Violence, Ideology and Counterrevolution: Landowners and Agrarian Reform in Cautin Province, Chile, 1967-73

摘要

The article analyses social and political conflict in Chile during the agrarian reform period of the 1960s and 1970s through a case study of the province of Cautin, in the indigenous heartlands of the south. Using a combination of written and oral sources, it analyses the responses and strategies of landowners descended from nineteenth-century settlers to the emancipatory projects carried out during the presidencies of Eduardo Frei and Salvador Allende. In the context of an increasingly radicalised agrarian reform programme and a growing number of territorial conflicts with the Mapuche communities, this little-studied political actor developed a collective identity, an ideological discourse and a readiness to use violence which provides important insights into the causes of the military coup carried out in 1973.