PEASANTS UNDER SIEGE: POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CONSERVATION AND STATE CONTROL IN THE CORDILLERA CENTRAL, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
By
MATTHEW M. McPHERSON
A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
2003 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My sincere thanks goes to the campesinos in the hamlets of the Cordillera who generously spent hours sharing their time and knowledge with me while I was conducting this research. In particular, my gratitude goes to the people of Los Postes and Las Papas:
Tomasina, Rosanna, Juan, Loli, Antonio, Cookie, Kung and especially Don Pedro and
Don Martin, the two octogenarians who inspired me to tell the story of the 'good old days' in the Cordillera.
I want to thank the members of my doctoral committee, Drs. Gerald Murray,
Helen Safa, Marianne Schmink, Anthony Oliver-Smith and Michael Bannister for their support during this process. Much of the inspiration for this dissertation came from the
literature and ideas to which I was exposed in Dr. Safa's seminar on Caribbean
Anthropology, Dr. Schmink' s seminar on Anthropology and Development, and Dr.
Oliver-Smith's course on Economic Anthropology. I am especially indebted to Dr.
Murray, the chair of my committee, who has been a true mentor, always proved willing to share his vast knowledge of rural life in Hispaniola and provided unwavering and ongoing support throughout my tenure as a graduate student and during the write-up phase of this dissertation.
Dr. Timothy Schwartz has been a close and supportive friend, a colleague in the field, and spent endless hours reviewing early drafts of this manuscript. His edits and
insights represent an invaluable contribution to this dissertation. I am deeply grateful for the support that he provided during this process.
ii friends in the Dominican Over the years I have accumulated a debt of gratitude to
RepubUc and the U.S. Domingo Marte provided the opportunity that kindled my interest in parks and conservation in the Dominican Republic. Rene Ledesma and his wife
Rosario have been close and supportive friends. Fatima Portorreal shared her personal library, friendship, and knowledge of Dominican rural life. Larry Gorenflo generously gave of his time in helping me to produce maps. Michelle Libby provided opportunities for fieldwork and new professional challenges. Jim Perm generously took time away
from his own writing to do favors for me on campus. Shay Stautz provided ongoing
encouragement and challenged me to continue to grow personally and professionally.
Friends in the Secretariat of the Environment, FLACSO and the Fundacion Moscoso
Puello also provided ongoing support and assistance.
Much of the research on which this dissertation is based largely took place with
fimding from The Nature Conservancy under the guise of a Human Ecological
Assessment of Rancier and Bermiidez National Parks (1998-99). Follow-up research was
conducted with a grant from WIDTECH to study gender and conservation in the
Cordillera in the summer of 2001 . I gratefiilly acknowledge the support of both of these
organizations.
Finally, I would like to thank my family: my parents Neil and Judy, my sister
Chris and my mother-in-law Norma for their years of patience ongoing encouragement
and support. Most important, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my wife and closest
friend Ana Maria. She has patiently endured many years of frequent and extended
absences and sacrificed her own time and social life so that I could complete this study. I
could not have completed this dissertation without her daily support and encouragement.
iii 1
TABLE OF CONTENTS page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii
ABSTRACT viii CHAPTER
1 INTRODUCTION 1
Summary of Argument 1 Theoretical Considerations 3 Research Objectives and Methods 16 Organization of Dissertation 19 Notes 21
2 GEOGRAPHY, PARKS, AND RESEARCH SITES OF THE CORDILLERA CENTRAL 25
Introduction 25 Geography of the Cordillera 25 Research Area 26 The Parks 37 Origins of the Peasants of the Cordillera Hinterlands 39 Conclusion 42 Notes 43
3 COWS, PIGS, AND PICKET FENCES: PAST LIFE IN THE CORDILLERA 48
Introduction 48 Martin Garcia: The Good Old Days 48 Early Peasant Economy 5 Land Availability: Foundation of The Golden Age 57 Agro-Pastoral Complex 59 Conclusion 67 Notes 69
4 STATE CONTROL AND PEASANTS DURING THE TRUJILLO ERA 72
Introduction 72 Pre-Trujillo Period: Brief Historical Background 72 State Control and Peasant Formation Under Trujillo (1930-1961) 74
iv Beginning of the Decline 76 Conclusion 84 Notes 85
5 TIMBER AND FORESTRY LAWS DURING THE TRUJILLO ERA 88
Introduction 88 Traditional Cutting versus Logging 88 Early Forestry Legislation 90 Enforcement of Forestry Laws 93 Conclusion 95 Notes 96
6 CRIMES OF THE FOREST: CANELA AND THE CREATION OF BERMUDEZ NATIONAL PARK 99
Introduction 99 Park Formation: Armando Bermudez National Park 101 Displacements 117 Forest Crime 119 Conclusion 121 Notes 122
7 STATE OF SIEGE I: CHEAP LABOR AND CHEAP FOOD, INDUSTRIALIZATION AND URBANIZATION OF THE REPUBLIC 125
Introduction 125 Two Faces of United States Occupation 126 Urban-Based Development 129 Providing Cheap Labor to Capital 131 State Neglect of Agriculture 141 Conclusion 144 Notes 146
8 STATE OF SIEGE 2: CONSERVATION AND MILITARIZATION OF THE HINTERLANDS 149
Introduction 149 Conservation in the Immediate Post-Trujillo Period 149 Forest Conservation: 1970s through the 1990s 153 Impacts on Campesino Adaptation 154 Conclusion 161 Notes 161
9 CONSERVATION, CONTRABAND AND POWERHOLDERS 1 64
Introduction 164 FORESTA and Paying of Bribes 165
V The Big Farmers 171^ ' Conclusion ' Notes
174 10 BENEFICIARIES OF RURAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE CORDILLERA
Introduction Government and Rural Development Organizations 176 Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) 177 Conservation, Campesinos and NGOs 183 1 oo Conclusion Notes
11 ENEMIES OF THE FOREST: CAMPESINO RESISTANCE AND THE CREATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL DELINQUENCY 191
Introduction Petty Forms of Resistance 192 Fire 193 Stubborn Defiance 195 Creative forms of Resistance 196 Conclusion 201 Notes 202
12 CRACKS IN THE ARMOR: EMERGENCE OF PEASANT SUBSISTENCE STRATEGIES IN THE INTERSTICES OF STATE CONTROL 209
Introduction 209 Political Crises 209 Elections 211 Natural Disasters 213 Areas Beyond Reach of State Control 213 Conclusion 215 Notes 215
13 CHANGING ADAPTIVE PATTERNS: DYING WAY OF LIFE IN THE CORDILLERA 216
Introduction 216 Dependency on the Market 217 Access to Productive Land and Farming Strategies 218 Impact of Need for Cash 222 Decline in Pastoral Activities 225 Diversification of Survival Activities 226 Conclusion 230 Notes 231
vi 1
235 14 GENDER AND MIGRATION IN THE CORDILLERA
Introduction ^-^^ Exodus ^-^^ Skewed Sex Ratios 241 Differential Male vs. Female Migration 242 Persistence of Gender Roles and Change in Demand for Female Labor 245 Rural Push Factors 247 Conclusion Notes 259
15 BOYS WEED, GIRLS STUDY: MIGRATION AND CHANGING SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 263
Introduction 263 Marriage Patterns 263 Education 268 Urban Employment 272 Conclusion 274 Notes 276
16 CONCLUSIONS 279
Summary: State of Siege 279 Dying Way of Life 28 Future Trends 284 Notes 287
APPENDIX
A BRIEF HISTORY OF LUMBER EXPLOITATION IN THE DOMEsflCAN REPUBLIC UP TO THE TRUJILLO PERIOD 288
Early Lumber Exploitation 288 The Emergence of the Lumber Industry in the Cordillera Central 290 Notes 294
B MODERN DOMINICAN FORESTRY LAWS 295
C HISTORICAL EXCHANGE RATES 298
D SELECTED DATA ON FIRE, MIGRATION AND SEX RATIOS 299
BIBLIOGRAPHY 304
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 318
vii Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
PEASANTS UNDER SIEGE: POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CONSERVATION AND STATE CONTROL IN THE CORDILLERA CENTRAL, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
By
Matthew M. McPherson
May, 2003
Chair: Gerald F. Murray Major Department: Anthropology
This study documents the historical and material processes that have led to the transformation of peasant lifeways in the highlands of the Cordillera Central mountain range in the Dominican Republic. The traditional peasant survival strategies of the region required free access to natural resources and significant autonomy from the state.
These two elements provided the foundation for a time that elderly farmers nostalgically remember as a peasant golden age.
The multiple forms of state intervention that were initiated during the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, including the passage of forestry laws and the formation of protected areas, signaled the end of the golden age. In the years after Trujillo, conservation policies evolved in conjunction with cenfral state development strategies that responded to the interests of international and urban power holders. Along with other forms of state intervention, conservation laws changed the rules governing access to and use of resources, systematically alienated peasants from the factors of production and transferred control over forest resources to powerful stakeholders.
This study rejects Marxist assumptions regarding the inevitability of the proletarianization of the peasanfry and builds instead on the notion that human subsistence sfrategies and social-structural configurations are responsive and adaptive.
viii absence Peasant activities have surged and retracted in line with state presence. But in the of a breakdown of the state, statistical and ethnographic evidence suggests that the remaining peasants in the Cordillera are the final generations of a dying subculture. The traditional institutions around which peasant life in the past was organized have either disappeared or been transformed.
The population of the remote Cordillera is declining. People are rapidly abandoning the area. Farmers—uneducated themselves-make special efforts to provide their children with a formal education, something that facilitates survival in urban areas, signaling an effective end to any aspiration for the intergenerational transmissions of their own rural lifeways. Changes in dependency on household production, which provoked a shift in the demand for male versus female labor, have given way to imusual patterns of outmigration characterized by a significantly more rapid exodus of females.
IX CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
Summary of Argument
This dissertation explores the expansion of State control in the Dominican
areas of Republic and its impact on farming strategies and social life in remote highland
8'*' the Cordillera Central. In the milieu of weak State control that characterized the late- 1 century Dominican Republic, rural life throughout the country took on distinct economic and structural characteristics. In contrast to the vast hatos (cattle ranches) of the colonial
era, life in the rural Dominican Republic became focused on small-scale household production. Swidden agriculture and free grazing of livestock were the dominant means of production; the dominant structural aspect of life was that labor was organized around the nuclear family. Capital was relatively unimportant and land was abundant. At the community level, life was characterized by egalitarian, inter-household cooperation in the form of work parties and the linking of families through intermarriage. People were inclined to farm for consumption rather than for markets. The greatest investments people made were in their own families.
In lowland areas of the Dominican Republic these patterns began to give way in the late 1800s to a resurgence of large-scale production organized around capital- intensive corporate entities that produced for the world market. A new wave of sugar plantations backed by expanding State control transformed the many of the formerly independent household producers of the east into a rural proletariat. In other areas of the
1 country, lands began to be concentrated in larger farms for the production of coffee, cacao, tobacco and livestock.' In the remote highlands of the Cordillera, however, swidden agriculture and free grazing of livestock continued to be the dominant means of subsistence and production and the organization of labor continued to revolve around the household. Indeed, many lowland campesinos (rural people) fled into the highlands to escape the encroaching State. But in the 1940s and 1950s this began to change. Highland
farmers began to feel the fiill brunt of State control. State authorities levied taxes, they forced campesinos to work on labor gangs, and they created police and military outposts.
They also created new rules regarding land tenure, redefining who had access to land and
the uses to which it could be put.
Many of the new State policies in the Cordillera were cloaked in the rhetoric of conservation. But policies that were supposedly meant to preserve land, flora and fauna often became, in practice, mechanisms for transferring control over natural resources from illiterate and politically powerless mountain peasantry to powerfial urban stakeholders—lumber companies, military officials, industrialists, big fanners and NGOs.
Conservation was also used as a justification for breaking up communal lands, for the forced settlement of peasants on marginal lands and for dismantling the traditional livestock peasant economy. The real-life consequence of the poUcies designed and launched under themes of patriotic conservation sounded a death knell for traditional
lifeways of the montane people.
Some campesinos of the Cordillera have continued to struggle to maintain a livelihood based on traditional economic strategies. Some have openly protested State
policies, and many have made it a common practice to elude and resist State authorities.
But in general, the campesinos of the Cordillera have succumbed. Traditional Cordillera 3
subsistence and social institutions can be best described as a dying way of life. The consequence has been massive outmigration from the Cordillera into the cities or
trend, overseas. This outmigration has been characterized by a demographically unusual
Cordillera: the one that has had a radical impact on the people who still live in the disproportionate exit of girls and women, something that has had independent and far- reaching social consequences.
Theoretical Considerations .;
Marxist treatises have focused on the inevitability ofthe proletarianization of the
Dominican peasantry (Boin and Serulle 1981; del Rosario et al. 1996; Duarte 1980;
Lozano 1985; San Miguel 1999b). The analysis provided here rejects this assumption as teleological and builds instead on the notion that human subsistence strategies and social-
structural configurations are responsive and adaptive. On the level of household and
commimity my approach shares with the Cultural Materialist research strategy the
heuristic premises that: 1) the primary sources of causation should be sought in
infrastructural factors; 2) structural conditions are adapted to or conditioned by
infrastructural facets of life; and 3) the ideological aspects of life are ultimately adapted
to or conditioned by structural conditions (Harris 1979).
The Cultviral Materialist research strategy, with its assumption of infrastructural
determinism, is here fortified by a political economic perspective. Similar to Cultural
Materialism, the political economy approach emphasizes the need for history to
understand the ways that particular societies have adapted in response to changes in
material conditions—such as technological developments; alterations in the availability
of resources; and demographic increment or decline. But the political economy approach
calls greater attention to links with the world economy and the notion that individuals are constantly being shaped through interactions with "wider economic relations and iBelds of
interactions" (Roseberry 1989: 11 3). Furthermore, power that afifect . . . daily and local whereas Cultural Materialism tends to view the emergence of the State as the effect of interacting technological and demographic forces of the past, a political economy perspective views the State as an active causal force in its own right, a view emphasized
in this thesis. The political economy perspective also emphasizes relations of production
and exchange that impinge on communities from outside, such as the underwriting of
particular export commodities, as in the case of sugar (Mintz 1985) and coffee
(Roseberry 1983) or other kinds of interventions that link the local with the broader
world, such as forest policies (Peluso 1992).
Kearney's (1996) recent work on peasantry reformulates in post-modernist and
Marxist terminology the same core insight that has dominated anthropological studies of
peasants from the outset: any analysis of peasants has to situate them in broader systemic
structures. Guided in particular by the political economic approach, my study attempts to
provide an understanding of social change in the hinterlands of the Cordillera Central by
examining the changing relationship between rural small producers, the Dominican State,
and the influence of foreign entities, most notably the United States. A significant
portion of the work is dedicated to providing an historical understanding of the
relationship between the evolution of the Dominican State and national economy and the
changing adaptive patterns of peasants living in the Cordillera. The boundaries of the
study are extended beyond the local and regional levels to national and international
levels with a look at the historical emergence of outside conservation initiatives.
Decisions made at higher levels regarding the conservation targets and the methods of
enforcement of conservation laws are inextricably bound up with broader trends in State 5
aspirations of political formation, changes in the market, and with the personal economic
shifting framework insiders and powerful financial entities. These forces constitute a
adaptive options for that, along with local ecological conditions, limit the range of
ecological impact individuals at the local level, thus determining the social, economic and of conservation initiatives.
The three major unifying themes of the study are: 1) peasant formation; 2) State
used control; and 3) conservation. The theoretical dimensions of these themes as they are
in this study are discussed in the sections that follow.
Peasant Formation and State Control
Obscurity of the peasant concept
The anthropological concept of peasant was formulated to describe people who do
to not fall within the classic subsistence-political organizational schema of 'himter-gather industrialist' and 'band to State.' Peasants are rural small producers who exist within or vis-a-vis a state and in relationship to urban areas, yet they display characteristics that are
both "primitive" and "modem" (Wolf 200 1 [ 1 955]). But the concept has been
problematic and "often obscures more than it illuminates" (Baud 1995:40). The term
peasant has been applied broadly to groups located in marginal regions throughout the
globe, implying that there is a peasantry that exists as "a simple, undifferentiated, and
isolable group" (Roseberry 1 989: 1 22).^ The use of the word peasant in a general and
imcritical fashion implies that there is a simple commonality between groups that are
radically different in terms of their historical origins, adaptive strategies and relationships
to the external world (e.g., indigenous communities in Latin America, medieval feudal
serfs, frontiersmen, and European villagers). It also masks differences not only among
different rural populations but also within them. 6
the scholarly literature than it is So what is a peasant? If the response depends on
There is a general a nebulous catchall term that changes from one researcher to the next.
has been variously failure to agree on even the most basic defining elements. Peasant
of used defined by or as: a form of household organization (Chayanov 1985); a mode
agricultural production (del Rosario et al. production (de Janvry 1981 : 101-2); a system of
or 1996); as a class or transitory class (de Janvry 1981); and a type of ideology worldview (Foster 1967; Vargas 1992). Depending on the conceptual frameworks being used, different rural peoples may or may not qualify as peasants. Furthermore, among
anthropologists there is not even agreement that a peasant must be a cultivator of the land. Wolf (2001 [1955]: 195) noted that in the 1950s Raymond Firth included fishermen and rural craftsmen vwthin the definition of peasant. More recently, Frank Cancian defined peasants as anyone who was related or lived in proximity to people who produce their own food and in elaborating on this definition he defined a peasant as a subtype of
"The peasants":
The peasants: People who have some ability to produce their own food, or have a close kinship connection to people who have some ability to produce their own food, or interact in a local economy with people who have some ability to produce their own food. This category includes various loosely defined subtypes: peasants (people who currently produce a substantial part of their own food); petty commodity producers (people who currently produce things for sale or live currently by trading in local markets. . .) and semiproletarians (people who work for wages but who also depend on food production or petty commodity production by themselves or their kinsmen for survival). [1989: 165]
In summary, the concept of peasant or peasantry is a problematic reification that calls
into question its utility. Aggravating the situation is the fact that term peasant is also a
colloquialism suggestive of ignorance, poverty and general backwardness.^
On the other hand, the debate over the definition and nature of the peasantry has
been usefiil in that it has forced anthropologists to examine the similarities and 7
arisen differences between rural peoples. The questions and conceptualizations that have as a result of these comparative efforts draw attention to the historical origins and adaptive processes of rural peoples within a context of ecological constraints and changing structviral relationships to broader society.'* Furthermore, attempts to understand the origins of so-called peasant adaptations have provided a basis for understanding "the problems of social and economic transitions in agrarian societies"
(Baud 1995:40) and shed significant light on differing patterns of rural development over time.^ However, to avoid using the term peasant indiscriminately it is important to define the criteria that will be used in this study.
Defining characteristics of Caribbean peasants and peasantries
The distinctive characteristics that have been used to define Caribbean peasants and that will be followed in this dissertation include both economic and politico-
structural features. A conceptual distinction must also be made between peasant and a peasantry, as discussed below.^
In the economic sense, the term peasant refers to people who largely depend on
the household mode of production and who have certain limited relationships to the
world market. Caribbean peasants are subsistence-oriented to the extent that they
practice survival strategies that allow the household to maintain a degree of household
autonomy fi-om the state and the market (i.e., are based on a household mode or Domestic
Mode of Production). These survival strategies almost invariably include crop and
livestock raising but also often include petty commodity production, foraging, fishing,
and hunting.
Nevertheless, Caribbean peasants are not subsistence producers immersed in
natural economies but have always been, to one degree or another, involved in regional 8
markets are dominated cash-based market systems as weU as the world market. Regional
produce, livestock, crafts, foraged by trade in local household products such as garden
are also linked in varying natural flora, fishing, and hunted feral and wild animals. They
several export products- degrees to the world economy through the production of one or
labor—and through the such as cofifee, tobacco, castor beans, cacao, beef, or human
consumption of specific imports such as dried fish (particularly cod and herring),
machetes, hoes, kerosene for lamps, textiles, matches, rice, beans, and flour.
Consequently, Caribbean peasants' productive strategies provide considerable
in industrial and economic flexibility. Unlike monocropping farmers or workers modem
multiple service-oriented economies, peasant households have a foot firmly planted in
economies, specifically the household economy; the regional marketing and service
these specialization economy; and the world economy. The dependence on any one of
economies varies over time among any particular peasant or peasant household. Thus,
the most important defining characteristic of Caribbean peasants is that they are not
definitely either one type of producer/consumer or another, but rather a little bit of
everything. They vary their dependence on any particular subsistence or money-earning
scheme in accordance with the opportunities available. But, very importantly, they never
commit completely to any particular strategy and in all circumstances maintain a
household productive unit capable of sustaining itself and even allowing its members to
withdraw completely fi-om outside economies in times of need.
A peasantry should be distinguished conceptually fi-om the peasants and peasant
households that comprise it. While theoretically a lone peasant household could exist, it
could not by itself be considered a peasantry. A peasantry is made up of multiple peasant
households and includes not only an economic facet but also a political one. 9
Economically, the most important defining characteristics of a peasantry include the
following: a peasantry is comprised of individuals who are members of households that control the means of production required to produce at least some of their means of subsistence; these individuals and households are linked in their productive activities through indigenous marketing systems; and they are all linked to the broader world economy through the purchase of imported goods as well as through the production of export-oriented crops.
Conceptually, a focus on the peasantry or peasantries highlights political- economic structural relations. Peasantries will dififer with regard to the structure of regional economic systems and their structural incorporation the world economy.
Furthermore, the concept of peasantry emphasizes political-structural relations to a state
or states. The formation of Caribbean peasantries historically has occurred within a
context of weak state control and has also been characterized by the relative absence of
its own formalized political hierarchies. While there is no reason that particular tribal
peoples in Africa or South America cannot also be categorized as peasants, Caribbean peasantries are different fi-om native groups that have become peasants. Caribbean
peasantries have been referred to as "reconstituted" due to the fact that they or their
ancestors came or were brought to the Caribbean region as something other than peasants
(Mintz 1989[1974]:132).' They originated as slaves or indentured servants imported to
work on plantations. They subsequently escaped, moved away from, or experienced a
collapsing around them of the plantation economies and/or State political control. They
formed productively autonomous households units, as defined above, and by virtue of
commercial interaction with one another peasantries emerged with their distinctive regional marketing systems and a relative absence, at the community level, of centralized political control.*
The Emergence of the Dominican Peasantry
The process of formation of the peasantries in Spanish Santo Domingo displays significant differences from that of the British and French Caribbean where peasantries emerged in association with plantation economies. In colonial Santo Domingo the sugar
plantations declined during the 1600s and it was not until the last quarter of the century, well after slavery had been abolished, that sugar again became important.'
Furthermore, the colonial cattle economy that dominated during the 17* and 18* centuries was not labor intensive, meaning that slave labor was of marginal importance.
Spanish Santo Domingo was also only Ughtly populated, containing vast areas of open and unexploited lands where individuals could freely settle. But despite these differences, peasant formation in Santo Domingo occurred in the context of the weakening or absence of the State and often implied an assertion by former slaves or workers of autonomy from
State control and coercion, just as it did in islands dominated by a fiilly developed plantation economy.
Gonzalez (1992) described the existence of an "archaic peasantry" in Santo
7* Domingo as early as the 1 century constituted by emancipated and creolized descendants of slaves who became established in remote regions of the country and maintained only limited interaction with local markets. During the same period, in the fertile Cibao region, subsistence farmers consisting largely of Creole Spaniards and migrants from the Canary Islands began to commercialize tobacco "in the shadow of and largely in opposition to Spanish mercantile control (Baud 1995:3; Gonzalez 1992). 11
However, it was not until the turn of the 19* century that the number of
independent peasant households rapidly expanded. Violent upheavals associated v^dth the
Haitian revolution (1791-1803) also led to a breakdown of the Spanish colonial
government and a disintegration of the livestock economy. Slaves and workers
previously tied to the hatos (cattle ranches) adopted household-based farming strategies
19* that emphasized subsistence production (Moya Pons 1994). In the second half of the
century peasants further expanded into remote and marginal areas, such as the Cordillera
Central. These groups consisted largely of individuals who sought to escape the violence
and political chaos brought about by the ongoing Haitian Wars, the War of Restoration
(1863-1865) and clashes between regional caudillos (Antonini 1968; Moya Pons 1994).
In the late 19* and early 20* centuries, with the expansion of intensive corporate
agricultural firms in the lowlands, farmers again moved into marginal, mountainous areas
in search of lands outside the control of the State (Antonini 1968; Murray 1970).
State efforts to "recapture" the Dominican peasantry
Pedro San Miguel (1999b) points out that peasant studies in the Caribbean have
tended to emphasize peasant resistance but have paid much less attention to the ways that
the state eventually began to dominate, submit or transform the peasant sectors, a process
that is one of the primary concerns of this dissertation. This study begins with the growth
of the independent Dominican State, which had remained weak through the first decade
of the 20* century but became militarized and dramatically strengthened during the U.S.
occupation fi-om 1916-1924. It examines the various forms through which the
Dominican State intervened in the Cordillera Central, transforming rural life in the
region. State control over the peasantry involved redistributing resources and
criminalizing existing household subsistence strategies: the very activities that provided 12
the basis for peasant economic and political autonomy. State regulation and taxation deliberately captured and rechanneled peasant agricultural production by forcing the
peasants to produce export crops and making it increasingly difficult for them to adapt by escaping into marginal areas or withdrawing into the household economy.
As the Dominican economy subsequently shifted from an emphasis on the production of export crops such as sugar, cacao and coffee and toward an industrial and service economy, the peasants became increasingly viewed as an impediment to national development (Baud 1995; Mintz 1974:146-7; San Miguel 1999a). Rural development, according to the State model, required the modernization of agriculture and the transformation of traditional peasant practices and the peasant economy (del Rosario et
al. 1996). As I show in the dissertation, conservation-oriented policies and activities and park formation were key mechanisms used by the State to achieve these ends.
Conservation and State Intervention
The social and political implications of conservation
My study examines the impact of conservation as a form of State intervention in the lives of peasants. The purpose of doing this is not to reject the need for environmental conservation in the Cordillera. Regardless of the motives for which they were carried out, conservation initiatives of the Dominican State have ultimately been successfiil in slowing and in many instances reversing the rate of ecological devastation
that was occurring in the Cordillera highlands. This is, by any measure, of critical importance. As the key watershed for the country's major river systems—including the
Yaque del Norte and Yaque del Sur, Bao, Yuna, Nizao, Las Cuevas, Grande, Tireo,
Blanco, and the Ocoa~the Cordillera provides fresh water for the approximately 2.2 million inhabitants of the capital city, Santo Domingo, and for the inhabitants of other ;
13
low lying areas in the Republic. The water generated in the region is also critical for the maintenance of lowland irrigation systems and ten hydroelectric dams.
But there are scholarly dividends that accrue from an examination of the motives
of the State, the processes of conservation, and the disruptive social consequences that
often result. The purpose of critically analyzing what has been the economic eradication
of the Dominican peasantry is to shed light on the often-overlooked dimensions of
conservation, including the fact that conservationist proposals often portend profound
social change (Jacoby 2001 : 6).
The environmental conservationist movement generally represents itself with
scenes of verdant nature and exotic wildlife, images that appeal strongly to the romantic
notions, longings, and fantasies of urbanites who feel estranged from 'nature'. The
movement also wields a persuasive rhetoric that is at once romantic and alarmist and
bases its authority on scientific knowledge and moral arguments. At the same time, as
Colchester (1996) notes, conservationists often prove reluctant to admit the profound
political and social implications of their recommendations.
The inescapable fact is that conservation proposals are also political proposals in
that they either explicitly or implicitly involve deciding who should control natural
resources and how these resources should be managed (Jacoby 2001 ; McCarthy 2001
Neumann 2001 ; Peluso 1992; Svmdar 2001). Conservation decisions reflect "the
distribution of power within human society. . .the ability of some groups of humans to
legitimize certain environmental practices and to criminalize others" (Jacoby 2001 :xvi).
There are beneficiaries and, all too frequently, victims of conservation-oriented initiatives
(Keller and Turek 1998; Spence 1999). Creating parks, protecting species, passing laws
that restrict access to water or other natural resources often has profound implications for 14
people and cultures. Displacements, impoverishment, imprisonment, massacres, and starvation have been among the consequences of conservation decisions. Anyone who
the feels this is an extremist statement need only recall the disease and starvation amongst
Ik as a result of the formation of Kipedo National Park in Uganda as documented by
Colin Tumbull (1972); the massacre of 50 villagers in Serengeti park in Africa by game rangers in 1998 (Neumann 2001); the burning of villages and slaughter of Miwok Indians by the U.S. Army in Yosemite National Park in the 1 880s (Keller and Turek 1998); and the displacement of Kung San from the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park in South Africa
(SASI 2003).
Proposals for conservation are the outgrowth of broader political, economic and ideological forces that operate within a given historical context. A significant body of literature has emerged, for example, that focuses on the implications for environmental management of the changing meaning of concepts that serve as the ideological foundation for conservation—concepts such as 'nature' and 'wilderness' (Cronon 1996;
Harrison 1992; Spence 1999). Other studies have shown that an understanding of political and economic motivations of state governments provides a ftiller understanding of the nature of conservation proposals. For example, in a recent work on conflicts between rural peoples and the State in the early years of the American conservation
movement, Karl Jacoby states:
We can also reach a fuUer understanding of the encounter between rural folk and American conservation by situating the history of conservation within its larger
context. Involving as it does factors such as the rise of the State, the development
of natural resources, and conflict with Indian peoples. [2001 :4]
Similar to what Jacoby (2001) shows for the Adirondacks, Yellowstone and the Grand
Canyon in the United States, my dissertation sheds light on the ways that conservationist-
i 15
oriented policies in the Cordillera Central have evolved in response to changing national- level poUtical and economic developments. The evolution of conservation in the
Cordillera sheds light on the mechanisms the Dominican State has used to assert control over the rural population and the implications that the evolution of national development strategies have had on the lives of peasants in the Cordillera Central.
State control, conservation and peasant resistance
Caribbean peasant economic strategies represent a kind of broad resistance to dominant economic and political forces. Recently, scholars have also paid increasing attention to smaller-scale acts of peasant resistance and their ideological underpinnings
(Scott 1985). Scholars have used the idea of small-scale everyday forms of resistance to
examine clashes in worldview^s among the state, power holders, and peasants regarding
nature and the material manifestations of these clashes. For example, Sahlins (1994)
showed how efforts by the French Forest Administration to impose its views regarding
the proper use of the forest through implementation of the 1827 National Forest Code led
to peasant revolt that became manifest through violence and unusual symbolic
expressions. Guha (1990) discussed the emergence of the Chipko movement amidst
conflicting worldviews regarding rights to forest use. Peluso (1992) described conflicting
moral economies between foresters and peasants and the emergence of a peasant "culture
of resistance" through which they could maintain a degree of control over forests and
lands. Jacoby (2001) discussed acts such as poaching, timber theft and squatting as local
manifestations of the clash between the local "moral ecology" of rural farmers and the
elite conservation discourse that emerged in the late 19"* century United States.
My study has been influenced by these works in that it examines concrete forms
of state domination and peasant resistance. I show that campesinos in the Cordillera have 16
not been passive observers of their fate but have struggled to circumvent and elude State
control and to take advantage of periods of weak State control. Ideological conflicts
between the state and the campesinos are embedded within these activities. Ideological
differences between the State and campesinos emerge at various points within this text, in
the words of the campesinos themselves.
Research Objectives and Methods
Research Objectives
The original objective of my research was to obtain an understanding of the ways
park formation impacted campesino communities of the Cordillera Central highlands.
This was divided into three components: 1) obtaining a general vmderstanding of the
characteristics of the populations living around the parks; 2) vmderstanding changes in the
local economy and social structure that resulted from park formation; and 3)
understanding park and people relationships including dependency on the parks for local
resources and the degree of local participation or resistance to park conservation.
The dissertation also addresses broader issues. It was clear upon arriving in the
parks areas that the majority of hamlets are being abandoned. Empty houses and
neglected fields are common. Locals are quick to explain that people are leaving for the
city en masse, that farming is no longer profitable. They refer to themselves as the
cabezas duras, the stubborn ones who have been able to endure and persist in the
mountains in the face of ecological and economic stress. Much of this stress originated
outside of the hamlets and includes low prices for farm products; repressive Forestry and
park policies; lack of access to credit; inaccessible educational facilities; lack ofjobs; and
the presence of low wage Haitian migrant workers. 17
Fieldwork and Participatory Observation
Conclusions and insights are based on 30 months of intermittent research in the surroundings of Armando Bermudez and Juan B. Perez Rancier National Parks. This period included two phases of concentrated research lasting a total of approximately 14
months. The first phase took place from early May 1998 to early June 1999 and involved
extended residence in two hamlets (three months in Los Postes and two months in Las
Papas) as well as shorter stays lasting approximately two weeks in sixteen other hamlets
strung along the northern boundaries of two parks.'" The second phase of research
consisted in two months of follow-up visits to Los Postes and Las Papas in the summer of
follow-up visits to other 2001 . During this period I was also able to make rapid
previously visited hamlets and gather data to further substantiate my hypotheses
regarding the causes of skewed sex ratios in the region."
Interviewing
Extensive informal and semi-structured household and key informant interviews
were conducted with migrant workers, local small farmers (men and women), female
heads of households, local leaders (men and women), commimity development workers,
regional leaders, government workers and oflScials, extension workers, NGO
representatives. Catholic priests, scholars and conservationists. Ninety-five longer key
informant interviews were taped, transcribed and subsequently coded for analysis.
Baseline surveys
Baseline Surveys had the primary objective of building a general demographic
profile of the people and hamlets surrounding the national parks (Table 1-1). Two
baseline surveys were carried out, one of households surrounding Juan B. Perez Rancier
National Park in the Fall of 1998 and the other of Bermudez National Park households in 18
the application of a the Spring of 1999. The Rancier General Survey included
using a census questionnaire to 246 households in eight hamlets surrounding the park
application of surveys in 352 strategy. The Bermudez General Survey included the
Dominican randomly selected households in eight hamlets bordering the park.'^
of the questionnaire assistants, trained in the field, participated both in the testing phase
as well as in the application of the surveys.
Table 1-1. Types of data gathered in baseline surveys Demographic Household economy Opinions characteristics ambitions for Age, sex, marital status, Primary occupation of Personal level of education, age of household head and all future
first marriage, number of individuals residing in marriages for head of household Ambitions for children household and all individuals residing in the Primary sources of income Knowledge of presence of household. for the household park
Relationship of each Amount of land possessed Opinions regarding park member to household by household head and head. status of land tenure
Place of birth for head of Number of gardens/farm household and parents of plots head of household Primary source of Number of children of head agricultural labor of household and spouse Age that women had first Source of agricultural credit child Type of wage labor Sex, age, educational level, employment, place of Number and type of animals residency, age of possessed by household migration, and type of assistance sent back for
all children of conjugal pair living outside of the household. 19
Opinion surveys
The goal of the opinion surveys was to obtain representative profiles of adult attitudes and opinions regarding issues relevant to the current study. Each informant was
interview. asked a standard list of questions complemented by a short semi-structured
Interviews were taped, transcribed and coded. Questions involved parents' preference for
children based on sex; parents' ambitions for their children's future; opinions on
migration of children; opinion on forestry laws; opinion on parks; opinion on whether
either current or past life was better; opinions on Haitians. The survey was applied to the
household head or spouse in a random sample of 40 households, 20 in Los Postes and 20
in Las Papas (22 males and 18 females). Other research methods and smaller surveys
were carried out to gather data on areas of particular interest. These included: a fertility
survey in Los Postes and Las Papas; household composition surveys; and a technology
survey. Historical land-use mapping and gendered resource-use mapping was also used
both with individual key informants as well as in a focus group format to generate
discussion surrounding past and present agrarian practices.'^
Organization of Dissertation
The rest of this text proceeds as follows. Chapters 2 and 3 provide the
background that serve as the foundation for the unfolding of the rest of the dissertation.
In chapter 2, a general overview of the research area is provided, including the geography
of the Cordillera, the parks, and of the origins and current general characteristics of the
populations living in the hamlets in the study region. Chapter 3 provides a detailed
description of past life in the Cordillera, reconstructed through oral histories provided by
elderly key informants throughout the northern Cordillera. It is the institutions and local
economic practices of this past life that were progressively altered by state intervention. 20
Chapters 4 through 9 provide the historical context for understanding both the
emergence of forms of State insertion into the Cordillera. The chapters document the conservation-oriented policies and ideologies as an outgrowth of changing political
evolution of economic strategies at the state level. Chapters 4 through 6 describe the
forestry State intervention in the Cordillera during the Trujillo era. During this period,
the laws were passed at the same time as lumber mills are introduced into the region and
Trujillo intensive exploitation of the vast pine forests of the Cordillera began. During the
period park formation become a factor in the region, and chapter 6 illustrates the
emergence of a conservationist ideology that justified criminalizing peasant activities as
well as wresting control of mountain resources fi-om the peasantry.
Chapters 7 through 10 focus on developments after the assassination of Trujillo in
environmental policies in the post-Trujillo 1961 . In chapter 7, State macroeconomic and
period are shown to resemble a siege-like attack mounted against the peasants of the
Cordilleran hinterlands. Chapter 8 shows how the strict new Forestry and protected area
policies that emerged in the post-Trujillo period were an outgrowth of the broader
political and economic strategies of the period and amounted to a direct assault on
peasant lifeways and living standards. Conservation policies were not applied equally
but, as discussed in chapter 9, the institutions and individuals that were the legal
custodians of the forest resources and conservation areas in the Cordillera often
manipulated their control over the rich pool of resources that had been made oflf-limits to
the campesinos for personal gain. Chapter 10 describes the failure of development
interventions to offset the impact generated by long-term State intervention in the
Cordillera. 21
level The rest of the dissertation (chapters 1 1 through 15) focuses on the local response to State intervention. Chapters 1 1 and 12 show that campesinos adopt a number
of creative mechanisms to avoid State control and to continue to persist through the use
of peasant-style productive strategies. Despite peasant efforts to resist, chapter 13 shows
that the siege-like historical processes of State intervention described in earlier chapters
resulted in the alteration or disappearance of the traditional institutions and survival
strategies around which early peasant adaptations were organized. The remaining
campesinos in the Cordillera are shown to be the representatives of a dying rural
subcultxare. Chapters 14 and 15 ftirther illustrate the manifestations of a dying way of
life. The fact that campesinos no longer consider farming in the Cordillera as a viable
means of making a living, especially for their children, has resulted in massive
outmigration from the Cordillera into the cities or overseas. These two chapters also
explain the unusual demographic trend characterizing outmigration, the disproportionate
exit of girls and women, and the social consequences of this trend for the region. Chapter
16 summarizes the conclusions and broader implications of the study.
Notes
' Coifee, cacao and tobacco continued to be crops produced primarily by smallholding peasants during this period. Nevertheless, during the early 1900s larger-scale plantations also emerged for the planting of these crops (Cassa 1992; Baud 1995).
^ In the Dominican Republic as in other Spanish speaking countries, the majority of the inhabitants living around the parks and in rural areas in general are referred to generically as campesinos, literally people from the "campo" or rural areas. The term campesino in common usage simply refers to a "rural dweller" or a person who lives in the campo (countryside). Conceptual confusion has been created, both in English and in Spanish academic works, by confounding the word "campesino" with the concept of "peasant" as it has been defined and used within academic circles.
^ The American Heritage dictionary defines a peasant as "a member of a rural class," that includes
"agricultural workers, tenant farmers and laborers." But it also defines them as, "a country p)erscHi, rustics"
and more to the point as, "uncouth, crude, or ill-bred. . . boor."
As Sidney Mintz stated: "we cannot really understand the origins or nature of peasant adaptations in the Antilles by studying them in vacuo. Each such mode of adjustment began as—^and remained—a means of
1 22
style was a response" (Mintz . the peasant coping with existing economic conditions. . to which 1989[1974]:134).
^ of rural development and A historical and political economy approach emphasizes the changing patterns they represent a simple the fact that so-called 'peasant' adaptations are not static conditions nor do that rural evolutionary stage between tribal and modem societies. Rather, recent studies have emphasized conditions and people may adopt or abandon a 'peasant type' of adaptation in response to changing market time (see Roseberry the changing role and influence of the State in particular regions at different periods of the market and their 1991; San Miguel 1999:59). In other words, rural people adjust their involvement in and social patterns of labor mobilization, among other things, in response to changing political, economic configurations.
between * The distinction, although perhaps overly pedantic for the present treatise, should also be made are peasants and peasant households. A person could be a member of a peasant household, in that they making financial contributions to the household and are considered among the proprietors of the homestead, but themselves not dependent on the household and therefore arguably not a 'peasant'. What household members who comes to mind is the hundreds of thousands if not millions of Caribbean peasant but have migrated over the last 100 or more years and continued to remit money to the household have decades, or sometimes ever. been fiilly involved in modem industrial economies, not returning for years, Another problem in discussing peasants versus peasant households is that the household engages in multiple subsistence strategies and participates in multiple economies, but the members of the household degrees are often specialists. And indeed, Caribbean peasant societies tend to be characterized by extreme of internal specialization. For instance, the woman of a Haitian or Jamaican household might specialize in marketing a particular commodity, such a chickens. A man might be strictly a farmer or a fisherman. Or, most commonly, he might be a craftsman partially dependent farming. Again the point is probably overly zealous, but it brings up the notion that perhaps a better use of the individuals. term peasant is in describing productive systems, economic and political relationships and not
' The purpose of this discussion is to discuss characteristics of groups labeled as peasantries in the Caribbean and not to provide an in-depth comparison of the evolution of the Caribbean peasantry with so- called peasants outside of the Caribbean. However, it is important to point out, first of all, that there are groups on the Latin American mainland that evolved peasant adaptations similar to those described for the Caribbean, especially colonists of frontier areas. Second, there are so many differences in the evolution of the Caribbean in comparison to the so-called 'traditional' peasantries on the Latin American that the use of the concept of 'peasant' for both of these groups is confusing (for example, I have read more than one article in Spanish that refers to the 'natural economies' of the Dominican peasants). For example, the groups that constitute the 'traditional' Latin American peasantry consist primarily of the ancestors of indigenous communities that predate the colonial period. On the other hand, Caribbean peasantries are very recent and Caribbean peasants are the ancestors of people that came from some other place in the world. Furthermore, wiiereas the Caribbean peasantry formed on the margins of State control, the formation of the traditional Latin American "peasantries" often involved the encroachment of the colonial State upon the "natural economies" of preexisting indigenous groups in order to extract surplus production and labor essentially in the form of fribute. Another important difference involves the relationship of the farmers to the land. The Latin American indigenous peasant groups tend to be linked to traditional plots of land to which they have long established historical ties and which they manage through locally developed social institutions. On the other hand, most Caribbean peasant groups tend to be highly mobile with few deeply rooted attachments to a particular plot of land. The traditional or indigenous peasant groups of Latin America also displayed closed communities and longstanding institutions that form the basis of a corporate type of social organization. On the other hand, the basis of social organization for the majority of peasant type groups in the Caribbean is the nuclear and extended family, and there are few local institutions that serve to coordinate the behavior of groups not linked through consanguineal or fictive kinship ties. In this sense, the Caribbean peasants live in "open communities" that are characteristic of groups that interact
frequently with outside markets (Wolf 200 1 [1955]).
' The peasant adaptation occurred along the margins of or within gaps in State control and the strategy permitted maintaining a degree of autonomy from the State and economic elites. It represented an assertion 23
the by these groups of their control over their time and the labor of their household. Furthermore, consolidation and disintegration of State control over rural peoples and geographic areas in the Caribbean regions. In displays uneven characteristics depending on the historical evolution of different islands and adaptation islands with developed sugar industries based on slave labor, Sidney Mintz describes the peasant plantation. .a response to the as a response to plantation slavery. It was the "antithesis to the . mode of plantation system and its connotations, and a mode ofresistance to imposed styles of life" (Mintz 1989[1974]: 132-33). The abolition of slavery weakened the control of the State and the planters over the previous slave populations and provided the primary impetus for the formation of the peasantry in colonies with well- developed plantation economies. In Jamaica, Trinidad and British Guiana, for example, Emancipation "remov[ed] that legal authority that had enabled a small minority to exercise virtually arbitrary power over the activities and even lives of the large majority" and ex-slaves anxiously sought lands that would provide them with the basis to retain a certain amount of freedom vis-a-vis the plantations (Marshall State control proved much more drastic and 1 996a[ 1 968] : 1 2). On the other hand, in Haiti the breakdown of complete as a result of 13 years of bloody revolution that essentially turned "one of the most prosperous plantation economies in the New World into a republic of peasant proprietors" (LaCerte 1996[N.d.]:42). Spanish Santo Domingo was characterized by the relatively weak presence of the State throughout the colonial period, although this was even further exacerbated when the consequences of the Haitian revolution crossed into the neighboring Spanish colony. The various states in the different Caribbean islands had strong material rationales for reasserting control over independent peasants. For example, with the demise of the indigenous population of the islands early in the colonial period, one of the enduring problems faced by the State in the Caribbean involved acquiring cheap labor to produce export crops. This was addressed early on by importing a slave labor force from Africa. With the abolition of slavery, however, once again "the planters' dilemma would turn on how to secure an adequate labor supply at a cost that they deemed affordable within the parameters imposed by deteriorating market conditions" (Scarano 1989). In the case of the Dominican Republic, peasants used resources in marginal areas that would later become coveted by economic and political elites and also represented 'uncaptured' labor for plantations, regional sfrongmen and State development strategies that emerged at the end of the 19* century. In Haiti, peasant subsistence production provided few revenues for State coffers relative to the plantations (Lundhal 1996[N.d.]). For that reason, measures were taken to reassert State confrol over peasant labor, land and production throughout the Caribbean. These efforts became manifest in different forms and had different degrees of success on hindering or fomenting peasant formation in the different islands. Immediately after the abolition of slavery in the British and French West Indies, for example, the British government supported the planters in their attempts to introduce coercive measures to force ex-slaves to continue working on plantations at low wages, something that hinged on preventing the expansion of a peasantry of independent small holding farmers. Coercive measures used in the British West Indies included adopting strict legislation to prohibit settling on Crown lands and provision grounds (Marshall 1996b[1968]); the passage of vagrancy legislation and land taxation schemes (BoUand 1996[1981]). In the French colonies of Martinique and Guadalupe, the State levied taxes on lands not dedicatai to export crops (sugar and coffee) to confrol peasant production; created an artificial need for cash through the levying of personal and road taxes to induce peasants off of the 'provision grounds' and into salaried plantation work; and adopted a 'pass system' that required blacks to engage in paid labor or be declared vagrants (Renard 1996). Both during and after the Haitian revolution, the new ruling classes desperately attempted to revive the plantation economy by taking measures to put the ex-slaves back to work on the plantations. For example, Toussaint L'Ouverture prohibited the purchase of small amounts of land, ordered all agricultural workers to return to their plantations and created a rural police force to frack down the non-compliant (Lundahl 1996[N.d.]; LaCerte 1996[N.d.]). His successors Dessalines and then Christophe continued to brutally enforce labor codes (Heinl and Heinl 1978). But by the early 1820s the peasantry had won out over the
Haitian State and Boyer's Rural Code of 1 826~implementing sfrict vagrancy laws, attempting to tie the rural labor force to plantations, and obligating rural farmers to pay a percentage of their agricultural production as a tax to the state—constituted a last ditch effort and largely unsuccessful effort to secure state confrol over the Haitian's labor and surplus (Machfri 1973:27). The Rural Codes were largely ignored. 24
' In fact, as will be discussed in later chapters, the establishment of the sugar plantations in the eastern region of the country in the late 19th century in the Dominican Republic contributed to the decline of the peasantry that had preceded the plantations in the region.
'° The Nature Conservancy funded the fieldwork for this phase of the research under the auspices of conducting a so-called "Human Ecological Assessment" of both Rancier and Bermiidez National Parks. The field research itself was carried-out independently and did not include participation in any kind of conservation or development intervention in the rural areas. In exchange for coordinating the activities of a small research team and providing the Nature Conservancy with an assessment of the human context of the parks, I was allowed to keep the database and to use the fiinds and time to also gather data of interest for my doctoral dissertation.
" This follow-up phase of the research was conducted with funding from WIDTECR
The household head or spouse was the required respondent. A household was defined as a building in which people sleep. The criteria used to define household members were those people who sleep in the house more than elsewhere. For the Bermiidez survey, initial rapid censuses of the hamlets were conducted. All households were numbered and a random numbers table was used to select those that would be approached to participate in the survey.
" Following is more specific detail regarding other methods that were used in the research: Focus groups. Eight small single-sex and mixed-sex focus groups were conducted. Seven to ten individuals participated in each focus group. Four focus groups were conducted in Los Postes and four in Las Papas. The goal was to understand perceptions of each group regarding changes in gender roles, changes in the community over time, changes in labor requirements and technology use and environmental awareness of the different groups. Participatory mapping was used with groups of men and women within the application of focus groups to obtain an understanding of current and historical resource use patterns. Gendered resource-use mapping. These were used to generate information regarding gender-specific land tenure and resource use. Mapping was used at both the household and community level to illicit discussion regarding types and differential patterns of resource use by gender. Sibling questionnaires. Thirty-four household heads bom in Los Postes were asked for the location of siblings and, for those siblings who were no longer in the area, the date the sibling had left. The objective was to capture an image of past migration and fertility levels. Other information collected included the age of siblings, education level, and for women, number of children bom and the sex of those children. Fertility questionnaires. To capture an image of current fertility levels by sex, all women in 194 households were asked how many children they had borne—this included all 86 primary women in the households in Los Postes and two nearby hamlets as well as a sample of 108 women in Las Papas. Technoi(^ use surveys. Two hundred and fourteen households in Los Postes and Las Papas were surveyed to obtain data on the labor saving devices present in the community. CHAPTER 2 GEOGRAPHY, PARKS, AND RESEARCH SITES OF THE CORDILLERA CENTRAL
Introduction
This chapter presents a brief description of the geography of the Cordillera
Central and an overview of the parks in the region. It also identifies the two case study hamlets chosen for in-depth anthropological research and discusses the historical origins of the population of the Cordillera hinterlands.
Geography of the Cordillera
Although popular images of the Dominican Republic are dominated by palm trees and tropical beaches, 80% of the country is mountainous. Beginning in the west, close to the Haitian-Dominican border, three principal ranges, the Cordillera Septentrional, the
Cordillera Central and the Sierra de Neiba, run parallel to one another in a southeasterly direction, dividing the country into a series of long valleys.' The central and most
important of these mountain ranges is the Cordillera Central (commonly referred to as
Cordillera). The Cordillera constitutes the geographical spine of the island of Hispaniola
(Zanoni 1993). Beginning in Haiti—where it is knovra as the Massif du Nord—^the
Cordillera extends 550 kilometers southeast, terminating in the municipality of San
Cristobal, just west of the Dominican capital of Santo Domingo. Averaging 80 kilometers wide, the range covers approximately one-third of Dominican national territory.
Contained within are the four highest peaks in the West Indies: Pico Duarte (3,175m),
25 26
La Pelona (3,087m), La Rucilla (3,049m) and Pico Yaque (2,760m) and more than 15 other mountains with heights of greater than 2,000 meters.
The majority of the Cordillera is dominated by hills. Fertile highland plains and valleys provided the ecological base for the establishment of larger agricultural villages and towns, the most important of which are Constanza, Jarabacoa and Tireo, located within the extensive intermountain valleys of the Cordillera. The important subregion of the Cordillera known as La Sierra extends along the northwestern slopes of the
Cordillera, to the west of the Jarabacoa region, and includes three municipalities: Janico,
San Jose de las Matas, and Moncion. The Cordillera also contains innumerable smaller highland savanna areas and river valleys that initially provided the basis for the establishment of small agricultural settlements deep in the interior of the range.
The climate of the Cordillera highlands is cool and temperate, distinct from the hot, tropical lowlands. During the winter months (January and February) temperatures in the highest areas approach zero degrees Celsius and temperatures as low as four below
Celsius have been recorded. In the municipality of Constanza, at approximately 1200
meters above sea level, the average temperature is 1 8 degrees Celsius, with summer highs averaging between 19-20 degrees Celsius (OEA 1967).
Research Area
There are currently five areas in the Cordillera under legally protected status.^
The Armando Bermiidez and Juan Perez Rancier National Parks are the two most important of these protected areas, covering approximately 25% of the Dominican
portion of the mountain range, and it is in the surroundings of these parks that the research was carried out (these two parks will hereafter be referred to respectively as
Bermiidez and Rancier). 27
The two parks constitute an almost contiguous expanse of land in the heart of the mountain range. Beginning with Rancier in the east, the westernmost hmits of Bermudez extend almost to the Haitian border. Rancier belongs to the municipality of Constanza to
the north. Its southern slopes include the municipalities of San Jose de Ocoa and Padre las Casas. Bermudez begins slightly to the west of Rancier, and extends from the municipality of Jarabacoa in the east, along the southern boundaries of the Sierra, to the west, near the Haitian border. The southern limits of Bermudez meet the northern limits of Jose del Carmen Ramirez Park in the heart of the Cordillera, and except for a spur in the extreme west, Bermudez remains unpopulated along its southem limits.
Effectively, then, the research area stretches across the remote northern slopes of the Cordillera, an area that has traditionally constituted the hinterlands of the larger
Cordillera towns and cities and remains among the last refuges of the traditional
Dominican campesinado, the small farmer groups that once constituted the backbone of
the Dominican economy. Visits and surveys were carried out in many of the hamlets
located along the borders of these parks, but two hamlets also were selected for longer
fieldwork. These hamlets have been identified in the study by the pseudonyms Los
Postes and Las Papas. Los Postes is located in the northwestern highlands of the
Cordillera, in a region commonly referred to as La Sierra. At the time of the last field
visits in 2001 the hamlet had 70 households. Las Papas is located farther east, in a region
of the Cordillera close to the important agricultural valley of Constanza. In 2001 this
hamlet had 119 households distributed over a broad area close to or just over the northern
boundaries of Rancier National Park. The history and contemporary condition found in
these communities reveals the breadth of changes in the economy, demographic patterns,
and subsistence strategies that have taken place in the Cordilleran hinterlands.^ 28
Legend
Figure 2-1. Research Study Area
General Characteristics of Highland Settlements in the Study Region
Los Postes and Las Papas are both parajes (hamlets), smaller units of much larger administrative units called secciones. Secciones primarily serve an administrative
function. There is an alcalde pedaneo, a kind of rural Justice of the Peace, who oversees the whole seccion. Each paraje also has a segundo alcalde, a deputy that reports to the alcalde pedaneo of the seccion. However, secciones and parajes are not strongly unified communities in a corporate sense. Neither parajes nor secciones have local governments or other institutions that require the families of a given paraje or seccion to coordinate their activities in a special way with other families of the same administrative unit.
Los Postes and Las Papas display characteristics that are similar to other hamlets that are widely scattered throughout the highlands. The typical paraje in the remote highlands consist of settlements that contain anywhere between 10 and 120 households. 29
These hamlets are among the most remote in the Dominican Republic, only accessible by
traversing often steep and rough mountain roads in a 4 x 4 vehicle or, in some cases, on
mule or by foot. The network of unpaved access roads were originally built by the
lumber companies in the 1930s- 1960s, and every couple of years, generally close to
election time, the government will pass a bulldozer through to level the roads, which once
again are quickly eroded and gullied by rain, wind, and the passage of animals and
vehicles.
Figure 2-2. Approximate location of Los Postes and Las Papas
The populations in the hamlets beyond the reach of access roads are reminiscent of the past when a semi-dispersed settlement pattern predominated in the highlands, an adaptation to the rugged mountain terrain in which locating flat areas for the construction of houses was difficult and the irregular topography made regular travel to a distant farm plot exceedingly tedious (Murray 1970; Sharpe 1977). hidividual or small clusters of households are widely scattered amongst the mountains and coimected by a network of mountain trails. The houses are often surrounded by vegetation making them difficult to locate without the assistance of a guide familiar with the local paths and terrain.
In recent years, however, the campesinos have increasingly come out of the hills
to settle along the main access roads.'* The majority of hamlets therefore consist of strip settlements in which houses, stores, and other buildings extend along both sides of a principle access road or path. A few other houses as well as pasture and farmlands are scattered widely in the nearby hills. The only hamlets that have anything resembling town centers tend to be the primary hamlets of the secciones, like Los Postes, in which service, administrative and specialized economic functions are concentrated.^
Households
The average campesino household includes slightly over five members.^
Households consist primarily of male-headed, nuclear family units. Although it is common for regular interaction, such as food and labor exchanges, to take place with extended family members, the predominant ideal and reality in these rural farming
communities is the management of households as independent nuclear family units. Upon
entering into union, a new conjugal pair is expected to establish a house that is separate
fj-om the parental household. Patrilocal residence rules predominate, and although it is common for male children to build their homes close to his parental home, even on family property, a fence will fi-equently be built around the yard of the new home to establish a clear division between this new nuclear family and the parental home.
Table 2-1 breaks downs the different household configurations that existed in the
hamlet of Los Postes during the summer of 2001 . As the table indicates, extended
family households are relatively uncommon and it is especially rare for households to 31
include nonkinship-based members or more than one nonconsanguinially related conjugal couple.
Table 2-1 . Household configuration in Los Postes Configuration of household Number % Nuclear-family households (conjugal unit and offspring) 46 65.7 Extended-family households (conjugal unit, offspring and spouse 7 10.0 with children) Female-headed extended-family households (female head with 6 8.6 offspring and children of offspring) Female-headed households (female head with children) 6 8.6 Single male households 3 4.3
: Households with single males and children < 2 2.8 Nonextended multifamily household 1 1.4 Total 70 100.0
My park surveys show that males head 91% of households in the study area.^ The relatively small number of female-headed households in the study region contrasts rather dramatically with both the rural and urban patterns at a national level, in which the incidence of female-headed households has reportedly increased significantly over the last 20 years. For example, a major national demographic and health survey carried out in 1996 reported that 19.8% of rural families are female-headed as are 31.2% of families
in urban areas (CESDEM et al. 1 996).
Despite the establishment of a separate domestic unit, males who remain close to home generally retain strong ties to the paternal and extended family and maintain a collaborative economic relationship with their fathers. Gerald Murray (1970) observed that in his study hamlet of Pino Tumbao the predominant settlement pattern consisted of small clusters of households consisting largely of patrilaterally related tri-generational extended families. This kind of settlement pattern continues to be observed in the
highlands of the Cordillera, although the quantitative frequency of its occurrence has not
'° been established with any certainty in this study. Nevertheless, it is important to point out that collaboration at the level of the extended, patrilineal family continues to play an important role, both in agricultural labor, amongst women in the performance of other household tasks, and in other forms of economic exchange.
Social differentiation
Although for convenience sake this study often refers simply to the peasants or
campesinos as if they are a homogenous group, the population of the remote hinterlands
is not completely egalitarian. Economic differences in the Cordillera derive from unequal access to the land and capital and from the relative position of the individual vis-a-vis
State power brokers. International migration has played an important role in social differentiation and those families with relatives abroad that receive remittances also tend to be among the economically privileged in the highlands.
The campesinos often simply divide people into two categories~/o5 Chiquitos
(literally, the small ones or poor people) and los Grandes (literally the big ones or wealthier people)~although the population can be stratified into finer segments." On the one extreme are migrant Haitian and, to a lesser extent, migrant Dominican laborers.
These individuals possess neither homes nor land in the hamlets in which they work, and in the case of Haitians, are generally illegal immigrants. On the other extreme are large absentee landowners, virtual latifundists who live in towns or villages, control abundant
resources and labor and who enjoy the advantages of urban political and economic ties.
However, the majority of the households in the Cordillera Central (approximately 50%) are small farmers. This is the also the social group in the Cordillera that most closely conforms to an image of the 'typical' peasant. These households have access to small plots of land (between 1.5 and 13 acres), which they use primarily to produce a cash crop.
Production is carried out through family labor although the use of salaried labor has become increasingly common even amongst these groups. 33
House construction
The typical campesino bohio (house or hut) consists of a single story, two to three
room structure with walls constructed of hand-sawn planks of pine {Pinus occidentalis)
or manacla palm {Prestoea acuminata). The walls and trim of the exterior are almost
always painted in bright pastels— light blue, pink, red or orange, among others. The floors
of these structures are generally cement or earth and in both cases maintained vigorously
swept. The roofing materials, which traditionally consisted of hand made wooden
shingles or palm thatch, are now almost exclusively tin. Kitchens are typically built
separate from the house.
Unlike what has been reported for other areas of the Caribbean, Dominican houses rarely share a yard even when living next to a household of an extended family member (Mintz 1974). The yards are controlled by the women of the family and generally planted with a diversity of edible, medicinal, and decorative plants. The yard also serves for the raising of smaller yard animals, particularly chickens. Latrines are typically crude huts and are frequently shared among many households, hi recent years modem technology has been introduced and many households now have access to piped water, solar panels and other labor saving technologies.
As will be discussed in Chapter 14, over the last 35 years the Cordillera has been characterized by rapid outmigration into urban areas or international destinations.
Migration is reflected materially in the fact that many of the hamlets also display larger houses built of a more durable construction materials. These homes are generally those of the families of migrants with members who have sent or brought back capital earned abroad, hi some cases these homes are two story structures, and inevitably they are built of cement block with zinc or cement roofs. The larger houses are occasionally found in 34
surprising spots deep in the mountains, and some even sport satellite dishes—virtual
mansions in comparison to the humble neighboring bohios.
Services
Since the Trujillo era ( 1 930- 1 96 1 ), government investments have been
concentrated in larger villages and urban areas, and this is reflected in the quality of
infrastructure and services available within the remote study region. The inhabitants of
the local communities are required to access the majority of services in the closest nearby
regional centers. None of the hamlets surrounding the parks are connected to the national
power grid, but there is considerable use of solar panels especially in the communities on
the western side of Bermudez. This is a recent phenomenon, linked to a rural
electrification program sponsored by the European Union.
Approximately 50% of the hamlets in the study area have access to potable water
through aqueducts, generally consisting of PVC tubes that draw water from the streams
and rivers in the highlands of the parks. The residents of communities with these systems
emphasize the high quality of their potable water. Of all the hamlets visited in the
Cordillera during the research, only two have pay phones running on solar power.
Nevertheless, there are often at least one or two families in each community that have cell
phones that will ftinction from a nearby strategically chosen high point on the top of a
hill.
Rural clinics that offer basic health care are scarce in the hinterlands. Hospitals
that provide emergency services are only found in the towns, generally the mimicipal
centers, often a trip of two hours from any given hamlet by vehicle. A number of
secciones have health promoters trained by the State Health Ministry or by NGOs, but these frequently have limited skills and primarily work in vaccination or infant healthcare 35
campaigns. In the most remote hamlets, those located off of the main access roads,
emergency cases must be carried or transported on muleback to a community where there
is an access road, and from there driven by vehicle to the nearest community where a
health clinic or doctor can be found.
All of the hamlets in the study area have access to a public primary school. The
schoolhouse commonly doubles as a community center and even as a church. The
schools in the seccion seats generally offer up to the 8th grade. Obtaining a high school
level education requires either a grueling daily commute, studying through a weekend
program, or a move into a larger town.'^ The overall educational level of the population
remains low, especially amongst adults. The Bermudez survey showed that 28.4% of
household heads never attended school and 72% of household heads have an education
that does not go beyond the third grade, which is a point of reference that has been used
as an indicator of functional ilhteracy in the country (SEA 1984).'^ Despite the difficuhy
of obtaining an education and the low literacy level of people who remain in the
conmiunities, the campesinos in the region assign tremendous importance to educating
their children and they make special efforts to this end (chapter 15).
Markets and other economic infrastructure
In contrast to other rural areas of the Caribbean where open-air markets play the
primary role in the distribution of goods and foodstuffs, in the Dominican Republic this
function is dominated by the colmados, small general stores (Murray 1996). Inevitably,
one or more colmados of varying sizes can be found even in the smallest of hamlets. In
Los Postes, for example, which only has 70 households, there are 5 cohnados.
The colmados serve a dual social function in the Cordillera. The first fimction is that of selling basic foodstuffs such as rice, vegetable oil, and salami as well as a variable range of other merchandise (machetes, batteries and flashHghts, pens and pencils). Foods
can be purchased in minuscule quantities and colmado owners will sell goods fiado (on
credit) to trusted customers. Also important, however, is the social function colmados
play as a social gathering place. Colmados are well stocked with liquor, and men gather
within and in front of these establishments to play dominoes, to drink rum, beer and
whiskey and to listen to music. Women, particularly young single women, are strongly
discouraged from visiting colmados, even to make a simple purchase.
