“We need progress,progress has to be made:” Road projects,subaltern politics,and uneven development in Nicaragua

This article examines processes of uneven development and subaltern politics in Nicaragua. Its lens is a rural road project that began during a moment of rapid neoliberal political-economic restructuring. Like other countries in the region, Nicaragua's neoliberal turn was at once a response to preexisting crisis, embraced by elites as a strategy to block “the future reemergence of the radical left” and for some “incapacitate the political center as well,” and imposed by the US and IMF among other lenders and donors (Gledhill, 2004: 336). In Nicaragua, however, these political-economic shifts began about a decade later than in other countries and followed in the wake of the socialist-oriented Sandinista revolution and counterrevolutionary war. As a result, neoliberal restructuring was entangled with those polarized political projects as they continued to play out in a new context, and confronted a highly engaged and mobilized population (Abu-Lughod, 2000; Babb, 2001; Dye et al., 1995). This engagement notwithstanding, the reactionary core of this moment of capitalist development (Gill, 2000: 182), with its high levels of un/underemployment, gutted social services, social dislocation and violence, socio-environmental disasters (e.g. hurricanes Mitch and Felix), and other serious problems, was unmistakable.

In a context of dramatic political contestation and draconian austerity, and at a cost of at least US$271,000, the promoters of the rural road project under scrutiny hailed it as a dream of historic proportions come true. By most standards, however, this road – the Carquita road – would seem quite unremarkable: a meager 15-km macadam road that despite its short length was more than three years in the making. Located in an apparent backwater, this road might seem to be a road to nowhere; to many, it would bear no resemblance to neoliberal “dreamlands” replete with spectacular “express roads … built in record time” (Mitchell, 2012: 231). What distinguishes this road and the many roads like it that have been built in Nicaragua since is the way it congeals the rescaling of national spaces, materializes processes of territorial integration as transnational, globalized ones, and intensifies the dynamics of uneven development (Smith, 2008: 260–266).

The rural community leaders who initiated this road project are men that an older peasant literature would likely classify as middle and rich peasants. Dedicated to dairy and agricultural farming, they are identified locally by occupation as either campesinos (peasants) or small and medium-sized producers; by place as either campesinos (rural residents) or Carquiteños (from the comarca or rural territory Carquita); and by ethnicity in unmarked terms or mestizo. Unlike the focus of much of the research on neoliberalism and social movements in Latin America (Edelman, 2001), however, this community and its leaders were not engaged in progressive movements or “expansive” politics (Hale, 2005). They did not fuel the growth of “uncivil movements” either (Payne, 2000; see also Fabricant, 2009; Fabricant and Postero, 2013), but they did express affinity with, and drew some ideological inspiration from, one such movement, the contras, and supported the right-wing parties in power from 1990 through 2006.

Like other campesinos around the country, these leaders probed for openings and pressed forward paths of political participation (Horton, 2007: 152–153 and passim). Processes of state restructuring and the “changing spaces of local governance” (Howard and Vasquez, 2011) provided one such opening. As elsewhere in Latin America, the reconfiguration of state included municipal decentralization and the promotion of models of participatory development that linked efforts to “strengthen civil society” and encouraged “state-civil society” partnerships in collaboration with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) (Gill, 2000; Postero, 2007; Radcliffe et al., 2002; see also Li, 2007). Carquita leaders engaged the opportunities and relationships these “collaborations” afforded, and through their dreams and practices – their politics – helped instantiate this reconfiguration of governance locally. Thus, projects like the Carquita road are physical and discursive avenues connecting the rescaling of national spaces and the extension of transnational forms of governmentality with particular local places and people.

The renewed emphasis placed on road building and the integration of national hinterlands by mainstream development practitioners in the 1990s is an important thread in this web of connections (Grandia, 2013; Wilson, 2004). Dominant development discourses typically naturalize roads as a means to achieve market access and growth, and render them merely technical thereby depoliticizing them. Wilson argues, however, that “[i]nstead of envisioning roads as neutral lines of penetration … they should be visualized as stretched-out places where intersecting social relations cluster and adhere” (2004: 529; see also Dalakoglou, 2010; Dalakoglou and Harvey, 2012). This work attracts attention to the ways roads lie at the intersection of “overarching territorial regimes” and political-economic processes, and turns our attention to political processes at different scales that shape the material and symbolic qualities of roads in particular moments in time.

Certainly, as Dalakoglou explains, roads, especially highways, have also been theorized as “the most typical examples of non-places, that is, alienating spaces controlled by the economic powers of capitalism … spaces of domination over the landscape” (2010: 133). But roads in developing countries are not simply an instance of the “spatialization of value” (Harvey, 2006; Smith, 2008); in fact, roads do not always lead to capitalist relations of production, nor does a lack of roads always signal their absence. Indeed, roads often index the dynamics of uneven underdevelopment. Moreover, although non-places in the sense just indicated, highways and roads everywhere may be sites of charged significance in or through which meanings and memories of nation, community, or power are instantiated and navigated. The contexts in which roads are desired, the moments in which they are built, destroyed, or repaired, the forces that bring them into being, and the meanings they invoke inform the politics of roads, too (Dalakoglou, 2010; Dalakoglou and Harvey, 2012; Nugent, 1997; Roseman, 1996; Wilson, 2004).

The Carquita road, at once physical and symbolic, was the route that led some local people into the discursive spaces of neoliberal governance. However, the right-wing affinities and road dreams that participants in this project shared do not reflect a simple internationalization and internalization of dominant neoliberal discourses, nor can they be reduced to an abstract attribution of class position (i.e. middle or rich peasant). Rather, its promoters and participants, their political identities and practices, and the meanings they ascribed to the road were informed by a much longer history shaped by distinct development regimes and promises articulated but left unfulfilled by them, regionally based social geographies of class, and the specificities of local political culture (cf. Dalakoglou and Harvey, 2012).

