The legacies of partial possession: From agrarian struggle to neoliberal restructuring in Mexico and Colombia

Abstract

How have communities in Latin America responded to neoliberal agrarian reforms? We address this question via an incorporated comparison of two regions affected by rural restructuring: La Laguna, Mexico and Viejo Caldas, Colombia. Prior to the introduction of market-led reforms, agricultural producers in both regions were heavily dependent on state support, yet in neither did they mobilize to resist neoliberal policies that were incompatible with the prevailing system of state-managed commercial agriculture. What explains this outcome? We argue that acquiescence to neoliberalism was, paradoxically, a legacy of agrarian unrest: In response to major mobilizations, historic land reforms were carried out in La Laguna and Viejo Caldas during the 1930s that created regional political economies organized around cotton and coffee, respectively. Over time, these economies evolved into regimes of ‘partial possession’ wherein the social reproduction of rural livelihoods came to depend on specific state institutions: the Ejido Bank in Mexico and Fedecafé in Colombia. We attribute the absence of organized opposition to neoliberal reforms in La Laguna and Viejo Caldas to the conservatizing political transformation that partial possession engendered. In so doing, we highlight the importance of regional histories in shaping popular responses to neoliberal restructuring across the variegated landscape of Latin America’s countryside.

Keywords

Agrarian movements Colombia land reform Mexico neoliberalism

Over the past several decades, states throughout the developing world introduced new property rights regimes, liberalized trade in agricultural products, and eliminated or restructured governmental programs serving the rural sector. The ostensible goal of such reforms is to increase productivity and integrate producers into global markets, but many who study their impact are not sanguine in their assessment. Although outcomes vary, neoliberal restructuring has negatively impacted many rural communities, resulting in displacement from the land (Akram-Lodhi, 2007; Araghi, 2000), the growth of ‘megacities’ comprised of urban slums and squatter settlements (Davis, 2006), pervasive unemployment and ‘forced underconsumption’ (Amin, 2003; Araghi, 2008), an expansion of transnational migratory labor networks (Edelman, 2008; Phillips, 2009), and an increase in informal and illegal economic activities in the countryside (Kay, 2008; Menjivar, 2006; Portes and Hoffman, 2003).

Scholarship on the neoliberal turn has been particularly contentious in reference to the experience of Latin American countries, which were among the first to embrace the neoliberal orthodoxy (McMichael, 2007; Portes, 1997).¹ While the consequences of Latin America’s neoliberal turn continue to be debated, and overall assessments are complicated by the fact that its consequences are uneven across the region, there is nevertheless substantial consensus that market reforms have caused modest to significant levels of economic hardship for Latin American publics, including growing economic polarization, social exclusion, and political authoritarianism (Huber and Solt, 2004; Londoño and Székely, 2000; Wood and Roberts, 2005). Given these negative outcomes, scholars have sought to explain how neoliberal policies became so widely adopted. How was neoliberalism accomplished politically?

One view contends that international institutions imposed neoliberalism on Latin America in the wake of the 1980s debt crisis (Broad, 2004; McMichael, 2007). Other scholars claim that domestic elites played a critical role in securing neoliberal reforms because trade and financial liberalization resonated with their emergent transnational market orientation (Robinson, 2008; Sklair, 2000). Whether implemented on behalf of international agencies or domestic elites, these perspectives emphasize the ‘top–down’ nature of Latin America’s neoliberal turn. It is, therefore, perhaps unsurprising that resistance to neoliberalism is a common theme in this literature. Scholars have been particularly attentive to a handful of rural-based, flagship social movements that are interpreted as challenges to the prevailing neoliberal climate, including the Zapatistas in Mexico (Harvey, 2004; Stahler-Sholk, 2007), the MST or landless workers’ movement in Brazil (Martins, 2000), and the transnational peasant organization Via Campesina, which has a particularly strong presence in Latin America (Desmarais, 2002; McMichael, 2006; Petras and Veltmeyer, 2001; Vergara-Camus, 2009). Some argue that these opposition movements even influenced the electorate at large and thus helped precipitate the region’s political shift to the left over the past decade (Prashad and Ballvé, 2006; Silva, 2009).

This critical view of the neoliberal turn is challenged by those who emphasize that public opinion polls and survey research finds broad popular support for market reforms. Why would Latin American publics support policies that cause privation? Some scholars try to explain this finding by calling for a more nuanced interpretation of neoliberalism. For example, rather than arguing that Latin Americans are for or against neoliberalism per se, Baker argues that different policies enjoy different level of support; he finds that free trade rates consistently high in public opinion polls, especially when compared with other reforms, such as privatization. Developing a consumption-based theory of policy preferences, he argues that people express support for trade liberalization because they recognize that it benefits them in the form of access to lower-priced imports (Baker, 2010).

Kurtz and Brooks (2008) offer a similar corrective to what they regard as an oversimplified view of neoliberalism, arguing that in contrast to the model of market reform associated with the Washington Consensus, what is evolving in Latin America is better described as a form of ‘embedded liberalism’ in which liberalization (i.e. of trade and capital accounts) co-exists with certain forms of state intervention, such as export promotion, service provision, and public employment generation that appeal to (particularly middle-class) voters. In other words, what Latin American publics support is a more regionally embedded trajectory of reform that departs from neoliberal orthodoxy in significant ways.

Still other research suggests that resistance to neoliberalism has been less widespread than expected because governments made strategic use of targeted benefits to compensate social groups negatively impacted by reforms, thus neutralizing potential opposition (Bruhn, 1996; Graham and Kane, 1998). Particularly in the early period, this form of ‘neoliberal populism’ was employed by several Latin American governments seeking to implement economic reforms in tandem with transitions to electoral democracy (Roberts, 1995; Weyland, 2003). In short, this work argues that, for a variety of reasons, the implementation of market reforms in Latin American countries has been supported, or at least not actively resisted, by national populations.

Was the neoliberal turn in Latin America actively supported, passively accepted, or openly resisted by the populations affected by these policies? We believe that some of the intellectual fog of these debates stems from a tendency to see neoliberalism as a radical break from the developmentalist model adopted broadly across Latin America after the Second World War. This assumption of ‘neoliberalism as historical rupture’ runs through the first body of literature that describes how economic liberalization institutionalized a break with the import-substituting industrialization regime of the past, facilitating new forms of external control over domestic policies and benefitting elites at the expense of the popular classes. Much of this scholarship anticipates resistance to neoliberalism because it is seen to threaten access to public entitlements and state provisions that at least partially decommodified social reproduction during the previous era. Harvey, for example, argues that because neoliberalism threatens the material well-being and cultural integrity of working people and their communities, it is spawning a ‘swath of oppositional movements’ that opens new ‘lines of social and political struggle’ (2007: 40). Silva comes to a similar conclusion, contending that episodes of resistance to neoliberalism are ‘Polanyian backlashes’ against efforts to disembed the market from society by ‘recommodifying capital, labor, and land’ (2009: 23).

