LATIN AMERICAN PEASANTS

THE LIBRARY OF PEASANT STUDIES

EVERYDAY FORMS OF PEASANT RESISTANCE IN SOUTH-EAST

ASIA
edited by James C.Scott and Benedict J.Tria Kerkvliet
(No. 9 in the series)
NEW APPROACHES TO STATE AND PEASANT IN OTTOMAN
HISTORY
edited by Halil Berktay and Suraiya Faroqhi
(No. 10 in the series)
PLANTATIONS, PEASANTS AND PROLETARIANS IN COLONIAL
ASIA
edited by E.Valentine Daniel, Henry Bernstein and Tom Brass
(No. 11 in the series)
NEW FARMERS' MOVEMENTS IN INDIA
edited by Tom Brass
(No. 12 in the series)
CLASS, STATE AND AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVITY IN EGYPT
Study of the Inverse Relationship between Farm Size and Land Productivity
by Graham Dyer
(No. 15 in the series)
TOWARDS A COMPARATIVE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF UNFREE
LABOUR
Case Studies and Debates by Tom Brass
(No. 16 in the series)
PEASANTS, POPULISM AND POSTMODERNISM
The Return of the Agrarian Myth by Tom Brass
(No. 17 in the series)
AN APARTHEID OASIS?
Agricultural and Rural Livelihoods in Venda by Edward Lahiff
(No. 20 in the series)

LATIN AMERICAN PEASANTS

 Edited by

TOM BRASS

FRANK CASS
LONDON • PORTLAND, OR
First published in 2003 in Great Britain by
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Latin American peasants.—(The library of peasant studies; no. 21)
1. Peasantry—Latin America 2. Peasantry—Latin America—
History.
I. Brass, Tom
305.5'633'098
ISBN 0-203-50566-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-55135-4 (MP PDA Format)

ISBN 0 7146 5384 5 (Print Edition) (cloth)
ISBN 0 7146 8319 1 (paper)
ISSN 1462–219X
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Latin American peasants/editor, Tom Brass.
p. cm.—(Library of peasant studies ISSN 0306–6150; no. 21)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7146-5384-5 (hardback)—ISBN 0-7146-8319-1 (pbk.)
 1. Peasantry—Latin America. 2. Agricultural laborers—Latin America.
3. Latin America—Rural conditions. 4. Land reform—Latin America. 5.
Peasantry—Latin America—Political activity. 6. Agricultural
laborers—Latin America—Political activity. I.
Brass, Tom, 1946– II. Series.
HD1531.L3 L37 2002
305.5'633'098–dc21
2002015545
This group of studies first appeared in a Special Issue on 'Latin American Peasants' of
The Journal of Peasant Studies (ISSN 0306 6150), Vol. 29/3 & 4 (April/July 2002)
published by Frank Cass and Co. Ltd.
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For Amanda,
and for
Anna, Ned and Miles.
 Contents

Latin American Peasants-New Paradigms for Old?

Tom Brass
The Peasantry and the State in Latin America: A Troubled Past, an Uncertain
Future
James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer
From Rubber Estate to Simple Commodity Production: Agrarian Struggles in
the Northern Bolivian Amazon
Willem Assies
The Impact of Neo-liberal Economics on Peruvian Peasant Agriculture in the
1990s
John Crabtree
Whither O Campesinato? Historical Peasantries of Brazilian Amazonia
Stephen Nugent
From Dependency to Reform and Back Again: The Chilean Peasantry During
the Twentieth Century
Warwick E.Murray
Globalization and the Reinvention of Andean Tradition: The Politics of
Community and Ethnicity in Highland Bolivia
John McNeish
Devil Pact Narratives in Rural Central America: Class, Gender and
'Resistance'
Kees Jansen and Esther Roquas
Representing the Peasantry? Struggles for/about Land in Brazil
José de Souza Martins
On Which Side of What Barricade? Subaltern Resistance in Latin America
and Elsewhere
Tom Brass
Abstracts
Author Index
Subject Index
 Acknowledgements

In the 29 years since its foundation, The Journal of Peasant Studies has
published special issues and books based on them on an increasingly regular
basis: two in the 1970s, five in the 1980s, and seven in the 1990s. With the
exception of two (Ottoman History, South Africa), all the special issues that
appeared over the last decade of the twentieth century were edited by me,
either alone or in conjunction with others, on the basis of which experience it
is possible to observe incontrovertibly that the task of editing themed
volumes is both rewarding and onerous. The total of fourteen special issues
of the JPS that have been published thus far—together with the book versions
–are wide-ranging in their thematic and geographical coverage, devoted as
they are to a variety of agrarian issues (feudalism, plantations, sharecropping,
everyday forms of peasant resistance, the state and the peasantry, new
farmers' movements, the agrarian question, rural labour relations) in all the
major areas of the globe, except two: Latin America and China. Accordingly,
this first special issue of the journal to be published in the new millennium is
also the first devoted specifically to peasants in Latin America; the
contributors represent a mixture of established and younger scholars, some of
whom have published in this journal before, and all of whom have conducted
fieldwork in rural Latin America.
Thanks are due to a number of people who in different ways have helped see
this volume to its conclusion. To Graham Hart of Frank Cass Publishers, who
steered it through the production process; to two members of the editorial
advisory board of the journal—Professor Olivia Harris of the Department of
Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, London University, and Professor Alan
Knight of the Latin American Centre at Oxford University—for small but
important acts of assistance in organizing this special issue; and, for reasons
which they know all too well, to Amanda, Anna, Ned and Miles.
Tom Brass
Richmond, Surrey
Introduction Latin American Peasants -New Paradigms
for Old?

TOM BRASS

'We were exhausted from a long, painful trek; more painful than long, to tell
the truth…We had lost all our equipment, and had trudged for endless hours
through marshlands and swamps. We were all wearing new boots and by now
everyone was suffering from blisters and footsores, but new footwear and
fungus were by no means our only enemies. We had reached Cuba following
a seven-day voyage across the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea,
without food, plagued by seasickness and aboard a far-from-seaworthy
vessel.'—Ernesto Che Guevara [1967:9] on the privations experienced by the
guerrilla forces prior to the 1959 Cuban revolution.
'I get up, I give interviews and then it's time to go to bed.'—Subcomandante
Marcos [2001:74], leader of the 1990s Zapatista Movement in Chiapas,
Mexico, in reply to a question about his average day.
Over the past decade, those with a passing intellectual acquaintance with
peasants and peasant movements in Latin America might be forgiven for
making two assumptions: that the only rural agency south of the Rio Grande
was confined to the state of Chiapas in Mexico, and that the only analyses of
agrarian mobilization were being written by postmodern theorists.1 As the
contributions to this volume attest, neither of these assumptions is correct.
What is undeniable, however, is the extent to which the study of peasants,
peasant movements and agrarian transformation in Latin America during the
latter part of the twentieth century has undergone a profound change. Like
their counterparts in Asia, peasants and rural workers in Latin America are,
we are constantly informed, not what they were once thought to be, nor is
their agency designed to attain the objectives previously attributed to them. In
rural Latin America, therefore, just as everywhere else nowadays, new
movements are said to be emerging, composed of new rural
subjects exercising new forms of agency in keeping with apolitical 'new'
postmodern populist objectives.
The latter designation, which signals a conceptual (and political)
abandonment not only of mass mobilization (= revolution) aimed at the
capture/control of state power, but also of the possibility/desirability of
systemic transcendence (a transition from capitalism to socialism), stems
from an equally marked process of epistemological confluence. This extends
from an academically resurgent neoliberalism and neoclassical economic
theory to a variety of currently still fashionable social frameworks informed
or influenced by postmodernism (subaltern studies, everyday forms of
resistance, post-development, post-structuralism, post-colonialism).2 What all
these paradigms have in common is not only their unabashed celebration of a
rural 'voice-from-below' engaged in quotidian/ local/(mostly individual)
resistance based on ethnic/gender/ecological/ peasant essentialisms, therefore,
but also its characterization as a new and empowering form of
identity/agency that occurs within capitalism.3
Because of the academic influence currently exercised by these 'new'
paradigms, this introduction will attempt to situate the argument made by
each contributor to this volume in relation to each of the two main analytical
frameworks that have dominated the study of Latin American peasants. The
first of these are the 'new' theories themselves, and their claims about peasant
identity/agency/empowerment, while the second concerns the older debate
over the agrarian question involving rival campesinista (= peasant
persistence) and descampesinista (= peasant disappearance) interpretations.4
To some degree, the eclipse of the latter approach, and the corresponding rise
of the former, have coincided with a decline in land reform undertaken by the
state, as Keynesian demand management gave way to neoliberal economic
policies. It was this shift that contributed in part to the replacement of
peasant-as-economic-subject by earlier concepts of peasant-as-cultural-
subject. Finally, the political nature and economic role of the peasant/state
relationship is considered briefly, not least because it is a complex history
and one that much 'new' theory about Latin American peasants tends either to
simplify or to ignore.
 I

It is now clear that the post-war decline in peasant economy has been
accompanied in the academic discipline of development studies by a
conceptual re-essentialization of the peasantry: first by neoclassical theory as
an economic subject, and then as a cultural subject by postmodernism. The
latter in particular has shifted the analytical focus of the study of peasants
away from political economy and history and towards literature and culture,
an approach which entailed both the conceptual deprivileging of economic
development ('post-development'), and the political rejection of Marxism,
meta-narratives, and European Enlightenment discourse ('post-Marxism').
The profound implications of this change were evident from the emergence
and consolidation in the 1990s of the 'new' populist postmodernism, a form of
analysis-lite that has led to the dumbing down of the development debate, or
the substitution of celebration for investigation.5 Such views, it could be
argued, have led to the uncritical espousal of what are unambiguously
populist theories about the attainment of from-below empowerment, and have
consequently not only reified false consciousness, but—in discarding
concepts such as rural class formation/struggle/ consciousness—have also
eroded the emancipatory objectives associated historically with development
discourse.6
Prior to the 'development decade' of the 1960s, the study of peasants was
confined largely to anthropologists and historians. The theoretical
construction of 'peasant society' was strongly influenced by anthropologists
conducting fieldwork in Latin America, for whom the peasantry constituted a
cultural system. For example, Foster's concept of 'limited good', Redfield's
'folk culture', and the 'culture of poverty' thesis advanced by Lewis, were all
applied to rural communities in Mexico in the 40-year period from the 1920s
onwards.7 The same kind of epistemology informed Murra's theory of
Andean 'verticality', applied by him and others subsequently to the study of
Peruvian rural communities.8 In these kinds of framework, peasants were
depicted as being economically backward because they chose to be so, and
for non-economic reasons to do with the culture and nature of peasant society
itself. Rural social systems also occupied the attention of historians during
the 1950s, albeit in a different way. Here the point of interest was the role of
peasants in economic development, but with reference to case studies of
agrarian transition long past. Examining how and why in particular contexts
(Europe, Japan) feudalism had been replaced by capitalism, historians such as
Dobb and Hilton focused on issues such as the relative importance to these
transitions of endogenous versus exogenous variables such as trade and
class.9
The post-war rise to academic prominence of development studies, and the
central role in economic transformation allocated to the peasantry in what
were still mainly rural Third World nations, was due to a renewed emphasis
on the desirability of capitalist development in the Third World generally and
its agriculture in particular. Because of the fear among policy-makers in
industrial nations caught up in the Cold War that economic stagnation leading
to peasant uprisings in underdeveloped countries would facilitate the spread
of communism throughout the Third World, mainstream development
strategy from the 1960s onwards required the implementation of agrarian
reform programmes in many Latin America countries.10 Economic growth
linked to domestic accumulation depended in turn on the extension of the
internal market, which required increasing the purchasing power of peasants.
For this reason, agrarian reform in the post-war era became a political issue,
and it was from this background that economic analyses of peasants emerged.
Accordingly, the debate about the peasantry, agrarian change and economic
development (and thus transition) underwent a multiple shift. Instead of being
concerned with peasant society and culture, or with specifically historical
instances of transition from feudalism to capitalism, therefore, it was
conducted now largely within the domain of the social sciences, where the
focus was both on peasant-as-economic-subject and on obstacles to
contemporary capitalism in underdeveloped countries.11 The rise of
neoliberalism in the 1980s, however, signalled a shift to export-led economic
growth and a corresponding decline in the economic role of the state,
consequences of which were the increased economic importance of
national/international agribusiness enterprises and a decreased economic role
for agrarian reform generally and smallholding agriculture in particular.12 In
Latin America as elsewhere, opposition to this process—both political and
intellectual—took a populist form, and was accompanied by a return to
earlier concepts of peasant-as-cultural-subject.
 NEW PARADIGMS, OR THE BLINDING DARKNESS OF LITE

Until recently, most analyses of Latin American populism acknowledged the

importance of peasant identity in this discourse, not least because of a
recognition of the importance of this rural dimension in Europe, North
America and especially Russia.13 In the last context, Chayanov long ago
argued that an homogeneous peasantry composed of self-sufficient petty
commodity producers constituted a pan-historical socio-economic category
which, in theoretical and political terms, was the mirror image of the classical
Marxist view.14 Unlike Chayanov, contemporary variants of peasant
essentialism incorporate both semi-proletarianized and economically efficient
family farms, arguing that the former should be helped to resist capitalism
while the latter constitute a commercially viable alternative to capitalist
production.15 Perhaps because the peasantry in general is no longer thought
of as politically important, however, more recent analyses of populism in
Latin America have tended to overlook the historical significance and
implications of this rural category in such mobilizations, and thus also of the
powerful way in which this kind of discourse addresses both the identity and
the socio-economic position of small and medium family farmers.16
Rather than a rural discourse that is backwards-looking, antagonistic to
economic development and politically reactionary, therefore, the more usual
interpretation of Latin American populism has been of it as an urban and
forward-looking ideology compatible with anti-imperialism and national
economic development. A variation of this theoretical approach has been
applied to Latin America by, among others, Octavio lanni and Otilio Borón,
both of whom argue that following the 1929 capitalist crisis populism was a
form of Bonapartism that was a pro-development and thus a politically
progressive discourse.17 Historically, however, Bonapartism shares many of
the same characteristics not just with populism but also with fascism, and
indeed, is in many instances synonymous with them: thus, for example, it is
unashamedly nationalist, it rules in the name of 'order' (imposed on a
mobilizing or mobilized urban industrial working class), it receives its main
support from an actual/erstwhile rural petty bourgeoisie (peasants,
lumpenproletarians) threatened by economic crisis, and it is a form of strong
government which designates itself ideologically in the classic populist
manner as 'above parties' and 'above classes'.18 It is precisely all the latter
aspects that have been appropriated by the 'new' postmodern populism, and
not only applied to rural agency in Latin America but also recast in a
progressive mould, either as 'new social movements' or as 'everyday forms of
resistance'.
Unconnected with class, systemic transformation, and the eradication of rural
poverty, the target of 1990s populist discourse (and in particular its
postmodern 'post-colonial' variant) seems to be economic development
itself.19 In a postmodern framework, therefore, an imposed and
disempowering economic backwardness which its rural subjects attempt to
transcend is reconfigured as a chosen and empowering form of cultural
'otherness', to be retained/reproduced at all costs. Instead of attempting to
realize the economic fruits and benefits of development (as Marxists argue),
peasants are depicted by postmodernism as engaged in a twofold struggle: to
remain subsistence producers, and against economic development.20 Peasants
and workers throughout the so-called Third World, and especially those in
Latin America, are now being invited by exponents of the 'new' postmodern
populist framework to forgo economic development, and to accept as a
substitute for this a celebration of their existing cultural identity. It is towards
the attainment of the latter, the 'new' postmodern populism asserts, that all
'from below' grassroots agency in Latin America (and elsewhere)—whether it
takes the form of micro-level resistance or macro-level new social
movements—is now geared.
In much current postmodern/populist analysis of agrarian mobilization,
therefore, the prevailing view is that rural grassroots empowerment always
and everywhere constitutes an unproblematically desirable end, a position
arrived at without asking by whom and for what such a process is conducted.
Thus the 1994 Chiapas uprising led by Subcomandante Marcos has been
hailed as an exemplar of the 'new' agrarian mobilization, on the grounds that
it represents a novel oppositional form (= the
internationalization/electronification of opposition to capitalism), based not
on class but on indigenous 'self-activity'/'self-valorization', is anti-
development (= 'the refusal of development') and pro-ecology.21 Peasant
movements, exponents of the 'new' postmodern populism claim, have
involved struggles by petty commodity producers against capitalism simply
to defend the existing pre-capitalist relationships and institutions which
protect them against economic hardship and starvation (the 'moral economy'
argument). More recently, this position has been extended to include the view
that the most effective peasant agency is not about revolutionary systemic
overthrow but rather a continuous and clandestine kind of struggle ('everyday
forms of resistance') to survive under feudalism, capitalism and socialism.22
In an attempt to disguise the conservative implications of this paradigmatic
shift, postmodernism has pointed to the radical nature of its methodological
approach: deconstruction, presented by exponents as an act of subversion that
involves questioning everything. Accordingly, the recasting of peasant
agency as 'everyday forms of resistance' has been accompanied by an
ubiquitous tendency on the part of postmodern theory to label any
identity/agency as 'subversive', an overworked and now largely meaningless
concept which fails to ask the second and third of three important questions:
not that something is being challenged, with a view to overturning it (the first
and easiest one), therefore, but why this challenge is being mounted, and what
politics inform this action and prefigure its outcome (the second and third,
more difficult questions). Those who ask only the first question, and let the
issue rest there, generally slot both agency and agent into a progressive
framework, and consequently leave the politics of what is invariably
categorized as 'resistance' unasked. Only by raising and then interrogating the
politics of this latter process, however, is it possible to understand that
'resistance' is not necessarily progressive, and can be a form of struggle
conducted as much by reactionaries on the political right as by progressives
on the left.

Empowering Peasant Agency?

Perhaps the most influential contemporary approach to the peasant agency in

the so-called Third World is the subaltern studies series.23 Questioning the
relevance of universals and the emancipatory object of the historical process,
it supports the postmodern/post-colonial view of a culturally empowered
peasantry as a 'natural' category outside and against history, and thus confers
epistemological acceptability on the struggle ('resistance') of its constituent
subjects to retain their traditions.24 The same is true of the new social
movements framework, which claims that contemporary rural activism is also
mainly about cultural empowerment, and thus constitutes a break with the
politics and practice of the past.25 Farmers' movements which emerged in a
variety of different national contexts (India, Mexico) during the 1980s and
the 1990s are regarded by postmodern theorists as examples of an
authentically new and classless form of agrarian radicalism that is both
apolitical and anti-state, part of the new social movements composed of
tribals, peasants, environmentalists and women.26 In Latin America, it is
claimed, such movements are authentic 'from below' phenomena, rural
grassroots struggles the aim of which is to reproduce peasant economy, to
celebrate ethnic identity, and to protect traditional culture.27 However, as
some of the contributions to this volume suggest, this claim is both open to
question and—where true—politically problematic.28
McNeish, de Souza Martins, and Nugent all highlight the role of NGOs and
other external forces in the ideological foregrounding of ethnic identity,
thereby confirming that—pace postmodernism and subalternism—this
particular form of 'otherness' is not simply a 'from below' phenomenon. Thus
McNeish argues that it was the neoliberal structural adjustment programme,
imposed on Bolivia during the mid-1980s, which undermined rural trade
union organizations and left-wing politics, creating a space for traditional
indigenous authorities and discourses to reassert their political power. He
shows not only how the reassertion of ethnic identity in the municipality of
Santuario de Quillacas in the Bolivian Highlands during the 1990s enabled
better-off peasants to avoid having to share their economic resources with the
inhabitants of poorer rural communities in the vicinity, but also—and more
importantly—that it was outsiders (NGOs, anthropologists) who reintroduced
Quillacans to their history, thereby providing the better-off elements with the
very weapons necessary for this politically conservative process of
'reinventing Andean tradition'. Much the same point is made by de Souza
Martins, who attributes to external 'mediating groups' (the church, political
parties) an important role in the ideological formulation and emergence in
Brazil of a conceptually homogeneous 'new' rural subject, notwithstanding
the historical and regional diversity of the agrarian structure and workforce.
Like de Souza Martins, Nugent also maintains that the essentialist notion of
an homogeneous Amazonian peasantry is a concept reproduced in the main
externally—by, for example, the MST (the Sem Terra Movement) as a result
of the agrarian struggles taking place in the south of Brazil.
This view is complemented by Brass who, in his critique of the
historiographical transfer from South Asia to Latin America of the subaltern
framework, indicates how a search for an 'authentic' grassroots identity has
led to the (re-)discovery by Latin American exponents of subalternism of a
traditional form of rural cultural 'otherness' associated with the reactionary
politics of the 1930s. In addition to the familiar economic objections made by
Marxists to the theory of peasant economy, therefore, Brass insists there is
also a basic political difficulty—that historically an essentialist concept of a
'classless' peasant has been (and is still) a central ideological emplacement of
the political right—which most contemporary Marxists either ignore or of
which they remain unaware.29 It is this, as much as anything, which led to a
recuperation by some variants of Marxist theory of peasant economy during
the 1960s and 1970s, and a consequent epistemological inability in the 1980s
and 1990s to combat the appropriation by the emerging 'new' postmodern
populism of a discourse proclaiming the culturally empowering role of
peasant economy.30 Not the least of the many ironies is the fact that,
historically and contemporaneously, the political right—its opposition to the
'foundational' universal categories associated with a socialist politics (class
formation/struggle/consciousness that transcend national boundaries)
notwithstanding—subscribes to what amounts to its own form of
conservative internationalism: the agrarian myth, at the centre of which is an
essentialist concept of peasant economy and culture.31
Just how conservative are claims made by this 'new' postmodern populism
about the empowering nature of 'from below' forms of cultural resistance
conducted by an essentialist notion of Latin American peasants emerges from
the critical analysis by Jansen and Roquas of the ideological and political role
of devil pact narratives in Central America. Taking issue with the work of
Taussig and Edelman, both of whom conceptualize the devil pact narrative as
a discourse connected not with class but with gender or as evidence for an
empowering resistance by peasant smallholders to capitalism, Jansen and
Roquas argue that this discourse is much rather a politically conservative way
of expressing grassroots antagonism about rural class inequality and wealth.32
Rather than being a straightforward exchange between the devil and a
particular individual who swaps his soul for wealth, therefore, it is clear that
in Central America the pact with the devil entails not one but three very
different kinds of symbolic exchange, each with its own class relation.33 By
attributing wealth to supernatural origins, however, the devil pact avoids
confronting head-on the material basis of rapid capital accumulation within a
particular rural community, and thus epistemologically locates this process in
a (non-temporal) domain where—peasants can maintain plausibly—nothing
can be done to alter surplus generating social relationships. Against the claim
that devil pact narratives in Central America are empowering 'from below'
forms of resistance to capitalism, Jansen and Roquas argue that such a
discourse is much rather a politically disempowering form of false
consciousness.34
What the contributions to this volume in their different ways suggest is that
all attempts by neoliberalism, populism and postmodernism to locate
empowerment within capitalism are based on a misplaced view of the latter
as a static, harmonious, crisis-free and thus essentially benign system. In
pleading for a return to a 'kinder'/'caring' form of capitalism, therefore,
exponents of these 'new' theories forget that, because the contradictions
inherent in the accumulation process generate both economic crisis and its
attendant class struggle, there is not (and cannot be) a 'steady state' tension-
free capitalism suspended in a permanent equilibrium. The political difficulty
now faced by born-again liberals (many of whom either used to be—or
indeed continue wrongly to regard themselves as—Marxists) is as a
consequence simply stated. No longer socialists, but still wedded to the idea
of progress, they find themselves caught between having to support either the
continued onward march of capitalism (= economic development) or
reactionary anti-capitalist discourses/regimes currently opposed to further
'globalization' and 'Westernization'. For those who remain Marxists, however,
no such dilemma exists: dismissing these two positions as a false dichotomy,
Marxists—now as in the past—insist socialism constitutes the only form of
systemic transcendence that goes beyond both capitalism and its reactionary
anti-capitalist opponents. The dynamic of this systemic transcendence is itself
located in the agrarian question, a debate that many exponents of 'new'
postmodern populism dismiss as an 'old' (= irrelevant) paradigm.
 II

The agrarian question is a longstanding debate between neopopulism and

Marxism about the role of peasants in two kinds of systemic transition: from
feudalism to capitalism, and from the latter to socialism. In the classical texts
of Marxism—the main Marxist contributions to the debate were made in
1899 by Lenin and Kautsky—the process of accumulation that constitutes
capitalist development is itself premised on an agrarian transition, which
releases a marketed agricultural surplus that is transferred to industry.35
Differentiating the peasantry into its rich, middle and poor components,
Lenin argued that capitalist development in agriculture converted the former
into a rural bourgeoisie and the latter into a proletariat, while middle peasants
(or petty commodity producers) were 'depeasantized', and over time also
became landless labourers. He also argued that, historically, capitalist
penetration of a latifundist agriculture followed two distinct paths. The first
was the Prussian model, in which the development of landlord capitalism on
the estate system led to the impoverishment or eviction of its tenants. Labour-
service relations between landlord and tenant continued, no new techniques
were adopted, and agricultural production remained low. In the American
model, by contrast, it was the better-off estate tenants who became capitalist
producers and expropriated their landlords. The abolition of rent enabled
these rich peasants to invest surpluses in new technology and thus to increase
output.36
The significance of Lenin's two-path model of agrarian transformation for
debates about rural development in Latin America lies in the historical
importance there of the large landed estate (hacienda, fundo).37 Although
elaborated with reference to agrarian transitions in nineteenth-century
European countries, the Prussian/American model is relevant to an
understanding of landlord/tenant struggles leading to a transformation of
large landed estates in the Andean regions of Latin America, notably the
hacienda system in Peru and Chile during the twentieth century. Latifundia
and plantations were the target of the three main agrarian reforms in Latin
America, carried out in Cuba (1959–63) by the revolutionary government of
Fidel Castro, in Chile (1964–73) by the civilian Presidents Frei and Allende,
and in Peru (1969–75) by the military regime of President Velasco, all of
whom redistributed land and converted tenants with usufruct rights into
peasant proprietors, a pattern which lends credence to the American path.38
Nugent, Assies and de Souza Martins, however, argue that—in contrast to the
Leninist model—peasant economy in Bolivia and Brazil did not precede
capitalism but much rather was introduced and reproduced by it.
 OLD PARADIGMS—PARADIGMS LOST?

Assies outlines how, in the case of Bolivia, the economic decline of rubber
tapping during the 1930s was accompanied by the emergence of peasant
economy linked to Brazil nut gathering on small plots of land leased by
estate-owners to their rubber tappers. The inexorable decline in rubber prices,
a trend reversed briefly only during the Second World War and the 1970s,
made Brazil nut gathering by Bolivian rubber tappers and their families an
increasingly important alternative source of income. Much the same was true
of Brazil where, as de Souza Martins shows, it was a commercial export-
oriented agriculture which introduced specific forms of petty commodity
production: the colonato system in the case of the São Paulo coffee
plantations, the seringuero system in the case of rubber extraction in
Amazonia, and the cambão relation on sugar plantations. In all these
contexts, therefore, petty commodity production was implanted as a result of
capitalist penetration, and is accordingly not pre-capitalist in origin. Where
rubber estates and sugar or coffee plantations were concerned, the object of
ceding usufruct rights to members of the workforce on the part of landlords
and/or planters was to obtain additional workers for capitalist agriculture, in
the shape of labour-power belonging to family members, usually women and
children. The historical roots of the present agrarian crisis in Brazil, as
represented by movements for the repossession of and/or the right to work on
the land, are to be found—de Souza Martins maintains—in the earlier process
of agrarian restructuring, whereby capitalist producers dispossessed/expelled
members of the existing permanent workforce who had usufruct rights to
land, and replaced them with temporary/casual/seasonal labour that was
landless.39 Rather than reasserting ancient property rights, therefore,
struggles for land in Brazil are of a more recent provenance.
Accounting for the historical invisibility of a specifically Amazonian
peasantry where ethnographic analysis is concerned, Nugent argues that this
absence is due to a number of interrelated causes: the fact that cultivation is
and has been combined with other forms of economic activity
(hunting/gathering, goldmining, fishing), that the indigenous population of
tribals is not a peasantry while Amazonian peasants are themselves composed
of non-indigenous immigrants, and the predominance of an environmental
deterministic discourse (smallholders are perceived in terms of ecological
'carrying capacity'). Like de Souza Martins, Nugent emphasizes that peasants
in Amazonia have their origin in migrants escaping from the declining
plantation economy of the northeast who became rubber tappers and,
following the decline of the rubber extractive economy, reconstituted
themselves as petty commodity producers combining multiple occupational
roles with providing food for workers employed on development schemes in
the region.40 For this reason, the peasantry in Amazonia has not been
depeasantized so much as transformed, along the lines suggested by Mintz
for Jamaica—a 'reconstituted peasantry', but one that is reconstituted from a
distance (migration). Like Murray (see below), however, Nugent expresses
doubts about the long-term viability of peasant economy, as
largescale/mechanized agribusiness enterprises shift to pasture, and thus
increasingly monopolize large tracts of land as unproductive reserves, as a
consequence of which the latter cease to be available for smallholding
cultivation.
A related matter concerns the role of peasant producers in the world
economy, and the implications of this for the campesinista/descampesinista
debate and the agrarian question. The combined impact on rural Latin
America of, on the one hand, a decline in land reform and, on the other, the
implementation of neoliberal economic policies is evident from the
contributions by Crabtree on Peru and Murray on Chile. Crabtree outlines
how, in the case of Peruvian agriculture during the 1980s and 1990s, it was
peasant smallholders who were economically most dependent on the
existence of a buoyant and stable demand in domestic urban areas for the
commodities they produced. When this domestic demand for the output of
peasant agriculture contracted, either as a result of wage-cutting neoliberal
industrial policies, or was met by cheap imports from abroad (again the result
of market liberalization by the Fujimori government), the consequence was
an inevitable economic decline on the part of petty commodity production
and a corresponding increase in the incidence of rural poverty.41 A twofold
process thus characterizes the Peruvian countryside: impoverishment means
that minifundización is combined with working for others and/or migration to
the towns/cities, while other rural producers have been and are doing quite
well. Into the latter category come large-scale export-oriented agribusiness
enterprises (agro-industry producing for 'niche' foreign markets), those
cultivating coca for the international drug trade, and rich coffee-growing
peasants who have benefited from exporting into world markets, all of which
have consolidated and even expanded the amount of land they operate.
That not even relatively better-positioned peasants are now able to survive in
the world market as independent smallholders is a point made by Murray
with regard to Chile, where the neoliberal counter-reform imposed by the
military dictatorship after 1973 created a sector of small-to-medium-sized
commercial proprietors (parceleros) from agricultural land that had been
collectivized/cooperativized. Cultivating cash-crops (apples, grapes) for
export, these peasant farmers were contractually tied to and (increasingly
tightly) controlled by the national/international agribusiness enterprises
which not only provided growers with capital investment but also marketed
their output. Over the 1980s and 1990s, however, as capitalist competition
and overproduction increased globally, many of these Chilean peasant
farmers were engulfed by crisis, which resulted in the economic
differentiation of the peasantry. The latter process took the form of disguised
proletarianization and/or full proletarianization: increasingly, therefore,
indebted parceleros were required to sell their land to agribusiness
enterprises to which they owed money, and either continued working on land
they no longer owned or sold their own labour-power (and that of their
kinsfolk) off-farm in order to generate additional income.
The case made by Murray in this connection—that in economic terms the
peasant survival threshold is probably much lower than thought—in effect
precludes the reproduction of what many observers (especially
postmodernists) and development theorists (especially neopopulists and
neoclassical economists) have regarded as viable peasant agriculture. It is
clear from this Chilean case-study, therefore, that in a laissez faire global
market peasant producers throughout Latin America have to compete both in
international markets and in their own domestic ones with agricultural
exports from advanced capitalist countries, a situation which casts doubt on
the long-term capacity of the peasant family farm to reproduce itself
economically. This problem also underlines the central difficulty faced by
those Marxists who continue to theorize the agrarian question at the level of
the nation state: while peasant cultivators in Latin America (and elsewhere in
the so-called Third World) may indeed be economically efficient when
compared to unproductive landlords in their own countries, this is not the
case when they have to compete with efficient high-tech international
agribusiness enterprises in world markets.42 In other words, a consequence of
limiting the agrarian question to national social formations is that crucial
processes—of class formation, surplus generation and transfer—occurring
within agriculture that license the continued reproduction of international as
distinct from national capital (that is, the systemic logic of capitalism) can
mistakenly be declared to be at an end.

(Dis-)Empowering Labour Regimes

Linked to this is the debate about transformations occurring in the labour

regime, an issue that also touches not just on the agrarian question itself but
also on the debate about the connection between capitalist development and
the employment of unfree labour. Evidence from many Latin American
contexts suggests that an important effect of the neoliberal economic policies
applied during the last three decades of the twentieth century has been a
strong trend toward part-time work and a pronounced gendering of the
workforce, a pattern confirmed here by Assies, de Souza Martins, Crabtree
and Murray with regard to Bolivia, Brazil, Peru and Chile. Where current
employment patterns involving poor peasants are concerned, therefore,
peasant smallholders and/or members of their families offer their labour-
power for sale to larger agrarian units and/or off-farm employers on a
temporary/casual basis, because employers themselves now only want a
casualized/feminized workforce.43 That the latter is not necessarily, always
and everywhere a proletariat, however, is point made by Assies, de Souza
Martins, and Jansen and Roquas. Assies demonstrates how in the Northern
Bolivian Amazon region the habilito system of labour contracting has been -
and continues to be—utilized by agribusiness enterprises to obtain workers.
This form of recruitment is based on a system of cash advances made by a
merchant or producer to a worker, whose resulting indebtedness prevents him
either—when he is a peasant smallholder—from selling commodities he
produces on the free market in order to realize the highest price, or—when he
is mainly an agricultural labourer—from selling his labour-power (his only
commodity) in the free market in order to obtain the highest wage.
Part of the problem is that the 'transition' paradigm—the assumption that
unfree labour is everywhere and always a pre-capitalist relation—is one to
which both neoclassical economic historiography and certain kinds of
Marxist theory adhere.44 The result is that, for exponents of both, where debt
bondage exists, capitalism cannot be present, and where capitalism is present
what exists can only be free labour.45 Thus, for example, Assies notes that in
certain important respects the epistemological distinctions between
apparently dissimilar analyses (by Barham and Coome, Weinstein, and
Stoian) of production relations structuring rubber extraction in Bolivian
Amazonia are not that great. All of them reject the interpretation of debt
bondage as a coercive relation, and subscribe instead to what might be termed
the combined 'risk-avoidance'/'subsistence guarantee' view, whereby both
parties to the relation (merchant and/or employer, rubber tapper) benefit
economically from the arrangement. The dynamic of the latter is
consequently reinterpreted: the debt relation ceases to be a forcible method of
extracting surplus labour (= a form of unfree labour), and thus a source of
acute and continuing struggle between tapper and merchant or employer, and
becomes instead a non-coercive, tension-free—and thus benign—form of
patron/clientage, a mutually-beneficial arrangement freely entered into by all
concerned.46
In a similar vein, Jansen and Roquas show not just how capitalist
accumulation by a wealthy landowner in Honduras is centrally dependent on
debt relations with his workers, but also how this relationship prevents them
from linking their poverty to his riches, attributing the latter instead to
supernatural causation in the form of a pact with the devil. Rather than
promoting class consciousness, therefore, the existence of debt relations
contributes to a situation of false consciousness, whereby rural workers reify
their relationships with capital. Much the same point is made by de Souza
Martins with regard to the Amazon region in Brazil, where the workforce
employed by advanced multinational agribusiness enterprises is recruited and
retained by means of debt peonage, a pattern that suggests a process of
restructuring whereby dispossession (= depeasantization) accompanied by
casualization generates not free but rather unfree relations of production.
Relevant to the way in which such labour regimes in the Amazon region have
been and are reproduced is the teleological link between peonage and what
might be termed the 'tropical nastiness' doctrine, or arguments to the effect
that in Amazonia tropical disease/climate hinder/preclude the existence of
'normal' agricultural production and social relations, an issue considered here
by Nugent. Just as for employers a discourse about the innate climactic
'otherness' of Amazonia licensed slavery and peonage, therefore, so
nowadays abolitionist NGOs and postmodernists (such as Taussig) deploy the
same epistemology but for different ends. The latter infer that only its own
form of 'other'—an indigenous subject that is conceptualized these days as
the ubiquitous 'subaltern'—is truly able to survive economically in Amazonia.
Both positions—the first political economy and the postmodern version of
the 'green hell' discourse—in effect exclude the economic activity and/or
relational forms encountered in the wider (non-Amazonian) society, and
(unlike the second political economy version adhered to by opponents of
coerced labour) each adheres epistemologically to the same discourse of
Amazonia-as-untameable-Nature.47

(Dis-)Empowering Rural Agency

The politics of the agrarian question concern the revolutionary agency by the
three components of the peasantry (rich, middle and poor)—distinct in terms
of class, and thus in opposite political camps—in two systemic transitions
(from feudalism to capitalism, and from the latter to socialism). In general
terms, classical Marxism has always questioned the revolutionary potential of
an undifferentiated peasantry, allocating to it a subordinate political role in a
worker/peasant alliance. Some, such as Lenin and Kautsky, advocated merely
the political neutralization of the peasantry, while others—such as Trotsky
and Luxemburg—regarded it as actively counter-revolutionary, maintaining
that once they became proprietors, peasants would oppose further attempts to
socialize the means of production.48 In contrast to 'new' postmodern
populists, therefore, Marxism has always regarded identity/agency connected
with peasant smallholding as neither progressive politically nor viable
systemically. What Marxists do accept, however, is the ideological potency
of peasant identity, particularly when deployed in the course of agrarian
struggles as a populist mobilizing discourse to disguise the different (and
potentially antagonistic) class positions and interests of the participants.
Thus a central role was played in Latin America by better-off peasants in
mobilizations with socialist objectives (the 1959 Cuban Revolution, and the
1979 Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua) as well as non-socialist ones (the
1952 Bolivian Revolution), all of which resulted in extensive agrarian
reforms. With the demise of the landlord class as a result of post-war land
reform programmes, agrarian populism shifted to reflecting the political and
economic interests of capitalist farmers and rich peasants who—like
landlords during the pre-war era—were similarly faced with potential or
actual challenges from poor peasants and landless agricultural labourers.
Populism was the mobilizing ideology deployed by Latin American rich
peasants engaged in cash-crop cultivation. In Peru, it was used by tenants
growing coffee for the world market in the 1960s and by better-off peasants
growing coca for the international drug trade in the 1980s, and also in
Colombia, by coffee-growing small agrarian capitalists during the 1970s.49
All these peasant movements not only possessed as their main objective a
redistribution of land but also continued to exhibit a powerful combination of
nationalist and agrarian populist ideology.
During the 1990s rural grassroots movements have changed their emphasis,
away from land redistribution (although this objective remains on the
political agenda of poor peasants and agricultural labourers) and towards a
combination of opposition to neoliberal policies, declining crop prices, the
power of the state and higher taxation, and a concern with environmental and
identity politics (sustainable economic development, biodiversity,
ecofeminist and gender issues, ethnicity). This is true not just of peasants in
Latin American countries (the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in the
Mexican state of Chiapas, the Landless Rural Workers Movement in Brazil),
but also of rural producers and inhabitants plus urban consumers in
industrialized Europe and North America (the Countryside Alliance in the
UK, farmers' movements in France, the anti-capitalist mobilizations against
the World Trade Organization). Against postmodern/populist interpretations
of these movements as 'new', however, exponents of 'old' paradigms would
make the following two points: first, some of these rural mobilizations still
represent the class interests of rich peasants and commercial farmers, and
where this is not the case, mobilize on the basis of a non-progressive
ideology; and second, all these 'new' movements raise the question of the
class instrumentality of the state.50
 III

That the institution of the state, and the instrumentality of its class politics,
remains a central issue in any history of the Latin American peasantry is clear
from the contribution to this volume by Petras and Veltmeyer.51 Rejecting
currently fashionable analysis, much of which is interested only in
empowerment achieved within the existing bourgeois polity (=
'redemocratization'), and consequently either ignores the role of the state
altogether (as in the case of postmodern approaches to the peasantry), or else
downplays the significance of class in its instrumentality (preferring instead
to focus on the state as a 'strong'/'weak' institution, and whether or not it
practices 'good governance'), they contend that the major function of the state
in Latin America throughout history has been and remains to shape the
agrarian economy in the interests of the ruling class.52
At times, Petras and Veltmeyer argue, this has required a pro-peasant stance,
such as promulgating agrarian reform legislation and the provision of credit
and other inputs, while at others it has entailed an equally powerful anti-
peasant intervention. The latter has taken either a direct form, such as the
exercise in periods of acute class conflict of violence and/or military
repression against guerrilla movements and rural-based armed struggle, or an
indirect (but more insidious) form based on the political strategy of co-opting
peasant movements and/or leaders. The main strength of the neoliberal state
in Latin America, Petras and Veltmeyer suggest, derives paradoxically from
the weakness of its rural opponents: the incapacity of contemporary anti-
systemic movements in Brazil and Mexico, which contain a sizeable and
socio-economically heterogeneous rural following, to build significant
political support/alliances in the cities, coupled with the mass exodus of
peasants from Ecuador, Colombia, Central America and the Caribbean.
 THE STATE OF THE PEASANTRY?

Broadly speaking, there currently exist at least four different theories about
the political nature and economic role of the peasant/state relationship:
Marxist, Keynesian, neoliberal and what might be termed a culturalist
version. Although there are obvious differences of emphasis, these four
models all circulate within the domain of political economy, and either
currently attract or have attracted in the recent past the attention of those with
an interest in Third World and/or Latin American economic development.
Their politics notwithstanding, these four concepts generate two distinct—
and actually opposing—views about the peasant/state relation: whereas in
Marxist theory the state is ranged against the peasant smallholder, in their
different ways Keynesianism, neoliberalism and culturalism all correspond to
frameworks in which the state intervenes on behalf of the peasantry.
Because for Marxism the peasantry is internally differentiated in terms of
class, the first model of peasant/state relations does not allocate smallholders
as such either a progressive role or an independent voice where the
instrumentality of the state is concerned. Both the latter characteristics are
extended by Marxism not to peasants but rather to agricultural workers and
rich peasants in their respective roles as representatives of labour and capital
engaged in class struggle, initially for the control of the state apparatus and
subsequently through the state apparatus itself. Thus the revolutionary seizure
of the state is historically the political objective of two different classes. As
an ascendant bourgeoisie composed of small capitalist producers, rich
peasants are in the course of a capitalist transition engaged in conflict against
the state which represents the political interests of the landlord class, only to
be dislodged in turn from state power by the proletariat and poor peasantry in
the course of a transition to socialism. Since in the course of this class
formation/struggle a peasantry is subject to a continuous process of
'depeasantization', it cannot discharge a similarly autonomous historical role;
for this reason, an homogeneous/undifferentiated peasantry is not considered
by Marxism to constitute an independent revolutionary force capable of
realizing its own specific interests/programme as a result of seizure/exercise
of state power.53
In the second model of peasant/state relations—the ECLA (United Nations
Economic Commission for Latin America) or Keynesian—by contrast,
smallholders are the economic beneficiaries of state intervention, but only
incidentally so. Whereas many still adhere to the view that, in the debate
about state planning versus the free market, ECLA was firmly in the camp of
the former, its position was rather more complex. Arguing that the existing
monopoly of agricultural land by unproductive landlords prevented this
resource from becoming available to the economically more efficient
smallholders who would cultivate it and sell the crops they grew, some of
those connected with ECLA advocated political intervention by the state: the
latter, it was argued, would expropriate landlords, thereby enabling land to be
converted into a commodity available to the most efficient producer.54 The
dual assumption was, first, that an efficient agricultural market would involve
only domestic producers, and second, that commercially-minded peasant
smallholders would as a consequence be the main beneficiaries of this
politically interventionist policy undertaken by the state. In short, ECLA was
not opposed to the market as such but favoured state intervention in order to
make the market work. The primary objectives of this Keynesian policy were
economic: land reform would not only break the monopoly over land
exercised by inefficient landlords but also turn land into a commodity. Only
insofar as they were economically the most efficient producers, however,
would Latin American peasants gain advantage from this process.
Much the same is true of the third approach to peasant/state relations in Latin
America: the neoliberal model, widely applied throughout Latin America
during the 1970s and 1980s. As with the Keynesian policy of ECLA, it is also
necessary to question a widely held view about neoliberal economic theory.
Although it is commonly assumed that the market was the institution around
which neoliberal theory circulated, the focus of its discourse was—like that
of ECLA—on the role of the state.55 Where agriculture is concerned,
monetarists perceive the state as discharging a dual but limited role: on the
one hand a positive one, to guarantee the reproduction of private property
relations and the free market; and on the other a negative one—the
simultaneous prevention of monopolies, precisely since the
formation/operation of the latter precludes the freedoms embodied in each of
the former (individual property, the market).56 If it is the case that
agricultural commodities are being produced efficiently for the market by
medium- or small-scale peasant farming, then the latter is an economic
category that is as acceptable to neoliberalism as any other kinds of rural
enterprise. In terms of political objective, therefore, the monetarist policies
applied to the Latin American peasantry during the 1970s and 1980s
represent to some degree a continuity of and not a break with earlier ECLA
development strategy: namely, using the state to ensure the functioning of the
market.
The fourth approach to the state is one which, despite (or, indeed, perhaps
because of) its nineteenth-century origins, has until recently attracted little
interest. It involves what might be termed the culturally specific state, in
which this institution coincides with and therefore represents the political and
economic interests of a particular ethnic group.57 According to this
conceptualization, the nation composed of a culturally homogeneous 'people'
united by common language, customs and ethnicity, both precedes and need
not necessarily ever result in the formation of the state.58 Whereas the
existence of the state is itself dependent on a preexisting 'people' who
themselves form a nation, the presence of a linguistically/culturally
homogeneous 'people' does not of itself lead to or require state
formation/reproduction. Nationhood, or the active realization of a nation
within the boundaries of the state, happens when a 'people' formally asserts
its 'national spirit' and 'national will', as a result of which the state henceforth
embodies 'a collective personality, legal and political', and can thus be said,
first, to have come about as a consequence of a 'people' exercising agency as
such, and second, to constitute the political expression of this particular
unity.59

States of Uncertainty?

The implications for the peasantry in contemporary Latin America of these

different theories about the role of the state are not difficult to discern. If
there is a space for peasants qua peasants in Marxist theory about the state,
then it is a politically reactionary one: namely, their role in Bonapartism, a
situation usually (but not necessarily only) of economic crisis in which
independent peasant proprietors are to be found in the vanguard of the
counter-revolution.60 This pessimistic interpretation is borne out by the role
of Latin American peasants in a number of different contexts over the latter
half of the twentieth century. Once they had become proprietors as a result of
agrarian reform, therefore, the unionized rich tenants who led the peasant
movement against the landlord class in the eastern lowlands of Peru during
the early 1960s not only ceased to be union members but also turned on poor
peasants and agricultural labourers (their erstwhile allies in the anti-landlord
struggle), and in the post-reform era deployed many of the same kinds of
exploitative/oppressive practices/mechanisms as had landlords (low
agricultural wages, land evictions, bonded labour relations).61
In a similar vein, attempts by the three most significant left-wing regimes in
Latin America—Castro's Cuba from 1959 onwards, the Chilean Popular
Unity government of Allende of the early 1970s, and the Nicaraguan
Sandinista government during the 1980s—to plan/regulate agricultural
production/distribution on behalf the urban and rural working class by, for
example, extending the existing agrarian reform programme to include poor
peasants and agricultural labourers, improving wage levels received by
urban/rural labour, and controlling basic commodity prices, was in each case
either opposed, blocked or undermined by better-off peasants.62 This was
possible because, in the case of Cuba, the sector of privately owned farms
was not only considerable but composed of average sized units far in excess
of those elsewhere in Latin America, a situation which in turn contributed to
the rapid expansion of the black market, and—from the late 1980s onwards—
decollectivization and land privatization.63
It could be argued that a main shortcoming in the Keynesian approach of
ECLA to peasant/state relations in Latin America was the assumption that a
global division of labour would separate countries in the Third World, where
the focus would be on agricultural production, from those in metropolitan
capitalist contexts, where nations would concentrate on industrial production.
What Keynesian theory failed to understand was that an effect of the spread
of capitalism would be that Latin American peasants had to compete with
commodities produced by the advanced agriculture in metropolitan contexts,
and it was into this theoretical gap, about the boundaries of the market in
which Latin American peasants would compete economically, that
neoliberalism inserted itself. Only peasant proprietors who were better-off
managed to do this, while those who did not featured increasingly in the
fourth model of peasant/state relations: the culturally-specific state.
The reasons for re-emergence towards the end of the twentieth century of a
nineteenth-century view about the realization of both nationhood and
statehood in the form of a culturally-specific state, are too obvious to require
much elaboration. From the Balkans to the erstwhile Soviet Union, the break-
up of the existing state has resulted in a process of political decentralization
not of the state itself but much rather of national identity, which has in turn
given rise to claims to nationhood/statehood on the basis of ever-smaller and
much older territorial units. In short, a process which involves the reassertion
by those claiming to form a 'people' possessing ancient territorial rights, on
which the realization of a nation within the boundaries of the state are now
increasingly based.64 In the case of Latin America, this kind of state (re-
)formation has been advocated historically both by socialists (José Carlos
Maríategui, Hildebrando Castro Pozo) and by populists (Victor Raúl Haya de
la Torre), all of whom insisted on building independent nations on the basis
of what they perceived as an 'authentic' indigenous form of 'lnca
communism',65 More recently, the idea of a culturally-specific state has been
advanced by indigenista theorists now associated with the application of a
postmodern subaltern studies project to the study of Latin American
peasants.66 This view has been supported by, among others, Albó with regard
to the Bolivian Aymara, on the grounds that smallholding peasants belonging
to that indigenous group had a culture and viable economic organizational
forms that were specific to it, and as such constituted a nation that preceded
Spanish colonialism.67
 NOTES

1. Symptomatic postmodern theoretical approaches to the study of peasants and/or the subject of
economic development in the so-called Third World would include not only those by Clark [1991],
Friedmann [1992], Foweraker [1995], Escobar [1995], Brohman [1996], and Williams [2001], but also
many of the contributions to the collections edited by Eckstein [1989], Foweraker and Craig [1990],
Escobar and Alvarez [1992], Galli [1992], Pieterse [1992], Schuurman [1993], Booth [1994], Sinclair
[1995], and Fox and Starn [1997]. The literature about the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas and its
background is vast, and includes Clarke and Ross [1994], Reygadas et al. [1994], Cleaver [1994], Tello
Díaz [1995], Gilly [1998], Díaz Polanco [1998], Harvey [1990; 1998], Otero [1999], Burgete Cal y
Mayor [2000], Weinberg [2000], Nash [2001], and Hodges [2002].
2. Rather touchingly, some neoclassical economic interpretations of the peasantry continue to puzzle
over whether or not peasants act as 'rational economic agents'. This, as every serious scholar of the
peasantry knows, is a deeply patronizing and now wholly discredited argument about whether or not
peasants are stupid; that peasants are not stupid, and do the best they can with the economic resources
at their disposal (i.e., those which they can afford to purchase) is an uncontroversial proposition which
nowadays occupies no-one apart from a few out-of-date neoclassical economic historians. It is, to put it
bluntly, of the same epistemological order as the medieval theological debate about how many angels
can fit on the head of a pin, and about as relevant to contemporary concerns. Because neoclassical
economic historians focus on 'choice-making' individuals exercising 'subjective preferences', they fail
to ask what is nowadays the more interesting question: why do peasants generally have only these and
not other economic resources? The latter is a question that, historically, has always been asked by
Marxists.
3. Even neoclassical economic historians [Fogel, 2000; Sivakumar, 2001:57, note 32] acknowledge the
existence of an epistemological overlap between their own views and those advanced by the 'new'
populist postmodernism. Thus, for example, Fogel—whose marginalist economic framework informed
the conservative and highly influential revisionist account [Fogel and Engerman, 1974] of antebellum
plantation slavery as non-coercive/'benign'/'mild'—deploys the familiar anti-foundational argument of
postmodernism in support of his present and equally conservative claim that poverty is no longer about
material but spiritual deprivation [Fogel, 2000]. In his view, therefore, grassroots agency (=
assertiveness/resistance) should henceforth be aimed at the realization of cultural empowerment (=
postmodern agenda), which according to him has now replaced economic empowerment (= modern
agenda) within the context of capitalism. The reactionary role of postmodernism in this discourse is
evident from the following [Fogel, 2000:2]: 'The agenda for egalitarian policies that has dominated
reform movements for most of the past century—what I call the modernist egalitarian agenda—was
based on material redistribution. The critical aspect of a postmodern egalitarian agenda is not the
distribution of money income, or food, or shelter, or consumer durables. Although there are still glaring
inadequacies in the distribution of material commodities that must be addressed, the most intractable
maldistributions in rich countries such as the United States are in the realm of spiritual or immaterial
assets. These are the critical assets in the struggle for self-realization' (original emphasis).
4. The periodic attempt by some commentators [Friedland, 1991; Buttel, 2001] to move beyond the
rival populist/Marxist interpretations of agrarian political economy by declaring them intellectually
redundant, have failed precisely because of the inescapable epistemological and political importance of
this dichotomy. Although Buttel [2001] wants to replace populist and Marxist paradigms, what he ends
up with amounts to a perception of capitalism-without-class, an eclectic epistemological mishmash
('cultural-turn rural studies', 'actor-network studies', 'agri-food regulationism', postmodernism, post-
developmentalism, etc.) that, on closer inspection, turns out to divide into the rival paradigms he so
desperately wishes to transcend.
5. As has been pointed out elsewhere [Brass, 2000], in contexts where even a half-hearted socialist
politics has been defeated, it is all too easy for the existing and/or continuing antagonism/opposition to
capital to be channelled in a reactionary populist direction. Thus, for example, a better illustration of
just such a populist mobilization than that undertaken by Osama bin Laden is difficult to imagine. To
begin with, he himself is a rich and powerful capitalist who nevertheless espouses a backwards-looking
ideological worldview, projecting a combination of anti-modern discourse/agency on behalf of the rural
poor in an underdeveloped country on the one hand and an endorsement of traditionalist belief plus
religious purity on the other. More importantly, both he and his anti-materialistic/anti-socialist/anti-
Western views were first privileged and then reproduced from above, by the USA in furtherance of its
struggle against a secular and materialistic communism in Afghanistan.
6. Marxists have long warned against this kind of nonsense, but to little avail. Those who were
excluded from the academy during the 1990s for criticizing postmodernism as a form of neoliberalism,
and pointing out its unambiguously conservative (not to say reactionary) political antecedents and
effects, are currently witnessing an entirely predictable form of academic venality. Now that these
Marxist criticisms have been vindicated, therefore, and the postmodern/neoliberal bandwagon has as a
consequence begun to slow down, some anti-Marxist neoliberal postmodernists have surreptitiously
watered down or shed their neoliberalism/postmodernism, and not only joined the ranks of its critics
but also claimed that they were there all along! This kind of opportunism suggests that erstwhile
postmodernists/neoliberals have little to learn from their fabled precursor, the Vicar of Bray.
7. For examples of the peasant-as-cultural-'other' approach of anthropology, see among many others the
classic texts by Redfield [1930; 1941; 1956; 1958], Foster [1962; 1965] and Wolf [1966; 1971].
Historically, such culturalist images of peasant society have been particularly dominant in the case of
Puerto Rico and Mexico, where the peasantry were depicted by anthropologists as belonging to (and
constitutive of) a self-contained and hermetically sealed socio-economic system [de Alcántara, 1984].
Such 'folk peoples', according to Redfield [1930:2], 'enjoy a common stock of tradition; they are the
carriers of a culture [which] preserves its continuity from generation to generation…such a culture is
local'. Similarly, the concept 'culture of poverty'—associated with the work of Oscar Lewis [1962;
1966; 1967a]—attributed rural poverty to psychologically innate negative cultural traits, while for
Malinowski the participation in or withdrawal from market activity by Mexican peasants was governed
by cultural factors, and not competition or declining prices/profits [Malinowski and de la Fuentes
1982:177–9]. In responding to Stavenhagen [1967:490], who accused him of saying 'being poor is
terrible, but having a culture of poverty is not so bad', Lewis [1967b: 499] not only seems almost to
agree but also to anticipate the postmodern celebration of culture-as-empowerment when he states: 'I
am also suggesting that the poor in a pre-capitalistic caste-ridden society like India had some
advantages over modern slum-dwellers because the people were organized in castes and panchayats…
[p]erhaps Ghandi [sic] had the urban slums in mind when he wrote that the caste system was one of the
greatest inventions of mankind.'
8. Applied by Murra [1972] to the organizational modalities of smallholders in the Peruvian highlands,
the concept 'verticality' refers to exchanges between peasants, rural communities, or land-based kin
groups (ayllus) occupying different Andean ecosystems, where survival not surplus is the object of
agricultural production. It is argued—again, largely by anthropologists [e.g., Fioravanti-Molinie, 1973]
—that culturally determined reciprocity embodied in traditional community institutions (mink'a, ayni,
compadrazgo) constitute an indigenous levelling mechanism which guarantees the subsistence of the
rural population. It also prevents capital accumulation and peasant differentiation, and thus accounts for
the continued existence of the Andean peasantry. For more on Andean 'verticality' and more generally
the role of traditional institutional forms in rural communities, see Crabtree, Assies, Jansen and Roquas,
and McNeish (this volume).
9. See Hilton [1976].
10. Both the 1949 Chinese Revolution and the Cuban Revolution a decade later contributed to this
anxiety.
11. The prevailing orthodoxy in the 1960s/1970s debate about the mode of production in Latin
American agriculture—a debate which in theoretical and political terms closely mirrored that taking
place with regard to India [Rudra et al., 1978; Thorner, 1982]—was that economic stagnation, low
growth rates, and inflation were all due to the continued existence of an economically backward
feudal/semi-feudal agrarian sector (for similar claims by Stalinist historiography, see Afanasyev et al.
[1974], Ulyanovsky [1974:328, 329, 334, 350, 354], and Rutenberg [1988: ch. VII]). Consequently,
exponents of this view argued, an as-yet absent process of capital accumulation could begin only when
the expropriation of unproductive latifundia permitted the redistribution of under- or unused land to
economically productive (but pauperized) smallholders throughout rural Latin America. The political
subtext of this dualistic framework—itself a variation on other similarly dichotomous economic models
('market'/'subsistence', 'modern'/'traditional', etc.)—is, argues Borón [1981:57–8], that 'a landowning
fraction of the bourgeoisie would appear or outwardly perform as a decadent landed gentry. Indeed, the
whole social structure of each formation, its culture, State and ideology, reflected the overdetermination
of the nascent capitalist order by archaic social relations. So powerful were these feudal aristocratic
elements that, for a whole epoch, there was an unfortunate and widespread belief among popular forces
that the socio-economic system in Latin America was not capitalism but feudalism.' Among those who
challenged this orthodoxy at that conjuncture were Frank [1967:221–42; 1969:350–61; 1979],
Stavenhagen [1968], Vitale [1968], and Petras [1970:381–2].
12. For the details of this process in Latin America, see Burbach and Flynn [1980] and Teubal [1987].
13. Whereas the text by di Tella [1965] on populism and Peronism makes no mention of a rural
dimension to this discourse, the accounts by Hennessy [1969:36ff.], about Latin American populism
generally, and by Cotler [1971], about populism and the military in late 1960s Peru, do.
14. The most influential neo-populist theoretician has been and remains A.V.Chayanov (1888–1937),
who at the beginning of the twentieth century denied that capitalist penetration of agriculture in Russia
entailed 'depeasantization'. Instead he argued, first, that peasant economy remained the same despite
exogenous systemic transformations (feudalism, capitalism, socialism) to which it was impervious, and
second, that the economic reproduction of each individual peasant family farm was determined
endogenously, by its demographic cycle. According to Chayanov [1966; 1991], the basic aspects of
rural economic organization such as landholding size, food output, and work motivation ('self-
exploitation') by sociologically undifferentiated petty commodity producers were governed by a
specific combination of factors. These were the size of the peasant family itself, the ratio of working to
non-working household members (or the labour/consumer balance), and the necessity of having to
provide all the latter with their subsistence requirements (the drudgery of labour).
15. For examples of the argument attributing 'peasant persistence' to economic efficiency in the case of
Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Ecuador, and Peru, see Reinhardt [1988], Gordillo [1988], Glover and
Kusterer [1990], and Korovkin [1997]. Over the last two decades the most influential exponents of
Chayanovian views [Lipton, 1977; Bates, 1981, 1983, 2001:30ff.; Shanin, 1990] have argued with
particular reference to India and Africa that rural development and food production should be based on
efficient peasant smallholding cultivation. Any economic failure on the part of the latter is attributed by
Lipton and Bates to 'urban bias', or the conceptualization of appropriation and conflict not as intra-
sectoral but rather as inter-sectoral (the countryside, agriculture and peasants all ranged against the
state, the city, industry, urban workers, bureaucrats and industrialists). In order to off-set urban bias,
they advocate the adoption in Third World countries of pro-peasant policies such as higher crop prices,
lower taxation and larger agricultural price supports and subsidies.
16. See, for example, Cardoso and Faletto [1979:127ff.], Collier [1979], Stein [1980], Coniff [1982],
Loaeza [1995], Mayorga [1995], Perruci [1995], Cammack [2000], Philip [2000], and Demmers,
Fernández Jilberto and Hogenboom [2001]. The analyses of agrarian populism in Mexico by Sanderson
[1981] and Knight [1998] are exceptions in this regard, and more typical is the assessment by Coniff
[1982:13, 20] who, despite noting the populist antecedents of indigenismo, nevertheless maintains that
'[p]opulism was urban in Latin America…populist movements and programs nearly always appeared in
major cities'. Most recent analyses of Latin American populism remain mired in the epistemology
structuring the earlier text on the subject by Laclau [1977:143ff.], beyond which none have managed to
move theoretically. The political significance of this is not difficult to discern: in his analysis of
populism, therefore, lie the roots of the subsequent rightwards trajectory followed by Laclau [1985;
1989; 1990; 1992], for whom socialism, class and class struggle have now been abandoned, and
replaced by (bourgeois) 'redemocratization' as the desirable end of grassroots action. The latter is for
Laclau now the only possible form of agency: that is, a populist/postmodern form of mobilization based
on 'new social movements', a plural-identity/non-class form of empowerment within (and thus
compatible with) capitalism.
17. See Ianni [1975] and Borón [1981].
18. That Bonapartism is virtually indistinguishable from populism is clear from the observation by
Marx [1979:194] about the role of the former in the 1848 French revolution: 'Bonaparte looks on
himself…as the representative of the peasants…[and he] wants to make the lower classes of the people
happy within the framework of bourgeois society'. The political role of Bonapartism during the early
stages of the Russian revolution was outlined by Trotsky [1934:663] in the following manner, which
suggests that he, too, regarded it as populist: 'The design had been by common consent to establish
above the democracy and the bourgeoisie, who were paralysing each other, a "real" sovereign power.
This idea of a master of destiny rising above all classes, is nothing but Bonapartism. If you stick two
forks into a cork symmetrically, it will, under very great oscillations from side to side, keep its balance
even on a pin point: that is the mechanical model of the Bonapartist superarbiter.' The link between
Bonapartism on the one hand, and populism and fascism on the other, emerges from the case of 1930s
Germany, where the same concept was applied by Trotsky [1975:454] to the intermediary political
regime that replaced bourgeois democracy and pre-figured fascism: 'a government of the sabre as the
judge-arbiter of the nation—that's just what Bonapartism is. The sabre by itself has no independent
programme. It is the instrument of "order". It is summoned to safeguard what exists. Raising itself
politically above the classes, Bonapartism…represents in the social sense, always and at all epochs, the
government of the strongest and firmest part of the exploiters' (original emphasis).
19. Unsurprisingly, academic assessments of the positive/negative impact of populism on the direction
of grassroots mobilization in Latin America have been influenced strongly by the prevailing intellectual
climate within the academy itself, a point that can be illustrated with reference to the case of Brazil.
Hence the marked contrast between the pessimistic view of de Kadt [1970], who regarded the populism
of Catholic radicals as contributing to the political weakness of rural agency in Brazil at the end of the
'development decade', and the over-optimistic/endorsing approach to this same mobilization
subsequently on the part of Lehmann [1990], who also saw Catholic basismo as populist but—at the
height of the postmodern reaction against development—celebrated this as a positive feature,
characterizing basismo as an 'authentic' process of 'from below' empowerment. The more recent
reassessments by Burdick [1993] and Hewitt [1998], however, have restored an element of intellectual
seriousness to this debate: not only do they show how conservative base Christian communities are, and
how these kind of organizations have in effect depoliticized grassroots agency in Brazil, but their
negative and critical interpretations vindicate the earlier less positive prognosis. (One can only smile at
the bafflement now expressed by adherents of the overoptimistic view [Lehmann and Bebbington,
1998]: 'ln an unexpected convergence, the anti-statism of neo-liberalism has found partners in the
basista hostility to bureaucracy cultivated by the NGO movement'.) The correctness of the pessimistic
interpretation—much 'new' grassroots discourse is neither grassroots, new, nor empowering—is borne
out by many of the contributions to this volume.
20. The result has been to reinstate a view of rural life in Latin America not so dissimilar from an
earlier and long-outdated perception of this as a tension-free rural arcadia, epitomized in the following
idealized description of the Chilean hacienda system at the beginning of the twentieth century [Mills,
1914:98, 132]: 'The [rural] working classes, apart from sudden ebulitions of temper, are a docile,
easily-led people, without much social or political ambition…there is no tyranny, for the inquilino [=
labour-service tenant] is in no way tied to the land, and can move off whenever he likes…The same
leisurely and wasteful ways persist in every direction. But it must be confessed that life on the hacienda
is often very pleasant. Many of them are large, well built, delightfully equipped, and money is
plentiful.'
21. For these views about the Zapatista National Liberation Army in the Mexican State of Chiapas, see
Cleaver [1994]. This kind of uncritical approach to Zapatista ideology leads Cleaver [1994:147] to a
positive assessment of 'from below' identity politics: 'Among the Indian nations and peoples of the
Americas…the affirmation of national identity, of cultural uniqueness, and of linguistic and political
autonomy is rooted not only in an extensive critique of the various forms of Western Culture and
capitalist organization which were imposed on them through conquest, colonialism and genocide, but
also in the affirmation of a wide variety of renewed and reinvented practices that include both social
relations and the relationship between human communities and the rest of nature.' Unsurprisingly, this
results not only in a corresponding idealization by Cleaver [1994:153, 154] of the golden age myth ('ln
traditional Indian society life was not so hard') but also to abandon the notion of class differentiation
('What is unusual and exciting about these developments is how…struggles are not being…
subordinated to "class interests"…[and represent instead] a workable solution to the post-socialist
problem of revolutionary organization and struggle'), a view which ignores the fact that coffee
production—albeit by peasant cultivators—has in many Latin America contexts licensed the emergence
of small agrarian capitalists.
22. Each of these two approaches, which attribute an efficacy to 'moral economy' and to 'everyday
forms of resistance', is associated with the work of Scott [1976; 1985]. Both are about the agency—
consisting of smallscale, quotidian and individual acts of resistance—undertaken by peasant family
farmers to reproduce themselves as an ubiquitous middle peasantry, and also the ideology—'moral
economy'—deployed by them in defence of such acts. The difficulties arising from any attempt to
classify all acts/forms of 'from below' cultural resistance as inherently progressive politically, however,
are evident from a collection [Duncombe, 2002] which attempts to do just this. For examples of
'resistance' theory as applied to rural Latin America, see Rasnake [1988], G.Smith [1989], Gould
[1990], C.Smith [1992], Urban and Sherzer [1992], Mallon [1994], Wade [1999], and Korovkin [2000].
23. Associated with the series edited by Guha [1982–89], this framework has had a profound impact on
the historiography of South Asia. As a number of commentators [Lemelle and Kelley, 1994; Howe,
1998] have pointed out, a not dissimilar process has also taken place with regard to Africa, where an
innate African cultural identity is now constructed/celebrated by exponents of an essentialist 'from
below' Afrocentric cultural nationalism.
24. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the neo-populist/neo-classical economic project of A.V. Chayanov
[1966], which essentializes peasant family farming as a pan-historical category, also finds its realization
in the postmodern theory dealing with rural agency in Latin America and India.
25. Although 'from below' agency as new social movement was a framework initially applied by
Castells [1977; 1983] to urban contexts, the categorization of peasant mobilizations in Latin America as
new social movements can be traced to the collection edited by Slater [1985].
26. Any lingering doubts about the spurious nature of the left-wing credentials attributed to
Subcomandante Marcos [2001] are dispelled by what he himself has said in a recent interview with the
Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez. Not only does Subcomandante Marcos espouse what are
unabashed populist beliefs, therefore, but he also condemns the political left, and maintains an eloquent
silence about socialism as a desirable objective of mobilization. That the agrarian mobilization in
Chiapas raises difficult questions (the idealization/essentialization of ethnic/peasant identity, the
predominance of religious ideology) about the political direction of the Zapatistas and Subcomandante
Marcos is clear from Berger [2001] and the exchange between Hellman [1999; 2000] and Paulson
[2000]. Most worryingly, in India an analogous discourse about rural cultural empowerment deployed
by the new farmers' movements is one that has much in common with that of the Hindu nationalist BJP
(the Bharatiya Janata Party) and the RSS (the National Volunteer Corps).
27. See, for example, Lehmann [1996].
28. It must be emphasized that not all the contributions to this volume agree as to how current agrarian
mobilizations in Latin America should be interpreted: thus, for example, Petras and Veltmeyer regard
the movements in Brazil and Mexico as possessing shared aims and characteristics, whereas de Souza
Martins denies this.
29. Arguments made in defence of an undifferentiated peasantry and/or peasant economy by those on
the left have frequently proved vulnerable to the positive characterization by conservatives and
landowners—those opposed to socialism, in other words—of peasant culture as an empowering
identity, a claim that not only takes many socialists by surprise, but has also led the latter to the
erroneous conclusion that those who advanced such claims were becoming more progressive
politically. The effectiveness of this line of argument in terms of class struggle waged from above
derives from the fact that the ideological defence by conservatives and/or the political right of plebeian
cultural 'otherness' enabled them similarly to defend their own (aristocratic or bourgeois) forms of
tradition/privilege/hierarchy, also in the name of cultural 'otherness'.
30. Even now it is not clear that this lesson has been fully learned by those who continue to regard
themselves as politically on the left. Thus, for example, in their introduction to a recent collection the
avowed object of which is to reassert the value of Marxist political economy, Lem and Leach [2002:1–
2] glibly brush aside the debates of the last decade, observing that the '[t]urn of the twentieth century
populist and liberal critiques, as well as more recent poststructuralist, feminist, and Foucauldian
assaults on Marxist analysis (and also responses to them) have come to be so familiar, and to some
extent mantric, that to review them here would be an exercise in redundancy.' One might justifiably
enquire of Lem and Leach, first, where exactly were they when that particular conflict between
Marxism and postmodernism was being waged, and what heroic deeds did they perform on the field of
battle. In a similar vein, one might also ask why, if their purpose is to restore a specifically Marxist
approach to economic development, Lem and Leach have included in their collection a chapter by
Roseberry, who—having endorsed the theoretical approach to the study of rural Latin America of
postmodernists such as J.C.Scott and Taussig [Roseberry, 1993]—was earlier aligned precisely with
those very same 'assaults on Marxist analysis'.
31. Not only does this essentialist concept of an ahistorical peasant economy/culture replace the
concept of depeasantization that is historically central to any Marxist theory about the dynamic
processes of class formation/struggle and systemic development/transformation, therefore, but—as
argued by Brass in his contribution to this volume—it is a category that has been deployed throughout
the twentieth century by the political right in Europe (Germany, Spain, the UK) and the United States
as well as Latin America (Peru, Bolivia, Argentina). A major obstacle to understanding this fact has
been the tendency to depict as absolute the landlord/peasant divide, an approach which fails to
appreciate that ideology corresponding to the agrarian myth possesses both an aristocratic and a
plebeian variant. Each variant of the agrarian myth—the landlord/aristocratic no less than the
peasant/plebeian—valorizes and recognizes the hierarchical immanence of the other. Indeed, it could be
argued that landlords object to peasants only when they cease to be peasants, and become either
agrarian capitalists or landless rural workers: it is in the latter capacity, as class-specific rural subjects,
that erstwhile peasants mount a challenge to the landlord class.
32. Jansen and Roquas also point out that, by maintaining that devil pact narratives in Central America
correspond to peasant resistance against capitalism, Taussig is in fact defending an essentialist concept
of peasant economy, whether or not he realizes that this is the case. For his part, Edelman attempts to
explain the contradiction—between a rich landowner who is said by the rural poor to have a pact with
the devil (= negative), and the fact that these same rural poor nevertheless identify with him, and thus
perceive him in a positive light—by arguing that the pact is not about wealth but about sexual
predation. For instances of devil pact narratives in rural Peru and Bolivia, see Lara [1973].
33. The three kinds of exchange are as follows. The first type involves a situation where the subject
concerned himself enters into a Faustian pact, exchanging his own soul for riches and power. The
second is structurally the same, except that in this case the object is to enrich or empower not oneself
but rather someone else. Both exchanges involve no one other than the person entering the pact and the
devil. These two variants have to be distinguished from another and structurally very different kind of
pact, in which the same subject also enters into a pact with the devil, but instead of exchanging his own
soul for wealth and power, he exchanges that of others—his own workers, who die suddenly and for no
apparent reason, or that of his kinsfolk. In terms of class, these three exchanges give rise to equally
different kinds of discourse. Accordingly, the first two types, where the subject involved exchanges
directly with the devil, can be acceptable ideologically to peasants and workers, since in these cases the
subject concerned bargains with his own property (his soul). Someone who becomes rich but forfeits
eternal salvation may redistribute some of the riches gained thereby to poor peasants and agricultural
labourers, in the process giving rise to the discourse about patronage which circulates about those who
become rich as a result of being in a pact with the devil. Similarly, the person who enters into the
Faustian pact can be said to have sold his soul for the benefit of others. Such transactions generate or
reproduce the notion of 'self-sacrifice', 'generosity' and 'selflessness', all of which lend credibility to the
concept of an exchange between a landowner on the one hand and a poor peasant or worker as an equal
one, involving reciprocity. In short, they can be—and are—perceived by the poor at the rural grassroots
as virtuous exchanges, from which others (and themselves) benefit materially. For this reason, these
two narratives generate a discourse which both recognizes yet simultaneously legitimizes (and thus
accepts) material inequality and wealth, a fact which gives rise in turn to the apparently contradictory
element of patronage. In terms of class, therefore, the first two kinds of exchange are also very different
from third, since what is bargained in the latter case is not the property of the exchanger—his own soul
—but rather that of others: other souls, the property of others. It is this exchange that comes within the
ambit of capitalism, where surplus-value (= soul) is extracted from the worker and appropriated by the
capitalist (= rich peasant/landowner=the devil). In structural terms, it is the same as the European
vampire legend, where Count Dracula, also a landowner, sucks the blood of peasants in order to benefit
himself. In both cases (Faust, Dracula), therefore, it is the property (souls, blood) of others (peasants,
the poor) which is appropriated for private (= capitalist) gain. This kind of transaction involves its
subject exchanging indirectly that which is not his to exchange, and generates what is the most negative
(and, from the point of view of the village poor, threatening) variant of the Faustian legend: someone is
said to be not so much in a pact with the devil (= from which he suffers and others might benefit) as in
league with the latter (= from which others suffer and only he benefits), i.e. an agent of
darkness/evil/(capitalism).
34. The element of false consciousness is linked directly to the discourse about free choice in the
Christian narrative: humanity can choose to be bad if it wants to be (= enter a pact with the devil), and
reject 'good' (= God), but in doing so it forgoes salvation and eternal life. In other words, those who are
—or become—rich/'different' are permitted to be so by Christianity, since the latter extends them the
right of choosing to be so. This is the way in which consciousness becomes false: disagreement and
condemnation is permitted, but outright opposition—in the form of agency to rectify the situation—is
not. Much rather, rectification or the pursuit of justice is something which is the preserve of God in
heaven (not humanity on earth). It is indeed conservative, being also passive and fatalistic, and in this
way it generates false consciousness among the rural poor. In other words, opposition to the landowner
is symbolic only: the Faustian pact narrative recognizes the injustice of-but does not challenge—the
basis of economic inequality (along the lines of 'we know it is unfair, but it is something about which
we can do nothing').
35. The relevant texts are by Lenin [1964] and Kautsky [1988].
36. Other Marxists took a slightly different view. Kritsman [1984] focused on exploitative relationships
within peasant households, and Kautsky [1988] maintained that although large farms were
economically more efficient than smallholdings, they did not necessarily displace them. The reason for
this was that a large agribusiness enterprise drew its (mainly seasonal) workforce from the surrounding
peasant family farms. In some important respects, the American road in Lenin's two-path model of
agrarian transformation is similar to the ECLA model. Whereas ECLA saw land reform as a means of
avoiding revolution, by giving land to all the peasantry (and thus buying them off), Lenin by contrast
saw it as a means of hastening revolution, since it would lead to open and increasingly acute struggle
between capitalist peasant farmers and landless agricultural labourers.
37. For debates about the agrarian question in Latin America, see among others de Janvry [1981],
Harris [1978; 1992], Winson [1978; 1982], and Reynolds [1997]. Although by no means all Marxists,
most of the contributors to this volume both refer to and accept the importance of the agrarian question
as having something to say about the way in which peasants in Latin America are transformed. By
contrast, most 'new' postmodern populists either ignore the agrarian question altogether, or else deny
that it is any longer relevant to an understanding of the peasantry in contemporary Latin America.
38. The subsequent fate of most land reforms in Latin America and elsewhere during the second half of
the twentieth century, however, challenges the optimism of those who advocate the long-term
economic viability of peasant family farming. None have survived, not even in China or Cuba, and all
have been swept away by market forces. This suggests not that the reforms were wrong, but that any
reform which fails to pose questions about systemic change—that is, the capitalist system itself—
cannot hope to survive.
39. This dynamic is not dissimilar to the one outlined by Baraona [1965] with regard to Ecuador, where
an historical process of internal/external encroachment (asedio interno, asedio externo) onto rural
estates occurred, involving erstwhile labour-service tenants deprived of their usufruct rights to hacienda
land, who were re-employed as landless casual workers, and then began to occupy estate land.
40. Given the widespread conflict over Amazonian land rights (on which see the contributions by
Nugent, Assies and de Souza Martins), and the resulting insecurity of tenure faced by smallholding
cultivators in the region, it would perhaps be inappropriate for this reason alone to characterize such
petty commodity producers as independent proprietors. Against this image of an innately ephemeral
form of agrarian existence, however, Nugent argues that—like those who work in the urban informal
sector throughout Latin America, about which there is a large literature—peasants in Amazonia are not
economically marginal, but engage in similar kinds of informal economic activity (harvesting Brazil
nuts, mining gold) beyond the gaze/regulation/control of the Brazilian state.
41. As Crabtree points out, an important factor in this process was a decrease in state intervention in the
agrarian sector, and a concomitant reduction in credit provision to smallholders. Murray makes much
the same point with regard to Chile.
42. This problem, of defining the agrarian question at the level of national economies, has been noted
by Watts and Goodman [1997:6], who rightly criticize Byres and Bernstein for their narrow focus 'on
the internal dynamics of [agrarian] change at the expense of what we now refer to as globalisation…the
agrarian question for Byres is something that can be "resolved" (see also Bernstein…) [which] seems to
imply that once capitalism in agriculture has "matured", or if capitalist industrialization can proceed
without agrarian capitalism…then the agrarian question is somehow dead'.
43. This view is in keeping with those who attribute the continued resilience of the peasant family farm
to an exogenous cause; its role as a source of an agricultural or industrial reserve army of labour, which
provides agribusiness enterprises or rich peasants with a supply of seasonal and/or casual workers.
44. That neoclassical economic historiography should deny the existence/efficacy of bonded labour is
in a sense unsurprising, since it is a theoretical framework the epistemology of which posits the
existence of an individual choice-making subject always engaged in the exercise of subjective
preferences in the context of what neoclassical economic historiography regards as unproblematically
free exchanges between capital and labour in the market place (see, for example, the neo-classical
economic analysis by Ortiz [1999] of rural labour markets in Colombia). More surprising, however, is
the adherence of a particular variant of Marxism, the semi-feudal thesis, to this same epistemology, a
difficulty attributable in part to low standards of scholarship (on which subject see Brass [2002]).
45. There is a way out of this dilemma: as has been argued elsewhere [Brass, 1999], the production
relations capital strives to reproduce are in certain circumstances not free but unfree ones.
46. As Assies points out, this is why neoclassical economists, such as Barham and Coome, object to
Weinstein's claim that the relations of production during the Bolivian rubber boom were pre-capitalist
and resembled a feudal mode of production. Barham and Coome can then argue that, because these
relations are 'chosen' by 'those below' and not enforced 'from above', they are in essence free, and thus
what exists systemically is not an economically inefficient pre-capitalism but much rather an
economically efficient form of capitalism—based on a free labour relation 'chosen' by and to the benefit
of all.
47. Although these 'tropical nastiness'/'green hell' claims have been refuted empirically, as Nugent
points out, it is important to distinguish between three distinct versions of this argument. The first two
circulate within the domain of political economy, but each is politically distinct, while the third—which
is postmodern—shares an epistemology with the first. The first political economy variant claims that
Amazonia is a place the 'otherness' of which precludes the kind of economic activity and relational
forms encountered in the wider society. Agricultural production in such contexts by non-indigenous
subjects is impossible, it is argued, and for this reason work in such contexts must be undertaken by
Indians. Not only is the indigenous subject constituted as the only suitable source of labour, therefore,
but a result of the workforce being composed of what in the same discourse is 'Indian-as-untameable-
Nature', work itself requires 'exceptional' measures (= coercion, brutality). This familiar discourse, in
which Indian-as-untameable-Nature merges with and becomes part of the Amazon-as-untameable-
Nature, is a variation on the 'green hell' argument, and one that has been used by employers everywhere
—for example, cotton planters in the antebellum American south—to justify coercive relations the
necessity of which derive from other causes (capitalist competition leading to overproduction and
declining profitability). It is a variant of the labour shortage argument, the focus of which is on the
supply (and not the demand) for workers. Whereas the first political economy variant has been
deployed historically by conservatives (rubber planters/employers) who—as defenders of slavery and
peonage—argue that since no one in their right minds would work in these tough conditions, economic
activity required 'abnormal'/'exceptional' relations of production, the second version of the same
discourse recognizes the environmental constraints, but denies that the environment precludes 'normal'
economic activity and—particularly—relational forms. The second of the two political economy
variants, therefore, has been and is deployed by radical opponents of unfree labour, both within and
outside Brazil. They agree about the toughness of the conditions, but disagree about the necessity of
relations such as slavery, debt bondage and peonage, arguing that if conditions do indeed amount to a
form of 'tropical nastiness', then labourers must be paid more to do this kind of work. Here it is not so
much the shortage as the cost of labour that is at issue.
48. Trotsky [1962] argued that since peasants did not constitute a class, they should be seen as a
revolutionary force only insofar as they ceased to be peasants, and—like Preobrazhensky [1980]—he
warned that because one of the first acts of a revolutionary government headed by workers would be to
expropriate all private property, the peasant proprietor should be regarded not as passively conservative
but rather as actively counter-revolutionary. Much the same point was made by Rosa Luxemburg
[1961], who opposed land seizures by peasants, since this created a new and powerful strata of
proprietors in the countryside who would—with greater success than a small group of landlords—block
further attempts to socialize the ownership of agricultural land.
49. For these peasant movements in Peru and Colombia, see Fioravanti [1974], Palmer [1992], and
Zamosc [1986]. The same was true of India, where agrarian populist ideology was invoked by rich
peasant tribals in West Bengal during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and also by the new farmers'
movements which emerged in the Green Revolution areas during the early 1980s [Brass, 1995].
50. Thus, for example, the Landless Rural Workers movement in Brazil not only eschews party
affiliation, and targets only unused land for occupation, but also includes among its ranks small farmers
who, it transpires, may in some cases own/operate holdings of up to 100 hectares in size [Stedile,
2002]. In his contribution to this volume, Assies indicates that some peasants in the rural communities
of the Northern Bolivian Amazon region also possess holdings of a similarly large size.
51. Elsewhere Petras [2002] reminds us of the important role discharged by the State in the
reproduction of imperialism. For the role of the Latin American State in restructuring the domestic
working class on behalf of national/international capital, see Vilas [1995].
52. For the concept 'redemocratization', and the attempt to recuperate a notion of a viable 'steady-state'
capitalism (= 'a citizen-based alternative'), see Biekart [1999] and Dierckxsens [2000]; just how
acceptable Latin American 'redemocratization' is to conservatives is evident from the defence of this
process by one such [Hawthorn, 2002]. From the 1970s onwards an empowering 'redemocratization' by
means of resistance was the avowed objective of anti-communist movements in eastern Europe (see, for
example, Havel et al. [1985]), many of which turned rightwards once they gained power, and embraced
not just capitalism but also neo-liberal economic policies and reactionary nationalist politics/ideology.
It is perhaps significant that the postmodern/populist call for 'redemocratization', or the realization of all
political empowerment within the confines of the existing capitalist state, has been taken up
enthusiastically by Lipset [2001], who commends those whom he terms wrongly 'socialists' for their
ideological pluralism and their acceptance of the market as a non-transcendental 'fact'. Like
postmodern/populist theorists, he too celebrates 'new social movements' as a vindication of a 'post-
Marxist' agency, claiming that henceforth this is the only viable form of grassroots action, noting that
'issues revolving around gender equality, multiculturalism…and supranational communities push
individuals and groups in directions that are independent of their socioeconomic position' [Lipset,
2001:84]. In other words, capitalism and its state can accept (and survive) every form of opposition
except one: that based on class. His first conclusion [Lipset, 2001:84–5], that '[a]ll this should make for
more conservative and smug societies', is accurate in a way that his second ('These post-Cold War
conditions bode well for democratic stability and for international peace') is not.
53. With one notable exception, these views were advanced by all those in the classical Marxist
tradition. Marx [1979] himself placed the peasantry in the camp of reaction when writing about the
1848 revolution in France, while Engels regarded farm labourers, rather than tenants or peasant
proprietors, as the most natural political ally of the urban industrial proletariat. For the process of
'depeasantization', and its connection with class formation and the struggle for the state, see Lenin
[1964]. A constant theme in Kautsky's writings on the agrarian question from the 1880s onwards was
that, as the smallholder was doomed economically, under no circumstances should an agrarian
programme implemented by a socialist government seek to revitalize peasant farming [Salvadori, 1979;
Hussain and Tribe, 1984]. Given the current enthusiasm on the part of 'new' postmodern populists for
'redemocratization', the words written by Kautsky [1902:50–51] one century ago are prescient indeed:
'[Small property owners] have despaired of ever rising by their own exertions, they expect everything
from above, and look only to the upper classes for assistance. And as all progress threatens them they
place themselves in opposition to all advance. Servility and dependence upon reaction make them not
simply the willing supporters, but the fanatical defenders of the monarchy, the church and the nobility.
With all this they remain democratic, since it is only through democracy that they can exercise any
political influence, and obtain the assistance of the public powers. …This reactionary democracy has
taken many of its ideas from the socialist thought, and many have therefore come to consider these as
but beginnings which indicate an especial transition from liberalism to socialism. The untenableness of
this position is clear today [= 1902]. Socialism has no bitterer enemy than the reactionary democracy.'
During the 1920s Preobrazhensky [1980] warned the Soviet government against raising producer prices
for foodstuffs, on the grounds that such a policy would benefit better-off peasants (kulaks), or precisely
those elements opposed to socialism. The sole exception in this regard is Eduard Bernstein [1961], the
founder of 'revisionist Marxism', who in a debate with Kautsky during the 1890s rejected Marxist
argument about class differentiation (= the vanishing 'middle strata' composed of small traders,
shopkeepers, artisans and peasants) on the grounds that the small farmer had not only not disappeared
but continued to be economically viable. There can be no doubt', Bernstein said, 'that in all of Western
Europe and, by the way, in the eastern section of the United States, the small and medium-sized
agricultural enterprises are growing in numbers, while larger or giant enterprises are declining' [Gay,
1952:193–4]. Others who adhered to this view (Eduard David, Friedrich Otto Hertz) argued that as
socialism amounted to no more than 'general well-being and spiritual culture (geisteskultur), such an
objective could be realized by productivity-enhancing aid/support provided by the state to small and
medium farmers [Gay, 1952:195].
54. This, for example, was the view of Kaldor [1964:233ff.], as outlined in a report submitted to ECLA
about the economic difficulties facing Chile in the mid-1950s. See the contribution by Murray to this
volume for additional information on this point.
55. Since for neoliberalism, the twin evils of planning and inflation that undermine the market derive
from the inability of the state to control the money supply. Because for monetarist theory the very fact
of market supply creates its own demand, economic growth requires that the market be permitted to
operate freely, without state 'interference' (regulation, taxation, etc.). The role of the state in liberal
economic theory is summed up thus by Robbins [1952:193]: 'For the Classical liberal the characteristic
function of the state…is the establishment and the enforcement of law…so far as the general
organization of production is concerned, his essential conception of the role of the state is the
conception of law-giver.' Long before its claimed 'discovery' by Isaiah Berlin, this element of
positive/negative freedoms embodied in the State was outlined by Hobhouse [1911:190]: 'Excess of
liberty contradicts itself. In short, there is no such thing; there is only liberty for one and restraint for
another. If liberty then be regarded as a social ideal, the problem of establishing liberty must be a
problem of organizing restraints; and thus the conception of a liberty which is to set an entire people
free from its government appears to be a self-contradictory ideal.'
56. On the subject of agricultural economic growth and the state, the following is a symptomatic
neoliberal statement [Friedman and Friedman, 1979:3]: The fecundity of freedom is demonstrated
most dramatically and clearly in agriculture…During most of the period of rapid agricultural expansion
in the United States the government played a negligible role. Land was made available—but it was land
that had been unproductive before…the main source of the agricultural revolution was private initiative
operating in a free market open to all.' Ironically, a similarly negative view of the state is held by many
of those who subscribe to Latin American subalternism, to an 'everyday forms of resistance theory',
and/or to a new social movements framework.
57. Perhaps the most influential exponent of this view is Bluntschli [1885: ch. II], Professor of Political
Sciences at Heidelburg in the late nineteenth century, whose ideas about the genesis and nature of the
state, and the process leading to its formation/reproduction, developed at the same time as Germany
became unified.
58. Hence the view [Bluntschli, 1885:86] that: '[A people] is a union of masses of men of different
occupations and social strata in a hereditary society of common spirit, feeling and race, bound together,
especially by language and customs, in a common civilization which gives them a sense of unity and
distinction from all foreigners, quite apart from the bond of the State.'
59. According to Bluntschli [1885:87], '[w]e are justified, then, in speaking of a national spirit
(Volksgeist) and a national will (Volkswille), which is something more than the mere sum of the spirit
and will of the individuals composing a Nation.' In many ways, his concept of transition, from nation-
in-itself (= people) to nation-for-itself (= State), mimics that of classical Marxism, from class-in-itself
to class-for-itself.
60. This much is evident from Marx's critique of Bonapartism during the 1848 revolution in France. He
regarded the Bonapartist state as backward-looking and reactionary, or the rule by 'the sabre and the
cowl' on behalf of a peasantry and lumpenproletariat (= depeasantized peasants) menaced by economic
crisis (taxes, debt, landlessness, alienation), a situation in which existing and erstwhile smallholders
struggle to restore their earlier position and/or old property relations [Marx, 1979:106, 149, 189]. The
current idealization by postmodernism and subalternists of grassroots agency (= 'resistance') undertaken
by peasants in defence of their status as traditional smallholders confirms the prescience of this critique
[Marx, 1979:188]: The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the conservative
peasant; not the peasant that strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the smallholding,
but rather the peasant who wants to consolidate this holding; not the country folk who, linked up with
the towns, want to overthrow the old order through their own energies, but on the contrary those who,
in stupefied seclusion within this old order, want to see themselves and their smallholdings saved and
favoured by the ghost of the empire. It represents not the enlightenment, but the superstition of the
peasant; not his judgement but his prejudice; not his future, but his past; not his modern Cévennes, but
his modern Vendée.'
61. The details of this 1960s Peruvian peasant movement, plus the post-reform continuation and/or
reintroduction by capitalist peasants of practices/mechanisms used by the landlord in the pre-reform
era, are outlined in Brass [1999:47ff; 2000:65ff.]. It should be emphasized that the latter case-study is
not a unique occurrence, since this pattern of post-reform fragmentation of a peasant movement united
solely in its opposition to a landlord class happened in many other contexts at that conjuncture. Much
the same occurred in the case of the peasant movement which took place in Colombia during the 1970s
[Zamosc, 1986], and also in the Indian state of Kerala, where a new class of rural capitalist emerged
from among the ranks of tenants who had themselves been active in anti-landlord struggles, and were
the beneficiaries of the land reform carried out during the 1960s [Krishnaji, 1986]. Conflict arose
subsequently within this anti-landlord front when, on the wages question, agricultural labourers
encountered fierce opposition from their rich and middle peasant employers, activists who had been in
the vanguard of the earlier struggles.
62. For the radical nature of the agrarian reform programmes carried out in Cuba, Chile and Nicaragua
over the latter half of the twentieth century, see among others de Vylder [1976], Peek [1983],
Kaimowitz [1986], Kay [1988], Ghai, Kay and Peek [1988], Habel [1991], Mesa-Lago [1994], and
Enriquez [1997]. For the imposition of an economic blockade by the United States against these three
Latin American countries, see Morley [1987]. Contrary to the claims made by opponents of Latin
American socialism—see, for example, the exchange between Colburn [1986], and Harris [1987]—the
shortages (of labour and goods) that arose in Chile during the time of Allende, Nicaragua during the
Sandinista era, and Cuba under Castro, were due not to the economic inefficiencies of planning but
rather to external blockade coupled with the internal expansion of employment and the increased wage
levels. In the case of Chile, for example, the availability of foodstuffs in 1972 was some 27 per cent
higher than in 1970, while in Cuba over the 1958–62 period real disposable income of the working
class rose by a quarter, and that of the poorest social groups doubled.
63. In the mid-1970s one-third of cultivated land in Cuba was in the non-state sector, where some
125,000 peasant proprietors owned an average of 12 hectares each, while as late as 1989 some 26 per
cent of all land was in the private sector [MacEwan, 1982; Deere, Pérez and Gonzales, 1994]. This
facilitated the emergence and expansion of the black market in Cuba, both in the 1980s and during 'the
Special Period in Peacetime'. When in 1980 the Cuban government permitted a free peasant market to
operate alongside the existing system of state planning/procurement, peasant farmers started to
decollectivize agriculture, proprietors leasing out land on a sharecropping basis rather than undertaking
direct cultivation themselves. When state-provided inputs were diverted into private production, the
free peasant market was closed down during the mid-1980s, because it threatened to undermine the
egalitarian objectives of the Cuban revolution.
64. As Bluntschli [1885:82] himself makes clear, nationhood and statehood to which it gives rise
involves nothing more than the re-assertion of a more 'authentic' historical identity underlying existing
nations/states. Hence the view that 'the Germans in the middle ages were at once a people (nation) and
a nation (Volk), while in the last few centuries [= the eighteenth and nineteenth] they ceased to be a
nation, and were rather a people divided into a number of different states, countries, and one may
almost say nations. Today [c. 1870] the German nation (Volk) has come to life again, although
individual parts of the German people form parts of non-German nations and states.' He concludes,
somewhat ominously given the events of the 1930s, by stating that '[a]lthough in our time the sense of
nationality is stronger than ever before, yet even now the ideas of "people" and "nation" nowhere fully
coincide.'
65. For a critique of the concept 'Inca communism', see Espinoza and Malpica [1970:155–8], who
blame Mariátegui for its idealization ('Mariátegui ha contribuido en mucho a la idealización del
Imperio del Tahuantinsuyo. Fue uno de los primeros en calificar su sistema de tenencia agraria como
"comunismo inkaico" y considerar al Imperio como el antecedente más remoto de los gobiernos
socialistas').
66. This issue is discussed further in the contribution by Brass.
67. The views of Albó are examined by McNeish and Brass in their contributions to this volume. The
political significance of this theory about peasant/state relations should not be underestimated, as is
clear from the case of India, where the same kinds of argument are currently being deployed by the
right-wing BJP and RSS in support of a specifically Hindu nation. It is clear that, in the case of India,
two important exponents of reactionary Hindu chauvinism, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Mahadav
Sadashiv Golwalkar, were both strongly influenced by Bluntschli's concept of a culturally-specific
State [Jaffrelot, 1996:32, 53–4]. A recent defence of the BJP by Elst [2001:306–9] attempts, wholly
implausibly, to argue that the influence of Bluntschli on Golwalkar was both minimal and 'innocent',
and thus possessed no political implications.
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The Peasantry and the State in Latin America: A
Troubled Past, an Uncertain Future

JAMES PETRAS and HENRY VELTMEYER

 INTRODUCTION

One of the ironies informing the study of peasants over the past three decades
is that, while there exist a plethora of analyses of both the peasantry and the
state, there is still no adequate theory of the relationship between them as
formed and changed over time. Numerous monographs chronicle the history
of the state in terms of its formation/support/reproduction as a macro-level
political institution, or of the peasantry as a socio-economic category with (or
without) a history in specific micro-level situations/contexts, but—except
when peasant and state are engaged in violent conflict (with one another or
against a third party)—neither feature in each other's history except
peripherally as a fleeting appearance in someone else's 'grand' narrative.1 This
is why the first part of this article briefly examines the debate on the state,
evaluating diverse views and arguments in terms of their adequacy in
explaining peasant-state relations in Latin America.
In the second section we discuss the practice of the state, specifically the
dialectic between the state and the peasantry in Latin American history as
seen 'from above', a relationship that has been complex and changing. It is a
truism, albeit an important one, that the role of the state with regard to the
peasantry is deeply influenced by the type of production unit that is dominant
and its relation to the market. The role of the state vis-à-vis the latifundio
with its smallholders, tenant farmers, sharecroppers and migratory forms of
landless or near-landless workers is significantly
different from that involving the plantation system with its seasonal but
'stationary' wage labour force. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the
rise of a quasi-industrial bourgeoisie sharing power uneasily with labour and
sectors of the agricultural elite, redirected the role of the state towards the
promotion of import substitution industrialization financed by the export
earnings of the agro-export sector. The role of the Latin American peasantry
within this scheme—the 'subordination of agriculture to industrialization'—
was designed to supply cheap labour to the cities and low cost food for the
urban labour force. The state in this context was compelled to introduce a
series of social and political reforms that would at once not only
accommodate the interests of the agrarian and industrial bourgeoisie and,
concomitantly, incorporate the urban middle and working classes into the
economic and political system, but stave off pressures for more radical
change.
With the advent of neo-liberalism in the 1980s, the relationship between the
state and the peasantry in Latin America took another turn. Under the neo-
liberal doctrine of free markets, structural adjustment and globalization [see,
inter alia, Veltmeyer and Petras, 1997; 2000], the reversal of previously
instituted reforms is accompanied by a massive displacement of small and
medium rural producers and rural workers at a time of declining urban-
industrial employment, engendering a new set of conflicts and confrontations
between the peasantry and the state.
The third part of the presentation explores the relationship between the state
and the peasantry in terms of a 'from below' response by the latter against the
'from above' imperatives of the former. Considered are three specific forms of
agency involving peasants: repression, displacement and revolution. The
generally repressive role of the state vis-à-vis the peasantry is contextualized,
so as to identify its particular and changing forms. In this connection, the
displacement of the peasantry from the land, from the agricultural sector
entirely, and increasingly decanting them across national boundaries, is not
simply a matter of 'individual choice' but of a systemic imperative driven by
state policy defined by its dominant classes. The long-term, large-scale direct
and indirect involvement of the state in the exploitation, repression and
displacement of the peasantry has engendered rebellions, reforms and
revolutions in which peasants have been the major protagonists. In colonial
Peru, Haiti and Mexico the enslaved, indentured and enserfed rural labour
force challenged colonial state power throughout the eighteenth and early
nineteenth century. In the late colonial or post-colonial liberal reform period
of history in Central America (El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua,
Guatemala), the state instituted legislative, policy and repressive measures to
bring into line (squash labour disorders)—and keep under control on the rural
estate system—rebellious peasants, indigenous peoples and landless rural
workers protesting against state actions in favour of the landed oligarchy
[Wheelock Román, 1985; Gould, 1983; Amador, 1990: Mahoney, 2001]. And
in the twentieth century, social revolutions in Mexico (1910), Bolivia (1952),
Cuba (1959) and Nicaragua (1979), had peasants playing a major role in
overthrowing the existing state.2 In other contexts, peasants and landless
workers were major actors in stimulating the development of a
comprehensive—albeit limited—agrarian reform programme. This was the
case, for example, in Chile (1965–73), Peru (1958–74), El Salvador (1980–
85), Ecuador (the late 1960s into the 1970s) and Brazil (1962–64).3
The fourth section of the article examines both the power and also the
limitations of peasant movements in their struggle with the state. The key
issues raised in the discussion will be how the state has affected the
peasantry, and the degree to which the state has been a friend or enemy at
different times and in different countries over the last half century. From the
mid-1980s onwards, peasant and rural landless workers' movements as well
as rural guerrilla movements, have moved on to the centre stage of a
protracted struggle throughout Latin America against neo-liberalism and its
imperial backers.4 In this struggle, the reforms and revolutionary changes
wrought by the peasantry have been vulnerable to reversals, and peasants
have suffered harsh repression, being forced to migrate in large numbers
from their communities as the result of changes in the configuration of state
power. The unfolding of this process is particularly clear with regard to
developments in Brazil: as a consequence of neo-liberal structural
adjustments to the economy, it is estimated [INCRA, 1999] that in the next
five years over a million landless or near-landless peasants or workers will
join the five million or so that migrated to the cities from 1986 to 1996, a
year into Fernando Cardoso's presidency [FAO, 1998:23; Petras and
Veltmeyer, 2001b: 97].
 THE STATE IN/OF THEORY

It is a commonplace that in Latin America, as elsewhere, the state has been

and is essential to the operation of markets and the defence or transformation
of the dominant social relations of production. In each specific form of
agricultural production, the state has been instrumental in the foundation,
extension, reproduction and transformation of the system involved, benefiting
some classes—most often the large landowners—and disadvantaging others
(mainly workers and peasants).5 The essential theoretical point here is that
the market is inexorably linked to an 'activist state', whether the principal
agricultural unit be the large landed estate (the hacienda or latifundio), the
plantation, the family farm, the peasant economy, or a combination of these
production systems.6 Before examining the latter, however, it is necessary to
consider the state in (or, perhaps, of) theory, and particularly how and why
there is still no adequate framework for understanding peasant/state relations.
Much recent theory about the peasantry has tended to oscillate between two
competing and politically very different perceptions. On the one hand, there
is the view that regards the peasantry as an entirely passive entity: it is either
the disempowered object of various kinds of state agency (legislation,
taxation, agricultural production regimes, systems of regulation, macro-
economic planning, etc.) emanating from above and elsewhere, or the equally
disempowered recipient of state patronage and inputs. On the other hand, a
rival perception of the peasantry views it as an active and empowered entity,
the grassroots agency of which contests both the effects of state action
(revolutionary mobilization, rebellion, everyday forms of resistance, etc.) and
what is received or on offer from the state (economic resources,
infrastructural developments, etc.). This distinction is perhaps accurately
reflected in the current epistemological gulf between varieties of on the one
hand Marxism, and on the other postmodernism. For Marxism, therefore, the
peasantry is mainly an economic category that corresponds to a transitional or
archaic organizational form, destined always to be on the point of vanishing
into the dustbin of history, and whose presence on the world stage is effected
now in other disguises (as a rural proletariat, as an urban lumpenproletariat
trapped in the proliferating informal sector, or as 'wage-labour equivalents'
everywhere).
In much postmodern theory about the so-called Third World, by contrast, the
peasant is recuperated mainly as a cultural category, whose identity as the
disguised 'other' of Eurocentric metanarratives has been rescued—by, among
others, exponents of post-colonial, post-development frameworks and the
Subaltern Studies project—and given new life as the emblem of an
irreducible alterity that is erased by misguided or inappropriate economic
development.7 Not the least problematic aspects of this approach are the
following. First, postmodern analyses of acts of resistance privilege the
element of identity-based particularities, which-when ethnicity replaces class
—brings them into the orbit of conservatism and even the political right.8
Second, the acts deemed by postmodernism to be empowering are invariably
localized and/or small-scale, an approach which avoids posing questions
about the role/function/reproduction of the state apparatus. And third, by
refusing to address both the issue of class, and therefore the instrumentality
of the state through which a class exercises power, postmodernism leaves the
state intact, for either a landlord class or a bourgeoisie to use against peasants
as and when it so wishes.
For its part, theory about the state has generally avoided issues to do with the
peasantry. In the case of non-Marxist theory, where peasant/state relations are
considered, they have invariably been viewed through the prism of
establishing or re-establishing nothing more than bourgeois democracy. Thus
the focus of an early and important analysis was on the way in which the
process of agrarian transition led either (in the case of Asia) to communism
or fascism, or (in the case of France, England and North America) to
capitalist democracy.9 More recent analyses that plough the same political
furrow have as their objective not the establishment but rather the re-
establishment of bourgeois democracy and its capitalist state. Here the focus
is on 'resistance' by new social movements, leading to the re-democratization
of the existing state apparatus [Fox, 1990; Hartlyn, 1998; Lievesley, 1999;
Grindle, 2000; Haagh, 2002], in the process forming a'civil society' that
enables 'good governance' or 'hegemonic' rule to occur.10 Linked to this are
two other approaches, with similar objectives. The first is the Gramscian
notion of 'hegemony', whereby control of the state is achieved by
constitutional (= parliamentary) means, a method that was tried and found
wanting in Chile during the early 1970s.11 The second is the currently
fashionable concept of the 'weak' or 'failed' state (particularly in Africa),
where the object is similarly to constitute or reconstitute the formal apparatus
of the bourgeois state.12 Insofar as peasants and agricultural labourers are
included within the ranks of these new social movements, and participate in
the resistance mounted by such mobilization against the 'weak' or 'failed'
state, the inference is that the rural poor necessarily benefit from such agency.
The absence of peasant/state relations from much Marxist theory about the
state has been due in part to the fact that the focus of the latter over the past
three decades has been on the formation/reproduction/role of the state either
in advanced capitalist societies or in areas of the so-called Third World where
capitalism is well established.13 In neither of these kinds of context has a
consideration of peasant/state relations been paramount, not least because
epistemologically the presence of capitalism has tended to exclude the
existence of peasants, and vice versa. For those Marxists with an interest in
underdevelopment, therefore, the theoretical decoupling of Third World
capitalism from the peasantry meant that the political object of agrarian
struggles was to unite peasants in what was deemed to be a pre-capitalist
countryside with elements of the 'progressive' national bourgeoisie in the
towns against a 'feudal' (or 'semi-feudal') landlord class and its colonial
state.14 The aim, in short, was for the peasantry to help the urban bourgeoisie
to achieve power, so that capitalism could then be established or 'deepened' in
rural areas. Just as the focus of non-Marxist theory about the role of the state
is on the 'weak' or 'failed' state—the object being to attain or re-attain
bourgeois democracy and capitalism—so for Marxist and Marxisant theory
the focus has been on the 'strong' (or in the case of Latin America, the
'bureaucratic authoritarian') state, seen as an impediment to the realization of
bourgeois democracy, and thus to a socialist transition.15 The 1970s saw a
gradual change of emphasis, the idea of a 'strong' and class-specific state
giving way to the concept of an 'autonomous' state; the rule by class of class
associated with the 'strong' state was accordingly replaced with the notion of
a 'plural' state, through which no particular class was powerful enough to be
able to rule.16 During the 1980s and 1990s this trend saw its apogee in
postmodern theory, which denied both the efficacy of class and-consequently
—state instrumentality.
Ironically, therefore, the development in Marxist theory of notions such as an
'autonomous'/'plural' state resulted in a de facto merger with non-Marxist
theory: both now subscribed to a non-instrumental view of the state, against
which were arraigned not specific classes but rather multi-class new social
movements, henceforth pursuing not revolutionary aims (the overthrow of the
existing social order) but engaged rather in everyday struggle in and against
the state. It is time, therefore, to remind ourselves of two things: not just that
the role of the capitalist state is essentially a coercive one (= the enforcement
of class rule), but also that in Latin America—historically and currently—the
target of this particular kind of non-hegemonic instrumentality has been and
remains peasants and workers. The threefold object of the presentation which
follows is accordingly to reinstate the agency of the state, to link this to the
enforcement of class rule over peasants and workers, and to connect the latter
in turn with challenges by peasants and workers to class rule and state power.
From the state in theory, therefore, we turn to the state in practice.
 AGRICULTURAL SYSTEMS AND THE STATE

The origins in Latin America of the earliest form of large-scale agricultural

production, on the landed estate, were based on three combined processes:
the forcible seizure of the land by the colonial state, the coerced conscription
—again by the colonial state—of labour belonging to indigenous populations,
small producers or imported slaves, and the development—yet again by the
state—of a marketing and transportation infrastructure so as to facilitate
exports [Bauer, 1975; Pearse, 1975]. A patrimonial state, a mercantilist
economy and the latifundio/hacienda land tenure system served to fuel the
European, and later US, accumulation process, which in turn generated
nineteenth-century forms of industrial capitalist development and its adjunct
—the 'old imperialism' of an exchange of raw materials and cheap labour for
manufactured goods.

Rural Labour Regimes and the State

The key to the whole system was the availability and exploitation of labour-
power, achieved via state coercion of workers, primarily native peoples and
African slaves.17 Exploitation was generally based on the expropriation of
surplus in the form of rent rather than profit, and was more 'extensive' than
'intensive'—that is, an extended workday predominated over technological
change.18 Given the abundance of land vis-à-vis people and the labour
conditions of super-exploitation, the only means by which the latifundio
could operate and expand (and with it the whole export-mercantilist system)
was through a system of overwhelming force and total state control.
The internal structure of the latifundio was based on a closed social system in
which all of the rural labour force interactions took place within the latifundio
and with the 'patron'—the boss (the landowner, his overseer or manager)—
thus isolating the dominant class from the multiplicity of commercial,
financial and manufacturing activities which might foster discontent, flight or
rebellion. To retain rural labour involuntarily within this allegedly
'paternalistic' and closed social system, violent coercion was routinized,
indiscipline was arbitrarily punished, and protest was savagely repressed with
exemplary violence. The impressionistic view, held by some scholars, of
'reciprocal relations' and 'mutual obligations' based on an apparently
harmonious 'moral economy', derived from the tightness of this control and
its 'normalization' inside a closed social system where obedience was
enforced under the threat (rather than the actualization) of violence. The
appearance of everyday normality was maintained by the ever-present threat,
and only the occasional reality, of a machete beheading.19
Two theoretical points need to be understood here. First, the existence of
coerced labour was not, as is sometimes supposed, part of the organic
evolution typical of 'feudal' or 'semi-feudal' systems.20 Rather, local and
world market opportunities, and the diverse and growing economic activities,
encouraged large landowners to resort to coercion and total control as a
means of maximizing exports and trade, securing thereby a supply of labour
under conditions of an unfavourable land/people ratio. The object was to pre-
empt/prevent competition for workers, which—if permitted—would raise the
cost of labour. This is not to say a market in labour-power was non-existent,
only to say that where it did exist it was controlled by landowners, who
frequently exchanged between themselves the labour-power of their own
workers (tenants, poor peasants and their kinfolk), an arrangement that
operated independently of worker consent. Secondly, and for this very
reason, the system of 'feudal', 'paternal' or 'reciprocal relations' on large
estates was little more than a facade for forced labour, a form of control made
necessary by the desire of most labourers to secure their independence and
own plot of land, as evidenced by the history of escaped slaves in Brazil,
Guyana and elsewhere in the Caribbean, and the search for refuge by Indians
in the Andes and Central America [Rodney, 1981, Ch. 2].21
The plantation system, in fact, was a 'rationalization' and 'transformation' of
the latifundio-based agricultural system.22 In no case were these two systems
ever in 'contradiction', either in violent civil wars or in bitter and prolonged
political conflicts. The plantation system functioned adequately with different
kinds of worker: slave, indentured and wage labour (see Best and Levitt
[1975] and Thomas [1984] on the plantation economy). In all these labour
regimes, the state's virtual monopoly over the means of violence in securing
the prevailing social relations of property in land and other means of
production severely limited either the formation or the reproduction of an
independent peasant economy. The peasantry, in effect, served as a huge
reserve army of labour, subsisting on tiny plots of land adjoining the larger
productive units, thereby enabling what neo-liberal ideologues call 'flexible
production'. Employed only during planting and harvesting, they subsisted on
their own plots in the 'dead season', saving their landlords the cost of their
social reproduction.23 Nevertheless, the smallholdings served as a meeting
ground for organization, and occasional large-scale land seizures and
protests; the economic advantages to the landowners of this arrangement had
a political price.
Theoretically, the transition away from coerced labour led not to a wage
labour system, or to a peasant economy, but rather to a system of wage
labourers who were also peasants.24 When they rebelled against their
landlords, therefore, it was as workers, but their demands on such occasions
were those of peasants—for land. The role of the state in such circumstances
was to facilitate land use for specialized production of exported commodities
and, given the precariousness of the commodities produced (their harvest
time was short), to apply the maximum force needed to ensure that labour
produced 'just in time'. Given the fact that the plantations were largely foreign
owned—particularly by investors from the imperial country (the United
States, Britain)—the state operated as a 'comprador' institution: its economic
activities were geared toward facilitating the movement of capital and
commodities as well as policing the workforce composed of peasants.25
Policing certainly involved repression, but in an important sense that has
been a constant in the history of state/peasant/landlord relations,
notwithstanding occasional shifts in state power to pro-peasant regimes. But
the level, intensity, content and purpose of state policing have all
metamorphosed with changes in the dominant form of agricultural
production. Policing under the latifundio system was essentially local,
supplemented by state power in cases of 'emergency' involving widespread
rural rebellion. The purpose was to maintain the 'closed social system' of the
latifundio in which tenants and labourers only interacted with the patron,
minimizing external (and 'politically contaminating') linkages. The only
exception here would have been the military conscription of peasants who,
because of their contacts with the urban centres, frequently became the
bearers of dissident views.26 In effect, policing under the latifundio system
was directed towards immobilizing the peasantry and confining them to a
closed social system.
In the plantation system, however, the role of the state was twofold: on the
one hand to provide a certain flexibility of movement while at the same time
trying to limit contact between rural and urban labour, and on the other to
ensure a docile stable peasantry by providing it with subsistence farming
during the 'dead season'. While 'local policing' continued, therefore, the great
concentration of landless labourers, their greater accessibility to 'outside'
ideas and organization, and the capacity for concerted large-scale action, all
led to greater degree of 'national state military intervention'. Local military
officials, judges and prosecutors, all of whom were politically and socially
intertwined with plantation owners, were in the course of employer-worker
disputes frequently called upon both to set in motion and to legitimize the use
of state violence and, subsequently, punishment (detention without trial,
imprisonment). The crucial strategic weakness of the plantation owners was
the vulnerability of their crops during harvest season: a strike of only a few
days' duration could lead to the decline or destruction of the harvest. This fact
was well understood by rural organizers of the plantation workforce. Given
this strategic asset favouring the workers, plantation owners turned to the
state for help, and solicited its repressive intervention—'exemplary' and
'preventative' violence—so as to pre-empt/prevent any action at harvest time.
Plantation markets were largely international, US or European, and as
tropical production sites multiplied and competition intensified, working
conditions deteriorated and new lands were expropriated from untitled local
producers. In this political situation, market dynamics led to intensified
conflict between the owners of expanding plantations and peasants, as well as
between the former and plantation workers. And once again, the state played
a crucial role. First, evicting de facto peasant squatters, using the judicial
device of 'untitled land'; and second, pushing displaced peasants on to
reserves set aside for indigenous peoples, thus opening up additional land for
extensive agriculture in the future. The state also promulgated labour
legislation outlawing the right to strike during the harvest season, and
subsequently institutionalized (= 'normalized') collective bargaining between
plantation owners and 'domesticated' leaders of the plantation workforce.