Other economic infrastructure tends to be concentrated in the seccion seats.
These include warehouses for the storage of produce; small distributorships of fertilizers,
herbicides and pesticides; and cooperatives. In some of the areas where coffee is
produced there are electric coffee mills run with diesel generators that have replaced the
labor-intensive hand cranked mills previously used in the region.
activities Social ,
As described above, the colmado is a common gathering point for men to drink,
play dominos and listen to music, especially on weekends. Other social gathering points
include the galleras (cockfight arenas). Indeed, cockfights are a national passion, and
many men dedicate considerable effort towards training and pampering fighting roosters.
Some of the smaller hamlets have makeshift galleras, which are technically illegal, or the
men travel to the nearest larger hamlet where a legally registered gallera is located.
Some hamlets have a community center where farmer, women's and youth organizations meet. In lieu of a community center, the schoolhouse may be used for social fiinctions. Sunday mornings are dedicated to church services. The majority of the population is Catholic although Evangelical churches have also begun to make inroads in many of the remote areas of the Cordillera. The most important social activities are the 37
Fiestas Patronales (Patron Saint Feasts) that take place during a week each year. During
Christmas season, many relatives return from the larger towns or from abroad to celebrate the holidays with their families in the countryside.
The Parks
The initial purpose of this dissertation was to achieve an understanding of peasant adaptation to park formation in the Dominican Republic. The communities studied all exist in close proximity to Rancier or Bermudez National Parks. Many of the changes
that have occurred in campesino life in the Cordillera have occurred elsewhere as well, in
areas farther from parks. That is, not all social changes in the Cordillera are due to the parks. Nonetheless, despite the fact that the creation of parks alone has not been the only causal force determining changes in peasant lifeways, they have been an ongoing and important presence that affects the lives of the inhabitants of the study region.
The parks protect unique natural species and are perhaps best known for their forests of Pinus occidentalis, a variety of pine endemic to the island of Hispaniola. The parks also provide important habitat both for endemic as well as migratory bird species.
However, the strategic economic significance of the parks at a national level rests in the fact that they protect the watersheds of the country's major river systems including the
Yaque del Norte and Yaque del Sur, Bao, Yuna, Nizao, Las Cuevas, Grande, Tireo,
Blanco, and the Ocoa. These rivers provide fresh water for the approximately 2.2 million inhabitants of the capital city, Santo Domingo, the estimated 800,000 residents of
Santiago and for the inhabitants of other low lying areas in the RepubUc. The water originating in the parks is also critical for the maintenance of low land irrigation systems and for the operation of ten hydroelectric dams. For thes^ reasons, the area of the 38
Cordillera encompassed by the parks has long been identified as a critical conservation
zone (Hartshorn et al. 1981; OAS 1967).
The lands and resources within the parks areas were also long exploited for other, narrower economic ends. Bermiidez, for example, is located to the immediate south of the hamlet of Los Postes. From a high point, the park appears like a vast expanse of green mountains stretching south as far as the eye can see. It is a Caribbean vista dominated by pine forests that seem more suited to the Swiss Alps or northern California.
From this perspective, high up in the park, an alert observer would notice uneven patches in the vegetation and small clearings in the park, evidence of past human activity.
Different groups have long used the lands and park resources. Archeological remains
attest to the presence during antiquity of Taino Indians; during the earliest days of
colonialism small bands of Spanish conquistadors established gold mines here; in the late
19* and early 20* centuries, the mountains provided the basis for a vibrant livestock and
agricultural based peasant economy; and in the middle part of the past century, sawmills
reached some of the most remote points of the Cordillera. It has only been since the early
1980s that prohibitions against agricultural and lumbering activities in Bermiidez have
been strictly enforced. Today Bermiidez National Park is relatively quiet and nature has
all but completely reclaimed the area, although some clandestine farming, grazing, and poaching continue.
In contrast, the areas within and surrounding Rancier National Park were
historically much less populated and much less intensively exploited. But recent activity
is markedly more apparent. Approaching the park from the north, one sees deforested hillsides coursed over with the washboard like undulating ridges characteristic of cattle overgrazing. Along the park boundaries, recently cleared mountain slopes are covered with neat rows of potatoes, cabbage and onions, non-traditional short-cycle crops planted for the urban market. Littering the fields are empty bags of chemical pesticides and
fertilizers. In some areas bulldozers and front-end loaders have recontoured entire hillsides. In other places mountain slopes have eroded away into sheer drop-offs. Eight- inch irrigation pipes extend up the hillsides into the park highlands effectively draining
off water miles before it reaches the park boundaries.
Crossing over into the park, winding up old logging roads and into the heart of the
preserve, 1 800 meters above sea level, the landscape becomes reminiscent of an alpine
valley. The visitor is in Valle Nuevo (the New Valley), the nucleus of the Rancier
National Park. Open areas are interspersed with impressive stands of occidentalis pine, extensions of abandoned pasture and flat grassy savannas. Burnt tree stumps attest to a history of forest fires in the area. Stunted stands of pine of the Honduran variety {Pinus caribbea) evince a failed attempt to reforest with an imsuited exotic species.
Origins of the Peasants of the Cordillera Hinterlands
The larger towns in the Cordillera such as Janico and San Jose de las Matas trace their origins back as far as 1605, when they were first settled by colonists displaced from the Northwest and North Central parts of the colony during the so called devastaciones, evacuations ordered by the Spanish monarchs who sought, unsuccessfiilly, to consolidate control over the colonists by concentrating them in the eastern portion of the island
(Estevez 2001). But throughout the colonial period the Cordillera and especially the lands deep in the heart of the mountains remained all but abandoned. These remote areas were the domains of semi-nomadic feral pig hunters known as monteros (mountaineers), lonely and now folkloric figures who based their livelihoods on himting feral pigs and cattle in the dense Cordillera forests (Antonini 1973; Bono 1968[1848]). Other lands in 40
the Cordillera became vast cattle ranches called hatos, operations that required little labor, often operated by the owner with his family members and a few slaves (Silie
1997).
The more significant population movements into the interior of the Cordillera began after the 1844 independence from Haiti, which was a time of great national political turmoil. The mid- 19"^ century was marked by frequent Haitian invasions as well as recurrent internal clashes between regional caudillos (strongmen) seeking to maintain
independence from central government control. The ongoing political turmoil and the constant campaigns by the caudillos to forcibly recruit soldiers into the local armies during the period drove many peasants to hide out in the remote mountainous areas of the country (Murray 1970). Similarly in the mid- 1860s farmers from the cenfral Cibao Valley migrated to the mountains to take refiige from the political turmoil caused by the War of
Restoration, a guerilla-style war waged to reverse the reannexation of the new republic to
Spain (Hoetink 1982:174). After the war, permanent settlements sprang up along the routes used by the immigrants (Georges 1990:49).
In addition to the efforts of peasants to evade the State, the second major cause of population expansion into the mountains of the Cordillera was the increasing scarcity of available agricultural and grazing land in the lowlands and in the more populated northern slopes of the Cordillera where the principal towns were located. This process began perhaps as early as the last quarter of the 19"^ century and endured through much of the 20"^ century. In essence, the agricultural frontier progressively expanded into the mountains. This trend was reinforced by the semi-nomadic character of peasant agriculture that required continual access to fresh lands and open areas for farming and the grazing of animals. Origins of the Population in the Study Region
At the beginning of the 20"" century, the population of the Cordillera remained concentrated largely around these primary towns such as San Jose de las Matas, Janico,
El Rubio, and Moncion that, at the time, were small and humble agricultural settlements and rudimentary marketing centers linked to the city of Santiago via mule paths. The emergence of a nascent lumber industry during the first decades of the century stimulated economic growth and diversification in the Cordillera. Accompanied by population growth, this provided an early impetus for the movement of farmers into the remote interior highlands to the south of the villages. Little State presence existed in these remote areas and farmers could either purchase shares of a communal landholding fi-om the ancestors of hatero (colonial ranching) families or settle on state lands without any impediment. Early farmers sought to settle on or near productive flatter lands where water was readily accessible—along river valleys, small highland plateaus or mountain savanna areas. Small settlements consisting primarily of households linked by extended family ties thus became distributed in a widely scattered fashion throughout the highlands.
The current populations of mountain hamlets such as Los Postes trace their origins back to these same pioneering families that were part of this migrant stream to the
Cordillera hinterlands early in the 20"^ century. By the 1920s if not somewhat earlier, small settlements had been established in the areas around and within the lands currently encompassing Bermiidez National Park.'"* These hinterland families produced much of their own food but also sold foodstuffs, cattle and other resources in the larger villages where it was either consumed by villagers or sold to intermediaries who transported the produce to markets in larger urban centers (San Miguel 1997:87). ' ' 42
The population of Las Papas and other hamlets along the northern limits of
Rancier National Park is of more recent origin than the population of Los Postes.
Other than old man Robles, a renegade rancher who established himself in the heart of
Valle Nuevo in 1905 in a savanna that now bears his name (Sabana de los Robles) the area remained virtually unpopulated until the arrival of three founding families in the early 1940s.'^ As in the case of the Sierra, these early migrants arrived from the north, a hamlet in the foothills of the Cordillera close to the town of La Vega. This occurred just before a number of lumber mills were established in the region.
For reasons that will be explained in subsequent chapters, the lumber mills were
able to control access to what are currently parklands and restrict extensive expansion of peasant agriculture into the region. Besides workers that lived in the lumber camps,
informants recall only 13 households whose heads were full-time farmers in the area.
After the closing of the mills in 1967, a small number of migrant farming families
occupied the work camp buildings abandoned by the lumber company that was located in the heart of Las Papas. Furthermore, two former company workers decided to remain
in the area and began to farm. By 1981, the population of the Las Papas consisted of 42 households. Unlike Los Postes, however, the in the last 20 years the population of Las
Papas has been bolstered by a recent influx of migrants from the south. This process was tied to the expansion of intensive vegetable farming from the Constanza valley into
the fertile lands within and surrounding the park region, and is an important phenomenon
that will be explained in much greater detail in later chapters.
Conclusion
The purpose of this chapter was to provide an overview of the research area including a description of the geographic characteristics of the Cordillera, of the study 43
area and of the parks. The populations surrounding the parks have a relatively recent origin. The early settlers of the Cordillera moved from the lowlands into the hills to
escape the violence and insecurity that predominated in the lowlands in the latter part of the 19"" century. Their progeny continued the move north, further into the heart of the
Cordillera in search of lands and established the early families and settlements that were the precursors to the current population of the Cordillera.
As will be discussed in the next chapter, elderly campesinos speak of the past with a great deal of nostalgia. They recall a time of prosperity that was based on the unimpeded access to the forest resources and vast open lands of the Cordillera. As this dissertation will show, however, this time of prosperity was relatively short lived.
Unimpeded access to resources would be increasingly restricted as political and economic elites supported by the State took increasing interest in using the resources of the Cordillera for other purposes.
Notes
' The most important and extensive of the valleys is the Cibao, the country's agricultural heartland, which lies between the Cordillera Central and the Cordillera Septentrional that separates the Cibao from the Atlantic Ocean.
^ At the time of research, these consisted of the following protected areas: Nalga de Maco National Park; Armando Bermiidez National Park; Jose del Carmen Ramirez National Park; Juan B. Perez Rancier National Park; and the Ebano Verde Scientific Reserve.
' I use the term community at times out of convenience to refer to a paraje or seccion, although as Murray (1970) points out the paraje and seccion refer to political administrative boundaries and not necessarily an important fiinctional unit. That is, there are few institutional links at the local level that tie together members of individual households. Dominican peasants tend to organize around, first of all, the household unit and secondly aroimd extended families. They work together when necessary, such as in reciprocal labor groups. They do, however, tend to represent themselves as a unified community before outsiders (Baud 1995:95). Community sentiment may have increased in recent decades as the State sponsored the formation of hamlet-level farmer, women's and youth organizations and as a result of the fact that hamlets have had to present themselves as unified fronts vis-a-vis outside groups such as NGOs and other development organizations.
" During fieldwork in 1999, for example, campesinos in one of the larger hamlets in the study region were lobbying local officials to move both the church and the schoolhouse, due to the fact that both were located in a high point in the hamlet approximately one kilometer off of the main access road. They stated that in the past, these buildings were built in what was essentially the center of the community. With the 44
movement of the population down to the main access road that has occurred in recent years, and the abandonment of the higher areas, both of these building are now located in marginal areas in the hamlet, requiring a tedious uphill walk up a very steep (and often muddy) path to be reached.
* In Los Postes, for example, there is an area where the road along which the village extends widens broadly. This open area along the road is surrounded by a schoolhouse, a warehouse, a cooperative, a colmado (general store), a Catholic Church and a community center. The house of the alcalde is also located near to this area. This center is not, however, the result of plaruied community scheme. On the other hand, the smaller hamlets of the seccion do not have anything resembling a defmable "center".
* The exact averages are 5.16 people per household, in the case of the Bermiidez survey, and 4.23 in the case of the Rancier survey. The lower number of average household members found in the Rancier survey can be explained by the fact that, when the survey was carried out in the northern part of the park, a work stoppage had just been lifted. Many household members had left in order to seek economic opportunities outside of the commimity.
' This pattem clearly existed in Los Postes. On the other hand, in Las Papas, houses were not divided using fences but this can be explained primarily due to the fact that these hamlets were originally established as labor camps in which the old workers quarters, which continue to be occupied by campesino families, as well as individual houses, were clustered very closely together.
* This is a snapshot at the time of research. However, household configurations frequently vary at different points in time due to the changing circumstances of its members. For exanple, households may become extended for periods as male children bring their new brides into the parental home while working to build an independent house and, during this time, bearing children. Furthermore, many studies have attested to the important impact that migration has on household configuration. There are households in the study communities in which the absence of adult males is the result of international migration ventures, often illegal, which involve extended absences from not only the home community but also the coimtry. In these cases, the household configuration provides the appearance of a female-headed unit, although in reality the nuclear family persists despite the extended absence of one of the conjugal pair. During times of economic hardship, adult females may leave the household temporarily for the city to work as in domestic service or in the duty free zone, leaving behind her husband and children for a period. It many areas of the Cordillera it has become increasingly common for the families to establish two households. One home is located in the nearest major town and occupied by the wife and children, who can then attend high school. The other household is located in the rural community and occupied by the father and his male children who work the family farm. In these cases, the family continues to function as a "non-localized" nuclear unit although the members of the family are distributed amongst more than one household (see Solien 1972).
' The definition used here of female-headed households is the same as that used by the World Bank (N.d.).
The are those households in which the husband is not present either because the head has never been married, or is widowed or divorced, or because the husband is not present in the household and the female has become the main decision-maker in his absence.
It is likely, however, that out-migration both from the most remote hills as well as in the cities has also begun to change these settlement pattems somewhat.
" In general terms, one way the groups can be categorized is in the following manner: a) migrant workers; b) landless agricultural workers; c) small farmers; e) medium farmers; f) latiftmdists or large landowners and g) businessmen. Migrant workers. Migrant workers, predominantly males, are a constant presence in the hamlets surrounding both national parks,. At any given time and place the number of these workers varies with seasonal labor demands. In the past, the laborers were primarily Dominican, but the presence of Haitian migrant laborers has increased over the last 15-20 years from essentially none to being more prominent than Dominican workers.
The presence of Dominican migrant workers is uncommon in the Westem Cordillera although in the large potato farms and onions fields surrounding Constanza and the northern boundaries of Rancier 45
National Park it is common to find Dominicans working alongside Haitian laborers. Indeed Dominican migrant laborers in this region appear to considerably outnumber Haitians. These workers come primarily from the dry provinces along the southern side of the Cordillera Central (Peravia and Azua). Landless Local Laborers. There are permanent residents in the highlands who report possessing insufficient land to maintain a household using traditional peasant farming strategies or monocropping strategies. These individuals are, for all practical purposes, landless, typically possessing a small fundo (house plot) and less than an acre of productive land elsewhere. Individuals who do not possess sufficient quantities of land must find other means to earn an income.
Permanent employ is usually not an option. There is a scarcity of fulltime jobs in the remote Cordillera. The few that exist include administrator or capataz of the farm of an absentee landowner; a government job such as that of park guard, forester or alcalde. There are also a few opportunities for chauffeurs, tourist guides (these are basically concentrated in two communities surrounding Bermiidez), carpenters; and some individuals who work in bodegas or colmados or perform other odd jobs. But in general employment opportunities are scarce and a majority of landless individuals must resort almost exclusively to trabajando alquilado, literally, renting oneself for wages as day laborers in agricultural jobs (land preparation, weeding, the fixing offences, the spreading of fertilizers, and the harvesting of coffee or other crops). Small Farmers. Small farmers constitute the majority of the households in the Cordillera Central (approximately 50%). These households have access to small plots of land (between 1.5 and 13 acres)
which they use to produce a cash crop. Production is carried out through the use of family labor with the occasional use of salaried labor (see below). Many small farmers report depending primarily on farming their lands for their household income, although as will be discussed in other chapters, the majority use diverse strategies to obtain an income. Medium Farmers. One can distinguish between small and medium sized farmers by the fact that the
medium farmer: 1) controls more productive land (generally over 50 hectares); 2) has greater access to capital, either through savings or because they are able to obtain loans which allow them to make investments that improve the productivity of their lands such as in irrigation systems; 3) depends primarily on the use of salaried labor for production. Medium farmers also may play other important roles in the
community such as: intermediary, colmado owner, lender, and a renter of animals or houses. It is common also that medium farmers hold local leadership positions as well as official positions such as that of alcalde. Many medium farmers are involved in patron/client relationships with the small farmers and worker groups. In Los Postes, for example, an elderly farmer named Rafael Gutierrez for years has served as an intermediario (middleman) and as a link between the smaller farmers and the broader urban economy in other ways. Rafael's family became prominent in Los Postes during the period of Rafael Trujillo. According to locals, Rafael's father, Epiphanio, was from one of the founding families of the community and made his early fortune through farming and panning for gold. Epiphanio entered into business as a middleman, buying and transporting coffee, beans and livestock using mule trains to the to the major local marketing centers.
Rafael maintained his father's business and expanded upon his father's fortune. Rafael continued to accumulate landholdings in Los Postes and nearby hamlets, obtaining key properties, in the words of local informants, by wheedling and coaxing small farmers to sell him lands that he was interested in. Rafael also continued to work as an intermediario (middleman), and would provide credit to the small farmers that he obtained through personal bank loans or fi-om larger coffee middlemen. Due to Rafael's political connections and financial ability to bribe foresters and park guards, he is one of the few farmers in Los
Postes who openly maintains a coffee plantation as well as animals within the limits of the park. Rafael is also involved in the trade of posts that are taken as contraband out of the park area, and he enqjloys, on an opportunistic basis, numerous local campesinos in this endeavor. Large landowners or latifundinstas. The large landovraers most often maintain their primary residences in nearby villages, more distant municipal centers or, at times, in Santiago or Santo Domingo where they have political ties and economic enterprises. Most often they obtained their land through inheritance and the largest properties tend to be owned by families who acquired the land as lumber concessions during the Trujillo period. The lands are typically maintained as vast cattle pasture. There are also owners of large coffee plantations who have expanded their holdings little by little through accumulated purchases over a period of 20 years or more. The large landowners depend exclusively on hired labor and have considerable access to capital and credit. The properties are run by an administi-ator or boss {capataz). Like the medium farmers, many large landowners establish patron/client relationships with small local farmers, operating as middlemen as well as employers. 46
Businessmen and Intermediaries. Fully 1 1% of families in the surveys reported operating some land of business. The majority of these households (65%) report these businesses as a secondary source of
family income. The business activity is typically limited to running colmados (small grocery stores) or purchasing operations. Some of the larger colmado owners and middle farmers act as local middlemen, purchasing coffee and odier crops and at times lumber or posts for resale to urban based purchasing agents. Often an individual will engage simultaneously in multiple activities. As in the case of Rafael mentioned above, he is resented by some, feared by others, but also respected by many in Los Postes. He has been able to maintain a position of respect through reciprocity. As one farmer in Los Postes describes it:
Sometimes he would operate as an middleman, he would buy coffee a la flor (before the harvest), but when the harvest came in those were sacred commitments. Men would commit their word and they would not go back on their word. But in the case that the person could not pay that year he was committed to pay the next year. They would pay. But at the same time, if in times past a person got sick in the middle of the year, a few months before the harvest, there wasn't a problem. You would go
to his house at midnight and say "Listen, my wife is sick and I need to take her to the doctor, I don't
have money lend me the money and I'll pay you later on with coffee." And forget about it, the money would appear.
At a national level, there is a clear difference between urban and rural areas in terms of access to high schools. According to PNUD 2000, for exanple, only 13.8% of all registered high school students were from rural areas, leading them to conclude: "a high school education is eminently an urban phenomenon" (PNUD 2000:31).
These educational levels are similar to the segment of the national population that falls within the lowest quintile of income, in which 29.3% of household heads are reported to have never attended school and 58.6% as only having attended primary school (CESDEM et al. 1996).
My Bermiidez survey data confmns the observations regarding the origins, migration patterns and timing of the formation of the populations of the settlements currently in the proximity of the park. For example, 49.3 % (total n=67) of informants over the age of 59 reported having been bom in the same rural park hamlet where the survey interview took place. More significantly, of the 50.7% of informants over 59 not bom in the interview community, only 7.5% (n=5) of reported having been bom in an area outside of the Sierra region of the western Cordillera. A similar pattem holds for the birthplace of the fathers of informants over 60 (male or female head of household). Of the 67 informants interviewed over 60 years of age, at least 72% of their fathers were bom within the Sierra itself, although the majority were bom in secciones located to the north of the interview hamlet.
Birthplace of parents of informants over the age of 60 from the La Sierra region of the Western Cordillera Birthplace Number % La Sierra 48 71.6 Outside of La Sierra 10 14.9 Missing 9 13.4 Total 67 99.9
Another explanation for the later occupation of the lands close to Rancier include the fact that the closest tovm, Constanza, developed much later than the municipal capitals of the western Cordillera mentioned
above, so its impact as a sending community for migrants into the hinterlands has been much more recent.
Two other mill owners, however, continued to claim extensive lands and restrict peasant access until the formation of the natural reserve. Furthermore, a military base was established in the heart of Valle Nuevo, further impeding the access of the population to these lands.
" The Cordillera, as explained earlier, divides the northern Cibao region and the southern Dominican Republic, two geographical regions of the country traditionally regarded as culturally and economically distinct. The fertile Cibao, agricultural heartland of the country, contrasts greatly with the arid southem lowlands. Nevertheless, there have been longstanding ties between the Surenos and the Cibaenos, the 47
regions being connected economically by traditional trails that crisscross the Cordillera and, in some cases, date back to colonial and perhaps Taino times. For example, elders from the southern province of Ocoa recall that during the times of die lumber mills southerners would frequently traverse the mountains to sell their produce in the work camps and to the company stores of the mills. The same phenomenon of dynamic north to south interaction existed in the Western Cordillera and was probably even more important for the economies of the regions. The ancient frails continue to be used to drive cattle across the mountains to be sold in the southern province of San Juan de la Maguana, altiiough in the past this phenomenon appears to have been much more pronounced. No studies have been Sierra el Sur) found tiiat describe the historical economic and social ties between these two regions (La and that franspfred as a result of the mountain frails. In more recent years, a trickle of south to north migration has characterized the internal migratory movements of populations surrounding both parks, but due to rather unique cfrcumstances the south to north migration has been much more pronounced in the area of Las Papas than in the Westem Cordillera. CHAPTER 3 COWS, PIGS, AND PICKET FENCES: PAST LIFE IN THE CORDILLERA
Introduction
Whereas the preceding chapter discussed the physical stage on which human life
has unfolded in the Cordillera, the present chapter will describe, in broad strokes, the
overall contours of the adaptations that emerged in earlier generations. The chapter will
thus provide a description of the livelihoods of the Cordillera peasants during the 1930s
and early 1940s; a period that elders romantically look back upon as a kind of "Golden
Age." I will present the picture through the lenses of elderly campesinos from the region
who recall those times.' Their descriptions paint the picture of a time in which the peasants remained relatively unburdened by the State. The agrarian system of the time was based on unrestricted access to land and forest resources and gave reign to an
economy based primarily on production for subsistence. Even when crops were sold on the local market, the objective was to obtain income to meet basic household expenses.
Elders look back on those periods as being times of prosperity. The information presented in this chapter is a reconstruction of the past peasant adaptive practices based on interviews with community elders, on earlier ethnographies, and on data drawn from primary and secondary historical resources.
Martin Garcia: The Good Old Days
Senor Martin Garcia, or more appropriately, using the respectfiil title reserved in the Cordillera for men of accomplishment, "Don" Martin Garcia, is an 85 year old elder
48 49
of the community of Los Postes. He wears thick glasses and rarely leaves the house without a gray fedora perched on his head. The lack of half of his upper and lower teeth causes his lips to collapse into his mouth, giving his weathered face an impish quality.
But his lifetime of hard physical work has served him well. Don Martin is fond of saying
that his spry body is still like that of a child, and he still swings himself easily onto the back of a mule or hikes up steep paths in the hills of the community.
Don Martin is an anachronism, a relic of a time when a different kind of peasant
economy predominated in Los Postes, a time before the park was established and strict
forestry laws were enacted. He is locally renowned for his vast memory and his tall tales
about the old life in the Cordillera. He is also renowned for his stubborn attachment to the land and what are considered to be old-fashioned campesino values. Martin proudly
states that after the government created Armando Bermudez National Park and declared it off limits to peasants, he was the last to leave La Lomita, a now abandoned village that was located deep in the heart of the Park, a 12 km trek from Los Postes. He left La
Lomita in 1990, only, as he states with pride: "after paying 10 fines to the State."
Martin was bom in 1917 and raised in a larger village in the eastern part of the
Sierra. He married three times (in the extralegal consensual union style that was the
dominant conjugal mode in times past). His first union was at the age of 22, when he set up residence with his first wife. This was during the rule of the dictator Rafael Leonidas
Trujillo, when a vagrancy law called the Ley de las Diez Tareas (Law of the Ten Tareas) was strictly enforced, applying stiff penalties for campesinos who could not show that they were duly employed or actively farming 10 tareas of land.^ According to Martin,
"Trujillo did not want to see lazy men, that was the only good thing about him."
V 50
In 1946, on the recommendation of another campesino who told him of the rich land available around the area of Los Postes, Martin approached the local political boss, a man named Pilo Santelices:^ "I told him that I needed to work, that I had seven orphaned
children to raise plus one of my own, that I didn't want to have to rob, so he sent word to the local alcalde (justice of the peace) to have him give me 50 tareas, and told him that
when I finished with those 50 he should give me 50 more." Martin prides himself on having been a hombre de trabajo, a hard-working man. He considers himself to have been wealthy and influential, a result of the productivity he achieved on his lands and his generosity to his neighbors. In his words: "I ended up working a total of over 600 tareas
[in La Lomita, currently within the park].'* Before the park was formed I milked 9 cows
of my own. I had mules to haul coffee. I had 15 female pigs, himdreds of chickens,
turkeys, goats ... I would give everyone viveres (root crops), because I was the biggest man up there."^
When talking to Don Martin, like many old campesinos of the Sierra, he speaks nostalgically of times when he could freely use the resources of the forest:
I would work where I wanted. I would cut down 20 tareas and plant 20 cajones of
beans and would get 25 cajones for each cajon I planted.^ I would plant beans, com, plantains, and sweet potatoes. You wouldn't have to buy rice; you wouldn't
buy viveres because we produced all of that. I had my meat, my chickens, my goats, my cows. Now all of that has to be bought in town. All kinds of verduras
(vegetables), garbanzos, lettuce, garlic, cilantro, all of that can be grown in this Sierra.
When I came here, I found aguacate (avocado) trees that the pioneering
families planted. These plants are over 1 00 years old, but they are old sticks that
hardly produce anymore. I would wander in the mountains looking for feral pigs,
parrots and bees. I would give the parrots away at 50 centavos for a chick, and I
would leave behind some workers in my fields. I would pay them 20 centavos a
day, 10 of them, and I would go off looking for gold. And I would find gold and sell it and I wouldn't have to sell a pig or a quintal of coffee to pay the workers. 51
As Don Martin's memories suggest, in the past free access to the lands and forest
resources of the CordOIera provided diverse opportunities for subsistence. Martin's
activities included agriculture, the raising of livestock, hunting and gathering, and even
panning for gold. His source of subsistence and material wealth-measured primarily in
terms of amount of land under production and the diversity of crops and animals
available for consumption—was made possible by access to the rich and abundant
resources of the area that was later to be taken from him by government fiat, when it
would be converted into Armando Bermudez National Park and Martin's way of life
would be suddenly criminalized. But Martin's story here tells us of a time before parks
and overly strict forestry laws when a vibrant peasant economy flourished in the
hinterlands of the Cordillera Central.
Early Peasant Economy
The economic autonomy of traditional life in the Cordillera was based on the self-
suflSciency of the household, around which farming and domestic tasks were organized.
The peasant household that prevailed during Don Martin's youth was organized
according to the domestic mode of production. The household was the medium by which
labor was allocated to produce the goods that would satisfy the material needs of its
members. This is not to say that the campesinos of the Cordillera were purely
subsistence farmers completely removed from the market. We will see that the market played an important role, even back in those "golden age" years. But households were much more self-sufficient, much less inclined to produce for the market and much less dependent on purchases from the market in that era than they are today. Household Labor and Subsistence ^ *
The family homestead, consisting of the bohio (house) and the patio (yard), was
the domain of women. Women processed food, cooked meals, retrieved water, washed
clothes, cleaned the house, made and mended clothes, tended kitchen gardens and cared
for small livestock such as poultry and goats. Female involvement in activities outside
the home was rare, restricted primarily to participation in agricultural harvests. Women
would cook when their husbands organized ajunta, a reciprocal labor party, and
participate in cooking for juntas held by other households. The only income earning
activities available to rural women were petty commercial activities, such as sewing and
making sweets or other foods to sell, cooking, the harvesting of coffee and legumes, and
in some instances, panning for gold. During this period, according to informants, it was
rare that women would work for cash in Los Postes.
Women had a burdensome reproductive role. With an average completed fertility
rate of eight to nine children (chapter 14), women spent most of their reproductive years
pregnant or nursing an infant. Women gave birth in their homes. Traditional midwives
were their only medical attendants. Mothers and female cousins assisted young mothers
in dealing with the burden of rearing infants and toddlers. As daughters reached the age
of five and six they assisted the mother in the rearing of their younger brothers and
sisters, taking over for the other female relatives, and increasing the autonomy of the household. The more girls and young women present, the more viable the productive and reproductive capacity of the household.^
The labor of children was a critical factor in traditional campesino production.
Beginning at four or five years of age, both male and female children aided women in the completion of household chores. By seven or eight years of age tasks began to be 53
differentiated according to the sex of the child. Male children were expected to
participate in agricultural labor, to work in the fields, fix fences and take responsibility
for herding activities. At harvest time, male children participated in the husking of the
coffee seeds, a tedious, time-consuming task involving the use of hand turned mills.
Girls would fetch water, take food to the males in the conuco (subsistence garden),
participate in the preparation of food, the brewing of coffee, the cleaning of the house,
and in helping their mother rear other children to the ages where they would also begin to
make contributions to the household labor pool. Girls helped during planting and at
harvest time in the picking of coffee and other grains, but besides that only in times of
dire need would girls be sent to work in the fields. In the words of one informant: "the work was too tough for them."
Campesino families were clearly patriarchal and male labor activities were oriented toward the world beyond the homestead. Men planted crops, gathered firewood, cut lumber, and raised large animals. Men were responsible for building and maintaining houses and fences. Although the vast majority of agricultural labor was taken care of through household and reciprocal labor arrangements, men could earn a small amount of cash by performing day jobs. Men dominated local political and administrative leadership roles and, unlike elsewhere in the Caribbean such as in neighboring Haiti, men and not women controlled regional trading. The dominant figure of Los Postes was the middleman, Don Efrain, who would purchase produce from farmers in the nearby hills and lead mule trains on long grueling trips across rough mountain frails to sell produce and purchase basic supplies for resale. Subsistence production
Despite the presence of such intermediaries, in Los Postes the household sought
to satisfy the majority of its needs through the processing of locally available resources
and household labor. Elders of the period speak of a relative scarcity of material goods
but they claim that there was always an abundance of comida (food). The diet consisted
of crops produced in the conuco, primarily of root crops and plantains, which were eaten
in the morning and the evening, as well as beans and upland rice (grown without
irrigation) used for the noon meal. These and other grains and legumes were stored in
graneros, large bins generally kept in the kitchen. Meat formed a frequent component of
the noon meal, and elders of the period speak nostalgically about of the abundance of
meat, particularly pork. The wide varieties of foods produced in the fields were processed
in the household: cow peas and beans were husked, rice was pounded in a mortar before
being winnowed and chickens had to be scalded and feathered. Some farmers grew a
small patch of tobacco for their own personal use. The farmers grew sugar cane and, in
lieu of processed sugar, melao (homemade cane syrup) or honey was used for cooking
and to make sweets. The cane was processed in local, animal driven trapiches (sugar mills). Manteca de cerdo (pig fat or lard) was used for cooking in lieu of processed vegetable oils. Women recall making homemade cheese from cow's milk as well as making of cassava bread out ofyuca amarga (bitter manioc) grown in the conuco. This was a tedious process that involved pounding the boiled manioc into flour before baking it into the round cakes. In the absence of modem medicines, locals relied on folk remedies using medicinal plants that women would grow in the yard or gather in the forest. Local specialists would prepare botellas, medicinal mixtures of herbs, sticks, leaves and bark steeped in rum and wine, with different combinations gauged to cure specific ailments.
Houses and ranchos were constructed through the use of timber hewn in the nearby forest. Depending on the region, hand-sawed boards of pine (Pinus occidentalis) or manacla palm (Prestoea acuminata) were used to makes beams for the fi-ame and boards for walls.* The uneven cracks between the boards were filled in with clay. Roofs were thatched with cana (palm leaves) or tabletas (hand sawed pine shingles) with roofs ofyagua (palm bark) being less common in the Cordillera than in other areas of the country. In Los Postes as in most hinterland communities of the Cordillera, water was
plentiftil and reasonably close to the homestead. It nevertheless had to be carried to the house and stored in higueros and bafianos (calabashes or other gourds) or in tinacos, earthenware jars that were kept in the kitchen and partially buried in dirt floor to keep the water cool and fresh. Cups, bowls and ladles were also fashioned out of calabashes and gourds. Kitchen implements were produced out of wood obtained in the forest. Brooms were crafted out of sticks and grass or pabn thatch. Beds were fashioned out of cloth casings stuffed with plantain leaves. Pilones (pounding mortars) were carved crudely out of logs. Kitchen implements were hung on racks fashioned from sticks. Splinters of highly combustible resin steeped pine called astillas de cuaba were gathered and used for lighting at night. Men and women would weave macutos (saddle bags) out of guano palm leaves (Coccotrinax miraguama) to use for the gathering and transporting of farm produce. Many women would make clothes for the family, and elderly women recall making homemade soap with cuaba (pine resin). The clothes had to be washed in the stream or river and pounded on rocks to get them clean. 56
The market
As described above, the campesinos in the Cordillera depended largely on subsistence production and men like Don Martin measured their wealth largely in terms of access to subsistence goods, in particular the diversity of crops and animals available
for household consumption. But it was not a life completely divorced from connections to the market. The campesino livelihoods bridged two distinct economic systems: a subsistence economy and a market economy (Murray 1970). But access to the market remained difficult, especially due to the difficulties in transporting goods to the local marketing centers. The campesinos lived, as Eric Wolf has said of peasants elsewhere,
"on the outskirts of the capitalist market" (Wolf 2001[1955]:213).
Up until the 1950s or so conuco production was oriented almost exclusively towards household consumption. Murray, for example, states: "the production of crops for sale on the conuco is a fairly recent innovation in the Sierra dating from the late-
1940s" (1970:135). Grains such as beans, rice and to a lesser extent com (fed to the chickens) would be stored in the granero and root crops have the advantage that they can
be left in the ground and, for all practical purposes, stored naturally. Cash came primarily from the sale of animals and the primary cash crop was coffee, although campesinos like Don Martin report also selling, at times, their surplus production of crops from the conuco, primarily beans and rice but also, at times, small quantities of viveres
(root crops). By the 1950s, in some areas of the Cordillera, farmers planted peanuts and tobacco for the market, but the production of these crops never took hold in Los Postes.
Many campesinos also report that they were able to raise cash by selling small quantities of gold panned in the local rivers. 57
The cash obtained from these sales was used primarily to purchase items imported from abroad that had come to constitute part of the household's basic or strategic needs.
Purchases were almost entirely focused on tools, such as machetes, hoes and picks, and other very basic goods including salt, spices, alcohol, matches, pots, dishes, cutlery,
textiles, and sewing needles. Locally produced clothing was also purchased at times.
They would also purchase animals, and at times seed for planting, but fertilizers and other agricultural inputs were never used. Nevertheless, despite these connections to the market, the predominant emphasis was on household self-sufiBciency. As one elderly farmer from Los Postes explained: "we would go to the conuco instead of heading to the market, before we lived from agriculture now we live from money. Before, we could go three months without finding any money. We consumed less money."
Land Availability: Foundation of The Golden Age
Terrenos Comuneros and Tierras del Estado
The golden age of the Cordillera was founded first and foremost on the abundance of land. Access to the land in the Cordillera was mediated by two primary mechanisms: buying shares in communal properties called terrenos comuneros (communal lands) or simply occupying and using the tierras del estado (State lands).
The terrenos comuneros, or communal lands system, predominated as the formal land tenure system in the Dominican Republic until the early part of the twentieth century
and still fiinctioned in much of the Cordillera Central when Martin arrived in La Lomita in the 1940s (Clausner 1973; San Miguel 1997). Under the terrenos comuneros systena, many individual shareholders purchased the right to settle and farm on what remained a
large parcel of land unified by one legal title. The communal landholding was often referred to as a sitio and the shares were referred to by different names: pesos, acetones. —
pesos de accion or derechos de tierra. Neither an exact delimitation of the properties nor
a notion of absolute private property was involved in the purchasing of shares. An
elderly female informant from Los Postes equated the buying into a common land
holding through the purchase of pesos to purchasing the derecho a vivir (right to live).
That is to say that the purchase of a share provided the rights to establish oneself on a
given land holding and to use of all of the communal resources within the landholding
pasture, forest and water. The buying of pesos also included the right to establish
conucos (subsistence gardens) and to graze animals en el sitio, meaning within the
! • • « communal landholding. ' ; .
State lands were simply those lands that did not have a recognized owner
(Clausner 1973:1 14-1 15).^ Due to the lack of an organized system to register land titles,
'° the extent of State lands remained unclear until at least the middle of the 20"^ century.
Furthermore, the weak Dominican state proved unable to control access to state lands,
especially in the remote areas. The highlands of the Cordillera, until the Trujillo period,
existed largely beyond the effective control of the State. Locals considered unclaimed
state lands to be '"tierra de nadie" (no man's lands), "montena" (forest or literally
"hunting areas") ' or terrenos baldios (empty land). ' These lands were settled based on
the local' recognition of property rights through occupation and use of the land.'^ Most
of the now abandoned settlements that existed within the Armando Bermiidez National
Park were formed on State lands, and the settlements surrounding Rancier also were originally established on State lands.
Early on, the monteros (wild pig hunters) freely settled in these unoccupied areas.
Peasants used the mountains as a refiige from the unceasing border conflicts or as an answer to the increasing scarcity of lands in lower areas of the Cordillera. As the hinterland populations grew, however, the federal government began to take steps to
incorporate them within the administrative apparatus of the State. Local alcaldes
pedaneos were assigned to the secciones and began to regulate access to State lands in
relatively close proximity to the seccion. During the Trujillo period the alcaldes
pedaneos tightly controlled their jurisdictions and monitored new settlers, as in the case
of Don Martin, who had to receive their authorization before settling on State lands within their jurisdiction.
Access to the public lands of the Cordillera was absolutely central to the peasant way of hfe. These lands provided critical natural resources. In addition to providing fresh
fanning plots, the land were used as coirmiunal pasture lands, as sources of wood and other construction materials, as foraging areas for domesticated pigs (that were earmarked and turned loose) and as hunting grounds for feral pigs. The vast majority of land currently making up Bermiidez and Rancier National Parks fell outside of the terrenos communeros. With the break up of the comunero holdings these park areas became increasingly important to the peasants as pasturelands and as a source of forest resources.
The Agro-Pastoral Complex
To understand the catastrophic impact that the imposition of a national park was to have on the campesinos, it is important to grasp the fundamental importance of this unimpeded access to land that characterized the pre-parque (park) system. The abundant availability of land allowed for unrestricted practice of traditional farming strategies, a mixed system of production that will be referred to as the agro-pastoral complex. The agro-pastoral complex was organized around the open grazing of livestock combined with the preparation of conucos (garden plots). 60
As is true of the land tenure system itself-that is, the system of terrenos comuneros~the origins of the traditional agro-pastoral complex of the Cordillera can also be traced back to the Colonial hato system. The hato was a largely self-sufficient ranch on which the free grazing of livestock took precedence over the production of crops.
Thus, the agro-pastoral complex that emerged in the Cordillera required the fencing in of subsistence plots to protect the crops from the animals, cattle, pigs and goats, that were
free ranged. In this system in which livestock dominated, it was not the animals that had to be fenced in, but the crops.
The livestock provided farmers with valuable reserves as sources of protein and of cash. The organization of livestock grazing followed a pattern similar to that of the colonial hato. The animals were branded (in the case of cattle) or ear-notched (in the
case of pigs) and left, as the campesinos of the time put it, to graze "en el sitio", the sitio referring to the vast, open pine forests in the comunero lands or in the State lands located in the inner Cordillera. For the better part of the year, cattle and pigs would freely forage and fend for themselves in the mountains.
In essence, the practice constituted a silvo-pastoral system. The grasses under the pine frees and in the mountain savannas of the Cordillera provided good pasturage for cattle. In order to eliminate the coverage of leaves and pine needles and foment the emergence of fresh grasses, the campesinos would commonly set fire to the forest. Early foresters and conservationists regarded these recurrent fires as one of the most serious threats to the conservation of the forest and, as early as the turn of the 20* century, recommended that the government take strict measures to curb the practice.'^
The scale and importance of past cattle raising in the region is testified to by toponyms such as Paso del Ganado (literally, Cattle Pass) and El Rodeo, names whose origins rest in the annual cattle roundups that took place in the Cordillera to gather and sort the animals. The roundups, as recalled by participants from Los Postes, occurred in
June of each year and would last for two weeks or more. The time for rounding up and corralling the livestock was selected strategically, coming soon after the birthing season.
The calves, which would be identified by owners due to the fact they would cling closely to their mothers, were branded for identification. When all of the animals had been rounded up, the ranchers would take inventory of their stock, take note of any missing animals and attend to sick animals. They would also select animals to be sold or butchered. Once these tasks were attended to, the animals would once again be released into the mountains to forage unattended.
These annual cattle roundups also required strong social ties amongst the inhabitants from across the Cordilleran hinterlands. Cattle would frequently stray deeply into the forests far from the hamlets of their owners. During the roundups the cattlemen from across the Cordillera would have to work together to sort out the animals. The activity of seeking out cattle was called sabanear. Campesinos, both ranchers and hired hands, would start high up in the mountains on foot, accompanied by their dogs, the ever- present companion of the campesino in the mountains. From this starting point the cattle were progressively driven out of the forest. Information would be exchanged between cattlemen from different hamlets regarding the location of their animals, and often word would be sent from afar that one of the local animals had been found close to a distant hamlet.
The fraditional cattle ranching of the Cordillera was based on low population density, mutual trust and solidarity. Informants of the time report that the stealing of animals was rare, a marked contrast from areas closer to the Dominican-Haitian border - ' 62
where cattle theft has been a historical source of major social conflict and tension between border populations.
The raising and hunting of pigs was called montear and was a traditional and important component of the adaptive strategy of the campesinos of the Cordillera that
traces its roots back to the colonial period. Like cattle, "domesticated" pigs were ear- notched for identification and allowed to forage freely in the mountains. The pigs thrived in the forest on an abundant diet of planted and wild tubers, fruits, and seeds. Wild
feral pigs also proliferated in the Cordillera. These were the progeny of pigs that escaped into the mountains early in the colonial period and could be identified by their distinctive characteristics, including their elongated snouts, their razor sharp incisor teeth and the
raised line of hair on their backs. In the 1940s, there were still monteros in the Cordillera who specialized in the hunting of these pigs, often spending many days in the mountains with their packs of dogs accumulating salted pork to be consumed by the family or sold.
Other campesinos also hunted feral pigs both for subsistence and for sport.
hi the farming system of the golden age of the Cordillera, traditional swidden agricultural methods prevailed. A multitude of different crops were interspersed throughout the garden. Don Martin's descriptions attest to the diversity of products that were produced within the structure of these subsistence gardens, including: beans, starchy tubers (sweet potatoes and yams), root plants (sweet and sour manioc and taro root), squash (auyama), wild rice, com, plantains, and bananas. Coffee, the primary cash crop, was planted on a plot separate from the conuco.
In successfiil tropical swidden systems, the production of aimual gardens requires access to primary forest or to lands that have been fallowed for sufficient periods of time to allow for secondary forest to emerge. In the absence of inputs such as fertilizers, the use of "virgin" lands or long fallow periods ensures that lands will be suflBciently rich in nutrients to ensure a good harvest. The soils of the Cordillera Central are varied and
complex. High, intermountain valleys, savannas and alluvial valleys contain relatively
rich soils that prove more resistant to erosion. These are the preferred planting areas
(Martinez 1990). However, the majority of the region is characterized by a highly
irregular topographic pattern and over time farmers have resorted to planting on hillsides
and steep-mountain slopes. The soils along the hills and slopes are commonly shallow,
relatively poor in nutrients and when stripped of their natural forest cover are subject to
rapid erosion, quickly reducing the productivity of the soil (OAS 1967). For this reason,
the swidden system employed in the Cordillera, as in other tropical areas, required
frequent movement from one garden plot to another in order to generate a productive
harvest.
Preparing the land for the planting of a new conuco is called making a tumba
(literally, a 'felling') and was highly labor intensive. Informants of the period report that
the making a new tumba was generally a biannual activity for the vast majority of
inhabitants of the region. The word tumba was used to refer to the cleared land, which
was not referred to as a conuco until the crops had been planted.
The first step that the farmer took in making a tumba was to identify a suitable
plot of land. A path was then cleared around the land to be appropriated. Then the
clearing process was initiated. The clearing process began with the clearing of the
thinner vegetation using a machete and concluded vsdth the tumba (felling) phase
involving the use of hatchets to cut down the larger trees. Two or more teams, usually
working in groups of two chopping simultaneously, would fell large trees. The better
pieces of wood were separated and reserved to build the fences. Other wood and grasses 64
were cut into smaller pieces, spread over the conuco and left to dry, generally for a month or more, before dandole candela (burning the litter). Once the litter was burned, the ash was distributed evenly throughout the tumba to fertilize the soil in preparation for planting.
Two crop cycles could be planted in a year and after the first year the degraded conuco was planted with annual crops (such as plantains and manioc), perermials, or high yielding grasses such as yaragua {Melinis minutiflora) for pasture. Don Martin described his system for rotating land use:
Over the years, I made over 60 conucos in the park; this was over a period of
almost 50 years. I would make a tumba, and when I collected all of the harvest I
would make another beside it and would use the first either to plant coffee or
pasture for the cows. I would plant bananas, coffee, or grass for pasture. When
the first harvest was com and beans, I would then plant sweet potato or plantains. With these, you would have to wait for a year or a year and a half. When that
harvest was gathered, the field was already a brogue (fiill of overgrowth) and you
would put the pigs or cows on it. And then in time you would go back and repeat
the process, when it would produce a little broquesito (overgrowth). Then I would
go back and chop and plant again, if it wasn't already planted with coffee or
grass. It would be at least three or four years before I would go back. I would
leave some areas fenced for the cows so when I needed to milk them or mark
them, I would be able enclose them in one of those areas that I kept.
The swidden system of the Cordillera Central involved two fundamental components in order to function. The first was the use of fire to clear and fertilize the land—in the words of the locals: "sin candela, no se puede trabajar" (without fire, you can't work the soil). The second involved the building of strong, tightly woven fences to protect the crops fi-om roaming animals.
Good Fences Make Good Neighbors
The most laborious task of the agro-pastoral complex in the Cordillera was the building of the empalizadas (fences) that would enclose the conuco. Farmers had a right to freely graze animals in the sitio. The preponderance of freely wandering livestock- 65
porcine, bovine, and caprine--made the fencing in of conucos of critical importance in order to preserve the crops and to avoid social conflict.
The building of a solid fence to protect crops from foraging animals was considered to be the responsibility of every farmer. If an animal entered a conuco, the
first thing that would take place would be a revision of the fence. If the fence was found to have flaws, or if the door had been left open, the responsibility would rest not with the owner of the animal but rather with the owner of the conuco. But once an animal entered a conuco due to a shoddily constructed fence, the animal could obtain a taste for the field
crops, making it more likely that the animal would continue to attempt to penetrate conucos. For that reason, the builders of shoddy fences were looked down upon as bad neighbors.
The empalizada that was built to protect the garden plot was essentially a very solidly built picket fence. Wood that was used for the construction of the empalizada was obtained from the tumba immediately after the bum. If this did not provide sufficient quantities of wood other sticks would have to be sought in the forest. The process was extremely laborious, as Don Martin describes:
You would lay down a rope in a straight line and split logs into sticks. Ideally you would use Cuerno de Buey {Colubrina arborescens), a stick that never rots. One would try to roughly cut the logs into pieces a foot or a foot and a half long. You would split the wood with a hatchet, and then you would put the posts (support beams) in vertically. Then you would stack the sticks very tightly within the posts, making sure that they were carefully aligned in a horizontal direction. You would start at the ground and raise the fence high, so that neither cows nor
goats could jump it. And you would construct four empalizadas, one on each
comer, so that it would completely surround the conuco.
Agricultural Labor
The traditional agro-pastoral complex was labor intensive, involving the clearing and buming of the lands and the construction of fences, as well as the maintenance of the 66
conuco—^weeding, the fixing of the fences, and the tracking down of animals in the mountains. Capital requirements were low. All of these tasks were accomplished using locally found resources and simple technologies: hoes, machetes and hatchets. Seeds for the planting of beans were generally reserved from the previous harvest and only purchased in times of emergency such as crop failure.
The two primary sources of labor for accomplishing tasks were household labor, discussed earlier, and the use of members of the extended patrilineal family. As discussed above, household labor for agriculture primarily included the male members of
the family. The strict sexual division of labor did not allow for women's participation in any tasks requiring the use of tools and the making of a tumba was strictly a male endeavor. Women and young children, both males and females, would commonly participate in lighter work, the planting of seeds as well as in the harvest, in particular that of coffee and of legumes. On the other hand, male children would begin to be initiated into the field chores at an early age.
The means of mobihzing non-family labor primarily involved the use of cooperative labor groups, a practice that also has been reported as used in other areas of the Caribbean (Metraux 1951). The use of cooperative labor groups provides a common alternative for mobilizing labor particularly amongst groups that are cash poor. In the
Dominican Republic, these labor groups are called juntas or convites, depending on local custom.'^ Don Martin described the functioning of these work groups in Los Postes,
There were thirty-five family houses in La Lomita of Los Postes, at the edge of
the river, and we made a union. We would say that on Monday, it is my junta, then we would go a month without returning to work in my conuco and we would go fi-om junta to junta. We also started inviting people fi-om another nearby hamlets. I got together groups of up to 40 hatchets (men) one day. These were tumbas that were chopped little by little. You would fell a cluster of trees, and 67
then say 'lets chop them up' so that when one burned the conuco there were only small sticks to pick up, you didn't have to get your hatchet. There were times when bad hearted people would want one to help them and being then, when it was their turn, they would say that they had to go to town, crafty to get out of work that they owed. In order to organize a junta, if you had a cow or pig you would kill it, it had to be more than a goat because if there were 40 or 50 people, you really had to
salt some meat. The women would go to cook, and if there were 40 men, 4 or 5 women would go. And the children, if the water was far away, would have to fetch water."
As Don Martin's description indicates, the organizing of a junta involved exchanging household labor, including that of the women and children of the household.
Furthermore, the carrying out of a junta required complying wdth fiindamental social obligations, the most important being the labor exchange and the other the ability to provide everyone working in the group with food—breakfast and lunch.
The use of the jimta was limited to activities in which timing does not prove
critical. For example, the junta was used for land preparation (the tumba) and planting,
but rarely for harvesting due to the fact that the harvests come in at the same time and
that timing is critical to avoid the rotting of the plants."
Conclusion
In this chapter I have shown that life in the pre- 1950 Cordillera was dominated by
the domestic mode of production and emphasized subsistence. The free access to land
and other resources of the moimtains gave way to kind of peasant aflQuence. As one elder
of the Cordillera stated: "Con candelay puya hasta el diablo comia" (with fire and a
dibble stick even the devil could eat). The agro-pastoral complex was based on the
production of a wide variety of crops and of livestock both for family subsistence and for
sale in the market. For campesino families living in the isolated mountains of the
Cordillera, the raising of livestock and the production of a wide variety of crops avoided
dependence on any one crop, spread out risk in the face of uncertainty, varied nutrition. 68
and provided the campesinos with the flexibility necessary to maintain a degree of
autonomy from the market. It will be shown in a later chapter that men such as Don
Martin struggled to hang onto this way of life in the face of increasing opposition from
the State. But before concluding it might be important to emphasize that, nostalgia aside, the semi-subsistence economy may have provided well, but it was not easy living. While reminiscing about the plentitude of yesteryear, elderly informants have not forgotten the hardship. In the words of Beatrice, a 60 year-old woman from Los Postes:
I remember that in 1940, we didn't have a school, we didn't have a church, we
didn't have a cemetery. . . In times past, there was plenty of food: root crops,
beans, rice, animals from the forest. But it took a lot of work to get it. One could
kill an animal, but it was a lot of work to get it because one had to track it down.
Our house had a dirt floor, it was full ofpajaritos (bugs): fleas and bedbugs. Life was difficult. You know we slept in homemade cots. It was a life as if the
indigenous peoples had just left, or if the Spaniards had just arrived.
Whatever the case, by the early 1950s the "Golden Age" of the Cordillera Central was coming to an end. Anthropologist Gerald Murray, who spent a year living in the
region during the late 1960s, said it best:
In the late forties Trujillo, who was then heading toward the summit of his eventual economic power, sold lumber rights to the pine trees to a Santiago-based Company, and forbade the clearing of more land. He also established a Parque Nacional, a forest preserve which included much of the higher reaches of Monte Adentro, above the altitude where pine trees were common, and thus this area of potential cropping land was also closed to the serranos. The population
movement was frozen in its tracks. From the fifties on the population began trickling back out of the hills. The golden age of Monte Adentro, talked about nostalgically by the older serranos, had passed. [1970:45]
As Murray noted, the State's appropriation of forest resources, both through the conservation of forested areas for the lumber companies and national park formation for urban interests, signaled the end of the "Golden Age." The causes and nature of the historical demise of the peasantry of the Cordillera are the topics of the following chapters. 69
Notes
' It should be mentioned that in this description I focus heavily on the campesinos of the Sierra region of the western Cordillera, in the surroundings of Bermudez National Park. As discussed in chapter 2, the campesinos living along the northem border of Rancier National Park represent a more recent expansion of intensive agriculture from the agricultural valley of Constanza into the nearby highlands. These populations are of much more recent origin than those surrounding Bermudez. Their case will be only touched upon in this chapter but will be elaborated on further in the chapters that follow.
^ A tarea is a Dominican land measurement the equivalent of .1554 acres or .063 hectares. There are 2.47 acres in a hectare.
^ Pilo Santelices is the real name of a historical figure from the Trujillo period. I have not used pseudonyms for historical figures discussed in this dissertation, unless doing so would risk revealing the identity of a living informant.
Martin was referring to having worked 600 tareas over a time span of approximately 40 years and not that he farmed 600 tareas at any one time. This would mean that Martin was bringing an average of approximately 15 tareas a year of new lands into production.
' This is the way that Martin's statement concluded, which is suggestive of the topics of the chapters to follow: "But when the Armando Bermudez Park was first formed, the progress that I had made was thrown back. I lost it all. What Trujillo gave me for that farm was $400 pesos. With that I bought a small piece of land, and was forced to buy little pieces of casaba bread when my viveres (root crops, in the park) were rotting.
^ A cajon literally means a box, and is a standard measurement used primarily for beans. Murray (1970)
reported an average of 12 pounds of beans per cajon .
' The women and younger children would collaborate in the rearing of the ever-present newborns. Also, according to local custom, after giving childbirth women were required to remain within the homestead for 40 days before being allowed to pass beyond the limits of the homestead. During this period, other women from the family would be required to attend to the women in retreat, collecting medicinal and aromatic plants for the preparation of daily healing baths.
* Both of these varieties are endemic to the island of Hispaniola.
' After Dominican Independence, Clausner points out that "all land was owned either by the state, by private citizens, or by the Church. Private lands could be groups into three categories: urban, rural communal land, and rural non-communal land. The fact is that ... no one in the newly established republic knew precisely how much land the state ovraed, because of the number of cases where the precise boundaries between rural communal lands and state lands had never been determined. Efforts to clarify this rather unusual legal situation were complicated later by the difficulties involved in the partitioning of rural communal land. Partition, an action relatively rare in colonial times, was ordered and carried out under Haitian rule, countermanded and ignored after independence, ordered and ignored in 191 1, and ordered again by the American Military Government of Occupation in 1920." [1973: 1 15]
Again, according to Clausner, who has written one of the most conprehensive historical accounts on the topic of land in the Dominican Republic: "By 1940 essentially all of the arable, privately owned land, especially that under cultivation, had been surveyed. Remote or economically undesirable public lands remained unsurveyed, leaving by 1 966, about ten percent of Dominican territory unsurveyed" (1973:198- 99).
" These are not to be confused with ejido lands, which were communal lands that were set aside for the common usage of settlements (Clausner 1973; Georges 1990). According to Clausner the Spanish Crown's 70
ejido land, Ordinances of 1573 authorized the founders of new settlements (called adelantados) to set aside system that continues watering places, roads and trails to be administered by the cabildo (town council), a the settlers, except for privileges up until present. "The use of common land was reserved exclusively for land assigned the specifically given to others. The cabildo supervised common farm land as well as the the expense of ejido land, or at town itself At times, the cabildo would amplify or extend town limits at writes that in her research times would lease the land in order to obtain income" (1973:48). Georges (1990) past existence of a village council that site of Los Pinos in the western Sierra, informants reported the reference to administered the State lands within the jurisdiction of the village. She was apparently making lands or spontaneous ejido lands. In the smaller hamlets deeper in the Cordillera, which were comunero settlements on State lands, informants made no mention of the presence of these councils in the past.
land Both the colonial government and the State had also long recognized prescriptive rights to the although "no applicable written law was incorporated into the land law system until 1912" (Clausner 1973:119).
" For example, Karl Woodward, in his 1909 report on the conditions of Dominican forests, states: "The measures to impede first and most important provision [for the development of a forestry plan] is to draft the setting of forest fires." He recommended that the legislature immediately enact a law that would make author's forest fires a criminal act, punishable by six months in prison or a stiff fine (Martinez 1990:58, translation firom Spanish).
Locals report that the pigs would eat the following found in the wild or in the conuco: celery root (apio), pahna (palm), batata (sweet potato), yautia (taro), cana (sugar cane), semilla almendro (almond seed), pomo fi^it, among others.
Since at least the period of Haitian occupation (1822-1844), in Santo Domingo rural land use conflicts often involved clashes between the traditional pastoral economy and more settled and intensive patterns of agricultural production. Freely grazing cows, pigs and goats can wreak havoc on unprotected farm plots and were viewed by State planners as impediments to the expansion and mtensification of agricultural production. The conflict between these two productive systems reached the Cordillera Central in the middle of the 20* century. The elimination of the practice of free grazing could be most easily addressed through the division of the terrenos comuneros into privately owned family farms. As will be discussed in greater depth in Chapter 4, the process of imposing State control over the internal areas of the Cordillera Central can essentially be traced by following the transition from an agro-pastoral complex, organized around the free grazing of livestock and swidden agriculture, to a system organized to enhance the production of traditional and non-traditional market oriented crops. In the Cordillera Central, both the breakup of the terrenos comuneros and the transformation in the local agro-pastoral system tends to move historically across the Cordillera in an east-west direction following the spread of coffee farming in the Cordillera.
If the fence was found to be solidly built then the owner of the animal could be required to pay for damages to the garden. Campesinos universally recall animals that were bravos, smbbom and wild, cows that would break through fence doors or pigs that would dig under fences. These animals were given three chances—on the third instance that a given animal entered a conuco he would have to be removed from the sitio and either sold or butchered.
The change from the use of the traditional empalizada to barbed wire symbolized a significant change in the productive systems of the region as will be discussed in Chapter 13. The traditional empalizada was tightly woven and designed to keep animals out of the conuco. On the other hand, barbed wire is used to keep animals, particularly cattle, within an enclosed pasture. The only place where significant use of the traditional empalizada has been recently witaessed by the author in the Dominican Republic is in the most remote areas along the Dominican/Haitian border, a testimony to the weakness of State insertion into that region.
The Haitians use the term "konvit" for reciprocal labor groups, similar to the commonly used Dominican term "convite". One would therefore hypothesize that regions in which the use the term predominates 71
convite must have a stronger historical connection with Haiti or Haitians than regions in which the clearly that Spanish term junta is used. However, so far I have not been able to identify a clear regional pattern would explain a preference for usage of either convite or junta.
" The other primary form of accessing non-family labor was through hiring workers. Although informants report at times paying for agricultural hands, elders report that money was scarce and they would generally attenpt to mobilize labor using other means. CHAPTER 4 STATE CONTROL AND PEASANTS DURING THE TRUJILLO ERA
Introduction
The present chapter begins the description of the forces that shaped State poUcies in the Cordillera Central. These policies, in turn, drove the traditional way of peasant life in the Cordillera out of a golden age, as described in the previous chapter, and established the early conditions for the ongoing decline of the traditional peasantry that would occur in the post-Trujillo period. The chapter begins with a discussion of rising State control during the Trujillo era. Over a period of thirty years, every comer of the country was brought under the strict control of the regime. Trujillo wrought a change in the structural
conditions of life in the study areas particularly with regard to the distribution of and access to land, a development that would set the stage for the unraveling of the peasant economy in the years subsequent to the dictator's death in 1961.
Pre-Trujillo Period: Brief Historical Background
Internecine warfare during the 19* century left the Dominican Republic politically fragmented and the country's infrastructure in ruins. According to San Miguel
(1999:133-34, auth. trans.), "It is inappropriate to think of the existence of a State power
that exercised a strict control over the totality of the territory and of the Dominican
population. . .this control was most precarious and fragile". The American occupation of
1916, as well as the network of roads and the effectively centralized Trujillo dictatorship that would emerge from that occupation, were of course unheard of in these decades of the 19* century. Centralized State control over rural areas remained undermined by the
72 absence of centralized communications networks and ongoing disputes between regional caudillos. The weakness of the State was evident in frequent revolutions and failed attempts to systematize land tenure and transform the agrarian structure. In rural areas, the role of the Dominican State was largely characterized by the requisitioning of goods and the recruitment of rural inhabitants to fight in military campaigns (San Miguel
1999a). The traditional peasant adaptation in the Cordillera began to flourish during
these 19"^ century decades. It can be understood as a response to the absence of centralized State control as campesinos in the lowlands moved into the mountains to avoid forced conscription and political turmoil.
The transformation of peasant lifeways was to begin in the lowlands, in the eastern part of the country, during the latter part of the 19"^ century. Backed by foreign capital and allied with the State, the sugar interests were able to progressively dispossess small farmers of their landholdings both through purchases and through manipulating the breaking-up of the terrenos comuneros (Clausner 1973; Duarte 1980). Similarly, in the
Cibao, the expansion of export-oriented agriculture involving tobacco and cacao and the accimiulation of lands by urban-based entrepreneurs stimulated the break-up of the terrenos comuneros (San Miguel 1997). By the early part of the 20"^ century the agro- pastoral complex style of life in the lowlands began to give way to permanent-field cultivation oriented toward the production of cash crops destined for export (Antonini
1968; Murray 1970).
