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Through their actions and discourse, poor people throughout Latin America tell us that the peasantry is alive, vigorous, and anxious to struggle against the massive transformations unleashed by several decades of capitalist expansion and production intensification in the countryside. While classical political economists and Marxists alike imagined capitalist development turning the peasantry extinct, their theories made it difficult to observe the viability of peasant models of development and the sustained appeal of the land in the context of industrial society. For contemporary rural social movements the land is a source of hope in a world led astray by capitalist excess. This special issue of Latin American Perspectives examines, root and branch, the rise and prospects of some of these newer peasant movements in Latin America.

The movements discussed are diverse in their origins and natures. They are found in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru, to mention only those countries that receive detailed attention from participating authors.. In fact, such movements can be found in nearly every national setting, even the United States and Canada, because recent processes of capitalist expansionism have created similar conditions around the globe. The Green Revolution of the 1970s set the stage by displacing millions of peasants and the neoliberal policies of the Washington Consensus stimulated action by transforming the political economy and jeopardizing the livelihoods of millions more. The more recent Genetic Revolution has further concentrated the power of the transnational agribusiness corporations, deepening the trends of land concentration, social marginalization and environmental destruction. In the meantime, hunger, which is often used to justify advances in agricultural technologies and further concentration, only seems to worsen.

Politically-engaged rural social movements of indigenous peoples, dispossessed farmers, underemployed farm laborers, and isolated urban poor have formed to challenge national development schemes that favor land concentration, expansion of the agricultural frontier, intensive farming methods, and the continued marginalization of the working class. Several articles defend the power of class as an organizing principal for rural studies, noting that structural factors played equal to greater roles in uniting participants than identity, particularly ethnic identity, which was a perspective that gained much currency among “new” social movement theorists associated with the post-modern and subaltern schools of thought. Most contributors describe ethnicity - especially indigenous identity – as less useful for understanding peasant movements than class.

Some of the movements, such as Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, MST), have already entered their second generation of existence and combine grassroots movement practices with the institutional administration of innovative non-governmental organizations. Others, such as the Ayala Plan National Coordinator (Coordinadora Nacional Plan de Ayala, CNPA) are older but passed through a process of transformation in the 1990s. As Miguel Teubal’s article in this issue indicates, the movements of the past fought to promote agrarian reform as a means of securing their hold on land they worked, while land struggle at the end of the 20th century focused more on obtaining land for those without work. The essential need for a livelihood felt by millions, as well as the countryside’s potential for fulfilling this need, has reinforced the concept of the peasantry as a class.

While distinct in name and practice, many of these peasant movements are affiliated with the Via Campesina, the international peasant movement coordinating organization. Member organizations share a sharp critique of the wave of capitalist development brought on by the neoliberal reforms of international trade and property law that began in the 1980s. In their confrontation with unquestioned development of agribusiness, a concept that has come to signify the U.S.-model of elaborate linkages among commercial, industrial and agricultural divisions of the agri-food and bio-fuel chains, the new peasant movements defend sustainable agriculture, reduced land concentration, reduced dependency on environmentally destructive techniques, fuller utilization of indigenous inputs such as native seeds, agro-centric vocations, revitalized country towns, and participatory democracy.

To understand the (re)formation of Latin American peasant movements, this issue was structured around the belief that it is important to look back at historical processes and geographical transformations. Our objective in organizing this theme issue was to better understand change and continuity among Latin American peasant and indigenous movements since World War II. During the period, peasant and indigenous organizations gained political weight and experienced change in their form, social relations, political position, and geographic space. From the perspective of various disciplines, the nine articles gathered here register these processes of change and continuity that brought advances and new challenges for peasant movements.