Agriculture and the 1930s Capitalist Crisis

The plantation model of agrarian development was so successful that it

spread from one section of the Latin American imperial domain to another;
because it was an advanced system of agricultural production, however, it
was ironically prone to economic crisis. Events in the 1930s had an enormous
impact on agro-export production systems, leading to a virtual disintegration
of export markets and the emergence of popular rebellions in the context of
widespread hunger. In a manner that is reminiscent of what happens today
(not just in the Third World but also in metropolitan capitalism), the 1930s
capitalist crisis was—as Marxists argued then and since—the effect of over-
accumulation, overproduction, and the consequent devalorization of existing
means of production, a combination which in turn precipitated a financial
crisis in the banking sector.27 With the collapse of export markets, and
commodity prices hitting rock bottom, the crisis of the 1930s dealt a powerful
blow to plantation agriculture. Some foreign owners sold their large rural
properties to the local elite, while others retained their holdings but sub-
contracted them to local farmers; yet others abandoned their lands in part to
peasant squatters. All plantation owners faced varying degrees and forms of
rural insurgency and peasant uprisings, and many of them diversified their
portfolios, diverting investment into urban real estate, finance and (in a few
cases) newly protected 'import substitution' industries. Although the state
played a crucial role in the suppression of rural uprisings (see below), it also
—and equally importantly—facilitated the transition to new forms of
agricultural production and urban sites. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the 1930s
crisis and the consequent economic decline of the liberal agro-export sector
had a major impact on peasants and rural workers in Latin America.
The 1930s crisis of the liberal agro-export system led to the emergence of a
new 'import-substitution' model, which harnessed agro-exports to local
industrial production without changing the domination of the agricultural
elite over the peasantry and the rural labour force. In effect, the ascendancy
of the urban bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie involved a trade-off in which
the agrarian oligarchy accepted its political subordination in exchange for
continued control in the rural sector. Agrarian reform—supposedly a
'democratic demand' of the 'progressive bourgeoisie'—had no part in the
social pact between the urban bourgeoisie and the agrarian oligarchy. In any
case, politically, the period from 1930 to 1964 in the case of Chile, and
within more or less the same timeframe in other countries, saw the gradual
decline of the agrarian oligarchy as industrialization advanced and capitalism
more fully penetrated the countryside, converting important elements of the
landed oligarchy into an agricultural bourgeoisie committed to a more
complete capitalist transformation of agriculture.28 In this kind of situation,
the role of the state was twofold: first, it was committed to industrialization
based on a process of import substitution, transferring resources and
investment capital from mining and agriculture into urban-centred industry;
and second, to ensure the availability of cheap foodstuffs and other wage
goods.
The import substitution model without agrarian reform led to the first wave
of rural to urban migration, beginning in the late 1930s and 1940s and
accelerating from the 1950s onwards.29 In this new situation, the federal state
channelled resources into industry, allocating foreign exchange earned by the
primary sector to the importation of capital and intermediary goods for the
burgeoning consumer goods industries. At the regional or local level, the big
landlords retained control over state power and so managed to pass the 'costs'
of their political subordination on to the peasantry. In the same context, while
Marxist or Communist parties endorsed the notion of a worker-peasant
alliance, in fact they were generally seeking alliances with the so-called
'national' bourgeoisie in pursuit of a productionist strategy, or were engaged
in strictly 'workerist' struggles and organization.30 The emergence of peasant-
based movements in this context owed little to the urban-based left or
populist parties—at least to their mainstream leaders and organizations (some
local organizations and individuals excepted).31

The State, Capitalist Modernization and Agrarian Reform

In a very real sense the economic crisis of the 1930s as this affected the
agrarian sector in Latin America was not itself 'resolved' until the 1960s,
when a programme of land reform was initiated by the state: this was done as
a defensive response to the lessons of the 1959 Cuban revolution, and thus
designed to prevent the emergence of more radical demands for change
among the peasantry. In this political climate, the state in almost every
country initiated a broad programme of agrarian reform, an additional
political objective being to incorporate the peasantry within a dual agenda:
not just to divert existing and future dissent into constitutional channels,
where it might more easily be co-opted by the state, but also to bring
smallholders into the orbit of a specifically capitalist development project,
thereby offering them a rival to the socialist alternative. Generally speaking,
under the rubric of agrarian reform legislation designed to modernize
agriculture, the ownership of productive tracts of land has been further
concentrated, redistribution occurring only within the peasant sector itself,
leading to a process of internal differentiation.32 The latter has involved the
emergence of a small stratum of rich peasants, some of which are converted
into rural capitalists, a somewhat larger middle stratum of self-sufficient
'peasant farmers' with productive capacity vis-à-vis the domestic market, and
a rural proletariat, composed in most instances of a huge mass of
semiproletarianized—that is, landless or near landless—migrant workers. In
most contexts, however, these attempts at accommodation and co-optation,
including unionization from above and the setting up of parallel or
government-controlled peasant organizations, either failed or were only
partially successful: usually, they tended to unleash class conflicts that
continued into another and more radical phase of land reform.33 For this and
other reasons, Latin American governments at first instituted a land reform
programme, but then devoted their energies to preventing its radicalization,
using a combination of strategies ranging from corporativism (unionization
from above), attempts at controlling peasant organizations, co-opting their
leadership, to outright repression.34
In each phase of capitalist modernization—that is, in the transition from
haciendas to plantations, and from export-oriented to import-substituting
industrialization—the state played a crucial role in promoting, financing and
protecting the dominant 'modernizing' classes from the threat of peasant and
rural worker movements, forcing the rural proletariat and peasantry to bear
the costs of 'transition'. These dynamics reappeared in the 1980s, in the
context of a transition towards a neo-liberal New World Order facilitated by
the so-called 'globalization process'. Among the categories disadvantaged by
the application of neo-liberal measures in Latin America, the peasantry and
rural workers have been the most adversely affected [Veltmeyer and Petras,
2000].

From Neo-liberalism to Neo-mercantilism

With the advent of neo-liberal reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, governments
in the region acquired a new set of weapons in their confrontations with
peasant-based and/or peasant-led organizations and movements, and in short
order, according to some observers, the era of radical—even liberal—land
reform was over.35 This, at least, is how it has appeared to those in control of
the state apparatus, or to the economists who serve the state in the capacity of
policy advisers. In short, the issue was no longer one of a redistributive land
reform, let alone one which entailed new non-individualistic or non-private
property relations, but rather the modernization and capitalist development (=
productive transformation) of agriculture, a process to take place without a
change in property relations or non-market redistribution of agrarian
resources/assets.36 To this end, governments in the region enlisted the support
of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to encourage peasant
organizations and communities to make greater use of the 'market
mechanism' (land titles, land banks, etc.) and, in their politics, to eschew
direct action and utilize instead 'the electoral mechanism'—in other words, to
adopt peaceful/legalistic forms of struggle in pursuit of their interests
(sustainable livelihoods) [Veltmeyer and Petras, 1997; 2000].37
The reality of today's world economy has little to do with 'free markets' and
even less with a 'globalization' in any of its permutations [Petras and
Veltmeyer, 2001a].38 The world is now divided into three competing and
cooperating imperialisms, headed by the US and including the European
Union (EU) and Japan. The nature of these imperialisms is essentially
neomercantilist, although their interests are cloaked in rhetoric of a 'marriage
[between] the free market and liberal democracy' [Domínguez and
Lowenthal, 1996]. Neo-mercantilism puts the imperial state at the centre of
economic activity—much to the disadvantage of rural producers in Latin
America, particularly smallholders and rural workers. The essence of
neomercantilism is a two-pronged strategy: at home, imperial state protection
of domestic capitalists who are not competitive, and abroad the forced
opening of markets in the Third World under conditions that are prejudicial
to other imperial competitors. Among the most protected and state subsidized
sectors is agriculture. Imperial policy-makers spend tens of billions of
dollars, Euros and yen directly and indirectly subsidizing producers and
exporters, while establishing a variety of protective measures, from explicit
quotas on agro-imports to so-called 'health concerns', so as to curtail or
exclude imports from competitors and Third World countries.39
Latin American peasants and rural labourers have been undermined by this
neo-mercantilist system in a number of fundamental ways. First of all, the
subsidies allow agro-exporters to sell cheaper, via subsidized electricity,
water, extension programmes, etc., than peasant and farm producers in the
Third World, thus driving millions of peasants into bankruptcy. Cheap food
imports supposedly produced by more 'efficient' (= subsidized) US farmers
have driven over two million Mexican and Brazilian peasants off their farms
in the 1990s [Petras and Veltmeyer, 2001b]. While the USA and the EU
heavily subsidize their food and grain exporters, the IMF and World Bank
demand budget cuts and free trade from Latin American countries, leading to
precipitous declines in budget funding for agriculture and the flooding of
domestic markets with cheap subsidized imports.
State-imposed overt and covert quotas on farm imports into the EU and the
USA undermine potential agro-exporters in Latin America who, in turn, cut
back on the work conditions, payment, and even the employment of rural
workers, in effect increasing the number of rural destitute. The non-reciprocal
nature of the trading rules that are 'agreed to' by Latin America regimes
reveals their 'colonized' nature. These colonized states play a crucial role in
raising the gate for foreign imports, cutting credit and investment funding in
the rural sector (except for a few specialized sectors that complement EU and
US agriculture). In addition to 'draining resources from the countryside' to
meet foreign debt obligations to EU and US bankers, the colonized state in
Latin America is also assigned several other crucial roles: to police the
displaced peasants and destitute rural workers, denationalize landownership,
and privatize economic enterprises in key economic sectors.40
Having examined the way in which the state in Latin America has ordered
and re-ordered agriculture 'from above'—first in the interests of a landed rural
oligarchy, then on behalf of an agrarian bourgeoisie, and latterly so as to
favour foreign and domestic agribusiness enterprises—it is necessary to
consider the 'from below' response on the part of peasants and rural workers
to all these developments: that is, the resort by the latter at different
conjunctures to rebellion, revolt, and revolution.
 REBELLION, REVOLT AND REVOLUTION

From the very beginning of colonialism and throughout its history—the

Spanish and Portuguese conquest, and the subsequent military incursions by
British, French and US forces—the peasantry has been the mainspring of
popular rebellion, revolts and revolutions in Latin America.41 While the
forms of popular rebellions varied, and on the surface took on the appearance
of 'archaic' or 'millenarian' movements by 'primitive rebels', the reality was
much more complex, both in substance and motivation.42

The Modernity of Peasant Agency

The early rebellions, symbolized by the uprisings led by Túpac Amaru, were
unquestionably attempts to oust the Spanish colonial rulers and restore
elements of pre-Columbian society. The key issue here was not the non-
viability of the latter, but rather the thrust of a popular rural uprising aimed
against imperial power. One cannot simply impose on this rebellion an
archaic restorationist symbolism, since peasants rebelling to free themselves
either from labour-service obligations (mita or repartimiento) and other
extra-economic coercive mechanisms of the encomienda system, or from the
burdens of tenurial labour-rent (inquilinaje, ponguaje, huasipunguero),
created the possibility of constructing a peasant-based subsistence
agricultural system [Pearse, 1975]. But, as Bauer [1975] points out with
regard to Chile, the constraints and oppressive conditions of a pre-capitalist
(and pre-modern) agrarian structure informing the latifundio/minifundio
complex, and consequently the prevalence of tenurial relations binding a
smallholding peasantry with only usufruct rights to a landlord class (the
hacendados], for the most part prevented the evolution of an independent—
and modernizing—peasantry.43
The clearest and most advanced example of the inherently modernist
tendencies of an enslaved rural labour force is found in the Haitian revolution
which occurred at the end of the eighteenth century.44 The antislavery
revolution was also anti-colonial and, at least among the masses, strongly
influenced by egalitarian sentiments favouring land redistribution. The
subsequent wars of Independence in Latin America operated on two levels:
struggles by merchants and landlords to secure state power (= political
independence), to liberalize the economy, expand trade and appropriate
native lands, and—on a different plane—struggles by slaves, peons and
smallholders both to secure access to land and also to free themselves from
coercive and exploitative social relations of production binding them to
landlords (= socio-economic emancipation).
The post-Independence era during the nineteenth and early twentieth century
is a period of repression coupled with modern rebellion. By that we mean the
following dialectical process. On the one hand the dominant rural oligarchies
engaged in a process of 'primitive accumulation' involving the seizure of
native communal land and the abolition of any legislative protection against
and thus constraints on the exploitation of rural labour, particularly that of
indigenous peoples. On the other hand, the popular rebellions were 'modern'
not in an ideological or programmatic sense but with reference to their
collective attacks on the oligarchy's monopoly of landownership, state power,
trade, and credit. The reclaiming of territory and defence of pre-existing
native property rights (usually community or cooperative in origin and
function) pre-figured and were, in effect, dress rehearsals for the modernist
claims being made, not just today but over the past decade, by indigenous
peasants in Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America for
self-determination, autonomy, and social justice. 'Local' or decentralized
forms of rebellion were characteristic of all 'early modern' urban and rural
revolts in the nineteenth century. The key point here is that, in substance,
peasant-peon revolts were blows against a liberal export model of agricultural
development linked to world markets, as opposed to production and trade of
foodstuffs for local markets.
The savage repression that accompanied the seizure of land and control of
post-slavery labour was met by mass resistance in Mexico and elsewhere.45
The successful repression by the state of these mass collective mobilizations
had as its aftermath the fragmentation and dispersal of the dispossessed
peasantry and the formation of bands who were later dubbed 'primitive
rebels', a label—as Wolf [1969] points out—which obscures much more than
it reveals about the sequencing of collective action.46 There is no question
that the armies of the oligarchic government were formed by peasant and
peon conscripts, and that there were varying lapses of time between revolts
and rebellions; nevertheless, there were oral traditions that transmitted tales
and legends of earlier periods of emancipatory struggle, between generations
and throughout the region.47
The modernist nature of rural revolts is confirmed by the Mexican peasant
revolution of 1910.48 By the end of the eighteenth century, Mexico had gone
furthest in terms of integration into world markets, penetration by foreign
capital, and in the formation and dissemination of liberal ideology—los
cientificos—cultivated by the Porfiriato.49 The brutal and savage forms of
torture and labour control—graphically portrayed in the novels of B. Traven
and the popular prints of Posada—were not part of an archaic (or 'feudal')
dynastic order exercising a benign form of authority over the Mexican
countryside and its denizens, but the means of maximizing profits for modern
capitalists in Europe, North America and Mexico City.50 At least with regard
to its popular sectors, then, the Mexican revolution was not merely a land
reform movement but had an anti-imperial character—the first major
revolution against a burgeoning US imperialism. Ironically, the trajectory of
the Mexican revolution highlights both the tremendous revolutionary
potentialities of the peasantry, and also the strategic weakness of the latter,
particularly with regard to the question of state power.51
Even though the peasantry has formed the backbone of virtually all
revolutionary armies, its basic economic interests have found expression in
only a few regional armies, namely the Zapatistas. While the peasant armies
were successful in overthrowing established power, they constantly resorted
to 'pressuring' the urban-based political regime to implement political pacts.
The state thus became a point of 'mediation' between conflicting bourgeois
and peasant demands, not a strategic resource to be reconfigured and
transformed in the service of a political economy, so reflecting a new
peasant-based economy. At the peak of each peasant revolutionary
mobilization, the bourgeois state responded with concessions and promises,
even radical legislation. But when the bourgeoisie and military regrouped,
and peasant mobilization weakened, the state reverted to type: that is, it either
reversed the reforms, or failed to implement them.
The phenomenon of mass collective action—mobilizing against the state,
displacing incumbent office holders and securing concessions, via pressure
on the state without changing the class configuration of the state—was a
characteristic feature of peasant movements throughout the twentieth century.
Nevertheless, the nature, the leadership, and the demands of rural-based
movements have changed over time.
 Peasant Revolt, the State and Revolution

In the 1930s, significant peasant-based mass movements emerged in Mexico,

El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Brazil and Peru.52 Rural workers,
particularly sugar workers in modern plantations in Cuba, the Dominican
Republic and Puerto Rico, as well as Guyana and elsewhere in the Caribbean
engaged in class warfare [Post, 1978; Canterbury, 2000]. In each instance,
extremely violent and repressive measures were taken by the state, either to
suppress or to destroy these rural rebellions, or—as in the exceptional case of
Mexico under Cardenas—agrarian reform was extended to include hundreds
of thousands of poor rural families. In El Salvador the peasant uprising was
crushed and some 30,000 were killed, with a similar 'development' in
Ecuador under almost identical circumstances and with the same devastating
effects on an incipient class struggle.53 In Nicaragua, the Dominican
Republic and Cuba, the US occupation army and its newly anointed tyrant-
presidents—Somoza, Trujillo and Batista—slaughtered thousands,
decimating the burgeoning peasant and rural workers' movements. In Brazil,
the Vargas regime defeated Prestes' rural-based guerrilla army while pursuing
a strategy of national industrialization; in Chile, the Popular Front of radicals,
socialists and communists aroused—and then abandoned—the peasant
struggle, together with demands for agrarian reform in an implicit
gentlemen's pact with the traditional landed oligarchy.54
In the best of cases, peasant-based revolutions have been able to secure
extensive institutional reforms in the agrarian sector—namely, land
redistribution. In the case of Mexico, agrarian reform was a sporadic and
prolonged process that began in the early 1900s and reached its high point in
the 1930s.55 In Bolivia, the 1952 revolution of miners and peasants led to a
sweeping agrarian reform that resulted in the expropriation of most large
estates.56 In Cuba at the end of the 1950s, the victory of the 26th of July
movement led by Fidel Castro ended with the confiscation of most of the US-
and Cuban-owned plantations, the land either collectivized or distributed to
smallholders.57 In Peru during the 1960s, Chile over the 1966–73 period, and
Nicaragua from 1979 to 1986, substantive land distribution took place,
largely as a result of mass peasant mobilizations and direct action [Cotler,
1978; Kay, 1981; 1982; Midlarsky and Roberts, 1995; Vilas, 1995].
However, with the exception of the 1959 Cuban revolution, these advances
by peasants and landless workers suffered severe setbacks over the medium
and long term. The key problem, as always, was the relation of the peasant
movements to the state. In practically all the revolutions, the agrarian reforms
listed above were reversed. In Mexico, Bolivia and Peru a prolonged process
of state disinvestment in the reform sector culminated in legislation that
provided incentives to agro-export monopolies, alienating community lands
(the ejido in Mexico) and stimulating cheap (= subsidized) imported
foodstuffs. The politics of alliances, in which the peasantry was generally
subordinated to the urban petit bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie, would often
secure an initial round of redistributive reforms and state assistance.
Subsequently, however, peasant movements tended to fragment and divide
along an 'official' and 'oppositional' line in which the former became a
transmission belt for state policy. The state, in this context, either played
upon or actively created these divisions. The inability of a peasant movement
to transcend its sectoral and/or 'economistic' consciousness confined it to
militant 'pressure group politics' in which other urban classes took hold of the
reins of power, using the peasant movement as a battering ram to clear the
way for a kind of capitalist 'modernization'. Only in the case of Cuba was the
peasantry able to consolidate its position and prosper, largely due to the
socialist nature of the urban leadership and its efforts to invest and develop
the countryside as the 'motor of development'.
The second factor leading to the decline of the agrarian reform movements is
intimately related to the first: the lack of state investment in the
infrastructure, credit, marketing and extension of services which are essential
for the development of cooperatives or individual land reform beneficiaries.
The 'maximum act' of the state was the awarding of land titles in ostentatious
ceremonies. The promise of future investments never materialized or, as in
the case of Mexico and Chile, was selectively distributed as part of an
electoral-patronage system. In the case of Nicaragua during the 1980s, the
US-Contra war destroyed many of the state-sponsored agrarian reform
support services, while forcing the Sandinista regime to reallocate budgetary
funds from agricultural development to military defence [Walker, 1997].58
Lacking credit, the beneficiaries were hard pressed to finance capital
investments; lacking roads and transport, they could not market at a profit.
The high costs of private credit and transport ruined many rural households
that had benefited from earlier land redistribution, and the lack of state
investment in irrigation facilities plus the (state sanctioned) usurpation of
water rights by better-off members of the new agrarian classes, undermined
growth. With the advent of neo-liberalism, the elimination of price supports
and subsidies, together with the importation of cheap foodstuffs, delivered
the coup de grace to the descendants of the initial land reform beneficiaries
[Vilas, 1995].

Counter-revolution and the State

Over time, the state turned increasingly to stimulating the reconsolidation of

landownership and the promotion of agro-export sectors. For example, in
northern Mexico, the Santa Cruz region of Bolivia, in Peru, and Nicaragua
and especially in Chile, land reforms were reversed, and old owners
recovered their land while new ones purchased their holdings, all with the
support of counter-revolutionary or counter-reform regimes.59 This process
of land reconcentration and reform reversal was itself facilitated by the
cooptation of peasant leaders and the incorporation of bureaucratized peasant
organizations as a subordinate component of the party-state. This, for
example, was the case in Mexico with the PRI (Partido Revolucionario
Institucional, or the Institutionalized Revolutionary Party) and Bolivia with
the MNR (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionaria, or the Revolutionary
Nationalist Movement).
The key theoretical point here is that revolutionary peasant movements (with
the exception of Cuba) have been unable to seize state power and recreate the
society and economy in their own image—at least in a manner that
consolidates and expands both their kind of social forces and political
interests. Armed peasant revolts with revolutionary programmes have seen
their leaders accept the blandishments of the urban elite, concern themselves
with modernizing reforms ('land titles,' etc.) or succumb to the temptations of
capital and patronage.60 In the case of Nicaragua during the 1980s, Chile in
1973, and the Dominican Republic in 1965 armed US intervention—not so
covert and via Marines or mercenaries—was an important factor in the
destruction of pro-land reform regimes and the institution of corporate
agribusiness [Kay, 1977, 1981; Vilas, 1995; Walker, 1997].
The crux of the problem can be summed up thus: the principal vehicle for
any and all agrarian reform programmes in Latin America has been peasant
influence over the state; the principal weakness, by contrast, has been the
failure to consolidate state power so as to sustain the reform and make it
irreversible. In both its positive and negative outcomes, therefore, the fate of
Latin American peasant movements is inextricably and unavoidably bound
up with the state. The point is that a revolutionary vision that takes account of
the links between agriculture and the commercial, financial and monetary
system is essential. The only successful case of revolution in consolidating
the position of land reform beneficiaries has been Cuba, which managed to
transform the urban economy in the context of a far-reaching radical agrarian
reform program.61 The question is whether the new and dynamic agrarian
movements that now dominate the political landscape in the Latin American
countryside have learned the lessons of the past.
 CONTEMPORARY RURAL MOBILIZATION AND THE STATE

By the end of the twentieth century, a new configuration of dynamic rural

movements took centre stage in Latin America [Petras, 1997; Petras and
Veltmeyer, 200 lc]. Such movements are found throughout Latin America,
including Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala,
the Dominican Republic, Haiti and, to a lesser degree, Peru, Chile and North
Argentina. Most significantly, it is these peasant movements—frequently
with a significant indigenous component—that have led the opposition to
neo-liberalism.
As in the past, the growth and radicalization of the major peasant and
indigenous movements is intimately related to state policies. In the case of
Mexico, for example, the inauguration of NAFTA (North Atlantic Free Trade
Area) was the detonator for the launching of the uprising by the EZLN (the
Zapatista Army of National Liberation) in 1994.62 Similarly, the major
Indian-peasant uprising and takeover of Quito, the capital of Ecuador, in
January 2000 and a year later was in large part a response to the neo-liberal
policies implemented by the national government [Ceriza, 2000; Lluco Tixe,
2000; Lucas, 2000; Macas, 1999, 2000; Hernandez, 2001]. In Brazil, the
Landless Workers Movement (Movimiento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem
Terra, or MST) has combined land occupations and mass demonstrations in
order to put pressure on the government to legalize and finance the
redistribution of land [Petras and Veltmeyer, 2001b; Robles, 2001].
Movements employing similar tactics such as Federación Nacional
Campesina have formed in Paraguay, where direct action land redistribution
tactics are combined with confrontations with the state to legalize and finance
agricultural credits and inputs [Informativo Campesino, No. 91, April 1996;
Fogel, 1986]. In Bolivia, Colombia and Peru peasant movements have been
in the forefront of the struggle to develop or maintain alternative crops (for
example, coca) as a source of livelihood in the face of the neo-liberal free
market policies that have inundated local markets with cheap imports. The
military and their paramilitary auxiliaries, with the active support and
approval of Washington's client regimes, have spearheaded the US-directed
offensive against coca farmers. The irony is that every client regime and its
generals have been the major drug traffickers in the region, while leading US
and EU banks are the major launderers of drug money.63
However, most important is the fact that the contemporary peasant
movements mentioned above differ substantially from those in the past. First,
they are all independent of electoral parties and urban politicians. Second,
their leaders are not part of and subordinated to a bureaucratic apparatus, but
are the product of grassroots debates and accountable to popular assemblies.
Third, they link sectoral struggles with national political issues. For example,
the MST in Brazil calls for agrarian reform, nationalization of the banking
system and an end to free market policies. The same is true for CONAIE
(National Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities) in Ecuador and other
movements. Fourth, most of the movements have developed regional
linkages (via CLOC, or Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Organizaciones
del Campo) and international ties (the Via Campesina) and frequently
participate in anti-globalization forums and demonstrations [Edelman, 1998;
Desmarais, 2002]. Fifth, the new peasant movements have been assiduous in
their search for urban allies and building electoral strength in national
parliaments. Finally, these movements have learned much from each other,
particularly in terms of tactics—for example, the widely practised action of
setting up and maintaining roadblocks (cortas de ruta)—that are now used
even by recently formed movements of the unemployed urban workers in
Argentina.
Because the neo-liberal economies depend on mining, forestry, agro-export
enclaves, assembly plants and external markets and finance, they have
weakened the economic position not only of the peasantry as a vital part of
the economy but also (and thereby) of urban workers: food imports lead to
de-peasantization, which in turn ensures that peasant dispossession unloads
more surplus labour onto an already flooded urban labour market. In
response, peasants have resorted to massive and direct forms of action,
involving among other things the cutting of major highways, blocking the
circulation of commodities essential for the neo-liberal economies, reducing
foreign currency earnings available for debt payments, and putting pressure
on overseas lenders. Roadblocks by peasants and rural workers are the
functional equivalent of strikes by workers in strategic industries: they
paralyze the flows inward and outward of commodities destined for
production and trade.64
The deepening of the economic crisis, particularly severe in rural Latin
America, has had two major consequences, both of them particularly evident
in Colombia. First, there is the radicalization and expansion of the struggle in
rural areas—particularly the growth of guerrilla armies now totalling over
20,000, mostly peasant fighters. Second, there is an increase in the number of
agrarian producers involved in the struggle. At the end of July 2001 in
Colombia, farmers, peasants and rural workers joined together in a national
strike, blocking major highways in protest over debts, cheap imports, and
lack of credit. Similarly, in Bolivia and Paraguay, alliances involving
peasants, coca growers (cocaleros), Indian communities, farmers and urban
sectors (trade unions, civic groups) have cut highways and marched on the
capital to confront the state.
The response of the state to these rural mobilizations has been substantially
the same in each case: the militarization of the countryside, the extension and
deepening of the presence of US military personnel and other federal policing
agencies, and negotiations designed to defuse but not resolve basic demands.
In Mexico, for example, massive urban support for the Zapatistas led to a
process of 'negotiations', and an agreement on which the government reneged
immediately after the pressure lessened. Similarly, in Ecuador the
government negotiated an agreement with CONAIE during the occupation of
Quito and then, with the Indian withdrawal to the highlands, failed to comply
with those parts of the agreement that came into conflict with earlier
undertakings made by the government with the IMF and World Bank.
Given the growth of international human rights concerns, US military
missions have increasingly encouraged Latin American armies to work with
'paramilitary' forces in order to carry out acts like village massacres and
assassinations of dissident trade unionists or human rights workers.65 In this
context, the case of Colombia is a classical replay of Vietnam. In 2000,
Washington provided US$1.3 billion in aid to the Colombian government,
and followed this with over US$600 million the following year; further, Plan
Colombia makes provision for the deployment in Colombia of over 1,000 US
military advisers and subcontracted 'private' mercenaries. Although presented
as fighting the war against narcotics, the Plan is actually directed against
suspected peasant sympathizers of the political left, and peasant guerrillas
linked to the latter. The use of paramilitary forces to repress civilians allows
Washington and its military clients 'plausible denial' (in fact Washington
even criticizes the 'paras') while channelling arms, funds and protection via
the Colombia military command.
In the last two decades, particularly with the introduction of neo-liberal and
neo-mercantilist policies, Latin American regimes have rejected land reform
as a policy solution to rural poverty. Unlike the 1960s, when agrarian reform
was perceived by some regimes as a method of pre-empting revolution, in
recent decades the state has sought to reverse what reforms had taken place
over the past 50 years. Growing international linkages and markets, the re-
colonization of the state, and a new Latin American 'transnational capitalist'
class are responsible for the roll-back of these agrarian reforms as well as the
growing impoverishment and militarization of the countryside in the interest
of containing the growing rural insurgency. The rollback in the countryside is
itself part of a more general process of denationalization of industry and the
privatization of public services and enterprises. Nonetheless, the development
of opposition has been uneven, with the urban working class lagging behind
the advanced detachments of the peasantry and rural workers. Urban mass
movements do exist, such as the COB (Central Obrera Boliviana) in Bolivia,
the CTA (Confedemción de Trabajadores Agricolas) and the unemployed
workers' movements engaged in mass roadblocks in Argentina (Movimiento
de Trabajadores Desocupados), the PIT-CNT in Uruguay and the Frente
Patriotico in Ecuador and Paraguay. However, in some cases, like Argentina,
Chile and Brazil (not to speak of the corrupt corporate unions of Mexico), the
official trade union confederations are controlled by corrupt right-wing
bureaucrats associated with neo-liberal regimes (the Confederación General
de Trabajo or CGT in Argentina, Forza Sindical in Brazil) or politically
moderate officials (the CUT in Brazil, Colombia and Chile) who, while
criticizing 'neoliberalism', live off state stipends and have neither the
incentive nor the will to mobilize their followers. Given these adverse
circumstances (state repression and laggard support), the demands and
achievements of the rural movements are extraordinary. In Colombia, for
example, the FARC-EP (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-
People's Army), a movement of peasant-based guerrillas, have secured a
demilitarized zone the size of Switzerland where social forums are held and
noted scholars, government officials and others debate vital issues such as
land reform and alternative cropping patterns. In addition, the guerrillas have
major influence in over one-third of the municipalities of the Colombian
countryside [FARC-EP, 2000].
The notion of territoriality is central to all of the indigenous peasant
movements. For example, a key Zapatista demand has been and remains legal
recognition of Indian autonomy, and the control by the indigenous
populations over the natural resources in their regions. Similarly, CONAIE in
Ecuador, the Ayamara and Quechua nations in Bolivia, and the Maya nation
in Guatemala, have all pressed their demands for national cultural autonomy
and economic control—demands resisted both by the rulers of the client
states and by US and EU extractive agribusiness enterprises. This issue of
national autonomy grows out of the increasing frustration with the neo-liberal
state, the constant military incursions and massacres, as well as a growing
reaffirmation of a national cultural identity.
The second major advance made by contemporary peasant movements in
Latin America is the anti-imperialist content of their struggles. The massive
and continuing US penetration of the Latin American state, and a desire to
reassert control over important natural/national resources is the mainspring of
this resurgent anti-imperialism in rural areas. For example, the aggressive US
anti-drug campaign involving the direct role of the Drug Enforcement
Agency, the CIA and the Pentagon in destroying the livelihood of 40,000
coca farmers in Bolivia and over 100,000 in Colombia has certainly fuelled
anti-imperialist sentiment. The US promotion and financing of sweeping
fumigation programmes that have adversely affected the health of the rural
population in Colombia, and destroyed traditional crops throughout the
southern part of that nation, has further heightened anti-imperialist
consciousness. Similarly, former US President Bill Clinton's admission of
'guilt' for complicity in the genocidal war on Guatemala, where over 250,000
—mostly Mayan Indian peasants—were slaughtered, has certainly not
endeared US imperialism to the campesinos.
This combination of self-determination, anti-imperialism and opposition to
neo-liberalism, is present in the advanced detachments of all the Latin
American peasant movements. Among the rank and file activist peasants,
however, the focus is on immediate local demands, particularly land reform,
credits and prices and—in some regions—the right to cultivate coca. Leaders
of the movements are only able to retain support on the basis of their
militancy and honesty in sustaining the struggle for immediate demands. Not
surprisingly, the Latin American state has not remained indifferent to this
dual process of 'from below' policy formulation and grassroots mobilization.
Thus the government of Mexico under President Salinas Gortieri attempted to
drive a wedge between the popular movement and its peasant constituency
via a programme (Pronasol) of 'poverty' subsidies. In Brazil the Cardoso
regime has launched an Agrarian Bank to finance a commercial land-
purchasing scheme in a failed attempt to draw peasant support away from the
MST. Hitherto, these and other such moves on the part of the state against
peasant movements of today have failed, unlike similar attempts made in the
past against peasant organizations and movements, which, more often than
not, succeeded in weakening or dividing them.
 CONCLUDING COMMENT

Both the history of and present forms taken by peasant/state relations in Latin
America underline the folly of ignoring or underestimating the
instrumentality of the state and also the class-based nature of its institutional
agency. Claims about the 'plurality' or 'autonomy' of the state
notwithstanding, it is clear that it has in the past acted on behalf of the
capitalist class, one that is either indigenous or external to Latin America, and
continues to do so in the present. Arguments about whether the state is
'strong' or 'weak' miss the point, since it is the politics of the state—as
embodied in its project and support—which is central. Insofar as the state is
not merely the object but also the product (and, indeed, the producer) of
conflict, therefore, it is both a participant in and a cause of struggle. Much
current non-Marxist—and especially postmodern—analysis of the peasantry,
however, either ignores the state altogether, or recognizes its presence and
impact but denies that such agency is based on class. The latter position gives
rise to two equally problematic interpretations. One reproduces an
epistemologically simplistic state/self dichotomy that, because it fails to
differentiate the act of resistance to the state in terms of class, wrongly
privileges all forms of grassroots resistance as necessarily progressive. The
other focuses on the desirability of formal redemocratization, an outcome
which similarly dissolves the contradiction between capital and labour that is
present so long as accumulation and surplus extraction continue to be
systemic imperatives: whether the state discharges 'good governance' in the
context of a liberal democracy or exercises 'strong' government on behalf of
neo-liberal economic objectives is in the end irrelevant, since capitalism
decrees that both these forms are merely two points on the same systemic
continuum. Sooner or later, therefore, the liberal democratic state in which
peasants and workers attempt to realize their political interests electorally
(that is, 'choose' to be something 'other' than that desired by
national/international capital) becomes of necessity under capitalism the
'strong' state administering the neo-liberal economy.
Historically and contemporaneously, the state in Latin America has played,
and continues to play, a major role in shaping the agricultural economy,
either following or setting an agenda that is for the most part directed against
the peasantry. In a few specific contexts, the state has—for tactical reasons—
supported an agrarian reform programme, but such ostensibly pro-peasant
interventions have been both time-bound and spatially limited, with little
actual redistribution involved. For its part, the peasantry has alternated
between local struggles and confrontations with the state, at times playing a
major role in confronting the incumbent governing class. In this kind of
situation, any positive achievements—such as securing land redistribution—
tend to be counter-balanced by incapacity of the peasant movement to shape
the permanent institutions of the state, and consequently the medium and
long-term reversal of reforms secured in periods of intense mobilization. This
is not merely a debilitating factor where past agrarian mobilizations are
concerned, but also a problem that persists to this day. For example, the
Brazilian MST which, in the course of a protracted class struggle, managed to
secure the expropriation of thousands of landed estates, has recently
encountered a major setback, in the form of a sharp reduction of credits,
which has in turn bankrupted—or threatens to bankrupt—otherwise viable
agrarian cooperatives.
The problem of breaking out of the constraints imposed by sectoral class
struggles is not an easy one for contemporary peasant-based movements in
Latin America. Today, unlike in the past, many of the peasant leaders
recognize that the financial system, the export regime, and macro-economic
policy directed by the state, are all major obstacles to any peasant-based
development. Yet the construction of durable and consequential political
alliances remains elusive. It is important, however, to understand that this
particular weakness is not due to what happens in the agrarian sector alone.
In most Latin American countries, therefore, the growth of precarious and
informal forms of labour has led to the decline of urban-based industrial
unions and the weakening of their capacity for collective action on anything
but wage demands. Even where the potential for mass urban organization is
present, however, there is the constant reality of state repression, hindering
the deepening of any revolutionary urban-rural alliance. In Colombia during
the peace agreement of 1984–90 between the FARC and President
Betancourt, for example, the Left attempted to organize a mass electoral
party. Some 4,000–5,000 activists and two presidential candidates were
killed, and scores of municipal officeholders were murdered by the military-
backed death squads, forcing the surviving militants to rejoin the guerrilla
movement and to resume the rural-based armed struggle. In Central America
(Guatemala, El Salvador), the former guerrilla commanders were effectively
incorporated into the electoral process, but only at the cost of abandoning the
peasant struggle and remaining a marginal force in the Congress.66
Faced with this dilemma of co-optation or repression, Latin American
peasant movements have responded in several ways. First, they have
radicalized the struggle by engaging in sustained and extensive roadblocks,
affecting the shipment of foodstuffs to the city and primary materials for
export. Second, they have brought the struggle to the city: the MST, for
example, has organized national marches into Brasilia of over 100,000
people, recruiting urban supporters as they march. In Mexico, the Zapatistas
marched to the national capital, mobilizing over 300,000 in Mexico City
itself. In Ecuador the CONAIE has occupied Quito and even 'taken the
Congress', establishing a short-lived 'popular junta' with progressive junior
military officials. Similar demonstrations and peasant marches have taken
place in the Bolivian and Paraguayan national capitals, La Paz and Asuncion.
These demonstrations of force usually result in securing a negotiating session
with the government, and not only generate a set of agreements that are
honoured in the breach but also lead inevitably—for the time being, anyway
—to demobilization. What all these examples underline is the centrality of
both the urban sector and its state to the success or failure of agrarian
movements.
However, the mass show of force does serve peasant organizations as a
negotiating tool, to exert pressure on the existing regime in order to modify
its neo-liberal agenda. Its revolutionary appearance notwithstanding,
therefore, because of the subjective or objective realities it is in fact a
reformist strategy. Many of the leaders of contemporary peasant movements,
like Vargas of CONAIE, have for almost a decade engaged in the cyclical
ritual of mass-protest/negotiation/agreements/broken-promises/mass-protest.
It is clear that the pursuit of mass pressure politics instead of revolutionary
struggles for state power is a sign of ineffectualness rather than strength: in
short, these tactics are dictated by the weakness in the cities, and/or the
limitations in the strategic thinking of the leaders concerning the nature of the
state.
Compounding the complexity of the peasant struggles are divisions within
peasant movements and weak coordination among peasant organizations,
factors that play into the hands of a divide-and-conquer strategy pursued by
the state. In Bolivia the personal rivalry between Evo Morales of the
cocaleros and Quispe of the peasant movements is a case in point. Similar
divisions exist in Paraguay, and to a lesser degree in Brazil. The most striking
case of fragmentation, however, is Mexico, where each state has its own
independent militant organization, and sometimes as many as two or three,
according to region. In this kind of situation, the state frequently offers
agreements or concessions to one organization at the expense of others, thus
driving a wedge between them all in terms of future unity of action.
Nonetheless, there have been a number of successes: some efforts at forging
tactical alliances between different rural organizations have paid off. In
Colombia, for example, in August 2001 there was a successful agrarian strike
(paro agropecuario) that included everyone from coffee growers to day
labourers, and managed to paralyze major highways throughout the
Colombian countryside. Similarly, a number of Indian organizations in
Mexico have formed a national federation that articulates their collective
interests and expresses their solidarity with the EZLN. Together with the
growth of regional solidarity among peasant movements, these alliances and
unified actions are a major step forward. However, the problem of
confronting US-backed client states and their military forces remains a
formidable challenge. The current efforts of the Zapatistas in Mexico and the
MST in Brazil to build counterpart organizations in the cities have yet to be
successful. While urban-based religious and human rights groups, leftist
parliamentary deputies, academics and trade unionists do provide valuable
support, they do not constitute an anti-systemic force that could aid
revolutionary peasant movements in transforming the state.67 For one thing,
unlike the peasant movements, these organizations do not have an anti-
systemic agenda. The most promising development in this regard is the
barrio-based urban movement of the un- and under-employed in Argentina,
and the community-based Coordinator of Popular Organizations (COPS) in
the Dominican Republic. Both have demonstrated an ability to undertake
national coordinated mass action that effectively paralyzes the urban
economy, and this despite savage repression.
One current alternative to rural insurgency and the savage state repression it
provokes has been what might be termed passive grassroots agency, which
takes the familiar form of rural displacement and mass overseas migration.
Over two million Colombians have been displaced by the US-backed
paramilitary/military scorched earth policy, and today there are more El
Salvadorians in the US and Mexico than in their home country. A massive
exodus of peasants from Ecuador, Colombia, Central America and the
Caribbean is the 'passive/negative' response to the failed neo-liberal
experiment coupled with state repression. Except for President Chávez in
Venezuela, who speaks of a massive agrarian resettlement of rural migrants -
a back to the countryside movement—no state in Latin America has either the
resources or the political will to reverse the current decline in and crisis of
agriculture as a whole, and of peasant economy in particular. Integrated into
world markets, subordinated to Washington, the Latin American state has
continued to pursue policies designed to 'empty the countryside', confiscating
fertile peasant lands and transferring them to big landowners and/or
agribusiness enterprises, and then repressing those who dare to object to this
process by taking part in the burgeoning mass movements. The dislike is
mutual, and the element of stand-off palpable: no mass peasant movement is
currently aligned with any state in Latin America, and no state formation
'speaks for' the peasantry. If nothing else, this situation underlines the
importance of developing an adequate understanding of peasant/state
relations.
 NOTES

1. A partial exception to this is the late Eric Wolf [1969; 1982; 1999], whose scholarly and insightful
work on the peasantry in general and that in Latin America in particular transcended the stereotypically
ahistorical and micro-/macro-level polarity that so often inform rural ethnography written by
anthropologists. However, even this relatively sophisticated approach to the study of rural society was
unable to develop a theory of peasant-state relations.
2. The leading role in the 1959 Cuban revolution, arguably, was undertaken by a rural proletariat
composed of sugar workers (on which see Zeitlin [1967]), but even in this situation the peasantry was a
critical factor in the rural social base of the revolution. With regard to Nicaragua see Ortega [1990].
3. The literature on the dynamics of these agrarian reforms is voluminous but see, inter alia, Gutelman
[1974] and—more broadly—De Janvry [1981] and Stavenhagen [1970]. A number of commentators
have identified up to three different agrarian reform programmes in Chile: the first (from 1982 to 1967)
pre-capitalist in form; the second, under Frei and Allende (1967 to 1973), involving a transition
towards a capitalist agriculture; and a third (from 1973 onwards) based largely on a return of landed
properties to their former owners, many of whom were converted into capitalists of the Junker variety
[Castillo, 1982].
4. We have noted and argued this point elsewhere (see, in particular, Petras [1997]), challenging the
position taken by many Marxists like Munck [1984:198], who draws the conclusion from developments
in Chile and elsewhere that 'the centre of gravity of the class struggle in Latin America has shifted
decisively from the countryside to the city.'
5. On this rather obvious point see, inter alia, Feder [1971] and Huizer [1973]. However, many
scholars of peasant rebellion, like Huizer [1973], make broad reference to the prevailing 'culture' of
repression in the Latin American countryside rather than document the specifics of state repression.
6. This point is made in more general terms by Karl Polanyi [1944] in his pathbreaking research into
the social and political institutionality of market systems.
7. There is now a large and expanding literature that applies a postmodern framework to the analysis of
Latin American peasants. For critiques of this approach, see Veltmeyer [1997] and also the
contributions to this volume by Nugent and Brass.
8. See Brass, this volume. This danger is also clear from what Saul [1976:98] observed, presciently as it
turns out, about Africa a quarter of a century ago: 'For "tribalism" (the politicisation of ethnicity which
is all too characteristic a pathology of dependent Africa) does not spring primarily from the bare fact of
the existence of cultural differences between people. Rather, it has been teased into life, first by the
divide-and-rule tactics of colonialism and by uneven development in the economic sphere that
colonialism also facilitates and, second, by the ruling petty-bourgeoisie of the post-colonial period. The
latter, too, seek to divide and rule—better from their point of view that peasants should conceive the
national pie as being divided, comparatively between regions and tribes, rather than (as is in fact much
more clearly the case) between classes.'
9. The text in question is Moore [1966].
10. The main exponent of this kind of anti-state 'resistance' theory is James Scott [1976; 1985; 1990;
1998]. Although Scott himself writes mainly about Asia, others who have adopted his analytical
approach have applied this same 'resistance' framework to Latin America [Nugent, 1998; Joseph and
Nugent, 1994]. Scott's concern with 'from below' agency notwithstanding, currently fashionable
postmodern theory refuses to address the question of peasant/state relations, preferring instead to focus
on the minutiae of quotidian grassroots resistance, which is invariably depicted as empowering. In our
view, an approach that does not address the interrelated processes of imperialism, the agency of the
state, and class rule, cannot understand the extent to which the exercise of 'from above' power
necessarily poses limits to any and every kind of 'from below' empowerment. For typically conservative
approaches to the issue of redemocratization, both at a theoretical level and in relation to the Third
World, see respectively Cohen and Arato [1992] and Held [1993]. The latter text is in many ways a
return to the earlier approach associated with Bendix [1964], for whom the object of Third World
development was nothing more than the realization of (bourgeois) citizenship within the context of the
(capitalist) nation-building process.
11. Under this rubric comes 'Eurocommunism', or the view that in western European nations such as
Spain and Italy socialist objectives could be achieved with the support of the bourgeoisie, a political
consensus amounting to the exercise by the working class (and peasant) of 'hegemony' in a capitalist
democracy. Just how fragile a concept 'hegemony' proved to be was all too evident from the attempt by
the Chilean bourgeoisie to undermine the constitutional rule by the Unidad Popular government in the
period 1970–73, and from the military coup that ousted President Allende. What happened in Chile had
a profound impact on leftists worldwide, and gave a renewed impetus to a longstanding debate: that is,
whether the parliamentary or revolutionary path was the most appropriate to achieve socialism. In
Europe, many of those who opted for the parliamentary road later abandoned the objective of socialism
altogether. However, the debate about the feasibility of two distinct attempts to capture state power—a
parliamentary road as distinct from extra-parliamentary agency—is one which still has currency in
much of Latin America.
12. The sub-text to the concept of a 'weak'/'failed' state (see, e.g., Sandbrook [2000] and de Rivero
[2001]) is that underdeveloped nations—especially those in Africa—are not yet capable of running a
bourgeois state apparatus, and therefore in some sense not yet ready for the benefits of capitalist
democracy. At an abstract level, not only is this kind of argument potentially (and always inadvertently)
racist, but it also overlooks the active role of western imperialist nations in destabilizing and/or
undermining for their own specific ends what used formally to be bourgeois democratic states in the
Third World.
13. Much of the debate that took place in the 1970s was restricted to a consideration of the state as it
existed in western capitalist countries (see, for example, Holloway and Picciotto [1978], Wright [1978;
1989], Jessop [1990], Clarke [1991], and Barrow [1993]).
14. Perhaps the best-known debate in Western academic circles is that about the mode of production in
Indian agriculture [Thorner, 1982]. Much of the debate about the role of the state, however, concerned
Africa; see, for example, Beckman [1982] and Saul [1974] for a discussion of some of these issues with
regard, respectively, to Nigeria and Tanzania, and the reply to Saul by Ziemann and Lanzendörfer
[1977].
15. The concept of a 'bureaucratic authoritarian' state, which was academically in vogue during the
1980s, is associated with the influential work of O'Donnell [1979; 1988; 1992] on the development of a
'strong' state in the southern cone countries of Latin America-especially Argentina—in the period from
the mid-1960s onwards. His argument is that in Latin America the 'bureaucratic authoritarian' state was
the result of a combination of processes: on the one hand the emergence of what he terms the 'popular
sector' on to the political stage as an electoral force, and on the other the simultaneous
transnationalization of the capitalist economy. Caught in a pincer movement between these two
antinomic forces—the 'popular sector' wants citizenship and democracy, and is able to realize this
desire electorally, whereas the bourgeoisie does not, because citizenship and democracy interfere with
or hinder accumulation—a 'strong state' is established (by the military, but with a technocratic civilian
component) and claims to rule in the 'general interest'. In the words of O'Donnell [1988:31], '[t]he
specificity of [bureaucratic authoritarianism] in relation to other, past and present, authoritarian states in
Latin America lies in this defensive action by the dominant classes and their allies to crises involving
the popular sector that has been politically activated and is increasingly autonomous with respect to the
dominant classes and the state apparatus.' The theoretical usefulness of this concept for the
understanding of peasant/state relations, however, is limited. Of the many difficulties with this theory,
three can be mentioned here. First, the concept 'popular sector'—or 'the people' (pueblo)—has been
criticized as too all-embracing and amorphous, composed as it is of 'the disadvantaged sectors' (a
designation which includes the peasantry), the 'urban middle sectors' and the urban bourgeoisie, all of
which are arraigned against a 'foreign oligarchy'. Second, as O'Donnell [1988:36, note 2] himself
admits, the concept pueblo is based on the extremely problematic formulation by Laclau of the
analogous concept 'the people'. And third, the analytical objective of this framework is the realization
not of socialism but of that political chimera—an elusive yet much sought after 'steady state' capitalist
liberal democracy, in which liberal state policy is equally acceptable to labour and to capital and the
liberal state consequently governs with the amicable consent of both.
16. This distinction is reflected in the debate between Miliband and Poulantzas, which took place in the
New Left Review during the decade following 1973; Miliband [1969] upheld the class-specific
institutional role and instrumentalist view of the state, whereas Poulantzas [1975], by contrast,
maintained that the state was autonomous, and independent of rule by a particular class. That
Poulantzas should take this view is in a sense unsurprising, since he came from the same theoretical
stable as Althusser, whose attempt to redefine Marxism as a non-determinate form of structuralism
anticipated the aporetic theory propounded in the subsequent decade by the strongly anti-Marxist
postmodernists.
17. The dynamics of this process in both the early colonial and the postcolonial period of national
independence has been fairly well documented (see, for example, Reyeros [1949], Chevalier [1963],
Bowser [1974], Florescano [1975], Rout [1976], Góngora [1975], Duncan, Rutledge and Harding
[1977], Cole [1985], and Klein [1986]). As for the more recent capitalist penetration of Amazonia in
the Brazilian context see, inter alia, Davis [1977], and Hall [1989]. See also the contributions to this
volume by Assies, Nugent and de Souza Martins.
18. On some of the theoretical—and political—issues involved here in determining the form and
conditions of exploitation see, inter alia, Laclau [1971].
19. For examples from different Latin American contexts of the use of violence to control rural workers
during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Stein [1985], Taussig [1986], Mallon [1983], and
Mendes [1992]. Despite its frequent romanticization, the phenomenon of rural banditry was another
instance of violence and coerciveness underwriting the hacienda regime [Sánchez and Meertens, 2001;
Tocancipá-Falla, 2001].
20. On this point, see the seminal and still important exchange between Frank [1969] and Laclau [1971]
over when and whether capitalism was present in Latin America. The degree to which rural labour in
Latin America has been coerced, and thus unfree, is also a subject of debate. Thus, for example, Bauer
[1979a; 1979b] considers that, historically, agrarian relations of production have wrongly been
classified as coerced or unfree, and are more accurately interpreted as free, the result of choice
exercised by the workers or peasants concerned. This interpretation has been challenged by, among
others, Loveman [1979] and Brass [1999], who maintain that such production relations were indeed
unfree.
21. This is the case made by Nieboer [1910], who pointed out that where land remained an open
resource, available to all, agricultural production necessarily entailed coercive relations, since this was
the only way in which existing producers held on to their workers.
22. On the economic and social structures of diverse systems of agrarian production see, inter alia,
Barraclough [1973].
23. On this theoretical point in regard to Latin America see Veltmeyer [1983] and—more generally—
Meillassoux [1981].
24. Hence the frequent resort to the word 'semi-proletarianization,' a term which recognizes the
difficulty of categorizing members of a rural workforce either as 'pure' peasants or as 'pure' workers.
25. Not the least important role of the state during the early part of the twentieth century was the
purchase and stockpiling of agricultural commodities in order to maintain prices at their existing level.
For an account of this process—known as the 'defence' of a particular crop -in the case of Brazilian
coffee, see Rowe [1932:22ff., 28ff.].
26. As happened in the 1917 Russian revolution.
27. Not just Marxists but Keynesians, it might be added. A case in point was coffee cultivation in
Brazil, as is clear from a report by Rowe [1932] who, together with John Maynard Keynes, co-wrote a
number of influential analyses of the way in which economic conditions in the late 1920s generated
crisis, and in particular how more effective state intervention in agricultural commodity markets
(stockpiling surpluses in order to maintain high prices) might avoid this outcome. Following the
bumper coffee crop of 1927, 'the vast majority of the planters had more money in their pockets by the
end of 1927 than they had ever had before in all their lives…[t]his superfluity of cash led to…new
planting [and] the operation of a general trade boom, with the inevitable accompaniment of an
expansion in bank credit to a most dangerous extent' [Rowe, 1932:12]. This led to extensive planting,
which in turn generated another bumper crop in 1928, resulting in falling commodity prices. The
degree to which this was so is evident from the decline in the price of Brazilian coffee on the New York
market: it went from over 20 cents per 1b. in the period 1924–9 to only 13 cents in 1930 [Rowe,
1932:86, Table IV].
28. On this point, see Orlove and Custred [1980].
29. This rural-to-urban movement was the effect of a proletarianization process that proceeded apace
with the advance of capitalism into the countryside [Bartra, 1976; Cancian, 1987; Sullivan, 1995;
Veltmeyer, 1983]. The transition towards full proletarianization went ahead slowly and unevenly, with
extra-economic coercion persisting well into (and in some cases beyond) the 1960s in most Latin
American nations. By 1970, a large part of the rural population in many countries was partially or
wholly proletarianized, a situation which generated a new wave of political protest and peasant
insurgency. As pointed out by Paige [1975] and discussed below, different categories of peasants
(tenants, sharecroppers, rich/middle/poor cultivators) responded differently to this process; thus the key
issue in rural struggles might be land, land reform, access to credit or technology, higher wages and
better working conditions, or indeed any combination thereof.
30. In this context the position of the Communist Party in Chile is symptomatic of a widely held view
on the Marxist Left that the first order of the day in the rural sector is to secure 'the end of the
latifundios' and support the bourgeoisie in attacking the serious low-productivity problem—'to organise
the new agriculture with the central objective of increasing agrarian production' (cited in Castells
[1976:358]). For a critique of this strategy as applied in Chile under Allende, see Palacios [1979]. It
was this politically reformist view—that Latin American agriculture was still in a pre-capitalist (=
'feudal' or 'semi-feudal') stage—against which Frank [1969] aimed his celebrated critique at the end of
the development decade.
31. The question of the relative spontaneity of peasant rebellions and social movements has been
heavily debated over the years and remains unsettled. For example, it is clear that the Zapatista uprising
in Chiapas in 1994 was the product of a major—albeit hidden—decade-long organizational and
political effort, but the upsurge of anti-systemic activity, both by Mexican peasants in the early 1970s
and by peasants elsewhere subsequently, are generally regarded as owing little to the organizing efforts
of Leftist or populist parties.
32. To take the not atypical and well-studied case of Chile, in the mid-1960s the Inter-American
Committee of Agrarian Development published a survey [CIDA, 1966] that showed the inequality both
of the land tenure system and of income derived from rural property ownership. In this survey the
latifundistas, or landowning oligarchy, represented barely two per cent of the rural population but
received a third of all income; rich peasants, or the rural bourgeoisie, represented seven per cent of the
population and received 15 per cent of total income. Middle peasants, however, constituted 21 per cent
of the population but received only 12 per cent of total income, while various forms of smallholder
made up the remaining three-quarters of the rural workforce but accounted for less than a third of total
income. The question is what impact the land reform programme has had on this social structure and
pattern of income distribution. Indications are, and several partial studies suggest [Barraclough, 1973;
De Janvry, 1981; Ghimire, 2001], that the overall impact of the land reform programmes of the 1960s
and 1970s on this structure has been negligible.
33. The dynamics of this process were well analysed in Kay [1977].
34. On this tactic of 'from above' unionization, see Thorpe et al. [1995:131–43].
35. Exponents of this view—the 'end of land reform'—include Lehmann [1978] and Kay [1999].
36. CEPAL's model of 'Productive Transformation with Equity' [CEPAL, 1990] applies principally to
industry, but policy-makers in the region have extended it to agriculture as the basis for a more socially
inclusive and participatory form of development that, unlike the neo-liberal model, interprets the role of
the peasantry in the production process in terms of social as well as economic criteria.
37. On the dynamics of this kind of rural development process, at the level of theory and practice, see,
inter alia, Amalric [1998], Chambers and Conway [1998], Ghimire [2001], Liamzon et al. [1996], and
UNRISD [2000]. For the impact of neo-liberal economic policies on Peruvian and Chilean peasants,
see Crabtree and Murray (this volume).
38. On this point, see the critique by Petras [2002] of the 'globalization' thesis advanced by Hardt and
Negri [2000] under the spuriously radical label of 'empire'.
39. For more details on these points, see Petras [2002].
40. The dynamics of this process are evident across the region, but are particularly clear in Brazil under
the presidency of Ferdinand Cardoso [Petras and Veltmeyer, 200 lb].
41. In fact the term 'peasant'—then as now—encompasses diverse forms, both of social relations and of
rural production and labour, most often in Latin America working the land under the constraint of debt-
peonage that structured the encomienda system. Under these conditions, the concept 'peasant' generally
referred both to those smallholders settled within large estates, where they were leased plots on a
sharecropping arrangement or as labour-service tenants, and those independent cultivators settled
outside the estates, but periodically drawn upon by the latter units as a source of seasonal or part-time
labour. The peasantry so understood constitutes a broad social grouping characterized, most often, by a
combination of subsistence and simple commodity production, but also including among its ranks a
huge rural proletariat and semi-proletariat composed of landless or near landless workers. The
theoretical issues involved in categorizing peasants in terms of class are outlined by, among others,
Duggett [1975], Foweraker [1978], de Janvry [1981], Brass [1991; 2000], Berger [1992], and Kearney
[1996]. In the Latin American context, that of a politically weak and subjugated peasantry and the
predominance of the latifundio, a rural petit bourgeoisie composed of independent farmers did not
develop to the same extent as it did, under very different conditions, in North America. On this issue of
the alternative paths of agrarian development in Latin America see, inter alia, de Janvry [1981], Kay
[1981] and Mead [1991].
42. Both the nature of and limits to rural millenarian movements undertaken by 'primitive rebels' are
examined in the important text by Hobsbawm [1959].
43. This touches on an issue that should be central to any discussion about rural transformation in Latin
America: the agrarian question, or whether the junker or farmer path of transition prevails in particular
countries, and why. Raised over a century ago—in 1899—by Lenin [1964] and Kautsky [1988], the
agrarian question addressed the way in which European agriculture at that conjuncture was being
transformed, and in particular what kind of relational changes this process involved, and how this in
turn permitted a surplus to be generated and transferred out of agriculture for the purpose of
industrialisation. According to Lenin, the junker path was the less conducive to capitalist development,
because its oppressive relations of production prevented smallholder accumulation, which in turn
blocked market expansion. By contrast, the farmer (or peasant) path allowed this to happen, with the
result that smallholding became differentiated in class terms, and the better-off cultivators that emerged
under this system purchased labour-power and generated surpluses for reinvestment in productive
capacity. One hundred year on, these remain important issues for those with an interest in Latin
American development, and the past two decades have seen the publication of some important texts
analysing the agrarian question in relation to specific countries in the region (see, for example, Harris
[1992], Harris et al. [1978], and de Janvry [1981]). For a useful analysis of current theoretical problems
raised by the agrarian question, see the collection edited by Goodman and Watts [1997].
44. For this event, see the classic account—initially published in 1938—by C.L.R.James [1980], who
noted that 'working and living together in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugar-factories…[slaves] were
closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time' [James, 1980:85–6].
45. Many historians in their reconstruction of events have tended to ignore or downplay the
significance of these and other such struggles and, in the case of Mexico, of a virtually 'unbroken
tradition of revolutionary protest' [Knight, 1985:2]. Unless they could be tied to some decisive
revolutionary change in, for example, the state, the class struggles, acts of mass resistance and peasant
rebellions that accompanied the process of 'primitive accumulation' (forcible seizure of land, etc.), and
that characterized the 'popular movement'in post-colonial times, in the ex post facto accounts of these
'events' given by historians like Ruiz [1980] the dynamics of mass struggle tend to disappear,
outweighed by institutional changes. Again, in the case of developments leading up to and following
the 'Mexican revolution,' the more nuanced 'class struggle' approach of the 'new Marxists' (Cockcroft,
Gilly, Semo), with all their conceptual stretchings and over-generalizations, did at least restore to the
historical record the centrality of class struggle and mass revolutionary action in the process of change,
particularly as relates to the state [Cockcroft, 2001]. On the vicissitudes of this notion of 'revolutionary
action' and the surrounding debates see Knight [1985].
46. It is important to remember that a similarly stigmatizing label—that of 'vagabond' (= 'masterless
man')—was attached historically to dispossessed peasants in England, a designation which was used by
the state to justify legal controls on their freedom to sell their labour-power, their only commodity.
47. A good example of the historical dynamics and legacy of an oral tradition of emancipatory struggle
is provided in the popular movements inspired by Emilio Zapata and Zapatismo which, notwithstanding
the localized and limited nature of the 'peasant rebellion' involved (reluctance to seize state power,
perhaps a 'fatal weakness'), did, as Knight [1985:9] points out, constitute a 'mobilisation of the rural
masses behind a genuinely popular programme' and a serious confrontation with the state that
'significantly helped in…[its] dissolution'. Zapatismo, in this context, inspired generations of later
mobilizations including those of Lucio Cabañas and the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional.
48. Important contributions to the historiography of the Mexican revolution include Knight [1986a;
1986b], Hart [1987], and Katz [1988].
49. For the prefiguring ideological influences on the revolution, see Cockcroft [1968].
50. The justly celebrated 'jungle' novels written during the 1920s by Traven [1974; 1981; 1982; 1994]
are about slave labour in the mahogany camps (monterias) in tropical Mexico at the time of the
Mexican revolution. For the popular prints of Posada, see Rothenstein [1989].
51. That this has continued to be a problem, particularly where the question of new social movements
in Mexico is concerned, is clear from Davis [1994].
52. On this point, see the relevant sections in the important collections edited by Stavenhagen [1970],
Landsberger [1969; 1974], the Commission Internationale d'Histoire des Movements Sociaux et des
Structures Sociales [1976], and Roseberry, Gudmundson and Samper [1995].
53. For El Salvador, see Dunkerley [1992:49ff.].
54. For a critical analysis and overview of the dynamics of these struggles, see Castells [1976], Kay
[1981], and Loveman [1976].
55. Early and still useful accounts that chronicle this process include Simpson [1937], Whetten [1948],
Silva Herzog [1959] and Tannenbaum [1968].
56. For the antecedents and effects of the 1952 Bolivian revolution, see the important political analyses
by Lora [1963; 1970; 1967–70], the contributions to the collection edited by Malloy and Thorn [1971],
and the more recent monograph by Dunkerley [1984]. Texts that deal specifically with the Bolivian
agrarian reform include Beltrán and Fernandez [1960] and Dandler [1969].
57. For the details of this process, see, inter alia, McEwan [1981].
58. This was also true of the Cuba revolution during the 1960s, when resources had to be allocated to
defend the island from US invasion.
59. For this process, see among others Teichman [1995] and Crabtree and Murray (this volume).
60. This is what happened in the case of the better-off peasantry in eastern Peru after the agrarian
reform there in the early 1960s [Brass, 2000: Ch. 2].
61. It is easy to overlook the longevity of Cuban socialism. The Soviet Union lasted 72 years, and the
Chinese revolution some 27 until the death of Mao: the Cuban revolutionary regime—which has so far
lasted 43 years—comes between these two.
62. On this, see Harvey [1994; 1995].
63. Colombia is an obvious case in point, but there are others. For example, Bolivia, where the Banzer
dictatorship, which ruled the country for most of the 1970s, had strong links with the drug trade based
in the coca-growing semi-tropical region of Yungas and Chapare. The military uprising which took
place in 1980 was known as the 'cocaine coup' because all the senior officers who took part were
involved in the illicit trafficking of cocaine [Latin American Bureau, 1980].
64. Similar kinds of direct action have been undertaken by new farmers' movements in India.
65. This is now stated US policy in many other parts of the world. Whenever the USA is engaged in
foreign conflict, therefore, as in the case of Afghanistan, its preferred strategy is to arm and support a
suitably pliant internal opposition to the existing government, against which hostilities are targeted. It is
important to remember, however, that—from Guatemala in the mid-1950s to Chile in the early 1970s—
this has to some degree always been true of US involvement in Latin America.
66. In the case of El Salvador this is the view, and political position, of the leaders of the ADC (Alianza
de Campesinos Democráticos), a highly representative national amalgam of 24 peasant organizations
that is informally aligned with the FLMN, who the authors interviewed in a series of research visits to
El Salvador in 1996.
67. Not least because so many of those who adhere to NGO activity or parliamentary methods now
eschew the possibility and the desirability of a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and its state.
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From Rubber Estate to Simple Commodity Production:
Agrarian Struggles in the Northern Bolivian Amazon

WILLEM ASSIES
Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don't do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out
[Talking Heads, Crosseyed and Painless, 1980]
 INTRODUCTION

In October 2001 the Bolivian government convoked an 'Earth Summit'

(Cumbre de la Tierra), to be held a month later. The previous years had seen
an escalation of peasant unrest. In the Andean highlands the peasantry had
turned increasingly to militant action with strong ethnic overtones. In the
eastern tropical lowlands a colonists' movement had gathered strength, and in
the year 2000 a movement of landless peasants had erupted, eliciting a
violent response from large landowners who, in turn, pressured the
government with their own claims. By the end of June that same year
indigenous people of the tropical lowlands had initiated their Third March'
under the banner of 'Land, Territories and Natural Resources' and were joined
by peasants from the region.1 The 'Earth Summit' ended in failure. Conditions
were hardly propitious as in early November a clash between landless
peasants and alleged paramilitaries had claimed seven lives, and peasant
organizations were suspicious about the intentions of a government
that had recently signed an agreement with the Camara Agropecuaria del
Oriente (CAO), representing the large landowners and cattle-raisers of the
Santa Cruz region, which ran quite counter to peasant interests. In the course
of November the 'Summit' was renamed 'Encounter', reflecting reduced
expectations, and when it took place by the end of the month some of the
principal peasant organizations made a show of absence and announced that
they would organize a summit of their own.
What the surge of peasant and indigenous people's movements made clear
was that the agrarian and forestry legislation introduced in 1996 had failed to
resolve the problems it was meant to address. The extremely slow, patchy,
and often landlord-biased implementation of the 1996 Ley del Servicio
Nacional de Reforma Agraria, also known as Ley INRA, generated
frustration. Moreover, this law failed to address the problems that had
accumulated in the Andean highlands since the 1953 Revolutionary land
reform, and it is hard to apply in other specific regional contexts. The Ley
Forestal generated its own set of conflicts. Forestry concessions that had
been granted overlapped with territorial claims by indigenous peoples, and in
1999 the Banzer government had issued a decree allowing the conversion of
rubber estates in the northern Amazon region into concessions under the 1996
Forestry Law, opening the way to a consolidation of a neo-latifundist tenure
structure to the detriment of the local peasantry. This was one of the direct
motives for the indigenous-peasant 'March for Land Territories and Natural
Resources' which successfully pressured the government to repeal the decree
and to modify the regulations for the implementation of the Ley INRA.
In this article I will focus on the specific constellation in the northern
Bolivian Amazon region that provided a major incentive for the Third
March', and I will seek to relate the issues at stake in the region to the broader
debate on agrarian and forestry legislation. The history of the region has been
marked by the rubber economy that arose in the final quarter of the
nineteenth century. By 1985, however, rubber extraction entered into a final
crisis. This heralded the beginning of a process of economic reconversion
marked by changes in labour relations and forms of resource use. In the first
section of this article I will outline the rise and demise of the rubber economy
and show how, with the decline of the rubber estate system independent
peasant-extractivist communities emerged, while at the same time control
over and access to resources, rather than control over people on which the
estate system was based, became increasingly important. In the next section I
will sketch the rise of a new regional economic constellation after 1985,
when the production of Brazil nuts became a major economic activity in the
region. The third section of the article offers a further analysis and discussion
of the regional transformations in the labour regime, in patterns of
landholding, and access to resources. This analysis delineates the latent
tension between 'owners' of barracas (former rubber estates) and the
emerging comunidades libres (free communities). This conflict of interests
became manifest when the 1996 land and forestry legislation started to be
implemented in the region. Section four discusses this new legislation, shows
how it triggered the 'Third March', and examines the outcomes of this
peasant-indigenous mobilization. The concluding section sums up the
argument and looks at the future prospects for the region.
 THE RISE AND DECLINE OF THE RUBBER TRADE

This section provides a brief introduction to the region and describes how,
alongside the rubber estates, a sector of free communities has come into
existence and competes for resources with the established local agrarian elite.
For convenience the century in which rubber production dominated-from
around 1880 until 1985—is divided into three periods. The first covers the
rise of the rubber economy and the consolidation of the 'Suárez Empire',
which came to dominate the region until it disintegrated after 1940. The
period from 1940 to 1985 is characterized by the emergence of a much more
fragmented system of patron-run estates, while in the interstices of this
system the first free communities emerged. This constellation changed
drastically as a result of the final collapse of the rubber trade after 1985. The
new Brazil nut-centred economy would be built from the rubble left after the
collapse of the rubber economy.2

The Rise of the Rubber Trade and the Consolidation of the Casa Suárez
(1880–1940)

Until well into the nineteenth century what nowadays is the northern Bolivian
Amazon region was still designated as 'land to be discovered'. The national
border with Brazil was ill defined. The 1867 Ayacucho Treaty mentioned a
line running from the confluence of the Beni River and the Mamoré, which
then forms the River Madeira, to the unknown headwaters of the Javari
River. This rainforest region was inhabited by various indigenous peoples—
such as the Araona, Cavineño, Tacana, Ese Ejja, Chácobo Pacahuara and
Yaminahua - descendants of whom can still be found in the region. Other
groups have been decimated or displaced [Lema, 1998; Stoian, 2000a: 82,
123; Weber, 1994]. To the south the rainforest gives way to the Moxos
plains, a swampy savannah region interspersed with patches of forest. This
had been a region of Jesuit missionary effort that resulted in the
establishment of some 25 mission-towns. After the expulsion of the Jesuits in
1767, mestizo cattle ranchers became the dominant class in the region. Only a
few missionaries and some explorers in search of El Dorado ventured into the
rainforest to the north, and often lost their lives there.
In the course of the nineteenth century, however, the rainforest region was
incorporated into the world economy. The extraction of forest products,
particularly cinchona bark (for quinine), brought new incursions, but all this
paled beside the rubber boom. The perfection, in 1839, of the vulcanization
process opened the way for new applications, resulting in growing demand
for this commodity from the industrializing countries. In 1888 Dunlop
invented the pneumatic tyre, first used for bicycles. It was the emergence of
the automobile industry at the end of the century, however, that triggered the
rubber boom between 1900 and 1913. Rubber extraction swept through the
Amazon region following the river systems. From the north, Brazilians made
their way upstream along the Juruá, Purus and Madeira rivers, and from the
south Bolivians went downstream along the Beni River.3 When Brazilian and
Bolivian rubber exploiters met, boundary conflict ensued and resulted in war.
In 1903 Bolivia saw itself forced to sign the Treaty of Petrópolis, by which it
ceded the territory of Acre to Brazil. A new national border was thus
established, which delimited the northern Bolivian Amazon. The town of
Riberalta, founded in the late nineteenth century, became the most important
regional centre. The present-day province of Vaca Díez in the Department of
Beni, and the five provinces in the Department of Pando, constitute the bulk
of the Bolivian Amazon region, and it is on this area that this article will
focus.
By the late nineteenth century Bolivian explorers entered the northern
rainforest region to engage in the rubber trade. One of them was Antonio
Vaca Díez, the 'Bolivian Cecil Rhodes', who in 1897 would drown together
with the notorious Peruvian rubber baron Fitzcarraldo, whom he visited on
returning from a business trip to Europe. In 1880 Vaca Díez had sponsored
an expedition by Edwin Heath who found that the Beni River effectively
flowed into the Madeira, a discovery that greatly increased the feasibility of
rubber production in the region since it provided a route toward the Amazon
and thereby to the Atlantic trade. These pioneers explored the rivers and
staked out the areas they took possession of by marking some trees on the
riverside and claiming all that was behind as part of their estates or barracas.
Then workers would be recruited and shipped to the rubber region. They
were the last link in a chain of habilitos in which goods were advanced in
return for the future delivery of rubber. This system, which will be discussed
in more detail below, reached down from the large trade-houses in Belém and
Manaus, through the patrons of the rubber estates, to the rubber tappers.4
The barracas consisted basically of a main-house on the riverside, where
administration, storage facilities and the pulpería (company store) were
concentrated, and a number of centros, settlements of a few huts in the forest
from which the rubber trails would start. Each worker would be assigned a
number of trails to work: in the morning he made incisions in the trees on
which were affixed small pots to collect the rubber; in the afternoon he
returned to collect the produce, and then coagulate it above the smoke of
wood chips to form balls of wild rubber. These would then be delivered to the
main-house every fortnight or so in exchange for a new supply of basic
necessities such as rice, sugar, manioc and other essentials.
Rubber production in northern Bolivia eventually came to be dominated by
the Casa Suárez (the House of Suárez). In 1882 the Suárez brothers, who
were engaged in river trade, established their headquarters in Cachuela
Esperanza, a strategic location on the Beni River, as it was the only place
where navigation was completely interrupted by rapids that had to be
bypassed by a short detour along the river bank. Until the late nineteenth
century the Casa Suárez was hardly involved in rubber production. It
advanced goods against future delivery of rubber and many a barraquero
(estate owner) became indebted to the Casa Suárez. From 1895 onward,
however, the Casa Suárez started taking over barracas from their indebted
owners, and by 1916 the Suárez empire was consolidated. The Casa Suárez
became a highly integrated enterprise, which at the height of its power laid
claim to about 75 per cent of the Bolivian Amazon region and handled some
60 per cent of Bolivian rubber production. The company had offices in
London and a number of other cities. Its headquarters in Cachuela Esperanza
came to include a radio-telegraph station, residential blocks, a hotel, a
restaurant, a cinema, a hospital under Swiss direction, and a number of large
machine shops. Including its holdings in Beni, dedicated to cattle-raising to
supply the rubber estates to the north, the enterprise extended for about
180,000 square kilometres. Patriarch Don Nicolas Suárez became known as
the 'Rockefeller of the rubber trade' [Fifer, 1970; Pacheco, 1992; Roca,
2001:241–255 Sanabria, 1988].
As we shall see in more detail below, the 1913 crash in rubber prices, due to
competition from plantation-produced rubber from the British and Dutch
colonies, triggered important changes in the organization of production. In
the first place, as imports became more difficult, local agriculture became
more important. In the second place, Brazil nut production emerged as a
complementary activity. Brazil nuts are harvested between December and
March, the rainy season when rubber tapping is not possible. However, in
contrast to the tendency toward fragmentation into smaller estates that could
be observed in other rubber producing regions [Costa, 1992:59; Martinello,
1988:47–61], the Suárez empire remained largely intact during the interwar
period.

The Fragmentation of an 'Empire' and the Rise of the First Free

Communities (1940–85)

Rubber production in the Amazon region saw a brief upsurge during the
Second World War, but then resumed its secular decline in the face of
competition from plantation produce and synthetic rubber. Brazilian exports
dropped by about 40 per cent from 1945 to 1946 [Martinello, 1988:293].
Production of native rubber in the region was saved from total collapse by
price support policies implemented by the Brazilian government, both in
response to pressures by estate owners and rubber traders and also for
strategic reasons. Domestic consumer prices in Brazil might be up to three
times the world market rate [Pinto, 1984]. Bolivian producers also benefited
from these schemes, and this was formalized in the 1958 Roboré Treaty
[Pacheco, 1992:255–6]. The 1970s saw another brief upsurge in rubber
prices in the context of the oil crisis, but thereafter the Brazilian price support
scheme again became its main prop until the system was abandoned in the
mid-1980s.
Meanwhile, however, Nicolas Suárez, the patriarch of the Casa Suárez had
died in 1940, and this set the stage for the disintegration and fragmentation of
the Suárez empire [Roca, 2001:255–64]. Its estates were sold off or simply
taken over by the administrators. The entrepreneurial organization of Casa
Suárez gave way to what Pacheco [1992] calls barracas patronales, of
various sizes. Where before Nicolás Suárez had been 'the patron' whose
barracas were managed by 'administrators', the number of smaller patrons
now proliferated. The emergence of the barraca patronal basically meant a
simplification and, according to Pacheco, often a harshening of labour
relations. Borrowing the imagery evoked by Aramburu [1994:85], we might
say that the 'golden age' of the 'big patrons' was over. At the time of the Casa
Suárez the labour force had been relatively diversified. Some sectors received
cash salaries and there was even something resembling a social policy. With
the decline of the rubber trade, and the demise of this entrepreneurial mode of
organization, relations were simplified to those between the patrones and
trabajadores empatronados [Pacheco, 1992]. The infrastructure of earlier
times fell into disuse and gradually decayed. Abandoned and overgrown
machinery and dilapidated barracks can still be seen in Cachuela Esperanza.
The Riberalta-based Seiler Company, earlier the Braillard Company and by
the late 1960s taken over by the Hecker family, remained as a more or less
'entrepreneur-type' venture.
Alongside the barracas patronales a sector of comunidades libres started to
expand, either as a result of the abandonment of barracas by their patrons or
through the settlement by rubber tappers in areas not controlled by patrons.5
The households in these communities relied on rubber tapping, small-scale
agriculture and Brazil nut gathering; the complementary set of activities of a
year-round agro-extractive cycle [Assies, 1997a: 8–10]. At the same time the
disintegration of the Suárez empire opened the way for the emergence of a
system of independent river-traders who came to play an important role in a
complex web of habilitos, centred in the town of Riberalta and linked to
Brazilian trade circuits. This trade web tied together the various components
of a much more fragmented system.
Using data from the 1984 Agrarian Census, held just before the final collapse
of the rubber trade, Ormachea and Fernández [1989:30] calculate that there
were 5,523 agricultural establishments in the region, covering 3,120,833
hectares out of a total of 8,626,100 hectares for the whole region. The
average size of the holdings was 565 hectares, but distribution was rather
skewed, with 88 per cent of the holdings smaller than 500 hectares and
occupying 9 per cent of the land, and 4 per cent of the holdings larger than
2,500 hectares occupying 79 per cent.6 Of the 5,523 establishments, about
3,200 were dedicated mainly to rubber and Brazil nut extraction. Data from a
smaller sample suggest that about half of them were smallholdings,
possessing up to 499 rubber trees and relying on family labour. The other half
were barracas, relying on 'outside', but mainly resident, labour and
accounting for 78 per cent of the rubber trails. Among the barracas, 95 per
cent were classified as small, possessing between 500 and 4,999 rubber trees
[Pacheco, 1990; 1992:177].

The Collapse of the Rubber Trade after 1985

After 1985, the Sarney government in Brazil started dismantling the state
agency regulating the rubber trade, and some years later the Collor
government virtually abandoned all price support schemes. Rubber prices
dropped to a historical low, and the rubber trade came to a virtual standstill.
This had a dramatic impact on the emerging constellation described in the
foregoing section.
The collapse of the rubber trade was accompanied by an accelerated spatial
relocation of the population. Since rubber production disappeared as the
mainstay of year-round economic activity, the barraca system ceased to be
the main mode of socio-spatial organization. The barraca 'was doomed as an
institution; it only remained as a geographic space', as one barraca owner put
it. The more remote barracas in particular saw a decline in their population,
which tended to move to or establish comunidades libres, or to migrate to the
urban areas. The collapse of the rubber trade also implied a contraction of the
itinerant trader networks, since there was little to trade any more for most of
the year. This further contributed to a modification of rural settlement
patterns, since the comunidades libres tended to establish themselves at
strategic and more accessible sites alongside the rivers, and at a later stage
along the roads that began to be improved by the late 1980s.7 While rubber
production had sustained a dispersed settlement pattern, its decline prompted
a clustering of the population and, whereas rubber extraction had been the
cornerstone of the agro-extractive cycle, agriculture now became the central
element with Brazil nut gathering as an important source of cash income.
Agriculture would be primarily subsistence-oriented, although depending on
the location and the distance from markets, it might be articulated in a
complex fashion with market exchanges [Assies, 1997a: 59–64].8 Alongside
the peasantry, particularly in the vicinity of the urban centres, one finds
medium-sized farms (granjas), often dedicated to fattening of cattle or the
production of some commercial crop. It is estimated that the cultivated area
in the region expanded from 21,000 hectares in the early 1980s to around
48,000 hectares in the early 1990s [Henkemans, 2001:52].
Another, no less important, consequence was massive rural-urban migration.
Census data from 1976 and 1992 indicate a decline of the rural population in
all the provinces of the Department of Pando, while the urban population in
the Province of Nicolas Suárez, that is the town of Cobija, grew at a rate of
5.8 per cent annually. The urban population of the Province of Vaca Díez in
the Beni Department, that is the towns of Riberalta and Guayramerín, also
increased at a rate of 5.1 per cent per year. The Vaca Díez province was the
only province where the rural population increased, at a rate of 0.5 per cent
per year. This reflects a clustering of the comunidades libres around the
towns [Assies, 1997a: 45–6]. While these national-level census data indicate
the transformations in the region, some authors [Henkemans, 2001:65;
Pacheco and Avila, 2001:60; Stoian, 2000a: 193] include local data referring
to 1985. Such data suggest that the latter year was a turning point, after which
migration greatly accelerated. The collapse of the rubber trade thus may be
assumed to have been a major push factor in the migration process. The main
point is that the urban population in the region grew from 33,508 in 1976 to
81,161 in 1992 and, according to preliminary census data, to 117, 559 in
2001, respectively making up 44, 66 and 71 per cent of the total regional
population.9
 THE RISE OF THE BRAZIL NUT TRADE

It was from the debris of the rubber economy that a new regional economy
arose, this time centred largely on Brazil nut production. As we have seen,
Brazil nut production started from the 1920s onwards, and by the 1950s it
had become an important economic activity in northern Bolivia, with a total
value often equalling and sometimes surpassing that of rubber exports
[Stoian, 2000b: 281]. Some beneficiadoras (processing-plants where nuts are
shelled) had been established from the 1930s onward, by the Casa Suárez
among others. Processing capacity went through some ups and downs during
the following decades, but around the mid-1980s all beneficiadoras had
closed due to the difficult economic and political situation in the country and
the decline of the regional economy [Assies, 1997a: 46; Bojanic, 2001:60–63;
Coesmans and Medina, 1997:149–50; Stoian, 2000b: 280–85].
The panorama changed radically during the second half of the 1980s. Various
factors contributed to this development. By the mid-1980s some US
importers had 'discovered' northern Bolivia as a source of Brazil nuts that
could be purchased at a price between 30 per cent and 40 per cent below
Brazilian export prices. In 1987 a British firm began importing Bolivian nuts
on a massive scale [Holt, 1992].10 The expansion of the new trade was also
facilitated by the structural adjustment policies implemented by the Paz
Estensorro government in 1985. Improvement of road connections to the
Pacific also contributed to Bolivian exports, as did the reputation of Brazil
nuts as a forest friendly product [Assies, 1997a, 1997b]. By the end of the
1990s some 20 beneficiadoras were operating in northern Bolivia, the great
majority in Riberalta, and about five more outside the region.11 Total export
volumes soared from 10,000 metric tons in 1986 to over 30,000 metric tons
by the late 1990s. More importantly, whereas in 1986, when all
beneficiadoras were closed, the nuts were exported in-shell, by the late 1990s
virtually the total volume of exports consisted of shelled nuts. The total value
of exports had risen from about US$ 9 million in the late 1980s to about US$
30 million ten years later. Bolivia had overtaken Brazil as the world market
supplier of Brazil nuts, which should arguably have been renamed 'Amazon
nuts' [Assies, 1997a: 1]. Brazil nut production became the driving economic
activity in northern Bolivia.
Two other economic activities also became important in the region. One is
palm heart production, which surged from 1992 onward. By the late 1990s it
contributed some US$ 7 million to the regional income but then disappeared,
even before depletion of the stock, due to international competition and the
drying up of the Brazilian market after some Brazilians allegedly died after
consuming the Bolivian product. The other activity is timber production. The
value of timber exports from the region increased from about US$ 1 million
in the mid-1980s to about US$ 20 million by 1997 [Stoian, 2000b: 291].12
A small group of beneficiadora owners have become the key players in the
new regional economy, displacing the barraquero sector. Beneficiadora
owners largely finance the Brazil nut harvest through a revamped habilito
system, and some of them are also involved in the timber or palm heart
industry. Some beneficiadoras have been set up with local capital, others are
owned by large Bolivian corporations, which may also be involved in other
ventures such as soya production. By the early 1990s the beneficiadora
owners set up an organization of their own, the Asociación de Beneficiadoras
del Nordeste (ABAN) which later fused with the Camara de Exportadores
del Norte (CADEXNOR). These organizations partly replaced the Asociación
de Productores de Goma y Almendra (ASPROGOAL), which had been
founded in 1973 to represent the then locally dominant barraqueros.
ASPROGOAL membership declined from some 160 members to about 40
around 1995. Occasionally, however, ASPROGOAL rises from the ashes, as
we will see in the following section.
The beneficiadoras process the Brazil nuts and finance a good part of the
harvest. Processing is done with the help of small manually operated cracking
devices.13 Initially the units of production often were no more than sheds, but
quality concerns have brought improvements, also to some labour conditions.
For processing the Riberalta beneficiadoras employ some 4,000 to 6,000
individuals, mainly women, for about seven to eight months of the year
[Coesmans and Medina, 1997]. Shelling nuts has become the main source of
urban employment in Riberalta. By the time of the harvest season the
beneficiadoras have often processed and marketed their stock of nuts, and lay
off their workforce, many of whom join their husbands during the nut
harvest.
Raw material for the beneficiadoras basically comes from two sources.
Barracas contribute an estimated 60 to 65 per cent and comunidades libres
the remainder. An outstanding feature that should be borne in mind in
discussing the configuration that emerged after 1985 is the change in urban-
rural relations. As noted, the collapse of the rubber trade brought the demise
of the barraca as the dominant mode of socio-spatial organization and
triggered an unprecedented process of demographic relocation. The rapid
shift of population to the urban centres meant that an urban labour pool, or
reserve army of workers, became available, and has come to play a
significant role in the emerging Brazil nut economy. The permanent
population of the barracas has declined dramatically, and sometimes only a
caretaker is left. Urban-based labour gangs have come to play a key role in
the Brazil nut harvest in the barracas, as well as in the exploitation of other
forest products. Each year, in December, between 5,000 and 6,000 people
leave Riberalta's peripheral neighbourhoods for the Brazil nut harvest.
The section below outlines the changes in labour relations in the course of the
process of economic transformation outlined above, and at the competition
over access to land and resources between barraca owners and the
comunidades libres.
 LAND, LABOUR AND THE AGRARIAN STRUCTURE

Labour Relations during the Rubber Era

The workforce during the early rubber era was mainly recruited outside the
region. The local indigenous population was hostile and mostly unwilling to
work on the barracas carved out on their territories. In a recent letter the heir
to one of the enterprises that arose alongside the Casa Suárez affirms:
For in case you do not know, Monsignor, nearly all the people that worked for the Braillard Enterprise,
later Seiler and then Hecker, were people that we brought from Apolo, Ixiamas, Tumupasa, Reyes,
Rurrenabaque and from various communities along the Beni river up to Puerto Linares. You can
recognize them by their way of dressing and because it was they who introduced the custom of the
'tipoy' and they were organized under the command of a Captain, who they elected from among
themselves, and every fortnight in their traditional ceremonies on Thursday they would use the drug
'hallahuasca,' a custom that still survives in some places. All the men that we brought from Caupilan
had the right to a paid return once they had paid off their advances. Very few returned. I am talking in
the plural because I do not conceal what my father and grandfather did; I acknowledge and accept it.
[…] With the exception of the indigenous peoples that the priests managed to evangelize, among them
those of Puerto Cavinas on the Beni river, all other 'savages' that lived on the navigable rivers were
exterminated once the repetition rifle became available, because thanks to this tremendous weapon the
'white man' gained supremacy and thanks to it he could practically exterminate all tribes. Before this
invention the savage had the advantage. […] A hundred years ago genocide was committed in our
region, a killing without mercy in the search for rubber lands where the only obstacle to their
exploitation was the savage man, who had to be killed by all possible means.14
Once the first barracas had been staked out workers would be recruited,
mainly in the Santa Cruz region and among the indigenous population of the
Beni plains, often by deceit if not by force [Sanabria, 1988:95–6]. After
being transported to the barraca, the worker would be supplied with the basic
tools for work and survival, and an account was opened to keep track of the
debt thus incurred, as well as for the future purchases at the pulpería in
exchange for the 'black gold'.
At the height of the rubber boom a large part of the goods sold to the rubber
tapper was imported. Thus Sanabria [1988:131] asserts that Bolivians
imported Chinese rice, Cuban sugar and Brazilian coffee and cachaça (cane
alcohol), which totally displaced similar products earlier imported from Santa
Cruz. In order not to divert the workforce from the main activity, and to
enforce relations of dependency, subsistence farming by rubber tappers was,
often effectively, discouraged on the estates though patrons might supervise
the centralized production of some staples on a chaco patronal (plot
cultivated under patron supervision) during the off-season. On the other hand,
in times of high rubber prices the tappers may have peferred to buy imported
luxury food [Romanoff, 1992:131; Stoian, 2000a: 77].
An issue that requires attention here is the controversial question of the
relations of production and the role of the habilito system. A question that
often emerges in the literature on the Amazonian rubber economy is why it
was not 'rationalized', and why it did not give rise to fully capitalist relations
of production and a plantation system. Labour relations in the context of
rubber production have often been described as a coercive and harsh system
of debt peonage. Weinstein [1993], however, reconsidered this view and
attributed the persistence of 'pre-capitalist' relations and the system of debt
peonage to an alliance between rubber tappers and traders based on mutual
self-interest. Due to various circumstances such as the dispersion of material
resources, the mentality of the rural population, the initial scarcity of capital,
and the enormous distances to be overcome, she argues, an economic system
emerged in which production largely remained under control of the direct
producer and surplus extraction occurred at the level of exchange. Patrons
and traders were unable to establish direct control over the labour force, and
for its part the labour force resisted such direct control. Weinstein's view, in
turn, has been challenged by Barham and Coomes [1994a; 1996], who adopt
a neo-institutional economic perspective, and argue that the debt system, or
debt-merchandise contract as they call it, was relatively efficient in terms of
transaction costs and risk reduction. Wage labour, they argue, would be
inefficient in the context of the rubber boom since it would involve high
transaction costs in monitoring the efforts of a highly scattered workforce to
ensure the full delivery of the produce, because rubber tappers might be
tempted to sell it to itinerant traders. On the other hand, the mark-up on
supplies and the discounts on rubber were justified by risks such as product
loss in transport or the loss of labour time of the tappers due to illness,
desertion and tapper mortality rates of 25–30 per cent (and occasionally as
high as 50 per cent). The clients, in return, would be assured of the delivery
of needed goods and insurance (or leniency, I would say) in times of illness
or other mishaps.15
Recently, Bojanic [2001] and Stoian [2000a], in their studies of the northern
Bolivian region, have taken up this lead in order to challenge the usual view
of the habilito system as 'brutal, unfair, exploitative and thus as an
undesirable bondage system' [Bojanic, 2001:93]. Their work invites further
scrutiny of the forms of labour recruitment, labour relations, and their
transformation in the region. I will first focus on the early rubber era and then
on the transformation and current forms of the habilito system.
One of the most surprising features of Stoian's [2000a] argument is his
assertion that Bolivian rubber tappers chiefly received fixed monthly wages
in the early rubber era, and that therefore they should be considered
proletarians in a context of 'primitive capitalism'. Only at a later stage were
these fixed wages replaced by piecework rates. According to Stoian, the
payment of fixed wages in northern Bolivia deserves special attention, since
it suggests that labour relations in this region were less exploitative than is
'often assumed in a general way' about conditions during the rubber boom.
This view, he argues, is rooted in the idea that rubber tappers received piece-
rates, an arrangement that transfers 'the risks of illness and adverse weather to
tappers, who reputedly received only nominal prices for the rubber delivered'.
The payment of fixed wages, moreover, would be remarkable in view of
Barham and Coomes' argument about transactions costs, and it refutes
Weinstein's view that relations of production during the rubber boom were
pre-capitalist and resembled a feudal mode of production. Conditions in
northern Bolivia during the early rubber era were less exploitative than might
have been the case elsewhere and fully, though 'primitive', capitalist labour
relations predominated [Stoian, 2000a: 62–3, 123–6],
Stoian, however, overstates his case, both for 'primitive capitalism' and the
extent of 'proletarianization' of the labour force. On the basis of a contract
reproduced in Pacheco [1992:237–8], for example, he argues that eight
indigenous labourers hired from their apparent owner, a Mr C.M. Barbery, by
the Casa Suárez, 'were granted sick leave of up to one month without losing
their wage', but fails to note that it was Mr Barbery himself who received
these wages [Stoian, 2000a:63n].16 In fact, the contract suggests conditions of
indigenous slavery. Most of the contracts cited by Stoian refer to activities
other than rubber tapping, for example a muleteer's contract; and the one that
does refer to rubber tapping stipulates a piece rate for rubber production and a
fixed wage for off-season activities. On the other hand, he is right in pointing
to stipulations regarding medical assistance, though here one may raise the
question as to whether this was anything more than legal formality (see
below). And, despite often citing Sanabria, he fails to note that this author
precisely sets apart the rubber tappers when stating that among the overall
workforce these 'were not salaried in the strict sense of the term' [Sanabria,
1988:129].17
Stoian's [2000a:77] objection to the 'prevailing image' of rigid forms labour
control as a 'subtle form of slavery' is not that convincing. Let us look at
some of the features of the early rubber era. As noted, the local indigenous
population was mostly antagonistic to recruitment into rubber tapping, and in
a report on his expedition to the region in the late 1890s General Pando
recommended their extermination, though finally some uneasy balance of
mutual tolerance was achieved [Fifer, 1970; Roca, 2001:229; Stoian, 2000a:
80–83]. The labour force came from elsewhere, and was recruited in various
ways. During the early rubber era, when the pioneers established their estates,
there was something like a 'rubber rush'. People, including shop-owners,
professionals, public servants and craftsmen, left the impoverished Santa
Cruz region for the 'rubber fields' on their own account, and often found work
there in the administrative sector of the barracas, or as overseers or
subcontractors, etc.; and they were salaried [Sanabria, 1988:93–4, 99].
Recruiting rubber tappers and boatmen required for transport, however, was
another matter. A number of them were recruited, often forcibly, from among
the indigenous population of the Moxos plains that had been subject to
missionary efforts. Others were recruited in and around the urban area of
Santa Cruz under the enganche regime: that is, literally, by being 'hooked up'.
Let us look at those two groups, which came to constitute the bulk of the
workforce, and who were not 'salaried in the strict sense of the term'.
The indigenous peoples of the Moxos plains had been converted to
Christianity by the Jesuits from the end of the seventeenth century. After the
expulsion of the Order in 1767, mestizo farmers and ranchers took control
and set the population to work, as cattle ranching expanded in these
savannah-lands. Some had become involved in the cinchona trade but the
situation changed dramatically after 1860, when the rubber trade took off and
boatmen and rubber-tappers were needed. When forcible recruitment became
widespread, many fled southeastward to the Secure forests. By 1887, Andrés
Guayocho, a local shaman, started to call on the indigenous population to
leave the town of Trinidad, and establish itself in the nearby townships of San
Lorenzo and San Francisco. A messianic movement emerged which took off
on a search for the Loma Santa ('the sacred hill'), a place without evil where
they could re-establish contact with their saints, and would be free from
suffering and exploitation. In the view of the dominant class the following
gradual but uninterrupted exodus from Trinidad was nothing less than the
beginning of an insurrection. They formed a 'War Committee', led by, among
others, Nicolás Suárez, usually depicted as the empire builder and benevolent
patron who brought progress to these remote lands. An armed column
marched on San Francisco in order to force the Indians to mend their ways.
They met with resistance, however, and 21 were killed, after which a punitive
expedition of 150 men was sent out from Trinidad. This time, the indigenous
population chose to flee into nearby forest areas where they were cruelly
persecuted. Andrés Guayocho was captured and brutally whipped to death.
Meanwhile, in the Secure region rumour had it that the Indians were
preparing a rebellion. They were surprised while attending mass and the men
received between 500 and 600 lashes apiece, while the women received
between 200 and 300. Nine men and one woman died as a consequence.
Many of those who could escape captur, or worse, fled towards the Chimane
forest in search for the Loma Santa. Forced recruitment soon resumed [Jones,
1995: Lema, 1998:11; Roca, 2001:119–33].
In Santa Cruz labour recruitment took place through the casas de enganche.
By various means people were lured into signing a contract, after which they
would receive an advance payment, but would also be locked up until they
could be shipped to the rubber fields. Once sufficient recruits had been
contracted for a shipment, they would be walked out of town under armed
surveillance through Beni Street 'from where people go, never to return'.
Outside the town they were chained together and then marched for five or six
days to the harbour of Cuatro Ojos from where they were shipped up north
[Sanabria, 1988:96]. While General Pando, after his expeditions to the North,
recommended the extermination of local indigenous peoples, he was moved
by the conditions of those who had been 'hooked' in this manner, and initiated
legislation to protect those recruited on enganches, which was adopted in
1896. The Ley de Enganches stipulated that rubber tappers should receive a
monthly or annual salary, their trip to the rubber fields should be paid for by
the employer, they should receive free medical assistance, be provided with a
register of their current account, receive a return ticket, could not be
transferred to another employer without their consent, and a limit put on the
payment advanced. A register of 'hooked' recruits was to be established by
the Security Police, preference was to be given to contracts extending to
workers conditions such as the freedom of labour, and 'hooking' indigenous
people was prohibited.18 The law pinpointed many of the abuses in
contracting rubber tappers [Roca, 2001:117], and it was to be honoured in the
breach [Sanabria, 1988:97]. Roca [2001:110] reports that, according to the
norms of the contemporary Civil Code on the freedom of contract, a clause
could be inserted by which the contracted party explicitly foregoes 'any
benefit' in his favour, and quotes several contracts in which the benefits of the
1896 law are annulled. Furthermore, the rubber barons filed recourse with the
Supreme Court, which declared the law anti-constitutional since it applied
only 'north of the fourteenth parallel' and not nationwide.
Forced labour recruitment continued. During one of his visits to Riberalta in
the early twentieth century, P.H.Fawcett, a British colonel and member of the
Royal Geographical Society who worked on the Peru-Bolivian boundary
survey, witnessed the arrival of one such 'cattle' transport, and learned that
the workers concerned were not sold through public auction, like Indians, but
by way of private transactions for the value of their debt [Paz, 1999:156–8].19
The Prefect of the Beni Department was involved in the trade, and connived
at the forcible recruitment of workers, peasants and Indians, who were
dressed like soldiers to be illegally shipped to the 'rubber fields'. In response
to such abuses an organization, the 'Social Defence', was created in 1906 in
Santa Cruz. It denounced these forms of recruitment and sometimes
prevented shipments of workers. By presidential order the organization was
denied legal status and declared 'seditious'. Forced recruitment declined only
after the rubber price crash in 1913, and the completion of the Beni-Mamoré
railway, which reduced the need for boatmen [Roca, 2001:118–19; Sanabria,
1988:137–43; Souza, 1980].
When, after 1909, the British government started to investigate the
denunciations against the Peruvian Amazon Company for atrocities
committed in the Peruvian Putumayo region, a delegate was also sent to the
Bolivian rubber region. Although in London representatives of the Casa
Suárez had declared that their barracas would be open to inspection by
anyone, the delegate—a Mr Gosling—was received in Cachuela Esperanza
and Riberalta for some days but was not allowed to travel to the rubber fields.
He denounced the debt-peonage in the northern Beni region as a form of
undisguised slavery and noted that debts were heritable. The reports on the
Bolivian rubber region noted widespread abuse, but surmised that things were
not as bad as in the Putumayo, since the high market value and the relative
scarcity of labour in Bolivia made it 'uneconomical to treat human life lightly'
[Fifer, 1970:137–40; Roca, 2001:179].
The picture that emerges shows, in the first place, that some sectors of the
workforce, particularly those not engaged in rubber tapping, received fixed
wages while at the same time being engaged in debt relations, but contracts
do not say how accounts were settled, or if—and when—cash appeared in the
process. However, there is no indication that, in contrast to other rubber
regions, Bolivian rubber tappers 'chiefly received fixed wages in the early
rubber era' [Stoian, 2000a:63]. In the second place, the account thus far calls
into question the rejection of the interpretation of debt bondage as a coercive
relation in favour of a view according to which both parties to the relation
benefit from the arrangement, as implied by Weinstein [1993], Barham and
Coomes [1996] and also by Stoian. The latter asserts that 'only if we
acknowledge the varied and often contradictory factors that have led to the
emergence of such systems-entailing advantages and disadvantages for all
parties involved—we can do justice to the people who, after all, keep these
systems alive', and affirms that the survival of such systems, albeit modified,
is due to their 'functional significance' [Stoian, 2000a:119].
One issue is that the neo-institutional/neo-classical economists argument
hinges on the assertion that the rubber trade was competitive rather than
monopolistic [Barham and Coomes, 1996:33; Stoian, 2000a:110]. In northern
Bolivia, by contrast, it was much rather monopolistic.20 Given the belief in
competition for clients, these authors re-interpret the debt bondage relation.
Downplaying the indebtness and bondage aspects, therefore, they view the
habilito as credit that 'enables' the rubber tapper to do his job and thus gain an
income. It ceases to be a coercive method of extracting surplus labour, and
thus a source of acute and continuing struggle between rubber tapper and
employer, and becomes instead a non-coercive, tension-free—and thus
benign—form of patron-clientage, a mutually beneficial arrangement freely
entered into by all concerned. Occasionally one even finds hints about debt
bondage as a source of difficulty—distress, even—for the benign employer.
The habilito system is viewed by such authors as a rational economic
response to imperfections in the markets for credit, insurance, information,
and factors of production since it reduces transaction costs [Barham and
Coomes, 1996:68; Stoian, 2000a:111]. It is precisely from such a perspective
that Barham and Coomes [1996:65–8, 109] object to Weinstein's claim that
the relations of production were precapitalist and resembled a feudal mode of
production. They argue that these relations are chosen by 'those below', rather
than enforced 'from above', and are therefore in essence 'free'. What exists
systemically is not an economically inefficient pre-capitalism but rather an
economically efficient form of capitalism, based on free labour relations
chosen by and to the benefit of all.
Stoian [2000a:122, 125], on the other hand, criticizes the feudalism thesis,
arguing that labour was separated from the land and from the means of
production and that it received a fixed wage or a piece rate. I do not think,
however, that it is very useful to frame the issue in terms of a
feudalism/capitalism debate, or to assume that unfree labour is everywhere
and always a pre-capitalist relation. It is not the place here to rehearse the
debate over capitalism and labour regimes or forms of labour control. I will
limit myself to quoting Marx who, in his essay on pre-capitalist economic
formations, affirmed that 'lf we now not only call the plantation-owners in
America capitalists, but [affirm] that they are [capitalists], this is because
they exist as anomalies within a world market based upon free labour' [Marx,
1974:358].21 To understand the relations between rubber tappers and their
patrons/employers, and the role of the habilito system, I think it is more
helpful to turn to the concept of simple commodity production, and in
particular Chevalier's [1983] argument that specific forms of simple
commodity production can be treated as variations of capitalism, and
therefore as subjected to a flexibly defined process of labour's subordination
(formal and real) to capital. This view of simple commodity production may
be combined with the notion of 'captivity', which suggests that patrons
created a 'virtual' or 'captive' market where the exchanges in fact are a barter,
but are symbolized in monetary value through the 'book of accounts'
[Geffray, 1995; Lescure, Pinton and Emperaire, 1994]. To be sure, patrons
claimed ownership of the object of production—the forest—although the
legal status of such claims was somewhat obscure, and in fact their claims
were rooted in 'custom'. Rubber tappers, on the other hand, 'owned' some
means of production with which they were provided on arrival, and the cost
of which they had to pay off subsequently with their produce rather than their
labour-power.22 They maintained a degree of control over the production
process in the absence of mechanisms of real subsumption due to the
dispersed nature of wild rubber collection. The debt peonage system thus can
be viewed as a variety of simple commodity production, formally subsumed
under capital, and characterized by the extraction of absolute surplus value
through monopolized exchanges. Viewing rubber tappers as a specific
'captive' category of 'self-employed' labourers also sheds light on their
struggle for more autonomy. The habilito system was accompanied by a
'moral economy' of its own, and was wrapped up in a discourse about
paternalist ties of patronage and compadrazgo. But paternalism and its
doctrine of reciprocal obligations, as Genovese [1976] has shown, develop as
a way of mediating irreconcilable class and racial conflicts.23
Until now the focus has been on production relations as they emerged during
the early rubber era and the boom period and, in passing, it has been noted
that at the height of the rubber boom many consumer goods that were
previously imported from Santa Cruz were displaced by foreign imports after
the 1913 crash. As imports became more difficult, local agriculture tended to
expand and the rubber estates sought to diversify their trade by engaging in
the production of Brazil nuts, which became significant in northern Bolivia
around 1930. Woortman [1996] describes this process as one of
'internalization of the conditions of reproduction', and suggests that
agriculture and Brazil nut gathering at this conjuncture may have constituted
'functional equivalents'. While in some cases subsistence agriculture among
rubber tappers might be tolerated, in other cases agricultural production
would be centralized under the control of the patron/employer while rubber
tapper households would be set to gather Brazil nuts and then exchange the
latter produce for subsistence goods in much the same way as rubber
[Lescure, 1993:15; Lescure, Pinton and Emperaire, 1994; Woortman,
1996].24
Although economically speaking both the patron and the barraca
organization mostly held their own, the main elements of a year-round
agroextractive cycle of complementary activities that could potentially
sustain a rubber tapper's household were now in place.25 In northern Bolivia
rubber tapping was confined to two phases in the dry season (April to
December). The first lasted from April to June. During the latter phase, when
economic activity in the region was affected by the cold winds from the
south, rubber extraction was suspended, only to be taken up once again in
October, until the rainy season which starts in December made further
extraction impossible. From mid-December until March was the season for
Brazil nut gathering. The period when rubber tapping was suspended, from
July to September, could be dedicated to related agricultural labouring tasks,
mainly the preparation of fields by clearing and burning the forest. The onset
of the rainy season from the end of November marks the sowing season for
dry rice and corn that can be harvested from February to April. Other
important staple products would be manioc and bananas [Assies, 1997a:8–
10]. Hunting and fishing provided proteins.
The mention of households in this context is not fortuitous. A further 'sign of
the crisis' as Woortman [1996:14] calls it, was the increasing presence of
women on the rubber estates and the emergence of family life among rubber
tappers. If during the first period a predominantly male workforce had been
recruited, now family life would be encouraged in order to tie the rubber
tappers to the estates.26 While rubber tapping remained a mainly male
economic activity, therefore, women and children came to play an important
economic role in the emerging subsistence agriculture and/or in
complementary activities such as Brazil nut gathering.
By making it necessary for rubber tappers to expand their agricultural
operations—sometimes controlled by the patron and sometimes under control
of the rubber tapper household—in order to enable the unit of production (=
the rubber tapping household) to reproduce itself economically, the decline of
the rubber trade brought about what one may call a 'peasantization' of the
rubber tapper. This tendency gathered momentum with the disintegration of
the Suárez empire, and the emergence of a new organizational constellation
made up of on the one hand patron-run estates, and on the other emerging
free communities. The collapse of the rubber trade after 1985 brought a
further decline of the estates as a form of social organization, and led to the
consolidation of the free communities and a rapid increase in urbanization. It
was from this situation that the Brazil nut economy emerged.

The Transformation of Labour Relations after 1985

In considering the way in which the production relations in the northern

Bolivian Amazon were transformed, it is necessary first to consider changes
to the labour regime in the barracas. Whereas formerly the latter were
populated all year round, now many barracas have been virtually abandoned.
Barracas patronales continue to exist, but with an often strongly reduced
number of inhabitants. In her recent study Henkemans [2001] describes one
such barraca and the way the habilito system still works there. Many of its
inhabitants have left, and those remaining have ambiguous feelings about the
patron who, in their opinion, has evolved into a mere merchant who no longer
takes care of his labourers, which forces them to develop new ties of mutual
support and social security. The patron, in turn, depends heavily on the
presence of cheap labourers:
He needs to give the labourers incentives to stay on the barraca or to prevent them from leaving in
another way, for example by causing them to be indebted to him. The habilito system still works well
for that purpose, because the remote barraca remains almost completely isolated from urban centers,
and the patron can largely control the transportation of outgoing extractive products and incoming food
products. The whole system is based on making the labourers indebted to him, or making them think
they are. As long as this is the case, many workers do not dare to leave. The veterans in the barraca
have ambiguous feelings about their position. On the one hand, they are proud of the fact that they have
become confidants of the patron due to their long service. On the other hand, they regret that they never
had the courage or the ability to leave and become independent. [Henkemans, 2001:92]
While in this case a group of permanent inhabitants has remained, in other
barracas only a caretaker is present most of the time. By the time of the
Brazil nut harvest, the zafreros (Brazil nut harvesters) arrive. Nowadays they
are largely contracted in the urban areas, mainly Riberalta, and in this context
the habilito system has taken new forms.
If the beneficiadoras own their barracas, they may provide a habilito to
labour contractors who, in turn, recruit gang labour. Otherwise, the habilito
may go to a barraquero, who may either contract workers himself or do this
through a labour contractor. They provide the workers with an advance, the
new habilito, which is often used for large expenses, such as the purchase of
new clothes, new shoes, and school utensils for the children. By mid-
December the harvesters, often accompanied by various family members, are
shipped to the distant barracas, to return two or three months later. Riberalta
harbour is bustling with small boats loaded with rice, noodles, cooking oil,
toothpaste, soap and other essentials, the workers themselves sitting on top.
Others may travel in trucks. During their stay in the barracas, where living
conditions generally are dismal [Henkemans, 2001:90–91], harvest labourers
will collect nuts and deliver them to the central storehouse or to the payoles,
storage facilities located deeper in the forest, where an account will be kept of
their deliveries and expenses. These accounts will be settled in the city at the
end of the harvest. By the mid-1990s about two-thirds of the Brazil nut
harvesters, or some 5,000 to 6,000 persons, were recruited in urban areas,
mainly Riberalta. Employment opportunities are scarce in these towns,
especially for male workers, and casual labour is rampant [Verheule, 1998].
Thus, in urban contexts the habilito still plays a role in the recruitment of
labour, and until recently debt obligations continued to be an important
aspect of this process, as revealed in surveys carried out in 1994 and 1996,
which show that harvesters ran up debts and felt obliged to work them off,
either by remaining in the forest longer than planned or by promising to work
for the same contractor the next harvest [Assies, 1997a:54; Verheule,
1998:87]. However, while the latter sources already point out that the habilito
system was running into difficulties in urban contexts, Stoian [2000a: 118]
and Bojanic [2001:87–106] describe how the rupture of the close patron ties
that prevailed in the barracas has resulted in an outright crisis of the habilito
system. Workers may take the advance payment without fulfilling their
obligations, contractors may cheat in the post-harvest settling of accounts or
not settle them at all. During the harvest, contractors attempt to mislead
workers, and vice-versa, over the volume and weight of nuts collected; food
consumed may also be overpriced. The climate is one of widespread distrust
in which all parties seek ways to deceive the other, setting off a spiral of
fraudulent transactions. Nonetheless, Bojanic argues, hardly any unskilled
jobs will be done if no advance payment is made, which leads him to the
conclusion that the habilito system will persist in the near future but that it
needs to be modernized, along with a formalization of labour relations.
Whether that can be done remains problematic. Employers may be interested
in disciplining the workforce involved in the Brazil nut harvest, but at the
same time informal labour relations in the context of extensive
underemployment [Verheule, 1998] contribute to the profitability of the
Brazil nut industry [Assies, 1997a:56–9].27

Communities and Estates: The Latent Conflict

The other source of raw nuts in the northern Bolivian Amazon are the
comunidades libres, which account for 35 to 40 per cent of the harvest. As
has been noted, these communities came into being in the context of the
disarticulation of the barraca system, and they rely on a combination of
peasant agriculture and extractivism. The relative economic importance of
agriculture in relation to extractivism varies, and is a function both of the
location of the communities themselves, and also of the size of the family
holding within communities. The migration and resettlement process
triggered by the collapse of the rubber trade resulted in relatively high rural
population densities in the Vaca Díez province. Family holdings within the
communities in this area range between 20 and 80 hectares in size, and
peasant proprietors dedicate themselves mainly to a mix of subsistence and
market-oriented slash and burn agriculture.28 The city of Riberalta is a main
outlet for agricultural produce such as rice, bananas and, more recently, some
agro-forestry products promoted by non-governmental organizations. Brazil
nut production takes a subsidiary role, given the relatively small size of the
family parcels. After harvesting crops on their own parcel, many families also
join the workforce harvesting on the barracas, in order to obtain a monetary
income [Henkemans, 2001].
The inhabitants of communities in the less populated Department of Pando
have access to significantly larger areas of forest. Here agriculture is mainly
subsistence-oriented, due to the distance from urban markets. Brazil nut
production is a major source of monetary income for these communities.
Nuts may be sold directly to a beneficiadora or through an intermediary.
Communities have tended to cluster along the Riberalta-Cobija road. It is the
competition over access to the road and to Brazil nut stands that underlies the
potential for conflict between the emerging comunidades libres and the
barracas in this region, a latent antagonism that manifested itself in the Third
Indigenous-Peasant March during July 2000. Understanding the nature and
dimensions of this conflict requires some further consideration of the
dynamics of the regional economy, as well as the role in this of the new land
and forestry legislation introduced in 1996.
As noted, the beneficiadora owners have become a key group in the regional
economy, overshadowing the once dominant barraqueros who have become
increasingly dependent on the beneficiadora owners to finance their
operations during the Brazil nut harvest. By the mid-1990s this economic
imbalance resulted in the takeover or purchase of barracas belonging to
indebted barraca owners by the owners' beneficiadoras. A process of vertical
concentration was taking shape through the elimination of the barraquero
from the production chain. While some of the beneficiadoras had been
created through investment by barraqueros, others had been created through
investment from outside the sector. Through vertical integration the
beneficiadoras sought to control part of their own supply of wild nuts. Most
of them acquired barracas, where the Brazil nut crop would be harvested by
a seasonal labour force recruited from nearby urban areas.
This tendency towards vertical integration casts some doubts on the
expectations about a 'democratization' of the Brazil nut industry, according to
which the role of the comunidades libres in supplying its raw material might
gradually expand. This in turn would benefit the peasant sector, among other
things by raising their monetary income, and at the same time contribute to
forest conservation [DHV, 1993a]. In view of the tendency toward vertical
integration, the expectations about a democratization of the industry have
been the subject of criticism [Assies, 1997a]. It was argued that production by
the comunidades libres would complement that of the barracas for two
reasons. In communities near the urban centres, parcel sizes tend to be
relatively small, and the commercial output of Brazil nuts is therefore less
significant than subsistence agriculture. By contrast, the more remote
communities face logistical problems in getting their harvest out of the
forest.29 Aside from assuring a steady supply of raw material, in this context
vertical integration and harvesting by means of urban-based gang labour
might yield a competitive advantage, and may beome a profitable option.
This argument has raised some controversy. According to Stoian [2000a:
139] it is a 'pessimistic outlook'. He argues that in the context of a booming
Brazil nut economy and growing production, the relative shares of nuts
produced by barracas and communities remained the same, but that the
greater volume produced by the communities implied competition over
access to resources. Communities pushed the barracas into less accessible
areas.30 Furthermore, he points to the ongoing conversion of barracas into
communities. Finally, the vertically integrated barracas produce no more
than one-fifth of the harvest, the remainder coming from peasant
communities and barracas patronales. The peasantry not only benefited
economically from the Brazil nut production boom through higher prices,
therefore, but also produced more. It is not at all clear, however, just how this
process corresponds to 'democratization'. What it does underline is the
dependence of the profitability of vertical integration on an additional
condition: namely, that world market prices for Brazil nuts are high. As we
will see below, in 2001 prices plummeted and local demand for raw nuts
contracted. Under such conditions beneficiadora owners may desist from or
reduce exploitation of their barracas, and instead purchase their raw material
from peasants whose logic is subsistence- rather than profit-oriented, and for
whom Brazil nuts are an important source of cash income. Under such
conditions the relative share of the peasantry in the production of raw nuts
may increase, but this would be a democratization of poverty.
In contrast to this critical view, Bojanic [2001:101] asserts that vertical
integration increases transaction costs, which might lead eventually to a
reversal of the vertical integration process itself, with barracas being
returned to the barraqueros. Evidence for such a reversal is hard to find,
however. If the process of vertical integration and concentration of
landholding halted, it would be for other reasons, such as the uncertainty
about future implementation of the agrarian and forestry legislation and the
irregularity of tenure rights. By the year 1999, when the issue of conversion
of the barracas into concessions under the 1996 Forestry Law had become a
major issue, the organizations of barraca owners presented a list that
distinguished between 'traditional' and 'non-traditional' barracas, the latter
being those claimed by enterprises involved in the process of vertical
integration. According to that list, ten enterprises claimed ownership of 38
barracas covering a total of 1,675,781 hectares, whereas 162 smaller
barracas—the 'traditional' ones—claimed a total of 1,719,010 hectares. It
was such claims, which according to a letter of the Superintendencia Agraria
(16 November 1999) implied that 'there would be hardly any land left for the
communities', that provoked the 'Third March'.31 We now turn to a
consideration of the 1996 land and forestry legislation which, together with
Supreme Decree No. 25532, allowed for the conversion of the barracas into
new concessions and thus triggered the 'Third March'.
THE 1996 LAND AND FORESTRY LEGISLATION, THE BARRACA
DECREE, AND THE 'THIRD MARCH'

By the 1990s it had become clear that an overhaul of Bolivian land and
forestry legislation was in order. The existing legislation was outdated, and
its implementation had become thoroughly corrupt. While debate over reform
had started in the 1980s, this would eventually be introduced under the
Sánchez de Lozada government (1993–97) as part of a far-reaching package
of 'second generation' institutional reforms complementing the structural
adjustment policies introduced in 1985. The 1996 Bolivian land and forestry
legislation reforms, however, stood out among similar changes carried out in
Latin America for not simply following the neo-liberal zeitgeist. While the
World Bank, for example, pressured Latin American governments to adopt
only market-oriented reforms which, it was believed, would not only promote
efficiency but also benefit the poor [Deininger and Binswanger, 2001], the
Bolivian reforms incorporated both market-oriented and social justice
elements [Urioste and Pacheco, 2000].
The 1953 revolutionary land reform had sought to expropriate properties that
were either unutilized/underutilized latifundia or operated under pre-capitalist
tenure and labour relations. It effectively eradicated the hacienda system in
the Andean highlands of Bolivia, but failed to resolve the demand for land.
The redistribution of land in the Bolivian highlands eventually resulted in
minifundization, while the occupation of the eastern tropical lowlands, which
accelerated in the 1960s, was characterized by the formation of huge
landholdings, surrounded by smallholding colonists. Meanwhile, the
institutions involved in land policies became seriously corrupt. The 1953 land
reform law had created the Servicio Nacional de Reforma Agraria (SNRA)
and in 1965, when the redistribution in the highland region was declared
complete, an Instituto Nacional de Colonización (INC) had been created to
promote the occupation and settlement of the eastern lowlands. Both
institutions were charged with the distribution of public funds, and were
supposed to complement each other's activities. Complementarity, however,
was absent in practice, and the two institutions dedicated themselves to the
distribution of lands through far from transparent procedures. While in the
western highlands of Bolivia peasant and community holdings were subject
to a process of land fragmentation, in the eastern lowlands by contrast huge
land holdings emerged as a result of policies pursued by the authoritarian
military governments of René Barrientos (1964–65 and 1966–69), Hugo
Banzer (1971–78) and the narco-dictatorship of Luis García Meza. In the
eastern lowlands, particularly around Santa Cruz, most land became
monopolized by a small group of large landholders and agribusiness
enterprises, dedicated to industrial farming (soya and oilseeds) and/or
extensive livestock ranching.
By the 1980s it was clear that land distribution had become extremely
skewed, though exact data on tenure patterns were not available due to the
irregular and corrupt distribution practices. It is estimated that between 30
and 60 per cent of the land may be subject to overlapping claims, and that 60
per cent of the owners do not have regular titles. The 1984 agrarian census
suggests that out of 22.6 million registered hectares, 15 per cent was
possessed by 308,000 small and medium-sized holdings, against 85 per cent
occupied by 6,000 large owners [Solón, 1995]. Other estimates also suggest
extreme polarization. [MACPIO, 2001:51–3; Hernaíz and Pacheco,
2000:156–61]. In 1992, after yet another case of corruption had been
denounced, it was decided to 'intervene' the land reform and colonization
institutions, and their actions were suspended in order to open the way for a
saneamiento (clarification) of land rights. This required reform of the 1953
legislation. A further issue that required attention was the demands made by
the indigenous peoples of the eastern lowlands who had made themselves
'visible' through their 'First March' in 1990, which had resulted in the
recognition of eight indigenous territories.32 During their 'Second March' in
1996, in the context of the debate on new agrarian legislation, they would
present 16 new territorial demands. This, too, had to be dealt with in new
legislation.
It took four years of negotiations among government officials, indigenous
peoples, peasant and landowners representatives before the Ley del Servicio
Nacional de Reforma Agraria was adopted in 1996 [Assies, 2000;
Salvatierra, 1996; Solón, 1995]. The outcome of the negotiation process was
a 'hybrid' law that did not fully satisfy anyone but seemed to be acceptable. It
introduces some elements of market-oriented reforms but at the same time
retains important elements of the social justice orientation embodied in earlier
legislation [Urioste and Pacheco, 2000]. The law thus recognizes various
types of landholding that fulfill a 'social function'. It is assumed that these
lands are used primarily for subsistence production by peasants or indigenous
peoples. These lands are either prohibited from being bought and sold, or—
where such market transfers are permitted—subject to specific
conditions/restrictions; furthermore, they are not liable to land tax. The solar
campesino (peasant yard) and the smallholding cannot be divided or
mortgaged, but may be sold only insofar as not expressly prohibited by law.
Collectively titled community properties and tierras comunitarias de origen
(TCO), the much larger holdings, cannot be sold at all. By contrast, medium-
sized properties and property held by agricultural enterprises, fall into a
category of lands that are supposed to fulfil an 'economic-social' function.
These holdings may be sold and mortgaged, and are subject to a land tax. The
law thus seeks to guarantee the tenure rights of middle and large properties
on the condition that they fulfil an economic-social function, and that they
pay taxes. Abandonment would be cause for a reversion of land to the
state.33 This was meant to remedy the concentration of land. Holdings which
reverted to the state would fall into the category of public lands (tierra fiscal),
and as such could then either be granted (dotación) at no cost to peasant and
indigenous communities or sold off (adjudicación) at market value through
public auction. Land grants would be given priority over selling off. In its
initial clauses, the 1996 law contains stipulations regarding the rapid titling of
the eight indigenous territories that had been recognized in the wake of the
1990 indigenous march, and admitted 16 new claims, which were
immobilized pending future regularization within ten months. These
territories, with a total surface of nearly 15 million hectares, are to be
regularized as tierras comunitarias de origen (TCO). The implementation of
the new legislation would involve the clarification (saneamiento) of tenure
rights and subsequent titling. This process should be completed within ten
years (i.e., by the year 2006).
The 1996 Forestry Law was also the outcome of a negotiation process [Pavez
and Bojanic, 1998], an attempt both to remedy the flaws of the 1974 forestry
legislation and to provide a better fit between land tenure and forest
exploitation. As a result of the earlier law, grants made independently of
tenure rights and logging concessions overlapped with communal/ indigenous
lands and other forms of possession or property. Furthermore, the 1974 law
had enabled an enormous concentration of concessions by a small number of
enterprises, it had failed to promote sustainable forest use, and its
administration was plagued with corruption [Contreras-Hermosilla and
Vargas, 2001]. The 1996 law foresees a regime of concessions of 40 years'
duration where state-owned forests (tierras fiscales) are concerned. Such
concessions can be transferred, are heritable, and they can be renewed.
Private owners and indigenous peoples can be authorized to exploit forest
resources within their property or TCO. Indigenous peoples are granted the
exclusive rights over forest resources within their TCOs. Within the Bolivian
municipalities, up to 20 per cent of the state-owned forests can be set aside
for use by locally based social associations.34
The new forestry regime made exploitation of resources conditional upon the
elaboration of management plans, and also introduced a new licence system.
Whereas the 1974 law linked payment for a licence to the volume of forest
resources extracted, under the new law the licence fee for timber exploitation
was set at a minimum of US$1.00 per hectare for concessions of state-owned
forests to the timber industries. Private owners can be authorized to exploit
forest resources on their land merely by paying the minimum licence fee.
Since the concessions would be auctioned, the expectation was that in this
case the licence fee would rise above the US$1.00 level. The law allowed for
the conversion of existing concessions into new ones under the present
regime, but it was expected that the licence fee system would prompt a
reduction in the number of concession areas. The remaining areas would
revert to the state, which might then allocate them to indigenous communities
or auction them off as new concessions. Indigenous peoples would have to
pay the same licence fee, but only for the area effectively exploited within
their TCO. For non-timber forest products, the licence fee was set at US$0.30
per hectare.
As will be seen below, these two laws provide the framework for the disputes
over land and resources in the northern Bolivian Amazon region. Generally
speaking, it can be said that the implementation of the Ley INRA has been
extremely slow. By November 2001 title clarification had only taken place
for 13 per cent of the rural lands, while 33 per cent were still being processed.
Final titling was proceeding even slower. At the same time, very little land
has been reverted to the state, so in the event the concentration of landholding
has scarcely changed. In the absence of clear stipulations about the social-
economic function of land, decisions were left to the discretion of INRA
officials. In the case of the TCOs clarification has made some progress, due
to international support, but at the same time the process of clarification has
meant that holdings of third parties were consolidated, resulting in a
significant reduction of the area to be granted to indigenous peoples.
Similarly, 'studies of spatial necessities' often resulted in significant
reductions of the area recommended for titling. By the year 2000, only one
TCO had been titled, together with part of another. Furthermore, in 1997 the
Forestry Superintendency allowed the 'voluntary conversion' of logging
concessions, part of which overlapped with TCOs, that were in the process of
consolidation.35 Finally, the INRA law brings no solution whatever for the
specific problems of the highland peasantry. It is in this context that demands
for the modification—or, in the case of the radical highland peasant
movement, even abrogation—of the INRA law have emerged. On the other
hand, large landowners have become increasingly militant in the defence of
their interests. The disputes that cropped up in northern Bolivia are to be
understood in this general context.

