Decree 900

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Decree 900 was a Guatemalan land reform law ordered in 1952 by President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. This decree redistributed unused lands of sizes greater than 223 acres (0.902 km²) to local peasants. Proponents of the law stated that is was intended to “eliminate all feudal type property...especially work-servitude and the remnant of slavery.” ¹ It expropriated the unused lands of large plantations (estates with lands fully in use were exempted from the law), paying the oligarchs whose lands were expropriated through government bonds.

Because of the Agrarian Reform Law, the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company in August 1952 announced that it would no longer purchase Guatemalan chicle. Since Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company had been the sole buyer of the product, the Arbenz government suddenly had to provide a massive aid program for chicle harvesters. ²

In 1953 Arbenz announced that under the Agrarian Reform Law Guatemala was expropriating 234,000 acres (947 km²) of uncultivated land from the United Fruit Company. United Fruit owned 550,000 acres in Guatemala, 42% of the nation’s (arable) land ³. United Fruit Company had been receiving tax breaks by assessing the value of its holdings lower than they actually were, and were offered $627,572 in bonds for the expropriation of their holdings, the amount United Fruit had claimed the land was worth for tax purposes. United Fruit then launched a massive lobbying campaign for US intervention. Guatemala was ultimately billed $15,854,849 by the US State Department for the land. ⁴

By 1954, 100,000 families had received land as well as bank credit and technical aid for sowing and marketing. The law showed that land reform increased productivity.^{[citation needed]} The countrywide union block which ran the program was under non-communist leadership until 1954.^{[citation needed]}

In 1954 the CIA-organized covert operation Operation PBSUCCESS overthrew the democratically-elected President of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán.

[edit] Footnotes

Note 1: La Feber, Walter (1993). Inevitable Revolutions The United States in Central America. Norton Press. ISBN 0-393-03434-8. , pg 118, Citing Blanche Wiesen Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower (Garden City, N.Y., 1981), page 224; Neale J. Pearson, "Guatemala: The Peasant Union Movement, 1944-1954," in Latin American Peasant.Wovements ed. Henry A. Landsberger (Ithaca, 1969), page 224

Note 2: La Feber, Walter (1993). Inevitable Revolutions The United States in Central America. Norton Press. ISBN 0-393-03434-8. , pg 119, Citing Donald Dozer, Are We Good Neighbors? Inter American Relations 1930 1960 (Gainesville, Fla., 1959), page 264

Note 3: La Feber, Walter (1993). Inevitable Revolutions The United States in Central America. Norton Press. ISBN 0-393-03434-8. , pg 120; Citing Graham H. Stuart, and James L. Tigner, Latin America and the United States, 6th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1975), page 519-520; Blanche Wiesen Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower (Garden City, N.Y., 1981), page 221-225

Note 4: Kinzer, Stephen and Stephen Schlesinger (2005). Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Harvard University David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. ISBN 0-674-01930-X. , pg 76