The assumption that neoliberalism constitutes a historical break also underlies the second body of literature, which reports acquiescence to, if not approval of, liberalizing reforms. Weyland (2002) argues that popular support for neoliberalism was strongest in the context of acute economic crisis because market reforms signaled a change in direction that was widely regarded as necessary, and perhaps even inevitable. Similarly, Kurtz (2004) contends that efforts to liberalize agriculture succeeded in Chile and Mexico because market reforms generated social dislocation that disrupted prevailing forms of political organization in the countryside, leaving peasant communities unable to effectively oppose these measures. Here, too, neoliberalism is seen as a break from the past, though in this case one that is undermining, rather than fomenting, resistance.

We do not disagree that as a model of development, neoliberalism marks a significant break with the statist paradigm characterizing post-war Latin America. However, at the level of lived experience, we are less sure that this is the case. Whether or not the implementation of market reforms constituted a historical juncture can only be determined by examining how dramatically they changed the status quo ante for the populations affected by them. This question of change is, in turn, critical for the debate about popular responses to neoliberalism. Critics argue that market-led restructuring creates new forms of social and economic exclusion, while others interpret popular support for reforms as evidence that these policies make people better off than they would be otherwise. Each of these contending views implicitly assumes a prior state of affairs against which the neoliberal era is compared – unfavorably by the first camp, more positively by the second. However, our view is that explaining popular responses to neoliberalism requires an explicit assessment of the conditions prevailing at the time of the reforms, as well an analysis of how they articulate with the implementation of economic liberalization as it played out on the ground.

In this article, we provide such an analysis for two subnational regions of Latin America: La Laguna, Mexico² and Viejo Caldas, Colombia.³ Rural producers in these historically important agricultural areas were, like many of their counterparts throughout Latin America, subject to liberalizing reforms in the 1990s. However, in contrast to some of the celebrated centers of rural resistance to neoliberalism, these regions did not experience widespread opposition movements. This absence of resistance is puzzling because, for much of the 20th century, the viability of commercial agriculture in La Laguna and Viejo Caldas depended on state financing and other forms of government support that are incompatible with the neoliberal model. Given that producers in these regions would seem to be among those who benefitted most directly from the statist development model, and should therefore have been among the most to lose from neoliberal reforms, why did the dismantling of that model not provoke more active resistance from them?

The measured response of these communities to the introduction of market reforms is particularly surprising given their historically restive nature: during the first third of the 20th century, La Laguna and Viejo Caldas were sites of persistent rural conflict and eventually widespread mobilization, which culminated in 1936 in two of the most far-reaching land expropriations in Latin America. Yet a half century later there was little in the way of organized resistance to neoliberal reforms in these regions, even though many of the producers affected were descendants of the beneficiaries of the 1936 struggle.

We contend that acquiescence to neoliberalism was, paradoxically, a legacy of this earlier struggle, or more specifically, of the system of state-managed agriculture that developed in the decades after the 1936 agrarian reform. Looking to ameliorate the conflicts of the previous decade and forestall new agrarian unrest, the Colombian and Mexican governments instituted measures in the aftermath of the expropriations to develop and consolidate a new class of agricultural commodity producers in each region: algodoneros (cotton growers) in La Laguna and cafeteros (coffee farmers) in Viejo Caldas. Over time, these systems of commodity-specific agriculture evolved into regional political economies that we describe as regimes of ‘partial possession’ – a term we coined to describe the way in which the market participation of producers, and thus their social reproduction as a class, came to depend on the state.

Our concept of partial possession draws from Farshad Araghi’s claim that a ‘peasant may own some of the means of production (e.g., title to a small plot of land) but may have lost his or her non-market access to the means of subsistence. . . [because they] have lost control of the labor process. What they produce, how they produce, and for whom they produce are decided by the agro-food corporations (or their subcontractors). Here production is carried out by the peasantry. . . but not for the peasantry’ (2000: 150). While Araghi develops this argument in order to answer a question distinct from the one that interests us here,⁴ we find his formulation useful because it diagnoses the degree to which rural producers may lose control of their own labor process without being dispossessed of the land they are working.

Following this insight, we explain how rural producers in La Laguna and Viejo Caldas lost control of their labor process not to ‘agro-food corporations (or their subcontractors)’, but rather to agencies of the Mexican and Colombian states – a situation we describe as partial possession. We use the term ‘possession’ here to refer to producers’ control over the means of production (in this case, the land they were given after the 1936 expropriations). This possession was ‘partial’ because, as we show below, the ability of producers in La Laguna and Viejo Caldas to maintain a livelihood by growing cotton and coffee became contingent upon continued access to the government support that underwrote their participation in these commodity markets.

The dependence of rural communities on government support cultivated clientelist ties between producers and the state, which over time, resulted in a conservatizing transformation in their political orientation. This transformation explains why regions that hosted two of the most significant agrarian uprisings in their countries’ histories were relatively quiet in the face of reforms that effectively dismantled the legacy of those movements. Thus, we argue that understanding the response of rural communities in La Laguna and Viejo Caldas to economic restructuring requires an appreciation of partial possession as neoliberalism’s status quo ante.

Our focus on regimes of partial possession does not only explain why rural producers in these regions responded as they did to the introduction of neoliberal reforms. It also allows us to clarify how this outcome was achieved. First, we identify the central mechanisms through which partial possession worked to cultivate dependence and stabilize rural communities in the decades following the 1936 reforms. In Mexico, partial possession was achieved largely via the Ejido Bank, a government-controlled financial institution that provided subsidized credit to rural producers. In Colombia, the key role was played by the National Federation of Coffee Growers, or Fedecafé, a parastatal body which organized and developed a sector of smallholding producers via market regulation.

Second, by specifying the institutional mechanisms used to consolidate partial possession, we show how changes in the world economy shaped these regions’ fortunes. Because La Laguna’s algodoneros relied on the cheap credit provided by the Ejido Bank, the entire system depended on the ability of the Mexican government to finance the bank’s activities, either from domestic sources, or increasingly from external ones. The sharp curtailment of Mexico’s access to foreign credit brought on by the debt crisis of the early 1980s deprived the bank of resources, and proved devastating for the rural producers dependent on its support. In Viejo Caldas, Fedecafé’s support to the cafeteros reflected Colombia’s capacity, given its pivotal position in the world coffee market, to influence the regulation of the global coffee trade via the International Coffee Agreements (ICA). Ultimately, Colombia’s influence was undermined by sweeping changes to the ICA’s quota and pricing system in 1989 and the subsequent liberalization of the world coffee market.

Finally, by detailing how these regimes of partial possession connected the fate of local producers to the world markets for their respective commodities, we are able to clarify the contingent logics of acquiescence to neoliberalism that operated in each region. The social reproduction of cotton producers in La Laguna was compromised by a decline in public support that occurred long before Mexico officially jettisoned its statist developmental model. On the eve of the country’s neoliberal turn, partial possession had effectively ceased to function in La Laguna, leaving in its place a clientelism that was simultaneously politically repressive and economically ineffectual. Consequently, when market-led agrarian reform was introduced, it was embraced by producers who regarded it as an opportunity to regain control over their livelihoods.

