Emancipatory Rural Politics in Latin America 2010-2020: Alliance-Building,Right-Wing Populisms and Political Transitions

Who And How: Subjects And Procedures Of Emancipatory Rural Politics

Two elements are key for defining emancipatory politics. First, its capacity to transform relations of oppression. Following Laclau (2007: 1): “There is no emancipation without oppression, and there is no oppression without the presence of something which is impeded in its free development by oppressive forces.” Second, it is essential to acknowledge that the association between utopian scenarios and emancipatory politics has been strongly questioned in times of neoliberalism. Santos (2008: 4) observed that neoliberalism crafted a double crisis, one of social regulation “symbolized by the crisis of the regulatory state,” and one of social emancipation, comprised of the crisis of reformism and revolution.

How to find emancipatory alternatives within the double crisis? One alternative is to observe “real utopias” (Fung and Wright, 2003) as political experiments that transform realities while advancing egalitarian and radical democratic values. Therefore, the emancipatory character of political processes should no longer be examined teleologically. Emancipation is not only about what the oppressed are pursuing (overcoming oppression), but also who (which subjects) is pursuing it and how (the kind of alliances they are building and the values they advance).

The question of what defines emancipatory rural politics was also raised by Scoones et al. (2017), highlighting the need for a grounded understanding. Thus, by bringing empirical experiences from diverse countries, the current literature on authoritarian populism and the rural world covers cases of emancipatory rural politics such as resistance against land grabbing for export-oriented large-scale agricultural endeavors (Monjane and Bruna, 2020); protests against neoliberal deregulation of agriculture and food trade (Mamonova and Franquesa, 2019); bottom-up food sovereignty experiences (Calvário, Desmarais, and Azkarraga, 2020; Felicien et al., this collection); and political claims towards the enforcement of redistributive policies in the countryside. They have also documented rural communities’ resistance to different kinds of extractive projects that would threaten their territories and livelihoods (Adaman, Arsel, and Akbulut, 2019).

The contexts in which these alternatives take place matter enormously for considering them emancipatory. While in some cases the engagement with state-anchored participatory processes, legal mobilization, or even electoral politics are studied as forms of emancipatory politics, in many other contexts, those kinds of experiences could be interpreted merely as ways of reinforcement and legitimation of means of domination. Within the literature, authors have also questioned the limits of those experiences. For instance, after reflecting on rural mobilization experiences in the current European countryside, Mamonova and Franquesa consider that their limitations lie in that “they are small-scale, focus on narrow ‘bread-and-butter’ issues and remain within national borders” (2019: 21). For considering their emancipatory character, I propose underlining the nature of the alliances involved (who participates and alliance-building) and the procedures conducted by the social actors (how they participate).

Context analysis is crucial for addressing these two questions. For instance, in Latin America, questions about emancipatory rural politics’ subjects should take into account the process of social fragmentation enhanced through neoliberalism (Sader, 2001; Hale, 2005). In the subjective and operational dimension, the emancipatory character of such politics is also determined by the capacity to subvert human oppression in a relational perspective, meaning through the development of alliances between different segments of marginalized people. For defining working people, I draw on Shivji’s (2017: 11) definition:

Commodification and privatization of health care, education, water, sanitation and removal of subsidies from essential foods, which all formed part of the social wage goods previously, means that now the poor have either to pay for it or go without. All in all, the materiality which underlies producers—peasants and pastoralists, proletarians and semi-proletarians, street hawkers selling consumer goods and peddlers selling cooked food, operators and repairers in backyard workshops—in virtually all sectors is the minimizing of their necessary consumption and maximizing their labour.

Although there are multiple differences between segments of marginalized people, whether based on ethnic or race-based identities, urban or rural habitation, or the kind of labor they are engaged with, working people are typically exploited under what Shivji (2017: 11) defines as primitive accumulation under neoliberalism: “the process of surplus extraction by capital based on expropriation of a part of necessary consumption of the producer.”

To a large extent, neoliberalism and its regulatory frameworks have deepened the differences between working people who are subjects of shared relations and experiences of domination, exclusion, and exploitation. Under neoliberalism, the institutional frameworks enabling social actors to present claims to the authorities limit their articulation, and one of the best examples of this situation is land policies. To provide an example of the institutional context in which emancipatory rural politics are developed, I will briefly consider the implications of neoliberal land reform in social fragmentation.

Neoliberal Fragmentation And Land Redistribution

One of the challenges of alliance-building within working people is rooted in the introduction of multiculturalism in Latin American constitutions since the late 1980s. Neoliberalism strongly influenced the new constitutional texts by reforming the state apparatus, the interrelation between governmental agencies, and the reduction of public expenditure accordingly. These new constitutions also included the recognition of rights, particularly over land and natural resources, to specific historically discriminated groups, such as indigenous groups (Gargarella, 2013). These paradoxical arrangements led to an institutional setting labelled “neoliberal multiculturalism,” generating tension between the politics of recognition of indigenous groups and the reaffirmation of their cultural particularities, while finding themselves “trapped” in asymmetrical negotiations for exercising rights over resources and political power (Hale, 2005: 13). Eventually, the enforcement of these new frameworks and institutions led to sharpening tensions between “ethnic” and “non-ethnic” subjects, in terms of protecting and recognizing their rights to land access and control.

