In this fascinating article, and an early one in English on its topic, Jorge Paz analyzes pre-colonial land tenures, the feudal Spanish conquest, and modern ‘republican’ exploitation of the Western Hemispheres vast Native populations.

‘Latin American Indians and the Peasant Problem’ by Jorge Paz from the Daily Worker. Vol. 6 Nos. 324 & 326. March 21 & 23, 1930.

IT would appear that America was not discovered by Columbus nor by Americo Vespucio; neither the Spaniard nor the Italian. But it has been discovered by the Communist International, at least as far as the problem of the Latin American Indian masses are concerned. Until recently we were most ignorant of the existence of a primitive rural economy worth taking into account in the later solution of the agrarian problem.

The men who tore away the mystery of the ocean, breaking the limits of the known world in the discovery of the land of golden legends, shattered completely the toneless multitude of Peru and Mexico, impelled by the hydropic thirst of metal riches.

Speedy horsemen climbed the mountains, forded the rivers, lost themselves in the immensity of the desert or in the labyrinthine forests, possessed by a devouring fever of enrichment. Such was the spectacle Latin America offered at the beginning of the Spanish Conquest.

The rowdies, the ruined and ragged nobles, the ambitious captains thrown out of impoverished Spain, travelled the tempting routes of the Valley of Anahuac in Mexico or the Tiawanaku Valley of Peru, tracing their destiny and synthetizing the motive of their enterprise in the lines that they marked with their swords. They poured into Latin America, more especially to Peru, High Peru (today Bolivia) and Mexico, countries where “gold blossomed from the ground,” to make themselves rich.

If the legend of the existence of gold in great quantity had not been woven as it really was, America would have had another destiny. Hence the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Indians, by “occidental civilization,” then represented with territorial eloquence by Spain of Ferdinand VII, later by Phillip the Second. But when the gold did not sparkle in the required quantity for the satisfaction of all the adventurers, the requirements of the kings and the grand feudal senors of the metropolis, these audacious adventurers transformed themselves into “peaceful” landholders, into royal commissioners.

The sword of the legendary noble was hung on the wall; the initial impulse was halted and the noble armed himself with the plow and learned to turn the sod by the methods of another culture. The bull was yoked; the war horse hitched to the wagon. Along with maize, native of America, shines the golden sheaves of wheat. From the sword and armor, tools were made; the soldier and royal commissioner became governors. An occidental government with all its system supplants the regime of primitive Communism that ruled in these two civilizations.

In fact, the Spanish found two civilizations in America, one a little different from the other. The Inca, in the area which today is Peru, Bolivia and North Argentina; and the Aztec, where today are Mexico and Guatemala, included in the last the Mayan civilization. Industrious the first; industrious and warlike the second.

In Peru, the center of Inca civilization, there existed in the pre-Columbus epoch, the following rural system: lands of the king; lands of the Sun, and lands of the community. The first belonged to the king, the Prince of Tawantinsuyu in Peru, and to the native nobility and warriors. One can say that the native civilizations in these two parts of America (in the rest of the continent the Indians were, in general, nomads) were characteristically of small rural proprietors and communal owners, whose greater pat were Pueblo (town) Indians. Hence the tendency is found that tries to return to this Inca Communism, which was nothing more than the Russian “artel.” These lands the Pueblo Indians cultivated.

The other lands, those of the Sun, were dedicated to the gods of the Indians and their products were destined to the church. We are not forgetting that all the primitive peoples were ruled by a system of feudo-theocratic government. Another part of the products of these lands were destined as reserves for times of bad harvests.

The lands of the communities or pueblos, in Peru called “Ayllu,” belonged to the agrarian communes and were worked in common by family portions. These, as all the lands, were cultivated by the people. By preference, they worked first the lands of the Sun, then those of the old, the sick, the widows, orphans and soldiers in active service.

Afterward, the people cultivated their own lands and were obliged to aid their neighbors. At the last, they cultivated the lands of the Inca, the king. And as the lands were thus divided, so were divided all kinds of wealth, mines, herds, etc. The Inca state had no money. One rule provided that any deficit in the contributions of the Inca were covered from the granaries of the Sun. No one was able to transfer land or to increase their holdings. When anyone died, the land was returned to the Inca.

This same form of community agricultural holdings in Mexico was called “callpulli,” and the Council which administered it, the “callpullalli.” The Council members were the old men of the village or community. In the present epoch of economic colonization by capitalist imperialism, the national reformists of our countries try to turn back to this ancient rural system. They wish to go back to the economic system now fallen astern of the ship of history.

Chauvinist Attitude Toward Latins.

The presumptuous adventurer taught us to despise the Indian. We spoke of the Indian’s “low passions” with emphasis, in the same moment in which the picks of occidental (capitalist) destruction were tearing down all the fortresses and temples of the Indians. Today, here in the United States, and even in the ranks of the Communist Party, I have noted with pain that there exists for us Latin Americans, an Olympic scorn, a dangerous tendency that those comrades who are affected by it must manage to overcome as they overcome white chauvinism, a prejudice of the occidentalist, that is to say, of capitalist culture, which must be replaced by the full acceptance of the Party policy and the culture of the proletariat, internationalism. This prejudice towards us comes from the latent and perhaps unconscious supposition that in our veins there runs the blood of an enslaved and outcast race.

Part II.

