large estate

We explain what a large estate is, its characteristics, why it is fought and what a small estate is. In addition, the latifundio in Mexico.

Large lands in few hands leave little room for work for the less favored classes.

What is a large estate?

A latifundio is an important extension of land belonging to a single owner or a few associated owners, generally idle or not very productive from the agricultural point of view. The minimum extensions of land necessary to be able to speak of latifundio may vary according to each country.

Today this term has a negative connotation, associated with the unequal distribution of land, and comes from Roman antiquity, in which there was talk of latifundium for large agricultural holdings, generally owned by wealthy local owners. This word came from the union of latus ("Wide" or "extensive") and fundus ("Background", "root" or "base").

Latifundismo, that is, the tendency to latifundio, arose from ancient times as a consequence of military conquest or colonial expansion, since the newly acquired lands were often distributed among the military leaders as a reward for their performance in the war.

A perfect example of this was the distribution of American lands after the Spanish conquest and colonization, in the 16th to 18th centuries. These lands became part of the heritage of the local aristocracy, worked by African slave hands and administered under a feudal regime.

With the passage of time and American independence, the descendants of those first landowners became the great landholders of the Spanish-American republics, that is, their latifundistas.

The latifundio has been fought through different strategies for the stateespecially during governments progressive, as it is considered a source of inequality and impoverishment: large tracts of useless land in the hands of rich and powerful families, for example, leave little room for the historically disadvantaged classes. One of these strategies is the so-called agrarian reform.

Characteristics of large estates

Large estates are characterized by the following:

  • They are large areas of land that are private property of a single owner or a small group of owners. A few hundred hectares in Europe are enough to speak of latifundio, while in America higher figures are handled.
  • They tend to be inefficient or even unproductive farm units, that is, they exploit the land far below their capacity.
  • They normally have low levels of capitalization and return, low level of technology and workforce precarious, all of which means they contribute low standards of rural living.
  • They are characteristic of plains Y valleys, and less common in topography mountainous, due to the natural restrictions that the relief brings with it.

Latifundio and minifundio

The latifundio and the minifundio are to some extent contrary concepts. The latifundio implies large tracts of idle land in private hands, while the minifundio implies modest or small parcels, in private hands and equally unproductive, in this case due to the limitations of their size or the quality of their land.

Minifundios allow their cultivators a subsistence agricultural economy, but are not very profitable for large-scale agricultural development. Like the latifundia, they present low capital investment, little technological development and are characteristic of underdeveloped and traditional economies.

However, the minifundio should not be confused with small agricultural properties. It is common for the minifundio to appear when dividing a large estate into small parts, destined to be leased by peasants who, in turn, will have to face the problems of a low cost effectiveness economic, and by not being owners, they will be prevented from associating with other small producers to improve their situation.

Latifundio in Mexico

Carranza carried out the Agrarian Reform, the objective of the Mexican Revolution.

As in many of the nations Latifundio is a rural problem that Mexico inherited from its colonial history at the hands of Spain. The rural populations, who did all the agricultural work to consumption internally and exported to other nations, he lived in very poor conditions, while the state was controlled by the wealthy classes, often associated with the military establishment.

For this reason, the struggle against the latifundio was found in practically all the Mexican revolutionary social movements of the 19th and even 20th centuries, and it played an important role within the aspirations of the Mexican Revolution: agrarian reform. All the revolutionary factions had to do, in one way or another, with it.

However, it was not until 1915 that the Agrarian Law was enacted thanks to Venustiano Carranza (1859-1920), favoring smallholdings and granting land ownership to many of its members. workers. To do this, it was necessary to seize farms and large estates, and create state organizations to deal with the matter. agrarian, such as the National Agrarian Commission (CNA) or private executive committees.

Among the changes that bliss brought legislation There was the ejido system, a community system for the distribution of arable land among peasants, part of which survived until the National Constitution of 1917.

!-- GDPR -->