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Description:
A day laborer farmer weeds with his machete after working in a corn field on the cooperative El Sunza in Sonsonate, El Salvador, October 7, 1983. Agrarian reform initiated in 1980 in El Salvador was designed by United States advisors, financed by the United States government, and implemented by the Salvadoran military. The reform followed the model previously employed in the Vietnam War of dividing large pieces of land into cooperatives in an effort to pacify a population considered to be sympathetic to the guerrilla insurgency. However, the model did not attempt to dismantle the landowner oligarchy nor the redistribution of coffee plantations, two critical causes of the armed conflict.