Explaining Patterns of Redistribution under Autocracy The Case of Peru’s Revolution from Above

Who benefits and who loses during redistribution under dictatorship? This article argues that expropriating powerful preexisting economic elites can serve to demonstrate a dictator or junta’s loyalty to their launching organization while destroying elite rivals out of government that could potentially threaten the dictator’s survival. Expropriation also provides resources for buying the support of key nonelite groups that could otherwise organize destabilizing resistance. An analysis of the universe of fifteen thousand land expropriations under military rule in Peru from 1968 to 1980 demonstrates the plausibility of this argument as a case of redistributive military rule that destroyed traditional elites and empowered the military. Land was redistributed to “middle-class” rural laborers who had the greatest capacity to organize antiregime resistance if they were excluded from the reform. This finding directly challenges a core assumption of social conflict theory: that nondemocratic leaders will act as faithful agents of economic elites. A discussion of other modernizing militaries and data on large-scale expropriations of land, natural resources, and banks across Latin America from 1935 to 2008 suggests that the theory generalizes beyond Peru.