Meat and Strength: The Moral Economy of a Chilean Food Riot

Abstract

The policies of a Latin American government drive food prices up; unions and neighborhood associations in the capital city organize a demonstration; the government calls in the army; many people are killed; an uneasy truce prevails. As area specialists and indeed most newspaper readers and television watchers know, such sequences of events are common in recent Latin American history.1 Such events seem familiar, not only because they appear regularly in journal articles, in books, in headlines, and on the evening news, but also because they can be easily fitted into plausible narrative frames. The actors (desperately poor masses, unresponsive governing elites) are well known, and they are engaged in a common sort of conflict (debates in public arenas over economic policies). The opening event in the narrative, a sudden rise in food prices, can be understood as one of the natural vicissitudes of an underdeveloped economy. Most readers, accustomed to hearing of such occurrences, would not be likely to question the direct links from the first event to the second, the public expression of political discontent, and then to the third, the repression by the government. This article examines one such set of events, which took place in Santiago, Chile in 1905, and compares it to food riots in other parts of the world. The analysis draws both on ways in which these events resemble other food riots and on ways in which they differ from them. The claims of the urban poor in this instance to have a right to subsistence and the rejection of these claims by elites are familiar to students of food riots in other parts of the world. The linkages among the three events in Chile in 1905, though, are less typical, for three reasons. First, the rise in food prices is a puzzling trigger of the riot, since the policy that caused the prices to increase took place years before the demonstrations and repression. Second, the foodstuff that was in dispute was not a common grain such as wheat or rice that provides the bulk of subsistence and whose price and availability form the key issues in most food riots, but meat, a luxury item that formed a small portion of the diet of much of the population of Chile at the time. Finally, the link between the protest demonstration and the repression is complex rather