Legislation
Árbenz began promoting agrarian reform soon after becoming President. He was aided politically by a renewed Communist Party of Guatemala (PGT), which believed that some amount of capitalist development necessarily preceded a communist revolution. Árbenz accepted help from the PGT and its leaders were among his personal friends; however, he rejected some of their proposals, including a mandate for the organization of producer cooperatives.
The proposed law gained widespread support among peoples' organizations and in the national press, but was opposed by the Associatión General de Agricultores (AGA), which represented the existing landowners.
Presented with a draft by the President, the Guatemalan Congress met on Saturdays and Sundays for five weeks. Congress introduced some changes to Árbenz's version, most notably restoring the idea of cooperatives (although not to the degree proposed by the PGT). Decree 900—Decreto Número 900 El Congreso De La República De Guatemala—was passed on 17 June 1952 at 1:45 AM and signed into law by Árbenz on the same day. It called for 603,704 hectares of farmland to be redistributed to 100,00 families. Specifically, it authorized the redistribution of all uncultivated land on estates larger than 672 acres, and of land on estates sized from 224–672 acres, on which less than two-thirds of the land was cultivated. It also specified total redistribution of the government owned Fincas Nationales, which contributed a quarter of the nation's coffee production.
Article 1 of the law reads:
The Agrarian Reform of the October Revolution intends to eliminate the feudal property structure in the countryside and develop relations of production that originate to develop the land to the form of operational and capitalist methods of production in agriculture and to prepare the way for the industrialization of Guatemala.
Proponents of the law stated that it was intended to “eliminate all feudal type property...especially work-servitude and the remnant of slavery.” Decree 900 specifically abolished slavery, unpaid labor, work as payment of rent, and relocation of indigenous workers.
Read more about this topic: Decree 900
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