In many rural settings, the enforcement of neoliberal-oriented land policies pushed marginalized rural actors to compete against each other to prove before the state who had the better position for claiming land ownership rights. Such rivalries were heightened by the use of legal and institutional channels, creating or deepening ethnic divisions between social subjects that had struggled together before the existence of multicultural institutional frameworks wrought by neoliberal constitutional reforms (Ng’weno, 2007). While landless and nearly landless people with different ethnic identities compete to gain the best position and the recognition of land rights by the state, large-scale landholdings and the structures of power related to land concentration continue to exist. Thus, the state makes concessions in terms of recognizing collective land rights to ethnic groups, but the agrarian structure remains largely untouched.

Furthermore, neoliberal land policies simplify the negotiation process between the state and different segments of land claimants: each group has a particular channel for demanding land rights, and the state can negotiate specific demands, even some of them in tension, without attending to broader claims for land redistribution. Therefore, one of the outcomes of neoliberal land policies is the difficulty of articulating marginalized rural people, because each group must pursue its own institutionalized route for rights-claiming. Thus, the courses of action—“the how”—matter significantly in rural emancipatory practices when state policies reinforce the separation between segments of what Shijvi calls working people.

Alliance Building And Emancipatory Politics

Rural politics are emancipatory in a relational way. Actors subverting relations of oppression eventually do so by building alliances with other social actors, despite cultural, geographical, and other differences. Through these political processes, different social actors develop alliances that make transformative claims, in which democracy and deliberation remain at the center of the political action. This is how these experiences gain an emancipatory character.

This relational perspective recognizes that the material basis matters as criteria for aggregating political forces in support of a social justice demand. It also reveals in a clearer fashion the antagonists of those working people’s alliances. Changes wrought through emancipatory alliances are usually contested by “the elites whose interests would be threatened by such changes" (Wright, 2010: 274). However, articulation beyond local regions remains one of the greatest challenges for emancipatory movements (Zibechi, 2012).

Although questions on the who and the how overlap, their emphases are distinguishable. The first reveals the emancipatory alliances built through the participation and collaboration among the oppressed and dominated. For instance, rural landed elites might oppose resource extraction, because it affects their interest in remaining at the top of structures of domination. While their interests might align with those of oppressed people, since they will also oppose resource extraction because of the negative impacts in their livelihoods and environment, rural elites’ action means no transformation of structures of domination, and therefore an eventual alliance between the oppressed and these elites would not be emancipatory.

The second question reveals deeper political choices. The “how” reveals that some politics are emancipatory in the sense that agents align their interests with those of other oppressed peoples, even if such an alignment is contradictory to their own interests. This aspect might indicate that social subjects have gained awareness of the structural relations of oppression, going beyond the bare satisfaction of their immediate needs. Hence, the capacity to emancipate relies on challenging the central power by subverting relations of oppression that are dominating others, going beyond the limited “bread and butter” scope of some rural politics, as pointed out by Mamonova and Franquesa (2019).

The elements of emancipatory rural politics considered here resonate with the characterization of emancipatory social movements proposed by Zibechi (2012), namely: territorialization of social struggles, reaffirmation of identities beyond citizenship, concern for the organization of work and the relationship with nature, and self-affirming political actions. This paper builds on Zibechi’s concern by regarding the challenges facing these movements in terms of alliance-building with other movements beyond their regions.

In terms of the scale, emancipatory rural politics are firmly rooted locally but are usually connected to national and international networks and platforms. Movements performing emancipatory politics are territorialized: rooted in spaces that have been recovered through struggles (Zibechi, 2012). Emancipatory politics take place in different locations simultaneously and successively. They are built up by groups and organizations representing different sectors: environmental activists, peasant producers, rural dwellers, proletarianized and semi-proletarianized workers; they simultaneously question core features of right-wing authoritarianism and populism, as well as capitalist extractivism (Ye et al., 2020). In sum, emancipatory politics are crucial for enhancing democracy, even if the actors involved are not engaging with electoral debates. Since this paper considers the emancipatory politics taking place in Latin America as a reaction to the latest wave of authoritarian right-wing political movements, I will introduce some elements of political context in the following section.

Political Transitions In Latin America: Populism, Neoliberalism, Social Mobilization, And Rural Policies

Neither authoritarian rule nor populism are new in Latin America. In the 1970s, scholars used the notion of populism for characterizing several political projects that gained relevance since the 1920s in most countries of the region. ¹ Then, populism was portrayed as the irruption of charismatic leaders that maintained an immediate relationship with the masses using anti-oligarchic narratives that threatened the basis of representative democracies and political intermediation (Borón, 2012). After the first wave of populism, authoritarian rule swept through the region with right-wing military dictatorships in several countries. Some authors claim that in the 1990s, amid the recrudescence of neoliberalism, a wave of neopopulism took place in the region, with the regime of Fujimori in Peru the most representative case (Crabtree, 1996).

