Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura (SNA)

The Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura (SNA), founded in 1869, is a voluntary association of landowners in Chile. Successor to the Sociedad Chilena de Agricultura, established in 1838, the SNA has been dominated by the large landowners of the Central Valley, many of them also members of the national social and political elites. During the nineteenth century its primary mission was to promote the modernization of agricultural practices. By 1900 the organization had become more explicitly political in response to the creation of competing economic interests. With the rise of working-class organizations and militancy following World War I, the SNA became increasingly identified with the defense of landowners on social issues, including food price controls, unionization of agricultural workers, and, by the 1930s, land reform. To meet these challenges, the SNA reached beyond its elite core by recruiting smaller landowners and founding the Confederación de la Producción y del Comercio (CPC), a multi-sectoral business pressure group, in 1934.

With the intensification of political challenges in the 1960s, the SNA became the most visible symbol of elite resistance to reform, but its efforts could not forestall the agrarian reform legislation that began dismantling the traditional rural estate in 1967. Defeated in the legislative arena, the SNA was instrumental in forging the gremio (guild) movement that began in the late 1960s and mushroomed after the 1970 election of Salvador Allende. A broad-based, militant coalition of large entrepreneurial associations with their smaller counterparts, the gremio movement used "bosses' strikes" and street demonstrations to weaken the Allende government in preparation for its overthrow.

During the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990) large landowners recovered most of the land they had lost to agrarian reform and, backed by the military regime, regained their traditional control over the rural population. Despite internal dissension over the Chicago Boys' neoliberal economic project, which cut some agricultural subsidies, the SNA regained prestige and influence. Since the return of elected government in 1990, large landowners have benefited from over-representation in congress, and the dynamic, socially retrograde, export-oriented agricultural economy that emerged during the dictatorship has continued to flourish. After nearly 140 years, the SNA remains one of Chile's most powerful economic interest associations.

See alsoAgrarian Reform; Chicago Boys.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carrière, Jean. Landowners and Politics in Chile: A Study of the Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura, 1932–1970. Amsterdam: Centrum voor Studie en Documentatie van Latijns-Amerika, 1981.

Izquierdo Fernández, Gonzalo. Un estudio de las ideologías chilenas: La Sociedad de Agricultura en el siglo XIX. Santiago: Universidad de Chile, 1968.

Wright, Thomas C. Landowners and Reform in Chile: The Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura, 1919–1940. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982.

                                        Thomas C. Wright