Land for the Indians

In colorful knitted caps, in leather hats bedecked with coins, in high white hats of straw, 150,000 stolid Indian farmers and miners poured into an open field near the 1 1/2-mile-high hamlet of Ucarena one day last week. Five airplanes appeared in the brassy sky, swooped down to a landing. Out of one plane stepped President Victor Paz Estenssoro, the bespectacled onetime economics professor whom the Indians call "our father." In an open car he rode to the field, where Indians greeted him with thumping drums and shrill flutes.

The President and the Indians were there for a major event: signing of the revolutionary government's promised land-reform decree. The law will expropriate big estates of landlords (half of them absentee proprietors), who own 70% of Bolivia's farmland, paying for them in 25-year government bonds. For 400 years Indians have lived on these lands virtually as serfs, working the owners' fields three days a week in return for their own small plots of potatoes, corn, barley and pigweed seed (a cereal). In practice, landlords have been able to buy and sell the farm hands with the land. Peasants will now get the plots they have been tilling. Only estates exceeding certain maximum sizes (e.g., 60 acres for valuable vineyards, 1,500 acres for hot, less productive lowlands) will be expropriated, but they will be taken in their entirety.

For Paz, land reform may prove harder to bring off than his nationalization of Bolivian tin (TIME, Nov. 10). Aside from the danger of violence between landlords and peasants, there is an admitted risk that the Indians, once they own land, will grow just enough for their needs, leaving Bolivia (which spends 35% of its national income for imported food) hungrier than ever. Said Paz Estenssoro to the Indians at Ucarena: "Now that the land is yours, I ask you to carry out your part by growing more." Donning a native cap himself, he then sprinkled some drops of chicha (corn beer) in the field--an ancient Indian ceremony by which the earth goddess Pachamama is beseeched to be fruitful.

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