User:Carwil/Land reform in Bolivia

Land reform or agrarian reform in Bolivia is the state-organized redistribution of agricultural land to Bolivian farmers and indigenous peoples since 1953. The Bolivian reform has been a central pillar of several political regimes in the country, including the post-1952 National Revolution, the "military-campesino pact" of the 1960s and 70s, and the current Movement Towards Socialism government. Bolivian agrarian reform has been accomplished through four legal efforts as well as through de facto occupations of rural lands by peasants.
 * Following the April 1952 Revolution led by the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR), Bolivian peasants pressed the new government to redistribute land to them, often taking the initiative by occupying haciendas and large plantations. On August 2, 1953, President Víctor Paz Estenssoro signed a land reform law (Law Decree 3464), which ended conditions of servitude on haciendas, redistributed lands to peasants, and transferred management of rural communities to agrarian trade unions. These trade unions became the legal representatives of three types of communities: "original communities" who continued precolonial land ownerhship, "ex-hacienda communities" formed of workers who inherited large estates, and "new communities" created by formerly landless families. The principal instrument for this transfer was the National Institute for Agrarian Reform (Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria; INRA), created by the 1953 law. The MNR largely politically abandoned this effort by the 1960s, but continuing titling under military rule resulted in a total redistribution of as much as 74.5% of all agricultural land from 1952 to 1977.
 * State-organized and spontaneous colonization of the eastern lowland plains in the 1960s and 70s, included both the small-scale colonization and the concentration of much land in the hands of a mestizo elite. The National Colonization Institute (Instituto Nacional de Colonización, INC; founded 1965, dissolved 1992) promoted migration and colonization by by some 70,000 (predominantly highland Aymara and Quechua) families toward colonization zones in San Julián (Santa Cruz), Alto Bení (La Paz), and the Chapare (Cochabamba), among other regions. Meanwhile, INRA distributed lands in the eastern and northern lowlands on the basis of promises to develop the lands, leading to large-scale agribusiness.
 * A new agrarian reform law (Law 1715, Ley del Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria) was passed in October 1996, which both recognized collective indigenous title through Native Community Lands and shifted agrarian reform standards away from production and towards tax payment as a standard of productivity. This law placed a 10-year time limit on the titling of land, but only 8.6% of the 106,751,722 hectares under INRA jurisdiction had completed the land title clearing process (saneamiento) by 2005.
 * On 29 November 2006, under pressure from campesino and indigenous movements, the Bolivian government approved (Ley modificatoria 3545 de Reconducción Comunitaria de la Reforma Agraria) to streamline the titling process, while moving the final deadline to 2013. The law also adopts collective or community-based titles as the preferred means for distributing land. By 2010, 51% of claims had resulted in finalized titles, with 40% of the titled land in Native Community Lands, and 39% in state-controlled fiscal lands.