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Part
II: Land Reform and the MIR By Norman
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September 1972
In
Chile, agriculture contributes around 11 per cent of the domestic product
and employs about a quarter of the economically active population... -Chilean
agriculture is characterized by a notorious incapacity to raise its
technical standards and improve the living conditions of the population it
employs. Over the last two decades, Chile has been facing a serious
dilemma: whether to wait until the rural population has completely drifted
away from the land, which in the long term would force landowners to
raise their technical levels, or whether to bring about planned reform of
the agrarian structure. The first option would mean a bottleneck in
agricultural production that would hamper development and reduce the
possibilities of creating new urban employment, thus increasing the
likelihood that the population migrating to the cities would suffer a
process of social degradation. The second solution would en tail a fall in
agricultural production over a prolonged period unless it were preceded
by thorough technical preparation and could be given substantial financial
backing. (From Celso Furtado.) The
name Mapuche means People of the Land. This is especially true in the
province of Cautín in Southern Chile, where the estimated 173,604 Mapuche
Indians living on 1,978 reducciones represent 84 per cent of the
rural population. It
also signifies the degree to which the agrarian power structure has been
urbanized, even in one of Chile’s most rural provinces, with most big
landlords living in the flourishing provincial capital of Temuco
(population 100,000) and spending most of their lime running supermarkets
or automobile distributorships or practicing the learned professions. The
majority of agrarian reform officials who have descended upon Cautín over
the past 18 months are also from the cities, as are the young cadres of
the MIR—many of them secondary school dropouts and former university
students from Santiago and Concepción—who have so successfully
organized the tomas that, together with the agrarian reform, have
imposed major changes in the province’s land tenure structure. It could be argued that the agrarian reform is the apogee of urban influence in the countryside. As explained to me recently by a senior official in the land reform program of President Eduardo Frei (1964-1970), “there had been talk of land reform in Chile for a few decades, but it took outside influences like the rise of Fidel Castro and the Alliance for Prowess to light a fire under the land reform movement.- The romanticism of the intellectuals concerning agrarian reform was coupled with the realization that, while Chile has urbanized rapidly, all the virgin lands had been occupied by persons not using their lands to their full potential, while agricultural production per capita had been declining steadily in recent decades. At the beginning of the Frei regime we undertook land reform with the knowledge that it would impair production at first, but this didn’t worry us because agriculture was only one-tenth of national production and copper prices were high enough to import food if necessary. While the Christian Democrats under Frei didn’t have a chance to expropriate much land, they were able to greatly increase rural wages and to promote the organization of peasants into unions.” During part of my three weeks in Cautín I conducted interviews with members of the MIR, both in Temuco and traveling among a number of seized fundos that are being turned into collective or cooperative enterprises. These interviews were extremely revealing as to how the agrarian revolt in Cautín was prepared and executed in the months before and after Salvador Allende’s election. According to Sergio, a 21-year-old high school dropout from Concepcidn who had been living with the Mapuches in Cautín, “I went to live in Lautaro on November 23, 1969. Students from the University of Concepción, which the MIR controlled, previously had run a summer camp for social projects in the communes of Lautaro Nueva Imperial, making contact with the Mapuches by conducting a medical clinic, literacy classes, political lectures, and movies. We started in Cautín working with students at the University of Chile’s branch in Temuco and in the secondary schools. But we soon decided that what counted was contact with the masses, so at one meeting we decided to split up and go to live in the reducciones. It took a lot of patient political work to give the Mapuches a new revolutionary consciousness before the corridas de cercos (literally, fence-running or seizures of disputed portions of large farms) and the tomas of entire farms.”
The MIR is organized on strict Leninist principles of a small revolutionary vanguard party that is extremely selective in recruiting new members. However the youth of some of its key cadres is somewhat astonishing. The person introduced to me as the coordinator of MIR activities in the rural zones of Cautín was called José, a 21-year-old former sociology student at the Catholic University in Santiago, who dressed conservatively and spoke very politely and had the neat, serious look of those American college students of the 1950s who were known as the Silent Generation. “My father is a professional man, a Christian Democrat, an admirer of Eduardo Frei,” José told me. “At the Catholic University we were studying an American-style sociology, methodology and Talcott Parsons and that kind of thing, which didn’t have much to do with the Chilean reality. When I got involved in politics I gradually moved out of my house, sleeping elsewhere, so there would be no problems with my parents and my six brothers and sisters. When I arrived in Cautín in August there already were 10 MIR cadres here. We always saw the South as a social base for guerrilla war. This followed the theory of the foco of Regis Debray, who was wrong because he viewed revolution as being dependent on an elite and not on the masses. We were carrying forward a plan for guerrilla insurrection in the South until Allende’s election victory, which surprised us greatly and led us to change our tactics by discarding guerrilla warfare in favor of a radicalization of the agrarian process. Between May 1970 and Allende’s election on September 4, there were some 40 corridas de cercos in Cautín and Malleco Provinces. A week after Allende’s election, we formally organized the Movimiento Campesino Revolucionario (MCR) on September 12, 1970, and at the end of November we carried out our first toma, seizing the Fundo Tres Hijuelas of Carlos Taladriz, who belongs to one of the most important landowning families in Cautín. “When a toma occurs, we generally leave behind an armed fighting group, with rifles and machine guns, to protect the toma until CORA intervenes and expropriates the property,” José continued. “This is necessary because, almost immediately, the reactionary landlords formed their own armed groups to retake the fundos from the peasants. Our big problem is an insufficient number of armed groups of our own to protect the tomas. We must train the peasants to defend themselves and arm them, but this