Accountability Politics: Power and Voice in Rural Mexico (Oxford Studies in Democratization) [1 ed.] 9780199208852, 0199208859

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OXFORD STUDIES IN DEMOCRATIZATION Series editor: Laurence Whitehead

................. ACCOUNTABILITY POLITICS: POWER AND VOICE IN RURAL MEXICO

OXFORD STUDIES IN DEMOCRATIZATION Series editor: Laurence Whitehead

................. Oxford Studies in Democratization is a series for scholars and students of comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes will concentrate on the comparative study of the democratization processes that accompanied the decline and termination of the cold war. The geographical focus of the series will primarily be Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia.

OTHER BOOKS IN THE SERIES Democracy and Diversity: Political Engineering in the Asia-Pacific Benjamin Reilly Democratization: Theory and Experience Laurence Whitehead International Democracy and the West: The Role of Governments, Civil Society, and Multilateral Business Richard Youngs The Architecture of Democracy: Constitutional Design, Conflict Management, and Democracy Edited by Andrew Reynolds Institutions and Democratic Citizenship Axel Hadenius The European Union and the Promotion of Democracy: Europe’s Mediterranean and Asian Policies Richard Youngs

Accountability Politics Power and Voice in Rural Mexico ................. JONATHAN FOX

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Jonathan Fox 2007 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–920885–2 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

................. Acknowledgments

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This book brings together a series of projects that spans more than a decade. Several of the chapters were made possible by team efforts. I would like to express my special appreciation—in semichronological order—for the opportunity to collaborate with Luis Hernández Navarro, Manolo Fernández, David Maldonado, Fernando Melo, Gabriela Rangel, Gaspar Rivera Salgado, Rufino Domínguez Santos, Xóchitl Bada, Andrew Selee, Libby Haight and Felipe Hevia de la Jara. The ideas that follow were influenced by a long-term partnership with Trasparencia, a Oaxaca-based public interest group that was active for ten years (1995–2005), and by collaboration with the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations (FIOB) since 1997. Most of the policymakers, grassroots activists and academics who contributed to specific projects are thanked in the respective chapters. This book first began to come together in response to a provocative suggestion by Guillermo O’Donnell at a LASA meeting several years ago. The idea became a reality thanks to encouragement from Laurence Whitehead. Tony Bebbington and Kevin Middlebrook made helpful suggestions at the proposal stage. Mimi Keck provided especially useful and timely feedback on the broader framing chapters. Longterm conversations with David Brooks and Lynn Stephen have also been very helpful. I am very grateful to all of them, though no one else bears any responsibility for what follows. The conceptual work reflected in the framing chapters, as well as the research on migrant civil society, were made possible by two years away from Santa Cruz (2004–6). A generous fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars made the first year possible, and in the second year I was graciously hosted by the University of California’s Washington, DC program, UCDC. Thanks very much to my colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for putting up with this prolonged absence. I would also like to thank the following foundations for funding projects that informed several of the empirical chapters, including the Inter-American Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the C.S. Mott Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. I would like to add

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a special thanks to Carmen Barroso for the opportunity to collaborate with a pilot program at the MacArthur Foundation between 1998 and 2000, which permitted me to collaborate with a wide range of Mexican public interest groups. I am also especially grateful to C.R. Hibbs of the Hewlett Foundation for her support for ongoing action-research work in support of Mexico’s public information access reforms. This project made possible the ‘re-study’ of a process of state–society power-sharing that I first studied more than twenty years ago. I would like to thank Shanti Eagle and Aviva Sinervo for help with the final preparation of the manuscript. Thanks also to Dominic Byatt for his flexibility on behalf of Oxford University Press. Most of all I would like to thank Helen, Benjamin and Lucia—their patience made this difficult process possible. Santa Cruz, California March, 2007 The following works by the author are reprinted here by permission: How Does Civil Society Thicken? The Political Construction of Social Capital in Rural Mexico, World Development, 24(6), June, 1996. Democratic Rural Development: Leadership Accountability in Regional Peasant Organizations, Development and Change, 23(2), April, 1992. National Electoral Choices in Rural Mexico, in Laura Randall, ed., The Reform of the Mexican Agrarian Reform, Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1996.

................. Contents

................. List of Figures List of Charts List of Tables 1. Transitions to Accountability: Disentangling State and Regime

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2. Civil Society and Accountability Politics

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3. How Does Civil Society Thicken? The Political Construction of Social Capital in Rural Mexico

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4. Democratic Rural Development: Leadership Accountability in Regional Peasant Organizations

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5. National Electoral Choices in Rural Mexico

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6. Contrasting Theory and Practice: The World Bank and Social Capital in Rural Mexico

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7. Decentralizing Decentralization: Mexico’s Invisible Fourth Level of the State

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8. Comparing Regional Rural Development Councils: Do ‘Invited Spaces’ Empower?

215

9. Accessing Accountability: Individual Versus Collective Voices

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10. Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society

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11. Unpacking Accountability Politics

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Bibliography Index

356 427

................. List of Figures

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4.1. Map of power relations of social organization leadership (Case: Trajectory of the Unión de Ejidos ‘Lázaro Cardenas’) 5.1. Oaxaca: political party presence in indigenous municipalities 5.2. Veracruz: political party presence in indigenous municipalities 5.3. Chiapas: political party presence in indigenous municipalities 5.4. Oaxaca, Veracruz and Chiapas: political party presence in indigenous municipalities 9.1. Diconsa: administration and representation 10.1. Migrant civil society: pathways of synergy 10.2. Mexican civil society in the US: crossborder and binational 11.1. The reciprocal interaction between rights and empowerment

102 132 133 134 135 252 318 321 336

................. List of Charts

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9.1. Targeting of the Rural Food Program, based on poverty levels of store localities 9.2. Federal budget transfers to Diconsa (1982–2005)

251 257

................. List of Tables

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3.1. Political space and social capital outcomes in rural Mexico 3.2. Social/geographical distribution of indigenous social capital in rural Mexico (1995) 3.3. Possible causal pathways for social capital accumulation 3.4. Three cycles of openings for participation by autonomous social organizations in Mexican government rural development programs 5.1. Electoral violations in the 1994 Mexican presidential elections: national, urban, and rural 5.2. Violations of ballot secrecy in the 1994 Mexican presidential elections: national, urban, and rural 5.3. Sources of pressure on voters in the 1994 Mexican presidential elections: national, urban, and rural 5.4. Two patterns of electoral violations 5.5. Percentage of polling places with political party presence 5.6. States with less than 80% opposition party coverage 5.7. States with more than 90% opposition party polling place coverage 5.8. State distribution of the national indigenous population 5.9. Polling places covered by political parties in municipalities with more than 5% indigenous population 6.1. World Bank lending targeted to sustainable development in Mexico (1986–2000) 6.2. Official goals of six World Bank projects for rural Mexico (1994–1997) 6.3. Indicators of project-level enabling environments for autonomous social organizations 6.4. Degrees of inclusion of autonomous indigenous producer organizations in marginal areas program regional councils 7.1. Submunicipal governance structures in Mexico 7.2. Submunicipal authorities: Elected vs. appointed 8.1. Protected areas advisory councils: degrees of consolidation

66 66 68

70 122 123 124 125 127 128 129 130 131 150 152 153

154 207 210 230

List of Tables 8.2. Comparison of power-sharing opportunities across Mexican rural development programs (according to formal procedures) 8.3. Regional councils compared: State—society power-sharing outcomes 9.1. Community Food Council member views of Diconsa rural food program 9.2. Rural Food Committee members’ views of Diconsa program 9.3. Village store customer views of Diconsa program 9.4. Mapping Community Food Councils: autonomy and capacity 9.5. Perceptions of local Oportunidades leaders (vocales) 9.6. Oportunidades’ Citizen Attention program: Trends in ‘citizen demand’ 9.7. National patterns of complaints received by Oportunidades 9.8. Official responses to complaints/denunciations 9.9. Beneficiary access to Oportunidades information 9.10. Comparing Diconsa and Oportunidades: participation, transparency and accountability 10.1. Locating migrant civil society in terms of exit and voice 10.2. Immigrant rights marches, Spring 2006 11.1. Positioning accountability agents 11.2. Repositioning accountability agents

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238 239 262 262 263 264 276 278 279 280 282 283 297 316 340 341

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................. 1

................. Transitions to Accountability: Disentangling State and Regime1

Changing Continuity How can the seeds of accountability ever grow in authoritarian environments? Embedding accountability into the state is an inherently uneven, partial, and contested process. Campaigns for public accountability often win limited concessions at best, but they can leave cracks in the system that serve as handholds for subsequent efforts to open up the state to public scrutiny. This study suggests that the construction of public accountability is driven by cycles of mutually reinforcing interaction between the thickening of civil society and state reformist initiatives. Though such state–society synergy remains the exception rather than the rule in Mexico, the exceptions matter. 2 These processes tend to unfold outside the realm of national elections and political parties. As a result, explaining accountability requires disentangling states from regimes. This study analyzes two decades of rural citizens’ struggles to hold the Mexican state accountable, exploring both change and continuity before, during, and after national electoral turning points. Though Mexican society is majority urban, 34 percent of the population lives in localities of less than 10,000 inhabitants—more than 35 million people (Zúñiga 2007). The focus here is on accountability politics—defined as the arena of conflict over whether and how those in power are held publicly 1 Thanks very much to Jennifer Franco, Margaret Keck, Andrew Selee, Andrew Schedler, and Helen Shapiro for comments on previous versions of this chapter. 2 The state–society synergy approach seeks to identify the dynamics and impacts of the mutual empowerment of actors in state and society. See Fox (1992a), Evans (1997) and Migdal (2001) as well as Ackerman (2004a, 2004b, 2007), Borras (2001), Hochstetler and Keck (forthcoming), Houtzager (2003), Migdal, Kohli, and Shue (1994), and Wang (1999). This approach is consistent with Long’s focus on actors and interface analysis (1989, 1999, 2001).

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responsible for their decisions. Accountability politics involves challenging who is accountable to whom, as clients become citizens and bureaucrats become public servants. Accountability politics can overlap with prodemocracy movements, but are not limited to them. Accountability campaigns often involve protest, but are not limited to contestation. Constructing accountability involves challenging the state, but also transforms the state. This umbrella concept treats the construction of public accountability as a process that is related to but distinct from electoral competition, as will be discussed below. Accountability politics provides the conceptual lens through which this book explores the rugged landscapes of power and voice in late twentieth-century rural Mexico. The research strategy compares rural civil society–state relations across regions, branches, and levels of government, with a special interest in understanding how initiatives for change can scale up, down, and across, between the local and regional and the national and transnational. The subnational comparative method is pursued with institutional ethnography and quantitative indicators, both interpreted through a political economy lens that assumes that incentives matter. To look for accountability in rural Mexico might seem puzzling, since it remains so scarce. Yet the weakness of public accountability reveals more about the power of those who enjoy impunity than it does about the aspirations of those citizens who try to change the balance of power between state and society. Mexicans’ widely documented lack of trust in government reflects their actual experiences—which in turn indicate their limited capacity to hold those in power accountable. 3 By the time of the 2006 presidential election campaign, national political rhetoric was peppered with newly obligatory references to transparency and accountability, as even old-fashioned politicians retooled by appropriating the discourse of good governance. While the term is new to national politics, in practice accountability has long been contested in Mexico, even in the countryside. Revolutionary Emiliano Zapata’s landmark agrarian reform proposal concluded with the little-known slogan ‘Justice and Law’, calling for the rule of law to restore stolen lands (the well-known ‘Land and Freedom’ came later). The long-standing rural demand for the ‘free municipality’ challenged central control, trying to bring the government closer to the people. Mexico’s postrevolutionary agrarian reform ejido communities were themselves designed to be governed by a system of checks and balances—after elections for leadership the losing slate became the ejido’s official oversight council (though this form of ‘divided agrarian 3

See Craig and Cornelius’ critique of the classic civic culture approach (1989).

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governance’ was eliminated in 1983). The students who led Mexico’s 1968 democracy movement insisted on public negotiations with the government, in order to be able to hold their leaders accountable. Mexico’s hallowed revolutionary principle of ‘no reelection’—so puzzling to political scientists for whom reelection is the principal instrument of political accountability—reflects a still-widespread belief that politicians, once in office, have such impunity that citizens will be unable to use elections to hold them accountable. 4 Accountability principles are also embedded in Mexican folk wisdom; consider the proverb quien paga manda, which translates as ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’. This expression communicates a commonsense principal–agent understanding of accountability politics. Meanwhile, new approaches to accountability are emerging in Mexico, both from above and from below. From below, the contemporary Zapatista social movement bridges indigenous accountability principles with late twentieth century mass organization through their principle of ‘governing by obeying’—mandar obedeciendo. From above, in 2002, a coalition of media and civil society elites forged a rare consensus among Mexico’s normally fractious political parties, persuading congress to pass a potentially powerful federal transparency law unanimously, backed by a hefty new agency with a bully pulpit. 5 A remarkably clean federal electoral process in 2000, when the National Action Party (PAN) unseated the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) from the presidency, convinced many that Mexico had crossed a threshold to democracy. 6 But the momentum for institutional change quickly stalled. Once incoming President Vicente Fox proved unable to assemble a working majority in congress, the ‘reform of the state’ dropped off the priority list. 7 Regulatory agencies remained weak. 8 Democratic electoral change at the subnational level—widely heralded as helping to drive the national transition in the 1980s and 1990s—produced relatively little in the way of 4 While the prohibition on reelection is grounded in concern about incumbent privilege, the perverse effect is to leave politicians more accountable to party leaders, who control future nominations, than to their current constituents. 5 See, www.ifai.gob.mx, as well as Fox et al. (2007), Concha Cantú (2005), Sobel et al. (2006), and Villanueva (2006). 6 See, among others, Domínguez and Lawson (2004). 7 See, among others, Valdés Ugalde (2007) and Weldon (2005). 8 According to a recent World Bank study, ‘regulatory agencies are an important set of institutions that counterbalance concentrated power. . . . However, in Mexico, regulators lack autonomous power’ (with the notable exception of the central bank). When combined with the judicial system’s bias, ‘the result is that the regulatory system is not a credible, independent threat to the behavior of large business interests’ (Guerrero, López-Calva, and Walton 2006: 16, 18). The study suggests that this lack of countervailing public power is both cause and effect of inequality, which in turn slows economic growth.

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Transitions to Accountability

innovative democratic governance. 9 Meanwhile, both participants and observers in the 2006 presidential elections were surprised by a broadbased opposition challenge to the legitimacy of the process that served as a powerful reminder that electoral democratization is far from a linear process. Even the most widely accepted national elections are blunt instruments for accountability, far removed from most of the interfaces between state and society. As Mexico’s first democratically elected postrevolutionary presidency came to a close in 2006, few independent observers would claim that it had produced significant qualitative change in state–society relations—especially if one is concerned with the quarter of the population that continues to live in rural areas. As in so many countries, rural democratization lagged substantially behind urban political change. Evidence of continuity in state practices raises the question of how much PAN rule transformed the state, versus how much the state transformed the PAN. No doubt both trends unfolded at the same time, though a comprehensive assessment falls beyond the scope of this study. 10 Several federal institutions have certainly changed. Mexico’s Supreme Court has gained incremental autonomy, especially since a 1994 reform (predating the democratic threshold). The congress is clearly increasingly independent, especially following the ruling party mid-term electoral setback in 1997, also predating the first clearly democratic presidential elections. 11 For the first time, the congress then began to gain limited capacity to influence the federal budget. While the fraction of the electorate subject to clientelistic control mechanisms appeared to have shrunk, partisan efforts to manipulate low-income voters with vote-buying continued. Freedom of assembly improved in some tangible ways; it would have been difficult to imagine the open Zapatista cross-country campaign caravans in 2001 and 2006 if the presidency had not changed hands. The Chiapas conflict stabilized, though it remained unresolved. The Ministry of the Interior no

9 On state level political change, see, among others, Cornelius, Eisenstadt, and Hindley (1999), Rodriguez and Ward (1995), Chand (2001), and Shirk (2005). Comparative studies of state level governance in Mexico include Beer (2003), Beer and Mitchell (2004), Merino (2005, 2006), and Snyder (2001b). 10 For a series of recent case studies that suggest more continuity than change, see Knight and Pansters (2005). 11 See, among others, Finkel (2003, 2005), Magaloni and Zepeda (2004), Schatz (2000) on the Supreme Court and Nacif (2005), Ugalde (2000), Weldon on the congress (2004). For comparison of the political origins and trajectories of other key federal accountability agencies, including the Federal Superior Auditor, the National Human Rights Commission and the Federal Electoral Institute, see Ackerman (2006).

Transitions to Accountability

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longer instilled widespread fear, though both federal and state police continued to repress radical protesters. Exclusionary political practices in Mexico, as in many postauthoritarian regimes, are widely associated with the notion of ‘authoritarian enclaves.’ 12 The term ‘enclave,’ however, may be imprecise insofar as the term implies that persistent authoritarian institutions are selfcontained. Insofar as authoritarian practices persist nationwide, the term ‘enclave’ also understates their geographic scope. For example, while the long-ruling corporatist political party left the presidency, the new ruling party left the corporatist system in place, making de facto pacts with authoritarian unions and peasant organizations. As a result, workers continued to be denied the right to the secret ballot for union elections, and were not allowed to see the contracts that their bosses signed in their name (Alcalde 2006). The state’s exclusionary relations with indigenous peoples changed little, as hopes for significant indigenous rights reforms went unfulfilled. 13 The rule of law remained remote for most people; 80 percent of the population believed that judges accept bribes (Méndez 2006). In addition, the federal government’s human rights record showed a high degree of continuity with the past. Torture remained systemic and officially sanctioned, and the police were not held accountable (Human Rights Watch 2006). Even the generally timid federal National Human Rights Commission admitted that government protection of official torturers is systematic, and that only 2 percent of more than 8,000 complaints led to sanctions (Ballinas 2006). Rigorous comparison of the Fox administration with its predecessors in terms of human rights abuses is not possible because of the absence of reliable independent time-series data on violations, but it is clear that both PAN and PRI public officials continued to use violence against protesters with impunity, notably in the cases of the 2006 crackdowns in Lázaro Cardenas, Atenco, and Oaxaca. 14 12 Fox (1994d), Cornelius (1999), Lawson (2000), and Snyder (1999) address subnational authoritarian enclaves in Mexico. The use of the term ‘authoritarian enclave’ originated in Chile, with Garretón’s discussion of redoubts of dictatorial rule embedded in the democratic regime, such as appointed senators (1989, cited in Lawson 2000, who uses the term to refer to both national and subnational arenas). 13 See Assies et al. (2005) and Hernández, Paz, and Sierra, (2004). The one apparent exception to this generalization was the Federal Electoral Institute’s little-known 2004 congressional redistricting process, designed to encourage indigenous political participation by creating 28 districts with 40% or more indigenous population, within the framework of the 2001 constitutional reform (González Galván 2006). However, reportedly only 15 elected indigenous candidates—largely because federal law continued to give political parties exclusive control over candidate nominations (personal communication, Nahua activist and former PRD congressman Marcelino Díaz de Jesús, December 3, 2006). 14 A long-awaited official report was released that recognized the government’s role in the ‘dirty war’ of the 1970s—though it was censored. The report did not address the killings of at least as many dissidents during the Salinas presidency (1988–94).

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In one of the central arenas for voice—national elections—the rural poor remain underrepresented, not only in the presidency but in the congress as well. Following the 2006 presidential elections, a substantial fraction of the population lost trust in Mexico’s hard-won electoral institutions. 15 The share of the electorate that did not trust the process remained significantly larger than the share that supported the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Yet no single political party can claim the allegiance of the majority of the rural poor. The colors on conventional electoral maps create the impression that the PRD candidate dominated the elections in rural and southern Mexico, but he won only pluralities in Mexico’s poorest states, not majorities. According to the most widely cited national exit poll, the PRD won only 36 percent of the rural vote nationwide (Reforma 2006). Moreover, whether or not a PRD presidency would have produced major changes in terms of accountable governance innovations for rural people remains a matter of speculation. More systematic analysis of rural accountability politics under PRD governors and mayors would provide important leads. So far, however, no independent research suggests that PRD electoral victories drive qualitative institutional change in rural state–society relations. Political parties across the spectrum continue to block the democratic representation of peasants and indigenous peoples, again reflecting continuity over change. 16 Free and fair electoral competition in rural areas is also limited by the lack of access to independent broadcast media, which continues to be tightly regulated by federal authorities. Efforts to shield federal social programs from electoral manipulation made progress compared to the 1990s, but did not reach the entire electorate. A large-scale 2006 survey by Civic Alliance found that 5 percent of low-income voters reported efforts to buy their vote, and 7 percent reported efforts (by all 15 In spite of the opposition’s rejection of the legitimacy of the 2006 process, a majority of Mexicans still reported confianza in the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) after their results were ratified by the federal electoral court. However, the share that trusted the IFE fell to 56%—from 74% before the elections (Galán 2006). The survey of 2,000 households was commissioned by the IFE and carried out by Parametría. 16 A full discussion of this issue is beyond the scope of this study, but suffice to say that the PRD still lacked democratic candidate selection processes in the 2006 elections, and very few peasant and indigenous leaders won nomination or election to congress on the PRD ticket, in spite of its unprecedented 2nd place finish. In principle, the creation of new ‘indigenous districts’ for congress created the possibility of greater representation, but control over nominations continued to be monopolized by parties. For a critique by one of the few indigenous rights activists elected to congress with the PRD in 2006, see Ruíz Hernández (2006). In the Yucatan, one of the few regions where the PAN has extensive rural and indigenous support, PAN leaders accused rivals in state government social programs of vote-buying to influence internal party elections (Boffil Gómez 2006).

Transitions to Accountability

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three main political parties) to condition access to social programs. Indeed, as Chapters 9 and 11 will show, the size of the electorate vulnerable to clientelism and vote-buying remained larger than the margin of victory in the 2006 presidential election.

Regimes and States Mexico’s unsettled combination of continuity and change underscores the relevance of the broad conceptual distinction between the political regime—the set of public institutions that determine who governs— versus the state—the public institutions that govern society and the economy in between elections. 18 Most of the political science literature on democratic transitions and governance focuses on electoral and elected institutions, but public concerns about accountable governance are as much about states as they are about regimes. Within electoral regimes, relationships between voters and the elected are relatively direct and therefore subject to analysis in terms of principal–agent models. In the rest of the state, however, institutional behavior involves longer and far more indirect ‘accountability chains’. Accountability is an inherently relational concept, as Chapter 2 explores in greater detail. That is, X can be accountable only in 17 See Alianza Cívica (2006a), Roig-Franzia (2006), and Vega (2006a, 2006b). Note that while reported levels of vote-buying and ballot secrecy violations dropped dramatically in the 2000 elections, some surveys suggest that they rose again in 2003 and 2006. One of the few surveys that addressed vote-buying in 2000 estimated that 2.8% of the electorate experienced serious vote-buying efforts—substantially less than in 1994, though far from insignificant (Aparicio 2002: 90–1; Díaz Santana 2002). Cornelius (2002b, 2004) and Schedler (2004) found a tendency among voters in 2000 to reject votebuying attempts—a finding probably linked to higher levels of ballot secrecy. FLACSO’s exit poll found that more 97% of voters reported that they voted in secret (Díaz Santana 2002: 110; FLACSO 2001). In the 2003 mid-term congressional elections, however, a survey funded by the Federal Electoral Institute found that 8% of voters reported their vote was coerced, and 4% voted because they needed their voting card marked, to show to political operatives (cited in Ramírez Cuevas 2006). After the 2006 presidential elections, Civic Alliance reported that the secret ballot was violated in 12.47% of polling places observed by their network of more than 2,000 activists (Alianza Cívica 2006b). At the same time, public campaigns in 2006 to encourage voters to defend their right to ballot secrecy appears to have had the unintended consequence of weakening the statistical validity of national exit polls, as the percentage of those surveyed who refused to reveal their vote tripled from previous rates to 14% (Univisión news report July 3, 2006). 18 Cardoso’s classic analysis made this distinction (1979: 38–40). Here, regime referred to the rules that link the political system, the party system and the citizenry, whereas the state refers to the underlying ‘pact of domination’ and relations between social classes. This framework also highlighted continuity in state–society (and state– economy) relations in the process of political regime change. For contemporary formulations, see O’Donnell (2004a, 2004b). On the question of whether the impetus for regime change comes from within the state or from within the regime, see Fishman (1990).

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Transitions to Accountability

reference to Y or Z. Only rarely are those in power accountable to no one, the issue is to whom they are accountable, how much, and for what. Principal–agent approaches address accountability relations between actors that have formal authority over each other, such as voters and elected officials, and elected officials and the state managers to whom they delegate authority. However, the relevance of actors that lack formal authority over ruling elites, such as the mass media, opposition parties, or public interest groups, significantly loosens the fit between principal–agent models and real-world political conflicts over accountability. Moreover, among elites, informal, behind-the-scenes political commitments may overshadow formal accountability relationships. The task of anticorruption campaigners, for example, is to break the principal–agent relationship between public officials and those who pay for their services. 19 To understand the relationships between those who do the accounting and those who are held accountable, we need dynamic analytical frameworks that can account for strategic interaction between multiple actors, including informal as well as formal relationships. 20 The concept of accountability is caught in a definitional tension— is it a process or an outcome? Logically it involves both—as does the concept of democracy. However, accountability and democracy do not refer to the same processes and outcomes. Some analysts incorporate accountability into their definition of political democracy. 21 Such definitions imply that democratic processes inherently generate accountability outcomes. Yet there are both empirical and conceptual problems with conflating accountability with democracy. The assumption that accountability is an inherent feature of democratic regimes is logically analogous to the concept of ‘substantive democracy’, in which regimes that fail to produce socially equitable policy outcomes are considered, by definition, to be undemocratic. Both accountability and state policies that promote socioeconomic equity are examples of normatively desirable outcomes of state actions that may or may not emerge 19 For applied approaches to anticorruption reform that are compatible with the state–society approach, see Johnston (2005). 20 Accessible, intuitive terms for the different parties in accountability relationships remain elusive. Behn refers to ‘accountability holders’ and ‘holders’ (2001). Bovens speaks of ‘accountors’ and ‘accountees’ (2005). 21 Note, for example, Schmittter’s explicit definition of political democracy as ‘a regime or system of governance in which rulers are held accountable for their actions in the public realm’ (1999: 59 emphasis in original, citing Schmitter and Karl 1991). More recently, Schmitter retained his view of accountability as a defining feature of democratic regimes while also casting it as a measure of the quality of democracy, and therefore a variable (2004). Consider Rose-Ackerman’s more bounded approach: ‘full democracy cannot be attained unless the policy-making process is accountable to citizens through transparent procedures that seek to incorporate public input’ (2005: 1).

Transitions to Accountability

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from procedurally democratic processes. Just as the conditions under which political democracies may produce socially equitable outcomes need to be specified analytically, so does the question of when democratic processes generate accountable governance. This reflection leads to the proposition that the conceptual distinction between regimes and states is analogous to the relationship between democracy and accountability. 22 O’Donnell showed how electoral democracy can fail to produce accountable governance, with his influential term ‘delegative democracy’, and his spatial metaphors that capture the unevenness of the rule of law (e.g. 1993, 2000). 23 In addition, a major set of theoretical arguments questions the assumption that there is a direct relationship between electoral competition, representative democracy, and accountable governance (Przeworski, Stokes, and Manin 1999). These authors show that electoral democracy is much more about voter choices than it is about the inherent accountability of politicians to voters. They argue that voters’ decisions are more prospective than retrospective— that is, more concerned about the future than about rewarding or punishing past behavior. 24 They convincingly identify serious conceptual flaws in the widespread assumption that electoral competition necessarily serves to hold politicians accountable for their actions. For the rest of the state, beyond elected leaders, electoral competition is an even more indirect (and often ineffective) instrument for public accountability. The widespread failure of new electoral regimes to consolidate accountable governance encourages analysts to look beyond the conventional institutions of political accountability (competitive elections 22 Consider also multilateral organizations as examples of the distinction between public accountability and political democracy. They do not claim to be governed by democratic principles, but they can be subjected to accountability politics, as civil society organizations hold them accountable to international human rights and environmental standards. For cross-national, cross-sectoral comparisons of accountability campaigns targeting the World Bank, see Fox and Brown (1998) and Clark, Fox, and Treakle (2003). Multilateral development banks are formally governed by boards of directors that represent the finance ministries of national governments. Civil society campaigns pressure the banks to both comply with and raise their standards of institutional behavior, both through direct pressure and through board members from nation-states in which they have leverage. 23 One could go further and question the conventional assumption that democracies necessarily govern through the rule of law. Brazil offers a powerful example of this contingent relationship, since official human rights abuses increased after the transition to democracy (Ahnen 2003; Pereira 2000). In practice, this dimension of the relationship between state and regime appears to be highly contingent (Bailey and Dammert 2006; Maravall and Przeworski 2003; Ungar 2002). 24 Samuels recently tested their claim empirically, based on a definition of accountability limited to voter disposition to reelect the ruling party (2004).

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and the separation of powers). 25 If electoral democracy does not necessarily produce accountable governance, or coexists with highly uneven and inconsistent degrees of accountable governance, then it may be useful to think in terms of transitions to accountability. Such transformations of the state are analogous to but distinct from transitions to democratic regimes. 26 The systematic study of transitions to democracy was marked by comprehensive explanatory frameworks for prodemocratic regime change (e.g. Anderson 1999; O’Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead 1986). Conceptually, these approaches were based on the interactive integration of structure and action. In contrast, the study of ‘transitions to accountability’ is today where the analysis of transitions to democracy was in the late 1970s or early 1980s—still lacking comprehensive, dynamic explanatory frameworks. Przeworski, Stokes, and Manin cleared the agenda by showing that elections do not necessarily produce accountability, though they did not show where it does come from (1999). New research explains the institutional origins of specific intrastate accountability agencies (Ackerman 2006; Isunza and Olvera 2006). Yet broad explanatory frameworks for how accountable governance becomes stronger, or how it spreads from enclaves across entire state apparatuses, or how accountability expands vertically, from the local to the national or vice versa—are still lacking. The problem goes beyond formal institutional design, hence the focus here on voice and power. This book does not claim to offer such a comprehensive explanation, but it does open a series of windows on different dimensions of how public institutions transition from complete authoritarian impunity to uneven combinations of responsiveness and accountability. 27 25 See, for example, Rose-Ackerman’s study of postauthoritarian Hungary and Poland (2005). 26 For example, more accountable states are not equivalent to consolidated democracies, a concept that refers to the stability of regimes. On the limits to the concept of democratic consolidation, applied to the Mexican case, see Barracca (2004). 27 Some analysts suggest that failures of political accountability basically reflect failures of electoral accountability, and therefore the problem does not warrant a distinct set of explanations or a focus on other state or nonstate institutions (e.g. Moreno, Crisp, and Shugart 2003). Leaving the narrow definition of political accountability aside for the moment, this point holds in the case of specific features of electoral systems that block accountability, such as Mexico’s prohibition of reelection. But if one wants to explain the limits of electoral accountability more generally, one would have to address the undemocratic impacts of related nonelectoral institutions, including the social programs used for vote-buying (as in Mexico) or the court systems that fail to prosecute human rights violators (as in Colombia). In such cases it would be inappropriate to speak of the ‘weakness’ of the institutions of electoral accountability, since their undemocratic nature may be the result of their strength. In other words, to explain why electoral competition may fail to generate political accountability, one must look beyond the

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The concept of ‘transitions to accountability’ can help formulate questions that would address the extraordinary variation in the degree to which proaccountability institutions actually manage to limit political power and to sanction its abuse. Empirically, whether or not democratic processes produce public accountability varies widely—across states, within states, and over time. Many consolidated democracies also experience extended periods and deep pockets of weak checks and balances. For example, the USA, Japan, Italy, and Germany are known for tolerating long-term, systemic political party corruption during much of the second half of the twentieth century. 28 In Latin America, the Colombian experience, with its combination of long-established electoral institutions with systematic impunity for officially sanctioned mass murderers, offers one of the most extreme cases of the distinction between electoral democracy and accountable governance. 29 The proposition that transitions to democracy and accountability are distinct is supported by the fact that the seeds of accountability can predate electoral transitions, just as the roots of authoritarian rule can survive regime change. 30 Analysts have long observed failures of electoral competition. Thanks to Andreas Schedler for his suggestion to make this point more explicit (personal communication, March 1, 2007). 28 In the USA, perhaps the most vivid disconnect between electoral democracy and public accountability involved the institutional failure to address the US government’s systematic mass murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the Indochina War. In only one case was an officer found guilty, after the exposé of the 1968 My Lai massacre. This low-ranking officer served less than four years under ‘house arrest’ on a military base, for the murder of approximately 500 civilians. He was carrying out a strategy planned at the highest levels of military and civilian authority; the difference in this case was that a military whistleblower and journalist provided incontrovertible evidence. 29 In this case the apparent disconnect between regime and state can be resolved by recognizing that the government’s consistent failure to protect citizens’ freedom of association and assembly means that the regime falls short of the most basic criteria for political democracy. For details, see the annual reports of Human Rights Watch (www.hrw.org) and the reports of Colombian human rights organizations http://colhrnet.igc.org/. 30 Historically, several major accountability innovations predate electoral democracy. England is a well known case, where the Magna Carta was a founding moment in the history of checks and balances (Whitehead 2002: 92). Parliament gained countervailing powers long before electoral democracy. Going back to ancient Rome, the Tribune of the Plebs dates from 508 BC and was empowered to protect plebeian rights, especially from abuses by magistrates (See www.romanempire.net and www.bartleby.com/65/tr/ tribune.html). China’s Imperial Censorate oversight agency was consolidated in the Han period, third Century BC, and also inspired Sweden’s innovations (Ackerman and Sandoval 2005, 2006). On China’s history of imperial oversight institutions, see Mung-Shing (n.d.). Sweden’s ombudsman office, dating from 1719, was inspired when King Charles was in exile in Istanbul by the thousand years of history of the Islamic ‘board of grievances’ known in Turkey as Diwan-ul-Mazalim. On the history of the Islamic ombudsman, see Pickl (1987), cited in Machacek (2001). The Iroquois Federation’s system of checks and balances is widely credited as an inspiration for the US Constitution (Johansen and Grinde 1993; Johannsen 1992). Even in the extreme case of Chile’s military regime,

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that authoritarian actors and institutions can remain embedded in regimes that have passed electoral democratic thresholds (e.g. Hite and Cesarini 2004). The converse pattern is less well known; innovations in accountability and participation can also emerge before democratic regime transitions, and their legacies also shape subsequent possibilities for accountability-building. For example, proaccountability actors that often predate electoral competition include human rights groups, independent media, and environmental campaigners. Many Latin American experiences show that even under authoritarian regimes, opportunities for autonomous collective action can permit the emergence of counterweights that bolster the social foundations of democratization. This book explores an analogous process: the construction of the social foundations of accountability. While the intellectual consensus on the importance of social foundations for democracy reaches back to de Tocqueville, the question of where those social foundations come from has not generated a similar analytical agreement. Similarly, analysts are just beginning to look for how the social foundations for accountability are built. This book explores this process through the lens of the state– society synergy framework for understanding how public institutions change. 31 In this view, the most relevant cleavage is not between an ostensibly dichotomous state and society. Instead, driving forces for institutional change can be found in the conflicts between contending forces embedded in both state and society. It matters when the forces for and against public accountability can be found on both sides of the state–society divide. Based on this approach, which is spelled out further in subsequent chapters, the rest of the book addresses the following analytical puzzle: when proaccountability societal actors and policymakers both start out with limited leverage over the actors embedded both in state and society that oppose public accountability, the result is a chicken-and-egg problem that requires deliberate strategies to crack. To put the question another way, how can diverse actors that favor accountability, often separated by the state–society divide, break out from a relatively static ‘low power equilibrium’ in which they lack leverage? In summary, the argument here goes beyond the now widely accepted proposition that electoral democracy is not sufficient for public accountability. The idea here is that the determinants of transitions institutional checks and balances mattered (Barros 2003; Policzer, forthcoming). The emergence of accountability institutions across such disparate cultures suggest that their relationship with Western-style representative democracy should not be assumed. 31

See note 2.

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to democratic regimes are distinct from ‘transitions to accountability’ involving the rest of the state. Explanations of such transitions remain incipient. This does not mean that electoral politics are irrelevant, but until we have a comprehensive approach for explaining the determinants of how state actors are held publicly accountable, it will be difficult to determine the relative weight of electoral politics and how party competition matters. In rural Mexico, at least, electoral competition remains low on the list of channels for accountability of the state to the citizenry. Both contemporary innovations with participatory powersharing in governance and old-fashioned protest matter more.

Previewing the Book: Accountability Politics in Rural Mexico This book explores accountability politics through the lens of a limiting case, the relationship between the rural poor and Mexico’s stillauthoritarian regime of the 1980s and 1990s. The findings suggest that even small increments of freedom of association can matter a great deal. The book’s empirical chapters show how a series of reformist antipoverty programs allowed the disenfranchised to engage in autonomous collective action, leading in turn to partial shifts in the state–society balance of power in some regions. The scaling up of autonomous mass membership organizations turned out to be key, and both their power and voice were amplified by coalitions with allies both in society and the state. In the discourse of social capital, both bonding and bridging social capital are needed and can be mutually reinforcing. Though both the reform openings from above and organizational consolidation from below often did not survive authoritarian backlash, those experiences left legacies that could serve as resources for subsequent campaigns, along the lines of Hirschman’s ‘Principle of Conservation and Mutation of Social Energy’ (1984). Less often, autonomous grassroots organizations scaled up without even tenuous partnerships across the state–society divide, as in Chiapas—where societal allies were most important. Throughout the countryside, however, pathways to change were forged by coalitions between communitybased organizations that managed to scale up to gain regional clout. In summary, the social foundations of accountability politics in rural Mexico were built through iterative cycles of conflict and coalition-building between state and societal actors before national regime change. Specifically rural accountability politics are distinct for two main reasons. First, the availability of potential coalition partners from the

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national political arena is limited. At the national level, the key actors that are central to accountability politics include the independent mass media, antiauthoritarian political parties and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Yet they have been and still are either absent or weak in most of the countryside. In terms of potential national coalition partners for rural grassroots movements, their sustained mobilization for a political solution in Chiapas was the exception rather than the rule. Second, scaling up rural civil society from below is especially difficult. The external constraints on autonomous collective action beyond the most local level are clearly daunting. Obstacles include: spatial dispersion, social and cultural subordination, lack of access to mass media (especially broadcast media), intercommunity rivalries, limited access to transportation, and most importantly, extreme vulnerability to reprisals from elites (Fox 1990; Kurtz 2004). Regional elites are often deeply embedded in the state apparatus and control the electoral machinery, the police, and the judiciary, as well as the prices of production inputs (including credit), basic commodities, as well as the purchasing and processing of crops. Regional bosses still derive much of their clout from their control over these mutually reinforcing strategic economic and political interfaces between rural regions and the rest of the country (Fox and Gordillo 1989). As a result of these constraints, the creation of the political space needed to increase the density and capacity of civil society has been especially challenging and uneven in authoritarian rural Mexico. By the time the ruling party was voted out of the presidency in 2000, in some rural regions these pro-accountability ‘virtuous circles’ challenged the usual ‘vicious circles’ of impunity and disenfranchisement. In regions of Chiapas, de facto dual power has persisted for more than a decade. Yet in many rural areas, national regime change was not followed by tangible changes in state–society relations. The point of departure starts three decades ago, under a postrevolutionary authoritarian regime that was world-famous for its capacity to maintain stability. Efforts to build broad-based, autonomous organizations of the rural poor had been repeatedly frustrated by the postrevolutionary state’s combined strategies of cooptation and repression. Since then a rural civil society has emerged, composed of a contested patchwork of socially and politically distinct regional civic transitions. Especially since the 1980s, campesinos and indigenous peoples have managed to build their own autonomous, scaled-up civic and social membership organizations. Their main goals usually combine community-based economic development with struggles to hold authorities accountable over a wide range of issues of public interest.

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Though many have survived in their regional arenas, most efforts to sustain coalitions that would give them national level clout have fallen short. These social and civic actors tend to be wary of all political parties, and to the degree that state actors become more publicly accountable to the rural poor, it is these membership organizations rather than political parties that drive the process. Drawing on this diverse tapestry of subnational rural politics, this book brings together studies of different dimensions of changing state– society relations to draw out broader analytical lessons. Most of the chapters pursue a comparative research strategy—some compare different national government programs, while others compare the same programs across different regions and localities. Most look at both state and societal actors, drawing on the interface between institutional and ethnographic data to construct indicators of change that are specific to the process of accountability-building. The breadth and depth of each chapter’s empirical foundation varies, depending on available data, but the main goal is to open a series of analytical windows on accountability politics, with the hope that the whole will be greater than the sum of the parts. Chapters 2 and 3 continue the discussion of conceptual issues involved in ‘transitions to accountability’. The subsequent chapters each ask a different set of empirical and analytical questions about different dimensions of accountability politics, making bounded causal claims regarding specific sets of actors and levels of analysis. Chapter 2 explores the conceptualization of accountability. This chapter poses some of the explicit conceptual choices that need to be made in the process of defining accountability, exploring some of the reasons why defining accountability turns out to be quite challenging. To begin with, accountability is not synonymous with democracy. In hierarchical private organizations, staff accountability flows upward toward managers who are in turn accountable to owners. Nor is accountability necessarily synonymous with the rule of law—the concept has only recently become linked to democracy (Pérez-Perdomo 2006). Meanwhile, dictators can be held accountable by angry mobs, or self-appointed assassins. At the broadest level, accountability refers to the process of holding actors responsible for their actions (Fox and Brown 1998). As Schedler put it, accountability ‘embraces three different ways of preventing and redressing the abuse of power. It implies subjecting power to the threat of sanctions; obliging it to be exercised in transparent ways; and forcing it to justify its acts’ (1999a: 14). While civil society influence on public accountability is widely recognized, the specific patterns and causal pathways of impact remain underspecified. To identify pathways of civil society influence on the state, the approach developed here distinguishes between

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Transitions to Accountability

accountability relationships within and among state and civil society actors, rather than treating state and society as implicitly monolithic. The framework further ‘unpacks’ accountability politics by recognizing the interaction between local, national, and international arenas. Building on O’Donnell’s distinction between vertical and horizontal dimensions of accountability (1999, 2003), the chapter emphasizes the mutual interdependence and interaction between them. Chapter 3 looks at the iterative process through which the rural poor were able to take advantage of cycles of partial openings from above to build the autonomous regional membership organizations that embody the social foundations of accountability. Originally written as a contribution to the more general discussion of state–society synergy (Evans 1997), this chapter engages with the broad debate over where social capital comes from, questioning the ‘historically determinist’ explanation proposed by Robert Putnam in his classic comparison of Italian regions (1993). His approach can be summed up, in his phrase, as ‘them as has, gets,’ leaving no room for either agency or policy. This study proposes an alternative conceptual framework to account for how, over much shorter periods of historical time, strategic interaction between pro-peasant actors in state and society could create the political space for ‘social capital accumulation’ under authoritarian conditions. In Putnam’s framework, this was not supposed to happen. In other words, in the historical-determinist approach, if Mexican rural civil society started out generally ‘thin’ before the 1970s, in terms of capacity for autonomous self-representation, then it should have either remained thin or gained thickness in similar increments by the 1990s. Yet the outcome was regional variation, with some regions generating dense, vibrant, scaled-up, autonomous associational life and others remaining thin. The explanatory framework brings politics in by combining political opportunity structure and strategic interaction approaches. 32 The argument is illustrated by a comparison of the regional impacts of three successive reformist rural development programs in Mexico from the 1970s through the early 1990s. The analysis emphasizes the critical role of uneven reformist openings for allowing the partial degrees of freedom of association needed to make collective action possible. Chapter 4 contributes to the broad literature on the social foundations of democracy by focusing on the internal dynamics of building 32 Encarnación’s comparison of Brazil and Spain comes to similar conclusions, noting ‘the argument that political institutions matter to the production of social capital has received scant empirical attention in the civil society literature’ (2003: 41).

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scaled-up, democratic counterweights under authoritarian rule. Social movements can often have democratizing impacts, but whether or not they are internally democratic is a different question. Analysts often conflate these two dimensions of democratization, and most studiously avoid the question of whether and how social organizations are themselves internally democratic. This study takes up the challenge posed by Roberto Michels’ classic political sociology puzzle of ‘Iron Law of Oligarchy’, asking which factors make it possible for members to hold their leaders accountable. The case study traces the history of a broad-based regional agrarian membership organization over a decade and a half to identify what turn out to be ebbs and flows of leadership accountability. An inductive, ethnographic, and longitudinal approach documents how the power relationships between leaders and members change over time. Though the organization held regular elections, in which elected agrarian community leaders voted for regional representatives, the electoral process was not the principal determinant of leadership accountability. Instead, the existence of other kinds of checks and balances— participatory subgroups and pro-democracy external actors—turn out to be more important factors in favor of leadership accountability. The original study is updated with an epilogue that explains the organization’s eventual decline and collapse, largely due to lack of leadership accountability. Chapter 5 analyzes persistent exclusionary practices in the countryside, using quantitative indicators of access to the secret ballot in Mexico’s 1994 presidential election—widely hailed for being the country’s freest until that time. While the opposition expected a rerun of the repertoire of fraud and manipulation that characterized the 1988 race, the state effectively deployed a range of levers of intervention in rural economic and social life that, in combination with the systematic lack of access to the secret ballot, reduced the ruling party’s need to resort to fraud by inducing a widespread ‘fear vote’. This study draws on two complementary data sets to estimate the degree of rural voter access to the secret ballot in the 1994 presidential elections. The first key indicator is whether or not officially registered opposition poll-watchers were present at polling places in key rural states. The second set of indicators draws on the national survey findings of the Civic Alliance’s election monitoring campaign, which found ballot secrecy violations in a substantial number of rural districts. The Civic Alliance concluded that the 1994 elections involved two very different processes—one urban and largely free and fair, and the other primarily rural and unfree. This chapter resonates with the increased

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recognition by electoral analysts that free and fair voting is easier said than done. 33 Chapter 6 explores the relationship between rural democratization and decentralization. Participatory budgeting in large cities both drives and reflects a deepening of democracy in Brazil and elsewhere. In Mexico, the government promoted deliberative citizen participation nationwide in rural municipalities, well before national electoral democratization. Mexican decentralization empowered municipalities, but it turns out that municipal governance systematically excludes millions of rural people who live outside of the town centers that usually control municipal affairs. Those villages are most directly governed by submunicipal authorities, which constitute an invisible ‘fourth layer of government’. In some states and regions these truly local authorities are chosen democratically, representing villagers to the municipality, in others they are designated from above, representing the mayor to the villagers. This chapter explores how rural citizens have attempted to hold local governments accountable by analyzing the contested balance of power between town centers and outlying villages, with significant implications for the recognition of indigenous rights. The study pursues three different comparative research strategies: analysis of resource allocation decision-making processes in a representative sample of local rural governments in the state of Oaxaca, comparison of changing municipal–submunicipal power relations in four rural states (Oaxaca, Guerrero, Hidalgo, and Chiapas), and a nationwide comparison of the state level laws that govern this invisible ‘submunicipal regime’. Chapter 7 continues the emphasis on cross-regional comparison, but brings in the role of both transnational and national actors by focusing on World Bank-funded rural development projects. The question is to what the degree the World Bank’s ostensibly new-style projects actually contributed to the ‘enabling environment’ that most would agree is key to permitting poor people to consolidate their own representative organizations. The term ‘enabling environments’ refers to the institutional context that either facilitates or blocks the collective action that is critical to providing leverage and voice to underrepresented people. The study ‘operationalizes’ whether enabling environments were in fact created by assessing the degree to which the projects complied with the World Bank’s own policy reforms involving public information 33 See Bjornlund (2004), among others. On the growing category of electoral semiauthoritarian regimes, see Diamond (2002), Fox (1994a, 1994b), Ottaway (2003), and Schedler (2006).

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disclosure and informed participation by indigenous peoples, testing a deductive proposition about the conditions under which compliance is most likely. The study documents varied outcomes in detail, both across projects and across regions within projects. With few exceptions, the projects did not significantly improve the enabling policy environment for the organizations of the rural poor. Chapter 8 documents whether policy reforms that formally permit participation by organized poor people actually led to power-sharing in practice. The Mexican state has more than two decades of experience with national rural development programs that convene ostensibly participatory regional and municipal councils. This chapter maps patterns of regional variation in pro-poor institutional change in rural Mexico by comparing seven programs, including the Community Food Councils, the Regional Development Funds, the Municipal Development Funds, Rural Development in Marginal Areas, the Protected Natural Areas, the Municipal Councils for Sustainable Rural Development, and the Regional Sustainable Development Program. The state–society councils’ practices varied widely, across programs, across regions, and over time. There is no independent evidence that the majority of regional councils were pluralistic and participatory in any of the national programs studied. Chapter 9 pursues a more in-depth comparison of innovations that encourage voice for accountability within two large-scale antipoverty programs, Mexico’s flagship welfare program, Oportunidades (formerly known as PROGRESA), and the subsidized rural food store network supplied by Diconsa. Oportunidades was designed to break the cycle of poverty by offering material incentives to mothers to encourage them to keep their children in school and to follow basic preventive health measures. Based on the program’s impressively tangible positive results for beneficiary families and its substantial coverage of the poorest fifth of the population, Oportunidades has become a widely hailed international model for what are now called ‘conditional cash transfer’ programs. The program’s emphasis on individuals’ ‘co-responsibility’ with the state contrasts with the state–society council approach detailed in the previous chapter and embodied in the Diconsa program’s Community Food Councils. Unforeseen ‘crossinstitutional disincentives’ built into Oportunidades appear to discourage pro-accountability initiatives. However, program leadership recognized the program’s lack of transparency and accountability mechanisms, and in response launched a new ‘Citizen Attention’ initiative for registering complaints and information requests. This chapter compares Oportunidades’ channel for the expression of individual voice

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with the Diconsa food supply program’s system of regional council oversight. Chapter 10 asks where migrants fit into the debate over how rural citizens can encourage public accountability, drawing on Hirschman’s framework of ‘exit, voice and loyalty’. Mexico’s sharp increase in rural out-migration rates during the 1990s was not simply a continuation of long-term structural trends, but was also accelerated by specific national policy choices. This chapter suggests that many of those who left the countryside to seek a better future in the USA turned to exit partly in response to their lack of voice. Yet many later found a collective voice as migrants—both in their home communities and in the USA. Though migrants are still widely described in Mexico as having ‘abandoned’ their homeland, some continue to express loyalty by exercising voice in their home communities, as well as by constructing a multifaceted public sphere that now warrants the term ‘migrant civil society.’ This chapter explores this new concept by exploring how migrants have forged collective civic, social, and political identities, transcending kinship networks and microlevel transnational communities. A new generation of organized Mexican migrants is engaging with both US and Mexican states and societies at the same time, constructing practices of ‘civic binationality’ that challenge the pressures from both national political systems and cultures to oblige them to define their engagements in terms of mutually exclusive nation-states. The empirical discussion compares a range of organizations that emerge from different migrant collective identities, including territorial, religious, worker, and ethnic-based forms of membership. Chapter 11 explores several more general conceptual propositions, in an effort to contribute to future research that will ‘map’ accountability pathways with greater precision. Empowerment is distinguished from rights, defined in terms of enforceable claims. The chapter also details the problems of ‘low accountability traps’ and the ‘positioning’ of accountability agents in terms of their relationships to state and society. The difficulty of launching pro-accountability ‘virtuous circles’ is addressed with the proposed concept of ‘accountabilities of scale’, drawing on an analogy with ‘economies of scale.’ The ‘vertical integration’ of civil society actors takes into account the challenge of scale, followed by a questioning of the ‘power of sunshine’ to leverage accountability outcomes. These concepts offer analytical tools for understanding when voice can change the balance of power by embedding accountability reforms into the state. Meanwhile, millions of Mexican citizens are weighing the decision of whether to pursue exit instead.

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Annex: Methodological Note34 This note makes explicit some of the methodological principles shared by chapters that follow. Most deploy a combination of four mutually reinforcing methodological strategies: the subnational comparative method, institutional ethnography grounded in political economy, the unpacking of collective identity formation, and the aggregation of qualitative indicators of institutional behavior. 1. The Relevance of the Subnational Comparative Method Within the field of comparative politics, analysts have long noted the risks of ‘whole-nation bias’ in studies that rely on national averages that mask sharp variation (Rokkan 1970). A focus on subnational variation allows comparisons to control for social, political, and economic differences, which in turn allows analysts to focus on relationships between specific institutional changes and social actors. As Snyder persuasively explained, subnational comparison addresses the classic problem of ‘many variables, small N’ by increasing the number of observations (2001a: 94). George and Bennett stress the importance of ‘structured, focused comparisons’, as well as the potential of comparative case analysis to go beyond correlations to understand causal mechanisms (2005). The spread of decentralization has increased interest in the subnational comparative method. The relevance of this comparative strategy is not limited to distinct subnational actors or governments, it can also be applied to nominally national campaigns, movements, or programs that in practice experience significant regional variation. Institutions or movements of national scope are rarely homogeneous. To the degree that the autonomy and capacity of civil society is a key variable influencing public accountability, subnational variation across regions, sectors, and social groups is a given. For example, one recent study applied the subnational comparative method to Amartya Sen’s classic proposition that the existence of a free press encourages accountable governance, focusing on responses to famine. Besley and Burgess test this proposition at the subnational level, comparing different Indian states in terms of their responsiveness to food crises. The relative strength and penetration of independent local media turns out to be a key variable. They conclude: ‘The formal institutions of political competition (such as open elections) are not sufficient to deliver a responsive government unless voters have 34 This section expands on sections of Fox (2004a). For discussion of relationships between normative and analytical dilemmas, see Fox (2006b).

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the real authority to discipline poorly functioning incumbents. This requires effective information transmission to voters’ (2002: 1446). Consider that in Mexico, independent broadcast media, notably radio, are lacking in almost all indigenous regions. Another application of the subnational comparative method used statistical techniques to explore variation in human rights violations in Mexico across states (Beer and Mitchell 2004). Controlling for variables such as economic development and ethnicity, they found that higher degrees of electoral democracy, measured by indicators such as competition and turnout rates, are correlated with lower levels of human rights violations. Another example is Hiskey and Bowler’s study of municipal democratization which finds that Mexican ‘citizens are more likely to participate in politics if they think the process is fair’ (2005: 57). This suggests that it is not clear which way the causal arrow goes between human rights and political participation—hence the importance of institutional analysis, to unpack actual decisionmaking processes. 2. Bridging Institutional Ethnography and Political Economy Analysts often treat both government agencies and social organizations as implicitly homogeneous, unified actors. The goals of both kinds of actors are often ‘read’ off of their public appearances, and their internal decision-making logics are often imputed from deductive assumptions rather than treated as questions that require explanation. This methodological strategy makes the opposite assumption, treating institutions as crosscut by different interests, goals, and strategies. The main rationale for ‘getting inside them’ empirically is that their internal logics may be driven by factors that are not obvious from the outside. For example, the internal logics of movements can only be understood by ‘unpacking’ them, rather than imputing leadership perspectives to rank-and-file participants. A political economy approach to institutional change suggests looking for how incentive structures might shape decision-making, while taking unequally distributed power resources into account. Incentives can be intangible as well as tangible, and they can also have very different implications for different actors in the same institution. An ethnographic approach involves documenting key actors’ actual practices, exploring both how they understand their own goals and their external environment. To bridge ethnography and political economy involves ‘unpacking institutions’ by looking inside them to see how their component actors perceive incentives, as well as how they engage and conflict with each other and outsiders. This strategy is especially relevant for explaining variation across similar-looking institutions. As will be seen in the empirical chapters, in most cases where pro-poor

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institutional change occurs, it reaches at most a modest subset of the national agency that is contested. The patterns are difficult to measure with precision because formal indicators of change often hide informal patterns of continuity. The general pattern, however, is that efforts at propoor institutional reform initiatives lead, at best, to intrainstitutional variation. While actors throughout that institution may appear to face similar incentive structures, in practice they behave differently, which underscores the need to document their actually existing internal logics—as well as to identify the specific factors that block the spread of change within and across organizations. Such an approach is just as valid for analyzing organized social movements as it is for public institutions. 3. Scaled-up Collective Identities Require Explanation The proposition here is that scaled-up collective action is associated with scaled-up collective identities, though which comes first is a difficult question. The classic analytical literature on collective action shows that whenever people come together in large numbers, beyond their immediate social networks, explanation is required. As class analysis suggests, the fact that people may appear to share certain ‘objective’ interests is not sufficient to explain why they come to experience shared interests. In the case of rural social actors, the classic Marxist assumption is that because of the dispersal of rural life and the individualized production process, peasants are inherently unable to develop the broader class identities needed to sustain largescale collective action for transformative goals. Indeed, rural people do face distinct obstacles to collective action. Isolation does matter, and local identities do not automatically scale-up—yet throughout the twentieth century, revolutionary leaders managed to confound Marx’s assumption by inventing strategies to overcome these obstacles to larger-scale rural collective action (usually facilitated by external threats). Nonrevolutionary strategies for scaling up rural collective action, such as electoral campaigns and mass direct action, have received much less research attention. Few studies have directly addressed the impact of the countryside on democratization or the impact of democratization on the countryside (cf. Fox 1990). Varshney shows for India how rural political power is constrained by crosscutting cleavages across economic interests and noneconomic identities (1998). Kurtz’s study of Chile and Mexico argues that neoliberal policy reforms increase the obstacles inherent in scaled-up rural collective action (2004). Lapp’s comparative study of Latin America finds that the extension of voting rights to the rural poor often coincided with land reform (2004). She notes, however, that this is not necessarily evidence of a

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state response to pressure from below, but rather ‘politicians sought political power by extending the right to vote while redistributing land’ (2004). This book’s findings suggest that analysis of how collective action scales up should focus on regional levels, addressing both on how local actors come together within regions, and on how regional actors come together across regions. 35 4. Aggregate Qualitative Indicators of Institutional Behavior When do indicators actually indicate what they are supposed to indicate? There is an emerging package of policy reforms associated with enabling institutional environments for transparency, accountability, and social participation, as discussed in Chapters 2, 7, and 8. To measure progress and identify bottlenecks, reform-specific indicators are needed to measure the inherently uneven degree to which they are actually carried out. These policies can be seen as intervening variables in between more easily quantified economic investment inputs and social indicator outputs. These indicators need to measure two distinct dimensions of institutional change. One involves its scope—to what degree are they actually implemented across a given public agency, or agencies. The other involves the depth, or intensity of reforms—institution-specific indicators are needed to capture the difference between ‘lite’ reforms and those with greater leverage. For example, official ‘pro-participation’ reforms range from information dissemination to consultation to shared deliberations to power-sharing to actual devolution of decisionmaking to social actors (e.g. World Bank 1996). Since participation has become widely accepted in official development discourses, vast numbers of meetings are held with stakeholders, usually without systematic monitoring of the degree to which they were actually participatory. Officials often describe social organizations’ attendance at meetings, or membership in ‘consultative’ bodies as ‘participation’, though in practice such venues often do not involve actual sharing of power. Meaningful indicators would address the breadth and depth of participation, including autonomy, ethnic/gender/class composition, scale, and especially its actual potential for impact on institutions. Conventional, easy to quantify indicators of participation, such as frequency and attendance at meetings, mean little without complementary indicators of the enabling factors that make free and informed participation possible—such as information access. Indicators of transparency reform implementation might include measures of the quality, reliability, quantity, practical 35 For analysis of how locally circumscribed collective identities scale up to regional, ethnic, and pan-ethnic identities in the case of Oaxacan migrants, see Fox (2006c).

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accessibility, and social relevance of the information disclosed. Accountability indicators might include both attempts and outcomes of enforcement efforts. Clearly, most of these indicators are not easily quantified, but that does not mean that they cannot be measured. One classic problem with indicators is that those that are easily measured are more likely to be measured. Ethnographic evidence whose generalizability is difficult to assess is often relegated to the category of ‘anecdotal’. Yet the classic debate between quantitative and qualitative evidence is based on a false dichotomy. Qualitative data on institutional performance and decision-making can be collected on a large scale, from representative samples (e.g. Fox and Aranda 1996). Positive synergy between quantitative and qualitative methods can reveal patterns of variation that would not otherwise be apparent.

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................. Civil Society and Accountability Politics

Introduction1 How do civil society actors contribute to the construction and empowerment of institutional checks and balances? Civil society actors clearly matter, but when, how, and to what degree? Through collective action, the media and the strategic use of information, they can expose abuses of power, encourage new standards of rights, and raise expectations of both public and private sector performance. Civil society actors can also go beyond ‘naming and shaming’, bringing political pressure to bear against impunity by targeting entrenched opponents of accountability. Such campaigns can also encourage governmental checks and balances to act, and sometimes drive the creation of new public accountability agencies. Yet accountability campaigns often fail, and their initial impacts may be limited to highly intangible changes in public discourse and political culture. The uneven and partial reach of accountability reforms reflects the institutional imbalances that characterize many nation-states, especially regarding the rule of law. 2 Yet causal explanations of when and where civil society manages to influence public accountability remain underspecified. 3 For example, while independent mass media can act 1 This is a revised and translated version of Fox (2006a), which draws on Fox (2000b). That first paper benefited from comments from John Ackerman, Scott Mainwaring, Gerry Munck, Guillermo O’Donnell, Pablo Policzer, Benjamin Temkin, Eva Thorne, and Chris Welna. 2 See O’Donnell (1993, 1999, 2000, 2003, 2004a, 2004b) and Méndez, O’Donnell, and Pinheiro (1999). 3 For example, Robert Putnam’s famous subnational comparative study of social capital in Italy shows a clear correlation between indicators of civil society density and accountable governance (1993). However, the proposed causal mechanisms are imputed rather than documented or explained. Not coincidentally, his framework considers political actors and dynamics to be of secondary importance, mere reflections of historically predetermined social relationships. See further discussion in Chapter 3.

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as watchdogs, they can also fail to exercise that capacity. Moreover, civil society itself—like the state—is often divided between advocates and opponents of accountability. The conceptual discussion of accountability has made significant progress in the past decade, but significant challenges remain. The point of departure here is that we have robust ideas for describing different genres of accountability, but they have not yet been sufficient to generate analytical frameworks that capture the dynamics that construct accountability—processes that are inherently uneven and often incomplete. Notably, the contemporary discussion of public accountability has been constrained by its almost exclusive focus on one level of analysis—whether national, local, or international— without addressing the dynamics of interaction between levels. This chapter responds to these dilemmas, though not with strong causal arguments about specific patterns of civil society influence. Instead, this chapter makes conceptual propositions that will hopefully serve as inputs to the eventual development of a framework that can account for the multiple and uneven roles of civil society actors in the construction of public accountability. In order to cover a broad range of issues, in the hope that the whole will be greater than the sum of the parts, no single proposition will be elaborated in great detail. The empirical discussion will be illustrative rather than demonstrative.

‘What Counts’ as Accountability? The first challenge is to specify a clearly bounded definition. Accountability is a remarkably underspecified concept, and it continues to be deployed with a strong sense of ‘you know it when you see it’. 5 At first glance, the definition of accountability seems obvious. However, when one starts looking for a more precise definition—one that people with different perspectives can concur with, and one that can also be applied across issue areas—a clearly bounded definition turns out to be much more elusive. 6 Its precise meaning turns out to vary greatly, depending 4

On Latin American watchdog journalism, see Waisbord (2000). Consider Ebrahim’s critique: ‘definitions and framings of accountability tend to be driven by normative agendas rather than by empirical realities’ (2006: 4). He goes on to take a skeptical view in which accountability is a subset of Foucault’s ‘governmentality’, in which ‘the tools of the trade—disclosure and surveillance, standards and regulation, monitoring and complaince, sanctions and deterrence—are more likely to serve the interest of the powerful than the weak through the control of those very tools and expertise employed to validate them’ (2006: 5). This chapter addresses this issue through the discussions of ‘reverse vertical accountability’ and ‘hyper-accountability’. 6 For diverse overviews, see Behn (2001), Bovens (1998), Goetz and Jenkins (2005), Mulgan (2000, 2003), Newell and Wheeler (2006), and Schedler, Diamond, and Plattner (1999). 5

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on the context and the actors involved. Contrast, for example, political from contractual, corporate, or legal accountability. Accountability is often used as shorthand for public accountability. Most discussions of public accountability refer to institutional accountability, insofar as they refer to power relations between those charged with the public trust and the citizenry. This broad category would include police officers and teachers as well as elected officials (Newell and Bellour 2002). In contrast, in what appears to be the distinct domain of personal accountability, the state or others hold people to account for their behavior as private individuals (rather than as ‘power-holders’). The distinction between personal and public accountability can be contingent, however, insofar as many of the boundaries between the public and private spheres are both socially constructed and politically contested. 7 At the most general level, accountability refers to the process of holding actors responsible for their actions. This involves ‘answerability’— usually formal processes in which actions are held up to specific standards of behavior or performance. For some this is sufficient to ‘count’ as accountability, while others prefer a more rigorous minimum standard, including sanctions and/or remedies for transgressions. These two definitions can be described as ‘soft’ versus ‘hard’ forms of accountability (Fox 2007). The spotlight of public attention certainly can have a cleansing effect—the ‘power of sunshine’ to both punish and deter transgressors. 8 Specifically, requiring people or institutions to explain justify, or just admit their actions can provide a hard edge to the process of transparency. At the same time, the more rigorous approach holds that ‘unless there is some punishment for demonstrated abuses of authority, there is no rule of law and no accountability’ (Schedler 1999a: 17, Moreno, Crisp, and Shugart 2003). Accountability also should be distinguished from responsive governance, insofar as 7 The simplest example involves the personal behaviors of power-holders—in some countries everything is potentially subject to public scrutiny, while in others some behaviors remain off-limits (e.g. the USA vs. France). For a more profound example, until recently, in most societies, intrafamily violence against women was not considered to be a crime. As a result, the police did not enforce laws against physical abuse. Feminist civil society campaigns then shifted the boundary between public and private by means that ranged from cultural interventions to women’s urban–popular organizations distributing whistles in their neighborhoods (Stephen 1997: 138). The goal was to—literally—blow the whistle on intrafamily violence. As a result, not only can the perpetrators be held accountable for previously ‘private’ actions, but public security forces can also be held accountable for not enforcing the law as well. 8 The classic quote is from public interest lawyer Louis Brandeis, who later became a US Supreme Court Justice: ‘Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman’ (1913).

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responsiveness is at the discretion of those in power, rather than an institutional obligation. This decision about whether to include sanctions in the definition is path-dependent, determining much of ‘what counts’ as accountability, yet few analysts address it explicitly. Either way, there is the contested issue of ‘how much’ answerability, or what kinds of sanctions, are ‘enough’ in any given case to ‘count’. This raises the issue of who decides how to weigh the relative seriousness of both the violation and the sanction. In other words, even when sanctions are applied, the question of whether ‘the punishment fits the crime’ is fundamentally a normative one, as well as a matter of degree. This issue of whether answerability without sanctions ‘counts’, raises the broader dilemma of whether one can speak of degrees of accountability. In Bovens’ view, in contrast, ‘you are either accountable or you are not. There is no middle way, you cannot be “somewhat” or “fairly” accountable, and you cannot call someone a little bit to account’ (1998: 31). More generally, when organizations are held accountable, there follows the challenge of distinguishing between holding an entire institution answerable, versus focusing on the decisions of specific individuals within the organization. This raises the problem of allocating responsibility across often large numbers of individuals involved in making and carrying out organizational decisions. Thompson refers to this as ‘the problem of many hands’ (1987). This issue can lead to all being held responsible in principle, which in practice can mean that no actual individuals are held accountable. Some political traditions hold those in charge accountable, as in the case of British parliamentary ministers, even if they were not directly responsible (Mulgan 2003). Others limit accountability to those at the lowest level who are found holding the proverbial ‘smoking gun’, as in the case of atrocities perpetrated by US armed forces—even if those in charge nominally accept responsibility (e.g. Abu Ghraib). 9 Even though powerful transgressors are rarely held ‘fully’ accountable in some legal sense, it still matters politically whether they are held accountable to some degree. Was Somoza’s assassination an example of extralegal accountability? This depends on one’s definition—he was sanctioned, but without answerability. When General Pinochet 9 See Mulgan (2003: 20–2). In contrast to Bovens (1998), Mulgan also distinguishes accountability from responsibility, which he sees as an internal response to duties and obligations, not driven by external scrutiny (2003: 15–18). He agrees that both answerability and sanctions are defining features, but defines accountability narrowly, excluding both social accountability and those broader laws and institutions whose checks and balances merely ‘include accountability mechanisms as part of their procedures for enforcement’ (2003: 20).

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was held under house arrest in Britain, and then had to answer questions in Chile about official atrocities, he clearly experienced both answerability and sanctions. Was he held accountable? Few would claim that the punishment fit the crime, but it set a major precedent when he was held accountable at all. As Bovens puts it, ‘the connection between responsibility and sanction is . . . ambiguous. Even without (formal) sanctions, processes of calling to account can be meaningful and produce learning effects. In the first place, . . . sanction is an elastic concept. . . . (F)or many people, the fact that one must appear before a forum in order to explain one’s conduct is already experienced as a demarche. It signifies that one is not trusted. . . . The sanction is therefore present in the very process of being held responsible’ (1998: 40). This argument relies on normative assumptions that fall apart when the gap between the transgression and the ‘answerability’ process is very large. In such cases, the process of ‘calling to account’ may be experienced as inconvenient by those called to account, but still allows them to, for example, get away with murder. This raises the broader debate about how to assess the impacts of truth commissions and whether or not truth contributes to justice. This debate was most pointed in South Africa, where human rights violators received amnesty in exchange for public confessions (Gibson 2005; Rotberg and Thompson 2000). In short, explicit benchmarks are necessary for measuring and explaining varying degrees of accountability. A ‘relativist’ approach is critical because some partial degree of accountability is usually the most one can expect, given the persistent power of anti-accountability forces.

The Directionality of Accountability Spatial metaphors offer useful tools for addressing the issue of the directionality of accountability. O’Donnell pioneered the distinction between vertical and horizontal accountabilities (1999, 2003; Kenney 2003). Vertical accountability refers to power relations between the state and its citizens, while horizontal accountability refers to processes of institutional oversight, checks, and balances within the state. 10 In this view, elections are the primary institution of vertical 10 Note that state institutions of horizontal accountability are not necessarily prodemocratic, as in the notable case of central banks, whose autonomy is intended precisely to insulate macroeconomic management from the uncertainties of majority rule (Boylen 2001). In some cases courts stay the hand of vertical accountability as well, as in the case of the US Supreme Court in the 2000 elections, or when courts defend minority rights against the tyranny of the majority. In the Mexican case, Finkel argues that the

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accountability, reinforced by civil society efforts to encourage accountable governance. 11 Indeed, electoral competition has been acknowledged to be insufficient for accountability since the origins of constitutional democracy. More recently, analysts have introduced the cross-cutting dimension of diagonal or ‘transversal’ accountability, to refer to public oversight agencies that bring together state and societal actors (Ackerman 2004, 2007; Isunza Vera 2004, 2005). Fung and Wright deploy the concept of ‘empowered participatory governance’ to refer to an emerging category of accountability agencies: joint state–society deliberative bodies for public administration (2003). 12 Within vertical accountability relationships, accountability can flow in very different directions. Elected leaders are presumably held accountable downward to voters, in contrast to vertical hierarchies in which bureaucrats, workers, or soldiers, are held accountable upward in a chain of command. Then there is collective internal horizontal accountability, in which members of a group are mutually responsible to each other, as in the case of the intense bonding among members of the same military unit or sports team. Members of such groups set informal standards for behavior, closely monitor, and then sanction or reward each other’s performance, in addition to their formal vertical accountability to military officers or coaches. Here the term ‘lateral’ may be more appropriate than horizontal, to distinguish intragroup from intergroup accountabilities. These multiple dimensions for the directionality of accountabilities challenge two-dimensional principal– agent models of accountability relationships. The concept of ‘multiple principals’ is one response, but once the causal arrows start pointing in multiple directions at once, the model’s parsimony erodes. 13 If we bound the domain of public accountability by focusing on institutional power-holders, the question of ‘what counts’ remains unresolved. In the case of corporate accountability, for example, the formal accountability ‘holdees’ are limited to boards of directors and president increased the Supreme Court’s autonomy in 1994 precisely to serve as a hedge against the ruling party’s possible future electoral losses (2003, 2005). 11 Mainwaring points out some of the limitations of the spatial metaphor, suggesting that the vertical image is inappropriate to describe relationships that do not include hierarchical power relations (2003: 18). For example, in a principal–agent framework, voters are the principals and elected officials are ostensibly their agents, yet the civic organizations that monitor those politicians are not principals. 12 Before the emergence of these conceptual tools, several Mexican rural development policies attempted to create such power-sharing initiatives, as discussed in Chapter 8. 13 For an application of the concept of multiple principals to accountability issues between nation-states and multilateral development banks, see Neilson and Tierney (2003).

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shareholders. Similarly, in multilateral organizations, formal accountability is held by nation-state representatives on boards of directors. Yet in both cases, civil society actors challenge these boards’ formal monopolies on (upward) accountability. In the case of elected officials, public interest groups and the mass media also implicitly question whether periodic voting in elections is the only legitimate accountability mechanism. Cutting across these different kinds of institutional accountability, is the fact that much of the actual contestation over what counts as accountability takes place outside of formal institutions. In response, the concept of ‘accountability politics’ encompasses the full range of public spheres within which actors determine whether and how to hold power-holders to account for their decisions—as mentioned in the introduction and discussed further below. The conceptual goal is to develop a more comprehensive approach for understanding the possibilities for synergistic interaction between agents of accountability that are inside and outside of the state.

Beyond Political Accountability The study of how state actors are held accountable is dominated by the concept of political accountability, which refers to processes of holding public officials answerable for their actions. Mainwaring ‘delimit[s] the concept of political accountability to relationships that formally give some actor the authority of oversight and/or sanction relative to public officials’ (2003: 7, emphasis in original). This definition has the advantage of boundedness, but its precision also imposes constraints. Many of the actors that attempt to hold state actors publicly accountable do not claim formal power over them. The concept of ‘social accountability’ gets at this issue, stressing that external pressure is often required to trigger the state’s checks and balances. Peruzzotti and Smulovitz define social accountability as ‘alternative forms of political control that rely on citizens’ actions and media organizations [. . . that . . . ] reduce the gap between representatives and the represented’ (2006). 14 In contrast, Mainwaring’s definition of political accountability explicitly excludes ‘social accountability’ for the sake of ‘conceptual demarcation’ though he recognizes its significance to the accountability process in practice (2003: 7–8). His approach avoids the risk of ‘conceptual stretching’ (Sartori 1984). However, such a narrow definition also excludes many of the actual processes that generate political accountability in practice. 14 In an earlier version, they used the formulation ‘societal accountability’ (Smulotivz and Peruzzotti 2003).

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Conversely, the concept of social accountability is also bounded, since the concept is not designed to get inside the state, at the processes that mediate the impact of external pressure on actual institutional behavior. The broader concept of accountability politics offers a complementary alternative umbrella that encompasses both political and social accountability, including the full range of relevant accountability ‘holdees’ and the public spheres in which they try to hold those in power responsible for their actions. As this book’s title suggests, accountability politics is driven largely by voice and power, mediated rather than determined by formal institutions. Accountability politics unfolds in arenas of conflict that are broader than formal authority structures, including political parties, social movements, the private sector, the mass media, and other actors that are involved in determining both the boundaries of the public sphere and what happens within it (cf. Avritzer 2002). These boundaries are politically contingent, especially in regimes that are in transition, and for systemic public accountability issues that reach far beyond specific elected officials—such as human rights, corruption, and the enforcement of laws against intrafamily violence. This chapter explores the conceptual foundation of accountability politics by focusing on civil society contributions to both vertical and horizontal dimensions of accountability. The contributions of civil society actors to the vertical dimension, especially involving the promotion of electoral democracy and the empowerment of independent media, have received significant attention from both scholars and policymakers (e.g. Bjorland 2004; Isunza Vera 2006; Pastor 1999). But civil society actors also contribute to both the creation and empowerment of the public accountability agencies that drive horizontal accountability from within the state (Schedler 1999b: 340). As O’Donnell pointed out, the impact of civil society pressure for accountability of public authorities ‘depends to a large extent on the actions that properly authorized state agencies may undertake in order to investigate and eventually sanction the wrongdoings’ (1999: 30). Civil society’s usual deployment of symbolic rather than legal sanctions leads some analysts to consider them to be inherently weak (Schedler 1999: 16), but Smulovitz and Peruzzotti argue that social accountability can have ‘material consequences’ by ‘turning on the alarm’ in ways that activate electoral or official horizontal accountability processes (2003: 311). 15 Media coverage—or fear of media coverage—does sometimes 15 The alarm metaphor refers to the classic distinction between centralized command control vs. demand-driven, decentralized approaches, as in police patrols and fire alarms (McCubbins and Schwartz 1984). See the related discussion in Chapter 9.

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encourage those in power to follow the law (e.g. Stanley 2005). Moreover, some social accountability strategies combine protest and media influence with sustained legal campaigns designed to activate the rule of law (e.g. Behrend 2006; Smulovitz 2006). Insofar as civil society actors pressure the state from below, they can be agents of vertical accountability. Yet to the degree that they, together with the media and opposition parties, bolster official checks and balances, they are also indirect agents of horizontal accountability. Moreover, where electoral processes are flawed and require official watchdog institutions, civil society’s empowerment of these horizontal accountability institutions also reinforces vertical accountability. Conversely, the causal arrow between civil society and horizontal accountability agencies also points from the state back toward society. When inadequate election oversight bodies allow less-than-democratic elections to stand, the weakness of horizontal accountability agencies undermines vertical accountability. 16 For another example, when ineffective official human rights defenders fail to stop or sanction violations of basic political freedoms, they also weaken civil society capacity to exercise vertical accountability over the state. The weakness of governmental electoral and human rights oversight agencies generates a downward spiral; persistent electoral and human rights violations in turn weaken civil society capacity to pursue all kinds of accountabilities, which in turn weakens the official horizontal accountability agencies— leading to a possibly self-reinforcing ‘low accountability equilibrium’. Conversely, strong horizontal accountability agencies and civil society oversight initiatives can mutually empower each other, through state– society synergy. In the context of this interdependence between civil society and public accountability agencies, one of the main analytical challenges is how to unpack the dynamic interaction between accountability’s horizontal and vertical dimensions. What factors determine whether they follow the path of mutual empowerment, or whether they get trapped in a low accountability equilibrium? What follows is a discussion of the some of the challenges involved in specifying working definitions of accountability. The chapter explores several analytical propositions, viewed through the lenses of state 16 Moreno, Crisp, and Shugart argue that ‘the apparent dearth of what O’Donnell and others call “horizontal accountability” is largely a malfunctioning of vertical accountability’ (2003: 109). They rightly emphasize the central importance of strengthening the accountability of elected representatives, especially since the actual impact of many horizontal agencies depends on the capacity of elected representatives to act on their findings. Yet they locate possible pathways for strengthening vertical accountability exclusively in the domain of electoral rules, implicitly assuming that representative democracy can be improved in the absence of checks and balances and civil society oversight.

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and societal accountability, respectively. This approach complicates the vertical/horizontal framework by taking into account multiple levels of state–society relations—subnational, national, and international— as well as the interaction between them. The first set of propositions analyzes intrastate accountability agencies, while the second explores the dynamics of accountability politics within civil society itself.

Propositions for Discussion: Intrastate Accountability Agencies This set of analytical propositions about the role of civil society in horizontal accountability focuses on state institutions, with an emphasis on the interdependence between vertical and horizontal accountability. This section briefly reviews several key state institutions of horizontal accountability in terms of their relationships with civil society: legislatures, the judiciary, and subnational governments. These counterweights are now complemented by a new wave of state institutions— demand-driven independent investigative and ombudsman agencies, public prosecutors, and citizen comanagement of state administration. Then, to explore the interaction between vertical and horizontal accountability, the concept of ‘reverse vertical accountability’ is introduced. If vertical accountability refers to citizen power over the state, then reverse vertical accountability refers to state power over citizens.

1. Legislatures, Usually the Most Important Counterweight to Executive Power, Often Suffer Weak Vertical Accountability. Legislatures are usually considered the single most important check on executive power. They play two distinct intrastate accountability roles, one involving horizontal accountability, the other driven by vertical accountability. First, legislatures are seen as inherently having institutional interests that compete with the executive, which undergirds the proaccountability potential of the separation of powers. 17 However, this potential holds primarily for presidential systems, when the separation of powers is often characterized by divided government. When the same party controls both branches of government, as in 17 For an example of the argument that the separation of powers is sufficient to compensate for the limitations of electoral accountability mechanisms, see Person, Roland, and Tabellini (1997).

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parliamentary systems, legislatures’ oversight roles are highly contingent. Moreover, while legislators may have an interest in bolstering their autonomy from the executive, they also have an incentive to gain autonomy from voters as well (Manin, Przeworski, and Stokes 1999). Legislatures’ second main accountability potential depends on their capacity to represent a more diverse array of interests than the executive, based on the assumption that legislatures are more permeable and responsive to organized citizens. In practice, the accountability of legislators to voters depends on their specific institutional characteristics, including exclusionary or imbalanced districting, party list rules, institutional capacity for autonomous oversight of the executive, as well as historical gender and racial constraints on suffrage. In systems where political parties control the lists that determine who is actually elected to legislatures, the ‘accountability chain’ between voters and elected representatives includes so many links that vertical accountability potential is weak. Some of the constraints on legislatures’ accountability to voters apply to elected executives as well. Civil society capacity to hold legislators accountable for their decisions is further reduced where reelection is prohibited, as in Mexico. 18 Many conclude that congressional representatives are more accountable to their parties than to voters. 19 Legislative accountability is also limited by the high information costs required. Voter capacity to monitor decisions made by elected representatives in faraway national capitals and often behind closed doors is quite limited. This is one area where civil society monitoring groups make important contributions to vertical accountabilty, by making the investments needed to lower the information costs that would otherwise prevent the public from making informed decisions. 20 Here 18 In Mexico, ‘no reelection’ is a nearly untouchable ‘third rail’ in politics, because of its association with the 1910 revolutionary challenge to the Díaz dictatorship. Yet that demand turns out to have been limited to the presidency; until 1933 congressional representatives could be reelected. Their loss of that right was a little-known key step in the the weakening of the legislature and the centralization of power in the presidency (Valdés Ugalde 2007). 19 According to a 2003 survey carried out by the Autonomous Metropolitan University, with support from the Federal Election Institute, 72.5% of Mexican voters reported they did not support any party, 63% had little or no trust in them, and 57.5% reported they did not know what congressional representatives do (Urrutia 2005). Only 0.9% affirmed that the function of congressional representatives is to represent the citizens. 20 The political impacts of information costs are also strongly influenced by the mix of state vs. market factors that determine access to media during election campaigns. Where campaign access to the mass media depends primarily on private money, then private investors are in a position to hold political parties accountable in exchange for their contributions. Efforts to limit the influence of private money on elections by regulating contributions, the ‘supply side’ are inherently limited. The ‘demand side’ is a more promising arena of intervention—limiting political parties’ need for funds by

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the operative catch-phrase is ‘follow the money’, for both the private resources that finance campaigns and the public resources that elected officials allocate. Civil society actors and opposition political parties have different interests in terms of the empowerment of legislatures as counterweights to executive authorities. Both have a stake in monitoring the government in power, but for most opposition parties, this interest is primarily instrumental. Their leaders do not necessarily want to institutionalize such checks and balances, in case they should come to power in the future. 21

2. Judiciaries, One of the Most Important Horizontal Accountability Counterweights, are Rarely Designed to be Vertically Accountable to Civil Society. The rule of law is not a sufficient condition for democracy, especially in the absence of institutional guarantees that it will be applied consistently, independent of political and economic interests. While regimes of many kinds rule with law, only those with independent judiciaries have rule of law, in the sense of applying the rules fairly and consistently. Yet, seen through an accountability lens, judicial institutional autonomy can be a two-edged sword. Most judicial accountability mechanisms depend primarily on self-monitoring and regulation, rather than on external oversight. This creates a chicken-and-egg problem, insofar as a high level of institutional consolidation is needed for judicial self-regulation to be effective, yet without self-regulation, it is difficult to achieve effective consolidation. Several governments have tried to compensate for the weaknesses of their judicial systems by creating additional horizontal accountability agencies, but so far with very uneven results, ranging from little impact in Central America to notable initiatives in Peru and signs of significant institutional change in Brazil (e.g. Dodson and Jackson 2004; Sadek and Batista Cavalcanti 2003; Uggla 2004). In spite of their formal-institutional autonomy, judicial systems can be responsive to civil society initiatives, which in turn can encourage efforts to transform them (Méndez, O’Donnell, and Pinheiro 1999). eliminating their major expense, which is the cost of buying broadcast media time. Brazil’s laws limit the influence of money in politics by defining campaign access to prime time TV as a public good, removing it from the private market, and assigning time in proportion to past election results. See also Fox (2001). 21 The recent Brazilian experience suggests that even legislators from the most programmatic, ideological parties are unlikely to be disposed to contribute to holding the executive branch accountable, if they belong to the same party.

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Investments in such initiatives are critical because the costs of making even moderately responsive legal systems ‘work’ consistently are inevitably high. Where the courts are relatively autonomous, they can serve to weaken obstacles to accountability that are entrenched in the legislative or executive branches, as in the case of the US civil rights movement. Two major questions remain, however. First, what factors permit the courts to gain the willingness to exercise the autonomy needed to play their role as horizontal counterweight? Second, what factors determine the judiciary’s capacity to enforce the law? Beer’s comparison of Mexican states finds judicial performance to be positively correlated with levels of electoral competition (2005). Pérez-Perdomo’s assessment of the meager impacts of judicial reform so far in Latin America leads him to focus more on lawyers as potential agents of accountability and the rule of law (2006). Postauthoritarian conflicts over whether to prosecute human rights violators are among the most notable cases of politically contingent enforcement of the rule of law. For example, Chile’s judicial system for long did little to hold official human rights abusers accountable. However, after a wave of international civil society initiatives that successfully provoked action by judicial authorities in Europe, Chile’s judicial system began to defend the rule of law by defining past disappearances as crimes subject to prosecution. However, Chile’s judiciary was already internally divided, and international pressure appears to have tipped the internal balance. The judiciary’s institutional powers did not change, but its willingness and capacity to act did, at least for a minority of judges. An approach that focused on formal institutional powers would not be able to explain this process, since it was a shift in the informal balance of power between actors that led to a small but significant change in the correlation of institutional forces. 22

3. Federalism’s Contribution to Accountability does not Fit the Vertical/Horizontal Approach. Much discussion of political accountability implicitly assumes that regimes are nationally homogeneous, neglecting the checks and balances built into intergovernmental power relations through federal systems. Yet in federal systems, local, provincial, and national governments are supposed to exercise checks and balances on one another. In 22

For details, see Policzer (forthcoming).

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other words, relationships between different levels of government look vertical but can also be understood as horizontal. Each level of government usually includes its own combination of horizontal and vertical dimensions, insofar as provinces have both governors and legislatures, and municipalities have both mayors and councils. However, in some regimes these relationships are very imbalanced, reproducing executive centralization at subnational levels, as in Mexico (see Chapter 7). Brazil’s state and city governments also combine a high degree of autonomy from the federal government with weak local legislatures. 23 Insofar as each level of government has their own accountability relationships, yet each one is a de facto check on another, federal systems involve ‘multiple principals.’ Decentralization is widely assumed to bring government closer to the people, and therefore to encourage vertical accountability at subnational levels. Moreover, some subnational governments are the size of small or medium-sized countries, so the information costs for monitoring them remain very high—for central governments as well as for citizens. Central governments share resources and power with subnational governments ostensibly based on certain standards for their use, which raises challenges in terms of monitoring and enforcement of those standards. Conversely, sub-national capacity to monitor and limit central government discretion is also a crucial variable in the balance of power. 24 Where subnational governments remain undemocratic in spite of regime transitions at the national level, policies that promote decentralization are likely to strengthen authoritarian elites, at least in the short to medium term. If authoritarian subnational regimes manage to block federal intervention, they can coexist with regimes that are considered democratic at the national level—while tilting the national political center of gravity to the right. Gibson refers to authoritarian strategies to pursue de facto subnational autonomy as ‘boundary control’, with the Oaxacan experience as a central case (2006). 25 Entrenched subnational authoritarian rulers challenge 23 The low horizontal accountability of Brazil’s subnational governments is related to the power relations between federal legislators and subnational executives, a pattern in which national congresspeople tend to be more accountable to governors and mayors than to their constituents (Mainwaring and Samuels 2000). 24 See Gibson on the relationship between federalism and democracy (2004). In contrast to the usual assumption that decentralization has a democratic character, nondemocratic regimes can have their own motives for promoting decentralization (Eaton 2004, 2006). Montero and Samuels focus on the interaction between national and subnational political elites, across regime type, as the key determinant of decentralization processes (2004: 11). 25 This case is explored further in Chapter 11.

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national authorities to choose between respect for the horizontal accountability embodied in the federal system of relatively autonomous sub-national governments, versus defense of vertical accountability, to citizens deprived of their democratic rights. When federal and subnational government conflict over whose rules apply, the outcomes are determined as much by politics as by law. Even where local governments are not overtly authoritarian, powerful institutional incentives may encourage exclusion of constituencies that they are supposed to represent. For example, in municipalities that include both urban and rural areas—as many rural municipalities do—urban residents tend to be better off, better organized, and therefore more influential in municipal decision-making, thereby excluding representation of rural residents—especially if they are also ethnically and economically subordinate. In the context of this tendency toward local centralization of political, economic, and social power in town centers, the public accountability of rural local government has a reciprocal relationship with the nature and density of civil society at the grassroots level. As discussed in Chapter 7, broadbased community participation can encourage more transparent and accountable local governance, while top-down rule by local elites can stifle the potential for vibrant civil society. 26 A comprehensive framework for understanding the relationship between federalism and horizontal accountability would need to address the reciprocal interaction between levels of governance. First, one can safely assume that degrees of horizontal accountability of subnational governments vary widely within most national systems. Second, this variation may include some that are more accountable (in both vertical and horizontal terms) than the national government, and others that are less accountable than the national government. Third, the balance of power between levels of government is both cause and effect of this variation in subnational accountability, but we know relatively little about the nature of this interaction. For example, under what circumstances do ‘advanced’ subnational governments induce multiplier effects, versus when they remain isolated enclaves of accountability? Programmatic political parties, dense civil societies, and independent media are crucial for explaining the sustainability and replication of innovation, but they are not sufficient. 27 At the 26 For analysis of this dynamic in the allocation of rural municipal social funds, see Fox and Aranda (1996a, b) and Fox (2002a). 27 Brazil’s widely admired local participatory councils are one of the best-known genres of Latin American local government accountability institution that has both been sustained and replicated, both nationally and internationally. These councils involve elected delegates and play both deliberative and oversight roles, and therefore combine

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other extreme, under what circumstances do subnational governments that lag behind progress at the national level catch up? If subnational political elites manage to exclude part of the electorate from democratic competition, then national political leaders will have little incentive or capacity to be accountable to those citizens. Electoral systems that overrepresent the least accountable regions in national politics exacerbate this problem, as in Brazil (Snyder and Samuels 2004).

4. ‘Upward Vertical Accountability’ from Citizens to the State also Matters, Both for Authoritarian and Democratic Regimes. Citizenship is supposed to combine a balance of rights and duties. Sometimes, however, state actors can deny citizen rights by holding them unduly ‘accountable’ for political dissent, insubordination, or culturally proscribed activities. Clientelism, for example, refers to relationships of political subordination in exchange for material rewards. Yet most discussions of clientelism do not specify what is undemocratic about it, since they do not define the term in ways that distinguish it from the more general category of political bargaining between those of unequal power (Fox 1994a). Specifically authoritarian clientelism enforces such imbalanced bargains with threats of coercion. Some forms of clientelism enforce bargains with threats of the withdrawal of critical services. In terms dimensions of vertical and horizontal accountability, like legislatures. While early architects expected these municipal councils to empower the disenfranchised, some find that they mainly empowered the already-engaged, as well as having the side effect of encouraging greater accountability within civil society neighborhood associations (Nylen 2002). Avritzer stresses the qualitative impacts of mass participation in deliberative decision-making (2002). Gurza Lavalle, Archaya, and Houtzager’s study of participatory bodies in São Paulo stresses the importance of civil society linkages with parties and the state (2005). The literature on municipal participatory budgeting experiences is now vast, but their relevance for national governance reforms remains unclear (e.g. Avritzer and Navarro 2006; Baiocchi 2003; Chavez and Goldfrank 2004). Abers and Keck’s study of watershed management councils transcends municipal boundaries, taking multilevel governance into account and stressing the question of whether state–society power-sharing bodies have the capacity to carry out their decisions (2006). For cross-national comparative discussion, see also Ackerman (2004a, b), Cornwall and Schattan Coelho (2007), De Sousa Santos (2005), Fung and Wright (2003), and Heller (2001). Melo and Baoicchi assess the incipient dialogue between the literatures on deliberative democracy and urban governance (2006). The apparent disconnect in Brazil between municipal accountability innovations and federal political corruption suggests difficulty with ‘scaling up’. For broad crossnational discussion of the local politics of democratization, see Harriss, Stokke, and Törnquist (2004).

