Editing Decree 900 (section)

===Mechanisms===
The law did not redistribute land automatically. It created a National Agrarian Department (DAN), and required people without land to file requests with Local Agrarian Committees (CALs). CALs would then make decisions about how to reappropriate the land of major owners. Landowners could dispute these decisions, with an appeals process going all the way up to the President.<ref name=Trefzger/> The committees were formed from local groups, and intended to foster the spirit of community control and local political power. As suggested by the PGT, the law also gave new landowners the option of choosing lifetime tenure instead of private ownership, with the goal of preventing large landowners from simply buying back the land. The ''Fincas Nationales'' were available only through the lifetime tenure option.<ref>Gleijeses, ''The Agrarian Reform of Jacobo Arbenz'' (1989), pp. 460–461. "Moreover, through the Departmental Agrarian Committees and the Local Agrarian Committees, Decree 900 sought to stimulate the participation of the peasants and the labour organizations, rather than to impose the reform from the top alone.</ref> According to [[José Manuel Fortuny]], a PGT leader who helped draft the legislation:

<blockquote>We [the PGT] proposed the creation of peasant committees [CALs] in order to lay the groundwork for the eventual radicalization of the peasantry. We talked to Arbenz about this, and he agreed with us. What we wanted was to foster the control of the reform from below. This would give the peasants a strong sense of their common needs. And if, from the system of lifetime tenure, cooperatives developed, the seeds of a more collective society would have been sown.<ref>Gleijeses, ''The Agrarian Reform of Jacobo Arbenz'' (1989), p. 461.</ref></blockquote>

Finally, the law established a system for using bonds to compensate people who lost acres to peasants.<ref>Gleijeses, ''The Agrarian Reform of Jacobo Arbenz'' (1989), p. 460.</ref> The property owners were paid in bonds which matured in 25 years; value of the land was based on claims made on the previous year's tax returns.<ref>Harbour, ''Creating a New Guatemala'' (2008), p. 18.</ref>