This meticulous, detailed, comprehensive study provides the kind of monographic examination of critical elections so long needed in Latin American political history. René Millar Carvacho sets the stage for the 1920 victory of Arturo Alessandri Palma by exploring the discontent spawned by an economy dependent upon deteriorating nitrate exports. Always cautious and convincing in his interpretations, the author further attributes Alessandri’s momentum to disenchantment with the inefficient Parliamentary Republic. He furnishes fascinating information on the intricacies of that political system, including electoral regulations and chicanery along with political parties and their caudillos, caciques, factions, and programs. The “Lion of Tarapacá” also owed his success to protests from emergent middle- and working-class sectors in the cities, to pressures from new interest-group associations, to demands from an idealistic younger generation, and to inspiration from reformist foreign ideologies and examples. At the same time, shrewd manipulation of traditional doctrinal and regional loyalties as well as clientelism, bossism, and bribery helped determine the outcome.
Thus, the 1920 showdown constituted a transition from the aristocratic parliamentarianism of the nineteenth century to the mass politics of the twentieth. Millar Carvacho’s clearly written study of every aspect of that turning point reaffirms that election’s significance without exaggerating its impact. Like many scholars working on Chile today, he is rediscovering the importance and virtues of that country’s democratic past.
Unlike most previous historians of Chilean and other Latin elections, Millar Carvacho rests his reassessment on a sturdy foundation of primary sources, especially congressional debates, newspapers, and electoral data. This investigation produces pathbreaking evidence on the social composition of political parties, conventions, and electoral coalitions. Most innovative is the microscopic dissection of neighborhood voting in Santiago, which reveals a much stronger connection between urban workers and Alessandri’s triumph than many scholars would have suspected. This section of the book would be even more enlightening if it compared those 1920 electoral returns with some earlier and later patterns. The research could also be fortified by consulting the basic works of Robert J. Alexander, Alberto Cabero, James O. Morris, Arturo Olavarría Bravo, and Fredrick B. Pike. Despite such minor shortcomings, René Millar Carvacho’s excellent contribution gives us not only a splendid treatment of one of Chile’s landmark elections but a model for similar analyses of other decisive contests in modern Latin America.
