THE NEW COLONIALISM 245
and implement a radical program of political and
social reform; their “frustrated bourgeois revolu-
tion” was drowned in blood. In this chapter we
examine a second Chilean effort to achieve autono-
mous development under the slogan “Chile for the
Chileans”; it too ended in defeat and in the death of
the president who led it.
EXPANSION OF THE HACIENDA SYSTEM
The neocolonial order evolved within the frame-
work of the traditional system of land tenure and
labor relations. Indeed, it led to an expansion of
the hacienda system on a scale far greater than
the colonial period had known. As the growing Eu-
ropean demand for Latin American products and
the growth of national markets raised the value of
land, the great landowners in country after coun-
try launched assaults on the surviving indigenous
community lands. In part at least, this drive re-
fl ected an effort to eliminate indigenous competi-
tion in the emerging market economy. In Mexico
the Reforma laid the legal basis for this attack in
the 1850s and 1860s; it reached its climax in the
era of Porfi rio Díaz. In the Andean region, similar
legislation turned all communal property into in-
dividual holdings, leading to a cycle of indigenous
revolt and bloody governmental repressions. But
not all native peoples opposed the nineteenth-
century drive to dissolve the ancient communal
landholding system. In both Mexico and the An-
dean regions, where market relations had induced
signifi cant socioeconomic differentiation within
villages, indigenous leaders often willingly ac-
cepted privatization of communal lands, viewing it
as a road to personal enrichment.
Seizure of church lands by liberal governments
also contributed to the growth of the latifundio. Mex-
ico again offered a model, with its Lerdo Law and the
Juárez anticlerical decrees. Following the Mexican
example, Colombian liberal governments confi s-
cated church lands in the 1860s, the liberal dicta-
tor Antonio Guzmán Blanco seized many church
estates in Venezuela in the 1870s, and Ecuadoran
liberals expropriated church lands in 1895.
Expansion of the public domain through rail-
way construction and wars also contributed to the
growth of great landed estates. Lands taken from
the church or wrested from indigenous commu-
nities were usually sold to buyers in vast tracts at
nominal prices. Concentration of land, reducing
the cultivable area available to native and mestizo
small landowners, was accompanied by a parallel
growth of the minifundio, an uneconomical small
plot worked with primitive techniques.
The seizure of indigenous community lands,
to use immediately or to hold for a speculative rise
in value, provided great landowners with another
advantage by giving them control of the local labor
force at a time of increasing demand for labor. Ex-
propriated natives rarely became true wage earn-
ers paid wholly in cash, for such workers were too
expensive and independent in spirit. A more wide-
spread labor system was debt peonage, in which
workers were paid wholly or in part with vouchers
redeemable at the tienda de raya (company store),
whose infl ated prices and often devious bookkeep-
ing created a debt that was passed on from one
generation to the next. The courts enforced the ob-
ligation of peons to remain on the estate until they
had liquidated their debts. Peons who protested
low wages or the more intensive style of work de-
manded by the new order were brought to their
senses by landowners’ armed retainers or by local
police or military authorities.
In some countries, the period saw a revival of
the colonial repartimiento system of draft labor for
indigenous peoples. In Guatemala, this system re-
quired able-bodied natives to work for a specifi ed
number of days on haciendas. It was the liberal
president Justo Rufi no Barrios who issued instruc-
tions to local magistrates to see to it “that any In-
dian who seeks to evade his duty is punished to the
full extent of the law, that the farmers are fully pro-
tected, and that each Indian is forced to do a full
day’s work while in service.”
As we have seen, slavery survived in some
places well beyond mid-century—for example, in
Peru until 1855, in Cuba until 1886, and in Brazil
until 1888. Closely akin to slavery was the system
of bondage, under which some ninety thousand
Chinese coolies were imported into Peru between
1849 and 1875 to work on the guano islands and
in railway construction. The term slavery also