Bellisario - Chilean PreAgrarian Peirod

Journal Journal of Agrarian of Agrarian Change, Change, Vol. Vol. 4 No. 6 No.
1 and 2, April 2,The January 2006, and pp. April 167204. 2004, pp. 0000. Chilean Agrarian Transformation
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The Chilean Agrarian Transformation: The Pre-Agrarian Reform Period (19551965)

ANTONIO BELLISARIO
Today Chilean agriculture has recovered from years of diminishing returns. The same arduous work carried out by a declining workforce has suddenly attained higher productivity and, therefore, achieved economic growth. This article suggests that Chile has undergone a series of fundamental changes in the last quarter of the twentieth century, which have intensied its capitalist development. It analyses the agrarian structure of the hacienda system during the period immediately before the agrarian reform, looking particularly at the transition to modern capitalism, agricultural growth and the land question. It argues that before the implementation of the agrarian reform, the country had not nished its transition to modern capitalism due to the persistence of the antiquated hacienda system. It further suggests that the land reform process implemented and consolidated from 1964 to 1980 permitted the culmination of the long-postponed transition to modern capitalism and gave rise to the ascendancy of an agro-industrial bourgeoisie and an export-oriented agriculture integrated into the world economy. Keywords : Chile, hacienda system, agrarian change, agricultural development, transition from old agrarian society to modern capitalism INTRODUCTION Chiles decline in both its agricultural workforce and rural population is similar to the rest of Latin America.1 But its share of agricultural exports has continued to grow since the mid-1980s instead of falling as in the rest of the region.2
Antonio Bellisario, Department of Geography, University of Concepcin, Casilla 160 C, Concepcin, Chile. e-mail: abellisario@airpost.net This paper draws upon a substantially revised chapter of a PhD dissertation (Bellisario 2002). A revised Spanish translation of this dissertation will be published in 2006 by Lom Ediciones (Santiago, Chile). I would like to thank the journals two referees. I am grateful to Terry Byres and Cris Kay for their detailed critical comments on this essay. I am especially grateful to Bill Hayes for his invaluable help. The remaining errors, of fact and interpretation, are solely mine. 1 In 1960, 47 per cent of Latin Americas labour force worked in agriculture; at the end of the 1990s, 31 per cent remained employed in the agricultural sector. The percentage of Latin Americas rural population in 1960 was more than 50 per cent; today it has declined to less than 25 per cent. 2 Latin Americas agricultural products accounted for more than 40 per cent of the total value of exports in the late 1960s; they declined to 24 per cent in 1990. Meanwhile in Chile the opposite happened as the total value of agricultural exports increased from 3 per cent in the late 1960s to over 20 per cent in 1990.
2006 The Author. Journal compilation 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Henry Bernstein and Terence J. Byres. Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 6 No. 2, April 2006, pp. 167204.
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Between 1960 and 2002, the percentage of those employed in agriculture fell from 30 per cent to 13 per cent, while during the same period, its rural population declined from 40 per cent to less than 13 per cent. During the 1950s and 1960s, the value of Chiles total agricultural imports surpassed its agricultural exports by at least two fold. Today, agricultural exports and semi-industrialized forestry products (such as cellulose, paper, wood and wood-chips) contribute more than 20 per cent of the total value of Chiles exports, far exceeding agricultural imports. This agricultural dynamism has helped fuel the recent growth of the Chilean economy.3 Chilean agriculture in recent years, somehow, has passed the point of diminishing returns. The same arduous work carried out by a declining workforce has suddenly attained higher productivity and, therefore, economic growth (Gmez and Echeique 1988; Murray 1999). It has been argued that societies can change by different processes such as rebellions, political revolutions, socioeconomic transformations and social revolutions. Social revolutions are rare but momentous occurrences in modern world history; they are rapid, basic transformations of a societys state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below (Skocpol 1979, 34). Thus, social revolutions are primarily dened by structural changes led by class struggle. We might say that right up to the early 1960s, Chilean society had been gradually passing from the old traditional agrarian regime to capitalist modernity. And during the period of intensied social class struggle and political turbulence of the late 1960s to early 1980s, Chile experienced an epochal change, which has resulted in the intensication of capitalist development ( Jocelyn-Holt Letelier 1998; Kay 2002; Lavn 1987; Moulian 1997; Riesco 1989, 1999). Indeed, since the 1960s, Chiles salaried workforce has more than doubled, while its GDP has more than tripled. The economically active population almost tripled in the last four decades. In 1960, the economically active population amounted to 2.3 million. In 2004, it had increased to 6.3 million. During the same period, the total population just doubled from 7.5 million to 15.5 million. This means that a larger share of the Chilean population has been participating in the economic process and has become dependent upon wages. At least three broad and highly contradictory stages mark this period of epochal change: rst, the bourgeois populist and reformist government of the Christian Democrat Frei (196470) sets the prelude to the revolution; second, the socialist government of the Popular Unity (Allende 197073) highlights the socialist revolution proper; and third, the military dictatorship government of Pinochet (197389) inaugurated the neoliberal capitalist phase in this transformation.
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Since 1985 the annual growth rate of the Chilean economy has averaged 6 per cent. But after the Asian economic crisis of 1998, annual growth rates have decreased to about 3 per cent. Alas, this growth of exports is mainly raw agricultural products with little industrialized added value. Meanwhile, agrarian policies have not solved the problems of poverty and inequality; instead, as some have argued, since the 1990s, these have increased (Murray 2002). Thus the Chilean economy continues to be immersed in the Latin American political economy pattern of over-exploiting its natural resources for external markets.
The Chilean Agrarian Transformation
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It is important to note that right up to the 1960s, Chilean society had not yet nished its transition to capitalist modernity, and during the Chilean age of revolution (late 1960s to the early 1980s), and particularly during the socialist government of Allende (197073), the country experienced a social revolution that totally transformed its political and social-economic structure. Like many other Latin American revolutionary movements of the twentieth century, the Chilean revolutionaries (urban workers, peasants, intellectuals, students and members of leftist political parties, socialist and communist) sought to overcome capitalism in order to construct socialism. But from todays perspective, it seems that they achieved the very critical revolutionary changes needed to overcome the ancient agrarian regime. Then, the social class struggle waged by the Chilean revolutionaries during the age of revolution, perhaps inadvertently, and certainly contrary to their anti-capitalist intentions, nally opened the oodgates to capitalist modernity, instead of to socialism. Thus, the unintended consequence of this contradictory process was the nal transition to modern capitalism (Riesco 1995). But this phenomenon is not in and of itself something new. The classical transitions to capitalist modernity of France and England were also precipitated by epochal and momentous revolutions carried out by progressive movements. Having said all this, it is important to mention that the transition to capitalist modernity is not yet fully complete; 800,000 Chileans (5 per cent of the total population and 12.7 per cent of the working population) still live off the land. But the expulsion of the peasants from the land and their transformation into modern wageworkers is proceeding rapidly; the agricultural workforce has been decreasing steadily since 1990 (see Table 1).
Table 1. Evolution of agricultural workforce Category Total national workforce Agricultural workforce Per cent Source : ODEPA (2005). 1990 4,728,500 882,500 18.7 1995 5,273,900 809,700 15.4 2000 5,870,900 773,500 13.2 2004 6,357,600 809,800 12.7
The development of competitive market-oriented agriculture is a gradual process. It needs a resolution in three interrelated areas. First, a proletarian workforce must be developed along with producers seeking to maximize their surplus extraction via increments in labour productivity. In short, the agrarian transition to capitalism must be completed. Second, the transition to capitalism must be reinforced by the resolution of the land question. A spatial organization must be developed that is attuned with capitalist social property relations and augmented forces of production. This spatial ordering permits the rational allocation of land to capital. And last, the development of industrial agriculture needs the resolution of the agrarian question. There must be a growth of surplus for capital
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accumulation and investment and to full the needs for primary products of a growing urban society. The transition to agrarian capitalism in Chile nally ended sometime during the 1960s and 1970s. Today capitalism is rmly rooted in the country as a whole. The resolutions of the land and the agrarian questions have also been secured. To fully understand Chiles agrarian transition to capitalism, it is important to study the transformation of the hacienda system during the early 1960s, to determine what the crucial changes were and when they took place. This is all the more decisive, because, in the early 1960s, most of the productive land, labour force and capital in the Chilean countryside still operated under the hacienda system (Kay 1982). Much research has been done to show how the hacienda system evolved with the increasing commercialization of agriculture. The most important analyses of the evolution of the Chilean hacienda system have argued that by the early 1960s, the hacienda system had basically completed its transformation to modern capitalism, while the agrarian question remained (Kay 1971, 1974, 1977, 1982; Schejtman 1971, n.d.). These authors note that this transformation occurred mainly through the proletarianization of the labour-rent tenants, the inquilinos. To sustain his thesis Kay points to: (1) the increase of payments in cash and the decrease in perquisites to the internal hacienda peasants, (2) the decline of the absolute and relative number of inquilinos within the total workforce and (3) the decline of land leased to inquilinos (1977, 11415). Schejtman notes that from the 1850s to 1965 capitalism slowly transformed the social relations of the hacienda system (n.d., 39). And he also notes that by 1965 (the beginning of the agrarian reform) the transformation of the hacienda into a capitalist enterprise was the dominant tendency within this system. He goes on to say that the internal economy of inquilinos (their tenancy rights in the landlords estate) had mostly disintegrated, and their proletarianization was rapidly advancing through cash payments for their labour. But he concedes that this process had not reached yet the largest majority of the haciendas (n.d., 7). I disagree with this line of analysis. It is my contention that to understand the Chilean transformation we need to widen the theoretical scope by adding a new ontological window of analysis, which has been neglected by these prevailing views: namely, the spatial relations of agrarian structure. And we must, then, introduce the hypothesis that up to the early 1960s, the hacienda system had not nished its transition to modern capitalism. I advance this thesis based on two premises. First, in my perspective, the permanence of servile and pre-capitalist social property relations continued to be an important component in the hacienda system. Thus, the full commoditization of internal hacienda peasants had not been accomplished. And second, and perhaps equally important, the spatial structure of most of the Chilean countryside was still pre-capitalist, rooted in the old regime of the latifundia system; that is, the landowners monopoly of the majority of the best agricultural land continued to provide them with the source of their economic and political power. In my perspective, and contrary to the view advanced by Kay and Schejtman, the resolution of the land question by the
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agrarian reform, between 1964 and the late 1970s, was the crucial process that precipitated the culmination of the haciendas transition to agrarian capitalism and permitted the resolution of the agrarian question; while for Kay and Schejtman this process did not play a signicant role in transforming the hacienda system because, in their line of analysis, the transition had been basically accomplished before the implementation of the agrarian reform. It is my thesis that the agrarian reform crucially affected all three interrelated areas needed for competitive market-oriented agriculture: (1) the transition to capitalism, (2) the land question and (3) the agrarian question. On the transition to capitalism, I argue, the agrarian reform process wholly reshaped Chiles rural class structure. It not only promoted the full commoditization of rural labour by transforming the haciendas internal peasants either into wage labour (by compulsory expulsion from the land) or into agricultural producers (by granting them a parcel of productive land); but perhaps most important, it encouraged the development of a modern capitalist agricultural class by triggering the development of medium-sized farms. These interwoven changes permitted the culmination of the haciendas transition to agrarian capitalism. In Bauers words the agrarian reform process meant the imposition of the long delayed agrarian capitalist revolution and the proletarianization without ceremony of the rural labour force (1994, 276). Furthermore, the concomitance of the agrarian reform with one of the most revolutionary periods in contemporary Chilean history helped to rmly establish capitalism in the country as a whole. On the land question, the agrarian reform completely restructured the spatial organization of the hacienda system. It ended the landowners virtual monopoly on the land that prevented an open land market and discouraged competition. This statist and spatial intervention resolved the land question by expropriating the totality of inefcient latifundia, which irredeemably destroyed the power base of the pre-capitalist landed class. In turn, the new spatial organization of the Chilean countryside developed, indirectly and directly, by the agrarian reform, stimulated the development of capitalism. Indeed, this process created 65,000 new land units out of the 5800 expropriated estates. These new farms were the base for the development of the land market that sustained the emergence of new agricultural capitalist groups (Echeique 1996). On the agrarian question, these interrelated changes, namely a new class and spatial organization in the countryside, in conjunction with neoliberal economic policies, helped to foster the augmentation of the forces of production and to improve agricultural productivity, although rural poverty and the continued proletarianization of small peasant farmers have remained as the major problems in the countryside (Kay 2002). In summary, this article analyses the agrarian structure of the Chilean hacienda system in the early 1960s, the period immediately before the implementation of the agrarian reform. It looks at the transition to agrarian capitalism (social property relations), the land question (the agrarian spatial relations of production and property) and agricultural development, or the agrarian question (that is, agricultures ability to successfully achieve its food-supplying function and to
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produce surpluses). It argues that the country before the implementation of the agrarian reform had not nished its transition to modern capitalism due to the persistence of the hacienda system. This agrarian structure hindered the development of capitalism by its landowners monopoly on the best lands suitable for agriculture and by the reliance of this class on non-capitalist forms of labour control and surplus extraction. It further argues that an open land market had not developed because landowners controlled the largest share of the best agricultural lands. In turn, the pre-capitalist social relations and landowners monopoly of the land postponed the agrarian transition. I further suggest that the agrarian reform directly resolved the land question through an open land market and that it was only with that agrarian reform that this resolution was secured. In turn, this state-directed spatial intervention wholly changed the social and spatial relations in the Chilean countryside and permitted the culmination of the longpostponed transition to agrarian capitalism, triggering the development of an export-oriented agriculture integrated into the world economy. In sum, the agrarian reform triggered the nal transition to modern capitalism and hastened the resolution of the agrarian question. SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF THE HACIENDA SYSTEM By the end of the 1950s and early 1960s, the hacienda system was characterized by a small number of great estates (the fundos or latifundios), holding 80 per cent of the agricultural land. This system also included a large number of smallholdings, the minifundios usually nearby the fundos that accounted for less than 10 per cent of the agricultural land.4 The hacienda system was a social system of agricultural production and a source of political power supported by the mutually dependent economies of landlords and peasants. Its structure was hierarchical and coercive, somewhat similar to the European manorial system, as argued powerfully by Kay (1974, 1980).5 The main difference between the hacienda system and European feudalism was that peasants in the former had no legal or customary attachment or property claims to the land. The hacienda system was a socio-economic system formed by the landlord and peasant economies. The direct producers of the landlord economy, or latifundia, were the service tenants and salaried workers. The service tenants (known as inquilinos in Chile) were the haciendas permanent labour-service that received a
I will use the terms hacienda system and latifundia interchangeably to dene the bimodal system of mutually dependent relations between landlords and peasants characteristic of the Central Valley. I shall use the Spanish term hacienda to depict a large agricultural estate or single property. The Agrarian Reform Law 16.040 of 1967 dened latifundio as any agricultural property larger than 80 Basic Irrigated Hectares (BIH). A Basic Irrigated Hectare (BIH) is an abstract land unit that standardized farmland quality in order to determine its susceptibility to expropriation based on the productive capacity of the land and not just on its sheer size. 5 Huggett (1975, 18) denes the manorial system as follows: Under the manorial system, peasants in many parts of western Europe had been granted the right to cultivate a share of the arable land in the large open elds of the village and a customary right to use the surrounding commons and wastelands in return for work on the lords demesne or the provision of other services.
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parcel of land for which they had to pay with their own labour.6 This service tenantry, the labour system of inquilinaje, was the most resilient element of the landlord enterprise. The hacienda also had temporary workers, who received a cash wage payment and food for their work. They were of two types: (1) temporary internal labour, known as voluntarios (literally volunteers), usually young males from inquilino households; and (2) temporary external labour consisting of peones (farm labourers) or afuerinos (outsiders) from outside the hacienda (Ramrez 1968). The peasant economy was structured along two types. First, minifundia (peasant smallholders) were those peasants living outside the hacienda boundaries whose sub-subsistence land parcels might have pushed them to sharecrop on some of the haciendas land, and/or they might have worked as seasonal wageworkers for the landlord economy (Kay 1977, 104). Second, besides composing the permanent labour force of the hacienda, inquilinos subsisted by consuming the production of their land tenancy (as well as from the reduced wage they received). The surplus they sold on the market was minimal. Inquilinos were agrarian workers who formed the permanent labour-service tenantry. They received, in exchange for their own and their familys labour, land, the use of pastures, consumption perquisites and a small amount of cash. The land perquisites (regalas de tierra) comprised a garden plot around the house and a small productive parcel of land (averaging one hectare). For pasture rights perquisites (regalas de talaje), typically landowners assigned to inquilinos the pastures of non-farmable dry lands in the landlords demesne for livestock breeding (usually a few head of cattle). The consumption perquisites (las raciones) included a house provided by the hacienda that served to shelter and settle the inquilino household on the hacienda grounds. Inquilinos were also allowed to extract rewood within the haciendas boundaries. Moreover, for those days that the inquilino had to work for the hacienda, landowners provided food for the inquilino and his family (Baraona et al. 1961, 230; Herrera 1968). As for the income composition of inquilino households in the late 1950s and early 1960s, national gures of inquilinos income are unavailable (Gregory 1961). But in 1957 the Agriculture Ministry conducted a survey using a direct questionnaire given to 92 inquilino households (529 persons) in the OHiggins province from which the following was obtained. The total annual income for the inquilinos in the sample was E 313 (escudos of the time), 74 per cent as agricultural workers and 26 per cent as agricultural producers. As a result, the inquilinos in the sample earned 56 per cent of their income in cash (30 per cent as wages and 26 per cent as income earned as producers) and 44 per cent in perquisites (see Table 2). If we compare the annual income of inquilinos with those of other workers, we nd that E 313 was an extremely low income. The average annual income for the overall active population in the same year totalled E 1719, whereas
For the historical origins and evolution of the inquilinos, see Gngora (1960). For a presentation of Chilean agriculture and the institution of inquilinaje in the rst decades of the nineteenth century, see the work of Claudio Gay (1973).
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Table 2. Income composition of inquilinos, 1957 Categories E As a worker Cash Perquisites Sub-total As a producer Total income Source : Chile (1960). Income (Escudos E) %
94 139 233 80 313
30 44 74 26 100