involves great problems of training and discipline. We must take five or six fundos at the same time in a contiguous area so one armed group can protect more than one fundo at once. There often have been conflicts among the campesinos themselves between the outsiders who took the farm and the inquilinos [tenants] who sometimes have lived there for generations. We have always told the Mapuches that the inquilinos are exploited also and we must unite with them. Our only failures came when we didn’t unite with the inquilinos. Although the agrarian reform law allows expropriated farmers to keep their buildings, machinery, animals and a minimum reserve of land. we decided to seize the farms a puertas cerradas [literally, with all doors closed], not allowing the landlord to take anything out and forcing CORA to expropriate the whole farm and everything on it. We felt that, with the houses, machinery and animals taken away from the peasants, the fundo would be completely decapitalized and the risk of economic failure would be much greater. If the landlord keeps his minimum reserve of land, this means he stays as a neighbor and a bad influence over the peasants, with a tendency for old feudal relationships to be revived. On the contrary, the peasants must be free to develop their own leadership. After a year of working in the countryside in Cautín we realized that most of our MIR peasant cadres were the sons of Mapuche minifundistas who worked as afuerinos because there was no land at home. Before that we gave them the ridiculous label of ‘small proprietor without land,’ not realizing that to be a proprietor one has to have land.” The rural agitation and corridas de cercos in Cautín in the months before the 1970 Presidential election Were a variant of the MIR tactics at the time of urban land seizures by squatters, especially in Santiago and Concepción, as well as wildcat strikes and seizures at factories and peasant “mobilizations” in the parts of the Central Valley where tomas were later to occur.3 Four months before the election the MIR publicly discounted the possibility of a leftist victory and suggested the possibility of a revolutionary situation developing from the political campaign: “If the election results in a triumph for the Unidad Popular, which we believe to be extremely unlikely, we proceed from the assumption that a reactionary military coup will try to block the people’s access to power. In that case we will not vacillate in placing our incipient armed apparatus, our cadres and all else that we have in defense of that which the workers and peasants have conquered.” Once Allende had won his narrow election victory, the MIR reiterated: “In May of this year we sustained that the increase in social mobilizations were the most relevant political fact of the period; that the elections would fit into the framework established by these social situations; that we would not participate in the election campaign as such, but would invest our efforts in pushing mass mobilizations by revolutionary methods and in developing direct actions linked to these mobilizations; and so we did. We developed this policy in distributing expropriated money [obtained in bank robberies for which the MIR claimed authorship] among the pobladores in the 26 de Enero squatter settlement; in the direct actions in the Helvetia and El Caucho factories; in the mobilization at Sigdo-Kopers, Muebles Roma, Carbón y Textiles de Tomé; among the pobladores in seven land seizures in Santiago and other urban tomas in Concepción, Tome, Coronel, Chillán and Los Angeles, in the peasant mobilizations of Chillán and Colchagua, in the corridas de cercos among the Mapuches of Cautín, and among the secondary and university students throughout the country. This policy permitted an enormous organic development, an increase in our operational capacity and a significant influence among the masses, contributing also to the political and combative unity of the workers.” Allende’s victory immediately provoked a financial panic in Santiago as thousands of Chileans fled the country and New York banks suspended routine commercial credits to Chile, and all this was further complicated by the assassination by right-wing terrorists of the army commanding officer, General René Schneider, a few days before Allende’s confirmation by the Chilean Congress. However, the MIR emerged from the crisis period of the 1970 elections with its organization greatly expanded, with great freedom of action and considerable support from within the new Unidad Popular government. Until 1970 the MIR’s main sources of strength were among the students of the University of Concepción, where the MIR was founded in August 1965, and among the influential group of ultra-left journalists and politicians who ran the Castroite biweekly magazine Punto Final in Santiago. That group included Clodomiro Almeyda, leader of the Maoist wing of the Socialist Party and now Chile’s Foreign Minister; Senator Carlos Altamirano, who was elected Secretary-General of the Socialist Party two months after Allende’s inauguration; Carlos Jorquera, who was appointed Allende’s press secretary; Jaime Faivovich, legal counsel to CODELCO, the state corporation running the newly nationalized copper mines, and Augusto Olivares, who was named head of one of Chile’s three television networks. Shortly after his inauguration, Allende freed some MIR members who were jailed for terrorist activities, while other MIR cadres became presidential bodyguards. As the months passed there was increasing talk in political circles of “double militancy” on the part of many members of Unidad Popular coalition parties- especially the Socialists and MAPU, the leftist splinter faction that broke away from the Christian Democrats before the 1970 election—who were also collaborating with MIR while conducting a running battle with the Communist Party for control of key state agencies. This was especially true of the agrarian reform bureaucracy, where the battle was joined between the Communist David Baytelman as head of CORA and the hard-line Socialist Adrián Vasquez as head of INDAP (Instituto de Desarrollo Agropecuario), which is supposed to give organizational and technical assistance to peasants outside the reformed sector. Characteristically, the Secretary-General of the MIR in Cautín, Juan Saavedra, was an INDAP official who visited fundos in a government vehicle shortly before they were seized by the peasants. In an internal document leaked to the press after the Unidad Popular coalition suffered its first major political defeat in parliamentary by-elections last January, the Communist Party complained: “One of the reversals that should concern us more is what we are experiencing in the countryside. We have expropriated fundos at five times the rate of previous governments. Nevertheless, we do not gain strength in the countryside. Doubtlessly fundamental is the lack of a common agricultural policy within the Unidad Popular. Of the agrarian sector one can safely say that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark. The policy applied is bulging with subjectivism, and is influenced by ultra-leftist conceptions. The state apparatus itself is strongly penetrated by ultra-leftist elements.”