Supreme Decree No. 25532

Although the 1996 Forestry Law provided for the possibility of converting
existing concessions into new ones under the new forestry regime,
barraqueros had made little effort to do so. For one thing, they had never
really bothered to acquire concessions: their claims were based rather on
'custom'. Moreover, they argued that the new licence fee system was
inadequate for Brazil nut production. In the past they had paid a fee per
volume extracted (though one may doubt that this system ever really
worked). Finally, they argued that the new forestry authorities did not accept
their proposals for conversion of their claims. All in all, little had been done
to implement the new legislation in the region and barraqueros probably
would have liked to leave things just like they had been in the past. Emerging
pressures for regularizing land tenure and forestry rights under the new laws,
however, prompted them, and particularly the larger ones represented in
CADEXNOR, to move on this issue, and to lobby for their interests. In
October 1999 their efforts were rewarded with Supreme Decree No. 25532 of
5 October 1999, also known as the Decreto de las Barracas.36
The decree mentions that the 1996 Forestry Law establishes that—where
areas with Brazil nut, rubber, palm heart and similar resources are concerned
—concessionary preference will be given to traditional users, peasant
communities and local social associations. Although the notion of 'traditional'
is taken generally to mean either peasant or indigenous users, the decree then
argues that the barracas are traditional rubber and Brazil nut producing
establishments which cover extensive forest areas in the north of the country,
where they have enjoyed 'inveterate and traditional' access to these resources
which are the principal socio-economic mainstay of the region. On the basis
of such considerations the decree then stipulates that the barracas should be
recognized as concessions for the exploitation of non-timber forest products
under the new regime, respecting the legally acquired rights of third parties.
The Forestry Superintendency should directly convert these areas, through
administrative act and without an auctioning process. The decree further
mentions a list of requirements and a formula for the calculation of licence
fees to be paid, and in one of its final dispositions establishes that this process
of voluntary conversion will not imply the renunciation of titling procedures
initiated or pursued with the competent authority. This opened up the
possibility for a further conversion into property under the agrarian
legislation.37

Chronicle of a Conflict Foretold

Soon after the decree was issued, the Agrarian Superintendency wrote a letter
to the Minister of Sustainable Development and the Environment in which it
recognized that the decree constituted a positive step towards the recognition
of the customary rights of the barraca owners, but that it might generate
some conflict with peasant communities and other 'equally traditional
possessors'.38 The decree seeks to be careful in respecting the rights of
peasant and indigenous communities, the letter argues, but in fact at the
moment it is impossible for such communities to sustain their property rights,
since they are no more than simple possessors as long as the process of
saneamiento has not been concluded. Out of the 6.3 million hectares in the
Department of Pando, only 330,000 (5 per cent) have been distributed under
the agrarian reform legislation, which means that the vast majority of the
rural population does not have duly regularized property rights. Moreover,
the saneamiento process has not even started in the region, and the Pando
branch of the Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria (INRA) has not yet been
institutionalized. Under such conditions the Decree means that the
communities will be deprived of property rights and the use of resources,
although they should be considered traditional settlements. The Agrarian
Superintendency then calculates that the decree would hand over some 3
million hectares of land (48 per cent) to the barracas. If one takes into
account that in the Department of Pando an area of 126,000 hectares (2 per
cent) has been reserved for cattle raising, that timber concessions occupy
some 250,000 hectares (4 per cent), that natural parks cover a further 14 per
cent, and if water resources and ecological obligations are also taken into
account, the conclusion can only be that hardly any land will be left for the
communities.39 Given the potential for conflict, the Superintendency
proposed that the property rights of communities and others should be
clarified through the saneamiento process before proceeding with any
conversion of the barracas. Finally, the Superintendency suggests that, given
the particularities of the economic activities in the region, the areas to be
allocated to the different types of users should be discussed in the context of
new regulations for the implementation of the Ley INRA instead of leaving
the issue to the discretion of the INRA.
With this letter the Superintendency outlined in unambiguous terms the
potential for conflict in the region, but its words of warning went unheeded.
Instead, the Bolivian government decided in May 2000 to extend the period
for applications for conversion of barracas, initially set at the end of April
2000, to the last day of July 2000. By then conflict was brewing [Betancur,
2000].

A War of Manifestos

Shortly after the Agrarian Superintendency had hoisted its early warning
signals, peasant communities and indigenous peoples of the northern Amazon
region issued a declaration invoking, among other things, ILO Convention
169, which establishes that indigenous peoples should be consulted over
legislation that affects them. Arguing that the decree would result in the
expulsion or eviction of peasant and indigenous communities to the benefit of
the barraqueros, the signatories of the declaration rejected the decree and
demanded that titling of community lands should precede any conversion.
They also decided to ask for the intervention of the Defensor del Pueblo
(human rights ombudsman), and announced an intention to undertake action
if their demands were ignored or overruled. This declaration was soon
followed by an open letter addressed to 'public opinion' issued by the
indigenous people's organization CIRABO on 1 December 1999. The next
day saw a demonstration in Cobija, capital of the Department of Pando,
organized by the rural workers' organization; the latter announced that to
indicate its rejection of Decree 25532, roadblocks would be set up on 13
December 2000.
The barraquero sector did not fail to react. In its own open letter, similarly
addressed to public opinion, ASPROGOAL replied to the letter issued by
CIRABO, which it accused of having initiated a disinformation campaign.
According to ASPROGOAL Decree 25532 aimed at the recognition of the
barraqueros' historical and legally acquired rights. ASPROGOAL argued
that the barraca owners historically had undertaken sustainable development
and protection of the forest in the region, and that their economic activities
depended on the extraction of non-timber products, which did no harm to the
forest. It claimed recognition of the barraca owners' rights 'passed down
from father to son' through a policy that would grant 'juridical security', and
would thus legalize their conservation activities and allow for the elaboration
of a socioeconomic development strategy for the region. It further questioned
some of the assertions and claims made by CIRABO. According to
ASPROGOAL, not only were the rights of peasant and indigenous
communities fully guaranteed in the decree, but the lands immobilized for
future titling as TCOs also stood in no relation to the actual numbers of the
indigenous populations involved. It suggested that CIRABO was manipulated
by 'foreign' interests outside the region, to the detriment of the local
entrepreneurs 'who at present help some 12,000 families, which work in the
collection of the castaña and other fruits of the forest, improving the internal
product of the Bolivian Northwest'.40 ASPROGOAL announced that it would
defend Decree 25532 at 'whatever cost' (hasta las últimas consecuencias).
About the same time the Civic Committee of the Riberalta Region, the
Thought and Muscle of the Bolivian Amazon', issued a public manifesto
following a similar line of reasoning, this time reproaching the Agrarian
Superintendency for its comment on Decree 25532. The Manifesto was
signed by several urban organizations that participate in the Civic Committee,
such as the Federation of Neighborhood Associations, the President of the
Vigilance Committee, the President of the Federation of Rubber and Brazil
Nut Workers, and the President of the Federation of Factory Workers. An
urban coalition was being forged in support of the claims made by the
barraquero sector, though in a reply to the ASPROGOAL and Civic
Committee statements CIRABO called into question the real degree of
support among urban organizations.41 CIRABO's reply also refers to
'conditions of semi-slavery' in the barracas, and once again rejects Decree
25532 which, it pointed out, would benefit only those who 'claim to be
entrepreneurs' (quienes dicen llamarse empresarios). In support of their
campaigns, both the peasantry and the barraqueros invoked the 'struggle for
poverty reduction', one of the slogans of the Banzer Government. However,
whereas the peasant and indigenous organizations pressed for redistribution
of land to achieve that goal, the barraqueros merely presented themselves as
the protagonists in the struggle against poverty.
In the event, the threatened roadblocks announced by peasant organizations
for 13 December 1999 did not materialize, since the Department of Pando
Prefecture called for a dialogue, which was to take place on 22 December.
The meeting was postponed until 15 January 2000, and peasant organizations
expected that it would be decisive. The meeting ended in failure. First of all,
the Pando Prefecture had 'forgotten' to send official invitations to the peasant
federation and the civil society organizations supporting it. Furthermore, the
composition of the governmental delegation remained unknown until the last
moment. When the meeting finally took place, the representatives of national
and local peasant and indigenous organizations, and the civil society
organizations with whom they worked, found that the governmental
delegation consisted of the INRA director and Senator Peter Hecker, one of
the principal landowners and barraqueros of the region. Since this delegation
had no power of decision, and because the choice of Senator Hecker as a
principal delegate was considered insulting in view of the Hecker family's
history of confrontation with peasant and indigenous organizations, the latter
walked out. They later agreed to talk with the INRA Director and the Pando
Prefect, but no point of convergence or consensus was found. As allowed for
by the INRA law, peasants insisted that saneamiento should precede any
conversion of barracas, and any attempt to implement Decree 25532 would
be met with legal, political and other kinds of opposition to prevent this.

Marching for 'Land, Territories and Natural Resources'

In April 2000 an 18-point Manifesto was launched by indigenous peasant

organizations, and in June a 31-point platform of demands was issued, to be
pressed for with a march for 'Land, Territories and Natural Resources'. A few
days later the Defensoría del Pueblo (national human rights ombudsman)
demanded that Decree 25532 be declared anti-constitutional, and on 28 June
some 500 peasants and indigenous people started their march from the region
to participate in the Great National Assembly of Indigenous Peoples
(GANPI) that was to take place in the city of Santa Cruz, where they arrived
on 5 July. The next day both CIRABO and the Coordinadora de Pueblos
Etnicos de Santa Cruz (CPESC) withdrew from the GANPI, accusing the
CIDOB leadership of brokering a deal with the government, and announced
that they would continue their march, now heading for the national capital
itself, La Paz. An agreement between CIDOB and government delegates who
had arrived to negotiate at the GANPI was indeed signed on 7 July.
According to the dissidents, it postponed solutions and contained empty
promises. They resumed their march on 11 July, and reached the town of
Montero two days later. Negotiations with a government delegation resulted
in another agreement in the early hours of 16 July.
By then, in an effort to stop the march and keep it from growing, the Council
of Ministers had on 10 July annulled Decree 25532, well within the 12-day
term that had been agreed earlier with CIDOB. Important points of the
Montero agreement were the cancelling of an internal INRA resolution that
made it possible to declare land available for concessions without first duly
clarifying the rights of local people, the setting of clear terms for the titling of
four TCOs, the creation of a fund with a starting capital of US$10 million for
the reactivation of the peasant, indigenous and colonist economy, and a
modification of the regulations of the Ley INRA. These modifications
accepted, among other things, the following two crucial arguments. First, that
the minimum surface area to be granted to families in peasant and indigenous
communities in the northern Amazon region should be 500 hectares.42 And
second, that clarification of property rights in the northern Amazon region, as
well as in the Gran Chaco region of the Tarija Department, should start
immediately and be concluded within a year.43 Furthermore, the procedures
for titling in favour of peasants, colonists and indigenous peoples were
simplified, and a series of technical norms were modified, including a clearer
definition of the norms regarding the economic-social function of land on
farms up to 500 hectares.44

The Aftermath of the March and the Crisis of the Brazil Nut Trade

After the march, implementation of the 1996 legislation gradually got

underway in the region. In the Department of Pando, the INRA structure
finally became more or less institutionalized, though it remained subject to
strong political pressures. 'Polygons' were defined, that is areas where the
demarcation of properties was to start, and in some cases INRA brigades
initiated their evaluation of tenure claims, accompanied by peasants who
were trained by local NGOs to keep watch over the process, and denounce
irregularities such as the creation of 'phantom communities' by barraqueros,
the deforestation of areas to prove the presence of economic activity, or the
'lending' of livestock by cattle raisers to one another, so as to provide visiting
INRA brigades with the necessary 'proof' of economic activity. In the Vaca
Díez Province the process proceeded somewhat more rapidly. The density of
settlement implied that boundaries between holdings had often already been
established, and political pressures from the departmental government were
less frequent than in Pando. Regularization of TCOs in favour of indigenous
peoples in the region also made some progress. Out of the four demands for
TCOs, titles were issued for part of the area demanded in two cases.
Meanwhile, the question of what to do with the barracas remained on the
agenda. After the abrogation of Decree 25532, the barraquero sector had
started to lobby for a law that would permit the conversion of the areas they
claimed into new concessions under the Forestry Law, or into properties
under agrarian legislation. By October 2001 a draft law was circulating and a
provisional agreement was brokered among barraquero associations and the
leadership of the Pando Peasant Federation, which however soon withdrew
its support for the proposal. The draft law foresaw the 'voluntary conversion'
of traditional barracas into new concessions and established an upper limit of
25,000 hectares, although barraquero organizations continued to pressure for
conversion of their barracas into property under the agrarian legislation. It
will, however, be difficult for them to prove that the barracas fulfil an
economic-social function, since labour relations are informal, debt-peonage
relations persist, and production is not mechanized in any way. On the other
hand, one large barraquero, ADN Senator Peter Hecker, claimed that a huge
concession should be granted for the exploitation of sangre de grado, a small
tree locally used for medicinal purposes. A US firm was interested, and this
could be a million-dollar business. The venture would increase regional
income and at the same time promote forest conservation, he claimed.
The push and pull over a law on the conversion of barracas developed amid
a crisis in the Brazil nut trade. After years of low exports, Brazil increased its
own production significantly in 2001; Bolivia itself also produced more than
in previous years, and was finally left with a stock of 157,000 boxes of
shelled nuts. With the world market saturated, prices plummeted, and the
beneficiadora owners announced that in the 2001/2002 harvest they would
not be able to pay more than 4 bolivianos per crate of raw nuts. They later
offered 8 bolivianos (about US$1.25), but this was still much less than the 20
bolivianos paid in the forest during the 2000/2001 season. Furthermore, they
decided that the harvest would be limited, in order to stabilize prices and to
allow them to sell the surplus production from the previous season. The
obvious consequence would be unemployment for thousands of people in the
region. Some 4,000 zafreros from the urban areas would be left without
employment during the harvest season, and employment of some 3,000
quebradoras and their 4,000 'helpers' would be severely cut back.45 To solve
the problem, it was proposed that the Bolivian state should create a special
fund to reactivate the regional economy and pay an additional 10 bolivianos
per crate harvested to the zafreros. In the forest, the zafreros would receive
coupons worth 100 bolivianos for every 10 crates of Brazil nuts delivered,
and after the harvest they could cash their coupons in town. By mid-
December, when harvesters are usually shipped to the barracas, a
government representative visited Riberalta to announce that the scheme had
been approved, but that some technical details still had to be worked out.46
By then, the president of the zafrero union was already selling official
membership cards to his clients at 10 to 20 bolivianos apiece. Peasant
organizations, however, vehemently rejected the proposal, since it might be
used to demonstrate that the barracas did indeed perform an economic-social
function. The government sought to tie approval of the subsidy scheme to
support for a new barraca law and, after its failed 'Earth Summit', announced
that it would organize regional encounters to find solutions for regional
problems.
 CONCLUDING COMMENTS

Conflicts over land and resources have become increasingly frequent in

Bolivia over recent years. This suggests, among other things, that the land
and forestry legislation introduced in 1996 has failed to resolve the problems
it was meant to address. It generated expectations that were not fulfilled due
to a lack of political will. Moreover, it is often hard to apply in particular
local situations. This article has discussed the implementation of the new
legislation and the issues it brought to light in the specific regional context of
the northern Bolivian Amazon.
To do so, it was necessary to outline the historical development of the
regional rural economy, tracing the emergence and consolidation of the
rubber estate system and its fragmentation after 1940. It has been argued that
there is little reason to revise the prevailing view of the rubber economy in
the region and its forms of organization, which are usually characterized as
rather harsh and exploitative. Labour recruitment during the early period of
rubber extraction was often coercive, and the workforce was not treated
particularly well, although excesses like those reported from the Peruvian
Putumayo region did not occur. Debt-peonage was the prevailing mode of
labour recruitment and control, and there is no convincing evidence in
support of the oft-heard argument that this was a relatively benign and, under
the conditions, 'rational' system. The interpretation of Barham and Coomes
has been shown not to apply in the region, because it hinges on the idea of
generalized competition for clients among patrons and merchants. Such
conditions did not obtain in the northern Bolivian Amazon region up to 1940.
In a similar vein, the evidence presented by Stoian in support of his argument
that fixed-wage relations for rubber tappers prevailed during the early rubber
era, and that this would shift most of the risk to the patron, was found to be
far from convincing. Some of the contracts he cites actually confirm the
presence of indigenous slavery, while others point to piece rates for rubber
tapping and fixed wages for off-season activities. The workforce could not be
considered to have been 'salaried in the strict sense of the term', a point
emphasized by Sanabria.
This, however, does not lead to a disagreement with Stoian's characterization
of the early rubber era as one of 'primitive capitalism', although a caveat is in
order. As noted, even Marx considered North American plantation owners as
capitalists, because they exist as 'anomalies in a world-market based in free
labour', For this reason it does not seem useful to frame the discussion in
terms of the feudalism/capitalism debate. Instead, it has been suggested that
Chevalier's view of simple commodity production may be combined with the
pervasive notion of 'captivity', which conveys the element of employer/patron
domination and monopoly, and the virtuality of a 'cash economy' in which
cash hardly ever materializes. Rubber tappers in the northern Bolivian
Amazon region can thus be viewed as simple commodity producers, formally
subsumed under capital and subject to the extraction of absolute surplus value
through monopolistic domination by a patron who brokers their relation to
the market. Their economy, however, was fully 'commodified', in the sense
that rubber was exchanged for subsistence goods in the penumbra of a
captive market operating through the patron's ledger. Establishing 'free
communities' can be understood as the antithesis of this 'captivity', and thus
as an emancipatory response on the part of simple commodity producers.
Free communities emerged in the context of a sustained crisis of the rubber
economy. It was precisely this crisis that shaped the conditions of emergence
of the comunidades libres, since it prompted the 'internalization of the
conditions of reproduction'. On the one hand, the crisis opened the way to the
emergence of an agro-extractive cycle, which combined rubber tapping,
agriculture and Brazil nut gathering as complementary activities that could
potentially sustain what was in effect a peasant household established by the
rubber tapper. The development of rubber tapper subsistence production, one
might say, entailed a process of decommodification, while rubber tapping and
Brazil nut gathering were to become sources of cash income. On the other
hand, the crisis promoted the formation of households through a new patron
strategy to perpetuate 'captivity' by promoting household life, often deciding
who was to marry whom, and establishing fictive kinship relations with the
parents and offspring, for what it was worth. While the internalization of the
conditions of reproduction had occurred in the wake of the 1913 crash in
rubber prices, after 1940 the process of socio-economic differentiation
between patron-run (instead of 'administrator managed') estates and
comunidades libres gathered momentum.
The final unravelling of the rubber economy after 1985 brought a new
dynamic to the region. It accelerated the decline of the estate system and the
formation of independent communities. Rural-rural migration modified the
pattern of spatial occupation of the region. The location of the independent
communities correlates with the size of parcels within the communities and
the relative weight of agricultural and extractive activities. At the same time,
a process of rural-urban migration contributed to the formation of an
industrial reserve army of urban labour that lacked employment
opportunities. During the Brazil nut season, harvesters are recruited from this
labour pool to work in the barracas, where the permanent population has
been drastically reduced and conditions have deteriorated. Although in
remote barracas debt peonage still persists, in the urban context the habilito
system as a form of labour recruitment for the Brazil nut harvest has entered
into a crisis with uncertain outcomes. The system may either be extinguished
or substantially modified, in tandem with a formalization of labour relations.
Decree 25532, which allowed for the conversion of barracas into new
concessions under the 1996 Forestry Law, and left open the possibility for
further conversion into property under the INRA Law, brought to light the
latent conflict between barraqueros on the one hand and the peasantry and
indigenous rural population on the other. Whereas the decree allowed for the
consolidation of barracas first and the subsequent clarification of peasant and
indigenous tenure rights, the Third March' successfully pressured for
abrogation of the decree and the implementation of the INRA Law in the
region while at the same time modifying the norms and procedures for its
implementation. According to the new regulations, the peasant communities
should be granted at least 500 hectares per family, which would allow them
to generate a reasonable income basically derived from the extraction of
forest products.
Whether and how the norm will be applied remains to be seen. In Vaca Díez
Province, where rural population is densest, parcels in the peasant
communities vary between 20 and 80 hectares, whereas in the Department of
Pando they have access to larger areas. There too, however, location is
important. Barraqueros argue that the peasantry seeks to occupy their lands
and installations and that, if peasants want land, they should move to the
more remote areas. The barraquero sector itself has introduced a distinction
between traditional and non-traditional barracas. According to the leader of
an organization of traditional barraqueros, the non-traditional ones could be
reduced in size so as to make it possible to grant peasant communities
sufficient land, albeit in more remote areas. As the clarification of tenure
rights gets under way, both communities and barraqueros seek to consolidate
their claims. Communities are constructing infrastructure with the help of
local NGOs that apply for funding from Bolivian poverty relief schemes. For
their part, barraqueros have cleared forest areas in order to establish their
presence, an important consideration in the light of future property claims.
The outcome of the implementation of a new tenure regime in the region will
be politically determined. Neither the peasantry nor the barraqueros, despite
their entrepreneurial rhetoric, are in favour of a market-led reform process,
although there is an element of deception here. Peasants and indigenous
people seek tenure according to the INRA regulations for land that fulfills a
social function and which, at least at the moment, may not be sold or
mortgaged.47 Barraqueros seek conversion of their barracas, which they
claim fulfill an economic-social function, through an administrative
procedure. If concessions were ever put up for auction, they argue, they
would lose out against transnational capital.48 And they continue pressuring
for the conversion of the barracas into regionally defined medium-size
properties under the tenure regime of the INRA law, which would bring them
'juridical security'. Their discourse of 'juridical security' is extremely
ambiguous, however. They present it as a 'freezing' of their 'inalienable
rights', rather than as a condition for the operation of market forces, but
various interviewees soon got into difficulties when asked how this type of
'juridical security' was to be reconciled with their claim to perform an
economic-social function, which implies that they would fall under the
market-oriented regime of the INRA law. They simply want full property
rights over their barracas, and while some might indeed want to work them,
others will surely want to sell them as soon as it becomes opportune and
profitable to do so. This outcome would, of course, re-launch the process of
vertical integration and concentration of forest-land in the hands of a few
agribusiness enterprises.
Market-led reform is not a viable option in the region. Experience shows that
land markets are highly segmented.49 There may be a considerable volume of
land transactions within farm-size groups, but land sales across farm-size
group boundaries are either absent or contribute to further polarization.
Simply put, the land market is not a level playing field.50 In Bolivia, the
mechanisms that were meant to correct such tendencies towards
concentration have been rather effectively sabotaged as a result of the lobby
for the reduction of the taxes and licence fees that were to stimulate the
market process. Under the questionable premise that such reductions will
contribute to economic reactivation, the Bolivian government has been quite
willing to grant such reductions.
A further issue that emerges is the question of 'poverty reduction'. Peasant
organizations and sympathizing NGOs maintain that redistribution of tenure
rights in favour of the peasantry and indigenous peoples is a precondition for
improving their livelihood. Barraqueros and beneficiadora owners view
themselves as the protagonists of poverty alleviation. The by now familiar
Hecker brothers regularly come up with grandiose schemes that would
require the granting of huge concessions for the exploitation of natural
resources in the region, or for conservation and carbon dioxide capturing. The
areas to be set aside for such schemes often coincide with indigenous peoples'
territorial claims, and it is not very clear how the profits would eventually
'trickle down'.51 Neither is there much to be expected from the smaller
'traditional' barraqueros. They lack capital, and mostly seem keen to rid
themselves of the 'responsibilities' that went with the moral economy of the
barraca patronal, while at the same time seeking 'juridical security',
perpetuating forms of debt-peonage, and claiming the monopoly over the
trade in products extracted from their barraca. In some cases barraca owners
have entered local politics, and managed to become mayor of the
municipalities created under the 1994 Popular Participation Law, while in
other cases barraqueros have set up a Territorial Base Organization under the
same law, thus creating 'phantom communities' where they hold sway. For
their part, peasant and indigenous communities, with the help of NGOs, are
engaged in consolidating their claims, constructing infrastructure to justify
these claims, and diversifying their production through agro-forestry
schemes. They also seek funding from governmental poverty alleviation
programmes and the Popular Participation Law.
Meanwhile, preliminary data from the 2001 census suggest that the decline in
absolute numbers of the rural population registered between 1976 and 1992
has been reversed. In the period 1992–2001 urbanization continued apace,
while the rural population of the region grew by 1.8 per cent annually.
Although the data are still preliminary, this reversal of the tendency toward
absolute decline may be due both to the efforts of NGOs to improve rural
living conditions and also to the increased investment in rural areas under the
Popular Participation Law. The data also suggest that rural population growth
in Vaca Díez Province is higher than in the Pando Department.52 This points
to continuing concentration of the population in the vicinity of urban centres,
where people can combine involvement in agricultural or agro-forestry
activities with the benefits of urban services, such as education. The
demographic dynamics of the region need further research when more
detailed and definitive census data become available, for example to assess
the growth of the emerging regional sub-centres. However, one may safely
assume that the bulk of this population growth takes place in the
comunidades libres, through migration from the barracas, natural growth,
and perhaps some return migration from the urban areas. What the future will
bring will very much depend on the outcome of the current struggle over land
and access to resources between agribusiness enterprises and simple
commodity producers, itself merely the latest stage in a long history of such
conflict in the northern Bolivian Amazon.
 GLOSSARY AND ACRONYMS

adjudicación: sale by auction of public lands to private enterprises or farmers

who perform an economic-social function
barraca: (rubber and/or Brazil nut) estate
barraca patronal: patron-run barraca, in contrast to 'adminstrator'-run
barracas in the context of the more 'entrepreneurial' organization model that
characterized the House of Suárez
barraquero: owner of a barraca
beneficiadora: processing plant where Brazil nuts are shelled
centro: forest settlement of a few huts in a barraca from where rubber trails
start
Centro de Desarrollo Forestal: Centre for Forest Development, local
executive agency under the 1974 Forestry Law
chaco patronal: field cultivated under supervision of the patron
comunidad libre: free community
Corporación Boliviano de Fomento: Bolivian Development Corporation
Defensor del Pueblo: (human rights) ombudsman
dotación: land grant to peasant or indigenous communities; land that
performs a social function
enganche: coercive form of labour recruitment, literally 'hooking' a worker
fregues: subcontractor on a rubber estate
granja: medium-sized farm
habilito: advance payment, known in Brazil as aviamento
Ley del Servicio Nacional de Reforma Agraria, Ley INRA: Law on the
National Service for Agrarian Reform, also known as INRA-Law (1996)
Ley Forestal: Forestry Law (1996)
motosierrista: chain-saw owner
payol: storage place in the forest for Brazil nuts
pulpería: company store
quebradora: worker (usually a woman) who shells Brazil nuts in a
beneficiadora
saneamiento: clarification of land rights
solar campesino: peasant yard
tierra fiscal: public land
trabajadores empatronados: workers in a barraca patronal
zafrero: Brazil nut harvester
ABAN:
Asociación de Beneficiadoras del Nordeste, Association of Beneficidoras of the Northeast
ADN:
Acción Democratica Nacionalista, Nationalist Democratic Action (political party)
ASPROGOAL:
Asociación de Productores de Goma y Almendra, Association of Producers of Rubber and Brazil nuts
(barraqueros)
CADEXNOR:
Camara de Exportadores del Norte, Chamber of Commercial Exporters of the North
CAO:
Camara Agropuecuaria del Oriente, Chamber of Commercial Agriculturalists of the East
CIDOB:
Confederación Indígena del Oriente, Chaco y Amazonía Boliviana, Confederation of Indigenous
Peoples the Bolivian East, the Chaco and the Amazon
CIRABO:
Central Indígena de la Region Amazónica de Bolivia, Indigenous Central of the Bolivian Amazon
Region
CPESC:
Coordinadora de Pueblos Étnicos de Santa Cruz, Coordinating Organization of Ethnic Peoples of
Santa Cruz
CPIB:
Central de Pueblos Indígenas del Beni, Central Organization of the Indigenous Peoples of Beni
GANPI:
Gran Asamblea Nacional de Pueblos Indígenas, Grand National Assembly of Indigenous Peoples
ILO:
International Labour Organization
INRA:
Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria, National Agrarian Reform Institute
NGO:
Non-Governmental Organization
TCO:
Tierras Comunitarias de Origen, Original Community Lands (legal figure for the regularization of
indigenous territories)
 NOTES

1. From the 1970s onward the indigenous peoples of the eastern lowlands had begun to organize with
the help of anthropologists and NGOs. This led to the formation of an umbrella organization, the
Confederación Indígena del Oriente, Chaco y Amazonía de Bolivia (CIDOB), in 1982. In 1990, on the
initiative of the Central de Pueblos Indígenas del Beni (CPIB), which confronted logging interests in
that Department, the peoples of the lowlands undertook a much publicized 'March for Dignity and
Territory'. In response to this march, which suddenly made the lowland indigenous people visible, the
then President Paz Zamora signed a series of decrees recognizing indigenous territories, and Bolivia
ratified ILO Convention 169 (Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries).
A'Second March', under the banner of 'Land and Territory', took place in September 1996 in the context
of the debate and negotiations over new agrarian legislation. The Ley del Servicio Nacional de Reforma
Agraria, which will be discussed below, was adopted in October 1996 [Assies, 2000]. A glossary and a
list of acronyms can be found at the end of this article.
2. It should be noted that this periodization departs from the conventional one that takes the collapse of
rubber prices in 1913 as a major conjunctural break. Although, as we will see, the 1913 crisis had
important effects, the power of the Casa Suárez remained intact.
3. It is estimated that between 250,000 and 500,000 people, mostly males, moved into the Brazilian
Amazon region, particularly after a drought hit the Northeast in 1877. About one-third of them are
estimated to have moved into the Acre region, which soon became the most important rubber producing
area in Brazil [Costa, 1992:39; Martinello, 1988:38]. Sanabria [1988:94] estimates that, between 1860
and 1910, some 80,000 people from the Bolivian side moved northward, particularly from the Santa
Cruz region. According to Stoian [2000a: 63] this figure may well be a gross overestimate.
4. In Brazil this system is known as the aviamento.
5. Though its effects in northern Bolivia were rather limited, the 1953 agrarian reform law contributed
to the consolidation of such communities [Ormachea, 1987; Ormachea and Fernández, 1989].
Officially, according to the 1953 law, rubber tappers would have received two trails to exploit and a
small property for agricultural use, totalling up to 500 hectares. The larger properties would be affected
according to the norms established for agriculture or cattle-raising in the tropical or subtropical regions,
and their maximum extension would be 50,000 hectares in the cases involving cattle herds in excess of
10,000 head. The remaining land would revert to the state.
6. It should be stressed that in view of the highly irregular process of land allocation these data refer to
claims rather than to properties. Of the smallholders, at best 5 per cent ever managed to get hold of a
title to their parcels, while titles acquired for large holdings are often questionable and frequently
unclear as to the real size and location of the area. On the other hand, concessions for forest product
exploitation had been given out ever since 1920, and some were reconfirmed during the 1940s by the
Corporación Boliviano de Fomento. When this agency was dissolved in 1985, the Regional
Development Corporation took over this task, though the 1974 Forestry Law made the Centros de
Desarrollo Forestal responsible for granting permits. In fact, exploitation was based on traditional
claims and a few renewed permits. In the early 1990s registration of such permits was non-existent
[DHV, 1993b] and fees due for exploitation of Brazil nuts were hardly ever paid. In 1996 the Riberalta
Forestry Development Centre tried to negotiate payment with the owners of Brazil nut processing
plants.
7. Based on a survey of 163 rural settlements, Stoian and Henkemans [2000] have elaborated a detailed
classification, which distinguishes four types of barracas and six types of independent community.
Their analysis of demographic trends details the increase in population in the communities and the
decline of the population in barracas, as well as the influence on this process of location. They point to
the emergence of some regional subcentres, often located at river crossings where, in the absence of
bridges, cars have to be brought over by boat. The rise of these sub-centres was also influenced by the
1994 Popular Participation Law, the aim of which was administrative decentralization and a
strengthening of the municipal level. In fact it not only strengthened the few actually existing
municipalities but created over 250 new municipalities where they had been virtually non-existent
before [Calla, 2000; Nijenhuis, 2000].
8. Part of the crop is often sold at harvest time, when prices are low, and staples then have to be bought
later in the year when prices are on the rise. This is due partly to the need for cash and partly to the lack
of adequate storage facilities. In 1994–95 the Riberalta municipality promoted a relatively successful
food security programme in some nearby communities, where as a result storage capacity was installed
and marketing was improved, resulting in better prices. In 1996, peasants in the area expressed their
satisfaction and stated their intention to expand rice production. In remoter areas subsistence agriculture
predominates and agricultural produce is bartered, rather than sold [Assies, 1997a: 63].
9. For a discussion of the 'urban question' in Riberalta, see van Beijnum [1996] and Verheule [1998].
10. This caused a temporary surge in international prices due to competition among buyers on the
Bolivian scene, and a misreading of events by Brazilian exporters, who attributed the reduction in
supply to a harvest shortfall in Acre rather than to the newfound market outlets for Bolivian producers
who now shipped their produce through the Pacific port of Arica [Holt, 1992]. Export prices for shelled
nuts went from around US$0.90 per pound in the mid-1980s to US$1.70 per pound in 1989, and then
dropped again, according to data from the Instituto Nacional de Promoción de Exportaciones (INPEX)
and La Fleur [1992].
11. Data supplied by the Asociación de Beneficiadoras del Norte (ABAN), and also from my own field
data for 1994–97. See also Bojanic [2001:61] and Coesmans and Medina [1997:150].
12. For a discussion of resources and resource use in the region, see Beekma, Zonta and Keijzer [1996].
See also the DHV [1993b] studies, as well as Bojanic [2001], Henkemans [2001] and Stoian [2000a].
13. Some processing plants have experimented with mechanical shelling, freezing shells and then
projecting them against a hard surface, all with variable success.
14. Letter from Federico G. Hecker H. to Monseñor Luis Morgan Casey, Vicario Apostólico de Pando,
Riberalta, 3 March 2000. The letter, written on the occasion of a land dispute, elicited an ironical reply
from the local indigenous organization, the Central Indígena de la Region Amazónica de Bolivia
(CIRABO). The latter first thanks Mr Hecker for acknowledging the genocide perpetrated by his
forebears, then enumerates the surviving indigenous peoples, and finally tells Mr Hecker to go and
claim property in his homeland, Switzerland, instead of telling the Tacana to return to their homelands,
from whence they were dragged by his ancestors [CIRABO, 'Rechazamos guerra sucia en contra de los
derechos de los pueblos indígenas en el Norte amazónico de Bolivia,' Riberalta, 8 March 2000].
15. The debate concerns the failure of sustained development in the Amazon region. In contrast to the
claim about the draining off of surplus, Weinstein [1993] argues that the failure of Amazon
development was due to the persistence of pre-capitalist relations, which she attributes to a tapper-
trader alliance. Tappers preferred a certain autonomy rather than engaging in wage labour on
plantations, which would have allowed for the development of significant internal markets. Barham and
Coomes [1994b; 1996; Coomes and Barham, 1994], in contrast, argue that the habilito system was an
efficient institutional arrangement under the circumstances, and that it allowed for significant local
surplus retention. They propose a Dutch disease model to explain the failure of Amazon development.
As to the possibilities for plantation production, it should be noted that Dean [1989] has argued that
efforts to do this failed basically because of an endemic American leaf blight. In other words, whereas
Weinstein locates the difficulty at the level of production relations, Dean attributes the same difficulties
to the nature of the productive forces.
16. According to the contract Mr Barbery 'authorized' the Casa Suárez to pay the workers 10 Bolivianos
per month, 'in merchandise or money', whereas he himself would receive 100 Bolivianos per worker
per month. At the time the nominal exchange rate was 12.5 Bolivianos for every pound sterling
[Sanabria, 1988:130].
17. Sanabria [1988:129] notes that there were cases of upward mobility among this group, but also that
many, when receiving payment (in English pounds) at the end of the season, rapidly spent it, and had to
reopen an account. The message of such stories is as clear as it is moralizing and apologetic: a
dedicated and hardworking rubber tapper, who does not fall ill, despite rampant malaria and snake
bites, and who does not squander his credit at the end of the season, could become a subcontractor
(fregues) and even a patron. No examples are given of rubber tappers becoming patrons at this time,
and claims regarding the possibility of upward mobility are consequently problematic.
18. The law is reproduced in Roca [2001:114–16]. See also Sanabria [1988:97] and Pacheco [1992:73–
4].
19. Fawcett also reported ill-treatment of rubber tappers to the British Foreign Office [Fifer, 1970].
20. When in the 1880s La Paz-based explorers entered the northern Bolivian Amazon to stake out their
claims, they met with fierce resistance from the Santa Cruz-based pioneers [Sanabria, 1988:59–67;
Roca, 2001:209–13]. The situation became monopolistic with the consolidation of the Suárez empire.
According to one of the heirs of the Riberalta-based Braillard Company, later Seiler and finally Hecker
Hnos. (Hecker Brothers), it was not for nothing that its main barracas were called Conquista
(Conquest) and Fortaleza (Fortress). This reflected their confrontation with the Suárez monopoly
(personal communication from Peter Hecker in 1996). The imagery of free access and unbridled
competition among a variety of entrepreneurs and merchants to win the clients' favour does not hold in
this case. Just like a single swallow does not a summer make, so an occasional 'interloper' does not
make for generalized competition.
21. Note that I do not follow the translation by Jack Cohen in Eric Hobsbawm's edition of the Formen
[Marx, 1965:119]. The translation states: 'lf we now talk of plantation-owners in America as capitalists,
if they are capitalists…'. The German text, however, is quite clearly affirmative: 'sondern daß sie es
sind…A more accurate translation might have saved a lot of ink and paper.
22. Although it was invariably a legal fiction, rubber tappers were formally viewed as the owners of
their product, which they, contractually, were obliged to sell only to the patron who had 'enabled' them
to produce it. The patron thus was the 'mediator' and the 'threshold' between the rubber tapper and the
market, and in effect controlled the circulation of goods within his realm, a 'virtual market', an
arrangement that was the basis of his 'paternalist exploitation' [Geffray, 1995:13–36].
23. Patron domination relies on a combination of violence and 'favours' that create strong, though
ambiguous feelings of dependency and mutual obligation [Geffray, 1995]. A striking example of such
contradictory feelings can be found in a document of the Brazilian Conselho Nacional de Seringueiros,
the organization of 'autonomous rubber tappers' founded by Chico Mendes, when it complains that
'[N]ot one government ever made the necessary social investment that could cover the costs previously
met by the patrons, the seringalistas, with the object of maintaining their domination. The whole
weight fell on the rubber tapper, as government evaded its obligations' [CNS, 1991]. On this point, see
also Aramburu [1994].
24. In his famous study of hunger as a man-made phenomenon, Josué de Castro [1963:106–7] noted
that the decline of the rubber trade was accompanied by an improved diet, due to the expansion of
subsistence agriculture. The phenomenon is also noted by Romanoff [1992:131].
25. It was reported that a number of 'free communities' came into existence at this time, either as a
result of patrons abandoning their barraca or by people moving into unoccupied areas [Ormachea,
1987].
26. As Costa Sobrinho [1992:65] notes, women might even be imported by the patrons as one more
item among the aviamento supplies, the Brazilian equivalent of the habilito.
27. It should be noted that since the early 1990s attempts have been made to formalize labour relations
obtaining in the Brazil nut harvest and also in the processing plants, but with limited success.
Formalizing labour relations during the harvest would require that the real employers, the beneficiadora
owners and the barraqueros, assume direct responsibility as employers, rather than transferring it to the
contractors [Assies, 1997a: 55–6]. As to profitability, beneficiadora owners complain a lot, and the
Hecker brothers like to tell anyone who wants to hear it that actually they are 'socialists of sorts' by
virtue of providing employment to the population of a backward region while earning hardly anything
themselves. During my research in 1995 and 1996, however, I was shown some feasibility studies for
beneficiadoras, which showed rather handsome profit expectations, and I made an approximate
calculation of the distribution of benefits from the nut trade in Bolivia. This showed that out of the
world market price for a kilogram of shelled nuts, 16 per cent goes to the zafrero (harvester), 11 per
cent to the barraquero, and 8 per cent to the quebradora (the women who shell the nuts in the
beneficiadoras). The remaining 64 per cent consists of operating costs for the processing plants,
transportation costs, intermediary costs, and profits. I concluded that the beneficiadora owners had no
reason at all to complain [Assies, 1997a: 59]. According to Stoian [2000a: 144 n.], who does not
address the methodological issue of the calculation involved, my view is an 'impressionistic' one which
unjustifiably attributes 'excessive gains to the entrepreneurial class'. Implying that 'erroneous—but
perhaps politically motivated—results can be produced', he then argues that 'the facts […] are different',
and that 'the profit after taxes of a typical processing plant is rather modest'. Although he does estimate
the share of beneficiadora owners, which I did not do, Stoian's [2000a: 146] calculation does not
contradict my findings where the other actors are concerned. The harvester's share in the world market
price of a pound of nuts could go from 14 per cent to 34 per cent in an exceptionally good year
(1997/98), the barraquero share is 14 per cent in that same year, and the quebradora share is 8.4 per
cent. According to this calculation the beneficiadora owner's share was 11.3 per cent. Bojanic
[2001:70] provides some insight into how this translates into incomes from the nut trade. The 25
beneficiadora owners earn US$5,000 per month, all year round, which means an annual income of
US$60,000. The 5,800 harvesters are employed for three months a year, and during this period earn
only US$173 per month, or US$520 per year. The 2,500 quebradoras, who are formally employed to
work nine months per year and themselves earn US$160 per month, or US$1,443 per year, while their
4,000 informally employed 'helpers' also work nine months annually, but earn only US$40 per month
or US$360 per year. Three hundred and fifty barraqueros earn US$500 during six months or US$3,000
per year. According to Bojanic [2001:82] such data not only do 'not reflect a high inequality in the
distribution of income', but they show that the lower income groups (harvesters and quebradoras) get a
daily or monthly wage higher than that paid by other forms of employment available to non-skilled
labour. He recommends calculating Gini coefficients and Lorenz curves. Elsewhere Bojanic [2001:174]
shows that 80 per cent of the households in the region live below the US$2 line and 44 per cent live
below the US$1 line: in other words, they are extremely poor. The 18 per cent who are 'not poor'
account for 36 per cent of the regional income and the 4.5 per cent in the 'higher income' bracket for 15
per cent.
28. The average parcel size in the area is about 50 hectares. This is barely sufficient for sustainable
slash and burn agriculture, based on the cultivation of about 2 hectares and a regeneration period of
about 25 years. Soils in the region as a whole are extremely poor, and hardly apt for agriculture. One
study [DHV, 1993b] suggests that the costs of slash and burn agriculture are economically higher than
the value it produces. Extraction of forest products would therefore be an alternative, and at the same
time would contribute to forest conservation. According to a document prepared by an NGO in
Riberalta, in order to earn about US$1,727 per year, a peasant household containing six persons and
relying on a combination of agriculture and extractivism would need access to between 300 and 500
hectares of forest land. Similar calculations have been made for the Brazilian extractive reserves, which
were created in response to the rubber tappers movement led by Chico Mendes [Allegreti, 1990; 1994;
Brown and Rosendo, 2000; Mendes, 1992].
29. Henkemans [2001] discusses the problems of a remote community attempting to become
independent from a patron.
30. On the other hand, Stoian points out that vertical integration was accompanied by a tendency
toward horizontal integration, that is a diversification of production into palm heart production and
logging.
31. In the course of the year 2000, when clarification of land rights had finally started, and after the
Third March', a technical commission made up of interested parties and various civil society
organizations identified 167 communities in the Vaca Díez Province and 307 in the Pando Department.
The total number of barracas may be around 300 to 350.
32. In Bolivia the highland Indian population rejects the term indígena and instead insists on being
called originario, which in their view better indicates that they were there before either the Spanish
conquest or the subsequent formation of the Bolivian state. The indigenous population of the lowlands
is estimated at some 220,000 people belonging to 30 different groups. The Quechua, Aymara and Uru
of the highlands would number over 4 million.
33. In practice the paying of tax was taken as proof that land fulfilled its economic-social function, a
point that was immediately challenged by peasant organizations.
34. This is meant basically to provide an area to be used by chainsaw owners (motosierristas), who
until then had exploited resources in a highly irregular way. They now should form an association and
work according to a management plan.
35. In March 1999 the International Labour Organization (ILO) issued a series of recommendations on
this case [Tamburini, 2000].
36. Possibly the decree was also a reward for support given to Acción Democrática Nacionalista
(ADN), the main party of President Banzer's governing coalition, during the 1997 elections.
37. Throughout the debate over the Forestry Law the timber industry has lobbied for full private
ownership of forest-lands [Pavez and Bojanic, 1998].
38. See Superintendencia Agraria, 16 November 1999, Despacho 715/99.
39. Later the INRA produced maps showing the area claimed by barracas and the distribution of
communities that had obtained legal personality under the Popular Participation Law of 1994, which
are by no means all the existing communities. These maps show clearly the extent to which these rival
claims overlap.
40. Castaña is the local term for Brazil nuts.
41. Beneficiadora owners regularly invoke doom-laden scenarios to defend their interests, and threaten
to shut down their operations. The support on the part of the President of the Federation of Rubber and
Brazil Nut Workers partly reflects the interests of the urban-based work force that participates in the
Brazil nut harvest. It should be noted, however, that both the role and representativeness of this
organization are rather doubtful. It holds office in ASPROGOAL—that is, under the auspices of the
employers' organization. The Civic Committee Manifesto mentioned various local NGOs with which it
claims to cooperate, but it is far from clear that these organizations would support the manifesto.
42. The stipulation that 500 hectares should be the minimum seems to be the result of a lapse by one of
the government delegates during the Montero negotiations. Consultants had recommended that the
families should be granted between 300 and 500 hectares.
43. The lack of advance in the Gran Chaco region possibly contributed to the conflict between the
emerging movement of landless peasants and allegedly paramilitary 'peasants with land', a clash that
claimed seven lives in November 2001.
44. Included in the agreement was the fact that at least 50 per cent of the land on such farms should be
worked. An earlier modification of the regulations already introduced the norm that such properties
should be worked with wage labour, that technical/mechanical productive forces should be used, and
that production should be destined for the market. As noted, initially the payment of tax was taken as
sufficient evidence for the performance of the social-economic function.
45. Only part of the workforce employed in the shelling plants is officially registered as such. These
workers—mostly women—are often 'helped' by family members who are not themselves officially
registered as part of the labour force.
46. Obviously, the scheme is rather questionable. At issue is who really benefited. Clearly, the
harvesters receive more, provided that the system works, but the beneficiadoras would at the same time
receive an indirect subsidy, receiving their raw material at an extremely low cost. On the whole, the
scheme proposed could not help but end in a huge fraud.
47. There are pressures from the business lobby to reform the constitution on this point.
48. The argument is not terribly convincing. As we saw, the bottom price for exploitation licences was
set at US$1, and it was expected that it would rise as a result of competition. That has not been the case,
since the fee was lowered to promote 'economic reactivation'.
49. On this point, see Zoomers [2000:299].
50. On this point, see Carter [2000] and Carter and Salgado [2001].
51. Kaimowititz and Bojanic [1998] provide another example. In the late 1990s, when Freddy Hecker
was Mayor of Riberalta, he proposed that the municipal forest reserve, defined in a way to make it
overlap with an indigenous territorial claim, should be exploited by a Cuban enterprise, rather than by
local 'social associations' of chainsaw operators.
52. This poses a problem. As we saw, parcel sizes in Vaca Díez Province are relatively small. Although
until now the communities have sought to accommodate newcomers, the latter receive increasingly
smaller parcels, and within the communities some people have no holding at all. Peasant organizations
have started to raise the question of a redistribution of land within the communities once they have
received their collective title.
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d'un Projet Multidisciplinaire', Paris: ORSTOM/INPA (working paper).
Lescure, J-P., F.Pinton and L.Emperaire, 1994, 'People and Forest Products in Central Amazonia: the
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the Brazilian Amazon: Perspectives on Regional Development: Paris: UNESCO (MAB Digest No. 18).
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de Asuntos Campesinos, Pueblos Indígenas y Originarios.
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o Vale Amazônico, Rio Branco: UFAC.
Marx, K., 1974, 'Formen, die der kapitalistichen Produktion vorhergehen', in K. Marx and F.Engels,
Staatstheorie; Materialen zur Rekonstuktion der Marxistische Staatstheorie, Herausgegeben und
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Marx, K., 1965, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, with an introduction by E.J. Hobsbawm, New
York: International Publishers.
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Level', in CEDLA, Fronteras: Towards a Borderless Latin America, Amsterdam: CEDLA.
Ormachea , S.E., 1987, Beni y Pando, Latifundio y Minifundio en el Norte Boliviana, La Paz: CEDLA.
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Agrícola Integral 'Campesino'.
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Castaña, Riberalta, Guayaramerin: CEDLA.
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la Amazonia Boliviana, La Paz: CEDLA.
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tierras bajas de Bolivia a fines del siglo XX, La Paz: PIEB.
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Hucitec.
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The Impact of Neo-liberal Economics on Peruvian
Peasant Agriculture in the 1990s

JOHN CRABTREE
 INTRODUCTION

During the 1990s, Peru was among the Latin American countries that
underwent the most rapid and radical transformation towards a liberal
economy. This had the effect of changing the rules affecting economic agents
of all sorts, including peasant producers. Although the collectivist aims of the
1969 agrarian reform legislation had long since been abandoned in favour of
policies that sought to privilege market relations in the rural sphere, the
liberalization of the agricultural economy became much more explicit in the
1990s. The virtues of free market economics were extolled as a panacea—
even for sectors like peasants at the very margins of the economic system.
State intervention for agriculture of all sorts was reduced, while producers
were forced to compete on more open terms with imports. Such a major
transformation naturally brought with it winners and losers in agriculture, just
as it did in other sectors of economic life.
The 1969 agrarian reform and its effects on Peruvian agriculture gave rise to
a substantial literature in the 1970s, but the changes that have taken place
since 1990 have received less attention, especially with regard to peasant
economy.1 Although rural poverty has recently become a major topic of
debate, much of the writing has focused more on the provision of different
types of social support than on resolving the underlying problems of
agriculture. The purpose of this article is to examine the ways in which
peasant agriculture has responded to the changes in the economic
environment in which it operates and the ways it has impacted on those
dependent on it for their livelihood. Overall, the conclusion reached here is
that, 12 years after it was originally launched, liberalization has probably
brought more losers than winners, and that many peasant producers have
been relegated further to the margins of the economic system. This is a
conclusion that has worrying implications for those concerned with reducing
rural poverty levels.
This is a discussion that has wider implications for the whole debate
surrounding the impact of globalization on those sectors that are ill-equipped
to compete in the worldwide marketplace for agricultural commodities of one
kind or another. What longer-term economic future do peasant producers
have in such a framework? Will we see the same disappearance of the
peasantry in Peru that Hobsbawm [1994] has noted elsewhere as being one of
the hallmark features of the twentieth century? As we shall see, such
producers in Peru—despite continued urbanization—are more numerous than
they were 30 years ago, casting doubt on this hypothesis [Mesclier, 2000].
Indeed, they still constitute a very significant proportion of the total
workforce. Assuming that they will not 'disappear' as such, what sort of
future therefore awaits them?
The answer to such questions can be only tentative at best, but the experience
in Peru over recent years provides some important pointers as to the
dynamics affecting peasants and small-scale producers in Latin America
more generally and possibly elsewhere. The approach adopted here is
essentially of a 'political economy' nature. While changes in economic policy
have major implications for different sectors of agriculture and alter the
relations of power among actors, such policies themselves exist within a
wider political framework that favours them in some circumstances and
prejudices them in others. Therefore, as well as analysing the impact of
structural adjustment on small-scale producers, it is also necessary to
understand the political transformations that have taken place in the past two
decades which made such structural adjustment possible in the first place.
The article therefore seeks to highlight both the economic policies employed
and their impact, along with the declining significance of 'producer politics' at
the national level during the 1980s and 1990s. It begins with a short
characterization of the agricultural sector generally, its heterogeneity and
volatility, before moving on to considering the key policies followed since
1990 and their effects. It continues with an evaluation of the extent to which
producers' ability to articulate their interests and negotiate policy was
circumscribed during these years.2
However, before going into detail, it is important first to provide some
elements of the geographical and historical context and to say a little about
what we mean by the 'peasant economy'. As will become clear, this article
follows a fairly wide definition of 'peasant producers', defining these as
small-scale, independent producers whose workforce consists mainly of
family labour.3 Such producers are not necessarily delimited to the highlands
of Peru (where they still predominate) but abound also in other areas of the
country. Equally, there are peasant farmers, so defined, working in the jungle
and on the coast. Nor are we necessarily talking about those for whom
subsistence agriculture is the only or even the main activity, since many such
producers have long been highly integrated into the market economy, even in
some instances as exporters. It is therefore no longer possible to isolate
peasant producers from the rest of the agricultural sector; rather they need to
be viewed as a key and integral part of an overall economic system that is no
longer limited to a single geographical or ecological zone, even though a
large number of those we classify as 'peasants' may still reside in the
highlands (sierra).
The article will also include some reflections on the implications that this
may have for policies to reduce poverty. Since poverty—especially extreme
poverty—is concentrated in the rural sector and since the majority of those
who live in poverty live off the land, it is not possible to hive off discussions
about agricultural policy from those designed to alleviate poverty. The ways
in which agricultural policies are designed have an obvious and immediate
impact on social conditions in rural areas, irrespective of other policies that
may be pursued. Despite the large sums expended by the Fujimori
administration (1990–2000) on programmes of social relief in rural areas, the
logic of these was largely assistentialist and often unrelated to improving the
productive economy of producers in rural areas. Rather, the consequence of
economic liberalization seems to have been to increase rather than diminish
social inequality, contributing little to the problems afflicting the poorest
farmers. That this appears to be the case also reflects the political weakness
of peasant producers in making their interests felt in spheres of decision-
making. The return to a more democratic government in 2001, committed to
improving levels of political participation as well as tackling poverty, may
create a more propitious environment for peasant agriculture. Whether this
happens remains to be seen.
 THE PEASANT ECONOMY IN PERU

The first (and perhaps the most obvious) point that needs to be made about
Peruvian agriculture is its extreme heterogeneity. This heterogeneity is
defined both by the country's highly differentiated geography and ecology, as
well as by widely differing degrees of commercialization, levels of
productivity and access to markets. There are few countries in the world
where farmers operate in such a broad range of ecological zones, producing
such a wide diversity of agricultural output. Equally, the social composition
of the agricultural sector is highly differentiated, ranging from subsistence
agriculture in the sierra to cash-crop agriculture in the irrigated valleys of the
coast (costa) and the Amazonian jungle (selva), geared more to meeting
urban and export demand. The social, political and cultural conditions in rural
Peru reflect this heterogeneity, greatly complicating the challenges for
framing public policy.
The country divides naturally into these three major areas, although there is
also a great deal of diversity within each of them.4 Firstly, there are the
irrigated valleys of the coast. This is where Peru's more profitable farms are
located, benefiting from high levels of irrigation and relatively easy access to
key urban centres and export markets. In the past 20 years, coastal agriculture
has benefited from a number of large, high-cost irrigation projects (e.g. Majes
and Chavimochic) which have absorbed the lion's share of agricultural
investment, albeit to the benefit of relatively few producers. Agriculture in
the coastal desert area is almost entirely dependent on irrigation. Secondly,
there is the sierra, where mostly peasant farmers produce both for their own
subsistence and the market (or a combination of the two). Peasant
communities still predominate, although in practice most production is now
organized on the basis of individual landholding [Eguren, 1999]. Some areas
of the sierra (e.g. the Mantaro valley) are important sources of food for
coastal cities, but under increasing competitive pressure from coastal
agriculture and imports. Yields in the sierra are typically much lower than on
the coast, good agricultural land is scarcer and rates of poverty higher.
Thirdly, there is tropical agriculture in the selva. Typical crops include rice,
coffee and citrus, but this is also where Peru's illegal coca is grown and coca
competes with other legal crops. For good or for ill, coca has been one of
Peru's most dynamic cash crops during the last 20 years. Most farmers in the
selva are of highland origin, although units of landholding tend to be larger
and more productive than in most parts of the sierra. The region suffers from
distance from markets and poor communication with the outside world,
except possibly in the case of coca, which has its own distinctive marketing
mechanisms (see Map 1).
This pattern of heterogeneity is as true for small-scale peasant agriculture as
it is for agriculture as a whole, perhaps even more so. The universe of peasant
production incorporates not just the sierra but also the costa and selva.
Although the majority of subsistence farmers are still concentrated in the
sierra, small-scale agriculture is dominant in terms of the number of units in
the other two main regions as well. According to the 1994 agricultural census
—the most recent comprehensive source of data at the time of writing—
small-scale units of landholding represented 92 per cent of all productive
units in Peru, an even higher proportion than ten years earlier. Of these, the
huge majority are independent households [Ministerio de Agricultura, 2001].
Even around 60 per cent of agricultural exports came from small-scale units
of landholding, principally coffee and cotton (not to

MAP 1
mention coca). The highest concentration of small units is found, as one
would expect, in the sierra, especially in the departments of Puno, Cusco,
Cajamarca and Ancash.
The definition used in the census of a 'small-scale producer' is one with up to
20 hectares of land. Such an upwards limit is perhaps excessive, especially in
view of the fact that there is an enormous difference in the productive
potential of 20 hectares of irrigated land on the coast and the same amount of
non-irrigated land in the sierra. If we take a rather more conservative
definition (subject to the same caveats about differentiation between areas) of
5 hectares or less, 'small-scale' production still represented over 70 per cent of
all agricultural units in 1994, among which great diversity was also to be
found.5 In terms of geographical distribution, the areas of the country where
the average unit of landholding was 2 hectares or less were concentrated in
the sierra, notably the highland zones of Apurímac, Moquegua, Junín, Lima
and Pasco. The average for the sierra as a whole was below 3 hectares, whilst
the largest average units were to be found in the jungle areas of the country.
This pattern of heterogeneity among small-scale producers has became more
pronounced because of the generalized tendency, dating from the early
1980s, towards the subdivision of the large, collective units established both
in the sierra and in the costa under the agrarian reform legislation. The
abandonment of the policies associated with agrarian reform led to the
parcelación of land into small, family-based units of independent producers.
Small-scale units are now the predominant forms of landholding in many of
the coastal valleys, increasing substantially the proportion of small-scale
producers in this part of the country. However, the same tendency is
observable in the sierra as well, leading to increasing differentiation among
highland parceleros, a dynamic that emerges clearly from a comparison of
the 1972 agricultural census data with that of 1994. In 1972, just after the
agrarian reform, the number of independent small-scale producers stood at
just under 50 per cent of the total, while by 1994 this had increased to 63 per
cent. Indeed, parcelación, coupled with demographic pressure on land, has
given rise in many cases to a renewed minifundización along the coast, with
the proportion of very small units (e.g. 1 hectare or less) increasing quite
notably in the 1980s and 1990s.
Other key defining characteristics that differentiate sectors of agriculture
(especially among small-scale producers) include the application of
technology and practices of marketing. An overall characteristic of Peruvian
agriculture is its low rate of productivity when compared with other sectors
of the economy, but the rates of application of even fairly basic technology
vary enormously between the costa and selva on the one hand and the sierra
on the other. Again, the 1994 census shows that the highly differentiated use
of improved seeds, chemical inputs, mechanization and electrical (or other)
sorts of energy, with much higher rates on the coast than in the highlands. At
the same time, there is an ever-increasing differentiation among small-scale
producers in terms of the markets they serve. While the overall trend is
clearly towards increasing participation in the market economy with an
increase in the proportion of tradeables, the great majority of land in the
hands of small-scale producers in highland Puno in 1994 was still devoted to
subsistence farming, whereas in coastal Piura most small-scale farmers were
involved in commercial agriculture selling into urban markets.
The performance of agriculture has been fairly volatile in the past three
decades, with growth rates considerably less dynamic in the sierra than in
other parts of the country. Between 1975 and 1990, agricultural production
grew at an annual rate of 1.9 per cent, well below the overall rate of
demographic growth, let alone that of rural Peru. Agriculture's contribution to
global GDP fell from 23 per cent in 1950 to 12 per cent in 1989. It currently
stands at around 14 per cent of GDP.6 This decline is particularly noticeable
in the area of foreign trade, with agricultural exports accounting for only 11
per cent of exports compared with over 50 per cent in 1950.
Volatility of output from one year to another is primarily a function of three
key factors. The first of these is variation in the level of demand, particularly
in the urban economy. Aggregate demand in the economy has been even
more volatile in Peru than in most other Latin American countries, with
protracted periods of recession interspersed by sudden (unsustainable) spurts
of growth.7 A succession of macroeconomic stabilization packages under the
aegis of the IMF has sought to rectify disequilibria on the balance of
payments basically by controlling aggregate demand. Given Peru's skewed
pattern of income distribution, such demand management tended to hit
demand for food particularly hard, thereby impacting on agricultural prices
and output. The second major source of short-term volatility is climatic
variation. The country's exposure to the periodic El Niño phenomenon has a
direct and sometimes dramatic bearing on agricultural output.8 The Niño
results in changed patterns of rainfall, generating drought conditions where
harvests depend on timely rainfall and floods that disrupt communications
(and therefore channels of marketing) in areas where normally there is scant
rainfall. The two most disastrous Niños of recent times were those of 1983
and 1998, although there have been less severe ones in the intervening years
and since 1998. The third major factor was the effect of political violence in
the 1980s and early 1990s. This had a major impact on output, especially in
parts of the sierra like Ayacucho, that underwent severe depopulation with
the consequent interruption that this caused for the agricultural economy.9
Of course, agriculture has also been affected by the direction of sectoral
policy under a succession of different governments. The agrarian reform
implemented by the military government in the 1970s changed the structure
of landholding through the expropriation of landed estates and the
reorganization of these into cooperatives of varying types. By providing land
to those who had been previously landless, it represented a major step
towards greater equity in the countryside. It also established new channels of
participation. However, it failed to provide the ancillary services (such as
training, credit and technical inputs) required to make the new system
economically viable in the longer run [Caballero, 1980]. Also, as a reform
imposed 'from above' rather than emanating 'from below', it was particularly
susceptible to shifts in government policy. As output levels dwindled in the
years after the reform, pressure built up to change the model. In the late
1970s and early 1980s, the agrarian reform was abandoned and the process of
dividing up the cooperatives began. The implementation of stabilization
policies from the late 1970s on-coupled with the negative effects of political
violence from 1980 onwards—created a situation that was particularly
damaging to peasant interests, especially in the sierra. As we shall see, the
decline in the organized political strength of the peasantry dates from this
period. The García government (1985–90) gave rhetorical support to the need
to boost the peasantry as one of the least favoured sectors of society, but in
practice did little to redirect policy to this end. While the abandonment of
IMF orthodoxy in favour of demand-led heterodoxy created a short-term
economic boom in agricultural prices in 1985–87, this policy proved
unsustainable. The return to (unsuccessful) stabilization policies in the late
1980s had a devastating effect on agricultural prices (and therefore rural
incomes) from which most of the agricultural sector found it hard to recover
in the 1990s.
One of the main conclusions of most studies on the long-run performance in
Peruvian agriculture is the negative impact of overall policy—one way or
another—on the rural sector, particularly those small-scale farmers most
dependent on domestic demand for food [Figueroa, 1992]. Broadly speaking,
this was because one of the strategic constants was the need of successive
governments to provide a sufficiently plentiful supply of cheap food to an
increasingly urban population. Whereas in 1950 Peru was one-third urban
and two-thirds rural, 30 years later these proportions had been inverted.
Partly through exchange rate policies, partly through price controls, this 'anti-
agrarian bias' encouraged an increased reliance on food imports that
competed on advantageous terms with locally produced staples. Over the
long term, changes in consumption patterns—strongly promoted by importers
—would further marginalize local products, to the disadvantage in particular
of small-scale producers in the sierra. Peruvian agro-industry has resorted to
importing the inputs for the food industry-notably grains, milk products and
vegetable oils—used to make basic food products. In 1970, for instance, Peru
imported 500,000 tonnes of food, whilst itself producing 2.7 million tonnes.
By 1998, it was importing 3.2 million tonnes of food, whilst producing 3.8
million.
 THE NEO-LIBERAL AGENDA

The liberalizing agenda took shape soon after the inauguration of Alberto
Fujimori in July 1990. Although there had been moves in this direction in the
early 1980s, these had been half-hearted and had encountered stiff political
opposition. Fujimori's approach to stabilization—the so-called 'Fujishock' of
August 1990—was full-blooded and implemented 'without anaesthetics'. The
series of stabilization packages that began in 1988 sought to change the
pattern of relative prices within the economy. They had dramatic short-run
effects on living standards, the rate of aggregate demand in the economy and
—consequently—prices for agricultural goods. Fujimori was able to bring
rampant inflation under control and therefore move to the sort of
restructuring of the economy that had been impossible previously. His
strategy was to push ahead with a radical restructuring of the economy along
neo-liberal lines, removing the last vestiges of the state-oriented ISI model
introduced in the 1970s. This involved a drastic reduction in public sector
activity, the deregulation of markets (including the labour market), the
encouragement of privatization and foreign investment, the dismantling of
industrial protection and the gradual reorientation of the economy towards
export-led growth.
These two strategies—one short-term stabilization and the other longer-term
structural adjustment—were regarded as distinct (there were some
inconsistencies between them) but complementary. They were
enthusiastically backed by the IMF and World Bank, which rewarded
Fujimori by facilitating the restructuring of the foreign debt.10 Policy
followed IMF prescriptions to the letter, irrespective of the short-term social
costs. It was pursued with particularly single-minded zeal under Carlos
Boloña, appointed finance minister in 1991, driven more by macroeconomic
exigency than by the needs of individual economic sectors. For most of the
Fujimori period, the role of the agriculture ministry was subservient to that of
the finance ministry, its capacity to intervene in the sector increasingly
limited by the government's rejection of state intervention in the productive
sphere. Agriculture, indeed, received less priority than other sectors (such as
mining and energy), and within it greater attention was given to boosting the
more commercially viable sectors (especially the export sector). Resolving
the problems of small-scale producers was not a major priority [Hopkins,
1998].
Meanwhile, the compression of domestic demand, first under García after
1988 and subsequently under Fujimori, had an immediate and very negative
impact on those sectors of agriculture producing for the domestic, urban
market. The Fujishock involved a dramatic adjustment of domestic prices, a
major one-off devaluation and a sharp rise in domestic interest rates, all of
which had important implications for agricultural producers. However, the
structural and institutional reforms that followed were to have more profound
and lasting effects. These included trade liberalization, exchange rate
appreciation, the ending of state subsidies in marketing, the closure of the
agrarian bank (Banco Agrario), institutional downsizing and the promotion of
land titling.
In 1990 and 1991, the Fujimori government radically altered the nature of
tariff and non-tariff protection for agriculture, as well as other sectors of the
economy. The purpose of trade liberalization was to reorient the economy
away from ISI towards export-led growth, and at once to improve the
efficiency and lower the costs of domestic production. In agriculture, the idea
was that cheaper inputs would help boost exports and make Peruvian output
more internationally competitive. At the same time, it was hoped that trade
liberalization would lower domestic food prices and therefore contribute to
reducing inflation. Tariffs (with some exceptions) were thus reduced from an
average of 56 per cent to two basic rates of 15 per cent and 25 per cent, and
were lowered still further in 1996. In order to compensate specific
agricultural sectors, a system of fixed and variable surcharges was introduced
in 1992, effectively taxes on five basic commodity imports: hard maize, rice,
sugar, milk powder and wheat. These helped shield some agricultural
producers from cheap foreign imports, but were vigorously opposed by well-
organized lobbies of importers. In 1998, for instance, lobbying from the
Alicorp consortium (an amalgam of the powerful Nicolini and Romero
groups) encouraged the government to drop the surcharge on imported wheat.
The effects of trade liberalization were compounded by exchange rate policy
[Gonzales de Olarte, 1996]. Following the 1990 devaluation, the central bank
managed the currency in such a way as to lead to progressive appreciation in
real terms. This made it cheaper to import agricultural commodities, but
reduced the effective protection afforded to domestic producers. The extent
of overvaluation at any one point is difficult to determine, but the devaluation
of the sol lagged well behind domestic inflation for much of the 1990s.
Fujimori inherited a system that involved heavy state intervention in the
agricultural sector through price controls and a state monopoly over the
trading of food and inputs. Amongst his first moves was to scrap price
controls, allowing these to be set by market forces. This, it was argued, would
work to the advantage of agriculture generally, since price controls had not
benefited producers. Fujimori also abolished two institutions which had
played a key role as intermediary between producer and consumer since the
time of Velasco government (1968–75): the Empresa Comercializadora de
Arroz (ECASA) and the Empresa Nacional Comercializadora de Insumos
(ENCI). The former had had a legal monopoly over the trading of rice, a key
staple in the Peruvian diet, ensuring politically influential rice producers an
above-market return on their crop. The latter controlled imports of food and
fertilizer.
As well as closing ECASA and ENCI, the new government eliminated the
Banco Agrario as a source of subsidized credit to producers. At its height, the
Banco Agrario had been lending up to 1 billion dollars a year in cheap credit.
Although an important source of finance to the agricultural sector, the bank
had become a nexus for corruption and influence-peddling, especially during
the García administration. In its place, it was hoped that commercial lenders
would provide the finance required, or otherwise the cajas rurales. In
practice, commercial lenders showed little interest in lending to the
agricultural sector, particularly to small-scale producers, perceiving it as
high-risk and lacking adequate collateral. The experience of the cajas rurales
also proved disappointing. Between 1993 and 1995, 12 were established,
their number subsequently rising to 17. By 2001, only five were still
functional, all on the coast and many lending for purposes other than
agriculture.
As mentioned above, the agriculture ministry underwent a radical
reformulation as the role of the state in agriculture was reduced [Santa Cruz,
1999], This was largely at the behest of the multilateral financial
organizations, the size of whose past loans to the agriculture sector gave them
considerable leverage. The ministry, accused by its critics of waste and
corruption, was reduced in size from 23,000 employees in 1990 to just 5,000
in 1996. As with other reforms to the public administration, this downsizing
was conducted in an ad hoc fashion with little prior planning. In many
instances, ministry programmes were abruptly suspended or handed over to
private sector entities. Lacking state capacities, Peru was poorly placed to
enter into the sort of 'second generation' reforms pursued elsewhere in Latin
America.
The attempt to create a functioning market economy in rural Peru was one of
the more ambitious of the Fujimori reforms. Consonant with the drift of neo-
liberal reform, this represented the most decisive break with the spirit of the
agrarian reform. It was hoped that the widening of private ownership would
extend the benefits of liberalization to a large number of small-scale
producers. The aim of building a market in land was clear in Decree Law 658
of 1991, but was made more explicit with the 1995 Land Law (Ley de tierras)
[Del Castillo, 1997]. This provided property guarantees to titleholders,
abolished the previous upper limits on personal landholding and allowed the
state to sell land currently in public ownership.11 By promoting individual
land ownership through titling, the new law sought to open the way to the
capitalization of agriculture by enabling holders to raise mortgages. It
reflected the thinking of those, like Hernando de Soto [2000], who saw the
unlocking of private assets as key to development.12 It also reflected the
views of the World Bank, which supported similar schemes in neighbouring
countries like Bolivia's Ley INRA. Separate legislation sought to extend
private ownership to water rights—a conflictual issue in an arid country
where control of water is arguably as key to production as access to land—as
well as the forestry sector in the selva. In practice, the government's land
titling programme, launched in 1993 with support from the Inter-American
Development Bank (IDB), proved over-ambitious. Between 1996 and 2000,
only half as many titles were authorized as planned. Most of these were given
to coastal producers. Even in the costa there is little to suggest that they
helped create a viable market in agricultural property, partly owing to
negative perceptions about the value of land, partly to the lack of financial
backup.
 THE IMPACT ON AGRICULTURE

Identifying the ways in which such policies, along with the effects of
macroeconomic and climatic change, impacted on different strata of the rural
population is by no means an easy matter. As well as problems of pinpointing
the differences between sectors within this heterogeneous universe, there are
serious problems with regard to the quality of the statistical data available.
The 1994 agricultural census provides the most complete set of figures on
production and living standards in rural areas, but only gives information for
the first years of the Fujimori period when most of these changes were only
incipient. The value of output data for agriculture is also questionable, not
least because in 2000 the government changed the base year on which such
data was collected from 1979 to 1994, altering significantly some of the
suppositions about the relative weight of agriculture in the economy as a
whole.13 Furthermore, the household surveys used to measure poverty in
rural areas as well as urban ones do not provide much information on such
key variables as land ownership, agricultural output and the technologies
used. Still, bearing in mind the limitations of the data available, it is possible
to give some idea of the effects on the sector as a whole and small-scale
producers in particular.
Overall, performance in the agricultural sector since the 1960s has been
sluggish. In the 1970s, this was attributable to the dislocations caused by the
agrarian reform. In the 1980s, agriculture was hit by the impact of the debt
crisis on demand for food, the effects of rural violence over large parts of the
country and the 1983 Niño. Between 1970 and 1979, agricultural GDP grew
on average by 1.53 per cent each year. Between 1980 and 1989, it grew by
2.13 per cent, slightly above the otherwise far from dynamic average rate of
GDP growth for the economy as a whole. During the 1990s, in somewhat
improved macroeconomic and political circumstances, growth in agriculture
picked up to 3.73 per cent, fractionally above the 3.69 per cent average
registered for the economy as a whole. Small-scale producers, like others,
benefited from such factors as the ending of hyperinflation, the quelling of
Sendero Luminoso and the return to more normal rainfall patterns after the
droughts of the late 1980s.
As we have suggested, the long-term agricultural growth figures mask a great
deal of shorter-term volatility caused by, amongst other things, sudden
variations in the climate and sharp annual changes in the pattern of demand.
The relative recovery in production towards the mid-1990s owed much to the
revival of domestic demand and the return to more normal weather patterns.
However, towards the end of the 1990s, these two key motors went into
reverse: the return of El Niño in 1997/98 had a major impact on supply,
whilst the economy entered a period of stagnation from which there were few
signs of recovery even at the end of 2001. The longer-term data also mask an
important change in the structure of agricultural production, with a notable
increase in the share of tradeable goods (such as rice, hard maize, wheat,
soya, sugar, milk etc.) and a decline in the proportion of non-tradeables (such
as potato, quinua and other Andean grains). Policy under Fujimori tended to
benefit larger-scale producers oriented primarily towards agro-industry and
foreign markets. Some took advantage of new 'niche' markets, such as
asparagus which, albeit briefly, became a boom industry in parts of the coast.
The effects of trade liberalization—and indeed other forms of liberalization—
are difficult to disentangle from the other factors that determine the rhythm of
growth in agriculture. However, the reduction of protective tariffs, in
conjunction with the maintenance of an overvalued exchange rate, created a
difficult environment for producers of tradeable goods who found themselves
increasingly subjected to competition from cheap food imports. Although
agricultural exports have increased in value terms since the mid-1980s, they
have been overtaken by the increase in imports. Imports of agricultural goods
averaged US$488 million in the period between 1986–90, rising to US$687
million in 1991–95, and reaching US$1,035 million in 1996–99. In volume
terms (eliminating the effect of price variations) food imports rose from 1.6
million tonnes (1986–90) to 2.1 million tonnes (1991–95) and 2.8 million
tonnes (1996–99). Peru's average annual agricultural trade balance, which
until 1980 had been consistently in surplus, registered deficits of US$216
million in 1986–90, US$383 million in 1991–95 and US$346 million in
1996–99.14
These figures suggest that Peruvian agriculture is satisfying an ever
decreasing proportion of domestic demand for food, a clearly worrying trend
for a country in which a large proportion of the workforce is employed in
agricultural activities.15 As we can see in Table 1, imports per capita of the
population have risen steadily since 1970, whereas production per head of the
population has declined. Imports now account for roughly 40 per cent of food
needs. As well as having important implications for domestic producers, this
makes food provision increasingly dependent on the existence of foreign
exchange to pay for imports.

The sectors most vulnerable to the inflow of cheap agricultural produce are
the producers of tradeables who, as we have noted, represent an increasingly
large proportion of those classified as small-scale peasant producers. At the
same time, the increase in imports has also accelerated a change in
consumption patterns away from traditional crops, mainly those associated
with highland agriculture. The increase in consumption of rice and pasta at
the expense of potatoes is particularly notable, even in the sierra. Such
changes are, of course, not new; they are a consequence of 50 years of
progressive urbanization and have defied attempts of various governments to
persuade consumers of the value of traditional Andean crops, especially
grains. Still, the availability of cheap imported grains has accelerated the
decline of such traditional crops as quinua, kiwicha, oca, olluco and beans.
Arguably, these may have proved to be more 'tradeable' than was previously
thought. Symptomatic of this problem is cultivation of wheat, grown in the
sierra. Wheat imports nearly doubled in volume terms between 1990 and
2000, without even taking into account donations by organizations such as
the European Union (EU) and the US Agency for International Development
(USAID). The removal in 1998 of the surcharge that protected producers of
wheat, at the insistence of local manufacturers of bread and pasta, further
reduced the potential for small-scale domestic wheat producers. A study in
Lima and provincial cities on consumption of traditional grains shows just
how difficult it is to reverse changing patterns of consumption once these are
set in motion [Smith and Trivelli, 2001].
Patterns of local demand, coupled with cheap imports, had a direct and
dramatic impact on domestic agricultural prices, the most important single
economic incentive for producers. These peaked in 1987–88, following the
demand-driven boom of García's first two years in office. The years that
followed brought a collapse in prices, afflicting all but those engaged
exclusively in subsistence farming and those producing for export. Trade
liberalization and the overvalued exchange rate reinforced this effect after
1990. Table 2 shows how real farm-gate prices (i.e. those actually received
by farmers) varied in the 1990s, but never remotely regained the levels they
had reached in the mid-1980s. This decline had a major impact on the
prosperity of the agricultural sector in all parts of the country, affecting
small-scale and larger-scale producers alike. Typical of those affected were
rice producers, mainly small-scale farmers in the southern coastal valleys
(Arequipa), those of the north (Piura, Lambayeque and La Libertad) and in
the jungle department of San Martín. Prices tumbled between 1988 and 1990
in response to the contraction in urban purchasing power, reaching their nadir
in 1994. The problem of low prices was compounded by an increase in rice
imports from lower-cost producers like Thailand. Another crop hit by low
prices was potatoes, a key crop in the sierra but one of growing importance
among small-scale producers in the costa where yields are higher and
marketing much easier. Partly as a result of changing patterns of
consumption, demand for potatoes slumped from 100 kg per person per year
in 1990 to only 38 kg in 2000.
The institutional reforms introduced by Fujimori in the early 1990s also
impacted on agricultural performance. Possibly the most important was the
disappearance of the Banco Agrario which, despite its inefficiencies in the
past, had been the sole source of credit to an important number of producers,
mainly on the coast. As it turned out, private lenders proved extremely
reluctant to lend, even to larger-scale, more prosperous landowners with
privileged market access either at home or abroad. When they did lend, the
interest rates charged reflected a perception of high risk.16 The appetite for
lending was also reduced by bankruptcies in sectors (such as asparagus) that
had briefly seemed to offer endless possibilities.17 The closure of ENCI and
ECASA also hit specific sectors. ENCI, for instance, had been the only
institution that was allowed to import milk and its disappearance removed a
source of support to the local dairy industry; as imports surged in the early
1990s (mainly from New Zealand, but also Australia, the United States and
even Poland) many smaller-scale producers went to the wall in areas like
Cajamarca and Arequipa. The abolition of ECASA liberalized the market in
rice, removing an institution which had maintained prices artificially high for
the benefit of producers. Some of its functions were taken over by the
Programa Nacional de Asistencia Alimentaria (PRONAA), the government's
subsidized food programme for the poor, which bought direct from small-
scale producers.18
Such institutional changes probably had relatively little impact on the poorest
farmers, particularly those in the sierra who had never benefited from state
programmes of any sort. However, they had a direct effect on those producers
more integrated into urban markets who found themselves forced to rely on
intermediaries or agro-industrial firms for credit.19 The disappearance of the
Banco Agrario thus made it more difficult for such producers to capitalize
their operations. The withdrawal of the agriculture ministry from its various
activities in such areas as veterinary work and extension also made it harder
for small producers to increase their competitiveness, although such services
had seldom reached those of the sierra.
The land titling programme, designed to assist the capitalization of small-
scale agriculture, also provided little by way of immediate help to farmers in
buying, selling or mortgaging their land to raise capital. Land titling went
furthest on the coast, arguably accentuating the differences between coastal
and highland agriculture. However, even on the coast, there is little to suggest
that it helped create a viable property market [Larson et al., 2001]. With the
commercial banks unwilling to lend and the cajas rurales ill-equipped to fill
the breach, property owners were thus not much closer to raising the capital
that they needed. At the same time, the land titling programme exposed
numerous longstanding disputes over land rights that it was unable to resolve.
This was particularly the case in areas like Puno in the sierra where the
agrarian reform and its denouement had led to widespread conflicts over land
rights between excluded peasant communities and those who received land
under the reform.20
 PEASANT AGRICULTURE AND RURAL POVERTY

The impact of agricultural liberalization on income inequality and poverty in

the rural sector has not been studied in a systematic or comprehensive way.
Not only are the patterns of causation often indirect, but the lack of adequate
tools for measurement once again renders such a task extremely difficult.
Agricultural production data for specific crops do not mesh easily with the
poverty data which are broken down only to the level of broad geographical
areas. The relationship between agricultural performance and poverty levels
in rural areas therefore requires further elucidation, but the linkage is clearly
very important since agriculture provides the main source of income for those
living in rural areas.
So far as income distribution is concerned, studies for Peru as a whole
suggest that inequality in the 1990s probably became more skewed than
before, since the benefits of resumed growth were very unequally shared.21
This had important implications for class differentiation in rural areas. Some
small-scale producers were pushed back into subsistence agriculture or into
selling labour, whilst others managed to increase the assets at their disposal,
becoming economically and politically predominant. The sectors that made
most gains were those with higher levels of productivity, especially those
linked to foreign capital such as mining, energy and telecommunications.
Agriculture was not one of the sectors that attracted foreign investment,
although there were specific types of agriculture (such as asparagus) that
responded positively to international market stimuli. Although agricultural
growth rates in the 1990s may have picked up on earlier decades, the fruits of
it were unequally distributed. Among small-scale producers, the most
dynamic were those that managed to retain some access to credit and sold
into fairly buoyant markets (like agro-industry) without having to depend on
a chain of intermediaries. With regard to the poverty data, the evidence
suggests that while extreme poverty in rural areas may have fallen, the
proportion of the total population living in poverty was higher in 2000 than
six years earlier, a finding that is also true of the rural population (see Table
3).22 The decrease in extreme poverty, especially in rural areas of the sierra,
was more a consequence of the Fujimori government's social programmes,
particularly the supply of subsidized food to the poor, than the result of any
improvement in agricultural incomes among more marginalized producers.23
Such programmes create a dependency on handouts and may well prove
unsustainable in the longer run.24
The patterns of real farm-gate agricultural prices, noted in Table 2, provides
compelling evidence as to why rural livelihoods suffered serious erosion
during this period. As we have seen, the impact of downward moving
agricultural prices was particularly dramatic at the end of the 1980s when
hyperinflation and deep recession severely eroded demand for food crops and
other agricultural produce. However, it is also noteworthy how agricultural
prices failed to recover in the period between 1993 and 1995 when demand in
the economy picked up strongly. Again, one explanation of this is the effect
of trade liberalization and the consequent rapid increase in imports after
1992, which meant that these supplied an increasingly large proportion of the
market. The differences between the growth period 1985–87 and that of
1992–96 are clear-cut in this respect.
We have already noted that those agricultural producers most at risk from
sudden changes in patterns of domestic demand are those more closely
integrated into the market economy, whilst those least likely to be affected
are those involved in subsistence agriculture and those that export. Exporters
are, of course, susceptible to variations in international prices.25 The vast
majority of small-scale producers produce for the domestic market and are
therefore vulnerable to changes in relative prices, especially during periods of
recession. By the end of the 1990s, many such producers were being pushed
back into subsistence agriculture and/or selling their labour power elsewhere.
This was also the case in the sierra, where relatively few small-scale
producers are entirely independent of the market.26
The impact of agricultural prices on living standards will depend in many
instances on the extent to which, faced with low prices, small-scale producers
are able to switch into other activities that compensate for the loss of
agricultural income [Castillo, 1994]. In this sense, highland peasants
probably enjoy greater protection than other small-scale producers. They
often have a more diversified economic base, producing not only crops but
livestock. They also can often complement agricultural earnings through non-
agricultural activities such as handicrafts. The ability of small-scale producers
to weather the effects of a downturn in relative prices will hinge on the
quality and quantity of the resources at their disposal. Faced with low prices,
those with less land (or land of poorer quality) will probably be forced more
quickly into working for others as labourers. The impact of low prices may
thus accentuate inequalities within specific rural areas, with wealthier and
more resilient producers managing to survive at the expense of others.
The extent to which migration to other areas was a mechanism for survival
for the poorest rural producers in the 1990s is also difficult to measure with
accuracy, but this has clearly long been a response to deprivation among
impoverished Andean farmers and/or their families. The available evidence
suggests that patterns of urban migration continued during the 1990s, but
probably at a slower rate than in earlier decades. In specific areas like
Ayacucho, afflicted by political violence in the 1980s, some earlier migrants
even returned to their original communities, often after lengthy periods of
displacement. Some highland peasants migrated to the coast (either
seasonally or permanently) to work as wage labourers, for example on
asparagus farms.27 Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the existence of coca
agriculture along much of the jungle fringe (ceja de selva), also provided an
occupational shock absorber for peasant producers forced to migrate from the
highlands, whether out of economic necessity or in response to political
violence. Through the links that increasingly exist between small-scale
producers in one place and those of another, the economic influence of coca
is widespread. US-backed policies to eradicate coca therefore have important
implications for small-scale producers, not only in the ceja de selva but
further afield.
 WEAKENING THE RURAL 'VOICE'

A key factor in the evolution of the rural economy is the capacity of

producers to articulate their problems and to influence policy in such ways as
to alleviate or resolve them. In seeking to understand that evolution, we
therefore need to focus on the strength of collective identities at the local
level. The degree of organization among a group or community of producers
is a key factor in their ability to negotiate with the outside world, whether it
takes the form of those to whom they sell or those who make policy. As we
shall see, the progressive weakening of the rural 'lobby' has been one of the
salient features of rural politics over the last 30 years. Arguably, this is both a
cause and effect of the process of economic liberalization.
The 1969 agrarian reform and the state policies that accompanied it gave
pride of place to the state as the key actor in the rural sphere, just as in other
areas of economic life. As we have seen, the state undertook such varied and
critical functions as defining landownership, setting agricultural prices,
undertaking marketing functions, providing credit and extension services,
amongst others. The reform and its aftermath was thus fertile ground for the
emergence of an array of organizations, each claiming to represent rural or
sectoral interests which sought to influence state decisions of one kind or
another. Some were quasi-official, such as the Confederación Nacional
Agraria (CNA), established by the Velasco government to develop and
consolidate regime support among the new cooperatives. Others, like the
Confederación Campesina del Peru (CCP), were more critical of the agrarian
reform and its shortcomings, seeking to radicalize the process and push it
further. The CCP had strong links with some of the more radical parties of
what became in 1980 the United Left (Izquierda Unida) coalition. Some
organisations, like the Organización Nacional Agraria (ONA) sought to
oppose the direction of the agrarian reform, representing the interests of
private landowners. Others represented the interests of specific types of rural
producers, such as the Fondos de Ganadería Lechera (Fongales), and even
ethnic entities like Asociación Interétnica de Desarrollo de la Selva Peruana
(Aidesep). In the context of the late 1970s, and particularly the incipient
process of democratization, most of these organizations adopted strong
ideological stances—albeit divergent ones—often reinforced by their ties to
specific political parties.
The abandonment of official support for agrarian reform by the Belaunde
government in the first half of the 1980s undercut the influence enjoyed by
some of these organizations, while limited moves were made towards
reducing the role of the state in the agriculture and other spheres. Although
the García government adopted a rhetoric of support for peasant agriculture,
it did little to privilege relations with representative organizations such as the
CNA or the CCP During the economic crisis of the late 1980s, rural lobbies
and pressure groups saw their power to influence official policy much
diminished. Indeed, hit by hyperinflation and deep recession, popular
organizations of all kinds—trade unions and neighbourhood associations as
well as those representing rural interests-saw their capacity to mobilize
protest greatly reduced. The political parties with which they were associated
also went into decline. In such conditions, those that otherwise would have
opposed the sort of economic liberalization unleashed by Fujimori in 1990,
found themselves unable to do so. Indeed, it is one of the remarkable features
of the Fujimori reforms that they sparked so little organized opposition.28
Rural pressure groups, especially those of the sierra, were also debilitated by
the spread of Sendero Luminoso (and to a lesser extent the Movimiento
Revolucionario Túpac Amaru—MRTA) during the course of the 1980s.29
Sendero's frontal assault on the local institutions of the Peruvian state, as well
as on parties and other grassroots institutions that stood in its way, had a
highly damaging effect on autonomous peasant organization, especially in the
sierra. The effect was compounded by the militarization of large parts of the
country during the course of the 1980s, with its legacy of killing, intimidation
and human rights abuse. Peasant communities were effectively caught in the
crossfire between Sendero and the military. Previously important regional
peasant federations, like the Federación Agraria Departamental de Ayacucho
(FADA), suffered greatly as a result. Increasingly autonomous peasant
protest became an unfeasible option where dissent was immediately seen by
the military authorities as evidence of support for Sendero. In such
circumstances, it became impossible, or even irrelevant, to represent the
economic interests of peasants or small-scale producers. Indeed, for many
communities the primary need was defence, and this was a need met by the
formation of rondas campesinas at the behest of the military.30 In
departments like Ayacucho, Apurímac and Huancavelica, the interruption of
the rural economy and the massive flight of rural producers to the relative
safety of urban areas had a major debilitating effect on social organization of
all types. In the selva, both Sendero and the MRTA also came to control large
areas of departments like Huánuco and San Martín. This, coupled to the
growth of coca cultivation and drug trafficking, led to a marked change in the
nature of community organization.
When Fujimori took over in 1990, the sources of potential rural opposition to
his liberalizing agenda had already been greatly weakened. However, his
policies weakened them still further. Three factors are relevant here. Firstly,
the process of parcelación and the atomization of ownership in most rural
areas made it increasingly difficult for producers to organize themselves on a
collective basis. As we have seen, the progressive dismantling of the
associative structures of the agrarian reform led to a large increase in the
numbers of smallholders, many of them living on plots close to the margins
of economic viability. This also led to a dispersion of crops, again making
collective action more difficult to organize.
Second, the withdrawal of the state from such areas as credit provision,
extension and marketing support reduced the importance of collective action
across a wide field of activities. Some former state functions were taken up
by private interests, but many were simply abandoned. Producers were
obliged to consider different ways of resolving their problems. Under
Fujimori, the government made it clear that it was not prepared to negotiate
terms with gremios that represented specific farming sectors, still less once-
politicized federations of peasants ideologically opposed to liberalization.
The reduced role played by the ministry of agriculture in rural areas further
limited the possibilities for negotiation.
Third, Fujimori was able to achieve a new relationship with rural producers,
especially those of the sierra. By channelling large sums into poverty relief
programmes, he was able to use the patronage and clientelism that this
encouraged at the local level to forestall open opposition to the government.
Local officials knew that the flow of resources from the centre was
conditional on their support for the regime. This produced a new level of
centralized control, a process facilitated by the demise of political parties.
The increase in social spending in rural areas—particularly in the years after
1994—tightened this control and reduced the scope for interest
representation. Still, these clientelistic ties were not of equal strength in all
places. Nor did they entirely obliterate 'associational autonomy'. And once
Fujimori stood down as president in 2000, they ceased to have much
relevance.
The main state agencies active in the rural sphere during this time were, on
the one hand, the ministries of health and education, and on the other a
number of programmes driven by the newly created ministry of the
presidency, the most important being the Fondo de Compensación Social
(Foncodes). Foncodes, along with PRONAA and other schemes, established
a new form of state presence in rural areas, distinct from what had gone
before. Whilst their ostensible objective was to reduce poverty (especially
extreme poverty), they also operated on a political logic to boost Fujimori's
standing. Tightly controlled from above, they tended to discourage grassroots
participation and worked in such a way as to bypass elected local
government. As such they reinforced the control of central government at the
expense of representative institutions.
The Peruvian experience stands in rather striking contrast to that being
implemented in neighbouring Bolivia, where the Sánchez de Lozada
administration's Participación Popular programme aimed to promote
administrative decentralization and build channels for grassroots involvement
in local affairs (see McNeish, this volume). The programme was designed to
give some sort of 'voice' to rural areas previously excluded from budget
assignations. Although Participación Popular had its limitations—it provided
more a blueprint for decentralization than a recipe for tackling poverty (still
less promotion of agriculture)—it represented an important innovation in
policy that opened up new spaces for the articulation of popular demands
[Gray-Molina, 2001]. The story under Fujimori in Peru was very different;
his main concern was to thwart any real devolution of power.
Although the various gremios representing agricultural interest groups in
general lost capacity to influence policy during the 1990s [Porras Martínez,
1999], some were clearly more affected than others. Broadly speaking, those
which managed to retain greater influence were those that represented sectors
that were economically more powerful or politically more resilient.
Organizations such as the CCP and CNA found themselves largely eclipsed,
no longer able to articulate the interests of peasants and small-scale
producers, and officially ignored as valid intermediaries. Those gremios that
survived were typically those that represented interest groups associated with
the more dynamic sectors of agriculture. A good example is that of the milk
producers (Fongales) who managed successfully to mitigate the more
dramatic effects of trade liberalization.
One of the main weaknesses of agricultural gremios during this period was
their disunity—they were at loggerheads for instance on the creation of a free
market in land—although on some questions they spoke with more of a
common voice than others [Alfaro Moreno, 1994]. The emergence of
Conveagro as an umbrella organization bringing together disparate gremios
as well as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) showed how on certain
issues a united position could be presented and taken seriously by the
authorities.31 One of the more powerful gremios to emerge during the late
1990s was the Comité de Usuarios de Riego, an entity that staged important
mobilizations among coastal agricultural interests in the twilight years of
Fujimori. The election of a more democratic government in 2001 provided
greater scope for such gremios to play a role in support of agricultural
producers, but from a much weaker starting point than in the 1980s.
 CONCLUSIONS

Economic policy in Peru has long been conducted in such a way as to benefit
the largely urban consumer at the expense of rural producers. This does not
appear to have changed in any fundamental way in the 12 years since neo-
liberal policies were applied. Indeed, it could be argued that the lack of a pro-
agricultural policy as such has led to a deepening of this process, a
phenomenon encouraged by the weak pressure exerted by groups
representing agricultural producers of one kind or another. The fate of small-
scale producers is perhaps typical. In themselves a heterogeneous grouping
that includes the majority of producers in the costa and selva as well as in the
sierra, these have not been among the prime beneficiaries of policy. Rather,
as we have seen, they have had to weather the impact of adverse
macroeconomic policies that reduced domestic demand for food, trade
policies that encouraged competing imports, and sectoral policies designed to
remove the state from active involvement in agriculture. Variations in the real
farm-gate prices for key products grown by small-scale producers underline
the difficulties these producers had to face.
What we have observed over this period is the following three developments.
First, increased disparities in performance between agricultural producers in
different parts of the country. The area that has probably benefited most—
albeit unevenly—were the irrigated valleys of the coast, where larger and
more profitable farms are more integrated into the market and better able to
access the reduced amounts of credit available. By contrast, agriculture in the
sierra has not benefited by any great increase in productivity, although the
traditional peasant economy has to some extent been shielded from negative
variations in prices. Government spending in the sierra has been geared
primarily to providing social support rather than developing the agricultural
base. The jungle has fared worse than the coast, due in part to its distance
from markets, although the coca economy has provided an important source
of employment and of income to many small-scale producers.
Second, within agricultural sectors it appears to be the case that there has
been a concentration of economic power among the larger and more efficient
producers to the detriment of small-scale producers. Where farmers enjoy
good access to land (and water), credit and markets, they are better placed to
prosper than those who lack these advantages. The retreat of the state from
active involvement in agricultural development probably magnified such
differences. Larger, more organized producers are better placed to influence
policy and to defend their interests than smaller ones. Although agricultural
gremios lost influence during the 1990s, this was particularly prejudicial to
small-scale and peasant producers.
And third, trade liberalization compounded the effects of longer-term shifts in
patterns of food consumption to the detriment of small-scale highland
producers. This is particularly true in the case of wheat, but also of a number
of other traditional Andean grains.
In sum, the effects of economic liberalization in agriculture have probably hit
hardest those who produce predominantly (or entirely) for the market but
who are integrated into it on the least preferential terms. Those whose
economy is largely one of subsistence may well have been partly shielded
from the fall in prices and the effects of the increased imports, whilst being
less exposed to the withdrawal of subsidized credit and marketing supports
(which they never received previously). Small-scale producers dependent on
urban demand and competing directly with imports were among those most at
risk, whether in the costa, sierra or selva. For these, the alternative to being
small-scale producers was either to return to subsistence agriculture, to seek
alternatives to agriculture (such as petty commercial activity) or a
combination of both. According to Carlos Amat y León, the agriculture
minister under the interim Paniagua administration (2000–2001), the shake-
out from small-scale, market-oriented agriculture in the late 1990s was 'truly
massive'.32 But until there is a new agricultural census, it will be difficult to
know just how many small-scale producers were forced to sell/abandon their
land and the extent to which this has led to renewed concentration of
ownership.
 GLOSSARY AND ACRONYMS

cajas rurales small-scale rural lending agencies

campesino peasant or small-scale rural producer
ceja de selva jungle fringe
comité de usuarios de riego committee of irrigation users
costa coast
foquismo rural guerrilla strategy
gremio professional or occupational organization
minifundio small unit of landholding
parcelación land sub-division
parceleros those occupying sub-divided land
rondas campesina peasant militias
selva jungle
sierra highlands
Aidesep
Asociación Interétnica de Desarrollo de la Selva Peruana
APRA
Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana
CAN
Confederación Nacional Agraria
CCP
Confederación Campesina del Perú
CEDEP
Centro de Estudios para el Dessarrollo y la Participación
CEPES
Centro Peruano de Estudios Sociales
CIES
Consorcio de Investigación Económica y Social
Conveagro
Convención Nacional del Agro
ECASA
Empresa Comercializadora del Arroz
ENCI
Empresa Nacional Comercializadora de Insumos
FAO
Food and Agriculture Organization
Foncodes
Fondo de Compensación Social
Fongal
Fondo de Ganadería Lechera
GDP
Gross Domestic Product
IDB
Inter-American Development Bank
ILD
Instituto Libertad y Democracia
IMF
International Monetary Fund
INEI
Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informatica
INRA
Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria
IRD
Institut de Recherche pour le Développment
ISI
Import Substitutive Industrialization
ITDG
Intermediate Technology Development Group
MRTA
Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru
NGO
Non-governmental Organization
OGPA
Oficina General de Planificación Agraria
ONA
Organización Nacional Agraria
PRONAA
Progama Nacional de Asistencia Alimentaria
SEPIA
Seminario Permanente de Investigación Agraria
USAID
United States Agency for International Development
 NOTES

1. Among the key sources of published research is Debate Agrario, the respected bulletin produced by
the Centro Peruano de Estudios Sociales (CEPES), and the proceedings of the Seminario Permanente
de Investigación Agraria (SEPIA).
2. Over the last 30 years Peru has experienced a fairly wide range of different governments. The
leftward leaning, nationalist, military government of General Juan Velasco (1968–75) gave way to a
much more conservative military regime under General Francisco Morales Bermudez (1975–80), which
shied away from the social reforms initiated by Velasco. The return to constitutional rule brought to
power the centre-right government of Fernando Belaunde (1980–85) which initiated some of the
liberalizing changes that were taken much further in the 1990s. The 1985 elections brought to office
Alan García (1985–90), whose centre-left administration in some ways harked back to the Velasco
period, but which ended in economic crisis. The 1990 elections were won by Alberto Fujimori who,
having changed the constitution, was re-elected in 1995. Fujimori, backed by the army and shunning all
opposition, spearheaded the process of neo-liberal transformation. Having fraudulently secured re-
election in 2000 for a third term, he was obliged to flee Peru when details emerged of the extent of the
corruption and political manipulation that had taken place during his government. He was replaced on
an interim basis by Valentín Paniagua, a centrist politician, pending further elections in 2001 that were
won by Alejandro Toledo.
3. The term campesino embodies this sort of wide definition. The literature on this subject is extensive.
For longstanding theoretical debate about the class position of the Peruvian peasantry, see among
others Bradby [1975], Scott [1976], Martínez-Alier [1977], Painter [1986; 1991], Assies [1987], Smith
[1979; 1989] and Deere [1990].
4. Much of the writing on Peruvian agriculture focuses on the particularities of these different areas,
both in terms of diagnosis of problems and suggested solutions. Following Murra [1975], proponents of
the 'verticality' thesis [Fonseca Martell, 1973; Alberti and Mayer, 1974; Figueroa, 1984] have in the
past argued that ownership of landholdings situated at different ecological levels in the Peruvian Andes
enabled individual peasant proprietors or peasant communities to draw on and exchange different staple
products throughout the year, and thus not only secure their subsistence requirements but also resist
class differentiation and capitalist penetration. There are still important linkages that bind these
economies together, not least in terms of internal trade and migration. It is quite common to find small-
scale producers active in more than just one geographical ambit. It is therefore useful to see these as
aspects of an overall system in spite of the spatial differences.
5. As we have suggested, a problem arises in equating the units of landholding mentioned in the census
with more analytical typologies of different types of peasant and small-scale producer. In practice, there
is a wide spectrum of small-scale producers, varying from family-based subsistence farmers at one end
through to family farms employing substantial quantities of labour at the other. Many of the smallest
producers are forced either to work for others or to involve themselves in non-agricultural activities for
at least part of the time. At the other extreme, those units with most land are typically peasant
communities dedicated to livestock agriculture at the highest altitudes. According to the census data
there were 875,000 peasant producers in 1994, who were preponderantly subsistence farmers, a further
650,000 'intermediate' small-scale producers, producing mainly for the market and some 38,000 small-
scale producers employing other labourers and with access to irrigated land. Differentiation within
similar productive areas is also very marked, as Cotlear [1989] observes in his important work on sierra
agriculture.
6. According to Eguren [1999], agricultural GDP per head was lower in 1997 than it had been 50 years
earlier.
7. This underlines the validity of the ECLA prognosis, made half a century ago, that ultimately answers
about smallholder productivity had to be linked to questions about the consistency (or the lack of it) of
domestic consumer demand.
8. The El Niño phenomenon occurs when the cold waters of the Humboldt Current, which normally
flow northward up the west coast of South America from Antarctica, are temporarily displaced by
warm waters flowing southwards from the tropics. Sea temperatures can rise by as much as 10 degrees.
Dry offshore winds are thus replaced by more humid ones. The phenomenon upsets normal climatic
conditions over other parts of the Pacific and elsewhere [Davis, 2001]. The exact reasons why Niños
occur is something of a mystery. 'Mega-Niños' appear to be becoming rather more frequent occurences.
9. The number of people displaced as a result of political violence in Peru between 1980 and 1997 is
reckoned at 430,000. The death toll was nearly 26,000 and a further 6,000 people 'disappeared'. All in
all, the population affected is put at 1.6 million [Coronel, 1999]. Others have put the number of
displaced higher [Aprodeh, 2000].
10. Peru had challenged the Bretton Woods institutions and the policies of structural adjustment when
Alan García had come to power in 1985. He sought to limit debt servicing to 10 per cent of exports and
introduced heterodox policies that challenged liberal orthodoxy [Crabtree, 1992].
11. Possession of a title to land occupied was seen by many smallholders as an important advance in
claiming their rights.
12. De Soto, who argues that the state is the main obstacle to those in the informal sector being able to
realize their suppressed economic potential, worked as an advisor to Fujimori during the early years of
his government. His Instituto Libertad y Democracia (ILD) was among the pioneers in seeking to
extend the benefits of economic liberalization to the poor.
13. The need to update the base year (1979) on which GDP growth figures were calculated became ever
clearer as the 1990s drew on. The hyperinflationary period of the late 1980s had distorted relative
prices. However the update was repeatedly postponed, basically for political reasons. The changeover
to 1994 was finally made in 1999.
14. The data come from AgroData/CEPES and are based on official agriculture ministry statistics.
15. Most agricultural producers are engaged in producing food for Peru. In the case of non-food output,
trade liberalization also often affected production of tradeable goods. A small but telling example is
that quoted by Victor Agreda [1994] of the jute producers in the Amazon areas who were hit by the
decision of Paramonga (the sole purchaser of jute) to switch to imported jute to make sacks.
16. The main commercial bank to lend to smaller-scale producers was the Banco Wiese, which did so
on an experimental basis using well-established NGOs to help it evaluate risk. The Wiese appears to
have been influenced by the model of Bancosol in Bolivia. It ended up losing much of the money it had
lent to, for example, coastal potato growers.
17. The banks found themselves confronted with large bad debts by asparagus producers when Peru
was undercut in the world market by other lower-price producers, notably China.
18. Although PRONAA generally paid above-market rates to farmers, the benefits seldom accrued to
poorest of these. PRONAA was also widely criticized for operating along lines of political favouritism
and patronage [Rebosio and Rodriguez, 2001].
19. The 1994 census records that the main reason for land lying idle on small-scale units was because
credit had become unavailable.
20. In the late 1970s and early 1980s members of peasant communities had occupied lands previously
redistributed to others under the reform. Land titling did nothing to resolve these disputes.
21. According to data from Cuanto [1997; 2001], the Gini coefficient for inequality in Peru as a whole
in 1999 was 46.2. This compares with 44.9 in 1994. An increase in inequality is also evident (both in
the rural and urban spheres) in figures produced by the World Bank [1998].
22. In numerical terms, the numbers of people living in poverty increased substantially. According to
Herrera [2001], these rose by 20 per cent between 1997 and 2000, or by more than 2 million. Herrera
reworks the official poverty data produced by INEI and concludes that the official statistics were
manipulated for political reasons under the Fujimori government.
23. According to INEI [2000], 46 per cent of all households in Peru were in receipt of food assistance
of one kind or another in 1998. In the rural sphere, the proportions were higher. In the costa it was 51.8
per cent, selva 68.5 per cent and sierra 69.4 per cent.
24. Trivelli [2000] also makes the important point that the numbers of 'non-poor' in rural parts of the
sierra whose incomes are only marginally above those of the 'poor' is higher than for the rural 'poor' as
a whole. The 'non-poor' are therefore at particular risk of becoming 'poor'.
25. Some small-scale producers were able to take advantage of exports in spite of unpropitious world
market conditions. Small-scale coffee producers, for instance, took advantage of the market for better
priced organic coffee and tapped into 'fair trade' programmes with help from NGOs. In Piura, for
example, in 2001, producers with less than a hectare of coffee were managing profitably to access the
export market, despite very low international coffee prices.
26. Iguíñiz [1994] makes the point that what needs to be measured is the extent to which producers are
'net exporters' or 'net importers' in the sense that they sell more in the market than they acquire from it
or vice-versa. A fall in prices for those who are 'net importers' of food may be beneficial.
27. It is interesting to note that many of those employed on such farms were women working part-time
or on a shift basis. Working conditions were exploitative even by the standards of Peruvian agriculture.
As in countries like Chile, some rural employers seem to opt for a casual workforce.
28. Politically an outsider, Fujimori came to power in 1990 on a wave of public revulsion against the
political class in Peru. In 1992, he took advantage of this mood—as well as the popularity he won by
overcoming hyperinflation—to stage a palace coup in which he closed down the Congress elected in
1990. This paved the way for his rewriting of the constitution the following year. As well as reducing
congressional powers, the new constitution lifted the bar on immediate presidential re-election.
Fujimori was re-elected in 1995 with an absolute majority, the election confirming the weak standing of
the political parties. But as Fujimori resorted to ever more manipulative methods to secure yet another
period in office in 2000, the public mood turned against him. Crabtree and Thomas [1998] provide a
synopsis of the Fujimori government.
29. Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) was originally a splinter group from Peru's main Maoist
Communist Party. With its roots in Ayacucho, it first launched its armed struggle in 1980 at the time of
the presidential elections of that year. It took advantage of the weakness of state institutions in the
sierra to mount a war against the Peruvian state. It came to pose a major threat to regime stability in the
late 1980s when the scope of its operations covered much of the country. Fujimori added to his prestige
when the capture of Sendero's leader, Abimael Guzmán, precipitated the dismantling of Sendero's
hierarchical structure. The MRTA, by contrast, owed its ideological origins to the pro-Cuban foquista
guerrillas of the 1960s and to dissident factions within APRA. It never reached the scale of the
Senderista insurgency. Its most spectacular attack (and its death knell) was the assault on the Japanese
ambassador's residence in 1997, and the hostage taking and three-month siege that followed.
30. The rondas campesinas were originally modelled on the peasant patrols that became common in
northern Peru in the 1980s as a method of dealing with the ever-present problem of cattle rustling.
31. Conveagro began life as an attempt by Absalón Vásquez, the agriculture minister in the early
1990s, as a one-off attempt to discuss problems in the sector. Following Vásquez's removal, it became
institutionalized and gained an important margin of autonomy from the government.
32. Interview with the author, April 2000.
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 Whither O Campesinato? Historical Peasantries of
Brazilian Amazonia

STEPHEN NUGENT

Brazilian Amazonian peasantries have attracted relatively little scholarly

attention, and even with the opening up of Amazonia via the TransAmazon
Highway (c. 1970) and a significant expansion of social science research in
the region, recent frontier colonists and environmental crises have been the
major foci. This article examines some of the factors contributing to the
relative invisibility of historical peasantries in the region and tries to show the
relevance of such peasantries to debates concerning agrarian structure,
economic transformation and state-led modernization efforts. A key feature in
the portrayal of Amazonian peasantries (and Amerindians) has been the
unique role attributed to the neo-humid tropical landscape in restricting the
possibilities for an elaborated social landscape. Drawing on anthropological,
archaeological and historical studies, the article advances the notion that
these simplifying assumptions are unwarranted and are impediments not only
to a more accurate understanding of the legacy of colonial society in
Amazonia, but also to efforts to mitigate social conflict and environmental
depredation.
The visibility of Amazonian peasantries in scholarly or general literature has
been highly variable over time. Currently and in the recent past, the activities
of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) and the Rubber Tappers Union
(CNS) (see glossary) have provided concrete examples of what an
Amazonian peasantry might represent, but these are hardly representative of
the diversity of Amazonian peasantries, and in the main, Amazonian
peasantries have tended to be subsumed under a rigid structure of naturalism
within which social life—whether Indian or mestiço—is treated as contingent
and burdened by what Blaut [1994:70] has referred to as the 'Doctrine of
Tropical Nastiness'.
The main purpose of this article is to try to account for the relative absence of
studies of Brazilian Amazonian peasantries from the anthropological and
peasant studies literature. The effort is directed at trying to insert the notion
of Amazonian peasantry—a relatively minor footnote—into existing models
or current debates as well as making exceptionalist claims based on: (a) the
historic configuration of anthropological research in the region; (b) the
structural position of the region in relation to the post-World War II
modernization strategy of the state; and (c) the imprecision of the agrarian
metaphor as a defining feature of the Amazonian peasantry.
The first sections of this study are descriptive and somewhat didactic, and for
a reason: despite the great historical depth of Amazonian peasantries, despite
the vast increase in social science research in recent decades (especially
following the planned and spontaneous colonization accompanying the
construction of the Trans Amazon Highway) and, currently, the attention paid
to the Landless Workers Movement, the category 'Amazonian peasant' is
inchoate. There are very few monographs: such standard works as The
Brazilian Peasantry [Forman, 1975] have relatively little to say on the
subject; and recent 'peasant' literature has focused mainly on migrations from
the Northeast and Centre-South instigated by the machinations of the
National Security State (1964–85). Additionally, the profusion of debate
surrounding ecology and resource issues has tended to overwhelm historical
and sociological matters. Thus, it is important to establish in clear form the
basis upon which one might set about characterizing historical peasantries of
the region and restoring, to some degree, their provenance as a significant
feature of the Amazonian landscape.
It is a cruel irony that the rise of—and attention granted to—the Landless
Workers Movement (MST), one of the most promising developments in
recent Brazilian history, should be so difficult to relate to the peasantries of
Amazonia, for the genesis of the MST lies in a Brazil far removed from
Amazonia and far removed from the agrarian conditions characteristic of
historical Amazonian peasantries. The MST is typically cast by
commentators as a New Social Movement, and while that characterization is
valid in crucial respects (the MST has been extremely measured in terms of
allying itself with other and more official opposition tendencies, including PT
—The Workers Party), it may be ease of au courant categorization that takes
precedence over appreciation of underlying causes that raises interest in the
prospects of MST. Existing Amazonian peasantries are poorly positioned to
join forces with MST. The former are highly dispersed, highly atomistic,
denied organizational opportunities for several generations (due to the
imposition of National Security State measures), and more accustomed to
patron-client politics than class politics. The latter are veterans of an
aggressive agro-industrial export system in which declining labour absorption
has resulted not in super-exploitation, but super-exclusion. While they
represent a reserve army of labour redundant in terms of further suppressing
agricultural wages, much like the super-reserve identified by Quijano [1971]
and others many years ago, it is unclear whether unproductive Amazonian
estates afford the same agricultural possibilities available on unproductive
lands elsewhere in Brazil, and almost certainly not in terms of large-scale
monoculture.2 Agriculture in the Amazon has been, for compelling—
although perhaps suppressible—environmental reasons, constrained in ways
that confound the expectations of those accustomed to large-scale
monoculture or an agrarian structure in which extactivism is subordinate to
farming. The dynamic qualities of Amazonian agriculture are tied intimately
to its coexistence with diverse forms of extraction (terrestrial and riverine)
and pastoralism that many outsiders view as eccentric and opportunistic. A
fisherman is also a farmer is also a taxi driver is also gold miner is also a
'wise forest-manager'. Certainly there are Amazonian peasants who are
landless labourers or woodcutters or charcoal makers, but Amazonian
peasantries are not in the main so specialized. The apparent equivalence in
social position between historical peasantries and MST peasants should not
be mistaken for the basis of a natural alliance, yet both are indicative of the
still active role of peasantries both in Brazil and Amazonia.
 PEASANT ANTECEDENTS

With qualification, in much of Latin America there are some significant

continuities between pre-contact indigenous social formations and
contemporary peasantries, and not infrequently there is a strong association
between ethnicity and class position (along indio v. ladino lines, for
example). This is not the case in Brazilian Amazonia (hereafter, simply
Amazonia). The contemporary Indian population of Brazil as a whole (with
the majority living in Amazonia) is around 300,000 (out of a national
population of 160 million), and those few live in relative isolation in remote
inter-fluve areas. This is not to say that contemporary Amazonian peasants do
not have indigenous antecedents, but it is to say that peasant society is not
modernized Indian society. Indeed, Indians in Brazil are officially regarded as
'relatively incapable' (see Ramos [1998] for an extended discussion) and are
sharply distinguished from other forest peoples (see Schwarcz [1999] for the
history of racial politics). While Indians are treated as 'real' Amazonians
(hyper-real in Ramos' astute analysis), non-indigenous Amazonians, such as
peasants, are 'inhabitants', 'populations', 'caboclos', 'ribeirinhos' 'colonists' or
other non-specific or specific (Jewish, French, Lebanese) designations which
are not seen as derivative of pre-historical Amazonians.
The consequences of this non-equivalence of native peoples and peasants are
numerous and strongly influenced by the early twentieth-century
nationbuilding projects focused around racial democracy and associated with
pronouncements of national intellectuals such as Gilberto Freyre and
Euclides da Cunha (see Schwarcz [1999]). Amazonian peasants have been,
by and large, regarded as relinquished to nature: social beings lacking the
integrity of Indians as well as a clear role as national citizens, Amazonian
without being exotic, national but atypical (see Verissimo [1970]).
A further complication arises from the fact that the livelihoods of Amazonian
peasants were (and are) substantially different from those of other Brazilian
peasantries in at least two important respects: the slavery-based plantation
systems of the northeast of Brazil (with parallel growth of an independent
peasantry—see Schwartz [1985]) in the early colonial period were not
replicated in Amazonia (environmental constraints, lack of terrestrial access),
hence the trajectory of Amazonian peasants deviated from that of the national
economy, and in addition, the importance of riverine production in Amazonia
places peasants outside the frame of the ideal-typical rural producer in
relation to Brazilian peasantries as a whole.3
In emphasizing the significance of the discontinuity between indigenous
peoples and non-indigenous Amazonian peasants, and also drawing attention
to the special features of Brazilian ethno-racial discourse (there are some 160
racial categories acknowledged by the national statistics bureau, IBGE), it
should also be noted that extant Indian groups themselves (with important
exceptions, such as the Yanomami) are highly discontinuous with regard to
pre-contact indigenous social formations. Recent archaeological research—
especially that of Anna Roosevelt [1980; 1991; 1994], anticipated by the
work of Donald Lathrap [1968]—has revised received notions of the social
landscape of pre-sixteenth century Amazonia in a way that has ramifications
for the characterization of contemporary peasantries. Roosevelt's work
suggests that the dominant Amazonian societies were sedentary, river-bank,
proto-states and that extant Indian societies represent either those driven into
the upland, inter-fluve interior or who fled there post-contact (for overview of
historical sources see Porro [1996]). To put this another way, not only are
contemporary historical peasantries of Amazonia not significantly derived
from acculturated indigenous peoples, but extant Indian peoples' distribution
in Amazonia does not represent an accurate pre-contact baseline from which
to analyse the cultural ecology of contemporary Amazonians (see Beckerman
[1991]). What is common to pre-contact social formations, extant Indian
societies and historical peasantries is extractive production (see Bunker
[1985] for an extended discussion), especially—although not exclusively—
riverine, in combination with agricultural production. That the significance of
riverine production has not featured prominently in discussions of
Amazonian peasantries can be traced to three sources: (1) the relative absence
of long-term ethnographic work among historic Amazonian peasantries; (2)
the relative neglect of archaeological work; and (3) the developmentalist
(since around 1970) emphasis on terra firme, smallholder colonist peasants as
well as large-scale commercial extraction.4
A fourth and more general source is the overwhelming dominance of
environmental determinism in shaping Amazonian research. Roosevelt
[1991:134] argues that this theory 'had its origin in ethnographic evidence
and in ethnocentric, historical, Neocolonial attititudes of Euroamerican
anthropologists to the tropics rather than primarily in environmental,
historical and archaeological evidence from Amazonia', and that the theory
has led to an incorrect characterization of human adaptation in prehistoric and
historic Amazonia such that 'the effect on anthropological empirical research
was to limit strategies, inhibit collection of certain kinds of data, and cause
misinterpretation of the data that was collected' [Roosevelt, 1991:134].
Attempts to characterize the Amazonian peasantry are doubly disabled, first
by the tenuousness of their relationship with pre-capitalist social formations
of the region and second by the dominance of a theoretical orthodoxy—
environmental determinism—that has presumed to have answered key
questions about the possibilities for socio-cultural florescence in the region. If
pre-conquest Indian society was, according to received anthropological
wisdom [Gross, 1975; Meggers, 1977] an impoverished victim of rigid
environmental constraints, it is not surprising that its successor should be
regarded as an ephemera.
To conclude this section: whatever the outcome of archaeological and ethno-
historical research informed by a revisionist scepticism, the emergence of an
Amazonian peasantry does not represent the transformation of pre-capitalist
social formations. Amazonian peasants are not autochthonous, although their
best life chances may well lie in attempts to replicate forms of resource-use
that characterized their indigenous predecessors [Roosevelt, 1991].
 THE INADVERTENT CREATION OF AN AMAZONIAN
PEASANTRY

Regardless of differences in the estimates of the pre-contact population of

Amazonia (five to ten million plus, according to Hemming [1987] and Hecht
and Cockburn [1989] respectively), there is no disagreement about the fact
that the region suffered a rapid demographic collapse commencing in earnest
in the seventeenth century (see Hemming [1987]). Eighteenth-century
attempts to encourage local population recovery through miscegenation (a
policy associated with the Pombaline reforms) were relatively fruitless. Given
the regional economy's dependence on extractive production (high volume,
low price tropical goods) in which output was directly related to the scale of
mobilization of labour, there was intense competition for free and indentured
labour [Alden, 1969]. The importation of African slaves was modest, not only
because of the difficulty of mounting plantation agriculture (largely for
ecological reasons), but also because of the difficulty of controlling
extractivist producers (and there remain today interior, runaway slave
communities—quilombos).
At the time of Brazilian independence (1822), Amazonia represented a
mercantile economy focused around the major interior city of Manaus and the
near-coastal city of Belém, but despite its marginality in relation to
developments (mainly in the form of export agriculture) elsewhere in the
country, Amazonia was far from pre-modern and in mid-century was the site
of civil war (o cabanagem) the set of antagonists of which gives some idea of
the complexity of transformation the region had undergone over two
centuries of colonial experimentation. The cabanagem was a conflict among
three elite fractions of the metropolis of Belém (and outlying cities such as
Cametá and, further afield, Santarém and Manaus) representing monarchists,
republicans and supporters of regional independence. Followers were drawn
from the fragments of Indian communities still functioning, agro-pastoral
landowners and their workers, freed slaves, and peasant producers. The
outcome—which saw many deaths among the metropolitan Belenense
population [Loureiro, 1989]—was a republican victory and coincided with
the rise of the rubber industry and the ascendancy of the region as a
significant economic enclave.
While the cabanegem has relatively little attention given the scale of social
conflict, the rubber industry—which, after all, lasted for a century and was
central to the acceleration of industrialization in Europe and North America
—has hardly been better treated. Two standard works in English [Dean,
1987; Weinstein, 1983] and one in Portuguese [Santos, 1980] prevail. Both
the cabanagem and the rubber industry, however, are key to understanding
the development of an Amazonian peasantry, the former because of what it
reveals about the class structure of late colonial Amazonia, the latter because
of what it reveals about two aspects of economic integration, within the
region and between the region and the world economy. The former is
important in illustrating the character of Belém as a mercantile city, an
entrepôt to 'green hell' (not least for European scientists), as well as its role in
nationbuilding activities (the Emilio Goeldi Museum was founded in 1855,
the first of its type in Brazil). The cabanagem was not a frontier forest shoot-
out, but a conflict driven by competition over the control of extractivist, petty
commodity and manufacturing interests. The production of rum, for example,
manufactured in tidally driven sugar engenhos in the estuary complex, played
a key role in upriver trade (rum serving as the primary currency for acquiring
diverse forms of interior forest produce; see McGrath [1989] and Anderson
[1993]).
The rubber industry is no doubt more significant in terms of the creation of a
peasantry in as much as it provided uniquely stable conditions for the
proliferation of petty commodity production and profitable extractivism for
many decades, a linking of multifarious producers (hundreds of thousands)
through the circuit of merchant capital.
The production (= extraction) of rubber was undertaken by independent
producers typically tied to merchants through stronger or weaker forms of
debt-bondage. Although remnants of the vastly reduced Indian populations
were engaged as rubber tappers, the industry was capable of absorbing far
more labour than was available regionally, and many conscripts from the
declining plantation economies of the northeast (coffee production had begun
in the south in 1855, signalling the end of a major epoch of northeastern
domination of export agriculture) were introduced into Amazonia.
Responsible for their own collections of rubber trees (confusingly described
as 'estates'), such imported tappers were tied economically through debt, were
physically contained (through control of river transport), and were dependent
on the exchange of rubber to meet their subsistence needs (the diversion of
extractive labour time into agricultural production was heavily proscribed).
Through a pyramid trading structure leading from the direct producer through
a chain up to the major trading houses of Manaus and Belém, the system was
a paragon of merchant capitalism: buying cheap and selling dear.
In retrospect—following the precipitous collapse prompted by the appearance
of plantation-grown rubber in Southeast Asia—the agents of the Amazonian
rubber industry, both tappers and merchants, have indirectly borne the blame
for the failure of the industry precisely for the peasant-like organization of
production (quasi-/semi-independent, dispersed producers), the allegation
being that it was the failure of the industry to modernize and rationalize
production that led to its demise (see Coomes and Barham [1994] and
Weinstein [1983]). Against this, as Dean [1987] has argued robustly, there
are constraints within the humid neo-tropical ecosystem which subvert large-
scale intensive monocultural production, and in addition there is no shortage
of failed attempts to replicate the Southeast Asian model (by Henry Ford, for
example, at two sites on the Tapajós River).5 Additionally, there would
appear to have been little reason for mercantilists to intervene in a system
that: (a) had a virtual monopoly on production of rubber (hevea brasiliensis);
(b) had producers implacably locked into a debt-peonage system; and (c)
could meet rises in costs through the steadily increasing market price of
rubber in New York and Liverpool.
While some attention is given to the rubber industry in the abstract, little is
given to the extractive-agrarian system it created and which outlived the
industry itself.6 In the first place, the rubber industry introduced to Amazonia
a new kind of social actor—a peasant direct producer—closely linked
through a mercantile network to regional and global economies, and did so
with little in the way of backward linkages. The infrastructure of the rubber
industry was largely represented in steam transport and warehousing. The
product as delivered by the direct producer was untransformed until it
reached a remote industrial metropolis. The labour regime was relatively
unsupervised, and relations between trading partners were highly
personalistic. One of the durable features of this system was the aviamento
according to which direct producers made regular deliveries of rubber to local
traders in exchange for subsistence goods (with or without augmentation of
debt). It would be foolish to romanticize what was clearly -from vantage
points near the bottom of the pyramid—a highly exploitative relationship, but
the system was—and continues to be—viable from the point of view of social
reproduction.
With the collapse of the rubber industry, just prior to World War I, a number
of pathological expressions came to be used to characterize Amazonian
society—for example, 'decadence', 'economic stagnation'-and the once direct
link to the global economy (the passage from Manaus to Liverpool was
quicker than that from Manaus to the national capital, Rio) was seen to be
severed. As the commercial lustre wore thin, so the notion that the peasantry
of Amazonia retained coherence lost plausibility.
The previous section concluded with the suggestion that the Amazonian
peasantry was not autochthonous, and was not a derivative of pre-capitalist
social formations. In the concluding part of this section this suggestion is
augmented with the following one: the Amazonian peasantry is a creation of
capitalist intervention, albeit a kind of capitalism that, as the dominant mode
of accumulation, is largely consigned to the periphery of contemporary
debate: merchant capitalism. The factors prevailing in the development of the
rubber industry in Amazonia—the framework for the contemporary
peasantry, or one of them at any rate—are uniquely combined: a natural,
virtual monopoly on a scarce tropical presicosity (hevea); a labour shortage
that can be mollified through inter-regional migration facilitated by the
collapse of an archaic agrarian economy; a restricted (riverine) transport
system; a regular increase in commodity prices on the world market; an
extensive distribution of overhead costs through a wide system of trade; and
finally, the inadvertent establishment of communities of petty commodity
producers linked through a network of small trading houses/companies.
While the ocean-going trading vessels disappeared from the scene and
warehouses lay empty, Amazonia did not involute or become dormant;
rather, direct producers extended the repertoire of activities necessary to
maintain a livelihood. New crops were introduced (jute and malva, for
example, and black pepper—introduced by Japanese Brazilians in Tomé-Açu
—which represented a major addition), and extractivist industries (Brazil nut,
pelts, fish, shrimp, cacao) proliferated.7 None of these in any sense replaced
rubber as the prevailing force in the regional economy, but nor did the
economy disappear. It just became super-peasant: not peasant as retrograde
agrarian actor, but peasant as disarticulated from the national trajectory.
WHERE IS THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL PEASANT IN AMAZONIA?