The intensification of agriculture in the lowlands in the northwestern Cibao led to further expansion of the population in the Cordillera, as campesinos seeking lands for subsistence cropping moved progressively south into the mountains. With the expansion of the sugar plantation economy in the south and the intervention of the U.S. government into Dominican affairs of State, conditions began to change in the early 1900s. During the 1916-1924 U.S. military occupation of the country, State power entered a period of rapid expansion (in large part buttressed by a new national road network). This power of the State would reach new levels under the subsequent reign of Trujillo. The subjugation of the mountain peasantry through increasing State control over lands and the labor of the
rural population was to become a major force in the evolution of rural Dominican life. It
is this very power of the State that would eventually lead to that decline of the peasant
way of life that is the central theme of this study. The rest of this chapter will trace the rise of this State power during this period.
State Control and Peasant Formation Under Trujiilo (1930-1961)
When Trujillo came into power in 1930, the nation was undergoing a severe financial crisis. As the world at large was sinking into The Great Depression, the
Dominican Republic experienced a drastic decline in traditional agricultural exports.
Foreign exchange became scarce and tax revenues plummeted. The costs of imports were high. The government teetered on the brink of bankruptcy.
The regime's strategy for surviving the crisis focused on achieving national self- sufiSciency in the production of staples. At the time of Trujillo's ascension to power, eighty-two percent of the national population was rural (ONE 1935). Early in his regime, in the fashion of a nineteenth-century Latin American rural caudillo, Trujillo directed his efforts towards capturing peasant production, incorporating the mountain peasantry into the State economy. Trujillo sought to develop the infrastructure required for expansion of agricultural production (Inoa 1994). He also launched a massive propaganda campaign reinforced by draconian, mechanisms of institutional control. 75
Trujillo's Partido Dominicano (Dominican Party) organized "agro-political" meetings and rural agricultural fairs called Revistas Civicas (Civic Reviews). New hybrid seeds, ploughs, tools, and information regarding modem agricultural technologies were disseminated both in the lowlands and in the mountains. Competitions were held and prizes awarded for outstanding farm production. The revistas also provided the party with the opportunity to disseminate information regarding agricultural laws and to portray
Trujillo as the mejor amigo del hombre de trabajo (the best friend of the working man) and protector of the Dominican farmer. Party speakers were expected to laud the achievements and personal characteristics of the dictator. The regime also set out to
"dominate the previously rebellious Dominican peasantry," a task accomplished by
"strict police vigilance, censure and terror before the law" (Inoa 1994:76, auth. trans.).
Here too, the Partido Dominicano functioned as the primary institutional mechanism.
Membership in the party became mandatory and the party I.D. called La Palma along with the state issued cedula (I.D. card) and a paper demonstrating compliance with the draft were popularly known as the Tres Golpes (Three Hits), the consummate symbols of control during the Trujillo era.
Rural alcaldes pedaneos backed by the military became feared strongmen whose responsibility was to control the rural population, organize local labor gangs, and ensure compliance with the dictates of the regime.^ Later, a rural police force was established to fiirther control the activities of the rural population. Local level juntas called the Juntas
Comunales Protectoras de la Agricultura (Communal Juntas for the Protection of
Agriculture) were formed to enforce compliance with the agricultural and vagrancy laws and to promote new farming technologies (hioa 1994; Vargas 1992). 8
76
To expand the amount of land under production the regime initiated a land distribution campaign and enacted legislation that established strict controls on internal
migration. The State sought to increase its revenues by encouraging the production of export crops, which were then taxed. Non-participation in the State economy was not an option. The vagrancy law called the Ley de las Diez Tareas required all campesinos to
demonstrate that they were economically active.^ Male campesinos over the age of 1 and not gainfully employed were required to farm at least 10 tareas of land
(approximately 2/3 hectares). Those who did not comply with the law were subject to a monetary fine, the equivalent in labor, or jail sentence. The Trujillo State also initiated corvee style labor, which forcibly conscripted campesinos to work on the construction of roads and State owned irrigation works.
The ultimate result of the Trujillo regime's policies~the redistribution of lands, the suppression of internal population movements, and the application of vagrancy laws- resulted in the expansion in absolute numbers of small-holding peasants in the Cordillera and in the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo era. However, the policies also brought deteriorating conditions of Ufe in rural areas and established the structural conditions for the decline of the traditional peasant economy in the Cordillera in the years
subsequent to Trujillo 's reign.
Beginning of the Decline
The Trujillo regime initiated processes of State control that marked the beginning of the demise of the "traditional" style of life that Don Martin described in the 1930s and
1940s. This was a gradual process, as the new policies and development strategies of the
Dominican State directed towards controlling peasant labor and production began to
reach into the Cordillera hinterlands. Little by little, terrenos comuneros were broken up and new environmental laws were passed and enforced. Rural police increasingly restricted peasant access to the vast mountain reserves upon which swidden agricultural and free ranging of livestock depended. At the same time as the regime took measures to foment agricultural production and tie the peasants to the rural areas, the political economic elites allied with the State seized vast tracts of forest and pasturage, invariably the choicest lands. Those sectors favored by Trujillo launched their own economic projects, principally the grazing of livestock and exploitation of timber, processes that would lead to skewed access to land, further integrate campesinos into a cash-based
economy and initiate a massive degradation of the resource base upon which the peasants
of the Cordillera depended for their livelihoods. Below the evolution of these factors will
be examined separately, beginning with land.
Altered Access to Land
The breakup of the terrenes comuneros
The terrenos comuneros system, legacy of a colonial past in which most land was
imder collective control for purposes of free livestock grazing was long considered
contrary to the modernization and intensification of agricultural production (Clausner
1973). Private ownership, guaranteeing the owner control over improvements to
farmland, was assumed to be essential to increased production by encouraging investment
in such improvements as irrigation works and the planting of perennial crops such as
9* coffee and cocoa. In the latter part of the 1 and early part of the 20* century some of the partitioning of the terrenos comuneros occurred naturally, the result of the agriculture intensification in lower lands of the Cibao and the east (Baud 1995; San Miguel 1997).
Furthermore, on numerous occasions since the early part of the 19* century, the
Dominican federal government had taken measures to break up the common lands.^ In 1907 and 1911 legislation was passed to foment the breakup of the comunero lands. But
it was the Ley de Registro de Tierras (Land Registration Law)~a law the US occupation government developed and enacted in 1920~that was to deal the final blow to the terrenos comuneros system in the Dominican Republic.
In the Cordillera Central, the dismantling of the terrenos comuneros system was a slow and uneven process, taking place over a period of 50 years. The naturalist Miguel
Canela reported the breakup of comunero holdings in the eastern part of the Sierra region as early as 1919 (Zaglul 1998). Furthermore, many of the comunero holdings surrounding Jarabacoa further east in the Cordillera, where settled agriculture through coffee farming began to become important in the early part of the century, were partitioned before the Trujillo period (1930-1961). But for most of the Cordillera Central,
the process began much later."* The entire municipality of San Jose de las Matas, located farther to the west, remained unsurveyed throughout the period of US Occupation (1916-
1924) (Georges 1990:54). In the western part of the Cordillera region the terrenos comuneros remained unsurveyed, undivided, and unregistered until the late 1950s. In
Los Postes, community elders vividly remember that the memura (the survey, partition and registration of the comimero lands) took place in 1958-59 and was associated with the formation of Bermudez National Park.
The break-up of the terrenos comuneros was a dual process. In most areas the process was initiated by the State, as described above. But in some parts of the
CordUlera, the change in the terrenos comuneros system was initiated by locals responding to the introduction of a new system of production, namely settled agriculture in the form of coffee plantations.^ Grasmuck and Pessar (1991:100-1) report the case, for example, of a community called Juan Pablo, located in the study region, in which "a few 79
of the most prosperous agricultural families," contracted surveyors in 1920 to divide the lands. These families had become increasingly interested in producing coffee and other cash crops for the market. In contrast, traditional cattle-raising families v^ere interested in retaining open access to communal grazing lands and, either in protest or due to lack of financial means, did not pay for the surveying of their lands. Those families who contracted for the siirvey were able to establish a legal claim for larger tracks than those to which they were entitled, to the detriment of the pastoral families. Grasmuck and
Pessar reported that 60 years later rancor still existed amongst the pioneering families of
Juan Pablo. By the early 1980s the families that initiated the siurvey continued to retain access to large areas of land whereas the cattle-raising families found themselves
"landless or living on less-than-subsistence plots" (Pessar and Grasmuck 1991:101-2).
But whether initiated by the State or peasants responding to new State promoted export opportunities (coffee production), the division of comunero holdings into privately
held parcels represented a move against the traditional practices of swidden and fi-ee-
ranging of livestock—the agro-pastoral complex described earlier. Peasant life in the
Cordillera was to be radically transformed.
Land distribution and agricultural reform
The early years of the Trujillo dictatorship were also marked by large-scale land distribution. According to Duarte (1980), this land distribution campaign constituted a kind of agricultural reform carried out to raise agricultural production by expanding the agricultural fi-ontier, to win the political support of the peasantry, and to consolidate control over politically sensitive areas along the border through the establishment of permanent populations of Dominicans.^ In practice, the land distributions often involved shifting campesinos into ecologically marginal areas while, as mentioned below, better
lands were concentrated in the hands of elites.
Agricultural colonies were formed in marginal lands located in the dry south and
along the Haitian Dominican border. Lands were also distributed in other areas of the
country including the remote mountainous areas of the Cibao. In 1935, more than
300,000 tareas were distributed amongst 8,657 farmers in the Santiago province, representing an average of 35 tareas per farmer. The majority of these lands~102,522 tareas (34.3%)—were located in the municipality San Jose de las Matas in the heart of the
Cordillera. In 1936 another 228,101 tareas were distributed in the province of Santiago
(29.2 tareas per farmer) (Inoa 1994:85-7).
By the end of the decade of the 30s, the process of distribution of lands in the
Cordillera had diminished considerably (San Miguel 1997:302-3). Still, as Don Martin's case in La Lomita showed, land distribution continued on a smaller scale. Elders interviewed in hamlets in the Cordillera report that local political bosses would order the alcaldes to provide landless campesinos with State lands deep in the Cordillera which they could work in order to comply with the vagrancy law.
Accumulation of land by the Trujillo state
Trujillo and his cronies exploited the process of land division and redistribution to accumulate vast reserves of land for themselves. As Crassweller (1966) points out,
Trujillo did not distinguish between his personal aggrandizement and the interests of the
Dominican State. When Trujillo came into power in 1930 he immediately began to use unscrupulous methods to personally monopolize key sectors of the Dominican economy.
No potentially profitable opportunity slipped through his grasp. The dictator developed and monopolized urban markets by gaining control over rural production. 81
Trujillo's passion was livestock, and early on he took steps to amass the best pasturelands in the country. Trujillo displaced campesinos from lands surrounding San
Cristobal, close to the capital. He set up a meat production business, eventually monopolizing the provision of meat and milk to the population of the capital. The dictator
also took an interest in agricultural production, buying up lands adjacent to proposed public irrigation projects. Early on, he accumulated the best rice lands in the provinces of
Maria Trinidad Sanchez, Valverde and San Juan de la Maguana and by the 1950s he took
over sugar cane fields that fed the Catarey, Rio Haina and Esperanza sugar factories
(Crassweller 1966). Crassweller (1966) estimated that by the early 1950s Trujillo
controlled a total of 1.5 million acres of "improved" land, a figure that did not include
vast tracts of unimproved property. According to one estimate, Trujillo personally
possessed approximately 60% of the country's best pasturelands (Georges 1990). At the
time of Trujillo's death, the Dominican State confiscated an estimated 6 million tareas of
land from Trujillo's personal holdings as well as that of his family members and
associates (Duarte 1980).
But the concentration of the best lands in the hands of Trujillo and his proxies
gradually had a negative impact on the campesino economy at the same time that it
created conditions for the degradation of existing forest In order to obtain land, large
numbers of peasants moved into ecologically marginal areas to farm lands of inferior
quality and highly susceptible to rapid degradation. As will be described later, through
land expropriations by lumber companies and the formation of national parks, even
access to the marginal lands along the so-called agricultural frontier in the Cordillera
began to be progressively restricted to the peasants in the late and post-Trujillo period. Lumber and land during the Trujillo era »
In the early years of the Dictatorship the peasants of the remote areas of the
Cordillera were spared from the direct brunt of Trujillo's voracious appetite for land.
This began to change in the early 1940s. In 1939, Trujillo hired the Puerto Rican forestry specialist Carlos E. Chardon to evaluate the country's timber reserves. Chardon reported an estimated 7300km2 of exploitable pine valued at $43,200,000 pesos constituting the most valuable of the country's harvestable tree reserves. The majority of these trees were concentrated in the Cordillera Central (7000km2) with a smaller area (300km2) in the
o Sierra de Bahoruco in the southwest (Martinez 1990).
At the time of Chardon's study, only small-scale Ixmiber operations existed in the
Cordillera (appendbc A). After the report Trujillo began to energetically promote lumbering. New lumber mills sprang up throughout the region, and Trujillo, family members, front men and sycophants actively accumulated vast amounts of forested land.
Fraud and violence were involved in many of the land acquisitions (San Miguel
1997:205). Trujillo himself and family members became actively involved in the building of roads and the establishment of mills. Trujillo also used timber concessions to reward intimate supporters, especially those from the Cibao region (Galindez 1956).^ Later in the regime, Trujillo appears to have become less directly involved in the operation of the mills, instead authorizing the selling of his personal properties as well as concessions on forested State lands to companies or individuals. But he retained an economic interest in the industry by charging a tax on every felled tree."
The increase in value of forest resources on the comimero lands created additional land grabbing opportunities. The lack of clear property limits meant that peasant shareholders interested in selling timber rights often disputed property boundaries with 83
their neighbors. To avoid conflict, shareholders would often sell timber rights to the
Santiago-based timber merchants, dividing the profits among themselves (San Miguel
1997:202).'^ Lumber companies would take advantage of the lack of clearly defined property boundaries and cross the boimdaries of their existing State concessions to cut pine on lands claimed by shareholders of a terreno comunero or they would use a concession in a comunero land to cross into State lands. Logging also resulted in evictions, as some companies were able to transform timber concessions into ownership of vast areas of land (Geilfiis 1998:3). The loggers were often able to maintain control over the land even after they had finished harvesting the trees and whether or not they
had title. When finished cutting the trees companies would often fence off the cleared lands and plant improved grasses for pasture, a de facto means of claiming ownership under the customary tenure rules and providing a basis for claiming a legal title through rights by prescription. The smaller campesinos were usually powerless in the face of these activities carried out by favored individuals with ties to the regime.
Impact of the Capture of Land and Lumber on the Peasant Economy
Land redistribution, the hoarding of land by political elites, and the laws and practices associated with lumber operations had direct impacts on the peasantry. The lumber companies obtained exclusive control over vast areas of the Cordillera Central establishing what Vargas (1992) described as "forest latifimdia". In this way, the mills monopolized peasant access to resources formerly fi^eely accessible through customary use rights. The peasants were increasingly driven onto more marginal lands located
deeper within the Cordillera.
The lumber mills also introduced other changes in the local subsistence economy.
The mills facilitated the increased incorporation of the campesinos into a cash based economy. The lumber companies built roads throughout the Cordillera, linking mountain communities to previously remote regional marketing centers. The mills also provided employment opportunities by hiring locals to perform less specialized tasks such as the felling of trees. Many of the elderly campesinos in Los Postes and Las Papas report having worked temporarily v^ith the lumber companies in this capacity, earning a wage based on the amount of timber that they would fell per day. This money would be used to purchase critical items, such as shoes, or to pay the annual tax required to obtain a cedula (LD. card).
The mills also created new market opportunities for local campesinos. Bateyes
(labor camps) were established, and semi-skilled laborers brought in to operate the machinery and carry out specialized milling tasks. The bateyes expanded the local markets for traditional campesino foodstuffs. The farmers of the region would not only sell their produce directly to the workers in the lumber mills but also to the company stores in exchange for vouchers. At the company store, the campesinos could then exchange the vouchers for imported foodstuff and goods.
Conclusion
This chapter has begun to show how the emerging power of the State and the creation and enforcement of state policies impacted the peasants of the Cordillera. The policies of the Trujillo govenmient fomented the expansion of a smallholding peasantry in the Dominican Republic. Land reform, vagrancy laws, and taxation tied peasants to specific parcels of land and encouraged the production of cash crops both for sale in the domestic market and for export. However, the measures taken by the Trujillo State to capture peasant labor and peasant surplus also set the stage for the decline of the traditional peasant economy. At the same time that the peasantry was being subjugated 85
by the State, vast tracts of land and forest resources were expropriated by political elites
interested in cattle rearing, agro-industrial ventures, and most of all, logging. In the
following chapter it will be seen that early conservation initiatives proved to be another
means used by the State to control peasant production and to capture the forest resource
upon which their traditional adaptive strategies depended.
Notes
' Whereas currently the local alcaldes pedaneos tend to be respected male community elders who attempt to resolve problems by persuasion as opposed to violence, during the Trujillo period the alcaldes pedaneos were local strongmen whose responsibilities included controlling the rural population and organizing local labor gangs. The campesinos who lived during that period frequently comment about fearing the alcalde and the Trujillo police. The words of a 54 year-old colmado owner from Las Papas who grew up in a very rural community in the southern Cordillera illustrates the repression of campesinos during the period:
When I was between 14-16 years of age, and I saw a policeman I went running off into the
mountains. Because at least I was growing and they would ask me for my ID card and I would say to
them that I did not need it (because of my age), and they would take me to prison. In that era, if you saw a stranger and you would hide because you knew that you were going to have a hard time if you were spotted You could be imprisoned vvithout committing any type of crime, the kind of latrine you had, or if you didn't have a latrine, and if you didn't have 10 tareas of land planted you were also imprisoned. They said that for Trujillo everyone was ready to go to jail because everyone was missing something.
^ Corvee labor gangs and vagrancy laws both date to the U.S. military occupation of 1916-1924, but were reactivated and strictly enforced by the Trujillo regime. With regards to the corvee labor, peasants reportedly were required to work two days a year or, in lieu of providing labor, to pay a tax in cash, the amount of which varied during the early years of the dictatorship. Failure to comply would result in imprisonment or in longer periods of forced labor (Vargas 1992).
^ As is the case of the traditional campesino productive systems in general, the comuneros land system came to be considered by political and economic elites as a "primitive" land tenure system not conducive to the growth of a modem agricultural sector. As far back as Haitian occupation (1821-1844), Boyer's
govenmient xmsuccessfully took steps to dismantle the terrenos comuneros, considering it an impediment to the intensification of agricultural production. However, it was not until the emergence of the plantation economy in the eastern part of the island at the end of the 19* century that the Dominican government began to take concrete steps to dismantle the system. The sugar plantation generated an increased demand for the lands in these areas and thereby increased their value as a commodity. Furthermore, the plantation owners desired to secure their absolute control over the lands they acquired and improved for sugar production.
During the dictatorship of Ulises Heureaux (1887-1899), the Dominican goverrmient began to take steps to dismantle the common lands in the Eastem sugar provinces. In 1907 and again in 191 1 the govenmient passed legislation calling for the division and titling of lands, but political chaos and the weakness of the govenmient during the period impeded the widespread inplementation of these measures. As described above, it was not until the US occupation that the State began to effectively dismantle the terrenos comimeros. The landmark Ley de Registro de Titulos (Land Registry Law), promulgated in 1920 by the US occupation government completely reorganized the Dominican land registration system around the Torrens System, a centralized and open land registration system that provided apphcants with a State secured indefeasible and definitive title. 86
The legal breakup of the terrenos comuneros depended on a cadastral surveys and registering individual plots to private owners in the newly formed Land Tribunal. The survey to partition the lands could be initiated either by the State or by the shareholders. In 191 1 the Law of the Division of Common Lands specified that the shareholders themselves were to initiate the breakup of the lands, requiring the surveying and division of common lands by official surveyors when one or more co-owners asked for it. On the other hand, the 1920 Law required government agents to take more aggressive steps to initiate the break-up the comunero lands. Using the concept of modernization and progress as a cover, large landowners used State sponsored mechanisms to take control of campesino lands. According to Cassa (1992) all three laws provided ample room for the emission of false titles and for dispossessing the campesinos of their lands, taking advantage of the fact that the majority could not read, could not hire lawyers, and did not fiilly understand the implications of the law. Furthermore, richer shareholders that could afford to request a survey could team up against the poorer majority to initiate the break-up of the lands and register larger portions. Consequently, as Baud (1995:156) points out, "the legislation thus supported tendencies toward social differentiation within rural society and laid bare the conflicting interests of more market-oriented, richer cultivators and the majority of the subsistence-oriented peasantry."
* Interviews with elderly informants across the region provide evidence that suggests that, the earliest partition of the common lands occurred in the eastern part of the Sierra, in the areas closer to Jarabacoa and Janico, and moved westward, albeit in an uneven fashion. In the highlands of the Sierra, in the hinterlands of the municipalities of Moncion and Santiago Rodriguez, the partitions took place much later.
' This process resembles the natural breakup of the comuneros land system that occurred in the lowlands of the Cibao valley, for example, when the hatos gave way to the planting of tobacco in response to the demand of the markets in Santiago. Widi the upsurge in the tobacco market, agricultural land began to take on value and the common management of lands naturally and gradually gave way to unfenced, privately managed plots (San Miguel 1997).
* The establishment of agricultural colonies began during the U.S. military occupation and was continued by the Trujillo regime. Between 1920 and 1961, an estimated 40 such colonies were established mvolving
the settling of approximately 1 1,500 colonist families on aroimd 2 million tareas of land (an average of approximately 195 tareas of land per family). Many of these settlements consisted of foreign immigrants settled in marginal areas. The actual impact of these settlements on increasing overall agricultural production during the period has been little smdied (Duarte 1980:158).
' Isis Duarte (1980:142) argued that the concentration of landholdings under the Trujillo regime marked a continuation of the process of displacement of campesinos begun in the late 19* century by the North American sugar companies. The ultimate effects of this process included exacerbating the minifundio agrarian structure of the country and, both directly and indirecdy, stimulating the expansion of the
agricultural fi-ontier due to the fact that the displacement of the campesinos from one area drove them into marginal areas. Wilfredo Lozano (1985:83) added that the expropriation of lands related to the consolidation of the cattle latifimdia as well as the emergence of modem agroindustrial enterprises linked to rice and coffee production in the 1940s expanded this process of landholding concentration into the Cibao
and Southern regions of the country (and here I show that lumbering made a significant contribution as well in the interior of the Cordillera, although Lozano does not mention this industry). Lozano also argued that during this period, the agricultural frontier continued to expand, but the process favored the larger scale capitalist enterprises at the expense of the peasantry, which controlled an increasingly smaller proportion of land. Throughout the 1950s the peasants became increasingly pauperized and the number of landless peasants increased significantly. Lozano claimed that by the late 1950s and early 1960s the structural problems of the Dominican govenmient in combination with the now precarious situation of the peasantry brought on a crisis in the agricultural sector.
* This was based on an estimate of 12,000,000 tareas of pine with 6 lumber quality pine trees per tarea at
the going rate of $.60 pesos per pine. It should be noted that at the time the exchange rate for the Dominican peso was on par with the US dollar. 87
' One of the most notable of these mill-owners was Antonio de la Maza, a close collaborator of the regime. De la Maza operated a mill in Restauracion, an area in the Cordillera Central very close to the Haitian/Dominican border. The previously mentioned Pilo Santelices also operated a lumber mill in the Los Postes area. Among the many others granted concessions are Santiago-based families whose last names continue to resonate as among the national oligarchy such as Mera, Bermiidez, and Guzman.
'° Taking as an example the lands that currently constitute the center of Rancier National Park, one can see an example of how the process worked. Initially claimed and titled by Trujillo himself, the dictator later sold the land to three lumber companies. The Santiago-based owners of these companies still lay claim to vast areas within the park. The largest of these landowners, the Constanza Lumber Company, claims over
1000 hectares within the park and holds a title that I have seen showing that the purchase was made from Trujillo himself in the 1950s.
" The companies paid a tax based on the amount of lumber that had been cut. Early on it was one peso per thousand feet (miliar) although the tax increased greatly numerous times diuing the 1950s, as will be described in the next chapter.
Three systems existed whereby lumber companies secured access to the forests: 1) They purchased rights to the lumber on privately held comunero lands; 2) They paid the state for a concession to cut the stands of lumber in a given area; or 3) They purchased and obtained a private land title to large tracts of forested areas. CHAPTER 5 TIMBER AND FORESTRY LAWS DURING THE TRUJILLO ERA
Introduction
In the previous chapter it was seen that peasants in the Cordillera and the
Dominican Republic in general began to experience radical changes under the Trujillo
State. State-sponsored land redistribution, expropriation by political elites of the most
fertile pastures and irrigated agricultural lands, and the land grabbing practices of the lumber companies severely restricted the peasantry's access to land. The purpose of this
chapter is to describe how the emergence and conditioning of conservation-oriented policies was paradoxically related to the same economic interests that had inspired the expropriation of land, interests typically thought of as anathema to conservation. The chapter begins by describing the process of logging and then goes on to discuss early
State forestry legislation and the oflScial rules and regulations regarding access to forest- based resources. In practice, these early conservation measures became directed not
toward preserving the natural environment but toward 1) controlling the activities of the peasant population; 2) promoting the production of coffee and other export crops; and 3) facilitating access of the lumber companies to the forests.
Traditional Cutting Versus Logging
Whereas before the Trujillo era the exploitation of timber in the Cordillera depended largely on household-based production using simple technologies and manual labor (appendix A; Georges 1990; San Miguel 1997), during the Trujillo period
88 89
logging became an industrial enterprise carried out on massive scale. The mills were mobile operations called sin Jims (literally translated as "without limits"). The companies opened roads into the forests using tractors and bulldozers.' Labor gangs felled the trees using axes. In some cases only the choice timber was removed but other sites were completely cleared. The logs were dragged out of the forest by oxen, loaded onto tractor pulled carts, and hauled to the milling site where diesel-powered saws sliced them into boards. The boards were then loaded onto trucks and transported to Santiago to be dried and sanded (Georges 1990; OEA 1967).
Only the most remote hamlets in the highest regions of the Cordillera Central went untouched by the lumber mills. For example, between 1943 and 1959, in the region currently covered by Rancier National Park, one of the more remote and inaccessible regions of the Cordillera, there were at least 19 mills (Table 5-1)—^approximately one
mill for every 30 km .
Table 5-1. Lumber mills established in the area of Rancier National Park, 1943-59 Company or Owner Area of Operation Year
Aseradero VaUe Nuevo (2) Los Vallecitos 1943 Ci'a. De Explotacion Mad. Calderon (Rancho Arriba) 1943
J. Armando Bermudez Monte Llano (Constanza) 1950 Jorge Antonio Zaiter El Convento 1955 Jose Delio Guzman El Montazo 1955 Jose Pacual Roselio La SUveria 1955 TuUo A. de Leon La Silveria 1955 Victor Manuel Bermudez El Castillo 1955 Jose A Reyes VegUo La Lechugita 1957 Tulio A. de Leon (3) Pinar Parejo 1957 Victor Santiago Infante Las Espinas 1957 Andres Medina (2) Nizao 1958 Jose Romero Keliz Sabana Keliz 1958 Diego Pesqueria El Castillo 1959 Jose Amado Garcia Pinar Bonito 1959 Source of Data: Martinez 1990 Early Forestry Legislation
During the Trujillo period (1930-1961) approximately 32 laws, 5 executive decrees, and 7 resolutions were passed to regulate the extraction of forest resources.
Seven laws were also passed to create protected areas in the form of forest reserves or national parks (appendix B).
The Secretariat of Agriculture was the government organization officially in charge of Dominican forestry regulation. At the local level, the laws were enforced by the guardabosques, the forestry guards. The forestry guard service was first established as the guarda campestre (rural guard) service in 1907 and replaced in 1934 by the cuerpo de Polida Guarda Bosque (Forestry Guard Police Corps: Law 641-1934). This police corps remained in place until the mid-1950s, when along with protected area formation the guardabosques were replaced by the Forestry Police Corps a more repressive rural
forestry police service (chapter 6).
The 1 934 law specified that the forest guards were to be assigned firearms and to make monthly rounds to guarantee complicity with the hunting, fiishing and forestry laws.
In practice, however, the forest guards during the Trujillo regime were used to conserve the stands of valuable timber for the lumber companies, progressively denying peasants their customary access to forest products and better lands. Elders in the Cordillera often bitterly remember the fact that guards generally enforced the forestry laws against small peasants and ignored the ongoing devastation being wrought by the mills.
Forestry Laws and the Lumber Companies
In 1948 Law 1688 entitled "On Forest Conservation and Fruit Trees" promulgated measures ostensibly designed to limit the ecological impact of the activities of both farmers and lumber companies.^ Areas declared to be off-limits to clearing, cutting. burning and planting included the summits of mountains, a thirty meter-wide strip of
forest along both banks of all rivers, and a ten-meter strip along the banks of streams.^
The law also required that a forested area with a radius of 150 meters be maintained around the headwaters of rivers, streams and springs as well as a 20 meter-wide forest buffer around lakes and lagoons."* The law prohibited the cutting of trees along public paths unless the trees represented a danger to the integrity of the path. Other articles of the law mandated that lumber companies take remedial steps after felling an area of
timber. Article 7, for example, prohibited the cutting of precious woods~e.g., caoba
(Swietenia mahagoni); sabina (Juniperus gracilior); espinillo (Zanthoxylum flavum); ebano (Diospyros revoluto); ebano verde (Magnolia pallescens); cedro (Cedrela odorata); roble (Catalpa Longissima Jacq.); capa (Petitia domingensis Jacq.); nogal (Juglans jamaicensis); granadillo (Ateramnus lucidus)~without replanting at a proportion of 20 to
1 . Furthermore, in theory, only trees whose trunks fell above a specified diameter could be cut (Regulations 323-39 and 9295-53).
While ostensibly passed to moderate the impact of the lumber companies, other laws pertaining to forests seemed uniquely designed to accommodate rather than control
logging. For example, scientific standards tend to begin to consider slopes over 20 degrees as high erosion risk, yet the law permitted slopes up to 60 degrees to be
transformed from forest into cultivated or pasture lands (i.e., logged).'
Forestry Laws and Peasants
The architects of the forestry laws passed during the 1940s and 1950s were clearly bent not on conservation per-se but rather on keeping peasants away from valuable stands of timber that could be exploited by the mills. Cutting precious woods was prohibited for "any other purpose in which the utility does not compensate for the 92
destruction of the trees," which effectively eliminated the cutting of valviable trees for traditional peasant uses, such use as firewood or the making of charcoal and fence posts.
The extraction of forest subproducts such as rubber, resins, essential oils, roots, cuttings or any other forest subproducts through which the activity "could result in permanent damage to the trees" was prohibited without a permit issued by the Secretariat of
Agriculture (Gaceta 1948:214).
In 1948 modifications to law 1688 technically required that a permit be obtained fi-om the Ministry of Agriculture for the felling of all trees.^ Obtaining a permit is a simple administrative task for an urban-based logging company employing secretaries and lawyers, but difiBcult for illiterate peasants living in the remote mountains. In the case of private or comunero lands, the solicitors of a permit had to either demonstrate they were the proprietors of the land upon which the trees were to be cut or they had to present a notarized authorization Irom the legal proprietors. According to the law, in the case of the felling of trees on State lands the solicitors were required to produce a legally obtained and currently valid concession to the timber issued by the State. Peasants did not get large timber concessions.
Law 1746-48 required that the clearing of all lands for planting be authorized by the Ministry of Agriculture, meaning that peasants now needed permission fi-om the State
to clear trees even to plant a traditional garden plot, the basis of peasant livelihood. In
the quest to generate State revenues via agricultural import substitution and increased
export crop production. Law 1688-48 prohibited the cutting of coffee, fiiiit and palm
trees.' Cacao trees could be cut only under very specific circumstances, such as when the
trees were excessively old or diseased. The penalties for cutting coffee or cacao ranged
fi-om a fine of 1 00 to 2000 pesos and 3 months to 2 years of incarceration. 93
Enforcement of the Forestry Laws
More important than a bias in the law favoring the lumber companies was discrimination in the application of the law. Lumber companies reportedly did as they pleased. Lands were clear-cut, trees leveled with no regard for trunk size, and replanting seldom occurred.^ Part of the reason laws were not enforced against the lumber companies lay in the fact that mill owners were front men or close associates of Trujillo, people who were hardly intimidated by lowly, typically illiterate, forestry guards.
Indeed, elderly campesinos report that in the areas in which they operated mill owners were in complete control, they were the autoridades (authorities).
Another reason for the privileged position of the mills and the lack of enforcement has to do with tax revenues. Milling operations in this period generated significant government revenue, a good deal of which was appropriated directly by
Trujillo or family members such his brother Petan.^ In 1937 a one-peso tax was established on every thousand square feet of wood produced by the mills. By 1951, this tax had been increased to an average of $12.00 per thousand square feet (Law No. 3005), and by 1958 a flat tax of 8% was charged on the profits of enterprises that exploited lumber (Law No. 5191).'*^ Between 1953 and 1960, official figures cite that an average of 29.56 million square feet of lumber was produced in the country per year, producing
annual yearly revenues of $354,744 pesos, although it is likely that the amount was considerably higher taking into account the dubious record keeping of the time. Also important was the growing urban demand for cheap lumber by industries and construction companies in the growing urban areas. Indeed, many of the companies that required the lumber produced in the Cordillera were controlled by Trujillo himself While laws were not enforced against the logging operations, the same was not completely true for peasants. During the Trujillo dictatorship, the small farmers of the
Cordillera were increasingly subject to the legal restrictions on the access to forest resources. However, as discussed in the previous chapter, taking into account the fact that the Trujillo regime also wished to foment peasant production, particularly production of export crops such as cocoa and coffee, complete access by peasants to State lands and forest resources was not entirely cut off." Campesinos retained access to trees of a quality or species considered to lack commercial value that could be used to build fences required to protect gardens from free ranging livestock. Campesinos of the era also report that they would not have to get a written permit but rather just permission from alcaldes and forestry guards in order to clear lands to establish a new conuco. These
authorities generally proved permission if there was no valuable timber on the lands
identified for clearing. Informants also report that the authorities proved relatively
flexible in allowing them to cut down better logs for critical needs, such as for the fixing
of a damaged house or to make coffins.'^
In many areas of the Cordillera the traditional peasant economy, although under
ever increasing pressure, continued to subsist along the margin of the lumber operations.
In the latter part of the Trujillo dictatorship campesino agriculture often followed on the
heels of the mills. Prohibited from working on lands that contained stands of valuable
timber, and progressively denied access to lands appropriated by the lumber companies,
the campesinos would establish conucos on lands that the mills had already cleared. In
the words ofone informant: '
Here the aserraderos (mills) opened roads and feUed the pine, and we would fell the remaining forest for agriculture. We would work where the lumber mills 95
went. They would go in ahead and we would follow from behind. Because where there was ebano verde (Magnolia pallescens) and pine the mills would fell
it. And then, on those lands, we wouldn't be scared that we would have problems with the authorities, because the valuable wood was akeady gone.
Elderly peasants describe that alcaldes and foresters would more easily provide
permission to fell conucos on marginal lands in which all valuable stands of timber had been felled and that had been abandoned by the mills. Especially in the period before protected area formation was consolidated in the mid-1950s, in this way a kind of symbiotic relationship was established between the clearing of lands by the lumber mills and the continuation of campesino subsistence agriculture.''' The building of roads by the mills also facilitated the occupation of lands deeper in the heart of the Cordillera at a time that the land was becoming increasingly scarce due to concentration and natural population growth in the lower, more densely populated areas of the Cordillera."* The mills cleared marginal lands of valuable timber that the laws were designed to protect,
facilitating occupation by peasants eager to find fresh lands on which to plant at the same time as further exposing these areas, many on steep slopes in higher watershed areas, to
further environmental degradation.'^
Conclusion
The State-supported expansion of timber production in the Cordillera had a pervasive social and environmental impact on the region, especially in previously remote hinterland areas where the best stands of pine were to be found. As the Trujillo regime
consolidated its control over the rural areas, the felling of valuable timber by campesinos was increasingly penalized with imprisonment or severe fines. By the early 1950s, the
system of guardabosques (forestry guards) was replaced by a more repressive rural police
force. The police controlled access to forested lands with the primary purpose of 96
protecting the valuable and taxable stands of timber now reserved for the lumber mills.
Even more so than forestry laws, however, what was to have an even more significant
impact on the lives of the campesinos in the Cordillera was protected area formation, as
will be discussed in the following chapter.
Notes
' The vast majority of the rural penetration roads that exist today in the Cordillera Central started as lumber roads.
^ The first version of this law had been passed in 1928. In 1934 it was replaced by an updated version and in 1948 was replaced by Law No. 1688.
^ Law 1688-48 provided for a 20 meter forested buffer along the banks of rivers. This was rapidly changed, however, to a thirty meter-wide strip in Law 1746-48.
According to the law, violation of these provisions was punishable by a fine of 10 to 200 pesos or one to six months of prison.
' This slope figure just provides a general guideline. The erodibility of soils involves several factors that determine the susceptibility of soils to "degradational forces", including factors that "influence surface flows" such as "rainfall amounts and intensities, soil structure and texture, vegetation, and large and small surface features" (Wilken 1987:97).
* During this period, the Secretariat of Agriculture was officially known as the Secretaria de Estado de Agricultura, Pecuaria y Colonizacion (the Secretariat of State of Agriculture, Livestock and Colonization). Throughout the Trujillo period, the name of the Secretariat of Agriculture was modified numerous times as
it assumed different responsibilities. Nevertheless, the Secretariat held wide-ranging powers in the rural areas throughout the Trujillo period.
^ The only exception to this provision was regarding the manacla palm which campesinos commonly used in the construction of their bohios.
* Testimony to the fact that the enforcement of the law to replant precious woods at a 20 x 1 ratio was proving problematic to enforce was the fact that, between 1934 and 1953, this same legal mandate was
established in at least four separate laws or regulations: 641-34, 523-39, 1688-48, and 9295-53 (appendix B).
' For example, according to Law 3005-51, 20% of taxes collected on lumber were to be reserved to fiind conservation initiatives or forestry police at the complete discretion of the Executive Power (Trujillo). This provision was modified in 1954 to read as follows: "20% of that produced by the tax established by the
present law remains specialized for conservation and forestry police, and other matters [my ital], in a way to be determined by the Executive Power" (Gaceta 1951b:404, auth. trans.).
There were a number of exceptions to this flat rate. For example, wood that was felled for the construction of containers used to box fruit was only taxed at the rate of $2.40 per thousand square feet and was reimbursable if the boxes were used for exporting crops. Similarly, the export of the most precious woods implied paying a higher tariff ($18.00 pesos per thousand feet). 97
" Baud (1995:212) provides an interesting commentary on the Trujillo regime's seemingly contradictory policies of fomenting small-scale peasant agricultare at the same time as fomenting capitalist-relations of productions in the countryside:
The Trujillo regime tried to reconcile two objectives in its policy toward rural society and agricultural
production. On the one hand, it aimed at keeping rural society intact, promoting small-scale agriculture, and even proclaiming a guaranteed access to ten tareas of land for every peasant family. On the other hand, the regime stimulated the penetration of capitalist relations of production in the
countryside and did all it could to free labor for government and private projects. These apparently contradictory objectives could be harmonized temporarily because of the rapid demographic growth in this period and the abundance of imcultivated land.
In the same way, at least until the latter years of the regime when conservation pohcies intensify due to park formation, the Trujillo authorities appear to have attempted to achieve a balance between conserving valuable stands of timber for intensive exploitation by the lumber mills while, at the same time, assuring that campesinos would have access to the ten tareas of land to which they were entitled.
This is one of the chief complaints that campesinos make regarding current foresters, that diey will not even provide permission to cut a tree when wood is needed to make a coffm.
This is a paradoxical mirror image of what happens in Amazonia, where impoverished farmers precede the highly capitalized ranchers, acting as agents of the deforestation of lands which they, the ranchers, subsequently appropriate.
The mills even contributed to the expansion of subsistence agriculture on lands that technically fell outside of their concessions. For example, elders in Las Papas discuss the fact that the campesinos would often give the mills permission to clear forested lands in their possession but to which they had no access in exchange for leaving the lands cleared. Once cleared of valuable timber the Forestry Guards would no longer object to the clearing by campesinos of valueless stumps, trees and shrubs for the establishment of conucos on lands that had been abandoned by the mills.
" Upon the invitation of prominent Dominican conservationist Miguel Canela, in 1953 a Professor H. Humbert, member of the French Academy of Sciences, visited the mountainous areas of the Dominican Republic and reported on the process of deforestation taking place in the remote areas of the Cordillera within the study region. Humbert's observations provide interesting insight into the links between the social and ecological processes taking place in the Cordillera at the time and the ways that the campesino economy continued to subsist along the margins and within the crevices of the lumbering activities. According to Humbert, the elimination of native pine forest was taking place in three steps with each corresponding to a particular stage of forest change. In the first step or phase, the lumber mills effectively cleared large areas of landscape using mechanical devices. The opening of new roads, "into the deepest areas of the Cordillera Central, using bulldozers and dynamite was particularly destructive. "The product of
these destructive activities is appropriated by the lumber mills and is transported by trucks: magnificent pieces of the trunks of pine trees that frequently measure .5 meters on each side once the trunk has been squared." In the second phase, Himibert observed that campesinos would move in and establish farm plots on the areas cleared in this way. According to Humbert, these farm plots were initially established on "terrain left covered with trunks and pieces of burnt trees, on steep slopes of 30 to 40 degrees." The thin and sandy topsoil of these plots originally cleared by the lumber mills "ensure that these terrains will only be farmed for two or three harvests." In the third and final step of the process, the farm plots were abandoned and these abandoned areas quickly become covered with a vivacious graminea (Milinis minutiflora), a type of grass that had
"recently" been introduced to the island from Brazil due to its excellent properties for use in pasture. According to Humbert, the disadvantage to this species for forest regeneration, especially in mountainous
areas, is that this type of grass is highly flammable in dry periods. In the case of a forest fire, the open
grasslands quickly transfer the fire to the borders of the surrounding forest. Furthermore, according to Humbert, the species spreads well under the canopy of pine forest further exacerbating the effects of forest 98
But the thick grasses, when fires. Pine regenerates well after fire assuming that the seeds can germinate. densely covering the ground, impede the development of namral seed beds, impeding the germination of forested lands into the pine seeds after the passing of a forest fu-e, and thus promoting the transition of grasslands and pasture (Zaglul 1998:236-7, auth. trans.). CHAPTER 6 CRIMES OF THE FOREST: CANELA AND THE CREATION OF BERMUDEZ NATIONAL PARK
Introduction
The previous chapter showed that during the Trujillo period laws pertaining to the forest resources began to restrict previously uncontrolled peasant productive strategies.
The State increasingly employed militarized forestry guards to curtail traditional campesino productive activities. Clearing for conucos and the use of timber required permission from legal authorities. Enforcement of the new laws was ostensibly meant to preserve trees and the environment and to encourage production for export. The conservationist motives of the State were, however, contradicted by the rapacious and essentially unfettered destruction of the forests by lumber companies, an industry controlled by Trujillo and his associates. These largely urban-based political elites used conservation laws and land distribution to facilitate a massive expropriation of land for their own use.
This chapter will demonstrate that the repression of the peasantry and the
expropriation of vast areas of land had its corresponding ideological rationales. Early in the 1920s a nascent conservation movement emerged in the city of Santiago. While clearly interested in conserving the forests for logical reasons, primarily the conservation of water, environmentalists and government oflBcials also used 'conservation' as a justification for State intervention in rural peasant society and the criminalization of
peasant activities. Peasant productive strategies were portrayed as backward, ineflBcient,
99 100
and irrational. The peasants themselves were often described essentially as environmental predators with a "flawed understanding of the natural world" (Jacoby 2001 :2).
Conservation ideology was commandeered by the political elites to facilitate the accomplishment of their own environmentally catastrophic business ventures, specifically logging, cattle ranching, and agroindustrial enterprises. This is not to say that there were not other incentives for conservation policies. For example, the international community increasingly pressured the Dominican govenmient to set park resources aside. But stereotypical images of rapacious campesino productive strategies provided the ideological rationale for moving the peasants off of land and outlawing their subsistence practices. In the name of conservation large numbers of campesinos were displaced, traditional peasant productive activities were criminalized, and vast areas of forest hitherto used by peasants in their quest for survival were legislated out of existence. By the end of the Trujillo era, 'conservation' dramatically altered peasant life in the
Cordilleran highlands.
In this chapter the formation of Armando Bermudez National Park is used as a case study to illustrate the process by which park formation was used to fiirther wrest lands and forest resources from the peasants. The passage of four laws in the period from
1928-1956 ultimately resulted in the formation of Armando Bermudez National Park in
1956. By 1958 with the creation of the Jose del Carmen Ramirez National Park, two extensive national parks covered the heart of the Cordillera. The circvmistances surrounding the formation of Bermudez shed light on the origins and evolution of the conservationist policies. As with the early forestry laws described in the previous chapter, formation of the parks and the more purely conservation-oriented policies 101
associated with their formation were conditioned by the special economic interests of the
political elites, not least of all the lumber interests.
Park Formation: Armando Bermudez National Park
In a recent work, Karl Jacoby points out that in the United States the conservation
movement is best known for its "pantheon of conservationist prophets", figures such as
John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt and Henry David Thoreau, who "laid the political and
also intellectual groundwork for the movement" (2001 : 1-2). The Dominican Republic
has its pantheon of conservationist prophets and heroes, with two of the most important
and influential being Dr. Miguel Canela Lazaro (1894-1977) and Dr. Juan B. Perez
' t Rancier (1883-1968). ;
Canela was a prominent medical doctor and influential Dominican citizen. He
was bom in the city of Santiago de los Caballeros but later established his home in the
nearby smaller town of Salcedo. Described as an introvert and eccentric by those who
remember him, Canela was also a kind of Renaissance man. In addition to being a
doctor, he was a self-taught botanist, an adventurer, astronomer, nature writer and land
surveyor who, when not exploring the mountains of the Central Cordillera, spent
extended periods of time in Paris studying medicine (Zaglul 1998). Canela maintained
close connections to and was favored by Trujillo regime, receiving numerous government
appointments during the 1940s and early 1950s, including a medicine professorship at the
University of Santo Domingo and an appointment as a Specialist in Hydrology and
Forestry (Tecnico en Hydrologia y Foresta) for the Ministry of Agriculture.
Perez, a prominent Santiago-based lawyer, was Canela' s indefatigable companion
in many excursions to the mountains.' Together they explored the remote areas of the
Cordillera and spent the better part of their lives lobbying for the preservation of the 102
Yaque del Norte River, located in the heart of the Cibao Valley, lifeblood of the municipality of Santiago.
Table 6-1. Summary of stages and impact of the formation of Armando Bermiidez National Park Stage Years Law(s) Description Impacts on peasants
1919- 1052-28 The Vedado del Yaque del 95 peasant families were 1928 Norte was established on displaced from the area of the eastern side of the the Preserve. All activities Sierra region of the within the Preserve were Cordillera Central. restricted.
1 948- 3 1 07-5 1 The first Armando Bermudez The protected area was
1 95 1 National Park was delimited but the law established on the westem appears to not have been side of the Sierra. strictly enforced.
1 95 1 - 3 84 1 -54 An hitegrated NaUiral Law 3 84 1-54 called for 1955 Reserve, creating a displacements of campesino 4120-55 protected area linking the families and strict controls Vedado del Yaque del on the activities of lumber Norte and the Armando companies. Law 4120-55 Bermudez National Park, derogated the controversial
was formed. 3841-54 soon after it was passed. 1955- 4389-56 The Armando Bermudez Massive displacements of 1959 National Park Forest campesinos from the area of Reserve replaced the the park. Forest zones were Integrated Natural Reserve. created for the lumber mills This park persists up until in which agricultural the present day. activities are prohibited. Other lands close to the park were declared coffee zones where traditional subsistence
agriculture is restricted. Uses of the park lands for grazing, the hunting of feral pigs by monteros, and subsistence farming were prohibited. Terrenos comuneros were divided. A new Forestry Police Corps was formed to capture and punish the law's violators.
Both of these men, but especially Canela, played a key role in early conservation
and in the formation of Armando Bermudez National Park. The formation of the park, in 103
its current form, occurred over four stages that took 36 years (Table 6-1). The writings and reports of both of these dedicated conservationists were intimately linked to the process of formation and provide key insights into conservation issues during the period.
Their works also provide insight into the components of an emerging conservationist narrative that was used to impugn the peasant as the culprits of the environmental devastation of the Cordillera due to their 'backward' productive practices, thus setting the stage for the progressive criminalization of traditional peasant activities.
Stage 1: Formation of the Vedado del Yaque del Norte (1919-1928)
The Armando Bermudez National Park was formed in four stages. The first stage of park formation took place in the early 1920s and coincides with the early establishment of irrigation in the Yaque River bottomlands stimulated by the US
Occupation government. Within a few short years after the establishment of the first small-scale irrigation systems in the Yaque Valley, the concept of irrigation rapidly gained popular acclaim and, by 1924, had become incorporated into the "political bandwagon" of Dominican political parties (Antonini 1968:1 16).
It was during this same period, between 1919 and 1926, that Canela and Perez carried out a series of expeditions in the Cordillera and sent alarming reports to the
Santiago Chamber of Commerce calling attention to the degradation of the forests in the headwaters of the Yaque del Norte River and along its banks.'^ The introduction to the second report by Canela and Perez, submitted to the Chamber of Commerce in 1924, displayed the dramatic and urgent tone that characterized their writings:
Lack of foresight is frequently the cause of great wrongs for peoples as well as for individuals and we are presented with the beautifiil opportunity of providing an example of patriotic foresight, protecting the waters of the Yaque del Norte against the dangers that ignorance and the indolence of the campesinos and the indifference of the authorities have threatened them with. [Report of Perez and 104
Canela to the Santiago Chamber of Commerce, May 27, 1924, reproduced in full
in Zaglul 1998:87-89, auth. trans.]
In the report Canela and Perez argued that the headwaters of the Yaque del Norte, the only source of irrigation water for the northwestern Cibao lowlands, were being threatened by the progressive penetration of peasants from both the north (Santiago province) and the south (La Vega region) into the mountains.^ They further reported that campesinos, in violation of existing laws and with the support of the alcaldes pedaneos of the area, had begun to establish conucos along the rivers, using the very banks as barriers.
Adopting the slogan Yaque Septentrionalis Protegendus Est Nobis! they recommended that the lands surrounding the key headwaters and tributaries of the Yaque be purchased and turned into a nature reserve:
The grave danger that threatens the Yaque del Norte is not. . .remote but
immediate. . . .It is important that we hurry to bring this project to a happy ending,
because it is neither just, wise, nor prudent that the agricultural future of Santiago and Montecristi should be abandoned to the whims of a few ignorant campesinos and a few lazy authorities. [Zaglul 1998:89, auth. trans.]
Canela offered to voluntarily conduct the survey to delimit the reserve. The initial estimate of the cost to purchase the lands and mejoras (improvement rights) was
DR$2000 pesos (US$2000), a relatively modest sum even for that time. In the report to the Chamber, Canela and Perez also recommended taking measures to protect the watershed of northwestern Cibao, which they asserted could also be carried out at a moderate cost through the purchase of shares in the comunero lands and by using these shares to take possession of the forested areas close to the headwaters."* By 1926 the US
Occupation had ended and the Secretary of Agriculture and Immigration had assumed charge of the Yaque reserve project, providing Canela and Perez with a budget of $2500 pesos to purchase the required acciones (land shares) and pay for helpers to carry out the 105
final delimitation of the reserve. Working with a team of campesino guides they marked the boundaries by cutting a swath through the vegetation (Zaglul 1998:96-121).
The task of surveying complete, Perez and Canela presented the Ministry of
Agriculture with a two-part report. The first part of the report described the social processes of environmental degradation that they perceived as affecting the headwaters of the river. The activities of the peasants in the mountains were clearly responsible for the negative environmental impacts that Perez and Canela observed in the mountains (no lumber mills had yet been established) and, as described below, Canela later proved to be an objective observer of the causes of environmental change in the Cordillera. However, the language that they used in their report to describe the rationale for campesino activities reflects the stereotypical attitudes towards peasants that predominated amongst the elite sectors of Dominican society of the time~a backward and non-progressive element of Dominican society that had to be transformed if the country was to advance.
This kind of rhetoric towards the peasants was already increasingly common in the official discourse and was used to justify the passage of legislation that would progressively criminalize traditional forms of peasant production.^
For example, in the 1924 report Canela and Perez had pinpointed the penetration of agriculture into the highlands and the clearing of the forest along the upper banks of
the Yaque and its tributaries as the primary threat to the watershed. In the 1926 report they added forest fires to the equation of pressing threats to the area. The persistence of forest fires has long been one of the primary fiaistrations for Dominican and foreign foresters and conservationists (Luna 1984; Martinez 1990). Whereas there is little doubt that the peasants were responsible for setting fires in the forest and that peasants were not
environmentalists, the persistent image of the peasant arsonist is based on the notion that 106
the campesinos have a complete disregard for and misunderstanding of the use of fire. It
still constitutes one of the dominant images of the environmentally predatory peasant in the Dominican Republic. According to the 1926 report,
In some areas of the country, the excuse provided for setting fire to the hills is the need to bum the pine needles that, accumulated on the ground, impedes the
growth of grasses that serve as pasture for cattle. . .This excuse cannot work in the region of the headwaters of the Yaque because there aren't any animals grazing, neither cows, nor pigs nor horses. Nevertheless, all of the hills there that encircle
the headwaters of the Yaque ands its watersheds . . .have been burned in the last 10 years. [Zaglul 1998:100-1, auth. trans.]
Canela and Perez offered no practical explanation for the peasant use of fires. Instead
they fell back on stereotypical notions of the utter backwardness of the peasantry:^
The montero (mountaineer) by profession is a lazy person who does not work the lands except fi-om time to time to make botados (quickly abandoned conucos). It
is not to be doubted, therefore, that the montero is a threat to the forests where he lives, which they are content to bum when they find the narrow trails that they customarily traverse blocked by brambles. It's easier to light a match than to chop a path with a machete. The seeker of wild honey is also an individual who is dangerous to the
forests. In essence, he is almost as lazy as the mountaineer and after he cuts down
the tree in which the beehive is located he has to proceed to extract the
honeycombs, from there is bom, with almost total certainty, a fire. [Zaglul 1998:101, auth. trans.]^
The alarming descriptions of the causes of the degradation of the Yaque
reinforced Canela and Perez's argument that the headwaters and primary tributaries of the
river were facing immediate threats from predatory peasants. The peasants had to be
removed through rapid and decisive action. The second part of the report provided a
detailed description of the proposed limits of the reserve as well as the legal status of the
lands. The final reserve would cover some 200,000 tareas in the municipahties of
Jarabacoa, Janico and San Jose de las Matas. As representatives of the Secretariat during
this period, Canela and Perez also reached agreements with the shareholders of a number
of terrenos comuneros to acquire lands falling within the proposed reserve for the 107
symbolic value of one centavo per tarea.^ They only identified 95 individuals, however, who would have to be displaced from the proposed reserve, including 1 8 families residing in the area in humble shacks {chozas) and 14 farmers with cultivated lands
{labranzas) in the areas. They proposed paying for the mejoras of these individuals in compensation for their having to abandon the area. Canela and Perez do not report significant conflicts with the proprietors or residents of the area in the course of forming the reserve (Zaglul 1998:102).
On the if^ of February, 1928, Canela and Perez's efforts cubninated with Law
No. 1052, President Horacio Vasquez declaring the founding of the Vedado del Yaque del
Norte (the Yaque del Norte Forest Preserve). The declaration marked the formation of the
first extensive protected area in the Dominican Republic and ended the first stage of the formation of what would uUimately become Armando Bermiidez National Park.
Second Stage: The First Armando Bermudez National Park
After the formation of the Vedado del Yaque del Norte, Canela enrolled in the
University of Paris, where he would acquire his doctoral degree in medicine. In his
absence, costly steps were taken to modernize Dominincan agricultural production.
Between 1930 and 1950 the number of irrigated tareas of land in the country went from
48,000 to 1,518,883 (hioa 1994:124) During the same period, irrigation works were built
throughout the northwestern Cibao all along the Yaque Valley floor from Santiago in the
west to the Yaque delta near Monte Cristi, using both the waters of the Yaque del Norte
River as well as tributary streams (Antonini 1968:1 16-120). Trujillo himself, as
mentioned earlier, expropriated significant areas of irrigated land either through force or
as payment by landowners to the government of the cuota parte, a percentage of the land
(generally 25%) in return for the right-of-way use of the irrigation waters. Some of the 108
others were given to lands thus appropriated were redistributed to political associates;
governments rural campesinos for the formation of agricultural colonies under the
regime granted the colonization program. Similariy, in the Yaque delta the Trujillo
plantation including the United Fruit Company concessions to establish a massive banana
lands required to right to expropriate under the Law of Eminent Domain all of the
1966).^ establish infrastructure, such as irrigation canals and roads (Franco
But the dictator himself retained significant holdings of lands adjacent to
Trujillo grabbed proposed irrigation projects. To provide an idea of the amount of land
confiscated 553,419 for himself and friends, within a year of his assassination, the State
family tareas in Santiago and 294,745 tareas in Monte Cristi belonging to Trujillo,
members, and close associates (Clausner 1973:235; Crassweller 1966).
As the negative environmental consequences of the regime's policies in the
mountains became increasingly apparent and lowland water became increasingly scarce
and valuable, concern grew over the deforestation of highland watersheds. Not only
domestic pressures, but external interest also mounted as the international community
turned attention towards environmental conservation during this period. In 1942, the
Dominican Republic ratified the Pan-American Union's Convention on Nature Protection
and Wild Life Preservation in the Western Hemisphere. In 1948 the country signed the
Constitution that formed the World Conservation Union (lUCN). Both of these
conventions called for countries to collaborate in the protection of endangered species
and to take measures to form protected areas and natural reserves to protect outstanding
scientific, scenic or historical examples of nature.
Returning from Paris in the early 1940s, Canela once again took to championing
conservation in the Cordillera. In 1948 he was hired by the Dominican government to 109
conduct a cadastral survey for the formation of a second protected area. Canela's reports of the period illustrate the palpable changes that had taken place as a result of the expansion of agriculture in the highlands. But more importantly, Canela expressed alarm
at the impact of the lumber mills. In a 1949 memorandum directed to the Secretary of
Agriculture, Canela described the "devastation" of the forests in the western Cordillera-- an area located in close proximity to Don Martin's La Lomita.'° In his dramatic tone,
Canela wrote: "I have been able to verify alanning clearings in the watersheds of the
Amina, El Dajao and Magua rivers, which seriously threaten the protection of the waters
and forests in this area" (Zaglul 1998:206, auth. trans.).
Canela's actions from this point on demonstrate that he was a dedicated
environmentalist and an honest observer of the forces behind the deforestation of the
Cordillera. In contrast to the peasants that he reported in the 1920s as the primary threat
to the headwaters of the Yaque, Canela now identified the lumber companies as the
primary threat. Canela reported that the Espaillat Lumber Company had invaded both
State and private lands and was rapidly expanding its activities further into the interior of
the Cordillera, clearing all lands including the banks of the rivers and streams:
The invasion of the State lands with potential preservation value. . .has begun. Like fast and threatening arrowheads, they [the lumber mills] rise toward the sources of the Amina, Magua, Dajao rivers and their tributaries. For now, the
damage is limited to large incisions made in the pine tree for the purposes of tapping the resin, but the true objective is to turn this into an ACT OF POSSESSION to prepare the cutting of these same pines. This is the customary tactic. [Zaglul 1998:208, auth. trans.]
Canela notes that the company's appetite for pine was so insatiable that it was sending
out brigades of workers armed with motorized handsaws to fell timber growing on steep
slopes. The mill felled pine along the banks of rivers, streams and springs in violation of 110
peasants took the law "with little regard for the consequences". The activities of the now on a secondary importance:
The primitive conuco system is the cause of great damage. Nevertheless, one must recognize that these [conucos], although of a cumulative character, are slow. [The environmental impact] can take decades. But [the damages] occasioned by the lumber mill in the region have to be counted, not in years, but in days. [Zaglul 1998:208, auth. trans.]
Whereas the lumber mills carried out their activities with complete impunity,
Canela stated that "the forest guards (guardabosques) and other functionaries ONLY control the small conuco clearings, but NOT the irreparable and massive devastation produced by the cutting of wood in these mountains." Canela also pointed out that the mill was invading comunero lands owned by the campesinos. Nevertheless, he observed that, "the [campesinos] have not protested [the invasion of their lands], due to
carelessness, timidity or for some other reason" (Zaglul 1998:208-9, auth. trans.).
Canela' s reports and cadastral surveys during this period became the basis for the
formation of a second protected area. Law No. 3107 of 1951 declared the formation of a
national park and forestry reserve to protect the watersheds of the Amina, Mao and
Guayubin rivers located in the western part of the Sierra (Gaceta 1951). On Canela's
recommendation, the park was (ironically) named after Armando Bermudez, one of the
most influential Santiago-based lumber mill owners, a homage to "the moral support he
provided to the project" and for donating land to the park (Zaglul 1998). Activities to be
prohibited within the limits of the park included the "cutting, destroying, mutilating,
pulling out, burning and tapping trees and plants; molesting, scaring, following,
capturing, and hunting any species of wild animals or destroying the eggs and nests of
wild birds in the park; and excavations, the creation of earthworks or embankments, the
extraction of materials or any other activity that modifies the shape or affects the Ill
conservation of the land or vegetation of the park." Violators of these prohibitions faced
"a fine of 50 to 2000 pesos and prison from one month to two years. In the case of a repeated offense, the double of the previously applied sanction would be applied"
(Gaceta 1951:521-2, auth. trans.).
Canela's continued protests and the legal formation of the park in 1951 did not, however, detain the Espaillat Lumber Company. In 1953, in a report published in
Santiago's El Caribe newspaper, Canela reported:
I thought that the first effective step [towards halting the lumber company] would
be Law No. 3107, but it is sad to confess that to the present date the [law] has been dead words; the lumber mill maintains an anarchic state of destruction and dissociation in the area that requires a solution. As a result, the fundamental measure towards saving the park, the rivers and the irrigation canals and
agriculture of the Cibao, is that the order should be given, without losing a day, to move that mill.
Canela further protested that "the clearing of conucos has accelerated in recent months, due to a veiled campaign by the mill, the shortage in root crops, the sterility of the land, restrictions in official permits within and outside of the park, and permits conceded by non-authorized functionaries, etc." (Zaglul 1998:243-4, auth. trans.)." His recommended solution was to relocate the campesinos to areas more appropriate for farming. The displacements of campesinos from the region would not take place, however, until the fourth stage of park formation.
Third Stage: The Formation of the Integrated Natural Reserve
The formation in 1 95 1 of the first Armando Bermudez National Park meant there were now two separate reserves, the first, created earlier, on the eastern side of the
Cordillera protecting the Yaque del Norte watershed and the second, the newly created reserve, on the western side protecting the water sources of the northwestern Cibao. A strip between these two parks, in the watershed of the Bao River, remained unprotected, an issue to which Canela next turned his attention.
On the 30"* of September 1953, Canela was named the &st and only "National
Director for the Protection of Natural Resources and Nature in General in the Country", a
powerful position with a flowery title that reported directly to the President of the
Republic (Trujillo). On the 1^ of October, the day after taking office, Canela published an article in El Caribe newspaper detailing the numerous conflicts affecting the
conservation of the Armando Bermudez National Park since its inception in 1951.
Canela pointed out that there were a diverse number of influential interest groups unhappy about the efforts to protect the watersheds, including lumber miUs, intermediaries, and some government officials. These interests groups attempted to manipulate the land surveys taking place for the division of the terrenos comuneros in order to alter the boundaries of the Yaque del Norte Reserve and the newly formed
Armando Bermudez National Park. He ftirther accused the lumber companies of hoarding lands in the Cordillera and of continuing to purchase shares and property rights to lands within the reserve, operating in collusion with surveyors and judges in the Land
Tribunal to register these lands as private before they were entered into the public domain. Finally, he accused these groups of masking their own agenda and manipulating the cause of campesinos, the lumber companies having claimed that increasing poverty of the campesinos could be attributed to conservation laws (Zaglul 1998:243-52).