The specificity of this already translocal “local” history shaped the road project including the social identity of its promoters, the need or desire for it, and the timing, size, and quality of its construction. It also informed a larger project that community leaders pursued and called “progress” for which the road was an important means. I thus situate this road project in that longer history and then trace the contexts and political currents through which the leaders of this community first began organizing. Earlier experiences as community organizers prepared the Carquita leaders to engage emergent spaces of neoliberal governance and shaped what they hoped or expected from them. Through interactions with local, regional, and national officials, as well as staff of different international NGOs, local actors, I argue, came to articulate a new politics of place; that is, they identified a path for conserving a way of life and improving it by “making progress,” an imaginary informed by older development regimes and inspired by neoliberal dreamlands. I, therefore, use the Carquita road project as a unique vantage point for exploring the paradoxes of neoliberal development (Lind, 2005) in terms of longer trajectories of uneven development and subaltern politics.

Turning point

The road project took place in Chontales, a predominantly rural southern-interior department that is among Nicaragua's largest and road poorest. Affectionately described as “the place where rivers are made of milk and the rocks of cheese,” Chontales and cattle ranching are synonymous. ¹ La Libertad municipality, located in northern Chontales where the Carquita road was built, is also known for its gold mines. La Libertad traces its historical roots to the arrival of 19th-century gold rushers and for more than 100 years, capitalist firms have been operating in the area, however intermittently. In the 1990s, the recently privatized gold mines, then owned by a Canadian company, were slated to become the largest in Central America. Quite literally in the shadow of this large enterprise, community leaders from Carquita, a comarca located north of town and the gold mines, seized every opportunity to realize their hoped-for road.

In May 1995, La Libertad joined celebrations of its 100 year anniversary as a municipality with the annual patron saint festival. These festivities brought visitors from NGO's, sister city representatives, and state agencies, and presented municipal authorities with the opportunity to discuss possibilities for new projects; it was decided that the road project had to be pursued. Carquita leaders quickly organized a public announcement and planning meeting. Just a short time later in June, an official delegation composed of the mayor of La Libertad, a municipal council person, two municipal office personnel, and the Municipal Development Committee (MDC) president left town early in the morning to make the 3-hour journey by horseback to Carquita for the meeting. ²

Once the meeting officially commenced, the mayor and other delegates addressed the standing room only audience in the capilla (a chapel that also served as a public meeting space). They explained that they were there to discuss plans to make a long-awaited dream come true: construction of La Libertad's first feeder road, an unpaved but all-weather road that would extend directly from town to Carquita and perhaps with time, even further north or northeast to reach many other comarcas within the municipality. The delegates lamented the distance, both physical and social, between town and countryside and the difficulties many endure as a result. Underscoring their commitment to improving these conditions, yet subtly distinguishing themselves from previous governments and this project from other promises unfulfilled, they summarized the current situation and the new possibilities on offer. They enumerated a number of municipal government collaborations that included work with “civil society,” namely the MDC, as well as NGOs, state, and parastatal entities. They also described an expanding sister-city relationship between La Libertad and Doetinchem, Netherlands, and noted that the latter's expertise meant that technical requirements for the road project could be met.

What remained was discussion of a list of logistical issues, such as fence moving, that would be dealt with later, and the touchy topic of counterpart funds. That this was a sensitive issue became apparent as one delegate explained that “in Nicaragua we deal with cruel realities. As a country of peasants rooted in agriculture and ranching we have only two large businesses in all of Chontales, the Amerrisque beef-packing plant and the gold mine.” So, he asked, “from where do we generate funds for much needed projects?” He thus implied the need to turn to NGOs or development agencies and added “but, all of these organizations ask: what do the beneficiaries, the producers, promise in return?” Perhaps in an effort to assuage these tensions, the delegates emphasized the many benefits a road would bring. Carquita could become a puerto de montaña (or a “mountain port”) like El Ayote, a burgeoning market town situated at the end of a road linking the capital of Chontales, Juigalpa, to the agrarian frontier (see below). Beans, corn, and plantains could be transported easily (and thereby sourced locally instead of stocking town stores with staples produced elsewhere), and a whole host of currently under-utilized or unsold farm products (such as fruits, tubers, chili peppers and so forth) would become marketable. A road would facilitate transportation of cheese to markets and more importantly, producers might sell fresh milk directly to the first industrial milk-processing plant in Chontales, which was located in town and was a recent project facilitated in part by La Libertad's Dutch sister city.

What remained to be done was for the community to agree to the project, organize a directiva (board or committee) that would represent them, and name a point person to work directly with the mayor's office. Awkward moments ensued as some asked about the meaning of “beneficiary” and whether it included people in comarcas between town and Carquita. Others noted that they were already organized; in fact, the meeting was an example of just how organized they were. Disquiet about the logistical issues intermingled with murmurs of concern about the way projects, political parties, and patronage are linked and problematic; thus, all the town delegates stressed and repeated that this project was about “municipal development,” it was a “work of progress,” and had nothing to do with politics, it was not political. These points of tension notwithstanding, the community of Carquita came to an agreement, the already existing directiva was officially named, and delegates and community participants alike referred to the meeting as “historic.”

Promises of progress unfulfilled

Like the road itself, the attribution of “historic” to a meeting such as this might seem exaggerated. After all, funds had yet to be secured and other issues like the logistics and the meaning of beneficiary had to be sorted out. But the fact that the elected officials present at the meeting were from opposing parties and, just a few years earlier, it would have been impossible for the Sandinista councilman to venture to Carquita without an army squadron, added significance. This designation was certainly animated by narratives about the history of La Libertad that circulated during the recent centenary celebrations. Its meaning was further reflected in the symbolic importance the place of the meeting invoked for participants, which suggested a new politics of recognition (Hale, 2005) and participation. Thus, the “historic” designation implied a sense of hope that a turning point from a troubled past to a brighter future had been reached.

Discourses of this troubled past include the idea that Nicaragua is a tragic nation in which promises of progress repeatedly succumb to forces that result in destruction and despair. A locally specific version of this invokes a proud mining tradition, but decries the poverty that more than 100 years of mining has produced. Thus, in La Libertad an often-repeated refrain was: “all the roads in Chontales could be paved over many times by the gold that has left here.” The critical stance embedded herein mingles with older dominant discourses that define Nicaragua in terms of what it ostensibly lacks – bureaucratic rationality, democracy, economic prosperity (Gobat, 2005) – or discourses of deficiency. Nicaragua's road network, typically described as late in development, limited in length, and in perennially poor condition, is a metonym for the nation. Thus, participants interpreted the significance of the meeting and the road itself as a project, like the nation, more than 100 years in the making. Here, I briefly summarize historical processes that have generated widespread discourses of national development as “promises of progress unfulfilled.”