the annual income of all agricultural workers amounted to E 648. This survey also states that due to their low income, the nutrition of inquilinos and their families was decient (Chile 1960, iiviii). The inquilinos had a dual economic function within the hacienda system. On the one hand, they were small agricultural producers on land parcels, upon which they had no legal or traditional property claims. They paid rent in labour for their tenancy rights on the landlords estate. On the other hand, inquilinos were workers on the landlords enterprise, but their labour was not exchanged for full cash wages. Instead, their labour was surrendered for a small amount of cash and a variety of perquisites; in other words they exchange services for precarious rights to land and perquisites (Bauer 1992, 24). Thus, the inquilinos were small producers, and also they were workers. Consequently, the system of service tenantry was a distinctive form of servile labour control of the Chilean latifundia. The hacienda was a hierarchical social system with coercive relations between the landlord and the peasants, which provided landlords with an important source of socio-political power at the national level. For example, those inquilinos who could read and write had been induced to register in the landlords political party and persuaded and in some cases forced to vote for the landlords candidates since 1874, when Congress passed the law granting male suffrage to those who could read.7 Referring to this process, Bauer has stated that from 1870s on, landowners were able to enfranchise their workers, fraudulently or not, and encourage, or if necessary purchase, their vote (1992, 28). These bondage
In 1958 the single ballot was introduced in Chiles electoral system, which changed this practice. The single ballot and the law that gave women the right to vote in elections in 1949 provided the institutional change that made it possible for the Christian Democrat party to win the elections in 1964. For an account of the constitutional history and the concomitant electoral development of Chile, see Gil (1966) and Urza Valenzuela (1992).
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relations between inquilinos and landlords provided the latter with the absolute control of the economic and social relations on their estates and in the surrounding countryside. Landowners exercised their powerful inuence on local policy, the judiciary and rural schools. Thus they controlled the external rural population in villages as well (Loveman 1976). For landlords, political calculations were of equal importance to their economic motivations. Their main objective was to retain their power in national politics to maintain their veto power on agrarian policy. They constituted an old aristocratic seigneurial class (Bauer 1975b; Gngora 1970; Stabili 1996). They held their estates as both a badge of class distinction and as a source of production for market-oriented agriculture. Two of the most enduring characteristics of this landed class were rst the impermeability that it posed to members of other classes, which was accomplished primarily by the intermarriage of its members, and, second, the monopoly that it enjoyed on most of the prime agricultural land.8 This monopoly was secured through inheritance from one generation to the next if possible in one piece usually to the rst-born male heir of the patriarchal lineal family. The legal use of primogeniture helped prevent the hacienda from being subdivided into smaller units and to keep it in the linear patriarchal family (Gngora and Borde 1956). By pursuing these two strategies intermarriage and the primogeniture inheritance of property Chilean landowning families retained their large estates. These estates helped them sustain their class privileges through the servitude and electoral support of their agricultural workers. A case in point, the banker and landowner, Julio Subercaseaux Brawne, after gaining a seat in the Congress Chamber of Deputies for the Conservative Party in the 1900s, commented on the reason for his victory: we had within our reach near three thousand votes corresponding to the inquilinos of our estates or those that we had in leasing and administration. Such was the electoral inuence that our bank had for its customers (cited in Villalobos 1987, 158). Consequently, rural proprietorship for landowners was the pivotal source of their economic base, as well as a political source of power through their dominion over rural labour. The hacienda El Huique exemplies the relentless bequeathing of large estates within the members of the landowning class (see Figure 1). This hacienda had several thousand hectares and was located in the Colchagua province; this region became the epitome of the Chilean latifundia (Stabili 1996, 188). The formation and development of this hacienda sprang from seventeenth-century mercedes, which were large grants of land, of 2000 hectares or more, given by the crown to favoured Spanish settlers in its American possessions. The hacienda remained intact until 1790 when it was subdivided into two haciendas, Almague and El Huique, among
In a book dedicated to the genealogy of the Errzuriz family, one of the most politically inuential Chilean families during the nineteenth century, there is a listing of each male scion of this family. It includes a list of his children and to whom they were married and if they were relatives. By quickly browsing through those listings, one can see that the majority of those who married wed their rst or second cousins (Medina and Larran 1964).
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Figure 1 Tenancy evolution of the hacienda El Huique
the children of Pedro Echeique (Bauer 1975b; Larran 1944). In turn, in 1828 El Huique was subdivided into two haciendas (El Huique proper and San Jos del Carmen) among the children of Miguel Echeique Lecaros. Juan Jos Echeique Bascun (17951883) inherited the southern half of the El Huique, which he
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named San Jos del Carmen.9 In 1852, he married Jess Mujica Echaurren (the niece of his rst wife), from this union his only child was born, Gertrudis Echeique Mujica. At the death of her father in 1883, Gertrudis Echeique Mujica inherited the hacienda. In 1875, she had married her rst cousin Federico Errzuriz Echaurren, president of Chile (18961901) and himself a large landowner. The only surviving child of the couple, Elena Errzuriz Echeique (18771966), inherited the hacienda in 1928, together with other properties. Elena Errzuriz Echeique was an absentee landowner. Like many members of her class, she spent at most a couple of months during the summer at the estate, and the rest of the year she lived either in Santiago or Paris (Medina and Larran 1964, 278). In May 1966, San Jos del Carmen, with an area of 6000 hectares, was expropriated by the CORA (the national agency for agrarian reform). In 1974, during the military government, the hacienda was subdivided into 143 parcels and distributed among the haciendas old inquilinos. CORA gave the owner a small reserve that contained the old estates house, the church and the gardens. In 1975, the heirs of Elena Errzuriz Echeique gave this reserve to the Chilean Army. In 1986, the army transformed the property into a museum, which stands today as a material remnant of the old relation between the landowner class and the Chilean state. Thus, the Echeique landowner family kept this hacienda from 1756 until its expropriation by the Chilean state in 1966. The smallholders who constituted the external peasant enterprises (the socalled minifundia) were and still are the typical manifestation of an agrarian economy of subsistence. This economy was based on safety-rst production and commercialization of surpluses. Family growth was the main contradiction that hindered and also supported the success or failure of the smallholders. The minifundia sector subscribed to the partible inheritance custom, which caused the proliferation of subdivided plots incapable of providing a basic subsistence for the smallholders household.10 Some of the population surplus generated in this sector sold their labour for cash wages as temporary workers in the surrounding hacienda or out-migrated to urban centres. The latter process contributed, especially after the world crisis of the 1930s, to the development of a highly urbanized national society. It should be mentioned that the minifundia never developed into the traditional smallholder peasant village, which characterized the Western European Grundherrschaft peasant experience and that of other Latin American countries such as Mexico. In these places, the peasant experience produced a distinct culture and a base for community action (Bauer 1975a, 170). Instead, as many have argued, the hacienda system not only controlled the lives of those who worked on the haciendas, but landowners controlled the minifundistas and
9 According to the 1854 government tax roll of rural properties, the haciendas San Jos del Carmen and El Huique had annual rents of 8000 and 11,000 pesos, respectively (Chile 1861, 23). In order to give an idea of the contemporary meaning of an annual income of 11,000 pesos, Bauer (1975a, 35) mentions that [t]he highest ranking general then was paid $4500 and the President, $18,000. During the 1860s, the value of one Chilean Peso ranged between 43 and 46 pence, and equalled US$1 (Pinto 1962, 104). 10 The causes and characteristics of the subdivision of minifundia in the early 1960s are expounded in Alaluf (1961) and a publication of the Universidad de Chile (1960). The study by Garrido and Errzuriz (1973) summarizes the socio-economic conditions of minifundia during the early 1970s.
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proprietors of small holdings in rural hamlets who depended on the landowners favours (Bengoa 1988, 12). The so-called latifundiaminifundia complex was a closed social system dominated by the landowners (the hacendados or latifundistas) through their exclusive control of the rural labour force and through the veto power that they enjoyed over the governments agricultural policy. The agrarian structure of the hacienda system began changing even before the agrarian reform. The crucial question is how much it changed. It is my argument that the change encountered a powerful barrier. Schejtman points out that due to the impact of the world economic crisis beginning in 1929, the hacienda system started slowly to change, and that this institution experienced a growing loss of legitimacy (n.d., 5). Based on his own previous work,11 he states that in the early 1960s, the contradiction between the landlord enterprise and the internal economies of peasants had evolved into three patterns of agrarian structure. The rst pattern, which possibly might have accounted for the majority of haciendas and fundos, is the Traditional Hacienda, standing in a sort of dynamic balance between the two economies the internal peasant economy and the landlord enterprise. The second pattern is the Modern Emergent Hacienda. These haciendas had concluded the transformation of their economies into a fully capitalist modern enterprise by totally or partially ending the internal economy of peasants. Landowners had advanced the proletarianization of their workers in a process that is reminiscent of the Prussian road to agrarian capitalism. The third pattern is the Traditional Hacienda in Disintegration. In these haciendas, the landlord economy has diminished in favour of an intensication of the internal economies of the peasants and the strengthening of sharecropping, the so-called medierias.12 Passive or absentee landlords with insufcient capital and those who held the land for pure class-status reasons sought to increase their rents by granting more land to the peasant economies. Unfortunately, there is not a study available that quanties the incidence of each pattern in the pre-reform period. Accepting Schejtmans categorization, I would argue that the relevant literature suggests that the Traditional and Disintegration phases of the hacienda system made up the majority of estates in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
In 196566, the Instituto de Capacitacin e Investigacin en Reforma Agraria (ICIRA) completed a longitudinal list of the greatest estates ( fundos de gran potencial) larger than 150 equal hectares (hectareas de equivalente primera de riego) in Chiles Central Valley, from Aconcagua to nuble (Chiles nine most important provinces for agriculture). This work showed that 1067 haciendas, 1.7 per cent of all land holdings registered in the Agricultural Census of 1955, constituted the most important segment of the latifundia. The ICIRA drew a random sample of 105 of these in order to lay down a sample of expropriable estates before expropriation began. Schejtman completed this list, including the drawing of the random sample, and carried out the baseline study in 1966. His work El Inquilino de Chile Central (1971) is the original analysis of the 1966 questionnaire administered to 259 inquilino households, who were living on the 105 haciendas. It documents the socio-economic conditions of the labour force of the hacienda system and the patterns of agrarian development between the landlord and the peasant economies. Kay used these data for his comparative analysis of the European manorial system and the Latin American hacienda system (1971). He coined the terms ICIRA Fundo Project for the general survey, Landlords Survey for the data of the Landlord Enterprise and Tenants Survey for the data concerning the internal Peasant Enterprise. 12 Bengoa (1988, 267), although writing about the last decades of the nineteenth century, refers to this process as inquilinizacin or campesinizacin of the labour force.
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In 1960, Chile had a total population of 7.6 million, of which 2.6 million were classied as rural. The total labour force was 2.7 million, of which 732,700 were engaged in agriculture, or 26 per cent of the total labour force (Garrido and Errzuriz 1973, 5). The most comprehensive attempt to characterize empirically the social structure of the agrarian sector in the pre-agrarian reform period was done by the Inter-American Committee for Agricultural Development (CIDA 1966). CIDA was the most inuential study that argued that Chiles agrarian structure was delaying the overall modernization of the country. Table 3 depicts the CIDA classication of agrarian social classes from the 1955 census data. The members of the Traditional Agrarian Landed class of Chiles latifundia (the landowners of the haciendas and large fundos) were only 2.1 per cent of the labour force. They comprised 3 per cent of the rural households and monopolized 78 per cent of the agricultural lands. The Agrarian Capitalists (the world of the modern and emergent medium capitalist farms) constituted 6.8 per cent of the labour force and held about 13 per cent of the land. The Agrarian Middle Class (the landowners of the family farms) comprised 16.5 per cent of the labour force and held 7 per cent of the land, which illustrates the weakness of this class among Chilean peasants.13 The Subsistence Peasants (the owner-operators or legal tenants of the sub-family farms of minifundia) consisted of 26 per cent of the labour force and had 2.1 per cent of the irrigated land. The Internal Hacienda Workers (operators of sub-tenures from the hacienda land) comprised 40 per cent of the labour force. Therefore, in the mid-1950s more than one third of the labour force was dependent upon the socio-economic system of latifundia. Of these workers, inquilinos were the largest group, representing 26 per cent of the labour force. Finally, the Landless Peasants were 8.5 per cent of the labour force. They sought permanent or temporary employment as agrarian workers in the large haciendas or in the medium capitalist farms.
Table 3. Distribution of agrarian social classes Class structure Labour force No. Traditional landed class Agrarian capitalists Agrarian middle class Subsistence peasants Internal hacienda workers Landless workers Total Source : CIDA (1966, 294).
13
Households No. 10,300 22,300 61,100 79,800 146,000 25,400 344,900 % 3 6 18 23 42 7 100
Irrigated land No. 856,200 138,200 80,100 23,400 n/d 1,097,900 % 78 13 7 2 n/d 100
% 2 7 16 26 40 8 100
13,700 44,900 109,500 172,300 267,500 56,300 664,200
De Janvry states: the nonexistence of a signicant rural petty bourgeoisie among [Latin Americas peasants] . . . reects the weakness of the farmer road under conditions of disarticulated accumulation and institutional control by the traditional agrarian elites (1981, 116).
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SPATIAL STRUCTURE OF THE HACIENDA SYSTEM I have concentrated so far on the social structure of Chiles hacienda system. I turn now to its spatial structure in the early 1960s, deriving from the social structure. This new focus reveals a marked sub-utilization of Chiles agricultural land. It also reveals that it was not land scarcity that was Chiles problem. Chile was characterized by an extreme concentration of land and resources, one of the most skewed distributions in the world. The arable land in Chile is concentrated in the Central Valley, the most important agricultural region. The Central Valley is a longitudinal depression, from the Aconcagua province in the north to the nuble province in the south, which runs northsouth between the Andes and the Coastal Range. The Central Valley has an area of 7 million hectares (70,000 square kilometres) comprising about 9 per cent of Chiles total landmass. It holds 76 per cent of Chiles prime irrigated lands. In the early 1960s, this region accounted for about 45 per cent of Chiles agricultural output. The area of Chile is 75.6 million hectares. Its available arable land is 4.6 million hectares (1.2 million hectares of irrigated land and 3.4 million hectares of arable dry lands).14 Arable land is not abundant in Chile. The 4.6 million hectares represents only 6.1 per cent of the total area of the country (GIA 1979) (Table 4). According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), other Latin American counties have larger percentages of arable land (e.g. Argentina, 10.7 per cent; Mexico, 12 per cent; and Uruguay, 8 per cent). In terms of absolute numbers, all these countries, with the exception of Uruguay which is smaller than Chile
Table 4. Distribution of land use capacity Land type No. Arable land Irrigated Dryland Sub-total Non-arable Prairies Forest Sub-total Non-productive Total Source: GIA (1979, 67).
14
Area (million ha) %
1.2 3.4 4.6 8.5 11.7 20.2 50.8 75.6
1.6 4.5 6.1 11.2 15.5 26.7 67.2 100.0
The irrigated land has not experienced fundamental advances in recent decades: in 1930 Chile had 1130 million hectares of irrigated land, in 1965 it was 1229, in 1986 it was 1257.
181
have a larger arable area. In 1965, the per capita availability of arable land was 0.5 hectares per inhabitant, which is lower than that of other Latin American countries, but higher than countries in Asia and almost equal to those in Europe, such as Spain and Italy.15 If we compare the potential capacity of the land with the actual use of the land in the 1960s, we nd that only 1.4 million hectares, of the 5.5 million that were classied as agricultural land by the 1965 agricultural census, were harvested and consequently used for agricultural purposes (Table 5). Indeed, since at least the 1940s, between 1.5 and 1.7 million hectares were harvested every agricultural year. This sub-utilization of the agricultural land is exemplied by the fact that 2.9 million hectares, representing 52 per cent of the total arable land, were left idle as unimproved natural pastures and fallow land. Even though arable land is not plentiful in Chile, the data on actual use of the land in 1965 show that land scarcity was not the limiting factor for agriculture, since more than 50 per cent of the arable land was underutilized as pastures.16 In the Central Valley, 3040 per
Table 5. Distribution of actual land use in 1965 Land uses No. Arable land Crops Improved pastures Natural pastures and fallow land Sub-total Non-arable Prairies Forests Unused land Sub-total Non-productive Total Source : Alaluf et al. (1969, 50). Area (million ha) %
1.4 1.2 2.9 5.5 9.0 5.8 2.3 17.1 8.0 30.6
4.6 3.9 9.5 18.0 29.4 19.0 7.5 55.9 26.1 100.0
The total population of Chile in 1965 was 8.5 million. The water supply and geo-ecological conditions of soil quality and climate are not a limiting factor for agriculture in Chile. The Central Valley has a good supply of water from rivers that ow eastwest from the Andes Mountains. In the 1960s, as well as today, irrigation water was only a problem in years of serious drought in the Central Valley. Recently, the agricultural frontier has moved further north to the non-irrigated lands of the semi-arid region of Norte Chico, where dropirrigation techniques have been implemented. Moreover, the Central Valleys mediterranean climate and the quality of its soils are among the most appropriate for agriculture in the world, which, as the later economic boom in agriculture has shown, are Chiles best agricultural comparative advantages.
16
15
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cent of the arable land was under natural pastures. This idle land could have been used for crops or improved pastures for livestock breeding (Alaluf et al. 1969, 77). Thus, the majority of Chiles agricultural land (52 per cent of the arable land) t for the production of staple food crops was idle, unutilized or used as unimproved grazing land while the population of the country was growing rapidly and food had to be imported.17 Historically, agrarian land tenure in Chile has had two basic characteristics: the excessive concentration of the best lands and the extreme division of the remaining land.18 According to the agricultural census of 1955 (see Table 6), estates greater than 1000 hectares (haciendas de gran potencial) comprised 2.2 per cent of the land holdings and held 73 per cent of Chiles total agricultural land (Chile 1962, 18).19 Thus, Chile had one of the most skewed distributions in the world with land and capital resources strongly concentrated in few hands (Chile 1965, 168). This concentration of land and resources was referred to as latifundia. Along with this extreme concentration of the land was an excessive division of small agricultural properties. A great percentage of land holdings accounted for a small portion of the agricultural land. This extreme division of the land in many holdings is known as minifundia.
Table 6. Distribution of farms and agricultural land by farm size, 1955 Size categories No. Below 10 1099 1001000 Over 1000 Total 75,627 53,766 18,316 3,373 151,082 Land holdings % 50.1 35.6 12.1 2.2 100.0 No. 217,604 1,833,720 5,365,040 20,295,944 27,712,308 Area (ha) % 0.8 6.6 19.4 73.2 100.0
Source : Alaluf et al. (1969, 96).
The census data of 1965, summarized in Table 7, basically conrm the structural feature of the Chilean land tenure system: minifundia account for the majority of the holdings but only a small fraction of the land; latifundia, on the other hand, hold the majority of the land.
17
Indeed, in the pre-reform years numerous estates with prime irrigated land were only used as unimproved grazing lands or completely unutilized for years. The owners of these estates used to state in the Census questionnaires that their land was left fallow. 18 For the purpose of this work we dene land tenure as the legal and traditional relations among individuals, producers and institutions that regulate the rights of usage of the land and the usufruct of its products, concomitant with the obligations attached to such rights (IREN-CORFO 1979, 18). 19 Agricultural land according to the agricultural census of 1955 is formed by arable land (irrigated and dry land) and non-arable land with forestry and livestock-breeding capacity.