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of the concept of accountability, authoritarian clientelism violates fundamental democratic principles in two ways. First, authoritarian vote-buying renders electoral competition less than democratic, undermining the regime’s potential vertical accountability. Second, authoritarian clientelism obliges citizens to abstain from participating in organizations that will be accountable to them, weakening civil society. 28 Furthermore, regimes that use the allocation of public resources systematically to reward and punish citizens create a form of ‘reverse’ or ‘upward vertical accountability’, requiring clients dependent on such resources for their survival to be accountable to state patrons. Stokes describes this dynamic in terms of ‘perverse accountability’ (2005). These authoritarian relationships are rarely visible to observers on election day, since the ‘bargaining’ usually takes place well in advance. 29 Moreover, when people vote for the official candidate to retain access to government programs that feed their children, or out of fear of perceived possible reprisals, fraud is not necessary. This problem reveals that the conventional concept of fraud is far too narrow to encompass the full range of actually existing authoritarian electoral practices (Bjorlund 2004; Fox 1994b, 1996b). Because the power of vote-buyers depends in part on their capacity to monitor the compliance of clients, ballot secrecy becomes a critical democratic resource, as discussed in Chapter 5. For a vivid example, one of the patterns of ballot secrecy violations most widely observed by Mexico’s Civic Alliance in the 1994 presidential election took a puzzling form: voters deliberately revealed their marked ballots to others (Alianza Cívica 1994a). Civic Alliance analysts concluded that these voters apparently felt pressured to prove to local bosses that they had kept their part of the vote-buying bargain. Where political bosses have the perceived capacity to monitor and sanction, clientelism can be understood as an upward vertical accountability relationship.

28 For broad comparative discussion of clientelism and democracy, see Roniger and Güne¸s-Ayata (1994), among others. 29 Morever, the regions and social groups most vulnerable to these forms of control are rarely comprehensively monitored by civic groups even on election day, as the 1994 Mexican and 2000 Peruvian elections showed. Usually only opposition political parties have the capacity for full national coverage. Chapter 5 details the uneven Mexican opposition party coverage of polling places in 1994, and even in the 2006 elections, the main opposition party managed to cover only 79% of the nation’s polling places on election day—in contrast to the 95% coverage expected (IFE 2006: 2).

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5. Promarket Public Policies may Reconfigure Rather than Reduce State Intervention, Bolstering Levers of Upward Vertical Accountability. Promarket economic reforms are usually associated with the regulatory withdrawal of the state from the market and social life. One might therefore expect such reforms to remove or to weaken the state’s levers for inducing reverse vertical accountability. However, promarket economic reforms may also be accompanied by social policies that maintain significant state intervention in economic and social life. In Mexico, the federal government withdrew support for family farming and agrarian reform, but at the same time also introduced a series of highly interventionist programs that reregulated rural social and economic life (Fox 1995; Snyder 2001). The Mexican federal government continues to supervise and regulate millions of individual rural citizens in ways that are different qualitatively from past forms of state intervention. Three national individualized programs include ejido land titling (PROCEDE), transfer payments to encourage maternal and child education and health practices (Oportunidades, originally known as PROGRESA), and crop payments (PROCAMPO). 30 It is worth noting that before Mexican electoral politics became competitive, most state regulation of rural life relied on local mediating institutions, such as corporatist organizations, and did not require the national government to institutionalize these direct relationships with millions of individuals. Oportunidades is officially based on upward vertical accountability. To encourage investment in human capital, family access to the cash transfer payments is conditioned on behaviors, such as school attendance and health lecture attendance, that are monitored by the state’s frontline service providers. Such ‘conditional cash transfer’ programs are being widely replicated around the world (e.g. Rawlings 2004). Oportunidades is by the far the most intensively evaluated Mexican government social program, including an impressive degree of public 30 The Procampo program involves a high degree of state intervention in agriculture, in spite of its promarket discourse. Widespread field reports indicate that crop payments to farmers have been systematically conditioned on continued, state-monitored grain production, in spite of the program’s official delinking of payments from production. Procampo payments allowed the federal government to induce corn production without having to pay support prices, and the monitoring process created opportunities for corruption (interview, congressional representative Victor Suárez May 4, 2005, Washington, DC). Reflecting the general pattern of government policy evaluations, subsequent official evaluations of Procampo do not include analysis of the program’s accountability processes (e.g. GEA 2005). For a rare official discussion of accountability and Procampo, see López Presa (2002).

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information about program impacts. 31 However, these public evaluations are designed primarily for national and international policymakers, rather than for beneficiaries. Indeed, PROGRESA was implemented without institutional feedback mechanisms for stakeholders to provide input or to express concerns. One of the most important differences with PROGRESA is that in 2002 Oportunidades launched its first ombudsman effort, the Citizen Attention program. This potential channel for beneficiaries to exercise voice is analyzed in detail in Chapter 9. It is important to note that the relevance of the concept of upward vertical accountability is relevant for established democracies, as well as for regimes in transition. Conditional access to citizenship rights can take the form of state withdrawal of political rights as a sanction for criminal convictions. For example, one could argue that the large fraction of minority youth currently incarcerated in the USA for nonviolent black market activities reflect what one could call ‘hyper-accountability’. Drug marketing is systematically punished more severely than many violent crimes, such as killing spouses or pedestrians. As a result, the USA now incarcerates approximately one quarter of the world’s entire population of prisoners. An estimated one in four African American males in their twenties are officially under the supervision of the criminal justice system. This has longterm effects on vertical accountability because in most states ex-felons lose their voting rights, often permanently. As a result, an estimated 4.7 million convicts and ex-convicts are officially disenfranchised in the USA, with significant effects on close national elections. 32 Powerful vested interests are now embedded into the US political system that favor more state investment in sanctions (through incarceration) rather than crime prevention (through education and public health programs). These interests have become known as the ‘prisonindustrial complex’. 33 To sum up, this reconfiguration of the electorate is an example of how one kind of upward vertical accountability can 31

For further discussion of Oportunidades, see Chapter 9. See www.sentencingproject.org and Cholbi (2002), among others. The Republican state election management authorities also purged several thousand citizens with full voting rights from Florida voting rolls, in the name of excluding felons. In addition, African Americans cast about 54% of the ballots that were anulled, though they only accounted for 11% of votes cast. These two measures probably determined the outcome of the 2000 US presidential election, since the state’s electoral margin was in the hundreds. This experience underscores the impact of weak horizontal accountability agencies on vertical accountability. For context, see US Civil Rights Commission (2001), whose report uses the term ‘responsibility without accountability’. 33 For example, in California, the state prison guard union is now more electorally influential than the state public teachers’ union, as reflected in campaign contributions and relative salary rates. For context, see IGS Library (2005). 32

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influence the ‘downward’ vertical accountability of electoral politics. The case also shows how the cumulative results of millions of ‘micro’ relationships with the state, mediated by state and local incarceration priorities, can have ‘macro’ impacts on the national political system.

6. International Actors have Contradictory Effects on State Accountability. Following a decade of nation-state-centric debate about democratization, by the mid-1990s analysts had brought transnational actors into the analysis (Whitehead 1996; Pastor 1999). To the degree that the construction of accountability is distinct from electoral democracy, however, the relative weights of the key actors may not be the same. The role of internationalized state and private sector elites in constraining both vertical and horizontal accountability in Latin America is well known (e.g. Robinson 1996). Since the 1970s, however, the range of relevant international actors has become considerably more diverse. Local and national pro-accountability civil society actors have found their own sets of transnational allies, ranging from churches and private foundations to human rights, environmental, women’s rights, and indigenous rights networks. These local/global coalitions are increasingly recognized to be significant political actors in their own right, as civil society campaigns use ‘boomerang’ strategies to influence nation-states from both above and below (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999; Fox 2002b, 2003a). Sometimes, however, international pressures boomerang against local allies, insofar as local elites use the discourse of ‘foreign intervention’ to isolate and delegitimize their targets. Transnational civil society coalitions have been very influential in terms of raising public expectations and standards of horizontal accountability, as well as influencing related public policies. Nonstate international actors lack the capacity to sanction, however, and their impacts are therefore primarily indirect, through their influence on multilateral organizations or their own governments. Though crossborder campaigns rely heavily on such information-based, media-led strategies, the tangible impacts of such approaches are often limited. The contrast between the goals and impacts of many transnational civil society campaigns provides further evidence of the limits of ‘accountability chains’ that are very indirect, with many links and few to no teeth. 34 34 For comparative studies of the impacts of transnational civil society campaigns, on NAFTA-related issues see Fox (2002b, 2005) and for World Bank campaigns, see Fox and Brown (1998) and Clark, Fox, and Treakle (2003).

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Civil Society Seen Through an Accountability Politics Lens This next set of propositions addresses the accountability relationships of civil society actors. The working hypothesis is that if civil society actors are themselves publicly accountable, they may be more likely to contribute to other kinds of public accountability. But what are the institutional factors that encourage civil society actors to be accountable to public interests, rather than to very particular or private interests? This question suggests the need to explore the interdependence between vertical and horizontal accountabilities within civil society organizations and coalitions. This involves distinguishing between two different categories of associations. Membership organizations, whose main goal is to represent the interests and goals of their members, are qualitatively distinct from non-membership-based NGOs (organizaciones civiles), a term that refers to entrepreneurial, service, and advocacy organizations that pursue ostensibly broader, society-wide goals. Some civil society organizations reach across both categories, however, as in the case of human rights organizations composed of victims’ relatives or community-based environmental justice groups. When discussing civil society organizations and accountability politics, it is important to keep in mind that many civil society actors primarily reinforce institutional arrangements that reproduce exclusionary political practices and cultural legacies. This would characterize, for example, most broadcast media, as well as elements within religious hierarchies and traditional charities. Civil societies also include some movements that oppose the extension or consolidation of social and political rights sought by other movements, most notably women’s rights. Looking at civil society broadly, including its powerful prostatus-quo elements, reminds us that it includes forces of inertia as well as forces for change, as suggested by Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. The following propositions focus mainly on how civil society actors may contribute to intrastate accountability by dealing with their own challenges of accountability as well.

1. The Iron Law of Oligarchy, though Alive and Well, is More of a Powerful Tendency than an All-Powerful ‘Law’. This classic sociological principle contends that the leaders of large membership organizations necessarily develop their own distinct interests, which encourages them to increase their autonomy from the base.

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This powerful tendency often undermines internal democracy within membership organizations, but to varying degrees that ebb and flow over time and across organizations. Chapter 4’s longitudinal case study of a regional membership organization found that the existence of internal horizontal accountability mechanisms can be crucial complements to conventional vertical accountability mechanisms, such as leadership elections. The key point is that in the absence of such participatory subgroups, leaders of large organizations deal only with atomized individuals who lack opportunities to share information and generate alternative opinions, counterproposals, and potential leaders. Participatory subgroups, in contrast, can increase member power (vertical accountability) by monitoring leader performance and brokering leader access to member votes and other resources. With intermediate spaces for participation, representation, and leadership, members are no longer atomized. In other words, many of the interactive vertical– horizontal dynamics involved in accountability politics at the nationstate level are reproduced in analogous ways within membership organizations.

2. Societal Organizations can Encourage State Accountability without Necessarily being Directly Accountable to their Constituencies. In Latin America, ‘democratic movements’ earn that label primarily based on their opposition to authoritarian rule. However, ‘democratic movements’ are only occasionally democratic themselves. Contradictory as it may seem, movements for democracy and accountability do not necessarily need to have formal internal democracy in order to have proaccountability impact on the state. Even among organized constituencies, for example, repeated waves of protest by civic groups and opposition parties drove many regime transitions without necessarily being internally democratic themselves. Armed protest can even help the process; the Zapatista uprising bolstered the bargaining power of groups that favored empowering the ‘citizenization’ of election management, tipped the balance within an internally divided state, and led to a major electoral reform agreement among the political parties in late January, 1994 (Fox 1994c). To mention a well-known Brazilian example, the rural poor are represented primarily by two very different kinds of organizations, a formally democratic, decentralized, left-led federation of rural workers (CONTAG) and a direct action-oriented, highly centralized political organization (MST). In terms of increasing the state’s public

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accountability in the area of agrarian reform policy implementation, the MST has been more influential than CONTAG, but is notably less internally democratic (Martins 2003; Navarro 2000, 2006). This distinction suggests a more general point, that mass mobilization and participation are not synonyms (Fox 1998). In some cases, memberships use means other than democratic processes to hold their leadership accountable. In local organizations, the threat of negative gossip can keep leaders in line (e.g. Martin 2005). Staying home or defecting can count. If members’ voice is not heeded, they may choose exit—holding leaders accountable indirectly if they end up with no one to lead (as noted in the epilogue to Chapter 4). If the leaders of cooperatives lack accountability in their management of economic activities, members can hold them accountable by selling their crops elsewhere (Attwood and Baviskar 1988; Tendler, Healy, and O’Laughlin 1983). In terms of the distinction between democratizing versus internally democratic within civil society, NGOs provide examples that are even clearer than social organizations or political parties. By definition, they are not membership organizations that represent a specific constituency, and they rarely claim to be internally democratic. Yet for some, democratic goals and public accountability are their raison d’être.

3. NGOs can be held Accountable even though They Lack Precisely Defined Constituencies. Since NGOs usually lack clearly defined constituencies, specifying their accountability processes is inherently problematic. From a principal–agent point of view, moreover, NGOs’ formal accountability to funders does not necessarily encourage accountability to the constituencies they claim to serve. NGO claims of loyalty to abstract value-based principles, such as democracy, justice, or environmental sustainability do not make the task of defining their accountability relationships any easier. Assessing NGO accountability is also complicated by their often zealous defense of their autonomy, as well as the ambiguity surrounding questions of who decides whether they are accountable to their ostensible goals, who sets the standards, and who monitors their performance? In practice, NGO accountability is multidirectional. Some are accountable to organized grassroots constituencies, based on clear

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partnerships—though these power relations vary greatly in practice. 35 They can also be accountable to charismatic leaders, political parties, or to certain religious faiths or ideological currents. While some merely tolerate their funders, other NGOs are primarily accountable to these external authorities, whether private or public. One of the most promising sources of NGO accountability is to each other, through horizontal coalitions. One of the most important potential sources of NGO accountability is the possible distance between the high standards they publicly set for themselves and their actual practices. 36 If the distance between goals and practices becomes very large, or very obvious, then the NGO will have a credibility gap. This is a major potential source of proaccountability external leverage because most NGOs need credibility to survive. They need credibility with the media to have a public voice, credibility with grassroots partners to have popular legitimacy, credibility with elites to influence policy, and credibility with funders to gain the material support essential for institutional survival. Since different NGOs often share these same goals, there is an element of competition that creates an incentive for mutual oversight, and therefore de facto mutual accountability. In this sense, the dispersion and competition that sometimes seem to characterize the NGO sector may well constitute a hidden institutional strength. While competitive pressures can reduce incentives for NGO transparency in the short term, they can also create incentives to set higher standards through their own practices. NGO communities in Latin America are beginning to create their own horizontal accountability mechanisms. Their networks and coalitions can serve to set at least some ‘rules of the game’ for NGO accountability. When consolidated, networks and coalitions can constitute ‘mini-regimes’ of self-governance within a given region or sector. Coalitions that set explicit shared goals and carry out joint actions thereby set standards of mutual accountability. NGOs can sanction those who do not comply with these expectations by excluding them from the coalition, with an associated loss of credibility. The more general point here is that competitive pressures, the risk of loss of credibility and de facto coalition politics can allow even relatively disembodied civil society actors like NGOs to be held accountable. 35 For a historic discussion of social movement–NGO relations in Mexico, see Fox and Hernández Navarro (1992). For a revealing critique of NGO–community relations in Bolivia, see Rivera Cusicanqui (1990). 36 On NGO accountability, see Jordan and Van Tuijl (2006), Fox and Brown (1998), Ebrahim (2003), Edwards and Hulme (1996), and Meyer (1999), and www. oneworldtrust.org.

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Civil Society and Accountability Politics 4. Social Movements and NGOs can Contribute to Political Accountability through their Influence on Political Cultures.

According to conventional indicators of mobilization, social movement activity often declines after transitions to democratic regimes, leading to the hypothesis that social movement impact on politics therefore drops off. However, the character of social movement impact on politics is not necessarily obvious or fixed; its nature can adapt and change. Influence on state behavior has the great advantage of being tangible, but impact on political cultures also matters, in spite of its intangibility. When considering the cultural dimension, recall that much of conventional civil society activity in defense of organized interests is largely instrumental or focused strictly on material issues, and therefore does not necessarily contribute to changing norms or expectations of public accountability. In this context, those social movements and NGOs that do focus on transforming political cultures make an especially important contribution to horizontal accountability. 37 Civil society campaigns can change the public agenda, though how and why this leads to actual changes in practices remains to be seen. What is the link between political culture and accountability? Many analysts attribute the lack of accountability to particular sets of societal values. Others attribute more importance to institutions and incentives. The practical implications are significant; note the huge difference between calling for ‘more education’ versus ‘ending impunity’ as the response to corruption. One does not need to resolve this debate to acknowledge that political cultures matter for horizontal accountability, however, because even if dysfunctional state institutions are not caused primarily by cultural factors, the process of state reform may well require changing political cultures. Political culture embodies attitudes, values, and behaviors—each of which matter for state accountability because they influence what citizens expect of the state. In other words, changing expected standards of behavior is key for promoting accountability, within civil society as well as the state. This contribution broadens the societal constituency for the state’s horizontal accountability innovations, as well as reinforcing the legitimacy of the notion that the state should obey standards of accountability in the first place. 37 For more on this proposition, see Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar (1998), as well as Avritzer (2002) and Peruzzotti and Smulovitz (2006). For broad discussion of how to assess social movement impact, see Giugni, McAdam, and Tilly (1999).

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5. The Potential Impact of Civil Society Oversight through Policy Monitoring Initiatives Depends on its Capacity for ‘Vertical Integration’. Many advocates of political accountability stress the importance of civil society monitoring of the policy process. The information costs required for effective vertical accountability are very high. Once civil society actors are armed with reliable information about state behavior, however, they can act strategically to bolster agencies of horizontal accountability within the state. Policy monitoring is critical to identify not only abuses of power, but also possible opportunities for civil society leverage. To be effective, civil society accountability strategies require reliable information about where precisely to target advocacy campaigns. The national public policy process is increasingly entangled with multiple levels of authority, both above and below the national arena. National executive authorities share power not only with other horizontal institutions, such as legislatures, but also with international financial institutions, private investors ‘from above’, and with relatively autonomous subnational governments ‘from below’. As a result, when national policymakers respond to civic and social organizations that are trying to hold them accountable, it is very convenient for them to emphasize—or even to exaggerate—the increased weight of either international or subnational policymakers. Decision-makers at different levels can step aside and point the finger elsewhere, and opaque policy processes make it very difficult for advocacy groups to assess their claims. This dilemma can be depicted as a process of ‘squeezing the balloon’; when public interests groups target one agency, it deflects responsibility to another. 38 For example, many kinds of public policies that privilege private business interests can be justified as a response to international business pressures, even though that may not necessarily be true. This appears to have been the case of the 1991–2 reform of the Mexican Constitution’s [agrarian reform] Article 27. Most of the evidence suggests that it was President Salinas’s initiative. 38 For example, multilateral development banks often respond to criticism by attributing ‘problem projects’ to national and local governments (as in the case of the political crisis following Bolivia’s Cochabamba water privatization). This is sometimes true, but how can independent observers know when? When a national government makes a socially or environmentally costly decision, it may be very convenient to have the World Bank look like it forced them to do it, so that their direct political cost is reduced. The World Bank may implicitly accept bearing the burden of blame, as a political favor to its allies in the borrowing government. In short, public interest strategists need to know precisely where key decisions are made, otherwise their efforts risk being mistargeted.

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The reform may have intended to attract foreign investment, but it was not a concession to direct, supposedly all-powerful pressures to open up the agrarian reform sector to market forces (Fox 1994b). Another notable case involves North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Mexican corn producers. The treaty allowed a buffer period of 15 years before the Mexican market had to open up fully to cheap US imports. Instead, the Mexican government decided to speed up this socially costly process—national trade policymakers decided to open up the corn market in the first two years, by choosing not to collect the tariffs due. Publicly, NAFTA provided a convenient pretext that allowed the government to evade its responsibility. This is example of an ‘accountability target’ (NAFTA) that ‘looks’ international, when the most ‘anti-corn’ decision-makers were actually national (though very few civil society actors had sufficient access to the relevant policy information to know this at the time). Since one could describe the multilevel public policy process in terms of vertical integration, civil society efforts to influence public policies need to integrate vertically as well. ‘Vertical integration’ of monitoring and advocacy strategies refers to the systematic coordination between diverse levels of civil society, from local to state, national, and international arenas (Fox 2001). One can find these vertical linkages either in specific sectoral issue areas, such as human rights, reproductive rights, the defense of biodiversity, or in broader multisectoral campaigns that cut across issue areas, such as the coalitions that campaign to increase the public accountability of the World Bank. When public interest groups work with parliamentarians to increase public scrutiny of multilateral development banks and their domestic allies in the executive branch, they are combining vertical and horizontal accountability strategies. This ‘nationalization’ of transnational advocacy differs significantly from the World Bank campaigns of the 1980s and early 1990s, which tended to link local and global groups while bypassing the national arena. 39 39 On civil society and multilateral development banks in Mexico, see Fernández and Adelman (2000), Fox (1999), and Chapter 6. One of the more consolidated Latin American efforts to vertically integrate civil society accountability campaigns in this arena is the Brazilian Network on the International Financial Institutions, which links leading national NGOs and broad-based social organizations (e.g. Vianna 2000). Their main goal is to work with diverse civil society organizations to bolster the capacity of the federal congress to exercise its mandate to oversee the nation-state’s relationship with the international financial institutions. In other words, they use vertical accountability mechanisms—their electoral clout—to strengthen horizontal accountability at the national level, via the congress. At the same time, they submit claims to the World Bank’s own horizontal accountability agency. The Inspection Panel is relatively autonomous and capable of investigating charges of World Bank violations of its own social and

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Conclusion This chapter focused on civil society roles in the interaction between the vertical and horizontal dimensions of accountability. Weaknesses in electoral democracy can undermine horizontal oversight institutions, and vice versa. Conversely, strong oversight institutions can empower mechanisms of vertical accountability. This is the dynamic context within which civil society actors that favor accountability come together in efforts to strengthen checks and balances. Schedler identified four main sources of proaccountability reform: ‘governments (reform from above); civil society (reform from below); staff members (reform from within), and international actors (reform from the outside)’ (1999b: 338). In each of these domains, however, proaccountability actors are often weak, in relation to the other actors in their respective arenas. Pro-accountability initiatives most likely encounter resistance both within and between state and society, but the ways in which such conflicts unfold are not predetermined by a static initial distribution of power resources. The analytical challenge, then, is to develop a framework that can capture the process of dynamic interaction in which weak actors gain leverage. After all, proaccountability initiatives often fail. Sometimes these failures nevertheless weaken the anti-accountability forces and therefore constitute partial steps toward reform, yet at other times the failure of accountability efforts can actually bolster the forces of impunity. What makes the difference? Chapter 3 analyzes the conditions under which proaccountability actors can set off ‘virtuous circles’ of mutual empowerment. An interactive approach is needed to account for how different actors’ capacities to pursue their goals change through conflict and convergence. The strength or weakness of pro-reform forces is shaped through their strategic interaction with each other and with their opponents. An interactive approach also requires rejecting the still widely held assumption that state and society are necessarily engaged in a zero-sum balance of power. 40 Pro-accountability actors within both state institutions and civil society need to find mutually reinforcing environmental standards. This transnational horizontal accountability agency was created and empowered in direct response to societal accountability campaigns (Clark, Fox, and Treakle 2003). 40 Stepan’s comparative discussion of regime transitions from military rule laid out four possible combinations, based on strong vs. weak states, and strong vs. weak societies (1985). The combination of strong states and strong societies is most promising for institutionalizing accountability—but leaves open the question of where this combination comes from, leading back to the puzzle of how to bolster the ‘social foundations’ of accountability.

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coalition strategies that bridge state and society, to make the whole stronger than the sum of the parts. In the iterative virtuous circles that bolster accountability, civil society, and state actors manage to empower one another and then embed reforms into the state. These institutional levers, such as transparency and oversight bodies, then further empower pro-accountability actors within both state and society, contributing to successive rounds of change. In conclusion, the question of which interinstitutional relationships most effectively promote horizontal accountability may involve more art than science, with the most promising institutional configurations depending on particular actors, times, and places. Perhaps the challenge can be understood as a kind of political Feng Shui—the ancient art of placing things in balanced relationships to one another.

................. 3

................. How Does Civil Society Thicken? The Political Construction of Social Capital in Rural Mexico1

Introduction How do the building block organizations of an autonomous civil society emerge and grow in authoritarian environments? How can state action block or encourage the broadening and strengthening of organizations that can represent diverse societal interests? To explain the production of social capital, analytical frameworks need to account for widely varying outcomes—over time, space, and social groups. One promising approach is to hold the broad context as ‘constant’ as possible, comparing diverse regions or social groups within nation states. 2 So far, however, much of the literature on social capital has focused on societies governed by political democracies. This chapter explores pathways for the ‘thickening’ of civil society under less-than-democratic conditions. To explain the diversity of outcomes within actually existing societies, one must ‘unpack’ both state and society. Under what circumstances do ‘pro-social capital’ actors in both state and society manage to converge? When one steps back to explain the societal outcomes found in the case of rural Mexico, it turns out that diverse subnational results emerged from three distinct political pathways: coproduction between state and societal actors, coproduction between external and local societal actors, and independent mobilization from below. Societal ‘thickness’ refers to the breadth and density of representative societal organizations, and can also be thought of in terms of 1 This chapter is an unrevised version of Fox (1996a). Thanks very much to Peter Evans, Charlene Floyd, Gerardo Munck and Elinor Ostrom for very useful comments on an earlier version. 2 Putnam’s study of Italian regional governments is the most developed example of such an effort, combining cross-sectional regional comparison with study of change over time (1993). For an especially nuanced cross-national study of related issues, see Crook and Manor (1994).

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social capital accumulation. Putnam’s definition of social capital as the ‘stock’ of ‘norms of reciprocity and networks of civic engagement’ helps explain how citizens overcome the classic textbook obstacles to collective action (1993: 167). 3 His work put two distinct causal arguments on the agenda: social capital as potential cause of good governance and economic development, and social capital as the result of pathdependent historical legacies. Most discussions of this study have tended to conflate theses two issues, but they are logically and empirically distinct. This article focuses on the second question: how civil society thickens. 4 One of the challenges facing the emerging literature on social capital is how to build in the role that political conflict plays in shaping state relations with ‘social capitalists’. Otherwise it is difficult to explain why some state actors are constructive partners while others are violent enemies of social capital formation. Most explanations of collective action and civil society-building are either state- or society-driven. On the society side, there is the ‘historical determinist’ explanation of social capital formation, including some who stress social structure and others who take values and cultures as givens. Much of the social movement literature stresses political strategy, ideology, and leadership, emphasizing consciousness, action, ‘solidary incentives’, and socially constructed collective identities to explain how people overcome the obstacles to joint action. 3 This concept of ‘stock’ has both advantages and disadvantages. While sociologists might claim that ‘social capital’ simply a new term for societal networks and organizations, the notion of stock has the useful implication that these relationships can be accumulated, though investment is required, as Ostrom suggested (1996). Stocks can also be ‘decapitalized’, through societal conflict, such as civil war. The problem with the notion of ‘stock’, however, is that it implies that social relationships are basically homogeneous, and that the density of micro levels of organization is an indicator of other kinds of ‘public good’ societal organization. This article will argue that social capital is not necessarily ‘continuously distributed’, either horizontally ‘across’ often segmented societies, or vertically from local to broader levels of organization. 4 Putnam’s explanation of social capital accumulation is very historical and exclusively society-driven. He goes back to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to compare the different ways in which northern Italian city-states organized themselves in terms of local voluntary corporations, versus the way feudal autocrats dominated southern Italy. In this view, northern society started out ‘horizontal’ and participatory while the south was ‘vertical’ and authoritarian. In this view, stocks of social capital grow as they are used, trust and reciprocity beget more trust and reciprocity, leading to virtuous circles of capital accumulation. Similarly, where societies are dominated by vertical power relations, authoritarian clientelism and widespread mutual mistrust in society, one finds vicious circles that prevent the accumulation of social capital. This framework explains social capital accumulation in terms of two equilibrium scenarios for high and low ‘civicness’, each one driven by their respective historical legacies. Putnam concludes: ‘As with conventional capital, those who have social capital tend to accumulate more— “them as has, gets”, (1993: 169). In this view, in other words, deliberate action and strategy cannot create social capital. For useful historically based critiques, see Morlino (1995) and Tarrow (1996).

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From the state side, the resource mobilization and new institutional approaches stress the centrality of rules and incentives that induce societal responses, but they do not explain the origins of the institutions. Most state- or society-centered approaches tend to treat the other arena as a residual ‘black box’. Patterns of constructive mutual support between state and societal actors may not be common, but they challenge ‘one-way’ approaches to state–society relations. To explain patterns of state–society synergy, one must analyze both arenas with an interactive framework that can capture the processes of mutual influence between state and society. A ‘political construction’ approach focuses on recursive cycles of interaction between state and societal actors to account for the uneven emergence of representative societal organizations under less-than-democratic conditions. 5 Such cycles of state–society conflict and coalition-building may or may not lead to social capital accumulation; both state and societal elites can either block or encourage autonomous collective action. The problem is not only in explaining how the accumulation or dismantling of social capital unfolds, but how each process can unfold simultaneously. In other words, the same state can include competing factions that act at cross-purposes—consciously or not—with some attacking societal groups that other state actors support. Three conceptual building blocks contribute to the development of a ‘political construction’ approach to the uneven emergence of social capital under authoritarian regimes. They include: political opportunities, social energy and ideas, and the processes of ‘scaling up’ local representation and bargaining power. First, elite political conflicts have an independent causal effect on civil society’s capacity to organize because they determine the state’s willingness and capacity to encourage or dismantle social capital. Associational life does not unfold in a vacuum: state or external societal actors can provide either positive incentives or negative sanctions for collective action. This point draws from Tarrow’s ‘political opportunity structure’ approach, where collective action emerges largely in response to: ‘changes in opportunities that lower the costs of collective action, reveal potential allies and show where elites and authorities are vulnerable’ (1994: 18). Even in less-than-democratic regimes, reformist officials can create positive incentives for collective action from below, as the Mexican government’s rural development reforms of the 1930s, the mid-1970s 5 For theoretical elaboration, see Fox (1992a), Chapter 2. This framework is consistent with Tarrow (1994) and the emerging ‘state-in-society’ approach in Migdal, Kohli, and Shue (1994).

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and early 1980s indicate. In the case of the Community Food Councils of the early 1980s, these channels for participatory community oversight of government consumer food subsidy programs made regionwide networking possible for village-level organizations for the first time in many rural areas (Fox 1992a, 1992b). Government reformists created positive incentives: if participation succeeded in making the program work, then communities received the material incentive of reduced food prices through more competitive local markets (a public good). The program also provided the community-managed transportation necessary to bring local representatives together over wide distances. But state reformists’ most important contribution to collective action was not their offer of positive incentives. Rather, it was the capacity to buffer the negative sanctions that other state actors usually deployed against autonomous collective action beyond the village level. Official reformists legitimized regional associational autonomy and therefore provided some measure of protection for scaled-up collective action. Both the positive incentives and the buffering of the negative sanctions matter, but the first helps little without the second. 6 This point reinforces Tversky and Kahneman’s emphasis on ‘loss aversion’ for explaining collective action. They stress that potential actors fear losses more than they value gains, and the related importance of subjective framing of contingencies and outcomes (1990). 7 The second conceptual building block of the political construction approach involves taking actors, their ideas and motivations into account to explain how people respond to political opportunities (or threats). Historical legacies certainly shape the ways in which actors respond to positive and negative incentives for collective action, but they do not respond in automatic or unidirectional ways. Contingent ideas, leadership, and action influence whether grievances are defined as shared and whether problems are interpreted as subject to change. 8 Hirschman’s ‘Principle of Conservation and Mutation of Social Energy’ is useful here (1984). Hirschman acknowledges that most of the time, failed efforts at collective action lead people to turn away 6 One problem here is that political science lacks conceptual explanations of the determinants of varying levels of state repression against citizens. The most common framework is a ‘pressure-response’ model of authoritarian regimes, where increased societal mobilization provokes state efforts to control society. As Stanley points out, however, comparable levels of societal mobilization can face vastly differing levels of state repression, whether one looks over time in the same country or at similar moments in different countries (1996). He combines state–society interaction with intrastate politics, interests, and ideologies to explain state terror in El Salvador. 7 Thanks to Elinor Ostrom for suggesting this reference. She also observed that ‘fear of retribution may be weighted more heavily than the “real” punishments that can be meted out’. 8 See McAdam’s ‘political process’ approach (1982).

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from public life—Putnam’s ‘low civicness’ equilibrium state. But since Hirschman is more interested in explaining collective action than its absence, he looks for the exceptions. First, he stresses the role of external aggression in provoking resistance, which is well known, but then he turns to cases where such unifying factors are not present. After studying a wide range of community development groups in Latin America, he found that many of them shared one striking characteristic: when we looked into the life histories of the people principally involved, we found that most of them had previously participated in other, generally more ‘radical’ experiences of collective action, that had generally not achieved their objective, often because of official repression. It is as though the protagonists’ earlier aspiration for social change, their bent for collective action, had not really left them even though the movements in which they had participated may have aborted or petered out. Later on, this ‘social energy’ becomes active again but is likely to take some very different form (1984: 42–3).

The usual response to failed collective action is demobilization, but it turns out that those initiatives that people manage to sustain in inhospitable environments are also often responses to past failures. For Hirschman, success can come from previous failure, whereas for Putnam only past success explains success. But why does civic failure lead to frustration and powerlessness in some cases, while it is ‘conserved and mutated’ into constructive social energy in others? Perhaps freedom of association is both cause and effect of society-building— once one gets a little, one can get more, as with Putnam’s virtuous circles of social capital formation. Yet it is also possible that a little bit of freedom of association leads threatened elites to murder local leaders. Then what happens? When does repression lead to a downward spiral of demobilization, versus the many cases, as in Chiapas, where the murder of local leaders inspires others to take their place and mobilization continues. In other words, repression cuts both ways, simultaneously facilitating collective action by sharpening the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ distinction, while increasing the price to be paid for it. The impact, on balance, is politically contingent. Political ideas and culture may make the difference here, though, as is often the case, ideas are granted causal weight when more tangible factors cannot explain the outcome. 9 Nevertheless, a more dynamic, actor-oriented approach to collective action gives more weight to the social capitalists, their motivations, and their decisions about whether and how to persist in spite of the odds against them. Leaders are those who pay the ‘irrational’ start-up costs of mobilization, long before collective action 9

I am grateful to Gerardo Munck for this observation.

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reaches the critical mass needed to produce any tangible benefits for participants (Oliver, Marwell, and Texeira 1985). The third building block in the political construction approach unpacks social capital and highlights the importance of those organizations whose efforts create opportunities for others to engage in autonomous collective action. Social capital is not homogeneous: some kinds of organizations have more public good ‘spillover effects’ than others. The premise here is that bargaining power is necessary to create respect for freedom for association, which in turn requires some degree of ‘scaling up’ of organization beyond the most local level. 10 For some analysts, the nature of the unit of social capital is not relevant. For Putnam, the microunits of choral societies and soccer clubs are taken to be indicators of the stock of social capital spread throughout society. This view assumes that social capital is ‘continuously distributed’ both horizontally and vertically. If this assumption were valid, then many of Mexico’s poorest regions would be considered to have large stocks of social capital. They are covered with strong horizontal associational webs at the most local level. Yet these are precisely the country’s poorest regions, with the worst systems of governance in terms of both process and performance. The answers lie in both society and the state. On the societal side, strong local solidarities may or may not extend beyond villages or neighborhoods. 11 Nagengast and Kearney’s study of the social construction of indigenous ethnicity showed both the local confines of village-based identities and the importance of collective action in encouraging broader shared identities (1990). The state also plays an active role in either blocking or promoting the expansion of solidary ties beyond the village level. 12 Most importantly, state actors have regularly used force to deny indigenous Mexican communities the opportunity to scale up and form organizations of sufficient scale to defend their interests. 13 In short, social capital cannot be assumed to be continuously distributed, especially where freedom of association is not guaranteed. Scaling up is especially important for representing the interests of dispersed populations, since they have the greatest difficulty defining common interests and are the most vulnerable to ‘divide and conquer’ 10

For a related but different use of the concept of ‘scaling up’, see Annis (1988). As Granovetter pointed out, local groups with strong internal ties may lack links with nearby counterparts, blocking the perception of broader shared interests even in the face of an immediate threat (1973). 12 Some neighboring villages have long histories of direct conflict, especially over land rights, though Dennis has shown that the state systematically encouraged such conflicts since the colonial period (1987). 13 On human rights violations in rural Mexico, see, among others, Americas Watch (1990) and Amnesty International (1986). 11

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14

efforts from above. If they do develop scaled-up organizations, they are then among the most vulnerable to the ‘iron law of oligarchy’, since dispersed populations have little capacity to monitor the activities of their leadership and therefore have little capacity to hold them accountable. 15 The category of ‘region’ is defined here as it is used by rural social movements in Mexico—regional movements usually involve dozens of villages, often covering several municipalities, but usually do not cover an entire state. 16 Regional organizations are especially important for representing the interests of dispersed and oppressed groups for three main reasons: overcoming locally confined solidarities, representative bargaining power, and access to information. 1. There is no reason to assume that community-based horizontal associations have ties with other communities. Dense concentrations of social capital may well be highly segmented across spatial and ethnic divides. Regional organizations can facilitate collective action in defense of shared interests by helping to overcome the socially constructed constraints of locally confined solidarities. 2. Strictly local organizations usually lack the clout to offset concentrated elite power, while national organizations are usually less representative of local diversity. Regional groups potentially combine 14 Olson made this point when discussing how the number of producers of certain commodities shaped their prospects for collective action, since large numbers of dispersed farmers of homogeneous crops would face much greater free rider problems than concentrated numbers of producers of specialized crops (1985). Marx made a similar observation long before, however, in his famous comment on the collective action problems of smallholders. Their family-based mode of production, poverty, and poor means of communication, ‘isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. . . . In so far as there is merely a local interconnection among these small peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no unity, no national union and no political organization, they . . . cannot represent themselves’ (from ‘the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, cited in Tucker 1978: 608). Except for the assertion that the peasant mode of production makes self-representation inherently impossible, the other structural obstacles to collective action Marx cites are remarkably Olsonian. 15 The conventional political science view grants political parties the role of aggregating diverse interests, but in practice few political parties have actually represented the most disenfranchised members of their societies, especially in the case of ethnic minorities. Even those few programmatic parties whose ideologies drive them to attempt to represent the most excluded are susceptible to the top-down, bureaucratizing tendencies of the ‘iron law of oligarchy’. On the problems of representation of peasants within radical and reformist political parties in Latin America, see Fox (1992c). For an analysis of the determinants of the ebbs and flows of the ‘iron law of oligarchy’ and degrees of internal democracy in a prototypical regional peasant union in Mexico, see Chapter 4. 16 Since the early 1980s, Mexican regional organizations have been forming statewide and national networks that united around common socioeconomic interests while respecting each other’s political differences and internal autonomy (Fox and Gordillo 1989).

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the strengths of scaling up with closer ties to local bases. Horizontal networks within and between such regional groups, in turn, have the capacity to offset the threat of the ‘iron law of oligarchy’ inherent in vertical pyramidal structures. 3. In societies where the vast majority lack access to independent mass media, autonomous regional organizations are often the only means for transmitting the information about shared problems and common enemies that is the precondition for broader interest articulation and collective action. Regional collective action may be necessary to offset the power of authoritarian elites, but these are precisely the kind of movements most likely to be targeted for repression. To sum up, historical legacies of horizontal organization are necessary but not sufficient to accumulate social capital. The scale of horizontal organization matters as well, and this is in turn conditioned largely by the political opportunity structure (which determines the availability of external allies to provide support and to offset the threat of repression).

A Political Construction Approach17 These three conceptual building blocks—political opportunities, social energy, and scaling up—can be assembled into an iterative ‘political construction’ approach to the emergence and consolidation of social capital under authoritarian rule. This framework involves cumulative cycles of conflict as well as cooperation. The key conflict is between the promoters and the enemies of horizontal collective action, both usually embedded in the state as well as society. In this approach, horizontal social organizations are able to grow and spread in inhospitable environments through iterative cycles of conflict between three key actors: the ‘social capitalists’ themselves, authoritarian elites unwilling to share power, and reformist allies based either within the state or elsewhere in society. Reformists are defined here as those state or societal elites willing to accept (or encourage) increased associational autonomy among excluded groups in society. 18 17 This section draws from Fox (1994a), which was influenced by O’Donnell and Schmitter (1986). 18 Reformists are defined here by their actions; their attitudes and interests are necessarily diverse and politically contingent. They tend to be united by a long-term view of state interests, involving a willingness to sacrifice the interests of local elites and tolerate some degree of conflict in order to incorporate social movements that might otherwise threaten political stability. This process also involves building their own potential political base. In undemocratic electoral systems, state reformists are more likely to be based in central government’s social and development agencies than in

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The point of departure is that as long as authoritarian elites remain united, there is little room for the construction of basic citizenship rights, which in turn is a precondition for consolidating autonomous representative organizations. If authoritarian elites split, however, for whatever reasosn—succession problems, economic crisis or war— they will differ over whether to respond to societal challenges with repression or concessions. Intraelite divisions can be triggered by societal pressure from below. For example, the Zapatista rebellion, based in a handful of remote municipalities, led to a deep split within Mexico’s national political class over whether to respond militarily or politically. The first step in the argument, then, is that reformists, defined by their greater concern for political legitimacy and resulting preference for negotiation over coercion, may conflict with hard-line colleagues over whether and how to cede access to the state. Second, if and when such cracks in the system open up, social organizations often attempt to occupy these spaces from below, demanding broader access to the state while trying to defend their capacity to articulate their own interests autonomously. 19 These efforts at social capital formation usually provoke an authoritarian backlash, which in turn ends the cycle of opening from above. Third, over time, these recursive cycles of bargaining between ruling hard-liners, reformist elites, and societal groups can gradually increase official tolerance for autonomous social organizations, often in a ‘two steps forward, one step back’ pattern. From the point of view of social capital accumulation, the key issue is how much societal political residue—whether organized or informal— is left after each window of opportunity closes, and how it can be sustained until the next one opens. Even though societal actors often fail to win their immediate demands, if they manage to conserve some degree of autonomy in the troughs between cycles of mobilization, they retain a crucial resource to deploy at the next political opportunity. This process is highly uneven within nation states. Societal groups gain legitimacy and leverage at very different rates and in different the electoral apparatus. Reformists tend to differ between those who tolerate relatively autonomous societal organization as a means versus those who support them as an end in itself. Reformists are most likely to be able to offset more authoritarian rivals within the state when the more ‘instrumental’ moderates manage to form coalitions with the more ‘ideological’ democratic officials (Fox 1992a). 19 Societal capacity to pry windows of opportunity open further depends on both prior accumulations of social capital and conjunctural political strategies. Some opportunities are simply missed while others are creatively pushed beyond what seemed possible at the time.

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bargaining arenas. The iterative nature of this pattern helps to explain why such different patterns of state–society relations can coexist simultaneously within the same nation-state: redoubts of persistent authoritarian clientelism can coexist with new enclaves of pluralist tolerance, as well as large grey areas of ‘semi-clientelism’ in between. The authoritarian and pluralistic poles of this proposed continuum from clientelism to citizenship are easily defined, but the multiplicity of political relationships ‘in between’ challenges analysts to develop categories more appropriate to systems in transition (especially since many regimes in transition tend to get stuck short of a democratic threshold). This framework suggests that the category of ‘semiclientelism’ might be useful to frame those state–society relationships that fall in between authoritarian clientelism and pluralist citizenship rights. Semi-clientelist authorities attempt to condition access to state benefits on political subordination. In contrast to conventional authoritarian clientelism, however, their leverage is the threat of the withdrawal of carrots, without the threat of the stick.

Indigenous Civil Society in Rural Mexico Rural Mexico has experienced a wide range of processes through which social capital ‘thickens’ where it might seem ‘thinnest.’ Conditions for social capital formation seem most daunting for the more than one in ten Mexicans who speak an indigenous language. They are the poorest of the poor, and they lack representation in the broader society and political system. Mexico’s indigenous population is the largest in the hemisphere, including over ten million people in fifty-six officially recognized ethnolinguistic groups. When one looks closely at the village level, however, social capital is widespread. In much of indigenous Mexico, communities have reproduced long-standing traditions of horizontal cooperation, reciprocity, and self-help. Thousands of villages make community decisions about resource allocation and justice by consensus, and they maintain powerful norms of accountability between leaders and community members. 20 There are increasing religious and class cleavages within many communities, as well as cultural differences provoked by migration, but the overall degree of survival of horizontal organization and norms of reciprocity in indigenous Mexico is quite remarkable. 21 20 For analyses of indigenous community decision making in the state of Oaxaca, see Collins (1995), Díaz Montes (1992), and Fox and Aranda (1996a), among others. 21 Hirabayashi uses the notion of ‘cultural capital’ to explore the maintenance of local village solidarities in spite of migration to large cities (1993). Most indigenous groups

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Putnam’s ‘societal historical determinist’ approach would lead one to expect that these dense horizontal local associational webs would lead to extensive social capital accumulation throughout indigenous Mexico. If most communities survived with strong inherited stocks of social capital, then this capital should have grown over time through the cycles of ‘virtuous circles’ he posits for northern Italy. Instead, until very recently most of indigenous Mexico looked more like historical southern Italy (dominated by vertical, authoritarian power relations). Incorporation into the national economy and political system led to increased microlevel subordination, and most local efforts at building autonomous representative organizations beyond the village level were repressed. If one turned to the other extreme, a ‘state-sanctioned repression dismantles horizontal organization’ argument would predict no scaled-up social capital formation at all. Until recently, that is what one found in most of indigenous Mexico, with social capital limited to the micro level. When one looks at the last two decades, however, it turns out that neither explanation is complete because in practice, both processes have been going on at the same time. For two decades or more, indigenous organizations have been coming together from below and then been dismantled from above, as competing state actors have pushed for both outcomes. 22 The result is a very uneven map, with extreme variation in the relative thickness of civil society in indigenous regions. Civil society is very thin in some regions, with citizens subordinated and divided by vertical, authoritarian clientelistic power relations, while other regions have vibrant civic movements for local-level political democracy and sophisticated producer and consumer cooperatives with thousands of members. The result is that within the broad category of indigenous civil society, there is great variation both between and within states. 23 Tables 3.1 and 3.2 synthesize the results of ongoing empirical research on contemporary rural Mexican politics, showing that social capital formation in indigenous regions is following several different paths, though seen historically they may end up being different stages that survived the conquest reacted by retreating to seek community autonomy outside of the colonized areas, in so-called ‘regions of refuge’. Very few are truly isolated today; most became fully ‘incorporated’ into the national market and political regime by the mid-20th century. 22 For overviews of regional indigenous movements in Mexico, see Mejía Pineros and Sarmiento Silva (1987), Moguel, Botey, and Hernández (1992), and Warman and Argueta (1993), as well as the journals Ojarasca and Cuadernos Agrarios. 23 For a related focus on the uneven development of democratic institutions under actually existing electoral regimes, see O’Donnell (1993).

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Table 3.1

Political space and social capital outcomes in rural Mexico Regional level of repression

Social capital level High

Medium

Low

Low

High

Pluralist enclaves (the result of successful prior mobilization against authoritarian rule) Semi-clientelist competition between state and civil society (state control exercised more with inducements than with coercion) Authoritarian rule rarely challenged and therefore rarely punished

Mobilization against authoritarian rule, unresolved (potential ‘dual political power’ situation) Growing societal challenge to authoritarian rule (coercion has contradictory impact, both encouraging and discouraging protest) Forced demobilization (aftermath of blocked challenge to authoritarian rule)

Table 3.2 Social/geographical distribution of indigenous social capital in rural Mexico (1995) Subnational political regimes Pluralist enclaves

Semi-clientelist competition

Authoritarian rule under challenge

Authoritarian rule dominant

States (regions within states) Oaxaca (Juchitán, Sierra Norte, parts of Mazateca Alta); Michoacán (parts of Purépecha region); Sonora (Yaqui region) Oaxaca (parts of Mazateca Alta, Central Valleys); Michoacán (parts of Purépecha region); Hidalgo (Nañhú region); Puebla (parts of Sierra Norte); most of Yucatán, Campeche, Quintana Roo, state of Mexico Chiapas (most of Altos, Lacandon, Sierra Norte, Sierra Sur), Tabasco (Chol region), Guerrero (Alto Balsas, Montaña, Costa Chica); Oaxaca (northern Isthmus, Pinotepa, parts of Mixteca); Hidalgo (parts of Huasteca) Veracruz (Sierra Zongólica, most of Huasteca), Hidalgo (parts of Huasteca); Guerrero (parts of Montaña); Oaxaca (parts of Mixteca); Puebla (parts of Mixteca, Sierra Norte); Chihuahua (Raramuri region)

of the same process. 24 The key descriptive variables that frame state– society relations in each region are the degree of repression and the thickness of civil society. Table 3.1 shows the different conceptual categories, and Table 3.2 shows how actual indigenous regions fit into 24

The regional categorizations are therefore neither complete nor definitive.

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25

the main scenarios in practice (as of early 1995). Note that these categorizations refer to ethnically distinct regions rather than to ‘entire’ ethnic groups. There is great diversity among different degrees and patterns of indigenous mobilization, within as well as between ethnic groups. 26 At one extreme are consolidated enclaves of high levels of associational life and respect for political and ethnic pluralism. At another extreme are regions where communities are internally divided, lacking in horizontal associational life and dominated by authoritarian clientelism. In some of these regions levels of repression may be low, but only because autonomous collective action is rare. One finds other scenarios in between: regions where autonomous social organization is spreading but faces political competition from the government’s new, more sophisticated semi-clientelism (Fox 1994a). Then there are areas of strong associational life that are actively attacked by hard-liners in the state or their societal allies. These areas, in the upper right box, begin to approach ‘dual political power,’ where civil society and authoritarian elites confront each other in an unstable stalemate. ‘Dual political power’ describes much of indigenous Chiapas—though not necessarily the original area of the Zapatista rebellion. Since the army incursion occupied and demobilized some of the region in revolt, it would fall into the lower right-hand box. Much of the rest of the state’s indigenous regions, however, fit into the upper right-hand box. Civic mobilizations and land invasions erupted throughout many areas outside the region in revolt, targeting large landholdings and authoritarian local bosses (including a broad-based independent electoral campaign for the governorship). 27 In the course of 1994, diverse 25 If non-indigenous peasant regions were also included, the main differences would be more regions can be considered pluralistic, mainly where state-level electoral victories by the center-right National Action Party appear to have dismantled much of the ruling party’s clientelistic control apparatus (e.g. Chihuahua, Baja California Norte, Guanajuato). In general, however, there is a similar diversity of state–society relations in nonindigenous rural areas. Local solidarities differ widely, and those with strong inherited collective identities were shaped largely by ‘foundational moments’ dating from the revolution and the state-structured land reform that followed in the 1930s (as Michoacán, Veracruz, or La Laguna region). Many regions experienced little land reform, however, such as Chiapas. 26 It is difficult to sustain political generalizations across ‘entire’ ethnic groups. One might suppose that the less assimilated groups might have the greatest capacity for resistance, but some do while others remain extremely vulnerable (the Mixe vs. the Huichol or Raramuri, for example). The larger groups are quite internally heterogeneous in terms of culture, language, and forms of political organization, such as the Nahua, Maya, Zapotec, and the Mixtec. 27 Not coincidentally, the secret ballot was violated in at least 68% of Chiapas polling places, according to Mexico’s independent election observer movement (Alianza Cívica 1994). For further analysis of the politics of the secret ballot, see Ch. 5.

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local civic movements managed to eject the ruling party mayors from more than one-third of the state’s municipalities, installing instead ad hoc, pluralistic town councils that include human rights movements, cooperatives, and ethnic rights groups. These new town councils in turn formed several ‘autonomous regional multi-ethnic governments’ to increase their bargaining power with state and federal authorities. An even more striking example of ‘spillover effects’ was seen in late 1995, when peace talks between the government and the Zapatistas included independent indigenous leaders from throughout Mexico.

Accumulating Social Capital: Political Pathways Three decades ago, Mexican indigenous communities had not formed ‘scaled up’ representative organizations beyond the village level. Through cumulative cycles of conflict and cooperation, the social maps of diverse regions then spread out in the varied array of political outcomes depicted in Tables 3.1 and 3.2. These distinct patterns of state– society relations constitute distinct ‘subnational political regimes’, ranging from entrenched regional authoritarian redoubts to enclaves of pluralism, with varying shades of grey in between. Where autonomous indigenous organizations managed to consolidate, they did so by following one (or more) of three main causal pathways. As outlined in Table 3.3, these three main causal paths include: state–society convergence, involving the joint production of social capital between reformist state actors and local societal groups; local/external societal groups, such as church reformers, NGOs or political oppositionists; and independent emergence, where social capital was produced more independently by local societal movements for democratization, accountable governance, or socioeconomic development. While these three categories are conceptually distinct, they often Table 3.3

Possible causal pathways for social capital accumulation

State–society convergence Coproduction between state reformists and local societal groups (synergistic collaboration)

Local/outsider societal collaboration

Independent societal scaling up

Coproduction between local groups and external allies in civil society (religious, developmental, environmental, civic, or political)

Bottom-up production of social capital through autonomous local social, civic, or political/electoral initiatives in the absence of external support

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overlapped in practice. Some analysts use the term ‘coproduction’ as shorthand to refer to coordinated joint efforts. 28

State–Society Convergence The main patterns of collaborative production of social capital between state and societal actors took the form of successive initiatives by middle- and lower-level reformist government officials to recognize and to encourage relatively autonomous grassroots organization. This process of coproduction had cumulative effects, as the results of each cycle bolstered societal capacities to take advantage of the next opportunity. One can describe Mexico’s diverse array of reformist programs and enclaves within programs in terms of three distinct cycles of openings from above, in the early 1970s, early 1980s, and early 1990s. Each reform opening was broader in some policy areas than others, and stronger in some regions than in others. Social organizations also varied in their willingness and capacity to take advantage of these openings from above. Their political strategies are key here: not all allies are perceived as such, while some who seem to be are not. Table 3.4 shows a stylized depiction of three cycles of openings from above that were partially occupied by mobilization from below. 29 The first and third of these openings were responses to the pressures from below (as in the early mid-1970s and late 1980s/early1990s), while the second was driven more by independent shifts in the balance of forces within the ruling political elite (as in the early 1980s). 30 During each of these three periods, reformist officials managed to control the actual implementation of a small but significant subset of the government’s diverse array of rural development programs. They were able to create, largely from above, institutional opportunities for grassroots participation in the implementation of development projects targeted 28

For an early formulation of the term ‘co-production’, see Parks et al. (1982). This table synthesizes the comparative discussion of PIDER, CONASUPOCOPLAMAR, and the Regional Solidarity Funds presented in Fox (1994a). See Fox (1994b) for a more detailed comparison of degrees of reform openings within and between states during the National Solidarity Program. For a study of one regional organization’s evolution in response to these shifts in political opportunities, see Ch. 4. 30 See Fox (1992a). More generally, these cycles of openings are related to the splits within the regime over the terms of state intervention. In spite of recent market openings, in Mexico the key issue is not whether the state will intervene to regulate the markets, but rather which state–society partnership will benefit. The three cycles of rural development innovations were led by reformists willing to use state intervention to break entrenched local elite monopolies by encouraging competition from communitymanaged economic enterprises. Notably, the announced withdrawal of the Mexican state from intervening in rural economic life that was so widely applauded in the early 1990s actually involved a reinsertion of state intervention, in some ways even deeper than ever before. For details, see Fox (1995). 29

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Table 3.4 Three cycles of openings for participation by autonomous social organizations in Mexican government rural development programs∗ Official channels for participation

Cycle 1 (1973–6)

Cycle 2 (1979–82)

Cycle 3 (1990–4)

Local project selection Local project implementation Promotion of new, autonomous regional organizations Monitoring of regional level government policy implementation Networking of autonomous groups beyond regional level Direct control of program resource allocation by regional groups Authoritarian backlash followed by purge of reform program ∗

These cycles reflect only the most ‘pro-participation’ subset of rural development programs implemented during each period. They are therefore never ‘typical’ of rural development policy more generally.

to Mexico’s poorest regions, including many indigenous regions that had never before experienced freedom of assembly and association beyond the village level. In each cycle, authoritarian or semi-clientelist elites were usually able to capture much of even the reform subset of programs. Autonomous participation beyond the local level was therefore not representative of most actual policy implementation experiences. The kinds of participation highlighted here were the regional exception rather than the national rule. From the long-term point of view of the accumulation of social capital, however, these regional exceptions overlapped, cumulated, and networked horizontally, eventually accounting for many of the regions where representative indigenous groups were consolidated by the mid-1990s. In each cycle, discreet networks of government reformists were able to reach out to those societal organizations that had survived the previous cycles, and in each case the participatory process was able to go further toward a transfer of state authority to greater power-sharing with autonomous, representative organizations. This shift in authority proceeded furthest in the case of the Regional Solidarity Funds for Indigenous Peoples, which—unlike any other branch of the National Solidarity Program (1989–94)—were designed to transfer regionallevel decision-making on issues of development resource allocation to ethnically and politically pluralistic councils of indigenous leaders. Indeed, the governor’s purge of this reform program was one of the

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turning points along the path to the Chiapas rebellion, publicly signaling the closure of what little ‘political opportunity’ for change within the system was left. 31 In consonance with the ‘two steps forward, one step back’ dynamic of the ‘social capital accumulation through conflict’ model sketched out above, each opening of access to the state was later closed by an authoritarian backlash—though in each case some social capital survived and not all reformists were purged.

Collaboration Between Local and External Civil Society Organizations The second causal path of social capital formation is through coproduction with other actors from civil society. The Chiapas experience illustrates this process especially well, since the ‘state–society’ partnership pathway was not open there. Not only is Chiapas one of Mexico’s most authoritarian states, but it is a state where local and state level elites managed to systematically block the operations of the same federal reform programs that were so crucial for creating new opportunities for autonomous regional organization-building in other rural states. Indeed, the survival of small but significant political spaces for autonomous grassroots organizations in other comparably poor and violent regions is one reason why the rebellion’s social and political resonance throughout rural Mexico was not expressed militarily. One of the most important external allies for local efforts to consolidate representative organizations in Chiapas is the democratic wing of the Catholic church. Because of the state’s deep and long-standing penetration into the countryside, and because of Mexico’s relatively small number of prodemocratization bishops, these external societal allies have managed to encourage the thickening of indigenous civil society in only a few regions, and Chiapas is one of them. 32 As in much 31 Rather than side with his own federal reformists, Mexico’s president chose to accept this purge and then promoted the governor to the cabinet post responsible for the police, politics, and the upcoming presidential elections (he was removed in the aftermath of the rebellion, however). 32 It should be noted that the key factors that influenced the contribution of religious activists to horizontal social capital formation are often determined by faraway institutional church politics, since it is the shifting balance of forces within the hierarchy that determines whether or not progressive clergy become bishops and where they are assigned. For example, in order for Christian Base Communities to spread sufficiently to contribute significantly to the formation of prodemocracy movements under authoritarian regimes, they needed the support of a prodemocracy bishop. Without the sustained institutional legitimacy and resources that only a bishop can provide within a given territory, other change-oriented organizing efforts are likely to be limited to tiny,

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of rural Mexico, nonpartisan networks of long-term democratic political opposition activists also provided key allies for many local grassroots movements, along with nongovernmental developments organizations (Fox and Hernández 1992). When Samuel Ruíz began as bishop of San Cristóbal de las Casas in the early 1960s, Chiapas highland communities were dominated by local indigenous elites whose authoritarian control was bolstered by their linkages with the state and national government (Rus 1994). A decade later, when the Bishop convened the first autonomous, statewide public indigenous forum (thanks to a brief political rapprochement with the governor), his diocese had trained about 1,000 lay activists. These catechists promoted autonomous community organizations and local self-help projects. Fifteen years later the diocese had trained over 8,000 such local leaders. 33 Organizational support from the diocese was the most important single factor permitting collective action beyond the village level. This process spread and diversified in the 1980s, as secular regional producer associations grew, encouraged by limited and erratic support from state reformists (Harvey 1990b, 1994). Looking back from 1994, much of the thick web of social organizations built by the indigenous peoples of Chiapas originated with their first taste of ‘scaled-up’ freedom of expression and assembly in 1974. 34 This ‘societal coproduction’ scenario for thickening civil society in authoritarian environments also requires other kinds of external allies, both national and international. Nongovernmental development, human rights, and environmental organizations have become major promoters of local organization-building efforts around the world, though in Mexico the preemptive power of the state has kept NGO development behind many other Latin American countries. Like state reformists and religiously based societal allies, NGOs can both politically vulnerable enclaves, with few horizontal spillover effects. This process is also interactive. As Charlene Floyd observed, Bishop Ruiz, like his Salvadoran counterpart Oscar Romero, was greatly influenced by the grassroots communities he worked with (personal communication). 33 Interview with Javier Vargas, an associate of the bishop since the early 1960s and a former diocesan priest (Cambridge, MA, 1995). For one of the few analyses of church-grassroots movements in Mexico, see Muro (1994). For an overview of religion, social movements and development in Latin America more generally, see, among others, Lehmann (1990). 34 The right-wing attacks on the bishop in months immediately preceding the rebellion brought over 15,000 indigenous people down from the mountains to march in his defense. This was the largest public protest in the history of Chiapas until that date, even larger than the 1992 protest against the 500th anniversary of the Spanish conquest, when the statue of the conqueror was torn down as a prelude to the 1994 rebellion.

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provide positive incentives for horizontal association as well as buffer the negative sanctions that would otherwise punish such efforts. 35 The internal dynamics of these alliances vary greatly, however, and both state and societal reformists often end up inducing subordinate semiclientelism without actually engendering an autonomous thickening of civil society. 36 Because this risk pervades efforts to provide positive incentives for collective action, it is crucial to keep in mind their contribution as potential buffers for negative sanctions. It is also important to recall that such buffer efforts often fail, as the experience of liberation theology-inspired groups in El Salvador and Guatemala shows. 37

Independent Production of Social Capital from Below Social capital can also grow and thicken independent of external allies, through sustained collective action by autonomous local social and political movements. Some of these groups are socioeconomic, building community-based economic development alternatives, others are civic, fighting for nonpartisan democratic, accountable government at the local level, while others promote a partisan opposition alternative. 38 Leaders of these movements often gained prior political experience far from home, but that does not mean that they brought allies home with them. In some cases they involve local defections from the ruling corporatist party, while other local movements have independently promoted alternative civic identities, often with a strong ethnic dimension, as in the case of the electoral, social, and cultural democratization of Oaxaca’s Zapotec market town of Juchitán. Yet even in this ‘paradigm case’ of bottom-up, identity-based mobilization, the movement was able to emerge in the first place by taking advantage of an opening 35 As David Brown argues, ‘NGOs can play critical roles in fostering cooperation among unequally powerful parties where the aim is to solve social problems, and that cooperative problem-solving can in turn create social capital’ (1994: 1). 36 It should be pointed out that the harmony, balance, and empowerment often attributed to NGO–grassroots relations is more often assumed than demonstrated. For example, for a powerful critique of NGO organizing styles that clashed with indigenous social organization, see Rivera Cusicanqui (1990). 37 The contribution of external societal actors raises the question of the role of international actors. The Catholic church is an international organization, not to mention the human rights groups, environmental organizations, and development agencies that provide political and economic resources to local counterparts. When do these international actors simply strengthen the various local and national ‘actors’, and when do they play a truly independent causal role? 38 Empirically, this independent pathway has tended to follow the civic or political route, while the state–society partnership has encouraged the socioeconomic organizations (largely because state reformists had more room for maneuver to support local movements that competed with local economic elites than to support those that challenged local political elites).

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within the ruling political class in the early 1970s. Juchitán’s subsequent waves of mobilization, repression, and renewed mobilization, eventually leading to municipal electoral democratization, are quite consistent with the three-actor ‘political construction’ approach proposed above. While mobilization from below was fundamental, the local movement developed increasingly important national political alliances, and made its greatest progress when reform-oriented elites controlled state politics. 39 The Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) is a more extreme example of social capital formation in what appears to be the complete absence of external allies. By the early 1990s, growing authoritarian attacks on the main external allies of moderate autonomous social groups in Chiapas—federal reformists and the bishop—dramatically changed the political opportunity structure seen from below. The promised path of gradual change through working within the system seemed to lead only to more repression. In this context, Zapatistas had been organizing in complete isolation from the rest of Mexico’s political opposition, and they began to win over many of the already-organized in Chiapas. For more than a year, many dozens, probably hundreds of villages debated whether or not to take up arms in open assemblies (though they debated in their own languages, and were therefore unintelligible to most government officials). This process produced a powerful indicator of the trust and loyalties woven into the dense webs of horizontal association: in spite of the fact that many communities were deeply divided over whether to take up arms, no one defected, so the government was still caught completely by surprise when the rebellion erupted on January 1, 1994. Looking at this another way, the lack of reform opportunities within the system caused broad-based societal organizations to split over the decision of whether or not to take up arms. In terms of its origins, Zapatista movement seems to be an extraordinary example of how social organizations can broaden and deepen without external alliances. Two major qualifiers are in order, however. First, much of its organizing took advantage of the preexisting networks that had already been created with support from the bishop and/or government reformists (the other two paths for coproduction of social capital). In addition, once the rebellion was launched, it was the mobilization of external allies in civil society at national and 39 For the most nuanced analyses of Juchitán’s COCEI (Coalition of Workers, Students, and Peasants of the Isthmus), see Rubin (1994, 1997). COCEI managed an uneasy alliance with the main center-left national opposition party, at the same time as it bargained independently (and successfully) for federal resources for better municipal services.

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international levels, as well as deep divisions within the ruling political class, that prompted the president to declare a unilateral ceasefire after less than two weeks of fighting, rather than pursue a Central American-style military ‘solution’. In the course of the ups and downs of the negotiation process that followed, it was the Zapatistas’ capacity to maintain a diverse set of national and international civil society alliances that allowed them to remain a political force in spite of what turned out to be their military weakness. So even in this extreme case of ‘strictly’ bottom-up consolidation of civil society in one of Mexico’s most remote indigenous regions, external allies turned out to be crucial to the movement’s capacity to survive. 40

Conclusions While many localized rural social movements have emerged independently from below, external linkages have long been seen as crucial for their capacity to scale up and consolidate larger-scale representative organizations under authoritarian conditions. In the literature, however, most of the attention to this issue is limited to one subset of the broader category of societal organizations: the emergence of revolutionary challenges to dictatorships. For example, Wolf ’s classic comparative analysis of rural revolutions saw societal capacity to sustain revolutionary challenges to authoritarian rule as driven by the ‘tactical mobility’ of ‘middle peasants’ (who are socially and geographically autonomous from state and landlords), together with urban-based allies. 41 The difference here is the attempt to explain the thickening of rural social webs under authoritarian conditions that do not lead to revolutionary situations; that is, most of the time. 42 Indeed, one of the main lessons from the Mexican experience is the need to ‘unpack’ the notion of authoritarian rule to distinguish both the importance of varying degrees of repression and the possibility that even authoritarian regimes can produce allies for autonomous collective action from below. 40 For English languages sources on the Zapatista rebellion, see, among others, Collier and Quaratiello (1994), Fox (1994e), Harvey (1994), and Hernández (1994), as well as the special issues of Cultural Survival (Spring 1994) and Akwekon, A Journal of Indigenous Affairs (Summer 1994). Among the many diverse Spanish-language sources, contrast Hernández (1995) and Tello Díaz (1995). 41 For a useful contrast, see Walton’s analogous comparison of failed rebellions (1984). 42 The ‘everyday forms of resistance’ approach has contributed greatly to our understanding of the hidden political subtexts of apparent subaltern ‘consent’ (Scott 1985; Kerkvliet 1990). Perhaps a synthesis with the political construction approach would help to account for the ‘everyday politics of organization-building’.

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More than two decades of repeated cycles of collective action have left an uneven map of social organizations in the Mexican countryside, ranging from enclaves of local democracy to persistent redoubts of authoritarian rule, with complex grey areas of semi-clientelism in between. These diverse outcomes emerged through analytically distinct political pathways, though they often overlapped in practice. The first pathway was the coproduction of social capital between state reformists and local societal groups willing and able to take advantage of openings from above, involving limited but substantive participation in the implementation of government development programs. The second pathway involves external nongovernmental actors that provide support to local and regional organizing efforts, such as church, development, and human rights groups. The third path is more independent of external allies, and—not coincidentally—of a more overtly oppositional political character. But even this last path, as the Zapatista rebellion suggests, requires external societal support to maintain sufficient political space to survive the inevitable authoritarian backlash. The challenge remains as to how one distinguishes the different contributions made by these processes of coproduction, as well as the diverse social imprints they leave. Since state and external societal allies provide a variety of contributions to social capital formation, often simultaneously, it is both logically and empirically difficult to determine their relative weights. Cast most broadly, however, both state and external societal allies provide resources for local collective action that can be divided into positive and ‘anti-negative’ incentives. Positive incentives range from direct individual and group material inducements, tangible and intangible rewards for the exercise of leadership, as well as enabling institutional frameworks and ideological resources that reduce ‘free rider’ problems. ‘Anti-negative’ resources, in contrast, reduce the costs that other external actors may threaten to impose on those engaged in constructing autonomous social capital: in other words, some degree of protection from retribution. External allies often play crucial roles in limiting the state-sanctioned repression that would normally dismantle most bottom-up efforts at scaling up local representative organizations (though such protective efforts also often fail). Since the broadening and deepening of autonomous social capital requires freedom of association, the positive and anti-negative incentives provided to those groups that defend the right to associational autonomy have powerful potential ‘public good’ multiplier effects. Much of the research on external allies has focused on the positive resources they offer local communities, often stressing their efforts at ‘consciousness-raising’. In various countries, community organizing efforts by both state and external societal actors are widely seen as

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contributing greatly to the emergence of social movements and political democratization. Perhaps the spaces for group reflection created by Christian Base Communities or literacy campaigns encouraged collective action because they influenced the way people think about the world. But just because that was the goal of the external actors does not mean that it was their main effect. One could also argue that their primary contribution to collective action was to create a relatively safe opportunity for people to come together who would otherwise be afraid of state repression, which in turn permitted them to learn leadership and action skills that could then be used in other kinds of mobilization. In other words, although government-sponsored community organizers or church-linked social action may well work to ‘raise’ consciousness at certain times and places, their greater significance may be that their presence and legitimacy can permit people who were already well aware of their oppression to expect less retribution from collective action. The politics of fear must be a crucial element of any explanation of the inherently uneven ‘thickness’ of civil society, especially under authoritarian rule. Those who work to reduce the fear of retribution, whether subjectively, objectively or both, powerfully change the political opportunity structure within which individuals and groups decide whether and how to act. If so, then concerted action can—sometimes, to some degree—overcome historically inherited legacies. Coming back to the broad question about the determinants of social capital accumulation, this suggests that—in contrast to Putnam’s explanation of social capital accumulation—historical legacies are deeply woven into social fabrics, but those imprints are not necessarily fixed by history. The widely varying ‘thickness’ of indigenous Mexican civil society and their diverse origins show that political conflict is critical, both within the state and between competing state–society coalitions, in explaining how representative societal organizations survive, consolidate, and develop bargaining power. Densely woven social fabrics can be unraveled by state-sanctioned coercion, on the one hand, while external allies from either state or society can help to weave or reweave them on the other.

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................. Democratic Rural Development: Leadership Accountability in Regional Peasant Organizations1

Introduction Local participation has increasingly become an article of faith in the development community. Poor people’s organizations are ‘scaling up’ as they attempt to participate in the development policy process in the many developing countries with increasingly open political systems. 2 Our frameworks for analyzing the consolidation of representative organizations, however, remain weak. For those who contend that Third World development depends on the emergence and consolidation of a dense web of local development institutions, organizational democracy is a problem of special concern.

1 This chapter is an unrevised version of Fox (1992b), updated with an epilogue made possible thanks to 2005 field research carried out by Pilar López Sierra. The original research was funded by a grant from the Inter-American Foundation. I am especially grateful to Luis Hernández Navarro, the field research coordinator, for his invaluable collaboration throughout the process. The research methodology used extensive participant observation and oral history involving a wide range of participants inside and outside the organization, including regional and local leaders, advisers, base members, local, state, and federal officials, as well as independent development analysts. Ignacio García Bueno and Juan Franques Jacobo, former presidents of the UELC, were especially generous with their time and support. The field research team included Milagros Camarena, Pilar López Sierra, Rolando Loubet, Ruth Pinedo, and Teodoro Torres. Encouragement from Pat Breslin, Manuel Fernández, Susan Pezzullo, and Charles Reilly was greatly appreciated. I am also grateful for useful comments on earlier versions from Helga Baitenmann, Paul Haber, Roger Karapin, Anthony Levitas, Richard Locke, Gerry Munck, Stephen Page, Frances Fox Piven, Jennie Purnell, Jeffrey Rubin, Richard Samuels, and Margaret Sherraden. Any unconvincing interpretations or errors are my own. 2 On grassroots development and local initiative, see, among others, Annis (1988), Annis and Hakim (1988), Durning (1989), Korten (1990), Leonard (1982), Nash et al. (1976), Ralston et al. (1982), and Uphoff (1986).

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Without representative organizations, the rural poor lack their own voice in the development process. Their capacity to build representative organizations depends on multiple channels for participation, as well as relatively autonomous, diversified linkages with external allies, as Esman and Uphoff (1984) have shown. 3 But where do these internal and external linkages come from, and why exactly do they matter so much? To understand the ‘thickening’ of civil society, the burst of research interest in democratization might seem promising. But most analyses of national regime transitions do not incorporate systematic analyses of power relations within civil society. Now that researchers are focusing more on the consolidation of political democracy, hopefully the issue of the democratization of the representative organizations of civil society will begin to receive more attention. 4 As one turns for guidance to the vast literature on social movements and community development, however, one finds that they tend to assume rather than to demonstrate that the organizations under study are actually democratic. 5 The discourse of anti-dictatorship movements in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s generally referred to mass mobilizations as ‘democratic’ by definition, but such movements challenged regimes to open up without necessarily being internally democratic themselves. This study examines a particular aspect of the broader problem of internal democracy: accountability, analyzed in terms of the changing relations between leaders and members in a regional peasant organization in Mexico. The case analysis suggests that different kinds of organizational structures encourage or discourage particular kinds of membership action, but waves of active rank-and-file participation in turn shape the ways in which organizational structures actually distribute power. To understand the complex determinants of organizational democracy, we need to develop analytical tools which clarify the relationship between the formal mechanisms of representation and the parallel channels for participation that often distribute power in practice. 3 Esman and Uphoff (1984) highlight these organizational features based on a very convincing comparison of 150 different local organizations, but they do not account for where these characteristics come from, nor do they focus on change over time. 4 As O’Donnell (1988: 283) put it early on, ‘if political democracy is to be consolidated, democratic practice needs to be spread throughout society, creating a rich fabric of democratic institutions and authorities’. 5 See Boschi (1984) for a provocative discussion of this point, based on the Brazilian experience. For suggestive discussions of leadership–community relations during the anti-Pinochet mobilizations in Chile, see Oxhorn (1991) and Schneider (1991).

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The Iron Law of Oligarchy Some social scientists have long contended that an ‘Iron Law of Oligarchy’ inevitably makes large membership organizations abandon their democratic ideals and become bureaucratized, elitist instruments of the leadership. Organizations take on their own dynamics, as leaders and staff develop interests which differ from those of the members. Opportunities to pursue political power, to benefit economically, or to pursue hidden agendas draw the leadership and staff away from representing membership concerns. In this view, new elites always manage to entrench themselves. 6 The emphasis on transitions from democratic to oligarchic rule within organizations is two-edged; it adds a dynamic element by highlighting change over time, but it is also highly deterministic, leaving one unable to explain change in the other direction. In practice, social organizations move in both directions, but analysis of this dynamic immediately plunges one into the murky waters of less than fully democratic forms of representation, as leadership trajectories travel between clearly democratic and authoritarian ‘poles’. Freely elected leaders can become authoritarian, and vice versa. Leaders may defend some member interests but not others. Clientelistic social and political organizations have long been known to deliver concrete benefits to poor people—usually, though not always, in ways which discourage collective action. 7 Leaders who act in ways which represent member interests without actually being democratic challenge the maximalist application of normative democratic ideals to organizational dynamics. Wide-ranging research on cooperatives and trade unions shows that not very democratic leaders can find themselves under diverse pressures which lead them to deliver broad benefits to members. 8 Democratic values and 6 Summarizing Roberto Michels’s classic formulation, ‘democracy is inconceivable without organization . . . the weapon of the weak in their struggle with the strong. . . . From a means, organization becomes an end. . . . Who says organization, says oligarchy’ (Michels 1959: 21, 373, 401). Zald and Ash (1966) discuss the intellectual history of this approach, and suggest possible countertendencies. 7 The literature on clientelism is rich and nuanced. See Schmidt et al. (1977) for one of the most comprehensive surveys. Ostensibly traditional patterns of dependent vertical linkages manage to find many ‘modern’ guises within which to reproduce themselves, yet few analysts focus on the countertendency—the transition from clientelism to citizenship among the peasantry. See Fox (1990, 1994a) for further discussion of this problem. 8 See, for example, the innovative work on cooperatives by Attwood and Baviskar (1988) and Tendler et al. (1983), as well as Sabel (1981) on corporatist trade unions. The tension between control and representation is especially pronounced in authoritarian corporatist systems. Official union leaders, in Mexico or Brazil, must represent some member interests some of the time, or they will lose their legitimacy and eventually fail in their task of controlling the workforce and blocking competing alternatives. Such

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rules, then, are not the only possible explanations for accountable leadership. One also needs to look at the ways in which the state, formal organizations, and social movements together structure the opportunities for leaders to get away with betraying member interests on the one hand, and for members to hold leaders accountable on the other hand. 9 The case analysis suggests that what was posed as an all-powerful ‘law’ turns out instead to be a strong, but far from invincible tendency. Larger grassroots groups often undergo a series of swings toward and away from democracy, with degrees of leadership accountability changing at different points in their history. The problem for the analysis of organizational democracy is that we lack general analytical frameworks to account for such shifts in the balance of power between leaders and members. This study shows that participatory subgroups are crucial complements to formal representative democracy in large membership organizations. The idea that participatory subgroups are necessary to keep larger groups democratic is not new. Political theorists have long held that national democracy depends on the checks and balances in society as well as in government; power must be decentralized among autonomous interest groups for democracy to work fairly. 10 But relatively few researchers have analyzed the inner workings of these social counterweights in terms of the ‘Iron Law of Oligarchy’. Lipset et al. (1956) are a notable exception. They explained a successful case of trade union democracy by analyzing the countervailing tendencies that offset the otherwise powerful and ever-present oligarchical pressures. This study goes further by highlighting the rise and fall of alternative channels for mass participation as a key determinant of the ebb and flow of countervailing democratic tendencies within large membership organizations.

Horizontal and Vertical Dimensions of Democracy The issue is not whether organizations ‘should’ have leaders. Leadership is crucial for mass mobilization, helping to articulate interests, systems are characterized by complex and variable combinations of carrots and sticks— but for one to work, the other is usually needed. 9 The ‘political opportunity structure’ approach has been increasingly applied to the analysis of the rise and fall of social movements. See Piven and Cloward (1977), as well as Tarrow’s overview (1989). This approach is not usually applied to leadership–base relations within social organizations. 10 See, for example, Dahl (1982).

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to project a vision that change is possible and to bring isolated people together who do not share ‘free spaces’ within which to interact on their own. 11 Because the skills of public speaking, tolerance, and consensus-building associated with democratic leadership are learned forms of behavior, the social and organizational context which makes such learning possible requires special attention. Examination of this process is crucial for understanding the conditions under which direct democratic processes can actually work. 12 Leadership and external allies can play important roles in forming group identities and particular interests, but within constraints shaped by the political moment and the structurally possible, as the case analysis will show. But leaders can also discourage or divert mobilization, weakening their members’ leverage. Poor people’s movements have leverage only during unusual historical moments, and rare opportunities may be lost if organizations put formal institution-building ahead of mobilization (Piven and Cloward 1977: 36). There are many possible angles from which to approach the issue of internal democracy. Democracy has both horizontal and vertical dimensions. From a horizontal approach, one would look at the construction of an empowered citizenry within an organization of civil society. Discussions of grassroots participation in the development literature, however, often conflate active membership with passive ‘followership.’ 13 Conventional indicators do not necessarily tell us much about this distinction, since large turnouts at public events or occasions calling for collective labor can be composed of either active members or passive followers. Mobilization does not necessarily involve participation in decision-making; it may be driven by economic incentives or coercive political pressures. A focus on the vertical dimension of democracy highlights the relationship between the leadership and the membership. The procedures for leadership selection can be important, but formal electoral processes do not necessarily involve effective competition for leadership or an active or informed membership, nor do they guarantee 11 Democratic mobilization is facilitated in those free spaces where distinct forms of self-identification overlap and can therefore reinforce one another (i.e. interests of class, gender, ethnicity, neighborhood, religious faith, locality, workplace). See Evans and Boyte (1986). 12 Advocates of direct democracy as a dichotomous alternative to the oligarchical tendencies of delegated, representative forms generally fail to acknowledge the facility with which mass assemblies can be manipulated. The larger the organization, the more difficult it is for direct democratic forms to live up to their promise. 13 This problem was particularly pronounced in much of the literature on the issue of popular mobilization in the Nicaraguan revolution (i.e. Ruchwarger 1987). For especially sensitive exceptions, see Gould (1990a, 1990b). [For further discussion of the distinction between participation and mobilization, see Fox (1998a)].

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accountability in between elections. The texture of informal social relations between leaders and members can be very revealing, as hierarchies are reproduced through ordinary daily activity. One could also highlight the social origins, charismatic mobilizing capacity, or political ideologies of the leaders themselves. Given the importance of both the horizontal and vertical dimensions of democracy, it is not surprising that Esman and Uphoff (1984) found that representative organizations were closely associated with multiple channels for voice and representation. Does the degree to which leaders and members value democracy in and of itself matter? In practice, it is difficult to disentangle instrumental means from normative ends. Political cultures of participation offer important resources for those who want to open up their organizations, but many examples exist of movements for democratization that do not rely on fully developed ideologies of participation. Similarly, movements which self-consciously cultivate ideologies of participation and collective identity have certainly been vulnerable to the ‘Iron Law of Oligarchy’. For those who see the ‘Iron Law’ as immutable, both institutional and political cultural factors are irrelevant, but those who see oligarchy as a tendency which can sometimes be outweighed face the challenge of integrating institutional and political cultural factors. This study focuses on interactive patterns of leadership accountability to the membership. The emphasis here is institutional, highlighting actions, both informal and formal, which encourage or discourage leadership accountability. This study could not answer the empirical question of how much the members actually fought for democratic process as an end in itself. Whether or not they were inspired by abstract, normative ideals—and few probably were—the rank and file certainly wanted their representatives to defend their interests. They repeatedly, though not consistently, called them to account. It is important to recognize that membership participation is only one possible form of action which can influence leadership accountability. If members are dissatisfied with their leaders, they may simply leave (or threaten to). The ‘exit option’ is certainly a crucial indirect means of exercising membership power, or at least, for withdrawing power delegated to leaders. But under what circumstances will this lead to increased accountability, rather than to the collapse of the group? 14 For those organizations that survive, the ‘exit option’ is most 14 If the group’s problems are beyond repair, its collapse may be quite appropriate, especially if the ‘social energy’ unleashed by the frustrated mobilization effort were to reemerge and find greater success at a different time and place (see Hirschman 1984).

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likely to promote accountability if it acts to increase the leverage of ‘voice’. This study stresses the ways in which ‘voice’ can be modulated and heard (Hirschman 1981). 15 One might hypothesize that most members of an organization under ‘oligarchic’ pressure will consider putting energy into the ‘democratic reform from within’ strategy insofar as the array of allies, enemies, and opportunities make the exercise of ‘voice’ a plausibly effective approach. Otherwise the ‘free rider’ problem will tempt most people to opt out and pursue other strategies in defense of their interests, even if people share some sense of group solidarity. Collective action in defense of democracy, like collective action more generally, only makes sense to most people under certain circumstances. In an effort to understand better why democracy defeats ‘oligarchy’ at some points and not at others, this study analyzes the key turning points in the conflictive history of a well-established regional peasant organization. This study is based on the premise that institutional procedures of democracy do not guarantee accountable leadership, but it matters a great deal whether or not the contours of the organization are sufficiently permeable for members to exercise some power over their leaders if and when they decide to try. The availability of opportunities for direct membership participation in decision-making can encourage people to try to hold their leaders accountable.

Regional Rural Membership Organizations While the issue of leadership accountability is problematic in membership groups of all kinds, this study focuses on regional peasant organizations for three principal reasons. First, regional organizations are crucial for democratizing the rural development process. In much of Latin America, the principal obstacle to rural development is the entrenched power of allied public and private sector regional elites. They often monopolize key markets, preventing peasants from retaining and investing the fruits of their labor. Regional organizations are often the only actors able to open up these markets and to push for more equitable and accountable development policy. Regional peasant organizations are also crucial for defending freedom of assembly, creating a hospitable environment for further community organizing—an important ‘spillover effect’ (Fox 1990). The second reason for focusing on regional peasant organizations is that they have the potential to combine the clout of a larger group with 15 For a careful analysis of village-level protest which highlights hidden voices, see Scott (1985).

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the responsiveness of smaller associations. Village-level groups are easily isolated by their enemies, while national peasant organizations are usually democratic only insofar as they are made up of representative regional building blocks. ‘Regional’ is used here to describe a membership organization that develops a second level of decisionmaking above the village (i.e. regional executives, delegate assemblies, etc.). The third reason for focusing on regional groups is that accountability is especially vulnerable in larger peasant organizations. Within communities, informal means of consultation, reproach, and decisionmaking can help to compensate for weaknesses in ‘public’ channels for participation (i.e. limited involvement in meetings, ethnic and gender bias, largely ceremonial assemblies, clientelistic government intervention, or flawed electoral processes). Groups that bring many communities together, however, are too large to be run by villagelevel direct democracy alone, and informal, face-to-face accountability mechanisms are inherently weak. This means that often only the central leadership connects the many dispersed and diverse member communities. Regionwide channels for member participation are thus especially important, because without horizontal linkages across communities there is little to prevent domination by the central leadership. In remote rural areas, however, horizontal linkages between communities rarely develop spontaneously, and require deliberate organizing efforts to be sustained. 16 The type of organization analyzed below, a Mexican union of villagebased agrarian reform communities, involves all three of these features: the broadening of the rural development process vis-à-vis both state and market, the creation of a ‘second level’ of regional leadership and the difficult problem of sustaining internal democracy across dispersed communities in the face of tendencies toward centralization of power.

Mexican Unions of Ejidos Mexico’s ‘inclusionary’ land reform left a complex organizational legacy which still structures peasant participation. Mexican agrarian reform 16 Regional peasant organizations face inherent contradictions. Since rural elites often centralize power at the regional level, rural membership organizations must also concentrate power regionally in order to become effective counterweights. Yet to remain internally democratic and to reduce vulnerability to external intervention, regional organizations must decentralize power internally as well. These twin challenges therefore pose a dilemma: how can a grassroots organization both centralize and decentralize power at the same time?

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communities (ejidos) are both political and economic institutions, to which the government cedes land-use rights while retaining a tutelary role. They are classic corporatist institutions; the state structures the opportunities for the articulation and expression of interests. Ejidos are legally run by the decisions of regular, ostensibly democratic mass membership assemblies, but government officials also supervise internal elections and often intervene. In practice, effective majority rule in ejidos depends on the balance of power between democratic forces within the community and political and economic elites both inside and outside the ejido. 17 Ejidos can form regional unions to collaborate on agricultural development projects. If ejido assemblies decide to join a union, they elect delegates, who in turn choose the union’s leadership and oversight committees. Rank-and-file members can participate in union meetings but cannot vote. Delegates to ejido unions are usually elected from outside the ranks of the existing ejido leadership, creating parallel authority structures that can serve as counterweights. In practice, most ejido unions were created on orders from government or ruling party officials. Most therefore either wither away or become tools of government bureaucracies. 18 For the better part of fifteen years, however, the ‘Lazaro Cárdenas’ Union of Ejidos (UELC) was among the exceptions, vigorously defending a wide range of member interests. Its history offers not only relevant lessons for understanding the ebbs and flows of leadership accountability, but it also illustrates key challenges facing the Mexican rural development process more generally. The UELC is representative of a new generation of Mexican regional producer organizations which united in a national network to hold government rural development agencies accountable to the rural poor, the National Union of Autonomous Regional Peasant Organizations (UNORCA). 19 17 Until a legal reform in 1983, runner-up slates in elections became official oversight committees (consejos de vigilancia), charged with monitoring the activities of the winning leadership teams. For further discussion of ejido politics, see Esteva (1983) and Gordillo (1988a, 1988b). 18 A national survey found that 237 UEs were actually functioning by 1981, representing more than 4,700 ejido and agrarian communities, over 20% of the total (Fernández and Rello 1984: 12). [Note: This remarkable survey found that almost a half million families were members of ejidos that were members of these unions. Almost all were formed during the Echeverría or López Portillo presidencies. While 60% of these unions reported they were members of the CNC, more than 30% reported no political affiliation.] 19 Since its founding in the mid-1980s, the UNORCA and its various related organizations have won important victories in a wide range of policy areas, pursuing the common goal of increasing organized peasant participation in the formulation and implementation of rural development policy. For analyses of the UNORCA, see Fox and Gordillo (1989), Bartra (1989a, 1989b), Fernández (1991), García (1989), Hernández (1989a, 1989b, 1990a, 1991), Harvey (1990b), and Martínez Borrego (1991).

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The UELC united fifteen agrarian reform communities with over 4,500 families in the southern part of the state of Nayarit, in westcentral Mexico. About half of the members were indigenous people. The UELC became a long-standing political and economic actor in the region, representing about half of the peasants in its area of influence. Most members are subsistence maize producers, though some also grow other cash crops as well. The average family allotment is about 4 rain-fed ha, although actual access is unequal, ranging from 1 ha or less, up to 8–10 ha. Agrarian law limits membership to heads of households, leaving most women and landless young adults indirectly represented at best. Landless farm-workers who are not members of ejido families represent a significant share of the region’s population, and the UELC rarely directly addresses their concerns. Most of the economically active population, with or without access to land, migrates seasonally to coastal agribusiness and employment in the USA, greatly complicating the sustainability of mass participation in UELC activities. From its birth, much of the UELC’s history can be seen as a series of creative responses by a new generation of peasant leaders to changing government rural development policies. The case study is organized around a series of turning points in the UELC’s history, defined as moments which shaped later patterns of leadership and rank-and-file relations.

Turning Points for the ‘Lazaro Cardenas’ Union of Ejidos Southern Nayarit had experienced four previous waves of peasant mobilization before the UELC emerged: the unsuccessful 1857–81 indigenous insurrection, the stalemated cristero uprising of the late 1920s, the victorious 1933–9 land reform movement, and the largely successful 1960s comunero movement by indigenous communities for the restitution of lands that had been usurped by private farmers and ranchers. 20 This historical legacy left a strong imprint on the local political culture, but not in the sense of a widely shared collective identity. Even though the class issue of land was often the key point of contention, peasants of the region remained deeply divided, with historic battles between villages over the relationship between church and state, strong ethnic differences, and competing vertical patronage networks with the state. Even the broadest movement within memory, the land reform mobilization of the 1930s, was largely induced by 20 Distinct from ejidatarios, comuneros are members of the less well-known officially recognized form of land tenure based on the restitution of ancestral claims, the ‘agrarian community’ (comunidad agraria).

