Thomas Miller Klubock – La Frontera

2-3 – This book brings together the social and environmental histories of the southern frontier territory to examine the origins of Chile’s recent forestry boom and uncover the roots of today’s bitter conflict between forestry companies and Mapuche communities.
3 – My goal is to write this history of ecological change in southern Chile’s temperate forests “from the bottom up,” as it was experienced by the rural poor, members of Mapuche communities, Mapuche and non- Mapuche squatters ( ocupantes ), settlers ( colonos ), seasonal laborers ( peones or gañanes ), and full- time resident estate laborers ( inquilinos )—roughly the broad population of laboring rural poor often referred to as peasants or campesinos.
I combine social history’s interest in rural land and labor relations with environmental history’s focus on the ecological changes wrought by economic development, settlement, and colonization.
I ask three basic questions about the environmental and social history of the frontier. First, what were the origins of today’s forestry miracle? While the ecological triumph of Monterey pine has been interpreted by both boosters and critics as the product of the radical free- market reforms designed by students of Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago ( los Chicago boys in Chile) and implemented at gunpoint by the Pinochet dictatorship, I demonstrate that the spread of the North American conifer throughout southern Chile was largely the result of state- d irected devel5 opment programs and forestry policy before 1973.
4 – My argument is that conservation, forestry, and forestry science served as tools for extending state governance into a frontier territory often referred to as Chile’s “Wild West.”
Second, I ask how forestry development remade southern Chile’s social landscape. Most literature on forestry in Chile and the contemporary “Mapuche conflict” attributes struggles over forests and forestation to the free- market restructuring introduced by the Pinochet dictatorship after 1973. However, my research makes clear that neoliberal economic “shock therapy” exacerbated, rather than initiated, the social dislocations produced by several generations of government forestry policy in Chile.
They provided both an alternative to reforming the frontier’s unequal system of property ownership and a means of redressing the impact of indiscriminate logging in native forests. For land and colonization officials, scientifically directed commercial forestry would civilize the frontier’s social and natural worlds, introducing the rational management of people and forests.
Third, I ask how southern campesinos confronted changing environmental and social conditions on the frontier, tracing their shifting relationship to the tree plantation economy and modern systems of forest management.
5 – Conservation and forestry science gave campesinos a language to make claims to frontier forests they believed to be public or theirs by rights conferred by generations of occupation.
11 – Although both travelers to the south and government officials frequently described these forests as uniformly dense and virgin, contributing to the myth of a pristine nature, Chile’s temperate forests were shaped by a long history of human intervention and ecological change.
16 – In this book, I build on the work of a number of recent histories of the frontier and Mapuche groups to argue that a view of Chilean history from the southern frontier provides a privileged lens onto the violence at the heart of state formation, as well as the violence involved in primitive accumulation, the dispossession of peasants from their land, the formation of modern property regimes, and the disciplining of workers to the necessities of wage labor.
However, common experiences of dispossession often laid the foundation for collective movements that included both Mapuche and non- Mapuche rural laborers who often toiled together on large estates, squatted as neighbors on both estate and public frontier land, followed the same routes of migration into the mountains to pasture livestock or across the cordillera to Argentina, and exchanged labor through sharecropping relationships.
This book places the story of the violent appropriation of campesinos’ land on the frontier at the center of Chile’s national history and the history of Chile’s southern frontier forests.
The frontier provides an especially privileged view of the role of the extraction of nature’s wealth, or what some theorists have termed “ground” or “forest” rent in capital accumulation.
17 – Despite the long history of violence directed by estate owners at southern campesinos with the complicity of government officials, a history of exclusion is insufficient to explain the process of nation- state formation on the frontier. In this book, I argue that ecological disaster in the south drove Chilean governments’ efforts to establish governance in frontier territory.
19 – Mapuche and non- Mapuche campesinos’ views of this frontier commons did not always converge. Mapuches nourished an abiding sense of rights to land based on long histories of possession since “time immemorial.” In addition, Mapuches drew on the legal status of indigenous communities and indigenous ethnic identity to lay claim to frontier land. Non-Mapuche campesinos employed a different language of rights. They invoked the frontier’s status as public, drawing on land rights embedded in colonization laws. Despite these divergent conceptions of the frontier commons, campesinos’ shared sense that private property organized in large estates was illegitimate drove chronic conflicts with landowners. They couched their claims to frontier land in terms of a moral economy grounded in their belief that the forests represented a public resource, a commons usurped illegitimately by estate owners to which they enjoyed use rights because of years of occupancy and labor. Campesinos pointed to estate owners’ destruction of native forests to underline the illegitimacy of their property claims and to justify land invasions that spanned the spectrum from squatting to violent rebellion.
For the Chilean state, establishing authority over frontier territory required reducing the complex ecosystems of the native forests and the disorderly social order embedded in these apparently chaotic natural landscapes, to the scientifically managed landscape of tree plantations.
- The synonymy of political control and environmental control
27 – A historical narrative of state formation on the frontier as centralization and simplification confronts, on the ground, an array of local ecological and social histories that defy reduction to a story of progress or declension (from whichever side you choose to approach it) toward the scientifically directed landscape of tree plantations and commercial forestry, a stable regime of private property, and ordered social relations produced by proletarianization. Despite the best efforts of state officials, from Federico Albert to the Chicago boys, to redraw southern Chile’s social and natural landscape, local realities defied simple characterization. The tension between state projects for engineering society and nature and the diversity of local social and environmental histories define the history of frontier as multiple.

Tags: Latin American Environmental History

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Thomas Miller Klubock – La Frontera

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