Two processes of change emerge from the articles: de-statization and territorialization. In the post-World War II era, many rural labor and peasant movements in Latin America were integrated into government-sponsored development plans. State controlled in fundamental ways, their activities were encouraged to organize the labor market and thus promote agricultural modernization. In the 1980s, economic crisis and the neoliberal response brought an end to this developmentalist model and emancipated the peasantry from both government control and support. The older movements either adjusted to the new context, as did the CNPA in Mexico, or found themselves eclipsed by competing, “private” organizations such as the MST in Brazil. While territorial questions remained a significant locus of struggle, its nature changed dramatically as national states ceded their powers to international bodies. In the developmentalist era, peasant organizations and states united in “nationalization” campaigns to protect national resources. In the neoliberal era, states sold-off national assets to influential bidders, abandoning their capacity to control national wealth. No longer in partnership with states, the privatized peasant movements adopted direct action techniques to preserve or take-back resources from capitalists and force governments to institute agrarian reform. Agrarian reform, which had been abandoned along with the developmentalist model, became the flag that united the rural working classes against the transnational agribusiness corporations and their national capitalist allies, invading the region, territorializing the land as well as agrarian policy making processes. A striking example of this was the recent advertising campaign of the Switzerland-based Syngenta Corporation that super-imposed a fictitious state called the “United Soy Republic” (Republica Unida de la Soja) over the boundaries of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay.

From the politically-based patron-client relationship developed at mid-century between states and peasants, contemporary organizations face a finance-based clientelism articulated through national governments by the World Bank. But the relative autonomy of Via Campesina-linked movements has enabled significant resistance to the cooptation schemes of multilateral institutions. They have not been able to break the back of peasant mobilization as planned with such programs as the Land Bank, which sought to fragment peasant and indigenous movements by attracting away members with low-interest farm loans. The so-called market-based agrarian reform sponsored by the World Bank was effectively denounced by the movements as more of the same – an attempt to lock family farmers into forms of capitalist dependency akin to debt peonage. The cooptation tactic helped reveal the period as one characterized by a conflict between two models of development, one based on commodities and the other on agroecology. Via Campesina movements have worked to represent the former as destructive and unsustainable and the latter as constructive and sustainable.

The articles also demonstrate how important peasant movements have been to democratization processes in Latin America. It is possible to believe that social movements, including the labor unions, recently elected presidents of like origins in the region, Brazil’s working class president and Bolivia’s indigenous president serve as cases in point. But more profound change has proved difficult to consolidate as the correlation of forces established by neoliberal policy continues to resist change. Thus, leftist governments have not been able to satisfy the demands of their social movement supporters and conflict has intensified. In some cases, the new peasant movements has discovered themselves to be perceived as one more special interest group – equated with but less powerful than agribusiness interests – with which governments need to negotiate.

Central themes of the dispute include tension over centralization vs. decentralization, food security vs. food sovereignty, concentration on commodities vs. investment in diverse crops, with the former characteristics predominant given their privileged position in the powerful world capitalist system. Other terms of the dispute pit the popular movements’ emphasis on the multidimensional, the pluricultural and territorially diverse against the homogenizing, standardizing and competitive values of the neoliberals.

The relationship between struggles based on class, ethnicity and geographic space receive significant attention by contributors to this issue. They give the agrarian question a new component, the condition of the peasantry’s existence in their territories. In the dispute over models of development, the land of labor becomes a territory, making explicit the multidimensional aspect of the dispute. The peasant’s countryside, thereby differentiated from the countryside of commodities, resists and advances at the same time as it submits and interacts with agribusiness territory. This perspective amplifies the meaning of agrarian reform. Instead of representing a compensatory policy of economic development it comes to stand for a policy of territorial development in the fullest sense of the term.

Essentially, the following articles demonstrate the protagonism of peasant movements organized around the concept of smallholders as a class, whether of indigenous, African, European or mixed descent. In the construction of Latin American territory, the movements are joined with other key institutional “builders” like the state, political parties, churches, businesses, unions, and non-governmental organizations. Peasants are treated as historical subjects that must be considered as part and parcel of the social formation, who must be studied if we are to understand present.

The article of economist Teubal examines the politics of agrarian reform policies in various Latin American and Caribbean countries in order to understand how today’s policies and practices differ from those of the recent past. He distinguishes two periods in the history of agrarian reform as a government policy in Latin America, one for the post-World War II liberal developmentalist period and another for the post-Cold War years. For Teubal, peasant and indigenous movements were both cause and consequence of these policy shifts. The author’s reading these movements as protagonists in the struggle for land and agrarian reform is original and up-to-date

Sociologists Hubert C. Grammont and Horacio Mackinlay focus not on policy changes but on documenting the formation of peasant and indigenous movements in Mexico from 1938 to 2006. They develop an organizational typology and periodization to explain changes in these organizations and create a context for understanding contemporary peasant and indigenous movements. Corporatist, political-type organizations predominated from 1938 to 1988. With neoliberalism and democratization underway from 1988, a mixture of political and social movements characterized the shift away from developmentalism and authoritarianism toward neoliberalism and democracy. By the beginning of the 21^st Century, they argue, social movements had eclipsed the political organizations of the peasantry. The article is an excellent reference for reflecting on the relationship among movements, political parties and the state.

