The Rural State: Making Comunidades, Campesinos, and Conflict in Peru's Central Sierra 9781477326299

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The Rural State

Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture

The Rural State Making Comunidades, Campesinos, and Conflict in Peru’s Central Sierra Javier Puente

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2022 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Puente, Javier, author. Title: The rural state : making comunidades, campesinos, and conflict in Peru’s central sierra / Javier Puente. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022002138 (print) | LCCN 2022002139 (ebook) ISBN 978-1-4773-2628-2 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4773-2629-9 (pdf) ISBN 978-1-4773-2630-5 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Indigenous peoples—Peru—Sierra—Politics and government—20th century. | Land reform—Social aspects—Peru— Sierra—History—20th century. | Agriculture and state—Peru— History—20th century. | Sierra (Peru)—Politics and government— 20th century. | Sierra (Peru)—Economic policy—History—20th century. | Peru—Politics and government—20th century. Classification: LCC F3451.A5 P84 2022 (print) | LCC F3451.A5 (ebook) | DDC 985—dc23/eng/20220126 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022002138 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022002139 doi:10.7560/326282

For Gabriela and Javier, mamá y papá

Contents

Gracias ix Introduction: Bringing Back the Central Sierra 25

1. Reimagining the Peruvian Andes 2. Making Indigenous Communities

47

3. Reconciling the State and Communities 4. Reforming without Revolution

71

99

5. Making Campesino Communities

129

6. Tilling an Agrarian Conflict 159 Conclusion: Eroding Rural Communities 193 Glossary 207 Notes

213

Bibliography 249 Index

261

1

Gracias

I would like to claim that I always envisioned writing this book, but that was not quite the case. The Peruvian central sierra and San Juan de Ondores became a part of my path as I struggled to find a dissertation topic. After a delightful but “unsuccessful” trip to Ayacucho, while spending some time at the drawing board, I encountered the first traces of the unusual trajectories of the Ondores people, a campesino community located in the Bombón Plateau, next to the Chinchaycocha lake in the highlands of Junín. At Georgetown University, Erick Langer and John Tutino patiently listened to my recounting of the first archival findings and convinced me that I had found what I was looking for. The Department of History and the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University funded multiple trips to Peru and a research year spent in Lima, Huancayo, Junín, and Ondores. I briefly considered visiting San Juan de Ondores before running into a comunero from San Pedro de Pari who was seeking the titles of his comunidad at the Archivo General de la Nación. After he was treated disdainfully by the staff, I tried to assist him and point him in the right direction. In return, he provided the phone numbers of the current communal leaders of San Juan de Ondores. Most of the research that informs this book could not have been possible without a great deal of good luck. Contingency also drives history. Throughout the course of my doctoral program, Georgetown University became home in ways I could not possibly convey. The halls of the Department of History offered shelter in winter, plenty of coffee, leftovers from faculty meetings, and—most important—the mentorship and guidance of Erick Langer and John Tutino. Erick and John nourished my early interests in rural peoples and their struggles with confronting structures of power. I could not have fulfilled any steps of the arduous processes of

x | Gracias

finishing a doctorate, finding fellowships, and landing jobs without their enthusiastic support. John McNeill became a source of wisdom of all sorts in the latter part of my doctoral training, making me one of “his people.” His ongoing mentorship has pushed me in different and very intellectually rewarding directions. All of them read the full draft of my dissertation and made seemingly endless corrections and suggestions. This book is the result of years of their generous guidance. While at Georgetown, I found the friendship and comradeship of a wonderful group of people. Clara Peña supported a great deal of this part of the adventure, helped me launch a life abroad, and endured some of the most challenging parts of this project, including many moves throughout Lima, Bogotá, and Washington, DC. Patrick Dixon and Lawrence McMahon helped me emotionally endure the challenge of pursuing a doctoral degree in a very foreign environment while reading more versions of the seeds of this book than they probably wanted to. I am very proud of having been part of the community of Latin American doctoral students, a generation of wonderful scholars set to achieve great things. Larisa Veloz, Okezi Otovo, Jonathan Graham, Nate Packard, Daniel Cano, April Yoder, and Fernando Pérez-Montesinos care about this book and me much more than I can possibly express. They also brought me to the Tombs for lagers and ales when times became hard. A pre-postdoctoral fellowship took me to the Latin American and Latino Studies Program at Lehigh University, in the core of the postindustrial United States. There, I benefited from the comradeship of Matthew Bush, Bill Bulman, Bárbara Zepeda, John Savage, José Cornelio, and Miguel Pillado, with whom I shared many thoughts, tacos, beers, and curry soups. The Instituto de Historia at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile allowed me to go back to Latin America after years of training in the United States, and I will forever be grateful. In San Joaquín, I found a community of mentors and friends. Fernando Purcell, Alfredo Riquelme, Olaya Sanfuentes, Claudio Rolle, and Rafael Gaune became endless sources of academic, professional, and personal advice. Brandi Townsend, a colleague and friend since our DC times, helped me build another community of friends and young scholars who became essential for my life and work. Matías Hermosilla, Denisa Jashari, Joshua Savala, Marianne González Le Saux, Joseph Feldman, Alfonso Salgado, Alyssa Bowen, and Samuel Finesurrey—the Taller team—read the entire manuscript, made valuable contributions, and helped me rework it along the way. Constanza Dalla Porta shared her own enthusiasm for campesino struggles in Chile, read

Gracias | xi

too many versions of many passages of this book, tolerated my constant academic rants, and always cheered me up with her unlimited kindness. Back in Peru, I have always counted on the unconditional support of Jesús Cosamalón, Margarita Suárez, Martín Monsalve, Joseph Dager, and the late Jeffrey Klaiber. Scholars all over the world also made me part of a community, sharing their intellectual depth. Special thanks go to Paulo Drinot, Emily Wakild, Adrián Lerner, Brenda Elsey, Joanne Rappaport, Catalina Garzón, Paul Gootenberg, Christof Mauch, Neil Safier, Hanni Jalil, José Carlos de la Puente, David Colmenares, Jonathan Graham, Cecilia Méndez, Gonzalo Romero, Mark Healey, Mark Carey, Brooke Larson, Claudio Robles, Vanderlei Vazelesk, Florencia Mallon, Charles Walker, Claudio Barrientos, Miguel La Serna, Emilio Kourí, Enrique Mayer, Sarah Hines, Nicole Pacino, Angie Picone, Rachel Nolan, Gilbert Joseph, Mark Rice, Alden Young, Raymond Craib, Aparna Vaidik, Karin Rosemblatt, and Alfredo Ávila. Kerry Webb, my editor at the University of Texas Press, believed in this project from the very beginning and pushed me to complete it with patience and kindness. Greg Cushman and another anonymous reviewer saw the potential of this book, and their insightful comments made it a much better work. In an unexpected turn of events, I returned to the United States to continue my academic career. Smith College opened its doors, brought me into a world completely unknown to me, and has offered me an opportunity to be a better scholar and a more complete human being. In the Happy Valley, I have had the good fortune of sharing my life with a truly wonderful array of colleagues, students, and friends. I want to mention, very specially, the intellectual and personal support of Dana Leibsohn, Elizabeth Klarich, Roisin O’Sullivan, Elizabeth Pryor, Ginetta Candelario, Rob Dorit, Floyd Cheung, Kiran Asher, Manuela Picq, Michelle Joffroy, and María Helena Rueda. They all offered words of comfort and encouragement when I needed them the most. Dana, in particular, has become an exemplary model of collegiality, mentorship, and friendship. Here, I also found an unexpected community of friends and colleagues who have become my own comunidad, including Verónica Dávila Ellis, Rachel Newman, Mariyana Zapryanova, Jorge Vásquez, Colin Hoag, Samuel Ng, Ilona Sotnikova, Sarah Mazza, and Susanna Ferguson. Amelia Mitter-Burke joined my New England life toward the completion of this project and became a beacon of light amid the darkness of COVID-19. Her pace, her love for classrooms, her passion for teaching, and her students are a source of inspiration.

xii | Gracias

This work could not have been possible without the trust and support of the Comunidad Campesina de San Juan de Ondores. Obed Laureano and Humberto Palomino, past presidentes comunales, believed in the importance of history and helped me to present the project before the rest of the comuneros and campesinos. Access to the community of San Juan de Ondores was granted by the popular vote of the asamblea comunal, a seminal moment that taught me much about the link between the historical discipline and rural politics. The late Dan Hazen believed the historical records of San Juan de Ondores needed to be preserved and funded a project for digitizing their actas comunales through the now extinguished Program of Latin American Libraries and Archives (PLALA) at Harvard University. Yoshy Luengo made the map included in this book and has always helped me with my cartographic quests. Joaquín Gutiérrez elaborated the bibliography and revised many smaller details of the final manuscript. Nino Bariola helped me revise the glossary of Spanish terms, providing his always incisive comments. Lisa Munro and Sarah Hudgens made the original text legible to other readers, and I cannot be thankful enough. Students at Georgetown University, Lehigh University, the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and Smith College deserve a special mention. In all of these classrooms, I have had the pleasure and privilege of exchanging and cocreating knowledge as well as testing many of the preliminary ideas that informed this work. They made this work better and also made me a better person. My parents—Gabriela and Javier—never thought a low-income, first-generation college student should become a history major, headed for a career that seemed reserved for the privileged few. However doubtful and hesitant, they respected, endured, and supported every single one of my decisions. I hope they will see this book, dedicated to them, as a reflection of years of challenges and loving perseverance.

Peru, the central sierra, the Chinchaycocha lake, and San Juan de Ondores. Map by Yoshy Luengo Oyarzún.

San Juan de Ondores and Atocsayco [sic], also known as the “Harrison Map.” Commissioned to William H. Harrison by the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation, 1905. Archivo Comunal de San Juan de Ondores.

The urban sector of San Juan de Ondores. Photograph by the author, 2012.

Boundary between the Atocsaico hacienda and the San Juan de Ondores Community, 1955. Archivo General de la Nación.

Internal statute of the comunidad indígena San Juan de Ondores. Archivo de Comunidades Indígenas y Campesinos, Dirección Regional Agraria de Junín, 1954.

Last page of the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces’ Council of Ministers’ minutes declaring the promulgation of the 1969 agrarian reform law. Colecciones Especiales, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1969.

Communal minutes of San Juan de Ondores declaring the possession of the Atocsaico estate. Archivo Comunal de San Juan de Ondores, 1979.

“Atocsaico es de Ondores,” La Voz Campesina, October 1979 (detail).

Abandoned structures of the old Hacienda Atocsaico. Photograph by the author, 2012.

The Rural State

Introduction Bringing Back the Central Sierra

This book tells the story of a rural community in the core of the Peruvian Andes. People living in the countryside during the twentieth century faced many challenges, particularly the acceleration of another globalized industrial revolution. While industry and capital incorporated rural spaces into their socioeconomic metabolism, livelihood in the countryside became an ongoing struggle over increasingly elusive subsistence and autonomy. As Karl Marx once explained, the absorption of areas not yet integrated into capitalist production entailed violent processes that led to “primitive accumulations” on the one hand, and deepening disenfranchisements on the other.1 Examining the conflicts between a rural community, a hacienda, and the many manifestations of statehood in the central sierra of Peru— primarily reconstructed based on documents preserved by the people of San Juan de Ondores—this book offers a century-long view of how los Andes became la sierra, how pueblos became comunidades, and how indígenas became campesinos. In each transformation, forces and agents at stake included the agency of rural villagers, the contested mandates of the Peruvian state, the industrializing aim of capitalist institutions, and other modernizing forces. I argue that conflict became a central thread in the making of the twentieth-century Peruvian countryside. While this story also included episodes of negotiation, cooperation, collaboration, and contestation, conflict—not violence, but conflict broadly understood— shaped institutions, social relations, and economic formations. In the last decades of the past century, political violence engulfed the Peruvian countryside, causing the death of approximately 69,280 Peruvians. Most lived in impoverished areas of the Andean countryside, survived on an

2 | The Rural State

agrarian livelihood, and spoke a language other than Spanish.2 More than 20 percent of the victims—over fifteen thousand people—lived in the central sierra, which became the second foremost battleground of the Internal Armed Conflict.3 Upon closing this book, I expect readers of The Rural State to further consider how political violence in the rural countryside emerged from grassroots understandings of and disputes over land, identity, autonomy, and sociopolitical belonging. Throughout the twentieth century, the world became more urban and less rural. A dystopian urbanization has turned cities—and specific forms of cities—into symbols of wealth and progress. Rural villagers became the center of wage labor markets, in major cities after migratory movements or as the regional focuses of industrializing development. Every Latin American nation-state faced the pressing challenge of desbordes populares, the quintessential label coined by Peruvian anthropologist José Matos Mar to explain massive human migration from rural peripheries toward urban centers. The physical and human geography of cities has been amassed with the flesh, social tissue, and resources of the countryside. Every macro sociopolitical development related to the perils of urbanization correlates to rural dynamics that deserve careful scrutiny. Since conquest and colonization, when war capitalism prevailed, the Andes became an integral part of what later became the “third world” and the “global south.” Incorporating this region into an accelerated world economy had an undeniable and unquestionable colonial component. In spite of major demographic constraints, the central Andean region transformed capitalism. The Potosí-Huancavelica complex signaled the emergence of a truly global circulation of commodities and capital. However, the early colonial reconstitution of Andean repúblicas de indios and the creation of regional networks of exchange and trade made the rural countryside important in decades and centuries to come. Nineteenth-century ideals of modernity reinvented the physical and human geography of the Andes. Nineteenth-century liberalism legally obliterated Andean populations, who were recovering after centuries of demographic collapse. A new world order emerged after the contraction of early-modern empires and the rise of British informal imperialism; paired with centralized industrialization and capitalist production, it brought the Andes—along with Africa, Asia, India, and other constitutive regions of the global south—into a worldwide scheme of circulation as “lands of famine.” Starvation, poverty, and desolation became “essential” characteristics of a pauperized global countryside. In turn, the fights of rural dwellers

Introduction | 3

against colonial and imperial domination became struggles over the means of life and death, the right to subsist. Means of Life and Death in an Andean Comunidad

People in rural areas become woven together into a community through social relations of production. Cultural articulations, the manifold and multilayered material interactions between peoples, resources, institutions, spaces, and environments, explain rural livelihood in the twentieth-century countryside. In the Peruvian Andes, as Enrique Mayer asserts, communities constitute “the home base of Andean peasant social and economic organization” centered on household economies and widespread networks of socioeconomic and political connections.4 Communal rationalities of settlement and mobilization are deeply embedded within the specificities of their environments, particularly in the vertical context of the Andes.5 Lowland communities and valley settlers mastered agrarian cycles of harvest and sowing seasons, producing enough for subsisting and a minimum of surplus for exchange. Peoples who migrated to upland grounds faced greater environmental constraints as elevation decreased oxygen concentration and hypoxia—commonly known as soroche—required both biological and societal adaptations. Aided by animal power, particularly sheep, these communities became masters of pastoralism and engaged grazing economic markets with greater surplus access and autonomy.6 Ethnic bonds and linguistic differences provided almost limitless distinctions within both lowland and upland communities. State powers, past and present, viewed the highly heterogeneous social tissue of rural communities through a homogenizing social lens. In these chapters, I recast the relationship between the Peruvian state and rural community to dissect how rural populations and state powers shaped each other throughout the last century. In offering a lococentric, regionally focused, community-based study of nation, state, and communal formation in Peru throughout the twentieth century, I also examine the problems that developed among centralizing state powers, logics of capital, and rural human groups. While implicit in many chapters, capitalism lies at the core of this rural appraisal of twentieth-century Peruvian history and the enduring histories of campesino struggles in the rest of the world. Rural communities as a socio-spatial ideal became a pivotal hub for framing the lives of thousands, even millions, of rural villagers in

4 | The Rural State

an age of an expanding governance of capital. When rural people were incorporated into schemes of capitalist production, they mixed economic practices—primarily indebted, and wage labor with subsistence agrarian economies—which remained profitable for the few and alienating for the many.7 San Juan de Ondores is one of the thousands of rural villages that constitute the social tissue of the Peruvian countryside. Subjected to centuries of social engineering projects, twentieth-century rural villages “became” Indigenous and campesino communities, adapting to evolving rural governmentalities of the state. Ondores lies in the upper central region of Peru, at more than thirteen thousand feet above sea level in the center of the Bombón Plateau. The central Andean region of the country is typically referred to as the central sierra, a pivotal geopolitical region of Peru. Within this area, Ondores and its surrounding lands cover much of the western margin of the Chinchaycocha lake, one of the largest bodies of water in Peru. The same melting glaciers that end in the Mantaro River feed the Chinchaycocha lake. Deglaciation water is geothermally heated, providing the lake with a surface temperature of fifty-seven degrees. This unusual environment produces a high level of moisture, encapsulated by the surrounding orography—wide and deep ravines along with medium-size hills. Crossing west over the hills—referred to by locals as La Cima—another vast plateau of natural pastures connects this region with the highlands of Lima and the mining towns of Morococha and La Oroya. This plateau contains approximately forty smaller bodies of water, from small lagoons to hot springs, which nurture rich natural pastures. These pastures, the environment, the altitude, and the ecological processes of rural settlement form a crucial part of the enduring story of the struggles of San Juan de Ondores over the means of life and death. San Juan de Ondores reached notoriety in the mainstream media when a prominent Lima journal, Caretas, published in 2003 an article about the historical struggle of villagers over a neighboring estate called Atocsaico.8 According to the article, San Juan de Ondores had been involved in a sustained trial with the Sociedad Agrícola de Interés Social (SAIS) Túpac Amaru over the possession and exploitation of more than twenty-two thousand hectares of land. The conflict ignited after the 1969 agrarian reform, when the Gobierno Revolucionario de la Fuerza Armada—a military junta led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado— established peasant cooperatives and agrarian societies, which he claimed empowered the Peruvian campesinado without threatening the productivity of major rural estates. In narrating the “historical nature” of their

Introduction | 5

trial, campesinos interviewed by Caretas framed the recent trial with the SAIS and the Peruvian state within a larger struggle over the recovery of lands—a struggle that dated to the colonial period. As in millions of rural stories of struggle elsewhere in the world, land as a means of life lay at the center of every battle—whether legal or physical—worth fighting and often dying for. Land, Eric Wolf reminds us, was far from being a “commodity in nature” but rather constituted the byproduct of a “new cultural system . . . creating a new kind of economics.”9 The twentieth-century history of rural and campesino politics has centered on questions of insurgency, rebellion, and revolution. The global countryside became a central battleground for the two dominant sociopolitical and economic architectures of the last century. Capitalism and communism have wielded their muscles over rural villages since the dawn of the Mexican and Russian revolutions, respectively, as definitional moments of global rural history.10 Consequently, almost every question related to the agrarian structures of power of production placed violence—whether insurrectionary or counterrevolutionary—as the deus ex machina of campesino histories around the globe. Capitalism placed the control of the means of life and death in the hands of a few—hacendados, corporations, or states—fostering enduring inequalities. Communism eventually provided the semantics of contestation and rebellion, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century, explaining the opprobrium and delivering answers and recipes for mobilization and revolution. Still, unjust material and social conditions for campesinos did not feed permanent revolution. Rural injustices also built up much needed moral codes and sanctioned legitimacies, soothing discourses that spurred campesino obedience while projecting fictions of assistance, cooperation, and empowerment.11 Rural villagers became campesinos upon being the subject of these fictions, experiencing the perils of power while learning to endure, resist, and mobilize when necessary and possible.12 In the Peruvian case, recent rural histories have almost all dissected the dynamics of the Internal Armed Conflict (1980–2000) and the post-conflict aftermath, as the Informe final of the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (CVR), the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, did in 2003. Nevertheless, the larger historical narrative of San Juan de Ondores, as recounted by its own members, transcends a conflict-centered understanding of communal trajectories. The campesinos of Ondores viewed the latter political violence as part of a historical struggle that started in colonial times. They saw how the community

6 | The Rural State

originated as a pueblo de indios in the eighteenth century and continued into a socially obscure era of indebted servitude as hacienda peons in the nineteenth century, then reemerged in the early twentieth century constrained by centralizing dynamics of state formation and capital accumulation. In becoming indios, peons, Indigenous people, and campesinos, rural villagers from Ondores have built a powerful memory of experiencing power, enduring injustice, advancing autonomy, and regaining their right to subsist—asserting how they live and die on their own terms. Tracing the history of San Juan de Ondores, in this book I bring global dynamics into local domains and local narratives into global discussions. Far from having a purely intellectual aim, rural villagers from Ondores demanded global understanding decades ago. In 1980, a group of Ondores campesinos participated in the Fourth Russell Tribunal for Indigenous Peoples, held in Rotterdam. Along with thirteen other Indigenous groups from all over the world, the campesinos presented their grievance at the usurpation of Atocsaico, the long-treasured rural estate that had become a core component of SAIS Túpac Amaru and a symbol of a militarily enforced agrarian reform. In presenting their grievance, this symbolic group of Peruvian campesinos intended to represent rural communities throughout the hemisphere and the world, millions of villagers who suffered economic disenfranchisement, political repression, and alienation. As the Peruvian Andes entered one of the darkest periods of its history, the presence of Ondores before the Russell Tribunal becomes even more symbolic. The Internal Armed Conflict, which began in 1980 as a conflict between the Maoist party Sendero Luminoso and the Peruvian state, escalated into a civil strife that placed the campesinado at the center of the conflagration—as both victims and perpetrators. In the century of history rebuilt in this book, the villagers of San Juan de Ondores pursued control of the means of life and death, experiencing the power of state and capital, resisting and adapting according to their logics, and revolting and mobilizing when conditions proved “favorable.” Facing social obliteration, a group of rural villagers resorted to legal means to recover lands, regain their autonomy, advance their political claims, and reaffirm the rights of a global countryside to remain alive. Toward a Modular History

Every local history is extraordinary, and San Juan de Ondores’s is not an exception. However, local history also risks becoming modular,

Introduction | 7

integrated into larger historiographical conversations due to methodology, scope, and relevance.13 Besides reconstructing a local history, a study of Ondores furthers our understanding of rural politics, economics, and societal formations. The documents community members presented before the Russell Tribunal indicated the existence of a campesino legal culture that engaged the official sphere of the state, circulating through courts and tribunal networks in different Peruvian provinces.14 As many studies remind us, legalistic vocabularies—the lingua franca of the state—often obscure court documents, hiding more than they reveal. Exclusive focus on the legal struggle of Ondores, by the same token, limits the historicity of the campesinado to a sphere dominated by the state, ignoring the many sources of rural conflict and their correlates. When studying Huasicancha, Gavin Smith showed how placing legal questions about land property within their cultural and ecological environments framed those questions.15 In vividly reconstructing the story of Huasicanchinos and their successful land recovery in 1972, Smith also showed that the period of agrarian reform represented both the departure and arrival of rural and campesino politics in Peru. Much of the contemporary political history of rural issues portrays the years of agrarian reform (1969–1975) as a primordial political principle, from where all evils that ravaged the countryside in the following decades first emerged.16 This view has dominated the literature that examines the military government’s policies in the decade following what Abraham Lowenthal and Cynthia McClintock label the “Peruvian experiment.”17 Such demiurgic nature attached to the 1969 agrarian reform, cast as an extraordinary and radical political restructuring of the countryside, enabled scholars to quantitatively and qualitatively measure the policies and outcomes of the regime. In combination with ethnographic and anthropological work, traditional literature provides critical social measurement, examining the nature of political attitudinal change among campesinos as the human focus of agrarian policies.18 Comprehensive understandings of twentieth-century rural history require a zoomed-in, intimate dissection of how national politics and international processes became grounded in major rural continuities over the course of the century. Century-long historical analyses have been as ambitious as rare. Rosemary Thorp and Geoffrey Bertram’s study of the policies and internal effects that shaped the Peruvian economy from 1890 to 1977 identified three major cycles, each fueled by both international market forces and domestic responses.19 The first cycle lasted until the 1879 debacle of

8 | The Rural State

the War of the Pacific and had guano at the center of economic dynamics. A second cycle (1879–1930) was characterized by repeated collapses of the international economy, ending with the Great Depression.20 Finally, a third cycle emerged in the post-Depression period and ended with the meltdown of the military economic policies in 1977. Thorp and Bertram show how national economic leadership failed to retain control of expanding economies and foster domestic manufacturing, preventing the launch of national industrialization. Every cycle began as a national, state-led, commodities-based boom and ended as a foreign-controlled disaster. Understanding these larger cycles of economic booms and busts should inform every discussion of rural economies. Villagers became campesinos within a larger framework of open economic policies and entangled growth. Andean regions and rural villagers helped make almost every commodity that fueled short-lived booms and dynamized the Peruvian economy. The case of the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation exemplifies the entangled economic growth described by Thorp and Bertram. A number of studies have analyzed Cerro de Pasco’s history, highlighting the social impacts of corporate operations.21 In fact, this particular case of corporate capitalism in Andean Peru spanned the three periods proposed by Thorp and Bertram. Rural villagers and the human geography of the Peruvian Andes made up the socioeconomic networks that linked mining areas and neighboring towns, accelerating the dynamics of capitalism. San Juan de Ondores, along with hundreds of other villages, helped establish the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation and twentieth-century capitalism. Early on, the villagers formed part of a coerced labor pool of miners, which seemingly transformed them into a new proletariat. Later, they labored as arrendatarios and salaried shepherds once the corporation diversified its production, participating in agrarian capitalism through livestock raising and wool exportation by the mid-twentieth century.22 Rural histories unfolded within larger economic narratives of capitalist development, which included the stories of people who created networks that structured the cycles described by Thorp and Bertram, linking the countryside with national and international webs of exchange, merging the local and the global. The Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation was one among many agents that framed the lives of villagers and structured the history of the countryside. Enduring campesino struggles over the means of life preceded the arrival of corporate capitalism. Other economic actors included private haciendas, business associations, and conglomerates such

Introduction | 9

as the Junta de Industria Lanar and the Sociedad Ganadera Junín, and state ministries and offices such as the Ministerio de Fomento. Campesino mobilizations also involved critical degrees of politicization as local struggles became regional and national. “Representing” campesino interests became a pivotal goal for political parties of diverse affiliations, campesino confederations, state bureaucracies and local representatives of the state, and lawyers and engineers as formative actors of statemaking. Both the economics and politics of the countryside, as projected by agents of power and holders of the means of life, turned the lives of rural villagers into the human fuel of major national and international processes. Every local history of the countryside examines how massive numbers of global campesinos participated in the capitalist making of the contemporary world. Conventional “moral economy” views of rural campesino struggles define them in a binary dynamic of resistance and rebellion.23 Campesinos endured stressful economic environments and equally challenging political circumstances until their “moral economy” became threatened and they engaged in open contestation.24 Moral economy views paid less attention to adaptation, neglecting how disenfranchising economic dynamics and obliterating political processes transformed rural lives into campesino lives.25 Marxist historiography brought the question of adaptation, tracing the trajectories of campesinos to show how they became wage laborers and transformed the countryside into a capitalist, rural-based economy. Florencia Mallon and Nelson Manrique, foundational scholars of the Peruvian central sierra, provide one last element of analysis. As capitalism settled in Peru and the central sierra, social relations among rural villagers—and between villagers and holders of the means of life—dramatically changed. Capitalism became the vocabulary of newly negotiated social relations, framing rural lives and turning villagers into campesinos. Inasmuch as capitalism became a language of economic, social, and political interactions that framed the lives of hundreds of communities and rural villages, campesinos—far from being antithetical to capitalism—became a byproduct of the incorporation of the countryside into global capitalist structures of power and production. On the Agrarian Historiography of the Peruvian Sierra

Part of a larger historiographical turn that fostered multiple “regional” histories, the central sierra once captured the attention of

10 | The Rural State

historians interested in major questions ranging from the nature of popular nationalism to the frustrated industrialization of Peru.26 The Mantaro Valley, the lower area of this geographic region, became a laboratory to test hypotheses that fostered discussions on much larger issues. More recently, the historiography of rural Peru has recentered on a postconflict agenda, as proposed by the Informe final of the CVR, strongly focusing on Ayacucho—the province where the Internal Armed Conflict first erupted. Within the historical discipline, rural issues—once a central component of academic and political conversations that included scholars such as Alberto Flores Galindo, Nelson Manrique, and José Luis Rénique, among others—were abandoned in favor of other accounts that overlooked and dismissed rural narratives of Peruvian history. The central sierra fell into a historiographical silence.27 Cecilia Méndez and Carla Granados reflect on the historical and historiographical silences surrounding “the rural” in Peru.28 They condemn a covert racism of Peruvian historiography, combined with a silent psychological fear grounded in the experience of the Internal Armed Conflict. Here, I respond to the silences that have engulfed the rural twentieth century, tracing the foundations of historical fractures that underlay the recent (de)formation of the Peruvian state. In doing so, I argue that the persistence of such fractures—the broken core of a “republic without citizens”—has constituted one of the greatest historical continuities of the nation- and state-making processes in Peru. As the narrative of the history of Ondores will make clear, unhealed fractures placed state and communities at odds, building the socioeconomic and political tensions that became the roots of the Internal Armed Conflict. Despite silences and limitations in the texts, I also build upon a prolific historical literature centered on the Peruvian central sierra, which dominated conversations about rural history before the outbreak of political violence. Florencia Mallon’s study of the Yanamarca Valley stands out as a foundational contribution.29 Mallon traced the history of a handful of villages from a period of economic bonanza, before the War of the Pacific, when guano exports catapulted the Peruvian economy and attracted foreign entrepreneurship, to two decades before the 1969 agrarian reform. While the central sierra faced both foreign invasions and capitalist agents, neither nationalist alliances nor capitalism quite materialized. Without remaining immune to both dynamics, communities “resisted.” Mallon advances some critical points that I further discuss in this book. First, protean capitalisms stratified villages and communities even before twentieth-century corporate capitalism settled in the region. Sec-

Introduction | 11

ond, once corporate capitalism disrupted village realms, campesino understandings of capitalism framed how villagers entered a period marked by hemispheric conversations about agrarian reform and the larger 1960s unrest of the global countryside. José María Caballero’s study of the sierra before the agrarian reform of 1969 provides much needed empirical information.30 Comparing other highland regions with the central sierra, Caballero highlights the limitations faced by agrarian reform policies due to social, economic, and environmental conditions. Contrary to the beliefs of beneficiaries and advocates of agrarian reform, the 1969 process proved that much less available land remained to distribute among campesino families. The very “agrarian frontier” of the country—the sheer number of hectares available for agrarian activities, whether family-based agriculture or large industrial ranching—was greatly limited. I reconstruct the process by which thousands of Indigenous comunidades, formally recognized by the state and legally enfranchised by its legislation, held the most agrarian land prior to the agrarian reform. By focusing on the upper region of the central sierra, I also illustrate how remaining land available for distribution faced one last ecological conundrum. While crop-based agriculture in the lower regions fostered domestic economies and facilitated family distribution of land, natural pastures suitable for ranching—the vast majority of agrarian land in Peru—faced decay when divided into household plots. Understanding the central sierra throughout the last century also requires building upon the long-term trajectories of social networks and the human geography of the region. Following José Deustua’s historical portrayal of the complex networks that linked traditional mining centers and village realms, I show how social connections created the sierra not only as a geographical region but also as a human domain.31 Deustua proved that in spite of traditional perspectives on subsistence rural economies, the nearby presence of markets, commercial dynamics, and protean capitalisms did not “disrupt” villagers but rather formed campesinos strongly engaged in capitalist practices. This book contributes to an understanding of the making of campesinos under capitalist governance, examining the social tissue that connected epicenters of production with villages, bringing together upper puna regions, mining areas, and lower agricultural valleys. Capitalism, particularly its twentieth-century corporate version, is another critical actor in the story narrated in this book. Alberto Flores Galindo wrote a model social history of the miners of the Cerro de

12 | The Rural State

Pasco Copper Corporation, reconstructing the social universe of thousands of rural villagers who became wage laborers and an incipient rural proletariat.32 Los mineros de la Cerro de Pasco illustrates the vitality of campesino identities forged upon entering the realm of capital and the human dimension of corporate mining businesses in the early twentieth century. Corporations like the Cerro de Pasco had become the largest employers of rural villagers in the Andes and throughout Latin America. Josh DeWind furthers our understanding of the weight of corporate capitalism in shaping the countryside, analyzing the Cerro de Pasco until its nationalization in the 1970s.33 Joining Flores Galindo and DeWind, I reassert that corporate capitalism in the Andean region remained deeply rooted in the mobilization of a human component, a campesino vital to developing a modern economy. Nelson Manrique showcases the wider, threefold importance of the central sierra for thinking about the much larger national question. First, he brings the question of campesino nationalism to the forefront of the debate about the War of the Pacific.34 Manrique thus inserts the campesinos of the central sierra into a larger debate about subaltern politics and popular nationalism in Latin America and the world—an effort joined by Florencia Mallon in her equally influential Peasant and Nation. The central sierra also became a pivotal case study for exploring how internal markets and regional economies formed in the long nineteenth century.35 Manrique proves how the dynamic internal market of the central sierra— initially spurred by mining economies and later centered on the highland aguardiente—turned this region of the Andes into the most socially and politically vibrant area of the Peruvian countryside. I further underscore the vital role of the campesinado in the rise and consolidation of internal markets, supplying labor and fostering demands, and I showcase how enduring questions about land ownership created alliances—bringing together the state, communities, hacendados, and corporations—framed within the language of capital and progress. These alliances, and the logics of capitalism exerted upon the countryside, framed Peru’s entrance into the twentieth century. When capitalist coalitions disenfranchised most rural communities, campesino demands created space and pushed the agrarian question onto a national political platform, raising awareness about the role of rural villagers vis-à-vis the economic modernization of the country. Enrique Mayer dissects the campesino condition of the central sierra. Analyzing the household realm as a constitutive microcosm of campesino identities, Mayer links family organization and domestic pro-

Introduction | 13

duction with the larger dynamics that shaped the agricultural economy of the country, as well as rural and urban environments with national markets and the ecological and cultural correlates that assist the negotiation of everything.36 I rely on Mayer’s seminal explanations of how the agricultural and social realities of the countryside shaped local economies—their internal structures of land ownership and societal organization—and whether campesinos embarked on collective or individualized ventures. Recently, Marisol de la Cadena furthered this understanding, proving the importance of transcending the subject-nature binary as a functional fiction of capitalism in agrarian environments.37 Mayer also expanded the scope of his research, tackling the period of agrarian reform beyond the central sierra.38 Challenging hegemonic views on the agrarian reform process as a period of campesino enfranchisement, I further reveal how the cooperativization of land and labor traumatized comunidades in the form of the subsequent Internal Armed Conflict. Political violence forged the countryside and campesinos decades before actual conflict unfolded. The Informe final of the CVR underemphasized the internal geopolitical importance of the central sierra in an age of social meltdown. While peripheral to Ayacucho, the epicenter of political violence, the central sierra became a battleground as revolution and counterrevolution reached national levels.39 Without discrediting the transcendental importance of the Informe final, the CVR unintentionally crafted a particular epistemology of the conflict—grounded and legitimized on the immeasurable social suffering inflicted upon countless victims of political violence—that outweighed decentered dynamics and understandings of the Internal Armed Conflict. With The Rural State, I join a new generation of scholars who have paved the way for a major rethinking of the roots of the Internal Armed Conflict. Jaymie Patricia Heilman recounts the socioeconomic trajectory of Ayacucho since the end of the War of the Pacific reconstruction period (1895) until the eve of political violence. Examining court documents to portray a society in a gradual descent toward an abyss, she shows how campesinos engaged politics as a process she labels as “government by abandonment.”40 This book also traces the presence and absence of the state in the central sierra, and how campesino groups made political and economic decisions about the type and degree of their participation in scenarios of sociopolitical violence. Miguel La Serna also examines communal politics in the decades that preceded the Internal Armed Conflict, those centered on the many responses of campesinos within the same

14 | The Rural State

regional space to violence and Sendero Luminoso.41 In tracing the history of Chuschi and Huaychao, important places in the grand narrative of the conflict, La Serna uses the concept of “degrees of development” since the years prior to the 1969 agrarian reform to understand the economic structures that framed violence as a political culture. As I explain, economic dynamism nourished communal cohesion and encouraged people to reject violence. In contrast, economic stagnation pauperized the material grounds of communal organization and pushed campesinos toward embracing violence as a legitimate discourse and praxis. On Rural History and Campesino Sources

Reconstructing the history of any twentieth-century campesino group and comunidad presents major heuristic challenges. Deliberate fragmentation in the historical register of the trajectory of the Indigenous and campesino communities in Peru reflects an equally fragmented and discontinuous approach of the Peruvian state toward rural populations and their worlds. After the recognition of the legal status of Indigenous comunidades (1921), the state periodically created a new institution— or reassigned the institutional location of an existent one—to supervise, monitor, and survey the lives of thousands of newly recognized communities. Institutions created copious documentation from decades of state surveillance of communities, which they relocated, transferred, depurated, and discarded according to political appraisals of rural and agrarian questions. Non-state administrations of agrarian businesses and estates, particularly private parties and haciendas, provide a more continuous, linear narrative about the lives of rural villagers living under their hegemonic control. This situation resembles many rural scenarios elsewhere in Latin America. As part of the 1969 process of agrarian reform and the expropriation of private property, the military government confiscated the documental patrimony of haciendas and other privately owned estates. This appropriation formed the most important documental corpus about the rural history of Latin America, originating with the Archivo del Fuero Agrario (AFA), an independent archive administered by the Tribunal Agrario, a legal court that attended to claims by campesinos and hacendados alike.42 In years after the 1969 agrarian reform, the AFA became a quintessential device to implement agrarian justice. While the Tribunal Agrario was still active, dozens of researchers explored the AFA’s vast documentation.

Introduction | 15

During the 1980s and 1990s, Peruvian historiography witnessed a great research revival devoted to exploring multiple questions pertaining to the historical condition of the campesinado.43 Campesino historiography was nurtured by the sources available for research endeavors at the AFA and fueled by the contemporary political condition of the countryside at the time.44 Still, virtually no study produced during this golden age of rural historiography transcended an imaginary boundary traced around 1940. Once the military government declared the agrarian reform process finalized, the AFA fell under the bureaucratic logic of the Peruvian state. Part of the documentation pertaining to the legal entitlement of community beneficiaries of the agrarian reform was moved to the administrative archive of the Sistema Nacional de Movilización Social (SINAMOS), the military government’s propaganda office that managed social issues, including containing potential upheaval against the regime. This documentation was later transferred to Organismo de Formalización de la Propiedad Informal (COFOPRI) during the Alberto Fujimori years, under the neoliberal premise of thoroughly advancing private property. Nearly a decade ago, these documents were transferred, once again, to regional governments when COFOPRI’s functions became decentralized. Some regional governments have preserved the documents in their offices of agrarian affairs, but others destroyed them. A critical part of the history of Indigenous comunidades and campesino groups has been the subject of deliberate obliteration.45 Remaining pieces of the AFA, mostly administrative records, were transferred to the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) to consolidate the documental patrimony of the country. However, these records remain the lowest priorities in terms of preservation, administration, and availability for researchers. Thanks to the personal help of administrative authorities and archivists, many of the existent collections that deal with the central sierra—especially those of the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation and the Sociedad Ganadera Junín—became available for this study. The collection of the colonial section of the AGN, “Comunidades de Indígenas,” provided additional information about the colonial origins of the struggle of San Juan de Ondores and a pivotal clue about the existence of legal documents of Ondores that had been in the possession of the Tribunal Agrario, possibly in the agrarian office of the regional government of Junín. The “Asuntos Indígenas” collection preserves some of the documentation of the Office of Indigenous Affairs, an office within the Ministerio de Fomento that was in charge of dealing with communal

16 | The Rural State

issues from 1921 until the creation of the Ministerio de Trabajo y Comunidades in 1965 and the beginning of the campesinización of Indigenous comunidades. Archival scouting in Lima repositories produced an incomplete image of the twentieth-century campesino problem. A trip to the city of Huancayo—capital of the Junín province and site of the office of agrarian affairs that could have the legal records of San Juan de Ondores—and a combination of fortunate events provided access to the Archivo de la Subdirección de Comunidades Indígenas y Nativas. This institution preserves the “titles” of San Juan de Ondores and hundreds of other comunidades and campesino groups of the central sierra. These documents included the transcriptions of colonial notarial records—which eventually brought the research back to the AGN and the notarial records—that detailed a 1707 emphyteutic lease, copies of nineteenth-century transactions that described a legal roadmap of Atocsaico, and a handful of initial claims against several private holders of Atocsaico throughout the twentieth century, including the hacendado Antenor Rizo-Patrón, Duncan Fox & Co., the Sociedad Ganadera Junín, and the División Ganadera of the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation. In spite of detailed information, the records I found shed little light on the voice of the comunidad. As a historian dealing with the past, I neglected to see San Juan de Ondores as more than a preterit subject, a campesino group living, producing, and struggling in the upper highlands of Junín. Further fortunate events brought me into contact with current communal leaders. Several visits set the groundwork for undertaking a major effort to bring together the state understanding of communal affairs and the communal understanding of statehood. I knew a critical piece of information before visiting Ondores. The 1921 stipulations for a rural group to be recognized as a comunidad established that every communal organization must hold weekly assemblies and record minutes—or act as comunales—where comuneros registered their internal discussions. A reasonable doubt existed that these minutes had survived after so many years. After I presented the dissertation research project to communal authorities, the president of San Juan de Ondores, Obed Laureano, requested a second presentation before the entire communal assembly. Once there, community members voted in favor of supporting the research. Originally planned as a scouting ethnographic trip to conduct a handful of interviews, the work turned into a major project of ethnographic archival research. Obed Laureano and the rest of the communal authorities unveiled the treasured communal archives, where San Juan

Introduction | 17

de Ondores had preserved the minutes of their communal assemblies since 1937. The official recognition of San Juan de Ondores as an Indigenous comunidad dates back to September 12, 1940, indicating that the minutes had recorded the history of the village at least three years before it became formally recognized as a comunidad. These actas comunales continued without any major interruption, besides a couple of weeks when assemblies were canceled due to the absence of a quorum. Even in moments of great material and political distress, such as the period of agrarian reform or the Internal Armed Conflict, the comuneros and campesinos of San Juan de Ondores continued meeting and registering their collective concerns. There were more than forty books of minutes, twenty-six of which corresponded to communal assemblies and the rest to meetings of the junta directiva. Besides actas comunales, the communal archive also preserves many communal censuses from different years, the earliest one being from October 1969, only a few months after the enactment of the agrarian reform. These censuses illustrate the concentration of land at the interior of the comunidad, the expansion of higher education among community members, communal migration to Lima and other countries, the rise of a new role for female campesinos as household heads, and the failure of communal exploitation of pastures due to the expansion of private property within the comunidad. Additionally, these communal censuses provide clues about residents’ internal migration within regional economic spaces—from poorer to better positioned provinces—and their employment as laborers by richer community members, a highly understudied topic in agrarian studies. Finally, the communal archive also holds a set of maps created by agents and institutions between 1905 and 1942. These maps illustrate the rationalization of space in the Peruvian countryside through the mapping of communal lands.46 During the first half of the twentieth century, dozens of engineers surveyed the lands of the Peruvian highlands—both communal and fallow—to craft a new understanding of the countryside as a rationally divided space of agrarian productivity. San Juan de Ondores has not one map but several; each has been claimed as legitimate by one party and impugned by another. Before 1942, every agent who claimed the legal possession of Atocsaico—Duncan, Fox & Co., Antenor Rizo Patrón, the Sociedad Ganadera Junín, the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation—had a map prepared in its own interest. Because each map has been sanctioned as “official”—crafted by a state-commissioned engineer and forming part of a legally sanctioned land entitlement—all

18 | The Rural State

the maps have legitimacy, but none is fully recognized as legitimate. This situation further complicates the legal condition of Atocsaico and prevents San Juan de Ondores from obtaining a final resolution of its legal struggle. In The Rural State, I mobilize all the aforementioned state sources but rely primarily on the existence of and access to actas comunales. Campesinos of San Juan de Ondores and their actas comunales embraced a form of “political literacy” that questions common assumptions about twentieth-century rural societies.47 In a century in which statehood was still feeble, and rural societies lay at the margins of the expanding and yet seemingly inefficient networks of the state, one rural village produced a coherent narrative about its socioeconomic condition and political standing and how it experienced being in the margins, earned recognition, became incorporated into the structures of production of the state, struggled to remain ecologically autonomous, and discussed the meltdown of everything the material lives of its people relied upon. A Note on Terms and the Use of Español

The prose of this book might surprise readers, even seasoned ones, of Latin American and Peruvian studies. I have retained the Spanish use of many words and phrases, including three important ones: “comunidad” refers to the specific ideal of rural community as envisioned by the state after the 1921 recognition of community members’ legal personhood; “comunero” is a member of this particular definition of comunidad, subject to local and national power structures; and “campesino” refers to the rural villager as transformed, nominally and materially, by the 1969 agrarian reform. None of the English alternatives—”community,” “community member,” or “peasant”—delivers the political weight of these categories for recounting the twentieth-century rural history of Peru. This book also retains the Spanish names of some seminal institutions of power and production that structured the lives of comuneros and campesinos in rural Peru. In many cases, these names had a potentially good translation. Yet non-English-speaking readers, an equally important target of this book, would get lost if I referred to the Ministerio de Fomento as the Ministry of Development. “Fomentar” entails deeper and wider meanings than simply “developing.” Since I do not expect every Spanish term to be self-explanatory, I have added a glossary with all of these terms.