In light of the ongoing violations of the reserves, Canela viewed the remaining unprotected corridor of land that separated the Yaque del Norte Reserve from the
Armando Bermudez National Park as a vulnerable point that was being used by the lumber companies to progressively penetrate into the interior of the Cordillera and 113
threaten the borders of the existing protected areas. Canela's concerns are expressed in
Law 3841 of 1 954 that declared the Bao River and its tributaries to be a forestry preserve
(Gaceta 1954). The law, drafted by Canela himself, was the culmination of his lifelong
project to protect all of the headwaters of the major rivers that feed into the Cibao Valley.
The law provided for the formation of a new nature reserve that would protect the watershed of the Bao River and its tributaries. The lands within the new reserve were declared to be of eminent domain, their conservation necessary for the healthy development of the Republic. Furthermore, the law consolidated the triad of the Vedado del Yaque del Norte, the Armando Bermudez National Park, and the new Bao River
protected area as a single Integrated Natural Reserve. The law provided for a 1 km wide protected buffer zone along the northern boundary of the reserve, and a 5 km buffer zone along the southern boundary. A 500 meter wide protected strip was declared along the riverbeds of the Bao and Jagua Rivers.
Law 3841-54 also provided for the displacement of the families living within the new protected area and prohibited the use of lands and resources within the new reserve.
The law was much more explicit in criminalizing specific behaviors than had been previous laws. Agricultural activities, the exploitation of timber, the burning and tapping of trees, the setting of traps, hunting, and the raising of livestock within the reserve and the buffer area were all prohibited under the new law. These provisions also called for protected "buffer" zones, although in these areas the Secretariat of Agriculture could authorize, on a case-by-case basis, small clearings for cultivation. In an explicit effort to prohibit the monteros from hunting pigs in the park, camping and the introduction of dogs into the reserve was also prohibited and travel within the reserves was restricted.
The law placed the control of the two primary paths connecting the northern Cordillera 114
with San Juan de la Maguana, the Paso del Tambor and the La Cidra paths, under the control of the Commission for the Protection of Natural Resources and Nature and provided for the establishment of a corps of special Forestry Police and Inspectors who would be named directly by the President of the country.
Beyond restricting campesino activities Canela used the law as a tool in his campaign against the lumber mills. Strict controls were established on the activities of the lumber mills not only within the Integrated Natural Reserve but also outside the boundaries. For example, in the protected bulfer zone, all activities relating to the exploitation of timber, including the cutting, mutilation and tapping of trees was prohibited as was the establishment of lumber mills within 5 km. Canela placed himself in a position of direct control regarding the activities of the mills. According to the law, after receiving official notification fi-om the Commission for the Protection of Natural
Resources, headed by Canela himself, the lumber mills would be provided with two months to cease activities in the region. Lumber mills could be fined $5,000 to $10,000
pesos (1 peso = US$1 .00) and the owners subjected to 6 months to 2 years in prison for violation of the law. The government could confiscate illegally obtained forestry products as well as the machinery and animals used to remove, process, and transport the products. Mills responsible for repeated infi-actions could be shut down and prohibited
fi'om operating for a period of 1 to 5 years (Gaceta 1954).
This new law, a direct attack on the lumber companies, stepped on the toes of important and powerfiil interest groups. Canela' s role in the formation of protected areas
in the Cordillera Central ended, when on September 9, 1954, by decree no. 154, he was discharged fi-om his position as Director of the Commission of Natural Resources. Law 115
4120 of April 21, 1955 derogated Law 4120 of 1954, mentioning, among other things, that the Law,
had created a social problem by covering an immense territorial area, placing the agriculture of the region in jeopardy, grounds making it necessary to undertake a creating new legal dispositions new, more conscientious study. . .directed towards
that at the same time as obviating, if at all possible, any difficulties, will serve to prevent the disappearance of the valuable natural riches and the perturbation of the hydrographic regimen of the waters that emanate from the Cordillera Central. [Zaglul 1998: 224-5, auth. trans.]
Stage 4: Law 4389-56 and the Formation of the Armando Bermudez National Park
In 1956, a new law was promulgated. Law 4389-56 essentially vindicated the
lumber companies, handing over to them many of conservation victories won by Canela while at the same time demonizing the peasantry with articles that further restricted their
traditional subsistence strategies (Gaceta 1956). True, and fortunate for the prosperity of
the Republic, the source of lowland water was to be protected. The Yaque del Norte
Preserve, Armando Bermudez National Park, and lands within the Bao watershed were
consolidated into one protected area~the Armando Bermudez National Park Forest
Reserve. And the first article of the new law's "Consideraciones"~the standard
introduction to Dominican laws—emphasized the importance of preserving the highland
watershed.
The conservation of the primary watersheds of the Cordillera Central are of primary importance to preserve the irrigation works and dams that are fed by these rivers, which are vital for the stability of national agriculture.
But from the outset. Law 4389-56 betrayed and redefined those very issues that had
previously created so much conflict around Law 3841-54, specifically control of logging
* activities. The Consideraciones continued, .
Outside of the protected area there are lands that are only apt for the lumber
industry, which is vital for the national economy and the utilization of these lands
in different agricultural pursuits . . .is the equivalent of their destruction as an economic factor. 116
The lumber industries are already established on the majority of those lands, and the conservation of the lands in those regions depends upon the rational manner in which those forests, used by those industries, are exploited.
Thus, in contrast to Canela's law of 1954 that viewed the lumber companies as the primary threat to the forests of the Cordillera, the 1956 law redefined the lumber companies as vital, both to the national economy as well as for the conservation of the forests. Furthermore, whereas Canela intended to prohibit all logging or mills within five kilometers of the park, the new law established a series of "lumber zones" along the boundaries of the park that reserved the standing timber exclusively for the lumber companies. The cutting of pine for agricultural purposes (tumbas) in these zones was strictly prohibited. The law established some controls on the lumber operations, including the provision they should only cut trees marked and authorized by the Secretariat of
Agriculture. Nevertheless, as previously, the lumber mills simply continued doing as they pleased.
The Consideraciones paid some lip service to rights of peasants. Article 4 acknowledged that: "There are some individuals within the area who have small but longstanding agricultural activities, the suppression of which could cause social
problems." But in contrast to its treatment of the lumber companies, the new law let the
entire weight of blame for environmental devastation fall on the campesinos. The law implied that the campesinos' invasion of lumber areas—and not the activities of the lumber companies—were responsible for the deforestation of the mountains. A series of measures were to be enacted to strictly control campesino activities. All residents living within the border of the park were to be displaced. Many areas adjacent to the reserve were designated as coffee zones where cultivation of crops not intercalated with coffee trees was prohibited.'^ The law also delivered a final blow to the terrenos comuneros by 117
calling for the division of all of hitherto undivided lands located within or close to park
limits.'-' Within the reserve itself, the uses campesinos made of the lands and resources, including subsistence farming, the grazing of livestock, the hunting of feral pigs and other wild species, and all other uses of the natural resources in the area, were strictly prohibited. To enforce the laws a special new Forestry Police Corps was created.
Displacements
Elders living in the hamlets of the Cordillera clearly remember the displacements that took place after the formation of Bermudez National Park. Households were scattered throughout the deepest and most remote areas of the newly formed park. The
exact number is not known.''* But evidence suggests that it was in the hundreds if not the thousands. In La Lomita alone, the deep mountain hamlet close to Los Postes where Don
Martin lived, 35 families were displaced. In combination with two other nearby hamlets, the elders estimate that up to 100 households, a total of 500 or more people, were displaced.'^ Furthermore, many campesinos that lived along the margins of the park depended on the parklands for their subsistence gardens, coffee stands, livestock as well as hunting, lumber and other activities. Once the displacement process had been initiated, the farmers had 30 days to cease their activities and remove their cattle from the park.
Most of the campesinos who were displaced or dispossessed of their lands received compensation from the State. For the majority, compensation involved either a
direct purchase of the lands (if they could demonstrate a peso title or evidence they owned acciones) or purchase of the existing mejoras (improvements) on the land. Elders, however, recall that the compensation process was rife with corruption, abuse and misunderstandings. In the words of one informant: 118
My property was 150 tareas of coffee, conuco and pasture, and what did they pay me? $400 pesos. Others who had less property sold it for $20,000 pesos. The alcalde sold his for whatever he wanted. The government (Trujillo) didn't trick anyone. But he sent Pilo Santelices (Trujillo's strongman in the region) as the second President, and told him: these millions are so that you can purchase the properties of the people who live in the park, according to a price that they negotiate. But with only half a million they bought out everyone in the park. Pilo and the alcalde took the rest of the money.
Campesinos complain that the park limits were manipulated to include lands owned by los grandes--x>nV\\QgQd individuals close to the regime such as Santelices--so that they
could sell their lands to the State at exorbitant prices. At the same time los chiquitos, the common campesino, received a pittance for their undervalued properties. Lawyers
involved in paying the campesinos for the lands would also deceive them. Many
campesinos complain that they were forced to leave the parklands without receiving any
compensation. Many of those interviewed claim to still hold peso titles to lands within
the park, lands for which they were never compensated.
A few campesino families, those living along the western park-limits, were
offered the opportunity to settle in agricultural colonies along the Haitian/Dominican border. Those afortunados (fortunate ones) received housing in the colony, lands and a
temporary stipend from the government (up until the time that their lands began to produce). However, most of those forced to sell their lands or mejoras were left
completely landless. They were forced to seek lands in other areas of the Cordillera,
struggle as landless workers or migrate into the city. Don Leon, from Los Postes, stated
that after the displacement: "I left everything discarded. When Trujillo was killed, I was
doing agricultural day jobs for 6 pesos a month, dead working, dying of hunger." Another
elderly informant from Los Postes, Don Jose, recalled that.
People went all over the place. . .only two or three stayed here (in Los Postes).
The majority went to San Jose de las Matas, almost all of them went, few stayed 119
here. It was very difficult for so many people to stay here, there wasn't enough
land and those who had it wouldn't sell it.
The displacements halted the incessant demographic movements south into the mountains
and drove many campesinos back north to where their families had originated. The
impact of these displacements thus reverberated in secciones of the Cordillera that were
further removed from the park areas. Georges (1990:63) reported that peasants evicted
from parklands in the remote areas around her case study seccion of Los Pinos simply moved onto unclaimed lands on the southern fringes of the seccion. By the end of the
process, the displaced campesinos occupied all remaining available lands in the seccion of Los Pinos.
Overall then the displacements appear to have had the effect of, among other things, fiirther driving campesinos into the remaining available marginal lands in the
Cordillera and exacerbating land distribution problems. It also represented the first stage of subsequent measures that drove the campesinos out of the mountainous hinterlands of the Cordillera. Many displaced campesinos who had once considered themselves rich, by virtue of their access to a wealth of natural resources in the highlands, now became impoverished. In the words of Don Martin:
I came here to make myself rich because the government would give me lands
where I wanted. Then when they displaced us from the park, what I had built up
was all torn down. I milked nine cows, I had my mules to carry coffee, 15 sows, hundreds of chickens, turkeys, goats, and I went back to nothing. What Trujillo
gave me for that farm was $400 pesos. I bought a house plot. I was forced to buy pieces of casaba bread when the root crops in the park were rotting, being lost.
Forest Crimes
Despite the displacements taking place in the Cordillera, the government continued to market rights to timber in the region. Regulation 5387 of 1959, signed by the dictator's brother. Hector Molina Trujillo, puppet President of the time, provided that 120
all moral or physical individuals wishing to receive permission from the Secretariat of
Agriculture to cut timber in the Forest Reserve of Armando Bermiidez National Park would have to first obtain a concession directly from the Executive Power (Gaceta 1959).
The solicitation for the concession was to include, among other things, a map of the area to be exploited, the methods to be used to carry out the exploitation as well as the amount that the solicitor was offering to pay the Dominican State for each tree cut.
Elders frequently tell stories of campesinos who were imprisoned for attempting to return to their conucos in the park, or fell a tumba in a lumber zone. But these were not the only 'criminals' to use the Cordilleran highlands at the time. During the same period, the Trujillo regime came under fire by the Organization of American States for its record of repression and a failed attempt to assassinate Venezuelan president Romulo
Betancourt. Internal opponents and exiled Dominicans living outside of the country began to sponsor popular anti-govermnent movements. In 1959 Cuban-based guerrilla exiles landed in the Cordillera towns of Constanza, Maimon and Estero Hondo.
Although most were rapidly killed by Trujillo's efficient military corps, a small band escaped into the remote mountains of VaUe Nuevo, in the heart of the Cordillera Central
(now in Rancier National Park). In the months of June and July of 1959, Ramfis Trujillo, the dictator's son and commander of the Dominican armed forces, directed military operations against the guerrillas. The starving guerrillas were eventually tracked down and killed in Las Papas, along the margins of the current Rancier National Park. Their final stand was made in the center of Las Papas, in a clearing of a lumber batey located close to the mills operated by the Bermiidez family.
But the conquest was not accomplished without significant environmental impact.
In a move intended to draw the guerillas out of the mountains, Ramfis had ordered the 121
northern and northeastern part of the park bombarded with napalm (De Lancer 1993).
Fearing repercussions, campesinos in the surrounding area reportedly also set fire to the
hills, "to discourage the barbudos from visiting their communities." Elders from the community of Las Papas, located at the northern entrance to Valle Nuevo, report that the remote and pristine forests of the Cordillera Central burned for over a month.
Conclusion
This chapter began an examination of the early conservation movement and its pantheon of heroes, most notably Miguel Canela Lazaro (1894-1977) and Juan B. Perez
Rancier. It was seen that State bureaucrats co-opted the anti-peasant ideology of
conservationism and used it to facilitate environmentally devastating economic ventures sponsored by urban based politico-economic elites, most notably logging operations.
Canela attempted to curtail the destruction wrought by the lumber companies. In the
1940s, he began to view the lumber companies as a greater threat to the remote forests of the Cordillera than the traditional campesino practices and he succeeded in passing laws
that, if they were enforced, would have stopped logging in many areas of the Cordillera.
His efforts, however, were nullified by more powerfiil stakeholders.
The lumber companies were able to get Canela' s laws rescinded and to hijack the conservationist agenda to extend, rather than curtail, logging activity. Reinforced by the conservation narrative that vilified campesinos as the source of deforestation and
environmental degradation, lawmakers continued the criminalization of their traditional
subsistence activities. The only policies that seemed to take the interests of small farmers
into consideration were equally repressive state laws directing the campesino economy
toward the production of coffee, an export crop of growing importance which by the
early 1950s was generating massive government revenues through export taxes and 122
permits and that, by 1955, Trujillo dominated through his control over the recently formed Cafe Dominicano C x A coffee-export monopoly (Cordero et al. 1975). At the same time, park formation continued the appropriation of forests for the use by the lumber companies, reducing land available for traditional subsistence and leading to large-scale displacements of campesinos.
The formation of Bermiidez National Park and the subsequent displacements did not constitute a fatal blow to the peasantry of the Cordilleran hinterlands. As will be discussed in the chapters that follow, at least some campesinos continued to struggle to maintain a peasant way of life, opportunistically taking advantage of the ebb and flow of
State control generated by the rough tides of Dominican politics. But there was a new special interest on the horizon. The Dominican Government, long subjugated to and responsive to the United States, would come under increasing pressure from Yankee and international development experts and conservationist groups that sought a reorientation of the national economy and the use of national resources towards a more "progressive", urban-based development model. As will be seen in the following chapters, the international groups were also championed by local politico-economic eUtes who had concomitant ulterior motives, motives that were to change many of the formerly self- sufficient rural campesinos into impoverished urban slum dwellers, a scenario hospitable to the growth of a low-wage industrial labor force that could be exploited by Dominican capitalists and that would attract foreign capital.
Notes
' In the Dominican Republic, lawyers commonly are referred to with the title of 'Doctor'.
^ Canela and Perez approached the Santiago Chamber of Commerce due to the fact that at the time the country was under US military occupation and, in their words, "there was no national government". 123
^ This report appears to have been widely discussed in Santiago. Between the 30* of May and the 3"* of
June, 1 924, the newspaper La Informacion pubhshed segments of the report in a series of three editorials (Zaglul 1998).
* They proposed that all interested parties, including the owners of irrigable parcels in the lowlands, the owners of lumber concessions, and the government collaborate to raise the needed funds to carry out the proposed purchases.
' The origin of a conservationist narrative 'demonizing' peasant practices in the Dominican Republic can be traced as far back as the mid- 19"' century. For example, Michiel Baud, referring to the Cibao region, shows that firom the late 19"' centiuy on the so-called peasant "slash-and- bum" agriculture became routinely critiqued, within official discourse, as contrary to the ideology of progress. In 1875, for example, the president of the Development Counsel of La Vega wrote that traditional campesino cultivation,
accustoms the majority of the peasants to idleness and vagrancy. That is the reason why there are so many people without farms, and why the majority of those who cultivate something do so without rule or order. They clear a piece of land, sow a little tobacco, and abandon the conuco. The next year they clear another piece of land, which they also abandon. And this goes on, year after year, without taking fiirther advantage of the extremely fertile land.
In 1912, the Minister of Agriculture complained, "Our forests are destroyed these days in order to clear conucos which are abandoned after two or three years; and trees do not grow back on the fallow land (botados) that remains once the land is abandoned." And in 1918, Holger Johansen, director of agriculture during the US occupation, wrote:
During my trip through the country I have noticed that much forestland is being cut down to procure
room for conucos, the native Dominican house farm. This is a very praiseworthy effort, but carries with it an imminent danger that many of such conucos are being cultivated for but a short time and then left to grow up in secondary growth and exposed to erosion.
The 1 920 Forest Law, passed under the US Occupation govenunent, was meant "to put an end to the relentless destruction of forests on the mountain slopes" (Baud 1995:163-64).
* Although there is a strong likelihood that the fires Canela and Perez observed were indeed of anthropogenic, and not of natural origin, if the peasants continued building fences around their conucos, as Canela and Perez described, it would seem unlikely that there were no livestock in the area. The mountaineers, in the process of hunting wild animals, would reportedly at times set fires in the forests to drive the animals out, making them easier to find and hunt. This is an activity that Jacoby (2001:76) reported was practiced by farmers in the Adirondack Mountains of New York in the late- 19"' century (and
it should be pointed out that if Jacoby 's historical descriptions are accurate, it would be fiilly appropriate to describe these Adirondack residents as 'peasants'). The fact that altering the fire regime through the setting of these fires potentially posed negative environmental ramifications is not disputed, but attributing the setting of forest fires to completely irrational motives-laziness and ignorance-appears unjustified and more in line with a lack of comprehension of the reality of peasant agricultiu-e of the time as well as based on a kind of elitist notion of the "environmentally predatory peasant" as discussed in the previous endnote.
' As further evidence of the peasants' complete ignorance of the envirormiental consequences of their actions, Canela and Perez mention prophecies that widely circulate amongst the campesinos, that one day all of the water sources of the lowlands will dry up and the sea will retimi to cover the Vega Real valley, so that those who wishing to save themselves will have to go to the Blue Mountain (referring to a mountain in the Cordillera Central.) They state, therefore, that the campesinos are convinced that the drying up of streams is merely the fulfillment of these prophecies.
* Although this meagre would sum appear ahnost exploitative at first glance, I would argue that it is merely a reflection of the fact that due to the abundance of land in the Cordillera at the time relative to population density, land had barely become a commodity with any value beyond its use value. 124
' the company established a As early as 1942 the primary crop area in the Yaque delta had been drained and massive irrigation system.
'° fieldtrips Indeed, Don Martin reported that Canela would often sleep in his house in La Lomita while on in the Cordillera during this period.
velada del " Canela does not clarify what he means by "veiled campaign of the lumber mill" {campam cleared asserradero). Perhaps one can speculate that he is referring to allowing the campesinos to occupy mills, as is suggested in the lands in order to mask the fact that these lands were originally cleared by the campesinos. previous chapter by the description of the synergistic relationship between the mills and the
In Article 14 of the Law 4389-56 there is an admonition: "it is obligatory for farmers to follow the regulations that Secretariat of Agriculture emits regarding (coffee zones), under the sanctions established in this law." No such admonition exists for the lumbering operations in the law.
The final break up of the terrenos comuneros as provided for in the law was carried out in the surroundings of the park. This provision in the law is the reason that in Los Postes, for example, the cadastral surveys and land divisions took place in 1958.
the total number of I have, unfortunately, not been successful in my attempts to procure data on individuals or families displaced.
This would be based on a conservative average household size of 5-- approximately the current average household size in the region. Taking into account that only in La Lomita, where Don Martin lived, there were 35 households at the time of the displacement (a figure that was derived by having former residents of the area actually list and map out every household present in La Lomita at the time of the displacement), and that there were two or three other hamlets in the park in close contact with Los Postes, the figure of 100 households displaced from this one region of the park seems reasonable. It is evident that the
displacements were widespread, but it isn't possible, based on the data that I have obtained, to estimate the total number of households that were displaced. My trips and interviews throughout the park region confirmed that displacements took place all around the park, except in the spur constituted by the Yaque del Norte Reserve (which had been displaced in the late 1920s in the first stage of park formation). It is possible, therefore, that the total number of displaced families or families prevented fi:om working conucos retained in the park reached 1000 or more. CHAPTER 7
STATE OF SIEGE I: CHEAP LABOR AND CHEAP FOOD, INDUSTRIALIZATION AND URBANIZATION OF THE REPUBLIC
Introduction
Rafael Leonidas Tnijillo was gunned down on the night of May 30, 1 961. His assassination marked the end of 30 years of a regime so totalitarian that Robert D.
Crassweller (1966:4) likened Trujillo to "the Oriental despots of ancient times . . .whose systems of absolute power remain today the purest expression in history of total personal domination."' Under Trujillo the influence of the State had been brought to bear on campesinos living in virtually every pocket of the country. The end of Trujillo was not, however, the end of the State's intrusion into the lives of the peasants of the Northern
Cordillera. Dominican domestic politics now came under the control of international development agencies acting in conformance with US foreign policy makers and dominant Dominican groups.
This chapter will show that, although they began during the dictatorship. State macroeconomic and environmental policies in the post- Trujillo period resemble a siege- like attack mounted against the peasants of the Cordilleran hinterlands. A military siege involves slowly forcing an opponent into capitulation by surroimding them and cutting them off from access to critical resources such as food. Like a siege, the consequence of
State policies in the Cordillera was to progressively alienate campesinos from resources upon which they depended to make a living. Conservation policies and highly skewed land distribution restricted access to the factors of production required for subsistence
125 126
agriculture and cash cropping. From another quarter, subsequent State policies to control food prices would paralyze the rural agricultural economy while at the same time ensuring that surpluses produced by campesinos in rural areas would be captured and reinvested in urban-based development initiatives. Over-exploitation of the remaining resources—by the campesinos themselves—led to environmental degradation and further reductions in productivity. The cumulative effect, if not explicitly and consciously intended by any particular policy maker, was nonetheless that of slowly driving the campesinos out of the coveted highlands of the Cordillera. In the lowlands and urban areas they would be forced to seek employment in low-wage agroindustrial enterprises, the growing import substitution and offshore assembly industries or an emerging service sector. Others would become incorporated into the urban "surplus labor" force within a growing informal economic sector of domestic workers, microentrepreneurs, street vendors and multiple other self-employment activities in the primary urban areas of the country (Itzigsohn 2000).
This chapter traces out these policies out at a national level, with the objective of
providing a background for the subsequent chapters in which I describe the dramatic changes that have taken place in the lives of the campesinos of the Cordillera over the past four decades.
The Two Faces of United States Occupation
During the period from 1961 to 1966 there were 14 different Dominican governments, a coup de etat carried out by the Dominican military, and a Civil War
fought in the streets of Santo Domingo (Hartlyn 1 998:60). The disorder prompted the
United States to initiate massive and direct involvement in Dominican internal affairs.
U.S. presence became most visible in 1965 when, under the guise of an OAS operation. 127
United States armed forces fought what it labeled 'rebels' in the city of Santo Domingo,
hi reality it was the rebels that the United States had entered the country to support.
Right-wing former Trujillo allies had ousted a liberal, democratically elected government. The U.S. subsequently supported the military junta that had overthrown the president, compelled a compromise from the left, and took complete control of the newly reconstituted Dominican Armed Forces.
Military invasion was the most conspicuous manifestation of U.S. presence, but it was only a small part of the U.S. involvement in the country. The entire transition into a post-Trujillo State was carried out with massive U.S. financial and technical assistance.
The presence and influence of the United States Agency for hitemational Development
(USAID) became so prominent that one USAID official called it the Dominican's
"parallel government" (Gutierrez 1972).
The assistance had begun in 1961 and increased rapidly thereafter (Hartlyn 1998).
Between the months of March and September of 1962, USAID programs involving an investment of $84 million dollars were initiated in housing, farm to market roads, agrarian reform, agricultural production, and education. By mid-September 1962 nineteen more agreements had been signed for another US $20 million in USAID projects (Martin
1 966 : 1 46). The development assistance became increasingly pronounced throughout the decade. By 1966 the Dominican Republic was second only to Vietnam as the highest per capita recipient of US aid in and the world (Georges 1990:30). Howard Wiarda, a US diplomat during the period, wrote that, "in 1966-67 the United States was omnipresent in all aspects of Dominican Hfe" (Wiarda 1975:110, auth. trans.).^
The aid came through the US Alliance for Progress program, the objectives of which were ostensibly to strengthen the social and material conditions required to sustain democratic governance.'' In general terms, however, the Alliance for Progress became manifest in the Dominican Republic through two main strategic components. In the first place, the Dominican state had inherited the massive fortunes of land and companies accumulated by Trujillo and his associates. One of the explicit objectives of the Alliance for Progress was to reduce skews in land distribution through agrarian reform, which implied the redistribution of some of the vast landholdings that the State had inherited.
The other major explicit objective was to develop the economy by fomenting urban-based industrialization, which meant opening the country to foreign investment. Although this was presented as a two-tiered strategy designed to address both rural and urban social concerns, the implementation of the agrarian reform program did not resolve the
"structural problems" of Dominican agriculture. Rather, it was plagued by corruption and failed to significantly alter the country's highly skewed land distribution.
Furthermore, urban-focused industrialization strategies augmented the economic pressure faced by rural producers. In essence, by assuming increasingly reduced living standards due to policies that guaranteed that crops could be purchased at a minimum price without a concomitant investment in the modernization of Dominican agriculture, the rural producers and especially the small campesinos assumed the costs of industrial growth in the cities (Lozano 1997:23). This later strategy articulated with USAID policy of using food aid to support US agricultviral industry. Not only was the food bought fi-om US
farmers as a mechanism of subsidizing/supporting North American agro-business, but it
was then used as an instrument to undermine agricultural markets specifically in countries that produced farm surpluses while at the same time promoting industrial development in these countries, the objective being to shift them fi-om net exporters of 129
their own products to net importers of US farm products (any reader who finds that this a
controversial statement need only visit the USAID website).^
Urban-Based Development
The primary consequence of U.S. assistance in the Dominican Republic was the
reorganization of the national economy around urban-based development policies
designed to expand the manufacturing sector and attract capital fi"om abroad. In the
Dominican Republic, as in other developing countries, political and economic elites
positioned themselves to take advantage of the political leverage and financial resources
made available by U.S. pressure and assistance.^ For example, many of the Santiago elite
families who benefited fi-om the new urban development strategy and established close
ties to the international agencies were fi"om the same families who had made or added to
their fortunes through the operation and ownership of limiber mills in the Cordillera
(Yunen 1985:113-4).
The early urban focused strategy involved stimulating the growth of the
manufacturing sector through government provision of special concessions to those
industries that would produce import substitutes. As discussed below, the strategy also
involved the creation of an infi-astructure base to support such industrial development,
and the maintenance of a low wage labor force that would attract foreign investment.'
One of the first measures taken by post-Trujillo governments was the passage in 1962 of
Law 4 "for Industrial Development".* This law provided special concessions for the
importation of machinery and raw materials to stimulate capital investment in industry.
Up to the Civil War in 1 965, the State also supported industrial investment through the
selling of state properties at low prices and through favorable interest rates (Cassa
1991:141).' 130
In Balaguer's first presidential term after US supervised elections in 1966, incentives for local industrialists and foreign capitalist investors were once again reinforced and consolidated through the passage of the controversial Law No. 299 de
Proteccion e Incentivo Industrial (Industrial Protection and Incentives). '° Rumors circulated that USAED participated actively in the drafting of this legislation as part of a strategy to open the Dominican market to US investment and fiuther tie Dominican industry to the US markets (Moya Pons 1992:159). Similar to Law No. 4, this legislation protected local industries and granted foreign investors concessions through the waiver of
' tariffs. ' At the same time, USAID and other international organizations provided funding to establish lending institutions designed to make capital available to potential investors. The most important of these was the Fondo de Inversion para el Desarrollo
Economico (FIDE) (Investment Fund for Economic Development) established in 1966 with US$13 million from USAID, $12 miUion from the IDB, and $1 1.4 milHon from the
Dominican Central Bank. By 1971, FIDE had provided a total financing of US$17.2 million for 159 projects (ONAPLAN 1971).
In the case of foreign investment, Law 299 limited concessions "to those areas where local technology and the lack of capital limited the investments of Dominican businessmen", primarily mining, metallurgy, tourism and duty free assembly industries
(Moya Pons 1992:154, auth. trans.). What the legal proscriptions on foreign investment
meant in practice is questionable. Balaguer displayed a marked preference for supporting
foreign investment projects (Moya Pons 1992:173). Many foreign investors accessed
local capital through FIDE and other sources. Between 1969 and 1973 generous state
subsidies and incentives helped major multinationals become established in the
Dominican Republic, among them companies like Rosario Resources (USA), Shell Oil
y r ' 131
(Haina refinery), Falconbridge Dominicana (Canadian), and Nestle milk (USA) (Moya
Pons 1992:174). Furthermore, pre-existing companies like the sugar giant Gulf and
Western Corporation took advantage of the concessions to expand their business
interests. It was the Gulf and Western Corporation, for example, which in 1969
established the La Romana duty free zone, the first free trade zone in the country.
USAID and the IDB also provided financing for infrastructure development that would provide support for industriahzation and attract foreign investors through the
construction of hydroelectric dams, highways, and canals. The first dam built with
foreign loans was the Taveras Dam on the Yaque del Norte river in the early 1970s. The
dam was designed to provide irrigation to the lower Yaque valley and potable water and
cheap hydroelectric power to the city of Santiago. Between 1971 and 1973, the
Dominican government requested US$151.9 million in financing for the construction of
roads and other large public works projects; technical training including that of 5000
industrial workers; and for the development of new sectors such as tourism (ONAPLAN
1971). International consultants were actively involved in developing plans to foment
investment in tourism development. Studies by the Organization of American States and
UNESCO on the viability of tourist growth would contribute to the declaration of five
tourist "poles" or zones, which along with the incentives for the development of duty free
zones provided for in Law 299, presaged the next major stage of Dominican economic
development that would initiate in the 1980s (ONAPLAN 1971).
Providing Cheap Labor to Capital
With the emphasis on manufacturing and attracting foreign investment, maintaining wages low became of critical importance in State development planning.
The passage of Law 299 was followed by an austerity plan that froze salaries in the ' • ^ 132
public and private sector. Economic developments during the 1970s and 1980s provided continued pressure to reduce available labor costs in order to attract foreign investment.
Balaguer's political economic strategy involved reducing operating expenses at the same time as stimulating economic growth through massive public works projects, projects specifically directed toward consolidating the infrastructural base required for the growth of the urban-based industrial sector. The strategy was made possible by the extraordinary infusions of US capital into the Dominican Republic in the years after the occupation. For example, between 1967 and 1970, US assistance in the form of donations and loans averaged approximately US $133 million a year. The US sugar quota alone represented 32% of Government revenues (ONAPLAN 1971).
U.S. assistance, U.S. quotas and world sugar prices remained favorable up until the mid-1970s, during which time the Balaguer government invested heavily in the infrastructure recommended in development plans drafted by U.S. supported international agencies. This included ports, highways, roads, energy infrastructure, schools, and dams.
The result, between 1970 and 1974, was an annual 10% grov^^h in GNP (Grasmuck and
Pessar 1991). The period became known as the "miracle years." By the mid-1970s, however, the "miracle" had ended. The international price of sugar and other primary
commodities fell.'^ The world was entering the first OPEC inspired 'energy crisis.' The national debt was rising. By the late- 1970s the country was in recession. In 1981, the
U.S. again severely reduced the sugar quotas, and in 1982 the world economy was shaken by a second oil crisis. Daily energy blackouts became a customary experience for
Dominicans living in urban areas. The country began to experience major economic problems such as the total depletion of foreign exchange reserves. The overvaluation of the peso created conditions in which minimum wages remained high in comparison to 133
other areas of Latin America, discouraging international investors (Fuller 1999). In 1984 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) imposed a severe structural adjustment program that included the devaluation of the peso, up to that time tied to the U.S. dollar, among
other measures.'^ Although ISI policies were never completely abandoned, in the eariy
1980s there was a shift in economic development strategy towards export-led
development and the expansion of the tourist sector. The structural adjustment program
and devaluation of the peso had the desired effect of lowering wage and exchange rates,
factors that favored international investment. The Caribbean Basin Initiative, initiated by
the U.S. Reagan administration in 1983, provided further incentives to attract capital to
the country. The latter part of the 1980s consequently brought a steady increase in local
and foreign investment in export-led manufacturing and tourism.'''
This process once again favored the traditional economic elites of the country,
who were able to adjust to invest in these new sectors individually or in partnership with
foreigners. At the same time, the economic model continued to emphasize the
competitive advantage of maintaining an expanding supply of low wage laborers.
Itzigsohn (2000) points out that both the ISI and ELD strategies involve the "granting of
cheap labor to capital." As Figure 7-1 shows, throughout the 1980s real minimum wages
continued to decline and even by 1999, only in the large industries had minimum wages
slightly surpassed their 1980 value whereas in the small and medium industries as well as
in the free trade zones minimum wages remained at 85% of their 1980 value or less.
Similarly, Figure 7-2 shows that throughout this period, the contribution of
manufacturing to the GDP increased steadily. Free trade zones became much more
important within the manufacturing sector at the same time as the contribution of sugar to
the overall GDP waned. 134
110.0 n
Large —x— Medium A Small • Free Trade Zones —»— Public Secta
Figure 7-1. Real value of minimum wages by sector 1980-1999 (from official figures of the Dominican Banco Central in CEPAL 2000 adjusted to consumer price index of 1980). Large =capital of 500,000 pesos or more. Medium= capital of 200- 500,000 pesos. Small= capital of less than 200,000 pesos
45,000 40,000 35,000 30,000 « 3 25,000 20,000 iSfflffl
1 5,000 10,000 5,000
0 m rrl nl MM
^ib A'' /,% oQ ofV o> o> c> <* c5) »^ ^ci^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ Years
EDSugar SOther HDuty Free Zones
Figure 7-2. Shifts in GDP from manufacturing 1970-1999 in millions of pesos at 1991 prices (from Dominican Banco Central estimates provided in CEPAL 2000) 135
Cheap Food for Cheap Labor
In order to secure votes and political support in light of low wages, the Balaguer and later PRD governments took measures that, in more theoretical terms, also represented a subsidy for the reproduction of the urban labor force. These subsidies took many forms: free energy; allowing the invasion of State lands in urban areas; and the construction of subsidized housing by the government.
However, the policies that most affected rural producers were the indirect subsidies provided for urban workers in the form of price controls applied to basic food staples. Keeping the cost of staples down was achieved by reducing tariffs on agricultural products considered to be important for import substitution such as com and other unprocessed foods, flooding the country with 'food relief through long-term credit sales ofUS grains and vegetable oils, and food donations distributed through organizations such as CARITAS and CARE.
Food imports to the Dominican Republic increased dramatically in the early post-
Trujillo period and food aid constituted an important early component of US assistance to
the country. No comprehensive analysis exists on the topic of food aid for the Dominican
Republic and primary data is not readily available. For that reason, it is necessary to
resort to secondary sources. The information garnered from these sources attests to the
overall importance of food aid as an instrument of development policy in the Dominican
Republic during the post-Trujillo period.
Aquino Gonzalez (1978) calculated that between 1958 and 1975, the Dominican
Republic imported a total of US$650 million in food imports, and at least 20% of these
imports were constituted by food assistance in the form of donations (7%) or flexible
food loans (13%).'^ The United States initiated these large-scale food assistance and donation programs early in the post-Trujillo period. John Martin, the US Ambassador in
1962, recalled that during this period the representatives of the Dominican governments
frequently appealed to him for more food assistance to appease the growing and restive urban masses. According to Martin, by 1962 CARITAS was akeady feeding as many as
350,000 Dominicans a day (which would have constituted approximately 10% of the
population), and two other organizations, CARE and the Church World Services were
also active in the distribution of food. Furthermore, between the autimin of 1962 and
Dec. 1963 the country received 50,000 tons of rice and 10,000 tons of com. These were
included in a $17.9 million dollar PL-480 Food for Peace program that constituted more
than 20% of total food imports that year (Aquino 1978; Martin 1966:721). By 1966,
besides unspecified Title I grants (food provided through low credit loans) the Dominican
Republic also received $27,227,000 in Title II US Food Gifts and Grants and the WaU
Street Journal reported that one in four Dominicans depended to some degree on US
Food Aid (Georges 1990:30; Stanley 1973:322). In 1968, food assistance constituted an
estimated 40% of total food imports and this percentage did not go below 30% until 1973
(Aquino 1978). Furthermore, from 1968 to 1973 at least 40% of the imports were under
Title II or Title III, which were in the form of donations. In a presentation to the
Interamerican Committee for the Alliance for Progress program in 1971, the Dominican
government justified its request for an increase in the US sugar quota for the country by
arguing that "a considerable portion of the foreign exchange obtained through sugar
exports has been used to acquire products from the agricultural sector of the United
States" (ONAPLAN 1971:17).
In 1969, the Dominican Institute for the Stabilization of Prices, better known as
INESPRE, was founded with RD$3 million in financing from USAID. The ostensible 137
objective of INESPRE was the regulation of agricultural prices both for the consumer and rural producer, and "the control and distribution of imported articles through international assistance programs" (ONAPLAN 1971:16). INESPRE rapidly became the instrument by which the Dominican government controlled the prices of foodstuffs. Besides flooding the market directly with cheap produce, many of IISfESPRE's imports were sold to domestic producers, local capitalists who benefited fi-om the use of cheaper inputs in the fabrication of their products.
Between 1972 and 1975 INESPRE was responsible for 70% of all food imports into the Dominican RepubUc (Aquino 1978).'^ In 1972, for example, INESPRE
imported RD$28 million in foodstuffs, largely through PL-480 and the Commodity
Credit Corporation, including 123 million metric tons of wheat, 163 thousand quintales of
rice and 92 thousand quintales of pinto beans.'* According to INESPRE's annual
memoir for that year, these imports were necessary "to maintain the price levels
accessible in the markets as a resuh of internal demand" (INESPRE 1972, auth. trans.).
In 1973, the value of INESPRE imports increased almost threefold, to RD$77,083,339.84
and again INESPRE's annual report claimed these imports were necessary to "avoid an
increase [in price] in articles of daily consumption (INESPRE 1973). By 1980,
INESPRE was responsible for 17.8% of distribution of all agricultural products sold in
urban areas in the Dominican Republic (Rosenfeld 1986). This pattern continued
throughout the 1980s (Table 7-1).
Impact on Farmers and Agriculture
Through food import poUcies, the State, under pressure fi-om local and
international investors, turned the domestic terms of trade against local agricultural
producers. Food subsidy programs were ostensibly designed to subsidize the urban 138
consumer and the capitalist producers of processed foods. But whether intentionally or not, the programs undermined local farmers. No detailed study exists regarding the specific impact of these policies. But Dominican agronomists and other scholars frequently have asserted that fNESPRE practices drove down market prices for domestic produce. For example, Itzigsohn (2000:45) asserts that the "subsidy" urban workers received through frozen prices for agricultural products, 'Svas an important cause of the decline of the small peasantry and of rural-urban migration". Aquino Gonzalez (1978), who was Secretary of Agriculture from 1973-1975, argued that the freezing of prices,
food aid and massive government imports had a cumulative effect upon internal demand
and the prices that farmers received for basic staples. The price controls that INESPRE
established for products of basic necessity such as beans maintained the margin of
earnings for the producers at very low levels. Rosenfeld (1986:399) stated that "the price
policies do not favor the small producer, who suffers from the competition of the import
of the American surplus facilitated by law PL-480 at prices lower than the internal
market, which permits subsidizing prices for the urban consumer" (George 1990; Hatton
et al. 1986). And in the specific case of peanuts, which were planted in many
mountainous areas of the Cordillera Central, respected Dominican agronomist Luis
Crouch (1979) observed:
Imports permitted the price of peanuts and peanut oil to increase more slowly than the rate of inflation over this period. Planners could thus rationalize ignoring domestic production. This strategy was not limited to peanuts alone but characterized many of the most important food staples, including rice and com. At the same time, the state exerted an indirect influence on farmers by failing to control the price of key inputs to production. [Georges 1990:176]
The broader consequences of these policies were, in the first place, the
progressive decline of agriculture and livestock as an overall percentage of Dominican 139
GDP. As is shown in Figure 7-3, between 1980 and 1999 there was either stagnation or a gradual overall decline in the production of many food staples typically produced by campesinos. Also notable was the fact that, although the farmer sector as a whole was becoming a smaller percentage of the GNP, the importance of agriculture vis-a-vis livestock production was declining. As Figure 7-4 shows, by 1995-1999, livestock had equaled crop production as a percentage of overall agricultural production in the
Dominican Republic. The causes of the relative increase in Uvestock production include
State policies designed to promote export-oriented meat production through state supports; a rise in domestic prices for meat as beef production was reoriented towards export (Georges 1990:179); the declining quality of soils for production of crops, and the lack of investments made by the State in the modernization of the agricultural sector.
100.0 -1 X 90.0
80.0
c I 40.0 o jE 30.0
20.0
10.0
0.0
Year
Beans Cow Peas —*— Green Coffee —X— Corn
Figure 7-3. Annual production of traditional crops 1980 to 1999 from CEPAL 2000 a
140
selected years, 1972-1999 Table 7-1 . INESPRE imports and exports from Imported Local Purchase PL-480 or CCC Imoorts Year 1 lllClllL'Ill^ \J\J>9 Primarv 1972 28.4 0.0 10.7" Wheat (123 million metric tons); corn (562 thousand qq); ricp' ninto heans
1973 54.2 22.8 N/a Wheat (98.5 million metric tons); com (1.2 million qq); T^f»OTllltUCilllUl Ull,Oil" liverii^f* 1984 105.4 17.52 82.26 Com (179 thousand qq) soy flour (49 thousand metric
trtnc"^*lUilo^, o\Jjcrw Ull,All 1987 25.58 9.91 N/a Soy oil (6.3 million metric
ions J, powticrcu miiK \ j. i million metric tons); beans
Pintr* Kf»!incUCall^ ^^^'t.'t(OA. A thf\ii5finHLllwU^ailu 1988 56.3 1 j.4j /J. 4 / I^UllU mciric luiiaj, buy uii thousand metric tons);
Q 7A Pintn h<=*jin<; (\ 7Q thniiQanH nnV lyyu J /.J y. /O J 1 .Uj edible oils
1 1 c An I? \f*(^ ( \'X'X tliAiiciinH nn^* nititrt 0.4 / iN/a ivlCC JJ lllUUoailU 4^^) ipilHU beans (329 thousand qq)
1 1 A (\(\ PnwHprpii millf ninto 007 14.U0 4.00 IN/ f \JWU&1&U illlllV^ hpan^tJ^CkiXJ 6' milk (from 1 yy J 1 8.6 0 Powdered New Zealand) 1997 2.91 1.06 N/a Rice (20.9 thousand metric tons); chicken 1998 50.41 21.5 N/a Rice (1.2 million qq); chicken (273 thousand qq) 1999 0 45.51 0.2^ N/a
a. The amounts represent millions of US dollars and have been converted from pesos reported by INESPRE to US$ at the prevailing market rate for the year (appendix C).
b. Full data not available, total likely to have been more.
c. Due to the precarious financial situation of INESPRE in this year, food imports were drastically reduced.
d. Apparent total for five PL-480 loans initiated that year.
e. Do not specify the full total, this is the value of edible oils imported.
f. Donations due to hurricane George. Source: Annual Memoirs of fNESPRE
In summary, the consequence of the policies of price supports designed to foment
industrial production, as Lozano points out, was that they fiarther reinforced the
availability of a cheap urban labor force at the expense of the rural farmer:
In the first place, the model rested on draining surplus from the agrarian sector, without being followed by a subsequent modemi2ation of the sector that would
elevate productivity. The result was a generalized agrarian crisis that in little
more than 1 5 years displaced towards the cities, primarily towards Santo 141
Domingo and in second place towards Santiago, around 1 miUion people. At the same time, this situation weighed on the dynamism of the urban labor market, fragmenting the possibilities of productive access to this market by urban worker, generating a systematic tendency for the fall of the average salaries. [1997:30, auth. trans.]
State Neglect of Agriculture
Agricultural Reform
State neglect for the agricultural sectors is reflected in a number of ways, one of the most important of which was the failed agrarian reform program. As in many countries in Latin America, Dominican agrarian reform was initiated by the Alliance for
Progress program with the collaboration of USAID. The first efforts at agrarian reform in the post-Trujillo era took place in 1962 with the distribution of some of the lands
appropriated from the regime. However, as Fernando Franco (1966) points out, the early
agrarian reform eflForts were manipulated by politicians and elites anxious to prevent
agitated campesinos from invading existing latifundia. Ostensibly, the agrarian reform
was to have involved the redistribution of the lands appropriated from Trujillo, his family
members and close associates, which has been estimated at 6 miUion tareas
(approximately 377,000 hectares), as well as other public and privately held lands
(Duarte 1980:142). The IAD (Instituto Agrario Dominicano) was formed by Law 5879
in 1962 as the agency in charge of land distributions. Early on, massive publicity and
propaganda was dedicated to drawing attention to the agrarian reform. In reality,
however, the process was rife with fraud. Lands were often handed out to supporters of
the prevailing party in power or turned over to mUitary oflScials who rented the lands or
only allowed campesinos to work them under sharecropping arrangements (Franco 1 966).
During the 1962-1972 period the distributions of land were irregular and sporadic,
and by 1 970 had failed to address the inequitable distributions of land in the country. 142
which had grown even more skewed than those demonstrated in 1960. In 1972,
Balaguer, who demonstrated outward enthusiasm for agrarian reform, introduced a series of new agrarian reform laws designed to completely alter the country's land tenure structure. The government passed measures to appropriate and redistribute excessively large latifundia and tierras baldias (lands not in production). The claimed purpose of the reinvigorated agrarian reform program was to stem the tide of rural to urban migration and mitigate social pressures that were responsible for political unrest during the period.
20.0 -
10.0 i
Agriculture -•-Livestock |
Figure 7-4. Growth of agriculture vs. livestock as a percentage of total farming economy (from CEPAL 2000 data)
One notable success of the agricuhural reform program was an increase in the
domestic production of rice, the primary staple of the urban diet. Rice farms were
located in some of the most productive lowlands in the coimtry. The State adopted a
series of measures to incorporate private, irrigated rice farms into collectives in order to
pursue national self-sufiBciency in rice at subsidized prices to the consumer. The farmers used state credit, technical assistance, equipment, and green revolution technologies. Rice yields greatly improved. In four of the years from 1972 to 1986, the country produced enough rice to meet domestic demand. The farmers sold the product directly to
INESPRE, which marketed the product at guaranteed prices until 1986. Besides rice production, however, the agricultural reform program proved to be a failure. In the first place, latifundists resisted government initiatives to break up their landholdings.
Furthermore, the State provided little support in the form of extension services, credit, and equipment to support farmers who were newly established on agrarian reform lands.
Corruption also continued to play an important role in distributing lands to non- campesinos. In the Cordillera Central, the agricultural reform has been marked by unkept promises to relocate highland farmers in many communities to lower and flatter lands.
Production of Non-Traditional Crops
A final example of government priorities with relationship to agriculture and
small farmers was government support for the production of "nontraditional" agricultural commodities. The "nontraditional" agricultural sector includes all agricultural and agro- industrial exports other than the traditional sugar, coffee, cacao, or tobacco and
agricultural products for the domestic market (Raynolds et al. 1993). Government
support to promote the non-traditional agricultural sector took place at the same time as the limited support that existed for the production of basic foods for the local market was
cut back (Raynolds et al. 1993.T 1 1 1). The policies favored the production of new export
crops over the traditional export crops produced by the peasantry. For example, the mechanism used to stimulate domestic and international investment in the non-traditional agricultural sector was the Law for Agro industrial Incentives of 1982. In the words of historian Frank Moya Pons this law. 144
was not designed to favor the smallholding campesinos but rather to attract the large investors and foment non-traditional crops. This law left outside of its protective framework the basic traditional crops of the rural economy of the Cibao region such as tobacco, colfee, cacao, and centered its attention on activities that required modem technology and economies of scale for large investment projects that the traditional peasants did not know how to manage: African Palm oil, citrus plantations for the export ofjuices, melons and winter vegetables for the US market, fish and shrimp farms, rubber, cotton, processed meats and flowers for export. [1992:308, auth. trans.]
The passage of this law also coincided with the Caribbean Basin Initiative, which provided the duty-free importation of agro-industrial products into the US market and encouraged new US investments in the Caribbean (Moya Pons 1992:310; Raynolds et al.
1993). The initiative was actively supported by USAID, exemplified by the fact that in
1986 the development organization provided support of DRS142 million pesos
(approximately US$50 miUion) to support the diversification of agriculture to non- traditional crops such as citrus, tomato, African palm, among others (Meyer 1989). From
1982-1986, non-traditional agricultural and agro-industrial exports rose from US $58
million to US $103 million (Raynolds et al. 1993:1 1 1 1). At the same time, domestic food
production in the Dominican Republic continued to decline "in the face of growing
competition from cheap imported grain as well as processed foods for the middle and
upper classes" (Raynolds et al. 1993: 1 113). An example of the ongoing decline is the
recent declaration by the FAO, which in 2002 continued to express concern over the ever
increasing reliance of the Dominican Republic on food imports in order to provide for
basic nutritional needs.
Conclusion
The first stage of the post-Trujillo State siege on peasants involved policies that
reduced farmers' chances to achieve a fair value for their produce. Despite the
longstanding rhetoric regarding agricultural reform, traditional peasant production was, in 145
reality, ignored in favor of urban-importers and large-scale export producers. The priority of the State, orchestrated by the US and international agencies, became the encouragement and exploitation of the Dominican Republic's "comparative advantage"-- a cheap urban labor force. Masses of impoverished men and women eager for low-wage employment would attract international capital and stimulate investment in ISI and export-led development industries.
The rural campesinos, not only those of the Cordillera but throughout the country, assumed the costs of these industrialization strategies. The small farmers absorbed the impact of price controls established on their products that served together with the subsidized or often gratuitous US imports as low cost food supply for urban-based proletariat—^themselves primarily former campesinos recently driven from rural areas.
The campesinos of the Cordillera began joining the low cost labor reserve available to satisfy Dominican industrial capitalists and attract foreign investment. These were direct consequences of past Trujillo-state policies and of post-Trujillo policies designed largely with U.S. guidance. The peasants in the northern Cordillera faced a situation in which they had limited access to land, a consequence of the past land grabbing activities of lumber mills and other power holders. Now, many could not make a profit farming because they were forced to sell coffee at prices established by monopolistic companies and, for other crops, to compete with subsidized agro-industrially produced staples imported from the United States.
Appearances suggest that the peasants were being neglected by deliberate design.
The price of foodstuffs was controlled through subsidized imports, but little concomitant investment was being made in domestic agricultural production. The State made no attempt to control the price of fertilizers or pesticides, the costs of which rose rapidly 146
relative to the prices received for agricultural products vsdth the devaluation of the peso in the 1980s. Furthermore, a major study in 1983 pointed out: "considering that the production of the basic staples of the Dominican diet is fundamentally in the hands of the
small and medium sized farmers, it is necessary that credit policies prioritize their needs."
Nevertheless, whereas the larger fanning operations could turn to private banks for loans, the government-subsidized credit mechanism supposedly designed to support the small and medium farmers (the Agricultural Bank (BAGRICOLA) proved to be a mismanaged and under-capitalized government institution (ONAPLAN 1983). For that reason many farmers had to turn to informal credit mechanisms. The lenders were generally middlemen who, benefiting fi-om the fact that direct access to the market proved especially difficult for the small and medium farmers, could dominate local markets with
little outside competition and charge rates of interest as high as 30% or more.
In summary, the policies of the State, guided by U.S. policy makers, militated
against the viability of campesino agriculture. Whether it was truly intentional or not, the
strategy functioned in effect as though there had been a deliberate design to drive the
campesinos off the land and into the cities where they would be available to work in the
new U.S. promoted industrial sector. This was stage one of the post-Trujillo assault by
the State on the peasants. The second stage of the State policies aimed at the peasantry
was to be a more direct attack at the local level, consisting of the strict implementation of
new forestry and park policies, the subject of the following chapter.
Notes
' The dictator's Cadillac, en route to his mansion in San Cristobal, was ambushed on the western side of the George Washington Blvd., the avenue that runs along the malecon (waterfront) of Santo Domingo. The plot to kill Trujillo was not hatched by revolutionaries seeking political and social reform but rather by a group of seven conspirators with close ties to the regime who had developed personal grievances against the man. They had revenge on their minds. This is the primary hypothesis suggested by Mario Vargas Llosa 147
over the years with individuals in "La Fiesta del Chivo", a view that concurs with the author's discussions who personally knew or were involved in the "death of the goat". Regardless of their true motives, members of the group, most of whom were killed immediately after the assassination, are today considered "justice." Trujillo, for as "heroes de la patria" (heroes of the fatherland) for having brought the dictator to of the example, was responsible for the murder of the brother of Antonio de la Maza, the ringleader conspirators.
^ John Bartlow Martin, U.S. consul in the Dominican Republic during this period, attested that US foreign loans granted the US government massive control over the formulation of Dominican development policies: "The Dominican government could not spend our loan money as it wished without our approval, anything used on a project that had to be bought abroad had to be bought in the United States" and there were more than 106 other restrictions on the use of fiinds by the Dominican government (Martin 1966: 146).
^ Despite the overwhelming Marxist bent of Dominican social scientists, it is surprising the lack of detail and data documenting the role of US foreign aid in overall Dominican economic development during this period.
The Alliance for Progress was a $100 billion program for the economic and social development of Latin America in the 1960s. First proposed by President John F. Kennedy, the alliance was formally inaugurated on Aug. 17, 1961, at Punta del Este, Uruguay, by a treaty between the United States and 19 Latin American countries, excluding Cuba. Operations ceased in 1974, when fmancial support was discontinued. In essence, the Alliance for Progress was supposed to constitute the concomitant to the Marshall Plan for Latin America. In order to strengthen the basic social conditions needed for sustaining democratic governments, the Declaration's goals for all countries in Latin America included: basic improvements in social services such as education, health and housing; accelerating economic and social development in the hemisphere; encouraging agrarian reform and narrowing skews in land distribution; improving the conditions and rights of workers; redistribution of income through tax reform; and stimulating private enterprise and industrialization. In a speech delivered on March 13, 1961, John F. Kennedy outlined the vision that inspired the Alliance for Progress:
"Our greatest challenge comes from within-the task of creating an American civilization where spiritual and cultural values are strengthened by an ever-broadening base of material advance, where,
within the rich diversity of its own traditions, each nation is free to follow its own path toward progress."
In the same speech, delivered before the death of Trujillo, Kennedy singled out Cuba and the Dominican Republic as the two model tyrannical systems that the Alliance for Progress was designed to combat.
' PL-480 is the common name for the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act of 1954. According to the Act, the four goals of the PL-480 program are "to dispose of surplus agricultural products, to develop markets for US agricultural products, to encourage development in less-developed countries and to provide emergency food for disaster relief overseas." PL-480 has three major provisions, or "titles".
Title 1 "makes US agricultural commodities available through long term dollar credit sales at low interest
rates." Title II "provides donations for emergency and humanitarian food relief" Title III "donates commodities to developing country governments, which sell these commodities to finance development or provide them to their citizens for relief purposes" (Heritage Foundation N.d.).
* For example, Dominican geographer Rafael Yunen, has postulated the interesting hypotheses that the Alliance for Progress essentially constituted a means through which a democratic ideology could be established in the country by using international aid to prop up Santiago-based elites (1985:1 14). Indeed, soon after the death of Trujillo, the Santiago business elite established the Association for the Development
of Santiago, a powerfiil local development agency that, with USAID ftmding, established what is currently the country's major private university, built roads and even built an agricultural school. In this way, according to Yunen, those individuals who are currently amongst the most economically and politically 148
influential in the country allied with and took advantage of development interventions to establish an institutional base that reinforced their investment potential and leadership role in the country.
' As Frank Moya Pons points out in his book Empresarios en Conflicto (1992), the implementation of ISI into power in the Dominican Republic is often mistakenly attributed to the Balaguer regime that came m 1966. In fact, ISI was one of the goals of the Trujillo regime and one of the drivers of economic however, the emphasis on development in the Dominican Republic in the 1 950s. In the post-Trujillo period ISI-based growth through the development of urban-based factory production and agro-industry become much more pronounced.
* This Law was passed under the Triumverate that came into power in 1962 after the exile of Joaquin Balaguer.
' Available accounts testify to the emergence of widespread corruption in government during the period from 1962 to 1965 as contraband, illegal commercial activities, and extortion provided opportunities for the expansion of urban enterprise and industry. The Dominican military in particular took advantage of their privileged position. High military officials used the exemptions granted for the supplying of the cantinas on military bases as a means of importing massive amounts of contraband into the country, often using official planes and boats to transport the merchandise (Cassa 1991:135).
'° The Law was passed on the 23rd of April, 1968.
" The law was also structured to stimulate industrial development outside of the capital city, granting new industries in these areas longer periods of tariff exoneration (8 years in Santo Domingo vs. 15 years in other areas). Duty free zones and export oriented industries received 20 years of exonerations regardless of their location.
In the late 1970s, a third of Dominican exports earnings came from sugar and another 30% from coffee, cocoa and tobacco. Mining for nickel, gold and amber, an industry developed largely during the decade, by the late 1970s accounted for 25% of export earnings (Fuller 1999).
The austerity program was met by heated riots, protests and strikes that were dealt with by the government through a military and police crackdown. Protests in April 1984 left 1 14 dead and over 500 wounded (Deere et al. 1990:87-88).
Between 1973 and 1985 there were 3 free trade zone parks in the Dominican Republic, which by 1985, contained 136 companies. After 1985, the free trade zone sector began to expand rapidly. By 1989, with 19 parks and 299 companies, the Dominican Republic was the world's fourth largest export processing zone economy in terms of both number of firms and employment, a position it has maintained since that time. The growth rate of free trade zone sector continued unabated throughout the 1990s, and by 1998 free zone companies accounted for over eighty percent of the Dominican Republic's total exports and approximately 3 percent of GDP (Warden N.d.).
Gonzales states that at least US $31.4 million of this amount included wheat imports that entered into competition with other locally produced products such as plantains and rice.
In Spanish, the name of the organization is the Instituto Dominicano para la Estabilizacion de Precios (INESPRE)
" During this period, total food imports, according to Aquino (1978), were RD$228 million (with the peso on par with the U.S. dollar).
The quintal is the equivalent of 100 pounds. CHAPTER 8 STATE OF SIEGE 2: CONSERVATION AND THE MILITARIZATION OF THE HINTERLANDS
Introduction
Dominican conservationist policies initiated in the late 1960s were linked to the economic and political restructuring of the Dominican Republic described in the previous chapter. The consolidation of a system of protected areas was recommended by the US policy-makers and supported by US and international funds. The mountainous areas of the country now became most important to the State not as a source of lumber and export crops, but as a source of water for hydroelectric dams, lowland irrigation works, and the burgeoning lowland urban populations. As we shall see, the policies were designed and launched under themes of love for the environment. Their real-life consequence was a death knell to the lifeways of mountain communities.
The conservation strategies inspired by an urban-based development strategy constituted a virtual attack on the traditional campesino economy.' The State classified immense expanses of new territory under protected area status. The Forestry Service was militarized and restrictions on cutting trees were strictly enforced. The new macroeconomic, conservation-oriented and military enforced policies were to drive increasing numbers of campesinos out of the mountains and into the cities or overseas.
Conservation in the Immediate Post-Trujillo Period
The passage of Forestry Law 5856 in 1962 marked the first post-Trujillo attempt to regulate forest resources, prohibiting among other things the clearing of lands with a
149 150
slope greater than 25% and requiring that a management plan be presented and approved
8086-62 in order to receive new^ timber concessions. In the same year executive decree established the Direccion General Forestal (General Forestry Directorate), an institution commonly referred to as FORESTA that was placed in charge of issues related to national forestry. The immediate impacts of the new Forestry Law and FORESTA were negligible. In the six years following the death of TrujUlo, State control over rural areas broke down and depredation of the forests of the Cordillera progressed at an even greater rate than before (Antonini et al. 1975; Gaceta 1985). Farmers, landless campesinos and opportunistic land grabbers recount taking advantage of the breakdown of State control to invade state forests, park lands and abandoned lumber concessions, asserting their claims through clearing land in a continuation of traditional agricultural and pastoral practices
(Geilfiis 1998).
More important, however, were continued unregulated commercial logging
activities. Under Article 143 of Law 5856-62, the Secretariat of Agriculture retained the
right to sell trees on State lands, including those within national parks, and by aU
accounts made widespread use of that right. No effort was made to encourage the
selective cutting or reforestation of these lands by the concession holders. Indeed, under
the new law reforestation became the responsibility not of the mills, but of a weak State
with little institutional capacity to assume that task. Lumber companies wasted no time
in taking advantage. Between 1961 and 1967 the number of mills and concessions
increased from approximately 65 to 178 (Martinez 1990; ONAPLAN 1983).^
International Involvement in Natural Resources Policy: the 1967 OAS Study
Between 1964 and 1966, OAS consultants carried out a major National Resources
Inventory of the Dominican Republic. The purpose of this study, according to the OAS, 151
planning, to help planners was to "create a national resource data base for development
enable the Dominican identify projects for immediate implementation, and to
for resource-rich Government to plan longer-range resource-development activities
vegetation, zones" (OAS, 1984). The final report included integrated maps depicting
population distribution, and land use, hydrology, geology, soils and land capability,
flood control, crop transportation networks. It proposed projects in irrigation, drainage,
programs in mining, diversification, and agricultural production, as well as research
underground water resource, forest conservation, and national park development (OAS
restructuring the 1967 and 1984). In essence, the study provided a basic framework for
exploitation of the country's natural resources within the context of a modernized
Dominican economy.
Regarding the campesinos of the Cordillera, the report portrayed a scenario in
which there was a clear incompatibility between the presence of a rural mountain
peasantry and of an economically modem and developed Dominican State. The study
emphasized, for example, that the true vocation of the country's geography was not
agricultural but timber production. Also, an analysis of aerial photos painted a grim
picture, even for the prospects of the ongoing commercial exploitation of timber. The
study reported that only 1 1 .7% of the national territory remained covered with
commercially valuable forest. The study further defined deforestation and soil erosion as
the country's major resource-degradation problems. The consultants pinpointed out the
lumber mills in the Cordillera Central-there were approximately 80 valid concessions in
161 well 1967, but it is not known how many of these were active (Martinez 1990: -6)~as
as the "excessive population densities" in the mountains of the Cordillera as the primary
agents of the ongoing ecological devastation (OAS 1984). 152
In response to the study, the State adopted severe measures, hi 1967, President
Balaguer banned the harvesting of all live trees and ordered the closing of all commercial lumber mills, a restriction that continues in force today, three and a half decades later.
The decree also established strict prohibitions on the sale and export of lumber.