Late 19th-century nation-state formation laid a basis for coffee agro-export and national political-economic integration via the first wave of motorized road and rail building. Elites imagined national progress to include a mercantilist path to prosperity with an inter-oceanic canal as its crowning achievement (Gobat, 2005). The United States, however, decided to build a trans-isthmian canal in Panama. Failed efforts to seek funding from US rivals and shifts in the Monroe doctrine led to direct US intervention and 20 years (1912–1933) of rule. The Bryan-Chamorro treaty (1916) transferred exclusive rights to build a canal in Nicaragua to the US, which served to block that hoped-for project; and other forms of infrastructure development were also obstructed. Whereas many countries in the region experienced an influx of direct and indirect US investment in the 1920s, US policy-makers excluded Nicaragua from these credit opportunities, dictated restrictive fiscal policies focused on the reduction of the public debt, and prohibited state investment in infrastructure development (Gobat, 2005: 156). As a result, by the 1930s, Nicaragua was the only coffee producer without rails connecting all of its most important coffee zones to ports, and the few roads outside Managua were barely travelable by automobile (Gobat, 2005: 155).

The Somoza dictatorship (1936–1979) rekindled the ideals of the late 19th-century project of nation building, promoted an ideology of peace, progress, and prosperity, and pursued a project of modernization shaped also by the world market and its geopolitics. Rapid expansion in agro-export production – cotton, coffee, and beef – and modest industrialization generated spectacular growth. Nicaragua's average annual rate of growth in gross domestic product (GDP) was the highest in Central America in the 1950s (Vilas, 1986: 51); and “[the] average annual rate of growth in agriculture alone between 1950 and 1977 was 4.7 percent, one of the highest rates in the world” (Enriquez, 1991: 43). This sparked new territorial dynamics that propelled urbanization, frontier development, and road building. By the end of World War II, the segment of the Pan-American Highway that traversed Nicaragua was completed. Later, roads to the interior regions were also constructed. For example, the east-west Managua-Rama road was built in the 1950s and 1960s. It was celebrated as the historic culmination of a national project of territorial integration connecting western Nicaragua (almost) directly to the Atlantic Coast region for the first time. In 1951, the road network covered less than 2500 km, but by the late 1970s it reached approximately 18,000 (CIERA, 1980: 162; Vilas, 1986: 84). Nevertheless, Nicaragua's road network still lagged behind that of its neighbors.

The staggering levels of personal corruption for which the Somoza regime was famous and the highly unequal and geographically uneven distribution of the prosperity that decades of “peace and progress” produced fomented deep opposition and paved the way for revolutionary insurrection that brought an end to 43 years of Somoza-family rule. The Sandinista government (1979–1990) combined revolutionary ideology rooted in anti-imperialist nationalism with a commitment to national unity and political pluralism, and attempted to transform the legacies of uneven underdevelopment by taking control of the “commanding heights” of the economy. State control of nationalized sectors (mining, banking, and foreign trade) and confiscated properties belonging to the Somoza family and close associates were to serve as motor and center of accumulation within a “mixed-economy.” It was hoped that the state-led mixed economy would increase productivity, redefine Nicaragua's relation to the world market, and capture surpluses for expanded reproduction of the state sector and ample redistribution via “a preferential option for the poor.”

A number of different territorial projects, such as the national literacy campaign, agrarian reform, and road building and repair, initially met with great enthusiasm. But constrained by conditions of underdevelopment, policy failures, and the US-supported counterrevolutionary war, the revolution resulted in economic crisis and contraction, halted infrastructure development, and much infrastructure destruction. By 1990, hyperinflation, declining levels of production and GDP per capita, and growing unemployment contributed to intractable economic crisis and the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas to the United Nicaragua Opposition (UNO) coalition (Arana, 1997; Stahler-Sholk, 1997).

This brings us back to the road project. This history of promises unfulfilled manifested in a widespread lack of roads and informed the “historic” quality attributed to the road meeting and project. I do not wish to imply, however, that campesinos in La Libertad have always clamored or hoped for roads, nor do I wish to naturalize roads, their presence or absence, meanings, construction, condition, or effects. As Wilson (2004) argues, “the state of roads” reflects the specificities of distinct territorial projects constituted at different scales as these are shaped by regionally and locally specific political-economic processes (see also Dalakoglou and Harvey, 2012). We need to explore some of these specificities especially as these shape middle-peasant dairy ranching in order to elucidate the particular context(s) in which the Carquita road was first proposed, then pursued, and eventually built.

Social geographies of uneven (under)development

Since the 1950s, a dominant trend in Chontales is an eve-increasing number of rural landless and land-poor (or subsistence peasants) and the concentration of land and cattle in a few hands. This familiar trend is complicated by the persistence of a significant and highly differentiated “middling” landed group that contemporary agrarian scholars of Nicaragua conceptualize as comprised of three strata: small-scale peasants, peasant-farmers, and farmers (RUTA, 2007). Agricultural production is concentrated among the middling group and subsistence peasants, but the latter are often reduced to the most marginal land and steep slopes. Most of the landed raise at least some cattle; however, subsistence, small-scale, and peasant-farmers focus on dairy, farmers tend to combine dairy and beef (called dual-purpose ranching), and large producers focus on beef production. Herd size, performance, and remuneration vary by class and strata with the largest number of cattle and least risky but most remunerative activities concentrated among members of the dominant class (Cajina, 1989; Jarquin Mejia and Videa, 1990; Sandino Matamoros, 1989; Williams, 1986).