The
new Communist Governor of Lautaro Department, Fernando
Teiller Morin, told the landlords that he preferred to use persuasion
rather than force in dealing with the tomas, and was later
suspended and ordered to stand trial by the Chilean Supreme Court for
“failing to duly cooperate in the administration of justice.” In
April 1972 the suspended governor told me that the land seized by the
Mapuches in the corridas de cercos had been in dispute for many
years with the farm’s previous owner, against whom the Indians had
brought a lawsuit for usurpation. “The case was won by the Mapuches in
three different courts—the Juzgado de Indios, the Appeals Court
in Temuco and the Supreme Court in Santiago,” Teillier said. “However,
under prevailing law the landlord was able to appeal to the government to
expropriate the land in his behalf, so the Indians lost out anyway.” Two
weeks after the toma of the Fundo Tres Hijuelas, the conservative
National Party deputy from Cautín, Hardy Momberg, charged on the floor of
the Chamber of Deputies in Santiago that the Mapuches had denied the
farm’s owner access to the fundo to transfer his animals and
machinery to his other properties. “On that fundo there are persons
who are not Mapuches or laborers,” Momberg continued, “but who form a
kind of militia with uniforms, special shirts, boots, berets, and machine
guns hanging at their sides, who live in tents beside an effigy of Che
Guevara. These are the ones who give orders. . . . Provoked by these to
mitt something very serious may happen soon. What farmer doesn’t
have a shotgun, rifle or pistol in his house? With this wave of land
seizures in the Province of Cautín, it may be reasonable to expect that
one day a farmer will fire in desperation at one of these militiamen or
agitators or workers and a clash will come.” Events
in the province of Cautín over the next two months came so swiftly that
they are hard to reconstruct. On the day that the Fundo Tres Hijuelas was
seized, the Lautaro landowners’ association charged that more than
5,000 acres had been taken since August 1970 by the Mapuches from 26 of
its members. While these corridas de cercos, however, had been
partial seizures of fundos often involving lands in dispute, what
fob lowed in the summer of 1970-71 (December through February) were tomas
of entire farms, sometimes at the rate of three or four a day,
amounting to some 25 tomas in Lautaro alone by mid-December and
leading Domingo Durán, president of the Consorcio Agricola del Sur, to
speak of the “desperation and anguish of the agricultural producers of
the South” at a meeting in Santiago between President Allende and 40
representatives of the principal landowners’ associations. In reply,
Allende described the tomas as being “ill-advised” and added:
“Since November 4 we have been concerned with defending the
institutional order, undoubtedly not because we like this order but
because we have committed ourselves to act within these institutions. We
have been the principal defenders-of this order so we can change it,
gentlemen, change it... We have information regarding landlords’
organizations, about arms contraband, the use of farms along the Argentine
frontier and about people who have small landing strips in this area.
Although we are aware of this, we have not wanted to denounce it because
we know that the institutional order is not in danger, first because we
know how to defend it and secondly because we have the majority support of
the country.” This
meeting was followed promptly by the arrival in Cautín of the Ministers
of Agriculture and of Lands and Colonization, who made inspection visits
to some of the seized fundos. Five days after the Santiago meeting
Allende himself came to Temuco and spoke for an hour before 7,000 persons
gathered in the Municipal Stadium for the closing session of the National
Mapuche Congress. “I have come to tell the landowners that we will also
respect the legitimate rights of landlords who have respected the law,”
Allende said. “And I want to tell our Mapuche companions that they
should completely end the tomas and corridas de cercos, because
they are exploited politically by the enemies of the People’s Government
and they hamper a rational and technical application of the agrarian
reform. I want to tell you that the agrarian reform will be accelerated,
that in this province of Cautín this accelerated process of land reform
will begin by my own personal order. And I have told my friend, the
Minister of Agriculture Jacques Chonchol, that he should establish himself
in the province of Cautín for a period of one or two months if necessary,
beginning on January 2nd, to set in motion an emergency plan.”
The arrival in Cautín of Chonchol—a Food and Agriculture Organization
adviser in Cuba in the early years of the Castro regime and a leading
agrarian reform official of the Frei government before he broke with the
Christian Democrats—was greeted by an editoirial in the conservative El
Diario Austral, which coldly observed that
“Chonchol is to private property what a tiger in the jungle is to
a gazelle.” II One
could have expected that the landlords’ reaction would be strong.
Politically, Cautín is one of Chile’s more traditional provinces, where
in the 1970 elections Allende finished a poor third with about 23 per cent
of the vote, while his conservative rival, ex-President Jorge Alessandri,
led with 43 per cent, his largest plurality among all of Chile’s
provinces. In Cautín, rural property is far more evenly distributed among
the “Chilean”—as opposed to the Mapuche—population than in the
more fertile Central Valley, which traditionally has been dominated by
great haciendas. Making this comparison in the early l930s, MacBride
observed that in the South “a casa de hacienda is seldom seen;
nor do miserable ranchos of inquilinos line the roadside.