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conflict between political entrepreneurs within the state, leading to inequalities in the redistribution process which continue to interfere with peasant unity decades later. 21 Popular political memories were probably quite ambivalent, highlighting the importance of tactical alliances with elites at least as much as horizontal collective action in defense of class interests. The UELC emerged in a period of growing social effervescence all over Mexico. After decades of neglect of peasant agriculture, the national government renewed its rural development efforts, including occasional support for increasingly autonomous peasant movements. 22 In 1974, under the auspices of the federal government’s new Rural Development Investment Program (PIDER), a dynamic team of community organizers brought leaders from several agrarian communities together for the first time. 23 The government also opened up a new branch of the official agricultural bank in the region; producers from isolated villages met one another for the first time in its waiting room. Smallholders lacked bargaining power in the three markets which together shaped their terms of trade: credit, inputs and marketing of their harvests. A small group of intermediaries, operating region wide, took advantage of peasants’ lack of capital, transportation, storage facilities, and market information. Monopoly control over inputs meant that producers were obliged to barter corn for fertilizer on highly unfavorable terms, unaware of the existence of official prices, while less than 5 percent of the ejidatarios had access to government credit. Government agricultural bank officials collaborated with private fertilizer distributors, ignoring official price ceilings (Hernández 1990b). Until the arrival of the PIDER ‘Brigade’, local peasant leaders reported that they were largely unaware of the loss of their surplus through tied markets and rent-seeking bureaucrats. 24 One reason was that local agents of the broader chain of intermediation leading up to large agro-industries and state enterprises were not so different from the smallholders themselves, and they were bound together in kinship and patron-client relations. One peasant recalled the story of a cat which lived in a village of mice. The cat was disguised as a mouse, so the mice did not realize that he was eating them one by one until 21 For detailed historical analysis of peasant movements in the region, see Hernández (1988). 22 For more on the government’s contradictory reform efforts during this period, see Esteva (1983), Grindle (1977), and Sanderson (1981), among others. 23 For background on PIDER, see Cernea (1979, 1983), Lindheim (1986), and Page (1989). 24 Local leaders called the PIDER team a ‘brigade’. Not only did the organizers travel in a jeep, but some armed themselves because of threats of violence from local elites.

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another mouse came from afar to tell them ‘don’t be stupid, that’s no mouse, it’s a cat and he’s eating you up’. This peasant told the PIDER team that they had come to ‘unmask the cats’ (Hernández 1990b: 22). The annual ejido evaluation and planning assemblies provided one of the first opportunities to apply pressure for more access to the government’s rural development programs. The peasants rejected the official bank’s corrupt practices. When the bank cut them off in response, producers mobilized themselves to visit the branch manager and the governor. Upon arrival, they started by helping themselves to the soft drinks in the governor’s office. When officials asked them who the leaders of the ‘rabble’ were, they answered ‘we’re people, not rabble’. The credit involved was not large, but their first victory showed that pressure can bring results (Hernández 1990b). When planting time came, fertilizer grew scarce. This was no accident; the bank was maneuvering because the ejidos had escaped its control. After meeting in the PIDER offices to analyze the situation and decide what to do, a delegation of 150 peasants went to meet with the governor again. When they arrived in the capital, they found moral support among the student movement, which had occupied the main square. Dividing into two groups, they simultaneously met with the governor and occupied the manager’s office in the government fertilizer company. They refused to leave until the fertilizer was distributed. The governor’s term was almost over, leaving him too weak to respond to the fertilizer company manager’s pleas for help. Fertilizer was promised to the seventeen ejidos represented. The group then decided to take advantage of the trip to the city to resolve other long-standing problems of red tape and land rights. They visited the Agrarian Reform Ministry offices, leading to their second victory of the day (Hernández, 1990b: 29). The PIDER team actively encouraged these mass protests, which were led by new young peasant leaders. The first generation of older ejido leaders had presided over an unequal distribution of land within the reform sector, inheriting power from the overseers of the old haciendas after the redistribution in the 1930s, but a new round of ejido elections began to bring a younger, more representative generation of community leaders to the fore. They won support from the older ejidatarios who had gained little from the original land redistribution. These first mobilizations were facilitated by the weakness of the government’s National Peasant Confederation (CNC), which left a convenient vacuum in the region. On the other hand, the CNC’s past track record also left peasants wary of joining organizations that seemed ‘political’. The CNC had long neglected peasant concerns in favor of

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electoral patronage and corruption. 25 Joint teams of new ejido leaders and PIDER promoters convinced skeptical campesinos that the main purpose of the organization was economic development rather than party politics. The opinion of Doña Cuca, an indigenous comunera, was decisive in at least one community assembly: ‘We’re going to show the government that we can work hard and honorably’ (interview, Jomulco, Nayarit, 1989). The quick successes of the credit and fertilizer movements showed that unity could mean strength, and the communities joined together to found a union in 1975; 1,500 campesinos attended the founding ceremony. The UELC combined mass protest at the state level with lobbying of federal reformists, winning the rights to the government’s regional fertilizer distribution. The arrival of the first forty-one wagon-loads of fertilizer unleashed a wave of optimism and self-confidence. Broad participation continued, as the UELC built a huge new fertilizer warehouse with voluntary labor. At first, local speculators managed to take advantage of the fertilizer operation, buying up the supplies indirectly for resale, but the UELC assembly soon decided to limit sales to heads of households, at amounts sufficient for only 20 ha per sale. From the very beginning, the UELC’s bargaining power depended on new local and regional waves of participation. First, the ejidos themselves were revitalized, as participation by previously excluded rank and file brought new, more representative community-level leadership to power. Second, their first ad hoc meetings of local leaders laid the foundation for the formal delegate assemblies that would come to lead the first peasant-managed regional development organization in the area.

Government Intervention The involvement of some community leaders and PIDER promoters in the popular opposition movement to the governor in 1976, led the UELC to be identified with the challengers in spite of its officially nonpartisan position. The popular opposition movement was widely seen to have been denied the governorship because of fraud. Reformists then lost power at the national level when the presidency changed hands in late 1976. The UELC had grown into a regional political force, but the new leadership failed to call the regular monthly assemblies during the key political transition period of late 1976. The resulting gap between the regional and village-level leaders left the UELC highly vulnerable to the change in political climate. The 25

On the CNC in the 1970s, see Hardy (1984).

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new governor then expelled the PIDER organizers from the state. As one leader put it, ‘we were left orphans’ (Hernández 1990b: 46). The UELC’s loss of federal allies opened it up to intervention by the state government. This vulnerability was heightened by the leadership’s overtly confrontational stance, which was not backed up by a consolidated base. The UELC’s president even publicly refused to shake the new governor’s outstretched hand. The tide turned against the UELC when an official audit was used to charge the leadership with fraud. Half the ejido delegates aligned with the official CNC and upheld the charges, while the rest defended the imprisoned president, largely as a point of principle against government intervention. The leadership’s failure to account adequately for its management of UELC finances facilitated the government’s divide-and-conquer strategy. The rank-and-file members were never able to come to their own conclusions about the charges, since the government confiscated the relevant records. In exchange for the release of the leaders, the government managed to use elections to impose its candidate on the union. Although fiftyseven delegates participated in the election, the Agrarian Reform Ministry official somehow declared a tied vote, followed by his deciding ballot. The official winner, a pliable CNC supporter little known outside his community, promptly turned the UELC’s principal asset, the fertilizer outlet, over to the government agricultural bank. At the same time, authorities cracked down on the two largest, poorest, and most active communities in the UELC, reportedly imprisoning over fifty people and putting out arrest warrants for many more (mainly indigenous people), ostensibly because of conflicts about land boundaries with private farmers and ranchers. 26 Many of the ejido members and authorities were unwilling to follow the union leadership’s risky path of militant confrontation in an unfavorable political climate. The defeat of the independent UELC leadership resulted from its inability to build sufficient member support to compensate for the loss of federal allies. The government’s ability to divide and conquer suggests that the leadership had lost touch with the base, in part because of the weaknesses of countervailing powers, especially the ejido delegate assembly. In other words, the leaders’ loss of accountability to the members contributed to the UELC’s loss of autonomy vis-à-vis the government. 26 A national study of newspaper reports of human rights violations found that Nayarit suffered to a degree far out of proportion to its share of the population during 1978 and 1979, with 20% of the arbitrary detentions in the country (Concha 1988).

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The state government tried to reinforce its control over the UELC with huge infusions of resources for development projects, but without grassroots participation in their design or implementation, they quickly failed. After a wave of demoralization, suspended assemblies, and the government takeover of the UELC’s fertilizer outlet, a new federal food distribution program brought fresh external allies to the region in 1980. Reformists had regained influence over food policy at the national level. 27 Community organizers came to form democratic, autonomous village-store management committees, which would in turn form a new, regionwide Community Food Council to oversee the government’s rural food distribution efforts. Organizers also inspired fifteen ejido leaders by bringing them to visit the most dramatic success story of peasant-managed regional development in Mexico at that time, the Coalition of Collective Ejidos of the Yaqui and Mayo Valleys of Sonora (CECVYM). 28 The new national food distribution program gave dissenters access to trucks, organizers, and political legitimacy. Inchoate dissatisfaction crystallized into discreetly organized opposition, as communities regrouped and prepared to redemocratize the union. Representative leadership regained lost ground in the next round of community-level ejido elections, waging a nonideological campaign to revitalize the UELC’s peasant-managed economic development efforts. The key issue was to recover the fertilizer distributorship. The rising parallel leadership was able to use the Food Council as a springboard from which to confront the government-installed authorities, informally relieve them of power, ratify the change through elections and begin the process of reviving the UELC’s autonomous economic development project. This leadership transition was a key turning point for the UELC, setting a pattern it would follow for years to come. The rising community-based network that gained power included both new and more experienced 27 COPLAMAR, a special antipoverty agency, launched the rural food program in 1979, and the Mexican Food System strategy for revitalizing peasant grain production was announced in 1980 (Fox 1992a). 28 Founded after a series of massive land invasions in 1975–6, the CECVYM grew to national political and economic importance, showing that the ejido sector could produce efficiently if organized democratically. The coalition was also unusual in Mexico because it was the only large ‘second-level’ organization to have direct membership elections for regional leadership (rather than indirectly through ejido delegates). On the formation and consolidation of the CECVYM, see Gordillo (1988a, 1988b) and Otero (1989). [Note: The CECVYM later faded as its members turned to renting their lands, reportedly often to the former owners.]

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leaders. They achieved a high level of unity and coordination in the process of organizing the food stores, the Community Food Council and recovering control of the UELC itself. 29 The UELC seemed back on track by 1981, but the alternative leadership had not agreed in advance on who should lead the organization. Two candidates emerged: one from Uzeta, a small, relatively wellendowed ejido that had always played a key role in the UELC leadership, and the other, a venerable leader of the much poorer, indigenous community of Jomulco (which by itself accounted for the majority of the union’s membership). Union delegate voting power was by agrarian reform community (ejido or indigenous community), not weighted by population. Jomulco’s leader still won by a small margin, ushering in an extended period of broadened participation in decision-making. The new president’s moral authority and low-key, consensus-building style created an open and accessible atmosphere. For him, the union was important beyond its material contribution. ‘Besides [the low fertilizer prices] the Union has helped a lot because we’ve shared experiences with folks we didn’t even know. When we used to go to other ejidos we barely said hello to each other, at best. Through the organization we’ve all become brothers now; whenever we drop in on any ejido we know that we’re with our own compañeros’ (Franques Jacobo 1984). After a long and difficult period, the UELC revived the uneven process of creating a collective peasant identity in the region. In sum, the Food Council program created new community level and regionwide arenas of participation from above that were effectively appropriated from below. The opportunity to organize around one issue unleashed ‘social energy’ which spilled over into other development efforts. After the new round of ejido elections, the village-store committees and the regional Community Food Council created autonomous free spaces which allowed peasants to come together in a democratic counterweight that served as the springboard from which to launch the revitalization of the UELC. The autonomous peasant movement won an important ‘war of position’.

National Networking: Independent or Autonomous? In 1984, the UELC hosted the Sixth National Meeting of Regional Peasant Organizations, a network which then represented several hundred thousand peasants, with more than twenty-five groups from 29 After the 1981 elections, the new governor, an old-time populist, turned most of the community stores in the region over to his political operatives. Only the stores in the union’s ejidos remained community managed (Hernández 1990b).

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nineteen states. They campaigned for greater peasant control over the government’s top-down rural development programs, higher crop prices and greater access to inputs, marketing, and processing. The network had emerged in the early 1980s, inspired in part by the CECVYM experience, to form a new political ‘grey area’ in Mexico, distinct from both the traditional official groups and the political opposition-oriented organizations. The new network pushed for ‘winnable’ demands, combining autonomous mobilization with pragmatic bargaining and concrete policy alternatives. The UELC played a central role in this new network, proposing its formalization as the National Network of Independent Regional Peasant Organizations at the 1984 meeting. For the president, the union’s independence meant that ‘it doesn’t get involved in politics. . . . Here in the Union we’re united as one single man. Outside our doors each one follows their own path, whether it’s the PRI [the government party], the PSUM [the Unified Socialist Party of Mexico], whatever party they want. But we don’t deal with that here because this is a campesino struggle, and as campesinos we should be united’ (Franques Jacobo 1984). The whole group agreed with this spirit, but some activists were concerned about the confrontational associations of the word ‘independent’, and did not want to foreclose possible alliances with regional groups which might be nominally official but relatively autonomous in practice. Some pointed out the existence of peasant groups which were independent of the government but vertically controlled by opposition political parties. The network was formally constituted six months later as the National Union of Autonomous Regional Peasant Organizations (UNORCA). Profound differences in interests and outlook among the member groups posed potential problems for the UNORCA, but since the UELC included both mestizo surplus corn producers and landpoor indigenous net consumers, then under indigenous leadership, it played a key role in weaving the UNORCA into a decentralized but cohesive network. UNORCA soon gained national stature, increasing the opportunities for coordinated regional actions, national lobbying, and exchanging lessons among diverse development groups. 30 The UELC’s mobilization for the meeting certainly involved a high level of member participation; hundreds of participants from all over Mexico were housed and fed, exchanging experiences with rank-andfile members. For the president, one of the important reasons for 30 For detailed regional case studies and oral histories of UNORCA member groups during this key growth phase, see the 1984–6 weekly page in El Día, ‘Del Campo y del Campesino’, edited by Gustavo Gordillo.

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the event was that ‘the Union is going to get stronger, and get more organized in the ejidos. It’s not just the ejidos from the Union who are participating, we’re inviting folks from other ejidos around here so that they see what goes on in these meetings, because there are folks who don’t even know what a workshop is, or why it’s important. . . . Lots of folks should be here so that they can learn more about how the Union’s been working for the peasant class’ (Franques Jacobo 1984). The meeting was a turning point for the UNORCA as a national process, involving the ‘scaling up’ of its own regional members. The UELC, along with other leading member groups, was very wary of creating yet another traditional national organization with a vertical pyramidal structure and centralized leadership. Instead, they chose to form a decentralized network, reinforcing accountability by keeping national authority and leadership in the hands of the regional organizations. 31

Village-Managed Housing UELC launched its rural community housing project in 1985, with government loans and the lessons learned from the CECVYM’s prior experience. Two of the UELC’s team of four advisers were veterans of the CECVYM. The advisers had settled in the region and comanaged the housing project with peasant leadership. The close working relations between the advisers and the UELC deepened, reinforcing a power relationship in which the advisers were clearly working for the organization, rather than vice versa. The peasant leadership was quite open to the advisers’ nonpartisan political views, however, supporting both direct and representative forms of democratic management of development projects. Ejido assemblies decided who would receive construction loans and, together with the individual participants, decided how to manage the construction process. 32 The design of the housing project encouraged direct beneficiary participation and trained intermediate level campesino activists to forge stronger links between the communities 31 The leaders understood that the process of building autonomous national forms of representation independent of political parties was going to be a gradual one. As the president of the UELC put it, ‘these gatherings are part of a struggle which has begun. These struggles do not get resolved right away, in one push, they come with time, as the wheel goes around, as they say’ (Franques Jacobo 1984). 32 New community-managed construction enterprises generated four months of employment for approximately 1,700 people, saving them from having to migrate for a season. The project was also the first to convince the government low-income housing agency to adapt its procedures to rural realities. For further details, see UELC (1985).

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and, the UELC leadership. Most prior UELC activities had been production-oriented, helping landed heads of households, but the housing program, like the Food Council, benefited landless members of the community, especially grown children of ejidatarios. Equitable and efficient project implementation was reinforced by the systematic decentralization of decision-making. Activists who had played key roles in the housing project won unanimous election to the UELC leadership in 1986. When Juan Franques stepped down in 1986 he had served since 1981—an unusually long period. First he had completed the time remaining from his predecessor’s term, and then the delegate assembly extended his own term of office by a year to ensure continuity in the implementation of the housing project. His leadership saw the UELC through the transition from political opposition to economic project management, which required the decentralization of power to a more technically oriented, younger generation of community leaders and advisers. His leadership was unusual because of his capacity to delegate economic management decisions effectively without provoking any questioning of his political authority.

Corn Producers Mobilize Squeezed between rising inflation and falling government input subsidies, corn production became less and less profitable. Across the country, coalitions of small and medium-sized grain producers, many led by UNORCA groups, took peaceful protest actions to encourage agricultural policymakers to give more attention to the soaring costs of production. 33 The UELC was one of the first, leading three dramatic waves of mass mobilization for higher corn prices beginning in 1982. Producers repeatedly took over dozens of government warehouses, especially in the 1986 mobilization. Originally called by the CNC, the UELC ended up participating actively in the protest. Broadly representative delegations traveled to meet with Mexico City policymakers, who steered them toward promises of local development projects instead of price increases. 34 The actual implementation of the projects turned out to depend on the governor’s consent. Promises were broken and the UELC responded by suspending payments on its housing loans. The ‘Corn Strike’ movement peaked in a massive ten-day blockade of the international highway in 1987, Organizers convinced the local 33

On the crisis of Mexico’s corn economy in the 1980s, see Hewitt de Alcántara (1992). UELC representatives insisted on traveling to the capital separately from the CNC officials ‘because of the flies’ (cited in Hernández 1990b). 34

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radio station to broadcast the call to action. Participants closed bars, to prevent possible disorder. The decision to take over the highway was made in spontaneous mass ejido assemblies, and the one-hour-on, onehour-off blockade involved over 3,000 peasants. This UELC-led movement broadened into the Producers’ Association of Southern Nayarit, including much of the base of the CNC. Vehicles with tourists, children, and chemicals were allowed through, while organizers explained their cause and raised funds among the motorists. With the unionized truck drivers, they explained that the crop support price was like their minimum wage. The movement was protected from repression by a combination of its peaceful and moderate tone, its breadth, and the support of the official party’s candidate for governor. 35 The UELC then organized ejido assemblies alongside the highway, followed by union delegate assemblies. While this form of organization probably limited input from the many nonmembers present, it also blocked reported government efforts to infiltrate and disrupt the action, guaranteeing an autonomous decision-making process. The ejido assemblies were the crucial arenas of participation in the crop price mobilization. These democratic spaces kept the leadership in touch with the base and maintained discipline, thereby protecting against possible external provocation. Through negotiations with the Planning and Budget Ministry, the movement won an 8,000 peso per ton price increase—a symbolic victory at best. To add to the symbolism, however, the government handed the distribution of this bonus to the CNC, effectively excluding the UELC. The corn price movement was remarkably broad, but resulted in the appearance of political clout rather than actual economic concessions for the UELC.

Peasant Women and the ‘Self-Defense Economy’ Most peasant organizations in Latin America exclude women, formally or informally, especially where agrarian laws exclude women from access to land. Mexican ejidos specifically exclude women from land rights, except for widows and some single mothers. In the UELC, 35 As Mexico’s ruling official party continued to lose ground in the cities in the 1980s, rural votes became increasingly contested. Electoral dynamics are crucial for determining the outcome of regional producer price movements, particularly if one compares the partial victories won in Nayarit with two other 1986 corn price movements. During Chihuahua’s most contested election ever, a broad, nonpartisan peasant movement won significant price increases, while in Chiapas, where opposition has long been stifled, the governor (a general) responded with repression (Fox and Gordillo 1989).

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however, ejido women managed to gain representation at the regional level for the first time in Mexico. To qualify for low interest loans, the government housing agency had obliged the UELC to carry out an extensive survey of its members’ economic situations. This participatory experience had highlighted the importance of the previously invisible, informal sector of the local economy. As corn production prospects dimmed, the UELC’s advisers elaborated a development strategy known as the ‘Self-defense Economy’, 36 designed to increase regional self-sufficiency through household and community production of basic goods, especially food, in order to buffer the impact of inflation ‘imported’ from the rest of the economy. Peasant women were major actors in the local informal economy, but they lacked organizing experience. At the urging of wives of active ejido members, women met in their communities to analyze the cost of living as part of the campaign for higher crop support prices. Together with two female UELC advisers, the women developed a series of community-based projects that revived the traditionally diversified ‘backyard economy’, thereby becoming part of the regional economic development effort. 37 Creating space for women’s representation in a male-dominated organization proved easier said than done. The organizers often depended on the wives of ejido officials for their initial support. They integrated themselves by preparing food for the ejido festivals, at the same time as they moved into the more ambitious income generating projects. Rather than welcoming this participation, however, some union men put obstacles in their path. Some leaders blocked the women’s access to development agency funds assigned to their projects, feeling threatened by the success of autonomous groups within the union. Official politicians from outside the UELC also attempted to coopt the movement. With the help of two veteran advisers, the women still managed to form a regional network of their fifteen communitybased groups, known in official parlance as Women’s Agro-Industrial Units (UAIMs). 38 In spite of their traditional male distrust of women’s empowerment, the UELC leadership soon realized that they could gain both 36 A more literal translation of the ‘economía de trincheras’ would be the ‘trench economy’. 37 Ironically, the traditional backyard economy had been greatly undermined by government agricultural officials. Corrupt functionaries, especially the notorious crop insurance agents, grew accustomed to taking their bribes in kind, by loading their trucks up with family barnyard animals (Hernández Navarro 1990b). 38 For more on UAIMs, see Arizpe and Botey (1987). For further discussion of the women’s organizing experience in the UELC in a comparative context, see Stephen (1991).

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economic resources and valuable political capital from the movement. The Women’s Network of UAIMs was granted official representation at the assembly of union delegates, the first case ever in Mexico. As federal funds then became available, the UELC leadership allied with past rivals from the CNC to win over most of the UAIM leadership from their original, more independently minded organizers. The resulting politicization of the UAIMs constrained the progress of their economic projects. In sum, formal representation did not translate automatically into increased power vis-à-vis the central leadership, but the more active UAIMs continued to defend their autonomy within the UELC.

Electoral Politics: Citizenship or Clientelism? While gender constraints to accountability were primarily internal, the UELC’s next turning point highlights the impact of national politics on leadership–base relations. The UELC’s demands had always been more economic than political. Electoral politics were widely seen as corrupting. But the rise of the centre-left nationalist opposition made the 1988 presidential race genuinely competitive in many regions for the first time. Previously unseen differences between the UELC leadership and rank-and-file membership emerged. The official presidential candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, made important concessions to peasant demands in his political canvassing, and personally visited the UELC to show his support for their approach to rural development. 39 He even called on the president of the UELC to speak in a public campaign event. 40 The UELC’s leaders were greatly impressed, and moved to take advantage of this opportunity to bypass their conservative local rivals in the official CNC. The UELC’s leaders supported Salinas’s policy proposals, but many members sympathized with the principal opposition candidate, Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas, son of the UELC’s namesake, Lázaro Cardenas, who as Mexico’s president had redistributed most of the land in the region in the 1930s. 39 The government’s new rural development policy promised to offer substantive reforms without requiring traditional ‘corporatist’ political subordination, in a policy known as ‘social dialogue’ (concertación social). For the Mexican president’s earlier academic analyses of the politics of rural development, see Salinas de Gortari (1982, 1984). For further analysis of the first two years of Salinas’s actual implementation of concertación, see Bartra (1990), Dresser (1991), Hernández Navarro (1989a), and Moguel (1991). 40 As one local observer quipped, ‘since Salinas said “Let’s hear Nacho speak”, his feet haven’t touched the ground’ (interview with Pilar López, Ahuacatlán, Nayarit 1989).

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As a development organization, the UELC was committed to defending its members’ common economic interests, but leadership involvement in party politics tended to divide the membership, as had happened in 1976. The leadership put more energy into consolidating their alliances with politicians than into building a consensus among the membership. As one put it, ‘the time has come to become politicians—we have to look for godfathers higher up’ (interview, Ahuacatlán, Nayarit 1989). Did the leadership’s support for Salinas imply a loss of autonomy for the organization? Some real concessions to peasant organizations seemed in the offing, but personal ambition undoubtedly played a role as well. UELC leaders appeared to have chosen their political strategy autonomously, without significant external intervention, but they hardly consulted the membership. By election time in 1988, membership dissatisfaction with this political decision was still too dispersed to be expressed through the regional participation channels, such as the delegate assembly. In the short run, members combined ‘exit’ with ‘voice’, participating less in the union while electing new ejido commissioners who opposed the central UELC leadership. In the 1990 municipal elections, the former president of the UELC, Ignacio García Bueno, became mayor of the regional centre, Ahuacatlán. Field reports indicate that he did not relinquish de facto control over the UELC, leaving it greatly weakened. By late 1990, according to local estimates, total regular attendance at ejido and union meetings was outstripped by the revived participation of women in the UAIMs.

Leaders, Advisers, and Membership Influence The UELC leadership represented many key member interests during much of its history, whether as a resistance movement challenging the state, a productive economic enterprise, lobbying group, or a citizenship training centre. But why? Most of the leaders were committed to regular elections, and their ongoing competition with the official peasant federation made them care about member interests and opinions. Yet when leaders strayed, the formal mechanisms of accountability did not operate automatically, and members dealt unevenly with their discontent. These lags may be due in part to the decentralized and seasonal rhythms of agricultural and migratory life—a fact often reiterated by local observers. But the inconsistent development of opportunities for direct membership participation in the UELC’s ongoing activities is also part of the answer. In retrospect, much of what initially looked like active participation to outside observers may in

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fact have been more induced or instrumental mobilization than active involvement in decision-making. The UELC’s leaders and advisers shared many goals, but they tended to differ over the relative importance of membership empowerment. The leadership did not promote systematic political education in favor of participation for its own sake, but the leaders’ nonideological pragmatism did lead them to offer practical, instrumental incentives for collective action. It was the union’s two generations of advisers, covering the periods 1974–6 and 1980–7, who consistently injected democratic principles into the organizing process. They played crucial roles in most of the democratizing turning points, which involved repeated cycles of mass participation in campaigns for key member demands. For the leaders, direct democracy was sometimes an efficient means of mobilization, while for most of the advisers it was an end in itself. The advisers’ room for maneuver was limited, however, by their overriding respect for the elected leadership’s authority.

Mapping Leadership Accountability The UELC’s history shows that it is difficult to paint leadership accountability in dichotomous, black-and-white terms. Shades of grey are more appropriate for analyzing change over time, but we are limited by the lack of graduated indicators of degrees of accountability. The following ‘map’ of leadership accountability both describes its variation and suggests possible explanations. Accountability has both internal and external dimensions. Leadership accountability refers to members’ capacity to hold leaders responsible for their actions, but it also requires some degree of autonomy from external domination. Autonomy refers here to a group’s control over setting its own goals and making its own decisions without external intervention, whether by governments, political parties, religious groups, or development agencies. Autonomy is no guarantee of accountability. It is essential if leaders are to fend off external threats and remain responsive to membership concerns, but leaders can also build up their own sources of bureaucratic, economic, political, or charismatic power, becoming autonomous from the membership as well—in other words, less accountable and more ‘oligarchic’. With these two distinct dimensions of accountability in mind, one can begin to map the power relations of social organization leaders. How much power do they exert over the membership, and vice versa, and how

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Independent/democratic

Autonomy from the government

1977/8 (8)

1981/7 (D)

High

1988/9 (E)

Low

1974/5 (A)

1979/81 (C)

Traditional corporatist/ authoritarian Degrees

Low

‘Modernizing’ corporatist High

Leadership accountability (converse of autonomy from membership)

Figure 4.1. Map of power relations of social organization leadership (Case: Trajectory of the Unión de Ejidos ‘Lázaro Cardenas’)

much power do external actors, in this case the government, exert over them? 41 One can frame degrees of leadership autonomy from the government along a continuum that ranges from high to low. Similarly, one can plot leadership accountability to the membership in terms that range from high to low (conversely, low accountability to members can be seen as high leadership autonomy from the base). Along each dimension, one can see changes over time. Putting the two dimensions together, one can chart the history of the leaders’ changing internal and external power relations. Figure 4.1 illustrates the political trajectory of the UELC leadership, from its founding in 1975 through the 1988 presidential elections. The UELC’s trajectory began at point A, in 1974–5, as reform-minded rural development promoters began organizing with local leaders around 41 The role of external actors is not necessarily negative, since they can ally with concerned members to increase leadership accountability, as they did in 1980. External funding of mass membership organizations, for example, necessarily affects the balance of power between leaders and members; the actual impact depends on the nature of the aid and how it is delivered.

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pressing felt needs. Mass participation and accountability were high in the founding fertilizer and credit access movements. The mobilization was not independent of the government, however, even though important agencies were its main targets; one cannot understand the course of Mexican social movements with a monolithic view of the state. The whole process was unleashed in large measure because of the strength of reformists within certain parts of the state apparatus at that time. 42 By the late 1980s, this type of ‘post populist’ government reform effort came to be known as ‘social dialogue’ (concentration social). 43 After the fraudulent 1976 state elections, with the change in presidency and the resulting expulsion of the UELC’s reformist allies, the leadership began to confront the government more directly. The union leadership moved up on the autonomy scale, but as it lost touch with much of the base, it also moved down on the accountability scale, to point B. The government then moved in to ‘divide and conquer’ and imposed its own leaders on the union, pushing the UELC far down on both the autonomy and accountability scales to point C. Traditional corporatists within the Mexican government frequently combine cooptation with repression of social movements. With the beginning of the redemocratization process, encouraged by the arrival of new external allies, the union began the long climb up to point D, high on both the autonomy and accountability scales. This shift inaugurated the most extended participatory phase in the union’s history, beginning with the Community Food Council—a key parallel political counterweight—and continuing with the self-managed housing project, the campaigns for higher crop prices and the women’s projects. All of these efforts decentralized the decision-making process, creating or reinforcing broadened opportunities for rank-and-file participation in addition to the regular union and ejido assemblies. With the controversies generated by the 1988 presidential elections, however, the leadership began to make political alliances without full 42 More generally, the prospects for internal democracy in Mexican peasant organizations also depend significantly on the role of the state. The state has often blocked the consolidation of democratic challenges through multiple combinations of repression and ‘divide and conquer’ tactics, yet it is not monolithic. Precisely because the Mexican state plays such a major role in structuring the limits and possibilities for organization, the role of reformists within the state turns out to be a crucial determinant of grassroots mobilization. Not only does their rise and fall within the state condition degrees of freedom of organization, but both the UELC’s founding and its later redemocratization indicate that the availability of state allies willing and able to support autonomy and internal democracy within social organizations can be decisive. For a more theoretical discussion of this point, see Fox (1992a). 43 By 1990, the policy of social dialogue appeared to create new, more pluralistic relations with autonomous social organizations in some cases, while in others, it simply ‘modernized’ the Mexican government’s traditional corporatist political controls.

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consultation of the base. Since the housing project, the new UELC leadership had devolved relatively little power to members and community leaders. They were very cautious, for example, about sharing crucial financial information, to prevent possible manipulation by political rivals. This fear may have been well founded, but also reflected limited communication between the leadership and the membership, which in turn was both cause and effect of the emergence of ‘oligarchic’ tendencies. The regular operations of the union began to be affected. For example, the fertilizer sales office only opened at 9 a.m.—rather late in the day for most peasant producers. The growing distance between the leaders and the rank and file is shown by the slide down both the autonomy and accountability scales to point E. This movement was not definitive, nor was it as dramatic as the earlier period of direct government intervention. The union had built up a rich internal political life, and multiple possibilities for future changes in leadership relations with the rank and file remained. One is reminded, however, of the repeated tendency for electoral politics to ‘spill over’ into the attempt to build a nonpartisan organization to represent broader class interests. The figure shows that accountability and autonomy are distinct but also related. For accountability to be high, autonomy must also go up (i.e. point D). But accountability can drop while autonomy either rises or falls (i.e. points B and E). Given the importance of democratically minded outside allies, increased accountability is more consistently associated with an empowered, active membership than with very high degrees of autonomy from external actors.

Conclusions Social science has yet to offer a general framework for explaining the ebbs and flows of organizational democracy. But one can take a genre of cases and work on particular dimensions of the problem. This study charted the process of leadership accountability and member participation in a regional organization typical of a growing trend in the Mexican peasant movement. The account showed how the interaction of internal and external factors shaped each turning point in its history. Leadership autonomy and accountability were then disentangled and mapped over time. But can one begin to draw more general conclusions about the process of democratic institution building? Perhaps the most important conclusion is that organizations do not build internal democracy through a linear process. Rather, the development of internal democracy is inherently an uneven and vulnerable

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process which depends on the presence of countervailing forces capable of offsetting the ever-present dangers posed by the ‘Iron Law of a Oligarchy’. But what do these countervailing forces look like? They reveal themselves with greatest clarity during dramatic turning points in an organization’s history. But to understand the origins of these determinants of the rise or fall of leadership accountability, one needs to analyze how power relations are expressed in between those moments when they are expressed through overt conflict. In this context, the most important counterweights for promoting leadership accountability were participatory subgroups within the peasant organization, often led by middle-level leaders. The case analysis reinforces a point which is quite familiar to most anthropologists: only rarely do peasant organizations actually make major decisions in mass meetings or through voting. More often, such formal procedures ratify decisions made previously, through subtle informal debates and pressures, as shown by the way in which the Community Food Council created the space from which the UELC could be redemocratized—first de facto, and only then formally. The relations between regional leaders and the rank and file were largely mediated by community-level leaders. The single most important kind of subgroup within the union was the member ejidos, but their formal operation alone was insufficient to ensure the democratization of the UELC—perhaps because they were so diverse, and were rarely all vibrant and participatory at the same time. Ejido commissioners, union delegates, local and regional assemblies, and project-specific committees all created alternative channels for the direct expression of membership power within the union. The villagestore committees, the housing project task forces and the ejido assemblies that met while occupying the highway are all important examples of both formal and informal counterweights to centralized leadership power. Alternative channels consist of the effective linkages between the base of a large membership organization and its formal pinnacle which add to the conventional pyramidal election of union delegates and leaders. Such parallel linkages include informal as well as formal opportunities for members to make, carry out, or oversee important group decisions. 44 As in the case of the housing project, when active rank-and-file members and community-level leaders were able to ‘scale 44 This concept was introduced in Fox and Hernández (1989) as ‘intermediate instances of participation’. The term ‘intermediate’ referred to the space ‘in between’ the central leadership and the rank and file. ‘Instance’ referred to the varied range of opportunities for alternative forms of participation. The result of combining these terms, however, was overly vague, and ‘alternative channels’ is more precise.

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up’ and play regional leadership roles, the boundaries between central leaders and the rank and file began to blur. The Community Food Council was formally a parallel regional group made up of village representatives, which in turn became the springboard for reopening political space within the UELC. Participatory subgroups are crucial for leadership accountability. In their absence, leaders of large organizations only need to deal with atomized individuals who lack systematic opportunities to share information and to generate alternative opinions, counterproposals, and contenders for leadership. In contrast, subgroups increase member bargaining power because they can broker leaders’ access to resources they want, such as votes, mobilization capacity, money, and information. 45 But the existence of subgroups alone does not necessarily imply that members will gain power. Subgroups may also only represent small minorities, and are therefore necessary but not sufficient to encourage leadership accountability to the majority. Furthermore, the lags which separate the waves of membership pressure for accountable leadership show that if members are disconnected or divided among themselves, leaders can maintain control by appearing to mediate, to represent the general interest, or through conventional divide and conquer tactics. It is important to recognize that ‘scaling up’ grassroots development organizations puts internal democracy at risk, but cycles of participation can offset tendencies towards centralization. In large organizations, formal and informal opportunities for participation mediate these cycles because they encourage or discourage different kinds of action. Inherited institutions thus condition mass participation, yet collective action (or inaction) can in turn open or close future opportunities for participation. Regular elections are not enough: organizational democracy depends on the emergence and consolidation of internal checks and balances as well. Multiple, alternative channels for both direct and representative democracy shape the balance of power between central leaders and the base.

Epilogue46 When the original study was completed in 1989, the ‘Lázaro Cardenas’ Union of Ejidos was on a downward trajectory. For most of the 45 Moe (1980) offers a useful discussion of leadership–subgroup interaction in the context of a sophisticated analysis of the determinants of participation in economic interest groups. 46 This essay is based on a recent extensive field report from Pilar López Sierra, an agrarian sociologist who participated in the original field study of the UELC in the late

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1980s, the organization had combined classic mass protest actions for economic demands, such as increased corn prices, with innovative alternative community development strategies, including women’s projects to increase household economic self-sufficiency and participatory self-built housing investments. These efforts simultaneously depended on and encouraged broad member participation. The housing program, for example, was designed to be carried out in the dry season, when farmers had fewer competing demands on their time. In 1987, 170 women from across five municipalities came together in the first Regional Women’s Meetings, making possible the Women’s Union and the emergence of thirteen women-run ejido enterprises. 47 During the run-up to the 1988 presidential elections, however, the pressures of electoral competition began to create a new set of incentives, both for UELC’s leaders and for their allies within the state— most notably Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Manuel Camacho. By then the housing program had ended, leaving the regional network of local women’s groups as the main counterweight to the increasingly centralized leadership. The UELC leadership did not support their programs but did want to control the external project funds, provided by the Agrarian Reform Ministry and a grant from the Inter-American Foundation. The leadership’s attitude, combined with their lack of financial transparency, provoked the women to unite in an unprecedented challenge to centralized power in the union. The leadership conceded by recognizing the women’s right to participate in union assemblies, and committed to provide both support and information, but this promise failed to materialize (p. 26). Meanwhile, the leadership saw the UELC’s advisors’ commitment to internal democracy as a threat and pressured them to leave the region. ‘For Nacho, who wanted to control the Union completely, the advisors represented a huge counterweight’ (p. 27). This decision by the Union president obliged the rest of the peasant leadership to choose, and they ended up deferring to one of their own, rather than taking sides with the advisors, who at the end of the day remained ‘external’, in spite of their years of commitment and integration into the communities. After all, in addition to class and cultural differences, they retained the option of leaving. The advisors chose to leave the organization rather than making an open break. The advisors formed a new NGO and continued to provide support to the women’s projects, until their continued presence in the 1980s. Citations refer to interviews that she carried out in December, 2005, and are reported in López Sierra (2006). Translations of quotes are by Jonathan Fox. 47

For further discussion of women’s participation in the UELC, see Stephen (1997).

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region became unviable. According to one of the advisors, once they left, all of the UELC’s economic projects fell apart—the feedgrain mixing plant, the backyard economy projects, the agreements with the Agriculture Ministry, etc. (p. 27). Only small-scale community economic development projects that were independent of the UELC survived, such as the turkey farm in Jomulco and the women’s honey project in the Heriberto Jara ejido, which predated the union. As López observes, Once the state government saw Nacho’s support from higher ups in Mexico City, he was offered the candidacy of the ruling party to run for mayor of the main regional town center. The UELC’s membership was divided over his candidacy. Some members supported him with the hope that from the mayor’s office, Nacho would channel support to the organization. Even some of the women’s groups supported his candidacy. Yet some members challenged Nacho even before his candidacy. Two ejidatarios from H. Jara publicly accused him of mishandling funds and criticized what they saw as Nacho’s turning the Union over to the government. (2006: 28)

Ignacio García Bueno served as mayor of Ahuacatlan from 1990 through 1993. Few union members were content with his administration. Even his own ejido, Uzeta, still lacked electricity service by the end of his term (p. 29). As an ejidatario from Ahuacatlán, Juan Manuel Quezada, put it, ‘Nacho did nothing for the municipality, nor for the Union, nor for the ejidos’ (p. 29). Others noted that the UELC presidents who followed him did not know how to take advantage of the opportunity for the organization. Yet López observes that ‘the fact is that, beyond what little interest Nacho showed in supporting the Union from the town hall, that level of government was limited in terms of what it could do to promote the Union. . . . The backing that the municipality could provide, rather than for the Union, were for productive projects of small groups of ejidatarios, and to get them they had to compete with groups and neighborhoods from the rest of Ahuacatlan, because Nacho would not give special treatment to the members’ of the UELC (pp. 29–30). This suggests that the former UELC president ended up being more accountable to his constituents as a whole than he was as president of the union. The UELC had two presidents after Nacho, and there was peasant participation in the elections, but the organization lacked a project that would mobilize the base. They even stopped the annual celebrations of the UELC’s founding. The most ambitious economic project during the early 1990s was to acquire a large garage and parts shop, to take advantage of the traffic from the nearby major highway that connected Guadalajara to the coast. Nacho cut the deal for a loan for the Union with President Salinas but in the end the project ended up under

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the control of the state government. Then Nacho promoted a loan for the UELC to buy fertilizer to sell to its members, but the UELC only recovered a third of the funds. The then president of the UELC, Chico Villlegas, recalled that he was warned ‘careful because you’re going to get over-committed’. That’s what happened, ‘folks said why should we pay? So they didn’t pay’ (pp. 30–1). Neither of these economic initiatives involved membership participation. As López concludes, ‘the internal life of the UELC never recovered. To this day Nacho is held responsible for the decline of the Union, though in practice neither [of his successors as president] managed to really lead the organization. It’s as though they all still expected Nacho’s leadership, even when he was no longer interested in the Union’ (p. 31). Participation in the assemblies dropped and the members did nothing to stop the downward slide. In Nacho’s view, ‘folks dropped it. It was like when you see a movie that supposed to have lots of action and then you don’t see much. Folks get bored and leave.’ As former UELC leader from the early 1980s Marcos Hernández put it, ‘we finished it off ’ (p. 31). The Union did not carry out the required leadership change in 1994 and fell apart. It is interesting to note, in terms of different leadership styles and their relationship with opportunity structures for participation, that the loss of member interest at the end did not reflect a lack of trust in or support for the UELC’s last president. Chico Villegas continued to be a recognized leader in his ejido and the region. After his period as president ended, he was elected as president of the Community Food Council, one of the few regional participatory institutions that remain, overseeing the operations of the government-supplied village stores. He later served as secretary of his ejido, representative for public oversight of the region Rural Development District, which oversees government crop support payments and is even appointed to organize his ejido’s festivals. It seems as though not only the membership lost interest in the UELC, but the leaders did as well—even those who remained committed to other pathways for peasant collective action (p. 31). Once the pathway to modernization via social sector enterprises met a dead end, southern Nayarit turned to modernization via the market. Rain-fed corn was largely replaced by agave production, based on contract agriculture with the large-scale tequila industry in nearby Jalisco. According to former UELC leaders, the ejido reform of Art. 27 of the constitution accelerated the weakening of broad-based community development projects. While this national policy change may have accelerated the shift to production of industrial raw materials,

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the UELC’s key period of decline predated the legal changes in the ejido’s economic role. This disconnect between participation, autonomy, and leadership accountability was not wholly structurally predetermined. Leadership styles mattered as well. The UELC was led during 1981–6 by a leader whose values and style led him to actively encourage participation and alternative leadership, in contrast to his successor’s approach. As López put it, the decentralized and low-key style of Juan Franques favored the emergence of mid-level leaders through the housing program. Groups that could take charge and could make decisions with some autonomy. While the accounting was handled by the Union, each ejidatario knew with precision what they received for housing. . . . The women’s projects also allowed them to work with some autonomy and to handle their resources. . . . The centralization of power in Nacho’s hands had to do with his particular leadership style and the strong links he built around Salinas and his team, links that he could not or did not want to get out of. The president of the Union was not naïve about the process of cooptation that the nation’s peasant organizations experienced when Salinas de Gortari became president. Yet he did not consider himself part of these coopted organizations, since he thought that he could, if need be, draw the line, together with the UELC.

As Nacho recalled, I saw that, in reality, at that moment, you serve as the system’s knight, but there are also moments when you serve as the bishop but then you end up as the pawn. It’s like a chessboard but in reverse. They use you . . . (interview, December, 2005: p. 22)

As López concludes If Nacho was able to consolidate his power as an authoritarian, exclusionary leader, it was because his links to the grassroots were quite traditional, through direct or assembly-style forms of democracy, where [members] follow the leader-as-father, though they then judge him morally and marginalize him. Just as they raise the leader up they bring him back down. (p. 45)

This point underscores the relevance of promoting checks and balances in between the leadership and assemblies through intermediate-level participatory bodies. From the beginning, regional campesino organizations’ strategy of ‘appropriating the productive process’ had relied heavily on access to federal resources—most notably for credit, but also for technical assistance and markets. 48 This access depended on personal 48 For classic reflections on the appropriation of the productive process, see Bartra (1991).

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connections linked to informal, behind-the-scenes political coalitions, rather than on consistent rules. Access had little to do with institutionalized rights. It may be no coincidence that regional participation in Ahuacatlán persisted, even after the demise of the UELC, through the Community Food Council. The Diconsa rural food supply program was and is governed by clear (though bounded) rules that had over the years become institutionally embedded as rights to information and accountability—not to mention low-cost basic foods. This nondiscretional access in turn motivated sustained participation at both community and regional levels. Moreover, large, centralized economic development projects turned out to be especially vulnerable to lack of informed member participation, which in turn undermined their social and economic foundations—as in the case of the UELC’s last big initiative, the loan for large-scale fertilizer purchases. In this sense the UELC experience was representative of most of what became of many of the UNORCA’s regional affiliates. Though many remained nonpartisan after 1988, for those that were unwilling to give up their rights to political contestation, former allies in the federal government often closed their doors. The UELC went further, breaking its ties to UNORCA when its former president was mayor. The pathway of the UELC’s decline in member participation suggests that the organization collapsed in large measure because of a withdrawal of member support and interest, rather than being directly dismantled by pressures or intervention from above. Members were not withdrawing from all forms of participation—they continued to engage in other forms of formal and informal collective action. They withdrew from this particular organization; one whose logic depended on having the mandate and resources to intervene in production and marketing. Yet federal policies (and politics) had combined to weaken both the role of ejidos, and the role of ejido unions, in economic life. In short, while lack of leadership accountability appears to have been the proximate cause of the UELC’s collapse, the institutional foundations of producer-based forms of organization and representation had already been significantly weakened.

................. 5

................. National Electoral Choices in Rural Mexico1

How do we know what Mexican rural citizens think about politics? Several different research perspectives provide important insights, but no single approach combines the diversity of the many ongoing trends with reliable nation-wide indicators of rural political views. The degree to which the Chiapas rebellion surprised most political analysts should lead to great caution when drawing firm conclusions based on a linear extrapolation of the tip of the rural political iceberg that is visible at any one point in time. 2 Rather than focus on the many reactions to the government’s rural policy reforms, however, this essay will concentrate on one key dimension of rural citizens’ capacity to express their political views: access to a guaranteed secret ballot. The right to a secret ballot is a necessary condition for political democracy. The secret ballot is not a sufficient condition for democratic voting, but without it all the other conditions could be ineffective. This chapter will analyze data on the secret ballot, pressure of voters, and the presence of opposition political parties in rural areas. Until the electoral process is free and fair in rural areas, it will be difficult to know what campesino political views are. The government’s agrarian and agricultural policy reforms provoked a wide range of reactions among the people most directly affected: the one in four Mexicans who lives in the countryside. In some regions, among some groups, the reforms generated active or passive acceptance, the response was open protest among others, with an 1 This chapter is an unrevised version of Fox (1996b). I am very grateful to Juan Molinar, then at the Colegio de México, for generously making IFE data available. Dr Sergio Aguayo, of Alianza Cívica and the Colegio de México, provided very useful feedback on an earlier version. Thanks also to Rogelio Razo, then an MIT undergraduate, for able research assistance and data analysis. 2 For example, President Salinas’s reform of Article 27 of the Constitution provoked little immediate rural protest, yet this policy change reportedly tipped the balance in the internal Zapatista debate over whether or not to take up armed struggle.

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unmeasurable degree of ‘everyday forms of resistance’ in between. Among those willing and able to protest, some opted for more militant action than others. Still others chose the long-standing exit option, leaving for the city or the USA. 3 No single generalization could possibly fit the inherently diverse individual and group reactions, but distinct general patterns do emerge. 4 The problem is that it is extremely difficult to discern the relative weights of the main trends. Studies of rural politics tend to fall into three disparate categories. First is the rich literature on rural social and civic movements, which provides great insight into how and why discontent turns into protest. Second is the growing body of public opinion poll data, which provides a snapshot of responses to questions about electoral preferences. The third main source of information about rural political views consists of the national election results themselves (if they are sufficiently disaggregated into rural and nonrural areas). None of these sources of information, however, provides a comprehensive overview of effective access to national electoral options in rural areas. Each kind of information has its limits. First, studies of mobilization tell us very little about the political beliefs of the vast majority who do not participate actively. Second, national polling in Mexico rarely reaches rural areas, and when it does, the specifically rural sample is far from robust. Moreover, in areas where political freedoms are lacking, exit polls may well reflect how people voted, but not necessarily how they would have preferred to have voted under democratic conditions. 5 Third, national election data from rural areas reflect the results of a process that has yet to cross a minimum threshold of freedom and fairness (Alianza 3 Indeed, top policymakers apparently expected rural out-migration to be the main campesino reaction to the policy reforms. At a May, 1992 Harvard forum, Dr. Luis Téllez (then Undersecretary of Agriculture) predicted that the economically active population in agriculture would probably fall from 26% to 16% in the coming decade (cited in Fox 1992b). 4 For analyses of specific movements and current trends, see La Jornada del Campo and Cuadernos Agrarios. For overviews of the political dynamics of the Salinas era agrarian and agricultural reforms, see Fox (1994c, 1995). 5 The best public political poll of ejidatarios, sponsored by the Instituto de Proposiciones Estratégicas in 1990, found that 20% sympathized with the PRD while the rest said they supported the PRI. But more notable is that PRI support was quite thin; only 10% said their affiliation was based on their ‘convictions’ (por convicción). The rest reported that they supported the PRI because it was ‘convenient’ (por conveniencia), because of various kinds of imposition, or because they knew of no alternatives (Morett Sánchez 1991: 110–11). For an overview of election polls in 1994 see De la Peña (1994). See also Domínguez and McCann (1995). They critique most Mexican pollling as inadequate, but their description of their own polling source (Gallup) suggests a very thin rural penetration. It should be noted that while many diverse polls in 1994 were consistent with the election results, it is possible that they may have been influenced by the same distortions that limited freedoms inside rural polling places.

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Cívica/Observación, 1994). 6 Therefore none of the three main sources of information about rural political beliefs is sufficient to permit a reliable assessment of the relative national weights of diverse ongoing rural trends. Rural movements for local level democratization have centuries of history in Mexico, but rural participation in national electoral politics has received much less research attention. If national electoral competition in Mexico is still new, then national electoral competition in rural areas is even newer. We do not know, however, what fraction of rural citizens had effective access to national choices in the 1994 presidential election. This study begins with a brief discussion of exclusionary political practices and the potential for the government’s recent agrarian policy reforms to be used as clientelistic control mechanisms. The analysis then focuses on access to the secret ballot in rural areas. Even if government officials tried to take advantage of the new reforms to encourage progovernment voting, ballot secrecy could potentially protect individuals and permit them to exercise their citizenship rights in spite of official pressures. The analysis of ballot secrecy will draw on two different data sources. The Civic Alliance’s election observation data will be discussed first, followed by an analysis of the degree to which opposition political parties were able to take advantage of their legal right to participate in the community-level administration of the voting process. Since the Civic Alliance found widespread violations of ballot secrecy in rural areas in the sample they observed, it is reasonable to assume that ballot secrecy was at least as serious a problem throughout the rest of the countryside. In this context, the participation of opposition parties in the administration of the polling place is probably a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for ballot secrecy to be respected. In other words, one can assume that voters at polling places where opposition parties were not present lacked a guaranteed secret ballot and therefore lacked access to meaningful national electoral choices. 7 6 For overviews of rural fraud in 1994, see Moguel and Botey (1994) and Massieu (1994). Electoral fraud has long been seen as more widespread in rural than in urban areas. According to Juan Molinar’s comprehensive overview of party politics: ‘electoral fraud is a generalized practice in the Mexican electoral system, but it is not universal or homogeneous. It is more common and intense in rural and remote areas. . . . This is not only because the PRI gets better results using cacique-style clientelistic mechanisms of electoral mobilization rather than modern campaign techniques; it also has to do not only with the opposition, which, with a few exceptions, only goes as far as the paved road’ (1991: 9). 7 Note Molinar’s point that the persistence of electoral fraud is due not only to authoritarian practices, but to the limited outreach of opposition parties as well (see above).

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The discussion will first analyze the Civic Alliance’s state level data, followed by an assessment of the presence of opposition parties at polling places in significant indigenous populations based on municipal level data for the three states with the largest indigenous populations (Oaxaca, Veracruz, and Chiapas).

Exclusionary Political Practices Most discussions of electoral irregularities focus exclusively on fraud. This approach deals with many of the obstacles to free and fair elections. Fraud is a subset of a broader category of exclusionary electoral practices that violate basic democratic principles. Exclusionary political practices are defined here as systematic patterns of manipulating electoral access, including fraud, voter registration bias, the lack of secret ballot guarantees, voter intimidation, and vote-buying (Fox 1994b). These are issues of electoral freedoms, as distinct from issues of electoral fairness, many of which remain unresolved in longstanding democratic systems (e.g. fair access to mass media, limits to campaign financing). Exclusionary political practices are often situated in ‘local’ politics because that is where most citizens either gain access to or are excluded from the state more generally. But authoritarian local politicians usually need national allies to survive, especially if challenged from below. Most analysts assume that fraud and other exclusionary electoral practices only raise fundamental problems for the democratic process if they are obviously nationally centralized. Otherwise such practices tend to be treated as ad hoc and anecdotal. 8 Conventional election observers tend to view such procedural problems as mere ‘imperfections’ compared to classic ballot-tampering, assuming that they are not deliberate, and can be easily corrected through proper and timely technical intervention. Whether or not they are systematic (i.e. centralized), such exclusionary practices can certainly be widespread. Mexico’s nonpartisan Civic Alliance observation movement found that in the 1994 presidential election, the secret ballot was not guaranteed 8 International election observers often acknowledge that fraud has occurred but then assert that it was insufficient to affect the outcome. There are several problems with this approach. First, if elections are flawed by fraud but there are no comprehensive independent parallel counts, then one cannot know its magnitude. Exit polls are helpful, but second-best, since they are based on samples rather than the full universe of voters. Second, widespread expectations of fraud or manipulation are sufficient to affect voter decisions about whether to participate at all. Third, the conventional definition of fraud includes tampering with the ballots or the count, but often overlooks other important exclusionary practices, such as manipulation of the registration process, partisan purging of the rolls, voter intimidation, violation of the secret ballot, and vote-buying.

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in 38 percent of their national sample of polling places (as will be discussed below). In the combined national and state elections in Chiapas, the secret ballot was violated in 68 percent of the polling places observed (and perhaps more often in polling places not observed). 9

New Levers of State Intervention in the Countryside Where do Mexico’s recent agrarian and agricultural reforms fit into the rural electoral equation? Rather than make generalizations about campesino political reactions to these important rural policy reforms, this study will address the question of their access to one particular channel for expressing their political views: the national election. One major link between this issue of electoral access, capacity to express political preferences and the government’s policy reforms is through the changing nature of state regulation of the rural economy. The nature of state intervention has changed significantly, but the state has not withdrawn from regulating key features of the peasant economy. The new regulatory institutions differ from those they replaced, but they still leave powerful discretionary levers in the hands of government officials, levers with the potential to be used for electoral manipulation. 10 If the state had completely withdrawn from rural life, it would have given up a wide array of instruments that have managed to channel rural dissent for decades. The government’s ambitious new programs for ejido land titling (Procede) and crop payments for trade adjustment (Procampo) were created as part of a broad policy shift to withdraw the heavy hand of the state from regulating peasant life. Whether or not they will in practice depends on the degree to which each program makes the transition from public declarations of intentions to the actual delivery of checks to real producers and the confirmation of individual land titles that match users’ claims to each parcel. These tasks require the national state to develop remarkably intimate relationships with millions of individuals for the first time. These reforms require federal bureaucrats to reach more deeply into the countryside 9 Even at the national level, relatively few exclusionary actions are actually needed to affect a close electoral outcome. A ‘little bit’ of exclusionary political practices can go a long way, especially in systems that lack second-round runoffs. The broader point here is not simply that most analysts only treat nationally-organized fraud seriously. Rather, the proposition is that, first exclusionary political practices are a more useful concept than narrowly defined fraud, and second, the cumulative result of decentralized exclusionary practices may be large enough to influence national politics. Exclusionary electoral practices may well have been ‘marginal’ compared to unbounded fraud in the past, but margins are supposed to matter in democracies. 10 This section draws on Fox (1995).

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than ever before, to learn about, measure, and mediate the complex diversity of real-life producer–land use relationships. For example, the Procampo crop payment program requires the state to determine who was growing basic crops, with how many hectares and whether they had legal use-rights to the land, complete with each producer’s correct name. Under the previous support price system, the official procurement agency (Conasupo), did not need to know exactly who produced what. The new approach fits well with the new official ideology of ‘social liberalism’, in which the state combines promarket economic policies with continued social concern. In contrast to the indirect patterns of regulation in the past, however, the new crop payment program requires the state to develop a formal relationship with every producer of basic grains in the country. This is a major challenge to state capacity, especially since the task of developing an official census of producers was given to the Ministry of Agriculture, an agency whose field apparatus is not known for its efficiency and transparency. The reform of land tenure policy raises analogous questions about state capacity to develop accountable relationships with millions of campesinos in a very short period ot time. The new agrarian regulatory apparatus was created with the explicit recognition that abuses of authority were possible, and as a result agrarian officials had the obligation to ‘receive, investigate and channel complaints and denunciations regarding possible violations of agrarian law and procedures committed by public servants to the appropriate authorities’. 11 As Baitenmann found in her Veracruz field research, however, since these agrarian officials ‘are also part of the same team that coordinates [the new land titling program], . . . they were not going to denounce themselves’ (1994). She points out that the experience of the government’s official human rights commission provides a notable contrast with the new agrarian apparatus, in that the new proaccountability human rights institutions are formally independent of the government agencies that they are supposed to monitor. To be successful on their own terms, Mexico’s promarket rural reforms require the state apparatus to operate with qualitatively higher levels of accountability than in the past. Yet progress toward accountable governance in Mexico has been highly uneven, across both policy arenas and geographical space. Because civic movements for local democratization and accountable governance have advanced little in most rural areas, the official project of streamlining and targeting 11 Chapter IX, Article 41 of the Internal Rules of the Agrarian Attorney General’s office (cited in Baitenmann 1994).

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the state’s role in agriculture and antipoverty efforts may well be undermined by authoritarian elements deeply embedded within the state itself. Several of the government’s rural reform programs provoked extensive criticism for being used for electoral manipulation. Many of these criticisms did not distinguish between electorally motivated ‘pork barrel’ inducements that are characteristic of most electoral systems, versus specifically authoritarian conditioning of access to these programs. The distribution of Procampo crop payment checks right before the 1994 presidential elections was one of the most controversial government actions. More than 2,800,000 Procampo checks were delivered just a few weeks or days before the 1994 presidential election (in open violation of the government’s own promise to suspend the program for the two weeks prior to the election). 12 The timing certainly suggests electoral motivations, but whether this counts as specifically authoritarian vote-buying (versus ‘normal’ pork barrel vote inducements) depends on the government’s capacity to effectively condition access on electoral support. In other words, if the government ‘carrots’ are linked to the threat of the ‘stick’, then this manipulation falls outside the ‘normal’ category of ‘democratic’ inducements. As will be discussed below, for the Civic Alliance, this process fell primarily under the category of ‘coacción’, or pressure on voters. 13 Since most government benefits were distributed before election day, whether they were solidarity projects, land titles, or crop payment checks, the bargaining process between state and citizens was not systematically documented by independent observers. In practice, this bargaining process involved a diverse combination of efforts to gain electoral support both with and without the potential for monitoring and punishing noncompliance. 14 Not all efforts to ‘buy’ votes involve threats to enforce compliance. The ‘lag’ effect in between the effort to ‘buy’ votes and the election-day act of ‘selling’ them may be one reason why such a large fraction of secret ballot violations took the form of voters who showed their ballot to others before depositing it (see below). In an authoritarian vote-buying scenario, if the buyer pays the seller before the actual vote is cast, then the voter is under implicit pressure to show that they kept their part of the bargain. 12 According to the program’s official schedule, the majority of participants in the program, (2.8 million peasants) were to receive checks between June 15 and August 15, a period ending one week before the elections. See Sosa (1994). 13 For the Civic Alliance criticisms of widespread vote-buying, see Rudino (1994). 14 The concept of ‘semi-clientelism’ refers to a growing category of power relations: government efforts to induce support that lack either the will or capacity to use authoritarian means to enforce compliance (Fox 1994a).

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Overall, however, it is impossible to measure the degree to which access to the state’s new rural development programs, whether through land titles or through trade compensation payments, was conditioned on electoral support in 1994. It is possible, however, to address the degree to which ballot secrecy was violated, which would suggest the pool of voters who were vulnerable to efforts to condition access to the reform programs.

National Voting in Rural Areas Mexico’s national elections have long been seen as irrelevant to rural citizens, whose electoral priorities focus on municipal races. 15 The classic anthropological view suggests that rural Mexicans trade their votes for local benefits, rather than use their votes to express national party preferences. Guillermo Bonfil, one of Mexico’s most prominent advocates of indigenous self-determination, suggested that they vote en corto, and even did so in the contested 1988 race. Their vote was based on short term considerations that have nothing to do with political programs which propose alternatives models for the society in the future. [It] is seen more as a resource for here and now, exercised towards the promise of finishing a road, building a school or a drinking water system, moving forward a land titling process, and other small benefits which help to resolve ancestral problems which shape their daily lives. . . . The parties will have to dig very deep to get to the bottom and touch the levers capable of politically mobilizing the deep Mexico. (Bonfil 1990: iii)

This view of rural voting was convincing as long as national politics remained uncompetitive, and as long as rural citizens lacked access to the information and rights necessary to choose among national options. This context is now changing. An alternative interpretation might suggest, for example, that indigenous voters do not so much lack national political preferences as they lack reasons for sacrificing shortterm benefits in favor of what often appear to be unviable longer-term political alternatives. The ‘political opportunity structure’ generally influences local political decisions about how and whether to take the risks inherent in supporting alternatives to the status quo (Tarrow 1994). In Mexico, at least until recently, no opposition political party has made organizing around specifically indigenous concerns a major national priority. 16 15

This section draws on Fox (1994c). Analysts differ as to whether the PRD has made serious efforts to reach out to indigenous voters. For Cárdenas’ most developed campaign statement on indigenous 16

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It is certainly difficult for urban-based outsiders to know what the motivations of rural and indigenous voters are, but there is very strong circumstantial evidence that the official electoral machinery has often not left the voting decision up to them. The overwhelmingly pro-PRI 1988 returns in the region of the Zapatista rebellion suggest that one can question the degree to which official rural votes reflected actual voter decisions, especially in indigenous regions. A major nonpartisan geographical study of the official 1988 returns gives a sense of the magnitude of this issue (López et al. 1988: 31–3). First of all, this study clearly shows that rural votes gave Salinas his official majority. In ‘very urban’ areas, he reportedly won only 34 percent but in ‘very rural’ areas, he received 77 percent of the votes counted. While the rural and semi-rural districts accounted for 43 percent of the electorate, they produced 57 percent of Salinas’ official vote. Within the countryside, the number of voters on the rolls in 35 federal congressional districts turned out to have between 105 percent and 125 percent of the number of adults estimated from the census. In Chiapas, for example, the Ocosingo district had 105 percent while the Comitán district had 124 percent. These remote districts also reported extraordinarily high turnout levels, ranging over 90 percent when compared to the population figures rather than the official rolls. Chiapas had 3 percent of the population, but accounted for 6 percent of Salinas’ national vote in 1988. The national electoral importance of these captive vote reserves may help to explain why President Salinas chose to reinforce rather than to weaken authoritarian political elites in Chiapas during the years preceding the rebellion. 17 policy, see his ‘México está en deuda con sus pueblos indígenas,’ published in La Jornada, June 5, 1994. 17 In 1992, President Salinas faced a major political choice in Chiapas. Governor Patrocinio González jailed the top officials of the federal indigenous affairs agency on trumped-up charges of fraud. Their real ‘crime’ was to have carried out the policy they were charged with. According to the INI’s Regional Solidarity Funds program, the government is supposed to support economic self-help projects organized by any legitimate community-based organization, whether or not they are affiliated with the ruling party. In many parts of rural Mexico, INI officials respected the policy’s pluralist discourse, most notably in Oaxaca. INI officials in Chiapas were also willing to support development projects without requiring political subordination. According to Chiapas indigenous leaders who protested in their defence, the INI officials were jailed because they were doing their job. President Salinas chose to side with the Governor rather than with his own federal agency. INI’s reformist approach to community development was blunted in Chiapas, while González was promoted to the cabinet. This example, along with the electoral data, shows that the ‘sub-national authoritarian regime’ typified by the Chiapas political system was not simply a remote backwater, forgotten by Salinistas pursuing reforms at the national and international levels. Nor was it an entrenched redoubt of autonomous resistance to Salinas’ reform efforts. Alliances with hard-line governors like González, José Francisco Ruiz Massieu in Guerrero and other rural states were a crucial part of the Salinas project. For details, see Fox (1994b).

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The Civic Alliance and the Secret Ballot The Civic Alliance brought together a wide range of NGOs to monitor the 1994 electoral process. While some of the participating groups had experience in several state elections, none had tried to monitor the national electoral process before. Some of the member groups were more ‘civic’, some were more involved in grassroots development efforts, while others were more ‘political’. Ideologically, Civic Alliance participants ranged from center-right to center-left, but they shared a strong skepticism toward all Mexican political parties. 18 Founded only five months before the August elections, the Civic Alliance fielded over 12,000 Mexican election observers and hundreds of international election ‘visitors’, as they were officially called. The Civic Alliance observed a statistically representative stratified sample of over 1,800 polling places for their national quick count (out of more than 94,000). Local affiliates extended this coverage in some states. They did not find any single obvious ‘smoking gun’ in terms of election law violations; instead they found a diverse array of mechanisms that tarnished and distorted the process in different ways, so diverse that they found it impossible to quantify the overall effect on the electoral outcome. As a result, the Civic Alliance did not challenge the PRI presidential victory, but they did claim that sum total of irregularities, whatever that was, certainly affected the PRI’s margin of victory, many congressional races and the Chiapas governor’s race that took place the same day. The Alliance’s main emphasis was to produce a ‘quick count’, in case the ruling party tried to change the results after the voting, and to document election law violations on the voting day itself. 19 The Alliance election observation effort documented the percentage of polling places affected by electoral law violations. Table 5.1 shows the main categories of election-day irregularities, first at the national level and then divided into their ‘most urban’ and ‘most rural’ of their four territorial categories. Almost all kinds of irregularities were more widespread in rural than in urban areas. 20 The most widespread 18 For confirmation of the Civic Alliance’s nonpartisan nature, see Taylor’s study (based on field research in Mexico City, Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, and Pátzcuaro (1995). 19 The Alliance also did systematic studies of progovernment media bias in the months leading up to the election. They were not able to address the flagrant violations of weak campaign spending laws, nor did they have the capacity to check the validity of the controversial official voter rolls. 20 Unfortunately the presentation of the data does not permit one to know the degree to which the various kinds of reported irregularities tended to be concentrated in the same polling places. If the violations were concentrated in the same districts, that would support the hypothesis that many rural voters live in de facto ‘authoritarian enclaves’. If the different kinds of violations were widely dispersed, it would be more difficult to support the hypothesis that such a ‘hard core’ of authoritarian regions persists.

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National Electoral Choices in Rural Mexico Table 5.1 Electoral violations in the 1994 Mexican presidential elections: national, urban, and rural Polling places where violations observed (%) Type of violation Lack of ballot secrecy Pressure on voters Voters not listed on rolls Voters lacked registration card Voters not from locality Voters arriving in group Ink not applied to all voters

Nationwide21

Urban22

Rural23

38.55 25.47 7.16 7.69 2.93

25.44 14.36 4.49 8.87 1.81 3.28 4.31

51.09 35.62 9.47 7.56 3.86 11.55 10.52

7.50

Source: Alianza Cívica/Observación ’94 (1994).

type of violation, by far, was ballot secrecy, and the rate of violation was much more significant in rural than in urban areas. The Civic Alliance data on ballot secrecy was controversial in part because the observers did not systematically document the nature or the number of individual violations at each polling place. The resulting incomplete data makes it difficult to estimate the fraction of the electorate whose ballot secrecy was directly violated, but if voters at a given polling place had reason to believe that even some voters’ secrecy was violated, then it is likely that their vote was cast with the expectation that it was certainly possible—if not likely—that their secrecy would be violated as well (even if ‘objectively’ it was not violated in their case). In other words, one could argue that the perception that ballot secrecy violations were likely would be sufficient to influence voting decision, especially in a region where other political rights could be violated by local bosses with impunity. As a result, even if not all voters lacked ballot secrecy at a given polling place, the violation of the guarantee of secrecy is sufficient to raise serious questions about the entire process at that polling place. Observers specified the cause of secrecy violations in 37 percent of the cases found, and Table 5.2 presents the data available. 24 Again, the 21 The national sample was designed to be statistically representative of the country as a whole, including 1,810 polling places, stratified into localities of four different sizes ranging from more to less urban. 22 This is the ‘most urban’ category, defined as municipalities with more than 500,000 inhabitants. 23 This is the ‘most rural’ category, defined as municipalities of less than 50,000. 24 The Alliance’s observer field manual did not emphasize the importance of counting the numbers of voters who lacked ballot secrecy, suggesting that Alliance leaders may well have underestimated the importance of this problem before the actual election.

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Table 5.2 Violations of ballot secrecy in the 1994 Mexican presidential elections: national urban, and rural Polling places where violations observed (%)25 Type of violation Lack of ballot secrecy Observers specified cause Method of violation No screens Someone watched voting Voters showed ballot Other

Nationwide

Urban

Rural

38.55 37.39

25.44 23.61

51.09 49.90

0.89 16.53 18.58 18.59

0.63 6.74 10.96 12.93

0.97 25.42 25.54 23.52

Source: Alianza Cívica/Observación ’94 (1994).

differences between urban and rural violations are dramatic. While the presence of screens at polling places was clearly almost universal, the degree to which outsiders were nonetheless able to watch the voting process suggested, in the view of Civic Alliance analysts, ‘some degree of complicity (or poor preparation) on the part of the coordinating committee (mesa directiva) of the polling place’. Voters also showed their marked ballots to others to a remarkable degree. The Civic Alliance observers found a wide range of patterns that suggested some kind of ‘arrangement which seemed to oblige the voter to show someone how they had voted. While showing a ballot may not be an irregularity, it is a practice that implies the existence of one or more electoral violations and that demeans [the process] because of the manipulation of the needs and poverty of the low-income population. It also suggests the force and the level of [vote] buying and the pressure brought to bear on the voters.’ The possible use of government rural programs to influence voting decisions is most likely to have been categorized by election observers as coacción, or pressures on voters. Table 5.3 presents the data on the scope and forms of voter pressure. Notably, the police and army played negligible roles in this process, even in rural areas. Local political elites, however, played direct roles, as representatives of either the ruling party or local government. As in the case of the overall data on irregularities, these data do not distinguish between polling places that experienced multiple kinds of voter pressure, as opposed to a more dispersed pattern. 26 As in the case of ballot secrecy, the findings do 25 The sum of the different causes is greater than the total because in many cases the observer specified more than one form of violation. 26 The actual means of pressuring the voters included speaking to them on line or in the booth (8.42%), carrying out party proselytizing inside the booth (7.49%), giving

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Table 5.3 Sources of pressure on voters in the 1994 Mexican presidential elections: national, urban and rural Polling places where violations observed (%) Type of violation

Nationwide

Urban

Rural

25.47

14.36

35.62

12.16 5.84 4.76 3.85 1.76 0.51

6.29 1.35 1.72 1.84 0.69 0.54

16.81 11.70 9.35 6.59 3.69 0.55

Pressure on voters (coacción) Source of pressure Party representatives Local officials or caciques Polling place officials Vote promoters Other election officials Police or Army Source: Alianza Cívica/Observación ’94 (1994).

not quantify how many voters were individually pressured at each polling place where pressures were exerted. Similarly, however, direct pressures did not have to be brought to bear on every individual in order to distort the electoral process. For example, if while waiting on line, voter X saw a local political boss who was perceived to have influence over access to crop payments or land titles pressure voter Y, then voter X may well have chosen to show their ballot to this same authority, in order to remove any suspicion of disloyalty. The overall findings that direct pressures were exercised on voters in more than one-third of rural polling places certainly suggests a serious and widespread problem. In spite of the limits to the Alliance data, one cannot assume that their results therefore overstate the scope of irregularities. One could argue that procedural violations were less likely to occur in those polling places where independent observers were present. Indeed, the actual presence of independent election observers must have actually biased their sample toward an underestimate of the scope of irregularities. One could reasonably hypothesize that the actual levels of violation of ballot secrecy were much higher in many rural areas that were not independently observed. Recall that the Alliance’s sample was a tiny fraction of the nation’s polling places. The final Civic Alliance report concluded that Mexico experienced two different elections at the same time. Table 5.4 shows the two extremes. out money or goods (2.57%), taking a list of voters (2.14%) and direct threats (1.12%) (Alianza Cívica/Observación ’94).

National Electoral Choices in Rural Mexico Table 5.4

125

Two patterns of electoral violations

Violation

Baja California Norte, Chihuahua, Distrito Federal, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Mexico, Nuevo León (%)

Chiapas, Guerrero, Michoacán, Oaxaca, Puebla, Tabasco, Veracruz (%)

22.34 12.53 2.64 1.88

59.89 46.03 5.02 14.12

3.30

12.39

Ballot secrecy Pressure on voters Ballot-stuffing (‘tacos’) Voters arriving in group (‘carrousel’) Serious disorder at polling place Source: Alianza Cívica/Observación ’94 (1994).

There were two clearly distinct elections: one in the urban zone, modern, where the elections were relatively clean, and another in the rural areas, especially in the south, where there was a very high incidence of serious violations against the citizens. This could explain the difference in the judgement of those international visitors who were present at the modern election versus those who were in the rural areas. The rural polling places of the southern states, which also have the highest indices of poverty, marginality, peasant struggle and political conflict, had serious violations during the election. There is sufficient evidence to question strongly the electoral process in that zone of the country. (Alianza Cívica/Observación ’94, emphasis in original)

Opposition Political Parties at the Polling Place One of the most revealing implications of the Civic Alliance data is that their presence, as independent observers, had such little apparent deterrent effect in rural areas. One could infer that those who commit electoral violations in rural areas assumed that they could carry out their tasks with impunity. In the vast majority of rural polling places, where independent observers were not present, the principal obstacle to election law violators was the presence of opposition parties. Indeed, Mexican electoral law allows opposition parties to participate in the administration of the voting process by joining the committee which administers the polling place precisely to deter irregularities. Actual opposition party participation in these committees is a very revealing indicator of the degree to which parties are actually present at local levels throughout Mexico. The Federal Election Institute (IFE) collected a data set which documents political party participation in the administration of the polling places during the 1994 presidential

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election. While not complete, this data set provides a remarkable X-ray of the horizontal penetration of parties into Mexican society. This IFE data shows that the two major opposition parties lack presence in significant portions of the country. The listing of a party on a ballot does not by itself offer a meaningful political choice. The local presence of political parties themselves is crucial for the actual vote to constitute a democratic option for two main reasons: one is an issue of fairness, the other an issue of freedom. The fairness issue has to do with access to electoral information. Because the independent print media is absent from most rural areas and the broadcast media is systematically biased in favor of the government, opposition parties and their local allies are the most important potential source for the information necessary for voters to make an informed choice. In localities where the opposition does not participate in the polling place, it is reasonable to assume that they lack sufficient presence to provide political information, especially in regions where Spanish is not the first language. 27 Second, because of such widespread violations of ballot secrecy in rural areas, in spite of the presence of independent observers, it is reasonable to assume that ballot secrecy was violated even more often where opposition parties were not present. In other words, the participation of opposition parties in the administration of the polling place is a necessary but not sufficient condition for ballot secrecy to be respected. Indeed, it was precisely this assumption that led the IFE to collect the data presented here. The IFE data show that a large fraction of the Mexican electorate lived in areas where opposition parties were absent. The opposition party with the most extensive presence was the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which participated in 70.8 percent of the nation’s polling places. The center-right National Action Party (PAN) participated in 67.1 percent of the polling places. Table 5.5 shows the state level distribution of opposition party participation in the administration of polling places in the 1994 election. Notably, not even the ruling party played this role in 100 percent of the polling places (although members may have played other roles in the process). The gap, however, between ruling party presence and opposition party presence is quite significant. In many states, only one of the opposition parties had an extensive presence. In only a handful of states did the smaller opposition parties have any significant polling place coverage, most notably the National Cardenista Reconstruction 27 Mexico has an important network of rural radio stations that broadcast in indigenous languages, managed by the National Indigenous Institute. Many of these stations work closely with communities and try hard to serve their interests, but they are not allowed to transmit independent political information.

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Table 5.5

Percentage of polling places with political party presence

State

Polls

PRI (%)

PRD (%)

PAN (%)

800 2,099 458 672 2,313 548 3,151 3,359 10,228 1,804 4,300 3,305 2,268 5,763 11,080 4,023 1,508 1,086 3,622 3,183 4,327 1,232 626 2,410 3,863 2,276 1,711 2,842 915 7,227 1,504 1,959 96,464

98.4 98.1 99.8 98.4 96.3 98.2 89.0 98.6 96.0 95.7 98.3 93.6 97.2 97.5 98.3 97.1 97.0 98.6 94.7 91.1 96.8 94.5 95.2 97.7 97.6 95.6 98.1 98.3 98.1 96.5 97.7 92.6 96.5

64.0 6.2 40.8 67.3 58.0 79.0 72.1 43.8 91.9 56.8 63.7 91.0 77.8 54.0 79.7 96.8 90.7 93.2 42.6 66.1 67.9 52.3 68.0 57.1 69.2 56.9 97.1 67.5 77.2 86.6 27.7 71.7 70.8

81.0 98.5 97.8 38.8 90.3 85.9 32.1 98.0 71.2 86.2 95.8 33.2 32.4 94.7 58.6 56.3 39.8 44.0 89.9 25.1 70.8 85.4 50.2 78.5 87.8 79.3 30.0 68.5 52.6 43.5 97.7 61.9 67.1

Ags BCN BCS Cam Coa Col Chs Chh DF Dgo Gto Gro Hgo Jal Mex Mic Mor Nay NL Oax Pue Qro Qoo SLP Sin Son Tab Tam Tla Ver Yuc Zac National

Other parties (%) PDM 11.6 PPS 59.1 PFCRN 16.6 PARM 45.4 PFCRN 47.1 PFCRN 59.7 PFCRN 16.9 PT 36.0 PFCRN 44.2 PT 65.6 PDM 32.3 PFCRN 28.3 PFCRN 22.0 PFCRN 26.0 PFCRN 29.9 PDM 12.4 PFCRN 21.3 PT 59.5 PT 45.8 PPS 10.6 PFCRN 8.4 PDM 15.2 PFCRN 24.4 PFCRN 11.2 PCFRN 7.9 PT 11.4 PFCRN 22.8 PARM 32.9 PT 51.4 PFCRN 25.0 PT 3.6 PT 24.7 PFCRN 22.6

PARM 4.44 PT 18.8 PARM 15.0 PFCRN 16.7 PT 8.1 PDM 33.8 PT 15.1 PFCRN 34.9 PPS 7.1 PFCRN 12.1 PFCRN 16.1 PPS 13.3 PT 13.6 PDM 13.5 PDM 6.9 PFCRN 7.6 PT 4.4 PFCRN 30.9 PFCRN 14.4 PFCRN 8.5 PPS 6.1 PPS 9.9 PPS 21.1 PDM 7.6 PPS 6.5 PFCRN 6.0 PT 6.6 PT 21.0 PDM 19.8 PPS 20.7 PFCRN 1.7 PPS 9.5 PT 11.3

Source: IFE.

Front Party (PFCRN, formerly the Socialist Workers’ Party, PST), which participated in 22.6 percent of the polling places, and the new Labor Party (PT), present in 11.3 percent (mainly concentrated in five states). Both parties are widely considered to be linked to factions within the government. The PAN and PRD had the most extensive opposition presence in all but four states. 28 28 The states where the second most extensive opposition presence was from one of the smaller parties were: Baja California Norte (PPS, 59.1%), Campeche (PARM 45.4%), Durango (PT, 65.6%), and Nayarit (PT, 59.5%).

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Table 5.6

State Campeche Chiapas Hidalgo Mexico Oaxaca Puebla Quintana R. San Luis P. Sonora Tamaulipas Tlaxcala Zacatecas

States with less than 80% opposition party coverage Highest opposition coverage (%)

PRD

67.3 72.1 77.8 79.7 66.1 70.8 68.0 78.5 79.3 68.5 77.2 71.7

X X X X X — X — — — X X

PAN

Next highest opposition coverage (%)

Ballot secrecy violation (%)

— — — — — X — X X X — —

45.4 32.1 32.4 58.6 25.1 67.9 50.2 57.1 56.9 67.5 52.6 61.9

— 67.8 60.2 33.7 53.1 47.5 44.3 42.6 — — — 33.3

Source: Data on ballot secrecy violations from Alianza Cívica/Observación ’94 (1994).

The main patterns of party presence emerge when one focuses on two kinds of states: those where no opposition party covers more than 80 percent of the state’s polling places, and those where at least one opposition party covers more than 90 percent of the state. These two groups of states might correspond roughly to the ‘two elections’ observed by the Civic Alliance, one relatively clean and the other plagued by widespread violations. Table 5.6 shows the twelve states where 20 percent of the polling places were uncovered by either of the two major opposition parties. In eight of these states, the opposition party with the broadest presence is the PRD, with the PAN more present in the other four. Interestingly, this list is not limited to the rather predictable southern, most rural states, but also includes the northern states of San Luis Potosí, Sonora, Tamaulipas, and Zacatecas. All these ‘uncovered’ states, however, have significant rural populations, either in relative or absolute terms (e.g. Puebla). The Civic Alliance data on ballot secrecy in these states shows that the degree of violations in these ‘uncovered’ states was above the national average in six of the eight states for which data were published. 29 29 In theory, it is possible that the regions not covered by the opposition party with the highest rate of coverage were actually covered by other opposition parties. An extremely detailed polling-place-level study would be required to test this with precision. The state level data presented in Table 2.2 show, however, in eight of these twelve states the gap between the first and second opposition party’s coverage was more than 20%. Only in Puebla and Tamaulipas was the party with the second-ranking coverage close. In other words, in most states where the main opposition party has major gaps, the second-ranking opposition party has vastly greater gaps in coverage. The second-ranking

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Table 5.7 States with more than 90% opposition party polling place coverage State Baja Cal. Nte. Baja Cal. Sur Chihuahua Distrito Federal Guanajuato Guerrero Jalisco Michoacán Morelos Nayarit Nuevo León Tabasco

Coverage (%)

PAN

PRD

Secrecy violations (%)

98.5 97.8 98.0 91.9 95.8 91.0 94.7 96.8 90.7 93.2 90.0 97.1

X X X — X — X — — — X —

— — — X — X — X X X — X

17.4 — 13.1 25.2 — 43.8 24.7 55.5 36.2 — 37.7 46.8

Source: Data on ballot secrecy violations from Alianza Cívica/Observación ’94 (1994).

Table 5.7 shows the twelve states where an opposition party was able to cover at least 90 percent of the polling places. The PRD and the PAN each had the most extensive presence in six states. The PAN clearly led in its degree of coverage, however, with more than 95 percent in four of its six top states (Baja California Norte, Baja California Sur, Chihuahua, and Guanajuato), whereas the PRD broke 95 percent coverage in only two states (Michoacán and Tabasco). When one compares these indicators of party presence with the state level Civic Alliance data on ballot secrecy violations, the pattern is not straightforward. There is no direct correlation between extensive opposition presence and incidence of secrecy violations. The data are not sufficiently disaggregated to draw strong conclusions, but Table 5.7 shows that ‘covered’ states where the PAN leads have far below-average rates of secrecy violations, while the ‘covered’ states where the PRD leads have aboveaverage rates of secrecy violations. The most likely hypothesis is that two different factors were operating simultaneously. First, the ruling party opposition to the PRD is more intense than its opposition to the PAN, especially at the local level, so its efforts to discourage opposition voting would be more aggressive in areas of PRD strength. Second, in many regions the PAN is more experienced, more unified, and betterorganized as a party, and therefore its activists may be more skilled at blocking electoral process violations. These two factors are mutually reinforcing. opposition party is most likely to cover areas not reached by the first party in the case of the PRD in rural areas of Sonora, and perhaps Puebla and Tamaulipas.

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Opposition Political Party Presence in Indigenous Regions The statewide data above present only indirect indicators of urban/rural differences in opposition party presence. To find more precise indicators, one would need to disaggregate electoral districts or municipalities into categories of urban versus rural, much like Civic Alliance did for its sample. Even this approach would be limited, however, as Civic Alliance recognized that its approach included rural peripheries of cities in its ‘urban’ category, as well as town centers in its ‘rural’ category. This study will focus on one especially powerful indicator of ‘rurality’: indigenous population at the municipal level. Mexico’s indigenous peoples are widely recognized to represent the poorest and most rural group in Mexican society. Indigenous people are also among those most lacking in access to freedom of assembly and expression, as well as pluralistic sources of electoral information. These obstacles in turn block local efforts at direct political participation and representation. Both the Civic Alliance survey and the IFE’s state-level map of political party presence would lead one to expect that opposition parties are least present in indigenous areas. If this were true, it would reinforce the Civic Alliance’s conclusion that Mexico’s most rural citizens were those most lacking access to a free and fair electoral process. Recall that indigenous peoples account for 10.7 percent of the national population, according to the National Indigenous Institute’s conservative estimate (Embriz 1993: 23). The analysis below will examine the relationship between opposition party participation in polling places and the percentage of indigenous population at the municipal level in three states. As Table 5.8 Table 5.8 State distribution of the national indigenous population State

Share of total indigenous population

Oaxaca Veracruz Chiapas Puebla Yucatán Hidalgo México Guerrero San Luis Potosí Michoacán Source: Embriz (1993).

18.29 13.47 12.98 9.42 8.22 5.73 5.56 5.17 3.17 2.92

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Table 5.9 Polling places covered by political parties in municipalities with more than 5% indigenous population State

PRI

PAN

PRD

Oaxaca Veracruz Chiapas

59.5 46.0 51.4

7.0 7.8 8.9

28.1 30.4 26.4

Source: IFE and Embriz (1993).

shows, these three states account for the largest fraction of Mexico’s indigenous population nation-wide: Oaxaca (18.29), Veracruz (13.47), and Chiapas (12.98). Together, these three top states include almost 45 percent of Mexico’s total indigenous population. The municipal level percentages of indigenous populations were calculated from the National Indigenous Institute’s demographic data on ethnicity (Embriz 1993). Unfortunately the IFE’s municipal-level data on party presence at polling places turned out to have some gaps for some of the most indigenous regions, especially in Chiapas and Oaxaca. As a result, the data presented below is likely to understate the correlation between indigenous population and the absence of opposition political parties. The first step in this analysis was to calculate the percentage of indigenous population for each municipality, developing a list with those from 5 percent to 100 percent. The second step was to calculate the percentage of each municipality’s polling places where one or more of the three main political parties participated in the mesa directiva, and therefore the actual administration of the voting process. Table 5.9 shows that average percentage of participation in each state’s indigenous municipalities for which the IFE had data. 30 The municipalities that lacked polling place data tended to have higher indigenous populations than the average for each state, so the results here probably overestimate the presence of parties in indigenous municipalities. The differences between the presence of Mexico’s three principal political parties in indigenous regions are quite sharp. The charts which follow show the relationship between the percentage of polling places covered in each state’s indigenous municipalities, with the indigenous percentage of the population of each municipality. 30 IFE’s data on party presence at polling places, when compared to INI’s list of indigenous municipalities (which is also incomplete), had the following gaps: Oaxaca (IFE missing 201 of 409 from INI’s list), Veracruz (missing 5 of 110), and Chiapas (missing 20 of 77).

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Polling places covered by political representatives/municipality (%)

PRI 80 70 60 50 PRD

40 30

PAN

20 10 0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Indigenous population at municipal level (%)

Figure 5.1. Oaxaca: political party presence in indigenous municipalities

Percentages are averaged over each percentage category. In the three states with Mexico’s largest indigenous populations, there is a clear negative correlation between indigenous population and presence of opposition political parties. The PRD is much more present than the PAN, although their presence is not trivial either. Figure 5.1 shows the three parties’ coverage of polling places in Oaxaca. This is the one state where the negative correlation is not continuous. In other words, PRD local presence increases as the indigenous percentage grows, from the 5–25 percent category through the 25–50 percent and 50–75 percent categories, after which it drops off sharply. The vast majority of Oaxaca’s many rural municipalities are in the 75–100 percent range, and they are well known to function according to their own political rules, without the presence of any political party, including the PRI. At least 400 of Oaxaca’s 570 municipalities are organized along non-Western, nonparty ethnically distinctive principles of governance (Díaz Montes 1992). The state and federal governments are relatively tolerant of this unusual degree of local political autonomy, which suits the communities very well. But the implications for their citizens’ participation in national elections are not clear. There is a widely shared understanding in which higher

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100 PRI

Polling places covered by political representatives/municipality (%)

90 80 70 60 50

PRD

40 30 PAN

20 10 0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Indigenous population at municipal level (%)

Figure 5.2. Veracruz: political party presence in indigenous municipalities

levels of government intervene little in local affairs in rural Oaxaca as long as the votes from those localities in national elections are ceded to higher authorities. In this context, the high relative levels of PRD presence in the middle categories are notable, especially in the 50–75 percent category, implying that a significant subset of Oaxaca municipalities are in transition towards a more competitive party system. The patterns in Veracruz (Figure 5.2) and Chiapas (Figure 5.3) are more consistent with the hypothesized national patterns of party presence, with their penetration dropping off as the population becomes more indigenous. Even in these two states, there is a tendency that echoes the Oaxaca trend, where the PRD presence increases in the 25–50 percent category. The implication is that the PRD is gaining organizational presence (which is distinct from votes) in numerous indigenous municipalities in all three states. Moreover, the relative levels of coverage in Veracruz are especially high, reaching close to the PRI in all but the most indigenous municipalities. Figure 5.4 shows the results of aggregating the indigenous municipalities of these three states. Since these states together account

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Polling places covered by political representatives/municipality (%)

PRI

80 70 60 50 PRD

40 30 PAN

20 10 0

10

30 40 50 60 70 80 20 Indigenous population at municipal level (%)

90

100

Figure 5.3. Chiapas: political party presence in indigenous municipalities

for 45 percent of the total national indigenous population, this chart provides a powerful indicator of the national trend. The PRI maintains high levels of coverage even in many of the most indigenous localities. The PRD is making significant inroads into more rural, multiethnic areas where its coverage breaks 80 percent of the polling places, but the PRD is still absent from more than 40 percent of the polling places in the most indigenous municipalities. The PAN penetrates somewhat further into rural areas than its reputation as the ‘asphalt party’ would lead one to expect, but its coverage is still quite low, never reaching more than one-third of the polling places in indigenous municipalities.

