Ránquil: Rural Rebellion, Political Violence, and Historical Memory in Chile by Thomas Miller Klubock

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ránquil: Rural Rebellion, Political Violence, and Historical Memory in Chile by Thomas Miller Klubock J. Patrice McSherry Klubock, Thomas Miller. Ránquil: Rural Rebellion, Political Violence, and Historical Memory in Chile. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022. Thomas Klubock has amassed a rich store of information about the injustices faced by Chilean campesinos in the years preceding the historic Ránquil rebellion of 1934 and the event itself. Thick with description and detail derived from hitherto unused judicial archives and unknown documents, the book adds depth to our understanding of peasant struggles in the south of Chile and the context surrounding the 1934 rebellion. Ránquil was the largest rural revolt in Chile's history. The author fleshes out the roles of the Sindicato Agrícola [End Page 231] Lonquimay, the Democratic Party and the Chilean Communist Party, and wealthy landowning families such as the Puelmas and Bunsters, as well as key peasant leaders such as Juan Segundo Leiva Tapia. Klubock shows that many of the peasants who participated in the rebellion were "disappeared" and murdered, previewing the savage repression to come forty years later under the Pinochet dictatorship. The book leads with an excellent introduction that presents the author's key conceptual observations. "Ránquil is a reminder that political violence and state terror have a long history in Chile," he notes, and continuing movements against inequality "are rooted in the repression of campesinos' recurrent struggles to build a more free and just society" (25). Many of the activists involved—Klubock details the role of indigenous Pehuenche and female campesinos as well as that of male unionists and peasants—sought to initiate a socialist revolution. One of Klubock's major points is that the rebellion was not exceptional or unusual but was rather "the most visible and pronounced clash in a long history of conflicts" in the region (2). Peasants had contested the property rights and deceitful maneuvers of wealthy owners since the nineteenth century. Another important observation is that the peasant movement was revolutionary, aiming to install a socialist transformation. The peasants of Bío Bío were "moving from a pragmatic strategy of working through the legal system and petitioning authorities in Santiago to revolutionary insurrection" (3), writes Klubock. This dimension of the struggle has often been lost in historical treatments of the conflict, Klubock notes; he gathers "considerable evidence that a number of the Sindicato Agrícola Lonquimay leaders were aligned with the Communist Party and articulated its ideological discourse" (12). The author highlights two parallel and opposing tendencies in Chile's history. On the one hand, dissident movements have appealed to the law and to the state to resolve conflicts, and at times the state has responded with reforms and upheld justice and rights. On the other, the state has regularly resorted to repression and violence and narrowed democratic rights to crush challenges and preserve the social order (13). Surprisingly, in his first presidential term, army general Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, who served twice as president, tried to institute reforms to break up large estates in the south and extend labor rights to those who worked the land (87–90). Many campesinos regarded him as an ally in their struggles against the oligarchic families that dominated the region. [End Page 232] Klubock argues that the Ránquil rebellion, when not forgotten by historians, has been categorized as a spontaneous uprising and not part of an organized collective movement. This "impedes a serious historical engagement with [peasants'] political consciousness," he asserts (17–18). Another of his arguments, which I found less persuasive, is that pardons and historical oblivion regarding massacres and repression by state security forces permitted "national reconciliation, functioning as a precondition for Chilean democracy and the legitimacy of the state" (21) as well as the development of a stable multiparty system. But while Chile was stable for long periods, stability is not the same as democracy. There is substantial literature on the long-term consequences of impunity that challenges his assertion that olvido is a necessary precondition for democracy. Similarly, the assumption that impunity and amnesia enhanced the legitimacy of the state is open to question. Chile's unresolved...