[Leslie Bethell] Chile Since Independence

8/9/2019 [Leslie Bethell] Chile Since Independence

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CHILE SINCE INDEPENDENCE


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CHILESINCE

I N D E P E N D E N C Eedited by

LESLIE BETHELLProjessor of Latin American H istory

University of London

C A M B R I D G EUNIVERSITY PRESS


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PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGEThe Pit t Building, Trumpington Street , Cambridge CB2 1RP, United Kingdom

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESSTh e Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB 2 2RU , UK http: / /www.cup.cam .ac.uk

40 West 20th Street, N ew York, NY 1 001 1-4 211 , USA http: / /www.cup .org10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia

The contents of this book were previously publsihed as parts of volumes III,V and VII of The Cambridge H istory of Latin America, copyright

© Cambridge University Press 1985, 1986, 1991

© Cambridge University Press 1993

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception andto the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,

no reproduction of any part may take place withoutthe written permission o f Cambridge University Press.

First published 1993Reprinted 1993, 1998

Typeset in Garamond

A catalogue recordfor this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available

ISBN 0-521-43375-4 hardbackISBN 0-521-43987 -6 paperback

Transferred to digital printing 2003


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CONTENTS

List of maps page viiPreface ix

1 From independ ence to the War of the Pacific iSIMON COLLIER, Vanderbilt University

2 From the War of the Pacific to 1930 33HAROLD BLAKEMORE

3 Ch ile, 1930—1958 87PAUL DRAKE, University of California at San Diego

4 Chile since 1958 129ALAN ANGELL, St. Antony s College, Oxford

Bibliographical essays 203Index 235


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MAPS

Chile in the nineteenth century page 5Twentieth-century Chile 86


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PREFACE

The Cambridge History of Latin America is a large scale, collaborative, multi-volume history of Latin America during the five centuries from the firstcontacts between Europeans and the native peoples of the Americas in thelate fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to the present.

Chile since Independence brings together chapters from Volumes III, V andVIII of The Cambridge History to provide in a single volume an economic,social and political history of Chile since its independence. This, it ishoped, will be useful for both teachers and students of Latin Americanhistory and of contemporary Latin America. Each chapter is accompaniedby a bibliographical essay.


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1

FROM INDEPENDENCE TO THE WAROF THE PACIFIC

At a banquet in Valparaiso in 1852 the Arg entin e pub licist Juan BautistaAlberdi proposed a toast to 'the honourable exception in South Amer-ica'. In one very important respect, the story of nineteen th century C hilewas, it is true, a striking exception to the normal Spanish Americanpattern. Within fifteen years of independence Chilean politicians wereconstructing a system of constitutional government which was to proveremarkable (by European as well as Latin American standards) for itsdurability and adaptability. This successful consolidation of an effectivenational state excited the envious admiration of less fortunate SpanishAmerican republics, torn and plagued as so many of them were byrecurrent strife and caudillo rule. A good part of the explanation ofChile's unusual record undoubtedly lies in what can best be called the'manageability' of the country at the time of independence, not least interms of the basic factors of territory and population. The effectivenational territory of Chile in the 1820s was m uch smaller than it is today.Its distinctive slenderness of width - 'a sw ord ha ngin g from the we st side

of America' - was for obvious orographical reasons no different; butlength wa ys n o m ore than 700 miles or so separated the min ing districts inthe desert around Copiapo, at the northern limit of settlement (27°S),from the green and fertile lands along the Bio-Bio river in the south(37°S) - the area traditionally referred t o as the Fron tier, beyo nd wh ichthe Araucanian Indians stubbornly preserved their independent way oflife. T he peripheral clusters of pop ulation wh ich lay still further so uth , atValdivia and on the den sely-forested island of Ch iloe (liberated from the

Spaniards only in 1826), were remote, insignificant appendages of therepublic; the same could also be said slightly later on of the strugglingsettlement on the Straits of Magellan established in 1843 a n d u se


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2 Chile since independen ce

200,00 0, the popu lation of C hile was still fairly small: it rose slow ly froman estimated 1,000,000 at the time of independence to an official (andpossibly conservative) figure of 2,076,000 in 1875. The overwhelmingmajority of Chileans lived and worked in the country's traditionalheartland, in (or very close to ) the central valley extend ing three hundredmiles southwards from Santiago. By the standards of Argentina orMexico, of Peru or New Granada, this was a very compact territoryinhabited by a compact population.

It was in many ways a ho m og ene ou s popu lation. Both ethnically andsocially the colonial past had left indelible marks. North of the Bio-Bio,few if any Indians survived in separate communities. The tiny black andmulatto trace in the community seems to have vanished within two orthree decades of the abolition of slavery (1823). Republican Chile wasessentially a country in which a small Creole upper class (with anaristocratic elite at its core) co-existed with the huge mass of thelabouring poor, who were predominantly mestizo and predominantlyrural. Th e ethnic and social div ision s coinc ided . Politically, the strugg leswh ich follow ed independence reflected disagreements within the fold of

the upper class rather than deeper conflicts in the body social moregenerally. Th e rural poo r remained passive thro ugh out the period and,in fact, well beyond it. This relatively simple social structure was notcomplicated by sharp cleavages of economic interest within the upperclass or by anything very much in the way of serious regional tension.Santiago and its rich hinterland dominated the republic. The remoternorthern or southern prov inces, whether disaffected or not, were pow er-less to alter the balance in their ow n favour, as was sh ow n very clearly inthe civil wars of 1851 and 1859. Con cepcion and the south underw ent afrustratingly slow recovery from the wars of independence; andalthough Con cepcion , by virtue of its role as a garrison to wn watchingover the frontier, was able in the uncertain atmosphere of the 1820s toimpose its will on the capital - as it did in 1823, with the overthrow ofBernardo O'H igg ins , and again in 1829 - in normal times a determinedcentral gov ern m ent in con trol o f the army (or m ost o f it) cou ld no t easilybe dislodged.

The issues which divided the upper class Chilean politicians of the18 20s into the perhaps predictable camps of Liberal and Con servativewere above all ideological and personal. The dominant figure of theseyears, General Ramon Freire, was a well-intentioned Liberal eager toavoid the authoritarian pattern set by his immediate predecessor, the


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From independence to the War of the Pacific 3

liberator O'Higgins. The new republic drifted from one makeshiftpolitical experiment to the next. The com plex and ingen ious constitutiondevised b y Juan Egana at the end of 1823 broke dow n within six mon ths,its moralistic conservatism rejected by the Liberals who surroundedFreire and w h o w ished , as they put it, 'to build the Repu blic on the ruinsof the Colony'. The vogue for federalist ideas which overwhelmedpolitical circles soon afterwards owed less, perhaps, to regional aspira-tions than to the dogmatically radical convictions of the man of themoment, Jose Miguel Infante; it produced a draft constitution,num erous new laws, an atmosphere of gro win g uncertainty, mild disor-

ders in several tow ns , and a propensity to mutiny o n the part of the army.The 'anarchy' of the period has often been exaggerated by Chileanhistorians; it was very limited in comparison with the turmoil thenoccurring on the other side of the Andes. Another Liberal soldier,General Francisco Antonio Pinto, president from 1827 to 1829, brieflysucceeded in organizing a governmen t w hich sho wed signs of solidity,and a new constitution (1828), the fourth since indepen dence, duly wen tinto effect. It proved inadequate to stem the mounting reaction against

Liberal reformism , colou red as this was by anti-aristocratic ve rbiage anda degree o f anticlericalism. In September 1829, wit h the vital back ing ofthe army in Co nce ptio n, a pow erful tripartite coalition of Conservatives- the traditionalist and pro-clerical pelucones ('big wig s'), the followers ofthe exiled O'Higgins, and a tough-minded group known as theestanqueros 1 - launched a revo lt against the Liberal regime. Freire, w h osprang quixotically to its defence, was defeated in April 1830 at Lircay,the battle which ended the short civil war and ushered in more than aquarter of a century of Conservative rule.

The political settlement of the 1830s was, as has been suggeste d, on e ofthe mo re remarkable creations of nineteen th-century Latin Am erica. T hecredit for its success is usually assigned to D ie g o Po rtales, the Valparaisotrader wh o m ore than anyone was the organizing gen ius of the Conserva-tive reaction. Certainly Portales's ruthless tenacity was a key factor inkeeping the new regime together, though his tenure of office as chiefminister was fairly brief. T his in itself may have im pede d the crystalliza-1 In 1824 the estanco, or state tobacco monopoly, was leased to the Valparaiso trading house of

Portalcs, Cea and Co., which undertook to service the £1,0 00,0 00 loan raised in Lon don by theO'Higgins government two years earl ier. The enterprise failed, and in 1826 the contract waswithdrawn, occasioning much i l l-feeling. The estanquero group was composed of men associatedwith this ill-starred venture; their leader was Diego Portales.


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4 Chile since independence

tion of a caudillo tradition in Chilean politics, for while Portales'sinfluence w as all-important, his aversion t o the trappings of po wer wasgenuine enough. 'If I took up a stick and gave tranquillity to thecountry', he wrote, 'it was only to get the bastards and whores ofSantiago to leave me in peace.' 2 Nevertheless, his actions both ingovernment and behind the scenes, his strict emphasis on orderlymanagement, his, at times, harsh attitude towards the defeated Liberalsand, no t least, his insistence on na tional dignity - these fixed the tone o fofficial policy for years to come.

