World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [34]
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Through the colonial period, small numbers of Spanish administered and exploited vast indigenous populations through the encomienda, a notorious institution by which Amerindians were distributed among and forced to pay heavy tributes to conquistadores, or encomenderos. The theory was that the encomendero would “protect and civilize” (i.e., Christianize) his Amerindians. In reality, the Amerindians served as pools of forced labor for the encomenderos, who quickly amassed huge amounts of wealth. The encomiendas were often very large; in Peru, for example, some conquistadores had as many as ten thousand Indian heads of household under their control.
The psychological effects of the Spanish Conquest were crushing and lasting. “The death of the sun—the strangulation of the Inca,” writes sociologist Magnus Mörner, was a “profound shock, reinforced later on by the beheading of Tupac Amaru.” Contemporary indigenous dances still reflect the profound “Trauma of Conquest.” Meanwhile, the missionaries, backed up by Spanish military force, did their best to destroy indigenous rituals, traditions, and kinship systems, all viewed as incompatible with the Christian faith, again with devastating effects. For example, before the conquest, consumption of intoxicating drinks among the Andean Indians was confined to ceremonial occasions. After the conquest, alcoholism became an outlet for indigenous frustration and has remained so ever since.
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At the same time, the Spanish confiscated indigenous land wholesale. Conversion of communal properties into private holdings occurred in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and elsewhere in Latin America. Bit by bit the communal landholdings of Amerindians were turned over to the expanding plantation economy. By 1910 over 80 percent of all rural families in Mexico were landless while Amerindians in Guatemala had such minuscule holdings (minifundia) that most of them came under the vagrancy laws requiring them to work for subsistence wages on coffee plantations. In virtually all of the Latin American countries, latifundios—large agricultural estates owned by a handful of Spanish-blooded families—grew more and more immense at the expense of an increasingly demoralized, expropriated rural proletariat.
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Today, Bolivia, Mexico, and Peru are the major exceptions in Latin America. Because of extensive agrarian reforms, these countries (along with Cuba) have largely dismantled their latifundia systems, at least to a much greater extent than elsewhere in Latin America. Virtually everywhere else in Latin America, the latifundia system is not only intact but poised to boom with each new round of pro-market, pro-globalization reforms.
Export-oriented plantations of over one thousand hectares represent just 1.5 percent of all farms in Latin America yet account for 65 percent of the region’s total farm acreage. The exclusive social clubs of Latin America’s major cities—where multimillion-dollar business deals are casually arranged and foreign investors are often wined and dined—are typically still controlled by men whose families derived their original wealth from plantation farming.
25 Not surprisingly, the market-oriented reforms of the 1990s disproportionately benefited Latin America’s Spanish-blooded latifundistas, who because of their capital, education, foreign connections, and conservative social policies historically have tended to be the soul mates, if not the relatives, of political leaders championing economic liberalization.
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Throughout Latin America’s countrysides, from Guatemala to Costa Rica, from Venezuela to Paraguay, the same stark pigmentocratic reality holds. Tall, light-skinned, Voltaire-steeped owners of latifundios dominate—and in many cases browbeat and brutalize through private militias—the vastly more