Cattle ranching in Chontales utilizes extensive techniques; it is an extractive economic practice that relies heavily on natural inputs and requires the fewest annual “man-hours” per acre of all of Nicaragua's major crops. ³ This means many of the landless and land poor are not absorbed in the cattle economy as a labor force; large amounts of land are used per head of cattle, but produce less milk or meat per acre and unit of time than achieved by other methods, and herd growth requires the expansion of land in pasture (Cajina, 1989; Williams, 1986; see also Edelman, 1992; Howard-Borjas, 1995). ⁴ This “need” for land contributes to class inequality and propels colonization of the agrarian frontier, or largely uncultivated and forested land in the interior departments and Atlantic Coast regions. In Chontales, the old frontier was located in the eastern regions or wetter climatic zones with dense forest. As forest was felled and this frontier consolidated in the 1950s and 1960s, a new frontier further east was pursued and its boundaries, in turn, continue to shift eastward. Frontier development provides a spatial “escape valve” for the tensions class inequalities produce, facilitates the reproduction of middling groups by offering a way to resolve generation-based land fragmentation, and is for some a path to upward mobility.

The expansion of extensive cattle ranching was fueled by the beef export boom, which began in the 1950s and was stimulated by the US fast food industry (Williams, 1986). In the late-1950s the first US Department of Agriculture (USDA)-certified packing plant was built in Managua; by the 1970s six more were constructed including the Amerrisque plant, which opened in Chontales in 1977. Additionally, World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank loans for cattle were channeled through different national institutions that, with slaughterhouses, overwhelmingly extended financing to large export focused producers. Credit policies inculcated some new practices, such as breeding for beefier varieties with a quicker turn-around time and improved pasture, yet they also encouraged the expansion of extensive land-use practices in lieu of costlier intensive alternatives. These practices not only had the stamp of approval of banking and processing industries and, thus, the state, but also Somoza who personally held numerous large investments in this industry and benefited from its financing (Cajina, 1989: 8–11; Sandino Matamoros, 1989: 29–37; Williams, 1986: 89 and passim; cf. Edelman, 1992).

At the same time, the national dairy market also grew. A number of industrial plants for pasteurization and milk processing were built. Owned and operated primarily by domestic capital, largely free from Somoza family investment, and concentrated in western Nicaragua, the plants generated a dramatic increase in the number of gallons of milk processed per year. However, most of this milk was sourced locally from highly specialized producers, only about 12% of the nation's milk production flowed to industrial plants, and it was not until the 1970s that industrial milk collection centers were opened in Chontales (Cajina, 1989: 74, 144). In Chontales, dairy farming utilized (and continues to utilize) “rustic” techniques, and while some credit opportunities existed for larger farmers for genetic improvement, most dairy farmers raised criollo cattle. Depending upon proximity to urban areas or access to roads, some dairy producers sold fresh milk to households or artisanal processors that made cheeses and butters, and others processed milk into cheese on their farms, which in turn was sold fresh or smoked in local, regional, or national markets.

Complex value chains link cattle producers of different classes and strata and the movement of herds and their products to equally differentiated merchants, some of whom are also ranchers, and contribute to relations of dependency, inequality, and social differentiation among them. ⁵ As suggested above by Wilson (2004), roads at once reflect and further shape these social relations. The limited road development that occurred in Chontales during the beef export boom reflected the “beef on the cheap” or extractive economic logic shaping the dynamics of accumulation and class relations. Limited roads also reflected the “second-class” position of the dairy industry and shaped the quality, amount, and kind of milk produced, the markets (i.e. local, regional, national, or international) reached, and the income generated. Thus by the 1970s, Chontales was the third-largest department and had the largest cattle herd, but was eleventh out of sixteen in terms of road length (CIERA, 1980). Nevertheless, some road building did occur; the Managua-Rama road mentioned above is the main road running east-west through Chontales. The inter-municipal road from Acoyapa to La Libertad (or from southeast to northwest) was built around the same time.

These roads eventually paved the way for the beef processing plant and milk collection centers in Chontales and facilitated if not accelerated frontier development (cf. Grandia, 2013). They also created new opportunities for transport merchants and disrupted earlier ox-cart monopolies owned by a few latifundist ranchers (or owners of extensive properties), whose transport endeavors were actually driven by gold mining (Aiyer, 2004; Lazo, 2004: 216). As indicated earlier, La Libertad is an important gold mining zone. Since the early 20th-century, foreign and national capitalist mining companies employing wage labor, intensive machinery, and operating on a large-sale, fostered both proletarianization and merchant capitalist expansion (Aiyer, 2004; see also Lazo, 1995). Latifundist oxcart owners transported gold from La Libertad to Puerto Diaz and from there by boat to the department of Granada, and brought goods from imported luxury items to foodstuffs back to La Libertad for sale. During World War II, with Nicaragua among the top gold producers in the world, boom times intensified these processes, but they did not result in investment in the wider economy; instead of building roads to facilitate or accelerate profit realization, a small airstrip was built that received weekly flights.

By the late-1940s, the mining boom gave way to bust and many miners and merchants left. This bust coincided with the beginning of the beef export boom. Some of the larger cattle ranchers took over portions of the abandoned mining areas and bought houses in town at bottom basement prices. Oxcart monopolies gave way to motorized transportation, and the latifundist rancher-transporters joined the beef export boom. For people in Carquita or nearby areas, the transformation from mining bust to agro-export boom precipitated a conversion to cattle from sugarcane production as the major cash crop. The men who became leaders of Carquita came of age during the decades of the cattle boom that ensued, engaged diverse kinds of market relations, and were exposed to both the possibilities and problems of growth led by agro-exports. They have direct experience with the pressures of generation-based land fragmentation and many have kin who have migrated, some to urban areas and many more to the agricultural frontier. Moving to the frontier afforded a number of these migrants lateral or upward class mobility, but they also faced numerous hardships along the way. Indeed, two of the men who became community leaders were return migrants from the frontier who remember those hardships well. Yet, the men who became leaders recall the boom years, despite the many problems, hardships, and the class downward mobility some of their kin endured, as a moment of great promise.