In the 2000s, the region observed the rise of the “Pink Tide,” broadly defined as the “rapid succession of electoral triumphs of leftists and center-leftist presidential candidates at the outset of the century” (Ellner, 2018: 4). While mass media and mainstream political analysts reproduced analysis of the Pink Tide by distinguishing between populist and non-populist governments, critical scholars have engaged more in-depth with the topic to understand and characterize the nuances and differences within this political phenomenon. After the Pink Tide’s collapse, the region fell into the global trend of multiple yet diverse cases of right-wing authoritarian politics.

Arguably, post-Pink Tide forms of populist and authoritarian governments in Latin America are rooted in hyper-presidentialism (Gargarella, 2013) and relate to the social crisis crafted by neoliberal policies throughout the last decades. Neoliberalism was aggressively if unevenly enforced in most countries of the region in the 1980s and 1990s. Neoliberal reforms included free-trade orthodoxy, labor deregulation, privatization of public social services, reduction of public expenditures, dismantling of public entities, and many other policies that negatively impacted the livelihoods of Latin American poor people. In reaction, since the late 1990s, so-called “Pink Tide” governments gained power in different countries, many of them with a well-defined purpose to initiate a post-neoliberalism era in the region. In some cases, these transitions implied Constitutional changes that “privilege[d] postneoliberal values: social over economic goals; pluriculturalism, including an appreciation of indigeneity; equality; and a non-exploitative approach to nature” (Ettlinger and Hartmann, 2015: 37). Although the inclusion of anti-neoliberal narratives in some of the new Constitutions and the enforcement of redistributive social policies significantly reduced the number of people living in poverty, some question the extent to which those progressive governments completely abandoned economic neoliberalism (Vergara-Camus and Kay, 2017).

In the early 2010s, the Pink Tide showed signs of collapse amid an economic crisis driven by the fall of commodity prices. In some countries, right-wing, authoritarian, and conservative incumbents won the elections; in others, they reached power by non-democratic means. Regrettably, in countries such as Nicaragua and Venezuela, left governments have degraded into authoritarianism, eroding basic democratic institutions and procedures. Despite the unevenness of the political transitions in the region, different features of neoliberalism have become reinforced. Given the particularity of each country’s political trajectory, the aggregation of country cases into broader categories is today impossible and analytically irrelevant.

Different voices consider the interrelations between neoliberalism and the social crisis crafted by its policies on the one hand, and the emergence of right-wing populism and authoritarianism worldwide on the other. For instance, the rise of Trump in the United States and the support that his political project in rural areas could not be explained without considering the impacts of the Democratic Party’s neoliberal turn and its subsequent alienation of its working-class base (Roman-Alcalá, Graddy-Lovelace, and Edelman, 2021).

Therefore, the analysis of the political alternatives confronting the new wave of right-wing populist and authoritarian politics should consider not only its implications in society but also how they confront these political projects. The re-accommodation of the right in Latin America during the 2010s, and its reinvigorated neoliberal perspective after the Pink Tide, sets up inquiries into social movements’ capacity to confront and offer alternatives to different expressions of authoritarianism and right-wing populism, regardless of whether they are in command of the state or not.

The experiences analyzed here are placed in the context of the social crisis forged from the failure of neoliberal policies. Right-wing incumbents strengthened the enforcement of neoliberal policies, and in the worst cases, implemented them by threatening primary democratic institutions, such as human rights, leading to ’authoritarian neoliberalism’ (Saad-Filho and Boffo, 2020). Therefore, although rural movements continue to struggle against the enforcement of different neoliberal policies, the political scenario in which they act places more significant challenges on their action, as they operate in more hostile environments.

After 2010, the Pink Tide began to show signs of crisis. Its further collapse is related to a twofold crisis. On the one hand, a legitimation crisis grounded on the erosion of alliances with powerful economic actors like agribusiness, as well as conflictive relations with rural social movements, among others. On the other hand, an economic crisis related to the multiple and convergent crises of the end of the 2000s (financial, food, and fuel) and the end of the commodity boom (Andrade, 2019). Then, during the 2010s, the region transited to an uneven scenario in which Pink Tide governments were gradually replaced by conservative and even far-right political parties, many of them through electoral victories.