FIVE HUNDRED years were necessary, and perhaps more, for the men of occidental culture, which in its superlative form is capitalist culture, to take note that there have existed, far beyond the columns of Hercules and the Helenic archipelago, thousands of years before, other civilizations not inferior to that of ancient Greece, but on the contrary of a superior type–if we may draw any comparison. In the telluric resources in which the Indians lived, they rooted their civilization, which the feudal invasion of the conquerors came to destroy with their harquebuses and catapults.

Four centuries the white conquerors fought, motivated by greed and infected by race hatred, to overturn the primitive institutions of the Indians. And though we may give it little thought, we see that they attained their object. The sad and disrupted story of Latin America is the tragedy of this struggle.

The Spaniards invented a new means. To the invaders, and according to their social positions, were given the communal lands, according to the orders of the king of the imperialist metropolis, whose notions of just what the Indians were, were most vague. To Hernan Cortez in Mexico, was given by royal order: “All lands are thine until where vision ends.”

Cortez climbed to the top of a tree and his vision reached the horizon. There he went, where his vision reached, and again climbed a tree. Thus one of the grandest valleys of the world, the Valley of Oaxaca, became his. In Peru, Almargo and Pizarro did the same. Thus were born the great latifundists and feudal senores in Latin America: adventurers and captains.

Besides the lands “until where vision ends” (a measure originating in the illiteracy of feudal Spain), these adventurers were given, or took, since these people asked or took orders from the Council of “savages” residing at the court of Seville, Indian slaves in sufficient number for the exploitation of the land. Thus was born the slavery of the Indian.

The officers of the army had the right to two “until where vision ends,” that is, to climb trees twice to find the horizon. The cavalry soldiers had a right to 10 “caballerias,” equivalent to 333 acres; the infantry soldiers had a right to a “peonia.” To this repartition of the land was added the robbery and sharing up of animals of all kinds, and the gold of the temples and the ornaments of the Indians. Booty was the one thing in mind. It is said that even the poorest mouse makes a hole in the cheese. But the natives remained to be dealt with.

The Spaniards were obliged to yield land to the natives. The Indians fled to the mountains and rejected the new civilization. In the mountains they fought. The Spaniards needed people. No other immigrants came than adventurers, soldiers and criminals. They were not sufficient to work the lands of the feudal warlord who was making a fortune to enjoy it later in the metropolis.

The “Ejido”–a Fake Commune.

The Spaniards had, therefore, to create the “ejido,” with the object of attracting the Indian from the mountains, a compromise to the occidental petulance of the invaders. The “ejido” was a parcel of land in the environs of a native town. The word “ejido” is derived from “exodus,” referring to ‘exile.” The “ejido” of the Spaniards pretended to revive the “ayllu” and the “callpulli.” But this “ejido” implied a small rural individual property. The right of its usufruct belonged to the viceroy and not to the people. And the viceroy took advantage of his right always when the harvest was good. It is very possible that the object of the “ejido” was the Spaniards’ desire to win over the chief of the native tribes. And though it did not always work, in many cases it did.

The “ejido” was a proportional measure of no more than ten hectares (about 25 acres) of cultivatable land. Besides these, the Spaniards created holdings called “propios” (property of the government) and “eriales,” the last being lands not fit for cultivation. It is this sort of “eriales” or land unfit for cultivation which Calles and Portes Gil, and now Rubio, agents of Yankee imperialism in Mexico, are giving to the Indians, among a din of noise abroad about the “benefits” thus conferred by the so-called “revolutionary” government.

The “propios” were worked by the Indian tribes “for themselves,” but with a right only to the third part of the harvest. And they could neither sell nor transfer it. There was a tax in kind. The conquerors pretended with this means to create a native communal property. But by it the feudal senores were enriched.

The “ejidos” were surrounded by feudal properties. To pass their product to market, it was necessary to pay toll to the feudal senor. The taxes, tributes, excises and church imposts, made of the “ejido” and so-called “communal property” of the “propios,” an appendix of the feudal lands.

Some fascist governments of Latin America which pose as “revolutionary” (Mexico and Peru, and particularly the former) pretend to return the communal lands to their ancient proprietors, the Indian communities or towns. But they find that the Indians “possess no titles” which show their right as “proprietors.” But who is so simple as to think that the Indians could exhibit, after 400 years during which the Spanish conquerors first and the republic later, made free with both the lands and the Indians, that the Indians should come forward with documents proving their ancient title?

The republican form of government in Latin America, a form that in these countries is adjusted to its typical feudal-capitalism, in oppressing and exploiting the Indian has gone further than did the Spaniards. In some places they are exterminated, in others they are robbed of all forms of agrarian property, be it communal or “ejiditaria.”

This can partly be explained by the fact that the Indians do not trust the whites and have for them a profound hatred. But today the Indian is an exploited, a most exploited class. The problem of the Indian as a land worker must be faced as a problem of the most brutally exploited part of a class, with its racial characteristics, but not as a race. This is almost a commonplace, as is known; but it is true that there exists a strong current in Latin America that hates the Yankee because he killed Indians, that hates Europeans for like reason, without distinction between the exploiting invaders and the exploited immigrants.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1930/v06-n324-NY-mar-21-1930-DW-LOC.pdf

Issue 2: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1930/v06-n327-NY-mar-25-1930-DW-LOC.pdf