Comarcas like Carquita were and are class stratified translocal social spaces constituted by intersecting processes at different scales. Despite the lack of roads, people, especially men, travel great distances by foot or mule – they are mobile (cf. Roseman, 1996: 840). But relations of dependency further strengthened by distance from roads and urban spaces means that patron-client and kin networks constitute “ties that bind” and generate affinities across class and generational divides (cf. Horton, 1999). Thus unlike northwestern Nicaragua, for example, where peasant politics were increasingly radicalized through the 1960s and 1970s (Gould, 1990), interior region campesinos like Carquiteños have more often been described as quiescent (Heijningen, 1994; Horton, 1999). This is not to suggest tension or conflict was absent, nor is it to imply that “everyday forms of resistance” and “hidden transcripts” (Scott, 1985, 1990) or the kinds of “coherent narratives” that index the complexity of state and class power as these play out in local social worlds were somehow lacking (Roseman, 1996). Rather it is simply to emphasize that prior to the Sandinista revolution, Carquiteños had not engaged in forms of collective organizing.

If we return to the critical perspective encapsulated in the “could be gold paved roads” discourse noted above, this emanated from small-miners and mine workers. Their anti-imperialist and large-company critical perspectives were further nurtured during the revolutionary 1980s. Indeed, their class-critical discourses included a critique of larger ranchers whom they called parasitic or feudal (a representation with wider national and historical antecedents (see Gobat, 2005)). Carquiteños did not share this standpoint. They admired larger ranchers (at least abstractly), and those who became community leaders in the 1980s learned to articulate class relations not through structural analysis and critique, but through idioms of personal responsibility. To the extent that they developed a structural critique, it referred mainly to “what is wrong” with particular political parties, the Sandinistas, and perceptions of urban bias. But new political identities and organizational forms as well as new expectations for material benefits were generated by the revolution, and it was through the dynamics of revolution and counterrevolution that the leadership of the Carquita community, those who initiated the road project, became community organizers.

Changing modes of governance and spaces of participation

The Sandinista revolution ushered in a moment of dramatic change and was met with great optimism. Unprecedented political organizing, including the formation or expansion of a number of party-based mass organizations, produced many sites through which revolutionary ideology circulated and experiments with participatory democracy flourished. Like many rural Nicaraguans, Carquita leaders speak of the early days of the revolution as a kind of “awakening” (Horton, 1999: 67, 91). As one man explained, “before the revolution we campesinos were way too humble/naïve … it's not that we didn't know how to form a directiva [organizing committee], we didn't even know what one was.” But through exposures to liberation theology, practices of citizenship (such as the right to health care and education), and policies for material improvement that included peasants for the first time, the revolution “opened their eyes” or “woke them up” to new ways of thinking about the world and engaging it. As if signaling new opportunity, road building in Chontales along the old oxcart trail from La Libertad to Juigalpa brought roads a bit closer and generated much enthusiasm.

However, the US supported counterrevolutionary war left few untouched and was felt especially acutely in the rural interior and Atlantic Coast regions where combat was waged and contra forces recruited. For many residents of the rural interior who had no prior ties to the Sandinistas, opposition to the revolution, although by no means universal, grew quickly and became widespread (Horton, 1999). Sources of discontent and distrust that fueled this opposition were numerous; for Carquiteños these included: a perceived anti-Catholic Church and atheist stance of the Sandinista leadership; fears of land expropriation; pricing and other agricultural commercialization policies; and spies. ⁶ Despite differences of opinion among them, Carquita community leaders agree that what first sparked their opposition was the Sandinista Defense Committees (SDC). These formed in urban areas during the revolutionary insurrection and later became a place-based (neighborhood, comarca) mass organization meant to coordinate food distribution, community projects, literacy campaigns, and “revolutionary vigilance” (Horton, 1999: 86; Vilas, 1986: 149–150). Carquiteños viewed them as divisive and with suspicion, as sites of militarization and army recruitment that they wished to avoid, and as an urban-based ideological and organizational imposition on the countryside.

As resistance and outright opposition to the revolution spread, many young men felt forced to decide which army to choose. Chontales had the greatest proportion of peasants join the contra compared to other departments; La Libertad, however, had the fewest in the department (Horton, 1999: 193–194). Nevertheless, during the war, the pattern described by Horton (1999: 204) for a northern-interior municipality that was ground zero for contra activity generally held for La Libertad as well. As the revolution (e.g. mass organizations) retreated from the countryside, the Sandinistas maintained military control and political influence in urban areas and nearby spaces where the remaining cooperatives, state farms, and mines were located as well as along the newly built road from Juigalpa to La Libertad. The contras maintained civilian bases of support and military influence in rural areas (Horton, 1999: 204 and passim). Thus, Carquiteños were geographically and politically squeezed between contra areas toward the north and northeast and Sandinista zones, including town, to their south and southwest.

As a result, Carquiteños, despite initial interest, did not support the process of revolutionary transformation. Moreover, older perceptions of discrimination took on new significance as Carquiteños felt that urban-based officials and many residents treated them not only with distrust, but also disdain. To the extent that many “middling sector” campesinos sympathized with or joined the contra, this distrust was not unfounded. Campesinos, nonetheless, attempted to mask their resentments and resistance to the revolution. As Horton explains, they did so through displays of neutrality when interacting with army personnel or other Sandinista officials while hiding sons or husbands from the draft or clandestinely supporting the contra ideologically or practically, that is through food provisioning, first aid, and intelligence (1999: 220–227, and passim).

In Chontales, one way to practice neutrality and create legal organizations that were also critical of the revolution was through the “traditional” Catholic Church. The regional Bishop, Pablo Antonio Vega, who was outspoken against the revolution and expelled from Nicaragua in 1986, and various local parish priests committed to expanding the church's reach in urban and rural areas vis-à-vis liberation theology and rapidly growing Evangelicalism. They did so, in part, through the formation of Catholic community-based organizations that fostered elements of the empowerment model of state-supported leftist Christian Base Communities without the radical critique of inequality. A number of campesinos were trained as lay church leaders and preachers. More importantly, they were encouraged to become community organizers who promoted Bible-based literacy, small-scale construction projects, and other “good works.”

By 1984 and 1985, the war was intensifying and Carquita's Catholic Church leaders were actively recruiting members and organizing other rural communities in La Libertad and neighboring Santo Domingo. As one man reflecting the language of the war-torn 1980s put it, “Carquita was like the control/command center for an entire sector.” They built the capilla, which served as church space and meeting hall, created new forms of community organization, and promoted civic participation in the countryside outside and in opposition to the framework of Sandinista governance. When the electoral process began, Carquita community leaders organized support and logistics for the UNO coalition in the countryside. The 1990 elections signaled the end of war and brought the UNO coalition to power. The experiences they gained in community organizing, the war-related resentments they harbored, and the political-ideological affinities they forged, meant that Carquita leaders viewed the election results as their victory. This victory fostered new hopes and expectations that Carquita leaders were well positioned to pursue as the neoliberal transition ensued. They did so through the new spaces of governance that state restructuring through municipal decentralization engendered.

