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Alternative Action in Costa Rica: Peasants as Positive Participants

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Leslie Anderson
Leslie Anderson
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Colorado
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Extract

As the developing world modernises and traditionally excluded groups seek to take part in their societies, the political activity of the peasantry assumes an ever-increasing importance. Yet most scholarship has focused on the more spectacular forms of political action such as rebellion. In recent years some scholars have turned their attention to the other extreme of everyday resistance,1 but such contributions are still limited in number. This paper utilises an inclusive view of peasant politics and takes the position that all kinds of peasant political action are different parts of one whole, such that a similarity of motivation lies behind them all. It concentrates upon a category of political action that falls between rebellion and everyday resistance: organised, non-violent peasant protest. It studies these alternative forms of political action within a political system which is relatively open to such tactics. The story which emerges reveals that by resorting to non-violent protest, peasants can make a positive contribution to their societies and improve their own welfare. In developing this argument the paper links the study of non-violent protest to existing theories and research on peasant violence and everyday resistance. In doing so it argues that the explanations for riot and rebellion given in the moral economy theory, and which underlie acts of everyday resistance, also help to account for collective, non-violent peasant political activity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 22 , Issue 1-2 , March 1990 , pp. 89 - 113
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

1 This research has examined either everyday resistance or organised non-violent peasant participation through cooperative reform. For an example of the former see Scott, James C., Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985).Google Scholar For examples of the latter see White, Christine, ‘Agricultural Planning, Pricing Policy and Co-operatives in Vietnam’, World Development, vol. 13, no. 1 (1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘Everyday Resistance, Socialist Revolution and Rural Development: The Vietnamese Case’, Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 13, no. 2 (01 1986)Google Scholar as well as ‘Agricultural Planning, Pricing Policy and Co-operatives in Vietnam,’ World Development, vol. 13, no. 1 (1985)Google Scholar; and Luciak, Ilja, ‘Popular Democracy in the New Nicaragua, The Case of a Rural Mass Organization’, Comparative Politics, vol. 20, no. 1 (10 1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Wolf, Eric, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1969).Google Scholar

3 Scott, James, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Subsistence and Rebellion in Southeast Asia (New Haven, 1976).Google Scholar

4 Popkin, Samuel, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley, 1979).Google Scholar Popkin's theory is also well-known for its stress upon the importance of leaders or ‘political entrepreneurs’ who can convince would-be peasant revolutionaries that joining the cause is of individual benefit. A similar image of the Viet Cong is found in Race, Jeffrey, War Comes to hong An, Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province (Berkeley, 1972), ch. 4.Google Scholar

5 Migdal, Joel, Peasants, Politics and Revolution: Pressures Towards Political and Social Change in the Third World (Princeton, N.J., 1974).Google Scholar

6 Ibid., pp. 228–32.

7 Paige, Jeffery, Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World (New York, 1975).Google Scholar Paige's work contrasts sharply with the ‘grassroots’ view of Wolf and Scott. With an economically deterministic approach, this theory explains that certain types of agrarian societies are inevitably susceptible to revolution by virtue of their production arrangements while other types of agrarian economies and industrial economies are immune from revolution.

8 Increasing poverty among the peasantry is evidenced in an explosion of peasant unions, growing landlessness and a rising rate of land invasion, and a dramatic surge in interest rates accompanied by greater scarcity of credit available to small holders. For a discussion of some of these issues see Venegas, Helio Fallas, ‘La Política Agrícola en la Crisis de Centroamérica’, Estudios Sociales Centroamericanos, no. 45 (09–12 1987).Google Scholar