As should be clear from the discussion above, the relationship between the
Amazonian peasantry and the agrarian question is not treated as a privileged
area, for it is unclear whether the agrarian question—in its narrow
formulation—is apposite in this context. What is of more interest is how
generous in some respects is the default category 'peasant' (pick any spot
along the line: auto-subsistent, formal subsumption, real subsumption) and
how exclusive it is (closed corporate; depending on less than 50 per cent of
labour time in proletarian guise [Kearney, 1996:58], etc.). In the case of
anthropological treatments of Amazonian peasantries there is yet another
issue: how particular academic/disciplinary culture industries render product,
and again, I wish to make an exceptionalist case, this time addressing
Amazonianist anthropology. The purpose here is not to criticize, but to try to
clarify how it is that a field—anthropology—has come to discriminate
between coexisting Amazonian social fields, that of the indigene and that of
the ersatz peasant.
Anthropological Amazonianist literature is largely ethnographic-monograph
based. This is not to disregard key contributions that have appeared in other
forms, but by and large, the literature is a collection of detailed case studies
of peoples defined by their cultural homogeneity, the x-tribe, the y-tribe and
so on. This has resulted in a highly valorized literature (the term 'fine-grained
ethnography' is a supreme commendation), but a literature that has not
allowed of much in the way of pan-Amazonian generalization. Three
authoritative overviews [Jackson, 1975; Overing, 1981; Viveiros de Castro,
1996] as well as the magisterial Historia do Indios no Brasil [Carneiro da
Cunha (ed.), 1992] concede that as yet, the literature is additive rather than
synthetic.
There are good reasons for this state of affairs. For one thing the Brazilian
government has not—to put it lightly—been particularly sympathetic to the
idea that it should have to deal with a multiplicity of sovereignties. 'The
Indian' will do as far as it is concerned, yet anthropological research has
continually emphasized the diversity of Indianness and the close attention to
the distinctiveness of Indian societies by anthropologists has underwritten
notions of authenticity that have aided groups in pursuing particular and
collective political programmes (land demarcation, halting development
projects), and as the field has matured, a number of anthropologists
acknowledge that the conduct of field research cannot be separated from
overt advocacy on the part of subject peoples [Ramos, 1998; Albert, 2001], an
additional headache for a government long accustomed to regarding
indigenism as a problem.
Thus, we have a highly productive academic Amazonianist anthropology and
one that is demonstrably politically vital to the life-chances of the few
remaining indigenous peoples.
Given these conditions, Amazonian peasants appear to fall well beyond the
remit of anthropology and are—often accurately—depicted as representing
malign social forces, not least in the context of a government-mounted
assault on 'the resource frontier' characterized by unregulated and volatile
forms of predation. For example, the Amazon gold rush-commencing around
1980—introduced perhaps one million gold miners into the region,
generating high levels of social conflict, the invasion of Indian lands and the
spreading of fatal diseases.
Assuming the plausibility of an argument for a residual peasantry in
Amazonia, there are four marked ways in which peasantries are
conceptualized within Amazonian agrarian/extractive structure. First, as
antagonistic cohabitees (with Indians) of public land subject to valorization
(i.e. made private); these are largely denigrated in the anthropological
literature (see Nugent [1993]). Second, as actual, bounded corporate
communities linked to mercantile networks via extensive repertoire of petty
commodity forms (as well as via real subsumption in primary, secondary and
tertiary sectors); these have been the subject of a very small number of
anthropological monographs [Wagley, 1953; Moran, 1981; Nugent, 1993;
Harris, 2001; Pace, 1985; see also the collection edited by Parker, 1985].
Third, as environmentalist actors, ranging from the pathological caboclo com
moto serra, or 'peasant with a chainsaw', to the aspirant utopian 'wise forest
manager'. And fourth, as frontier colonists inserted into the region post-
TransAmazon Highway (c. 1970); in the literature, these are mainly treated as
economic actors.
In view of the relative paucity of empirical studies, it is not surprising that
macro-models (three and four) have achieved greatest visibility, a fact no
doubt strongly associated with the aggression with which the federal
government has pursued its policies of so-called integration. Of these, the
environmentalist (underpinned by panglossian sustainability arguments)
commands greatest attention at the moment, but the 'frontier colonist'
model(s) laid the strongest basis for an analysis of Amazonian
agrarian/extractive structure that integrated historical and recent frontier
peasantries.

Articulation and Penetration

Although some authors [Browder and Godfrey, 1997:35–9] distinguish quite

sharply between intersectoral articulation and capital penetration perspectives
in relation to Amazonia, there are strong grounds for collapsing them.
According to Browder and Godfrey [1997:37], the two approaches differ on
three points: (1) while the articulation model presumes a discrete category of
peasantry, the penetration model is basically sectoral; (2) while the
articulation model emphasizes the logic according to which pre-capitalism is
maintained under capitalism, the penetration model 'stresses the logic by
which we countenance the dissolution of the peasantry under capitalism'; and
(3), while the articulation model emphasizes the appropriation of labour
congealed in undervalued peasant products (e.g. cheap foodstuffs), the
penetration model emphasizes the appropriation of means of production.
The articulation model addressed by Browder and Godfrey is one in which
the expression 'pre-capitalist' underwent significant modification from the
time of the work of early structural-Marxist anthropologists (working mainly
in Africa) until its insertion into more wide-ranging debates about the
agrarian question in Latin America (see Goodman and Redclift [1981]). Not
least of the consequences of these modifications was a shift in meaning from
a rigorous definition of pre-capitalism to a rather ersatz one (not quite
capitalist). It would be fair to say that anthropological attention to
substantivist and formalist economic logics was hardly galvanizing outside
the field, but equally, the articulation arguments of Meillassoux [1972],
Terray [1972], Dupré and Rey [1978], Godelier [1972], Wolpe [1972] and
O'Laughlin [1977] are based on a notion of social reproduction in which pre-
capitalist characterization (bearing on the substantivist/formalist distinction)
is of some theoretical and empirical significance. In the case of Amazonia, it
would be difficult to characterize peasant production as pre-capitalist in the
sense first mounted in the articulationist arguments: Amazonian peasantries
were products of capitalist penetration of the region, not the transformations
of extant precapitalist social formations, but articulation—of petty
commodity producers, say—still bears compelling implications.
Second, the peasantries of Amazonia are not being dissolved (and from what
initial state in any case?), but being transformed, unquestionably further
subsumed under a national economic structure, and it is an unanswered
empirical question whether real subsumption is more potent than formal
subsumption.8
Third, the appropriation of labour and the appropriation of means of
production are parallel processes that have centre-periphery (e.g. region and
nation, region and world economy) implications as well as internal ones
(Amazonia itself represents a significant internal market, see Browder and
Godfrey [1997] for detailed account of modern urbanization). Additionally,
the appropriation of means of production (land) in Amazonia probably
represents more a hedge against inflation than it does the establishment of
latifundios (see Hecht and Cockburn [1989]) for other examples of agrarian
capitalism.
What is little allowed for in much of the literature on neo-Amazonians,
whether or not one maintains a distinction between articulation and
penetration models, is the prior existence of a complex peasantry. When the
frontier image is invoked (under whatever theoretical banner) the historical
peasant appears to become a non-person, and the significance of actual
existing peasantries becomes an antiquarian footnote to a projected future
Amazonia (whether that be one of signed-up wise forest managers,
independent small farmers, disorderly colonists or a region of grand projects -
Tucuruí, Carajás, Jarí).
There are a number of possible explanations for this lacuna, some of which
have been already been alluded to. One of these is that unlike many other
Latin American societies, modern Brazilian peasantries have few significant
cultural continuities with indigenous peoples, and in Amazonia itself
historical peasantries are mainly represented by refugees from other quarters
of the colonial project (e.g. chronic migration of nordestinos to the region).
Even in the immediate period, the visible profile of 'Amazonian peasantry' is
due more to the activities of the MST, arising more in reaction to conflicts in
the agro-industrial south of the country than in—as yet—a distinctively
Amazonian form.
A further possible explanation lies in the ascendancy of Brazil as a major
semi-peripheral power such that the focus of compelling questions of
agrarian transformation were closely linked with regionally specific matters
of national significance from which Amazonia was excluded. In this regard,
Amazonia has been marginal, as it was during the period in which slave-
based plantation systems the Northeast were the national cynosure.
A further explanation—and one the aspects of which are taken up more fully
later—has to do with the importance of extractivism (terrestrial and riverine)
in the livelihoods of Amazonian peasantries, forms of extensive rather than
intensive production which have militated against the formation of a rural
class structure comparable to those typically encountered elsewhere in Brazil.
In the absence of a clear picture of 'Amazonian peasantry' it might seem
perverse to suggest that an idealization may provide a partial solution to the
problem of characterizing such a peasantry: an idealization of what extant
examples?
For the purposes of this discussion an idealization is proposed: settled
cultivators of land (which may or may not be titled, more often the latter)
who are also extractivists (terrestrial and aquatic foci) and who may also
engage in other livelihoods (drivers, artisans) including wage-labour.9 This
idealization is not intended to form the basis for an argument of unwarranted
exceptionalism, but to try to frame the peculiarities of 'Amazonian peasantry'
in a way that permits recognition of particular socio-historical features as
well as some discussion of comparative value.
There are several reasons for this strategy. First, the non-person/agent status
of historical peasantries in Amazonia has meant that they have been subject
to redefinition/characterization by virtue of cavalier, external fiat. The
caboclo indolente (= lazy peasant) of the 1920s is reconceived as potential
'wise forest manager' in the 1980s and 1990s on the basis of a theoretical shift
requiring virtually no examination of empirical evidence.10 Their inclusion in
the larger programme of environmental awareness and concern is cynical,
and has been promoted by the same autocratic agencies and interests that
have been responsible for the pillage of the past quarter century: the
deforestation of the region (around 14 per cent), threats to biodiversity,
pollution, and rapacious mining, not to mention the engendering of intense
social conflict.
Second, the plausibility of a critical social science depends significantly on
challenging official and self-serving credos according to which the subjects
of, say, anthropological investigation are rendered mute objects in a field of
geopolitical strategizing.
 ACTUALLY EXISTING PEASANT SOCIETIES

While the relative isolation of Amazonia from the main path of Brazilian
national development may account for the lack of theoretical attention
granted regional agrarian structure, it is also the case that the 'problem' of the
Amazonian peasant would appear to have been solved by recourse to a crude
environmental determinism: peasant societies are as they are because of
environmental features that preclude socio-economic—not to mention
cultural—complexity. Even those Amazonian peasantries that have been
subject to detailed analysis tend not to be named peoples, but marked by
geographical referents ('in the lower Amazon', 'in Tocantins-Araguaia',
etc.).11 In a tradition commencing with Steward's cultural ecology
declarations and sustained today by much more sophisticated—but still
resource-focused—research [Moran, 1993], peasants are portrayed as
relatively incapable of surmounting the intrinsic natural defects of the humid
neo-tropics.
An interesting commentary, although one largely based on Africanist and
Asianist rather than New World material, is provided by J.M.Blaut [1994] in
his discussion of The Doctrine of Tropical Nastiness', according to which
widely acknowledged, common sense depictions of tropical societies and
civilizations maintain a plausible stereotypical façade despite empirical
refutation.12 The three tenets of this theory do not withstand much scrutiny,
but that has hardly subverted their firm grounding as folk wisdom. They are:
(1) the negative effects of a hot, humid climate on the human mind and body;
(2) the inferiority of tropical climates for food production; and (3) the
prevalance of disease in tropical regions (on which, see Blaut [1994:70]). The
specifically Amazonian version of the Doctrine of Tropical
Nastiness is embodied in the imagery of 'green hell'.

Amazonia as 'Green Hell'

The theory of 'climatic energy' invoked in tenet 1 has not been seriously
defended since the 1950s. The theory of intrinsic impoverishment of food
resources is not supported by historical, pre-historical and ethnographic
evidence (see Beckerman [1991] for an Amazonia-specific discussion).
Third, public health scourges associated with the humid neo-tropics are
largely diseases of poverty introduced during the early colonial period.
Whatever the facts of the matter, however, the enduring vision of 'Amazonian
society' (whether Indian or peasant) is one of contingency: there are limits to
what is socially possible, enforced by Tropical Nastiness. The constraints
attributed to 'green hell' have been used in the past to explain—if not justify
—the brutality of labour regimes in the region, from the debt-bondage of
rubber tapping to the 'culture of terror' referred to by Taussig [1987] in the
context of the Putumayo scandal. While few would deny the significance of
ecological constraint, it need not invoke a pathological reading (see Baleé
[1998], Esterci [1987], and Souza Martins [1997]).
'Green hell' and The Doctrine of Tropical Nastiness have a direct bearing on
characterizing Amazonian peasants because they have aided in pre-empting
serious study of such peoples on the grounds that peasant society is inchoate
and it must either be approached through a resource/carrying capacity model
(environmental determinism writ large) or though a broader model of national
agrarian reform (in relation to which Amazonian agrarian structure is
manifestly exceptional and hard to incorporate within the agro-industrial
export programme).13 The results of empirical case studies attending to actual
existing peasant societies, few though they may be, tend to converge around a
couple of key points: a broad though shifting range of peasant livelihoods;
the durability of social organization; the long-term interpenetration of wage
and non-wage forms of labour; and petty commodity production conducted
under the regime of merchant capital.

Amazonian Peasants: The Discipline of Research Priorities

A recent monograph on the people of Parú in the lower Amazon [Harris,

2000] draws attention to the way the seasonality of riverbank existence
matches shifts in both intensive and extensive forms of production, none of
which provides an accurate focus for characterizing the economic structures
embracing the people of Parú. Intense, seasonal commercial fishing is
certainly a key feature for a significant proportion of Paruenses, but typical
household production also depends on pastoralism, terra firme extraction,
food agriculture, non-food agriculture and gardening. This is a monetized
economy, but one that has shifted its cash crop basis (from jute to fish, for
example) without necessarily transforming basically auto-subsistent regimes
in the course of that shift. As noted above, this seems hardly an issue of
articulation versus penetration, for the viability of the local community is
premised on the existence of a market sufficient to absorb surplus, but
insufficient to compel (or permit) proletarianization. This kind of system is
often portrayed as an adaptation (cf. Moran [1974]), but an adaptation to
what?

MAP 1

Source: Journal of Development Studies, Vol.23, No.4 (July 1987).

Otavio Velho [1972] offered a partial answer to this question in a discussion

focused around frontier expansion that took place following the construction
of the TransAmazon Highway (see Map 1). Small-scale frontier colonists
cultivating untitled public lands were producing cheap foodstuffs (through
engagement of non-valorized domestic labour) that subsidized both the
growth of an expanding urban labour market and capital intensive export
agriculture in the south of the country. A not dissimilar argument was later
employed by Foweraker [1981] in arguing that state promotion of frontier
agricultural expansion (largely through the provision of roads and a modicum
of further infrastructural support) made possible the clearing—and hence
commodification—of forest land that could then be usurped by large
farmer/ranchers with the resources necessary to claim and title the land.
In both cases, the emphasis is on frontier expansion, but in many respects
both arguments have pertinence in relation to the conditions of non-frontier
Amazonian peasants as well: peasants persist in a permanent condition of
ambiguity vis-à-vis peasant autonomy and formal subsumption.
An example from the Eastern Amazon, the town of Igarapé-Açu (see Sousa
Filho et al. [n.d.]), shows how the frontier status need not be considered a
transitional one in the sense that the collapse of the spatial frontier need not
imply a collapse of the social frontier (i.e., a commodified agrarian structure
does not imply proletarianisation). Established in the late nineteenth century
as a community of peasant producers linked to urban markets only by river
systems, the people of Igarapé-Açu produced a surplus of locally consumed
foodstuffs (rice, maize, beans and farinha) as well as extractive produce (fish
and game) conveyed to urban markets by local traders. In the period 1895–
1940, with the construction of a railway linking the town to the state capital,
the immigration of nordestino and Spanish settlers with sufficient capital to
purchase land outright saw significant differentiation within the peasant
category as well as the introduction of agro-industry in the form of various
sugar-cane products (sugar and rum) as well as cotton production. As the
authors note, these changes represent both an intensification and
diversification of production, a point valid when considering a broad range of
Amazonian peasant societies during the period between the collapse of the
rubber industry and the modernizationist programmes of the late twentieth
century.
The enhancement of local value-added activities (processing of cotton and
rice) led to further differentiation in terms of household resources, but not to
proletarianization. Indeed, the direct producers in Igarapé-Açu were linked to
final markets via the system of compra na folha according to which
personalized credit relations were established between direct producers and
traders. With the addition of road transport (and gradual decline of the
railway), improved access to peripheral regions led to more land being
brought into cultivation and notable environmental degradation. Still,
however, the diversification of agricultural activities proceeded with
permanent cultivation (e.g. black pepper and dendê palm) as well as
semipermanent (e.g. maracujá—a fruit). The outcome of one hundred years
of incremental peasant production expansion is summarized by the authors as
follows: (1) the commodification of land; (2) the ascendancy of cash-only
crops (black pepper, dendê); and finally, (3) the creation of a labour market
[Sousa Filho et al., n.d: 7].
This region is, notoriously, one of the most intensely deforested in Amazonia,
and hardly a peasant paradise, but the transformation of the peasantry is
hardly captured by the concept of frontier occupation and exploitation.
Instead, there is a gradual, rather benign interpenetration of use-value and
commodity production maturing over a period of 100 years, rapidly defeated
at the end by the valorization of land prompted by roadbuilding.
Both examples attest to a far more dynamic conception of Amazonian
peasant than is evident in current or previous discussions of the modern
Amazonian social landscape, and raise the question: why the
invisibility/anonymity of such a cardinal feature of post-indigenous
Amazonia? The relegation of neo-Amazonians by anthropologists has already
been alluded to, as has the effect of the National Security State on peasant
political organization from 1964 to 1985. An overriding factor, however,
concerns the concept of agrarian reform in the Brazilian context.
Brazil, as is well known, has one of the highest concentrations of land
ownership in the world. About 2 per cent of all agricultural landowners
control 60 per cent of the arable land while half the agricultural labour force
is landless, and in the face of pressure for agrarian reform, landowners have
argued that reform should apply only to unoccupied public land, e.g. in
Amazonia. A gloss on this is that agrarian reform is not about altering
agrarian structure, but on stopping excessive growth in the coastal
metropolises [Leroy, 1997], and in relation to such a goal, actually existing
peasantries of Amazonia are an irrelevance. They are already part of the
solution (they are structurally marginalized) and to them should be added
many more of the dispossessed.
One measure of the structural marginality of Amazonian peasants is the scale
of the informal (and hence untaxed) economy of the region. While there are
some sectors that are subject to scrutiny (production for export, large-scale
monoculture and ranching, major city markets), economic activity that goes
unreported/unacknowledged is extensive to an astonishing degree. To take
one minor, but indicative, example: a major extractive product in the Belém
estuary is the fruit of the açaí palm. Açaí fruit landed at Ver-o-Peso is subject
to fiscalização (taxation) and no doubt accounts for a substantial portion of
that consumed in the city. What is landed at other wharves is also substantial,
and given that there are some 2,000 retailers of açaí in Belém, one can with
confidence refer to a grey economy in açaí of not inconsiderable economic
proportions, and açaí is but one of the numerous products that make their
way virtually directly from producer to consumer. Cleary [1990] has made
this point in another context, that of gold production: the bulk of the 100
tonnes per annum of gold extracted from Amazonia during the 1980s and
(dwindling) the 1990s found its way to market without the scrutiny of state
operatives. The river trade from Belém to the upper reaches of the Brazilian
Amazon River—regatões carrying manufactured goods to be exchanged for
forest and river produce—occurs on a scale far beyond the reach of the
statisticians at IBGE. The main point here is that there is an endogenous
commercial Amazonia of considerable historical depth that has yet to be
factored into generic accounts of 'rural Brazil'.
 WHAT IS SO INFORMAL ABOUT THE INFORMAL SECTOR?

Over 25 years ago, Perlman's [1976] work on favelas of Rio and Brazilian
internal migration drew attention to rural-urban relations that are suggestive
in terms of thinking about the dynamics of Amazonian agrarian structure.
Among her observations were three of particular salience: (1) the fact that
favelados were not, as commonly assumed, just rural refugees, but also
migrants from other urban areas and home-grown; (2) the fact that
immigrants tended to be better skilled and educated than those who remained
in the countryside; and (3), the fact that favela occupancy conferred certain
material advantages—transfer of land from public to private 'ownership' and
evasion of fiscalização. In the Amazonian context, these three observations
draw attention to dynamic features that might help to account for the
difficulty of situating the peasantry. With regard to forms of migration, for
example, there are three considerations: immigration into Amazonia (from
the north-east, classically); migration within Amazonia (in micro-region
scale, between Belém and Santarém, for example); and systematic migration
within micro-regions, in response to the annual flooding of the varzeas, for
instance.14
Immigration to Amazonia is relatively well documented, certainly for the late
modern period, and attention has mainly been drawn to the ways colonists
adapt to new agricultural conditions (see Moran [1981]). This is, in effect, a
frontier colonist literature attending more to the accommodations that have to
be made by peasants unfamiliar with regional environmental conditions as
well as the novelty of the prospect of independent smallholder status (see
Wood and Carvalho [1988] for a demographic overview). Cleary's [1990]
book about the Amazon gold rush documents a dramatic instance of
opportunistic mass migration (see also MacMillan [1995]), but in general
terms, this kind of migration is treated in national terms, one result of which
is that the baseline for comparison is not Amazonian agrarian structure per se.
Migration within Amazonia by historical peasants is poorly documented.
There is a set of case studies that allude to the fact that there are region-
specific factors that prompt migratory shifts (e.g., the creation of large
projects at Jarí and Carajás) that reflect something of the character of existing
Amazonian peasants, but the broad features are not well documented.
Systematic movement of historical Amazonian peasants among various
livelihood possibilities are also weakly documented. A handful of
monographs referred to above comprise—at best—a very fragmented set of
empirical studies.
The threefold relevance of Perlman's observations is as follows.15 First,
marginal Amazonians have not become so through some simple route ('a land
without people for a people without land'); there is a researchable (although
largely ignored) Amazonian peasantry that persists, perhaps in interesting
ways. Second, Amazonian favelado analogues have polymath attributes that
are infrequently acknowledged. The straw-hatted, canoe-paddling fisherman
could well be a former taxi-driver, lottery ticket salesman—hardly unusual,
one would have thought, except that deviation from stereotype is so rarely
recognized. Somehow, the notion that the boat going into town filled with
forest produce is going to return to the margins with automobile batteries in
service of television sets that will broadcast (in houses on stilts, palm frond
roofs, a couple of bottles of tepid beer) the World Cup, doesn't scan, despite
the fact that it obviously does. And third, as a largely (although now
decreasingly) unregulated set of public resources, Amazonia has afforded
numerous possibilities for opportunistic exploitation by peasants and large
commercial entities as well as a middle range of land speculators and
ranchers. The variety of strategic appropriations of natural wealth has been
subsumed under the gross notion of 'frontier conquest' without sufficient heed
being paid either to internal differentiation—one per cent of landowners
control 57 per cent of officially registered lands [Flavio Pinto, 2001]—or to
the long-term viability of particular kinds of resource appropriation (see
Peters, Gentry and Mendelsohn [1989] for discussion of various
sustainability trajectories).
As with Perlman's critique of the myth of marginality, re-evaluation of the
dynamic features of Amazonian peasantries confounds received wisdom
about the character of a self-provisioning plus petty commodity producing
rural sector linked to the national economy a là Velho [1972] and Foweraker
[1981] through its capacity to supply cheap foodstuffs, and through the
subsidy to land valorization (by bearing the significant primary costs of land
clearing), and significantly disarticulated from that national economy (there is
a vast internal, regional market).
The pressures under which Amazonian farmers/extractivists have found
themselves in recent years are increasingly framed by developments in the
national sphere, especially the federally directed assault on Amazonia as an
untapped resource domain and the growth of large-scale, capital intensive
agro-pastoral holdings, yet there is still capacity for accommodation within
the existing repertoire of viable peasant livelihoods. What is less clear is
whether national tendencies toward concentration of agricultural land will in
the long term preclude the social reproduction of historic peasantries of the
region.
Thiesenhusen [1996], for example, has drawn attention to the possible
consequences of regional and national agricultural market integration by
emphasizing the historic tendency for frontier regions such as Amazonia to
lose their labour absorption capacity. There is an inverse relation between
farm size and production per hectare, as there is an inverse relation between
farm size and labour use per hectare. Data from 1980 indicate that farms of
1–10 hectares employed almost ten workers per hectare (with farms under 50
hectares accounting for 71 per cent of the total farm labour [Thiesenhusen
and Melmed-Sanjak, 1990:398] such that 12 per cent of the country's
farmland accounts for more than half the value of farm income) and farms in
the 2,000–10,000 hectare range employ 0.25 of a labourer per hectare (a ratio
of 500:1). Returns on small farms, however, appear to be declining as
resource depletion occurs (and such farms are weakened by subdivision with
successive generations) and large farms—increasingly mechanized, therefore
less labour absorptive—tend both to replace agriculture with pasture and
maintain large unproductive holdings (35 million hectares according to the
1985 census). The consequence, as observed by Fearnside [1985:246]—a
veteran observer of the Amazonian scene—is that: 'At some point the flow of
migrants to the Amazon may slow when the last remaining minifundios in
Paraná and São Paulo are finally replaced by mechanized soya beans, wheat
and sugar cane'. Or to put it another way, the proletarianization of Centre-
South small farmers may insulate Amazonian peasants from the same
tendencies while simultaneously the extractivist predation promoted by the
state subverts the unique agro-pastoral-extractivist material base of a diffuse,
marginal peasantry.
What is proposed here, echoing Mintz's [1974] analysis of the Jamaican
peasantry, is that the Amazonian peasantry is best viewed as a particular kind
of reconstituted peasantry, not one at the heart of Brazilian agrarian structure,
but one shaped from a distance. Unlike the Jamaican peasantry, however, for
which resistance was a hallmark of reconstitution, the Amazonian peasantry's
reconstitution is better characterized—to use Harris's [2000:25] expression—
as resilience, an accommodation not to the disappearance of one agrarian
regime (for it would be difficult to characterize colonial Amazonia as
agrarian in any strict sense) but accommodation to an unusual set of historical
and material conditions.
 CHAYANOV AND THE ECOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE

In recent years the question of the Amazonian peasantry has been

increasingly implicated in the question of sustainable development.16 Perhaps
the most potent example is provided by the efforts of Chico Mendes and the
Rubber Tappers Union who forced on to the agenda the notion of extractive
reserves, an ejido-like arrangement whereby collectively owned forest could
be protected from the incursions of unregulated resource plunderers.
Regardless of the mixed results of these efforts, the equation of social justice
and ecological justice has been brought to the fore.17
While the dominance within Amazonian anthropological discourse of
environmental determinism has long provided a shared frame of reference,
with the massive increase in biological resource-oriented research
commencing in the 1970s, there has been a notable segregation of social
science and natural science camps, and a curiosity is the ecological fit of
Chayanov [1966] in providing the missing link: with the increasing
recognition by geographers, ecologists, economists and others of the
particular social character of historic and frontier peasantries, Chayanov's
attempts to explain socio-economic differentiation on the basis of
demographic variation are particularly appealing. At the simplest level, the
notion of 'carrying capacity' represents more than just a condensation of the
social-landscape=natural-landscape pairing that has so long prevailed in
Amazonianist discourse. If for Chayanov's Russian peasant it was the
consumer:worker ratio that was key, it is the parallel social
reproduction:natural reproduction that is now (inadvertently) substituted (see
Perz [2000] and Porro [1997]).
The current Chayanovian discussion in Amazonianist literature is in many
respects a marked advance, for it draws attention to an aspect of Amazonian
peasantries that has long been excluded from serious discussion: actual
Amazonian societies with dynamics worthy of examination as opposed to the
mystical operators programmed into the macro-visions of state planners. That
being said, the conception of Amazonian peasant sociality currently bolstered
by a Chayanovian approach is still lacking in much historical depth.
Chayanov has been invoked to provide a fairly adaptationist, strategy-seeking
model for the peasantry rather than one that addresses the long-term
formation of a peasantry reconstituted in the way suggested by Mintz [1974]
for the Caribbean or, as I have intimated, derivative of the narrow constraints
imposed by the domination of merchant capital. What it attends to
particularly well, however, is the immediacy of peasant response to the state
(and its agents) and highly variable environmental prerogatives, a response
that belies the longstanding perceptions of the passivity supposedly afflicting
the most marginal of the marginal.18 A crucial difference between
Chayanov's peasants and those of Amazonia, though, is that while for the
former subsistence strategies represented (in part) a response to the
capitalist/market transformation, for the latter the capitalist/market
transformation has been a precondition. There may well be a 'logic of peasant
production', but that logic mutates, and does so in ways that defeat attempts
to anticipate a formulaic outcome. It may be the case, for example, that
Amazonian informal sector/petty commodity participation in the market
evades both the constraints of state-sector domination of Amazonian
development (enacted, for example, via the Greater Carajás Project, see Hall
[1989]), and those of the environment (see Mattos, Uhl and Gon^alves
[n.d.]).
 CONCLUDING REMARKS

That there are historical Amazonian peasantries is not an issue; that these
peasantries remain largely invisible and thereby excluded from socio-
historical analysis is, and it is a sad irony that even the heightened attention to
the plight of Amazonia in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries
has not secured a more prominent role for such peoples. There is no focal
explanation, but a set of nested explanations that can account for the
structural marginality of Amazonian peasantries not only in relation to the
Brazilian state, but also in relation to scholarship. A key one of these is the
persistence of a Eurocentric construction of the pathologies of 'green hell' that
has bolstered a fundamentally ahistorical characterization of the region and
its peoples. Another is the marginality of the region-episodically interrupted
—and its retention as a resource domain whose primary products have gained
appeal only with the decline of more accessible resources (e.g. bauxite in the
Caribbean; tropical woods in Africa and Asia). Yet another is the atypicality
of peasant livelihood prospects (with a strong riverine and extractivist base)
in light of the prominent and normative agro-industrial structure of the
Centre-South and other regions of Brazil. Additionally, the anthropological
gaze has, for various reasons, been directed elsewhere such that Amazonian
peasants have been trapped in a grey area between rural
sociology/development studies and pristine ethnographic investigation. Last,
the ascendancy of ecologically driven research, both in concert with and in
opposition to top-down modernization, has tended toward crisis-focused
solutions to the assault on the Amazon in which historical peasantries are
conceived as minor players.
 GLOSSARY

Açaí: a palm fruit (Euterpe oleracae) of considerable commercial value to

small-scale extractivists.
Aviamento: debt-credit system according to which tappers exchanged rubber
for consumer essentials.
Cabanagem: mid-nineteenth century uprising in Lower Amazon region
involving all social classes.
Caboclo: in Amazonia, person with varied ethnic antecedents; peasant.
Compra na folha: to buy on credit.
Dendê: African palm oil (Elaeis guineensis).
Ejido: generic term for communally owned, non-partible land (based on
Mexican agrarian reform device).
Engenho: sugar-mill—in Amazonia, tidally driven.
Favela: shanty town built on public land. Inhabitants: favelados.
Hevea braziliensis: the major species of rubber tapped in Amazonia.
IBGE: Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics.
Índio: Amerindian.
Ladino: in some South/Latin American countries, person identified as having
European rather than Amerindian attributes.
Landless Workers Movement: The MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores
Rurais Sem Terra) has, since 1985, sought to occupy unproductive
agricultural land in the name of landless labourers. To date, some 250,000
families have won title to more than 15 million acres.
Latifundio: large estate. In Brazil, a significant proportion of latifundio land
is unproductive.
Mestiço: person with varied ethnic antecendents.
Nodestino/a: person from the northeast of Brazil (especially Ceará and
Pernambuco). Many 'traditional' Amazonians have nordestino antecedents.
Quilombo: community of descendants of runaway slaves.
Regatão/ões: long-distance river trading vessels.
Ribeirinho: peasant cultivator/extractivist mainly living on river.
Rubber Tappers Union: The CNS (Conselho Nacional dos Seringueiros),
based in Western Amazonia and, until his assassination in 1988, led by Chico
Mendes, has promoted the idea of extractive reserves as a means of
promoting both social and environmental justice.
Várzeas: refers generally to nutrient-rich, annually inundated lands of the
Amazon Basin.
Workers Party: The PT (Partido Trabalhista) emerged as the major left
opposition party in the wake of the 'redemocratization' of Brazil following the
demise of the National Security State (1964–85). Notably more successful in
cities rather than the countryside, PT has gained a number of significant
victories.
 NOTES

1. The physical size of Brazilian Amazonia as well as its socio-cultural and natural diversity militate
against the notion of a generic 'Amazonian peasantry'. On the other hand, the region's historic
marginality in relationship to the emergence of Brazil as a major semiperipheral state makes possible a
degree of generalization: petty commodity-producing extractivists, agriculturalists and pastoralists
occupying land that may or may not be titled and exploiting a range of terrestrial and riverine habitats.
Although urbanization is pronounced—and has accelerated since the road construction projects
commenced in the 1960s—many Amazonian peasants maintain both rural and urban identities. Most
Amazonians are descended from immigrants—or are themselves first-generation immigrants—
especially from the northeastern states of Brazil, and although there is a significant sub-set of
nordestinos who maintain that identity within the Amazonian peasantry, there is a pronounced
assimilationist tendency, not least because of national perceptions that Amazonia is a frontier region
ineptly occupied not by members of distinctive societies (except in the case of Indians, who are
definitely not a category of peasant), but by 'populations', 'inhabitants', 'settlers' or colonists.
2. See Dean [1987] for a detailed case study of ecological constraints on large-scale plantation
agriculture.
3. Although there is an old—archaic?—debate in the anthropological literature concerning the
appropriateness of characterizing fishing peoples as peasants, such discussion does not seem to have
had much salience in relation to the agrarian question in Latin America. That a degree of Eurocentrism
should afflict progressive attempts to analyse the course of development/underdevelopment in the New
World may not be too surprising, but in the case of attempting to come to grips with 'the Amazonian
peasant/agrarian question' two options present themselves: (1) make an exceptionalist claim in which
the dominance of the (literally) agrarian question is attenuated by considering the full range of material
conditions characteristic of peasant livelihoods, such as fishing/extractivism; or (2) place the
Amazonian peasant outside the whole theoretical discussion of the agrarian transition. J.M. Blaut, in
The Colonizer's Model of the World [1994], vigorously dissects the anti-tropicalist bias that would
favour the latter.
4. In recent years, in the context of sustainability claims forged in the alliance of eco-politics and
developmentalism, there has been a marked shift by some NGOs toward riverine peasant production.
Mark Harris's Life on the Amazon [2000] is a rare example of a study of a ribeirinho peasantry; Lourdes
Furtado's Curralistas e Redeiros [1987] is a massively detailed account of Lower Amazonian
agriculturalists/fisherfolk (see p.125 for detailed illustration of the integration of riverine and terra
firme activities); Violetta Loureiro in Os Parceiros do Mar [1985] provides an account of fishing
communities forced from the littoral on to smallholding farming plots. The links between
environmentalist and developmentalist arguments, however, are multifarious, often converging in
Amazonianist discourse (see Anderson [1990]), but elsewhere critically opposed (see Latouche [1993;
1996] and Shiva [1988; 1991]).
5. The late twentieth-century attempt by Daniel Ludwig to create a similar 'factory in the field' project
—the Jarí complex—was notably unsuccessful.
6. But see the contribution by Martins to this volume.
7. On the subject of the important economic role of Brazil nuts in Amazonia, see the contribution to this
volume by Assies.
8. The extent of the informal economy in Amazonia is unknown, but there are few field researchers of
long experience in the region who would not acknowledge the significance-if not dominance—of
unmonitored economic activity. Even an activity as visible and specialized as gold mining is largely
carried out in the informal sector.
9. This idealization excludes recent frontier colonists and commercial entrepreneurs such as ranchers
while acknowledging that there is a high degree of drift (see Mattos, Uhl and Gonçalves [n.d.] for
discussion of entrepreneurial peasants).
10. Which is not to say that the latter characterization is inaccurate. Its emergence is ideologically
convenient.
11. Chico Mendes and the Rubber Tappers Union represent an important exception, the threat of which
no doubt accounts in significant part for the vehemence with which Mendes' assassination was pursued.
12. The 'Doctrine' plays a relatively small, but crucial, part in Blaut's analysis, which is mainly devoted
to the ways in which the writing of history from a European standpoint tends to make special cases for
societies on the periphery.
13. Despite its high industrial profile, Brazil is still dependent on the export of primary goods for over
half of its foreign earnings. Amazonian exports are largely extractive and include not only minerals
(e.g. iron ore and bauxite) produced in large enterprises, but exotic woods, shrimp and fish.
14. Várzea refers to low-lying riverbank that is annually—to an unpredictable degree and for an
unpredictable duration—flooded during the period December-June. In the estuary of the Amazon
(which is tidal for several hundred miles) there are numerous sub-categories. In the Middle and Lower
Amazon (Manaus-Santarém, Santarém-Belém, roughly) várzea land is heavily exploited agriculturally
and pastorally, its fertility guaranteed by alluvium originating in the weathering of the Andes. In pre-
history, permanent settlement of the várzea was made possible through the construction of large-scale
earthworks. In the modern period accommodation of the flood is more difficult and excessive flooding
often results in large-scale migration to terra firme and/or cities/towns.
15. And it should be noted that despite her demonstration that the growth of favelas is not a
pathological add-on to the 'development process', but central to it, there is still a tendency to regard
them as epiphenomenal.
16. See Peters, Gentry and Mendelsohn [1989] for a succinct analysis.
17. One by-product has been government enthusiasm for biological reserves, the implementation of
which often takes little heed of the fact that such reserve areas are not pristine ahuman environments,
but social as well as natural communities.
18. Rod Aya's [1992] sympathetic critique of Wolf's [1969] Peasant Wars of the 20th Century is
apposite. Aya argues that Wolf makes two historical generalizations, one of which holds, the other of
which does not. The latter is that peasants react to capitalism in a uniform manner. The former is that
there are a variety of tactical reactions. While Wolf may have been focusing on the revolutionary
potential of peasantries, there is no reason not to consider more prosaic circumstances within the
analysis. The military metaphors ('assault on the Amazon'; 'conquest of the tropics') are widely
deployed, but the reality (which is by no means bereft of gross brutalities) is more often conducted
under the terms of neo-colonialist and post-colonialist protocols, those of: neo-liberalism, bureaucracy,
consultants, experts, 'officials', researchers, NGOs.
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and Providence, RI: Berg.
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Critique of Anthropology, Vol.2, No.8.
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From Dependency to Reform and Back Again: The
Chilean Peasantry During the Twentieth Century

WARWICK E.MURRAY
 LATIN AMERICAN PEASANTS—AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE?

Although the Latin American peasantry remains comparatively important in

terms of livelihood generation and identity formation, the rise of neo-liberal
economic theory and policy and its application across the continent arguably
spells the demise of peasant economy and society.1 There can be little doubt,
therefore, that the economic liberalization associated with the most recent
penetration of global capital represents an important—if not epochal—
watershed in the transformation of Latin American peasantries. The latter
notwithstanding, debates about this process, its causes and outcome, rage
unabated. Views range from the descampesinistas, who insist upon the
inevitable decline of the smallholding sector, to the campesinistas, who
emphasize the vitality and adaptability of the peasantry [see Kay, 1997b;
2000]; however, the literature is on the whole fairly negative with respect to
the implications of the current restructuring phase.2 This article takes the
political economy—arguably structuralist—position that a predetermined
transformation is not possible and that agrarian policy frameworks play a
crucial role.3 It is clear that, in the wake of globalization, the peasantry is
being abandoned politically by Latin American governments whose primary
concern it once used to be.
At a conceptual level, it appears that there is a simultaneous process of de-
peasantization and de-agrarianization occurring throughout Latin America.4
Despite the recent structural reforms launching economies back towards
specialization in agricultural exports, in general the relative economic
importance of agriculture is declining both in terms of income
and employment [Murray, 2002a]. Peasant farmers are being marginalized as
a result of the rapid restructuring taking place, in terms of land concentration,
earnings and access to inputs and other resources. Although broadly speaking
the peasantry is being proletarianized, both the form taken by and the
consequences of de-peasantization and de-agrarianization are uneven and
contextually specific. In some cases, therefore, what is occurring is disguised
proletarianization, where small growers become so dependent on agri-
business that they effectively become employees of that concern. Full
proletarianization is also increasing as more peasants are affected by the
economic pressures of market forces, swelling the ranks of temporary rural
labourers, or urban migrants. Perhaps the most important process, however, is
semi-proletarianization, whereby peasant farmers are increasingly forced to
combine their on-farm income with other off-farm forms of income
generation.
The case of Chile is particularly illuminating in this regard, given the
relatively widespread agrarian reforms that were undertaken there in the
1960s and 1970s, and the neo-liberal experiment which was conducted by the
military dictatorship from the mid-1970s onwards. Chile was the first of the
developing economies to experience neo-liberal 'shock' treatment based on
the economic doctrines of Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago, and
it underwent the purest application of this theory to date. Throughout the
1990s, a period characterized by a return to democracy, the free market
economic model has been altered very little. Yet within these overarching
macro-economic trends, micro-economic change in response to neo-
liberalism unfolds unevenly across nations as they are pulled into the
everexpanding vortex of capitalist accumulation. The specific nature of this
insertion, as it affects countries, regions, and rural localities, gives rise in turn
to the varying trajectories of agrarian transformation which pattern the broad
sweep of epochal change.5 Perhaps the structuralist idea that national
economies are conditioned by externalities, or the nature of their insertion
into the broader global capitalist system, has never been as true as it is today;
equally true, however, and as the Chilean case studies presented below
confirm, is the specific nature of these transformations as experienced by
those at the rural grassroots.
This article builds on the observation that, '[t]racing the historically
contingent processes of peasant formation and dissolution confirm rather than
deny the importance of differences in locality, context and human agency'
[Bryceson, 2000:5]. As such, in order to understand the unravelling of the
peasantry in specific cases, it is necessary to understand the mechanisms
which articulate 'global' processes at the level of the locality, how such
processes are conditioned by and re-condition the interaction between the
different levels involved, and how resultant patterns are contingent upon
different micro-physical and human geographies. This entails a detailed
appreciation of the history, political economy and environment of the
contexts studied [Llambí, 2000], and a careful teasing out of the interaction
between the factors responsible for change. Such ideas have long been
important, but given the present widespread conceptual ascendancy of the
'global', it is crucial to situate the latter in an understanding of the 'local'.
To this end, the analysis which follows traces transformations in the structure
of peasant economy in two localities which were subject to land reform in the
1970s, and were then thrust into the economic orbit of the global fruit
complex in the 1980s. By comparing the impact of Chile's neo-liberal agro-
export boom on landholders (parceleros) in different regional contexts, it is
possible to highlight the importance of local contingency on the direction and
pace of such macro-economic transformation.6 Special emphasis is placed on
the connection between agri-business enterprises and peasant farmers, since
this relationship is the mechanism linking the 'local' to the 'global'. The article
begins by considering the recent history of the peasantry in Chile, the
creation of the parcelero sector, and the adoption of neo-liberal rural policy.
Having outlined the characteristics of the fruit export boom, it then presents
findings from two localities where fieldwork was conducted in 1995.
Following a comparative analysis of the changes taking place in these
locations, the conclusion focuses on their implication for rural transformation
and agrarian policy in Chile and beyond.
 PEASANTS IN CHILEAN HISTORY

The historical trajectory in Chile, from one form of internal dependency up

until the 1950s, to the hopes embodied in the various agrarian reform
programmes from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, and the despair
represented by the return once again to dependency in the 1980s and 1990s,
is not difficult to discern. In order to understand the current fate of the
market-oriented parceleros, however, it is necessary to put them into a
broader context of Chilean history, and in particular to trace how peasants
generally have been involved in and affected by the transformations in
agricultural production, tenure patterns, and national politics. Broadly
speaking, the evolution of peasant smallholding in Chile has followed the
same pattern of rural change as that experienced elsewhere in Latin America,
and as such its development has been determined by the combined shifts in
national and international capitalism structuring the integration of Chile into
the global economy.7 Created in the course of land settlement/alienation that
accompanied Spanish colonization in the sixteenth century, the majority of
Chilean peasants have since that time operated at the economic margins of
existence, and benefited little from the formal process of independence from
Spain at the start of the nineteenth century.
During the nineteenth century the latifundio/minifundio complex (based on
the coexistence of large estate and peasant smallholder) was consolidated,
and production relations on the rural estate (or hacienda) system in Chile's
central valley were structured by a system of internal dependency. The latter
condition arose from labour-rent payments made to landlords by livestock-
owning tenants (inquilinos), peasants who received in exchange
grazing/usufruct rights to a portion of estate land.8 As elsewhere in Latin
America, the growth in the external demand for agricultural produce
stimulated the expansion of the large latifundia. Thus the landlord response
to the 1850s wheat boom was to expand labour-intensive cultivation, which
entailed settling more tenants on the rural estate, and increasing the amount
of labour-rent.9 From the 1930s onwards, however, raised wheat output by
Chilean landlords no longer depended on a settled workforce composed of
tenants: the increasing trend towards mechanization led to the
proletarianization of labour-tenants (= depeasantization), and the employment
of outside migrant workers. This process of workforce restructuring
accelerated during the political struggles of the 1950s, as estate tenants
resisted proletarianization and welfare legislation increased the cost of tenant
labour-power. Although the landlord class still exercised political power at
this juncture, through its control over the state apparatus, this was subject to
increasing challenge: the latter derived from the extension of the franchise to
the peasantry, which ensured that from this point on political parties began to
complete for the mass rural vote.

Land Reform and the Peasantry: Internal and External Pressures

A direct effect of increased peasant participation in national politics was that

land reform was forced onto the policy agenda, and the three Chilean
governments which took office between 1954 and 1973 all addressed this
particular issue. The objectives of the reforms changed over time, from an
emphasis on productive efficiency to an overriding concern with exploitative
social relations of production and rural poverty. Land reform programmes
during this period have been categorized in different ways: for example, Kay
[1977b] characterizes that undertaken by the Alessandri government (1958–
64) as 'technocratic', that of the Frei government (1964–70) as 'reformist', and
that of the Allende government (1970–73) as 'radical', and these labels are
persuasive. The problems of rural poverty and food supplies, however, were
not solved by these agrarian reform programmes, and the import substitution
policy of the 1960s was replaced by the free market policies of the mid-
1970s, the 1980s and the 1990s.
The domestic agenda of production increases and poverty reduction was in
turn combined with external pressure to achieve the same end. Increased food
output based on land reform was at the centre of the 1950s development
strategy advocated by the United Nations Commission for Latin America
(ECLA). Rather than outward-oriented economic growth linked to the export
of primary commodities (copper in the case of Chile), ECLA argued for the
adoption of inward-oriented development, which would inaugurate and
sustain a virtuous economic circle. This consisted of import substitution
premised on the expansion of the internal market in Latin America, which
necessitated increasing the purchasing power of the rural population by
means of agrarian reform programmes. The major obstacle to economic
growth, therefore, was the existing inequality in the system of land tenure.10
By expropriating unproductive landlords, and putting cultivable land hitherto
belonging to the latter into the hands of productive smallholders, ECLA
argued, all the economic problems associated with inflation and balance-of-
payments deficits would be solved.
Interestingly, in the light of events and neo-liberal policies from the mid-
1970s onwards, this ECLA argument was made not so much against a
laissez-faire economic policy as in the name of the free market: the latter, it
was pointed out, could not function properly so long as Chilean landlords
were under no economic compulsion to surrender their land to more
productive economic agents (= smallholders). It was in order to make the
market work, therefore, that ECLA recommended that the Chilean state
should intervene politically, and expropriate the landlord class.11 According
to this development strategy, a result of land reform would be that land itself
became a commodity; peasants with land would then produce food for the
nation, saving foreign exchange for investment in domestic industry, and at
the same time buy commodities produced by the latter with income generated
from the cultivation of food crops. In Chile this ECLA strategy was followed
over the period 1964–73 by parties at different points on the political
spectrum.
Alessandri's approach, like the party he represented, was conservative and
intended to raise productivity only. Land reform legislation was passed, but
under pressure from the landed elite it was not implemented.12 During the
mid-1960s, therefore, the agrarian reform programme of the Christian
Democrat president Eduardo Frei Montalva attempted a capitalist
modernization of the estate system, by expropriating large and/or
economically inefficient estates, setting up agrarian cooperatives
(asentamientos), giving ex-tenants ownership rights, and providing state
credit for agricultural production.13 In 1964, he pledged 'massive, drastic and
rapid' land reform to increase both efficiency and equity [Brown, 1989]. Frei's
initiative was backed by the US anti-communist Alliance for Progress, which
intended to reduce the potential for revolution in the countryside across the
continent. It was during this period that the parcellation process was initiated.
After initial collectivization, beneficiaries could decide whether to carve up
estates into individual plots. Ultimately Frei's reform did not live up to its
promise for the peasantry in terms of increased land access.14
President Allende's socialist Popular Unity government which was elected in
1970 expropriated all estates, extended the agrarian reform to include hitherto
excluded poor peasants and agricultural workers, and introduced food price
controls.15 The response of rich peasants was to withhold foodstuffs which,
together with declining imports combined with increased consumption, led to
shortages that contributed to the military coup of 1973.16 Allende's
government rapidly accelerated and attempted to fully collectivize the
process began under Frei, placing the elimination of rural inequality at the
centre of the agenda. Thus all large estates over 80 basic irrigated hectares
(BIH) became eligible for expropriation—regardless of efficiency criteria and
land use. In 1973, due largely to increased pressure from the peasantry, which
had grown dissatisfied with the speed of the programme and had become
involved in increasingly violent land seizures (for example, in Melipilla
during 1972), a law was passed which allowed the expropriation of
inefficient farms between 40 and 80 BIH. Very few land reserves were
offered to former owners (patrones), and no cash compensation was made
available. Undoubtedly this added to the groundswell of dissent among the
landed elite and its supporters which helped precipitate the downfall of
Allende.

Military Counter-reform and Neo-liberalism

On the advice of the new libertarian economists belonging to the Chicago

school, the Pinochet dictatorship restored expropriated land to previous
owners, banned political activity, cut wages, and ended food price controls
for the urban working class and subsidies to peasant smallholders.17 With the
resulting collapse of domestic purchasing power, and the reversal of the
internally oriented development strategy advocated by ECLA, medium-scale
capitalist producers began to export traditional staple foods—which locals
were no longer able to afford—to international markets. The historical
trajectory over the last half of the twentieth century had accordingly come
full circle, and peasant producers in 1990s Chile once again found themselves
in a precarious economic situation of dependency, but with one major
difference: unlike tenants on the estate system in the 1950s, who were
dependent on an internal landlord class, peasant producers in 1990s Chile
found themselves dependent on an external capitalism.
Soon after the assumption of power the military regime declared its intention
to 'normalize' and 'consolidate' the agrarian reform programmes of Frei and
Allende. The main objectives of this counter-reform were threefold. First, to
dismantle the asentamiento system by returning land to former owners;
second, to raise the efficiency of agriculture by stimulating competitive
forces, principally through parcellation for selected beneficiaries; and third,
to fragment and weaken the political power of the collectivized peasantry
[Hojman, 1985], Ultimately, this counter-reform would constitute part of a
move towards neo-liberalism in the wider economy and society, where
individualism and competition became the central pillars of Chilean
development policy [Silva, 1995].
Of the land worked as cooperative farms in 1973, 30 per cent was returned to
the former owners, 30 per cent of the land was auctioned privately, and 7 per
cent was kept by the state. Thirty-three per cent of land was converted to
parcelas [Collins, 1979]. Selection for parcela ownership would be based on
an exacting point-based competition which was ostensibly technical. In
practice, political background determined many outcomes. The process of
grading was secret, although appeal was possible. Not surprisingly, very few
unsuccessful applicants filed complaints. Successful applicants among the
peasantry were offered the plots at 50 per cent of market value, often
obtaining credit from the reform commission CORA (Corporación de la
Reforma Agraría).
By 1979 the counter-reform was completed. The increased importance of the
small (<5 BIH) and medium-small (5–20 BIH) parcelero sector, rising from
22.7 per cent to 42.3 per cent of total land, is shown in Table 1. The new
parcelas were almost exclusively carved out of formerly collectively owned
land—though not all of those who had worked on the collective farms were
able to gain from this subdivision and privatization, given constraints in
access to credit and the political nature of the selection process outlined
above. The growth in the large-scale farm sector, above 80
hectares, resulted mainly through the return of land to former patrones.
Initially then, the reform increased land access for the peasantry. However,
many of the new parceleros failed to keep up with payments, thus beginning
a process of re-concentration soon after the reform's completion. The
prospect of a peasant renaissance was short-lived, as 'savage capitalism' [Kay,
1977b] carved a deep swathe of economic differentiation across the
countryside and creditors refused to support peasants who had benefited from
land sales by the military government [ICIRA, 1979]. It is widely accepted,
however, that the counter-reform precipitated increased agricultural
efficiency [Cruz, 1993; Gwynne and Meneses, 1994; Kay, 1993; Universidad
Católica, 1991]. With the creation of an active land market, a new class of
small-to-medium sized farmers was created. In general, the new parceleros
were private landowners, commercially oriented, and often employed wage-
labour on their plots. De-collectivization, and the concomitant restructuring
of the agrarian economy, undoubtedly contributed to the agro-export led
growth of the late 1970s and 1980s [Murray, 1998].

The Agro-export Boom and Agrarian Policy

In the wider political economy the military pursued a neo-liberal economic

model, being the first such example in the Third World periphery. This model
placed particular emphasis on the opening of the economy in order to
stimulate export growth. New niches in global markets for non-traditional
agricultural exports (NTAX)—such as fruit, fish and forestry products-
appeared with fortuitous timing. Chile's abundant natural resources, counter-
seasonality with respect to major markets, and de-unionized labour force
attracted capital investment, precipitating a major boom. The growth of the
fruit export sector has become the best-known instance of capitalist
restructuring [see Murray, 1999], as nominal export values increased from
close to zero in 1974 to nearly a billion US dollars in 1991. Fruit became
Chile's second largest export sector, and the country became the leader in the
southern hemisphere.18
Given the fruit specialization in the case studies outlined below, reference
must be made to the main species of fruit exported. Grapes and apples
became the two leading export items as Chile competed on international
markets in price rather than quality terms [McKenna and Murray, 2002].
From the mid-1980s, however, the saturation of global markets (a result of
increased competition, especially from New Zealand and South Africa),
growing protectionism in the USA and EU, and the appreciation of the
Chilean peso, all led to sharp decreases in the real price of Chilean fruit
exports. Between 1986 and 1994 (that is, up to the point of the fieldwork
surveys) the real value of grape exports stagnated. Apple export values
declined sharply in the late 1980s, and collapsed in 1993.
The salient question here is: how did this boom and the subsequent stagnation
impact on the parcelero sector in different markets and localities? What
mechanisms allowed these farmers access to such markets initially, and how
did these arrangements evolve? Given that policy at the time was anti-
interventionist, what implications did global market-orientation have for the
economic viability of peasant farmers and the social cohesion of their rural
communities? These questions are not merely of historical interest. During
the democratic transition, agrarian policy has changed relatively little [Kay,
1997a; Murray 2002b]. Whilst there is now more explicit concern with rural
poverty, and some targeted state intervention, the principal policy for small-
scale farmers is to encourage reconversion (conversion) into globally
oriented, competitive sectors. The ideology underpinning this policy
framework is economic Darwinism -failure is seen as an indication of non-
competitiveness, and is therefore regarded by the state as an essential and
positive element in the economic rationalization and modernization of rural
Chile.19
The point made by means of the case studies presented below is that such a
Darwinist economic perspective ignores the rather obvious structural
impediments to successful participation on the part of peasant farmers in
global markets. These impediments can only be tackled—if at all—by policy
which addresses deep-seated political and economic asymmetries in the
capitalist market. In particular, power-relations (and thus policies) tilt heavily
in the favour of agri-business enterprises which, in times of market
saturation, will inevitably take advantage of these imbalances.
 PEASANT DIFFERENTIATION COMPARED

Research was undertaken during the mid-1990s in two localities, El Palqui

and East Curicó, in the regions of the Norte Chico (Region IV) and Maule
(Region VII; see Map 1) respectively. These areas were subject to extensive
land reform in the 1970s, and were affected by major export-oriented booms
in the 1980s. Significant parcelero specialization has developed: in grapes in
El Palqui, and in apples in East Curicó. Semi-structured questionnaires were
used to interview the growers (and other informants) owning less than ten
hectares, about their agricultural activities and relationships with
agribusiness.20 Sample characteristics are reported in Table 2, broken down
into smaller parcelación and village units which comprise the wider
localities. These case studies are considered in turn, each beginning with a
contextual investigation of the impacts of restructuring in the surrounding
region.

MAP 1

CHILEAN REGIONS AND FIELDWORK SITES

Source: Warwick E.Murray and Kevin Burkhill.
 Capitalist Restructuring in the Norte Chico

Chile's semi-arid zone, the Norte Chico, has rapidly become Chile's leading
grape export region, and one of the major supply zones for this agricultural
commodity in the southern hemisphere. Historically, agriculture has been
relatively difficult in this zone, given its climatic and topographic
characteristics, which partly explain the high incidence of poverty
traditionally observed in the region. Much marginal land has been converted
to grape production over the last two decades, as the agricultural frontier has
expanded rapidly [Pino, 1995]. Much of this growth has taken place in the
region's five east-west oriented valley systems: Copiapó, Huasco, Elqui,
Limarí, and the Choapa valleys. El Palqui is located in the Guatulame valley,
which is within the Limarí system (see Map 2). The distribution of
temperature and insolation characteristics throughout the year means that the
harvesting period, from mid-November to mid-February, has generally
coincided with peak prices (around the Christmas festivities) in northern
hemisphere markets. Harvest times in the Guatulame can be particularly
early, and thus the produce can command excellent prices.21
The region's grape economy is almost entirely dependent on an
interconnected dam/irrigation infrastructure. Three dams in the Limarí have
made export orientation possible—La Paloma, on which El Palqui is located

MAP 2

THE LEMARC VALLEY

Source: Gwynne and Meneses (1994)

being the largest such facility in South America. The marginality of the
regional environment is cause for concern, however, as rainfall declines, dam
system losses grow, and water prices rise rapidly [Gwynne, 1993].
Natural and constructed advantages in the region, combined with reforms,
have shifted the economic base from one oriented towards the production of
horticultural products for local and national markets, to one which is directed
largely at the northern hemisphere winter fruit market. In the ten years
preceding 1992, land devoted to the cultivation of the table grape rose
approximately fourfold; from 1,780 to 7,335 hectares [CIREN-CORFO, 1982
and 1992].22 The transformation has been most spectacular in the Guatulame,
where between 1962 and 1988 land on which grapes were grown rose from
70 to 1,500 hectares (see Table 3). The region as a whole now exports close
to 20 per cent of the Chilean grape export total.
Peasant farmers have played an integral role in this transformation, and in
numerical terms dominate the regional export economy.23 Such growers have
been able to participate in the export drive through the provision of capital by
agri-business. The first company involved in the region was domestically
owned David Del Curto (DDC). Foreign capital entered the regional market
in the early 1980s: for example, Unifrutti in 1982, UTC in 1984, and
Standard Trading in 1984. Total combined investment in establishing farm
production by these enterprises was by 1995 estimated at US$250 million
[Murray, 1997].
Virtually all of the export companies participating in the regional economy
utilize the credit-consignation-contract (CCC) form of procurement in their
relations with parceleros. In this system, credit is advanced by the companies
to growers for the initiation and maintenance of grape plantations; this sum—
plus interest and commission—is then subtracted from the final receipts for
the product at the port of destination. This system has 'tightened up' in
response to market pressures outlined previously. Rates of interest and
commission have risen, new debt clauses

MAP 3

EL PALQUI AND LOCATION OF STUDY PARCELACIONES

Source: Warwick E.Murray.

oblige growers whose returns do not cover credits and charges to

supplyexclusively to the firm, and the monopoly provision of inputs, labour
andtechnology is now often required by the firm. In short, firms are able
toobtain bilateral monopoly positions with relative ease, acting as
banker,advisor and customer to the growers.24

Peasant Differentiation in El Palqui

'Here things are very bad, and they are going to get worse. Many of my friends are in serious debt with
the companies, who will not hesitate to take their land. We were made a lot of false promises in the
early days. This system is not for the people, it is for those who are already rich.'
Jose Muñoz, peasant farmer, Los Litres, El Palqui, 1995
A rural settlement of some 5,000 inhabitants located at the edge of the
Paloma Dam in the Guatulame valley, El Palqui is one of the most rapidly
transformed exporting areas in the whole of Chile.25 The paved road link to
Ovalle completed in 1989 further stimulated the outward economic
orientation of the town. The area underwent extensive land reform:
expropriated from six large estates during the Frei period, 144 parcelas of an
average size of 7.3 hectares each were organized into five agrarian reform
units (parcelaciones) by 1977 [Silva, 1993] (see Table 2, and Map 3). Of the
five parcelaciones within the settlement—Puente Plomo, El Peñon, San
Antonio, Santa Rosa and Los Litres—the final three were selected for
intensive study. Twenty-six out of 90 growers owning less than ten hectares
were interviewed.
The transformation of the local peasantry into grape producers took place in
roughly three stages: first, repeasantization, or the creation of parcelas and a
domestic market-oriented horticultural base (1974–84); second, the
incorporation of the parceleros into the expanding global

FIGURE 1

PRODUCTIVE LAND-USE IN STUDY PARCELACIONES, EL PALQUI 1983–93

Source: Fieldwork.

market for grapes (1984–90); and third, the proletarianization of the

parceleros in a stagnating global market for grapes (1990 to the present).

Repeasantization in El Palqui

Historically, local agricultural production in the Guatulame area followed the

traditional pattern: that is, cultivation of tomatoes, green beans and other
horticultural products. In 1983 all these crops were grown by the producers in
the fieldwork sample (see Figure 1). This produce was sold in local markets,
and in the 1980s the markets of the national capital, Santiago. The simplicity
of the procurement system, which involved a travelling middle man
purchasing on the spot, was recalled with nostalgia by a number of the
peasant farmers. Many claimed that, when compared to the grape purchasing
system now operating, the earlier system was 'transparent', 'understandable',
and generally yielded a low but adequate level of profits.26 High levels of
credit were not required for these low-technology activities.

Peasant Incorporation in El Palqui

The second phase in the transformation of the agrarian structure in El Palqui

involved the rapid, and almost total, adoption of grape cultivation. Except in
the cases of some of the larger growers, this transition was financed largely
by agri-business through CCC systems. Set-up and annual maintenance costs
are approximately US$25,000 and US$5,500 per hectare

FIGURE 2

PROPORTION OF GRAPE OUTPUT ACCOUNTED FOR BY VARIETY WITHIN THREE

SURVEY PARCELACIONES 1983–93

Source: Fieldwork.

respectively—sums representing substantial investments for peasant farmers.

One of the growers described this period as 'something like a gold rush' that
involved a fight among firms to win suppliers.27 Large credits were granted,
and it was not uncommon for money to be lent to cover non-household and
living expenses as well.
The modal year of reconversión was 1984, and those peasant farmers who
converted early have tended to fare better (given favourable early prices). The
adoption of the grape spread through a neighbourhood diffusion process. By
1988, 75 per cent of the sample land was turned over to this crop. Eighteen of
the 26 interviewees were practising full monocultural production at this point.
Moreover, the green Thompson seedless variety dominated plantations (see
Figure 2).28
In El Palqui as a whole at this stage there were signs of land concentration.29
By the late 1980s, 36 of the original 144 parceleros—some 25 per cent—had
been displaced. According to the roles much of this land was purchased by
companies or commercial corporations. The greatest number of land
transactions took place in 1990, as early 'non-competitive' peasant farmers
were expelled from the market.

Proletarianization in El Palqui

Through the economic mechanisms of prices and contracts, external

problems were increasingly visited upon the locality from 1990 onwards. By
this time, a completely monocultural agriculture was being practised by
peasant farmers included in the sample (see Figure 1). This agricultural
pattern was encouraged by the agri-business firms, eager to benefit from
economies of scale where possible. Many growers were unable to shift out of
grape production, as returns consistently failed to cover credits and charges.
Their situation worsened considerably in this period, a consequence of the
rapid cost-acceleration of the productive forces, in the form of water prices.
Water scarcity put the price out of reach of many parceleros, and growers
reported declining yields due to this.
Agribusiness companies were active in squeezing the parceleros during this
period, passing on much of the risk associated with increasingly
unpredictable trading conditions.30 All growers remaining in business in 1995
were subject to the monopoly supply of inputs, labour and machinery. Given
'lock-in' clauses, firms were granted enormous power over the pattern
followed by local agrarian transformation. Farmers often did not know what
their produce was earning in foreign markets, and had few ways of finding
out.31 Many complained that they simply didn't understand balance sheets,
and were convinced that items they had not purchased were being included.
An additional clause specified that grievances should be heard in Santiago—
too far away for many growers to travel to. The CCC

FIGURE 3

PROPORTION OF LAND ACCOUNTED FOR BY DIFFERENT SIZED GROWERS

Source: Murray [1993].

system had become increasingly non-transparent and incomprehensible to the

farmers, who were now effectively tied labour for the firms concerned.
This squeeze and declining real prices led to crippling levels of debt. Six of
the sample had already had to sell their parcela to the company in order to
pay this by 1995 (receiving lower than market price for the land), and had
moved into temporary farm work and petty trading. Of those remaining in
business in 1995 the average level of debt was US$50,217. This meant that
the average parcela value/debt ratio was 3:1. In nine cases properties had
been mortgaged to the agri-business firms in order to re-secure this debt. In
these specific cases the average parcela value/debt ratio was 2:3—implying
very insecure tenure indeed. This level of indebtedness was leading in turn to
a significant concentration of landownership. Figure 3 shows a steady decline
between 1983 and 1994 in the relative importance of holdings below ten
hectares, from over 60 per cent to just over 40 per cent. By 1995, some 39 out
of the 144 original parcelas in El Palqui—or 27 per cent—were owned by
agri-business export companies.32
The asymmetry in political and economic strength between peasant farmers
and agri-business enterprises allowed the latter to pass any risk on to the
former, thereby protecting themselves against market volatility. These
asymmetries include (among other things) differential access to finance,
organizational capacity, and information levels. Furthermore, the extreme
economic vulnerability of the El Palqui parceleros was exacerbated by
declining environmental conditions and the practice of monoculture. Locked
in to highly exploitative contracts, peasant farmers had become almost
entirely dependent on agribusiness as the process of disguised
proletarianization in the locality increased. It is quite possible, six years after
the completion of the original fieldwork, that the remainder of the parceleros
have now been fully proletarianized.

Capitalist Restructuring in Maule

The region of Maule (Region VII) lies within the upper half of the Central
Valley. Favoured by fertile alluvial soils and the Mediterranean climatic
regime, agriculture has long been the main economic activity here. Fruit
species were traditionally produced in the area. Since restructuring in the
1970s, land under fruit has increased significantly—this has taken place
through conversion of existing areas rather than through expansion of the
frontier. Specialization in the cultivation of apples has become marked. Intra-
annum temperature patterns lead to February-March harvests,

MAP 4

MAULE (REGION VII)

Source: Warwick E.Murray.

coinciding with the period of maximum prices in Chile's major apple market
—the EU. Harvests in the province of Curicó are particularly early and highly
profitable.33
Given the abundance of land, the parcelas created during the counter-reform
were larger than those in the Norte Chico. This factor help generate a more
rapid development of fruit cultivation by peasant farmers in this area than
elsewhere [Riffo-Rosas, 1993; Pino, 1993]. A small export base was built up
during the 1960s, following the implementation of President Frei's National
Fruit Plan.34 By the time the free market reforms of the mid-1970s took
place, a process of 'learning by doing' had already begun. Unlike the north,
however, the boom did not change the nature of the regional economic base
overnight, as more step-like transition took place.
Peasant growers in Curicó have been involved in the export economy -
although economically they are not as important relatively as they are in the
north. Riffo-Rosas [1993] has undertaken surveys which show that the
percentage of surplus product destined for global markets increases
significantly with farm size in the region. As elsewhere, peasant farmers were
incorporated largely through agri-business investment. The history of agri-
business enterprise involvement in Curicó, however, is different from that in
the Norte Chico. Agri-business production and accumulation in the late 1960s
was centred on a collective of large growers called Copefrut. David Del
Curto established the prototype CCC system of procurement in 1979,
drawing in the first generation of export-oriented peasant farmers. Beginning
in the early 1980s, foreign investment has been particularly important in this
region. Today there is a marked cluster of large-scale packing and storage
plants along the Pan American Highway on the outskirts of Curicó city.35 By
1994, approximately US$100 million had been invested in the establishment
of apple orchards by large firms. Moreover, set-up costs in the region are
cheaper than in the Norte Chico.
In the early 1990s the regional marketing structure evolved considerably as
'footloose' export companies began to play a more important role.36 Such
operators did not advance credit, and produce bought was paid for directly at
the point of sale. In this way footloose companies absorbed some of the risks
generated by market volatility, and extracted correspondingly higher profits.
'Footloose' companies tend to work with small collections of growers, with
whom they have built a relationship. A notable separation of procurement
mechanisms is occurring in the region's marketing structure. Larger
companies are relying increasingly on their own orchards for supply, whilst
medium and large growers are increasingly turning footloose. Unable to gain
credit to work with 'footloose' companies, and increasingly unattractive to the
large firm, peasant farmers face limited choices in marketing their goods.

Peasant Differentiation in East Curicó

Their fixed costs are so high, and their problems so great now, that they need growers in debt so they
can treat them like lambs and pay them what they want. That system cannot go on forever. As more
people like me enter the market, there will be increasing competition for produce. If the growers can
escape debt they will never return directly to the large export companies.'
A'footloose' company owner talking of large export companies,
Curicó, 1995

MAP 5
THE COMUNA OF CURICÓ (WEST) AND LOCATION OF STUDY VILLAGES

Source: Warwick E.Murray.

As the leading export locality for Chile's second fruit, 16 per cent of the
nation's apple area is found in the comuna of Curicó. The proximity of the
latter to the national capital Santiago has traditionally been an economic
advantage that stimulated the commercial production of fruit crops. In Curicó
the tenure structure created by the military counter-reform was characterized
by the relatively high incidence of large agricultural estates interspersed with
small 'pockets' of land. The parcelas investigated for the purposes of this
study correspond to five such 'pockets' surrounding the villages of
Cordillerilla, Santa Rosa, Chequenlemu, Los Niches and Vista Hermosa.37
Research in the latter contexts involved interviewing 20 out of a total
population of 61 peasant farmers (see Table 2 for details of sample).
The transformation undergone by parceleros in this locality follows a pattern
similar to that experienced by peasant cultivators in El Palqui. First, the
creation of parceleros producing apples for domestic markets (1974–79);
then the incorporation of parceleros into an expanding global market for
apples (1979–88); and, latterly, the differentiation of parceleros producing
for the world market (1988 to the present).

Repeasantization in East Curicó

Very few parceleros in East Curicó were involved in the production of fruit.
Such activity was reserved for larger-scale farmers, not least because of the
investment and running costs: at 1994 prices, establishing a hectare of apples
required an outlay of US$9,000, and maintenance amounts to US$2,000 per
annum per hectare. At this time then, the small-scale farming sector was
dedicated mainly to the production of traditional crops, the most important of
these being sugar beet, green beans and tomatoes. These products were
marketed largely within the region, and occasionally in Santiago.
Two parceleros in the sample planted apples for export in 1976. Low
availability of credit meant that the growers had to sell a portion of land they
had received in the counter-reform in order to finance this. Two further
growers planted apples in 1978. The shift to fruit cultivation for export was
among the earliest in the country.

Peasant Incorporation in East Curicó

As previously noted, David Del Curto (DDC) entered the local market
offering credit in 1979. Of the 20 peasant farmers in the sample, 16 initially
entered the market under a CCC arrangement with DDC. By 1984, all 20 of
the fieldwork sample had partially reconverted to the production of apples for
export. However, unlike El Palqui, land use in the East Curicó sample
remained relatively diversified; 46 per cent of land was dedicated to the
cultivation of the apple crop, one-third to pears, and the remainder to a

FIGURE 4

APPLE VARIETIES IN EAST CURICÓ SAMPLE 1984–94

Source: Murray [1996].

mixture of on average three horticultural and fruit products. In 1984 there

was an almost even split between red and green apples (in terms of global
consumer demand red apples have tended to be the dominant kind), with
Richard Delicious and Granny Smith dominating commercial production (see
Figure 4).38
Overall, the sampled growers were adding to their apple holdings in a step-
like fashion, using credit from firms primarily but also ploughing back
economic gains to reconvert. In 1986, however, the real price for apples
dropped by nearly 25 per cent. As was the case in the north of Chile (see
above), large export companies began to tighten up their contract conditions
in response to this. By 1988, 13 of the 20 peasant farmers were indebted to
export companies.39

Semi-proletarianization in East Curicó

By 1994, 75 per cent of the land in the East Curicó fieldwork sample was
dedicated to the commercial production of apples, with the remainder set
aside for pears, plus an additional range of other fruit and vegetables. Despite
this increased specialization, however, crop diversity persisted. Figure 4
shows that six types of apple were being produced in the locality by this time
—the new additions such as Royal Imperial and Red King Oregon
representing much sought-after innovative reds. All peasant farmers had at
least two varieties of apples growing on their land.
In 1993 quota impositions in the EU resulted in a fall of 50 per cent in the
real price of apples. Having avoided fully dedicating their lands to just one
crop, the parceleros were partially shielded from the economic impact of
export market restriction. Of the 13 who were indebted to export companies
in 1988, nine had re-negotiated or grown out of these problems and shifted to
'footloose' companies (there being four agri-business enterprises of this
description operating in the locality at the time). All of those who had made
the transformation declared they would not return to work with the large
firms. Three of the sample had sold off parts of their parcela in order to
escape the debt. For those working with 'footloose' companies, an important
development has been the increased role of off-farm income. All nine work
on other farms and, in many cases, in other industries to supplement their
earnings and finance investments. The multi-occupational family is thus very
much part of the survival strategy followed by this group.
Two large export companies purchased the output of the rest of the sample
(covering approximately 55 per cent of the output). For the 11 peasant
farmers under this regime, debts mounted, particularly after 1993, and they
became increasing tied into CCC arrangements. Of the 20 growers in 1994,
therefore, nine were indebted to companies, the average level of debt being
US$3,500. It will be immediately apparent that these levels are far lower than
in El Palqui, and the ratio of parcela value to debt is not high (26.7 mean). In
this respect the tenure status of the growers in East Curicó appears to be
relatively secure. It is worth pointing out, however, that many of those worst
hit by company debt in the locality had quit farming apples altogether by the
time of the fieldwork.
Through the process of capitalist restructuring, parceleros in East Curicó
have been differentiated into two distinct groups. The first of these is linked
to footloose intermediaries, and the other to the larger export companies. The
latter group has been squeezed and become economically dependent to a
certain degree, but not to the same extent as elsewhere. It is quite possible
that some of these parceleros may have escaped debt in the period following
the fieldwork survey, and have moved into the footloose market. However,
they may have been forced to do this, given the increasing reluctance on the
part of large agri-business companies to work in conjunction with small
peasant farming. Although the footloose group appear to be relatively
favourably placed, ironically this group too is somewhat vulnerable: were
peasant farmers to suffer economic difficulties, or the locality to experience
problems, the footloose intermediaries would be the first to cease their
operations. The dominant transformational processes in East Curicó are thus
both a disguised variant and a more obvious form of semi-proletarianization.
 EXPLAINING PEASANT DIFFERENTIATION

The impact of neo-liberalism on the Chilean peasantry has been broadly

negative, yet substantially uneven. The El Palqui parceleros have clearly

fared far worse than those in Curicó. This is despite the fact that the global
market for apples has presented deeper problems than the market for grapes.
What explains this paradox? A range of factors, including natural and
constructed antecedents, production costs, and marketing structure, have led
to quite different levels of economic dependence and vulnerability in the two
localities. A comprehensive list of these differences, together with the
variable outcomes, is presented in Table 4: it is to these differences, and their
causes, that we now turn.
In terms of natural antecedents, the Curicó group is favoured by climatic
factors which make irrigation relatively unproblematic and cheap, and
encourage agricultural diversity. Higher land quality in the Central Valley
also reduces the preparation costs of land significantly. Distinctions in the
productive forces in agriculture are therefore crucial to the different economic
outcomes in the two areas studied. Curicó's history of fruit production, crop
diversity, tradition of cooperation, land reform patterns, and infrastructure,
have also provided a relatively sound context for peasant farming. Larger
parcela sizes in particular offer capital a more substantial economic base,
facilitate agricultural diversity, provide (albeit limited) economies of scale,
and allow step by step adoption patterns of new cropping patterns and
varieties. It was the rapid nature of the transition to export monoculture as
much as anything that weighed heavily against the El Palqui group, leaving
the peasant farmers there exposed to high risk levels.
Of additional critical importance are the divergent levels of production cost
between the two localities, those for El Palqui being three times higher than
in Curicó. This difference is due both to local environmental constraints
(reflected in the differential water costs) and the relatively costly, technology-
intensive, requirements of grape production. This, in turn, led to the fact that
the growers in northern Chile had to obtain significant levels of credit in
order to establish their orchards, and a number of them never managed to
escape from this initial debt. Because of the relatively favourable factors at
work in Curicó, by contrast, growers there have generally avoided having to
go into debt. Ultimately it is because of indebtedness, and because the El
Palqui group is forced to work exclusively within the CCC system, that
current debt dependency has reached such critical levels. Hence a
combination of internal and external economic factors have united to produce
either disguised or full proletarianization, a process leading in turn to rapid
land concentration.
The fieldwork on which these two case studies are based was completed in
1995/96. Given increasing demand saturation in the world market for fruit,
increased southern hemisphere competition, lower prices and raised
protectionism, it is unlikely that conditions have improved for the majority

FIGURE 5

PEASANT TRANSFORMATIONS AND CHILE'S FRUIT EXPORT COMPLEX

of the Chilean parceleros. Although this remains to be confirmed by further
research, it is likely that agri-business firms have been moving into the
purchase of land, moving away from dealing with small-scale peasant
farmers, and generally tightening up the conditions governing access to
provision of inputs and credit. Given these factors, land re-concentration, de-
peasantization, and debt are likely to have continued.
The fruit boom has deepened inequality in rural Chile, and created an
increasingly differentiated peasantry. In the worst cases, this is recreating the
bimodal agrarian structure of the past—only this time the patrones are the
fruit companies.40 In the best cases, peasant farmers have managed to remain
independent of agri-business control, but earn only modest returns. Despite
being regarded as the best advertisement for neo-liberal policies in Latin
America, therefore, there has been no discernible improvement in living
standards even for the more successful parceleros in Chile's fruit export
sector. Although patterns diverge at the local level, it is nevertheless possible
to identify an overarching process of transformation at work. This is
represented graphically in Figure 5, which depicts the major changes in
policy, market conditions, etc., throughout the period in question. It is
suggested here that the transformations affecting peasant smallholders in
other export-oriented sectors within Chile, and indeed other Latin American
countries, have all followed a roughly similar path.
 CONCLUDING COMMENTS

Chile has often been, and remains, a site where significant politico-economic
'experiments' are played out. The outcomes of the resultant systemic shifts
offer important signposts for the rest of the global economic periphery. It
could be argued that a main shortcoming in the earlier analyses of
dependency theorists and ECLA was the assumption that a global division of
labour would separate countries in the Third World, where the focus would
be on agricultural production, from those in metropolitan capitalist contexts,
where nations would concentrate on industrial production. No account was
taken of the possibility that, in a laissez-faire global market, peasant
producers in less developed countries such as Chile would have to compete
with agricultural exports from advanced capitalist countries, not just in
international markets but also in their own domestic ones. While peasant
cultivators may indeed be economically efficient when compared with
unproductive landlords in their own countries—the assumption made by
ECLA—this is not the case when they have to compete with efficient high-
tech international agri-business enterprises in world markets.
This shortcoming can be linked in turn to one of the more ironical outcomes
of ECLA development strategy in Latin America. Many still adhere to the
view that, in advocating economic growth, agricultural productivity and
agrarian reform, ECLA championed state planning against the free market.
On this point, however, the position of ECLA was rather more ambiguous. It
was not in fact opposed to the market as such (as many think) but wanted
state intervention in order to make the market work. In terms of political
objective (= establishing the market), therefore, the neo-liberal policies of the
Pinochet dictatorship represent to some degree a realization and not a
negation of earlier ECLA development strategy. As this study implies,
peasant survival is contingent on more profound and committed state
intervention and support than simply 'lubricating' the market. This is unlikely
to be forthcoming given the continued dominance of the neo-liberal
economic model.
This article has explored the impact of the neo-liberal economic model on the
Chilean peasantry as this involves transformations in the agrarian structure of
two fieldwork locations, illustrating that changes there are locally contingent
and regionally specific. It has also shown the important determining role of
market integration on economic differentiation of the peasantry in these
fieldwork locations, and thus the manner in which the 'global' is articulated
with the 'local'. It is clear that, at the macro level, there are increasing general
pressures on the peasantry resulting from the application of neo-liberal
economic policies and the corresponding withdrawal of political commitment
to the economic reproduction of the peasantry. The reality of the situation is
that—barring a major paradigm shift—government support for the peasant
farming sector will not manifest itself in the foreseeable future. Increasingly,
then, peasant livelihoods and rural community trajectories will be determined
by powerful global forces, resulting in dependency for those who survive as
peasants and proletarianization for those who do not.
Structuralism has much to say on the implications of asymmetric power
relations for global wealth distribution. Relatively little has been said about
the impact of asymmetries between individual agents at the micro-level, and
how this affects distributive outcomes. Isolating for the impacts of local
physical geography and history, a major driving force, and arguably the
ultimate determining factor in terms of the scope for survival, is the
relationship between agri-business enterprises and parceleros. It is this
relationship which either constrains or liberates the parcelero in the context
of the market. Policy which encourages parceleros to reconvert by linking
into CCC systems tends to end in failure. It is clear that an alternative
reconversión strategy must involve both the identification of alternative
sources of credit and the provision of post-conversion assistance. A major
aspect of such assistance would involve the monitoring of fruit contracts and
the behaviour of companies, together with the development of mechanisms to
deal independently with grower grievances. Without this there simply will be
no equality of opportunity, and efforts to increase productive efficiency are
likely to be futile.
Neo-structuralist ideas, which have become influential in some Latin
American countries (such as Chile under Ricardo Lagos), offer little hope for
the peasantry given that the promotion of neo-liberal capitalism remains very
much at their core. Agrarian policy in Chile has moved little beyond the law
of the jungle associated with the 1970s, and the lessons about the reasons for
economic failure have been largely ignored. The decline of Chile's parceleros
is not inevitable, but it is increasingly likely, given the current overlap
between the political and economic interests of international capital and those
of the ruling elite within the country itself. About the failure of peasant
economy it is possible to say two things. First, the threshold of economic
failure is high, affecting as it does those with ten hectares of land. This is a
very different, and in some ways more alarming, picture than the one usually
presented with regard to rural Latin America, where the expectation is that it
is only a minifundist agriculture—that is, smallholders with less than five
hectares—that is economically unviable. As the Curicó fieldwork in this
article shows, only very few peasant farmers will make it through to become
capitalist peasant farmers; once the latter breakthrough has been achieved,
moreover, economic reproduction will continue to be precarious. And
second, the failure of peasant economy is a political choice rather than the
outcome of supposedly inevitable forces of 'globalization'. By continuing to
choose this path, the Chilean government also seems prepared to accept the
social upheavals and associated costs that will accompany such failure. These
include the unsustainable expansion of regional urban centres and Santiago
itself, as well as the full proletarianization of those who remain in rural areas;
both these outcomes will enhance poverty and economic insecurity in rural
areas. The survival of the peasantry in general, and rich peasants in particular,
thus becomes a political choice, impossible to effect in the capitalist market
without strong state support.
As we move to a food regime characterized by niche markets, novelty tastes
and the need for economies of scope, the potential for peasant participation in
export markets is likely to be further reduced. Economic viability is about
more than size (although it helps). Crucially, successful producers will
increasingly have to shoulder personal risk—which is not a favourable
option. Given the saturation of global markets, it is inevitable that agri-
business companies will continue to restructure and rationalize the agrarian
structure of Chile in the future. The asymmetries in the market in terms of
knowledge, information, and access to resources and technology are so great,
and the incentives to exploit them so strong, that they are likely to be
impossible to confront without collective behaviour. There are signs of
renewed political activity of this nature in rural Chile, but peasants are not the
effective force for social change they once were. In this sense the findings
presented here tend to support the descampesinista viewpoint: that is to say,
given the increased expansion and global penetration of the capitalist system
on the one hand, and the absence of state regulation or a state-enforced
process of de-regulation on the other, the economic decline of the peasantry
is unavoidable. Agrarian reforms are likely to be short-term panaceas at best,
and easily reversed if neo-liberal policies continue to prevail.
 ACRONYMS AND VERNACULAR TERMS

Asentamiento
Cooperative farms established in the course of President Frei Montalva's agrarian reform programme,
and expanded during the Allende period.
BIH
Basic Irrigated Hectares. For reform purposes (and beyond) landholdings were expressed in units of
comparable productive capacity. One BIH is equivalent to one hectare of prime irrigated land in the
Central Maipo river valley [Jarvis, 1989].
Campesinistas
Academics and policy-makers who stress the vitality and adaptability of the peasant economy.
CCC
Credit and Consignation Contracts. Such contracts involve the provision of credit by an agri-business
enterprise to cover some or all production costs. Payment is made on the basis of what the product
commands at the destination port.
Comuna
Government in Chile is administered at the national, regional, provincial and community levels. The
administrative unit of the comuna represents the smallest of these.
CORA
Corporación de la Reforma Agraría, the Chilean agrarian reform agency.
DDC
David Del Curto: A large Chilean-owned fruit export firm based in the Central Valley.
Descampesinistas
Academics and policy-makers who argue that the decline of peasant agriculture is inevitable in the face
of capitalist development.
EU
European Union
Latifundio
Large-scale landholding unit, usually a landed estate, created through colonial occupation and
conquest.
Minifundia
Small-scale peasant landholding units existing alongside (or, as tenancies, within) latifundia.
Historically, the latifundio/minifundio complex entailed ties of economic dependency linking
smallholder to landlord.
NTAX
Non-traditional agricultural exports
Parcelación
A group of individually owned and operated smallholdings (parcelas) all created as a result of land
fragmentation and subdivision.
Parceleros
Farmers who operate parcela landholdings.
Patron
Landowner or landlord owning a latifundio.
Roles
Lists which detail land ownership in a given area for the purposes of taxation.
UTC
United Trading Company. A large-scale US-based fruit export company.
 NOTES

1. The hegemony of neo-liberal economic policy in the global periphery and semi-periphery (and
arguably the core) has been referred to as 'monoeconomics', given the extent to which it has diffused
and also the great similarity in the nature of its policy manifestations across widely differing national
contexts.
2. The trajectory followed by agrarian transformation in Latin America, and the role in this of peasants,
has provoked great debate. Two opposing viewpoints on the fate of the peasantry are represented by the
campesinista ('peasantization') and descampesinista ('depeasantization') schools of thought. The former
[Stavenhagen, 1978] has argued, albeit in slightly different ways, that the peasantry is not being
eliminated as a result of capitalist development, and may in fact be strengthening. This view is often
associated with the views of Russian populist A.V.Chayanov [1974]. In outlining the views of this
group, Kay [1997b: 13] argues, 'they view the peasantry as mainly petty commodity producers who are
able to compete successfully with capitalist farmers in the market rather than viewing them as sellers of
labour power and being subjected to the processes of socio-economic differentiation'. The second group
are far less optimistic about the fate of the peasantry, maintaining that petty commodity producers will
be 'de-peasantized' by an expanding capitalism, and will as a result become either rich peasants (= small
agrarian capitalists) or wage labourers (= proletarians). This camp is often associated with the ideas of
Lenin on the subject of the Russian peasantry. It is possible to conceptualize shades in between the two
extreme views as the nature of capitalism is altered and the collective organization of peasants changes
across time and space. Ironically, both the political left and the right have appealed to the logic of a
descampesinista argument. However, the recent growth in peasant movements in Latin America has
brought attention to the possibility of multiple peasant futures. See Goodman and Redclift [1982] for an
entry point into this debate, and also the contribution by Petras and Veltmeyer to this volume.
3. Structuralism in this context refers to the theory of economic development associated with the ideas
of Raul Prebisch and the UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) during the late 1950s
and early 1960s. Essentially the theory conceptualized the globe as divided between an economic core
(= advanced capitalist countries in the developed world) and a periphery (= underdeveloped nations of
the Third World), a pattern of economic inequality and dependency established historically through
imperial conquest. The nature of a country's integration into this world system would largely determine
developmental outcomes. This countered earlier ideas of modernization theory, which conceptualized
development as an a-historic trajectory. Although it must be said that structuralists were not anti-
market, they nevertheless argued that the nature of a Third World nation's insertion into the global
economy would—and could only—be altered through state intervention. The two core policies
informing ECLA theory about economic development were import substitution industrialization and
agrarian reform. This theory, which laid the foundations for later dependency analysis, has seen
something of a rejuvenation over the last decade in academic circles, in the form of neo-structuralism
(see Sunkel [1993], and Gwynne and Kay [2000]).
4. De-agrarianization refers to the decline in the proportional contribution of agriculture to income
generation and employment, a process which has been observed empirically for the continent. Between
1962 and 1999 GDP accounted for by agriculture in Latin America fell from 17 per cent to 7 per cent.
Over the same period, agricultural employment as a proportion of total employment fell from 48 per
cent to 29 per cent. Due to data collection, calculation and reporting errors, however, these can only be
considered approximate figures, although they do reveal a clear trend [ECLAC, 2001]. In an absolute
sense, real agricultural output has continued to grow, as have certain kinds of agricultural employment.
The latter is particularly marked in the case of seasonal harvest jobs and female packing work
associated with the recent boom in non-traditional agricultural exports across the continent [see
Murray, 2002a].
5. In tracing out the implications of different regimes of accumulation for the Latin American peasantry
Llambí [1991] offers a useful regulatory framework for conceptualizing epochal change, although it is
hazardous to make claims for broad historical transitions of this nature, as does Bryceson [2000].
6. By focusing on parceleros—that is, recipients of parcelas or subdivided land plots in the agrarian
counter-reform—the analysis is shifted away from the minifundistas, temporary workers and other
peasant strata who are generally among the relatively deprived. The advantage of this methodological
procedure is simple: by studying parceleros, one obtains an idea of where the economic survival
threshold is located, precisely because this group should exhibit the greatest scope for economic
survival. If, as is argued here, relatively wellplaced elements among the parceleros are unable to
reproduce themselves economically, then this bodes ill for less well-placed elements in the rural
population as a whole.
7. On this process, see in particular Kay [2000], who argues that changes in the rural labour force in
post-1973 Chile have been very similar to those occurring in other Andean countries. Among other
things, these changes include the growth in agriculture of temporary and seasonal employment, as well
as the gendering of rural work (= more female labour).
8. Useful accounts, from different political perspectives, of the historical development of the rural
estate in central Chile are contained in the texts by Kay [1971; 1977a], Bauer and Johnson [1977:83–
102], Bauer [1975a], and Loveman [1976]. Equally valuable are microlevel accounts of the way in
which particular estates developed over time, such as the Hacienda 'El Huique' during the latter half of
the nineteenth century [Bauer, 1975b: 393–413], and the hacienda—together with its smallholding
tenants—in the Putaendo valley [Baraona, Aranda and Santana, 1961].
9. For the history and economic dynamics of the 1850s Chilean wheat boom, see Sepulveda [1959].
10. Details of the unequal land tenure system in Chile at this period are contained in texts such as that
by Urzúa [1969], and also in the influential countrywide report by CIDA [1966].
11. In a 1956 report prepared for ECLA on the subject of the economic difficulties facing Chile, Kaldor
[1964:233ff.] attributed inflation, a balance-of-payments deficit, and underdevelopment generally to
'social factors which hamper the free development of productive forces'. At the root of the problem was
the unequal access to land, a point he made in the following uncompromising manner [Kaldor,
1964:238]: 'ln the case of agriculture…the growth of an efficient enterprise depends not so much on the
accumulation of capital but on the acquisition of land. A class of efficient farmers cannot, merely
through the forces of competition, deprive the relatively inefficient farmers of their land—particularly
if the latter have individual holdings large enough to enable the owners to make a living despite
inefficient management and low productivity. Hence, if the land is firmly held by a class of large
landowners, the forces making for efficient leadership…in agriculture are largely inoperative; no
amount of market competition can cause the efficient units to grow beyond a certain point, if they
cannot force inefficient units with a stagnant outlook to surrender their land.' The conclusion by Kaldor
is salutary: 'There can be little doubt that the promotion of a vigorous entrepreneurial class in both
industry and agriculture is the main long-term requirement for economic development in Chile—at any
rate, so long as she remains, as she is likely to remain, a private enterprise society.'
12. It has been argued that Alessandri's pledge of agrarian reform was made largely in order to capture
the vote of the peasant population enfranchised in the early 1950s, and that he had no intention of ever
enacting his promised policy [Bengoa, 1982].
13. For the agrarian reform programme of the Frei government, see among others, Warriner [1969: Ch.
IX], Menjivar [1970], Petras and LaPorte [1971], and Kaufman [1972].
14. Agricultural labourers who worked on the estates, and poor peasant smallholders outside the estate
system, received no land. Excluded from the benefits of the Christian Democratic reform, rural
labourers and poor peasants voted for Allende's Popular Unity coalition in the 1970 elections. For a
case study of peasant land occupations during this period, see Petras and Zemelman Merino [1972].
15. For the agrarian policy of the Popular Unity government, see Allende [1973], Chonchol [1973], and
de Vylder [1976: Ch. 7].
16. In this connection it is important to understand that, in the main, shortages in foodstuffs were the
result not of economic inefficiency on the part of the reformed agricultural sector (as opponents of
Allende claimed), but rather of an increase in the economic capacity to consume among the very poor.
As de Vylder [1976:202] points out, 'the overall availability of foodstuffs in Chile is estimated to have
been some 27 per cent higher in 1972 than in 1970 …there can be little doubt that the Chilean people
had both more and better food at their disposal in 1971 and 1972 than before.'
17. The nature of agrarian transformation effected as a result of the Pinochet dictatorship is outlined in
the collection edited by Hojman [1993].
18. Outpacing in the process major fruit exporting nations, including South Africa, Australia, Argentina
and New Zealand (the former leader).
19. Indeed, by making the policy selective and consigning much of the minifundista and small farm
sector to the non-viable category, the state is explicitly admitting what it perceives as the inevitability
of the decline of the peasant sector and the desirability of that outcome.
20. The 'populations' from which the grower samples were drawn were derived by checking down the
agricultural roles and counting off the number of growers with plots of less than 10 hectares.
21. Since the late 1980s, however, the peak price period has moved back to late November, favouring
regions further north. Minute changes in demand conditions and price movements can affect spatial
outcomes enormously.
22. This measure refers to land already in productive use and land planted with fruit trees in formation
[CIREN-CORFO, 1992].
23. It is estimated that close to 75 per cent of the region's 16,000 growers have plots of less than 10
hectares [Gomez and Echeñique, 1989].
24. A bilateral monopoly is a market characterized by a company which is simultaneously the single
seller (monopoly) and single buyer (monopsony).
25. Although contrary to appearances the settlement takes much of its water from another dam in an
adjoining valley system.
26. These comments are ascribable to a small grower from San Antonio, interviewed in March 1995.
27. This comment is ascribable to the son of a small-scale grower from Santa Rosa, who was
interviewed in September 1994.
28. This variety is the grape for the cautious farmer. It has been a steady performer over the years and is
considered relatively predictable. For peasant farmers who are unable to take the risk of venturing into
more exotic varieties it represents a sensible choice. In this context, an interesting story was related by a
grower who wished to remain nameless. This particular man was advised by an agronomist from Río
Blanco to plant grapes of the 'Ribier' variety in 1988. According to this agronomist, this was the 'grape
of the future'. The grower followed this advice, and re-planted half of his parcela (about 2.5 hectares).
Returns for the 'Ribier' were so low that he ran up a debt of nearly US$23,000. He received no
compensation for the bad advice from the company. This kind of anecdote preys heavily on the mind of
many growers—it was repeated on numerous occasions, and was often used as a good reason not to
diversify production.
29. This information was gleaned by an analysis of the roles for the district.
30. A new clause which appeared in the early 1990s contracts absolved firms of responsibility for
produce until it was in the possession of the purchaser at the final destination. This came about
following the 'poison grape' episode where a cyanide-laced grape was allegedly found in a shipment to
the USA and the cargo had to be destroyed. By including the 'catastrophe' clause firms would be free of
responsibility to compensate farmers in such cases. Needless to say, farmers did not often take out
insurance to cover such losses.
31. In this context a local lawyer—who has made his business representing small farmers -estimated
that in 60 per cent of cases profit returns were underestimated when reported back to the growers.
32. This probably underestimates the true extent of corporate ownership, however, given the ploy of
using private names in order to shield against taxation. This also means that levels of concentration are
also underestimated.
33. There is a province of Curicó, a comuna of Curicó, and a city of Curicó. Chile is organized into
regions, which are subdivided into provinces. These are further subdivided into comunas. East Curicó
refers to the eastern portion of the comuna.
34. This plan involved a range of initiatives intended to stimulate fruit production (especially for
export) and laid the seeds of later macroeconomic successes. Investment in infrastructure, training,
adaptation and technology was centred on Curicó.
35. This contrasts with the spatial structure existent in the Norte Chico where packing facilities and
cool storage facilities tend to be separated. The former are usually located very close to the inland fruit
supply area, whilst the latter are clustered in one area in the port of Coquimbo. The reason for this is
that Curicó is located at a greater distance from its port, Valparaiso. Therefore, the fruit must be cooled
ready for the relatively long journey (6–8 hours) to port in special 'cool' trucks. In the Norte Chico
however, the fruit can be taken the relatively short distance to Coquimbo (1–2 hours) and cooled there.
36. Companies that do not pre-determine from whom they will procure produce through contract
arrangements are here referred to as 'footloose' companies. These companies often function with
unwritten agreements concerning their suppliers, but never get involved in the granting of credit or any
other aspect of the CCC system. Companies determine from whom they will buy according to the
nature of the harvest, and the conditions in the global market. They generally pay for produce on the
spot. Most of the footloose firms in the Curicó sample were independent (often comprising large-scale
growers, or former fruit export company employees) although some were backed by the large-scale
firms. The footloose companies tend to hire space from the larger companies in order to pack produce.
37. Strictly speaking, these communities do not represent parcelaciones in the same sense as the reform
projects in El Palqui.
38. Like the Thompson seedless grape variety, these are the most sensible choices for peasants who
cannot take the risk with 'novelty' varieties. Richard Delicious and Granny Smith have performed well
globally. However, the markets for these varieties are now almost completely saturated.
39. According to anecdotal evidence many local growers lost their land in the late 1980s. Unfortunately
the methodological bias built into the field research (i.e. of 'selecting those that have had already been
selected') means that the experiences of these early losers are missed.
40. And ultimately, one might argue, the Northern consumers whose preferences drive the market,
demanding ever cheaper fruit from an increasingly over-exploited environment in increasingly
vulnerable communities.
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Globalization and the Reinvention of Andean Tradition:
The Politics of Community and Ethnicity in Highland
Bolivia

JOHN McNEISH
 INTRODUCTION

Travelling and working beyond the boundaries of their traditional

communities, rural populations in the Andean Highlands have never really
fitted with earlier categorizations of peasants as easily definable, harmonious
and isolated communities wholly reliant on gaining subsistence from working
their land. In an age of increasing globalization, in which the distances
travelled and the nature of work are changing worldwide, this has never been
more true than it is now. Back in 1967, historical events led Eric Wolf
[2001:232] to write that 'peasants are often merely spectators of political
struggles, or they may fantasize the sudden advent of millenium, without
specifying for themselves and their neighbours the many rungs on the
staircase of heaven.' It is argued below that present realities contradict this
statement: as a result of recent local government reforms, peasant inhabitants
of the community of Santuario de Quillacas in Highland Bolivia have become
locked into a negotiation over their identities as individuals and development
aspirations as a community with both the national state and the international
policy system. The analysis which follows suggests that, although
globalization is responsible for an increase in the spread and economic
diversification of rural Andean communities, local people continue to ground
their different identities in a sense of tradition and past. Described below are
the complex ways in which the inhabitants of Santuario de Quillacas mediate
present political conditions through an internal discourse,
involving conflicting interpretations of personal and historical memories. Of
particular significance, and the central focus of the article, is the way in
which an apparently arcane dispute over municipal status and boundaries is
used by local people as a means to understand and devise contrasting
strategies for dealing with the new economic and political interests created by
government reform.
 I

In 1994 Bolivia placed itself at the forefront of contemporary institutional

reform in Latin America with the announcement to National Congress of the
Laws of Popular Participation (Ley de Participación Popular) and of
Administrative Decentralization (Ley de Decentralización Administrativa).1
By introducing these laws, and making a conscious break with a political past
identified with the over-centralization of government and the marginalization
of the vast majority of the rural population, the Sánchez de Lozada
administration was considered by many commentators to be embarking on
the most challenging exercise in social reform seen in the country since the
Bolivian Revolution of 1952 [Blackburn and Holland, 1998; Booth, Clisby
and Widmark, 1995, 1997; Albó 1996].
 GLOBALIZATION, DECENTRALIZATION AND POPULAR
PARTICIPATION

Described as a programme for 'municipalization plus popular vigilance', the

popular participation legislation had the combined effect of decentralizing a
significant percentage of government expenditure to local government
budgets, the creation of new opportunities for rural communities to partake in
the planning and regulation of local government, and formal recognition of
indigenous and popular organizations as political entities with rights. Under
the administrative decentralization law, non-payroll responsibilities of central
government ministries—including health and education—were devolved to
the departmental level, and for the first time prefectural governments at those
levels were advised by and made accountable to elected councils representing
the municipalities of their area. Although introduced a year later than the
popular participation legislation, the administrative decentralization law had
in fact been conceived as the functional basis for governmental reform, but
had taken longer to pass through Congress as a result of conservative political
opposition. Taken in tandem, the two pieces of legislation were claimed by
the Sánchez de Lozada administration to provide a comprehensive plan for
the creation of a less top-heavy and more integrated and democratic state, in
which there would be greater opportunity for formerly disenfranchised
groups of non-Hispanic ethnicities to find representation.
Bolivian legislation about popular participation and administrative
decentralization has largely been portrayed by government, media and social
commentators alike as the radical and original response by the Sanchez de
Lozada administration to social pressures within the country.2 Although the
legislation was clearly a response to civil society, this interpretation neglects
the way in which it built upon relatively long-established currents in Bolivian
politics. It also glosses over the fact that it was both broad public and narrow
private sectors of civil society that pushed for change. Importantly for this
article, it also ignores the direct and indirect pressure imposed on the country
and national government by international economic and political forces.