Introduction | 19

The networks of production and circulation of knowledge between the United States and Latin America promote the prevalence of US scholarship over domestic appraisals and interpretations. While retaining the use of Spanish terms might be perceived as simply symbolic, I expect this option will do justice to the histories and historiographies with which The Rural State connects. Structure of the Book

I wrote this text thinking it could be read as a single book, as individual episodes, or in two sections. The first part of this book—chapters 1 and 2—set the ground for the history of San Juan de Ondores while providing the lococentric angle of the story. In chapter 1, “Reimagining the Peruvian Andes,” I reevaluate the central sierra as a space of economic profitability. Drawing on a combination of travel accounts and a series of pamphlets and agrarian manuals published by Peruvian state officials, I discuss the rhetorical and policy-making aspects of forging a new governmentality for understanding sierra and high-altitude environments. This connects state endeavors, early capitalist practices, and rural labor as integral parts of refashioning the physical geography of upland environments. Following a rhetorical transformation of nature into natural resources—pivotal in the making of a larger narrative of the country as a space naturally suited for capitalist venture—in this chapter I also discuss how a rising state governmentality responded to the question of industrialization vis-à-vis the preexisting social and economic condition of upland environments. Likewise, the chapter also traces policy discussions about whether rural populations—arbitrarily called villagers, Indigenous, or indios—were capable of joining the agrarian side of this industrialization. In chapter 2, “Making Indigenous Communities,” I focus on how human geography remanufactured upland landscapes. Based primarily on legal documentation, the chapter begins with the recognition of the juridical existence of rural comunidades by the Peruvian state (1920) and their subsequent designation as Indigenous. By granting Indigenous comunidades corporate legal status, thus inaugurating a process of social engineering, the Peruvian state conferred visibility to the rural village. In turning rural populations into legible social units, legal recognition contributed to the refashioning of the countryside and the economic integration of upland environments. Shaping social, in addition to legal, legibility

20 | The Rural State

included the creation of bureaucratized mechanisms of state rationalization. I also discuss how state legibility triggered an intellectual debate among government officials and intellectuals about the nature of rural communities—a debate that shaped rural politics in decades to come. The second section of the book—chapters 3 and 4—brings the story back to Ondores. In chapter 3, “Reconciling the State and Communities,” I introduce San Juan de Ondores, a comunidad predominately made up of livestock grazers in upland Peru, and sketch their historically rooted and conflicted history with the Atocsaico hacienda. I discuss the proposals for state-sponsored development in the Peruvian countryside and the central sierra as the early decades of Cold War politics unfolded, framing the countryside as a national and hemispheric battleground for ideas about rural industrialism, grazing labor, race, and citizenship. On the one hand, the Peruvian state pushed a discourse of national integration with political and, most important, economic connotations. Policy making for the rural sphere emphasized the need for the state to incorporate the now-legible Indigenous comunidades into its structure, comunidades whose comuneros had adapted to evolving economic environments. On the other hand, members of Indigenous comunidades became aware of their need to adapt to changing socioeconomic environments, galvanized by discourses and policies of integration; they learned to navigate the expanding networks of the state and otherwise began to earn important levels of political, social, and economic autonomy. Ultimately, rural modernity came in ways the state could not foresee, with comunidades wielding capitalism to their advantage and communal economies advancing to the detriment of a contracting hacienda system and elusive state centralization. Projects of agrarian development and rural industrialism moved from national to hemispheric policy making as the Cold War progressed. When the Alliance for Progress was signed in 1961 with the Punta del Este agreement, agrarian reform arose as the best mechanism for both developing the countryside and undermining the threat of potential communist uprising. A new set of politics of production emerged, deeply impacting the central sierra. Therefore, in chapter 4, “Reforming without Revolution,” I trace the history of agrarian reform projects as an environmentally constrained and ecologically conflicted process. While theory about agrarian reform aimed to redistribute land on a family basis, the realities of agrarian land use in Peru set limits on its practice. In contrast to popular domestic and foreign perceptions, most agrarian land in Peru

Introduction | 21

lay above altitudes suitable for parcel- and family-based agriculture. As the midcentury wool boom proved, grazing and herding environments in high-capacity natural pastures were the norm. Although early proposals for agrarian reform acknowledged this factor, political discourses emphasized a direct redistribution model. In this chapter I weave together three interconnected developments. First, agrarian knowledge about “reforming the countryside” circulated domestically and internationally through bureaucratic means and the creation of national agrarian technocracies deeply aware of social, economic, and environmental constraints. Second, empowered communal herding economies advanced at the expense of the decaying hacienda system in the uplands, further challenging agrarian technocracies. Third, agrarian reform arose as a shared and yet ambivalent goal for both communal herders and state government, bringing unequal expectations that set the path for social unrest. The final section of the book—chapters 5 and 6—centers on the remaking of social relations of production in the countryside. The Peruvian state issued an agrarian reform law in 1969, a year after a group of self-proclaimed “radical” military officers organized a coup and installed another military regime. Law 17.716 was intended to transform the structures of land ownership in the Peruvian countryside, including the rhetorical transformation of indios into campesinos and the empowerment of family-based agrarian economies. In practice, as I argue in chapter 5, “Making Campesino Communities,” the making of campesinos changed the ecological relationship between villager and land, turning materially empowered comunidades into disenfranchised usufructuaries of land and agrarian resources. Here I reconstruct the life of campesino villagers of San Juan de Ondores within the structures of a state cooperative— the Sociedad Agrícola de Interés Social Túpac Amaru—highlighting the accelerated erosion of a relative ecological autonomy of communal production at the expense of state agrarian centralization, the last step of decades of rural development and modernization trials. While the armed forces brought long-awaited agrarian reform, comuneros were coerced into cooperatives and agrarian societies as reform became a centralized mode of state-sponsored agrarian capitalism that stressed internal differentiation and fostered social tensions. This chapter also offers a historical ethnography of the struggles of campesinos who experienced the cooperativization of land exploitation, arguing that campesinización was much more than a nominal change. For the villagers of San Juan de Ondores, cooperativization and campesinización through agrarian reform brought

22 | The Rural State

into question the convenience of living and producing as a village and a communal economy. In an unforeseeable turn of events, herders claimed parceling grazing land as an ecological survival mechanism. When first informed about the early events of political violence in the Peruvian countryside, President Fernando Belaúnde labeled insurrectionary acts as cases of abigeato, or cattle rustling. Often perceived as a gesture of disdain toward countryside politics, Belaúnde’s expression reflects the early nature of a rising conflict. Drawing on sources from the communal archive and the Center for Memory and Human Rights of the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, chapter 6, “Tilling an Agrarian Conflict,” moves back to a regional and national scope. My central argument recasts the period of political violence as an agrarian conflict resulting from the derailed “modernization” of the countryside. Distancing myself from a discursive analysis of what became known as the Internal Armed Conflict, I identify territoriality, livelihood, and communal consensus as three agrarian roots of political violence. The disintegration of the agrarian reform process and the campesinización of comunidades help explain the initial success of radicalized politics in the countryside, of which the Sendero Luminoso was just one option. A dramatic change occurred when agrarian reform turned sociopolitical equivalence into material egalitarianism among comuneros. During the conflict, comunidades became a critical unit of the territorial conflict between Sendero Luminoso and the state. Similarly, livelihood was a pivotal target of political violence within comunidades. Finally, communal consensus stabilized internal sociopolitical life yet failed to further hold economically differentiated herders together. As conflict followed, the nature of political violence and revolutionary struggle during the Internal Armed Conflict proved as dismissive of communal ecological autonomy as agrarian reform had. Once comunidades realized the even more disenfranchising nature of revolutionary means, many attempted to realign with the state—some joining campesino militias, others returning to legal struggle—with often unsuccessful results. In the conclusion, “Eroding Rural Communities,” I provide a theoretically informed reflection on the nature of the contemporary Peruvian state, current projects of state and nation making, and the new neoliberal capitalist paradigm by questioning their relationship with the countryside. Departing from a critical observation of present-day Peru, I deconstruct the often-distant relationship between the state and comunidades vital to contemporary projects of capitalist investment and development. While this distance has been regarded as a major historical continuity

Introduction | 23

resulting from a structural fracture that lies at the origins of Peru as a nation-state, I argue otherwise. Throughout the twentieth century, state and comunidades entered into sequential episodes of contact, collaboration, contestation, and conflict. Inasmuch as nation-state making was a sociopolitical process, rural environments demanded constant ecological reappraisals foundational to the sociopolitics of state building. However urban the forefront of the nation may have been, its materiality relied on the long-term sustainability of an efficient ecological relationship with the countryside. The state spent most of the twentieth century, therefore, incorporating upland and human geographies, economic rural activities, and social relations of production into its agrarian architecture. As the period of political violence ebbed and the logic of neoliberal state making ascended, the countryside and its components became a dispensable space for the nation. I ultimately describe how contemporary states in Latin America and elsewhere have condemned rural villagers and their livelihoods to a social, political, and economic margin and beyond.

1 | Reimagining the Peruvian Andes

Among the earliest geographical accounts of the Peruvian sierra, José de la Riva-Agüero’s Paisajes Peruanos illustrates a dominant image of the Andes as an unruly territorial component of the country.1 Riva-Agüero, then an economic nationalist, departed from Cusco in January 1912, traveling almost one thousand miles by train and on the back of a donkey, before reaching Huancayo—the capital of Junín—and returning to Lima. The route integrated five major departments of Peru—Cusco, Apurímac, Ayacucho, Huancavelica, and Junín—in a route that retraced earlier colonial networks of trade and power. However, as Alberto Flores Galindo notes, Riva-Agüero’s narration presents an “empty landscape” in which both nature and ruins evoke romantic visions of the past, devoid of contemporary Indigenous populations.2 In dismissing the populations of the highlands, Paisajes Peruanos belongs to a tradition of travel writers and travel writing as agents and expressions of power. Prior to the scientific revolution, travel accounts helped construct “novel theories of nature as a whole,”3 unveiling the wilderness and bringing untamed landscapes into the domains of empires and states. In the early twentieth century, in the aftermath of the War of the Pacific and the midst of “national reconstruction,” the Andean countryside became the focal site of exploration for domestic and foreign travelers. While the indio had been blamed for the military defeat in the war, the sierra as a region had been the last resort of resistance against the Chilean invasion and a bastion of patriotism.4 Twentieth-century travel accounts shifted the way Peruvian statesmen thought about the sierra as an integral component of the official domains of state and capital. Travelers articulated and systematically crafted a discourse on the Peruvian Andes as a space suitable for entrepreneurial economic exploitation,

26 | The Rural State

rhetorically transforming unexplored nature into potential natural resources through the intervention of capital.5 Before the arrival of corporations and the incipient industrialization of the countryside, commercial geography fulfilled what David Harvey describes as a “mere compilation” of resources.6 Travelers operated a rhetorical commodification of the countryside, the Andean highlands, and sierra environments, discussing both the physical and human characteristics of a seemingly hostile region. Resembling other high-altitude regions, which have often remained engaged in “marginal economies with associated social, economic, and demographic problems,”7 the Peruvian sierra had been only peripherally integrated into national and international systems of production and trade. Within the rhetorical making of commodified environments, early twentieth-century travelers provided critical insights into the physical and human complexities of the upland regions of the Andes—regions above eleven thousand feet above sea level. While altitude had been a definitional characteristic of the sierra as a whole, early twentieth-century narratives of Peruvian upland landscapes reshaped larger understandings of the sierra in decades to come. These understandings of the sierra circulated widely throughout trade and cultural networks, shaping rural policy making for the uplands and nourishing modernizing mindsets among statesmen and intellectuals. In discussing the material foundations for rebuilding a nation, the role of the sierra spurred larger questions about the industrialization of the country centered on the preexisting social and economic conditions of the Andes. Observers of the uplands, including early twentieth-century rural policy makers, vigorously discussed whether native populations— arbitrarily called villagers, Indigenous, or indios—were prepared to join modernizing and industrializing endeavors. In refashioning highland environments and recasting upland landscapes, capitalist understandings of the sierra reinforced core-periphery appraisals of the Andes. Economically dynamic haciendas and mining facilities epitomized progress, while villages and pueblos still embodied socioeconomic atavisms. In turn, social conflict resulting from clashing ideals and policies on modernizing the Andes became a distinctive characteristic of upland landscapes. The central sierra—comprising the departments of Huancavelica, Huánuco, Junín, Pasco, and Lima’s highlands—and the upper regions of Junín held a significant role in the refashioning of the Peruvian uplands. Combining high-altitude regions, large demographic concentrations, and the vast presence of haciendas and corporate landholdings, the central sierra became a pivotal ground for statesmen and policy makers

Reimagining the Peruvian Andes | 27

to observe, test, and advance modernizing ideals and developmentalist projects. In the midst of the highland plateaus, the Atocsaico hacienda— property of Duncan, Fox & Co., a British trade company—embodied many of the ambitious features of upland landscapes as reinvented through capitalist interventions.8 There, foreign corporate landholding had tamed the hostile conditions of high-altitude environments, turning Atocsaico into a symbol of rural prosperity. More importantly, the company promoted modern labor conditions for grazing capitalism that had turned the unruly presence of wandering indios into a major source of workforce. The consolidation of upland landscapes as places of power and production, centered on modern forms of land exploitation that mastered high altitudes, recast the human geography of the sierra. Unlike preceding perceptions of wandering indios as a social burden for the remaking of the country—rooted in nineteenth-century racial understandings— commercial geographic appraisals assessed the necessity of making the Indigenous population legible, fulfilling what James Scott has described as the inherent ambition of the state in crafting an “administrative ordering of nature and society.”9 Once nature had been subject to a process of rhetorical and administrative commodification, capitalist appraisals paved the way for comunidades to become the cells of a new human geography of upland landscapes, allowing ungoverned indios to reenter the sphere of visibility—socially, economically, and politically—of the state. The Central Sierra

The central sierra is a geographically diverse region. A combination of Andean valleys, upland plateaus, and even some jungle regions structure this important region of the country. Since colonial times, the central sierra’s natural resources—particularly mineral and agricultural— had drawn attention from many observers, colonizers, and settlers.10 In the upper areas of this region, Cerro de Pasco had become an epicenter of silver production and turned the region into a truly central component of the Andes. After the collapse of colonial domination, mining centers experienced a combination of environmental exhaustion and infrastructural destruction as a result of the materially devastating Wars of Independence (1820–1824).11 In spite of such constraining circumstances, the central sierra remained a pivotal core of socioeconomic and political processes.

28 | The Rural State

In an attempt to revitalize the mining sector, the Peruvian state released a new mining code on July 6, 1900. Besides legally reframing the existent mining property regime, the 1900 code became the vanguard of a larger political and economic discourse intended to portray an image of the sierra, high-altitude provinces, and the natural resources within economically unexploited regions.12 Capitalist perceptions of the highlands as an unexploited area required lessening regulations for the arrival of private and foreign investments to develop an unruly environment. Complementing the newly minted mining code, the Ministerio de Fomento—the office responsible for supervising the social and material development of the country—published another document that further advanced the capitalist understanding of the sierra. The Guía del Perú para capitalistas y emigrantes, published in 1902, spread and circulated— through a combination of trade, diplomatic, and cultural networks— information about the region’s natural resources and their potential for sustaining the rebuilding of a nation.13 Both documents, the 1900 mining code and the Guía del Perú, highlighted the protection of foreign investment and private property in the economic development of a new idea of the sierra, the abundance of natural resources, and the absence of any social and political constraints for the exploitation of highland environments.14 Natural abundance, in particular, dominated capitalist descriptions of the central sierra. In spite of the apparent hostility of a diverse geography, which included extreme altitudes and tropical environments, Junín presented an unparalleled combination of silver, copper, lead, zinc, coal, timber, livestock, barley, potatoes, wheat, and wool.15 Placing the region within a hemispherical context, the Guía del Perú praised the central sierra as “the most prominent source of mineral wealth in the whole American continent.”16 More important, the natural wealth of the central sierra also included the still unveiled potential of the human geography for fueling capitalist transformations. Coexisting with natural richness, hundreds of thousands of local Indigenous populations, Andean indios, had expanded demographically, sustained by the healthy conditions of unexploited sierra environments. Such a demographic expansion fueled capitalist endeavors, as indios could efficiently engage the harsh working conditions of the mines. Unlike previous geographic accounts of the Peruvian Andes, the human component of the central sierra—the thousands of indios living in unmapped towns and villages—defined the industrial potential of the countryside. Functional to their role in capitalizing upland landscapes, the Guía del Perú highlighted the docility of indios

Reimagining the Peruvian Andes | 29

as potential laborers, a valuable feature for companies that ventured into the sierra. So docile was the indio laborer, according to the Ministerio de Fomento, that “he may be barefooted, half naked, hungry, and without his pay [and yet] never the idea of a revolt will cross his mind.”17 Differing from imperial understandings of place and space, where claims over the wilderness status of a given territory led to expunging Indigenous populations,18 transforming the natural richness of the central sierra relied on the incorporation of indios into the capitalist scheme of environmental commodification. The Ministerio de Fomento, originally established in 1895 with the purpose of “developing the material interests of the nation,”19 became a focal voice in the portrayal of a capitalist view of the central sierra. In advancing its foundational missions, namely producing an accurate recount of resources for the promotion of industrialization, this institution characterized the sierra as a potential, even vital, component of an industrializing country. The Reseña económica del Perú (1906) reasserted the existence of “enormous riches that are treasured in the . . . valleys and quebradas of the highlands [and] the core of the cordillera.”20 Far from resembling an imperial blindness solely centered on the availability of raw materials, the actual economic value of the sierra relied on its people and their ability to sustain extractive economies. The “great centers” of the sierra, both major towns such as Huancayo and less settled areas such as the upper plateaus, hosted a combination of “capital y brazos,” capital and labor, that promised industrializing conditions for investors and laborers alike.21 Both travelers and the Ministerio de Fomento created an image of the Peruvian highlands, and the central sierra in particular, that merged nature and society through increasing interventions of state powers and capital.22 The central sierra turned into an Andean political landscape, a “geography made meaningful through the interaction of private interests” that redefined fundamental understandings of territory, resources, and peoples.23 The Ministerio de Fomento transformed a racialized discourse of sierra environments as regions of human emptiness and social atavism into more nuanced, increasingly ethnographic narratives of upland landscapes as venues for new social and economic dynamics. Transforming existing understandings of the physical and human geography of the central sierra required recasting private property as a socioeconomic centerpiece and exploring the intricate question of land tenancy. However shapeless Indigenous peoples may have seemed, commercial geography brought the focus of the state into the hundreds of towns and villages,

30 | The Rural State

the neighboring homes of indios, that remained largely unknown— unnamed, unmapped, and illegible for state purposes. Within towns and villages, often referred to simply as pueblos, indios appeared to hold a primary role as small land tenants. In the view of the Ministerio de Fomento, an obscure regime of Indigenous tenancy challenged the expansion of capitalism and the future exploitation of sierra resources. While indios retained capitalist value as laborers, Indigenous property seemed detrimental for the remaking of upland landscapes. In lieu of a more sophisticated legal framework, the Ministerio de Fomento displaced indios and dispossessed them of their land, eliminating any barriers for capitalists and entrepreneurs. Although the envisioned economic development of the central sierra centered on the exploitation of minerals, Indigenous land tenancy in the central sierra threatened the future of any projects and prospects. Addressing the upland areas of the central sierra, where grazing economies prevailed, capitalists viewed local peoples as incapable of engaging in technically efficient husbandry, emphasizing the need for “neat people, compliant of the orders they are given.”24 Contrasting the view of indios as efficient laborers in mining ventures, the veterinarian Arturo Declerck echoed a nineteenth-century argument in suggesting the immigration of “foreign farming families [to] take care of the livestock.”25 The husbandry professor Edmundo de León further developed Declerck’s perspective. In comparing the Peruvian sierra with rural Europe, De León observed that family-based farming and ranching had developed the European countryside, converting it into a pillar of national economic prosperity. In the Peruvian highlands, Indigenous tenancy had left the industrial capacity of ranching economies—including the quality of animals— underdeveloped.26 In spite of bearing the “defects of the primitive man,” De León affirmed that the industrial future of the central sierra relied on transforming indios into wage laborers. Once turned into rural workers, indios could be morally redeemed and become “more honorable and less vicious.”27 Behind this proposal, De León questioned the structure of property and how to displace central sierra indios as land tenants for the consolidation of rural capitalism. In the upland core of the central sierra, at the Bombón Plateau, a ranching hacienda embodied the image of the capitalist highlands envisioned by the Ministerio de Fomento. Atocsaico, a rural estate located in the uplands of the department of Junín, held thousands of hectares of rich natural pastures, had built adequate ranching installations, had imported modern technology for husbandry purposes, and epitomized the

Reimagining the Peruvian Andes | 31

meaning of rural development. In Atocsaico, Indigenous peons and Scottish shepherds mixed and mingled for the socioeconomic production of a modern hacienda environment. Foreign capitalism reeducated neighboring indios as laborers for increasingly industrial ranching and modern husbandry practices, promoting unforeseeable developments.28 A colonial hacienda that faced economic demise, in 1902 Atocsaico became property of Duncan, Fox & Co., a British corporation focused on cotton and wool production. In the decades to come, this central sierra hacienda symbolized rural capitalism, the materialization of envisioned agrarian modernities, and a focal space for the unfolding stories of villages, towns, and Indigenous populations. By 1917, decades of capitalist transformations in the central sierra reaffirmed the industrial potential of the countryside as the Ministerio de Fomento positioned Atocsaico as a successful narrative of socioeconomic and environmental refashioning. The readiness for capitalist exploitation of sierra soils merged with an image of indios as cheap labor who, despite persistent social and “moral” problems, had been fruitfully integrated in the remaking of the highlands.29 Farming and ranching had become major economic activities in advancing industrialism and reshaping the countryside. Usually defined by its mining potential, the upland regions of Junín also became home to natural pastures as a major source of environmental richness and economic potential. State narratives of rural development praised the reconsolidation of the hacienda system as foundational for the industrialization of ranching activities. While mining the uplands had primarily brought foreign corporations to the region, industrialized farming and ranching required expanding privately owned rural estates. In Junín, the Sociedad Ganadera Junín—a conglomerate of local hacendados—became the leading project in the development of a pivotal business for the future of the nation.30 The central sierra became the vanguard space of rural development and industrialization. Within this region, Atocsaico held the most prominent position. In the space of fifteen years, the hacienda had become the epicenter of sheep-based rural capitalism. Thousands of purebred flocks, carefully bred animals produced through the application of cutting-edge veterinarian knowledge, circulated widely through the plateau, transforming bucolic landscapes into spaces of capitalist profitability. Purebred sheep, foreign shepherds, and overall modern husbandry also required that local people serve as everyday agents of rural modernization.31 The convergence of external flows of capital, knowledge, and local labor had positioned Atocsaico as a primary global exporter of

32 | The Rural State

high-quality wool.32 Once a symbol of economic and political autarchy, this central sierra hacienda now served as a socioeconomic laboratory in which to implement renewed land and labor exploitation schemes. As grazing capitalism consolidated, state makers and capitalists perceived and projected the upland landscapes of the central sierra as much more than a source of mineral wealth. Mineral deposits and rich pastures combined and fostered an integral industrialization of the countryside, bringing together haciendas and mines, grazing estates and scaffolds, foreign capital and state legislation, and modern knowledge and Indigenous labor for reshaping a nation from its rural foundations.33 Although at the core of the rural foundation of the nation, Indigenous populations remained marginalized. They were actively involved in the early industrializing endeavors of corporations and haciendas, but villagers and wandering indios stayed largely illegible to the state. Paying increasing attention to the presence of Indigenous populations as a defining element of the sierra geography further encouraged travelers, policy makers, bureaucrats, and other professionals to venture into the depths of the countryside, further exploring and discussing how to deploy Indigenous participation in capitalist development. Such explorations led to the consolidation of a commercial geographic narrative that recast indios as the human basis of capitalism, the ultimate source of energy for the industrialization and transformation of upland landscapes. An increasingly widespread awareness of the role of Indigenous populations in reinventing the sierra and fully exploiting the economic potential of the rural countryside also contributed to the political discussion about the “Indian problem” at the center of a larger, national labor question. Answering these questions demanded new understandings of place and space vis-à-vis the past and present of the indios from the central sierra. Capitalist Landscapes

Travel writing has been a crucial component in the reinvention of Latin America and the Andean region as exploitable geographies, suitable for the imperial making of profitable enterprises. In recounting unexplored landscapes, travel writers surveyed territory, facilitated the appropriation of natural resources, and ultimately nurtured a sense of administrative control of elusive regions.34 Among the most crucial components of such narrations about the Andes was the purposeful obscuration of the presence of local Indigenous populations. The erasure of

Reimagining the Peruvian Andes | 33

human beings enabled imperial geography to introduce (Latin) America as a space of “harmony, industry, [and] liberty . . . all projected onto the non-human world.”35 In unveiling the physical and human geography of the Andes, travel writers created an image of upland regions, taming the perceived hostility of high-altitude environments. Unlike preceding imperial accounts, early twentieth-century travelers and commercial geographers rhetorically transformed nature into natural resources and integrated Indigenous populations into capitalist visions of the sierra. Commercial geography commodified upland landscapes, transforming the elusive and unruly mountainous regions of the Andes into a space of potential economic profitability through the intervention of capital. As nature became resources, Indigenous rural villagers also became functional elements for the exploitation of a tamed physical geography. The image of the Peruvian sierra described in travel accounts circulated widely throughout cultural and political networks, further drawing the attention of investors—primarily foreign—and enhancing the economic colonization of commodified sierra environments. In crafting alluring narratives of nature capital, commercial geography showcased the Peruvian Andes as a place that merged advantageous natural conditions—unexploited nature and available Indigenous labor—with favorable legal frameworks in an otherwise unindustrialized landscape. In 1905, the US assistant secretary of commerce, Frank Wiborg, produced one of the earliest commercial accounts of Andean geography.36 A Commercial Traveler in South America set the tone of many forthcoming publications that redrew an economic image of the Peruvian Andean landscapes and the central sierra. Within a larger capitalist survey of Latin America, the central sierra had a central place in Wiborg’s geographic description.37 The central sierra’s early twentieth-century economic developments enabled Wiborg to present Peru as an example of how US capital had refashioned its geography. In Wiborg’s view, corporations established and consolidated US capitalism in South America, gradually displacing European interests. After a century of British informal imperialism in Latin America—a commercially driven socioeconomic governance that involved the indirect control of natural resources—Wiborg advocated for a repositioning of US capital in ruling American landscapes.38 Within a new hemispherical understanding of US capitalism, South America presented certain naturally advantageous conditions—primarily expressed in terms of an unexploited environmental richness—that demanded the immediate

34 | The Rural State

involvement of investors and corporations. In venturing into these unexplored landscapes, Wiborg reinforced colonial understandings of the internal geopolitical configuration of the Andean region. Throughout the preceding centuries, the Cerro de Pasco mines had defined the economic geography of the central sierra—their very “centrality” and the role this region played within the larger national scenario—in ways that Wiborg considered functional for the future of US capitalism. Still, US corporate capitalism faced critical challenges. The topography of the Andean region limited the advancement of foreign investments. Without state presence and governmental support for building transportation and communication infrastructure, capitalists required an even greater involvement of US capital to conquer upland landscapes. Despite the proximity of the central sierra, the provinces of Junín remained hard to access. The Ferrocarril Central, the sole central railway that connected Lima and Huancayo, proved insufficient for expanding capitalist interests, the future arrival of mining corporations, and the integration of this geographic region under capitalism. Addressing “the traveler, the merchant, and the financier” as his primary audience, the US trade advisor Percy Falcke Martin complemented Wiborg’s account of the central sierra, exploring “the principal agricultural, mining, and manufacturing districts of the country.”39 Furthering a capitalist view of the exploitation of Andean landscapes, Martin’s proposal commodified sierra environments. “The commercial and industrial Peru . . . may be expected to appear in a few years,” Martin explained, “when some of the many natural resources of the country have been developed more fully.”40 At the core of the development of natural resources, Martin envisioned the manufacturing of nature through the establishment of capitalist projects, which in turn would transform a hostile and elusive nature into exploitable and profitable natural resources. Natural resources, however, was not a concept restricted to nature alone. Martin inaugurated a commercial discourse on the human geography of the central sierra, incorporating indios as a pivotal element for the capitalist refashioning of upland landscapes. “The average native,” Martin asserted, “is by no means as dull and as stupid as some people imagine . . . the Quechuas were a thoughtful, melancholic race, much given to the ornamentation of their monuments and the elaboration of their artistic occupations.”41 In discussing the economic potential of the sierra—past, present, and future—Martin merged descriptions of both the natural and human potential of upland landscapes, integrating indios

Reimagining the Peruvian Andes | 35

as a defining feature of the geography of the central sierra and making them a central asset: [Indios are] quite obedient and docile, but usually very ignorant. . . . Many of them own small patches of land, and these they industriously cultivate; at certain times of the year they will disappear, generally without notice, in order to plow or harvest according to the season; but they almost invariably return after these operations are completed.42

The capitalist refashioning of the central sierra recast the Andean indio as an industrious man, which contrasted with both the ideal of the sierra without inhabitants and the alleged atavistic character of rural villagers. According to Martin, the Peruvian highlands were valuable due to their mineral wealth only inasmuch as such wealth could be exploited by mobilizing indios as laborers. Modern sheep farming and grazing economies of the central sierra revealed how indios could shape the economic future of the countryside. In Junín, particularly in the upper regions of the Bombón Plateau, hundreds of herds of cattle and sheep were reshaping upland livelihoods in unprecedented ways.43 Hacienda Atocsaico, in the middle of the plateau, seemed to Martin to be the vanguard of the central sierra’s potential and Indigenous labor’s power. Under private ownership, Atocsaico’s grazing activities and economic production surpassed every other local hacienda throughout the nation.44 Such a success relied on modern sheepherding and husbandry, which included breeding animals adapted to the environmental conditions of upland landscapes and employing local indios as herders. Property and Land Ownership

Property complicated the capitalist refashioning of the central sierra. Along the coast and the rainforest lowlands, the inhospitable montaña, unoccupied lands claimed by state ownership became potentially assignable plots for settlers. In the upper central sierra the legal status of most rural estates beyond haciendas, filled with unexploited natural resources, remained obscure.45 In the early twentieth century, the central sierra was one of the most densely populated areas of the country, the homeland to a large mass of indios whose roles as land settlers posed questions about the future of capitalism. As a human mass, capitalist appraisals of the

36 | The Rural State

commercial geography of the central sierra valued indios as a source of labor. However, their role as land tenants, traditional holders of multiple estates and lands, entailed critical challenges for the advancement of capitalist private property. The US engineer Charles Reginald Enock—author of more than a dozen travel accounts that dealt with Great Britain, the United States, and Latin America—addressed the question of how Indigenous properties could further capitalist developments. In Enock’s view, indios were not only errant inhabitants of a vast landscape, but also the main actors of the human settlement of the central sierra. In the highlands, Indigenous villages neighbored haciendas and large rural estates, merging together to create a structure of land ownership that, according to Enock, resembled the European countryside during medieval times.46 Contrasting the image of a highland landscape hegemonically dominated by haciendas, Enock’s ethnographic description highlighted the presence of Indigenous villages as an important spatial component of the central sierra. Unlike the hacienda system, a property regime with unclear and strongly contested origins, Indigenous settlements remained rooted on ancestral land rights. Alleged inheritors of the pre-Columbian civilizations, contemporary Indigenous lands structured a human web whose comprehension proved fundamental for the future of capitalist resettlements. Indios and Indigenous properties had tamed a “desolate and inhospitable region,”47 turning it into a social and economically thriving domain. “Vast plains and pasture lands, stupendous mountains and unequalled scenery, great mineral and matter of historic and archeological interest” had been radically transformed by the very presence of indios and their work as laborers.48 Within Indigenous villages, contemporary indios— whom Enock also called serranos, people of the highlands—endured every environmental challenge in the making of upland livelihoods. As many of these villages coexisted with unexploited mines and ungrazed pastures, the capitalist remaking of the central sierra incorporated village livelihoods into the envisioned scheme of exploitation of upland landscapes. The incorporation of village livelihood, and in fact the potential appropriation of Indigenous lands, entailed critical problems. Unlike landless hacienda laborers, landholding indios embraced subsistence economic practices, including family-scale agriculture and communal herding. Villages’ subsistence economies, along with the remoteness of some Indigenous landholdings, had fostered certain autonomies that prevented authorities from seizing their lands. Landed autonomies, socially

Reimagining the Peruvian Andes | 37

enclosed within village life, prevented the formation of a “useful peasant class,” the indio condition economically transformed into modern rural labor.49 Envisioning the future of the Indigenous intellectual question in Peru, Enock discussed the centrality of land ownership in the economic reorganization of upland landscapes. Indios, transformed into peasants and villagers brought into labor markets for meeting their subsistence demands, could be a pivotal source of human energy for the remaking of the central sierra. Hence, furthering capitalist developments upon the territory required pulling indios out of their villages and, in turn, recasting the role of Indigenous landholdings. Once dispossessed and disenfranchised, indios could become a rural working class to fuel the rising industrialization of the countryside. Transforming upland landscapes ultimately required a careful engineering of the human geography of these regions, and a revising of the Indigenous landholding question.50 Commons into Property

Peruvian statesmen and intellectuals responded, directly or indirectly, to the same challenges addressed by foreign commercial geographers. As the first decade of the century unfolded, a rising class of rural experts explored the Andean countryside and central sierra landscapes, and discussed its feasibility as a space for economic exploitation. Much like those of foreign travelers, a domestic narrative about upland landscapes as spaces for profit and revenue also circulated throughout geopolitical networks and nurtured visions of the highlands. By the same token, many of these state narratives focused on how the state would refashion the physical and human geography of upland landscapes. Venturing into the quest for recasting Indigenous landholdings, certain state discourses promoted a vision of the central sierra as a completely unsettled landscape. In his Guide to Modern Peru, Adolfo de Clairmont, a Peruvian consul in the United States, remarked on the wide availability of unsettled, ungrazed, and unexploited rural estates, ready for keen capitalists and avid colonizers to claim them.51 Clairmont vividly described the abundance of natural resources in all regions of the country. Vacant lands served for commercial agriculture, modern ranching, and industrial mining. The Andean countryside was “a veritable land of sunshine, of flowers and fruits, of cattle and sheep, of natural, rich pastures, of cotton, silver and gold.”52 Beyond counting natural resources, the capitalist appraisal of Clairmont’s narrative privileged the role of nature

38 | The Rural State

over the role of people. Capital and labor alone did not make a modern nation.53 The actual greatness of a country relied upon the exploitation of natural resources, the unrestricted arrival of foreign investment, and the availability of unexploited landholdings.54 Nowhere else in the country did these conditions exist in as much fashion as in the upland regions of the central sierra. According to Clairmont, Peruvian mines had boomed and fueled a modern global capitalist economy despite the backwardness of a colonial regime, the limited industrializing capacity of Catholicism, and the socioeconomic atavism of Indigenous labor.55 Disputing preceding claims and arguments about the suitability of indios to become laborers of modern rural economies, Clairmont reassessed assumptions of their incapacity to partake in the capitalist remaking of upland landscapes. Returning to nineteenthcentury proposals about the need for European colonizers of the internal frontier, the consul claimed that “several millions of immigrants” would be able to join capitalists and entrepreneurs in transforming Indigenous landholdings into prosperous units of production.56 The “industrial possibilities” of the country did not require transforming Indigenous labor but instead the complete deregulation of land grabbing for future capitalists.57 Without regulations for land accumulation, large capital investors and small colonizers seized new optimal opportunities. Large capital investors would advance large-scale mining exploitation; small colonizers would explore lesser venues of industrial potential. The modern exploitation of pastures, in particular, seemed capable of sustaining the massive arrival of colonizing capitalists and the making of a large-scale grazing economy. The livestock industry, in Clairmont’s view, had been particularly underdeveloped, given the extent of the lands, grazing estates, and climate conditions of the central sierra.58 The availability of grazing estates capable of sustaining a racialized repopulation of upland landscapes, however, meant a major attack against local villagers and village commons, rural estates that had been under collective, shared exploitation by villagers within the same town and even different villages within the same region.59 In decades to come, the modern hacienda system seized the village commons, claiming their baldío status and promoting their commodification as capital assets. The transformation of village commons into private property had already nurtured the making of large corporate landholdings in the central sierra. Alexander Garland’s commercial guide to Peru (1906) described the successful story of the Cerro de Pasco Mining Company, one of the

Reimagining the Peruvian Andes | 39

largest mining corporations of the world.60 The appropriation of Indigenous landholdings not only expanded mining facilities but also allowed the company to construct the infrastructural network that connected Cerro de Pasco, Lima, and the global mining markets.61 As capitalism settled and expanded territorially, creating a new geographic ordering of the central sierra, villagers lost their land and became the impoverished labor of increasingly industrialized activities. The same Indigenous labor that once nurtured the greatness of the Inca Empire could be used for the remaking of capitalist landscapes. Mobilizing the “humble” indio and his “unlimited endurance” had helped tame the environmental hostility of the Andean landscape and build agricultural systems that had amazed observers since the conquest.62 While disease and harsh conditions imposed upon indios during colonial times had demographically decimated the Andean highlands, Garland estimated that many sierra villagers still wandered around a desolate sierra.63 Recovering such lost greatness required the intersected development of agriculture, mining, and manufacturing to reshape the internal landscapes of production. Inasmuch as the industriousness of indios lay at the center of the future of the nation, their participation in the making of capitalism in the highland required their disenfranchisement and dispossession. In the harmonious convergence of economic growth and social progress portrayed by Garland, the capitalist agenda of the state envisioned landless villagers as laborers of lands that no longer belonged to them. Most village commons remained under an obscure system of collective property, in the hands of Indigenous villagers whose agrarian livelihoods had become an obstacle for the modernization of rural economies. The modern advancement of extractive and agrarian economic activities, a central aspect of the capitalist remaking of landscapes, required a pool of workers with enhanced technical knowledge. Hence, modernizing the central sierra encouraged the formation of a first generation of professionals and experts in rural development, focused on the establishment of modern soil exploitation.64 In assessing existing agrarian regimes, rural experts praised the hacienda system as the vanguard of soil exploitation, particularly in upper sierra regions with rich natural pastures. While grazing economies articulated almost every region of Peru, including coastal areas and inter-Andean valleys, regions ten thousand feet above sea level, such as the upper central sierra, relied almost exclusively on ranching. A variety of animals, including llamas and alpacas but primarily sheep, symbolized the economic potential of high-altitude environments. As the

40 | The Rural State

number of animals expanded, increasingly modern grazing economies needed to expand the ranching frontier of the hacienda, posing questions about the legal condition of villages and the Indigenous tenancy of land. In the upland regions of the central sierra, transforming commons into private property included both the land and the herds in the hands of Indigenous villagers. The evaluation of the economic potential of grazing activities also shed light on Andean animals, their physiology, and their biological constraints in adapting to highland environments. The future of modern ranching required, according to Garland, mimicking the developments in Junín and the upper central sierra, where advanced hacienda husbandry had remade Andean sheep through the importation of European and Australian breeds.65 As modern husbandry became central in the refashioning of upland landscapes, biologically enhanced sheep would displace villagers’ herds, contributing to the privatization of collective property and the overall economic dispossession of Indigenous villagers from their land. Just as modern mining turned Indigenous people into individual pauperized laborers, modern ranching would turn other villagers into equally pauperized shepherds of industrialized grazing economies. The privatization of village commons, ultimately a massive project of land alienation, became a keystone of the renewed vision for the Peruvian highlands and the central sierra. As land tenants and autonomous villagers, indios had been a seemingly insurmountable obstacle for the capitalist refashioning of upland landscapes. As impoverished miners and grazers serving the interests of industry and capital, indios could become an essential feature of future modernizing projects. Socially engineered impoverishment lay at the core of early twentieth-century indigenismo, which articulated a sociopolitical discourse on the role of indios in the making of national industry.66 The growth of mining corporations and the massive employment of disenfranchised indios, in particular, promoted major moral questions about the future of capitalism in the highlands and the central sierra. Dora Mayer de Zulen, a German-born journalist and activist, shed light upon the “large mechanical contrivances” deployed by mining corporations in Cerro de Pasco, and the “inhumane conduct towards the aboriginal workmen” observed in the larger central sierra region.67 According to Mayer, the infamous enganche system, the labor hire scheme that indentured and semi-enslaved workers for haciendas and mines,68 had pushed villagers to leave their properties, abandoning their towns and leaving

Reimagining the Peruvian Andes | 41

behind their subsistence economies, to embrace “the hard and ill-paid drudgery in the mines.”69 Village abandonment, spurred through the enganche system, collaborated with the appropriation of commons, the demise of Indigenous subsistence, the impoverishment of indios, and the marketization of rural economies on the basis of capitalism-induced Indigenous poverty.70 Capitalism expanded territorially and gained control of village commons, making enclave economies that encapsulated the lands and lives of thousands of Indigenous villagers its physical and human foundation. In turn, the territorial hegemony of the capitalist remaking of Andean landscapes raised political concerns about the sovereignty of the state. On August 23, 1911, Deputy Joaquín Capelo questioned the alleged benefits of political and social concessions for capitalists in the central sierra, whose industrial advancement had pushed thousands of Indigenous families into debt and poverty as landless wage laborers.71 Capelo portrayed this capitalist governance of land and lives as the making of “an independent nation” in the central sierra.72 Turning upland landscapes into spaces of industry displaced fundamental autonomies of villagers, creating an incipient and impoverished rural working class, and made capitalism the sole driving political and economic force of the central sierra. “Illegal industrialism,” as Mayer calls it, allowed capitalism greater degrees of autonomy, primarily through the unregulated control of the highlands, enforcing their interests within their boundaries and expanding their influence beyond.73 The territorial hegemony amassed by capitalism also impacted the environment and triggered property claims throughout the central sierra. Smoke and ashes from La Oroya, produced during the smelting process of minerals, damaged the grazing pastures of neighboring estates, intoxicating thousands of Indigenous laborers employed within mining facilities and sickening those who remained living in villages. Without political and social constraints, the environmental pollution produced by extractive capitalism obliterated agriculture- and ranching-based subsistence economies.74 As capitalism expanded, villagers precariously defended the integrity of their domains, but the deslinde processes— legal trials that demarcated boundaries between private holdings and village commons—often favored powerful hacendados and corporate representatives.75 Upon securing undisputed territorial control, capitalists also mobilized villagers and laborers for political purposes, securing the election of local authorities favorable to their interests. Territorial

42 | The Rural State

consolidations, the demise of subsistence economies, social impoverishment, and environmental pollution defined the central sierra as an uncontestable space for capitalism.76 Landscapes of Labor and Conflict

Every process that transformed the central sierra into a realm of capital and industry brought the labor question to the center of debates about the economic future of the countryside. Although local Indigenous laborers had been thrown into a functional form of landless poverty, capitalists and corporations struggled to hire and retain. Even the enganche system failed to maintain laborers within the territorially consolidated domains of capitalism. On January 17, 1902, Manuel Francisco Diez Canseco, the prefecto of Junín, addressed the director of government in Lima, explaining how workers from mining facilities were gaming the system when getting hired, often signing two contracts and receiving the usual advance payment, then fleeing their jobs before completing their obligations.77 Diez Canseco proposed regulations that fulfilled a twofold purpose: serving as a guarantee for employers when hiring new workers, and avoiding the necessity of enganchadores pursuing justice by their own hands. In suggesting a model for such regulations, Diez Canseco attached to his letter a copy of the Reglamento de explotaciones en la montaña approved in 1897, expecting this document to serve as a basis for crafting much-needed policies. Heraclio Bonilla identified these fleeing operarios as the ultimate result of a human geography transformed through capitalism.78 In expanding territorially and appropriating village commons, capitalism gradually amalgamated mines and haciendas into a single socioeconomic space. This amalgamation, the very core of the making of the central sierra and upland landscapes as a realm of capital, allowed increasingly disenfranchised villagers to skillfully navigate emerging networks of labor. Fleeing operarios moved throughout upland landscapes, now fully integrated as a region under capitalist governance. Thus, when villagers embraced wage markets and became laborers in factories, they continued to be villagers, rarely abandoned communal obligations, and retained whatever rights they held. When fleeing the factory, often in the event of constraining economic conditions and wage contractions, laborers returned to their villages and haciendas as autonomous grazers or indentured shepherds,

Reimagining the Peruvian Andes | 43

resuming their ranching activities to meet subsistence needs as individuals and families. In spite of the ongoing obliteration of village commons and the engineered disenfranchisement of villagers, the making of the central sierra as a consolidated capitalist landscape for capital granted villagers an unprecedented level of mobility—social, political, and spatial. Such mobility, an unintended consequence of the capitalist refashioning of upland landscapes, nonetheless concerned contemporary observers. Diez Canseco also reported how the sub-prefecto of Junín worried about the “most complete immorality” in which Indigenous towns and villages of their jurisdiction lived.79 Villagers refused to return to work in mining facilities and challenged the legitimacy of local authorities by filing claims and grievances against them.80 The indios who stayed in villages remained beyond the control of capital, resisting the compulsive allure of labor. Authorities consequently believed they were immoral and uncivilized people. As further coercion, meaning the total disenfranchisement of villagers and the complete obliteration of village autonomies, failed to transform the central sierra into a domain of capital, negotiation ensued. Facing increasing resistance from villagers, at times violent,81 state and capital promoted new labor terms, including raising wages for operarios.82 However, the situation worsened as new conflicts arose between capitalists and villagers. On March 31, 1902, a letter submitted to the prefecto of Cerro de Pasco highlighted the tension between foreign corporations and villagers over the use of local infrastructure.83 A year later, the Junín prefecto, Bruno Bueno, prohibited the arbitrary imprisonment of local villagers by private agents.84 In September 1903, Bueno also banned pongaje, hacienda peonage, and other systems of indentured labor.85 In most circumstances, capitalists and entrepreneurs overlooked these measures. Conflict also erupted inside mining facilities, the core of capitalism. In March 1907, the prefecto of Junín informed the director of government about a strike in the Peña Blanca and Diamante mines.86 While demanding wage increases and reduced working hours, revolting operarios had violently assaulted the house of the corporation’s director, bombing the facade and injuring the director’s family. On April 14, 1907, another strike erupted in the Goyllarisquizga mine.87 Claiming that the corporation was selling staple items at inflated prices, strikers had looted the local bazaar and stoned the administration. The central sierra as a realm of labor became engulfed in violence. Conflicts also emerged over the control, possession, and exploitation of natural resources. On May 3, 1907, the Municipality of Cerro de Pasco claimed to be the immemorial

44 | The Rural State

proprietor of the Patarcocha Lagoon, currently exploited by a mining corporation.88 A few years later, in 1915, the villagers of Tingahuarco claimed that the same corporation had built a wall to control and prevent local trade with neighboring communities and the grazing of privately owned pastures, enforcing a territorial monopoly throughout the region.89 In 1916, the villagers of Vinchos requested the creation of a rural police force to fight livestock rustlers, or abigeatos.90 Every conflict that emerged during the capitalist refashioning of the central sierra revealed the clash between the hegemonic ambitions of capitalist interests and the enduring struggles for autonomy by villagers. In May 1917, conflict in the central sierra reached its first historic peak. In one of the greatest labor strikes in the history of the Peruvian Andes, operarios of the Goyllarisquizga mine, many from neighboring villages, violently clashed with local police. Strikers demanded a 50 percent salary increase, the elimination of a mandatory health insurance fee, a reduction of housing expenses, the provision of free housing for workers, the elimination of nonmonetary compensation, and a reduction of working hours.91 After violence ceased, the strikers and corporation settled over certain terms, including a marginal wage increase and the elimination of mandatory fees. More important, the settlement allowed operarios to leave their jobs at will and still get paid proportionally.92 In spite of the settlement, by August 1917, local police reported bandits wandering near Goyllarisquizga and other areas involved in the strike. On August 21, a series of attacks destroyed the telegraphic lines of the central sierra.93 Social distress continued to engulf the sierra, further characterizing the region as a place of inherent conflict and violence. In 1921, a pasquín titled La masacre de la Oroya circulated within the smelting facilities of the corporation.94 Authored by the alleged Sociedad de Trabajadores Billinghurst, the pasquín called workers and villagers from the entire central sierra to unite against the abuses of foreign corporations and to challenge private and state institutions through violence. This pasquín resonated far beyond the facilities of the corporation and the upper central sierra, triggering a wave of social unrest that swept across distant provinces of Junín. In the lower Mantaro Valley region, the priest of Sapallanga and a Huancayo hacendado named Alfredo Alonzo joined the protest against foreign capitalist abuses. The circulation of the pasquín revealed the sociopolitical integration of geographically distant provinces of the central sierra as part of the capitalist refashioning of this region. In promoting essential disenfranchisement and spurring social

Reimagining the Peruvian Andes | 45

distress, capitalism invented the central sierra as a landscape for profit, a realm of impoverished labor, and a space of enduring conflicts. Conclusion

Peru attracted the attention of international observers at a crucial moment. In the aftermath of the War of the Pacific (1879), a materially and politically devastated state encouraged foreign capitalist investments to reconstruct the nation. The first decades of reconstruction, although auspicious, had not represented the ascent of the industrial potential of Peru as envisioned by private capitalists and statesmen. In the minds of elites, full reconstruction could only be achieved through the arrival of a massive amount of foreign capital to industrialize the country. More important, the industrialization of a shattered nation required the incorporation of the countryside—particularly the upper sierra regions, unruly areas that had long been considered elusive landscapes for state governance—into the structures of capitalist production and state power. A commercial geographic discourse, promoted by foreign travelers and statesmen, rhetorically reinvented the countryside and the central sierra as ideal spaces for capitalist ventures. In particular, the upper central sierra’s unruly plateaus and mountains became lands and mines for profit. Commercial geography transformed nature into natural resources, articulating a discourse on the profitability of the unexploited highlands to prepare for the establishment of capitalist industries upon previously commodified natural resources. The commodification of environments, however, failed to fully make a capitalist landscape. In contrast to imperial observations and appraisals of nature, capitalist eyes and commercial geography framed native inhabitants as potential laborers biologically and culturally adapted to work in environmentally hostile conditions. The commodification of villagers required a massive attack against village commons, an aggressive territorial consolidation of capitalist interests, and a carefully engineered project of socioeconomic impoverishment that transformed indios into poor rural laborers. Through the amalgamation of commodified environments as natural resources and equally commodified villagers as laborers, upland landscapes became an ideal shared by capital and state. Upland landscapes of the central sierra became built spaces of capital, with commodified natural resources and disenfranchised indios as

46 | The Rural State

pillars of rural industries. In this remaking of the central sierra, capitalists pushed for manifold hegemonies as villagers endured impoverishment and struggled to retain some foundational autonomies. Then, villages and private landholdings—rural estates or mines—became clashing spheres that nurtured ongoing conflicts. Inside the former, indios became the operarios of industrializing capitalism and the makers of the modern countryside. Inside the latter, the same indios hindered the economic, social, and political reconstruction of Peru. Both coercion and negotiation ultimately failed to turn labor into the alluring civilizing principle of the modern countryside. As conflicts escalated and violence became part of the upland landscapes, the enduring presence of indios in villages required a more ethnographic recast of the human geography of the central sierra. To advance the governance of the state and capital in the countryside, the intimacy of villages needed to be fully unveiled. To avoid conflict, the ideal of comunidad gradually replaced labor as the pivotal principle for the remaking of the central sierra and the Andes at large.