Table 7. Distribution of farms and agricultural land by farm size, 1965 Size categories No. Below 10 1099 1001000 Over 1000 Total 156,708 74,120 19,333 3,331 253,492 Land holdings % 61.8 29.2 7.6 1.3 100.0 No. 437,300 2,348,200 5,572,400 22,290,800 30,648,700 Area (ha)
183
% 1.4 7.7 18.2 72.7 100.0
Source: Alaluf et al. (1969, 98).
WAS THERE STRUCTURAL CHANGE BETWEEN 1955 AND 1965? Two elements seem to have changed between the censuses of 1955 and 1965. First, the total number of land holdings seems to have increased by more than 100,000 units. Second, those land holdings smaller than 10 hectares (the minifundia) seem to have also increased. It is important to reect on this, since our assessment of the nature of agrarian change in Chile at this juncture and of how far any possible agrarian transformation had proceeded hinges upon whether these numbers are accurate. Some inuential scholars may have been misled by the apparent change. In fact, this growth did not occur. On the contrary, the number of land holdings decreased by 36,000 units. This error was the product of two different conceptual denitions that produced a change in the census questionnaires. The agricultural census of 1955 did not consider the land holdings of inquilinos and medieros whose holdings are sub-tenures of less than 10 hectares within the hacienda in its survey, because it did not consider them to be agricultural producers. Therefore their land holdings were not considered in the totals, while they were included in the 1965 census. The land holdings of inquilinos and medieros in the 1955 census were 111,790 units. Therefore, if one wants to compare the land holdings of 1955 with those of the agricultural census of 1965 (the year in which inquilinos and medieros were considered agricultural producers), one would have to add the 111,790 land holdings of inquilinos and medieros to the 151,082 land holdings of the other agricultural producers of that year, which adds up to 289,733 units. Thus, the total land holdings decreased by 12 per cent which means that the concentration of the land increased between 1955 and 1965 (see Table 8). With regard to the compatibility of the 1955 and 1965 censuses for comparison purposes, the following should be noted. Many problems of comparing different census data stemmed from the changes introduced, from one census to another, in the denitions of key classications used to gather the information. These changes render some of the totals incompatible if some adjustments are not
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Table 8. Corrected distribution of land holdings by type of tenure, 1955 and 1965 Type of tenure Number of land holdings 1955 Producersa Inquilinos Sharecroppers Total
a
Change (19551965) No. 24,088 51,475 8,854 36,241 % 15.9 46.0 33.0 12.5
1965 175,170 60,315 18,007 253,492
151,082 111,790 26,861 289,733
Includes unpaid family members. Sources : Alaluf et al. (1969, 52).
made. Failure to do so has misled some authors and led them to advance an inaccurate assessment of the nature of agrarian change at that time. Thus, for example, some authors, including the very inuential Schejtman (1971, 200; n.d., 58) and Kay (1971, 127; 1977, 11316), have used census data of the labour force structure, and especially of inquilinos (their total numbers and the amount of land assigned to them within the haciendas) to show the rapid disintegration of the hacienda system and the proletarianization of its labour force in the 1950s and 1960s. Specically, both authors used the absolute and the relative number of inquilinos in the agricultural labour force to sustain their thesis. Kay observes: Inquilinos became less important within the total economically active agricultural population. Their proportion of the rural population diminished from a maximum of 21 per cent in 1935 to 12 per cent in 1955 and 6 per cent in 1965 (1977, 115). According to the two censuses, the total number of inquilinos in 1955 was 82,367, and in 1965 it was 73,938. The total active agrarian labour force in 1955 totalled 664,240, and in 1965 it amounted to 878,780. Therefore, according to these numbers, the relative number of inquilinos in the labour force was 12 and 9 per cent, respectively. Thus, besides the relative fall of the participation of inquilinos in the active agrarian population, the total number of the active labour force seemed to have increased by more than 200,000 persons, a 32 per cent increase (see Table 9). This growth seems to contradict the widely accepted notion that agriculture since the 1930s did not attain sustainable rates of growth, and therefore the rural labour force continued to out-migrate, in vast numbers, to the rapidly growing cities. Alaluf et al. (1969, 6270), however, have demonstrated that this growth of the agrarian labour force indeed did not occur. The totals thus obtained in these two censuses are not an accurate account of the total persons engaged in agriculture in those years since some important omissions in the population count were made in the 1955 census, and other duplications (some of which can be accounted for and others not) were made in attempting to surmount this shortcoming in the 1965 census. In the 1955 census, the family members of

