Maria Chávez Rivera

Led Peru's peasant movement to secure land rights through nonviolent resistance

Maria Chávez Rivera (1910-1974) was a Peruvian campesino leader who pioneered the Huallaga Valley Movement that secured land redistribution for 200,000 families. Starting in the 1940s, she organized farmers using the Asamblea Popular model of grassroots assemblies, which combined indigenous traditions with Marxist principles. Her 1957 protest march from Ayacucho to Lima, involving 15,000 peasants, pressured the government to pass the Agrarian Reform Law. Maria's innovation was the Community Land Trusts, which prevented land sales for 25 years after redistribution. Though assassinated in 1974, her work inspired Latin America's land rights movements. The Maria Chávez Institute now trains activists across the Andes. Her writings like La Tierra Es Nuestra Madre (1963) remain required reading in agrarian studies programs worldwide.