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 Velasco Alvarado law that was never enacted. Peruanismo was also characterized by authoritarianism, as the administration grew away from tolerating any level of dissent, periodically jailing, deporting and harassing suspected political opponents and repeatedly closing and censoring broadcast and print news media, finally expropriating all of the newspapers in 1974 and sending the publishers into exile. A cornerstone of Velasco's political and economic strategy was the implementation by dictate of an agrarian reform program to expropriate farms and diversify land ownership. In its first ten years in power, the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces (GRFA) expropriated 15,000 properties (totaling nine million