Furthermore, in the same year under Law 206 the General Forestry Directorate was transferred from the Secretariat of Agriculture to the Dominican Armed Forces. The law cited the "organization and discipline for civic action" of the military and the police as the reason this measure was adopted (Gaceta 1967).^ Again, even stricter measures were adopted in 1969 when Executive Decree 3777 prohibited the now militarized Forestry
Service from issuing any cutting permits except in "extraordinary circumstances" and only with the direct approval of the President of the Republic. This measure was taken, according to the decree, primarily to protect the Taveras and Valdesia dams which were
under construction at the time.'*
These new State policies signaled impending economic doom for residents of the
Cordillera. In 1967, only weeks after the enactment of the decree, anthropologist Gerald
Murray arrived to conduct fieldwork in La Loma, a small hamlet in the northwestern
Cordillera Central. Murray was inunediately struck by the impact of the new measures:
This spelled economic disaster for almost everyone in the village. The sawmill workers, of course, were to be without jobs; and no provisions were announced to find them new jobs. The squatter-farmers, whose hilly plots of land produced well for two or at the most three years, of necessity had to seek new plots every
few years, which involved cutting down the pine trees which covered the hills. Since this was now to be strictly prohibited and the prohibition enforced (the prohibition had existed but was loosely enforced), their source of sustenance was likewise ripped away from them. In effect this entire community had been condemned by government decree to economic death. [Murray 1967:2] 153
Forest Conservation: 1970s through the 1990s
Between 1970 and the present, international organizations such as the United
Nations Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), USAID and the United sponsored major studies on the Dominican environment (FAO 1973; ONAPLAN 1983; OAS USAID 1981) and the OAS produced two more major regional studies (OAS 1977;
in the 1967 1978). The reports continued to focus on the same issues as those exposed
ongoing degradation of OAS report emphasizing, above all, problems brought on by the
expressed concern for the forests in the mountainous regions of the country. The reports the plight of the campesinos but little sympathy for their traditional peasant strategies, insisting instead that agricultural practices in the mountains must be transformed.
The State responded to the reports v^dth the continued enactment of conservation
it in legislation, most notably legislation that took land out of circulation and preserved
the form of parks, scientific reserves and buffer zones. Law 627 of 1977 declared it to be
of national interest for the State to use, protect, and acquire lands in all mountainous
areas of the country, including the Cordillera Central, the Sierra de Bahoruco, the Sierra
de Neyba, the Sierra de Martin Garcia, the Sierra de el Seybo, and the Cordillera
Septentrional. This entire region was placed under a special protective jurisdiction to be
managed by FORESTA and the National Institute of Hydraulic Resources (INDHRI), the
institution responsible for the country's dams.
The new emphasis on the growth of the tourist sector in the 1980s provided yet
another strong incentive for park formation and the implementation of strict conservation
policies. For example, in the 1970s, the Cordillera region between Jarabacoa and
Constanza was declared to be the fifth polo turistico (literally tourist pole), with the
attraction being the fi-esh mountain forests of the Cordillera. In 1975, with the support of 1
154
del Este (East National Park) was the Gulf and Western Company, Parque Nacional
the Dominican RepubUc, the Casa established in the proximity of the first major resort in
International consultants drafted the de Campo Resort, constructed by Gulf and Western.
attraction. early plans for developing this park as a tourist
(National Parks With the formation of the Direccion Nacional de Parques
accelerated in the 1980s and Directorate better known as DNP), protected area formation
national parks, scientific 1990s. Between 1980 and 2000 the State set aside 61 new
January of reserves, and ecological buffer zones (USAID 2001). By 2002, 16%
of nine Dominican land and 12% of Dominican territorial waters fell within one
categories of protected areas (Table 8-1).
Table 8-1. The Dominican protected area network lUCN Category Number of Total area (km2) Surface area (km2) areas Terrestrial Marine 94 Scientific reserves 10 639 546 2126 National parks 22 8485 6359 155 98 National 1 246 monuments 25303 Wildlife refiiges 7 25577 273 Other 20 546 513 33 Total 70 35494 7844 27646 Percentage of DR 16 12 territory Source: Adapted fi-om USAID (2001 :3 3)
Impacts on Campesino Adaptation
The de facto consequences of this restriction of campesino access to the factors
of production, if not one of the publicly formulated objectives of the State policies, was
the creation of a pressure that would force them to leave the Cordilleran highlands.
FORESTA agents were instructed to step up pressure restricting swidden agriculture, the
cutting or cleaning coffee groves, and livestock grazing both within and on the outskirts
of the parks. Besides surveillance and repression, the strategy employed by the State 155
the parks. prohibition on the included restricting agricultural credits in areas near to A
cimarron, an exotic species generaUy hunting of feral pigs (the puerco jibaro or puerco
destruction) constituted a direct attack considered itself to be an agent of environmental
CordiUera were now completely denied against the montero lifestyle. Campesinos of the
age of the early part of use of areas that had constituted the base for the peasant golden
and great grandparents had the 20*^ century, the very retreats where their grandparents
of caudillos and other originally sought refuge from forced recruitment into the armies
peasants, legislation elements of State control. Even in areas that were not off-limits to
slowly choke off other peasant restricting land use gave the State the foothold needed to
grazing. subsistence practices, something evident in the demise of livestock free
Free Grazing in Armando Bermudez National Park
there Beyond the breaking up of the terrenos comuneros into individual holdings,
in the have been two State tactics used to eliminate the traditional practice of free grazing
highlands of the Cordillera. The first involves the declaration of agricultural zones in
Zona. The other areas in which free grazing had prevailed. These areas were called la
required method was called the Permiso Pastizal (Pasturage Permit) and it involved the
registration and paying taxes on livestock free-ranged within the park.
Agricultural zones
Despite the formal break-up in the late 1950s of the comunero lands in the Sierra
region of the Cordillera the agro-pastoral complex continued to be practiced there into the
late 1970s and even perhaps into the 1980s.^ One strategy adopted by the State to end the
practice was linked to the designation of vast areas as agricultural zones or coffee zones,
called by locals la Zona. The use of the zona agrkola (agricultural zone) or zona
cafetalera (coffee zone) extends back to the Trujillo period and has been used by the 156
State to foment the expansion of cash crops or export crops, primarily coffee, at the expense of the livestock economy. In areas falling within a designated agricultural or coffee zone animals must be tethered or maintained within a fenced pasture.
Many locals clearly remember the arrival of la zona in their communities. In most cases, the State simply declared a particular area to fall within a zona and the locals had to respond accordingly. In other cases, the zona designation generated significant conflict among ranchers in light of the emergence of two mutually opposed systems. For example, as in much of the rest of the western Cordillera, the pioneering families of
Loma sin Cerca lived on communal or State lands and the local economy was based on the agro-pastoral complex. Elders report that in the late 1950s and early 1960s outsiders in search of land began to establish themselves in the area. These individuals owned few animals. The majority of these focused on cash cropping, especially coffee and to a lesser extent short cycle and annual crops.
Due to the fact that fi-ee grazing continued to predominate in the region, the new agriculturalists were required to build strong empalizada fences to protect their crops fi-om roving livestock in the same fashion that the locals did. These new arrivals owned few animals and found the task of building and repairing fences burdensome and to limit the expansion of their farming activities. For the traditional ranchers whose livelihoods emphasized herding, the building of the empalizada around the conuco was also laborious but the idea of abandoning the use of the empalizada to raise their animals within enclosed pastures represented economic suicide. The open pasturelands upon which their herds depended would be eliminated, and the number of animals they could raise would
be limited by the small size of their personal land holdings. It was not long before this 157
exploded into a conflict over productive strategies created local social divisions and political struggle.
organize in In the early 1970s, to the horror of the ranchers, the farmers began to favor of the area being declared a zona cafetalera. Early on, however, the traditional
seccion. ranching families remained the wealthier and more powerful families in the
the dominant These families maintained close ties with Balaguer's Reformista party,
were able to retain force in national politics from 1966-1978. Throughout this period they effective political control over the seccion and successfully militate against the zona
initiative.
The political tide changed in 1978 when a PRD presidential victory ended Joaquin
Balaguer's 12-year reign. The new local alcalde of the seccion, a PRD appointee, sided
with the farmers in support of the zona cafetalera initiative. By this time the farmers had
become the majority group in the seccion. The zona initiative was submitted to a local
referendum and emerged victorious. This initiated the progressive destruction of local
livestock raising and favored the emergence of a local economy increasingly oriented
toward the production of coffee.^
The pasturage permits system
The parklands provided the last remaining refuge for ranchers wishing to continue
the practice of free grazing livestock. As occurred all around the park, many ranchers
from Loma sin Cerca defied park regulations and released their animals into the
Bermudez National Park. Although the owners of animals risked harassment and even the
confiscation of their animals, park enforcement remained weak and the proscriptions
against using the parklands for pasture even met with opposition from local authorities. 158
For example, many park rangers and local government officials themselves raised
animals within the park. \ . .
In the late 1980s this began to change. In an interview^, the park administrator
during that period claimed that cattle raising within the reserve occurs on lands "very
steep and susceptible to erosion and, for that reason, constitutes a serious management
problem, although we do not have any specific studies regarding the carrying capacity
and environmental impact generated by this activity." He also stated that grazing within
the park increases the likelihood of forest fires instigated by delinquents interested in
encouraging the emergence of fresh pasturage. The DNP therefore launched a program
designed to gradually end the use of the park as an area for grazing livestock. The
program was called Permiso Pastizal (Pasturage Permission), something the park
administrator described in 1998 as having had the "desired effect" of progressively
eliminating the livestock from the park without provoking heated social conflicts.^
The Permiso Pastizal system required cattle owners to register all of their animals
that were in the park. Unregistered animals found in the park were confiscated and the
introduction of new animals was prohibited. Next, the campesinos were required to pay
an annual tax for each animal registered. Early in the program, the tax was low and the
campesinos responded favorably to the initiative. The DNP was able to use the system to
register the cattle present in the park and identify the owners. But then the DNP annually
increased the livestock tax. In light of increased vigilance by authorities and the
increasingly burdensome tax, the campesinos soon began to voluntarily remove their
animals from the park. By the late- 1990s only wealthier landowners and a few rebellious
campesinos chanced free-grazing their livestock within park borders. Along with the
breakup of the terrenos comuneros, the zonas agricolas and the Permisos Pastizales had agro-pastoral essentially brought an end to the activity around which the traditional complex in the remote highlands of the Cordillera was organized.
Pressure from FORESTA and Tree Cutting
Conservation policies also brought pressure to bear on more mundane peasant
cutting and subsistence activities. Forestry policies that prohibit even very small-scale
of the use of wood without a permit are viewed by the campesinos as the most oppressive
FORESTA regulations. In the words of Miguel, a 38 year-old fanner from Los Postes:
the "if people paid attention to the Forestry Service, we wouldn't even use firewood from park, because not even that [is allowed]. They even want to prohibit us from cutting firewood and dried sticks."
Besides the collecting of firewood, other violations of the forestry law include the
felling or damaging of pine trees when clearing or burning a conuco and the cutting of
trees without permission, even on one's private property, for home or other farm
reparations. These constitute violations that are generally small in scale in terms of
environmental impact, but the penalties can be severe. Campesinos report being detained
or jailed for weeks at a time by District Heads in complete violation of habeas corpus
rights. Take for example the case of Fausto, from Los Postes:
I have been held by FORESTA three times. The last time was for seven days, in San Jose de las Matas (in the District OflSce of FORESTA). When I was constructing these ranchitos (work sheds) they found me with seven varas (sticks) of pine and they put me in jail for seven days. Those sticks ended up costing me a
lot, and they kept the sticks.
I didn't have to pay a fine because these days what they say they do is give a punishment to the offender^. But one of the things that the law prohibits is when a person admits his guilt, to hold him for more than 48 hours without being tried and
sent to jail. I told the lieutenant that I wanted him to call Santiago and see what he was going to do with me, because you can't hold me here for more than 48 hours.
He said, no, this is a matter of the Forestry Service. So I told him: 'Well, then FORESTA must be the owner of the Republic or of the Dominican Constitution.''" 160
There are many similar stories of detentions, many much longer, and conflicts with local
Forestry agents and FORESTA officials especially over the cutting of logs and the
gathering of posts.
The constant pressure and harassment by Forestry agents and Park guards has slowly extinguished most of these now illegal activities, especially within the protected areas. For example, the making of conucos within both parks has been almost completely controlled. "People aren't like they were before, people finally became convinced and stopped going there" stated an elderly woman fi-om Los Postes. The ongoing pressure by
Forestry agents and Park guards eventually takes its toll. For example, besides imprisonments and fines. Forestry agents are accused of other abusive behaviors such as purposely releasing animals into illegally planted conucos to destroy the crops. This occurred to a widow in Los Postes who, after her husband passed away, had been allowed to live within Bermudez National Park, just across the park boundaries:
After they took away her conuco she became depressed, couldn't take it. A la pobre le did pena. That poor woman just lost hope and she left the community taking her kids. They didn't put her in jail, what they did was deforest her conuco.
Similarly, Fausto stated: "I finally had to abandon a piece I had up there (in the park).
Because that is the mystique that they have, to keep attacking people until they will move."
The campesinos complain bitterly that the government policies and incompetent
Forestry agents and Park Guards are at fault for their misbehavior. The story told by El
Diacono, a campesino leader and Catholic deacon fi-om a seccion close to Los Postes, is reflective of this perspective. El Diacono needed to cut down three pine trees on his property to make reparations to his house: 161
So they told me that I had to request a permit, and I did that. They told me I had to
pay for some State seals, so 1 went to the Internal Revenue office and I bought the
seals. But when 1 go to the head Forester to deposit my solicitation, he read the
whole Forestry law to me; that you can't cut pine anywhere, nor mill it
electrically or by hand. So I said to him: 'where does the law say that a person
has to live in a cavern? The law doesn't say that. But I have to live because I am
a person.' So I had already paid for the seals, I had requested a permit and it was denied.
Conclusion
Conservation during the post-Trujillo era was driven by urban-oriented
development priorities, principally: 1) the construction of hydroelectric dams to provide
cheap energy to a booming urban population; 2) the expanding need for potable water
amongst the growing urban populations; and 3) the expansion of the urban-based manufacturing and tourism sectors. A growing worldwide conservation movement
championed by foreign governmental agencies such as the OAS, USADD, the German
GTZ and the Swiss HELVETAS also effected changes during this period. The funds provided by these organizations gave way to a burgeoning domestic conservationist movement manifest in the emergence of a multitude of conservation-oriented NGOs.
The new conservation laws took vast areas of land away from the campesinos and began to outlaw many of their traditional subsistence strategies. The consequences of these policies amounted to a direct assault on peasant lifeways and living standards. But as will be shown in the next chapter, in the face of continually declining living standards,
little was done to help the campesinos make the transition to a different lifestyle.
Notes
' Dominican geographer Yunen proposes the hypotheses that one of the primary plans of the elite Cibao leaders was (and is) to take advantage of the hydroelectric potential of the Sierra region of the Cordillera Central at the same time as fomenting the growth of the urban population of Santiago to provide the labor to support the establishment of certain kinds of industries. Yunen also stated the following:
There is an incongruence between agricultural and manufacturing activities in the Cibaeiio economic system as a consequence of the national political economy. The non-exporting agricultural sectors
I 162
'suffer' as a result of the necessity to maintain agricultural goods at a cheap price that is accessible to the poor masses of the cities, but the large urban manufacturing sector is interested in maintaining
those prices a low levels because in that way it will guarantee low wage labor with fixed salaries. So any measure that tends to '"improve"' the latifundios in one form or another goes against the rural workforce or urban manufacturing or vice-versa. An example of this situation is offered in the Central Cibao where the agricultural GDP per rural inhabitant is the lowest, precisely because it is the subregion that most uses urban workers in manufacturing. For this reason, the elites who dominate the centralizing structure of Santiago try to find solutions to the production of foodstuffs using the following rationale: 'The rural areas should have few people: we have to design better agrarian technologies that augment agricultural productivity and that conserve the environment; when the envirormient improves, we will obtain more energy; with more cheap food the urban unemployed will relax and with the production of energy, better the provision of services (medical, sanitary, housing,
etc.) by the State, and better the manufacturing that needs a 'reserve army' to provide cheap labor to the city, which will then be abundant, varied and cheap.'" [Yunen 1985:115, auth. trans.]
^ The available sources do not agree on the exact number of mills active in 1966. For example, although ONAPLAN 1983 and Martinez 1990 both report over 170 mills in 1967, apparently not all of these were active. For instance, in 1966 the Aimual Report of the Direccion General Forestal documented 92 active lumber mills that harvested a total of 14,092,577 square feet of lumber. In that same year, 1966, the Secretariat of Agriculture reports agreeing to 54 new timber concessions earmarking the cutting of 19,895
pine trees, 850 Ebano trees, 200 Sabina trees, and 1475 other hardwood trees. But it is not specified whether these concessions were provided to existing mills or to form new mills. Furthermore that year the Secretariat of Agriculture only reported providing 670 authorizations for the clearing of a total of 20,439
tareas for agricultural purposes. The small number is clearly an indication of either: 1) bad record keeping or 2) the most likely explanation, that the SEA simply was not strictly controlling conuco making in the majority of the country during the period. What is very likely to have been poor governmental record keeping during the period raises questions regarding the accuracy of the SEA data.
^ Each member of the Armed Forces and police was called upon to enforce the law and to "assume, before the country, the obligation to preserve our forest resources from all types of depredation or degradation that
could reduce it" (Gaceta 1967). The Armed Forces was ftirther instructed to establish permanent military posts in areas near the headwaters of rivers.
In August of 2000, with the passage of the new General Law of the Enviroiment 64-00, control of FORESTA was taken away from the military and turned over to the newly formed Secretariat of the Environment. This occurred at the time that fieldwork for this dissertation was being completed, and for that reason the author has not been able to draw any reliable conclusions regarding the impact of any new
forestry policies being enacted by the Secretariat, although initial impressions are that very strict policies have continued.
' The only area of the country in which the free grazing of cattle continues to occur is along the remote mountainous areas of the Dominican-Haitian border. The formal system of terrenos comuneros does not
exist in these areas, however (Murray et al. 1997).
^ Now members of both groups, the farmers and the cattle ranchers, lament the declaration of the coffee
zone, due to the fact that they say it has severely limited available options for productive activities. They say that before, comiamos came todos los dias (we ate meat everyday), and now, if lucky, they consume meat once a week. In fact, not only in Loma sin Cerca but also in many of the communities surrounding the PNAB, they say that their quality of life has decreased substantially due to policies that have resulted in the progressive destruction of the local livestock economy.
^ The park administrator also acknowledged that the problem has not been completely resolved. Some campesinos, for example, had taken advantage of political conflicts surrounding recent changes in government to reintroduce cattle into the park. Furthermore, some local officials disagree with the policy regarding animals in the park. In the northwest of the park, the sindicos (mayors) of the municipalities tend to support the grazing of hvestock in the park due to the fact, among others, that one of the local taxes upon 163
which the mxuiicipalities depend for income is that which is levied on the local butcheries. Others continue to resist and introduce livestock into the park in a clandestine fashion. This pattern matches other ongoing campesino struggles to continue to subsist by taking advantage of gaps in State control, as is discussed further in chapters 1 1 and 12.
* The DNP also convinced the Agricultural Bank to cease providing loans for livestock in areas around the park.
' During this period, as a punishment in lieu of a fine, the offenders were required to work in the local greenhouse filling sacks with dirt for the planting of seedlings.
Fausto's knowledge of his constiturionally established habeas corpus rights in this circiunstance is very unusual. He had learned these rights through taking a course sponsored by an NGO run by a Catholic priest in Santiago. This NGO has concentrated on providing training to campesino leaders in areas such as human and constitutional rights and is one of the few organizations that is regarded favorably by most campesinos of the region. CHAPTER 9 CONSERVATION, CONTRABAND AND POWERHOLDERS
Introduction
Strict policies initiated in the late 1960s prohibited the exploitation of the forest resources of the Cordillera based on the argument that the conservation of these resources was critical for the economic prosperity of the Dominican Republic. Conservation also became described as a civic and patriotic duty. However, the strict conservation laws did
not apply to all. In the post-Trujillo Dominican Republic, exceptions could be made to all laws if one had money or relaciones—influential connections. Virtually all governmental services—governmental contracts; customs tariffs; police services; judicial services; and permits—were on sale to the highest bidder. Even obtaining basic government documents such as the cedula (state ID card), driver's licenses, passports, and the Acta de Buena Conducta (Good Conduct Pass) in a prompt manner required paying officials or bureaucrats in charge a "tip". For that reason, Dominicans frequently repeat expressions like: Este es un pais en que si uno tiene cuarto, uno vive como un
principe (This is a country in which, if one has money, one lives like a prince). Ability to bribe officials or mobilize the right political relationships represented freedom and privilege.
As will be discussed below, the conservation of the natural resources of the remote hinterlands of the Cordillera became subject to the same preferential system. With the implementation of strict forestry laws, control over natural resources in the Cordillera
164 165
was shifted from the lumber mills and the campesinos to the militarized FORESTA
officials, politicians, and the park service. These institutions and their representatives, supposedly the custodians of the forest resources and conservation areas, often took advantage of their control over the rich pool of resources that had been made ofif-limits to
impoverished campesinos. The natural resources of the CordUlera came up for sale. The military-controlled Forestry service negotiated illicit access to land, timber, and other
natural resources. Politicians interested in procuring votes also readily sacrificed the
interests of conservation. Impoverished campesinos (and later Haitian workers) were
used either as scapegoats or to justify the uses of resources being controlled and
manipulated by these powerfiil institutions.
FORESTA and Paying of Bribes
Campesinos frequently complain that it is not the small farmers but the oppressive
FORESTA agents and officials who benefit directly from the strict application of
conservation laws. ' Locals in the Cordillera complain that the true contrabandistas
(contraband traders) are the Forestry guards and higher officials. Another frequent
protest is that the Forestry agents are not professionals but political appointees who often
use their position to abuse their power and extort lumber and money. Stories of abuses of
power range from detaining campesinos on small or false charges in order to pressure and
seduce the aggrieved farmer's wife; harassment and incarceration as revenge against
members of opposition political parties; to the widespread solicitation of bribes.
Interviews with Foresters confirm the statements made by the campesinos. Ing.
Gomez, a 12-year veteran of the Forestry Service, explained that the higher Forestry
officials have traditionally benefited from the sale of the Transportation Permits {Carta
de Ruta) for timber, which in his words is a gran negocio (lucrative business).^ 166
Similarly, a former local Forestry agent from a community around Jarabacoa explained that his boss provided instructions that Forestry agents were to solicit a bribe of no less than $1000 pesos from violators who, if not able or willing to pay that amount, should be detained. Another informant, "El Chino," was heavily involved in clandestine lumbering
^ in the late 1980s:
Those who benefited from the contraband coming out of the protected area were FORESTA. Because if they caught me with 500 feet of Ebano, they would take it
from me and divide it up amongst the bosses. I didn't touch anything. The forestry agent who grabbed me also didn't touch anything. He simply has to
comply with his job. It isn't the lower Forestry agents who really benefit, because
if you are a FORESTA boss and you want to make a rocking chair, or a cabinet for your house, a bedroom set, a good bed, and you have taken away a contraband of 500 feet, you weren't going to report to the District that you had 500 feet. You
would tell them: 'Ok, 1 got 100 feet of wood.' And 400 feet you would divide it up for other purposes. That is the main reason that FORESTA went after us so hard.^
Campesinos across the region share the impression that the local Forestry bosses divide the spoils-bribes, timber and posts appropriated from violators and even the fines that are
imposed. Stories circulate that important Forestry oflBcials live in houses constructed of
precious wood filled with luxurious fiimishings fashioned from the valuable timber they
had appropriated from poor campesinos.^ They report that Forestry agents would
exaggerate violations in order to extract larger bribes or fines than those deserved and, in
order to increase their take, would knowingly wait patiently for spotted violators to finish
extracting a significant amount of lumber or posts before arresting them. In summary,
the campesinos attribute the corruption of the FORESTA to the selfish incentives the
Forestry agents had for applying the law. In the words of an informant: 'TORESTA isn't
autonomous; every time there is a change in government there is a change in Forestry
agents. And these rapidly change into contrabandists." 167
The Big Farmers -
State intervention has increasingly proscribed the range of peasant subsistence activities and sought to control the range of activities of the Dominican peasantry. The government passed laws dictating the uses of the lands that peasants lived on and fanned;
vagrancy laws made it illegal not to produce; and government price controls and industrial policies determined what they could profitably produce. Rhetoric that focused on the campesinos as agents of environmental destruction served as a justification for policies that criminalized practices essential to their livelihoods. But when conservation has run counter to the economic interests of power holders, a reverse rhetoric has at times been employed. Concern for the welfare of the campesinos and their right to make a living becomes used as a justification for practices that degrade the envirormient. One use of this rhetorical tactic was mentioned in chapter 5, when the lumber companies disputed Canela's park laws by arguing that they prevented impoverished peasants fi^om practicing their livelihoods. The same tactic was used in a recent expansion of large-scale agro-industrial farming into the highlands along the borders of Rancier National Park.
In 1983, in response to a large forest fire in the heart of Valle Nuevo, near the case study community of Las Papas, a new scientific reserve was formed (Martinez
1984). The initial limits of the reserve covered a lightly populated area, a consequence of the fact that lands within the reserve had remained under the control of two families that
had, up until 1 967, operated lumber mills in the area. The formation of the reserve
immediately created a conflict with the families that claimed to hold legal title to lands in the reserve who were not compensated for their lands. At the time, the hamlet of Las
Papas, located close to the borders of the new reserve, only contained approximately 30 households some of whom also worked lands within the park. 168
agricultural In the late 1980s, however, there was an expansion of intensive production within the park. In light of decreasing yields in the valley, several prominent
Constanza farmers moved to lands along and within the limits of the reserve where they initiated the intensive production of vegetables. The occupation of the lands by the
Constanza-based farmers was facilitated by the fact that these had strong connections to the local Reformista political party.^ Once established, these large landowners leveraged their political influence by facilitating the occupation of the area by smallholding campesinos, migrant workers primarily from the south. Local informants report that both these migrants also entered the park region "wearing red hats," the color of the same
Reformista party.' Local politicians from the party, anxious to increase their voting base, ensured that the authorities did not interfere with the occupations of the park.
The new campesino occupants were given small parcels of land to sharecrop and the big farmers underwrote the costs of fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation. By 1994, a
study conducted by the Secretariat of Agriculture reported 285 famiUes living and
working within or along the margins of the reserve. Over 1000 hectares of land within the
reserve was being farmed using intensive agro-industrial techniques (i.e., agro chemicals
and irrigation).
It was no secret to the Secretariat of Agriculture that in reality the land was
concentrated in the hands of a few owners. According to the SEA report, five
landowners (1.7%) held 30% of the area being exploited within the reserve
(approximately 4950 tareas). Another 64 families (22.5%) were middle-sized farmers
occupying 7041 tareas (approximately 110 tareas per family). On the other hand 75.78%
of the occupants (216 families) occupied only 4509 tareas (27%). These families
exploited small plots of less than 50 tareas each (Abreu 1998). " 169
The Secretariat's study was initiated as a response to mounting pressure to enforce restrictions related to the reserve, hi the early 1990s, representatives from farmer and ecological associations in Constanza began to complain that activities in the reserve, specifically the damming and extraction of water from the headwaters of the Rio Grande
(the river that feeds the irrigation systems in the valley of Constanza), was threatening their already overtaxed water supply.
hi response to the study, a 1994 internal resolution of the National Parks
Directorate ordered the inhabitants of the park border displaced. A full military brigade was mobilized. The soldiers bulldozed homes and other infrastructure in the park. But before the peasants were entirely driven out of the area President Balaguer ordered the
displacement halted. It was a standoff. All agricultural activity in the proximity of the reserve was paralyzed by decree. But the small campesinos stayed put. FORESTA
provided weekly rations for the families while maintaining strict controls restricting all land use in the area.
The 1994 displacement initiated a four-year political struggle between the government and the farmers living on the outskirts of the reserve. The large landowners,
individuals from influential families who received little empathy from the public for their
"phght," organized the smallholding campesinos into an association and used the association as a front before the national press. Furthermore, in order to obtain sympathy for their cause, they spread the story that the 285 farming families affected by the
displacement had been working in the park for more than 40 years. ^ In the meantime, they—the large landowners who were politically connected—went to work behind the scenes. In 1998, after four years of impasse, an agreement was struck between the new 170
PLD government, landowners and small farmers living along the northern limits of the
reserve. The displacement order was lifted.^
It would appear that the peasants had won the standoff and that at least in this
instance the political momentum that had been sweeping peasants from the mountains for
almost half a century had been reversed. The government officials who lifted the
displacement described the move as sensitivity to plight of the smallholding campesinos.
According to the FORESTA director of the time: "I am from the campo (rural areas) and
I have to feel the pain of the men and women of the campo and what we are doing is
indisputable" (Sosa 1998). This official claimed that the displacement was lifted as an
example of the fact that man can live with his environment. It was to be a new
'sustainable development' approach implemented by the government. FORESTA
provided the campesinos with courses in soil conservation, and agreements were signed
that barriers would be built to prevent soil erosion and that no agrochemicals would be
used in the area.
But the story used both by the large landowners and the government to justify the
lifting of the displacement was a farce. It was clear to all involved and anyone who
bothered visiting the area that the campesinos who were supposedly the focus of the
controversy were not long-time fraditional residents of the region (Abreu 1998). They
were rural semi-proletarians and sharecroppers, recent immigrants from the dry south. In
the park and along its borders they lived in small, densely settled roadside hamlets reminiscent of work camps and they spent most of their waking hours employed as paid
laborers in the fields and hot houses of large landowners. The large landowners facilitated their access to land and provided them agrochemicals, seeds, and irrigation, so that they would produce potatoes and other vegetables. Consequently, in order to legitimize their traditional claims to the park area, the large landowners used the image of mistreated peasants as rhetorical ammunition to defeat the conservationist groups.
There were powerfiil economic motivations behind the lifting of the displacement.
intensive With the lands in the vaUey of Constanza increasingly degraded by years of exploitation and the salinization of the soils due to years of mismanaged irrigation, the region around the park provided fresh lands for the intensive production of potatoes and vegetables. Since the lifting of the displacement, the region has begun to rival if not surpass the valley of Constanza in terms of overall agricultural production. Bulldozers and front-end loaders busily remove boulders and re-contour the landscape. New trucks transport workers into the area and leave the area loaded with sacks of enormous potatoes, prize onions, large carrots and heads of cabbage that weigh over a pound. In
blatant disregard for the supposed agreement upon which the displacement was
rescinded, empty bags of industrial fertilizers and pesticides litter the neat rows of
vegetables. Irrigation pipes run miles up into the very park itself.
The activities along the borders of Rancier constitute, like the lumber mills of the
past, an environmentally devastating attack on the park. But these activities clearly are
not those of traditional peasants, but rather sophisticated and politically connected agro-
industrialists with vested capital who have used campesinos as a front to justify their
access to park resources. The peasants were handily set up as the agents of someone
else's ecological havoc. And once again, the political weight of capital demonstrated that
when not economically expedient, conservation was expendable.'*'
Conclusion
In this chapter it was seen that despite strict conservation laws, Foresters, park
guards and powerfiil stakeholders often stepped in and made healthy profits on the . 172
'protected' resources of the forest. As had occurred during the Trujillo era, those aUied
with the State—in this new case Forestry guards, officials, and agro-industrialists with
political and financial capital—took advantage of their positions. Guards pressured
campesinos for bribes while at the same time they often exploited the park resources for
their own use, grazing cattle and negotiating illegal access to park timber. Meanwhile, in
a trend reminiscent of the lumber companies, agro-industrial elites used dispossessed
campesinos as cheap laborers on their fields and in their hothouses and as political pawns
in their struggle against conservationists.
At the same time as conservation policies and siege-like State policies militated
against the viability of campesino life, ongoing efforts were being carried out in the
mountains ostensibly directed towards assisting the campesinos to find alternative
livelihoods and to participate in the transition to a modem industrialized economy. These
efforts were lavishly fianded by 'foreign aid' from developed economies, principally the
United States but also Canada, Germany, Japan and other industrialized nations. The aid
came in the form of consultants, new State bureaucratic institutions, NGOs, and operating
funds. But as will be discussed in the next chapter, in the same vein as the resources of the Cordillera the "assistance" became overwhelmingly commandeered by others:
educated urbanites, economic elites, people with political contacts and government functionaries and politicians.
Notes
' The Dominican Republic in the post-Trujillo period has been characterized as a "predatory state". The selective application of the term "predatory" only to certain kinds of Third World states is problematic. Nevertheless, the description that Evans (1995) provides of a predatory state clearly matches the Dominican situation:
A state in which, central control and bureaucratic norms have disintegrated and corruption rules. Different groups in the state bureaucracy attenpt to maximize their own profit by selling their services 173
in the market. Those with the means to buy state services or privileges get them, while the rest of the population has no choice but to exit the state institutional system. [Itzigsohn 2000: 14]
^ Ingeniero, abbreviated Ing., literally means "Engineer" and is a title of respect used for college graduates
in any branch of engineering. I have included this title to add an authentic feel to the conversation. However, as in the case of all my informants, the name used is a pseudonym.
^ I have used "El Chino" as a pseudonym for this informant. As I have also done in the case of "El
Diacono" I have used pseudonyms that refer to some characteristic of the informant. In the Dominican campo this would be common. Campesinos more frequently refer to one another by using "apodos", nicknames which often refer to some physical or personality characteristic, than through their baptismal names.
* In 1998, when discussing my research with an owner of one of the last functioning lumber mills in the city of Santo Domingo, the individual reported that military/FORESTA officials were bringing in timber on a weekly basis.
' In Los Postes, informants insisted that a former colonel in charge of FORESTA in San Jose de las Matas bragged about building a large house in La Vega with the contraband he had recovered from campesinos.
* The park was formed under the PRD administration of Salvador Jorge Blanco. In 1988, Balaguer's Reformista party won the national elections.
^ People often joke that campesinos always have available the caps of the three national political parties: the white symbol of the PRD (Partido Revolutionario Dominicano) party; the red of Balaguer's Reformista party; and the purple of the PLD (Partido de la Liberacion Dominicana) party. The point being that most
campesinos will readily change hats when they perceive that it is in their interest to do so.
^ In fact, according to in-depth interviews with key elderly informants in Las Papas there were only 12 families that had worked in the region since the 1960s. All of the other small farmers inpacted by the displacement orders were recent arrivals.
' Park-related problems were further compounded in 1996, when the limits of the protected area were vastly expanded and the name of the area changed to Juan B. Rancier National Park. The new park limits incorporated numerous other populated hamlets along the northem, eastern and southern limits of the protected area.
During the same period, the displacement order was given for hamlets located along the eastem limits of the scientific reserve. Through executive decree 199 of 1992, President Balaguer declared an area in the highlands along the eastem and southern limits of what at the time was Valle Nuevo Scientific Reserve to be Vedado a toda Actividad Humana (Restricted from all Human Activity). The entire region was claimed by the State under eminent domain, and the National Institute of Hydraulic Resources as well as the Directorate of National Goods was ordered to take all human beings out of the restricted area using the ordinary and exttaordinary resources that would be required. The United Nations (FAO) provided money to carry out the displacement of campesinos living in the area. Nevertheless, the displacement process was rife with corruption. Few displacements actually took place, and the can^esinos slowly began practice agriculture again. CHAPTER 10 THE BENEFICIARIES OF RURAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE CORDILLERA
Introduction
Despite widespread corruption and political manipulation of conservation laws,
State conservationist policies can be viewed as an ecological success. The formation of
protected areas, the closing of the lumber mills, the militarization of the Forestry Service
and State siege-like policies that militated against the viability of campesino agriculture
succeeded in slowing the tide of deforestation in many areas of the coimtry and
paralyzing if not reversing it in others. By 2001, USAID consultants reported: "the loss
of forest cover appears to be stabilizing; there is some suggestion of forest recovery"
(USAID 2001).
But it was a success that came with a human cost. In 1960, the year before the
assassination of Trujillo, 70% of the Dominican Republic was rural while the population
grew at 2.5%, ranking the country among the most rural and fastest growing populations
in Latin America. Basic conditions of rural life were grim: only 12.4 percent of rural
inhabitants had tap water available in their homes; and only 1.9% had electric lights;
death rates from infectious, parasitic, gastro-intestinal and respiratory diseases were
among the highest in all of Latin America, as were illiteracy rates (Clausner 1973:238-
243; Duarte 1980; hioa 1994; Lozano 1985).'
In the decades following Trujillo's assassination, some progress was made in
areas such as healthcare and education. For example, between 1960 and 1993 literacy rates climbed from 64.5% to 81.7% (PNUD 2000). Life expectancy increased from 53.6
174 175
in 1960 to 72.3 years in 2000. But what these statistics meant was elusive. The change
in life expectancy was almost entirely a consequence of dropping infant mortality rates—
from 132.2 per thousand in 1960 to 30 in year 2000 (CEPAL 2000). Furthermore, other
than life expectancy, progress made in "human development" indicators remained largely
concentrated in urban areas (PNUD 2000).
The region of my fieldwork, the Cordillera, remained amongst the most
marginalized regions. For example, a 1997 study of national poverty carried out by the
government planning office (ONAPLAN)--using a model based on variables such as
housing conditions, access to piped water, latrines; and energy, educational levels and
unemployment—estimated that the municipalities surrounding the Bermudez and Rancier
National Parks were among the most impoverished in the country. According to this
study, 91 .1% of the households in the seccion of Las Papas are poor and 50% are
indigent, meaning that the families generally are unable to meet daily caloric
requirements and the majority of other basic needs are unsatisfied. The same study
indicates that in Los Postes, 82.9% of the population is officially indigent.
Government and international agencies initiated a series of costly interventions
meant to address rural underdevelopment. But in this chapter it will be seen that while
rural "development" projects proved to be a boon for opportunistic urban-based political
and non-profit "entrepreneurs", they did little to improve circumstances for the intended
beneficiaries who were impoverished campesinos. Non-governmental organizations-
quipped "FONGOs," foraging non-governmental organizations, by one veteran observer
the of Dominican 'development industry'- captured project funds destined for rural
development and then used them to pay ample salaries of urban staff and to purchase jeeps and office equipment, much of which was used much more in the city of Santo 176
Domingo than in the campo (Murray et al. 1998). State agencies mismanaged funds,
often redirecting them into the pockets of corrupt politicians. Equally damaging was the
fact that "sustainable rural development" was essentially a euphemism for programs that
reinforced the siege-like State policies that had undermined the viability of peasant life in
^ the first place.
Government and Rural "Development" Organizations
Government development programs in the northern Cordillera were, and still are,
marked by resounding ineffectiveness. Evaluation of the programs emphasize the lack of
trained personnel, the lack of coordination between institutions, overlaps in institutional
fiinctions, and the inefficient use of resources (ONAPLAN 1983; USAID 1981 and
2001).^ But the interesting thing about these evaluations is that 1) the governmental
institutions that were supposed to manage the funds were created by the evaluating
organizations; and 2) the institutions performed exactly as they had been created,
becoming very efficient at procuring, processing and disposing of funds as desired by the
donors.
The Dominican Secretariat of Agriculture (SEA) is a notable example of how the
process worked.'* The SEA is the primary public agricultural agency in the Dominican
Republic. From the early 1960s until the eariy 1990s approximately 20% of SEA's total
budget came from donors, yet these funds constituted 80% of the SEA's operating
budget. Government funds were absorbed in bureaucratic expenses such as salaries and building maintenance (Meyer 1992b). By controlling operational fiinding, donors, who were trying to promote their own foreign policy objectives, controlled decisions regarding the types of programs that could be implemented and institutional changes that would occur within SEA. And for Dominican "political entrepreneurs" or decision- makers: "the promise of donor funds and the opportunities for personal advancement
served as adequate compensation to . . . supply the requisite changes." Donors pressured SEA to mimic projects that achieved success elsewhere yet "were based on assumptions that did not hold in the Dominican environment." Demand for change also
"proved to be external rather than local" (Meyer 1992b:636) and donors proved to be highly fickle. In the absence of short-term results or in line with development fads, donor priorities rapidly changed and funding was redirected to achieve different objectives. Yet decision makers within SEA, with strong incentives to capture international funding, always proved receptive to donor priorities. Organizations such as USAID provided international consultants to assist in the organization or reorganization of projects and provide advice. Dominican professionals were sent abroad to receive the requisite training to implement projects that would only last until the funding ran out.
It was not, therefore, the supposed clients, the rural farmers, whose needs were served and who benefited from extension and other SEA programs. Rather, the projects served the needs of the donor organizations—SEA's true clients. The mostly urban-based
Dominican "political entrepreneurs and bureaucrats" benefited financially, in terms of increased prestige and through valuable contacts and opportunities. By the 1980s, when international donors abandoned the public sector to work with private non-profit organizations, SEA was left almost completely inoperative (Meyer 1992a).^
Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)
In the 1980s, in light of the failure of initiatives financed through the public sector, donors began to focus on financing development initiatives through non- governmental organizations (Meyer 1992a). hitemational donors ahnost began to fiinction like venture capitalists for the non-profit sector. Influential Dominicans 178
anxiously sought ideas that would capture donor funds to launch new organizations and
pilot projects. '
Funds were provided for the formation of NGOs in a broad number of sectors of
strategic interest to donors, including conservation and rural agricultural development.
The availability of donor funds produced a virtual explosion in the number of NGOs with
Boards of Directors anxiously seeking to capture development projects and identify
suitable clients. Individuals from all walks of life clamored to form an "ONG" with the
hope of landing a big project. Former high government officials used the prestige,
contacts and knowledge of the development sector acquired while in office to form their
NGOs.
Much literature has been produced regarding the structural advantages and
disadvantages of NGOs vis-a-vis public sector executed development (e.g., Meyer 1992a;
Korten 1990). However, whether governmental institutions or NGOs, the phenomenon
of donor driven development had not changed. It was still the donors who were making
decisions regarding how funds were spent and largely educated urbanites, and not rural
people, who were capturing the funds. NGOs were forced to focus not on what the
people in rural areas needed but on what the donors believed they needed or wanted them
to have. For many NGOs, the principal task was to substantiate short-term compliance
with donor-driven project objectives in order to qualify for further funding by the same or
other donors. Relatively few important Dominican NGOs have managed to subsist on
locally raised funds. In short, foreign flinders and their clusters of developmental
interests, and not the needs of rural clients, largely drove the process of rural Dominican development. NGO formation was also manipulated both by locals and by international organizations for other political ends. For example, a prominent Dominican sociologist argues that during the politically tumultuous 1980s international organizations such as
USAID used NGOs as a tool to buy oflF political agitators. Many former leaders of left- leaning political groups came to direct NGOs and, as a result, they became dependent on international donor groups for income and thus controllable (Marina Ortiz, pers. comm.).
The lesson was not lost on local politicians. The Dominican Government has recently become a major donor in its own right. Dominican senators and representatives use questionable NGOs, largely formed by former government officials, as a means to reward political supporters or to captvire public funds themselves. The 2002 national budget, for
example, included over 13 billion pesos (approximately US$590 million) in fiinding for
over 3000 non-profit organizations (Cabrera 2003). The local press has reported widely
on the controversy over the use of so-called "phantom" NGOs by legislators (Ramirez
2001).
NGOs in the Cordillera
The picture of the NGO sector described above does not mean that within the
morass of predatory organizations there is not a sub-segment ofNGOs run by individuals
deeply committed to meaningfiil development for rural farmers. Clearly, the NGOs that
have been affiliated v^th the Catholic Church tend to have delivered the most consistent
service in the Cordillera, have fought most diUgently for the interests of the campesinos,
and are the organizations most respected by the campesinos. The reason for this includes the fact that the Catholic Church maintains a permanent institutional presence in the
region and the motives that push Church actors toward involvement in development
activities go beyond the crass financial payoffs which clearly drive many of the fly-by- 180
night NGO's headed by current or former government officials. Furthermore, the
Catholic affiliated organizations tend to be led by socially committed priests, generally
with a liberation theology background, who live with and maintain daily contact with the
campesinos and are therefore more oriented towards producing meaningful development
results for the client than for the donors.
Church-inspired NGOs rely on both public and private financing. Two prominent
examples of these kinds of organizations that operate in the Cordillera region are
CEFASA and the Junta de San Jose de Ocoa. CEFASA's objectives have included
providing training to campesino leaders, primarily in local law and constitutional rights
and in human rights including women's rights. CEFASA has also formed locally-based
women's cooperatives. The Junta de Desarrollo de San Jose de Ocoa (although
technically not in the study region), functions as a federation of locally based campesino
associations. Organized originally by a Canadian Scarborough priest, Padre Luis Quinn,
who has maintained a continual symbolic presence for over thirty years, the Junta has
been active in organizing the campesinos to build schools, improve access roads and
paths and other rural infrastructure and to increase agricultural productivity. One
example of the success of this organization in successfully producing positive
development outcomes for campesinos vis-a-vis government managed initiatives includes
a project in which gravity driven irrigation was used as an incentive for campesinos to
adopt soil conservation practices. The strategy adopted by the junta, as well as the use of
donor funds, proved much more successful and efficient in channeling funds to rural
farmers, in promoting long-term soil conservation and in producing meaningful economic benefits for farmers than a similar project managed by a government agency (Murray
1994). 181
In the northern Cordillera the most frequently mentioned project inspired in part
by the Catholic Church is Plan Sierra. Plan Sierra is formally independent of the Catholic
Church but was founded in 1979 with the inspiration and lobbying of the Archbishop of
Santiago who retained a long-time prominent presence in the Board of Directors of the
project. Nevertheless, the organization was not as closely cormected to the Church as the
institutions mentioned above. Intended as an innovative "crossover institution," Plan
Sierra operated with funding both from the Dominican government as well as private and
international donor organizations.
In theory, the projects fostered by Plan Sierra were intended to alleviate rural
poverty. The idea was that improved management of the environment would increase
productivity and thus provide a more sustainable living for the campesinos of the region.
Programs promoted soil conservation through reforestation, coffee cultivation and the use
of erosion control techniques on degraded hillside lands. Plan Sierra was also involved in
infrastructure development, health and education programs (Witter et al. 1996). Plan
Sierra also implemented a small pilot project for the community management of forests
in which the government has permitted the felling and milling of pine trees and training
has been provided to locals who have established carpentry workshops (USADD 2001).
Despite some success in achieving objectives in promoting conservation
measures, in improving infrastructure in some of the rural cortununities and in providing
farmers with education, Plan Sierra suffered many of the problems inherent in the NGO
sector in the Dominican Republic. Efforts over the years have frequently been diverted by the poUtical vicissitudes of both the State and the organization's leaders for reasons completely divorced from the needs of their campesino clients. Extension workers' enthusiasm for achieving conservation often overrode the interest in forwarding the economic interests of the campesinos. Some campesinos in Los Postes attribute stricter
State controls in Bermiidez National Park during the early 1980s to Plan Sierra extension workers and foresters who, they claim, also served as informants to oflBcials on their activities in the park. Plan Sierra's strategies also pushed many campesino families towards exclusive dependence on coffee production, a strategy that failed when coffee prices crashed and Plan Sierra had no means to buttress prices. In short, though the involvement of Catholic Church actors in development activities is spurred by motives quite different from the resource-capture motives which move many fly-by-night
"foraging" NGO's, Church activities are vulnerable to the same constraints that limit other undertakings in the sector.
Other strategies, for example, such as promoting reforestation of trees with commercial value, continue to be sabotaged both by the NGO itself and by broader State policies that protected trees. In Los Postes, for example, Plan Sierra promoted tree planting with very flexible credit terms. The credit program was being run through a second NGO that also assisted the peasants to obtain authorizations to cut the trees. A few farmers with larger landholdings attempted the project. Two farmers stated that, after seven years, the director of the organization secured the authorization to conduct the
first thinning of the plantation. The trees were cut and transported to Santiago. But no money came back. The farmers never received payment for their wood. The excuse the director gave was that the hardware store to which she sold the lumber didn't pay her, complaining of the low quality of the wood. But the farmers are convinced that the director absconded with the money. They have not seen her since.
In summary, although Church-based and inspired NGOs have provided some meaningfiil development outcomes for rural campesinos, these organizations faced an uphill battle. The programs were often undermined by broader State macroeconomic and conservation-oriented policies that militated against the success of programs designed to provide campesinos with viable alternatives to deal with the poverty and desperation associated with being deprived of their traditional subsistence base.
Conservation, Campesinos and NGOs
Equally incompatible with the endurance of traditional peasant livelihood strategies was the fact that the effort to provide campesinos with new economic opportunities became imbued with the idea of conservation-conscious rural economic development, commonly called 'sustainable development'. Sustainable development became championed by foreign governmental agencies such as the OAS, USAID, the
German GTZ and the Swiss HELVETAS. The funds provided by these organizations gave way to a burgeoning domestic conservationist movement manifest in the emergence of a multitude of conservation-oriented NGOs. These organizations often proved much more interested in promoting conservation-oriented initiatives than in generating economically meaningfiil outcomes for campesinos. Most projects emphasized economic development through conservation, in particular reforestation and the adoption of soil conservation techniques. However, as will be discussed below, in the absence of broader political changes at the State level campesinos perceived most conservation-oriented activities as contrary to their interests.
Blaming the Victim: Reforestation and Soil Conservation Initiatives
Despite the fact that development projects tend to be donor driven—responding to donor objectives rather than the needs of the campesinos~and that the majority of tangible benefits and incentives fi-om donor fluids do not accrue to the rural farmers, development agents tend to blame the campesinos for the failure of conservation and 184
"development" projects. The campesinos are implicitly accused of being the agents of their own "underdevelopment". Many development experts express fiaistration over campesino behavior they perceive as passive aggressive towards rural reforestation and other farming extension projects.
Project directors often make depreciating remarks, sometimes even in the presence of campesinos, referring to them as ignorant, unable to accept what are "clearly" rational ideas that will be in their self-interest.^ For the typically urban-based
development expert it is a finstrating experience. For example, despite the use of so- called participatory techniques, campesinos are expected to understand and conform to the concepts, objectives and models being used by donors and NGOs. As described in a recent evaluation on organizational capacity conducted for a 'participatory' project to conserve the Yaque del Norte watershed:
[The campesinos] do not perceive the project as an opportunity in which they themselves can become actively involved through formulating requests for sub- projects that they have in mind. Instead [the campesinos] expressed that they were going to support the project and the experts in their activities. [The campesinos] view the project as a traditional type of assistance that will involve consciousness raising regarding the need to reforest and preserve the natural resources in the watershed, a type of persuasive campaign to win over the farmers to [support] the objectives of the project. This attitude requires that a strong effort be devoted to
information so that the message of the project is disseminated and to guarantee at least a minimal participation of the campesinos. [Plan Cordillera 1998:6, auth. trans.]
As described in this statement, campesinos almost always warmly accept the idea of collaborating with outsiders in the realization of a project that they propose. Yet, once the project promoters leave, the campesinos often undermine the work. Animals are allowed to graze in newly reforested lands; a mysterious fire razes newly planted trees; pumps are neglected; plants go unwatered. 185
Another example of campesino misbehavior has been a certain resistance to
conservation. Jacoby (2001 :42) makes the point that conservation "breeds lawlessness."
Urbanites, lawmakers and law-enforcers prove unendingly frustrated by the
"misbehavior" of the campesinos. The campesinos' failure to comply with the laws is
often interpreted by decision-makers and elites as the manifestation of the backwardness
of the peasantry. The peasant response to the laws is not interpreted within the logic of
peasant survival strategies but rather as a manifestation of ignorance regarding
environmental processes and stubborn adherence to traditional practices. For decision
makers, therefore, changing peasant behavior towards the use of resources is often
understood as requiring education and stricter enforcement of existing laws.
Such has been the case of reforestation projects in which the campesinos have
been held responsible for the failure of initiatives despite the fact that political and
economic incentives clearly do not favor the planting of wood trees. Since the closing of
the lumber mills in 1967, government, development workers and the public at large
blame hillside farmers for deforestation of the country's mountains. According to
Geilfiis (1998:2), who worked for many years with an NGO project that implemented one
of the only successfiil agroforestry projects in the country's history, the campesinos have been viewed as by policy makers as "largely ignorant or fatalistic as regards to
environmental degradation, and in need of education in order to evolve from a 'tree- hater' to a more rational 'tree lover'." In light of the passage of the strict new forestry laws in the late 1960s and donor-fiinded campaigns devoted to reforestation in the late
1970s and early 1980s (including 1982 which was declared by the government to be the
'year of reforestation'), the cutting of trees became increasingly stigmatized as an
"antisocial activity" and reforestation hailed as a civic duty. The prevailing official 186
rhetoric continues to emphasize the environmental predatory nature of campesino
agriculture and the ignorance of farmers regarding the environmental and economic value
of trees. As a result, reforestation (and other conservation projects) have focused largely
on concientizacion (consciousness raising), envirormiental education, and "the civic value
of reforestation" and disregarded the economic dimension of reforestation for the
campesinos.
But the prevailing legal framework only provided for planting trees for
envirormiental protection and not for productive uses. Why would a campesino want to
plant and protect a tree that was subsequently going to be used to draw attention of the
authorities and risk the de facto expropriation of his land? Promises of assistance in
getting tree cutting permits are of little good when the person who makes the promise
will not be around in the 7 to 1 5 years it takes before the lumber is harvestable. And
while the urban-based development expert feels confident that he or she knows and
understands these processes, the campesinos have become the true development experts,
having witnessed the comings and goings of development projects for 40 years. Long
after the development expert has settled into a comfortable urban job and no longer visits
the Cordillera, campesinos must continue to live with the consequences of a failed
project.
As discussed in the last chapter the campesinos have few incentives to reforest.
Corruption and strict laws imply that a campesino can be jailed for felling a tree.
Farmers have to pay fines and bribes, trees in farm plots are viewed as a potential problem, seedlings found within farm plots became a nuisance, and the planting of forest trees became regarded by campesinos as an opportunity to attract State intervention and lose access to their lands. Nevertheless, development workers express tremendous 187
frustration when reforestation efforts are undermined by campesinos that set animals loose or bum the newly reforested areas in a clandestine fashion.
A similar situation applies to the implementation of soil conservation activities.
Barriers planted in fields to control soil erosion by programs such as Plan Sierra are often neglected, used for grazing and allowed to die once project incentives such as credit for fertilizers, training and free coffee plants disappear. Once again, outside agents generally interpret these activities as the result of a kind of misbehavior of the campesinos, a misbehavior rooted in their stubborn conservative natures, their ignorance and laziness.
However, there are good reasons why farmers allow the barriers to degrade. One farmer explained the neglect of the barriers in the following manner:
The people have finished off the barriers through lack of care. It is not that people reject the barriers, but the agricultural lands are small and the price of
money isn't very cheap. The barriers reduce the amount of land that is available for the harvest, and people don't see the long term, they only see what they aren't able to plant: a number of quintales [that they would be able to plant without the barriers].
As Murray (1998) points out: "the short-term, productivity-enhancing capacity of soil conservation measures in isolation—in the absence of simultaneous breakthroughs in other technical or commercial domains—is quite reduced." Erosion control measures require investments in labor and (in the case of live barriers) plants, often implying a labor or monetary sacrifice for campesinos who are living from harvest to harvest on miniscule profit margins.
Particularly ironic are nutritional projects that attempt to reorient campesinos towards subsistence production through patio gardens and fishponds. These projects imply retraining formerly subsistence-based campesinos who are being pushed into a cash-based economy by broader political and economic forces back into subsistence 188
production. Other projects include the provision of relatively low cost infrastructure:
aqueducts; schools; and the installation of solar panels with flexible payment terms.
Nevertheless, there is a contradiction between the siege-like government policies that
restrict land use and fail to provide any kind of broader assistance, and those of the NGOs
that seem to be oriented towards stimulating people to stay in the rural areas through the
provision of infrastructure and labor saving technologies. The overwhelming thrust of
State policies remains that of gradually driving the campesinos out of the mountains and
serious NGOs face a uphill battle. Although some of the development projects can claim
success in meeting particular objectives, it is clear that few projects have significantly
addressed the issues that interest campesinos such as credit at favorable rates; paved
roads; irrigation; access to non-degraded lands; stable and viable prices for their crops;
and jobs that pay a living wage.
Conclusion
From the time that Don Martin describes as almost a golden age in which the
peasants lived a life largely outside the control of the State, siege-like policies have
increasingly restricted access by campesinos to resources required to maintain a viable
livelihood. Rural development initiatives were supposedly designed to address the
consequences of these policies. However, the projects emphasized generating positive
conservation outcomes over generating economically meaningful outcomes for peasants
and in that way reinforced the siege-like policies. Funds provided for relocation,
reforestation, and soil conservation projects failed to provide the campesinos with viable,
long-term economic alternatives. There were no incentives for small farmers to allow secondary forest to regenerate or to replant trees for soil conservation. Lands were turned into pasture or over taxed to the point where they would only produce through the heavy - : . 189
application of fertilizers and pesticides. At best, struggling church-based programs or
NGOs provided training opportunities, basic infrastructure or jobs that campesinos could use to facilitate migration into the city.
Today, the contemporary Cordillera is littered with the decaying remnants of abandoned "development" projects: unkept live barriers; unused 'energy farms'; eco- tourist lodges that have never received a visitor; grassroots organizations that exist in name only; and burnt stumps of trees that were once part of ambitious reforestation projects. Outsiders have been consistently frustrated by the campesinos' hearty receptivity to projects and then their failure to carry them out or sustain them. The campesinos are often blamed for the failure of the projects, either due to their stubborn misbehavior; laziness; adherence to traditional values; or lack of education. But the misbehavior, both in conservation and other kinds of development projects, most often
lies in the &ct that development projects don't meet campesinos needs. Instead, the project objectives meet the desires of the donors and are often illogical within the legal constraints imposed by the government.
The following chapters will show that many campesinos have continued to struggle to maintain some of their traditional subsistence activities in the Cordillera.
Nevertheless, the ultimate result of these historical processes has been to provoke the
demise of the traditional form of life practiced by Don Martin and to gradually drive the campesinos out of the moimtains. The consequences of the constraints imposed on the farming economy of the Cordillera highlands have not been uniform but have had differential impact on young versus old and on males versus females. 190
Notes
'Similarly, census data from 1950 shows that for every economically active male reporting having received a wage the week before the census took place there were 3.1 who worked without pay—implying that these relied on subsistence agriculture and/or survived through the production and sale of home farm products. In contrast, in 1960 the same ratio grew to one for every 5.5 and the absolute numbers of rural wage earners remained virtually the same during the 10-year period (@140,000). At the same time, the amount of arable
land available per person (males) of working age decreased from 36 to 3 1 tareas (ONAPLAN 1 967).
^ The observations made in this chapter are based largely on my experience working as an insider within the private, public and non-profit sectors in the Dominican Republic. Besides time spent conducting research in the field, my experience in the Dominican Republic included two years as the Director of a small NGO, two years working as a mid-level functionary as a local hire with the Ministry of the Enviroimient, and significant experience working as a consultant for organizations such as USADD, the GTZ, and The Nature Conservancy.
^ The observation of these deficiencies in official reports by agencies such as USAID seems ironic in light of the fact that the majority of the uncoordinated governmental organizations were created with backing and technical support from USAID itself or other international donors. It is also clear that citing these institutional deficiencies serves to divert attention from the real problem.
" Meyer (1992b:630) uses the conceptual distinction between 'institutions', which she describes as the "rules of the game" and 'organizations', which are the "players" or the "decision-makers with legal personality".
^ During the period in which this dissertation was being written, I spent two years working as a mid-level fiinctionary for a major govenmient Ministry as the head of a Research Department. My experience closely matches that described by Meyer regarding the SEA. For example, although the carrying out of my duties required extensive field research, it was extremely difficult to come by fiinds for equipment, transportation, and per diems. Nevertheless, at the beginning of each fiscal year sfrenuous efforts were made to develop detailed annual budgets, which were never even remotely followed.
Another frustration included the fact that consultants and donor organizations proved unwilling to provide services based on the expressed needs of the Ministry due to the fact that these projects did not clearly articulate with donor objectives. Donors hired intemational consultants to conduct studies without consulting Ministry personnel and ignored our requests for serious participation in the process or even to provide us with a copy of the databases elaborated by the projects so that we could follow up on the consultants' studies. Endless hours of meetings were spent with intemational consultants to coordinate workshops and other projects that completely failed to address our expressed needs. During my two years in the Ministry, donors invested millions of dollars yet, in my personal opinion, failed to inclement one project that would strengthen the capacity of the Ministry to carry out its fimctions independent of the donor organizations.
^ Forming an NGO has become regarded as a means of capturing donor funds and of making a good living. Indeed, in my years living in the Dominican Republic I have been approached on numerous occasions by Dominican family members, friends and professional colleagues who, knowing of my contacts and experience in the development field, have proposed attempting to start an NGO.
' I have witnessed this phenomenon on numerous different occasions in the field with the comments being made by representatives of a number of different NGOs. 1
CHAPTER 1 THE ENEMIES OF THE FOREST: CAMPESINO RESISTANCE AND THE CREATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL DELINQUENCY
Introduction
Previous chapters showed that the campesinos of the Cordillera are under siege by political and economic forces that have implemented conservation laws denying them access to their traditional mountain resources. At the same time, well-ftmded and at times well-intended efforts to provide economic alternatives have frequently been
sidetracked to benefit urban-based elites. Other projects that do make it to the rural areas are typically used to fiind projects that do more to fiirther the goals of resource conservation than to create viable economic alternatives for the campesinos. Church- based NGOs that fight for the interests of the campesinos face an uphill battle in the face of State policies that militate against the viability of life for campesinos in the rural areas, and in the face of funding competition from the predatory resource-foraging pseudo-
NGO's that now dot the phonebooks, not only of the D.R., but of other countries where donors have annoimced their interest in channeling resources to the NGO sector. Such announcements have been greeted as music to creative bandit ears.
In this chapter it will be seen that campesinos have not passively accepted their fate. Resistance—evasion, circumvention, and protest—and attempts to continue practicing traditional peasant subsistence strategies have come in many different scales and in multiple forms. Least frequently in the Cordillera, campesinos have organized in mass protest against conservation laws. More commonly, resistance has taken place on a
191 192
scale of what James Scott (1985) refers to as "everyday forms of resistance." This may include an act as small as giving a tree a daily machete chop; to elusiveness towards outsiders; to clandestine logging and farming; to taking advantage of gaps in State control to clear lands and access timber; to forging alliances with power-holders; to setting forest
fires.
Petty Forms of Resistance
Since virtually aU extractive resource activities are illegal both within and outside of the parks, the carrying out of any subsistence activity other than agriculture on one's own land represents a defiance of State authority. Some individuals hunt feral pigs in the park.' Park rangers rarely convict anyone for this activity saying they are hard to catch.
As one park ranger explained: el montero tiene mil entradas y salidas (the montero has a thousand entrances and exits). Similarly, the capture of parrots for sale is common, especially in the western part of the Cordillera.^ And although fish have become scarce in the rivers and streams of the region, many campesino families capture fi"esh water crabs
called jaibas} Another prohibited activity in which campesinos occasionally engage is the extraction of sand and gold fi-om the riverbeds within the protected areas."*
The practices that attract the most attention fi-om authorities are those involving the cutting or use of timber without a permit, the introduction of animals into the parks and the felling of unauthorized conucos both within and outside of the parks. Despite the forestry service efforts to eliminate grazing fi-om Bermudez National Park, described in a previous chapter, a few campesinos continue to release animals, albeit at a much lesser scale. According to an ofScial fi-om the Parks Directorate of Bermudez, the policies against the raising of animals in the park has met with some resistance not only fi-om small campesinos but local officials, including military oflScials and park guards who 193
maintain herds in the park lands as well as the municipal sindicos (mayors) who express concern that the policies will effect municipal revenues.^ The park guards, however, continue to harass the campesinos about animals in the park, threatening confiscation.
Other small-scale, everyday forms of resistance include slowly damaging unwanted trees, through, for example, chopping at a tree with a machete as one walks by
it, so that it will die and fall. Because secondary growth places land at risk of de facto appropriation by the State, campesinos also rip pine saplings out before they become large enough to attract the attention of forestry officials. Similarly, instead of allowing secondary growth to emerge on fallowed land, campesinos prefer to allow these lands to
"fallow" as pasture. If the tree were to grow, government policy would criminalize any
attempt by the farmer to use it, and its presence would therefore reduce the effective amount of agriculturally productive land on the plot. The campesino therefore destroys the tree as enemy vegetation. State policy, in other words, creates an enmity between farmer and tree and creates the conditions for the emergence of pasture-useful savannas, the kiss of death to the regeneration of natural forests. The campesinos are also accused of manipulating park boundaries, by feigning ignorance or by actually moving or removing the milestones that have been set in place to mark the limits of the parks.
