Are Latin American peasant movements still a force for change? Some new paradigms revisited

This article is a critique of structuralist and postmodern approaches to the study of agrarian reform and the viability, nature and significance of peasant and landless movements in Latin America. Contrary to the dominant structuralist view, we argue that peasant and landless workers’ movements in Latin America are not anachronistic but dynamic modern classes, which in many contexts play a major role in opposing the dominant neoliberal agenda. Against postmodern interpretations of such grassroots agrarian movements, we also argue that in terms of action and programme, peasant and landless workers’ movements have raised fundamental class issues, in some instances combining them with ethnic demands. Deploying a reconstituted class analysis, we examine four cases of peasant/landless workers movements currently challenging state power: the Rural Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, the Revolutionary Armed Forces in Colombia, the National Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities in Ecuador, and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico. Our conclusion is that in the current context, peasant and landless workers’ movements in Latin America are engaged in a modern form of struggle, combining traditional forms of solidarity not only with the acceptance/adaptation of modern goals and techniques, but also with a strategic understanding of the levers of power in the national and international system.     

Resistance,class struggle and social movements in Latin America: contemporary dynamics

ABSTRACT

This paper traces out the changing forms of the resistance associated with each advance in the capitalist development of the forces of production over the course of the neoliberal era in Latin America. The central argument is that the resistance to the forces of agrarian change and capitalist development over the past three decades has been mobilised by a succession of social movements, whose dynamics and changing forms can best be understood in terms of Marxist class theory. The central focus of the paper is on the current dynamics of the class struggle on the expanding frontier of extractive capital in South America in the context of what has been described as a ‘progressive cycle’ in Latin American politics – a cycle that to all appearances is coming to an end.     

The Challenge of Diversity in Rural Latin America: A Rejoinder to Jean-Pierre Reed (and Others)

A review in the Journal of Peasant Studies by Reed [2003] of our book on indigenous movements and the state in Latin America provides a suitable opportunity to discuss several comments on questions raised in that text. In this rejoinder I argue that we do not judge neoliberalism a positive factor that provides indigenous peoples with a democratic space to press their demands. I show that our discussion of the neoliberal ‘cultural project’ provides the ground precisely for questioning the neoliberal brand of multiculturalism. Although the latter entails some degree of cultural affirmation, it simultaneously involves economic marginalization and disempowerment. This leads in turn to a further discussion of the relationship between indigenous movements and citizenship, and the strategy choices indigenous movements face in their pursuit of multicultural citizenship.     

The agroecological revolution in Latin America: rescuing nature,ensuring food sovereignty and empowering peasants

This paper provides an overview of what we call ‘agroecological revolution’ in Latin America. As the expansion of agroexports and biofuels continues unfolding in Latin America and warming the planet, the concepts of food sovereignty and agroecology-based agricultural production gain increasing attention. New approaches and technologies involving the application of blended agroecological science and indigenous knowledge systems are being spearheaded by a significant number of peasants, NGOs and some government and academic institutions, and they are proving to enhance food security while conserving natural resources, and empowering local, regional and national peasant organizations and movements. An assessment of various grassroots initiatives in Latin America reveals that the application of the agroecological paradigm can bring significant environmental, economic and political benefits to small farmers and rural communities as well as urban populations in the region. The trajectory of the agroecological movements in Brazil, the Andean region, Mexico, Central America and Cuba and their potential to promote broad-based and sustainable agrarian and social change is briefly presented and examined. We argue that an emerging threefold ‘agroecological revolution’, namely, epistemological, technical and social, is creating new and unexpected changes directed at restoring local self-reliance, conserving and regenerating natural resource agrobiodiversity, producing healthy foods with low inputs, and empowering peasant organizations. These changes directly challenge neoliberal modernization policies based on agribusiness and agroexports while opening new political roads for Latin American agrarian societies.     