Table 9. Labour force structure (uncorrected census data), 1955 and 1965 Category 1955 1965
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Change 19551965 % 58.6 1.4 1.8 8.4 No. 185,525 526 3,478 8,429 68,309 214,540 % 56.3 4.2 17.8 10.2 35.3 32.3
No. Producers/unpaid family members Administrators/employees Overseers Inquilinos/inquilinosmedieros Sharecroppers (medieros) Temporary workers (afuerinos) Total Source : Alaluf et al. (1969, 175). 329,262 12,664 19,499 82,367 26,861 193,587 664,240
% 49.6 1.9 2.9 12.4 4.0 29.1 100.0
No. 514,787 12,138 16,021 73,938
261,896 29.8 878,780 100.0
inquilinos and sharecroppers that worked in agriculture without remuneration were not included in the count since inquilinos and sharecroppers were not considered producers. If we assume, after Alaluf et al. (1969, 67), that there was at least one unpaid family member per inquilino and sharecropper family, we would have to add 111,790 persons to the category of producers and unpaid family members in the 1955 census. In the 1965 census, inquilinos, sharecroppers, administrators, employees and overseers together with their family members who worked in agriculture were accounted for twice, once as producers and again as workers. Hence, more than 60,000 persons should be subtracted from the category of producers and unpaid family members in the 1965 census. In summary, in 1955 the total active population engaged in agriculture was larger than 664,240, possibly about 776,030. The corresponding population of 1965 was smaller than 878,780, probably between the range of 780,000 and 818,465. Even this latter estimate still has duplications that are impossible to assess. Then, if we take into consideration the duplications incurred in the 1965 census, and the fact that the unremunerated family members of inquilinos and sharecroppers were not counted in the 1955 census, we can conclude that the agricultural workforce did not increase during the 1955 and 1965 period. In the best scenario, we can say that it remained constant (Alaluf et al. 1969, 69). Thus, the relative number of inquilinos participating in the agricultural active labour force from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s ranged between about 9 and 10 per cent (see Table 10). This is at variance with Kays assessment of the situation. These gures do not support his thesis of the rapid disintegration of the hacienda system and the proletarianization of its labour force in the 1950s and 1960s. On the contrary, the demise of the traditional hacienda system would require purposive state intervention. Another problem with these two censuses involves the total amount of land that inquilinos held in the form of regalas. Kay, referring to the fall in the total number of hectares leased to inquilinos, states: the land leased on a sharecropping
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Table 10. Corrected labour force structure, 1955 and 1965 census Category 1955 1965 Change 19551965 % 53.3 1.5 2.0 9.0 2.2 32.0 100.0 No. 4,587 526 3,478 8,429 8,854 68,309 42,435 % 1.0 4.2 17.8 10.2 33.0 35.3 5.5
No. Producers/unpaid family members Administrators/employees Overseers Inquilinos/inquilinosmedieros Sharecroppers (medieros) Temporary workers (afuerinos) Total Source : Alaluf et al. (1969, 6270). 441,052 12,664 19,499 82,367 26,861 193,587 776,030
% 56.8 1.6 2.5 10.6 3.5 24.9 100.0
No. 436,465 12,138 16,021 73,938 18,007 261,896 818,465
basis remained more or less the same between 1955 and 1965, whereas the land leased in regala to labour-service tenants diminished by about one sixth (1977, 114). For his observations Kay used the raw data of both censuses, which showed 136,900 hectares held by inquilinos in 1955 and 115,400 hectares for the 1965 census. These data show a decrease of 15.6 per cent in the land assigned to inquilinos. The problem with this information is that the total amount of land held by inquilinos in 1955 was composed of both their land held in regalas and on a sharecropping basis. In consequence, the sharecropping class in 1955 is a pure category. The 1965 census, on the other hand, distinguishes between the land held by inquilinos in regalas from their land held on a sharecropping basis. The rst amount, the land held in regalas, is depicted as the land held by inquilinos; and the second amount, the land held on a sharecropping basis, is added to the land held by pure sharecroppers. Thus, the sharecropping class is a mixed class of pure sharecroppers and the land held under this guise by inquilinos (Alaluf et al. 1969, 558). After the adjustments have been made to the agricultural censuses of 1955 and 1965, the corrected data show that the land held by inquilinos (tierras en racin) instead of diminishing, as depicted by the unadjusted data, grew by 3000 hectares (a 2.3 per cent increment). And the land held on a sharecropping basis declined by 140,000 hectares (a 36 per cent cut) (Alaluf et al. 1969, 58). Thus, the data of inquilinos (their total numbers and the amount of land assigned to them) from these two censuses depict two different classications that should be taken into account when used to identify a general trend (see Table 11). That general trend was not one of disintegration of the traditional hacienda system. On the contrary, the data show the endurance of the internal peasant enterprise within the hacienda system. Agricultural censuses attempt to survey all the land that potentially can be used for agriculture. Yet, as stated before, in Chile the actual land used for crops each year was smaller than the total area surveyed by the agricultural census. In