In Colombia, the collapse of the regulated coffee trade under the ICA had a similar impact on Fedecafé that the debt crisis had on the Ejido Bank. Unlike their counterparts in La Laguna, however, the cafeteros of Viejo Caldas saw little opportunity in liberalizing reforms. Yet, instead of openly opposing them, they responded to the erosion of their privileged position by trying, without much success, to reconstitute the old development model within the new neoliberal context. In short, we not only develop the concept of partial possession to explain a similar outcome across the two cases – that is, the lack of organized resistance to market reforms – we also identify the distinct logics of acquiescence that operate in each region to produce this result.

Methodologically, the strategy we employ is best described as the method of incorporated comparison (McMichael, 1990, 2000). This approach rejects the conceit of traditional comparative methods, namely that cases can be treated as self-contained units representing independent examples of a particular kind of phenomenon; simultaneously, it also seeks to avoid the determinism that macro-analytical alternatives, such as Tilly’s encompassing comparisons or Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, can encourage. Incorporated comparison proceeds instead by analyzing ‘differentiated outcomes or moments of an historically integrated process’ in relation to a ‘dynamic, self-forming whole’ (McMichael, 1990: 392, 396). The ‘historically integrated process’ we examine is the neoliberal restructuring of agriculture, and our incorporated comparison of La Laguna and Viejo Caldas demonstrates how this transformation emerged over time through locally situated instances of agrarian change embedded within the emergent dynamics of the global political economy.

Our incorporated comparison unfolds in four sections. The first section begins with an account of the agrarian struggles that culminated in the historic 1936 expropriations. The second section analyzes the institutional practices through which partial possession was consolidated in La Laguna and Viejo Caldas, focusing specifically on how these measures weakened the collective capacity of producers. The third section describes the set of contingent, albeit distinct, world economic conditions that enabled the Mexican and Colombian governments to successfully reproduce these rural communities in the decades after the 1936 reforms, and explains how changes in these conditions eventually undermined the viability of partial possession. The fourth section explores how the collapse of partial possession created distinct rationales for acquiescence to neoliberal reforms in the two cases.

Resistance as pre-history: Agrarian struggles over land and livelihood

The regimes of partial possession in La Laguna and Viejo Caldas were rooted in historic conflicts over land and labor that date back to the emergence of cotton and coffee capitalism in the late 19th century. In both cases social contradictions that emerged with the introduction of capital into the countryside led to the radicalization of producers, who mobilized around demands for land reform that were eventually met by the Mexican and Colombian states.

From rural proletarians to ejidatarios in La Laguna

Formerly a sparsely populated frontier region, La Laguna became a site of large-scale cotton production in the 1880s, following the construction of irrigation canals and the development of rail connections to the rest of the country (Plana, 1991). Within two decades, it became the most important cotton-growing area in the country, producing between 75 and 90 percent of the nation’s annual crop (Mora-Torres, 2001; Walsh, 2008).

La Laguna’s well-capitalized cotton haciendas relied primarily on wage labor provided by permanent workers who lived on the estates or in nearby communities. Although they were sometimes given housing, estate workers were not given plots of land to farm. Consequently they resembled a rural proletariat that had ‘no link with the land and could not. . . supplement their wage with income or products from small family plots’ (Rello, 1987: 40). A small number of sharecroppers and independent smallholders existed alongside the cotton plantations, but it was the large estates and their proletarianized workers that dominated the region’s agricultural landscape. Because the decade-long revolution that began in 1910 had little impact on the region’s rural economy, La Laguna’s countryside continued to be characterized by high levels of land concentration and extensive foreign ownership throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s (Meyers, 1994).

The struggle against the cotton estates began when some of the region’s residents sought to acquire the land grants that were promised in the Mexican Constitution of 1917. Up to that point, land distribution had been minimal, in part because it was unclear if policies which were intended primarily to restore land to indigenous communities could also benefit groups of landless mestizo workers. New legislation issued in 1927 clarified the eligibility of La Laguna’s rural communities to receive land under the Constitution’s agrarian provisions, causing local petitioners to become more organized and more militant (Restrepo and Eckstein, 1975).

The onset of the Great Depression contributed to the intensification of local unrest; La Laguna had long sent large flows of migrants to work in the US during periods of slack labor demand on the estates, and the return of migrants unable to find work north of the border intensified competition for jobs (Meyers, 1994). At the same time, estate owners, seeking to reduce labor costs, further mechanized operations, exacerbating tensions between the workers and the hacendados. In this context of heightened conflict, local landowners and the foreign-owned land companies established the National Chamber of Agriculture of the Comarca Lagunera (NCACL) in 1930. The NCACL’s creation signaled growing concern among elites that the sporadic bribery and violence on which they had previously depended to suppress the agrarian struggle might soon prove insufficient to thwart producer demands (Rello, 1987).

In response to growing unrest, a perfunctory land reform was carried out in 1934, largely at the behest of the NCACL, which hoped that it might forestall more far-reaching measures (Craig, 1990). However this limited effort only galvanized the local agrarian movement (Carr, 1987; Senior, 1940). Radical unions based in the region’s largest city, Torreón, sent organizers to the countryside, and eventually a diverse alliance of urban and rural workers became consolidated under the leadership of the Comité Regional de la Defensa Proletaria de la Comarca Lagunera. This organization included most of the region’s industrial and agricultural trade unions, including those with ties to the Mexican Communist Party.

Increasing unrest came to a head in spring 1936. When the estate owners refused to negotiate a collective contract that would guarantee a minimum daily wage and a maximum workday, the unions declared a general strike. With 104 unions and 20,000 agricultural workers participating, the strike succeeded in paralyzing the region’s economy. Government officials summoned both sides to Mexico City for negotiations at which the employers held firm and threatened to abandon production in La Laguna. With talks at a stalemate, employers, aided by local officials, attempted unsuccessfully to break the strike by bringing in 10,000 strike-breakers (Otero, 1999; Rello, 1987). Concerned that a protracted conflict would result in the loss of the season’s crop, Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas ended the strike in dramatic fashion by announcing a massive land distribution program for the region. Within a matter of months, over one million acres were expropriated from the cotton plantations – an amount equal to three-fourths of La Laguna’s irrigated land. This land was redistributed to 38,000 families and organized into 311 collective farms, or ejidos (Carr, 1987; Senior, 1940).

From colonos and arrendatarios to smallholders in Viejo Caldas

Coffee production took off in Viejo Caldas after the government opened the region to commercial development and land colonization in the 1870s and 1880s. These measures attracted settlers of different social classes whose interests conflicted sharply. The largest group to colonize the region was subsistence peasant families (colonos), who viewed the open frontier as an opportunity to gain land, and therefore direct control over the means of their subsistence. Many chose to settle in regions located near rivers, roads, and railroad lines so that they could supplement subsistence agriculture with limited production of commercial crops, coffee being the most lucrative (LeGrand, 1986).