9 Gudmunson, Lowell, Las Luchas Agrarias del Guanacaste, 1900–1935: Campesinos, Parcelarios y de Hacienda, Respuestas al Capitalismo Agrario y al Reformismo Político (Heredia, Costa Rica, 1981).Google Scholar For more comprehensive and recent studies of Guanacaste, also by Gudmunson, see Hacendados, Políticosy Precaristas: La Ganadería y el Latifundismo Guanacasteco 1800–1950 (San José, 1983)Google Scholar and Costa Rica Before Coffee: Society and Economy on the Eve of the Export Boom (Baton Rouge, 1986).Google Scholar See also Edelman, Marc, ‘La Integratión de una Región Periférica al Estado Nacional y a la Economía Internacional: Procesos de Proletarización y de Recampesinazación en la Provincia de Guanacaste, Costa Rica’, unpublished manuscript, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, Universidad de Costa Rica, San José, 1981.Google Scholar

10 Seligson, M., ‘Trust, Efficacy and Modes of Political Participation: A study of Costa Rican Peasants’, British Journal of Political Science, vol. 10, part 1 (01 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Booth, John and Seligson, Mitchell, ‘Peasants as Activists, A Reevaluation of Political Participation in the Countryside’, Comparative Political Studies, vol. 12, no. 1 (04, 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Seligson, M., ‘The Impact of Agrarian Reform: A Study of Costa Rica’, Journal of Developing Areas, vol. 13 (1979).Google Scholar

12 Seligson, M., Peasants of Costa Rica and the Development of Agrarian Capitalism (Madison, Wisc, 1980), chs. 5, 6.Google Scholar

13 Ibid., p. 75.

14 See, for example, Granados, Carlos and Ohlsson, Anita, ‘Organizatión del Territorio y Resultados Electorales en Costa Rica, 1953–1982’, Estudios Socials: Centroamericanos, no. 36 (09–12 1983)Google Scholar; Seligson, Peasants of Costa Rica, and Booth, and Seligson, , ‘Peasants as Activists’; as well as Sánchez, Oscar Arias, ¿Quién Gobierna en Costa Rica? (San Jose, 1984), chs. 2, 5.Google Scholar

15 In the same survey 83% of peasant respondents felt that the act of voting was important as an expression of support for the Costa Rican democratic system. The peasants made a clear distinction between the symbolic value of voting and the use of voting as an effective political tactic. Some respondents explained that connection by saying that the presence of an electoral democracy allows them to engage in organised activity which produces results although the voting itself accomplished nothing. A minority of 17% felt that even the symbolic act of voting was not important.

16 All peasant quotations cited here are from interviews conducted in 1985, 1986, and 1987.

17 Reventos, Ciska, ‘Desarrollo Económico, Estructura y Contradicciones Sociales en la Productión de Café’, Revista de Historia, no. 14 (1985), pp. 180–2.Google Scholar

18 Wolf, Eric, ‘Closed Corporate Peasant Communities in Mesoamerica and Central Java’, in Potter, J. et al. , Peasant Society: A Reader (Boston, 1967).Google Scholar

19 A union leader who had been given the task of finding landless peasants from the region to settle on land in a distant part of Costa Rica could find only three takers. Interview with Leon Victor Barrantes UPANacional offices, San Juan de Tibas, Costa Rica, 11 Feb. 1985.

20 This crisis began with the rise in oil prices between 1973 and 1979 but manifested itself in Central American agriculture in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Venegas, Fallas, ‘La Política Agrícola’, p. 72.Google Scholar

21 IMF policy imposed from the outside was largely responsible for this rise in interest rates. Ibid., p. 77.

22 When confronted with having neglected the landless, union leaders now claim that solving the landless problem has never been the goal of UPANacional. Nevertheless, the official statement of union goals records an original intention to address this problem.

23 A word of caution is again warranted. Although UPA has clearly improved conditions for small and medium peasants in the central region, rural residents there are still potentially subject to increased stratification as a result of the modernisation of the coffee industry. The extent to which they are able to hold their own depends in part upon UPA's ability to do its job.