Table 11. Corrected distribution of land by type of tenure, 1955 and 1965 Type of tenure 1955 Producersa Inquilinos Sharecroppers Total
a
187
Area (1000 ha) 1965 30,259.5 140.0 249.2 30,648.7
Change (19551965) No. 3,073.9 3.1 140.6 2,936.4 % 11.3 2.3 36.1 10.6
27,185.6 136.9 389.8 27,712.3
Includes unpaid family members. Source: Alaluf et al. (1969, 58).
1955 and 1965, the cultivated area was 1.4 million hectares each year (annual and permanent crops). Therefore, when we look at the participation of tenure types in the actual harvested land, we can better measure the impact of sub-tenures in growing the domestic food that was produced in those years. In 1955, inquilinos represented 10 per cent of the agricultural workforce and held 9.2 per cent of the cultivated area. Sharecroppers represented 3.4 per cent of the agricultural workforce and held 26 per cent of the total cultivated area. Together they represented 14 per cent of the labour force and held 35 per cent of the total cultivated land. In 1965, inquilinos comprised 9 per cent of the agricultural workforce and held almost 10 per cent of the cultivated land. Sharecroppers represented 2.2 per cent of the agricultural workforce and held 17.5 per cent of the cultivated land. Together they represented 11.2 per cent of the agricultural labour force and held 18.5 per cent of the cultivated land (Alaluf et al. 1969, 50, 58, 61, 69). These data show the unexpected structural continuity of the hacienda system. The growing urbanrural struggle in national politics, the continuing erosion of landowners veto power on agricultural policy and the lethargic performance of agriculture did not yet produce deep structural changes in the hacienda system. Rather, the landowners continued to hold the majority of the agricultural land captive and unproductive and to rely on a combination of cash payments and non-capitalist forms of surplus extraction from labour-service tenants and sharecroppers. Some changes were taking place that were indeed part of the secular decline of agriculture in general and the hacienda system in particular. For example, one small sector of the haciendas was reinforcing the old labour system of inquilinaje by providing more land resources to service tenants in return for rents, while others, also few in numbers, had evolved into modern capitalist structures by intensifying the use of productive resources and extending the cash wage to their labour force. The majority of the estates, however, were under the Traditional stage of the hacienda system. Up to this point, we have presented our disagreement with the way in which Kay and Schejtman have used the census data to advance their thesis of the
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continued disintegration of the internal economies of peasants since the 1930s. They identied this change to argue that, by the early 1960s, the Chilean hacienda system had largely completed its transition to agrarian capitalism. My systematic analysis has shown that up to the beginning of the agrarian reform, in 1965, the data do not support their thesis of the disintegration of the hacienda system. One cannot yet speak of the obliteration of the hacienda system nor of the complete proletarianization of its labour force. It is my argument that the agrarian restructuring process carried out by the state would ultimately, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, completely reshape it into more capitalistic forms. Therefore, both the countrys and the haciendas transition to capitalism were far from being accomplished in the early 1960s. ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE HACIENDA SYSTEM The hacienda system was consolidated in the second half of the nineteenth century with the growth of foreign markets. Certainly, from 1850 onward, Chilean agriculture received a great economic boost from the growing demand for its wheat, rst in the Pacic basin and later in England (Bengoa 1990; Seplveda 1959). At the end of the nineteenth century, the export of wheat started declining. Nonetheless, from 1900 to 1930 Chilean agriculture saw a period of higher production due to the growth of the internal market for agricultural products and the implementation of some mechanization (Mamalakis 1965; Meller 1996). The world economic crisis beginning in 1929 arrested this development. An agricultural downturn set in, and Chilean agriculture failed to produce enough foodstuffs to feed the growing urban population (Mamalakis 1976, 347). The natural consequence of this situation was the sustained growth of food imports, which in turn upset the balance of trade and hurt the Chilean economy. Thus, the limited supply of foreign exchange had to be spent on food imports. Furthermore, agriculture stopped generating employment and, as a consequence, a growing number of landless agricultural workers out-migrated to the cities to seek employment in the urban economy.20 The sluggish growth of urban labour markets led to the growth of unemployment and increases in poverty rates.21 The imbalance between a rising population and diminishing food production was clear. Between 1936 and 1965, the population grew at a rate of 2.1 per cent while agricultural output grew at only 1.8 per cent, a rate that is inferior to population growth, to the internal demand for agricultural products and to the growth of the other sectors of the economy (Chile 1968, 3). As a consequence,
20
For an account of the socio-economic determinants of Chiles rapid urbanization in the twentieth century, see Friedmann and Lackington (1971), and Johnson (1978). For an interesting exposition of the case of Santiago and the countryside at the beginning of the twentieth century, see chapter 8 of Bauer (1975a). 21 In 1960, Chile had 67 per cent of its population classied as urban and Santiago concentrated about one third of Chiles total population of 7.6 million of habitants.
189
the annual per capita rate of agricultural production growth for this period was negative, at 0.4 per cent. Food imports lled this gap between the growing demand for food and diminishing agricultural productivity. Indeed, from the second half of the nineteenth century, Chile was a net exporter of agricultural products, and after the world economic crisis it became a net importer.22 From 1963 to 1965, agricultures contribution to total income generated by exports was only 3 per cent, whereas importing foodstuff and inputs for the agricultural sector used 30 per cent of total export income (Chile 1968, 3). From 1936, the income spent on agricultural imports roughly doubled with each passing decade to reach about US$155 million by 1965; causing each year a sustained haemorrhage in the national accounts. Even though a large share of the countrys income had been spent on agricultural products, a large share of the population is malnourished (Chile 1968, 4). As to what went wrong with agriculture and the hacienda system after the 1930s, there were two opposing answers that offered two different sets of policy recommendations. The rst was the so-called monetarist approach, and the second the structuralist or reformist approach of agrarian stagnation. According to the former view, the incentives for modernization and higher production in agriculture and the rural sector were simply not present. It was further contended that national economic policymaking had been more favourable to the interests of industry and the urban sector by placing price controls on agricultural products (Swift 1971, 2), and against the interests of agriculture by keeping prots low. This perspective asked for sectoral incentives more in tune with agricultural needs, such as higher prices for the domestic production of agricultural products, high tariffs on imports of competitive agricultural products, and lower tariffs on imports of agricultural inputs. This approach was informed by the market rationality view of neo-classical economics and sought to promote agricultural growth via technological change and, most importantly, within the existing socio-political structure (Bray 1966). Mamalakis summarized this view by stating that negative incentives, such as price controls, deteriorating terms of trade, subsidized imports, inadequate extension work, and land reform led to agricultures decline as a food producer (1976, 348). Proponents of the second view argued that the main obstacles to modernizing the agricultural system were both the concentration of the best land and water resources in the hands of an agricultural oligarchy that hold land more for a status symbol than for prot making and the antiquated system of its labour force (Swift 1971, 2). In this approach it was further argued that the hacienda system was characterized by low productivity and underutilization of labour and land. Table 12 shows the extent to which labour and the productive land were managed by each social group of agriculture in 1965, and their output, expressed in the monetary value of their production. First, it should be borne in mind that
1939 was the last year that agriculture showed a positive balance of trade. In 19421944 the balance of trade of the agricultural sector was 6.7 million dollars, by 19481950 it had grown to 29.6 million dollars.
22
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Table 12. Labour structure, land use and value of production, by category of land tenure, 1965 Category Latifundiaa No. Labour structureb Administrators/employees Overseers Inquilinos/inquilinosmedieros Afuerinos Total Land use (1000 ha) Crops Articial pastures Natural pastures Productive non-used land Total usable land Value of production (1000 E)c Crops Livestock and products Total production
a
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Medium farms % No. %
Family farms No. %
Minifundia No. %
Total No. %
8,674 13,061 60,015 142,521 224,271 287.8 490.5 7,762.4 2,161.7 10,702.4 189,780.0 245,060.0 434,840.0
75.7 83.9 83.9 59.5 66.4 18.8 47.6 76.5 52.2 63.5 16.5 27.8 21.4
1,638 1,401 8,207 41,142 52,388 573.8 447.0 1,670.3 1,214.3 3,905.4 444,030.0 354,720.0 798,750.0
14.3 9.0 11.5 17.2 15.5 37.5 43.4 16.5 29.3 23.2 38.6 40.3 39.3
650 544 2,342 27,221 30,757 303.4 70.2 556.5 567.4 1,497.5 211,640.0 127,880.0 339,520.0
5.7 3.5 3.3 11.4 9.1 19.8 6.8 5.5 13.7 8.9 18.4 14.5 16.7
501 561 945 28,543 30,550 364.7 23.0 161.8 200.9 750.4 304,800.0 152,470.0 457,270.0
4.4 3.6 1.3 11.9 9.0 23.8 2.2 1.6 4.8 4.5 26.5 17.3 22.5
11,463 15,567 71,509 239,427 337,966 1,529.7 1,030.7 10,151.0 4,144.3 16,855.7 1,150,250.0 880,130.0 2,030,380.0
100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100
Size of holdings: Latifundia, over 80 BIH; Medium farms, 2080 BIH; Family farms, 520 BIH; Minifundia, below 5 BIH. The category of producers/unpaid family members is not included. They amounted to 376,400 persons. c Escudos of 1965, 1 E = 0.27 US$. Sources: For labour structure, Thomas (1996, 38); for land use, Baytelman (1979, 125); for value of production, Baytelman (1979, 140).
b
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the hacienda system concentrated the majority of the nations rural labour force: 66 per cent to be exact. Second, it should be noted that this system encompassed the majority of the usable land (63 per cent), but cultivated only 18 per cent of the countrys total land dedicated to crops and concentrated 47 per cent of the total land used for improved pastures for livestock grazing. The majority of latifundias usable land was, however, left unproductive as natural pastures and non-used land. Therefore, the hacienda system contributed, proportionately to its size, a small part of the total countrys agricultural production, only 19 per cent of its crop production and 28 per cent of its livestock products (measured by the value of production). This is of fundamental importance inasmuch as it shows the latifundias severe underutilization of land and labour (Baytelman 1979). The structuralists policy proposals aimed not just to radically change the distribution of economic resources such as land and water, but also sought the inclusion of the peasantry into the modern economy as a condition for the modernization of the whole society (Thiesenhusen 1967). The proponents of the reformist perspective, which emphasized modernization through social-political change, argued that to increase agricultural production, it was imperative to broaden direct political participation in the policymaking process. This was an altogether more realistic assessment than the monetarist one. A series of reports developed by research institutes linked to international agencies became the intellectual basis for the reformists argument for agrarian reform. For Chile, the Inter-American Committee for Agricultural Development (CIDA) elaborated the most inuential of these reports. CIDA argued that in Chile there was an inverse relation between farm size and the value of production or farm productivity (CIDA 1966, 149). Specically, this argument noted that the high concentration of agricultural land in the hands of a landed elite not willing or interested in investing was the cause of low agricultural productivity. In turn, insufcient productivity triggered scarcity thus causing price increases and, ultimately, ination. The structuralists saw this mechanism as the root cause for the failure of government programmes to control ination and argued that only by restructuring rural relations of property could agriculture become more productive (Thomas 1996). At the time, this argument was widely accepted as one of the characteristics of agriculture in developing countries. Thus, the CIDA study showed empirically that small-sized farms had better productivity than the large estates. This argument was crucial to those who thought that latifundia were the cause of agricultural backwardness and that a re-distributive land reform was the correct policy to carry forward. For example, the CIDA report showed that the sub-family and family farms (the Agrarian Middle Class and Subsistence Peasants respectively) had, on average, an estimated per arable hectare value of output twice as large as the Multi-Family Farms (the Traditional Landed Class) (CIDA 1966, 150). Later developments have shown that as an observable phenomenon the inverse relationship is essentially correct, but the explanation of the difference in productivity between farms of different sizes encompassed other causes than just qualitative and quantitative factor differences. Originally, it was argued that
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higher efciency and better land quality accounted for the greater productivity of small farms. More recently, others have argued that the sizeproductivity relationship is historically specic to those formations where emerging capitalist forms of surplus extraction coexist with non-capitalist elements. In other words, it is the desperate struggle of poor families of smallholders that overexploit themselves for survival on below-subsistence plots of land in a relatively backward agriculture (Dyer 1997, 146). The same author, drawing his conclusions from Egypt and a detailed treatment of the extensive debate on the inverse relationship in India, states that as agriculture becomes more capitalistic, the inverse relation tends to disappear and capitalized farmers of medium-size farms with access to new technology start to exhibit the best productivity. In Chile, a similar process occurred after the agrarian reform was consolidated. Capitalized farmers and agro-industries started to buy the land parcels created by the agrarian reform from the peasant beneciaries on the best-irrigated lands to form medium-size farms. This re-constituted capitalist class had the capital to access and implement new technologies into the most dynamic sectors of agriculture, such as fruit, forestry and wine production. The transformed social relations of production in conjunction with developments in the forces of production (technology) and the new land market permitted the capitalist accumulation that started in the second half of the 1980s. During the pre-reform period, the stagnation of the agricultural sector initiated after 1936 continued. Throughout the period, this sector was unable to feed a growing but small population of less than 8 million inhabitants. This state of affairs leads one to conclude that the sector was characterized by a structural inexibility that pre-empted substantive change. These facts, high food imports and underutilization of land resources, provided a powerful argument to the sector of Chilean society that believed agricultural productivity would be increased if land ownership were restructured. THE LAND QUESTION AND THE CHILEAN TRANSITION TO AGRARIAN CAPITALISM From 1930 to 1964, Chilean landowners failed to become an agrarian bourgeoisie, which would have transformed the countryside to the sway of capitalist modernization (Bauer 1975a, 170; Bengoa 1988, 274). At two conjunctures during the last decades of the nineteenth century and in the 1930s the historical conditions were favourable for the development and growth of agrarian capitalism. At the end of the nineteenth century, instead of making the transition, landowners chose to reinforce the old system of inquilinaje and became more conservative, retrograde and defensive (see Bauer 1992; Bengoa 1988, 26778). The impact of the economic crisis of the 1930s triggered the slow erosion of latifundia and the continuing of an incomplete agrarian capitalist development (Bengoa 1990, 20916). Until the early 1960s, when the organized political action of the urban middle class, the campesinos, the proletariat and the state apparatus struck the nal blow to the landed class in the form of the agrarian
