Introduction

This assessment of the agricultural situation in 17 Latin American countries seeks to continue the great effort made three decades ago by Pablo González Casanova with his history of farm movements. At the same time, it seeks to show the effects on the countries of our continent of the process of globalization which has been exacerbated and directed by the international capital that has developed global farming for more than 30 years.

Latin America is a concept that covers various regions with distinct orography, water resources, and climate systems; it is an area that has come from historical construction that varies considerably according to circumstance. Therefore, in order to facilitate a comparison between different cases, we considered those differences in organizing the three volumes that make up this work. This has meant the grouping into vast regions (the Southern Cone, the Andean arc, Mesoamerica) of countries that, grosso modo, have similar characteristics, despite their demographic, ethnic, geographic, historical, and cultural differences. In this vein, we have endeavored to be precise in this macroscopic approximation by studying microscopically the specific forms that general phenomena take in each country, with the aim of recognizing the diversity that marks Latin America, as well as the complex processes that make up some of these phenomena. Every study, performed by recognized specialists whom we thank for their collaboration, seeks to show us the agricultural and agrarian transformations of the last four decades and their tendencies as they run their course.

This means that we deliberately address only the historical, social, cultural, and economic roots of these changes in progress. Social structures and the characterization of the dominant and dominated classes are shown equally in filigree to the reader–which is to say, between the lines–as much as the political conflicts that connect the interests of the social blocs that, in this period, made up the core of power in each country with the interests of agribusiness and international capital. In effect, instead of undertaking the enormous task of a multifaceted study and comparison of all the socioeconomic diversity that makes up our continent, which is much more than just rural economics and sociology, we prefer to consider these volumes to be raw material for the historians, sociologists, geographers, economists, anthropologists, and political scientists who will, in the near future, complete an exhaustive global study of the problems of our continent and, in the short term, as a tool for those studying the problems of rural Latin America.

We leave it to our readers, then, to perform the creative analysis of reconciling this up-to-date and abundant information, of the socio-political synthesis of same, and of the examples granted by each work of how, at the end of the 1970s, international capital completely transformed the world–in particular the rural world–for the exclusive benefit of the industrial-financial sector and to the detriment of the farmers who, for capital, are relics of the past and obstacles to be eliminated, just like the indigenous peoples, communities, and solidarities of all types (tribal, community-based, familial, mutualist, syndicalist).

Raúl Prebisch, founder of the Economic Commission for Latin America, maintained that the politics of capital, through its concentrative tendencies and its exclusive search for profit, were incompatible with democracy, particularly in dependent countries like those of Latin America. The process of globalization directed by financial capital and the adoption by governments, to greater or lesser degrees, of the Washington Consensus and the neoliberal versions that followed confirm his words.

For example, Mexico in the first years of the 1980s was a net exporter of food and agricultural products before neoliberalism, in the name of “comparative advantage,” decreed that its supposed “natural vocation” was to export crude oil in order to import cheap food. The result of this idea is that now, Mexico has lost not only its food independence and security, but it has also destroyed its royal and agricultural economy, since this could not resist the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed in 1992 at the end of two devastating decades of neoliberal governments. In the present, Mexico continues to export crude oil (although it imports refined gasoline), but it is also in first place in the world in terms of emigration, as millions of farmers find themselves obligated to risk their lives every year to cross the U.S. border and perform manual labor there without legal documentation, in poor conditions and subject to discrimination.

In Latin America, as in the rest of the world, capital subsumed agriculture and took over lands, waters, forests, and territories, remade the economy, customs, culture, and society according to its interests.

In a global social offensive, similar to the brutal expropriation of the commons and expulsion of English farmers from their lands during the transition to capitalism, which violently created an abundant and poorly paid workforce for industry, the nations of our continent in the last decades have seen the extreme weakening or disappearance of their farming sectors which produced for internal consumption or internal markets and, in their place, have seen the development, without limit or mediator, the production of exportable commodities.

Take Argentina, for example. Before the First World War, it fed the workers of the global powers, but today depends on above all the export of fodder for Chinese consumption. Brazil sees its production of basic foodstuffs shrinking year by year, because capital prefers to feed the engines of cars produced by foreign firms with alcohol from sugarcane rather than feeding Brazilians sufficiently, and Uruguay devotes half of its arable land to the unsustainable industrial growing of eucalyptus in order to make paper pulp. Other countries and regions–such as Central America–live off the exportation of laborers, those modern semi-slaves and servants, who send money back to their families at the cost of super-exploitation, while other countries throughout the Andes allow huge mining concerns, stimulated by the current price of gold, rare Earth, and precious metals, destroy the environment and local agriculture, steal water from the inhabitants of the countryside, from villages, even from the cities before leaving the disaster once the resources they plunder have run out.

As in the rest of the developing world, in our continent the process of globalization brought about large demographic changes, themselves results of the massive migrations towards the richer and more industrialized countries, and of rapid urbanization without any plan. The countryside has been depopulated, and the rural young has been obligated to cut their ties to their lands, their families, their communities, their culture. The unhealthy growth of large cities simultaneously caused massive social problems through the need by states that neoliberalism sought to diminish to no longer offer housing or services to the populations of the “villas miserias,” “cantegrils”, “callampas”, “ciudades perdidas”, and “favelas,”¹ and thus degrading their own social conditions.

At the same time, a model of food production and consumption, imposed by transnational corporations via a powerful system of capitalist fabrication of perception, results in a world of obesity and starvation based on the poisoning of the land, the water, and food. We are the first generation in human history in which the primary social groups–the family, the community, the immediate social network–have lost their primacy in handling the necessities of their children, as explained by the historian Edward P. Thompson. Thus, as opposed to what happened in the past, in the present day it is impossible to separate the issue of agriculture from that of environmental protection, public health, and the fight for safe, healthy food for the population.

