CHILE 215
mining capitalists and their workers, artisans, and
small farmers, all groups with grievances against
the dominant Central Valley alliance of great mer-
chants and landowners. Their demands included a
democratic republic, state support for mining and in-
dustry, the splitting up of the great estates, and abo-
lition of the semifeudal inquilinaje system of peonage
as incompatible with democratic principles. Before
it was over, the revolt had taken fi ve thousand lives.
Some of the bourgeois leaders of the revolt were im-
prisoned, others were deported, and others fl ed into
exile, but a large number of miners, artisans, and
peasants were executed. Maurice Zeitlin regards it
as a crucial turning point in Chilean history: “Defeat
of the revolutionary bourgeoisie amounted to vir-
tual suppression of an alternative and independent
path of capitalist development for Chile—a realm of
objective historical possibilities unfulfi lled because
of the failure of the bourgeois revolution.”
By 1861 the depression had lifted and another
boom began, creating new fortunes and bringing
large shifts of regional infl uence. A growing stream
of settlers, including many Germans, fl owed into
southern Chile, founding cities and transforming
woodlands into farms.
But Chile’s true center of economic gravity be-
came the desert north, rich in copper, nitrates, and
guano; the last two, in particular, were objects of
Europe’s insatiable demand for fertilizers. The ma-
jor nitrate deposits, however, lay in the Bolivian
province of Antofagasta and the Peruvian prov-
ince of Tarapacá. Chilean capital, supplemented
by English and German capital, began to pour into
these regions and soon dominated the Peruvian
and Bolivian nitrate industries. In the north there
arose an aggressive mining capitalist class that de-
manded a place in the sun for itself and its region.
A rich mine owner, Pedro León Gallo, abandoned
the liberals to form a new middle-class party called
Radical, which fought more militantly than the lib-
erals for limited constitutional changes, religious
toleration, and an end to repressive policies.
LIBERAL CONTROL
The transition of Chile’s political life to liberal con-
trol, begun under Montt, was completed in 1871
with the election of the fi rst liberal president, Fed-
erico Errázuriz Zañartú. Between 1873 and 1875,
a coalition of liberals and radicals pushed through
the congress a series of constitutional reforms: re-
duction of senatorial terms from nine to six years;
direct election of senators; and freedom of speech,
press, and assembly. These victories for enlighten-
ment also represented a victory of new capitalist
groups over the old merchant-landowner oligar-
chy that traced its beginnings back to colonial
times. By 1880, of the fi fty-nine Chilean personal
fortunes of over 1 million pesos, only twenty-four
were of colonial origin, and only twenty had made
their fortunes in agriculture; the rest belonged to
coal, nitrate, copper, and silver interests or to mer-
chants whose wealth had been formed only in the
nineteenth century. Arnold Bauer has observed
that the more interesting point is “not that only
twenty made their fortune in agriculture, but that
the remaining thirty-nine—designated as miners,
bankers, and capitalists—subsequently invested
their earnings in rural estates. This would be com-
parable to Andrew Carnegie sinking his steel in-
come into Scarlett O’Hara’s plantation.” Bauer’s
comment points to the “powerful social model”
that the Chilean agrarian oligarchy continued to
exert. For the rest, the victories of the new bour-
geoisie brought no relief to the Chilean masses,
the migrant laborers and tenant farmers on the
haciendas, and the young working class in Chile’s
mines and factories.
During the fi rst half-century after indepen-
dence in Chile, collective fear of subaltern social
sectors caused liberal and conservative elites to
overcome their considerable differences and create
a national political identity that stressed oligarchic
unity and collaboration with foreign capitalists.
Meanwhile, the great majority of Chilean peasants,
propertyless wage workers, and indigenous com-
munities, all of whom were largely excluded from
this defi nition of citizenship, mobilized around is-
sues of democracy, equality, and anticolonialism
to promote their rival vision of a more inclusive
nation-state. Ironically, José Manuel Balmaceda,
himself born to a wealthy aristocratic family, soon
became a national voice for this growing reform
movement.