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reform, the latifundia system remained as the backbone of agrarian production and underpinned social property relations. Rural workers provided landowners with the source of their privileged social position and a captive electoral constituency that voted for their political representatives in local and national elections, allowing them to be one of the most important political forces nationally. From the 1930s to the early 1960s, landowners consistently and successfully opposed fundamental transformations in the countryside (Loveman 1976, xxviii). Their political actions, along with the historical weight of their being the most visible and important social class in Chile, allowed them to secure the non-intervention of the state in the countryside (Loveman 1976, xxviii). The struggle for land and control in the countryside was fought in the political arena. From the 1930s, an unstable coalition made a series of attempts to undermine landowners socio-political power, utilizing diverse strategies, including modest efforts for land redistribution and challenges to their control of rural labour. The coalitions instability was due to the highly contradictory interests of its members formed by urban and industrial unions, the urban working class, class-oriented political parties of the left such as the Socialist and Communist Parties, and the middle class, and its political representatives such as the Christian Democrat Party. None of these challenges succeeded completely in its task until the passage in 1967 of the laws authorizing the expropriation of agricultural estates and permitting rural unionization, but nonetheless, each signied a slow dilution and eroding of the landowners political base. A crucial change was the electoral reforms of 1958 and 1962. The rst introduced the secret ballot, which ended fraudulent electoral practices, and the second made the registration to vote compulsory (Winn 2004, 94). These reforms permitted the political parties of the left to access the electoral constituencies in the countryside, which up to that point had remained captive to the political parties representing landowners interests (Bengoa 1988, 14). This shift in policy allowed in the countryside the intrusion of class-based political parties that sought to gain the vote of the rural population. As a consequence, in 1963 for the rst time in history, a candidate of the left was elected as a deputy to the lower house of Congress by a rural locality (Gmez 1986a, 43). Despite these attempts, as of the mid-1960s landowners monopoly of Chiles most productive land still provided them with their source of socio-economic and political power. Numerous studies of contemporary Chile concede that from 1930 onward, the strategy of national industrialization reconciled the interests of wageworkers and the industrial bourgeoisie with landowners against rural labourers around the necessity to keep food prices low. This was referred to as the dualist approach. According to this approach, wageworkers and the industrial bourgeoisie (the modern classes) did not seek alliances with the poor rural classes to pressure landowners for a structural transformation of the obsolete agricultural system.23 Instead, they opted to keep the rural classes outside of the political system and to
23
Some authors describe it as pre-bourgeois, or neo-feudal, others refer to it as traditional.
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develop a fragile political agreement with landowners. Under this arrangement, landowners agreed to food-price controls by the state and, in return, they were allowed to keep the system of inquilinaje under their exclusive control, with the resulting low labour costs and political power that the system thus granted them (Cademrtori 1968; Ramrez Necochea 1956).24 Writing from the dualist approach, Salazar and Pinto (1999, 105), for instance, note that after the economic crisis of the 1930s, landowners made it a priority to block efforts to modernize labour relations in the countryside, such as the introduction of unionization laws. They go on to point out that landowners entered tacit agreements with the urban sectors and agreed to agricultural price controls, especially on food. In turn, rural workers were explicitly left out of such legislation, and urban political forces agreed neither to politicize the countryside nor to pressure for unionization. Despite controls on agricultural prices, during downturns in economic cycles, the political system had to rely on raising the nominal wages of the urban working class to counterbalance the higher production costs of industrialists and to strengthen the internal demand for domestic industrial products (Moulian 1997, 817). This mechanism prevented more severe confrontations between the urban working class and the industrialists, but caused an inationary spiral that plagued the economic performance of the so-called populist state (Pinto 1962, 12570). On the other hand, the non-capitalist character of payments to the agricultural labour force with its modality of perquisites, in-kind and land, and cash, left them, if not totally outside, at least on the margins of the market economy. These rural workers were conned to an economy of marginal subsistence. The agrarian question had not been resolved. This line of analysis implicitly asserts that the progressive industrial bourgeoisie and the landed traditional oligarchy were two separate and opposing groups of the Chilean propertied classes. Zeitlin and Ratcliff (1988), in a cogent and more convincing treatment, have attempted to question this premise of the separation of these two social classes and the theory of sectoral conict. Through an empirical analysis, with data of the mid-1960s, they have advanced the thesis of the inter-sectoral cohesiveness of the dominant class of Chile. To what extent did the same persons, families and corporations that owned industrial and nancial capital also own land in Chile? Zeitlin and Ratcliff tell us that in the mid-1960s, the Chilean dominant class consisted of an amalgam of capitalists and landowners, a coalesced dominant class, in their apt characterization. The core of this class its hegemonic fraction, in Gramscis term was a
24
The sectoral conict is close to this approach, since it portrays the economy divided among diverse sectors, some with mutually exclusive interests. This approach sees the agricultural stagnation that set in after the world economic crisis of the 1930s as a result of discriminatory policies against agriculture, and favouring the industrial sector. Mamalakiss work is one of the best examples of this thesis (1965, 1976). In the same perspective, Carrire (1981) argues that the landowners main objective in this period was to carry out a capitalist modernization of agriculture. He claims that landowners used the Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura as an interest pressure institution to advance their sectoral policies.
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segment composed of landed capitalists. They were landowners from well-known political families who simultaneously were owners of capital as well as being higher executives of the top corporations. Zeitlin and Ratcliff also found that the members of this intra-class segment were distinguished by their disproportionate numbers among the most conspicuous political leaders of their class (1988, 206). And they go on to suggest that due to the historically important role that land ownership has played in Chiles development, the landed capitalists are distinguished politically as their classs leaders not because they are landed capitalists, but merely because they are, in reality, great landowners per se, heirs of their own political families landed political power and propensity to rule (1988, 207; emphasis in original).25 The authors note that the landed capitalists, the core of the Chilean dominant class, found themselves in an opposing intra-class position due to the contradictory character of their interests as landowners and capitalists. Due to this delicate intra-class position of being landowners and capitalists, the landed capitalists sought class hegemony and direct representation in the state. Therefore, they could have the upper hand on policymaking to harmonize their opposing interests as landlords and capitalists. Moreover, Zeitlin and Ratcliff suggest that this contradictory intra-class position is the very cause of their disproportionate representation in holding the key ofces of the Chilean state. Furthermore, under this framework the authors argue that one can attempt to understand the contradictory economic policies in place in Chile during the rst half of the twentieth century. They were the direct result of the contradictory intra-class position of the core Chilean dominant class. That is eminently plausible. On policymaking, Zeitlin and Ratcliff note that if one looks at the main policies implemented by the different governments of the import-substitutingindustrialization (ISI) period, 1930s to 1973, one nds that some policies were indeed intended to protect the industrial sector. But one also nds that many other policies were originally and specically devised to protect the agricultural sector and its landholding class. Thus, the policymaking process attempted to reconcile the contradictory interests of capitalists and landowners. The economic model during this period focused on the manufacturing of previously imported goods. It was vital for the government to secure a cheap supply of food to reduce the share of food expenditures in the wages of the industrial and service-related working-urban class. The control of agricultural prices was an important element to prevent urban workers from demanding higher wages. Food prices were controlled from rising too high to secure a level of prots for industry;
Other authors have also emphasized the joint character of the dominant class and the predominant position of landowners. For example, Moulian has stated: The symbiosis between the industrialists and landowners, crowned by the predominance of the latter in the political representation of the whole, constitutes the explanatory axis of the relative conservatism of the dominant classes (cited in Pinto 1985, 89). Loveman has characterized the dominant class along the same axis; he has stated: From the outset, the Chilean hacendado class linked itself to urban and industrial enterprise. At the same time, successful merchants, miners, and industrialists bought haciendas to consolidate their upper-class status (1976, 5960).
25
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they were also controlled from extreme plunges to protect the prots of the landholding class. Another important policy that speaks of the governments attempts to reconcile contradictory interests is that urban industrial workers were granted the right to unionize, but peasants were explicitly excluded from asserting this right. With this measure, the government ensured that landowners would not have the pressure from a unionized peasantry to raise wages. The compelling picture that arises from the work of Zeitlin and Ratcliff is one of a constant governmental effort to reconcile the divergent interests between capitalists and landowners. They show the capacity of the landed capitalists to direct policymaking to full their opposing contradictory interests as landed capitalists and also the capacity for forcing into assimilation those divergent social forces unleashed by the processes of industrialization and urbanization into the social order. This approach is accurately attuned with the historical experience of the representative political activity played by the landed class in Chilean affairs. In Lovemans words: Indeed, this class of hacendados essentially constituted an aristocratic atavism for Chile in the early twentieth century. It dominated the Congress, executive administration, and judiciary. Also heavily represented in commerce and industry, Chiles most important hacendados were in addition Chiles most important bankers, miners, and politicians. In short, the hacendados were not simply a rural class but a national propertied class whose source of political power rested in the countryside but extended to the urban sphere. (1976, 60) The contradiction thus embodied would have to be resolved if a full transition to agrarian capitalism were to be secured. By the 1950s, Chile had become a highly urbanized society with signicant industrial development. But the development of an urban and industrialized polity had not erased the old agrarian character of its social relations. Perhaps this was one of the main paradoxes of Chile in the twentieth century, namely that a rising modern urban society kept at its central core agrarian social relations. Put another way, a constant contradiction permeated the alliance of dominant classes in Chile, a contradiction arising from the antagonistic relation between industrial capital and traditional landownership (Zeitlin 1984; Zeitlin and Ratcliff 1988). The pervasiveness of rural power as a matrix for social relations and policymaking has led some authors to argue that the sluggish economic development and hyperination that haunted the Chilean economy during the period of Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) development strategy (193052) was caused by the retarded development of a Schumpeterian capitalist class and the endurance of an outdated agrarian structure in the countryside (Kaldor 1964). There is, surely, some truth in that. Others such as Carrire, writing on the role that the Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura (SNA), the landowners traditional interest-group association, played in supporting the cause for the most capitalist-driven sector of Chilean landowners, argued that agriculture after the 1930s clashed against the states driving force
