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Mixed Blessings: Disruption and Organization among Peasant Unions in Costa Rica

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Leslie Anderson
Leslie Anderson*
Affiliation:
University of Colorado
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One of the most urgent issues in contemporary Latin America is the popular struggle against rural poverty. Because Latin American states have failed to alleviate rural impoverishment, the poor have undertaken to solve their own problems. One fruitful way of improving their conditions has proved to be forming grass-roots peasant organizations outside state auspices. This approach, however, can bear fruit only under a democratic regime or in states that provide some political space in which peasants can act without being crushed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , 1991 , pp. 111 - 143
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

∗

This article is based on a paper presented at the meeting of the American Political Science Association in September 1988 in Washington, D.C. I would like to thank Jonathan Fox, Erwina Godfrey, Lawrence Mohr, Frances Fox Piven, several anonymous reviewers, and the LAR editors for helpful comments on an earlier version. I also wish to acknowledge support from the U.S. International Education Foundation in a Fulbright Grant that allowed me to complete the early stages of this research.

References

Notes

1. The fieldwork on which this article is based began in 1985 and is still going on. I have conducted interviews with fifty members of UPANacional, forty-four members of UPAGRA, and fifteen members of La Coordinadora Atlántica, many of them several times. With the exception of one person, I have interviewed all previous and present leaders of all three unions at least once and usually several times. I also interviewed local and national officials of the Instituto de Desarrollo Agrario. I have reviewed union and IDA files and documents as well as newspaper accounts of events discussed. During field trips, I have had numerous opportunities to watch the unions in action in such events as blockages, demonstrations, marches, national congresses, and general assemblies to elect officers and decide policy. I have also visited land invasion sites, those in process as well as successfully established communities. In 1985 and 1986, a research assistant surveyed all members of one UPA village (110 persons) and two UPAGRA villages (172 persons). The survey consisted of twelve questions. One of the two UPAGRA villages was part of the UPAGRA-supported invasion community. For more detailed reports on those surveys and their use, see Leslie Anderson, “Alternative Action in Costa Rica: Peasants as Positive Participants,” journal of Latin American Studies 22, pt. 1 (Feb. 1990):89–113; and Anderson, “Preceding Post-Materialism: Economic and Non-Economic Political Motivation in the Third World,” Comparative Political Studies 23, no. 1 (Apr. 1990):80–113.

2. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage Books, 1977).

3. Some of the best-known theories of peasant rebellion are found in the following works: Eric Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper, 1969); James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Subsistence and Rebellion in Southeast Asia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976); and Samuel Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979).

4. Piven and Cloward, Poor People's Movements, intro., chap. 1, pp. 82, 89.

5. According to union leaders, fourteen separate peasant unions were operating in Costa Rica in 1987. That number changes periodically as unions come and go. Some may function for more than a year before registering themselves as a union; others may disappear, leaving only their names in the official records. In addition, umbrella organizations with which several unions may affiliate themselves behave like unions in some ways. Political parties may attempt periodically to organize peasants for specific projects. The total of fourteen unions cited excludes umbrella organizations and unions affiliated with any political parties.

6. Lowell Gudmundson argues that the trend has been moving in this direction for decades, although it has reached crisis proportions only in the past ten years. See Gudmundson, Costa Rica before Coffee: Society and Economy on the Eve of the Export Boom (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1986), 55.

7. Jorge Rovira Mas, Costa Rica en los años '80, 3d ed. (San Pedro de Montes de Oca, Costa Rica: Editorial Porvenir, 1989), 49.

8. The term self-exploitation in the context of the peasantry originated with A. V. Chayanov. He uses the term only to connote a peasant family's use of its own labor power, without the Marxist meaning of exploitation referring to the cruel and extremely taxing misuse of labor power by a capitalist entrepreneur. Chayanov's theory recognizes, however, that in conditions of economic hardship peasant families may indeed be forced by circumstances to misuse and overuse their own labor power to such an extreme that Marx's meaning of exploitation becomes relevant to the term self-exploitation. For a new presentation of Chayanov's major work, see The Theory of Peasant Economy, edited by Daniel Thorner, Basile Kerblay, and R. E. F. Smith (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).