Left electoral defeats have taken place since the 2010 presidential election in Chile, where former president Sebastián Piñera defeated the center-left candidate; further events have seriously affected the leftist’s coalition viability since. Undemocratic transitions have also taken place in Honduras (2009), Paraguay (2012), Brazil (2016) and Bolivia (2019). In these countries, coups and soft coups enabled the transition to right-wing governments that rapidly enforced socially regressive political projects. In Argentina (2015), Brazil (2018), Chile (2018), and Uruguay (2020), conservative and right-wing candidates won the elections, and those victories brought the Pink Tide era and its regional integration process to an end. In Colombia (2018) and Guatemala (2019), politics moved even further to social and economic conservatism with the victory of far-right candidates. In Ecuador, the heir of Correa’s Citizen Revolution, Lenin Moreno, won the elections in 2017, but he rapidly turned to the right. Since the presidential elections in 2016, Peru has counted with six presidents in office, one of them gaining power through a coup-d’état.

Conversely, México (2018), Bolivia and Argentina (2020), and Chile and Colombia (2022) elected left-wing candidates, accentuating the regional electoral landscape’s uneven character, and the leftist governments of Nicaragua and Venezuela gained reelections in 2017 and 2018, respectively, while progressively assuming an authoritarian character. Therefore, early claims of the existence of a regional right-turn ² have lost their material basis.

It is not easy to bundle all right-wing and conservative governments of the last decade in Latin America into one single category. The trend of right-wing electoral victories has not been unidirectional and cannot be compared with the victories and the political momentum gained during the 2000s, by political parties and movements from the left. ³ Svampa (2019) identified at least two “new right” strains: the neoliberal right and the radical authoritarian right. While the first refers to the prolongation of neoliberal policies paired with social conservatism, the latter conveys elements of “explicit fascism.” Despite sharing a neoliberal economic perspective and, to some extent, standard political rhetoric (in which frequent reference is made to Venezuela’s crisis), ⁴ their contexts, methods, and the degree to which they are constrained by political and institutional apparatus vary in every case, leading to diverse forms of authoritarian rule. Furthermore, their attempts to act in coordination, for instance, in building a regional platform or developing organized action to confront the Venezuelan crisis, have had little impact.

Although uneven, post-Pink Tide right-wing governments share some crucial characteristics, which are highly relevant for the rural world: overrepresentation of rural landed classes, setbacks in environmental policies, and increased risk for land and environmental rights defenders.

Overrepresentation Of Rural Landed Classes

One common element across countries is the power and representation gained by rural elites during the last decade. Agribusiness, cattle-ranchers, rural rentiers, and landed elites acted and benefited from and played a substantial role in the political transitions. Their role varied depending on each country’s political context: they acted as instigators of non-democratic transitions, as in Bolivia, Brazil, Honduras, and Paraguay (Friggeri, 2017), or forged alliances that permitted the electoral victory of right-wing political parties, as in Colombia in 2018 or Guatemala in 2019. Their representation often translated into policies that reinforced the privileges and interests of rural elites and agribusiness. Simultaneously, they rolled back different policies that favored the rural poor and were enforced by previous governments.

For instance, in Guatemala, the role of agribusiness elites is critical for understanding the composition and nature of the government elected in 2019. Legal and criminal strategies intertwine to ensuring state-sponsored capitalist accumulation in favor of sugar cane and oil palm corporations (Alonso-Fradejas, 2021). In Colombia, two of the most important rural policies, namely the land restitution policy and the comprehensive rural reform that resulted from the 2016 peace agreement, were seriously compromised by the Duque administration (Coronado, 2019).

In Brazil, regressive policies in the countryside started after the coup led by Michel Temer and supported by the Ruralist Block. Such transformation included the Ministry of Agrarian Development’s elimination and the reduction of the budgets of key state agencies in charge of land reform and indigenous people’s rights (Wolford and Sauer, 2018). Afterwards, Bolsonaro’s election was primarily supported in agribusiness-expansion regions, and during his presidency, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Rural Workers’ Movement, MST) faced political prosecution and authoritarian measures such as the closure of their political training schools (Barbosa, 2020). Furthermore, he expressed his positions in different opportunities against granting indigenous people territorial rights and racist positions against quilombolas – rural Afro-Brazilian communities: “I visited a quilombola in Eldorado Paulista, there, the lightest afro-descendant registered seven arrobas. ⁵ They do nothing! I believe that they are not even useful as breeders. More than 1 billion Reais is spent per year on them.” (Gielow, 2019).

In Bolivia, the 2019 political turmoil was not just the consequence of that year’s electoral events and the constitutional reform that allowed Morales and García-Linera’s indefinite reelection. It was also rooted in the tensions within the popular forces supporting Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement toward Socialism, MAS), mainly prompted by the government’s position regarding the 2011 conflict over the Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro-Sécure (Indigenous Territory and National Park Isiboro-Sécure, TIPNIS) triggered by its plans to build a road affecting both a national park and indigenous reserve (Hetland, 2019; McKay and Colque, 2021). Besides these tensions, one of the winners of the 2019 coup-d’état were the landed elites, including the Comité Cívico pro-Santa Cruz (Civic Committee pro-Santa Cruz), led by Luis Camacho, a representative of the eastern Bolivia agribusiness and rentier elites (Miranda, 2019). The political actors who led the coup have effectively enforced a Christian-conservative and far-right discourse, as symbolized by Janine Áñez assuming the country’s presidency by holding a colossal Bible amid widespread human rights violations against protesters in the streets of El Alto and La Paz. During Áñez’s presidency, rural landed elites reinforced their capacity to capture public rents, wealth and political power (Colque, 2019). In the short period of the de-facto government, the former Minister of Economy was accused of land grabbing properties that comprised 34.319 hectares of public lands (Fundación Tierra, 2020).

