Republikanischer Staat und indigenes Land: Die Erfahrungen in der Andenregion im 19. Jahrhundert

Abstract

The advent of the republican state involved the imposition of liberalism as the central value of the new institutional Latin-American order. Such a process, justified by the prestige of the European experience, was supported by the proliferation of a set of laws aimed at cancelling any reference to the colonial system. In its economic profile, the new ideology gravitated around the establishment of individual freedom of disposition over the most valued asset according to the European values of physiocracy: the land. For this reason, the process of economic consolidation led to the establishment of an increasing market in land based on individual titles to property, and to the eradication, through an exhaustive legislative production, of any obstacle to the free alienability of land.
This paper illustrates, within the wider legal framework required to carry out this operation, the ideological and normative approach that altered the structure of the land tenure systems of the Andean indigenous groups during the 19th century. Our analysis will focus on the principal legal milestones enacted in four countries of the Andean area: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Peru, with particular regard to the experience of the Bolivian state during the period between 1825 and 1880.
The study seeks to reflect about the legal transplant of possessive individualism in order to provide a critical review of the impact of the rule of law in the arrangement of the indigenous agrarian system during the 19th century.