Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2022
This article reviews recent neoliberal agrarian legislation in Latin America in terms of the advances and setbacks for women's and indigenous movements. Institutional reform of the agricultural sector has been heterogenous in part because of the role of these movements. In the twelve countries studied, the new legislation favors gender equity except in Mexico. The indigenous movement scored notable successes in Ecuador and Bolivia but suffered apparent setbacks in Mexico and Peru in the defense of collective land rights. The article also explores why the slightest progress toward gender equality was made in some of the countries with large indigenous populations and strong indigenous movements.
The field research on which this article is based was funded by a grant from the Ford Foundation regional offices for Mexico and Central America, the Andes, and Brazil. An earlier version was presented as the keynote address to the Conference on Land in Latin America: New Context, New Claims, New Concepts, sponsored by the Centro de Estudios y Documentación Latinoamericanos (CEDLA), the Research School for Resource Studies in Development (CERES), and Wageningen Agricultural University, Amsterdam, 26–27 May 1999. The authors are grateful to four anonymous LARR reviewers for their thoughtful comments.