A Discriminatory Frontier Land Policy: Chile, 1870-1914

Writing in 1904, the Chilean intellectual Nicolás Palacios bitterly complained that his fellow-countrymen inhabiting the southern frontier provinces were “orphans” in their own land. The simile was appropriate. Since the 1870's, the government, through its land policy, systematically and deliberately had excluded Chile's wage-labor class from property ownership in the frontier. As a direct result, many Chilean laborers fell to peonage while European immigrants and wealthy Chileans acquired ownership of much of the public domain. Shortly before World War I, social and political pressures in Chile forced the government to end this discriminatory policy and to begin distributing the remainder of the public domain to nativeborn settlers.