Rollback Of Environmental Policies

One of the most alarming impacts of the right authoritarian governments in the region is the worsening of environmental crises. Devastating, massive fires in the Amazon region shocked worldwide audiences in 2019. Different studies point out that the startling increase of fires in the Amazon is related to the expansion of agriculture, logging, and cattle-ranching in areas previously covered by rainforest, but also that the cuts to environmental protection agencies under Temer and Bolsonaro’s governments reduced the capacity of the Brazilian state to effectively confront the crisis (Pereira et al., 2019; Diele-Viegas and Rocha, 2020). Moreover, the Bolsonaro government defunded environmental protection agencies and actively encouraged all kinds of extractive endeavors in the Amazon forest and indigenous territories. The Amazon fire crisis also affected Bolivia, coinciding with the last months of Evo Morales in power. Bolivia’s rainforest became more susceptible to fire hazards due to the agrarian policies promoted by the succeeding government; independent research concluded that fires in Santa Cruz are "directly caused by [. . .] the decision of the government of withdrawing fines against illegal logging and fires and the authorization of settlings that were managed as state secrecy” (Fundación Tierra, 2019: 78). Other regional governments have also promoted actions that increase the environmental hazard. In January 2020, former president Duque signed a decree authorizing the Colombian armed forces to resume aerial fumigation with glyphosate to combat illicit coca crops. This order rolled back the policy developed by his predecessor to prioritize other means for combating the increase of coca crops, following a ruling by the Constitutional Court. The tribunal observed that this method severely affected rural populations’ human right to health. Disregarding the court ruling and public health experts’ recommendations, the Duque government opened the possibility of resuming this pesticide use.

Higher Risks For Environmental And Land Rights Defenders

Authoritarianism has also increased the risks faced by grassroots leaders and defenders in the countryside. In the countries under this kind of rule, the processes of rural organization and rights-claiming campaigns and mobilization faced increased violence, fueled by the discourses and positions of administrations in which rural landed elites and agribusiness were highly represented. Colombia, Brazil, México, and Honduras were among the top five of most dangerous countries for environments and land rights defenders in 2019, with Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Venezuela in the top ten (Global Witness, 2020). Despite widespread violence, social movements have not remained still. Different forms of rural politics have taken place during the last decade. Protests against land grabbing, large-scale mining, and dam constructions are perhaps the most salient examples of the current wave of rural politics. Amid rural mobilization and resistances that have taken place during the last decade, some experiences that shaped our understanding of what could be emancipatory rural politics in Latin America stand out. In the next section, I will consider two of them.

Exploring Emancipatory Rural Politics In Latin America: Alliances Among Working People

Over the last decade, rural social movements in Latin America have engaged in different mobilization processes. Although the struggles against neoliberal-oriented agrarian policies remained active throughout the last decades, the uneven political shift in the region impacted their agendas, particularly in the humanitarian field. ⁶ In this section, I explore examples of rural politics that match the definition of emancipatory politics presented in this paper, namely, instances of alliance-building between different segments of working people in a context of social fragmentation induced and sustained through neoliberalism. While I am interested in rural politics that have taken place amid the emergence of right-wing political authoritarianism in the 2010s, emancipatory politics is not limited to this time frame. Social movements and organizations developed different kinds of emancipatory politics at different historical moments.

Those alliances are crucial for confronting the advancement of the far-right as well as reconstructing rural social movements: “An essential ingredient for a recovery of peasant movements has to be the strengthening of the organization of peasants and rural workers, and the building of broad-based class alliances within rural and urban sectors” (Vergara-Camus and Kay, 2017: 435). However, effectively bringing together social actors that remained separated for decades and that have developed sectorial struggles, as in the Latin American case, is no easy task. The actors in the cases explored in this section are rural social movements and organizations that stretched the scope of their sectorial struggles to build alliances with other segments of what Shivji (2017) considers working people. These took place during right-wing rule in the 2010s and confronted core expressions of agrarian neoliberalism and extractivism.

