The Centrality of Peasant Movements in Latin America

[sintax]

Strategies of Struggle

The Centrality of Peasant Movements in Latin America

By JAMES PETRAS

For over a century social analysts of the right and left have been predicting the disappearance of the peasantry, with the advance of capitalism. Even today some of the more prominent authors of the Left, like Eric Hobsbawn, write of the marginalization of the peasantry deducing their conclusions from quantitative demographic data.

In terms of policy, on the neo-liberal right, President Da Silva of Brazil and his Agricultural Minister have provided vast resources to the agro-business export sector, and have relegated ecological, human rights, small farmers and landless workers demands to the lowest of priorities.

Despite this apparent consensus among academics and politicians, the peasantry refuses to disappear, or to play a marginal role. Despite the decline in the relative percentage of rural inhabitants, the peasantry over the past 20 years has re-emerged as an historical actor, playing a central role in changing regimes, determining national agendas, leading struggles against international trade agreements (ALCA or Free Trade Area of the Americas) as well as establishing regional and local bases of power. In many countries coalitions of landless farm workers, small family farmers and peasants have been central to national struggles against neo-liberal regimes and free trade policies. In some cases rural movements have detonated larger struggles, activating urban classes, trade unions, civic groups and human rights organizations.

Data from most Latin American countries over the past quarter of a century demonstrate that peasant and other rural movements have become increasingly central to any process of social change and resistance to neo-liberals. Paradoxically this occurs at a time when the urban population is increasing , but the level of class organization and internal cohesion of the industrial working class has been substantially weakened. At least in the recent past, the weak link in any potential peasant-worker alliance is to be found in the decline of militancy and organization among industrial trade union leaders, not from the rural organizations.

http://www.counterpunch.org/petras06042005.html

[struggle4progress]

1. Petras is as good as ever. eom

[Selatius]

2. Just look at Venezuela

60% of that country lived below the poverty line before Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution came. In a country with incredibly vast oil wealth, one has to ask what has happened to that wealth over the decades? In short, it was squandered. It disappeared into private bank accounts, or it left the country to be invested elsewhere.

The people didn't want to take it anymore. Chavez came to power on the promise of trying to help the poverty-stricken, and one of the ways was to use that oil wealth and reinvest it in the poor.