Agricultural structures in Latin America
The structures of agriculture and land ownership in Latin America were strongly shaped by colonial influences well into the 20th century . To date, the sector is split between the vast estates of big landowners and a large number of subsistence operated small farmers and landless farm workers.
Encomienda and Repartimiento
Shortly after the discovery of America in 1492 , the Spanish crown began colonizing settlements, as profitable trade with the indigenous people there was impossible.
Goals of the Spanish Crown
The aim was, on the one hand, a profitable colonial system, the establishment of an export-oriented agriculture ( sugar cane in particular was ideal for the local climate), the development of the colonies and the securing of control over the Indians . On the other hand, the crown tried to prevent an autonomous political power from developing in America. Instead of an autonomous and powerful hereditary nobility, the areas were to be controlled by a bureaucratic apparatus from Seville . For centuries, all trade (even between the individual colonies) had to be carried out via the Casa de Contratación there.
Encomienda system
For this purpose, the so-called encomienda system ( Spanish for “entrustment”) was created in 1503 by Queen Isabella I of Castile . The conquistadors were given very large estates together with the indigenous population living there in trust . The encomienda Casa Grande in Peru was about the size of today's Belgium . Formal feudal lord of the indigenous population was the Spanish royal couple, who were commissioned to proselytize them. It commissioned the encomendero ("contractor") to take care of the protection and proselytizing of the indigenous people living there. In order to secure the influence of the crown, encomiendas were (at least initially) only given for one generation, so they were not hereditary. Since the Castilian customary law proved to be inapplicable in the context of the Conquista, a meeting was held in Burgos in 1512/13, from which new laws emerged, the Leyes de Burgos ("Burgos Laws"). According to these, the indigenous inhabitants of the encomiendas were basically free and not the property of the encomenderos, i.e. no slaves . They could be forced to work, but had to be paid - in cash or in kind. Military submission by indigenous people was only permitted if they refused to be baptized. It was enough if they did not understand the articles on compulsory conversion read to them to force them to subdue them.
In its practical implementation, the encomienda system, which was constantly being redesigned, was nothing other than lifelong forced labor . Pedro de Valdivia had an encomienda near Concepción in Chile with allegedly 40,000 encomiendados who worked in the gold panning industry and did not have time to grow their own food. Contemporaries like Bartolomé de las Casas , but also today's historians, saw and still see the system as even more inhumane than slavery , since the oppressed represented no economic value for the landlords because they neither had to be bought by them nor belonged to them and accordingly frivolously to death were battered. However, z. T. acquired slaves from the Portuguese colonies.
The Spanish crown introduced a number of Indian protection laws in the middle of the 16th century to ensure the continued existence of the rapidly decimating population. She was aware that “without Indians” there could also be no “Indias” (the name of the “New World” at the time). In addition to these economic reasons, moral reasons were also decisive. After the dispute in Valladolid in 1550, in which de las Casas denounced the grueling working conditions , Charles V was on the verge of giving up the entire colonization enterprise.
From 1536 the encomenderos were only entitled to tribute payments, but not to the labor of the indigenous population. A year later, the Dominicans, with the support of Spain, set up the first mission reserve in northern Guatemala , in which the inhabitants were undisturbed by Spanish settlers. With the Leyes Nuevas (Spanish for "new laws") enacted in 1542 and 1543 , which responded, among other things, to the criticism of Las Casas, an attempt was made to curb the excesses of the encomienda system and to end the slavish treatment of the indigenous population. Among other things, the extensive legislative package again banned Indian slavery and granted the indigenous population a status comparable to that of minors.
The Leyes Nuevas led to violent protests and an uprising by the Encomenderos led by Gonzalo Pizarro between 1544 and 1548, during which the Viceroy of Peru, Blasco Núñez Vela , was overthrown and killed in 1546. As a result, the reforms were drastically curtailed and the encomienda system de facto continued. The passage prohibiting the inheritance of the encomiendas was also deleted in 1545.
Even before that, the immense distance to Seville, the poor transport routes in the interior of the colonies and the resulting communication time of up to two years prevented the protective laws from being effectively implemented. According to the motto “obey but not obey”, the laws were recognized, but neither applied nor effectively punished for violations. In practice, the encomienda system led to the extermination of the indigenous population in the Caribbean. They were replaced by slaves imported from Africa.
Repartimiento
The institution of the encomienda existed formally until 1791. In practice, however, it was replaced in many places after the disputes between the viceroy and encomenderos under pressure from the Catholic Church by the modified system of the repartimiento (in German "allocation"). The year 1549 is often seen as the year of the system change, even if the encomiendas continued to exist for a long time in some areas (in Chile, for example, until the second half of the 17th century) and / or existed parallel to the repartimiento system.
In the Repartimiento system, Indian communities who lived on territory that had become Spanish as a result of the conquest were obliged to make men from their ranks available to the state as labor for temporary projects. The size of this work force was two to four percent of the male population. The so-called Supreme Mayor (Spanish Alcalde Mayor ) of the responsible administration was then responsible for assigning the workers to agriculture, mining, etc.
Hacienda and Fazenda
In the course of the independence movements from 1810, the "borrowed" large estates were converted into ownership. The farms now called Hacienda (Spanish) or Fazenda (Portuguese) were much smaller, but often still comprised thousands to tens of thousands of hectares of land.