2 | Making Indigenous Communities

“One of the greatest problems of vivid interest to the ideal of strengthening [the nation’s] vitality in its double aspect—internal organization and external power—is the problem of the indigenous race.”1 With these lines, Florencio Loayza, a lawyer from Arequipa, opened one of the first comprehensive accounts on the problem of Indigenous populations and their societal organization in the early twentieth century. According to Loayza, one of the central misunderstandings of the state about Indigenous populations was “dismissing the thrust . . . and the power of the individuals who compose them.”2 Loayza identified a critical conundrum in the making of the human geography of the Peruvian sierra. At the dawn of the century, most of Peru remained rural and Indigenous. Decades before the so-called desborde popular—a local expression of the greater transformations that occurred in the global countryside as the world became more urban—the Peruvian state faced the question of integrating millions of rural people into larger national projects.3 In proposing venues for integration, the state identified property, specifically land, as a pivotal problem. Land ownership defined Indigenous villages. Previously, the state had legally obliterated Indigenous land through different mechanisms enacted under the doctrine of economic liberalism.4 In turn, the remaining Indigenous communities lost their lands to land speculators, hacendados, and state officials who did not demur in displacing and dispossessing villagers. Loayza proposed the creation of an official defensor de indios, as part of an updated colonial institution known as the Protectoría de Indios, that would defend the material interests of Indigenous populations.5 More important, the proposal also called for the creation of a register of Indigenous property, a crucial piece of state legislation for the benefit of the country as a whole.

48 | The Rural State

Other lawmakers and intellectuals shared Loayza’s view about the defense of Indigenous land rights as a central aspect of the larger process of state making, furthering a link between material and moral conditions. While the state had neglected communal land rights, provincial lawyers and intellectuals spurred a national debate around the vitality of Indigenous populations and their importance for the economic future of the country. At a time in which the liberal view on the elimination of communal landholdings prevailed, Loayza’s proposal seemed to protect Indigenous peoples. Yet Loayza, and others who shared his view, doubted if actual Indigenous people would be protected. No substantial knowledge existed about indigeneity and their composition, location, demarcation, and—given how destructive nineteenth-century liberalization and land usurpation had been—societal organizations. In other words, little information about the human geography of the highlands, and the central sierra in particular, existed to be safeguarded through any protectionist measure. Addressing these issues, Ricardo Bustamante Cisneros placed the question of communities within a stronger capitalist understanding of nation and state making. The issue at stake, according to Bustamante Cisneros, was a matter of private property. Indigenous landholdings, as expressions of rural private property, required state surveillance because they embodied the interests of the nation as a whole.6 The prevalence of capitalism was otherwise deemed unfeasible in a country with ambivalent positions toward private property. Regardless of whether political and economic communalism shaped societal order from a demographic point of view, rural properties became a central part of remaking the countryside as a suitable place for capitalist ventures. Furthermore, Bustamante echoed previous studies by Manuel Vicente Villarán, Germán Leguía y Martínez, and Alejandro Maguiña, asserting that while the state had to recognize and protect Indigenous communities and their property, internal property regimes had to be individualized under a system of homesteading similar to those in neighboring countries such as Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay.7 In sum, a new system of land ownership required recognizing the agency of Indigenous societal order while reshaping how these groups defined, conceived, and managed their property. Bustamante and Loayza’s positions illustrate a rising debate in the third decade of the twentieth century in Peru, one that placed the discussion of the existence, recognition, and legibility of Indigenous populations at the forefront of a national agenda.8 This debate centered on questions of representation. After the reinvention of the physical land-

Making Indigenous Communities | 49

scapes of the Andean region, including the uplands and the central sierra, the focus of intellectual discussion and state measures shifted to human geography. Two alternatives seemed viable. Many intellectuals emphasized indigeneity and Indigenous populations through individualistic notions, making the traditional liberal claim that inculcating individual values led to modernization and progress. Still others embraced the idea of returning to communal forms of Indigenous representation, challenging dominant views about collectivized subjectivities as atavistic burdens for advancing national progress. In the process, Indigenous populations largely went along with new state initiatives that sought to make their communities more legible. Several measures intended to resolve the representational debate, while Indigenous populations struggled for their own means of asserting themselves. Ultimately, a notion of comunidad became a central piece of a mounting project of modernization in Peru, and a fundamental component in the remaking of the human geography of the rural countryside. The Return of Comunidad

In 1924, Hildebrando Castro Pozo, a provincial lawyer and sociologist, authored one of the centerpieces of indigenista literature, Nuestra comunidad indígena.9 Castro Pozo had taught at a Jauja school in the central highlands and worked in the Ministerio de Fomento and the Office of Indigenous Affairs, of which he eventually became director. His life prior to the publication of Nuestra comunidad indígena reflected the developing trajectory of the Indigenous question. Between 1921 and 1923, Castro Pozo organized several important Indigenous congresses, an endeavor that state officials believed challenged the ideas of indigeneity advanced by President Augusto B. Leguía.10 As a result of this, and in spite of his previous positions held within state administration, Castro Pozo was arrested and deported to Panama. After being released from prison and publishing Nuestra comunidad indígena, Castro Pozo helped found the Socialist Party of Peru, through which he engaged in an active political life as senator and deputy in the national legislative body. As a representative of the Piura province, Castro Pozo participated in the international Indigenous congress of Pátzcuaro before returning to public service as a technical advisor in the Office of Indigenous Affairs in the late 1940s.11 In Nuestra comunidad indígena, Castro Pozo argued that community played a key role in national progress. Communal values, including the

50 | The Rural State

traditional mechanisms of land exploitation, gender relations, women’s social function, marriage conditions, education and role of public schools, and property regimes, were presented as potentially ductile for state interests. Moreover, the preexisting societal organization of Indigenous peoples—primarily collectivized at its core—helped implement socialism. Far from deeming community-based socialism as a return to a utopian, pre-Hispanic past, Castro Pozo equated a socialist regime with the much-needed modernization of the rural countryside. Socialist cooperativism, as a modern value, aligned perfectly with the enhanced societal order of Indigenous communities. While modernization through capitalism had alienated Indigenous peoples in Peru, and elsewhere in Latin America, communal socialism appeared capable of integrating these populations within state and market structures. Castro Pozo’s views represented a critical step in the larger debate that departed from the earlier works of Loayza and Bustamante Cisneros, a step enabled as the Peruvian state progressively changed its policies toward Indigenous populations.12 In fact, Nuestra comunidad indígena informed the policy-making process. As the state implemented legal devices and surveillance mechanisms for the governance of communal domains, Castro Pozo’s ideas became central to state attempts to outline a comunidad. In some instances, popular intellectual reflections and proposals remained largely ignored, as was the case with Manuel Yarlequé’s La raza indígena, which addressed the Indigenous question in racial terms.13 As a social activist and local politician, Yarlequé had participated in land struggles against foreign companies and state projects that threatened small rural properties. After returning from exile, Yarlequé joined the indigenista movement, publishing a series of articles compiled in La raza indígena. His work centered on the meaning of “nationality” and the role of “the effective liberation of the Indian” as Peru reached the centennial of its independence.14 Such liberation, according to Yarlequé, required the adamant defense of Indigenous property rights. Yarlequé argued for laws to guarantee “the intangibility of their assets, the homestead . . . thinking of removing local magistrates, coercion, and the influence of caciquismo.”15 Such measures needed to align with the “hygienization of cities and the preparation of a people strong in body and spirit for the struggles of labor.”16 Yarlequé also wrote a memorial, claiming to represent all “existent ayllus”—the pre-Columbian form of societal organization—in the Peruvian republic and requesting international assistance to liberate the Indigenous race. Economic and social emancipation, as they entailed the defense of property, required Yarlequé

Making Indigenous Communities | 51

to bring a new version of the “Indigenous question” to the forefront of both national and international debates. While relying on ayllus as a way to recast societal organization in rural areas and the human geography of the Peruvian sierra, Yarlequé did not address the communal aspect of property rights and whether proprietors should embrace an individual or collective model. Nevertheless, implicit anxiety permeated the possibility of haciendas and private corporations expanding at the expense of communally held lands. Víctor Pérez Armendáriz addressed the latter point in an essay published the following year. La individualización de la propiedad comunal indígena resembled the traditional nineteenth-century liberal argument for the abolition of communal property rights.17 The Indigenous inhabitant, according to Pérez Armendáriz, represented an element of national progress insofar as they were physically adapted to the environmental conditions where capital and industry intended to settle.18 As a social group, Indigenous populations seemingly offered more than labor. The indio was not only an ideal producer but also “a consumer who does not consume anything that they produce[,] . . . performing the economic ideal of offering most of their products to the national market.”19 If the creation of national markets solidified the nation as a whole, indigeneity would certainly contribute to that endeavor. Communal property rights, however, could be detrimental to capitalist expansion. They could not be traded, taxed, mortgaged, or otherwise capitalized in a land market. This impossibility of capitalization had produced, according to Pérez Armendáriz, two outcomes. On the one hand, most communal land remained uncultivated, turning the whole countryside into an unproductive wasteland. On the other hand, collectivization encouraged community members to migrate to neighboring privately owned estates, where they performed wage labor in the hacienda system, which also discouraged land cultivation. Another provincial intellectual, Víctor Guillén, made a different argument in La reintegración de la propiedad comunal indígena.20 According to Guillén, solving the Indigenous question required enhancing, rather than abolishing, communal property to stimulate the communal economy from within. Protecting communal properties and Indigenous populations also protected the economic potential of Peru. To justify the reintegration of communal property, questioning the legitimacy of the dominant hacienda system, Guillén explains how “the indio . . . has unquestionably exerted possession and dominion [of his lands] since time immemorial.”21 Guillén cites immemoriality, the principle

52 | The Rural State

of seemingly untraceable land occupancy and dwelling as an origine of Indigenous identity, as a source of property legitimacy.22 From a political-economic viewpoint, the state should invest in communal economic activities. Carlos Valdez de la Torre argued for state investment in communal affairs by emphasizing two distinctive, overlooked aspects of communal societal organization. On the one hand, most rural communities were not made out of indios; they were actually mestizo communities. Unlike “traditional” Indigenous settlement, mestizo landholding entailed a dual form of land exploitation. While a portion of communal lands— particularly subject to “immemorial” legitimacy—were preserved under collective management, other sections of communal lands were subject to family-based parceling. Occupation of this land required financial assistance to ensure cultivation. By carefully surveying the balance between communal and parceled land, the new governance of Indigenous human geography could classify communities centered on the internal structure of property and dominant economic activities. Valdez de la Torre envisioned categories that included comunidad agraria absoluta, comunidad mixta, comunidad casi nominal, comunidad para aprovechamiento de aguas, and comunidad nominal.23 Comunidades agrarias absolutas, the self-sustaining ideal of rural dwelling, hardly existed anymore. Most rural communities were mixed in nature, and many were becoming comunidades nominales as haciendas continued to expand. This rising social taxonomy of rural communities identified ranching as the dominant economic activity in areas where communal lands remained pivotal. Protecting the integrity of communal landholding and enhancing communal activities also invigorated grazing as a national economic activity. Ultimately, grazing, rather than agriculture, as a suitable economic activity—given the physical, environmental, and human conditions of most of the Peruvian highlands—paved the way for discussions about turning the comunidad into a socially and economically legible unit. Though early twentieth-century rural cadasters and institutions of agricultural governance remained scarce and inefficient, national livestock required communally held land, often family owned. When the modern grazing industry was established, neighboring rural communities usually supplied labor and livestock. Rural communities gained the political and economic momentum but required a necessary level of state legibility, a functionally incomplete vision of the comunidad, for their efficient incorporation into larger structures of production.

Making Indigenous Communities | 53

Legible Comunidades

The enactment of the 1920 constitution during the administration of President Augusto B. Leguía constituted a watershed for Peruvian state making.24 Politically speaking, the establishment of multilayered legal frameworks was intended to turn socioeconomic realities into legible orders. In past decades, as intellectual and political conversations about the societal governance of Indigenous populations had ensued, the state began to see the Indigenous question in more nuanced ways, shifting its understandings of the reconstruction and modernization of the nation. The Leguía administration crafted mechanisms, institutions, and devices to reassess Indigenous populations otherwise cast as a shapeless, atavistic mass. The so-called Patria Nueva, as Leguía’s autocratic regime became labeled, recast, administered, and governed its different populations and reinvented the human geography of Peruvian territories.25 Indigenous peoples occupied the forefront of new concepts of modernity when, on January 18, 1920, the newly enacted constitution granted legal status to all Indigenous communities of the nation.26 After nearly a century of liberal reforms devoted to obscuring and displacing communal property, Peru entered the twentieth century with new constitutional articles that recognized the legality of Indigenous communities, as comunidades, identifying the state’s responsibility for surveying and defending their properties, and creating legal mechanisms to protect them. The constitutional recognition of comunidades recast the location— spatial, legal, social, and economic—of Indigenous populations within larger state structures of power and production. An equally meaningful decree was issued on September 12, 1921, announcing the creation of the Office of Indigenous Affairs as a bureau of the Ministerio de Fomento. This office emerged from the “numerous claims and complaints that indigenous people [were presenting] before public authorities” and sought to ensure that these populations were not “treated differently to other citizens.”27 The decree also stipulated special legislation to safeguard “the well-being and culture” of these populations. This rising bureaucratic language for surveying the human geography of indigeneity highlighted how the state perceived comunidades. People living in comunidades had the same constitutional status as citizens elsewhere, yet their Indigenous “condition” demanded a special legal realm. Far from simply expressing a hidden racial segregation, new legal spheres for framing Indigenousness

54 | The Rural State

shaped the future relationship between Indigenous communities and the central state. The new human geography of the highlands, as the emerging rural bureaucracy envisioned it, required a new legal language of engagement. Inasmuch as the Office of Indigenous Affairs was intended to defend Indigenous peoples from potential abuses, it also aimed to “intensify their instruction, education, civic culture, and moral and economic progress” through a careful surveillance of communal life.28 The Patronato de la Raza Indígena, established in 1922, complemented the Office of Indigenous Affairs.29 After observing the persistent conflict between Indigenous populations and hacendados, a problem that inhibited the “normal development of industrial centers,”30 Leguía envisioned a decentralized institution capable of defending Indigenous peoples and newly recognized comunidades throughout the highlands. This institution, composed of representatives from the Catholic Church, lawyers, and engineers, reflected how the state understood the new Indigenous question. The establishment of local outposts in every province, and the defense and protection of populations, was a territorial and spatial endeavor as much as a moral and legal issue. Fostering “cultural and economic development” required an extensive and unprecedented rural expansion of state bureaucracies to govern the new human geography of comunidades.31 Local offices of the Patronato Indígena, named juntas, brought the Peruvian state into what once had been its peripheral legal margins. These local offices connected comunidades and the central state through a capillary network of bureaucrats, intermediaries, and offices. Juntas of the Patronato Indígena conducted important surveys of Indigenous wage labor in the sierra. Haciendas and large estates were known for mistreating Indigenous workers, who typically remained indentured and coerced into exploitative conditions. Indentured Indigenous labor, the Patronato asserted, created considerable distress and resentment, and local juntas were called upon to intervene.32 At the beginning of the year, local juntas informed municipal councils about minimum wage rates for Indigenous workers and guarantees for employers to meet those conditions. The local juntas paid particular attention to hacendados who made weekly noncash advancements for amounts higher than a week’s worth of labor, a coercive labor recruitment mechanism resembling the enganche system practiced in mines.33 Nevertheless, the juntas were limited in their efforts to supervise communal affairs. The comunidad of Pachachaca reported, in 1924, that some comuneros had been negotiating compensation with the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation without communal consent.34 These pay-

Making Indigenous Communities | 55

ments were to repair the damage produced by the smoke of the smelters in La Oroya. Yet no one knew just how many comunidades had been affected by the smoke or who should receive compensation. Rural bureaucrats had no real understanding of the human geography the new legislation was nurturing, nor the complex issues that confronted communal, state, and private interests. Such knowledge required more concrete information about the number of communities, the designation of internal representatives, and the overall dynamics of communal life. Surveying communities from without, through the establishment of local juntas, proved insufficient. Strengthening communal legibility and Indigenous human geography required an internal survey of the comunidades. A first, critical step toward new ways of envisioning communal organization would require counting the existing comunidades. Engineer Victor Falconí was commissioned to survey Pachachaca and the rest of the comunidades affected by the mines’ air pollution.35 In 1925, the state began the process of socially deciphering and legally recasting the human structure of the Peruvian countryside by enacting a supreme resolution establishing the Registro Oficial de Comunidades de la República (Official Register of Comunidades of the Republic). The registrar reported to the Ministerio de Fomento and the Office of Indigenous Affairs. To register, Indigenous communities were required to apply to receive formal recognition from the state. This application needed to include an accurate description of the group or pueblo to become a comunidad. Applicants included detailed information about their comunidad, including population number, main economic activities, number of state and private schools, and extent of land exploitation. A few months later, another decreto, a presidential or congressional order intended to amend the emerging relationships between state and communal domains, required livestock censuses to be included as part of the communal depiction. The state held certain preconceived criteria for evaluating the legal status of a comunidad. Comunidades had to be populous and transcend family networks and collectivities, even if some of them resembled some form of ancient association such as ayllus. Comunidades also had to be economically active and productive, holding a progressive educational agenda, sanctioned through the presence of schools—or acknowledging the necessity thereof—which guaranteed interaction between the state and rising generations of comuneros. Finally, comunidades required property—whether land or livestock, preferably both—and such property equally required registration, constituting an incipient endeavor toward the making of a rural cadaster. In sum, the larger human geography

56 | The Rural State

of comunidades had to look like, or be portrayed as, socially healthy, culturally advancing, and economically profitable. Comunidades, therefore, became cells to be absorbed by the politics of state metabolism. Despite the difficulties in applying for state recognition, rural populations eagerly pursued the opportunity to earn legal status. In January 1926, the comunidades of San Pedro de Huancayre and Lomada de Huaral became the first ones to formally receive the new legal status.36 Throughout the rest of the year, more than fifty communities mobilized and successfully obtained recognition. This number increased exponentially as years passed. The legislation appealed to rural populations in spite of setbacks. A few years before, Leguía’s administration had also enacted the Ley de Conscripción Vial, a policy designed to recruit labor to build roads to connect distant provinces of modernizing Peru.37 This policy targeted Indigenous populations—now subject to expanding forms of state governance—and was largely successful, for state purposes, due to the increasing capacity of the state to identify, locate, name, and eventually mobilize those living within the limits of state-recognized comunidades. In spite of the coercive nature of conscription and the harsh conditions inflicted on those who were brought into it, comunidades persisted in seeking legal status, declining whatever autonomy social illegibility enabled while aiming to acquire prerogatives provided under state sponsorship. Legalizing Comunidades

A circular submitted to the prefecto of Lima on February 25, 1925, alerted officials to the growing presence of Indigenous people in the capital “seeking justice and requesting guarantees[,] . . . pointing out outrageous abuses and attacks against them and their properties[,] . . . which conduct the indigenous race down the slope of ruin.”38 A telegram submitted by Ignacio Yucra, an Indigenous resident of Arequipa, illustrates this point.39 In his telegram, Yucra requested financial support to travel to Lima to file a claim against his neighbor, Efracio Salas, who had allegedly taken his property and left him ruined. In compensation for this financial support, Yucra offered the director of Indigenous affairs “two children to serve you.”40 Traveling to Lima to defend the expanding rights of a mounting number of comunidades and Indigenous populations, and appealing to a legal structure already in place for such purpose, encouraged unthinkable investments and sacrifices. State legislation on communal

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affairs sheltered the integrity of people like Ignacio Yucra and, foremost, their properties. State bureaucracy guaranteed the sustenance of those who were moving temporarily to Lima to file their claims. The director of Indigenous affairs replied to Yucra’s telegram, granting financial aid for his travel. Similar cases denounced “the imposition of forced labor, free and unpaid, illegal fines imposed by [local] authorities, and dispossession of their livestock and lands.”41 In other words, comunidades’ grievances dovetailed with what the state envisioned as the main features of well-to-do comunidades and the larger human geography of the highlands: protection of population, territorial integrity, and property rights. On May 22, 1931, the director of development in the Ministerio de Fomento submitted another memorandum to the prefectos of every province inquiring about the status of comunidades in their jurisdictions.42 Comuneros worried about the unfolding process of urbanization in areas adjacent to their communal lands, as it affected their economic lives. Comunidades, according to the memorandum, had reached an important degree of advancement and wealth. Such early improvements had resulted from the dual nature of land exploitation. While some communities had persisted under a strictly communal paradigm, with little privatization and domestic distribution of land, others had embraced individual parceling and left a specific area for communal exploitation. The director of development inadvertently described two ecologically grounded models of communal organization. In the lowlands, where agriculture was dominant, parceling was viable. In the highlands, specifically above a certain altitude at which agriculture became less suitable and ranching took over as the dominant economic activity, comunidades leaned toward preserving lands under communal cultivation. In years to come, the Ministerio de Fomento strengthened its understanding of not only the socioeconomic but also the environmental and ecological conditions under which communities thrived. State enforcement of legal frameworks for communal governance was sometimes problematic. Back in the central sierra, the members of Yanacocha, a comunidad located in the district of Yanahuanca, Pasco, filed a grievance to their senator, Alejandrino Maguiña, claiming that they were exploited by the former mayor of the district, Ernesto Cisneros.43 While Cisneros had originally signed an underpriced lease for the use of the communal pastures of Yanacocha, he had recently begun to charge transit fees to muleteers passing through communal lands, sublease portions of the lands to increase his own profits, and illegally serve as an intermediary in the formal process of state recognition of Yanacocha. In his

58 | The Rural State

role as intermediary, Cisneros had introduced a former district official as the engineer commissioned to map communal properties. Neither his intermediation nor the engineering commission had produced results, delaying the comunidad’s legal status recognition. In their grievance, comuneros argued that they had faced “threats and rudeness, proper of the caciquismo of these highlands.”44 Yanacocha’s claims illustrate how the legal language regarding comunidades had effectively been transmitted through the expanding networks of the Patria Nueva, reaching the internal communal, societal domains. Comuneros now addressed state representatives with a vocabulary shared by state and comunidad. While the effectiveness and execution of communal legislation faced challenges, particularly the opposition of local authorities to collaborating with the state’s efforts, state governance of communal affairs rearranged the human geography of the sierra. In 1930, the Great Depression inflicted major institutional challenges on the Patria Nueva.45 In August, a military coup led by commander Luis Sánchez Cerro ousted Leguía and brought eleven years of autocratic government to an end. While the coup created political rupture, legislation on comunidades advanced during the Patria Nueva changed little in the convoluted years that followed. A new constituent assembly was established in 1931, culminating in the promulgation of the 1933 constitution. The issue of Indigenous comunidades became part of vigorous discussions during the drafting of the new Carta Magna because of the input from diverse intellectuals concerned with the Indigenous problem, including Hildebrando Castro Pozo and Abelardo Solís.46 Title XI of the new constitution sanctioned important legal advancements and enhanced communal existence and the human geography of the highlands, which centered on property rights issues. Such advancements included the adjudication of juridical status for legal comunidades. This juridical status fostered the integrity of communal landholdings and property, as constitutional measures now guaranteed them. Similarly, the legislation called for a more precise rural cadaster to safeguard properties. The proposed rural cadaster protected the indivisibility and inalienability of landholdings while also enabling state expropriations to serve manifold purposes. In the event of material communal demands, the rural cadaster required a precise description of potential resources for redistribution. More important, juridical status prevented both national and local authorities from exercising jurisdiction over communal affairs. The state thus granted the comunidades a limited degree of internal autonomy. While such legislation certainly responded to preceding intellectual

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debates, represented in the works of Hildebrando Castro Pozo and José Carlos Mariátegui, the Peruvian state rejected indigenismo as an official policy toward comunidades. The state aimed to recast the societal organization of Indigenous populations through the establishment of a legal proximity with emerging comunidades. Undermining legal intermediation, diminishing political unrest, centralizing the legitimacy of the state in fewer institutions, and circumscribing increasing Indigenous mobilization within the institutional boundaries of the state were prerequisites for the manufacturing of a new Indigenous human geography. Furthermore, the Civil Code enacted in 1936 offered special legislation to regulate lives within the community. This new code, reformulated for the first time since 1852, required comunidades to draft periodic reports informing the state of their internal padrones of comuneros—essential documents for determining the internal electoral population and the qualification for election as a community representative. After locating comunidades within the structures of state power and increasing the surveillance of internal communal affairs, new legal devices strengthened the state sanction of the sociopolitical organization of communal life and provided more accurate internal images of comunidades; these new arrangements mediated the relationship between the state and rural populations. Ultimately, “seeing” comunidades through new legal devices shaped their very existence, fostering how the state conceived the highlands in new, rationalized terms. Such rationalized ways included comunidades meeting conditions perceived as beneficial, namely valuable and incorporable, for the state as a whole. Comunidades and Space

Constitutional and civil measures complemented several decretos. An ideal of comunidad, no longer an abstract notion of indigeneity, had become the central rural question for the state and its representatives, a question tackled through legislative procedures to enhance communal governance. Nevertheless, one critical aspect remained unaddressed. Comunidades, as portrayed and cast in most of the new legal devices, were the alleged historical inheritor of ancestral ayllus; their existence was supposedly “immemorial.” Two potentially conflicting logics emerged and clashed. On the one hand, the state envisioned comunidades weaving a human geography resulting from the legal remanufacture of the highlands. On the other hand, comunidades still claimed “immemorial rights”

60 | The Rural State

to assert their existence. The state often recognized the validity of immemorial rights, though it required legal documentation to support such claims. In those cases, comunidades were required to submit documental “proof ” of their claim, usually expressed in the form of “colonial titles” or other legal documents.47 Often, however, many comunidades lacked any documentary support and yet persisted in claiming immemoriality. In resolving the issue of unprovable immemoriality, the state resorted to an equally pivotal, technocratic device: communal maps. Comunidades that could present evidence of their immemorial possession of any sort had to submit a “representative sketch of their domain or communal usufruct lands, indicating neighboring [landowners].”48 Every other rural settlement and social group, seeking to gain legal status as comunidad, required a communal map drawn by a state-commissioned surveyor. The rural bureaucracy understood the problem of comunidades, as a newly cast Indigenous human geography, as a spatial issue. Guaranteeing the integrity of communal boundaries strengthened the state’s surveillance of comunidades.49 Elusive communal frontiers and vague demarcations created problems such as land usurpations, crop appropriations, and livestock rustling. While the state had addressed countless communal grievances through new legal devices,50 fully safeguarding the interests of comunidades and consolidating the envisioned human geography of the highlands required a new territorialization of the countryside. The map-making process of communal lands shows how the state projected comunidades spatially, interweaving throughout the highlands. First, maps recorded a memoria descriptiva—a systematized narrative containing orally transmitted, historical, and geographical information—of the location of the communal lands. A memoria descriptiva provided information about the exact location of lands, the existing roads with their approximate length, the distance to a railway or major roadway point, the paths for traveling from and to the provincial capitals (including information on the pascana sites51), and the existence of riverbeds. Second, memorias descriptivas included a detailed census of the community population, including gender, marital status, place of birth, place of work, educational level, age, and the specific address of each member. Third, maps outlined communal boundaries, including information on how topography and landforms demarcated certain points. Water sources deserved special emphasis, in particular those lying at borderlines. The state also required a detailed account of the fieldwork procedures upon which communal lands were mapped. The map also offered a precise metric

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of the economic spatialization of communal lands, indicating the sections destined for family farming and collective grazing, and those that remained uncultivated. Ultimately, maps also described the economic geography within communal domains, reporting the type of crops and every other agricultural activity and the challenges of maximizing communal production. The state required this information to be delivered through previously distributed forms and accompanied by photographic records, charts, and other pertinent documents. The map itself had to be printed on fabric with a blueprint copy, on a scale from 1:1000 to 1:50,000, with a detailed contour that included equidistant points outlining all the projected points of the polygon. Communal boundaries needed to align with the magnetic meridian; the names of neighboring estates; any zones of doubtful property or under litigation; the fluvial system of rivers, lakes, lagoons, streams, and springs; existing bridleways, distinguishing them from roads; the direction of ridges, chains of hills, or buttresses that originated in the Andes, including gullies and every other major landform; the magnetic direction of the map; and a thorough map legend. After compiling all of these details, maps had to be submitted to the state and approved by the Office of Indigenous Affairs. Upon approval, the state commissioned engineers to place mojones, boundary stones, along the boundaries of the newly mapped communal territory. Mojones had to be made of cracked stone with sand and limestone or cement and follow specific guidelines to highlight their visibility from medium distances. Mapping communal domains and, therefore, mapping the highlands as a whole entailed a spatial rationalization critical in the making of comunidades and the human geography they nurtured. Such rationalization merged equally critical processes. First, communal mapping juxtaposed the increasingly bureaucratized rural governance, as envisioned by the state with Indigenous “immemoriality,” to produce a mechanism for communal self-assertion. Second, the mapping of comunidades and the subsequent demarcation of boundaries engendered rural metrics and geometrized the highlands on an unprecedented scale. Finally, as comunidades sought the approval of state-crafted maps, a new spatial and geographic relationship emerged. While the verticality of the Andes had imposed limitations upon the connection between state powers and communal domains, state mapping of comunidades promoted new territorial understandings conceived in horizontal terms. This spatial rationality of the highlands triggered unforeseeable consequences. A note submitted to the Office of Indigenous Affairs in 1937

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alerted officials to disturbances among comunidades seeking legal status.52 The overlapping of district limits, individual property, and increasingly fixed communal boundaries created social distress. State-sponsored conciliation emerged as a temporary solution, becoming a resort for comunidades in conflict as well as members from within the same comunidad. The former mobilized over further delineating the limits between neighboring comunidades; the latter rallied over demarcating internal limits within, between privately owned and communal lands. One problem, though, remained unaddressed. State legislation and spatial rationality did not guarantee equitable representation of comuneros in the usufruct of lands. Once an internal division was traced between family plots and communal areas, all comuneros required, in principle, equal access to the usufruct and profits produced by communal exploitation of land. The significance of this issue led the Office of Indigenous Affairs to encourage the formation of similarly state-sponsored internal hierarchies, shaping communal sociopolitics in an unprecedented way. Another circular written by Juan Luis Mercado, the director of Indigenous affairs, and submitted to provincial prefectos on July 19, 1937, addressed the aforementioned problem.53 While comunidades could retain their immemorial nature and the state respected their “ancestral customs,” they were required to operate under clearly organized structures of power, “obeying one or several persons as their chiefs, elected every so often.”54 Likewise, comunidades had to embrace the “spirit of association and defense that has singularized these collectivities.”55 In other words, the state intended to reshape communal politics through a combination of both internal regulation and collective, modernized values. Eventually, the comunidades would become microrepresentations of modern societies and, therefore, territories of economic, social, and political progress in the rural countryside. In regard to territorial overlapping, Mercado asserted that state boundaries and communal jurisdictions occupied separate spatial categories. Several comunidades could exist in any given district, or, alternatively, a single comunidad could hold lands in several districts, a measure to palliate external distress through the maximization of ecological complementarity and mastery of the “vertical archipelago.”56 The election of internal authorities deserved attention from representatives of the central state. A decreto supremo issued on July 18, 1938, regulated the terms of the election of internal authorities, or personeros.57 A directorate, or junta directiva, supervised the voter rolls. The date of the election had to be communicated to the Office of Indigenous Affairs or, alternatively, the provincial authority. All permanent residents eighteen

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years and older could participate in elections, including female household heads. Votes had to be cast publicly and verbally. Leading positions were reserved for literate comuneros who were properly enrolled in the mandatory military register and neither plaintiffs nor defendants in any internal trial. Terms of office would last two years, though revocation was possible with approval of two-thirds of the communal electors.58 Upon being elected, the officeholder had to submit a report, including the original minutes of the election, to the registrar of the Office of Indigenous Affairs. Comunidades that did not attain legal status named their personero according to their traditional customs for filing the application and adjusted their political organization after gaining recognition. Shaping internal politics of communal life constituted a final step in the remaking of comunidades as fundamental components of the human geography of the highlands. The previous spatial recast of communal territorialities allowed the state to effectively turn comunidades into microspheres that resembled modern political, social, and economic practices. Such modern practices—maximizing economic productivity, enforcing private property, and holding elections for naming internal authorities—taught comuneros about citizenship, citizenry, and democracy. Spatially circumscribed comunidades enabled rural collectivism to enter into economic structures of the state as poverty spread throughout the countryside. Comunidades faced scarce resources, and reports on the mobilization of comuneros and other rural workers increased. The state exerted its political hegemony over the comunidades by delegitimizing any form of political representation other than personeros, intending to control the political networks that linked interwoven comunidades, provincial capitals, and other working centers in the highlands. By 1944, the Congreso de la Sierra Central promoted abolition of alcaldes de vara, or varayos, traditional authorities perceived as final “obstacles” in controlling comunidades as a social and spatial unit. Still, new legal languages and political vocabularies empowered comunidades to a degree that the state did not fully comprehend. As the new human geography of the highlands consolidated, rural questions recentered on the capacity of comunidades to increase their autonomy from the state. An Unruly Space of Social Unrest

Upon the assassination of the Peruvian president Commander Luis M. Sánchez Cerro in 1931, the Peruvian Congress appointed another

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military officer, General Oscar R. Benavides, to prevent further political instability. The economic crisis that had struck Peru in previous years worsened because of the political disturbance of the electoral campaign in 1931 as well as the turmoil that engulfed several provinces after the uprising and repression of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA) Party. Political agitation increased when the Socialist Party relaunched itself as the Communist Party of Peru, aligning itself with Moscow and the Third International following the death of the historical leader of Peruvian Marxism, José Carlos Mariátegui.59 The Communist Party had focused on unions and syndicates, both in Lima and major provinces. Its activities, including political indoctrination and encouraging social mobilization, impacted the highlands, particularly nearby major industrial centers like mining towns. Union strikes plagued the state. Reports from the Junín prefectura warned of the possibility of “Cuban style” strikes and their potential for causing economic stagnation in the country, predicting unprecedented levels of social unrest.60 Benavides immediately outlawed both APRA and different communist parties after passing a law that prohibited the foundation and activities of parties with international origins and affiliations.61 Junín and the larger central sierra experienced political and economic convulsion due to the worldwide economic contraction, which plummeted the prices for major sierra commodities such as minerals and wool. The Congreso Minero of 1930 mobilized workers from all mining sites within the region as social unrest elsewhere ensued. In the central sierra, comunidades struggled for greater visibility socially, politically, economically, and spatially. Taking advantage of this moment of social unrest, the comunidad of Yanacocha filed a grievance against a local hacendado over the leasing of their pastures. In years of economic growth, many comuneros moved to mining centers—sometimes enganchados—often willingly becoming labor of corporate capitalism. Migration to mining centers decompressed socioeconomic pressure for available land. Many comunidades with a surplus leased part of their exploitable, communally held lands. As wages in mining towns contracted and poverty increased, laborers returned to comunidades and the pressure for land returned. Unrest in the town and comunidad were intimately interconnected. As agrarian compression hit the countryside, comunidades looked to the state to guarantee their territorial integrity and their economic advancements. In 1935, the local police arrested a wandering comunero near Tarma.62 This comunero was carrying several pamphlets and propaganda about

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communist activities in the central sierra. The whereabouts of the arrest suggests that propaganda followed the same trajectory as returning comuneros, circulating from the mining towns to comunidades carrying a message that recast the new political role of Indigenous populations in times of unrest. The first of the pamphlets, Unidad de Acción, was probably published in late 1934, after Benavides had annulled parliamentary elections to prevent the underground APRA Party from gaining political representation.63 This event sparked a series of riots and a general sense of social unrest that spanned several provinces, which the Benavides regime labeled as a political conspiracy. The pamphlet argued, in contrast, that this watershed moment marked the beginning of a revolutionary movement. As both the Communist and APRA Parties had been outlawed, no one knew who was leading the revolution and the human grounds that fueled it. Responding to this uncertainty, the Communist Party—through its Central Committee—called for the union of all “oppositionist” parties, the workers of all political tendencies and affiliations, and—foremost—the active participation of the indio as a central actor in Peruvian history. The indio, once mobilized by “civilians and military” alike, had been called to political life as “montoneros . . . without arms and [without asserting their] demands.”64 In alignment with some ideas of José Carlos Mariátegui, the Communist Party incorporated Indigenous peoples, organized as comunidades, into its political structure, emphasizing how a communal platform of demands coincided with the communist agenda. The second of these pamphlets was titled En el Centenario: Marcha de Hambre and was published by the Comisión Central de Agitación y Propaganda of the Communist Party of Peru.65 The pamphlet denounced the bourgeois and “creole” nature of commemorating the fourth centennial of the foundation of Lima. According to the pamphlet, the emancipation of Peru had not brought freedom for Indigenous populations, Peru had not become a unified nation, and four million people of Indigenous origins—now organized in comunidades—still lived under “misery, oppression, illiteracy, and degradation.”66 The pamphlet called for the mobilization of a “national campesino movement,” nurtured by their “older siblings, the workers,” for an ongoing struggle over land and freedom. Such mobilizations, and the ambitious alliance of workers and campesinos, required absorbing the highlands as a social and spatial unity for revolutionary purposes, using the networks that linked mining towns and comunidades.67 Another one of the pamphlets was authored by the Comisión Nacional Indígena y Campesina of the Communist Party. While civilista elites

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promoted the celebrations of the fourth centennial, both working class people and campesinos fell further into poverty.68 In the central sierra, according to this manifesto, local gamonal Ernesto Hurtado had “stolen 8 mules, 7 cows, and a horse from the comunidad of Panti, [making] indigenous peons work for months and years while only giving them a handful of coca and a glass of aguardiente.”69 Many factors explained how Hurtado perpetrated his actions. First, expanding legislation on comunidades also nurtured wicked alliances between communal leaders and local authorities, allowing hacendados and gamonales to exercise power over comuneros. Likewise, local authorities took advantage of communal legislation, claiming to advance policies in favor of rural populations—as was the case in Panti with the establishment of farming workshops— while reaping considerable illegal profits from fiscal revenues. While claiming to reposition indios in the structure of power and production, comunidades as an envisioned human geography had renewed historical structures of oppression against Indigenous peoples, dismissing them from the work of forging a new national identity. Another edition of Marcha de Hambre explicitly referred to the way efforts to socially recast the highlands as a space inhabited by comunidades had allowed the “fascist-feudal . . . state afflicting entire peoples, comunidades, and vast indigenous nationalities.”70 The state’s envisioned organization of comunidades strengthened the traditional political and economic structures that prevented the empowerment of rural working classes and Indigenous peoples, limiting their agency to claim legal statuses. Comunidades, according to the pamphlet, needed to join social and class struggles, thus making communism the most efficient representative of their interests. Gamonalismo persisted as a major force in the restructuring of the sierra, characterized by economic arrangements and political maneuvering. This arrangement, defended by state representatives and local authorities, promoted condescending views of comunidades. Overcoming this situation demanded a major mobilization of comunidades over Lima, turning the highlands into a fertile ground for nurturing political contestation and revolution. In the same vein, Hoz y Martillo, yet another confiscated pamphlet, called for the conformation of a frente único that dismissed political sectarianism and created committees in every “factory, neighborhood, and pueblo,”71 fostering the revolution from three spatial layers—city, mining town, and comunidad—as representatives of the urban proletariat, rural workers, and Indigenous peoples, respectively. These three layers also symbolized the human platforms that fueled class struggles worldwide.

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These pamphlets traversed well-established political networks that connected mining towns, neighboring rural areas, and the country capital, linking increasingly politicized factory and mining environments with villages and comunidades. The major changes inflicted upon the human geography of the highlands and the comunidad paradigm facilitated the circulation of labor, as an intended consequence, and the transit of ideas, as an unintended one. Incipient revolutionary discourses found in the human web of the sierra, envisioned and established through state means, found an ideal vehicle for delivering their messages. Rural people who traveled between mining towns and villages embraced both wage labor and seasonal agrarian sustenance. The organization of comunidades fused two originally disjointed spheres, the realm of capital and the realm of the indio. The insurrectionary discourse presented in these pamphlets exploited this linkage, arguing that the highlands should be converted into a larger revolutionary sphere. Indios organized in comunidades materialized this conversion as they personified the comunidad-capital duality. How effective these discourses were in mobilizing comunidades deserves further discussion. While the great march of indios and comunidades over Lima never materialized, the rural countryside experienced extreme political unrest that went beyond the areas immediately adjacent to mining towns. In other words, the social, economic, cultural, and physical separations between the realms of capital and the realm of indigeneity shrunk. Inasmuch as the expanding networks of the state reframed Indigenous populations becoming comunidades to appropriate a legal language of interaction and engagement, the human web of comunidades projected as a social and spatial recast allowed diverse ideas to circulate throughout. This moment was a departure point for the state to eventually reconceive the highlands as a space naturally given to sedition. Comunidades as Public Spheres

El Eco de los Andes, a newspaper published by the Juventud del Centro, lamented in 1920 that the “indigenous lives and labors are what augment the wealth of gamonales, landowners, coastal and highlanders” without the state worrying about the material and moral conditions of countless Indigenous inhabitants.72 This economic and social prostration, the newspaper argued, undermined the lives of people fueling a precarious yet consistent industrialization as well as advanced agrarian activities, and combined modern technologies and traditional forms of

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production, creating an unlikely communion between capital and comunidades. More than a decade later, several more newspapers circulated throughout the countryside and addressed the new role of comunidades in modernizing Peru. As comunidades became legible and acquired legal status, the foundation of Indigenous federations, larger associations of comunidades, grew alongside many of these newspapers. Among these federations, the Federación de Comunidades Indígenas del Perú published El Indio in 1934 with the alleged mission of “defend[ing] the Indian [as] the racial basis of nationality itself,” an assertion that would have been impossible before comunidades regained legal status. This federation, supposedly composed of genuine representatives of equally genuine comunidades, posed the Indigenous question as one of education. “The indigenous element,” one of the newspaper’s circulars stated, “is not the same as yesterday. It cannot be, because he lives, listens, reflects, and draws conclusions.”73 The remaking of comunidades had brought the state into communal domains, creating new social, economic, and political demands as Indigenous populations were becoming more legible. With a new legibility attained, comunidades used new language to navigate state networks and consolidate their spaces and dynamic rural public spheres. A publication similar to El Indio brought a new term into this consolidating communal public sphere. El Campesino y la Escuela, published in Jauja, reiterated the argument about Indigenous education, emphasizing the role of women and the necessity of educating them to become “a worthwhile partner, maker of the new indio.”74 “From their wombs,” the publication added, “will the new Peru emerge, amassed in her blood.”75 In contrast to El Indio, El Campesino y la Escuela was published by the comunidad of Orcotuna, through communal means. Many of the discussions presented in the newspaper—such as demands for the establishment of new schools—drew on the particularities of communal experiences. As communal spaces consolidated as spheres for debating and discussing internal and state affairs, questions about the legitimacy of leaders and representatives of comunidades emerged. Whether an interprovincial federation of communities or state-framed communal leadership retained a greater entitlement for wielding the actual needs of their comuneros, comunidades as public spheres proved that the “Indigenous question” had evolved from a problem of spatial legibility and legal incorporation into one of internal geopolitical representation. On September 4, 1937, the director of Indigenous affairs, Juan Luis Mercado, addressed the director of government regarding the official rec-

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ognition sought by the Delegación General de Comunidades Indígenas del Perú. Official recognition had been denied, and Mercado explained that “the promoters of such organization, under the alleged title of defenders of the interests of indigenous communities, clearly pursue political purposes.”76 With a clear legal framework already in place for defending and protecting comunidades, Mercado argued against rights to that sort of organization. Two years later, the Confederación de Artesanos Unión Universal submitted a letter congratulating the director upon his announcement that he had dispatched literacy brigades throughout the central sierra. The confederation offered the assistance of some of its members, who “[spoke] the Quechua language and . . . perfectly [knew] the idiosyncrasy of the indio,” to help the newly established brigades. While the letter remained unanswered, the confederation gained no direct involvement in the literacy brigades. The Peruvian state attempted to create a direct relationship between its central structure and comunidades. It did not matter that comuneros such as Genaro Llauripoma, a representative of the community of Tupicocha and member of a Liga Indígena Fraterna del Perú—a “nationalist institution, representative of the Peruvian indio, which advocates for the vindication of the rights and interest of the [Indigenous] race”—claimed to be a valid interlocutor between state power and communal domains. The state had recreated comunidades to have a direct relationship with rural populations, providing no legitimacy for organizations that intended to serve as intermediaries. The state required real, not “imagined,” communities. Conclusion

Within two years, between 1919 to 1921, the Indigenous question in Peru moved from a problem of invisibility and moral character to a matter of internal geopolitics and political representation. In the process, the state manufactured a social engineering project in which comunidades were recast as a spatial, socioeconomic organism that constituted the basic cell of a new human geography of the highlands within an increasingly modern, industrial national society in which indigenousness was a collaborating factor. Socially speaking, the official recognition of a new legal framework for comunidades was intended to recast indigenousness as a value no longer perceived as antithetical to progress. The state sanctioned the existence of comunidades, conferred legibility to them, and turned them

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into ductile organisms. Establishing the basic aspects of a comunidad enforced an indigeneity recast by the state, in which property rights became a key element. Much of the discussion about the feasibility of communal life within modern times, therefore, centered on Indigenous property. State policies defined a direct equation between communality and land ownership, and the existence of landless communities unpleasantly baffled policy makers, who responded with mechanisms to guarantee land access. The communal logic of immemoriality juxtaposed with the state logic of rationalizing space, and while land-granting legislation initially alleviated distress, it paved the way for intercommunity unrest. Economically, comunidades were meant to engage the national industrialization process. While the existence of a racialized labor state seems hardly deniable, at the periphery of that labor state, race—and indigeneity in particular—became congruent with labor values. Politically, the proximity between state and comunidades encouraged the latter to acquire a language to navigate through expanding state networks. Initially, comunidades mobilized within the boundaries of the state, seeking official recognition, legal status, and juridical personhood. All this was possible because of state guarantees of territorial integrity, economic certainty, and social mobility pursued by comunidades. As the state failed to protect these values, particularly in times of general economic contraction, comunidades mobilized outside the boundaries of the state, welcoming and adopting radical languages of political contestation. In the recast of human geography, comunidades transformed from new spatial understandings of the countryside to rural public spheres. Their quest, thus, was no longer solely a matter of territorial integrity and economic certainty. Comunidades asserted their position in increasingly autonomous ways. By the end of the period, as the world faced years of political unrest and economic dynamism, the relationship between comunidades and the state entered a stage of apparent social peace, economic symbiosis, and political stability. The state launched a systematic project of agrarian development, intending to extend its original project of modernizing the comunidad by amassing agrarian industrialism, a newly conceived form of organizing rural labor and land exploitation under state-led capitalist values. “Modernity” became a buzzword in discussions on the future of the countryside. Countless comunidades engaged with the state, subscribed to its terms, and became Indigenous, consolidating a human geography of the highlands in accordance with the terms by which the state projected indigeneity.