Conclusions Elections and development policies are two different arenas of interaction between the state and its citizens. Rather than generalize about the complex linkages between these two arenas, this study has focused on one dimension of this interaction: the issue of the

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100

Polling places covered by political representatives/municipality (%)

90

PRI

80 70 60 50 PRD 40 30 PAN

20 10 0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Indigenous population at municipal level (%)

Figure 5.4. Oaxaca, Veracruz, and Chiapas: political party presence in indigenous municipalities

secret ballot, which permits citizens to express themselves politically without risking individually targeted reprisals from government officials. The government’s new rural reforms are related to this issue of individual political expression because the policies have focused on developing direct relationships between the federal government and individuals, both through Procede’s land titling and Procampo’s crop payments. Only a synthesis of independent opinion surveys with microlevel ethnographic studies of state–peasant bargaining relations can adequately assess the degree to which these programs were carried out with the political neutrality promised by the government. This study probed the other side of the coin: the most important mechanism through which ruling party officials had the potential to monitor compliance with clientelistic bargains. In light of the widespread violation of ballot secrecy found by the Civic Alliance, the empirical analysis was based on the assumption that the participation of an opposition political party in the administration of the polling place is a necessary but not sufficient condition for ballot secrecy to be

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respected. Indeed, the Civic Alliance effort was crucial for documenting the pattern of irregularities, but their limited deterrent effect was limited to their small sample of polling places covered. Opposition parties, because of their institutionalized role in the process and their much greater coverage of rural areas, were the main potential deterrent to violations of ballot secrecy. Ballot secrecy is directly linked to the capacity of citizens to reject the pressures of vote buyers and vote according to their political preferences. If voting were guaranteed to be secret, then even the poorest of the rural poor could potentially express themselves politically in favor of political alternatives that encourage more accountable governance, in spite of economic survival pressures to accept the government’s favors. The secret ballot is therefore one of those democratic ‘formalities’ that is actually most important to the system’s least powerful citizens. They are the ones most vulnerable to reprisals if they vote for the opposition. 31 Most importantly, this study found that the main opposition political parties were not represented in many areas of significant rural states, and they were weakest in indigenous regions within the rural states. In twelve states, both main opposition parties were not present in more than 20 percent of the polling places. Much more detailed research is necessary to determine whether one party might have covered the regions where the other party was absent, but since the other party usually had more than 20 percent less coverage, this is very unlikely. In another twelve states, an opposition party covered more than 90 percent of the polling places, though only six reached more than 95 percent. In other words, about one-third of Mexico’s states can be considered to have been ‘uncovered’, while another third were close to ‘covered’ in terms of opposition presence. This pattern is broadly consistent with the main findings of the Civic Alliance: that the 1994 presidential elections involved two distinct election-day processes, one ‘modern’ and relatively clean, the other filled with irregularities, including

31 It must be noted, however, that potential threats of reprisals for electoral dissent would not disappear even if individual secret ballots were respected. If entire communities, or majorities within communities, were to vote for the opposition, then the official polling place returns would reveal this dissent to the authorities. Whether such broad communitywide electoral opposition would actually provoke negative sanctions would depend on local political conditions and the degree to which authoritarian elites had the will and capacity to retaliate. In more politically open regions, however, the response would involve more ‘carrots’ than ‘sticks’, and electoral opposition would be indirectly ‘rewarded’ by targeted, disproportionate government spending. For a discussion of this process based on state level analysis of National Solidarity Program resource allocation, see Molinar and Weldon (1994).

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widespread violation of ballot secrecy and direct pressures by local bosses on voters. The municipal level polling place data confirm the patterns suggested by the state level data. Looking at the patterns of party presence within the three states with the largest indigenous populations, there is an inverse relationship between political party presence at the polling place and the percentage of indigenous population at the municipal level. In other words, the more indigenous the locality, the less likely that an opposition party was present at the polling place. Therefore the more rural and indigenous members of the electorate are the least likely to have guaranteed access to a secret ballot.

................. 6

................. Contrasting Theory and Practice: The World Bank and Social Capital in Rural Mexico

The World Bank and Social Participation: Cracks in the System? 1 Public policy can make or break social capital. The state—or different actors within it—can promote differing policies that can contradict themselves. Some will encourage the development of social capital for specific social actors while, at the same time, others will inhibit the possibility of drawing on horizontal social relations as resources for development. The Mexican state, with its history of internal heterogeneity, has a relatively well-known track record of such practices. Throughout the postrevolutionary period, some peasant and indigenous organizations have been able to take advantage of limited cracks in the system to expand and strengthen their social capital, while 1 This study was originally presented in Spanish at the XXIII International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, LASA (2001), Washington, DC, September 6–8, 2001. This chapter is a translated and revised version of Fox (2003). Parts of the introduction and findings were also included in articles that compared World Bank rural projects in Mexico and the Philippines (Fox and Gershman 2000, 2006). The empirical research on the World Bank and the six rural development projects was carried out between 1995 and 2001. The write-up of the research was funded by the Soka Foundation. The author would like to express his gratitude to former participants in Trasparencia (1995–2005), a Mexican civil society organization that pioneered ‘right-to-know’ advocacy in Mexico, working to promote the informed participation of rural social organizations in the public policy process. I appreciate the many years of collaboration, debate, and convivencia with Trasparencia’s founding director, Manolo Fernández. Thanks also to former Trasparencia director Fernando Melo. Trasparencia’s role in the early phase of the fieldwork was funded in part by the Moriah Fund and the North–South Center, and was facilitated by a partnership with the Bank Information Center. Thanks also to Libby Haight, Jennifer Melissa Freeman, and Valeria Gama Rios for assistance with the translation from the Spanish. Thanks also for comments from David Bray.

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many others have been divided or crushed by state actors. The considerable variation in whether autonomous membership organizations are subordinated or expand, thanks to cracks in the system, has yet to be explained with precision. The relative strength and weakness of more versus less authoritarian factions clearly matters, however, as does variation across agencies and regions. Here the World Bank’s role matters, since its choice of which sectors, agencies, and programs to support constitutes a set of alliances with specific state factions and strategies. In the 1990s, the World Bank and the Mexican state shared a contradictory pattern—both institutions were driven by a vertical, authoritarian, and insular governance process, and both invested substantial resources in social programs while broadcasting a pro-empowerment discourse. In Mexico, the World Bank’s role is mediated by its partnership with the Treasury Ministry, especially since external loans do not increase the budgets of programs targeted for support. The Bank therefore lacks one of its key tools of leverage for influencing intragovernmental policy debates, known as ‘additionality’ (Fox 2000a). The World Bank nevertheless did influence the Mexican policy environments in which programs were designed and implemented, in ways that could either facilitate or obstruct processes of propoor social capital accumulation. This study analyzes the degree to which World Bank projects contributed to enabling institutional environments for poor people’s social capital, based on comparative field studies of six ‘post-reform’ rural development projects. The concept of social capital has followed a contested trajectory in the debate over how to describe poor people’s social resources. Some frame social capital in terms of a broader, comprehensive theory of how the barriers to collective action can be overcome. Others see it as a descriptive term whose main value is to facilitate communication about collective action across disciplinary boundaries. Critics see it as yet another example of the increased domination of mainstream economics over other intellectual traditions. In the international development field, this debate reached a high point with the World Bank’s (2000) use of the concept in its World Development Report 2000/2001. 2 This same 2 For insider analyses of the social capital debate and the World Bank, see Bebbington et al. (2004, 2006) and Edwards (2006). See also Woolcock (1998) and Woolcock and Narayan (2000). For the point of view of an ex-Bank vice-president, see Serageldin (1996). External critics contend that the concept has the effect of depoliticizing development by embedding social capital in a discourse that excludes or obscures relations of power, domination, and inequality. See Harris and DeRenzio (1997), Harris (2001) and Fine (2001). Some analysts instead proposed a more politicized deployment of the concept, as in this chapter. See also Evans (1997) and Fox (1996), as well as Krishna (2002) and Moore (2004).

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flagship analytical document also endorsed a limited notion of poor people’s empowerment. 3 Rather than focus on the contested impact of the concept of social capital, however, this chapter documents the impacts of actual practices of the World Bank and its government counterparts. This involves assessing the degree to which the Bank’s projects actually contributed to the ‘enabling environment’ that most would agree is key to permitting poor people to consolidate their own representative organizations. The central issue remains the enabling environment for the accumulation of social resources for collective action, whether they are understood as social capital or as social capacity (Smith and Kulynych 2002). The idea of ‘enabling environments’ refers to the institutional context that either facilitates or blocks the collective action that is critical to providing leverage and voice to underrepresented people. This environment includes those institutions and actors that determine access to resources, the capacity to engage in autonomous, scaledup collective action, and restrictions on freedom of association. This study ‘operationalizes’ this notion of enabling environments with a deliberately narrow focus, by analyzing indicators of the degree to which the World Bank’s own relevant social and environmental policies were actually implemented in practice. The premise is that, had official Bank reforms that mandated public information access, indigenous peoples’ participation in policy design, and power-sharing over resource allocation, actually been carried out, those changes would indeed have potentially encouraged the consolidation of existing poor people’s organizations. This focus on the potential for the creation of political space may appear to be counterintuitive, since the negative impacts of the World Bank on specific communities and large social sectors are so well known. 4 Specifically, many authors have documented in great detail the effects of structural adjustment policies, and the social and environmental impacts of Bank mega-projects. During the last twenty years, the extent to which these projects have had negative impacts on biodiversity, along with the ‘involuntary resettlement’ of literally millions 3 For analysis of official development agency discourses and practice in support for poor people’s participation, see Francis (2001), Francis and Jacobs (1999), Long (2001), and Miller-Adams (1999). Cooke and Kothari offer a more critical compilation (2001) and Hickey and Mohan respond (2004). For internal studies, see Gibbs et al. (1999) and Van Wicklin (2000. For a staff manual on participation, see World Bank (1996) and for more recent overviews, see Alsop (2004) and Alsop, Bertelsen, and Holland (2006). 4 For critical analysis of the World Bank, see Caulfield (1996), Clark, Fox, and Treakle (2003), Fox and Brown (1998), Rich (1994), and George and Sabelli (1994), among others. For more recent civil society positions and debates, see links to international campaigns through the site of the Bank Information Center at www.bicusa.org.

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of poor people each decade (including many indigenous communities), have become the focus of numerous civil society organizations and have contributed to uniting environmental movements with human rights and indigenous rights networks. 5 The Bank’s most relevant reform policies are of essentially two types: ‘safeguards’ and ‘good practices’. The former are of the ‘first do no harm’ variety and include environmental assessment, indigenous peoples, and resettlement, and are supposed to be mandatory. 6 The ‘good practices’ policies are merely recommended and advocate, for example, good governance, gender equality, collaboration with NGOs, and informed participation by beneficiaries of World Bank-funded projects. If implemented, both kinds of policies could contribute to an enabling environment that facilitates poor people’s collective action. The empirical question that follows is when, where, and whether these policies are implemented. The process of translating policies into institutional practice has been quite uneven so far, with significant variation occurring among countries and across sectors within countries. Apart from the policies and the ‘best practices’, and outside of the operational apparatus of the Bank, there are additional areas and factions within the institution that produce research and discourse that favor social participation (as long as they do not interfere with the overall position of the Bank on macroeconomic issues). For example, official Bank discourse recognized that poverty is not due only to a lack of economic growth, but also is related to poor people’s lack of power over the institutions that govern them (see the World Development Report 2000/2001). Both before and within this document, noneconomist factions within the Bank deployed the concept of social capital in an effort to support a social development agenda. Their proparticipation agenda did not extend to national or international arenas, however, reflecting their own limited room for maneuver. 7 Critics noted 5 For a comparative analysis of diverse social and environmental campaigns against the Bank, both from the north and the south, as well as an analysis of the origins of the partial reforms that the institution implemented in response to those campaigns, see Fox and Brown (1998). For a political analysis of Bank norms related to ‘involuntary resettlement’, as an example of the interaction between external social and civic pressure and reformist internal currents, see Fox (1998). For information on involuntary resettlement in hydroelectric projects financed by the Bank in Mexico, see Aronsson (2002) and Nahmad (1999). 6 The safeguard policies are bolstered by a relatively autonomous investigative body, the Inspection Panel, which produces reports that have sometimes had significant impacts. See Clark, Fox, and Treakle (2003). 7 In the draft phase, this document was officially released by the Bank in order to be subject to an unprecedented formal international debate, which was organized by a coalition of civic organizations in England (www.brettonwoodsproject.org). For an indepth analysis of the intense controversy that later resulted from the World Development Report, see Wade (2001).

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that leaving national politics aside inherently confines notions of poor people’s empowerment to the receiving end of policy (Joshi and Moore 2000; Moore 2001). Though diverse definitions and implications of social capital continue to be widely disputed, influential studies have posited that some kinds of social capital contribute to economic and institutional development. 8 For the purposes of this study, social capital is defined as those social networks and relationships that facilitate collective action. The capital in social capital refers to ties that become resources that can help to overcome obstacles to collective action both within and between groups. These linkages are especially valuable for underrepresented social groups that have few power resources other than their capacity for collective action. This kind of ‘positive’ social capital is widely associated with social norms of trust and reciprocity, but the definition used here does not conflate the norms with the ties, nor does it assume that one drives the other. Most likely they are mutually constitutive. Intersectoral social capital facilitates cooperation between distinct groups, overcoming boundaries between neighboring communities, ethnic groups, or across the institutional divides between civil society, the state, and the World Bank. This study examines the degree to which the development ideas associated with the concept of social capital ‘trickled down’ to influence World Bank operations. Some Bank analysts began to make the connection between the intellectual recognition of social capital’s potential contribution and its own institutional policies and actions. One early essay concluded by signaling four areas for action (Grootaert 1997). The first recommendation was: ‘Do Your Homework, Do No Harm. Such assessments of how to avoid damaging the social fabric would prevent projects from weakening existing positive social capital, and suggest ways to strengthen it’. This approach was quite compatible with 1990s Bank policies on social and environmental assessments, but their implementation in practice was limited (Fox and Brown 1998). The second recommendation was to: ‘Use Local-Level Social Capital to Deliver Projects’. This suggestion underscored existing Bank mandates on NGO collaboration. 9 The third suggestion was to ‘Create Enabling Environments’. In other words, ‘The scope for effective use and strengthening of social capital depends critically on the nature of the wider political and policy environment’. Notably, this suggestion was not linked to the Bank’s separate discourse on ‘good 8 The literature is now vast, but the single most influential work in the development debate was Putnam (1993). 9 See Covey (1998), Gibbs et al. (1999), and Nelson (1995), among others.

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10

governance’. The fourth recommendation was to ‘Invest in Social Capital’, which ostensibly involved supporting ‘existing and emerging organizations’. This chapter assesses the degree to which six postreform projects applied these ideas in practice in rural Mexico between 1995 and 2001. The question of the impact of World Bank projects on poor people’s social capital is quite broad, especially if one were to include indirect effects of macroeconomic adjustment operations. 11 This study pursues a more bounded approach, focusing only on loans that directly involved the institutional environments for already existing rural poor people’s economic development organizations. The focus here is on sectors and regions where many poor people were already organized. Following Grootaert’s propositions, the study’s empirical concern is whether or not the Bank projects avoided harm, designed projects to tap existing social capital, contributed to enabling institutional environments, and invested directly in existing social capital.

Research Design Conceptual Assumptions This study is based on the following four assumptions. First, the investment of external resources, including the prestige of the World Bank’s technical blessing as well as the funds themselves, influence the balance of power within the state, strengthening some agencies and policymakers over others. These external resource flows also influence power relationships within society, as they strengthen or weaken specific government policies, which in turn benefit different interests. Meanwhile, institutions that mediate the relationship between the World Bank and the rest of the state are inherently strengthened by their control over the terms of engagement, as in the case of the Treasury ministry’s capacity to assign resources and external blessings (Fox 2000a). Second, this study is based on the proposition that the World Bank, national governments, and civil societies are often divided on the issue of whether and how to promote the consolidation of poor 10 For an analysis of the ‘disjuncture’ between the discourse on ‘good governance’ and Bank projects in rural Mexico, see Fox (1997a). 11 For example, adjustment-related increases in unemployment could be linked to breakdowns in community social cohesion, gender or ethnic conflict, as well as directly dismantling social capital embodied in trade unions (for analysis see Esman and Herring (2001).

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people’s social capital. 12 This view challenges the widespread external assumption that the World Bank is a monolithic institution. The research strategy looked for cases in which pro-social capital actors in each of these three policy arenas (Bank, state, and society) manage to form effective pro-reform partnerships. 13 Third, the research design assumes that the most direct impact of ‘post-reform’ World Bank projects on social capital development depends on whether or not the projects contribute to the consolidation of an enabling environment. The fourth assumption that guides this study is that reforms that can change the balance of power between the state and organized poor people will inevitably provoke opposition, both inside and outside the state. Together these assumptions lead to the main proposition to be tested here, which is that ‘enabling’ institutional reforms required balanced, multisectoral coalitions to offset likely resistance from vested interests. In other words, the process through which a World Bank project can generate enabling environments that strengthen social organizations depends on a mutually empowering convergence of pro-reform actors inside the Bank, inside national governments, and inside civil society. Specifically: 1. At the international level, within the World Bank, projects must be supported by actors willing to spend resources (political as well as economic) in the intrinsically difficult process of opening spaces for autonomous civil society organizations. 2. At the governmental level, projects must support and be designed by agencies that are already controlled by policymakers who favor balanced partnerships with broad-based social organizations. 3. Projects must be designed to target sectors and regions where proparticipation civil society stakeholders have the capacity to act in support of reform policy implementation. 14 12 This proposition is based on prior empirical research on the Bank’s environmental and social reform process, presented in Clark, Fox, and Treakle (2003), Fox (1998b), Fox and Brown (1998), Kardam (1993), Thorne (1998), and Wade (1997). 13 ‘Pro-reform’ is defined here as institutional change that influenced the balance of power between the state and autonomous membership organizations in favor of the latter. 14 This hypothesis is the result of previous studies regarding struggles surrounding the partial compliance with this new wave of Bank reforms (both in antipoverty and environmental programs) (Fox and Brown (1998). The approach is compatible with the Operations Education Department findings on NGO collaboration with the World Bank, which also highlights both enabling environments and intersectoral relationships (Gibbs et al. 1999). These are two principal differences, however. First, this study focuses on membership organizations while the OED dealt mainly with NGOs. Second, while the OED study refers to a general notion of ‘close working relationships’ (Gibbs et al. 1999: 15ff.), this study attempts to develop more precise indicators of such relationships,

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The convergence between these three sets of actors is crucial to change preexisting power relationships within each set of actors (Bank, government, and society), as well as among them. The corollary is that if any of these three pro-reform actors are not involved in the project process, reform implementation would be likely to fall short, and state– society relations will not change. Three distinct kinds of social capital are involved 15 : Horizontal. Local, horizontal social capital constitutes the basic building block for grassroots action. This kind of social capital is difficult for Bank-funded projects to create where it is absent, but easy for Bankfunded projects to destroy where it is present (most directly, through large infrastructure projects, but also indirectly through macroadjustment programs). Scaled-up—horizontally and vertically. When base groups form networks and federations, the vertical and horizontal ties between them may be weaker than intragroup ties, but they play a critical role in terms of generating bargaining power vis-à-vis other actors. 16 This kind of social capital is more susceptible to consolidation in response to the institutional environment, including freedom of association and participatory policy innovations. Intersectoral. In order for national and international policymakers to promote institutional innovations that create enabling environments for grassroots social capital on the ground, intersectoral social capital between diverse coalition partners needs to be created and consolidated. 17 These relationships involve coalition-building between proreform actors across the boundaries between international agencies, nation-states, and civil societies (organized locally, nationally, and transnationally). This study focuses on scaled-up and intersectoral dimensions of social capital. While it is certainly difficult for policymakers to promote local social capital where it is absent, they can promote social capital and of the specific policies that facilitate such relationships. For the OED study, close intersectoral relationships are a cause of positive development outcomes. This study, in contrast, treats such relationships as the result of Bank compliance with key social and environmental policy mandates and participatory project goals. 15

For further discussion, see Woolcock and Narayan (2000). On the mutually reinforcing contributions of internal and external linkages in scaled-up community-based organizations, see Esman and Uphoff (1984) and Chs. 3 and 4. On the critical role of weak ties between strong subgroups, see the seminal work by Granovetter (1973). 17 For background, see Brown (1991, 1998), Brown and Ashman (1996), Brown and Fox (1998), Esman and Uphoff (1984), and Woolcock and Narayan (2000). 16

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between themselves and with already existing poor people’s organizations, in order to promote the horizontal spread and vertical scalingup of already existing grassroots social capital. Chapter 3 discussed a series of government reform strategies that encouraged these regional scaling-up processes, and many of the membership organizations mentioned below are legacies of these earlier experiences with state– society synergy.

Comparative Methods This study uses a layered comparative method, first comparing across projects, then comparing across regions within a project. Cases selected include the majority of World Bank Mexico projects that involve rural productive and infrastructure investments targeted to low-income regions during the five-year 1994–9 period, after the Bank’s environmental, indigenous, and public information disclosure reforms. 18 This study does not address World Bank-funded investments in basic education and health, which did not even claim to encourage social participation. 19 The rationale was to choose cases where, because of the Bank’s ‘safeguard’ policy reforms, at least some degree of institutional change was possible. The projects studied were all designed ostensibly to combine targeted support for pro-poor economic development with sustainable resource management. In addition, all the projects were implemented in sectors or regions where some degree of consolidated social capital already exists, in the form of broad-based rural grassroots organizations and experienced development NGOs. Reform policy compliance is assessed based on a series of indicators drawn from the official policies themselves (see below). All of the projects either partly or exclusively involved indigenous peoples. 20 The key provision of the Bank’s indigenous people’s policy is the ostensibly 18 The World Bank ‘safeguard’ reforms that guide the project design process include its environmental assessment policy (1989, revised in 1991), its public information disclosure policy (1994), and its indigenous peoples policy (1982, revised in 1991). All three policies are designed to promote informed participation by key stakeholders in the design as well as the implementation of projects, among others. These reform policies, as well as more attention to project ‘quality at entry’, subsequently received high-level backing from World Bank President Wolfensohn. 19 For two rare independent evaluations of World Bank health projects, see Battacharjea (1999) and Frade (2000). On the broader context of the Bank’s Mexico strategy during the 1990s, see Fox (1996, 2000a). 20 Official statistics on the indigenous population in Mexico were analyzed in a project called, ‘Perfiles indígenas’ (available at www.ciesas.edu.mx, under ‘proyectos especiales’, and also in Molnar and Carrasco (2001).

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obligatory mandate for the ‘informed participation’ of affected indigenous peoples at all stages of the policy process, including the design phase. 21

Indicators of Institutional Preconditions for Informed Participation by Social Actors This study focuses on only some of the institutional changes that contribute to an enabling environment for social capital. 22 The first three indicators detailed below, all highlight the fundamental role of opportunities for informed public participation. The fourth indicator assesses whether any intersectoral coalition-building to promote these institutional changes took place. In order to see the broader patterns, each project is rated on a scale from zero to low, medium, and high, according to each indicator. Public participation in the project design process: To what degree did the project design process involve informed participation by a pluralistic range of organized low-income people, especially indigenous peoples and rural women’s groups? This assessment involved specifying which organizations were involved, who they represented, at what phase of the project cycle, their access to relevant information, the nature of their input, and how they affected project design, if at all. If consultative meetings were held, was the input ignored? This would be considered a ‘low’ level of public participation. Medium and high levels would involve degrees of tangible impact, such as the creation of power-sharing bodies to allocate resources to subprojects. Timely public access to information in the implementation: Did organized beneficiaries have timely access to the basic project documents at an early stage of the implementation process, in their languages? Which documents were available, when, to whom, in what language, and why? Key documents include government agency project operating manuals, World Bank Public Information Documents, Staff Appraisal Reports, social and environmental impact assessments, economic feasibility studies, broader World Bank environmental and participation policy directives, etc. If only the minimum English-language 21

For background on the Bank’s indigenous policy, see Gray (1998) and Thorne (1998). For example, this study does not assess the degree to which social organizations enjoy basic civil rights, such as freedom of association, or whether/where their human rights can be violated with impunity. While in many ways more important than the indicators we focus on here, they are not the main focus because they are not primarily determined by the World Bank and the government agencies responsible for project design and implementation. 22

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Bank documents mandated by the public information disclosure policy were available, and only upon request to Washington, then for the purposes of assessing the institutional environmental for social capital consolidation, such projects would be ranked ‘zero’. If such documents were available, still in English but in country, then the ranking would be ‘low’. If no Bank documents were available in country but the key project information, such as the rules of operation, was in a publicly available Spanish language government document, the ranking would be ‘medium’. If the government and/or the Bank made a systematic effort to translate and disseminate not only the basic documents but also ongoing project implementation information, such as regular progress reports, the rating would be ‘high’. These rankings are national. This indicator is also disaggregated, also including regional level information about ‘subprojects’. Each of the six large loans allocated funds to numerous, sometimes hundreds of social, economic, and natural resource management ‘subprojects’. The ‘local-regional’ indicator refers to transparency of resource allocation criteria between and within distinct ‘subprojects’. Institutional mechanisms for state–society power-sharing over resource allocation: This indicator refers to whether the projects included institutional mechanisms for pluralistic power-sharing over resource allocation between the state and representative civil society organizations, where the project involved indigenous groups. Since such bodies often existed only on paper, or participation was limited to clientelistic pro-government organizations, the key question was whether they actually existed, and if so, whether they included the full range of actually existing poor people’s socioeconomic organizations in the specific region or sector. This indicator is disaggregated in terms of national and local-regional levels, where state–society powersharing was more likely to be permitted. If state–society councils were created that included the key relevant social organizations but lacked actual authority over resource allocation, their contribution to the environment for social capital consolidation might be considered ‘low-to-medium’. If, however, at most a small minority of regional councils created by a project were even partially inclusionary, then such a project would rank zero-to-low in terms of power-sharing. If a substantial minority of project councils were inclusionary and they actually had some authority, such a project would rank ‘medium’. If a majority were inclusionary and had authority, such a project would rank ‘medium-to-high’, or ‘high’. If there is a wide diversity of regional outcomes, such projects could be ranked ‘low-high’.

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Intersectoral coalition-building: This indicator describes whether international and national policymakers made efforts to reach out to form coalitions in order to promote the previously described changes. Note that this is a very specific kind of intersectoral partnership. Others exist, such as those partnerships between Bank and government officials opposed to engagement with civil society organizations, or coalitions between those national and local government officials who together might reject Bank entreaties to engage more with civil society. This raises the more general issue of social capital as a twoedged sword—sometimes these social resources permit people to come together for collective action in favor of broader inclusion, and sometimes groups coalesce in order to exclude others. For this indicator, timid and erratic efforts to form coalitions would be rated zero-to-low. Discreet, selective efforts would be rated medium. More sustained, broader coalition-building efforts would rate medium-high or high. One key indicator would be whether Bank and/or government policymakers actually developed practical strategies and invested their own political capital to offset resistance from antiparticipation factions embedded in both the Bank and the state.

Rural Poverty in the Big Picture To provide context for the case studies that follow, two broader trends warrant mention. First, during the period of study, the overall public policy strategy promoted by the Mexican government directed toward the countryside was openly supported both politically and economically by the Bank. Second, the net impact of these policies on rural poverty was not positive. Rural employment fell substantially (see Chapter 10). In 1998, more than 81 percent of the rural population in Mexico lived below the poverty line—in contrast to 73 percent in 1992, and 58 percent nationally. Almost 57 percent of the rural population was living in what was officially considered ‘extreme poverty’, in contrast to 45 percent in 1992. 23 In the national policy context, none of the projects considered below were considered priorities in the shared agendas of the Mexican government and the World Bank. This is revealed most clearly by the very modest amounts of resources assigned to them, compared to the 23 These statistics were presented in World Bank (2001). This annual document, previously confidential, was first released to the international press in 2001, after several years of being informally leaked (Cason and Brooks 2001).

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Table 6.1 World Bank lending targeted to sustainable development in Mexico (1986–2000) Period 1986–1990 1990–5 1996–2000

Antipoverty targeted (%)

Environment (%)

Drinking water and sanitation (%)

Total per period (%)

7.54 27.92 7.75

0.25 7.56 4.94

0.20 10.07 3.63

7.99 45.55 16.32

Note: Only projects that have direct ‘sustainable development’ priorities are considered here. They are defined here as those that are institutionally designed to target most of their resources to social investments in low-income people or regions, to environmental protection, and/or to drinking water, and sewage infrastructure. Five-year lending flows reflect aggregated annual new loan amounts, each attributed to the year signed. This approach indicates World Bank resource allocation decisions. Actual disbursements depended on Mexican government allocation of matching funds. Source: This table updates the 1986–1995 data presented in Tables 1 and 2 in Fox (1996: xiii–xvi) and draws on World Bank Staff Appraisal Reports for categorizing specific projects.

overall Bank lending to Mexico. For more than two decades, Bank loans to Mexico prioritized structural adjustment, or in other words, macro and sectoral reforms that are considered necessary to attract large private investments. However, for a brief period of time the tendency shifted. Between 1991 and 1995, there was a significant increase in the percentage of new loans directed toward poverty alleviation, environmental protection, and building potable water and sanitation systems. This tendency reached its highest point in fiscal year 1994. In the five years following the peso crisis (1994–5), the composition of the Bank’s portfolio in Mexico returned to the previous dominant trend. 24 Table 6.1 shows these trends from 1986–2000, in five-year intervals. A study of the Bank’s then confidential Country Assistance Strategies revealed the rationale for this unusual shift in the distribution of Bank resources. Three mutually reinforcing factors came together to encourage more social and environmental investments: apparent macroeconomic stability allowed greater attention to social investments during the period preceding the 1994 elections, the US congressional debate over NAFTA gave greater political weight to environmental issues; and the international momentum of environmental and social advocates within the Bank, thanks to the Rio UN Summit in 1992 (Fox 2000a). 24 For information on the general relationship between the Bank and the Mexican government, from semi-official perspectives, see Bonnick (1994) and Urzúa (1997). From civil society, see Purcell and Heredia (1997) and Fernández and Adelson (2000).

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Case Analysis This study documents the history of the design of the six case study projects, based on review of the official documents and extensive interviews with World Bank staff, national and local government officials, and representatives of grassroots stakeholder organizations. The official goals of each project are summarized briefly in Table 6.2, based on their ‘founding’ operational documents. All the projects explicitly stress their official intention to target benefits to the rural poor, and/or to protect local natural resources, and some refer to supporting producer organizations. The case discussion that follows focuses on synthesizing the assessment of each project in terms of the four main indicators. The results are summarized in Table 6.3, which highlights indicators of participation and information access. The discussion of the sixth case provides an additional layer of comparison by analyzing interregional variations in the degree to which autonomous social organizations were included in the project’s regional councils (Table 6.4).

1. Decentralization and Regional Development 225 Two of the Bank’s largest loans for social development in Mexico in the 1990s were directed primarily to local governments in rural areas. The first loan (for US$350 million during 1991–4) was called Decentralization and Regional Development 1 (DRD1) and was targeted to four of the poorest states in Mexico. The Municipal Funds program began as a key piece of the National Solidaridad Program (1989–1994), and were later reinforced by the President Zedillo’s ‘new federalism’ (Ward and Rodríguez 1999). Decentralization and Regional Development 2 (DRD2) (US$500 million during 1995–9), had broader geographical coverage, reaching eight of the poorest states, and the Municipal Funds program was allocated 70 percent of the investment funds (World Bank 1994a). Both loans were key elements in the Bank’s geographically targeted ‘social strategy’ for Mexico, which focused on health, education, infrastructure, and agriculture in the poorest states (Fox 2000a). The choice of states covered by DRD1 and DRD2 did not take into account their respective track records in terms of government accountability and community participation. 26 25 This section synthesizes some of the findings from Fox and Aranda (1996a, 1996b) and from Fox (2002). 26 In fact, the ‘Implementation Completion Report’ indicated that only two out of the four participating state governments had truly launched key institutional mechanisms

152 Table 6.2

Contrasting Theory and Practice Official goals of six World Bank projects for rural Mexico (1994–7)

Projects

Official goals related to creating policy space for rural smallholder organizations

‘To alleviate poverty by increasing the access of rural poor and indigenous communities to basic social and economic infrastructure. . . . The project would strengthen mechanisms for participation of these communities in public decision-making at a local level’. (World Bank. 1994a: 1) 2. Rainfed areas ‘To raise agricultural productivity in selected rainfed areas development (1994) [and] to give additional emphasis to the creation of producer organizations.’ (World Bank 1994b) 3. Rural financial ‘To augment the participation of rural entrepreneurs in rural markets (1995) financial markets, especially of the poor . . . [and] to demonstrate that it is possible to supply financial services to small and microentrepreneurs in small rural localities—in a sustainable manner’ (World Bank 1995c: 3) 4. Aquaculture (1997) ‘Promote sustainable aquaculture development by increasing the productivity of the aquaculture sector within a framework of social consensus and environmental soundness [by assisting] the government in completing and implementing its regulatory framework . . . provide key public goods and support productive investments and training for social sector producers and develop a more level playing field for social sector participation.’ (World Bank 1997b: 13) 5. Community forestry ‘Designed to empower the communities and ejidos in their (1997) decision-making as to the nature, extent and timing of the training and technical assistance on sustainable forestry management they would receive’ (World Bank 1997a: 21) 6. Rural development in ‘Improve the well-being and income of smallholder in about marginal areas (1997) 24 targeted marginal areas . . . fostering community socio-economic development, organization and participation’ (World Bank 1997c: 2) 1. Decentralization and regional development (1994)

Note: Each statement is drawn from the official project document, formerly known as the Staff Appraisal Report (currently known as Project Appraisal Document). Because all of these projects were signed after the World Bank’s public information disclosure policy became effective in 1994, these project documents were available to the public through the World Bank’s Public Information Center, and later became accessible on-line at www.worldbank.org/mexico. Some of these project documents were also translated into Spanish, but those versions were not available online.

The experience with DRD1 showed both federal and World Bank social development officials that state governments preferred to allocate resources to urban municipalities, and smaller municipalities preferred to allocate investments to their town centers. Because these to foster community participation in the Municipal Funds program (World Bank 2001: 7). An internal WB report, done when the project was halfway through, concluded that ‘community participation in assignment execution, selection and maintenance is minimal, and none in design and control’ (Lemmet, Nahmad, and Carrasco 1997).

Table 6.3

Indicators of project-level enabling environments for autonomous social organizations

Projects

National

Local–regional

National

Local–regional

Cross-sectoral proparticipation coalitions

None–low

Low

None–low

None

None–medium (regional variation)

None

None None–low

None None–low

None None

None None

None None

None None

Low–medium Medium–high

None High

None Medium–high

None Low

None Low–medium (regional variation)

None–low

None–medium (regional variation)

None

None–low (regional variation)

None Mutual support between WB officials, Environment Ministry, social organizations, and NGOs Initial outreach efforts not sustained by WB or adopted by Agriculture Ministry

Rural development in Low–medium marginal areas (1997)

153

Definitions of indicators: Participation in design: Informed participation by autnonomous, representative membership organizations in project design. Information access: Availability of basic project information to stakeholders in Spanish (e.g. Staff Appraisal Report, operations manual and/or other basic project documents, information about resourece allocation criteria). Power-sharing: Representation of autonomous membership organizations of the poor in state–society decision-making bodies that influence resource allocation to subprojects.

Contrasting Theory and Practice

Decentralization and regional development II (1994) Rainfed areas (1994) Rural financial markets (1995) Aquaculture (1997) Community forestry (1997)

Participation in project design

Power-sharing in resource allocation for subprojects

Stakeholder access to policy information during implementation

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Table 6.4 Degrees of inclusion of autonomous indigenous producer organizations in marginal areas program regional councils Exclusion

Incipient inclusion

Partial inclusion

Full inclusion

Oaxaca

Mazateca Baja >

< Mazateca Alta < Cuicatlán < Mixe Alto > < Mixe Bajo—Istmo >

Mixe Bajo—Cuenca Huasteca region < Huasteca—Hidalgo Huasteca—San Luis Potosí sierra > Huasteca—San Luis Potosí (llanos) > Huasteca—Veracruz (no regional council) Note: The indicators reflect varying degrees of inclusion at the time of field research interviews with local leaders of producer groups and human rights organizations (August 1999). The arrows indicate which direction each regional council was moving in at the time, toward more or less pluralism. For additional details regarding patterns of exclusion and inclusion in the councils in the Huasteca region, see Macehualiztiztin (2004), Rangel (2004), and Trasparencia (1998), and for Oaxaca, see Trasparencia (1999) and (2000) and Velásquez (2000). For details on the Mazateca, Huasteca Veracruzana, and Sierra Norte of Pubela, see also Nahmad (2000).

funds were intended to be invested with an antipoverty targeting logic, DRD2 was quietly redesigned to include new administrative requirements for intrastate allocation formulas that favored rural areas, as well as ceilings on the amounts of municipal funds that could be spent in the town centers (Fox and Aranda 1996a, 1996b). These measures created new entitlements for the poorest and most rural communities within each municipality, though this mechanism was later eliminated due to a 1998 pro-decentralization fiscal reform (World Bank 2005). This law trumped social policy, removing federal agency oversight of municipal social investments. During the DRD2 project design process, there was little participation by peasant or indigenous organizations in the project design, but the Bank’s project Task Manager did take into account some suggestions from NGOs and academic studies regarding the importance of targeting rural areas. Following the Bank’s public disclosure reforms, the project’s information document was translated into Spanish, but it was only very narrowly circulated within the Social Development

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Ministry. The executive summary of the actual project document was not translated. The project’s operation manual, produced by the government, only began to circulate many years after it was produced. At least in Oaxaca, the manual only began to reach rural mayors in 1998, the same year that the new law invalidated the pro-rural targeting policies. While the project did encourage greater participation and accountability in a substantial fraction of rural municipalities in Oaxaca, it appears that the same municipal funds program in Chiapas had a major role in the ‘low-intensity conflict’ strategy that followed the Zapatista uprising. 27 The state-level formulas intended to reduce discretional resource allocation between municipalities combined variables of poverty and population, and they were required to be published in the state governments’ official daily bulletins. Because the bulletins circulated almost exclusively among government officials, and because the formulas were highly technical, this formal transparency had little practical effect. 28 Governors could also choose the timing of the actual disbursement of the funds. Because the grants were annual, they had to be spent in the year delivered, so end-of-year disbursements to mayors not considered loyal could prevent them from effectively investing the funds, In general, the municipal funds program managed to empower the state governments more than rural municipalities. The national Municipal Funds strategy did call for the formation of municipal councils, in order to broaden participation in processes of resource allocation. However, as discussed further in Chapter 8, in practice they rarely functioned as pluralistic, deliberative decisionmaking bodies. Where these councils did function, however, and where the program offered outlying villages some entitlement to investment resources for the first time, the Municipal Funds did contribute to new power-sharing arrangements for resource allocation, and therefore the Table 6.3 ranking takes into account this regional variation.

2. Rainfed Areas Development This project was designed to buffer the social cost of NAFTA by helping small-scale rainfed corn producers invest in higher-value 27 This hypothesis was indicated in Fox and Aranda (1996a). One of Chiapas’ leading analysts of municipal politics suggests that municipal social investments had a very important role in the division of the civil movement in favor of municipal autonomy, particularly during 1994 (Burguete Cal y Mayor 2001). 28 Indeed, State authorities actively suppressed their own official bulletin to keep municipal fund information from mayors.

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crops. Producer organizations were not involved in project design, however, nor were they informed about its existence. After the 1994 change in presidential administration, the Agricultural Ministry decided that such investments were not its priority, and instead used the funds as part of its conventional investment programs, which focused instead on better-off producers, those with cattle or irrigation, through the Rural Alliance program. The project was renegotiated in 1996, and most of the potentially pro-participation provisions were eliminated. Much of the project’s funds were then used for the government’s Temporary Employment program, which was more of an ad hoc, politically discretionary transfer payment window than an investment program that could strengthen producer organizations (Adelson 1999). Under the original project, producers were to apply for support in organized groups (World Bank 1994b: 13). No institutional mechanism for coordination with the producer organizations was created, however, and under the renegotiated project producers no longer had to be organized. The goal of strengthening producer organizations was eliminated (Adelson 1999). Overall, this project ranked zero for participation in the design phase, no information about its activities was made public during the implementation phase, and no power-sharing bodies were created to allocate resources. In spite of its explicit intention to strengthen producer organizations and to encourage alternatives to rainfed corn, the project ended up subsidizing better-off, individual producers, with no apparent complaint from the World Bank. A new, larger follow-on loan called ‘Agricultural Productivity’ reinforced the Bank’s support for the Agriculture Ministry’s conventional programs, not specifically targeted to the poor (in contrast to the same ministry’s Rural Development in Marginal Areas project, discussed below).

3. Rural Financial Markets This project was designed after a Bank-funded study discovered that rural financial markets in Mexico do not work equitably or efficiently (World Bank 1995c). The project design assumed that only private commercial banks had the potential to provide efficient financial services to the rural poor. The study had surveyed families in three 29 This project was part of a broader trend in the Bank’s Mexico strategy during the early 1990s, which attempted to contribute to the NAFTA process through unprecedented levels of investment in antipoverty and environmental projects. After NAFTA was approved, followed by the peso crisis, this component of the portfolio dropped sharply (Fox 2000). For background on NAFTA’s impact on corn producers, see Nadal (1999). For a Bank assessment of NAFTA and Mexico’s southern states, see Esquivel et al. (2003).

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157

regions about their access to rural financial markets. The pilot project proposed to address these issues by subsidizing private banks willing to experiment with low-cost banking systems appropriate for rural areas (as exist in Indonesia and Thailand). The technical assistance element of the project (with less than 10 percent of the budget) was the only provision that could conceivably have reached NGOs or social organizations, but in the end they only received a small fraction of that. The project’s design phase involved considerable debate with one of the Mexican peasant movement’s networks of regional economic organizations, the Mexican Association of Social Sector Credit Unions (AMUCSS). AMUCSS raised concerns about the Bank and Treasury Ministry’s rejection of their point of view, and cited Bank policies mandating consultations with indigenous peoples (AMUCSS affiliates in Oaxaca and Chiapas are broad-based indigenous credit coops). The Bank’s response claimed that its field research surveys had fulfilled this requirement, and even ‘went beyond the World Bank participatory guidelines’. However, these surveys were designed as research, not consultations. They did not ask, for example, for views regarding possible solutions to the problem of credit access. Moreover, they did not survey community-based economic organizations. The Bank’s written reply also asserted that the proposal to hire local individuals to staff the proposed experimental rural bank branches would be sufficient to count as indigenous people’s participation, assuming that would somehow guarantee accountability and responsiveness. The Bank’s response also noted that AMUCSS affiliates had attended a BankTreasury Ministry seminar, and they had therefore been ‘consulted’. 30 The AMUCSS credit union association was not associated with the political opposition. Though autonomous from the government, it was led by a member of the peasant wing of the then ruling party. AMUCSS’s views were rejected because World Bank and counterpart Treasury Ministry officials considered all credit unions to be inherently flawed, because of weaknesses in the national legislation that induced their creation years before. Indeed, the weak institutional framework did permit corruption at several major credit unions, mainly in urban areas. The Bank-sponsored study did not consider those credit unions linked to small farmer associations, to see whether, in spite of financial weaknesses, they might have created compensatory pro-accountability structures and embodied considerable accumulated social capital. Indeed, at least one of the main flaws identified by 30 AMUCSS represented during that time 35,000 families in 17 states. See Cruz (1995) and the letter from AMUCSS’s elected leadership to President Wolfensohn of the World Bank, May 23 1996, as well as the reply from Task Manager Rodrigo Chaves, September 27, 1996 (also sent in Spanish translation).

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the Bank as inherent in all credit unions—the possibility of owners lending to themselves—was also shared by Mexico’s private banks— the very institutions assumed to be the solution to Mexico’s rural credit problems. Project design reflected Bank economists’ faith that large private commercial banks would respond to subsidies intended to induce them to offer credit to the rural poor. In practice, however, they did not respond. This was not surprising, given the short-term orientation of most Mexican private banks. Indeed, the project document itself recognized that the rural financial situation was likely to get worse before it got better. As a result, after three years few funds had been disbursed and the project was cancelled—an unusual admission of failure. 31 On balance, this project contributed nothing to enabling the accumulation or strengthening of poor people’s organizations. Indeed, the project’s Task Manager would have preferred to liquidate poor people’s existing financial organizations rather than attempt to, for example, restructure them to harness their accumulated social capital. Since there was some serious debate with social organizations in the design phase, one could rank that as zero-to-low participation, but then the doors closed and the project rated zero.

4. Community Forestry Mexico’s situation is almost unique in the world in that 70–80 percent of its forest resources are in community-based landholdings (World Bank 1997a: 1). Over the last three decades, Mexico’s forest policy shifted from promoting corporate and state firm logging, to encouraging community-based self-management, and then to promoting private forest plantations (Bray and Wexler 1996; Bray, Merino-Perez, and Barry 2005). These different policy priorities have coexisted within the Mexican government since the 1990s. While observers might easily have expected the World Bank to support the Mexican government’s program to support large commercial forestry plantations, instead this modest project’s goal was ‘to empower the communities and ejidos in their decision-making’, above all regarding their access to technical assistance for sustainable logging and related conservation measures (World Bank 1997a: 21). This project was designed in response to the failure of an earlier World Bank forest project and is an instructive case of ‘social learning’ by the relevant actors in the Bank, the state, and civil society (Brown 31

Interviews, Mexican Finance Ministry, May 1999.

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159

1998). The previous project had focused on subsidizing logging roads in ancestral indigenous lands in northern Mexico, without taking into account the corresponding environmental or social costs. 32 A MexicoUS cross-border human rights and environmental advocacy coalition that had challenged the project in 1991 was empowered by the growing debate around NAFTA. In addition, indigenous rights advocates within the Mexican government quietly shared critical information about the then secret forestry project with NGOs, suggesting a coalition between civil and state actors. 33 The external pressure shed a spotlight on the project’s inadequate environmental and social assessments, leading Bank staff to suspend the project in 1991. According to the official Bank retrospective, administrative problems along with ‘mounting public criticism of the operation’ led the government to perceive the project as ‘problematic’, lose interest, and eventually cancel the balance of the loan (World Bank 1995d: iii). This was the first World Bank project ever cancelled in Mexico in response to civil society concerns. 34 Rather than move on to a new project quickly or just pull out of the sector, new Bank staff chose to reflect and convene a collaborative analysis of the forest sector with the Mexican government, including some of Mexico’s most socially and environmentally concerned nongovernmental forest policy experts. This produced an overview study that provided the framework for the participatory project design process that followed (World Bank 1995b). Close collaboration between pro-reform Bank staff, Mexican Environmental Ministry officials, Mexican forest policy researchers, and NGOs encouraged a series of participatory workshops with community-based indigenous timber enterprises (Martínez et al. 1995a, 1995b). The project that emerged was targeted geographically to the state of Oaxaca, where many of Mexico’s most consolidated, community-based indigenous economic enterprises are found, many of which have years of experience managing their timber resources. 35 The project was designed to bolster access to diverse forest management services, including subsidies for 32 For details on the critique from US and Mexican public interest groups, see Lowerre (1994). 33 Interview with former Mexican government policymaker involved with the project, Mexico City, May 1999. 34 ‘Official’ lessons included the lack of local participation and ‘poor external relations’ (World Bank 1995d: iv). These lessons learned did not specifically underscore the need for more informed and effective indigenous people’s participation. The need for more participation was conceived more in terms of official stakeholders, such as state governments—this would have eased the flow of funds, but would not have encouraged indigenous peoples’ participation in the process. 35 See, for example, Asateco (2002), Bray (1995), Bray, Merino Perez, and Barry (2005), Chapela (1999), Klooster (2000), and Mitchell (2006).

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sustainable logging plans and market research studies for possible nontimber forest enterprises (such as bottled spring water and ecotourism ventures). The idea was to increase quality, promote conservation, and raise the level of accountability of service providers for the forestry social organizations, which own the resources. To convince the economists, the initiative could be presented in terms of strengthening the forestry services market. The project intervened primarily on the ‘supply side’ by making resources available for professional services. Project implementation included regular consultations and information sharing between a wide range of stakeholders, building partnerships between project managers in the Environment Ministry, forest management NGOs, and community forestry organizations. However, the project had to face serious opposition from the Treasury Ministry, which blocked and then slowed allocation of most counterpart funds. 36 Resistance from within the Environment Ministry itself came from traditional forest engineers, who did not share the project goal of forester accountability to community organizations. 37 It was difficult for Environment Ministry managers to be accountable to their civil society partners when they had few funds with which to operate the project, but the intersectoral relationships were sufficiently strong to survive this test. Indeed, World Bank project staffers were consistently supportive of their Mexican counterparts in their internal debates with Treasury and other Environment Ministry officials. 38 These challenges to the implementation process suggest that the combination of broadbased horizontal social capital with diversified intersectoral social capital is necessary but not sufficient. Such coalitions must also mobilize their own political capital to offset opposition that is inherent in the process of encouraging the empowerment of poor people’s organizations. However, what effects did the project have on the community forestry sector? The project was designed to subsidize the service providers, rather than to provide direct support to the organizations. 39 The project could fund the design of alternative investments, but could not provide the capital needed to carry them out. At first, under pressure to produce results with few resources, project efforts favored 36 See the project implementation progress report (Subsecretaría de Recursos Naturales 1999) and Oaxaca press coverage, which highlighted the Treasury Ministry’s opposition (Bermúdez 1999b). 37 Interviews with Oaxaca-based forest NGOs and program managers, May 1999. 38 Interviews, World Bank and Environment Ministry officials, August 1998 and May 1999. 39 For detailed project implementation research, see Castellanos (2000), DeWalt, Guadarrama Olivera and Betancourt Correa (2000), DeWalt (2001), Maldonado (2001), Reed Segovia, González Vicente, and Segura Warnholtz (2004), and SIPA (1999).

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the most consolidated organizations. After several years, the less consolidated organizations gained increased access to projects. The Community Forestry project’s track record with both public information access and consultation with stakeholders was consistently stronger than any other World Bank project in Mexico. 40 Moreover, the project survived and expanded to other states, with support from a follow-up World Bank loan and a complementary GEF grant, which increased the prospects for impact on the less consolidated forestry organizations.

5. Aquaculture Mexico’s commercial aquaculture sector was poised for a boom after the mid-1980s legal reforms liberalized the sector. Rapid growth in commercial aquaculture in other countries had provoked widespread controversy because of its high environmental and social costs. This World Bank project was designed to provide basic infrastructure, and to strengthen the capacity of the Environment and Natural Resources Ministry so that it could regulate the impacts of aquaculture growth, and would promote it within the ‘social sector’ of low-income agrarian reform beneficiaries. This proposal, together with the community forestry initiative, were the first World Bank projects in Mexico where institutional design was significantly influenced by civil and social stakeholders. Mexico’s Environment Ministry was a recent institutional creation at the time. Socially minded, committed environmentalists held the highest positions but they presided over a ministry that was composed primarily of several powerful, more conventional, historically autonomous agencies that had been reassigned from other ministries. The fishing agency was not under the control of the environmentalist policymakers, and would have preferred a clearly industrial approach to aquaculture. The first World Bank project summary reflects this 40 For progress reports and the minutes of multistakeholder state level project implementation committees, see www.coinbio.org. In spite of this high degree of participation, in November 2003, several community leaders from southern Oaxaca wrote to the World Bank Inspection Panel, alleging violation of the indigenous people’s policy mandating the right to informed participation due to personnel and administrative changes in the project. Their request is posted at www.inspectionpanel.org. The Inspection Panel found the ‘requestors’ to be eligible and made a field visit. Most other stakeholders did not appear to share the requestors’ concerns, and expressed support for continuation of project implementation. The Inspection Panel did take issue with some aspects of the Bank’s role, but held off on making recommendations that would slow project implementation (Inspection Panel 2004: 16). A review of recent state implementation committee minutes suggests that a high level of community participation and engagement continues.

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bias, where priority was given to conventional industrial aquaculture parks. 41 Civil society concerns resonated with the Bank’s own social and environmental assessments, which encouraged World Bank project staff to attempt to build more participatory power-sharing features into project design. 42 Internationally, the Mangrove Action Project and later the Canadian Sierra Club plus its international allies called on the World Bank to cancel project preparation because of the environmental risks. 43 These Northern NGOs took this position without consulting Mexican fishers or environmental organizations, which did not support cancellation. Their policy agenda with the Environmental Ministry was broader, and instead they proposed redesigning the project to be more socially and environmentally sensitive. When a Washington-based public interest group, the Bank Information Center, together with a new Mexican NGO watchdog group, Trasparencia, alerted grassroots fishers’ organizations from Oaxaca about the project, the local organizations faxed various World Bank officials directly to alert them to the fact that the project violated the World Bank’s policy on indigenous peoples. This allowed a senior Bank anthropologist to contact their Legal Department, which in turn temporarily suspended project preparation until the project design took impacts on indigenous populations into account. 44 Even though this provoked friction both within the Bank 41

See the early Project Information Document (World Bank 1993). The social assessment, carried out by independent anthropologists had an upbeat tone but stressed the many obstacles to effective grassroots participation and the lack of positive relationships between the relevant government agencies and local communities (DeWalt and Toledo 1994). As one Bank social specialist noted at the time, ‘the Fishing Ministry project smelled like “raw fish”, but who knows, maybe it can still be saved with some dignity’ (personal communication, October 1995). 43 See the exchange of letters between Robin Round, Canadian MDB Campaign Coordinator (September 18, 1995) and James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank (October 2, 1995). After debate among NGOs, the Mangrove Action Project shifted its position to call for ‘halting’ the project ‘until more accountability can be provided as to the ecological impacts of large-scale shrimp aquaculture’ (Mangrove Action Project Quarterly News June 1995). The Mexican NGOs led by Environment, Development, and Society and Greenpeace-Mexico took the position that ‘the few attempts made to incorporate public participation have been absolutely insufficient, and the steps proposed for mitigation of environmental impact are inadequate’ (Whizar, Salazar, and González Franco 1995). For the results of a grassroots forum on the issue, see Salazar and Whizar (1996). 44 The Bank manager in charge of Mexico reportedly responded by throwing the lawyer and senior social development specialist out of his office. In terms of the relations between the Task Manager and Oaxaca fishers, see their exchange of letters. On September 20, 1995, the organized fishers wrote to criticize the Bank for claiming in its Project Information Document that they had been consulted during project preparation. The Task Manager responded on January 2, 1996 that they had been consulted because of their attendance at a forum convened by a Bank consultant (who did not consider himself to ‘represent’ the Bank). Note the contrast in response time with the Canadian letter mentioned above. The letter, written in English, ends on a positive note, encouraging the fishers’ participation in the new targeted investment fund. Trasparencia’s director 42

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and between the Bank and local fishers, it also led to informationsharing meetings with fishers’ organizations. Subsequent negotiations between the Bank and the Environment Ministry led to significant changes in its original top-down, industrial emphasis. By the time the loan was signed, only one largescale conventional shrimp aquaculture park of the kind emphasized at the beginning was left, an elaborate scheme for ongoing social participation, environmental assessment, and public transparency was devised, and a separate social fund for low-income indigenous fishers was included (accounting for 11 percent of project funds), as well as another 11 percent for social sector training (World Bank 1997b). The combination of civil society scrutiny, combining confrontational international pressure with more ‘propositional’ Mexican input from social and civil organizations, both pressured and empowered the project Task Manager to try to bring the project into compliance with some of the Bank’s most important safeguard policy reforms. As she put it, ‘they’ve been trying to promote commercial aquaculture since the very first mission, while we’ve been trying to carry out aquaculture of a social nature’. 45 One of the lead social assessment specialists was more critical, concluding that ‘what finally was approved in the Aquaculture Project for Mexico essentially ignored most of what was said in the social assessment report and the indigenous people’s development plan’. 46 The result was a project full of compromises that did not generate much enthusiasm among any of the different stakeholders. After the loan was signed, the Mexican government did not allocate counterpart funds to the project, and therefore, almost none of the Bank funds were disbursed. 47 Therefore, none of the safeguard provisions built into the project were ever tested in practice. The project was frozen in part because it lacked a strong pro-reform coalition behind it. Both the Bank and the Mexican government were divided over whether to pursue the reform agenda in this sector. The potential beneficiary grassroots suggested that they write back to her in Huave (an indigenous language spoken by fishers in eastern Oaxaca). Earlier, Greenpeace had also complained that Bank claims that they had been ‘consulted’ were inaccurate—instead, they were merely informed of Bank plans (The News, March 10, 1995 [Mexico City]). 45 Interview, Washington, DC, January, 1996. The task manager added: ‘I’m concerned that they [government counter parts] are giving lip service to the social goals without really believing in them. Let’s go ahead anyway because the lip service makes it hard to say no—but let’s get the NGOs in’. 46 Personal email communication, October 1997. 47 The Mexican Treasury Ministry was reluctant to allocate budgetary resources to this project because the large-scale park appeared to be another state enterprise, in spite of its joint venture provisions (interview with World Bank staff, May 1999).

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organizations lacked leverage and public sector allies, and at most were only involved with a small part of the project. Overall, while on paper the project design was influenced by the Bank’s environmental and social reform mandates, intersectoral social capital was weak in face of official resistance to participatory innovations.

6. Rural Development in Marginal Areas This project emerged from the recognition by a World Bank institutional development specialist that more participatory, targeted approaches were needed to reach low-income, indigenous small producers in Mexico. She learned this from her experience with the Decentralization and Regional Development project, which succeeded in funding many small-scale public works projects in low-income rural areas, but failed in its effort to support productive investments in the same regions. She set about finding a more viable ‘fit’ between rural development agencies, rural producer organizational capacities, and institutional designs. She invested her own political capital toward the construction of bridge-building intersectoral social capital, making the effort to meet relevant NGO leaders, to learn about the actual functioning of Mexican institutions, and commissioned the first ever Spanish translation of a World Bank pre-project summary document (1995a). The project design process began in Oaxaca and involved studies and consultations that expressed a wide range of views (Velásquez 1996). In their recommendations, Oaxacan public interest groups and indigenous producer organizations insisted that the project allocate its resources through participatory regional councils that would include regional producer organizations. In their view, these councils should have had a significant degree of autonomy from government agencies, in order to avoid problems previously experienced with ‘power-sharing’ bodies that either excluded the larger (and therefore potentially more vocal and autonomous) organizations or lacked real decision-making power. This project design drew lessons from the National Indigenous Institute’s experience with co-managing regional development funds with producer councils (discussed in Chapter 8). However, control of the project shifted from the Social Development Ministry (which lacked expertise in productive projects but had a track record of partial powersharing with civil society) to the Agriculture Ministry (which gave priority to productive projects but lacked any track record of balanced power-sharing with autonomous indigenous producer organizations). If Bank project managers had sustained their emphasis on participatory

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approaches, they perhaps could have influenced the balance of power within the Agriculture Ministry to favor participatory approaches. However, the Bank project manager was transferred to another country long before the project proposal was finalized. Most subsequent Bank project managers either lacked power (one was just a temporary consultant) or did not prioritize participatory approaches and power-sharing with producer organizations. In addition, the project’s geographical coverage was expanded far beyond the original focus on Oaxaca to include the Huasteca region, which covers parts of three other states—apparently in order to allow federal officials to offer to bring in four governors rather just one. In most of the Huasteca region—in contrast to most of Oaxaca—consolidated regional economic development organizations and positive partnerships with the public sector were both lacking. The final version of the project retained some of the original ideas, such as regional councils, but the design limited their potential for significant power-sharing, granting veto power over council decisions to a wider range of potentially unsympathetic government agencies. They were designed to be even less autonomous than the INI’s regional funds. For example, project proposals that were supported by the regional councils also had to be approved not only by the relatively sympathetic rural development department within the federal Agriculture Ministry, but also by the ministry’s dominant faction, which consistently favored better-off producers through its Rural Alliance subsidy program. Moreover, if and when regional councils were divided over whether to support a project (quite possible if the councils were to be pluralistic), then the decision moved ‘up’ to state level councils controlled by conservative government officials and a few exclusively government-allied producer organizations (SAGARPA 1998). These constraints did not necessarily predetermine the outcomes; often Mexican rural development programs have followed more participatory paths than observers first predicted. In past experiences, however, as previous chapters have shown, the degree to which programs could ‘outgrow’ their initial constraints depended first on the capacity of already-existing social organizations to respond to small openings for participation within the system, and second, on the capacity of propower-sharing policymakers to gain actual control over program implementation. In this case, the implementation process shows that many autonomous social organizations did consistently try to participate, but they did not find policymakers willing to invest their political capital in building partnerships. At the federal level, the program was assigned to a department of the Agriculture Ministry that was managed by a nominally sympathetic undersecretary, but one whose views were not

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shared either by his key operational subordinates, nor by the four state governments directly involved in managing the regional councils—all of which were hostile towards the idea. The World Bank manager responsible for the project at the time of its closure offered this retrospective assessment: There were a lot of problems with the first one (PDRAM), the goal was just to pump money into the countryside, don’t expect it to be different. The government had dismantled the extension system and was trying to put it back in an ad hoc fashion, through privatized services, just trying to make sausages. They had to spend their time on administrative processing, with little time for follow-up with communities, high turnover. Federal requirements defined technical asssistance as a cost, not as investment. Plus they pushed inappropriate technological packages for upland, poor areas. Structural changes were needed, a paratécnicos approach. 48

When pressed to assess the project’s relationships with autonomous producer organizations, he recognized that ‘social capital conditions were ripe but that there was a lack of an enabling environment. Oaxaca was the model, divide and conquer—in contrast to Chiapas, where the approach was “we’ll just shoot you” ’. 49 Independent field study of ten of the original regions and subregions found two broad patterns, a predominant trend toward exclusion of actually existing autonomous producer organizations, combined with a weaker trend of partial inclusion, varying by region. 50 Partially inclusive councils are defined as those in which autonomous producer organizations had a ‘seat at the table’ in the regional councils, and at least nominal access to resources. As the program implementation proceeded, the Agriculture Ministry began to subdivide its original councils into smaller, subregional councils. According to federal officials, this would facilitate participation and inclusion, but in practice it did not change or weaken those state and federal government officials who were managing to block power-sharing. As Table 6.4 illustrates, the program had ten distinct regional or subregional decision-making processes in its six original regions by August 1999. Of those ten 48

Interview, James Smyle, December 10, 2004, World Bank, Washington, DC. Interview, James Smyle, December 10 2004, World Bank, Washington, DC. 50 This assessment is based on extensive interviews with two key federal program officials in May 1999, field visits and detailed interviews with social organization participants from five of Oaxaca’s six councils in April, May, and August of 1999, the government’s own commissioned evaluation of implementation in Oaxaca (Sánchez et al. 1998) on Rangel’s detailed evaluation of the San Luis Potosí experience (1999, 2004), and August 1999 interviews with independent policy analysts based in Veracruz. See also studies by Castellanos (2000) and Haight (2004), the press account in Bermúdez Santiago (1999a) and the producer organization testimonies reported in workshop minutes (Trasparencia 1998, 1999). 49

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regions or subregions, one lacked any participatory mechanism at all (Mixe Bajo—Cuenca), two only involved incipient inclusion (Huasteca Veracruzana and Huasteca Hidalguense), three involved some combination of incipient and partial inclusion (Mixe Alto, Mazateca Alta, San Luis Potosí—Plains), three involved partial inclusion (Mazateca Baja, Mixe Bajo-Istmo, and Huasteca San Luis Potosí—Sierra) and only one council could be considered fully inclusionary. In this last case, all of the representative producer organizations in the region were involved. Not coincidentally, rural civil society in this Cuicatlán region had an unusually high degree of organizational and social cohesion, with all the representative organizations unified under a single umbrella group (Unión de Ejidos y Comunidades Cuicatecas). Cuicatlán’s regional indigenous producer organization had extensive experience participating in and directly managing other government rural development programs (Fox 1994b). Though autonomous in practice, this organization was also actively affiliated with the ruling party, and therefore less likely than more overtly autonomous groups to be excluded from a government program. Indeed, the most important leader of the ejido union reported that the state government, together with the state-level representative of the Agriculture Ministry, decided unilaterally to dissolve their regional council in favor of creating three new ‘microregional’ councils. He reported that: They [the Agriculture Ministry] say we are a model, a pilot, and then they want to disappear us. We asked them what does this mean for our [elected] delegates, and for our technicians [support staff assigned to their regional council], and they had no answer. The Agriculture Ministry officials in Mexico City say they want to support the communities, and we met with them to review the 1999 program, but then they never did any follow-up and now it’s Sept. already. Now they’re dividing us and the folks don’t agree. 51

As a result, this government-affiliated organization began considering taking militant direct action for the first time in its more than fifteen years of co-management of government rural development programs. Even in this case, where one would expect all of the necessary conditions for an inclusionary council and the construction of intersectoral social capital to be in place, the council’s views were systematically rejected by the Agriculture Ministry. 52 51

Telephone interview, September, 1999. Interviews with the leaders of the Union de Ejidos y Comunidades de Cuicatlán, Oaxaca (Cuicatlán, Oaxaca, April 1999). For example, in spite of being in charge of the regional council, they only received a copy of the program’s Operational Manual after joining with other regional organizations and the NGO Trasparencia to inform the Undersecretary of Agriculture directly about their exclusion from decision-making processes. While they were able to leave with a copy of the Manual, the visit made no 52

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These findings were confirmed by an extensive field study of three regions commissioned by the World Bank, carried out in 1999 by a team led by one of Mexico’s leading anthropologists (Nahmad 2000). Two of the three regions overlapped with those studied independently (Mazateca Alta—Oaxaca, Huasteca Veracruzana, and the Sierra Norte of Puebla). This study found that (P)articipation was not able to mobilize the funds. . . . (T)he implementing agencies . . . were surprisingly reluctant to invest resources in the complex of activities associated with social participation . . . and therefore frustrated the strengthening of the organizations’ and communities’ social capital . . . It is common for the planners, administrators and technical staff to see the people as ‘the problem’ and to assume that they have the solution . . . In the process of decentralization at the core of the project, we have identified that the power groups at the state and microregional levels are not willing to cede power to the beneficiaries, to the communities, and above all not to the regional councils. (Nahmad 2000: 10–11).

This was the logic that drove the Agriculture Ministry to divide regional councils that were gaining autonomy into small subregional councils (as in the Mazateca region), to exclude the most consolidated and representative producer organizations from the councils (as in the case of the Tosepan Titataniske Cooperative in Puebla) and to avoid forming a regional council in the first place in Veracruz, where the program was incorporated into an existing state government ministry. Indigenous women’s producer organizations were systematically excluded, and the Puebla evaluation concluded that the program ‘was helping to socially decapitalize the productive activities that could have been carried out jointly’ with the leading producer organization. This pattern of exclusion was reinforced by the program’s systematic lack of transparency (Nahmad 2000: 38). The authors’ intent to publish their findings was vetoed by the World Bank. 53 After several years, several of the regional indigenous producer organizations in Oaxaca began to openly claim their right to be taken into account in the project. In 1999, they formed a new statewide network of regional Sustainable Development Councils, primarily involving leaders excluded from the official councils and with technical support from the public interest group Trasparencia. These alternative councils turned out to lack the social cohesion and political unity needed to survive the state government’s hostility, especially in the absence of access to government resources, and the network fell apart. other noticeable difference in terms of their capacity to share power with the rest of the Agriculture Ministry apparatus. 53

Personal email communication, Salomon Nahmad, May 17, 2006.

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Policy advocacy by Trasparencia, together with regional producer groups in Oaxaca and the Huasteca region, did not manage to influence resource allocation with the councils. However, their campaigns did have a modest impact at the federal level. They sustained a tense policy dialogue with the Agriculture Ministry and proposed a series of changes in the program’s operational manual. Some of these changes were accepted, with possible subsequent multiplier effects in other regions. In 1998, before the pilot regions had consolidated, the federal government expanded the program to other predominantly indigenous regions, and the World Bank prepared a follow-up loan. One sticking point was whether the World Bank would fund the program’s activities in Chiapas. National news reports charged the program, with World Bank backing, of becoming a tool of counterinsurgency in Chiapas (Henríquez 1999). Program operations in conflict zones had been contracted to a private consulting firm closely linked to Adolfo Orive, a former leftist leader who had become a counterinsurgency advisor to the Interior Ministry. A senior World Bank social development specialist confirmed that this private contractor concentrated on ‘trying to penetrate regions with a high Zapatista and PRD presence’. 54 The only independent study of the program in Chiapas found that regional councils were consistently government-controlled, and only progovernment organizations were invited to participate, in apparent violation of the World Bank’s indigenous people’s policy (Perola and Burguete 1999). At the time, World Bank officials claimed that they were not willing to fund program operations in the regions of conflict, and subsequent internal documents support that claim. 55 In 2001, the government passed a new Sustainable Rural Development Law that called for the creation of municipal councils throughout the country, and they rendered the regional councils of the Marginal 54 Personal email communication, August 1999. Orive had been a leader of the semiunderground organization Línea Proletaria, which secretly allied with the Salinas de Gortari brothers in the 1970s. 55 As the project manager reported in an internal aide-mémoire, which summarized discussions with the federal government: ‘The regions of the Altos, Cañadas, and the Selva were studied and evaluated as part of the group of marginal areas that could be integrated into the second phase of the adaptable loan 7004-ME in June, 1999. Nevertheless, at the time of negotiations it was preferred to leave these regions out of the funding because they were not considered to have the conditions for adequate Program operations, because of the precarious situation involving social cohesion within the communities, which could even be considered one of latent conflict, accentuated by the electoral climate at the time’ (Brizzi 2001: 4–5, translated by the author). This same document mentions specific states where councils include only individual producers instead of organized producers (Puebla, Guerrero), and does not cite any specific councils that met the desired criteria of balanced participation of producer representatives (2001: 12).

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Areas program obsolete (World Bank 2004). Some government policy analysts consider these municipal councils to be a major success, while other independent assessments are much more critical—as discussed in Chapter 7’s analysis of municipal democratization. According to the World Bank manager who oversaw the project’s past several years, the shift to promoting municipal councils nation-wide meant that the project’s outcome was ‘satisfactory’ because the Agriculture Ministry’s rural development department got ‘pointed in the right direction. . . . Maybe in a decade, they will be useful, if there is anyone left in the countryside’. 56 Overall, the Rural Development in Marginal Areas did not encourage an enabling policy environment for the consolidation of autonomous rural producer organizations. Federal and World Bank policymakers adopted a participatory discourse but did not make the partnerships or invest the political capital necessary to actually overcome the obstacles to balanced power-sharing with representative social organizations. An initial opening toward public information access was not sustained. In some of the project’s initial pilot regions, autonomous producer organizations took the official discourse seriously and managed to get a foot in the door. However, none of the original regional councils became a fully inclusionary power-sharing body.

Conclusions Most Institutional Environments did not Enable Three main patterns stand out from the six projects. First, only Community Forestry clearly contributed significantly toward encouraging more balanced relationships between the state and poor people’s organizations. Though initially limited to one state, this project served as a pilot that was later expanded to other states. The second main pattern was that the other incipient or partial openings were unstable and limited to a minority of the regions involved. This municipal and regional variation underscores the limitations of taking national policies or projects as the main or only unit of analysis. Third, the government and World Bank’s official pro-participation discourse served largely to mask the persistence of exclusionary, nontransparent decision-making over resource allocation. In all of the projects that actually underwent implementation, the key institutional obstacles were grounded in state–society coalitions 56

Interview, James Smyle, December 10, 2004, World Bank, Washington, DC.

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that opposed power-sharing with poor people’s organizations, particularly indigenous people’s groups. These coalitions were well entrenched both in state governments and within national agencies. Though federal agency managers were more likely to deploy pro-participation discourse, few were willing to invest their political capital—as in the notable case of the Agriculture Ministry. Project managers in both the Bank and the national government tended to at most react to these obstacles, rather than to develop proactive strategies that took them into account. In other words, the mixed cross-regional results—even in initially promising projects—were in part the result of policymakers’ ‘underinvestment’ in promoting more enabling institutional environment(s, plural, at the subnational level) for social capital.

Gender and Ethnic Dimensions of Social Capital were Largely Ignored Policymakers generally did not take into account the ethnic and gender dimensions of social capital. None of the projects studied were influenced by gender perspectives. This follows the broader pattern in which World Bank gender sensitivity is limited to considering women as mothers, rather than as economic actors as well, such as peasants, workers, natural resource managers, or merchants (Buvenic, Gwin, and Bates 1996). Indeed, in at least one case in Oaxaca, organized rural women engaged in militant direct action to press for their right to be included in the program, holding Agriculture Ministry officials hostage in their offices for three days. 57 In terms of ethnicity, only the Community Forestry project promoted partnerships that systematically respected the autonomy of Mexico’s many and diverse indigenous producers’ organizations. In contrast, the once-promising Rural Development in Marginal Areas project excluded the most consolidated autonomous indigenous producer organizations in most of its areas of operation. Federal officials blamed state government counterparts for these problems, but the entire project design was based precisely on reinforcing state officials’ leverage over resource allocation.

Intersectoral Trust Meets ‘Rational Wariness’ The patterns of variation support the hypothesis that funding implementing agencies that were already under the control of pro-social 57

Interviews with grassroots leaders, Tuxtepec, Oaxaca, April 1999.

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capital policymakers would be more likely to encourage an enabling environment. In the case of the Community Forestry project pro-reform Bank staff and policymakers ‘found each other’, as well as social organization and NGO counterparts. This cross-sectoral coalition generated a virtuous circle of mutual empowerment. They built trust, which was enhanced by the project’s unusually high degree of transparency. The role of trust raises a broader conceptual issue. There is a great deal of confusion in the social capital literature over whether trust is an element of social capital, built into its definition (‘norms and relationships’), a factor that encourages social capital, or whether it is the result of social capital. Conflating norms and networks under the same conceptual umbrella makes it difficult to understand causal flows: is trust generated by relationships, or do relationships generate trust? In practice, the process is often reciprocal, but it may also be path-dependent, which suggests that it matters whether the chicken or the egg comes first. To avoid this problem of endogeneity, the definition of social capital used here does not incorporate norms, and is instead limited to practices and relationships. The findings here suggest that levels of trust reflect previous experiences with relationships. For example, where trust is initially lacking—for example, between government officials and grassroots leaders—then relationships must be built that can justify trust. This is clearly a challenge for those attempting to build coalitions across the state–society divide under less then democratic conditions, where, based on past experience, state actors are not widely perceived as pluralistic or motivated by the public interest. From the point of view of autonomous membership organizations, the reaction to the promise of participatory inclusion in the policy process is often one of rational wariness. As a result of this dynamic, development policies that attempt to encourage an enabling environment for state–society partnerships face a problem of strategic interaction. Pro-participation policymakers often start out relatively weak, with limited leverage over the rest of the state apparatus, so they need social actors to mobilize in support of their efforts. Yet those social actors may be quite skeptical about whether to invest in untried promises of change. This is where the subjective factor of trust becomes relevant: for a mutually reinforcing coalition to emerge, each potential partner must make an investment with a high degree of uncertainty regarding the commitment, capacity, and intentions of their potential partner. The Rural Development in Marginal Areas experience is especially revealing of the central role of trust in the building of state–society

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coalitions. Here was a case that began with an unusual degree of communication and trust between the initial World Bank project manager and key social organizations and NGOs in the relatively densely organized state of Oaxaca. After the key Bank manager moved elsewhere and the project design rejected key civil society recommendations for power-sharing resource allocation decision-making processes, years went by before the project itself was launched. Even after the loan was signed, funding flows at best trickled—in turn leaving the regional councils to ‘dry up’, as one senior federal Agriculture Ministry manager put it. 58 In short, the intersectoral social capital accumulated during project preparation was dissipated rather than invested. This experience suggests a possibly generalizable dynamic, a vicious circle of unmet expectations that would account for why some participatory projects start off well but then veer offtrack. To understand this pattern, one needs to start by assessing the strategic calculus of the key subjects of the development process. Broad-based, autonomous producer organizations may choose not to invest their scarce leadership resources and political capital by getting involved in ostensibly participatory development programs because of low expectations; they expect little or no return to their organization’s investment. Based on their extensive past experiences with rural development programs, producer organizations are often well-informed about which kinds of government programs are likely to respect their autonomy and to deliver what they promise. Leaders who are accountable to their base will be especially sensitive to the risks associated with raising their members’ expectations about the possible benefits from investing organizational resources in a government program. Leaders’ time and credibility are especially scarce resources, and they will be understandably wary about risking their own members’ trust in them. This ‘rational wariness’ underscores that it is critical for government and Bank officials to take tangible measures designed specifically to generate trust, and to only make commitments that they can in fact comply with. If, because of the target group’s rational wariness, few broad-based organizations choose to participate in the government program, then the perverse effect will be that pro-participation officials in the government and the Bank will lack the organized constituency that they would need in order to offset opposition to social participation. As a result, program managers will be unlikely to be able to deliver on their promises to the few organizations that do choose to participate, further eroding prospects for state–society coalitions. At the same time, 58

Interview, Mexico City, April 1999.

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those organizations that decided not to participate will see their rational wariness to have been vindicated, in turn raising the minimum threshold policymakers will need to establish credibility and trust in the future. This downward spiral describes the Rural Development in Marginal Areas program experience in Oaxaca over the 1995–2000 period. The largest and most influential of the state’s autonomous producer organizations, the Oaxaca State Network of Coffee Organizations, participated in initial consultations but chose not to invest further resources after the delayed and watered-down project design process eroded incipient trust. Those organizations that stuck with the participation process, such as the Union of Ejidos and Communities of Cuicatlán, ended up feeling that their investment had been wasted. National policymakers repeated their pro-participation promises, but they remained either unwilling or unable to prevent state and federal operational officials from breaking those promises. The obstacles were even greater in Chiapas, where the evidence suggests that program operations were turned over to political strategists of the counterinsurgency program. This raised issues of trust for autonomous indigenous organizations in other regions. While it appears that the World Bank tried to keep some distance from the Chiapas operations, its support for the program in other regions, combined with its unwillingness to make public any skepticism about Chiapas operations, sent a public signal of unqualified support for the Agriculture Ministry’s activities. In the case of the Community Forestry project, in contrast, even though the federal reformers also faced serious obstacles from within their own ministry, not to mention Treasury, the intersectoral social capital that had been built up between state, Bank, and civil society participants had generated sufficient trust to sustain the proparticipation coalition even when it was difficult for officials to meet their commitments. The more general proposition here is that intersectoral trust is a resource for policy reform, but it requires a substantial, sustained investment to generate and sustain partnerships, especially in the face of inevitable resistance.

Unpack the State Horizontally and Vertically The original research design focused on the three-way relationship between the Bank, the implementing government agency, and civil society. The field results suggest two important modifications of this schematic triangular relationship, both involving further ‘unpacking’

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of the state (both horizontally and vertically). At the national level, the cases highlight the important role played by the national financial intermediaries between the Bank and the rest of the state. Because the Treasury Ministry controlled disbursements, including national counterpart funds, it had the power to either inhibit or promote the enabling environments for social capital accumulation. In Mexico, the Treasury Ministry systematically undermined the Community Forestry project by withholding counterpart funds. In this case, World Bank staff allies who had helped to shepherd the project through Treasury during its design and launching, lost most of their leverage once the loan had been signed and the project moved into the implementation phase. 59 Treasury systematically micromanaged Environment Ministry budget plans, and retained more than sufficient autonomy to resist entreaties from Bank staff. The Treasury Ministry could exercise this leverage in part because this was a very small project that was marginal to the broader Bank-state policy agenda. The second way in which the national state needs to be institutionally ‘unpacked’ in order to understand prospects for encouraging social capital consolidation involves decentralization. This is the ‘vertical’ dimension, in which state and local governments gain increasing responsibility and autonomy for the implementation of national social and environmental policies. In those cases where notable pro-social capital initiatives were found, they consistently came from within federal agencies.

Truly Enabling Environments will Threaten Vested Interests, therefore Political Capital is Required Social capital is often discussed in ways that emphasize shared norms and negotiated, consensual understandings. Conventional approaches focus on those who share social capital, eliding the inherently conflictive process of collective action in defense of the excluded. In the cases where serious institutional reform was attempted, conflict ensued— both within the state and between state and social actors. In this context, Bank actors—as sources of funding, prestige, and ideas— inherently took sides. 60 To have a possibility of being effective, strategies to create enabling environments need to identify and intervene to weaken, sidestep, 59 60

Interview, Environment Ministry officials, May 1999. For an elaboration of this point, see Fox (1997a).

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or neutralize vested interests from the beginning. Otherwise, proparticipation forces will be caught in the inevitable backlash, and will be forced to continuously fight rearguard, defensive battles, focusing primarily on minimizing losses rather than maximizing gains. Conflict should be seen as a likely and perhaps necessary outcome, to be foreseen by creative institutional design and managed by the investment of political capital, rather than treated as an implicitly unusual outcome and dealt with through ad hoc, after-the-fact damage control measures. These challenges suggest that the combination of broadbased horizontal organizations with diversified state–society coalitions is not enough to ‘enable enabling environments’. Pro-poor coalitions must also mobilize their political capital to offset the opposition inherent in the process of encouraging the empowerment of poor people’s organizations.

................. 7

................. Decentralizing Decentralization: Mexico’s Invisible Fourth Level of the State1

Where does the state leave off and society begin? To be more precise, when one looks at forms of representation and participation that bridge state and society, at what point do they represent the state to society, versus representing society to the state? For national governments and international development agencies, whether and how to permit direct stakeholder participation is usually determined by bureaucratic discretion and ad hoc political bargaining. In contrast, in increasing numbers of local governments, grassroots movements are claiming the right to participate in decision-making and oversight. These democratic aspirations often focus on transforming local governance. In many of Latin America’s cities, for example, participatory budgeting has been praised from the far left to the World Bank as a means for citizens to exercise direct democratic influence over resource allocation. But do such local governance innovations represent waves of the future or isolated enclaves? The determinants of the process of horizontal diffusion of local governance innovations remain poorly understood, and participatory budgeting has yet to sink deep roots in rural areas. More generally, it is safe to say that the democratization of local governance in rural areas remains very much a work in progress, even under national regimes that have experienced competitive elections for many years.

1 The author is grateful for input regarding individual states from practitioners and analysts Xóchitl Bada (Michoacán), Araceli Burguete (Chiapas), Juan Cisneros (Hidalgo, San Luis Potosí), Yaotzin Domínguez Escobedo (Veracruz), Carlos García (Guerrero), Flavio Lazos (Querétaro), and Fernando Melo (Oaxaca). Thanks very much for comments from Jennifer Franco, Kent Eaton, Xóchitl Leyva, and Jennifer Johnson on earlier versions.

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This study focuses on one of the territorial dimensions of accountability politics by problematizing the question of ‘what counts’ as local government. As decentralization increasingly devolves more resources to lower levels of government, the incentives for contesting control over local government increase. 2 To frame this question in terms of state– society relations, is village government a bottom-up form of societal representation, or is it a top-down instrument of state control over the community? 3 How local is local, anyway? Rural districts, counties, panchayats, and municipalities are often treated by policy analysts and political scientists as the ‘most local’ level of government, yet these bodies may exclude other forms of local territorial representation. 4 Mexico’s federal system of governance is based on three constitutionally recognized levels of government. The emerging literature on intergovernmental relations focuses mainly on federal–state relations, to a lesser degree on state and federal relations with municipalities, and even less on the ramifications for intramunicipal power relations. 5 The point of departure here is that while the municipality is often described in Mexico as the level of government ‘closest to the people’, much of 2 The now enormous literature on decentralization focuses mainly on states and large cities, with the notable exception of the large body of research on India. For crossnational comparisons, see Crook and Manor (1998) and Ribot and Larson (2005). For recent studies that specifically focus on the democratization of a level of rural government that is closer to the village than most, the barangay in the Philippines, see Estrella and Iszatt (2004). For development studies of rural municipalities in Latin America, see Cameron (2005), Fox and Moguel (1995), Fox and Aranda (1996), Litvack, Ahmad, and Bird (1998), Rowland (2001), and Tendler (1997). For comparative overviews of the political dynamics of decentralization in Latin America, see Eaton (2004, 2006), Gibson (2004), Montero and Samuels (2004), and Oxhorn, Tulchin, and Selee (2004). 3 In parts of rural Africa, for example, what appear to be forms of customary rule and therefore societal representation often turn out to be legacies of colonial indirect rule, state-regulated forms of top-down governance that end up competing with territorial forms of citizenship-based representation (Ribot 2004). 4 Even if village government is representative of the majority of the community, in some sense, by what criteria would it be considered the most local expression of the state, versus an expression of society? Uphoff and Krishna, for example, in their discussion of state–society relations as a potentially nonzero-sum relationship, locate local government at the state–society interface, but explicitly put it in the societal box (2004: 361). Any effort to draw a strict boundary between state and society at this ‘most local’ level of rural government would be artificial, given their high degree of interpenetration, yet two key indicators are relevant for considering village government to be in some sense a branch of the state. First, are local leaders named from above, by higher level officials? Second, does village government administer funds that come from higher levels of government? If the answer to at least one of these questions is yes, then it is fair to say that such bodies have a significant degree of ‘stateness’. 5 See, among others, Beer (2003, 2005), Díaz Cayeros (2003, 2004), Díaz Cayeros and Silva Castañeda (2004), Flamand (2004), Joumard (2005), Rodríguez (1999), Rodríguez and Ward (1995), Ward and Rodríguez (1999), and Webb and Giugale (2000). Some overviews of recent changes in Mexican governance do not address decentralization at all (e.g. Peschard-Sverdrup and Rioff (2005).

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the countryside is also governed by a ‘fourth level’ that administers villages within municipalities. 6

Mexico’s Submunicipal Rural Governance Regimes Long before national democratization, municipal government was often the most contested elected office in Mexico. While a few rural municipalities were among the first to break the PRI’s electoral monopoly, urban municipal democratization generally led while rural municipal democratization lagged. 7 After the 1988 presidential election, hundreds of opposition activists were killed as they campaigned for municipal democratization, notably in Michoacan, Guerrero, and Chiapas. A decade later, most rural municipalities experienced less violent electoral politics. 8 But for many living outside town centers, the right to self-governance was more elusive than access to partisan competition. This chapter focuses on the contestation of power over Mexico’s ‘submunicipal’ governments, with a focus on rural and indigenous regions. The main argument is that the struggle over local rural democracy and village autonomy constitutes an unresolved, ongoing form of ‘regime change’. Legally, Mexico’s states determine submunicipal governance structures, and they are remarkably evenly divided between elected and appointed regimes. As this chapter’s concluding review of state legislation shows, as of 2006, thirteen states had elected systems, in thirteen states submunicipal officials were named by the municipal authorities, and four states had mixed systems, in which different layers of submunicipal leaders are chosen through different means. Notably, during the 1996–2006 decade, only four states passed laws that involved any formal changes in ‘submunicipal regime’. Most of the focus here, however, is on actual practices of local autonomy. This layer of submunicipal governance has been visible only to anthropologists—and to the millions of citizens who live in villages. 9 As a result, both journalistic and scholarly coverage of ‘local’ power struggles involving a given municipality often creates the impression 6 Olmedo is one of the few specialists in Mexican municipal governance to refer explicitly to the ‘fourth level of the state’ (1999a, 1999b). 7 See, for example, Cornelius, Eisenstadt, and Hindley (1999), Fox and Hernández (1992), López Monjardin (1986), Paré (1990), Rubin (1997), and Ward and Rodríguez, (1995). 8 Statistical evidence suggests that municipal democratization has been driven mainly by a process of horizontal diffusion (Hiskey and Canache 2005). 9 For example, the intensely studied municipality of Tepoztlán, Morelos is characterized by political and economic inequality between the district seat and its ‘subject communities’ (Martin 2005: 16).

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that such conflicts unfold within a single community. Consider the Atenco conflict, which attracted worldwide attention in 2001. Militant local resistance to the expropriation of farmland to build a new Mexico City airport is widely described in the terms of the implicitly homogeneous community of San Salvador Atenco—the name of the municipal center. Yet the displacement was to affect not one, but thirteen ejidos, and the movement involved a regional convergence of thirteen ‘pueblos’, in this case distinct communities within the municipality. The organization that led the campaign is called the Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra (The Coalition of Communities in Defense of the Land), ‘a movement that brought together regional struggles that were not limited to land’ (PRODH 2006). To use the name of the municipal center is certainly convenient shorthand, but from an analytical point of view this practice renders invisible the question of how these different communities came together. Yet, as discussed in previous chapters, the process of ‘scaling up’ collective identities and action from the village to regional level is at the center of the question of how the rural poor can be represented vis-à-vis the state. These submunicipal leaders are legally considered to be ‘municipal auxiliaries’ and they usually lack much in the way of formal authority—except when government social development funds are supposed to be invested outside the town center. Beyond the issues of official powers and who controls the public ‘micro’ finances, however, is the question of who will represent the interests of rural people who live outside of cabeceras municipales, or town centers? Until the 1990s, the key local leaders were agrarian authorities, those elected to govern ejidos and agrarian communities. Ejido powers mattered a great deal as they were empowered with sufficient resources to be economic actors, but after the Salinas era reforms, the role of many ejidos was limited to administering land titles—as detailed in southern Narayit in Chapter 3. 10 In the context of a de facto dual power system of local territorial governance, just as ejidos became less relevant, relatively large injections of social investment funds made municipal authorities more significant. As a result, it appears that many rural citizens have shifted the focus of their microdemocratic concerns from agrarian to municipal governance. Where these dual structures of territorial governance overlap and are both democratic, they point in the same direction—as in the case of the Atenco airport campaign, when the

10 For initial overviews of the impacts of the ejido reforms, see Cornelius and Myhre (1998) and Randall (1996).

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FPDT had the support of both the submunicipal delegations and the leaders of the affected ejidos. 11 The question of how these jurisdictions should be represented cuts across the conventional ideological spectrum—as does the issue of decentralization more generally. For example, Subcomandante Marcos recently stated his case to an indigenous Mazahua community in the state of Mexico: It’s the pueblo who should be in charge. 12 Why do we want some #$%#$ lawyer, who comes from somewhere else, who doesn’t even know the folks here, if the folks themselves can organize and put one of their own in, and take turns [governing]. That’s the way we do it in the Zapatista communities in Chiapas. There it’s not the government of the Republic that’s in charge, not the state, and not the municipal [government], it’s the communities themselves that name their authorities. That’s the way it should be here, because who better knows the problems of La Marquesa? The very same folks of La Marquesa. That way, if the person in charge begins to take the wrong path, we’re watching him, and if he’s getting rich, we can kick him out (cited in Bellinghausen 2006c).

While the rejection of federal authority gives this argument its revolutionary edge, a similar self-governance-from-below discourse has been echoed for years by one notable voice from deep within the state. As Raúl Olmedo (1999b: 1–2), founding director of the Interior Ministry’s Center for Municipal Studies, put it: The Mexican municipality in its current form, though it is said to be the level of government closest to the community, continues to be an abstraction and is not really the direct government of the community. . . . The current municipality is the legacy of the . . . Conquest and the Colonial period and was designed to impede community organization, and even to intentionally disorganize society, to weaken it to be able to dominate it. . . . [Since the 1980s,] electoral democratization [of the municipality] has not changed its centralized and colonialist structure: power continues to be concentrated in the municipal center and the actual communities—rural and urban, continue to lack the right to govern themselves. . . . The demand for autonomous [local] government has been taken up by the indigenous peoples, but also by neighborhood citizens’ organizations in large cities.

In rural areas, these submunicipal jurisdictions are called municipal ‘agencies’, ‘commissions’ or ‘delegations’. These territories are in turn divided into smaller jurisdictions, sometimes known as rancherías, 11 Personal email communication, Javier Salinas, La Jornada correspondent, May 22, 2006. 12 Note that in Mexican political discourse the term ‘pueblo’ means both ‘community’ and ‘people’.

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subdelegations, or police agencies. Those who govern the agencies are known as ‘municipal agents’, but whose agents are they? From the point of view of democratic governance, the key question is: do they represent the village to the municipality, or do they represent the municipality to the village? Mexico currently has 2,438 municipalities (as of 2006), and 85 percent of them are rural. 13 While national and state policymakers often favor the fusion of the small municipalities, Mexican municipal advocates contend that Mexico does not have enough to represent rural citizens effectively. 14 Rural municipios are closer to ‘counties’ than to ‘towns’, and most include at least several, sometimes dozens of distinct communities. Almost 25 million Mexicans still live in localities of fewer than 2,500 inhabitants, which legally are too small to constitute municipalities (2000 data, cited in CONAPO 2001). While many of Mexico’s almost 200,000 officially designated ‘localities’ are tiny hamlets, most of this population lives in larger villages. Because these villages cannot constitute their own ‘free municipalities’—to use the classic prerevolutionary Mexican phrase—millions of rural people live in communities that are ‘unfree’, that is, they are politically subordinate to town centers. This dynamic leads both to persistent efforts by subordinate communities to split off and launch their own municipalities (sometimes known as ‘remunicipalization’) and to ongoing tensions between town centers and outlying villages. 15 This review of the available literature suggests that these intramunicipal tensions are exacerbated by at least three factors: persistent local authoritarian rule, increased funding flows to municipal governments, and ethnic differences between town center elites and outlying villagers. In Mexico’s indigenous regions, municipal cabeceras are often located in mestizo-controlled market towns that have centuries of history as 13 For background on Mexican municipalities, see the government’s Institute for Federalism and Municipal Development—http://www.e-local.gob.mx/wb2/INAFED/ INAF_Inicio and the Network of Researchers on Mexican Local Government—http:// www.iglom.iteso.mx/. 14 Carlos Rodríguez, director of one of Mexico’s leading municipal development NGOs, points to Spain, with more than 8,000 and France with more than 36,000, noting that each country has a smaller territory and population than Mexico (2004: 1). On the Centro de Servicios Municipales ‘Heriberto Jara’, founded in 1990, see http://www. cesemheribertojara.org.mx/. 15 The primary focus here is on the issue of submunicipal autonomy because local demands for the creation of new municipalities are rarely successful. New municipalities must be approved by state legislatures. Such decisions would be politically costly for congressional representatives because they involve taking territory and power away from existing mayors, often from the same party—while creating incentives for more breakaway campaigns. For an overview of ‘remunicipalization’ trends, see Rodríguez (2004). In Chiapas, the state government pursued ‘remunicipalization’ in 1999 in the context of counterinsurgency strategy (Leyva and Burguete, forthcoming).