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toward industrialization because at the state level the requirements of ISI came to take precedence (1981, 205). Under these conditions, the author goes on to say, agricultural producers lobbied through the SNA for policy changes that would have made agriculture more protable, but ISI industrialists prevented and halted the capitalist modernizing impulses that landowners and the SNA provided for agriculture. Therefore, for this author, the SNAs unimpressive record of achievements in defending landowners interests at the state level, especially in dealing with issues of pricing, suggests that landowners were no more than junior partners in the inter-sectoral coalition that made up Chiles ruling class (Carrire 1981, 202). If they were junior partners, they were, nevertheless, capable of frustrating the ISI programme and contributing signicantly to hyperination. They were, to be sure, an integral part of a contradiction that had to be resolved. Bengoa (1988, 1990) has suggested that the development of agrarian capitalism in Chile has not been linear. That, surely, has been the experience pervasively in the historical record elsewhere. One would not, necessarily, expect otherwise. In Chiles case, the expansion of a market-oriented agriculture has shown advances and declines, owing largely to the changes in the export sector. Bengoa (1988, 12) notes that in the periods of agricultural bonanza, a greater proletarianization of the workforce takes place through the raising of the cash wage component of its payments, se produce una mayor asalarizacin de la mano de obra. Contrariwise, when agricultural exports decline and prices are low, landowners intensify service tenancy by raising the land component of payments to the workforce, se campesinaza la fuerza de trabajo. He goes on to say, as I have indicated, that, in Chile, the development of capitalism is not necessarily linear (1990, 9). Kay has argued that, from the 1930s, landlords were engaged in transforming their estates into capitalist enterprises, and by 1964 (the beginning of the agrarian reform) they had almost completed the transformation into wage labour (1992, 104). He has contended that in the case of Chile, the agrarian question continued while agriculture had become predominantly capitalist (1992, 104). He exaggerates, I argue, the extent to which the transformation had proceeded. It is my contention that up to the early 1960s, the Chilean agrarian system, despite being fully commercialized, had not completed its transition to modern capitalism. Two related points can be made to demonstrate this: rst in relation to the character of the workforce and second with respect to the landlords socio-political power. First, it has been argued that the development of agrarian capitalism requires the commodication of a large amount of the labour force (Brenner 1986). That is, the large majority of agricultural workers must be wrested from controlling their means of subsistence through the intensication of primitive accumulation. In the 1960s, a large percentage of the labour force was not fully commodied. These workers had access to a land parcel and sold their labour in a seasonal or intermittent manner. Indeed, in 1965, a year after the agrarian reform had begun, internal hacienda workers (inquilinos and sharecroppers) accounted for 11 per cent of the agricultural labour force and held 18 per cent of the cultivated land. That
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same year, external hacienda peasants or smallholders comprised about 26 per cent of the agrarian labour force with access to land, although some of them were on below-subsistence land parcels. Thus, peasants had not been fully subordinated to the commoditization of labour markets and to the massive use of wage labour and capital. Secondly, a large proportion of traditional landowners had not become capitalist agrarian producers. As stated earlier, some of them exploited their estates with a bare minimum of capital investment; others held their land primarily for class status and credit guarantees; still others solely extracted pre-capitalist rents from their estates. I have already mentioned that one of the main factors retarding the development of a fully capitalist agriculture was the landowners large share of political power at government levels and their veto power over agrarian policy (Zeitlin and Ratcliff 1988). As Kay has noted (1992, 107), government policies favoured large landowners on issues of credit policy, taxation, public investment, agricultural prices and export policy to the detriment of smaller producers. Landowners controlled a large share of the means of production, such as land and water rights, and used these resources for prot-oriented purposes as well as for their social-political power and class status. Thus, traditional landowners sought indirect benets from land ownership. They controlled the rural labour force for political power; they used the estates as collateral for investment credits invested in more protable business outside agriculture; they diverted rents from manorial tenants and sharecroppers; and they used land as a speculative asset and as a device for receiving exoneration from government taxes (Loveman 1976). In the Chilean path to modern capitalism, in general, and in agriculture, in particular, we nd that social relations were mediated by a combination of both modern and traditional elements of labour control and surplus extraction. That is, two interwoven, and highly contradictory, factors negotiated the development of agriculture. In the early 1960s, the landed class was suspended in an ambiguous amalgam of traditionalism and modernizing process. Some rural workers had been thrown off the land and were being subjected to modern wages while many rural workers lived off the land and thus had access to subsistence plots of land. Productivity and capital accumulation were sluggish even for the most capitalist-oriented sector of landowners. The development of the capitalist forces of production via the introduction of modern farm technology such as mechanization (labour-saving technology) and improved seeds (yieldincreasing technology) to fast-track productivity had been introduced on some modern farms while the majority of haciendas were still using antiquated technology such as wooden ploughs and animals for tilling. In sum, by the early 1960s, while the hacienda system was still dominant it coexisted with the slow rise of agrarian capitalism. CONCLUDING REMARKS: THE AGRARIAN REFORM During the early 1960s, a consensus was formed among left-centre political parties to implement some type of agrarian change. In 1964, the Christian
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Democrat party won the presidential elections in a landslide victory. The newly elected president, Eduardo Frei, made agrarian reform a central part of his policymaking agenda. The Agrarian Reform Law was passed in 1967. During the presidencies of Eduardo Frei (19651970) and Salvador Allende (19711973), this law was implemented, expropriating more than 5800 estates consisting of 9 million hectares (59 per cent of Chiles agricultural land), which represented all of the latifundia (ODEPA 1974; Barraclough and Fernndez 1974). After the military coup that deposed Allende on 11 September 1973, former landowners were granted back 32 per cent of the expropriated land in the form of reservas or in fully returned haciendas.26 The original specications of the agrarian reform law stipulated that expropriated landowners could retain a parcel of their estates not exceeding 80 Basic Irrigated Hectare (BIH) called reserva (reserve) (Cruz 1983). In 1973, 76,500 rural workers comprised the reformed sector.27 At the end of the consolidation process, in 1980, only 46,000 peasant families had been assigned two-fths of the expropriated land in the form of individual parcels of land.28 The remaining 29,000 peasant families were left without their means of subsistence, and no other employment alternatives were provided. Today, approximately 43 per cent of those peasant families that received land still have their farms and are relatively prosperous (Echeique and Rolando 1991; Echeique 1996; cf. Gmez 1986b, 1924). The remaining expropriated land was auctioned off in the private market or given to public or non-prot institutions. The original objective of the agrarian reform was to resolve the land and agrarian questions, specically to break up the concentration of land ownership and to increase agricultural production. Relatedly, it intended to modernize society by moving agricultural workers into society at large (Chonchol 1972). One of the main consequences of this state intervention process was to hasten the transition to agrarian capitalism. The agrarian reform totally dismantled the structure of the hacienda system, and by doing so it radically changed agrarian social property relations by developing an open land market. Some of the beneciaries of the new agricultural units created by the reform are capitalist groups that have consolidated medium-sized farms engaged in the protable export-oriented sector of fruits and wines. Large-sized forestry companies have also acquired large tracts of land, which have been developed for the export of wood-chips and cellulose (Gmez and Echeique 1988).
These returned farms were of medium size with more efcient productive techniques than latifundia and were expropriated in the last years of the Allende government. The military did not return any expropriated estates that were inefcient, abandoned or with absentee landowners. 27 61,100 families and 15,400 single workers, the total population of the reformed sector added up to 342,000 individuals (ODEPA 1974, 8). 28 Hernn Urrutia, Director of the Subdepartamento Tenencia de la Tierra y Aguas, provided this information: 46,269 families were assigned a productive land parcel from 3,946,106 hectares representing 39.6 per cent of the expropriated land. The Corporacin de la Reforma Agraria (CORA) was the agency that carried out the agrarian reform; it was dissolved on 31 December 1978. The Ocina de Normalizacin Agraria (ODENA) succeeded CORA until December 1979. From 1980 onward, the Sudepartamento Tenencia de la Tierra y Aguas has been in charge of the remaining business of CORA. The CORA archives are housed at this ofce.
26
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In summary, agriculture during the pre-reform period was stagnant, and unable to feed a growing, but small population of less than 8 million inhabitants. The sector did not have the structural exibility to adjust to changes. The facts of high food imports and underutilization of land resources provided a powerful argument to the sector of Chilean society seeking to restructure land ownership to increase agricultural productivity. Landowners were left without arguments to counterattack. The end of the hacienda system was initiated and ushered in by the Christian Democrats. In contemporary Chile, a long period of agrarian restructuring has wrought many changes to the countryside that neither the old hacendados nor the inquilinos could have foreseen. Todays landowners seem to be closer to the Schumpeterian ideal of modern capitalists than the old hacendados. Moreover, the pivotal relation between this new capitalist class and the rural workers is rmly centred in capitalist forms of surplus extraction. Capitalist transformation is now complete. In another article I shall consider in detail the changes triggered by the implementation and consolidation of the Chilean agrarian reform (from 1964 to 1980). REFERENCES
Alaluf, David, 1961. Problemas de la propiedad agrcola en Chile. Kiel: Schriften Des Geographischen Instituts der Universitt Kiel. Alaluf, David, Emilio Robles and Ana Mara Lpez, 1969. Cambios ocurridos en la agricultura chilena en el perodo comprendido entre los censos agropecuarios 1955 y 1965. Santiago: ICIRA. Baraona, Rafael, Ximena Aranda and Roberto Santana, 1961. Valle de Putaendo: estudio de estructura agraria. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria. Barraclough, Solon and Jos Antonio Fernndez, 1974. Diagnstico de la reforma agraria chilena. Mxico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. Bauer, Arnold J., 1975a. Chilean Rural Society from the Spanish Conquest to 1930. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bauer, Arnold J., 1975b La hacienda El Huique en la estructura agraria del Chile Decimonnico. In Haciendas, Latifundios y Plantaciones en Amrica Latina, ed. E. Florescano, 393413. Mxico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. Bauer, Arnold J., 1992. Chilean Rural Society and Politics in Comparative Perspective. In Development and Social Change in the Chilean Countryside: From the Pre-Land Reform Period to the Democratic Transition, eds C. Kay and P. Silva, 1931. Amsterdam: Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation (CEDLA). Bauer, Arnold J., 1994. La sociedad rural chilena: desde la conquista espaola a nuestros das. Santiago: Editorial Andrs Bello. Baytelman, David, 1979. Problems of Collective Land Exploitation in the Chilean Agriculte. In Chile at the Turning Point: Lessons of the Socialist Years, 19701973, eds F. Gil, R. Lagos and H. Landsberger, 12157. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues (ISHI). Bellisario, Antonio, 2002. The Land Question in Chile: Statist Planning and Capitalist Development in the Chilean Countryside. PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. Bengoa, Jos, 1988. Historia social de la agricultura chilena, Vol. I, El poder y la subordinacin. Santiago: Ediciones Sur.
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Bengoa, Jos, 1990. Historia social de la agricultura chilena. Vol. 2, Haciendas y campesinos. Santiago: Ediciones Sur. Bray, James O., 1966. Mechanization and the Chilean Inquilino System: The Case of Fundo B . Land Economics, 42 (1): 1259. Brenner, Robert, 1986. The Social Basis of Economic Development. In Analytic Marxism, ed J. Roemer, 2353. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cademartori, Jos, 1968. La Economa Chilena. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria. Carrire, Jean, 1981. Landowners and Politics in Chile: A Study of the Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura, 19321970. Amsterdam: CEDLA. Chile 1861. Renta de los predios rsticos. Provincia de Colchagua, Departamento de Caupolicn. Valparaso: Imprenta del Comercio. Chile, 1960. Aspectos econmicos y sociales del inquilinaje en San Vicente de Tagua Tagua. Santiago: Ministerio de Agricultura. Chile, 1962. Documentacin bsica general sobre la tenencia de la tierra en Chile y materias anes. Santiago: Ministerio de Agricultura. Direccin de Agricultura y Pesca, Departamento de Economa Agraria, Seccin Economa de la Tierra. Chile, 1965. Proyecto de ley de reforma agraria. Santiago: Gobierno de Chile. Chile, 1968. Plan de desarrollo agropecuario, 19651980. Santiago: Ministerio de Agricultura. Chonchol, Jacques, 1972. La reforma agraria: como proceso dinmico de integracin en una sociedad que se transforma. Series: ICIRA documento de trabajo no. 61. Santiago: ICIRA. CIDA (Inter-American Committee for Agricultural Development), 1966. Chile: Tenencia de la tierra y desarrollo socio-econmico del sector agrcola. Santiago: CIDA. Cruz, Maria Elena, 1983. La Tenencia de la Tierra en Chile: 19651978. Santiago: Grupo de Investigaciones Agrarias (GIA) and Academia de Humanismo Cristiano. de Janvry, Alain, 1981. The Agrarian Question and Reformism in Latin America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dyer, Graham, 1997. Class, State and Agricultural Productivity in Egypt: A Study of the Inverse Relationship between Farm Size and Land Productivity. London: Frank Cass. Echeique, Jorge, 1996. Mercado de tierras en Chile. In Mercados y Polticas de Tierras, eds B. Reydon and P. Ramos, 73107. Campinas: Universidade Estatal Campinas, Instituto de Economia. Echeique, Jorge and Nelson Rolando, 1991. Tierras de Parceleros Dnde Estn? Santiago: Agraria. Friedmann, John and Thomas Lackington, 1971. La hiperurbanizacin y el desarrollo nacional de Chile. In Estructura social de Chile, ed. H. Godoy, 42638. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria. Garrido, Jos and Margarita M. Errzuriz, 1973. Desarrollo rural y minifundios. Santiago: ODEPA. Gay, Claudio, 1973. Agricultura Chilena, 2 Vols. Santiago: ICIRA. GIA (Grupo de Investigaciones Agrarias), 1979. Tenencia de la Tierra en Chile. Santiago: GIA and Academia de Humanismo Cristiano. Gil, Federico G., 1966. The Political System of Chile. Boston: Houghton Mifin Company. Gmez, Sergio, 1986a. Evolucin orgnica e ideolgica de las organizaciones empresariales rurales. Santiago: FLACSO. Gmez, Sergio, 1986b. Tenencia de la Tierra, Chile 19651985. Santiago: FLACSO. Gmez, Sergio and Jorge Echeique, 1988. La agricultura chilena: Las dos caras de la modernizacin. Santiago: FLACSO. Gngora, Mario, 1960. Origen de los inquilinos de Chile central. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria.
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Bellisario - Chilean PreAgrarian Peirod