9. For a history of the struggle between the peasants and the ranchers in Guanacaste, see Lowell Gudmundson, “Las luchas agrarias del Guanacaste, 1900–35,” manuscript deposited at the Universidad Nacional, Heredia, Costa Rica, 1981; and M. Edelman, “La integración de una región periférica al estado nacional y a la economía internacional: procesos de proletarización y de recampesinación en la provincia de Guanacaste, Costa Rica,” manuscript written for Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, Universidad de Costa Rica, San José, 1980.

10. For a history of the Costa Rican banana industry, including its establishment in Limón province and its later move to western Puntarenas province, see Jeffrey Casey Gasper, Limón, 1880–1940 (San José: Editorial Costa Rica, 1979).

11. Philippe Bourgois, The Ethnicity of Work (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Bourgois reports that employees work up to ten hours per day and are required to carry bunches of bananas weighing eighty to a hundred pounds while jumping across irrigation ditches, balancing on single-board bridges across them, or wading through ankle-deep mud. The workers are paid according to piecework, which causes them to work harder and faster and “results in premature aging and rapid health deterioration.” It is perhaps not surprising that workers have passed their physical prime by age forty.

12. Biologists and ecologists inform us that Costa Rica, lying as it does between two continents and two seas, offers a larger and more varied collection of flora and fauna than any other country of similar size on earth. Among Third World governments, the Costa Rican state is unusually aware of the need to preserve some of the natural environment for the benefit of biology and the environment. Ironically, this awareness and the positive steps the government has taken toward land and forest conservation have only increased the pressure on dwindling land resources and provided yet another source of competition for peasants.

13. Tom Barry, Roots of Rebellion: Land and Hunger in Central America (Boston, Mass.: South End Press, 1987), 150.

14. United States Agency for International Development, Country Study: Costa Rica, Fiscal Year 1980 (Washington, D.C.: USAID, 1980).

15. Rovira Mas, Costa Rica en los años '80, 44 and 150.

16. For a general discussion of land invasion in Costa Rica, its successes and failures, see Mitchell Seligson, Peasants of Costa Rica and the Development of Agrarian Capitalism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), chap. 5. For the story of specific land invasions, see 107–9; see also Anderson, “Alternative Action.”

17. The Instituto de Desarrollo Agrario (now the IDA) began as the Instituto de Tierras y Colonización (ITCO).

18. Quarterly Economic Review, supplement, 1984.

19. To date, the most extensive review of the IDA's specific accomplishments is critical of the institute. See Francisco Barahona, Reforma agraria y poder político: el caso de Costa Rica, transformación estructural (San José: Editorial Universidad de Costa Rica, 1980), 233, 254–55, 288. Barahona argues that Costa Rica never possessed the political will for land reform in the first place. Others have argued in a similar vein that Costa Rica uses a tactic common throughout Latin America: that of “colonizing” land, or giving away state land and calling it “land reform,” but never actually redistributing any private property. See, for example, Helio Fallas Venegas, “La política agrícola en la crisis de Centroamérica,” Estudios Sociales Centroamericanos 45 (Sept.–Dec. 1987):72. For an alternative assessment of the IDA that concentrates more on its institutional position, see Seligson, Agrarian Capitalism, chap. 6 and pp. 162–69.

20. Barahona, Reforma agraria, 207; and Barry, Roots of Rebellion, 150.

21. Cooperatives are popular in Costa Rica and have provided another experience in popular organization. They offer a means of launching or maintaining expensive projects that an individual could not fund. They also provide a way of distributing profits more widely than private enterprise would allow. Throughout Costa Rica, one finds cooperative banks, cooperative grocery stores, and cooperatively built parks. One of the most successful cooperative enterprises is a sugarcane processing plant in Grecia, Alajuela. During World War II, the Costa Rican government confiscated the plant from its German owners. Instead of falling into private hands, the plant became a cooperative. Jointly owned today by local farmers who are cooperative members, the plant processes both coffee and sugarcane and employs large numbers of landless rural dwellers from the area who are also co-op members.