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centers of racial and economic domination of the surrounding villages. In addition, intermunicipal boundaries in these regions were often drawn to reinforce the town center’s power, which ended up dividing communities that share ethnic identities and ancestral land claims. The de facto apartheid legacy of colonial town centers in Mexico’s indigenous regions came to worldwide attention with the Chiapas rebellion. San Cristóbal’s tradition of forbidding indigenous people from walking on the sidewalk until the mid-twentieth century was emblematic. During the first days of the rebellion, while in command of seven cabeceras in Chiapas, the rebels destroyed the police stations and trashed the files of town halls, but little else. The masked Indians whose hammers whacked away at the Altamirano ‘municipal palace’ resonated with images of the collective dismantling of the Berlin Wall. 16 In Chiapas, where mestizo ranchers and farmers had monopolized local political power, the municipality was far from the level of government ‘closest to the people’. Instead, ‘local government’ had long been the embodiment of racial and economic exclusion. Many indigenous communities had retained their own colonial era institutions of selfgovernance, some of which managed to govern the smaller highland municipalities through the nineteenth century. In 1921, however, a new state constitution eliminated 59 of the state’s 116 municipalities, subordinating them to largely mestizo-run town centers (Burguete 2004: 148). By mid-twentieth century, the postrevolutionary regime also developed means of indirect rule through bilingual indigenous intermediaries, often teachers or other professionals, who could rule with impunity in exchange for delivering votes and stability (Rus 1994). This chapter explores territorial governance of (or by) the rural poor by analyzing the changing power relations between municipal cabeceras and outlying villages. 17 The analysis follows three complementary subnational comparative strategies. The first is to analyze how municipal governments decide how to invest their newly increased budgets for social investment, based on a comparison of rural municipalities in Oaxaca’s indigenous regions. The second approach compares the contested balance of power between town centers and villages across four of Mexico’s most low-income, rural states—Chiapas, Hidalgo, Guerrero, and Oaxaca—analyzing both laws and actual practices. The third approach steps back to the national level, comparing 16

See the photo in La Jornada, January 4, 1994, as well as Burguete (1998). Though large rural municipalities are organized through multiple territorial layers, the focus here is on the level of governance immediately below the municipality. 17

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the state laws that regulate submunicipal governance for all of Mexico’s states, including an analysis of change in these laws over the last two decades. These three strategies combine to reveal Mexico’s usually invisible fourth level of governance.

Participatory Budgeting in Rural Mexico: Oaxacan Experiences18 On paper, participatory budgeting in Mexico is not new. The constitutional framework for municipal governance has included provisions for broadly representative Municipal Development Planning Councils to make infrastructure investment decisions since 1983, though in practice they were rarely activated (Selee 2006; Ziccardi 2004). 19 Municipal investment budgets grew substantially in the late 1990s as Mexico’s decentralization deepened. In practice, however, in rural Mexico, the dominant pattern for the allocation of these funds involved: ‘The municipal budget ends up staying in the municipal center, leaving communities and villages abandoned, lacking the financial and organizational resources to develop themselves’ (Olmedo 1999b: 6). 20 18 This section summarizes field research carried out between 1992 and 1994. For quantitative data analysis, institutional description, detailed case studies, and methodological discussion, see Fox and Aranda (1996a, 1996b). 19 In the early 1990s, Mexico began a national program of specifically rural municipal social infrastructure investments that was in principle based on community public debate and decision-making over resource allocation. The Municipal Solidarity Funds program of demand-driven community development block grants was launched within the multipronged National Solidarity Program (Pronasol). Though the Solidarity program ended in 1994 with the term of out-going president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the municipal funds component, like many others, continued on under a new name. 20 A comparative World Bank assessment of rural investment funds in Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia explained the political economy of this dynamic:

Local government’s primary concern is likely to be vote appeal and patronage. . . . If civil society is weak, then there will be no checks on local officials pursuing these objectives. Even if civil society is reasonably strong, it may function primarily in the urban areas [of rural districts]. If this is true, then ‘rational’ local politicians will focus on satisfying urban voters and patrons, and neglect the concerns of rural people. . . . Thus, unless rural civil society is reasonably strong, elected officials will likely discriminate against poor rural areas, retain the power to make decisions, and reward their financial backers with municipal contracts. The goal of strengthening municipal government is thus best achieved by taking action to strengthen civil society. (Wiens and Guagdani 1998: 11–12) This analysis had little impact on actual design and practices of the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank’s substantial loans to Mexico for rural municipal funds in the 1990s (see Chapters 6 and 7). Lacking prior evidence of the capacity of rural local governments, the multilateral development banks essentially experimented with billions of dollars before eventually concluding that accountability, transparency, and participation were relevant (Fox 1996b, 1997, 2000a).

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Behind the scenes, in the mid-1990s, Social Development Ministry policymakers, together with World Bank staff, used the federal government’s discretionary administrative power to make policy changes to intervene in the balance of power between state, municipal, and submunicipal governments. Their goal was to make social investments more geographically targeted to low-income rural areas. The changes included: 1. using relative poverty levels to allocate Municipal Funds between states; 2. making public explicit formulas for allocating funds between municipalities within states thereby limiting the potential for discretionary biases by state authorities; 3. encouraging better antipoverty targeting within municipalities by capping the fraction allowed for town centers at 25 percent; and 4. setting a sliding scale for varying levels of community counterpart contributions intended to encourage higher social-impact investments (participants had to contribute a larger share of the cost of projects that either were less directly related to fighting poverty or were not public goods). 21 These last two local measures created incentives for broader citizen participation in outlying villages by potentially bringing antipoverty funds within their reach. The geographic targeting measures created an unprecedented new entitlement for outlying villages, which in turn created an accountability benchmark that served to encourage participation. These pro-targeting provisions were rolled back, however, as a little noticed consequence of a national 1998 decentralization law that increased municipal autonomy. Opposition parties, notably the National Action Party, were increasingly winning elections in large and medium-sized cities; for them, greater municipal autonomy was a democratic advance. For rural municipalities, however, the same national law removed most of the checks and balances that had limited town centers’ power over outlying villages (Fox 2002). More systematic research is needed to determine the degree to which entitlements to villages in the 1990s triggered claims on municipal resources, but the 21 If the sliding scale for counterpart contributions required a significantly higher local investment to build a lower-impact project (such as a sports field) than a higherimpact project (like a drinking water system), that targeting measure potentially magnified the voice of the less well-off citizens who needed water. In principle, this interaction could engender virtuous circles in which broader participation then encourages more equitable and accountable local government performance, which then demonstrates the payoff from sustained participation.

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press accounts cited below suggest that village claims on town centers are now widespread. Field research examined whether this pattern characterized rural municipalities in Oaxaca, where local government is widely considered to be more participatory and accountable than in much of rural Mexico. Rural municipalities in Oaxaca are much smaller and more numerous than in any other Mexican state, so local government there actually is often close to the people. In addition, in most small towns and villages, the state’s indigenous population has long governed itself by non-Western local political institutions, and this de facto parallel system was recognized legally by the state government in 1995. 22 At the same time, some local governments are still dominated by authoritarian elites linked to the postrevolutionary ruling party, as in the Mixe region (e.g. Regino 2006). Other municipalities are involved in contested processes of transition from customary law to political party competition, with pro-democratic forces on one side or the other, depending on local circumstances (Velásquez 2005). The field research generated two data sets, each aggregating qualitative indicators that focused on whether village level project selection decisions were made top-down (by state government or town center officials) or bottom-up (within the community). The first data set permitted statewide generalizations about which combination of actors actually made project selection decisions, and covered a stratified sample of 50 rural local governments (more than 10 percent of the state’s rural municipalities). The second data set permitted more in-depth analysis of the relationship between decision-making processes and development outcomes, based on a sample of 145 local projects. Assessing the impact of the Municipal Funds’ pro-participation institutional design features turned out to be difficult because the question presumes that they were actually implemented. For example, the Municipal Development Planning Councils were intended to be more inclusive than conventional town councils, since they were also supposed to include village-level project committee leaders. Yet the Oaxaca field study found that the Municipal Councils were rarely fully operational: they only met in 54 percent of the cases, and then more often in the larger towns. 23 Their presence and degree of authority was quite 22 The 1995 state law ratified existing local customary law (e.g. Bautista Cruz 2005). On Oaxaca’s distinctive system of local governance, which includes the option of selecting authorities through nonpartisan communitarian processes, see Anaya Muñoz (2004, 2005), Díaz Montes (1992, 2002), EDUCA (2005), Flores Cruz (2002), Hernández Díaz (forthcoming), Hernández Navarro (1999), and Velásquez (2000a, 2000b). On Oaxacan indigenous civil society, see Hernández Díaz (2001). 23 Fox and Aranda, op cit, p. 22. Where they worked, however, they contributed greatly to decentralizing the decentralization process.

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uneven because in many municipalities they potentially constituted a counterweight to traditionally centralized local authority. Indeed, that was their goal. Creating institutional counterweights to decentralize the decentralization process from above proved easier said than done. This tension is observed nationwide as well, where the degree to which the Municipal Development Councils even exist varies widely. 24

Local Project Decision-Making In Oaxaca, 418 of the 570 municipalities are governed by community assemblies, and the rest are governed by conventional party competition. Some in both categories have achieved stable democratic municipal ‘regimes’, while others are blocked or remain in transition. The municipal funds program worked well in those towns that had consolidated electoral democracy, but those with unresolved electoral conflicts experienced less community participation in municipal development projects. In practice, the official program structure, composed of new municipal councils and local committees, was largely folded into existing organs of local government. Most rural Oaxaca communities already had their own active local public works committees, as part of their ethnically based system of rotating community responsibilities. In most of rural Oaxaca, these unpaid, often full-time positions are chosen through community consensus. Until the federal government began the municipal investment program, most of their funding came from local contributions, supplemented by migrant remittances. 25 In the smaller villages, most Municipal Funds projects were taken on by these preexisting committees led by municipal authorities, such as the town council or the local municipal agent. The statewide sample found that participatory community bodies made the key project decisions in 58 percent of the municipalities— a relatively high rate for Mexican social programs at that time. 26 24 Puebla ranks as the state with the highest rate of council formation, with 204 of 217 municipalities, whereas in neighboring Veracruz, only 19 of 210 municipalities have such councils (Ziccardi 2004: 260). 25 On the changing roles of migrants in indigenous community governance, see Kearney and Besserer (2004), Maldonado (2004), and Robles Camacho (2004). 26 See Fox and Aranda (1996a: 24). Though Oaxaca is widely considered in Mexico to have a relatively dense rural civil society, social and civic organizations rarely participated in the formal Municipal Funds decision-making process. In contrast to one of the initial hypotheses, the presence of strong membership organizations had little impact on the project decision-making process, playing a role in only 8% of the cases reported. Nor did they appear in the case studies of municipalities where grassroots groups were known to be active. This absence was not only the result of a failure to

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However, state government officials significantly influenced project choices in at least 38 percent of the municipalities. Because communities were largely dependent on state government officials for information about the program options and procedures, for technical assistance (if any), and for acceptance of expense receipts, these higherlevel officials held de facto veto power over community project choices. State government officials often encouraged communities to choose less ambitious projects. The following scenario was quite common: State government officials convened community assemblies to define local public works priorities. These officials would respond to the prioritized list by indicating which projects were too expensive, which required technical assistance that they were unwilling to provide, which would take more than the limited time available, and which were acceptable. At the symbolic level, it is also notable that Municipal Funds checks were personally handed to the mayors by the governor himself in 86 percent of the municipalities surveyed. This reinforced the perception of municipal funds as politically discretionary rather than entitlementbased investments. Project level analysis found significant imbalances between investments in town centers and outlying villages. Positive social impact, broadly defined, was found in 56 percent of the projects observed. Community assembly decision-making produced disproportionately better projects, while project selections by mayors and external actors produced tended to produce lower impact projects. Most projects carried out by committees composed entirely of local citizens were successful (70 percent), while just under half (47 percent) of the projects carried out by committees with local officials had significant impact. If more participation can be taken as a rough indicator of local social capital, then this outcome is consistent with the conventional wisdom. However, Oaxaca’s smaller, more remote villages, which would also generally be expected to have denser levels of social capital, also turned out to have fewer significant projects and more project failures than the municipal centers. In terms of observed impact, three-quarters of projects in town centers were successful (74 percent), in contrast to a 50 percent success rate in outlying villages. Imbalances in project budgets appear to have been quite relevant; in 1992 average projects disseminate the fact that productive projects could be included in the project menu; it was also due to the widely held traditional conception of the division of labor between the duties of local government and the role of producer and other social organizations. Local government is widely seen to be responsible for service provision, while producer groups are expected to focus on economic activities. In municipalities where social organizations were strong, however, their members did participate actively in Municipal Funds projects as individual citizens.

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in town centers received about three times the average amount for projects in outlying areas. 27 Nevertheless, outlying villages began to receive government social funds for the first time, and in the course of the following decade increasing numbers of communities attempted to transform these entitlements into rights. The Oaxaca study suggested that a process of reciprocal interaction between citizen action and institutional change drives this decentralization of decentralization. On the one hand, the breadth and density of grassroots civic organizations and practices shapes rural citizens’ capacity to hold municipal governments accountable. On the other hand, by creating incentives and disincentives for participation, local governance institutions in turn influence the capacity of grassroots communities to exercise voice.

Comparing Submunicipal Regime Dynamics Across Four States28 The second research strategy involves an empirical comparison of the patterns found in indigenous regions of four of Mexico’s most rural states. The assessments synthesize the results of field research, press reports, and interviews with rural development policymakers, community leaders, and NGO activists. The main finding is that in all four states, submunicipal regimes are in the midst of long-term, unresolved transitions, involving both widespread protest and persistent repression. Rural municipal governance in these four states still falls short of democratized decentralization. To document more precise trends would require much more comprehensive and in-depth empirical research, based on the kinds of representative samples used in the earlier statewide Oaxacan study.

Oaxaca Oaxaca stands out as the Mexican state whose laws have gone the furthest toward recognizing indigenous rights to self-governance. Municipalities are allowed to decide whether to govern themselves through partisan balloting or through diverse forms of normative law, widely known as usos y costumbres systems. For more than a decade, 418 of 27 See Fox and Aranda (1996a: 47) for further discussion. These findings suggest that participatory community decision-making over how to spend miniscule amounts of money turned out not to be enough to produce significant increases in access to public goods. In other words, social capital is not enough. 28 This section draws on ideas first discussed in Fox (1999, 2002a).

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Oaxaca’s 570 municipalities are governed by non-Western community decision-making and do not require the intermediation of political parties. 29 Local autonomy in Oaxaca holds both for municipalities and for most submunicipal jurisdictions. The social foundations of rural governance in Oaxaca, as in much of rural Mexico, are also influenced by the diverse web of relations between local government and agrarian community governance, which manages land rights. In some cases, municipal territory coincides with ejido or agrarian community lands. In Oaxaca, some municipalities include several agrarian communities, or several agencies which overlap with their own agrarian communities. In a few cases, agrarian communities include more than one municipality. 30 Intercommunity conflicts over agrarian boundaries raise crosscutting issues for rural municipal and submunicipal governance. 31 In some regions, indigenous municipalities have come together to form regional coalitions, to increase their bargaining power with the state and federal government, as in the cases of the United Front of Municipal Presidents of the Sierra Mazateca, and the coalition of local agents within the large municipality of Miahuatlán. Yet few such coalitions have sustained autonomy over multiple mayoral terms. The most consolidated and long-lasting regional experience is in the Zoogocho Sector of the northern highlands, whose municipal and agrarian authorities have sustained a regional coalition for more than a decade. In this body, submunicipal authorities are fully represented, and at different times have led the regional coalition. 32 When Murat was governor (1998–2004), a rare pro-indigenous rights official in the state government tried to encourage the formation of these regional governance coalitions. As he put it: the point of departure was that the unions of municipalities, or municipalities and [agrarian] communities had potential and support. They had a series of definitions that could be interpreted by the state apparatus as a process of micro-regional or regional planning for indigenous peoples. . . . At first we proposed to work, in the first year, with 242 of them, from nine peoples, integrated into 23 associations, to be able to create a state regional development program for unions of municipalities and indigenous communities. . . . This proposal 29 See references in note 20. For a comparison with other states, see Assies, Ramírez Sevilla, and Ventura Patiño (2006). 30 Personal email communication, April 10, 2006 with Oaxacan municipal development specialist Fernando Melo. 31 Intervillage land conflicts in Oaxaca have a long history of provoking bloody conflicts. Historians and agrarian experts stress the responsibility of federal authorities in either ignoring or exacerbating these conflicts (e.g. Dennis 1987). 32 López and Robles Camacho (n.d.) and Personal email communication, Fernando Melo, May 15, 2006.

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went back and forth with the representative of the State Planning Council. His response was that by ‘orders’ of the governor, investments should be made municipality by municipality, because there were not enough resources to meet the demand, and if [allocation] were done based on proposals, that could create an alternative political force that afterwards could not be controlled. (Moreno Derbez 2006: 5)

The state government’s ‘divide-and-conquer’ approach to local government was also underscored by Governor Murat’s removal from power of 25 percent of the state’s mayors during his term (del Collado 2003). The exclusion of rural citizens is not imposed exclusively from above, however. Several forms of locally based exclusion persist as well. First, local bosses continue to use violence with impunity in a significant number of Oaxacan municipalities, under both the usos y costumbres and political party regimes. For a notable example, an outgoing mayor in the Pinotepa region felt sufficiently secure to gun down a leading opposition candidate to succeed him, apparently because of her threat to audit his administration. He shot her in the back in the local medical clinic, declaring ‘I’m tired of you and I’m going to kill you’ (Ruíz and Habana 2004). State authorities did not rush to apprehend the gunman. Local PRI bosses often count on state government authorities to side with them against communities that attempt to exercise their autonomy—as in the case of the arrest of village leaders in the Mixe region (Recondo forthcoming; Regino 2006; Ruíz Arrazola 2006b). Second, women continue to be treated as less than full citizens by many—though not all—indigenous village governance systems. Historically, indigenous women were excluded from voice and vote in Oaxacan village governments, but recent studies show a significant shift towards broader female civic participation. According to the most comprehensive survey, in 10 percent of the Oaxacan municipalities governed by the nonpartisan system, women are completely excluded, both from the right to vote and speak in assemblies and the right to be elected. In 9 percent of the cases they cannot vote but can hold community leadership positions. In 21 percent, they can vote but their level of participation is low. In 60 percent, they can vote, participate in public life, and hold leadership positions (Velásquez 2004). In some villages women can exercise an indirect right to vote, but only in representation of migrant husbands. In others, married women lose the right to vote (Cuellar 2002). For those women who do exercise leadership, reprisals are not uncommon (Dalton 2005). 33 In one case of a gendered transition 33 For context, however, it is worth noting that while the percentage of mayors of Oaxaca’s indigenous municipalities who are female is very low, it is low throughout Mexico. A recent UN study found that only 3.5% of Mexico’s municipalities are governed by women, one of the lowest rates in Latin America (Anzar 2005).

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to submunicipal democracy in the Mixteca region, women found allies among male migrants who returned to comply with their local civic leadership duties. The returning men had formal clout but lacked information about local politics, while the women had the information but lacked voting rights, so they found common ground to unseat local bosses (Maldonado and Artía 2004). Overall, while citizenship rights remain clearly gendered in municipal and submunicipal governance in Oaxaca, the regime is nevertheless in transition, and quite different from the pattern of complete exclusion one would have found just two decades ago. A third persistent pattern of exclusion in Oaxaca’s rural local governance system is much more subtle. While many Oaxacan villages are indeed self-governing vis-à-vis the cabeceras, their voice in selecting town center authorities varies. In principle, all residents of a municipality vote for the municipal authorities, but this is not necessarily the case in Oaxaca, especially if the town center is also governed by community assembly rather than balloting. In other words, in Oaxaca’s nonpartisan governance system, villages often retain their local selfgovernance at the cost of being excluded from the right to participate in the selection of the municipal authorities—who are the gatekeepers for federal investment funds. In this sense, there appears to be a significant trade-off between autonomy and scale, with village selfgovernance accepted as long as they remain de facto disenfranchised from decision-making at the municipal center. When agencias working within the usos y costumbres system do manage to participate in municipal politics, the losers do not always quietly withdraw. For example, in the case of San Martín Intuyoso, where the winner repeatedly won the majority of the vote with support in the municipality’s three agencias, at least four people were shot to death at the new mayor’s first town council meeting. Shortly before the shots were fired, the mayor-elect, Antonio López Martínez said ‘if something happens to me or to other compañeros’, [the Governor’s regional subdelegate] will be responsible. In his view, the state government backed the local bosses ‘who have always controlled the town hall’ (Ruíz and Rojas 2005). 34 34 Such conflicts over local autonomy between agencias and municipal centers cut across ideological lines, as in a recent case of villagers from Ejido Zapata who attempted to force their way into the city hall of Juchitán, long under the control of the Coalition of Workers, Students and Peasants of the Isthmus (COCEI). They were protesting the COCEI mayor’s ‘unwillingness to call a new assembly to elect a new municipal agent, after the majority of villagers voted to impeach [the current agent], who is accused of mishandling community funds’. In spite of the COCEI’s earlier history as a paradigm case of local, independent, indigenous-led democratization, town police beat twenty of the protesters (Ruíz Arrazola 2006a).

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The Oaxacan experience suggests the importance of distinguishing between submunicipal autonomy, on the one hand, and the accountability of municipal and state governments to villagers on the other— especially when it comes to resource allocation. One revealing indicator (and determinant) of the balance of power involves the municipal fund program’s degree of public transparency. In the state of Oaxaca, for example, a decade after the field research reported above was carried out, federal guidelines required the state government to make public the amounts of the annual grants allocated to each municipality. This would allow mayors to know how much funding their towns and villages were due, and would permit them to compare their funding levels with other municipalities with similar characteristics. The data was also highly relevant for agencia leaders, to permit them to assess funding distribution patterns. The state government formally complied with this transparency requirement, insofar as the state government’s Finance Ministry published the data in the official state bulletin. Under normal circumstances, this bulletin would not circulate far outside state government offices, but officials did not want to take any chances that this data would reach municipal leaders. In 2003, the state Finance Ministry purchased almost the entire press run of that issue of the government bulletin. Nevertheless, at least one copy reached a Oaxacan public interest group, which published all the funding data as a special supplement of a local independent newspaper, for distribution to municipal leaders statewide (Trasparencia 2003). Local NGOs have continued to disseminate information about municipal funds to community leaders, in an effort to provide them with the tools needed to hold both municipal authorities and state government officials accountable (EDUCA/Trasparencia 2005).

Guerrero Guerrero’s system of submunicipal governance is a hybrid that includes two levels. Formally, district ‘comisarios’ (commissioners) are elected, and mandated to form a municipal advisory council of commissioners. In municipalities with over 20,000 inhabitants, the mayor has the discretionary power to create districts to be administered by appointed ‘delegates’, who can simultaneously be elected town councilors (regidores). 35 While this provision appears to be designed primarily for urban management, at least a half dozen of Guerrero’s municipalities with populations greater than 20,000 are either primarily or 35 See ‘Ley Orgánica del Municipio Libre del Estado de Guerrero’, Arts. 198, 203B. accessible at www.pads.com.mx.

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substantially rural. 36 This creates substantial ambiguity in terms of what system of submunicipal governance will dominate, elected versus appointed. Guerrero’s municipal governance regime is in a protracted transition. 37 Some municipalities have experienced notable processes of democratization, but elsewhere local communities are excluded from municipal decision-making (especially where municipal authorities are controlled by regional political bosses who do not represent indigenous residents). The struggle for municipal democratization has been long and costly. In indigenous regions these campaigns often take the form of efforts to gain autonomy from violent and authoritarian elites in the town centers—sometimes through attempt to become new municipalities, as in the case of the last decade of repression in Xochistlahuaca. 38 The majority of the population is Amuzgo and lives in the outlying villages. In this case, persistent political exclusion by mestizo political bosses in the town center led villagers to declare their own de facto autonomous municipality, ‘Suljaa’. This one campaign for municipal democracy has been met with at least twenty killings and more than fifty arrest warrants against local activists. As David Valtierra, one of Suljaa’s leaders put it, Here folks put up with poverty for too long, but what they just couldn’t take any more was that the municipal authorities did not respect the communities’ [right] to elect their delegates. This problem isn’t from yesterday or the day before. It began with the aggression against our people and our usos y costumbres, when they tried to impose leaders on our communities. . . . In spite of all of our denunciations of the beatings and deaths, those responsible are not only free, they are working in the government. (cited in Rojas 2004)

Submunicipal leaders often come together to protest corruption that is widely believed to be the responsibility of the municipal president. In the case of Chilapa, comisarios together with the indigenous Council of Elders wrote to the national daily La Jornada to accuse the mayor of breaking prior agreements to carry out specific local public works. Their letter concludes ‘we call on all the communities [pueblos] of the 36

See demographic data in Tlachinollan (2004). On Guerrero rural civil society, see Bartra (1996, 2000), Bustamante Alvarez and Sarmiento Silva (2001), Dehouve (2001), Espinosa Damian (1998), Hébert (2003), Johnston (2005), and Yaworksy (2005). For the results of a detailed study of local governance in Guerrero, see the series of articles in the journal Autogestión, published in the state capital by the Programa de Autogestión para el Desarrollo Social, a grassroots training NGO [Self-Management Program for Social Development] Their publications also include a handbook for municipal commissioners (PADS, n.d.). 38 The municipality includes 87 villages and the population numbers over 20,000, of which 68% is non-Spanish speaking and 65% is illiterate (Tlachinollan 2004: 21). 37

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municipality of Chilapa to form a common front, to demand what by rights is due us, that they provide basic services to our communities so that we can benefit from rural programs’ (Consejo de Principales 2003). When most of the comisarios in a large rural municipality do come together, and when their petitions are ignored, they are capable of engaging in militant direct action. In the municipality of San Luis Acatlán, for example, thirty comisarios municipales came together to protest the PRD mayor’s alleged corruption. After not getting a response, they occupied the town hall and detained state officials responsible for public works to pressure state authorities to audit the town hall and expel the mayor (Habana 2003; They won an audit, which found serious irregularities, leading twenty-two comisarios to another round of protests—blocking the federal coast road—to pressure the state government to follow up by pursuing legal charges against the mayor responsible (Habana, Ruíz, and Saavedra 2004). In effect, these submunicipal leaders broke the law in the name of promoting the rule of law. Submunicipal leaders have also come together to defend municipal presidents who have been attacked by political opponents. The mayor of Alcozauca, a very low-income rural municipality where elected leftwing governments date from 1979, was charged with corruption by a PRI-dominated state congress and removed from office. Indeed, it is not uncommon in Mexico for corruption charges to be used as a political weapon—especially since state legislatures have the power to approve or challenge any mayor’s accounts. In this case, the village leaders came together to declare in the national press ‘The works built with municipal funds are there. Anyone who would like to can see them. There is no stolen money’ (Guzman del Carmen et al. 2002). Opposition mayors also accused the PRI governor of extreme partisan bias in the distribution of funds to municipalities (Saavedra and Habana de los Santos 2004). New research is needed to determine whether the postPRI governor changes the state–municipal relationship. Guerrero’s most notable experience involving submunicipal leaders coming together to promote good governance involves the Montaña region’s Community Police. Diverse social organizations participated in launching and sustaining the Community Police, including indigenous rights advocates, coffee coops, and the catholic diocese, but it is governed by submunicipal comisarios. They are represented through a regional assembly, the Coordinadora Regional de Autoridades Comunitarias, and an executive committee of 6 regional leaders. 39 The 39 For details, see Habana (2003a), Johnson (2005), Rojas (2005), Rowland (2003), and Tlachinollan (2004), among others. For detailed ethnographies of municipal gov-

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volunteer security force includes 612 participants, reaching across six municipalities (Rojas 2005). Founded in 1995, the nonpartisan Community Police survived for a decade in spite of hostility from the state government, and succeeded in substantially reducing crime. 40 Some municipal leaders failed to cooperate, as in the case of Marquelia, where members of 5 villages occupied the town hall to protest the mayor’s lack of respect for the Community Police (Habana 2004). 41 In terms of relations with the state government, the new PRD governor waited a full year before recognizing the existence and legitimacy of the community police (Ocampo and Habana 2006). Community police in other regions of the state also hold state authorities accountable, as in their recent disarming and arrest of three state police agents on robbery charges (Guerrero 2006). In the context of Mexico’s ongoing debate over indigenous autonomy, Guerrero’s community police stand out as a rare case of a consolidated alternative regional governance process. Not only does it set a precedent in terms of accountable, effective public security where both municipal and state authorities had failed, it shows how submunicipal leaders can come together to become a regional civic force for accountable governance. Community-based economic organizations have come together to form regional coalitions in Guerrero for decades, but the ruling party’s strategy was to oblige them to sacrifice their political autonomy in exchange for access to economic benefits. 42 These organizations generally dealt directly with federal programs, sidestepping rather than confronting less-than-accountable municipal and state authorities (as illustrated in Chapter 3). In this context, one of the most distinctive features of the community police movement in Guerrero is their transformation of territorially based forms of governance, and especially the sustained convergence of submunicipal leaders to form a cohesive regional body that serves as a direct counterweight to both municipal and state government officials. ernance in part of the Montaña region, see DeHouve (2001) and Dehouve, Pellotier, and Hémond (2006). For background on the relations between municipal centers and villages in the large, multiethnic municipality of Tlapa, see Nicasio González (2005). 40 The state government appeared tolerant at first, but quickly became unsupportive. For example, in one case the state police jailed community police for jailing someone who had made death threats against a relative, and only freed them in response to a mass protest (Habana 2002). 41 In San Luis Acatlán, the decision of the municipal authorities to put some community police leaders on the payroll provoked others to occupy the town hall in protest, to defend the principle of unpaid community service (Habana 2003b). 42 Bartra frames this tension in terms of the imposed choice between their identities as interest groups (gremios) vs. citizens (1996, 2000).

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At the municipal level, most of the state’s municipalities now experience party competition, and the PRD won the majority of town halls for the first time in 2005. This outcome would have been difficult to imagine in the early 1990s, when dozens of PRD activists died in municipal electoral conflicts. Yet whether the change in the party in power will affect submunicipal governance remains to be seen. Grassroots indigenous rights activists often claim, as in the case of a leader of Guerrero’s Organización Independiente del Pueblo Mixteco y del Pueblo Indígena Ma’phaa, that ‘political parties have only used and divided us. When they get to power, they are all the same’. 43 One key test of the PRD’s campaign promises will be the party’s position regarding the recognition of new indigenous municipalities, in response to frustrated efforts to democratize submunicipal governments. One of the most notable cases is the so-far-unsuccessful effort to launch the new municipality of Rancho Nuevo de la Democracia. Beginning in 1995, approximately thirty communities that ‘belong’ to three different PRI-controlled municipalities campaigned to launch their own multiethnic municipality (most of the villages are Mixteco, with three Nahua and two Amuzgo). Since 1996, twenty Mixteco communities have called for their right to form the Chilixtlahuaca municipality. Rodríguez goes on to cite at least six other campaigns for new municipalities in southeastern Guerrero, which along with ongoing efforts for submunicipal democratization appears to constitute a trend (2002, 2005). Indigenous civic movements to decentralize decentralization combine ‘scaled-up’ participatory democracy with new challenges in terms of intervillage conflict resolution. The villages that come together to call for new indigenous municipalities tend to make decisions through participatory assemblies, as Hébert’s study of the Consejo de Pueblos Indígenas (CPI) documents, ‘the view of one person must not be ignored, and where the comisario acts as a mediator between opposing views’. The regional leadership took on the task of balancing the interests of the different villages, but the necessity of choosing a cabecera [the new municipal seat] clashed directly with the hitherto egalitarian nature of the regional movement, and some delegates reacted strongly to the fact that their political efforts would profit a community that was not theirs. In other words, the replication of communal decision-making within the CPI was only possible as long as the 43 Cited in Bellinghausen (2006b). He also quotes local leaders who note that ‘the ma’phaa do not like to be called “tlapanecos”, because it means “dirty face”. They also deplore that the soldiers have raped their daughters, sisters and wives “as revenge because we are building poder popular” ’.

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interests of the emerging ‘regional community’ (i.e. the movement) did not clash with those of the ‘real communities’. (Hébert 2003: 76)

Democracy activists buffered intervillage rivalries by persuading delegates to choose their new proposed municipal center by consensus rather than majority vote, taking into account objective criteria such as access to communications infrastructure, and by working with regional church leaders to promote ‘a symbolic redefinition of the “community within which consensus has to be achieved” ’ (Hébert 2003: 82). In spite of the many external and internal challenges, a submunicipal regime change appears to be under way throughout rural Guerrero. Communities are increasingly demanding the right to local self-governance. According to local municipal democracy activist Carlos García Jimenez, of the Program for Self-Managed Development (PADS): Legally, the commissioners are elected and the delegates are appointed (either by the commissioner of the main locality or the municipal president). Nevertheless, in practice, the dominant tendency is for the delegates to be elected, in assemblies, by their villages (in rural areas) and by their neighborhoods (in the cities and municipal centers). Paradoxically, only in large neighborhoods, where it’s not possible to have representative assemblies, does the municipal authority name the delegates. In rural areas, the delegates have the same status as the commissioners. [Their] elections are increasingly competitive . . . to the point that sometimes two commissioners operate in the same locality, one recognized by the municipality, the other not. Because of the geographic and political distance between the municipal and the community authorities, de facto, they exercise a certain degree of selfgovernance. . . . In practice, they have the freedom, with community consensus, to exercise governance to face the challenges of community development: social welfare, public services, public security, fund-raising, and environmental protection. Nevertheless . . . they lack the culture and capacity that municipalistas propose for the 4th level of government. Small-town, paternalistic attitudes often lead community authorities to depend on what the municipal government proposes, they go to the town hall to ‘solicit’ help. In Guerrero, the recognition of the community representation role of the commissioners and delegates has been growing, bit by bit. . . . There is an incipient opening for their participation in Municipal Development Councils, town council meetings, Advisory Councils of Commissioners. The spaces for their representation are recognized both in the law in and in the discourse, though del dicho al hecho todavía hay mucho trecho (there is a large gap between words and deeds). 44 44

Personal email communication, April 6, 2006.

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Hidalgo Municipal democracy in Hidalgo is still incipient, and civic participation is reportedly inhibited by fresh memories of the intense agrarian conflicts of the 1970s. 45 In practice, many indigenous communities in the Huasteca region retained the tradition of designating their own village leaders (known as ‘judges’). In contrast to most other states, Hidalgo’s law that regulates municipal–community power relations has been the subject of public debate. In the 1970s, submunicipal communities were self-governing, but they lost this right as the result of 1983–4 negotiations between the governor and ranchers whose lands had been invaded by thousands of landless peasants. Though the ranchers ended up losing large amounts of land, they were able to hold on to local power in other arenas thanks to their control of the town centers. In 1998, various social and civic organizations raised the issue of submunicipal governance again, and their campaign succeeded in passing a new law in 2001 that recovered village self-governance. Delegates and subdelegates are elected by residents of the locality on an annual basis, their mandate includes advocating for community needs at the municipal level, and they can be removed by residents ‘for cause’. 46 In general, however, the policy environment in Hidalgo discourages municipal accountability. 47 As of 2006, rural governance in much of Hidalgo had yet to experience the impacts of Mexico’s movements for democratization and indigenous rights. In the case of Acaxochitlan, the twenty-two Nahua communities account for 70 percent of the population, while mestizo caciques in the town center continue to monopolize both local government and the local branches of federal agencies. Bellinghausen quotes a leader of the local civic organization ‘Aitepe Mechual Tlapaleguiani’ (‘Help Indigenous Peoples’, in Nahuatl): ‘They have used us so that they have the best and we’re left like their piglets’ (2006a). The municipal police allow private loggers to cut timber while prohibiting indigenous people from collecting firewood on their own communal lands. The municipal police did not protect the indigenous communities from cattle rustlers, leaving them without livestock. The town center pollutes the local river, preventing downstream indigenous villages 45

For a comprehensive account, see Schyer (1990). See the ‘Ley Organica Municipal del Estado de Hidalgo’, Articles 75 and 76, at http://www.e-local.gob.mx/wb2/ELOCAL/ELOC_Ley_Organica_Municipal_del_Estado_ de_Hidalgo. 47 This account is from Juan Cisneros, a rural development practitioner with two decades of public sector and NGO experience in Hidalgo (interviews, Mexico City, April and August 2001). 46

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from taking advantage of the local waterfalls as a tourist attraction. Local elections mean little. As one local leader put it, ‘We had elections, with hundreds of “extra” voters. We were going to protest, so that the “elected” PRI leader would not be able to take office. But that day our leader was shot to death in his house’. After a local civic leader was killed, ‘there appears to be no true criminal investigation to shed light on the secret that everyone knows: the mestizo and priísta caciques of the town center killed him’ (Bellinghausen 2006a). Lack of municipal accountability sometimes provoked mass protest by villagers. In Huazalingo, Hidalgo protesters took over the town hall to demand that the PRI mayor deliver on promised public works, and to call on the state congress to investigate him for corruption. The mayor had even received financial contributions from villagers for projects that were not carried out, and they demanded their money back. The state official in charge of security dismissed the protesters as a small group, but an independent journalist reported that 1,500 indigenous people from 26 villages had come together, stacking bricks in the entryways of the town hall until the state government complied with its promise to negotiate (Camacho 2005). This case is evidence of what appears to be the growing tendency of villagers to hold mayors accountable for resource allocation. Abuse of municipal funds is common in Hidalgo. For example, the state government’s review of the 2002 accounts found irregularities in the accounts of forty-eight of the Hidalgo’s eight-four municipalities, leading the state congress to file charges in ten cases (Camacho and Chavez 2003; Camacho 2003). However, because state government accounting oversight is in the hands of an agency that is not autonomous from ruling party officials, it is difficult to determine to what degree their role is politicized. The problem is not only that the party that controls the state government may look the other way when a case involves a mayor of same party. As is the case throughout Mexico, the state government’s capacity to charge outgoing mayors with fraud provides them with a powerful tool for top-down political control. This underscores the more general trend in which pressure both from above (from the states) and from below (from citizens and outlying communities) has turned municipal accounting for development funds into a major point of contention.

Chiapas Chiapas is also in the midst of a protracted local regime transition, involving unresolved conflict over both municipal and submunicipal

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autonomy. Both were priority issues at the 1996 San Andrés indigenous rights negotiations between the government and the Zapatistas. A diverse group of independent Mexican indigenous rights leaders and advisors informed the Zapatista position, which ended up emphasizing the transformation of municipal governance over the main alternative view, which promoted the creation of a new intermediate level of governance, the Autonomous Multi-Ethnic Regions. 48 In the section specific to Chiapas, the final text of the San Andrés Accords explicitly proposed to transform Mexico’s submunicipal regime, while also creating the possibility of autonomous regional associations between both submunicipal and municipality authorities: In municipalities with majority indigenous population, the right of indigenous pueblos and communities to elect their traditional and municipal authorities will be recognized, according to their normative laws (usos y costumbres), and their practices and institutions will be legally validated, including their systems of cargos, assembly, popular consultation and open councils. Municipal agents will be elected and removed by their respective pueblos and communities, and not designated by the municipal president. [emphasis added] Mechanisms should be encouraged to permit the participation of indigenous pueblos and communities in electoral processes, without requiring the participation of political parties. Municipalities with majority indigenous population will be able to impeach municipal authorities when they are responsible for practices that violate the law or their traditions, and the state congress should respect and approve their decision. The communities and the municipalities with majority indigenous population, in their character as subjects with rights already expressed by law, will be able to come together and associate among themselves to carry out regional actions to optimize their efforts and resources, thereby increasing their capacity to manage, develop and coordinate their actions as indigenous pueblos. The appropriate authorities will carry out the orderly and gradual transfer of resources, to that they themselves can administer the public funds assigned to them, and to strengthen indigenous participation in the administration of different arenas and levels of government. 49

These proposed measures addressed many of the key obstacles to accountable local self-governance cited earlier in this chapter, and would have been relevant to the governance of indigenous communities 48 The former position was associated with indigenous rights experiences in Oaxaca, while the latter position was associated with a non-Zapatista political formation, the ANIPA, which promoted the formation of Autonomous Multi-Ethnic Regions in their areas of influence in Chiapas, such as the Tojola’bal region. For background, see Ruiz Hernández and Burguete (2003) and Mattiace (2003). 49 See Hernández and Vera (1998: 80–6) also cited in López Monjardin and Rebolledo Millán (1999). For overviews of post-San Andrés Accords political conflicts over indigenous rights reforms, see Assies et al. (2006), Hernández Castillo et al. (2004) and Oehmichen Bazán (2003).

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throughout the country. 50 Nevertheless, President Zedillo quickly backed away from the San Andrés Accords. A government counterinsurgency crackdown followed, including the 1997 Acteal massacre and the dismantling of many of the autonomous Zapatista municipalities. 51 In practice, the diverse local governance regimes in Chiapas divide along several cleavages. The first is between the official and the Zapatista municipal governance systems. Beginning in December, 1994, almost one year after the rebellion, the Zapatistas launched thirty-eight of their own autonomous municipalities. They claimed their right to do so under Art. 39 of the Mexican Constitution, which states: ‘the people have at all times the right to choose their own form of government’. 52 The construction of Zapatista municipalities is part of an indigenous strategy to build autonomous municipalities in the regions, without waiting for federal reform legislation. As one Zapatista municipal leader put it: The indigenous municipalities are a fact, they exist and have been working for some time—what we are calling for is that the law recognize our own democratic and participatory way of organizing ourselves, of working, of electing our authorities. That’s the autonomy that we want, and why we are struggling, it’s not that we are against the nation’s sovereignty. . . . That’s the pretext that indigenous people’s enemies use to deny us the right to autonomy that we as peoples are demanding. (Elías 2006)

The Zapatista movement then reorganized their autonomous governance institutions into the ‘Snails’ (Caracoles) (González Casanova 2003; Martínez 2003). In 2003 they were in turn transformed into the more institutionalized regional ‘Good Governance Councils’ (Juntas de Buen Gobierno), elected by organized Zapatista communities. Their leaders are members of the autonomous municipalities, they overlap 50 Indigenous resistance to imposed submunicipal authorities is not limited to southern Mexico. In Vícam, the political capital of the Yaqui people and near the US border, community activists recently rejected an imposed municipal comisario by expelling the police and local officials, bringing in their own traditional guards, banning the entry of state police, changing the sign on the building to read ‘The Office of the Yaqui Tribe’ and flying the Yaqui flag over it (Muñoz Ramírez 2007). 51 For detailed descriptions of government hostilities, from the point of view of Zapatista municipal leaders, see the communiqués at www.laneta.apc.org/enlacecivil. 52 As one autonomous municipal leader put it: ‘indigenous pueblos and civil society named authorities to be able to deal with the most urgent problems in the zone. . . . The main goal is to show the government that with or without resources (from the state) we can promote sustainable development (and to) demonstrate to the government how to administer justice, taking into account the voice of the people, and that it be the communities themselves that can make decisions on development and the mandate of their authorities’ (cited in Rodríguez Castillo n. d.).

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in territorial terms with conventional local government, and operate as parallel authorities. According to one description of their accountability structures: If the municipal authority or the Good Governance Council don’t do their job, if they get corrupted or commit injustices, there is a people’s oversight commission in charge of monitoring how the authorities function. The ones who do this oversight work are compañeros and compañeras from each Zapatista municipality and region. (Caracol II 2006)

So far, it appears that Zapatista local government institutions primarily rule those who accept them as legitimate authorities, rather than attempting to impose their rule on others. Notably, in the 2003 municipal elections, according to an independent human rights organization, ‘The Zapatista Juntas de Buen Gobierno fulfilled [their] promise to respect the work of the electoral bodies’. The council announced this in August, requesting that ‘in the same way that we respect those who want to vote, you must respect those who do not’. This decision confirmed the nonconfrontation option of the Zapatista movement’ (SIPAZ 2004). In some regions the autonomous municipalities have developed working relationships with the official local governments. For example, according to one leadership report: ‘If the priístas try to get the Federal Electrical Commission to cut the flow to the Zapatista support bases, the official and autonomous [municipal] leaders get together to dialogue, to avoid provoking a confrontation between the two sides, to solve the problem of the Northern Zone’ (Josefina and Miguel 2006). The future of Zapatista civilian territorial governance structures became uncertain in May 2006, when Subcomandante Marcos declared their operations suspended indefinitely, as part of an EZLN ‘Red Alert’ in response to the government repression of a community protest on the periphery of Mexico City (involving the Atenco resistance movement mentioned above). In contrast to Marcos’s apparent expectation, the government did not crack down on the Zapatista communities, but their local governments remained suspended for at least five months. At least one longtime observer interpreted this impasse as reflecting a shift in the internal balance of power between civilian and military Zapatista leaders (Ross 2006). By the fall of 2006, however, the Good Governance Councils reconvened, and leaders reiterated their seven principles of governance: ‘[T]o obey and not order, to represent and not supplant, to go down and not go up, to convince and not take over, to build, not to destroy, [and] to propose, not to impose’ (Roel 2006). The second main cleavage in Chiapas municipal politics involves the participation of official municipal authorities in counterinsurgency activities. This was especially notable in the period after the Zapatista

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rebellion and before the 2000 elections, when the PRI lost the governorship as well as the presidency. During this period, the official municipal governments became battlegrounds in official counterinsurgency efforts. Increased federal funding of services was widely seen as part of efforts to reward supporters and isolate proautonomy forces. In 1998 and 1999, the state government pursued its own ‘remunicipalization’ strategy, intended to strengthen local allies (Leyva and Burguete 2007). The fact that the Acteal massacre was carried out by municipal leaders, with support from state and federal authorities, was an extreme, but far-from-unique example of the multiple links in the chain of authoritarian rule in Chiapas. The third main cleavage is between the formal-legal municipal regime and the diverse web of actually existing submunicipal governance institutions. State law gives municipal authorities the power to designate their agents. In practice, however, at least in the Altos region, communities themselves consistently name their own leaders. 53 In contrast to other regions of Chiapas, municipalities in the Altos had already come under largely indigenous control by the 1960s (e.g. Burguete and Torres Burguete 2007). Indigenous people first reclaimed the agencies, then the municipal centers. This pattern was repeated in the Northern region in the 1990s (Bobrow-Strain 2007). Yet the ‘indianization’ of local political power did not stop local challenges to abuse of municipal authority. The mass expulsions of residents of outlying villagers in San Juan Chamula is the most well-known case, a process widely attributed to religious intolerance but driven more by authoritarian local elites (Morquecho 1992). Their hold has since weakened, as indicated by a protest in which thousands of citizens held the mayor hostage and burned the home of one of the town councilors to protest municipal corruption (Henríquez 2004). In contrast, in larger, more racially polarized municipalities, the ‘indianization’ of local political authority did not happen until after the Zapatista rebellion. 54 Leyva explains in detail the complex, multiple 53

Personal communication, Araceli Burguete, April 10, 2006. For a detailed study of this process in north-central municipalities of Chilón and Sitalá, in the context of broader racial and class conflict, see Bobrow-Strain (2007). He shows how post-1994 non-Zapatista land invasions drove nonindigenous elites from both economic and political power. He sums up the previous regime with a local notable’s snapshot of a nonindigenous merchant who had been a mayor: ‘Sitalá has a tradition of getting rid of its [Municipal] Presidents, if you know what I mean. Shooting them, throwing them off bridges, that kind of thing. But Israel . . . he stayed in power through his whole term because every day at noon he would charge out onto the porch of the town hall, shoot off a few rounds of his pistol into the air, and scream, “Who’s the biggest f xxxx in Sitalá?!” [¡‘Quién es el más chingón de Sitalá?!]’. Later, one of the subsequent indigenous PRD mayors was driven out by a mob because of corruption (Aaron BobrowStrain, personal communication, May 12, 2006). 54

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layers and arenas of local community self-governance in the huge Ocosingo municipality, including efforts to create space of pluralism in spite of a high degree of political polarization (2001a, 2001b, 2003). In the municipality of Las Margaritas, what Mattiace calls a ‘regional renegotiation of space’ was driven by indigenous regional selfgovernance initiatives that dated back to the 1980s (2001, 2003). More recently, after the PRI lost the governorship in 2000, a new PRD mayor in Las Margaritas reportedly led the transformation of the clientelistic regional development strategy Plan Cañadas into a more inclusionary and participatory institutional experiment. The large municipality was divided into pluralistic ‘micro-regional’ councils, which came together with social organizations and formed a regionwide Coordinating Collective (Rodríguez Castillo 2004). Formally, women have the right to vote in local elections. But in practice husbands often have two votes, known as the ‘family vote’. Enclaves of extreme restrictions on women’s rights persist, and not only in indigenous communities. In a mestizo community in the municipality in Frontera Comalapa, women were banned from marrying men from outside the village, under threat of explusion (Mariscal 2006). Zapatista women have advanced the most, in terms of gaining political rights and participating in municipal leadership. For example, the first Good Government Council in La Realidad had only one woman member out of fourteen, and three years later women had equal representation (Bellinghausen 2006d). Nevertheless, some Zapatista women express concern that their own ‘revolutionary women’s law’ has been implemented slowly. 55 In the context of Mexican rural municipal governments in political transition, Chiapas is clearly an extreme case, insofar as large regions are governed by parallel local governments, while simultaneously experiencing the state’s military occupation and low-intensity conflict strategies. Several military posts were dismantled in 2001, but the overall number of troops stationed in Chiapas reportedly did not go down. Though the frequency of human rights violations appears to have fallen since the PRI lost the presidency and the governorship, paramilitary forces remain armed, and two of the main paramilitary leaders claimed responsible for the 1997 Acteal massacre were freed, along with other suspects. 56 Hernández Castillo notes that in some highland municipalities, such as San Pedro Chenalhó, ‘there is one soldier for every ten residents today’ (2006). Yet at the same time, in an increasing number of municipalities, more competitive electoral 55 56

See Chiapas Media Project (2004). For analysis of grassroots human rights initiatives, see López (2005), among others.

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politics and the weakening of the former ruling party’s capacity to back mayors may be redistributing power downward. Power relations between municipal centers and villages remain conflictive, but only more systematic comparative research can determine whether such conflicts are resolved more through negotiation, through the rule of law, or by force. As one of the closest observers of Chiapas municipal politics observes, ‘because here the law doesn’t function, everything is de facto’. 57 In summary, municipal politics remains in flux throughout the state, and the state continues to be characterized by a diverse patchwork of submunicipal governance regimes.

Local Governance Laws in National Perspective Mexico’s states determine submunicipal governance structures, and they are remarkably evenly divided between elected and appointed regimes. Based on a review of state municipal laws as of 2006, thirteen states have elected systems, in thirteen states submunicipal officials were named by the municipal authorities, and four states had mixed systems, in which different layers of submunicipal leaders are chosen from above and below. Tables 7.1 and 7.2 review the state level data. Notably, during the 1996–2006 decade, only four states passed laws that involved qualitative changes in ‘sub-municipal regime’. 58 Hidalgo carried out a substantial shift toward self-governance, as noted above, while the states of Zacatecas and Michoacan consolidated trends in that direction. Campeche, on the other hand, changed to an appointed system. In terms of national trends, the fact that municipalities are still governed internally ‘from above’ in almost half of Mexico’s states suggests a very limited institutional response, especially considering the degree to which the terms of submunicipal governance appear to have been widely contested from below. At the same time, de facto systems of submunicipal governance have changed more than the limited formal-legal changes would suggest, as evidenced by the Chiapas experience described above and the Michoacan experience discussed below. Beyond this legal review of the state level municipal governance regimes, several multidimensional experiences further confirm that an uneven submunicipal regime transition is under way in many states, driven by factors that are independent of Mexico’s national regime change. The first state to create a ‘fourth level of government’ was 57

Personal communication, Araceli Burguete, April 10, 2006. For an overview of recent state level municipal governance reforms more generally, see Guillén and Ziccardi (2004). 58

Decentralizing Decentralization Table 7.1

207

Submunicipal governance structures in Mexico

State

Municipal Laws (reforms)

Submunicipal authorities

Selection process

OFFICIAL SELECTION PROCESSES FOR SUBMUNICIPAL AUTHORITIES Aguascalientes

Baja California

1977 (1983) (2000) 1989

2001

Baja California Sur

1986 2004

Campeche

1981 (1983) (1994) 2005

Coahuila

1990 (1999) (2005) 1995

Colima

2001

Chiapas

1988 2000

Chihuahua

1982 (1992) 2003

Durango

1975 (1987) 2000

Delegates Subdelegates Commissioners Councillors Delegates Subdelegates Sector leaders Delegates Subdelegates Auxiliary agents Delegates Delegates Subdelegates Provisional delegates Juntas Commissioners Agents Agents Delegates Inspectors Block leaders none

Juntas Commissioners Delegates Juntas Commissioners Delegates Agents Agents Subagents Juntas Police commissioners Juntas Section leaders Police commissioners Juntas Headquarters leaders Block leaders Juntas Headquarters leaders Block leaders

All chosen by municipality

Elected Chosen by municipality

All chosen by municipality

Elected Elected by plebiscite Chosen by mayor Elected Elected Chosen by municipality All chosen by municipality

All chosen by municipality

All chosen by municipality ‘with citizen participation’ Chosen by municipality All chosen by municipality All elected All elected

Not indicated

All elected

(cont.)

208 Table 7.1

State

Decentralizing Decentralization (Continued) Municipal Laws (reforms)

Submunicipal authorities

Guanajuato

1984 2001

Delegates Delegates Subdelegates

Guerrero

1984 (1989) 1983

Delegates Commissioners Delegates Subdelegates Municipal collaboration councils Commissioners Delegates

Hidalgo

1996

2001 Jalisco

1984 (2000)

México

1982

1992

Michoacán

1982 (1984) 2001

Morelos

1992

Nayarit

1990

Delegates Subdelegates Delegates Subdelegates Municipal agents Collaboration councils Delegates Subdelegates Delegates Subdelegates Citizen participation councils Tenancy leaders Block leaders Tenancy leaders Peace-keepers Municipal delegates (urban and suburban) Intendents (rural) Municipal aides Social procurador Regional delegates Delegates Commissioners Auxiliary leaders Urban sector leaders Rural sector leaders Block leaders

Selection process Chosen by municipality All chosen by municipality nominated by mayor, after citizen consultation Elected Chosen by municipality All chosen by mayor

Elected by slate Nominated by mayor, chosen by two-thirds vote of town council All elected All chosen by municipality

All elected

All elected

Elected Chosen by mayor Elected by plebiscite Chosen by municipality

Elected Elected All elected

Decentralizing Decentralization Table 7.1

(Continued)

State

Municipal Laws (reforms) 2001

Nuevo León

Oaxaca Puebla Querétaro

1991

1993 (2003) 1984 (2001) 1984 2005

Quintana Roo

1986 (1990) 2000

San Luis Potosí

1984

Sinaloa

1984 (2000)

Sonora

1984 (2001) 1984

Tabasco

Tamaulipas

1984 (2002)

Tlaxcala

1984 (2001) 1984 (2001)

Veracruz

Yucatán

209

1988

Submunicipal authorities Delegates Auxiliary judges Administrative delegates Citizen participation organizations Municipal agents Police agents Auxiliary juntas Delegates Subdelegates Sector leaders Block leaders Delegates Subdelegates Delegates Subdelegates Delegates Leaders of dependencias Councillors Commissioners

Commissioners Delegates Delegates Subdelegates Sector leaders Block leaders Delegates Subdelegates Sector leaders Block leaders Auxiliary mayors Delegates Agents Subagents Block leaders Delegates Commissioners Subcommissioners Block leaders

Selection process All elected Chosen by mayor Elected Chosen by mayor or elected by local traditions Elected Chosen by municipality

All elected All elected in assembly All chosen by municipality

All chosen by municipality (with consultation in assembly) All chosen by municipality Nominated by mayor, elected in assembly Chosen by municipality All chosen by municipality

All elected All elected (in assembly, by secret ballot or by nomination) All chosen by municipality

(cont.)

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Table 7.1

(Continued)

State

Municipal Laws (reforms)

Zacatecas

1993

2001

Submunicipal authorities Delegates Commissioners Sector leaders Block leaders Delegates

Selection process Elected from list chosen by municipality and Social Participation Committees Elected

Source: Data through 1995 presented in Appendix 3, Fox and Aranda (1996). Thanks very much to municipal governance experts Flavio Lazos and Braulio Olvera of Locallis for their help with gathering and analyzing the post-1995 laws. See their work at www.locallis.org.mx. For texts of the state laws of municipal governance, see http://www.e-local.gob.mx/wb2/ELOCAL/ELOC_Legislacion_ Basica_Local. Note that Baja California Norte’s current law does not specify a submunicipal governance procedure and municipal laws centralize the selection process. Note also that in some states, in practice, submunicipal authorities are often chosen by the communities, especially in indigenous regions (e.g. Chiapas, Guerrero).

Table 7.2

Submunicipal authorities: elected vs. appointed

ELECTED (13) BAJA CALIFORNIA SUR DURANGO CHIHUAHUA HIDALGO

MEXICO MICHOACAN NAYARIT OAXACA PUEBLA QUINTANA ROO

TLAXCALA VERACRUZ ZACATECAS

MIXED (4) GUERRERO

MORELOS NUEVO LEON TABASCO

APPOINTED (13) AGUASCALIENTES BAJA CALIFORNIA CAMPECHE COLIMA CHIAPAS GUANAJUATO

JALISCO QUERETARO

SAN LUIS POTOSI SINALOA SONORA TAMAULIPAS YUCATAN

Source: Table 7.1. Note: States marked in bold indicate a shift in status since the assessment of state laws presented in Fox and Aranda (1996b). ‘Mixed’ systems refer to cases where the two levels below the municipality are chosen by different means. Elections where the mayor chooses the candidates are considered mixed systems (e.g. Tabasco). Oaxaca is counted here as elected, based on the predominant pattern. Nuevo León arguably should be considered in the appointed column.

Tabasco. In 1984, then governor and self-identified leftist Enrique González Pedrero promoted a reorganization of the state’s 17 municipalities by creating 185 ‘integrating communes’, ostensibly grounded in more than a thousand base committees (Olmedo 1999b). Nevertheless,

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the current degree of submunicipal democratization—as distinct from decentralization—remains unclear. In 1985, the state of Tlaxcala both allowed the election of submunicipal leaders by the outlying communities and introduced the ‘principle of communal and territorial representation’, which incorporated them as members of the municipal council. In 1995, Tlaxcala went further, bolstering the powers of submunicipal leaders by converting them into ‘auxiliary municipal presidents’, a unique institution in Mexico (Olmedo 1999a, 1999b). The state government also recognized sixteen new municipalities, perhaps the largest one-time increase in numbers of municipalities in any Mexican state. Several of these Tlaxcala cases were driven by local processes of reemergence and politicization of Nahua indigenous identity. 59 Michoacan experienced both formal and de facto changes in the submunicipal regime. Not only did state law’s shift from a mixed to a bottom-up system, the role of cross-border civic organization among migrants also bolstered the representation of outlying villages within municipal decision-making. This process of submunicipal empowerment was independent of partisan competition. Michoacan has one of Mexico’s highest rates of out-migration, as well as the highest per capita rate of remittances. The state’s hometown associations disproportionately represent migrants from outlying villages, whose local representatives are not represented on municipal councils. The local leaders are elected, but lack the resources or power to represent their communities to the municipal government. 60 A new federal social program that provides matching funds for collective remittance investments has changed the balance of power, however. According to Bada’s findings: The 3 × 1 program . . . has improved the relationship between geographically isolated communities and town centers. Historically, [these] communities . . . have tended to be more neglected regarding public infrastructure and basic services. This is in part because these communities are poorly represented in the municipal government. . . . In the past decade, the hometown associations have done a great job in reaching out to municipal authorities in town centers. HTA leaders have direct access to the state (government) migrant affairs office, which makes it easier to get an appointment with the municipal president. Depending on community location, it is not very difficult for migrant leaders to take a flight to Morelia or Guadalajara, drive to the town council and communicate the needs of their isolated communities faster 59 Personal email communication, Francisco Guizar Vásquez, El Colegio de Tlaxcala, March 2, 2006. 60 For an analysis of conflicts between mestizo municipal centers and outlying Purépecha communities, see Ramírez Sevilla (2006).

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or more effectively than the assistant authorities. This suggests that these leaders are frequently playing the role of ‘substitute assistant authorities’. (Bada 2006: 11)

It is also very significant when states that by law allow submunicipal self-governance actually transition toward practices of local democracy. The Veracruz case is notable, since the state has one of the largest indigenous populations in the country. According to a state level Citizen Councillor of the Federal Electoral Institute with many years of experience as a grassroots human rights defender: Although there is a long way to go, there have been advances towards the citizenization of municipalities, mainly in rural, indigenous and marginal areas more generally, where people have common problems to organize around. . . . Though there have been attempts by mayors to impose municipal agents, the communities have defended their right to elect them and efforts to impose them by force have produced social mobilizations that reach the state congress, which is the body that can discipline municipal governments. They don’t always win, but there is the experience with expressing the will of the community through mobilization. In indigenous regions such as the Huasteca and the Zongólica the predominant practice is still to choose [submunicipal leaders] by open assembly, as they have done forever, according to collective memory. Similarly, in Paso del Macho, a mestizo region of cane growers, the ejidos and villages have a system for naming local authorities that is similar, by a show of hands in an assembly. 61

This account clearly describes a statewide process of submunicipal regime change, uneven and incomplete, but clearly in transition.

Conclusions This chapter explored power relations between municipal centers and outlying villages through three different lenses—following the flow of social funds by comparing rural municipalities in one state, reviewing the diverse map of struggles for local autonomy in four states, and by documenting variations in the state laws that regulate submunicipal governance. Lack of more systematic empirical data prevents detailed generalizations about the precise mix of continuity and change. Yet the contrast between changes in actual practices and legal frameworks appears to be significant. Based on comparing a decade of legal changes, only a handful of Mexican states increased the degree to which they recognize submunicipal autonomy. Yet throughout rural Mexico, rural citizens 61

Personal email communication, Yaotzin Domínguez Escobedo, April 9, 2006.

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are raising their voices, sometimes to the point of risking their lives for the right to govern their own communities. This process shows that the ‘right to have rights’ has spread very unevenly across space, class, gender, and race. The first conclusion here is that Mexico has a distinct regime of submunicipal governance, through which villages are either represented to or subordinated by municipal centers. The second conclusion is that this regime is still in flux, involving diverse combinations of village leadership selection from above and from below. In some states, submunicipal regime change predated national regime change, unfolding alongside Mexico’s uneven process of municipal and state level transitions—as in the states of Tlaxcala, Oaxaca, and Hidalgo. In other states submunicipal regime change toward local democratization lags far behind, as in Chiapas and Guerrero. This lag is also analogous to those state governments that have yet to cross a minimum democratic threshold of political democracy, years after the presidency changed hands, as in the case of Oaxaca (e.g. Gibson 2005). This dual pattern of submunicipal regimes leading and lagging vis-à-vis political transitions at ‘higher’ levels recalls the relationship between state and municipal democratization on the one hand, and federal level democratization on the other hand. Submunicipal transitions vary both between and within states, suggesting a third conclusion—that these transitions are driven primarily by power struggles between rural citizens, local elites, and their respective allies in state governments— far from the purview of national political elites. This ‘de-linking’ of patterns of change at different levels was reinforced by the 1998 national law that reinforced municipal autonomy. Looking across the uneven landscape of rural Mexico’s ‘submunicipal regime change’, Guerrero’s decade-long experience with community policing represents one of the most significant innovations. The Regional Network of Community Authorities (CRAC) combines local accountability to elected community leaders and scaledup, regionwide impact with tangible impacts on the personal security of thousands of families. One of the CRAC’s leaders, Cirino Placido, recently offered this assessment: Now we don’t have legal recognition, but at least we have political recognition. They have not given us legal recognition because of racism against indigenous peoples. The community police have it in practice. The bureaucrats send us official documents and come to our anniversaries. . . . Our actions speak louder, I don’t like to brag about what we have because that scares your political adversary. We have to work like gophers, because that animal goes making his burrows and then comes out ahead, we have to move forward without talking too much. In my region it’s even prohibited to use the word autonomy

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because it scares this regime. We’re doing it in practice but we don’t call it that. . . . In ten years we have learned, we have advanced and we are going to continue to dream about a new struggle in which we have barely taken two steps: one, community security for 60 Tlapaneco, Mixteco and mestizo communities, and two, we have created an institution that provides justice: CRAC. But we also have to deal with production and the internal market, it won’t matter if we’re really great at justice if there is hunger, because where there is hunger, there is dependence and subordination. (cited in Bermejillo 2006)

................. 8

................. Comparing Regional Rural Development Councils: Do ‘Invited Spaces’ Empower?

Participation at the State–Society Interface1 Rural Mexico is now filled with an untold number of regional councils whose official goal is to allow social organizations to deliberate with government agencies over how to allocate public rural development resources. These state–society councils address issues ranging from agricultural investment, food distribution, electoral administration, regional infrastructure investment, watershed management, and sustainable use of natural resources. Federal agencies began to promote these regional councils in the 1970s and 1980s, and the result is a complex, multilayered set of deliberative bodies whose mandates often overlap and whose scope rarely coincides with territorial forms of representation, such as ejidos, municipalities, and state governments. For better or worse, these councils constitute a web of sites that both parallel and overlap with much of actually existing rural civil society. 2 This chapter asks: Do these spaces constitute opportunities for state–society power-sharing, or are they window dressing that merely legitimates government decisions? The research strategy compares regional councils involved in seven different rural development programs, focusing on their capacity and degree of inclusion of actually existing organizations, following a discussion of broader analytical and conceptual issues. These councils are examples of a broader category of governance reforms that attempts to change the balance of power within civil society by creating pluralist spaces for civil society 1

Thanks to Andrea Cornwall and Jennifer Franco for comments on an earlier version. Unfortunately this study does not address the role of councils involved with schools and clinics in rural areas, but no independent research is available that suggests significant degrees of participation or impact. 2

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deliberation, of which participatory budgeting and parent-managed schools are the most well-known examples. Fung and Wright call them institutions of ‘empowered participatory governance’ (2003). For Evans, they are examples of ‘state–society synergy’ (1997). For Avritzer they are cases of ‘participatory publics’ (2002). For Bebbington, Delamaza, and Villar, they are ‘public spaces for local concertación (bargaining)’ (2006). De Sousa Santos sees them in terms of ‘democratizing democracy’ (2005). For Ackerman, they are examples of ‘co-governance’ between state and society (2004a, b). Cornwall’s term emphasizes the degree to which they are state initiatives: ‘invited spaces’ (2002). Analysis of contested participatory spaces in government programs faces at least two major challenges. The first is empirical, and involves the difficulty of generating enough independent data about numerous and diverse regional experiences to be able to generalize about broader, sometimes contradictory patterns. While it is often straightforward to find cases of co-optation or exclusion, or occasional cases of transformation and empowerment, how does one distinguish the exception from the main trend, especially when extensive grey areas of ‘partial inclusion’ are involved? In addition, the degree of pluralistic inclusion involved may change significantly over time, depending on the interaction between civil society efforts to make them work and the varying strength of backlash that such efforts often provoke. Only a representative sample of regional processes and outcomes can provide a rigorous basis for identifying the broader patterns (an empirical standard that will not be adequately met by this chapter). A second research challenge is analytical and involves how to explain the dynamics of institutional change. Even the World Bank has recognized that for anti-poverty policies to successfully reach poor people, the institutions that carry them out must be transformed in favor of the poor. 3 In spite of this ‘official’ intellectual recognition of the need for ‘pro-poor’ institutions, the causal processes through which institutions become pro-poor are not well understood. Specifically, how do propoor reform innovations scale up and spread out, to go from bounded enclaves to influence entire agencies, regions or nation-states? 4 In 3 World Bank analysts spelled out their assessment of the reasons why propoor institutions are needed to promote poverty reduction in the World Development Report 2000/2001. This influential report argued that the local empowerment of poor people is important for the success of antipoverty policies. Critics pointed out that this approach ignored power imbalances at the national level (e.g. Moore 2001). Many of the institutional logics and incentive structures that explain why some public agencies are more propoor than others were detailed in World Bank (2004a). 4 For a useful recent intellectual history of related theoretical debates in the fields of political science and public administration, see Olsen (2004).

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217

this context, analysis of the dynamics of state–society interfaces can contribute to the broader question of how institutions become ‘pro-poor’. This chapter explores whether regional state–society councils can become arenas for accountability politics, and therefore potential levers for institutional change. Although these regional councils lack operational power and independent spending authority—they are almost all exclusively consultative and their deliberative quality is politically contingent—this study explores the possibility that inclusion of representative organizations could permit regional councils to promote public accountability. In other words, the inclusion and exclusion of preexisting autonomous organizations would be a key indicator of the potential for official regional councils to become arenas for accountability politics. More generally, this focus on the interaction between autonomous civil society and the state reflects the need for ‘public spaces that are outside the domain of the state’ as ‘an essential precondition for citizen engagement that does not simply serve to legitimate the existing political system’ (as posed by Habermas, cited in Cornwall 2004: 78–9). 5 Official claims that engagement with government consultative processes will involve actual power-sharing always warrant a high degree of skepticism. This chapter explores whether these spaces for state–society interaction actually lead to changes in the balance of power. Previous chapters addressed this question through varying strategies. Chapter 3 compared the degrees of relative opening in regional deliberative spaces over time, and found ebbs and flows rather than linear change. Chapter 4 addressed regional state–society interfaces from the point of view of a regional producer organization, and found at least one turning point when official participation created new autonomous space. Chapter 6 compared World Bankfunded regional agricultural councils and found that autonomous indigenous producer organizations were consistently excluded. Chapter 7 compared Mexico’s wide variety of institutions of submunicipal representation, suggesting that rural municipalities can be better understood as microregions that include multiple communities. Given that rural municipalities rarely adequately represent outlying 5 Cornwall goes on to note that ‘thinking of spaces less as concrete locales than as sites that are constitutive as well as expressive of power relations focuses attention on agency. . . . A gamut of cultural, social, historical and political contextual factors are all tangled together in shaping the boundaries of the possible in any given encounter . . . “invited spaces” are always already permeated with the power effects of difference’ (2004: 83). For further discussion and a wide range of comparative cases, see Cornwall and Schattan Coelho (2007).

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villages, opportunities for local leaders to come together outside the purview of municipal authorities have the potential to forge regional counterweights. This chapter pursues this concern with the ‘scaling up’ of autonomous voice by comparing regional ‘state–society interfaces’. Interface analysis is an actor-oriented approach that focuses on interlocking relationships, contested discourses, and conflictive negotiations. 6 Institutional advocates of empowerment have begun to assemble a substantial body of research. Drawing on the intellectual space opened up by relatively heterodox World Development Reports, World Bank social and institutional analysts recognize the relevance of ‘institutional climate’ and agency, but they sidestep the role of conflict and the political dynamics of changing the balance of power within the state (Alsop, Bertelsen, and Holland 2006; Narayan 2002, 2005). Independent analysts, in contrast, put power imbalances between state and society at the center of the empowerment process. This emphasis on power and conflict is shared by both those who argue that the new official acceptance of participation is limited to official discourse (Cooke and Kothari 2001), and those who see processes and outcomes as politically contingent (Hickey and Mohan 2004). Cornwall aptly describes official channels for participation as ‘domesticated sites of invited, or indeed induced participation’—in contrast to autonomous participatory spaces that ‘people make or shape for themselves’ (2002: 3, 20). Yet this distinction between ‘invited’ and ‘autonomous spaces’ does not necessarily mean that they are dichotomous. Cornwall notes that ‘ “invited spaces” offer one important vehicle through which development intervention can support more transformative participation . . . they come to be defined by those who are invited into them, as well as by those doing the inviting’ (2002, 2004: 76, 80). Much of this study has sought to identify this realm of possibility, the room for maneuver to push back initial constraints. Yet the evidence shows that most of the time those constraints have not moved, or openings turned out to be temporary. Therefore the question remains, to what degree can ‘invited spaces’ actually contribute to changing the balance of power between the state and underrepresented social actors?

6 See Long (1999), which details Mexican case examples, as well as Long (1989, 2001) and Arce and Long (1992). For conceptual discussion that focuses specifically on participatory councils as state–society interfaces that act as ‘tranversal accountability’ agents, see Isunza Vera (2004, 2005).

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While the differences between autonomous and official spaces for participation often appear stark, the often-posed dichotomy between them may turn out to be overstated, for at least two reasons. First, at least in rural Mexico, many autonomous organizations are themselves the legacy of previously official spaces that were appropriated from below, as described in earlier chapters. Experiences with past engagements with the state are therefore embedded in those organizations’ repertoires. Second, the process of engagement with official spaces depends heavily on whether the decision to engage is made autonomously. The dynamics of engagement are likely to be pathdependent, so it is crucial to know whether those ‘invited’, such as regional membership organizations, make their own choices as to whether or not to engage, as well as how they perceive the potential risks and benefits. Their choices are certainly often constrained, insofar as the government programs involved may offer development funds needed for the leadership to deliver tangible results to their rank and file. Limited information also constrains the decisions of autonomous, representative organizations about whether and how to engage with the state. Their most reliable information draws from their own past track record of engagement with the state, which may lead to the ‘rational wariness’ discussed in Chapter 6. Key information variables also include the degree to which organizations are networked with counterpart organizations in other regions, as well as their degree of access to insider information about the balance of power within the state. 7 This issue of varying degrees of transparency and information access is part of the broader question of whether these invited spaces are institutionally structured with measures that attempt to ‘level the playing field’ between potential participants with highly imbalanced degrees of power. As Bebbington, Delamaza, and Villar note, these local bargaining arenas are always embedded in their local political economies, which ‘implies that political-economic differences of power, interests and material resources are also present’ (2006). The emerging broader comparative literature on ‘empowered participatory governance’ shows that it is indeed possible to find significant 7 Whether an autonomous decision to engage turns out to be empowering or disempowering is another question. In principle, such organizations could engage with regional councils with their eyes open, yet find themselves further constrained and end up sacrificing autonomy in favor of conditioned access to resources. When discretionary and less-than-transparent resource allocation is involved, co-optation is a frequent outcome. Yet the criteria for determining whether or not a social organization is co-opted are often in the eye of the beholder, especially if one recognizes that autonomy from the state is relative rather than dichotomous.

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examples of mutually empowering synergy across the state–society divide, in different sectors and around the world. While participatory governance bodies institutionalize conflict—if successful, bounding it—they also create deliberative mechanisms that can turn what would otherwise be zero-sum confrontations into win-win solutions. Their dynamics build on, but are qualitatively distinct from, more conventional and adversarial forms of representative democratic pluralism. 8 Most notably, the literature so far suggests that these cases are usually limited to modest enclaves compared to the national context—specific cities, towns or regions—with the notable exception of Mexico’s electoral administration system (e.g. Ackerman 2007; Avritzer 2002). As will be seen below, however, Mexico’s rural development council programs fit the much more common pattern, in which balanced power-sharing turns out to be highly exceptional. For reasons described above, then, the main factor that limits the potential effectiveness of ‘empowered participatory governance’ is that, in contexts in which the informal distribution of power is highly lopsided, such institutions can be easily co-opted and end up providing a democratic veneer to preexisting power imbalances. 9 Fung and Wright conclude that such experiments are most likely to work when high levels of ‘countervailing power’ are present—a reference to dense, locally grounded representative social actors (2003). This explanation is certainly consistent with many experiences with regional councils in Mexico, but it has two major gaps. First, it does not account for cases where political exclusion prevents participatory cogovernance in areas of dense local levels of countervailing power (as in much of southern Mexico). In other words, inclusion of the already-organized cannot be assumed, it is a process that requires explanation. This point is analogous to Chapter 3’s critique of Putnam’s depoliticized explanation of social capital accumulation, where ‘them as has, gets’. Second, to find that participatory governance functions well where countervailing powers are already dense does not indicate how such powers can be bolstered where they are thin. These two gaps suggest the need for a more dynamic framework that can account for how social actors and pro-participation state managers can interact in ways 8 Note that the conventional dichotomy between participatory and representative democracy falls apart in the cases of larger scale institutions of empowered participatory governance, insofar as the participants are themselves elected representatives of constituency groups. 9 Because local power relations vary, community level homogeneity should not be assumed. See, for example, Williams et al. (2003).

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that shift the balance of power, triggering virtuous circles of institutional change. This involves making some conceptual assumptions explicit, such as the distinction between formal and informal power relations.

Formal versus Informal Power10 One key point for identifying the obstacles and opportunities for institutional change involves explicitly recognizing the distinction between how power is supposed to be exercised, according to official policy processes, versus how power is actually exercised. The premise is that, in practice, institutions operate based on combinations of formal and informal power resources. Formal power resources refer to official mandates, including the administrative, legal, and political authority and resources assigned to carry them out. At the same time, these de jure mandates and authority structures are also influenced by de facto, informal power relations. While the former may be quite visible, the latter are often deeply embedded and well hidden from outsiders. In other words, official administrative incentive structures may compete with alternative and often conflicting incentive structures to determine patterns of actual institutional behavior. For this reason, the analytical distance between underperformance and corruption is less than the ethical distance between them. Both sets of institutional behaviors are driven by tensions between official and de facto incentive structures. This approach suggests that public institutions whose leadership attempts to transform them in more pro-poor directions will have limited results if they rely solely on their own formal authority. Informal power resources include social capital relationships— within the institution, bridging to counterparts in other institutions, as well as reaching across the state–society divide, as discussed in Chapter 5. Informal powers also include political capital, which refers to resources that generate the capacity to seek to change the balance of power. These resources include intra- and extra-institutional credibility, as well as a willingness to use (and create) leverage to influence other actors. Political capital is grounded in a combination of networks of social capital, the capacity to deploy institutional resources, as well as a willingness and capacity to use the media to inform public debates 10 This section draws from Fox (2004). Helmke and Lewitsky bring together political scientists who address informal power (2006).

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over the issues at stake. The effective investment of political capital requires entrepreneurship, especially since it often involves some degree of risk. Like social capital, the idea of political capital has a certain ‘you know it when you see it’ quality. This certainly limits its measurability, but not its relevance. The capacity of policy ‘implementers’ to use both formal and informal powers to divert or capture prochange directives from above is well known. 11 The factors that shape reformers’ capacity to use their formal and informal powers to move from lesser to greater influence over their institutions has received less analytical attention. When both pro-poor policymakers and social actor counterparts start out with limited leverage over the state and social actors that oppose institutional change, the result is a ‘chicken-and-egg’ problem that requires deliberate strategies to crack. Put another way, how can propoor actors inside and outside institutions break out from a relatively static ‘low power equilibrium’, in which both sets of counterparts lack leverage?

Contending Cross-Sectoral Coalitions An interactive approach to institutional transformation suggests that pro-poor reforms require changes in three distinct arenas: within the state itself, within society, and at the state–society interface. Each of these three arenas involves both formal and informal power relations. If one looks at pro-poor institutional change through this lens, then one can frame the reform process as one driven by contending crosssectoral coalitions. These coalitions both require and generate bridging social capital between institutional and social actors, and in the process generate ‘state–society synergy’ (as discussed in Chapters 1 and 3). In this approach, institutional change depends on changing the balance of power between pro-reform actors embedded in both state and society against an anti-reform set of actors, which are also embedded in both state and society. Yet while the anti-reform forces in state and society are very likely to constitute an organized coalition, closely linked through informal ties and grounded in shared material interests, pro-reform forces do not necessarily coordinate their efforts or perceive shared interests. Potential pro-reform coalition partners may share ‘objective’ interests in institutional change, but past experiences may feed mutual wariness and distrust that limits cooperation across 11 The recognition of the relevance of such actors dates to Lipsky’s focus on ‘streetlevel bureaucrats’ (1980).

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12

the state–society divide. Only unusually, entrepreneurial reformists are willing and able to take the political risks involved in reaching out to build pro-reform cross-sectoral coalitions. While it is very common for policymakers to take risks with other people’s resources, in practice it is rare for policymakers to take the specific kinds of risks involved in encouraging the empowerment of poor people and the transformation of public institutions into pro-poor actors. Such risks involve accepting the uncertainties inherent in partnering with autonomous poor people’s organizations, which by definition bring their own goals and strategies to the table. Yet strategic interaction between policymakers and civil society counterparts is needed to help both sets of actors to target and weaken obstacles to change. This suggests that cross-sectoral coalition-building requires its own set of investment strategies, which involve both social and political capital.

Regional Rural Development Councils This comparison of regional councils maps the range of processes and outcomes across seven different rural development programs. A wide range of federal programs expect social actors to participate in local and regional councils—a total of thirty-six, according to one federal expert in municipal governance (Acosta 2006). The seven programs studied here were chosen based on two main criteria. First, each convened ostensibly power-sharing councils that were all considered potentially significant from the point of view of at least some autonomous peasant and indigenous people’s organizations. 13 Second, in the case of each program’s regional councils, some body of empirical research was available that permitted national generalizations about actual practices. This narrowed the range of options considerably. 14 While this approach lacks the depth provided by ethnographic 12 On the ‘rational wariness’ of poor people’s organization to engage with participatory policy reforms in less-than-democratic settings, and ‘intersectoral trust as a resource for reform that requires investment’, see Chapter 6. 13 This claim is not based on a systematic survey, but rather on extensive interviews over 20 years with regional leaders in central and southern Mexico. These discussions focused on where they perceived opportunities for constructive engagement with the state. 14 For example, the Social Development Ministry’s Micro-regional Councils would have been interesting to include, since they were involved in a large-scale program that targeted Mexico’s lowest-income regions. According to one official evaluation, only 40% of the councils were created, and often not according to the rules. In those, the councils did not represent many areas within the regions, and they were often limited to public works committees. Those project-specific committees, similar to those created by the National Solidarity Program, did ostensibly carry out an oversight function. But the councils were

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research, it allows analysis of the broad trends and avoids the problem of sampling on the dependent variation (whether one is looking for successes or failures). The main constraint is the unevenness of the independence and quality of the data. In some cases only semi-official evaluations are available, while in others, council performance was low on the research agenda. Some of these programs included power-sharing bodies at the community level, others operated at regional levels, representing dozens of communities, while others created bodies that operated at both levels. At least two programs included national level meetings of regional councils. All were federal programs of national scope, and all provoked varying degrees of resistance from within both state and federal government. Most of the field research focused on cross-regional variation within the state of Oaxaca, though some studies cited also included interstate comparisons that involved other low-income states. The program reviews draw on available independent research, since no known official government evaluation, whether internal or external, addresses the question of autonomy and capacity of regional councils. 15 All of the programs are still in operation, with widely varying degrees of support from the federal government. 16

1. The DICONSA Rural Food Store Network The Mexican government has long intervened in consumer food markets with a variety of direct and indirect policy instruments, including a gradual and uneven shift from generalized to targeted subsidies (both systems overlapped for an extended period). The first significant targeted rural consumer program focused on remote, low-income areas, creating thousands of community-managed local stores that were supplied by the retail distribution branch of the government food company (DICONSA). The stores sold basic foods with modest per unit subsidies of price and transportation costs. The stores’ main impact on low-income rural consumers, however, was not a priority for the ministry, whose leadership eventually eliminated them in 2005, having concluded that public works issues should be handled by the Municipal Planning Commissions (SERPRO 2006: 73). 15 Federal social programs have been legally mandated to commission external evaluations since 2001, but their agendas are determined by the agencies to be evaluated. As a result, these assessments focus on a narrow range of operational questions, and they do not attempt to assess regional council dynamics. Though legally required to be public, a study of the public accessibility of these social program evaluations found that many either remained confidential or were difficult to find as of 2005 (Fox and Haight 2005, 2007a). 16 The first several program summaries draw from Fox (2004a).

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to weaken local grain oligopolies, most notably in corn deficit regions. Any economic assessment of the program’s benefit to consumers must take into account the counterfactual, in terms of its regulatory impact on the highly fragmented and imperfect grain markets that characterize remote rural areas. Beginning in 1979, the program pursued its first systematic attempt to use community participation and oversight to encourage the public accountability of the food distribution company. The key institutional innovation was to scale up rural consumers’ opportunities and capacities for oversight by creating regional councils that would meet regularly at the DICONSA warehouses charged with supplying the rural stores. Each warehouse supplied several dozen stores. This regional level of organized participatory oversight was critical because the warehouses proved to be the key site for possible diversion of subsidized food to private elites. In many of these rural regions these councils were the first autonomous and representative civil society organizations to be tolerated by the government. The local store management committees and the regional councils were launched by the program’s national network of grassroots organizers, which was initially independent both of DICONSA management and the ruling party. Though this outreach network was purged early on after a backlash from regional elites, many of the participatory councils, once launched, continued to function (Fox 1990, 1992a). By the mid-1980s, approximately one-third of the councils had achieved some degree of autonomous oversight capacity, and national networking efforts have ebbed and flowed since then. Many food distribution councils spun off or reinforced autonomous regional producer associations. In spite of the highly targeted nature of the program, it has long lacked high level policy support. Nevertheless, the rural store network survived several attempts to liquidate it during the late 1990s and it continues to operate more than 22,000 village outlets. 17

2. Indigenous Regional Development Funds Starting in 1989, the government dramatically increased the economic development role of its National Indigenous Institute (INI). In the mid-1980s, the INI had launched Community Planning Committes, 17 For further discussion see Chapter 9. For official data, see www.diconsa.gob.mx and the official studies located at www.sedesol.gob.mx, under the Planning and Evaluation Subsecretariat.

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but they functioned merely as ‘transmission belts’ for administrative decisions (Oehmichen Bazán, 1999: 100). As part of the National Solidarity Program, however, the INI created dozens of regional economic development councils that were designed to include actually existing autonomous regional membership organizations. Key INI staff drew from their experiences with the DICONSA food councils as well as with the self-managed economic development initiatives of the Union of Autonomous Regional Peasant Organizations (UNORCA) (Fox 1994b, Oehmichen Bazán 1999: 106). Elected representatives of indigenous producer organizations jointly evaluated grassroots funding proposals, and even cosigned the checks together with INI outreach officials. These councils achieved widely varying degrees of autonomy and capacity, and in some regions INI operational officials managed to exclude autonomous organizations. A 1991–2 field study compared the INI’s own ranking of varying degrees of consolidation and pluralism with an independent assessment based on a survey of local civil society leaders (Fox 1994b). The variable of pluralist practices is key because, in political systems characterized by persistent authoritarian clientelism—all other things being equal—‘participatory’ councils will be controlled by pliant official membership organizations that lack the autonomy necessary to represent their members. As in the case of the rural food store program, economic and political support from federal level pro-empowerment policymakers made pluralism and autonomy possible in a significant minority of the regional councils, and the program continues to exist. The program managed to survive the institutional change of the INI into the Indigenous Development Commission (CDI), as well as concerns from the Treasury Ministry about uneven loan recovery rates (due in part to ambiguous rules). 18 In 2004, the program funded 250 regional councils, still composed of indigenous producer organizations, with an annual budget of approximately US$12 million and an officially estimated beneficiary population of just over 32,000, with 30 percent of the resources concentrated in Chiapas, 15 percent in Oaxaca and 11 percent in Veracruz (UAM-X 2004: 11, 17). The official evaluations do not explain the significant overrepresentation of Chiapas.

18 During the Fox administration, the INI was transformed from an agency with the Social Development Ministry to a more autonomous Indigenous Development Commission. This shift appears to have been largely administrative, since the CDI is widely seen as a continuation of the INI. The CDI puts only a few of its external evaluations on their website, in locations that outsiders cannot find without guidance from insiders (based on internet search and official reply to public information request, June 2006)

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Yet over time the rules that governed the decision-making role of the regional councils changed significantly. In the early years, the INI would disburse funds directly to the regional councils, for distribution to those organizations whose projects they approved. This turned out to violate federal laws governing public finance, leading the INI to convert the regional councils into formal nonprofit organizations (Oechmichen Bazán 1999). As recently as 1996, the project decision-making was a process that was officially shared between the INI and the regional council. The leadership of the council would review the proposals, together with the INI’s technical support, they would prioritize the proposals, and they would be presented to the general assembly for debate and final decision-making. The rules changed, however, giving the CDI full control over the project selection process. As a recent official external evaluation observed: In this sense one could note that the current rules make a healthy distinction between the functions and responsibilities of the Indigenous Regional Funds and the Indigenous Development Commission, in terms of project review and selection, which is the core of the program. Nevertheless, the final decision is explicitly to be made by the Commission, which does not correspond with the [program’s] specific goal of ‘strengthening the participation of indigenous communities and organizations in their development, generating co-responsible and self-managed processes that would permit them to raise their social and economic levels’. (according to the Rules of Operation 2004, cited in UAM-X 2005a: 10–111)

In addition, in 2004 another top-down rules change required that the Regional Funds constitute themselves officially as nonprofit associations. While this change in status clarified their separation from the government agency that originally convened them, it also created potential problems insofar as they managed regional funds that were supposed to be market-oriented. Though subsidized, they were supposed to attempt to generate surpluses for reinvestment. After fifteen years, ‘they function to receive proposals for productive projects, but not as a convening body for organized groups to come together to discuss and plan regional projects’ (UAM-X 2005a: 11). Over time, the program’s budget was down since 2000, to approximately 60 percent of its annual budget during the heyday of the early 1990s, but because of funding smaller numbers of people, the estimated per person investment went up (UAM-X 2005: 14). This is related to a significant shift toward livestock projects, a strategy that raises environmental concerns. Half of 2005 project investment funds went to livestock projects (UAM-X 2005). Such investments were mainly for cattle, which served

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more for status and a low-productivity savings reserve than for economic development (Oemichen Bazán 1999). While the Regional Funds have many operational problems, such as delayed disbursements, low recovery rates, lack of technical assistance, and dispersal of resources into many small projects, the character of the councils as a pluralistic space appears to have often been maintained. Though independent research is lacking, the most recent official review concluded: The Funds’ long path and the review of their member organizations has reached a situation in which the old forms of organization and control that dominated in the countryside (ejido commissioner, municipal authorities) have little or no role in the initiative and in the organization of projects. Nor is there involvement by the Peasant Centrals [corporatist organizations] or political parties. What stands out are the working groups or organizations that have small horizontal organizational structures where the initiative in the formulation of projects and decision-making is in the hands of the members (UAM-X 2005a: 13).

This same evaluation also found a consistent increase in the participation of women and women’s organizations in recent years, including a minimum of 30 percent of program resources.

3. Rural Municipal Development Funds The Mexican government’s Social Development Ministry launched its first large-scale investment program for rural municipal investment funds at the beginning of the 1990s, as part of the National Solidarity Program. This program lacked regional power-sharing bodies, but local investment decisions were supposed to be made by grassroots communities, as part of a process that included an inclusionary municipal planning council (and not by the local governments alone). As noted in Chapter 6, this program tended to work in those communities that already exercised a high degree of assemblystyle decision-making. A study of a representative cross section of Oaxacan municipalities found that in a clear majority of cases, project selection decisions were made by the community assembly rather than the mayor, a local subgroup or external actors (Fox and Aranda 1996a). This experience was not generalized, however. The key proparticipation variables in Oaxaca—dense horizontal social capital and autonomous sub-municipal village governments—were not widespread in other low-income rural states. Therefore the government’s rural municipal funds probably empowered authoritarian municipal governments elsewhere, most notably in Chiapas and

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Guerrero (see Chapter 7). In contrast to the DICONSA and INI programs, this one lacked both local capacity-building component and regional participatory councils that could become counterweights. The participatory elements of the program lacked strategic political support from federal level reformists, leaving its fate up to local and state political dynamics. To sum up, the degree of inclusion and powersharing in the allocation of municipal funds varied enormously, both between and within states, depending primarily on existing structures of representation for villages within municipalities (Fox and Aranda 1996a).