Most colonos could not afford the titling and surveying costs required to formalize their holdings and therefore ended up simply squatting on unsettled land on the edges of the agricultural frontier. This brought them into conflict with a class of absentee landlords and investors who purchased large tracts of frontier land for commercial plantations. These planter-entrepreneurs used their influence over local government to forcibly evict squatters from the land, hoping to convert them into a wage labor force for their plantations. When successful, these planters adopted tenant farmer and rentier (arrendatario) arrangements wherein workers were permitted a small plot of private land in exchange for the payment of a specific amount of coffee beans or a set number of hours dedicated to plantation work (Bergquist, 1986). Many of the displaced colonos, however, rejected this option, choosing instead to clear new plots of land even further into the jungle, where the cycle of frontier expansion and dispossession began anew (LeGrand, 1986).

Steady demand and high prices for Colombian coffee helped make Viejo Caldas the country’s leading coffee-producing region by the 1920s. Colonos contributed to this growth by converting larger portions of their land to coffee, even as they remained dedicated primarily to subsistence production. Plantation owners, in turn, expanded their coffee estates by liberalizing their labor contracts and providing more favorable wage arrangements, which brought new migrants to the region and galvanized the existing labor market (Machado, 1977).

As in La Laguna, the stock market crash of 1929, led to a subsequent drop in world prices that dramatically shaped the region’s historical trajectory. To compensate for a drop in the price of coffee beans, most colonos either converted from coffee to subsistence agricultural production or internalized the costs of production by overexploiting their household labor power to produce more coffee (Machado, 1977). The impact of the crash on the region’s commercial planters was far more severe. The sudden drop in coffee prices propelled them into bankruptcy and debt to commission houses. Many attempted to avoid ruin by externalizing costs onto their workers, squeezing more labor for the same pay. This proved a daunting task, both because over the course of the 1920s plantation workers had become more organized and more militant under the leadership of communist and socialist activists, and because they had become accustomed to the liberal tenancy and labor agreements that permitted them the right to grow their own coffee on planter lands. Planter attempts to roll back those arrangements sparked a wave of mass unrest on the plantations from arrendatarios who argued that they could make better use of the land than the owners and therefore deserved full ownership of it.

Plantation owners were further discomfited by the views expressed by some government officials, who were flirting with economic planning as a way to confront the crisis. Sensing a dual threat of state appropriation and worker takeover, they began exploring ways to break their contracts with the arrendatarios altogether in order to legally expel them from the lands as a preventative measure. Rather than simply forfeit their plots to the plantation owners, however, the workers followed the example of the frontier colonos by simply squatting on the lands that they were already working and occupying. The owners countered this militancy with attempts to forcefully displace them, using police and hired thugs (Bergquist, 1986; Machado, 1977).

The outbreak of violence on the coffee plantations became a hot issue in the presidential election of 1930, with the Conservative Party supporting the coffee planters and the Liberals advocating for land reforms. The election went to the reform-minded Liberal Carlos Lleras Restrepo who, like his Mexican counterpart, feared that agrarian unrest would destroy this export sector altogether. In order to end the crisis and save the coffee industry, he signed Land Law 200 of 1936, which facilitated governmental purchases of the bankrupt plantations, subsidized the sale of parcels of these plantations to the squatters that occupied them, and granted formal land titles to the smallholding squatters along the coffee frontier. The Law forged a consensus between key players within the political establishment. Conservatives backed the government’s agreement to pay full market prices to owners for the expropriated land. Liberals were content to have the land put to productive use. And militants of the Communist Party were satisfied with the transfer of land to the squatters. This compromise effectively ended the largest agrarian struggle of Colombian history and set the stage for the consolidation of a predominantly smallholder structure of coffee production (Zamosc, 1986).

The year 1936 capped a period of intense mobilization in both Viejo Caldas and La Laguna, as agrarian movements succeeded in securing land reform despite the efforts of local elites to prevent it. However, having granted land to producers, the Mexican and Colombian governments confronted the task of transforming labor and property relations in these economically important regions.

The pyrrhic victories of partial possession

By securing their access to land, the 1936 reforms gave rural producers control over the means of production and therefore the ability to reproduce themselves and their households outside of the plantation economies that had long dominated the agricultural landscapes of these regions. Yet rather than convert their lands to subsistence agriculture, these newly landed producers continued to cultivate the region’s dominant cash crops. This market orientation was both encouraged and buttressed by the Mexican and Colombian states, which wanted simultaneously to diffuse further agrarian unrest and preserve commercial agriculture in these regions. Thus, the expropriation of cotton plantations in La Laguna and the passage of Land Law 200 in Colombia proved to be pyrrhic victories for rural producers who, although no longer subject to domination by the region’s economic elites, grew increasingly dependent on state support. Government assistance was channeled to rural producers in Mexico and Colombia via the Ejido Bank and Fedecafé, respectively; by linking the social reproduction of rural communities to the political regime, these institutions were central to the emergence and consolidation of clientelist relations connecting state agencies and rural producers in La Laguna and Viejo Caldas in the decades following the 1936 reforms.

The Ejido Bank and partial possession in La Laguna

Following the expropriation of the cotton estates, government officials feared that newly created ejidal communities would convert what had been revenue-generating fields into subsistence production. Therefore, President Cardenas proposed a daring plan that he hoped would make La Laguna a model for other ejidos in commercial agricultural regions of northern Mexico. First, he encouraged collective production on the redistributed lands by establishing a system of cooperative farming in which smallholders shared infrastructure such as tractors, wells, and gins. Second, Cardenas established the National Ejido Credit Bank (hereafter the Bank) to finance investments in infrastructure and provide subsidized credit to ejidal producers (Walsh, 2008). Third, ejidal producers (or ejidatarios) were organized into regional credit unions that were coordinated by an overarching body, the Central Union of Collective Credit Societies (hereafter Central Union), whose leaders would be elected by the ejidatarios themselves to serve as an interface between themselves and the government agencies that were responsible for the administration and support of the cooperatives.

The Bank quickly became the most important of these government agencies. Some of the credit it provided was used to finance longer-term investments (e.g. new machinery), but what was particularly critical for the evolution of cotton clientelism in La Laguna were the Bank’s short-term credits, or créditos de avío, which were cash advances on anticipated profits that sustained ejidal households through the growing season. These credits were distributed in the form of fixed payments for specific tasks (e.g. soil preparation, planting, harvesting, etc.) that were disbursed to each ejidatario after the Bank’s field inspector confirmed completion of the work. While the reproduction of La Laguna’s cotton ejidos depended primarily on the Bank, the government also subsidized and regulated the entire cotton commodity chain through an alphabet soup of parastatal organizations that handled everything from the provision of inputs (e.g. seeds, fertilizers) to the marketing of the final product.

Yet despite the state’s central role in managing La Laguna’s cotton economy, ejidatarios achieved a considerable degree of autonomy vis-à-vis the government in the immediate post-reform period. During regular assemblies, they discussed many of the issues affecting the cooperatives and held elections to choose officials for the Central Union. These officials, in turn, proved effective not only in representing the interests of ejidal producers to government agents in La Laguna, but also in turning out protestors for organized demonstrations on the streets when a public display of the ejidatarios’ collective political strength was deemed necessary.