Peasant and Nation in Bolivia

Over the last 20 years or so, Bolivian politics has undergone great
transformation, almost as great as that brought about by the National
Revolution in 1952 which ended the conservative rule of large landlords and
mine-owners, and resulted in the introduction of universal suffrage as well as
widespread agrarian reform [Kohl, 1978; Klein, 1992]. In 1982, following a
break of more than a decade of military rule, Bolivia returned to a
representative democratic governmental structure. This return to democracy
is largely recognized as the result of pressure by international and national
business for the country to restructure and gain control of its corrupt and
ailing economy [Lee Van Cott, 2000:131]. However, just as in 1952, there is
also some recognition of the centrality of the peasant majority in Bolivia in
pushing through political change. Many observers consider the relentless
militant mobilization of the country's politicized and wellorganized peasant
union to be the key to the final destabilization of the military government
[Rivera Cusicanqui, 1987; Albó, 1994].3 Indeed, it can be argued that despite
the radical transformation of politics in Bolivia, the sustainability of political
trends and governments remains to a great extent reliant on the goodwill and
support of the country's rural population [Ríos Reinaga, 1967; Léons, 1970].
The necessity of a pact between government and peasantry in Bolivia has
resulted in a long-established practice of political bargaining in which
'sweeteners', in the form of favourable legislation and rural development
projects, are created by successive governments so as to reproduce a situation
in which power is centralized in the hands of the country's urban criollo
(creoles) and mestizo population [Platt, 1982, 1984].4 In this light, the current
legislation about popular participation and decentralization can be understood
in the same way as the agrarian reform programme of 1953 [Carter, 1964,
1971; Menjivar, 1969; Pearse, 1975; Hahn, 1991]. In short, although
legislation was formed in response to national and international business
interests for greater liberalization of government and economy [Laserna,
1994; Urioste and Baldomar, 1996], it is evident from the political history
and literature written in the country over the last 20 years that its introduction
was a pragmatic attempt to respond to growing demands by peasants and the
indigenous population for increased political representation, and to secure
their acceptance for the wider actions of government [McNeish, 2001;
Untoja, 1992; Rojas Ortuste, 1994; Cárdenas, 1988; CIPCA, 1991; Medina,
1992, Cuadros, 1991; Ticona, Rodriguez and Albó, 1995].
Popular participation and decentralization are now widely celebrated in the
development literature as institutional responses to the challenges of
economic regionalism, development planning and the distribution and
balance of power. In Latin America, schemes for administrative
decentralization of the state and participatory development were, with few
exceptions, introduced by most governments—including advocates of neo-
liberal economic policy—during the 1980s. In Africa, state-run programmes
for participatory development and decentralization have been nearly as
widespread as in Latin America: for example, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Uganda,
Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Botswana and South Africa to name but a few [Skou,
2000; Crook and Manor, 1998; Good, 1996; Mohan, 1996; Steifel and Wolfe,
1994; Erikson, Naustalstid and Shou, 1999]. In Asia various experiments
with state-sponsored programmes for popular participation in development
and decentralization have also been undertaken, in India, Bangladesh, the
Philippines, Nepal and China [Crook and Manor, 1998; Webster, 1992, 1999;
Zuo, 1997; White, 1999]. Programmes for democratic local governance have
also been introduced as part of the package of reform in a number of
European and former Soviet Union countries [Blair, 2000].
Governments and supporters of the programmes in NGO circles back
administrative decentralization as a way to improve both the efficiency and
the responsiveness of governmental institutions. Although claiming the
home-grown nature of their respective reforms, national governments appear
to learn from each other in including popular participation as the necessary
responsive ingredient in their decentralization process [Martinez, 1996].
Whilst this learning process appears to originate at home in most countries,
the influence both of economics and of international organizations such as the
UN, the IMF, and the World Bank on those countries which have continued
with programmes of popular participation and decentralization is
unmistakable [Palma Caravajal, 1995; Montano, 1996; Ospina, 1997]. In
Bolivia the World Bank was a key player in pushing through legislation for
local government reform, the financing of the implementation of reform, and
the blueprint for participation in planning. In Latin America popular
participation and decentralization programmes were not only the result of a
regional political mood-swing, but by and large carried out as a part of the
structural adjustment process at the behest and with the support of the
international community represented by the UNDP (United Nations
Development Programme) and the World Bank [Tendler, 1999; Palma
Caravajal, 1995; Martinez, 1996; Stiefel and Pearce, 1982]. The
municipality, a legacy of the centralized Napoleonic state structure shared by
many countries in the region, was to be recast and granted a key role in most
new programmes for administrative decentralization [Nickson, 1997].
 THE CONTEXT: SANTUARIO DE QUILLACAS

Santuario de Quillacas is a municipality of principally Aymara-speaking

subsistence farmers and pastoralists located on the Southern Bolivian
altiplano at an altitude of 3,800 metres (12,500 feet) in the Southern Bolivian
Department of Oruro. As is evident from the name itself, the community of
Santuario de Quillacas is known to Bolivians not only as a small municipality
but also as a major religious sanctuary. Each year on 14 September, people
from all over the Bolivian Highlands and from as far away as northern
Argentina and Chile descend on the municipal capital of Quillacas, on
pilgrimage to celebrate the feast of Señor de la Exaltación. The local image of
Christ Crucified, known as Tata Quillacas, is held to be a miraculous suma
miriku, or a doctor with exceptional curative powers.
Despite its current small population of around 2,265 inhabitants, the
community of Santuario de Quillacas has had its own municipal government
since 1962. Together with environmental change and the reduction of the
railway services over the last 30 years, the crash in tin prices and
privatization of the mining industry have also been responsible for forcing
many Quillacans to leave the area in search of seasonal employment.
However, men still seek employment in the nearby mines of Totorani,
Collowara and Huanuni.5 In addition to seasonal work in the mines, short
periods of work are also carried out in the cities or richer agricultural areas in
the eastern lowlands (Chapare, Santa Cruz). One or two individuals in the
town of Quillacas have also managed to make enough money to buy
themselves trucks, which they use to tender for haulage work between the
major Highland and Lowland cities. On their way they carry local produce
from one ecological area to sell or exchange in the next.
Unlike other municipalities in the Highlands of Bolivia, in Quillacas there are
no large landowners and no visible remains of a hacienda system. Modern
cantonal divisions within the municipality correspond more or less to the
boundaries of pre-existing ayllu subdivisions. While there are clearly some
common features in this widespread organizational and structural feature of
Andean society—the common ownership of land, the Chinese box
subdivision of the community, the importance of kinship and ancestors, and
connected system of rotating local leadership—the truth is that there exists
considerable variance in the form and meaning of the ayllu.6 In Quillacas it is
the ayllu mayor (main ayllu) which is considered to be the maximal body of
people and land that is their community. Within this maximal body the
community is segmented into four sections or ayllus menores (minor ayllus),
which are groups based on kinship and virilocality. It is these ayllus menores
which correspond with municipal cantonal subdivisions. Within each of the
five ayllu menores that make up the ayllu mayor land is again subdivided.
The landscape surrounding each of the villages and settlements is divided,
often quite roughly, and people can only work the land, keep animals, or
build their estancias or ranchos (farms or ranches) on parcels belonging to
the ayllu or sub-ayllu into which they are born or marry.
In common with other colonial towns—for example, Yura [Rasnake, 1988]
or K'ulta [Abercrombie, 1998]—this division of territory according to the five
ayllus is repeated even in the town and villages of Santuario de Quillacas.
Neighbourhoods and streets are again divided according to ayllu, and people
reside side by side with their fellow ayllu members. Separately the central
square and churchyard are also divided according to ayllu. During festivals,
religious parades and rituals, ayllu members and their musicians take up
positions, lead off from and carry out libations, divinations and sacrifices in
these areas where—like them—their ancestors are held to reside. In simple
terms, then, what the ayllu consists of is a classificatory system which locates
its subject within a predefined Andean society, and thus a space which, albeit
imperfect and frequently broken, emanates out from the church and square of
the central marka, through the streets, out into the landscape, between
different communities to the common borders of their greater community, the
ayllu mayor.

The Sevaruyo-Soraga Conflict

In April 1998 Don Eleuterio, the Mayor of Santuario de Quillacas, was

handed a letter by a town inhabitant returning from market in Oruro.7 That
night the contents were read out at a meeting of the municipal council. The
letter announced the holding of an extraordinary meeting of the Civic
Committee (Comité Cívico), a migrant residents' organization, in Oruro, to
which all interested residents were invited. There was a rumour amongst
officials of the Departmental Prefecturate that the Bolivian National Senate
was in the process of discussing the ending of Santuario de Quillacas's status
as a municipality, and the annexation of its political jurisdiction by a
neighbouring municipality and province. The meeting in Oruro was aimed at
fielding and finding solutions that could address the threat posed to the
continued existence of Quillacas' government. The municipality was asked to
prepare a report of its accounts, development plan and status in relation to the
implementation of the popular participation and decentralization laws;
information which the Civic Committee considered important indicators of
their chances in government debates about their future.
The reason behind the National Senate's review of Santuario de Quillacas's
municipal status lay with the history of conflict between the municipal
authorities based in the town of Quillacas and the inhabitants of an outlying
canton. In 1996 the municipal government in Quillacas received notification
that in carrying out its duty under the popular participation legislation—that
is, redrawing territorial and judicial boundaries—the National Boundary
Commission (CONLIT) had accepted an application by the canton of
Sevaruyo-Soraga, to the southwest of Quillacas, to shift its political and
judicial affiliation to the municipality of Huari in the province of Sebastian
Pagador (see Map 1). For the municipal government of Santuario de
Quillacas, the decision by CONLIT came as shocking news. Although there
had been tensions between the government and the canton for some time,
cantonal leaders had not received an invitation to the meeting in Pazna where
the decision had been taken. Since being returned from Huari to Quillacan
administrative jurisdiction in 1994 following the introduction of popular
participation, there had been some grumbling amongst cantonal leaders about
being forced to join a poorer municipality. However, nothing had been said
about a complete change in political affiliation. Although it had been a part of
Sebastian Pagador for 12 years, in historical and cultural terms Sevaruyo-
Soraga had always been considered an integral member of the greater
community of Quillacas. Besides the loss of territory, losing the canton's
population of around 700 people [National Institute of Statistics, 1992] meant
that the per capita resources received by the municipality through provision
of popular participation—that is, the coparticipación tributaria—would now
be greatly reduced.
The municipality of Santuario de Quillacas felt cheated by the actions of
Sevaruyo-Soraga and Sebastian Pagador. Quillacas had supported the
creation of the province of Sebastian Pagador and the municipality of Huari
in 1982, even though this had physically separated Quillacas from the rest of
the province of Avaroa of which it remained part politically. With this
redrawing of the boundaries, Santuario de Quillacas changed from being the
third to the second section of the province of Avaroa. Although this improved
its administrative status, and the members of the municipal

MAP 1

AVAROA PROVINCE, DEPARTMENT OF ORURO, BOLIVIA

Source: Ministerio de Desarrollo Humano, Secretaria de Participación Popular, Bolivia.

government of Santuario de Quillacas feared that physical separation from

Avaroa might harm communication with the provincial government in
Challapata, they nonetheless agreed to the creation of Sebastian Pagador. It
appeared that the administrative entity Quillacas had helped create had turned
against it by agreeing to the annexation of Sevaruyo-Soraga. Envoys from
Quillacas travelled to the canton and to the neighbouring municipality to see
if they could stop the proceedings. However, in view of the economic value
of their decisions, the public representatives of the administrations of Huari
and Sevaruyo-Soraga remained unmoved by Quillacan objections.
Since popular participation funding to the municipalities is calculated on a
per capita basis, Huari was keen to obtain the financial advantage of raising
its overall population. Sevaruyo-Soraga, disappointed at the slow pace of
development in the municipality of Santuario de Quillacas, stated that it had
been considering such a shift in political affiliation for some time. Indeed, its
application to become a canton had been inspired by a desire to secure
autonomy from Santuario de Quillacas and redefine its administrative
position in relation to the state through permanent administrative union with
the wealthier province of Sebastian Pagador. Quillacas knew this. Now with
the legal re-demarcation of municipal boundaries carried out under the
popular participation law, the opportunity to join the richer municipality of
Huari had arisen. The leaders hoped that the shift in political affiliation would
see investment in their area rise.
According to municipal authorities in Quillacas they had been powerless to
stop this situation from arising. The municipality of Santuario de Quillacas
had been severely slowed down in its use of popular participation financing
due to a serious error made during the original drafting of the law. In 1994,
the Bolivian state issued Supreme Decree No. 23943, which listed the 311
municipalities recognized under Law 1551 as recipients of per capita funding:
the list itself was published.8 It did not include the municipality of Santuario
de Quillacas. Without the official recognition conferred by this document, the
first year of financing bypassed Santuario de Quillacas, and was transferred
entirely to Huari. The following year the municipality's complaints and proof
of its right to be recognized under this law stopped the flow of money away
from its community. However its municipal accounts were frozen until
legislative recognition in May 1996 made its existence official in the eyes of
national government.9 As a result of these problems, the municipality of
Santuario de Quillacas experienced severe delay in its efforts to introduce and
finance development initiatives throughout its territory. The leaders of the
communities within the canton of Sevaruyo-Soraga refused, however, to
accept this as a suitable excuse for what they considered to be the poor
administration of their area.
Unable to change the decisions of its neighbours, the municipal government
of Santuario de Quillacas looked for an alternative way out of the crisis.
Together with the Civic Committee in Oruro, it put together a case against the
official decision made by CONLIT. The National Senate, the Sub-Secretary
of Popular Participation, the National Directorate of Territorial Boundaries
and the Military Geographical Institute were each sent a series of documents.
These documents not only demonstrated the lawful constitution of the
municipality by President Paz Estensorro in 1961, but the historical
connection of the canton of Sevaruyo-Soraga to Quillacas. Letters sent with
these documents also argued that CONLITs decision had been unlawful.
Contrary to legal procedure, none of the Quillacan officials had been invited
to attend the meeting in Pazna. It was pointed out that without the signature
of the President of the Republic the document approving the canton's
annexation was invalid. Notarized reports that officials of CONLIT had
accepted bribes from the municipality of Huari were also included.
Although the case remained unresolved throughout 1996, 1997 and 1998, the
submission of a legal case to the correct authorities meant that CONLIT and
the province of Sebastian Pagador were temporarily unable to proceed with
the annexation of the canton of Sevaruyo-Soraga. Santuario de Quillacas's
boundaries remained intact, and with the passing of the 'Law of the Creation
of each municipality' the municipality of Santuario de Quillacas began to
receive co-participacion funds. According to the law of popular participation,
they were free for the time being to look for other external sponsors for local
development projects. Municipal structures were more or less in place, and
Quillacas's annual plan (POA) and municipal development plan (PDM) had
received official ratification. To try and demonstrate goodwill to Sevaruyo-
Soraga, the canton was earmarked within these plans for a considerable rise
in investment and development. However, despite the efforts made by the
mayor and the Centre for Training and Socio-Economic Development
(CCEDSE) to discuss possible projects with the canton, its leaders and
inhabitants refused to negotiate.10
As opposition continued and escalated throughout 1997 and into 1998, the
conflict began to create such tensions that Don Eleuterio and some of his
colleagues were verbally abused and threatened by people in Sevaruyo-
Soraga.11 The road leading from the town of Quillacas to Sevaruyo was
blockaded with large boulders, and visiting officials' vehicles were stoned. A
few weeks prior to the arrival of the letter, the departmental Prefect and
police officers had been called in to try and calm down the situation, and to
guarantee both sides that a final decision on their case would be made shortly
by the national government.
 RURAL GRASSROOTS MOBILIZATION

Given the precious time away from their fields and the long journey they had
made to get there, the turnout for the Civic Committee meeting held in the
draughty 'Market-Traders' Union Hall' in Oruro was quite impressive. As the
numbers rose in the meeting hall the leader of the Civic Committee started
proceedings by offering formal greetings to all who had arrived, before going
on to describe the subject and direction of the meeting. The meeting first
considered the report from the Alcaldía before proceeding to the question of
how to deal with the current problem. As formal greetings were made, in
addition to vecino residents the names of outlying village and hamlet
representatives were warmly repeated. Given the main topic of the meeting
there was a notable exception. Despite the great turnout for the meeting,
nobody from the canton of Sevaruyo-Soraga was present.

The Conflict Addressed

In his account of the municipality's current situation, Don Eleuterio began by

recounting the problems they had experienced as a result of the conflict with
Sevaruyo-Soraga. He explained that although they had received the
development funds promised by popular participation legislation, the
municipal administrative budget was still struggling to cover the cost of
certain functionaries. According to Don Eleuterio, the Alcaldía in Quillacas
was experiencing problems making the 15 per cent of co-participación
tributaria funds allocated to the running of the municipal government stretch
to cover some of their costs, including the wages of two of its staff (the
Contador, or accountant, and the Oficial Mayor, the general administrator).
An inspection made by the Vice-Ministry of Popular Participation of the
municipal government the previous month had given their adoption of the
new administrative structures the official all-clear. So far they had not been
able to produce many visible signs of 'public works' (obras publicas), but the
municipal accounts had received co-participación tributaria financing, as
well as further funds, from the Social Investment Fund (FIS) and the
Departmental Prefecture for the planned electrification of the towns of
Quillacas and Sevaruyo. To this funding a number of international and
national NGOs had added considerable sums of money to finance a range of
local development projects.12 However, the conflict with the canton of
Sevaruyo-Soraga, and the long drawn out process of changeover in
government following the last election, had considerably slowed down the
implementation of these projects. Without the cooperation of all the
inhabitants of the municipality he feared that any attempts to speed up these
works could mean the freezing of their accounts for another year.
Following the Alcalde's account of the current situation, a number of
comments made by authorities and individuals in the audience began to
reveal hitherto undisclosed opinions and information.13 First, Don Crecencio
Huaylla, President of the Vigilance Committee, stood up and announced that,
in adjusting to his new position, he had struggled greatly to understand the
complexities and meaning of the reforms for the community and its
government. In the municipality of Santuario de Quillacas, grassroots
organizations (OTBs) representing the four cantons and a Vigilance
Committee had been registered successfully soon after the introduction of
reform. Although he had taken over the role of Vigilance Committee
president without any previous experience of public office, Don Crecencio
complained had been expected to come to terms with the demands of his new
job without formal training or a wage. Together with the grassroots
organizations, he observed, he had successfully conducted workshops in
order to gain an understanding of people's interests and opinions, and what
they wanted by way of development planning and investment. In the course
of these activities he had encountered other individuals and groups who were
similarly confused and struggling to understand the complex legal
requirements of the new laws: The people of the rinconada don't understand
why money can't be handed directly to them', he said, 'why does the
government need to oversee and control local decisions in this way?'
Building on the Spanish word for corner (rincón), the term rinconada is used
by people in the town of Quillacas to refer to the outlying settlements that
belong to their municipal and Ayllu area. Although the word is often used in a
neutral sense, conversations with inhabitants of Quillacas revealed that the
term was often used in a negative context. It conveyed the sense of non-
vecinos as peripheral, and therefore less aware of or connected to the loci of
administrative power and decision-making. Although its critical use is
significant in terms of an 'us/them' differentiating mechanism, here Don
Crecencio uses it in a way that sets up another 'us/them' distinction.
Specifically, he appeals to the mainly vecino audience to understand that
cantonal views of recent local government reform differed little from those of
people living in the town: in his words, 'They had paid the taxes required
under governmental decentralization, but under the new system of popular
participation was this not meant to be their money, to be directed by them, to
address local needs and development? Why did this money have to pass
through the state system at all?'
From the sounds of obvious approval and the nodding of heads, these
sentiments appeared to find widespread support among those present at the
meeting. According to Article 5 of the Decreto Reglamentario de los
aspectos economicos y patrimoniales de la Ley de Participacion Popular,
(Decreto Supremo, No. 23813, June 1994), citizens of a municipality are
expected to pay tax for their ownership of all urban and rural property and
goods, and vehicles. Although older members of the community remembered
pre-revolutionary payments of a tasa, or poll tax, to the Oruro Prefectura, for
most Quillacans this was the first time in recent memory they had had to pay
any tax other than a small annual fee to the ancestral leaders for community
land use.
In response to Don Crecencio, Don Cirilio said that he for one was happy that
people in the municipality were complying with new tax requirements.
People should recognize that although the system was not as clear as it should
be, their taxes were beginning to feed back into the development funds
available to the municipality. In reading out the figures from the past three
years, Don Eleuterio demonstrated that their account had grown from
B$245,000 in 1996 to B$395,000 in 1998.14 There followed some prolonged
discussion before a member from the Civic Committee in Cochabamba rose
to his feet. His comment was that the municipal government of Santuario de
Quillacas was in need of some constructive criticism; that it appeared to have
a problem with communication. For the last two years it had not told the
residents what was happening with the money it was receiving. More regular
'economic reports' (informes económicos) and more information about the
legislation and how it worked were needed before any faith in their
possibilities could be created. To this the Alcalde openly apologized, adding
that 'in an ideal world…we would make more effort to communicate with
people.'
However, he went on to say that officially the role of introducing the system
of participatory planning, whereby community members could actively
participate in municipal development planning sessions, was to have been
taken care of by CCEDSE. He now admitted that this was problematic. This
was the first time that CCEDSE had dealt with this kind of work. Not only
were CCEDSE new to this kind of socio-political facilitation in general, but
they also admitted to lacking experience of dealing with the interests of an
ethnic rural community such as theirs. This initiated a discussion about
political and legal communication. Members of the community in the
audience voiced their concern, both about their own vulnerability and about
the lack of knowledge (escaso conocimiento) regarding the new legislation
and its meaning. These concerns were expressed in the following manner:
The laws express respect for our norms and customs, and promise a positive change in local
development, but still they appear to take little account of our lands, customs and culture. When other
laws, such as the agrarian reform of 1953, changed our government and rights to land, they too were
advertised and initially accepted as positive advances. However, these laws nearly resulted in the
destruction of the ayllus. What will stop these laws from having the same effect on our communities
now? …The reforms of the last government state that they will not disrupt our organizations, but they
still do. Popular participation, decentralization and INRA have all divided us more than ever before. Do
we not have natural rights to land and identity not given by national law? This is what we have to
remember! …We can adjust to the new system of government and perhaps receive some benefit from
it, but we need to think about our future. At two in the morning another decree can be passed and what
will we do? Still hope that the law benefits us?
As well as expressing present difficulties with the Bolivian state, the
audience's reactions to what had been said appeared to favour the avoidance
of future difficulties of the kind they now faced, through getting hold of more
information and improving the community's understanding of national
legislation. One member of the audience proposed that perhaps the best
source of this knowledge lay with the community's young people. Either the
latter, educated as they were in the urban ways of the city, could together
with the Bolivian government communicate their knowledge to the Civic
Committees, or young people in the secondary school in Quillacas might
receive special tuition from CCEDSE explaining the intricacies of political
and legislative structures. Don Eleuterio responded that he thought this a
good idea. However when he had tried in the past year to interest students in
the popular participation legislation, they had shown no interest in coming
along to meet the development specialists setting things up in the Alcaldía.
He had even toyed with the idea of having the specialists run computer
classes for a few teenagers on the new computer installed there. However, the
simple fact that young Quillacans saw their future linked to the city made
these initiatives unworkable. All he could think of doing in the meantime was
to ask the Federation of Southern Orureño Ayllus (FASOR), a local ethnic
political organization based in nearby Challapata, to come and give them
another public workshop about the working of the laws.15 Two months
before, on the day of the arrival of a representative of Oxfam America,
FASOR had organized a workshop in Quillacas to demonstrate their work in
community education about rights, law and identity. A number of other
workshops of this kind had been held in the area during the previous year.
Impatient to get on and address the problems at hand, Don Eleuterio now
urged the audience to think of what they were going to do in relation to the
Sevaruyo-Soraga problem. He repeated his fears that resistance to the
government's plans might compound difficulties generated by lack of
communication with the state, adding that: 'Central government always seems
to have a different perspective from ours. They often seem to have problems
integrating our ideas with the Departmental Development Plan.' Nonetheless,
he reminded them that what was at stake was not only the possibility of
losing their current right to manage their own development projects, but also
a complete loss of local self-government. Given this danger, he believed it
important to continue trying to win their case with the government and
offering the hand of friendship to the canton. Only in this way would they
secure the continued existence of the municipality of Santuario de Quillacas.
What were their opinions?

The Voice of the Rural Grassroots?

Don Julian, one of the ancestral authorities in the community, stood up for
the first time in the meeting. He stated that he for one was opposed to the
opinion of some residents that the exercise of physical pressure on the canton
was the way to stop their intended separation. He wanted the alcaldía to
continue down the path they had started. That was, to use existing laws to
solve their predicament. Obviously stung by his comment, the Alcalde
responded that he personally was not satisfied with this response, that he was
tired and lacked time to continue dealing with these problems on his own.
Now he wanted the ancestral leaders and the entire community to join him in
taking on responsibility for the conflict.
One of the municipal council members urged the community to continue
down the diplomatic path, but to work through some kind of independent
mediator: someone who could not be 'bought', perhaps someone from the
Catholic church who was not tempted by money might intervene on their
behalf. At this point, criticism was made concerning the loyalties of Don
Cirilio Villalobos, the Director of the Civic Committee: 'Why should we
listen to the thoughts of Señor Villalobos…he is not going to suffer the
consequences, is he? We are the ones who will suffer, aren't we? And if the
municipality disappears, we are the ones who will be guilty.' Two men from
the audience expressed their opinion that the diplomatic path taken by the
alcaldía was a waste of time. It was clear to them that to enter a dialogue
with the people of Sevaruyo was impossible. Such people should be forced to
understand and accept the justice of the municipal government's location in
the town of Quillacas: 'They refuse to accept or discuss anything other than
their aspiration to join Sebastian Pagador. With this kind of people it is
impossible to progress.'
Don René Jallaza, President of the Civic Committee in La Paz, who was
clearly bothered by the direction of the preceding discussion, managed to
attract the meeting's attention by standing up and waving his hat. A
businessman by profession, Don René clearly had learnt some skills in
presentation: having received permission to speak, he walked to the front of
the audience with a flip-chart and felt-pens. Turning to the audience he
commented: 'lt's clear that someone has to lose this conflict and, considering
all the facts, it looks like it will be Quillacas.' Perhaps by not complying with
the letter of the law, he said, CONLIT and Sevaruyo-Soraga had indeed
exposed a great weakness in their case. Quillacans, however, should

recognize that there were too many factors that would swing the situation in
favour of their rivals in Huari. Their municipality's lack of territorial
continuity with the rest of the province of Avaroa and insufficient population
size—fewer than 5,000 inhabitants—meant that they did not even meet the
basic legal requirements for the constitution of a municipality required by the
Law of Popular Participation and the will of central government.16 Sooner or
later, these deficiencies would be addressed by the Bolivian State. He
reminded his audience that Quillacans should also recognize that, however
unfair it might be, Huari had much more money to play with than the
Santuario de Quillacas; money which they could not only use to bribe
government officials at national and departmental levels, but which also
made their claim to exist and expand appear all the more plausible.
Don René continued by saying that it appeared that the leaders and residents
refused to accept, or were unaware of the fact that, the majority of
communities in the municipality of Santuario de Quillacas were in favour of
annexation by another province. To show this, he wrote down the names of
all the settlements belonging to the community of Quillacas, and asked the
members of the municipal council to report in turn which communities were
to their certain knowledge presently for and against its control of local
government (see Table 1). The diagram he produced clearly showed that,
despite municipal leaders' and townspeople's protestations, the majority of
settlements in the municipality were in favour of joining the richer
neighbouring province. He said that other settlement leaders were tired of
waiting for the municipality to deliver them support. With this, Don René
concluded that Quillacans should accept their fate. It would better for their
community if they find themselves the best possible deal within the coming
annexation. This would reduce the effect on the population and boundaries of
their community. After all Santuario de Quillacas was a religious sanctuary
and ayllu before it was ever a municipality.
A later show of hands would show that the majority of people at the meeting
considered this to be defeatist talk. As the meeting drew to a close it became
clear that the majority of town residents and municipal representatives were
in favour of continuing negotiations with the government and Sevaruyo-
Soraga. If a neighbouring province annexed them, they would have to accept
a reduction in their political status, from a section to a canton. From this
diminution would stem a loss both of their right to self-government and a
significant proportion of their population.
Discussion then turned to how they could strengthen their current position as
an ethnically distinct people—that is to say, as an Aymara-speaking
community—with an independent local government. Surprisingly, although
some of the municipal authorities and town residents were aware of this
alternative—looking to form a mancomunidad with an adjoining municipality
(Pampa Aullagas, Ladislao Cabrera)—this option did not enter their
discussions.17 In later interviews with municipal authorities, it was made
clear that despite the fact that such an arrangement would have strengthened
their numbers and their finances, they were frightened that such a move
would mean a reduction in their overall administrative control. It was quite
obvious that—where local leaders and the leading families were concerned—
there was also a considerable amount of pride involved in choosing to
continue to remain independent. Instead, the meeting proposed that in
addition to the legal actions already taken by the municipality, some attempt
must be made to study the possibility of having the state recognize their
status as an indigenous municipality.
It was suggested that perhaps the government might grant their community
more secure status if, as in the case of the nearby communities of Coroma
and Santa Ana de Chipaya, the special nature of their history as a distinct
political and cultural centre was formally recognized. Under the special
conditions set by the law of popular participation, ethnic communities can
apply for legal recognition as indigenous municipal sections. Within existing
municipal structures, this gives them a legal right to have their leaders occupy
the local positions of cantonal municipal agents. It also gives them legal right
to apply for funding specially allocated by government and other
organizations to indigenous peoples and their interests. However, that these
communities were recognized legally as dependent indigenous municipal
sections, and not as autonomous municipalities in their own right, was a
consideration that municipal leaders in Quillacas failed to take into account.
It was with these ideas in mind that the meeting in Oruro finally came to a
close. Different opinions, ideas and disagreements had all been voiced, but
the municipal government had somehow managed to come out with its
existing strategy intact. The idea of becoming an indigenous municipality
would be looked into, but the municipal government would continue to rely
on the legal case it had submitted.

The Conflict Unresolved

In the weeks and months that followed the meeting in Oruro, the conflict
between Quillacas and the canton of Sevaruyo-Soraga remained a major
preoccupation of all the inhabitants in the town. The latter discussed the most
recent developments in the situation on a daily basis, however small they
might be. In conversations about the conflict and legal case it became
obvious that opinions in the town were becoming increasingly divided over
what was happening, and what should be done to resolve the conflict. As the
situation worsened and their efforts appeared to be getting nowhere, a
growing number of people were in favour of changing the strategy employed
by the municipal government. The Prefectura in Oruro and the National
Senate appeared to have forgotten their case. Except for building a block of
public toilets and showers in the main square and improvements to the local
schools, all other development projects appeared to have been suspended
until the end of the conflict. As more town residents aligned themselves with
the view that 'perhaps annexation by a neighbouring province wouldn't be so
bad', the verbal battle lines for those implacably opposed to compromise
became more and more forcefully drawn. For vecinos allied with the alcaldia,
talk of annexation was cowardly. These weren't real Quillacans speaking.
Real Quillacans would keep on fighting for their political rights. After all,
they had always been the centre of government in the area. They couldn't just
give that up now. For other vecinos lacking political influence or ties to local
government an administrative shift increasingly seemed logical and
necessary. Their municipality was too small and too poor to continue on its
own. At Don Vicente's home there were regular discussions and occasional
arguments between the extended family members and neighbours who met to
talk and eat together in the evenings.
As relations between individuals and settlements worsened, Don Vicente was
asked as one of the ayllu's ancestral leaders to come and conduct wilanchas,
or sacrifices, for the local ancestors and spirits of the town, the canton of
Sevaruyo-Soraga and other neighbouring hamlets. People hoped that by
asking for the ancestors' help, the hostility in the community might be
dispelled and peace return to their land. During the procession celebrating the
festival of Santa Vera Cruz,18 the priest stopped at each shrine in the
churchyard to offer prayers about the conflict with Sevaruyo-Soraga, and
asked for peace in the ayllu which tended the shrine concerned. In response
to calls from local people, the priest held a special mass in the church of
Quillacas at the start of July, calling for reconciliation through prayer and
blessing. When reports and stories of similar, but much more violent, inter-
and intra-community conflicts in nearby rural locations such as Qaqachaka or
K'ulta were told or read about in La Patría, the main newspaper in Oruro,
people in Quillaca made comparisons with their own situation. What could be
done, they asked one another, to stop things getting so out of hand?19 During
1997 and 1998 some 14 people had died as a result of the conflict between
Qaqachaka and their Laymi and Jucumani neighbours. A riot in Challapata
between opposing K'ulta cantons vying for position as the site of a new
municipal capital had put two people in hospital with severe injuries. Aware
of such episodes in these neighbouring communities, vecinos and rinconada
alike in the municipality of Santuario de Quillacas were concerned that their
own dispute might end in bloodshed. By August 1998, when I departed from
the community, these concerns were still apparent. After two years of
arguments, blockades, insults, and finally state intervention, the conflict with
Sevaruyo-Soraga remained unresolved.20
 II

As is evident from the above account, the inhabitants of Santuario de

Quillacas are not passive onlookers where the recent process of local
government reform in Bolivia is concerned. Through their meetings and
conflicts with one another and the state, they struggle over the meaning of
and form taken by the international development policies they consider to
have been imposed on them. This process is not without its problems, and
highlights the fact that peasants in this context approach the question of
change from different political and economic perspectives. Although it is not
possible to address all of these perspectives, the second part of this article
will focus on the way in which the antinomic conditions of antagonism and
solidarity are formed and reproduced. This is a complex process which, it is
argued here, lies at the heart of the different ways in which the government
reforms (popular participation, administrative decentralization) have been
experienced by and impacted upon the rural population in the locality.
Without examining these contradictory processes, neither the significance of
local power relations nor the dynamics of linkages with the state and
development policies would be evident. A central claim is that in Santuario
de Quillacas the past—or rather the way in which the past is understood and
(re-) interpreted in the present—is a key ideological and political resource in
the course of current decision-making by those at the rural grassroots. In
short, peasants with different material and class interests mobilize specific
images of the past as part of a specific strategy that is supportive of their own
particular interests. To a considerable extent, therefore, these ideological
constructions and understandings of the past explain why different segments
of the rural population act in the way they do.
 LEARNING TO SEE THE PRESENT THROUGH THE PAST

Quillacans draw upon different sources in their efforts to form an

understanding of their own past. If they have gone to school to any level they
will have received some kind of instruction about the defining moments of
the country's history. However, in learning these dates of formation, battles
and retreat, no official mention is made of their own community's history and
past. The latter has no place in Bolivian children's battered jotters and
notebooks. For most Quillacans, therefore, the story about their own
particular municipality, ayllu, and religious sanctuary, is something they
absorb on a quotidian basis, by living in the community and participating in
its organization and routines. It is a story that is built cumulatively: a form of
knowledge that never arrives all at once, but is rather acquired in fragments
throughout their lifetimes. Some families in the village have stores of old
documents they try to preserve: papers which their grandparents or ancestors
either wrote or received, a record of their past lives. These are occasionally
searched for and pulled out, but more commonly they are talked about, as
material proof of experience and memory. Rarely are they read. More often it
is a process whereby the contents of a particular document are relayed orally,
from one individual to another by word of mouth. As in other areas of the
Andean region, written histories are not the source of rural grassroots
knowledge about the past. Indeed, the process of learning about the past is
often more subtle than the spoken word [Abercrombie, 1998:130].
Like most Andean peoples, the past is a lived experience for Quillacans. The
longer residents participate in life of the community, the more knowledge
they acquire about its formation and constitution. Instead of a narrative
punctuated by dates and events like the formal history of Bolivia itself, what
they gain on a quotidian basis is an implicit understanding of why things are
the way they are.21 However, what is quite distinct in Andean society is the
context in which this process of tacit learning takes place. In the community
of Santuario de Quillacas members of the community are said to travel along
a 'pathway of life' known as thakhi (= 'road/path' in aymara). Although not
every inhabitant of the rural community does this, the thakhi consists of a
series of interconnected positions of service, responsibility and authority
through which all residents are encouraged to pass (and most do) during their
lifetimes. According to the leaders of Santuario de Quillacas, it is in the
course both of the journey through and the carrying out of each of the
positions that go to form thakhi, that people gain knowledge and
understanding of their community's past and reasons for its present
organization. It is in essence a system of learning by doing/being, or rather by
living.22
Given the way that thakhi functions as a process of learning, the accounts
given by Quillacans of their past are frequently more moral than historical.23
Constructing the basis of a civil/religious moral order in the community, the
understanding of the past embedded in thakhi is not as concerned with the
accurate depiction of time as Western histories are. Through the activities and
responsibilities that thakhi entails, the past is bent into the present to
construct a singular series of lessons about life and how it should be lived as
a member of the community. These lessons are practised through
participation in communal work parties (faena, mink'a), and regularly acted
out in the dances and rituals associated with festivals. The costumes worn
during these events aim to exaggerate and therefore highlight the moral
personality of the mythical and historical characters involved. At the festival
of Señor de la Exaltación, for example, the practical jokes and general
rudeness of dancers wearing a bear costume emphasize the need for propriety
amongst people. The long noses, red cheeks, drunkenness, and sword waving
of others dressed as Spanish soldiers hint not only at the strangeness and
erratic behaviour of their earlier conquerors, but also at the dangerousness
and lack of morality of all gringos (= white people) or q'ara (= non-people).
In common with other Amerindian narratives about the past, the accounts of
the past lived out and described in the course of thakhi are not chronological
[Rappaport, 1990]. In the course of re-enacting past events during festivals
and rituals, time frames are juxtaposed, causal explanations left out, and
narrations of the events themselves are not given in linear form. It is only in
conjunction with a whole range of activities—including ritual, pilgrimage,
dance and daily work—that an elaborate key to the understanding of these
non-sequential narratives can be obtained [Abercrombie, 1998]. Indeed, much
of this history is encoded in the physical environment in which the people
themselves live.24 Around Quillacas, the mountains, hills, large boulders,
wild/domestic animals, changes in weather and season, were all named, and
—through their believed connection with one another—seen by local people
as active elements with which they interact in daily and ritual life, as had
their ancestors before them.
If through thakhi Quillacans' knowledge of their past is embodied in a non-
chronological expression of time rooted in physical space, ritual and
community practice, this is not to say that peasants have no sense of the flow
of time in a European sense, that they are unable to distinguish fact from
fiction, or that they prefer to confront universal and logical problems as
opposed to the specific [Rappaport, 1990]. Its prime aim is to initiate
individuals into the moral order of a shared community, but this whole
system of learning about the rural community and its past does not stand
apart from the serious practical questions encountered in everyday life.
Indeed, it is deeply engaged with it. Fictitious and fantastic images are
employed, but such images are frequently used to reflect on and say
something about the real, to comment on present conditions and play out a
stock of tried and tested solutions.
Not as remote from daily existence as one would suppose, therefore, the
complex and interrelated method both for understanding the past and
describing the social and moral order of the local community that is thakhi
has been subject to change and external influence. The system of ancestral
authorities and beliefs, visible in both the daily and ritual life of the
presentday community of Quillacas, is—contrary to immediate appearances
—the contingent product of long and difficult negotiations with the outside
world, or (more pointedly) with the changing and often contradictory
demands and projects of the Bolivian state. To stress the changing and
contingent historical character of thakhi is important, not least because the
circumstances that result in change help explain the contrasting forms of
ideology and agency in the present.
It is a commonplace that Andean society has been almost completely
transformed in the course of history. However, in the form of the ancestral
spirits (achachilas) to whom rituals and sacrifices are made, a powerful
memory of how things were remains in the present. Indeed much of the
power of this memory remains embodied in the person, actions and
judgements of the jilaqatas and alcalde cobradores, community authorities
who act as intermediaries between ancestors and community, and community
and state. Although these positions have not remained untouched by external
pressures of political change, their offices have retained a highly influential
role in both the spiritual and temporal aspects of community life, even when
ancestral authorities have been officially sidelined by state policy and
organization. Currently, therefore, the ancestral authorities continue to be
active leaders in every area of community decision-making. It is quite clear
that, at the same time as the ancestral authority system of thakhi has had to
adapt to efforts by the national state at local government reform, to a
significant degree the local community and leadership of Quillacas have
managed successfully to negotiate their own understanding and working of
the new systems. The latter have, in short, been adapted so as to defend the
importance both of the ancestral authorities and the moral system they
represent within community life.
 THE REINVENTION OF ANDEAN TRADITION

Up to this point, the picture presented has been one of Quillacan

understandings of the past being formed through individuals who embody a
commitment to a local system of organization and practice. Broadly
speaking, this is an accurate method of depicting what happens in Santuario
de Quillacas. It would be wrong, however, to claim that this represents the
sum total of knowledge possessed by peasants concerning the past. Personal
experience and the experience of a modern education also determine
knowledge about what has gone before. Indeed, making a survey of possible
sources tells us little more than what kind of 'historical material' is available
to people, and from which narratives about the past are constructed. The
actual act of remembering is much more complicated and less easily
quantifiable as individuals draw on different sources at different times.
Rather obviously, the process of remembering is contextually and
experientially selective: accordingly, at one conjuncture a specific kind of
knowledge is privileged, whereas at another a different set of details are
invoked. Most importantly, in the course of conflict at the rural grassroots,
memories and/or details about the past become the subject of negotiation and
serious disagreement, and are transformed thereby into ideological and
political weapons.
To underscore the complexity of remembering is thus of considerable
importance, not only because it allows description/explanation of how
peasants in Quillaca interpret their past, but also because it permits an insight
into the way community members deploy conflicting narratives and
discourses about this past in order to justify actions in the present. Much as
the structure and functions of local government are the product of negotiation
between state and community through history, therefore, they are also the
product of ongoing discussions within the community, which are firmly
grounded in contrasting visions/versions of the past. Although the discourse
of thakhi (outlined above) aims to provide a uniform account of the past to
which all Quillacans subscribe, it is nevertheless a loosely shared vision, and
one which individuals in the community frequently knock down. In recent
years the context framing knowledge about the past appears to have changed
in Santuario de Quillacas.
Although historical documents kept in a few family homes and a number of
cardboard boxes stacked in the corner of the Cabildo office are given
considerable importance—as symbols of family and community past, and as
vital deeds to land and property—until recently few people paid much
attention to the actual historical details such records contained. The
Quillacans' connection to the past was generally mediated through personal
memory or thakhi. Over the last decade, however, a number of influential
residents in the town of Quillacas have begun to deploy a more detailed kind
of historical knowledge in their debates with the rest of the community
discourse about leadership and the direction in which the community should
go, resulting in a renewed interest in the past of Santuario de Quillacas. The
reasons for this are twofold: first, the availability of new external sources of
information about the history of the rural community; and second, the
appearance of new commentators on the community's history. Since the mid-
1980s, Santuario de Quillacas has become a site of interest to a number of
academics interested in the previously little studied history and culture of the
Bolivian Southern Altiplano area. However, as much as this interest in the
past can be explained by the availability of new information and
commentators, it is argued here that the heightened interest in it of key
figures within the community itself can be explained by the value that these
historical interpretations have in supporting or defending ideological
positions in current struggles.

Anthropologists Make History

In the late 1980s the Bolivian anthropologist, Ramiro Molina Rivero began
conducting research in the Quillacas/Pampa Aullagas area.25 In so doing it
appears that he became an authoritative source and interpreter of local history
and culture. Indeed, it was he who helped the ancestral leadership in
Santuario de Quillacas to organize and find funding for the setting up of two
organizations responsible for giving an impetus to local cultural rejuvenation.
The first of these organizations, the Jatun Quillacas Development
Cooperation (CODEJQ, Cooperación de Desarrollo de Jatun Quillacas) was
created to organize and coordinate local development projects, but also to
look for ways to strengthen local autonomy and cultural pride. It was
CODEJQ which, through its financial support and encouragement, brought
about the 'First Regional Assembly of Indigenous Authorities of the Ayllus
Mayores of Southern Oruro'. Held in Santuario de Quillacas, this assembly
brought together ancestral leaders from communities throughout the region to
discuss their common cultural heritage and seek solutions to shared problems.
On the back of this assembly another organization was created: namely, the
Federation of Southern Orureño Ayllus (FASOR), which defined itself as
having both a developmental and cultural aim. Ethnic leaders and authorities
committed themselves to search for solutions to the problems and needs of
Southern Oruro, which they publicly ascribed to the government having
abandoned them. Together with other indigenous organizations in the
country, FASOR subscribed to the idea of defending the rights of ayllus to
local self-government (auto-determinación). In 1990 this organization
managed to gain sufficient financial support from Oxfam America to build a
small centre in Challapata, the provincial capital. Two fulltime members of
staff were hired to teach and hold workshops throughout Southern Oruro,
covering a series of issues connected to local development and ethnic
identity.
In 1991 a history graduate by the name of Ramon Conde, connected to and
partially funded by the Andean Oral History Workshop (Taller Historial Oral
Andina or THOA), a centre for Aymaran cultural activism in La Paz, became
attached to FASOR's office in Challapata. As an historian and ex-militant of
the Aymara ethnic political Katarista movement, Ramon Conde acted as a
major contributor of historical knowledge and political direction to FASOR
and to the local leaders of Santuario de Quillacas. Under his influence local
ayllu leaders in the Southern Oruro area were invited to attend workshops on
local history, Aymara language and culture in the town of Quillacas and
Challapata.26 During that first meeting a number of speakers were invited to
speak on a range of topics, including history, indigenous rights, education,
and the Laws of Popular Participation and Administrative Decentralization.
Through FASOR and CODEJQ, the ancestral and municipal authorities in the
town of Quillacas became extremely interested in the picture of the past that
historical sources furnished them with. As a result of the growing interest in
historical sources among townspeople in Quillacas, papers and articles given
to the community by the Peruvian historian Espinoza Soriano were dusted off
and invested with new value. Historical documents stacked in the corner of
the Corregimiento office were also looked through and reevaluated. When I
returned to Quillacas with a copy of an article by Espinoza Soriano [1969]
publicizing a key sixteenth-century source on the history of the region, this
too became an object of intense interest. Now they could read for themselves
the contents of documents such as La Información, La Probanza de Servicio
y Meritos presented by the Quillacan mallku, Don Juan Colque Guarachi, to
the colonial authorities to describe his family lineage's contribution to
government in the area. They could also read about the senorío (lordship) of
Killaka-Asanaqi, which in the early sixteenth century stretched across the
area and secured the allegiance of a great swathe of communities throughout
the southern altiplano and southern Asanaqi mountains. Reading about the
Killaka-Asanaqi federation's integration into the Inca Empire as a reino
provincial (= sovereign provincial authority), they learnt additionally of their
ancestor's role as a powerful ally of the zapainca Tupac Inca Yupanqui.27 To
get an idea of the scale of Killaka-Asanaqi federation at that time, it is
sufficient to note one of the titles attributed to Inca Colque: that of Huno
Mallku.28 Huno signifies 'ten thousand': that is, the number of tributary heads
of households subject to his power and over whom he ruled.29 This suggests
that a total population in excess of 50,000 may have been subject to his rule.
Although now based on authoritative and scholarly studies/documents, it
becomes clear if what Quillacans say about this history is compared with the
works themselves, that the reading FASOR and the ancestral authorities of
the town of Quillacas make of the past is somewhat partial. Together with the
actions of the ancestors which are less than palatable, therefore, portions of
their history are conveniently left out of the picture they portray. That
members of the Colque Guarache lineage were more interested in protecting
their own positions of power and wealth than in defending their subjects'
cultural and political autonomy is never mentioned in the oral versions of
history the local leadership and FASOR have put together from documented
sources. As in the Inca Empire, during the colonial period the Guarache
lineage were able to keep hold of their cacicazgo (leadership) privileges
through the continued rendering of services to the imperial power. Their
access to beasts of burden and herders (which would become extensively
used in the moving of minerals and ores from the mines such as Potosi, as
well as for the supply of the city), and strategic location of Aullagas (the last
tambo and substantial settlement of 'peaceful Indians' on the road South) and
Puna (a primarily herding settlement conveniently positioned to the Southeast
of the Killakas-Asanaqi territory) made them vital allies in the early colonial
project.30 The mallku Guarache also demonstrated his new loyalty by
directing the Spanish exploitation of the Incan silver mines in Porco
[Espinoza Soriano, 1969:15]. However, this history of political pragmatism is
not the image of Quillacas presented today.
The image of Quillacas currently projected by the local authorities is of an
ethnically integrated and historically fully autonomous community which—in
the course of its defence of autonomy—had been divided and cumulatively
weakened by the Bolivian state. Neither they, nor the ancestral authorities
before them, are responsible for the reductions that have been made to their
community's territory or political jurisdiction. Today, as in the past, it is their
responsibility, through negotiation with the ancestors and with the state, to
ensure the continuation of Quillacan local sovereign autonomy. Based on an
interpretation of historical documents, therefore, even comparatively recent
events are re-interpreted, repackaged and broadcast as a new foundation
story. Now the image of local organization and authority presented to the
representatives of the Bolivian state is of a community where ayllu and
ancestral authority have always been an integral aspect of socio-economic
existence. The ancestral authorities informed me that there was an unbroken
chain of tradition linking them to their ancestors. However, dig a little deeper
and a different story is told. In this story the tradition of ancestral authority is
not unbroken. Indeed, following the introduction of peasant union structures
after the revolution of 1952, both ayllu and ancestral authority disappeared
for a time [Dunkerley, 1984]. Cultural regeneration took place only in the
1980s, and then because of the confluence of a number of factors either well
beyond the control of local people themselves, or dependent on the actions
and influence of individual external agents.

A Different History, a History of Difference

In the mid-1980s a changing political and economic climate in Bolivia

combined with serious environmental changes to create a situation which
undermined both the state policies and syndicalist traditions of the previous
30 years, which had been inspired by the 1952 revolution.31 In the early
1980s a major fall in the price of tin, and oil prices, led Bolivia into a serious
economic crisis, to which the then left-wing coalition government was unable
to find a solution. The country was paralysed by hyperinflation and mass
demonstrations led by the main workers' union, the Central Obrera Boliviana
(COB). Hoping that under his direction some stability might return to the
country, Bolivian voters in 1985 re-elected for a third time Victor Paz
Estensorro as President. Reacting to the situation he found, Paz Estensorro's
new administration broke with the tenets of the 1952 revolution in order to
try and re-establish favour with foreign governments and international
business investors.32 A neo-liberal structural adjustment programme was
introduced at the behest of the World Bank and the international financial
community. Although it succeeded in reining in the economy and
streamlining government, the social cost of the programme was extremely
high [Crabtree, 1987; Nash, 1993]. Nationalized industries—such as
COMIBOL, the National Bolivian Mining Company—were to be sold off.
Unable to stop privatization, the Bolivian trade union movement lost much of
its membership and, therefore, its political influence and power. Thousands
of tin miners were made redundant, as were other public sector employees:
left without employment or access to land, some 500,000 people migrated
from the highlands to the lowlands in search of alternative sources of income.
Often there was no employment to be found other than in illegal coca
production. This enforced migration was compounded further by a serious
drought that hit the country in 1984, as a result of which numerous rural
family farms in the altiplano were unable to reproduce themselves
economically. Many peasant households were compelled to abandon their
holdings and attempt to find alternative employment, either in urban areas or
in lowlands.
This harsh economic climate formed the context in which the ancestral
authorities of the Southern altiplano area managed to make a political
comeback. In Quillacas, for example, the drought and loss of seasonal
employment brought about by the closure of nearby mines forced many
families to move out in search of work or land elsewhere. Some moved away
permanently, others moved away on a more temporary basis, continuing to
return to Quillacas to plant, harvest and take part in the community's ritual
and festival life. As the number of peasant households in the community
dwindled, those who remained lost faith in the representative power of their
peasant unions. It seemed to them as if local leaders and the national union
movement were completely ineffectual. In many highlands areas the decline
of trade unionism, caused in part by a widespread perception of the failure of
left-wing politics, produced a resurgence of interest in an indigenous politics
of difference [Ströbele-Gregor, 1994; Ticona, Rodriguez and Albó, 1995].
Ethnic political paradigms, such as Katarismo, began to make a comeback,
and not only surfaced in trade union discussions, but also found their way
into more mainstream political debates, such as those taking place in
Congress or reported in the national media.
By the late 1980s, therefore, political discourse appeared to have changed its
view on the subject of the national indigenous population and its various
forms of 'traditional leadership'. One way in which this manifested itself was
through changes to rural development policy and practice. A programme
known as CORDEOR-EU had been set up by the Bolivian government and
co-funded by the European Union to encourage rural development in the
provinces of the country. In the Department of Oruro, for example, the local
representative body of this programme—called 'The Program for Peasant
Self-Development' (CONPAC)—had been running a 'consolidatory phase'
since 1986.33 In addition to starting a series of agricultural and infrastructural
development projects, therefore, another major task undertaken by CONPAC
was to encourage a re-evaluation of local culture and indigenous community
organizational structures [Izko, 1992; Ayllu Sartañani, 1992]. Both these
elements (development, culture) informing the strategic approach of
CONPAC were designed to solve the serious and continuing problem of
outmigration from the area. To this end, CONPAC started an active campaign
to re-insert the local ancestral leadership positions within the local
government structure. Although now forgotten, it was actually under the
auspices of this programme that CODEJQ was established. The
anthropologist Ramiro Molina had only brokered the deal between the
community and the state's development corporation.

The Modernity of Tradition

For the ancestral authorities in Quillacas, and indeed for many of the people
elected to positions within the municipal government who agreed with them,
the idea of their town being at the helm of a distinct 'historically recorded'
sovereign territory was particularly appealing, if not convenient, as it
appeared to support their claim to be the authentic—and hence legitimate—
administrative centre of the municipality. For town elites this was an
important consideration, as both their social and economic positions relied on
this proximity to political power. Currently, therefore, they assert
authoritatively that it was their ancestors—not those of Huari, of Sevaruyo-
Soraga, or those of the hamlets and villages of the rinconada—who had
safely steered the community through its history and sustained its cultural
integrity. Why change what had always been successful? This was the line of
reasoning taken by them in discussions with the rest of the community and,
backed up by historical documents, invoked as proof of their municipal
jurisdiction at the level of national government.
Although there were some personal tensions between municipal staff and the
ancestral authorities as regards the day-to-day running of local government,
there was no disagreement between them on the interpretation of reform.
Indeed, throughout my stay in the municipality it was quite clear that—in
their view—no such opposition between modernity and tradition could be
applied in that context. Their role as representatives of a new government
regime notwithstanding, most municipal leaders were traditionalists at heart,
a situation which can be explained largely by reference to the intertwining of
local government and thakhi positions.34 By adopting this 'revised' historical
account of their past, much of the leadership in Quillacas, the ancestral
authorities and most of the municipal officials, formed a radically
conservative position with regard to their shared strategy for the future. They
would defend the position of Quillacas as the municipal capital, while
simultaneously opposing any moves to reduce the autonomy of the territory
under their administrative control. Significantly, this radically conservative
approach to the distribution of power in the community did entail opposition
to local government reform (represented by popular participation and
administrative decentralization). The reforms were interpreted by the
conservative section of the community of Santuario de Quillacas as the
means not only of defending their local sovereignty, but also of extending it
even further (that is, by securing the return of Sevaruyo-Soraga to their
political jurisdiction). Popular participation and decentralization appeared to
provide the very means whereby Quillaca would become the distributive hub
of a system of local development financing.
Whilst it was unsurprising that most municipal government staff were
supporters of recent reforms to local government, since their positions
depended upon the successful functioning of these structures, rather more
surprising was the active support for the reform on the part of the ancestral
authorities, the jilaqata and alcalde cobrador, and the people concerned with
the ritual and religious importance of Quillacas. One way of resolving this
apparent contradiction is by reference to the 'invention of tradition'
framework associated with the work of Hobsbawm and Ranger [1983], who
point out how rituals, traditions and/or identities—although often accepted as
ancient—are often of a more recent vintage: in short, inventions that have
been reintroduced/introduced 'from above' in order to legitimize a specific
political objective. This is precisely what seems to have happened in the case
of Quillacas, where the concern expressed by the highly influential rural elite
for the upkeep of religious practices, and their role as a blueprint for how the
community should be run, was in fact a method of defending both the status
quo and their own political power within the existing structure. Although the
ancestral authorities often voiced their distrust of the local state apparatus,
and bemoaned its lack of sensitivity to their cultural interests, they
nevertheless conferred legitimacy on government reform by participating in
meetings both of the municipal government and the Vigilance Committee.
For this small, politically conservative section of the community, popular
participation and administrative decentralization were tools to uphold their
vecino-centred beliefs about the how the community should be organized
morally and politically. These are beliefs which, as has been argued above,
are tailored to a specific interpretation of past moral and political
organization.
Such attempts at the 'reinvention of Andean tradition' did not, however, pass
unchallenged. Although the interpretation of Quillacas's 'glorious past'
provided vecino elites with arguments supportive of claims for their
continued rule, other sections of the rural community outside the central
canton lacking the same access to, or need for, historical information were
less than convinced of its veracity and rationale.35 For people from the other
cantons, the vision of the past shared by the ancestral authorities, municipal
government and most vecinos of Quillacas served to disguise the reality of
recent events. It conveniently covered over the fact that canton Sevaruyo-
Soraga had not always been a part of the municipality of Santuario de
Quillacas. Between 1982 and 1994 the canton had been under the
administrative jurisdiction of the province of Sebastian Pagador, a period
which people remembered as being more prosperous than the present. It was
this economically advantageous linkage that had overturned as a result of the
re-assessment of municipal boundaries following the introduction of popular
participation. As a result of this experience, the leaders of the canton had
learned to make a distinction between (anti-Quillacas) municipal affiliation
and their (pro-Quillacas) ayllu allegiances. In short, their interest in changing
their political affiliation to ensure local development had in their eyes nothing
to do with their continued allegiance to Quillacas as a cultural and spiritual
centre. That such a distinction could be made at all was an ideological
transformation of which the Quillacan authorities and elites seemed quite
unaware.36
For the leaders of Sevaruyo-Soraga and people from other rural settlements in
the rinconada their transfer of provincial and municipal identity was
pragmatic. Although involved in municipal decision-making and
development planning sessions in Quillacas, they nevertheless felt that over
the last few years their economic needs and aspirations had been ignored by
the elites in the canton of Quillacas. Although NGOs such as CARITAS and
UNICEF had inaugurated useful projects, the municipal government in
Quillacas had been unable or unwilling to deliver any concrete programme of
change until the canton's petition to move administrative affiliation had been
made public. It was, to put it bluntly, a political battle for access to and
control over economic resources. Sevaruyo-Soraga had long wanted its own
primary school, and had been petitioning the municipal authorities for help
with an irrigation project. Recent favourable changes in government and
development, however, all appeared to benefit Quillacas. For this reason,
Sevaruyo-Soragans' opinions of FASOR were very low. In their view this
organization did not understand that, by pressing for the reconstitution and
cultural survival of ayllu structures such as Santuario de Quillacas, it was
sentencing smaller rural communities such as Sevaruyo-Soraga to economic
stagnation. They agreed with the organization's politics, but said that its
leaders did little for them, and were rarely seen in Challapata except on
market days. Another complaint was that, although the leaders from the
rinconada were invited to FASOR's workshops, they were not offered
support for their travel or accommodation. When interviewed, a number of
peasants from outlying rural settlements dismissed the validity of FASOR
altogether. For them, the self-appointed leaders of FASOR were more
interested in lining their pockets and extending their personal political
influence than really pushing for political transformation in the area. Even in
Quillacas itself there were those who held strongly critical opinions of
FASOR, noting that 'they talk about representing us, but really they have no
support at the local level'.37
Having been passed from one municipal jurisdiction to another, there simply
was not the same sense of pride at stake for some of the rural communities in
the rinconada. It is this receptiveness to change which largely explains the
decisions made by the canton of Sevaruyo-Soraga immediately following the
introduction of legislation about popular participation and administrative
decentralization. Rather than see the reforms as a means to protect the
integrity of Santuario de Quillacas as an 'historical community', therefore,
Sevaruyo-Soraga chose instead to see them as an opportunity to shake off
what, on the basis of their own earlier experience of Quillacas, they saw as
inept government.38 The drawing of municipal boundaries carried out as a
preparation for the structural adjustments made by the new legislation
provided the rural hamlets of the canton with a window of opportunity:
namely, to announce their intention to move their local government
allegiance to the neighbouring municipality of Huari. Given the wealth of the
neighbouring province, this was a move which for obvious economic reasons
offered them better opportunities of development and future viability as a
rural community.
 CONCLUDING COMMENTS

Although the combination of rural grassroots antagonism and solidarity

outlined above with regard to the community of Santuario de Quillacas in the
Bolivian Highlands may appear contradictory, such politico-ideological
harmony/conflict is common throughout Andean village communities.
Similar kinds of situation have been noted, both by Barbara Bradby [1982] in
the case of the inter-relationship between the Peruvian communities of
Huayllay and Carhuapata in the Department of Huancavelica, and by Thomas
Abercrombie [1998] in the case of the nearby Orureño community of K'ulta.
Set along side the case of Santuario de Quillacas, the contexts described by
Bradby and Abercrombie are revealing, in that they indicate that the
harmony/conflict pattern of Santuario de Quillacas is a typical aspect of rural
community relationships in Andean history and society. While the details
differ (in Quillacas religious loyalties remain intact), the same kind of
struggle generated by economic changes taking place in other rural
communities gives rise to a similar dynamic informed by a process of
politico-ideological action and reaction. Action takes the initial form of
changes involving external political and economic forces (emanating mainly
—but not only—from the nation state), which push, encourage or require
groups or individuals previously on the periphery to question and break with
historical or customary linkages and local structures of political power. By
contrast, reaction takes the form of what is in effect a conservative political
response: the reassertion of historical authority and cultural tradition on the
part of those whose local power and 'right to rule' is threatened by this
process of participation/decentralization. As has been shown above, this is
exactly what has happened in Santuario de Quillacas.
The delimitation of municipal boundaries carried out by CONLIT in
compliance with popular participation legislation opened up the opportunity
for Sevaruyo-Soraga to establish within the province of Sebastian Pagador
conditions (political, financial and developmental) that were to its own
advantage. For the municipal government in Quillacas, these efforts to seek
separation from their jurisdiction were seen not only as an attempt to subvert
their historical right to act as the political centre for the area, but also—by
endangering the amount and delivery of their finances—as a threat to their
future local government operations. Rather than accept change or entertain
the idea of a radical legal solution, such as forming a mancomunidad with a
neighbouring municipality, the inhabitants of Quillacas pushed instead for a
conservative re-emphasis on their historical traditions and pride in their
cultural authenticity. This picture suggests that - as has long been argued by
many observers of rural Latin America -external pressures are responsible for
breaking down the traditional fabric of rural community life, driving a wedge
between those who exhibit a continued loyalty to culturally traditional forms
of social organization and political allegiance, and those who are willing to
forego these traditional forms in order to secure for themselves an
economically more advantageous situation within the wider (local or
national) socio-economic context. As Bradby [1982:108] writes about
Carhuapata, 'all nostalgia for the past had been rejected and a new ideology
of progress and development substituted'.
However, this picture may be incomplete. As Abercombie [1998:314] notes
about the situation in K'ulta, '[w]hile the cantonisation process underlined the
seceding groups' lack of commitment to the previous manifestation of the
ritual political order, its re-inscription into a more circumscribed social space
with the same kind of cultural features characteristic of the old, larger ones
proves to be a reaffirmation, rather than a rejection of its commitment to
values that motivated participation in their ritual-political synthesis in the first
place.' What this suggests is that although a peripheral group or town may
separate off from the body of its historic community out of self-interest, this
does not mean that it intends to separate itself from the cultural ideas and
beliefs it shared with the larger community in the past. The same structure of
organization and perceptions of political rights and involvement may be
reconstituted within the reduced context. This is an important feature of the
situation in Santuario de Quillacas: as much as the community has become
divided over different methods of dealing with change, a common perception
of cultural identity and organization has been retained.
Just as the political situation in Santuario de Quillacas is comparable with the
situations described in Carhuapata and K'ulta, it can also be argued that this
conflict/harmony pattern is itself symptomatic of Aymara society generally. It
casts doubt on the assumption, still made by some writers [Apfel-Marglin,
1998], that there exists an overwhelming grassroots commitment to
community within Andean rural society. What is being played out here on the
scale of local development politics is reminiscent of what Xavier Albó [1975]
has called the 'Aymaran Paradox'. The latter consists, according to Albó
[1975:7], of the fact that although 'the Aymara have a strong sense of group
identity…at the same time a typical element of their cultural structure is an
internal factionalism, which shows itself at the level of family, politics,
religion etc.'. Albó builds the case for the paradox being responsible both for
occasional fragmentation of rural communities as well as the articulation of a
discourse of solidarity which has enabled Aymara-speaking rural society to
adapt to and resist transformations imposed from outside—that is, by the
wider Bolivian society. The work of Albó is complemented and amplified by
research carried out by Gary Urton [1992] in Pacariqtambo in Peru. Urton
demonstrates that the antinomic situation of conflict/harmony, or
'communalism and differentiation', is not specific only to Aymara society, but
found to occur throughout Andean rural society in general. Like Albó, he
shows that to a great extent the continuing life of Andean communities is
dependent on the persistence of forces which pressure peasants both to assert
their individual personal identities and to bend their wills to support their life
and work of their community. More than this, he suggests that
conflict/harmony—or 'communalism and differentiation'—are forces and
attributes which actually make Andean social organization dynamic.
To some extent, these observations about the dynamic created by the
grassroots rural coexistence of conflict and harmony are representative of an
epistemological transformation in the way that agrarian 'communities' are
studied by anthropologists. Assumptions about a 'folk mentality' [Redfield,
1947] have been replaced by an acceptance that peasants are not locked into a
uniformly static 'corporate' [Wolf, 1957] acceptance of their world, but often
refashion their social structures and institutions to meet their current needs.39
While it is important to highlight 'difference' as a dynamic in the creation and
continuance of rural community, therefore, it is also important to point out
that this 'difference' is not necessarily something that has to be resolved. As
Urton [1992] suggests, the antinomic process of 'communalism and
differentiation' is an ongoing dynamic—there is an unending negotiation
between both of these forces, an idea which connects well with Andrew
Cannessa's [1998:244] 'processual and performative' understanding of
Andean identity. As well as the symbols for community boundaries [Cohen,
1985; 1986], negotiation provides the 'dialectical' tension through which the
potentiality for change and transformation of social organization over time is
both enabled and made sense of [Urton, 1992]. It has often been assumed by
social scientists that the outcome of disputes, whatever their content, is a
process which leads to reconciliation and the restoration of harmony, itself
considered to be the social ideal. Conflict, by contrast, is regarded as the
enemy of rural community, a teleology which Urton and other
anthropologists [Caplan, 1995; Colson, 1995; Gulliver, 1979] have shown to
be false.
The picture presented above with regard to Santuario de Quillacas in the
Bolivian Highlands during the 1990s underlines the fact that, in an era of
expanding globalization, just as peasants themselves are changing so our
notions of peasants have themselves to change [Kearney, 1996]. Whilst still
linked to land, labour, and a common sense of the past linked to rural
community, Bolivian peasants are not restricted by such categories, but are
much rather active agents negotiating the very meaning and significance of
these conceptual boundaries. Although in recent years Scott [1985; 1990] and
members of the Latin American post-colonial school [Rivera Cusicanqui,
1998] have highlighted the existence, effects and political importance of
peasant agency, there have been few detailed ethnographic examples from
Latin America of the way in which local rural communities 'think through'
the manifestation of the global in the local (or the 'them' in the 'us'). In this
process of thinking through, local notions of history, community and politics
are recycled, re-invented and given new meanings. In contrast to Scott
[1985], the argument outlined here demonstrates that Quillacan peasants are
not restricted to small everyday political deeds within the local arena.
Although palpably not on an equal footing with the political elites at the
national level, peasants are by necessity frequently engaged in—and have an
influence on—the political arena of the nation. Indeed, the argument made
here not only describes the way that the local is deeply embedded in both the
national and the international, but highlights that this involvement is not
necessarily oppositional.40
 ACRONYMS

CARITAS
The Catholic Agency for Overseas Aid and Development
CCEDSE
Centro de Capacitación y Dessarrollo Socio Economico, Centre for Training and Socio-Economic
Development
COB
Central Obrera Boliviana, Bolivian Workers Central
CODEJQ
Cooperación de Desarrollo de Jatun Quillacas, Jatun Quillacas Development Corporation
CONPAC
Programa de Auto-desarrollo Campesino, Programme for Peasant Self-Development
CORDEOR
Coordinación Rural de Desarrollo, Oruro, Rural Development Agency, Oruro
CSUTCB
Confederación Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia, Rural Workers' Union
Confederation of Bolivia
FASOR
Federación de Ayllus de Sur Oruro, Federation of Southern OruroAyllus
FIS
Social Investment Fund
IMF
International Monetary Fund
INRA
National Agrarian Reform Law
MBL
Movimiento Bolivia Libre, Free Bolivia Movement
MIR
Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria, Movement of the Revolutionary Left
MNR
Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario, National Revolutionary Movement.
MRTKL
Movimiento Revolucionario Tupak Katari de Liberación, Tupak Katari Revolutionary Liberation
Movement
NGO
Non-Governmental Organization
OTB
Organización Territorial de Base, Grassroots Organization
PDM
Plan de Desarrollo Municipal, municipal development plan.
POA
Plan Operativa Annual, Annual Plan
SNAEGG
Secretaría Nacional de Asuntos Etnicos, de Genero y Generacional, National Secretariat for Ethnic,
Gender and Generational Affairs
SNPP
Secretaría Nacional de Participación Popular, National Secretariat for Popular Participation
THOA
Taller Historial Oral Andina, Andean Oral History Workshop
UCS
Unidad Cívica Solidaridad, United Civic Solidarity
UNDP
United Nations Development Programme
UNICEF
United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund
USAID
United States Agency for International Development
 GLOSSARY (SPANISH/AYMARA)

Achachilas (Ay.) mountain and ancestral spirits

alcalde (Sp. From Arabic) Mayor, central position of municipal government
alcalde cobrador (Sp.) High-level ancestral authority of a major ayllu
altiplano (Sp.) High plateau
ayllu (Ay) Polity self-formulated through ritual
cabildo (Sp.) Office of the ancestral authorities in Quillacas
capacitación (Sp.) Education and training
canton (Sp.) Smallest administrative division of territory in Bolivia
ch'uspa (Ay.) Bag for carrying coca
comité civico (Sp) Representative organization of residents who have
migrated to the city or to another area of the country
comuneros (Sp.) General term used for community members in Santuario de
Quillacas
Contador (Sp.) accountant
co-participación (Sp.) The financing of local government from a share of
central
tributaria taxation
faena (Sp.) Faena is an ayllu-level agreement in which all heads of families,
or their delegated representatives, participate in a communal work project: for
example, building works, infrastructural preparations for festivals,
development projects, etc.
jilaqata (Ay.) High-level authority of a major ayllu
mallku (Ay.) Mountain peak, mountain spirit, condor, hereditary authority
marka (Ay.) Central or capital of a major ayllu
mink'a (Ay.) Involving the exchange of labour between family groups, mink'a
is a smaller affair than faena. It refers to the pooling of labour in order to
make production more efficient, but it is also crucial for the preparation of
weddings and other festivities.
municipalidad indígena (Sp.) Indigenous municipality
oficial mayor (Sp.) Municipal secretary
administrativo
pasäru (Ay.) Community elders who have passed through all the steps of
thakhi
pollera (Ay.) The colourful layered skirt commonly worn by women in the
Bolivian Highlands
planificación (Sp.) The system of municipal participative planning introduced
by the
participative Law of Popular Participation
q'ara (Ay.) Naked, incompletely dressed; figuratively, 'culturally peeled', an
insulting reference to nonindians (mestizos, criollos, Europeans)
quinoa (Ay.) A high-energy value cereal crop grown in the Southern Andes
Rancho (Sp.) Agricultural holding
Reuniones (Sp.) Public meetings
Rinconada (Sp.) Building on the Spanish word for corner (rincón), the term
rinconada is used by people in the town of Quillacas to refer to the outlying
rural settlements that belong to their municipal and Ayllu area
sumu miruku (Ay.) Doctor, healer
talleres (Sp.) Workshops
thakhi (Ay.) Term with a gamut of meanings linking chronological sequence
and landscape. Most prosaically, 'path', 'trail', but modified in a variety of
compound terms. Linked here to local organization and moral order.
Vecino (Sp.) Townsman with fully vested rights (colonial); town resident
sometimes non-indian (modern)
Vigilancia (Sp.) Vigilance
Wilancha (Ay.) Sacrifice, live offering to the land and ancestors
 NOTES

1. Respectively, Ley No. 1551 of the 20th April 1994, and Ley 1654 of 20 July 1995.
2. See Molina and Arias [1996]; also Arrieto and Pinedo [1995].
3. The peasant union is the Confederación Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesinos Boliviano,
CSUTCB.
4. Creoles are the descendants of the Spanish colonizers who, through their appropriation of land,
wealth, and power exercised through the legislature, have managed to retain control of the country and
government. In simple terms, the Bolivian mestizo population are understood to be people of mixed
Spanish and indigenous blood. However, this simple definition often fails to take account of the
frequently fluid nature of race and ethnicity in Bolivia. It is not uncommon for a person of one ethnic
classification to change to another by transforming cultural habits and costume. In this way people of
ethnically indigenous background become mestizo by casting aside their traditional dress (for example,
the pollera) and adopting urban lifestyles and professions.
5. Usually from June to July, when their plots are lying fallow.
6. On these points, see Ayllu Sartañäni [1992], Skar [1982], Rasnake [1988], Godoy [1984], Bastien
[1978], Platt [1982], Murra, Wachtel and Revel [1986], Harris [1985], and Mayer [1985].
7. Don (men) and Doña (women) are local terms used to show respect for adult members of the
community.
8. That is, 'Reglamento y Distribución de Coparticipación Tributaria para los Gobiernos municipales'.
9. That is, Ley de Creaciones de cada Municipio, Acta Apocrifa.
10. Centro de Capacitación y Desarrollo Socio Economico—one of the many private companies
formed since the introduction of the popular participation law to fulfil the tasks of local capacitación in
relation to the new procedures of development planning and governmental administration. Based in
Oruro, CCEDSE had won a government contract funded by the World Bank to introduce and supervise
the new system of planificanión participativa in four municipalities of the department.
11. In October 1997 an article in Oruro's newspaper La Patria reported the conflict as Delimitacion de
territorio provoca problemas vecinales (Territorial Redrawing Causes Problems Between Neighbours).
12. For example, CARITAS signed an agreement to fund a drinking water project. USAID had agreed
to fund local Health projects. UNICEF had agreed to fund a mother and daughter health and education
programme.
13. It was apparent that local people had been careful to hide their differences from me.
14. That is, from $US47,115 to $US75,982.
15. FASOR stands for Federación de Ayllus de Sur Oruro. See below for more on this organization.
16. Article 22 of the Law of Population states that 'those municipalities that don't possess a minimum of
5,000 inhabitants, must form mancommunidades [i.e. a federation with another such community]' in
order to form a sufficient size of population amongst which coparticipacion funds can be shared.
17. That is, an administrative alliance between municipalities.
18. That is, 'the Holy Cross'. A festival held on 3 May which not only marks the death and celebrates
the resurrection of Christ but also has a pre-Christian significance: namely, crosses as symbols of
fertility. At this particular festival, crosses are paraded and venerated throughout the community.
19. See for example the article 'Conflicto de Límites provoca dos muertes' in La Razón, 26/1/1998.
20. At the end of 1999 a decision was finally made by the National Senate, with the result that the
municipality has been reduced from four to three cantons.
21. Perhaps this is not so different from the way we ourselves understand our own past.
22. For a full description of this process, see McNeish [2001] and Ticona and Albó [1997].
23. 'Adam and Eve and the Red-Trousered Ant' re-told by Denise Arnold [1993] and Fidencia's story in
McNeish [2001] are examples of powerful foundation stories that are both mythical and moral in
character, which by stressing the values of solidarity, trust, faith and reward, form a narrative about the
present and about continuity.
24. Hence the view that: 'Geography does more than carry important historical referents: it also
organises the manner in which these facts are conceptualised, remembered and organised into a
temporal framework' [Rappaport, 1990:11; Rosaldo, 1980; Harwood, 1976].
25. See Molina Rivero and Portugal Loayza [1995] and Molino Rivero [1987].
26. It is to one of these meetings that I was invited to on my first trip to the area at the start of my
fieldwork period.
27. On this point, see Espinoza Soriano [1969:199] and Cieza de Leon [1986/1553:447].
28. See Espinoza Soriano [1969].
29. On this point, see Espinoza Soriano [1969:196].
30. An Incaic staging post cum storage facility.
31. Although the National Revolution had tolerated 'traditional' leadership forms, subsequent efforts
were made to transform and 'modernize' local political structures. Teams of MNR militants, or
revolutionary 'brigades' as they were known, were sent out by the government to instruct peasants about
the National Revolution and to create a network of sindicatos agrarios (rural unions) to replace pre-
existing forms of community organization [Izko, 1992; Arganaras, 1992].
32. A caveat is in order, since evidence suggests that even in 1952 the populist MNR government of
Paz Estensorro was keen to maintain good relations with its powerful northern neighbour, the United
States.
33. The Programa de Auto-desarrollo Campesino.
34. Although playing the game of party politics required by the government system, authority figures
such as Don Eleuterio certainly regarded their positions as part of thakhi—that is, as a moral duty.
35. As participants in the everyday life and ritual of thakhi, people in the rinconada continued to see
Quillacas as an important centre. Although at loggerheads with the municipal leadership over their
administration, to the surprise of many vecinos they continued to play a part in thaki and community
obligations. As participants in the community festivals, including Señor de Exaltación, which are
located in Quillacas, they allocate the town a focal position in their relationships with the larger ayllu
mayor, their ancestors, and the local area. By coming to Quillacas in order to take part in festivals, and
showing a continued willingness to meet and take part in communal work parties (faena) to look after
the church and their ayllu's chapel, therefore, individuals from the rinconada demonstrate as much
concern with the upkeep of ayllu relations as the residents of the town. Through their participation in
these events they not only subscribe to a common ideological discourse (based on shared spiritual and
cultural values) with the town but also evince a mutual pride in community history and membership.
However, in their decisions both about the present and the future, the vision of the Quillacan leadership
ruling over a political and physical territory that encompasses their own land is neither attractive nor
useful to those occupying the rinconada.
36. However, it is probably what Don René Jallaza was getting at in his comments reported earlier (see
above).
37. Although unfair to make sweeping generalizations, it is pertinent to note that the disjuncture
between indigenous organizations and the grassroots is a common phenomenon in Latin America. Such
a disjuncture has been reported for Bolivia by Ticona, Rodriguez and Albó [1995] and for Guatemalan
Mayan movements by Warren [1998].
38. The phrase 'historical community' was one that Don Julian, the Jilaqata in 1998, frequently and
proudly used to describe his community, Santuario de Quillacas.
39. As Levine [1993:2] has noted, 'the objects of any study of culture and power cannot be understood
as objects alone: they are created by people, active subjects with lives, interests, and dynamics of their
own.' Rural communities are generally understood as being formed out of the complex interlinkage of
internal and external discourses over identity and place. Trying to get inside and understand these
discourses, it has been suggested, means that we need to 'appreciate the subjective self-understanding of
the ethnic group—how the group views its own present situation—as well as its objective
circumstances understood in terms of interests, resources and competition' [Urban and Sherzer,
1991:5]. The way outsiders attempt to understand the way rural inhabitants symbolically construct (or
perhaps deconstruct) their community is of course—as Cohen [1985] suggested a long time ago -
effected by the participant/observation approach to the study of locality and membership.
40. On this latter point, see also Abu-Lughod [1990].
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Devil Pact Narratives in Rural Central America: Class,
Gender and 'Resistance'

KEES JANSEN and ESTHER ROQUAS

 INTRODUCTION

Throughout Latin America, and also many other parts of the world, a
common theme informing peasant narratives is different kinds of pact in
which the recipient obtains the power of the devil in exchange for a soul. The
analysis of these narratives is not a mere cultural curiosity; rather, it is a
useful way of gaining an insight into how peasants understand and give
meaning to the social order in which they live and the social change they
experience. Such an approach to devil pact narratives goes beyond
conceiving them simply as religious or psychological expressions, and
regards such discourse as a method of projecting the language of social
relationships and power. It is, however, a hidden discourse not easily
accessible to the outside researcher.
Only after we had lived in the village for quite some time did peasants begin
to tell us the local narrative of a landlord who signed a pact with the devil.
Significantly, the narrative was not told openly, in public, but secretly and in
private. The most detailed account of this particular devil pact narrative was
obtained after sunset, when we were alone with one of the poorest inhabitants
who lived in a mud hut without electric light on the fringes of the village. But
does the offstage setting of this discourse imply that peasants tell the story to
subvert domination, as some observers argue? This question points to the
reason for our interest in understanding precisely what the devil pact
narrative, as told in rural Central America, represents. Of particular interest,
therefore, is whether the telling of stories about devil pact narratives
involving landlords constitutes a form of resistance by
subordinate groups. Our analysis questions a recent tendency in the literature
to assume a priori that offstage peasant narratives defy forms of domination.
The detailed study by Edelman [1994] of a Costa Rican devil pact narrative
will serve as our starting point. The life history of the protagonist in our
story, Alfredo Luna (an Honduran landowner), runs surprisingly parallel to
the life of Don Cubillo, the man whose history is vividly described by
Edelman. Both were wealthy landowners, who had been poor in the past, and
each was a notorious womanizer. The structure of the narratives, the language
and the details of the various symbols also show clear similarities. However,
while Edelman focuses on the connection between the narrative and the
womanizing behaviour of Cubillo, our analysis interprets the narrative as an
expression of the struggles generated by capital accumulation, as is apparent
in the following example:
The only thing you have to do is to take a bath. Then, you take off your clothes and you lie down under
a fig tree (mata-palo) at midnight. You lie on your back and start to praise him. A snake will start to
pass over you fifteen minutes before midnight, and when its tail passes by you have to watch out. A
white flower will drop.1 When you see it fall, you have to reach out your hand and 'chás!' you will grab
it and you will talk to the devil. He will propose that you sign a paper with blood from your veins, and
that you will hand over your most beloved child. Then the devil will give you lots of money (el gran
dineral) [Ramos and Valenzuela, 1996:45–6].
The quotation links the reasons for entering a pact to securing 'lots of money'.
This is but one of the many historical plots of the devil pact narrative.

Doctor Faustus in Central America

The pact with the devil is a discourse of great antiquity, in which progress
and development called forth supernatural (either divine or diabolic)
retribution, an exchange which entails the acquisition of new knowledge, the
power to rule, sexual pleasure, immortality, everlasting beauty and economic
advancement. All the latter correspond to what might be termed the up-side
of the bargain, and different legends and literary variants emphasize one or
more of these aspects. In the legends of the ancient Greeks, Prometheus was
punished for having provided humanity with fire stolen from heaven:
although humanity benefited, Prometheus himself was made to suffer by
being chained to a rock. The acquisition of knowledge as a central feature of
the devil's pact is embodied in the legend of Doctor Faustus. From humble
peasant stock, he studied theology and medicine, became a medieval
magician in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Wittenberg (Germany),
and dabbled in the black arts and was said to be in league with the devil.2
According to the legend, Faustus turned from scholarly pursuits to conjuring
up the devil, with whom he then signed a bond (in his blood). The terms of
the resulting contract (or pact) with the devil were that, in exchange for
providing the latter with his soul, he received not only material wealth and
his choice of the most beautiful women, but magical powers to do things no
mere mortal could undertake.3 Sexual liberty and sinfulness as central
features are also present in Mariken van Nieumeghen, a late Middle Age
Dutch miracle play, and some of the Don Juan interpretations.4
Many aspects of the classic European depiction of the complexities and
ambiguities raised by the struggle between good and evil are reproduced in
the Latin American and Central American versions of the pact with the devil
considered below. These all bring forward one particular theme of the legend:
new riches.5 In the acquisition of the latter lies the clue as to the down-side of
the Faustian bargain with the devil. Rapid economic advancement, the legend
warns, is invariably accompanied by social costs, and this positive/negative
combination is accordingly represented symbolically in terms of an
exchange, whereby the material benefits obtained by an individual or society
(or, indeed, humanity) are offset by long-term disadvantages, either to the
individual concerned, or to society as a whole. Current debates about
economic development fit neatly into this framework: continuing economic
development on a global scale is perceived as having profound negative
consequences for the whole of humanity, in the form of environmental
pollution and global warming.
The problem of how to understand the Central American narratives is not
only a consequence of the different readings of the devil pact narrative that
result from the obscurity of an offstage discourse, or the richness of the
symbols and the meanings with regard to the acquisition of knowledge,
sexual liberty and rapid economic advancement. Two other aspects render
interpretation difficult. First, the devil pact narrative we study is a living
discourse—and therefore important for understanding current peasant society
—but one which nevertheless takes elements from a pre-existing symbolic
language to talk about contemporary social processes. The pact is accordingly
not simply an imagined idiom but chillingly concrete, and its micro-politics
are all-too-real [Comaroff and Comaroff, 1993: xxvii]. Explanations of earlier
uses of this narrative are thus historically specific; both the symbolic content
of the narrative and the context in which the narrative is reproduced explain
why it is retold. Local interpretations of the devil are therefore highly modern
and constantly changing [Geschiere, 1997].
A second problem faced by those reading meanings into this peasant
narrative is the shift in theory itself. We therefore intend to analyse and
account for an epistemological shift in the way the Faustian pact is
interpreted: that is, the shift from Taussig's [1980] positioning of this
narrative between different modes of production—reminiscent of the early
1980s theorizing on modes of production (although distinct from modes of
production theory)—to Edelman's [1994] focus on gender identity and
Foucauldian interpretations of domination—in keeping with the post-
structuralist vogue of the late 1980s and 1990s—in order to explore the
intertwined modalities of exploitation.
 FROM CAPITALIST ALIENATION TO SEXUAL DOMINATION

Any discussion of pacts with the devil in Latin America necessarily begins by
addressing the polemical argument in Taussig's The Devil and Commodity
Fetishism in South America [1980]. Thus Edelman's subsequent contribution
to the debate is itself a critique of Taussig's earlier work. Taussig relates how,
because they cut more cane and earned more than their fellow workers
without added effort, some male Colombian sugarcane workers were said to
have entered a pact with the devil. Cane cut by these workers died soon after,
while the additional money they earned as a result of this pact was thought to
be barren, and used by them to purchase only luxuries. Moreover, the
sugarcane workers who made the pact themselves died prematurely and in
great pain. According to Taussig, the narrative emerges when former peasants
—now rural workers or miners—lose control over their means of production
as labour relationships are transformed in the course of a transition towards
capitalism. He interprets the change which gives rise to the devil pact
narrative as an economic shift, from gift (use-value) to commodity exchange
(exchange-value) and from peasant cultivation to wage labour relations.
Undergoing these processes of commoditization and proletarianization, and
trapped at a point somewhere between full-time cultivation and permanent
wage labour, peasants tell a variety of stories about the devil so as to
represent the process of alienation they experience with the transition from
pre-capitalist to capitalist relations.6 The devil, with all his ambiguity, serves
as a mediator of the clash between petty commodity production and the
capitalist mode of production [Taussig, 1980:37]. In this framework, Faustian
pact narratives are an indigenous reaction to the supplanting of a pre-existing
organic unity between persons and their products by the commodity fetishism
of capitalism, with its split between persons and the things they produce and
exchange.
Taussig's influential study has been widely discussed and criticized, and the
two interrelated objections to it are important for our discussion. A major
critique concerns Taussig's eloquently worded, but nevertheless simplifying,
representation of a very recent capitalist encroachment on a 'romanticized' or
'idealized' non-market economy.7 Consequently, and we find this less
developed in the critiques, one may question the gist of Taussig's argument,
which sees devil pact narratives as a 'counter-capitalist culture' [Austen,
1993:95] or 'oppositional cultural practice' [Taussig, 1987]. Taussig lauds the
tin miners in Bolivia and sugarcane cutters in Colombia for their attempt to
reconstitute the significance of the past in terms of the tensions of the present
(imagining the possibility of use-value, of a gift economy, in a capitalist
context). In Taussig's view, therefore, everyone is in their debt for having
shown us that apparently natural relations are in fact asymmetrical, non-
reciprocal, exploitative and destructive relationships between persons. The
devil pact narrative is a moral indictment of the new mode of production
[Taussig, 1995:390], a rejection of capitalist logic. Although we do not
question the possible value that such an analogy may have for 'the finding of
meaning for us' [Taussig, 1987:105], we do question—more modestly—
whether this really is present in the narrative outlined by us below.
Edelman starts from the many critiques of Taussig's work, and finds the
latter's claims too bold, implying as they do a uniformity of peasant beliefs
about devil pacts. He points out that Taussig compresses the devil contract
into one single perspective: namely, a reaction by peasants to wage labour-
based agrarian capitalism. Against such a view, Edelman proposes an
alternative framework, the explanatory focus of which is less on wage labour,
and more concerned with the intertwined modalities of exploitation. Instead
of the alienating effects of wage labour and commoditization, therefore, his
interpretation considers the devil pact an expression of the 'variety of socially
conditioned anxieties and psychic conflicts' related to gender and ethnic
domination [Edelman, 1994:60]. This raises the question as to why, precisely,
Taussig remains so important in Edelman's thinking. The answer to this,
outlined below, is that both studies share the conceptualization of the devil
pact narrative as counter-culture, as a form of resistance to domination:
resistance against capitalist alienation in the case of Taussig, and resistance
against sexual domination in the case of Edelman.8 The latter's argument is
developed around the history of Don Cubillo, to which we now turn.

Don Cubillo in Costa Rica

Within a few years of arriving in the Costa Rican town of Filadelfia as a poor
Nicaraguan immigrant, Don Chico Cubillo turned from a man of humble
origins into a wealthy and powerful landowner. In local stories, this abrupt
transition was attributed to the fact that Cubillo had signed a pact with the
devil. Some rural inhabitants thought that it was this which led to his sudden
riches, while others rejected this explanation, and instead pointed out that
Cubillo was an intelligent person who knew how to conduct business.
Edelman finds it important to note that Cubillo was not considered a greedy
and innately evil (= diabolical) person. Many people remembered Don
Cubillo as someone who always used to invite people to drink with him.
Another typical feature of Don Cubillo that local inhabitants recalled was his
seduction of women. He was an inveterate womanizer, and had offspring
with many women. Moreover, he recognized many of these children and left
them a bequest. It is significant, however, that Edelman does not provide
exact information about the way in which Cubillo amassed his wealth. He
states that the accumulation of land by Don Cubillo was not perceived as a
problem by other people, because at that time—between 1900 and the 1940s
—unsettled land was still available in the area. Furthermore, the sale of land
to rich landowners was a convenient way for poor peasants to generate much-
needed cash.
Three stories about Don Cubillo's life lead Edelman to consider the devil pact
entered into by the landlord not as a story that tells something about wage
labour and class antagonism but rather as a commentary on sexual
domination. Two of the three lead Edelman to the conclusion that rural
people themselves identified with Don Cubillo and his wealth, finding little
problem in his riches besides common envy. In the story of the lost alforja
(saddlebag), therefore, a poor man who encounters a drunken Don Cubillo
next to an alforja bulging with money makes off with the latter. Honest and
humble as he is, the man then returns it to a now-sober Don Cubillo. The
latter, who has not even missed the bag containing his money, offers the
finder a pittance of a reward, just enough to buy a rope with which to hang
himself. A second story relates how Don Cubillo visits the famous Hotel
Costa Rica in the national capital San José, the best hotel in the country.
When the hotel employees refuse to serve him because he is dressed like a
poor peasant, he calls over the owner, shows the latter the money in his old
alforja, and proposes to buy the whole hotel with all the employees in it.
Edelman argues that both these stories constitute evidence for the presence of
grassroots sympathy towards Don Cubillo, suggesting that rural people
identify themselves with his caustic sense of humour. In addition to the fact
that he spent his money lavishly within the rural community, for Edelman the
fact that the landowner did not even miss the money when it was taken is
proof that Don Cubillo was not a greedy person. Furthermore, in the episode
set in the Hotel Costa Rica, the latter symbolizes the 'white' townsfolk,
whereas Don Cubillo by contrast is the champion of the ethnically different
rural population who 'cleverly humiliates representatives of the wealthy,
white elite'.9 The third story deals specifically with Don Cubillo's sexual
dominance. It describes what happened in Room 21, a room in one of
Cubillo's houses, where he received a great many women who had sex with
him in return for money and other material goods. Edelman understands the
third story as an attack on the manhood of poor Filadelfinos, in that Don
Cubillo's predatory sexuality offended Latin American male supremacist
values about the protection of wives, sisters, girlfriends and daughters.
According to Edelman, these stories complicate the interpretation of the devil
pact narrative as a simple expression of class antagonism.10 Rather than the
latter, therefore, it is sexual domination and gender antagonism which give
rise to the powerful emotions that find expression in the beliefs about
diabolical phenomena. By interpreting gender and not class as a key to
understanding the meaning of devil pact narratives, Edelman seems to stand
Taussig's analysis on its head: it is no longer capitalism but gender that is
diabolical. The important issue here, therefore, is the following: by
compressing the many stories of Don Cubillo's life into one single cultural
interpretation of the devil pact, Edelman may have failed to recognize the
multidimensional aspects and the absence of uniformity structuring peasant
beliefs. Before discussing his interpretation in more detail, it is necessary to
consider a parallel kind of discourse: the life history of Don Alfredo Luna in
Honduras.
Our analysis of a similar Faustian pact discourse in Honduras leads us to
question the explanatory shift proposed by Edelman, from capitalist
alienation to sexual domination. It also leads us to question the main logic
informing the analyses of Taussig and Edelman, and one which they both
seem to share: the devil pact as a 'from below' cultural discourse that
challenges and defies existing relations of power and exploitation.
 ALFREDO LUNA AND THE DEVIL IN HONDURAS

We came across a devil pact narrative similar to that involving Don Cubillo
while conducting fieldwork research in a village in the Santa Barbara district
of Honduras between 1992 and 1997.11 Like Don Cubillo, the protagonist in
this case was an immigrant who, having once been poor, became a dominant
economic figure in the region, was a well-known womanizer, and a man
whom it was said had conjured up the devil. When we met Alfredo Luna he
was 90 years old and still an active person, living with a wife 40 years his
junior. Arriving in the village as a petty trader in the late 1920s, he fell in
love with and married a local woman, Doña Aurelia. He established himself
as a retailer of consumer goods, but soon became involved in agricultural
production and the merchandising of agricultural produce. He started to
amass land, and became rich, powerful and the head of a family of wealthy
landowners in the village. Significantly, Alfredo did not go in for an
ostentatious display of his wealth. When we visited his house, there was
nothing to indicate that he had been the richest man in the region. He
received visitors in rustic peasant garb: barefooted and stripped to the waist,
his old trousers had holes and were held up with a simple piece of string.
Other than a pair of the cheapest, locally made chairs, his house contained no
furniture. Like Don Cubillo, Alfredo had a reputation as a womanizer. In
spite of his marriage to Doña Aurelia, he regularly had affairs with other
women. He recognizes paternity of some 40 children, 12 of them already
dead, the offspring of two official spouses plus many pegados (literally,
children 'stuck on' other women). To visitors he recounts at length how much
he has spent on the education of his children, both legitimate and illegitimate,
and how well they have done: 'I have an engineer, two are in the USA, there
are secretaries, nurses, accountants, and my grandchildren are lawyers,
engineers and doctors'.12

Alfredo Luna, Agrarian Change and Land Appropriation

During the 1920s and 1930s, most of the land controlled by the municipality,
the so-called ejido, was distributed among villagers, who generally did not
lack access to land [Jansen, 1998].13 In the nineteenth and early twentieth
century the village economy was connected with external markets through
the sale of cattle, pigs, coffee and indigo (the latter in the nineteenth century
only), as well as artisan products (mainly sleeping mats produced from
natural fibres). Cattle raising as a more specialized commercial production
became profitable in the context of the opportunities offered by the national,
and Central American, cattle boom of the 1950s and 1960s.14 This expansion
of commercial livestock rearing, and the related concentration of land on
which to undertake this kind of economic activity, intensified the conflicts
over rural property in many regions of Honduras. The steady growth and
intensification of coffee cultivation, led by better-off producers and leading to
the emergence of class differentiation of the cultivators into rich, middle and
poor peasants, was particularly salient in the 1970s and 1980s.
The basis of Alfredo's fortune lay in his shop, the first one in this
municipality of about 1,500 inhabitants. Many people bought drink and drank
it on credit.15 He started to buy small pieces of land close to the village, on
which to pasture the mules he used to transport goods and agricultural
produce between the village and the district capital. Only later did he begin to
invest in livestock rearing and coffee cultivation. He also became an
important coffee trader in the village. During the 1930s and 1940s, Alfredo
Luna held various political posts on the municipal council, including that of
mayor. Along with his trading, producing and banking activities, this political
office-holding contributed to his riches.
Throughout 1935, Alfredo frequently travelled as a village representative to
the capital in order to secure a piece of land—called Juniapal—as an ejido for
the village. However, he used these trips to advance his own personal
interests, and to make himself the leaseholder of the state, in spite of the fact
that the municipality had already received written permission to use the land.
Evidence we have seen suggests that Alfredo also bribed the village
authorities during the conflict that resulted. The documents proving that the
state had assigned the land to the village and not to Alfredo, disappeared
mysteriously. After years of submitting new requests to the national
authorities, the municipality received approximately half of the Juniapal land,
although the boundaries between it and Alfredo's portion of the holding
remained the subject of dispute.
Alfredo had also purchased smaller pieces of land adjacent to Juniapal from
individual peasants, as well as one large tract of private land onto which
peasants had encroached decades earlier, and which they now considered as
their own private property. In the disputes that followed, an official survey of
the land was carried out, from which (according to information provided by
one of his sons) Alfredo benefited enormously. He got all the best land, in a
continuous plot, and intensified his cattle raising accordingly. Alfredo
changed his agricultural pattern from a maize-pasture-fallow rotation to
permanent pasture. Henceforth tenants were no longer able to use this fertile
valley land for maize cultivation.
Although in the words of the villagers Alfredo 'grabbed the land' to which the
whole village was entitled, there was never a mass protest against and
sustained opposition to his behaviour. Nowadays villagers blame this episode
on 'the authorities of those days', who in their opinion failed 'to defend the
people's interests'. Organized collective action against Alfredo's private
appropriation of public land never took place. He nevertheless did not have
everything his own way: complete control of the land was not possible, since
it was not fully fenced, and some villagers continued to farm plots there.16
Although he did not evict them because he feared this would lead to violence,
Alfredo passed the Juniapal land on to his son Pedro in 1967, not least
because he anticipated potentially unfavourable changes in national
legislation and politics. His family then commenced legal proceedings to
secure legal title, since all leaseholders of the state had the right to convert
this into ownership rights. Without the latter, the land would be affected by
the agrarian reform.
When, in response to a renewed interest in agrarian reform in the prevailing
political climate, some peasants attempted to occupy some of this land during
the 1970s, many villagers condemned them, stating that one should not enter
another's property (meterse en lo ajeno). The ensuing violent confrontation
between, on the one hand, several armed Luna brothers and their (military)
'bodyguards', and on the other the peasants who had invaded the land, was
seen by the villagers as 'understandable'-that is, the Luna family was justified
in protecting what was now perceived as their private property. The
attempted occupation failed, and Pedro Luna then sold large parts of the land
to his brothers. Despite the fact that nobody knew whether the Luna family
had legal title to the land, and that Alfredo had probably manipulated the
authorities in order to get and retain access to it two decades earlier,
therefore, a certain public legitimacy was conferred on the defensive reaction
by his sons to the occupation. In an important sense, this struggle had already
been lost much earlier, in that the village seemingly accepted the legitimacy
of Alfredo's rights by virtue of not challenging them at the time he
appropriated the land (el pueblo dormido; no se avivarori), and that his sons
had then bought the land concerned. Two local norms—being owner of
something you buy (even if it is from another member of the same family)
and having rights because you have fenced in the land with the tacit approval
of the villagers—were violated by the 1970s land occupation.
The acquiescence in Alfredo's land appropriation of both the municipal
authorities and the individual villagers was related in turn to the various ways
they were tied to Alfredo. The municipality regularly borrowed money from
well-to-do inhabitants like Alfredo in order to carry out public activities, such
as buying land for the villagers. Once the division of the Juniapal holding
appeared inevitable, it was Alfredo who paid for the land to be surveyed;
while he himself did indeed benefit from the latter, it also gave villagers
access to an additional and substantial amount of land suitable for maize
cultivation. Moreover, Alfredo's network of personal relationships protected
him from mass protest: it was said that 'Alfredo dominated the village', or that
'he was the axis of the village'. He was the only merchant in the village from
whom peasants either borrowed money or purchased items on credit: it was
said that 'everybody was indebted to Alfredo'. The absence of massive
opposition to his appropriation of public land was due not just to this
economic dependency but also to patronage ties: hence the view that 'you
could wake him in the middle of the night to obtain some medicines ... He
was a man of prosperity; we saw him as our father, all we asked for he gave
us, he did not refuse.' His wife, Doña Aurelia, strengthened his social
position; she was called 'the mother to the village' because of her generosity
towards the poor. Peasants also admired his strong personality, describing
him in positive terms as vivo ('alive, shrewd') and trabajador ('a hard
worker').
Other people in the village stress the far-reaching 'vision' of Alfredo in the
following manner: 'After the mayor had divided the land in the 1950s, many
people sold their parcels to Alfredo, and he bought everything, but cheaply. I
remember that my family sold eight manzanas for 100 lempiras, which they
spent on drinking.17 For booze they sold him the land; then they went to
drink, together with Alfredo, in his shop.' This view includes scarcely veiled
admiration for the cunning way in which Alfredo acquired land belonging to
other people ('for booze, they sold land'). Furthermore, Alfredo was the only
person in the village able to provide agricultural wage labourers with a
substantial amount of employment (many orphans considered themselves
adopted children of Alfredo, who supplied them with food, housing and
work). For all these reasons, villagers perceived Alfredo with mixed feelings.
They saw him as friend, father, compadre, employer, moneylender, esteemed
authority and also land-grabber.18 These multiple and contradictory
relationships with Alfredo influenced how villagers reacted to attempts by
him to amass land. It was, however, the dominant presence of dependency
relations that enabled him to appropriate land which belonged to the village
unopposed. In turn, a combination of merchant and finance capital on the one
hand, and primitive accumulation in the form of land grabbing on the other,
was the key to Alfredo's later success in cattle raising and coffee
production.19

The Devil and All His Works

During our conversations with Alfredo, he always looked directly into the
visitor's eyes, with a penetrating stare which is much talked about, feared and
respected in the village. Reference to the mysterious power of this stare was
for many peasants an oblique reference to his contract with the devil. Similar
in many respects to other devil pact narratives in Honduras [Aguilar,
1989:150–51; Chapman, 1985:168; Ramos and Valenzuela, 1996, 1997],
Alfredo had sold his soul to the devil in order to become rich. The most
complete story about the devil pact entered into by Alfredo was told us by
Fidel Alvarado (b.1941), a poor peasant who lived on the outskirts of the
village in a very dilapidated hut. His detailed account of the pact between
Alfredo and the devil starts with some observations on his own father.
My father got to know Alfredo Luna at the time he started to buy and sell petates and other stuff in the
village.20 Soon, Alfredo came to live in the village. My father said that he travelled with mules as far
as San Pedro to sell petates; eight days it took to travel from here to San Pedro. The petate was cheap
but Alfredo nevertheless became richer very fast. Once when my father went with his compadre
[Alfredo Luna] to his hacienda they spent the night there. On the way my father said to him that he had
seen a man on a black mule counting the cattle of Alfredo. Alfredo answered: 'Just leave him there,
these are sombras (shadows), it is the friend, let him count the cattle'. When they went upstairs to enter
the hacienda-house, Alfredo said: 'Wait here for me compadre, I have to go out to do something'. My
father stayed in the old wooden house a while but then he left to look for his compadre. He went down
and searched in a small ravine where he saw Don Alfredo sitting at a table with a tall man. In a ravine,
you understand. What tables and chairs would be there? The man had a big book open on the table, and
a pen; that table was well illuminated. The man was writing, bent forward. I do not know what Don
Alfredo Luna was saying because my father returned to the house. When Alfredo Luna came back my
father asked him: 'Compadre, where have you been?' 'I went to do something in the ravine', Alfredo
answered, and he continued: 'and you don't have the guts to do such a thing [usted no tiene valor]. Five
days later one of his farm labourers died. The labourer went to bathe in the river and simply drowned,
even though he was healthy. Labourers of Alfredo died from drowning, or were bitten by insects, for
example by ants in the mountains, or from disease. Another died just like that. One guy went to buy
eggs, and when he entered the house he dropped on the floor, dead. It turned out that Alfredo handed
over many people. The people worked for him because he had work for them to do. In this village we
have poverty, we all are poor, so therefore people went to work for the man, because he had ways to
pay labourers, many ways. Also, the late Santiago worked for him. The late Santiago was depulping
coffee when a tall man, black and with a big sombrero, passed by on a black mule. Then one day
Santiago drank milk from a black cow. I was still a boy and told him not to drink the milk. He was
caught by cholera, and died lying on a pile of maize leaves. There was a burial; just for drinking a glass
of milk! But [I know that] the late Santiago is not there [where the dead are], but stays in the black
house. They say it is a black house. Some say it is a white house. One can see the black house only at
noon and at midnight. People say that it is the place to enter into an agreement. I have walked a lot in
San Pedro, but I have never come across that house, although I want to see it. [To make a contract you
have to pass] seven rooms, each one with a big snake, before you meet him [the devil]. He instructs you
to deal three blows to Jesus Christ; but Jesus Christ is weeping and shedding tears. Anyone who is
timid, who lacks guts, will not make the pact when he sees Christ weeping because of the three blows
he will receive. But he who masters his conscience will win; [he] who indeed wants to be rich, will
strike Jesus Christ three blows. The deal is for a few days only, and [the devil] will come to collect.
People say Alfredo handed over his own daughter. They say that those handed over will never die. If,
for example, someone is to be shot, Lucifer will make a puppet, and when the shot is fired he throws it,
and the bullets will hit the puppet. The puppet will fall dead on the ground, and the person will be taken
alive to the black house. They say that my madrina, Doña Aurelia, the wife of Don Alfredo, is there
too. She died in childbirth, along with her baby.21 Alfredo sometimes goes to San Pedro, maybe to see
her. His sons also travel to San Pedro often. She has told one of her sons that they should take her out
there, and should construct a house outside the village. She said: 'The people think that I am dead so
how can they then see me alive? You have to bring me a black cat, without any white hair. If you bring
it, I will leave.' But no one brought her the cat. All the farm labourers who were handed over by
Alfredo are there too. One of his sons told me. He knew all the labourers, and had seen them through a
window of the house. He had seen this guy and that; he had seen about eight labourers in the black
house. He had also seen my madrina with her son, already big now; also some uncles. Nobody was
dead, all were alive. Who knows how he managed to bring so many people? In this way Don Alfredo
became rich. It is not nothing to make a pact. You have to love the person who is handed over very
much. He had an enormous cattle herd. He had fifty pack animals, just to lug coffee. He always had ten,
twenty labourers to pay.
Many of the symbols in Fidel's devil pact narrative appear in similar form in
other Honduran devil pact narratives. For example, the black mule
accompanying the devil, the ravine with a table and a chair at midnight, the
sudden and unexpected death of day labourers and family members, the black
cat, and the empty coffins, or coffins filled with puppets. Another recurring
theme is the pact as a signed document.22 Significantly, the basement of Don
Alfredo's house appears in many versions of the narrative. Alfredo's house
was the only one in the village with a basement. One of his granddaughters
asked him one day why he had constructed the basement, and he said that he
used it to keep 'things' in. But people thought of it as a place of evil.23 Most
stories about Alfredo's devil pact refer to his extraordinary powers. In one of
the stories, a certain Anastacio, who lived near the river, left his house on a
night of torrential rainfall to check his belongings. It was midnight, and he
saw Don Alfredo passing on a black mule. Alfredo went to his hacienda to
look for his animals. Anastacio told him not to go because he had to cross the
river, which was in torrent and had swept away entire trees. Alfredo
nevertheless crossed the flooded river, mounted on his mule, and disappeared
entirely under the torrent. Anastacio thought Alfredo had drowned until he
heard him shout on the other side of the river. Everybody still wonders how
Alfredo succeeded in crossing the flooded river. Another example of his
extraordinary powers is his age, about which people say: 'eighty-nine years
and he still mounts horses and keeps glaring at people with eyes full of fire.
Nobody of that age is so energetic.' These stories have two sides: Alfredo is
human, but he is also super-human, as he can do things of which normal
people are incapable. These are taken as signs that Alfredo really does have a
pact with the devil which gives him everlasting life.
The speed at which Alfredo became rich is important. As one villager
expressed it: 'He rapidly became Don Alfredo'.24 Alfredo arrived rather poor
and became incredibly rich very fast. He handed over to the devil his own
family and his farm workers, he had courage (valor) and he possessed super-
human powers. The sacrifice of his own family underlines the widespread
conviction that he personally handed over his farm workers. Someone who is
capable of handing over members of his own family can certainly be
expected to hand over his farm workers as well. The fear on the part of day
labourers who refuse to work for Alfredo is therefore accepted as plausible
and well-founded. 'Having guts' is important because it explains why only he
and nobody else made this pact with the devil: only he had sufficient courage
to do this. At the same time it conveys respect for those who find it necessary
to maintain working relationships with Alfredo. In spite of what he does to
his fellow beings, it is possible for some villagers to have dealings with him.
Alfredo himself is accordingly not totally evil, he just has the courage to
make bargains with evil. The ideological sub-text is inescapable: because he
is courageous, Don Alfredo deserves to acquire things of value; his wealth is,
in the end, a result of his own work.25
 CONTRADICTORY ASPECTS OF THE DEVIL PACT

The life history of Don Cubillo, the protagonist of Edelman's devil pact
narrative in Costa Rica, is in three important respects very similar to that of
Alfredo Luna in Honduras: a sudden economic ascent, a pact with the devil
and the reputation of being a womanizer. But is Edelman correct in his
assertion that the devil pact of Don Cubillo is primarily a discourse not about
his wealth but rather about his sexual liaisons with women? Edelman argues
that Don Cubillo's wealth cannot be the source of the devil pact narrative
because there were also other rich men in town without a pact with the devil.
In support of his claim, Edelman invokes two additional arguments: that
peasants tended to identify with Don Cubillo because, first, the regional
economy revolved around him, and second, he championed their rural/ethnic
'otherness' against the urban white population. These same peasants,
however, do not identify themselves with the sexually predatory behaviour of
Don Cubillo: according to Edelman, therefore, the element of devilish evil
refers (and is confined) to this particular aspect of Don Cubillo's life. Such a
claim is also supported by the fact that the only difference between Don
Cubillo and other wealthy men was his womanizing. We will first discuss this
problematic epistemological shift in Edelman's explanation, to sexual
domination, before discussing the issue of whether or not peasants identified
with Don Cubillo.