Latifundia
A largely synonymous term in this context is the latifundium , also latifundie (Latin latus "wide", fundus "soil, property"). In antiquity, the term referred to the large estates owned by the Roman senators since the 2nd century BC. These ancient latifundia were originally worked by slaves . In South America (and in Spain) the word is still used today for “large landed property”, in contrast to mini-fund for small-scale subsistence farming.
Slavery and dependence
Both before and after independence, African slaves were mainly used on the export-oriented plantations in the Caribbean basin, on the Pacific coast of Peru and in Brazil . Typical haciendas in the highlands secured the dependency of the indigenous people in a more subtle way: In a quasi-feudal system, the farm workers were allocated a small plot of land on which they could operate subsistence farming. In return they had for the hacendado or patrón work offering services - nothing more than forced labor . In the best case, the landlord ran his hacienda in a paternalistic manner and thus enabled people to live a tolerable and secure life without, however, changing the continuation of the hierarchical distribution of power or dependency.
Slavery was not abolished in Brazil until 1888, later than in almost any other country. The systematic attitude of addicts in the relatively closed social hacienden system lasted well into the 20th century.
Large estates as an obstacle to development
The agrarian structure, dominated by large landowners, is still one of the main obstacles to the economic and social development of Latin America.
fallow
Often, large parts of the South American large estates lay fallow or are only used extensively. B. used by sheep and cattle breeding, which only benefits the hacendados on closer inspection . On the one hand, this blocks the potential acreage so that the workers cannot switch to free land. Thus the wasteland is capital tied up in an unproductive manner, but it is a safeguard against the loss of cheap labor. On the other hand, land ownership in South America has been a status symbol since colonial times and in some cases to this day, the ticket to the elite upper class. So many traders or, later, industrialists bought together huge estates without having an interest in intensifying agriculture.
Moneyless economy
In addition, hacienda structures hampered industrialization because they did not generate demand. The workers were given a plot of land for their work, which they provided for themselves if they had the time to do it in addition to forced labor, but no wages. This created no demand for simple handicrafts or industrial goods. The hacendado, with its immense wealth, also had hardly any demand for simple goods that could be produced in the country, but mainly had luxury goods imported from Europe. However, the massive rural exodus has led to the collapse of this agricultural system in many regions since 1860 - initially in Chile. The world economic crisis in the years after 1929 and again the financial crisis since 2008 also led to the fact that many haciendas with less profitable lands were given up.
Extractive economic institutions
The American political scientists Daron Acemoğlu and James A. Robinson see in the extractive institutions, that is to say to exploit the masses of the population such as the encomienda, the repartimiento or the Mita used in mining, a major cause of development deficits in Latin America: Because there was no incentive whatsoever To increase their own work output, since the profit would only have gone to the encomenderos or the mine owners, the indigenous population stuck to their increasingly outdated agricultural technology for centuries. There was also no incentive for the elites to modernize, as the various forms of forced labor always provided enough inexpensive human capital . These extractive structures that inhibit development have continued to the present via path dependencies .
Land reforms
In most of the countries of Latin America, there are now efforts to reform land . So far, however, these have only been implemented reasonably effectively in Venezuela , Cuba and Peru ; In Nicaragua , the Sandinista carried out a land reform, which today, however, has largely been reversed. In Brazil, the landless movement Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra is fighting for the implementation of land reform.
literature
- Peter Bakewell: A History of Latin America. Blackwell, Malden, MA et al., 1997, ISBN 0-631-20547-0 .
- Ernest Feder : Strawberry Imperialism: Studies on the Agricultural Structure of Latin America. Suhrkamp , Frankfurt am Main 1980, ISBN 3-518-10977-4 .
- Ernest Feder: Agricultural Structure and Underdevelopment in Latin America . European Publishing House , Frankfurt am Main 1973, ISBN 3-434-30145-3 .
- Ernest Feder (ed.): Violence and exploitation . [Latin America's Agriculture]. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1973, ISBN 3-455-09100-8 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Also on the following see Richard Konetzke : South and Central America I. The Indian cultures of ancient America and the Spanish-Portuguese colonial rule (= Fischer Weltgeschichte . Volume 22). Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1965, pp. 173-195.
- ^ Richard Konetzke: South and Central America I. The Indian cultures of ancient America and the Spanish-Portuguese colonial rule (= Fischer Weltgeschichte. Volume 22). Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1965, pp. 175-180.
- ^ Gabriel Paquette: The European Seaborne Empires. From the Thirty Years' War to the Age of Revolutions . Yale University Press, New Haven / London 2019, ISBN 978-0-300-24527-1 , p. 146 (accessed from De Gruyter Online).
- ↑ Lawrence A. Clayton: Bartolomé de las Casas. A biography . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2012, pp. 278-282 et al .; Lynn A. Guitar: Negotiations of Conquest . In: Stephan Palmié, Francisco A. Scarano (eds.): The Caribbean. A History of the Region and Its Peoples. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2013, p. 121.
- ^ Richard Konetzke: South and Central America I. The Indian cultures of ancient America and the Spanish-Portuguese colonial rule (= Fischer Weltgeschichte. Volume 22). Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1965, p. 121.
- ↑ Eberhard Schmitt (ed.): The construction of the colonial empires (= documents on the history of European expansion , vol. 3). CH Beck, Munich, 1987, p. 44 f.
- ↑ Michael Zeuske : Handbook History of Slavery. A global story from the beginning until today . De Gruyter, New York / Berlin 2013, p. 231 f.
- ↑ Daron Acemoğlu and James A. Robinson: Why Nations Fail . The origins of power, wealth and poverty . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2013, pp. 37–40.