The violence in Columbia or the tens of thousands of dead in Mexico because of the war between drug traffickers in which is also involved an important part of the state edifice, cannot be separated from this process by which capital subsumes agriculture, nor the concentration of the former in commercial agriculture and exports, nor the displacement of indigenous people and cimarrones/quilombolas,² rural depopulation, or the destruction of rural life and culture.

Widespread fraud and corruption in governmental bodies have the same origin: the expropriation of inhabitants’ political rights, the reduction of democratic spaces, the concentration of information, and the production of popular culture in the hands of large financial consortia, promoters of neoliberal politics, the integration of the decisionmaking sectors of the local dominant classes with international capital via the clandestine exportation of capital or the transnationalization of enterprise.

In the food-exporting countries, land is nowadays rented out en masse and plundered like a mine with monocultivars by financial groups who live in cities or abroad. Meanwhile, the sectors that produce soy, grain, biofuels, timber, or minerals for export do not have the least interest in the internal markets or development of the countries or regions they exploit, because, instead, it is better for them to keep wages low, maintain a vast quantity of disorganizes and ignorant “informal” workers, and poor living conditions in order to reduce democratizing pressure and to increase their earnings.

Thus, it is not unrelated that, in order to privatize public enterprises that cost decades of popular spending and effort, in order to roll back social laws and rights, to take control of common goods and to transform a territory that was historically built by its inhabitants, financial capital has needed, first, bloody dictatorships that for years caused tens of thousands of deaths and millions of rural refugees and then, using as pretext a war on the crime and drug trafficking that their policies created, undeclared wars against the population, in which the State loses legitimacy, fractures that much more, falls apart, and degrades.

The expropriation of common goods has been–and continues to be–the expropriation of democratic spaces and the concentration of decisionmaking in the hands of large corporations and the governments that pay them tribute.

It is not a coincidence that, since 1990 in Ecuador and 1994 in Mexico, culminating in Bolivia, there is a general mobilization of those most excluded: indigenous peoples, including in those countries where they make up a small minority of the population. Nor that their fight is taken up also in urban areas that understand that democracy is only possible with radical social change. In these decades, as a consequence, an alliance has been formed, a social bloc that has not yet fully coalesced, between those who are condemned by capital to be marginalized and to disappear, and those who are condemned to a life of poor living and full of privations in rich countries that, precisely through the poverty of the majority, boast without shame and in plain sight a tremendous concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, who are also among the richest in the world.

We cannot address here the national and social movements that channel social protests, nor the governmental responses to them. We only wish to mention that peoples create their leaders as they need them; by the same token, the rupture with old, anachronistic state institutions, with mediating structures (parliamentary, [politically] partisan, etc.), the laws and constitutions of a past that has already occurred is a necessity that is felt more and more, which creates a power vacuum that seeks to fill itself in the form of new men and women who, coming from nothing, seek to drive as much as possible a process that they neither created nor directed. Contrary to what is said by pseudoscientific charlatans regarding populism, the engines of change are not the policies of those leaders nor a supposed vision beyond class, but rather the factor that strengthens or weakens those governments are the battle of the popular classes against the politics of capital and the defense of their rights and concessions on the environment, public goods, human rights, democracy, gender equality, egalitarianism and brotherhood, autonomy, and more and more, the self-management of land.

There are still some governments that claim an alliance between international financial capital, the decisionmaking part of the dominant class, and some parts of the middle class that have been conquered by neoliberal ideas. But, as the crisis has worsened, so too does the distance between the evolution of Latin American society and state apparatus increase. This growing rupture may be measured in social conflicts and even the persistence and increase in crime which in large part is due–just as was banditry in wholly agrarian societies–to marginalization and anarchic social protest. On the other hand, there are new sorts of processes and agents, such as international organized crime or the trafficking of weapons and drugs, which worsen this area and make it more complicated.

Those who declare their opposition to the Washington Consensus and who support themselves with the waves of citizen uprising are without doubt different from those who seek to maintain an unsustainable past. However, they nonetheless maintain an essential dependence on international financial capital and agribusiness just as on neoliberal policies, now colored with neo-development, welfarism, and distributionism designed to alleviate poverty and unemployment. They seek to grow internal markets, but at the cost of the environment and without touching the foreign influences that control agricultural exports, nor financial and industrial capital, also foreign, that extract huge benefits precisely because there is no human development nor justice. Hurried by the global crisis, they accept the poisoned apples of Big Mining, which plunders water resources and expels farming communities. That policy drives them to a confrontation with the public that prioritizes the logic of life, of work, and of natural presentation over the logic of business luxury. Thus they separate themselves from the social bases that propelled them into the government and become closer to those who always had decisionmaking power even though they are deeply anti-national given their exclusive and discriminatory nature, facing outward, and base themselves on the exploitation of peoples for those who typically are not even among them and who are separated by a cultural abyss.

As a result, neither democracy nor social and political stability have been conquered. We live in a transition phase in which the new fights to be born and the old resists its disappearance and even more continues to bind itself to the levers of power. Precisely because we have confidence that the Latin American people will succeed in creating a more just and more favorable future, we focus in the pages of this study on the issue of the vital agricultural sector on our continent, in order to show its unsustainability and its abnormality and, at the same time, to underline with hope the presence of forces that labor for profound change.

The editors
Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City
August 2012