There are the makings of at least three books in Agrarian Reform under Allende. A first chapter on “Rural Strategy under Allende” describes and analyzes the difficulties confronting the Popular Unity program in the countryside; a second chapter discusses class relations in Chilean agriculture from 1540-1930, providing an abbreviated and quite selective socioeconomic history of Chilean agriculture. The remaining two-thirds of the volume consist of a highly readable, personal and partisan account of events in the rural sector of the province of Cautín from 1970-1973.
A Marxian approach underlies the study, but the abbreviated nature of the first two chapters and a lack of systematic consideration of agriculture, class relations, and land policy in the frontier region of Chile from 1870 onward prevent an effective integration of the case materials on Cautín with the analysis in the earlier chapters. Moreover, a number of factual errors or misinterpretations in the first two chapters require the reader to exercise caution. For example, we are told in the first sentence of chapter 1 that Chile has a predominantly industrial economy. Though Chile’s population is predominantly nonrural, the Chilean economy is not now nor has it ever been predominantly industrial—even including the dominant mining sector. We are told (p. 77) that the agrarian reform law of 1967 enabled agricultural unions to come into existence. This is simply not the case—though the Chilean congress did pass an agricultural unionization law in 1967. We are told (p. 210) that Frei’s agrarian reform law called for cooperatives in the expropriated farms. While the law did permit cooperatives, it specifically stipulated that preference be given to dividing up the expropriated farms into family farm units. The Agrarian Reform Corporation (CORA) evaded this mandate and favored creation of agricultural cooperatives.
These types of errors are unnecessary and detract from the main thrust of the book which is a description and analysis of the agrarian reform process in Cautín province from 1970-1973. The last two-thirds of the book provide a detailed case history—names, places, dates, feelings of the participants—for a farm in the comuna of Lautaro in Cautín province and places these events into a regional, provincial and national context.
Steenland offers a highly partisan account of the struggle of the Mapuche to recover land stolen from their ancestors in the nineteenth century or before, using as leverage the conflictive political situation in Chile after 1970. Though the landowners, bureaucrats, soldiers, and campesinos named in Steenland’s account may have different recollections of their motivations, feelings, or of the events described in the narrative, Steenland’s insight into the struggle of the Mapuche in Cautín is at places invaluable. Having lived for more than two years in Cautín province and having spent much of the last five years studying Chilean agriculture and rural class relations, I was repeatedly struck by the acute, sensitive perceptions of the author as he portrayed the complexity of the Mapuche dilemma, the tension between the Indian campesinos and the huinca (non-Indians) and the never ending bickering within the Popular Unity coalition that confused and obstructed the process of agrarian change in Cautín and throughout the country. There are parts of Steenland’s book, such as the paragraph reproduced below, that should have been required reading for the urban Marxists and revolutionaries who were unable to understand the reluctance of the Mapuche campesinos to place their faith in the promises of huinca politicians or to accept the message of “consciousness raising” (coneternización) that called upon them to give up their small holdings in the reservations.
. . . the peasants were brave when it came to personal danger. They were militant when it came time to take land away from those who had exploited them. They were conservative, however, when it came to their own land on the reservations. Tradition weighed heavily on the peasants at Elicura, and its effects were contradictory. Generations of poverty had bred revolutionaries, but dependence on scarce land for subsistence had bred conservatives—within the same people.
Steenland also notes the roles of wine, personal quarrels, soccer games, and male-female relations in Mapuche life in Cautín and the effects of these on the agrarian reform process. The narrative is sympathetic to the Mapuche struggle, but it is not a romanticization of the campesinos’ nobility or saintliness.
Thus, notwithstanding the limitations of the first part of this book, the material on the Mapuche struggle makes this an important contribution to the literature on rural Chile. As a student of rural Chile, I only wish that the first two chapters of this book had been supplemented with at least a brief history of the Araucanian resistance against Spanish and Chilean soldiers, and with an historical consideration of the special character of the agrarian question, land policy, and rural class relations in the Chilean frontier provinces—as a prelude to the description of events in the countryside of Cautín after 1970.