My methods for case selection followed three criteria defined by the conceptual tools explored above. First, to consider rural politics that have not been sufficiently examined by the academic literature: while studies on the MST in Brazil or the Zapatistas in México are abundant (Wolford, 2010; Vergara-Camus, 2014), less attention has been paid to the political mobilization of rural workers organized in unions, or the alliances between unions and rural movements or urban consumers. Second, the political activity of rural actors that took place of the rise of different forms of right-wing authoritarianism and populism in Latin America between 2010 and 2020. This section aims to understand how these politics responded to the contemporary rise of authoritarianism. Third, cases of alliances that brought together social actors with alleged contradictory agendas, to observe how emancipation takes place in a relational manner. To select the two cases studied, I surveyed both academic literature and news reports, particularly from independent media. The analysis of the cases relied on secondary sources and dialogue with researchers from both countries working on this topic. Other cases also fulfill these criteria, but there was not enough information available, for instance, the mobilization against the construction of the interoceanic channel in Nicaragua. Both selected cases, alliances against extractivist food policies in Argentina and alliances against mining-hydrocarbon extractivism in Colombia, provide rich information for the notion of emancipatory rural politics developed throughout this paper and bring resonance to the study, in the sense that “different elements, dynamics, and relations could be recognized from one case to the other” (Lund, 2014: 226). While the cases are different, they resonate with the general argument of emancipatory rural politics, because of the common participation of social sectors with alleged clashing political agendas.

Argentina: From Food Riots To Popular Food Markets

In December 2001, amid the social crisis induced by the Argentinian government’s implementation of a structural adjustment, widespread social protest disrupted the country and generated a political crisis that led to the resignation of then-President Fernando de la Rúa. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the number of people living in poverty doubled in less than three years, reaching 21% of the population, accompanied by massive unemployment, state retrenchment, and social welfare deprivation (Giarracca, 2003).

One of the most visible repertoires of that wave of protests were food riots. These were a reaction to the increasing social crisis and food insecurity faced by many Argentinian households, which increased severely during 2001. The social crisis was fueled by the enforcement of rigid economic policies, such as the limits on cash withdrawals, which severely affected informal economies that relied on money circulation (Page Poma, 2020). 289 food riots occurred in Argentinian provinces, most of them in Buenos Aires, the country’s most populated province (Auyero and Moran, 2007). Yet, the 2001 food riots were not homogenous events: many were directed against chain supermarkets, others targeted small markets, while some were relatively spontaneous. Organizers conducted others. Although many of these riots escalated into violence, in some cases, the presence of organizers prevented that by facilitating the continuation of food distribution networks or the emergence of community-based food provision mechanisms, such as soup kitchens (Page Poma, 2020).

Regardless of such diversity, the 2001 protests left an imprint in the memory of the Argentinian people: the social crisis was induced by structural adjustment policies and the reduction of social welfare services. For social movements, the peak of the protests was an inflexion point for considering alternatives to mediation of institutionalized actors in their relationship with the state. During the Kirchner era (2003-2015), the dynamics of social mobilization and organization were reconfigured. The organizations forms that gave birth to the 2001 social outburst were transformed into other platforms, new social actors were formed, and new repertoires of protest were developed (Palumbo, 2019).

The countryside was no exception to such transformation. While many agrarian movements in Argentina initiated a new cycle of protests against the expansion of different forms of extractivism, notably promoted and benefited by the Macri government (2015-2019) (Palmisano, Wahren, and Hadad, 2021), other initiatives and organizational forms emerged. In 2010, peasants, ⁷ rural workers, and farmers living in the rural-urban areas of the city of Buenos Aires founded the Unión de Trabajadores de la Tierra (Union of Land Workers, UTT). This new organization gained national attention for promoting a new wave of food politics (Wahren and García, 2020) that differed from the methods observed during the 2001 food riots.

In 2018, UTT gathered around 15,000 families from fifteen out of the country’s twenty-three provinces who rent mainly other people’s land for food production (UTT, 2018), holding a protest that grabbed the attention of urban consumers. With the slogan: "There is another countryside, the one that is having a rough time, the one that is not exporting or speculating with dollars,” they installed popular food markets, or as they are known in Argentina, “Verdurazos.”

One of the first "Verdurazos" took place in a public space located in front of the venue for the “Rural Fair” conducted by the Sociedad Rural (Rural Society, the most extensive landowner and agribusiness federation in Argentina, that augmented their influence during Macri’s presidency). The protest consisted of selling more than 5,000 kilos of vegetables for production while advocating for regulatory frameworks that would facilitate access to land and fair markets for Argentina’s landless peasants (El Clarín, 2018). The “Verdurazos" go beyond an economic transaction. They are mainly about bridging working classes from the urban areas and the countryside by raising awareness of the latter’s situation by supplying the former with cheap and healthy food.

This experience has been replicated in cities and municipalities across the country. While some of the protests were violently repressed by police due to problems with municipal permits for the markets, food producers expect to forge alliances with urban consumers through a broad and comprehensive reflection on the importance of providing land access to the rural poor to ensure healthy food access for the urban poor (Martín, 2019). Some of the “Verdurazos” have taken place in front of places where rural elites conduct their meetings and fairs, highlighting the contradictions between rural social classes and seeking broader alliances with urban workers.

Argentina’s “Verdurazos” could be compared with other experiences across the region in which peasant movements attempt to forge alliances with broader and usually unorganized, urban working masses. ⁸ The “Verdurazos” alternated with institutionalized politics, specifically with legislative debates around family farming and peasant agriculture, an initiative which articulated other agrarian movements through platforms for collective action (Wahren and García, 2020).