Social Movements and Alliance-Building in Latin America

In the midst of an accelerating capitalist crisis, the enthusiasm of many academic commentators for social movements as a form of grassroots political agency capable of successfully resisting a globally rampant capitalism has not abated. This despite the weight of evidence to the contrary, which indicates that in Latin America the interests of farmers and smallholding peasants belonging to these movements are not best served by engaging with center-left parliamentary politics. Case studies of such alliance-building examined here include social movements in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela, and also Mexico, Costa Rica, Peru, Colombia, Chile, the Dominican Republic and Haiti.     

Forests lost and found in tropical Latin America: the woodland ‘green revolution’

Forest dynamics in the Latin American tropics now take directions that no one would have predicted a decade ago. Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has dropped by over 80 percent, a pattern mimicked elsewhere in Amazonia, and is down by more than a third in Central America. Forest resurgence – increasing forest cover in inhabited landscapes or abandoned lands – is also expanding. In Latin America, woodland cover is increasing, at least for now, more than it is being lost. These dramatic shifts suggest quite profound and rapid transformations of agrarian worlds, and imply that previous models of understanding small-farmer dynamics merit significant review centering less on field agriculture and more on emergent forest regimes, and in many ways a new, increasingly globalized economic and policy landscape that emphasizes woodlands.

This paper analyzes changing deforestation drivers and the implications of forest recovery and wooded landscapes emerging through social pressure, social policy, new government agencies, governance, institutions, ideologies, markets, migration and ‘neo-liberalization’ of nature. These changes include an expanded, but still constrained, arena for new social movements and civil society. These point to significant structural changes, changes in tropical natures, and require reframing of the ‘peasant question’ and the functions of rurality in the twenty-first century in light of forest dynamics.     

recasting the role of the intellectual: Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral

The life and work of Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin American writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945, is examined as an example of how difficult it was for women to win recognition as intellectuals in 20th-century Latin America. Despite an international reputation for erudition and political commitment, Mistral has traditionally been represented in stereotypically gendered terms as the ‘Mother’ and ‘Schoolteacher’ of the Americas, and it has been repeatedly claimed that she was both apolitical and anti-intellectual. This article contests such claims, arguing that she was not only committed to fulfilling the role of an intellectual, but that she also elaborated a critique of the dominant male Latin American view of intellectuality, probing the boundaries of both rationality and nationality as constructed by male Euro-Americans. In so doing, she addressed many of the crucial issues that still confront intellectuals today in Latin America and elsewhere.     

Agrarian structure,foreign investment in land,and land prices in Brazil

The recent global rush for farmland in Latin America has produced a dramatic increase in the level of foreign investment in land in Brazil. The current trend accentuates the ongoing process of foreignization of agriculture associated with the production of grains, sugar, ethanol and other commodities, increasing land prices. In response, the Brazilian government reestablished a legal mechanism for ‘controlling’ land-based foreign investment which has proven neither efficient nor effective in solving land concentration. This paper examines this issue by analyzing the causes of the increase in investment as well as the consequences of this process with respect to land prices, critically situating land-based investments and the government's policy response in a broader discussion of the demands of agrarian social movements.     

Transnational labor action in Latin America: from the struggle against the Free Trade Area of the Americas to the return of labor relations

Neoliberalism was the hegemonic political and economic model in Latin America during the 1990s. The promotion of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) was a fundamental policy to extend neoliberal policies and foreign influence throughout the region. In a momentum built throughout that decade and into the 2000s, the trade union movement joined forces with social movements to create a counterhegemonic force using traditional and novel power resources. This alliance managed to defeat the FTAA and was a central force in supporting new center-left administrations throughout the region. The developments since that historic event have shown the relevance of political contexts and strategic outlooks for the long-term success in maintaining, or failing to maintain, such kinds of alliances.     