The self-directedness of ejidal communities, the independence of their elected representatives, and the close links that existed between several of these Central Union officials and the Mexican Communist Party was regarded by the conservative presidents who followed Cardenas as a threat to the power of Mexico’s ruling party (eventually known as the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI). Under Miguel Alemán (1946–1952), the government began a boycott of La Laguna’s collective producers that was designed to undermine their economic viability and political organization. Its principal mechanism for achieving this objective was the Bank, which withdrew support for the collective producers while encouraging a reorganization of farming that featured the subdivision of land and the allocation of small plots to individual ejidatarios (Wilkie, 1971). The Bank’s officials argued that these reforms would incentivize effort by tying income more directly to performance, thereby increasing the productivity of the region’s growers. However, the motivation was primarily political, as the state sought to strengthen its direct presence in the countryside by fragmenting the ejidal sector and weakening its leaders (Hellman, 1981; Pucciarelli, 1985).

Alongside de-collectivization, the state encouraged the proliferation of new credit unions, and then elevated to the leadership of these unions individuals who would be more amenable to working within the ruling party apparatus, especially the official organization that represented the rural sector within the corporatist structure of the PRI, the Confederación Nacional Campesina (CNC). These preferred intermediaries received considerable resources from government patrons, which they could, in turn, make available to their network of supporters (Hellman, 1983; Otero, 1999). In contrast, critical inputs such as credit and access to water were withheld from local leaders who were not considered sufficiently reliable supporters of the regime. When these tactics failed, the state resorted to outright repression of independent producer organizations, jailing their leaders and violently dispersing public demonstrations.

By the 1960s, state efforts to weaken the collective cotton ejidos had largely succeeded. Between 1940 and 1960, the number of loans made to collective farms declined by approximately 50 percent, and the number of credit unions proliferated. By 1967, there were 1182 credit societies in La Laguna. Consistent with this ‘divide and conquer’ strategy, the Bank insured that most of these unions were very small, with an average size of 35 members (Rello, 1987).

Additionally, the Bank insured the near-exclusive dedication of La Laguna’s ejidatarios to cotton farming by refusing to provide credit for other crops and punishing producers who diverted loans to other uses by withholding further credit or the subsidized inputs, especially fertilizers, which were critical for the chemical-intensive farming methods employed in La Laguna (Hellman, 1981). In this way the state sought to limit the amount of subsistence crops grown by ejidatarios, thus insuring their dependence on what was, at least initially, a relatively lucrative crop. When cotton prices later declined, the government sought a limited diversification of La Laguna’s agricultural profile by relaxing restrictions on food crops and permitting ejidal producers to plant fodder, which was in high demand due to growth in the region’s burgeoning dairy industry. However, the Bank continued to control ejidal agriculture by making the availability of both credit and water (the latter a critical resource in this semi-arid region) contingent on the type of crops being grown.

Fedecafé and partial possession in Viejo Caldas

Land Law 200 became the central pillar in a series of state initiatives to stimulate the growth of the coffee export sector through the consolidation of a smallholder structure of production under Fedecafé control.⁵ The Colombian government granted Fedecafé the authority to tax coffee exports, vertically integrate national production, and regulate the market as part of its national development strategy. In response, Fedecafé created the National Coffee Fund (FNC, established in 1940) to oversee the taxes levied on exports. It used these revenues to finance a system of coffee storage and husking plants to integrate the diffuse geography of coffee fields and centralize oversight of local production and sales.

Additionally, the FNC instituted a policy to guarantee the purchase of smallholder beans that met quality standards set by Fedecafé as long as these smallholders became card-carrying members of the local chapter of the Federation. It subsidized a price floor system to guarantee that the price of beans sold by farmers would not fall below a level necessary to sustain a typical smallholding family. In order to ensure steady yields and productive farms, Fedecafé established a public bank, the Banco Cafetero (1950), to provide subsidized credit to smallholders, and expanded its coffee science institute, Centro Nacional de Investigaciones de Café (Cenicafé, established in 1938). The results of Cenicafé’s sponsored research by international scientists on the ecology of the region and other issues related to productivity were regularly diffused to farmers via a broad extensions program equipped with local experts who regularly met with producers (London, 1999).

The financing provided by the Banco Cafetero and the research developed at Cenicafé were incentives for smallholders to convert greater portions of their land from subsistence crops to coffee. Most loans were used to purchase new ‘sun-tolerant’ seed varieties developed at Cenicafé, which yielded more beans per plant. However, they also demanded different inputs, including expensive fertilizers and irrigations systems, and they required smallholders to uproot the subsistence crops that had provided the overhang required for the ‘shade-grown’ coffee cultivated in the past. Despite these risks, most producers converted to ‘sun-tolerant’ varieties and subsidized the additional cost by taking on larger loans (Ortiz, 1999).

Fedecafé’s developmentalist initiatives proved successful in stimulating productivity in Colombia’s coffee industry throughout the postwar decades, but its successes were not strictly economic in nature. They also laid the groundwork for the construction of a national identity rooted in the experiences of smallholding coffee producers, epitomized by the symbol of Juan Valdez (London, 1997). In so doing, these measures effectively generated regional bastions of support for the political status quo. With few exceptions, the smallholders of Viejo Caldas backed Fedecafé in its unwavering support for the elite-led and highly exclusive Liberal and Conservative Parties that monopolized the country’s highest political offices. This support continued throughout the period of sectarian political violence called La Violencia (1948–1957), the military dictatorship under General Rojas Pinilla (1953–1957), the National Front regime⁶ (1957–1974) (Bergquist, 1986), and even into the early 1990s following the writing of a new national constitution in 1991 (London, 1999).

While some have hailed the political conservatism of the cafeteros as a ‘great transformative and integrating force’ responsible for the relative stability of Colombia’s political regime (Sánchez, 2001), the leaders who received the bulk of cafetero electoral support also implemented policies that caused social upheaval, over-urbanization, and rapid proletarianization in regions outside of Viejo Caldas. The cafeteros’ conservatism therefore separated them from a larger and increasingly militant population of non-coffee producing agricultural workers and peasants, urban students, and industrial workers who were excluded from the benefits of the coffee-based developmental model (Bergquist, 1986).

To be sure, the region’s cafeteros participated in a national dialogue on agrarian rights promoted by the Asociación Nacional de Usarios Campesinos (ANUC) movement that formed in the late 1960s. However, the cafeteros were less militant in their tactics and more conservative in their demands than the ANUC branches that emerged in those regions of the country marked by marginalized subsistence peasantries and repressed proletarianized agro-export workers. Moreover, the struggles between the coffee-based conservative faction and the more radicalized factions of the ANUC ultimately divided and weakened the movement, facilitating the repression of the radicals and the eventual demise of the organization by the early 1970s (Zamosc, 1986). This divergence continued well into the 1980s, with revolutionary guerrilla activity expanding into these same regions of agrarian repression and Viejo Caldas remaining a key site of political stability with little guerrilla influence (Rettberg, 2010).