The medium-sized rural dwellings and their wide distribution over the
countryside give the social landscape a different aspect from that of the
hacienda-land farther north. This is clearly a country of smaller
holdings, of more equal distribution of the land. In a region whose
basic wealth is the soil this means less inequality of status among the
inhabitants. Social and political conditions must follow the lead of
this land distribution, and the traveler realizes that he has left the
home of the Chilean aristocracy and has moved into provinces marked by far
more democratic ways.” But
land has become increasingly scarce. Two decades later Ricardo Ferrando,
today a leading Christian Democratic senator, wrote that “Cautín was a
kind of American Far-West. It attracted people not for the gold of its
mines but for its agricultural wealth and for the ease with which landed
property could be obtained; that is, snatched from the Indian who had no
system of private property. This accumulative process increased while
there still were lands available, while the great deforestation
proceeded and a stable rural life was organized. Today the province of
Cautín is a region tilled to capacity within its present economic system,
and this is so true that the population actually declined between the 1940
and 1952 censuses while the rest of the Chilean population was growing,
signifying a substantial out-migration from Cautín in this period.” Although
Cautín has followed the general Chilean pattern of rapid urbanization in
recent decades, but at a slower rate, its basic wealth remains in the
land. Although the MIR appears to have been reluctant to carry out tomas
against “Chilean” farmers living on their land, such tomas have
taken place. To nobody’s surprise, landowners began organizing
self-defense vigilante groups to patrol country roads at night and
“retake” (retomar) farms seized by the Mapuches. The
first important outbreak of violence came on December 24, 1970, just four
days after Allende’s speech in Temuco. It occurred at the Fundo Rucalán,
a 1,500-acre farm near the town of Carahue in the heart of the Mapuche
country west of Temuco, which had been seized by 38 Mapuche families from
a nearby reducción at 3:30 A. M. on the morning of Allende’s
visit, ejecting the owner and his family in their nightclothes. Three
Mapuches were wounded when the Fundo Rucalán’s owner and a large group
of his friends, heavily armed, chased the Indians from the property.
This was the first bloodshed issuing from the land seizures in Cautín,
and a public scandal developed when the fundo‘s owner, Juan
Bautista Landarreche, and his two sons were arrested for a violation of
the State Security Law for retaking the property by force. As in virtually
all the rural land seizures in Chile during this period, the Carabineros
(police) did not take any action apart from visiting the scene and making
a report. However, the accusation against Landarreche occasioned a major
political trial, with one of Chile’s most famous criminal lawyers flying
down from Santiago to conduct the landowner’s defense and the full
15,000-word transcript of the trial pleadings published in three
consecutive editions of El Diario Austral. Landarreche was quickly
freed and the MIR began to complain of “armed groups of latifundistas”
and charged that “a team of ten right-wing lawyers went to the
province of Cautín to study, case by case, all the possible expropriations
that the government would attempt. The fight will take place in the
courts, where the judges always have shown a strong weakness for the landowners.”
When I visited the Hacienda Rucalán more than a year later in the company
of a young MIR activist named Alejo, he told me: “The Mapuches here have
shown a strong will to fight. This fundo changed hands five times
in tomas and retomas before it was finally expropriated.” The
retoma of the Fundo Rucalán began a series of sporadic clashes in
the countryside of Cautín that left a total of five persons dead and more
than a score wounded. These deaths occurred in what were, after all, minor
and isolated incidents which, while most unusual in Chile, have not
produced any sign of major political and social forces massing for civil
conflict. On the contrary, these clashes were the exceptional cases in
which the Mapuches involved in a toma encountered resistance from
people living on the property. Needless to say, none of these tomas probably
would have succeeded against the will of a government bent on stopping
them. III The
real impact of the tomas throughout rural Chile, but especially in
Cautín, has been of panic and chaos among agricultural producers that
tends to worsen the already critical economic problems of the Allende
regime, perhaps out of proportion to the real level of violence in the
countryside. The Association of Agricultural Employers listed 694 illegal
seizures of farms in Chile between Allende’s inauguration and the end of
September 1971. Of these, 555 farms were later returned to their owners.