Stories of night and dawn: Latin American women today

Latin America: surrounded by blue, intemperate and at times macabre oceans; enclosure of enormous mountain ranges, volcanos, glaciers, rivers, jungles; land of poets who have come from tiny little villages to reveal the secrets of their far-off regions and to sing of them to other men. Let us recall the rural school teacher, Gabriela Mistral, and Pablo Neruda, both from Chile, and Gabriel García Márquez, of Colombia, who taught us that yellow butterflies are magical and that a woman hanging out sheets in the garden can indeed ascent to heaven.It is worth noting that all three of these writers were awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in recent decades: Mistral in 1945; Neruda in 1971; and García Márquez in 1982. Latin America's other winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was Miguel Angel Asturias, of Guatemala, in 1967. All these splendid writers were from an area said to be Third World, said to be underdeveloped, or in the new parlance, ‘developing’.And then we have the other Latin America: a land of absences; of sudden deaths that never occur by accident; a continent of the ones who have disappeared; of the Madwomen of the Plaza de Mayo, the women who, for years now, gather every Thursday in the deserted Plaza de Mayo of Buenos Aires to weep, to scream and to beseech heaven and earth for news of their missing loved ones.Where is this Latin America? What is it really like?     

Older women's living arrangements and family relationships in urban Mexico

It is often assumed that in Latin America the family will care for elderly relatives. Yet, older people's dependence on family members should not be regarded as unproblematic. This article reviews the living arrangements of older women in urban Mexico, where, despite widely held beliefs about the special treatment merited by women as mothers, one in nine older women now lives alone. Recent figures suggest the proportion is growing rapidly. We use a life course perspective to explore the reasons for this pattern and examine the implications for the well-being of unmarried women living alone or with married daughters or sons. The article presents findings from a research project on gender and the home using a combination of qualitative and survey research methods in Guadalajara, Mexico's second largest city.     

Indigenous Land Policies,Culture and Resistance in Latin America

Considered here are three edited collections about Latin America that address a wide variety of key rural development issues arising from landholding. The latter include not just methodological approaches (anthropology, political economy) but also questions of identity (gender, indigenous) and sustainability (the environment). Two seemingly antithetical interpretations of the impact of neoliberal project on indigenous populations are in evidence: as economically disempowering, but as politically empowering. A possible synthesis of these contrasting positions is suggested.     

A tribute to Willem Assies (1954–2010): reflections on his contribution to peasant and indigenous studies

This article discusses the manifold contributions of Willem Assies to the social sciences and Latin American studies. It focuses on his writings on agrarian and peasant studies, social movements, and indigenous peoples. In particular, he made important contributions to our understanding of multicultural citizenship, the multiethnic state, and plurinational democracy. His writings had a major impact on those working on rural and indigenous peoples' issues, although the Dutch academic establishment largely failed to appreciate his exceptional talents. It is argued in this article that he never wavered from his early recognition of the importance of class in social analysis, while acknowledging its limitations. In his view, one of the central challenges facing the indigenous peoples' social movements was how to link indigenous issues to general national problems. To what extent had they met this challenge? His premature death prevented him from exploring this key issue further, but hopefully other scholars will take up the baton and continue to debate his ideas.     

How to live precariously: Lygia Clark's Caminhando and Tropicalism in 1960s Brazil

Economic booms and busts, major social upheavals, brutal military dictatorships: precariousness has been a feature of everyday life in Latin America since its independence. But what does it mean to “propose precariousness as a new idea of existence,” as Brazilian artist Lygia Clark did in 1966? This essay focuses on one specific work by Clark, her 1963 Caminhando, in order to explore the ways in which the very status of performative practices can respond to their social and political conditions and thus offer a model for a subjective experience of precariousness in everyday life. A close study of the process that led Clark to create precarious works will be further supplemented by a contextual analysis of debates about precariousness and adversity within the Tropicalist movement that emerged in late-1960s Brazil, which included artist Hélio Oiticica as well as singers and film-makers.     

Land grabbing in Latin America and the Caribbean

Land grabbing has gained momentum in Latin America and the Caribbean during the past decade. The phenomenon has taken different forms and character as compared to processes that occur in other regions of the world, especially Africa. It puts into question some of the assumptions in the emerging literature on land grabbing, suggesting these are too food-centered/too food crisis-centered, too land-centred, too centred on new global food regime players – China, South Korea, Gulf States and India – and too centred on Africa. There are four key mechanisms through which land grabbing in Latin American and the Caribbean has been carried out: food security initiatives, energy/fuel security ventures, other climate change mitigation strategies, and recent demands for resources from newer hubs of global capital. The hallmark of land grabbing in the region is its intra-regional character: the key investors are (Trans-)Latin American companies, often in alliance with international capital and the central state. Initial evidence suggests that recent land investments have consolidated the earlier trend away from (re)distributive land policies in most countries in the region, and are likely to result in widespread reconcentration of land and capital.     