22. Banana workers in Limón province have the most extensive experience with unions. See Gasper, Limón, 1880–1940; and Leslie Anderson, “From Quiescence to Rebellion: Peasant Political Action in Costa Rica and Pre-Revolutionary Nicaragua,” Ph.D. diss, University of Michigan, 1987, chap. 2.

23. The union most like UPA is UPAPZ (Unión de Pequeños Agricultores de Pérez Zeledón), which is located in southern Costa Rica in Pérez Zeledón. Smaller than UPA, UPAPZ is less inclined toward a leadership role, but its political position and organizational tactics are very similar.

24. UPA's membership includes landless peasants and those with too little land as well as small producers. UPA offers national health plan benefits to all members. Some landless members view these benefits as at least as important as any production gains made by the union.

25. Interview with León Víctor Barrantes, UPA publicity officer, Sept. 1987, in San José.

26. UPA's fate is not unique either to Costa Rica or to unions. Eckstein's discussion of urban unions observes that co-optation is one of the major tactics by which the Mexican state has exercised control over popular groups. See Susan Eckstein, The Poverty of Revolution: The State and the Urban Poor in Mexico (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), 78–79, 86–87, 89, 90, 93–94, 102, and 136. Co-optation has also been a problem for labor unions in Chile and for the major peasant union in Nicaragua. See Alan Angel, Politics and the Labour Movement in Chile (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 261; and Ilja Luciak, “Popular Democracy in the New Nicaragua: The Case of a Rural Mass Organization,” Comparative Politics 20, no. 1 (1987):35–55.

27. One national poster proclaims, “La empresa privada hace la libertad” (private enterprise creates liberty). Likewise, official union statements frequently refer to the unique value of the Costa Rican democracy, swear repeatedly to operate only within state definitions of legality, and praise private property. For example, see the program of the Congreso Nacional de la Agricultura for 1985 and the “Plan de trabajo” for 1987. These publications of UPANacional are available at their main office in San Juan de Tibas, Costa Rica.

28. UPA also includes small dairy farmers. Although they do not rely entirely on farming, they are still small agricultural producers. Many of them farm as well as raise cows.

29. I interviewed thirty-three members of UPA from the central valley region in 1985. These included current and former union leaders at regional and national levels. I spoke with leaders from several levels in Grecia, San Ramón, San Carlos, Cartago, and San José. I also picked two villages in Alajuela, San Luis and San Miguel, where I interviewed 30 percent and 10 percent of household heads respectively. These interviews provided a rank-and-file perspective on UPA. In 1987 and 1989, I returned to interview a randomly selected subgroup of those interviewed in 1985. Only two of the subgroup felt the union provided no significant benefits. In 1985 and 1987, I also encountered UPA members while studying UPAGRA in Limón, and I interviewed five of them. In 19891 interviewed twelve additional members from Cartago and northern Alajuela, near San Carlos. These in-depth conversations lasted two or three hours and followed a questionnaire that included open-ended and closed questions.

30. For example, in 1988 and 1989 gas emanating from the Poas Volcano ruined the coffee crop within a ten-mile radius. UPA is negotiating with the state to obtain low-interest emergency loans for the smallholders involved.

31. One model of organizational interaction, the “firm model,” posits that given consistency of participants, negotiation and bargaining more accurately describe the quality of interaction than confrontation or even strictly goal-oriented rationality. Where actors are likely to meet again, giving a little now in the hopes of getting a little next time becomes a logical aspect of the mutual search for a solution. For a description of the firm model of organizational interaction and an explanation of its applicability to situations of participant consistency, see Lawrence Mohr, “Organizations, Decisions, and Courts,” in Law and Society Review 10, no. 4 (Summer 1976):630, 635–37.

