Productive dilemmas: assistance and struggle in a Nicaraguan agricultural cooperative David Thomas William Cooper University College London Department of Anthropology Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) 2015 Abstract Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this thesis is an ethnography of Gualiqueme, a village in the northern mountains of Nicaragua which was established by the Sandinistas as an agricultural cooperative in the 1980s. It explores the way rural Nicaraguan understandings of efficacy have informed and inflected their involvements with the cooperative, the Sandinista state, and each other. For Gualiqueme residents the prospect of productivity and efficacy revolves around a crucial dilemma. On the one hand effective action is viewed as grounded in an embodied personal struggle (lucha). On the other, relevant powers are taken to be distant and external, and viable action is understood to be contingent upon cultivating vital relations of assistance; with God and the saints, with the president and politicians, with the powerful outsiders staffing NGOs. The effort to mediate this duality of assistance and struggle across a range of domains is shown to comprise a central concern for Gualiqueme residents. It runs through the local production of historical knowledge, the negotiation of household relations, through efforts to establish entitlements to land, participation in state and NGO welfare projects, and the differing forms of popular religion. Developing this argument allows the thesis to present a novel perspective on the distributive politics characteristic of ‘New Left’ governments in Latin America, going beyond standard models of populism or clientelism. Gualiqueme residents are keen supporters of Daniel Ortega’s incumbent administration, and becoming a beneficiary of state welfare projects has come to hold a central place in rural political imaginaries. The thesis shows that understanding the appeal of these ‘assistentialist’ political forms for Gualiqueme residents requires framing them in relation to the diverse ways in which dilemmas of efficacy are handled in rural Nicaraguan life. Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................... 1 Table of figures ...................................................................................................................... 3 List of Acronyms and Organisations .................................................................................. 5 Chapter 1—Introduction ...................................................................................................... 7 El Mero Jefe .................................................................................................................. 7 Efficacy, productivity, and struggle ........................................................................ 11 Peasant studies, land reform and the prospect of ‘cooperation’: a cautionary view of the individualism-collectivism binary....................................................... 24 Ethnographies of collective and cooperative farms .............................................. 27 Peasants as individualists ......................................................................................... 29 Peasants as proto-socialists; resistance studies ...................................................... 32 Agrarian policy in Nicaragua................................................................................... 33 Clientelism and dependency: Socialism for the 21st century .............................. 38 Dependencies of left and right ................................................................................. 43 Outline of the thesis .................................................................................................. 48 Chapter 2—Village overview and methodological considerations ............................... 53 Arriving at the village ............................................................................................... 53 ‘A proper town’.......................................................................................................... 56 A typical day .............................................................................................................. 59 La roya: the 2011-2 coffee rust epidemic ............................................................... 62 Research strategies, methodological considerations and access ......................... 63 Meetings ..................................................................................................................... 65 Labour ......................................................................................................................... 67 Household .................................................................................................................. 68 Religion ....................................................................................................................... 69 Formal interviews ...................................................................................................... 70 Chapter 3—Transformation and assistance in local historicity .................................... 73 Part 1: Pre-1979 society, the coming of revolution, and the early years of the Gualiqueme cooperative........................................................................................... 76 Wages and exploitation ............................................................................................ 82 Devil pacts and local understandings of wealth .................................................... 83 Guerrillas and collaborators .................................................................................... 85 Revolutionary ‘Triumph’ and turmoil .................................................................... 86 Early years of the cooperative .................................................................................. 88 Post-1990 experiences of violence........................................................................... 92 Land reform in the post-Sandinista period: the Sacuanjoche Cooperative ....... 93 ‘Not really a cooperative’ .......................................................................................... 97 Part 2: Assistance and progress in Gualiqueme history ....................................... 98 ‘He is our government’: Daniel and the gift of land ........................................... 101 Diego Quintero and the creation of the cooperative .......................................... 102 Padre Bonifacio and the construction of the village ........................................... 104 San Miguel and the installation of the water system .......................................... 105 Part 3: Ethnicity and transformation .................................................................... 108 Indios and indígenas ................................................................................................ 110 Linguistic inversion: the incapacities of indios .................................................... 113 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 116 Chapter 4—Derecho: rights, ownership and entitlement in cooperative land relations ............................................................................................................................................. 119 Derecho: rights, land and entitlement ................................................................... 122 Derecho-as-land—El Zapote ................................................................................. 126 The process of land division within the cooperative .......................................... 129 Agarrando: grabbing land ...................................................................................... 132 Sons, and sons-in-law, of socios ............................................................................. 136 Inheriting derecho ................................................................................................... 138 Alexis ........................................................................................................................ 139 Land sales ................................................................................................................. 141 Land types ................................................................................................................ 145 ‘Los Revueltos’ and derecho-as-duty ..................................................................... 147 Sandinista derecho ................................................................................................... 154 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 158 Chapter 5—Vicio and everyday domestic relations ...................................................... 161 Evangelicals in Gualiqueme ................................................................................... 166 Vicio .......................................................................................................................... 173 Two cases.................................................................................................................. 175 Esperanza ................................................................................................................