Rural policy of social improvement of the General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez and contradictions, 1932-1944

Abstract

The lives of the settlers and laborers-stationary on farms and ranches, between 1920 and 1932, was impoverished. An example of the above is that by 1930 laborers and stationary landless settlers were around 50,000, but in the west, representing, according to Jeffrey Gould and Aldo Lauria, 18% of the rural population in the west of the country and who they lived mostly in the coffee plantations. Increasing this rural sector was due to the expansion of coffee cultivation area, which resulted in the re-concentration of small properties of peasants who were engaged in cultivation of basic grains in small-scale coffee plantations landowners and poor economic conditions these peasants, who had been favored with land for the liberal reforms of the late nineteenth century; they could not pay their land due to lack of technical and financial government support, and they were forced to sell or mortgage them with coffee with greater purchasing power. Among the different forms of loss of small properties were debts to the coffee growers and ranchers or pressures that forced the neighboring farmers with their properties to sell their land, promising that these will stay on their farms or ranches as settlers.