In Cautín, however, the impact of the tomas was especially strong,
with only 41 of 95 seized farms returned to their owners. Shortly
after he established his temporary headquarters in Cautín in January
1971 on President Allende’s orders, Minister of Agriculture Jacques
Chonchol spoke at a labor union rally in Temuco’s Municipal Theater to
outline his plans. “It is the decision of the People’s government,”
he said, “to carry out a land reform in depth in this province. The momios
[mummies: a slang word meaning reactionary that became popular during
the 1970 election campaign] say they agree as long as it is done within
the law. It will be done within the law, but the law will be applied in
depth, compañeros, to its last article. Tomorrow they
should not come to tell us that their fundamental rights are being
trampled, because here the People’s government will apply the law from
the people to the momios and not by the momios against the
people.” What
this meant in practice soon became clear. Under the Chilean labor code,
the Ministry of Labor is empowered to appoint interventors to manage any
production unit that is paralyzed by a labor conflict. Because most tomas
have involved peasants already working on the farm as well as others
from outside, they can be formally defined as a labor conflict and an
interventor appointed to run the farm. The interventor is empowered to
hire as many new workers as he deems necessary and contract any debts that
he deems advisable, with the proprietor obliged to repay the debts. In
many cases the landowner finds it preferable to sign over his property to
CORA than risk being mined h~ such indebtedness. Often the interventors in
rural tomas are members or friends of the MIR who as a matter of
routine hire onto the permanent payroll the peasants from outside who
seized the farm. One
of the most spectacular tomas of the last year was the Fundo
Loberia owned by Domingo Durán, president of the southern regional landowners
association and brother of a leading conservative senator. Loberia was
one of four haciendas which until the early l960s formed a single
5,000-acre estate, much of which was a drained swamp used for
cattle-fattening until a large part of it sunk beneath the water line in
the 1960 earthquake that caused widespread devastation throughout
Chile. On the night of October 16, 1971 more than 100 Mapuches from a
neighboring reducción seized the four farms and removed the plank
bridge that connected the haciendas with the outside world. After Durán
agreed to the expropriation, a municipal water inspector from the nearby
town of Puerto Saavedra was named interventor for the four fundos. When
I visited the site—traveling in a launch from a place further up the
river because the plank bridge was still out—a gaunt but tensely
talkative man named Juventino Velazquez, told me: I am a member of the
Socialist Party, the son of a peasant inquilino de fundo, and most
recently a mechanic in the water supply department of Puerto Saavedra. I
was involved in the planning and preparation of this toma during
the five months before it took place, since I am also coordinator of the
Peasant Council of Puerto Saavedra. The toma involved 94 families
from three different reducciónes, where 110 families had been
sharing a total of 375 acres, much of it uncultivable. These four fundos
together cover about 7,500 acres, but the titles cover less than half
this area. Since becoming interventor I have put all the Mapuche men on
the payroll at 30 escudos per day, and we have brought in two Czech
tractors. The peasants decided to seize this land because all other
solutions were blocked, but we still had to play the legal game by tilling
out papers for CORA and drafting petitions for expropriation for the
Peasants Council of Puerto Saavedra. After all, Domingo Durán is the
president of the latifundistas of Chile.” Part
of the “legal game” calls for CORA officials to visit the farm and
appraise the installations, machinery, and animals for compensation to the
former owner. Theoretically, if the expropriated owner thinks the payment
fixed by CORA is unfair, he can appeal his case to one of the Agrarian
Tribunals established under the 1967 land reform law. In fact, however,
most of the judgeships on the Agrarian Tribunals have remained vacant
because the Allende regime has refused to make appointments to these
courts. Ironically, the same travesty of justice is being practiced
against the landlords that was carried out against the Mapuches a
half-century ago. The
kind of confusion that can arise out of this state of affairs is
illustrated by events following the toma of the nearby Fundo
Nehuentue, which I Visited two weeks after its seizure in late March 1972.
As in the case of nearly all seized fundos, there was no place for
the invading peasants to live, so the 30 families who seized the Fundo
Nehuentile settled into a barn, which soon became filled with children
and smoke from cooking fires inside the building. The barn was partitioned
into sleeping quarters for the 30 families, most of whom came not from
Mapuche villages but from the neighboring town of Nehuentue, where they
were stranded for 12 years in government-built emergency shacks built
after the 1960 earthquake, which had destroyed the town of Puerto Saavedra,
where most of them had previously lived. These shacks were grouped in a
barren, unpainted clapboard compound that rotted for a decade alongside
a road that wound through a strikingly beautiful countryside of fertile
pastures and bread-loaf hills leading down to the Pacific Ocean a
kilometer west of the town. The people who had lived in these shacks
seemed singularly unequipped for agriculture, and quickly came into
conflict with the workers who were already established on the fundo. “Most
of our children have gone to Santiago because the owner of the Fundo
Nehuentue refused to give our families work,” one of the housewives who
lived in the barn told me. “He brought in people from outside because he
didn’t want problems with local people. Now that we have taken the fundo,
it seems that many of the inquilino families already inside are
complaining that they want their patroncito [dear, little boss] to
come back. They complained so much that we finally told them: ‘If you
want your patroncito so much, you should go where he is. Either
join with us or get out.’ ” There was a rough numerical equality
between those who seized the fundo and those living on it before
the toma, but a few days later six of the old inquilinos were
expelled from the farm for allegedly refusing to stand guard duty at
night. According
to the MIR representative who accompanied me to the farm on my first visit
there, the toma of the Fundo Nehuentue had been in preparation for
eight months. “There was much discussion, planning, deciding what to do,
talking about what socialism is,” he told me. A few days later I asked
Mario Alvarez, the former owner of Nehuentue, whether he had heard of the toma
in advance. “We heard for months that a toma was coming, that
meetings were held in the town. I rode fences night after night with my inquilinos
for months, and nothing happened. So we got tired of riding fences and
then the toma came one night when I was away from the farm. I know
the MIR regarded me as its enemy because I participated in the retoma of
the Fundo Rucalán in December 1970. My property is surrounded on three
sides by Mapuche reducciones, so we knew anyway that our turn might
come soon. When the tonic, did occur, I filed a complaint with the
police to inform the courts. When I filed a formal complaint with the
local court, the judge issued an order for the arrest of all persons
involved. But the provincial head of the Carabineros in Temuco refused to
carry out the arrest order, saying he didn’t have enough men. When the
judge who issued the order was informed of the Carabineros’ inaction, he
declared himself incompetent to hear the case. Then the case file was sent
to another court in the county seat of Nueva Imperial, which asked for a
new report on the toma. Meanwhile, I had 175 acres of wheat being
grown on contract with the State Bank as high-quality genetic seed that
was needed in the province for fall planting. If the wheat were left
standing much longer, the grains simply would fall to the ground and be
lost for seeding purposes. There was a Communist official of the State
Bank [the agency through which public credit and agricultural supplies
are provided to farmers] who was very concerned about a seed shortage in
coming months, so both he and I spoke with leaders of the MIR. It just
happened that Juan Saavedra, the Secretary-General of the MIR in Temuco,
was au old schoolmate of mine, and he thought I had an effective eviction
order against the toma. So after a lot of talking, I was finally
allowed by the MIR to bring a crew into my fields and harvest the wheat.