The work of the Conservatives in the 1830s was later described by

critics of the regime as in essence a 'colonial reaction'. That it was areaction to the ill-starred L iberal reformism of the 1820s is clear en ou gh .But it is perhaps more accurate to see the new political system as apragmatic fusion of the tradition of colonial authoritarianism, still verystrong in Chile, with the outward forms (and some thing of the spirit) o fnineteenth-century constitutionalism. The Constitution of 1833, whoseregular oper ations we re not interrupted until 1891 and wh ich su rvive d inamended form un til 1925, em bod ied m any of the principal Conserva tive

ob sess ion s. It was discernibly more au thoritarian than its ill-fated prede-cessor of 1828, and in particular very strongly presidentialist. Twoconsec utive five-year terms of office w ere permitted, a pro vision wh ichled in practice to four successive 'decennial' administrations, the firstbeing that of Portales's nom inee General Joaquin Prieto (1831 -41 ). T hepresident's patronag e, contro l of the judiciary and pub lic adm inistration,and pow ers o ver Co ngress were all extensiv e, thou gh the legislature w asleft with an ultimate check o n the executiv e thro ug h its technical right todeny assent to the budget, taxation and military establishment. Thepresident's emergency p ow ers, in the form of'extraordinary faculties' orlocalized states of siege, were highly conspicuous: moreover, suchpo we rs were regularly used - in on e variety or another they were in forcefor one-third o f the entire period b etw een 1833 and 1861. Th e centralistspirit of the constitution was equally notable. The feeble institutionalrelics of the federalism of the 1820s were now swept away completely.The Intendant of each province was now defined as the president's'natural and immediate agent' — and so it was to prove in practice: the

Intendants were in some way the key officials of the regime, eachIntendancy b ecom ing in a real sense the local nexus of gover nm ent. The

2 Ern esto dc la Cruz and Guillerm o Feliu Cruz (eds.), Epistolarto de don Diego Portales, 3 vols.(Santiago, 1957), 1, 352.


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From independence to the War of the Pacific

20°S

30°S

40°S

50 °S

Territory conquered fromPeru and Bolivia, 1879 83

Mining zone

Talc

Concepcibn,

Talcahuai

Heartland of Chile:

Northern centralvalley

Va Id i viaARAUCANIAIndian territory

\ until occupied,LLIanquihueQ t 1860 83

Chiloe

5 0 0 km

3 0 0 miles

Chile in the nineteenth century


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hegemony of Santiago, already well entrenched, was thus reinforced atthe expense of regional initiative.

No constitution, least of all in Spanish America, is efficacious on itsown. T he successful operation o f the new p olitical system depended on anumber of well-tested techniques used with methodical persistence bythe governments of the period. Some were more obvious than others.Rep ression w as a recurrent tactic for three decades. By the standards ofthe twentieth century it did not amount to very much. The deathsentence was far more often invoked than applied. The standard penal-ties for political dissent were incarceration, internal exile ('relegation'),

or banishment abroad for a fixed period. Voluntary exile (sometimesunder bond) was not uncommon, especially in the embattled decade ofthe 1850s. A less overt means of inculcating social discipline can bedetected in the careful way in which the Conservatives restored clericalinfluence; until the 18 5 os the Church was a useful mainstay of the system .Likewise, the incipient militarism of the 1820s was curbed by a drasticpurge of Liberal officers and by a comprehensive reorganization of thecountry's militias. By the middle of 1831 the National Guard numbered

25,000 m en. It more than dou bled in size later on and was a very crediblecounterweight to the regular army, whose peacetime establishmentrarely went much above 3,000. Twice, in the mutinies of June 1837 andApril 18 51 , the militias helped to save the regime from forcibleoverth row. They also fitted very neatly into the govern men t's control ofthe electoral process.

Electoral intervention runs like a constant theme through the entireperiod . It surviv ed lo ng after the repressive practices already m ention ed.In fact it was a Liberal president w h o, w he n asked in 1871 by on e of h isministers whether C hile wo uld ever enjoy 'real' electio ns, curtly replied,'Never ' 3 Th e electoral law o f 1833 severely restricted the franchise, butspread the net just wide enough to include artisans and shopkeepers,many of whom formed the rank and file of the National Guard, whichthus supplied a numerous voting contingent at every election. Quiteapart from this invaluable support, the government resorted to anynumber of methods - intimidation, temporary arrest, personation,bribery - to prevent op po sitio n vote rs from exercising their franchise

and to secure comfortable majorities for its own candidates. Theoperation was co-ordinated by the Minister of the Interior, and hissubaltern agents in the provinces, the Intendants, the departmental

3 Abdon Cifucntcs, Memorial, i vols. (Santiago, 1936), n, 69.


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gobernadores and the subdelegados, were as adept as any modern Chicagoward boss (and possibly more so) in 'delivering' the vote. It is hardlysurprising that seven out of the eleven congressional elections heldbetween 1833 and 1864 (at regular three-year intervals) were eitherun conte sted or virtually so. E ve n in the more tolerant political climate o fthe 1860s and 1870s, an opp osition stood no chance whatever o f electinga majority to Congress. Not until the 1890s did the executive cease tointerfere directly in elections.

In its earliest years the new Conservative system both faced andsurvived the ultimate test of war. The relations between Chile and Peru

deteriorated sharply in the early 1 830s. Com mercial rivalry, a brisk tariffwar, and Peru's failure to repay a Chilean loan (itself part of the£1,0 00,0 00 loan raised by O'Hig gin s in Lo nd on in 1822, on wh ich Chilehad long since defaulted) were not in themselves a sufficient cause foraggression. Th is was provided in 18 36, whe n General An dres Santa Cruzforcibly u nited Peru and Bolivia into a Confederation. Portales v iewe dthe formation of this potentially powerful state as a threat to Chileanindependen ce; it wo uld no t be an exaggeration t o say that he pushed his

country into war. He was himself one of its first victims. D iscon tent ove rthe war brought renewed Liberal conspiracies, and the all-powerfulminister was murdered by a mutinous army battalion in June 1837, anoccurrence which seems to have greatly solidified support both for thewar policy and for the regime in general. Portales's death delayed but didnot deflect the course of events. Th e second of tw o Chilean expedition-ary forces, under the comma nd of General Manuel B ulnes, invaded Peruand defeated Santa Cruz's army at the battle of Y un gay (January 1839).Th e Con federation diss olve d. Th e war of 1836—9 was an example ofnational assertiveness which incurred strong disapproval from GreatBritain and France, but it inevitably heigh tene d the international prestigeof Chile. At home, it enabled the Prieto government to adopt a moreconciliatory attitude towards the oppo sition, w hile the victorious Gener-al Bulnes became the obv iou s su ccessor to the presidency. Just before theelection Bulnes was betrothed to a daughter of the former Liberalpresident, Francisco An ton io Pinto , thus confirming the apparent trendtowards political relaxation.

General Bu lnes's p residen cy (1841—51) has often been represen ted asan 'era of good feelings' and for much of the time this was true. In theearly 1840s, indeed, Liberalism came close to being killed by kindness.But Bulnes, for all his generou s bo nh om ie, did nothin g to und ermine the


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authoritarian framework; in certain respects (the stiff Press Law of 1846,for instance) he added to it. The revival of L iberalism as a political forcetowards the end of his second term owed much to the ambitions of hischief minister, Manuel Camilo Vial, whose following, well representedin Congress, went into active parliamentary opposition when Vial wasdismissed (1849). The leading Liberal intellectual of the period, JoseVictorino Lastarria, attempted to give direction and coherence to thisnew opposition. Outside the congressional arena the young idealistsFrancisco Bilbao and Santiago Arco s, mesmerized by the French revo lu-tion of 1848, were active in trying to m obilize support a mo ng the artisans

of the capital: their Sociedad de la Igualdad, with its meetings andmarches, survived for much of the year 1850, until the inevitableimp osition of emergency po wers by the gove rnm ent. T he main effect ofthis agitation , bot h Liberal and igualitario y was to frighten the C onserva-tive party into accepting Manuel Montt as Bulnes's successor.

President Montt (1851-61) was the first civilian to govern Chile formore than a few weeks. His oddly opaque character has defied allattempts at precise historical portraiture. His talent was undeniable; so

was his austere inflexibility. ('AH head and no heart* was his bluffpredecessor's private opinion .) Mon tt's election provo ked three m onthsof full-scale civil war, in wh ich the challenge t o the regime came n ot o nlyfrom the Liberals but also, more seriously, from the southern prov inces.The leader of the revolt, General Jose Maria de la Cruz, was in fact aConservative and the cousin of ex-president B ulnes, wh o defeated h im ina short but blood y cam paign. For the mom ent the regime was safe. By themid-18 5 os, however, Montt's authoritarian approach was inducingstrains and tensions within the Conservative governing combinationitself. These finally came into the open as the result of a noisy jurisdic-tional conflict between the gove rnm ent and the Church, wh ich was n owre-emerging as an independent factor in politics. In 18 5 7 the bulk o f theConservative party defected and joined forces with what was left of theLiberal opposition. Those Conservatives who remained loyal to Monttfounded a new Na tional p arty, but it lacked the wider up per class supp ortenjoyed by the nascent Liberal-Conservative Fusion . For a second timevigorous agitation led to renewed repression and so to a further armed

challenge to the regime. T he civil war of 18 5 9 is chiefly remem bered forthe miracles of impro visation performed by the rebel army in the m iningprovinces of the north — the focus of the war — but once again thegovernment won. This time, however, military victory was followed by


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political defeat. Mon tt found it impossible to impose his ow n cho ice forthe succession. This would have been Antonio Varas, Montt's closestassociate and a highly talented politician. An elderly, easygoing,benevolent patrician, Jose Joaquin Perez, was selected in Varas's place.It was a decisive turning point.