24 In 1974 the United Fruit Company alone owned 14,537 hectares in Limón. Contreras, Fernando, ‘El Enclave Bananero en Costa Rica’, Tesis de Grado, University of Costa Rica, Faculty of Social Sciences, School of History and Geography, 1974, p. 254.Google Scholar

25 At age forty the company considers workers to have passed their physical prime. Plantation labourers are required to leap across ditches, balance on board bridges, and wade through deep mud while carrying banana stems which weigh 80–100 lbs. It is small wonder that health deteriorates prematurely and that by age forty physical strength has begun to decline. In addition, the firing of workers while they still have some strength left for other work relieves the company of having to pay retirement and disability benefits when the workers retire or if they are injured on the job. See Bourgois, Philippe, ‘Ethnic Diversity on a Corporate Plantation: The United Fruit Company in Bocas del Toro, Panama and Talamanca, Costa Rica’, unpublished dissertation, Anthropology, Stanford University, 1985, pp. 29, 91, 148.Google Scholar

26 This respondent is referring to approximately 1960 when the exchange rate was $1 = 5.60 colones. International Financial Statistics, vol. 14, no. 3 (03, 1961), International Monetary Fund, Washington, D.C., p. 88Google Scholar

27 Bourgois, , ‘Ethnic Diversity’, p. 23, 55.Google Scholar

28 Established in 1978, UPAGRA is and has always been an independent peasant union autonomous from the State and from official connections to political parties. Despite its independent position, its militance in favour of affiliates and its tremendous organisational capacity have unnerved conservative members of the Costa Rican elite, particularly large landowners. The result of such concern has been an energetic campaign against the union by the Costa Rican media, particularly the press (which is owned by conservative business elites). In addition, when the union was first founded, it received rhetorical support from the Costa Rican Communist Party. That support never went beyond rhetoric in the early months, however, because the Party was so urban-based and -oriented that it had little advice to offer about how to organise the peasantry. More recently, however, UPAGRA and the communist parties (now two) of Costa Rica are far from being allies. UPAGRA supports private property in land and works for reformist changes within the system of commercial enterprise. Its leaders maintain that the parties consist of arm-chair activists who do nothing about current problems while waiting for the revolution. Officials of the communist parties, in turn, characterise UPAGRA as bourgeois and devoted to short-term solutions which fail to address the systemic problems.

29 The names devised for this State institution betray the ambiguous and reluctant Costa Rican attitude towards agrarian reform. Both names suggest every kind of agrarian policy except agrarian reform. The verb ‘colonisation’ refers to the settlement of landless peasants on State land, much of which could be virgin rain forest or national parks, rather than land redistribution. In Latin America colonisation is frequently substituted for redistribution and for solving the problems of land concentration. Garcia, Antonio, ‘Agrarian Reform and Social Development in Bolivia’, in Stavenhagen, Rodolfo, Agrarian Problems and Peasant Movements in Latin America (Garden City, NY, 1970), p. 318.Google Scholar Fallas Venegas argues that Costa Rica has been guilty of precisely this substitution, thus failing to solve the problem of land redistribution. This failure is one cause of the agrarian crisis in Costa Rica today’. ‘La Política Agrícola…’, p. 74.

30 Francisco Barahona argues that IDA exists only to give the appearance of agrarian reform without redistributing much land. Reforma Agraria y Poder Político: El Caso de Costa Rica, Transformación Estructural (San José, 1980), pp. 233, 254–5, 288.Google Scholar In his book of the same year, Seligson offers a much more sympathetic assessment of IDA, arguing that any failings on its part are due to inadequate financial support from a State which is not wealthy. Seligson, Peasants of Costa Rica, ch. 6.

31 IDA has a mandate to expropriate land but not to confiscate it. Expropriation requires that payment be made for the property on a par with its market value. Given the shortage of State funds, the requirement that IDA purchase property at market value is another factor which prolongs the process of land redistribution.

