Cornering the Market: State Intervention in Comparative Perspective Brazilian Coffee and Mexican Henequen1

Abstract

Today, state participation in the export sector and in international cartels such as OPEC is commonplace. But in the early twentieth century such actions by states were almost unheard of. This article compares the Brazilian state's role in the international coffee market with the Mexican state's participation in the world henequen market. Since coffee was one of the world's most internationally traded commodities in terms of value, the Brazilian effort set an important precedent that helped convince exporters of other raw materials such as tin, rubber, and petroleum of the need for greater state participation. The comparison of the coffee and henequen programs illustrate the qualitatively different paths that state interventions took. The first “valorization,” as the program came to be known, represented a dramatic departure from past state agricultural policy. Brazilians constructed a state capitalist model in which the state oversaw the financing, commercialization, and transportation of coffee while perpetuating traditional social relations and leaving secure planters’ latifundia. The Mexican state also came to oversee the infrastructure of the henequen economy, but the consequences of its intervention were quite different than in Brazil. Although the Mexican state failed to prop up the international price of henequen, it did restructure property and social relations in the Yucatan. The object of this article is to explore why and how Brazilians were the first to effect such an enterprise and why it was successful. After all, it is not at all obvious that in the Age of Empire it would be a dependent Third World nation that would restructure an international commodity market. The participation of the Brazilian state in this venture is particularly intriguing because conventional wisdom has maintained that the Republic, which was founded in Brazil in 1889, gave birth to a decentralized, laissez faire regime.