Markets were not only places of exchange; above all, they became scenarios of encounter. Following E.P. Thompson (1971: 135), markets are places:

where one-hundred-and-one social and personal transactions went on; where news was passed, rumor and gossip flew around, politics was (if ever) discussed in the inns or wine-shops round the market-square. The market was the place where the people, because they were numerous, felt for a moment that they were strong.

Therefore, depending on the intentions, provoking encounters between food producers and consumers could reduce the distance between sectors facing social fragmentation under neoliberalism. In cases like Argentina’s, food markets should be recognized as a venue for constructing emancipatory politics.

Colombia: Environmental Justice Alliances

During the 2010s, Latin America witnessed the emergence of multiple social movements, particularly those opposing the expansion of mining and oil extractive industries (Porto-Gonçalves, 2017; Lander, 2017). In the extractive sector alone, the Observatorio de Conflictos Mineros en América Latina (Observatory of Mining Conflicts in Latin America) identified 285 conflicts during this decade (OCMAL, 2021). Peasants, indigenous peoples, afro-descendant rural dwellers, environmentalists, and others joined forces in multiple struggles in practically all the countries of the region. One of the most emblematic struggles was the violent conflict in Bagua, Perú, in 2009, where thirty-three people died, including twenty-three police officers and ten protestors. However, the social conflicts triggered by extractivism are not always violent, and not all of them express a clear opposition against the exploitation of natural resources and the protection of local dwellers’ agricultural livelihoods. They are often used as channels for negotiating better economic compensation or to gain control of the revenues paid by companies to the state (Arellano-Yanguas, 2011).

Those conflicts usually also entail complex negotiations with powerful actors. Grassroots organizations are under enormous pressure and experience limits to the free exercise of civil and political rights, particularly their right to association. Multiple actors participate in such conflicts. The state, for instance, plays different and contradictory roles, sometimes as a regulator but usually as an ally of the parties interested in pursuing extractive endeavors. Allies of affected communities frequently include environmental justice movements and human rights defenders, and they do not usually include workers in the contested mining project.

In 2010, El Cerrejón, one of the largest open-pit coal mines worldwide and located in the northern La Guajira department of Colombia, announced a project to expand its operation by diverting the Ranchería river, the principal water source of that region. The project’s announcement, and particularly the company’s first steps for obtaining the consent of affected communities, brought together multiple social and political actors in a diverse coalition to oppose its implementation. This platform, named the Comité Cívico (Civic Committee), was composed of several actors, including indigenous and peasant communities affected by mining, many of them displaced and dispossessed from their traditional lands due to the expansion of the mining project at different moments; intellectuals and university students based in Riohacha (the departmental capital); leftist political forces; environmentalists and civil society organizations; and the coal-mining workers’ union, Sintracarbón (Granados and Múnera, 2012).

Many of the interests of these actors are easily aligned. The interests of indigenous people and peasants included the restitution of land rights; the interests of leftists and scholars was the protection of the public resources; and the interests of environmentalists and human rights defenders was to surveil and control the mining operation. Sintracarbón’s participation in such a coalition cannot be taken for granted. Although this committee was composed of diverse political forces representing several interests, the participation of the workers’ union posed a major challenge: for instance, the committee’s first protest aimed to block roads and impede workers’ access to the mining facilities. After a deliberative process, Sintracarbón joined the coalition and used their bargaining power to pressure the company’s ambition to divert the river and expand its operation. Due to convergent causes, including the fall of international coal prices and social unrest, the company withdrew its plan (Semana, 2012).

In 2015, the company launched an alternative project to expand its operation by diverting the Ranchería river and its tributary stream, Arroyo Bruno (Arboleda, 2015). Opposition to the project quickly emerged and was built upon the previous alliances that contested the last mine expansion project. However, the workers’ union played an even more decisive role in this case. In 2015, Sintracarbón, in association with Friends of the Earth-Colombia, conducted independent research to critique the environmental impact studies through which the company obtained the license from the public authority to execute the project. The report found several reasons for opposing the implementation of the diversion project, such as the loss of ecological diversity in one of the most endangered ecosystems of the Caribbean region (tropical dry forest); the negative impacts of the project on water stress in the region; and the violation of human rights of rural communities affected by the project, among other causes (Censat and Sintracarbón, 2015).

Consequently, Sintracarbón asked Cerrejón, as a part of the collective bargaining agreement, to protect the rights of indigenous and afro-descendant rural communities affected by the mine by withdrawing the plan to divert the Bruno stream (Portafolio, 2016). Despite opposition from workers and multiple political actors in La Guajira and elsewhere, the company insisted on the project. Based on the environmental license and on the questionable free, prior, and informed consultation required, the diversion project was implemented. After a human rights trial, the Colombian Constitutional Court declared that the state and the company violated the fundamental rights of affected indigenous and afro-descendant rural communities (Guerrero Pérez, 2017). Solidarity ties continue to promote an articulated opposition to the expansion of extractivism in southern Guajira.