But they were very careful not to allow me to go near my house or other
installations.” As
a result of such tomas and the legal expropriations carried out
by CORA, there have been major changes in the land tenure system in Cautín
Province. While the Frei regime had created 30 land reform settlements
through expropriations that brought roughly 1,000 families into the
reformed sector in Cautín, by April 1972 the Unidad Popular government
had increased this total to 151 settlements incorporating 5,096 families
in Allende’s first 17 months in power. In the Department of Lautaro,
where the greatest number of land seizures have occurred, all of the 47 fundos
were expropriated that, according to the 1965 Agricultural Census,
were more than 1,250 acres (500 hectares) and occupied more than 125,000
acres together. Also expropriated were one-third of the 60,000 acres in
medium-sized farms between 500 and 1,250 acres. These expropriations in
Lautaro have created a reformed sector of about 1 50,000 acres to benefit
some 1,297 peasant families without, however, making any great impact on
the shortage of land and jobs in rural areas. According
to one land reform technician with many years’ experience in Cautín,
“the great need and the conscious purpose in the new land reform
settlements has been to absorb more labor. Planting beet sugar and
potatoes absorbs lots of labor, but this can be done only in certain
places in Cautín. Our beet sugar crop throughout the country has
suffered this year because private farmers are reluctant to hire labor to
plant and harvest the beets, fearing that these men will form groups to
take over the farms where they’re working. These problems really are
very complex. Despite the fact that wheat, meat, and milk are scarcer
commodities in Chile than in Argentina, the Chilean prices for all these
commodities have been kept artificially lower to protect the urban
consumer. Declining yields have resulted over the years because of a lack
of production incentives and planting marginal soils with wheat and
rapeseed [to make vegetable oil] that do not belong there. No well-worked
farm should produce wheat yields of less than 30 or 35 quintals per
hectare, yet because of soil exhaustion and poor farming practices in
both the minifundia and commercial farming sectors the average
wheat yield in Cautín Province is around 15 quintals per hectare. Now
with so much land in the reformed sector, even these low yields are being
undermined by organizational problems and late arrival of seed and
fertilizers. The planting for the 1971-72 harvest was delayed because the
necessary machinery, seed, and nitrate fertilizer arrived in June and July
instead of April or May when they were needed to plant winter wheat. This
year the 1972-73 harvest is being delayed by the lack of phosphate
fertilizer, which is desperately needed in our volcanic soils. Unfortunately,
80 per cent of our phosphate must be imported and is a drain on our
foreign exchange reserves.” The
demographic pressures on a stagnant provincial agriculture have been
aggravated both by production declines and logistical snares in the
agrarian reform bureaucracy. The new organization emerging in Chilean
agriculture—that of cooperative or collective settlements guided from
day to day mainly by government technicians—is the result of an urgent
quest by Latin American land reform specialists for a formula to absorb
the most surplus peasant labor possible into an obviously inadequate
supply of available land. Since Chile is already a net food importer with
chronic balance of payments problems except in years of high world copper
prices, and since those three-fourths of all Chileans who live in towns
and cities must get most of their food from the one-fourth of the
population still living on the land, it seems that a fundamental conflict
is being posed between the demands of redistribution and productivity. According
to the respected survey of the Economics Workshop of the University of
Chile, ‘available information for the 1970-71 agricultural Year shows an
estimated growth for the whole sector of 5.8 per cent above the
preceding year. Since a greater increase is expected for the economy in
general, the agricultural sector in 1971 will represent less than 8 per
cent of Gross National Product although the farm sector employs nearly
one-fourth of the country’s labor force. This again demonstrates the
profound disequilibrium between the agricultural sector and the rest of
the economy, which has a per capita product three times greater than that
of agriculture. On the other hand, imports of food products are growing in
1971 at more than 64 per cent. Supposing that the figures on
production increases are correct, the rising imports could be explained by
the redistribution of income that would mean an increase in food consumption
by the low-income sectors of the population and also by increases in the
majority of world food prices. Surveys of intentions to plant for the
coming year show that the best we can hope for is a drop of 2.5 per cent
beneath this year’s agricultural production. It is disturbing to think
that the agricultural sector has received an increasingly preferential
treatment in recent years in terms of political and social policies
expressed in terms of development plans, agrarian reform, etc., without
any positive results showing from the vantage point of the whole Chilean
economy. It is possible that this is due to the slight emphasis placed on
problems of productivity and production. ... The above production
estimates do not take into consideration the problems arising from the
acceleration of the agrarian reform in 197 1 nor the effects of the proliferation
of tomas and the climate of effervescence that has reigned
especially in the South.” In
this context it is especially revealing to examine the impact on the
national food supply of recent developments in Cautín Province, which is
a leading producer of wheat, oats, barley, vegetable oil (rapeseed), peas,
beef, and milk. According to statistics supplied me by the Empresa de
Comercialización Agricola (ECA), the public agency in charge of food
imports, the key items of wheat, powdered milk, vegetable oils, and beef
have accounted for most of the explosive growth of food imports over the
past decade; between 1963 and 1971 the volume of these items imported grew
from 101,000 to 569,400 metric tons, while in value these imports grew
from $16.4 million to $128.4 million. Over the past two decades, Cautín
Province had remained Chile’s largest wheat producer, growing more
than two million metric quintals in a good harvest year. However, the
urban population of the province has grown from 27 per cent in 1940 to 35
per cent in 1960 to 50.4 per cent in 1970. with this urban population
growing at the rapid rate of 5 per cent annually over the past decade.