Under President Perez (1861-71), the last of the four 'decennial'presidents, the Chilean political system at last began to liberalize. Perezhimself, by virtue of what was called at the time 'a supreme toleranceborn of an even more supreme indifference', did as much as anybody innineteenth-century Chile to enhance the tradition of stable constitution-

alism. Rep ression end ed, even if electoral interv ention did no t - Perez'sministers saw to that. The new president, though himself nominally aNational, quickly summoned the Liberal-Conservative Fusion into of-fice (1862). This alliance between former enemies proved a remarkablyworkable governing combination, though it naturally attracted theopposition not only of the displaced Nationals (whose loyalty to Monttand Varas won them the name of monttvaristas) but also of the stronglyanti-clerical 'red' or 'radical' Liberals who presently became known as

the Radical party. The 1860s thus saw an increasingly diversified ideo-logical panorama, and (except electorally) the 'new po litics' was allow edto grow and thrive, although as it happened, domestic rivalries weresom ewh at dam pened d ow n in 1865—6, wh en the aggr essive ac tions of aSpanish naval squadron cruising in Pacific waters dr ove Chile and threeof her sister republics into a short war with their former m etro po lis. 4 Bythe close of the 1860s Liberal notions of constitutional reform wereocc up ying the forefront o f the political stage. Such ideas, centred, ab oveall, on limiting presidential pow er, increasingly formed com m on grou ndbetween the four main parties. The first amendment to the hithertoinviolate Constitution of 1833 was passed in 1871; significantly, itprohibited the immediate re-election of the president.

It was during the govern me nt of Federico Errazuriz Zanartu (187 1-6 )that the final transition to Liberal-dominated politics occurred. In theearly 1870s 'theolog ical q ues tion s' (as they were called) began to be takenup as political issues. They were less concerned with theology, in fact,than with the demarcation of ecclesiastical and secular functions in the

national life; they generated a good deal of feeling, both pious and

4 Such fighting as there was (and there was not mu ch) took place at sea. Before w ithdr awin g fromthe Pacific, however, the Spaniards subjected Valparaiso to devastating bombardment (March1866).


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i o Chile since independence

impious. A dispute about private education in 1873, pitting anticlericalsagainst the Conserva tives, w ho were beco min g more and more identifi-able as the militantly Catholic party in politics, brought about thedisintegration of the Fusion. The Conservatives went into opposition,and the way was thus laid open for a new dominant coalition with aLiberal focu s. Th e clever Errazuriz con du cted the necessary m ano euv res.The Liberal Alliance (1875) was the third of the great governing com-binations of the period, but the least stable, since several factions ofthe pow erful Liberal party were invariably to be foun d o pp os in g as wellas supporting the government. The Errazuriz presidency also saw

further constitutional reforms, all tending to limit executive influence.Important chan ges in electoral procedu re (1874) were designe d to reduceofficial intervention, but in 1876 Errazuriz and the Alliance had nodifficulty in imposing the next president in the usual manner. Theirchoice fell on Anibal Pinto, the son of the Liberal president of the later1820s.

If the outline of the Cons ervative settlement o f the 18 30s was still verymuch intact, its inner workings were nonetheless altering in significant

ways. Party politics had developed apace since the Perez decade; theparties themselves were acquiring rudimentary forms of organization.Th e Radicals, with their netw ork of local asam bleas, were perhaps the firstgro up to d evise a definite (if flexible) structure. Th e Con servatives werethe first to h old a national party conference (1878). But v ot in g on partylines in Congress was far from automatic. When in 1876 the Radicaldeputy Ramon Allende (grandfather of the future president) suggestedthat party considerations sh ould o utw eigh private principle in con gres-sional voting, the idea was greeted with several outraged reactions.Quite apart from this, it was becoming clear by the later 1870s thatCongress as a wh ole aspired to a much greater degree of con trol ove r theexecutive than had been attempted or perhaps even contemplated pre-viously. The constitution , as we h ave seen, was strongly presidentialist;but it was also possible, as politicians now proved, to give it a logical'parliamentary' interpretation. Through constant use of the interpelacionand vote of censure, congressmen made the lives of cabinet ministersincreasingly tedious and arduous. This was particularly the case during

Anibal Pinto's presidency (1876-81), which coincided, as we shall see,with several parallel crises of a very acute kind. That Chilean institution shad survived the tempests of the 1850s, that they were gro win g notice-ably more tolerant - these thing s were cause for pride, certainly, but there


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From independence to the W ar of the Pacific 11

were some politicians, including Pinto, who regarded as sterile thepolitical squabbles now often monopolizing congressional attention tothe exclusion of more urgent national business, and others who won-dered whether the tension between the executive and the militantlegislature m ight no t destroy the tradition of stability. 'Gen tlem en o f themajority, ministers', exclaimed a Conser vative d eputy in 1881, 'I tell you :Don't pull the string too hard, because the thing might explode ' 5

The connection between political stability and economic progress isnever entirely clear-cut. It nevertheless seems fair to argue that the

considerable comm ercial expansion wh ich Chile underwent b etwee n the1820s and the 1870s owe d som ething , at least, to the settled co ndition s tobe found in the country, as well as to the international demand for whatChile could produce. Expansion was not, how ever, comp letely sm ooth.At the close of the 1850s, with the loss of certain overseas markets forwheat and flour, coupled with two poor harvests in a row and theexhaustion o f som e o f the silver deposits in the north , there was a briefbut serious recession. At other periods (notably from the end of the 1840sto the mid-18 50s, and again from the end of the 1860s into the early1870s) the growth of trade was very rapid indeed, and Chile enjoyedboom conditions. The total value of the country's external trade rosefrom $7,500,000 in 1825 to $74,000,000 in 1875. Government revenuesincreased somewhat more slowly, from $2,000,000 in 1835 to$16,400,000 in 1875; from the end of the 1830s they generally outranexpenditure very comfortably. 6

A highly cosmopolitan trading community established itself atValparaiso in the years after independence, and the governments of theperiod saw trade with the maritime nations of the North Atlantic,especially Great Britain, as one of the main stimulants of progress.Indeed, the political settlement of the 1830s was accompanied by an'economic settlement', largely carried through by the brilliant ManuelRengifo, finance minister from 1830 to 1835 and again from 1841 to1844. Rengifo blended liberalism with pragmatism in his economicmeasures, wh ich in cluded the simplification of the fiscal system and tarifflaws, the consolidation of the public debt, and, not least, the establish-5 Cristian Zcg crs, Anibal Pinto. Historiapolitica de sugobierno (Santiago , 1969 ), 119. Ten years later,

in the political crisis of 1891, the 'thing' did explode.6 The Chilean peso [ I] maintained a more or less constant value throu ghou t mo st of the period,

being worth around 45*/. in terms of sterling, or slightly less than an American dollar, exceptduring the American civil war, when i t was worth sl ightly more.


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ment on a permanent basis of public warehouses {almacenes fiscales atValparaiso, where traders could store duty-free merchandise whileawaiting favourable markets. That Valparaiso should be the dominantport on the Pacific coast was a cardinal maxim both for Rengifo andPortales.

Heavily dependent on customs duties for its revenues, the Chileangovernment had the strongest possible reason for wishing to augmentthe flow o f trade, an aim w hich certainly reflected the vie w of the Chileanupper class as a wh ole. But broader considerations o f national d evelo p-ment were never entirely absent from the official mind. The state was

active in many spheres, including the impr ovem ent o f comm unications;and tariff policy did not ignore local interests other than those ofexporters. The tariff reform of 1864, often presented by historians as agadarene rush to free trade, was in many respects no more than atemporary aberration from the more standard nineteen th-centur y po licy,which strove (rather ineffectively) to give at least a minimal degree ofprotection to certain domestic activities as well as to maximize trade.Nev ertheless, it seems reasonably clear, given the extreme po verty of the

new nation and the lack o f a 'spirit of association ' so frequently lamentedby, inter alia, Manuel Montt, that even a much stronger dose of protec-tionism could hardly have done much to diversify economic activity orto develop an industrial base of any size. The country's options at thisperiod were fairly narrow.