Fire
Though campesinos are known to subtly destroy saplings, a more serious campesino response to strict forestry laws has been the setting of fires.^ Although accurate historical data on fires is not available, Ing. Gomez, the 12-year veteran of the
Forestry Service and an official in the Forestry Resources Fire Division in 2000 cited in the previous chapter, explained the primary two causes of forest fires in the Cordillera
Central are pasture fires set by cattlemen and out of control conuco fires.' But Gomez 194
also explained that the setting of fires has been used by campesinos as a form of protest
and revenge against overly repressive foresters and forestry policies. Dunng 1990-1991,
for example, he was one of the foresters in the Jarabacoa district. This was during a
period that the Forestry Service was under the direction of a military commander
renowned for using a heavy hand against the campesinos in response to violations of the
Forestry Laws.^ According to Ing. Gomez, that year there were over 40 forest fires set in
his district, significantly more than a normal year: "People use fire as a means of
repudiating a person in charge who is over exuberant. And many of the encargados
(heads), even me at times, will go overboard (i.e., be overly strict or repressive)."'^
The setting of fires may not be as fi-equent as other forms of resistance, but it is
more powerful and pernicious. With the mere striking of a match, an angry campesino
can cause widespread damage." And he can do it with little fear of being caught.
Indeed, like a cloak of conspiratorial silence, it is ubiquitous and shadowy delincuentes
(delinquents) who locals not only in the Cordillera but throughout the country blame for
fires. Campesinos know that the Foresters cannot easily catch arsonists and they know
that above everything else Foresters dread the fires. The campesinos will sometimes
brandish the threat of starting a forest fire like a weapon. In the words of one of the
campesinos who was affected by the Rancier National Park displacement in 1994:
The land that I have in Las Papas was marked with a zero by FORESTA, meaning you can't plant there due to the slope. Right now I'm relaxed, but if they don't
resolve my situation and that of the children I have there, I'm going to bum and I don't care if the whole forest bums down. I'm not going to go hungry. If in Valle
Nuevo they don't resolve something for us, once again fire is going to happen. I'll go along buming everything.
In the same way that fire is used as revenge or to protest overly aggressive
foresters, it is also used to attract the attention of the State authorities in other matters.
During one interview, for example, a farmer living in a very remote hamlet on the 195
northeastern side of Rancier National Park pointed out a nearby hill and said: "every year, the delinquents bum that mountain out of spite. What the people want is for the government to get us out of here. If we plant trees or reforest those vagabonds bum it down to attract attention, so that the government will relocate them."
Strict forestry laws also provide small farmers and large landovmers with the
incentives for setting fires. Fire removes or damages the trees and it eliminates saplings on reforested lands, facilitating access to the land. For example, one of the most severe forest fires in the heart of the current Rancier National Park took place in 1983.
Although this fire was ofBcially attributed to a worker who was "quemando una batata"
(cooking a sweet potato to eat) when his bonfire escaped control, the more suspicious
campesinos believe the fire was set purposely, so that the owners of the land, the lumber
companies whose activities in the area had been paralyzed with the closing of the mills in
1967, could find a legal loophole to cut and sell the trees. Indeed, in this case the
government did permit the cutting and milling of the pine trees that had been damaged by
the fire. Similarly, in a hamlet along the northwestem side of Bermudez National Park,
campesinos described the use of fire to rid the community of an imwanted forestry project
(note 21 in this chapter).'^
Stubborn Defiance
Some campesinos have responded to the State siege with their own war of
attrition. Those who have stayed in the mountains, the cabeza duras and cabezudos as
they like to call themselves (literally the hard-headed or stubborn ones), talk with pride of
being imprisoned or fined. Don Martin's long holdout in La Lomita is an example of one
such case. In Don Martin's words: "I paid ten fines because I maintained myself with the
sweat of my brow." Similarly, two farmers fi-om a community in the proximity of Rancier 196
National Park explained that while FORESTA maintained the upper hand, they still did as they pleased. Both farmers, one who is a community leader and one of the larger landowners in the hamlet, confessed to having been imprisoned by FORESTA. One had been imprisoned for 30 days and had to pay a fine of $2000 pesos for having burned 3 pines trees while making a fire to bum the stubble on his property. The other admitted to having been incarcerated for having cut pastes (posts) to repair a barbed-wire fence.
Nevertheless, both farmers confided that they continue to acquire the wood they need by cutting in the forest. Occasionally, FORESTA will provide a permit but if not, as one said, motioning toward the forest: "I go in there at midnight." The other also admitted,
"if I need some wood, I cut it."
Creative Forms of Resistance
Manipulating the system
Other forms of resistance involve taking creative advantage of loopholes or internal contradictions within the Forestry system. For example, farmers are prohibited fi"om selling milled wood in the market, but they are able to circxunvent the law by selling cuaba, highly combustible resin sticks that are used as kindling to start stove fires. To obtain the cuaba farmers girdle the trees, causing them to slowly die with resin
concentrated at the base. Once the tree is dead, farmers use the tree branches for kindling
and divide the trunk into pieces of cuaba to sell.
Another example, a system that locals call la multa (the fine), comes fi-om Los
Postes. La multa began in the 1960s and functioned in the following manner.
Campesinos would clear a plot of land within the park and deliberately have themselves caught by Forestry agents. The agents would take them to the municipal capital, San Jose de las Matas, to pay a fine of 50 pesos. Once the fine was paid, the policy of the Forestry department required the farmers to "reforest" the cleared areas with coffee, part of the
State's interest in promoting agricultural exports. The peasants were the ones who
harvested the coffee and so paying a fine, followed by the required planting of coffee, led
the campesinos to use la multa as a system for accessing lands within the park.'''
Although FORESTA ended this practice in the 1 970s, the campesinos in Los Postes
continue to express a sense of proprietorship over the mejoras (the improvements) they
made to these parklands.'^ They save the receipts fi-om FORESTA fines as if they were
mejora titles, evidence that they received the authorization fi-om the State to establish
coffee plots in the park.'^
Another example of farmers attempting to manipulate the authorities' relatively
favorable view of coffee production has been the planting of coffee trees under pine
forest. The farmers are aware that pine does not provide favorable shade for coffee, and
that the lands under pine are acidic, also unfavorable to coffee production. But once the
coffee trees are grown farmers solicit permission from the Forestry service to cut the
pine, which they hope to sell, and replace the pine with traditional shade trees {Inga
vera).
Alliances with Rural and Urban Power-holders
All campesinos who remained in the mountains have, in some way or another,
resisted the encroachment of the State. Some have been able to circumvent forestry laws.
Most, however, complain that the system favored wealthier farmers and large
landowners, those with access to influential polificians and the money to pay bribes.
Campesinos complain that FORESTA maintained a double standard. Los chiquitos,
literally the smaller ones, the weaker and poorer farmers, suffered the most from the application of strict forestry policies. Thus, in an effort to circumvent the Forestry and park laws, smallholding campesinos entered into alliances with wealthier sponsors, padrinos (godfathers).
Larger-scale timber theft, for example, almost always involves alliances between smallholding campesinos and more powerful purchasers. The case of El Chino provides an example of how the process works. El Chino had remained unmarried and in the
parental home to care for his sickly father. In 1 986, his father passed away and El Chino decided to set himself up independently and search for a wife. The family, however, had
little land, with only 50 tareas used to pasture a cow and plant beans, and a separate small plot of coffee. These lands were being farmed by a married brother who used the meager revenues he could generate to support his family of two children and their elderly mother.
In El Chino's words: "I didn't have anything to do. I didn't have the means to
plant beans or to plant anything, I didn't have any way out. So I decided I was going to deal in contraband (timber)." El Chino worked on consignment with intermediaries who were local businessmen and landowners, "people of influence in Jarabacoa," and he explained that entire process was "very, very clandestine." They would obtain authorization from FORESTA to transport a given amount of Ebano Verde {Magnolia pallescens—a precious wood endemic to Hispaniola) under the guise that the wood was
from trees that had fallen on their own or from some type of natural occurrence, what is called "dead wood." El Chino emphasized that in order to avoid problems with
FORESTA, he took care not get caught with green wood:
so if FORESTA caught you they would take that into account and not apply the law
strictly, they would take it easier on you. It showed that you did not kill a Ufe in order to get wood, but that you took that wood out dead. This would provide you with support. That was the alternative that the contrabandists would always use, not the green, not to take out the green. 199
- >
In order to have a ready supply of dead wood available, El Chino would cut live trees in the forest at night, one or two trees, "so that when they would come and ask you for
wood, when you would come and tell me, 'get me 500 feet of Ebano', I already knew
where I had it cut down and where I was going to get it."
Through the contacts El Chino made selling timber, he himself eventimlly became
an intermediary:
I began to buy from others. There is a large population of young people who were raised here, who didn't leave, who want to survive, who need to survive. And those
people go into the hills. Then, I don't have to go to the hills. I buy from them Because since they don't have any contacts and don't know anyone important, I
would buy it from them and sell it in town.
El Chino emphasized that his influential friends, which included high ranking military
personnel in town, protected him: "They never grabbed me. They did many others. Even
a brother of mine went to jail. But not me. I had my relationships, my network above.
They always took care of me, my friends took good care of me."
The example of El Chino, who was protected by high-level FORESTA oflBcials,
illustrates how some campesinos have been able to take advantage of alliances with
power holders. But the favoritism inherent in a corrupt forestry service combined with the
concentration of land, capital, and influence in the hands of a relatively few individuals
means that campesinos have most often been exploited, finding themselves in alliances in
which where they are used as front men for the chicanery of the more powerfiil. One
example was described in the previous chapter in the agroindustrial ventures on the
border of Rancier Park, near Constanza. Other examples abound. Throughout the
region, large absentee landowners wishing to clear a parcel of their land commonly allow
campesinos to use the land under sharecropping agreements. In return for use of the
lands, the campesinos assume the risks of clearing the land. After a given period (2 or 3 200
years) they must give the land back planted in high yield pasture, something that gives the owners the right to graze cattle. Another variant of this practice is forming alliances with immigrant Haitians to clear private or State lands. If caught, the Haitians are blamed, sometimes jailed, and deported--but the truth is that rarely if ever do Haitians exploit Dominican forests without a Dominican sponsor (Murray et al. 1998).'^
Mass protests
Previous paragraphs discussed economic mechanisms of resistance. But there are social mechanisms as well. Outside development agents in the Dominican Republic have often been frustrated by the apparent inability or unwillingness of the campesinos to organize for the achievement of larger objectives. On occasion however, campesinos mobilize en masse. One of the circumstances in which they have done so has been to address conflicts over lands and the threats posed, in particular, in response to displacements related to the formation of protected areas.^** Around Bermiidez National
Park, for example, small scale protests and land occupations occurred in different periods from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s.^'
Outsiders, however, have engineered the largest mobilizations. The most famous
incident is the response to displacement orders affecting the communities surrounding
Juan B. Perez Rancier National Park, described in the previous chapter. In what appeared to be a rare organizational initiative among the campesinos, five communities unified to
fight for the lifting of the work stoppage. The protest attracted considerable attention
from the press. But as described previously, the protest was actually organized by
sophisticated, wealthy and well-connected agroindustrialists from Constanza. Members
of the alliance describe a relatively peaceful process in which there were few arrests, but
members of the opposition movement in Constanza, the conservationists interested in 201
conserving water for the city and valley irrigation, reported receiving threats from anonymous members of the alliance.
An example of a more legitimate campesino protest of environmentally related policies emerged as a result of the Decree 199-92 that declared a vast and well-populated area on the eastern side of Rancier National Park to be Vedado a toda Actividad Humana
(Restricted from all Himian Activities). At the same time that the campesinos were being pressured to leave the area, the government authorized a foreign firm to exploit a gold mine in the protected zone. Under the leadership of a local school teacher and an old militant activist from the Trujillo era, the campesino associations of the region organized themselves into a Federation and, in alliance with the Dominican Academy of Sciences and a local Catholic priest launched a vigorous protest, marching, blocking roads and
burning tires. But the success of the protest actually came as a result of it being allied with conservation goals. The targets included not only the gold mine but also local poachers and traffickers of the Ebano Verde tree. The group was able to successfully close the gold mine, and reached agreements with the government to collaborate in the reforestation of the watersheds, in exchange for letting the campesinos continue with their activities in the protected zone.
Conclusion
In this chapter it has been shovra that peasants of the Cordillera developed
strategies of resistance to strict forestry laws and to the creation of parks and scientific reserves. Much of this resistance came simply as side effects of new laws. Gathering firewood, for example, became technically illegal in areas within the park. More aggressive forms of resistance include arson and clandestine logging. But while the poorer campesinos suffered under the laws, wealthy landowners and FORESTA agents 202
have often managed to use the campesinos to take advantage of the law and make money.
In the following chapter it will be seen that peasant resistance has surged and retracted in
response to the institutional presence of the State. In times of political or economic crisis
the presence of FORESTA weakens and the peasants reclaim lands and once again begin
to practice traditional subsistence strategies.
Notes
' The traditional practice of hunting feral pigs still lives on in the Cordillera. Exclusively males, often sons
of the old mountaineers of the Cordillera, carry out the activity. It is also particularly popular to hunt feral pigs to obtain meat during the Christmas holidays. Whereas in the past the monteros hunted feral pigs in
order to salt and sell the meat, currently the activity is carried out primarily as a kind of sport or hobby.
To hunt feral pigs, dogs are used, generally a pack of 10 or more that is specially trained to hunt the down animals. The dogs are classified into two types, attack dogs and ruimers. The first encircle and grab
the animal, the latter are those responsible for chasing the animal imtil it tires and is cornered. The hunters
kill the trapped animal, traditionally with a knife or machete but it is ever more common to use a rifle for this task. Despite the large populations of feral pigs in the park, the fact that these are not endemic species and that large pig populations potentially pose a serious threat to forest resources (something that has not yet been studied), the hunting of these pigs has been declared illegal. The park authorities expressed that the prohibition was established based on the fear that the activities of the dogs and hunters within the park would have negative ecological implications. (On the other hand, permitting the hunting of the feral pigs may provide a viable alternative to control the population of these animals within the park, since these are introduced and man is their only predator.)
Since entering the park to hunt feral pigs is an illegal activity, survey data regarding the number of individuals who practice this activity is not reliable. In the Bermudez survey, only 2.2% of informants reported hunting feral pigs. However, in Los Postes and other communities the author interviewed numerous farmers who openly admitted to pig hxmting and who easily evade the authorities. For example, park guards complain that the pig hunters are difficult to capture, according to one: "the mountaineer has a thousand entrances and exits" to the park, referring to the fact that these individuals know the multiple routes within the park better than they do, and it is therefore easy for them to avoid being captured in flagrante delicto. A couple of farmers showed the author live adult feral pigs they had captured or feral
piglets they were raising that they had captured in the wild. (One farmer even asked the author if I knew where he could obtain a license to legalize the raising of his pig). Two other pig hunters interviewed showed the author the upper jawbone they had saved of particularly ferocious feral pigs they had killed so that he could appreciate the canine teeth which are called navajas (blades) orjachas (hatchets) due to the fact that they are elongated and exceedingly sharp. In summary, it is obvious that despite its illegality pig hunting occurs, but in contrast to the past it no longer an economically important activity for the residents surrounding the park. Not a single case was identified in which the himting of feral pigs plays an important role within the household economy. In almost all cases, the meat of the pig is consumed within the household and distributed amongst friends and neighbors and not sold on the open market.
^ Some of the campesino families in the Cordillera supplement their family income through the illegal capture and sale of birds, primarily cotorras (parrots) particularly in the communities surrounding Bermudez National Park. Relatively few families actually raise domesticated parrots as pets. The parrots fetch a good price. At the time of research, the going price for these birds was RD$500 (@US$35.00) for ?Lpichon (chick) and RD $1000 (@US$75.00) or more for aduh birds. There is a good— theoretically underground-market for these birds. Along the Duarte Highway on the route between La 203
Vega and Santiago, in fiill view of a large sign that warns of the illegahty and penahies involved in the sale of parrots and other protected bird species, vendors openly sell these birds. At times, in the middle of Santo Domingo, in full view of police officers, young salesmen offer chicks to motorists stopped at traffic
lights. In other words, outside of the forest, once brought into the cities, the market for parrots is quite
open. The authorities do not display any real willingness to control the market at the point of sale. Local campesinos involved in the activity generally only capture and sell one or two birds per season. On the other hand, there are specialists in the capture of parrots called pichoneros who come from areas outside of the park communities and capture large numbers of young birds These professionals generally work in teams of three or four, they enter the park using little used footpaths and make temporary huts in the mountains which are abandoned after only a few days of use. Campesinos from the Cordillera claim that they fear coming across a group of these individuals in the mountains. Due to the fact that these want to avoid identification, and given the illegality of their activities, they may become violent. Similarly campesinos claim that the pichoneros sometimes kill and eat the animals that are found loose park that generally belong to campesinos from hamlets close to the park.
The period of parrot hunting is generally in the months of May and June when the pichones begin to grow feathers. According to campesinos interviewed on the topic, different techniques are used to capture these birds: a sticky material is placed in the parrots nest, or on the branches of trees that have been observed to be common spots where parrots perch. Another technique used for capturing them consists in introducing a can into the nests (which are made in dried and hollowed out branches). This causes the pichones to make noise and is a means of identifying whether or not there are pichones in the nest. Pichoneros also reportedly use trained parrots tied onto tree branches to attract other parrots. Once the wild parrots land they are quickly knocked down to the ground with long sticks, and the stunned birds are easily grabbed.
^ The residents of the communities surrounding the park report that in the past the rivers were replete with fish. For example, residents of Los Postes, living along a major tributary river, as well as residents along the Rio Guanajuma and other major highland rivers in the Cordillera report that in the past many species of fish were found that began to disappear more than 20 years ago. These include the Anguilla, Sago, Guabina, Dajao and camarones.
The impact of dam construction has probably been the most significant element that has provoked extinctions offish in certain watershed areas m the Cordillera. The locals, however, attribute the disappearance of these species to fishing techniques that were used in the past. One method used consisted in spreading a powder in the river made from the roots of a local tree. This substance restricts oxygen and brings the choking fish to the top of the water, where they can be merely scooped out of the river. It is a technique that has also been reported for many other countries in South America and on the Island of Hispaniola may extend back to the Tainos. Another technique involved the throwing of a small bottle bomb m the river, which would kill not only the fish but also all of the other aquatic fauna in the area of the explosion. The campesinos claim that this was not a local practice, rather it was practiced by fishermen from other communities with ties to fish markets in the larger towns who had the equipment needed to preserve and carry the fish to market. Some campesinos, primarily young men, occasionally engage in die capturing of fresh water crabs calledjaibas. This is another activity that has been declared to be illegal, but the locals do not perceive it as such and restrictions against the capturing ofjaibas are rarely if ever enforced. Jaibas are captured primarily for home consumption, and simple technology (generally a string with a chicken bone tied to it) is used, although in Los Postes there are young men who occasionally capture jaibas on consignment. These enter the park at night and using flashlights, are easily identified in the streams where they are grabbed with the use of rubber gloves.
" The mountains in the Cordillera Central are rich sources of minerals, and since colonial times the extraction of gold from the streams and rivers of the highlands has been common. According to Dr. Canela, during the colonial period the Spaniards had a gold mine in an area now located in the heart of Bermudez National Park. In another hamlet close to the park there is a now inoperative copper mine that was exploited primarily during the Trujillo period. Despite the fact that the mine is closed, in the hamlet there is a representative from the Mining Directorate responsible for supervising mining activities in the area. 204
1
Panning for alluvial gold is an activity that has long been carried out by both men and women in the
highlands of the Cordillera. Gold is traditionally sought in the sediments of the river and within the sand along the banks of the rivers and streams. All of these activities are prohibited; for that reason campesinos who enter the park to pan for gold must carry out the activity in places of difficult access to avoid park or forestry officials.
The campesinos generally express that panning for gold is an uncertain business; for that reason they prefer agriculture or a salaried job rather than dedicating themselves to gold mining. They also state that in the past gold was much more abundant than at present, since the more easily found alluvial gold has
become increasingly scarce. For this reason, the panning of gold is a marginal activity practiced by individuals either as a hobby or in times of extreme economic difficulty. Nevertheless, some campesinos continue to keep themselves updated on the price of gold. Along the western side of the Cordillera individuals enter the park to pan for gold close to the headwaters of the Mao river. In Los Postes, there are pits all along the banks of the Amina river within the park limits, evidence of years of sporadic gold mining attempts by locals.
Another prohibited mining activity is the extraction of sand from the rivers. In Los Postes, there are women who extract white clay from the hills close to the community for domestic use—to paint the kitchen
and the hearth, to fill holes in the house and cover the floors. Once again, these activities are practiced sporadically.
* The municipalities charge both for the right to run a butchery as well as a tax on every animal that is
slaughtered. It is one of the sources of income in what constitute very limited municipal budgets. In the highlands of the Cordillera, the butcheries are generally constituted by small shacks with rather bloody
interiors in which the skinned beef is hung and in which there is a cutting board and a scale. The meat is sold by pound on a first come, first serve basis without distinction regarding the particular cut of meat.
* Fire is a natural and often critical component of certain ecosystems so the enviroimiental concern involves not fire per se but rather the alteration of the fire regimes through increasing the frequency and intensity of fires. Recent studies indicate that since the Holocene period forest fires were common in the Caribbean basin and in the higher areas of the Central Cordillera evidence has been found of Holocene period forest fires that occurred over 8 thousand years ago by researchers from the University of Tennessee who have been conducting research in Valle Nuevo and Armando Bermudez National Park in collaboration with a local NGO (Andres Ferrer, pers. comm.). There is also evidence that suggests the presence of indigenous
groups at least in the Valley of Constanza during pre-Columbian times, although no research is available which suggests whether and how the exploitation and management of natural resources by indigenous populations shaped the landscape of the Cordillera Central.
Although the natural frre regime is unknown, there is little doubt that the alteration of the fire regime by humans has played an important role in the distribution of the pine forest in the Central Cordillera (Darrow and Zanoni 1993). Holdridge (1947) argued that natural fu-es were not very frequent, at least in the highest regions of the Cordillera, due to the relatively high humidity of the air in the region. It is important to note that the endemic Hispaniolan pine species, Pinus occidentalis, generally does not survive forest fires in its sapling stage, although in mature trees the thick outer bark provides quite effective resistance to fires (Darrow and Zanoni 1993). Research conducted in Haiti by the same authors indicated that the regeneration of Pinus occidentalis improved after forest fires.
^ He also stated that fire is frequently used as a political weapon:
Politics has had a lot to do with fires. The loser (of an election) responds by provoking a fire and there isn't enough personnel available to control the fu-e. This happens during the election year and after when there is a new government, at the beginning. In 1997 there were many forest fires because
of a drought but also people who want to be director send someone out to make a fu-e, so that the current person in charge will look bad.
* Numerous other scholars have also reported the setting of forest fires as a reaction to state forestry policies. For example, according to Jacoby: "The scholar Ramachandra Guha, for example, has proposed that the fi-equent arson in India's forest districts reflects an alienation from nature produced by state forestry policies. According to Guha, peasants excluded from woodlands where they had once forged began to 205
view the forest not as source of sustenance but 'as an entity opposed to the villager' —a symbol of their displacement and disempowerment. Consequently, peasants retaliated by burning the woodlands they had once depended upon." Jacoby notes a similar phenomenon occurring in the Adirondack mountains of the United States in the late 19* century: "Revenge certainly explains a substantial portion of the arson in the
Adirondacks. . . Residents had multiple reasons for seeking vengeance: the state's restrictive new himting ." law.. .; the Forest Commission's efforts to uproot squatters. . .; and the prosecution of timber thieves. . (Jacoby 2000:73). Peluso (1992) also reported the use of clandestine fnes by Indonesian peasants to eliminate unwanted reforested areas in State forests in Java. In the Dominican Republic as in other sugar
producing countries, one of the common tactics used by disgruntled sugar cane employees was setting fu-e to the cane fields. As recently as 1999, numerous fires were set in the State -held cane fields reportedly as a protest against the layoffs brought about by the privatization of the Corporacion Estatal de Azucar (CEA).
' One commonly repeated story about this same individual is that in while Forestry Director making rounds in the south, he came across a campesino in the mountains with a mule loaded with illegal charcoal. He ordered the charcoal and the mule to be drenched in gas and burned in the presence of the owner. Whether or not this particular story is true, the repressive tactics of this individual in the interest of conservation has been well documented in the press. While Forestry director in 1986, this individual, a Colonel in the Dominican Armed Forces, directed a crackdown on violations of Forestry laws called Operacion Selva Negra (Operation Black Forest), a repressive military campaign that targeted deforestation and, in particular, illegal charcoal making activities. In 1995, while in-charge of the National Parks Directorate, he would make roimds in a military helicopter and backed up by a substantial military escort, conliont campesinos engaged in "illegal" activities within the national parks. In the East National Park, he ordered that the ovens the campesinos were using to make coconut oil, as well as beehives being kept in the park, to be smashed. The same individual was later named the chief of police for Santo Domingo, where he became a regular target of international human rights organizations due to his alleged support of brutal police tactics and killings.
The available data, obtained from the Forestry Service and summarized in appendix D, Figure D-1 and D-2, do not appear to reflect any specific pattern regarding increases in fires during electoral periods or periods of unusually harsh repression such as 1986, when the Black Forest operation was carried out. Unfortunately, however, the Forestry Department data on forest fires is very inaccurate. Ing. Gomez told me that the inaccuracy of the data was due both to flawed recordkeeping as well as the fact that the local heads of districts would commonly not report frres or undeneport the magnitude of forest fires occurring in areas imder their jurisdictions, fearing reprimands from their superiors and even the possible loss of their jobs.
" As noted above, changes in fire regimes are particularly important in provoking landscape change in
forested areas. For example, relatively frequent forest frres tend to provide a competitive advantage to fire- resistant pine over broadleaf species that are much more sensitive to fi-equent fires. If the fires recur with sufficient frequency even pines will be unable to resist, and lands will be transformed into grasslands. For both of these reasons, the controlling of the campesinos' use of fire has been one of the chief preoccupations of State authorities going back to the turn of the century. More recently, conservation- oriented non-profits have become involved in activities directed towards changing traditional campesino behaviors regarding the use of fire.
Nevertheless, current policies actually create incentives for the setting of forest fires. The manipulation of the natural environment of the Cordillera through the use of fire was long critical within die campesino survival strategies. For example, as described in chapter 3, canpesinos consider the use of fu:e to be essential to the preparing of a conuco, which is reflected in frequently heard expressions such as sin candela no se trabaja (without fire you can't work). In the traditional swidden agriculUiral systems of the Cordillera fire was used both as a labor saving mechanism in the clearing of die lands as well as to produce ash that is used as fertilizer and spread over the cleared lands before planting. Campesinos claim that firing the conuco also serves to control the population of bugs, insects and other plagues located in the topsoil. The campesinos are often accused of negligence and ignorance regarding the control of conuco fires, and considerable money and energy has been spent by development agencies and Dominican governments to educate the campesinos regarding the importance of controlling forest fires and to train the campesinos in fire prevention techniques. Nevertheless, as discussed in chapters 3 and 5, since the Trujillo period campesinos have used laborious methods to ensure that the conuco fires would not pass over into nearby forest, in the face of severe penalties. Rural residents have also extensively used fires to manipulate the environment in other ways. Even travelers through the Cordillera Central in the early part of the century reported widespread evidence of forest fires. For example, Karl Woodward, conducting a forestry study of the Dominican Republic in 1909 stated in his report that "during a trip of over 200 miles thorough this [pine] region, we saw the prints of
fire all over, except in places that are very humid where the humus remains wet year round. . . The excuse for these is that, in this way, one obtains better grazing harvests" (Martinez 1990). As described in chapter
6, the reports of Canela and Rancier also discussed widespread evidence of forest fires, as did many other travelers through the Cordillera of the first half of the past century (e.g. Luna 1984). Generally, these fires are attributed to the laziness, carelessness and ignorance of the peasants. Campesino informants admit that occasionally a negligent farmer would not take the needed precautions and allow a conuco fire to escape control, or perhaps a strong and unexpected breeze would provoke accidental forest fires. But the qualitative evidence suggests that the majority of forest fires in the Cordillera Central with anthropogenic sources were purposely set in order to save labor or manipulate the environment in some way. Monteros at times use fire to scare animals out of dense forest so that they could be more easily hunted. Similar use of fire has been widely reported in other areas. For example, in the Adirondacks of New York at the turn of the last century, Jacoby found that the Adirondackers, "adopting a long-standing Indian practice, burned local woodlands to encourage the growth of berries or
fresh browse for livestock or wildlife.. . Others set fires . . .with the intention of driving deer and other game animals onto lands where they might be hunted" (2001:76). Sabaneros would set forest fu-es to clear the pine thimbles from the ground to bring out fresh grasses for grazing. Rural farmers in the Dominican
Republic continue to use fire in agriculture, but with the demise of the swidden system and the tumba, fire is used primarily to eliminate wastes by burning the dried grasses and stubble that are collected after the land clearing process takes place.
There are numerous other cases of the use of fire in this respect. For example, in a community on the southern side of Rancier National Park, the author witnessed recently burned pine trees on a parcel of land.
When asking locals about it, they stated that the owner of the land was one of the three large landowners of the community. He was called to Santo Domingo by the Forestry Service to respond for his actions but returned three days later after having easily resolved the problem por debajo de la mesa "under the table." In the same area, the author was in the company of a former consultant who had been in charge of a
reforestation project carried out 15 years prior. He proudly showed me one steeply sloped nearby hill covered with pine stating: "that was the result of my project." However, he lamented that in other areas in the same community, the campesinos had burned the reforested fields and destroyed the saplings soon after the project personnel had abandoned the area.
This system of seUing pine to circumvent Forestry laws has not only been witnessed by the author but has been identified as a tactic frequently used by campesinos in other studies (e.g. Darrow and Zanoni 1993).
''* The campesinos of Los Postes emphasize the high productivity of the parklands and the special value of the coffee harvested in those areas. In the words of Antonio (60 year old father of Fausto in Los Postes):
I made a property through the famous "fine" of the 1960s. What I have is something like five harvests of coffee. This harvest comes in the bad times. Up there, because it is a higher point, the
harvest still hasn't taken place. So that little comer of coffee I wouldn't give it up for the whole institution of the park. Now, if they buy it from me, and if they tell me that they are going to give me so for it much and I'm going to put you in a place where you are going to live better. I may stop. I that that know really isn't mine but until they buy it from me, I won't stop working it (Los Postes April of 1999)
According to informants in Los Postes, a significant number of locals established parcels of coffee in die park using this system. These coffee stands are generally located far from the Los Postes in small valleys located in higher areas in the park. Current State policy does not prohibit the collecting and harvesting of ' t 207
coffee within the park but they do prohibit conditioning the coffee groves-trimming, weeding, fiimigating and fertilizing the coffee farms. Regarding this provision, many of the poor campesinos living in Los Postes complain that the authorities are "two faced," in this respect. They have one policy for the "rich" and another for the "poor." They say that the park guards look away while the "rich" in the community fully condition their relatively extensive coffee groves located in the park, while they arrest the poor for doing the same.
" Like the livestock grazing described in the previous chapter, the exploitation of coffee areas in the park began to change in the early 1 980s, when the National Parks Directorate strengthened its presence and began to pressure people to stop working in the park. Still, however, many campesinos in the Los Postes community continue to resist abandoning these properties, risking harassment, fines, or imprisonment by State authorities. And some continue to buy and sell mejoras (coffee parcels and fenced pasture).
The reasons stated by the campesinos include the following: • The length of time they have been working these plots and the considerable investments in cash and labor that have been made for their "improvement." • The feeling that the Forestry service provided a de facto approval and incentive for the establishment of these coffee parcels. As a result, they feel entitled to receive compensation for the mejora (improvement) made to the lands. • The shortage of available productive lands outside of the park to replace those properties within the park. They also claim that planting within the park allows them to take advantage of different ecological zones in which the coffee harvest arrives later than in the lower lands outside of the park. As a result, the properties within the park have a special value. As one of the informants stated: "that coffee (within the park) comes
during the worst times. . when here there isn't any coffee." According to an official from the National Parks Directorate, a census has been conducted of the coffee areas within the park. But this was carried out to be presented to the Agricultural Bank, to assure that they don't loan to the farmers so that they do not have financing to work in these areas. The DNP does not report any plans to provide a solution to the situation of these coffee farmers who have properties within the park.
In some areas, the campesinos express a willingness to plant native pine species if they are issued a certificate by FORESTA that permits the fiiture cutting rights of the trees. At least in one case, a bumed ioiaJo—fallowed land covered with secondary growth—was found planted with native saplings, a case in which the farmer was using fne to progressively eliminate the pine that had spontaneously grown on the property, which under the forestry law he is prohibited from cutting down without a permit, and replacing those with native pine saplings which were being planted with a certificate for ftiture cutting.
El Chino's community was part of a major reforestation effort carried out by FORESTA between 1972 and 1982, one of the few successful reforestation initiatives carried out by the State during this period. FORESTA employed the majority of campesinos in the community to carry out the project. At the same time, however, the goverrmient agency reforested the State lands that had been used by the local community for agriculture and grazing. By the time the project ended, a robust pine forest had emerged on the lands. Furthermore, forestry enforcement remained strict regarding the making of conucos on these lands. The majority of campesinos were left with little land on which they could farm. As a resuU, most abandoned the community. Like El Chino, the majority of campesinos who remained behind in the community turned to clandestine lumbering in order to subsist. In 1989, the area was declared to be a Scientific Reserve and the management was placed in the hands of a locally based NGO. The NGO confronted the contraband problem by hiring the former poachers as reserve guards. They also paid these guards an incentive of one peso per foot of contraband lumber that they found. Since these mdividuals understood the contraband system and knew who the primary local poachers and intermediaries were, they were rapidly able to control lumber poaching within the Reserve. El Chino continues to work as a guard m the reserve, but has now moved with his family from the rural community in which he was bom and raised into the nearby tovra of Jarabacoa in order to ensure that his children will be able to receive an education.
" The Secretary of the Environment, Frank Moya Pons, in 2001, criticized this practice in the press. Although the practice appears more common in areas close to the border, such as in the Sierra de Bahoruco 208
or in the Loma Nalga de Maco National Park, similar cases have appeared m the press in which local alcaldes in the Sierra accuse Haitians of invading State lands in the Cordillera, something that is highly unlikely for reasons that are explained in Murray et al. 1998, a study in which the author of this dissertation was involved.
^° There have been a number of significant campesino movements that have emerged surrounding other protected areas as a result of displacement actions taken by that State. The longest lasting has been in the Los Haitises National Park located on the eastern side of the country, where, with the assistance of the Catholic Church and a long time radical union leader from Santo Domingo, canpesinos mobilized to contravene a displacement of the region ordered in 1992. This conflict has yet to be fully resolved.
^' At the time of fieldwork, the most significant recent land occupation encountered had occurred in the early 1990s and involved invasions of the lands of the Mera family acquired during the lumber mill period along the northwestern borders of the park. Another very significant conflict that occurred in a seccion near the northwestern boundaries of Armando Bermudez National Park in 1994 shows how clearly State forestry policies have, in practical terms, conflated the forestry issue with the issue of land scarcity. In this seccion, a prominent family from
Santiago initiated a forestry project, claiming to have obtained title to a large parcel of land within the community. They began planting pine frees, which they claimed they would later cut down with a permit from the Forestry service, and also started buying, at a minimal cost, the rights to plant pine trees in properties of some of the local campesinos. The project promised to provide reforestation work to locals and that the participating campesinos would receive a share of the company's profits. The project was infroduced into the area without consulting the local campesino associations, which made the local leaders suspicious. The community became tensely divided over whether or not to support the project. Some locals enthusiastically embraced the project and began to participate by providing lands to be reforested. Others mistrusted the motives of the project promoters, viewing the project as a scheme designed to appropriate lands within the seccion and reduce local land values. The local campesino association mounted an intense protest in which they blocked the primary access road and refused outsiders access to the seccion. The local witnesses state that it was only by pure luck that no one was killed in the ensuing protest. The conflict became so intense that it aroused the attention of the national press. The Forestry Director of the time helicoptered into the community to negotiate with the protesters, and the prominent host of a major TV show interviewed the protest leaders. At the end, no agreement could be reached and the project was abandoned. Soon after the conflict ended, a series of mysteriously set fires began to slowly eliminate the pine saplings planted by the project in the hills of the seccion. Recounting the story of the conflict still provokes heated arguments between individuals who were proponents and opponents of the project in the community.
Sfriking consistencies between all of these movements include the fact that the initial organization and ongoing leadership was carried out by outsiders. Furthermore, these movements have had difficulty in making the transition from protest groups to more stable rural advocacy groups. The Bloque of Campesinos in Las Papas in essence proved to be an instrument devised by the large absentee landowners to incorporate and use the small farmers in their movement for the lifting of the work stoppage. The campesinos in Las Papas complain that since the work stoppage was lifted the association has not done anything for them. The Bonao Federation continues to meet and has received some fimding from
international organizations to carry out rural development and reforestation activities in the region . Nevertheless, their leaders attest to the fact that making the ttansition from protest and advocacy to local development activities has proved difficult. CHAPTER 12 CRACKS IN THE ARMOR: THE EMERGENCE OF PEASANT SUBSISTENCE STRATEGIES IN THE INTERSTICES OF STATE CONTROL
Introduction
In the previous chapter it was shown that peasants of the Cordillera have
responded to strict forestry laws with a wide range of resistance strategies. In this chapter
it will be shown that conservation policies have created a pressure cooker type situation
in which rural peasants take advantage of periods of weak state control. In the wake of
lapses in the institutional presence of the State, peasants quickly take up traditional
subsistence strategies and seek to reestablish claims to parklands and scientific reserves.
Examples of periods of weak State control include national crises, such as that provoked
by the death of Trujillo; times of natural disasters such as hurricane David in 1979 or
hurricane Georges in 1998, when the State's attention was diverted by rescue efforts; and
electoral periods, when obtaining votes takes priority over the strict enforcement of laws.
Political Crises
As discussed in chapter 8, the most severe political crisis that took place in the
post-Trujillo period was the vacuum in power created after the dictator's assassination.
The internal power struggles carried out from 1961 to 1966 were largely centered in
Santo Domingo. They involved mass demonstrations and the struggle for power among numerous political factions. The struggles culminated with the Santo Domingo based revolution of 1965, intervention by the US military, and the subsequent re-ascension to power of Trujillo's close associate, Joaquin Balaguer, in a 1966 US supervised election.
209 210
As a result of these urban-centered crises, control over the rural areas was
neglected. The absence of military and political administrators in rural areas led to a
resurgence of peasant subsistence activity throughout the country. In the Linea Noroeste
(the northwest region that includes the lower part of the northern slopes of the
Cordillera), for example, the breakdown of the State system provided the opportunity and
necessity for campesinos to recur to making charcoal and to take to the hills for
subsistence production (Antonini 1968). Campesinos took advantage of the void in State
control to appropriate lands and forest resources that had been taken from them during
the Trujillo regime. Peasants massively invaded former lumber company lands: "All
standing timber was indiscriminately cut by peasants intent upon establishing their land
claims by introducing slash-and-bum farms" (Antonini et al. 1975:56). Similarly,
campesinos in the hinterlands of the Cordillera who had been displaced from Bermiidez
National Park took advantage of the political chaos to reestablish their presence in the
park. Don Leon, from Los Postes, was one of those who returned to the park after the
Trujillo period and one of the last who remains living in the park:
When they assassinated Trujillo, I was doing day labor for 6 pesos a month,
killing myself working, dying of hunger. I was making 20 centavos a day. I said, I'm going to go where I lived (in the park) even if they ring my neck, I'm tired of
this hardship. I came back here. These were all forests and overgrown fields. Nobody bothered me until the beginning of the Balaguer period (1966). There was a man named Rafaelito, he was a Forester, and he came and told me: 'Look, you can't live here, don't do that because you aren't going to live here. The government is going to give houses and land to those who don't have them.'
And I answered him: 'Rafaelito, that is why I'm doing this. Because if I am not
working any land, and I eat at someone else's house, and at noon I go eat on some
one else's account, and at night I go eat supper at another's house, and I sleep there, well then the government doesn't have to deal with me because I'm a
vagrant. But if I have a little ranch here, on this land, and I am working, they will have to give me a house for that hut.'
During this period Don Martin also returned to his lands in La Lomita, as did numerous others who had been displaced during the Trujillo period. By the mid-1960s, 211
approximately 20 families had become reestablished in La Lomita. Farmers who continued to live outside of park limits also took advantage of the opportunity. Farmers living in Los Postes wasted little time in reestablishing gardens and releasing livestock in the park, a presence they were able to retain up until the early 1980s.
Elections
The campesinos of the research communities also took advantage of the relaxed enforcement of laws prior to political elections and the absence of guards during changeovers in political parties. The Dominican RepubUc has traditionally had a governmental bureaucracy in which jobs are procured based on patronage. The change in control from one political party to another generally includes the complete turnover of government employees, from the highest pohtical authorities to the lowest level civil servants, including forestry guards and park representatives.
During election times, therefore, both local and higher level oflBciak become preoccupied with obtaining votes in order to stay in power and conserve their jobs.
Smdicos (mayors) of the municipalities travel through the rural areas, making promises to resolve local problems and reinforcing these promises with acts such as repairing a road.
Local officials and employees, keen on holding on to their jobs, are also likely to be feverishly involved in campaign related activities and more likely to turn their heads regarding violation of forestry laws, especiaUy if these involve violations by party supporters. Election times, therefore, are accompanied by increases in land invasions both in urban and rural areas, as well as invasions by campesinos of forested areas.
The lands on the margins of Rancier National Park (at the time called Valle
Nuevo Scientific Reserve) near the seccion of Las Papas were initially occupied by farmers taking advantage of an electoral period. After 1984, these lands began to be 212
invaded by farmers from the dry south who would cross the mountains on footpaths to seek employment in the town of Constanza. According to informants, the occupation of the lands occurred during the electoral process when the Reformista party was attempting to gamer votes:
Those were State lands, under the control of the Forestry Service. On those lands a man arrived named Salvador, and he began to put fences up in that area. He
said that all of that land was his. We didn't pay any attention, because the people there have never been ambitious (i.e., land grabbers); we left him alone. Salvador came, and then the cousin of Salvador, and then the compadre of Salvador, and then a friend to grab lands there. It was a gold mine because everything can be produced there. The heads of cabbage weigh a pound. One quintal of potato planted produces thousands. There is also water. So the migrants began to arrive, and in less than a year there were more than 1000 inhabitants, including workers. That was the result of the kind of politics the colored party (PRSC—symbolized by the color red) wanted to win. They would put a red hat on the campesinos and because they were Reformistas, they would allow them to clear lands. They would even put a red hat on the tree stumps so that they would look like men.
In the same way, transitional post-electoral periods create a power vacuum as
former governmental employees are dismissed and members of the newly elected party
are named. After the 2000 elections won by the PRD, the park guards and foresters, all
of whom were members of the former party, the PLD, were dismissed. A fiill year
passed and only one new park guard had been named. Local elites and campesinos took
advantage of the vacuum in power to extract timber within the park, primarily in the form
of posts from a durable wood called Cuerno de Buey. Furthermore, locals were taking
the opportunity to introduce animals into the park and to weed, fertilize and generally dar
condiciones (improve conditions) of their old coffee plantations within the park. As local
informants put it, there were too few guardaparques (Park Guards) to keep track of
activities in the park, so "/a5 personas se estan aprovechando la coyunturd" (people are
taking advantage of the current situation). Natural Disasters
Another example of a period in which State control becomes lax is that of natural disasters. The Cordillera Central, particularly the areas around the eastern and central
Cordillera, have been greatly impacted by two powerfixl hurricanes in the last 30 years:
Hurricane David (1979) and hurricane Georges (1998).' Although devastating to
campesinos dependent on monocropping, in another way the hurricanes were a boon,
especially for those living near parks. The aftermath of George, for instance, hearkened
back to the prosperity of times when campesinos had firee access to the timber of the
Cordillera. The winds knocked over millions of trees in the eastern and central parts of
the Cordillera Central. For the first time since 1967 the Dominican government
authorized the establishment of lumber mills at strategic points in the Cordillera.
In a community near the town of Jarabacoa, for example, the Forestry Service
established a lumber mill, the first legal mill in the area since the 1960s. Mills were also
established near the town of Constanza. The resulting prosperity was evident. New
houses went up throughout the region and old houses were being repaired. Nevertheless,
soon after this policy was adopted conservationists and opposition parties began reporting
abuses, claiming that greedy landowners and campesinos were taking advantage of the
situation not only to extract timber feUed by the hurricane but also to fell and mill
standing trees.
Areas Beyond the Reach of State Control
Finally, some campesinos have been able to continue to subsist by employing the
old strategy of occupying areas that, due to their remoteness and difficulty of access,
remain beyond the reach of State authorities. An example of this is in the western
Cordillera in an area close to the far northwestern limits of the Bermiidez National Park. 214
This is an area where the campesinos have retained strong economic hnkages with the communities in the southern Cordillera. Traditional mule trails in the area link the marketing center of Moncion in the northern Cordillera with the hamlets and market centers in the southern Cordillera in the provinces of San Juan de la Maguana and Elias
Pina. These trails are still used to drive livestock across the mountains. Generally cattle
are purchased in the San Juan region and sold in Moncion, the primary municipality of the western Cordillera.^
The campesinos of the far western Cordillera complain that their options for agricultural production are severely limited. The areas in which they live and work have now been officially designated as coffee zones. In combination with restrictions related to the nearby park, there are few options available for raising livestock. Furthermore, campesinos lament that soils not under coffee cultivation are exhausted and for that
reason the production of beans, the crop they are most interested in producing, is low. To expand their agricultural options many campesinos in the region have tumed to lands in the remote southem slopes of the Cordillera, along the southwestern limits of Bermudez
National Park.
One hamlet in particular, Pino Escondido, is located high in the moimtains, in a remote area of extremely difficult access and described by the campesinos as a kind of refuge. Reaching this community constitutes a five-hour trip on muleback across the mountains. Nevertheless, the campesinos are willing to make the trip. There, they continue practicing the traditional agricultural activities that they used to practice within the park itself: the cultivation of beans and yautia using slash and bum techniques; the use of empalizada fences to surround the gardens and the fi-ee grazing of cattle. Pino
Escondido also provides important grazing lands for the communities in the northwest of 215
the park. Parrots are captured and feral pigs continue to be hunted. It is an area rarely visited by authorities, according both to the locals and the administrator of Bemuidez
National Park, and for that reason Pino Escondido is an area still outside of State control where traditional adaptations are continued. Despite the distance and the burdens of the
trip, the farmers willing to make the trip mitigate the effects of living in an area in which productive options are restricted almost exclusively to coffee production.
Conclusion
Peasant activities have surged and retracted in accordance with the presence of the
State. During times when and in places where the State presence was powerful, peasant activities have been repressed by the Forestry service. But in times when and in places where the State has been essentially absent, as during political crises and in the wake of natural disasters, campesinos have taken advantage of the situation to reclaim lands and to take up traditional subsistence activities. Overall, however, campesinos of the
Cordillera have been consistently pressured into giving up traditional livelihoods and into
slowly leaving the mountains. In the following chapters it will be shown how Cordillera peasant lives have changed since the period that Don Martin and others have described as a kind of golden age in response to this pressure, as well as the strategies they have used to cope and, frequently, to escape to the cities and overseas.
Notes
' Because I was present in the Dominican Repubhc during hurricane Georges, I was able to witness not only the devastation but also the activities subsequent to the hurricane.
^ In the times of the pig-hunting monteros there were also important economic ties between the communities on the eastern side of the park and San Juan de la Maguana. In particular, the campesinos from the communities travel to San Juan seeking seasonal agricultural work, and the mountaineers from these communities sold their products (salted meats and skins) in this region. These economic ties have apparently dwindled or disappeared with the improved road system, the growth of the markets in Jarabacoa, and the easier access to the Santiago market. Nevertheless, according to the park guides, a handful of tourists each year request trips across the park along the old mountaineer trails, entering the park in the La Cienaga entrance on the eastern side of the park to emerge in San Juan in the west. CHAPTER 13 CHANGING ADAPTIVE PATTERNS: DYING WAY OF LIFE IN THE CORDILLERA
Introduction
By 1970 anthropologist Gerald Murray in Los Conuqueros: Shifting Cultivation
in the Dominican Republic noted, regarding campesinos in the western Cordillera, that
"the decline had already begun to set in on an ancient and special way of life."' This
chapter will show that the majority of campesinos in the Cordillera have slowly
capitulated to the siege-hke State policies designed to subjugate rural land, labor, and
capital to urban interests. Legislation that removed land from production and criminalized
traditional subsistence practices denied peasants in remote areas of the Cordillera a means
of earning a living. At the same time they were progressively moved into dependency on
the world market and the cash economy.
The system of shifting cultivation that Don Martin described in the 1940s and that
Murray described in 1 970s has, for all practical purposes, passed into history. The tightly
woven conuco fences critical for the fimctioning of the traditional agro-pastoral complex
have been replaced by barbed wire. The folkloric cantos de conuco, antiphonal songs
sung by the juntas and convites while clearing land for gardens, are rapidly disappearing.
When asked about farming practices, practices that Murray described less than 35 years
ago, young people today refer to them as las cosas de antes (things from before) as if
they were discussing archaic folklore. Similarly, older campesinos say things like "/o5
" jovenes ya no saben trabajar. . . los jovenes de aqui no saben ni clavar un estante
216 217
.they don't even know (young people don't know how to work in agriculture anymore. . how to put up a post).
This chapter systematically examines the changes in the Cordillera that have come about since the golden age. State policies that implied restrictions on land use and access to resources have provoked a significant shift in survival strategies. Farming patterns that increasingly emphasize cash cropping have made campesinos vulnerable and more dependent on the market than in times past. The viability of raising livestock, once the foundation of the agro-pastoral complex, has greatly declined in light of the break-up of the terrenes comuneros and the end of free grazing practices. The domestic mode of production characteristic of the golden age has been challenged by the need for
campesinos to look outside the household for alternative income-generating strategies.
Campesinos no longer perceive farming in the Cordillera as a viable way of life, resulting
in massive out-migration.
Dependency on the Market
A major change in rural life in the remote Cordillera has been a shift from
households that produce a large portion and perhaps a majority of their subsistence needs,
to households in which there is an ever-increasing need for cash. In the words of El
Diacono from Los Postes:
Nowadays you see people traveling (into town) in an air-conditioned bus, and no one takes anything from the rural areas to the cities. They go to find things. They go to buy a carton of eggs; they have to go to buy industrially grown chickens, peppers, and parsley. Everything that women use to spice foods, all of that has to be brought from Santiago. Now you see in the cohnado two or three cucumbers, two or three pounds of tomato, a couple of cabbages. All of that comes from Santiago. People have become accustomed to not producing things to eat.
Contemporary campesinos living in the remote areas of the Cordillera need cash to obtain
the resources critical to the survival of the household and they need it to purchase the ^
218
fertilizers and hire the labor required to generate a profitable harvest. Yet, as will be
shown, for the same reasons campesinos need money, it is a scarce commodity in the remote Cordillera.
Access to Productive Land and Farming Strategies
The average amount of land required simply to survive on subsistence agriculture in the Cordillera using traditional types of technology has been estimated by the SEA to be 80 tareas (Pessar 1982). But the average contemporary campesino family living there has exclusive access to somewhere between 8 and 79 tareas (approximately 1.3-13 acres) with the average holdings for the small farming families falling within this group being only 24 tareas, down from an average of 35 tareas at the end of the Trujillo era (Clausner
1973; Table 13-1). Furthermore, a significant minority of families (25.2%) reports having no private lands to farm. Of these, nine percent (9.4%) reported that they work exclusively on borrowed or rented lands.
The terrenos comuneros system has completely disappeared in the Cordillera both in legal terms as well as in practice. The mountains are no longer a refuge from the State.
With park formation and the implementation of strict forestry laws, free access to the tierras del estado (state lands) has been, for all practical purposes, eliminated.^
Expansion of landholdings requires either accumulating enough cash to purchase or rent lands, inheriting land, or entering into sharecropping arrangements with large, often
absentee landowners. In Table 13-2 it can be seen that in the proximity of Rancier
National Park the majority of lands were obtained either through purchase (38.8%) or inheritance (29.7%)."* Comparable statistical data is not available for lands in the proximity of Bermiidez National Park, but ethnographic evidence suggests a similar pattern. Today, farmlands are obtained much more frequently through purchase and
I 219
inheritance rather than sharecropping or squatting.^ With no available vacant lands, continued population growth and the legal requirement for the division of parental lands
among all siblings means increasingly less land per capita.^
Table 13-1. Distribution of lands in the Cordillera
No. of tareas # of families % Total tareas % of total land Less than 8 47 13.4 194 0.4 8-79 201 57.4 5707 13.1 80-159 40 11.4 4191 9.6 160-799 47 13.4 14647 33.5 800-1599 13 3.7 14945 34.2 1600-3199' 2 0.6 4000 9.2 Total 350 99.9 43684 100.0
a. Due to the fact that some of the largest landowners are absentees, this number probably underrepresents the number of landholding within this category. Source: Rancier and Bermudez Surveys, 1998-99
Table 13-2. Primary means through which farmers obtained land Means of obtaining land # of famiUes % Purchase 64 38.8 Inheritance 49 29.7 Borrow/sharecrop 27 16.4 Squatting on state land 18 10.9 Missing 7 4.2 Total 165 100.0
Source: Rancier Survey 1 998
Farming
An equally if not more important factor than the amount of land that campesinos
possess is the quality and productivity of their holdings. With the limited availability of
new lands, campesinos have been compelled to rely on fixed garden plots, often in
marginal locations such as steep hillside slopes. Intensification of agriculture on
marginal lands has favored erosion and soil exhaustion. Older farmers fi^equently
comment on the declining productivity of their lands, nostalgically recalling times when
virgin or fallowed lands produced up to 25 cajones of beans for each cajon planted or
when 1 kilo of potatoes produced 20 kilos at harvest. Farmers complain that their lands 220
are now cansados, tired. Productivity of anything other than sturdy root crops or cowpeas requires costly fertilizers and pesticides and the purchase of "improved" varieties of seed.
As described in the words of Don Tomas, a 52 year-old farmer from Las Papas:
In many ways life before was better. In past times what we would buy were tools to work, picks, hoes, machetes, we didn't have to accumulate so many fertilizers. Today if you are going to plant 50 kilos of potatoes and you can't buy 50 or 60 sacks of fertilizer you aren't going to do anything.
Some similarities between farming practices of the past and current practices
continue to persist. Agricultural production in the Cordillera remains labor intensive and
is carried out with the use of simple tools. Machetes are used for planting, weeding,
chopping and harvesting; picks are used to dig holes for planting bananas and coffee; and
hoes are used for weeding. Many farmers continue to grow subsistence crops, primarily
root crops such as cassava (yuca span., Manihot dulcis L.) and dasheen (yautia span.,
Xanthosoma sagittifoli L.) along the margins or within the farm plots in which the cash
crops are produced. Plantains (platano span., Musa paradisiaca L.) and bananas (guineo
span. Musa sapientum L.) are commonly planted within the coffee groves. One still finds
subsistence conucos in which a wide variety of associations are found—com is planted
along with beans and yuca; sweet potato {batata) is planted with squash, sugar cane and
com; yuca is planted with cowpeas.
But many of the fundamental components of the traditional system have changed.
Swidden agriculture has, for all practical purposes, disappeared. The tumba (felling of
trees) has been replaced by the chapeo (the chopping down of weeds), and rather than
burning tree trunks and branches the use of fire has largely been reduced to eliminating
grasses and stubble. Farmers now use backpack pumps to apply costly chemical
herbicides, insecticides, and fertilizers. 221
Labor
Another trend has been increasing dependence on hired labor. There are three ways that farmers in the Cordillera Central can access labor: 1) they can appropriate it
from members of the immediate or extended family; 2) they can obtain it by participating
in a labor exchange arrangement; or 3) they can purchase it7 The surveys and direct
observations in the field indicate that farmers, particularly small farmers, continue to rely
primarily on the labor of members of the immediate and extended family for the majority
of agricultural tasks; secondarily, they rely on paid labor; and far fewer reported using the
reciprocal labor arrangements called juntas or convites that were common in the past
(Table 13-3).^ hideed, although some farmers in Los Postes occasionally form juntas to
weed the coffee groves, the use of reciprocal labor groups has begun to disappear from
the Cordillera.^ In the words of Fulgito, an older farmer from Los Postes with four sons:
With a junta, I would have a job and I would bring eight together, if I were going
to make a tumba I would bring fifteen or twelve and we would fell everything in a day and then move on to the other's field, but that doesn't exist anymore. Now, everyone must scratch their own backs. He who doesn't have money doesn't do any agriculture here. Now you have to pay someone to help you. I have to put
some fertilizer on the fields and look how I am, I can hardly walk and I know that
I have to make the effort to spread the fertilizer. Because if I don't pay someone
they aren't going to put it on for me, no one is going to say 'lets go help Fulgito
because he can't walk', to spread the fertilizer. I have to do it, because if I pay
they come, but if 1 do ajunta no one will come. That kind of union no longer exists.
Table 13-3. Primary source of labor used on the family farm Primary labor source % Household/family 54.3 Hired labor 31.5 Junta or convite 10.5 Missing 3.7 Total 100.0 Source: Rancier and Bermiidez Surveys 1998-99 (n=438) 222
One important change related to labor costs, something that will looked at in greater depth in the next chapter, is the massive incorporation of Haitian migrant workers into the agricultural labor force of the Cordillera.
Impact of Need for Cash
With the need for cash investments to produce a profitable harvest, the farmers have increasingly turned to monocropping strategies. An almost extreme example of this
transition is La Hacienda, a paraje located on the southern borders of Rancier National
Park. In 1998, the Rancier census recorded 32 households in La Hacienda. The farmers planted guandules (cowpeas) and raised goats. But they were struggling on largely degraded lands. They were barely subsisting and at the time many expressed a desire to abandon the community. The people of La Hacienda soon became part of the southern wave of migration to the seccion of Las Papas in the northern outskirts of Rancier, where
it was seen in an earlier chapter that peasants fi-om the south were used by agro- industriaUsts to circumvent conservation pohcies. In the wake of Hurricane George
agricultural restrictions along the northern boundaries of the park were lifted. By 2001
only three households remained in La Hacienda. The rest of the inhabitants of the
community migrated across the mountains, to Las Papas, where they became potato and
vegetable sharecroppers. In Las Papas they no longer plant conucos and they have no
livestock. Even chickens cannot be raised in the yards. Instead, chickens must to be kept
in coops because they pick at and damage the vegetables in the fields.
Intensive monocropping has also increasingly taken hold in the Sierra region of the western Cordillera where campesinos in Los Postes explain that although the past 30
years have been characterized by an increasing dependence on coffee growing, it was not
until the early 1 980s, with the strengthening of restrictions on access to parklands, that 223
farmers were compelled to rely almost exclusively on coffee groves for income and subsistence. As Angelina, a campesina woman from Los Postes in her late 50s explained:
Things are worse than before, there is more misery. One has to work to live.
There is less to eat. Before there was more, more work and more food and now there isn't any work for men or women. Now we only live by coffee.
The traditional, diversified cropping strategies that allowed campesinos, such as those of Los Postes, to weather natural and economic crises and fluctuations in world market prices for produce have all but completely disappeared. Similar to the monocropping of vegetables in Las Papas, dependence on coffee production in Los
Postes means that peasant households have become increasingly subject to plagues, weather cycles, and the vicissitudes of the world market. This vulnerability was keenly
felt in Las Postes during the mid-1990s, with the arrival of la broca, a beetle
{Hypothenemus hampei) that bores into the coffee cherry. La broca brought about a dramatic decline in Cordillera coffee production, annually damaging 60% or more of the harvest. Combating la broca requires using pesticides and meticulously cleaning the groves of fallen beans, procedures that raised production costs significantly. Many farmers began to convert their coffee from the traditional arabica to a more resistant plant called the caturra, a hybrid that, in order to be productive, requires the application of
copious quantities of fertilizer. Then, in 1998, came the winds and torrential rains of
Hurricane George, stripping the cherries from their trees and destroying much of the
1998-1999 coffee harvests. As if the fanners had not suffered enough, the price of coffee on the world-market subsequently plunged, falling from highs of US$1.02 per pound in
1998 to US$0.47 per pound in 2001, a price that failed to cover the costs of production
(Carvajal 2001).'° hi August, 2001, a coffee farmer from Los Postes complained: 224
Things are so bad there isn't even anything to give the kids. One has to hold out until noon and hope that God sends one something to make moro (rice and beans). Before, one lived from agriculture and one sold, one spent and something was
left. Now prices (for crops) are too low, now all we do is incur expenses.
The prolonged coffee crisis of the late 1990s has had a severe impact on the small producers in communities in the Cordillera such as Los Postes. From 1999 to 2002, many campesinos refrained from conditioning and harvesting the coffee groves simply to avoid inciuring losses. Campesino households not only lost access to the income generated from their own groves, but also to employment in those of their neighbors.
Whereas in 1998 the harvesting of coffee paid $60 pesos a box, and at an average of three boxes per day a harvester could daily earn $180 pesos (approximately US$12.25). But by
2000 the wage fell to $20 pesos a box (US$1.25). Households also lost access to coffee related credit. Intermediaries refiised to provide loans or purchase coffee a la jlor (before the harvest), practices that although often deemed exploitative, enabled small producing households to obtain money to finance emergencies or merely to survive during the cash- crunch of the non-harvest season (Sharpe 1977).
As described previously, State intervention contributed both directly and indirectly to increased reliance on cash cropping and monocropping strategies by campesinos. Through park formation and strict forestry laws, the State removed land from circulation that the campesinos previously relied upon to make conucos.
Environmental degradation due to more intensive farming of smaller plots on marginal lands required cash investments in the form of increased use of chemical inputs to yield a significant harvest. Forestry laws, which also apply to coffee frees, have also significantly reduced the campesinos' autonomy and flexibility to adapt to fend off the current crisis. Campesinos have been unable to obtain the required permission from 225
FORESTA to eliminate their coffee groves to plant a more profitable crop or to increase subsistence cropping on their lands.
Decline in Pastoral Activities
The campesinos have also been increasingly limited in the benefits they derive from livestock raising, a practice that once served as the foundation of the Cordillera hinterland economy. My survey data indicates that over 80% of campesino households continue to raise animals, but the majority of these are so called animales de patio (yard animals)—^primarily chickens and roosters and sometimes pigs raised in an enclosure in the yard of the household (Table 13-4). These animals are used primarily for household consumption. A significant number of households also own mules (generally only one or two), which are important as pack animals and for transportation. Few households, however, rely on livestock as an important source of income. Unequal ownership of
land, degradation of the soil, and state regulation have brought an end to the era in which annual roundups predominated throughout the Cordillera and have made modem livestock rearing costly and difficult. Although an estimated 40% of the study region
consists of enclosed pasture dedicated to non-intensive livestock grazing, the pasturage is mostly owned by a relatively small number of individuals—local latifundists, absentee emigrants and urban elites who obtained the property during the heyday of logging operations. Only a handful of resident campesino families have sufficient landholdings to permit the grazing of more than a couple of head of cattle (Table 13-6). Free grazing has been outlawed and so campesinos that do have sufficient land must purchase barbed
wire fences to keep cows and horses confined. Pigs must be raised in sties, hicreasing the economic challenge to mammalian livestock owners, fenced animals suffer nutritional deficits and must be supplemented with purchased feed and vitamins. State regulations 226
also currently require that animals be vaccinated and inspected before being butchered, adding more to the expenses of livestock rearing. In summary, the costs of vaccinations,
rolls of barbed-wire for fencing, vitamin supplements, and processed animal feed make it
difiBcult for the small farmer to earn profits through livestock. Canpesinos in Los Postes
complained that the price to be obtained per pound of pork or beef often proves inferior
to the investments made to fatten the animal for sale. And they lament the old days, as a
farmer from Los Postes noted:"
We lived well in those times; I remember that we had the goats there, in the hills, we had 70 goats. Now, you see that boy? He only knows what a goat is because
he can see one little goat they have tied up over there. After those times, everything started to get scarce. And that is why we have the needs that we have these days.