This burgeoning of town-dwellers has meant, according to ECA officials
interviewed in Temuco, that Cautín itself today consumes one-half of
its own wheat production and thus can send less and less outside the
province to feed the rest of the Chilean population. This fact gathers
significance when one considers that the 1972 wheat harvest in Cautín
was one-third below the previous harvest, according to Agriculture
Ministry officials in Temuco, and even less if one listens to the
government’s enemies. IV
This
exceptional situation has been explained best to me by some of the young
technicians who run the present agrarian reform at the grassroots level.
In the words of José Ovando, the 25-year-old director of the CORA office
in Lautaro, this year’s production declines in Lautaro—Chile’s
leading wheat-producing county—can be explained by several causes. “In
the first place,” Ovando told me, “many of the tomas and
expropriations of fundos came just before the fall planting of
winter wheat, our most important crop, and we just didn’t have the
manpower or resources to cope with the confusion. Not only did seed and
fertilizer arrive late for the planting, but we had and still have a
critical shortage of technicians to work with the peasants on the
expropriated fundos. To work among some 60 farms now in the
reformed sector in Lautaro, we have only ten technicians, and they must
walk or hitchhike from farm to farm because there are not enough vehicles
to go around. The lag between the takeover of the fundos and the
training of a new work force has been taking too long, and this has been
complicated by other factors such as too much rain and wind during the
fall sowing season and poor applications of insecticide. On top of this,
CORA is without money and the State Bank recently cut off credit advances
to our land reform settlements because they didn’t make their expenses
during the 1972 harvest. This meant a cutoff in the daily wages of 1,500
men supporting some 7,000 people. This is why the peasants recently
moved into Lautaro and occupied the offices of CORA until we met their
demands. The problem was settled in their favor when we appealed to
Santiago to overrule the local State Bank officials’ decision.” On
the Fundo Tres Hijuelas, 22 peasants were employed as a result of the land
reform where, in the past, five workers were enough to make it one of the
best wheat farms in the district, and this pattern of overemployment is
visible throughout the reformed sector. “Because of the MlR invasions,
too many peasants have stayed on too many small farms,” said the young
CORA field worker who provides technical supervision to Tres Hijuelas and
six other seized farms in the district. “The MIR has the great advantage
of living with the peasants, which government officials never do. The MIR
is disciplined and hard-working and its cadres live on the asentamientos,
but never appear before strangers. In Lautaro these days there are no
more tomas because there’s nothing left to take. Now that the tomas
here are over, we find the big problem for the peasants is communal
living. Although most of them were grouped together in reducciones, they
worked their tiny plots of land individually and are totally
unaccustomed to working in groups with a common purpose and without
constant fighting. The president of the asentamien to
theoretically is in charge, but he has little authority to get people to
do what they don’t feel like doing. The peasants are benefiting from the
process without understanding it. They can’t believe the land is really
theirs and that they have a stake in their asentamientos to develop
them more. They just feel that the government has become the new owner,
and their wages are much better now in terms of the ‘labor advances’
paid by the State Bank.” These
“labor advances” paid at the rate of 30 escudos a day to peasants on
all land reform settlements in Chile by the State Bank has become critical
to the reformed sector. According to another CORA official, half of the 32
million escudos lent by the State Bank last year to the reformed sector in
Lautaro went for these advanced wage payments. Not only does the
government undertake to supply the expropriated fundos with seed,
fertilizer, and machinery, but through these wage “advances” it in
effect guarantees a minimum annual wage to all peasants in the reformed
sector. When loans advanced for wages and farm supplies cannot be
repaid—as is often the case—blame is rightly laid at the door of the
land reform bureaucracy for its apparent incapability to get seed and
fertilizers to the farms in time for planting. When one views this problem
in the context of the land reform’s main objective of maximizing farm
employment, however, it becomes clear that the payrolls on the
expropriated farms have been expanded by the agrarian reform far beyond
the capacity of most production units to repay the wage bill advanced by
the State Bank. Since one of the main lures held out to peasants preparing
land seizures in Cautín is hope of exchanging the abject misery of
subsistence farming for year-round wage employment, the urge to hold onto
this wage advance is very strong. As in the case of other money-losing
state economic operations—including some of the recently nationalized
factories, banks, and distributorships—the only way of avoiding chaos is
for the government to print more paper money to make up for losses. Thus
the amount of currency in circulation increased in Chile by 120 per cent
during 1971, and continues at the same rate for 1972. During the first
five months of 1972, inflation has been running at an annual rate of 60
per cent. President
Allende seems unable to take decisive action to deal with the agrarian
crisis. He cannot send the army into key areas to impose order or to offer
guarantees or incentives to the private sector, along the lines of
Lenin’s New Economic Policy, because this would antagonize important
elements of his Unidad Popular coalition. He cannot impose lull
state control of the agricultural sector because the opposition is too
strong for the government to do this, legally or illegally, Besides this,
the resources of the state administrative apparatus are Already enormously
over committed as a result of the seizure or expropriation of 263
factories and
thousands of farms that have been absorbed into the public sector Also,
the agrarian reform bureaucracy has becomy honeycombed with rival
political actions. In a recent interview, Agriculture Minister Chonchol
