Some Final Thoughts

In a recent review of Victor Bulmer-Thomas's incisive work on Central America's export economies, E. V. K. Fitzgerald succinctly paraphrased that author's main hypothesis as follows: "Export agriculture has been the source of dynamism in the Central American economy, providing potential resources for industrialization and social infrastructure, while simultaneously generating institutions and incentives that make these strategic objectives difficult to obtain."^[52] This statement epitomizes the frustrations of economic, social, and political development in many parts of Latin America and approximates one of the main theses of this study. To phrase this idea more broadly, favorable commercial conjunctures for major primary products lead to economic growth throughout entire regional economies. At the same time there was a strengthening of the social forces, modes of behavior, and institutions that undermine the possibilities for sustainable growth and many of the required structural transformations, from infrastructure to education and a more even distribution of income. In the southern Andes this notion applies as much to the colonial silver cycle as to the wool export cycle that began in the 1820s, flourished between the 1850s and World War I, and decayed after 1920.

I have suggested in this book that an incomplete and truncated transition to capitalism lies at the root of the frustrations suffered by the export economy in the altiplano. During the mid-nineteenth century the notable citizens of rural areas such as the altiplano embraced the possibilities of integrating their region into international markets dominated by European and North American capitalists. They espoused the notions of material progress, the values, and the institutions propagated by Europe's seemingly triumphant civilization: free trade, the sanctity of private property, investment in transport infrastructure, and modern education. But they did so from a position of weakness rather than strength. The disintegration

of the Andean colonial commercial circuits and structures of authority had destroyed the fortunes of many an obraje owner, hacendado, and merchant. During the period of crisis and realignment Andean peasants had become more autonomous and solidified their hold on much of the land.

Under these conditions the espousal of European progressive civilization was associated with authoritarian, hierarchical, and paternalistic notions of social control over the vast majority of the altiplano's population, the Indian peasantry. Developing the export trade, insisting on the sanctity of private, individual property, and drawing broad distinctions between an enlightened, Europeanized elite and the Indian masses, said to persist in their "ancestral vices," became mere tools to foster the narrow interests of provincial gamonales. It was the only path open to the struggling provincial notables to improve their own economic situation and build a base of power. The colonial divide between Spaniards, now called whites, and Indians was reinvented—indeed, recast in starker terms—within an export economy and notions of European civilization. It legitimized the rising provincial elite's exclusionary claims to power and delivered the tools to incorporate increasing numbers of Indian peasants into dependent relationships through trade, acquisition of their lands, appropriation of labor in livestock estates, and the use of local offices for surplus extraction from the communities.

Thus, between the mid-nineteenth century and 1920 there occurred a deepening of the commercial web, of market exchanges and the "commodification" of social relations, and simultaneously a strengthening of dependency, paternalism, and subjection of the peasants to the designs of gamonales. The newly empowered provincial elites were not picky about the means they employed to foster their economic and political interests, and these means frequently were in direct conflict with the notions of bourgeois society and competitive market economy that they espoused themselves. In brief, exploitation along the reinvented colonial and ethnic divide was made harsher with the rise of the export economy, but this exploitation had at least as much to do with strongly polarized neocolonial power relations as it did with class interests. Consequently, many gamonales feared that the rise of agrarian capitalism, with its impersonal capital, commodity, and labor markets, might undercut their political and economic power, based on highly personal qualities of leadership and protection of their clients and toughness against competing gamonales and unruly dependents.

The rise of the wool export trade created similar ambivalences among the peasants. The new era of economic expansion brought tremendous hardships for the great majority of peasants, who suffered insertion into

highly dependent trade relationships, the transfer of much land from communities to the new or expanding haciendas, and growing demands from local authorities. But it also created complex transformations and differentiations among the Indian peasantry. In the first place, as the provincial elites used notions borrowed from European bourgeois civilization to distinguish themselves from the Indian peasantry, so the Indian peasantry came to have a stronger sense of its own separate and subaltern identity. The same degrading, racist, and authoritarian images of the Indian so emphatically disseminated by the altiplano provincial elite to underscore their own exalted identity appeared in the indigenista literature after the turn of the century as evidence for the need to protect and "redeem" the Indian.

The effects of the wool export cycle on communal solidarity were not all deleterious. No doubt, commercial, demographic, and land-related pressures strained what was left of common usufruct of land, but solidarity flourished in other arenas of community life. At the same time some of the more affluent peasants took seriously the gamonales' sermons about market economy and sanctity of private property and began to acquire additional parcels of land and to clamor for unimpeded trade and the termination of unpaid labor services and other obligations. In other words, the economic and political ideologies associated with the export economy and the social differentiations engendered by that economy began to create challenges to gamonal domination on its own terms. In the cycle of social movements that swept the altiplano between 1915 and 1924, these affluent peasants combined Incaic notions, inevitable products of the neocolonial divide of the preceding decades, with anarchist and progressive-liberal demands for autonomous markets, return of community lands, rural schools, and so on. In calling for more autonomous, associational communities, they weakened the hierarchical community structures that ironically had become the very tool of gamonal domination. But it is crucial to stress once again that these new, commercial peasant leaders were not abandoning communal solidarity altogether. A mirror image of ambivalences among hacendados, they sought both to advance their own family interests in market terms and, as an insurance policy against continued gamonal abuses, to foster Indian communal solidarity.

The blockage of the full transition to capital-intensive and highly productive agrarian structures based on wage labor and yeoman farming in the altiplano can be explained through a number of discrete economic variables, such as specific factor endowments and high transaction costs, which I have discussed in various parts of this study. But there remains a residue, not easily captured in economic terms, that has to do with historical constel-

lations of power between social groups, modes of conflict resolution between them, and the type of legal and institutional framework the state provides for economic actors.

After the disintegration of the colonial corporate order, the Peruvian state of the nineteenth century increasingly sanctioned the notions of free trade, private property, and the sanctity of contract. But the state had little power in faraway provinces such as Azángaro other than that exercised by the provincial elite in the state's name. Until late in the nineteenth century the state in the altiplano was little more than the resonance box for the ideological pretensions of the provincial elite, as well as the arena for battles between various gamonal factions. After the central state gained more autonomy in the mid-1890s, the provincial elites hoped to make it into their handmaiden in their drive to concentrate a growing share of resources under their control. It did play that role in numerous instances, but never dependably so. Just when the state began to gain autonomy, it also began to listen, sporadically and unreliably, to the indigenista critics of the provincial elites. Yet even then, as witnessed by the military campaigns of repression between 1915 and 1924, it was still far from setting a firm, dependable frame as guarantor of private property and the sanctity of contract.

There is a sad irony in this history. Until the agrarian reform of 1969 it was commonplace to note that the most severe exploitation in Peru occurred precisely in the "mancha india," the southern sierra, including the altiplano, where the Indian population share continues to be high. Exploitation and the conservation of Indian identity somehow seemed to have formed an indissoluble pair. Only when Indian identity can be construed without the heavy burden of repression, and when businesspeople and officials in Peru's sierra have ceased to rely on the crutch of the neocolonial construction of power, can we hope for sustainable economic growth and a more equitable distribution of resources.