4. Natural Protected Areas Advisory Councils Many of Mexico’s biodiversity hotspots are denominated Natural Protected Areas, and 85 percent of the land is in the ‘social sector’, meaning in ejidos and agrarian communities rather than private or federal property. Nationwide, Mexico has forty-seven Protected Areas, under the authority of a National Commission. In order to create a state–society venue for dialogue with the landholders, fifty Advisory Councils have been created since 1992. After a difficult start, most were either created or revived in the late 1990s, with encouragement from the Global Environment Facility, which funds seventeen of the Protected Areas. A high-level faction in the environment ministry leadership came from university and NGO backgrounds and encouraged nonpartisan grassroots participation. As with Mexico’s other regional councils, in practice these ranged from vibrant to nonexistent. In 2005, an official evaluation carried out a remarkably balanced assessment of the Advisory Councils, involving field visits to thirty-two Councils (Rosas Hernández et al. 2005). Of these, twenty-six actually functioned and allowed for an assessment based on a comprehensive set of performance indicators. Of all the official evaluations of programs with regional Councils, this was the only one to include a serious empirical assessment of their performance. The indicators ranged from very basic, such as Advisory Council validation of the Protected Area work plan, women’s participation, whether meetings have a facilitator, availability of training, whether meetings are called by government officials or council leaders, to more serious forms of power-sharing, such as involvement in designing the work plan, and access to a share of the Protected Area’s budget. Together, these indicators allowed evaluators to rank the Advisory Councils they visited in terms of four broad categories, ranging from very satisfactory to unsatisfactory. Table 8.1

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Category

Number

Very satisfactory Satisfactory Barely satisfactory Unsatisfactory In formation, with active subcouncils Not in operation for two years In operation but not visited

6 7 7 6 5 8 10

Note: This table does not include: Advisory Councils in formation, with active subcouncils, Advisory Councils that have not met for two years, and Advisory Councils in operation that were not visited. Source: Rosas Hernández, et al. (2005: 10–13)

also includes the numbers of councils either not in operation or not visited. The main finding is that, of those observed, half were either satisfactory or very satisfactory, while the other half were ‘barely satisfactory’ (‘poco satisfactorio’) or simply unsatisfactory. The fact that as many as half of the advisory councils were functioning adequately reflects several years of institutional investment, starting from a very low base-line. Of the seven programs with regional councils discussed here, this one appears to have one of the highest shares that actually function to some degree. 19 In a few cases they have functioned as ‘citizenship schools’, in terms of encouraging new repertoires of participation. Nevertheless, these councils did little scaling-up. They met or communicated rarely amongst themselves, and they had little impact on national conservation policy. 20

5. The Rural Development in Marginal Areas Program In the late 1990s, the Agriculture Ministry, with World Bank funding, launched another rural investment program in low-income areas. The design of the program was informed in part by the INI program experience. As discussed in Chapter 6, regional councils of elected representatives of producer organizations were created, with a mandate to choose among grassroots funding proposals. In contrast to the INI program, however, the Agriculture Ministry’s decentralization process 19 For ethnographic case studies of participation in the management of protected areas in Mexico, see Cortez and Paré (2006) and Paz Salinas (2005). 20 Email communication, Martha Ileana Rosas Hernández, January 3, 2007.

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through Alianza para el Campo created more formal and informal opportunities for state government officials to influence or veto council decisions. Most state government officials involved in the Rural Development in Marginal Areas program opposed power-sharing with producer organizations. The federal officials involved claimed that they supported power-sharing, but there is no evidence that they invested substantial political capital to overcome state government resistance. As a result, few regional councils gained either autonomy or capacity. As shown in Chapter 6, most of those councils that did begin to develop the capacity to represent organized producers were broken up or starved for funds by the state government of Oaxaca. The more powerful autonomous producer organizations were wary of investing their political capital in a program that seemed closed to them anyway, an example of ‘rational wariness’. The result, however, was limited pressure from below to open it up. The Agriculture Ministry was not committed to a program that was intended to encourage both investment in and power-sharing with low-income producers. The regional councils withered after 2000, and were later supplanted by municipal agricultural councils (see below).

6. Regional Rural Sustainable Development Program (PRODERS) Between 1996 and 2000 the Environment Ministry created and implemented a regional sustainable development program that was designed ‘to build on civil society’s expertise and experience of participatory approaches, with an emphasis on the region as a political, administrative and socio-ecological unit’ (Blauert and Dietz 2004: 1). By bringing together civil society actors and researchers with the three levels of government, the program attempted to institutionalize a participatory approach to the design, implementation, and evaluation of local and regional sustainable development projects. The Ministry was newly led by nonpartisan policymakers who drew on their prior experience with more similar, though more localized NGO-universityled sustainable rural development initiatives. In practice, the Treasury Ministry caused delays in budget disbursement that seriously affected the launch of program operations (Toledo 2000: 46 ). Program design required both high levels of interagency collaboration and extensive technical studies, which contributed to operational delays. Yet coordination with other agencies was critical for leveraging funds

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for investment and employment, since PRODERS’ own budget was miniscule (Blauert and Dietz 2004: 20). The program targeted twenty-four regions, and in some of them favorable political conditions permitted the emergence of pluralistic councils. According to the lead policymaker, in the Purépecha highlands of Michoacán, the councils were ‘taken up enthusiastically by the municipal presidents, who formed an “Inter-municipal Network of Mayors”, in spite of state government opposition’ (Toledo 2000: 48). Even where grassroots conditions were promising, as in the Montaña of Guerrero, where policymakers had prior experience and other ministries were supportive, the program remained vulnerable to state government opposition. There the program’s council worked well during an interim governor, until a new, less tolerant governor took office (Blauert and Dietz 2004: 39). After fifteen regional councils came together at the first national meeting, forty-two met at the second such meeting in 2000 (Toledo 2000: 50, 52). Participants at that meeting called on the federal government to bring together its many different and overlapping regionalization and council strategies. The meeting came to the modest conclusion that ‘at least some regional councils have managed to become the general space for inter-institutional coordination and regional community participation.’ (emphasis added, Bartra 2000: 76). As a sympathetic assessment concluded ‘After the presidential elections of 2000, the new environmental ministry slowly dismantled some of PRODERS’ operational roles, trust in this space was eroded, [leaving it to] local governments or CSOs to take up the cause again’ (Blauert and Dietz 2004: 40). However, reading between the lines of these evaluations suggests that from the point of view of grassroots organizations, the more likely result was ‘rational wariness’ along the lines discussed in Chapter 6.

7. The Municipal Councils for Sustainable Rural Development Mexico’s 2001 Sustainable Rural Development Law mandated the creation of Councils for Sustainable Rural Development at the national, state, district, and municipal levels. One consultant and former policymaker involved with the process of ‘municipalization’ claims that: today they constitute a national social and institutional movement of great importance, with the possibility of structurally transforming rural public policy. . . . The formation of ‘mixed’ Councils, meaning, with the participation of

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government institutions, but [also] with strong, pluralistic and inclusive social organizations represents a form of organization of rural regions that can help to overcome the old problem of the Mexican countryside: corporatism and state control of rural society. . . . Often the resources targeted to rural areas followed the logic of political control more than development. Rural regions, especially the poorest, cannot renounce the resources . . . from more economically developed regions, but they do have the right to decide for themselves how these resources . . . should be allocated in their regions and localities, without having to pay for them by supporting one political party or another. This involves exercising autonomy based not on the absolute separation from government institutions, as the Zapatistas . . . propose, but by means of pluralistic, inclusive and legitimate participation in mixed bodies like these councils, which would be transferred authority over the use and destination of public funds and in which an intense social participation and effective decentralization would be assured (Toledo 2006: 32, 34).

He goes on to recognize that these councils drew from prior histories with the PRODERS regional councils (which he led), the Agriculture Ministry’s Marginal Areas regional councils (discussed above) and the Social Development Ministry’s ‘micro-regional councils, in the Cañadas region of Chiapas, which although contaminated by the logic of counter-insurgency that dominated in those years to confront the problem of the Zapatista uprising, nevertheless developed valuable approaches to peasant and indigenous participation’ (Toledo 2006: 34). The Municipal Councils were formed quickly in 2002, with little participation by producer organizations and little activity for at least the first two years. They became more active in states where the governors took an interest. Beginning in 2004, some degree of resource decision-making capacity in the Agriculture Ministry’s Rural Development Program was transferred to the municipal councils, which Toledo reports encouraged ‘a process of appropriation of the councils by social and producer organizations’ (2006: 35, 36). The federal law does not specify how membership in the councils is to be determined, so participation is at the discretion of the municipal authorities, together with the Agriculture Ministry. New rules for these councils in 2004 did not improve the situation, and even set back the role of civil society participation by requiring that the councils be led by government officials. Toledo reports that when only organizations are represented, that facilitates control of the CMDRs and there is a tendency towards clientelism. For that reason, a combination of representatives of organizations and communities [submunicipal leaders] is the best formula, since the presence of the representatives of localities balances the participation of organizations, which obliges them to consult more, resulting in greater participation (2006: 36).

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While this makes intuitive sense, no distinction is made between submunicipal leaders who are chosen by their villages, and those who represent the mayors to the villages, the key distinction discussed in Chapter 7. For example, municipal agents are included in these councils in the state of Jalisco, but in that state they are chosen by the mayors. Therefore their presence does not offset the general tendency, in which no more than 20 percent of the municipal councils could be considered minimally democratic, according to one of their main promoters in the state. 21 Toledo recognizes that ‘currently, the representativity of the councils varies and oscillates between some with a high degree of representation to others where it is still insufficient’ (2006: 40). He does not go so far as to assign relative weights to these different scenarios, though the overall thrust of the article implies that if he had evidence that the first trend predominated, he would have cited it. The full study remained confidential as of mid-2006. The two field-based independent studies of municipal councils carried out so far come to different conclusions. Merino and Macedo studied five municipalities selected by Agriculture Ministry officials as exemplary, and carried out a survey of government officials in the states of Morelos and Zacatecas (2005). They conclude that the municipal councils are mere transmission belts for decisions made at higher levels. ‘They do not play a decision-making role, the councils are limited to the role of assistance and consultation.’ For local projects to be funded, they must not only fit precisely with detailed federal policy rules, they must also be approved by a state level Technical Committee. Moreover, the federal law obliges municipalities to participate in agriculture policy through nineteen different administrative processes, including thirty decisions and seventy-one routines, as well as six steps to be accredited to participate in the first place, but it does not provide policy instruments ‘specifically designed to produce incentives to make the active participation of municipal governments possible’. As a result, they conclude, state governments dominate the municipalities, traditional power relations have not changed and ‘the new procedures have been adapted to the old routines’ (Merino and Macedo 2005: 11, 16, 20, 22, 29). The second independent study of the municipal councils focused on the Altos region of Chiapas. A survey of sixteen program outreach workers reported that 70 percent of the mayors in the region did not know about the law and were not interested in the council meetings, and 80 percent of the participants in the first meetings of the councils 21

Interview, Guadalajara, April 28, 2006.

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did not know about the law either, attending only in the hope of receiving resources (Cartagena Ticona et al. 2005: 362). The study found few advances toward effective decentralization and participation, in part because of the ‘institutional and cultural context’ which was the product of: a state–society relationship based on authoritarianism and clientelist and corporatist relationships. As a result in all levels of government there is a pattern of simulation . . . in which, depending on the requirements of the official discourse, each level or official informs their immediate superior that the process is developing normally, in accordance with the law. Social participation in the municipal sustainable development councils has been very limited and tends strongly to be illegitimate. The constitution and operation of the councils has been until now under the responsibility of actors external to the municipalities, mainly the municipal coordinators, since there has not been an efficient process of dissemination of the law nor outreach to the social actors that could generate local leadership that could push this space to promote participation in development decision-making (Cartagena Ticona et al. 2005: 393, emphasis in original).

This study’s methods permitted robust generalization about the trends among the region’s eighteen municipalities. The new rural development research center of the national Congress also commissioned research on the municipal and district councils in selected states (e.g. CEDRRSA 2006). This report confirms the extraordinary administrative complexity emphasized by Merino and Macedo, as does a study of the new federal law through the lens of the implications for the Michoacan state government (Chapela 2006). In Veracruz, the CEDRRSA study did not find significant social participation in either the municipal or district councils (2006). The mayor’s role as council president proves significant, as noted by a mid-level Agriculture Ministry official in the Zongólica region: Yes, the projects are discussed in the Council, but . . . the Municipal President has a lot of influence over the others. If in the past there were ‘godfathered’ projects, now they really are, by the mayor. We cannot deny that they are politically handled, the municipal president insists that he made a commitment to a certain community and he is going to do everything he can to pull it off, because he made a campaign promise (CEDRRSA 2006: 91).

In most of the municipalities studied, however, the mayors were simply unaware of the new federal agriculture law, while in others the councils reportedly were inclusionary and rendered accounts to the citizens. In Xoxocotla, for example, the council members are elected, women as well as men, including the municipal agents, block judges, and leaders of producer organizations (CEDRRSA 2006: 229). In other

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municipalities the agents were on the council but unable to participate effectively because of lack of training and information. The report does not systematize its findings and therefore the relative weights of the different trends are not clear. Overall, the CEDRRSA report confirms Merino and Macedo’s findings insofar as ‘static forms of operation are still “dragging,” with reflex actions in which each level follows what the level immediately above does’ (2006: 243). This includes persistent state government control of funds. In Veracruz, in spite of the obligatory rule that state governments must channel at least 50% of the Rural Development Program resources to the municipalities, this scheme simply did not operate. The cases reported in this study show that the failures were not at the municipal level, but rather at the state level, and to some degree also at the federal level, given its role as supervisor of compliance with the rules. In the municipalities, with all the doubts and errors that come with inexperience, they complied with all the required rules and the councils selected the projects and prioritized the use of funds that they were assigned. In contrast, the role of the state level agency (INVEDER) left much to be desired and revealed how difficult it will be for the municipalities and the Councils to take away its power to decide how to use those resources. (CEDRRSA 2006: 250)

A World Bank study of the municipal rural development councils draws similar conclusions, stressing the role of selective information access for biasing access to federal funds. The complexity of the rules makes it also difficult for potential beneficiaries to understand the characteristics of the programs. Hence, they tend to rely on information from intermediaries . . . Complexity, thus, by militating against dissemination, reinforces clientelistic ties and discriminates against those who, because of educational level, time constraints or remote location, have less access to information. (Caballero 2005a: 13)

This same report goes on to point out structural weaknesses in the councils: . . . they are mostly confined to act as passive recipients of atomized requests from local producers, and as disseminators to their communities . . . of government rules and instructions. . . . (M)ore often than not councils are dominated by presidentes municipales, technical coordinators or members representing SAGARPA or the state’s [government] rural administration. . . . Councils, thus, often behave as arms of government (municipal, state, federal) rather than as constructions of rural society. . . . Members from ejidos and communities, who are the majority of civil society participants in most councils, rotate frequently, usually every year. This makes it very difficult for them to understand the purpose and workings of the councils, assimilate the basic rules of the programs, and participate effectively. (Caballero 2005a: 32)

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The World Bank released an abridged version of this study to the public, both in English and Spanish, but without any of this assessment, including the entire section on transparency (Caballero 2005b). As in the cases of all the other regional councils, only more systematic comparative data, combining institutional ethnography with surveys of participants, in larger, more representative samples would permit stronger generalizations about the relative weights of the different trends. However, in the case of the Municipal Councils for Sustainable Rural Development, it is difficult to conclude that they have become spaces for state–society power-sharing in more than a small minority of cases. So far, the evidence suggests that they lack both the breadth of inclusion as well as the autonomy and capacity needed to be effective deliberative agents of agricultural policy.

Conclusions This chapter explored the dynamics of power-sharing at the state– society interface by reviewing the available evidence regarding pluralistic inclusion and decision-making power in six different kinds of regional rural development councils. Though the empirical evidence is uneven and incomplete, and regional variation is consistently significant, Tables 8.2 and 8.3 summarize the broad trends that emerge. Table 8.2 compares the state–society power-sharing opportunities, according to each program’s formal institutional design. In principle, most are supposed to include representation of producer organizations, and the councils are officially to be able to participate in decisions about how to allocate program investment funds in their regions. However, in few cases is there evidence that broader program operations and decision-making processes are transparent to regional council members. 22 In addition, in almost all the cases, state governments retained veto power over council decisions, whether directly, through their representation on the councils, or indirectly, through their power over disbursements for projects that councils selected for funding. For example, in the case of PRODERS, 22 The transparency assessments in Table 8.1 are based on reviews of officially public program documents, manuals, and interviews within policymakers, consultants, regional indigenous and peasant leaders, and nongovernment public interest groups. Most of this research was carried out primarily in the context of collaboration with the NGO Trasparencia, which was most active in partnership with regional organizations in Oaxaca and the Huasteca region between 1997 and 2002 (see Chapter 6).

Table 8.2 Comparison of power-sharing opportunities across Mexican rural development programs (according to formal procedures) Federal programs Regional Food Councils (Diconsa, since 1980) Regional Funds (INI since 1989) Municipal Funds (Sedesol 1990–8) Protected Areas Advisory Councils (Semarnat, since 1992) Regional Councils for Rural Development in Marginal Areas (Sagarpa 1998–2002) Regional Sustainable Development Councils (Semarnat, since 1996) Municipal Sustainable Rural Development Councils (Sagarpa since 2002)

Community level committees

Council seats for regional social organizations

Council control over resource allocation decisions

Program transparency to beneficiaries

State government veto power over council decisions

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

No

Partial Yes Limited

Yes No Yes

They propose They propose They propose

Limited No Partial

No Yes No

Partial

Yes

They propose

No

Yes

No

Yes

They propose

Limited

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

Limited

Yes

Table 8.3

Regional councils compared: State–society power-sharing outcomes

Regional Food Councils (Diconsa, since 1980) Regional Funds (INI since 1989) Municipal Funds (Sedesol 1990–8) Protected Areas Advisory Councils (Semarnat since 1992) Regional Councils for Rural Development in Marginal Areas (Sagarpa 1998–2002) Regional Sustainable Development Councils (Semarnat since 1996) Municipal Sustainable Rural Development Councils (Sagarpa since 2002)

Regional councils sustained over time

National meetings of regional councils held

Majority of councils with degree of autonomy from federal agency

Significant minority of councils gained degree of autonomy (as of 2006)

Evidence of partial accountability impacts on the national program

Cases of spillover effects that encouraged autonomous social organization

Yes

Six

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

?

No

Yes

No

Yes

No

No

No

Yes

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

No

No

No

One

No

No

No

No

Yes

Two

No

No

No

No

Yes

No

No

No

No

No

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. . . (U)nder the chair of the state government, the councils were to bring together all the actors from the key society groups, though the hierarchical structure is clearly visible. The attempt was to find a locus for the councils within . . . Mexico’s federal structure. If this had not been the case, the councils would have represented a threat to state governors, ministries and planning authorities, and would not have been allowed to exist. (Blauert and Dietz 2004: 36)

The first general conclusion, then, is that since almost all of Mexico’s state governments are consistently hostile to autonomous regional social and civic organization in the countryside, state government veto power over the composition, decisions, and capacities of the regional councils turned out to be a systemic problem from the point of view of their potential for state–society power-sharing. While Table 8.2 focuses on process, Table 8.3 compares actual outcomes, focusing on the degree to which councils actually changed the balance of power between state and society within their regional domains. In half the cases the regional council programs did not survive broader policy changes. In most cases the regional councils never met at the national level, and therefore lacked even the possibility of policy dialogue with their government counterparts at the national level. Chapter 9 will explore the limits and possibilities of such national meetings in the context of the Community Food Councils. The second broad conclusion is that in no case did the majority of the regional councils gain a significant degree of autonomy from the federal program they were part of. Much more systematic comparative field-based research would be needed to measure the following finding with precision, but the evidence available does support the proposition that at best a significant minority of the councils gained autonomy and then only in three of the seven programs. In each of these three programs, the village food stores, the indigenous development funds, and the municipal development councils, at least dozens of councils contributed to encouraging increased governmental responsiveness and accountability (as detailed in the historic example of the Community Food Councils’ democratizing impact detailed in Chapters 3 and 4). It is probably not a coincidence that they were the three programs that also generated some cases of spillover effects, in the sense of encouraging other forms of scaled-up, regionwide autonomous social and civic organization. Moreover, only the Community Food Councils managed to generate national level policy impacts and accountability effects. Their most important impact was to successfully block efforts by the Treasury Ministry to end the program, most notably in 1999, as

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well as their veto of the sale of imported corn through the village store network (see Chapter 9). Clearly the results in terms of actual power-sharing were uneven in most cases, but the degree of exclusion varied significantly. Differences include both varied degrees and scales of transparency and participation, as well as varied informal relationships between state and societal actors. On the society side, one of the key variables was the capacity and willingness of social organizations to engage with the opportunities for participation. On the state side, the key variables included whether there were regional representative bodies, as well as their degree of oversight and decision-making capacity. In all cases the degree of power-sharing generated in practice depended heavily on the presence of a de facto faction within the implementing agency, both at the top and at middle levels, that was willing to take the risks inherent in partnering with autonomous social organizations. This suggests the third broad finding, that institutional reforms that appear to be enabling may not be. Institutional design clearly matters, as in the systematic problem of state government veto power. But such programs also need to be unpacked in terms of their actual coverage, to document whether or not they were actually implemented, and by what kinds of actors. In the case of the INI Regional Funds and the Community Food Councils, much of program outreach was carried out to a significant degree by a cadre of nonpartisan, pro-empowerment grassroots organizers with esprit de corps and support from a faction of national program administrators. In contrast, when the Social Development Ministry called for municipal councils to allocate their social funds, or when the Agriculture Ministry convened regional, and then municipal councils to deliberate over investment funds, in those cases such efforts were decreed by policymakers rather than actively promoted by organizers who could actually offer incentives to alreadyexisting organizations to overcome their ‘rational wariness’ and engage with the state. Yet if one looks more closely at the political dynamics within those programs that did create some space for power-sharing, the results suggest that the high-level policymakers who are willing to invest political capital in promoting state–society power-sharing have extremely limited, and often transitory influence. The Environment Ministry’s regional councils were often inclusionary, but their high level allies were unable to allocate more than symbolic budgetary resources, had great difficulty leveraging intended counterpart funds from other agencies, and did not survive the change in national government. When the indigenous Regional Funds exercised autonomy, they tended to find themselves on the defensive, and over time governors

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gained increased leverage over the indigenous affairs agency that funded them. As Chapter 9 will show, the Community Food Councils program experienced several waves of autonomous organizing, and several states have consolidated blocks of autonomous councils; only occasionally have they found allies among national level program administrators. Yet as Chapters 3 and 6 suggested, institutional reforms that encourage empowerment and accountability need to be driven by mutually reinforcing cross-sectoral coalitions between actors in state and society. This, together with the findings presented here, suggests that pro-reform cross-sectoral coalitions in favor of empowerment require propoor policymakers to invest their political capital, to give potential civil society counterparts clear signals, tangible incentives to engage, and some protection from backlash. This challenge underscores the fourth broad finding, that tangible support from national policymakers for the actual implementation of reforms that empower pluralistic, autonomous regional councils has been consistently limited, uneven, and transitory. For social actors who usually lack freedom of association and access to resources, it certainly matters when cracks in the system open up, but they will remain cracks and can easily close up again unless ‘virtuous circles’ are triggered that can mutually empower pro-reform actors in state and society.

................. 9

................. Accessing Accountability: Individual Versus Collective Voices1

‘Social accountability’ reforms have multiplied and spread, both within Mexico and around the world, involving diverse combinations of citizen voice, participation, and transparency to encourage institutional responsiveness. 2 Yet analysts still know very little about which specific action strategies and institutions are most likely to produce accountability in practice. This chapter asks: what kinds of institutional strategies give rural, low-income citizens effective voice in antipoverty programs? The study that follows compares ‘best-case’ examples of two very different approaches, each embedded within major national antipoverty programs. In political science, analysis of oversight institutions has been strongly influenced by a conceptual framework that distinguishes between ‘police patrol’ versus ‘fire alarm’ approaches (McCubbins and Swartz 1984; Siavelis 2000). In this view, the key distinction is between centralized public agencies that engage in ‘command and control’ style monitoring, versus more decentralized, indirect approaches that delegate the task of monitoring to citizens, who are mandated to sound the alarm when danger strikes (Smulovitz 2003). The ‘fire alarm’ image resonates with accountability politics because it literally projects the voices of citizens concerned with defending themselves or their communities from threats. Loud alarms are difficult to ignore. They also have the advantage of potentially protecting the identity of those sounding the alarm from possible reprisals 1 This chapter draws on field research projects ably carried out by Libby Haight and Felipe Hevia de la Jara in 2005 and 2006, in the context of an ongoing UC Santa Cruz-based research project on transparency in the Mexican rural development policy process. This project was funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Global Development Program. Thanks very much to Libby Haight and Raul Pacheco Vega for editorial suggestions. 2 For overviews, see Ackerman (2005) and Peruzzotti and Smulovitz (2006).

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from arsonists. At the same time, the metaphor elides key distinctions within the ‘alarm-sounding’ process and implicitly assumes that public agencies are both willing and able to respond once they are alerted. For the fire alarm metaphor to be effective at capturing how institutions respond, one must hope that a fire department is actually located nearby. The metaphor also assumes that the fire department is the solution rather than part of the problem. In other words, the police patrol and fire alarm metaphors highlight the ‘alerting’ process, without addressing the question of what kinds of incentives encourage public institutions to act in the public interest. Different kinds of alarms are needed to address multiple possible sources of institutional failure. Individual alerts to localized service providers are insufficient to address systemic problems that result from power imbalances that are located further ‘upstream’ in the policy decision-making process. The street-corner alarm box cannot ensure that the fire department has the right staff and equipment, nor is it adequate for reporting corruption in the fire department itself. Moreover, fire alarms also conflate individual with collective action involved in alerting the authorities to problems. This distinction is relevant insofar as collective action is likely to be more effective than individual alarms at holding unresponsive institutions accountable, at least for under-represented communities. The viability of different alarm strategies depends on the social and institutional context. In Mexico, for example, few crime victims call the police, for fear of being doubly victimized. In terms of public security, some rural Mexican communities responded to this challenge by creating their own, autonomous, scaled-up, locally accountable governance institutions, as the cases discussed in Chapter 7—such as the Community Police movement in Guerrero, the Good Government Councils in Chiapas, and coalitions of municipal and agrarian authorities, as in Oaxaca’s Zoogocho region. In these regions, neither conventional governmental police patrols nor fire alarms worked. To ensure public accountability, these communities elected their own autonomous police patrols. Though grounded in preexisting institutions of local self-governance, by scaling up to regional levels they constituted autonomous counterweights—new forms of ‘dual civic power’ that responded to the failure of the conventional authorities. In other regions, in contrast, rural social and civic organizations fight for accountability by trying to take advantage of cracks in existing public institutions, especially when opportunities arise for informed participation in and oversight of the policy process—as in the case of the many programs with regional councils detailed in Chapter 8.

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This chapter explores how two different ‘fire alarm’ strategies work by comparing the institutional and political dynamics of social accountability reforms within antipoverty programs—Oportunidades’ human capital investments and Diconsa’s rural store network. In a society in which 12.7 percent of children under five still suffer from chronic malnutrition, both programs clearly have a long way to go before their missions are fulfilled. 3 The accountability strategies within both programs are ‘demanddriven’, but Oportunidades’ is based on individual initiative while Diconsa’s is designed to encourage and respond to collective action. Moreover, this collective action strategy reaches beyond the local, to regional, state, and national levels. This emphasis on scale contrasts with the ‘client power’ accountability strategy promoted by the World Bank’s approach, which limits citizen empowerment to improve public service delivery to the most local level—the receiving end of policy decisions (2004). A ‘scaled-up’ approach to collective action for accountability, in contrast, has the potential to address upstream failures. Oportunidades, Mexico’s flagship social program, was intended to increase investment in human capital. Originally named Progresa when first launched in 1997, the program pioneered the ‘conditional cash transfer’ approach, which used payments to mothers to encourage families to increase their use of the government’s basic education and health services. The program built on an official discourse of ‘co-responsibility’ (Lucissano 2002, 2004). To bypass local intermediaries and ensure strict poverty targeting, the program began with a highly centralized approach to the selection of communities and means-tested individual family ‘beneficiaries’. After Mexico’s watershed 2000 election, the new government changed the program’s name to Oportunidades, and created a ‘Citizen Attention’ window to allow program participants both to register questions and to file complaints about service delivery. 4 Oportunidades also convened local committees made up of beneficiary vocales, or spokespeople, but as discussed below, the available evidence indicates that these committees represented the program to the participants, rather than vice versa (Hevia de la Jara 2007). The Rural Food Supply Program, managed by the Diconsa agency, took a different approach to co-responsibility, designating entire communities and their elected representatives as the state’s coresponsible counterparts. In the context of Chapter 8’s comparison of channels 3 This data comes from the National Health and Nutrition Survey 2006, carried out by the National Public Health Institute (cited in Cruz Martínez 2006). 4 Diconsa also has a program called ‘Citizen Attention’, operated by an ‘internal control unit’ of the Ministry of Public Administration, but its impact is unclear.

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for collective voice through deliberative regional councils, the rural food store program was the most established and most accountabilityoriented program among them. Until the late 1980s, Diconsa also operated a large-scale urban retail food store network, as a subsidiary of the National Basic Foods Company (Conasupo). Though Conasupo was dismantled in the late 1990s amidst congressional corruption investigations and as part of the government’s privatization policy, Diconsa still supplied more than 22,000 community-run village stores from its 300 regional warehouses as of 2007. 5 The Diconsa program originated in the 1970s, drawing from the left wing within Mexico’s postrevolutionary tradition, whereas the Oportunidades approach was a product of the market-oriented, individualized policy strategies of the late 1990s. 6 One could describe their two approaches to social accountability in shorthand terms as ‘old school’ versus ‘new school’. They share several key characteristics: both were geographically targeted to low-income rural communities, both were of national scope, both were administered by the same Social Development Ministry, and both reached several million families each. 7 Indeed, 72 percent of Diconsa customers surveyed were also Oportunidades participants (Guerra Ford 2005b: 154). Yet the two programs differed fundamentally in terms of their strategies for reaching people. 8 The regional council citizen oversight strategy was part of an antipoverty program that provides public goods, in the form of secure 5 Historically, Conasupo’s combination of pragmatism and flexibility allowed its intervention in grain markets to become a politically effective tool for managing conflict and reproducing the regime’s long-term stability (Grindle 1977; Ochoa 2000). On Conasupo’s privatization, see Mitchell (2001). 6 After the 2000 change in ruling party, the new leadership changed the program’s discourse to emphasize citizen rights, layered on top of the previous, more paternalistic discourse about ‘beneficiaries’. The new program leadership referred to questions and complaints from beneficiaries as ‘citizen demands’. 7 This discussion will not address Oportunidades’ post-2002 expansion into urban areas. For ethnographic analysis and urban–rural comparison of different enrollment strategies, see Hevia de la Jara (2007). 8 In economic terms, the two programs are quite complementary. As the official evaluations report, the Diconsa-supplied village stores make basic foods cheaper and more accessible than they would be otherwise (Guerra Ford et al. 2005a). They therefore increase the effective purchasing power of Oportunidades payments. Yet their relative economic impacts differ greatly. Oportunidades’ family payments are substantial in comparison to their income, whereas the village stores provide modest incremental benefits of approximately 5% savings on basic food costs to all inhabitants within the stores’ area of influence. These benefits also reach those who do not shop in the stores, insofar as they provide competition that keeps private retail prices down. In this sense Diconsa stores provide a local public good, whereas Oportunidades provides private transfer payments. The programs also differ substantially in the costs to the federal government, with federal transfers to Diconsa accounting for less than 3% of Oportunidades’ 2005 budget. Since Oportunidades spends 6% of its budget to deliver the payments and monitor beneficiaries, and Diconsa’s federal transfers cover the costs of delivering food

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community access to low-cost staple foods. To set up stores, low-income rural communities had to organize and request them. In contrast, the Oportunidades welfare payment system was targeted to individual families, as was the complaint system. In other words, the institutional nature of each channel for voice was consistent with each program’s strategy for delivering its services—collective versus individual. While Diconsa constructed its counterpart social subject in terms of a socially and territorially defined community, Oportunidades defined its counterpart in terms of individual mothers and their families. Program discourse referred to the families as ‘beneficiaries’ and to the mothers as ‘entitlement-holders’ (titulares). Yet both programs’ design presupposed that each agency would respond to participant concerns once alerted, insofar as neither accountability process was independent of each respective agency, and neither had sanctioning powers to discipline officials who violated the public trust. In other words, both accountability strategies encouraged voice but lacked teeth. This raises the question of what institutional incentives might encourage responsiveness to voice, and this is where the distinction between individual versus collective voice becomes key. These two different kinds of citizen-driven accountability strategies unfolded in a broader context in which institutionalized opportunities for public participation, deliberation, and making direct claims on the state, apart from top-down corporatist organizations, political parties, and elections, had been percolating through the Mexican state apparatus since the 1980s. This diverse array of innovations comes together under the umbrella term contraloría social, the Spanish term for ‘social accountability’ or ‘societal auditing’. 9 The concept refers to a wide range of ‘state–society interfaces’ that in principle attempt to promote civil society engagement to bolster vertical and diagonal forms of accountability. As of 2005, of at least 130 Mexican federal programs that published ‘rules of operation’, 83 included some specific reference to encouraging societal auditing (Hevia de la Jara 2006c: 19). Though the Mexican government has required regular ‘external’ evaluations of social programs since 2002, those studies have not documented whether social accountability reforms actually work. Indeed, at least until 2007, the agencies themselves determined their evaluation agendas (Fox and Haight 2007a). One can therefore conclude that the agencies that were supposed to be held accountable by contraloría social to stores, one could also compare the two programs in terms of overhead costs, in which case Oportunidades spends more than twice as much as Diconsa, in relative terms. 9 For comprehensive overviews of contraloría social in Mexico, see Hevia de la Jara (2005, 2006c, 2006e, 2007).

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reforms did not make it a priority to find out whether such innovations actually met their goals. 10 Methodologically, this chapter draws on official government evaluations and opinion surveys that have recently become public, as the result of Mexico’s evaluation and public information mandates. Because these studies were carried out either by government agencies or under contract to them, their findings are unlikely to overstate the social auditing programs’ limitations. The chapter combines institutional analysis, interviews with participants, and quantifiable indicators of participation and accountability processes. The data sources permit generalizations about nationwide patterns, and their findings are supplemented by interviews with program participants at local, regional, and national levels. The chapter’s primary method for analyzing the two programs differs, however, because of their different strategies for projecting the voices of program participants. In Oportunidades, individual complaints are analyzed with primarily quantitative indicators, whereas Diconsa’s collective voice mechanisms are better suited to institutional analysis. To frame these two programs in the broader context of Mexican state–society relations, the rural food store program and their associated regional councils embodies a classic postrevolutionary repertoire: government reformers partnered with organized social actors to encourage the mutual empowerment needed to transform state intervention. 11 In the 1980s, governmental reformers reformulated state– society partnership strategies and in some notable cases tolerated a higher degree of social actor autonomy from the ruling party, a bargaining process eventually known as concertación social. The most well-known early experience with concertación involved the bargaining between the Mexico City government and autonomous neighborhood organizations following the 1985 earthquake. In the wake of the contested 1988 election, President Salinas’s National Solidarity Program promoted a discourse of participation and co-responsibility between the state and poor people, often bypassing official corporatist 10 Until we know more about whether social accountability programs actually have an impact on the state, to refer to them in terms of ‘accountability’ involves a certain degree of wishful thinking (much as agencies like a Ministry of Justice or Public Security may or may not actually pursue their nominal goals). 11 This approach reached its high point during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940), with its promotion of land reform and worker-managed industries, and was partly revived during the reform opening under president Luis Echeverría Alvarez (1970–6). Both presidents managed widespread dissent by channeling social participation within the confines of the corporatist ruling party.

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channels while still discouraging electoral opposition. In 1991, this program formally recognized the principle of contraloría social. Yet the Mexican government’s first nationwide experience with this relatively pluralistic approach to state–society bargaining with organized poor people dates back to 1979, with Diconsa’s rural food store program (Fox 1992a).

The Diconsa Rural Food Store Program: Institutional Accountability through Collective Action The village store program was designed to support food security by making consistent supplies of low-cost basic food available to remote, low-income populations. The program was designed to regulate, rather than to replace, private food markets (where they exist). Rather than subsidize the price of food, Diconsa absorbed the operational and transportation costs involved in delivering supplies from its regional branches and warehouses to the villages. Diconsa provided approximately 22,000 village stores with basic foods, such as corn, beans, cooking oil, salt, sugar, rice, crackers, sardines, and increasingly, corn flour. The assumption behind the program was that in the absence of this market intervention, basic food supplies in remote, seasonally corn-deficit villages would either be erratic or expensive due to high transportation costs and uncompetitive local retail markets. Both official evaluations and independent field research confirmed the village stores’ pro-consumer regulatory impact. 13 As one official evaluation put it: The structures of rural markets are characterized by not being totally competitive. The opening of a private store, increasing the supply of goods, should 12 Note Harvey’s balanced analysis, which recognizes the degree to which concertación represented both a concession to popular movements and an effort to deflect them from electoral opposition (1990b). On the Solidarity program, see Bruhn (1996), Cornelius, Craig, and Fox (1994), Dresser (1991), Kaufman and Trejo (1997), and Soederberg (2001). On its ideological origins in Mexico’s social left, see Moguel (1994). For examples of Solidarity program relationships with autonomous social organizations, see Fox (1994b) and Haber (1994). 13 Two recent field studies confirmed Diconsa stores’ regulatory impact. A 2006 survey of 847 households carried out in 11 villages in Oaxaca and 2 in Chiapas found that prices in Diconsa and private stores were similar according to half the households, while just over one-third of households reported that Diconsa stores were cheaper. (Jessa Lewis, personal communication, March 14, 2007). Independent field research carried out by Libby Haight in the Chilapa region of Guerrero in June of 2005 found that in localities that lacked Diconsa stores, staples cost on average 1–3 pesos above Diconsa’s established prices. In other localities visited, prices in private stores were exactly the same as the prices in Diconsa.

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reduce prices, but this does not always occur. Therefore this should be treated as a market monopoly, in which government intervention is necessary to regulate prices through a policy that we could call ‘anchor prices,’ which would at least permit the population to have an option of relatively low average prices. (Guerra Ford 2005a: 65–7)

By 2005, the Diconsa stores reached an estimated nine million people who live in localities that were officially considered to be of ‘high or very high marginality’ (Guerra Ford 2005a: 389). Raw corn accounted for 17.9 percent of total sales (Guerra Ford 2005b: 334). Diconsa sold 62 percent of its corn in only five states: Oaxaca, Veracruz, Chiapas, Tabasco, and Puebla (Diconsa 2005c: 1–5). Diconsa stores were highly geographically targeted, focusing on lowincome rural communities. In 2005, 67.3 percent of stores were in villages (‘localities’) considered to be either high or very high ‘marginality’. 14 If one also includes villages considered to be of ‘medium marginality’, then 86 percent were located in low-income communities (Haight 2006). In spite of the ‘middle class’ implications of the term ‘medium marginality’, two-thirds of their employed inhabitants earned less than twice the daily minimum wage, equivalent to approximately US$8 (CONAPO 2001). The category ‘medium marginality’ was defined by a series of indicators that emphasize physical infrastructure rather than family poverty. The potential population served by the village stores located in communities of very high and high marginality totaled 8.8 million people (14 million if one includes those of medium marginality). The correlation was very high between each state’s level of poverty and its percentage of stores in high or very high marginality localities, as indicated in Chart 9.1. 15 By these criteria, the program was extremely well-targeted in southern Mexico, especially in indigenous regions, while most of the stores that were not well-targeted are located in northern states. The rural food store program experience is especially relevant for the analysis of social accountability because it was Mexico’s first national

14 The government’s external evaluation found a lower level of targeting because of program guidelines that excluded communities with more than 2,500 inhabitants from the official target population. Since this population ceiling had been lowered from 4,000 in 2004, many stores that were located in very low-income villages were subsequently redefined as poorly targeted. As a result of this arbitrary population ceiling, the 2005 evaluation found that only 47.8% of stores were well-targeted (Guerra Ford 2005b). Nevertheless, even according to these narrow criteria, a review of the evaluations from 2002 through 2005 shows that the pattern of poverty targeting improved over time. 15 Calculations by Haight (2006), drawing on data in Guerra Ford (2005b) and Diconsa (2005a).

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251

Degree of targeting of the Rural Food Supply Program, based on state and local marginalization indices, as of September 2005 100

2.5

90 80

1.5

70 1

Percent

60 0.5

50 0

40 −0.5

30

−1

20

−1.5

BCN

BCS Ags

DF Coah Tlax

Col Sin Nay NL Mor Chih Dgo Son

Jal Edomex Zac

Tab Hgo Mich Tamps

QR Gto Qro

Oax Chis Ver Gro Pue SLP Yuc Camp

10 0

State marginalization index (absolute)

2

−2

State % of stores located in localities with high or very high marginalization indices, as % of total stores in the state % of stores in localities with medium, high or very high marginalization indices, as % of total stores in the state State-level marginalization index, according to CONAPO (2000)

Chart 9.1. Targeting of the Rural Food Program, based on poverty levels of store localities Source: Haight (2006), based on data in Guerra Ford (2005b) and Diconsa (2005a).

social program that was designed explicitly to promote collective action by organized beneficiaries to monitor the performance of federal program operations. Village assemblies elected local store management and oversight committees, which in turn sent representative to elect regional councils to oversee warehouse operations. Program design assumed that in the absence of scaled-up stakeholder oversight, officials would be tempted to divert subsidized food to private intermediaries. The village stores provided a ‘public good’ in the economic sense of offering reliable, open access to low-cost staple foods to the entire community, both directly through sales and indirectly through competition with private outlets. This ‘public good’ service created a communitywide material incentive for collective action. Program failures were especially transparent to stakeholders, since they took the

252

Accessing Accountability National Coordinating Committee

Central Offices Multi-region Distribution Centers

State-level Councils

Regional Warehouses

Community Food Councils

Individual Stores

Community Food Committees

Figure 9.1. Diconsa: administration and representation

form of unreliable or substandard food deliveries. 16 In principle, the regional oversight councils were able to keep track of inventory if and when it reached the warehouse. The food supply councils were also organized into statewide networks, though most of the state councils did not appear to be autonomous from the agency. Council delegates also elected a national coordinating council to negotiate directly with Diconsa management. As illustrated in Figure 9.1, the program’s management structure was paralleled by counterpart layers of representation at each level. The degrees of each representative body’s internal democracy and autonomy from the agency changed over time and varied widely in different regions and states, as discussed further below. The process of representation within these official channels for participation was marked by the program’s origins. In its early years, reformist program managers created a rare opportunity for regional collective action that was relatively free from the control of the ruling party. This opening was encouraged by the program’s initial staffing, which recruited hundreds of nonpartisan community organizers to help launch the committees and the councils. Though they often worked in authoritarian contexts, the program’s federal imprimatur gave the community organizers room for maneuver—symbolized by the government seal prominently emblazoned on their trucks: ‘Federal Executive Power’. In many regions, the Diconsa warehouse became a ‘free space’, permitting regional freedom of assembly and association— often for the first time. 17 This opening in turn allowed the food council 16 Diconsa considers local store managers and the staff who deliver the food from warehouses to the villages work to be ‘community staff ’ rather than employees, in order to encourage them to be accountable to the communities served (and to avoid paying public sector union wages and benefits). 17 On the key role of ‘free spaces’ for autonomous collective action, see Evans and Boyte (1986).

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253

leaders to find common ground on other issues, and many spun off autonomous producer organizations. 18 While most food councils’ limited focus on improving program operations and community economic development reflected their generally collaborative approach to Diconsa management, the more autonomous councils repeatedly proved willing and able to engage in confrontational tactics. During the first wave of national food council mobilization, in 1985 and 1986, approximately one-third of the food councils were tangibly autonomous of Diconsa management (Fox 1992a: 194). They regularly engaged in mass direct action to protest inadequate quantity and quality of basic food supplies, and to hold Diconsa functionaries accountable for broken promises. 19 For twenty-five years, food councils repeatedly occupied or blockaded Diconsa company offices when faced with unresponsive or corrupt managers. 20 Management repeatedly purged grassroots outreach staff seen as too sympathetic to the more autonomous councils. The key arena for contestation was usually at the regional level, where councils had the greatest oversight capacity and clout. Sometimes the more autonomous food councils were also able to come together at the state level, though government ‘divide-and-conquer’ tactics usually prevented them from gaining a clear majority of the councils. The autonomous food councils, though not overtly politicized and therefore little noticed by urban intellectuals, were among Mexico’s most significant national peasant and indigenous movements of the 1980s (Fox and Gordillo 1989). During the Salinas presidency (1988–94), managers of the National Social Enterprise Fund (FONAES), an agency tasked with bolstering community-based economic enterprises, were both sympathetic to the Diconsa program’s participatory vision and were interested in reinforcing nonpartisan channels of ‘concertation’ between state reformists and the rural 18 These experiences have been studied most in the state of Guerrero. See Bartra (1994, 2000), and Fox (1992a). 19 As Arcadio Morales, the leader of the first wave of Oaxaca’s Food Councils put it: ‘many program supervisors think that they are the ones organizing us . . . but it’s we who have organized ourselves, based on our own needs . . . and if we have been able to advance with our organization, it is because no political parties or religious creeds are involved. . . . What’s going on is that the communities have lost faith in many of the government agencies . . . (El Día, March 24, 1984: 6). 20 For example, in 1988, 500 peasants from 280 communities in Yucatan took over the main Diconsa offices to demand the firing of the manager, who they charged with corruption, causing lack of corn supply for two weeks. Even after he ostensibly presented his resignation ‘ejidatarios declined to give up the Conasupo headquarters, including twenty trucks belonging to the rural program, because the resignation had not yet been officially announced, and above all, because Diconsa had yet to meet their other demands, including the normalization of corn supply’ (Vega Martínez 1988).

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poor. Diconsa and FONAES officials convened the first official ‘congress’ of national food councils in 1992, followed by national meetings in 1993 and 1994. In 1994, the Councils also began a process of organizational conversion into ‘civil associations’, a more autonomous status that allowed them to receive funding from FONAES for production and marketing projects. The national meetings in 1999, 2001, and 2006 were convened by the food councils themselves, through their new national coordinating network, though in coordination with Diconsa managers. For an example of the public discourse used by the more autonomous food councils, consider the following protest statement, published as an insert in the national newspaper La Jornada. Thirteen of the Oaxaca councils—about half of the state’s total—addressed their demands to Mexico’s president, the Social Development minister, to the governor, and to other food councils (notably not mentioning Diconsa management). They charged: The Community Food Councils of the state of Oaxaca that sign here register our deepest dissatisfaction with the grave situation caused by the lack of supply of products for our basic needs, above all corn, in the marginalized rural communities of our state. This situation further worsens the already precarious living standards and pushes the rural population dangerously close to situations of social instability. (La Jornada, January 30, 1996: 21)

This last line is an example of a discursive device often used by more moderate Mexican social organizations, in an effort to gain clout by signaling the threat of greater militancy if their concerns are not addressed. The statement continued: we publicly denounce Diconsa management, who instead of dealing with the supply problems, dedicate themselves to their mean-spirited desire to defend their own interests, carrying out a policy of sowing division within the communities in our organization, in an effort to silence our voice’s just call for dignified food supply for our communities. . . . If our demands are not resolved, that will demonstrate Diconsa management’s lack of political will to establish the necessary agreements through dialogue and concertation, with respect for the principles of the population’s co-responsibility and participation in the definition and leadership of initiatives for their own development, contradicting in practice the policies of the President of the Republic, Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León.

This last line combines both the councils’ appropriation of official ‘pro-participation’ discourse, in an effort to hold state managers 21

For a rare independent study of FONAES, see Pérez Yarahuán (2003).

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255

accountable for their hypocrisy, while also following the long-standing Mexican political tradition of appealing to the higher authority and legitimacy of the ostensibly benevolent president when faced with unresponsive officials. 22 Corn quality issues have provoked protest ever since the beginning of the rural food program. Much of Diconsa’s stock has been imported from the USA, #2 yellow corn, which is considered animal feed. In the early 1990s, the food councils challenged the government policy of promoting the substitution of grain-based corn dough by industrially manufactured corn flour. They called for support from the ruling party’s National Peasant Confederation (CNC) to stop ‘this authoritarian move by the Ministry of Trade and Industry, which is an attack on rural communities’ culture and customs’ (Pérez 1993). For two decades, the councils campaigned for Diconsa to supply domestic white corn, with limited results. Finally, as part of the 2003 agreement signed in response to the broad-based ‘The Countryside Won’t Take Anymore’ protest movement, the president committed Diconsa to procure exclusively Mexican-grown white corn for the village stores, and to buy from organized producers—though this did not end the councils’ complaints about inconsistent corn supply and quality. 23 The food councils’ combined consistently moderate goals with occasionally radical tactics. For example, while most observers of Oaxaca social movements considered the state’s food councils to have been tamed back in the late 1980s, in 2001 2,000 members blocked federal highways for 8 hours and took over the Diconsa offices. According to a news report, they called for the firing of the Oaxaca state program manager: ‘the dissidents accused the functionary of dividing the councils and repressing staff who questioned his acts’ (Ríos and Ruíz 2001). 24 The rural food program’s level of federal support ebbed and flowed over time. Diconsa went through five different general managers 22 Shortly thereafter, following a statewide meeting of Guerrero’s 15 Food Councils, 55 councils published a statement protesting food price increases, including the slogan ‘we don’t want yellow corn and old beans!’ Their ambitious demands also included: extending the government’s milk program to indigenous communities, larger and timely deliveries of white corn to the villages, a national campaign for a million signatures to defend the rural economy and preparation for a national meeting of village store committees (La Jornada, March 13, 1996: 38). 23 Consider, for example, a case in San Luis Potosí when members of the community food committees took over the warehouse to protest Diconsa’s delivery of 800 tons of rotten corn. They demanded and received the resignation of the Diconsa manager (La Jornada de San Luis 2005). 24 Detailed patterns, trends, and impacts of Community Food Council protests have not been systematically documented.

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during the six years of the Vicente Fox presidency, suggesting that the agency was a low priority (e.g. Pastrana 2002). Following the sharp spike in rural poverty caused by the 1994–5 peso crisis, in contrast, the federal government used Diconsa’s extensive national coverage of low income rural communities to cushion the blow, as Chart 9.2 indicates. 25 Federal budget transfers to Diconsa more than tripled between 1994 and 1996. 26 During that same period, however, a new national social policy strategy gained influence. Then Undersecretary of Finance for Spending Santiago Levy argued strongly that generalized food subsidies should be replaced by income transfer programs that were both geographically targeted and family means-tested. The new strategy— then known as the Education, Health, and Food Program (Progresa)— gave mothers regular welfare payments in exchange for their children’s school attendance and participation in health programs. Though most Diconsa stores were geographically targeted—located in villages considered to be of ‘high or very high marginality’—Levy considered the program to be a generalized subsidy, putting it in the same category as the Mexico City-focused tortilla program, which reached urban consumers (Levy and Rodríguez 2006: 216–17). He persuaded the cabinet to eliminate grain subsidies for urban consumers and to invest heavily in Progresa, which became the government’s flagship social program. The Finance Ministry managed to significantly reduce Diconsa’s budget, as Chart 9.2 indicates, but was unable to eliminate the program. 27 Rather than resist this attack, Diconsa management proposed closing stores in communities with more than 4,000 inhabitants, ostensibly in the name of improved sociogeographic targeting—regardless of whether their official poverty levels were high. Other Diconsa staff alerted food councils to the Finance Ministry plan to cut the program, and the councils mobilized legislative allies in Mexico’s first ever opposition-dominated congress (Pastrana 1999a, 1999b). Within Diconsa and the Social Development Ministry, the most senior advocates of community participation and representation were 25 On the increase in rural poverty during this period, see Fox and Aranda (1996a). 26 Because the Diconsa program is primarily paid for by its own sales, its costs to the federal government were always relatively modest, especially when compared to the government’s generalized subsidies for urban corn, tortilla, and wheat consumption during this period (for details, see Levy and Rodriguez 2004: 206). 27 These cuts followed the dismantling of most, but not all of the National Basic Food Company. Conasupo’s other two targeted programs, the means-tested urban milk and tortilla distribution programs, also survived initially. Though the tortilla program was eliminated early in the Fox administration, the milk program continued—and was used to provide electoral support to the PRI (FUNDAR 2006).

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257

Federal transfers to Diconsa, S.A. de C.V. (1982--2005)∗ Deflated to 2000 pesos 4,500,000 Total federal transfers spent by Diconsa 4,000,000

Thousands of Pesos

3,500,000 3,000,000 2,500,000 2,000,000 1,500,000 1,000,000 500,000

181,233 0 1982

1984

1986

1988

1990

1992

1994

1996

1998

2000

2002

2004

Year

Chart 9.2. Federal budget transfers to Diconsa (1982–2005) Source: Public Accounts data, provided by the Finance Ministry, UnderSecretariat of Spending, June 10, 2005. Note: the data for 2005 reflects only authorized spending and was not deflated. Thanks to Libby Haight for locating and analyzing this data.

relieved of command during this period. As Carlos Rojas, President Zedillo’s former Social Development Minister (and previously senior strategist for the Solidarity program) put it: Beginning in 1998, the President stopped supporting the program. Now [under the PAN] officials see the stores as part of the government, not the community. . . . I always promoted the idea that the stores belonged to the community. Is it a crime to use the trucks that are returning empty to transport their coffee? For me, clearly no, but for them, yes. 28

According to Luis Tames, Diconsa’s head of Operations from 1997 to 1999: The program for us implied a pact with the people, with organized consumers. . . . We were a different left, in [Diconsa] Operations, supporting 28 Interview with Libby Haight, Mexico City, August 24, 2005. Note that his period in charge of the Social Development Ministry, in the mid-1990s, coincides with the highest ever budget allocations to Diconsa.

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community organization. But you end up squashed by the powerful. . . . That’s why we organized the national congresses [of food councils]. . . . We wanted to organize the campesinos independently, to be self-managed actors. We sought a new social pact for food supply. . . . We were a non-PRI left. . . . But when the PANistas came, everything changed. Before we went to the warehouse takeovers to negotiate a way out, we never saw them as illegal acts. Now the damn PANistas come with their lawyers up front. They don’t negotiate with the people, they want to punish them. All this about sticking to the rules is a PANista tool for changing the rules of the game. 29

Nevertheless, the program survived. Most of the food councils had been in a lull during the 1990s, but according to María José Arrellano— who, after serving as former village store manager and regional council leader, was elected National Coordinator of the Consejos, from 1999 to 2005: [W]hen the Finance Ministry’s attack came, we wanted to organize really well to defend the program. . . . We went to the media, to social organizations and to Congress. . . . We said ‘if we are partners with Sedesol, then Sedesol is our partner too, so let us speak, we want Sedesol to listen to us. . . . We sent a document with thousands of signatures to Congress to demand the budget. That’s when they began to talk about closing stores and ending up with only 11,000. . . . That’s why we organized the 4th National Congress of the Community Food Councils. . . . They obliged us to cancel plans for the congress twice, because they were afraid that we were going to make a lot of noise in response to the attack. Finally we held it in Nuevo Leon, with two important results. First, we changed the rules so that the council leadership could serve three years instead of two [to allow for continuity and learning], and to overlap with mayors’ terms. The second important result was the creation of the National Coordination, with three representatives from each region (North, South, and Center). There were two previous sets of national leaders, but the company got rid of them. 30

Representatives of the councils threatened to block highways before meeting with congressional leaders, who they warned ‘We can’t tell the folks who to vote for, but we can tell them who not to vote for . . . ’ (Pastrana 1999b: 8, emphasis added). This approach suggests that equating the official structure of council representation with conventional top-down corporatism would be an oversimplification. The 1999 national meeting called not only for the defense of the program, but for raising the ‘right to food’ to the level of a constitutional right and for the inclusion of the councils in Diconsa and the Social Development 29 30

Interviews with Libby Haight, Mexico City, February 2006. Interview with Libby Haight, Mexico City, July 25, 2005.

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259 31

Ministry’s national level decision-making processes. Diconsa’s unsympathetic then director in 2000, Juan Francisco Mora Anaya, recognized their impact: [t]he Community Food Councils campaigned in the Senate and Chamber of Deputies, and since then it’s been clear that [budget cuts and stores closings] could provoke a social conflict. There was a plan to do that but it was not carried out . . . it was logical, but it did not go forward. Once the affected villagers learned about the plan they began to oppose it. There were protests and marches in the communities, because they are very well organized around their stores. They don’t belong to the Social Development Ministry, they belong to the communities, and they mobilized. (Ballinas 2000).

As a result of this organized response, in spite of historically low levels of federal budget transfers, the number of rural stores even grew after 2000. The councils’ mass mobilization and lobbying sent a powerful signal about stakeholders’ willingness and capacity to defend the program from both neoliberal policymakers and hostile operational managers. Senior Finance Ministry policymakers still considered the program to constitute unfair competition with the private sector, but they had to live with it ‘because the Community Food Councils are very powerful, politically speaking . . . above all the ones from Guerrero, Puebla and Oaxaca, they have a strong capacity to mobilize people.’ 32 The councils’ mobilization went beyond the defense of the program, in an effort to influence its operating rules, and they pushed for a seat on Diconsa’s national board of directors. As Mauricio Martínez Ramírez, representative of Oaxaca’s Laollaga council observed, that access would allow ‘greater oversight of the spending of resources, but not influence over their allocation’. He went on to observe ‘the word subsidy makes their hair stand on end. . . . We don’t care what they call it—our concern is with guaranteeing the corn supply, in the quantity and quality required, at fair prices for the consumer’ (Ríos 1999: 63). Back in the mid-1980s, Diconsa management brought in PRI operatives to weaken the more autonomous councils (Fox 1992a). But by 31 For details, see Comisión de Prensa de los Consejos Comunitarios de Abasto (1999). In their 2006 congress, the councils reiterated their demand for inclusion in ministeriallevel policy decisions. 32 Pablo Reyes, Director General de Programación y Presupuesto ‘B’, Treasury Ministry, interview with Libby Haight, Mexico City, May 25, 2005. Trained as a University of Chicago economist, Reyes was convinced that the store program ‘distorted’ prices because its subsidy of the costs of bringing basic foods to remote villages made it a ‘disloyal competitor’ with the private sector. Program advocates, in contrast, claimed that the program provided alternatives to otherwise uncompetitive private stores.

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the late 1990s, PRI leaders saw the councils as more of a constituency than a threat, and council links with congressional leaders turned out to be crucial for defending the program against the Finance Ministry. Oaxaca offers a key case for considering different kinds of council power. While they steered clear of the political opposition, Oaxaca councils had influence over food policy at state and national levels. Oaxaca alone accounted for 20 percent of national Diconsa corn sales, in part because the councils had received supplemental working capital from the state government, which in turn allowed the stores to provide more corn to their communities, which in turn bolstered their constituency. This relationship reflected a combination of cooptation and effective bargaining that would be difficult to disentangle without further research. Shortly before the 2004 governor’s elections, an internal Social Development Ministry assessment considered twenty of the state’s thirty councils to be part of the PRI electoral effort. 33 This could be read in two different ways. On the one hand, nonpartisan federal officials considered two-thirds of the councils to be incorporated into the state level PRI machine. On the other hand, they recognized that a third of the councils had managed to resist the PRI’s entreaties. The difficulty of making assumptions about how councils make decisions based on their external affiliations is reflected in a comment by the former national coordinator of the councils: ‘In Oaxaca . . . what they do is they negotiate with who they have to negotiate with, and then they do whatever they want . . . ’ 34 The PRI’s use of the Oaxaca councils was part of the governor’s strategy to co-opt a vast array of social and political organizations, including many that had once been associated with the opposition and some that later became part of the 2006 civic resistance. 35 This pattern is a reminder that co-optation is neither unconditional nor indefinite. 33 This confidential document was prepared by a mid-level field operative of the Social Development Ministry in Oaxaca, who was also an author of a study that included this description of the role of the Food Councils: ‘Led by the current Federal Congressman Manuel García Corpus, they began to receive support from Sedesol programs in 2003, which were used for political purposes. In 2004 the resources were used openly in support of the PRI’s candidate for state governor. Sedesol resources were used to strengthen the governor’s control over Diconsa in Oaxaca. . . . The State Planning Council generates a budget allocation as Community Food Councils but in reality the resources are distributed by Federal Congressman Manuel García Corpus’ (Anonymous 2004, Fox and Haight 2007b). 34 María José Arrellano, interview with Libby Haight, Mexico City, July 25, 2005. 35 For example, the same Sedesol document includes details how the Nueva Izquierda Oaxaqueña, led by Flavio Sosa, received funds as part of a strategy to divide the left’s electoral opposition (Anonymous 2004). His subsequent return to the opposition led to his arrest, becoming ‘the first political prisoner of the presidential term’ (Hernández Navarro 2006d).

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Moreover, as it turned out, an alliance with the PRI within the arena of state politics did not limit their willingness and capacity to defend the program vis-à-vis Diconsa management, the Finance Ministry, and the congress. By 2006, the Oaxaca councils had regained a degree of autonomy; the new leader of Oaxaca’s statewide council network confirmed that they had worked with their congressional allies to defend the program. In his view, [Diconsa management] never wants to meet with us because of their bourgeois interests. . . . We are the ones who oversee the program to make sure it works well, we are societal auditors (contralores sociales), together but not mixed up. . . . [When Diconsa pays too much for the food] it’s either because they’re too stupid or too corrupt. . . . We defended the state manager in Oaxaca because they wanted to impose a PANista from Mexico City. Up on top [in the federal government] their attitude was very closed, but now they respond because we get together. . . . [President] Fox wanted to disappear the program. We’ve gotten to this point because the communities pressure. 36

He also charged that Oaxaca’s councils were underrepresented within their official national network: ‘there is racism from Mexico City to the north of the Republic, they feel superior, they feel rich and white. It’s cost us’. He also took some of the credit for the unprecedented congressional decision to increase Diconsa’s 2006 budget: sometimes we are very good at knocking on doors . . . we have some friends who are federal congressmen, and we have known them since they were state congressmen . . . of the thirty councils in the state, ten are very savvy. Another third are under control [of Diconsa], they just raise their hand. 37

Oaxacan congressional representatives were strategically located, presiding over both the Social Development Commission and the congressional leadership as a whole. According to the leader of the National Coordination of Food Councils, Enrique Pérez, The Deputies from Oaxaca helped a lot. [Congress] initially approved M$750 million for the food supply program—not for investment, just for operations. We ended up with M$1250 million, including M$200 million earmarked for the vehicle fleet. . . . The councils’ 31 state representatives went to the Congress three times. . . . The Oaxacan councils had the connection with congress. 38 36 Interview, Celso Avendaño Chavez, state coordinator of Oaxaca councils, Guadajalara, March 2006. 37 Interview, Celso Avendaño Chavez, state coordinator of Oaxaca councils, Guadajalara, March 2006. Note how his assessment differed from the Social Development Ministry’s internal document cited above—his focus was on council autonomy vis-à-vis Diconsa, rather than autonomy vis-à-vis the PRI. 38 Interview, Oaxaca, with Libby Haight, December 2005.

262 Table 9.1 program

Accessing Accountability Community Food Council member views of Diconsa rural food

Members with direct responsibility with program management and oversight Councils that met monthly or bimonthly in the past year Complete membership attendance at council meetings Councils that met fewer than three times in the past year Average number of meetings annually Members who report program food supply is satisfactory Members who report lack of food supply as number one problem Members who report access to warehouse sales and price margin data Councils that report to community assemblies Members with less than one year experience Members with more than two years experience Members who received training Average age Members who are female

Table 9.2

81% 63% 38% 19% 7.9 86% 10% 62% 59% 50% 35% 62% 43.5 19%

Rural Food Committee members’ views of Diconsa program

Committee holds assemblies Frequency of assemblies every two weeks Committee addresses issues not related to food supply Committee consults with community about what decisions to make Committee participates in the oversight of the store Do you know where store 5% markup from sales goes? Committee participates by proposing alternatives to solve problems Assessment of Committee functioning: good, so-so vs. bad Members who receiving training Average age Members who are female

64% 46% 17% 50% 60% 58% 44% 59%, 25%, 11% 35% 41.5 39%

In the process, the program not only survived, it provided a wellreceived service relatively consistently, and the community participation processes actually functioned in many regions—according to the official external evaluations carried out by the National College of Economists (Guerra Ford 2005a, 2005b). They included large-scale surveys of three distinct sets of participants: store customers, members of village committees, and regional councils. Table 9.1 shows that among regional council members, 81 percent reported that they had direct responsibility for program management and oversight, 63 percent met monthly or bimonthly, 62 percent reported access to warehouse sales and price margin information, and 59 percent reported to community assemblies. Table 9.2 shows that among the village committee

Accessing Accountability Table 9.3

263

Village store customer views of Diconsa program

Customers who shop mainly at Diconsa stores Main reason: cheaper products/closest store The store has benefited the community a lot, a little or not at all Diconsa store prices are cheaper than local alternatives Diconsa store prices are similar to local alternatives Diconsa store product quality is good, so-so, poor Takes less than 15 minutes to get to the store If there was no Diconsa store in the community, would have to travel to buy basic foods Knows what the Rural Food Supply Committee is Community participates in the selection of representatives on committee Knows how often the committee meets Knows what the committee does

84% 47%, 33% 67%, 24%, 4% 59% 34% 80%, 19%, 1% 93% 50% 86% 66% 57% 66%

Source: Guerra Ford (2005a, Chapters 3 and 8)39

members, 60 percent reported that they participated in store oversight, 66 percent held regular assemblies, 46 percent met every two weeks, and 17 percent addressed issues not related to food supply. Table 9.3 shows that, remarkably, 66 percent of villagers surveyed reported that the community participated in the selection of the store oversight committee and 57 percent even knew how often they met. Table 9.3 also shows that among customers surveyed, 59 percent reported that prices were cheaper than alternatives (34 percent say they were similar— which is consistent with the expectation that the program’s presence regulated private retail prices). The program’s participatory processes were highly institutionalized. According to the official evaluations, the vast majority of regional councils carried out their formal duties, such as regular meetings, handling stores’ orders of nonbasic foods and reporting on the community stores’ own separate capital accounts to the Diconsa warehouse managers. The councils clearly functioned as routine co-managers of the food program. Yet the official procedural compliance and survey data are insufficient for understanding whether the councils had the autonomy and capacity to hold Diconsa accountable for program performance. Diconsa controlled the ‘external’ evaluation agenda, and therefore the studies assessed the councils only in terms of their compliance with 39 According to one of the CNE evaluators, it is the practice of the Social Development Ministry to tell the ‘external’ evaluators which communities they should study (interview, Libby Haight, Mexico City, October 25, 2005) Their rationale was to avoid the problem of evaluators going only to easy-to-reach communities, but the practice could be used to steer evaluators away from problem areas.

264 Table 9.4 2006

Accessing Accountability Mapping Community Food Councils: autonomy and capacity as of

CCA degree of autonomy from Diconsa: High

Partial

Dependent

CCAs active, with impact Durango, Guerrero (Montaña), Tabasco, Yucatán Chiapas (Selva, Altos, Sierra), Nuevo León, Oaxaca, Sinaloa, Veracruz

CCAs active, with limited impact Hidalgo (Huasteca), Puebla (Sierra Norte, Mixteca) Campeche, Guerrero (center, coast), San Luis Potosí, Tamaulipas Chiapas (coast), Chihuahua, Coahuila, Hidalgo (Altiplano) Puebla (center), Quintana Roo, Zacatecas

CCAs not active, low impact

Baja California Sur, Jalisco, Morelos, Tlaxcala

Aguascalientes, Baja California Norte, Colima, Estado de México, Guanajuato, Michoacán, Nayarit, Querétaro, Sonora

Note: The states in bold indicate the top ten in terms of numbers of stores (ranging from 800 to more than 2,000 each). The states in italics indicate those represented on the councils’ national coordinating committee chosen in April 2006. The underlined states are among the top five in sales of raw corn. CCAs are Cousejos Comunitarios de Abasto. Source: These ratings of autonomy and capacity reflect Jonathan Fox and Libby Haight’s observations and interviews with council leaders prior to and during the Sixth National Congress of Community Food Councils, Guadalajara, April 2006, as well as interviews with the former elected leader of the National Coordination of the Community Food Councils, María José Arellano (July 2005, February 2006, and January 2007)

Diconsa’s rules. They did not address Diconsa managers’ compliance with their commitments to the councils. To assess the food councils in terms of their capacities as agents of accountability, Table 9.4 highlights two main indicators: first, councils’ degree of autonomous decision-making vis-à-vis Diconsa on the one hand, and second, their capacity to influence Diconsa on the other hand. The findings reflect a pattern that is consistent throughout the program’s history: the regional councils varied widely in terms of both of these capacities. The table’s key indicators distill broad trends at state levels, noting those cases where different councils within the same state clearly follow different trends. In a significant minority of states, councils made decisions about how to engage with the program with some degree of autonomy from the government. Councils in many of these states also managed

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to influence Diconsa operations. Yet autonomy and capacity are distinct—autonomy does not necessarily lead to influence over program operations. In Hidalgo, for example, the state’s food councils united in an autonomous stance, yet as of 2006 they had not managed to influence actual program operations. 40 In some cases, moreover, councils that appeared to lack autonomy reported some degree of influence over program operations. Highly autonomous food councils made decisions and took actions independently of Diconsa officials. This included a sustained commitment to oversight of government operations, as well as willingness to propose policy changes and to directly criticize program officials. This did not mean that their agendas went beyond intervening in the management of the food program, nor did autonomy necessarily mean that council decisions were made by community leaders who were directly accountable to their villages. Councils could be autonomous from Diconsa without necessarily being internally democratic, as in the case of Puebla food councils that were under the control of Antorcha Campesina, widely considered to be tough enforcers allied with the former ruling party (they reportedly controlled five of fourteen in the state). Partial autonomy refers to councils whose leadership bargained with program officials over how to manage the program, but within terms of debate controlled by Diconsa management. Under ‘partial autonomy’, food company officials attempted to intervene in internal council decision-making. Dependent councils did not even bargain with Diconsa officials, and they confined their activities to following procedures within the program’s rules of operation. Any list of regions with high levels of autonomy and capacity would lead off with the Chilapa council in the state of Guerrero, a very broadbased, consolidated organization that bargained hard with the government. They gained room for maneuver in part by generating one of the largest community capital funds of any council in the country. 41 The Chilapa food council, like a significant minority of others in the 1980s and 1990s, was also closely associated with a consolidated regional producers’ organization. 42 As of 2006, about half of Guerrero’s councils 40 Their autonomy was demonstrated in 2006 national meeting in Guadalajara, where the state contingent walked out to protest the process of electing the new leadership slate for National Coordination of Community Food Councils. The conference organizers had simply called for an up-or-down vote for a single slate, without debate. 41 See Diconsa (2005b). The volume of community capital accumulated reflects the result of past purchases, which is an indirect indicator of the degree to which the stores are serving their communities (except in cases where officials made discretionary contributions of public funds, as may have happened in Oaxaca). 42 For a rare study of regional peasant politics that explains the role of the food council, see Meza Castillo (2000).

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were militantly autonomous, while the other half worked more closely with Diconsa management. In both Durango and Hidalgo, autonomous councils also had statewide influence—though with uneven impact on actual Diconsa operations. In Chiapas, the Ocosingo food council would be an example of partial autonomy, with impact on Diconsa. The program operated in a region known worldwide because of the Zapatista movement, which rejected engagement with government social programs. Yet their council’s representative spoke of ‘our Zapatista brothers’ and claimed that 40 of the 120 stores supplied by their warehouse were in Zapatista zones—a relationship facilitated by dialogue with the municipal leaders of Ocosingo. He reported that some of the Zapatista autonomous municipalities do not accept the Diconsa program, as in the case of Polhó, yet others do, as in Aldama. 43 The Sinaloa food councils offerred another example of partial autonomy, sustaining a statewide network while lobbying for both state and federal laws that would guarantee the right to food. In Veracruz, council leaders eschewed confrontation with Diconsa management but were committed to encouraging high levels of program performance. The experience of the Veracruz councils suggests that a confrontational stance is not the only indicator of autonomy and capacity. Early on, one council leader put it this way: ‘in Veracruz we fight for our freedom because we are not yet free. We are still enslaved by poverty and hunger’. 44 Food councils’ autonomy and capacity were limited by Diconsa’s ‘no reelection’ clause, which prevented regional leaders from accumulating expertise and bargaining power vis-à-vis agency officials. Administrators could watch elected leaders come and go. Diconsa’s control over the training of new council members also prevented the transmission of lessons of past struggles, as each generation had to (re)learn how to find the cracks in the system. In some regions, the councils were also seen as mere adjuncts to or employees of the warehouse managers, rather than as their overseers. In addition, the councils required funds for operating costs, most notably transportation and food for the volunteer community representatives, who regularly traveled long distances to regional meetings. Councils officially were officially due 1 percent of store profits for their travel costs, but Diconsa managers ably used their control over the actual flow of funds to limit council autonomy. To fully understand the diverse regional patterns of participation, much more detailed comparative studies would be needed. In some regions, regional and store management committees were incorporated 43 44

Interview, Manuel Moreno Sánchez, Guadalajara, April 2006. Cited in the ‘El Campo y El Campesino’ page in El Día, August 18 (1984: 6).

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into traditional community service obligations, as is widely reported in Oaxaca. Another factor that encouraged both autonomy and capacity was the presence of a critical mass of other autonomous councils within the same state—as in Guerrero, Durango, or Hidalgo. As of the 2006 national congress, in most cases Diconsa managers managed to keep dissident, autonomous councils to a minority within each state. The agency could retain control of the main agenda as long as autonomous councils were unable to muster a unified majority within any single state. Controlled and dispersed pluralism proved to be manageable. The history of the Diconsa rural store program shows that the ‘old school’ approach to voice, transparency, and accountability contributed substantially to the program’s survival and performance. Reliable access to low-cost staple foods in remote villages had come to be widely considered to be a right. When the program was working, this right was often taken for granted, with routine forms of participation and oversight embedded in the local institutional landscape. When the program was not working, or was under threat, mass mobilization was often the response, including both direct action and national legislative lobbying. This chapter now turns to analysis of a best-case example of the ‘new school’ approach to accountability, based on individual rather than collective voices.

Oportunidades’ Social Accountability Program Oportunidades is Mexico’s flagship social program, an international pioneer of what have come to be called ‘conditional cash transfer’ (CCT) programs. Widely hailed in official international development agency circles, CCT programs encourage low-income families to invest in their children’s human capital by providing material incentives to use public education and health services. Specifically, CCTs provide cash payments to means-tested families, usually to mothers, conditioned on monitored school attendance and basic preventive health measures. Mexico’s program is primarily rural, where its coverage is also geographically targeted. First known as the Education, Health and Food Program (Progresa), the program was launched in 1997. Progresa gained worldwide fame in large measure as the result of its rigorous impact assessments. The Zedillo government commissioned the International Food Policy Research Institute to do the evaluation, which used semiexperimental methods to demonstrate tangible improvements in key education and health indicators, such as school attendance, repetition

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rates, food consumption, and incidence of illness. 45 For example, one study reported an 11 percent decline in infant mortality among participating rural families (Barham 2005). The findings’ scientific rigor bolstered the program politically, and the incoming Fox administration significantly expanded its coverage to reach five million families— approximately one quarter of the entire national population. The program was designed to bypass local political brokers, and in principle neither municipal nor state government officials could influence which individuals would be chosen to receive payments. However, some attempted to insert themselves in the process, and governors were active in behind-the-scenes negotiations over which municipalities would receive coverage (Hevia de la Jara 2007). Election observers reported clientelistic electoral manipulation of beneficiaries in 2000 (Global Exchange 2000), and their surveys found that 40 percent thought that Progresa belonged to the PRI (Alianza Cívica 2000). Subsequent academic studies found quantitative evidence suggesting electoral geographic targeting before the 2000 elections (cf. Rocha 2001; Takahashi 2006). De la O found that in the 2000 presidential election, localities with Progresa had higher voter turnout and a larger PRI vote share than did comparable rural localities (2006). These two findings are probably not coincidental, though the data correlations do not disentangle gratitude for the program from possible politicization of access. To bolster the program’s political legitimacy, the new government named as director a former leader of the nonpartisan Civic Alliance, Rogelio Gómez Hermosillo. Early on, he recognized electoral abuses of the program (e.g. Paniagua 2001). Of Oportunidades’ eight top national officials, none were members of the PAN. In addition to the national coordinator, several other top managers also came from nonpartisan civic organizations. Among Oportunidades’ thirty-one state level 45 To access the vast official evaluation literature, see www.ifpri.org and www.oportunidades.gob.mx. After the 2000 election, the new government allowed the IFPRI studies to be made public. According to an anonymous lead Mexican evaluator in the late 1990s, Progresa leadership had strongly resisted releasing evaluation findings, even though they were largely positive. After 2000, the new government also shifted responsibility for third-party program evaluation to national research centers, including Economics Research and Teaching Institute (CIDE), the National Institute of Public Health and Center for Advanced Research in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), Mexico’s leading social anthropology research institute. Their impact studies are extensive and publicly accessible. For a feminist analysis, see Luccisano (2002, 2004). For a study of Progresa through a philosophical lens, see Dieterlen (2003). In addition, Oportunidades also carries out its own internal monitoring and evaluation, and their findings are potentially accessible to the public through specific information requests via the Federal Information Access Institute. For overviews of the role of evaluation, see, Behrman and Skoufias (2006) and Schlefer (2004).

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managers, only thirteen were considered PAN political appointees (Hevia de la Jara 2007). This pattern contrasted sharply with the more overt politicization of the rest of the Social Development Ministry leadership. The program’s national coordinator proudly announced, following the 2003 mid-term elections, that not a single charge of electoral crimes was filed against Oportunidades (Hevia de la Jara 2007). These indicators suggest that a ‘civic current’ dominated the top ranks of agency management during the Fox administration. 46 Election watchdog groups did not give up their scrutiny of Oportunidades just because one of their own was in charge. Yet independent research on state elections in 2004 did not find evidence of systematic electoral manipulation of voters by Oportunidades (FUNDAR 2006). Observers differed over the role of Oportunidades in the 2006 presidential elections, though some incidents were clear-cut. During the campaign, the Oportunidades coordinator for the state of Tlaxcala was forced to resign because of electoral manipulation (FUNDAR 2006). In Sinaloa, the state government reported collusion between PAN elected officials and the state delegate of the Social Development Ministry, involving suspension of payments and threats of withdrawal in order to coerce voters (Méndez and Valdez 2006: 8). Indeed, after the Secretary of Social Development stepped down to coordinate the PAN’s presidential campaign, it was revealed that a consulting firm linked to the PAN had been given full access to the government’s internal social-geographic databases on social program beneficiaries, including individual names and addresses (Méndez and Garduño 2006; Muñoz and Saldierna 2006). On election day, however, neither election observers nor opposition parties documented widespread manipulation of Oportunidades. Most complaints about politicization involved abuses by leaders of local program committees and municipal officials (who did not actually control program operations, but are capable of bluffing). 47 After the 2006 elections, according to exit polls, 41 percent of participants in Oportunidades voted for the ruling PAN, in contrast to 31 percent for low-income voters overall (those earning less than $200/month) and 31 percent for rural voters overall (Reforma, 2006). This finding does not constitute evidence of electoral manipulation per 46 The 2006 change in presidential administration led to a turn away from this ‘civic current’, in spite of Mexico’s ostensible creation of a civil service. As one state coordinator from the civic faction put it, as s/he began preparing his/her departure, ‘it seems that the PAN does not forgive Oportunidades because the poorest municipalities opted for the PRI or the PRD in the last elections . . . [the program directorship] is part of the division of jobs between the different groups in the PAN, and as they say, “nos tocó bailar con la más fea” [we got stuck dancing with the ugly one], in this case, the most conservative faction’ (personal email communication, March 12, 2007) 47 On patterns of program complaints, see Hevia de la Jara (2006d).

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se, and could simply reflect voter gratitude for what is a substantial stipend for Mexico’s lowest-income families. In spite of the election campaign debate about the role of social programs, the Oportunidades program had campaigned extensively to tell beneficiaries that their vote was free and secret. The program presented itself as not related to any political party (though President Fox’s own campaign of televised promotions claimed credit for it). Oportunidades leadership also timed new enrollments to avoid coinciding with electoral campaign calendars (FUNDAR 2006). Yet survey results, discussed below, indicate that substantial numbers of program participants still perceived their access to the program to be politically conditioned, as recently as 2006. Possible electoral manipulation is not the only reason why citizen oversight is important. Independent oversight is also needed to improve the quality of service delivery, which in turn is crucial for meeting the program’s human capital goals. Not surprisingly, participants’ food consumption went up as their cash income rose. This spending went further if they had access to Diconsa rural stores. Demand for education and health services also clearly went up, but it is not clear whether the supply increased correspondingly. The vast evaluation literature does not address this question, but some puzzles suggest a possible disconnect, especially in education. For example, while students clearly spent more years in school, the evidence on educational attainment did not show that they learned more. One study by long-term evaluators found ‘ . . . no impact on achievement test scores’ (Behrman, Parker, and Todd 2005: 10). A recent World Bank study found that the federal government’s spending on its largest and most effective compensatory education spending program for the most disadvantaged schools dropped substantially after 2000, both in absolute and relative terms, during the same period when Oportunidades’ enrollments doubled (Patrinos et al. 2006: 8). If Oportunidades-driven increases in student enrollments were not matched by comparable investments in more teachers, schools, and books, then it would not be surprising if student achievement rates dropped. 48 Basic education for indigenous students remained especially weak. For example, no more than 6 percent of indigenous students had access to indigenous language textbooks and their teachers had little training (Yonker and Schmelkes 2005). 48 Indeed, many observers recognize that the Fox administration chose not to invest the political capital required to take on the issue of educational reform, which would have required challenging the PRI faction that controlled the teachers’ union. Not coincidentally, the president encouraged a political alliance with the leader of the teachers’ union, in order to offset political challenges from the left.

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As a World Bank comparison of CCT programs recognized, ‘one of the main challenges . . . is how . . . to tackle the more difficult issues of improving the quality of health and education services’ (Rawlings 2004). Indeed, at the same time that the CCT strategy gained the support of mainstream development agencies, the World Bank was also emphasizing the need to improve the quality of basic services through ‘client power’. The empowerment of poor people in their direct interactions with service providers was considered the ‘short route to accountability’—in contrast to working through representative political institutions that had limited influence over the actual functioning of the state’s administrative apparatus (World Bank 2004a). Client power ostensibly involves a degree of voice, as in the case of parental involvement in school management and measures to involve them in verifying teacher performance. Yet CCT programs assign frontline service providers the task of verifying participant co-responsibility—a prerequisite for receiving the welfare payments. This gives the teachers, nurses, doctors, and other service providers enormous power over their ‘clients’. For example, if participants complain about teacher absences or abuse by doctors, then those teachers or doctors can drop those families from the list of beneficiaries. 49 As a result, by their design, CCT programs inherently constrain the client power that the World Bank recognizes is crucial for improving service quality. This constitutes an unforeseen cross-institutional disconnect between attempts to induce two different kinds of behavior—compliance and voice (Fox 2004a). Nevertheless, three elements of the Oportunidades program could potentially have improved program performance by encouraging participant oversight. They include: first, the world-class evaluation system, second, the Community Promotion Committees, and third, the Citizen Attention complaints window. The evaluation system proved very effective at informing national and international policymakers. Policy evaluations, if made public, are widely seen as instruments through which transparency can generate accountability. Yet the evaluations were exercises in ‘upward transparency’, targeted exclusively to policymakers, rather than ‘downward’ to the beneficiaries themselves. 50 The program’s public evaluations did not permit beneficiaries 49 To be sure, in practice, few Oportunidades program beneficiaries are actually disenrolled for noncompliance—reportedly only 1%. This is impressive and illustrates the power of material incentives to influence participant behavior, but is not an indicator of the impact of the ever-present threat of disenrollment, which can influence both the capacity of already vulnerable beneficiaries to express concerns and the behavior of service providers. 50 Even within upward transparency, the evaluation results had little influence over service providers not under Oportunidades authority—such as the education and health

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to learn about institutional performance in ways that enabled them to use the findings to encourage accountability. For example, the national aggregation of results generated robust statistical samples that bolstered impact findings, but the lack of disaggregation made it difficult to identify problem areas. As the head of the Oportunidades Evaluation Department put it, ‘the state governors ask for state level data, and we are not able to respond’. 51 For example, one evaluation found both little reduction of malnutrition and significant distribution problems with the program’s nutritionally fortified food supplements intended for pregnant and nursing mothers and young children. The data suggested a link between this incomplete distribution and persistent malnutrition, but the evaluation agenda did not direct researchers to address the question of what might have caused the distribution problems. The public version of the evaluation did not locate the problem, institutionally or geographically. As a result, evaluators could only observe that ‘The information does not report the causes of the lack of delivery of the supplement’ (Meneses González et al. 2005: 334). Nevertheless, one dimension of the evaluation process did project grassroots voices in ways that influenced the national policy process— through little-known qualitative research. The new Oportunidades leadership discovered that many overwhelmingly poor communities were only partly covered by Progresa, which helped to explain widespread ethnographic reports of intracommunity divisions. 52 systems. As the head of evaluation put it, ‘the most we can do is show the evaluations to the health sector’ (interview, Iliane Yaschine, Sedesol, Mexico City, March 3, 2005). 51 Interview, Iliane Yaschine, Social Development Ministry, Mexico City, March 3, 2005. 52 The IFPRI evaluation included a sociological study of beneficiary perceptions, which found that the program provoked divisions between beneficiaries and nonbeneficiaries, but these findings were buried deep within IFPRI’s website (Adato 2000). Yet they were consistent with a little-known, unpublished ‘grey literature’ on actual Progresa operations. For example, Progresa also commissioned Mexico’s leading social anthropology research center to carry out ethnographic research in 12 communities. Their 1999 report came to similar conclusions about the unintended impacts on community cohesion, but was not made public. For a censored version, see Nahmad, Carrasco, and Sarmiento (1999). With modest World Bank support, a Social Development Ministry research and training center commissioned a field-based ethnographic study that raised similar issues, but it was not made public either (Aguilar Rivero 2002). For a broader gender analysis, see Luccisano (2002). Three dimensions of program implementation caused intracommunity divisions. First, widespread ethnographic evidence suggests that during its first years, the program often reached less than a majority of those who considered themselves to be very poor. Second, Progresa’s lack of transparency aggravated confusion and tension between low-income families, since the reasons why some were included and not others was a mystery to them. Third, the program’s lack of public recourse mechanisms prevented families that felt that they were unfairly excluded to petition for reconsideration, undermining trust both in the government and in those neighbors who were included. As a result, many members of the independent National Network of Rural Women’s Advisors felt these impacts directly through divisions in the

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Oportunidades managers found that Progresa had kept down the administrative costs of means-testing individual families by paying private surveyors based on the number of households visited. This approach created incentives to concentrate on the easier-to-reach households, while avoiding more difficult-to-reach homes and excluding households where no one was home during the first visit. In response, Oportunidades managers brought the survey process inhouse and sent staff back to communities that had already been ostensibly ‘covered’, to enroll low-income families who had been missed by Progresa. 53 According to internal Oportunidades data, this ‘densification’ of the rolls added 1.7 million new families, mainly in 2002–4, leading to a much higher degree of coverage of Mexico’s poorest rural communities (Hevia de la Jara 2006b). Curiously, this major accomplishment of Oportunidades was not disseminated, perhaps because the ‘densification’ strategy constituted an implicit recognition of the exclusionary impact of Progresa’s approach to targeting. The second Oportunidades strategy that had some potential to project participant voices involved the Community Promotion Committees (CPCs). While in principle Progresa was supposed to convene local committees to provide input into the selection of beneficiaries, the available evidence indicates that did not happen (Nahmad, Carrasco, and Sarmiento 1998: 106; Adato 2000). Since the beginning of the program, local liaison was facilitated by ‘promoters’ ostensibly elected from among program participants. Mothers also met regularly at health clinics, but there is no independent evidence to suggest that these gatherings became autonomous spaces for discussion and collective action. Official evaluations suggested that some promoters were empowered by their new roles, though their selection process appears to have been top-down. Independent field reports from women’s rights NGOs found ‘authoritarian practices’, as promoters focused mainly on ensuring beneficiary compliance with program requirements (Espinosa 2001). Some of the new Oportunidades managers had similar concerns about the promoters. In 2002, their liaison strategy shifted to create instead small local committees of elected ‘spokespeople’—vocales. dozens of grassroots cooperatives that they had spent years organizing. The intensity of their reaction is reflected in the provocative title of their collectively written assessment of Progresa, which was called ‘The devil’s money’ (‘El dinero del diablo’)—a term quoted from a grassroots leader (Frade 2000). 53 A senior operational manager confirmed this account, noting that ‘there was undercoverage in high and very high marginality communities, mainly due to the poor quality of the surveys carried out by external firms’ (email communication, Concepción Steta, September 11, 2006).

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Some kind of local liaison was clearly needed, since each official field staffer dealt with a universe of 8,000 families, with administrative tasks involving 40,000 (Hevia de La Jara 2006b: 10). Little fieldbased evidence is available regarding the actual operations of these liaison structures, though some survey data exists (discussed below). The Oportunidades evaluation agenda did not address them. The only reference in their many hundreds of pages of official studies concluded: In general the committees studied do not function as such, and have shown little leadership in other arenas. Their functionality has depended on having good relationships with the liaison staff (enlaces). . . . This leadership (which in political terms is a form of brokerage or intermediation) could require oversight, but it becomes functional for the community and for the beneficiaries. The leadership could be partisan, but not always. Though some ex-promoters and vocales are involved in clientelistic relations and take advantage of their position—for example, they ‘orient’ the processes of recertification and densification—only in a minority of the cases is it clearly partisan. (Escobar Latapí and González de la Rocha 2005: 311, cited in Hevia de La Jara 2007)

Apparently in response to reports of abuse of power by these local promoters, Opportunidades convened new local committees of elected vocales, with each member assigned to education, health, nutrition, and ‘oversight’. According to Hevia’s research: The deficiencies in the election of the Community Promoters led them to abuse the power they were granted, holding a privileged position in the program and acting as an authority over the community, imposing unpaid work tasks, asking for money and using the program for political campaigning. This represented not only a deviation from the Program’s Rules of Operation, but also weakened the relationship between the Promoter and the community and undermined mutual trust. This is why the Community Promotion Committees were created, as a way to break the authoritarian power held by the Promoters, as well as to strengthen compliance with the Program and its monitoring by the vocales for health, education and control. . . . The vocales, who now share the power and responsibilities, continue to be elected, in assembly, by the majority of the program beneficiaries. (Hevia de La Jara 2007)

One Oportunidades state coordinator added: The change from promoters to committees was, in my opinion, more virtual than real because the vocales (education, health and control) did not receive sufficient training (because of staff workload) nor specific tasks to carry out, with corresponding follow-up. 54 54

Personal email communication, March 3, 2005.

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Yet toward the end of the Fox administration, Oportunidades staff had met their enrollment ceiling of 5 million families and accelerated their efforts to build the Community Promotion Committees. By the end of 2005, they numbered 51,000, including 215,074 vocales in more than 86,000 villages and hamlets. By August, 2006, the CPCs numbered 67,513 and the vocales numbered 291,058 (Oportunidades 2006e). More than a third received training in 2006. The training brigades were composed of one program staffer and two college students recruited from the National University’s biomedical program. 55 The training manuals were almost exclusively administrative in focus, detailing extraordinarily precise directions regarding logistics and procedures, such as exactly how to distribute program materials and document attendance, as well as guidelines for managing group dynamics (Oportunidades 2006a, 2006b, 2006c). Almost all of the manuals’ discussion of CPC duties focused on their support role in administering the program, with very little said about the role of the spokesperson responsible for oversight. Nevertheless, in spite of this heavily administrative focus, the training process did include an effort to contribute to what was referred to in the context of Mexico’s 2006 election campaign as ‘electoral shielding’ (blindaje electoral). To begin with, membership in CPCs was limited to women who were not members of any political party (Oportunidades 2006c: 23). Teaching materials included widely distributed posters depicting smiling women and the slogan ‘I am a beneficiary of Oportunidades and my vote is free’, followed by a discourse that stressed rights as well as responsibilities. For example: My rights as a citizen allow me to: elect my representatives, say freely what I think (and) vote for whatever candidate or political party I want to. . . . For no reason will I permit ANYONE to: pressure me to vote for someone, to threaten to take away my Oportunidades support if I don’t vote for who they say, who lies to me, saying that Oportunidades belongs to some political party (or) takes my election registration card. . . . Did you know someone who threatens to take away your Oportunidades support to get your vote is committing a crime? (Oportunidades 2006e: 134–6).

Clearly, the Oportunidades teaching and outreach materials were informed by a strong civic stance, reflecting the commitments of the civic current in management. Yet the results of a large-scale survey of vocales suggested that the CPC leaders continued to see themselves 55 An internal survey of these university participants found that 31% considered the committees to have ‘significant impact’, 62% considered beneficiaries’ principal problem to be ‘lack of information’ and 35% considered the program to be ‘politicized’ (Oportunidades 2005c).

