Land reforms by country centuries-old system of debt peonage. Further land reform occurred after the 1968 coup by left-wing colonel Juan Velasco Alvarado. The military dictatorship under General Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968–75) launched a large-scale agrarian reform movement that attempted to redistribute land, hoping to break Peru's traditionally inequitable pattern of land holding and the hold of traditional oligarchy. The model used by Velasco to bring about change was the associative enterprise, in which former salaried rural workers and independent peasant families would become members of different kinds of cooperatives. About 22 million acres were redistributed, more land than in any reform program outside
Juan Bautista Alvarado Frémont arrived in Monterey at the beginning of 1846. Afraid of foreign aggression, Castro assembled his militia, with Alvarado second in command, but Frémont went north to Oregon instead. An unstable political situation in Mexico strained relations among the Californios and it seemed that civil war would break out between north and south. On July 7, Commodore John D. Sloat occupied Monterey, declaring to the citizenry that the Mexican–American War had begun. Pico, Castro, and Alvarado set aside their differences to focus on the American threat, but by the end of August, Pico and Castro fled to Mexico, and Alvarado