The paradoxes of Latin America's ‘Pink Tide’: Venezuela and the project of agrarian reform

A ‘pink tide’ swept over Latin America following Hugo Chávez's 1998 election to the presidency in Venezuela, bringing to power multiple left or center-left governments. What possibilities for and obstacles to social change were presented by their having attained power through the ballot box? This question is explored through an examination of Venezuela's agrarian reform and the promotion of agroecology within it. The article paper concludes that, while the reform has been successful in providing resources to the land-poor and landless, the landed class has not passively acquiesced to this redistributive effort. Moreover, a situation of ‘dual power’ – in which parts of the government remain in the hands of the previously predominant class, while the newly powerful class gains influence in others – characterizes the Venezuelan state.     

Marx's third class: Capitalist landed property and capitalist development

This article consists of a detailed discussion of Marx's theorisation of a landed class in the capitalist mode of production. It is argued that Marx does not consider landlords as feudal leftovers but does indeed succeed in providing a sophisticated theory of capitalist landed property as an independent class, which conforms in all major respects with his theorisation of capital and wage‐labour. Moreover, the role of landed property in the process of capitalist development of relative surplus‐value extraction is analysed. It is argued that it is possible to speak of different forms of capitalist relations according to whether landed property or capital provides the leading force behind the development process. Capitalist development is then shown to be the outcome of a class struggle between landed property, capital and wage‐labour. This process is briefly illustrated with reference to England in the 1840s and Latin America in the 1960s.     

‘Centre-left’ regimes in Latin America: History repeating itself as farce?

Examined here is the phenomenon of the‘centre-left’ regime that has emerged recently in Latin America, and the reasons why such palpably neo-liberal governments attract the uncritical support of leftist intellectuals worldwide. The‘centre-left’ governments of Lula in Brazil, Kirchner in Argentina, Tabare Vazquez in Uruguay, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Toledo in Peru, and Gutierrez in Ecuador are measured against a set of criteria designating espousal of leftist politics, a test failed by them all. It is argued here that, in order to develop authentically leftist views about future patterns of agrarian policy and transformation, and to support these once developed, it is necessary first to sweep away the rhetoric that these days is taken for‘leftist’ views.     

Territories of peace: alter-territorialities in Colombia’s San José de Apartadó Peace Community

ABSTRACT

Scholars are increasingly re-theorizing territory beyond the nation-state given Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups’ demands for ‘territory’ as they confront land grabbing in Latin America. Yet alternative territorialities are not limited to such ethnic groups. Based on 16 months of ethnographic research between 2011 and 2016, I explore the relational territoriality produced by a peasant ‘peace community’ in San José de Apartadó, Colombia. By tracing the collective political subject produced by the Peace Community’s active production of peace through a set of spatial practices, places and values, which include massacre commemorations, food sovereignty initiatives and Indigenous–peasant solidarity networks, this contribution presents a conceptual framework for analyzing diverse territorial formations.     

Fleeing rural violence: Mam women seeking gendered justice in Guatemala and the U.S.

ABSTRACT

I use the concept of gendered embodied structures of violence as the analytical framework for illustrating how in rural Huehuetenango, Guatemala, historical and contemporary structures and processes of violence which center the normalization of multiple forms of implied or actual physical and sexual violence against women (and often other men and children) continue to undermine efforts to strengthen women’s rights and provide access to safety and justice for women. Overlapping structures of primarily male power suggest the difficulty of separating state and non-state actors from the vectors of violence affecting women. This article contributes to emerging literature on indigenous women’s access to justice in Latin America through adding a transnational lens to this discussion and suggesting why we cannot separate pubic from private violence and state from non-state actors.