32. Such has been the story, for example, with the mine workers' unions in Zambia. This case, however, is not exactly comparable with that of Costa Rica since the Zambian state has even stronger reasons for co-opting workers: it owns the mines and is therefore the employer of the workers. See Robert Bates, Unions, Parties, and Political Development (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971). The national peasant union in Nicaragua, UNAG (Unión Nacional de Agricultores y Ganaderos) is also in some danger of being co-opted and inadequately representing the interests of its members before the state. UNAG is apparently aware of this danger, however, and is struggling successfully toward greater autonomy. See Ilja Luciak, “Popular Democracy,” 49–52.

33. Interview with Jorge Hernández, public relations manager for UPA, May 1989, San José.

34. UCADEGUA (Unión Costarricense de Agricultores de Guatuso), from Guatuso in northern Alajuela, is smaller and less visible than UPAGRA but resembles it in tactics and political attitudes.

35. Minor Keith, who first organized the Costa Rican banana industry, found himself handicapped by the same labor shortage that had troubled the Spanish colonizers. Because bananas are a labor-intensive crop, he imported workers but soon became embroiled in labor disputes. See Vladimir de la Cruz, Las luchas sociales en Costa Rica, 3d. ed (San José: Editorial Costa Rica, 1983), 31–35; 47–48.

36. See Gasper, Limón, 1880–1940, for a discussion of the temporary demise of the banana industry in Limón in the 1930s. Racism and fear of labor competition during the depression years led the legislature to pass laws restricting blacks (a large percentage of the Limón population) from migrating to other parts of Costa Rica.

37. Anderson, “From Quiescence to Rebellion,” chap. 5 of “Peasant Political Action in Costa Rica”; and interview with Luis Palma, peasant farmer, village of El Hogar, February 1986.

38. In conditions of scarcity and hardship, those who are without will feel a greater injustice and will be more tempted to alleviate their condition when the means they need are clearly visible nearby and are being kept from them only by the actions of others. According to Barrington Moore, the poor reason that extreme inequality and substantial wealth are unacceptable in the face of severe poverty. See Moore, Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1978), 25, 37–38. This same reasoning underlies Rousseau's political thought as well as the moral economy of the English poor and of the peasant. See Jean Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality among Mankind (1754; republished New York: Washington Square Press, 1967), 246; E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd,” Past and Present, no. 50 (Feb. 1971):69, 79, 131; and Scott, Moral Economy, 157, 162–63.

39. Peasants resort to land invasion and squatting all the more readily because the practice has a long tradition in Limón. See Anderson, “From Quiescence to Rebellion,” chap. 2.

40. For a discussion of this attitude and the way in which peasants have acted on it to force the IDA to redistribute land, see Anderson, “From Quiescence to Rebellion,” 19–22. Costa Rican land invaders typically attempt to attract attention so as to raise the likelihood of success, although in establishing ties with the IDA, peasant groups also run the risk of co-optation. See Seligson, Peasants of Costa Rica, 107–14. The Costa Rican pattern contrasts with that in Colombia, where state attention is more likely to result in repression than success and invasions operate secretly as long as possible. See Roger Soles, “Rural Land Invasions in Colombia: A Study of the Macro Conditions and Micro Conditions and Forces Leading to Peasant Unrest,” Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1972, 306.

41. UPAGRA convinced local businesses to give or loan the invaders food and money when crops and all possessions were burned by the authorities.

42. When ITCO (later the IDA) was established, it provided legal guidelines for those who could qualify for land redistribution. For example, land recipients were to be peasants (as opposed to urban workers) who had some knowledge of agriculture. They could not have received land from the IDA previously. The guidelines also specified that families with large numbers of children and therefore many hands for farmwork would have a relative advantage in competing for land. Unfortunately, the IDA rarely distributes land and thus uses the guidelines only infrequently.