bitterly complained: “The government apparatus in the agricultural
sector is bad. We Inherit a structure in which 30 different organisms
Operate under four or five ministries... The problem worsens if we
consider that middle-level management is divided among different parties
within the Unidad Popular We adopted this principle to avoid that
a government agency might become the fief of a single party, but in
practice these organisms tend to wear their own colors. To remove a single
functionary you sometimes have to fight a whole party. This wears you
out.” The
three months of my visit to Chile— February through April 1972—saw an
alarming and accelerating deterioration of the Unidad Popular government’s
position, a decline which has continued since then. In the first five
months of this year the Unidad Popular has lost three major elections
among the three social groups on which it counted for the strongest
support: peasants, students, and workers. It is hard to say which of
these defeats did more harm to Allende’s coalition—the parliamentary
by-election losses in the rural provinces of O’Higgins and Linares,
the resounding defeat of the Unidad Popular candidate in the University
of Chile’s elections, or the massive Christian Democratic vote in the
formerly Marxist-dominated labor confederation CUTCh (Confederación
Unica de Trabajadores Chilenos). But it was the January 16 by-election in
Linares that showed the failure of Allende’s agrarian policy of
accelerating the legal process of expropriation while allowing free rein
to the MIR to carry out tomas. In his landslide defeat in Linares
Province of Sra. María Elena Mery—the widow of a Frei regime land reform
director there who was killed by a landlord while carrying out an
expropriation—the candidate of the conservative National party, Sergio
Diez, announced in his campaign that “I am doing battle against the
government and the MIR” in response to a radicalized land reform program
drawn up by the MIR and the Unidad Popular parties in Linares
shortly before the election, and to the large number of land seizures
and expropriations taking place in the province while fear was spread
among peasants by the opposition that all expropriated lands would be
turned into state farms. It
is amazing how much, through the whole period of Allende’s rule so far,
a small group like the MIR has remained at the center of the ideological
debate in Chile not only between the government and opposition, but even
more importantly among the Unidad Popular coalition parties themselves.
Although not itself a member of the ruling coalition, the MIR has played
the ambiguous role both of revolutionary vanguard and of viper at the
bosom of the Unidad Popular government. When the MIR sent its
cadres into the Central Valley during the 1971-12 harvest season, its
economic and social impact was much less than in Cautín the year before,
but politically it was the perfect target for attacks against the
government by the right-wing press and the Sociedad Nacional de
Agricultura (founded in 1838), which for more than a century was
Chile’s most effective political party and whose powers of persuasion
never should be underrated. The rural agitation in the Central Valley
this year bore most heavily upon Nuble, which is Chile’s second most
important wheat-growing province (after Cautín) and the leading producer
of beet sugar. In Nuble the MIR cadres were formed largely by students
from the University of Chile’s Agronomy School in the provincial capital
of Chillán, some 63 fundos in the province were reported seized
by March 1972, another 17 on strike and another 13 being managed by
government interventors.26 These strikes and tomas seemed part of a
contest between the extreme left and the agrarian reform authorities prior
to the legal expropriation in late March of 137 fundos in Nuble to
see how many farms would be expropriated without any land, machinery,
animals and buildings left to the previous owners, and which political
faction would win the loyalty of the peasants. This political contest is being duplicated today on mimeograph machines and in street fights elsewhere, to the degree that, if civil war is a reality in Chile today, the contending factions are the MIR and the Communist Party. Throughout the summer and fall of 1972 this dispute became increasingly acrimonious and harmful to the Allende regime, especially after a MLR student was killed in May by police during street fighting in Concepción prompted by MIR efforts to stop an antigovernment protest march. Increasingly, the MIR has insisted on defining recent events in Chile as part of a polarizing struggle between socialism and fascism, while the Communists have attempted to move into middle ground to neutralize antigovernment feeling and consolidate the badly shaken Unidad Popular coalition. Increasingly engulfed by intractable political and economic problems, President Allende has seen his capacity for maneuver rapidly diminish and the survival of his government increasingly in doubt. His friends on the extreme left—both within and outside the Unidad Popular coalition—increasingly see Allende’s fall as inevitable and feed their imaginations with dreams of repression and guerrilla warfare. As a young MIR activist told me recently on a spectacular autumn afternoon as we rode together in a jeep through the Mapuche country of Cautín: “There is a great sense of failure and frustration in the country toward the Unidad Popular, and we believe Allende will fall. We think it much better for the future of the Left and of socialism in this country for Allende to fall by an act of force against a legally constituted government than to be rejected overwhelmingly by the electorate. For this reason we are trying to create a situation of disorder and tension to provoke the reactionaries into a coup d’état.”
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CHILE
The
problems generated by revolt and reform in the Chilean countryside must be
viewed in terms of an historically stagnating agricultural economy and
constantly expanding urban food requirements. The declines in wheat, milk,
and sugar beet production, the clandestine slaughter of beef and dairy
cattle by frightened farmers trying to defend themselves against land
seizures and confiscatory expropriation all must be judged, however, in
terms of an exceptional situation which will surely pass, but will just as
surely leave residual problems that may take decades to resolve.