Sociologist Jasmin Hristov uses the case of Columbia’s Cauca Region Indigenous Council (Conselho Regional Indígena de Cauca, CRIC) to study the relationship between ethnicity and social class, analyzing policy disputes between the state and movement. Giving emphasis to identity formation processes, he focuses attention on the structural conditions and political dimensions of the strategies used to shape ethnic identity among the peasant class. The article demonstrates well the complex relations that limit and expand the possibilities for peasant mobilization and how post-modern interpretations have failed to represent these complexities.

Through a municipal-level examination of indigenous peasant movement political activity, the international development specialist John D. Cameron shows how such movements in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru managed to consolidate their power at the grassroots and use this base of support to launch themselves as political forces on grander geographic scales. The author studies changes in their different organizational forms and structures that have influenced the movements as well as municipal politics. The study helps us understand the indigenous peasant basis of support for the presidential victories and administrative capacities of presidents Evo Morales and Rafael Correa. In this way, Cameron reveals more about the relationships between class and ethnicity as well as between changes on micro and macro scales.

Rural studies doctoral candidate Susan Healey analyzes the victory of Bolivian president Morales from a historical perspective, emphasizing the role of indigenous identity as an essential factor. Her analysis is based on the concept of resilience, arguing that the election of an indigenous president resulted from an accumulation of historical forces that have pitted indigenous peasants against the Ladino ruling class since colonial times. In contrast to other articles in this issue, which examine empirical evidence to document the material basis of Morales’ victory, Healey emphasis a cultural history approach at the national level to explain how a long oppressed people finally achieved at least symbolic justice.

Development studies specialist Ida Pape offers the third article on the theme of class and identity in the Bolivian Andes. Instead of focusing on municipal governments, her object of study is two indigenous peasant organizations. Indigenous culture is examined in order to understand the unique non-linear approaches to organizational administration that have helped these peasant movements persevere. This closely researched institutional profile also helps explain the destatization process that characterizes contemporary peasant movements.

Historian Cliff Welch, co-editor of this special issue, documents the destatization process of the Brazilian peasant movement. In a case study of three moments in the history of peasant struggle in a particularly disputed region of Brazil, Welch discovers both change and continuity in the collective action of peasants, their relations with the government and their territorial occupation. The article also debates new social movements literature and contextualizes the MST, which is the subject of the following two articles.

Jack Hammond, sociologist and participating editor of LAP, reflects on the history of Brazilian rural society in examining the forms of violence used by latifundiarios and the state to repress peasant families involved in land occupations. Particularly noteworthy is Hammond’s discussion of the contradictory role of the state in repressing occupations and implementing agrarian reform. For Hammond, the fact that occupations are acknowledged to be an efficient form of land access for peasants contrasts sharply with the violence the landless must confront.

Political scientist Leandro Vergara-Camus ends the trilogy on the MST with a discussion of the movement’s methods of organization and political formation. Vergara-Camus analyzes the encampments and settlements of the MST as spaces and territories of politicalization. He argues that these relatively autonomous spaces enable the construction of a movement identity that enables peasant mobilization. To examine the politicalization process, the article examines some of the challenges faced by the MST, including confrontation with the agribusinss sector and their commodity enhancing policy proposals as well as the MST’s contradictory relationship with the Lula government.

The articles published here demonstrate the resiliency of peasant movements in Latin America and reaffirm the importance of analyzing their historical development, a process that brings new lessons daily. In accordance with the title expression “looking back, moving ahead,” the peasant and indigenous movements of today are renovated organizations that challenge political parties, unions and governments. They demand structural change and confront neoliberal policies. The articles reinforce the thesis that peasant movements promote substantial change in the substance of modern capitalist society and are among the most progressive organizations in the region. Through conflict, they promote development from outside the government and regularly fight for the society they dream of creating.