CHILE 211
tremely heavy reparations. Brazil, the occupying
power, installed a puppet regime that radically re-
constructed the Paraguayan economy and state.
The essence of the new policy was to liquidate
the progressive changes made under the Francia
and López regimes. Most of the state-owned lands
were sold to land speculators and foreign business-
men at bargain prices, with no restriction on the
size of holdings. Tenants who could not present the
necessary documents were ejected even though
they and their forebears had cultivated the land
for decades. By the early 1890s, the state-owned
lands were almost gone. Foreign penetration of the
economy through loans, concessions, and land
purchases soon deprived Paraguay of its economic
as well as its political independence.
PROGRESS AND DEVELOPMENT UNDER SARMIENTO
The Paraguayan War also changed Argentina,
which obtained its share of Paraguayan repara-
tions and territorial concessions (Formosa, Chaco,
and Misiones). Politically, it ushered in a transfer
of power to Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1868–
1874), a gifted essayist, sociologist, and statesman,
who worked for Argentine unity and economic
and social progress.
Even more important, however, a fl ood of
technological change began to sweep over Argen-
tina. Railways penetrated the interior, extending
the stock-raising and farming area. The gradual
introduction of barbed-wire fencing and alfalfa
ranges made possible a dramatic improvement in
the quality of livestock. In 1876 the arrival of an
experimental shipload of chilled carcasses from
France prepared the way for the triumph of frozen
over salted meat, which led to a vast expansion of
European demand for Argentine beef. Labor was
needed to exploit the rapidly expanding pasture-
lands and farmlands, so Sarmiento’s administra-
tion promoted immigration; some three hundred
thousand immigrants poured into the country.
Sarmiento, believing it necessary to educate the
citizens of a democratic republic, expanded the
public school system and introduced to Argentina
teacher-training institutions of the kind his friend
Horace Mann had founded in the United States.
But Sarmiento’s policies had a dark side, as well.
Regarding native peoples and gauchos as obstacles
to the advance of “civilization,” he waged a war
of extermination against the indígenas and used
vagrancy laws, press gangs, and other repressive
measures to control the gauchos.
When Sarmiento left offi ce, Argentina pre-
sented the appearance of a rapidly developing,
prosperous state. But clouds invaded the generally
bright Argentine sky. The growth of exports and
the rise in land values did not benefi t the forlorn
gauchos, aliens in a land over which they had
once freely roamed, or the majority of European
immigrants. Little was done to provide newcomers
with homesteads. Immigrants who wished to farm
usually found the price of land out of reach; as a
result, many preferred to remain in Buenos Aires
or other cities of the littoral, where they began to
form an urban middle class largely devoted to trade.
Meanwhile, foreign economic infl uence grew as
a result of increasing dependence on foreign—
chiefl y British—capital to fi nance the construction
of railways, telegraph lines, gasworks, and other
needed facilities. The growing concentration of
landownership reinforced a colonial land tenure
pattern; the tightening British control of markets
and the country’s economic infrastructure rein-
forced a colonial pattern: dependence on a foreign
metropolis, with London replacing Seville as the
commercial center. But Mitre, Sarmiento, and
other builders of the new Argentina were dazzled
by their successes in nation-building and by a cli-
mate of prosperity they believed permanent. These
men did not suspect the extent of the problems in
the making, nor did they anticipate the nature
of the problems future generations of Argentines
would face.Chile
The victories of José de San Martín’s Army of the
Andes over royalist forces at Chacabuco and Maipú
in 1817 and 1818 gave Chile its defi nitive indepen-
dence. From 1818 until 1823, Bernardo O’Higgins,
a hero of the struggle for Chilean liberation and
a true son of the Enlightenment, ruled the coun-
try with the title of supreme director. O’Higgins