From the point of view of foreign trade, mining was by far the mostimportant sector of the economy throughout the period. The miners ofthe north accumulated the largest individual and family fortunes of thetime. The two thinly settled provinces of Atacama and Coquimbo, thearea nowa day s referred t o by Chileans as the No rte C hico, constituted themost dynamic region of the country, with a population (about one-eigh th of the nation's total in 1865) wh ich rose m uch faster than was thecase in the hacienda-dominated provinces of the central valley, thousandsof whose people were lured to the ramshackle, rowdy and occasionallyrebellious min ing cam ps of the arid north; there were som e 30,000 mine-workers there by the 1870s. Tough, enterprising, industrious, periodi-cally volatile, fiercely proud — such was the distinctive culture of the

mining zone. Its laboriously extracted riches had a vital impact on therest of the natio n, 'en no bling the central cities and fertilizing the fields o fthe south', as President Balmaceda was later to put it. 7 Of the three7 Roberto Hernandez, ]uan Godoy o eldescubnmtento de Ckana rcillo, 2 vols. (Valparaiso, 1932), 11,5 60 .


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principal metals mined in Chile in colonial tim es, go ld did least well afterindependence, falling from an annual average production of 1,200 kg inthe 1820s to a level o f around 270 kg in the 1870s. O ver the same pe riod,by contrast, silver production rose from ab out 20,000 kg per annum toabout 127,000 kg. (G iven the persistence of sm ug gling , such figures areperhaps conservative). Copper, the most profitable of the three metals,was produced at an annual rate of 2,725 metric tons in the 1820s; thisgrew very steadily to 45 ,600 m etric ton s in the 1870s, by wh ich time C hileregularly accounted for between one-third and one-half of the world'ssupply.

The allure of mineral wealth attracted numerous traders, speculatorsand prospectors to the northern deserts. The search for new veins o f orewas incessant; the mining zone expanded slowly northwards into theAtacama desert and towards the long undefined border with Bolivia.The important early silver strikes at Agua Amarga (1811) and Arqueros(1825) were soon wholly eclipsed by the sensational discovery atChanarcillo, south of C opiapo, in 18 3 2. It was the single mo st p rodu ctivem ining district of the century, a veritable 'silver mountain* whic h yielded

at least 12,000,000 in its first ten years and where by the m id-1840 s therewere over on e hundred mines. The discovery o f Tres Puntas (1848) was afurther fillip to the bo om , tho ug h less dramatic. Th e last silver rush of theperiod occurred in 1870, with the opening up of a major new miningdistrict at Caracoles, across the border in Bolivia though worked almostentirely by C hileans. Copper mining d epended less on n ew explorationthan on the wo rking of established veins o f high-grade ore, but here toopatient prospecting sometimes reaped a fabulous reward, as in thespectacular case of Jose Tomas Urmeneta, who searched for eighteenyears in dire poverty before coming across, at Tamaya, his legendarydeposit of copper. He was soon a millionaire, one of perhaps severaldozen very rich men wh ose great fortunes came from the Norte Chico.

Chilean method s o f mining changed o nly slow ly and partially from thepattern established in later colonial time s, wh ich had been characterizedby numerous small enterprises, individual or family entrepreneurship,simple technology and short-term marginal activity. By the 1860s, it istrue, som e of the larger mines - Urm eneta's at Tamaya, and Jose Ram on

Ov alle's at Carrizal Al to , for instance - had gon e in for exte nsiveme chanization, and it is interesting that the two districts cited accou ntedfor one-third of copper production in the 1870s. But the persistence ofolder practices - and a large number of small-scale operations which


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continued to rely, in preference to steampower, on the sturdy barreterosand apires w h o d ug the ore and shifted it from the m ine - is attested bymany visitors to the north during this period. In the 1870s only somethirty-three mines in the Norte Chico used steam engines, leaving 75 5wh ich did not. Inno vations in the smelting and refining o f copper were agood deal more noticeable, with reverbatory furnaces (the 'Englishsystem') spreading from the 1830s onwards. O ver the next tw o decades,in what amounted to a minor technological revolution, several largesmelting plants were established on the coast, most notably at Guayacanand Tongoy in the Norte Chico and at Lirquen and Lota five hundred

miles further south ; these wer e Ch ile's first industrial enterprises o f anysize. They a lso processed Peruvian and Bo livian ores , and partially offsetthe produ cers' previous dep endence on the smelting and refining ind us-try of South Wales. The smelters' insatiable demand for fuel made deepinroads into the exiguous timber resources of the Norte Chico andcontributed to the southward advance of the desert — that usuallyunremarked but basic ecological theme of Chilean history since colonialtimes. The main alternative to wood was coal, which was increasingly

mined along the coast to the south of Concepcion from the 1840sonwards. Here, domestic production was vulnerable to imports ofhigher-quality coal from Great Britain (or occasionally Australia), butheld its own in the longer run, in part because a mixture of local andforeign coal was found to be ideal in smelting operations.

Chileans (sometimes first-generation Chileans) were outstandingam ong the mining entrepreneurs of this period. On e or two of the copperconcerns were British-own ed, but these were exceptions, tho ug h foreignengineers were prominent throughout the mining zone. Men such asUrmeneta and a handful of others like him were naturally substantialcapitalists in their own right, and they frequently turned their hugewindfalls to good account, investing in transport and agriculture as wellas in the m ines, thoug h n ot failing, either, to provide them selves w ith asuitably opulent style of life. Many of the lesser mining entrepreneurswere heavily dependent on a breed of middlem en k now n as ha bilitadores,w ho bou ght their ore in exchange for credit and supplies. This b usinesswas the founda tion o f several large fortunes, a famous example being the

career of Agu stin Ed wards Ossa ndo n, the son of an Eng lish doctor w hosettled in the Norte Chico just before independence. By the 1860sEdwards was one of the richest and most active capitalists in Chile. In1871—2, in a well-kn ow n episode , he quietly accumulated and stockpiled


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vast am oun ts o f copp er, dr ove up the price by fifty per cent and realized aprofit estimated at $1,500,000. By the time Edwards executed thisaudacious coup, Chile's nineteenth-century silver and copper cycle wasreaching its climax. T he silver mines w ere to maintain a hig h ou tpu t fortwo more decades; but with production booming in the United Statesand Spain, 'Chili bars' became a decreasingly important component inthe world supply of copper, no more than six per cent of which camefrom Chile by the 1890s. By then , of course, deserts further to the northwere yielding a still greater source of wealth: nitrates.

Although mining dominated the export sector, it was agriculture

which dom inated m ost ordinary lives. Four ou t of five Chileans lived inthe countryside in the 1860s. He re, as in so many other w ays, the colon iallegacy was overwhelming. Throughout the nineteenth century Chileremained a land of great estates, ownership of which conferred socialstatus, political influence (if desired) and (less automatically before the1850s) a comfortable inco me . Th is tradition of landownersh ip is one ofthe keys to und erstanding Chilean history betwe en colo nial times and themid-twentieth century. The precise number of haciendas in the mid-

nineteenth century is hard to assess. The tax records of 1854 show thatsome 850 landowners received around two-thirds of all agriculturalinco m e in central Chile, and that of these 15 4 own ed estates wh ich earnedin excess of $6,000 per year. (For purposes of comparison, it might beno ted here that the president of the repub lic was paid a salary of $12 ,000 ,raised to 18,000 in 1861.) Haciendas occu pied at least three-quarters of allagricultural land; most included large tracts of ground which wentuncultivated from year to year. The estates were worked by a stable,resident class of inqui/inos, or tenant-labourers, and, when necessary, bypeons hired for seasonal work from outside. This type of rural laboursystem, as we know, was common (though with many variations) inmany parts of Spanish America. When Charles Darw in rode th roug h theChilean countryside in the mid-i83os, he thought of it as 'feudal-like'.Th e Chilean inquilino was bou nd to the hacienda, allowed to cultivate hisown small parcel of land in exchange for regular labour services to thelandowner, by ties of custom and conven ience rather than by those o f lawor debt. In the absence of traditional village com mu nities o f the Eu ro-

pean kind, the estate became the sole focus of his loyalty and formed hisow n little universe. 'E very hacienda in Chile', wr ote an acute observer in1861, 'forms a separate society, whose head is the landowner and whosesubjects are the inquilinos . . . The landowner is an absolute monarch in


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his hacienda/ 8 For the tenant-labourers life was poor though notnecessarily harsh; their farming methods were primitive, their dietmonotonous and sometimes barely adequate and their opportunities torise in the social scale very strictly lim ited. Bu t the relative security o f thehacienda could be contrasted with the plight of m ost of the peons outside—a destitute mass of peo ple scraping a very precarious living by squattingon marginal land, by wandering the central valley in search of seasonalwork, or in some cases by turning to cattle-rustling and banditry. Fromthe viewpoint o f the hacendado, there was plenty o f surplus labour, as we llas unused land, in the countryside. Neither was needed on a large scale

before 1850 or so.If agriculture w as un pro du ctive and unprofitable in the earlier part o f

this period, the reason is easy enough to identify. Local demand wasquickly satisfied, while export markets were few and far between. Theeighteenth-century grain trade with Peru, whos e importance has prob-ably been exaggerated by historians, was never quite re-established onthe old scale following the wars of independence and the commercialrivalry of the 1830s. Between 1850 and 1880, however, the outlook for

landowners improved quite radically, with haciendas responding im-mediately to the opening up of new markets overseas. As the only majorcereal-growing country on the Pacific coast of America, Chile was wellplaced to take advantage of the sudden dem and set up by the go ld rushesin California and Australia. Exports of wheat and flour to Californiaamou nted to around 6,000 metric quintals (qqm) in 1848. Tw o years laterno less than 277,000 qqm of wheat and 221,000 qqm of flour wereshipped northwards. The bo om w as ephemeral - by 18 5 5 California wasself-sufficient - but it yielde d hig h profits w hile it lasted, and it wasresponsible for conso lidating a technically up-to-d ate m illing industry inthe Talca area and along Talcahuano Bay, as well as in Santiago itselfslightly later on. By 1871 there were some 130 or so modern mills inChile. (At the end of this period, further changes in the technology ofmilling were being pioneered in the middle west o f the United States andin Eur op e, but these, by contrast, were slow er to reach Chile.) A ustraliaprovided a second short-lived (and somewhat precarious) market forChile in the 1850s, lucrative for a while. Landowners were well aware

that geography and goo d luck were the causes of such windfalls, w hichwere substantial enough: agricultural exports quintupled in value be-

8 'Atropos/ 'El inquil ino en Chile ' , Kevista del Pactfico, 5 (1861), 94.