The framework for municipal decentralization was rooted in municipal autonomy laws enacted but not implemented by the Sandinistas, and the new government did little to clarify or financially support local governments. Newly elected officials faced an unclear legal framework, few resources, and many new responsibilities often without the technical or financial means to carry them out. But they along with a range of supporters worked to clarify, fortify, and expand the project of municipal decentralization. They did so through and helped forge an emerging matrix constituted by local government, state institutions, and international NGOs and development agencies. MDCs, first promoted by the Ministry of Social Action (MAS), were the linchpin that like other examples of “government through community” (Li, 2007; see also Gill, 2000; Postero, 2007), were presented as building blocks of civil society and vehicles of transformation. ⁷ That is to say, they were the organizational structures through which capacity building and participatory local development would presumably coalesce by means of collaborative reflection, planning, execution, and evaluation of projects.

MAS organized MDC meetings and workshops in the urban “centers” of municipalities throughout the country. As MAS staff and printed materials articulated it, a “good MDC” must include the mayor and perhaps various local state actors (i.e. schools, health) and be representative, representative of different “groups, sectors, and tendencies” in the municipality and representative territorially or in terms of neighborhoods and comarcas. MAS workshops typically included an overview and introduction by the facilitator, break out sessions and group work, final summing up, and lunch. They were pedagogically oriented and organized around themes such as the structure and purpose of MDCs, negotiation and conflict resolution, human rights, leadership and communication, and so forth. Some meetings guided participants to think about their community, create census-like profiles (including demographic, economic, and organizational information), identify problems, make lists of (realizable or doable) priorities, and consider what (small) steps they would take to address these.

The formation and performance of MDCs was uneven throughout the country, and even within departments noteworthy variation was evident. In La Libertad, urban and rural residents participated, but many only irregularly or for short periods of time. Despite the turn-over in participation, La Libertad's MDC was considered by MAS staff to be a particularly successful example in Chontales. In part, this reflected the committed local urban-based leadership who organized meetings, conducted outreach, and initiated projects. It also reflected the fact that the mayor (and other officials) did participate. But as importantly, leaders from Carquita participated regularly despite the one-way 3-hour commute by horseback. Additionally, building upon and extending their experiences with Church-based organizing in the 1980s, Carquita leaders helped establish “micro-MDCs” in a number of different comarcas. They, therefore, were significant actors in the consolidation of MDC in the municipality and leant it at least the appearance of active citizen participation.

Carquita leaders found many aspects of the MDC framework refreshing. First, the apolitical language was a far cry from the ways, they complained, the Sandinistas politicized everything, especially through the SDCs. Second, the guidelines explicitly stressed the importance of “representation” including rural participation; the MDC gave Carquita leaders another avenue through which to extend their church-based organizing in the countryside. This in turn helped them press forward openings for rural participation that, albeit perhaps only subtly, challenged the implicit urban emphasis in the meaning of municipal. Third, a language of personal responsibility and an ethos of working collaboratively were emphasized. This resonated with Carquita leaders who felt it complemented what they had been striving to cultivate since they first started their church organization. Finally, Carquita leaders appreciated the opportunity to network with officials from other cities and foreign NGO staff; indeed, they felt this helped them gain recognition and leverage in their interactions with local authorities and other individuals.

But as skills were developed or practiced and community needs identified and prioritized, Carquita leaders repeatedly stated that what they really needed was “progress.” Progress meant many things, but first among them, it meant a road. Informed by ideological spaces first opened by the Sandinistas, but channeled through a different political project, Carquita leaders used the MDC as a vehicle to articulate the desire for, and then pursue, their road. While many NGOs were actively supporting MDC-municipal government collaborations, they typically only funded micro-projects developed through these structures to do so. ⁸ For Carquita leaders, the repeated emphasis on micro-projects was not the kind of progress they envisioned. Instead, they rejected the small-scale emphasis but not the organizational structure imposing it, and they continued to press for a road within this framework in efforts to rescale its effects.

“We need progress, progress has to be made”

The road meeting, which was discussed above, marked a turning point in Carquita leaders’ efforts to make their dream of a road a reality. During the road meeting, municipal officials explained that the recently opened National Program for Rural Development (PNDR) had issued a call for proposals for roadwork. ⁹ This created an opening for local officials to seriously consider this project, but there were still many obstacles in their path. Although the road project had been publicly announced, it turned out that PNDR funds were earmarked only for road repair. The problem, therefore, was not only that funds were limited and demand great, but also that there was no road to Carquita to repair.

La Libertad's Dutch sister city provided needed technical support. They brought two engineers from their other sister city, Pardovice Czechoslovakia, who mapped the road and planned drainage points, grading, surface width and thickness, and so forth. Meanwhile, local authorities were able to make arrangements with the recently privatized gold mine to use their equipment to make a tractor cut, a road to be repaired. This, however, meant long delays and funds had to be raised to pay for the diesel and associated costs, leading some community members to wonder if they were shelling out resources for “a road” with no guarantee that the road would ever be built. Tension points already evident during that historic road meeting surfaced again. But, by June 1996 or a year after that meeting, PNDR approved La Libertad's project proposal, bidding began, and a contract was signed.

By this time, attention had turned to the 1996 national and municipal elections and the rainy season had already begun. Thus, construction would not begin until February or March 1997, just as the new government would take office. Fears that the funds might be lost after this transition meant that tensions were high in April 1997 when work had hardly begun but the new mayor was pressing for counterpart funds, which prompted another meeting. It was decided that the “beneficiaries” should include not only Carquita community members, but also owners of farms between town and Carquita up to three farms “in” or away from the road. The mayor wished, it appeared quickly, to make a list of these beneficiaries in order to establish individual quotas. This, however, promoted community leaders and other campesinos to raise the issue of fairness. After much discussion it was suggested that not everyone should be expected to pay the same amount; there should be a sliding scale that differentiates the contributions of “poorer or middling folks from the big ones [larger ranchers].” If the issue of counterpart funds was now largely resolved, another emerged, road maintenance funds, which was left unresolved.

