Partners in Conflict

Abstract

Between 1964 and 1973, the Chilean state expropriated almost half the country's agricultural land and began redistributing it to campesino peasants.In nine short years, this policy, known as the Agrarian Reform, virtually dismantled the latifundia system of large estates and semipeon laborers that had dominated Chilean agriculture since the nineteenth century and whose roots were far older.The Agrarian Reform sparked the explosive growth of a militant rural labor movement that, during the same nine years, recruited a quarter-million members and gave the rural poor a meaningful voice in national politics for the first time.It encouraged massive state investments in rural education and health care, including the first national birth control programs, and initiated projects aimed explicitly at mobilizing rural women and young people.These were radical policies with radical goals.The Agrarian Reform was begun in full by President Eduardo Frei's liberal Christian Democratic government (1964-1970), which aimed to make small peasant farmers the basis for revitalizing capitalist agribusiness.It was accelerated by President Salvador Allende's Popular Unity coalition of Marxist and social democratic parties (1970-1973), which sought to use collective holdings as the basis for creating socialism.Despite profound differences between these administrations, both Catholics and Marxists shared a bold optimism that their version of the Agrarian Reform was revolutionary.Both sought national salvation through restructuring the agrarian economy, the political empowerment of the peasantry, and the moral rehabilitation of rural society.Such zeal reflected both the heady utopianism and the Cold War fears of the 1960s.

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