Sexual Liberty and Male Protection

A central claim made by Taussig, that only men could sign a pact with the
devil, has been accepted rather too uncritically: it is certainly not true of the
Honduran devil pact narrative.26 Several of the Honduran narratives
chronicled by Ramos and Valenzuela [1996, 1997] relate of women who
have entered into pacts with the devil. In the course of our own fieldwork
research in Honduras, informants stated that Alfredo's eldest daughter Josefa
inherited the pact; they also told us about women in other villages who had
made pacts with the devil.27 In the case of Honduras, therefore, entering a
devil pact is not the exclusive preserve of men. One might nevertheless argue
that, where Don Cubillo and Don Alfredo Luna are concerned, the pact is not
a gender specific one, involving antagonism between males and females, but
rather one involving sexual behaviour, a discourse about promiscuity versus
marital faithfulness and/or pre-marital chastity (for both men and women).28
According to Edelman [1994:74], Don Cubillo's womanizing and sexual
promiscuity 'represented an attack on the manhood of poor Filadelfinos'. This
libidinous behaviour generated both admiration and anxiety, an antinomic
reaction that provided fertile ground on which the myth of the devil pact
could flourish. The story of Room 21 symbolized a twofold attack: not just
on the reputation of women, but also on their male relatives who were
supposed to protect them. A woman's reputation for virtue can only be lost
once, and if this happens men, too, are drawn into the ensuing scandal: it is as
much the reputation of males, who are supposed to protect their women,
which is dishonoured, and both lose face if this defensive role is not
performed. Although the libidinous behaviour of Don Cubillo is the subject
of male admiration, therefore, men are nevertheless anxious when this
libidinous gaze settles on women under their own protection.
In the event, Don Cubillo chose his women, and 'there was not likely very
much that a poor servant girl could do about it' [Edelman, 1994:71]. As
depicted by Edelman, however, these women were passive victims of Don
Cubillo's libido; they had no capacity to consider the advantages and the
disadvantages of such a relationship, and to decide for themselves; they were
unable to act in their own right. Because females aspire to conform to the
'traditional Latin American male supremacist values', women's reputations
are also important to men [Edelman, 1994:73].29 Invoking the presence of
Latin American male chauvinism (machismo), Edelman tends to accept it as
standard ideology, the only representation of real practice; in contrast to this
interpretation, others (such as Melhuus and Stolen [1996]) have pointed out
how the responsibility of men to protect the 'reputation' of women actually
varies a lot in practice. Furthermore, many men live with women whose
reputation has been 'lost'. The argument that men simply wish to uphold
traditional male chauvinist values leaves little scope for any consideration of
the ideological variations and contradictions that inform Latin American rural
machismo.
Alfredo Luna was a womanizer like Don Cubillo, and many villagers liked to
gossip about it, but no storyteller linked the devil pact narrative directly with
Alfredo's extramarital affairs. Womanizing is not at all uncommon in the
village. Many rich and poor men maintain relationships with several women
during their lives, and recognize the offspring of several partners as their
own. We know of some men who were poor, but who spent alternate nights
of the week with different women in different houses. None of these men are
said to have made a pact with the devil. Hence, womanizing is not an
exclusive preserve of Alfredo alone, nor it is restricted to men who are
wealthy. It affects men and women in all social groups.30
To substantiate the claim that the devil pact is an expression of gender
relations, Edelman refers to other myths and narratives, which combine the
theme of reproduction and female sexuality/fertility with evil. In these stories
women change to animals, or evil creatures who disguise themselves as
beautiful seducers to destroy men. During our fieldwork research we came
across numerous similar stories. Sorcery and witchcraft were connected to the
night, to certain places (where somebody was murdered, or had died in
suspicious circumstances), or to sinful practices such as adultery.31 However,
most of these stories, full of references to sorcery and demonic creatures,
never once referred to a pact with the devil. Examining all the different
variations in Honduras, our conclusion is that the element of evil generated
by the devil pact narrative is connected with the exchange whereby men and
women gain a specific advantage, either by becoming rich (the most common
attribute that attracts opprobrium), or less commonly by acquiring knowledge
(academic titles) which also gives them access to wealth.32
One might propose, therefore, an alternative reading of the sexual domination
as practised by Don Cubillo in Costa Rica: rather than an attack on Latin
American male values, which are not negated but reproduced by inveterate
womanizing and the repeated violation of women's 'reputation', sexual
domination should be seen as a form of competitiveness between rich and
poor men. Males who are poor both admire and fear Don Cubillo's libidinous
behaviour, and dread the potential dishonour it brings through the failure to
guard against the loss to him of female reputation that it is their responsibility
to uphold. That the root of this antinomy is to be found elsewhere is clear
from an observation by Edelman [1994:74] that 'Cubillo could suborn local
women and girls by providing significant material inducements that were
beyond the ability of "their" men to provide': in other words, he has the
means to buy women's favours in a way that was denied to those who were
poor. Given this, it is unclear why Edelman does not push the argument to its
logical conclusion: the narrative about Don Cubillo's devil pact is ultimately
one about his wealth, and thus also about class antagonism.33 Why does
Cubillo's money 'upset the balance of control over wealth between the sexes'
[Edelman, 1994:74] instead of between classes?34

Attraction and Betrayal

A major theme in devil pact narratives is betrayal.35 Many devil pact

narratives contain references to the attraction of new technology and other
aspects linked to the process of modernization. Some of the storytellers laid
emphasis on Don Alfredo's desire to introduce new technologies into the
village as the reason for his pact with the devil. He was the first to own a
radio, a water pump next to his house, and a coffee pulping machine; that is,
economic innovations which are viewed as attractive but also potentially evil.
Other Honduran narratives positing the existence of a contract with the devil
often refer to new elements entering peasant village life from the outside
world. In the village of Don Alfredo, the engineering company that
constructed a hydroelectric power plant during the early 1980s introduced
new machinery and, for the first time, industrial employment opportunities
into the village. For their part, villagers suspected the company of having
made a pact with the devil. The souls of the men who died during the work, it
was said, were handed over to the devil and still wander around as malas
espíritus (evil spirits) on the land near the power plant.36 This combination of
new technology, capital accumulation and new social relationships, is also
present in stories about banana, sugar and mining companies operating in
Honduras, all of which are said to have signed a contract with the devil.37
Most devil pact narratives in rural Latin America refer to one of the following
two kinds of betrayal. In the first kind, the subject of the narrative competes
strongly with other members of his peer group and threatens group identity.
The sugarcane cutter in Taussig's analysis belongs to this category of
betrayal.38 The second kind concerns subjects who transcend a particular
class location, or the poor person who becomes extremely rich. The latter is
no longer considered 'one of us' since he/she now belongs among the ranks
(and is an ally) of the 'other'.39 The protagonist in this second category,
someone who commits an act of betrayal by entering a pact with the devil, is
no longer regarded as a co-worker/peasant, but as a patron/capitalist. Often
the subject who betrays his fellows does so by securing large tracts of land, a
category into which Don Alfredo clearly fits. He arrived poor, with holes in
his trousers, and married into the village. However, unlike the other villagers,
he then went on to amass much property, became rich within a few years, and
was the first villager to employ a substantial amount of farm workers
throughout the year. Until that episode, people regarded it as well-nigh
impossible for someone to have enough money to pay or provide for so many
agricultural labourers. By establishing what was virtually a new kind of
labour relation, accumulating lots of land and applying new agricultural
technologies, Alfredo became in part the classic non-peasant 'other' of the
devil pact narrative and its theme of betrayal, while at the same time
remaining an important co-villager. The devil pact represents this shift as a
betrayal of existing social relations of production and exchange uniting
members of the community (while at the same time it mystifies this relation:
see below). This variant of the narrative identifies the source of wealth: the
latter not only is generated by earlier riches or by personal endeavour, but
also is created as a result of power over others. Alfredo became rich,
therefore, because he was able to do two things: first, to hand day labourers
over to the devil, that is, to exploit labour-power under his control; and
second, to take over land belonging to peasants (including the 'theft' of such
property). To accumulate his wealth, therefore, it was necessary for Don
Alfredo to cause the death of the farm labourers who worked for him, an
exchange which is emblematic not only of the devil pact narrative but also of
the theme of betrayal within the narrative itself.
Betrayal does not necessarily result in the destruction of all relationships. The
blandishments introduced by the devil cause new relationships to be
established, and the power Alfredo gained attracted other villagers to him.
Like Don Cubillo in Costa Rica, he developed into a typical Central
American patron. People sought him out to borrow money, find work, sell
their products, find political protection, rent land, get information, ask him to
become a compadre, drink with him, find a new parental home and so on.40
In contrast to suggestion made by Edelman, such an identification with the
patron as co-villager, important as it is for the local economy, does not imply
that the patron himself is seen as equal with the peasant.41 To substantiate his
analysis of Don Cubillo's social relationships, with sameness/'identification'
in the economic field and difference/opposition in the field of gender
relations, Edelman identifies the former as the domain of 'good' (= not the
devil) and the latter as the realm of 'evil', and therefore the devil.42 In a
similar vein, Taussig tends to characterize the devil in absolute terms, as the
embodiment of evil.43 By doing so, both Edelman and Taussig follow a
theologic/Eurocentric epistemology, in which the devil embodies an evil that
must be challenged and defeated. In the peasant reading of Alfredo's pact,
however, the very strength of Don Alfredo is also a source of his good deeds:
that is, the patronage which emanates either directly from him or indirectly
from his wife. His economic power made him not only a danger for the
village, therefore, but also attractive as an ally to individual peasants and the
peasant community/municipality as a whole. The epistemological border
between God/virtue and the devil/evil is, in the context of devil pact
narratives and their meanings, far too absolute.44

Heavenly and Earthly Powers Compared

The argument developed hitherto, about the devil pact narrative in Central
America as symbolic reference to new forms of exploitation and the resultant
class contradictions (instead of gender/ethnic domination), is essentially one
concerning the content of the narrative. A necessary second step is to explain
why a narrative about exploitation and class contradictions is located in the
realm of the supernatural. Taussig suggests that the narrative offers a much
better account of labour relations under capitalism than those who live in a
fully developed capitalist society might imagine. Broadly speaking, the latter
tend to perceive capitalist relations as natural and thus unchangeable
phenomena, and not as actively and socially produced forms of inequality
between human beings. By contrast, peasant narratives about the devil pact
break with this naturalization of capitalist relationships. The narrative is
viewed in essence as a social explanation, either of capitalism (Taussig) or of
gender (Edelman).
The devil pact narrative about Don Alfredo does indeed seems to be an
alternative to natural explanations. The new and unusual situation, of one
individual becoming very rich while living and working in the same socio-
economic environment as his co-villagers, is not easily explained away as a
natural occurrence. None of the villagers could imagine it possible that one of
them could become so wealthy so easily and rapidly. They all worked very
hard throughout their life, but nobody had ever managed to amass a
comparable fortune. It is true that some were better off than others, but this
had always been a result of differences in inherited property and
industriousness. This kind of explanation was impossible where Alfredo's
wealth was concerned. His rapid and phenomenal economic success could
not even be explained by reference to his commercial activities, as these
involved low-value produce, such as petates, beans and coffee, and high costs
in order to transport them to faraway cities. Hence the rapidity of his
accumulation did not itself fit into the existing notions of a natural process.
But is the devil pact narrative therefore a social explanation? People in the
village were, to a certain extent, well aware that Alfredo's riches had
something to do with his relationship to them. But why did this lead not to a
straightforwardly social explanation, but rather to a devil pact narrative? Why
did not a peasant narrative emerge that explains directly how Alfredo
exploited labour, made people indebted to him, and practised forms of
primitive accumulation in order to expand the amount of landed property he
owned? This question—why supernatural and not temporal explanations are
invoked—is not answered satisfactorily, either by Taussig or by Edelman.
Rather obviously, the devil is not part of the social environment but belongs
to, or comes from, the supernatural realm. Hence the attractiveness of the
devil pact narrative as an ideological representation of new forms of social
inequality may lie precisely in its supernatural (= 'other worldly') character.
By displacing the locus of antagonism, from earth into the realms of the
supernatural, it represents the new situation precisely as a non-natural
occurrence, and thus precludes a specifically social explanation involving
relations of exploitation. The latter kind of explanation, were it to circulate in
public discourse, would provoke tensions, anxieties and discomfort among
the peasants, not least because its remedy would involve action on their part
that undermined the existing social order. If Alfredo's wealth came simply
from exploiting his co-villagers, they could and should recover it forcibly,
both by taking it back and refusing to participate further in exploitative
relationships. But if his wealth emanated from a supernatural source, then this
was a situation that lay beyond the capacity of simple human beings to alter.
Alfredo's influential position in the village, his wide network of personal and
family relations, and his economic and political power, all made organized
opposition difficult. Socially and economically, people allied themselves with
Alfredo for the reasons outlined above. At the same time, however, these
same people, who inhabited an individualized peasant community, were
resistant to the idea that they were simply clients - dependent on others and
tied into social relations that generated inequality.
Not surprisingly, therefore, villagers occupying the same social and economic
domain as Don Alfredo were reluctant to locate the cause of their relative
powerlessness in relationships with him in themselves, in their own silence
and complicity. Instead, they opted for a classic ideological displacement,
and relocated the cause in a realm where they themselves were—quite
literally—powerless, thereby justifying their acquiescence and
simultaneously presenting their disempowerment in a positive light, both to
themselves and to others. Hence what appears as contradictory in natural and
social explanations—a rapid increase in riches/accumulation, new
exploitative social relationships, all coupled with a 'from below' endorsement
on the part of the rural poor—appears as much more logical and acceptable in
this supernatural explanation. For villagers who felt betrayed by Don
Alfredo's economic success, but at the same time participated in and to a
limited degree benefited from this process (= 'trickle down' effect), and for
this reason did not offer resistance, a supernatural explanation serves well.
 CONCLUSION: PEASANT NARRATIVES AND POLITICAL
CONSCIOUSNESS

This article has examined both the structure of and reasons for rural
narratives in Honduras about Don Alfredo Luna, who grew from a petty
trader to a large landowner, and his pact with the devil. Via Alfredo, villagers
became acquainted with a new combination of merchant capital, personal
political ties between individual villagers and state-level politicians,
permanent wage labour, primitive accumulation (grabbing of land) and new
agricultural technologies.45 As the embodiment of an expanding class of
livestock owners, Alfredo took advantage of the new economic possibilities
available, installed new technologies and introduced new grassland systems.
No one else before Alfredo had been able to expand his farming operations as
fast. The devil pact narrative about Alfredo Luna emerged quite clearly in a
context where fears generated by this process of rapid accumulation
combined with profound changes in the agricultural production system and
labour relations. Given this, it is somewhat surprising to encounter
explanations of the devil pact narrative in Central America which identify its
meaning as being solely about gender and resistance. Against such views, the
point made here is that the theme of sexual predation in folkloric accounts of
the Faustian bargain entered by Don Cubillo in Costa Rica and Don Alfredo
in Honduras does not necessarily mean that gender domination is the main
reason why the story is being told. Most Central American devil pact
narratives have as their central theme the unnatural acquisition of wealth, a
transformation which can be viewed as a form of betrayal. If gender elements
are introduced in these narratives, they do not change either the meaning or
the central importance of this particular theme.
Equally surprising is the claim that the devil pact narrative corresponds to
'from below' resistance, an empowering form of opposition to exploitation
and domination. Hence the problematic nature of the two main approaches to
this issue: by Taussig [1980], who views it as grassroots opposition against
the capitalist mode of production and the exchange economy, and by
Edelman [1994], who sees it mainly as a reflection of grassroots struggle over
sexual dominance. The analysis of the latter is based on Crain [1991:68], who
considers the devil pact narrative as an empowering ideology of resistance
against dominant interpretations and definitions of the 'real', similar to the
everyday forms of peasant resistance theorized by Scott [1985] as the
'weapons of the weak'. Against these kinds of framework, all of which regard
the discourse about 'the supernatural' in a positive light (= empowering), it
has been argued here that equating devil pact narratives with
opposition/resistance from below is problematic.
In contrast to the approach of those such as Taussig, Edelman, Crain and
Scott, therefore, the case made here is that the invocation by peasants of the
supernatural in the devil pact narrative offered them an alternative to natural
and social explanations of Alfredo's wealth. A natural explanation was
implausible, since the situation was new, nobody had ever experienced it, and
his rapid accumulation of wealth was therefore non-natural. A social
explanation, which would connect the exploitation and inequality in the new
social relationships to the process of capital accumulation, either onstage or
offstage, would in effect be a call for opposition. It would demand that
villagers resist the exploitative relationships and land appropriation effected
by Alfredo. A resort to supernatural powers in order to account for the origins
of Alfredo's wealth, however, offered an alternative to social and natural
explanations. Alfredo's practices of exploitation and primitive accumulation
were identified as being evil, therefore doing something about this was
banished as an option: no one could possibly resist his supernatural power,
nor would anyone be expected to attempt this. Not only is the devil the
embodiment of evil/betrayal, but he also represents desire. The new patron
created by the devil was an important economic factor in the livelihood
strategies of individual peasants searching for ways to survive in the changed
circumstances. This element of ambiguity inherent in the devil, who
simultaneously projects 'good' and 'bad', as do those who enter a compact
with him, suggests an alternative explanation of the devil pact narrative: not
as the empowering cultural expression of 'from below' resistance/opposition
to Don Cubillo in Costa Rica and Alfredo Luna in Honduras, but much rather
as a conservative representation of difference licensing in turn a
disempowering form of accommodation.46
Devil pact narratives in rural Central America enable peasants to account for
new wealth, new social relations and a new set of circumstances without,
however, alluding to the details of what for them are painful revelations about
deceit, theft, complicity and consent.47 It keeps distant, or perhaps even
denies, the possibility of social change and political resistance.48 In doing so,
the narrative does not simply reflect underlying social relationships, but also
intervenes in social relationships themselves, by representing them in a
specific way: in short, it locates them in a realm where, in effect, nothing
much can be done to change them. It also helps to create social conventions
and the formation of social institutions, that is, new landlord-peasant
relationships. A supernatural principle—the pact with the devil—is, it could
be argued, an intermediate step in the process of naturalizing new
inequalities, in a stage where existing conventions are as yet too fragile to be
completely naturalized.49
 NOTES

1. Mata-palo is not the common fig (Ficus carica) but a strangler fig (Ficus glabrata or Ficus
citrifolia) [Williams, 1981]. Figs, according to peasants, are special trees, as they do not have flowers
but do bear fruits (botanically, they have flowers, but these are not visible). Hence, the dropping of the
flower is in itself an unnatural act.
2. Among the many literary variants that refer to the theme of forbidden knowledge are Marlowe's play,
The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus [1589/92], Goethe's Faust [1808], and Harry Mulisch's De
ontdekking van de hemel [1990, translated as The Discovery of Heaven]. The expulsion from the
Garden of Eden of Adam and Eve, who had eaten the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge,
inspired this particular theme. In Mulisch's novel, the representations by Marlowe and Goethe of the
thirst for knowledge on the part of Faustus are themselves inventions by the devil to obscure another,
very real pact that Francis Bacon, in the name of mankind, signed with the devil at the same time as
Faustus was alive. In this novel, God tries to recover the two tables of the law, since Bacon had learned
from the devil how to institutionalize the scientific method and thus bartered away human morality, as
inscribed in the Decalogue, in exchange for knowledge about the origin of the universe.
3. In Marlowe's version, the devil collects an unwilling Faustus at the end of the contract, and takes him
down to Hell. Three centuries later, in Goethe's version, angels hoodwink Mephistopheles at the
moment his part of the contract is due, and take Faust's body to heaven. Faust's thirst for knowledge is
therefore rewarded. Compare this with the much more devotional end in the earlier play about Mariken
van Nieumeghen [anonymous, c. 1500] in which the Holy Mother helps Mariken, after a dissolute life,
against the accusations of the devil; Mariken does penance for her sins, and dies peacefully in a
convent. The peasant narrative we analyse here has no sad, happy or devotional end; the devil pact
narrative has been and remains a continuous part of peasant life.
4. The power of seduction, and leading people into sinfulness, is a theme that runs through many devil
pact narratives. Thus Mariken van Nieumeghen conjures up the devil and leads a life of sexual
debauchery. The devil himself benefits from this when men fight over her and kill each other.
Seduction by a diabolic male of females is of course a central theme in Byron's Don Juan [1818] and
Bram Stoker's late nineteenth-century novel about the Transylvanian Count Dracula.
5. This reproduces the offer by the devil to Jesus, whereby in exchange for worshipping Satan, Jesus
would receive as his reward all the kingdoms and power on earth.
6. In Marxist theory, alienation refers to the process whereby the worker undergoes a double separation,
both from ownership of the means of production and the means of labour. This in turn is experienced
by the subject concerned as a double estrangement: from a capacity to exercise control over the labour
process, and from selfhood.
7. Taussig's study has generated much criticism, most of it ably summarized by Edelman [1994:59–60].
One of the accusations levelled at Taussig is that he idealizes a pre-capitalist past [Austen, 1996;
Turner, 1986]; consequently, he mistakenly characterizes Latin American peasant societies as non-
market economies, whereas most peasants have long been incorporated into the market [DaMatta,
1986]. Another is the fundamental opposition between gift exchange and commodity exchange
advocated by Taussig and anthropological discourse in general, a point questioned by Appadurai
[1986]. Taussig tends to treat the domain of gift exchange as non-exploitative, innocent and even
transparent [Parry and Bloch, 1989:9]. Yet another criticism is that Taussig views the key contradiction
in the society he studied as one between capitalism and a rural pre-Conquest world, whereas it more
likely lies within capitalism itself [Trouillot, 1986:88]. Taussig also fails to account for the specific
content of devil pact narratives [Gross, 1983]. In a similar vein, Chevalier [1982:192] finds unanswered
the crucial question why only co-workers and not plantation owners are said to have pacts with the
devil, when both are equally responsible for the introduction of wage labour. Peasants, too, may have
pacts with the devil [Parry and Bloch, 1989], so this has to be explained as well. Edelman [1994]
himself questions the total rejection by Taussig of any link between devil pact narratives and socially
determined fears and conflicts. If these are not to be reduced simply to individual psychology as a way
of dealing with problematic situations, it is necessary to locate the reason for the reproduction of such
narratives in the wider context (see also Meyer [1994] for devil contracts in Ghana). In his response to
some of these critiques, Taussig [1987] insists that his book never described anything resembling a
'natural peasant economy'. Although many critics point to Taussig's idealization of peasant economy,
opposed by him to the capitalist economy, little has been said about his schematic view of the ecology
of peasant farming as opposed to plantation farming. His claim that peasant economy maintains soil
fertility in the rainforest [Taussig, 1995] has either been dismissed in its entirety [for example, Weischet
and Caviedes, 1993] or reinterpreted as an historical and location-specific phenomenon instead of a
static, pre-capitalist reality [for example, Amanor, 1994]. Between 1980 and 1995 Taussig changed the
key feature of the devil pact narrative while retaining the theoretical contrast between the gift economy
and the exchange economy. In a later text [Taussig, 1995], therefore, devil pact narratives are no longer
seen as a commentary on the development of capitalist relations of production but rather as a tale—still
reconstituting the past—which shows alternative forms of consumption. It is a discourse about giving
without receiving, and as such is a warning about contemporary, capitalist-created luxury and excess
consumption.
8. Taussig [1980:230] sees the devil pact narrative mainly as an effect of imagination and not - or not
yet—as an effect of politics, because in his view the latter requires, amongst other practices, political
organizing. This view, however, does not prevent him from ascribing many oppositional/resistance
characteristics to the discourse about the devil.
9. Edelman suggests that this is an 'ethnic' dimension of the devil pact narrative. He does not, however,
explore this further, and this argument remains inferential. The focus here is therefore on the gender
element in his analysis.
10. We use here Edelman's terms. Taussig's account is, in fact, not so much about class antagonism—
which would exist within one mode of production—but about antagonisms between the different modes
of production (or different modes of consumption in his 1995 analysis).
11. The focus of our fieldwork research in Honduras was on peasant perceptions of, on the one hand,
agrarian change, natural resource use and agricultural knowledge [Jansen, 1998], and on the other the
working of law and norms [Roquas, 2002]. During our long stays in the village, over different periods,
recording local interpretations of Alfredo Luna's position in the village and his contract with the devil
became part of our study of peasant narratives. We were unable to persuade Alfredo Luna himself to
give us his view about the devil pact narrative. At his age he seemed interested in talking only about his
children.
12. This occupational list is very different from the kind of list that most villagers would produce if
asked about what jobs their own children held, and as such illustrates the extent to which members of
the Honduran landed elite typically invest in educating their children for urban employment and often
state jobs.
13. The definition and meaning of the Honduran ejido has changed over time (see Roquas [2002] for
the different definitions, and disputes about them). For the purpose of the discussion here, it is
sufficient to understand ejido as state land over which the municipality can claim certain rights, one of
them being to concede usufruct rights to individual villagers. Peasants, however, have perceived these
usufruct leases as ownership rights to this land, private property which they have subsequently sold,
inherited or sublet.
14. These opportunities resulted from improved transport facilities, an emerging export beef market
with new packing plants, credit from a developmentalist state, new pasture varieties and cultivation
systems, and new cross-breeds and disease control [Howard, 1989; Williams, 1986].
15. Between 1952 and 1963 at least 906 people received credit from Alfredo (source: accounting books
of Alfredo Luna).
16. Apart from secretly invading his property, directly stealing his belongings is another individual
response Alfredo was required to tolerate, as the following local story illustrates. Juan Perdomo worked
as a day labourer in Alfredo's warehouse. One day he ate a combination of raw onions and plantains,
and his farts produced a terrible smell. He complained to Alfredo that a bad smell filled the warehouse,
adding that 'there must be a dead rat somewhere'. Alfredo ordered him to look for the rat and then to get
rid of it. A few hours later, he saw Juan leaving the warehouse with a big box in his arms. He asked
what was in the box and where he was going. Juan replied: 'This is the dead rat and I am going to throw
it away at the rubbish dump'. Alfredo gave his permission, and Juan left with the big box for the
rubbish dump, and dropped it there. At night he went back and collected the box, which did not contain
a rat but twenty pairs of shoes stolen from the warehouse. Just like everybody else in the village,
Alfredo knew about the missing shoes, but he never claimed them back or pressed charges against Juan.
17. Officially one manzana measures 0.7 hectare, but in the village is 0.8361 hectare [Jansen, 1998].
18. Compadre refers to co-parenthood (compadrazgo), a form of fictive kinship which in many Latin
American cultures contains, or has contained, a set of rights and duties between the godfather/mother
and the parents of the godchild (which does not imply equality, however). In this particular Honduran
region, compadrazgo has been relatively unimportant as an agrarian social institution.
19. One informant also stated that he took calves belonging to cattle owned by other villagers, livestock
which then was still able to wander freely on common land; Alfredo put his own brand on the calves,
and then grazed them on his land. Such thefts made him rich, according to this peasant.
20. Petates, or woven sleeping mats, were made by the women of the village.
21. In other versions of the story, she died of fright when a pig that was hanging from the ceiling fell
off and dropped into a bin filled with water just beside her.
22. This reinforces the power and importance of signed documents, and the respect with which people
treat them. There is another devil pact narrative in a neighbouring village featuring a man who signed it
because he wanted to have money to allow his son to study. When his son had completed his studies,
the man would hand himself over to the devil. But the son found out about this arrangement, and he
went with the chain of the holy saint Francisco to the devil and tied the latter to a chair. The son then
demanded that the devil return his father's contract. A contract was indeed returned by the devil, but it
was one with another person. The son kept it, and demanded the right contract. Again the devil handed
him a contract involving another person, which the son also kept while insisting he be given the right
contract. In the end the devil handed over the right document, the contract involving his father. In this
way the son rescued not only his own father but also two other individuals from the clutches of the
devil.
23. Don Alfredo's granddaughter's own theory was that her grandfather used it to store his cash at a
time when there were only coins and no paper money. But she also considered it possible that he used
the basement for the illegal production of alcohol. He loved drinking, and frequently organized big
parties in his house. The granddaughter remembered how on these occasions alcohol was procured for
the party from somewhere inside the house.
24. The word 'Don' is an honorific term of address for a man who is held in respect, on account of his
wealth, age, wisdom or professional title.
25. It seems unnecessary to point out that this kind of self-validation is the stock in trade of capitalists
everywhere, all of whom claim that their wealth is the result of their own hard work.
26. Although Edelman [1994:86–7] refers in two notes to other sources which indicate that women
made pacts with the devil, he mentions—but does not comment upon—the claim by Taussig that
women do not enter pacts with the devil.
27. In the course of conducting fieldwork research in another part of Honduras during the year 2000,
we recorded a detailed story of four sisters who had entered a pact with the devil. Although they were
poor, they purchased more and more land. Nobody was able to explain from where they got the money
to do this.
28. A theme that appears in many versions of devil pact narratives elsewhere (see note 4 above).
29. Edelman [1994:73] considers men's anxiety lest their women are seduced by Don Cubillo a contrast
to the prevalence of 'highly unstable, informal unions, which lessened males' affective attachments to
their partners and their concern and capacity for protecting female relatives…'. Unlike Edelman,
however, we did not observe that unstable or informal marital relations (widely present in our research
area) automatically implied lessened affective bonds between men and women. Edelman infers that
men in (supposedly) monogamous, stable marriages in western capitalist societies love their wives
more than men in the Costa Rican hinterlands.
30. Neither does the combination of being rich and a womanizer of itself give rise to devil pact
narratives. Several other wealthy men maintained multiple extramarital relationships, but were never
said to be in league with the devil.
31. An informant told us the story about her father, a womanizer, who fell in love with one particular
woman. 'He regularly followed her to her house and tried to chat with her through the kitchen window.
One night, when it was very late and the village was deserted, he saw the woman he admired walking a
short way ahead of him. My father immediately tried to attract her attention. She walked out of the
village and he followed her. She disappeared and then suddenly reappeared, over and over again.
Without warning her appearance changed, and he saw that she was no longer his beloved woman but
"la sucia" (= 'the dirty one'). My father was seized by panic, but he had brought a cigar with him, and
the smoke of a cigar can save you from la sucia' Although this informant's narrative is about evil,
linked to her father's adultery, such a story is not of itself evidence that the pact with the devil is
necessarily a discourse about female sexuality.
32. About the role of class in the devil pact narrative, Edelman is somewhat ambivalent. His stated
intention is to 'challenge the idea that devil pact beliefs are rooted in economic exploitation alone'
[Edelman, 1994:78]. Regardless of the degree to which class antagonism plays a role in his
interpretation of the devil pact narrative, however, according to him the central theme remains the issue
of gender and sexual domination. In our view, Edelman tends to overstate the gender issue and to
confuse different social structures. Devil pact narratives may interweave issues of riches and new
wealth with symbolic reference to sexuality and knowledge, but his does not necessarily mean that in
this case the narrative is a coherent and encompassing explanation of all the behaviour featuring Don
Alfredo Luna and/or Don Cubillo. Edelman tries to incorporate every detail of Don Cubillo's life
history within the single rabric of his devil pact narrative, which is 'a nearly ubiquitous cultural matrix'.
Edelman [1994:61] argues further that 'the recognition that the rural poor (or others) do not always
analytically separate "modes" of exploitation or types of power relations is key to understanding their
narratives about domination and subjection. In the case that is the central concern here, intertwined
modalities of exploitation are mirrored in stories that mix symbols and levels of meaning but that, in
using the metaphor of the devil pact, employ a commonly available idiom or interpretative framework'
(for the historical background, see Edelman [1992]). In our fieldwork conversations about Don Alfredo,
villagers drew a clear distinction between class (capital accumulation) and gender (that is, sexual
predation), using the devil pact narrative exclusively to deal with Alfredo's rapidly acquired riches,
changes in the agricultural production system and the use of wage labour. We think class and gender
can be seen as different structures, contingently related, which -as has often been the case historically—
may or may not reinforce each other: capitalism without gender oppression is theoretically imaginable,
and an objective pursued in most feminist projects [Sayer, 1984]. The social structures of class and
gender both appear in the life history of Alfredo Luna: the large landowner and the famous womanizer.
In contrast to Edelman, who states that rural people cannot distinguish modes of exploitation, the
different tales about Alfredo separate out these different structures very clearly. In the case of the devil
pact narrative about Alfredo, the story told is of his capital accumulation and not of his libidinous
behaviour and his 40 children. Thus the devil pact narrative is not a comprehensive cultural matrix
which reflects all the behaviour and social relationship of the person involved.
33. Crain [1991] does consider a similar situation in Ecuador as an expression of class antagonism.
34. In fact, gender struggles are absent from Edelman's case study.
35. The structure of betrayal connects centrally with Christian narratives about the transformation of
good into evil, and the absolute contrast between them: not only with regard to the expulsion of Adam
and Eve from the Garden of Eden, and the Jesus/Judas relationship, therefore, but also to the one
involving God/Lucifer/Satan. Satan was a fallen angel: that is, he was initially part of the system
against which he subsequently turned, and of which he became the 'other'. In terms of a discourse about
betrayal, the devil pact narrative replicates the theme of Satan's fall. Just as the rich man was poor to
begin with, and like the poor an honest and virtuous person, so Lucifer—who was originally an
archangel in heaven—betrayed God, and consequently became the embodiment of evil and all-that-
God-is-not. Like Lucifer/Satan, therefore, those who enter a pact with the devil signal thereby a
permanent and enduring process of transformation, or leaving behind 'goodness' (= peasant economy)
in order to become something 'other' and 'bad', for example, an accumulator of capital
(money=dirt=evil).
36. Such 'undead'—those who are neither in heaven nor in hell—also appear as the people in Alfredo's
black house in San Pedro de Sula in the story cited above.
37. Crain [1991] describes a former peasant, now a foreman, who had become so obsessed with a new
sawmill which he operated that he regularly remained with the machine at night and fell asleep beside
it. His attachment to this symbol of danger and power led ultimately to him being handed over to the
devil.
38. Trouillot [1986:88] argues that piece-work tends to generate resentment in cases where some
labourers exceed significantly the average worker's productivity. He advances the persuasive
hypothesis that, in the case of the Colombian cane cutters, it was this resentment by fellow workers of
the betrayal by some of their number of worker solidarity (= 'rate busting')—and not the clash between
two modes of production—that was the source of the devil pact narrative.
39. We leave aside a third category, in which the subject of the devil pact narrative is predominantly an
external agent that threatens peasant livelihoods. For example, the agricultural school el Zamorano in
Honduras is supposed to have a pact with the devil. It acquired large tracts of the best land in the
Zamorano valley on which it erected buildings remarkable for their beautiful architecture. Each year,
when its board of trustees meets, it is thought that these 'gringos' have their annual devils' sabbath. The
dead souls are handed over to the devil on the last bend of the road that descends from the mountain
and enters the valley, a spot where many accidents always result in fatalities. All three categories
mentioned are constructed by and circulate within the domain of popular culture. Devil pact narratives
may also be constructed by elites who feel threatened by lower classes: for example, the witchcraft
trials in European history [Waardt, 1989] and the demonization of the Indian population by the Spanish
conquerors [Cervantes, 1994].
40. Villagers did not perceive Alfredo as completely diabolical or greedy. Many people reported that
Alfredo liked to drink and invited them to drink with him. The same is true of Don Cubillo, and
Edelman emphasizes that he, too, was not greedy, and thus not entirely evil, which he takes as evidence
for the fact it was not his wealth which led to the devil pact narrative. However, the point about Alfredo
is that a person in league with the devil always finds new money in his coffin, and thus is able to keep
inviting others to drink with him.
41. According to Edelman, because many storytellers identify themselves in some way with Don
Cubillo, the devil pact narrative cannot express hostility or class antagonism. He considers the story of
the lost alforja as an expression of precisely this identification. However, the lost alforja could equally
well be interpreted as another form of identification: not with Don Cubillo, who lost it, but with the
impoverished finder. The moral of this story could just as easily be that the finder was poor because he
was too honest, the inference being that those who are rich become so by being dishonest.
42. Edelman stresses the importance of recording the stories not only from people who believe in the
devil pact, but also from those who deny that Cubillo conjured up the devil. He invokes the latter
stories as evidence for his assertion that devil pact narratives were not principally about capital
accumulation. However, we also recorded stories by those who did not believe in the pact with the
devil; although they did not equate the pact with the illicit acquisition of wealth, such people did indeed
identify other mechanisms used by Alfredo to become rich. Let us consider the view of one informant,
who told us: 'I do not believe in it—no such pact exists. That man loaned half a bag of beans to
someone who later had to return him three quarters of a bag. These were loaned out again, and so
Alfredo got more and more. Furthermore, he sold everything in his shop…Alfredo also became rich
because he took away from the poor animals belonging to them that were wandering free. He branded
these animals and put them in his own sheds. This is the way the rich become rich, by taking from the
poor'. In this account, Alfredo's wealth is based on accumulation through commanding exchange and
credit in kind and through what has been called primitive accumulation: the forcible appropriation of
means of production belonging to others. Whilst denying the existence of a pact with the devil,
however, this view nevertheless confirms its central theme: the specific ways in which Alfredo became
rich -by usury, commerce and dispossessing peasant smallholders. The veracity of devil pact narratives
is also denied by those villagers belonging to new evangelical religious movements, who dismiss such
beliefs as 'superstition'. One such villager said: 'People say Alfredo has a pact with the devil. I do not
believe this. The devil has no money with which to make someone rich. God has not created the rich
and the poor for nothing. There have to be rich and poor. The poor can work as farm labourers for the
rich and share in some of their wealth. The poor and the rich are there for each other.' This
representation of social relationships recurs in the perspective of many poor people. If the rich did not
exist, the poor would be unable to find work and receive payment. Although the villager in question
rejected the mythological explanation of Alfredo's wealth, he too identified the same link between this
wealth and the labourers who work for Alfredo. In his rejection of the devil pact narrative the villager
nevertheless confirms that it is centrally about relations between employers and workers. The only
difference is that for him it is God and not the Devil who is the source of wealth. In the accounts of
both kinds of non-believer, the central theme of the devil pact narrative remains intact.
43. Taussig [1980:113] acknowledges the importance of the paradoxical and contradictory processes
we find in the devil, but his devil is mainly evil, and thus lacks benevolent and attractive qualities.
Taussig's Tío in the Bolivian tin mines therefore seems more of an European devil than a pre-
Columbian deity: the latter possessed malevolent and benevolent qualities, depending on whether or not
it received sacrifices, and was only transformed into the 'devil' during the Spanish conquest [Cervantes,
1994]. The European version seems to come closer to the characterization of Nash [1979]: 'We eat the
mines and the mines eat us'.
44. See Geschiere [1997] for a similar view on the close relationship between evil and good in devil
and witchcraft stories in Africa, and Cervantes [1994] for the devil as a god exhibiting both malevolent
and benevolent behaviour in post-Columbian Indian religion.
45. This changing context differs from Taussig's case [1980]. When Alfredo Luna arrived, exchange
value was already a common element in the village economy.
46. We do not deny the possibility that the devil pact narrative could be used in a process of collective
resistance, but we deny the a priori connection between peasant culture and empowerment/resistance.
If there is any opposition to the landowner in the devil pact narrative, it is a symbolic one only;
disagreement and condemnation is permitted, but outright opposition—in the form of agency to rectify
the situation—is not. In keeping with other popular and official Christian/Catholic beliefs, it teaches
that rectification or the pursuit of justice is something which is the preserve of God in heaven (not
humanity on earth). While on earth, wealth and power are not to be challenged; if punishment is due,
this will be meted out only after death. It thus reinforces passivity and fatalism.
47. Those storytellers who thought that Alfredo was in league with the devil generally talked in
admiring terms about Alfredo; by contrast, those who did not express admiration for him, and held far
more negative views about the kind of person he was, were precisely the ones who explained his
acquiring of riches not as a result of a pact with the devil but rather by means of land grabbing, money
lending and trading. The argument that such a narrative, as an offstage discourse of gossip and
calumniation, undermines the power of the landlord, is not valid in the case of Alfredo. It would
anyway be a somewhat one-dimensional explanation, negating the dynamics present in the
betrayal/attraction dialectic.
48. It generates consent in this case, not in the sense of an elite discourse imposed upon the peasantry,
but as a popular culture giving meaning to its acquiescence.
49. When this grounding in nature through the supernatural is recognized, this fragile convention may
collapse or be challenged—for example, when peasants state that it is not the pact with the devil but
rental payment which makes Alfredo rich.
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Representing the Peasantry? Struggles for/about Land
in Brazil

JOSÉ DE SOUZA MARTINS

 INTRODUCTION

Unlike most other countries in Latin America (particularly Andean and

central American ones), a longstanding and thus deeply rooted system of
independent smallholding cultivation based on an indigenous peasantry has
until relatively recently been absent from Brazilian history. Perhaps because
of this, peasants in Brazil have been and are currently more prone than their
counterparts elsewhere in the continent to the phenomenon known as the
'invention of tradition', a process which in turn generates claim and counter-
claim about identity and entitlement based on this.1 For this same reason, the
domestic and international visibility of the struggle for land in Brazil over the
last quarter of a century, and especially during the last decade, challenges the
social sciences to update their understanding both of the agrarian question
and of the peasant struggles in this country.
At the same time, these struggles over land raise important questions
concerning the direction and outcome of such conflict: in short, struggles for
land are also struggles about wider socio-economic objectives, or the way in
which property rights desired by the protagonists are perceived as desirable
by those in Brazilian society as a whole. Recent clashes over the issue of land
reform suggest that more attention be paid to the role and agenda of non-
peasants, or those who are termed here the agents of mediation (= mediating
groups). The latter designation covers a variety of groups and institutions—
especially the Roman Catholic church—that have played a crucial part in
making peasant and Indian protest and resistance viable.
It is necessary, therefore, to dispel some of the more misguided assumptions
relating both to the land issue in Brazil and to the ensuing conflicts. First and
foremost, one should keep in mind that, in the Brazilian
case, the agrarian problem does not conform to the standard Latin American
format. Historically, Brazil's huge landed estates (latifundios) focused on
producing tropical goods for export, such as sugar and coffee, and were
responsible for the development of an agrarian bourgeoisie that played a key
role in Brazilian economic development. In cases such as that of the São
Paulo coffee area, this class evolved into a dynamic commercial, industrial
and financial bourgeoisie, as early as the nineteenth century. It was this
segment of the bourgeoisie, of agrarian origin, that was largely responsible
for the industrial development of the country's southeast, currently the core of
Brazil's economy. It was a bourgeoisie, furthermore, whose social and
political vision had a major social and political impact, such as its
involvement with the establishment of the University of São Paulo in 1934,
currently Brazil's most important centre of higher education and of the
production of technical and scientific knowledge.2
The contemporary history of Brazil, especially that which started with the
1964 coup d'état, which installed a military dictatorship that lasted for twenty
years (1964–85), suggests that agrarian issues generally and the struggles of
the peasantry in particular should be examined through a much broader optic:
namely, a perspective that is not confined to episodes and events which occur
only in the countryside, but one that includes a wider range of different social
categories and classes in Brazilian society. In brief, it is difficult to
understand peasant struggle until we cease to regard it merely as a current
manifestation of an ancient conflict the protagonists of which have their roots
in a distant past, and a past, furthermore, which they are intent on
recuperating. For this reason, it would be epistemologically and politically
inappropriate to reduce the recent history of Brazil's peasant struggles to a
stereotype shared historically with the peasantries of Mexico, Central
America, Bolivia or Peru. The genesis of and path followed by agrarian
conflict in Brazil is very different, and calls for an interpretation compatible
with its own socio-economic specificities.
The presentation which follows contains three sections, each of which
corresponds roughly to a particular phase in the agrarian struggle. The first
examines what might loosely be termed the 'opening of the agrarian frontier',
the ensuing cash-crop production (coffee, sugar, rubber) being dependent for
its labour supply on a process of international immigration and settlement.3
The second looks at the subsequent closing of the agrarian frontier, a
situation of double dispossession which gave rise to national migration as
land usufruct rights hitherto enjoyed by members of the agricultural work
force were cut back at the same time as urban employment opportunities
became scarce. The third considers the way in which the land question was
then reopened, by whom, and why, while the conclusion investigates the
arguments and conflicts surrounding what have in effect become movements
by Brazilian Indians and peasant smallholders for the re-possession of and/or
the right to work on the land.
 OPENING THE AGRARIAN FRONTIER

In order to understand what peasant movements consist of in Brazil, as well

as to appreciate their aims and difficulties, it is necessary to refer briefly and
in passing to the agrarian question. We are all aware of what the agrarian
question is in theory: namely, a question about obstacles to accumulation,
whereby the existence of land rent blocks the development of capital, and in
effect prevents a surplus being generated in agriculture for the purpose of
industrialization.4 Where economic activity depends on the land, and where
agricultural land is controlled by a traditional landowning class not directly
involved in cultivation, an economically unproductive landlord has the power
to demand from the economically productive capitalist what amounts to a
charge on accumulation as a condition of setting the agrarian labour process
in motion. Such a cost is either passed onto and thus borne by all productive
elements in the context concerned, or—more probably—acts as a barrier to
capital investment and surplus generation.
In Brazil, however, the modern ownership of land was instituted through the
1850 Land Bill, which had as its purpose the formulation of legal
mechanisms that made the cultivation of great landed estates obligatory,
especially where coffee plantations were concerned, during the nineteenth
century.5 Its objective was to stimulate a process of primitive accumulation
that Brazil did not have, and—in the absence of a large mass of peasants who
could be expropriated and then proletarianized—for which the country lacked
the necessary pre-conditions. In this respect, it was a different process from
the one that took place in European countries, from the reality and history of
which the primitive accumulation theory derived. With the abolition of
slavery looming, the purpose of the 1850 Land Bill was simple: to create both
a shortage of land and a consequent incidence of poverty, so as to ensure the
availability to landowners of a work force that was necessary, in large
numbers, to tend coffee crops and to maintain the sugar economy. Slave
emancipation did indeed take place, in 1888, and deprived plantation
agriculture of its captive work force.6
By lowering the cost of the agrarian workforce through a system very similar
to debt peonage, this measure, to some extent, transferred both the hardships
of and the economic burden occasioned by the abolition of slavery onto the
new worker. At the same time, it converted surplus portions of this workforce
into a reserve army of labour that was essential to the establishment of a
cheap source of blue-collar workers necessary for industrialization. In
providing medium and small commercial farms, as well as large plantations,
with low-cost rural workers, the 1850 Land Bill subsidized the reproduction
of the industrial workforce, making it cheaper for industrial capital to employ
labour-power. Thus, to some degree Brazil was able to meet its requirements
for accumulation from within its own borders, by mobilizing surplus labour
for all sectors of the economy (agriculture, industry, trade, banking).
In the Brazilian case, the agrarian question manifests itself on two planes. On
one hand, therefore, ownership of the land in a political system that was part
of the client-oriented and oligarchic system constituted—at least up to the
time of the 1964 coup d'état—an economic reward for political loyalty. The
republican constitution of 1891 had transferred to the states of the Brazilian
federation the ownership of devolved land, and transformed it thereby into
the currency of political deals in the market of oligarchic domination. In the
more backward areas of the country, land obtained by political means was the
source of conflicts with rural workers and consequently of violence against
them. On the other hand, land was monopolized specifically in order to
enable landowners to exercise control over their work force, and until the
1950s rural labourers were indeed in a relation of dependence on farmers
who employed them. With the industrial boom of the 1950s, however, the
urban demand for agricultural produce increased the value of land, and rental
payments—which hitherto had been a way of obtaining and retaining workers
—were now transformed simply into a way of accruing speculative profits.
In this connection, it is important to understand that the current agrarian
conflict in Brazil does not stem directly and solely from the undeniable fact
of land concentration, notwithstanding the fact that large plantations were and
are a focus of struggle. Current agrarian conflict, and political solutions
linked to this, stem not from latifundism per se as from the transformation in
the relations of production that replaced slave labour, and came about as a
result of the abolition of slavery in the late nineteenth century. To
demonstrate this it is necessary to outline the three different solutions adopted
by regional elites in Brazil in order to replace slave labour, and thus to ensure
the continuity of large-scale export-oriented commercial agriculture. The key
to present agrarian struggles, and to the agrarian question itself, therefore, lies
not so much in the system of landholding as in the changes to the labour
regime introduced by rural employers.

Land, Slavery and the State

Changes to relations of production within Brazilian agriculture during the

nineteenth century were necessitated by the abolition of slavery in the sugar-
producing colonies of the Caribbean, itself an effect of inter-imperial
rivalries, and the consequent pressure from England to end the slave trade.7
Shortly after Brazilian Independence from Portugal in 1825, England
obtained from Brazil the right for the English navy to board the slave ships
headed toward its ports, freeing the captives in their own colonies and
confiscating the vessels. But it was only in 1850 that Brazil finally approved
a law forbidding the trafficking and entry of slaves from Africa. This sealed
the fate of slavery in Brazil.
At that very conjuncture, Brazil also passed a new Land Bill, replacing the
sesmarias or land-grant system inherited from Portugal and suspended in
1822. According to this older form of tenure, the occupation of land was free
and ownership was conferred by virtue of cultivating the land and residing on
it permanently. This earlier form of land title extended only to those who
were white, free, and Roman Catholic: that is, to those 'pure' in blood and
faith. Final disposition over land, however, was vested in the crown (as
embodied in the state), which upheld property rights only where land was
cultivated. If land granted remained uncultivated, the crown had the right to
reallocate such holdings to other interested parties. In essence, the Land
Grant Bill (Lei das Sesmarias) of the kingdom of Portugal was, in the early
fourteenth century, only a usufruct right to land whereby tenure was
conditional on the land being cultivated. It is to this law that the
establishment of huge landed estates in Brazil is erroneously ascribed; much
rather, the consolidation of such latifundia was linked to the availability of
slave labour—provided both by the indigenous population and also by
Africans. The land grant (sesmaria) itself was merely a secondary factor in
the establishment of the large landholdings system prevalent in the country.
According to the new Land Bill of 1850, the Brazilian State gave up its rule
over granted land (the dominium) and made the grantee the full and
unquestioned owner of the land, thereby instituting full ownership rights over
land property. It simultaneously abolished previous ethnic prohibitions on
landownership, while at the same time restricting access to land by
establishing economic barriers. In other words, land was henceforth a
commodity, and as such could be purchased, either from a private individual
or from the State. This law was premissed on two complementary processes.
First, the gradual disappearance of slavery, as a result both of the ending of
the slave trade, and of an inability to supplement this shortfall by the
employment of a captive indigenous population. And second, the recognition
that large-scale farming required massive immigration, or the influx of
foreign labour to till the land. The interruption of slave trading, however, led
to a substantial increase in the price of slaves, which rendered the abolition of
slavery inevitable by 1888, for cost reasons.8 Two years before abolition, the
Brazilian government was already fostering immigration schemes, which
subsequently resulted in the inflow of hundreds of thousands of families—
initially from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and Switzerland, and later on
from Japan—all of which were relocated in the south of Brazil, and
especially in the coffee-growing south-eastern region.9

Coffee and the Colonato

In the case of coffee, besides the transformation of work relations, one must
also take into account that, at that time, cultivation of this crop expanded
toward the west of the province of São Paulo, pushing out the economic
frontier and occupying virgin land, especially the highly fertile, so-called
'purple' soil. Together with the labour supply crisis occasioned by the
abolition of the slave trade, this resulted in an economic decline of the rich
but less productive coffee estates in the south-east area, which depended on
the port of Rio de Janeiro. These estates suffered economically because of
two factors: the comparatively lower productivity of their coffee plantations
and the suspension of the slave trade, each of which combined to undermine
the position of slave-owning landlords. In the western area of São Paulo, by
contrast, commercially dynamic agricultural production based on a new type
of labour relation, the so-called colonato system employing immigrants from
other countries, became the norm [Beiguelman, 1968].
Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, chattel slavery in Brazil was not
replaced with free wage labour.10 Commercial farmers made several attempts
to create a new work relations that would, above all, ensure the continuation
of export-oriented agricultural production on large landed estates managed on
capitalist lines. In Rio de Janeiro, for example, one alternative given serious
consideration was the introduction of Chinese 'coolies'. The latter,
commercial farmers hoped, would become temporary slaves on coffee
plantations. This proposal, however, did not work out. Sharecropping was
attempted in São Paulo, but this also failed, due to the high cost of obtaining
foreign workers, a result of commercial farmers in Brazil themselves having
to pay for the passage of such migrants and their families from Europe to the
place of work [Davatz, 1941].
Instead of these options (coolies, sharecroppers), commercial farmers finally
opted for the colonato system, which took root and operated for roughly one
century. Although there is still debate about this, the colonato system in
effect combined what were various different types of working arrangement
within a single production relation.11 On any coffee plantation in Brazil at
this conjuncture there were three main kinds of agricultural task requiring
manual labour. The first was taking care of the coffee plants, by keeping the
plantation weed-free, a task which entailed two or three weedings annually.
This work was paid for in cash, a fixed amount according to the number of
coffee bushes treated. Additionally, a contract labourer (colono) was allowed
to plant subsistence crops—such as corn, beans and even rice—between the
rows of coffee bushes. The second task consisted of harvesting the coffee,
work that was paid for either in cash, by volume of coffee picked, or under a
sharecropping system. Thirdly, a contract labourer had to provide the landed
estate with several days of unpaid work per year: this consisted of jobs such
as clearing pasture, cleaning and maintaining paths and roads, fixing fences,
and putting out fires. Members of the contract labourer's family also received
wages for working in the coffee processing area.
The colono contract in fact encompassed the whole agricultural labouring
family, all of which was involved in working on the farm, even the
children.12 Accordingly, there was a clear preference on the part of
commercial farmers for the recruitment and employment not of single
workers but rather of agricultural labouring families, and large ones at that.
These agricultural labouring families lived in 'colonies' of houses sited within
the estate or farm; some of the larger coffee estates had several of these
colonies located within their boundaries, forming a veritable rural network of
villages. Besides a house, the colono workers were entitled to a plot of land
on which to plant vegetables and raise farm animals (chickens, goats).
Finally, they were also allowed to maintain in the farm's pastures-that is, at
the owner's expense—two pack animals (horses, mules, donkeys) for working
and transportation purposes. The colonato relation included, furthermore, the
possibility that at harvest-time a contract labourer might himself hire workers
on his own account (i.e., recruited and paid for by him), to help him pick
coffee both in the amount and in the time stipulated by his contractual
obligations to his employer.
The colonato was accordingly a diversified and complex contractual
relationship, combining salaried work, the payment of rent in the form of
labour and goods, and the rendering of labour services free of charge, in
addition to direct production of the means of subsistence. It was, in short, a
relational form that united elements of a declining peasantry with aspects of
an emerging rural working class, and thus a working arrangement in which
cash payment represented less than half of overall pay, in general roughly one
third. Researchers who maintain that the colono relation indicates the
existence of a rural proletariat point to behavioural evidence, citing the
participation of contract labourers in strikes. Such episodes were few in
number, however, and have little significance when considered in the wider
context of the large number of contract workers who did not withdraw their
labour-power in this fashion. Most importantly, the dispute about whether or
not the colono was a proletarian overlooks both the fact and the role of the
relation as being that of an agricultural labouring family, and not an
individual worker. There is much documentary evidence that the recruitment
by rural employers of a family as distinct from a single worker was a
deliberate act, designed to achieve two particular ends: not just to obtain
access to more labour-power at a lower overall cost, but also to use the family
itself as a method of social control. Simply put, the colono was dissuaded
from participating in class struggles due to the fear of seeing himself and his
family—especially his wife and small children—evicted from their
smallholding.13
The main problem facing commercial farmers using this new labour relation
was generated by the fact of worker indebtedness, a result of the trip from
Europe. Debt condemned all the agricultural labouring family to many years
of serfdom, which contract labourers were unwilling to accept. While the
imminent abolition of slavery was being debated in Parliament, a revolt by
colonos from Switzerland contributed to the decision by the Brazilian
government to establish state subsidized immigration. In this it had the
support of the government of the province of São Paulo, which also instituted
a wide-ranging programme of subsidized immigration in order to obtain
workers for its coffee plantations.
It was the Brazilian state which instituted rational, effective ways to manage
the landed estates' demand for manpower and the organization of supply. It
organized the immigration process, appointing and hiring recruitment agents
in Europe, and also created hostels in which to house the immigrants
temporarily between their arrival in the country and their transferral to farms
and/or estates. Since it was the state which paid for the passage of agricultural
labouring families, the labour-power embodied in the latter was in effect
gifted to the estate owners. This was, indeed, the form taken by the economic
compensation that the Brazilian government offered farmers and/or planters
for their acceptance of an end to slavery: namely, socializing the costs of
obtaining and establishing a substitute work force, without which the
territorial expansion of large coffee plantations would have been impossible.
This measure was very important, both in creating the internal market and
also in providing a first impulse toward industrialization, shortly after the
abolition of slavery.

Sugar after Slavery

In the most important sugarcane growing and sugar-producing area of the

country, the north-east, the rural labour supply crisis occasioned by the
ending of slavery had other characteristics.14 At that particular conjuncture,
the cultivation of sugarcane differed from the cultivation of coffee in many
ways. First, because sugarcane was being grown in what was basically the
same area as it had since the sixteenth century; coffee, by contrast, had only
become a major crop in the south-east during the nineteenth century, and
especially after 1860. This difference in longevity profoundly affected the
way in which farmers and workers were habituated to the production regime.
Second, for a long time the cultivation of sugarcane was essentially limited to
the same part of the north-east, close to the coast. There was a major area of
sugarcane plantations also in the inner state area of São Paulo and Rio de
Janeiro, but this did not generate the same kind of habituation as was the case
in the north-east.
As with coffee, sugar cultivation became a tool for expanding the economic
frontier, moving further inland and, over the course of several decades, into
new areas of virgin territory covered by native woodlands. Sugarcane
production was undertaken by what became over time a wellestablished
planter class, given to conspicuous consumption and the self-image of which
was that of an aristocratic agrarian elite, and generally conservative as to
property inheritance, social relations, social hierarchy and political outlook.
By contrast, coffee produced an agrarian elite that was open to the
incorporation of new farmers, precisely because of its rapid and relatively
recent territorial expansion. Unlike their well-established counterparts
producing sugarcane, therefore, coffee farmers in Brazil were required to start
cultivation from scratch: felling the forest, clearing and preparing the soil,
seeding the coffee plantation, and waiting for a period of between four and
five years before production could commence.15 All of this groundwork was
based on temporary, formally non-capitalist, labour relations; only once all
this had been accomplished did the resident colonos move in to tend the
plantation and harvest the crop.
Because it was older, the cultivation of sugarcane maintained within the great
plantations a large mass of creole (mestizo) inhabitants descended from
Indian freedmen, Indian slavery having been abolished during the mid-
eighteenth century. This form of chattel slavery was unknown in the
cultivation of coffee. When emancipated, this workforce—equivalent to what
the colono would become at a later date—did not command sufficient
resources enabling them to survive as independent economic agents outside
the estate system. For this reason, they continued to live on their former
masters' estates, under the paternal regime of the planter class, growing food
for their own subsistence on marginal plots of land ill-suited for sugarcane
cultivation. In exchange for permission to grow their own crops, these
descendants of Indian freedmen paid the landowner labour-rent, an
arrangement known as the 'yoke' (cambão), whereby they worked for a
certain number of days per annum in the sugarcane plantation.16 Although
they were allowed to sell surplus product from their plots to anyone they
chose, in practice the purchaser was often the landowner himself, who
acquired their output at niggardly prices.
Planters were from the outset obliged to acquire black slaves as labour for
sugarcane cultivation, not least because of the monopoly over slave
trafficking exercised by the Portuguese Crown itself. With the cessation of
this trade, slave labour gradually became scarce, both in the sugar-producing
north-east and in the coffee-producing south-east, causing the price of such
workers to rise. Sugarcane growers began selling their slaves to the large
coffee-plantation owners in the south-east, thereby establishing an internal
trade in unfree labour. In order to compensate for workers lost in this manner,
planters increased the amount of labour-rent their freedmen were required to
provide in order to continue having access to smallholdings on the estates.
From this emerged a system of tenant farming based on a permanent
agricultural worker (morador) resident on the sugar plantation, a relational
form that lasted until the mid-1950s.

Rubber Tapping in Amazonia

Another area of economic activity possessing its own specific labour regime
was the rubber industry located in the Amazon region. Unlike the cultivation
of sugar or coffee, rubber was an extractive economic industry based on large
tree groves in the heart of the forest. This form of productive activity became
more important in the Amazonian region only after 1870, and chattel slavery
was therefore relationally insignificant to its economic development. The
cultivation and harvesting of rubber depended, much rather, on the labour-
power of an internal migrant workforce, composed of impoverished peasants
and agricultural workers escaping from the semiarid north-eastern region (not
the sugarcane north-east).17 These migrants were recruited in large numbers
and then transported to the Amazon region by labour contractors. Although
the latter exercised extra-economic coercion when recruiting workers, usually
a process linked to cash advances and debt, the main reason for migration
remained hunger and poverty occasioned by severe drought, especially the
one that occurred in 1877.18 Once in Amazonia, these migrants were reduced
to serfdom by virtue of debts they owed to the owner's store (barracão) that
supplied them with staple goods on credit, to be paid for from their
accumulated earnings at the end of the agricultural season. Unlike the colono,
the rubber tapper (seringueiro) was a lone worker, living and labouring by
himself in the forest, with the owner's store as his sole point of reference.19
The estate owner forbade the rubber tapper from trading with strangers
(either buying from or selling to others), a measure enforced by hired gunmen
(gatos) who also prevented workers from running away by controlling river
access to the rubber-tree groves. Structured by coercion, this type of
production relation was in essence a form of slavery: the debt peonage
system [Cunha, 1946]. 20
Just as the labour regimes of sugar and coffee cultivation differed from that
of rubber production, so the economic crisis of the latter was due to an
equally distinct cause: the introduction into the world market in 1911 of
rubber produced in Malaysia [Santos, 1980]. With its comparatively low
level of productivity, the extraction of rubber continued in Amazonia, but
now stripped of the economic importance it had enjoyed during the 20 years
in which its output had dominated world markets. This was the period in
which the ostentation and conspicuous consumption by rubber planters
ensured that their lifestyle became in effect a tropical extension of Parisian
high society. This was particularly true of the town of Belém, the gateway
into the Amazon region, the architectural splendours of which reflected the
profitability of the rubber economy. In some areas, estates producing rubber
were abandoned by their owners, but the rubber tappers continued to work
independently as squatters [Ianni, 1978]. The extraction of rubber in Brazil
was given a new lease of life during World War II, when the West's access to
Malay rubber plantations was cut off. As part of the war effort, the Brazilian
government developed an incentive program for rubber and encouraged
migration from the semi-arid northeast to the Amazon region. These
measures, however, did not bring about any changes in production relations.
Much rather the contrary, since the economic revitalization of rubber
extraction also resulted in a corresponding revitalization of peonage, or the
practice of holding persons in servitude to work off a debt.

Peasant Agriculture in the South

There were yet other areas of agricultural production in Brazil the economic
problems of which made a contribution to the formation of what now
manifests itself as a crisis of the peasantry. This is particularly true of the
important family farming sector composed of privately owned smallholdings
in the south of Brazil. At a time when it was recruiting workers in Europe for
the commercial coffee estates and farms, the Brazilian government intended
that at least some of these immigrants should join agricultural colonization
projects where they would become peasant family farmers. Not the least
important objective of this policy was an ideological one: namely, to
demonstrate to prospective immigrants that by working hard on the
plantations they, too, could become independent peasant proprietors. The
latter was, quite explicitly, held up as a reward for contributing to the
economic well-being directly of commercial agriculture and indirectly of the
nation itself. In the south of the country, most of the agricultural workers
settled in this manner and for this reason were of Italian, German and Polish
origin. Theirs was a self-sufficient agriculture, practised by a peasantry
transplanted literally from Europe to the south of Brazil, a form of production
that remains fairly important to this day.
Each one of these economic processes—sugar, coffee, and rubber production
—had its moment of crisis and, consequently, its experience of social
transformation. Except for producers engaged in the extraction of rubber,
whose crisis came earlier, those who cultivated sugarcane and coffee plus the
peasant family farms in the south all faced economic difficulties, but for
different reasons, from the 1950s onwards. It was these economic difficulties
that are at the root of the social conflict which eventually forced itself onto
the national political agenda in the decades which followed. What is
important to understand is that, to some degree, it was the shared chronology
of change taking place in distinct agricultural sectors located in different parts
of the country that conferred ideological legitimacy on the presence of a
uniform problem and political solution: that is, on the notion of a uniform set
of problems, a uniform political programme, and a uniform agrarian struggle.
In short, a rural movement the mobilization of which managed to hide its
diverse causes, and—by implication—the different social consequences of
this fact for a seeming unified demand for reform.
II
 CLOSING THE AGRARIAN FRONTIER

The main outcome of these crises in the different sectors of the agrarian
economy was a process of internal migration and westwards expansion
within Brazil itself, and the gradual but ineluctable occupation of land on the
frontier. From the nineteenth century onwards, therefore, it was this as much
as anything which ensured the survival and consolidation of peasant family
farming, acting as a safety valve by absorbing migrants from other parts of
the country. The capacity of peasant economy to reproduce itself in this
manner only really began to diminish in the period of the military
dictatorship (1964–85), in the face of what some have defined as 'closing the
frontier'.
New land was accordingly occupied not only by coffee planters from the
southeast, but also by poor peasants and agricultural labourers from the
north-east, midwest and the south. The latter categories became squatters
(posseiros) who practised shifting cultivation, which involved clearing a
small plot of land and cultivating it for a few years, and then moving on to an
adjacent plot, where the same procedure was repeated. This permitted the
original site to recover its fertility, thereby enabling the squatter to return and
cultivate it once again. Thus practised shifting cultivation was sufficient only
to provide the squatter and his family with subsistence, and any surplus
product generated by this form of peasant economy was sold locally. Because
squatters lacked title to the land they occupied and cultivated in this manner,
their smallholdings were frequently the subject of ownership disputes,
particularly with large landlords or agribusiness enterprises seeking to expand
their properties by appropriating all peasant family farms in the vicinity.21
Thus rural conflicts in the south, such as the Contestado revolt (1912/1916)
and the uprising in the state of Paraná (1957), and more recently in the
midwest and Amazonia, have all involved disputed land rights and titles.22

Closing the Urban Industrial Safety Valve

During the period between the 1930s and the 1960s, a rapid expansion of the
Brazilian economy meant that migrants from the rural north-east and south-
west were able to find urban industrial employment, particularly in the São
Paulo region. Agricultural workers who became unemployed as a result of
falling coffee prices in the 1930s, migrated to urban areas and found jobs in
labour-intensive capitalist enterprises recruiting new workers. After receiving
rural migrants from the coffee estates, industry subsequently absorbed those
from the north-east who were fleeing drought and poverty, and also those
from Minas Gerais, displaced as a result of the expansion of livestock
ranching into areas of peasant economy. However, this capacity on the part of
Brazilian industry to employ workers expelled from the land lasted only until
the coup d'état of the mid-1960s, when the dynamic of accumulation shifted
decisively away from a labour-intensive process to a capital-intensive one.
A crucial result of the technical modernization of Brazilian industry at that
conjuncture was a decline in the number of jobs available to rural migrants.
Such employment as existed was now open only to skilled workers with
higher educational and better technical qualifications than those possessed by
agricultural labour. Urban areas continued to receive migrants, but
increasingly these entered not the better-paid industrial workforce (= the
formal sector) but rather the informal sector economy, where wages were
low, working conditions poor, and employment insecure.23 Over the last
three decades, therefore, rural migrants have become slum dwellers
(favelados) living at the margins of subsistence in the shantytowns, a far cry
from kind of life offered them by what they perceived until the 1960s as the
welcoming city. In short, migration from the countryside in search of urban
employment has ceased to be what it once was in Brazil, a safety valve
mechanism.
This decline in urban employment opportunities was itself compounded by
transformations in the agrarian economy generally, and in the labour regime
on sugar and coffee plantations from the 1950s onwards. In an attempt to
stave off the effect of capitalist competition, sugar planters in Brazil
increased the amount of labour-rent payable by their plantation workforce.
During the 1960s, however, the economic situation improved as a result,
ironically, of the Cuban revolution; sugar planters in Brazil benefited from
the reallocation by the United States of Cuban sugar quotas to other sugar
producing countries. The consequent recovery in the demand for this
commodity generated an additional need for plantation labour, and
landowners extracted more surplus-labour from their existing permanent
workers, converting the latter into rent-paying tenants and the former into a
rent-receiving landlord [Andrade, 1979].24 Many smallholding permanent
workers, who were unable to meet these demands for additional labour-rent,
were evicted from the sugar plantations, only to return subsequently but now
as landless casual agricultural labour (clandestinos) employed on a temporary
or seasonal basis.25
A not dissimilar process took place on the coffee estates, where a permanent
agricultural workforce was casualized and deprived of its usufruct rights. In
well-established and older coffee estates plagued by declining soil fertility,
the colonato relation was essentially a sharecropping system. To the west of
the state of São Paulo, where coffee bushes were by contrast newer, younger,
and thus more productive, the colonato system combined the characteristics
of independent cultivator and wage labourer. Access to land in both coffee
growing areas—old and new alike—meant, however, that a colono harboured
ownership aspirations and perceived his true identity to be that of a peasant
farmer. This self-identity sprang from the right of a contract labourer to grow
his own staple crops in the rows between the coffee bushes, and either to
consume them or sell any surplus produce via the estate owner. From
viewpoint of the landlord, this arrangement ensured that the colono would
regularly and scrupulously clear the coffee groves of competing weeds, if for
no other reason than to be able to plant his own crops (corn, beans) in the
spaces cleared. Under this system, the colono worked simultaneously for
himself and for his landowner.
In the course of the century during which the colono system prevailed,
however, it became clear that growing crops in the spaces between the rows
of coffee bushes was counter-productive and thus uneconomic. First, these
crops damaged the shallow roots of the coffee bush, affecting the
productivity and profitability of this cash crop. And second, the introduction
of new and more productive varieties of coffee plant requiring more shade
and thus less space between the rows, eliminating the area traditionally
cultivated by the colono. To compensate for the loss of this usufruct right,
colonos were provided with alternative plots of land outside coffee estates,
which in turn transformed the existing division of labour. As a result of
coffee and subsistence crops occupying a separate physical space but
coinciding in terms of harvest time, the males in the agricultural labouring
family worked on the coffee estate while the women tended the smallholding.
Ironically, the growth of the domestic market for foodstuffs linked to
industrial boom of the 1950s gave an added impetus to the peasant farming
side of the colono relation and simultaneously undermined this. While the
increased demand for foodstuffs cultivated on plots leased from coffee
growers generated more income for the colono family, therefore, it also
alerted landlords to the economic potential of such smallholdings. Estate
owners began to phase out the colono system and its usufruct component,
preferring instead to pay such workers a cash wage. Access to land owned by
the coffee estate, and with it the possibility of a higher income, was gradually
replaced with wage labour for a cash payment. This trend towards the
proletarianization of the rural workforce was strengthened by a federal
government policy aimed at rationalizing the cultivation of coffee; subsidies
were provided enabling farmers and estate owners either to replace old coffee
bushes with new ones, to convert portions of their property into pasture, or to
diversify into other commercial crops. Consequently, the need to maintain the
colono system as a means of securing labour-power for estates and large
farms declined accordingly.
These changes were pushed through rapidly, not least because of the
opposition by organized rural labour to their implementation, the ending of
the colonato, and the eviction of erstwhile colonos and their families from the
estates. When the Rural Worker Bill was passed in 1963, giving legal
substance to the agricultural worker fightback, landowners and farmers
quickly recognized the colonato system as being not just an economic burden
but also a threat. The rate of evictions increased, and the now landless
workers (bóias-frias) were frequently re-employed on a temporary basis by
the same landowners, who no longer dealt directly with them but with labour
contractors.26 Accordingly, the transition to a casual agricultural workforce in
coffee cultivation, from colonos to bóias-frias, was in essence no different
from the transformation from moradores to clandestinos in the north-east
sugar region.
To some degree, these transformations in the patterns of rural employment
were accompanied by changes in the productive forces, a result of the
adoption by employers of low-cost subsidized technical, mechanized and
chemical inputs. Coffee, for example, continued to be harvested by manual
labour, but the task of weeding was accomplished through the use of
herbicides. In the sugar plantations, tasks such as the annual tilling of the soil
and the planting of the cane crop were mechanized, but harvesting of the cane
—as in the case of coffee—was still undertaken by labour-power. In other
words, capitalist production in Brazilian agriculture became increasingly
fragmented into tasks that still required manual labour, and those in which it
was no longer employed [Silva, 1980]. The effects on agricultural labour of
this transformed combination of productive forces and social relations of
production were profound: the increasing presence of technical/mechanized
inputs meant that agrarian capitalists had to exercise greater managerial
control over labour-intensive tasks. Rural workers and their families lost not
only their limited and conditional access to land, therefore, but also their
equally limited capacity to control the rhythm and pace of agricultural tasks.
Moreover, as casual labour they faced long periods of seasonal
unemployment coupled with migration to distant areas in search of work.27

Land Grabbing and Dispossession in Amazonia

Although in Amazonia the extraction of rubber went into economic decline as

early as the first decades of the twentieth century, it recovered during World
War II when metropolitan capitalist access to the output of Malaysian rubber
plantations was interrupted. It survived until 1965, when for strategic reasons
the military dictatorship put into practice a sweeping programme of economic
development in the Amazon region. By means of a tax incentives policy, the
federal government granted a 50% income tax exemption to those companies
already installed in other areas which were willing to expand their activities
into the Amazon region.28 Since most investment was in crop and livestock
farming, the demand for Amazonian pasture land increased correspondingly.
However, territory that the military dictatorship assumed to be empty was the
last refuge of the Indian tribes, both indigenous to the region and those which
had fled the Portuguese conquest during the sixteenth century. Amazonia was
also the location of on the one hand peasant smallholders, consisting of
squatters pushed out from the north-east in previous decades, and on the other
rubber-tappers working for masters—especially in the territory of Acre—who
actually had no title to the land.29
The new Amazon occupation policy revealed the precarious nature of
landownership and titles in this region.30 Those who operated rubber estates,
and had government leases to this land, acted as if they had property rights
and sold these agreements on to companies interested in the federal
government's tax incentives. In a similar vein, forged documents appeared
claiming title to the land of Indian tribes and peasant squatters, 'property' thus
acquired in the Amazon being sold to enterprises seeking tax incentives. In
this situation, paper rather than land exercised power: it was on the basis of
such power, however, that Indians and squatters were 'legally' evicted from
their holdings by capitalist enterprises.31 The extent of illegal and dubious
transfers of land titles in the Amazon region is underlined by the fact that in
the year 2000 the federal government nullified titles to some 63 million
hectares of landed property.
Such 'legal' acquisitions of land in Amazonia were also enforced by a process
of threats, violence and widespread extra-judicial murder.32 Peasant squatters
were evicted, and not infrequently killed, by gunmen hired by old or new
'owners' of land occupied by the former; squatters reacted weakly and only
locally, with actions that had little impact on this incursion. Any attempt to
organize resistance was undermined by the isolated nature of small villages
and peasant family farms, the inhabitants of which were easily picked off by
hired gunmen.33 Unsurprisingly, therefore, the numbers of peasant families
murdered soared, particularly during the seventies and the eighties. Because
they were relatively more united and organized, tribal populations fought
back with more success, and for 20 years a situation akin to tribal war
prevailed in the Amazon region. In order to protect themselves from the
attempt to deliver 'Indian-free' land to capitalist enterprises, Amazonian tribes
closed or destroyed many of the secondary roads opened by the Brazilian
state government in order to form a network linked up to the Transamazon
Highway. This resistance notwithstanding, many tribal groups suffered huge
losses during this struggle to protect themselves and their lands, and some
lost as much as two thirds of their numbers during this period.
These facts confound received theory about the way in which agrarian
capitalism is reproduced.34 Contrary to the assumptions made by current
theory on the subject of primitive accumulation, capitalist development still
entails the dehumanization of the labouring subject, an objective pursued in
the Amazon region not by economically backward enterprises but rather by
new investment made by companies that are economically among the most
dynamic and advanced representatives of the capitalist system.35 New
companies, not infrequently renowned multinationals, major banks, large
industrial concerns, and leading commercial conglomerates, have no problem
with the widespread employment on their farms of workers for the slow and
exhausting work of felling the forest, clearing the soil and seeding the
pastures, who are recruited and retained by means of debt peonage relations
—that is, slavery through debt (peonagem).36 It is estimated that, during the
1970s, the number of debt peons enslaved by such modern companies may
have been as high as 400,000 people [Branford and Glock, 1985]. The
current assumption made by evolutionist varieties of Marxism, that
accumulation generally and the development of the productive forces in
particular necessarily and always entails (and, indeed, is dependent upon) a
corresponding transformation in the social relations of production relations,
or a transition from unfree to free forms of labour-power, is wholly
undermined by the trajectory followed by agrarian capitalism in Amazonia.37
In the latter context not only did capital give a new lease of life to so-called
'feudal' relations, but the resulting traffic of people was both ubiquitous and
open: thus, for example, labour contractors supplied farm managers with
receipts for the debt peons bought and sold, as if this were a perfectly normal
capitalist transaction—which, in a sense, it is.

The Crisis of Peasant Economy in the South

Family farms in the south of the country also faced crisis from the 1970s
onwards, as a consequence of problems in ensuring the social reproduction of
peasant economy established by Italian and German immigrants during the
nineteenth century. These politically conservative smallholders, who were
closely linked to right-wing parties because of their strong religious (mainly
Roman Catholic) background, found it difficult to obtain additional land for
their offspring. Due to the high prices of rural property, such peasant family
farms possessed insufficient resources to compete financially with large
capitalist enterprises entering the land market, and were consequently unable
to purchase new holdings or expand existing ones. However, as long as the
offspring of peasant families were able to migrate to and find well-paid
industrial jobs in urban locations, this crisis remained dormant.38 Peasant
economy adopted internal regulatory mechanism in order to cope with a
declining land base: among the descendents of Italian immigrants who settled
in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, for example, this took the form of
ultimogeniture, or the institutionalization of property inheritance by the
youngest [Santos, 1978]. Sons and daughters of the peasant family married in
age order, the last one to marry—the youngest—staying on in the parental
home and inheriting the land, in exchange agreeing to take care of elderly
parents.
 Peasants or Workers?

Agrarian struggles in Brazil generated by these different conflicts became

organized around two opposed rural identities and policies that were in
conflict with one another. One of these was the reassertion of a smallholder
identity, which entailed the restoration of peasant economy by means of land
reform; this was the path taken by members of the Peasant Leagues, and also
by supporters of the Maoist Communist Party of Brazil (Partido Communista
do Brasil, or PC do B). In the view of the latter, the struggle in the
countryside would be spearheaded by dispossessed peasants for land, and not
by landless agricultural workers exploited through the wage relation. The
pro-Moscow Brazilian Communist Party (Partido Communista Brasileiro, or
PCB) took the opposite view, and argued that the struggle would be a
peaceful one, involving the implementation of existing rural labour
legislation recognizing the claims of both colonos and permanent labourers
not as peasants with rights to land but rather as agricultural workers with
rights to a decent wage, reduced working hours, and improved working
conditions. In short, groups with a shared political outlook were fighting for
different policy objectives (land reform; improvements in pay and conditions)
on the basis of socio-economic identities that were equally distinct (peasants;
agricultural wage labourers).
This contradictory and thus debilitating approach to rural identity and policy
was inherited by those who subsequently became involved in agrarian issues:
the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (Movimento dos Trabulhadores
Sem Terra, or MST) and Church groups.39 The latter consisted of the Roman
Catholic and Lutheran Churches, both of which took up the question of rural
crisis and conflict in the early 1970s, when Brazil was undergoing its severest
period of political repression. For these Church groups, what was happening
in the countryside generally, and in frontier areas especially, was nothing less
than the violation of human rights (of Indian tribes, squatters, agricultural
labourers, debt peons, and peasants). Up until the 1964 military coup, the
Church generally had not only been reluctant to embrace the policy of land
reform but also supported the dictatorship due to a fear on its part that
agrarian struggles—and that of the Peasant Leagues in particular—threatened
the institution of private property. The reason for this change of mind is
complex, but has to do with the way in which the right to private property
was seen by Church groups as theologically subordinate to (and thus
overridden by) the broader issue of human rights. In short, private property
came to be seen by Church groups as being at the root of social injustices
inflicted by the powerful against the weak, and thus a motive for the
wholesale appropriation by the rich of vast tracts of 'unoccupied' land and the
murder of the poor and defenceless who attempted to resist this.
This social awareness on the part of Church groups also stemmed from the
findings of their pastoral commissions investigating the situation of native
populations and migrant squatters in the Amazon region.40 In the polarized
political climate of the dictatorship, the involvement of laymen in pastoral
activities established what amounted to a 'popular front', enabling political
cooperation between and coexistence among those who opposed the military
regime. These associations were necessarily of varied and contradictory
origins, not infrequently involving groups that hitherto had nothing in
common except a long history of conflict with one another: Roman Catholics,
Protestants, and Communists, the latter split along different political
allegiances (pro-Moscow; Maoist) and organizational modalities (legal
opposition; armed struggle). When the military dictatorship ended in the mid-
1980s, two things happened to this politically heterogeneous opposition: on
the one hand, the clergy withdrew from direct political involvement, leaving
such activity to laymen, and on the other the MST appeared.41
III
 RE-OCCUPYING THE AGRARIAN FRONTIER?

Not the least of the many ironies informing Brazilian history is the fact that
dispossessed peasants and agricultural workers, the main players in conflicts
over land, are not actually the main political players in the struggle for
agrarian reform. The reason for this, which requires some explanation, lies in
the way successive waves of rural population have been inserted within the
broader discourse about what it means 'to be Brazilian', and the effect of this
ideological exclusion/inclusion on the power of, respectively, members of the
urban bourgeoisie and (especially) the intelligentsia on the one hand, and
peasants, workers and tribals on the other, both to formulate and thus to
delineate the parameters of specifically political solutions to the agrarian
question in Brazil.
Like many other countries in the so-called Third World, the non-owning
and/or impoverished components of the rural population in Brazil have been
either excluded from or marginalized in relation to a broadly defined notion
of 'belonging to', being 'part of', and thus in a very basic sense defining the
nation. In common with other countries colonized by Europe, Brazil was
defined largely by a small element of its urban inhabitants, the wealthier class
which, in addition to being urban were also citizens, and citizens, moreover,
whose outlook was shaped by all things European (culture, fashion, art,
literature, music, ideas, politics). An outlook which, in effect, constituted a
backwards glance at (not to say a longing for) its colonial past. The
inescapable irony here is that the economic reproduction of this 'civilized'
Brazil—urban, wealthy, Eurocentric—was underpinned by the surplus labour
of a politically unrecognized and unrepresented plebeian 'other' Brazil: the
peasants, workers and tribals employed in commercial agriculture the
products of which (sugar, coffee, rubber) were exported to Europe, and
whose very profitability made a European lifestyle possible for its Brazilian
owners.
This notion of Brazilian national identity defined largely by external criteria
—a European culture and society that was a colonial heritage -changed in the
1930s Revolution, when nationalism began to drawn from internal cultural
phenomena (indigenous/rural/local artistic/musical influences, etc.) in order
to construct a non-European self-awareness, or an authentically modern and
forwards-looking Brazilian identity. Although this process of redefinition
included what amounted to urban nostalgia for elements of plebeian rural
tradition and culture—the hitherto excluded 'other' Brazil—the peasants,
workers and tribals whose culture this was were themselves nevertheless
excluded from both participation as citizens and an awareness of
social/political rights linked to this. It was from the resulting gap—between
the recognition of cultural value but the denial of the social and political
rights that usually flow from such recognition—that many of the present
agrarian disputes and conflicts have received their current impetus.
It is important, therefore, to understand four crucial points about the conflict
over land which erupted in Brazil during the 1970s. First, it was a struggle
undertaken by members of a rural workforce (especially in the Amazon
region) to avoid being expelled from the lands they had occupied under the
assumption that these belonged to the government (which would negotiate
with them over usufruct rights). Second, theirs was a struggle to obtain or
retain access to the means of labour required for survival, and as such had no
wider programmatic status, nor did it exhibit a recognizably political form of
awareness. Third, the same is true of smallholders in the south and parts of
the south-east, who faced impoverishment as a result of being trapped
between two rapidly closing frontiers, one in the towns (where secure, well-
paid industrial jobs were no longer available to them) and the other in the
countryside (where the intergenerational reproduction of peasant economy
was blocked by corporate land purchases). And fourth, even casual rural
workers, arguably the poorest of the poor, exhibited little interest in joining
these struggles for land. All of these categories—squatter, peasant
smallholder, potential migrant, and wage worker alike—interpreted politics
simply as an act of good will on the part of the state, which in its 'kindness'
could (and would) grant the poor land.

Agrarian Struggle for Bourgeois Ends?

The political input to the land issue came from another source altogether,
provided by the discourse and agency of those who represented the peasantry,
who might be termed the agents mediating peasant struggle: these belonged
to party organizations of the left, which saw the struggle for land and agrarian
reform as part of a much wider process of class struggle, the end object of
which was socialism.42 Generally speaking, these mediating groups are
composed of the bourgeois and intellectual strata, and are frequently religious
or party agents, or educators, even though many of them are closely or
distantly related to peasant families, especially in the south. This is especially
true of the MST leadership and representatives of the Pastoral Land
Commission. Furthermore, these groups know that the consciousness of the
peasants and rural workers themselves is limited to the immediate objective
of survival, and that for this reason it is a consciousness devoid of a wide
political dimension.43 It is precisely because of this that the recent Brazilian
history of the politicization of peasant struggles is a history in which the
political consciousness of the mediating agents not infrequently shows no
consistent link with the objectives of those who are, in theory, the main
players on the rural scene.
As a result, the complex social and political realities of what in essence is a
struggle for land have been reduced to the struggle for land reform, or that
which is concerned not with the use but with the ownership of land. This has
imbued the struggle for land with the characteristics of a 'from above'
struggle in order to realize objectives—such as the manoeuvrings by Church
group or political party for advantage and dominance—which have tended to
be those of the Brazilian bourgeoisie. This kind of intervention by the middle
class gives agrarian struggles generally a particular character: the peasantry
makes a rapid transition from the role of an outcast and wholly marginalized
'other' to being incorporated with the status of client. From a culture of
outright contempt, therefore, the rural subject is absorbed into a culture of
patronage, which is nothing more than just another kind of 'otherness' (and,
perhaps, even contempt). Underlying this transition is the idea that the rural
poor will always need someone to talk/act on their behalf, a perception which
downgrades or dismisses their own actions and utterances as politically
inadequate, based as they are on an inability to comprehend the struggles of
which they are a part.
It was on these kinds of terms—reflecting 'from above' rather than 'from
below' objectives—that 'support' networks composed of bourgeois
intermediaries were established in rural Brazil. Unquestionably, these were
highly motivated and organizationally efficient, far more so than any
networks or organization that workers, peasants and tribals could have put in
place on their own. The outcome of this process was that the rural poor were
now in a dependent position that was no longer economic or electoral, but
rather political and party-related.44 These bourgeois mediations ensured that
the different sources of rural conflict, deriving as they did from dissimilar
social relations of production and thus from separate and distinct causes,
were consolidated politically under the single and all-embracing rubric of
land reform. This overlooked the fact that, except for the case of smallholders
in the south, all the other conflicts stemmed from production relations which,
in different ways, combined the identity of peasant and wage labourer.45
That is, a hybrid relational form the economic crisis of which could be solved
in two opposing ways: either in a politically forward-looking fashion, by
recognizing the subject as a wage labourer, whose class interests were those
of a rural proletarian, or in a politically backward-looking fashion, by
categorizing the subject as a peasant linked to a landlord by rental payments
and whose interests were those of a petty-bourgeois. The first of these two
distinct identities structured the programme of the Brazilian Communist
Party, while the second informed the views of church groups, the Peasant
Leagues, and the Maoist Communist Party of Brazil. The political and
programmatic significance of these two identities is that, as a worker, the
labouring subject is committed to collective ownership of the means of
labour, whereas as a peasant the same labouring subject is locked into an
agrarian reform redistributing land on the basis of individual ownership—that
is, land as private property. This raises, once again, the element of irony,
since it is private property in land—as both church groups and Marxists agree
(but for different reasons)—which is at the root of the recent and current
agrarian crisis in Brazil: for church groups it gives rise to human rights
violations, while for Marxists it constitutes an obstacle to socialism.
Of these two identities, it was the first—that of rural proletarian—which was
recognized legislatively by the state before the 1964 military takeover, in the
form of the Rural Landworker's Bill: it was this which hastened the eviction
from large landholdings of resident permanent workers with usufruct rights,
and their conversion into temporary wage labourers who were landless. The
second identity—that of peasant—structured the claim by the Peasant
Leagues to property rights embodied in a land reform programme, which
appeared to landowners to be a harbinger of revolutionary socialism.46 When
the military took over the state, it promulgated a Land Bill which, for the first
time in Brazilian history, defined what kind of land could be expropriated and
redistributed via a land reform. The intention behind this policy, however,
was the realization not of social justice but rather of national security as
defined by the military dictatorship: namely, to guard against the possibility
of a revolutionary transition to socialism.47
Over the longer term, the inability of any group or party successfully to
address the question of which of these two identities should guide agrarian
policy on the one hand, and political agency in the countryside on the other,
has been profound. This failure was also an effect of the Cold War, and the
prevailing fear among the Brazilian elite of anything resembling an
autonomous mobilization of the rural 'voice from below'. Having
ideologically constituted the 'enemy' as a uniform peasantry fighting for land
reform, the state under the control of the military then reacted to them as if
they were, by criminalizing it as 'subversive' and inflicting violent repression
on this fictitious domestic 'enemy'. This fight, waged by the state against
what in reality was a non-existent national entity, continued after the
departure of the military.
For their part, those who opposed the dictatorship—church and leftist groups
—have, like the military itself, adhered to this same national chimera.
Accordingly, leftist groups and parties have persisted in their attempt
ideologically to reconstitute a similarly homogenous peasantry out of a
widely varying rural population, and to subordinate this politically to the
struggle of the urban industrial working class. Thus, for example, both the
MST and the Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT) follow this
line, while the MST and the Church continue to act as if the rural stereotype
conjured up by the military during the Cold War was real. One irony is that,
in an important sense, both the right and left have shared a perception of a
uniformly revolutionary peasantry because it is a powerful image that
legitimizes and fuels their very different struggles. Another irony which
deserves mention here is that the re-emergence in democratic Brazil of a
specifically indigenist movement, at the centre of which is an emphasis on
the politics of cultural identity, has been due in part to the success of the
military during the era of dictatorship in suppressing other, politically more
threatening forms of rural agency based on economic identity.48

The Emergence of a 'New' Rural Subject? Brazil is not Mexico…

With the end of the dictatorship and the Cold War, and the dismantling of its
longstanding discourse and structure of confrontation, a democratic space
was created which licensed freedom of expression, and into this gap emerged
what might be termed a new rural subject, a 'voice from below' that no longer
coincided with the way in which this had been depicted -either by mediating
groups or by the military—in the recent past. Because those actually
participating in agrarian struggles ceased to identify themselves as peasants
or as wage labourers, such mobilizations were now classified as new social
movements composed of 'minorities', native peoples and environmentalists,
all of whom were engaged in the defence of nature. Thus, for example,
indigenous land rights were included in the 1988 Constitution.49 Rather than
belonging to a proletariat and fighting as a member of the rural working
class, therefore, the agricultural labourer is currently depicted as a 'new'
subject, defined simply in terms of being poor and excluded, and whose
agency is no longer aimed at systemic transition but consists instead of a
politically less threatening process of quotidian 'resistance'.
Such a definition, however, raises as many problems as it purports to solve,
not the least important of which are the following: to what degree is this 'new'
subject any more homogenous—and thus a sociologically concrete category
—than that which it replaced, the ubiquitous peasant? Is this 'new' rural
subject in fact still the 'old' homogenous peasantry, but in a different guise?
And, most importantly, what are the demands made by this 'new' rural
subject, and how compatible are its programmatic aspirations with those of
Brazilian society generally? Those who argue for the existence of a 'new'
rural subject are faced with the same dilemma as earlier advocates of a
revolutionary peasantry, in that it raises similar difficulties, not the least of
which is that mobilization might take place on the basis of idioms and
programmes formulated/constructed once again by 'mediating groups'.
In this connection it is important to recall that both the international media
and much academic writing currently draws a parallel between the Zapatista
movement in the Mexican state of Chiapas and the MST in Brazil.50
Although there are a number of similarities between the two in terms of form
—such as the active involvement of the Roman Catholic Church in providing
each movement with a support network, the possession by both movements
of a reasonably efficient level of organization, and the use by each of the
same tactics to secure publicity—there is little in common in terms of
substance. Unlike its Mexican counterpart, the MST in Brazil is not a rural
protest movement generated by the continued existence of a large pre-
capitalist (= 'feudal' or 'semi-feudal') landholding system that still holds sway
in the countryside, much rather the contrary: as has been argued above, the
roots of the MST lie in the specifically capitalist path of development
followed by Brazilian agriculture. For this reason, it is necessary to avoid a
facile and unwarranted association with the events in Chiapas.
Another reason for not drawing this parallel is that, by inference, it reduces
the diversity and complexity of Brazilian agriculture and agrarian structure,
together with the different causes and effects in terms of economic crisis
faced by peasants, squatters, agricultural workers, and tribals, to events
centred around the MST, merely because it is the latter that generates all the
international media publicity and academic interest. Without underestimating
the significance of the MST and its achievements, it is necessary to remember
that another, equally important, and far older grassroots organization has
operated in the Brazilian countryside: that is, the National Confederation of
Land Workers (Confederação Nacional dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura,
or CONTAG). Historically, the latter has been an authentic 'voice from
below', at the centre of the social struggle for land, and representing millions
of unionised rural workers. There are also other, less visible but no less
crucial, rural organizations and unions that operate at the grassroots within
specific localities throughout the country. Rather than the more conservative
agency (quotidian resistance) attributed by international 'mediating groups' to
the 'new' rural subject, these older trade union organizations have fought—
and continue to fight—for systemic change in Brazil.
The international media reaction to the Zapatistas in Chiapas and the MST in
Brazil is based on the assumption that these are 'new' social movements, and
as such constitute a departure from traditional peasant movements.51 This,
however, is to confuse the form taken by the Zapatista and MST—which is
certainly new—with the content of the movements, which is not. That the
Zapatistas and the MST have added new tactics to existing forms of struggle
is undeniable, especially where the development of international linkages is
concerned.52 The proclamation by Commandante Marcos of the fact of the
Zapatista revolt by an email sent to the New York Times, at the same time as
he actually initiated the revolt itself, is undoubtedly a first in the history of
peasant movements.53 In much the same way, the MST has established
contacts with more than two-dozen organizations abroad, especially in
Europe, all of which provide it with support.
The existence of both networks stretching to and support in Europe is in part
attributable to the political importance there of the burgeoning
environmentalist cause. The latter has conferred iconic status on peasants
engaged in ('ecologically friendly') subsistence agriculture and tribal
populations surviving in forest areas, and consequently these have not only
been confirmed in their status as 'new' rural subject but as such have assumed
an important role in the anti-capitalist struggle waged in the West.54 Whilst in
a general sense welcome, this ideological development introduces yet another
irony: before reopening the frontier, and reoccupying the land, peasants and
tribals have first seized the imagination of the elite and the middle class—
both at home and abroad—a development that those on the left, beginning
with Marx and Lenin, failed to anticipate.55 That these two agrarian
movements in Latin America, the Zapatistas and the MST, have managed to
tap into European networks so successfully, not least to secure funding, raises
the possibility that the identity of the middle class 'mediating groups' which
exercise 'from above' influence on rural mobilization, may have undergone a
subtle change, and is now perhaps as much international as it is domestic.
 CONCLUDING COMMENTS

It has been argued here that formation of the agrarian structure in Brazil has
been shaped historically by the need on the part of commercial landowners to
obtain and secure workers, and that the rural struggles arising from this have,
in turn, been determined by two phenomena linked to this, one internal to the
rural population and one external to it. The internal phenomenon consists of
the sheer variety in the many components of the rural population itself, while
the external phenomenon has been the influence exercised on the ideological
formation/construction of the agrarian question (and thus also its solution) on
the part of bourgeois elements in Brazilian society, specifically those with
affiliations to political parties and church groups.
In what might be termed the process of opening, closing, and then
reoccupying the agrarian frontier, it has been the control of labour-power
rather than land that has been crucial to the development of a latifundist
commercial agriculture in Brazil. The response of the latter to slave
emancipation in the latter half of the nineteenth century was the immigration
and settlement of European labour combined with internal migration, a
process which gave rise, variously, to the colono system in coffee cultivation,
to tenant farming based on the morador in sugar cultivation, rubber tappers in
the Amazon, and independent smallholders in the south. In all these cases,
usufruct rights of one sort or another (to land, to crops) enabled members of
the rural workforce to unite two distinct identities: that of cultivation for
oneself with working for others. This coexistence of peasant economy and
agricultural labour, and with it the crucial role of the former as a safety valve
mechanism for economic crisis and/or depeasantization elsewhere, was
broken as capitalist expansion led to the elimination of traditional usufruct
rights, peasant dispossession, the invasion of indigenous territory, and the
replacement of permanent workers by casual labour, processes completed
under the military dictatorship. However, the dual identity of the workforce
was reproduced in the agrarian struggles conducted both against the
dictatorship and the subsequent democratic government, not least because of
the role played by non-peasant 'mediating groups' (the church, political
groups and parties) in the ideological reproduction of each, a process that
culminated in the emergence of what is now termed a 'new' rural subject.
The problems generated by this 'new' rural subject stem in turn from the
internal phenomenon, or the fact that the rural population in Brazil is not only
different from its counterparts in the rest of Latin America, but also more
differentiated in terms of background, culture, and class. When compared to
the history of other peasant populations in Latin America, therefore, that of
what is usually termed 'the Brazilian peasantry' is distinct, as are its
formation, culture, and institutions. The difficulties experienced by observers
attempting to insert a 'new' rural subject—squatters, peasants, agricultural
labourers, rubber tappers, and tribals—into a broader pattern of new social
movements in Latin America, merely underlines this fact. At the root of this
distinctiveness is the variety of rural subjects, whether 'old' or 'new', that
constitute the agrarian history of Brazil: Indians emancipated from slavery in
the eighteenth century, but retained by their erstwhile masters within a
relation of dependence; nomadic Indians and Creoles with no defined rural
status since colonial times; modern descendents of nineteenth century
European immigrants who settled as colonos or independent peasant
cultivators; and freed black slaves who became rural wage labourers. These
distinct origins, ethnicities and cultures—not to say social relations of
production—make it difficult to speak of 'a Brazilian peasantry', whose
characteristics, economic interests and political outlook converge in a single
project.
Ironically, this internal phenomenon—the variety and distinctiveness of rural
Brazil—is in effect denied by those who compose the external phenomenon:
elements of the middle class, of rural petty-bourgeois backgrounds but now
mainly urban and cosmopolitan in ideology and political outlook, who—as
members of church groups and political parties - have influenced the
direction taken by rural struggles in a number of significant ways (the
provision of networks, support, finance). It is these 'mediating groups' which
have tended to amalgamate all the rural subjects, from distinct cultural
backgrounds and in equally distinct economic relations, into a uniform
'Brazilian peasantry' with an uniform political interest. The 'voice from
below', embodying the diverse origins and different economic demands of the
rural subject, have accordingly been overridden by the 'voice from above'
belonging to these mediating groups. When the rural subject has been
conservative, the mediating group has tended to be radical, and vice versa.
This contradiction is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the different
interpretations of what is meant by reform of the Brazilian countryside. First,
there are unionized groups, such as CONTAG, with a long history of class
struggle against capitalists and landlords, and a political ideology that both
addresses and simultaneously requires wider systemic change in Brazilian
society. Second, there are church-affiliated and church-inspired groups, such
as the MST, which see no need for radical systemic transformation, and
adhere much rather to a communitarian vision in which capitalist and worker
enjoy a tension-free parity of esteem. And third, there are rural subjects
affiliated to both of these groups and none, whose actions are based on the
need to have access to land as the means of labour, and yet who are guided by
family and religious values, and also by the ideology of 'moral economy'.56
It could be argued that these values—family, community, land for
subsistence, religion—that are usually associated with backwards-looking
forms of agrarian tradition and thus seemingly conservative, are much rather
the opposite. That is, they are the product of an undeniably modern
capitalism, not least because of the crucial distinction made by the rural
labouring subject concerned: namely, between land as the instrument of
labour (to provide work and basic subsistence for himself and his family) and
land that is owned privately (to provide the owner with profit, as a result of
speculation, or generating rent or surplus-value). In short, when considering
the issue of land the labouring subject makes a distinction between use-value
for himself and his family and exchange-value, by capital for the purpose of
accumulation. In this distinction lies, perhaps, a clue to the modernity of the
'voice from below', and also to the way in which family farming in Brazil
might be included in a political future.
 NOTES

1. The concept 'invention of tradition' is examined and applied to many different case studies (the
British Isles, Victorian India, colonial Africa, and Europe) in the collection edited by Hobsbawm and
Ranger [1983]. See also McNeish, this volume.
2. Although their class interests include the appropriation of land rent, and thus also a speculative and
economically backward role in the development of capitalism, the class position of big landowners in
Brazil is more accurately characterized as that of a bourgeoisie. This does not mean one should ignore
that, throughout this period, a powerful faction in this class has acted as land speculators, interested in
obtaining the gains from land speculation rather than in making land productive. To define all big
landowners simply as belonging to a parasitically pre-capitalist category of rent collectors, however,
would be to misunderstand their economic significance in the contemporary history of Brazilian
capitalist development.
3. It goes without saying that the notion of an economic frontier is contested. See Wagley [1974] and
Hennessy [1978] for the examination of the frontier thesis as applied to Latin America. For a different
view, see Cleary [1993].
4. In a very real sense the agrarian question has been—in one form or another—at the centre of most
debate about industrialization. Its clearest formulation was by Marxists in their arguments about
historical transformation, and especially the presence of (non-capitalist or 'feudal') obstacles to
economic development in Russia and Germany at the end of the nineteenth century [Lenin, 1964;
Kautsky, 1988]. It has also surfaced periodically in debates about economic development in Latin
America [de Janvry, 1981].
5. For important accounts of the labour regime on Brazilian coffee plantations prior to the abolition of
slavery, see Dean [1976] and Stein [1985].
6. See Bethell [1970] and Scott et al. [1988] for details about slave emancipation in Brazil.
7. On this see the classic interpretation by C.L.R.James [1938] and Eric Williams [1944].
8. In other words, slave labour became too expensive. The same kind of argument has been made with
regard to the ending of plantation slavery in the antebellum south; its applicability to the latter context,
however, has not gone unchallenged—it has also been the subject of critical analysis by economic
historians [Wright, 1978].
9. For these migrations, and the subsequent history of the migrants involved, see Denoon [1984], Curtin
[1990] and Willems [1948].
10. A recent analysis by Freitas [1994] shows how, after the abolition of the slave trade, the attempt in
Minas Gerais to enslave free workers ensured that in effect an illicit traffic in unfree labour continued.
11. See Holloway [1980] for the colonato contract in São Paulo.
12. For the role of gender and kinship in colono/landowner relations on São Paulo coffee estates from
the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century, see Stolcke [1988] and Stolcke and Hall [1983].
13. This is a familiar threat, and one that has been utilized by landowners everywhere—not just in Latin
America—whenever continued usufruct rights to land were part of the production relation governing
the employment of an agricultural workforce. In parts of Europe, for example, this kind of pressure still
exists, and takes the form of 'tied' housing, a situation whereby an agricultural worker who loses his job
also loses his home.
14. For the economic transformation of Brazilian sugar plantations, and in particular how this entailed
changes in the labour regime, see among others Reis [1977], Taylor [1978], Schwartz [1985], and
Eisenberg [1989].
15. As one coffee grower confirmed to a Dutch researcher [Meijer, 1951:174] during the early 1950s,
the reinvestment of profits in agricultural improvement was always linked to whether or not coffee
prices were high, and whether or not landowners thought they would remain high. Hence the view that
'when asked what he was going to do with his profits [one fazendeiro] answered that he was going to
buy more coffee soils, or, if he thought a crisis within a few years likely, that he would probably
suggest the purchase of real estate in one of the big cities. The answer "I am investing a big part of my
profits in my existing fazenda, by fighting erosion, laying out new plots in the modern way, replacing
badly producing trees by young ones, breeding [coffee plants] on my own seed beds from carefully
selected material, improving the harvesting methods, cleaning, fermentation and so on" will rarely be
given. "Get rich quickly and forget what comes afterward" seems to be still the attitude of the majority
of coffee producers.'
16. According to Julião [1972:11], 'cambão is the name given to the dry, leafless and earless maize
stalk. It also refers to the piece of wood [= yoke] hung around an ox's neck…Finally cambão is the
day's unpaid labour demanded by landowners once a week from their peasants as rent for their land…'
17. For the agrarian structure of the Brazilian northeast generally at the mid-twentieth century, see
Goodman [1977].
18. For the role of drought in driving poor peasants and agricultural workers out of the semi-arid north-
eastern region of Brazil, see de Castro [1952], Hall [1978], and Davis [2001:377ff.].
19. In the case of rubber production in Amazónas at the beginning of the twentieth century, newly
recruited labourers were assigned a low-yielding area, the object being precisely to prevent them from
being able to cover their subsistence costs and expenses during this period, and thus making debt a
necessary outcome [Ballivián and Pinilla, 1912:245–6].
20. As will be seen below, such relations continue to flourish in the Amazonian region.
21. For more details about the struggles conducted by posseiros during the military dictatorship, see
Souza Martins [1980].
22. The Contestado uprising, which took place in the southern states of Paraná and Santa Catarina,
involved some 20,000 peasants, many of whom had been dispossessed as a result of railway expansion.
23. The most influential recent contribution to the debate about the role of the informal sector economy
in Latin America is that by de Soto [1989].
24. This change, which reduced even further the already precarious economic condition of the
plantation workforce, led to the consolidation of the Peasant Leagues (Ligas Camponêsas) demanding a
radical agrarian reform programme. It was advocacy of the latter policy that led, in part, to the 1964
military coup. For the role of the Peasant Leagues, see Julião [1972] and also Hewitt [1969]; for the
mobilization of rural workers in São Paulo prior to the 1964 coup, see Welch [1995].
25. In an important sense, the expulsion from the sugar plantations of permanent workers with usufruct
rights to land, and their transformation into temporary landless labour, completed the process of
capitalist transition that began when the slave trade ended. In other respects, however, the plantation
work regime continued very much as it was, which suggests that accumulation in rural Brazil was able
to proceed without undertaking the kind of radical change usually associated with an agrarian capitalist
transition [Sigaud, 1979].
26. On the socio-economic characteristics and working conditions of bóia-fria labour, see Spindel
[1985].
27. It is not unusual for the same migrant workers who harvest sugarcane in the north-east to harvest it
in the south-east or in the midwest as well.
28. The amount saved through the tax exemption was to be invested in Amazonia, up to a limit of 75
per cent of the capital of the new company.
29. For peasant economy in Amazonia, see Nugent [1993]. See also his contribution to this volume.
30. There were also state-sponsored land colonization schemes at this conjuncture. For an account of
just such a project in Rondônia during the 1970s, see Martine [1982].
31. Indian lands were invaded by large corporations, although the Brazilian Constitution expressly
forbids the expropriation of land traditionally inhabited by Indian tribes.
32. For an account of this process, see Mendes [1992].
33. It is significant that, despite being faced with the same kind of violent incursion and expropriation,
initially no political alliance was formed between squatters and the Indian tribal groupings who
inhabited the Amazon region. To some degree, this was an effect of the mutual suspicions with which
each regarded the other (perhaps more accurately, the 'other'). For their part, peasant smallholders who
were themselves not infrequently of Indian descent, nurtured prejudicial views about tribal populations,
a legacy of colonial missionary teachings. This was reciprocated by Indian groups, which for their part
tended to categorize all non-indigenous people as potential enemies, a perception bolstered in the late
1980s when independent gold prospectors (garimpeiros) invaded lands in the Amazon that were
traditionally part of Yanomami territory.
34. It goes without saying that, whereas Marx himself recognized and drew attention to the violence
accompanying the accumulation process, many of his more recent followers have tended to underplay
or even ignore this aspect of economic development in the Third World. For an account of the link
between violence and agrarian capitalist expansion on the Brazilian frontier, see Foweraker [1981;
1982].
35. For the impact of capitalism on the Amazon region, see among others Barbira-Scazzocchio [1980],
Bunker [1988], and Hall [1989].
36. On contemporary forms of debt peonage in the Amazon region, see Souza Martins [1990; 1997]
and Esterci [1979; 1987; 1994].
37. Evolutionist marxism is associated most closely with the 'semifeudal' thesis, which insists that
capitalist development proceeds through stages each one of which is, in terms of labour regime, an
improvement on what came before (see the contributions to the collection edited by Brass and van der
Linden [1997] for a discussion of the theoretical issues). Upholding a position that is in its essentials
not so different from the Whig interpretation of history so beloved of bourgeois academics, exponents
of the 'semifeudal' thesis maintain wrongly that where capitalism exists, ('feudal' or 'semifeudal') unfree
production relations are absent, and where the latter are present, capitalism is absent. In the case of
Brazil, such a notion was challenged by the justly celebrated analysis of Andre Gunder Frank
[1971:249ff.—'The Myth of Feudalism'].
38. For more on the crisis of peasant smallholders in the south, see Papma [1992].
39. For more on this, see Souza Martins [1989]. The MST appeared in the mid-1980s as a result of
Roman Catholic militants connected with the Pastoral Land Commission, and consequently enjoyed the
support of the Church.
40. The impact of bodies such as the Pastoral Land Commission (Comisão Pastoral da Terra, or CTP),
connected to the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops, and the Centre for the Support of the Small
Farmer (CAP), funded by the Lutheran Church, should not be underestimated.
41. See Maybury-Lewis [1994] for a useful account of the MST. The latter derived its impetus from
struggles conducted by poor and landless agricultural workers from the state of Goiás. These workers
started camping out on the strip of government-held land between the barbed wire fences separating
farms from the road, an area designed to be used by road maintenance crews and equipment. This strip
of land was taken over for a dual purpose: not only for habitation (= the installation of black plastic
tents, the squatters' living quarters) but also for cultivation. This tactic rapidly spread and changed,
becoming a springboard for the invasion of uncultivated land on neighbouring estates. At first the MST
attempted to justify this direct action by invoking existing legislation (the Land Bill), but subsequently
used this kind of direct action (land invasions) in order to stimulate state intervention.
42. Dom Tomás Balduíno, retired bishop of Goiás Velho and coordinator of the Pastoral Land
Commission, highlights this in a recent interview, observing [Balduíno, 2001:18] that 'lndeed, socialism
is the horizon…'.
43. The MST is currently engaged in an attempt to formulate a wider political programme, addressing
issues such as domestic food security, and the democratization of landownership [Robles, 2001]. The
emphasis is still very much on what ought to happen in the countryside, rather than the whole of Brazil.
44. The argument that, in place of traditional domination, a new form of clientage had been established
by leftist political groups over Brazil's peasants, was put forward initially by Galjart [1964].
45. Hence the view expressed by Joâo Quartim [1971:85], a member of the Popular Revolutionary
Vanguard, not long after the 1964 coup: 'Whether the likelihood of agrarian reform is a political or
economic question is, one can now see, really a side issue. What matters is the content of the reform.
Though the regime may have nothing to fear any longer from the latifundists themselves and though it
may be fully prepared to dispossess them by slowly transforming the old latifundia into large scale
capitalist enterprises, they still have everything to fear from an immiserated peasantry. Such a
transformation of landless peasants into agricultural wage-earners could only make the situation in the
countryside more explosive.' In short, the assumption is that there is only one 'authentic' rural identity—
that of peasants. It is an identity, moreover, that is to be built into an agrarian reform programme.
46. Prior to the 1964 coup, a landless workers' movement (Movimento de Agriculturos Sem Terra, or
MASTER) had appeared in Rio Grande do Sul, backed by the Brazilian Labour Party of the then
already deceased President Vargas. At a time when there were no laws in the country supporting this
policy, let alone any public bodies addressing social problems in rural areas, MASTER advocated an
agrarian reform as a solution to the problem of small farms. These early pressures for change in the
land tenure structure of the south were preceded by a movement composed of permanent workers from
the north-eastern sugarcane plantations, which peaked with the organization in 1955 of the Peasant
Leagues, led by Francisco Julião, from the Socialist Party.
47. Landowners throughout Latin America still feared both the example and the spread of the 1959
Cuban Revolution and—before that—the 1949 Chinese Revolution. However, it is necessary to
question the extent to which those leftist groups (such as the Maoists) really were radical in seeking to
subdivide the land into peasant smallholdings, thereby institutionalizing an agrarian system based on an
indisputably Chayanovian peasant family farm. Historically, the latter unit is one against which
Marxists such as Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Kautsky and Preobrashensky all fought, pointing out that,
once established, peasant economy would effectively prevent the further socialization of land, and its
consolidation in large units of production, state-owned, collectively-run, and centrally administered.
48. This argument has been made recently by Ramos [1991].
49. On the connection between the politicization of indigenous land rights and the 1988 Constitution,
see Carvalho [2000].
50. See Harvey [1998] for an analysis of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas.
51. An important aspect of this media exposure is the fact that peasants and tribals, together with their
struggles, have installed themselves in literary and cinematic discourse of Western capitalism over the
past three decades. Thus, for example, films such as Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo
(1982), both directed by Werner Herzog, and The Emerald Forest (1985), directed by John Boorman,
are not only set in the Amazon jungle but have as their sub-text a discourse about 'nature', the 'natural
world' and an equally 'natural' group of indigenous inhabitants. Similarly, the film The Burning Season
(1994), directed by John Frankenheimer, is a fictional portrayal of the struggle by Chico Mendes and
the rubber tappers against cattle ranchers and landowners.
52. It is necessary to qualify even this claim to newness, however, given both the fact and the
effectiveness of the international campaign mounted in the 1960s to save Hugo Blanco, the leader of
the peasant movement in the Peruvian province of La Convención, from the death penalty.
53. Lest the element of irony be missed here, this departure in form is due to the simple fact that all
previous agrarian movements in Mexico did not have access to the internet.
54. On this point, see the arguments put forward by the Via Campesina [Desmarais, 2002].
55. For more on this point, see Crisenoy [1978]. Such a development also puts in question the
perception of Marx [1926] himself that the peasantry was incapable of undertaking political action on
any scale other than at a local level.
56. The concept 'moral economy' as used here has the same meaning as when used by Thompson
[1993].
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 On Which Side of What Barricade? Subaltern
Resistance in Latin America and Elsewhere

TOM BRASS

'Subaltern tyrants are ever the most intolerant, and intolerable'—An

observation made two centuries ago by J.G.Zimmerman [1800:4]
'A system of mal-government begins by refusing man his rights, and ends by
depriving him of the power of appreciating the value of that which he has
lost.'—Maxim CLXXXIV [Colton, 1835:127].
This is the only way to travel'—Groucho Marx in the film Duck Soup (1933),
as Rufus T. Firefly, President of Freedonia, sitting on a motorcycle that isn't
going anywhere.
 INTRODUCTION

Where the study of peasants is concerned, there can be little doubt as to the
identity of the most fashionable and influential paradigm exercising
intellectual hegemony in academic circles over the past two decades: the
Subaltern Studies project, a six-volume series edited by Ranajit Guha that
appeared throughout the 1980s.1 Conceived initially as an alternative
historiography of South Asia, it sought to reinterpret both the rural 'voice
from below' and grassroots agrarian mobilization that occurred during the
colonial era. Its goal was simple: to expunge the outdated view of South
Asian peasants as ideologically passive/disempowered—a tainted legacy of
colonialism, it was argued—and replace it with an appropriately (post-)
modern (or post-colonial) perception of them as active/empowered rural
subjects. For this reason, the epistemological focus of the Subaltern Studies
project was from the outset on the idioms of agrarian protest, the object being
to rescue and give expression to hitherto subordinated and/or ignored
forms of ideological utterance. An important effect of subalternist
methodology—uncovering a hidden 'authentic' form of plebeian
discourse/agency—was nothing less than the reinstatement of 'the peasant' as
the subject of the historical process in South Asia.
The critique which follows focuses on the work of Beverley, Canclini, and
Albó, whose symptomatic postmodern/post-colonial theoretical approach
inadvertently reveals all the difficulties that arise from the attempt to apply an
analytical framework based on the concept 'subaltern' to Latin America.2 Not
only does their work epitomize all that has been wrong with much
supposedly 'critical' analysis by those within the domain of cultural studies of
agrarian change in the so-called Third World over the past two decades, but
the confusions/silences which pervade this approach serve as a useful
warning against the perils arising from a superficial acquaintance with
Marxism, with its 'other', populism, and with the Subaltern Studies series
itself. Like its South Asian counterpart, the Latin American subaltern
framework constitutes a reaction to and simultaneously an intervention in
longstanding and ongoing debates between Marxists and populists about the
agrarian question: that is, the degree to which peasant economy/culture in
Latin America is undermined by capitalist development (the descampesinista
position) or impervious to this process (the campesinista position). In contrast
to Marxism, which maintains that petty commodity producers are
differentiated in the course of class formation/struggle, therefore, the
subaltern framework not only reifies peasant economy (= peasant family
farming) but also attributes this survival capacity to the efficacy of an
empowering cultural resistance against capitalism by smallholders mobilized
on the basis of non-class identity.3
This presentation is divided into three sections, the first of which examines
the search by subalternists for evidence of an 'authentic' and empowering
Latin American subaltern identity, as manifested in ancient/indigenous
nationhood, the carnivalesque, and literary accounts, plus the questions these
quests raise concerning the theorization of subaltern consciousness/agency. In
the second section a specifically plebeian propeasant ideology not dissimilar
to that espoused by exponents of the subaltern framework is considered in
relation to the discourse of the political right in Latin America and elsewhere,
while the focus of the third is on the unsuccessful attempt to depict
contemporary subaltern resistance as a politically progressive form of anti-
fascist agency not unlike the 1930s Popular Front. Against the latter view, it
is argued that—as Trotsky and other Marxists pointed out at that same
conjuncture—an essentialist concept of 'the peasantry' (= subaltern identity)
and 'peasant resistance' (= subaltern mobilization) which it generated have
tended, historically, to be grassroots identity/agency linked to a reactionary
politics.
 I

That many current texts about the rural grassroots in the so-called Third
World nowadays carry the obligatory word 'subaltern' instead of 'class' in the
title, and within such analyses the terms 'struggle', 'revolution' and 'socialism'
have been replaced with concepts such as 'resistance', 'identity' and
'democracy', is symptomatic of the present intellectual dominance exercised
by the postmodern 'new' populism in general, and in particular the agrarian
myth.4 Given this epistemological volte face, it is necessary to ask the
following question: what kind of agency is ascribed to those categorized as
'subalterns', and on whose behalf politically is their 'resistance' exercised? In
short, on which side of what barricade (for whom and for what) do they
fight? This is also a question that it is necessary to ask of those who write
about the subaltern.
The provenance and subsequent trajectories of a number of exponents of
subalternism resembles nothing so much as an intellectual game of snakes
and ladders: having been Marxists, they then discarded Marxism and
espoused the postmodern/post-colonial theory redolent of the 'new'
populism.5 Now that the latter is discredited, some have finally begun to
abandon postmodernism too, and find themselves in what amounts to an
epistemological limbo. That they have nowhere to go has not prevented them,
however, from attempting to reinvent themselves, as liberal or even Marxist
critics of the 'new' populism. Initially, therefore, some abandoned Marxism in
favour of the 'new' populism for reasons to do with the intellectual fashion of
postmodernism/post-colonialism, jumping onto a bandwagon because
everyone else was on it, and without examining too closely what this
transition involved theoretically or politically.6
Others changed paradigms because they lacked an understanding of
Marxism, and thus failed to recognize—or to appreciate the importance of -
the epistemological distinctiveness between it and its 'new' populist (=
postmodern/post-colonial) 'other'.7 For specifically historical reasons, yet
others shifted their allegiance because they had forgotten—or perhaps never
learned—about the dangers posed by the political right. The latter is perhaps
the most worrying aspect of the intellectual realignment that has occurred
during the past 20 years. Many of those involved are attempting -
unsuccessfully—to disassociate themselves from theoretical positions held
earlier, since it is now at last clear to them that such positions are
compromised politically in ways which they did not realize at the time.8
Thus, for example, some erstwhile postmodernists—such as Ulrich Beck,
Richard Rorty and Ramachandra Guha—are now trying to reinvent
themselves as beleaguered liberals, well-meaning and apolitical centrists
trapped between the equally malign and politically discredited 'extremisms' to
their political left and right.9
Much the same is true of postmodern fellow-travellers like Giddens, who
persists in the palpably mistaken belief that 'Third Way' ideology is a weapon
against the political right, rather than what it actually is: a weapon of the
political right.10 Others, such as Beverley, continue to present themselves as
socialists of some sort, whose subaltern framework is—they claim—in
essence no different from earlier and more inclusive forms of Marxism (=
Gramsci's theory of 'passive revolution', the Popular Frontism of Dimitrov).
A prominent exponent of Latin American subalternism, Beverley has
produced what is fast becoming a publishing phenomenon: a theoretically
confused account by an ex-postmodernist who then proceeds to blame
everyone else for the sins of which he himself was guilty earlier.11 Where
exponents of the subaltern framework are concerned, the cause of such
multiple and ever-changing epistemological trajectories lies in the
problematic nature of the original search for an 'authentic' grassroots identity
in Latin America.
 THE QUEST FOR AUTHENTICITY

The search by Albó for subaltern 'authenticity' leads him to the holy grail of a
pristine 'from below' nationhood underlying and pre-existing what for him is
the false 'from above' nationalism associated with European conquest, which
—once identified—can then be said to embody this same subaltern
'authenticity'. Accordingly, Albó sets up an opposition between on the one
hand the 'from below' nation (= indigenous='authentic' = virtuous), which he
terms the nation-over-the-state (or 'trans-state nation'), and on the other the
'from above' nationalism imposed by the state (=
Europzan/mestizo=foreign='inauthentic'=evil), or nation-under-the-state (that
is, the 'multinational state').12 The latter corresponds to a situation whereby
the 'real' (or 'authentic') nation of the indigenous 'other' throughout Latin
America has been—and is—suppressed by and subordinated to the will of an
external ('alien'/'other'/foreign) power, a form of rule exercised through an
equally illegitimate institutional form (= the state). For this reason, argues
Albó, the aim of indigenous people participating in new mobilizations
throughout Latin America is nothing less than to reconstitute themselves as a
nation, separate from the wider and overarching national designation which is
an historical residue of European conquest and colonization. Such a newly-
constituted grassroots identity, maintains Albó, would also break with
Marxist views which historicize national identity.13 Underneath the existing
nation and its state, therefore, is to be found an earlier and more 'authentic'
nationhood—that of the Latin American subaltern; the reassertion of this
subaltern identity would require the dissolution of existing national
boundaries so as to recuperate territorial spaces occupied by longstanding
culturally-constituted nations (or national groups).14
In their quest for ever more authentic forms of (subaltern) identity in Latin
America, however, postmodern subalternists forget that all forms of
'authenticity' are socially constructed, both by those to whom this designation
is applied and also by those who apply this designation: any Latin American
identity described as 'authentic' is thus of necessity historically specific.
Because the concept 'authenticity' cannot be affixed to a particular socio-
economic identity in a particular location at a particular conjuncture, it cannot
be essentialized in epistemological terms. This difficulty confronts the
attempts by Canclini and Albó to transcend the cultural hybridity that has
followed the modernization of pre-Columbian traditions, a process whereby
for them a mainly foreign capital appropriates and 'de-authenticates' what was
previously an 'authentic' cultural tradition. Thus, for example, Canclini denies
that carnival is a site of 'from above' repression/discipline (still less so a
context in which false consciousness is reproduced); he insists, much rather,
that its rituals 'incorporate the possibility of social transgression'.15 For
Canclini, therefore, an 'authentic' Latin American 'popular culture' (as
embodied in the 'transgressive' rituals of carnival) is itself empowering: only
in its 'inauthentic' form—that is, in 'from below' manifestations which have
resulted from the appropriation by foreign capital of previously 'authentic'
traditions/cultures—is 'popular culture' considered by him to be
disempowering. In short, the choice presented by Canclini is not of a
progressive, forward-looking identity in preference to a backward-looking,
traditional one, but much rather between two backward-looking ones: that is,
between 'false'/(disempowering) and 'true'/(empowering) forms of indigenous
grassroots cultural tradition/'exoticism' .16
Celebrated not just by Latin Americanist subalternism but also in postmodern
frameworks (resistance theory associated with the work of J.C. Scott) and
non-postmodern theory (the 'moral economy' approach of E.P. Thompson)
alike as power-exercised-from-below, the 'primordial' rituals of
'crowning/decrowning' associated with Bakhtinian concepts of carnival and
carnivalesque discourse/performance are currently presented as the 'natural'
voice of the people at the rural grassroots in many so-called Third World
contexts, a politically unmediated (= 'authentic') form of 'from below'
resistance to any/all types of injustice/oppression/exploitation exercised 'from
above'.17 Broadly speaking, carnival and the carnivalesque entail the
inversion—and thus the negation—of existing hierarchy and its structures of
control/domination, a situation which licenses in turn a ritual challenge to
those who exercise power and its symbolic overturning.18 In specifically
Thompsonian terms, this involves the application of 'moral economy' in a
carnivalesque form known as 'rough musicking' (= 'a ritualised expression of
hostility').19 Such a view, however, overlooks the extent to which carnival not
merely does not challenge but actually reinforces and justifies the existing
social structure, and is therefore—pace Canclini—more accurately
categorized as a form of social control (or power-exercised-from-above).20
For this reason, it is important to remember a number of things about the role
of carnival in general, and its particular manifestation as the fiesta in rural
Latin America, in the reproduction of the wider socio-economic system.21
To begin with, the fact that in Latin America (as elsewhere) the main impact
of carnivalesque discourse/performance is ideological and not material, and
as such involves nothing more than a ritual and symbolic overturning, and
one moreover that is only of short duration.22 Furthermore, insofar as
carnival is the site of laughter, this serves not to reinforce but to defuse the
anger that prefigures class struggle.23 In other words, the function of carnival
is much rather that of a 'safety valve' mechanism: any grassroots opposition
that exists is doubly displaced, from potentially threatening arenas (the labour
process) and organizational forms (strikes, trade unions), thus rendering it
safe.24 Opposition is permitted, therefore, but channelled in what is an
essentially harmless form (antagonism=symbolic) into an equally harmless
site (carnival, the fiesta) in which its manifestation is and remains
systemically non-threatening. Equally significant in this regard is the fact
that, where disputes over title or access to property have been concerned,
often it was poor peasant farmers or labourers who were targets of
carnivalesque discourse initiated by authorities or landowners in the
vicinity.25 Far from being a break with the existing socio-economic order, the
carnival (and carnivalesque discourse) in some instances ensures its
continuation, and allows the dominant class in the context concerned to
reproduce the social relations of production and thus to perpetuate its rule.26
Evidence from many different contexts/periods in Latin America suggests
that ideological conflict in the context of the rural fiesta system -one of the
main sites in which carnivalesque performance/discourse has been
reproduced historically—has either involved the deployment of traditional (=
backwards-looking) identities or been waged by landlords and/or capitalist
rich peasants, neither of which is supportive of progressive 'from below'
agrarian class struggle. That the rural fiesta throughout Latin America has
been, and remains, a localized institution necessarily restricts its potential
impact in terms of grassroots mobilization. As important is the fact that the
discourse-for/discourse-against circulating in such contexts has been about
religion and ethnic identity. Most importantly, however, is the fact that the
class view reproduced in carnivalesque discourse is not necessarily that 'from
below', nor is it the case that the 'from below' idioms which do circulate in the
fiesta context are necessarily progressive in political terms. Thus, for
example, carnivalesque discourse/performance associated with one particular
fiesta in the central Peruvian Andes during the pre-reform era—a location
where agrarian class struggle was endemic-not only served to strengthen
ideological ties between landlords and local peasant communities but also
reaffirmed the importance of traditional rural identities (religious and ethnic)
that transected the class structure.27
Even in cases where it is not itself a site in which ethnic or religious
discourse/performance takes centre stage, the fiesta does not necessarily
correspond to an expression of power-exercised-from-below. Far from
regarding the fiesta as empowering, therefore, unionized estate tenants in the
eastern lowlands of Peru opposed office-holding sponsorship, and the fiesta
itself ceased with the rise of peasant unions.28 Significantly, the contradiction
between landlord ideology about the fiesta, which projected the estate as an
undifferentiated and thus harmonious rural community, was challenged not
by agricultural workers or poor peasants but by capitalist rich tenants, for
whom fiesta office-holding costs formed part of labour-rent imposed by the
landlord. Equally significant in this regard is the fact that these same images
of an homogeneous rural community were reintroduced by these same rich
peasants in the post-reform era along with the fiesta itself, when the latter
once more served as a context in which agrarian capitalist producers
attempted to disseminate their own class-specific discourse about community
identity and resource transfers.29 It is precisely this 'other' role—enforcing
conformity not transgression, licensing continued 'from above' exploitation
not 'from below' resistance—that is overlooked or ignored by those
postmodern subalternists intent on celebrating carnival and the carnivalesque
as sites of grassroots empowerment in Latin America.30

'Bringing news'

Just as Canclini and Albó identify nationhood and the carnivalesque as sites
where an 'authentic' and empowering form of subaltern identity/resistance
manifests itself, so the search by Beverley for a similarly pristine subaltern
'voice'/agency takes him into the domain of literature.31 Because explanations
of capitalism were in his opinion inadequate, Beverley sought a 'new'
understanding of culture/identity in literary criticism, and found this in the
form of subaltern studies, 'a new form of academic knowledge production'
which as a result became 'a conceptual vanguard in Latin American studies'.32
The futility—not to say the fatuousness—of this vanguardist intellectual
aspiration surfaces rapidly when Beverley attempts to contrast non-literary
and literary accounts of the Túpac Amaru rebellion against Spanish
colonialism during the early 1780s, with the object of revealing the presence
in the former of a non-creole national identity constructed by and thus
representing an authentic indigenous grassroots voice: 'cultural practices', he
proclaims, suggest the existence of 'a vast revolutionary social movement
from below, propelled by the poorest and most exploited sectors of the indian
artisans and peasantry'.33 Even some literary sources, such as the play
Ollantay, written anonymously in Quechua at this time, in his opinion
amount to 'the cultural production of a national-popular imaginary by an
indigenous peasantry and its organic intellectuals'.34 This is an astonishing
and unwarranted leap: a text which Beverley accepts is anonymous—its
author and the socio-economic origin/position of the latter is unknown—
suddenly and without any evidence whatsoever becomes the product of 'an
indigenous peasantry and its organic intellectuals'.
Beverley attempts to get round this problem by invoking two forms of
postmodern aporia (narrative hybridity, subaltern unknowability).
Accordingly, much of his analysis is devoted to the conceptual rehabilitation
of testimonio, or 'narrative…told in the first person by a narrator who is also a
real protagonist or witness of the events he or she recounts', as he applied it
originally to Rigoberta Menchú, an icon of Latin American subaltern
'otherness'.35 On discovering that hers was not testimonio in the sense he had
defined it, however, Beverley reverses its meaning: testimonio, he announces,
no longer has to consist of a first-hand witness account but can now involve
'a kind of narrative hybridity'.36 In other words, it is composed of a mixture
of truth and non-truth. There is no limit to this kind of inflation: how long
before one is told that testimonio composed entirely of falsehoods is still
acceptable as testimonio? Perhaps such a moment will also mark the
annexation by literary studies of social science and history, a process
whereby all fact finally becomes its 'other', fiction, and the literary critic is
accordingly installed as the only true subject of struggle, which he himself
constitutes in the realm of literature, the fictional but nevertheless only 'real
world'.37
A second form of postmodern aporia involves the claim that, as the subaltern
is unknowable, he/she cannot be represented, in effect not only abolishing the
intellectual accessibility of peasants and labourers but converting them into
the mysterious 'other' of conservative discourse. Those such as Spivak and
Kristeva link the 'unrepresentability' of subaltern culture to the
'unknowability' of the subaltern him/herself: a subject thus defined cannot be
represented by someone 'other' (= intellectuals) than him/herself, a view that
verges on the solipsistic.38 A consequence of pristine subaltern 'otherness'
being both unknowable and intellectually inaccessible, moreover, is that it is
unalterable. Just such an epistemology is invoked by conservatives who claim
that, as the subaltern likes the way he/she is, and feels empowered by his/her
culture (of which the economic is merely a part), consequently no one—and
especially not intellectuals on the left—should presume to advise him/her
otherwise. This of course leaves power and control in the hands of the
bourgeoisie, since according to this kind of argument it is impermissible for
an intellectual even to put to a subaltern a non-subaltern idea: because the
subaltern is unknowable, the nature of the subaltern and therefore of its 'other'
cannot even be posed. Even if it could, intellectuals are disbarred from this,
because to do so is to privilege a non-subaltern discourse.
Theorized in this manner, both the subaltern and his/her culture become
essentialized and a-temporal forms of existence. Each remains socio-
economically hermetic and ahistorical, immune to external change and
challenge: neither can be analysed, only reported.39 This innate and
unmediated subaltern consciousness of course forbids its characterization as
false, which in turn prevents not only the transcendence but also a political
critique by those who are not themselves subalterns of existing cultural
identity and agency based on this. Denying the efficacy of 'false
consciousness' on the grounds that 'Western Marxism [refuses]
classconsciousness to the pre-capitalist Subaltern', therefore, Beverley again
follows Spivak and maintains that it is necessary to recognize the existence of
a specifically subaltern form of peasant consciousness.40 Not the least
problematic aspect of such an epistemology is that it depoliticizes the link
between consciousness and action. Like postmodernism generally, it also
licenses the reification of every form of belief, which can then be subsumed
within an all-embracing rubric of 'subaltern consciousness'. Trapped within
this epistemology, Latin American subalternists are forced to conclude that,
since there is no such thing as false consciousness, all from-below
consciousness which exists must therefore be an 'authentic' grassroots
manifestation. Within this non-judgemental framework, subaltern agency
based on any and every conceivable kind of political consciousness -
conservative and reactionary as well as socialist and progressive—becomes
empowering for its subject, and consequently is regarded not just as
legitimate but also as unchallengeable.