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tween 1844 and 1860. N or w as this by any means the end of the story. Th eexperience gained in the Californian and Australian markets, combinedwith vital improvements in transport, enabled Chile in the 1860s to selllarge quantities of grain (wheat and barley) to England: 2,000,000 qqmwere exported in 1874, the peak year. Once again, however, Chile'scompetitive position in the international market place was more fragilethan it appeared, and it was permanently undermined a few years later,when grain prices fell and new, more efficient cereal-growing countrieswere opened up.

The stimulus of these mid-century export booms brought some

definite chang es to the countryside. M ost visible of these, perhaps, werethe numerous irrigation canals no w constructed, som e of them remark-able feats of engineering. (The Canal de las Mercedes, sponsored byManuel Mon tt and other hacendados in 18 5 4, too k thirty years to build andeventually extended seventy-five miles over very uneven terrain.) Thequality of livestock was slowly improved, through the introduction offoreign breeds. W ith the gro wt h of the tow ns , an expanding market forfruit and poultry greatly benefited nearby haciendas and the smaller(often specialist) farms known as chacras. Chileans had drunk their ownwine since early colonial times; but the foundations of the greatviticultural tradition wh ich wa s later to produ ce the finest vintage s in thewestern hem isphere were on ly laid in the 18 5 os, wh en pino t and cabernetgrapes, brought from France, were gro wn locally for the first time. Th egovernment itself, as well as the Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura (inintermittent existence from 1838) tried to improve agricultural knowl-edge. Developments such as these, thus sketched, seem to convey animpression of vitality, but it is somewhat deceptive. Rural society andtraditional farming methods were in no real way drastically disturbed,altho ugh it seems probable that mon etary transactions in the co untry sidebecame more widespread than previously. There was relatively little inthe way of hig h capital investm ent in agriculture (leaving aside irrigationwo rks), and despite the enthusiasm of a number of progressive landow n-ers, farm-machinery w as never imported or emp loyed on a large scale.(Oxen remained in universal use in Chile until the 1930s.) During thehappy years of the export boo m , landowners had ample reserves of b oth

land and labour on which to draw. The acreage placed beneath theplough in these years may well have tripled or even quadrupled. Newfamilies from ou tside the haciendas were encou raged (and in many caseswere no doubt eager) to swell the ranks of the inquilinos. The labour


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1 8 Chile since independen ce

system itself was certainly tightened up, with greater demands beingmade on the tenant-labourers. Quite apart from inquilinaje, a variety ofsharecropping practices, especially in the coastal range, were developedto help feed the export boom. The number of minifundios also seems tohave risen. But in general it was the hacienda system itself, the basicunderpinning of the nation's elite, which w as mo st clearly con solidatedby the changes of the mid-nineteenth century.

Such manufacturing as existed in Chile at the time of independenceand for two or three decades thereafter was carried out by artisans andcraftsmen in small workshops in the towns. In the countryside, the

hacienda population largely clothed itself, though the grow ing import ofBritish cottons probably had the effect over the years of reducing theextent of local weav ing . Th e upper class wa s, on the w ho le, able to satisfyits demand for manufactured goods, including luxuries, from abroad,and was uninterested in promoting an industrial revolution. (Miningentrepreneurs w ere a partial excep tion here, and at the end o f the periodindustrialism was viewed as a possible way forward for the country by agrowing number of intellectuals and politicians.) There can be little

dou bt, ho we ver , that the expansion of national wealth after 1850 or sodid provide certain opportunities for entrepreneurship in manufactur-ing, and such opportun ities w ere sometimes seized - usually by foreign-ers, though these can better be regarded, perhaps, as first-generationChileans. The first major industrial enterprises arose in conn ectio n withthe export boo m s and were the copper smelters and flour mills m entionedalready. In addition to these, the 1860s and 1870s saw the growth ofsmall-scale factory pro du ction in such fields as textiles, food -pro cess ing,brick-making and glass-blowing. By the 1880s there were at least thirtybreweries in the coun try. Furtherm ore, the needs of the new railways andof the mining industry itself stimulated the appearance of a number ofsmall foundries and machine shops capable of repairing and in someinstances even making equipment. In fact, what seems to have been arespectable metallurgical and engineering sector was developing withsurprising speed by the early 1870s. There is growing evidence forsup po sing that the start of Chilean industrialization, often dated from theWar of the Pacific, should be pushed back by about ten years.

It goes without saying that Chile's export-led economic expansioncould hardly have taken place without improvements in transport andcommunications, which were also of obvious importance in consolidat-ing the political coherence of the new nation. The number of ships


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calling at Chilean ports rose more or less constantly from the 1830sonwards, to over 4,000 per annum in the 1870s. Two 700-ton paddlesteamers were brought to Chile from England in 1840 by a veryenterprising American, William Wheelwright, the founder of the Brit-ish-owned Pacific Steam Navigation Company. The outside worldbegan to draw closer. From the mid-1840s it became possible, withsuitable connectio ns across the Panama isthmus, to travel to Eu rope inunder forty days. (Sailing ships still too k three or four m on ths.) In 1868the now well-established P .S.N.C . (w hos e initials later prompted severalfamous Chilean jokes) opened a direct service between Valparaiso and

Liverpool by way of the Magellan Straits. Meanwhile, inland transportwas slowly being revolutionized by the inevitable advent of the railway.Th e nor th o f Chile, indeed , installed the first substantial len gth of trackin Latin America. Th e line, built by W heelwright and finished in 1851,linked C opiap o w ith the po rt of Caldera fifty miles away. It was financedby a group of wealthy miners, and it set the pattern for several laterrailways in the mining zone. The vital link between Santiago andValparaiso had to wait somewhat longer. This was initially a mixedventure, the government subscribing about half the capital, but in 1858,following tiresome delays and difficulties, the state bought out most ofthe private shareholders; a swashbuckling American entrepreneur,Henry M eigg s, was entrusted with the com pletion o f the line; and the lastsections of the wide-gauge track were laid in 1863. Another mixedventure sponsored the third main railway, extending southwardsthro ug h the central valley, a line of particular interest to cerea l-grow inghacendados. The Errazuriz gover nm ent to ok this over in 1873, and only afew years later the line joined u p w ith a further railway w hich by then hadbeen built inland from Talcahuano and was pressing southwards into theroman tic landscapes o f Araucania. In 1882 there were nearly 1,200 m ilesof track in Chile, just ov er half state-ow ned . T he state also subsidized andsubsequently purchased the nascent telegraph netwo rk, co nstruction ofwhich began in 1852 - yet another enterprise of the indefatigableW heelwright, to w ho m , in due course, a statue was raised in Valparaiso.Twenty years later the Chilean brothers Juan and Mateo Clark linkedSantiago to Buenos Aires; with the laying of the Brazilian submarine

cable in 1874 Chile was for the first time placed in direct touch with theOld World.

The increasing pace of economic activity during the third quarter ofthe nineteenth century left its mark on the country's financial and


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2 0 Chile since independence

commercial institutions. Up to the 1850s the main sources of credit, forinstance, had been private lenders or the trading houses. This nowchan ged , with the appearance of the first proper banks - the Banco deOssa and the Banco de Valparaiso, founded in the mid-18 50s - andbanking operations were sufficiently extensive to warrant regulation inthe important law of i860. The creation in 1856 of the notable Caja deCredito Hipotecario funnelled credit to the countryside - in practicemainly to the big landowners. Joint-stock companies now becameincreasingly common, though supplementing rather than replacing theindividual and family concern s and partnerships wh ich had hitherto been

the standard modes of business organization. The earliest were therailway comp anies; by the end of the 1870s well ov er 15 o such enterpriseshad been formed at one time or another, predominantly in mining,banking and insurance, and railways. Chilean capitalism showed amarkedly expansionist tendency in the 1860s and 1870s, with moneyflowing into the nitrate business in Bolivia and Peru as well as to thesilver mines at Caracoles. Unregulated stock exchanges were operatingin Valparaiso and Santiago from the early 1870s, at which point

'Caracoles fever' was dr iving inv estor s into a speculative frenzy with ou tprecedent in Chilean history.