3 | Reconciling the State and Communities

By the mid-twentieth century, the Latin American rural countryside had become a focal point of hemispheric interest. Between World War II and the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, I will argue, ideals about urban development and industrialization coexisted with renewed visions about rural environments as focal areas of modernization projects.1 Within this context, rural Peru—particularly the Andean highlands—served as a major battleground of ideals about modernity and material progress. A clash of politics and policies primarily confronted state-sponsored models of modernization, focused on advancing the material and social conditions of rural spaces against communal-based understandings of development, combined with the need to navigate expanding state networks of power and production. The central sierra of Peru, and the upper Junín region, turned out to be key for the making and unmaking of contested projects of socioeconomic development. At thirteen thousand feet in altitude, in the midst of the Bombón Plateau, San Juan de Ondores—along with many other neighboring comunidades—confronted and adapted to modernization. As San Juan de Ondores became a comunidad and engaged with the state in remaking the rural countryside, their comuneros acquired sociopolitical, economic, and cultural knowledge and practices that enabled them to meet the challenges of state-sponsored development and capitalism. However constraining state-sponsored communal policies seemed, comunidades managed to attain levels of economic and social autonomies—foundational capacities for materially sustaining families within their comunidad based on reorienting their internal production and commercial practices toward a consolidated, export-oriented

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agrarian capitalism—all within a state framework that mobilized policies and resources to galvanize these changes. As modernization paradigms settled, the Peruvian state moved from notions of rural modernity as a quest for legibility and legal proximity to ideals of capitalist development centered upon maximizing agrarian productivity, which changed the collective and individual subjectivity of comuneros as people the state aimed to incorporate into its structures of production. While the period unfolded, the structure of land ownership framed the discussion about the progress of the countryside. When the hemispheric debate about the progress and modernity of the countryside revealed a problem of inequity in land ownership and the potential for nourishing revolutionary processes, Peru—as well as many other Latin American countries—experienced the rise of agrarian reform as the ultimate ideal of rural and agrarian capitalist progress. Wool Markets and Land Questions

The state sponsored and promoted several agrarian development projects, but especially the granjas comunales. On July 28, 1943, President Manuel Prado announced a pathbreaking project in the long history of rural governance, aiming to convert every Indigenous comunidad into a granja indígena.2 The project aimed to “orient the activities of our aborígenes towards new fields of production and labor.”3 The granjas, shortly renamed comunales, could be dedicated to farming or grazing activities, depending on the geographic and environmental conditions of the comunidad. San Pedro de Cajas and Huayre, in Junín, were the first granjas comunales in the central sierra. Shortly after, another twenty-four comunidades submitted their applications to host their own granjas. According to the Office of Indigenous Affairs of the Ministerio de Fomento, applying comunidades possessed a cumulative total of 50,000 hectares of land and approximately 150,000 soles in capital—usually as communal and domestic flocks. The granjas project also was intended to achieve “the integration of the indio into national life,”4 a long-sought goal of the nation-making process in Peru. Granjas could establish norms and regulations in communal economies, leading their members to “progress and welfare, not only of these groups [the comunidades] but also for the positive national advantage.”5 The state planned to fuel the capitalization of a national agrarian economy from within comunidades while basing agrarian industrialism

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upon the socioeconomic preconditions inherent to communal organization, namely land, labor, and cooperativism. Through granja activities, the state would democratize the comunidades and consolidate a rural civil society. Comuneros could finally achieve a supreme, noble political spirit in understanding their individual and collective roles while engaging with state visions of progress and development. As granjas comunales had to become the forefront of agrarian industrialism from within the core of Indigenous comunidades, they fell under direct supervision of the Junta de Industria Lanar, a conglomerate of powerful businessmen and market-oriented hacendados who had turned wool into a dominant sector of the Peruvian export economy. Peruvian entrepreneurs involved in the Junta included Ricardo Bentín Mujica as president, Enrique Gildemeister as the president of the Asociación de Ganaderos del Perú, and the hacendado Elías Fernandini as the representative of the central sierra.6 The granjas comunales project was meant to establish focal points of rural development in regions and provinces historically considered socioeconomically backward but with enormous material and environmental potential to nurture granjas. While Puno and the southern highland plateau livestock economy welcomed the first granjas comunales in the early 1940s,7 the central sierra quickly took over as the main region for the formation of these projects by the end of the decade. In 1947, the central sierra was home to a total of twelve granjas comunales, including San Pedro de Cajas, Huayre, Pucará, Oroya Antigua, Ninacaca, Carhuas, and Peñaloza. The Ninacaca granja was part of a Cerro de Pasco local parish, while the Carhuas and Peñaloza were family driven. Another five granjas had been recently founded that year: Chongos, Pinos, Tusi, San Antonio, and Ondores. On December 31, 1947, the account of livestock in all granjas of the central sierra amounted to 11,345 sheep, including ewes, rams, and diverse breeds of lamb. San Pedro de Cajas stood as the biggest and most important granja comunal, with 2,581 sheep, followed by Carhuas with 1,657 and Ninacaca with 1,359. Ondores, a recently founded granja, possessed around 500 sheep.8 The Junta de Industria Lanar, aiming to further enhance communal production, intervened directly in the operations of the granjas. The Junta proposed the construction of infrastructure for further strengthening grazing activities, particularly wallows, pens, and shearing sheds. San Pedro de Cajas modeled the implementation of communally run facilities. The initiative had immediate positive outcomes. Communal herds improved in condition as sheep received better veterinary treatment and

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professional care. Scabies and ticks were major concerns for the condition of sheep, also effectively addressed and eliminated in communally run facilities. Twenty-four communal wallows were established throughout major comunidades of the region. More than a quarter million sheep were treated in them. In Ondores, the communal wallow received a total of 30,497 sheep in their first year operating as a granja comunal, ranking first among comunidades dedicated to this service.9 The economic dynamism of granjas comunales becomes more evident when looking closely at the case of the Carhuas granja. In May 1946, Anacleto Carhuas applied to the Junta de Industria Lanar to form a communal, family-led granja in Carhuamayo.10 In their application, the members of Carhuas indicated that their purpose was “rising the standard of labor in the zone, surpassing and being surpassed by other indigenous groups that have the same capacities but lack an example and stimulus.”11 The original patrimony of the newly constituted Granja Carhuas was 1,000 ewes, coming from a handful of family flocks. Anacleto himself supplied 375 ewes, while the comunero Regis Gallupi provided 210. Most comuneros, including Alberto Carhuas, Mateo Panduro, and Marcelo Bedoya, contributed between twenty-five and one hundred ewes. More interesting, women actively participated and became stockholders of the Carhuas granja, supplying flocks of ten to fifty ewes.12 The total number of ewes from the Carhuas flocks was five hundred, and thus counted as 50 percent of the total patrimony. Besides ewes, the Carhuas purchased an unspecified number of stallions. According to a simple scheme of capital composition, granja revenues had to be distributed at the end of every fiscal year, matching the contributions of every family flock. Before distributing revenues, 10 percent of the profits were reserved for infrastructural and technical improvements of the granja— including purchasing rams, increasing the genetic pool of granja herds— and 10 percent was retained as collective capital. The granja operated for a period of ten years. All lambs born within this period automatically increased the capital of the granja. Any partner, after two years, was free to redeem their capital in accord with their original contribution, or they could transfer their capital to other partners. All partners named a caporal de campo, or field supervisor, who covered their wage with profits from the granja businesses. Ultimately, comuneros as partners of the newly constituted communal enterprise commissioned the Junta de Industria Lanar to write an internal statute for the granja. The enhancement of sheep-based communal economies through the establishment of granjas became a quintessential component of a

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larger economic project. Behind the promotion of communal development, the state aimed to foster an ideal of agricultural industrialism. The state developed greater interest in fostering communal economies when there were major shifts in the international prices of high-quality wool. Not until 1946 and 1947 did wool prices rise from 115.46 soles per quintal to 146.92 soles per quintal,13 an important recovery in the post–World War II global economy. In comparison with wool market conditions during the war, the new international wool market demanded high-quality wool for refined production. Consequently, the Junta de Industria Lanar aimed to respond to this surge in the international demand for wool, and results were encouraging. In 1946, the total production of wool reached 148,086 kilograms, 59 percent of which was superior quality.14 The internal wool buyers had also been purchasing national wool, with the same preference for high-grade fiber. No demand for low-quality wool existed, internationally or domestically, something that the Junta attributed to the oversupply of this variety of wool during the World War II years.15 Yet the Peruvian wool industry, through the association of the Junta and the granjas comunales, was now able to deal with shifting market conditions. In order to maximize financial and technological aid for comunidades and their granjas, the Junta established agrarian educational facilities for comuneros. The central sierra thus became a focal laboratory for such painstaking efforts. This project of expanding agrarian education networks included the foundation of rural schools where comunidades could learn about modern animal husbandry. In Sicaya, the lower Mantaro Valley in the central sierra, a student from its rural school received funding to travel to a granja modelo in Puno. Three students of the Escuela Nacional de Agricultura in Lima were sent to different granjas to complete their fieldwork as part of their university education. Finally, the Junta financially supported the Facultad de Medicina Veterinaria and the Instituto Nacional de Biología Andina in conducting research on sheep fertility throughout the comunidades of the central sierra.16 The quest for high-quality wool as a symbol of modern grazing economies and developed comunidades had created an unprecedented network of knowledge circulation, bringing together the state, market, and communal domains. In the years to come, the central sierra’s networks of wool production and circulation expanded. Junín wool entered the markets of Great Britain, the United States, France, and Belgium. Ondores and many other Indigenous comunidades from the central sierra participated in a revival of the global wool trade. As war and postwar conditions reshaped the terms

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of wool trade, national and local structures of production responded to the challenges presented by shifting global markets. Primarily through the Junta de Industria Lanar, the Peruvian state furthered projects of rural development beyond granjas comunales. On September 3, 1943, a group of deputies led by Ernesto More—a representative of Huancané, Puno—presented a legal project in their chamber. According to their diagnosis, while the Peruvian agrarian economy had flourished over the last few years, such prosperity had brought the countryside to a highly unequal “heterogeneous situation” in which most of the population— Indigenous in origin—did not have the means to exploit the land they possessed or simply did not have any lands at all.17 The “incorporation” of Indigenous populations, More argued, was impossible without the enactment of an integral plan to solve the distressing problem of unequal land ownership. Countries that refused to dramatically alter their material structures in times of peace, More asserted, would be unprepared for the challenges of the new rising global political economy. As early as 1943, More had inadvertently become a champion of the first state visions of agrarian reform. The deputies requested ten million soles from the national budget, primarily to expropriate lands and facilitate their subdivision and distribution among landless Indigenous comunidades. In discussing the feasibility of agrarian reform, More and the deputies envisioned a colonizing model of Indigenous settlement to complement expropriation and subdivision, to expand the limited agrarian frontier of the country.18 More and other deputies worried about the potential decrease in the productivity of grazing lands. While agricultural land retains productivity when subdivided and parceled, making family-based crop economies and small-scale agriculture conceivable upon direct distribution of land through agrarian reform, grazing and herding required concentration of land and vast extensions of pastures. Hence, More’s project also raised the possibility of agrarian reform without direct distribution of land. Besides land expropriations, the requested state funds could be used for supplying newly constituted Indigenous groups and tenants with efficient technical aid through the promotion of an Instituto Rural Tecnológico Indígena. In technically training comunidades through granjas and other endeavors of agrarian industrialism, More’s proposal required financial sustainability, including tax-based budgetary increases, according to the economic possibilities of the fiscal reserves—as galvanized by the revenues of agricultural and grazing industries—and the necessities of the Indigenous comunidades.

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More’s first agrarian reform project received considerable attention. A report submitted by Manuel Gallagher, the director of Indigenous affairs, about the progress of the granjas shortly after More’s proposal, asserted that while establishing these granjas, some minor expropriations of rural estates had taken place.19 Furthermore, Gallagher urged the immediate approval of More’s project and the assignment of a direct budgetary allotment to further expropriation processes. The Comisión Pro-Indígena of the Chamber of Deputies responded to More’s project and Gallagher’s claim. On October 27, 1943, the commission enacted a law addressing the problem of land and its role in the “incorporation of the aboriginal population into active national life.”20 In responding to this central question, the Comisión Pro-Indígena asserted the immediate necessity of agrarian reform. The defense of the comunidad gained through the recognition of communal juridical personhood and legal status in 1921 did not guarantee their active involvement in the national, agrarian-based process of industrialization. Sporadic expropriation and adjudication were equally insufficient. A systematic process of land redistribution and the galvanization of communal economies had to be enforced. In foreseeing another rearrangement of rural economies and the role of comunidades, the Comisión Pro-Indígena looked to the United States and Mexico as pivotal models for the future of the Peruvian state vis-à-vis rural and Indigenous populations. In fact, the first Inter-American Indigenista Congress of Pátzcuaro, in 1940, established a hemispheric consensus about how rural issues could be resolved through congressional and legal means. The Comisión Pro-Indígena’s project had more capitalist-oriented goals than More’s original proposal. Beyond directly benefiting the Indigenous comunidades through land redistribution and the expansion of the agrarian frontier, the commission intended to promote the population growth in agrarian regions, employing modern technologies in agricultural activities, satisfying basic national consumption needs by reducing subsistence expenses, enhancing the exportation of agricultural commodities, increasing fiscal resources, and enlarging the public treasury as the consequence of an overall improvement of the national agricultural industry, ultimately stimulating internal consumption by rural populations while consolidating an internal market and boosting the national economy.21 In other words, Peru faced a new stage of modern capitalist agricultural industrialism through the enhancement of comunidad-based central economic planning.

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The terms of the Comisión Pro-Indígena’s project show how the state envisioned the modernization of the countryside and comunidades. As a first step, the state needed to acquire rustic estates—whether inhabited or vacant—for organized labor and the technical exploitation of agricultural land centers “based on the uses and customs of the cooperative character of indigenous comunidad.”22 Second, these labor and exploitation centers needed constant technical support to exploit the lands, including seeds, fertilizers, and purebred animals. Third, all these centers required supervision by state institutions to preserve, transport, and trade the products from these centers. Finally, all comunidades subject to this project seemingly needed to be automatically recognized to attain legal personhood and, as far as possible, receive assistance with preexistent legal problems with other landholders, whether neighboring comunidades or hacendados. Different provinces and authorities responded favorably to the project. The deputies of Sayán, in the highlands of Lima, believed that this law could be the final solution to the problem of the people of their town, the ultimate solution for the “future of a race.”23 Representatives of the comunidades of Huillacunca, Tarhuahuata, Huancho, Jarata Quispe Romero, Prata, Huacicuyo, Quishuarán, Chaya, Machacmarca, Totorani, Calbapani, Tithue, Antacahua, Asangarillo, Manaipa, Balsapata, Huariccuyo, Cecicasco, Yanaaco, Alrededor Pueblo, and several other comunidades from different regions of the country also telegraphed their approval, emphasizing the importance of the project by “enlightening the dangerous social moment [World War II] that the world was going through.”24 The implementation of this project had mixed results. In upcoming years, politicians and statesmen continued to push agrarian reform, often through the colonizing alternative. In 1953, Luis E. Galván, a senator for Ayacucho, exposed the oxymoronic necessity of regulating the immeasurable migratory movements of disenfranchised Indigenous peoples in two directions.25 First, Galván proposed constraining population flows toward Lima, Arequipa, and Trujillo, because newcomers had created an “economic catastrophe.”26 New migrants lived in shantytowns on the hills surrounding such cities, which were creating hovels and slums in the cities while leaving the productive countryside unattended. Second, he proposed rechanneling migration toward the rainforest and the region known as montaña, a space that—according to Galván—had been historically conquered by the Indigenous inhabitants. This second aspect of regulating migrations, sending seemingly impoverished comuneros to the montaña region under state instruction and sponsorship, constituted

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the greatest effort to maximize the rural potential for the purposes of industrializing the country and expanding the agricultural frontier.27 Institutional Transformations and Acculturation

Wool trade and communal developments continued to promote state transformations of institutional structures, which enhanced the placement of comunidades as integral components of the state and essential elements of the human geography of the countryside. The Office of Indigenous Affairs, once part of the Ministerio de Fomento, became dependent on the Ministry of Justice and Labor. Having fully occupied the sphere of development and become economically and socially legible for the state, Indigenous populations—as comunidades—were entering the intertwined realms of justice and labor. Now with a greater role as the agricultural and grazing labor of an emerging agrarian capitalist economy, the comunidades required enhanced legal mechanisms for their incorporation, the state believed. Engineers and engineering came to complement lawyers and legal frameworks, articulating state powers and local dynamics. The Office of Indigenous Affairs hired dozens of engineers to put together one of the most ambitious goals of the mid-twentiethcentury Peruvian state: the creation of an accurate rural cadaster. In redefining agrarian economies, particularly communal grazing activities in granjas, territorial making and delimitation became a crucial quest. Beyond the borders and margins of comunidades, institutional adaptation of the state also centered upon the question of Indigenous housing to promote agrarian industrialization. In 1949, the prominent intellectual and state maker Enrique Gamio had reported on the physical conditions of Indigenous housing in the Peruvian highlands and their moral consequences for the redemption of their residents. Echoing eugenic arguments about indigeneity and domestic infrastructure, Gamio implored the state to start “surveying rural housing,”28 given the importance of households for the improvement of labor conditions and workers available for the modernization of grazing economies. According to this report, Indigenous housing was generally poor and lacked basic hygienic conditions, though with some contrasts. In the lowlands, Gamio argued, rural housing reflected a “mestizo style,”29 while the highlands remained architecturally “Indigenous” and used stones, mud, and straw as primary materials. “Indigenous architecture” also favored cultural behaviors that negatively affected the nation in economic terms. Impoverished

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infrastructure promoted practices such as the servinacuy, or traditional concubinage, a detrimental practice for the constitution of family values, largely functional for the industriousness of the comunidad. “Ignorance,” Gamio asserted, “builds the shack of the Indian.” Another two projects had begun to address these conditions. On the one hand, the Brigadas de Culturización, launched by Manuel Prado in May 1939, consisted of teams of teachers commissioned to travel to the Peruvian highlands to educate, with moral connotations, Indigenous populations.30 On the other hand, private companies such as the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation had sponsored working rural housing. Gamio suggested turning the first one into a sanitary, rather than educational, campaign and to follow the model of corporation-sponsored, working rural housing to improve Indigenous material living conditions. Gamio also evoked conditions in Argentina, Spain, and the United States as examples to follow in terms of legislation on rural housing.31 “Protecting the Indian,” Gamio concluded, “was not enough” without surveying the domestic realm of rural laborers. In turn, this project became the state’s first effort to enter and govern the household realm within comunidades. In 1946, the Office of Indigenous Affairs raised national awareness about the first Inter-American Indigenista Congress, held in Pátzcuaro, Mexico. After the congress, attendees and organizers decided to hold the next meeting in the city of Cusco, therefore bringing the Indigenous question into Peru in an age of industrial promotion of the rural countryside. The prominent Peruvian anthropologist and historian as well as indigenista intellectual, Luis E. Valcárcel, was charged with organizing the upcoming event. On May 15, 1946, Valcárcel led the creation of the Instituto Indigenista Peruano under the auspices of the Ministry of Justice and Labor.32 Members of the newly founded institute included reputed scholars and intellectuals from different fields, such as Julio C. Tello, Alberto Giesecke, José Sabogal, Uriel García, and Eduardo Samudio. One of the most important members, Carlos Monge, assumed the presidency of the commission of hygiene and sanitation. In the years after the foundation of the Instituto Indigenista Peruano, a group of indigenista intellectuals continued to present the problem of the Indian as a sanitary issue. Indigenous housing remained a focal point of interest for the state.33 However, the sanitary nature of the Indigenous problem eventually became more economically and socially holistic. In 1947, Valcárcel sent a report to Monge to recommend studying the best way to deal with issues pertaining to Indigenous problems. Some of these issues included communal property and the adequate use of land, necessary legislation

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for the creation of a separate legal charter for Indigenous comunidades, the improvement of public health conditions, and the establishment of an Institute of Anthropology to best address these questions.34 The agenda of the upcoming second Congreso Indigenista reflected these and other concerns.35 Monge, named director of the Instituto de Biología Andina, surveyed many of the projects addressed by the congress, with Valcárcel as the leading figure of state-sponsored development of the Indigenous population. Valcárcel eventually became the minister of education shortly after the foundation of the Instituto Indigenista Peruano, and he promoted the creation of the Instituto de Estudios Etnológicos as an important institution of communal governance. Indigenismo and Valcárcel brought the attention of American cultural and economic anthropologists to the comunidad and the central sierra, and their means of life and death, thus reinventing the notions of modernity and development.36 A Disciplinary Conquest

The relationship between the United States and rural Latin America was mediated through the Department of State’s Interdepartmental Committee on Scientific and Cultural Cooperation (ICSCC). This office, a short-term program during the hemispheric buildup to World War II, institutionally and financially supported initiatives to improve knowledge of “the cultures of contemporary peoples.”37 Such peoples inhabited places perceived to be outside “the rapid-moving and complex trends of modern culture.”38 As such, the office aimed to promote the adaptation, incorporation, and acculturation of rural people. The ICSCC supported the Institute of Social Anthropology of the Smithsonian Institution, an office that collaborated closely with the Peruvian Ministry of Education and the indigenista-run Instituto de Estudios Etnológicos, to survey the central sierra to balance the existing knowledge of the Indigenous peoples of Peru.39 The survey of the central sierra was commissioned to Harry Tschopik Jr., a prolific American ethnologist and anthropologist who published many studies about the Indigenous societies of Peru, particularly about the region of Chucuito in Puno.40 By the time of Tschopik’s mission, the central sierra had been the subject of many surveys and state-sponsored studies, becoming a geographically, demographically, socially, culturally, and economically well-known region. As part of the knowledge gathered about the central sierra, structures of land ownership and economic

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infrastructure reflected the particularities of the region’s relationship to the larger Andean highlands. On the one hand, the hacienda system coexisted with communal land in complementary ways, framing comunidades “in a state of change,” which implied a cultural exchange resulting from coexistence. On the other hand, existing roads and railroads had turned the region into a commercially dynamic space with corporations enhancing native economic development.41 Thus, the central sierra represented a place where US-sponsored forms of “modern civilization” could emerge. Provinces to be surveyed in the central sierra included Huancavelica, Ayacucho, Junín, and Pasco. The study centered on the town of Sicaya, in the lower region of the Mantaro Valley. Sicaya was selected to illustrate the ultimate goals of the entire commission. Sicaya was considered a mestizo town, a place of social, racial, and cultural miscegenation with developmental consequences deriving from this blend. Comunidades like Sicaya were “less picturesque, perhaps, than the colorful and largely self-sufficient indio towns of the south [but] are of more importance to Peru in that they take an active part in the national economy and participate more fully in the life of the country.”42 The value of Sicaya, and arguably of other comunidades of the central sierra, was the degree of cultural, and therefore, economic acculturation. Hence, these comunidades had integrated into what the amalgam of both state and anthropology considered a modern way of life, a higher status than that of other Indigenous comunidades. The report described the region as geographically diverse, positing certain limits to the treatment of the “central sierra” as a holistic category. The physical characteristics determined at least two different environments: the lower areas in the valleys, in which agriculture was the dominant economic activity, and the upper region of the puna, where ranching constituted the main mode of production.43 Such fundamental environmental differences enforced divisions and distinctions at cultural and ecological levels. Comunidades were hierarchically cast in terms of their degree of “cultural development,” from “primitive villages” such as Choclococha and Huaccha in the upper puna to the “progressive and industrious mestizo towns Chupaca and Muquiyauyo” in the valleys.44 Socially and politically, the report explained how the region had been marked by two interrelated crucial developments in the early twentieth century. On the one hand was the impact of “modern mechanized civilization,” meaning the arrival of great capitalist mining corporations.45 On the other hand were the “leftist political trends” that emerged parallel to capitalist development in the central sierra by the 1920s—through

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processes such as unionization and formation of labor movements—and that had strongly influenced the politics of comunidades in this period.46 While unionization had been presented as detrimental to the making of industrial Peru, the alleged leftist influence upon comunidades and their social and political organization did not threaten the overall westernized, modern future of rural regions. In informing the state, anthropology implicitly foretold the progressive embrace of capitalism by comunidades. Demographically, the situation was far more complex. The report presented the region as not solely inhabited by indios but also increasingly populated by mestizos.47 According to Tschopik, this coexistence challenged indio-mestizo identification and differentiation. Phenotypically, the differences were not apparent, and therefore “racial” frameworks had little to no significance in defining their identities. Culturally, the distinctions were evident in terms of self-identification and external recognition. Linguistic differences, however, mattered little since both Quechua and Spanish were used interchangeably and often combined. Instead, the degree to which comunidades embraced modern Western practices separated indio and mestizo towns. Elements that defined whether a comunidad had embraced modern practices, despite many regional variations, included whether its members chewed coca, walked barefoot, prepared food with native techniques, and domesticated small animals such as guinea pigs and rabbits within the household, and—of particular importance—whether a given comunidad owned land or its comuneros remained manual laborers. Economically, the pivotal point of analysis was the existence of internal class divisions within comunidades. The report underscored that most towns, villages, and comunidades had a mestizo “aristocracy” and a large campesino population.48 Individuals within each class experienced little social mobility, though communal life ultimately enforced peaceful coexistence as a foundational social norm. Conversely, predominantly mestizo towns leaned toward “classless” structures.49 Peons and landless day laborers attained limited levels of social mobility, mostly through marriage with a landed mestizo woman. Life in Sicaya was presented as socially harmonious and devoid of the class conflict found in other mining towns and settlements. From a regional perspective, Junín was presented as economically advanced. Contrasting widespread perceptions of the upper highlands as an area predominantly driven by Indigenous economies and therefore backward, upland ranching had turned the provinces into one of the most economically dynamic areas of the countryside. Wool production

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from Junín dominated, along with that of Puno, in terms of the commodity’s total national production. Lowland, primarily family-based agriculture, lagged behind—ranking fourth in the national agrarian economy—though certain crops, such as wheat, held a significant economic importance for domestic markets.50 Mining remained the most important economic activity in Junín, and centers of production such as La Oroya, Morococha, Yauli, and Yauricocha were pivotal economic centers of both the Peruvian and the Latin American mining industries. Huancayo, the core of the Mantaro Valley, controlled trade for the larger Junín region. Indians and mestizos alike attended the feria in Calle Real every Sunday, engaging in the market and further fostering the economic dynamism of the province. The socio-spatial distribution of the Sunday feria deserves some attention. According to Tschopik, “the people in the market represent[ed] a fairly complete cross section of the population of highland Peru.”51 Whether indios, mestizos, miners, hacendados, shepherds, rich, poor, women, or men, everyone attended the market to buy and sell goods, both through bartering and using cash. Every block of Calle Real was organized by product, corresponding to their respective provinces and regions, thus making the feria a microcosm of the entire Junín area. Tschopik also observed that it was increasingly occupied by people from outside the Junín region, and therefore correctly asserted that “the native market [was] rapidly becoming a national market” offering a “glimpse of the future of highland Peru.”52 In the upper highlands, which Tschopik referred to as Cerro de Pasco, pastoralism had survived, particularly in the regions surrounding Lake Junín. However, mining capitalism had also shaped the space and social relations of production. While prior to 1900 low copper prices had discouraged foreign investment, by the time Tschopik surveyed the region, Cerro de Pasco had become a global center of mining capitalism, primarily because of the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation. Comunidades that revolved around copper mining, according to Tschopik, had benefited from the material improvements brought by foreign capitalism. Consequently, people had partially abandoned pastoralism in favor of wage labor, as social services such as housing and hospitals had become available for the average comunero. Rural urbanism, meaning the physical design of provincial towns throughout the countryside, illustrated this economic hybridity by presenting “hotels, office buildings, and motion picture theaters [standing] side by side with colonial houses, ancient churches, and dark, smoky picanterías.”53

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Finally, Tschopik also explored the socioeconomic conditions of two upper sierra comunidades in detail, Huayllay and Huaychao, both within the provincial administration of Cerro de Pasco. He believed the overall Lake Junín region had seen “cultural contact and . . . processes of acculturation that ha[d] differed markedly from those which ha[d] prevailed in other regions of the central sierra.”54 Both comunidades had internal class divisions. New opportunities in the mining labor market for both indios and mestizos had “upset the established social equilibrium,”55 nourishing social distress as class differentiation strengthened. While Tschopik labeled Huayllay comuneros as mestizos, he understood the complexity of their economically grounded ethnic and cultural identities. Huaychao had even clearer internal differentiation, whereby indio shepherds worked as laborers for mestizo land tenants. Politically, Huayllay and Huaychao also differed. While Huayllay had a junta comunal, following the state policies concerning communal organization, Huaychao had a “traditional” organization—one that fell outside the state policies concerning communal politics—of appointed authorities occupied exclusively by mestizo residents. Tschopik’s conclusions, and those of the rest of the Smithsonian team, heavily influenced the future of rural policy making in the central sierra. Among the ideas his investigation challenged was the myth of a “uniformly primitive, backward, and non-progressive” indio.56 The survey established that levels of acculturation varied among comunidades, largely depending on their location in what the author called a “stratification of culture.”57 While coastal Peru had already been “westernized,” highland valleys—following the patterns of colonial settlement—had also been partly “modernized.” It was only in the very upper regions of the highlands, particularly the central sierra, where a “pre-modern” Indigenous shepherd dominated the landscape and where indigeneity had to be transformed if the countryside were to become a space of economic contribution for the overall progress of the nation. Blossoming Comunidades

More than twenty years had passed since the moment when the Peruvian state—then under the administration of Augusto B. Leguía— recognized the juridical existence of Indigenous comunidades in the rural countryside. Now rural populations entered the state’s jurisdiction by voluntarily seeking official recognition. Their very existence had to

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be sanctioned through a series of legal mechanisms, largely described in the previous chapter. The rural cadaster of 1947 illustrated how vast the human geography of comunidades and the rural countryside had become since the recognition of communal legal status.58 In two decades, the state had processed 1,373 applications for communal recognition and also identified another 2,993 comunidades in the process of receiving legal status. Junín alone was home to 271 Indigenous comunidades, ranking as the foremost province with villages attaining communal status. More interesting, the rural cadaster presented a complex image of the Peruvian highlands, one in which varying forms of agrarian structures of land property coexisted—caseríos, estancias, aldeas, fundos, and haciendas still constituted the greatest proportion of land, but also where comunidades were growing exponentially in number and becoming more visible as years progressed. State surveillance of the countryside allowed comunidades to be identified before they became “recognized”—or granted legal status— making state recognition the last phase of a larger process to create a comunidad. The process included identifying both demographic data and geographic location, and establishing a complex system of hierarchization of agrarian agents that populated the Peruvian countryside and the central sierra that fostered a rational image of these areas. Such a rational image—partly real and partly projected by the state upon comunidades—lay at the core of an agrarian know-how promoted by the Peruvian state and increasingly acquired by legal comunidades, all in years in which development and modernization at the rural level became pivotal for the process of nation and state building. State legislation also encouraged the formation of some “imagined” communities, groups of people who pursued the rights and privileges of communal organization by following state directives established for Indigenous comunidades. Many of these communities emerged in the central sierra. On July 19, 1943, people of alleged non-Indigenous origin founded Patria y Bandera in Chupaca, inside Mantaro Valley. According to their basic platform, they aimed to “dignify the patria and the [national] flag.”59 They planned to establish cells within every comunidad in which their presence seemed necessary, to inculcate patriotic feelings among the Indigenous population. A slightly different organization, the Sociedad Civilizadora Chongos Alto, was founded on January 14, 1944. As opposed to Patria y Bandera, this association had a communal origin—and allegedly some of their members were Indigenous, mostly

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“notable [members of the community] and the youth from [Chongos Alto].”60 The organization wanted to turn their towns into “cultured and civilized” places by promoting, for example, Spanish as their official language. Among many arguments, the members of this society claimed to be of good conduct with no criminal records, to have held public positions in the past, and to “have been married in democracy.”61 In spite of their seemingly altruistic goals, neither group received authorization to pursue their objectives. However, some comunidades—even “real” ones—vanished or became ghostly. On November 1, 1951, Manuel D. Faura, the senator for the Department of Junín, presented a claim to the representative of the Ministry of Labor, Manuel B. Llosa, and Senator Luis Enrique Galván.62 Faura claimed that the comunidades of Huaynacancha and Oroya Vieja had been seriously affected in past decades by smoke emissions from the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation’s smelter in La Oroya. Huaynacanchinos had been forced to migrate to other areas and comunidades upon receiving monetary compensation. A similar compensation was given to Oroya Antigua’s comuneros, which allowed them to purchase two haciendas, Cari and Queta. Neither of these comunidades existed anymore in their “original” or “historical” form. However, according to Faura, people from these areas still claimed to be legal representatives of such comunidades. Faura argued for excluding both comunidades from the regional register and enforcing all necessary measures in order to prevent similar situations. The Ministry of Labor eventually backed Faura’s claim. A notification that was circulated among the prefects of Junín called for a lecture series directed toward legal representatives of Indigenous comunidades.63 Nevertheless, certain problems persisted. In December 1954, Alicia Blanco Montesinos was commissioned by Manuel Faura to organize the Asociación de Comunidades Indígenas del Perú Central.64 The commission and the presence of Blanco in Huancayo made local representatives of the Ministry of Government and Police uneasy. Blanco and Faura were reminded by the minister of labor and Indigenous affairs, Victor Casagrande, that no meetings of Indigenous peoples were permitted without the authorization of appropriate authorities, in accord with a supreme decree dated October 1942. Representatives of different provinces had previously criticized this decree because it created “the legal character of the antidemocratic concept of racial inferiority,” both a colonial legacy as well as an ideal of “the aggressive and imperialistic politics of Nazism.”65

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In spite of these criticisms, the decree remained in place as the state continued to enforce Indigenous mobilization from within its structure, other wise enhancing the legibility of comunidades. Communal legibility followed increasingly specific discretions and guidelines. As time progressed, the state sanctioned the existence of comunidades through increasingly limiting legal mechanisms, policy, and power devices. While the state had initially recognized claims of immemorial rights as a source of legitimacy for asserting communal existence, by 1951, only property titles and maps could prove the validity of both social existence and communal land rights. Property titles remained elusive, as they referred to an undetermined type of documents a given comunidad could attain to assert their historical trajectory. Property title documents often had colonial origins, which made them both potentially challenging and subversive for comunidad, state, and neighboring landholders. Such documents were sometimes altered, forged, or physically mutilated, due either to confiscation or accidental loss. Therefore, maps created by the Office of Indigenous Affairs became the main source of legitimacy for communal recognition. According to the Office of Indigenous Affairs, the Department of Junín hosted the largest number of comunidades that had acquired full legal status, either through the presentation of titles or the elaboration of an official map. Once the official recognition was granted and the legal status of the comunidad was fully sanctioned, communal structures of power were required to write an internal statute to regulate their administrative structures and larger socioeconomic lives in order to comply with the regulations state enforced upon Indigenous populations. Once drafted, the comunidad had to submit the statute to the Office of Indigenous Affairs as a final step in sealing the legibility of the comunidad. The dissection and careful scrutiny of a statute unveils the inner core of the comunidad as a consolidated state ideal of the human geography of the Peruvian sierra. An Internal Statute

According to local accounts, the comunidad of San Juan de Ondores—similar to most comunidades in rural Peru—had a pre-Columbian legacy. Comuneros claimed to have inherited the ayllus that existed hundreds of years before in the region of the upper central sierra.66 Documentally speaking, San Juan de Ondores’s history—like many other com-

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munal trajectories—is difficult to trace back beyond the late nineteenth century. In spite of their claim on the pre-Columbian and colonial origins of the village, San Juan de Ondores was “constituted” as a comunidad following the legislation established for framing communal existence. Ondores was, according to the “general description” that opens their internal statute, “a comunidad with juridical and legal status, in virtue of the resolution of September 12, 1940.”67 While they presented their communal identity as immemorial, meaning tracing back beyond “history,” the statute acknowledged that the comunidad acquired its collective existence and legal status through state means.68 The comunidad also cited its possession of land. While Ondores drew on the same immemorial nature to assert communal land rights as the cultural and material inheritor of the pre-Columbian ayllus of the central sierra, the colonial nature of such rights seems clearer. The 39,417 hectares of land that Ondores claimed to possess came from a emphyteutic lease subscribed in 1707 in favor of Pablo Santiago Concha. This rental validated the legality and legitimacy of the land currently occupied by the comunidad, as well as 14,121 hectares in the possession of the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation, the famous rural estate of the central sierra known as Atocsaico.69 Communal domains—established by physical boundaries with neighboring comunidades, haciendas, and private landholders—were sanctioned through official maps.70 In 1940, Luis M. Gamio, an engineer of the Ministry of Labor and Indigenous Affairs, was commissioned and dispatched to map the comunidad. In years to come, a question about the validity of Gamio’s work became central to the comunidad’s struggles. Within communal territories, all land was considered collective property while every comunero retained usufructuary rights upon such properties with “equality of rights and actions.”71 In defining a comunero, the statute asserted that all “natives and originarios” from Ondores were automatically considered such, without making any racial, social, economic, and gender distinctions. Men and women alike—regardless of their age—were considered comuneros. The status of native, or natural, came through having been born in the comunidad, whereas the status of originario referred to descendants of past comuneros. However, these conditions often conflicted. The statute defined descendants born outside the comunidad as a group of people who could be accepted back into the communal core upon requesting their reincorporation as full comuneros. Besides birth and kinship, social relations presented alternatives for becoming a comunero. Marriage was one of them, as outsiders—

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typically men—who married established comuneras could attain such a status. As the statute did not elaborate on the opposite situation (female outsiders marrying male comuneros) while keeping the lack of gender divisions about the rank of comunero in perspective, this precision on the gender composition of exogenous marriage reinforced patriarchal understandings of comunidades. As agrarian frontiers of comunidades also constrained societal consolidation, bringing male outsiders into the communal structures through marriage allowed the annexation of whatever inherited lands they possessed, a rare situation among female comuneras. Voluntary inclusion in the comunidad provided another route to becoming a comunero. Any person, regardless of gender or age, could declare their willingness to live in the comunidad while “acquiring real estate and solemnly promising to abide by the obligations and customs of the comunidad.”72 Ultimately, a registro de comuneros, which the communal assembly also submitted to the Office of Indigenous Affairs, compiled the identity of every properly sanctioned, legitimate, and legal comunero. All comuneros had the same benefits, rights, and obligations, and any could be elected as a local authority. Distinguished members, namely elected authorities and members of the junta directiva, received special honors and prerogatives. Every year, the communal assembly received requests from people willing to become comuneros. Every four years, upon the inauguration of a new communal administration, the registro de comuneros had to be refined and renewed.73 The rights of comuneros included receiving vacant lands, usufructuary rights of communal pastures for their herds, house-building aid, legal assistance, rights to elect and be elected as local authorities and actively participate in the communal assembly, and otherwise receive aid in the formation of their own flocks, given the importance of sheep for the entire comunidad. Obligations included donating for the “defense of communal interests” and the “promotion of local progress” through education and social assistance,74 working in collective duties, carrying out orders given by the communal assembly, participating in the vigilance of communal boundaries, providing mandatory assistance to the assembly, and accepting their roles as authorities if elected. Upon turning sixty years old, all comuneros, regardless of gender, were released from all communal duties except for the donation; however, the next generation assumed the responsibility once a younger comunero started herding the family flock. Comuneros also received penalties and fines for certain forms of misconduct. Failure to participate in communal assemblies was consid-

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ered a serious grievance, and consistent nonattendance led to expulsion from the comunidad and the dispossession of all rights, including those of land ownership. Transferring individual benefits to another comunero was another serious accusation, while allowing an outsider to use and profit from communal property entailed even graver consequences. Suing the comunidad or their representatives, and therefore trespassing upon the charter of the Office of Indigenous Affairs, was considered a threat to communal interests. While state legislation related to communal affairs shaped communal life from without, justice for comuneros resided within the juridical, social, and political limits of the comunidad. Seeking justice outside the comunidad was limited to severe, often criminal grievances; it was a collective decision that depended on the communal assembly. The greatest penalty a person could suffer was losing the status of comunero—whether permanently or temporarily—and the loss of all benefits thereof. The economic organization of the comunidad is equally revealing. The inner core of its economic life was defined as a “communal agricultural regime,” with ranching the dominant activity. Internal structures of land property preserved both large communal pastures and small private holdings, as the comunidad understood that ranching shaped space and land ownership and preserved communal exploitation of existent natural pastures as a pivotal goal. Avoiding the rise of “gamonalillos,” 75 comuneros with the material capacity to behave as mini-hacendados inside the comunidad, was equally essential. Land accumulation in the hands of a few powerful comuneros threatened poorer comuneros. The statute also addressed the issue of internal differentiation. Communal exploitation of lands and pastures would prevail in spite of the economic hierarchies from within. Specific regulations on the communal economic regime soothed any bad feelings about social differentiation. Every registered household-leading comunero, male or female, could maintain one shepherd, thirty sheep, five cattle, and five horses or mules in communal pastures without paying a fee. If comuneros wanted to raise additional animals, they paid a fee to the caja comunal, a collective fund trust that enhanced communal economic and legal endeavors. Fees paid for holding enlarged herds on communal pastures ranged from twenty to thirty cents per month. Land tenure issues were even more critical. Sales and every other form of land alienation were strictly prohibited without a previous claim for “public or private necessity,”76 meaning that comuneros could file a

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request for usufruct of a given portion of land either for themselves or the entire comunidad. If the requested land was private, the claim was dealt with in the communal legal sphere. If the land was communal, the Office of Indigenous Affairs intervened and had to grant authorization. External interventions were also enforced if the land in question did not belong to the comunidad yet, as these questions also concerned neighboring comunidades or private landholders. Absent comuneros who had acquired lands elsewhere, and whose children did not contribute to the comunidad, automatically lost their land. Land devoted to worship, schools, or “enlargement of pantheons” was declared inalienable. Land inheritance followed precise rules. A comunero’s death without a will resulted in communal appropriation of whatever land was left behind. If the late comunero had earned, received, been granted, or acquired land in whatever form, the comunidad automatically redeemed those lands. Female inheritors received special treatment. While they retained whatever land they inherited, comuneras had to use it for grazing and could not under any circumstances sell or rent such lands. Furthermore, their land was subject to collective usufruct should communal needs arise. In those cases, land use generated a rent in favor of widows and other female inheritors. Full land rights were granted to comuneras whose male companions were appointed as state officials or were declared physically incapable. One striking aspect of the internal economic organization of the comunidad dealt with the formation of the granja comunal, the communally operated enterprise promoted by President Manuel Prado and dedicated to the administration of communal pastures and other properties— including herds—funded with communal contributions through the caja comunal and associated with the state-run Junta de Industria Lanar.77 The communal assembly held direct control of the granja, and a “trustworthy shepherd” supervised it daily.78 The granja comunal engaged regional, national, and international markets representing the comunidad as a whole. Besides trading with internal and external markets through selling chusco sheep and wool accordingly, the granja comunal focused on improving husbandry practices and breeding communal herds of sheep. Purebred sheep were reserved for the insemination of communal flocks. Half-blood sheep of medium quality could be requested by comuneros to enhance their family herds. Newlyweds could buy ewes to form their family flock if they had not received any as inheritance. Ewes and lambs as wedding gifts were wholeheartedly encouraged instead of “liquor

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[and] coca.”79 At all times, a spirit of cooperation—referred to as “Incan principles”80—was encouraged for the benefit of the granja comunal and other matters of cooperative need.81 The statute also defined the cultural regime of the comunidades. “Supporting the state efforts” in terms of primary education was deemed vital.82 The comunidad and state institutions cooperated directly to create new schools. A “communal library” promoted agrarian knowledge, particularly pertaining to sheepherding.83 Communal efforts also sustained a health post for first aid services, demanding direct aid from the Ministry of Public Health. In order to have trained staff assigned to the health post, the comunidad proposed educating one of their orphans in the Escuela de Enfermería de Lima to become a nurse who could also be  trained in veterinary sciences to treat domestic animals. Furthermore, all comuneros whose children had distinguished themselves during their secondary education could request a communal loan for higher education at major national universities. Female comuneras interested in becoming schoolteachers and social workers received particular attention.84 Organizationally, beyond the assembly, the comunidad had a highly hierarchical internal constitution with many specialized administrative posts. The community and state internally and externally recognized the junta directiva as the superior instrument of internal executive government. The junta directiva was composed of a presidente (comunal), two vicepresidentes, a secretario de actas,85 a secretario de correspondencia, a tesorero recolector,86 a tesorero contador, a fiscal—considered the highest “juridical and moral” authority87—five officers (charity, culture, social work, hygiene, and public works), and four inspectors (bridges and roads, morality and public works, fields and pastures and local ornament, and leisure). The statute finished with a major conclusion. Should conflicts among comuneros arise, if neither the assembly nor the junta directiva or any of its members are able to resolve the conflict, all of the comunidad acknowledged the authority of the state—and specifically the jurisdiction of the Office of Indigenous Affairs—to intervene in internal matters. Communal harmony should persist at all costs, and the route toward progress could not be hampered. Upon receiving communal approval, the statute draft was submitted to the División de Organización Social y Económica of the Office of Indigenous Affairs. Alfonzo de Manzano Ganoza, the chief of this division, sealed and signed the project and