32 Between the occupation of IDA offices and the official distribution of land titles eighteen months passed while IDA tried to retard the process and distract the peasants from their purpose. At one point IDA made up all the titles in the wrong names. Procrastination and false promises frequently constitute part of the State bureaucratic response to popular demands for land which is why peasants are reluctant to traverse the IDA bureaucracy in an attempt to acquire land. For example, an organised group of homeless urban residents invaded land outside San José, demanding that they be allowed to construct houses on the site. They also experienced official filibustering and deceit in the course of their struggle. These were urban workers, however, operating close to the capital and public attention. Accordingly, the State delayed less and attempted fewer tricks than it had with the peasants in isolated Limón. Centro de Estudios Para La Acción Social (CEPAS), ‘Condiciones de Vida y Dinámica Organizativa en un Asentamiento Urbano de Costa Rica: La experienca de la Comunidad de los Sauces de Tres Ríos’, Estudios Sociales Centroamericanos, no. 44 (05–08 1987).Google Scholar In Costa Rica, as elsewhere, the peasants are the easiest group to neglect and ignore. While one might attribute IDA's behaviour to inadequate finances or bureaucratic red tape, the peasants see it as a deliberate attempt to deny them their right to land. As of 1988, some landowners in La Lucha still do not have title to their land.

33 Partly as a result of troubles with IDA and other State institutions, most residents of La Lucha do not vote in national elections. They see elections as farcical contests among the rich which yield nothing for the poor. As one respondent explained ‘They [politicians] go in [enter office] to get richer than they already are. It makes no difference for us. We still have to work if we want to eat.’ For these peasants the value of the democracy lies not in elections but in the general willingness to allow them to organise and work through their union.

34 Those familiar with rural Costa Rica may wonder at the absence of ‘professional’ land invaders from the La Lucha story. Professional squatters invade land and accept a parcel from IDA only to sell at a profit and repeat the process elsewhere. This activity is illegal and IDA attempts to impede it. Although the actions of professional squatters are problematic in Costa Rica, their numbers and the extent of their activity are subject to extreme exaggeration by the media which seeks to portray all squatters as criminals. My fieldwork and surveys in La Lucha and El Hogar revealed that such professionals had not been allowed to receive land from this invasion. The exclusion is due to the vigilance of the peasant union itself. Peasants are usually in an excellent position to distinguish between the truly needy and the profiteers. The La Lucha invaders knew that their own legitimate need for land would be jeopardised by the involvement of anyone who had previously received land from IDA or anyone without a genuine interest in farming. They therefore screened each other closely. This is not to say that none of the invaders eventually sold their land. Some attempted to farm their plots but were forced under by the scarcity of credit and slim profit margins. However, all participants in this invasion acted in good faith. The question remains whether or not this was an exceptional group of invaders. Only further extensive fieldwork in other invasion sites holds the answer. Yet if this group was unusual in its good intentions such a state of affairs would speak strongly in favour of peasant-organised invasions rather than IDA's bureaucratic solution. Although IDA's behaviour in La Lucha leads us to believe that IDA would like to eliminate peasant organisation, perhaps it is precisely such organisations which can best fulfil IDA's own goal of prohibiting professional squatters from obtaining land.

35 Translated ‘vale la pena’.

36 White, ‘Agricultural Planning,… ’and ‘Everyday Resistance,…’, and Luciak, ‘Popular Democracy in the New Nicaragua,…’.

37 Powell, John, ‘Venezuela: The Peasant Union Movement’, in Landsberger, Henry (ed.), Latin American Peasant Movements (Ithaca, 1969), pp. 89–90.Google Scholar

38 Thorner, Daniel, ‘Peasant Economy as a Category in History’, in Shanin, Teodor (ed.), Peasants and Peasant Societies, 2nd edition (Oxford and New York, 1987), p. 65.Google Scholar

39 Ibid., p. 2.

40 For a more detailed definition of ‘peasantry’ along these lines see Ibid., pp. 2–5.