Bernays' Sauce, or Postmodern Food for Thought

The political implications of this inability to conceptualize false

consciousness and the consequent problems with rural grassroots
mobilization based on this are profound. To begin with, the labelling by
postmodern theory of all grassroots culture as 'authentic' and 'innate', and
mobilization on the basis of this as empowering, is a direct effect of a view
that regards subaltern identity/agency as perpetually 'there', and thus
'naturally' desired by its subject.41 Not only is such a view epistemologically
misplaced—ideologically, nothing is or can be 'natural' -but it misinterprets
as 'from below' or 'authentic' grassroots phenomena forms of
identity/behaviour/culture/consciousness that are actually 'from above'
creations.42 In doing this, postmodernism exhibits a gullibility exploited in a
systematic fashion from the late 1920s onwards by a nascent public relations
industry, which demonstrated clearly how public opinion in the United States
could successfully be constructed/channelled.43 The object was simple:
consciously to stimulate anti-rational desire, which could then be harnessed
by capitalism for two particular ends. First, to generate additional demand for
its commodities; and second, to disguise the 'from above' origin of this
initiative, by presenting it as a 'natural' or 'from below' cultural emanation
that empowers its subject.
Those who advocated this maintained that the outcome—a situation in which
economically unnecessary goods were devoured by those whom big business
hoped would become politically passive consumers—would avoid/postpone
both economic crisis (due to overproduction) and political crisis (binding
workers-as-consumers to capital, in the process pre-empting questions about
systemic change). Like postmodernism itself, however, this approach was
premissed on a pessimistic view of humanity—one which proclaimed that, as
humanity was innately (or instinctively) non-rational, fundamental systemic
change was unfeasible.44 The latter was a philosophy which 1920s capitalists
unsurprisingly found congenial, a perception which their contemporaries now
extend to the similar postmodern view that economic need (= class identity)
—for capital an unpalatable and thus non-negotiable political demand—be
replaced with what can be represented as an 'authentic' and thus empowering
cultural desire (= ethnic/national 'belonging'), which for capital is an
inherently acceptable political demand. For this reason, the justification of
1930s Popular Frontism by exponents of Latin American subalternism such
as Beveley (see below) in terms of the realization of a politically empowering
'popular culture' by means of consumer sovereignty is misplaced: not only is
such a view nonsense (popular culture # consumer sovereignty) but it also
fails to engage with the politics of mass culture (e.g., racism, sexism).
Many examples from Latin America, North America and elsewhere confirm
that mass culture is as much a 'from above' as a 'from below' product, a point
underlined by the depoliticization/repoliticization of much current popular
culture. The case of Disney comics demonstrates both the longevity of and
the extent to which 'popular culture' is formed not 'from below' but rather
'from above', and also how the reproduction of the agrarian myth is a central
aspect of this process, resulting in the formation of what amounts to false
consciousness.45 Control exercised 'from above' over what precisely
constitutes the 'from below' agenda of 'popular culture', together with its
reproduction, has always been a political objective pursued globally both by
imperial states and by multinational corporations.46 There is accordingly a
remarkable overlap between what are usually represented as being politically
divergent processes: on the one hand, the 'natural' identity which both
postmodern theory and the subaltern studies project currently insist is
culturally empowering for those at the rural grassroots; and on the other, the
similarly 'innate'/'authentic'/non-rational-yet palpably disempowering—form
of consciousness which capital has attempted historically to create/reproduce
'from above' for its own economic and political ends.
As even commentators sympathetic to post-colonial studies themselves
admit, the burgeoning 'alterity' industry in the academy is based on
complicity: namely, between local oppositional discourses and capitalism
itself, an arrangement whereby the latter commodifies the 'marginality' of the
former as 'cultural difference'. In the course of being processed as an
ideological commodity, therefore, 'non-Western' identity is rendered 'exotic'
(= 'other'), and literary representations of this exoticism are consumed within
Western capitalism as one more product.47 Nor should the role within
metropolitan capitalist contexts of travel writing—a widely read genre and
hugely influential form of 'popular culture'—in reproducing the agrarian myth
about rural populations in the so-called Third World be underestimated.48 To
claim, as Beverley does, that all one has to do in such cases is to
'resubalternize' the issue is to avoid this question, not to answer it. Not the
least of the difficulties is that 'resubalternization' will amount in the majority
of instances merely to the discursive reinstatement of nationalism, and with it
the enduring historical opposition between a stereotypically pristine national
identity on the one hand and an all-embracing imperialism on the other. In
other words, agency licensing struggle not between classes but between
nations, and within the latter between ethnicities.
In contrast to Marxism, for which existing rural grassroots
traditions/institutions generate the false consciousness (e.g., national/
ethnic/community/religious solidarity) that misinforms/misleads/deflects
'from below' class struggle, both postmodernism and the subaltern approach
recast these same non-class ideological forms in a positive light, and regard
them as making a positive contribution to (non-class) grassroots agency. The
fact that those at the rural grassroots—like people everywhere—tend to act
not on reality but on perceptions of reality merely serves to underline the
importance of mediation, and thus also of false consciousness, when
considering questions of and reasons for such kinds of agency (and,
correspondingly, their absence). The falsity of consciousness applies not so
much to perceptions of a problem (rural workers are indeed aware of the
existence of oppression, injustice, etc.) as to perceptions of what can be done
to remedy the situation. That is, the desirability/feasibility/possibility of
specific political solutions (fascism, racism and bourgeois democracy instead
of socialism or communism) to the problem which exists and of which they
are aware.49 However, the conceptual banishment by subalternists generally
of false consciousness, and the corresponding assumption on their part that
all from-below agency is necessarily progressive, means that the fact that,
historically and currently, grassroots agency has been the result of
mobilization by the political right as much as by the left, together with its
implications, cannot even be considered.50
 II

Contrary to the claims made by postmodernism, the subalternist exponents of

which eschew cross-cultural comparative analysis because in their view no
such undertaking is possible epistemologically, what is significant about the
discourse of the political right and the place of the peasantry in this is
precisely the remarkable similarity of the 'difference' invoked across space
and time. Nowhere is this universality more evident than in the claims made
by conservatives and the political right in many different contexts and periods
concerning the desirability of redemption linked to the innateness of Nature
and thus rural existence and traditional identities based on this. Historically,
such arguments have consolidated around what might be termed the
aristocratic and the plebeian versions of the agrarian myth, a discourse which
is supportive of countryside (= 'good') against the town (= 'bad'). On the one
hand, therefore, it valorizes small-scale rural-based
uniform/harmonious/'natural' economic activity (artisanry, peasant family
farming) and culture (religious, ethnic, regional, village, family identities
derived from Nature). On the other, it can be equally supportive of
landlordism as part of an ancient—and therefore 'natural'—rural hierarchy to
which the peasantry also belong. Both variants of the agrarian myth unite in a
symptomatically populist fashion to express their hostility and ideological
opposition to urban-based large-scale industrialization (finance capital, the
city, manufacturing, collectivization, planning, massification) and its
accompanying institutional/relational/systemic effects (class
formation/struggle, revolution, socialism, bureaucracy, the state), all of which
are perceived as non-indigenous/'inauthentic'/'alien' internationalisms
imposed on an unwilling and mainly rural population by 'foreigners', and
therefore as responsible for the erosion of hitherto 'authentic' local traditions
and values.
All too often rural struggle has been represented by Marxists and non-
Marxists alike as one between landlords and peasants, with the twofold result
that not only have small agrarian capitalists been banished epistemologically
from the ranks of the peasantry but the degree to which the latter category
was central to the discourse not of the left but of conservatism and the
political right has also been overlooked. The persistence of pro-peasant views
among the landlord class and/or the rural bourgeoisie is embodied, for
example, in references to the presence and benign character of patron/client
relations. A landlord will recognize the worldview of peasants only insofar as
it coincides with and reinforces his own (= anti-state, anti-industrialization,
pro-nation, pro-tradition), and claim merely that these subjects are culturally
and economically different from him. Insofar as they recognize his and their
place in the same rural hierarchy, and embody national cultural traditions
which he approves of and respects, therefore, he will defend any desire on
their part to remain the same and oppose attempts—by them or by others—to
change. It is precisely this kind of relativistic conservativism that draws
support from postmodern aporia ( univocality): both espouse a view in
which an inability/ unwillingness to make value-judgements merges
imperceptibly with a 'refusal of history', positions that mask 'a fear of
history'—specifically, of what history tells.51 The political effect of this
aporia is inescapable. If culture lies beyond the realm of value-judgement and
satisfies human needs in the way postmodernists claim, then it follows that
there is no need to change the material base which sustains cultural activity in
the first place. Not the least problematic aspect of such aporia is that it
licenses the systemic reproduction of landlordism and peasant farming, each
of which can be justified in terms of the cultural empowerment it confers on
its constituent subject.
 'A FEAR OF HISTORY'

An important and enduring weapon in the ideological armoury of a ruling

class in many different contexts and periods has been the capacity to choose
to be 'other', or to have an identity 'different' from that which history confers,
both on its own followers/supporters and on those to whom it is opposed.52
This ideological defence, in which a fear of history leads to and combines
with an invocation of 'choice', has at times entailed the mobilization by the
class in question of a discourse about Nature and 'the natural', and the
application of the latter both to itself and also to the category or class
threatening its own power.53 It is often forgotten, therefore, that such claims
deployed 'from above' about cultural 'difference'/'otherness' refer not just to
those who rule but also to those who are ruled, and that the recipients of this
act of labelling have usually been peasants. For this reason, claims about the
innate 'difference'/'otherness' of what was regarded as an undifferentiated
peasantry have been—and remain—central not just to nationalism, to
opposition by conservative philosophy to Enlightenment discourse, but also
to the ideology of the far right.54 Moreover, such claims can be traced
through a common discourse about the agrarian myth shared by the political
right in Latin American and non-Latin American contexts alike.55

Pro-Peasant Ideology and European/North American Conservatism

The aristocratic variant of the agrarian myth projecting seigniorial

attitudes/values operates even in advanced metropolitan capitalist contexts,
where it forms an important ideological component of
historical/contemporary conservative discourse that is supportive of
smallholding agriculture. In the case of England, for example, early
twentieth-century imperialist discourse warning against the demise of empire,
patriotism and the nation itself attributed this to the economic decline of the
small farmer (= the military backbone of nation, colonies and imperial
possessions) and a correspondingly inexorable process of rural exodus,
urbanization and industrialization.56 Not only is this discourse anti-Semitic,
condemning finance capital (= 'a plutocratic caste') for undermining
empire/nation/agriculture, but the traditional landlord class is designated the
true defender of the small farmer (and, by inference, the nation itself), the
conclusion being that agriculture—both at home and in the colonies—should
be encouraged/protected.57 Significantly, at the same conjuncture much the
same kind of argument structured the plebeian variant of the agrarian myth in
the United States of America, where agrarian populists argued that, by
proletarianizing yeoman farmers and transforming them into their 'other' (=
the 'mob in the streets') finance capital would destroy not only the peasantry
(= warriors) which protected its own class power by defending the latter
against the proletariat but also and thereby the nation itself.58
Discourse about an undifferentiated/ahistorical peasantry also circulated in
both the aristocratic and the plebeian variants of the agrarian myth in
Germany. Thus, for example, the eighteenth-century defence of rural tradition
and hierarchy against the Enlightenment (aufklarung) undertaken by the
conservative theoretician Justus Möser did not prevent him from admiring
what he regarded as the cultural 'otherness'/'difference' of peasant society, a
golden-age version of which in his view constituted the authentic and
timeless embodiment of German national identity.59 Much the same is true of
twentieth-century Germany, where Prince Bernard von Bülow, scion of the
Junker landlord class, and later Richard Walther Darré, the Nazi Minister of
Agriculture, both invoked what each claimed was an unbroken ancient rural
lineage—composed of an unchanging/homogeneous peasantry (= a mythical
ancestral being closer to Nature, and thus 'more natural')—as evidence for the
existence of a pristine nationalism, in terms which were no different from
those used by Möser some 200 years earlier.60 Such pro-peasant views,
moreover, are not of themselves incompatible with a view of Nazism as a
form of reactionary modernism bent on carrying through a project of
capitalist development and industrialization. Accordingly, those linked to the
Nazis who espoused pro-peasant ideology perceived no incompatibility
between such views on the one hand, and capitalist development and
industrialization on the other.61 And even where such a specifically material
incompatibility may have existed, reactionary pro-peasant ideology fulfilled
an important mobilizing role in the class struggle.62
In the case of 1930s Spain, this fear of history manifested itself in the concern
of the ultra-right Falange for the effects on the peasantry of the capitalist
crisis, a fear that translated into a reactionary and specifically regressive form
of anti-capitalist discourse. The result was a conservative pro-peasant
programme of agrarian reform, based on a seemingly contradictory
ideological combination: an acceptance by the Falange of the Marxist critique
of capitalism, but the rejection of its form of transcendence.63 Like the
political right in Germany, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder/leader of
the Spanish Falange, endorsed Rousseau's critique of the 'adding-on' inherent
in the historical process; that is, the way in which what he regarded as all the
'non-natural' accretions that constitute historical development erode a pre-
existing and ahistorical 'primitive goodness' and 'natural community'.64 The
solution to the destructive systemic effects on the peasantry of the 1930s
capitalist crisis required liberation from these 'non-natural' accretions—from
history itself, in other words—so as to return to an
ideologically/institutionally 'spontaneous'/('natural') condition: according to
Primo de Rivera, this would be the task of the Spanish Falange.
Instead of a progressive, forward-looking 'going-beyond', therefore, Primo de
Rivera sought redemption for rural Spain in the reaffirmation of
traditional/feudal values/beliefs embodied 'naturally'/eternally in peasant
smallholding agriculture.65 Because he feared the impact on the latter of the
kind of capitalist development that Marx predicted, Primo de Rivera argued
that impoverished peasant family farming—the embodiment of nationalism -
had to be rescued by the Falange, both from the Marxist policy of
proletarianization that would convert peasants into workers (who would then
be 'led astray by Marxism'), a transformation that would result in social
chaos/collapse, and also from the clutches of finance capitalism, and made
economically viable by means of an agrarian reform programme.66 The
object of the latter would be to 'release small farmers, small industrialists and
shopkeepers from the gilt claws of the usurious banks', to restore handicraft
production in rural areas, and most importantly to reconstitute and protect the
future economic and cultural well-being of the peasant family farm itself.67
Claims about the desirability of an innate peasant economy/culture continued
to be central to both variants of the agrarian myth from 1945 onwards, its
ideological complicity with European fascism notwithstanding. The survival
during the post-war era of a conservative pro-peasant programme was due at
least in part to the fact that it circulated now within the discourse of the
victorious bourgeoisies, who were ideologically strongly opposed both to
socialism and to collectivization, and—in the context of East European
communist revolutions—still feared their own industrial working classes as
potentially militant 'mobs in the streets'. Lamenting the fact that 'the doctrine
of progress…still exercises an uncritical and fatalistic influence', therefore,
European and North American exponents of this discourse combined the
aristocratic and the plebeian variants of the agrarian myth in a symptomatic
defence of large landowner and smallholder, both of whom (it was claimed)
shared a common rural identity under threat from the urban state and its
proletariat.68 Not only was the post-war trend away from agriculture towards
urbanization/ industrialization decried as a profanation of Nature and 'natural
law', and finance capital blamed for undermining the small farmer, but in
some instances this was done in nationalist idioms and barely coded anti-
Semitic terms (= 'money-power') not so dissimilar to those circulating in the
prewar discourse of the political right (German fascism, British
imperialism).69 By the mid-1960s, the political right in the USA was arguing
strongly in favour of the small farmer: this it managed to do because it had
executed a populist reappropriation of existing discourse about political
freedom, in the process bolstering the claim of conservatives to be
disinterestedly plebeian by linking the concept of 'freedom' simultaneously to
a pro-farmer, promarket and anti-state ideology.70
Pro-peasant ideology continues to inform the discourse of the political right
in Europe.71 In what is currently an almost classic restatement of the
aristocratic variant of the agrarian myth, therefore, conservative philosophy
even now combines a defence of rural hierarchy and tradition based on large
landownership with populist concern for the threatened survival of 'natural'
forms of rural economy based on small-scale agricultural production.72
During the period after the Second World War, both components of the
English pastoral (landlord estate+small family farm) have been continuously
undermined by what for populist conservatives are the interconnected and
mutually supportive evils of urbanization, taxation and state regulation, all of
which have resulted in the appearance of 'that previously unknown and
deeply troubling thing: a landscape without boundaries' (that is, no small
privately-owned farms), and a loss of the countryside which is now equated
with the loss of national confidence and identity.73 Like the plebeian variant
invoked by the political right in the United States of the 1960s, therefore, the
aristocratic variant of the agrarian myth deployed by late 1990s English
conservatism is supportive of the free market, decries state 'interference', and
is profarmer.74 Significantly, many of these same themes also inform the
discourse of the political right in Latin America.
 Pro-Peasant Ideology and Latin American Conservatism

It is the acceptability to landlords and rich peasants alike of the pro-peasant

discourse informing the agrarian myth, together with the close link between
the latter and the politics of nationality and tradition, that poses difficulties
for Latin American subalternists. Because the views of those on the ultra-
nationalist political right in 1930s Latin America were from the 1920s
onwards influenced strongly by the writings and ideas of their European
counterparts (José Ortega y Gasset, José Calvo Sotelo and José Antonio
Primo de Rivera among them), many commentators equate reactionary
discourse in Latin America simply with a harkening back to European culture
and tradition (Hispanidad).75 Whilst true in part, this argument overlooks the
extent to which a specifically populist form of right-wing reactionary
discourse about rural society locates its nationalism in idealized forms of
popular culture and indigenous tradition within Latin America itself.76 Not
the least of the many difficulties faced by those who attempt to apply a
subaltern framework to Latin America, therefore, is the crucial role played by
the peasantry in the discourse of the political right, where it takes the form of
a specifically plebeian national identity deployed by conservatives and
reactionaries as a weapon in their struggle with the left.
In describing the subaltern studies project as a new approach Beverley
ignores the long history of such ideas in Latin America generally and in the
Andean region in particular.77 Grouped under the rubric indigenismo, the
lineage in question extends from adherents such as José Carlos Maríategui,
Hildebrando Castro Pozo and Hugo Blanco, whose formal position on the
Peruvian left masked their populism, to explicitly populist organizations such
as the APRA of Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre and the Partido Indio de
Bolivia of Fausto Reinaga.78 What the latter have in common are golden age
visions of the agrarian myth: on the basis of a shared epistemology, all of
them subscribed to the view that the Spanish Conquest imposed an
'inauthentic' and 'foreign' (= European) feudal tenure structure on what each
of them interpreted as being a materially self-sufficient and culturally
'authentic' indigenous Andean peasant community that characterized the pre-
Columbian era.79 More important was the fact that for Maríategui, Castro
Pozo, Blanco and Haya de la Torre, this discourse also possessed a
programmatic status: the socialism of the first three as well as the nationalism
of the fourth entailed building on what each perceived as being a still-viable
peasant economy, a residue from the golden age of Peru that had survived
colonialism. Like their counterparts who focus on Asia, therefore, exponents
of the Latin American subaltern studies project have adopted a
symptomatically postmodern discourse-for/discourse-against that structures
indigenismo, populism and the agrarian myth.
Thus, for example, the discourse-against of the agrarian myth deployed by
Albó deprivileges class as an analytical category and trade unions as an
organizational form, and opts instead for the subaltern category based on the
ethnic/cultural identity of what he calls the 'testimonial peoples' of Latin
America, composed of 'the modern representatives of old, original
civilizations which European expansion demolished'.80 It is equally clear that
Albó also endorses the discourse-for (= 'natural'/harmonious rural
community) of the agrarian myth.81 As the attempts by Albó and Canclini to
reconstruct nations based on traditional ethnicity demonstrate, earlier
indigenista views have merely been recycled, and the same arguments now
appear under the rubric of Latin American 'subaltern' identity and
resistance.82 For Albó, therefore, the 'testimonial peoples' constituting the
Latin American subaltern are composed of 'small indigenous nations' which
exist in a 'primordial relationship of culture with cultivation': as with the
Asian subaltern, the 'testimonial peoples' who form the 'authentic'/indigenous
nations of Latin American subalterns, and for whom 'the land is also the
fundamental base of their cultural identity', correspond to a smallholding
peasantry.83
The difficulty faced by exponents of subalternism is that the agrarian myth is
deployed as—or perhaps more—effectively by Latin American
conservatives. Like the Spanish Falange and the German Nazis, the ultra-
nationalist political right in Latin America at the same conjuncture also
rooted its claims to and view of a pristine national/cultural identity in an
indigenous peasantry.84 The latter category was accordingly regarded as
'natural', eternal and homogeneous, all characteristics with which the Latin
American political right imbued its nationalism. This was particularly true of
the Andean countries, where since independence nationalist discourse had
invariably contrasted the exploitative 'foreign other' to the virtuous
indigenous self. In addition to the standard right-wing discourse—invocations
of organic unity, authority, hierarchy, family, religion and patriotism,
combined with opposition to class, class struggle and the 'foreign other'—the
programme for the New Bolivian State (Nuevo Estado Boliviano) proposed
by the Bolivian Falangists (the fascist FSB, or Falange Socialista Boliviana)
during the early 1940s invoked and endorsed peasant economy: not only was
an ethnically-specific peasant identity equated with nationalism ('El indio es
la raíz de nuestra nacionalidad'), therefore, but this culturally delineated
rural subject was also to be reinforced and guaranteed economically by an
agrarian reform ('Un plan de reforma agraria le dará su liberación
ecónomica').85 However, this cultural/economic identity was itself both
subordinate and fixed, the structural location and immutability of which its
subject was expected to recognize and accept: like every other social category
in the 'natural' hierarchy which composed the nation, the Bolivian peasantry
had in the view of the FSB its own 'natural' economic role in the new
corporate order ('El individuo participará de la unidad orgánica del estado
mediante un regimen corporativo en que cada uno desempeñe su función de
acuerdo a la calidad y especialización de su trabajo').
Even in the southern cone countries of Latin America, where indigenous
populations were numerically and economically less significant than in their
Andean counterparts, an idealized image of peasant farming still informed the
discourse both of nationalism and of the political right. In the case of
Argentina, for example, the emergence of the political right at the beginning
of the twentieth century was a direct response to the mobilization of the
labour movement, and a discourse combining cultural nationalism with anti-
modernism, anti-urbanism and anti-cosmopolitanism was central to the class
struggle waged 'from above'.86 From the 1890s onwards, the political right in
Argentina was not merely anti-Semitic but its racism mimicked in every
respect that propounded by agrarian populists elsewhere at the same
conjuncture, and for much the same reasons.87 Indeed, it was a twofold desire
to rescue an 'authentic' indigenous process of family farming in Argentina
from the clutches of ('foreign'/'alien'/'Jewish') finance capital and also to
prevent depeasantized workers from falling into the clutches of
('foreign'/'alien'/'Jewish') socialism that led to the advocacy by the political
right of land reform and rural cooperativization.88
During the period following the 1914–18 war, the protection of smallholding
peasants and/or the reconstitution of a middle peasantry, was central to
Argentinian fascism, as represented by the ultra-reactionary policy and
discourse of the Argentine Patriotic League (Liga Patriótica Argentina).89
Along with the gaucho, peasant smallholders were considered by those on the
political right not just as indigenous and loyal subjects who upheld private
property rights and 'knew'/accepted their 'natural' position in the social
hierarchy, but also (and therefore) as the embodiment of an 'authentic' rural
tradition that contrasted with an 'alien' urban cosmopolitanism represented by
a mainly immigrant proletariat which lived/worked in the cities, as the bearer
of 'authentic' national identity and consequently as a bulwark against the
spread of socialist and revolutionary ideas to rural areas.90 Throughout the
capitalist crisis of the 1920s, the League maintained a pool of strike-breaking
workers that was deployed against organized rural labour in every part of the
country; these scab workers (crumiros) were made available to farmers and
tenants who were in dispute with their hired labour.91 When workers began to
organize or withdrew their labour-power, therefore, it was not just large
landowners and owners of agribusiness enterprises but also small farmers,
ranchers and tenants—many of who were engaged in struggle with their own
labourers (over issues such as wage levels, working conditions and the right
to form/join unions)—who called upon the League to come to 'the defence of
the cultivator', and it was from these elements of the agrarian petty
bourgeoisie that the political right in Argentina received crucial support and
recruited much of its membership.
Significantly, pro-peasant ideology continued to be found in the discourse of
the bourgeoisie and political right in Latin America throughout the decade
and a half after 1945, not least because—like their counterparts in Europe and
North America—they were not on the losing side during the war.92 Thus, for
example, an agronomist who was an advisor to the Peruvian landlords'
association (Sociedad Nacional Agraria, or SNA), and who defended the
hacienda system on the grounds that it contributed to the national wealth of
Peru, also supported the idea of peasant family farming.93 When equipped
with more advanced forces of production, such independent cultivators could,
in his view, operate alongside similarly equipped latifundia.94 In a similar
vein, an important vineyard strike by smallholding tenants in Chile during the
early 1950s was organized and led by a member of the Chilean Falange.95
Like its 1930s Spanish counterpart, the mobilizing discourse used by the
Falange in Chile during the course of this strike was that of Roman
Catholicism, and in particular the social teachings contained in the papal
encyclicals Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno, both of which upheld
the rights of private property and were against socialism and class struggle,
advocating instead class compromise between rural workers and their
employers.96 As the case of peasant smallholders among the indigenous
Pewenche population confirms, right-wing political candidates and parties in
Chile were still able to draw electoral support from among independent
cultivators even in the late 1990s.97 During the same decade, moreover,
elements of the Argentinian political right shifted their own discourse, from
one which emphasized the necessity of temporal (= military) authority
exercised 'from above' to one which invoked the desirability both of religious
(= 'natural') and 'from below' plebeian (= populist) legitimacy.98
 III

That exponents of Latin American subaltern resistance miss the political

significance for their project of longstanding conservative pro-peasant
ideology not only in Europe but also in Latin America itself is attributable in
turn to a corresponding failure on their part to understand political theory,
and thus also the connections and contradictions involving a number of
crucially similar and radically antinomic discourses. In short, the link
between Marxism and populism (subalternism Marxism), that between
populism and subaltern resistance (subalternism=populism=Popular
Frontism), and the one between fascism and capitalism (fascism feudal
reaction). Accordingly, the reason behind their misrecognition of the fusion
between the subaltern/resistance framework on the one hand and the populist
right on the other is not difficult to discern. Since he fails to distinguish
populism from its epistemological and political 'other', Marxism, it is in a
sense unsurprising that one advocate of Latin American subaltern resistance -
Beverley—conflates Marxism not just with the Subaltern Studies project but
also with Popular Frontism and Gramscian theory.99
 THE POLITICS OF SUBALTERN RESISTANCE

In some cases, the merger of subaltern/resistance/populism with the politics

and agency of reaction stems from a failure to ask whether those opposed to
capitalism were thereby automatically disposed towards socialism. This is
particularly true of subaltern 'resistance' generated by issues of ethnicity,
nationality, environmentalism, gender and sexuality, where the assumption
has been that those who opposed discrimination and/or oppression under
capitalism necessarily did so because they were in favour of socialism.100 For
very much the same reasons, it is also true of those who interpreted
'resistance' to capitalism on the part of an undifferentiated peasantry as
opposition that prefigured a process of systemic transcendence. The frequent
assumption made by exponents of the subaltern framework—as applied to
Asia and Latin America—is that all resisters are the same, by virtue of
belonging to the same non-class group (ethnic, national, gender), whereas
evidence from peasant movements worldwide shows that, in order to
understand agrarian resistance/accommodation, such a category must be
differentiated along class lines.
The extent of the difficulties informing the arguments made by Beverley may
be gauged from the confused attempt to define the relationship between the
Subaltern Studies project and Marxism: '[m]y own perspective on subaltern
studies', he states, 'is that it is a project of Marxism rather than a Marxist
project…I do not think of subaltern studies therefore as a kind of post-
Marxism, unless what is meant by post-Marxism is a new kind of Marxism,
or a new way in which Marxism acts within the world' [sic].101 Because he
conflates Marxism with its 'other', the 'new' populism, Beverley is still able to
argue that 'what is most urgent today is a defence and rehabilitation of the
project of the left', that the latter is a 'Marxism' purged of social democracy,
Leninism and even modernity, and that 'a "postmodernist" form of
communism [sic] is lodged within the problematic of the subaltern.'102 This
is a claim that verges on the nonsensical, and one that could be made only by
someone who misunderstands the antinomic epistemologies and histories of
populism, postmodern theory and Marxism.
Not only is the subaltern not a class category, but Marxists in general (and
Trotskyists in particular) have been very critical of the whole cultural turn, as
embodied in the rise to prominence and subsequent dominance of the
subaltern/resistance paradigm. Questions such as who in class terms is the
subaltern, and consequently what is resistance designed to achieve, for
whom, and why, were asked by a number of Marxists right at the start of the
1990s, when the whole subaltern studies project and its 'everyday-forms-of-
resistance' paradigm was in the process of becoming ubiquitous.103 Rather
than a critique which emanates from Marxism, therefore, the
subaltern/resistance framework was (and is) regarded by Marxists as a
nationalist and/or 'new' populist critique of Marxism. Moreover, it is a
framework which in some instances shares an epistomology and discourse
not with the left (to which it is hostile) but—more problematic in political
terms—with a globally ascendant 'new' right.

'The old reserve of curses'

That Beverley is unfamiliar with the prefiguring discourse of the

subaltern/resistance framework is clear from three things. First, his
superficial acquaintance with Marxism; second, an equally slight engagement
with the Subaltern Studies series itself, as applied throughout the 1980s to
studies of rural Asia; and third, an inability to connect the postmodern
epistemology of the latter to the rise of the 'New Philosophers' in France
during the previous decade. Most worryingly, therefore, is the fact that
Beverley's familiarity with the Subaltern Studies project is confined largely to
two anthologies, edited respectively by Guha and Spivak and by Guha, both
of which were published in the United States.104 He does not seem to have
read any of the ten volumes (published in India throughout the 1980s and
1990s) which comprise the series, nor is he aware of the large secondary
literature which this has generated, both within and outside India. Thus, for
example, Beverley claims that the main Marxist critique of the Subaltern
Studies project was that by Ahmad, a critique which he then dismisses as
irrelevant.105 Such a view not only overlooks the Social Scientist critique of
the early 1980s, but also that Ahmad's principal target was not Subaltern
Studies but Said's theorization of orientalism.106
More important than this, however, is the fact that the postmodern
epistemology of the Subaltern Studies project is rooted in structuralism,
which in turn informed the reactionary linguistic/cultural turn of the 'New
Philosophers' in France, who emerged in the mid-1970s and in turn
prefigured the political right.107 The rightwards political trajectory of the
'New Philosophers', for the most part ex-Maoists who participated in the May
events of 1968, is linked invariably and simply to a disillusion which resulted
from the chronicling by Solzhenitsyn of prison life in the Soviet Gulag, a
discovery which permitted them to affix the institution of the concentration
camp—associated hitherto solely with fascism—firmly within a Marxist
lineage, and thus to condemn socialism as irretrievably tainted (Marxism=the
State=the Gulag).108 However, it is equally clear from the views expressed at
that conjuncture by Jean-Marie Benoist, one of the 'New Philosophers', that
their political roots go much deeper, and are to be found in an espousal of
structuralism/(postmodernism), and thus also in the theoretical objections of
such theory to Marxism. His structuralist argument is symptomatic, and
anticipates all the classic oppositions of postmodern theory: on the one hand,
a facile dismissiveness of 'Eurocentrism' coupled with an antagonism towards
Marxism, historical materialism, science, development and history, and on
the other an endorsement of Heidegger, Neitzsche, an innate concept of
difference/'otherness', aporia and the linguistic/cultural turn.109
What is particularly significant about both the discourse and the politics of
the 'New Philosophers' is the agrarian dimension. Applauding Rousseau's
objections to Enlightenment claims about the desirability/possibility of
progress and reason, and following anthropologists such as Leach and Lévi-
Strauss, Benoist maintained that social relations, myths and beliefs are all
informed by a deep and unconscious linguistic structure, which is in turn
rooted in Nature (and thus 'natural'/immutable).110 Just as for Benoist it was a
specifically Lévi-Straussian concept of the Third World tribal that was
emblematic of this perpetual and unbridgeable element of 'discontinuity' that
constituted a natural form of irreducible/eternal 'difference' found in Nature,
so for other 'New Philosophers' this same kind of innate rural 'difference' took
on an equally specific peasant form.111 Thus Michel le Bris, who came from
a Breton peasant background, and was later active in the Occitanian
autonomist movement, was an enthusiastic advocate of what he termed the
peasant 'way of life', while (in an echo of José Antonio Primo de Rivera and
the Spanish Falange) the 'New Philosophers' Nemo and Clavel sought a
transcendence of capitalist alienation in what for them was the more desirable
personal bond between master and servant under feudalism.112 It is this
discourse—about the immutability of Nature and the resistance to
Marxism/materialism/history on the part of the Third World rural 'other'-that
is the immediate precursor of the Subaltern Studies approach that Beverley
and Albó apply to the Latin American peasantry.113
In seeking to displace criticism—why those like him should wish to apply to
Latin America, where nations became independent at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, a theory about post-colonialism developed in relation to
India, which became independent only in the mid-twentieth -Beverley
invokes Gramsci's theory about the historical roots of and the reasons for the
rise of fascism.114 The latter process is attributed by Gramsci to Italy, and by
others to Germany, to the failure or incompleteness in both contexts of what
was seen as the liberal bourgeois project: no bourgeois revolution took place,
it is argued, either in Italy during the Risorgimento or in Germany during the
1848 revolution. In both contexts, therefore, and in contrast to France in
1789, pre-capitalist landowners not only survived but continued to exercise
power, while peasants were excluded from the formation of a 'national-
popular will'. The resulting incompleteness of a bourgeois democratic
revolution, it is further argued, was the persistence of an authoritarian and
pre-bourgeois politics, which culminated in the rise of fascism in Italy during
the 1920s and Nazism in Germany during the 1930s.
This theory about 'passive revolution'—the view linking the rise of fascism to
the lack of a bourgeois revolution, and consequently a 'weak' national
bourgeoisie and bourgeois democracy, and the absence of a peasant 'voice' in
national politics—is wrong on a number of counts. First, as has been argued
in the preceding section, not only were peasants not excluded from
nationalism but they were projected by those on the political right as the very
embodiment of the nation itself. Second, it is a theory which decouples
capitalism from fascism, and thus exonerates the former from any blame for
the latter: if fascism was a feudal reaction against capitalism, then capitalism
is recast as an innately progressive systemic form.115 This idea, as Trotsky,
showed throughout the 1930s, is nonsense: fascism was a specifically
capitalist reaction against the working class, and thus unconnected with
feudalism. The latter critique notwithstanding, it was ideas about 'passive
revolution' (fascism=feudal reaction) which lay behind the disastrous policy
of the Popular Front, or agency which represents the epitome of 'subaltern
resistance'.

National Popular or National Geographic?

In keeping with his search for an authentic and from-below 'national-popular',
and to counter the objections of those who point out the potentially
reactionary components of subaltern identity, Beverley not only draws
attention to the similarity between the category of subaltern and the social
composition of 1930s Popular Front Marxism (= 'National Popular'), but
commends the role of each as an authentically anti-fascist and thus
progressive grassroots mobilization.116 One of the reasons why Beverley
endorses 'Popular Front Marxism' is that in his opinion it recognizes
popular/mass culture as forms of subaltern agency.117 Where mass culture 'is
popular in the consumer sense', therefore, he maintains that 'it is also
"popular" in the political sense; that is, representative of the people,
embodying the social will of the people, national popular, "progressive".'118
Such a view merely confirms the extent of the failure to understand not just
the epistemological differences between populism and subaltern resistance on
the one hand and Marxism on the other, but also the political consequences of
this inability to distinguish between them.
The perils of concessions made by communist parties in order to gain the
support of peasants, in terms of the formation of an anti-fascist alliance with
the 'progressive bourgeoisie' in defence of democracy and the nation, was
pointed out a long time ago. It is important to recall, therefore, the lessons
history teaches about the political objective and outcome of Popular
Frontism. In order to counter the rise of fascism, Stalin and Comintern
instructed autonomous working-class parties and/or organizations throughout
the world to ally themselves politically not just with the peasantry and the
national bourgeoisie but also with conservatives in their respective national
contexts.119 Popular Frontism in the mid-1930s accordingly entailed the
replacement of working-class struggle and revolutionary internationalism
with a nationalist and multi-class defence of democratic capitalism. Based on
peasant essentialism, this populist strategy has a long history, and Popular
Frontism represented the culmination of revisionist views advocated some 40
years earlier by Eduard Bernstein and Eduard David. Of equal length is the
history of Marxist opposition to this kind of political strategy.
For example, Leon Trotsky opposed Popular Frontism on a number of
grounds.120 First, he objected to the peasant essentialism it advocated:
because an undifferentiated category of 'peasants' included in its ranks small
agrarian capitalists whose interests were not merely distinct from but actually
opposed to those of workers, Trotsky emphasized the importance of
recognizing agricultural workers as part of the proletariat and not as an
incipient peasantry. Writing about France during the mid-1930s, he
accurately delineated the connection between the populism of the political
right and the agrarian myth, and how the latter entailed not only rural
mobilization which ignored the existence of class differences within the
peasantry but also a discourse-for that idealized the local and a discourse-
against that opposed the large-scale (foreign monopoly capital, finance
capital, the state).121 Second, he maintained that the target of working-class
mobilization should be capitalism and not feudalism, since fascism was a
reaction not by the feudal ancien regime but by the bourgeoisie. Third, he
warned against the dangers of categorizing the national bourgeoisie in less
developed countries as 'progressive', and thus also of the risks to a proletariat
of entering supra-class (= Popular Front, 'national-popular') alliances with a
colonial or semi-colonial bourgeoisie in order to carry out the tasks of
'democratic' capitalism. And fourth, Trotsky argued that confidence in the
existence of a 'progressive national bourgeoisie' itself was misplaced, since it,
too, would turn to fascism were its own interests to be threatened by
working-class mobilization. In short, the middle classes were not interested in
anti-fascist struggle if this in turn opened up the prospect of socialist
revolution, as happened in both China during the late 1920s and 1930s Spain.
Instead of Trotsky, however, Beverley symptomatically invokes the views of
a prominent Stalinist, Georgi Dimitrov, as emblematic of the supra-class
Popular Frontism he wishes to identify with subaltern 'resistance' in Latin
America.122 The folly of this position can be gauged from the fact that the
Bulgarian peasantry seen by Dimitrov as the main element of this anti-fascist
Popular Front stood not on the left but on the right of the political spectrum.
In extolling the virtues of 'people's democracy' in Bulgaria, therefore,
Dimitrov invoked the anti-fascist alliance between the Communist Party and
the Agrarian Union in the mid-1920s, arguing that fascism triumphed because
the working class was isolated from the peasantry, its 'natural' allies.123 The
difficulty with this claim is that, far from being the 'natural' allies of the
working class, the mobilizing discourse of the Bulgarian peasantry and its
political party, the Agrarian Union, was much rather indistinguishable from
that of fascist organizations in Eastern Europe at that conjuncture: all of them
adhered to a populist mobilizing discourse that was not only anti-Marxist,
anti-urban, anti-industrial and anti-Semitic but also supportive of nationalism
and the agrarian myth.124
Whereas Marxists who grew up in the first half of the twentieth century did
so in the shadow of fascism, at a time when the political right was flexing it
muscles, those who grew up during the second half, by contrast, did so in a
period when, following the defeat of fascism, the political right was
dormant.125 For this reason, the discourse of the political right, with which
most early twentieth century Marxists were familiar and against which a
constant guard was mounted, was ignored by many of those who came to
Marxism during the latter half of the century.126 This led in turn to a lack of
vigilance and a corresponding false sense of security, with the result that
when this same nationalist politics re-emerged in the 1960s and rose to
prominence once again during the 1980s and 1990s, many of those who
perceived themselves as being on the left were caught unawares, and
consequently wrongly identified elements of its discourse as progressive.127
In short, because socialists have forgotten who their enemy is, too often they
have mistaken the latter for a friend.128 It was perhaps this as much as
anything which was responsible for the gasps of surprise from postmodern
theorists in the academy when they were presented with evidence of the
fascist complicity of a number of prominent intellectuals who were either
current exponents of postmodern analysis, or whose theory prefigured
postmodernism.129
Consequently, during the recent past many of those who regard themselves as
on the left have perceived the enemy simply in terms of an external force
(foreign capital, the state) clearly visible on the other side of the barricade,
rather than—more insidiously—groups on the same side of the barricade.
Although it is true that one of the dangers posed by reactionary populist
mobilization is that its 'strategy of tension' frequently enables the capitalist
state to proscribe all opposition, including that of the left, therefore, as
dangerous for those on the left is the risk posed by an unwitting alliance with
such mobilizations.130 This is the problem confronting those such as
Beverley, Albó and Canclini, who pin their hopes for a politically progressive
grassroots mobilization in Latin America on the deeply problematic category
of 'subaltern resistance'.
 CONCLUSION

A fairly predictable outcome of the undoubted academic success enjoyed by

postmodern/post-colonial exponents of South Asian subalternism during the
1980s was the extension by a similarly self-styled 'alternative' historiography
of the search during the 1990s for a culturally 'authentic' rural subject to Latin
America. In an age full of ironies, one of the more amusing—and
intellectually least sustainable—examples is perhaps the following: just at the
moment that the Subaltern Studies project as applied to Asia is sinking under
the weight of damaging political criticism, its Latin American counterpart
appears to be taking off as a serious academic project. This contradictory
juxtaposition might be explained in a number of ways: a project that was
inapplicable to South Asia is relevant to Latin America, or the criticisms
which have been levelled at the South Asian subaltern do not apply to the
postmodern/post-colonial theorization of the subaltern in Latin America.
Neither of these explanations, however, is sustainable, not least because, in
its essentials, the Subaltern Studies project as applied to rural South Asia is
epistemologically indistinguishable from that applied to rural Latin America.
The latter is as a result vulnerable to the same kinds of political criticism
made of the former.
Arguing that capitalism de-authenticates what is for them a 'natural' and
longstanding identity indigenous to Latin America, Beverley, Canclini and
Albó all search for and claim to have found evidence of a more 'authentic'
grassroots subaltern consciousness and agency. In the case of Canclini and
Albó, this quest leads them to the (re-)discovery of a pristine 'other'
nationhood suppressed by European conquest, while Beverley locates the
presence of a similarly 'authentic' subaltern identity/resistance in literary texts
projecting the 'voice-from-below'. These kinds of search for 'authenticity', it
has been argued here, cannot but culminate in a return to 1920s and 1930s
indigenismo, and its attendant romanticization of peasant
economy/culture/tradition. Because all grassroots cultural forms are regarded
by both postmodern theory and the subaltern studies project as empowering,
Beverley, Canclini and Albó conceptually eschew false consciousness. The
deleterious political impact of this postmodern epistemology is impossible to
avoid.
By agreeing to this essentialization of their discourse, poor peasants and
agricultural labourers are permitted by exponents of the postmodern 'new'
populism to celebrate their culture, thereby forgoing the right to change the
class structure—the very existence of which is denied by these same
postmodern 'new' populists—which makes their culture specific to them. In
other words, it is a Faustian pact, whereby the celebration of culture is at the
same time a celebration of the class system which gives rise to that culture. In
exchange for accepting cultural autonomy, poor peasants and workers agree
implicitly not to tamper with the underlying class structure. The denial of the
falsity of consciousness also has other effects. Thus, the subaltern framework,
in both its South Asian and Latin American manifestation, is necessarily
silent about the formation and reproduction of 'popular culture' so defined.
How, and why, specific forms of cultural identity surface at particular
conjunctures is a question that is not asked, a silence which serves to mask
the extent to which cultural forms celebrated by subalternism simply as
empowering 'from below' manifestations are much rather disempowering
'from above' emanations, reproduced by capital for commercial and political
reasons (to combat overproduction and to lock workers into the capitalist
system as consumers).
Accordingly, the dominant intellectual trajectory in the social sciences,
history, anthropology and development studies over the past two decades
suggests that those who remain Marxists are going to have to fight many
battles they had long thought settled all over again. The rise of postmodern
theory, and its influential progeny the Subaltern Studies project, indicates that
—among other things—this battle will involve re-materializing, re-
politicizing and re-historicizing the analysis of Asian and Latin American
peasantries, who, reclassified as de-materialized/ahistorical/apolitical
'subalterns', have now become trapped in an hermetically sealed discourse
about language, literature and culture. Rather than discarding important
components of Marxist theory—as even some Marxists now advocate—this
battle with the postmodern 'new' populism requires exactly the opposite
strategy: reasserting the political validity of these very components. Among
the many accusations levelled at Marxism in general, and Leninists in
particular, two of the most persistent have been that the insistence of
socialists both on the class differentiation of the peasantry and on the
international necessity for and similarity of working-class agency are
mistaken. Conservative and right-wing critics of Marxism aver that no
evidence exists for either of these two processes: not only does class struggle
waged by workers possess no international dimension, therefore, but the
reason for this is that they—like peasants—are national sociological entities
whose specific characteristics (economic conditions, ideology, culture and
political interests) are not and cannot be replicated elsewhere.
Of the many ironies raised by these criticisms perhaps the most significant
are the two following. First, although it is fashionable nowadays to decry
Marxist theory about the class differentiation of the peasantry, the main
reason why the latter is still important is invariably overlooked. Marxists
opposed the notion of an undifferentiated peasantry on two grounds, of which
the less important one was that the reproduction of a middle peasant stratum
would prevent class formation, and thus prove an economic obstacle to
capitalist development. More important was the political objection (raised by
Trotsky) that an undifferentiated peasantry would continue to be invoked as
bearers of national identity and culture by those opposed to socialism. It is
the second of these two forms which the subaltern project—as applied to
Asia—has recuperated, in the process making this discourse academically
'respectable' and thus available to those on the political right in India. This is
the danger that confronts those such as Beverley, Canclini and Albó, who
wish to extend this same framework -subaltern identity/resistance—to the
analysis of rural Latin America.
And second, it is clear that the political right not only possesses an
international dimension to its own ideology, but that the latter also allocates
similar characteristics and a political role to the peasantry regardless of
national context. Against what it categorizes as the 'alien' internationalism of
the left (proletariat, class structure, class struggle, socialism), therefore, the
right in Germany, Spain, Argentina and Bolivia during the first half of the
twentieth century, and in Europe, North America and parts of Latin America
during the second half, counterposed its own 'authentic' form of
internationalism: namely, the global existence of peasant economy and
culture—the embodiment of nationhood and the repository of cherished rural
tradition—threatened with destruction by finance capital and
depeasantization. This in turn confers legitimacy on historical and
contemporary forms of grassroots resistance conducted by peasant cultivators
and farmers in defence of their private property against any ('redistributive')
state attempting to change existing social relations of production and thus
disrupt what conservatives maintain are organic and harmonious rural
communities/traditions/hierarchy.
This 'from above' concern for those 'from below' characterizes conservative
discourse about peasants as populist, a powerful ideology that combines
plebeian and aristocratic versions of the agrarian myth. Its object is to
disguise the impact of capitalist development in rural contexts by recasting
economic inequality as 'natural', and refocusing 'difference' away from class
and onto a town/countryside divide. Such a mutually supportive fusion of
above and below forms of 'difference'/'otherness' in general, and arguments
concerning the innateness of hierarchically-linked-but-socioeconomically-
specific rural identities in particular, are found not just in most European,
North American and Asian but also in Latin American variants of
conservatism. All the latter lament the loss and simultaneously preach the
importance of recuperating an historically innate form of (non-class)
national/cultural identity that is virtuous, non-conflictive and rural in origin,
and thus unifies the nation, thereby guaranteeing national harmony. For this
reason, it is necessary to regard pro-peasant ideology mainly as a mobilizing
discourse which, by fostering false consciousness among the opponents of
capitalism (which include uncompetitive and/or dispossessed peasant
proprietors), permits the process of capitalist development to proceed,
especially when—as in the case of 1920s and 1930s Europe and Latin
America—deployed in a classically populist fashion by groups/parties on the
political right.
Although they would not see it as such, therefore, those who now advocate
transferring both the subaltern project and its form of 'from below' agency (=
'resistance') from the analyses of rural Asia to approaches to the peasantry in
Latin America run the risk of transferring also its nationalist ideology and
politically reactionary assumptions. The whole point about the acceptability
to the political right of an idealized image of an undifferentiated, ahistorical
peasantry is that—once this supposedly homogeneous category is
differentiated, and the presence of historically distinct class elements are
revealed—it ceases to embody precisely those eternal/ahistorical/traditional
virtues that make it acceptable to conservatives. As long as the peasantry
remains an epistemologically undifferentiated category, however, it licenses a
discourse about the agrarian myth that is central to the populist ideology of
the political right. Thus the state/nation duality, and the concept of national
identity based on this, which informs the search for a pristine grassroots
subaltern 'authenticity' in Latin America has been—and remains—a polarity
that underlies the analyses of agrarian populism and fascism. As the cases not
only of Germany and Spain but also Bolivia and Argentina in the period
between the 1890s and the 1940s all demonstrate, both agrarian populism and
fascism seek to realign what they deem to be a pre-existing indigenous—and
thus authentic—national identity with a state apparatus that is deemed to be
representative of this.
The profoundly conservative subtext to this subalternist discourse has already
been noted: no longer permitted by those in the academy to aspire to overturn
existing property relations and the division of labour, poor peasants and
landless labourers in the so-called Third World are now encouraged to like
what they are and to enjoy what they already have. Because 'those below'
cannot expect anything better than the status quo, agency in the form of
'assertiveness' is thereby confined epistemologically and politically not to a
transcendence of current production relations, but to a defence of the latter on
the part of poor peasants and landless labourers. The patronizing sub-text is
that 'we cannot expect these people to want more', and consequently their
present situation (and class position) represents for them an appropriate
aspiration. In short, henceforth they must learn to be empowered by—and
thus to be satisfied with—the 'otherness' of their culture, and with it their
'natural' position in the 'natural' socioeconomic order. Because it is deemed to
be for them a disempowering transformation, therefore, they must eschew
economic change (= a Eurocentric metanarrative, the material benefits of
which are not for them). In one form or another, this message has always
been central to the thinking not of the left but rather of the political right.
That such a view can be espoused by those who continue to regard
themselves as part of the left is symptomatic of the depoliticization of
academic discourse about development, together with a forgetfulness about
the hard political lessons learned by an earlier generation of socialists—
Gramsci among them -during the 1920s and 1930s, about the tenacity and
durability of reaction.
 NOTES

1. The Subaltern Studies project is embodied in the series about South Asian history and
historiography, edited initially by Ranajit Guha [1982–89] and more recently by Chatterjee and Pandey
[1992], Arnold and Hardiman [1994], Amin and Chakrabarty [1996], Bhadra, Prakash and Tharu
[1999], and Chatterjee and Jeganathan [2000]. For seriously flawed accounts of the project as applied
to South Asia, see Sarkar [1997; 2002:154–94], Vanaik [1997], Chaturvedi [2000], and Ludden [2001;
2002]. While useful new critiques of the subaltern/post-colonial approach are still being written (see,
for example, Veltmeyer [1997], Nanda [2001], Gupta [2001], and Petras [2002]), most of those
produced after the mid1990s are highly derivative; thus many of the arguments—plus the Brecht quote
—in Brass [1995] are also found in Bahl [1997].
2. As well as Beverley [1993; 1999], Albó [1993], and Canclini [1992; 1993; 2001], on whose work
this article focuses, others who consider subaltern identity/resistance in relation to Latin America
include Aman and Parker [1991], Rappoport [1992], the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group
[1993], Mallon [1993:388ff.; 1994; 1995], Joseph and Nugent [1994], Lowe and Lloyd [1997], Nugent
[1998a; 1998b], Chomsky and Lauria-Santiago [1998], Joseph, LeGrand and Salvatore [1998], Bueno
and Caesar [1998], Peloso [1999], Fiddian [2000], Mignolo [2000], Masiello [2001] and Aldama
[2001]. That the concept subaltern resistance has become so all-embracing as to become meaningless is
evident from the way in which it is being applied to specific Central American and Latin American
contexts/conjunctures (see, for example, its deployment by Gudmunson and Scarano [1998]). Writing
about nineteenth-century Brazil, therefore, Bieber [1999:11] states: 'Although the term subaltern has
typically been applied in the Latin American context to peasants, bandits, women, and the politics of
resistance, it may also be fruitfully employed to analyse municipal bureaucrats, who are simultaneously
marginal within the political system yet dominant within their local communities.' On this criterion, it
would be possible in the case of English history to describe as 'subaltern' those powerful feudal nobles
at the apex of the landowning hierarchy who were nevertheless opposed to the exercise of medieval
kingship.
3. This epistemological break is one that exponents of the Latin American subaltern framework share
with their South Asian counterparts. Both have shifted the analytical locus of grassroots conflict away
from class and towards non-class cultural 'difference', the latter becoming as a result a celebration of
what in effect is reified by subalternists as a permanent, ahistorical and empowering identity and
resistance by peasant smallholders. What Marxism regards as false consciousness—ideas of selfhood
based on subsistence cultivation by those whom (subalternists claim) are, have always been, and always
will be middle peasants—is accordingly banished at one stroke.
4. Details about the postmodern 'new' populism, together with its connection to the agrarian myth, are
contained in Brass [2000a]. The reasons for the intellectual acceptability of the Subaltern Studies
project to those in the academy are complex, and have to do with the rejection by many
intellectuals/academics of universal categories associated historically with a progressive and forward-
looking anti-capitalism, and a corresponding retreat into the national/regional/local/ethnic
particularisms/identities that have long been the preserve of a backward-looking, romantic anti-
capitalism. It is clear that in some cases (unconnected with the application of a subaltern resistance
framework to Latin America) a Faustian bargain has been struck—in exchange for entry into or
promotion within the academy, Marxists have 'softened' their views and criticisms, seen the virtues of
bourgeois political and/or economic theory, and in effect become 'Marxist' professors.
5. A similar kind of misrecognition informs a recent claim made in what purports to be a history of this
journal: namely, that the critique of the postmodern underpinnings of the Subaltern Studies project was
prefigured in an early article by Hobsbawm [1973], who 'anticipated so many of the characteristic
tropes of "everyday forms of resistance" and "weapons of the weak" [and the subaltern]…none of
which he saw as reason for analytical inflation or ideological romance, but rather the opposite, in fact'
[Bernstein and Byers, 2000]. This, of course, is nonsense, and the reality turns out to be rather different.
Leaving aside the obvious difficulty faced by claims that a critique was already in place in the early
1970s of an as-yet unformulated project, or what became the Subaltern Studies series only in the early
1980s, a central question is: if Hobsbawm himself was indeed as prescient as argued, why then was he
to be found in the ranks of the 'new' populists a short while after having subjected their views to a class-
based critique? Claims made by Hobsbawm [1981] about the decline of the working class as the subject
of history were firmly in step with the fashionable anti-Marxist views of the time, and in fact no
different from—and thus epistemologically supportive of—those made at that same conjuncture by
many of those who were (or became) postmodernists and/or Subalternists.
6. It is clear from what he himself states that Beverley falls into this category. In the preface to an
earlier collection of his essays, covering the period 1989–92, he admits [Beverley, 1993: xi] to a 'rather
uncritical enthusiasm for postmodernism', and also identifies the reasons for this: namely, that '[i]n
jumping on the postmodernist bandwagon [he] was following the dictates of [his] taste', and also that he
'saw postmodernism as a way out of the crisis of the left'.
7. The abandonment of socialism by many of those on the left, and its replacement with one or other
variety of the 'new' populisms influenced by postmodernism, has to some degree followed the same
intellectual trajectory as that criticized by Deutscher [1955:14–15] some 50 years ago: 'Nearly every
ex-communist broke with his party in the name of communism. Nearly everyone set out to defend the
ideal of socialism from the abuses of a bureaucracy subservient to Moscow. Nearly everyone began by
throwing out the dirty water of the Russian revolution to protect the baby bathing in it. Sooner or later
these intentions are forgotten or abandoned. Having broken with the party bureaucracy in the name of
communism, the heretic goes on to break with communism itself. He no longer defends socialism from
unscrupulous abuse; he now defends mankind from the fallacy of socialism. He no longer throws out
the dirty water of the Russian revolution to protect the baby; he discovers that the baby is a monster
which must be strangled. The heretic becomes a renegade.'
8. Beverley [1999] falls squarely and self-consciously within the former category, and his book belongs
to an increasingly familiar academic genre: the confessional text, which parades and then dismisses the
significance of the author's earlier political naïvety, prior to a restatement/reaffirmation of his initial
position. For other and earlier examples of this kind, see the texts examined in Brass [2000b]. As a
review in this journal (JPS, Vol.29, No. 1, October 2001, pp. 182–91) makes clear, a more recent
instance of the same type of volte face is Corbridge and Harriss [2000].
9. Ulrich Beck, who, together with Giddens, spent most of the 1990s assuring us that individual
'choice'/risk was innate to all forms of economic activity [Beck, 1992], is now attempting
unsuccessfully to dissociate his version of individual 'choice' from its conceptualization by
neoliberalism [Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2001]. The same is true of Richard Rorty [1998], an
erstwhile postmodernist who, now that he finally accepts that it is unable to address issues such as
inequality, advocates a return to liberal values of Dewey and Whitman (his incorrect description of
them as 'leftist' notwithstanding). Yet another example of this trend towards self-reinvention is
Ramachandra Guha [2001], an agrarian populist sympathizer of the Subaltern Studies project who,
much like Beck and Rorty, now attempts to give new relevance to liberalism by arguing that, unlike the
political right and left, both of which espoused variants of identity politics (the former advocating a
unified Hindu community, the latter a unified lower caste community), liberals like him subscribe to
personal choice incompatible with identity politics. In his view, therefore, liberals occupy what
amounts to a 'commonsense' position in the centre of the political spectrum, between 'the blinkered
polarities' of left and right: 'Fierce political opponents though they may be,' he concludes [Guha,
2001:4669], 'intellectuals of red [= left] and saffron [= right] hues often practice the same methods
[and] both tend to equate scholarly worth and scientific truth with ethnic background or cultural
affiliation.'
10. For the dubious argument that 'Third Way' discourse is a bastion against the spread of the political
right, see Anthony Giddens, 'The Third Way can beat the Far Right', Guardian (London), 3 May 2002.
What he fails to understand is that fascist mobilization has presented itself historically as an 'above
politics' movement that is neither of the left nor of the right, but rather a 'third way' alternative to both.
11. Described on the blurb in a vainglorious manner which goes well beyond the usual hyperbole
deployed in such contexts ('one of the most interesting contributions to subaltern studies since Ranajit
Guha's definition of the field in the early 1980s'), the book by Beverley [1999] is part of a series
identified in somewhat bizarre terms as 'post-contemporary interventions'. At one level, the book,
which consists of essays published during 1993–98, can be read as a baroque allegory of the double
disenchantment that occurred over the course of this period: first with Marxism, and then with its
replacement -the Subaltern Studies framework—as the realization of the latter's theoretically
unsustainable and politically tainted nature gradually dawns on Beverley. By then it is too late, and a
final attempt by him to reinstate the concepts which structure Marxist analysis merely confirms the
confused nature of the whole approach. Many others who also got it wrong are now trying vainly to
persuade everyone either that they did not, or that it does not matter if they did.
12. On the nation-over-the-state versus the nation-under-the-state, see Albó [1993:24]. The same kind
of polarity informs the highly romanticized account of the Peruvian peasantry by Apffel-Marglin
[1998:3–4], who rejects 'Western science/rationality' in the name of what she claims is the 'egalitarian
ethos of Andean peasants', so as 'to weaken development efforts and strengthen Andean life'.
Significantly, earlier she had applied a subaltern framework to peasants in Eastern India [Apffel-
Marglin and Mishra, 1995].
13. In contrast to the existing designation of an all-embracing national identity, whereby both nation
and state in Latin American countries are historically 'given' categories, even for those who challenge
their content, form and political object, Albó [1993:27] wishes to adopt a wholly 'from below'
designation: that is, the nation-as-defmed-by-the-(rural)-grassroots. On this he comments: 'The
difference between this [former designation], tied to progressive sectors of the hegemonic groups [= the
political left], and those originating from indigenous and subaltern groups that have been condemned to
a marginal role since 1492 is clear.'
14. In support of his argument that a more 'authentic' indigenous 'nation' overrides the national identity
conferred by independence from Spain or Portugal, Albó [1993:28] cites the example of the Aymaras
(= true identity) inhabiting the space on either side of the frontier between Perú and Bolivia (= false
identity). Notwithstanding the centrality of grassroots ethnicity to his categorization of 'nation', Albó
[1993:26–7] persists in the view that his project is fundamentally different from ethnic nationalism.
Albó [1993:24] also accepts that the process of decentralization and re-territorialization could extend to
include the recognition of other forms of subaltern identity, such as regionalist tendencies (that of
Cuzco in Perú, Sucre in Bolivia, and Bahía in Brazil).
15. On the innately transgressive role of carnival ritual, see Canclini [1993:81]. In making this claim,
Canclini is merely repeating an argument that has long circulated within anthropological discourse
about rural Latin America.
16. Unsurprisingly, those at the rural grassroots do not themselves share this view, either about the
existence or about the desirability of returning to a pristine indigenous culture. In this connection,
Canclini [1992:38] is forced into making the following revealing confession: 'When I first studied these
changes I could only deplore the influence that the taste of urban consumers and tourists had on crafts.
However, on a field trip eight years ago [i.e., the early 1980s] to a weaving pueblo in Teotilán del
Valle, I entered a shop in which a fifty-year-old man and his father were watching television and
conversing in Zapotec. When I asked about the wall hangings with images from the work of Picasso,
Klee, and Miró, the artisan told me that he began to weave the new designs in 1968 on the suggestion
of a group of tourists who worked for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He then took out an
album of clippings of newspaper reviews and analyses, in English, of his exhibitions in California. In
the half hour I spoke to him I saw him move comfortably from Zatopec to Spanish and English, from
art to craft, from his ethnic culture to mass culture, and from practical knowledge of his craft to
cosmopolitan criticism. I had to admit that my worry over the loss of tradition was not shared by this
man who easily negotiated three cultural systems.'
17. In keeping with this kind of approach, Dirks [1991] maintains that religious festivals in south India
were examples of power-exercised-from-below. For important critiques of the carnivalesque as a 'from
below' form of empowerment, see Gupta [2001:102ff.] and McNeish (this volume).
18. According to Bakhtin [1984:122–3], the characteristics of the carnivalesque are as follows: The
laws, prohibitions, and restrictions that determine the structure and order of the ordinary, that is non-
carnival, life are suspended during carnival: what is suspended, first of all is hierarchical structure and
all the forms of terror, reverence, piety, and etiquette connected with it—that is, everything resulting
from socio-hierarchical inequality or any other form of inequality among people (including age). All
distance between people is suspended, and a special carnival category goes into effect: free and
familiar contact among people. This is a very important aspect of a carnival sense of the world. People
who in life are separated by impenetrable hierarchical barriers enter into free familiar contact on the
carnival square…Carnival is the place for working out, in a concretely sensuous, half-real and half-
acted form, a new mode of interrelationship between individuals, counterposed to the all-powerful
socio-hierarchical relationships of non-carnival life' (original emphasis). In keeping with this view,
Scott [1990:175] identifies the carnival as resistance incarnate, 'the ritual location of uninhibited
speech…the only place where undominated discourse prevailed, where there was no servility, false
pretenses, obsequiousness, or etiquettes of circumlocution' (original emphasis).
19. According to Thompson [1991:467ff.], rough musicking is an informal yet powerful type of
grassroots sanction, a public method of social disapproval (and thus control) exercised historically by
village populations 'against individuals who offend against certain community norms'. The highly
stylized act of rough musicking was a customary form of 'from below' retribution in which the whole
community participated, and amounted to a display (procession, dancing, construction and burning of
effigies) the aim of which was the public humiliation of a specific individual within the community
involved: such displays entailed ritual forms of 'unpitying laughter' or 'satiric noise' (= obscenities, rude
cacophony, mockery), leading invariably to ostracism or expulsion of the victim. The link with carnival
and the carnivalesque is clear: '[r]ough music is a vocabulary which brushes the carnival at one extreme
and the gallows at the other' [Thompson, 1991:509].
20. Whereas the majority of ethnographic accounts about the fiesta system in Central America have all
tended to depict it as a context in which socially marginal subjects voluntarily assert what for them is
an empowering 'from below' ethnic/cultural identity, Smith [1977] by contrast argues that Maya Indians
in Guatemala and southern Mexico only go down this path involuntarily, when excluded from
participation in the wider economic system. In other words, the kind of 'authentic' identity which
postmodern/subaltern theory insists is much sought after is not in fact one that is freely chosen by its
subjects (but much rather imposed 'from above'), nor is it regarded by them as a form of power-
exercised-from-below.
21. In most rural contexts throughout Latin America the fiesta has been one of the most important sites
historically of carnivalesque discourse/performance; such occasions attract large numbers of people to a
specific location, and in many cases the whole population from the surrounding area attends and
participates in all the fiesta activity—its religious observances, ritual celebrations, and accompanying
festivities (street theatre, puppet and firework displays, dancing and drinking, etc.).
22. This replicates a central theme of folkloric discourse, whereby a subject (prince or pauper) discards
his true identity for a short period, during which he becomes his 'other' and after which he once again
resumes his normal social position in the existing hierarchy. To regard this 'other' identity assumed by
the pauper as an empowering transition emblematic of plebeian strength, and thus indicative of the
efficacy of 'from below' resistance, is simply to reify power.
23. For the centrality of laughter generally, and Menippean satire in particular, to the supposedly
transgressive role of the carnivalesque, see Bakhtin [1984:133ff.] and Lotman and Uspenskij
[1984:39ff.].
24. This dissonance between carnival and carnivalesque discourse on the one hand, and 'from below'
class struggle on the other, is recognized by E.P.Thompson. In the case of nineteenth-century England,
therefore, Thompson [1991:525–6] accepts that 'rough music cannot be claimed as a "working-class"
tradition, for the forms were imperfectly integrated into the early organized labour movement…the
more sophisticated, organized, and politically-conscious the movement, the less indebtedness it shows
to traditional forms of folk violence'. Significantly, he continues: This may have been because
reformers sensed, in the very forms, a disposition to favour the traditional—or even atavistic—mood of
the people. For it was a form which was used, very consciously, by traditionalists against reformers or
out-groups…Where the rites of rough music survive after 1815, they appear to have an increasingly
socially-conservative character' (emphasis added).
25. Thus, for example, Thompson [1991:502, 504, 507, 516] cites numerous examples of rough
musicking initiated by a member of the gentry and/or landowner in an attempt either to evict
'troublesome' tenants from their holdings or to silence their supporters.
26. For the way in which carnivalesque discourse/performance in India has on occasion served to
reinforce communalism (= ethnic identity), see Cashman [1975] and Freitag [1989]. The kinds of
domestic transgressions (conjugal infidelity, illegitimacy, widow remarriage) and offenders (blacks
who challenged racism, women who challenged patriarchal values) punished by 'rough musicking',
together with the discourse (monarchism, racism, anti-Semitism) and performance (lynchings)
structuring the carnivalesque in many different contexts [Thompson, 1991:486, 487, 523], reveal clearly
its potentially/actually reactionary content and form, as well as its compatibility with class struggle
waged 'from above', and corresponding incompatibility with a politically progressive notion of 'from
below' agency. On this point Thompson [1991:524] comments: 'Domestic rough music was socially
conservative, in the sense that it defended custom and male-dominative tradition…the elite saw little
threat in it and were casual in their attempts to put the practices down'.
27. This particular fiesta, held in honour of the Virgin of Cocharcas in the central Andean province of
Huancayo, involved in the period before the early 1940s a large-scale festive re-enactment of the
Spanish Conquest by two rival sponsoring groups representing Spaniards and Incas [Quijada Jara,
1947]. Central to the carnivalesque performance/discourse of this fiesta were songs/dances reaffirming
an autonomous Incaic ethnic/cultural/linguistic/religious identity under threat from the Spanish
invaders—for example, offering to pay Pizarro any kind/size of ransom in exchange for the safe return
of the imprisoned Inca ('caballero de luenga barba/no dés muerte a mi Inca/ si dices plata, si pides oro/
lo que quieras te daré'), a process which licensed the reproduction of the following ideological
oppositions:
Self
Other
Inca
Pizarro
Indigenous/'authentic'
Non-indigenous/'foreign'
Incaic/(Peruvian)
Spanish/(European)
Victim
Conqueror
Non-Christian beliefs
Christianity
For the high incidence of agrarian struggle in the Mantaro region, of which
Huancayo is a part, see Samaniego [1978].
28. For this particular case study, which concerns the role of the fiesta in the rural estate system (and
subsequently agrarian cooperatives) of the province of La Convención in the Department of Cusco over
the period 1940–75, see Brass [1986b].
29. The fiesta officeholders in this instance were capitalist rich peasants, minor bureaucrats from the
agrarian reform office, and local merchants, all of whom presented sponsorship of the accompanying
festivities in terms of self-sacrifice/service to the benefit of the members of the agrarian cooperative on
which it took place. The subtext to this discourse was the necessity in turn of specific forms of material
reciprocity on the part of the receiving community (peasants and agricultural labourers) to the
officeholders sponsoring the fiesta (selling their produce only to the merchants sponsoring the fiesta,
overlooking sponsors' non-fulfilment of conditions necessary for continued membership of the
cooperative, etc.).
30. In contrast to postmodern subalternists such as Scott and Canclini, who regard carnival as a site
where 'popular culture' and the voice-from-below are reproduced, and consequently for whom the
carnivalesque is an unproblematically democratic form of expression, Thompson - who unlike
postmodern subalternists also knew his Marx—adopted a more nuanced approach to the
form/content/object of rough music. Unsurprisingly, therefore, his analysis of the
performance/ritual/discourse/meaning of rough musicking is torn between two contradictory political
images of the carnivalesque: on the one hand a benign interpretation that stresses its 'folksy and even
reassuring' role as a uniformly 'from below' form of resistance, and on the other a view which
recognizes that it can also be a site of politically reactionary discourse/performance. Hence the
revealing nature of his concluding observation [Thompson, 1991:530]: 'I make [this] point strongly,
arguing in a sense with part of myself, for I find much that attracts me in rough music. It is a property
of a society in which justice is not wholly delegated or bureau-criticised, but is enacted by and within
the community. Where it is enacted upon an evident malefactor—some officious public figure or a
brutal wife-beater—one is tempted to lament the passing of the rites. But the victims were not all of this
order. They might equally be some lonely sexual non-conformist, some Sue Bridehead and Jude
Fawley living together out of holy wedlock. And the psychic terrorism which could be brought to bear
on them was truly terrifying: the flaring and lifelike effigies, with their ancient associations with
heretic-burning and the maiming of images—the magical or daemonic suggestiveness of masking and
of animal guising—the flaunting of obscenities—the driving out of evil spirits with noise.'
31. It is important not to confuse a critique of the folkloric images of rural life interpreted by
subalternists as 'authentic' with a demeaning attitude to peasants themselves. As Marxists have
frequently pointed out, first-hand accounts of peasant/village life emanating from the rural grassroots
are usually beset by two kinds of bias: such discourse is not only penetrated by landlord ideology but
also localized and parochial in scope. Thus, for example, Trotsky [1925:72–3], who strongly opposed
attempts by Russian populists to romanticize village life, acknowledged that Ivanov, an organic
intellectual of the peasantry, 'knows and understands the Siberian peasant, the Cossack, the Khirgiz',
but was nevertheless critical of him, observing that 'whether Ivanov wants it or not, he shows that
peasant uprisings in "peasant" Russia are not yet revolution. The peasant revolt bursts forth suddenly
from a small spark, unevenly, often cruel in its helplessness—and no one sees why it flared up or
whither it leads.' It was this absence of the bigger picture—life beyond the village, in other words—that
Trotsky found problematic in accounts of village life written by these organic intellectuals. Ironically,
the more 'authentic' such literary accounts were, the less they could be said to address the problems of
the wider society.
32. For this view, see Beverley [1999:3, 14–15, 28]. The degree to which those who study/teach
literature, and whose knowledge is confined to the latter, remain disconnected from reality (thus
disqualifying them from membership of a vanguard of any kind), is perhaps nowhere better illustrated
than in the naïve utterance by one such in the course of reviewing the latest collection of postmodern
absurdities: 'Who else but Zizek', the reviewer in question gasps, 'could show that the postmodern
celebration of difference depends on the radical abolition of class conflict…' (see Times Higher
Education Supplement, 28 September 2001). Precisely this point ('the radical abolition of class conflict'
by postmodernism) has been made time and time again over the past decade by a small number of
social scientists who remained Marxists, a fact which appears to escape those who possess knowledge
only about literature, or that which according to Beverley is sufficient to endow one with vanguardist
potential.
33. See Beverley [1999:49ff., 53]. Not the least of the many ironies inherent in this privileging of
literature as part of a new revolutionary movement, in the vanguard of which are to be found not only
post-colonial theorists but also literary representations of the subaltern 'other', is the fact that V.S.
Naipaul, one of the principal novelists associated with the notion of post-colonial writing (his family
left India for the Caribbean in the 1880s, and his early writings were about Trinidad), is now an
unabashed cultural conservative whose literary ideal is the English pastoral, and who appears intent on
reinventing himself as an English country gentleman [Theroux, 1998:145, 362]. This kind of rightwards
transition on the part of novelists, together with the reasons for it, has long been recognized, not least
by writers who are themselves conservatives. Hence the observation about Kingsley Amis, John Braine
and others, by fellow novelist and conservative Anthony Burgess [1990:140] that: 'These former
radicals had fulfilled Marx's thesis about economics being at the bottom of everything. A struggling
author does well to favour socialism and dream of art as being useful to the state: to prosper with one's
books brings capital, and the state had better leave it alone…the literary conservatism that Amis and
[Robert] Conquest were adopting seemed to be based on the false premise that literary revolution and
political progressivism grow from the same roots. This was never so: the literary innovators have
always been bourgeois with a tendency to fascism.'
34. See Beverley [1999:56].
35. On this point, see Beverley [1999:65]. For a similar definition and methodological endorsement of
testimonio by another exponent of Latin American subalternism, see Canclini [2001:7–8, 170 n3]. The
more perceptive hearers of and commentators on oral history have long warned about the uncritical
celebration of the 'voice from below', and the epistemological and political risks attached to its
idealization. One such is Jerry White, who two decades ago made the following still relevant
observations about the illusory search in the UK for 'representative biographies'; although his criticisms
are of the 'new local history' as practised in Britain, they apply with equal force to the celebration of the
Third World 'other' by postmodern new populist accounts of the 'voice from below'. '[I]ndividual
experience', he notes [White, 1981:36–7], 'can tell us little about the forces which shape our lives make
us what we are and where we live what it is. There is a huge reality outside the boundaries of individual
consciousness. It is the critical understanding of that reality, of the relations of capitalist society and
our historical place within them, which must be the object of an actively socialist local history. This
critical consciousness of capitalism is missing from the new local history (as it is from much local and
political life). It is not that people's reminiscences are necessarily quietist or uncritical: indeed, many of
them are fired by a fine anger. But this is criticism without understanding…Without a socialist
understanding, criticism is always in danger of latching onto any apparent "explanation" that happens
along: "colour not class" …or (and just as much) "the council", "the government", "the unions" and
whoever and whatever people blame for getting us where we are now. At its worst, and few local oral
history publications are free from this, autobiography can reinforce capitalist values so that the whole
tone (notwithstanding the angry bits) is politically bland and negative and unprovocative. They give us
moving insights which enrich the brotherhood of man and boost the self-confidence of working people,
but it all appears to take place in a vacuum…Work is treated very much as if it were a thing complete in
itself, instead of being one part of a social relationship: we do it because we do it. The dignity of labour,
stressed by many of the local oral histories which focus on work, disguises what work is for—who
owns what we produce, where profits come from, why we are deprived of work, how new jobs are
made, the social consequences of the things we do, and so on. We should thus be made to question the
function of what, after all, amounts to nearly half the product of our waking lives: unthinking pride in a
job well done is just what the capitalist ordered' (original emphasis).
36. For the announcement of this reversal, see Beverley [1999:69]. On the problematic nature of the
testimonio by Rigoberta Menchú, see Stoll [1998] and the contributions in Rus [1999].
37. It is perhaps significant that, during the 1960s when the political role of literature was subject to a
closer scrutiny than it is now, even those on the political right—like the novelist Simon Raven
[1967:115]—admitted that '[d]eceit, masquerade, metamorphosis, moralization—there is almost no
trick class will not try before it is finally made to appear in its own true and proper form and, so to
speak, own up'. It goes without saying that such an admission undermines the naïve faith expressed by
Latin American subalternists in the unproblematically emancipatory political role of literature per se.
38. For the argument that subaltern 'otherness' cannot be represented by anyone other than the subaltern
him/herself, see Beverley [1999:30, 102, 112]. This claim about the innate 'unknowability' of the 'other'
is central not just to postmodern/post-colonial theory but also to texts [e.g., Clifford and Marcus, 1990]
which insist on the impossibility of ethnography (= non-fiction), and maintain that the latter is nothing
more than literature (= fiction). Such an approach, which reifies all 'from below' discourse because this
cannot be represented by someone who is not him/herself a subaltern, contrasts absolutely with Marxist
analyses of literary texts, where the objective/subjective polarity is retained. Thus, for example, both
Engels [1976a; 1976b] and Lukács [1950] criticized literary representations projecting rural poverty as
ennobling, regardless of whether or not such images circulated at the village level. In a similar vein,
Russian writers and poets (Sergei Yessenin, Vsevolod Ivanov, Nikolai Nikitin, Boris Pilnyak) who
themselves came from peasant backgrounds, and who also idealized rural life, were characterized by
Trotsky [1925:93^4] as 'the rustic or peasant-singing writers' engaged in legitimizing rural reaction
against the urban proletariat ('the revanche of the bast shoe over the boot'). His observations on this
process are instructive: 'all the rustic writers tend in the direction of a primitive nationalism smelling of
roach…The economic decline [of the peasantry], the strengthening of provincialism, the revanche of
the bast shoe over the boot, home-brew and drink—all these are pulling (one can even say, have pulled)
backward into the depths of centuries. And parallel with this can be seen a conscious return to the
"folk" motif in literature. Blok's great development of city couplets ("The Twelve"), the notes of folk
song (in Achmatova, and with more mannerisms in Tsvetaeva), the wave of localism (Ivanov)…The
advent of workers as a ruling class caused an inevitable reaction against the borrowing of bourgeois
patterns…It is quite evident that the return to bast shoes, to home-made rope and to home-brew is not a
social revolution, but an economic reaction, which is the main obstacle to revolution. In so far as a
conscious return to the past is concerned, everything that has been done is extremely unstable and
superficial. It would be unreasonable to expect the development of a new literary form from…a peasant
song.'
39. The dismissive comment (cited in Theroux [1998:127]) applied by novelist V.S.Naipaul to a writer
about the working class ('He brings news…from working class people. It's not writing, really. It's
news') is, if anything, a more accurate description of the uncritical approach by postmodern/post-
colonial theory to the agrarian grassroots in the so-called Third World (= the literary depiction of the
rural 'other'). Not the least of the many ironies framing this comment is that the original position
occupied by Naipaul himself in the literary salons of metropolitan capitalism was precisely that of a
'bringer of news' (about the non-Western 'other').
40. See Beverley [1999:100, 101]. What Beverley forgets (or perhaps does not know) is that Marxism
does not refuse to recognize the existence of a consciousness among peasants: what it does refuse are
claims that peasant consciousness is a consciousness of class and (thus) politically progressive.
41. As has been pointed out elsewhere [Brass, 2000a; 2000b], the political antecedents of this kind of
theory ought to generate concern among subalternists (Latin American and others) who subscribe to
them.
42. For historical instances of this process, the recent and conscious 'from above' creation of what is
widely believed to be a long-standing tradition emanating 'from below', see the seminal text edited by
Hobsbawm and Ranger [1983]. See also Philo and Miller [2001] for the impact of cultural studies on
the analysis of media, and in particular how postmodern theory recast (and simultaneously
depoliticized) such analysis by decoupling economic content (ownership/control of media) from
questions of ideological form, the latter as a result being seen (wrongly) as economically non-
determined, ideologically free-floating, and thus politically 'autonomous'.
43. This process of actively constructing/creating public opinion along lines desired by capital is
associated with the highly influential ideas about public relations developed by Edward Bernays (1891–
1995), a nephew of Sigmund Freud, who deployed his uncle's theory in the service of corporate North
America [Ewen, 1996; Tye, 1998]. The many successes he achieved in this regard underline both the
existence of and the relative ease in reproducing what is palpably a 'from above' form of consciousness,
and one which—considered in terms of 'from below' class interests—is undeniably a situation of false
consciousness.
44. Freudian pessimism about humanity in general, and the possibility of a progressive politics in
particular [Einstein and Freud, 1933], was transmitted in turn to the influential work of Fanon and
Marcuse (on which see Brass [2000a: Ch.5]), where it was responsible in part for the political despair
each expressed about the possibility of revolutionary action undertaken by a Western industrial
working class co-opted by consumer capitalism, and their consequent espousal of an instinctual (=
'pure'/non-rational) process of mobilization undertaken by peasants and lumpenproletarians in the Third
World who had not been coopted by capital.
45. For the widespread distribution in Latin America and the ideological impact there of Disney
comics, plus the centrality to the latter of a 'from above' discourse about on the one hand the desirable
innateness of Nature, the countryside, ethnicity, the 'noble savage' and 'primitive otherness', and on the
other the corresponding undesirability of technology and the modern city, see Dorfman and Mattelart
[1975:41ff.]; for the reactionary beliefs and political linkages of Walt Disney himself, together with the
way these permeated the films and animated characters (= 'popular culture') that emerged from his
Hollywood Studios, see Peary and Peary [1980:47ff.] and Eliot [1993].
46. After 1945, this ideological control has been ubiquitous, and to a large degree effective: in the
ensuing five decades it has encompassed the political content of film, the electronic media (radio,
television), and the printed word [Kahn, 1948; Mattelart, 1979; 1991; Cumings, 1992; Saunders, 1999].
47. This argument is applied by Huggan [2001] to what might be termed the global literary embrace of
post-colonialism, a process extending from the dominance of post-colonial writing where the Booker
prize is concerned, and imperial nostalgia for texts about India, to the academic study of post-colonial
literature in Canada and Australia. Although he draws attention to the marketing of all the latter by
metropolitan capitalism, Huggan himself is nevertheless sympathetic to the post-colonial project; unlike
the view taken here—that the quest for any form of 'authenticity' is necessarily self-defeating—he
accepts the existence of an essential 'authenticity', and objects only to conceptual misuse of the term by
those engaged in searching for it. Like other exponents of postmodernism, Huggan tends somewhat
over-optimistically to regard 'exoticism' as a form of political subversion, and -as in the case of
Beverley—his critique is itself confined to post-colonial discourse as a purely literary phenomenon; his
focus is accordingly on the form of mediation (= literature), rather than between the latter and what is
mediated (the material reality existing at the rural grassroots).
48. Thus the idealized Rousseauesque image of the 'noble savage' (= nomadism as 'natural'/primitive
humanity) which informed the travel writings of Bruce Chatwin was appropriated by him from
anthropological texts [Shakespeare, 1999], while a similarly derivative and romanticized account of the
Kalahari Bushmen in a correspondingly prelapsarian state structured the equally inaccurate but highly
popular narrative in the same genre by Laurens van der Post [Jones, 2001]. In the case of the latter
writer, this influence not only extended into British ruling class circles but also threatened to have an
impact on the shape of the post-apartheid political settlement in South Africa. Dismissing the ANC and
Nelson Mandela as 'communists', van der Post (along with the far right in the UK and South Africa
itself) championed the separatism of the reactionary Zulu Inkatha movement led by Chief Buthelezi,
whose espousal of traditional cultural values represented for the travel writer the embodiment of his
own vision of 'natural'ְ/'primitive' man in Africa. From the late 1980s to the early 1990s, van der Post
continuously pleaded the Inkatha/Buthelezi cause to the then Conservative prime minister Margaret
Thatcher and Prince Charles, with the object of securing their political support for the creation within
South Africa of a separate Zulu nation (= KwaZulu-Natal).
49. The corollary of the view that there is no such thing as false consciousness is that all consciousness
is true, a position akin to the neoclassical economic argument that individual 'choice'/'preference' is
exercised on the basis of 'perfect knowledge', and about as convincing. It should be emphasized that the
term 'false consciousness' as theorized by Marxism is not the same as that used by Canclini (see above).
The latter differentiates between false/non-authentic and true/authentic forms of indigenous
culture/tradition (= rural folkloric beliefs/practices), both of which are consigned by Marxism to the
realm of false consciousness.
50. By contrast, the desirability/possibility of mobilizing the grassroots in the pursuit of reactionary
ideas/objectives has not escaped those on the political right. Thus, for example, Moeller van den Bruck,
who in the early 1920s made an important contribution to Nazi ideology, argued that German
reactionaries must wrest the proletariat from the hands of Marxism. His views on this are both prescient
and instructive [van den Bruck, 1934:142, 152, 177]: 'To be successful, a leader of today will need to
persuade the masses to permit him to act for the whole nation, to preserve or win the values that are
essential…If he is to give the masses the opportunity of making the Revolution…ultimately fruitful for
the nation, he will require the superiority that springs of an exact knowledge of proletarian problems
and persons. He must rejoice at being called to lead the proletarian masses, to direct their will into
national channels…Marx had offered to men accustomed for tens of centuries to live for and by ideas,
the lure of his materialist thought and his materialist conception of history. Movements, however, beget
counter-movements. When Marxism was swamped in democratic chaos, Nietzsche with his conception
of aristocracy came to the fore…the world revolution will not be that which Marx envisaged; it will be
rather that which Nietzsche foresaw.' Nor is it the case that such views were confined to Germany. In a
similar vein, Patrick Donner, the English conservative MP for West Islington, made the following
observation some ten years later: 'lt showed our [English] Socialist politicians in their true light, as men
out of touch with actualities and times in which they live, that they were not even aware that the days of
revolution from the left are over in Europe, and that modern revolutions come, when they do come,
from the Right' (see Patrick Donner, 'The Political Outlook in 1933 from the Conservative Angle', The
Bookman Special Christmas Number, December 1933, p.150). Although wrong on the subject of
revolutionary mobilizations from the left, the criticism that the majority of socialists tend to underplay
or ignore the counter-revolutionary potential of those on the right was nevertheless correct. More
recently, and in a similar vein, a supporter [Elst, 2001:393–4] of the reactionary Hindutva project of the
BJP has argued that 'Little wonder that some right-wing "identitarian" groups are taking inspiration
from and exploring cooperation with surviving and newly assertive tribal populations…Leftist
ecologists and pro-tribal activists plead indignation at the sight of rightists inviting tribal leaders to their
meetings [but] if you apply the usual yardsticks of Left and Right to these tribals, it should be obvious
that to a man [sic], they are in the rightist camp on most issues. They favour…religion over secularism,
tradition over progress, tribalism over globalism, identity over the melting-pot.'
51. That conservatives identify as kindred spirits those relativists who claim to be non-conservatives is
clear from the following observation by a prominent American conservative [Buckley, 1959:154]:
'There is nothing so ironic as the nihilist or relativist (or the believer in the kind of academic freedom
that postulates the equality of ideas) who complains of the anti-intellectualism of American
conservatives.'
52. It could be argued that existentialist claims about 'choice' validated not only the choice-making
subject of neoclassical economics but also and subsequently the anti-Enlightenment/anti-foundational
framework which underlay the relativistic identity politics of postmodernism. This was perhaps one of
the reasons why both existentialism and postmodernism ended up unwittingly occupying the same
epistemological ground as conservativism. As pointed out at the time by those on the political right,
existentialism was for them a central theoretical emplacement of their own ideology. Jacques Maritain,
for example, attempted to claw back from Sartre what he regarded as a Thomist concept of
existentialism that legitimized and reasserted the anti-rationalistic act of Christian choice as an method
of denying/defying what for those on the right were the unpalatable lessons taught by an historical
process unfriendly to his/their cause. Hence the observation [Maritain, 1957:11–12] that '[a] Thomist
who speaks of St. Thomas's existentialism is merely reclaiming his own, recapturing from present-day
fashion an article whose worth that fashion itself is unaware of'.
53. The historical potency of a discourse about Nature, and its role in the ideological armoury of any
ruling class engaged in struggle with 'those below' is well-known, and was outlined most succinctly in
the late 1920s by Vološinov [1976:11]: 'Whenever…a social class finds itself in a state of disintegration
and is compelled to retreat from the arena of history, its ideology begins insistently to harp on one
theme, which it repeats in every possible variation: Man is above all an animal…The ideology of
periods such as these shifts its center of gravity onto the isolated biological organism; the three basic
events in the life of all animals—birth, copulation, and death—begin to compete with historical events
in terms of ideological significance and, as it were, become a surrogate history. That which in man is
nonsocial and nonhistorical is abstracted and advanced to the position of the ultimate measure and
criterion for all that is social and historical. It is almost as if people of such periods desire to leave the
atmosphere of history, which has become too cold and comfortless, and take refuge in the organic
warmth of the animal side of life. That is what happened during the period of the break-up of the Greek
city states, during the decline of the Roman Empire, during the period of disintegration of the feudal-
aristocratic order before the French Revolution. The motif of the supreme power and wisdom of Nature
(above all, of man's nature—his biological drives) and of the impotence of history with its much ado
about nothing—this motif equally resounds, despite differences of nuance and variety of emotional
register, in such phenomena as epicureanism, stoicism, the literature of the Roman decadence (e.g.
Petronius's Satyricon), the skeptical ratiocination of the French aristocrats in the seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries. A fear of history, a shift in orientation toward the values of the personal, private
life, the primacy of the biological and the sexual in man—such are the features common to all of these
ideological phenomena' (original emphasis).
54. This connection is examined by me at length elsewhere [Brass, 2000a: Ch.5]. The absurdities
arising from this idealization of agrarian custom/practice/tradition can be illustrated from the case of
1930s Germany, where the Nazis presented traditional peasant costume from Bavaria to workers in
northern industrial cities as part of their common national identity, the extent of the cultural gap (and
corresponding distinctiveness) between their respective urban/rural backgrounds notwithstanding [Jell-
Bahlsen, 1985:318]. The same source concludes that this 'abstraction of "cultural unity" in the shape of
folklore aided the Nazi regime in imposing a contrived unity from above onto the people below'.
55. Given the idealization by Beverley of literary discourse as a source of knowledge about subaltern
identity/resistance, it is perhaps significant that one of the most influential books circulating in the
domain not just of 'popular culture' but also of the 'counter-culture' during the latter half of the twentieth
century—J.R.R.Tolkien's trilogy The Lord of the Rings—is regarded by the Italian 'new' right as an
embodiment of its own political beliefs [Griffin, 1985]. The reason for this is simple: the fictional
portrayal of an alternative mythical cosmology that is both anti-modern and anti-historical shares many
of the assumptions that structure conservative ideology.
56. Hence the symptomatic nature of the discourse encountered in White [1901:95ff., 101ff., 256, 312–
13], who not only attributes military setbacks in the Anglo-Boer War to the fact that British soldiers
defeated by South African farmers were recruited in towns and cities, but also equates village
depopulation and urbanization/industrialization in England with national decline, invokes as ideals both
the Russian mir and French peasant society ('France is firmly set among the nations by her peasant
proprietary'), and concludes on an undeniably fascistic programmatic note ('restore responsibility,
enforce it on high and low…[p]atriotism will be taught in our schools, and the gospel of Efficiency will
be our national cry').
57. The anti-Semitic nature of this discourse is unmistakeable, 'alien'/'foreign'/'materialistic' Jews being
identified as a 'cosmopolitan plutocracy' which threatens empire, nation and small farmer alike [White,
1901:69–70, 74]: 'The great and prosperous Jewish nation…is a caste [that] devotes itself mainly to
finance…[this] plutocratic caste is a growing menace to our Imperial position. Many of these
gentlemen have no roots in the land. They inhabit town houses, and, if they own a place in the country,
it is for display. Their investments being mobile, they themselves are cosmopolitan. The influence they
bring to bear upon Governments is noxious, because the British Foreign office learns to recognize the
interests of rich men as those which alone require attention. Thus it comes to pass that the interests of
the rich and the poor are by no means always identical, and the diplomatic, naval, and military forces of
the Crown are utilized in the interests of the plutocratic caste—a proceeding which may, and sometimes
does, injure the bulk of the people of England. The material side of life is emphasized, the soul of the
nation is shrivelled as the fronds of a filmy fern when exposed to the fumes of an acid.' By contrast, the
same discourse [White, 1901:67–8, 74] presents 'authentic' English landlordism in a rather more
positive light, as the source of a 'real aristocracy' rooted not in money but in tradition/land/nation,
members of which are both the first line of defence against finance capital and also benign protectors of
the small farmer: 'The owners of great estates are in a better position to contribute to the welfare of the
residents than are the smaller proprietors. They help tenants at a pinch, and assist them to tide over bad
times. As a rule, they have more capital than the small owners. They expend it on a system that
becomes a family tradition. There is more economy of labour and material. Profit is little, and
occasionally, no consideration whatever to the owner of the great estate… The system of land tenure
and of primogeniture which have allowed the great estates to descend unimpaired from one generation
to another…secures to those dwelling on the soil material and moral advantages greater than any that
are promised under any alternative system, and it enables the heads of great families to take part in
public affairs without the imputation of interfering in politics for what they can get out of it. To the real
aristocracy of the country I look for a remedy for the disease with which our nation has been infected
by bad smart society [= the 'plutocratic caste'].'
58. On this point, see Brass [2000a: 255–6].
59. For the details about Justus Möser (1720–94) see Epstein [1966: Ch.6]. Noting the prefiguring
influence of Möser's views on German conservatives such as Adam Muller and Novalis, Epstein
[1966:324, 325] observes that his 'admiration for a society of peasants… has a Jeffersonian flavour; it
did not, however, imply any bias towards egalitarianism. On the contrary, Möser explicitly favoured a
hierarchic order of society where everybody knew and kept his place…Möser admired a society
marked by a great diversity of status, where everybody was content to perform his traditional function
for the common good. He looked upon inequality as a positive good, not a necessary evil…'. On the
question of a golden age, self-sufficient peasantry as the authentic representatives of German national
identity, Möser (cited in Epstein [1966:329]) observed: 'Where do we find the true German nation? We
certainly do not find it at the court of the princes. Our cities today are filled with misshapen and spoiled
copies of humanity;…our countryside with exploited peasants. How different was our nation [in the
early Middle Ages], when every Franconian or Saxon peasant cultivated and defended in his own
person his paterna rura, that is his hereditary allodial lands, free of feudal ties or manorial obligations;
and when every freeholder went from his homestead to participate in the work of a popular assembly.'
60. Darré's words (cited in Mosse [1966:148–50]) are as follows: 'First there was the German peasantry
in Germany before what is today served up as German history. Neither princes, nor the Church, nor the
cities have created the German man. Rather the German man emerged from the German peasantry.
Everywhere one will find primordial peasant customs that reach far back into the past. Everywhere
there is evidence that the German peasantry, with an unparalleled tenacity, knew how to preserve its
unique character and its customs against every attempt to wipe them out…' Just as for Darré a direct
link joined the German peasant to his führer, so for Prince Bernhard von Bülow at an earlier
conjuncture there existed a similarly direct link between the peasantry, the Prussian landowning class,
and the German kaiser, all united by a common bond of national identity, history, and—by inference -
economic and political interest. Hence the view [von Bülow, 1915:136–7] that 'we must not forget what
those very classes did in the service of Prussia and Germany. It was the noblemen and peasants east of
the Elbe who…primarily achieved greatness for Brandenburg and Prussia. The throne of the Prussian
kings is cemented with the blood of the Prussian nobility… The praise which the Prussian nobility
demand, and which they have a perfect right to expect, is not meant to detract from the achievements
and merits of other classes. Without the self-sacrificing loyalty of the middle classes, the peasants and
the poor people, the nobility would have accomplished little'. Not only does von Bülow [1915:233]
point with satisfaction to the rising number of peasant smallholdings, which he claims increased by
some 180,000 in the period 1895–1907 directly as a result of his 1902 Tariff Law protecting German
agriculture, but he also makes clear the political advantage this process confers on Prussian
landlordism: namely, to counter the dual political threat posed by a rapidly expanding and class
conscious proletariat on the one hand, and the influence of the radical leftwing German Social
Democrats on the other. In short, the positive and endorsing views held both by von Bülow and by
Darré about the peasantry correspond to class struggle waged not 'from below' but much rather 'from
above'.
61. The connection between capitalist development and a conservative pro-peasant discourse is clear
from the role of peasant economy in the Nazi project. A fascinating insight into the potentially capitalist
economic role of smallholding cultivation as envisaged by Nazism, and thus the importance to the latter
of reproducing peasant economy, is provided by the arguments advanced by Professor Konrad Meyer
[1939]. He was the representative of Stabsamt des Reichsbauernsführers, who led the German
contingent of professional economists attending the 1938 International Conference of Agricultural
Economists. Among other things, Meyer [1939:58, 60, 62, 64] claimed that the growth of peasant
economy had effectively refuted Marxist claims about the inexorable nature of land concentration and
depeasantization, that the 'internal biological vitality' of the race and nation required
material/ideological sustenance by the peasantry, and that the latter formed a solid bulwark in the
countryside against the growth in towns of 'class feeling which [originated] in the cities'. The combined
economic/political/ideological objectives of fascist pro-peasant discourse, according to Meyer
[1939:58–9], were to kill four particular birds with one stone: first, to retain the political allegiance of
the peasantry in a doubly threatening context—from what was perceived to be an external (= 'foreign')
menace, and from the unfolding capitalist crisis; second, to prevent the latter from accentuating the
process of depeasantization, and consequently the formation of the threatening and muchfeared urban
'mob-in-the-streets', which—as an urban proletariat—was the traditional bastion of the political left;
third, to include small-scale peasant farming within the industrialization process, so as to make it more
efficient economically, thereby ensuring that smallholding cultivation made a contribution to
Germany's requirement for foodstuffs; and fourth, to settle and populate conquered territories
(although, for obvious reasons, this is not made explicit by Meyer). In other words, as a modernized
peasant economy that for Nazis simultaneously embodied all the virtues of a 'traditional', rural and
specifically German national identity (= the economically efficient, socially harmonious, culturally
enduring, community sustaining activity of family farming), smallholding cultivation could be said to
be part of the fascist project of reactionary modernization.
62. Evidence suggests that between 1928 and 1933 rural voting support for the Nazi Party increased
more dramatically than its urban counterpart, the former rising from 2.8 per cent of all votes cast to
52.4 per cent while the latter rose over the same period from 2.4 per cent to only 39.6 per cent
[Knauerhase, 1972:42, Table 5]. The role of petty commodity producers in the rise of German fascism
is confirmed for the rural areas of Schleswig-Holstein and Hanover where, in contrast to poor peasants
and agricultural labourers who supported the Socialists and Communists, the majority of those who
voted for the Nazis in the 1932 elections were peasant family farmers [Loomis and Beegle, 1946].
63. Far from disagreeing with Marx, therefore, it was because they were familiar with his writings, and
thought his prognosis historically accurate, that Falangists were vehement anti-Marxists. In short, they
detested and feared Marxism not because it was wrong but much rather because it was right.
Throughout his writings Primo de Rivera [Thomas, 1972:160–61, 180] repeats constantly that his anti-
Marxism stems from the recognition that Marx was correct in predicting that large-scale capitalism
would lead to the ruin of small rural producers and through this the nation itself. Much the same is true
of fascism elsewhere at that same conjuncture. Hence the observation made by the leader of the British
Union of Fascists [Mosley, 1932:66–7]: 'lt is now the declared aim of every great nation to have a
favourable balance of trade. Every nation, in fact, seeks to sell more to others than it buys from them—
an achievement which, it is clear, all nations cannot simultaneously attain. So a dog-fight for foreign
markets ensues in which the weaker nations go under, and their collapse in turn reacts upon the victors
in the struggle by a further shrinkage of world markets. A continuation of the present world struggle for
export markets is clearly the road to world suicide, as well as a deadly threat to the traditional basis of
British trade. These phenomena appear at first sight to support Marxian theory…Some of the Marxian
laws do actually operate if mankind is not organized to defeat them, and they are operating today in the
inchoate society which they envisage…if we rely on Conservatism to defeat Marxism, we shall be
defeated by Marxism' (original emphasis).
64. See Thomas [1972:98]. In attempting to define Spanish nationalism [Thomas, 1972:98ff.], however,
Primo de Rivera recognized—but did not resolve—the central contradiction facing those on the
political right who wished to formulate national identity on the basis of claims to a geographically
innate culture that was pristine, traditional and irreducible. Just as it was possible for him to invoke
Spanish nationalism as a 'natural' attribute unique to Spain as embodied in the existing nation-state,
therefore, so others inhabiting specific areas within this same national context could in turn invoke an
equally distinct set of regional/local characteristics/identity (ethnicity, language, religion, culture,
music, folklore, etc.) in order to justify their claim for the creation of a new nation-state (Catalonia
being the example he cited). In the end, he evaded this problem of separatism, settling instead for the
nebulous equation (reminiscent of current postmodernism) nationhood='otherness', and then asserting
the primacy of an overarching Spanish 'otherness' which in his view subsumed all rival local/regional
claims.
65. Hence the view expressed by Primo de Rivera [Thomas, 1972:209] that Falangists 'do not see
agrarian reform as merely a technical and economic problem…Spain is almost entirely rural. The open
country is synonymous with Spain; if in the Spanish countryside the living conditions imposed on the
Spanish sector of agrarian humanity are intolerable, this is not merely an economic problem. It is a total
problem, religious and moral' (emphasis added). His idealization of feudalism and regret concerning its
passing is contained in Thomas [1972:21]. For Primo de Rivera, peasant farming and individual peasant
proprietorship were unconnected with capitalism, the capitalist system and the 1930s crisis: much
rather, in his view '[o]ne effect of capitalism was just the annihilation, almost entirely, of private
property in its traditional forms' [Thomas, 1972:158, 178]. This was due to the fact that he equated
capitalism simply with finance capital (= the usurious 'foreign other'), a conflation which in turn
licensed a potent relay in statement decoupling property relations both from the crisis and its solution
(peasant economy=private property=non-capitalist = 'natural'/Nature, against which were arraigned all
its antagonistic 'others': capitalism = finance capital=foreign other=economic crisis).
66. On these points see Primo de Rivera [Thomas, 1972:30, 134, 165, 182, 206–7, 234]. This was a
common theme in the discourse of the European political right during the 1930s, and involved blaming
not capital or capitalism but finance capital both for the economic crisis and for the dehumanizing
impact (= deculturation) of the latter on the peasantry, the embodiment of national identity. In many
contexts, this discourse was also ethnicized, and gave rise to a potent ideological opposition between
finance capital as the exploitative 'foreign other' (the Jewish 'foreign other' in Nazi Germany) and the
exploited peasantry as the national 'self'. For examples of this anti-finance capital stance in the case of
the Spanish political right during the 1930s, see Calvo Sotelo [1938] and Primo de Rivera [Thomas,
1972:29, 159]. Socialism was inculpated with the revolutionary destruction of the peasantry and thus by
inference of national identity, about which Primo de Rivera [Thomas, 1972:181] observed the
following: 'lf we really want to prevent the results foreseen in the Marxist prophecy, we have no choice
but to dismantle the unwieldy machine whose turning wheels inevitably bring those results; we must
dismantle the unwieldy machine of capitalism, which leads to social revolution, to Russian-style
dictatorship'. Similarly, the Republican government to which the Falangists were opposed was accused
by Primo de Rivera [Thomas, 1972:184] of a trend 'towards the collectivisation of agriculture, the
transformation of the peasantry into a gregarious mass, just like the workers in the cities'.
67. On these points, see Thomas [1972:170, 182]. For the agrarian reform programme of the Spanish
Falange, see Primo de Rivera [Thomas, 1972:134] who noted that '[t]he state will recognize private
property as a valid means of attaining individual, family and social ends and will protect it against
being abused by high finance, speculators and moneylenders.'
68. In the immediate post-war era the concept of an innate 'peasant-ness' was central to the work both
of H.J.Massingham, a widely-read writer about the English countryside, and of Wilhelm Röpke, a
member of the political right whose ideas influenced European and American conservatism [Abelson,
1988; Hartwell, 1995]; for examples of their conservative pro-peasant discourse, see the Third Way'
ideology propounded by Röpke [1948; 1950], and also the contributions collected in Massingham
[1945]. Both were vehement anti-communists, and each was influenced by the views of Hayek (see
Massingham [1945:1–2]). Advocating a return to Nature, therefore, Massingham [1945:7–8] insisted
that 'we shall not, in fact begin to understand the meaning of husbandry unless we relate it to the first
principles of natural law, which is the earthly manifestation of the eternal law…[t]he pattern of life
worked out by pre-industrial rural society was an unconscious obedience to ecological laws.' If
Massingham represented the aristocratic variant of the agrarian myth, then the emphasis of Röpke was
on the plebeian variant: the significance of his views is that these constitute an epistemological fusion
of the agrarian myth, populism, neoliberal economics and the 'traditional' conservatism of the political
right. Hence the centrality to his argument [Röpke, 1950:201ff.; 1948: Ch.IX, The Peasant Core of
Society—Danger of Agrarian Collectivism'] of an economically viable smallholding agriculture
premissed on the recuperation of an idealized peasant proprietorship was itself linked to the wider
political project of the right, incorporating ideological support for small-scale rural
production/exchange (artisan, petty trading) and opposition to the large-scale (the state, monopolies).
For Röpke the importance of peasant family farming was that, since it is immutable and basically
individualistic/conservative, it operates as an ever-present economic/political/cultural bulwark against
the political dangers represented by economic progress, urbanization, mechanization, class struggle,
proletarianization, socialist planning and collectivization. Claiming that smallholding agriculture based
on private property 'brings men and nature together' in a way that 'counter-balances the industrial and
urban aspects of our civilization with tradition and conservatism, economic independence and self-
sufficiency [that derive in turn from a] proximity to nature, …a natural and full existence near the
sources of life…', Röpke [1950:202–3] warned that 'the peasant world together with other small sectors
of society, represents today [the early 1940s] a last great island that has not yet been reached by the
flood of collectivization, the last great sphere of human life and work which possesses inner stability
and value in a vital sense. It is a priceless blessing wherever this reserve still exists…'.
69. Significantly, among the contributors to the collection edited by Massingham were Edmund
Blunden, Rolf Gardiner and the Earl of Portsmouth, all of whom had been fellow-travellers of the
political right in the 1930s [Griffiths, 1983]. In what is an astonishing case of denial, and in defiance of
evidence to the contrary, however, Massingham [1945:3, 4] asserts that German fascism was a
'proletarian vice', an instance of 'state absolutism…all urban in origin', and the result of 'the loss…of the
timeless rural values in industrialism'. In keeping with the cold war rhetoric of the political right, he
then equates German fascism with Russian communism, in order to dismiss them both as examples of
industrialized 'totalitarian' states and also to disassociate himself (and his contributors) from pre-war
German sympathies. His coded anti-Semitism is evident from the following [Massingham, 1945:6]: 'A
usurious system was built up round this primary sin of abandoning our native land. It not only
maintained itself by ruining our own farmers and pushing those of other lands into debt, but handed
over all the power and credit in the community from the primary producer to the dealer. Examine the
vested interests of this country, and it will be seen that they are nearly all clustered round the breeding
of money…'
70. Hence the fact that in North America during the mid-1960s, 'Goldwater showed that with liberals in
control in Washington, conservatives could appropriate the tradition of antigovernment populism, thus
broadening their electoral base and dispelling their traditional image as elitists.' [Foner, 1998:313].
Where US agricultural policy was concerned, Goldwater [1964; 38ff.] united a critique of high taxation
and state regulation with the claim that only the free market would eliminate surpluses and thus deliver
higher prices to the farmer ('[f]arm production, like any other production, is best controlled by the
operation of the free market').
71. It is necessary to emphasize that, on the question of economic policy generally, the European
political right is not a theoretically homogeneous grouping. In the case of Britain, the contemporary
political right is usually divided into two distinct ideological tendencies: on the one hand the free
market economists assembled under the neoliberal banner, and on the other traditional conservatives
less concerned with economic growth than with reasserting ancient privilege. This distinction was
accurately delineated in the mid-1980s by David Edgar, who observed that 'an element at least of the
impetus behind Thatcherism was to be nothing to do with the release of vital new entrepreneurial
energies, but was all about the reassertion of the most ancient of privileges, the most crude and atavistic
of class hatreds. That the restitution of seigniorial authority is not the whole of New Conservatism
shouldn't blind us to the fact that it's a part…' ('Let Them Eat Dirt', New Statesman, 26 September
1986, original emphasis).
72. The continuing link between conservatism, the aristocratic variant of the agrarian myth and a pro-
peasant ideology is epitomized by the work of Roger Scruton. On the one hand, therefore, the pastoral
vision of countryside-as-Englishness he endorses has at its centre an idealized image of the landlord
class: hence his acceptance of the view that country house life amounted to 'the conjunction of liberty
and liberality that comes about when affluence coincides with a secure and localized social standing',
and that 'the country house came to represent an ideal of English civilization—one in which hierarchy
was softened by neighbourliness, and wealth by mutual aid' [Scruton, 2000:237, 239]. This benign
perception of rural landlordism as seen from above is then attributed to those below: 'Our countryside is
inseparable from the country house and its parklands, and expresses the careful integration of villages,
farms and vistas that constituted for the gentry the visible signal of their title. It bears the mark of a
mild and deferential despotism, and the nostalgia that people now feel…for the class-divided and
deferential [traditional rural] society' (Roger Scruton, 'ln Praise of Mild Despotism: Old families, not
the National Trust, can save the countryside', Business FT Weekend Magazine, 27 October 2001).
Accordingly, this same pastoral vision also requires the inclusion within its ideological framework of a
similarly idealized concept of the small family farm: hence the view that in England '[p]rimogeniture,
and the abolition of feudal tenures, gave early reality to the small family farm, intact over
generations…[i]t is on such farms that the "yeoman stock" celebrated by Macaulay was raised'
[Scruton, 2000:240].
73. On these points, see Scruton [2000:241]. Symptomatically, this organic unity of English rural
society (landlord+small farmer='Englishness', or English national identity) is then contrasted [Scruton,
2001] with the evils of large-scale urban decay ('Many of our innercity areas are now unviable. Schools
are dreadful, drugs and promiscuity threaten the young, and crime levels are soaring'). Among the
reasons that England no longer exists (= The Forbidding of England'), therefore, is that '[t]he family
farm, which maintained the small-scale and diversified production that was largely responsible for the
shape and appearance of England, is now on the verge of extinction' [Scruton, 2000:254]. The principal
cause of this multiple and inter-related decline—in 'Englishness', English identity, English culture, and
the countryside that embodies them all—is the post-war tax system introduced by the Labour
government, which destroyed the country house and now threatens the small family farm [Scruton,
2000:240]. The programmatic imperative of this discourse is not difficult to discern. Lamenting that
taxation which penalizes inheritance (= 'broken up landed estates') 'now threaten[s] the family farm',
Scruton [2001] calls for 'a wholly new and radical conservative policy' that will reverse this process,
both by re-establishing family farming ('[t]he family farm is the backbone of the rural economy, and the
most important generator of the distinctive British landscapes') and by rolling back European Union
and/or British state control ('it is now clear that regulations are killing off small farms'). Small
producers, concludes Scruton [2001:16], must be protected from 'unfair competition'. That pro-farmer
views not only continue to resonate within English conservativism but do so in both plebeian and
aristocratic forms, underlines both the centrality of the agarian myth to the populism of the political
right, and also the extent to which the discourse of the latter continues to be based on a project of
innateness. For this reason, it is necessary to disagree strongly with Cook and Clarke [1990:140] when
they claim that: 'a writer like Scruton is not embarking on a project of innateness but…one of
populism'. Much rather, Scruton's populism is not only based on a project of innateness but actually has
no meaning outside this ideological framework.
74. A revealing illustration is the trajectory followed by Richard Mabey, currently an influential writer
about nature, conservation and farming in England. During the mid-1960s, when the entrenched power
in British society of tradition/privilege/hierarchy was being questioned, he [Mabey, 1967] espoused the
then commonly-held conservative view that it was the working class, not the bourgeoisie, which
objected to attempts to categorize its culture as disempowering. What is of particular interest, however,
is the way in which this argument was deployed. Rather than defending tradition/privilege/hierarchy,
therefore, the argument took the opposite form: a defence of plebeian cultural 'otherness'. Hence the
view [Mabey, 1967:15] that 'we shall have class groups forming who share not only different standards
for living but different standards of living. At this point passing some sort of judgement on class
inequalities becomes almost impossibly complex' (original emphasis). The insidiousness and
effectiveness of this spuriously democratic kind of discourse should not be underestimated.
Conservatives begin by pointing out, uncontentiously, that workers object to attempts by the
bourgeoisie to represent their plebeian culture as disempowering; the next step, which is also seemingly
uncontroversial, is the conservative claim that, because culture is indeed different, workers are right to
make this objection; from this, however, conservatives draw what is palpably a contentious inference.
Since cultural formation/reproduction possesses its roots in what one does for a living, conservative
political discourse concludes rightly by pointing out that all culture is linked ineradicably to the
economics of class. Accordingly, the conservative plea for the innateness of cultural difference
becomes in effect a plea also for the retention both of existing class relationships and of the capitalist
system itself. Symptomatically, Mabey's [1967:15–16] opinion is that the problem is not one of class
distinctions per se but rather of communication between classes: 'the class problem today is not so
much one of privilege…but of communication. [It is] a dangerous and total separation of two sorts of
person that it would be to our very great [national] benefit to have, not being the same as each other,
but knowing each other' (original emphasis). In a conclusion that could easily have been written by a
contemporary exponent of postmodern subalternism, he notes [Mabey, 1967:16]: 'We should perhaps
be aiming for the class equivalent of a multi-racial society, where ethnic differences are appreciated,
not obliterated.' Here the reactionary political role of non-class identity emerges with stark clarity: what
conservative discourse is arguing, therefore, is that workers can enjoy any identity they want, so long as
it is not that of class. The sub-text is equally clear: celebrate your culture, conservatives proclaim, and
we—as conservatives—will not only allow but encourage you to do this; you for your part,
conservatives swiftly add, must allow us to do the same—namely, celebrate our culture and assert our
cultural difference which, of course, as we all recognize is rooted in our class position. As the right-
wing novelist Simon Raven [1967:122, 123] put it at that same conjuncture, 'for [the right] knows that
since it will continue to go to its own restaurants, as it were, it will not often be called upon to
demonstrate its belief in the new equality', a situation in which "'parity of esteem" is accorded to
everyone who fulfils his function conscientiously, no matter how prosaic that function may be.' It
comes as no surprise to learn that Mabey [1980; 1983, 1990], who defended
tradition/privilege/hierarchy in this seemingly plebeian fashion during the mid-1960s, was during the
1980s—and is in the late 1990s—not only upholding views about the sacredness of nature ('I have a
belief that we have an atavistic bond with the natural world…[p]eople are drawn to the countryside to
experience the unique rhythms of the natural landscape…[w]hat is exciting about the natural world is
precisely that it is autonomous'), advancing a reactionary form of anti-capitalism ('Farmers are utterly
in thrall, not to the local rhythms and inward-looking perspectives that have to do with an indefinable
quality of rurality, but to a business schedule delivered from factories and companies…you could say
that in earlier times we weren't indifferent to nature…'), and advocating small-scale subsistence
agriculture ('When we talk about peasant communities we can genuinely talk about rurality, there is a
set of conditions of self-sufficiency and of certain kinds of introversion in social living. These are
concerned with keeping the integrity of rural communities intact…If you happen to be a lawyer, or a
shop-keeper, and you're making a moderate income from that, then you don't have to try so desperately
to wring the last ounce of profit from the land…[h]obby farming should be encouraged') but also
sharing a platform [Mabey, 2000] with Prince Charles and Vandana Shiva. In other words, over the last
three decades Mabey has remained politically consistent, both in his defence of rural
tradition/privilege/hierarchy and in his advocacy of small farming: that is, in his espousal of the
aristocratic variant of the agrarian myth.
75. See, for example, Rama [1981]. Among those on the Latin American political right during the
1930s who were influenced by European fascist ideology, and in particular that of the Spanish Falange
(see above), were two important Peruvian political leaders: Luis Flores of the Union Revolucionaria,
and the Catholic landowner José de la Riva Agüero (see Klaren [2000:279–80]).
76. In many ways, these two sources of nationalism—one inside and one outside Latin America -are
similar to the two sources of North American right-wing politics: on the one hand the Southern agrarian
tradition, linked to visions of European aristocratic culture epitomized by and reproduced in the context
of the antebellum plantation system, and on the other an 'authentic' indigenous plebeian version
embodied in the frontier myth and its images of family farming.
77. This misrecognition extends also to Canclini [2001:11], who observes: 'This is not to say that in
Latin America there have not been nationalist and ethnicist fundamentalisms, promoting exclusivist
self-affirmations and resisting hybridization by constructing a single absolutist patrimony that illusorily
casts itself as pure…However, this has not been the dominant tendency in our history. And much less
in this era of globalization…' (emphasis added).
78. For evidence of which, see Maríategui [1928], Castro Pozo [1924; 1936], Blanco [1972], Haya de
la Torre [1936a; 1936b], and Reinaga [1953; 1968; 1969; 1971]. Since these are all examples of a
discourse which operates within the domain of 'the political', it is in one sense unsurprising that literary
criticism remains unaware of it.
79. In the course of leading an important peasant movement in eastern Peruvian province of La
Convención during the early 1960s, therefore, Hugo Blanco believed that 'dual power' corresponded
simply to the traditional institutional structure of peasant economy that existed prior to the implantation
of the landlord estate.
80. For these points, see Albó [1993:19] and Ticona, Rojas, and Albó [1995]. The degree to which
Albó's subalternism reproduces all the indigenista stereotypes is evident from a comparison with the
earlier—and in many ways prefiguring—work of Fausto Reinaga, whose views about the presence in
Bolivia of an indigenous and undifferentiated Andean peasant community are virtually
indistinguishable from those currently held by Albó. Hence the identical claim by Reinaga [1953:50]
that the rural grassroots in Bolivia were not only innately socialist but have also been practising this
non-Marxist form of socialism since the pre-Conquest era ('En la vida económica y social del indio,
vive íntegro en espíritu y cuerpo el sistema comunista incaico, no el de Sorel, Lenin o Marx. El hábito
colectivo del trabajo social en la producción, la distribucción y el consumo es toda una evidencia. El
indio, como ayllu y comunidad práctica y en alto grado una envidiable vida social socialista.') The
connection between the populism of the Russian narodniks and the conceptualization of Andean
peasant community/economy/family is discussed, briefly, by Urquidi [1970:194ff.].
81. According to Albó [1993:21], this 'authentic' grassroots identity is an 'image [in which] one can
perceive the unity, born in good measure from a common history [that has] led to a shared language of
exchange, to similar systems of beliefs and values, and to many shared institutions, such as…the
compadrazgo [fictive kinship] systems and rural community'. Much the same point is made about
agrarian relations in Peru by another exponent of Latin American subalternism [Peloso, 1999:150], who
claims that '[b]ased on mutual trust between the participants, sub-tenantry most frequently occurred
between relations and compadres'. As many ethnographic studies conducted in the Andean region
confirm [Sánchez 1977, 1982; Brass, 1986a], these idealized claims are quite simply incorrect: both
Andean rural community and its institutional forms—such as fictive kinship—have for a very long time
not only been differentiated internally along class lines but also perceived as such by the poor peasants
and agricultural labourers involved.
82. For an example of earlier indigenista arguments made by those who are now in the Latin American
subalternist fold, see Albó [1972; 1987; 1988]. For the deep roots of indigenismo in anthropological
accounts of the Andean region and Brazil, see Marzal [1990] and Ramos [1998].
83. See Albó [1993:30–31], where the importance of this nation/culture/land/peasant linkage to
subaltern identity in Latin America is underlined in the following manner: 'Perhaps the most
fundamental point is that, in contrast to the dominant capitalist models, there persists a collective and
self-generating development of the productive forces concerned with maintaining the communal base to
a greater or lesser degree in the majority of the indigenous nations we are referring to.'
84. In this connection it is important neither to overlook nor to underestimate the influence of religion
on the positions taken by the political right in Latin America (and in Spain). Accordingly, it is
significant that, throughout the period from the late nineteenth to the midtwentieth century, even the
reactionary/conservative discourse of the Roman Catholic Church has consistently advocated the
protection/survival of peasant smallholding. This is evident from an analysis by Karin Dovring [1956:
Ch.7] of the teachings of Roman Catholicism about land reform, as embodied both in the social
encyclicals of and related pronouncements by the Vatican over a 60-year period—from De Rerum
Novarum (1891) issued by Pope Leo XIII, through Quadragesimo Anno (1931), to the Pentecost
message of Pope Pius XII in 1941 and the Vatican-influenced ideas of Christian Democratic politicians
in Italy during the early 1950s. Throughout this period, therefore, the official discourse-for and
discourse-against of a profoundly conservative Catholic Church was uniform in its views. In keeping
with the ideology of those on the political right, the discourse-against of the Roman Catholic Church
expressed hostility to the theory, practice and institutions/organizations of the left generally
(Bolshevism, socialism, communism, class warfare, class hatred, unionization), and argued against
collectivization, asserting that socialism threatened family life and was contrary to natural law; it
warned continuously against 'state-interference', condemned socialists and left-wing trade unionists as
'crafty agitators', 'seditious' and 'futile', dismissed equality as 'ridiculous', and insisted that common
ownership of property was against workers' interests. Over this same period, by contrast, the official
teachings of Roman Catholicism not only endorsed private property in all its forms but especially small
and medium peasant family farms: the discourse-for of the Vatican and/or Christian Democratic
politicians linked to it continuously stressed the value of small- and middle-sized rural landed
properties, arguing that Vatican policy was to support 'a society of small owners with farms fit [for]
developing family life…', its ideological focus being on the 'care of the individual male farmer, his
workplace and land, his home and the raising of his own family' [Karin Dovring, 1956:302, 305]. On
this point the same study concludes: 'The concept of the state, the claim for the right of the individual,
private property, negativism against the too rich, the stress on the lawful owner and respect for the
law…are among the concepts the Vatican made its own. A comparative glance at the different
documents will disclose more common symbols which definitely conform to the Vatican ideal for a
society: small holdings, small lands where the family can be supported' [Karin Dovring, 1956:310].
Two additional points are worthy of note. First, that the two main papal encyclicals reaffirming
authority/hierarchy and condemning the left were both issued as ideological guidance during periods of
acute economic crisis (1891 and 1931). And, second, that—like the political right generally—the target
of Vatican criticism was not the capitalist system per se but rather financial capital (= 'greedy capitalist',
'rapacious usury', 'grasping speculators'). This is also true of Argentina, where both the discourse-for
(upholding authority, hierarchy, nationalism, family farming) and the discourse-against (anti-socialist,
anti-Enlightenment, anti-Semitic) of the Roman Catholic Church were supportive of—and, indeed,
indistinguishable from—the discourse of the political right [Deutsch, 1986; Deutsch and Dolkart,
1993].
85. For the early 1940s political programme of the Bolivian falangists, and the role in this of an
indigenous peasantry, see the FSB texts reproduced in Cornejo [1949:131–8]. For the views of its
Secretary General, Oscar Unzaga de la Vega, and the attempt by the FSB to reinvent itself politically
during the post-war era, see Lora [1970:271ff.].
86. Hence the observation [Deutsch, 1986:41–3] that by the start of the twentieth century: 'Some
intellectuals blamed foreigners for class conflict [and] urban blight…The gaucho and the Hispanic past
found their greatest defenders in the writers whom historians have called the cultural nationalists…The
cultural nationalists defined the Argentine character in terms equivalent to traditional society—terms
that did not threaten the existing order… the hitherto reviled gaucho now became a model for the
masses to follow. Loyal to his employer, content with his station in life, opposed to thrift, rational
behaviour, and planning, the idealized gaucho was the antithesis of the successful foreign-born
entrepreneur and the labor activist alike.' Such views, the same source notes, 'reflected the extent to
which cultural nationalism and intertwined xenophobic and antimodernist sentiments had permeated the
upper class'. For the rise of the political right in Argentina, and in particular the role in this from 1919
onwards of the Argentine Patriotic League, see Deutsch [1986; 1999] and Deutsch and Dolkart [1993].
87. In a period of capitalist crisis, therefore, Jews were blamed in the domain of 'popular culture' both
for causing the crisis (= finance capitalism) and also for its potential effect (= socialism) [Deutsch,
1986:35, 44–7, 74–5, 78; Deutsch and Dolkart, 1993:38–9]. This discourse informed widely-read anti-
Semitic fiction, both in Argentina and in the United States of America: the agrarian populist dystopic
book Caesar's Column by Ignatius Donnelly [Brass, 2000a: Ch.6] in the latter context, and in the
former the novel La bolsa by Julián Martel [Deutsch, 1986:45–6].
88. On the cooperative credit unions (cajas rurales) set up in the countryside by the Argentine Social
League, a forerunner of the political right, in order to provide small farmers with loans so that they
would not 'have to turn to foreign sources of financing', see Deutsch [1986:53].
89. The Argentine Patriotic League was a 'from above' response to labour militancy and mobilization
during the 1920s, when the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie feared both that the state would be unable
to resist this and that—unchallenged—such working-class agency would (as in the case of Russia) lead
inevitably to the revolutionary overthrow of the existing socioeconomic order. Its self-professed aims
were not just to guard against revolution (= 'to defend the existing socioeconomic order against the
left'), but also to maintain national unity ('Fatherland and Order'), to 'help the poor' by 'opposing class
hatred', and to protect Argentine nationality and property from 'foreigners', strikes and left-wing
ideas/actions. Half its leaders were either themselves landowners or related to members of the landlord
class, and many League members had occupations (ranching, commerce) either in agriculture itself or
with close links to this [Deutsch, 1983:66ff, 80ff., 102, 104–5, 111].
90. 'Land reform was a matter of special interest for the League and a useful example of its ideas. One
reason for the importance of this issue was the postwar agrarian disorders. Another was the fact that
League members, like cultural nationalists, believed that the countryside was the storehouse of
Argentine traditions and virtues, in contrast to the cosmopolitan cities… In formulating their opinions
on this topic, some Liguistas followed [the] dictum that order depended not on abolishing property, but
on multiplying it… property ownership gave one a sense of self-worth and a stake in the present order;
indeed, the worst enemies of Bolshevism were landholding peasants. Dividing large holdings into
smaller ones and facilitating their sale to small farmers would create a large antileftist constituency…
In one of the rare instances in which a Liguista mentioned Mussolini, Carlés [the Argentine Patriotic
League leader] suggested that Argentina follow the example of the Italian Fascists, whose land reforms
were enlarging the independent peasantry' [Deutsch, 1986:168–9].
91. There can be no doubt as to this objective and its long-term political effects. In the view of one
commentator [Deutsch, 1986:112, 152] '[the Argentine Patriotic League] spread antileftist publicity,
crushed strikes, and replaced unions with [bosses' organizations]. Without serious hinderance from the
government, the League helped to weaken the labour movement for decades to come'; unsurprisingly,
the number of strikes/strikers declined from 367 and 309,000 in 1919 to an annual average of 90 and
70,000 during the period 1921–28.
92. That is, in the period before the development decade of the 1960s, when peasant economy and the
issue of agrarian reform became the central focus of discourse about economic growth and planning.
93. The agronomist in question was Gerardo Klinge [1946], who attributed the problems of a
minifundist agriculture not to the presence of the hacienda system but rather to land fragmentation as a
result of inheritance within the context of peasant economy itself.
94. On this point, see Klinge [1946:369]. Much the same is true of India at that conjuncture, where a
report written by representatives of industrial capital [Thakurdas, Tata, Birla, Dalal, Ram, Lalbhai,
Shroff and Matthai, 1945:82] similarly advocated 'the establishment of a class of peasant proprietors'.
An analogous recommendation was made by yet another capitalist spokesperson [Zinkin, 1956:209–
10], who also supported the idea of an individualist agrarian reform in India on explicitly political
grounds, because it 'creates new owners by the million', adding that: 'The difference between a man
with two acres and a man with twenty is still great, but it is different in kind as well as in degree from
the difference between a man with nothing and a man with two acres.'
95. For a detailed analysis of this strike, see Landsberger [1969].
96. That the vineyard workers' strike was not a success is attributed by Landsberger [1969:263] to its
politically reformist discourse which, by eschewing class struggle, ensured that any 'from below' action
undertaken by the strikers stopped short of a challenge to either the property rights of or the power
enjoyed by large landowners. An explicitly political objective of undertaking rural grassroots
organization in this manner on the part of religious and/or radical right-wing groups was to deny this
support to left-wing groups; the latter had been organizing among Chilean vineyard workers since the
1930s.
97. See Fletcher [2001] for evidence of support for the political right by peasant smallholders in the
Pewenche indigenous population from the Alto Bío-Bío region of Chile. As this particular case study
makes clear, the opposed views held by the Pewenche regarding their displacement by a hydroelectric
dam, and consequent resettlement, were themselves an effect of equally distinct employment histories,
or the relative importance of experiences as workers or smallholders in the formation of their political
consciousness. Whereas males migrated in search of paid work, Pewenche females remained in charge
of cultivating the family smallholding. For the women leading the resistance to Pewenche resettlement,
therefore, the importance of 'staying put' was because it permitted them to continue as smallholders on
ancestral land. In other words, opposition to dispossession stemmed from their economic identity as
peasants, and consequently a stated desire to avoid deculturation was an attempt to present this in a
politically more acceptable form, by invoking a discourse about legitimacy rooted in ethnic tradition.
As is well documented, this kind of defence has a long history in Latin America, where land rights have
been defended by recourse to arguments about ethnicity, tradition and culture. Its ideological potency is
particularly marked where women are perceived as defenders of a number of mutually reinforcing
'natural'—and thus immutable—traditional identities: of Nature, of the family, of subsistence farming,
of indigenous culture, and through all the latter, of the nation itself (female=family=subsistence
farming=Nature=nation).
98. As Payne [2000:74] points out, the political right in Argentina was not only 'unabashed in its
appropriation and adaptation of past cultural symbols', but also 'hired a "cultural adviser" rather than a
political adviser', the object being—as its arch-enemy, the founder of the Mothers of the Disappeared,
put it—to disguise 'a right-wing agenda with left-wing discourse to win working-class votes…the
demagoguery of working for the lower echelon of society.'
99. Although he disavows a connection between the subalternist framework and cultural studies on the
one hand and populism and nationalism on the other, Beverley [1999:97, 103, 111, 112] becomes
increasingly aware of the unsustainability of this disavowal as his analysis progresses. Hence the
profusion of disclaimers such as 'I perhaps run the risk here of idealizing mass culture in the same way
that earlier…I seemed to idealize the Popular Front'. Much the same is true of Canclini, another
influential exponent of Latin American subalternity, who similarly oscillates between a desire to make
the subaltern studies project work and a belated recognition of it populist/nationalist underpinnings.
100. It should be noted that there were two kinds of offender in this regard. The first, and in an
important sense the less serious category, was the non- or even anti-socialist (such as Foucault), for
whom the presence of non-class issues and discourse merely confirmed what he/she had always
maintained was the case: namely, the political irrelevance of Marxism. The second, and far more
problematic category consisted of those who continued to regard themselves as socialists (for example,
Löwy [1998]), and who endorsed a wide variety of agency as progressive simply because it was 'from
below' mobilization against capitalism.
101. Beverley [1999:21–2]. Symptomatic of this theoretical confusion is the fact that at other points in
his book Beverley [1999:101, 109, 113, 127–8, 171 n22, 172 n32] appears to be not merely non-
Marxist but actually anti-Marxist.
102. Beverley [1999:22, 23, 24]. Although he seeks to distance the Latin American Subaltern Studies
project from the Dependency theory of the 1960s and 1970s [Beverley, 1999:10, 47, 91–2], the
structure and political discourse of the former inescapably mimics that of the latter. Just as the
economic problems of Latin America were attributed by Dependency theory to external forces
(imperialism), rather than on those which existed internally (capitalism, class), in the 1980s and 1990s
the ideological problems of Latin America (= crisis of representation) were similarly blamed by
postmodernism on exogenous influences ('foundational' Eurocentric metanarratives) rather than on
endogenous discourses (nationalism, populism).
103. Marxists who questioned the postmodern theoretical underpinnings and warned about the political
direction of subaltern/resistance framework included Petras [1990] and Brass [1991]. These warnings
went unheeded, as is clear from the following symptomatic observation about subaltern mobilization by
Fox and Starn [1997:5]: 'Perhaps more than anything else, the rise of a literature on new social
movements reflects a new sensitivity on the part of scholars to the multiple vectors of political activity
that always exist in any society'. What this complacent statement boils down to is this: resistance and
political activity have always taken place, a feature that observers should appreciate. Apart from it
being a point that is so self-evident that it hardly requires making, what is avoided by Fox and Starn is
the necessity of having to evaluate any/all agency politically. To state, as they do, that because it takes
place all such 'from below' mobilization is necessarily good is, in effect, to approve of all grassroots
agency regardless of its politics and objectives—in other words, to endorse action simply because it
corresponds to 'from below' agency. This kind of approach depoliticizes grassroots mobilization, failing
as it does to make a political distinction between wage struggles and trade union organization on the
one hand, and the lynching of black workers and sharecroppers by racist whites on the other. Both are
'from below' forms of agency, but each is informed by a very different kind of politics.
104. The anthologies in question are Guha and Spivak [1988] and Guha [1997]. The latter are the only
Subaltern Studies texts cited by Beverley: see, for example, both the main text [Beverley, 1999:32, 41–
2], and the accompanying references [Beverley, 1999:170 n 10, 171 n30, 172 n2, n4 and n9, 173 n15
and n18, 174 n1, 175 n3, 178 n28, 181 n1, 182 n5, 184 n21, and 187 n12].
105. On this point, see Beverley [1999:20].
106. Like every other recent commentator on the intellectual impact of the Subaltern Studies series
(about which see Brass [2000b]), Beverley quite simply ignores the critique made by the Social
Scientist in the early 1980s. This silence is also found in texts by Ahmad [1992; 1995; 2000a], whose
initial focus was on the work of Edward Said, and subsequently on Asian politics and the rise of Hindu
nationalism. The Subaltern Studies project itself received scant mention in his otherwise useful
analyses, a fact which Ahmad [1992:210] makes clear when he observes 'the actual content of what
[Ranajit] Guha or the general Subaltern tendency actually does cannot be an issue here, and all that
matters is Said's own construction of it'. By the time he finally turns his attention to the details of the
Subaltern Studies project, Ahmad [1997; 2000b] is—not surprisingly—unable to say much that has not
already been said in earlier critiques: for example, that the Subaltern Studies approach legitimized
postmodern approaches to the 'other' of development theory, that postmodern anti-Enlightenment
discourse has its roots in right-wing ideology, that McLuhan and Heidegger are important theoretical
precursors of anti-modernism, and that much postmodern theory was prefigured in the emphasis placed
by Marcuse on alienation and more generally the events of 1968 [Ahmad, 2000b: 451, 454–5, 457, 458,
459, 461–2].
107. On the reactionary politics, the theoretical project, and the media courting of the 'New
Philosophers', see in particular Jenkins [1977], Dews [1980], Sheehan [1980], Hirsch [1982; 193ff.],
and Lecourt [2001]. In an observation that might have been written about postmodern exponents of
subaltern resistance in the 1990s, rather than about the class-collaborationist/reformist policies of
French Stalinists in 1935, Trotsky [1970:11] observed: 'Even now the Communist leaders are already
not unsuccessfully picking up drawing room language in their dealings with their allies on the right; the
old reserve of curses is preserved only against opponents from the left.'
108. That the Russian Gulags constituted a more specifically located crisis—of Stalinism and not
Marxism—was a question ignored by the 'New Philosophers'.
109. It is in fact remarkable just how much the subsequent critique of Marxism by postmodern theory is
prefigured in the earlier project of the 'New Philosophers'. The objections of Jean-Marie Benoist to
Marxism (dismissed by him as an 'univocalist causalist scheme' [Benoist, 1978:19]), for example, were
framed in terms which are identical to those that postmodernism later made its own: namely, an attack
on Marxism that is castigated as Eurocentric, scientistic, historicist, statist and deterministic, all in the
name of a pluralist, ahistorical, anti-scientistic, anti-state, aporetic structuralism that is Heideggerian
and Neitzschean, and for which 'difference' and a dematerialization of language were epistemologically
important [Benoist, 1978:19, 29–30, 37ff, 58ff., 69, 183, 196]. This postmodernism avant la lettre is
summed up by Benoist [1978:13] thus: 'Now that the classical ideal of univocality is dead, [a
theoretical] work must be allowed to remain free of any attempt to reduce it to a unilateral
decipherment: it must remain "pure ambiguity".'
110. On this point, see Benoist [1978:64–5, 66–7, 71], who observes that 'this deep structure might be
called nature, because its roots culture back into natural laws…Both Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss see
time and history as eroding factors which the frail balance of structures and culture try desperately to
arrest: we are far from the ideology of progress in history endorsed by Marxists…and the philosophers
of the Enlightenment' (original emphasis). The revival by Claude Lévi-Strauss in mid-1970s French
anthropology of Rousseauesque visions of 'the noble savage' is discussed in O'Hagan [1978] and
Lemaire [1979].
111. This element of structural 'discontinuity', avers Benoist [1978:69], permits Lévi-Strauss 'to refute
the linear evolutionist pattern according to which so-called primitive societies were conceived as earlier
stages of a development of mankind whose Western culture would have represented the latest stage.
Such a myth…is a consequence of this subtle Western ethnocentrism…Against this ideology, Lévi-
Strauss provides a pattern of discontinuity and differences…'.
112. For the agrarian nostalgia inherent in views of the 'New Philosophers' le Bris, Clavel and Nemo,
see Dews [1980:3, 10].
113. As has been argued elsewhere [Brass, 2000a: Ch.5], there are of course earlier precursors (Fanon,
Marcuse) of the 'new' postmodern populism.
114. Beverley [1999:11].
115. Not the least of the many ironies is that such a view is in many respects identical to the semi-
feudal thesis, and thus replicates the argument propounded by the Communist Party of India (the need
for a 'pure' capitalist stage, which in turn licensed the policy of support for a 'progressive' national
bourgeoisie that would realize an equally 'pure' democratic project) to the theory and politics of which
the Subaltern Studies project was ostensibly opposed.
116. Beverley [1999:88ff.].
117. See Beverley [1999:106].
118. Beverley [1999:107]. Perhaps uncharitably, it could be argued that a focus on the
image/identity/culture of the 'other', the reproduction of folkloric/national stereotypes, and a never-
ending search for exotic 'authenticity' are all characteristics that the Subaltern Studies project shares
with the popular/populist and widely read magazine National Geographic.
119. This class collaborationist policy remained in place long after the demise of the Popular Front
itself, and continued to inform Stalinist views about the so-called Third World. In the mid-1970s, for
example, one encounters the following [Ulyanovsky, 1974:17, 19]: 'Even today revolutionary anti-
imperialist nationalism continues to play a significant progressive role… The foundation for the
formation of the patriotic national front is co-operation between Communists, the most consistent
champions of the social and national liberation of the working people, with the broad strata of
revolutionary democrats. Experience has borne out the idea put forward by the international communist
movement to the effect that for the successful development of the national liberation revolutions
involving far-reaching socioeconomic and political changes, a question of central importance is the co-
operation and close friendly relations between the parties of the revolutionary proletariat and the
revolutionary democrats. Any lack of mutual understanding and even tense relations between them can
only play into the hands of the imperialists and local reactionary forces.'
120. For these objections to Popular Frontism, see for example Trotsky [1936; 1970]. In this
connection, there is a revealing contrast between, on the one hand, the Marxist critique of 'popular'
culture made by Trotsky (see above), and on the other the palpably non-Marxist analysis of the same
domain effected by those associated with the Popular Front. An example of the latter is the review of
the film Duck Soup (1933) carried in the influential journal Left Review, where it was suggested that the
appeal of the Marx Brothers derived from their satirical and deflating attacks on "'diplomacy",
"dignity", autocracy and [the] pomposity of Governments'—in short, 'giving representatives of upper-
class society a warm time' [Goldman, 1936–7:830–31]. The same film review continues: 'The rôle of
the Marx Brothers…is that of rebels against society', that of Groucho being to act 'Prime Minister' or
'Financier' as shyster, 'always acting the part with an unabashed dishonesty that must be very
disconcerting to the class of people he is mimicking'. The latter aspect, the review concludes, 'is the
secret of the Marx Brothers' popularity with audiences the wide world over. For in each of us,
conscious rebel or not, there is a deep instinctive dislike of the myriad shams of this world. It is because
the Marx Brothers tear down the flimsy screen covering these shams that we love them so much. It is
their healthy contempt of the "mighty" that endears them to us…We all like to give a jolt to the
"comfortable", to act the same against those people whom circumstances (not ability) have placed in
authority over us. That is the essence of the Marx Brothers' appeal. They are the free, untrammelled
spirit of mankind playing havoc with its would-be oppressors.' The undoubted comic genius of the
Marx Brothers notwithstanding, the political discourse of the film Duck Soup (anti-state, anti-politics,
anti-'shams') which this review endorses so enthusiastically is not so much Marxist as populist. It is
difficult to characterize the anti-state discourse which is the essence of the Marx Brothers' attack as
politically progressive, therefore, since it makes no distinction between a state oppressing workers on
behalf of capital (a conservative or a fascist state) and a state expropriating capital on behalf of workers
(a socialist state). The same is true of the theme 'rebels against society', which similarly fails to specify
what kind of society: no distinction is made between society that is capitalist and/or fascist (against
which socialists mobilize) and one that is socialist (against which conservatives and fascists organize),
a view encapsulated in the film Horse-Feathers (1932), where Groucho as Professor Quincy Adams
Wagstaffe sings 'whatever it is, I'm against it'. Anti-politics is also a specifically populist discourse; the
latter attacks all politics and all government as innately corrupt, regardless of whether this is of the left
or of the right. The claim that what is wrong with society is due to 'shams'—namely, the way the
system functions, not the system itself—is also populist, in that the latter regards monopoly capital or
foreign capital as the problem, not the capitalist system per se. This is the reason why populism
approves of small-scale capitalist production, which is precisely what many of its (mainly petty
bourgeois) supporters—such as peasants—actually do. Finally, the description of the Marx Brothers as
'the free, untrammelled spirit of mankind' is a classically Rousseauesque sentiment, again a hallmark of
agrarian populism. All of this would not matter were it not for the fact that the film review is in a left-
wing journal; rather than a Marxist politics, the analysis follows a populist line in keeping with the
Popular Front. The latter, in turn, is a view that accords directly with the way in which Beverley,
Canclini, and Albó perceive 'popular' culture: not just the innate virtue inscribed in the grassroots
identity/resistance of the Latin American subaltern, therefore, but also the Menippean/carnivalesque/
transgressive form taken by such 'from below' opposition.
121. This argument is embodied, for example, in the following observation [Trotsky, 1959:75]:
'Regionalism is a response to the diversity of agrarian conditions in France. The provincial fascist and
prefascist programmes will be varied and contradictory as are the interests of the different categories—
the vine growers, truck gardeners, wheat growers—as well as the different social strata of the
peasantry. But all these programmes will have in common their hatred of the bank, the treasury, the
trust and the legislators.'
122. Significantly, Dimitrov [1935; 1951] was instrumental in the political transformation of Comintern
policy during the seventh Congress which took place in 1935. The focus of the latter was on the rise of
fascism in Germany, as a result of which Comintern policy switched from one of international working-
class solidarity, class struggle against imperialism and the bourgeoisie, with the object of capturing the
state and establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat, to one of anti-fascist alliances with what was
deemed the 'progressive' national bourgeoisie in order to defend bourgeois democracy against fascism.
The seventh Congress was described by Trotsky [1970:8–9] as 'Comintern's Liquidationist Congress',
signalling a return to the discredited policies of 1914–18—when nationalist objectives replaced
socialist ones in the discourse of the left—that led to the disintegration of the Second International.
123. See Dimitrov [1935:26] on the role of an undifferentiated peasantry as the 'natural' allies of the
working class. For the alliance between the communists and the Agrarian Union in Bulgaria, see
Dimitrov [1951:192–3, 202], who dismissed Trotskyists as advocates of 'narrow' socialism who
'dogmatically defined the peasant commodity producer as a conservative element in society', adding
that they 'did not realise that the domination of the trusts leads to the increasing exploitation and
pauperisation of the mass of the peasantry, renders them ever more dissatisfied and arouses
revolutionary tendencies among them'. That peasants who are 'dissatisfied' exhibit 'revolutionary
tendencies' is undeniable: as the example of Eastern European countries during the 1920s suggests,
however, these 'revolutionary tendencies' were not of the left but rather of the radical right.
124. East European fascist organizations during the 1920s and 1930s included the Christian Slovak
People's Party in Czechoslovakia, the Croatian Peasant Party, the League of the Archangel Michael and
the Iron Guard in Romania, and the Hungarian Nationalist Socialist Workers' Party [Brass, 2000a:
32ff.].
125. During the 1930s even those more 'moderate' socialists, who rejected a revolutionary overthrow of
capitalism in favour of a parliamentary road to socialism, were aware both of the reasons for and the
dangers inherent in fascism, and—with the exception of those who advocated a Popular Front strategy
—also of the importance to fascism of peasant support and the reactionary character of certain kinds of
anti-capitalist discourse. Thus, for example, the analysis by the Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer of what he
terms 'populist Fascism' written in the late 1930s (cited in Bottomore and Goode [1978:168–70])
argued that: 'the economic crises of the postwar period [after 1918] reduced the profits of the capitalist
class. With its profits threatened the capitalist class sought to restore them by raising the level of
exploitation. It wanted to break the resistance of the working class, and doubted whether it could do
this under a democratic regime. It used the Fascist groups and people's militias created by the rebellious
mass movements of the petty bourgeoisie and peasantry at first to intimidate the working class and
force it on to the defensive, and subsequently to destroy democracy…[Fascism] is typically petty
bourgeois, directed against large capital and the proletariat at the same time; for the officer hates the
racketeer and the war profiteer, and despises the proletarian. This anti-capitalism is of course only
directed against the specific parasitical forms of capital during the period of war and inflation; the
officer values war industry but hates the racketeer, so he is hostile to the "profiteering", but not to the
"productive" capitalist. [Fascism's] opposition is much more passionate to proletarian socialism…At a
time when the power of socialism to attract the masses is at its strongest, fascism represents its own
ideal as "national socialism", and in these terms opposes proletarian socialism…[Fascism] represents its
fight against democracy to the masses as a fight against the class rule of the bourgeoisie, to the
capitalists as a fight against the mob rule of the proletariat, to the nationalist intelligentsia as a fight for
the co-ordination of all national forces against the external enemy.'
126. It should be emphasized that this is not generationally but politically determined, in the sense that
there is no simple chronological reason why one generation of activists should necessarily forget the
lessons learned by the previous one. Those who have not forgotten these lessons, or learned about
them, have done so because remembering/learning about fascism and the political right is not only part
of politics, but also part of a specifically Marxist politics. Ironically, it is Marxists themselves who have
the most reasons for maintaining an interest in the ideas of the political right, and who should therefore
insist on the continued visibility of such views. These reasons are as follows: first, in order to ensure
that right-wing political theory is subjected to continuous criticism; second, to prevent elements of this
political discourse from merging with mainstream ideas; and third, to avoid the endorsement of such
views in the mistaken belief that they are somehow progressive. Where postmodernism is concerned, it
is precisely this third problem that has materialized, in the form of the 'new' populist enthusiasm for re-
essentialized (or 'other') identities in general, and those of a Third World peasantry in particular.
127. Not only did reactionary populist forms of ideology and mobilization never actually disappear, but
evidence of their presence in the Americas was in most instances hard to miss. In the case of Canada,
for example, the right-wing populist Social Credit movement emerged initially during the capitalist
crisis of the 1930s [Finlay, 1972], and 'succeeded in igniting a spark which spread rapidly in the 1940s
among the alienated French-Canadian masses who were caught within the vice of rural poverty and
were threatened by further decline…but at the same time wished to preserve their religion, language,
culture, and traditional way of life' [Stein, 1973:18]. It re-emerged during the 1960s in Quebec, and
secured 26 per cent of the vote in the 1962 Canadian federal election. Espousing the classic discourse-
for/discourse-against of a right-wing reactionary populist mobilization (anti-Marxist, anti-socialist, anti-
finance capital, anti-monopoly, anti-Semitic, anti-state, anti-taxation, anti-collective and anti-urban;
pro-small-scale, pro-individual, pro-'choice', pro-tradition, pro-religion, pro-rural and pro-farmer), the
Ralliement Créditiste drew its support from rural areas where 'middle sized farmers' faced economic
decline [Stein, 1973]. Objecting to what was interpreted as a process of cultural erosion, its 1960s
programme was based on the earlier ideas of Major C.H.Douglas (1878–1952), which advocated the
restoration of individual choice by means of a return to the 'natural' condition of humanity before its
distortion by finance capital (not capitalism). For an analysis of the continuing influence of this populist
discourse in Newfoundland, see Overton [2000].
128. Instances of this kind of forgetting abound. Typical, perhaps, is the following observation [Munck
and Waterman, 1999:ix]: 'Living 150 years later [after the publication of the Communist Manifesto],
under a high capitalist modernity, both informalized and globalized, we need fundamentally to
reconsider the role of [the working] class and its basic organizational form, the trade union. We need to
do so in the light of contemporary economic and political developments, of contemporary emancipatory
social movements, of the latest critical social theory.' More worryingly, this forgetfulness has in some
instances been a sin of commission and not omission, and resulted from what can only be described as
'turning a blind eye', a process from which those on the left have unfortunately not been immune.
During the late 1990s, for example, an erstwhile colleague, who regarded himself as a socialist,
objected to a critique by me of another self-proclaimed socialist on the grounds that I had pointed out
that the latter adhered unwittingly (and thus uncritically) to arguments that had been—and continued to
be—deployed by those on the political right.
129. The intellectuals in question were Maurice Blanchot, about whom Mehlman [1989:329] comments
'what is of interest is simply the omission of the fascist articles of the 1930s from the Blanchot texts
discussed by Derrida in his book'; Martin Heidegger, whose complicity with fascism was enduring and
unapologetic; and Paul de Man, whose pro-Nazi wartime writings in Le Soir—particularly 'The Jews in
Contemporary Literature'—were imbued with volkish anti-Semitism. Like many contemporary
postmodern theorists, de Man was engaged in a quest for literary authenticity: in his case, a pristine
European tradition purged as he saw it of Jewish influence.
130. Hence the view [Boggs, 1999:256]: 'The ruling elites are more likely to use the terrorism of the
populist right as an occasion to repress opposition in general in the name of the state than to enter into
an explicit alliance with the anti-statist reactionary populist groups. The danger that reactionary
populist groups pose for the left is not that they are about to turn into successful fascist parties. It is
rather that they could have the effect of inducing a "state of emergency" response from the state which
will fail to discriminate (indeed may be only too ready not to try to discriminate) between right-wing
terrorism and legitimate left wing political activity.'
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 Abstracts