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authorized its publication. Every comunero received a copy. The state and comunidad had finally reached a social contract. Communal Conciliation, Navigating the State

On May 20, 1942, the personero and presidente of San Juan de Ondores negotiated a land agreement with a local hacendado named Luis D. Córdova. The settlement avoided a tedious and expensive trial over the land of Chulpán and Cataycancha, previously acquired by Córdova through a purchase from Luis Bao y Barreda in 1938. The regional inspector of Indigenous affairs, Manuel Velasco Núñez, witnessed and sanctioned the negotiation. This settlement, known as an acta de conciliación, a legal mechanism put into place by the Office of Indigenous Affairs, promoted legal settlements between comunidades and private landowners, particularly in cases of potentially lengthy trials over land possession.88 The terms of the settlement between Ondores and Córdova reveal important general characteristics of this conciliation process. First and foremost, the settlement recognized the rights of the comunidad to  the pastures as legitimate, sanctioned by both the state mediator and the hacendado. The presence of the former, a state representative from the Office of Indigenous Affairs, was pivotal for the agreement’s validity. The hacendado received monetary compensation after returning the land to the comunidad. Córdova established the price through an appraisal conducted within six months after the signing of the settlement. During that time, the hacendado remained in possession of the land. The comunidad agreed to pay the appraised amount. To enforce the fulfillment of the settlement, both parties agreed to pay a penalty should they decide to challenge any of its clauses. Both parties assumed the administrative costs in equal proportion. They signed the document on June 24, 1942.89 Luis Córdova was not the sole proprietor of Chulpán y Cataycancha. Like many estates in the central sierra, the lands had been fractured into smaller properties, sold, transferred, inherited, and further divided. Descendants of Luis Bao y Barreda, the original tenant, also owned a portion. Ondores decided to consolidate and recover all these fragmented pieces of land. Along with the negotiation with Córdova, the comunidad also reached a parallel settlement with Francisco Osorio and his wife, Constanza Bao, daughter of Luis Bao y Barreda. They possessed part of the estate as well as the pastures known as Quiolocancha and Pucuscancha. The terms of the agreement differed slightly from those of

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the settlement with Córdova. While monetary compensation was contemplated—no appraisal was needed given that the community agreed to pay 3,240 soles—the settlement also included the incorporation of Osorio and Bao as comuneros, with full rights and duties.90 While the purchase of lands only pertained to Chulpán and Cataycancha, the comunidad gained collective rights to Quiolocancha and Pucuscancha. Should Osorio and Bao decide to leave the comunidad, they would have to pay compensation to comuneros for the years they used both estates. The community continued to expand in the following months. On October 9, representatives of Ondores achieved another conciliation and land sale with Córdova. Besides Chulpán and Cataycancha, Córdova and his wife, Segundina Chaccha, had purchased an estate called Yaculcancha Pachachaca from San Juan de Ondores comuneros Ramona, Lucía, and Isabel Pomachahua Surichaqui in 1937. Communal authorities intended to acquire this estate to further expand their frontier. Córdova agreed to sell the lands for 3,000 soles. Upon payment, Córdova delivered all property titles to the comunidad. They were all escrituras públicas between Córdova and the Pomachahua Surichaqui sisters.91 This particular settlement shows how communal land had been fractured by the late 1930s, and how the comunidad recovered those previously sold lands through a combination of acquisition and legal conciliation. This process of conciliation proved successful in settling arrangements with small hacendados. Ondores regained control and expanded its domains through legal, state-sanctioned mechanisms. However, legal conciliation did not allow the comunidad to address the Atocsaico question, the most important land issue for Ondores. Throughout its history—and dominant in its members’ collective memory—Ondores had struggled over the adjacent lands and pastures of this estate. The hacienda, which had some of the richest pastures of the entire central sierra, had passed through the hands of several agents and entities during the first decades of the twentieth century. By 1942, the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation had gained control of Atocsaico through its purchase as part of the properties of the former Sociedad Ganadera Junín. As described above, Ondores asserted its rights to Atocsaico based on the colonial emphyteutic lease. Nevertheless, the conciliation processes opened a new route for legal settlement in republican terms. On October 1, 1942, Luis F. Córdova, the attorney for the comunidad, presented a claim to the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation indicating a problem with the map that had been created by Luis M. Gamio two years before. According to Córdova, the Cerro de Pasco Copper

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Corporation had purchased only the lands of the Atocsaico hacienda, but the boundaries between the hacienda and the communal pastures did not correspond to the limits established on property titles.92 A commission surveyed the property markers in the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation’s titles. When the commission reached the landmark known as Yanamachay, disagreement broke out. According to the comunidad, former tenants of the Atocsaico hacienda had planted a hedge, which had been invading communal pastures for many years. In spite of the disagreement, both parties “convene[d] to act according to a conciliatory and friendly spirit,”93 tracing a new boundary. On the one hand, the points known as Shaigua and Pariapirca were included in Gamio’s original map; on the other hand, Laguna Cormacocha, a natural source of water for herds of both the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation and the comunidad, remained unmapped. New hedges had to be erected, paid by communal laborers, private capital, and technical aid. While both sides agreed to the arrangement, Ondores had further goals. When the comunidad had first submitted a request to the Office of Indigenous Affairs for a process of reconciliation, its representative had emphasized the illegal appropriation of communal pastures when the Atocsaico hacienda was first formed. The community therefore aimed to challenge not only the accuracy of the boundaries between the hacienda and the communal land, but also the legitimacy of the property of the hacienda itself. In the weeks before the visit of the regional inspector and the aforementioned survey, the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation’s attorney reminded the Office of Indigenous Affairs of the impossibility of including matters pertaining to this communal claim in any upcoming legal deal.94 According to the survey conducted by state inspectors, the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation’s larger interests in Atocsaico prevailed. On October 31, 1942, the comunidad signed the acta de conciliación with Bernard T. Colley, the representative of the American company. Problems persisted between the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation and Ondores in subsequent years. Upon submitting its file containing the map of communal lands for final recognition, Carlos Meneses, the chief of the Departamento de Mapas y Demarcaciones, reported that the acta de conciliación was missing. The discrepancy between Gamio’s map and the terms of the conciliation, particularly those referring to the points between the Atocsaico hacienda and the communal pastures, was apparently the source of the problem. This tension shows how and why the comunidad decided to leave the conciliation with the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation and the recognition process with the state as sepa-

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rate issues. The reasons for this ambiguous position will be highlighted in the following chapter. The conflict over Atocsaico remained a major source of identity for Ondores in years to come. Conclusion

Twenty years after the recognition of the legal status of Indigenous comunidades, the Peruvian state embarked on a systematic promotion of social and economic development of those comunidades. These projects included the enhancement of communal production through the modernization of economic activities, the acculturation of Indigenous peoples through the promotion of modern practices and establishment of educational services, and the first attempts to craft the ideal of land redistribution while retaining and enhancing national agrarian productivity. All in all, the Peruvian state directed its efforts toward a holistic project of agrarian industrialism with comunidades at the center. In doing this, the state enhanced its relationship with rural populations and turned the countryside into a space of economic and social legibility inhabited by increasingly economically efficient Indigenous comunidades. Comunidades responded positively to state policy stipulations. The communal censuses and records of rural cadaster collected by the second half of this period indicate that rural populations effectively mobilized to earn recognition of their collective legal status. Part of the effectiveness of this mobilization resided in the mechanisms put in place by the state to come to terms with comunidades, particularly establishing institutions and the commissioning agents who surveyed the sierra, and to create an increasingly rational image of the Peruvian countryside and its populations. In addition, the permeability of the state’s legal foundations and structures for accepting historically grounded communal mechanisms of identity definition and assertion of rights, particularly colonial legal documents such as emphyteutic leases, increased the efficiency of this process. Nevertheless, the Peruvian state faced key challenges when the discussion about Indigenous populations became hemispheric. Global post–World War II political culture emphasized the nation as a modern, industrialized, developed, democratic, and otherwise westernized collectivity. Thus, the Indigenous comuneros had to be “incorporated” into a “national life” to promote social, economic, and political development. International congresses linked different national discussions about the

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transregional Indigenous “problem” while intellectuals, scholars, and statesmen from different latitudes exchanged knowledge about the real nature of the Indigenous and indio problem vis-à-vis modernity. Within this context, the comunidad of Ondores modeled what a comunidad should be for both the state and other social groups aiming to become comunidades. In the view of the state, a comunidad subscribed to the legal terms for earning personhood and embraced the approach these rural institutions promoted. Written internal statutes shaped communal life in ways the state considered pertinent, an explicit concession of communal self-rule in order to attain a condition deemed more beneficial to their interest: state legibility and state services. By the same token, residents of Ondores learned to navigate the state and negotiate with its institutions to acquire a quintessential, and some might contend unwanted, feature of rural development, namely communal autonomy. While embracing state policies of rural modernity, Ondores began to advance its socioeconomic conditions, often to the detriment of neighboring, smaller comunidades and—more important—of haciendas. Ondores engaged in legal trials and conciliations, and effectively interacted with state and private institutions over issues that previously could be addressed only through resistance or mobilization outside legal structures. Many comunidades similar to Ondores pursued communal selfredefinition, a rising social contract between comunidad and state in the 1940s. Despite the seemingly harmonious writing of this social contract, the terms in which it was written—an ambiguous narrative of centralization and autonomy—also prepared the path for its demise.

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In the period 1960 to 1964, the central sierra witnessed a large number of uprisings and land invasions. In 1960, the community of Rancas— composed of around 1,200 peasants—invaded the hacienda Paria, which belonged to the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation. This invasion, and the consequent repression suffered by the peasants, became the most significant one in terms of historical impact, as Manuel Scorza narrated it in his famous Redoble por rancas.1 Shortly after that, in January 1961, the peasants of San Pedro de Yanahuanca also invaded several estates that belonged to the mining company. This particular event was followed by a violent reaction from other local communities, gathered behind the Federation of Communities of Pasco, against the repression of state forces. Enrique Mayer estimates about eighty total land invasions throughout the decade.2 The Quest for Atocsaico

The comuneros of San Juan Ondores gathered on January 17, 1960, to hear from their representative during a meeting that brought together other communities of the central sierra under the leadership of the Confederación Campesina del Perú (Peasant Confederation of Peru, CCP).3 In a previous gathering, the comuneros of Ondores had discussed the persistent conflicts with a neighboring hacendado, issues of trespassing on communal lands, and how larger social mobilizations throughout the countryside threatened their livelihoods. As both the conflict with the hacendado and communal mobilization continued, comuneros asked current legal representatives to bring these issues to a final resolution.4 In

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response, communal authorities dispatched the comunero Hipólito Espinoza to the Office of Indigenous Affairs in Lima to report on the unrest that engulfed Ondores and to request state assistance to guarantee the integrity of the communal domains. Upon returning to Ondores, Espinoza reported that he had failed to personally meet with state authorities but had delivered a collectively signed letter, or memorial, requesting that the Ministry of Government and Police demarcate communal lands. In times of social anxieties and unrest, Ondores and many other comunidades of the central sierra relied on the state for safeguarding their livelihoods. By 1960, rural property rights had become part of a larger question about land ownership and communal livelihood in the central sierra and elsewhere in rural Peru.5 While communal quests for earning state recognition and consolidating economic subsistence remained largely hacienda centered, owning land and holding land titles formed their center. In Ondores, most comuneros perceived that securing their landholdings—legalizing and potentially expanding their pastures— would lead to strengthening their grazing activities and, therefore, consolidating their economic position based on the profits from the granja comunal. Traveling to the Office of Indigenous Affairs, delivering memoriales, hiring lawyers, and filing endless paperwork for securing property rights proved financially expensive for comunidades. Ondores navigated these and other costs with the resources from their granja comunal and the exceptional economic position of the comunidad in the central sierra. The profits of the granja comunal also funded other development projects related to securing the territorial integrity of communal lands. Nothing secured communal property rights more than regulating the mobility of shepherds and flocks with barbed wire.6 Other endeavors, also funded by the granja comunal, that enforced the integrity of Ondores’s domains included the development of irrigation projects that enhanced the hydraulic power of the comunidad within and beyond its frontiers. As Ondores accumulated wealth and some power, the need and capacity for advancing communal property rights became crucial. Atocsaico, the colossal hacienda of the upper central sierra, had become a core property of the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation (CPCC). The company purchased the estate from the Sociedad Ganadera Junín ( Junín Livestock Society) upon establishing the División Ganadera (Livestock Division) to consolidate an economic enclave that merged mining and agrarian production. The rich pastures of Atocsaico, which had been central to the expansion of the wool economy in previ-

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ous decades, became essential for the making of the División Ganadera. With more than thirty thousand hectares of land, Atocsaico’s ownership had stoked tensions between comuneros and hacendados—the former claiming immemorial property, the latter contending legal ownership. After the purchase of Atocsaico, the relationship between Ondores and the CPCC became entangled. While the claim for the immemorial property of Atocsaico never vanished, communal authorities signed agreements with the CPCC to end the conflict over Atocsaico. Such agreements, according to communal records, included a deslinde supervised by the Office of Indigenous Affairs. The deslinde demarcated the boundaries between communal and hacienda lands, separating the properties of San Juan de Ondores and Atocsaico. Soon after the deslinde, in May 1960, renewed needs for the granja comunal—namely, more lands for an increasing number of sheep flocks—nurtured doubts about this settlement. On May 29, 1960, the comunero Wyle Bravo proposed naming a commission to travel to Lima to inquire at the Office of Indigenous Affairs about the possibility of rescinding previous settlements with the CPCC.7 Bravo argued that the comunidad was in a strong economic position to repurchase land and “rescue” Atocsaico from corporate ownership.8 Within, an “Atocsaico question” materialized as more comuneros claimed the need and unprecedented possibility of buying their lands back. Responding to these claims, on October 9, 1960, the communal president, Nicolás Gómez, called for another extraordinary meeting to discuss the status of Atocsaico.9 In previous weeks, Ondores had sent several commissions to Lima seeking legal advice about the possibility of regaining the estate. Joining other comunidades in the central sierra and beyond, Ondores asserted its legal rights upon Atocsaico.10 In their legal mobilization, comuneros expressed the necessity of engaging with state networks, appealing to the senators and deputies of Junín, and carefully navigating the state to reclaim the Atocsaico pastures.11 The comunero Florencio Astuhuamán, however, voiced a different view about how to reclaim land—through violent means.12 Rumors from neighboring comunidades about the pursuit of land through seizures made their way to Ondores and nourished a collective position that favored combining legal and forceful mobilizing strategies to regain control of Atocsaico. To that end, the community established the Comisión de Reivindicación de las Tierras Comunales de San Juan de Ondores (Commission of Claims of Communal Lands of San Juan de Ondores), composed of comuneros Dario Agüero, Alberto Lázaro, Teófilo Blanco, Rodolfo

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Terrel, and Aquiles Pomachagua. Ondores thus mobilized with other Indigenous groups and comunidades from the region in a moment of nationwide rural unrest. In turn, these comunidades formed larger federations, including the Federación Nacional de Campesinos Peruanos (National Federation of Peruvian Campesinos, FENCAP), which Ondores joined a few weeks after naming the Comisión de Reivindicación.13 By the end of 1960, amid increasing communal organization, authorities of the CPCC feared imminent invasion and called on local police to secure the División Ganadera and Atocsaico. Echoing these concerns, the prefecto of Junín surveyed Atocsaico’s boundaries—at the request of the company—and asked the communal presidente to join. The survey intended to determine the frontier of communal and company borders. Nevertheless, neighboring hacendados contributed to the growing fear of an invasion. The comunera Cristina Cajas reported that company representatives claimed that comuneros “were planning the invasion [of Atocsaico], which they will [conduct any day] between night and dawn.”14 To uncover information about a potential invasion and the community’s general strategy, the CPCC had allegedly bribed local shepherds and comuneros—through the local administrator of Atocsaico—to turn over the conspirators.15 The comunidad responded to the challenge. Arguing the impossibility of designating an individual representation for communal matters, Ondores refused any communal representation in the survey of Atocsaico.16 Instead, comuneros debated two options. On the one hand, if a massive group of comuneros attended the survey, they risked being labeled as invaders. On the other hand, comuneros feared that naming a special commission as delegates in the matter of Atocsaico would not seem resolute enough. After the comuneros held a vote, comunero Saturnino Recalde and a local lawyer chaired the ad hoc commission. With the participation of CPCC and Ondores delegates, the local judge Elías Espinoza, the notary Juan Garay, and more than seventy comuneros, the prefecto of Junín surveyed Atocsaico’s boundaries on December 29, 1960.17 Recalde wrote a communal memorandum informing authorities and company officials about his role as a representative and his inability to sign any settlement over communal properties. While the survey proceeded without a legal resolution, a majority of state authorities supported the CPCC, which further reinforced the communal awareness about why they should fight for Atocsaico in the legal sphere. A month after the survey, on January 29, 1961, in response to a communal grievance, the La Oroya court requested a copy of the prefecto’s final

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report. From this point forward, local courts and prefecturas became the primary battleground for San Juan Ondores and the CPCC. The Promise of Agrarian Reform

During 1960, the term “agrarian reform” entered the political vocabulary of Latin American politics. According to Tom Brass, fears about “economic stagnation leading to peasant uprising in underdeveloped countries [that] would facilitate the spread of communism throughout the Third World” transformed the politics and policies of Latin American states.18 In Peru, President Manuel Prado (1956–1962) had commissioned the businessman and media entrepreneur Pedro Beltrán to lead the Comisión para la Reforma Agraria y la Vivienda (Commission for Agrarian Reform and Housing, CRAV) and design an agrarian reform project to reshape national land ownership. The CRAV presented a limited project that focused on the colonization of the Amazonian frontier—often known as the montaña region—and suggested a límite de afectación, a five-hundred-hectare maximum limit that left much of the hacienda system intact.19 The journalist and Puno deputy Ernesto More commented on Beltrán’s proposal, arguing that his credentials as a landowner discouraged him from proposing an “integral reform.”20 According to More, agrarian reform also required an unprecedented degree of state centralization, which Beltrán—as a laissez-faire advocate—would never support. Echoing the hemispheric concerns of technocrats and policy makers elsewhere, More asserted that agrarian reform was an “unavoidable premise for the economic emancipation, industrialization and progress” of Peru.21 However, unlike other proposals, More not only envisioned future agrarian reform projects as top-down legal enforcements, but also as “mobilization of campesino consciousness.”22 A more ethnographically sensitive agrarian reform, in More’s view, must be shaped by the material and social specificities of each people and comunidad that participated in the process. For comunidades immersed in legal and social mobilizations, the establishment of agrarian reform projects in local and national politics meant direct access to land and property rights. In November 1961, Ondores comuneros met with the national secretary of FENCAP and the general secretary of the Federación Provincial de Yauli (Provincial Federation [of Comunidades] of Yauli) to discuss the future of the “patrimonial rights” of comunidades in the larger Junín region amid rumors about

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imminent agrarian reform interventions.23 According to the secretario of FENCAP, the political weight of gamonales, the vicious sierra hacendados, and the landowning oligarchy threatened the organization’s vision of agrarian reform. The challenge of shaping agrarian reform as a project of direct redistribution of land, according to the leadership of both federations, required solidarity among Indigenous peoples and the political and social revitalization of comunidades. Only grassroots organizations could balance the overwhelming ambition of hacendados. In reality, however, the rural landscape offered different conditions. Economically advanced comunidades experiencing unprecedented degrees of political organization had successfully mobilized over land, combining legal and forceful strategies.24 While the former nurtured solidarity among neighboring comunidades, the latter had nourished a communal legal culture that empowered some comuneros more than rivaling hacendados in the event of an agrarian reform. On the one hand, regardless of the political orientation of most agrarian reform proposals, comuneros perceived their comunidades as the unmistakable beneficiaries of any land redistribution. More important, in the event of an adverse turn against the interest of comunidades, comuneros felt confident about their legal knowledge in navigating state networks. Ondores comuneros, in particular, perceived agrarian reform as another process and a renewed vocabulary of economic and legal entitlement for comunidades. For these same comuneros, agrarian reform and the larger promise of transforming land ownership meant that they might recover Atocsaico from the CPCC.25 Ondores brought the Atocsaico question into FENCAP’s agenda during their Congreso Nacional Campesino (National Peasant Congress) held in January 1962.26 In the central sierra, reflecting a wider scenario of rural unrest, conflicts between comunidades and haciendas in Chinchín, Rancas, Pichihua, Yanacancha, and Santa Rosa shaped national debates about the future of agrarian reform and informed Ondores comuneros about their own struggle over Atocsaico. The comunero Rodolfo Terrel, the communal fiscal of Ondores, explained how communal mobilization throughout the countryside complemented their legal strategies with renewed social strategies nourished through political support of the communal grassroots organizations. Other comuneros, however, feared that an escalation of their conflict, so far primarily legal, might ignite radicalization and social violence. Some of those fears revolved around the political affiliation of some communal authorities, such as the former Ondores mayor Aquiles Pomachagua, an alleged member of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria

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Americana (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, APRA) Party.27 Alejandro Astete, another empowered comunero and current community personero, claimed that Pomachagua had been “a person of violent ideas” who encouraged “divisionism and agitation” in the comunidad.28 In contrast to Pomachagua’s influence, Astete pointed out that he had documented the historical trajectory of the Atocsaico estate, obtaining copies of the property titles from public offices in Huancayo and the Archivo General de la Nación (General Archive of the Nation, AGN), papers that strengthened their legal claim. With these papers, Terrel encouraged comuneros to expedite the legal recovery of Atocsaico because the community “needed their terrains today more than ever.”29 Having heard Astete and Terrel’s positions, most comuneros supported the idea of legality and the state judicial sphere for pursuing their land claims.30 Members of the comunidad debated whether to change their legal representatives in the claim for Atocsaico. Having reached a consensus about pursuing a legal path, persistent debates about joining communal mobilizations and grassroots organizations triggered discrepancies, rumors, and internal factionalism. The promise of agrarian reform, nevertheless, enforced communal unity and indispensable consensus for advancing the Atocsaico question. In the last days of January 1982, Ondores dispatched a commission of thirteen comuneros to the headquarters of the CPCC in La Oroya to formally request the return of Atocsaico to communal properties in the name of law and agrarian reform. The commission met with Milan Véliz—the manager of the hacienda Casaracra, one of the CPCC’s División Ganadera—and informed him about Ondores’s demands for future reform and land restitutions. Véliz, in turn, declared that he was not authorized to respond on behalf of the company, though he claimed that the company had “legally” purchased all of its properties.31 After their claims, titles, and documents had been dismissed, comuneros delivered a memorial to the company’s directors, phrased as “a direct and harmonious request” for the return of Atocsaico. Having the estate back in communal domains, according to the text, “would reestablish [the comuneros’] rights and remove forever the difficulties” between Ondores and the CPCC.32 Upon receiving the memorial, Atocsaico’s CPCC manager, Claude Isaac, replied that its lawyers would review the claim and invite the comuneros back to Casaracra to inform them about the company’s decision. Inside the comunidad, some insisted on avoiding violence to prevent the loss of their legal entitlement to pursue their cause in the event of an upcoming agrarian reform.33 While the memorial remained unanswered, evidence suggests

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that the CPCC did fear the partial legal dispossession of Atocsaico. In response to the mounting rumors about agrarian reform in the central sierra, the company announced the possible sale of many of their División Ganadera lands. In the following weeks, claiming the imminent arrival of agrarian reform, residents of Ondores debated suing the CPCC for having “illegally invaded” Atocsaico, thus violating their immemorial rights and trespassing their communal property.34 For comuneros, facing a trial with a major corporation required mobilizing not only their financial assets but also their social and political resources. Financially, the granja comunal provided key resources to sustain a legal struggle. The presence of comuneros throughout the larger Junín region, working and living in neighboring mining towns and haciendas, provided a foundational social network that facilitated different forms of circulation—most notably, people, documents, and information. Finally, decades of interaction with state powers and local offices of rural governance nurtured a fluent relationship between comunidades and state through institutional grids that brought them together. These grids transmitted news about rural policies and the future of agrarian reform. Commenting on Beltrán’s proposal to venture into the Amazon basin and the montaña region to expand the agrarian frontier, likely communicated through the Office of Indigenous Affairs, Ondores comuneros refused to participate in a colonizing endeavor and resigned their claim over Atocsaico.35 Far from simply being potential beneficiaries of land redistribution, comunidades saw themselves as active agents in the making of agrarian reform projects and visionaries of a renewed rural economy. In the midst of increasing unrest, communal mobilization, and rumors about agrarian reform, the 1963 presidential election brought Fernando Belaúnde Terry into office as leader of the center-left party Acción Popular (AP). Belaúnde was then, in many ways, an innovative politician. While most elections before 1963 were decided solely based on the candidate’s platform for Lima, Belaúnde campaigned throughout the countryside and brought elections to regional and provincial arenas, where the potential electors placed agrarian reform at the center of national politics.36 A few months before, the same military junta that cancelled the results of the 1962 presidential elections had released the Leyes básicas de reforma agraria, a doctrinarian statement and theoretical reflection on the urgency of radical transformation of the structures of land ownership.37 Shortly upon inauguration, President Belaúnde established the Oficina Nacional de Reforma Agraria (National Office of

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Agrarian Reform, ONRA), the first state institution solely focused on studying the question of land ownership and crafting a new proposal to replace Beltrán’s colonizing project. The ONRA promptly produced a revealing ethnographic appraisal of the rural countryside and Peruvian comunidades. In this report, the state acknowledged the vitality of communal mobilizations, the extent of hacienda invasions and land seizures, and the centrality of agrarian reform to the future of the national political debate. According to the ONRA , communal mobilizations symbolized “a revolution against poverty, injustice, and illiteracy, and the existence of a tremendous strength generated by millions of Peruvians unwilling to continue in their acceptance of poverty, ignorance, and sickness as a normal lifestyle.”38 Addressing the urgency of passing a new law of agrarian reform, Belaúnde spoke to the communities of Junín, urging federations and comunidades to not get settled in land of doubtful or inexistent titles, so that the efforts they do in those lands will not be wasted. . . . Nothing is against the people who follow the path that justice has traced. Therefore, nothing would be more irresponsible, nothing would be more unforgivable, than generating violence, when the path of fraternity and progress is wide open.39

Just like Enrique More had proposed a few years before, the ONRA and the minister of agriculture, Enrique Torres Llosa, projected agrarian reform as a measure that transcended Peruvian politics. Instead, agrarian reform in Peru had to be inserted within a hemispherical process that involved “every country insufficiently developed, . . . with a too-grave dependency on primary sources, lacking an internal market, and with a population that lives primarily in a simple subsistence economy.”40 In many ways, given the demographic centrality of rural populations, Peruvian agrarian reform epitomized the political, social, and economic transformations envisioned for the Latin American countryside.41 Hence, Belaúnde’s vision of agrarian reform expanded from previous colonizing proposals. While developing the agrarian frontier into the montaña region remained central, the 1963 project included abolishing the hacienda system and redistributing expropriated land. In a project centered on hacienda displacement and land redistribution, the ONRA recast comunidades as potential “units for the provision of technical assistance, credits, and economic and social services, organized by the state or public entities.”42 Besides financial aid and technical support, agrarian reform would also provide legal assistance for comunidades to engage in

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ongoing trials and juicios de reivindicación. Belaúnde himself suspected that the emphasis on expropriation required that the agrarian reform question gradually be put in belligerent terms, confronting comunidades against landholders. Thus, on September 11, 1963, and in front of the comunidades of Junín, he presented the agrarian reform context as one of “progressive agrarian organizations” and the state against “gamonales, those who amassed fortunes at the expense of the sacrifice of people.”43 The Sociedad Nacional Agraria (National Agrarian Society, SNA), a conglomerate that included some of the most powerful hacendados of the countryside, informed Belaúnde’s administration that while it did not oppose an agrarian reform, it would favor a cooperative-based model with limited expropriations, marginal redistribution, and the maintenance of the integrity of estates in pivotal regions—namely, the industrialized sugar-based northern coast and the grazing pastures of the upper central sierra. In other words, hacendados supported the creation of private enterprises with communal bases, organizing comuneros as laborers of a modern capitalist agrarian economy. Such a vision of agrarian reform emerged from larger hemispheric platforms—including the Centro Interamerican de Reforma Agraria (Inter-American Center of Agrarian Reform, CIRA) in Bogotá and the Punta del Este agreement— which projected an understanding of reform less focused on crafting legal mechanisms for delivering justice and more on economic strategies to reshape a country’s development upon enhanced agrarian structures of production. As agrarian reform debates ensued, Ondores remained in close contact with the state technocrats dispatched to survey the highlands and inform Belaúnde about the socioeconomic situation of comunidades. Shortly after attending Belaúnde’s speech in Junín, the comunidad welcomed two engineers who visited Ondores to study what kind of projects could be developed within the current communal territory.44 The ONRA informed Ondores authorities that some of its comuneros were invited to attend a special session to discuss the future of agrarian reform in the Junín region, which included the council of ministers and President Belaúnde himself. In the meantime, communal authorities continued to collect funds from personal contributions and revenues from the granja comunal while contacting lawyers who could assist the comunidad in the Atocsaico trial. Samuel Hurtado, the personero of Atocsaico’s laborers, warned communal authorities that the government intended to prevent more land seizures and further invasions of neighboring haciendas.45 According to Hurtado, ONRA’s engineers and technocrats secretly reported

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to the government about potential invasion plans. Some comuneros began to resent agrarian reform as proposed by Belaúnde and conducted by the state. Many feared an actual reform would not meet Ondores’s actual demands of Atocsaico.46 Despite these reservations, Ondores authorities traveled to Lima and with Vice President Edgardo Seoane in October 1963 to discuss the future of agrarian reform. Seoane praised comuneros for pursuing their struggle without violence and listened with attention to the details of the trial. Comuneros informed him that the claim involved thirty thousand hectares of rich natural pastures currently under possession of the CPCC. Seoane then asserted that these lands had actually been identified as a primary priority of future expropriation, once the agrarian reform process started within the next month.47 Without any word about land redistribution and the future of Atocsaico after expropriating the CPCC’s División Ganadera, comuneros soon realized that agrarian reform might not mean the delivery of the justice they had been seeking. The conversation with Seoane revealed how conflicting visions of agrarian reform placed two ideals on a path to collision. While the state held agrarian reform as a path to landownership, comunidades expected agrarian reform as part of their struggle over lands and direct property rights. In the view of the state, expropriating land from private and foreign hands seemed an affordable expense in the name of modern agrarian capitalism. In the view of comuneros, expropriation without immediate redistribution and land entitlement seemed like an unfulfilled promise and a political deception. State uncertainties and communal anxieties merged at the core of these clashing visions. Despite decades of rural governance of the countryside and the highlands, the Peruvian state still held a meager image of their larger economic landscape and economic profitability. Pairing with these uncertainties, comunidades perceived direct redistribution of land on a communal or family basis to be the sole conclusion of state interventions. A general lack of agrarian knowledge nourished conflicts between state and comunidades over the real meaning of agrarian reform. In response to this lack of agrarian and ethnographic knowledge about the countryside, the central sierra in particular, the state conducted a program of internships organized by the ONRA , which included temporary visits by university students conducting research in comunidades in disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, agronomy, and engineering.48 The ONRA also reviewed rural archives in comunidades and some haciendas, which led to a detailed account of the economic situation of

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the highlands and the central sierra. Both disciplinary interventions and archival reviews renewed the state’s goals of a cooperative system of land exploitation as the ultimate result of agrarian reform. Particularly in the upper central sierra, due to the limits of the agrarian frontier and the profitability of ranching estates, major cooperatives as the predominant agrarian unit of land in the aftermath of agrarian reform would guarantee the economic success of transforming the structures of land ownership.49 Defending a cooperativizing model, ONRA’s technocrats claimed that comunidades already embodied the collectivist values essential for the success of an agrarian cooperative. With these premises in mind, Belaúnde’s administration issued a law of agrarian reform on May  21, 1964, establishing the Instituto de Reforma y Promoción Agraria (Institute of Agrarian Reform and Promotion, IRPA) as an institution that would supervise future land adjudications based on the “sociological characteristics [of the population], the economy of the zone, the quality of the land, and the type of agrarian or ranching exploitation established or to be established.”50 In projecting beneficiaries of the agrarian reform, Belaúnde’s law distinguished individuals, comunidades, and cooperatives. As further research and surveys unfolded, cooperatives dominated the technocratic discussion on agrarian reform. The 1964 agrarian reform law, or Ley 15.037, unveiled the power of technocracy in shaping the existent networks between the state and comunidades.51 As a technocratic formula, agrarian reform seemed to include communal demands and foster grassroots understandings of rural justice. On August 30, 1964, after sustained debates, Ondores accepted the 1964 agrarian reform and direct state intervention as a means to recover Atocsaico.52 Immediately afterward, the IRPA mobilized institutional resources to Ondores, establishing a communal office of agrarian reform, offering scholarships for comuneros to attend agrarian reform training and providing services, including healthcare for comuneros, veterinary care for sheep, husbandry assistance, labor training, and general financial support. Despite a promising environment, some comuneros feared an unconditional acceptance of the seemingly disenfranchising terms of agrarian reform. The comunero Aquiles Pomachagua, for example, claimed that “agrarian reform had advantages and disadvantages, because the most productive land will not be affected [by the agrarian reform process].”53 Pomachagua’s fears represented a widening faction of dissenting comuneros. The forthcoming materialization of the agrarian reform promise led to divergent views about the role of the comunidad within the process.

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The immediacy of the IRPA, and the daily interaction with agrarian technocrats through the local office of agrarian reform, shaped communal debates over their integration into the national economy versus communal divisionism.54 As months passed, comuneros steadily rephrased their claim for Atocsaico, using the new vocabulary of agrarian reform. By 1965, comuneros fully adopted the political vocabulary of state reformism, no longer demanding the restitution of their immemorial rights, but requiring the adjudication of Atocsaico as a matter of national interest.55 Within three years, due to the influence of agrarian reform lexicon, Ondores’s struggle over Atocsaico shifted from a purely judicial matter to an increasingly political claim. In the name of agrarian reform, comuneros filed a new grievance against the CPCC in La Oroya in May 1965. Unlike previous grievances, which used a language of immemoriality, the 1965 claim appealed to the standing procedures and legislation of agrarian reform.56 In La Oroya, a juez de tierra (a land property rights authority) immediately authorized an inspection of Atocsaico. Seeking to support another upcoming legal struggle, communal leaders sold sheep from the granja comunal, imposed new taxes upon comuneros, and carefully considered requesting a loan from the Banco Agrario (Agrarian Bank)—the financial branch of the IRPA. This seeming merge of communal and state interests behind the promise of agrarian reform also triggered dissent, leading to the establishment of a major political opponent that grouped together the SNA, the Sociedad de Productores de Lana (Society of Wool Producers), and the CPCC. Hacendados and businessmen rallied against the IRPA, the agrarian reform, and Ondores, threatening the communal claim for Atocsaico. Reacting against this threat, and experiencing the weight of the state and agrarian reform, comuneros established the Comité para la Defensa de Tierras Comunales (Committee for the Defense of Communal Lands) in October 1965.57 According to their members, the committee intended to defend both the comunidad and agrarian reform from a “biased and badly intentioned campaign” of hacendados and the CPCC.58 In defense of agrarian reform, the committee praised the “efficient work that the Sierra Central program is accomplishing” and the imminent fulfillment of communal demands.59 All communal hopes hinged on the arrival and defense of agrarian reform. However, the 1965 agrarian reform disappointed comuneros. The IRPA and its reform efforts focused on the production of agrarian knowledge but with limited transformation into actual rural policy. Moreover, despite the technocratically enhanced links between comunidad and

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state, national politics obstructed the implementation of agrarian reform. Powerful alliances of landowners fostered political coalitions—including the APRA Party and Union Nacional Odriísta (UNO)—that blocked Belaúnde’s attempts to enforce many promised reforms.60 Ondores’s twofold strategy of waiting for agrarian reform while also pursuing its legal claim, reframed under the political vocabulary of state reformism, allowed the comunidad to gain a better position in the last months of Belaúnde’s administration. Thus, in July 1968, the La Oroya court finally ruled in favor of Ondores and adjudicated Atocsaico’s property—36,146 hectares of rich natural pastures—to communal possessions.61 Given the extent of the land at stake, however, the court’s verdict required comuneros to “cooperativize” the administration of the estate. As the result of months of thinking about agrarian reform technocratically, the request to cooperativize the exploitation of Atocsaico advanced a new role of the state in refashioning the national agrarian economy and communal production from within. Initially perceived as a fulfillment of communal demands, the court verdict, the arrival of agrarian reform, and the adjudication of Atocsaico triggered another debate inside the comunidad. Comuneros questioned whether they should accept the verdict and organize the state-envisioned cooperativized structures. Some proposed bringing their claim to another court in the hope of obtaining a similar verdict but without the legal framework of agrarian reform. Most comuneros, though, favored the cooperativization of Atocsaico. According to them, cooperativization meant that Ondores would retain the property of the Atocsaico lands, changing slightly their communal organization and possibly resigning a portion of their production to the state. Ultimately, comuneros agreed that accepting the terms of the verdict and agrarian reform cooperativization did not threaten the comunidad’s demands for land and justice. In the last weeks of September 1968, Ondores prepared to meet all legal requirements for the adjudication of Atocsaico through agrarian reform. As part of those requirements, the IRPA requested a communal census to update the exact number of comuneros, determining beneficiaries of agrarian reform based on a family distribution of domestic units of production and registering both communal and family flocks to occupy sheepherding land. A few weeks later, General Juan Velasco Alvarado led the military coup of October 3, 1968, bringing Belaúnde’s administration to a dramatic end. In the central sierra, however, agrarian reform continued. Weeks after the coup, the local office of the IRPA and the comunidad adjudicated Atocsaico without military intervention.

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Only on November 12, 1968, more than a month later, did a member of Ondores refer to the need to visit “the revolutionary President of the Peruvian Republic.”62 Ondores, together with other comunidades from the central sierra, attended the military expropriation of some of the CPCC’s holdings. Velasco’s mention in the communal minutes of Ondores first introduced the term “revolution” into communal discussions about state power and rural politics. “Revolutionary” politics, as projected by a militarized state, proposed another vision of agrarian reform as a vehicle for delivering agrarian justice. Soon enough, the comuneros learned that militarized state involvement required further adaptations. In January 1969, newly appointed agrarian reform technocrats informed the comuneros that the adjudication of Atocsaico experienced delays because the military government was rethinking how it would administer expropriated and reformed lands in the future. More important, the military also announced that any communal measures targeted to hasten reform—such as invading lands that had been declared subject to expropriation months before— would be perceived as a hostility against the state.63 The comunidad also learned that the next steps of agrarian reform included financially compensating the CPCC as part of the expropriation process of Atocsaico. While comuneros had been expecting monetary compensation as part of the terms of expropriation and agrarian justice once promised, the early news about the new project of agrarian reform envisioned by the military seemed far from fulfilling their demands and hopes of communal justice. In the first months of Velasco’s regime, comunidades throughout the highlands demanded a direct redistribution of land along with several reparations. Inside Ondores, some comuneros began to fear that agrarian reform and militarized state interventions might actually mean transformed subordinations and unprecedented disenfranchisements. A Military “Revolution”

Self-identified as the Gobierno Revolucionario de la Fuerza Armada (Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces), the Velasco administration (1968–1975) radically redefined the politics of production in Peru.64 Weeks before the coup, corruption charges related to the concession of oil reserves in northern Peru to the International Petroleum Company (IPC) engulfed the last months of Belaúnde’s administration.

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In the countryside, agrarian reform had stalled due to the opposition of the parliamentary coalition APRA-Unión Nacional Odriísta. Claiming the need for major reforms and urgent anticorruption measures, General Juan Velasco Alvarado articulated a “revolutionary” discourse that intended to legitimize another military intervention against democracy. A few days later, on October 9, the army seized the facilities of the IPC in Talara, launching one of the most dramatic expropriations of a US company in the history of the region. During the following years, the eviction of the IPC was commemorated as the Día de la Dignidad Nacional (Day of National Dignity), signaling the nationalist and anti-imperialist identity of the regime. A few months later, in June 1969, Velasco announced a new agrarian reform law, Ley 17.716, and the beginning of a major transformation of the rural countryside. Ley 17.716 replaced Belaúnde’s failed proposal of agrarian reform, targeting the northern coastal haciendas and corporate landholdings throughout the highlands. As the reform unfolded, the military’s project centered on the cooperativization of expropriated agrarian properties and other forms of state-controlled agrarian production. Velasco relied on a pivotal propaganda apparatus that enhanced the “revolutionary” character of the process through rhetorical and aesthetic resources, including renaming Indigenous comuneros as campesinos and making Túpac Amaru a major symbol of agrarian reform.65 Far from a simple nominal transformation, the conversion of Indigenous comunidades into coalitions of campesinos incorporated rural populations into the state structures of agrarian production and militarized political power. While claiming to confer a new status upon campesinos as rural citizens, the military agrarian reform aimed to turn comuneros into rural workers of the state.66 In an internal meeting with fellow military officers, months after the expropriation of the IPC and shortly before the promulgation of Ley 17.716, Velasco asserted that the military revolution was taking all necessary measures to defend Peru from a dual threat: foreign imperialist domination and domestic oligarchic preeminence.67 Upon confiscating the IPC’s facilities and recovering the oil wells of La Brea and Pariñas, Velasco carefully explained that the expropriation represented part of the final struggle for independence. Seizing US property, according to Velasco, meant a truly continental event, one that marked the beginning of a new economic independence for Peru and Latin America at large. During the first anniversary of the Día del Ejército (Day of the Army) after the 1968 coup, Velasco asserted without reservation,

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There were not dates in the Golden Book of our history that were so intimately linked with the dignity of Peru, and the future of Latin America, as December 9, 1824 and October 8, 1968. The first marked the end of a war that guaranteed equality and justice for Peru and America, seeking to define the political liberty of our peoples. The second has pointed out the beginning of a struggle for economic liberty, which will allow Peru and other peoples of Latin America to shake off the notorious and sultry economic slavery.68

However, achieving what Velasco constantly referred to as a “second independence” was as much an internal battle against dominant economic structures, especially landownership, as a geopolitical and international struggle. Thus, after evicting the IPC, Velasco’s revolution focused on enforcing a law of agrarian reform. On June 24, 1969, with a discourse broadcast nationwide, the military junta announced Ley 17.716, naming Indigenous sectors as the pivotal beneficiaries of the reform and coining the phrase “campesino, el patrón no comerá más de tu pobreza” (campesino, the patron will no longer feed from your poverty) as its motto. Advised by the Comité de Asesores del Presidente (Presidential Advisory Board, COAP), Velasco himself picked an emblematic date for the promulgation of the law. In the agrarian calendar of most rural communities, June 24 marked the beginning of the Andean winter, the end of the rainy season, and the start of the harvest. In the political calendar of the state, June 24 had been commemorated as the Día del Indio since 1921. Velasco thus reestablished June 24 as the Día del Campesino, a nominal change that became the first step in the transformation of the countryside, the structure of land ownership, the property regime, and the social relations of production inside comunidades. As Cynthia McClintock has explained, turning comunidades formerly known as Indigenous into a national campesinado enforced a class-based understanding of the socioeconomic conditions of comunidades.69 Equally important, comuneros as campesinos were gradually incorporated into the structures of power and production of the state under increasing practices of social obedience and subordination. Mobilizing the National Campesinado

Upon allegedly emancipating an emerging campesinado, the military regime created a path for controlling their future mobilization.

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Established in 1971, the Sistema Nacional de Movilización Social (National System of Social Mobilization)—whose acronym, SINAMOS, suggested a land with no masters—channeled the social organization of campesinos, mitigating possible conflicts among comunidades and resistance against the state. Claiming that “the campesino [would] no longer be a pariah” and promising that “the patron [would] no longer eat from the campesino’s poverty,” Velasco and the rhetorical regime of the agrarian reform strengthened visions of struggle between campesinos and hacendados.70 The military feared that the conflict between campesino and landlord, further reinforced when Velasco addressed the conditions of “ignorance, inequality and injustice condemning the country” fostered by “the enemies of the revolution [and] the enemies of the military forces,” would become an uncontrollable social force.71 As the reform unfolded, SINAMOS facilitated a campesino social mobilization resulting from deepening social conflicts, fueling the revolution though not turning into a subversive force. Agrarian reform accompanied a larger set of reforms intended to dramatically alter the structures of Peruvian society, a point that Velasco raised constantly. In fact, according to the internal statute of the military government, the regime sought to promote five critical points, and agrarian reform was projected to address all of them. The five critical points were, first, to transform the structure of the state, making it more dynamic and efficient through better economic, social, and political development; second, to promote higher standards of living, compatible with human dignity, for the less-favored sectors of Peruvian society by transforming economic, social, and cultural structures; third, to acquire a nationalist and independent sense, sustained in the firm defense of national sovereignty and dignity; fourth, to moralize the country in every field of national activity and reestablish the full principle of authority, respect of the law, and justice; and fifth, to promote the union, concord, and integration of all Peruvians, strengthening the national consciousness. As many later discourses and documents emphasized, the traditional prevailing order of the nation-state had failed, and therefore the military sought to change such an order, “against which [the military government had] emerged, because [traditional order] was based on inequality, injustice, discrimination, dependence, and privileges.”72 No clearer expression of the “traditional order” and its oligarchic nature existed to be overthrown than the dominant structures of land ownership.