However, Sintracarbón is not the only extractive industry workers’ union that has assumed an atypical position on extractivism in Colombia. The country has experienced an intense debate around oil extraction through fracking in recent years. In the presidential campaign of 2018, candidates from opposing political positions declared that this practice should not be permitted in the country because of environmental hazards (Vega, 2019). Not surprisingly, the right-wing party candidate who won the elections changed his position once in office. Former president Duque’s change of position reopened an extensive debate with different actors’ participation, including academia, environmentalist activists, and policymakers. One of the sectors that actively participated in the debate was the oil industry trade union Unión Sindical Obrera (Worker Trade Union, USO). In recent years, USO members engaged in an internal discussion on the topic, on which they did not have a definitive position. While a part of its constituency did not express severe opposition to fracking, a growing proportion of members fiercely opposed its implementation in Colombia. Environmental justice movements and activists, alongside other actors such as indigenous peoples, afro-descendant rural communities’ organizations, and peasant movements, have been campaigning against fracking for years. In the latter half of 2019, USO united after a deliberative process in which its constituency declared its open opposition to any fracking in the country. In its statement, the union declared that “it is undeniable that global society has begun a structural debate about socio-ecological transformation and energy democracy, which obliges us to take a political and institutional position that transcends the ethics of labor and is oriented toward energy transition." In the same document, the union invited its constituency “to actively engage with the process of territory defense and to confront the implementation of any fracking project, particularly by promoting popular consultations at the local level and seeking municipal council resolutions” (USO, 2019).

This outstanding event not only highlights how different actors with different and apparently contradictory claims and struggles could enhance their position by joining forces to contest the expansion of extractive frontiers. It also shows how the development of new extractive endeavors combined with accumulated environmental liabilities affecting rural communities generates a creative tension for the emergence of new claims, alliances, and repertoires of protest among working classes.

These cases are just two examples of emancipatory rural politics in Latin America, and they indicate a myriad of politics taking place in the region. In the cases discussed, rural movements act in the specific context of their country, with its unique class struggle context and politics. Therefore, their capacity to contribute to an international emancipatory struggle is restricted at least prima facie. However, their relevance needs to be assessed critically.

Despite the limited scope and scale of these cases, their importance lies not in their capacity to lead social forces towards a national revolution, but rather to subvert oppression by building alliances between social actors in a context where neoliberalism makes them compete against each other to ensure their basic reproduction. However, their limitations could gain visibility over a broader time period. In the Colombian experiences, the limits to alliances become more relevant after years of experience; as they are reactive to specific conflicts, their potential to remain active after the de-escalation of the conflict that facilitated the constitution of the alliances is constrained. However, even in the cases where they did not last, the experience gained was crucial for the articulation of social actors in other regions to replicate their resistance by adapting it to their contexts, as many rural communities have done to resist against mining in Colombia (Dietz, 2020).

Conclusions

Despite the transformation of official politics in the last twenty years, governments in Latin America have not entirely abandoned neoliberalism, generating more significant challenges for rural social movements. In recent years, left-wing parties and coalitions won significant elections in Colombia, Argentina, Bolivia, México, Perú, and Chile. However, the extent to which neoliberalism will be radically confronted through governmental actions remains to be seen.

The notion of emancipation has transformed over time and is currently redefined empirically by social actors engaged in radical politics to confront neoliberalism and authoritarianism while promoting democracy through direct and institutional channels. This process is also taking place in the countryside. This paper reaffirms that the limits of emancipatory rural politics are not defined by their scale or ends but by the capacity to sustain alliances within different segments of working people. Struggles against extractivism on the one hand, and for rural democracy and food sovereignty on the other, are examples of how the notion of emancipation is being redefined in the era of protracted neoliberalism and authoritarianism. They are meaningful not because of their resistance, but in their capacity to subvert social fragmentation through new forms of alliances between social actors that are pushed to compete among themselves in the neoliberal context.

The process of alliance-building between social actors and segments of working people reveals emancipatory features of the struggles against exclusionary authoritarianism in Latin America. To confront the segmentation of social actors crafted by multiculturalism, subjects have forged alliances that challenge their own interests: workers of extractive industries calling for corporate accountability and to stop the expansion of extractive operations, and small-scale food producers promoting dialogues with urban consumers on food sovereignty. Consideration of such experiences can open new debates on the meanings of emancipatory and cross-class alliances in the twenty-first century to confront the rise and consolidation of authoritarian populism, not only in Latin America but other regional contexts.

These experiences are situated in a broader spectrum of emancipatory politics that are gaining momentum in the region, particularly through electoral victories by progressive political movements. Broad struggles for food sovereignty and climate and agrarian justice are rooted in local experiences, in alliances crafted in the everyday politics of social agents that challenge expectations by including demands that do not necessarily favor their own interests, but those of other oppressed peoples.