276 Table 9.5

Accessing Accountability Perceptions of local Oportunidades leaders (vocales)

A vocal should inform the participants (titulares) about the services offered by the Oportunidades Program The Community Promotion Committee is a group of women participants elected by the majority of the beneficiaries and who organize to benefit the community Social oversight helps citizens to demand their rights Support from the Oportunidades Program is independent of how you vote The talks by Oportunidades staff were clear Oportunidades staff always cleared up any doubts

True (%)

False (%)

90

9

10

86

20 22

75 74

98 92

2 7

Source: This survey was carried out after training by program staff. Sample size: 830 vocales in 22 states, reported in Oportunidades (2006e).

mainly as program support staff, with little understanding of the rights discourse promoted by the official teaching materials—even after their training. Remarkably, as Table 9.5 shows, 86 percent of the CPC leaders did not consider themselves to be representatives of the beneficiaries, 75 percent did not understand social oversight, and only 22 percent considered access to the program to be independent of how one votes. Very few vocales considered themselves to be grassroots representatives tasked with being active agents of accountability. The unsigned text accompanying this Oportunidades survey exuded frustration because the responses had changed so little before and after the huge investment in training. On balance, the available evidence indicates that the program’s system for representing participants—first with promoters under Progresa, followed by Oportunidades’ vocales—served to represent the program to the participants rather than vice versa. The vocales’ limited capacity to project voice upward to the program administration is a major reason why Oportunidades’ third channel for voice, the Citizen Attention program, was so potentially significant, since it allowed participants to communicate directly with state and national level program officials. Seen through the lens of accountability politics, the Citizen Attention window provided a degree of ‘answerability’ to program participants, allowing them to project their voice ‘upward’ to state and federal levels within Oportunidades. First launched in 2002, the program combined the role of information provider and ombudsman. For those participants who were aware of Citizen Attention, it offered a back-channel to file complaints about service provider performance,

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possible abuse, incomplete payments, or expulsion from the program. While the office was part of the same agency that participants might complain about, it was several steps removed from the immediate service providers. Complaints could be registered through an 800 telephone number, in person at the state program headquarters, or through sealed boxes made widely available at the cash distribution points. Civic-minded program managers within Oportunidades recognized that citizen complaints and information requests were dramatically underregistered, both because of their limited credibility and because of fear of potential reprisals. 56 The introduction to the first annual report was quite explicit: The data presented could be only part of the citizen demand that exists in the country, the rest remains in silence. In this sense we reaffirm that this report gives resonance to all those voices that dared to raise a concern to the Oportunidades program, and that managed to do so in spite of the difficulties inherent in their situation of poverty. . . . We warn that there is still a serious problem of under-reporting. (Oportunidades 2004a: 5)

Indeed, Citizen Attention program managers were wary of making their progress reports public because they considered the complaints data to paint an inaccurate portrait of the actual distribution of problems in program operations. Program managers took an epidemiological approach when assessing patterns of reported complaints. In other words, where the numbers were very low, they considered the most likely explanation to be underreporting rather than flawless program operations. Low numbers in certain states were considered evidence of insufficient program outreach and low staff productivity. As might be expected, operational staff often did not welcome the questions raised by the program’s ombudsman efforts. Nationally, Citizen Attention had a staff of only 50, which translated into one administrator for every 100,000 families enrolled. In spite of these obstacles, large numbers of program participants did reach out to the Citizen Attention program. The official term for beneficiary inquiries reflects the discourse of the civic current: ‘citizen demands’. Most were information requests involving program operations, but a ‘hard core’ of between 13 percent and 15 percent involved more serious charges of abuse of power by Oportunidades staff, vocales,

56 Interview, Rebecca Barranco, Director of Citizen Attention, Oportunidades, Mexico City, October 22, 2004.

278 Table 9.6 demand’

Accessing Accountability Oportunidades’ Citizen Attention program: Trends in ‘citizen

Total ‘citizen demands’ ‘Complaints and denunciations’ (%)

2003

2004

2005

72,433 11,264 (15.5%)

78,837 10,798 (13.7%)

80,076 10,579 (13.2%)

2006 87,714 17,128 (19.5%)

Source: Oportunidades (2004a), Acanual 2005. Base datos MsExcell. Thanks to Rebeca Barranco, Director of Atención Ciudadana for access to annual data, and to Felipe Hevia de la Jara for assistance with data analysis.

or related health or education personnel. 57 The trend summarized in Table 9.6 shows relatively large and growing numbers of inquiries, reaching over 87,000 in 2006, including a growing proportion of the more serious ‘complaints and denunciations’ over time. This data indicates the Citizen Attention program’s increased outreach and credibility. For comparison, the Federal Information Access Agency (IFAI), which covers more than 200 agencies in the federal government’s entire executive branch, received fewer public information requests in 2006—a total of just over 60,000. 58 In 2004, the majority of ‘citizen demands’ were submitted in person (53.7 percent), with 28.6 percent submitted by phone and the rest by fax, email, letter or online (Oportunidades 2005: 4). Among the officially denominated category of ‘complaints and denunciations’ received at the national office, Oportunidades staff were the focus of 63.3 percent, followed by health staff (8,9 percent), the payment agencies (6.6 percent), vocales (5.6 percent) and school staff (4.3 percent). 59 Table 9.7 shows the main reasons for these complaints. Those complaints that were filed in writing tended to receive more attention, and the institutional response was more likely to have been documented in agency files. Here follows one example of a written complaint: To whom it may concern: I wish to inform you that the auxiliaries and the vocales of Oportunidades of the neighborhood of MXXX called us together, 57 Management assessed productivity in terms of total numbers of citizen demands addressed, which created incentives to deal with as many simple information requests as possible, rather than the more difficult denunciations of abuses. 58 See ‘Estadísticas SISI’ at www.ifai.gob.mx, accessed April 14, 2007. 59 Data refer to July, 2004–July, 2005, from Sistema de Atención Ciudadana, Oportunidades, 2005, cited in Hevia de la Jara (2006b). Note that an additional federal ombudsman agency exists to address medical malpractice charges, the National Commission for Medical Arbitration, founded in 1996 (www.conamed.gob.mx).

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Table 9.7 National patterns of complaints received by Oportunidades Types of complaints/denunciations: Abuse Solicitation of money Electoral manipulation Obligatory manual labor Access to payments conditioned Dropped from rolls because of operational errors Total

Total 473 336 225 98 49 31 1,212

Period covered: One year, July, 2004–July, 2005 Source: Sistema de Atención Ciudadana, Oportunidades, (2005) and Hevia de la Jara (2006b)

the participants in Oportunidades, to support the candidate of the PRI, with the pretext that if we don’t support him with our presence and vote, they would take away programs like Oportunidades, ‘Solid Floor’ and payments for the elderly, since the supposed candidate is the one who moves the program. Meanwhile, the day October 23, we went to the neighborhood of Ixxx to the rally, since if we didn’t go, they would mark us down for missing sessions on our attendance card, doing us harm in this way. We know that we should not [have to] support candidates, but they threaten us. . . . We thank you in advance for the solution of this problem, since there are many anomalies that we do not denounce because of fear of reprisals from the vocals and the auxiliary Cxxx, because some time ago someone tried to end these problems and they threatened to beat her and expel her from the Oportunidades program, which led her to have to move away. (three signatures, original document cited in Hevia de la Jara 2006b: 56–7, actual names kept confidential)

The few documented cases repeatedly refer to requestors’ need to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals, and indeed the Citizen Attention procedures require respect for anonymity. However, complaints involving the health or education systems were simply passed on to those ministries. Not only did Oportunidades’ Citizen Attention staff lack any leverage over employees of other ministries, once the complaint was passed on, the commitment to anonymity was lost—which risked revealing the identities of accusers to the same teachers or doctors who were charged with abuse. Those who reported electoral abuses were directed to the specialized federal prosecutors’ agency, the FEPADE, which had a high public profile but in practice had little-to-no impact on sanctioning electoral abuses of antipoverty programs (Haight and Suárez Zamudio 2007).

280

Accessing Accountability Table 9.8

Official responses to complaints/denunciations

Official case conclusions

Number

Percentage

Positively By orientation Negatively Investigation under way Pending Lack of petitioner interest

1,366 5,739 671 1,337 48 32

15 62 7 15 1

Total

9,193

Definitions: Positive: When the official response supports the petition or when the complaint moves forward Negative: When the response does not support the petition or when the complaint does not move forward By orientation: When the petitioner is given the information requested, when they are informed of the correct way to present a complaint or denunciation, or when they are encouraged to check the website. Investigation under way: Case is studied by Oportunidades authorities Lack of petitioner interest: When petitioner is asked for additional information and does not respond within three months Period covered: July 2004–July 2005 Source: Hevia de la Jara (2006b)

The Citizen Attention program registered its responses to ‘citizen demands’ in terms of the following categories: ‘positive’ resolution, resolution ‘by orientation’, rejection (‘negative’ resolution) as well as ‘under investigation’ (in very few cases), as shown in Table 9.8. The category known as ‘by orientation’, representing the majority of cases, proved to be the most problematic. Many of the most serious complaints were registered via toll-free telephone calls, which offered anonymity and did not require literacy. Operators standing by were capable of resolving simple information requests or payment problems through their access to online databases, which may well have left most callers satisfied. However, operators’ standard response to cases of serious complaints was to recommend that they be filed in writing. Such calls were then registered as having been resolved ‘by orientation’. No system followed up or kept track to see whether those who had dared to call in to denounce abuses had actually followed up in writing (Hevia de la Jara 2006b). Because of the combination of complainants’ limited literacy, fear of exposure and/or lack of trust in the complaint boxes, it is safe to assume that few actually did follow up in writing. More generally, analysis of the agency response procedures and data management system revealed that it was impossible to confirm whether complaints were positively resolved. Of the complaints registered at the national

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offices, only 15 percent included any written documentation of the response (Hevia de la Jara 2006e). Only one quarter of those included sufficient documentation to conclude that the problem was actually addressed. 60 Surveys of beneficiaries carried out by the federal government’s Ministry of Public Administration offer a different perspective on Oportunidades’ social auditing initiatives. A comparison of similar surveys carried out in 2003 and 2005 provide evidence of the program’s increased emphasis on both the CPCs and the Citizen Attention program toward the end of the Fox administration. Table 9.9 shows a near-doubling of the share of respondents who reported knowing how to present complaints, as well as the functions of the Community Promotion Committees. Yet this data also clearly shows that a substantial majority of Oportunidades participants remained unaware of both potential channels for voice. Overall, the Citizen Attention program contributed directly to project participant voice for resolving simple program implementation issues, serving as an information access system. The program clearly addressed a major felt need, as evidenced by the large and growing numbers of ‘citizen demands’, but the staff available remained tiny given the size and complexity of a program involving five million families. Complaints were duly processed, but the agency lacked empirical evidence to demonstrate whether the Citizen Attention program could resolve problems of abuse. Its ombudsman capacity for dealing with more serious problems appeared to be quite limited. Most importantly in terms of the need for improving the quality of the services that human capital depends on, the program lacked any leverage over problems located in the education and health system, such as abusive doctors or absent teachers—not to mention insufficient public investment in those services. As a result, these modest channels for expressing voice had very limited potential for addressing the crossinstitutional disincentive problem built into the structure of the CCT program. 61

60 Considering the extraordinary precision with which Oportunidades monitors the behavior of and payments to 5 million individual families, the absence of precise documentation of tangible institutional responses to complaints of abuse can be interpreted as evidence of its low priority. 61 These issues were implicitly recognized by the discourse of the newly appointed director of Oportunidades in the Calderón presidency. In his first declarations, he ‘expressed his concern for improving the quality of the services offered to the beneficiaries of Oportunidades, especially health and education, and announced that he would develop the functions of oversight and auditing to avoid the misuse of the Program’ (Oportunidades 2006f ).

282 Table 9.9

Accessing Accountability Beneficiary access to Oportunidades information

Information received by beneficiaries surveyed regarding Types of support for health Types of support for food Types of support for education Goals of Oportunidades Rights and commitments of beneficiary families How to present complaints and denunciations Where to present complaints and denunciations Functions of the Community Promotion Committee Functions of the municipal liaison Have you received information about social auditing? (contraloría social) Where payments are delivered, have you seen boxes for sending complaints, denunciations, or recognitions? Have you presented a petition, as a suggestion, recognition, complaint, or denunciation about the operation of the Oportunidades program? If so, by what means?

2003

2005

68% 55% 43% 36% 33%

81% 70% 57% 47% 57%

19%

37%

14%

30%

17%

29%

12% 31%

22% 33%

Was the response satisfactory? If not, why not?

48%

3%

Mobile box: 17% Fixed box: 12% Telephone: 6% In person: 67% 57% No response: 67% Problem not addressed: 33%

Source: Secretaría de la Función Pública (2004, 2005)

Conclusions Both Oportunidades and Diconsa programs officially recognized participants’ right to voice, granting them the ‘standing’ to point out problems in operations. Yet the two programs’ strategies for exercising this right differed greatly, along lines that parallel their different approaches to delivering basic services to the rural poor. Table 9.10 sums up many of the key differences between them, in terms of opportunities for participation, transparency, and accountability. The central difference involved scaled-up, versus locally bounded and individualized channels for participation and representation.

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Table 9.10 Comparing Diconsa and Oportunidades: participation, transparency, and accountability Participation, transparency and accountability provisions

Oportunidades

Individual participation requirements

Program access conditioned on school and health program attendance

Participant oversight channels (‘demand side’)

Individual communications to ombudsman office, local committees of elected vocales Citizen Attention office (limited to Oportunidades program, no jurisdiction over health and education) No

Ombudsman agency (‘supply side’)

Possible program oversight linkages among participants beyond the community level External program evaluations address beneficiary participation processes External program evaluations easily accessible to participants External program evaluations oriented towards beneficiaries (i.e. agenda informed by beneficiary concerns, disaggregated data, accessible format) Accountability institutions reviewed in external program evaluations External evaluations easily accessible on agency website

Diconsa-rural Signatures on initial request for stores, participation in election of store oversight committee Elected local store oversight committees, regional councils monitor warehouses ‘Control office’ of the Public Administration Ministry can receive complaints

Regional, state, and national-level networks of oversight councils

No

To a limited degree

No

No

No

No

No

No

Yes

No62

62 There is a section in Diconsa’s website under ‘Rural Program’ where an executive summary is indicated, but the link is empty (accessed, February 4, April 17, 2007). The full evaluations are available elsewhere, deep within the Social Development Ministry’s site.

284

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The two programs’ ‘voice strategies’ differed not only in the nature of the actors involved (individual versus collective) but also in the scale of their intervention (household versus regional and national level). Scale matters because of the importance of upstream impacts. While individuals or local committees may well help to ensure that specific services are delivered or public works are completed, their locally bounded scale often confines their denunciatory or supervisory role to the micro end of the policy process, lacking any capacity to influence the broader process of resource allocation. 63 In the case of the Community Food Councils, their regional scope allowed them to monitor whether food that reached the warehouse is actually delivered to village stores. Yet monitoring why deliveries may fail to reach the regional warehouse was beyond their scope—hence the importance of statewide and national representation and networking among food councils. This potential disconnect between monitoring locally versus supervising all the relevant links in the chain of the policy process underscores the importance of vertical integration and scale to accountability politics (to be addressed further in Chapter 11). Returning to the metaphor introduced at the beginning of this chapter, both programs’ ‘social accountability’ strategies shared the ‘fire alarm’ approach, insofar as they relied on beneficiaries to alert agency managers to problems with program operations. In principle, Oportunidades actually had two systems—one involving local leadership committees, and the other offering access to program officials through an ombudsman program. Until the Citizen Attention program was created, Oportunidades was transparent ‘upwards’, to policymakers, but not ‘downwards’ to beneficiaries. In practice, the available evidence indicates that only Oportunidades’ ombudsman program functioned to project beneficiary voices to higher levels within the agency. Diconsa, in contrast, relied on local, regional, statewide, and national level representative structures to provide oversight and project voice upwards. In terms of the accountability impacts of each program’s channels for voice, both provided some degree of ‘soft accountability’, in the sense of 63 For example, in the State of Mexico, the state government’s Office of Social Accountability created more than 63,000 local committees to oversee infrastructure projects and local services (Hevia 2005: 20). These committees may well have had some impact on the receiving end of services and projects (though no impact assessments are available). Yet independent research on that state’s budget and investment process for municipal funds during the same period found systematic electoral manipulation of the resource allocation process (Lavielle 2006). Even if some of the funds were well spent in terms of building infrastructure, thanks in part to local oversight, the overall process appears to have been politically biased.

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official answerability without the threat of sanctions. Yet the Citizen Attention office only provided answerability for individual problems, and then primarily for easily resolved issues. The Community Food Councils, in contrast, had the clout to sit down with agency managers at the regional, state, and national levels, and to call them to account for systemic problems—such as insufficient or poor quality corn deliveries, or broken promises regarding corrupt officials. This did not mean that the Councils’ voice was always heeded, or that they exercised full political autonomy. But they had the right and the capacity to call for answers regarding upstream problems in program operations, and were not confined to the ‘end of the pipe’. Moreover, at a critical turning point when the whole program was threatened with elimination by the Treasury Ministry, the food councils were also able to hold congressional representatives accountable and use the political system’s incipient checks and balances to defend the program. The fundamental difference between these two programs involved representation. Diconsa’s ‘target population’ had the potential to defend their interests in the context of the program because they were represented at local, regional, state, and national levels. When combined with the service delivery strategy based on the provision of a public good, one can conclude that the program was structured, at least in principle, to treat millions of villagers as citizens. In the case of Oportunidades, in contrast, the ‘target population’ lacked representation. Participant families were considered ‘beneficiaries’, and the mothers who ‘held title’ to the benefit were known as titulares. With the program’s transformation from Progresa into Oportunidades, the newly appointed ‘civic current’ within the agency’s management began referring to participants as ‘citizens’ as well, most notably in the context of the Citizen Attention ombudsman program. Yet this shift in official discourse was not matched by a qualitative change in the process of representation. In practice, participants remained beneficiaries and lacked rights, in Tilly’s sense of ‘enforceable claims’ (1998). In conclusion, Diconsa’s ‘old school’ approach, which predated electoral competition and remained vulnerable to clientelistic manipulation, had very different origins from Progresa/Oportunidades, which was created and consolidated in the heat of Mexico’s national transition to competitive electoral politics, and was carefully designed to limit the opportunities for intervention by local political machines. Yet this chapter’s comparison of accountability politics within the two programs found that Diconsa’s official channels for scaled-up

286

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representation, bolstered by the potential threat of mass protest, produced more autonomous power and voice for the rural poor than Oportunidades’ openness to receiving individual complaints. While in principle both programs’ social accountability mechanisms projected voice without teeth, the Diconsa rural program’s channels for voice, backed up with collective action, echoed voice more loudly and more broadly—both vertically upward and horizontally across villages and regions. This difference changed the ‘incentive structure’ for administrators, increasing the potential cost of ignoring participant concerns. The broader implication is not only that collective action matters, and not only that scale matters, but also that for social accountability reforms to produce accountability, they must change the balance of power between state and society.

................. 10

................. Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society1

Contending Rural Futures: Democratization or Depopulation? Does migration take pressure off the Mexican political system, as is widely assumed? The short answer is that scholars lack the tools with which to address the question. Both analysts and politicians often refer to migration as a safety valve that contributes to Mexican stability, yet analysts of rural political change in Mexico are just beginning to take migration into account. At the peak of contestation over Mexico’s 2006 elections, Stanford economic historian Steven Haber warned the readers of the Wall Street Journal that shutting Mexico’s escape valve of immigration to the USA would increase ‘[t]he widespread frustration . . . which fuels the populist presidential campaign of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. . . . There is no scenario in which these developments would be positive for Mexican political and social stability’ (2006). Shortly afterwards, a leading Mexican immigrant rights advocate surprised many by welcoming the prospect of a border wall; Primitivo Rodríguez reportedly argued that ‘if Mexicans were really shut inside their country . . . Mexico might be 1 An early version of this chapter was presented as ‘Repensar lo rural ante la globalización: La sociedad civil migrante’, Conferencia Magistral, Asociación Mexicana de Estudios Rurales, Quinto Congreso, Oaxaca, May, 2005 www.amer.org.mx. This chapter also draws on ideas presented in Fox (2004, 2005a, 2005c, and 2005d) and Fox and Rivera-Salgado (2004). The research was made possible by grants from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, as well as a 2004–5 fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Center. This chapter was informed by ongoing conversations with colleagues too numerous to thank here, but I would like to express my special appreciation for input from Xóchitl Bada, Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, and Andrew Selee. Thanks also to Roxana Rivas, Heather Williams, and participants in the University of California, Los Angeles Migration Study Group for helpful comments on earlier versions. Thanks for graphics assistance to Michael Fox for Figure 10.1, and to Emma Lukin for Figure 10.2.

288 Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society forced to get its own house in order’. 2 Apparently both those who favor more pressure from below and those who fear such instability can accept the counterfactual hypothesis that a harder border could promote a left turn in Mexican politics. It is probably no coincidence that rural Mexico’s most radical mass movement in recent decades, Zapatismo, emerged from one of the regions that was least integrated into US labor markets. Indeed, Zapatismo first emerged from communities of migrant homesteaders who a generation before had left the highlands for the lowlands. 3 Yet analysis of the relationship between Mexican migration and collective action remains incipient. 4 Migration, the classic exit option, is widely considered to be a substitute for collective action. Yet there may be conditions under which exit can encourage voice. This chapter proposes conceptual tools for addressing these issues. While exit might well substitute for voice in the short term, the emergence of what can be called ‘migrant civil society’ suggests that exit can also be followed by voice. This chapter begins with a brief empirical review of rural out-migration trends, followed by a conceptual discussion of the relationship between exit, voice and loyalty. This provides context for this chapter’s main thrust, which is to sketch an analytical and comparative framework for mapping the contours of an emerging Mexican migrant civil society. The chapter concludes with an effort to begin to bridge the persistent gap between the analysis of migration and development with an analysis of migrant civil society’s ‘feedback effects’ in Mexico. The premise here is that both conceptual tools and empirical research needed for analyzing the relationship between migration and rural politics beyond the micro-case level are lacking. Yet demographic data on rural out-migration trends abound. For example, consider the implications of the fact that the million Mexican farm-workers who gained US permanent residency under the 1986 immigration reform were equivalent to one-sixth of the adult men in rural Mexico at that time (Martin 2005: 6). One-quarter of Mexicans who are in the formal sector, earning at least the minimum wage, are now working in the USA (Carter, Martin, and Zwane 2005). While circular migration 2

Cited in Thompson (2006: A12). See also Rodríguez (2006). See Leyva and Ascencio Franco (1996). 4 The first systematic quantitative analysis of exit versus voice in Mexico finds that high out-migration municipalities had a lower voter turnout rate in 2000 than otherwise comparable municipalities, leading the authors to speak of a ‘political brain drain’. Yet they also found that high out-migration communities showed higher levels of group membership. The authors hypothesize that this pattern is explained by residents turning away from formal politics towards local civic activity stimulated by migrant home-town associations (HTAs) (Goodman and Hiskey, forthcoming). 3

Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society 289 continues to be viable for those workers who are documented, almost 6 million Mexicans in the USA are not—60 percent of the total (Passel 2005: 4). In other words, for increasing numbers of Mexicans, oncecircular migration has become a one-way trip (Cornelius 2001; Durand and Massey 2004). As a result, in increasing numbers of villages, young men and women increasingly expect to migrate, rather than envisioning their future in rural Mexico. Back in 1991, Mexico’s then undersecretary of Agriculture, economist Luis Téllez, predicted dramatic changes in the place of agriculture in Mexican society. Thanks to the Salinas government’s agricultural policy strategy, combining NAFTA, the withdrawal of production supports for family farming and the Constitutional reform that encouraged individual titling of agrarian reform lands, Téllez estimated that within the following decade, the share of Mexico’s economically active population in agriculture would drop from 26 to 16 percent (Fox 1994c). According to economic policymakers, this massive rural exodus was not a problem. According to their logic, it was a solution. The problem was that agriculture’s share of GDP was only 7 or 8 percent, much lower than its share of the population. According to their worldview, these percentages should be similar. The dramatic, short-term population shift seen as necessary also promised to flood urban labor markets, keeping wages in export industries low. Since NAFTA, estimated annual Mexican migration levels to the USA rose by 63 percent, from 329,000 people in 1992 to over 530,000 in 2000. 5 Given this context, analysts need to go beyond merely referring in passing to cross-border migration as an ‘escape valve’ and begin to explore more systematically how migration influences the future of public life in Mexico. 6 According to the Mexican census of 2000, almost 25 percent of the population continued to live in localities with less than 2,500 inhabitants. This suggests a remarkable persistence of ‘rurality’, especially when one considers that the government’s threshold for defining rural is exceedingly low. Yet when one considers the share of the population 5 See the trends presented by Passel and Suro (2005: Table 5a). Their estimate of annual Mexican migration rates later fell to 460,000 in 2004, apparently in response to rising US unemployment levels (post 9/11). 6 Few recall that during much of the 20th century, Mexico’s national government actively attempted to control emigration. In the decades following the revolution, when the central government was weaker, municipal and state governments played active roles in encouraging or discouraging emigration, especially through their control of travel documents. Fitzgerald found that local elites in Jalisco actively encouraged the emigration of landless campesinos in order to reduce the potential social base for agrarismo (2006).

290 Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society that is ‘economically active’ in agriculture, it turns out that Luis Téllez was remarkably prescient. According to the National Employment Survey, agricultural employment fell from 24 percent in 1991 to under 15 percent at the end of 2005 (INEGI 2005). A similar survey found a loss of 1.3 million agricultural jobs between 1993 and 2002 (Polaski 2003: 20). These two respective data trends, for population and employment, indicate a growing gap between the population that lives in the countryside and the population that lives from the countryside. 7 The growth in the share of the rural population that does not live off of agriculture has major implications for the future of public life in the countryside. 8 This pattern raises the question: how rural is Mexican out-migration? Since the 1990s, migrants to the US increasingly come from urban areas, yet they still came disproportionately from rural areas. 9 According to the national census, 40 percent of US-bound migrants during the 1995–2000 period had rural origins. 10 Before turning to conceptual issues of exit, voice and migrant civil society, with these large-scale demographic processes as context, it is worth briefly recognizing the role that language plays in shaping how these issues are understood. Powerful discursive frames can make it difficult to recognize migrant agency. Consider some of the conventional terminology. The term ‘flow’ is especially common, often used in the context of the powerful economic forces of pull and push. Then 7 For a different comparative reference, remittances reported in 2005 accounted for 70 percent of the value of that year’s agricultural production (Zúñiga and Cardoso 2006). As that news report concluded: ‘the remittances sent by almost 900,000 farm-workers expelled from the rural areas of the country are practically the mainstay of the Mexican countryside’. 8 Note that remittances are far from the only nonagricultural source of income for the rural poor. Of the 5 million families that receive welfare payments under the Oportunidades conditional cash transfer program, 69% are rural (Oportunidades 2005), and most of the grain farmers who receive Procampo crop payments are also lowincome (World Bank 2004). Mexican policymakers continue to debate what fraction of the population receives remittances. According to the then Undersecretary of Social Development, only 6% of the population group with the highest levels of poverty received remittances regularly, while 90% of that group received government transfer payments from Oportunidades (Muñoz 2004). This empirical debate remains unresolved. 9 According to a long-term government survey of Mexicans who migrate to the northern border, of those who specifically report the US as their destination, the proportion who came from ‘nonurban’ areas fell from 43% in 1993–4 to 40% in 2001–2 (STPS, n.d.). Data from the 2000 census could be interpreted as indicating that the rural share of US migrants was close to the overall share of the national population. The population living in localities of less than 10,000 five years earlier was 35.7%, and the share of US migrants who had lived in communities of that size was reported to be 34.6% (INEGI 2000). However, this figure does not include a large ‘unspecified’ category, and the data on current US residents is likely to be substantially underreported. 10 See INEGI (2000). Migrants with rural origins continue to be disproportionately male. During the 1995–2000 period, 42% of male migrants to the USA came from communities with less than 2,500 inhabitants, compared to only 30% of female migrants.

Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society 291 there are the widespread references to ‘waves’ (e.g. Haber 2006), while policymakers speak of the need to ‘choke off the flow’ (e.g. Stevenson 2005). Waves, in turn, are not far from ‘floods’. US critics of migrants also speak of a ‘brown tide’ (Santa Ana 2002). The Border Patrol’s practice of dealing with non-Mexican unauthorized workers was widely known as ‘catch and release’, borrowing a term used mainly for sport fishing. All these terms refer to liquids, whose flows are difficult to stop, pulled by higher powers such as gravity. Sometimes flows come together, sometimes they disperse. They always find their niches, through capillary action. Yet this discourse obscures a great deal. 11 First, migration is not only an implicitly inevitable structural process, it also responds to specific public policy decisions. 12 Indeed, the term ‘escape valve’ does implicitly suggest hands that can open and close off flows. Second, the conventional discourse leaves out the role of agency: migrants’ capacity to make choices, to act, and sometimes to act collectively. Migrants are not only acted upon, they are also actors. This brings us to the conceptual questions involved in their choices of exit or voice. Indeed, one advantage of these analytical tools is that they emphasize agency, in contrast to economistic approaches that frame migrant workers as anonymous commodities that flow from surplus to deficit areas and sectors.

Exit and Voice: Dichotomous or Interactive? Overall, in 2000, 14 percent of Mexican-born adult workers were in the USA (Martin 2005: 10). The cumulative result of this exodus of working age adults must affect the prospects for future social and political change in the countryside, but the nature of this impact remains unclear. So far, no research strategy for addressing this question 11 Similarly, Tsing’s analysis of north–south environmental issues critiques the widespread use of the term ‘flow’ to suggest quasi-natural associations, obscuring tensions and the role of agency—hence her title: ‘friction’ (2004). 12 For contrasting analyses of the Mexican agricultural policy decisions in the early 1990s that encouraged increased rural out-migration later in the 1990s, see, among others, Cornelius (2002a), Fox (1994a, c), Martin (2005), and Puyana and Romero (n.d.). Campesino advocate Victor Suárez was one of the first to draw attention to the Mexican government’s decision to open up to imports much earlier than NAFTA required (2005). Few recall, however, the ostensible logic of Mexico’s negotiators, who were willing to open up the nation’s single-most important crop in exchange for the right to export orange juice to the USA—a commodity that is still marginal for Mexico (Maxfield and Shapiro 1998). Recent Mexican research also finds that ‘it was not the US that pressured to open the corn market to free trade, rather the offer came from the Mexican government. Why? One reason, among others, was, to use NAFTA as an excuse and lever to force the traditional Mexican economy to transform itself or die. The second is what ended up happening’ (Meyer 2005: 126, citing Lasala 2005).

292 Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society has overcome the challenge of making counterfactual assumptions. What are the possible impacts of this massive exercise of the ‘exit option’ on the prospects for addressing the problem of the underrepresentation of the concerns of the rural poor in the national policy process? It is worth recalling that during the post-NAFTA decade, with the notable exception of the regionally bounded Zapatista movement, Mexico experienced no sustained protest movement of the rural poor of national scope. The well-known Barzón protest movement for debt relief reached national scope after the 1995 peso crisis, but it represented primarily small-to-medium-sized commercial producers. 13 The broad-based but brief ‘Countryside Won’t Take Any More’ 2003 march on Mexico City was the decade’s only peasant protest of national significance that focused on making family farming economically sustainable. Though that mobilization was larger than even sympathetic observers expected, it ended up having virtually no impact on national agricultural trade and investment policies, which continued to be extremely biased in favor of better-off producers. 14 This one national protest against agricultural trade opening took place years after most of NAFTA’s provisions had already been implemented. One does not need to assume that those who migrate are necessarily more enterprising than those who stay, in order to conclude that the ‘exit option’ potentially undermines the capacity for collective action among those left behind. As one of Mexico’s most incisive political analysts put it, migration, along with the lack of formal sector employment, ‘stimulates the disintegration of the communities and the social fabric that sustain popular movements. They severely erode traditional forms of political and social mediation’ (Hernández Navarro 2006: 27). 13 See de Grammont (2001), Williams (1996, 2001). Only a minority of Mexican farmers were sufficiently well-off to have received bank credit in the first place. 14 On the distribution of Mexican government’s agricultural spending across social classes, see the little known but nominally public social incidence analysis by the World Bank (2004c). Most analysts would agree that the very modest agricultural policy concessions that the 2003 peasant protest had appeared to win were quickly subsumed by old-fashioned corporatist-style payments to organizations. Once the protesters returned home, the combination of technocratic diversions and the persistent intervention of traditional corporatist peasant groups overwhelmed the national representatives of participating independent organizations. The newly governing PAN discovered the political convenience of providing funds directly to PRI-style peasant organizations, as evidenced by the biased and clientelistic allocation of resources within the federal programs for the rural elderly and rural housing (Pérez 2004; Fox and Haight 2006). For background on the ‘El campo no aguanta más’ movement, see, among others, Schwentesius et al. (2004), a thematic issue of El Cotidiano (no. 124, March–April, 2004) and the extended debate between leading analysts Luis Hernández Navarro and Armando Bartra in the pages of La Jornada during 2003.

Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society 293 In Mexico, the ‘exit’ option is still widely associated with a lack of loyalty. In spite of the post-2000 change in official Mexican rhetoric towards greater public recognition of migrants’ contributions to the homeland, many still refer to those who moved to work in the USA as having ‘abandoned’ their country. 15 Until very recently, most Mexican political elites treated migrants as second-class citizens, and nationalists close to the PRI considered them too subject to US influence to risk granting them the right to vote (Martínez Saldaña and Ross Pincda 2002). These concepts of exit, voice and loyalty draw from the classic approach developed by heterodox economist Albert Hirschman (1970, 1981). In this view, simply put, exit and voice are two alternative responses to decline (in firms, organizations, states). Exit refers to opting out, voting with one’s feet—whether as consumer changing brands or as emigrant leaving one’s homeland. Voice refers to more direct expressions of dissent, whether through protest, electoral contestation or suasion—in its German edition, Hirschman’s book title was translated literally as ‘Out-migration and Contradicting’ (Hirschman 1993: 174). Loyalty cuts across both options, affecting decisions about whether to use exit or voice by making voice more likely. One of Hirschman’s main points was that easy availability of exit is inimical to voice, because voice is generally more costly than exit. ‘The more pressure escapes through exit, the less is available to foment voice’ (Hirschman 1993: 176). This approach appears to account for an extraordinarily wide range of experiences. 16 If this hypothesis holds for rural Mexico, then the implications are dramatic. Yet the relationship between exit and voice may not be predetermined. This is the context for asking, along with one of Hirschman’s 15 For example, when Subcomandante Marcos was recently asked about the relationship between the migrant movement in the USA and ‘the other campaign’ of the nonparty radical left in Mexico, he replied that they were relating ‘from below, through the families. Wherever . . . the other campaign has gone, they have told us that there is practically no family that has not lost a member, whether because of death or because they are there [in the US] and don’t see them anymore, and they feel the need to rebuild, not only their family, but their community’ (quoted in Marcos 2006: 17). Curiously, his response focused exclusively on migrants being ‘lost’, rather than their new public presence (in the USA), even to the point of implicitly equating their physical absence with death. 16 For example, many US historians have explained the weakness of 19th century US labor movements with the open frontier and the ease of exit. Tolnay and Beck explain geographic variation in rates of African-American out-migration from the US South during the 1910–30 period and find that exit was more likely in counties where lynchings were more frequent—with terror presumably the opposite of voice (1992). Gammage explores the gendered interaction between exit and voice among Haitian women migrants (2004).

294 Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society critics, ‘whether in some cases the same factors make for exit and for lack of voice among those remaining’ (Barry 1974: 85). Hirschman later recognized that under certain conditions, exit and voice can be mutually reinforcing, and the East German revolution of 1989–90 offered a vivid example. Indeed, Pfaff and Kim’s study of East Germany is especially suggestive, showing how the analysis of collective action can benefit from taking exit into account (2003). They find that the effects of exit on voice depend on the scale and pace of exit, following a U-shaped pattern. Exit can encourage voice by revealing grievances in ways that undermine regime legitimacy, especially if the regime attempts to forbid exit. In this context, exit signals voice. Yet at higher levels, mass exodus undermines the social foundations of protest by siphoning away participants and potential leaders. Pfaff and Kim contrast what they call exit’s ‘signaling effects’ versus its ‘network erosion effects’ (2003: 438). Yet turning back to Mexico, when one looks for ‘signaling effects’, more than four million paisanos had left the country during the administration of Vicente Fox without apparent dramatic impacts on the regime’s political legitimacy (Milenio 2006). It remains to be seen under what conditions exit and voice are complementary or contradictory. Hirschman’s original formulation explicitly framed migration and protest as alternatives, citing a study of Italian workers in the first decade of the twentieth century (1981: 226). He recalled that MacDonald asked why levels of out-migration varied so much, even between regions with similar poverty rates (1963). The study found little outmigration from regions with strong, mobilized workers’ movements, like the center and Apulia—in contrast to southern Italy, where there was little collective action and a massive exodus. No comparable study of Mexico exists, but it would be useful to compare levels and forms of organization with levels of out-migration across regions and subregions. The findings would be unlikely to reveal as clear-cut a pattern as in the Italian case, but one still might find a relationship between exit and voice in rural Mexico at a more general level. Looking back at the dramatic increase in levels of out-migration from Mexico during the 1990s, it might be useful to rethink the importance of the 1994 national elections. The public policies that are now widely associated with the increase in out-migration, notably the withdrawal of support prices, input subsidies for low-income farmers and trade protection for basic grains, date primarily from the Salinas presidency (1988– 94). In this sense, the 1994 elections, had they been fully democratic for rural voters, might have served as a referendum on this package of public policies. Yet, as Chapter 5 showed, the systematic lack of a

Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society 295 guaranteed secret ballot meant that a significant fraction of the rural electorate was denied free and fair electoral choices about their country’s national future. As Hirschman noted, the secret ballot is a key mechanism for ‘making voice retaliation-proof ’ (1981: 241). To put this in Hirschman’s terms, given the lack of political voice for most of the rural poor, many turned to exit. While this was certainly not the only migratory push factor, out-migration rates did rise substantially over the rest of the decade, perhaps suggesting some relationship between lack of voice and the exit option—at least at that political turning point. 17 Beyond the electoral arena, through the 1980s and 1990s, many dozens of autonomous regional producer organizations exercised voice through scaled-up community-based economic development alternatives. But many failed to survive the increasingly inhospitable policy environment—as in the case detailed in Chapter 4. The clearest expression of rural political voice during this period came from Mexico’s indigenous peoples, whose numerous local and regional organizations began to influence the national political agenda for the first time in the 1990s, especially after the Zapatista rebellion. Yet during the same decade, cross-border migration processes reached most of Mexico’s indigenous regions for the first time. Looking back over the past decade and a half, Mexico’s indigenous peoples have been exercising both voice and exit more than ever before. Both decisions involve agency, though with very different implications for the balance of power in the countryside. If one brings in loyalty as an ‘intervening variable’ between exit and voice—a factor that influences the choice between collective action in communities of origin versus the individual or family-based strategy of migration, it is worth reflecting on the commonplace Mexican use of the term ‘to abandon’ one’s community. First, one must also recognize that many who migrate do abandon their communities. Some do not return. More revealing is the fact that many do not send resources to support their families. Surveys of Mexican migrants report that 45 percent send remittances—which means that a slight majority do not (Benavides 2002: 19). The ‘abandonment as disloyalty’ view is understandable from the point of view of community organizers. When an organizer migrates, their organization clearly suffers a loss—especially if their training required an investment, as in the case of cooperative certifiers of 17 An alternative explanation should be acknowledged: low US unemployment rates during the Clinton presidency—but the arrow points in the same direction.

296 Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society organic coffee production (Mutersbaugh 2004). While such scenarios may well be commonplace, the impact of the emigration of activists on Mexican social movements has received remarkably little research attention. Yet what does this suggest for understanding the role of loyalty? From the point of view of an individual committed to change at home who decides to migrate, exit may be understood as an act of loyalty to their family—or as an act of self-preservation in the face of repression. More broadly, Mexican rural development activists and policymakers often use the term ‘migration problem’, when from the point of view of individual migrants, exit is actually the response (and for some the ‘solution’) to their employment problem. In some Oaxacan communities, highly localized identities ground collective efforts to discourage out-migration. While even communities with strong norms lack the clout to prevent members from leaving, they retain indirect leverage that takes the form of strict enforcement of obligatory citizenship duties for those who leave. In these cases, one must make amends in order to be permitted to return in good standing, which includes access to communal land and the right to be buried in one’s home village cemetery. There the penalty for noncompliance is ‘civic death’ (Mutersbaugh 2002). At least one Zapatista local government attempts to discourage migration, though they are unable to forbid it. Their rule requires potential migrants from their communities in resistance to ask permission, to justify their request, and—like in much of Oaxaca—for family members to compensate the community for lost labor (Stahler-Sholk 2006: 20). Yet the trends of the 1980s and 1990s, involving growing migrant collective action based on shared communities of origin, suggests that many migrants bring their sense of community with them. They recreate their sense of home community with their paisanos in the USA, which raises questions about the meaning of ‘exit’. This sense of shared collective identity is broadened when hometown associations form statewide federations, constructing a regional civic identity that the migrants may not have shared before they left. Similarly, the collective identity formation experience of Oaxacan indigenous migrants suggests that they developed shared ethnic and pan-ethnic identities through and because of the migration process, leaving behind more traditional, highly localized identities. 18 These patterns suggest that while exit may sometimes weaken voice, and at other times they may reinforce each other, perhaps exit can 18 For a review of the growing literature on this process, see Fox and Rivera-Salgado (2004). For a related conceptual discussion, see Fox (2006a).

Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society 297 Table 10.1

Locating migrant civil society in terms of exit and voice

Exit/Voice options Leave Stay

Silence Unorganized migrants Compliance, clientelism

Voice Migrant civil society Mass protest, electoral opposition

Note: This approach draws on ideas presented in Barry (1974), in response to Hirschman (1970).

also reflect the prior weakness of voice. Many look to regions of longterm out-migration and see a very thin civil society, yet the cause and effect relationship is not so clear-cut. Many migrants leave regions where rural civil society was already thin. In addition, even in regions that had experienced autonomous collective action, few campaigns had produced lasting change, and even fewer could offer viable future options from the point of view of young people. 19 But if we extend the temporal and geographic frame for considering the interaction between exit and voice and take the binational arena into account, new ways of considering the relationship between exit and voice emerge, as well as the role of loyalty as a mediating factor. Several steps are involved in broadening the frame. The first is to recognize that at least some migrants engage in collective action, along a range of possible pathways to be discussed further below. Second, for many migration has a collective dimension, insofar as it is only possible thanks to extended networks of social capital in which loyalty and trust can make the difference between life and death, between economic success and disaster, and between deep alienation and cultural survival. Third, when migrants send a significant fraction of their wages to their relatives and communities, they are also expressing loyalty. As suggested schematically in Table 10.1, when migrants come together in hometown associations to send collective social remittances for community projects, they are expressing not only loyalty, but also voice directed homeward—as they participate in debates over what social investments are most important. For those migrants who did not have access to autonomous, dense civil society alternatives back home, their exit can permit the exercise of their collective voice for the first time, whose costs are born out of loyalty. To sum up before exploring migrant civil society, exit can be a step towards voice rather than necessarily a substitute. Meanwhile, the implications for those who remain at home remain to be seen.

19 For a comparison of Mexico’s indigenous regions in terms of varying density of autonomous regional organizations, see Chapter 3.

298 Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society

Mapping Mexican Migrant Civil Society20 As many as hundreds of thousands of Mexican migrants work together with their paisanos in the USA to promote ‘philanthropy from below’, funding hundreds of community development initiatives in their hometowns. Almost 55,000 attempted to register to exercise their newly won right to cast absentee ballots in Mexico’s 2006 presidential election. Others are more engaged with their US communities—as organized workers, parents, members of religious congregations, undocumented get-out-the-vote campaigners and naturalized voters. In addition, some Mexican migrants are working to become full members of both US and Mexican societies at the same time, constructing practices of civic binationality. Many of the migrant activists working at the interface between Mexican and US societies are themselves cross-cultural interlocutors, people who straddle networks. The patterns of social, civic, and political participation among the Mexican migrants are just beginning to be seriously documented, and major gaps remain. The literature on Mexican hometown associations is becoming increasingly robust, yet it is often difficult to discern the patterns that are specific to Mexicans in the studies that document broader Latino participation in community organizations, unions, or religious congregations. In addition to the gaps in our basic knowledge about what the key trends look like, our capacity to understand these patterns of migrant collective action is also limited, in part because our conceptual frameworks have lagged behind migrant realities. Both Mexican and US approaches for understanding migrants remain basically national in their focus. US-based frameworks focus primarily on the degree to which migrants are incorporated into US institutions, and do not take into account how migrants are organizing themselves, often in relation to their communities of origin. The ethnic politics literature that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s to explain patterns of participation among Mexican-Americans has limited applicability to the millions of migrants who grew up in Mexico. A transnational perspective is needed to understand migrants’ nationally and regionally distinctive worldviews and organizing repertoires—to understand, in other words, ‘where they are coming from’. In contrast, Mexico-based lenses see a broad panorama of cross-border migrant collective action, as migrants organize as 20 The following section draws on Fox (2005d). Lanly and Valenzuela (2004) also use the term ‘migrant civil society’, though limited to the world of Mexican HTAs. The use here is broader and not limited to ‘homeward-oriented’ associationalism.

Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society 299 Mexicans—yet they have difficulty accounting for patterns of continuity and change in terms of migrants’ integration into US society. To sum up, the research literature has not analyzed migrant integration into the USA in ways that fully take into account the process from Mexicans’ points of view. To see the full picture, we need to look both at how migrants are organizing themselves in relationship to Mexico and other Mexican migrants, and at how they are organized in the USA, as residents, workers, parents, or members of faith-based communities. Increasingly, to account for both migrant collective action and patterns of continued engagement with their home countries, scholars have worked with the concept of ‘transnational communities’. Transnational communities are groups of migrants whose daily lives, work, and social relationships extend across national borders. 21 This idea helps to reveal relationships that are not visible when migrants are seen only through the lens of their engagements in the USA, yet the concept also risks tilting too far in the other direction, leaving out migrants’ multiple engagements in the USA. Moreover, transnational communities provide a social foundation for, but are not the same as, an emerging migrant civil society, which also involves the construction of public spaces and representative social and civic organizations. Just as only some migrants are members of transnational communities, only some transnational communities become the building blocks for representative social and civic organizations of migrants themselves. This idea is the point of departure for a comparative approach to analyzing the diverse and sometimes overlapping patterns of migrant collective action in the USA. 22 Most often, in migration studies, comparative analysis refers to the comparison of different national origin groups. This approach, most 21 For reviews of the flourishing sociological literature on transnational communities, see, among others, Fletcher and Margold (2003), Guarnizo, Portes, and Haller (2003), Levitt (2001), Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt (1999), Portes (2003), Smith and Guarnizo (1998), and Waldinger and Fitzgerald (2004). Much of this debate is framed in the broader context of ‘transnationalism’. For those who use survey methods, the individual is the unit of analysis. Guarnizo, Portes, and Heller find that a modest share of the migrant population participates intensively in collective transnational activities, while a larger group participates intermittently. Compared to high expectations associated with a romanticized view of transnational communities, these levels of reported participation appear low. However, if one compares reported participation to levels among members of other groups, especially when controlling for education and income, then they may not seem so low. 22 Note that these specifically migrant-led membership organizations are all distinct from those that emerged from the Mexican American civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The Chicano movement generation of organizations included both internationalist and cultural-nationalist wings that identified as Mexican and mexicano. See Gutiérrez (1995, 1996) for historical analysis and Jones-Correa (2005a, 2005b) for contemporary perspectives.

300 Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society often used in survey research, has generated rich findings. 23 Yet the Mexican migrant population in the USA is so large, and so diverse, that national-origin averages can mask key variables, such as ethnicity, region of origin, or region of settlement. Note that migrants from different Mexican states organize hometown associations at widely varying rates, and Mexicans from the same states organize at different rates in different regions of the USA (Rivera-Salgado, Bada, and EscalaRabadán 2005). Among indigenous Mexican migrants, members of some ethnic groups organize much more than others, in some regions more than others. Sectoral differences may also matter, insofar as we have not yet compared participation trends across hometown associations, worker organizations, neighborhood associations or religious communities. In the literature on naturalization and voting patterns of new citizens, it turns out that national samples can hide significant regional differences. Migrants in California have followed a much more highly politicized path than those in Texas and Florida, in terms of their rates of naturalization and voting (Pantoja, Ramírez, and Segura 2001). These differences only become visible once one takes a comparative approach—across states, regions, sectors, and patterns of participation. One of the main puzzles to consider here is whether the models of civic and social engagement that we work with, the lenses that we use to see how and why people engage in collective action, see home country engagement as ‘instead of ’ or ‘in addition to’ participation in the host society. This could be seen as the inverse of the exit-voice dichotomy, in which voice back home is assumed to involve deferring on voice in communities of residence. Is the relationship between these two kinds of participation ‘win-lose’ or ‘win-win’? Some see the answer as culturally predetermined, but this review of the research available finds no predetermined response. We can find both trends at the same time in the same communities. We can also see change over time. In other words, the terms of engagement are politically contingent— as in the case of the recent growth in the rate at which Mexican legal residents become US citizens. 24 This variability suggests that strategy, context and institutions matter. If this proposition holds up, then one could go further and suggest that strategies for encouraging civic participation ‘here’ that take into account engagement ‘there’ can increase the degree to which each kind of involvement can bolster the other. 23 See, among other recent studies, DeSipio et al. (2002, 2006), DeSipio (2004), and Guarnizo, Portes, and Haller (2004). 24 According to Fix, Passell, and Sucher, the fraction of Mexican permanent residents who had become US citizens grew from 19% in 1995 to 34% in 2001 (2003: 3).

Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society 301 What are some of the implications of the term ‘migrant civil society’? Simply put, migrant civil society refers to migrant-led membership organizations and public institutions. This includes four very tangible arenas of collective action. Each arena is constituted by actors, while each set of actors also constitutes an arena. 25

Migrant-led Membership Organizations Membership organizations composed primarily of migrants can range from hometown associations (HTAs) to worker organizations, religious associations and indigenous rights groups. In other words, they tend to come together around four broad collective identities—territory of origin, shared faith, work, and ethnicity. 26 Sometimes, these identities overlap, as in the cases of specifically Oaxacan catholics in Los Angeles or religious farm-workers in the Midwest, where union leaders preside over weddings and baptisms (Franklin 2006).

Hometown Clubs and Federations Most of the territorially based organizations take the form of hometown associations (HTAs) and their federations. The Mexican consulates have registered well over 600 hometown clubs (Rivera-Salgado, Bada, and Escala Rabadán 2005). 27 Each has a core membership of perhaps an average of two dozen families, some with hundreds more. They are primarily concentrated in metropolitan areas. Many HTA members are relatively well-established, and are better-educated than average among migrants. Much of their leadership has relative economic stability and are either legal residents or US citizens (e.g. Alarcón 2004; Alarcón, Runsten, and Hinojosa-Ojeda 1998). Leadership is also heavily male, and with a significant presence of entrepreneurs. Hundreds of HTAs have in turn federated into associations that 25 Definitional note: While this approach accepts the widely held proposition that the density of civil society constitutes the social foundation for democracy, it does not assume that civil society organizations are necessarily either democratic or democratizing. Indeed, recalling Gramsci, much of civil society reproduces dominant social hierarchies and is invested in maintaining the status quo. Hence the importance of unpacking civil society into its distinct components, to be able to identify where democratizing potential lies. 26 It should be noted that Mexican and other Latin American migrant entrepreneurs also come together in their own business associations and professional associations, as in the case of many Spanish-speaking Chambers of Commerce, professional, and service organizations. As many as 10% of Lions Clubs members are immigrants (Ly 2005). 27 Orozco and LaPointe claim over 2000 clubs (2004: 31).

302 Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society bring people from one state in Mexico together in another state in the USA, as in the flagship case of the numerous Zacatecas Federations. It is difficult to measure how many migrants participate with any precision, especially given the wide variation in the size and activities of each HTA and federation. In addition, the official consular registries include some clubs that exist only on paper, while some active associations choose not to register. An unusually large-scale survey of relatively recent Mexican migrants found that 14 percent of respondents belonged to some kind of hometown association, with higher rates reported for men and for migrants over 30 years of age (Suro 2005c). Whether this is considered a large or a small percentage depends on one’s comparative frame of reference. Today’s Mexican HTAs have a long history, with the first Zacatecan club in California dating back to 1962 (Moctezuma 2005). But their numbers and membership boomed in the last fifteen years, as the result of several converging factors. Within the USA, the massive regularization of undocumented workers that followed the 1986 immigration reform facilitated both economic improvement and increased cross-border freedom of movement for millions of migrants. On the Mexican side, the government deployed the convening power of its extensive consular apparatus, bringing together people from the same communities of origin and offering community development matching funds to encourage collective social remittances, through the 3x1 program. Though this policy began as a response to pressures from organized Zacatecan migrants, it also served as a powerful inducement for other migrants to come together in formal organizations for the first time. After all, many transnational social and civic relationships unfold outside of the clubs and federations (Fitzgerald 2000). In addition, the Mexican state changed the tone of its relationship with the diaspora by formally permitting dual nationality for the first time (Castañeda 2004, 2006). While many clubs emerged from below, many of the state level federations were formed through engagement with the Mexican state (Goldring 2002). 28 This raises questions about the degree to which the state migrant federations involve new, cross-border forms of corporatist representation. 28 For more on Mexican HTAs, see also, among others, Bada (2001, 2004a, 2004b), Cano (2002, 2004a, 2004b), Escala Rabadán and Zabin (2002), Espinosa (1999), Fitzgerald (2000, 2004b), Goldring (1998, 2002), Lanly and Valenzuela (2004), Leiken (2000), Moctezuma (2003a, b, 2005), Orozco, González, and Díaz de Cossio (2003), RiveraSalgado and Escala Rabadán (2004), Smith (2003), Smith (1995, 1998, 2003), and Williams (2004). On the strategies of the Mexican state, see also Ayón (2005), García Zamora (2005a, b), Goldring (2002), Gonzalez Gutiérrez (1993, 1997, 1999), and Martínez Saldaña (2003).

Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society 303 At least until recently, many Mexican migrant organizations were disengaged from US civil society. For example, in 1994, few Mexican hometown associations participated in the broad campaign against California’s notorious anti-immigrant Proposition 187 (Zabin and Escala Rabadán 1998). In contrast, a decade later, when California’s main state level immigrant rights advocacy campaign involved the right to drivers licenses for the undocumented, hometown association members were actively involved, working the phone banks at the headquarters of the Los Angeles trade union movement. 29 The leadership of the Southern California Council of Presidents of Mexican Federations has now joined the fray of state politics (Rivera-Salgado, Bada, and Escala-Rabadán 2005). Some Mexican federations have also joined the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities, especially in the Midwest. 30 Meanwhile, mainstream US Latino politicians and public interest groups are also reaching out to Mexican HTAs like never before (e.g. Hecht 2005). 31 This contrasts with the once widely held view among Latino civil rights advocates that immigrant home country engagements were potentially in conflict with encouraging civic participation in the USA. 32 This array of Mexican migrant alliances within the USA would have been hard to imagine a decade ago. 33

Faith-based Organizations While HTAs are one of the main forms of expression of Mexican migrant civil society, they have received more scholarly and press attention than the other main categories of membership organizations, 29 On the role of Los Angeles trade unions as channels for political participation by noncitizens, see Varsanyi (2004, 2005). On the drivers’ license campaigns in California and elsewhere, see Ansley (2005), Seif (2003), and Waslin (2002). On the contested terrain of state and local immigration policies more generally, see Wells (2005). 30 Founded in 2004, NALACC is a national coalition of diverse migrant-led organizations that encourages civic engagement both in the USA and in their countries of origin. See www.nalacc.org. 31 As a precedent, in 1999–2000, the National Council of La Raza convened at least three meetings to explore relationships with Mexican HTAs, with a focus on community economic development, collective remittances, and the formalization of nonprofit status for HTAs in the USA. See Mexico-US Advocates (2000). 32 On relations between Mexican migrants and Mexican-Americans, the classic work is Gutiérrez (1995, 1996, 1998, 1999). See also Fitzgerald (2004b), Jones-Correa (2005), and Pitti (2003b). 33 In smaller cities, however, the distance between mainstream Latino organizations and organized migrants can remain significant. In Salinas, California, for example, according to local community organizers, Mexican HTAs have long been invisible to local Latino political and nonprofit leaders (field interviews, August, 2005).

304 Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society notably religious, worker, community-based and indigenous organizations. 34 Faith-based associations are among the most widespread forms of collective action among Mexican immigrants. According to Pew Hispanic Center surveys, by far the leading category of ‘volunteer activity’ among both US and foreign-born Latinos is church-related (Suro 2005: 5). Cano’s comparison of Mexican Catholics in Houston, Chicago and New York highlights the diverse patterns of interaction between religion and civic engagement (2004c). While many congregations generate social or civic action among migrants—as with the rest of the population—the degree to which they do so, as well as the different pathways they follow, have yet to be well-documented. The Catholic Church has been reorienting towards its new mass constituency, and has become one of the most important forces promoting immigration reform in the USA, but it remains unclear the degree to which congregations and related organizations are actually immigrant-led. 35 Faith-based groups, like worker organizations, are also likely to bring together Latin American immigrants of diverse national origins, bolstering the social foundations of the concept of Latino. Beyond the Church itself, the most prominent specifically Mexican faith-based membership organization that is consistently active in promoting a rights-based approach to civic and social issues is the New York-based Asociación Tepeyac. Tepeyac is well-known for leading its own mass traveling collective action for immigrant rights, an annual relay Torch Run that travels through several of Mexico’s ‘sending’ regions and arrives in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City on December 12 (Antorcha Guadalupana Mex-NY). Along the way, the runners, called Mensajeros por la Dignidad de un Pueblo Dividido por la Frontera [Messengers for the Dignity of a People Divided by the Border] pray to the Virgin for the right to permanent legal residency. 36 34 Few cases of gender-based Mexican migrant membership organizations have emerged. The most notable example is Líderes Campesinas, a membership organization of women farmworkers in California, mainly from migrant families (Blackwell 2006). Founded in 1992, Líderes organizes mexicanas to create and occupy public spaces in small rural towns. They literally take to the streets, marching to challenge domestic violence and impunity, showing that the barrier between public and private can be challenged. Like many other US grassroots organizations with a primarily Mexican migrant membership, Líderes Campesinas is led by a bilingual, US-born daughter whose parents participated in the United Farm Workers movement of the 1960s and 1970s. 35 The main Catholic advocacy campaign brings together a wide range of US religious authorities, health and education institutions, including the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Jesuits. See www.justiceforimmigrants.org. Kerwin reports that ‘nearly 80’ dioceses had ‘initiated’ local campaigns by 2006, of a total of almost 200. On bishops’ national political role in the 2006 immigration debate, see Swarns (2006). 36 See www.tepeyac.org.

Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society 305 Their repertoire resonates widely, though Mexicans in New York also form hometown associations and worker organizations. The Tepeyac Association pursues a distinctive strategy for forging collective identity, based around the combined ethnonational and spiritual symbolism of the Virgen de Guadalupe, together with an explicit effort to build a shared collective identity as undocumented workers. Founded by Jesuits, their New York City social base is organized in forty different neighborhood Comités Guadalupanos. This is very different from the hometown-based approach to migrant organizing. Tepeyac’s original US partner was the New York Diocese of the Catholic Church, whose leadership took the initiative that led Tepeyac to form in the first place, by reaching out to Mexican church counterparts. 37 Another major form of immigrant participation in faith-based organizations is through the Industrial Areas Foundation’s many regional affiliates. 38 IAF members number in the hundreds of thousands. The IAF is a secular network, but one of its main organizing strategies is to work with communities that are already involved through their congregations. IAF organizers often begin to work in regions through alliances with religious leaders—notably Catholic bishops. IAF affiliate organizations are multiethnic and multiracial, but MexicanAmericans are especially well-represented, especially in Texas, Illinois, California, and Arizona. In this context, Mexican immigrants clearly participate, though available research does not address their specific role and presence in network affiliates (e.g. Warren 2001). At least one major union organizing success involving primarily Mexican and Guatemalan meatpacking workers in Omaha, involved both an IAFaffiliate (Omaha Together One Community—OTOC) and the United Food and Commercial Workers (Bacon 2002, 2006; Fine 2006). OTOC, in turn, brings together more than thirty-five organizations, including Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish congregations, as well as the Omaha Latino Soccer League and Charros Hometown Association. 39 Both the institutional church and faith-based community organizations are widely recognized to have played very significant roles in the spring, 2006 mobilizations, most notably in southern California. Indeed, some church activists explicitly contested the media version 37 See Gálvez (2004), Rivera-Sánchez (2004a, 2004b, 2005), and Solís (2001, 2002). On local level Catholic Church responses to Mexican migration, including changing forms of popular religiosity, see also Machuca (2004). More research is necessary to document the full picture of cross-border collaboration between Mexican and US churches. For a historical perspective, see Fitzgerald (2005). On religion and Latino migrant political participation more generally, see Jones-Correa and Leal (2001). 38 See affiliate listing at http://www.industrialareasfoundation.org/ 39 See http://www.otoc.org/

306 Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society that portrayed the marches as ‘spontaneous’ (León Zaragoza 2006). Together with the active encouragement of Spanish language media, the blessing of church leaders created an environment in which hundreds of thousands of immigrants felt safe enough to engage in mass public action for the first time. 40

Worker Organizations The US labor movement’s opening to Mexican immigrant workers is relatively recent, and was made possible primarily by the growing voice and clout of Latino leaders within the mainstream labor movement—notably in California. 41 Mexican workers are an increasingly important part of the trade union movement in those regions and sectors where unions are dynamic and organizing new members. By 2004, Mexican-born workers represented 2.3 percent of all union members, over 360,000, with unionization rates much higher for longterm residents (Milkman 2005: 5). In regions of high union density, Mexican migrants are well-represented in the membership of unions that represent primarily low-wage workers, like UNITE–HERE (garments, textiles, hotels, and restaurants), SEIU (services, including health-care workers, and the legendary Justice for Janitors campaign), UFCW (food processing), and the Teamsters (agro-industry). Further research would be needed to determine how many union locals are actually migrant-led, and therefore part of migrant civil society, as defined here. Clearly, however, in terms of both sheer numbers and the impact on members’ daily lives, unions are by far one of the most important institutions for the representation of Mexicans in the USA. Nevertheless, trade unions face many structural, institutional, and cultural constraints in their efforts to organize immigrant workers. In response, a new set of institutions has emerged to try to fill the gap between traditional workplace-based unions and low wage immigrant 40 In this context, the political role of Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles has been crucial. After working to support the UFW in the 1960s, he served as the first chair of the state’s farm labor authority in 1975, when it supported worker representation and opposed the 1994 ballot initiatives against immigrant access to public services. In 2006 his constituency included 5 million Catholics, 75% of whom were Latino (Parkes 2006; Watanabe 2006). 41 On US worker organizations and Mexican migrants, see Bacon (2004, 2005), Delgado (1994), Fine (2005, 2006), Fitzgerald (2004a), Gordon (2005), Johnston (2003, 2004a, 2004b, 2005), Mellor, Kath, and Bulger (2003), Milkman (2000, 2005, 2006), Ruiz Cameron (2000), and Waldinger et al. (1998). Fitzgerald’s study is one of the most comprehensive so far, taking into account worker identities, organizational issues and hometown dynamics. For analysis of grassroots Mexican worker identities through the lens of the US racialization process, see De Genova (2005). For comparison, see Fink’s richly nuanced analysis of a primarily Guatemalan immigrant worker organizing campaign in North Carolina (2003).

Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society 307 workers. Worker centers include a wide range of grassroots organizing initiatives that operate separately from trade unions. Sometimes they coordinate, and sometimes they are in tension. A comprehensive recent survey found 137 worker centers across the USA, 122 of which work closely with immigrant workers (Fine 2005, 2006). Of the 40 studied in depth, about 17 have a significant Mexican constituency, and 13 of them are predominantly Mexican. 42 The National Network of Day Laborers brings together 29 worker centers from 11 states, with half in New York and California. 43 One approach to unpacking migrant civil society involves distinguishing between organizations in terms of whether they are US institutions transformed by migrants, or whether they are ‘migrant institutions’, but one also needs to consider the participation of migrants as individuals. The same people may participate in both arenas of migrant civil society, though sometimes separately, a form of doble militancia. Note the case of Oregon’s farm-worker organization, the Northwest Treeplanters and Farmworkers United (PCUN), whose membership combines Mexican-Americans, mestizo Mexican migrants, and indigenous Mixteco migrants from Mexico’s state of Oaxaca. While PCUN is very much a US organization, some of its Mexican members are also active in their own hometown associations. In the case of some of the Oaxacan HTAs, they have as many as a dozen branches spread across the USA, each raising funds to support community development projects back home. 44 PCUN is one of several regional US farmworker organizations, each one with thousands of members. 45 Some have won tangible victories, which are especially notable in the overall national context of eroding union bargaining power. The Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), a trade union based in the Midwest and North Carolina, won an unprecedented contract for as many as 8,000 Mexican H-2A workers (Chavez 2004). The FLOC has long pursued an unusually internationalist, cross-border worker organizing strategy, and recently opened its own office in Mexico. 46

42

Janice Fine, personal communication, June 2005. See www.ndlon.org, which has links to members’ websites. See Gordon (2005) for a detailed study of a leading worker center, Long Island’s Workplace Project. 44 See www.pcun.org and Stephen (2001, 2004, 2007). 45 According to the most broad-based farm-worker field survey, Mexican-born workers represent 75% of the US farm labor force, up from 65% in 1994 (Department of Labor 2005). This finding is substantially higher than the Current Population Survey figures, which are cited more often (e.g. Migration News at www.migration.ucdavis.edu) 46 See www.floc.com. One observer estimates their long-standing Ohio and Michigan membership at 6,000 (Straub 2006). 43

308 Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society Florida’s Coalition of Immokolee Workers recently won a major victory from Taco Bell, thanks to a combination of a mobilized base, highly effective media strategies, and strong alliances with students, churches, and unions. They combine direct action with legal strategies, which have even jailed labor contractors on charges of forced labor. The CIW led their own Truth Caravan, with eighty workers traveling to fifteen cities by bus. Their rank and file is 50 percent Mexican (many from southern states), 30 percent Guatemalan, and 10 percent Haitian. 47 Majority-migrant worker organizations, like the UFW, PCUN, FLOC, CIW, as well as many union locals in manufacturing and service industries, are all US organizations insofar as their goals are to defend their members’ rights in the USA, both as workers and as migrants. 48 In some of these regional organizations the vast majority of members are Mexican, while others include workers of multiple nationalities, as in the case of CIW. Few have binational or cross-border priorities or characteristics—with the major exception of FLOC. Yet their members may also have other affiliations, which may or may not be visible to outsiders, as in the case of PCUN, or the representation of leadership of the United Farm Workers on the Mexican government’s migrant outreach agency’s Advisory Council. 49 Only further research could tell whether their members are also organized binationally, around their communities of origin. Mexican immigrant workers are incorporated into US unions and worker centers as Latino immigrant workers. Mexican migrants encounter this panethnic identity for the first time in the USA. US union strategies and discourses, meanwhile, downplay immigrant workers’ distinct national origins and migration experiences. While this umbrella approach facilitates collective action among workers who share labor market position, language, and immigration status issues, the submergence of their ‘Mexican-ness’ complicates efforts to understand the political cultures and repertoires that these workers bring with them. Even in cases where Mexican workers are successful at democratizing both their workplace and their organization, unions 47 See www.ciw-online.org, Bowe (2003), Payne (2000), and Leary (2005). Leary estimates CIW’s core membership at 2,500, but they played a key role in leading an April 10, 2006, march of 75,000 in Ft. Myers, Florida (a community of 65,000), according to local newspaper accounts (The News-Press, April 11, 2006). For comparative context and sources on turnout in the spring, 2006 immigrant marches, see Table 10.2. 48 Little field-based research is available on the changing relationships between the UFW and Mexican migrants over the past decade. In the 1960s and 1970s, growers used undocumented workers to break UFW strikes, leading to tense relations. 49 For recent analysis of the Mexican government’s effort to institutionalize liaison with the diaspora through the Institute of Mexicans Abroad, see Ayón (2005).

Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society 309 are reluctant to draw fully on the potential for solidarity generated by their shared migration experience (e.g. Apostolidis 2005).

Ethnic Organizations While ‘Mexican’ in the USA is widely seen as a homogeneous ethnic category, Mexico is in fact a multiethnic society, with at least one in ten Mexicans coming from a family in which an indigenous language is spoken. Indigenous Mexicans have a long history of migration to the USA, but only since the 1990s has their share of the migrant population begun to approach their share of the national population. In the racialization process that accompanies migration, indigenous Mexicans often go through a process of ‘scaling up’ their collective identities. This shift from a primary identification with their home community to ethnic and panethnic identities became the basis for political activists to build indigenous Mexican rights organizations. 50 The Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations, formerly known as the Oaxacan Indigenous Binational Front (FIOB), is one of the very few mass membership organizations that include organized bases in both the USA and in Mexico, with thousands of affiliated members organized in branches in California, Baja California, and in their home state of Oaxaca. The FIOB is not a federation of hometown associations, though its members have a strong sense of shared homeland, in the sense of being paisanos. For Oaxacan migrants, the collective identity represented by the term paisano is situational. As the FIOB’s Oaxaca coordinator put it: The word paisano can be interpreted on different levels . . . it depends on the context in which it is used. If we are in a specific community, you say paisano to mean being part of that community. . . . it’s a mark of distinction for the person, showing their honorability . . . This term has been part of the people’s culture . . . With the need to migrate to other places, we find ourselves meeting people who, after talking a bit, we find out are from the some region, in a place filled with people from other states. There the concept is used to distinguish ourselves, and to bring us together more. Then the word reflects our identity as brothers. (Interview, Romualdo Juan Gutiérrez Cortés, Huajapan de León, Oaxaca, May, 2000, author’s translation)

This quote shows how collective identity ‘scales up’ from home community to shared region of origin in the course of the migration process. 50 The foundational work is Kearney (1988, 1995, 2000) and Nagengast and Kearney (1990). See also Fox and Rivera-Salgado (2004), Fox (2006a), Rivera-Salgado (2002), and Velasco Ortiz (2002, 2005).

310 Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society Their sense of being oaxaqueño is a shared identity that comes out of a struggle against the intense racism they face in northern Mexico and in California, where they face ethnic slurs, like oaxaquito, or oaxaco, from other Mexicans. In this context, oaxaqueño is not just a geographic reference, but rather a term of both respect and self-respect. In the process, regional identity becomes socially constructed as a panethnic umbrella identity, since Oaxaca includes at least sixteen distinct ethnic groups. In this context, the FIOB’s recent decision to change its name is especially notable. The change in the wording from ‘Oaxacan’ to ‘Organizations’, while keeping the FIOB acronym, reflected the new realities of their mass base in California and Baja California, where indigenous migrants from states other than Oaxaca are increasingly involved (Cano 2005). Among the binational leadership commission elected in March, 2005, five Mexican languages are spoken (Mixtec, Zapotec, Mixe, Purépecha, and Spanish). The FIOB actively pursues a wide-ranging rights agenda on issues that range from family and community-level public interest advocacy, environmental justice, public health education, and PTA training, to national immigrant and indigenous rights in both countries (Domínguez Santos 2004; Martínez Saldaña 2004). 51 They work closely with a wide range of public interest groups in both countries, their leaders run for mayor and state congress in Oaxaca, for school board in California, and they do public interest advocacy at local, state, and federal levels in both countries. This raises a conceptual issue. Does the FIOB represent the ‘migrant wing’ of Mexico’s national indigenous movement? Does the FIOB represent the ‘indigenous wing’ of a broader cross-border migrant movement? Clearly the FIOB plays both roles.

Migrant-led Communications Media Migrant-led nonprofit media can range from local and binational newspapers to radio programs, independent video, and now numerous internet discussion oriented to hometowns or regions. 52 For example, the Oaxacan community in Los Angeles is now sufficiently large and established to support two newspapers, El Oaxaqueño and Impulso de Oaxaca. The first publishes more than 30,000 copies biweekly and circulates both in California and Oaxaca. In additional to regional community service-oriented publications, the broader Mexican migrant voting 51 For foreign-born Latinos in general, school programs are the second most extensive form of reported volunteer activity, after church (Suro 2005c). 52 See the listings of hometown websites by state at www.jornadasinfronteras.com, the migrant-oriented website of Mexico City’s La Jornada.

Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society 311 rights campaign now has its own binational monthly magazine based in Chicago, MX Sin Fronteras. The migrant-run Spanish language public radio network, Radio Bilingüe, is broadcast on approximately fifty stations in the USA and twenty more in Mexico. 53 In addition, for many years Radio Bilingüe broadcast the only regular programming in indigenous Mexican languages. For many migrant farmworker communities, Radio Bilingüe is their principal news source, and internal evaluations have found that it really reaches them. Beyond the nonprofit media is the huge world of commercial Spanish language media. Though for-profit enterprises fall outside of most definitions of civil society, these media nevertheless play key civic roles, not only informing their publics, but also encouraging public service. Spanish language media have actively encouraged both US citizenship and voter turnout (Rodríguez 1999, 2005). Such practices contrast sharply with critics’ assumptions that the persistence of Spanish is associated with an unwillingness to join US civil society (e.g. Huntington 2004). At the same time, migrant-oriented media is not necessarily the same as migrant-owned, so Spanish language media institutions therefore only overlap partially with a strict definition of migrant civil society. In many cases, however, key media decision-makers, such as editors and reporters, are most often migrants. This is increasingly the case in English language mass media as well, at least in California, where fully bilingual migrant professionals have made important steps up the media ladder. Here, as with the media more generally, there are gray areas where civil society and the corporate sector overlap. The concept of migrant civil society includes both institutions and individuals. For example, the civic role of Spanish language media personalities has yet to be fully documented, but was quite significant even before their widely recognized role in the mass mobilization of the spring of 2006. In the key immigrant cities of Chicago and Los Angeles, Mexican Spanish language radio DJs were quickly recognized to be major forces behind the huge 2006 immigrant marches. 54 Once considered to be exclusively entertainers, they have taken on their civic role with seriousness. As Los Angeles DJ ‘Piolín’ put it, ‘I feel a great responsibility, and I should be careful. I’m not going to do things because a politician or anyone else calls me . . . I’ll only do what comes from my 53

See www.radiobilingue.com and Orozco (2001). See Watanabe and Becerra (2006). In the context of the new public attention to the penetration and influence of Spanish language radio, media and political analyst David Ayón noted that the contribution of TV and print media has been underestimated. He cited the prime-time endorsement of the April 10 march by Los Angeles’ leading TV newscaster, whose credibility contributed to the widespread feeling that collective action was both safe and legitimate (personal communication, April 2006). 54

312 Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society heart’ (Navarro 2006). The experience of Chicago DJ ‘El Pistolero’ is especially important, since that city was the first of the spring, 2006 protest wave to experience a truly enormous immigrant march. When later interviewed in English on National Public Radio, ‘El Pistolero’ revealed the relevance of his own family’s Mexican political history for understanding his current civic commitments: I grew up in a very active, pro-immigrant valley, I come from Fresno, California, the Central Valley, and to be honest, I lost my father in Mexico and that’s how I ended up in Central California, because my father was in politics in Mexico and he lost his life because of it. And I’ve always promised myself that I would never get into politics. But you know, you hear the call and it is the moral responsibility when you’re behind a microphone, not just to entertain people, but to inform people of what’s going on around their lives. (cited in Block 2006)

In terms of the framework sketched out earlier, this testimony evokes exit being transformed into voice, mediated by loyalty to community. Indeed, the previous summer, ‘El Pistolero’ had helped to convene an effervescent immigrant rights march that was largely invisible outside of the immigrant community. He was inspired by a local Mexican priest’s call-in talk show to denounce the claims of the ‘Minutemen’. The priest later commented that ‘it’s sad that the hometown clubs and the federations didn’t want to participate, because the march was going to be on the South Side [in immigrant neighborhoods rather than downtown] and [they thought therefore] it would have no impact, and because it was organized by radio personalities’ (cited in Martínez and Piña 2005: 8). The turnout was then unprecedented, with estimates ranging from 30,000 to 50,000. 55 This little-known mass action reinforces the widely held interpretation of the later spring, 2006 protest wave, in that both Spanish language media and religious leaders proved to have broader convening power than existing membership organizations.

Migrant-led NGOs While many NGOs, or nonprofits, serve migrant communities, in this approach only those that are migrant-led would be considered part of migrant civil society. Here one must keep in mind the clear distinction between NGOs and membership organizations—a distinction that is sidestepped by the fuzzy US term ‘community-based organization’. 56 55

Raûl Ross, personal communication, October 27, 2005. In Spanish, the often preferred term for NGO translates into English as ‘civil organizations’. 56

Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society 313 In some cases migrant membership organizations have spun off their own NGOs, as in the case of the Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations (FIOB), which has set up its own NGOs in California and in Oaxaca, to provide support services and to invest in community development and public education projects. 57 In addition, many migrants in NGOs, both as individuals and as organizations, joined with membership organizations to lobby the Mexican government for voting rights abroad (Rodríguez Oceguera 2005). While many US community development organizations appear to be quintessentially US Latino NGOs, an uncounted number are in fact migrant-led, as in the case of Chicago’s Little Village Community Development Corporation. Affiliated with the National Council of La Raza, this nonprofit is led by a pioneer of civic binationality, a Mexican immigrant who is also a founder of a Mexican organization, Durango Unido (Bada, Fox, and Selee 2006). To continue recognizing gray areas of overlap, this category within migrant civil society can also include those migrants who, as individuals, have gained positions of leadership within established US nonprofits, including foundations. They are strategically located to make major contributions to the capacity-building of other migrant civil society institutions. 58 Here the support group Hispanics in Philanthropy plays an important role, bringing together both US-born and immigrant foundation staffers, with chapters in California and Washington, DC. 59

Autonomous Migrant-led Public Spaces Public spaces refer to large gatherings where migrants can come together to interact and to express themselves with relative freedom and autonomy. 60 Here culture, religion, sports, and recreation are key. For example, in California, indigenous Oaxacan migrants now organize huge annual music, dance, and food festivals known as Guelaguetzas. They are the embodiment of the imagined cultural and civic space known as Oaxacalifornia. 61 Specifically Oaxacan migrant civil society in California is now sufficiently dense that migrants put on six 57 See www.fiob.org, Domínguez Santos (2004), Fox and Rivera-Salgado (2004), Ramírez Romero (2003), and Velasco Ortiz (2002, 2005). 58 The US foundations involved in these issues are organized into an affinity group, Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees. See www.gcir.org. 59 See http://www.hiponline.org 60 On the social construction of public spheres in the Latino community, including both migrants and non-migrants, see Rocco (2004). 61 For background on this concept, see Kearney (1988, 1995, 2000) and Nagengast and Kearney (1990), as well as Besserer (2003), Escárcega and Varese (2004), and Fox and Rivera-Salgado (2004).

314 Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society different Guelaguetza festivals each year. 62 They are held in parks, high school auditoriums, college campuses, and the largest is held in the LA Sports Arena—the former home of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team. In each one, hundreds volunteer their time so that thousands can come together, so that parents can share their culture with their children. Indeed, probably few had had the opportunity to see such a festival when they were living in Oaxaca. With so much activity, California’s multigenerational Oaxacan migrant dance groups are in high demand, and they represent yet another network of membership organizations. 63 Each of the six annual festivals reveals an Xray of the social networks and organizational styles of different strands of the web of Oaxacan civil society in California. For example, some work with local Latino politicians and organizations, others collaborate with the PRI-controlled Oaxacan state government, and still others keep their distance. One of the most vivid efforts to bring immigrants into the public sphere was led by trade unions, notably UNITE—HERE, the union that brings together hotel and restaurant workers with garment and textile workers. They led the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride in 2003. By highlighting the historic legacy of the Freedom Rides, migrants of many nationalities explicitly reached out to diverse US constituencies by framing immigrant rights under the historical mantle of the African-American civil rights movement. Migrant organizations, including California’s Oaxacan Federation, were officially represented on the ride. 64 In several areas of recent Mexican settlement in the USA, such as Nashville, the Freedom Ride permitted migrant organizations to become public actors for the first time. 65 Old habits die hard, though, and some Mexican migrant bus riders were frustrated with what they described as their trade union handlers’ ‘mania for control’. This cross-cultural disconnect erupted at one point into 62 Two are held in Los Angeles, including the longest-running California Guelaguetza, led by the Oaxacan Regional Organization, as well as the largest one, organized by the Oaxacan Federation. The Coalition of Oaxacan and Indigenous Communities in northern San Diego County holds theirs at California State University, San Marcos. Two different branches of the Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations hold Guelaguetza festivals as well, one in the central valley in Fresno, the other on the Ventura County coast in Santa Maria. The most recent one is held in the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium. 63 See Cruz Manjarrez (2001). 64 The two returning Oaxacan migrant federation representatives on the ride were honored with a photo on the front page of the Los Angeles-based El Oaxaqueño newspaper (October 18, 2003, 4(116). On the importance of ‘framing’ for social movements and collective identity formation, see Morris and McClurg Mueller (1992), among others. 65 See, for example, Miller (2004) and Reyes (2003a, 2003b). On the broader processes of new Mexican settlement in the South and Midwest, see Zuñiga and Hernández-León (2005).

Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society 315 a brief, behind-the-scenes ‘rebellion’ by migrant riders against the coordinators of one of the buses. 66 This small but revealing incident is emblematic of how much more work is needed to build and sustain cross-cultural coalitions. Overall, the Freedom Ride made unprecedented inroads in terms of projecting humanizing images of migrants in the mainstream media. Both the Freedom Ride and Tepeyac’s Torch Run brought organized migrants into the public sphere, both crossed vast territories in the process, both were organized from below but counted on institutional allies in the USA. Yet they followed different strategies to broaden their bases—one ventured from west to east, while the other traveled from south to north. The Freedom Ride framed migrants as the most recent wave in the long history of struggle against social exclusion in the USA, building a multiracial class identity as immigrant workers, while Tepeyac looked across the border to build a shared identity as Mexicans fighting for dignity and recognition as Mexicans. This review of public civic spaces created by organized migrants provides context for understanding the extraordinary explosion of civic energy embodied by the immigrant marches on the spring of 2006. Until more in-depth research is carried out, the following patterns emerge. First, the marches were triggered by the attempt to use federal law to criminalize undocumented workers and their supports. This added insult to injury, provoking perhaps the single clearest message to emerge from the mass actions: ‘we are workers, not criminals’. 67 Second, while existing membership organizations played key roles, notably unions and hometown federations, the turnouts dramatically surpassed their organized bases. To reach out beyond the already organized, the Spanish language media and the Catholic church were the most important actors. They were primarily responsible for the remarkable consistency of the marchers’ message and repertoire— order and respect for the law, white shirts, and the mass display of US flags. Though well over three million people marched, hardly a single arrest for violent protest was reported. Third, though participation was primarily Mexican—especially in the West and Midwest—the marches went further than ever before toward the social construction of a shared identity among Latino immigrant workers. Fourth, the marches united people of diverse migration status, including undocumented, permanent residents and citizens—reflecting the actual experiences of 66 They were reportedly turned off by some union staffers’ styles, their lack of Spanish, and their efforts to prohibit Mexican flags while encouraging the display of US flags. See Ehrenreich (2003) and Jamison (2005) for detailed accounts of the Freedom Ride. 67 Among many other accounts of this dynamic, see Brooks (2006) and Pomfret and Geis (2006).

316 Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society Table 10.2

Immigrant rights marches, Spring 2006

Date

Estimated turnout (Lower and upper bounds)

City

State

Los Angeles

CA

5/1/06

650,000–700,000

Chicago Dallas Los Angeles Washington Chicago

IL TX CA DC IL

5/1/06 4/9/06 3/25/06 4/10/06 3/10/06

400,000–750,000 350,000–500,000 200,000–500,000 180,000 100,000–300,000

New York Phoenix

NY AZ

4/10/06 100,000 4/10/06 100,000–300,000

San Jose Atlanta Fort Myers Denver Denver Detroit Houston San Diego Atlanta

CA GA FL CO CO MI TX CA GA

5/1/06 3/24/06 4/10/06 3/25/06 5/1/06 3/27/06 4/10/06 4/9/06 4/10/06

100,000 80,000 75,000 50,000 50,000–75,000 50,000 50,000 50,000 40,000–50,000

San Francisco St. Paul

CA MN

5/1/06 4/9/06

30,000 30,000

Washington

DC

3/6/06

30,000

20 largest events totals

2,715,000–4,000,000

Totals Spring 2006

3,568,566–5,111,716

Sources LA Times, La Opinión, ABC News Chicago Tribune, Univision Dallas Morning News LA Times, La Opinión New York Times Chicago Tribune, CBS2 Chicago New York Times Arizona Republic, Washington Post, NYT, CNN San Jose Mercury News Atlanta Journal Constitution Orlando Sentinel Denver Post Denver Post, La Opinión Detroit Free Press Houston Chronicle, Forbes San Diego Union Tribune Atlanta Journal Constitution, Houston Chronicle San Francisco Chronicle, AP Minneapolis Star-Tribune, AP Chicago Tribune

Source: Bada, Fox, and Selee (2006).

so many immigrant families of mixed status. Fifth, the impacts of the marches on national policy, like so many grassroots movements, will be mediated in unpredictable ways by electoral politics and intermediary organizations. The geographic pattern of the marches and their varying sizes provides a snapshot of the density of immigrants’ willingness to ‘come out’. Table 10.2 documents the size of the marches, citing the turnout reported by each city’s local English-language newspaper as the most conservative estimate (as well as sometimes higher estimates by other

Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society 317 media). The first very large march was in Chicago, reaching over 100,000 and included the mayor and governor. The next major wave was led by Los Angeles, Dallas, Denver, Phoenix, San Jose, and San Diego, each of which experienced the largest public protests in their cities’ respective histories. Also remarkable were the many marches in smaller and medium-sized cities, such as Fresno, Yakima, and Walla Walla, each of which also experienced the largest protests in their cities’ histories. The May events capped the cycle of protest with more than 400,000 again in Chicago—by far the largest march that city had ever seen, on the very anniversary of that city’s own contribution to international workers’ history—the fight for the 8 hour day, led by immigrant workers in the late nineteenth century. It would be difficult to account for the huge May 1 turnouts across the country without recognizing that day’s place in the political-cultural repertoire that Latin American migrants came with. To sum up this review of the landscape of Mexican immigrant membership organizations through the lens of migrant civil society, migrants are represented through two main pathways. The first is the most straightforward: organizations that are led by and made up of migrants themselves. The second is less straightforward because the boundaries are more blurred, and takes the form of US civil society organizations that have effectively been transformed by migrant participation. This would describe many Catholic parishes, trade union locals, worker centers, and parent teacher associations. Notably, an estimated 170 of Chicago’s innovative elected School Councils are reportedly primarily Mexican—they allow noncitizen voting (IME 2005).

Pathways of Synergy Clearly this landscape of four intersecting arenas is dynamic rather than static, as suggested by Figure 10.1. At different moments in history, different arenas lead and lag in the process of ‘thickening’ civil society. During much of the 1990s, membership organizations quietly carried out the slow work of assembling the building blocks of participatory campaigns to defend rights, ranging from Justice for Janitors to efforts to get Mexican Consulates to pay attention to their constituents to the right to the absentee ballot. By the middle of the next decade, however, formal organizations of any kind still had yet to reach the vast majority of the migrant community, yet they turned out to be engaged and paying attention to the public sphere through the mass media and their congregations. When media and religious leaders,

318 Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society

Migrant membership organizations

Autonomous public spaces

Migrant-led media

Migrant-led NGOs

Figure 10.1. Migrant civil society: pathways of synergy

resonating with their constituents’ concern, called for taking a stand, the thickness and directionality of the arrows shifted dramatically, inflating the public sphere to previously unimaginable proportions.

Unpacking Civic Binationality This chapter will conclude by posing a series of specific analytical questions raised by the construction of migrant civil society, but first it is worth posing more general, crosscutting interpretive questions about the nature and process of binationality. While most civic binationality takes the form of individuals who do double duty, some migrant organizations are following what we could call ‘fully binational’ paths as well. This means being engaged with social, civic, or political agendas in both countries. Increasingly, hometown federation leaders have been increasingly involved in US civic life and deal directly with local and state government leaders. This process of engagement is most developed in Los Angeles and Chicago, reflecting the high level of institutionalization of the federations themselves in multistate councils (Rivera, Bada, and Escala Rabadán 2005). 68 68 This process is expressed both by organizations and by individual leaders. In Chicago, the former president of the Michoacan Federation (FEDECMI) was hired by the Illinois Government Office of New Americans.

Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society 319 Among the few organizations that go as far as the FIOB in terms of having organized mass bases in both countries is the campaign of the ex-bracero workers for the restitution of government wage deductions. This campaign has been active both in Mexico and in the USA and involves several organizations, including the Unión Binacional de Organizaciones de Trabajadores Ex Braceros and the Alianza Braceroproa. They took different positions on the Mexican government’s recent commitment to make a flat compensation payment of just over $3,000 to each former bracero (Balboa 2005). In practice, the Interior Ministry’s bureaucratic obstacles, including the requirement that former Bracero program workers produce originals of the evidence of their participation, will ensure that only a small fraction of eligible workers actually receive payments (Martínez 2005). This wide range of practical experiences with civic binationality raises the following more general question: Do organized Mexican migrants represent the US branch of Mexican society, or the Mexican branch of US society? In other words, having reviewed these four distinct arenas of migrant civil society, how might we think about their relationships with US civil society? Is migrant civil society the US branch of Mexico’s civil society? Or is it the Mexican branch of US civil society? The concept of migrant civil society proposed here would include both, because it is defined by the migrants themselves rather than the national arena within which they are active. The hometown associations would be the clearest example of a branch of Mexican civil society that is in, but not necessarily of the USA. They have created a public sphere that is clearly Mexican, not only because of its participants’ national origin, but also because of their culture, organizational style, symbolic references, and principal counterparts. In contrast, for examples of Mexican branches of US civil society, we could look at the trade union locals that have become majority-migrant and migrant-led, as in the case of several major agro-industrial, service, and construction unions in California, or the probably hundreds of religious congregations that have become Mexican spaces within US churches. To pursue this conceptual question, one way to think about this distinction between migrant civil society in the USA versus of the USA, is to think about two words that are usually treated as synonyms: crossborder and binational. Here ‘cross-border’ refers to Mexican society broadly defined, located both inside and outside the physical borders of the homeland. 69 ‘Binational’, in contrast, would refer to being of both 69 This distinction is compatible with Fitzgerald’s distinction between ‘long-distance nationalism’ and ‘dual nationalism’ (2004b), as well as his related point about

320 Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society nations, an overlapping sphere or space of convergence, in which civil society actors are simultaneously part of both Mexican and US civil societies. In both cases the membership of the organizations may be similar, but in the first case their goals, strategies, and coalition partners are focused exclusively on Mexico, while the second arena would also include US-oriented goals, strategies, and coalition partners. Figure 10.2 is intended to illustrate the conceptual distinction at the most general level, rather than to describe any specific organization or relationship. 70 The two diagrams might reflect a process of change over time, given the important shift among Mexican immigrants toward a binational agenda over the past decade (Rivera-Salgado, Bada, and Escala-Rabadán 2005). To illustrate how this understanding of cross-border and binational can be both distinct yet overlapping, consider some of the discourse of the recent campaign for Mexican voting rights abroad. Not long ago the Coalition for the Political Rights of Mexican Abroad, which led the recent campaign, celebrated their victory in the National Palace in Mexico City. One of the pioneers of this campaign, Raúl Ross Pineda, commented: This [decision] has returned to millions of Mexicans what they needed to stop being second class citizens. . . . The struggle for the vote was a cause that, like no other before, horizontally united Mexicans abroad beyond our economic, social, professional or organizational differences. (Ross Pineda 2005, author’s translation)

Here we have a very civic discourse, which emphasizes the expansion of rights—what Ross calls ‘the universalization of electoral democracy’. His next comment is quite relevant in terms of the explicit analysis of the relationship between campaigning for voting rights in Mexico and immigrant rights in the USA. [The campaign] leaves us with a valuable experience that could serve as a precedent for other battles. Having resolved the voting issue, a huge amount of social energy has been released which now can be applied to deal with other problems, like a migration reform in the US, to address the situation of the undocumented.

The proposition here is that once the social actors are in action, they can campaign on various fronts at the same time. In this view, once having achieved the unifying experience, and the dignity and ‘extraterritorial citizenship’ (2000). For further discussion of cross-border civil society networks, in terms of social sectors that include but are not limited to migrants, see Brooks and Fox (2002) and Fox (2002b). 70

Thanks very much to Emma Estrada Lukin for assistance with graphics design.

Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society 321

US civil society

USA

US civil society

USA

Mexican civil society

Mexico

Mexican civil society

Mexico

Crossborder Mexican migrant civil society

Binational Mexican migrant civil society

Figure 10.2. Mexican civil society in the USA: crossborder and binational

recognition associated with the right to vote, migrants could mobilize to defend their rights vis-à-vis the US nation state. Ross’ vision of Mexico as a ‘new nation without borders’ is not only cross-border, but binational as well. If ‘cross-border’ refers to ‘a people divided by a border’, as New York’s Tepeyac Association put it, then ‘binational’ refers to engaging with both societies at the same time. In this sense, a migrant civil society that is engaged across borders may or may not be engaged binationally.

Migrant Civil Society Feedback Effects If exit indeed can be transformed into voice, that voice can be directed either back toward Mexico or within the USA. Mexico-focused civil

322 Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society society advocacy ‘feedback effects’ can be unpacked into at least three different arenas: the impacts of migrant associations on home communities and states, migrants’ potential impact through electoral processes, and their potential engagement with the challenge of development.