Table 13-4. Percentage of households owning animals, by types Animals % Cows 21.8 Chickens and roosters 77.2 Goats 7.6 Pigs 24.4 Mules or donkeys 54.8 SourcerRancier and Bermudez Surveys (N=500)
Table 13-5. Importance of animal raising for household income
Rank as source of household income % r 1.6 10.6 3"* 3.4 4* 1.0 None 83.4 Totals 100.0 Source: Rancier and Bermudez Surveys (N=500)
Diversification of Survival Activities
The base of the local economy for those who have remained in the Cordillera
Central remains small-scale farming. The majority of household heads describe 227
themselves as farmers (75.5%) and the majority of households (69.7%) continue to rank farming—on family land or through sharecropping—as the primary source of family income. Nevertheless, small-scale farming increasingly has become less viable as an exclusive source of produce and income (del Rosario et al. 1996; Georges 1990).
Table 13-6. Number of animals owned per household, by % of households Number of % owning % owning % owning % owning % owning Animals cattle pigs goats chickens mules/donkeys
1 or 2 11.3 16.2 2.8 4.7 42.6 3 to 5 6.1 3.4 2.4 17.8 8.3 6 to 10 2.0 2.6 0.8 26.1 3.0 11 to 20 2.2 0.8 1.0 17.0 1.0 Over 20 0.6 0.2 0.0 10.8 0.0 None 77.8 76.8 93.0 23.6 45.1 Source: Rancier and Bermudez surveys 1998 and 1999 (N=500)
Table 13-7. Primary occupation reported by heads of households Occupation _% Farmer 75.5 Paid agricultural work 8.5 Business (store owner or intermediary) 3.7 Tourist guide 1.2 Sale of other services 4.3 Other" 5.0 Did not respond 1.7 Missing 1.0 Total 100,0
a. The majority of these were female heads that described their profession as housewdfe. Source: Rancier and Bermudez surveys 1998 and 1999 (N=515)
In the surveys carried out during the field research, some 49% of families reported
multiple sources of household income and 18% of households did not report family
farming ventures as a source of income, showing that a significant group of non-farming
families has emerged. The primary source of income for the reported non-farming
families was agricultural wage labor (57%) followed by remittances (22%) and business
(13%). 228
Table 13-8. Sources of income for families Activity Order of importance in percentage First Second Third Fourth Farmer 69.7 9.1 1.6 Ag. wage labor 11.6 8.3 1.0 Business 3.5 6.8 Remittances 5.1 5.5 Livestock 1.6 10.6 3.4 1.0 Tourist guide 1.5 4.6 1.4 <1.0 Other 5.7 3.3 2.7 <1.0 Source: Rancier and Bermiidez surveys (N=515)
Approximately one of five households (19.9%) reported that paid agricultural
labor constitutes either the primary or secondary source of family income. Work as
mountain tourist guides also provides an alternative for some campesinos, although these jobs are concentrated in two communities close to Bermiidez National Park that serve as
the entry point for excursions to the Pico Duarte. Some 8.5% of Dominicans living in the
surveyed hamlets report making a living exclusively as salaried workers. Salaried
agricultural workers tend to constitute a higher percentage of the population in the areas
in which potato and vegetable farming predominates as opposed to coffee producing
1 2 areas. Agncultural work is generally most readily available on a seasonal basis, during the harvest or land preparation seasons, and involves temporary migration toward specific
areas. The importance of seasonal work is reflected by the fact that 21.8%) of heads of household surveyed report having lived in a community other than that of the interview in the last 10 years and 20.9%) of informants reported salaried agricultural work as either a primary or secondary source of family income.
Campesino families also gamer income through a wide variety of other sources and strategies not readily apparent in the survey data. Some 24.7% of the 352 Bermiidez families interviewed reported having children outside of the survey hamlet who provide assistance, either in cash or goods, to the parental household, and 34% of all children 229
< reported as living outside of the community provide assistance to the parental family
(Figure 13-1). Although these may constitute a significant contribution to family subsistence at any given time, the gifts of children may be irregular and for that reason not considered a fundamental part of household income, and thus underrepresented in the
statistics.
Sources of income for a typical household in the Cordillera often vary over time.
During times of crisis, for example, men may engage in migratory agricultural work and women may make temporary migratory ventures into the city to raise cash, primarily through working as domestic servants or in the duty fi-ee zones. Other unreported sources of income are clandestine activities carried out by men in park areas, such as poaching, the capture of parrots, gathering honey, and harvesting lumber. The cumulative effect of
this diversity constitutes an important part of household income that is not clearly reflected in the statistics (del Rosario 1996:101).^^
6% 5%
No response nPNone ElMoney mother assistance
Figure 13-1 . Types of assistance provided by migrant children to their rural families fi-om Rancier and Bermudez survey data, 1998-99 '
230
Conclusion
This chapter has documented, both ethnographically and statistically, the transforming effect of State policies on the lifeways of the campesinos of the Cordillera.
Beginning late in the Trujillo period, the policies of the Dominican State resembled a death knell being tolled for the traditional Cordillera peasant way of life. Formalization of the economy, concentration of land in the hands of urban political elites and conservation areas, soil degradation, and the mandated corralling of livestock drove campesinos of the Cordillera into a dependency on the market. Campesinos increasingly came to need cash to meet subsistence needs and to meet the costs associated with the technological inputs necessary for modem farm production. State and internationally formulated economic constraints came with little in the way of viable occupational
alternatives: little capital was provided through credit programs; there were few effective
extension programs; no improved access to foreign markets; and no price support programs. Instead, the government deliberately kept domestic agricultural prices low by
inundating the market with subsidized agro-industrial imports from the United States.
Today campesinos are frequently heard to say 'ya no se puede trabajar en estos campos
(no longer can one work in these fields). Traditional peasant farming in the Cordillera
has become a dying way of life. The next chapter discusses the fact that although the
majority of campesinos consider that rural life has its advantages—for example, rural
areas are healthy and have little crime and few delinquents in comparison to urban areas-
it is no longer a good place to make a living. The consequence has been large-scale
outmigration, a demographic phenomenon that itself had led to radical transformations in
the patterns of social behavior in the remote CordiQera. 231
Notes
' to It is in^ortant to note that I am using the "dying way of Hfe" as an evocative literary image draw attention to clear changes that have occurred in the adaptive patterns of campesinos in the Cordillera Central of the Dominican Republic, and not to reify either the 'peasant' of the Cordillera or their 'way of to life'. Murray (1970) uses similar evocative imagery in referring to an 'ancient and special way of hfe' draw attention to the rather unique farming adaptations that emerged in the Cordillera Central that incorporated elements of the hato ranching system that appeared in Santo Domingo relatively early in the colonial period. But in strict historical terms, the adaptive strategies to which Murray referred were not ancient but actually rather recent, emerging in the late IS* century in the lowlands of the country and in the late IP* century in the highlands of the Cordillera Central.
^ According to my Rancier and Bermudez survey data, landless groups are disproportionately represented among households with relatively young heads (<30 years of age) and among female-headed households. For example, in the Bermudez san^le only 14.1% of households were headed by males in the 20-29 age group, yet these represented 33% of landless households. Similarly, female-headed households constitute 9.1% of the sample but comprise 26.1% of all households reporting no access to agricultural land. In the case of households headed by males, this data may indicate that there is a variation in landownership commensurate with the age or lifecycle of the male heads of campesino households. The case of high landlessness reported by female-headed households could be explained by the fact that most of these households are headed by older women who probably have ceded any lands they inherited from their husbands to their sons to work. In exchange, the sons provide for them.
^ The illegal occupation of State lands has been the form of land acquisition that has received far and away the greatest attention from conservationists and the press. The word campesino is almost inevitably accompanied by the term conuquismo (subsistence garden making), and tumba y quema, (slash and bum), both of which imply the progressive encroachment on State lands and the felling of forested areas to plant subsistence gardens (conucos). As noted in chapter 3, in the fairly recent past (as little as 25 to 30 years ago), occupation of State lands remained a common practice in many areas of the Cordillera and was linked to swidden agriculture, a farming strategy that requires regular access to fresh lands. The campesinos in the Dominican Republic continue to be vilified for expanding into State lands to the present day. But in most areas in the Cordillera,
land tenure is relatively stable and squatting on State lands has become increasingly imcommon. In particular, the strict forestry and park related policies have greatly curtailed squatting. This is reflected in the data from the Rancier survey, in which only 10.9% of farmers reported having obtained lands through squatting on unoccupied State lands (and many of these occupations occurred 20 or more years ago). Somewhat similar to squatting on State lands is the invasion of private lands. In the Cordillera, land invasions have involved organized attempts by campesinos to take over large parcels of land, generally maintained in pasture and controlled by the previous owners of lumber mill operations. Along the northern boundaries of Rancier, the majority of can5)esinos live on lands that were abandoned by one of the lumber companies that operated in the region up until the late 1960s. Owners of lands controlled by two other lumber conpanies in the same region, however, have fought bitterly to prevent their lands from being occupied.
* In the hinterlands of the Cordillera, lands are freely exchanged for cash. In light of the scarcity of property titles, what is sold in strict legal terms is not the actual property but the recognized right to exclusive use of the property and what are called the mejoras (literally, improvements) on the land. The improvements may include: 1) the labor invested to prepare and clear the lands for farming, including the removal of tree cover, stones and logs; 2) existing infrastructure (fences and ranchos (huts)); 3) the existing or permanent crops on the land (for example, coffee, fiiiit and shade trees, and pasture grasses); 4) irrigation works; and 5) any other elements that may constitute an investment that enhances the value of the land. The majority of these land transactions go unregistered in the Lands Tribunal although the mejora sale is generally witnessed by an alcalde, who will issue a letter called a certifico that serves as evidence of the mejora fransaction. 232
migration. One of the factors that has played a role in stimulating land sales in the Cordillera has been Gomez (1997) for example reported that in the seccion of Donaja (located within the study region), an increased demand for land has been fomented by returning migrants wishing to establish homesteads in the increase in community as well as by remittance money sent to relatives so that they can purchase land. The proposition demand has resulted in an increase in land prices, making the sale of family farms a tempting regional for smallholders without relatives abroad who can use the money to fmance their migration into urban centers.
^ Statistically, the renting, borrowing or sharecropping of lands play relatively minor roles in campesinos gaining access to lands in the study region. For example, only 9.4% of the farmers surveyed reported working on rented, borrowed or sharecropped land. Of the different arrangements used to access non-private lands, renting land for cash is very uncommon. For example, only 2.5% of the campesinos in the Rancier survey reported renting lands for cash. More common methods of renting land are through sharecropping arrangements. Sharecropping implies that a tenant works of a piece of land in exchange for providing the landowner with a portion of the crop or revenues yielded as a resuh of the use of the land. Sharecropping, therefore, is not only a means whereby land-hungry peasants can access land, but also a means whereby land-owners can mobilize labor to make their lands productive without having to pay cash. Sharecropping takes on many different forms in the Cordillera Central. The two primary arrangements are "a tercios", requiring that the farmer provide the landowner with a third of the proceeds of the harvest, or "a medias", in which the farmer provides the landowner with half of the produce or revenue generated by the harvest. The amount of payment provided to the landowner depends largely on the other contributions the landowner makes toward the productive process. For example, in the case of a tercios arrangement, the landowner may merely provide the tenant with land but the tenant must make all of the other investments required to produce a harvest, including the purchase of seed and fertilizers, labor, and harvesting costs. On the other hand, a medias generally involves the splitting of all of the investments required for production (seed and fertilizers) between the owner and the tenant. The tenant, however, is expected to provide labor.
The borrowing of land is also a relatively common form of accessing land. Land are frequently borrowed from a parent or from absentee landowners, generally relatives or close friends of the borrower, in an arrangement through which in exchange for the right to use the land, the borrower acts as an
adminisfrator, caring for the land and ensuring that it remain in use and unoccupied by squatters. Such an arrangement applies, for example, to Alfredo from Los Postes:
The people whose lands I manage are like my grandparents. When the owner died, I came down to take care of the property and his wife, who is an elderly woman (all of the children live in the United
States). I didn't work with them before, I worked with my father. . .1 take care of this place, and if I
think that something can be fixed so that it will work better, I do it. They don't pay me to live here, I
just administer what they have, and what I have to do I do it, always in consultation with them. But I
use the harvest to eat, and to repair anything that has to be repaired. I don't have to give them a
percentage of the production, because there isn't enough profit. But I make investments in the property.
As Alfredo mentioned, this kind of borrowing arrangement may also imply that the tenant maintain the properties in good shape, keeping coffee plantations weeded, taking care of pasture, and taking care of cattle or other animals owned by the absentee landowners. Under this arrangement, the borrower makes all of the investments required for production and also retains all of the profits reaped from the harvests. In exchange, he watches over the properties for the owners.
Another kind of borrowing arrangement reported in the region, one that is less common than those
mentioned above, is one in which the landowner will loan a farmer a plot of land and, in exchange, the
farmer is expected to return the land to the owner in a given period of time (2 or 3 years) cleared and planted in improved pastures. In this case, the benefits that accrue to the owner include the fact that the farmer will assume the costs and legal risks involved in the clearing of land of overgrowth or forest cover as well as the mejoras (improvements) made to the land—the land will be returned to the owner cleared and
planted in a usefiil crop (pasture) that enhances its value. * Postes. Her story of the division of Angelina is an anomaly, a female landowner in the community of Los patterns in the family lands after the passing of her father serves as an example of land inheritance equally amongst all hinterlands of the Cordillera. It also shows that lands do are not always divided entitled members. When Angelina's father died, her oldest brother divided the family lands amongst all of his siblings. However, according to Angelina, her brother did not distribute the lands equally. There were in fact three sister) that of special cases that had to be resolved: those of the two female siblings (Angelina and her and a brother who had migrated to the United States. Angelina claimed that she was provided with her fair share of land because she was single, poor, had a number of children and her father had made a special request to her brothers that they help her. So the older brother apportioned more lands to Angelina than to her sister, who had married and gone to live in a received different region of the Cordillera. Angelina claims that her sister did not protest the fact she had distribution of less less land than that to which she was legally entitled, and her older brother justified the land to Angelina's sister by saying that "they [the family members remaining in Los Postes] would be more protected" by giving more land to Angelina than if they would be in "leaving it to her sister's husband." As Angelina's case shows, Dominican law and local custom recognize bilateral inheritance rights to land. males Upon the death of an individual, the surviving spouse and legitimized children of the property owner, and females, have a legal and equal claim to the lands of the deceased. These inherited lands are called the succesion (hereditary succession). Upon the death of a parent, the family succession either may be jointly managed by the family or divided among family members. In the case of the Cordillera Central, lands are most commonly divided. The family succession is generally only held in common in cases where there are large numbers of absentee family members. In those cases, one or two family members may stay behind to administer and farm the family lands, or an administrator may be hired. Dominican law specifies, however, that any participant in a family succession may at any time claim his share. Despite the legal recognition of bilateral inheritance, common practice tends to channel control of family lands through males. If the deceased did not divide up the lands while alive then, according to law custom, it falls to the oldest son to divide the land. In the case that there is a surviving spouse, by 50% of the land automatically goes to the spouse, and the rest of the lands should be divided up equally amongst the children. However, a de facto gender bias in land inheritance is common in the Dominican Republic as has been reported for Latin America in general. Deere and Leon (2001) point out, for example, that in most civil . . Latin American of Latin America there is a "disjuncture . between the egalitarian norms of most codes with regard to the inheritance rights of children, and local practices governing the mheritance of land." Based on their comparative studies of land tenure in Latin America they conclude:
Overall, inheritance of land in Latin America favors sons, even where bilateral inheritance practices are the norm. This pattern was supported until recently by the locale of post-marital residency, the logic of peasant household reproduction, and gender stereotyping that privileges men's work in agriculture.
In both Los Postes and Las Papas it was found that relatively few women own land independently. For example, of the 78 households in the primary hamlet of the seccion of Los Postes, there are only 5 women who own more than 6 tareas of land and, of these, only two have more than 20 tareas. The findings in these communities corroborate the conclusions of Geffroy and Vasquez (1975) regarding customary handling of land inheritance in the Dominican Republic. As the case of Angelina shows, women tend to lose their claim over family land unless they remain living close to or on the family lands. This may prove to be an additional incentive for households to encourage early female migration and contribute to the male skewed sex ratio that will be discussed in chapter 15. Male children have an incentive to reduce the presence of women in the parental household and in the local area in order to maintain control over larger portions of the family land succession. Angelina's older brother justified providing her sister with less land through the rationalization that the land would be transferred to her husband. In fact, one of the principle justifications used for deviation from the customary and legal standards regarding the bilateral distribution of land is that married women, and especially those who out-marry, tend to forfeit their rights to their corresponding land inheritance. After a female marries, popular opinion dictates that the woman's claim over her husband's lands has supplanted her need for access to her family lands. In contrast, as in the case of Angelina, women who remain in their home community generally retain more control over their land inheritance, although they 234
frequently do not take actual possession of the land but either they sell it to a brother or allow him to work the property and share the profits reaped from the harvest.
' the of Paid labor is procured imder several specific different types of arrangements, depending on type work and the necessary abilities to carry them out. These arrangements include: por dia (by day); por ajuste (by task); and porfanega (by volume). The por dia work is used for tasks that must be carried out with care such as or example, weeding, planting, harvesting, and plowing. Por ajuste means the contracting of one or more laborers and paying them a fixed sum for a specific job, generally a job that does not require a great deal of care or detail such as fixing a fence or clearing land. Farmers report that they hire individuals por dia for jobs that require care and attention to detail due to the fact that the incentive for a day laborer will be to work more slowly and carefully, to extend the number of working days. On the other hand, for jobs not requiring great care, por ajuste arrangements are more appropriate. Under these task- based contracts, the laborer does not earn more if he takes more time, so the incentive the worker has is to complete the task as quickly as possible. In the por ajuste contracting system, it is common to use Haitian labor, although Haitian labor is also used for day labor. Por fanega--by volume-is used primarily in the harvesting of coffee. The volume measures used are the caja (box) or cajon (larger box). With relation to the sexual division of labor, many women work in the harvest, but due to local gender-based norms rules it would be rare to fmd a woman working in agricultural tasks that are considered to require hard physical labor or working with heavy tools-clearing lands with a machete, plowing, or fiimigating with a motobomba (packpump). The pay for all these labor arrangements varies depending on the region and the type of work. For example in Constanza, the region where workers report receiving the highest pay rates in the Cordillera, por dia payment at the time of research was approximately $100 pesos a day with meals. A good plower, which is a specialized task, could eam $350 pesos a day without meals. In comparison, in the rural communities along the southern slopes of the Cordillera pay per day was reportedly $50 pesos with meals for unskilled day jobs.
* One explanation for the difference between farmers who report primarily using paid labor and those who primarily use family labor involves the number of children remaining close to the paternal household. For example, my survey data displays a statistically significant difference (p<.000) between the average number of children reported as living within or close to the households that report using family labor (avg. 4.53) in comparison with those who report hiring labor (avg. 3.09). Another factor that is involved is the amount of land being worked by a given household. The same survey reveals a statistically significant difference (p<.03) in the amount of land reported by farmers using family labor (mean 107.61 sd. 283.83) versus those who report using hired labor (mean 228.33 sd 399.66).
' The junta or convite is now frequently used to appeal to an ethos of mutual aid and neighborly help, at times by the local associations or NGOs, for the completion of timely tasks in the commimity such as path improvement.
The dramatic decline in coffee prices was related to a series of geopolitical factors including the promotion of the production of low quality robusta coffee in Vietnam by the World Bank and European countries. Vietnam subsequently flooded the market, crashing world coffee prices (Stein 2003).
" A classic case of State involvement that destroyed a traditional peasant livestock adaptation is the USAID promoted and financed extermination of native pigs carried out in the early 1980s. In a campaign to combat the spread of swine fever, the State virtually wiped out the native criollo (Creole) pigs and replaced them with a Iowa hybrid pig. Whereas the native pigs survived by foraging in the forest and eating household and garden refuse, the Iowa bred pigs, locally called puercos gringos, had to be raised in enclosures and fattened with expensive imported animal feeds.
One of the reasons for this difference has to do with the fact that along the northern border of Rancier National Park, many of the farms that produce potatoes and vegetables are ovmed by farmers living in the valley of Constanza. These farmers hire the campesinos to work in and oversee the farms during their absence. CHAPTER 14 GENDER AND MIGRATION IN THE CORDILLERA
Introduction
Previous chapters showed that dependency on cash, concentration of land
ownership, and declining soil quality have destroyed the viability of traditional peasant
subsistence strategies in remote areas of the Cordillera highlands. In contrast to nostalgic
remembrances of a golden age characterized by free access to resources and abundant
and diversified production, older campesinos now lament that ya no se puede trabajar
(you can't farm anymore) and, as a result of conservation-oriented policies, aqui se
trabaja con miedo (one farms with fear). This chapter will show that the consequence
has been massive migration out of the Cordillera. There has, however, been a highly
unusual feature of this migration, something that may set the Dominican Republic apart
from other Caribbean societies, and something that has had wide ranging impact on the
social life among the people remaining in the Cordillera. Unlike patterns reported on
other islands, out-migration from the Dominican Cordillera has been characterized by a
significantly more rapid exodus of females. As we shall see, the greater and more rapid departure of girls and women has become a positive-reinforcing process, leading to other developments, such as fertility decline, the introduction of household labor saving devices, and the in-migration of male Haitian laborers, factors that further encouraged
' ' skewed ratios of women versus men. .> .; »
235 236
Exodus
Despite annual national population growth rates of approximately 2.6% since
stagnated and in 1970, population densities throughout the northern Cordillera have remote highlands of the study region they have declined.' The population of the western
to 1981 Cordillera grew at a low annual rate of 1 .6%, from 82,537 to 88,664, in the 1970 period; but between the census of 1981 and 1993 the population actually dropped at an annual rate of 0.6%, from 96,191 to 88,664. The decline in population has been even more dramatic in the study region. For example, between 1981 and 1993 the population of the seccion of Los Postes dropped 31.1% (from a total population of 2779 to 1914),
Similarly, between 1981 and 1993 the total population of all of the secciones surrounding
Bermudez dropped 1 1% (Table 14-1). There are campesinos who have literally picked up
their and left, dismantling their entire houses, board-by-board, and migrating wath it and
families into the cities. Some rural hamlets have been completely abandoned, only the
• • * 3 schoolhouse remaining behind. «
Table 14-1. Population changes in hamlets in the study region, 1981-1993 Seccion Year 1981 Year 1993 % change Los Postes 2779 1914 -31.1
Seccion 1 3948 2480 -37.2 Seccion 2 4184 3793 - 9.3 Seccion 3 1828 1447 -20.8 Seccion 4 3687 2978 - 19.2 Seccion 5 1509 1319 - 12.6 Seccion 6 4847 5491 +13.3 Seccion 7 4121 3992 - 3.0 Seccion 8 4113 4257 + 3.5 Seccion 9 5217 4525 - 13.3 Seccion 10 3623 3232 - 10.9 Totals 39856 35428 - 11.1 Source: Dominican National Census 1981 and 1993
This does not, however, mean that all campesinos want to leave. When
informants (heads of households or their spouses) were asked in the Bermudez and 237
Rancier surveys if they would prefer to remain in the hamlet in which the interview took place or migrate to another area, only 27.2% expressed a desire to leave (Table 14-2).
So, despite the hardships involved, most adult campesinos want to remain in the
Cordillera, or at least say that they want to remain there. Some say they do not have any
skills other than farming with which to make a living. Others say they fear the crime and unhealthy lifestyle on the cities, hi the words of a 40-year-old farmer, who is the segundo alcalde in Los Postes:
I have a lot of family in the capital, but the city is too complicated. Even though one doesn't go to the city one keeps watching the news and sees that in the city
delinquency remains higher than anything else. I have been to the capital during
vacations and it doesn't interest me at all. Life in the city is a life of the tiguere, you go down the street and they take your watch, you get killed or you have to
kill.
Table 14-2. Heads of household or spouses' aspirations for a better life Aspiration Number % Remain in community 346 71.0 Leave community 134 27.5 No response 7 1.5 Total 487 100.0 Source: Rancier and Bermiidez Surveys
Many campesinos from all socio-economic levels would also prefer that their children stay with them in the mountains, hi my random, open-ended opinion survey carried out in the summer of 2001, 30% of those interviewed indicated that if they had the resources they would prefer that their children remain with them in the Cordillera
(Table 14-4). But as a male farmer from Las Papas expressed it, la agricultura da mucho
trabajo con poca produccion (farming is a lot of work and there is little production).
Campesinos no longer see a future for there children in fanning: 74.2% of informants in the park surveys clearly indicated that their children would be better off leaving the 238
Cordillera to pursue opportunities in another place, as did 56.7% of those interviewed in
the opinion survey (Tables 14-3 and 14-4).
Table 14-3. hiformant's Aspirations for their Children Aspiration # of responses % Remain in community 106 22.9 Leave community 343 74.2 No response 13 2.8 Total 462 100.0 Source: Rancier and Bermudez Surveys (n=462)
Table 14-4. Opinion regarding migration of children Summary of opinion expressed % VaHd % Children should stay 13.5 16.7%
Would like for children to stay, but they 10.8 13.3% have to go to have a better life Children should go 46.0 56.7%
All children have already left 10.8 13.3% No clear opinion 18.9 Source: Opinion survey of Los Postes and Las Papas (N=37)
Besides the lack of opportunities for making a living in the mountains, the
primary reason that campesinos state that their children should migrate is to receive an
education. The almost universal desire expressed by campesinos for their children to
receive a solid education is one of the clearest expressions of a dying way of life in the
Cordillera and of the almost complete incorporation of campesinos into a market and cash-based economy. The high priority placed on education indicates that campesinos are aware that a better education improves their children's chances of acquiring a decent paying job in the urban areas and signals an effective end to any aspiration for the intergenerational transmissions of one's own rural lifeways, the sign of a dying subculture. The pursuit of an education has become one of the primary driving forces behind migration in the Cordillera. Typical was the following statement by a woman in . 1
239
Las Papas who has three young children:
It is better for them to go and estabHsh themselves in another place because here in Las Papas there isn't anything, there isn't development, there isn't a future. . there isn't any development for the children. The school here only reaches 4'*^
grade. . . It is obligatory to leave here so they can study.
But the migration process has not been uniform. The constraints imposed on the farming
economy of the Cordillera highlands have had a differential impact on young versus old
and on males versus females.
Urban Rural Park Areas
I Males II Females
Figure 14-1. Urban, rural and study (park) area sex ratios from 1993 Dominican Census data
Rancier Bermudez
I Males H Females
Figure 14-2. Comparative sex ratios from study area communities, from Rancier and Bermudez surveys, 1998 and 1999
241
Skewed Sex Ratios
In rural areas of the Dominican Republic, sex ratios-typically measured by the number of males for every one hundred females in a given population—^have historically tended to be skewed in favor of males, a phenomenon that is an anomaly in the
Caribbean.'* But in recent years this has been a growing demographic trend in the country
(Table 14-5, Figures 14-3 and 14-4). The 1993 Dominican National Census revealed that in areas with a population density of less than 260 people per square mile (100 people/km) the masculinity index averages 118 males for every 100 females. The over-
representation of males is a trend even more evident in the very marginal rural areas in the Dominican Republic such as the remote highlands of the Cordillera. For example, for approximately 41 hamlets bordering Perez Rancier and Armando Bermiidez National parks, data from the 1993 Dominican National Census indicated a masculinity index of
127 males for every 100 females.' In the survey data acquired in 1998-99, the recorded combined sex ratios for the 16 parajes surveyed was 129 males for every 100 females
(Figures 14-3 and 14-4).* This high representation of males is an unusual phenomenon, especially in the Caribbean where sex ratios have been largely skewed towards females.
Age child left (5 year age groups)
Figure 14-5. Ages that children left rural household from Bermiidez survey, N=527 242
Table 14-5. Historical sex ratios for case study municipalities San Jose de las Matas Constanza Jarabacoa Census year Rural Urban Rural Urban Rural Urban 1935 105.7 93.3 104.7 104.5 105.4 87.0 1950 105.5 80.0 107.8 92.7 105.3 86.0 1960 N/a N/a N/a N/a N/a N/a 1970 108.5 81.7 108.6 93.6 107.3 91.5 1981 111.0 92.9 111.6 101.0 110.0 93.8 1993 113.0 101.7 112.6 101.0 N/a 92.6 Sources: Dominican National Censuses 1935-1993
Differential Male vs Female Migration
The primary cause of male-skewed sex ratios in the study regions is the
differential migration rate of females versus males, particularly among teenagers and
young adults. Both women and men are migrating out of the remote highlands of the
Cordillera, but women have been migrating in greater numbers than men. According to
the 1998 survey conducted in the surroundings of Bermudez, for example, between 10-24
years of age 80.2% of females left (24.5% between 10-14 and 55.7% between 15-24)
compared to 70.1% of males (16.6% between 10-14 and 53.5% between 15-24) (Figure
14-5). Explanations for greater female versus male migration could focus on the recent
reorganization of national production and the concomitant differential incorporation of
women versus men into newly emerging non-traditional employment sectors, specifically
duty free zones and the relatively new ago-industrial sector (Raynolds 1998; Safa 1995).
One argument is that these nontraditional sectors act as pull factors, attracting
impoverished female laborers from remote areas into the urban and agroindustrial
workforce. An examination of the most recent statistics seems to support this view. For
example, 56% of duty free zone employees are female (Consejo Nacional de Zonas
Francas 2000). Furthermore, 42% of employees in non-traditional agricultural jobs are 243
women in comparison to an estimated 5.5% of rural women who report salaried agricultural employment in traditional areas (CESDEM 1997; Raynolds 1998).
Legend
Figure 14-6. Areas with sex ratios over 120 in 1993 Dominican National Census
But urban job opportunities in isolation fail to explain why so many women are
leaving rural areas at greater rates than men. Urban wage labor is absorbing only some of the female exodus. Dominican women have long been excluded from key economic sectors of the urban economy, with a much lower rate of participation than that of men in private firms, as independently employed professionals, as workers in publicly owned companies, and as owners of non-registered businesses (PNUD 2000). Between 1996 and 1999, 60% of the new permanent jobs created in the Dominican Republic were for men (Secretaria de Estado de Trabajo 2000). hi the year 2000, 70.3% of males of working age were economically active in comparison to 40.6% of females, hi the same year, 7.9% of the economically active male population was unemployed in comparison to 244
23.8% of the economically active female population (Banco Central 2000). In short, men
continue to have an advantage on urban labor markets. If these urban labor markets were
the sole or even principal causal dynamic propelling emigration, then there should be
more males emigrating than females. As we have seen, the reverse is true.
Table 14.6. Employment and unemployment by sex in year 2000 % economically active of Unemployment amongst economically Sex working age active population Males 70.3 7.9 Females 40.6 23.8 Source: Banco Central 2000
The fact is that men fill the majority of both old and new jobs in the Dominican
Republic. Furthermore, there is little that can be considered attractive about most urban job opportunities open to women. The participation of women remains largely
concentrated in non-professional, low paying jobs within the service sector of the
economy, primarily in domestic service and as duty free zone workers. Domestic service
in particular was mentioned by informants in Los Postes and Las Papas as one of the primary urban job opportunities sought by female migrants.^ But fuUtime work as domestic servants only pays $1,500 - 3,000 pesos (US$90-$180) per month, although room and board is often also included. The other major female job opportunity, working
in the duty fi-ee zones, is no more enticing. In 2001 , the minimum wage for a worker in the duty fi-ee zone was $2490.00 pesos, or approximately US $150 per month, US$0.93 an hour, among the lowest paid industrial employment opportunities in the Western hemisphere. To put these income levels in perspective, the Dominican Central Bank calculated that in 1999 the monthly cost of food for an average family was $6,240.84
pesos per month (US $374.60)-two and one half times the salaries in the duty fi'ee zones
(Banco Central 1999).* And to put these income levels in perspective with male incomes, 245
unskilled Haitian immigrant males working on urban construction sites earn in 4-8 days
the monthly salary of a female Dominican domestic servant.' Perhaps gender-
differentiated employment opportunities explain why studies suggest that as many as one
in every ten Dominican women between the ages of 16 to 30 engage in prostitution.'"
So if the female job opportunities in the city are unattractive why have women in
the remote areas of the Cordillera been leaving at greater rates than men? The most
plausible explanation is that the destruction of the rural economy discussed in previous
chapters has occurred more rapidly and been more complete with respect to traditional
female occupations than it has for male occupations. This trend has caused additional far
reaching changes in behavior of the campesinos. Before examining these changes it is
necessary to understand that they resulted from the interaction of two factors, one that did
not change and one that did change, specifically: unchanging gender roles and changing
demands for household tasks that traditionally fell to females and children.
Persistence of Gender Roles and Change in Demand for Female Labor
The traditional sex and age-based division of labor described in chapter 3 has
changed little in the remote hinterlands of the Cordillera. Female contributions continue
to be centered on household tasks and male work activities continue to be focused outside
the household. There have been movements toward increasing female participation in political and administrative activities, such as school management and leadership in grassroots organizations. Furthermore, women have attempted to develop petty commerce activities. In Los Postes, for example, a few women organize raffles; some women have started beekeeping and tried, unsuccessfully, to sell processed coffee. But these activities are tied to NGOs and Peace Corp initiatives and, on the whole, women continue to be largely excluded from primary economic activities, such as colmado 246
(small store) ownership and commerce. In contrast, women in Las Papas report that female involvement in paid agricultural labor in the potato fields has increased, but
women are still expected to perform domestic chores such as cooking, washing clothes,
and housekeeping. Rural women still clearly define men as the principal breadwinners,
and men still dominate politics and still control retail and wholesale trade. Women continue to perceive their economic participation outside of the household as transitory and justified only during times of crisis, and they express a preference for maintaining their traditional role as homemaker (similar attitudes were also found by Pou et al.
1987:204). One female informant from Las Papas explained.
Sometimes we work day jobs (echando dia), tying up the vines, pulling up garlic and onions... we would gather potatoes and beans, but women aren't into that. If
we have the opportunity in which it has to be done, it has to be done. But often if you have your husband and he doesn't want you to work we thank God for that. But there are many women who due to necessity have had to echar dia (work as day laborers).
This quote expresses nicely the ideals of the traditional division of labor in the rural Dominican household. The ideal norms concerning the sexual division of labor have not changed, but what has changed over the past three to four decades are demands for female labor within the rural household. With the shift from dependency on household production to purchased industrial products both male and female domestic labor demands have declined precipitously. The declining viability of the domestic mode of production gave way to the high rates of out-migration seen earlier. Men and women began leaving for urban centers and areas of non-traditional agricultural production. But the changes in productive strategies had a greater impact on the demand for female labor than on the demand for male labor in rural areas. The domestic mode of production has
been largely supplanted by a dependence on imported processed foods, industrial textiles. 247
soaps, and other products sold in the market. This dependency is underwritten by income generated from largely male activities carried out within or independently of the household. Examples of these primarily male-centric income generating activities include intensive agricultural production (coffee and potato farming), livestock rearing
(in which Hvestock is sold on the hoof rather than processed first by the household), agricultural wage work, lumber contraband, honey gathering, remittances, small businesses, trade, taxi and freight services.
Rural Push Factors
As described in the previous chapters, important transformations in rural life in the Cordillera hinterlands began in the 1950s and 1960s and can be linked to State policies that gave precedence to urban industrial sectors and agricultural elites. Below I review and elaborate on these processes to show how women were impacted to a greater degree than men in the Cordillera.
Conservation Policies and Protected Area Formation
Strict forestry laws have affected rural areas throughout the country. But as is reflected in the maps shown above, many of the changes that have occurred in campesino
life in the Cordillera have occurred elsewhere as well, and are not necessarily tied to the formation of protected areas. Nonetheless, there are similarities amongst the areas in which extremely skewed sex ratios in the country tend to occur. For example, skewed sex ratios over 120 occur either in the mountains or along the Dominican-Haitian border, areas along the so-called "agricultural frontiers" (appendix D, Figure D-3). These are marginalized areas that share similar characteristics, particularly the fact that the
'traditional' campesino adaptations in the Dominican Republic have persisted the longest in these areas. Along the remote northern slopes of the Cordillera, forestry laws and park ' • ' 248
formation represented the closing of the agricultural frontier in that region. Furthermore, earlier chapters showed that there were three aspects of park formation that made
traditional campesino household-oriented productive strategies extremely difficult: 1) land was being pulled out of circulation by the creation of the parks; 2) household
production strategies in buffer zones were criminalized by making it illegal to plant gardens or cut trees without a permit, even on private holdings; and 3) household production strategies were rendered infeasible by taxing fi'ee-ranged animals and denying park-area farmers access to agricultural credit.
These processes affected men and women. Men were affected because they were no longer able to access land for traditional male campesino activities, principally farming and livestock rearing. Many men who could not find land or did not already possess land migrated out of the region. Significantly, those men who stayed were forced
to specialize their agricultural practices. Those with little land increased their reliance on agricultural wage labor, sought alternative subsistence strategies, such as involvement in trade, or devised new strategies based on a combination of opportunities, such as clandestine lumbering, poaching, or gathering wild honey in the mountains. But for the households whose members managed to remain in the hinterlands of the Cordillera the impacts differentially affected women. While men intensified income generating activities outside the household women found themselves with less to do: fewer food processing tasks; fewer responsibilities for mending clothes and making other products like soap used in the household; fewer responsibilities for bearing and raising children and, as will be discussed below, with the introduction of Haitian labor even fewer income earning opportunities. The reduction in the female labor tasks associated with the decline in conucos (garden plots) and livestock rearing is evident in the lamentations of one female informant from Las Papas:
In many ways, things in the past were better. With modernization and all of that
today is better but in times past we lived with less torment and less problems. . .
Before it was more comfortable. In the house we had goats, cows, chickens, [and
now] if it isn't fenced in you can't have any of that. Now we live more poorly, we live more comfortably but we live more poorly. We used to eat cheese that my mother made. We worked in agriculture in my house, we planted manioc, com, potatoes, we had milk, chickens, goats, pigs, because we had the means to have
all of that. Instead of heading to the market, we headed to the conuco (garden). Before we lived off of agriculture but now we live off of money. Before you
could go three months without finding any money. Now it is not like that.
In summary. State intervention through conservation policies and protected area formation began to alter labor needs within the household and extra-household labor opportunities for women, creating conditions in which females began to represent surplus labor within the household. This process would be further exacerbated by other factors.
Urban and Industrial Biased State Development Policies
The importance of female labor in the remote Cordillera was further diminished by the increasing availability of processed foods and the progressive decline in market prices for traditional staples. The primary impetus behind this trend, essentially an artificial recession in the traditional agricultural economy was, as described previously, the creation of the agrarian price-control agency INESPRE and the State engineered reduction in the market price of basic foodstuffs. These new productive strategies promoted in the post-Trujillo period relied on a low wage labor force and the encouragement of international capital investment in the country. The effect of flooding the Dominican market with ready-to-cook food staples drove the prices of many traditional staples down, staples that had depended for processing on female and child
*- household labor. . 250
In the Cordillera, the impact the depressed market had on campesino livelihoods
was intensified by the conservation policies. The formation of protected areas took vast
amounts of land out of the hands of campesinos. ' The restrictions on access to fresh
conuco lands limited the number of yearly harvests that could be dedicated to subsistence
crops. Furthermore, the diminished productivity of remaining lands as well as the
emergence of plagues related to more intensive agricultural production drove up the costs
of production, increasingly requiring that costly investments be made in fertilizers or
pesticides. As a result, farmers began to find themselves ever more dependent on the
colmado (general store) for food purchases and, concomitantly, on cash sources of
income. Land scarcity therefore articulated with the availability of low cost food,
creating situations where men were desperately trying to hang onto traditional
subsistence strategies, working harder, with less, to produce enough income to support
families; meanwhile campesino women were cooking processed foods, effectively
lowering the amount of time they were engaged in productive household labor
activities." Thus the sum effect of reduced agricultural prices, availability of relatively
inexpensive processed foods, and artificially induced land scarcity that led to declining
productivity was to reduce both the possibilities and incentives for the production of
surplus staples and make imported processed foods a major part of the Cordillera diet.'^
With the progressive decline of the economy of the Cordillera, many families
began leaving for wage opportunities in the city. The campesinos who stayed have been
forced to eke out a living through independent coffee or potato production supplemented by wage work, remittances or other income generating strategies. Others have become
full time rural proletarians on agroindustrial farms, or work in transportation or other
small commercial activities. Women, with their role in the home reduced, were left with 251
even fewer options in the rural areas. Some women entered the ranks of seasonal day laborers—^where they found themselves competing with low wage Haitian immigrants for seasonal agricultural jobs.
The Incursion of Haitian Migrant Labor
Another factor that further intensified the declining demand for female labor was the arrival of Haitians. In the wake of campesinos departing for the cities came male
Haitian migrant laborers. Informants report that Haitians first began arriving in Los
Postes and Las Papas during the mid to late 1980s.'^ Today, in communities like Los
Postes, Haitians constitute over 50% of the work force, performing agricultural tasks such as weeding, planting, and harvesting coffee.'" They also tend animals and perform simple construction tasks and other chores such as fetching wood.'^
It was primarily the larger farmers who facilitated the massive influx of Haitian workers. The largest coffee and potato farmers employ and house hundreds of Haitians during harvest and planting seasons.'^ Farmers establish ongoing relationships with
Haitian labor recruiters or overseers with experience in the Dominican Republic. The recruiters assume a kind of foreman role in which they organize, manage and contract labor teams. Medium and large farmers also establish relationships with particular workers who divide their time between Los Postes, Haiti and/or other areas of the
Dominican Republic."
Expressions of negative and racist attitudes regarding Haitian migrant workers are frequently heard but tend to be especially concentrated among Dominican small farmers and laborers. Small farmers and landless laborers who rely on agricultural jobs for household income almost universally resent the presence of Haitians. Many explain that 252
the Haitians have lowered wages and taken agricultural jobs from Dominicans. Typical statements by landless informants include the following:
Here, the Dominicans are having a hard time because when a Dominican wants to do a job, they use Haitians instead. The Haitian does a job for $2000 pesos, and
the Dominican would do it for $4000 pesos. That is why they have been brought here, because the Haitian works more cheaply than the Dominican. - Don Pedro, Los Postes
The coming of Haitians here has been bad because I'm poor and I work in
agriculture and the work that I had the Haitians have taken from me. They come
from Haiti and work at a lower price than I do. A job that I would do for $ 1 00 pesos they do for $50 pesos and that affects all of the Dominicans. -Luis, landless campesino from Los Postes
Poorer campesinos say that Haitians migrant workers are willing to work for such low wages because they are desperate for food and do not have families to take care of Even amongst poor Dominicans, Haitians have the reputation of being amazingly frugal. As an
informant from Los Postes expressed it:
The Haitians have been really affecting the community. The Haitian is now earning the money from the jobs that the Dominican workers did. A landowner would pay a Dominican, for example, 100 pesos, but he only pays a Haitian 75 pesos. The Haitian does not have to take care of a family rather they earn their money, they eat and dress themselves and the little that is left over they take back to Haiti. But the Dominican has to worry about the children, the mother, the
father and the house. So it is affecting us too much. One of the crises that is affecting the country are the thousands and thousands of Haitians that come here.
Dominican small farmers and laborers claim that Haitians do not work as well as
Dominicans. They say that Haitians pick the coffee cherries when they are green and do not perform other jobs as they are told: "They are brutos, stupid. They say 'yes' but then they work according to their own fashion. Dominicans do as they are told."" In contrast, the larger farmers have a more magnanimous attitude toward Haitian immigrants. They say that not only do Haitians work harder, they work for lower wages and on more favorable terms than Dominicans. They claim that Haitians are more reliable and bargain 253
less vehemently over prices for the carrying out of piecework tasks (por ajuste) such as weeding. The same farmers explain that whereas Dominicans insist on being paid on a regular basis and tend to be less reliable due to family obligations, the Haitians, whose families are distant and do not make immediate demands on them, work long hours and under more difficult conditions. Haitians are often willing to accept payment after all work has been completed and the harvest sold, which relieves farmers of the need to secure capital to pay them before the harvest takes place.
Many farmers state that Haitians have played a pivotal role in allowing agriculture in the Cordillera to continue. Medium and larger-scale farmers in Los Postes, for example, claim that due to out-migration there are no longer sufficient Dominican workers to carry out the coffee harvest. In the words of Alfonso, a capataz (overseer) who watches over the coffee groves and lands of a family that left the commimity for the
United States: "if it were not for the Haitians everyone would have had to abandon their coffee groves. No less than 70% of the weeding of the coffee groves and the harvesting
of coffee is carried out by Haitians. If there weren't Haitians, the coffee harvest would be lost."
Cheaper Haitian labor has filled the void required by larger landowners in their endeavor to continue to produce." But at the same time, Haitians have virtually taken over as laborers during the coffee harvest, the primary traditional extra-household income opportunity available to women and children in Los Postes.^" By doing this, not only have Haitian migrant laborers filled the void of departing women in these jobs, but they have also reduced the need for women in one of the few outlets for female labor in the rural areas. 254
The Modernization of Daily Life and Fertility Reduction
Another factor that has filled the void and acted as positive feedback, further lowering the demand on female household labor, is the introduction of labor saving devices such as gas stoves, mills, piped water, and washing machines. The availability of pre-fabricated clothes has reduced time for ironing and darning as well as the making of clothes. The recent introduction of these devices and products effectively lowers the amount of time and number of women necessary to accomplish traditional household labor tasks.
Table 14-7. Percentage of households owning different devices Piped Gas Sewing Solar Motor- Hamlet water stove Washer machine Generator panel cycle Car TV Los 72.9 62.4 11.9 8.3 16.5 12.9 20.0 7.1 21.2 Postes Las 16.9 64.0 4.8 0.0 3.2 16.9 25.0 2.4 29.6 Papas Source: 2001 technology surveys
Table 14-8. Average number of years households have owned device Piped Gas Sewing Solar Motor- water stove Washer machine Generator panel cycle Car TV Los 7.7 3.4 1.6 13 9.7 3.2 5.5 3.5 4.7 Postes Las 7.7 4.3 1.5 0 2.0 3.4 4.8 9.0 3.4 Papas Source: 2001 technology surveys
Table 14-9. Approximate date of first introduction of technology Piped Gas Sewing Solar Motor- water stove Washer machine Generator panel cycle Car TV Los 1971 1987 1997 1976 1974 1982 1986 1985 1981 Postes Las 1969 1979 1998 N/a 1997 1994 1980 1979 1980 Papas Source: 2001 technology surveys
My data shows that gas stoves and piped water were the earliest labor saving devices introduced into the regions and they are currently the most widespread. Whereas in the past women cooked almost exclusively with rudimentary woodstoves and charcoal 255
charcoal and gas stoves. In Los grills, today most women in the park areas have wood,
Papas, they were Postes, gas stoves were introduced through private initiatives. In Las
(persons introduced privately but a government-sponsored program for displaced persons
the mid- displaced as a result of the protected area) also distributed stoves in Las Papas in
1990s. In Los Postes, the &st gas stove was introduced approximately 14 years ago and
currently over 62 % of households have access to gas cooking fiiel. Similarly, in Las
it until the Papas, the first gas stove was introduced in the area 1979 although was not
early 1990s that these began to proliferate due primarily to strict park and Forestry laws
related to charcoal making and the collection of fuel wood. Currently, 64% of women
have gas stoves in Las Papas (Tables 14-7 thru 14-9).
Despite the added cash burden (approximately US$6 dollars for a subsidized 50-
pound tank of gas in 2001 which lasts an average household approximately 6 weeks)
local informants express a preference for gas stoves.^' They emphasize that the
introduction of gas stoves saves at least '/a to 1-hour cooking time for each meal, in
addition to the labor saved by children in the collection of firewood.^^
The second major time and labor saver is piped water. In Los Postes, almost V^ of
households have piped water, acquired primarily within the last 10 years. Although
water is not scarce in Los Postes, women claim that piped water saves them and their
daughters three to four trips to the closest water source per day. It also saves
considerable time in washing clothes, which typically required spending up to a full-day
per week at the river. In Las Papas, few households have piped water, but three years ago
a water pump was installed in the center of one of the major hamlets of the seccion. In
summary, these two technological mnovations, but especially the introduction of piped 256
water, have significantly reduced the time and labor that women previously had to invest
in conducting mundane household tasks.
Fertility
Labor saving devices and the general shift in household livelihood strategies have
also contributed to lower fertility rates. Women are not only practicing birth control due
to the proliferation of contraceptive technologies but rather, more importantly, as a
response to the reduced need for children (Schwartz 2000). The reduced need for children
in Los Postes and Las Papas is linked to the decline in subsistence production and the
increase in availability of labor saving devices. As children have become less needed in
terms of labor they have also become more costly to rear in cash terms. In the words of a
44 year-old Las Papas woman with eight children:
Question: Are people having as many children as families in the past? Answer: We aren't into that anymore. The economy is very hard. Question: How did people manage with such large families? Answer: Giving goat's milk, cow's milk, to the youngest ones. In the morning they would make them rice with cream of beans, for dinner they would prepare another thing with a little of milk and they (the children) would raise themselves. [Now] you have to buy a can [of powdered milk] that costs $40 pesos or so in the
colmados, and if it is a small sack it is $25 pesos. Question: So now people don't want to have so many children because it costs them a lot of money?
Answer: The last girl that I had tasted like cash. [The costs of raising her] are bleeding me to death (i.e., draining her financially)
The use of tubal ligations is the primary method employed by campesina women
to control fertility. In Las Papas, female informants recall that the first woman to
prepararse (literally 'prepare herself) did so approximately 20 years ago. Today there
appears to be an overall drop in the fertihty rate beginning with women in the 30 to 40
age range (Figure 14-7). , 257
10
S c(D I c o 6
CO 4
•s
-Jf ^cf ''j: 'a \^ ^a^ •^c^ \
Figure 14.7. Female fertility by 5 year age groups from Bermudez survey, n=154
A reduction in fertility represents a reduced labor burden for women as responsibilities for bearing and rearing children were reduced. At the same time, lowered
fertility reduces the need for female children in the household to attend to the younger brothers and sisters and participate in other household tasks made more cumbersome by larger family sizes.
.; %
Conclusion ' -
The reorganization of production in response to State policies, including the formation of parks and the strict application of FORESTA policies, deprived campesinos of recourse to traditional livelihood strategies. This shift away from dependence on traditional household livelihood strategies also reduced the inportance of household labor. The result was massive outmigration. The majority of campesinos living in the
Cordillera came to view farming as an impractical option for themselves, and above all, for their children's future. Campesinos who have not left the Cordillera desire to provide an education for their children and in light of the fact that schools in the remote 258
they highlands, at best, provide the opportunity to complete 8th grade, at &st opportunity attempt to send their children into the urban areas to study.
But the process of outmigration was imbued with an imusual demographic feature by Caribbean standards. The forces that drove outmigration had a differential impact on
leaving at great pace than women and girls than it had one men and boys. Females began
males. While men responded by turning to extra-household income generating
occupations and boys remained valuable for the performance of non-remunerated extra-
household tasks that still need to be accomplished—such as gathering wood and fruits,
and caring for livestock- women and girls became less critical in the processes that
sustained households. This was due not to any one factor in isolation but to an
accumulation of factors that reduced both the need for female labor in the household as
well as further reduced opportunities for females to engage in extra-household labor
activities in the rural areas. New trade policies brought about by international pressure in
combination with "food relief opened the floodgates to inexpensive imported foods,
foods that were already processed. Labor saving technologies such as piped water and
gas stoves were introduced into the household. The process became self-reinforcing.
Female labor was increasingly supplemented with labor saving devices and the decline in
demands for household labor meant monetary costs for additional family members
became an increasing concern, giving way to increased use of contraceptives and a
reduction in fertility. Fertility reduction lowered the childcare burden and lessened
female and child time commitments even further. Simultaneous to the falling need for
female labor within the household, the incursion of inexpensive Haitian labor reduced the
need for female and child participation in the harvesting of coffee and other crops, the
major traditional female and child economic opportunity in many areas of the highlands 259
of the Cordillera. Without a corresponding shift in the sexual division of labor, women and particularly their female children represented an increasing financial burden to rural campesino households and had few opportunities other than marriage or migration into
the cities.
The following chapter will show how these gender-biased processes—^processes that derived from the urban imposed changes in access to land, labor, capital, and markets seen in the previous chapters—reverberated throughout the social structure to determine specific transformations in peasant social institutions such as marriage and the sexual division of labor.
Notes
The average population growth that occurred between 1970, when the Dominican census recorded a population of 4,009,458 and 1981 (pop. 5,545,741) was 2.9% and between 1981 and 1993 (pop. 7,293,390) was 2.3%.
^ Due to the previously described process of immigration into the park area that took place in the late
1980s, the population of the seccion in which Las Papas is located increased significantly between the 1981 and 1993 censuses. Nevertheless, this phenomenon is an anomaly in the Cordillera.
^ There has been a considerable amount of literature that discusses the phenomenon of international migration from the Cordillera Central (e.g., Pessar and Grasmuck 1991; Georges 1990). However, the destination of the vast majority of individuals who migrate out of the remote hamlets bordering the parks is intemal to the Dominican Republic, as is demonstrated in Table D-1, appendix D.
* Sex ratios skewed in the favor of males, like those currently foimd in rural area of the Dominican Republic, are a historic anomaly in the Caribbean, especially in the English and French Caribbean. For over a century, male wage migration to urban and industrial agricultural zones resulted in sex ratios ranging far below the expected 99 males to 100 females (Table D-2, appendix D).
' For a more specific breakdown of populations and sex ratios in hamlets surveyed in the study region, see Table D-3, appendix D.
* Ten of the sixteen hamlets surveyed exhibited sex ratios higher than 120 males to every 100 females; only two hamlets exhibited sex ratios that fit global statistical norms. However, in the context of the other communities studied, these communities appear to be statistical anomalies, likely an incidental result of the low numbers of individuals in the respective commuirities-representing a combined population of only 121 of the 2,734 individuals sampled (Table D-4, appendix D).
' Studies indicate that females constitute 95.1% of all workers in domestic service in the Dominican Republic (PNUD 2000:159). 260
* This average is for urban families outside of the capital of Santo Domingo with 4.3 members and two wage earners. According to the Central Bank this average should not be compared to the minimum wage, because the families in the lowest quintile (i.e. those with the lowest levels of consumption) can survive on $2528.22 (US $151.75) a month. Obviously this rationale provides a State justification for maintaining policies that support extremely low wages and dooms the poorest Dominican famihes to a life of perpetual poverty and misery.
* The average urban pay for women in the Dominican Republic is reportedly 72% of that of salaries for males (PNUD 2000).
This figiu-e was extrapolated from a newspaper article that cites data from "social work groups" that estimated there are currently 100,000 female Dominican prostitutes working within the borders of the Dominican Republic and another 40,000 working outside of the country (Miami Herald 1997). Similarly, a study carried out by UNICEF in the early 1990s estimated that in the Dominican Republic 25,455 minors between the ages of 12 and 18 (both males and females) practiced prostitution, which at the time equaled approximately 5% of the total population within those age categories (PNUD 2000:141). It should be noted also that prostitution is not exclusively a female activity. Male prostitutes, known popularly as "sanky pankys," proliferate especially in tourist areas. No estimates however were found regarding the number of males practicing prostitution in the country.
Lopez and Polanco calculated that coffee farmers in the Cordillera Septentrional produce approximately 20% of their food and dedicate approximately 85% of their cash income to cover the costs of food
(1997:23-25). In this study, I relied on repeated qualitative interviews as well as participatory observation to establish that a shift has occurred in which agricultural production has been increasingly oriented away from subsistence production towards cash cropping and that the vast majority of food consumed in campesino households is purchased. Estimates provided by informants in Los Postes regarding the amount of food the household consumes produced on the family farm were similar, if not somewhat less, than those reported in the above-mentioned study.
The Haitian informant in Los Postes who reported the longest period of regular travel to the Dominican Republic stated that he began working in the Cordillera in 1987.
''' Haitian laborers have long been a presence in the Dominican sugar plantations but it was only much more recently that Haitian migrant laborers became important in other agricultural sectors of the
Dominican Republic, including those that predominate in the study region. There are clear reasons for this. In light of monopolistic practices and trends in the international market (especially in the coffee sector) as well as previously discussed government policies, the low market prices for agricultural produce and high production costs have increasingly driven down agricultural wages (Grasmuck 1982:373). Wages have reached a point to which they can no longer maintain the social reproduction of rural Dominican semi- proletarianized and proletarian families-and as discussed above, Dominicans have migrated into the cities. Furthermore, restricted access to capital and other incentives have required medium and larger producers to continue to rely on cheap labor to obtain a profit as opposed to mvestments in technological intensification.
" At the time of fieldwork in Los Postes, the population of Haitian migrant workers was entirely male and consisted of 30 workers, equivalent to approximately 7.5% of the population of the hamlet But this was during the off-season. During harvest periods migrant Haitian workers may constitute up to 25% of the total population of the case study secciones (Haitian workers are not included in the national census or the surveys carried out in this study). In Los Postes, all workers were male and most were young, falling within the age range of 16 to 30 although a few old timers were in their mid-thirties and the oldest was in his mid-forties. About one fourth of the Haitians in Los Postes were childless, although the majority had a family of two or three children and a wife waiting back in Haiti. In contrast, in Las Papas some female Haitians worked alongside Haitian males and Dominican males and females in the potato fields.
Outside of coffee picking, in which workers are paid by volume (por fanega ), the por ajuste (per task) agreement is the most common arrangement that Dominican farmers enter into with Haitian workers. 261
Farmers negotiate the price to be paid based on the nature of the task. If the task requires a considerable time to complete, the farmers provide the Haitians with food, the costs of which are withdrawn from the final payment, and simple sleeping quarters, typically no more than a shack located on the farm plot or within the yard of the farmers house. Some Haitian migrants also report diat they are given free access to their pafron's gardens to supplement their food rations. Haitians are also hired to work as echa dias (day laborers), although this occurs with much less frequency than the por ajuste arrangement. The daily pay in 2001 ranged between $50 and $100 pesos (US $3.00-$6.00) plus the provision of two meals a day (breakfast and lunch) by the employer.
" Lozano and Baez (1992:26) argue that since the 1960s there has been a Haitian agricultural proletariat that has increasingly become permanent residents of the Dominican Republic, moving to work from one crop or region to another on a seasonal basis. Their data showed that by the late 1980s the majority of Haitians (64.2%) working in coffee resided permanently in the Dominican Republic. In contrast to these
findings, all of the thirty workers censused in Los Postes described an intention to return to Haiti on a
cyclical basis. The majority of Haitian migrant workers in Los Postes could barely speak Spanish. Furthermore, they reported that their families were located in Haiti.
The fact that landless and small farmers perceive Haitian laborers as a threat to their access to decent paying jobs frequently manifests itself in expressions of suspicion, racist sentiments and at times direct abuse of unprotected illegal Haitian migrants. Haitians are often accused of being prone to stealing and to committing other crimes such as rape. Examples of such attitudes in the words of Dominican informants are the following:
One can't have faith in Haitians because a Haitian is like a dog, the Haitian walks at night. A Haitian does something bad to you during the day and at night, who is going to see them? You don't see them because they are all so black.
Many Dominican customs are being lost. People are changing over to Haitian culture. In that way, the impact of Haitian labor has not been favorable. If a Dominican woman gets together with a Haitian,
now that woman has to adjust herself to the patterns that he imposes. Similarly if it is a Dominican male who marries a Haitian woman, that husband has to adjust himself to her customs.
I don't like Haitians much. A while ago, some Haitian workers were in a colmado and some boys went to buy some things there and one of the Haitians told him: give me money or if not I'll kill you.
He had $500 pesos with him and they weren't his. So I went and spoke to their enqjloyer, and told him that we weren't going to accept Haitians. And the boys who were involved were so scared that they didn't want to go to school or to the colmado.
Nevertheless, negative feelings and racist sentiments towards Haitians are not universal, even amongst the poorest rural Dominicans. Although they resent the presence of the Haitians because they take jobs, many also understand that the Haitians are, like them, simply trying to survive. In the words of an informant in Los Postes:
They aren't to blame, the Haitians. I'm sincere (in saying that), because they are just looking for an
opportimity and they do it out of necessity. Those that are to blame are the owners of the work, because they don't offer work to Dominicans.
" Furthermore, in driving rural labor costs down, the presence of Haitian labor is an indirect means whereby the economic elites have been able to exploit Dominican labor in the urban sector. The availability of desperate and vulnerable low-wage Haitian labor force ensures that wages are maintained at the lowest
levels for all workers, both Dominican and Haitian (Murphy 1 986).
According to the Haitians, their Dominican patrons generally freat them decently. Overall, the Haitians in Los Postes and Las Papas appear to live relatively at ease, especially in comparison to the abusive conditions described in the literature regarding Haitians in the sugar plantations (Moya Pons et al. 1 986; 262
Lemoine 1985). In both communities, those who learn to speak Spanish develop friendships with Dominicans. Although marriage between Haitians and Dominicans would be frowned upon in Los Postes (and informants cannot recall any such marriage taking place), Haitians can, on occasion, be observed flirting with young Dominican women. They report obtaining credit from colmados and they move about freely. Illegal Haitians are clearly afraid of the Dominican authorities and have few rights in the Dominican Republic, but they consistently report that if a Dominican employer refuses to pay them, they contact the local authorities (alcalde or military) who will often support them. The most significant grievance expressed by Haitian informants is problems with the poorest rural people, in particular men who heckle them and sometimes pick fights. They say that Dominicans pa bay nou vale--do not respect them. Haitians are subject to frequent racial slurs and verbal abuse, mostly carried out in a joking yet biting fashion. (I am grateful to Timothy Schwartz, PhD who accompanied me to Los Postes and Las Papas to interview the workers in their native Haitian Creole and thus provided much of the information regarding Haitian migrants workers in Los Postes and Las Papas).
^' Government subsidies on propane gas were lifted in 2002, and the price of a 100-poimd tank rose to
$2000 pesos (@US$87.00). With this increase in price, it is extremely likely not only that the campesinos will increasingly turn back to almost exclusive use of fuewood but also that there will be an increased demand for charcoal in the cities as residents in poor neighborhoods are forced to return to the use of anafes, portable charcoal grills.
Although gas stoves have reduced the time involved in cooking, it is unlikely that the introduction of gas stoves by the govenmient, which was done ostensibly to mitigate deforestation by providing campesinos an alternative to using fuewood, has resulted in significant conservation outputs within and surrounding park areas. Firewood storage and use in the rural areas of the Cordillera Central is much different than what is commonly seen in the northern United States, for example, in which households stack logs by the cord in sufficient quantities to satisfy firewood needs during a long and cold winter. In the warm climate of the Caribbean, even in the mountains, which experience cooler evenings, Dominican campesino households do not have fireplaces and rarely store more wood than that which will be needed to cook for a week. Furthermore, the firewood used almost always consists of dried Xvngs, and sticks that are either gathered from the ground or chopped off of already dead trees. Especially in coffee producing areas such as Los
Postes, much if not the majority of the fuel wood that is used is gathered in the coffee groves. The clandestine making of charcoal also occurs in the northern Cordillera but only at a very small scale and for local consumption—women only use charcoal to cook during extended rainy periods when it is difficult to find dry firewood. Some campesinos admitted to chopping down one or two trees a year in the park, leaving them to dry to have available as a reserve source of fuel in times of scarcity (especially the rainy season). But the cutting of live trees for use as firewood currently is —and appears to have long been —the exception rather than the norm in the Cordillera Centtal. CHAPTER 15 BOYS WEED, GIRLS STUDY: MIGRATION AND CHANGING SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
Introduction
With the decline of the household as the principal mode of production, additional non-contributing family members came to represent financial drains on household resources, resources now obtained largely through extra-household, male-centric income earning activities. Evidence suggests that rural families in the park areas are encouraging the departure of female children at young ages. At the same time, as noted in chapter 13, many small farmers continue to rely primarily on household labor to carry out farming
activities. For that reason, farmers continue to make efforts to retain at least some male
children in the household. The primary mechanisms that need to be taken into account
regarding the 'release' of females fi-om the household are marriage, education, and
channeling them into urban job opportunities.
Marriage Patterns
The primary mechanism through which women leave the park commimities at
greater rates than males is marriage, or more specifically in the case of the park regions,
consensual union. Rural Dominicans tend to be patrilocal, meaning that upon entering
union yovmg women leave their home communities and move to the community of their
new husband. In the past, the loss of local women was largely compensated for by young
women fi'om outside marrying into the communities. But data suggests that women are
263 264
marrying out at increasingly younger ages. Importantly, they are also using marriage as a means of migrating into larger towns and cities. As a 16 year-old young woman from
Los Postes stated: "The girls here, a lot of them marry boys from outside. My two sisters went to the town of La Vega, which is a long way away from here. Some marry to go to
[the municipal capital]." During fieldwork, another girl eloped with a man from La Vega whom she had just met during the town's Fiestas Patronales (Patron Saint Feast). In the words of Lola, a 31-year-old married female when discussing the case: "Girls here generally prefer to marry men from outside, to go, to have an adventure."'