The road was finally built in 1998. Although tensions at times surfaced and the issue of road maintenance had not been solved, during the first road meeting and over the course of the subsequent three years, or the time it took to finally build the road, the local participants shared overlapping interests and perspectives on the need or desire for this road. The idea that roads access markets, which in turn lead to economic growth, circulated widely. During the aforementioned road meeting, the economic benefits a road would bring were emphasized by municipal officials. These narratives at once echo a long history of dominant development discourses about roads and specifically index neoliberal ideology; that is, the renewed emphasis on road building, especially rural roads, and the assertion that these roads facilitate economic growth are widespread in contemporary mainstream development thought (Dalakoglou, 2010; Dalakoglou and Harvey, 2012; Grandia, 2013; Wilson, 2004). ¹⁰

It is also important to emphasize, though, that these echoes of neoliberal ideology are grounded in regionally specific histories and discourses. In a context of economic contraction in which, for example, the national cattle herd was estimated to be shrinking to half its late-1970's size, a situation felt particularly acutely in Chontales, many wished to reverse this trend. Local officials, community members, and others shared hope that the dynamism of the Somoza-era beef export boom could be rekindled and expanded in the contemporary political-economic context such that an earlier history of exclusions – from roads or other material benefits – would not be repeated. Some, particularly supporters of small and medium-sized producers, were convinced that Somoza, Sandinista, and neoliberal-led governments wasted resources (such as credit) on larger producers thereby fostering inefficient extensive practices with little growth or development. For them, the real source of dynamism and economic growth could be found within, say, small-to-medium scale dairy-producers given their tendency to intensify production if the right conditions (like roads, credit) obtain. Arguments such as this buoyed Carquita leaders' and municipal authorities' shared hope in this project.

There was also shared understanding that this road was not an economic panacea. For example, although the new industrial milk plant was running under capacity, this did not result simply from a lack of roads or even supply. Rather, it had to do with the quality of milk, which was not suited for industrial processing, a legacy of class and state relations during the beef export boom that prioritized beef production with limited capitalization, and de facto encouraged an intensification or expansion of “rustic” dairy farming. Thus, the economic benefits a road would bring narrative was used by participants across geographies of class and power to mobilize support in the hopes of creating some openings for change in a context of limited options. It was also jointly exaggerated for the purpose of project justification in order to access funds.

Shared discursive strategies and understandings of the road coexisted in tension with the ways the local participants also displayed different understandings and motivations, and at times were actually pursuing different projects. State restructuring placed new kinds of fiscal pressures and responsibilities upon local officials that informed their outlook and actions. Municipal authorities pursued a territorial project motivated by efforts to render “distant comarcas” legible (Grandia, 2013; Scott, 1998; Wilson, 2004). Improving local tax collection, property and cattle taxes key among them, was a central concern. For them, the road was literally a means of access to many farm “owners” (that is, people with legally registered properties or those with de facto ownership) who did not or who rarely paid taxes. Roads were seen as a means to territorial integrity against perceived encroachments by neighboring municipalities, a situation made more heated by the fiscal pressures just indicated. Local elections in a multi-party context added to desires to secure votes, and, thus, jurisdiction, and roads would facilitate electoral campaigning (and be particularly useful to the party who built the road). Finally, the charged national context that included re-armed groups coupled with lessons learned during the counterrevolutionary war regarding the politico-military implications of a “road-free” mountainous interior, also informed official desires to gain access to and secure the countryside via road building.

The territorial project pursued by local authorities joined them with their counterparts throughout the country in a clamor for cadastral surveys, updated property registries, municipal boundary mapping, and so forth. It also linked them to central state authorities and international agencies such as the World Bank adding another thread in the complex tapestry of neoliberal-led development by “extending the grid of legibility” (Hale, 2005). The associations this territorial project conjured, which can be summarized as increased urban-based surveillance of the countryside and extraction of rural resources, were not lost on Carquita leaders or many community members. These were sources of anxiety and at times debate and discord. As Wilson (2004) argues, discourses emphasizing the access roads bring often fail to consider the forms of autonomy that are lost. Community members, and at times leaders too, expressed a similar concern.

Despite the tensions and risks, community leaders emphasized that “we need progress,” like a road. But they also stressed that “progress has to be made.” As leaders mobilized support to make their dream of a road a reality, to make progress, they drew on their Church-based organizing, MDC participation, and road work to promote a new sense or identity of place. Although their politics were not “expansive” in the sense indicated by Hale (2005), their vision of what progress meant was extensive. It included the hope that a road would pave the way to different kinds of access – to the state, NGOs, and other resources. They hoped to see more schooling, a health clinic, and a local market. They also wanted agricultural extension services and workshops in Carquita. One leader referred to this as a process of “civilizing ourselves.” Indeed, he imagined that at the end of the road, where the school and capilla stand, a small ring of houses, meeting spaces, and a market could be built: a “Carquita urbanizada” (a downtown Carquita). But this is not to suggest that he or others wished to see the spaces of their farms paved over in concrete. Rather, they wished to see “progress made.” Carquita leaders and a number of community participants were dairy farmers, some of whom had tried the frontier, others with kin there. All had adult or teenage sons and the road, it was hoped, would also provide a path to class reproduction without the need to move to the frontier. That is, they hoped a road would pave the way to a kind of community reproduction in place, instead of across space.

If the revolution woke them up, the church and contra ideologies nurtured their dreams. As Horton (1999) argues, contra forces articulated notions, however vaguely, of democracy, citizenship, and neoliberal entrepreneurialism that resonated with many rural residents including the leaders of Carquita. Community leaders combined these ideals with a certain sensitivity to the need to extend a helping hand, to build community, and do “good works.” These are not radical claims for egalitarianism, but they do provide opportunities to press for economic resources and offer hope that a better future – progress – might be made (Horton, 2007). They are also a means to articulate struggles for access to political and interpretive power (Lind, 2005). As with the road, or to a small degree, Carquita leaders forged progress; in 2000, two Carquiteños were elected to municipal government for the right-wing Liberal Constitutionalist Party (PLC), which like the road was an historic achievement.