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Planning Agrarian Reform

Despite the clear structuring of the discourse around the project of agrarian reform, examining the internal sources of the military government reveals a military vision of a transformation much more convoluted and experimental than Velasco’s public discourse. On the evening of June 23, 1969, Velasco’s council of ministers and the COAP gathered to debate the enactment of Ley 17.716. The urgent need of the regime to consolidate its revolutionary agenda, amid early dissent, nourished the conversation on the eve of the promulgation. The minutes of this session show how much the military government improvised the pathbreaking agrarian reform. Weeks before the announcement of the agrarian reform, the military government—in one of its most critical political mistakes—had partially abolished free secondary education, a measure that unleashed a series of student and teachers’ union mobilizations in different provinces and a widespread wave of social unrest that reached its peak in the town of Huanta. The regime perceived that social unrest had led the rural sphere and the organized campesinado to a point of potential upheaval, where “pekineses (pro-China communists), apristas, and belaúndistas” could capitalize on political support and challenge the hegemony of the “revolution.”73 Hence, the government responded to this mounting agrarian discontent with the rushed promulgation of agrarian reform, which would have even greater symbolism if it had been enacted the following day, when most rural masses gathered to celebrate the Día del Indio. Rather than a well-planned rollout timed to coincide with the Día del Indio, agrarian reform emerged as a quick response to social unrest in rural areas. From the beginning of the session, the discussion centered on turning agrarian reform into a financially self-sustainable enterprise. Expropriation meant a social and financial expense, which President Fernando Belaúnde had already addressed in Law 15.035, a law that included an ambiguous process of land valorization. Two possibilities were considered to resolve the question of valorization. On the one hand, valorization could be solved by considering the value established in the self-appraisal of 1968, when most estate owners were called upon to establish the price of their properties, including any improvements upon the property after that date. On the other hand, the regime used the original purchase price of the property, which implied the confiscation and revision of the internal accounting books of every expropriated estate. This entire expense

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was meant to be covered by the income generated from the expanding state-controlled industrial sector. In terms of the structure of land ownership, the minutes outline the comprehensive goals of agrarian reform: the consolidation of the family-based agrarian property, the reevaluation of the small and medium property, and the capitalist reformulation of the large agrarian property, particularly the agro-industrial haciendas of the northern coast. In the latter case, campesinos were meant to become collective proprietors of expropriated estates under strict supervision of the revolutionary organisms of the state. Velasco and his technocrats discussed how to supervise expropriated and reformed estates and also debated whether to privilege the land demand of campesino families or safeguard the potentially industrializing levels of agrarian productivity in capitalized lands. While the “traditional” order that Velasco’s “revolutionary” discourse constantly attacked targeted the landed oligarchy, not every hacienda fit into the autarchic and premodern model, though Velasco’s rhetoric did prove useful in pitting campesinos against hacendados and gamonales. Facing this conundrum, agrarian reform technocrats opted to preserve certain structures of land ownership, reforming only land usage and turning the state into a mediating agent between land, campesinos, and markets. The session that began in the afternoon of June 23 lasted until the next morning, finishing in time to allow Velasco and his inner circle to prepare the ceremony during which the military junta announced the historical milestone. The images preserved from the moment of promulgation, shaped by the military logics of planning and ritual, contrast with the minutes of the council of ministers and advisors, which reflect a rushed and impulsive discussion. While a technical commission studied different proposals of agrarian reform, along with several legal antecedents and projects, the events of June 24 reflected an improvised implementation— highly conditioned by specific political circumstances—of the most important legal device of rural policy making in the twentieth century. In the midst of convoluted improvisation, one criterion prevailed: Agrarian technocrats and the military regime favored the financial sustainability of the larger project of agrarian reform over the family-based demands of direct land redistribution. Aside from the agro-industrial haciendas of the north, another group of lands had caught the attention of the military government. The ranching haciendas of the upper central sierra, most of which were under possession of the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation, were pivotal engines of agrarian industrialism. These haciendas differed from the traditional

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image of gamonalismo that Velasco politically projected. Most of these rural properties had undergone intense processes of capitalization and modernization when they belonged to the Sociedades Ganaderas. They often had been aided by the government through the Junta de Industria Lanar and had otherwise established a combination of capitalist and clientelist relationships with local populations and comunidades. The production of these haciendas had generated considerable revenue through tributes due to the positive fluctuations of the international wool market. The Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation had purchased these lands decades before based on its interest in providing resources and staple items, such as milk and meat, to working families—and engaging in the wool trade in the event of severe contractions of mineral prices in global markets. Since the early days of the military government, months before the enactment of Law 17.716, Velasco paid close attention to the situation of these haciendas. The minister of agriculture, General José Benavides, referred to the situation of the estates as a problem of “multiple economic aspects,”74 most of which revolved around the conflicts between state economic interests and how campesino families structured in communal demands. In the meantime, land invasions in the central sierra ensued. A report from the Ministry of Government informed Velasco that the areas of Marcavalle and Concepción had witnessed land seizures “provoked by agitators . . . with the pretext of the agrarian reform.”75 As the military government struggled to redistribute confiscated estates and haciendas on a family and communal basis, campesino groups and organizations had already understood the promise of agrarian reform as a proximate direct redistribution of land. The situation for the military government worsened when the United States responded to the enactment of Law 16.674—which authorized the government to expropriate foreign possessions if they were declared of national economic interest—by approving the Hickenlooper Amendment in the US Congress. This amendment, originally approved in 1962, cut financial aid to any government that nationalized or expropriated American possessions abroad or that established any fiscal measures to that end. Velasco responded by reframing the expropriations as a project designed to promote state capitalism, while defining the Hickenlooper Amendment as a direct threat to national sovereignty.76 The expropriation of the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation’s estates continued in spite of US threats. However, the way Velasco reframed the process led Minister Benavides to incorporate the term “public use

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and necessity,”77 abandoning the rhetoric of confiscation. During the first weeks of November 1968, the company was informed of the impending situation concerning their agrarian estates, which according to the minister of government had unleashed “great joy throughout the country [, encouraging] comuneros of the zone . . . to march to Lima, [a mobilization] which may cause some problems.”78 These problems stemmed from the asymmetry between communal expectations and the actual extent of the expropriation. For most comuneros, this moment meant the beginning of the historically promised agrarian reform that would finally sanction their ancestral rights over land. For the military government, it was first and foremost a political move against American capitalism rather than an intent to fragment the estates and directly redistribute family or communal plots. In order to avoid this march, while acknowledging the support that comuneros offered, the minister of agriculture commissioned a group of engineers to visit the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation’s estates and inform them that although the regime was grateful for their support, it planned to continue the expropriations.79 In January 1969, months before the enactment of the agrarian reform, Minister Benavides finally took possession of the first eighteen hectares expropriated from the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation. Representatives of the company, state officials, and personeros of approximately twenty-two comunidades who allegedly intended to become “cooperatives” attended the event.80 The military regime and agrarian technocrats had been contemplating turning comunidades into agrarian cooperatives since the agrarian reform had become a focal point of discussion. Cooperative exploitation of land intended to solve the dichotomy of productivity versus direct distribution at once, preserving the structures of land ownership while empowering comunidades as associates of a given cooperative. Furthermore, according to the military government and previous studies on the feasibility of agrarian reform, the historical legacy of collectivist labor at the interior of comunidades fostered the assembly of this new type of land tenure. Finally, cooperatives enabled the regime to maintain an indirect but clear presence in the daily development of communal economies. As Velasco and his ministers monitored the experience of the expropriation of these small estates, they came to understand the fiscal burden that the agrarian reform could create. In a meeting held a few weeks before the enactment of the agrarian reform, Velasco insisted to his ministers “that the new law should include revolutionary approaches that can be executed thanks to budgetary resources.”81 The council worried about

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how much of the national budget could actually be devoted to the agrarian reform and how the 1970 budget would best reflect that the military government was actively pursuing its “revolutionary” goals, especially the agrarian reform. Agrarian technocrats intended to address many of these questions, along with the problem of the productivity of capitalized haciendas, in the weeks to come. In the meantime, the military government proceeded with the expropriations, which affected other rural estates and haciendas in the rest of the countryside. The engineers Agustín Merea and Benjamín Samanéz, along with the lawyer Guillermo Figallo, composed the commission assigned to elaborate the new agrarian reform law. Merea and Samanéz were to supervise the technical aspects of land expropriation and redistribution, while Figallo was in charge of the legal aspect. They intended to work based on the existent Law 15.037, though the political framework in which this piece was promulgated limited their capacity to bring about effective changes. Consequently the commission reported the necessity of crafting a whole new legal agenda, which preserved some of the general characteristics of Law 15.037—particularly the declarative aspect and the establishment of national areas of agrarian reform—but otherwise departed from its predecessor.82 Many of these changes had to do with the límite de afectabilidad of lands to be expropriated, new subjects of reforms, the elimination of exceptions for the Catholic Church and other limited companies, the intention to abolish smallholdings that escaped the minimum area for becoming subject to reform, and the elimination of protections for land that transformed primary resources into agrarian commodities through industrial means. The most important reform established the Sociedades Agrarias de Interés Social (Agrarian Societies of Social Interest, SAIS),83 which provided the state a means to accommodate campesino requests for land without sacrificing state objectives for development. The government intended the SAIS to be a milestone in the making of the “revolutionary” and reformed countryside, as it addressed the dichotomy of productivity versus direct redistribution.84 By establishing the SAIS, a group of campesinos—whether landless or fully entitled—forcefully became a collective enterprise and received land distributed on collective terms. This way the state avoided the atomization of land and a fall in productivity. By the same token, the SAIS considered the assignment of family units of production “in case of the death of the household head” so that surviving family members were able to produce their sustenance without threatening the integrity of the SAIS as a whole.85 Many points remained

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uncertain after the presidential meeting with the agrarian reform commission. Most notably, the commission had not enacted a new water law, considered essential to the interests of the agrarian reform, particularly in areas with limited irrigation infrastructure—both on the northern coast and in the upper highlands. However, agrarian reform was ultimately promulgated in the circumstances described above, more strongly motivated by a sense of political urgency than confidence in the technocratic certainties about its conduction. Certainly, Velasco and his rural policy makers expected that the beneficiaries—the historically oppressed campesinos—would appreciate the political symbolism of the reform without questioning, or even realizing, its larger material meanings. Unfortunately for the purposes of agrarian reform and the interests of the military government, unionized campesinos began to ask about the extent of the agrarian reform. FENCAP called for a meeting on July 19, 1969, to “study and criticize the law of agrarian reform.”86 Of alleged aprista affiliation, and thus strongly opposed to Velasco’s larger political project as it embodied the historical tension between the APRA Party and the Peruvian Army, FENCAP quickly became the foremost opponent of the much-desired hegemonic nature of the agrarian reform. Nevertheless, this initial campesino inquiry about how agrarian reform would impact every region did not constrain the military government, and expropriations of major rural estates proceeded as planned, with support from comunidades. Agrarian reform was conducted in this way because Velasco perceived that changing the structures of land property would alleviate social and political unrest. Hence agrarian reform policy—expropriations, cooperativization, and the social organization of campesinos—needed to be reinforced where social turmoil threatened state interests, such as in the provinces of Cajamarca and Ayacucho.87 In this regard, the minister of the interior suggested that Ayacucho and Huanta were “comunizadas,”88 politically aligned with communism, and thus necessitated the diligent advance of agrarian reform policy making throughout the larger region. While rural technocrats evaluated the material conditions for the economic success of agrarian reform, Velasco and his inner political circle wielded agrarian reform as the quintessential anticommunist tool for the military regime. Although Velasco negotiated political and economic support from nonaligned countries, even obtaining technical assistance from the Soviet Union, he had no intention of antagonizing the United States in the midst of the Cold War.

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In fact, the military government employed agrarian reform policy making as a focal point to establish its hemispherical position to both national and international audiences. The minister of foreign affairs reported to Velasco that “the [new] political order makes the US understand that it is not convenient to hinder the march of the Peruvian revolutionary process, which by its nature differs from other cases of revolutions; that being so evident the insurgence in Latin America, it was necessary to channel it or otherwise another type of revolution would be encouraged.”89 While the situation in the central sierra was less complicated than in Ayacucho and Huanta, agrarian reform intensified in critical areas of agricultural production. After the confiscation of the lands of the Sociedad Ganadera del Centro, the second most important landholder after the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation, the popularity of agrarian reform in the central sierra reinforced Velasco’s perception of how rural policy making mitigated social unrest.90 The announcement about the arrival of agrarian reform in the central sierra fostered as much excitement as convulsion among comuneros. On September 23, 1969, the Ministry of the Interior reported a strike of twelve unions of the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation, which threatened to reach neighboring mining provinces.91 While a small incident compared to the larger agrarian interests of the military government, comunidades and an emerging campesinado both supported and questioned the early implementation of agrarian reform. The initial executive stages of the agrarian reform failed to completely resolve social conflict, and better planning seemed indispensable. A few months after enacting the agrarian reform law, when expropriations were used as a primarily political device, Velasco and his agrarian technocrats established a five-year plan (1970–1975) that rectified the haphazard first steps of the reform process. The minutes for the October 21, 1969, session of the military government reveal the discussions before the approval of the five-year plan. For agrarian reform to succeed, the government needed a rural census. Before the military government, generating a clear rural metric for countryside surveillance had been a crucial goal for many administrations, even prior to when the agrarian reform project became a matter of national debate. The military and the rural technocracy lacked an accurate image of the Peruvian countryside and, in particular, information about the actual extent of agrarian lands, their geographic and topographic conditions, and the actual human demand for land.92 Surely this session made

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Velasco realize how little his regime knew about what agrarian reform actually entailed, but also made him more cautious about the potential of “radicalizing” the process. During the presidential session, some attendees—particularly technocrats—feared there would be too little agricultural land available to satisfy the campesino demands on domestic units of production, even using cooperativizing measures. Responding to this challenge, rural technocrats deemed small entrepreneurship and increasing colonization of the montaña region, led by the comunidades and financially assisted by the state, necessary complements for the state-sponsored agrarian reform. The funds for entrepreneurial entitlement were to come primarily from international organizations such as the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), the World Bank (WB), and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO),93 which showed that Velasco’s agrarian reform was gaining acceptance within the hemisphere. During the following years, despite the structured plan in place, agrarian reform faced challenges both material and political. At the material level, drawing the rural census raised awareness of the limits of the agrarian frontier. Contrary to what Velasco, his ministers, and rural technocrats had suspected, much less land was available to cultivate and redistribute, even when the industrialized haciendas were considered.94 At the political level, the agrarian reform stirred the politics of production in the countryside, encouraging the formation of Comités de Defensa de la Revolución (Committees of Defense of the [Military] Revolution), which General José Graham—chief of the COAP—feared were being infiltrated by members of communist parties.95 Graham recommended channeling this social and political mobilization within state structures, thus benefiting from the foundation of several hundreds of these associations and using campesino mobilizations for state purposes. This suggestion eventually led to the consolidation of SINAMOS, which became the foremost political branch of the military “revolution.” Nevertheless, politicized social upheaval persisted, and accusations concerning guerrilla operations within the interior of former haciendas began to emerge.96 Communist activities were reported in Huancayo and Tunán, lower areas of the central sierra. The socioeconomic and political situation of the upper plateau differed greatly from that of the lower areas of the central sierra. In October 1969, the military government established the first SAIS of the central sierra, symbolically named Túpac Amaru after the iconic symbol of the agrarian reform. The comunidades of Usibamba, Tanta, Suitucancha, Huayhuani, Huacapo, Urauchoc, Paccha, Llocllapampa, Challhuas, and

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Ondores became affiliates of the SAIS. Additionally, the SAIS constitution included a service cooperative, the managerial branch for centralized trade purposes, and an experimental hacienda in the montaña region named La Soberana. In setting the territorial possessions of the SAIS, partnering comunidades were granted the haciendas of Casaracra, Pucará, Quinlla, Pachacayo, Cochas, Consac, and—more important— Atocsaico. Considering the extent of rural estates and comunidades, SAIS Túpac Amaru became the largest landholder of the central sierra and one of the most important nationwide. Given the size of territorial possessions, the labor capacity of thousands of comuneros, and the economic dynamism of this region before agrarian reform, the military government intended the SAIS Túpac Amaru to become the flagship to uplift the agrarian production of the central sierra and the Peruvian countryside. As part of this process, the SAIS improved breeding of a new type of sheep, known as “Junín,” because of the province where the SAIS was located. The Junín sheep became a fundamental source of wealth for both comunidades and the state agrarian economy, as this breed had acclimatized to the harsh environmental conditions of higher elevation, overcoming hypoxia and providing wool and meat. The satisfaction that Junín sheep and the SAIS provided for internal and external markets—in meat and wool, respectively—embodied what the state had envisioned for cooperativized agrarian reform. For the lives of comuneros in Ondores, partnering within the SAIS proved alluring. After years of sustained legal struggle and social mobilization, cooperativized agrarian reform brought the comunidad and Atocsaico back together. In an unforeseeable way, agrarian reform conferred upon Ondores the legal possession of Atocsaico, recognizing the combination of “immemorial rights” and the construction of a larger legal claim through many years. The size of the lands to be adjudicated were determined using both state devices of rural metrics, such as maps elaborated by engineers of the Office of Indigenous Affairs, and communal appraisals of place and space. Rural census at the interior of the comunidad measured the demographics of people and livestock, thus providing the knowledge to turn agrarian reform into an economically sustainable endeavor. More important, numbering comuneros as part of an internal census offered an exact measure of the communal demands for land in the event of an actual redistribution on a family basis. However, SAIS Túpac Amaru absorbed both comunidad and estate as part of a new conception of agrarian economies in the countryside and the central sierra. While family agriculture made family-based redistribution

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of land conceivable, ranching economies constrained the possibility of land fragmentation. The SAIS model addressed the political needs of campesinos and comunidad without threatening the economic integrity of national agrarian productivity. As comuneros realized how they had been disenfranchised, they began to oppose agrarian reform and its new structures of land ownership. Comuneros, now defined as campesinos, confronted state apprehension and renewed politics of subordination and constraint. Conclusion

The 1969 agrarian reform in Peru was one of the greatest inflection points in recent Peruvian history. A long-term promise of manifold political projects—leftists, developmentalists, and nationalists—the military version of 1969 meant that agrarian reform came in an unexpected guise. A military coup empowered a group of officers concerned with national development, influenced by an increasingly hemispherical doctrine focused on changing internal structures of power and production. Claiming to conduct a “revolution,” Juan Velasco Alvarado and his military junta delivered what previous state endeavors could not—a politically radical project of agrarian reform that targeted the landed oligarchy and foreign proprietors. However, Velasco’s emerging rural technocracy faced similar challenges to those of its predecessors, primarily the lack of understanding of the countryside and the Andean highlands. While agrarian reform presented a seemingly planned and well-conceptualized state project, an exploration of the intimacies of agrarian reform at state and communal levels indicates how improvised the process became. In turn, cooperativization of land exploitation aimed to resolve improvisation, signaling a well-planned path for refashioning property and remanufacturing agrarian economies. A continuing subject of contemporary debate, the 1969 agrarian reform has been labeled the quintessential expression of “state socialism.” Still, previous processes and projects, including agrarian reform laws promulgated years before the coup, nurtured the military agrarian reform: cooperativization and colonization still placated the potential impact of family-based redistribution of land. In fact, rural technocracies established years before the coup remained in place regardless of their political affiliation. Provincial offices of agrarian reform felt little or no impact from the political changes at the national level. Mobilizing the

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required resources to transform the agrarian structures of the countryside required amassing and systematizing the little information that was known and collecting new information about the conditions for agrarian reform. Comuneros had ambivalent experiences with this process. In the early years of the decade, thousands of comunidades had hoped that agrarian reform would restore their land rights. Comunidades, particularly those in ranching environments, began to expand their communal frontiers while previous projects of rural developmentalism nourished and streamlined their economies. In many circumstances, comunidades were better positioned than haciendas, economically speaking, to face distressing conditions. The combination of legal mobilization and land seizure became an essential strategy for comuneros pursuing land rights. In turn, agrarian reform promises constrained, limited, and channeled this strategy. The language of agrarian reform reframed communal demands for land, providing a renewed vocabulary for interaction with state powers. As agrarian reform materialized, comuneros were first recast as campesinos, key protagonists of rural change. However, the campesinización of comuneros meant much more than a nominal change. Agrarian reform and the making of Peruvian campesinos turned comuneros and comunidades into understandable social and territorial units. For the first time in the twentieth century, and in the republican history of the country, the state had a much clearer governance of its rural environments and a greater control of agrarian economies. In the creation of campesinos and the reinvention of the countryside, the cooperativization of the lives of thousands of comunidades was pivotal. The intimacy of cooperatives and the Sociedades Agrarias de Interés Social embodied how the state had envisioned the rural countryside for decades, which ultimately marked the beginning of the political and economic demise of comunidades.

5 | Making Campesino Communities

A year after the foundation of SAIS Túpac Amaru in Junín, agrarian technocrats and military authorities informed General Juan Velasco Alvarado about the economic progress of his envisioned reform.1 Comunidades within the SAIS had reduced lamb mortality, a major pastoral problem throughout the century, raising the number of sheep from 87,000 to 149,000 and doubling their agrarian capital. SAIS administration of valuable rural estates brought the overall profit of these properties to several million soles, to pay preexistent debts. In lieu of redistributing revenue among partnering comunidades, General José Graham, chair of the Comité de Asesores del Presidente, suggested giving some of the comuneros a few silver-minted commemorative coins with the face of Túpac Amaru.2 Dismissing communal rights to the revenues produced through their cooperativized labor announced a forthcoming, broader demise of communal economies and domestic organization of production from the reformation of agrarian structures. Unlike other forms of campesino cooperatives that required self-management, socioeconomically disenfranchised comunidades became the ultimate result of agrarian reform and the establishment of the SAIS in the central sierra.3 From within the core of agrarian reform, the sociopolitical intimacy of comunidades, increasingly radicalized discourses challenged the military government and its “revolution,” viewing it as yet another experience of subordination, imperialism, and renewed oligarchic interests.4 Displacing communal structures of production and power at the interior of the SAIS also carried political consequences. Cooperative organization of agrarian production entitled the state to name 80 percent of representatives and authorities, leaving comunidades with marginal representation in the leadership. Agrarian reform plans stipulated that

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partnering comunidades within the SAIS must have twenty years of membership before electing their own cooperative authorities. Unlike the ideal of campesino cooperatives as experiences of self-management, the SAIS brought communal structures into the domain of the state in an unprecedented fashion. SAIS authorities, sometimes members of a comunidad but often individuals from outside the community, replaced traditional communal authorities, including presidentes comunales and internal committees. Communal agrarian production, which had nurtured family livelihood and sustained collective political endeavors, became a subject of governmental centralization under a seemingly emancipating but disenfranchising language of cooperativization. In the upper central sierra, a region dominated by grazing economies, the centralization of agrarian production guaranteed the profitability of expropriated estates and haciendas. Since the promulgation of agrarian reform in June 1969, technocrats and specialists had feared that parceling grazing haciendas would destroy ranching economies. The implementation of SAIS cooperativization fulfilled the ambivalent goal of empowering campesinos without direct land redistribution. In contrast, the cooperativization of land and animals alienated campesinos from the land and gradually impoverished them, as flocks, family labor, and communal pastures became assets within “entrepreneurial forms” of agrarian management.5 Throughout the years of agrarian reform, almost two million hectares of expropriated estates and haciendas became the “property” of campesinos and comunidades, but with the condition that they join a cooperative or SAIS.6 The military had unleashed a deeply disenfranchising process.7 Agrarian reform expropriations in the central sierra targeted the landholdings of the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation’s División Ganadera, the livestock complex that took over the Sociedad Ganadera Junín’s estates in 1926.8 Through mining and agrarian industrialized production, the corporation had become a prominent political agent of the central sierra and an engine of Peruvian capitalism. The expropriation of the División Ganadera’s estates required a careful combination of anti-imperialist prose and political maneuvering. The military regime negotiated with both multinational organizations and the US government, requesting financial assistance to compensate the corporation while deepening agrarian reform projects.9 As part of these negotiations, the World Bank dispatched a technical commission to discuss whether to disburse an important loan to Peru, on the condition that most of this money pay the necessary reparations to the corporation. While foreign

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financial aid undermined the anti-imperialist claims of the military regime, Velasco and his officers did welcome US financial assistance to further the agrarian experiment and strengthen state control of campesino labor. In turn, the military regime channeled financial assistance coming from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank to cooperatives throughout the central sierra, subsidizing essential agrarian production and enforcing renewed clientelist relationships with cooperativized comunidades and campesinos.10 In lower areas of the region, namely inside the Mantaro Valley, subsidies for staple items and wage increases of salaried campesinos maintained the fundamental social cohesion to intensify the reform.11 The situation in the upper plateau of Junín differed. In grazing regions, subsidies and salary increases did not appease campesino demands. There, dozens of comunidades continued to claim the expropriated land that had become an integral part of the SAIS’s possessions—in other words, they fulfilled the agrarian reform promise. As the “revolutionary” regime could not dismiss land requests as invalid campesino demands, the military channeled their demands through the Tribunal Agrario, a special court established as part of the agrarian reform process to administer justice in agrarian matters, perhaps hoping that lengthy and costly trials would dissuade further campesino grievances.12 Early in the making of agrarian reform, comunidades from both lower and upper areas in the central sierra faced the cooperativization of expropriated land, which differed from their own understanding of reform. In lower areas of Junín, where family-based agriculture prevailed, individual or communal assignment of estates remained feasible. However, in regions where ranching predominated, such as the upper Bombón Plateau, parceling rural estates and haciendas threatened the productivity of natural pastures and made direct redistribution of land impossible. Still, campesinos and comunidades demanded direct adjudication of land properties, often based on documents that the military government, the Tribunal Agrario, and every institution of rural governance considered apocryphal.13 Such dismissed documents included communal titles from colonial times that were intended to restore the immemorial rights and claims that many of comunidades once held to earn legal status. In reforming the structures of land ownership, the military also recast the mechanism for asserting collective personhood of comunidades.14 As the 1969 agrarian reform unfolded, the transformation of the countryside became part of a much broader question centered on national agrarian productivity and the future of state capitalism at large.15

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In spite of subsidies and additional measures promoted by Velasco, production issues emerged at the interior of cooperatives and the SAIS, further discouraging the inclusion of communal rights and fulfillment of campesino demands within the “revolutionary” ideals. By January 1974, frequent reports on food shortages throughout the country led the COAP to consider establishing a Ministry of Food Administration.16 The military “revolution” faced the overwhelming challenge of satisfying fundamental needs in an age of demographic growth and accelerating urbanization.17 Unable to meet conflicting notions of agrarian justice, combined with an inability to provide basic material demands in the countryside and urban areas, the regime’s legitimacy crumbled. In December 1974, the Ministry of Agriculture informed Velasco that it needed two hundred million soles to advance agrarian reform projects, including a network of rural hospitals for campesino families inside cooperatives and the SAIS.18 With slightly over one hundred million soles available, the cost of agrarian reform surprised Velasco. Much of the financial uncertainty about the funds for the final steps of agrarian reform remained unexplained, though members of the COAP allegedly claimed that the economic compensation of expropriated estates had caused the problem. Agrarian reform, as originally envisioned in 1969, would be finalized the following year. Consequently, lack of resources in these final stages deepened social distrust toward the military regime and threatened the vitality of agrarian reform. Mario Vásquez, the general director of agrarian reform, briefed Velasco and the COAP about the status of expropriations and cooperativization.19 The results shocked the military. Vásquez informed Velasco that his office required at least three additional years to transform the country. While Velasco and other authorities had reiterated that agrarian reform would be concluded before 1975, the rural technocracy of the reform challenged these expectations. In defending his position, Vásquez affirmed that the original deadline was based on a nonexistent rural cadaster and the affidavits of expropriated haciendas and estates.20 A more expedited reform, Vásquez also asserted, would have been financially unfeasible and could have threatened other state projects. Still dissatisfied with the explanation, Velasco requested a new report, including a map that presented the agrarian reform’s progress and achievements. In the meantime, the military hoped that another symbolic act would bolster the social legitimacy of the regime and declared Quechua as an

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official language of Peru in due time for another celebration of the Día del Campesino.21 Velasco did not remain in power long enough to receive the new report about the status of agrarian reform. Because he was facing health issues and physical incapacities, having lost a leg due to an embolism, critics posed serious questions about Velasco’s capacity to lead the regime while the country’s economy quickly deteriorated. On August 26, 1975, after an internal coup organized by top military commanders, Velasco learned that General Francisco Morales Bermúdez had taken over as commander in chief and president of the military junta.22 The “second phase” of the military revolution had begun.23 General Morales Bermúdez received a first statistical report on the agrarian reform on September 9, 1975.24 The report shed light upon the improvisational character of the 1969 projections and outlined future limitations that agrarian reform faced. From a total of 128 million hectares of agrarian land, 72 million were woodlands, 27 million were natural pastures, and slightly fewer than 3 million were cultivable land. Of these 3 million hectares, approximately half had irrigation systems, while the other half were rainfall dependent. With an estimated two million economically active rural people in the countryside, 0.2 hectares of cultivable land per capita remained available. While seemingly urgent and necessary, the expansion of the agrarian frontier through colonization of the coastal desert and montaña could provide another three million hectares at best, after developing expensive irrigation and desalination projects. Even with low rates of population growth in the countryside, the prospects of agrarian reform and land redistribution remained uncertain. Posing further challenges, the Ministry of Food Administration predicted protein shortages due to the precarious condition of cooperativized grazing lands.25 Facing complete demise, the military stopped agrarian reform, contracted state involvement in rural affairs, and launched a period of counterreform. Life and Production in the SAIS

The social and economic configuration of Sociedades Agrícolas de Interés Social involved more than the cooperativization of land property and the integration of communal economies into commercial production.26 At its core, the SAIS required state power to control, administer,

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exploit, and commercialize communal life production. The SAIS centralized every resource available to comunidades: livestock, lands, and, most important, the lives of thousands of campesinos. While the SAIS did not physically resettle people and comunidades, the project mobilized lives and resources through persuasion and coercion. In mobilizing comunidades, the SAIS required a limited number of campesinos to participate as delegates within the central administration, establishing new power structures upon preexistent communal configurations and appealing to the government’s military capacity to legitimize the mobilization of resilient campesinos. Through the establishment of the SAIS, the militarized state responded to one of the foremost challenges of agrarian reform. The Dirección General of agrarian reform characterized the SAIS thus: “[It] spreads modern agrarian technology, trains campesinos, is governed democratically and, in sum, is a Peruvian solution to the typical problem of agrarian Peru.”27 In renegotiating land accessibility and recasting property rights, the SAIS model addressed the economic demands of struggling comunidades and the political need to abolish the hacienda system in grazing regions of the central sierra. A SAIS-based agrarian reform transformed the countryside and preserved the productivity of large estates and haciendas in upland regions, dominated by livestock and grazing economies, which would not survive a process of parceling and direct redistribution. Ultimately, the SAIS as a “supercooperative” encapsulated the ideal of social structures and economic organizations that the state projected over a reconfigured countryside.28 Through the SAIS, the state mediated the relationship between comunidades and markets—local, regional, national, and international. State intervention between markets and campesinos made comunidades increasingly vulnerable, threatening basic levels of autonomy for families living and working within the SAIS. SAIS involved aspects of authoritarian social engineering, the ultimate attempt of the Peruvian state to handle the countryside and its newly made campesinos to “redesign rural life and production from above.”29 The SAIS categorized and labeled socioeconomic and spatial units based on their economic and ecological role within the larger structures of agrarian production. Depending on the geographic location, environmental characteristics, and human configuration of a SAIS, socioeconomic and spatial units included units of production, adjudicated estates, natural reservoirs, and comunidades. When merged into a SAIS, every estate, hacienda, and piece of land that belonged to a comunidad became a unit of production, the central engine of agrarian production

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of a SAIS and joint property shared by state administration and every partnering comunidad. Adjudicated estates were hacienda lands that did not become communal property or part of the joint property of partnering comunidades and SAIS administration. Natural reservoirs were lands that existed in the montaña region—beyond the agrarian frontier of the lower highlands and nearby rainforest—and whose potential for valuable production required further examination and investments. Finally, agrarian reform turned partnering comunidades into social units of production, transforming the old Indigenous community through the process of campesinización. The making of Peruvian campesinos included compulsory incorporation into the SAIS and other cooperativizing endeavors, fragmentation of communal lands for units of production, the gradual replacement of communal authorities with state-sponsored administrators, and direct intervention of a militarized state in the social and economic life of campesinos within the SAIS. The almost 330,000 hectares that became SAIS Túpac Amaru, under the control of the División Ganadera of the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation until 1969, presented additional conditions to the agrarian reform technocrats and reformist politicians before 1969. The central plateau and every neighboring region had been among the first agrarian regions to be declared a “zone of agrarian reform” by a supreme decree enacted on December 29, 1964, under the administration of President Fernando Belaúnde. Unlike the 1969 reform, as Enrique Mayer asserts, the 1964 project envisioned a voluntary direct redistribution of land and cooperativization.30 In mapping the extent of land potentially subject to reform, identifying a total of nineteen haciendas, the 1964 project also found a pivotal challenge for future state interventions.31 According to engineer Jorge Aguilar, a technocrat assigned to the Oficina Regional de Apoyo de la Movilización Social (Regional Office of Support for Social Mobilization, ORAMS), the upper plateau of the central sierra had one of the largest concentrations of natural pastures in the entire country, along with access to an immediate labor supply that had nurtured past and present grazing developments.32 On top of that, the human geography linked grazing haciendas and industrial mines—then controlled by the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation—maximizing the governance of social mobilization in years of economic and political unrest. However, these pastures could not be parceled and redistributed on a communal, family, or individual basis. For a successful reform, retaining the level of grazing productivity observed under corporate exploitation, the campesinización of land and labor also needed to preserve certain

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structures of property and social relations of production from hacienda and corporate times. While claiming a radical redistribution of land as the ultimate goal, agrarian reform delivered limited property transformations. In past years, Indigenous comunidades had mobilized to regain control of land they had claimed as their immemorial property.33 In spite of the language of social justice and empowerment that addressed these past mobilizations, the materialization of agrarian reform as envisioned in 1969 left little room for direct redistribution of land among campesino families and comunidades. In fact, military authorities required the continued employment of the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation’s agrarian technicians to maintain the same level of productivity. Hence, most of the former agrarian technicians and authorities of the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation’s División Ganadera became the “revolutionary” technocrats of the SAIS’s Cooperativa de Servicios Junín, the administrative branch of the SAIS. In other words, the same agrarian specialists who had once supervised haciendas under corporate exploitation became the agrarian reform technocrats responsible for cooperativizing campesinos and comunidades. The technocratic management of comunidades and their transformation into partnering comunidades of the SAIS required a clear grasp of the social, political, economic, and environmental conditions of a given comunidad, to evaluate their potential contributions once cooperativized, and rearrangements to better integrate them into the domains of the SAIS and the state. Conditions required for comunidades to become partners of a SAIS included adjacency to the expropriated estates of the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation’s División Ganadera, legal recognition as a comunidad by the Peruvian state, not being the beneficiary of another adjudication of land, and having a minimum coefficient of “land necessity,” obtained by dividing the campesinos among the hectares of land the comunidad owned. The technocratic appraisal of comunidades also needed to make a more accurate image of these social groups as they entered the process of campesinización. To acquire detailed information about the social and economic aspects of a comunidad, agrarian reform technocrats surveyed them through communal and state institutions of rural governance—district mayors, local offices of agrarian reform, and communal authorities— nourishing the SAIS administration with critical information about everyday life and production. Communal censuses reported on the number of campesinos and their collective income from communal labor

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and other financial resources, including the existence of modern agrarian infrastructure within communal domains. In creating indispensable agrarian metrics for reformist purposes, the state determined an index of participation that partnering comunidades held while redistributing annual revenues produced by the SAIS as a whole. Under SAIS administration, despite a radical language of empowerment that filled the agrarian reform discourse, campesinos and comunidades had access only to redistributed agrarian revenues proportionally based on their preceding contributions to cooperativized production. While claiming to be a redistributive agrarian reform, cooperativization of land and campesinización of comunidades did not fulfill Saturnino Borras’s definition of tenancy and ownership, namely “the effective control over nature, pace, extent, and direction of surplus production and distribution.”34 Far from entitling comunidades, the cooperativization model pursued through the SAIS gradually turned campesinos into laborers for state-centralized agrarian production. The rural census conducted that established SAIS Túpac Amaru identified a total of sixty-three comunidades from the upper central sierra that met the requirements for cooperativization and campesinización. Upon further scrutiny, agrarian technocrats reduced the number of incoming comunidades socias to fifteen, discarding those who did not fulfill the coefficient of land necessity due to previous adjudications of land. The comunidades of Canchayllo, Chalhuas, Huacapo, Huancaya, Huari, Huayhuay, Llocllapampa, Ondores, Paccha, Pachachaca, Sacco, Suitucancha, Tanta, Urauchoc, and Usibamba joined the Cooperativa de Servicios Junín, seven expropriated haciendas, and two experimental colonizing haciendas—SAIS Pampa and La Soberana—in the montaña region near the Amazon basin. Together, these comunidades, haciendas, and estates produced a total territorial extent of 420,077 hectares of land, turning the SAIS into the largest landowner of post–agrarian reform Peru. Within this massive property, comunidades represented 176,000 hectares and haciendas, relabeled as unidades de producción, 217,000 hectares. The materialization of the agrarian reform built upon the consolidation of comunidades and haciendas as domains of the state. In terms of population, SAIS Túpac Amaru held control of approximately 21,000 people. Most of this population corresponded to campesinos living in partnering comunidades, former Indigenous comuneros whose lands and lives had become cooperativized. The Cooperativa de Servicios Junín and other external agrarian technicians assigned to SAIS Pampa and La Soberana, people who lived outside comunidades,

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accounted for approximately 3,600. Most outsiders served as employees of the central SAIS administration and other agrarian institutions of the state within the SAIS structure. The remaining 16,700 lived and worked in one of the partnering comunidades affiliated with the SAIS. Their access to communal lands and their family labor transferred into a centralized scheme of grazing and agrarian production. Among partnering comunidades, Ondores represented almost 15 percent of the entire area of the SAIS, 10 percent of the total population, and almost 12 percent of the total number of families. Along with the neighboring Atocsaico hacienda, whose contested property continued to fuel conflict, Ondores became an iconic case in the development of agrarian reform. Population management within the SAIS focused on transforming the campesino family as a source of labor. SAIS authorities and agrarian technocrats identified 1,744 household heads, 60 percent of whom held leading roles within campesino families, as skilled agrarian laborers. The survey of partnering comunidades also identified the remaining 40 percent of household heads as unskilled laborers or not fully entitled comuneros. The distinction between skilled and unskilled campesino laborers structured power within the SAIS and reshaped the comunidades. To qualify as skilled laborers, campesinos needed to present evidence of full legal entitlement as communal members, family property of lands and animals, and willingness to deliver their family assets to cooperative property upon communal affiliation to the SAIS. Conversely, comuneros who had lands or animals but were unwilling to deliver them to the SAIS, resisting campesinización, were labeled unskilled laborers. As the agrarian reform unfolded, those who contested the cooperativization of communal life became forcefully marginalized from the campesino-based remaking of the countryside. The cooperativization of communal production turned campesino labor and lands into capital assets administered through centralizing mechanisms of an expanding state. Agrarian resources, primarily land and animals, became “social capital” managed through cooperativizing programs focused on the scaling and maximizing of production. Within the SAIS, cooperativized agrarian administration redistributed surplus based on the original contributions of an affiliated partnering comunidad. Empresas comunales—autonomous economic associations within comunidades, another layer of production within SAIS structures—only benefited from the usufruct of resources. Surplus produced by these empresas could not be redistributed among campesinos. Instead, revenues were periodically reinvested to improve infrastructure and agrar-

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ian technology. While cooperatives remained subject to centralized rule and their members had no representation in the configuration of SAIS internal power, empresas comunales still retained some economic and political autonomy. Nevertheless, the SAIS required cooperatives and empresas comunales to name delegates for a central plenary under direct supervision of state authorities. This plenary served as the ultimate source of legality and legitimacy for sanctioning every aspect of cooperativized life within the SAIS, particularly the administration of capitalized agrarian assets. The plenary was a general assembly of delegates constituted by thirty-four representatives, two for each partnering comunidad and two additional members representing the Cooperativa de Servicios Junín. The assembly held two ordinary meetings within a given year and as many extraordinary meetings as the central administration considered necessary. Other structures of power included a board of directors consisting of an administrative council and a security council, with six and four communal representatives, respectively. The board of directors organized the labor of comunidades and units of production to survey daily economic life. Many of these directors stayed in the administration of SAIS, eventually climbing to powerful positions beyond cooperative realms. The creation of multiple layers of agrarian administration generated an atomization of power that reinforced differentiation among cooperativized campesinos. Assembly delegates often challenged their own local authorities. Members of the board of directors overshadowed both delegates and communal leaders; fellow campesinos resented those who reached powerful posts within the SAIS structure. While state presence consolidated, power atomization undermined the internal structure of comunidades. Aiming to strengthen and expand the social legitimacy of agrarian reform, the SAIS also promoted several projects of rural and agrarian development. These projects focused on educating campesinos, strengthening communal organization, improving rural public health, and building agrarian infrastructure. In terms of education, the SAIS promoted the technical training of unschooled campesinos and launched information campaigns about land and property rights. Many of these campaigns focused on discouraging the parceling of communal lands and natural pastures, a negative process for the overall economic goals of cooperativized land exploitation. Organizationally, the SAIS sponsored the ongoing evaluation of the status of campesino, incorporating and excluding people from comunidades based on their compliance with cooperative

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requirements. Equally important, the SAIS also encouraged campesinos to write new internal statutes to regulate each partnering comunidad and their empresas comunales. Internal statutes decentered power at the core of the SAIS and claimed to shift principles of communal authority to higher political positions. At the infrastructure level, the SAIS advanced the construction of roads, pens, electric towers, irrigation channels, and other agrarian infrastructure, supervising the necessary mobilization of communal labor and resources. Finally, the level of means of production was where the centralizing and seemingly disenfranchising nature of the SAIS proved most overwhelming for partnering comunidades. The Oficina Nacional de Evaluación de Recursos Naturales (National Office for the Evaluation of Natural Resources, ONERN) elaborated detailed reports about the environmental conditions and future feasible economic activities of the SAIS. Early in the making of the agrarian reform, the cooperativization of agrarian life and the establishment of the SAIS faced critical environmental challenges. At the high altitudes of the Junín plateau, land suitable for agriculture was scarce and family redistribution of parcels—a central aspect of the agrarian reform promise—seemed unfeasible. Most agrarian lands actually corresponded to natural pastures fit for ranching. In turn, large-scale ranching made communal and family parceling unfeasible as grazing livestock required greater mobility for proper nourishment and the regeneration of pastures. Environmentally speaking, the lands of SAIS Túpac Amaru encapsulated the larger problem of the Peruvian agrarian frontier. Beyond Junín, most of the agrarian lands throughout the countryside only sustained grazing economies based on collective exploitation, communal landholdings, and large estate ownership. The landholding regime required for grazing to flourish precluded the possibility of family or communal adjudication of lands. The only option for direct redistribution of parcels was expanding the agrarian frontier and venture into the montaña region, the eastern margins of the Amazon basin, a possibility conducted in the province of Pucallpa through the SAIS Pampa project. In Junín, and elsewhere in the highlands beyond a certain altitude, grazing lands and their agrarian assets became centralized and integrated into the core of state-controlled cooperatives. In becoming subjects of the state, livestock, lands, and campesino labor transformed into “social capital,” a measurement of both economic value and integration within state structures of power and production. Allocating social capital to partnering comunidades of a SAIS proved challenging. Inequalities abounded among comunidades and

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among families within each comunidad; some held more land than others. Therefore, the SAIS administration dismissed the possibility of land-based distribution of social capital and revenues. In terms of animal property, the SAIS standardized all communal herds using a purebred sheep index—an X number of sheep, cattle, or camelids equal to a number of purebred sheep. Favoring a sheep-based ranching economy, the SAIS administration ordered the gradual elimination of cattle. Once sheep ruled the SAIS economy, the central administration distributed purebred stallions as “social capital,” often purchased with a combination of cooperative revenues, loans from the Fundación de Fomento de la Ganadería de Carne (Beef Cattle Ranching Promotion Foundation, FUNFOGA), and loans from the Inter-American Development Bank through the Oficina Nacional de Desarrollo Comunal (National Office of Communal Development, ONDC).35 In spite of ongoing efforts and expanding support, many people believed that social capital had been distributed unequally. Among partnering comunidades, San Juan de Ondores provided more than 12 percent of social capital while receiving 7.67 percent of revenue participation, whereas Usibamba provided slightly more than 2 percent of social capital and received 8.99 of revenue participation.36 Nevertheless, despite perceptions about unequal redistributions, communal sheep flocks offered the possibility for campesinos to preserve some economic maneuverability. Throughout the most transformative years of agrarian reform (1969– 1974), SAIS controlled fewer sheep than communal flocks. However, the SAIS always retained a greater value of the total social capital because of the improved breeding of its animals. While SAIS sheep were exclusively purebred, animals that belonged to the partnering comunidades and campesino families were considered huaccha—mutts that offered low-quality meat and wool, and therefore scarce profits. Wool produced by comunidades, greasy and poorly valued, generated little revenue for campesinos. As modern husbandry improved newborn lambs in communal flocks, the SAIS seized purebred animals, brought them into cooperative flocks, and allegedly increased the participation of a given partnering comunidad. Regardless of the quality of sheep and wool, Ondores owned several thousands of huaccha sheep, remaining a major participant in the national and international wool market. By 1971, Ondores still held twenty-one thousand sheep, being the most economically empowered partnering comunidad of the SAIS. Because of this position, Ondores campesinos promptly triggered early dissent—about how the agrarian reform had been conducted, as well as its future. Amid

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disenfranchising cooperativization and enduring communal vitalities, members of Ondores decided to pursue the recovery of the Atocsaico hacienda and their voluntary exclusion from SAIS Túpac Amaru. As the number of sheep grew and pasture availability contracted, agrarian pressures within partnering comunidades erupted. For campesinos in Ondores and elsewhere, recovering previously “reformed” land—exploited under cooperative and SAIS ownership—gradually became a focal economic and increasingly political goal. Even as several partnering comunidades preserved some huaccha flocks, cooperativization threatened the sustenance of campesino families at large. In the middle of rising dissent, and fearing the mix of huaccha and purebred sheep, the SAIS ordered the extermination of communally owned muttons. Without lands and sheep, campesino dissent turned into anxiety, which in turn materialized into social challenges against agrarian reform. For Ondores, anxieties revolved around the recovery of the Atocsaico hacienda, one of SAIS Túpac Amaru’s most precious possessions. With thousands of hectares of natural pastures and thousands of purebred sheep, Atocsaico represented approximately a quarter of the total social capital and a third of the production of the SAIS. As the quality of sheep within partnering comunidades improved and they were transferred to the core of the SAIS, placed on the units of production, Atocsaico’s value also increased. Campesinos from neighboring comunidades supplied labor in units of production like those in Atocsaico; a handful of administrative officials from the SAIS supervised them. In such a scheme of agrarian production, some campesinos perceived how the state reproduced a hacienda-like form of labor exploitation. In fact, as campesinización continued, affiliation with the SAIS and participation as a “beneficiary” of agrarian reform impoverished many. Although the military government had showcased socioeconomic conditions in the highlands and the central sierra before the 1969 agrarian reform, many comunidades had prospered in the past based on successfully claiming land rights.37 Comunidades engaged with local, regional, and international markets directly or indirectly, sometimes through state agencies such as the Junta de Industria Lanar and private conglomerates such as the Sociedades Ganaderas. Ferias regionales—market spaces that facilitated provincial and communal commercial practices, such as the famous Huancayo feria on Calle Real—provided major venues for social and economic contacts among comunidades. Whether through state means or ferias, comunidades maintained active economic practices that put them in contact with wider worlds. In becoming campesinos, the

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SAIS reconfiguration of land and labor altered such practices by making the state the sole mechanism for market access and commercial interaction both within the SAIS and with external markets. As agrarian reform and the SAIS consolidated, communal production and trade became increasingly restricted. Inside the SAIS Túpac Amaru, partnering comunidades produced and traded poor-quality wool, some beef, rubbish leather, and dairy. At the end of 1973, all noncooperativized communal production accounted for less than a third of the total goods traded in the upper Junín region. Market competition for communal production sometimes came from the same SAIS. Greasy wool from communally owned huaccha sheep could not compete with the high-quality wool produced by the SAIS—often using campesino labor and communal flocks. In serving agrarian reform, campesinos’ cooperativized labor threatened their own livelihood. In turn, their negative perception of their position within agrarian reform worsened as campesino sustenance depended on the redistribution of SAIS revenues. Redistribution of SAIS revenues among partnering comunidades was intended to be directly proportional to their participation in the making of the original social capital. For example, Ondores received the revenue equivalent to its 7.67 percent contribution in the social capital of SAIS Túpac Amaru. Deficiencies in revenue distribution, however, gradually deepened as the years passed. As the total social capital of the SAIS did not consider communal lands that had been transformed into units of production as contributions, revenue redistribution remained based on arbitrary appraisals of agrarian assets and the trade value of pivotal agrarian commodities. Having supplied a sizeable amount of land, many sheep, and a constant influx of campesino labor, Ondores received less revenue than other partnering comunidades, such as Usibamba or Llocllapampa. Equally important, the redistribution of revenues also dismissed the demographics of comunidades. While the military government and the SAIS administration contended that they used an economic rationality to redistribute revenues based on the symmetry between social capital and total production, profit allocation dismissed the social aspect of the cooperativization of land exploitation, alienating campesino families as pivotal agents of agrarian economies. Ultimately the redistribution of revenue often remained unfulfilled, as the SAIS administration often claimed that profits should be reinvested to benefit cooperative production through the infrastructural and technical improvement of partnering comunidades. Corruption also affected revenue accessibility and redistribution, as some SAIS and campesino

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authorities faced misconduct charges. As material disenfranchisement deepened impoverishment, eroding degrees of autonomies, the social tissue of partnering comunidades began to erode and sparked campesino mobilization against the military “revolution.” Mobilization against the Revolution

The centralization of agrarian resources and the changes inflicted upon social relations of production deteriorated the internal social tissue of partnering comunidades. When the 1969 agrarian reform finally arrived in Ondores, the comunidad reacted positively, adapting to the military government’s discourse of cooperativization and approving the creation of the Cooperativa Ganadera San Juan de Ondores on July 20, 1970.38 Through the establishment of the Cooperativa Ganadera, campesinos from Ondores aimed to respond to the upcoming cooperativizing endeavors of the state. Within the new framework of Law 17.716, along with dozens of comunidades from the central sierra, Ondores mobilized in support of the “revolutionary government” and joined the campesino project.39 As the military unveiled agrarian reform as something other than direct land redistribution, other sources began to inform alternate understandings of the meaning of reform and revolution. Among those sources, the APRA Rebelde (AR)—a political faction first founded in 1959, during a severe ideological crisis within the Partido Aprista Peruano and led by Luis de la Puente Uceda—played a pivotal role.40 Having been part of a set of radical guerrilla groups militarily repressed and politically displaced, the agrarian politics of AR endured and prospered among comunidades because of its support for campesino enfranchisement and radical understandings of land reform. A pamphlet published in 1970 under the title Tierra para los campesinos and distributed among several national campesino organizations called for deeper transformations of agrarian property than the 1969 reform.41 According to AR, both political and military authorities served “their landowning masters and the great mining companies . . ., hacendados, bankers, exporters.”42 Agrarian reform, the pamphlet contended, had to be achieved, not through state or legal means but rather through the struggle of campesinos and workers. In that sense, a true agrarian reform involved the return of land to campesinos and Indigenous comunidades, compensating them for the years in which their properties were illegally usurped. The distribution of land had to privilege “people who spilled their blood for

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reconquering land, relatives of the martyrs of campesino struggle, campesinos subject to servitude, [and] campesinos who had served in the military.”43 Agrarian reform had to consider previous social struggles and mobilization as primary sources of communal legitimacy for land claims. While AR did contemplate the possibility of cooperativization, the pamphlet emphasized the need to separate communal and state structures of production and power. In alternate views of agrarian reform, such as AR’s proposal, autonomous campesino organization was essential for a real transformation of the countryside. In the years after the agrarian reform promulgation, Ondores accepted state terms to transform the countryside. The political symbolism of the process, the exacerbation of nationalism and Indigenous icons, seemingly outweighed the actual significance of land cooperativization. Comunidades understood the language of military cooperativism as another stage of state-sponsored communal organization, no different than other episodes of state-community relations in their distant and recent pasts. Newly established cooperatives built upon existing communal structures as campesinos became associates of a central organization but otherwise preserved their existent social relations of production. As the comunero Pompeyo Valerio Laureano described, despite the creation of cooperatives, “the government had expropriated the land for the campesino.”44 The comuneros of Ondores, in particular, mindfully accepted the terms for conducting land expropriations in their neighboring areas and conceded that “the property rights [of the estates] corresponded to the Sociedad Agrícola de Interés Social.”45 Contrary to state assumptions, comuneros understood the actual meaning of land and labor cooperativization; however, those of Ondores simply tolerated the terms of the 1969 agrarian reform as another critical episode in a long-term relationship with the state. While they obliged the making of a SAIS, Ondores comuneros also continued their legal efforts to recover Atocsaico, realizing that “not accepting becoming part [of the SAIS] could lead to losing the trial.”46 Ultimately, as the comunero Rodolfo Terrel stated, those in Ondores perceived they could always leave the SAIS after a favorable outcome in the trial over Atocsaico.47 Comuneros perceived their SAIS campesino membership as a symbolic, political maneuver that could be undone at their will. The incorporation of Ondores into SAIS Túpac Amaru as a partnering comunidad occurred in the context of shared doubts expressed by individual comuneros and the need to reach a communal consensus of collective support for the military government and joining agrarian reform.