Men in the rural areas, on the other hand, are tending to stay at home longer and marry older, or in fewer cases remain single.^ Thus, early marriage is fimctioning as one mechanism whereby girls are leaving, being drawn off, or perhaps it could be said, being expelled from the hamlets in the study region.
The vast majority of marriages begin as consensual unions but there are customs and social rules related to the consolidation of a consensual union that imbues the relationship with formality and social acceptance.^ The 'marriage' is typically planned in
secret and involves an elopement. The 'groom' escapes vnth his 'bride' to a motel in a nearby town, to a relative's house, or to his parent's home. When their daughter fails to
appear at a reasonable hour, the parents recognize that she has been 'taken'. In Los
Postes tradition dictates that the man appear on the following day to ask his bride's parents for forgiveness for taking their daughter. In Las Papas, where the majority of
residents are migrants from the south, the traditional practice is called the ''besa mano",
the kissing of the hand. The new 'bride' generally remains hidden in the house of the
male's family, avergonzada (embarrassed), until the ninth day. During this time the male
visits her parents and asks for their blessing. On the ninth day the bride emerges and a 265
dinner or party is held to celebrate the union and bring the families together. The families and other members of the community thus provide a social legitimization to the vmion similar to the marriage ceremony in western circles. The couple refers to one another as husband and wife {'"esposa" or ''mujer" and '"esposd" or "maridd") and is expected to form an independent household and produce children.
Parents repeatedly express that once their daughters are 'taken,' they become the
full responsibility of their husbands. They tell their new 'son-in-law' that the daughter has now become his responsibility—^he is to provide for her fully and not mistreat her.
The campesinos emphasize that once their daughters are taken they undergo a transformation. They become mujeres (women) and are expected to return to the parental household only in the event of a crisis in the relationship such as abandonment or severe mistreatment by the husband."*
12 14 16 18 20 22 24 28 28 30 34 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 32
AGE OF FIRST MARRIAGE
Figure 15-1. Female age of &st marriage from Bermudez survey, n=340
Of particular significance is the fact that the Dominican Republic has a Code for
the Protection of Girls, Boys and Adolescents (Law No. 14-94) that provides parents with
broad authority over their children who are legally minors (under the age of 18). The law 266
prohibits taking a minor from the parental home, which is regarded as the legal equivalent of kidnapping.^ Local authorities interviewed emphasized emphatically that if
parents turn in the violator, the law is strictly applied. The violator (generally a man) will be fined and, according to the law, may be incarcerated for a period of one to five years.^
But the fact is that parents are not turning in men for eloping with their young daughters.
On the contrary, it appears that parents are increasingly using 'marriage' as a mechanism to escape the burden of caring for daughters who no longer have a significant economic value to the household. The sheriffs of Los Postes and Las Papas and their deputies in
the hamlets emphasized that it is unusual for the girl's parents to bring suit against men who have eloped with young girls. And yet in both Los Postes and Las Papas a striking
number of young women were identified who entered into first union between 1 1 and 14
years of age. Looking at Figure 15-1, it can be seen that girls begin entering union in relatively significant numbers by the age of 14. By 16 years of age, 38% of women in the
1998-99 surveys reported having been in at least one union.
14 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 32 34 36 40
15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33 35 37
AGE OF FIRST MARRIAGE
Figure 15-2. Male first age of marriage from Bermiidez survey (n=321) 267
Marriage at these young ages is a new phenomenon in the rural Cordillera. The
Bermudez survey data reflects that the average age of marriage for females between the
ages of 10-39 is 17.5, almost two years younger than the average 19.1 years of age for women who are now over the age of 39 (stat sig: p<.000). One 45 year-old male informant from Los Postes lamented:
They don't have experience to attend to a household. In our culture, in the times
that I was raised it was very difficult for a girl of 16 to become involved with beginning her own family. Not all of them, but [now] they are marrying nuevecitas, brand new. This began some time ago, that they are marrying so young. Before a normal age for them to marry was 22 or 23.
Men enter union later and over a much broader range of ages (Figure 15-2). In contrast to the 38% of women who are or have been in union by the age of 16, only 7% of males have entered a union by that age. The average age of first union for males is over four years older than their female cohorts (22.64). Even more significantly, however, many males do not enter union until their mid to late 20s. Thirty-one percent of males marry for the first time at the age of 25 or over. In comparison, 93% of females are married by the age of 25. Congruently, males stay in the parental home for a longer period of time. Of the single individuals in the Bermudez survey in 1999 over the age of
16 (n=215), 80% are males and only 20% are females. This percentage differential increases as single individuals enter their 20s. Of single individuals over the age of 20
(n=105), 85.7% are male; only 13.3% are female. Over the age of 24 (n-53), 88.7% of
the single individuals in the sample are male and 1 1.3% are female.
An elderly male informant from Los Postes explained, "the male child is worth more." While parents are allowing daughters to leave earlier, they continue to hold onto their sons. Don Efrain, a 71 -year-old campesino from one of the founding famihes of
Los Postes, has five children, three males and two females. Both daughters left the 268
community and married in Santiago. But his sons have stayed in the community. Efrain
stated that he had been ill lately, and at his age he needed the boys to stay at home. "I taught them to work, to work in the coffee fields. They find jobs as day laborers. I can send them to do errands by themselves and other things, which I cannot do with girls.
Females? Cleaning, cooking, that is basically what they do."
Although during the interview Dona Carolina, his wife, suggested to him that it would be nice to have a female in the house to help her with the chores, Efrain said that his sons are in no position to marry and bring a girl home. Efrain stated emphatically:
"my sons can't fall in love yet because there aren't any resources available for that."
Thus, while parents are allowing daughters to leave earlier by providing them with the fi-eedom to enter into unions at increasingly young ages, they are continuing to hold onto their sons because of their continuing importance to the viability of the rural domestic economy. The demographic implication of this trend is an unfilled gap in the physical presence of women in the 10 to 25 year age-range, a principal cause of the unbalanced sex ratios identified in the region.^
Education
As discussed in chapter 13, one of the primary indicators of the 'dying way of
life' in the Cordillera consists of the great desire expressed by campesino parents that
their children, both males and females, receive an education. This is despite the fact that the parents themselves have experienced an average of less than three years of schooling and many have never attended school.^ However, schools in the Cordillera hinterlands generally do not provide beyond a 4'*^ grade education (although a couple of the larger
seccion seats have schools that reach 8* grade). High school is only available in the larger towns and cities. For that reason, campesinos express the desire to send their 269
children out of the rural areas to continue their studies, as reflected in the following statements:^
I For me it would be better for my children to go, so they can do their studies. want them to achieve the best that they can, especiaUy in their studies. If they can, they can become professionals, and if later they decide that they still aspire to be farmers they can do that too. But if they can do something that isn't agriculture well, that would be better, because agriculture isn't easy. I work in
agriculture because I don't know anything else. If I knew something else I wouldn't work in agriculture. It is lots of work. And production? Nothing. - Fernando, 40-year-old farmer in Las Papas
If I had the opportunity, I would like to send them out. Out of here, I could give them what my father didn't give me, an education-which is what I needed the most. - Heriberto, 42-year-old agricultural worker in Los Postes
What I have been thinking about up until now is, God willing, to raise (my kids) away from here. You can't raise an ignorant family-you have to take them a lo 6* claro, to clear areas (cities) so that they wake up. The school here reaches grade, and now they are going to add 7* grade. After that I hope to buy a small
place in town, if 1 can get some money, and continue working here but leave my wife £ind kids in town. -Placencio, 35-year-old farmer in Las Papas
I want them to leave. I say it as a result of my experience, my father did not want 4"' me to study, and so 1 was only able to complete grade. To continue studying I would have had to go down to another village, but my parents wouldn't let me go
down. Maybe I would be better off now. Imagine, if I go to Santiago to work I can find work in a house (as a domestic servant), but I'm not going to find a
comfortable job because I don't know how to read and write. - Carmen, 37-year-old mother in Las Papas
Campesinos express an aspiration to provide both male and female children the
opportunity to receive an education. But they also express a desire to keep at least some
male children closer to home to work on the family lands. On the other hand, comments
from informants suggest that acquiring an education has become incorp)orated into the
gender roles of females: "the boys weed, the girls study, the work of women doesn't get
as complicated as that of boys, [who have to work] to obtain money to survive," stated
one informant. When a female informant from Las Papas was asked: "Do you want your 270
daughters to stay here in the community," her response was; "oh, no, the schools are too far away." And in the words of the director of the school in Los Postes: "Parents keep the boys and send the girls to study. The girls have more freedom to study." Besides marriage, therefore, another cause of skewed sex ratios is the fact that parents are sending their daughters to the cities in greater numbers than their sons to continue their studies.
School enrollment data support the comments of the informants. In both Los
Postes and in Las Papas, there were more males enrolled in grade school than females, a fact echoing the male-skewed sex ratios (Table 15-1). But at the high school level there
is a dramatic reversal. The male/female ratio of enrolhnents changes from 110 for grades
4-8 to 80 for grades 9-12 (Table 15-2). The same trend exists in the municipality of
Santiago, one of the primary destinations of migrants of the region, with a ratio of 104 for
grades 1-8 and 80 for grades 9-12 (Secretaria de Educacion, Statistics Department).
Similarly, in Los Postes a rural video high school program was recently initiated with an
enrollment of 8 females and 3 males (despite the fact that the sex ratio in Los Postes for
individuals between the ages of 15 and 24 is 153)."
Table 15-1. Enrollment in Schools of Los Postes and Las Papas 2000-2001 Los Postes Las Papas*
Initial Final Initial Final Initial Final Initial Final Grade male male fern fem male male Fem fem gth 7 5 1 1 6 6 7 6 6* 13 12 6 7 3 3 5 5 5th 12 10 5 5 1 0 9 9 4th 8 8 7 7 5 5 9 9 11 9 7 7 13 13 3 2 2nd 5 5 9 9 10 10 5 4 JS, 8 8 4 4 12 10 8 5 Totals 58 68 46 46 44 41 39 34 Sex ratio 147 121 *The school in Las Papas only reaches 6"^ grade. Source: Interview with the school directors in Los Postes and Las Papas in 2001 271
municipality (1999-2000) Table 15-2. Student enrollment by ^ Grades
9- 1 Inicial (grades 1 -4) Basico (grades 5-8) Media (grades 2) Municipality Masc Fern Masc Fem Masc Fem 1030 Constanza 400 413 4286 4000 751 1226 Jarabacoa 672 634 6065 5578 926 220 Janico 113 119 2270 2020 185 748 797 San Jose de las Matas 434 377 5333 4733 3273 Totals 1619 1543 17954 16331 2610 Sex Ratio 105 HO 80 Source: Secretaria de Estado de Educacion, Dpto. de Estadistica, Santo Domingo
region The family of Ramoncito Pujols illustrates how campesinos in the study
and urban tend to push their daughters through school, sending the girls away to towns
middle-aged centers while at the same time trying to hold on to the boys. Ramoncito is a
four boys. father from the seccion of Los Postes, who has nine children, five girls and
capital, Ramoncito 's eldest daughter left to study in Los Postes, the municipal
weekends. Then she met when she was 1 5 years old. Initially, she would return home on
studies a man in town and married when she was 16. After marrying she abandoned her
and never completed her first year of high school. The next oldest daughter also was sent
to study in the municipal capital. Ramoncito states that she frequently returns home on
weekends, as did her sister. This daughter has been more persistent in her studies,
avoided the temptation to many, and has reached her final year of high school before
reaching her 17*^ birthday. Ramoncito expects that she will graduate from high school
this year and find a job in Santiago. Ramoncito's three youngest daughters are of
elementary school age and continue to live in Los Postes and attend the local school.
But Ramoncito's attitude toward his boys is much different. Ramoncito keeps the
boys close to home. All four male children continue to live in the family home in Los
Postes. The oldest, a 22-year-old, completed his first year in high school by making the
2V2 hour round trip to the municipal capital to study in a Saturday program. The next 272
oldest, a 20-year-old, first enrolled as a freshman in high school courses in 2001, when high school became available locally through a video study program. The third boy, an 18 year-old, recently began his second year of high school. He makes the 1 Vi hour daily round trip from Los Postes to attend a regional high school in the nearest town. The youngest son has just completed the 8"" grade and is awaiting word on whether he has passed the National Exams to move on to high school. He has never left the community
and, if he passes the exams, will probably enroll in the video studies program.
Ramoncito says that he has to send his daughters out of the community to study.
It is more difficult for women to travel daily than men: "you have to be careful with the
girls, the boys can catch a ride with anyone." But clearly there is more to it than this.
Their brothers could escort the girls to school, or they could simply have remained at
home as many boys end up doing. After all, if the girls were more usefiil in the
household their education would perhaps be delayed or drawn out, similar to that of the
sons. In fact, Ramoncito clearly emphasized that he needs his sons close to home:
I sent [both] of my daughters out to study. With my sons I have plenty of desire to send them out to study but I need them. For example, they study outside and do their work here. One of my sons just did his first year of high school in (a nearby town), he works with me in my bus and comes home at 12:00 noon.
Urban Employment
Placing a conceptual emphasis on local push factors does not mean that young
women are merely passive agents in the migration equation. Women are aware that there
are labor opportunities available in the urban areas and they view migration into cities as
an opportunity for social mobility and independence. In the words of a 25-year-old
unmarried Los Postes male expressing frustration at not being able to find a wife: "If one
says to a woman 'lets fall in love, we are going to Santiago' they will go straight away. 3
273
want But if you ask a woman to come here, there is no way she will come. The women to go to Santiago, they are all into that."
Females have work opportunities in the cities, however menial they are, although the availability of labor opportunities in the urban areas for adult women does not explain
the skewed sex ratios in the Cordillera. Rather, it is the outmigration of greater numbers
of young females than young males in which the skew occurs. Besides the fact that
campesinos attempt to retain males to work on the family farm, younger females have
advantages that make it easier for them to establish themselves in urban areas to study.
For example, one of the primary advantages that younger females have over males is, in
contrast to rural areas in which there is a reduced demand for female labor in the
household, a greater demand exists for female labor than for male labor in urban
households. Parents make use of urban-based kinship networks to facilitate the migration
of their children to study, but urban families often prove more willing to receive females
who will be expected to help out with the domestic chores in the house. Furthermore, in
the absence of kin, campesinos also attempt to procure jobs for their yoimg daughters as
domestics with urban families. For example, some 12.5% of urban households have
'adopted' children living in them, despite the fact that in the majority of cases the parents
are alive (CESDEM 1999). In a phenomenon that resembles the Haitian restavek, a
recent study estimated that in the Dominican Republic there are over 48,000 child
domestic workers, with a significant majority being females (Hoy 2002).'^
Although often the girls combine their studies with work, primarily as domestics,
what is notable is that only in rare instances did informants mention sending their
1 daughters to the city exclusively in order to work to send back money to the family.
For example. Dona Esperanza reported that two of her four daughters migrated to 274
Santiago to work and study. Her oldest male also migrated, but in his case it was solo a
trabajar (only to work). As one informant put it: "the girls, when it isn't leaving to study
its to work, but the majority do both things. The boys don't leave so much, the boys stay in the home."
Don Efrain was one of the few who decided to send both daughters to Santiago primarily to work, "with the idea that they could better contribute to the household in that way, working and sending back ayuda (assistance)." But families understand that depending on daughters to work to send back support is temporary at best. For example, both of Don Efrain's daughters married in Santiago. Although one daughter, Yadira continues to work in the duty free zone, they no longer send back much help, hi the words of Efrain: "their responsibilities are now to their husbands."
Conclusion
Siege-like State policies have provoked changes in traditional peasant adaptive strategies and campesinos have responded through widespread migration out of the hinterlands of the Cordillera. For the families that remain, one of the primary
expressions of the fact that they no longer perceive that life in the Cordillera provides a
viable ftiture is the great desire that they express to provide their children with the opportunity to receive an education. The fact that campesino parents, themselves with little formal education, express this desire indicates that they no longer perceive that their children will be able to make a living in the manner that they and their parents and
grandparents have. Rather, the children must obtain the necessary skills in order to, in the words of the campesinos, alquilarse, rent themselves, to sell their labor and procure a
decent job in the cities. 275
But outmigration of children has favored females over males, as has become manifest in extremely skewed sex ratios in the Cordillera. I have argued that any explanation for the greater migration of women than men out of the highlands of the
Cordillera has to look not only at the differential opportunities available to men and women outside of the region but also at gender-specific transformations occurring within
the rural communities themselves. I have indicated that the decline of the household mode of production, the increasing use over the past three decades of processed foods, and the availability of household labor saving devices such as piped water, gas stoves, and washing machines has meant that the need for girls and women to accomplish traditional labor-intensive female household chores has declined precipitously. With the decline of reliance on the traditional DMP, the volume of female tasks has also declined and the presence of contemporary labor saving devices has meant tasks that thirty years ago took several women a full day to accomplish can often today be accomplished by a single woman in a matter of hours.
At the same time that the need for female labor in the household has declined, few new opportunities outside of the household have opened up for women to become viably incorporated into significant income generating rural enterprises. Women, who have become a financial liability for economically strapped rural famiUes are being released at a young age from the households, either by allowing or encouraging young girls to marry at a young age or sending them out to live with relatives and study in the urban areas.
Male labor, however, continues to be considered important for household subsistence and
families are holding on to many of their male children, hi the final chapter that follows, I summarize the conclusions of the study and discuss some of the implications of changing 276
patterns of livelihood amongst the campesinos of the highlands for the future of the rural
Dominican Republic in general.
Notes
' Girls take advantage of many different opportunities that are available to meet men from towns and cities: during Patron Saints celebrations, during trips to a larger village or Santiago or when outsiders visit Los Postes to visit relatives or on excursions. There is a river that runs along the western side of Los Postes. Located high in the mountains in a fresh, well forested area, there are swimming holes in different spots along the river that are popular on weekends for people from town making day-trips. In the words of an informant: "Maybe the girl meets a boy from Santiago and she wants to inprove her situation. He shows up with a car, maybe she sees him and says 'ah, this one can take care of himself and she goes.
^ Men are marrying women that are considerably younger. For example, my survey data suggests that there
is an average age difference of 7 years between males and their younger spouses. In some cases, the men are marrying women from their own hamlet but in other cases, they are bringing women in from other rural areas. The reason, however, that older males bringing in females from the outside does not balance out the overall male/female population distribution is that, in the first place, the skew is most exfreme amongst males and females in the 10-29 age range. For example in the Bermiidez sample the masculinity index for
the population from 10-29 years of age is 148. The skew becomes mitigated somewhat in the population older than 30, although the skew remains high (129). The Bermudez siu^ey shows a significant number of single males over the age of 30 living in the parental home (25), something very rare for females (2).
' As has been described for other areas of the Caribbean (e.g., Horowitz 1971), rural Dominican marriages tend to begin as consensual unions and formal marriage, which in the vast majority of cases is a church marriage as opposed to a civil ceremony, takes place later in life. Of 635 married individuals recorded in the park surveys, the mean age of 296 married informants was 48.09 years in con^arison to 36.25 for informants living in consensual union (p<.001).
* It should also be pointed out that, as a matter of policy, the Dominican Secretariat of Education does not allow consensually or legally 'married' women to attend school with single female students. Married females are expected to attend to their house during the day and the perception also exists that they will be
a corrupting influence on the single girls. If married girls or women desire to continue their education they must attend night school.
^ Article 355 of Law No. 24097 provides that all individuals who 'exfract' a minor under 18 years of age
from their homes without the consent of their parents or guardians is subject to one to five years of prison and a fine of 500 to 5000 pesos. Similar penalties can be applied to adult males for engaging in sexual relationships with female minors.
* The violator in the majority of cases wall be a man. However, there are exceptions. For example, during fieldwork in Los Postes a case emerged in which a campesino discovered that his 14 year-old son was sleeping with a neighbor, a woman in her late-70s. The father, embarrassed and oufraged, requested the assistance of one of the community's female leaders to confront the woman. The man considered filing charges against the elderly woman for 'corrupting' his son. At the end, however, he was convinced not to press charges. Instead, he sent his son into the city both to get him away from his elderly 'lover' and to spare the boy the ongoing ridicule and embarrassment to which he would be subject in the community.
' Although polygyny in these areas of the Centtal Cordillera appears to have widely occurred in the past- something reported both in Los Postes and Las Papas—and was observed by the authors during a 1998 research project along the Dominincan-Haitian border, polygyny was not found in the study region (Murray etal. 1998). 277
expected Polygyny is commonly viewed as an indicator of female repression and therefore would be in in the park areas due to the low value attributed to women. However, the issue is not so simple. Women the park areas are actually being given greater freedoms. They are being allowed to marry younger (i.e. greater sexual freedom), and they are being encouraged to get an education. Both of these 'advancements' fall within the realm of what we have interpreted as efforts to release girls from the household. The seeming incongruence between "lower value" and "greater independence" only exists if the assumption is made that the repression of females is a manifestation of the low social 'value' of women. In fact, women may be repressed in many cases because they are so valuable, i.e. in areas where the production of children (Seroki is critical to household sustenance. (For example, a recent article in the Christian Science Monitor 2001) reported that in India there are now villages consisting largely of bachelors due to the fact that the introduction of amniocentesis has allowed for the selective abortion of female fetuses. As a result, in these villages women are very valuable but also even more guarded). Therefore there is no reason to expect that despite the fact that women have lower value within the household in the rural conservation areas women are being more repressed than in the past. Furthermore, there is evidence in Haiti that polygyny appears to be related less to the repression of women and more: 1) an inequality of income among males; and 2) single women aggressively seeking fmancial support from the few males who have it to spare (Schwartz 2000).
* The actual statistics are an average of 2.6 years of education for the primary male of the household (n=3 17) and an average of 2.38 years for the primary female of the household (n=295). To put it another way, in the Bermudez siu-vey 80.8% of primary males and 84.7% of primary females have not completed more than 4 years of schooling. One male and no females amongst the primary aduhs of the household were identified that had completed the bachillerato (high school). One female, a schoolteacher, and no males, had completed the Licenciatura (a university degree).
' These statements are taken from open-ended opinion surveys that were carried out in a randomly selected sample of households in the communities of Los Postes and Las Papas. The question that evoked the
response was: "For their futures, do you think it would be better for your children remain in this community or go somewhere else?"
'° The use of the expression a lo claw literally meaning "into the clear" as a metaphor for movement into
the city by this informant is an interesting reflection of the perception of the city vis-a-vis rural areas.
Vargas (1992:286) also noted the use of the expression >'fl salimos a lo claw, meaning "we just came into the clear", as commonly used by southemers to refer to moving from the remoteness of the rural areas, referred to as lo oscuw (the dark), to the cities~"to the center, the place 'where cheques are made.'"
" This pattern becomes even more pronounced in Dominican universities. In 1997, the sex ratio for all students registered in universities in the Dominican Republic was 72. In other words, 58% of all university students were females and 42% males (CEPAL 2000). The percentage of female imiversity students has risen over the past 20 years. For example, in 1982 females represented 50.8% of total university enrollment in the country (FLACSO N.d.).
The term restavek is used in Haiti to describe children, generally females from rural areas, that have been turned over by their parents to be raised by families in urban areas. The restavek is expected to provide domestic labor for the 'host' family. Rural families hope that 'giving away' their children as restaveks will provide them ultimately with a possibility to obtain an education and have a chance for economic and social advancement in the cities. The practice has been widely criticized by human rights groups as highly exploitative of the children involved (McCalla and Archer 2002).
Safa (1995:104-105) found that one half of her sample of women in the export processing industry were married and another fourth divorced or separated. Two-thirds of her sample had one or more children. She found that the workers are largely young—three fourths of women imder the age of 30 years, 78 % are migrants from the rural areas, and 60 % had been living in the city for 10 years or less. Raynolds (1998) reports similar marital patterns for women working in the non-traditional agricultural sector. These findings contrast markedly with duty free zones in other countries such as those in Asia, where single, childless young women predominate. In contrast, in the Dominican Republic the presence of nubile females
working in the duty free zones is relatively rare. The data is fiilly consistent with our observations of 278
migratory mechanisms employed in the rural areas. Few single rural women are migrating directly into the city to pursue employment in the non-traditional export sectors. Rather, marriage appears to be as important if not more important as a means through which females from rural areas established themselves in the cities. CHAPTER 16 CONCLUSIONS
Summary: The State of Siege
Conservationist-oriented policies and other forms of state intervention in the
Cordillera emerged and evolved in response to changing political and economic interests
As increasing attention was drawn to the value of the resources of the Cordillera—timber
reserves; water required to feed lowland irrigation systems and hydroelectric dams;
unique highland biodiversity; and the tourist value of scenic alpine forests--the State took
measures to commandeer access to these resources and restrict peasant use of them. The
cumulative effect of state intervention, if not explicitly and consciously intended, was
nevertheless like that of a military siege in that it changed their access to the means of
production and slowly drove the campesinos out of a peasant adaptation and out of the
coveted highlands.
During the 1930s, 40s and 50s state intervention included the breakup of the
comunero lands. 'Land reform' programs forcibly settled peasants on fixed parcels of
land while transferring land and timber rights of vast areas to more powerfiil stakeholders
such as lumber companies, cattle ranchers, Trujillo cronies, and government officials
themselves. Land-zoning procedures, including the establishment of protected areas
(forestry reserves and national parks) as well as agricultural zones, redefined both the
legitimate use and illegitimate users of highland resources. Campesino production was
purposefiiUy reoriented toward taxable export crops such as coffee. To enforce the
279 280
criminalization of traditional peasant productive strategies, soldiers, rural police and
peasants Forest guards were posted throughout the area. Laws were enforced against the while the wealthy, the well connected and the authorities themselves often did as they pleased.
During the 1960s, following the death of the dictator Rafael Trujillo, the direction of Dominican political and economic development came under control of the US government. The principal objective of US policy in the Dominican Republic was the development of an industrial sector. This meant getting people concentrated in areas where they could be put to work—i.e., urbanization—and it meant maintaining wages
low. Under the tutelage and assistance of US advisors, the Dominican government
accomplished this through control of the prices for basic staples. Market prices for traditional peasant crops were driven down through the import of foodstuffs, which
frequently took the form ofUS "food aid" provided in the form of donations or
subsidized loans. Imports not only drove down market prices, making it easier to feed
urban populations, but peasants became less important as suppliers of food to urban
populations. This permitted ftirther marginalization, and encouraged an intensification of
the urbanization process. At the same time, the peasantry was simply left out of national
development planning schemes. Loans and incentives were provided to foment the
emergence of agroindustries dedicated to the production of non-traditional export crops,
while the state failed to provide assistance to campesinos to make the desired transition
from traditional peasant productive strategies to more intensive forms of farming.
Agricultural reform, credit programs, extension services, and programs to guarantee more
stable and profitable market prices for campesino products were either sporadic or non- 281
or existent. The majority of remote rural areas were left without decent roads, schools,
electricity.
Development projects, largely funded by the US government, were devised supposedly to countermand the destructive social and environmental forces that had been unleashed in the Cordillera. Most NGOs act in harmony with donor objectives that reinforce conservation initiatives that undermine peasant subsistence strategies. Other
NGOs with dreams of small-scale rural development and community-based conservation in rural hamlets acted, and continue to act, in direct contradiction to macroeconomic and demographic trends. If the idea is to somehow sustain the peasantry, development agencies and NGOs promoting rural "sustainable development" initiatives in the
Cordillera are wasting money on a hopeless cause. Even if the projects were
appropriately designed and substantial enough to have an impact, they would be based on
romantic notions of a peasantry that no longer exists. The best projects prove
ameliorative in some way (installing solar panels at low credit or rural aqueducts). But
even the former peasants understand the irony and futility of many if not most so-called
rural sustainable development efforts. Projects have often been subverted through
neglect and lack of interest.
Dying Way of Life
Subsistence Strategies
Campesinos often attempted to challenge the constraints imposed by state
intervention through what can be described as resistance tactics. These involved eluding,
circumventing or defiantly breaking laws and taking advantage of periods of weakness in
state control to occupy new lands or use restricted resources. Ultimately, however, only
residual and sporadic manifestations of the traditional peasant system continue to exist. 282
The livestock economy around which the agro-pastoral complex was organized has been drastically reduced. In their loss of livestock, campesinos have lost a form of savings that could be liquidated to survive hard times. Similarly, occasionally a campesino will still risk making a small tumba on a plot of forested land. However, the primary remnants of past swidden agricultural practices are the clearing of weeds and overgrowth on over farmed lands and the burning of the stubble. Some farmers continue to organize reciprocal labor parties through local farmer associations. In general, however,
outmigration and the intensification of agricultural production have minimized the use of juntas and convites as a means of mobilizing labor. Many small campesinos continue to
rely primarily on household labor for farm tasks. But the use of household labor is rapidly
being replaced by wage labor and especially by Haitian migrant workers who in recent
years have largely supplanted Dominican workers in the rural labor force.
Changes in the Cordillera have led to the increasing dependence of campesinos on
a cash-based economy. The concentration of land resulting from past land redistributions
and the formation of parks and forestry laws drove many campesinos into marginal lands
and created shortages in productive farmland. Intensive production on fixed plots
resulted in soil degradation and reduced yields. With the consequent need to make cash
investments in fertilizers and pesticides, the campesinos increasingly turned to
monocropping strategies. Planting for subsistence has not been entirely abandoned, but
far fewer campesinos practice the traditional, diversified cropping strategies that allowed
them to weather natural and economic crises and fluctuations in world market prices for
produce.' Instead, contemporary campesinos mitigate risk through increasing reliance on
non-farming strategies such as wage work. And they also leave. 283
Migration: Generational and Gender Differences at the Household Level
The primary adaptive response to land scarcity and the criminaUzation of peasant farming strategies has been outmigration. hi past generations, the peasants of the highlands of the Cordillera assumed that their children would become farmers. Today many adult campesinos express the desire to remain in the rural areas themselves, but the majority no longer view farming as a viable option for their children. Instead, they want
them to continue their education in towns and cities. They see obtaining skills to find
decent employment in the urban labor market as critical. This emphasis on the education
and outmigration of their children signifies an end to aspirations for intergenerational
transmission of their rural folkways, a clear expression of a dying subculture.
Campesinos' preoccupation with their children's urban-bound futures has
articulated with a continuation of traditional gender roles to shape gender and age
specific migratory patterns. Children are frequently leaving the family home at young
ages and females have been migrating out of the Cordillera at faster rates than males.
The differential patterns of migration between males and females reflect unchanging
norms regarding gender roles. The demand for female labor within the household has
decreased and daughters have begun to represent surplus labor. Fathers clearly express
the desire to retain some of their sons within the household to help out on the farm, while
young women are being provided increased independence and are sometimes even
allowed to marry and leave the home as young as twelve and thirteen years of age. With
the declining importance of female labor within the household, a new role has been
defined for them, that of students. Parents take steps to send their daughters to urban
areas to study, often taking advantage of the fact that there is a demand for female 284
domestic labor in urban households. This has been another factor that has facilitated female outmigration and generated skewed sex ratios.
Finally, the findings presented in this study regarding the outmigration of young females differ somewhat from the findings of migration studies carried out in the
Cordillera in the past.^ Pessar and Grasmuck (1991) use a household approach to explain outmigration but focused on sons and wives, and failed to even mention the outmigration
of daughters. Georges (1990), in a much more detailed study, did observe the pattern of
internal migration that differentially favored females over males. She also noted that
families in Los Pinos sent young girls to the cities to study, to work as domestics, or
simply to find a good spouse. Nevertheless, her study found that the majority of women
internal migrants (63.3%) fell within the 20-39 year age range, hi contrast, the data
collected in this study suggests that the average ages of female outmigrants tend to be
considerably younger than those found by Georges.
In summary, state intervention in the hinterlands of the Cordillera has radically
transformed the adaptations of campesinos, altered social institutions and led to a dying
way of life that has been expressed in massive out-migration, especially of young people.
Future Trends
Puerto-Ricanization of the Dominican Republic
hi many ways, this study of the dying subculture of the peasantry of the Cordillera
serves as a regional case study of a process that is occurring throughout the rural
Dominican Republic. The specific configuration of forces that contribute to the decline
of rural economies may vary somewhat on a regional level, but the overall consequences
have been the same, with the most salient consequence being large-scale out-migration
fi-om rural areas into the cities. 285
70.0
Figure 16-1. Rural-Urban distribution of Dominican population from 1960-2005 based on CEPAL 2000 estimates
Significant rural to urban migration is not a new process in the Dominican
Republic. It began in latter years of the Trujillo era and accelerated greatly in the post-
Trujillo period. In 1935, 18% of the Dominican population was urban. In 1960, 36% was urban. Beginning in the early 1980s, the majority of the population (53%) lived in urban areas. Estimates suggest that by 2005 over 65% of the Dominican population will be hving in urban areas (CEPAL 2000, Figure \6-\).'^ This process has led scholars and journalists to begin comparing the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico and to declare the country as "completely urban" (Miguel 2003; San Miguel 1999).
Indeed, there are many historical similarities between processes that occurred in
Puerto Rico beginning in the 1940s and recent developments in the Dominican Republic.^
In the words of Pedro San Miguel (1999:63, auth. trans.):
[Puerto Rico] today has an economic structure that is highly dependent, founded
on industry and services; [the Dominican Republic] is abandoning at its
traditional rural economy at an accelerated pace. In some ways, Puerto Rico is a kind of premonition of one of the possible destinies of the Dominican Repubhc. On the other hand, for the student of Puerto Rican reality, the Dominican Republic can permit him to observe the "archaeology" of what was, up until
recently, its rural society. 286
The fact that scholars are comparing the Dominican RepubUc to Puerto Rico is a particularly dramatic development taking into account the fact a mere 40 years ago over
65% of the Dominican population was rural. The rapid urbanization of the Dominican
Republic is, in part, a legacy of the structural inequities established during the Trujillo period which agrarian reform failed to address. But more importantly the truly massive
exodus of rural Dominicans into the cities reflects the extremely unequal patterns of
regional development that have characterized the Dominican economy in the post-
Trujillo era. This process has shaped state policies and generated forces that make life
increasingly unattractive in rural areas in the country in general. If not necessarily an easy
or attractive option, at least migration to urban areas offers the possibility of pursuing and
education, a chance for social mobility and possibly a chance for a better life.
The Cordillera: Implications for the Future
Siege-like state policies have imdermined the peasants but proved successful in
conserving the forest resources of the Cordillera. The watersheds of the country's
primary rivers are being protected for future generations of Dominican urban dwellers.
One can envision that in a relatively short period of time the ex-peasants remaining in the
Cordillera will have been replaced by "ecotourists" and the humble campesino bohio
replaced by wealthy vacation homes for Santiagueros or return U.S. migrants. With a
radical change in traditional government incentives, perhaps absentee landowners will
plant tree farms as a retirement fund using Haitian labor to plant and manage the
plantations.
But many of the costs of outmigration from the Cordillera and other areas of the
country will have to be assumed in the urban areas. In the same way that social issues are
being transferred from the rural areas to the cities in the form of slums and shantytowns, 287
but urban-based the primary environmental issues of the future in the DR will not be rural environmental issues, hi the future, one can anticipate that the primary threat to the urban water supply will no longer be the deforestation of the highlands of the Cordillera but chemical pesticides and untreated wastewater firom the urban areas themselves.
Notes
' subsistence The observations in this paragraph follow Eric Wolfs (1999[1955]:207-8) observations that and market production area not mutually opposed:
subsistence and production for the It would seem advisable to beware of treating production for alternation market as two progressive stages of development. Rather, we must allow for the cyclical of view of of the two kinds of production within the same community and realize that, from the point the outside the community, both kinds may be alternative responses to changes in conditions of market.
improve ^ As previously noted, one of the ironies therefore of rural development interventions designed to subsistence the nutritional standards of the peasants has been the fact that they have tried to re-introduce gardens, or production strategies, through increased intercropping within coffee groves, through patio through fish ponds.
^ the Georges 1990 study It should be pointed out that both the Pessar and Grasmuck 1991 study and focused primarily on international migration and fiirthermore were carried out in larger villages in the Cordillera. Small and very remote hamlets like Los Postes and Las Papas constitute the hinteriand patterns communities of these larger towns. For that reason, it is reasonable to assume that migration may and differ somewhat from those found in larger villages that have more diverse and dynamic economies that there that serve as the marketing centers for the hinteriand hamlets. Chapter 14 for example notes appears to be a negative relationship between population density and skewed sex ratios favoring males (i.e., areas of lower population densities display higher skews that favor males).
" Unfortunately, at the time of writing the detailed results of the 2002 census had not been released, but
initial results, that show a decline in population in many rural provinces, suggest that the pace of urbanization could indeed be even faster than that suggested by CEPAL estimates.
' According to Silvestrini (1989), for example, in 1940 Puerto Rico suffered from extreme inequalities in land distribution. Furthermore, the US rapidly facihtated the importation of food products from the US. Small farmers proved imable to compete with US imports. Operation Bootstrap, launched in 1947, provided tax-holidays to attract foreign investment, neglected local agriculture in favor of increased support
to manufacturing and by the 1970s, the country was almost completely dependent on food imports from the US mainland. APPENDIX A BRIEF HISTORY OF LUMBER EXPLOITATION IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC UP TO THE TRUJILLO PERIOD
Early Lumber Exploitation
The exploitation of the hardwood forests of Santo Domingo extends back to colonial times. The export of precious woods such as mahogany, cedro, ebano, and
16* guayacan, campeche, espinillo, caya, mora, robles to European markets began in the century, the early years of Spanish colonization of the island. However, lumber took on particular economic importance in the years in the turbulent years following the Haitian revolution with the decline of the cattle economy and the emergence of peasant groups throughout the Dominican countryside. This especially occurred in the Dominican deep south, where the traumatic events of the nineteenth century induced the emergence of a smallholding peasantry in areas formerly dominated by the hatos. With the devastation of the southern herds and the total decline in the demand for the export of skins and meats, these smallholders turned alternatively to lumber in order to meet their need for cash to pay for imported products (Lluberes 1973).
During the early part of the 19'*" century, therefore, the lumber industry, and particularly the trade in mahogany, replaced cattle as the most important economic activity of the colony of Santo Domingo (Cassa 1979; Moya Pons 1995). The early lumbering activities were carried out primarily at a household scale by the campesinos of the south and east. Hatchet in hand, the campesinos used the trade in mahogany and other tropical hardwoods to obtain the means to trade for imported and locally produced
288 goods to supplement what was an otherwise humble and largely subsistence-based existence. The smallholding campesinos privately harvested and sold small quantities of wood directly to local intermediaries or worked as temporary wage laborers for larger
producers. European commercial trade houses were established in the city of Santo
Domingo to purchase and export the lumber across the Atlantic (Cassa 1992:14).
During the period of Dominican history known as the "Espana Boba" (1809-
1821), a period in which the colony found itself in complete economic decay and
virtually abandoned by the Spanish colonial government, lumber exports in the colony
reached approximately 3 million cubic feet a year (Martinez 1990:38). Lumber exports
continued to increase after the Haitian occupation of Santo Domingo (1822-1844) despite
repeated efforts by the Haitian government, led by Charles Boyer, to restrict and control
the cutting and export of mahogany in Santo Domingo in an attempt to direct campesino
production to foodstuffs and export crops (Moya Pons 1994). Between 1822 and 1844,
the export of lumber exports from Hispaniola averaged over 4,000,000 cubic feet a year
with the vast majority of coming from the Santo Domingo side of the island. The exports
accelerated during the last years of the Haitian occupation (1839-1842) averaging
approximately 6,270,000 feet a year (Cassa 1992:16; Moya Pons 1994).
Lumbering continued to play an important economic role in the new Republic
after the Independence from Haiti. During this period, as the mahogany forests were
depleted along the coasts and along the banks of the rivers, cutting began to expand into
the north and western areas of the country. The primary political figures of the period,
including the two dominant caudillos of the First Republic, Pedro Santana and
Buenaventura Baez, both based their wealth largely on the export of precious woods.'
These caudillos used their political clout to obtain access to the best stands of wood on 290
these areas (Cassa State lands, as well as to mobilize campesino labor gangs to exploit
1992; Martinez 1990:39).
of the The forests of the southern coastal areas were further decimated at the end
mills in the nineteenth century, with the opening of the first modem sugar plantations and
Dominican Republic. The expansion of the sugar industry during late nineteenth and
coastal early twentieth centuries resulted in the complete deforestation of the largest
plains of the south and northwest of the country (Moya Pons 1994). The sugar
companies cleared significant areas of forest to plant sugarcane. The mills also required
transport firewood to fuel the boilers and the steam engines of the trains that were used to
the cane.
Emergence of the Lumber Industry in the Cordillera Central
Despite the extensive degradation of forest resources on the coasts, at the end of
the nineteenth century the exploitation of the vast pine forests of the interior of the
country for commercial purposes was just beginning. Moya Pons points out, at the turn
of the century these forests had "barely been exploited by the artisans of the Cibao who
required pine to fabricate furniture and urban homes" (1994:3). Georges (1990) reports
that the first steam driven lumber mill in the northern Cibao was established in Santiago
de los Caballeros in 1897, although other reports suggests that mills may have established
a few years earlier than the date reported by Georges (Martinez 1990:39; San Miguel
1997).
The extent of forest cover in the country at the turn of the century is described in a
report issued in 1909 by a Forest Engineer from the United States named Karl
Woodward. In this report. Woodward estimated that 85% of the country remained under
"some degree" of forest cover and 50% of the country (approximately 5.5 milUon acres) 291
remained under extensive forest cover. Although Woodward provided no estimation of the total tree cover in the Cordillera Central, and observed of the mountain pine forests
that:
some cutting has been done in the pine region, but the distance from the coast has impeded an extensive exploitation. All of the cut pieces have been used in local consumption. The small mills that are being used are insufficient for the more lucrative processing of the larger trees. [Martinez 1990:54-58, auth. trans.]
Woodward attributed the low intensity of pine forest exploitation in the mountainous
interior primarily to the lack of adequate transportation routes.
Although Woodward dismissed the exploitation of the pine forests of the
mountainous interior as relatively insignificant, he did note the presence of small mills in
the region. Recent historical accounts confirm this account of the presence of a small-
scale yet growing lumber industry in the pine forests of the Sierra by the early part of the
20* century. The primary transportation routes used by the lumber traders were the
traditional trails stretching from San Jose de las Matas and Janico to Santiago de los
Caballeros (San Miguel 1997). Most commonly, the logs were floated down the Yaque
del Norte River and received by small milling operations that had been estabhshed along
its banks in flatter lands close to the city of Santiago.
Campesinos of the Sierra took advantage of the relatively free access to forest
resources on communal and State lands to become involved in the lumber trade. Early in
the century, Santiago-based intermediaries began establishing a presence in the Sierra and
financing locals for the harvest and purchase of lumber, and local intermediaries emerged
that employed wage labor to harvest pines and lead the mule trains used to fransport the
wood. Nevertheless, during this period the majority of Serranos involved in the lumber
frade were, according to Georges (1990:55), "engaged in simple commodity production. 292
This production relied entirely upon the unpaid labor of household members and others to produce for a common subsistence fund rather than to make profits for investment to
19"" generate still more profits". As it had in the century among the campesinos of the
south, lumbering activities played a supplementary role within the survival strategies of the majority of the campesinos of the Cordillera Central during this period.
The increase in value of lumber as a commodity on the comunero lands
established the basis for conflict to emerge amongst shareholders. Due to the lack of
clear property limits, shareholders were often unable to determine amongst themselves
the corresponding rights to forested areas on the properties (San Miguel 1997:202). To
avoid conflict, the shareholders often sold the exploitation rights to the lumber on their
lands to Santiago-based lumber merchants and divided the profits. Early on, the most
active of the companies involved in the purchase of these rights was the Asseradero La
Fe, of Espaillat Sucesores, one of the largest lumber mills located along the banks of the
Yaque del Norte River. As early as 1907, Espaillat y Sucesores is reported to have
purchased the rights to exploitation of forested areas on communal lands in communities
in the proximity of San Jose de las Matas. During this period, an Italian agent of
Espaillat Succesores named Ferroni is reported as having purchased the rights to exploit
common forest areas extending from Jarabacoa in the east to Moncion in the west of the
Cordillera Central (San Miguel 1997:203). The Santiago-based Espaillat Company
remained an important presence in the lumber business in the Cordillera well into the
1930s. By 1934, Espaillat Succesores had purchased the lumbering rights to thousands of
hectares of forest within 25 hamlets in the municipalities of San Jose de las Matas, Janico
and Mao. Among the hamlets in which Espaillat owned the rights to exploitation of
acciones was Los Postes (San Miguel 1997:206).^ 293
rudimentary In 1913 the Dominican government initiated construction of a highway extending from San Jose de las Matas to Santiago. The first vehicle from
officially Santiago arrived in the village in March 1916 to great fanfare, and the road was inaugurated in April of 1916. The US Occupation government (1916-1924) made important improvements to the road, bringing in heavy equipment to expand the road and by constructing iron bridges (Estevez 2001). The improved infrastructure provided
also brought ftirther access to the pine forests of the region. The occupation government in specialists to evaluate the potential for exploitation of the forests of the Cordillera.
W.W. Durland, a Foresty Engineer from Yale University, estimated after his trip around
the country in 1922 that 75% of the Dominican Republic remained covered with forest in
different stages of succession. Durland, like Woodward 13 years before, continued to
emphasize the fact that the potential for the exploitation of the pine forests of the
Cordillera remained unrealized despite the nascent lumber industry that was emerging in
the region. According to Durland:
In previous years, some efforts were made to exploit these forests, but the
. the operations were done at a small scale and in a provisional way. . .Due to [system] of property rights and the instability of previous periods of government the exploitation of the forest as a mercantile enterprise has been almost impossible. As a result, these forests have remained in an unaltered state, as an abundant source of wood for construction. [Martinez 1990:73]
As the lumber industry grew in the Sierra, the economies of the principle villages
of the region began to diversify and, accompanied with population growth, this likely
provided an early impetus for the movement of Serrano farmers into the more rural
interior hinterlands. The hinterland populations provided foodstuffs, cattle and other
resources both for local consumption as well as for sale to intermediaries who transported
the produce to markets in larger urban centers. The roads completed during US 294
Occupation provided the infrastructure needed to intensify trade with the urban centers,
agricultural patterns and in particular Santiago de los Caballeros, stimulating more settled
real a further intensification of the exploitation of the pine forests of the Cordillera. The
however, intensive exploitation of the pine forests of the interior of the Cordillera began,
during the period of the Trujillo dictatorship as described in chapter 4.
Notes
'Buenaventura Baez was the Dominican president during 5 distinct periods: 1849-1853, 1856-1858, 1865- 1866, 1868-1874, 1876-1878.
^ This includes the areas surrounding San Pedro de Macoris, La Romana, El Seibo, Barahona, Azua and Puerto Plata.
^ acquired Although San Miguel (1997) provides the figure, 1 do not report the exact number of acciones by Espaillat in Los Postes in order to protect the anonymity of the community. .
APPENDIX B MODERN DOMINICAN FORESTRY LAWS
Table B-1. Dominican forestry laws since the year 1900 Year Number Type Title Early Legislation (1900-1915) 1907 4794 Law Creates and organizes the Guarda Canpestre service US Occupation (1916-1924) 1919 365 Executive Order Regarding the forestry service 1920 527 Executive Order Regarding the Rural Guard (Guarda campestre) service. Substitutes law 4794-07 1920 586 Executive Order Forest Reserve Law in which the Cordillera Central, the Cordillera Septentrional and the Sierra de Bahoruco are declared forestry reserves under the control of the Dominican state 1921 631 Executive Order Regarding the Rural Guard (Guarda campestre) service. Modifies Law 527-20 Pre-Trujillo (1924-1929) 1928 944 Law RpaarHincT the rnn^prvation f»f woodlands rmontes^ and waters
Declares all State lands to be forestry resources 1928 1052 Law Creates the Rio Yaque del Norte Vedado (restricted area) Trujillo Period (1930-1961) 1934 1044 Regulation service 1934 641 Law Substitutes Law 944-28 regarding conservation of woodlands and waters 1935 864 Law Modifies paragraph 10 of law 641-34 1937 1321 Law Modifies article 9 of law 641-34. Prohibits the cutting of trees
unless the lands are reforested on a 20 x 1 basis
1937 1804 Regulation Establishes a 1 peso tax on each thousand square feet of wood produced by the lumber mills. 1938 1464 Law Modifies article 10 of Law 641-34. The felling of coffee and cacao
trees is prohibited unless authorized by the Sec. of Agriculture
1939 523 Regulation Regulates the cutting of trees and mandates reforestation at 20 x 1
1940 22 Law Regarding the extraction of products derived from the forests 1940 227 Law Prohibits the extraction without permission of rubber, resins,
essences, roots, cuttings and any subproduct of the forests whose
obtaining puts in danger the life of trees 1940 591 Regulation Regarding the extraction of oleoresin from pine trees. 1942 654 Resolution Congressional Resolution Approving the Convention for the Protection of Flora, Fauna, and the Natural Scenery of America 1942 1506 Regulation Regarding the extraction of cascara de mangle 1943 208 Law Obligates people who clear lands to repopulate them and put them in condition for cultivation
1945 803 Law Modifies art. 10 of law 641-34
1946 1274 Law Regarding the destruction and replanting of cacao trees (Cacaotales) 1947 4257 Decree Prohibits the export of manufactiu^ed precious woods
295 296
Table B-1. Continued Title ifear Number Type 1948 1688 Law Regarding the conservation of forest and fruit trees. Derrogates laws 641-34, 864-35, 1464-38, 803-45, 1274-46, 208-43. 1948 1746 Law Adds article No. 9 to Law 1688-48 1949 1974 Law Modifies article No. 2 of Law 1688-48 1949 1997 Law Adds another article to Law 1688-48 1949 5884 Decree The Secretariat of Agriculture is ordered to study the plants that can be adapted for the conservation of soils and waters. 1949 5975 Decree Declares the celebration of rural reforestation competitions between students and members of rural clubs to be of public interest
6845 The Secretariat of Agriculture iniciates the planting of 1 6 national forests in the Distrito Nacional and 15 municipalities 1950 1410 Law Prohibits cutting within the "El Puerto" National Park in Jarabacoa. 1950 2668 Law Prohibits providing permission for the cutting of trees in lands in which the survey (mensura) has not been payed 1951 3005 Law Establishes taxes on the production and export of wood 1951 3066 Law Introduces some modifications to some articles of law 3005-51 1951 3107 Law Creates a reserve named Parque Nacional "Armando Bermudez"
1952 3316 Law Adds paragraph to Art. 1 of Law No. 3005-51 1953 9295 Regulation Regulation substituting regulation 323 of 1959. Places the Secretaria de Agricultura in charge of the cutting of trees. 1954 3966 Law Modifies Art. 3 of Law No. 3005-51 1954 3841 Law Establishes measures to protect the watershed of the Bao river and
its affluents 1955 4288 Law Modifies Law No. 3005-51 1956 4495 Law Two paragraphs are added to article No. 9 of Law 1688-48 1956 4544 Law Measures are added to prevent forest fires in sugar cane fields. pasture, wood deposits among others. 1956 4371 Law Declares to be of National Interest the reforestation in all of Dominican territory and prohibits clearings for cultivation 1957 2944 Decree Declares the flower of the mahogany tree to be the "National Flower" 1957 4795 Law Modfies article 13 of Law 1688-48
1958 4890 Law Modifies articles 1,4,5, and 10 of Law 4371-56 and expands the role of the Secretariat of Agriculture in reforestation. 1958 4974 Law Modifies Art. 4 of Law No. 4371-56 1958 5191 Law Imposes a tax of 8% on the profits of lumber exploitation enterprises 1959 5387 Regulation Regulation No. 5387 regarding the concession of permits for the exploitation of the forests in the forest reserve of the Parque Nacional Armando Bermudez
1961 5482 Law Reforms paragraph I of Art. 1 of Law No. 3005-51 1961 5631 Law Modifies Art. 4 of Law No. 3003-51 1961 5741 Law Modifies Law No. 3 003 -51 regarding taxes on production and export of wood 1961 5745 Law Modifies Law No. 3003-51 regarding taxes on production and export of wood Post-Trujillo Period (1962- present) 1962 1506 Regulation Regulation No 5707, regarding the extraction of the husk of the mangrove 1964 470 Law Prohibits the cutting of trees in the headwaters of rivers
1965 662 Resolution Congress Resolution creates Inst. Forestal Latinoamericano. 297
Table B-1. Continued Year Number Type Title 1967 1289 Regulation Declares Saona Island to be a Forest Reserve 1967 104 Resolution Congressional resolution that declares the reforestation campaign to be of high national interest
1968 1044 Regulation Modifies Art. 1 of Decree No. 728-66 1968 2335 Regulation Puts off for five more years the one year deadline established in Decree No. 1509-67 for industries to cease using firewood 1969 3676 Law Forms the Coordinating Committee to Foment and develop Incentives for Forest Resources 1972 2596 Regulation Creates a commission in charge of studying the problems that contamination cause in the Dominican environment 1973 3545 Regulation Declares the 21st of march of each year as "World Forestry Day" 1974 4612 Regulation Modifies the only Article of Decree No. 2596-72 1977 632 Law Prohibits the cutting of trees and plants in the headwaters of the rivers and streams that feed into watersheds 1977 221 Law Modifies Article 2 of law 436-64 1977 2729 Regulation Requires the Secretariat of Tourism to coordinate efforts with the Sec. Of Agriculture to ensure that urban and hotel development projects in Constanza and Jarabacoa don't affect the forest resources of the area 1980 1985 Regulation Restructures the commission created in Decree 2596-72 to study the contamination of the environment 1981 362 Law Derrogates Law 92 of 1962, because in the country the stoves are produced 1981 409 Law Regarding the Fomenting and Providing Inventives for Agroindustrial Production 1982 3405 Regulation Creates a Commission In of studying and making final recommendations to solve the problems related to prohibitions on the cutting of trees in Altagracia province. 1982 579 Regulation Regulation for the application of Law 409 of 1982 on agroindustry 1982 420 Regulation Regulation 420, for the aplication of Law No. 409 of 1982, regarding the Incentivation and Fomenting of the Protection of Agroindustry 1983 355 Law Prohibits the aplication of quicklime to trunks of trees 1983 648 Regulation Creates a commission in charge of the elaboration and promotion of agroindustrial projects considered to be priorities of the country 1983 753 Regulation Declares 1983 to be "Year of National Reforestation" 1985 528 Law Approves the National Forest Ordenament 1985 284 Law Requires that the fences of rural areas should be constructed out of live hedges
1985 2639 Regulation Modifies Art. 1 of Decree No. 421-82 1985 258 Resolution Congressional Resolution approving the National Forestry Zoning (Ordenamiento) Plan 1987 112 Law Established the obligatory forest service 1990 221 Regulation Requires the reforestation of the watersheds 1991 443 Regulation Designates new members of the National Technical Forestry Commission 1997 138 Regulation Creates the National Plan "Quisqueya Verde" 2000 4 Regulation Designates a Commission in charge of elaborating the Regulations for the General Forestry Law APPENDIX C fflSTORICAL EXCHANGE RATES; PESOS TO US$
Table C-1. Exchange rates of pesos to US$ since 1966 Year Official Market 1966 1.00 1.00 1967 1.00 1.00 1968 1.00 1.00 1969 1.00 1.12 1970 1.00 1.15 1971 1.00 1.14 1972 1.00 1.12 1973 1.00 1.13 1974 1.00 1.14 1975 1.00 1.18 1976 1.00 1.20 1977 1.00 1.22 1978 1.00 1.25 1979 1.00 1.22 1980 1.00 1.26 1981 1.00 1.28 1982 1.00 1.46 1983 1.10 1.60 1984 1.37 2.83 1985 1.98 3.12 1986 2.62 2.91 1987 3.49 3.84 1988 5.78 6.15 1989 6.33 6.97 1990 8.75 11.13 1991 12.42 13.07 1992 12.50 12.77 1993 12.50 12.68 1994 12.62 13.17 1995 12.87 13.60 1996 12.90 13.78 1997 14.01 14.27 1998 14.70 15.27 1999 15.83 16.03 2000 16.18 16.42 2001 16.69 16.95 2002 17.76 20.42 Source: Adapted from Banco Central data cited in Gutierrez (2002)
298 •' r, 4^
APPENDIX D SELECTED DATA ON FIRE, MIGRATION AND SEX RATIOS
600
YEAR
Statistics Department of the Figure D- 1 . Forest fires, years 1 965 to 2000 according to the Secretaria de Estado de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales, DR.
200000
oj (O V >o
YEAR
Figure D-2. Number of tareas affected by annually by forest &es, years 1965 to 2000 according to the Statistics Department of the Secretaria de Estado de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales, DR.
299 300
children in the western Cordillera (n=570) Table D-1 . Migration destination of Destination % males % females % total
U.S.A. or 9.0 7.4 8.1 International* Santiago 41.0 31.1 35.6 Santo Domingo 6.6 4.7 5.6 Secondary urban areas 31.1 38.5 35.2 Other rural 12.3 18.2 15.6 communities in Cordillera Total 100.0 100.0 100.0 'Only two informants that had migrated out of the country did not migrate to the U.S. but rather to Venezuela. Source: Bermudez Survey 1999
Table D-2.Historical sex ratios in the Caribbean Census date Country 1881 1891 1911 1921 1946 1960 British N/a N/a 85.7 75.7 83.5 Honduras British N/a 124.4 105.9 95.4 87.4 84.4 Guiana Trinidad and N/a 115.9 104.0 94.6 91.8 85.5 Tobago Antigua 75.9 76.3 55.3 48.6* 74.5 74.7 Barbados N/a 59.0 42.5 43.0 74.6 70.5 Dominica N/a 57.9 64.7* 71.6* 73.5 71.4 Grenada 70.4 73.3 57.1 46.8 53.3 65.0 Jamaica 81.3 74.2 75.0 68.9 81.7'' 77.4 Montserrat 64.6 58.3 35.5' 35.0 61.5 58.5
St. Kitts- N/a 67.8 43.4 38.8 73.2 71.0 Nevis
St. Lucia N/a 84.7" 72.2 71.9' 76.6 70.8 St Vincent N/a 74.0" 48.5 45.1 60.8 67.1 Note: The majority of ratios are for Males aged 20-49/Females aged 15-44 x 100.
a. For the age group 16-45 females, 21-50 males. b. For the age group 15-49, both sexes.
c. For the age group 16-50, both sexes.
d. For the year 1943. Source: Modified from Marino (1970:163) i )) j;) 91411 1
301
bordering parks Table D-3. Populations and sex ratios of communities Males- 1993 Females- 1993 M-F Ratio 1993 Rancier 117.0 ^ 131 112 LjCij I aijaj V. / 184.7 T flQ Pana^ C?^ 266 144 Pact Hamlet (\^ 51 45 113.3 Fact Hamlet (Ys 73 41 178.0 Rermi'iHey 124.7 1 U 81 Hamlet ( 1 111.3 1 zo98 115 Hamlet ; 11/171 124 137.9 Hamlet ( j ; 1 \ f\ 76 152.6 Hamlet (4 1 to 112.3 Hamlet (o) 57 41 14 120.6 Hamlet ( / ) 105.5 Hamlet (o 174 165
1 1 1200.0 Hamlet [y) IZ 6R 57 119.3 Hamlet ( l u
1 1 oK 120.4 Hamlet ( 1 1 j 87 144.8 Hamlet (Iz; I ZO Hamlet yii) Z7 28 103.6 119.3 Hamlet (14; 00 83 94 20 120.0 Hamlet ( l j_) zt 141 121.2 Hamlet ( 118
1 18 139.8 Hamlet (l /; Hamlet (is) 295 111.2 HZ49 29 144.8 Hamlet ( 1 V j
1 1S 1 122.7 Hamlet (.zu; 1 J J 10 66 140.9 Hamlet (z l "J 164 133 123.3 Hamlet (zz ) 71 110.9 Hamlet \Li / 64
1 40 108 129.6 Hamlet (z4 ) 1 HU
9 1 115.1 Hamlet (zjj Z 1 186
1 SO 128 124.2 Hamlet (zo ) 47 27 174.1 Hamlet (,z / j Hamlet (zoj 46 119.6 1 00 1 I 200.0 Hamlet (zy j Hamlet (jU) ji zo9» 182 1 Hamlet (31) 61 65 93.8 Hamlet (32) 100 67 149.3 Hamlet (33) 54 51 105.9 Hamlet (34) 45 42 107.1 Hamlet (35) 74 61 121.3 ' Hamlet (36) 109 77 141.6 Hamlet (37) 65 50 130.0 Total 4129 3248 127.1 Source: 1993 Dominican National Census 302
Table D-4. Rural sex ratios in the Cordillera hinterlands General Population Zone Males Females Total Sex ratios 72 213 Rancier Las Papas (3) 49 23 153 (data obtained from Las Papas (4) 29 19 48 149 conununiiy Lcii»ua_^ 35 24 59 ^niith Hamlet 65 49 114 133
East Hamlet (1) 37 23 60 161 120 East Hamlet (2) 12 10 22 164 East Hamlet (3) 90 55 145 169 East Hamlet (4) 47 28 75 110 South Hamlet (2) 44 40 84 Total 408 271 679 151
General Population Zone Males Females Total OCA lallUo
T T 1 —i. 1 218 142 Armando Bermiidez Hamlet 1 90 (data obtained from Hamlet 2 134 102 236 131 sample of Hamlet 3 148 118 266 125 community) Hamlet 4 103 65 168 158 Los Postes 129 111 240 116 Hamlet 5 194 180 374 108 Hamlet 6 136 118 254 115 Total 972 784 1756 124
All Communities 1380 1055 2435 131 Sources: Rancier and Bermudez surveys, 1998 and 1999
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He graduated Matthew M. McPherson was bom in 1966, in Baltimore, Maryland.
degree in history Summa Cum Laude from Towson State University in 1988, receiving a
from the University of and philosophy. In 1991, he received an M.A. in history
anthropology at the University Maryland, CoUege Park. He began his doctoral studies in of Florida, Gainesville, in 1995.
working at Georgetown University The author's professional experience includes
Coordinator for a USAID-sponsored academic in Washington, D.C., as a Regional
in the Dominican program; and 2 years working as the director of a smaU local NGO
of Environmental RepubUc. From 2000 to 2002 he worked in the Vice-Ministry
the Research Department in the Management in the Dominican RepubUc as Head of
McPherson has also conducted National Directorate of Environmental Norms. Matthew
on a wide range of topics research as a consultant throughout the Dominican RepubUc
alcohol consumption patterns ir including Haitian and Dominican relations on the border;
around Los Haitises Santo Domingo; local participation in grassroots organizations
Environmental Impact National Park; stakeholder analysis in the Cordillera Central;
for Caribbean Assessments; and modeUng human environmental impacts on biodiversity
Ecoregional Planning.
318 and that in my opinion it confoms to I certify that I have read this study fully adequate, in scope and quality, acceptable standards of scholarly presentation and is Philosophy. as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor ^ jj^ (\. jju H Gerald F. Murray, Chair Associate Professor of Anthropology
and that in my opinion it conforms to I certify that I have read this study quality, and is fully adequate, in scope and acceptable standards of scholarly presentation Philosophy. as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor
Helen I. Safa Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
and that in my opinion it conforms to I certify that I have read this study quality, and is fully adequate, in scope and acceptable standards of scholarly presentation Philosophy. as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor
Anthony ^ver-Smith Professor of Anthropology
and that in my opinion it conforms to I certify that I have read this study fully adequate, in scope and quality, acceptable standards of scholarly presentation and is
for the degree of Doctor Philosophy. , as a dissertation _ ^
Marianne C. Schmink Professor of Latin American Studies
and that in my opinion it conforms to I certify that I have read this study fully adequate, in scope and quaht^ acceptable standards of scholarly presentation and is Philosophy,. J as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor P
ichael Bannister esearch Assistant Professor of Forest Resources and Conservation
of the School of This dissertation was submitted to the Graduate Faculty accepted as partial fulfillment of the Anthropology and to the Graduate School and was requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy.
May 2003
Dean, Graduate School