Foreign trade through out this period was largely controlled by severaldo zen imp ort-exp ort h ous es centred on Valparaiso and the capital; thesecontributed much to the building up of the new money market, andremained influential thereafter in the dev elo pin g co rporate sector of theeconomy. Foreigners, whether as permanent residents or as transientagents of overseas trading houses with branches in Chile, were particu-larly prominent here, with the British leading the field. The Britishconnection was fundamental to Chile. Investment in the country byBritons was mostly confined to government bonds - to the tune ofaround £7,0 00 ,00 0 by 1880 - but Great Britain was the destination forbetw een o ne-third and two-th irds o f all Chile's exports and the source ofbetween one-third and one-half of all her imports in any given year.Imports from France also ran high, reflecting upper class tastes. As incolonial times, trade with Peru continued, but this was overshad ow ed bythe links now being forged with the North Atlantic. The steamers,

railways, telegraphs, banks and joint-stock companies all played theirpart in cementing Chile's solidifying association with the internationaleconomy now coming into being around the world. Politicians mightoccasionally denounce the British traders as the 'new Carthaginians' or


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even (in more popular vein) as 'infidels', but by and large their presencewas welcomed as a vital element in what was confidently assumed to bethe progress of the nation.

Sixty years after independence Chile was an altogether m ore prosperousland than would have seemed likely in 1810, as well as being moreintegrated economically than in colonial times. Her record in this respectcontrasts forcibly with the stagnation evident in several of the otherSpanish American republics. But the new prosperity was not distributedproportionately (still less evenly) to all sections of the people. The wealth

of the upper class increased very strikingly, and the upper class had afairly clear idea as to what to do with it. An American v isitor in the mid-18 50s observed that 'the great object of life' on acquiring wealth seemedto be to 'remove to the capital, to lavish it on costly furniture, equipageand splendid living.'9 The gradual disappearance of older, more austere,supposedly more virtuous habits of life was lamented by writers of amoralistic cast of mind; and it is probably fair to say that the adoption ofmore sophisticated, E uropean styles of living - fashions across a wholerange from hats to horse-racing altered visibly between the 1820s and the1870s - may well have deepened the psychological gulf between rich andpoor; it may also be one of the keys to understanding the politicalliberalization which set in after 1861. The elite of Chilean society wasnever closed to newcomers. The new magnates of mining and financewere easily assimilated, as were the children or grandchildren of success-ful immigrants — though the much remarked contingent of non-Hispanicsurnames in the Chilean upper class only became really conspicuous atthe end of the century. (There was only one English surname in any of thecabinets before the 1880s.) The underlying coherence of this open,flexible elite was provided by a set of economic interests - in mines, land,banks and trade - which overlapped and often interlocked. The minersor traders who in different circumstances might have formed the van-guard of a bourgeoisie conquerante were from the start included at thehighest levels of the social hierarchy, where fundamentally aristocraticoutlooks and attitudes prevailed. The supreme upper class values werethose concerned with family and landownership. The importance of

family connections at this period cannot easily be exaggerated. It wassomething which often showed up in politics. President Buines was theson-in-law of one of his predecessors, the nephew of another and the

9 [Mrs. C. B. Me rwin], Three Years in Chile (New York , 1865), 95.


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2 2 Chile since independen ce

brother-in-law of one of his successors. In the century after 1830, theErrazuriz family g ave the republic one a rchb ishop, three presidents, andupwa rds of fifty congre ssm en. T he attraction of rural prop erty, likew ise,integrated rather than divided the elite; landownership was the highlyprized badge of aristocratic status. These powerful forces for coherenceclearly encouraged continuity and stability rather than change andrearrangement in the social development of Chile.

Betwe en the land own ing upper class and the labouring poo r, a small,miscellaneous 'middle band* of society grew perceptibly larger as theresult of economic expansion. It consisted of the owners of the smaller

businesses and farms, the gr ow ing numb er of clerical emp loyees in trade,the subaltern members of the bureaucracy (which even in 1880 stillnumbered no more than 3,000), and the artisans and craftsmen of thetow ns. T hese last were what educated Chileans of the period meant wh enthey used the term clase obrera. On the upper fringe of the middle band,frustrated w ou ld-b e entrants into the best circles con stituted a recogniz-able type, we ll described in som e of the fiction of the tim e. From at leastthe later 18 5 os such people were know n as siuticos and tradition attributes

the neologism, still understood if no longer widely used, to Lastarria.Chilean artisans, for their part, were n ever w ell prote cted b y comm ercialpolicy, but the growth of the towns (and upper class wealth) created ademand for services and products which could best be met locally, andmany crafts and trades seem t o ha ve flourished, at least in a m ode st w ay.In their manners and aspirations such groups evidently took their tonefrom hig h society. R eferring to the 'mecha nics and retail shop keep ers' ofthe Santiago of 1850, a sharp-eyed visitor noted:

There is an inherent want of tidiness in their domestic life; but in public, finedress is a passion with them, and a stranger would scarcely suspect that the manhe meets in a fine broad-cloth cloak, escorting a woman arrayed in silks andjewelry, occupied no higher rank in the social scale than that of tinman,carpenter or shopman whose sole stock-in-trade might be packed in a box fivefeet square. 10

The spread of mutualist associations in later years provided a greaterdegree o f security for artisans and craftsmen. Th e first was fou nde d in theprinting trade in 1853 a n ^ did not last long; but by 1880, thanks to the

efforts of the builder and architect Fermin Vivaceta and others, therewere some thirty-nine societies of this kind enjoying legal status, fore-shadowing the later emergence of trade unions.10 Lieut. J. M. Gilliss, U.S.N., The United States Naval Astronomical Expedition to the southern

hemisphere durin g the years it^-jo-jr-j2 t vol. i., Chile (Wash ington, 1855), 219.


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From independence to the W ar of the Pacific 2 3

A deep material and psychological chasm separated all the socialgroups so far mentioned from the great mass of the labouring poor intown and countryside, whose condition improved only marginally, if atall, over this period. Despite the higher number of families now beingsettled on the haciendas, the peons of the central valley were oftenobliged to look elsewhere for work . Th ey migrated in their thousands toovercrowded and insalubrious districts in the main towns. Both rotos(urban labourers) and peons also flocked to the northern mining camps,and to the railway-building gan gs, in Chile and overseas. W hen , at theend of the 1860s, the audacious Henry M eigg s (renow ned for the remark

that he wo uld sooner em ploy five hundred Chilean rotos than a thousandIrishmen) embarked on grandiose railway-building schemes in Peru atleast 2 5,000 Chileans answered his call. This ou tflow of labour p rovo keddebates in Congress, with proposals to restrict emigration, while land-owners complained of a 'shortage o f hands' in the countryside. In fact,there was no real shorta ge, and this wa s appreciated by tho se m ore acu teChileans who now began to subject the labouring poor to somewhatcloser scrutiny than in the past.

If em igration was (briefly) a concern of C hilean legislators , the idea ofimmigration from Europe, as a means of 'civilizing' the lower classes,was suggested more frequently. Traces of xenophobia may have sur-vived amo ng the poor, to be whipped up on occasion, as during the civilwar of 1829—30, but in general foreigners w ere w elco m ed with op enarms. ' "F oreign er"', once said A nto nio Varas, 'is an immoral wor dwh ich should be expun ged from the dictionary ' The census of 1875cou nted 4,10 9 British, 4,03 3 G erman and 2,330 Fren ch residents in Chile,with p eop le of other nationalities totalling nearly 15,000, a figure wh ichincluded 7,000 Argentines. The role of the British in trade has alreadybeen noted; some prominent Chilean families came in due course fromthis quarter. The milling industry referred to earlier was largely estab-lished by Americans; Americans and British helped to build and then tooperate the railway network; a high proportion of the industrial entre-preneurs of later years came from abroad. At a more modest level,foreigners also found a place in the expanding artisan class, notably inthose trades which catered to the style of life favoured by the rich.

European scholars and scientists such as the Frenchmen Claude Gay(author of a famous thirty-volume account of the country's natural andcivil history) and Am ado Pissis (who mapped the republic from 28°io 'Sto 4i°5 8'S) did much t o add to the store of Chilean k no wle dg e; thegovernment had a more or less systematic policy of employing such


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people. There was no mass immigration of the kind desired, but at theend of the 1840s the government encouraged the settlement of familiesfrom Germany in the thinly-populated southern territories aroundValdivia and Lake Llanquihue. By i860 there were more than 3,000Germans in the south, hardy pioneers w ho cleared the forests and open edthe land to cultivation.