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Journal Journal of Agrarian of Agrarian Change, Change, Vol. Vol. 4 No. 6 No.

The Chilean Agrarian Transformation: The Pre-Agrarian Reform Period (19551965)

The Chilean Agrarian Transformation

The Chilean Agrarian Transformation

The Chilean Agrarian Transformation

94 139 233 80 313

The Chilean Agrarian Transformation

Figure 1 Tenancy evolution of the hacienda El Huique

The Chilean Agrarian Transformation

The Chilean Agrarian Transformation

13,700 44,900 109,500 172,300 267,500 56,300 664,200

Area (million ha) %

1.2 3.4 4.6 8.5 11.7 20.2 50.8 75.6

1.6 4.5 6.1 11.2 15.5 26.7 67.2 100.0

The Chilean Agrarian Transformation

Source : Alaluf et al. (1969, 96).

The Chilean Agrarian Transformation

% 1.4 7.7 18.2 72.7 100.0

Source: Alaluf et al. (1969, 98).

1965 175,170 60,315 18,007 253,492

151,082 111,790 26,861 289,733

Includes unpaid family members. Sources : Alaluf et al. (1969, 52).

The Chilean Agrarian Transformation

% 49.6 1.9 2.9 12.4 4.0 29.1 100.0

No. 514,787 12,138 16,021 73,938

261,896 29.8 878,780 100.0

% 56.8 1.6 2.5 10.6 3.5 24.9 100.0

No. 436,465 12,138 16,021 73,938 18,007 261,896 818,465

The Chilean Agrarian Transformation

Area (1000 ha) 1965 30,259.5 140.0 249.2 30,648.7

27,185.6 136.9 389.8 27,712.3

Includes unpaid family members. Source: Alaluf et al. (1969, 58).

The Chilean Agrarian Transformation

Medium farms % No. %

Family farms No. %

The Chilean Agrarian Transformation

The Chilean Agrarian Transformation

Some authors describe it as pre-bourgeois, or neo-feudal, others refer to it as traditional.

The Chilean Agrarian Transformation

The Chilean Agrarian Transformation

The Chilean Agrarian Transformation

The Chilean Agrarian Transformation

The Chilean Agrarian Transformation

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