In short, the agrarian struggles in La Laguna and Viejo Caldas granted producers access to land, but over time, these producers became heavily dependent on state institutions that regulated commodity markets and/or subsidized their livelihoods through the provision of credits, loans, and agricultural services. The consolidation of these regimes of partial possession created reliable political supporters of the state, effectively depoliticizing the very classes of producers who had been among the most radicalized and organized segments of the rural population just decades earlier.

The world historical conditions of partial possession

While partial possession succeeded in stabilizing agrarian unrest, its success rested on the ability of the Mexican and Colombian governments to subsidize commercial cotton and coffee production. This ability, in turn, depended on strong demand and high prices for the region’s dominant crops, or access to credit. In this sense, partial possession was enabled by and contingent upon the economic expansion that occurred during the post-war period in the context of US hemispheric hegemony.

The limits of debt-dependent development in La Laguna

In 1944, cotton cultivation in La Laguna reached a historic high of 142,777 hectares – a year in which the region’s collective cotton farms, which represented less than 8 percent of the country’s ejidos, received more than 35 percent of the loans granted by the Ejido Bank, underscoring the region’s significance as a model of collective, commercial agriculture (Heath, 1976; Otero, 1999). This support also underscored the key position of La Laguna’s cotton producers within Mexico’s nascent import-substituting industrialization (ISI) regime, both because they supplied a critical input for the nation’s textile industry, the lynchpin of the manufacturing sector, and because the revenue generated by cotton exports contributed to the agricultural surplus on which ISI depended.

Yet in little more than a decade, world market conditions shifted, due in part to the decision of the U.S. government to subsidize of US cotton (Chavéz Ortiz and Ibarra Thennet, 1987).⁷ In 1956, the Mexican government’s earnings from cotton – at the time, its chief agricultural export – fell 25 percent, and prices continued to fall through the rest of the decade (Walsh, 2008). Meanwhile the cost of domestic production in Mexico increased, launching many of La Laguna’s cotton producers into a spiral of ever-increasing debt to the Ejido Bank.

In the decades that followed, the Ejido Bank continued to provide créditos de avío, but as the probability of these loans being repaid steadily declined, their function changed. Originally intended to serve as a short-term advance on profits, the credits became a government wage to producers, thereby converting ejidatarios into de facto employees of the Ejido Bank. Although these payments were a financial drain on the government, they helped reproduce ejidatario households and thus buttressed rural support for the ruling party (Rello, 1987).

However, over time it became more difficult for the government to access the funds necessary to subsidize developmentalist agricultural policies. Because Mexico was attempting to finance rapid industrialization through agricultural surpluses, declining investment and lagging productivity in the rural sector compounded a significant balance of payments problem (Fajnzylber, 1983). The discovery of new oil reserves in the late 1970s provided a temporary reprieve, but the collapse in world oil prices during the recession of 1981–1982 plunged the Mexican economy into a severe crisis. Amidst widespread speculation that Mexico might default on its debt, the Baker Plan was launched in 1985 to provide the Mexican government with access to new loans, conditional on the implementation of market-oriented reforms to address the underlying causes of long-term indebtedness (Aspe Armella, 1993).⁸

Among the reforms impacting agriculture was the privatization of the state enterprises producing seed and fertilizer in 1989. Between 1990 and 1991, the government also eliminated direct price supports for producers of nine basic crops, including cotton. Perhaps most significantly, the availability of credit was sharply reduced. Only 33 percent of La Laguna’s ejidatarios received credit for cotton in 1992, down from nearly 80 percent just two years earlier (Otero, 1999). Without the resources necessary to cultivate their fields, many ejidatarios rented or sold their land to larger private or ejidal farmers, even though the Mexican Constitution of 1917 prohibited the alienation of ejidal lands (DeWalt et al., 1994).

The limits of world market regulation in Viejo Caldas

As in La Laguna, the viability of partial possession in Viejo Caldas rested on the state’s ability to reinvest in the economic well-being of producers, and on a world economic context that enabled the Colombian government to provide this support. But whereas Mexico was powerless to counter the decline in world cotton prices that made the reproduction of La Laguna’s producers more expensive, Colombia was able to exert some influence over the world coffee market. This was achieved via cartel-like arrangements that the Colombian government coordinated with other leading Latin American coffee-exporting countries, including Brazil (the world’s largest exporter), to secure higher prices by withholding coffee from the world market.⁹ In this way, Colombia was able to offload at least some of the cost of reproducing its coffee sector on to importers and consumers. This was possible because collectively Latin American countries commanded 76 percent of the world coffee market during the 1950s, with Brazil and Colombia alone accounting for just over 60 percent (Daviron and Ponte, 2005).

Yet a favorable geopolitical climate was critical for realizing the benefits of this market position. The cartelization strategy orchestrated by Colombia was legitimated and institutionalized by the United States government during the Second World War as a measure to thwart Axis influence and maintain US geopolitical hegemony in the hemisphere. Similarly, during the years of the Cold War, as part of the Alliance for Progress, the US signed onto a series of International Coffee Agreements (ICAs) that included the vast majority of coffee-exporting countries. By regulating world coffee prices and volumes, the ICAs ushered in a period of protracted price stability, expanded growth, and upward mobility for coffee exporters (Krasner, 1973; Talbot, 2004).

Though the ICA’s quota system was successful in raising and stabilizing coffee prices to the benefit of its members, by the 1980s there was growing evidence that the consensus on which it rested was being undermined due to issues with free-riding, squabbles over quotas between larger and smaller producers, and a growth in coffee traded outside of the ICA quota system (Austin, 2012; Ponte, 2001; Talbot, 2004). By the time of the 1989 ICA meeting, the political alliance on which the quota and pricing system depended had collapsed, leading to the abrogation of the system (Bates, 1997) and eventually undermining Fedecafé’s developmental initiatives.

Neoliberalism and the legacies of partial possession

The logic of acquiescence to liberalization in La Laguna

Mexican President Carlos Salinas, who took office in 1988, oversaw the most significant changes to Mexican agriculture since the Cardenas era. Salinas wanted to modernize the country’s moribund agricultural sector in general, and to increase the productivity of inefficient and undercapitalized ejidos specifically. In pursuit of these goals, he orchestrated the passage of the so-called ‘New Agrarian Law’ in 1992, which made three significant amendments to the agrarian provisions of the 1917 Constitution: 1) it ended the government’s obligation to redistribute land; 2) it relaxed the prohibition on corporate ownership of agricultural land; and 3) it created a process by which ejidatarios could convert usufruct rights to formal titles, thereby giving them the right to rent or sell their land to others (De Janvry et al., 1997).

The New Agrarian Law was presented as a measure capable of strengthening (especially commercially oriented) ejidos; secure property rights would make producers more willing to invest in their land, and banks more willing to lend to them. Thus, the reforms would increase the market exposure of Mexico’s ejidal producers, but simultaneously liberate them from state control.