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To secure collective support, agrarian reform officials—both military and civilian technocrats—worked to bring the state and partnering comunidades closer. Upon meeting with recently incorporated partnering comunidades of SAIS Túpac Amaru, the minister of agriculture, Jorge Barandiarán, handled land titles to reinforce the perception that agrarian reform actually fulfilled social demands.48 In response, Ondores named its communal representatives for the SAIS administration. Given the extent and reach of agrarian reform, and realizing the militarized character of the transformations, a handful of comuneros questioned the future of their land struggles and their property rights over Atocsaico. Communal authorities appeased questioning members and soothed tensions within the newly minted partnering comunidades. Legal personeros explained how lands had in fact been formally granted to the SAIS, though comunidades would be the primary beneficiaries of the SAIS’s annual revenues.49 However, the cooperativization of lands and labor did not deliver property rights. Despite this, Ondores and other partnering comunidades of SAIS Túpac Amaru joined and supported the agrarian reform, hoping revenue redistribution would sustain communal livelihoods. Regardless of their early support for agrarian reform, comunidades endured in legally mobilizing over previous land claims. In 1970, after their incorporation as a partnering comunidad in SAIS Túpac Amaru, Ondores received a favorable verdict from the Tribunal Agrario, the judicial core of agrarian reform making.50 After decades of legal maneuvers, the foremost agrarian court finally mandated the return of Atocsaico to Ondores. The SAIS and communal authorities established a commission to study the seemingly problematic situation of Atocsaico, considering how Ondores could remain a partnering comunidad after the return of the estate. Fearing the loss of both Ondores and Atocsaico, SAIS authorities intended to coopt communal leaders to dismantle opposition against cooperativization. The campesino Rodolfo Terrel received a “scholarship” for attending an agrarian reform seminar, traveling to Lima and beyond along with other campesinos and rural technocrats. The SAIS made financial aid and scholarships available for campesinos to be trained as agrarian reform experts, expecting them to become vocal advocates for cooperativization. Within a few months, Ondores campesinos had gone from adamantly demanding the return of Atocsaico to considering the benefits of partnering as a partnering comunidad.51 Trained campesinos informed the adaptation of communal, social, and economic life within a cooperative and without Atocsaico, leading to the transformation of their internal structures. These transformations included replacing their

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Indigenous identity with the newly coined campesino one and otherwise completely remolding communal institutions with the language of agrarian reform. Campesino adaptation enabled Ondores to access lands that had not become the core of units of production of the SAIS.52 These estates—parcels with low-quality pastures and limited productivity— temporarily fulfilled internal communal needs for land. Despite all the soothing endeavors described above, communal anxieties about the future endured, and internal cohesion eroded. A first sign of the erosion of the social tissue inside partnering comunidades came in the form of gossip.53 When discussing boundary problems with a neighboring comunidad to enforce the security of the limits of Ondores, the comunero Alejandro Crispín complained that fellow campesinos spread rumors about illegal arrangements and questioned the honor of communal authorities.54 According to such rumors, communal authorities had accepted bribes in exchange for resigning some land claims, favoring landless campesinos of Junín and other comunidades. The comunero Hipólito Zevallos accepted the existence of “compensation,” though he claimed that all money received had been deposited in a bank account. Echoing these rumors, the sub-prefecto of Junín warned communal leaders about possible financial misconduct that threatened the stability of partnering comunidades and the progression of agrarian reform.55 Collective fears about communal financial misconduct emerged from the new roles that campesino authorities held inside the SAIS; they often served as intermediaries between cooperative authorities and partnering comunidades and also were the alleged recipients of exclusive benefits. These positions shifted often. In the event of disruptions, for example sheep losses, comuneros voted to remove the low-ranked authorities and appoint new internal and external representatives.56 In these elections, campesinos acquired and displayed a political vocabulary that responded to times that framed communal life within the SAIS and the social changes at the interior of partnering comunidades. As the members of Ondores continued to discuss the Atocsaico question, comuneros conveyed their arguments in increasingly radicalized terms, framing their agrarian quest as part of the “the problems of the proletarian class, workers and campesinos alike.”57 As times of campesinos settled, several partnering comunidades found that they could no longer hold their communal assemblies as more comuneros refused to participate in local governance. Throughout a decade of cooperativization (1969–1979), the institution of the asambleas comunales—primary domains of communal politics throughout the

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century—gradually lost their legitimacy as campesinos refused to attend their meetings, yet another sign of social erosion inside partnering comunidades. As rumors and gossip ensued, the redistribution of SAIS revenues further undermined the credibility of communal authorities who faced continuous accusation of financial mischief. Seen more structurally, uneven distribution of revenues deepened existing degrees of economic inequalities among and within partnering comunidades, leading to campesino dismissal of communal power. Sheep became a proxy for understanding rising imbalances of property and power. As the SAIS appropriated communal flocks, especially purebred sheep, the market value of family flocks decreased. Differences in the market values of huaccha and purebred sheep led to a key difference. Campesino families whose livelihood remained based on grazing flocks of huaccha sheep gradually faced economic stagnation and impoverishment. Instead, campesinos became closer to cooperative structures as agrarian reform authorities economically prospered and often amassed social and political power. While historical documents suggest that most accusations of financial misconduct against communal authorities remained unproven, a few cases led to the prosecution and expulsion of accused campesinos.58 On such occasions, the legal realms of partnering comunidades and the SAIS merged and renewed the links between cooperative and communal authorities while reaffirming the legitimacy of campesino structures of power as reshaped through agrarian reform. By 1976, the relationship between SAIS Túpac Amaru and partnering comunidades faced deepening deteriorations. Miguel Valerio, the newly elected personero of Ondores, reported on the results of a study about the role of partnering comunidades in the distribution of social property and cooperative revenues. Valerio found that the demand of campesino labor had increased without a similar rise in access to SAIS revenues.59 He asserted that many of the other partnering comunidades had agreed to demand the return of their lands and their withdrawal from the SAIS. The comunero Alejandro Crispín accused the director of the SAIS of threatening the integrity of partnering comunidades and dismissing the moral principle of “la tierra era para quien la trabaja” (land was for those who work it).60 Upon discussing Valerio’s report, the comuneros of Ondores agreed to formally request the return of Atocsaico and their withdrawal from both SAIS Túpac Amaru and the agrarian reform process. This resolution echoed a larger sociopolitical unrest in the central sierra and throughout the rest of the countryside against agrarian reform, largely triggered by the change in the leadership of the military

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regime.61 As an incoming leader of the Liga Agraria de Junín, an association of mobilized comunidades against agrarian reform, Crispín condemned the “many [negative] changes in the politics of the revolutionary government.”62 Ligas agrarias, larger confederations of comunidades once subject to agrarian reform, began to lead in the defense of communal property rights against cooperativization, the SAIS, and the military regime. While the military government had adamantly tried to contain mobilization during Velasco’s administration (1969–1975) and repress dissent under General Francisco Morales Bermúdez, years of politicization nurtured campesino grassroots politics in unprecedented fashion. Ligas Agraria de Junín and Liga Agraria José Carlos Mariátegui—along with the Confederación Nacional Agraria (National Agrarian Confederation, CAN) and the Confederación Campesina del Peru (Peasant Confederation of Peru, CCP)—assumed leading positions in a rising wave of campesino mobilization against disenfranchising reform and a repressive regime. Within communal domains, questions over property rights ensued. In Ondores, the return of Atocsaico to communal possession became a more critical demand as economic necessities deepened for impoverished campesino families. Amid distress, some accommodated campesinos proposed parceling Atocsaico and establishing family-property limits within communal lands. Parceling had been discussed earlier, though the radical fragmentation of Atocsaico threatened family lives and posed questions about the future of the comunidad as a whole. The comunero Francisco Tinoco, president of the Comité de Propiedad de Tierras, led a faction of campesinos who advocated for the parceling of Atocsaico. Others considered this proposal one that would foster tensions and divisionism, a threat to the future of the comunidad.63 Just as agrarian reform technocrats opposed the parceling of pastures, campesinos also feared land fragmentation and the future of communal and family ranching economies. As uncertainties about recovering Atocsaico persisted, more campesinos endorsed the possibility of parceling any available lands. Before agrarian reform and times of campesinos, comuneros held both communal and family property rights as foundational principles of their livelihoods. Decades of legal interactions with haciendas, corporations, and state powers nourished pivotal understandings of property regimes. Under SAIS administration, cooperativization and the language of state capitalism ultimately made private property central to post–agrarian reform campesino livelihoods, for wealthy and poor families alike. The final outcome of agrarian reform displaced communal exploitation of

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land and made individualized land ownership the primary means to secure family needs. Becoming an individual proprietor, thus, became a focal goal for campesino politics.64 Framed by wider campesino mobilizations and internal dissent within SAIS Túpac Amaru, partnering comunidades challenged the morality of agrarian reform.65 In an increasingly widespread view, the endurance of agrarian reform prevented comunidades from accessing their legally entitled lands, whether for communal exploitation or family parceling. Cooperativization had dictated the terms of communal and family ranching economies, expropriating pastures and purebred flocks for state-controlled exploitation, leaving campesinos with limited resources for their own sustenance. Agrarian reform, in turn, had become the core of conflicts among fellow campesinos during the previous few years and had been the pivotal explanation for the moral deterioration of campesinos in comunidades. Differentiated interests about communal participation in agrarian reform had undermined cohesion within partnering comunidades, threatening material foundations of communal livelihoods and unleashing legitimacy crises. The comuneros of Ondores responded to the deepening legitimacy crisis through rewriting their internal statute. In this statute, intended to replace the 1954 version, the comunidad detailed potential reasons for the expulsion of comuneros and, in many ways, illustrated the transformations in the communal understandings of power and morality. Reasons for expulsion included allying with “enemies” of the comunidad, illegal appropriation of communal funds, alienation and commercialization of communal lands, falsification of legal documents, and general malfeasance.66 In centralizing resources and recasting socioeconomic relations, agrarian reform and cooperativization inflicted structural changes within the comunidad, to which comuneros and campesinos responded creatively. Finally, on February 18, 1979, the comunidad responded with a resolution. In the following days and weeks, comuneros would recover Atocsaico from SAIS Túpac Amaru through any means necessary.67 According to the communal vice president, the economic and political failure of the SAIS—and the collapse of the larger agrarian reform project—had pushed comuneros to recover their land even at the expense of violence.68 According to communal leaders, such a forceful resolution was equally based on both an existent legal verdict that favored Ondores and the legislation on agrarian reform. While anticipating legal means would be insufficient for battling the SAIS and the military regime, the comunidad

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continued to engage agrarian reform and rural property legislation. As expected, however, conflict erupted. Upon filing another grievance at the ONRA , agrarian technocrats and SAIS authorities adamantly affirmed that Ondores had never been the owner of Atocsaico and recognized the state as the sole proprietor of the hacienda.69 With legal means blocked, the comuneros decided to mobilize and seize their land as the last alternative to recover Atocsaico. On August 26, 1979, the comuneros of Ondores launched a land seizure against SAIS Túpac Amaru and challenged the military regime in a way no comunidad campesina ever had before. Authorities suspended all communal activities, persecuting and punishing comuneros who refused to support the mobilization, and challenged the communal decision to seize Atocsaico. In the midst of seizure preparations, and after years of refusing the politicization of their cause, the comuneros also decided to finally join the CCP, fully embracing their campesino identity and the larger struggle of other campesinos and comunidades elsewhere.70 The comunero Romualdo Agüero also pointed out that Ondores should consider joining other associations, federations, and confederations besides the Liga Agraria de Junín and the CCP, to strengthen a support on the eve of a land invasion. The seizure of Atocsaico was a transcendent event for Ondores, the rest of the partnering comunidades in SAIS Túpac Amaru, and other campesinos elsewhere. On September 6, 1979, joined by Andrés Luna Vargas—the prominent general secretary of the CCP—Ondores called for an asamblea comunal in Atocsaico after centuries of usurpation. Upon occupying Atocsaico, authorities created several important documents: a declaration of possession of Atocsaico, an open letter to the workers of SAIS Túpac Amaru, and a press release for regional and national media. The declaration of possession reaffirmed the validity of Ondores’s legal claim as the legitimate owner of Atocsaico. Unlike preceding claims, the declaration of possession no longer invoked immemorial rights but the principles of modern justice as envisioned by the state and transformed by the 1969 agrarian reform.71 Every internal organization of the comunidad participated, as well as the larger social network that configured Ondores, particularly associations of migrants elsewhere in Junín and the country as well as residents in neighboring mining centers. The presence of Juan Guillermo Carbajal, the juez de tierras of Cerro de Pasco, supported the invasion. The open letter to the laborers of SAIS Túpac Amaru informed them that they could join the struggle of Ondores and become incorporated as campesinos with all land rights thereupon.72 Reports to

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media and campesino organizations emphasized the symbolic character of the invasion of Atocsaico for larger rural politics of the countryside. Before finishing the first assembly in Atocsaico, the comunidad agreed to build a temporary site for holding future meetings, organize militias to defend the invasion, move communal huaccha flocks to the hacienda, and take full possession of the recently recovered lands. In the following weeks, communal authorities feared a violent eviction and asked comuneros to settle, move their flocks, and attend communal assemblies. The possibility of eviction radicalized comuneros, who declared themselves ready to defend the invasion and the recovery of Atocsaico to the death.73 In the midst of negotiations that involved communal authorities, CCP leaders, and SAIS representatives, the repressive character of the “second phase” of the Peruvian revolution emerged. Special police forces killed some communal flocks and arrested comuneros, sabotaging the possibility of a negotiated consensus. Political violence was about to strike Ondores. The Massacre of Ondores

On October 22, 1979, months before returning to democracy after twelve years of military dictatorship, San Juan de Ondores presented a petition to the salient president, General Francisco Morales Bermúdez. After narrating the main events in their history, the comuneros requested that General Morales Bermúdez find an amicable resolution to the Atocsaico crisis, avoiding a violent eviction and the potential death of dozens of comuneros.74 The petition accurately predicted the possibility of a massacre resulting from a clash with police forces.75 Nevertheless, violence prevailed. The military regime perceived the occupation of Atocsaico as an intolerable challenge against the political hegemony of the state. Morales Bermúdez responded to Ondores’s petition by dispatching police special forces, better known as the sinchis. On December 18, three hundred sinchis attacked occupying comuneros, killing and wounding many. While reports about the outcome of the eviction remain imprecise, and communal minutes do not detail these events, comuneros in Junín and campesinos elsewhere referred to these events as the massacre of Ondores. In communal accounts plagued with traumatized memories and enforced silences, the state slaughtered comuneros and inaugurated an age of political violence and massacres in the Andes.

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In the days following the clash between the sinchis and comuneros, communal leaders filed a claim requesting to have these events investigated and to prosecute those found responsible. Local authorities, presumably coerced by the central government, denied the request to open a legal investigation. Campesino organizations, on the other hand, publicly denounced the massacre. The CNA alerted its members about the violence, emphasizing the historical character of the struggle of campesinos and the iconic role of Ondores in the central sierra.76 In explaining the violent outcome, the CNA blamed both state forces and communal leaders. While holding sinchis accountable for the slaughter of comuneros and campesinos, the CNA offered to mediate between the state and comunidades to reestablish order in Junín. El Diario de Marka, a seminal leftist publication, was among the few media outlets that covered the events of Ondores. Under the title of “La lucha continúa: Tierra para las comunidades y no para las SAIS” (“The Struggle Continues: Land for Comunidades and Not for the SAIS”), El Diario made clear that agrarian reform, as envisioned in 1969, had never served the interests of the national campesinado.77 El Diario accused the Tribunal Agrario, once portrayed by the military and its “revolution” as a quintessential realm of rural justice, of serving dictatorial interests and betraying the revolutionary values once proposed by General Juan Velasco.78 According to El Diario, enforcing the verdict that favored Ondores in regaining Atocsaico threatened the existence of the SAIS and ultimately the agrarian reform itself. The SAIS had inculcated a culture of divisionism among its workers, usually disenfranchised campesinos from partnering comunidades, pitting comuneros against comuneros. Such divisionist culture had permeated the sociopolitical intimacy of partnering comunidades and the larger campesino organizations of Junín, undermining the social stamina of the campesinado. El Diario detailed how campesino perceptions of the military government had changed, from the ultimate deliverer of limited campesino justice—through statesponsored agrarian reform—to a repressive military dictatorship, an autocratic and oppressive regime that no longer represented the interests of the campesinado. In challenging the agrarian hegemony of the regime, Ondores became “the strut of the campesino struggle, together with el pueblo, against the repressive, dispossessing, and submissive policies of the dictatorship.”79 El Diario published an open manifesto by the CCP that claimed that two comuneros arrested during the eviction had been released. The CCP

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emphasized how the military government had revealed its true nature yet again, recalling previous episodes of repression such as the Huanta massacre of students and campesinos of 1969.80 The connection between the Huanta repression of 1969 and the Ondores massacre of 1979 proved, according to the CCP, how the military had repressed campesinos and massacred comunidades, as every other dictatorship in Peru and Latin America had. Along this line, the manifesto also suggested that repression of campesinos ensued after the massacre, which criminalized national campesino leaders, including the general secretary, Andrés Luna Vargas, and the defense secretary, Carlos Taype, leaders of the CCP. Finally, Amauta, another leftist publication, also published a detailed account of the Atocsaico invasion and the massacre, highlighting the important role of women during the invasion. The women’s committee of Ondores, led by the comunera Luisa Quispe, had played a primary role both during the invasion and occupation and in the long aftermath of the repression. Comuneras, not comuneros, planned the logistics of invasion, herding flocks of sheep to Atocsaico, organizing daily life during the occupation, resisting eviction, and seeking justice for those killed, wounded, and arrested. Despite the dominant patriarchal structures of rural comunidades, reinforced through an equally strong patriarchal understanding of campesino identities, the members of Ondores planned the invasion using foundational social structures that placed women at the center of daily social and political life. Besides internal structures of power, Ondores also relied on other institutional resources available for campesino politics beyond its own domain, such as CCP support in funding and training militias to resist the eviction. Finally, Ondores also used state means to sanction its mobilization, having a local Junín judge—Víctor Alvarado Morales—issuing possession titles to legitimize the invasion of Atocsaico. While repression ultimately prevailed, the invasion revealed the organizational capacity of comuneros, strengthened after decades of internal unrest and political constrictions in an age of agrarian cooperativization, and essential in an upcoming age of political violence. Ondores held two more meetings in Atocsaico after the massacre. While the communal minutes do not mention the repression and only contain a handful of vague mentions about arrested campesinos, these documents did record a wider conversation about upcoming social and political measures for recovering Atocsaico once again.81 To this end, communal leaders requested assistance from labor unions in neighboring mining centers. Strikes planned for January 1980, announced during

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the congress of the Federación de Trabajadores Mineros (Federation of Mining Workers) held in Morococha, included a claim in support of Ondores and the larger campesino struggle. Other communal authorities insisted on personally visiting “the bases of neighboring comunidades and mining centers, making effective the support of the living forces of comunidades, unions, federations, and popular organizations that identify with us.”82 Appealing to the larger political networks of communal associations and social organizations throughout the countryside, beyond Junín and the central sierra, facilitated the arrival of new vocabularies of political contestation. Ondores joined a greater landscape of upheavals that transcended their social frontiers, placing them in contact with unforeseeable sources of political sedition, unseen degrees of radicalization, and political violence. Conclusion

Between 1970 and 1980, the promise of agrarian reform drove political and economic forces in Peru. For economically dynamic and socially active comunidades, agrarian reform had to fulfill an ideal of justice based on furthering property rights for comunidades and rural families. When the vocabulary of agrarian reform entered the domain of communal politics in the central sierra, comuneros welcomed, appropriated, and adapted the language of state reformism. In the view of the state, agrarian reform had to insert rural Peru into the larger global context of Cold War policy making, reforming the structures of landownership and promoting new ideas of capitalism. In turn, while they claimed to share the same ideal, comunidades and the state held antagonistic definitions of that same process. In 1969, as the ideal of agrarian reform settled into an unpredictable fashion, the militarized state faced key challenges connected with the economic and environmental conditions of the countryside in general and the central sierra in particular. Previous studies about the feasibility of agrarian reform addressed these problems, including the scarcity of lands available for redistribution among campesino families and the limits of the agrarian frontier itself. Equally important, and contrasting conventional appraisals of haciendas and comunidades, neither were the former all premodern and autarchic, nor the latter all disenfranchised and poor. Amid an economic and political puzzle, agrarian reform technocrats proposed cooperativization as an optimal solution for the

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implementation of agrarian reform in rural Peru. Despite the alleged revolutionary identity of General Juan Velasco Alvarado’s regime and the 1969 agrarian reform, cooperativization retained the major characteristics of the hacienda system—namely, land extents and a deeply hierarchical understanding of rural capitalism. While the making of a SAIS system was intended to enfranchise partnering comunidades as campesinos of the state while retaining the productivity of haciendas and Sociedades Ganaderas, cooperativization of land and labor ultimately undermined the autonomy of comunidades and threatened the foundations of rural livelihood. For comunidades like San Juan de Ondores, agrarian reform became a liminal experience, an age of disenfranchisement and increasing impoverishment, which threatened communal autonomies. While communal autonomies had been historically nurtured based on collaboration with the state, as in Indigenous comunidades that served as outposts of agrarian and rural development, comunidades had been able to produce and trade outside the structures of state power. In other words, the communal capacity of sustaining future generations did not depend on external factors. Moreover, in the relationship between comunidades, haciendas, and private corporations, the state often served as a mechanism of protection and provided the legal framework to regulate the balance of rural capitalism. Finally, in the relationship between comunidad and state, haciendas and corporations served as a presence that triggered ongoing transformations of legal frameworks and new vocabularies of rural power and legitimacy. A careful balance existed in the countryside before 1969 as neither relationship placed communal livelihood under threat. The 1969 agrarian reform altered this balance, displacing private ownership of rural estates and replacing it with the overwhelming presence of state powers, shifting the politics of production for both the newly coined comunidades campesinas and the state, and threatening rural family livelihoods. With the arrival of agrarian reform, through the cooperativization of land and labor, the state recentralized decades of investment in the development of the countryside. In theory, this centralization was intended to create greater access to agrarian surplus for partnering comunidades of a given cooperative or SAIS while also reconsolidating the national agrarian economy and remaking rural capitalism. Economically dynamic and socially empowered comunidades experienced cooperativization and campesinización as disenfranchisement. Comuneros lost their lands and livestock and suffered the alienation of their social relations of

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production. As campesinos, they went through accelerated processes of internal differentiation and witnessed the daily erosion of their internal social tissue. Contrasting dominant images of the 1969 agrarian reform as a clash of campesinos against hacendados, the ultimate outcome of the larger process of rural transformations was the mobilization of organized campesinos against the military revolution. Some campesinos resented the 1969 agrarian reform just as much as landlords and private corporations once did. In fact, while expropriated hacendados and corporations had received some compensation, the crushing experience of agrarian cooperativization demanded great sacrifices and offered limited rewards for comuneros-turned-campesinos. Intending to escape agrarian reform, the comuneros of Ondores mobilized their limited resources— both financial and political—to recover Atocsaico and leave SAIS Túpac Amaru. The comuneros discussed the strategic use of violence as a complement to their legal pursuits. As agrarian reform collapsed and campesinos mobilized and challenged a militarized and increasingly repressive state, violence dominated. Inaugurated in the massacre of Ondores of 1979, repression against campesinos and campesino politics became the norm and announced a new age of widespread political violence. Violence became the new language between the state and comunidades, whether Indigenous or campesinos. The autonomy of comunidades, however limited, central to the making of Peruvian rurality throughout the twentieth century, deteriorated in the aftermath of agrarian reform failures and the advent of widespread social conflict and radicalization. In years to come, comunidades—indígenas and campesinas—followed divergent paths in response to state repression. The politics of newer generations of campesinos, many of whom had become mining town workers and university students, pointed toward increasing radicalization.

6 | Tilling an Agrarian Conflict

The Assassination of Honorio Pomachagua

At midnight on July 26, 1987, two Ondores campesinos met with Honorio Pomachagua and informed him about an impending emergency that required his attention. A figure of authority, Pomachagua had been presidente of the comunidad and currently served as major of the district. Minutes after Pomachagua left his house, a group of senderistas, members of Sendero Luminoso, captured him and brought him to Mishquipuquio, a few miles away from the urban center of the comunidad. Like thousands of campesinos who were victims of political violence, Pomachagua was tortured, quartered, and shot. After senderistas finished with Pomachagua, they moved on to the municipal building and burned everything inside. The fire consumed a good number of records, including comunidad censuses that dated from the official recognition of the community in 1942 and historical documents essential for the sociopolitical organization of San Juan de Ondores that registered the vitality of internal sociopolitical affairs. Police investigations into the assassination of Pomachagua led to the capture of three campesinos directly involved in the events of July 26: Rufino Quijada, Wilfredo Gómez, and Abdías Valerio. They were captured outside of Ondores and brought to the police station in La Oroya. Lack of evidence led to their release shortly thereafter. In the days after the assassination of Pomachagua, senderistas visited Ondores again and gathered the comunidad to inform it about their political intentions “to rule the country”; their actions were moral, they said, because “they were fighting for the poor, and [villagers] should not be slaves of the rich.” Senderistas threatened snitches and asked them to leave the comunidad

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because—according to them—most of the Ondores villagers supported Sendero Luminoso. Otherwise, “gossipers would have their tongues turned into scarfs, and then would be killed.”1 A few events preceding the killing of Pomachagua provide a partial answer to why he was murdered. Weeks before his assassination, a group of campesinos who self-identified as senderistas visited Ondores and brought approximately five hundred purebred sheep from a neighboring agrarian state cooperative, a declared enemy of the comunidad that had seized a great deal of its grazing lands years before. The church bells announced the arrival of senderistas. Most of Ondores attended the call, and the senderistas asked communal authorities to redistribute the sheep among households. The senderistas proclaimed that purebred sheep belonged to the people, not the cooperative. Honorio Pomachagua, acting as a local representative of the state, identified the senderistas and informed the police about the robbery of the sheep. Police arrived at Ondores over the following days and—assisted by Pomachagua—found many of the stolen sheep. Pomachagua turned in the senderistas and others who benefited from the robbery, offering shelter to the police during the search. In previous months, political graffiti had appeared on walls throughout the comunidad announcing death to traitors, snitches, and landowners. Additionally, communal authorities had been directly threatened and forced to leave their offices. Because of the threats, Manuel Abad, the mayor of the district of Ondores, had stepped down and left Pomachagua in charge of the political administration of the district. When senderistas and other campesinos asked him to leave his office for his own safety, Pomachagua adamantly asserted that “he would die following his beliefs.”2 Further scrutiny of the actors involved in the assassination of Pomachagua shed light upon larger historical trends that had engulfed the comunidad years before the revolution. First, the sheep rustling incident indicates that the political message senderistas attempted to convey needed to be grounded on certain specificities of the material culture of the comunidad. Redistributing stolen sheep might not seem truly revolutionary at first sight. Yet sheep rustling, as an act of revolution, was intended to deliver a moral message that would restore and reconfigure communal livelihood based on preexistent material conditions. Second, the murderers of Pomachagua came from within the comunidad yet were captured in La Oroya, approximately fifty miles from Ondores. Their permanent residency in La Oroya and their identity as Ondores campes-

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inos was far from being contradictory. Amid a war increasingly focused on territorial control, communal identity had been and continued to be defined in nonterritorial terms. Arguably, the senderistas used this double residency and their communal identity to camouflage themselves, successfully murder Pomachagua, and temporarily avoid authorities. Finally, despite having killed a village authority, the senderistas returned to the comunidad. Once again, the revolutionary message acquired moral connotations. Communal authorities seemed unable to contest their presence. Nevertheless, the assassination of Pomachagua triggered internal discussions concerning the future of the comunidad and the security of its members, a discussion politically framed in terms of what would best restore and safeguard the material autonomy of campesinos. More important, a consensus necessary for a soothing discourse to deflate internal material differences became more elusive as radicalizing political language flooded communal affairs. In sum, although the rise of Sendero Luminoso and the presence of senderistas triggered the chaos that swamped communal life in the latter part of the twentieth century, the conflict was otherwise rooted in the long history of struggle of grazing peoples from the upper central sierra. Analysis of communal life, as it is conveyed here, requires a careful examination of livelihood, territoriality, and the communal politics of consensus. This analysis should be inserted within a larger understanding of state-comunidad relations throughout the twentieth century, in which— as Gavin Smith has noted—outbursts of violence have been mediated by larger and more sustained periods of coexistence and negotiation that are typically overlooked by social scientists.3 State-comunidad relations in Peru centered on an agrarian tension that confronted a rural state governmentality versus communal, comunidad-based rationalities. On one side, campesinos living within territorially fixed villages and organized in comunidades aimed to nourish and retain three pivotal capacities: security, mobility, and limited autonomy. On the other side, state power stressed a centralizing prerogative to socioeconomically integrate the countryside, comuneros and campesinos, into a larger project of nation- and state making. These conflicting demands produced politically framed compacts between comunidad and state, which spurred internal negotiations among campesinos and comuneros and larger negotiations between comunidades and multilayered state powers. When negotiation failed, extralegal means and bounded violence became instrumental for further defining the terms

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of state-village relations. Yet unrestrained political violence brought by senderistas proved to be of little use for campesinos, and it led to the ultimate collapse of state-comunidad relations. Along with the central tension that drove state-comunidad relations prior to the rise of senderistas, the three crucial elements of communal life—livelihood, territoriality, and campesino politics of consensus—were also subject to this clash. In the case of livelihood, state governmentality had historically perceived communal life as a form of legible organization resulting from many forms of state surveillance. Comuneros and campesinos, on the other hand, perceived their livelihood as an ecological byproduct of environmental and material conditions—a holistic organization of social relations designed for economic prosperity amid stressful circumstances. In the case of territoriality, state power had aimed to fix campesino life in geographic and spatial terms, creating the ideal of comunidad as a limited place. Conversely, campesinos deemed space and territory symbiotic with their ecologies and economic activities, whereby family agriculture favored land parceling and grazing privileged more boundless understandings of space. Furthermore, ancient ecological principles of territoriality, nurtured by the verticality of the Andean environment, also molded flexible spatial conceptions. Finally, in the view of the state, campesino politics should represent a collectively raised, homogenous position resulting from state-surveyed communal organization. Comuneros and campesinos, on the contrary, perceived internal politics as a realm for morally sanctioning an internal structure in which communality did not entail egalitarianism, and that required consensus to move forward both differentially and as a whole. An Agrarian Conflict

The assassination of Honorio Pomachagua was one among thousands of similar events that tainted twenty years of Peruvian contemporary history. As the country was returning to democracy after twelve years of military dictatorship, Sendero Luminoso declared an armed struggle against the democratic-bourgeois state and civil society at large.4 Arising from the southern province of Ayacucho and revolving around the leadership of university cadres led by philosophy professor Abimael Guzmán, Sendero Luminoso initially targeted symbols of electoral politics amid the 1980 elections. The Internal Armed Conflict, as it has been

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labeled by the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, formally began on May 17, 1980, when senderistas burned the ballot boxes of an electoral outpost in the small Andean town of Chuschi, in Ayacucho, portraying the party’s disdain for electoral means.5 As the conflict ensued, senderista tactics developed into guerrilla warfare based on a strategy of sabotage, in which local material and human resources from the countryside were exploited to maximize the revolutionary army’s potential. Guzmán sought to reach a “strategic equilibrium” with state powers by disputing territorial control of important sierra regions.6 Besides the southern province of Ayacucho, the central Andean region of the country—producer of most of the capital’s material resources—became essential to this goal.7 Ultimately, narratives of the Internal Armed Conflict suggest the revolutionary war of Sendero Luminoso acquired national dimensions and engulfed most of Peruvian society, moving into the capital and indiscriminately attacking all socioeconomic layers. While a portion of the campesinado initially endorsed the revolution, comunidades organized campesino militias and communal networks vital for establishing refugee organizations. Inasmuch as the official war against Sendero Luminoso was won by state and police intelligence, campesino politics beyond militia warfare in defeating Maoism proved to be indispensable. The CVR—established in 2001 to investigate the events, causes, and consequences of the Internal Armed Conflict—reached disheartening conclusions in its final report. The most likely estimate of the total number of victims of this civil strife was approximately seventy thousand people. Of this total, 40 percent of the victims came from the province of Ayacucho; another 45 percent came from the provinces of Junín, Huánuco, Huancavelica, Apurímac, and San Martín. This means that 85 percent of the victims came from rural areas, the most impoverished provinces of the country. Furthermore, the CVR also found that 45 percent of the victims had an agrarian lifestyle, and 75 percent of them had Quechua or a native dialect as their primary language. In other words, the foremost target of the conflict was the non-Spanish-speaking rural campesino. Stressing the gravity of the point, the final report concluded that if the same mortality rate had applied for all provinces in the country, the total number of victims would have surpassed one million people, with nearly half a million from Lima. Empirical evidence suggests, on the other hand, that while there has been much effort in presenting the Internal Armed Conflict as a national civil strife, the war was primarily an agrarian conflagration in origin, nature, execution, and outcome.8

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Consequently, in this chapter I decenter current understandings of the Internal Armed Conflict by focusing on structural agrarian elements, including village livelihood, territoriality, and the politics of consensus. The first part of the chapter illustrates life as an Andean comunero and campesino at the dawn of the Internal Armed Conflict, as well as how violence affected the livelihood of comunidades in multiple ways. The second part features an overlooked ecological aspect of the Internal Armed Conflict—the issue of territorial dispute between the state and Sendero Luminoso—and how campesinos pursued nonterritorial strategies, including enduring, resisting, and battling political violence. Finally, the third section includes an analysis of the role of consensus as a critical aspect of comunidad and campesino politics and its elusiveness amid highlighted internal differentiation and the irruption of political violence in the vocabulary of comuneros and campesinos. Productivity and Politics of Production

A military government intended the agrarian reform of 1969 to be the greatest age of campesino and communal enfranchisement.9 Decades of industrialization had economically empowered the rural economies of comunidades. Even the opprobrious hacienda system had been pushed back because of communal-based grazing dynamism. Wool from villages arrived in Liverpool, and sheep resilient to higher altitudes were purchased from Wyoming farms. The economic dynamism of grazing encouraged comunidades to expand their agrarian frontiers through legal and extralegal means. Peaceful land seizure of estates in the 1960s had become part of everyday livelihood and campesino politics. Far from facing repression, comunidades experienced state sanction of their demands. Further hemispheric fears, framed by Cold War unrest, about the insurrectionary potential of the Latin American countryside ultimately placed land seizures as first signs of political dissent and contestation. Stateorganized agrarian reform aimed to bring stability to Andean livelihood by promoting a sense of campesino justice—reformation of the material structures of land ownership in exchange for further comunidad-based agrarian productivity. In reality, the 1969 agrarian reform brought something different. For the campesinos of Ondores, whose lives unfolded at thirteen thousand feet above sea level, all the aforementioned turning points dramatically changed the interior of their social collectivity. Prior to

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1941, Ondores had struggled with material survival amid greatly constraining conditions. Once labeled a pueblo in the eighteenth century, nineteenth-century liberalism had enacted a combination of political obliteration and commercial disruption. Their land had been the subject of transactions among local landowners, a major British commercial firm, and a massive US mining corporation. In all circumstances, campesinos adapted and endured based on three livelihood-related aspects: their valuable role as local labor, the mobile nature of grazing, and their flawless circulation of commercial networks that linked their comunidad with the wider central sierra region. The subsequent regulation after the constitutional recognition of the legal personhood of comunidades allowed Ondores comuneros to reassert their legibility vis-à-vis the state. Communal values expressed in a local statute, published shortly after this personhood was granted, showed how internal organization had been tailored to fit state expectations.10 The core of the comunidad was presented as economically energetic, socially structured, politically committed, and morally vigorous. A few years later, reports by the Consejo Nacional de Industrias Lanares (National Council of Wool Industries) reported more than thirty thousand healthy rams and ewes in the pastures of Ondores. The existence of grazing infrastructure benefited several interconnected comunidades, and demand for the production of high-quality wool grew in Europe as post–World War II markets shifted.11 Ondores had become an exemplary representative of state industrializing efforts at the interior of other comunidades, a successful case of the granjas comunales project. In fact, the comunidad advanced so much that while other comunidades were seizing land, Ondores villagers purchased neighboring estates and brought past enemies—corporation and hacienda owners—to legal conciliation based on the effective manipulation of the local legal system.12 In turn, the 1969 agrarian reform and the process of state-led land reform did not find a people struggling for survival. Quite in contrast, Ondores comuneros were materially enfranchised and economically flourishing. The recentralizing muscle of the state, in the form of an agrarian cooperative, actually threatened communal livelihood.13 After more than a decade of resisting state intromission and enduring repression by cooperative and state forces, Ondores campesinos were wondering about the future of their very collective existence at the dawn of the period of political violence. The comunidad had been formally expelled from the state cooperative and lost the legibility campesinos had pursued and retained over the last four decades. However, the internal social tissue seemed more deeply affected. One of the foremost

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proposals at the time was cooperativizing the granja comunal. While the granja had been the vanguard of communal development prior to 1969, at the dawn of the period of violence, campesinos began to see how state redistribution of resources through cooperativization had highlighted an internal socioeconomic differentiation detrimental to the interests of the comunidad as a whole. The cooperativization of the granja comunal and the larger reformulation of grazing economies was intended to morally reinforce unequal allocation of resources, which did not mean enforcing egalitarianism but strengthening internal ties among campesinos. In fact, agrarian livelihood had been so strongly challenged that another discussion revolved around the transformation of the communal high school into an industrial or an agrarian school where younger generations of campesinos could acquire technical knowledge useful for the future of the comunidad. Following some debate, the assembly decided to reestablish the school as an industrial one because “solely agrarian education” would not be enough for the current needs of Ondores.14 After centuries of agrarian and grazing livelihood, campesinos questioned the feasibility of future survival solely based on upholding tradition. Whether internal differentiation had been a source of internal distress for campesinos prior to the agrarian reform, such distress had never affected the material foundations of Ondores. It seems, however, that the period of agrarian reform aggravated differences and exacerbated internal contradictions. Communal resources had been historically allocated differentially, greatly benefiting a few leaders at the expense of the majority. Still, the comunidad did not perceive unequal allocation of resources as an incongruity with its larger values if revenues remained distributed internally. When revenues left the communal realm, in times of state cooperativization of the campesino economies, differentiation mattered. Tensions among campesinos peaked as Ondores faced obliteration. On August 8, 1980, alleged representatives of the state cooperative assaulted three campesinos on the property of the powerful Pomachagua family.15 Witnesses identified Nicolás Carmelo, a well-known campesino who had collaborated with the state cooperative, as one of the attackers. Carmelo and the attackers aimed a few shots at the Pomachagua property and seized many of the family’s possessions. A few weeks later, the villager Honorato Quispe referred to the Carmelo event and denounced the communal leaders as “political agitators and terrorists” before a judge in Junín.16 Another campesino, Primitivo Laureano, stated that “terrorism was a threat” and that the duty of the comunidad was to figure out Quispe’s accusations.17 An agrarian struggle that had pitted the

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comunidad against external threats was now becoming a conflagration of campesinos against campesinos. On top of rising internal tension, external threats against village livelihood ensued. As the granja comunal thrived after village cooperativization due to the introduction of purebred sheep and an internal and seemingly even redistribution of profits, the village engaged in tertiary economic activities, offering transportation services that met internal and external demands. These developments in Ondores awakened the interest of neighboring villages and groups. On June 6, 1980, the campesino Alejandro Astete warned Ondores about the presence of forasteros wandering around village lands. The presence of intruders created unrest in the comunidad, which feared a link between forasteros and the state cooperative. In the afternoon, forasteros were brought before the communal council.18 They responded to the names Juan Quintanilla, Victor Cuéllar, and Ricardo Morán. All claimed to be members of the Movimiento de Campesinos Pobres (Poor Campesino Movement, MPC), an unknown campesino organization. At least one of them, Quintanilla, insisted he was from Ayacucho, and another one, Morán, claimed to be a student. The communal minutes that registered the presence of Quintanilla, Cuéllar, and Morán were finalized with some mystery.19 The assembly session finished half an hour after the strangers declared their origins and affiliations. Three missing lines in the report, between Morán declaring he had an acquaintance in Ondores and the closing remark at the end of the session, suggest that something remained purposely unrecorded and missing from the minutes. Minutes from the following sessions of the communal assembly make no further reference to these people. The possibility of reestablishing thriving economic conditions in Ondores, however, attracted the attention of organized groups from beyond the frontiers of the comunidad and the Junín province. Moreover, in spite of the restoration of essential conditions for future economic success through the cooperativization of the granja, material challenges topped with increasingly radicalized politics—both internally and externally—engulfed livelihood in Ondores. Isolated from state development projects, antagonized by the state, and lacking agrarian assistance and technological aid, comunidades saw their purebred sheep quickly deteriorate. Campesinos mixed purebred ewes with mutts, often referred to as huaccha, which led to the sheeps’ loss of the characteristics that had earned national and international praise—particularly their fine wool.20 In turn, internal revenues decreased and the socioeconomic organization of the comunidad faced even greater pressure. Material

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pauperization, moral challenges, and deteriorating livelihood created the circumstances in which the attack against Pomachagua occurred. The characteristics of Pomachagua’s assassination and its livelihood roots were common. In 1987, Aquilino Samaniego—a campesino from the neighboring Usibamba—was also murdered by senderistas. As it happened in Ondores, senderistas had seized livestock from the state cooperative and distributed it among the comunidad. Samaniego, a former sergeant in the army and currently a schoolteacher, assisted cooperative officials in recovering the missing livestock, knocking on doors to find the stolen bulls. At midnight on May 22, a group of senderistas went to Samaniego’s house, attacked his family, and took him to the headquarters of the cooperative in Pachacayo. The senderistas wanted to retake the livestock and bomb the front gate of the SAIS. Samaniego’s body was found in the main square of San José de Quero with a sign reading, “Thus die the snitches of the SAIS Túpac Amaru.”21 Upon finding out about the death of Samaniego, his family was advised by fellow campesinos to not say a word about previous events. Samaniego’s corpse was transported in one of the vehicles of the cooperative and buried in the communal cemetery. After an investigation, a group of Usibamba campesinos was found responsible for the death of Samaniego. This group included Gabino Damián, Domingo Macha, Leonardo Macha, Evaristo Osores, Juvenal Díaz, and Mario Aquino. The presence of senderistas within the comunidad discouraged Samaniego’s family from continuing the investigations into his death. Ciles Samaniego, son of Aquilino, reported to the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, “Terrorist violence was stronger every time, and you could not denounce anything, because senderistas threatened everyone. I was afraid to speak, because in reprisal [senderistas] could kill my family, which was still living in Usibamba.”22 Two years after the murders of Pomachagua and Samaniego, Amancio Aquino, another campesino from Usibamba, also became a victim of revolutionary violence and counterrevolutionary measures. A group of senderistas had stolen a herd of bulls from the state cooperative, brought them to Usibamba, heaved and cooked them, and forced villagers “to eat the meat, bring it home, or else [comuneros] would be killed.”23 Hours later, cooperative officials and police searched for the meat within the comunidad. Anyone found in possession of the stolen meat was accused of being or supporting senderistas. The senderistas suspected that local authorities had betrayed them and threatened those authorities by killing the mayor of the nearby district of San José de Quero. Many communal authorities stepped down, and more military repression followed. Army

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officers who moved into the comunidad to investigate the robbery of the cattle considered everyone in Usibamba a terrorist. Aquino was one of the few authorities who did not fear Sendero Luminoso. He told his daughter that fear would lead to the complete disappearance of communal authorities. “I have not done anything bad, so there is no danger of being killed,” Aquino asserted, “[but] at the end, if I die, it would be in defense of my people.”24 On the night of November 17, 1989, Aquino was taken from his home by a group of cooperative officials—among them Braulio Castillo, the manager of the cooperative, and Marino Samaniego, an Usibamba campesino—along with army soldiers. While they were taking him, Aquino referred to them as “the green ones” and tried to confront them with some fellow campesinos. The soldiers were heavily armed and the campesinos were no match for them. Aquino’s family tried to advocate for him, and the soldiers told his wife that he would return shortly. Aquino was taken in a cooperative vehicle to a military base near Chaquicocha, where he allegedly faced torture and then disappeared. His family continued searching for him throughout Pachacayo— headquarters of the cooperative—and in military bases, morgues, and prisons in the lower valley. Aquino was never found. The experiences of Ondores and Usibamba show how the state cooperative spread violence throughout the upper highlands and grazing regions, and illustrate the larger effects of political violence upon Andean livelihood. In the absence of gamonales, who had been politically wiped out by the 1969 agrarian reform, the state cooperative provided Sendero Luminoso a target to label as the agent of the “bourgeois state” and “semifeudal relations” that the revolution intended to destroy. The events of Usibamba also illustrate an alliance between cooperative and state forces in defending the property rights of the former. Such property rights—namely, the cooperativization of communal lands and labor and the state centralization of campesino economies—had challenged Andean livelihood and communal organization. When comunidades attempted to respond to these challenges through internal reconfigurations of power and livelihood, as was the case in Ondores, preexistent conflicts became obstacles. Campesinos holding different socioeconomic positions questioned the morality of communal organization, and they endorsed, welcomed, and actively participated in attacks against communal authorities and wealthier campesinos and comuneros. Comunidades that confronted the state faced isolation, and their internal economies became incapable of restructuring livelihood in ways that resembled the limited autonomy they held prior to 1969.