43. The print media have been the most energetic participants in this campaign, particularly the newspapers La Nación and La República. The years 1981 and 1982, during the height of the land invasion, provide the most examples of this campaign. See La Nación, 7 July 1981, 8 July 1981, 17 June 1982, 18 June 1982, and 23 June 1982; also La República, 7 July 1981, 22 June 1982, and 25 July 1982. See also the newspapers' coverage of the peasant demonstration in San José on 15 Sept. 1986. In early 1989, UPAGRA initiated a slander suit against the newspaper La Prensa Libre and against Sergio Fernández, director of Costa Rica's intelligence agency. Fernandez and the newspaper alleged that UPAGRA's leaders had received military training in Cuba, were importing arms from abroad, and were training members to overthrow the state violently. At this point, UPAGRA found a lawyer and sued Fernández for fourteen million colones and the newspaper for thirty five million. Over a six-month period, the state tried every conceivable tactic to have the suit thrown out of court but failed. Court proceedings have been delayed repeatedly and were scheduled to begin in July 1990. It remains to be seen what will actually come of the suit. If it succeeds, perhaps future contributors to the discreditation campaign will be more prudent in their accusations.

44. Interview with Marcos Vinicio, IDA coordinator of Negev settlement, Mar. 1986, in Guácimo.

45. Interview with Carlos Campos, UPAGRA Secretary General, June 1989, in Guácimo.

46. Interview with Juan José Herrera, former UPAGRA Secretary General, June 1989, in Guácimo.

47. Two similar unions are APROAP (Asociación de Pequeños Agroforestaleros) and ASPAS (Asociación de Pequeños Agricultores de Guanacaste) from northern Guanacaste province.

48. This interviewee preferred to remain anonymous.

49. Piven and Cloward, Poor People's Movements, 72, 84, 85.

50. Ibid., 26. Piven and Cloward clarify their advocacy of disruption within a context of powerlessness in an exchange published after Poor People's Movements. See William Gamson and Emile Schmeidler, “Organizing the Poor,” Theory and Society 13, no. 4 (1984):567–85; and the “Rejoinder” by Piven and Cloward, 587–99.

51. Focusing exclusively on disruptive or even organized resistance ignores another dimension of political opposition that is equally important and more useful in certain situations. I refer to everyday resistance, that “prosaic but constant struggle between the peasantry and those who seek to extract labor, food, taxes, rents, and interest from them … : foot dragging, dissimulation, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage. …” See James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1985), 29.

52. The usual exception to this rule is market day, when many rural dwellers come to the urban center. Not surprisingly, market days have also been occasions when riot became as useful a tool for the rural poor as for their urban counterparts. As Sidney Mintz noted, “The market was the place where the people, because they were numerous, felt for a moment that they were strong.” See Mintz, “Peasant Markets,” Scientific American, no. 203 (1960):112–22. Markets were also the place where rural consumers came to make purchases. If they considered prices unjust, they would confront that fact in the market, where their concentrated numbers made it seem more likely that protest would be successful. See also George Rude, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848 (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964), 37, 40, 47; and Louise Tilly, “The Food Riot as a Form of Political Conflict in France,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2, no. 1 (1971):26, 32.

53. Piven and Cloward appear to have some appreciation even of nondisruptive organizations. See, for example, the introduction to the paperback version of Poor People's Movements, xiv, xvi, xxi; see also Piven and Cloward, The New Class War: Reagan's Attack on the Welfare State and Its Consequences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), pp. x, 7. In this latest work, they argue that the poor in the United States will survive the Reagan administration precisely because they have established durable organizations.

54. Piven and Cloward, Poor People's Movements, paper ed., 595–96.

55. For example, the movement Piven and Cloward admire most is the U.S. civil rights movement in its early days, when it was disruptive in an organized fashion but neither entirely spontaneous nor bureaucratized and lethargic.