Such promises resonated deeply in a region like La Laguna, where a system of collectivized cotton production had long since morphed into a system of ‘agrarian state capitalism’ in which decisions about what would be grown and how were made not by the ejidatarios, but by government officials (Rello, 1987). A survey of La Laguna’s ejidal producers carried out one year after the New Agrarian Law was passed found that a large majority (77.2%) approved of the Law; an even higher percentage (86.8%) supported the specific provisions regarding the certification and titling of ejidal lands.¹⁰ Yet only a very small percentage (4.3%) reported plans to sell all or part of their land, and most agreed with the statement that the government has an obligation to grant credit (89.0%) and subsidies (90.8%) to ejidatarios (Salinas de Gortari and Solís González, 1994).

Our interpretation of these results is that La Laguna’s ejidatarios were enthusiastic about a new law that they believed would reduce the state’s presence in the countryside, and thus restore to them effective control over the production process. However at the same time, they rejected the notion that the reforms abrogated the government’s obligations towards the ejidal sector. This suggests that while producers wanted to see the state’s political influence over rural life diminish, they rejected the notion that the government should withdraw its economic support from the ejidal sector.

In the two decades since the New Agrarian Law was passed, the most striking change in La Laguna has been a steep decline in cotton cultivation. As recently as the late 1980s, a full three-fourths of La Laguna’s ejidatarios grew cotton; but this percentage plunged precipitously in the early 1990s (Otero, 1999). By and large, cotton has been replaced with cattle fodder, including sorghum and alfalfa, which was planted on 60 percent of the region’s agricultural land in 2007. The conversion to cattle feed is having a pronounced impact on rural employment generation in La Laguna, given the much less labor-intensive nature of fodder as compared with cotton. During the late 1990s, some of this rural labor was absorbed by the region’s export-oriented maquila industry, which expanded dramatically following the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Martínez et al., 2005). During the boom period, the demand for labor was so great that a number of urban industrialists built assembly factories in ejidal communities, but, as export growth slowed and then reversed in the 2000s, so too did the demand for labor, exacerbating rural under- and unemployment (Bair and Werner, 2011). Yet in spite of these difficulties, there is little evidence of sustained political mobilization around producer demands, and the resistance movements that emerged elsewhere to challenge the country’s neoliberal transformation are largely absent from La Laguna.

The logic of acquiescence to liberalization in Viejo Caldas

The termination of the ICA’s quota and pricing system in 1989 led to an immediate drop in the world price of Arabica mild coffee beans from almost $2.50/lb. in 1987 to just over $0.50/lb. by 1993 (Oxfam, 2002). Despite a brief jump in prices in 1994–1995 due to coffee frost and drought in Brazil and in 1997 due to a speculative hike, the average composite price during this time remained 20 percent lower than it was during the late 1980s (Ponte, 2001). In Colombia, Fedecafé responded to this drop by cutting the FNC’s export taxes and using its accumulated reserves to subsidize growers for their losses. However, the eventual depletion of these reserves, coupled with the appearance of a coffee berry borer worm (la broca) that spoiled close to 500,000 hectares of coffee fields, forced the FNC to sell off its interests in the Banco Cafetero and seek out loans from the central government, both to finance the extermination of la broca and to continue to subsidize the drop in coffee prices. By 2001, the FNC, which had incurred debts of over $433.5 million, was forced to abandon the price floor mechanism. Without the price floor to assure producers a price pegged to the cost of living locally, the FNC’s ability to maintain its guaranteed purchase policies was also undermined, giving way to increasing competition between Fedecafé and foreign transnational conglomerates, whose share of local purchases jumped from 8 percent in 1989 to over 50 percent by the early 2000s. With less to sell, Fedecafé’s revenues dropped over the course of the decade by 80 percent (Robledo, 1998; Talbot, 2004).

The impact on cafeteros was severe. The cost of coffee production skyrocketed at the same time that prices declined, leaving many farmers in debt. In the past, they would have turned to the Banco Cafetero for low-interest loans and to Fedecafé for technical support and assistance. However, the bankruptcy of the FNC meant that many farmers were forced to resort to high-interest loans from private banks that ended up exacerbating their debts by the close of the decade.

A movement did emerge to contest the dismantling of Fedecafé’s developmentalist agencies. Between 1992 and 1995, a group of cafeteros called the Unidad Cafetera Nacional (UCN) organized a series of street mobilizations in Viejo Caldas to demand forgiveness for outstanding loans. In 1997, the UCN organized a national civic strike that succeeded in forcing the FNC to write off 25 percent of cafetero debts and provide subsidies to cover the costs of new worm-resistant coffee varieties. Another such strike occurred in 2001. By then, the FNC itself was bankrupt, so the Colombian government stepped in to write off debts to over 80,000 cafetero families and reinstate a direct price-floor subsidy (Robledo, 1999). Rather than fix local prices according to living costs, the new subsidy pegged them to world market prices that have been both more volatile and significantly lower than they were during the heyday of the ICA regime. Since then, grower debt has increased, and the UCN has not organized further demonstrations (Hough and Bair, 2012).

In the absence of a comprehensive solution to the coffee crisis, bankruptcy and debt forced Colombia’s cafeteros to resort to new sets of livelihood strategies. Many smallholders began to sell ever greater portions of their farms, leading to a concentration in land ownership and a polarization in the size of landholdings throughout the region (Robledo, 1998). Some eventually became fully proletarianized workers on the large plantations, while others abandoned the countryside altogether, contributing to an estimated 8 percent per annum increase in informal sector economic activities and an average 22 percent rate of unemployment in the region’s largest cities (Ramírez, 2002).¹¹ Still others became coca farmers, either by migrating to established coca-producing regions or by planting their coffee fields with coca (Rettberg, 2010; Smith, 2003). Either way, the illegal nature of coca production brought them directly into the center of the war- and state-making activities of illegal armed groups, including leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitary groups, and drug mafias. The decline of smallholder coffee production in Viejo Caldas therefore undermined the social stability of the region and triggered the types of unemployment, urban decay, political violence, and organized criminal activities that characterized other regions of the country over the past decades.¹²

Thus, while outcomes were broadly similar in La Laguna and Viejo Caldas, the responses of local producers to the introduction of market reforms reflected different rationales. In La Laguna, ejidatarios hoped the reforms would deliver the final blow to a long defunct system of cotton clientelism. The survey results cited above suggest that many producers viewed rural restructuring as in their interest, and therefore embraced, rather than merely acquiesced, to reforms. In contrast, Fedecafé continued to deliver the goods to cafeteros in Viejo Caldas after it ceased to do so in La Laguna. The dismantling of Fedecafé’s support system following the abrogation of the ICA quota and pricing system therefore brought new hardships to smallholders, who found themselves exposed to the same difficult market conditions that other rural producers had been facing all along. Yet rather than joining cause with these groups to mobilize against the reforms, cafeteros have advocated a more conservative and sectarian position, preferring instead to attempt to resurrect Fedecafé and regain their privileged status within Colombian agriculture. Unable to do so in the liberalized world coffee market, the region’s producers have struggled to attain new livelihood strategies.

