Brazil's Agrarian Reform: Democratic Innovation or Oligarchic Exclusion Redux?

The government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2002) redistributed a surprising amount of land to Brazil's landless. Assessing that reform, this study argues that an adequate appreciation of land redistribution must transcend the debate about the number of beneficiaries and place the reform in the larger context of state policies toward land and agriculture. It then asks to what extent such policies under Cardoso represented the dismantling of past state practices in the countryside. Although the Cardoso administration enacted some significant and democratizing changes, it missed other opportunities to benefit the rural poor, and its policies essentially maintained the agricultural model of the past two decades.