Latin American Peasants—New Paradigms for Old?

TOM BRASS
Comparing two of the main paradigms utilized in the study of Latin
American peasants, this introduction considers the way each interprets
grassroots rural identity/agency, as embodied in their respective approaches
to the reproduction and survival of peasant economy, the
empowering/disempowering nature of specific kinds of agrarian mobilization
and labour regime, together with their perception of the role/form of the
State. The first of these paradigms is the one used by the 'new' postmodern
populists, who—together with neoliberals—theorize rural agency as based on
innate peasant/ethnic identity, the aim of which is not to transcend capitalism
but to survive within it. This approach to the peasantry in Latin America
contrasts with that of the agrarian question, an 'old' paradigm in which rural
agency based on class identity is designed to capture and exercise state
power, with the political object of transcending capitalism. Their relative
merits are examined, and evaluated in terms of the case studies presented in
this volume.

The Peasantry and the State in Latin America: A Troubled Past, an

Uncertain Future

JAMES PETRAS and HENRY VELTMEYER

This article provides a retrospective overview of peasant/state relations in
Latin America. First we assess the adequacy of alternative explanations
regarding the dynamics of these relations, and then we review the actual
history of peasant/state relations in Latin America, analysing the forces
involved in change and struggle. Also examined is the process of regression,
displacement and revolution. The analysis concludes by evaluating the kinds
of power which structure peasant/state relations, with particular reference to
the social forces involved, and to the objectives and outcomes of peasant
mobilization.
From Rubber Estate to Simple Commodity Production: Agrarian Struggles in
the Northern Bolivian Amazon

WILLEM ASSIES
Rural unrest has been spreading in recent years in different regions in
Bolivia, which suggests that the agrarian and forestry legislation introduced
in 1996 has failed to solve the problems that it was meant to address. This
article examines the background to rural conflict in a specific region, the
northern Bolivian Amazon. It reviews the rise and decline of the rubber trade
and the subsequent emergence of the Brazil nut economy in the region. In
this way it shows how free communities emerged alongside the estate system
and compete for access to land and forest resources. This involves a
discussion of the evolution of forms of labour recruitment and debt-peonage
that takes issue with the neo-institutional economics perspective recently
adopted by various authors and students of the region. It is argued that debt-
peonage in the Amazon area can be viewed as a specific form of 'captive'
simple commodity production, and that this sheds light on the struggle by
rubber tappers for autonomy. The article concludes by analysing the 1996
agrarian and forestry legislation, and shows how its landlordbiased
implementation made manifest the latent conflict between free communities
and estate owners.

The Impact of Neo-liberal Economics on Peruvian Peasant Agriculture in the

1990s

JOHN CRABTREE
The adoption of neo-liberal economic policies by the Fujimori government in
the 1990s had major implications for peasant agriculture, as for other sectors.
Twelve years after their initial implementation, these policies appear to have
brought more losers than winners. Hit in particular by slack urban demand for
food and a sharp increase in imports, low agricultural prices undercut peasant
incomes. Those most affected were those producing primarily for the market,
who were either forced back into subsistence farming or into seeking work in
other areas. Rural poverty levels increased over this period, as did inequality
in the agrarian sector.

Whither O Campesinato? Historical Peasantries of Brazilian Amazonia

STEPHEN NUGENT
Brazilian Amazonian peasantries have attracted relatively little scholarly
attention, and even with the opening up of Amazonia via the TransAmazon
Highway (c. 1970) and a significant expansion of social science research in
the region, recent frontier colonists and environmental crises have been the
major foci. This article examines some of the factors contributing to the
relative invisibility of historical peasantries in the region and tries to show the
relevance of such peasantries to debates concerning agrarian structure,
economic transformation and state-led modernization efforts. A key feature in
the portrayal of Amazonian peasantries (and Amerindians) has been the
unique role attributed to the neo-humid tropical landscape in restricting the
possibilities for an elaborated social landscape. Drawing on anthropological,
archaeological and historical studies, the article advances the notion that
these simplifying assumptions are unwarranted and are impediments not only
to a more accurate understanding of the legacy of colonial society in
Amazonia, but also to efforts to mitigate social conflict and environmental
depredation.

From Dependency to Reform and Back Again: The Chilean Peasantry

During the Twentieth Century

WARWICK E.MURRAY
This article is concerned with the impact of neo-liberal economic theory and
resultant policy on peasant farmers in Latin America. In particular, it explores
the relationship between agri-business and the peasantry in Chile and traces
the evolution of the parcelero sector in response to the forces of globalization
over the last 30 years. In order to place recent trends in context, the historical
evolution of Chile's peasantry, particularly during the last century, is analysed
in some depth. To illustrate the impacts of neo-liberalism, two fieldwork-
based case studies in areas (El Paqui and East Curicó) where land reform has
taken place and fruit export booms have occurred are presented. Although
local transformations are varied, it is contended that the application of a 'free'
market policy has increased the dependency of the peasantry, creating
disguised, semi- and full proletarianization. The latter process has reversed
the various agrarian reforms which took place in the 1960s and 1970s, and
returned the Chilean peasantry to the subordinate position it occupied
previously. It is argued that the failure of peasant economy is a political effect
rather than the outcome of inevitable 'global' economic forces.

Globalization and the Reinvention of Andean Tradition: The Politics of

Community and Ethnicity in Highland Bolivia

JOHN MCNEISH
This article examines the complex ways in which a peasant community in the
Bolivian Highlands mediates present political conditions through an internal
discourse and conflict over personal and historical memories. Highlighted is
the way in which existing disputes are used by local people to take advantage
of the new economic resources made available by recent government reforms
aimed at democratization and decentralization, and how the latter in turn
create a space for traditional indigenous authorities to reassert their political
power. It is argued that whilst globalization is responsible for an increase in
the spread and economic diversification of local communities, peasants in
Bolivia are able to negotiate the limits and significance of these changes.

Devil Pact Narratives in Rural Central America: Class, Gender and

'Resistance'

KEES JANSEN and ESTHER ROQUAS

The Faustian bargain, or 'pact with the devil', made by a person who
exchanges human souls in order to obtain unattainable riches and power, is a
widespread peasant narrative in Central and South America. The narrative
expresses various overlapping meanings, of which a sudden increase in
wealth and a concomitant shift in social relationships is a central theme. In
the case examined, peasants invoke the devil pact narrative and the realm of
the supernatural to explain wealth and poverty in order to avoid tensions that
socio-economic accounts would provoke. By not referring to the history of
deceit, force, robbery, consent and complicity that has led to an unequal
distribution of local resources, peasants make new forms of accumulation
ideologically manageable. The Faustian narrative offers an ideologically
acceptable explanation, and thus provides them with a way of handling the
inequality between villagers created as a result of accumulation. It is
therefore best seen as an adaptive mechanism in the face of contradictions
generated by a modernizing agrarian capitalism, rather than—as in Taussig's
interpretation—as a form of resistance by the gift economy against unfolding
capitalism, or—as in Edelman's interpretation—as an everyday form of
resistance against sexual domination.

Representing the Peasantry? Struggles for/about Land in Brazil

JOSÉ DE SOUZA MARTINS

Arguing that the economic development in Brazil of a commercial latifundist
agriculture has depended historically on access to and control over labour-
power, the crisis resulting from slave emancipation in the second half of the
nineteenth century was met by immigration and settlement of European
workers plus internal migration. Usufruct rights in export agriculture (coffee,
sugar and rubber) meant the emergence of dual identity, whereby
smallholding was combined with working for others. Capitalist expansion in
the twentieth century resulted in casualization and/or dispossession of the
agrarian workforce in commercial agriculture, undermining the peasant
economy. The reproduction of the latter, however, has remained a focus of
agrarian struggles, not least because of the ideological role played by non-
peasant 'mediating groups' (the church, political parties), a process
culminating in the emergence of what is now termed a 'new' rural subject.
Such a designation, it is argued, fails to capture both the socio-economic
diversity of the rural workforce and also the way in which the 'voice from
below' conceptualizes agrarian reform.

On Which Side of What Barricade? Subaltern Resistance in Latin America

and Elsewhere

TOM BRASS
Following in the footsteps of their South Asian counterparts, exponents of the
Latin American subaltern framework are currently engaged in a quest for
evidence of an authentic and thus empowering rural consciousness/agency, as
manifested in ancient/indigenous nationhood, the carnivalesque, and literary
accounts projecting the 'voice from below'. The consequent essentialization
of peasant economy/culture (= subaltern identity) and agency (= subaltern
resistance), however, reproduces a specifically plebeian form of conservative
discourse, a pro-peasant ideology that has deep roots in Latin American
history. This epistemological fusion is attributed here to a failure on the part
of the subaltern approach to differentiate the peasantry in terms of class, as
well as to decouple Marxism from populism, and fascism from feudalism.
 Author Index

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Abelson, E., 380

Abercrombie, T., 233, 247, 248, 259, 260
Abu-Lughod, L., 266
Afanasyev, L., 23
Agreda, V., 158
Aguilar Paz, J., 280
Ahmad, A., 357, 358, 388
Albert, B., 171
Alberti, G., 157
Albó, X., 21, 229, 230, 231, 255, 260, 261, 265, 266, 337, 339, 342, 353, 362, 363, 364, 367, 369, 384,
390
Aldama, A.J., 367
Alden, D., 167
Alfaro Moreno, J., 154
Allegretti, M.H., 126
Allende, S., 222
Alvarez, S., 21
Amador, 43
Amalric, F., 72
Aman, K., 367
Amanor, K.S., 293
Amin, S., 366
Anderson, A., 185
Anderson, S., 168
Andrade, M.C. de, 313
Anonymous, 292
Apfel-Marglin, F, 260, 369
Appadurai, A., 293
Aprodeh, 158
Aramburu, M., 88, 125
Aranda, X., 222
Arato, A., 69
Arganaras, F.G., 265
Arias Duran, I., 264
Arnold, David, 366
Arnold, Denise, 265
Arrieto, M., 264
Assies, W., 10, 13, 14, 23, 28, 29, 30, 70, 83ff., 89, 90, 91, 101, 103, 105, 107, 122, 123, 125, 157, 185
Austen, R.A., 274, 293
Avila, H., 90
Aya, R., 186
Ayllu Sartañani, 255, 264

Bahl, V., 367

Bakhtin, M, 340, 369, 370
Baldomar, L., 231
Balduíno, Dom T., 330
Balée, W., 175
Ballivián, M.V., 329
Baraona, R., 28, 222
Barbira-Scazzocchio, F., 330
Barham, B.L., 14, 29, 94, 95, 98, 99, 117, 124, 168
Barraclough, S., 71, 72
Barrow, C.W., 70
Bartra, R., 71
Bastien, J., 264
Bates, R.H., 24
Bauer, A.J., 46, 54, 71, 222
Bebbington, A., 25
Beck, U., 338, 368
Beckerman, S., 165, 175
Beck-Gernsheim, E., 368
Beckman, B., 70
Beegle, J.A., 379
Beekma, J., 123
Beiguelman, P., 305
Beijnum, P. van, 123
Beltran, F., 74
Bendix, R., 69
Bengoa, J., 222
Benoist, J.M., 358, 389
Berger, G., 73
Berger, M.T., 26
Berlin, I., 31
Bernstein, E., 31
Bernstein, H., 28, 367
Best, L., 48
Betancur, A.C., 112
Bethell, L., 328
Beverley, J., 337, 339, 342, 343, 344, 345, 346, 356, 357, 359, 361, 362, 363, 364, 367, 368, 369, 372,
373, 374, 375, 377, 387, 388, 389, 390
Bhadra, G., 366
Bieber, J., 367
Biekart, K., 30
Binswanger, H., 106
Birla, G.D., 386
Blackburn, J., 229
Blair, H., 231
Blanco, H., 352, 353, 384
Blaut, J.M., 162, 175, 185
Bloch, M, 293
Bluntschli, J.K., 31, 32, 33
Boggs, C., 392
Bojanic Helbingen, A.J., 91, 94, 95, 103, 0 105, 108, 123, 125, 126, 127
Booth, D., 21, 229
Borón, O., 5, 23, 24
Bottomore, T., 391
Bowser, F.P., 70
Bradby, B., 157, 259, 260
Branford, S., 316
Brass, T., 7, 22, 26, 29, 30, 32, 33, 69, 71, 73, 74, 330, 367, 368, 371, 374, 377, 378, 384, 386, 388,
389, 391
Brohman, J., 21
Browder, J., 172, 173
Brown, K., 126
Brown, M.R., 194
Bryceson, D., 191,222
Buckley, W.F., 376
Bueno, E., 367
Bunker, S., 165, 330
Burbach, R., 23
Burdick, J., 24
Burgess, A., 372
Burgete Cal y Mayor, A., 21
Buttel, F.H., 22
Byres, T.J., 28, 367

Caballero, J.M., 138

Caesar, T., 367
Calla, R., 123
Calvo Sotelo, J., 352, 380
Cammack, P., 24
Cancian, F., 71
Canessa, A., 261
Canterbury, D., 57
Caplan, P., 261
Cardenas, V.H., 231
Cardoso, F.E., 24
Carter, M.R., 127
Carter, W., 231
Carvalho, G.O., 331
Carvalho, M. de C., 180
Cashman, R.I., 371
Castells, M., 26, 72, 74
Castillo, L., 68
Castillo, M, 150
Castro, J. de, 125, 329
Castro Pozo, H., 352, 353, 384
Caviedes, C.N., 293
CEPAL, 72
Ceriza, A., 60
Cervantes, E, 296, 297
Chakrabarty, D., 366
Chambers, R., 72
Chapman, A., 280
Chatterjee, P., 366
Chaturvedi, V., 366
Chayanov, A.V., 4, 23, 25, 182, 221, 331
Chevalier, E, 70
Chevalier, J.M., 99, 117, 293
Chomsky, A., 367
Chonchol, J., 222
CIDA, 72, 222
Cieza de León, P., 265
CIPCA, 231
CIREN-CORFO, 202, 223
Clark, J., 21
Clarke, B., 21
Clarke, J., 382
Clarke, S., 70
Cleary, D., 179, 180, 328
Cleaver, H., 21, 25
Clifford, J., 373
Clisby, S., 229
CNS, 125
Cockburn, A., 166, 173
Cockroft, J.D., 73, 74
Coesmans, K., 91, 92, 123
Cohen, A.P., 261, 266
Cohen, J.L., 69
Colburn, F.D., 32
Cole, J.A., 70
Collier, D., 24
Collins, J., 196
Colson, E., 261
Colton, C.C., 336
Comaroff, J., 272
Commission Internationale d'Histoire des Mouvements Sociaux et des Structures Sociales, 74
Coniff, M.L., 24
Contreras-Hermosilla, A., 108
Conway, G., 72
Cook, J., 382
Coomes, O.T., 14, 29, 94, 95, 98, 99, 117, 124, 168
Corbridge, S., 368
Cornejo, A., 385
Coronel, J., 158
Costa Sobrinho, P.V., 87, 122, 125
Cotler, J., 23, 57
Crabtree, J., 11–12, 13, 23, 28, 72, 74, 131ff., 158, 159, 254
Craig, A.L., 21
Crain, M.M., 291, 296
Crisenoy, C. de, 332
Crook, R.C., 231
Cruz, M.E., 197
Cuadros, D., 231
Cuánto, 148, 158
Cumings, B., 375
Cunha, E. da, 309
Cunha, M.C. da, 170
Curtin, P.D., 328
Custred, G., 71

Dalal, A., 386

DaMatta, R., 293
Dandler, J., 74
Davatz, T., 305
Davis, D.E., 74
Davis, M., 158, 329
Davis, S.H., 70
de Alcántara, C.H., 22
de Janvry, A., 28, 68, 72, 73, 328
de Kadt, E., 24
de la Fuentes, J., 22
de Rivero, O., 69
de Soto, H., 142, 158, 329
de Vylder, S., 32, 222, 223
Dean, W., 124, 167, 168, 185, 328
Deere, C.D., 32, 157
Deininger, K., 106
del Castillo, L., 142
Demmers, J., 24
Denoon, D., 328
Desmarais, A.-A., 61, 332
Deutsch, S.M., 385, 386
Deutscher, I., 368
Dews, P., 388, 389
DHV, 105, 123, 126
di Tella, T. 23
Díaz Polanco, H., 21
Dierckxsens, W., 30
Dimitrov, G., 339, 361, 390, 391
Dirks, N.B., 369
Dobb, M., 3
Dolkart, R.H., 385, 386
Dominguez, J.I., 53
Dorfman, A., 374
Dovring, K., 385
Duggett, M., 73
Duncan, K., 70
Duncombe, S., 25
Dunkerley, J., 74, 254
Dupré, G., 172

Echenique, J., 223

Eckstein, S., 21
ECLAC, 221
Edelman, M., 8, 61, 27, 271, 273, 274, 275, 276, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 291, 292, 293, 295, 296,
297
Eguren, E, 134, 158
Einstein, A., 374
Eisenberg, P.L., 328
Eliot, M., 375
Elst, K., 33, 376
Emperaire, L., 100
Engels, E, 373
Engerman, S.L., 21
Enriquez, L.J., 32
Epstein, K., 378
Erikson, S.S., 231
Escobar, A., 21
Espinoza, G., 33
Espinoza Soriano, W., 252, 253, 265
Esterci, N., 175, 330
Ewen, S., 374
Faletto, E., 24

FAO, 43
FARC-EP, 63
Fearnside, P, 181
Feder, E., 68
Fernández, J., 74, 89, 123
Fernández Jilberto, A.E., 24
Fiddian, R., 367
Fifer, J.V., 87, 96, 98, 124
Figueroa, A., 138, 157
Finlay, J.L., 392
Fioravanti, E., 30
Fioravanti-Molinié, A., 23
Flavio Pinto, L., 180
Fletcher, R., 387
Florescano, E., 70
Flynn, P, 23
Fogel, R.B., 60
Fogel, R.W., 21
Foner, E., 381
Fonseca Martell, C., 157
Forman, S., 163
Foster, G.M., 3, 22
Foweraker, J., 21, 73, 177, 180, 330
Fox, J., 45
Fox, R.G., 21, 388
Frank, A.G., 23, 71, 72, 330
Freitag, S., 371
Freitas, J.B., 328
Freud, S., 374
Friedland, W.H., 22
Friedman, M., 31, 191
Friedman, R., 31
Friedmann, J., 21
Furtado, L., 185

Galjart, B., 331

Galli, R.E., 21
García Canclini, N., 337, 339, 341, 342, 353, 362, 363, 364, 367, 369, 371, 373, 375, 384, 387, 390
Gay, P., 31
Geffray, C., 100, 125
Genovese, E.D., 100
Gentry, A., 180, 186
Geschiere, P., 272, 297
Ghai, D., 32
Ghimire, K.B., 72
Giddens, A., 339, 368
Gilbert, J., 367
Gilly, A., 21, 73
Glock, O., 316
Glover, D., 23
Godelier, M., 172
Godfrey, B., 172, 173
Godoy, R., 264
Goldman, W., 390
Goldwater, B., 381
Gomez, S., 223
Gonçalves, B. de A., 183, 185
Góngora, M., 70
Gonzales, E., 32
Gonzáles de Olarte, E., 140
Good, K., 231
Goode, P., 391
Goodman, D., 28, 73, 172, 221, 329
Gordillo, G., 23
Gould, J., 25, 43
Gray-Molina, G., 154
Griffin, R., 377
Griffiths, R., 381
Grindle, M.S., 45
Gross, D., 166, 293
Gudmundson, L., 74, 367
Guevara, E. Che, 1
Guha, Ramachandra, 338, 368
Guha, Ranajit, 336, 357, 366, 368, 388
Gulliver, P.H., 261
Gupta, D., 366, 369
Gutelman, M., 68
Gwynne, R.N., 197, 202, 221

Haagh, L., 45
Habel, J., 32
Hahn, D.R., 231
Hall, A.L., 70, 183, 329, 330
Hall, M.M., 328
Hardiman, D., 366
Harding, C., 70
Hardt, M., 72
Harris, M., 171, 176, 182, 185
Harris, O., 264
Harris, R.L., 28, 32, 73
Harriss, J., 368
Hart, J.M., 74
Hartlyn, J., 45
Hartwell, R.M., 380
Harvey, D., 21
Harvey, N., 74, 331
Harwood, E, 265
Havel, V., 30
Hawthorn, G.P., 30
Haya de la Torre, V.R., 352, 353, 384
Hecht, S.B., 166, 173
Held, D., 69
Hellman, J.A., 26
Hemming, J., 166
Henkemans, A.B., 90, 102, 104, 123, 126
Hennessy, A., 23, 328
Hernáis, I., 107
Hernandez, V., 60
Herrera,!., 159
Hewitt, C.N., 329
Hewitt, W.E., 24
Hilton, R., 3, 23
Hirsh, A., 388
Hobhouse, L.T., 31
Hobsbawm, E.J., 73, 124, 132, 257, 328, 367, 374
Hodges, D., 21
Hogenboom, B., 24
Hojman, D.E., 196, 223
Holland, J., 229
Holloway, J., 70
Holloway, T.H., 328
Holt, J., 91, 123
Hopkins, R., 140
Howard Borjas, P., 294
Howe, S., 25
Huggan, G., 375
Huizer, G., 68
Hussain, A., 30

Ianni, O., 5, 24, 310

ICIRA, 197
Iguíñiz, J., 159
INCRA, 43
Instituto Nacional de Estadística e
Informática (INEI), 159
Izko, J., 255, 265
Jackson, J., 170

Jaffrelot, C., 33
James, C.L.R., 73, 328
Jansen, K., 8, 9, 13, 14, 23, 27, 270ff., 277, 293, 294
Jarvis, L.S., 220
Jeganathan, P., 366
Jell-Bahlsen, S., 377
Jenkins, T., 388
Jessop, B., 70
Johnson, A.H., 222
Jones, J.C., 97
Jones, J.D.F., 375
Joseph, G., 69, 367
Julião, E, 329

Kahn, G., 375

Kaimowitz, D., 32, 127
Kaldor, N., 31, 222
Katz, F., 74
Kaufman, R.F., 222
Kautsky, K., 9, 15, 28, 30, 73, 328
Kay, C., 32, 57, 59, 72, 73, 74, 190, 193, 197, 198, 221, 222
Kearney, M., 73, 170, 262
Keijzer, B., 123
Kelley, R.D.G., 25
Klaren, P.F., 383
Klein, H.S., 70, 230
Klinge, G., 386
Knauerhase, R., 379
Knight, A., 24, 73, 74
Kohl, J.V., 230
Korovkin, T., 23, 25
Krishnaji, N., 32
Kritsman, L.N., 28
Kusterer, K., 23

Laclau, E., 24, 70, 71

LaFleur, J.R., 123
Lalbhai, K., 386
Landsberger, H.A., 74, 387
Lanzendörfer, M., 70
LaPorte, R., 222
Lara, J., 27
Larson, J., 147
Laserna, R., 231
Lathrap, D., 165
Latin American Bureau, 74
Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, 367
Latouche, S., 185
Lauria-Santiago, A., 367
Leach, B., 26
Lecourt, D., 388
Lee Van Cott, D., 230
LeGrand, C., 367
Lehmann, A.D., 25, 26, 72
Lem, W., 26
Lema Garret, A.M., 85, 97
Lemaire, T., 389
Lemelle, S., 25
Lenin, V.I., 9–10, 15, 28, 30, 73, 328
Léons, M.B., 230
Leroy, J.P., 178
Lescure, J.P., 100
Levine, D.H., 266
Lévi-Strauss, C., 358, 389
Levitt, K., 48
Lewis, O., 3, 22
Liamzon, T., 72
Lichbach, M., 45
Lievesley, G.,
Lipset, S.M., 30
Lipton, M., 24
Llambi, L., 192,221
Lloyd, D., 367
Lluco Tixe, M., 60
Loaeza, S., 24
Loomis, C.P., 379
Lora, G., 74, 385
Lotman, Ju. M., 370
Loureiro, V.R., 167, 185
Loveman, B., 71, 74, 222
Lowe, L., 367
Lowenthal, A.F., 53
Löwy, M, 387
Lucas, K., 60
Ludden, D., 366
Lukács, G., 373
Luxemburg, R., 15, 30

Mabey, R., 382, 383

Macas, L., 60
MacEwan, A., 32
MacMillan, G., 180
MACPIO, 107
Mahoney, J., 43
Malinowski, B., 22
Mallon, F.E., 25, 71, 367
Malloy, J.M., 74
Malpica, C., 33
Manor, J., 231
Marcos, Subcomandante, 1, 26
Marcus, G.L., 373
Maríategui, J.-C., 352, 353, 384
Maritain, J., 376
Martine, G., 329
Martinello, P., 87, 88, 122
Martínez, J.A., 231
Martínez-Alier, J., 157
Martins, J. de Souza, 7, 10, 11, 13, 14, 26, 28, 70, 98, 175, 185, 300ff., 329, 330
Marx, K., 24, 30, 32, 99, 117, 124, 332
Marzal, M., 384
Masiello, F, 367
Massingham, H.J., 380, 381
Mattelart, A., 374, 375
Matthai, J., 386
Mattos, M.M. de, 183, 185
Maybury-Lewis, B., 330
Mayer, E., 157, 264
Mayorga, R.A., 24
McEwan, A., 74
McGrath, D., 168
McKenna, M.K.L., 197
McNeish, J., 7, 23, 33, 228ff., 231, 265, 328, 369
Mead, W., 73
Medina, J., 231
Medina, M. del Carmen, 91, 92, 123
Meertens, D., 71
Meggers, B.J., 166
Mehlman, J., 392
Meijer, H., 328
Meillassoux, C., 71, 172
Melhuus, M., 285
Mendelsohn, R., 180, 186
Mendes, C., 71, 126, 329
Meneses, C., 197
Menjivar, R., 222, 231
Mesa-Lago, C, 32
Mesclier, E., 132
Meyer, B., 293
Meyer, K., 378–9
Midlarsky, M, 57
Mignolo, W., 367
Miliband, R., 70
Miller, D., 374
Mills, G.J., 25
Ministerio de Agricultura, Oficina General de
Planificación Agraria (OGPA), 134
Mintz, S.W., 11, 181, 183
Mishra, P.C., 369
Mohan, G., 231
Molino Rivero, R., 264, 265
Montano, J.A., 231
Moore, B., 69
Moran, E., 171, 174, 176, 179
Morley, M.H., 32
Mosley, O., 379
Mosse, G., 378
Munck, R., 68, 392
Murra, J.V., 3, 22, 157, 264
Murray, W.E., 11, 12, 13, 28, 31, 72, 74, 190ff., 191, 196, 197, 198, 202, 221

Naipaul, V.S., 372, 374

Nanda, M., 366
Nash, J., 21, 254, 297
National Institute of Statistics, Bolivia, 234
Naustalid, N., 231
Negri, A., 72
Nickson, R.A., 232
Nieboer, H.J., 71
Nijenhuis, G., 123
Nugent, D., 69, 367
Nugent, S., 7, 10, 11, 14–15, 28, 29, 69, 70, 162ff., 171, 329

O'Donnell, G., 70
O'Hagan, T., 389
O'Laughlin, B., 172
Orlove, B.S., 71
Ormachea, S.E., 89, 123, 125
Ortega, M, 68
Ortiz, S., 29
Ospina, C.M., 231
Otero, G., 21
Overing, J., 170
Overton, J., 392
Pace, R., 171

Pacheco, B.P., 87, 88, 89, 90, 95, 124

Pacheco, D., 106, 107, 108
Paige, J.M., 71
Painter, M., 157
Palacios, J., 72
Palma Carvajal, E., 231, 232
Palmer, D.S., 30
Pandey, G., 366
Papma, F., 330
Parker, C., 367
Parker, E., 171
Parry, J., 293
Paulson, J., 26
Pavez Lizarraga, I., 108, 126
Payne, L.A., 387
Paz, R.V., 98
Pearse, A., 46, 54, 231
Peary, D., 375
Peary, G., 375
Peek, P., 32
Peloso, V.C., 367, 384
Pérez, N., 32
Perlman, J.E., 179, 180
Perucci, G., 24
Perz, S.G., 182
Peters, C., 180, 186
Petras, J., 16–17, 23, 26, 30, 41ff., 42, 43, 52, 53, 59, 60, 68, 72, 221, 222, 366, 388
Philip, G., 24
Philo, G., 374
Picciotto, S., 70
Pieterse, J.N., 21
Pinedo, E., 264
Pinilla, C.F., 329
Pino, F., 200, 209
Pinto, N.P., 88
Pinton, F., 100
Platt, T., 230, 264
Polanyi, K., 69
Porras Martínez, J., 154
Porro, R., 165, 182
Portugal Loayza, J., 265
Post, K., 57
Poulantzas, N., 70
Prakash, G., 366
Preobrazhensky, E.A., 29–30, 31

Quartim, J., 331

Quijada Jara, S., 371
Quijano, A., 164

Ram, S., 386

Rama, C.M., 383
Ramos, A., 164, 170, 331, 384
Ramos, K., 271, 280, 284
Ranger, T., 257, 328, 374
Rappaport, J., 248, 249, 265, 367
Rasnake, N., 25, 233, 264
Raven, S., 373, 383
Rebosio, G., 158
Redclift, M., 172, 221
Redfield, R., 3, 22, 261
Reinaga, F., 352, 384
Reinhardt, N., 23
Reis, J., 328
Revel, J., 264
Revista Koeyu Latinoamericano,
Rey, P.P., 172
Reyeros, R., 70
Reygadas, P, 21
Reynolds, L., 28
Riffo-Rosas, M., 209
Ríos Reinaga, D., 230
Rivera Cusicanqui, S., 230, 262
Robbins, L., 31
Roberts, K., 57
Robles, W., 60, 330
Roca, J.L., 87, 88, 96, 97, 98, 124
Rodney, W., 48
Rodríguez, E., 158
Rodriguez, G., 231, 255, 266
Rojas Ortuste, G., 231
Rojas, G., 384
Romanoff, S., 94, 125
Roosevelt, A.C., 165, 166
Röpke, W., 380, 381
Roquas, E., 8, 9, 13, 14, 23, 27, 270ff., 293, 294
Rorty, R., 338, 368
Rosaldo, M.Z., 265
Roseberry, W., 26, 74
Rosendo, S., 126
Ross, C., 21
Rothenstein, J., 74
Rout, L.B., 70
Rowe, J.W.F, 71
Rudra, A., 23
Ruiz, R.E., 73
Rus, J., 373
Rutenberg, V., 23
Rutledge, I., 70
Salgado, R., 127
Salvadori, M, 30
Salvatierra, G.H., 107
Salvatore, R., 367
Samaniego, C., 371

Samper, M., 74
Sanabria Fernández, H., 87, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 117, 122, 124
Sánchez, G., 71
Sánchez, R., 384
Sandbrook, R., 69
Sanderson, S., 24
Santa Cruz, E, 141
Santana, R., 222
Santos, J.V.T. dos, 317
Santos, R., 310
Santos, R. dos, 167
Sarkar, S., 366
Sartre, J.P., 376
Saul, J.S., 69, 70
Saunders, F.S., 375
Sayer, A., 296
Scarano, F.A., 367
Schuurman, F.J., 21
Schwarcz, L., 164, 165
Schwartz, S., 165, 328
Scott, C.D., 157
Scott, J.C., 25, 69, 262, 291, 340, 370, 371
Scott, R.J., 328
Scruton, R., 381, 382
Semo, E., 73
Sepulveda, S., 222
Shakespeare, N., 375
Shanin, T., 24
Sheehan, T., 388
Sherzer, J., 25, 266
Shiva, V., 185
Shou, A., 231
Shroff, A.D., 386
Sigaud, L.M., 329
Silva, J.G. da, 315
Silva, M., 204
Silva, P., 196
Silva Herzog, J., 74
Simpson, E.N., 74
Sinclair, M, 21
Sivakumar, S.S., 21
Skar, H., 264
Slater, D., 26
Smith, C., 25
Smith, G., 25, 157
Smith, S., 145
Smith, W.R., 370
Solón, P., 107
Sousa Filho, F.R. de, 177, 178
Spindel, C.R., 329
Spivak, G., 343, 344, 357, 388
Starn, O., 21, 388
Stavenhagen, R., 23, 68, 221
Stedile, J.P., 30
Stein, M.B., 392
Stein, S., 24
Stein, S.J., 71, 328
Steward, J., 174
Stiefel, M., 231, 232
Stoian, D., 14, 85, 90, 91, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 103, 105, 117, 123, 125, 126
Stolcke, V., 328
Stolen, K.A., 285
Stoll, D., 373
Ströbel-Grogor, J., 255
Sullivan, K., 71
Sunkel, O., 221

Tamburini, L., 126

Tannenbaum, F., 74
Tata, J.D.R., 386
Taussig, M.T., 8, 15, 27, 71, 175, 273, 274, 276, 284, 288, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 297
Taylor, K.S., 328
Teichman, J.A., 74
Tello Díaz, C, 21
Tendler, J., 232
Terray, E., 172
Teubal, M., 23
Thakurdas, P., 386
Tharu, S., 366
Theroux, P., 372, 374
Thiesenhusen, W.C., 181
Thomas, C.Y., 48
Thomas, H., 379, 380
Thomas, J., 159
Thompson, E.P., 332, 340, 370, 371
Thorn, R.S., 74
Thorner, A., 23, 70
Thorpe, A., 72
Ticona, E., 231, 255, 265, 266, 384
Tocancipá-Falla, J., 71
Tolkein, J.R.R., 377
Traven, B., 56, 74
Tribe, K., 30
Trivelli, C., 145, 159
Trotsky, L.D., 15, 24, 29, 359, 360, 361, 372, 373–4, 388, 389, 390, 391
Trouillot, M.-R., 293, 296
Turner, T., 293
Tye, L., 374

Uhl, C, 183, 185

Ulyanovsky, R., 23, 389
Universidad Católica, 197
UNRISD, 72
Untoja, F., 231
Urban, G., 25, 266
Urioste, M., 106, 108, 231
Urquidi, A., 384
Urton, G., 261
Urzúa, R., 222
Uspenskij, B.A., 370

Valenzuela, M., 271, 280, 284

van den Bruck, M., 375
van der Linden, M., 330
Vanaik, A., 366
Vargas Rios, M.T., 108
Velho, O., 177, 180
Veltmeyer, H., 16–17, 26, 41ff., 42, 43, 52, 53, 59, 60, 69, 71, 72, 221, 366
Verheule, E., 103, 123
Verissimo, J., 165
Vilas, C., 30, 57, 58, 59
Vitale, L., 23
Viveiros de Castro, E., 170
Vološinov, V.N., 376
von Bülow, B., 349, 378

Waardt, H. de, 296

Wachtel, N., 264
Wade, P., 25
Wagley, C., 171, 328
Walker, T., 58, 59
Warren, K.B., 266
Warriner, D., 222
Waterman, P., 392
Watts, M., 28, 73
Weber, J., 85
Webster, N., 231
Weinstein, B., 14, 21, 29, 94, 95, 98, 99, 124, 167, 168
Weischet, W., 293
Welch, C., 329
Wheelock Roman, J., 43
Whetten, N., 74
White, A., 377
White, J., 373
White, S.C., 231
Widmark, C., 229
Willems, E., 328
Williams, E., 328
Williams, H.L., 21
Williams, L.O., 292
Williams, R.G., 294
Winson, A., 28
Wolf, E.J., 22, 55, 68, 186, 228, 261
Wolfe, M., 231
Wolpe, H., 172
Wood, C., 180
Woortman, E.F., 100, 101
World Bank, 158
Wright, E.O., 70
Wright, G., 328

Zamosc, L., 30, 32

Zeitlin, M., 68
Zemelman, H., 222
Ziemann, W., 70
Zimmerman, J.G., 336
Zinkin, M, 386
Zizek, S., 372
Zonta, A., 123
Zoomers, A., 127
Zuo, X.L., 231
 Subject Index

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Since these terms reoccur throughout the text, this index contains no entries
for 'Latin America', 'peasant/s', or 'smallholders'.

academy, the, 22, 170, 171, 251, 301, 324, 330, 346, 366, 367
accumulation, primitive, 55, 73, 95, 117, 271, 276, 280, 288, 290, 291, 297, 302, 316, 327, 330
(see also capitalism)
Administrative Decentralization Law, 229, 230, 231, 234, 240, 252, 258, 259
(see also Bolivia; Popular Participation Law)
advances, cash, 93, 97, 102–3, 190ff., 209, 309
(see also contract labour;
debt bondage;
labour contractor;
producer contract;
unfree agricultural labour)
Afghanistan, 22, 75
Africa, 24, 25, 45, 69, 70, 167, 172, 175, 231, 293, 297, 304, 328, 375
agency, grassroots, 2, 5, 6, 7, 15, 21, 25, 32, 42, 43, 44, 54, 56, 59ff., 69, 96, 112ff., 114ff., 151ff., 220,
230ff., 237ff., 300, 316, 320, 323, 337, 341, 346, 362, 365, 387, 388
(see also everyday forms of resistance;
peasant movements;
revolution)
agrarian myth, 8, 27, 345, 346, 347, 348, 351, 352, 353, 361, 380–81
(see also peasant persistence;
peasant disappearance;
populism) aristocratic, 27, 347, 352, 365, 383
plebeian, 27, 347, 349, 352, 365, 380
agrarian question, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, 28–9, 30, 73, 170, 185, 300, 302, 303, 319, 325, 328
(see also peasant persistence;
peasant disappearance;
Marxism)
agrarian question, American path, 10, 28, 73
agrarian question, Prussian path, 9, 68, 73
agrarian reform, 4, 11, 15, 16, 19, 50, 52, 58, 59, 62, 65, 72, 84, 107ff., 131ff., 190ff., 278, 280, 321,
322, 350, 354, 386
Bolivia, 74, 84, 106, 122, 123, 230, 240, 354
Brazil, 43, 175, 178, 300, 318, 319, 321, 322, 329, 330, 331
Chile, 10, 32, 43, 57, 58, 59, 68, 72, 191, 193ff., 204, 222
Cuba, 10, 32, 51, 57
Ecuador, 43
El Salvador, 43
India, 386
Italy, 386
Mexico, 57, 58
Nicaragua, 32, 57, 58
Peru, 10, 43, 57, 131, 136, 138, 141, 151, 342
Alessandri, Jorge, 193, 194, 222
Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA), 159
Allende, Salvador, 10, 20, 32, 68, 69, 72, 193, 195, 196, 222, 223
Amazonia, 7, 11, 14, 15, 28, 29, 30, 70, 83ff., 122ff., 158, 162ff., 184ff., 309–10, 312, 315, 318, 326,
329, 330
anthropology, 122, 162, 163, 166, 170ff., 178, 182, 183, 185, 251ff., 261
anti-capitalism, 16, 325, 350, 367, 383, 385, 391
anti-semitism, 351, 354, 361, 377, 380, 381, 385, 386, 392
archaeology, 165, 166
Argentina, 60, 61, 62, 63, 70, 223, 232, 354, 355, 364, 366, 385, 386, 387
Argentine Patriotic League, 354, 355, 385, 386
(see also fascism/nazism;
nationalism)
Australia, 147, 223, 375
authenticity (see identity politics;
nationalism)
Aymara, the, 21, 63, 126, 232, 244, 252, 260–61

Banzer, Hugo, 84, 113, 126

(see also Bolivia)
barracão (see company store)
Batista, Fulgencio, 57
(see also Cuba)
Belaunde, Fernando, 151, 157
(see also Peru)
beneficiadora, 91, 92, 104, 120, 125, 126, 127
Blanco, Hugo, 331, 352, 353, 384
bóia-fria, 314, 329
(see also Brazil;
casual agricultural labour)
Bolivia, 7, 10, 13, 14, 15, 21, 26, 27, 29, 43, 55, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 67, 74, 83ff., 122ff., 142,
153, 228ff., 264ff., 274, 297, 301, 353, 364, 366, 369, 384
Bonapartism, 5, 19, 24, 32
(see also fascism/nazism;
lumpenproletariat;
populism)
Brazil, 7, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 43, 48, 53, 57, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67, 70, 71, 72,
86, 88, 90, 122, 123, 125, 162ff., 184ff., 300., 328., 369, 384
Bulgaria, 361, 391
bureaucratic authoritarianism, 46, 70
(see also the state)

cambão, 10, 308, 329

(see also labour service)
Campesinista (see peasant persistence;
re-essentialization)
Canada, 375, 392
capitalism, 2, 3, 4, 9, 15, 23, 24, 27, 45, 51, 52, 56, 58, 62, 65, 68, 73, 94, 99, 117, 124, 131ff., 169,
172, 183, 186, 191, 195, 197, 200, 219, 221, 271, 273, 274, 276, 288, 293, 295, 296, 305, 312, 314,
315, 316, 324, 327, 328, 329, 337, 342, 345, 346, 348, 350, 356, 359, 360, 361, 363, 364, 373, 374,
378, 380, 383, 385, 386, 387, 391
agribusiness, 11, 12, 13, 14, 28, 29, 59, 63, 68, 107, 120, 121, 139, 145, 147, 149, 173, 175, 177, 181,
185, 192, 198, 202, 205, 206, 207, 209, 213, 217, 218, 219, 222, 224, 312, 355
Cardenas, Lazaro, 57
Cardoso, Fernando, 43, 64, 72
Caribbean, 17, 68, 183, 372
carnival, the carnivalesque, 304, 337, 340, 341, 342, 369, 390
see also empowerment;
everyday forms of resistance;
religion)
Castro, Fidel, 10, 20, 32, 57
Castro Pozo, H., 352, 353
Central America, 8, 17, 27, 68, 270, 272, 288, 301, 367
Central Indígena de la Region Amazónica de Bolivia (CIRABO), 112, 113, 124
Chavez, Hugo, 68
Chiapas, Mexico, 1, 6, 15, 16, 21, 25, 26, 72, 324, 331
(see also Zapatistas)
Chile, 10, 11, 12, 13, 20, 25, 28, 31, 32, 43, 45, 50, 54, 59, 60, 62, 63, 68, 69, 72, 75, 159, 190ff.,
221ff., 232, 355, 387
citizenship, 70, 165, 230, 319
(see also nationalism;
redemocratization)
clandestinos, 313, 314
(see also casual agricultural labour)
class, 3, 16, 25, 27, 32, 43, 44, 62, 64, 69, 70, 73, 125, 149, 163, 164, 167, 173, 195, 286, 288, 295,
296, 300, 301, 323, 328, 338, 341, 342, 348, 353, 355, 356, 357, 360, 363, 364, 367, 373, 379, 382, 385
consciousness, 3, 8, 9, 14, 344, 374
differentiation (see peasant differentiation) formation, 3, 8, 17, 29, 31, 157, 347, 364
struggle, 3, 8, 17, 25, 26, 45, 52, 57, 61, 64, 65, 71, 73, 83, 100, 111ff., 275, 297, 303, 307, 317, 318,
320, 321, 323, 325, 327, 329, 338, 342, 346, 347, 350, 353, 354, 360, 364, 372, 381, 385, 386, 390–91
Clinton, Bill, 63
Cold War, 3, 322, 323
Colombia, 16, 17, 23, 29, 30, 57, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 67, 68, 74, 273, 274, 296
colonato, 10, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 313, 314, 326, 328
(see also Brazil;
labour contract;
producer contract;
sharecropping;
tenants)
colonialism, 21, 42, 45, 46, 54, 69, 70, 87, 167, 173, 175, 182, 186, 192, 253, 304, 317, 319, 328, 342,
353
Comintern, 360, 390
community, rural, 85, 88, 92, 101, 103, 111, 118, 119, 121, 122ff., 157, 158, 177, 185, 198, 218, 228,
233, 236, 238, 240, 241, 247, 248, 249, 251, 252, 253, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 266, 270ff., 306
(see also indigenous groups)
compadrazgo, 100, 280, 281, 287, 294, 384
company store, 86, 93, 309
comunidades libres (see rural communities)
Confederación Campesina del Peru (CCP), 151, 152, 154
consciousness, false, 16, 27, 28, 320, 340, 345, 346, 347, 367, 374, 375
conservatism, 32, 44, 230, 256, 257, 259, 260, 291, 324, 327, 343, 348, 349, 350, 351, 351, 364, 365,
370, 372, 375, 376, 377, 379, 380, 381, 382, 383
contract, devil, 272, 293, 294
(see also devil pact narratives)
contract, labour, 13, 89, 95, 97, 102, 124, 125, 306, 307, 313, 328
contract, producer, 12, 202, 209, 211, 212, 215, 219, 223, 328
Costa Rica, 271, 274, 283, 285, 290, 291, 294
crisis, economic, 5, 50, 61, 87, 115ff., 122, 254, 310, 311, 315, 317, 321, 322, 324, 345, 355, 385
(see also capitalism)
crops, 123, 143–4, 145
açaí fruit, 178, 179
apples, 12, 197, 198, 208, 209, 211, 212, 213, 215, 224
brazil nuts, 10, 28, 84, 85, 89, 90ff., 100, 102, 110, 115, 118, 123, 125, 126, 127, 170, 185
coca, 16, 60, 61, 63, 64, 74, 134, 136, 150, 155, 254
coffee, 10, 15, 25, 71, 134, 159, 168, 277, 280, 281, 282, 286, 300, 301, 302, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309,
310, 311, 312, 314, 319, 326, 328, 329
cotton, 134, 177
grapes, 12, 197, 198, 200, 204, 215, 223, 224
maize, 278, 279
rice, 123
rubber, 10, 11, 29, 84, 100, 101, 110, 117, 118, 122, 167, 168, 177, 301, 309, 310, 311, 315, 319, 326,
329
sugar, 10, 57, 73, 167, 177, 181, 273, 274, 286, 296, 300, 301, 302, 307, 308, 309, 311, 312, 314, 319,
326, 328, 329
wheat, 193, 222
Cuba, 1, 10, 20, 32, 43, 57, 58, 59, 74, 127
culturalism, 2, 17, 19, 20, 26, 44, 170, 252, 255, 258, 260, 274, 276, 291, 340, 344, 345, 348, 358, 363,
367, 369, 383, 385, 387, 389
culture
folk, 3, 261
poverty, 3, 22

debt bondage, 14, 19, 94, 95, 98, 99, 100, 103, 115, 117, 118, 120, 168, 175, 279, 302, 307, 309, 310,
316–17, 318, 329, 330
(see also contract labour;
habilito)
decollectivization, 20, 32, 196, 197
de-peasantization, 9, 10, 11, 14, 18, 23, 26, 42, 43, 61, 74, 132, 172, 191, 193, 206, 207, 220, 221, 274,
297, 301, 317, 326, 329, 379
dependency, 195, 213, 215, 218, 387–8
descampesinista, 192
(see also peasant disappearance)
developmentalism, 2, 3, 12, 166
devil pact narratives, 8, 14, 27, 270ff., 272, 273, 276, 280, 283, 284, 288, 289, 290, 292ff., 295, 296,
297, 298
(see also doctor Faust)
Dimitrov, Georgi, 361
(see also Popular Front)
Dominican Republic, 57, 59, 60, 67
drought, 309, 312, 329
drug economy, 12, 60, 62, 63, 74, 107, 152
Duck Soup (1933), 390

East Curicó, Maule, 198ff.

(see also Chile)
ecology, 3, 6, 7, 16, 293, 325
Amazonian, 11, 29, 85, 124, 164, 165, 167, 168, 171, 174, 182ff., 185, 309
Andean, 3, 23, 133–4, 155, 157, 202, 215, 232, 248, 376
Ecuador, 17, 23, 28, 43, 55, 57, 60, 62, 63, 66, 68
El Niño, 137, 143, 158
El Palqui, Norte Chico, 198ff.
(see also Chile)
El Salvador, 42, 43, 57, 66, 67, 74, 75
empowerment, 2, 6, 9, 16, 21, 24, 30, 69, 291, 297, 342, 344, 345, 348, 369
encomienda, 72
(see also extra-economic coercion;
labour service;
latifundio)
enganche (see contract labour;
debt bondage)
England/UK, 16, 26, 48, 74, 304, 349, 351, 352, 370, 372, 373, 376, 377, 380–81, 382
environmental determinism, 166, 174, 175
(see also ecology;
Nature)
Estensorro, Paz, 237, 254, 265
(see also Bolivia)
ethnicity, 264
(see also indigenismo;
indigenous groups)
Europe, 4, 53, 54, 56, 63, 145, 167, 197, 209, 213, 231, 255, 302, 305, 307, 310, 319, 326, 328
existentialism, 376
(see also religion)
extractivism (see brazil nuts;
fishing;
forestry;
rubber tapping)
extra-economic coercion, 54, 71, 93, 94, 96–7, 98, 117, 309, 316, 328
(see also debt bondage;
feudalism;
unfree labour;
agricultural labour)

faena (see work party)

Falangists, 379
(see also fascism/nazism) Bolivian, 353–1, 385
Chilean, 355
Spanish, 350–51, 353, 379, 383
farmer
capitalist, 16, 90, 211, 303, 305
(see also rich peasants) movements, 16
small (see peasant peasant economy persistence;
petty commodity production)
farmer path (see agrarian question)
farmers, 15, 16, 355, 377
(see also capitalism;
rich peasant)
fascism/nazism, 5, 24, 45, 347, 350, 351, 354, 356, 359, 361, 366, 372, 377, 378, 379, 380, 381, 383,
390, 391
(see also Bonapartism;
Falangists;
lumpenproletariat;
populism)
Faust, doctor, 27, 28, 271–2, 273, 276, 290, 292
(see also devil pact narratives)
feudalism, 4, 15, 29, 45, 47, 72, 95, 99, 117, 316, 324, 328, 330, 350, 352, 356, 359, 361, 376, 382
(see also extra-economic coercion)
semi-feudalism, 23, 29, 45, 47, 72, 324, 330, 389
fiesta, the, 232, 245, 248, 265, 340, 342, 370, 371
(see also carnival)
film, 331, 374, 390
fishing, 164, 170, 176, 177, 180, 185, 197
forestry, 84, 104, 106ff., 110, 112, 115, 116, 119, 120, 123, 126, 142, 164, 177, 180, 197, 309
France, 16, 24, 30, 32, 357, 359, 360, 377, 390
Frei, Eduardo, 193, 194, 195, 196, 204, 209, 222
frontier, agrarian, 177, 180, 182, 301, 302ff., 311, 319ff., 325, 328, 329
Fujimori, Alberto, 12, 133, 139, 140, 141, 142, 145, 149, 152, 153, 154, 157, 159
(see also Peru)

Garcia, Alan, 138, 140, 141, 145, 151, 157, 158

(see also Peru)
gender, 7, 11, 13, 16, 92, 101, 125, 127, 159, 271, 274, 275, 284, 285, 288, 290, 292, 293, 294, 314,
328, 367, 372, 387
Germany, 24, 26, 31, 33, 305, 328, 349, 350, 351, 359, 364, 366, 375, 376, 377, 378, 380, 381
Gramsci, Antonio 45, 339, 356, 359, 366
(see also hegemony)
Guatemala, 23, 42, 60, 63, 66, 75, 266, 370
guerrilla movements, 43, 57, 61, 62, 63, 65
(see also peasant movements;
revolution)
Guyana, 48, 57

habilito (see contract labour;

debt bondage)
hacienda (see landlords;
latifundio)
Haiti, 42, 55, 60
Haya de la Torre, V.R., 352, 353
hegemony, 45, 69
Hispanidad (see culturalism;
nationalism)
Honduras, 14, 42, 276, 277, 280, 282, 285, 290, 291, 293, 294
Horse Feathers (1932), 390
huasipunguero, 54 (see also labour service)

identity politics, 2, 16, 25, 26, 44, 93, 228, 241, 244, 245, 248, 251, 252, 255, 256, 258, 260, 261, 275,
300, 319, 321, 322, 323, 338, 339, 344, 345, 346, 349, 353, 354, 363, 364, 367, 368, 370, 376, 382,
387, 392
(see also indigenous groups;
nationalism)
imperialism, 46, 53, 56, 63, 64, 69, 304, 346, 351, 377, 389
Inca, 21, 33, 252–3, 265, 371
communism, 21, 33
indenture, 42, 48, 167, 305
India, 7, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 33, 74, 231, 328, 359, 369, 371, 375, 376, 386, 389
indigenismo, 20, 24, 171, 323, 352, 353, 384
indigenous groups, 11, 55, 63, 69, 84, 85, 95–6, 107, 112, 113, 115, 118, 120, 122, 123, 126, 151, 162,
164, 165, 167, 168, 170, 171, 173, 175, 185, 229, 251, 255, 266, 304, 308, 315, 316, 318, 319, 321,
323, 329, 330, 358, 376
(see also culturalism;
the Aymara;
identity politics;
the Maya;
the Pewenche;
the Quechua;
primitivism;
the Uru;
the Yanomami)
industrial labour, 5, 42, 49, 61, 303, 312, 317, 322
industrialization, 42, 50, 51, 167, 301, 302, 307, 312, 314, 319, 328
(see also capitalism)
informal economy, 28, 44, 158, 178, 179ff., 185, 312, 329
inquilinaje, 54, 193
(see also labour service)
International Monetary Fund (IMF), 53, 62, 137, 138, 139, 231
(see also World Bank, WTO)
irrigation, 134, 136, 142, 154, 155, 186, 195, 200, 206, 215, 223
Italy, 69, 359, 386
Jamaica, 11, 181–2, 305
Japan, 53, 305
Jesuits, 85, 96
Julião, Francisco, 329, 331
Junker path (see agrarian question)

Katarista movement, 252, 255

(see also the Aymara;
culturalism;
identity politics;
indigenous groups)
Keynesianism, 2, 17, 18, 20, 71

labour, agricultural, 1, 5, 15, 19, 20, 27, 28, 29, 32, 41, 45, 101ff., 103–4, 105, 116, 125–6, 127, 150,
158, 164, 174, 175, 181, 221, 222, 273, 280, 281, 282, 283, 287, 293, 294, 303, 317–18, 319, 328, 329,
330, 331, 341, 343, 346, 355, 363, 366, 384
(see also debt bondage;
indenture;
slavery)
casual, 11, 13, 29, 73, 103, 104, 159, 221, 222, 232, 313, 314, 315, 322, 329
child, 11, 306
female, 11, 13, 92, 127, 159, 221, 222, 306, 314
migrant, 11, 12, 41, 43, 52, 68, 181, 193, 274, 276, 304–5, 309, 312, 314, 317, 318, 320, 328, 329
permanent, 11, 41, 273, 309, 313, 317, 322, 329
unfree, 13, 14, 29, 48, 99, 71, 74, 316, 328, 330
(see also debt bondage)
labour, non-agricultural, 11, 12, 13, 92, 103, 104, 157, 164, 174, 175, 180, 191, 213, 232, 254, 255, 301
labour contractor, 102, 103, 309, 317
(see also contract labour)
labour service, 10, 25, 72, 193, 303, 306, 308, 309, 312, 321
land
disputes, 106, 107, 110, 111, 116, 124, 278, 279, 312, 320
evictions, 307, 313, 315ff., 329
occupations, 60, 171, 222, 304, 311, 320, 330
titles, 49, 52, 59, 107, 108, 109, 114, 123, 127, 140, 142, 147, 158, 174, 177, 194, 250, 278–9, 311,
312, 315
Landless Workers Movement (MST), 7, 16, 30, 60, 64, 65, 67, 162, 163, 164, 173, 318, 320, 323, 324,
325, 327, 330
(see also Brazil;
new social movements)
landlords, 10, 11, 13, 15, 17, 18, 19, 26, 30, 43, 44, 45, 47, 54, 55, 68, 84, 85, 88, 107, 110, 113, 115,
124, 167, 178, 180, 194, 195, 197, 222, 230, 232, 270, 271, 274, 275, 276, 277, 287, 290, 292, 296,
297, 302, 305, 308, 309, 310, 312, 313, 314, 321, 322, 327, 328, 329, 330, 331, 341, 342, 347, 348,
349, 351, 352, 355, 359, 370, 377, 382, 383, 384, 386
Ligas Camponésas, 317, 318, 321, 322, 329, 331
(see also Brazil;
Francisco Julião;
peasant movements)
literature, 342ff., 372, 373, 374, 375, 377
(see also popular culture)
livestock, 84, 85, 87, 90, 107, 111, 115, 123, 157, 193, 277, 278, 280, 290, 294, 312, 315
lumpenproletariat, 5, 32, 44, 374
(see also Bonapartism;
fascism/nazism;
populism)

machismo (see sexual domination)

Malaysia, 310, 315
Maríategui, J.C., 352, 353
market, the, 41, 42, 43, 46, 49, 52, 53, 56, 60, 69, 71, 90, 99, 104, 106, 107, 108, 116, 117, 120, 125,
127, 131, 132, 133, 136, 137, 139, 141, 143, 150, 153, 154, 156, 157, 159, 169, 173, 177, 178, 181,
183, 190ff., 198, 200, 202, 204, 205, 206, 209, 211, 215, 217, 218, 219, 220, 222, 224, 270ff., 303, 310,
317
(see also neo-liberalism)
Marx Brothers, the, 336, 390
Marxism, 3, 5, 8, 9, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 26, 28, 29, 30, 32, 44, 45, 68, 71, 73, 117, 172, 316, 321,
322, 325, 328, 330, 331, 337, 339, 344, 347, 356, 357, 361, 364, 367, 368–9, 372, 375, 380, 387, 389,
390, 391
Maya, the, 63, 266, 370
(see also Guatemala)
media, the, 230, 255, 324, 331, 374, 375
(see also popular culture)
Menchú, Rigoberta, 343
Mendes, Chico, 125, 126, 182, 185, 329, 331
(see also rubber tapping)
mercantilism, 52, 53, 62, 167, 168, 169, 175
Mexico, 1, 3, 6, 7, 16, 17, 22, 23, 25, 26, 42, 43, 53, 55, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 64, 66, 67, 72, 73, 301, 323,
331, 370
middle peasants, 10, 15, 25, 32, 42, 51, 71, 72, 277, 354, 367
(see also peasant economy;
peasant family farm;
peasant persistence;
poor peasants;
rich peasants)
migration, 90, 103, 118, 121, 122, 150, 157, 169, 173, 177, 179–80, 185, 191, 254, 255, 301, 307, 310,
311, 312, 326, 328
(see also migrant agricultural labour)
mining,
gold, 164, 171, 179, 180, 185, 330
tin, 230, 232, 253, 254, 255, 273, 274, 297
mita, 54
(see also labour service)
morador, 309, 314, 326
(see also Brazil;
permanent agricultural labour;
tenants)
moral economy, 6, 25, 47, 100, 120, 327, 332, 340–41
Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru (MRTA), 152, 159
(see also guerrilla movements;
Peru)
municipalization, 229, 232, 234, 236, 243, 244, 245, 256, 257, 258, 259
(see also Bolivia;
rural community)

National Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities (CONAIE), 60, 62, 63, 66

(see also Ecuador;
new social movements)
National Security State (Brazil) (see repressive state)
nationalism, 19, 20, 25, 30, 164–5, 173, 31, 33, 63, 319, 339, 343, 345, 346, 348, 349, 350, 352, 353,
354, 358, 359, 360, 361, 365, 369, 373, 377, 378, 379, 380, 383, 384, 385, 387, 388, 391
(see also culturalism;
fascism/nazism)
Nature, 29, 165, 347, 348, 350, 351, 358, 376, 380, 381, 382, 383, 387
green hell, 15, 29, 167, 175ff., 183
neo-classical economics, 2, 12, 21, 29, 99, 375, 376
(see also the market)
neo-liberalism, 2, 9, 11, 12, 13, 16, 17, 18, 20, 22, 30, 31, 42, 43, 52, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68,
72, 106, 131ff., 139ff., 157ff., 186, 190, 191, 192, 195ff., 215, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 254, 368, 380
neo-mercantilism (see mercantilism)
new rural subject (see new social movements)
new social movements, 5, 6, 7, 16, 24, 26, 31, 45, 46, 72, 74, 163, 323ff.
(see also peasant movements)
New Zealand, 147, 197, 223
NGOs, 7, 14, 25, 52, 75, 104, 115, 119, 121, 122, 126, 154, 159, 185, 186, 231, 238, 252, 258, 264
Nicaragua, 15, 20, 32, 42, 43, 57, 59, 274
North Atlantic Free Trade Area (NAFTA), 60 (see also the market;
neo-liberalism)

orientalism, 358

Paraguay, 60, 61, 62, 66

paramilitary forces, 62, 67, 83
Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), 59 (see also Mexico)
Pastoral Land Commission, 318, 320, 330
(see also Brazil;
MST;
religion)
patron (see landlords)
peasant differentiation, 10, 12, 51, 136, 149, 157, 180, 182, 197, 198ff., 204ff., 210, 215ff., 221, 277,
337, 391
(see also class;
depeasantization;
proletarianization;
rich peasants;
middle peasants;
poor peasants)
peasant disappearance, 2, 11, 19, 23, 132, 190, 221, 337
(see also agrarian question;
agrarian myth;
peasant persistence)
peasant economy, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 26, 27, 44, 132ff., 155, 182ff., 190ff., 219, 293, 296, 312, 317, 319,
320, 326, 329, 330, 351, 354, 378–9, 384, 386
(see also peasant family farming;
peasant persistence;
petty commodity production)
peasant family farm, 4, 13, 23, 28, 43, 101, 132–3, 157, 215, 254, 306, 307, 310–11, 312, 317, 327,
330, 347, 350, 355, 379, 380, 381, 382, 383, 385
peasant movements, 3, 17, 26, 43, 50, 56, 57, 58, 60, 64, 65, 72, 84, 324
Argentina, 60
Bolivia, 60, 84
Brazil, 7, 16, 26, 57, 60, 302, 324, 329
Chile, 60
Colombia, 16, 30, 32, 57, 60
Dominican Republic, 60
Ecuador, 57, 60, 61
El Salvador,57
Guatemala, 60
Haiti, 60
India, 30, 32, 74
Mexico, 1, 16, 26, 57, 60, 331
Nicaragua, 57
Paraguay, 60
Peru, 15, 30, 32, 57, 60, 74, 331, 342, 343, 384
peasant persistence, 2, 11, 23, 177, 190, 221, 337
(see also agrarian question;
agrarian myth;
peasant disappearance)
peonagem (see debt bondage;
slavery)
Peronism, 23
Peru, 10, 11, 13, 15, 19, 22, 23, 26, 27, 30, 42, 43, 57, 58, 60, 72, 74, 97, 131ff., 157ff., 261, 301, 331,
342, 353, 355, 368, 383, 384
petty commodity production (see peasant economy;
peasant persistence;
peasant family farming;
simple commodity production)
Pewenche, the, 355, 387
Philosophers, New, 357, 358, 388
(see also conservatism)
Pinochet, Augusto, 195, 218, 223
planning, 31, 32, 44, 182, 218, 224, 231, 240, 347
(see also the state)
plantations, 11, 21, 41, 43, 49–50, 52, 57, 99, 117, 124, 165, 167, 168, 173, 185, 293, 302, 303, 305,
307, 309, 310, 312, 314, 315, 328, 329, 384
(see also rural property)
Poland, 147
ponguaje, 54
(see also labour service)
poor peasants, 10, 15, 17, 19, 20, 42, 47, 48, 71, 104, 136, 222, 275, 277, 311, 341, 363, 366, 384
(see also middle peasants;
rich peasants)
popular culture, 266, 296, 298, 345, 346, 371, 372, 373, 375, 377
Popular Front, 337, 339, 345, 356, 359, 360, 361, 387, 389, 390, 391
Popular Participation Law, 120, 121, 126, 154, 229, 230, 231, 234, 236, 238, 239, 240, 252, 258, 259,
264, 318
populism, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 15, 16, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 28, 30, 51, 72, 221, 265, 337, 338, 347, 349, 351, 352,
353, 354, 355, 360, 362, 365, 366, 367, 372, 373, 380, 381, 386, 387, 388, 389, 392
(see also Bonapartism;
postmodernism;
post-development;
post-colonialism;
post-structuralism;
subalternism)
Portugal, 304, 305, 369
posseiros, 310, 311, 329, 330
(see also Amazonia;
land titles)
post-colonialism, 2, 5, 186, 262, 337, 346, 359, 366, 372, 374, 375
(see also postmodernism;
post-development;
post-Marxism;
post-structuralism;
subalternism)
post-development, 2, 3
(see also postmodernism;
post-colonialism;
post-Marxism;
post-structuralism;
subalternism)
post-Marxism, 3, 357
(see also postmodernism;
post-colonialism;
post-development;
post-structuralism;
subalternism)
postmodernism, 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 14, 15, 16, 21, 24, 26, 28, 30, 44, 46, 64, 69, 70, 273, 337, 345, 348,
357, 362, 363, 367, 368, 371, 372, 373, 376, 383, 388, 389, 391, 392
(see also populism;
post-development;
post-colonialism;
post-structuralism;
subalternism)
post-structuralism, 2, 172
(see also postmodernism;
post-colonialism;
post-development;
post-Marxism;
subalternism)
poverty, rural, 12, 22, 62, 113, 119, 120, 131, 132, 133, 147ff., 153, 154, 159, 194, 200, 309, 312
primitivism, 73, 374, 375
(see also indigenismo)
production, mode of, 70, 95, 99, 166, 169, 172
(see also capitalism;
feudalism)
proletarianization, 12, 18, 71, 176, 177, 181, 191, 193, 205, 208, 215, 218, 219, 273, 302, 349, 350, 381
proletariat, 17, 221, 306, 321, 322, 323, 349, 354, 373, 375, 389
(see also agricultural labour)
property, rural, 28, 32, 89
(see also plantations)
ayllu, 233, 239, 240, 244, 247, 253, 254, 257, 258, 265
barraca, 84, 86, 87, 89, 92, 93, 96, 100, 101ff., 110, 111, 112, 115, 118, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 126
collective, 20, 57, 131, 182, 195, 331, 347, 351, 381, 385
cooperative, 20, 55, 58, 65, 138, 151, 194, 196, 354
ejido, 58, 182, 294
latifundio, 12, 23, 25, 28, 41, 43, 47, 49, 54, 65, 71, 72, 73, 84, 106, 107, 138, 173, 193, 195, 222, 232,
301, 302, 303, 304, 307, 324, 326, 331, 355, 382, 384
minifundio, 12, 54, 106, 136, 181, 193, 219, 222, 223, 386
parcelero, 12, 192, 196, 197, 198, 202, 204, 206, 207, 209, 211, 212, 215, 217, 218, 219, 222, 223, 224
public opinion, 345
Puerto Rico, 22, 57
pulpería (see company store; debt bondage)

Quechua, the, 63, 126

Quillaca, Santuario de, 228, 232ff., 265, 266

redemocratization, 30, 45, 46, 64, 104-5, 151, 191, 229, 230, 323, 330
re-essentialization, 2, 181-2, 183, 204, 254, 317, 344, 360, 392
Reinaga, Fausto, 352
religion, 24, 27-8, 96, 232, 233, 245-6, 247, 248, 249, 257, 258, 259, 265, 270, 292, 296, 297, 298, 317,
318, 320, 322, 323, 324, 325, 327, 330, 341, 342, 353, 355, 370, 371, 376, 379, 384-5
repartimiento, 54
(see also labour service)
repeasantization, 204, 205, 211, 302
(see also peasant economy;
peasant persistence;
re-essentialization)
resistance, everyday forms of, 2, 5, 6, 7, 21, 25, 31, 32, 44, 64, 69, 262, 271, 274, 290, 297, 323, 336ff.,
342, 356, 357, 359, 371
restructuring, capitalist (see East Curicó;
El Palqui)
revolution, 6, 15, 28, 42, 44, 54, 59, 66, 69, 74, 75, 186, 195, 338, 342, 351, 359, 375, 389, 391
Bolivian, 15, 43, 57, 74, 106, 229, 230, 254, 265
Chinese, 23, 74, 331, 361
Cuban, 1, 15, 23, 33, 43, 51, 57, 68, 74, 313, 331
French, 30, 32, 376
Mexican, 43, 56, 73, 74
Nicaraguan, 15, 43, 68
passive, 339, 359
Russian, 24, 71, 74, 368
Spanish, 361
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - People's Army (FARC-EP), 63, 66
(see also guerrilla movements)
Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR), 59, 265
(see also Bolivia)
rich peasants, 10, 12, 15, 16, 17, 19, 29, 30, 51, 71, 72, 74, 219, 221, 277, 332, 341, 342, 352, 371
(see also capitalism;
middle peasants;
poor peasants)
Rivera, Primo de, 350, 352, 379, 380
(see also Falangists)
rough musick, 340, 370, 371
(see also carnival)
Rubber Tappers Union (CNS), 162, 182
(see also Chico Mendes;
rubber tapping)
rubber tapping, 10, 11, 14, 29, 86, 87, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 117, 118, 123, 124, 125, 168,
175, 309, 315, 326, 329, 331
Russia, 4, 20, 23, 231, 328, 372, 377, 388

Sandinistas, 20, 32
(see also Nicaragua)
semi-proletarianization, 12, 52, 71, 170, 191, 207, 212, 213
Sendero Luminoso, 143, 152, 159
(see also guerrilla movements)
serfdom, 42, 307, 309
seringuero (see rubber tapping)
sexual domination, 271, 274, 275, 276, 285, 286, 290, 292, 295
(see also gender)
sharecropping, 32, 41, 71, 72, 305, 306, 313
simple commodity production, 99, 100, 117, 121, 167, 168, 169, 171, 175, 180, 183, 221
slavery, 14, 21, 29, 42, 46, 47, 48, 55, 73, 74, 95, 113, 117, 165, 167, 173, 302, 303, 304, 305, 307,
308, 309, 316, 326, 328, 329
(see also debt bondage;
indentured labour;
serfdom)
socialism, 2, 9, 15, 17, 22, 23, 26, 30, 32, 74, 69, 320, 322, 330, 347, 353, 354, 356, 368, 376, 384, 391
Somoza, Anastasio, 57
South Africa, 197, 223, 231
Spain, 26, 69, 305, 350, 364, 366, 369, 379-80
state, the, 4, 16ff., 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 41ff., 44-5, 52, 56, 61, 64ff., 70, 75, 108, 109, 123, 131, 139, 140,
141, 151, 152, 155, 159, 177, 179, 182, 185, 194, 219, 221, 229, 236, 241, 243, 249, 253, 259, 294,
303ff., 319, 329, 331, 339, 348, 358, 362, 365, 369, 381, 385
plural, 46, 64
repressive, 42, 46, 47, 48, 57, 61, 67, 68, 158, 163, 178, 195ff., 301
strong, 46, 65, 70
weak/failed, 45, 64
strikes, 49, 67, 306, 341, 355, 386, 387
subalternism, 2, 6, 15, 21, 31, 32, 44, 336ff., 342, 345, 359, 360, 366, 367, 371, 372, 377, 383, 384, 388
(see also postmodernism;
post-colonialism;
post-development;
post-Marxism;
post-structuralism)
Asian, 7, 336, 337, 353, 357, 362, 363, 364, 366, 367, 388
Latin American, 8, 15, 21, 31, 337, 343, 352, 353, 362, 363, 364, 367, 372, 387
surplus, economic, 10, 13, 73, 99, 123, 176, 302

taxation, 32, 44, 120, 125, 126, 127, 178, 179, 223, 234, 237, 238, 239, 240, 315, 351, 381, 382
technology, 47, 71, 88, 91, 127, 136-7, 138, 142, 181, 203, 205, 215, 220, 224, 286, 287, 290, 301, 312,
314
tenants, 10, 19, 25, 28, 41, 47, 71, 72, 194, 222, 278, 309, 313, 342, 355, 370, 377, 384
testimonio, 343, 353, 372, 373
Thailand, 145
thakhi, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 256, 265
(see also the Aymara;
indigenous groups;
rural tradition)
Third Way, 338, 368, 380
Toledo, Alejandro, 157
(see also Peru)
tradition, rural, 7, 23, 56, 110, 111, 119, 144, 228, 233ff., 240, 245, 246ff., 250ff., 255ff., 270ff., 292,
300, 327, 328, 340, 342, 347, 348, 350, 358, 370, 376, 377, 379, 382, 386, 387
(see also popular culture)
TransAmazon highway, 162, 163, 171, 177, 316
transition, agrarian (see agrarian question)
travel writing (see popular culture)
Trinidad, 372
tropical nastiness, doctrine of, 162, 175
(see also ecology;
environmental determinism;
Nature)
Trujillo, Rafael, 57
Túpac Amaru, 54, 342

underdevelopment, 4, 45, 221, 328

Unidad Popular, 69, 222
(see also Salvador Allende)
unions, trade, 52, 61, 62, 63, 65, 72, 152, 197, 230, 254, 255, 264, 265, 324, 327, 342
(see also class;
grassroots agency)
United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), 18, 19, 28, 31, 158, 194, 195, 217,
218, 221, 222
(see also Keynesianism;
the state)
United States of America, 4, 21, 22, 31, 32, 48, 53, 54, 56, 59, 62, 63, 67, 74, 75, 147, 150, 162, 167,
194, 197, 265, 277, 313, 345, 349, 351, 352, 374, 376, 381, 383
urban bias, 24
Uru, the, 126
(see also indigenous groups)
Uruguay, 62

Vargas, Getulio, 57, 331

Velasco, Juan 10, 141, 151, 157
Venezuela, 68
vertical integration, 105
Via Campesina, 61, 332

work party, 248, 265

Workers Party (PT), 163, 323
(see also Brazil)
World Bank, 53, 62, 106, 139, 158, 231, 232, 254, 264
World Trade Organization (WTO), 16

Yanomami, the, 165, 330

(see also Brazil)

Zapatista Army of national Liberation, the (EZLN), 1, 16, 21, 25, 26, 60, 61, 63, 66, 67, 72, 74, 324,
325, 331
(see also Chiapas;
Mexico;
guerrilla movements;
new social movements)
 Footnotes

Introduction Latin American Peasants -New Paradigms for Old?

Tom Brass formerly lectured in the Social and Political Sciences Faculty at
the University of Cambridge, UK. E-mail address:
tom@tombrass.freeserve.co.uk.

The Peasantry and the State in Latin America: A Troubled Past, an

Uncertain Future
James Petras is Professor Emeritus in Sociology, Binghamton University,
New York, USA, and Henry Veltmeyer is Professor of Sociology and
International Development, St. Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia,
Canada. The authors extend their thanks to Tom Brass for his helpful
suggestions and comments on an earlier draft of this article.

From Rubber Estate to Simple Commodity Production: Agrarian

Struggles in the Northern Bolivian Amazon
Willem Assies, El Colegio de Michoacán, Centro de Estudios Rurales,
Martínez de Navarrete 505, 59699 Zamora, Michoacán, Mexico. Email:
assies@colmich.edu.mx. The author thanks Javier Aramayo, Ana Cecilia
Betancur, René Boot, Roxana Cuevas, Armelinda Zonta and many others for
their aid in locating sources for this article and for their stimulating
discussions. I would like to thank Tom Brass for his inspiring comments on
an earlier draft of this essay. Final responsibility is of course all mine.

The Impact of Neo-liberal Economics on Peruvian Peasant Agriculture

in the 1990s
John Crabtree is Research Associate at the Centre for Latin American Studies
in the University of Oxford. The article is based on an unpublished earlier
study for Oxfam on economic liberalization and its impact on rural poverty
and inequality in Peru. The author is grateful to Tom Brass for editorial
comment and suggestions.

Whither O Campesinato? Historical Peasantries of Brazilian Amazonia

Stephen Nugent, Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths College,
University of London and Institute of Latin American Studies. Email:
snugent@gold.ac.uk. Thanks are extended to Tom Brass for editorial
suggestions and comment.

From Dependency to Reform and Back Again: The Chilean Peasantry

During the Twentieth Century
Warwick Murray, Institute of Geography and Development, Victoria
University, New Zealand. Email: warwick.murray@vuw.ac.nz. I would like
to extend thanks to all of the Chilean farmers interviewed for this study. I am
grateful to Bob Gwynne and Cristóbal Kay for the generous expert guidance
and feedback on the PhD on which some of the article is based. Tom Brass
should also be thanked for the extensive and constructive editorial comments
and suggestions on the first draft.

Globalization and the Reinvention of Andean Tradition: The Politics of

Community and Ethnicity in Highland Bolivia
John McNeish is at the Centre for Comparative Research on Poverty
(CROP), the University of Bergen, Norway, where he coordinates a research
programme on the Caribbean and South America with the Consejo
Latinamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO). The article benefited from
helpful editorial observations by Tom Brass.

Devil Pact Narratives in Rural Central America: Class, Gender and

'Resistance'
Kees Jansen, Technology and Agrarian Development group. E-mail:
kees.jansen@alg.tao.wau.nl; Esther Roquas, Law and Governance group. E-
mail: esther.roquas@alg.ar.wau.nl; both at Wageningen University, The
Netherlands. We would like to thank The Netherlands Foundation for the
Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO) for funding the research. We
appreciate the helpful comments of Tom Brass, Paul Richards and
participants of the Ceres seminar 'Acts of Man and Nature?'

Representing the Peasantry? Struggles for/about Land in Brazil

José de Souza Martins, Professor of Sociology, University of São Paulo,
Brazil. The article in its present form owes much to the editorial comments of
Tom Brass.
 On Which Side of What Barricade? Subaltern Resistance in Latin
America and Elsewhere
Tom Brass formerly lectured in the Social and Political Sciences Faculty at
the University of Cambridge.