The road continues

For community leaders, the road symbolized a turning point from a troubled past toward a better future, a place where long-awaited dreams met new expectations. As such, the historic qualities attributed to that first road meeting and the road itself were informed by many things: the social and political identities of the participants; their understandings of discourses of Nicaraguan history and development; experiences rooted in social geographies of class and uneven development; and the way this project appeared to represent new forms of collaboration and inclusion despite the exclusionary aspects of neoliberal capitalism or the charged clashes rocking national politics. The road meeting led eventually to a road built and the physical and political infrastructures that emerged through these processes constituted a kind of foundation upon which subsequent developments at different scales coalesced. I will briefly describe three here.

First, diverse and growing opposition to aspects of neoliberal restructuring and the Alemán (PLC) administration (1996–2001), especially in the wake of Hurricane Mitch, resulted in a push for expanded municipal decentralization legislation and civic participation laws. A broad range of social movements that united under the umbrella Civil Coordinator, international NGOs, and donors outraged by Alemán's corruption joined forces in this endeavor. Their efforts resulted in new laws that expanded remittances to municipalities from the central government and formalized MDCs in law (2003) and they became the normative framework for citizen participation (Cupples et al., 2007; Larson, 2004; Prado, 2007, 2010). In the wake of these political-legal shifts, a new push to create departmental development committees (or consejos de desarrollo departmental) began.

Second, the creation of a national institution called the Road Maintenance Fund (FOMAV) emerged at the intersection of the processes just described and the Bush administration's Millennium Challenge Account (MCA). The MCA was authorized by the US Congress in 2004 and the Millennium Development Corporation (MCC) was established to carry out its mission. Although embraced by some as a 21st century Marshall Plan and Alliance for Progress, others critique it as a primary example of post-Washington Consensus neoliberalism and 21st century imperialism (Mawdsley, 2007; Soederberg, 2006). For our purposes, MCC compacts, which provide relatively substantial financial packages to countries that meet eligibility criteria, impose preconditions. Nicaragua's compact included funds for property regularization (cadastral mapping, land titling, and government land administration management), rural business development, and road development. The preconditions, in the words of one MCC report (2007), included:

 … legislation to secure funds for the Road Maintenance Fund (FOMAV) to cover maintenance costs of all Nicaragua roads, and not just those funded by the MCC …  not only did the MCC offer the carrot of new funds, it also built a constituency for the reform and engaged in strategic and genuine consultation with local government officials and department level councils to press for passage of the reform.

Third, since the road to Carquita was built, it has been extended about another 15 km north, and with Japanese funding a bridge was built. At least 40 km in other rural roads have been built as well (DANIDA, 2010). Like the road network generally, these roads are in perennial need of repair. This road development (including its poor quality) is not unique to La Libertad and throughout the interior regions road building is clearly evident and supported by a number of international “partners.” Important among them is the Danish development agency, DANIDA, which not only supports rural road development, but has also conducted detailed studies of the road networks throughout the interior region. Their work points to many ambivalences regarding the economic and social impact of roads, and this bring us to the question of uneven development and roads.

Road building in developing countries has long been shaped by the dynamics of the international state system and world market, and has been dependent upon the financial support and technical expertise of “outsiders,” such as United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the World Bank, and so forth. What makes the Carquita road – and other roads and road projects (i.e. FOMAV) – different is the way they materialize the rescaling of national spaces as globalized ones. As such, municipal governments pursue these projects, directly engage the support of NGOs and development agencies, and enlist the collaboration of different subaltern constituencies in governance. Together they shape the rescaling of the state at once shaping the particular character of the neoliberal state and patterns of transnational territorial integration. The road analyzed herein may not be a crystallization of the forces shaping “neoliberal dreamlands” (Mitchell, 2012) driven by finance capital and real estate or the new international financial architecture led by the dominant fraction of the global capitalist class (Soederberg, 2004). But it does represent the spatialization of forms of transnational governmentality that directly links middle-class professionals who work for NGOs or development agencies to middle-peasant beneficiaries in “partnerships for participatory development” that emerge in the long shadows cast by networks of global finance capital (cf. Gill, 2000).

There is ample evidence that neoliberalism is in crisis, but there is less evidence of its radical reorganization. As Smith notes, “a neoliberalism in crisis will not bring an end to uneven development but its opposite, an intensification” (2008: 266). Nicaragua continues to be among the Highly Indebted Poor Countries, and is now even more deeply enmeshed in, and dependent upon, global circuits of capital accumulation and the complex and variegated webs of international financial institutions, development agencies, and NGOs. If we return to Chontales, whereas 12% of rural families were estimated to be landless in the 1970s, 44% were in the early 2000s (RUTA, 2007). In La Libertad, 50% of the population is estimated to live in extreme poverty, another 30% in poverty. In 2005, 57% of the municipality's population was rural, down from 76% in 1995, and 67% of those households living in extreme poverty were rural (INIDE in DANIDA, 2010: 12–13). What this suggests for “middling” dairy producers like some Carquiteños is that if they were squeezed between two armies in the 1980s, by the mid-2000s, they were squeezed between accumulation and dispossession.

The road was built and with it spaces of neoliberal governance. That is say, to the extent that this road is also a discursively mediated political space in and through which local people become “responsible citizens” and worked for progress/development together with elected officials and development practitioners of various sorts, they helped forge a decentralized and multilayered system of governance that does not dissipate, but rather accentuates the inequalities of uneven development and some of the very conditions they hoped the making of progress would alleviate. Moreover, it is important to note that in addition to their hard work and dedication, the relative class privilege of Carquita community leaders made it possible for them to be so engaged. Additionally, many others like them in other comarcas did not participate in the MDC or development projects, and many more, because they were poor and far from roads, were simply excluded from these processes, which together highlights the uneven quality of inclusion and participation. It nevertheless remains to be seen how these leaders and community members will remember and tell the story of the road they built (Roseman, 1996), and in what way it will animate their future dreams or nightmares, that is, their politics.