1. What are the Social, Civic, and Political Impacts of Migrant Associations in Their Hometowns and States? How do migrant hometown clubs affect public life in their communities of origin? At least until recently, many clubs actively considered themselves as apolitical, or even ‘anti-political’, partly in response to associations of politics with corruption (Fitzgerald 2000; Waldinger and Fitzgerald 2004). Yet such attitudes appear to be politically contingent, both in terms of engagement in home communities and in the USA. Do hometown associations encourage local democratization? Do they affect women’s opportunities for participation and representation? 71 The evidence is not yet clear, though many participants and observers expect that HTAs have democratizing impacts. Returned migrants certainly play key roles in public life as individuals. According to a survey carried out by the Michoacan state government migrant support agency, 37 percent of the 113 mayors who governed in the state from 2002–4 were former migrants (Bada 2004c). 72 Indeed, cases of local social movement leadership by returned migrants date back to the 1920s (Craig 1983). But the fact that some migrants return to fill local leadership roles does not answer the question about the civic and political impacts of HTAs. In at least one high-profile case of a migrant elected mayor, the so-called ‘Tomato King’, his leadership turned out to be very controversial. 73 More generally, to what degree do the HTAs reproduce the political culture that dominated Mexico in the twentieth century? Optimists often suggest that organized civil society generates democratic values and practices, and this is sometimes the case. But civil society also carries the weight of history, and is crosscut by hierarchies 71 For binational analyses of migrant organizing and gender, see Goldring (1998, 2004) and Stephen (2006). For a case study of the relationship between migration and women’s empowerment in a home community in Oaxaca, see Maldonado and Artía Rodríguez (2004). 72 Such roles are also very common in Oaxacan towns and villages, many of which retain high expectations in terms of their expatriate citizens’ duties and responsibilities (Kearney and Besserer 2004; Mutersbaugh 2002; Robles 2004). 73 For reports of his abuse of power, see Valadez Rodríguez (2005). For background on his campaigns, see Cano (2001), Castañeda (2004, 2006), and Williams (2004).

Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society 323 and inequality between genders, classes, and ethnic groups, as well as the legacy of less-than-democratic political ideologies. After all, many of the federations, as well as some of the HTAs, came together in response to Mexican government initiatives. If one interprets this relationship through the lens of state–society relations in Mexico, then this government strategy represents both a response to real demands from below, while also serving as an institutional channel to regulate relationships with migrant civil society. 74 In principle, in contrast to similar government efforts in Mexico, one might expect that migrants in the USA would be less vulnerable to clientelistic manipulation, but some recent reports indicate that such practices persist. The broad question of home community impact needs to be unpacked in at least two ways. First, to what degree do the HTAs themselves generate democratic values and practices? De la Garza and Hazan address this question in terms of their contributions as agents of integration into the USA (2003). So far, research that compares the internal practices of different state federations finds a wide range of practices, from more to less democratic (Rivera-Salgado and Esacala Rabadán 2004). The second question would focus on their impacts in home communities. These questions are distinct because, in principle, hometown clubs could be highly representative of their constituencies, but not necessarily of the nonmigrant population. Why might one expect migrant clubs to encourage democratization in home communities? Those that send collective remittances for community investments are taxing themselves for the benefit of others. Historically, those who pay taxes are accustomed to demanding some form of representation, which recalls the metaphor of exit, voice, and loyalty. In this view, collective remittances are possible thanks to migrants’ exit, they exist because of their loyalty, and then tend to encourage the exercise of voice. A new wave of research suggests that HTAs tend to hold local governments accountable (Burgess 2006; Williams 2004). However, even if most clubs were internally democratic, and even if they held local governments accountable, this would not necessarily generate democratization within the home community. Accountability refers to a power relationship, checks and balances, in this case between a specific constituency and the local government—but not necessarily vis-à-vis the majority of the community (whether defined in local or 74 The government’s role in inducing the formation of HTA federations recalls and parallels Mexico’s experience with the National Solidarity Program, which both induced the formation of only nominally participatory committees from above in some areas, while in others bolstering representative social organizations that took advantage of this partial opening to consolidate (Cornelius, Craig, and Fox 1994).

324 Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society translocal terms). Do the nonmigrants play any role in determining how to invest collective remittances? How are choices weighed between infrastructure projects that the migrants use on their annual visits home, versus those that may have a greater impact on the daily lives of nonmigrants (e.g. rodeo rings versus water systems)? It should be no surprise that relationships between migrants and mayors are not always easy, especially now that local elections are more democratic in many regions of Mexico. Future analysis of the impact of organized migrants on Mexican government accountability needs to be more clearly specified in terms of both mechanisms and actors. Field research by Xóchitl Bada suggests that Michoacan HTAs have been able to improve the allocation of infrastructure funds for underserved communities by using their political access with state government officials to amplify the voice of hometown villages that otherwise would be excluded by municipal presidents. Thanks to Michoacan HTA efforts, 75 percent of the Threefor-One projects during 2002–4 were allocated to villages outside of town centers, though generally not in the poorest municipalities (Bada 2006: 12). Yet the HTAs’ lack of partnerships with dense local social and civic actors limits HTA capacity to follow up and monitor the actual implementation of community development projects (2006: 3). Indeed, Michoacan state government Migrant Affairs officials report that the local ‘parallel committees’ that are supposed to supervise project implementation are working well in less than 10 percent of the cases (cited in Bada 2006: 11). More generally, in the government’s ‘Three-for-One’ matching fund program for community development projects, ‘HTAs have been more able to denounce irregularities than to prevent them’ (Bada 2006: 5). In Michoacan, HTAs have had more success gaining representation in the executive branch of the state government than at the municipal level, gaining official representation on the advisory council of the state government’s Migrant Affairs office, composed of seven migrants and seven state officials (Bada 2006: 10). In this sense, both at the state and municipal level, HTAs and federations began to improve accountability. At the same time, however, the governance structure of the Three-for-One program reproduces long-standing patterns of corporatist interest representation. Originally, the federal matching fund program was called ‘Citizens’ Initiative’, and any local group could provide the matching funds, migrant or nonmigrant. Under pressure from the Zacatecas Federation of Southern California, the program rules changed in two significant ways. First, only organized migrants could participate. Second, only hometown clubs that were part of state federations could participate, and their proposals required the validation

Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society 325 of federation leaders. This policy gives federations monopoly powers of representation, and its accountability impact depends heavily on each state federation’s degree of internal democracy and pluralism. The Three-for-One Program’s potential for reproducing corporatiststyle interest group politics was underscored by the declarations by leaders of California’s Michoacan, Jalisco and Zacatecas Federations of support for the National Action Party’s presidential campaign, in apparent exchange for the PAN’s support for the Three-for-One Program. They were flown to PAN headquarters just a month before the 2006 election (Herrera Beltran 2006). They gave their support nominally as individuals, and there is little evidence that they consulted the rank and file of their federation membership. The PAN’s campaign manager had previously served as Social Development Minister, and in that capacity had negotiated with them to implement the Three-for-One Program. According to one report, ‘Rosalío Platas, of the Federación de Clubes Michoacanos Lázaro Cárdenas del Río, even said that she would “demand” that her members vote for the PAN’ (Nuñez 2006). At the same time, the head of the Southern California Zacatecas Federation was running for congress with the PRI, as an alternate.

2. How can Disenfranchised Migrants Gain Political Representation? The issue of how migrants can gain political representation poses a puzzle. If they lack voting rights in their host country, then host country politicians have little electoral incentive to make the political investment necessary to enfranchise them. If they also lack voting rights in their home country, then their home country politicians will lack political incentives to enfranchise them. This presents a ‘chicken and egg’ problem—migrants need to gain electoral clout for politicians to pay attention, yet they need politicians to pay attention to get electoral clout. In Mexico, the recent approval of the absentee ballot represents a first step toward overcoming this problem, though the voting procedures discouraged participation. 75 The complex mail-in balloting, combined with the impossibility of registering abroad, was approved by a near-total consensus in the Mexican congress. This allowed congressional representatives to show their recognition of Mexican migrants’ 75 For the most sophisticated critique of voting rights for migrants, within a framework of democratic theory, see López Guerra (2005).

326 Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society citizenship rights without actually risking a significant change in the composition of the electorate. 76 Mexico’s electoral authorities were very cautious about defending the security of a national voting process that only recently had won the trust of the electorate. Mexico’s congress, moreover, built measures into the law that were designed to limit the possibility of external intervention in an extraterritorial voting process. As a result, to limit possible abuses, only those migrants who already hold a Mexican voter registration card can use the new vote-by-mail system (constituting an estimated electorate of 4 million of the more than 10 million Mexicans in the USA). 77 Mexican political parties are not allowed to campaign abroad, candidates cannot travel, and campaigns cannot receive funds from abroad (though migrants might contend that their funds are not ‘foreign’). This experiment in migrant voting poses a paradox, as suggested by a Los Angeles Times editorial (September 21, 2005). Recalling dissident José Vasconcelos’ 1928 presidential campaign in the USA, the editors noted that that before Mexican migrants had the right to vote, they could do politics freely in the USA. Now that they have the vote, they are prohibited from doing politics. This ban appears to have compounded the severe procedural obstacles that kept the number of migrants who signed up for ballots to approximately 55,000 (of which approximately 14,000 were rejected). 78 While the representation of migrant electorate in Mexican national politics will be slow and largely symbolic, two state governments have created legislative positions for migrant representation, as well as the possibility for migrants to run for mayoral office (Zacatecas and Michoacan).

76 Consider one of the less visible obstacles to migrant voting. The new procedures require voters to send in copies of their election card by registered US mail, which costs $9. This does not include the time required to go to a post office during working hours, which could add an additional hour or two of lost wages to the price of voting. Requests for ballots sent by regular mail were considered invalid. To compound the confusion, Mexican migrant voters were told to send their forms by ‘correo certificado’, a term whose English cognate refers to ‘certified mail’—a postal term that refers to a purely domestic mail option. As is so often the case with access to voting rights for the disenfranchised, the devil is in the details. 77 In the Pew Hispanic Center’s survey of Mexican migrants, 87% report an interest in voting in presidential elections. Of those who came within the last two years, 64% report having the Mexican voter registration card with them, falling to 42% for the survey group as a whole (Suro 2005: 1). Yet a subsequent survey found that ‘more than half (55%) of Mexicans in the U.S. were not aware that a presidential election is taking place this year’ (Suro and Escobar 2006). See also Marcelli and Cornelius’s earlier estimate of the size of the likely migrant voting population (2005). 78 Data from the Instituto Federal Electoral, as of February, 22, 2006. For an overview of the process, see Molina Ramírez (2006).

Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society 327 3. Why is there a Persistent Disconnect between Analysis and Action Involving Migration and Development?79 In light of the clear overlap between the challenges of migration and rural development, one might expect high levels of dialogue and convergence between the analysts and social actors involved. After all, the growth in migrant worker remittances, combined with the spread of organized HTAs, has provoked widespread optimism about prospects for investing in cross-border community development. Yet analyses of Mexican migration and development continue to engage only sporadically, for reasons that are not well understood. Each agenda tends to treat the other as a residual category, while fully integrated approaches have yet to be developed. Specifying the nature of the linkages between migration and development turns out to be easier said than done. For example, does sustainable/fair trade coffee production and marketing provide an alternative to migration, does it serve as a source of funding for more migration, or do remittances end up subsidizing coffee production because demand at fair trade prices is insufficient? 80 So far, the huge volumes of remittances have attracted most of the public and policy attention. The framing of migration and development issues through the lens of remittances draws attention to questions of how financial institutions can capture the funds. While ‘banking the unbanked’ is certainly important to those sending remittances, the connection to broader development remains uncertain (Zarate-Hoyos 2005). For migrants and their families, the most tangible impact of the widespread public discussion has been the significant recent reduction in transaction costs, driven in part by increased private sector competition. From a development point of view, most of the policy discussion involving remittances has focused on the Mexican government’s cutting-edge efforts to support collective social remittances through its Three-for-One matching fund program. The program now has a significant track record that analysts are carefully examining, but its high public profile contrasts remarkably with its practical application. In 2004, the Mexican Social Development Ministry budget invested about $18 million, less than 1 percent of its budget, matching migrantgenerated funds for social development projects in migrants’ home 79

This section draws on Fox (2006b). For one of the few studies to directly address the relationship between coffee and migration, see Lewis and Runsten (2005). For an in-depth economic analysis of co-op coffee dynamics in Oaxaca, see Calo and Wise (2005). For an overview of sustainable coffee issues in Mexico and Central America, see Gliessman et al. (2008). 80

328 Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society communities. Few of these funds supported productive projects. Those that did, involved family-based rather than collective enterprises and had a high failure rate (Bada 2005). Meanwhile, individual private remittance investments concentrate in the service sector, and tend to reproduce preexisting inequalities in access to education and land (Massey and Parrado 1998). Indeed, in spite of almost a decade of public discussion about the potential of remittance investments to create development alternatives, in Mexico there is still little tangible evidence of remittance investments that generate sustainable jobs beyond a few microlevel cases. This should not be surprising, given the dearth of investment opportunities in so many sending communities, as well as the critical need for on-the-ground entrepreneurial and technical capacity. The issues of economic viability are compounded by the structure of the decision-making process. When migrants pool their hard-earned money for hometown projects, they place a premium on those investments that provide benefits to the community as whole. Most jobcreating investments, in contrast, directly affect only a small subset of the community. In addition, the benefits of productive projects may be perceived as at risk of being captured by local elites—in a context in which ‘long-distance accountability’ is difficult. This dilemma suggests the importance of identifying those productive investments that can also have ‘public goods’ effects, such as improved coffee-processing infrastructure in those communities where most people depend on coffee and already have years of experience working together in a marketing co-op whose leadership is publicly accountable. Yet this category of potential investment projects has yet to be linked to migrant collective action. Creative practitioners and analysts are beginning to address this longstanding disconnect between migration and development agendas. The University of Zacatecas-based Migración y Desarrollo international research network is making a critical contribution, as is the Chicago-based public interest group Enlaces Américas that helps Mexican and Central American migrant organizations build their capacity to engage in local, national, and international development policy debates. 81 Yet efforts to bring migrant organizations into the broader development policy debate are still incipient. In an effort to craft a new way of framing the relationship between migration and development, Mexican rural development strategist 81 For further details, see www.migracionydesarrollo.org and www.enlacesamerica. org. Enlaces has consistently tried to bring together migrant leaders and Mexican peasant advocates (see Chacon, Shannon, and Miller 2002) as did the Mexico-US Diálogos project’s binational multisectoral exchanges between social constituencies in the 1990s (Brooks and Fox 2002).

Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society 329 Armando Bartra bridges the migration, development and rights agendas with the call for respect for ‘the right to not [have to] migrate’ (2003). After all, the Mexican Constitution’s Article 123 still speaks of citizens’ right to ‘dignified and socially useful work’. The ‘right to not migrate’ recognizes that while migration is an option, it is a choice made within a context imposed by public policies that enable some development strategies over others. The idea also shows how the term ‘migration policy’ is deceptive insofar as it is often limited to those policies that deal with migrants, such as matching funds for projects, or protection from police abuse on the way home for the holidays. The idea of ‘migration policy’ should also take into account how the full range of public policies, such as the withdrawal of support for family farming, affects the decision to migrate. Yet the apparently limited impact of the ‘right to not migrate’ concept suggests that translating an evocative frame into practical strategies for grassroots organizations turns out to be a serious challenge. In Mexico, migration to the USA is increasingly recognized as having become a fully nationwide phenomenon, remittances are widely seen as a development resource, and practitioners and analysts working on migration increasingly acknowledge the need to take dynamics in communities of origin into account. What then might explain the persistent disconnect between the analysis of migration and development? Perhaps the roots go deeper and one needs to look at the basic frameworks used to define strategies for change. In the Mexican rural development context, migration is still seen as occurring outside the dominant analytical framework. Migration is treated as an external process happening ‘around’ the grassroots development process, as a residual category, whereas for campesino families, migration is inside the box, a central component of a diversified survival strategy. In contrast, for most practitioners and analysts working on migration, the development dimension of the relationship between receiving and sending community focuses on the ‘philanthropy from below’ process, including the challenges of raising and sending the funds, and finding high profile, ‘something for everyone’ projects. But who decides how to invest the funds, who ends up managing the projects, how sustainable are they? How do longer-term development impacts figure into the decision-making process? 82 Where do the rest of the government’s social, economic, and environmental policies fit in? 82 For a heterodox critique of the conventional discussion of remittances and development, see the Cuernavaca Declaration from the Migration and Development Network, at www.migracionydesarrollo.org. For an English translation, see Enlaces News, No. 10, August 2005 at www.enlacesamerica.org. It is worth noting that researchers have yet to agree on the validity of the official remittance data, the share of the Mexican population that receives remittances, or on the degree to which they reach the poorest communities (e.g. Muñoz 2004).

330 Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society One indicator of the challenge of engaging the migration and development agendas involves the uneven landscapes of the relevant community-based organizations. Mexican migrants, for example, have generated a broad and diverse array of membership organizations, but they vary widely in their density and distribution. They are much more widespread in major US cities than in smaller towns and rural areas, and they are most prominent and most consolidated in Los Angeles and Chicago. At the same time, the map of those Mexican migrants who are organized does not correspond directly to the map of where migrants come from home towns that have community-based economic development. Notably, as many as one-fifth of all Mexican HTAs in the USA represent the state of Zacatecas; while those from states that account for a greater share of the migrant population appear to be less densely organized. ‘Mapping’ the organized world within Mexican migrant society is still in its early phases, and more work needs to be done to trace its contours with precision. 83 To contribute more directly to grassroots development strategies on the ground, a next stage of mapping is necessary. Perhaps at the level of a state or a region, it would be very useful to take a map of those communities whose migrants have generated HTAs and lay it over a map of those communities of origin that have also generated the social, civic, and economic development organizations that could serve as counterparts with the organized migrants. Some ‘sending’ communities in the state of Oaxaca have very limited economic development prospects but others have significant, scaled-up, community-based enterprises, such as organic coffee and timber cooperatives. Imagining alternatives with those organized migrants who come from hometowns with community-based economic development track records could go a long way toward addressing the issues that make productive investments of remittances difficult. Those issues include the need for viable investment prospects, for entrepreneurial experience and reliable technical support, for public accountability to the communities of origin, and for positive social spillover effects beyond the local interested parties. Yet sustained matching of organized migrants to grassroots initiatives has yet to be done. To sum up, the disconnect between migration and development has two dimensions, one involving intellectual frameworks, the other involving civil society actors.

Conclusions This chapter mapped the contours of an increasingly visible Mexican migrant civil society. Membership organizations, NGOs, media, and 83

For further discussion, see Fox (2005d) and Bada, Fox, and Selee (2006).

Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society 331 public spaces each constitute distinct, though overlapping arenas. The process of ‘thickening’ migrant civil society is driven by the dynamic interaction between each of these sets of actors, as illustrated in Figure 10.1. The emergence of migrant civil society suggests, in contrast to the widely assumed dichotomy between exit and voice, that exit can be followed by voice. In the short term, migration does involve tensions between exit and voice—what one could call a ‘civic opportunity cost’. Especially for those who were active in Mexican civic life before they left, the prospects for change back home may well have been undermined by their departure, as in the case of community-based organic coffee certifiers. Many of those with experience appear to find their place in the leadership of emerging migrant civil society, following Hirschman’s principle of the ‘transformation and mutation of social energy’ (1984), though this process has yet to be well documented. However, there is no evidence to suggest that more than a small fraction of migrants were active before they left. For many rural Mexicans who left their villages to go north, autonomous collective action began after they left home. Exit and voice are both directly linked to the issue of work. Most of the Mexican workers who left their homeland lacked both voice and work. They lacked the kind of voice and representation that could have led the political system to respond by creating jobs more successfully. Indeed, the spring, 2006 migrant mobilizations in the USA could be understood as a call not only as a rejection of criminalization, but also for the right to work—a demand formally enshrined in the Mexican Constitution that has yet to find effective channels for expression. From the 1990s through the first half of the following decade, at least for many tens of thousands, migrant collective action unfolded in the USA but was primarily homeward-looking—through hometown associations and voting rights campaigns. Yet civic leaders’ hopes for widespread migrant engagement with Mexico’s 2006 presidential election went unfulfilled, as long-distance voter registration fell far short of even the most pessimistic predictions. From an accountability politics point of view, access to this electoral process was constrained and no political party attempted to represent migrants. Meanwhile, leading Mexican policymakers continued to assume that agriculture will and should continue to shrink dramatically. The Secretary of Agriculture announced that agriculture would only employ 3 or 4 percent of the economically active population, as ‘natural consequence of development’ (Olivares Alonso 2006). This assumption is not only deeply embedded in conventional economic theory, it is also both cause and consequence of the persistent,

332 Exit Followed by Voice: Mexico’s Migrant Civil Society systematic underrepresentation of the rural poor in Mexico’s political system. In Mexico’s 2006 presidential campaign, some critics of the president’s National Action Party spoke of his having presided over the ‘expulsion’ of two million rural people. A coalition of thirty peasant organizations called for a ‘New Pact for a Better Future for the Countryside and the Nation’, to avoid the spread of ‘ghost towns, where [migrants] build luxury houses to die in’ (Pérez-Perdomo 2006). But even though a quarter of the population continued to live in small villages, both rural voters and their social and civil organizations were unable to significantly influence national policy decisions affecting the countryside. In 2006, Mexican migrant civil society in the USA was just beginning to emerge, after years of coming together beneath the radar of national politics, both in the USA and in Mexico. Organized migrants were just beginning to come together across social sectors, regions of origin, and regions of settlement in the USA. With the exception of the voting rights campaign, organized Mexican migrants also lacked consolidated partnerships with potential counterparts in Mexican civil society. The cross-border debates that would be needed to identify shared agendas and to agree on shared goals had yet to happen. As of 2006, the future of rural Mexico had not yet been imagined jointly, between those who left and those who stayed.

................. 11

................. Unpacking Accountability Politics1

This study explored diverse dimensions of accountability politics, from internal democracy within membership organizations and access to the secret ballot to local self-governance, participatory regional councils, information rights, and even exit as a possible step toward voice. In order to disentangle the broad trends over the last two decades, each chapter analyzed rural civil society effects to hold the state accountable through comparison across regions and policies. At the most general level, the main analytical finding is that changes in the balance of power between society and the state in the countryside were driven by long-term cycles of reciprocal interaction between scaled-up grassroots organizations and other institutional innovators—sometimes based elsewhere in civil society, sometimes within the state. The transition to competitive electoral politics at the national level has yet to be a driving force for accountability politics in the countryside, underscoring the distinction between regime change and the transformation of state–society relations. This study found that most of the significant innovations in accountable rural governance were independent of political parties, such as Guerrero’s Community Police, the Chiapas Good Governance Councils, Oaxaca’s indigenous municipal self-governance, organized migrant participation in federal matching funds for social investments, and the grassroots campaigns to hold the World Bank accountable to its pro-participation discourse. The results of electoral competition had the most significant impact on the cases involving nationwide anti-poverty programs. After 1997, the emergence of a congress in which no one party held a majority created political space for the Community Food Councils to lobby to defend the rural food store program. The election of the Fox 1 Thanks very much to Sergio Aguayo, Margaret Keck, Andreas Schedler, and Andrew Selee for editorial suggestions on earlier versions of this chapter.

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administration in 2000 permitted the relatively nonpartisan management of the flagship Oportunidades program. The alternation in presidential power also made possible the 2002 information rights reform, but political parties followed rather than led the process. Following the 2000 elections, the new ruling party adopted the discourse of transparency and accountability, but it was the independent media, civil society organizations, and social movements that were primarily responsible for keeping those issues on the agenda. Research is just beginning to address the question of how and when civil society can make a difference in terms of holding state actors publicly accountable, and much more comparative analysis is needed (e.g. O’Donnell 2006; Peruzzotti and Smulovitz 2006). This conclusion’s main goal is to propose new conceptual tools that can guide further research. Specifically, this chapter explores propositions involving: the distinction between empowerment and rights, persistent ‘low accountability traps’, the ‘positioning’ of accountability agents, and the importance of ‘accountabilities of scale’, analogous to economies of scale. The ‘vertical integration’ of civil society campaigns is also discussed, as a pathway to address the challenge of scale. The concept of transparency turns out to be just as relational as accountability— leading to a discussion of ‘directionality’. Finally, the ‘power of sunshine’ is questioned, posing the need to reassess the widely assumed relationship between transparency and accountability. This effort to conceptually ‘map’ accountability pathways more precisely involves two cross-cutting issues: positioning and scale. In order to inform the eventual development of testable hypotheses, the conceptual points are framed in terms of propositions for discussion.

Empowerment and Rights Are Distinct Preceding chapters analyzed pathways for the ‘thickening’ of rural civil society under less-than-democratic conditions in the late twentieth century. Building on institutional and ideological legacies inherited from agrarian revolution, in many regions rural Mexicans empowered themselves, in the sense of gaining the willingness and capacity to defend their interests. In the course of three decades of cycles of mobilization, the ‘right to have rights’ spread, in the sense of popular understandings of what claims are legitimate and what citizenship means. Yet at the same time, the representative organizations of the rural poor made quite limited progress toward turning this discourse into consistently enforced rights. For example, few would doubt that

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Zapatista women empowered themselves over the past decade. Yet few would claim that they have won enforceable rights vis-à-vis the state. 2 Empowerment involves changes in power relations in three interlocking arenas—within society, within the state, and between state and society. 3 In this context, it is useful to distinguish empowerment, in the sense of social actors’ subjective capacities, from rights, in the sense of institutionally guaranteed entitlements. Actually existing rights are those that are strong enough to constitute ‘enforceable claims on the state’ (Tilly 1998: 56–7). 4 The conceptual point here is that rights and empowerment do not necessarily go together. Institutions may nominally recognize rights that actors, because of imbalances in power relations, are not able to exercise in practice. Conversely, actors may be empowered in the sense of having the experience and capacity to exercise rights, while lacking institutionally recognized opportunities to do so. Formal institutions can help to establish rights that challenge informal power relations, while those informal structures can also undermine formal institutions. 5 As Figure 11.1 illustrates, rights and empowerment can each encourage the other, and indeed they overlap in practice, but they are at the same time analytically distinct. In other words, empowerment is not a sufficient condition for winning rights. This gap between empowerment and rights suggests the following proposition: empowerment can make nominal rights meaningful, and nominal rights can make empowerment possible. Empirically, this conceptual point helps to understand a process that cuts across the patterns of state–society interaction analyzed in previous chapters: rural civil society’s autonomous capacity for representing social actors to the state, on the one hand, and their limited and uneven capacity to claim actual rights on the other. Most of the innovations analyzed in previous chapters involving participation, transparency, and accountability, to including both power-sharing interfaces and oversight agencies, add up to a repertoire of ‘soft law’ 2

See Speed, Hernández Castillo, and Stephen (2006). Power is often treated as an implicitly one-way capacity, but it is more usefully understood in terms of relationships. See Lukes (1974: 31). His three-dimensional view of power transcends the limits of the conventional ‘A has power over B to the extent that A can get B to do something that B would otherwise not do’ approach, including the range of capacities to persuade and induce that can lead to disempowered consent. For related classics in political sociology, see also Bachrach and Baratz (1962) and Bachrach and Botwinik (1992). 4 For a related discussion that analyzes this approach to rights in terms of different conceptions of citizenship, see Fox (2005a). 5 For cross-national discussion of the impact of informal institutions on democracy in Latin America, see Helmke and Lewitsky (2006). 3

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Rights

Empowerment

Informal institutions

Figure 11.1. The reciprocal interaction between rights and empowerment

whose enforcement remains politically contingent rather than institutionally guaranteed. While social mobilization may lead to negotiation and sometimes extracts concessions from the state, rights—defined in terms of enforceable claims—remain few and far between.

‘Low Accountability Traps’ Are Persistent and Reinforced by Decentralization One of the most powerful mechanisms for perpetuating political exclusion after national regime transitions is the mutual reinforcement between flawed elections and weak public oversight agencies, as discussed in Chapter 2. This interdependence between vertical and horizontal accountabilities rose to the top of Mexico’s national political agenda following the 2006 presidential elections, when the federal election administration agency and electoral court exercised their legal authority to determine which contested votes counted, and which should be recounted. Yet these agencies were designed with a bounded mandate, to address the casting and counting of votes. This means that even if the electoral court had allowed a full recount, many of the most important patterns of political exclusion would not have emerged. This

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is because no recount would have addressed votes that were influenced before election day by vote-buying and coercion, or on election day by a perceived lack of ballot secrecy. These votes were contaminated before they were counted. Mutually reinforcing interaction between weak oversight and flawed elections creates ‘low-accountability traps’. Here the partisan administration of state power permits the reproduction of unfree elections, which in turn perpetuates impunity in the administration of state power. Much of this book has focused on analyzing both state and societal initiatives that attempted to escape from such traps. Cracking them requires upsetting a self-reinforcing equilibrium. Given that the problem is caused in large part by the political weakness of civic, social, and political forces that favor public accountability, how can they be empowered when their opponents have so much to lose? Put another way, how can pro-accountability actors in both society and the state break out of the trap in which both sets of counterparts lack leverage? Earlier chapters emphasized how ‘virtuous circles’ of mutually reinforcing changes can be triggered, through cross-sectoral coalitions in which societal and state actors empower each other. Yet ‘vicious circles’ persist. Oaxaca is perhaps the most notable recent example of a state that got stuck in a ‘low accountability trap’—in spite of the state’s robust civil society. The case is worth mentioning here because it illustrates several dynamics discussed earlier in this study. For example, the flawed 2004 governor’s election, followed by a hardening of authoritarian rule at the state level, is an example of how weak horizontal oversight agencies can undermine vertical accountability processes. Opposition efforts to use the electoral court system to challenge the results failed, the Federal Electoral Tribunal ratified their state level counterpart’s decision to allow the results to stand (along with a similarly close and controversial state election that year, in Veracruz). 6 The court ruled that ‘the elections were carried out in accordance with the law’ (TEPJF 2004: 379). 7 6 For an overview of the Tribunal’s decisions to annul elections, see Medina Torres (2006). Though the tribunal was ostensibly bolstered as part of the electoral reforms of the 1990s, most of its rare challenges to official outcomes occurred after the 2000 elections. 7 Later that year, the tribunal obliged the then presiding judge to step down from the presidency, allegedly for ‘inexplicable enrichment’ (Saldierna and Urrutia 2005). One columnist published allegations that the judge had been bribed to make the decisions ratifying state elections in Oaxaca, Veracruz, and the state of Mexico for a million dollars each (Consuegra 2005). Journalistic accounts did not explain why such transgressions were sufficiently serious for the judge to have to leave the court’s presidency, but could remain on the court itself until the end of his term in 2006.

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Before those 2004 elections, thanks to the decentralization of social policy, the state government was able to divert federal funds for electoral purposes to a degree that may have determined the outcome. The official result was 47.46 percent versus 44.35 percent, and a new third party with an indigenous discourse drew 4.02 percent, effectively splitting the opposition vote. The governor used federal anti-poverty funds to pump up this new party. Appalled, one mid-level nonpartisan Social Development Ministry field operative accurately predicted: ‘A few days before the elections for governor and state congress, one can anticipate that, if the PRI candidate becomes governor, in the coming years Oaxaca will be subjected to permanent socio-political instability and violence’. 8 Had the system of electoral oversight functioned properly, however, the state’s subsequent political crisis could have been avoided—including at least twenty political murders. 9 In terms of the conceptual distinction between state and regime posed at the beginning of this book, Oaxaca’s political crisis shows that the new ruling party did not change the systematic empowerment of a subnational authoritarian regime by the federal state apparatus. Though Oaxaca’s state government has a tiny tax base and could not function without federal resources, federal authorities did not exercise the leverage that potentially accompanied such dependence. The state government’s de facto control over federal funds in turn gave the governor a virtual monopoly on access to public resources for organized poor people. This helped to ensure that the PRI political machine could hold social organizations accountable ‘upwards’, rewarding subordination while punishing independence. Civil society was held accountable to the state, rather than vice versa. Meanwhile, at the national level, the federal accountability agencies dedicated to auditing and electoral justice stood aside. 10 The state government’s leverage over the federal government grew over time. Following the contested 2006 presidential election, the incoming president could take office only with support from the PRI’s congressional delegation, which in turn required the PAN to back Oaxaca’s governor, in spite of strong evidence of the state’s ‘ungovernability’. Because of their pact, the two political parties’ accountabilities 8 This comment, along with details on the Oaxacan state government’s electoral manipulation of social programs, comes from an internal Social Development Ministry study. See Anonymous (2004) and Fox and Haight (2007b). 9 For analysis of the civic resistance movement, see Hernández Navarro (2006a, 2006b), López Barcenas (2006), and Martínez Vásquez (2006), among others. 10 The wheels of federal audits only began to turn after the civic uprising began. But in the confusion surrounding Oaxaca City’s street fighting in the fall of 2006, the offices of the federal agencies charged with auditing the current and previous governor’s administration were torched, allegedly by state government agents (Bracamontes 2006).

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to each other trumped accountability to the public. As long as national elites in the federal government need the political support of those who control subnational authoritarian regimes, official checks and balances are unlikely to dislodge ‘low accountability traps’. 11 This study found no case in which a state government sustained an initiative that increased public accountability to rural civil society. 12 Note that this pattern contrasts with Mexico’s historical experience of the 1920s, when state level ‘laboratories of the revolution’, led by reformist governors, set the stage for the scaling-up of mass politics during the Cárdenas presidency of the 1930s. While some might expect to find cases of openings to rural civil society in PRD-governed states, independent confirmation of such a hypothesis is lacking. 13 In all the cases where governmental actors were found to have sustained support for accountability reforms, they were embedded in federal agencies. In most cases, this reformist presence was brief, and/or limited to certain regional branches of those agencies, as emerges from the generally weak track record with regional state–society powersharing councils documented in Chapter 8. Yet sometimes they did manage to create an ‘enabling environment’ for accountability—most often by creating political space for autonomous collective action. 14 This pattern resonates with Mexico’s historical experience during the 11 Authoritarian governors’ resulting veto power over national political reform resonates with the US experience (Gibson 2005). As in the US south, in the early stages of democratization, those openings that did occur were driven by the mutually reinforcing interaction between mass protest from below and federal intervention from above—a ‘sandwich strategy’ for change (Fox 1992a). 12 One possible exception to this generalization would be Oaxaca’s 1995 state law that recognized preexisting nonparty forms of municipal self-governance, but even in that case, the subsequent governor subverted the law’s intent by holding local authorities accountable ‘upward’ through his control over resources and threats, including the suspension or removal of 25% of the state’s 570 mayors during his term (Del Collado 2003: 15). 13 Indeed, one well-informed Zacatecas-based rural development scholar/practitioner concluded that ‘the constant is that all state governments limit themselves only to administering federal programs and promoting the image of the governor. The disillusionment is greater when one thinks of the governments of the left (at least in terms of their discourse) in Michoacán and Zacatecas; the image is totally empty. When one tries to move municipal experiences forward, or help to build them, the state governments get jealous and interfere’ (email communication, Rodolfo García Zamora, January 29, 2007). 14 Gibson identifies the driving force for ‘provincial democratization’ as the ‘nationalization of subnational conflict’ (2005: 128). This is convincing when explaining tipping points that allow for fair contested statewide elections. The focus here, in contrast, is on a prior stage in the weakening of authoritarian rule, the creation of the political space needed for pro-accountability actors to emerge at ‘sub-state’ levels. Regional contestation is a precondition for the horizontal spread of anti-authoritarian actor, which in turn permits statewide contestation. This is the context in which federal reform interventions matter—though usually far from public view, outside the electoral sphere, and not involving ‘nationalization’ of political conflict.

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Table 11.1 Position

Positioning accountability agents Accountability agents

From above From below From within From outside

Legislatures, courts, anticorruption agencies Voters, election monitors, independent mass media, NGOs, social movements Proreform insiders International financial institutions, human rights organizations, anticorruption NGOs

Source: Elaborated based on Schedler (1999b: 338–46).

Cárdenas period, when federal teachers and land reform organizers weakened landlord power in many—though not all—rural regions. Meanwhile, when one looks at pathways to sustained accountability that were completely independent of the state, the most notable regional experiences so far—in Zapatista Chiapas and with Guerrero’s Community Police—have not spread ‘horizontally’ to other regions and remain the exception rather than the rule.

Accountability Agents are Positioned Inside and Outside, from Above and Below, and Across the State–Society Divide The third conceptual issue explored here underscores the importance of specifying the positioning of each accountability agent. Because of the inherently relational character of accountability, pathways to accountability are contingent on relations between different kinds of public interest actors. Schedler proposed a clear and comprehensive framework, identifying four main sources of ‘agents of accountability’: those that emerge from above, from below, from within, and from outside the state—as described in Table 11.1. Yet this set of categories does not recognize blurred boundaries— between state and society on the one hand, and between those actors who are ‘above’ and ‘below’ on the other hand. For example, international financial institutions operate both ‘from above’ and ‘from outside’. Governmental accountability agencies vary in terms of whether they operate outside (such as the legislature or auditing agencies) or from inside the agencies themselves (such as federal inspectors or whistleblowers—who act both as insiders and—most often—‘from below’). Moreover, Mexico’s series of institutional spaces for state– society power-sharing has rendered the distinction between ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ unduly dichotomous.

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Table 11.2 Repositioning accountability agents Position of accountability agents From above (not just from the state)

Shared state–society spaces

From below

From inside the agency Chain of administrative command in line agencies Agency inspectors Citizen-managed electoral administration Power-sharing councils Proreform insiders Whistleblowers

From outside the agency, but inside the state Legislative oversight Judicial review Ombudsman

Official truth commissions Juries

Proreform insiders Whistleblowers

From outside the state International financial institutions (including their own ‘horizontal accountability’ agencies) Wall St. Professional associations with power to investigate delegated by state External evaluations Voters, election observers Independent mass media NGOs

The framework proposed in Table 11.2 takes these blurred boundaries and overlapping categories into account. The most significant difference in approach involves the recognition of important spaces that bridge state and society. Deeply embedded inside the state, yet including societal actors, one finds ‘citizenized’ election administration, participatory budgeting, as well as the regional councils discussed in Chapter 8. Official truth commissions and juries would be examples of state–society power-sharing bodies that are one step removed from related state agencies yet are still embedded within the state (though not in the Mexican case). Beyond the state, accountability-holders ‘from above’ include the international financial institutions and private investors. Outside, yet in a shared state–society space one could find professional associations with delegated powers of third-party certification, such as anticorruption monitors and policy evaluators. As in the first framework, the key accountability agents that are both ‘outside’ and ‘from below’ include voters, the independent media, and NGOs.

‘Accountabilities of Scale’ Matter To introduce multiple scales into the conceptual discussion complicates the evocative spatial metaphors of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal accountability relationships. In federal systems, the horizontal accountabilities embodied in the separation of powers and oversight agencies coexist with the checks and balances that operate between

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national and subnational authorities, as Chapter 2 suggested. Moreover, each level of government, especially in a federal system, includes their own domains of horizontal and vertical accountabilities. One must unpack nested institutions of accountability in order to understand how people are actually represented in practice, as Chapter 7 pointed out for the millions of citizens who live outside of rural municipal centers. Rather than relegate subnational politics to a residual category, to bring scale ‘inside the box’ would oblige us to address the interaction between levels of government as central to accountability politics. The concept of ‘accountabilities of scale’ addresses these dynamics in two ways. First, the term evokes the economic concept of increasing returns to scale, in which the cost of each additional unit of X goes down as more X is produced and/or distributed. In other words, the more accountability one has, the more one can get. Conversely, the less accountability one has, the more difficult it is to generate each additional degree of accountability. Second, the concept of accountabilities of scale evokes the importance of embedding answerability across the public sector’s different scales and domains. Local accountability reforms do not necessarily ‘scale up’ to influence higher level decisionmaking, while national accountability reforms do not automatically ‘scale down’ throughout the policy implementation process. 15 Research has barely begun to address how the construction of accountability reforms unfolds across different scales—a key dimension of the ‘transition to accountability’ process described in the introduction. Yet one major research effort has addressed the relationship between accountability and scale. The World Bank’s 2004 World Development Report (WDR) implicitly concludes that scale is not central. The WDR’s generally innovative discussion of the ‘short route’ to holding public service providers accountable through ‘client power’ is almost exclusively devoted to micro-levels of institutional behavior. To the degree that the WDR recognizes poor people themselves as change agents, they are assumed to be exclusively local (whether families, individuals, implicitly homogeneous communities, or village/neighborhood level organizations). To limit the discussion of how to improve institutional accountability to the ‘receiving end’ is analogous to the ‘end-of-the-pipe’ approach to pollution control—which addresses the symptoms of the problem rather than its causes. 16 15 This process of dynamic intergovernmental interaction is further complicated where territorially based forms of state–society power-sharing cut across conventional municipal-state boundaries, as in the case of the regional social and environmental development councils, or watershed management councils (e.g. Abers and Keck 2006). 16 An ‘end-of-the-pipe’ approach focuses on clean-up, such as scrubbers on smokestacks, without addressing the reduction in the use and emission of toxics.

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The 2004 WDR’s focus on locally bounded ‘client power’ elides the fact that local arenas are far from the only domain within which the quantity and quality of public services are determined. 17 For example, while rural clinics may lack an accessible supply of subsidized medicines because local officials sell them on the side, it is also possible that clinics are empty because they were never delivered, having been diverted from somewhere higher up the chain of authority—or it is possible that the medicines were never budgeted for in the first place. This is why the potential oversight capacity of regional powersharing councils is so significant. Even if corruption were not an issue, sharp social or geographical biases in public spending would remain untouched by an exclusively micro or local approach to the ‘short route’ to accountability. This study’s review of experiences with participation, transparency, and accountability reforms suggests that unless they ‘scale up’ to address problems throughout the chain of institutional decision-making, their impacts will inherently be limited. This does not imply the substitution of meso-level or national-level institutional measures for local efforts. A grounded process of scalingup involves bringing together local civic, social, and political organizations that share accountability agendas, allowing them to exchange experiences, to see what an agency is doing in the bigger picture, to defend each other from possible reprisals, and to deliberate about which joint strategies to pursue. 18 The fundamental challenge is that the opponents of accountability are institutionally embedded throughout the chain of authority. Their power relies in part on economies of scale (perhaps producing ‘disaccountabilities of scale’). Therefore, to change the balance of power, pro-accountability actors also need economies of scale—which brings us to vertical integration.

The Vertical Integration of Civil Society Policy Empowers by Scaling Both Up and Down This emphasis on scale implies that the vertical integration of proaccountability actors can bolster civil society influence. Vertical integration refers here to the systematic coordination of policy monitoring and advocacy between diverse levels of civil society, from local and 17 On the relationship between anti-poverty policy and poor people’s empowerment at intermediate and national levels, see also Houtzager and Moore (2003), Joshi and Moore (2000), and Moore (2001). 18 For example, recalling the question of what makes possible the cross-sectoral coalitions discussed in Chapter 6, it would be difficult for local pro-accountability actors to make informed decisions about which policymakers are reliable coalition partners without information about their track records in other regions or in past positions, and other social actors would be the most credible sources of such information.

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regional to state, national, and international arenas. The problems that civil society monitoring is supposed to address are produced by vertically integrated authority structures, and therefore effective monitoring processes require parallel processes of vertical integration. 19 In those issue areas where autonomous poor people’s organizations build shared agendas and trust, vertical integration of policy monitoring can guide the investment of their limited political capital, helping them to target their limited leverage to those pressure points where they are most likely to break bottlenecks. Not only does scale provide social actors with increased bargaining power, it also provides better information about how state power is actually exercised. Yet vertical integration of civil society oversight initiatives may be only as strong as the weakest link in the chain between local and national actors. Notably, very few networks of rural civil society organizations have managed to sustain the effective linkages between local, regional, state, and national levels needed to influence national policy effectively. For example the Zapatista movement gained the political clout needed to bring indigenous rights reform to top of the national policy agenda in 2001, and leaders managed to address congress on national television—a historic turning point in the Mexican struggle against racism. Yet they lacked the advocacy capacity needed to influence the subsequent direction of congressional legislation. Similarly, after the 2003 national wave of peasant protest brought the federal government to the bargaining table, efforts by national peasant organizations to negotiate and monitor a vast, complex policy reform agenda largely failed. The PAN government proved remarkably adept at keeping ‘The Countryside Won’t Take Any More’ campaign off balance by dividing the PRI’s corporatist organizations from the autonomous producer organizations. 20 The two main post-2000 instances of national 19 In Mexican civil society, one can find these vertical linkages most often in specific issue areas, such as human rights, the defense of the vote, reproductive rights, or coffee production. In other issue areas, vertical integration is weak—as in the case of the independent indigenous rights movement. Based on past experience, many regional indigenous leaders are wary of the risk of concentrating power in national leaders who will be difficult to hold accountable. 20 Traditional group-by-group payoffs kept advocates’ proposals for accountability reforms at bay. One of the federal government’s tactics was to stonewall on major policy reforms while targeting small-scale social programs to specific organizations’ members, most notably the Rural Housing and Rural Elderly Programs. While these programs shared the appearance of technical objectivity associated with Oportunidades, in 2004 and 2005 they targeted their benefits to members of both corporatist and autonomous organizations (Fox and Haight 2006; Pérez 2004). By the time of the 2006 campaign, however, the PAN purged the rolls and used these programs to reward its supporters (Muñoz 2006b, 2006c). For a broad overview of charges of the electoral use of social programs by an investigative journalist with El Financiero, see Reveles (2006). During the postelectoral conflict, the PAN submitted a legal document to the Federal

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level protest for rural change fell far short of influencing the policy process. In contrast, two cases of national rural policy advocacy efforts in less overtly politicized, more bounded issue areas had more impact. One of rural Mexico’s most notable experiences with representative organizations’ capacity to monitor and influence national policy is the National Network of Coffee Organizations (CNOC). 21 Their nonpartisan stance helped to fend off policymakers’ divide-and-conquer efforts. The national network of Community Food Councils proved its capacity to defend the rural food program from radical cutbacks. While the councils’ greatest leverage was at the regional level, they also made incremental inroads in terms of promoting their own policy agenda, including obliging Diconsa in 2003 to procure only domestic white corn to supply the rural stores, promoting autonomous self-management through store-based community capital, and campaigning for official recognition of access to food as a right. These two experiences also indicate that while vertical integration may be necessary for effective policy influence from below, it is far from sufficient. Few smallholder coffee producers or shoppers at the village stores would claim that they had won major policy victories, since the campaigns’ main impact took the form of the mere survival of long-standing safety net programs that otherwise would have disappeared. Their organizations’ vertically integrated clout sustained national programs that make a social difference at the margin. For those on the edge of survival, often weighing exit or voice, those margins matter. These two examples of relatively successful national rural policy advocacy campaigns shared another characteristic: they were relatively horizontally integrated, as well as vertically. To continue the spatial metaphor, both the Community Councils and CNOC had breadth as well as depth, bringing together many counterpart regional organizations with shared agendas under national umbrellas. Their Electoral Institute denying electoral use of social programs, claiming as evidence the electoral results in which the PRD candidate won (pluralities) in 10 of the 12 states with the largest numbers of social program beneficiaries (Urrutia 2006). However, Mexican presidential elections are determined by the total number of votes nationwide, not by the number of states won. So even in those states, every vote that did not go to López Obrador counted against him—including still significant showings by the PRI. 21 This experience has received little independent research attention since the early 1990s. See Aranda (2003), Calo and Wise (2005), Celis (2003), and Snyder (2001b). CNOC is in turn part of a diverse national advocacy coalition, the National Council of Coffee Producer Organizations. For documentation of recent coffee policy issues, see the website of the new congressional think tank, the Center for the Study of Sustainable Rural Development and Food Sovereignty (www.cedrssa.gob.mx).

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structures of representation ‘scale across’ as well as ‘scale up’. 22 Yet their impacts were still more defensive than they were ‘propositiva’, more limited to defending past policy gains than leveraging new ones.

Transparency Politics Cuts Both Ways, Channeling Information Upward as well as Downward Mexico’s 2006 electoral conflict transformed the transparency issue from an almost technical subject, largely of interest to specialists in civil society, law, the media, and public administration, to an issue that dominated the nation’s headlines. The discourse of transparency became a weapon deployed by each presidential campaign, in their effort to either justify or to disqualify the administration of the electoral process. For the ruling party, transparency was framed in terms of the release of data about public administration. The left opposition party framed information access more broadly, highlighting the lack of pluralism in the dominant broadcast media. Meanwhile, the transparency and accountability agenda in major nonelectoral arenas, such as public budgeting, human rights, the environment, and social policy, was promoted by public interest groups and the print media. The information rights agenda was unusual in Mexican politics, perhaps unique in its capacity to bring together advocates from across a remarkably broad ideological spectrum. Yet the balance sheet in terms of civil society capacity to turn newly won information rights into tangible impacts on state action remained incipient. Civil society organizations and independent journalists learned how to use the information law, sometimes generating headlines about high-profile diversion of public funds—but the tangible impacts of these scandals on the actual behavior of public sector institutions were few and isolated. 23 Notably, at the end of the Fox presidency one of the IFAI’s 22 Chapter 6 analyzed a modest experience with horizontal networking within the vertical integration strategy, when autonomous regional producer organizations advocated for more inclusionary and transparent implementation of the World Bank-funded Rural Development in Marginal Areas project. At its peak in 1999–2001, this campaign reached a substantial number of the regions involved in the project (in Veracruz, San Luis Potosí, and Hidalgo, with contacts in Guerrero, as well as in Oaxaca). In Oaxaca, the state government froze the program rather than allow federal funds to reach autonomous organizations, while sending threatening signals to the public interest group behind the campaign. Overall, this campaign was well integrated from local to state levels, across several states, and internationally—in direct policy dialogue both with the World Bank and with NGO counterparts around the world. Yet the national policy arena remained a missing link in the chain of vertical integration of civil society, limiting their medium-term policy impact. 23 For a broad civil society review of the tangible impacts of Mexico’s transparency reforms by issue area, see Fox et al. (2007).

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commissioners, Juan Pablo Guerrero, observed that Mexico’s advances in transparency had not yet had positive impacts on corruption in the federal government (Redacción 2006). After the first three years of the implementation of the federal transparency law, Mexico’s rating in the Transparency International index had not improved, nor had everyday citizens’ corruption experiences (Reyes Heroles 2006). Yet many civic leaders continue to hope that the transparency opening will be bolstered by ‘second generation reforms’ that will grant the IFAI more autonomy, and will raise the minimum standards for the many weak state laws (Merino 2006; Villanueva 2006). 24 By 2006, governors from all three major parties jointly called for a constitutional amendment to further strengthen information access policy, and it passed in 2007. The concept of transparency turns out, like accountability, to be relational, as noted in Chapter 2. That is, the term’s meaning depends on who is supposed to be transparent to whom. This emphasis on the relative positions of actors that promote transparency and accountability can be applied to a wide range of state–society interfaces. This underscores the need to specify the terms of information access rights, both in terms of actors and directionality. 25 For example, Mexico’s Oportunidades social program required beneficiary accountability to the state in order to justify access to welfare payments, in the name of coresponsibility. By design, ‘upward accountability’ works through ‘upward transparency’, in which state employees monitor beneficiary compliance with program requirements. When the program was known as Progresa, through external evaluations targeted to national and international policymakers, the program was clearly ‘upwardly transparent’. In contrast, it was neither transparent nor accountable to beneficiaries. After the program became Oportunidades, however, the creation of the Citizen Attention program opened a new window for ‘downward transparency’, to respond to those beneficiaries who dared to exercise their voice. This provided a degree of what one could call soft accountability, insofar as Oportunidades became ‘answerable’. In practice, the program’s answerability window effectively explained or straightened out tens of thousands of information requests, but more serious complaints of abuse did not lead to demonstrable results, as Chapter 9 showed. The Citizen Attention program lacked the capacity to impose sanctions—hard accountability—and had even less influence over the potentially more serious 24 See Merino (2006) and Villanueva (2006). On civil society information rights agendas and links, see www.mexicotransparente.org and www.derechoasaber.org. 25 For a discussion of transparency that addresses these directionality issues, see Heald (2006).

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abuses caused by other federal agencies beyond its jurisdiction. 26 This example illustrates the importance of specifying the directionality of transparency and accountability relationships. Consider another example of the relevance of the directionality of transparency: lack of access to a guaranteed secret ballot can also be understood in terms of ‘upward transparency’. On the one hand, the available data for 2000 and 2006 indicate that the fraction of the electorate that did consider their vote to be secret was significantly larger than in 1994. On the other hand, perceived lack of ballot secrecy and the conditioning of access to social programs continued to be relevant issues in 2006. 27 This was one of the main findings of a large independent opinion survey of federal social program beneficiaries that was carried out during state election campaigns in 2004 and 2005. 28 The survey concluded that: ‘in general, the target population considered the vote to be secret: only 5 percent of the total interviewed had serious doubts about ballot secrecy and 4 percent had moderate doubts’ (Probabalística and Berumen 2006: 16–17). 29 Overall, the survey findings show that the majority of a large sample of social program 26 For discussion of the distinction between soft and hard accountability, see Fox (2007a, 2007b). 27 Even though this social program was the most protected from coercive vote-buying efforts (coacción), a substantial fraction of participants still perceived their access to the program as dependent on their vote. An internal survey of 830 trained local vocales reported that only 32% agreed with the following statement ‘Support from the Oportunidades program is independent of voting’ (Oportunidades 2006e: 17). Of this group, some still assumed that it was possible (for parties) to know how someone votes (5% of those interviewed . . . ). Other vocales feared that not voting could provoke reprisals. Since these local liaison leaders represented those most likely to have gained a sense of program access as a right, for two-thirds to still see access as politically conditioned is quite significant. 28 This survey was part of a broader study of the effectiveness of ‘electoral shielding’ measures, carried out independently but officially sponsored by the Social Development Ministry. Official sponsorship permitted surveyors to focus on program beneficiaries. The overall study was coordinated by Sergio Aguayo and the survey was carried out by two leading private firms (Probabalística and Berumen 2006). The survey interviewed 4,650 participants in four programs in four states with governor’s races. The federal programs involved were Oportunidades, Liconsa, Food Supports, and the Rural Elderly, in Nayarit, State of Mexico, Veracruz, and Tlaxcala. Combining the total number of program participants in the four states, the population sampled was 2.8 million. For the broader context of this study, see Aguayo Quezada (2006). 29 Rogelio Gómez Hermosillo, the coordinator of Oportunidades responded: ‘What these studies tell us is that as a country with a still incipient democracy, it is necessary to work to eradicate a political culture that still persists in marginalized localities, in which parties and candidates try to pressure the citizens through all kinds of clientelistic offers. This cultural reality is not part of a centralized strategy and can in no way be identified with a specific political party, but rather is rooted in old vices and the vulnerability that comes with poverty—which the Oportunidades program has been confronting by eliminating intermediaries, brokers, leaders and all kinds of coyotes in its operation’ (Oportunidades 2006).

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participants are not subject to clientelistic pressures and do perceive their ballot as secret. At the same time, if one extrapolates the 9% who doubted their ballot secrecy to the overall universe of federal social program participants, then major gaps in the federal government’s ‘electoral shielding’ of social programs appear. When the survey extrapolated its findings to the 2006 elections, the size of the electorate considered vulnerable to clientelistic manipulation ranged from between one and four million voters. This pre–election data does not constitute a ‘smoking gun’ in terms of what actually happened in the presidential election. 30 Sedesol authorities differed over whether to accept the survey’s estimate of the size of the vulnerable electorate, but they did recognize that 2.6 percent of those enrolled in federal programs could be subject to manipulation (Muñoz 2006a). Yet the margin of victory in the 2006 presidential election was approximately a quarter of a million votes. Considering that the 2.6 percent estimate of vulnerability refers to a universe of ten million families and possibly as many as twenty million voters, the size of the electorate officially recognized to be vulnerable to vote-buying pressures was significantly larger than the margin in the presidential election. In summary, the issues of perceived ballot secrecy and conditioned access to social programs show that ‘upward transparency’ was still electorally relevant in 2006. The Sedesol-sponsored external study of ‘electoral shielding’ also showed that the agency for prosecuting electoral crimes accomplished little, indicating that the government’s horizontal accountability agencies had failed to address key flaws in vertical accountability (Acosta 2006). 31 Looking back, in 2006, independent election monitoring had lost much of the urgency of the 1990s; the 2000 experience had inspired both civil society and opposition parties to be more confident in the electoral process, and both invested substantially less in oversight in 2006. In retrospect, according to Sergio Aguayo, a founder of Civic Alliance, Mexico experienced ‘new, much more sophisticated forms of vote-buying. We did not manage to shield the social programs, with the exception of Oportunidades, 30 Nevertheless, the estimates are based on conservative assumptions, and they draw only from state level elections—which would involve lower risks of manipulation of federal social programs than presidential elections. The survey findings also predate the government’s saturation TV promotional campaign to associate federal social programs with the PAN. 31 The special prosecutor’s office charged with investigating reports of electoral crimes (FEPADE) generated a great deal of publicity but its investigations led to a miniscule number of actual sanctions. FEPADE does not make public data that indicate which government agencies are involved, nor does it clearly disclose whether anyone who is charged is actually sanctioned (Haight and Suárez Zamudio 2007).

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which did respond to our recommendations . . . we need to go back and fight to clean up elections’. 32 The persistence of subnational authoritarian rule in states like Oaxaca suggests an additional dimension of ‘upward transparency’ that is relevant for understanding the obstacles to accountability. The previous discussion of ballot secrecy focused on the question of individual voter freedoms, yet there is also a collective dimension to ballot secrecy—the returns themselves reveal how people voted, down to the precinct level. As a result, where the returns reveal that the majority in a given community opposes the governor, for example, then individual ballot secrecy offers voters little protection from potential reprisals against the entire community. This is a form of ‘upward transparency’. In other words, election results allow authoritarian elites to map which communities should be punished and which should be rewarded with public resources. Where repression of dissent persists with impunity, semi-clientelism (the threat of withdrawal of material rewards) is bolstered by authoritarian clientelism (rewards backed by the threat of coercion). 33 Such practices are also ‘downwardly transparent’, insofar as the threat of political reprisals is usually quite evident to those on the receiving end. Otherwise they would not work.

The ‘Power of Sunshine’ Needs to be Measured and Explained Most public oversight institutions emphasize the production of transparency. Through courts, inspections, reports, audits and investigation, legislative hearings, ombudsmen, truth commissions, complaint offices, and human rights commissions, they shed light on abuses. At best, most produce forms of ‘soft accountability’—answerability without sanctions. Yet civil society organizations and independent media invest heavily in encouraging these official watchdogs to do their job (Peruzzotti and Smulovitz 2006). This dynamic embodies the potential synergy between vertical and horizontal accountability. Contemporary official policy discourse in Mexico assumes that transparency necessarily generates accountability. This assumption is widely held around the world, associated with classic phrases such as ‘information is power’, ‘the truth shall set you free’, ‘speak truth to power’, and in the words of a founder of public interest law, Louis Brandeis: ‘sunshine is the best disinfectant, electric light the best 32

Interview, Mexico City, January 28, 2007. For further discussion of this distinction between different kinds of clientelism, see Fox (1994a). 33

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policeman’. Nevertheless, the empirical evidence from Mexico and internationally indicates that transparency is necessary but far from sufficient to produce accountability. If the power of transparency is based on the ‘power of shame’, then its influence over the shameless may be quite limited. In this context, future research might ask reframed questions such as under what conditions does transparency lead to accountability? What types of transparency manage to generate what kinds of accountability? These questions are complicated by the fact that the two concepts are difficult to disentangle, insofar as ‘answerability’ involves both transparency and accountability (Fox 2007a, 2007b). The potential contribution of transparency to accountability politics is constrained in part by the degree to which the actual exercise of citizen rights under ‘right-to-know’ reforms tends to be limited to specialists. As of 2006, broad-based constituencies tended to see the results only as the result of media dissemination, rather than investing themselves in the exercise of information rights to pursue their own agendas. In Mexico, most official information requests came from business, academia, the media, and other government agencies. Notably, in the absence of explicit minimum standards in the constitution, state government information access laws in southern Mexico more closely resembled ‘state secrets’ laws. Yet the creative vertical integration of civil society actors and initiatives may eventually make a difference. In late 2006, in Guerrero, a wide range of grassroots organizations came together in a statewide forum entitled, ‘Toward a Democratic and Transparent Guerrero’. Though convened exclusively by nonpartisan grassroots organizations, the gathering was held in the state congress library, to send a message of pluralism and checks and balances. 34 More than 140 representatives from 34 indigenous, peasant, environmental and human rights organizations, as well as 12 government agencies, exchanged experiences about how to exercise their right to access government information. Remarkably, participants in this dialogue ranged from social movement leaders—including the indigenous Community Police of the Costa Chica-Montaña region, the Community Coordinating Committee against the ‘La Parota’ Dam and diverse regional ejido unions— to flagship NGOs such as the Tlachinollan Human Rights Center and the Mexican Center for Environmental Law, to state and federal 34 The event included an exchange of experiences with a leader from India, where in contrast to Mexico, information access reforms have been led by radical mass movements willing to engage in direct action. In both countries, however, national level policy reforms required electoral shifts that weakened the veto power of traditional parties. For details on India’s reform, see links at http://www.freedominfo.org/countries/india.htm.

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government representatives—including horizontal oversight agencies such as the state’s information access agency and human rights commission. Excerpts from the plenary session were broadcast live on a statewide radio station. Detailed, practical proposals for bolstering the exercise of the ‘right to know’ were reached by consensus. This unusual convergence positioned itself politically with the following general statement: Considering: 1. That citizens have the ‘right to know’ about public affairs, as has been recognized since the mid-twentieth century through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; 2. That in our country, as a result of the initiative of several civil society organizations, the Federal Access to Public Information Law was passed in 2002; 3. That in the state of Guerrero, since February of 2006, the State Access to Public Information Law is in effect, which, though insufficient to allow citizens to fully exercise their right to know, is an important step toward meeting this goal; 4. That in the context of the current process of Mexico’s State Reform project, in which the executive, legislative, and judicial branches are involved, it is necessary—as an essential element of the process— to include greater transparency, access to information, and the informed participation of society; 5. That due to the changes and instability that our country, and especially the state of Guerrero, are experiencing, and in light of economic inequalities and political competition, it is necessary to establish a true ‘culture of transparency and accountability’ in all spheres of public authority; 6. That in order to reach a point where government institutions truly act with transparency, it is not enough to rely solely on ‘good intentions’, but must also be accompanied by the active participation of society; 7. That a ‘culture of transparency’ in all domains of public life, as well as an informed citizenry, are key to eliminating past institutional practices, such as centralism and clientelism. 35 Specific follow-up proposals included emphasis on ‘training communities on how to exercise their right to know effectively’, improving the state’s limited information law, encouraging local governments to open up information access, making public funding of civil society 35

See the full document in Organizaciones Sociales del estado de Guerrero.

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organizations more transparent, dissemination of public information in indigenous languages, independent monitoring of governance and public spending, citizen evaluations of the performance of public agencies, and the convening of public hearings for the planning, monitoring, and evaluation of state government policies. These proposals concluded with a declaration of participants’ ‘opposition to the construction of the ‘La Parota’ Dam, and we give our full support to the social movement, Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (APPO). We also demand that all political prisoners receive just and fair treatment from the legal system’. In summary, this declaration’s combination of forwardlooking democratic reforms with support for ongoing, more defensive resistance struggles reflects the event’s broad, pluralistic civic and social base summed up in its carefully worded title: ‘Toward a democratic and transparency Guerrero’ (emphasis added). 36

Final Reflections To equip the analysis of ‘transitions to accountability’, this chapter explored the conceptual issues of empowerment versus rights, low accountability traps, accountabilities of scale, vertical integration, the positioning of accountability agents, the directionality of transparency, and the power of sunshine. Turning back to the question posed at the beginning of this book—how the seeds of accountability can grow in inhospitable environments—the answers lie in the dynamics of interaction between different actors, strategies, and their capacity 36 Participatory working groups proposed very specific, practical information access reforms by issue area. For environment and rural development issues, participants called for the creation of information and training access outreach centers in each municipality in the state, for the producers who receive government support through programs included in the Rural Alliance system; public access to environmental impact studies of public works, particularly among the affected population, publication of the names of the beneficiaries of the government Rural Alliance programs at the community level, as well as the amount that each receives; as well as publication of the amounts of fiscal transfers due to each municipality. Participants in the justice and human rights working group called for access to interpreters in the legal system, multicultural police forces; as well as the recognition of ‘the right to public information as a fundamental human right’, calling for not only the ‘right to know’, but also ‘right to the truth’. The education and culture group called for promoting a ‘culture of transparency’ through the basic education system, more transparency in resource allocation in the system, including public employee wages, as well as more participation by both parents and teachers in the resource allocation process. The social program working group called for more budgetary transparency, clear community-level explanations of the rules of operation and opportunities for participation in social programs, as well as more participation in their design. The local government working group called for transparent funding of local government, more effective social auditing of government performance, and more active participation of social organizations municipal budgeting, through the existing councils (Oviado Bautista (2007).

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to trigger virtuous circles that empower otherwise-weak agents of accountability. Where electoral competition is less than free and fair, some of the institutional change strategies that might be expected to generate accountability include mass protest, participatory state–society powersharing, decentralization, and transparency reforms. This study has shown that on their own, none of these approaches managed to embed accountability reforms in the state. Mass protest can certainly provoke responsiveness, in the form of material concessions or vetoed threats, but has not been enough—by itself—to embed accountability reforms into state–society relations. Participatory power-sharing rural development programs certainly opened up space and shared resources in some regions, some of the time, but they rarely scaled up and across to influence more than enclaves within national programs. Decentralization clearly empowered authoritarian state governments. In states where the PRI lost governorships, there is little evidence that rural civil society experienced qualitative changes in terms of greater public accountability. Mexico’s submunicipal regimes remained in transition, divided between those that allow rural citizens who live outside of town centers to elect their own representatives, and those whose leadership is imposed on them from municipal centers. This study found that institutional reforms that might look ‘enabling’ on paper need to be unpacked and examined from below to determine their actual coverage, depth, and empowerment impacts in practice. Moreover, some of these reforms can conflict with others— as in the notable case of decentralization, which consistently empowered state government capacity to block state–society power-sharing councils in federal programs. The key point is that transparency, accountability, and participation reforms need each other, they can be mutually reinforcing—but that such synergy remains exceedingly rare. In the face of the ‘low accountability trap’, the challenge is how to trigger and sustain ‘virtuous circles’ of mutual empowerment between proaccountability actors in both state and society. This process is both path-dependent and iterative, and can be driven by two interlocking processes. First, autonomous indigenous and peasant regional organizations need to combine vertical integration with horizontal spread, in order to gain the combination of grassroots grounding, national linkages, monitoring capacity, and bargaining power needed to change the balance of power between the state and rural civil society. Second, reformers within public institutions need to encourage ‘enabling policy environments’—state initiatives that tangibly reduce the costs and risks associated with poor people’s collective action.

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If the past serves as a predictor of the future, rural Mexico will continue to experience partial movement toward public accountability in some regions, in some policy areas, while still confronting persistent authoritarian resistance in others. Whether and how such islands of accountability can grow and spread remains to be seen. Recognition of this regional diversity should not obscure the dominant trend: an ongoing weakening of the peasant economy that obliges more and more people to choose between exit and voice. During the first six years following the electorate’s ejection of the PRI from the presidency, Mexico’s census data indicate that more than three million Mexicans emigrated during the Fox administration (Martínez and Muñoz 2006). Very few of those who left voted in the 2006 election, which one leading peasant advocate suggested ‘could be the last call’ for Mexico’s peasant movement (Quintana 2006). In conclusion, the available evidence suggests that the vast majority of Mexico’s rural poor have yet to experience the state’s transparency and accountability reforms. For most rural people, whose main interface with the state is through the police, mayors, clinics, schools, social program administrators, and agrarian bureaucrats, few effective avenues for holding these public authorities accountable have opened up. This is the context within which Mexico’s peasants and indigenous peoples are choosing between exit and voice. The costs of both are high, with few prospects of going down in the short term. While rural civil society continues to engage in accountability politics, at local, state, and national levels—exit may trump voice at the grassroots.

Epilogue This book explored the interplay between voice and power by comparing different patterns through which organized indigenous peoples and peasants projected their voices over two decades, with an emphasis on whether or not they were heard by state actors. Mexico’s political opening made a huge difference in this process, but more because of modest improvement in freedom of association and access to information than because competitive elections allowed the rural poor to hold political parties accountable. The shifts in state–society relations were highly uneven and vulnerable, underscoring a fundamental distinction between voice and power. If voice is about capacity for selfrepresentation and self-expression, then power is about who listens. Santa Cruz, California July, 2007

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................. Index

................. Page references in the form 100 n. refer to information which occurs in the footnote only. absentee ballot 325–6 accountability 7–8, 27–30, 333–4 accountabilities of scale 341–3 agencies see accountability agencies civil society influence 15–16, 26–7, 50–2 construction of 1–2, 12 definitions 27–30, 32 degrees of 29–30, 101–2 Diconsa Rural Food Store program 249–67, 283 directionality of 30–2, 33–4 hometown associations 323–4 indicators of 24–5 leadership 80–1, 83, 100–6 low accountability traps 20, 336–40, 354 NGOs 48–9 Oportunidades program 267–82, 283 political culture relationship 50 positioning of accountability agents 20, 340–1 promarket reforms and 117–18 in regional organizations 79–81 relationships 16 in rural Mexico 2 social accountability 32–5, 243, 247, 250–1 transitions to 10–13 transparency and 350–3 accountability agencies 35–45 federalism 38–41 international actors 45 judiciaries 37–8 legislatures 35–7

positioning of accountability agents 20, 340–1 promarket public policies 43–5 accountability politics 1–2, 13, 32, 33, 333–4 rural 13–14 Ackerman, John 1, 4, 10, 26, 31, 41, 216, 220, 243 Acteal massacre, Chiapas 202, 204, 205 advisers, UELC 101 agrarian reform 2–3, 51–2, 112–13 Brazil 48 ejido communities 85–7 electoral implications 116–19 agricultural employment 290, 292 Agricultural Ministry 230 Aguayo, Sergio 112, 333, 348, 349 Alcozauca municipality, Guerrero 195 Alianza Braceroproa 319 answerability 28–9 Antorcha Campesina 265 Aquaculture project, World Bank 161–4 Asociación Tepeyac, New York 304–5, 315, 321 Atenco conflict 180 authoritarian clientelism 41–2, 350 authoritarian enclaves 5 Autonomous Multi-Ethnic Regions 201 Bada, Xochitl 177, 211–12, 302, 322, 324, 328 ballot secrecy see secret ballot

428

Index

Bartra, Armando 86, 99, 110, 194, 196, 232, 253, 329 Barzón protest movement 292 Bebbington, Anthony 139 Bellinghausen, Herman 181, 197, 199, 200, 205 Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations 309 binationality 318–21 see also migrants; migration Bonfil, Guillermo 119 Brandeis, Louis 350–1 Brazil 39, 40–1 n. organizations for representation of the rural poor 47–8 Burguete, Araceli 155, 177, 183, 204, 206 Camacho, Manuel 107 Cárdenas, Cuauhtemoc 99 Catholic church 71–2, 304 Chiapas 4, 14, 133, 183 collaboration between local and external organizations 71–2 Decentralization and Regional Development (DRD2) project 154–5 Diconsa Rural Food Store program 266 electoral violations 115–16, 120 indigenous population 131, 201–2, 204, 227 Municipal Councils for Sustainable Rural Development 234–5 Rural Development in Marginal Areas project 169, 174 scaling up of mass membership organizations 13 submunicipal governance 183, 200–6 sustained mobilization 14 see also Zapatista social movement Chilapa, Guerrero 194–5 food council 265–6 Chile, judicial system 38 Citizen Attention program 44 Civic Alliance 17, 42

election observation data 114, 121–5, 135–6 civic binationality 318–21 civil society 26–7, 46 collaboration between local and external organizations 71–3, 74–7 democratic movements 47–8 influence of 15–16, 26–7, 50–2 migrant 288, 296–7, 298–317, 318, 321–30, 331–2 policy monitoring initiatives 51–2 social accountability 32–5 thickening of 55–77, 317 transnational 45 vertical integration 51–2, 343–6 see also social capital clientelism 41–2, 80, 350 semi-clientelism 64, 118 n., 350 Coalition of Collective Ejidos of the Yaqui and Mayo Valleys of Sonora (CECVYM) 92 Coalition of Communities in Defense of the Land 180 Coalition of Immokolee Workers, Florida 308 Coalition for the Political Rights of Mexican Abroad 320 Coalition of Workers, Students and Peasants of the Isthmus (COCEI) 192 n. coalitions building 149 contending cross-sectoral coalitions 222–3 collective action 56–62, 245 failed 59 migrants 296–7, 298–9, 304 see also mobilization; social capital; specific movements collective identity migrants 296, 305 rural 23–4 communications media, migrant-led 310–12 Community Food Councils 92–3, 103, 105–6, 111

Index accountability issues 58, 240–1, 263–7, 284, 285 autonomy 263–7 see also Diconsa Rural Food Store Network Community Forestry project, World Bank 158–61, 170, 172, 174 Community Police, Guerrero 195–6 Conasupo (National Basic Foods Company) 246 concertación social 248 conditional access to citizenship rights 43–4 conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs 267 conflict 218 CONTAG, Brazil 47–8 contending cross-sectoral coalitions 222–3 contraloría social 247, 249 COPLAMAR 92 n. coproduction 69, 72 corn producers 52, 96–7 Corn Strike movement (1987) 96–7 corn supply 255 Cornelius, Wayne 5, 7, 289, 291 corporate accountability 31–2 ‘Countryside Won’t Take Any More’ campaign 292, 344 credibility NGOs 49 cross-border 319, 321 see also migrants; migration decentralization 18, 39, 178 low accountability traps and 336–40 Decentralization and Regional Development project (DRD1/2), World Bank 151–5 demobilization 59 democracy 8–9 electoral 9–10 hometown associations 323 horizontal and vertical dimensions 81–4

429

internal 17, 47–8, 103 n., 104–6 organizational 78–9 rural 23 social foundation of 16–17 transitions to 10–13 democratic movements 47–8 democratization 79 Diconsa Rural Food Store Network 19–20, 111, 224–5, 245–7 accountability issues 249–67, 282–6 see also Community Food Councils East German revolution (1989–90) 294 economic reforms 43–5 education 270–1 see also Oportunidades welfare program; PROGRESA program Education, Health, and Food Program see PROGRESA program ejido agrarian reform communities 2–3, 85–7, 180 ‘El Pistolero’ 312 elections 6–7, 112–37 absentee ballot 325–6 access in rural areas 113, 114 clientelism 41–2, 80, 350 electoral shielding 348 n., 349 fairness 115 fraud 114 n., 115 freedom 115 ineffectiveness of oversight bodies 34 national voting in rural areas 119–20 Oportunidades program and 269–70 participation 114 transitions to 11–12 UELC electoral politics 99–100 vertical accountability and 30–1 violations 121–5 vote-buying 6–7, 42, 118, 348 n., 349

430

Index

elections (cont.) see also opposition party; secret ballot electoral democracy 9–10 electoral shielding 348 n., 349 empowered participatory governance 31, 219–20 empowerment 218, 242 versus rights 334–6 see also power relations enabling environment 18, 140, 144, 147, 170–1 indicators of 153 as threat to vested interests 175–6 enclaves 5 Environment Ministry 161–3, 231 ethnic organizations, migrants 309–10 ethnographic approach 22–3 exclusionary practices Guerrero 194 Oaxaca 191–2 political 17, 114, 115–16 women 97–8, 191–2, 205 exit option 83–4, 113 signaling effects 294 voice and 291–7, 321–2, 331 see also migration faith-based organizations, migrants 303–6 Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) 307 fear 77 Federal Election Institute (IFE) 125–6, 131 Federal Information Access Agency (IFAI) 278 federal systems 38–41 Fernández, Manuel 78, 86, 138 fertilizer distribution, Nayarit 88–90 fire-alarm accountability approaches 243–5, 284 Food Councils see Community Food Councils; Diconsa Rural Food Store Network

formal power resources 221 Fox, Vicente 3, 256, 270 Franques, Juan 96 fraud 42 electoral 114 n., 115 Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra 180 García Buneo, Ignacio 100, 108 García Jimenez, Carlos 198 gender perspectives 171 see also women Gómez Hermosillo, Rogelio 268, 348 n. González Pedrero, Enrique 210–11 Government programs: PROCYMAF 15, 42, 173, 216, 219 Good Governance Councils, Zapatista 202–3, 205 Guelaguetza festivals 313–14 Guerrero Community Police 195–6 Diconsa Rural Food Store program 265–6, 267 submunicipal governance regime 193–8, 213 ‘Toward a Democratic and Transparent Guerrero’ forum 351–3 Guerrero, Juan Pablo 47 Haber, Steven 287 Haight, Libby 138, 166, 243, 249, 250, 251, 257, 259, 260, 261, 263 health services see see also Oportunidades welfare program; PROGRESA program Hernández, Luis 75, 78, 86, 88, 89, 91, 93, 96, 98, 99, 186, 260, 292, 338 Hernández, Marcos 109 Hevia de la Jara, Felipe 243, 245, 246, 247, 268, 269, 273, 274, 278, 279, 280, 281

Index

431

Hidalgo Diconsa Rural Food Store program 265, 267 submunicipal governance regime 199–200, 206 Hirschman, A. 20, 294–5 Principle of Conservation and Mutation of Social Energy 13, 58–9, 331 hometown associations (HTAs) 301–3, 319 impacts of 322–5 horizontal accountability 30–1, 33–4 NGOs 49 see also accountability; accountability agencies housing program, UELC 95–6, 107 Huazalingo protest, Hidalgo 200 human rights 5 ineffectiveness of oversight bodies 34

information rights 346 institutional accountability 31–2 institutional change 12 indicators of 24–5 Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) 3, 121, 338 Diconsa program and 259–61 indigenous regions 131, 132–4 internal democracy 17, 47–8, 103 n., 104–6 hometown associations 323 international actors 45 intersectoral coalition-building 149 invited spaces 216, 218 Iron Law of Oligarchy 17, 46–7, 80–1, 105

Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride 314–15 Imperial Censorate oversight agency, China 11 n. indicators of accountability 24–5 Indigenous Development Commission (CDI) 226, 227 indigenous population 130 Chiapas 131, 201–2, 204 ethnic organizations 309–10 Guerrero 194, 196–7 Hidalgo 199–200 migrants 300, 309–10 Oaxaca 131, 189–90 opposition party presence 130–4 social capital 64–8 submunicipal governance 182–4, 189–90 Veracruz 131, 212 Indigenous Regional Development Funds 226–8 Industrial Areas Foundations (IAFs) 305 informal power resources 221–2 information, public access to 147–8

Labour Party (PT) 127 Las Margaritas municipality, Chiapas 205 Lazaro Cárdenas Union of Ejidos (UELC) 86–111 advisers 101 corn production and 96–7 electoral politics 99–100 government intervention 90–1 leadership 100–4 membership participation 100–1, 111 national networking 93–5 reform 92–3 Self-defense Economy 98 turning points 87–90 village-managed housing 95–6, 107 women’s representation 97–9, 107 leadership 80–2 accountability 80–1, 83, 100–6 hometown associations (HTAs) 301 UELC 88–91, 92–3, 100–4 legislatures 35–7

José Arrellano, María 258 Juchitán, Oaxaca 73–4 judiciaries 37–8

432

Index

Levy, Santiago 256, 267 Little Village Community Development Corporation, Chicago 313 local government 177–8, 206–12 submunicipal rural governance regimes 179–84, 189–206 López Martínez, Antonio 192 Lopéz Obrador, Andrés Manuel 287 loss aversion 58 low accountability traps 20, 336–40, 354 loyalty, migrants 295–7 Magna Carta, England 11 n. Marcos, Subcomandante 181, 203 Martínez Ramírez, Mauricio 259 Martínez Saldena, Jesus 302, 310 mass membership organizations 16 scaling up 13 see also specific organizations media coverage 33–4 migrant-led media 310–12 Melo, Fernando 138, 177, 190 Mexican Association of Social Sector Credit Unions (AMUCSS) 157 Michels, Roberto 17 Michoacan 211–12, 232, 324 migrants 20, 291–3 autonomous migrant-led public spaces 313–17 civil society 288, 296–7, 298–317, 318, 321–30, 331–2 disconnect between migration and development 327–30 engagement with US civil society 303 ethnic organizations 309–10 faith-based organizations 303–6 feedback effects 321–30 gaining political representation 325–6 gender-based membership organizations 304 n. hometown associations (HTAs) 301–3, 319, 322–5

mapping 298–301, 330 migrant-led communications media 310–12 migrant-led NGOs 312–13 worker organizations 306–9 see also binationality migration 113 n., 287–91 as abandonment 295–6 voice and 291–7 see also exit option; migrants mobilization 59 indigenous population 67–8 Nayarit 87–90 see also collective action; social capital Mora Anaya, Juan Francisco 259 MST, Brazil 47–8 Municipal Councils for Sustainable Rural Development 232–7 Municipal Development Planning Councils 184, 186–7 Municipal Solidarity Funds 184 n. municipalities 182–3 Murat, Governor 190–1 Nahmad, Salomon 141, 154, 168 National Action Party (PAN) 3–4, 126–9, 185, 332 Oportunidades program and 268–9 presence in indigenous regions 131, 132–4 Three-for-One Program and 325 National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities 303 National Basic Foods Company (Conasupo) 246 National Cardenista Reconstruction Front Party (PFCRN) 126–7 National Human Rights Commission 5 National Indigenous Institute (INI) 226, 227 National Network of Coffee Organizations (CNOC) 345–6 National Network of Day Laborers 307

Index National Network of Independent Regional Peasant Organizations 94 National Peasant Confederation (CNC) 89–90, 91, 255 National Social Enterprise Fund (FONAES) 253–4 National Solidarity Program 184 n., 226, 228, 248–9, 253 Natural Protected Areas Advisory Councils 229–30 Nayarit agrarian reform communities 87–90 see also Lazaro Cárdenas Union of Ejidos (UELC) networking 93–5 ‘no reelection’ principle 3, 36 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 72–3 accountability 48–9 credibility 49 influence of political cultures 50 internal democracy 48 membership versus nonmembership organizations 46 migrant-led 312–13 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 52 Northwest Treeplanters and Farmworkers United (PCUN) 307 Oaxaca 132–3 Community Forestry project 159–60 Decentralization and Regional Development 2 project 154–5 Diconsa Rural Food Store program 254, 255, 260–1, 267 indigenous population 131, 189–90, 227 local project decision-making 187–9 low accountability trap 337–9 migrants 296, 309–11, 313–14

433

participatory budgeting 183, 184–9 Rural Development in Marginal Areas program 164–5, 168–9, 174, 231 rural municipal development funds 228–9 rural municipalities 183, 186 submunicipal regime dynamics 189–93, 213 Oaxacan Indigenous Binational Front (FIOB) 309–10, 319 Ocosingo food council 266 O’Donnell, Guillermo 7, 9, 16, 26, 30, 33, 34, 65, 79, 334 Olmedo, Raúl 181 Omaha Together One Community (OTOC) 305 Oportunidades welfare program 19–20, 43–4, 245, 247–8, 290 n., 347 accountability issues 267–86 Citizen Attention program 276–81, 284, 285, 347 Community Promotion Committees (CPCs) 273–6, 281 electoral manipulation 269–70 opposition party participation in polling administration 114, 125–9, 135–7 presence in indigenous regions 130–4, 136 organizational democracy 78–9 role of participatory subgroups 81, 106 see also democracy organizations 78–9 accountability within 27, 79–81 collaboration between local and external organizations 71–3, 74–7 exit option 83–4 mass membership organizations 16 participatory subgroups 47, 81, 106

434

Index

organizations (cont.) regional 16, 61–2, 84–5 scaling up 13, 78 see also migrants; non-governmental organizations (NGOs); organizational democracy; specific organizations paisanos 309 participation 78–9, 218–19, 354 at state–society interface 215–20, 237, 247 creating opportunities for 69–70 Decentralization and Regional Development (DRD2) project 154–5 Diconsa Rural Food Store program 225, 251–2, 263, 266–7, 282–4 in elections 114 empowered participatory governance 31, 219–20 indicators of institutional preconditions for 147–9 invited spaces 216, 218 migrants 298–300, 302, 305, 307–17 Municipal Councils for Sustainable Rural Development 233–5 Oportunidades program 271–81, 282–4 opposition party participation in polling administration 114, 125–9, 135–7 participatory budgeting 177, 184–9 participatory subgroups 47, 81, 106 in project design process 147 Rainfed Areas Development project 156 Rural Development in Marginal Areas project 165, 167–8 Rural Financial Markets project 157–8 UELC 100–1, 111 see also power relations

participatory budgeting 177, 184–7 local project decision-making 187–9 participatory spaces 216 Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) 6, 126–9 Guerrero 197 presence in indigenous regions 131, 132–4 Pérez, Enrique 261 personal accountability 28 see also accountability Peruzzotti, Enrique 32, 33 Pinochet, General 29–30 Placido, Cirino 213–14 political capital 175–6, 221–2 political culture 50 political economy approach 22–3 polling 113 pork barrel inducements 118 poverty 149–50 power relations 105, 145, 335 n. balance of power 185, 217–18, 237–42 Diconsa Rural Food Store program 225 formal versus informal power 221–2 state–society power-sharing mechanisms 148 see also participation; state–society relations; submunicipal rural governance regimes prison-industrial complex 44 proaccountability actors 12–14, 53–4 PROCAMPO crop payment program 43, 116, 117–18, 135 PROCEDE land titling program 43, 116, 135 Producers’ Association of Southern Nayarit 97 Program for Self-Managed Development (PADS), Guerrero 198 PROGRESA program 43, 44, 245, 256, 267, 273, 347

Index see also Oportunidades welfare program promarket economic reforms 43–5, 117–18 propoor institutions 216 propoor reforms 222 contending cross-sectoral coalitions 222–3 Protected Areas 229–30 public accountability 28 see also accountability public good 251 public spaces, migrant-led 313–17 Puebla food councils 265 punishment 28–30 Putnam, Robert 16, 26 n., 56, 65 Rainfed Areas Development project, World Bank 155–6 Rancho Nuevo de la Democracia municipality, Guerrero 197 rational wariness 171–4 reformists 63 regimes 7 see also submunicipal rural governance regimes regional movements 61–2 Regional Network of Community Authorities (CRAC) 213 regional organizations 16, 61–2, 84–5 accountability within 79–81 see also organizational democracy; organizations regional rural development councils 215–20, 223–4 see also rural development programs Regional Rural Sustainable Development Program (PRODERS) 231–2 Regional Solidarity Funds for Indigenous Peoples 70 regulatory agencies 3 religious activists 71–2 n. faith-based organizations 303–6 resource allocation 148

435

responsibility 28–30 responsive governance 28–9 rights conditional access to 43–4 information rights 346 versus empowerment 334–6 see also human rights Rodríguez, Primitivo 287–8 Rojas, Carlos 257 Ross Pineda, Raúl 320 Ruíz, Samuel 72 rule of law 37 rural accountability politics 13–14 Rural Alliance program 156, 353 n. Rural Development Investment Program (PIDER) 88–9 Rural Development in Marginal Areas program 164–70, 172–4, 230–1 rural development programs 18–19, 215–16 Diconsa Rural Food Store Network 19–20, 111, 224–5 Indigenous Regional Development Funds 226–8 Municipal Councils for Sustainable Rural Development 232–7 Natural Protected Areas Advisory Councils 229–30 Regional Rural Sustainable Development Program (PRODERS) 231–2 rural municipal development funds 228–9 Rural Financial Markets project, World Bank 156–8 Rural Food Supply Program see Diconsa Rural Food Store Network rural municipal development funds 228–9 rural municipalities 182–3 rural politics studies 113 rural poverty 149–50 Salinas de Gortari, Carlos 51–2, 99–100, 107, 120, 253

436

Index

San Andrés Accords 201–2 San Juan Chamula, Chiapas 204 San Luis Acatlán municipality, Guerrero 195 San Martín Intuyoso 192 sanctions 28–30 Schedler, Andreas 1, 7, 11, 15, 18, 28, 33, 53, 333, 340 secret ballot 42, 112, 114, 121–5, 135–6, 295, 348–9 Chiapas 116 violations 115–16, 119, 122–4, 135–6 SEIU trade union 306 Self-defense Economy 98 semi-clientelism 64, 118 n., 350 signaling effects 294 Sinaloa food councils 266 Oportunidades program 269 Sixth National Meeting of Regional Peasant Organizations 93–5 Snyder, Richard 4, 5, 21, 43, 345 social accountability 32–5, 243, 247, 250–1 Diconsa Rural Food Store program 249–67 Oportunidades program 267–82 social capital 60, 138–40, 141–2, 145–6, 175 definition 56, 142 distribution of 60–1 formation/accumulation of 55, 56–61, 62–4, 68–77 gender perspectives 171 horizontal 145 importance of external alliances 71–3, 74–7 indigenous population 64–8 intersectoral 145 political construction approach 57–61, 62–4 scaling-up 60–1, 145 see also civil society social capitalists 59–60 Social Development Ministry 228 Micro-regional Councils 223 n.

social dialogue 103 social movements 50 see also civil society South Africa 30 Southern California Council of Presidents of Mexican Federations 303 spillover effects 68, 84 state government veto power 240, 241 state–society convergence 68, 69–71 state–society relations 178 multiple levels 35 participation at state–society interface 215–20, 237, 247 power-sharing 148, 215, 237, 238–42, 354 synergy 1, 16, 57 see also participation; power relations states 7 Stephen, Lynn 28, 78, 98, 107, 307, 322, 335 submunicipal rural governance regimes 179–84, 189–206, 207–10, 212–14 Chiapas 200–6 elected versus appointed authorities 210 Guerrero 193–8, 213 Hidalgo 199–200 Oaxaca 189–93, 213 structures 207–10 subnational comparative method 21–2 subnational regimes 39–41 Suljaa municipality, Guerrero 194 Supreme Court 4 Sustainable Rural Development Law (2001) 169–70, 232 Tabasco 210–11 Tames, Luis 257–8 Teamsters trade union 306 Téllez, Luis 289, 290 Tepeyac Association, New York 304–5, 315, 321

Index thickening of civil society 55–77, 317 see also civil society; social capital Three-for-One Program 324–5, 327–8 Tlaxcala 211 ‘Tomato King’ 322 torture 5 trade unions, US 306–9 transnational actors 45 transparency 346–51 accountability and 350–3 indicators of 24–5 Treasury Ministry 175 trust 171–4 UFCW trade union 306 Unido, Durango 313 Union of Autonomous Regional Peasant Organizations (UNORCA) 86–7, 94, 226 Unión Binacional de Organizaciones de Trabajadores Ex Braceros 319 UNITE–HERE trade union 306, 314 United Food and Commercial Workers 305 United Front of Municipal Presidents of the Sierra Mazateca 190 United States accountability issues 11 n. hyper-accountability 44 see also migrants; migration unpacking of the state 174–5 upward vertical accountability 41–2, 43–5 Valtierra, David 194 Vasconcelos, José 326 Velásquez, María Cristina 154, 164, 186, 191 Veracruz 133, 212 Diconsa Rural Food Store program 266 indigenous population 131, 212, 227

437

Municipal Councils for Sustainable Rural Development 235–6 vertical accountability 30–1, 33–4 upward 41–2, 43–5 see also accountability; accountability agencies vertical integration of civil society 51–2, 343–6 vested interests 175–6 village-managed housing project, UELC 95–6, 107 Villegas, Chico 109 voice 243–4, 282, 285 exit and 291–7, 321–2, 331 strategies 243–5, 284 see also social accountability vote-buying 6–7, 42, 118, 348 n., 349 women migrant membership organizations 304 n. political exclusion of 97–8, 191–2, 205 representation of 97–9, 107 World Bank gender perspectives 171 Women’s Agro-Industrial Units (UAIMs) 98–9 worker organizations, migrants 306–9 World Bank 18, 52, 139–43 Agricultural Productivity loan 156 Aquaculture project 161–4 Community Forestry project 158–61, 170, 172, 174 Country Assistance Strategies 150 Decentralization and Regional Development project (DRD1/2) 151–5 gender perspectives 171 impact study research design 143–9 Municipal Councils for Sustainable Rural Development study 236–7 official goals of projects 152

438 World Bank (cont.) Rainfed Areas Development project 155–6 reform policies 141 Rural Development in Marginal Areas project 164–70, 172–4, 230–1 Rural Financial Markets project 156–8 rural investment fund assessment 184 n. rural poverty and 149–50, 185

Index World Development Report (WDR) 342–3 Zacatecan hometown clubs 302 Zapata, Emiliano 2 Zapata ejido protest 192 n. Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) 74 Zapatista social movement 3, 4, 47, 63, 120, 202–4, 288, 344 origins 74–5 spillover effects 68 Zedillo, President 202