Th is new official interest in the south spelled the beg inn ing of the endfor the independent Indian enclave of Araucania, which lay inconve-niently between the new areas of settlement and the country's heartlandnorth of the Bio-Bio. T he sup pression of the widespread banditry wh ich

followe d indep endence in the southern provin ces, comp lete by the mid-1830s, had placed the Araucanians in a somewhat more vulnerablepo sition than previously; but for the next quarter of a century they w ereleft largely undisturbed. As in colonial times, the army patrolled thefrontier while the government in Santiago cultivated (and subsidized) anumber of amiably disposed caciques. The agricultural expansion of the18 50s, how ever , drew settlers into the area south o f the Bio -Bio , causingtensio n with the Araucanians. The Indian attacks on frontier settlem ents

wh ich follow ed (185 9-6 0) raised the 'Araucanian qu estion' as a politicalissue, much discussed o ver the next few years. The p olicy adop ted by thePerez government was, by establishing 'lines' of forts, to enclose theAraucanians within a diminishing belt of territory. The Indians resistedthe encroaching Chilean army in a further series of assaults (1868-71),but by the end o f the 1870 s, wit h settlement spilling int o the frontier, the'lines' had drawn inexorably c loser togeth er. A fter the War of the Pacific,troops were sent in to 'pacify' and occupy the narrow fringe of Indianterritory which remained. The long, proud history of Araucania drew toits pathetic close. The Indians themselves were given, on paper, asettlement deemed generous in the eyes of Santiago, but the pattern ofland transactions on the frontier over the previous twenty years washardly a go od augury. The gover nm ent strove in vain to regularize landtransfers in the south, but failed to prevent the formation of newlatifundia, often through chicanery and intimidation. Nor could themeasures taken to protect the interests of the Araucanians againstpredatory landowners (great and small) be described as anything but

inadequate.The m ost vivid contrast, in the Chile of the 1870s, was betwe en tow n

and country. Civilization — that term so often used to justify the'pacification' of Araucania - was perhaps most evident in its urban


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setting. Nineteenth-century Chilean urbanization (modest indeed by thestandards of the tw entieth century) was essentially a tale of two cities -Santiago, which grew from about 70,000 in the mid-1830s to 130,000 in1875, and Valparaiso, which by the end of our period had reached closeon 100,000. Other Chilean towns lagged far behind. During the miningbooms, it is true, Copiapo enjoyed a prosperous heyday; Concepcion,devastated by the earthquake of 18 3 5, flourished again with the spread ofwheat-growing and milling; and among the som nolent little towns of thecentral valley, Talca nurtu red a well-developed sense of civic pride. Butnone of these places had populations of more than 20,000 in 1875. The

predominance of the capital and the main por t, underpinned by politicaland commercial hegemony, was unchallengeable. As contemporarydrawings and prints show clearly, Santiago retained a definitely colonialappearance until around 1850, but the mid-century export boom quicklyleft its mark. By 1857 the normally sober Andres Bello could write that'the progress made in the last five years can be called fabulous. Magnifi-cent buildings are rising everyw here . . .; to see the A lameda on certaindays of the year makes one imagine one is in one of the great cities ofEurope.'11 The year

18 5 7, in fact, saw the inauguration of the fine Teatro

Municipal and the introduction of horse-drawn trams and gas-lamps inthe streets. Architectural styles altered, French (or even English) modelsbeing preferred for the new aristocratic mansions now being built. Theunusually active programme carried through by Benjamin VicunaMackenna, the almost legendary Intendant of the early 1870s, endow edthe capital with avenues, parks, squares and the superb urban folly of theCerro Santa Lucia, which delights santiaguinos to this day. Valparaiso, thefirst Chilean town to organize a proper fire-brigade (1851), underwentsimilar though less flamboyantly publicized improvements. Its businessdistrict took on a faintly British atmosphere. Both capital and port (andother towns later on) soon acquired a respectable newspaper press,which flourished with particular vigour in the more liberal politicalclimate after 1861. The doyen of the Chilean press, El M ercurio, foundedat Valparaiso in 1827 (and a daily from 1829), is today the oldestnewspaper in the Spanish-language world.

Education in this period made slower progress than many Chileans

would have wished, despite the best efforts of such presidents as Montt,whose obsessive interest in the matter was shared by his great Argentinefriend Sarmiento. Illiteracy fell gradually, to around seventy-seven per

11 Domingo Amunategui Solar, ha democracia en Chile (Santiago, 1946), 132.


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cent in 1875, at which point seventeen per cent of the school-agepopulation was undergoing some form of primary education. By 1879,too , there were some twenty-seven public liceos (two for girls) and alarger number o f private scho ols p rovid ing instruction at the secondarylevel, along with the prestigious Instituto Nacional, where so many ofthe republic's leaders received their secondary (and for many years mu chof their higher) education. Higher studies (and especially professionaltraining, to which women were admitted by the decree of 1877) weregreatly stimulated by the formation in 1843 of the University of Chile.M ode lled o n the Institut d e France, it was in its early years a deliberative

and supervisory bod y rather than a teaching institu tion, b ut its standardswere high. The distinct strengthening of intellectual and cultural lifewhich now became noticeable owed much to the first rector of theuniversity, the eminent Venezuelan scholar, Andres Bello, w ho spent thelast thirty-six years of a long life in Chile. Po et, grammarian, ph ilosop her ,educ ationist, jurist, historian, indefatigable p ublic servant and senator —Bello had a patient and many-sided genius which inspired a host ofdevoted pupils and disciples. It is impossible in the space of this chapter

to survey the cultural panorama of the period; but one rather singularaspect deserves to be noted. This was the primacy accorded to history, aprimacy encouraged by the university and (in a small way) by thegovernment itself. Th e result, betw een 1850 and 1900 or so, was the fineflowering of historical narrative represented, above all, in the works ofDiego Barros Arana, Miguel Luis Amunategui, Ramon SotomayorValdes and Benjamin Vicuna Mackenna. Of these four, Barros Aranawas the most diligent and scholarly, Vicuna Mackenna the most lyricaland vivid. All can still be read with profit.

It is po ssib le that this Chilean preference for history bo th reflected andreinforced the grow th o f national consciousn ess. P atriotism, to be sure,is never easy to assess. It may be doubted whether a clear sense ofchilenidad really penetrated very far into the coun tryside before the 1870s.Th e people o f the tow ns , by contrast, responded ardently to the v ictorycelebrations in 1839; the dieciocho^ the annual national holiday, thoughoften a pretext for prolonged alcoholic indulgence, was an undeniablypopular occasion; and private as well as public initiatives saw to it that

statues were raised to the heroes of independence and other nationalfigures, starting with General Freire in 1856. (Portales and O'Higginsgo t their mo num ents in i86 0 and 1872 respectively). Educated Chileanswere strongly inclined to see their country as superior to others in


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Spanish America - and it is hard to resist the conclusion that in certainimportant respects they were right. 'We saved ourselves from the generalshipwreck', wrote the rising Conservative politician Carlos WalkerMartinez.12 Chile as the republica modeloy as an example to unruly,'tropical' lands, was a recurrent them e in speeches and editorials. 'I havesuch a poor idea of the . . . sister republics', observed Antonio Varas in1864, 'that . . . I regret we have to make common cause with them.'13

Such opinions often coincided with foreign views of Chile, especially inEurope . (In April 1880 even The Times used the phrase 'model republic'.)European flattery was deeply pleasing to educated Chileans, many of

whom believed that Great Britain and France (in particular) were leadingthe world up a highway of progress which in due course Chile herself wassure to follow: 'Europe's today is our tomorrow.'14

This mood of confidence and optimism was severely shaken by themultiple crisis of the mid-1870s. This can effectively be dated from thecollapse in 1873 of the speculative bonanza induced by the Caracolessilver boom. The economic difficulties which mounted up thereafter

stemmed in part from the serious international recession which beganthat year (the start of the 'Great Depression' which followed the longmid-Victorian boom), but they also reflected a more fundamental prob-lem: w ith the appearance in the world economy of new and m ore efficientproducers of both wheat and copper, Chile was now being displaced inher most important export markets. The springs of prosperity wererunning dry. Copper prices, briefly boosted by the Franco-Prussian war(as they had earlier been by the Crimean war), went into sharp decline.The value of silver exports halved within four years, though the causeoften assigned to this — the shift to the gold standard by Germany andother nations — may have been exaggerated by historians. On top of allthis, an alarming and untimely cycle of both flooding and d rought in thecentral valley brought three disastrous harvests in a row . An abrupt risein the cost of living plunged many thousands of poorer Chileans intodestitution and near-starvation. There were disturbing symptoms ofsocial unrest. The peso, stable for so long, began to depreciate, fallingfrom 46*/. in 1872 to 33*/. by 1879. (It is faintly amusing to record that in

this atmosphere of desperation, official hopes were briefly raised by a12 C. W. Martinez, Portales (Paris, 1879), 452.13 Antonio Varas , Correspondence, 5 vols. (Santiago, 1918- 29), v, 48.14 Editorial, El Mercurio, 18 September 1844.


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Franco-American confidence trickster who claimed to be able to convertcopper into gold; he was lionized and had a polka named after him.)Fearing a catastrophic run on the now largely insolvent banks, the Pintoadministration took the drastic step^of declaring the inconvertibility ofbank-notes (July 1878), which thus became obligatory legal tender; itwas the start of a century of inflation. In its efforts to solve the acute fiscaldilemma (made still more acute by the need to service a national debtwhich had grown perilously fast over the previous few years), thegovernment first resorted to cuts in public spending; the NationalGuard, for instance, was reduced to a mere 7,000 men. As the recession

deepened, many intelligent Chileans, noting their country's heavydependence on exports, advocated a stronger p rotectionist dose for theembryonic industrial sector (this was partly achieved in the tariff reformof 1878) and also the imposition of new taxes on the wealthy. This latternotion, according to the British consul-general, was well regarded 'by allbut those whose pockets it would chiefly affect and who, for themisfortune of their Country, just now largely compose her Legisla-ture'.15 In fact, Congress in 1878-9 did agree, after much argument, to

levy small taxes on inheritances and property. These had little effect onthe crisis, from which Chile was saved not by fiscal mprovization but byblood and iron.

