Reform or Else

Guatemala's Congress this week passed one of the most sweeping land-reform bills ever enacted in the Western Hemisphere, and sent it to President Jacobo Arbenz. As the measure's prime sponsor, he was expected to sign it promptly into law.

Backed by Guatemala's influential Communists, the bill is designed to double the number of small landholders by expropriating larger landholders' untilled fields. Owners of such idle lands--possibly one-third of the country's arable acreage--will be paid off with 25-year government bonds. The bill exempts all farms of 225 acres or less and farms of less than 675 acres on which at least two-thirds of the acreage is cultivated. Also exempt, because they are cultivated: the vast banana plantations of the U.S.-owned United Fruit Co.

The new program promises to tear the social and economic fabric of the country as surely as did Mexico's revolutionary land reforms. Even before the bill was passed passions blazed in capital and countryside. Near the eastern frontier, rabble-rousing organizers of the National Peasants Union announced lists of landholders marked for expropriation, and began measuring off parcels. Infuriated small farmers, swinging machetes, seized police headquarters in the village of San Jose Arada, wounding two cops. In Camotan, another band hacked a union leader to death and wounded five of his backers.

Nervous and obviously expecting more trouble, the government replied with increasing harshness toward the big landholders. In answer to hints that the law might bring civil war, it issued a decree last week forbidding any citizen to carry arms. And its congressional backers, led by Communist Victor Manuel Gutierrez, wrote another amendment into the bill: "Landowners who oppose the agrarian reform law by violent or subversive means will be totally expropriated by the government without regard to the limitations referred to in the law."

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