1 THE ABANDONED AGRARIAN REFORM: VALLEYS AND HIGH PLAINS

At the beginning of the 1950s, Bolivia underwent profound social upheaval as an effect of the generalised occupation of haciendas in the valleys and high plains (altiplano) regions of the country. When the MNR party forcibly took power in 1952, it did not have a clearly defined land programme, although it had produced a series of essays that did not explicitly touch on the subject of Agrarian Reform. This came about as a result of the indigenous rebellion and generalised seizures of land. In Ucureña, just one year after taking power, the revolutionary government issued the decree that legalised the freeing of the rural-indigenous labour force and the redistribution of lands. The Bolivian Agrarian Reform Act was deeply inspired by a similar process begun in Mexico 35 years previously, except that the Bolivian revolution ended up opening the doors to the birth of a new large landholding or estate system with respect to land in the eastern part of the country, doling out huge portions of territory left and right to supposed landowners. In the mid-1970s, over twenty years later, the Reform had been abandoned, with no one knowing when it had concluded. It ended up in the corners of a handful of offices as thousands of files with no political backing or direction. All government administrations wer