Thus far, we have argued that regimes of partial possession developed in both La Laguna and Viejo Caldas in the decades following the 1936 agrarian reform. However, it is important not to overstate the similarities between the two cases, which vary in terms of the key institutions that reproduced producer livelihoods and in the nature of rural communities’ dependence on the state. In Mexico, the major mechanism of partial possession was the ejidatario’s reliance on the Ejido Bank, which leveraged its financing of cotton production into a significant degree of control and management over La Laguna’s ejidal sector. Perhaps most importantly, the system of advance credits that the Bank provided became, over time, a major income stream on which rural households depended. In Colombia, Fedecafé (via the FNC) played an important and somewhat analogous role for Viejo Caldas’s newly landed coffee smallholders, although they retained greater control over the production process than their counterparts in La Laguna. In this sense, the political control engendered by partial possession was somewhat more indirect in Colombia than in Mexico. However, in both cases producers’ continued reliance on commercial crops made them dependent on government support (either in the form of direct financing as in La Laguna, or in the form of a regulated global market as in Viejo Caldas), which was a necessary condition of their economic well-being as well as a mechanism for insuring political stability under the PRI in Mexico and the National Front regime in Colombia.

Conclusions

We began this article with a specific puzzle: why rural producers in areas that experienced historically significant agrarian mobilizations proved relatively quiescent in the face of market reforms that would appear to undermine these hard-fought gains for land and livelihood. Our analysis of the historical trajectories of producers in La Laguna and Viejo Caldas found that contemporary responses were shaped by the particular regional political economies that were consolidated during the post-war developmental decades. We coined the term ‘partial possession’ to refer to these regimes, which granted producers control of the land, but made their social reproduction dependent on clientelist ties to state institutions. In this way, partial possession cultivated a conservative political orientation among these rural communities that was critical for the maintenance of the existing political order.

Our analysis of partial possession in La Laguna and Viejo Caldas helps extend our understanding of Latin America’s neoliberal turn in several ways. We noted above that the literature examining popular responses to market reforms diverges between two scales of analysis: case-based studies, mostly of anti-neoliberal resistance, and public opinion-based studies, mostly finding some degree of popular support for neoliberalism. Regarding the former, our analysis provides much needed counterfactual cases that demonstrate what Rovira Kaltwasser (2011: 233) correctly describes as ‘the varied response to the implementation of market reforms’ across and within Latin American countries. Compared to the Zapatistas in Chiapas, for example, producers in both La Laguna and Viejo Caldas were clearly acquiescent in the face of neoliberal reforms. However, despite these regions’ shared histories of agrarian unrest, land reform and dependence on state support, the logics underlying the responses to liberalization vary. This suggests the value not only of avoiding deterministic generalizations about the nature of neoliberalism at large from a select number of regional cases, but also of paying greater attention to the historical contingencies that produced acquiescence (or resistance) in each case.

Our findings also speak to the stream of literature documenting public approval of market reforms. However, here, our analysis suggests that some degree of caution is warranted when using national surveys to study popular responses to neoliberalism. Not only are these poor instruments for identifying varying levels of support for reforms within countries, perhaps more importantly, they tell us little about why people support (or oppose) them. Reactions to the neoliberal turn may be just as informed by actors’ assessments of the status quo ante than by their evaluations of neoliberalism’s strengths and weaknesses. In our case, developing concrete explanations for why communities responded to economic liberalization as they did required us to examine the institutional practices underlying the social reproduction of spatially and temporally contingent classes within national publics.

Similarly, our study provides a different explanation for popular responses to neoliberalism than has been offered by those seeking to explain the apparent support of Latin American publics for such reforms. For example, Kurtz (2004) argues that rural communities in Chile and Mexico failed to resist neoliberal policies because market reforms created social dislocations in the countryside that undermined the political organization of these communities, and weakened their ability to mobilize effectively. In contrast, our analysis suggests that the collective capacity of rural producers declined long before the introduction of neoliberal reforms, and that this was an outcome that was not caused by the market, but rather cultivated by agencies of the state.

Second, our analysis of the key institutions underlying partial possession, and the ways in which these institutions were shaped by developments in the world economy, allows us to extend our analysis outwards in ways that help highlight the central role that the macro-context played in shaping the trajectories of these regions. As we pointed out, partial possession in La Laguna depended upon the viability of a debt-dependent model of development, while in Viejo Caldas it relied on a regulated world coffee market. Our incorporated comparison reveals the ways in which regional regimes of partial possession articulated with developments in world markets, and how changes in the global political economy eventually undermined partial possession, thus providing a nuanced account of the multi-scalar causes that facilitated the implementation of, and acquiescence to, neoliberal reforms in these two regions.

Third, our findings complicate the conventional narrative that the neoliberal turn in Latin America was a sharp break with the developmentalist regime of the past. To be sure, the dismantling of Fedecafé’s market regulations changed the status quo ante because, as Silva (2009) argues, it exposed producers directly to the whims of an unregulated world market. However, it is clear from our analysis that the social reproduction of cafeteros was marketized over the course of several decades, as they became ever more committed to commercial coffee production over subsistence agriculture. The same was true in La Laguna. In other words, our study reveals that marketization occurred alongside the development of statist development policies that provided commodity producers some protection from the vicissitudes of the market in exchange for political support of the prevailing regime. By ending the support that buffered producers from market pressures, what neoliberalism represented was not so much a radical departure from the previous regime than a deepening of a marketization process that began during the developmentalist era. This perspective clearly problematizes any neo-Polanyian formulations either associating developmentalism with embeddedness and neoliberalism with disembeddedness, or assuming a historical disjuncture between the two.

Relatedly, our findings suggest that marketization is not necessarily the key factor determining how communities respond to neoliberal reforms. Again, the UCN movement and the cafeteros’ efforts to resurrect Fedecafé in the 1990s might appear to substantiate Silva’s argument that increased marketization triggers a Polanyian countermovement. However, coffee producers in Viejo Caldas did not resist their marketization during the heyday of Fedecafé, and there is no evidence of active resistance to economic liberalization in the region today. Moreover, in La Laguna there is even less evidence of the kind of social mobilization that would be suggestive of a countermovement. Thus, what shaped producer responses to neoliberalism in these regions was not marketization so much as the experiences of these rural communities with the clientelist practices of the state.

Finally, our analysis of partial possession provides some insight into the social and political obstacles confronting resistance movements in the neoliberal era. The systems of state-supported agriculture that emerged in La Laguna and Viejo Caldas in the aftermath of the 1936 reforms were not only designed to forestall further conflict in these historically restive regions; they also created rural labor aristocracies that supported existing political regimes at the expense of the development of broader social movement alliances with those excluded from the benefits of cotton and coffee clientelism. Insofar as this position of relative privilege was eroded by economic liberalization, neoliberalism may indeed by creating opportunities to construct the sort of inclusive counter-movements imagined by its critics. Such possibilities, however, must overcome the institutional legacies, lived experiences, and political imaginaries of the past that, as we see in La Laguna and Viejo Caldas, can make alternative futures appear distant.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the members of CU Boulder’s Latin American Studies Center faculty working group and the journal’s referees for comments on an earlier version of this article.

Notes

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