The menacing international tensions of the 1870s derived from longstanding border disputes with Argentina and Bolivia. Neither frontierhad been precisely delineated in colonial times. The Chilean presence onthe Magellan Straits after 1843 had raised the question of the ownershipof Patagonia, which Argentines considered theirs. Chile, in effect,abandoned her claim to all but a fraction of this huge but desolateterritory in the Fierro-Sarratea agreement of 1878, accepted by Congressdespite the angry crowds outside the building and a strong speech froman irate former foreign minister, who lamented that Chile would nowremain 'a poor republic' instead of becoming 'a great empire'. Theagreement averted the danger of war with Argentina; there had beenconsiderable sabre-rattling on both sides of the Andes. The problemwith Bolivia was more intractable, for while few vital interests had beenat stake in Patagonia this was emphatically not the case in the Atacama

desert, one of the principal scenes of Chilean economic expansionism.Here in the 1860s, on the Bolivian littoral, the Chilean entrepreneurs Jose15 Consul-General Packenham to the Marquis of Salisbury, Santiago, 24 February 1879. Public

Record Office, London: F.0.16/203.


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From independence to the War of the Pacific 2 9

Santos Ossa and Francisco Puelma had pioneered the extraction ofnitrate, in growing demand abroad as a fertilizer. (Chilean capital wasalso prominent in the nitrate business in the Peruvian desert, furthernorth; but the industry there was nationalized by the Peruvian govern-ment in 1875). In the Atacama, thanks to generous concessions byBo livia, the powerfu l C ompan ia de Salitres y Ferrocarril de An tofagasta ,a Chilean-British corporation in which a number of leading Chileanpoliticians held shares, was close to constituting a state within a state.Most of the population on the littoral was Chilean. Such a state of affairsis always potentially explosive. In 1874, in an attempt to settle the

frontier once and for all, Chile agreed to fix it at 24°S in return for theBolivian promise of a twenty-five-year moratorium on the furthertaxation of Chilean nitrate enterprises. The additional export tax of tencentavos per quintal suddenly imposed by the Bolivians in 1878 wasclearly a breach of faith. (Whether the original Bolivian co ncession s wereimprudent or not is another matter.) The refusal of the Compania deSalitres to pay up brought threats of confiscation. In order to forestallthis a small Chilean force occupied Antofagasta (February 1879) and

went on to take control of the littoral. The conflict swiftly assumedgraver proportions. Peru was drawn in by virtue of a secret treaty ofalliance with Bo livia, con clud ed six years previou sly. C hile declared waron both countries in April 1879.

The War of the Pacific was seen at the time (by some) as a cynicallypremed itated exercise in plunder, with the aim of rescu ing Chile from hereconomic plight by seizing the mineral wealth of the northern deserts.Others detected the invisible hand of more powerful nations and theforeign trading concerns so closely enm eshed w ith the nitrate business.The American secretary of state, the egregious James G. Blaine, evenasserted later on that it was 'an English war on Peru, with Chile as theinstrument', a verdict which it is difficult to sustain from the existingevidence.16 It must, however, be said that Chilean politicians (not leastthose who held or had held shares in nitrate enterprises) were aware ofthe advantages w hich m ight accrue from control of the deserts and wereequally aware of the country 's dire econ om ic po sition in 1879. Insofar asthere had been a public 'willingness to war' over the previous months,

this had mainly been directed against Argen tina. No ne the less it may well

16 On these points, see V. G. Kiernan, 'Foreign interests in the War of the Pacific', HispanicAmerican Historical Review\ 35 (1955), 14-36, and John Mayo, 'La Compania de Salitres deAntofagasta y la Guerra del Padfico', Historia, (Santiago) 14 (1979), 71-10 2.


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3 < D Chile since independence

be true that the eagerness with which the outbreak of hostilities waswelco me d (generally, if not universally) was in som e sense an outlet forthe pent-up feelings of frustration which had accumulated during theyears of recession. (Chile's action in February 1879 c o u ld plausibly bedescribed as precipitate.) But neither Chile nor her enemies were pre-pared for war. Their armies were small and poorly equipped. Chile hadcut back her military strength during the recession, while both thePeruvian and Bolivian armies were decidedly over-officered. At sea,Chile and Peru (Bolivia had no navy) were perhaps m ore evenly matched;and comm and of the sea was the key to the war. In the end, Chile's greater

national coherence and traditions of settled go vern me nt probably madethe vital difference. A t various p oints d uring this time of m ortal danger,both Bolivia and Peru were afflicted by serious political upheavals. InChile, by contrast, congressional and presidential elections were held asusual, cabinets changed without excessive drama and energeticpoliticking by no means ceased: neither the Conservatives nor thedisaffected Liberal group led by Vicuna Mackenna (who had made anunsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1876) were invited in to the cabinet,

and they made up f6r this by mercilessly castigating the government'snumerous hesitancies and failures in the conduct of the war.The early mon ths, taken up w ith a struggle for naval mastery, were a

frustrating per iod of reverses for Chile, but also pro vide d the single m ostmemorable incident of the war. On 21 May 1879, °^ Iquique, thedecrepit wooden corvette Esmeralda was attacked by the Peruvianironclad Huascar. Although the corvette was outclassed and doomedfrom the outs et, the Chilean comm and er, Captain Arturo Prat, refused tostrike his colours. He himself died in an entirely hopeless boardingoperation as the Huascar rammed his ves sel, wh ich , after furtherrammings, went down. Prat's heroic self-sacrifice turned him into a'secular saint' without compare in the admiration of his countrymen.Five months later, off Cape Angamos, the Chilean fleet cornered theHuascar and forced her to surrender. This victory gave Chile commandof the sea and enabled her to launch an offensive o n land. So on after thebattle of An gam os, an expeditionary force invad ed the Peruvian desertpro vince of Tarapaca, forcing the enemy to fall back on Tacna and Arica

to the north. Early in 1880 an army of 12,000 men, commanded byGeneral Manuel Baquedano, undertook the conqu est of these provincestoo, in a desert camp aign culmina ting in the ferocious battles of Cam pode la Alianza and the Morro o f Arica (M ay -Ju ne 1880). By this tim e, anintervention to halt the conflict had been mooted among the powers of


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Eur ope, but the sugg estion was effectively torpedoe d by Bismarck. T heUnited States, however, succeeded in arranging talks between thebelligeren ts, aboard a cruiser off Arica, in Octo ber 1880. Th e conferen cebroke down. The Chilean government, now in control of all the mainnitrate-producing areas, would almost certainly have liked to makepeace, but public opin ion dem anded the humiliation o f Peru, in stridentcries of 'On to Lima ' At the end of 1880 an army of more than 2 6,000men, on ce again under Baq ued ano, disembarked on the central Peruviancoast. The extremely bloody battles of Chorrillos and Miraflores (Janu-ary 1881) op ened the gates of Lima. The war contin ued in the interior of

Peru for two further years, with guerrilla forces resisting the army ofoccup ation, but noth ing could disguise the fact that Chile had wo n a totalvictory. A ne w Peruvian gov ernm ent even tually accepted, in the Treatyof Ancon (October 1883), most of the victor's stiff terms for peace.Tarapaca was ceded in perpetuity, and Chile was given temporarypossessio n of Tacna and Arica - over wh ich there developed a lon gdiplomatic wrangle not finally resolved until 1929. The last Chileansoldiers left Peru in August 1884. A truce with Bolivia (April 1884)

allowed Chile to remain in control of the Atacama until the negotiationof a full peace settlement, which only materialized in 1904.Victory in the War of the Pacific gave Chile very substantial inter-

national prestige. For Chileans themselves there were the inevitabletemptations to hubris, not entirely resisted. The optimism so seriouslyshattered by the crisis of the previous decade was swiftly recaptured,with the discov ery that, as Vicu na Macken na characteristically put it, 'inthe Chilean soul, hidden beneath the soldier's rough tunic or coarsepo nch o of native weav e, there throbs the sublime heroism of the age ofantiquity'. 17 In every Chilean, it seemed, there was a soldier. With theconquest of the Bolivian littoral and the southern provinces of Peru,Chile enlarged her national territory by one-third. Possession of thenitrate fields meant that the country's wealth was enormously aug-mented overnight — and in the nick of time, given the apparent exhaus-tion of the sources of Chilean prosperity in the mid-1870s. As nitratetoo k ov er from copp er and silver, the material progr ess und ergo ne in thehalf-century or so before the war soo n began to look mod est in compari-

son with the boom of the 1880s. Such sudd en national windfalls need tobe carefully appraised and judiciously managed. For Chile, the modelrepublic of Latin Am erica, the victories o f peace were,

Documents

[Leslie Bethell] Chile Since Independence