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Being a comunero prior to the period of political violence carried an important sense of material enfranchisement. Communal membership was defined more in terms of participation in everyday livelihood and household property rights than in terms of cultural or ethnic ancestry. Under an important degree of state surveillance, communal livelihood had flourished differentially but had brought an overall sense of progress. The period of agrarian reform that preceded the Internal Armed Conflict situated the cooperative and the comunidad as antagonistic characters and communal livelihood at the center of deteriorating state-comunidad relations. Ultimately, the tension between comunidad and cooperative was transferred onto state-comunidad relationships. While comunidades perceived previous state repression against campesinos as outrageous, a communally held ideal of mal gobierno, bad government, placed the responsibility of ill-governance on local agents of state power. A principle of legitimate state rule, often incarnated in the image of presidential power, retained the capability of restoring the stability of livelihood. However, as the Internal Armed Conflict unfolded into indiscriminate terror and a repressive alliance between cooperative and state forces emerged, campesinos perceived their ideal of justice—re-empowerment and re-enfranchisement of comunidades as legitimate and legible socioeconomic polities—to be undelivered. The impossibility of restabilizing livelihood through state and village means gradually placed comuneros and campesinos into polarized positions. Some remained advocates for realignment with the state. Others openly embraced or silently endorsed radicalizing politics. Violence erupted internally as a result of this polarization. In turn, senderistas presented themselves as the heralds of communal justice and the restorers of Andean livelihood. The new order that Sendero Luminoso intended to create upon the ashes of the old state required hegemonic territorial control order before the violence it worshiped could reinvent communal life. Territoriality

The history of spatial and territorial organization in the Andes also deserves scrutiny. The same environmental and topographic conditions that fostered livelihood, as described above, shaped certain forms of understanding space, land, and property through the centuries. Perhaps the most foundational element for understanding the role of territoriality

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in shaping livelihood and vice versa is the discontinuous territoriality resulting from the mastery of the vertical archipelago. Larger ethnic economies linked lower and upper regions of the Andes in a collective effort to maximize access to agrarian foodstuffs, whether crops from the valleys or tubers and livestock products from the puna. The flawless circulation of foodstuffs and populations had carried a sense of dual residency, a cultural practice by which peoples of the same alleged ethnicity and living in territories distant from each other perceived their territoriality as socioeconomically integrated as a whole. Pre-Columbian ayllus and their articulation into larger polities were based on this principle. In terms of territorial and spatial reorganization, modern conceptions of Andean communities—particularly the twentieth-century notion of comunidad studied in previous chapters—as limited, fixed polities with clear geographic boundaries are in many ways related to past foundational moments of the remanufacturing of sierra human geography. In spite of being able to geographically fix Andean comunidad, state powers were—and almost needed to remain—unable to fix the flow of social relations that linked communal settlers in Ondores with tribute payers in Huancavelica, or shepherds in the upper central plateau with farmers in the lower valley. The existence of comunidades solely differentiated by the suffixes “upper” and “higher”—such as Chongos Alto and Chongos Bajo—indicates that dual residency endured in spite of the state-centered geographic interventions. For grazing villages like Ondores, livestock added further mobility to comuneros’ understanding of space. Sheep require an average of eight hours of grazing between dawn and dusk. One hectare of pasture in ideal environmental conditions—plenty of precipitation, moist weather, and adequate administration of soil—can feed approximately twenty sheep. Family herds averaging one hundred would require five hectares of land. Communal herds averaging several thousand put severe pressure on lands and pastures.25 To decrease the pressure upon land and pasture availability as well as limited possibilities for family profits, villagers from Ondores historically engaged with the larger commercial and economic networks that surrounded them. When twentieth-century Peruvian legislation opened a venue for reestablishing the legibility of the comunidad, social cohesion arose. Comuneros quickly returned to mining towns and the lower valley, and conducting censuses became a quintessential, recurrent means of reassuring social cohesion. Place of residence became a critical category of the communal census, as it indicated external residence and yet bolstered internal belonging. More than

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a century of legal obliteration could not destroy the social tissue that linked Ondores comuneros throughout the central sierra. The vitality of discontinuous territoriality proved essential for Ondores campesinos and others like them in the years of civil strife. Senderistas, as discussed by Robert Kent, sought to establish an insurgent state as their central goal.26 This insurgent state was the ultimate stage of revolutionary politics—after mobile and guerrilla warfare—in which territorial dispute is open and confronts state and insurgent forces. Guzmán constantly referred to the alleged strategic equilibrium, a moment in which Sendero Luminoso and the state reached even military and political conditions. While such strategic equilibrium was never reached on a national scale, the regional tactics of Sendero Luminoso proved successful. After launching a political campaign from a provincial capital and a university environment, senderistas focused on remote alliances with campesinos and selective attacks to displace state territorial control.27 Early supporters of the revolution established political and military bases, using comunidades as frameworks for territorial administration. Sendero Luminoso’s territorial rule promoted the idea of “liberated zones,” areas in which state power had no authority and party values framed everyday life. Upon realizing the military strategy of the senderistas, counterinsurgency efforts also focused on regaining control of territories under insurgent rule and securing state prerogatives in disputed regions.28 Nevertheless, both Sendero Luminoso and the state failed to grasp the historically rooted understanding of territory and social cohesion among campesinos. Ondores and the central sierra were key battlegrounds in the war for political and military hegemony in the countryside. According to the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, the outbreak of Sendero Luminoso in the central sierra paralleled the events of Chuschi in 1980 when the Provincial Council of Cerro de Pasco was bombed.29 In the case of Junín, no clear traces of the presence of Sendero Luminoso existed until 1984, when several communist flags were raised throughout the lower valley city of Huancayo. From that point onward the presence of senderistas in the central sierra “maintained important levels until the end of 1992, year of the capture of A[bimael] Guzmán, when [political violence] descend[ed] abruptly.”30 The Sendero Luminoso organization in this region was led by Óscar Ramírez Durand, also known as Feliciano, who chaired the Comité Central Regional of the party from 1981 to 1985. The senderistas deemed the conquest of the central sierra pivotal to facilitate the conquest of Lima. Nelson Manrique has described the impact of

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political violence in the central sierra as a focal war over an economically strategic area of the country, a war that peaked in the latter years of the 1980s as “Junín became a clear priority to the senderista leadership.”31 The assassination of Honorio Pomachagua was one among many violent events that struck the central sierra during this war. Interviewed by the CVR, Alejandro Olivera Vila, the deputy of the Department of Junín, member of the Peruvian Communist Party (1980–1985), and deputy of the United Left (1985–1990), narrated how “the central zone of the country, concretely the town of Huancayo and its provinces, suffered a strong wave of terrorist violence as well as violence from the state.”32 In towns like Sincos, in the lower part of the valley, Sendero Luminoso executed “campesino leaders, authorities, governors, and municipal agents.”33 Countryside and comunidades became spaces of ideological struggle between political forces, confronting Sendero Luminoso and other communist affiliations. Comunidades such as Tarma, Santo Domingo de Acobamba, and Pariahuanca hosted the political activities of multiple affiliations, including a variety of Maoist parties. Markets and slums such as the Asentamiento Humano Justicia, Paz, y Vida in Huancayo were other pivotal battlegrounds where political conflict emerged. In 1984, the ideological conflict turned into a military one, with Sendero Luminoso territorially positioned in the montaña region and organizing the Ejército Guerrillero Popular amid the difficult terrain of the jungle.34 The university remained a focal military base; the basement of the library served as an arms depot, and the stadium functioned as a place for summary executions.35 Students of agronomy and anthropology could be found in the comunidades of Yanacancha, San Juan de Jarpa, and Achipampa, gathering information for Sendero Luminoso and extending its area of influence from the urban core to the rural periphery. Where communal support could not be gained through the redistribution of livestock and other agrarian assets, and campesinos presented resistance, Sendero Luminoso bombed the granjas comunales and tortured and executed communal leaders accused of political misconduct. In time, military actions reached the upper central sierra. By 1987, Sendero Luminoso had unleashed a series of selected annihilations and revolutionary trials in Ulcumayo, approximately fift y miles from Ondores. These acts were meant to support a sustained presence of senderista cadres in Ulcumayo and the larger plateau region. Informants of the CVR suggested that Sendero Luminoso’s presence remained deeply rooted in Ulcumayo and in neighboring comunidades such as Carhuamayo, Junín, Cerro de Pasco, and Ondores until well into the 1990s.

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The upper central sierra had become a zona liberada, an area “liberated” from hegemonic state control. Sendero Luminoso’s rule in Ulcumayo reveals how senderistas understood territorial control. Power was organized through popular committees and what Sendero Luminoso called comités de socorro, which served as a strategy of hit-and-run guerrilla warfare. Brief and violent irruptions in neighboring comunidades were evidence of the strong presence of Sendero Luminoso and allowed senderistas to avoid confronting state power while retaining hegemonic control of their communal outposts. Everyday life was framed by party values. Fiestas patronales, communal celebrations in honor of the local patron saint, were forbidden because they promoted semifeudal habits. Bartering, exchanging, and further commercial and market practices were equally forbidden; communal resources were destined only for self and party sustainability. Comunidades of the upper central sierra became the cannon fodder for the civil strife. Sendero Luminoso’s control of communal resources and ability to mobilize popular support were exhausted when campesinos began to perceive its actions as immoral and against communal values.36 Still, by the end of the war, communal life was “deteriorated, unorganized, dismembered at the family level, disconcerted, with uncertainty, and with a hope about their very future placed upon their fiestas patronales, their family feasts, and their liturgy and religious acts.”37 Actors other than Sendero Luminoso and the state also struggled over territorial control. A revolutionary nicknamed Sergio, a student from the Universidad Privada Los Andes, participated in the organization of Puka Llacta in the upper central sierra.38 Sergio confirmed the presence of multiple organizations in this region, including Patria Roja, PCP-Unidad, Puka Llacta, and Sendero Luminoso. Sergio described a process of revolutionary formation from member of the study groups to militant—a transition that lasted an average of six months to a year. During his premilitant period, he participated in campaigns of persuasion and concientización among campesinos about the need to join the revolution. Thus, much of the political activities of Puka Llacta were focused in the upper sierra and the Bombón region. Puka Llacta eventually lost the political struggle, and Sergio started to sympathize with Sendero Luminoso. He noticed many of the political bases of Puka Llacta and PCP-Unidad served as both the social and geographic platform for senderistas. Sendero Luminoso fully encapsulated communal sociopolitical livelihood in both real and symbolic ways, maximizing its capacity for

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delivering revolutionary messages to campesinos. When instructing them about the revolution, Sergio narrated, We shared a Chinese tale about this wise man who tried to build a road across a hill, and started digging, and when people looked at him and asked him if he realized it would not be possible in his lifetime, the wise man said he may not finish it, but his children and his grandchildren would. Such was the understanding about the revolution.39

Ultimately, Sergio never fully joined Sendero Luminoso. Yet his testimony reveals some critical understanding of why senderistas failed to gain campesino support and consolidate their territorial control in the central sierra. Much of this failure had to do with the indiscriminate use of violence and the poor preparation their cadres received, which eventually turned the campesinos against the senderistas. More striking, Sergio also revealed that Sendero Luminoso moved not from the lower areas toward the upper regions, but vice versa: senderistas moved from the Cerro de Pasco and Bombón Plateau regions toward the lower parts of the valley. The understanding of communal life amid grazing environments nourished the politics of Sendero Luminoso and its understanding of the campesino condition. The presence of state cooperatives in the upper sierra spread revolutionary discourse and acceptance in ways lower valley conditions could not. The larger history of struggle among the grazing comunidades of the Bombón Plateau enabled metaphors like the ones told by Sergio. As the conflict continued to unfold, senderistas gained limited support in the lower valley, and Puka Llacta moved to the Huallaga region in the very late stage of the struggle, aiming to retain a geographic outpost that could provide shelter. Senderismo collapse, as interpreted from Sergio’s testimony, lay in its inability to connect— politically and geographically—two ecologically distinct areas of the central sierra. Moving back to the upper sierra, a closer view of the Ondores district also illustrates how territoriality and Sendero Luminoso’s dismissal of the differentiated ecology of comunidades enabled forms of resistance against political violence. Around September and October of 1986, groups of senderistas visited the comunidad of San Blas—a few miles north of Ondores—inquiring about the social behavior of campesinos and communal misconducts to place themselves as restorers of moral order.40 In September, Paulino Chavarría disappeared from the comunidad,

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further spreading fear throughout the district about the imminent arrival of Sendero Luminoso. A month later, three men riding horses ambushed Adrián Morales Guadalupe, calling him “terruco” and accusing him of bigamy; reportedly, Morales was married and lived with a different woman. Morales was taken to the upper lands of San Blas. His father asked for assistance from the local police, who found Morales’s body tortured and with a stab wound to the lung, along with a sign that read, “Thus die those who have two women.”41 Approximately twenty days after the death of Morales, his father was visited once again by a group of senderistas. They wanted to know the whereabouts of his other son, Marcelo, and asked him for a poncho. “We do not like to take things without permission,” the senderistas told Adrián’s father. A few days later, these senderistas were found dead, killed under uncertain circumstances while planning to bomb the railways of Cerro de Pasco near Vicco.42 In spite of police investigations, responsibility for the assassination of the senderistas remained a mystery. The Chavarría and Morales incidents and their ultimate outcome, however, reinforces two points. Senderistas held some legitimacy as seeming guardians of moral conduct at the interior of comunidades. However, fears about indiscriminate violence and the bombing of a pivotal network of communication and transit, which connected the Bombón Plateau with the lower valley and the mining towns, encouraged retaliation. A few months later, Jubina Guerra, from Usibamba, reported that her husband, Pedro Canchumanya, had disappeared after being taken by a group of unknown armed men.43 In previous weeks, other groups of senderistas had brought livestock from state cooperatives and left them in the main square of the comunidad, symbolizing the economic struggle of Usibamba and the role Sendero Luminoso intended to fulfill. According to Guerra, Canchumanya was a small farmer and weaver without any political affiliations. Guerra saw Canchumanya being transported in a vehicle of the state cooperative by the unidentified armed men; when she confronted them, they slapped her and told her to go away. Guerra could see her husband being taken along with another campesino named Amacio Aquino. Police forces based in the lower town of Pachacayo, where the state cooperative headquarters were also located, reacted dismissively toward the disappearance of Canchumanya. Local informants and fellow campesinos from other towns—including Pachacayo and La Oroya, where Usibamba campesinos had organized a group of migrants—led Guerra to believe that military forces had kidnapped her husband.

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Organizations of migrants in mining towns were common in many comunidades of the upper and lower central sierra. After centuries of economic integration, comunidades and mining towns had established social networks through which thousands of people moved between grazing and mining worlds.44 Many campesinos settled semipermanently for many reasons, including demographic pressures in their comunidades of origin and economic prosperity in their new hometowns. Semipermanent settling did not mean removal from their comunidades, and in most circumstances it involved associating endeavors that fulfilled a twofold role. On the one hand, associations created collective identity and communal solidarity amid new socioeconomic environments. On the other hand, mining town settlers retained representativeness vis-à-vis their comunidades through these associations as well as remaining family relations. Ondores alone had various associations of migrants, named Hijos Legítimos de Ondores, in Morococha, La Oroya, and Carhuacayán. Violence also spread into the nonterritorial networks that connected comunidades and mining towns. Inside the latter, social mobilization had been intense in the decade following the 1969 agrarian reform. As happened with the rural estates and haciendas, the mines of Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation had been expropriated and became part of the Empresa Minera del Centro del Perú (Mining Enterprise of Central Peru, CENTROMIN), a state-run corporation. By 1986, Ricardo García Balvín was an employee in the coal mine project of CENTROMIN. In November 1988, a group of senderistas visited the nearby town of Santo Domingo de Cachi and announced they had arrived to work in favor of campesinos, workers, the poor, and the oppressed. “The exploiting government,” the senderistas declared, “must end in the hands of all the people, because the intention is to distribute goods and richness equally.”45 Shortly after that meeting, García noticed that senderistas were present on a daily basis, asking questions about the working conditions. Fear spread among workers, who were used to political debates and social mobilization but who now faced a different scenario. In 1989, ten armed people, presumably senderistas, seized the premises of CENTROMIN in Cachi and forced all workers to abandon the mine. Upon evicting the workers, the senderistas bombed much of the machinery and infrastructure of the mine, which was completely ruined and never rebuilt. García and many of his fellow workers cooperated with the investigations and had to find new jobs in other mining towns such as Morococha. Political violence also engulfed Morococha in 1989, when Antonio Cajachagua—the secretary general of the mining syndicate of

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CENTROMIN—was assassinated on May 7.46 Cajachagua had been a student at the Universidad del Centro but eventually dropped out due to economic circumstances and moved to Morococha in 1967, when the facilities were still under the control of the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation. News about widespread social and political violence in distant provinces reached the town, ambivalently affecting the politics of unions in the town—throwing some into turmoil while encouraging further cohesion at the same time. The strength of union politics seemed to shelter workers from political violence. Yet news about the assassination of union leaders, such as the national official Saúl Cantoral, alerted Cajachagua about the possible repercussions of his leadership.47 As part of the struggle against unions, Sendero Luminoso called for a national strike on May 10; the local union of Morococha held meetings days before the strike to discuss its position. On the night of May 7, after a union meeting, Cajachagua went to his son’s house with a fellow worker named Alfredo Huamantuma. On his way, Cajachagua was kidnapped by a group of unidentified armed men. Campesino associations and union members suggested that undercover police officers or maybe the paramilitary group Rodrigo Franco—an underground armed cadre of alleged APRA origins—could have killed Cajachagua.48 Nevertheless, the larger struggle of miners’ union leaders and campesino associations against political violence indicated that Cajachagua was probably a victim of Sendero Luminoso. A similar, devastating fate would fall upon Donato Bernal Cristóbal, the secretary of the financial department of CENTROMIN in La Oroya.49 Bernal was shot in the head as he walked to the social club of the mining corporation in town, after being confronted by a couple of people who asked him who he was. Many incidents during his funeral and the night following his burial—which involved the presence of unknown men and several shots in the air—suggested that his assassination had political meaning. As in the Cajachagua incident, it was unclear who had killed Bernal. The police informed Bernal’s family that he had been a victim of Sendero Luminoso’s selective assassinations and discouraged them from pursuing more information at the risk of being accused of senderismo. Generalized and widespread fear ultimately prevailed. The assassinations of Cajachagua and Bernal proved that political violence not only swamped comunidades, but also damaged the larger campesino networks that linked grazing estates, provincial capitals, and mining towns. The complex social tissue that connected villagers within and without the geo-social boundaries of communities seemed to fall apart. While in the past villagers traveled through these networks for

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work, thus keeping their connections with their comunidades alive, the attacks unleashed against livelihood targeted not only the comunidad as an ideal—considered by Sendero Luminoso as part of the feudal burden of Peruvian society—but also campesino survival between grazing and mining worlds. Senderistas seemed to understand that imposing revolutionary rule upon campesinos not only coopted and controlled life within the physical limits of a village, but also eliminated the links that tied them to larger urban centers and mining towns. However, the military strategy of insurrection and warfare proposed by Sendero Luminoso made such control unattainable. Being a campesino from the upper central sierra of Peru, or a similar environment, was much more than a territorially based identity. The endurance of networks of peoples and social relations of production, rather than the defense of a geographically constrained piece of land, survived the spread of violence and fear in the larger central sierra region. Campesinos found no shelter from violence on the home front as the territorial warfare of Sendero Luminoso consumed comunidades. Instead, they relied on the socioeconomic and political functionality of a nonterritorial strategy, grounded in historically rooted understandings of people, space, and mobile economic and political practices inherent to their material culture. Information about Sendero Luminoso’s actions and the presence of senderistas moved back and forth between comunidad and mining towns, alerting campesinos in both worlds and informing their courses of actions. Upon a tragic episode, relatives of the victims counted on local associations of their fellow campesinos for information about the incident and potential prosecution. Dozens perished under revolutionary fire, but many more were saved by this survival strategy, escaping senderismo to distant outposts of their provinces. When political violence engulfed both comunidades and networks and the territorial warfare of Sendero Luminoso seemed to have succeeded, networks of campesinos went wider and reached the capital. Associations of Ondores migrants, as well as their peers from other Andean comunidades, emerged in Lima during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The organization Hijos Legítimos de Ondores in Lima did not respond to new socioeconomic trends and labor dynamics. Instead, Lima-based migrant associations provided shelter amid the meltdown of comunidades and their networks. By the same token, the possibility of village worlds falling apart finally triggered militant responses from campesinos. Militias of campesinos, or rondas campesinas, organized throughout the central sierra, heavily concentrated in the montaña region and the lower

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valley due to the warfare patterns of the latter part of the conflict. Much of the success of these militias had less to do with their actual military capacity and the possibility of regaining territorial control, and more to do with sociopolitically revitalizing nonterritorial networks that brought communal worlds back together. The politics of campesinos proved essential for the recomposition of the countryside. Campesino Politics of Consensus

In the early years of the Internal Armed Conflict, and after having faced state repression following a land seizure, the Ondores campesino Uldarico Hurtado expressed his distrust for communal leaders. According to Hurtado, communal authorities “did not have a unique and independent, and non-politicized preoccupation[, preferring] to identify themselves as leftist politicians, something that labeled the comunidad [as a whole] as ultra-leftist.”50 Hurtado thought a more “centralist” and stable position than affiliating with political parties would benefit the interests of the comunidad, given that the radicalism of leaders had been responsible in part for the repressive outcome of the land seizure. Hurtado’s view indicates that, at least for some campesinos, the struggle for autonomy and land against the state cooperative had to be politically supported through a combination of internal organization and external backing from campesino organizations and other comunidades. Moreover, past authorities affiliated with seditious politics and previous land seizures were identified by police forces; warrants for their arrest were issued and distributed throughout the province. Legal obliteration of the leadership of the comunidad led some campesinos to believe they should elect new representatives and remain ideologically aseptic, at least as far as party affiliation was concerned. Unnecessary politicization of communal claims was deemed antagonistic to their ultimate goals.51 The Ondores campesinos faced repression after being evicted from their lands, which they perceived as a failure of their leaders. When discussing new legal strategies, Isaías Hurtado advocated seeking a lawyer “from without the party . . .[,] independent, or free from political parties.”52 Although Hurtado did not mention the identity of the party that invaded Atocsaico and continued to influence communal politics, traces indicate that party variants of Maoism were involved.53 Moreover, the 1980 return to a democratic administration also failed to deliver what Ondores was pursuing.54 The campesino Romualdo Agüero asserted,

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“Acción Popular [the party in office] will not be able to solve our problems due to the presence of Mr. [Manuel] Ulloa, because he is a multimillionaire of the Rokefeller [sic] firm. Same is the case of Mr. Carmen [Calmell] del Solar, another landowner of our country.”55 Given the distrust toward Acción Popular, the communal council decided to rely on campesino organizations and federations to regain enfranchisement for the campesinos of Ondores and others like them. Campesinos living in mining towns—including Morococha, La Oroya, and Carhuacayán— who may have understood the politics of unionized social mobilization, endorsed a collective mobilization within the boundaries of nonpartisan politics. As political violence erupted, campesinos omitted, and they still deny, the presence of Sendero Luminoso in Ondores. If there was an exacerbating tension shaking existing social relations at the interior of the comunidad, campesinos indirectly linked it with events outside the physical and political boundaries of communal influence. Still, on March 20, 1983, the campesino Ademir Tueros was informed in a visit from provincial authorities that “in Ondores, there were subversive or terrorist groups called senderistas.”56 Whether the accusation was real or not, it was not registered in following meetings, though debate probably ensued. More importantly, the social erosion experienced within the comunidad and the deterioration of state-comunidad relationships found a new vocabulary: the rhetoric of political violence. Political violence as discourse potentially appealed to both state and comunidad alike. On the one hand, the state used the discourse of political violence to delegitimize further communal claims, labeling campesino politics as insurrectionary and seditious endeavors, dismissing them as valid interlocutors. On the other hand, it provided the comunidad with a language of political contestation against state powers, which, as previously discussed, also framed increasing internal fragmentation of social relations at the interior of the comunidad. In October of the same year, after negative responses to their legal endeavors to recover land seized by the state cooperative, Ondores campesinos mobilized through extralegal means.57 They established a comité de lucha, naming Pablo Guadalupe as the leader. Guadalupe, along with Rodolfo Terrel and Albino Lázaro, oversaw organizing all sectors of the comunidad and the associations of migrants in the mining towns. The creation of the comité de lucha seemed to respond to fears about a negative outcome of the legal struggle against the state cooperative, yet perceptions about the ultimate result of the trial differed among comunidad

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members. The campesino Jorge Laureano accused people of gossiping and spreading unfounded rumors about the situation with the state cooperative. Other campesinos remained confident of a positive verdict and hopeful about an overall improvement of state-comunidad relations. Still others accused former authorities, such as Alejandro Crispín, of betraying the interests of the comunidad by using political connections to gain a privileged personal position. Communal politics, according to campesinos, needed to focus on a combination of short- and long-term goals. Despite decades of campesino alignment with multilayered state powers, the land sized by the state cooperative had not been returned. For some campesinos, social mobilization and extralegal means, amid an age of radicalization of rural politics elsewhere, seemed detrimental to their larger interests—regaining sociopolitical legibility and economic autonomy. Past experiences of repression diminished possibilities for homogenous collective resolution. Upon voting, the comunidad decided to continue to struggle within a legal arena while also organizing their social bases for a potential seizure of land. While communal livelihood did not entail egalitarianism, campesino politics did demand consensus to morally sanction internal differentiation. The increasing impact of radical politics made reaching essential consensuses more elusive. As the legal strategy ensued, conservative postures lost more legitimacy, which further polarized the community. A few campesinos raised severe allegations, often naming specific people, about snitches within the comunidad who worked for the state cooperative and allegedly disseminated “all the agreements of the comunidad.”58 The university-educated generations of campesinos presented further challenges, such as when Willy Tueros Palomino—a student of The Daniel Alcides Carrión National University in Cerro de Pasco—distributed flyers during a meeting in which campesinos discussed following extralegal means.59 While the content of the flyers was not registered in the communal minutes, the message seemed to tip the scale toward deciding to dismiss legal strategies and endorse mobilization. In the following days, Pablo Guadalupe and the comité de defensa visited the neighboring mining towns to recruit campesinos and gather supplies for the mobilization. The newly elected communal presidente, Simón Contreras, swore he would “spill blood if [necessary] during the struggle.”60 Campesino politics had finally radicalized by privileging the short-term goals of recovering seized land at the expense of dismissing the need for more enduring social consensuses. The elections of 1985 and the arrival, for the first time in history, of the APRA Party to national political office dramatically altered the polit-

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ical situation of Ondores. The authorities of the state cooperative were alleged APRA affiliates, which in the view of campesinos added more political asymmetry to their standing legal dispute. Some of the most conservative members of the comunidad, particularly campesinos reluctant to embrace extralegal means and land seizures, reengaged with the politics of campesino confederations and sought assistance from the Confederación Campesina del Perú. However, the unfolding war between Sendero Luminoso and campesino confederations—already widespread in the central highlands—had placed the campesino organization in a politically disenfranchised position. While the CCP and the Confederación Nacional Agraria had historically endorsed the claim of Ondores, little in their platforms—or those of the larger legal Left—endorsed political mobilization in favor of campesinos. Campesino politics faced the destructuration of intercommunal solidarity and campesino organization, which undermined possibilities for reaching agreements. In lieu of local representation and to avoid radicalization, affiliation with the APRA Party seemed a feasible alternative to remaining within the boundaries of legality.61 Yet the principles of nonpartisan communal politics quickly dismissed this possibility. In the weeks that preceded the assassination of Honorio Pomachagua, the comunidad faced yet another challenge. The Peruvian government enacted a new law on campesino communities, decree 24.406. The law was intended to restructure the internal political organization of the comunidad and mandated the immediate discharge of current communal authorities. A temporary electoral committee was named to conduct the election of a new communal presidente. Miguel Valerio was named chair of this electoral committee. For the first time in the contemporary history of the comunidad, three campesinos ran for president: Dionisio Ventocilla, Víctor Blanco, and Francisco Tueros. One of Honorio’s brothers, Federico Pomachagua, was a member of Blanco’s electoral ticket. Elections were held on May 3, 1987; Ventocilla won the presidency. Candidacies, campaigns, and results showed that Ondores faced a large degree of political fragmentation that further enhanced the heterogeneity of campesino politics at the peak of the Internal Armed Conflict.62 Upon his inauguration, Ventocilla emphasized “the hard task of conducting the destiny of the comunidad,”63 which demanded the union of all campesinos. Soon enough, Ventocilla realized that his fears of a divided comunidad were justified. Shortly after being elected, he was blamed for the robbery of communal documents and the disappearance of financial inventories.64 Additionally, the chief of the comité de lucha, for every other

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purpose the military arm of the village, presented his resignation, which led Ventocilla to name former presidential candidate Francisco Tueros as the new leader of this body. The comité de lucha focused on the larger legal battle over land with the state cooperative, but also on increasingly recurrent cases, such as Albino Lázaro’s complaint about “hooded men” who broke into his house and took him to La Oroya, where he remained “without communication” for an unspecified period of time.65 Similar situations engulfed Ondores and immersed campesino politics in a widespread state of fear that led to the cancellation of two communal assemblies the week Honorio Pomachagua was killed. Political violence obliterated a critical sphere for the making of communal consensus. The meeting after Honorio Pomachagua’s death, held on August 6, 1987, demanded that the villagers “urgently treat the cases [that had] happened in this locality.”66 While no explicit mention was made about the assassination of Pomachagua, the rhetoric of political violence entered the discussion. The vice president of the comunidad informed members about recent dealings with the central state, stating, “[Congressmen] have labeled the entire people of Ondores as terrorists, which is a lie to us.”67 The campesino Miguel Valerio reacted to this affirmation by saying that “the domination of capitalism” in the higher political spheres of the state was to be blamed for such accusation, and yet communal struggle needed to continue.68 Likewise, the campesino Pablo Guadalupe insisted that the comunidad “needed to make some decisions as other organizations [of the central sierra] have done.”69 Campesino politics amid radicalization and political violence needed consensual resolutions more than ever. Indicative of this political necessity, this communal council meeting ended with the “irrevocable resignation” of Juan Echevarría, the governor of the Ondores district, after he was accused of financial misconduct and feared facing the same fate as Pomachagua. The death of Pomachagua profoundly affected the self-perception of the comunidad and its possibility of remaining morally legitimized as a representative institution amid radicalizing differences. Campesinos, at the same time, believed there was no shelter from political violence. The villager Diego Ranés asked the leadership to name a special commission to address several problems that affected “the defense of comunidad.” 70 This special commission required expenses covered by a combination of special fees paid by every campesino or, alternatively—in the case of campesinos who refused to contribute—the killing of a few rams from the communal cooperative, formerly known as the granja comunal. Ranés expressed a twofold problem. The monetary contributions

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of campesinos, seminal in past experiences of struggles, no longer provided a reliable source of collective funding. By the same token, revenues from the cooperativized granja comunal were equally scarce, as the quality of sheep, wool, and carcasses had deteriorated. More important, the threats Ondores faced focused on communal authorities, and Ventocilla announced his resignation shortly after Pomachagua’s death. “I have accomplished a part of my work,” said Ventocilla, “and up to this point is where my duties end, because of so many things that are spoken by people.”71 In previous weeks, Ventocilla had been arrested in La Oroya for unspecified reasons. Campesino politics of Ondores could not hold things together any longer. Further responding to this level of internal political destructuration, the campesino Tomás Soto asserted that Ondores needed an organization that would secure communal life. He claimed that “an outpost of the Guardia Civil [police]” could serve this purpose.72 Soto and those who supported his proposal were overlooking—intentionally or not—that the Guardia Civil was the same institution responsible for the massacre of Ondores in 1979.73 A decade after a historical tragedy for Ondores, the Guardia Civil was being asked to rescue communal life. The Ministry of the Interior requested concessions previously unthinkable by campesino politics. Besides demanding the authority to scrutinize acts and interrogate victims of political violence, the Guardia Civil could investigate everyday delinquency, including robbery of personal belongings, breakins of campesinos’ houses, and theft of family flocks. The increased police surveillance distressed some campesinos. Máximo Cruz claimed that in facing everyday delinquency, the comunidad “had to be unified and make justice by the people, as other peoples do.”74 Segundino Palomino also lamented bringing police surveillance into the comunidad and advocated for guaranteeing the integrity of the comunidad without state intervention. Campesino politics faced a combination of internal and external threats.75 In the following days, the campesino Javier Campos and one simply referred as Amaro were arrested in La Oroya under unspecified circumstances. Information available indicated that these campesinos were not carrying personal documents, which, considering the political environment in the central sierra, made them suspected traitors.76 Whether or not Campos and Amaro were senderistas, the comunidad defended them against state forces, which spurred further internal unrest. A few days after the arrest of Campos and Amaro, another member of the Amaro family—Nicolás—requested assistance from the comunidad to search for his missing son Wilfredo.77 The communal assembly offered

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legal assistance and transportation for the search for Wilfredo Amaro. State surveillance had failed to restore communal life or foster new communal consensuses. In fact, the state presence had weakened campesino politics, particularly their ability to maintain communal integrity. The comunidad was riddled with violence, and neither the people nor the state seemed to have answers. The names of regular attendees to communal councils abruptly changed after the death of Honorio Pomachagua. Campesinos from mining towns and migrant associations, crucial to the social fabric of the comunidad, attended communal councils only sporadically, and by 1989 they had stopped coming altogether. The number of widows seeking financial support also increased, although most of their cases were not detailed in the minutes. Discussions about the legal struggle with the state cooperative vanished. Every component that had shaped communal life in Ondores suddenly seemed wiped out, and campesino politics were unable to respond to these conditions. Conflict, however, ensued. A transportation service that had been established by the comunidad a few years before, the Empresa de Transportes San Juan de Ondores, suffered from internal contempt among campesinos due to its alleged mismanagement. Driving buses and trucks replaced shepherding as the best way to make a decent living as a campesino. The communal cooperative and smaller agrarian projects to establish new collective farms lost importance. In previous years, the community had publicly commemorated anniversaries such as the 1979 massacre of Ondores and many other lifechanging events in the history of the comunidad. These commemorations were no longer held after Pomachagua’s murder. Campesino politics forbid political commemorations as a measure for protecting the endangered communal integrity. Moreover, grazing land—historically preserved and collectivized for the sake of village and family sheepherding—was subdivided into family plots, which created unprecedented challenges for the economic survival of the comunidad as a whole. The subdivision of grazing land and the community’s reluctance to engage with further communal enterprises illustrate the fear that haunted campesino politics in Ondores. The campesino Albino Lázaro loudly denounced the fact that “many [campesinos] had left their lands available for lease,”78 which many perceived as the final step toward the ultimate destruction of communal political organization and the demise of campesino politics. Without the presence of campesinos, the comunidad could not be preserved. Without communal endeavors, consensuses were simply impossible.

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Campesinos still tried to react to the violence and collapsing village organization by enforcing security measures. On April 30, 1989, the campesina Catalina Yauri accused two unidentified delinquents of stealing sheep and money.79 “Delinquency,” according to the presidente, “had to be eradicated from our midst[;] we [could] no longer permit this situation.”80 Máximo Tueros, the secretary of the comunidad, informed the assembly of the establishment of “secret agents” who would “be in charge of the surveillance” within the comunidad.81 Attacks seemed to target well-positioned families, possibly people who had a record of being victims of previous assaults throughout the decade. In other words, internal violence followed a pattern of targeting campesinos perceived as illegitimate and immoral—due either to their political affiliations during the decade of civil strife or their economic position during and after the period of agrarian reform. Both the possible logic behind these assaults and the secrecy enforced by communal authorities who tried to police everyday violence indicates an increasing level of campesino consent and the possibility of reaching a new consensus of internal politics about rescuing communal livelihood. More important, campesinos kept state surveillance and police out of their internal investigations. Political caution became so crucial for communal politics that when states of emergency and curfews were declared in the province, Ondores campesinos refrained from joining social mobilization efforts alongside neighboring comunidades. When neighboring comunidades requested the support of Ondores in marches and political endeavors, its campesinos preferred to obey policies in place. The campesino politics that had privileged communal solidarity, linking Ondores with other towns, had critically eroded.82 Ultimately, campesinos in Ondores intended to realign with the legal sphere of the state. Any possibility of combining a legal strategy with extralegal mobilization—alternating between short- and long-term goals—as a crucial component of campesino politics vanished in the latter part of the decade. State authorities could have perceived land seizures, a complementary measure to the legal struggle of campesinos, as a sign of sedition and subversion. The communal debate about sticking to the historical politics of mobilization reflected both internal and external campesino dynamics in the larger central sierra during the Internal Armed Conflict. Ultimately, the fact that communal politics dismissed historical networks of campesino solidarity seems to be unquestionable proof that social cohesion—inside and outside the comunidad—had

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been severely undermined if not completely destroyed. Larger campesino politics also succumbed to the delegitimization experienced by federations, organizations such as the Confederación Campesina del Peru, and the comunidad itself, all perceived and labeled by the state as possible agents of political sedition. As Ondores entered the 1990s, its campesinos realigned with the state, sought legal sanctions on their claims, dismissed social mobilization, and even demanded that state agents come back within their boundaries.83 Finally, in November 1989, a new verdict by the juez de tierras from Junín ruled in favor of Ondores campesinos in their land struggle with the state cooperative. While in previous years such a verdict would have produced an outbreak of social convulsion, the comunidad reacted conservatively. Communal authorities followed the recommendation of the Ministry of the Interior to not sell liquor twenty-four hours before conducting the return of Atocsaico to Ondores. Likewise, authorities welcomed the presence of police and military forces who attended the event and encouraged campesinos to respect internal communal organization and conduct themselves in an orderly manner on their way to the estate.84 The preparations leading up to the legal occupation included inventorying flocks to be placed in the rural estate; mobilizing diverse sectors, including the long-forgotten migrants in mining towns; and the return of campesinos who had fled the comunidad in past years.85 The legal strategy enforced by campesino politics, and the fulfillment of a critical shortterm goal of Ondores, revitalized the social fabric of the comunidad. On December 22, 1989, a decade after the massacre of 1979, campesinos held a meeting under the interim presidency of Dionisio Ventocilla on the land once seized by the state cooperative. After years of internal struggle and questions about abandoning the legal struggle and dismissing communal livelihood, the state had legally sanctioned a critical component of the agenda of campesino politics. With the short-term goal fulfilled, and despite the times of violence and fear, state-comunidad relations seemed to improve and Ondores campesinos moved on to more structural longterm goals. A new consensual horizon could be established. Yet political violence had changed circumstances forever. Conclusion

When senderistas arrived at Ondores, bringing sheep from the neighboring state cooperative, they intended their political violence to

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frame revolution as a moral power rooted in its capacity to restore the stability of communal livelihood. Ondores campesinos, whose lives had historically developed amid grazing environments and ecologically collectivized endeavors, had experienced previous disenfranchisement due to agrarian state centralization after the 1969 reform. Appealing to preexisting conflicts between comunidad and state, the agrarian nature of the Internal Armed Conflict shook the foundations of village life. As state centralization highlighted internal differences among campesinos and households, violence struck in the form of indiscriminate terror, pitting campesinos against campesinos. The assassination of Honorio Pomachagua meant much more than the arrival of Sendero Luminoso in Ondores: it was the ultimate consequence of an increasing level of communal destructuration. The structure of communal livelihood had historically relied on some pivotal material conditions. Altitude of communal lands had made family agriculture limited and scarce, and the availability of pastures and sheep nourished a combination of economically differentiated household economies and communalized endeavors. Grazing itself depended on perceptions of land and space. Integrated within a larger socioeconomic grid that involved grazing communal economies and mining markets, the campesinos of Ondores mobilized constantly between agrarian estates and mining towns, joining labor markets in times of drought, sheep disease, and collapsing wool prices. Unavailability of lands for household tenancy pushed seasonal mobility to semipermanent and eventually permanent settlement beyond the geo-social frontiers of the comunidad. By the dawn of the Internal Armed Conflict, Ondores campesinos inhabited the neighboring towns of Carhuacayán, Morococha, and La Oroya, where associations of migrants remained closely linked with communal sociopolitical organization. Ondores campesinos also had a strong presence in Junín, Tarma, Huancayo, and Cerro de Pasco, pivotal commercial outposts of the central sierra. Political violence also circulated throughout these networks, and it facilitated political agitation from the radicalized valley lowlands, the university environments, and the mining towns. As the Internal Armed Conflict became a matter of territorial dispute between Sendero Luminoso and state powers, campesinos were able to revitalize their nonterritorial networks, endure violence through refugee organization, and struggle against senderistas through militia organization. In the intimacy of communal politics, the impact of political violence was even more structural. Materially speaking, the socioeconomic

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life  of  the comunidad did not include egalitarianism. For decades, campesinos had flourished differentially based on their capacity to increase the size of their family flocks and control communal institutions. Despite differences, communal politics guaranteed the stabilization of social life through the establishment of consensus. While consensus typically expressed the view of a powerful few, the political organization of the comunidad enabled the powerless many to actively participate and mildly reshape that consensus. The larger socioeconomic compacts between state and comunidad also legally entitled internal consensus, insofar as village claims gained state sanction. People may have experienced “progress” unequally, but internal consensus morally sanctioned inequity and deflated tensions resulting from differences. Radical politics polarized villagers to unprecedented degrees and made the possibility of reaching and establishing consensus increasingly unattainable. Furthermore, the confrontation between comunidad and state, and the dissolution of socioeconomic contracts with multilayered state powers, wiped out consensual horizons. As disintegration peaked, campesinos questioned the legitimacy of internal institutions, challenged the morality of communal life, resented the partisanship of communal politics, and lamented the state surveillance of everyday life—all while radical campesinos spread violence and terror. Once violence became unbearable and campesinos abandoned—politically and physically—communal life, realignment with the state seemed unavoidable. Another state sanction of a historical communal claim, the recovery of land previously seized by agrarian reform, restabilized livelihood and renewed communal politics of consensus. The possibility of revitalizing communal life under a new social contract with state powers became the new consensual horizon. However, the state that emerged after a decade of military warfare in the countryside was remarkably different, and campesinos who survived repression faced different forms of obliteration. Finally, the chaos that swamped village life may have been triggered by Sendero Luminoso but was otherwise rooted in the long history of grazing peoples and their relationship with state powers. The variables used in trying to grasp the impact of the age of terror in Ondores— livelihood, territory, and communal politics—belong to a larger understanding of communal ecologies and their role in nation-state making. Outbursts of violence, distanced by intricate process of negotiation, were a key part of state-comunidad relations. Yet political violence and terror eroded the internal social fabric of the comunidad. The ultimate out-

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comes in Ondores during the Internal Armed Conflict suggest that chaos also entails negotiation, stirs social relations, poses greater demands for consensus, and inflicts seemingly irreparable distress upon social fabrics. Life in Ondores during and after civil strife required recasting communal livelihood amid social meltdown, revitalizing nonterritorial networks amid escalating conflagration, and establishing new consensus amid highlighted and ongoing internal differentiation.

Conclusion Eroding Rural Communities

On any given day, San Juan de Ondores can resemble a ghost town. Conflict and subsequent abandonment have engulfed the lives of hundreds of campesino families who survived decades of peril, burdensome reform, and destructive political violence. The main square, despite scarce social and political activity, serves as the location of the political administration of the Ondores district. Smaller estates owned by campesino families and individuals structure the rest of the urbanized area of the comunidad, all under a shared administration of communal and state authorities. These estates are not fully abandoned, as herds of sheep can be seen grazing near the western hills of the town, portions of which are also parceled; others are stationed inside countless pens. However, Ondores and its communal organization have also experienced another kind of abandonment of their former social vitality. The comunidad still seems economically and politically active—herds are in place; authorities still survey communal life—but most campesinos have left the village. On a handful of occasions, the people return and Ondores comes back to life. The first one is the celebration of the fiesta patronal of San Juan Bautista. Ondores celebrates its fiesta patronal each June 24 to commemorate. In this respect, Ondores differs from many other comunidades that celebrate the Día del Campesino on the same day, a pivotal date in many agrarian calendars and the day of San Juan Bautista in the Catholic calendar. The military government promoted the Día del Campesino as a refounding political act, part of the process of agrarian reform, to recast the socioeconomic position of Indigenous populations within the structures of the state.1 Before 1969, the Peruvian state held the Día del Indio on June 24, a holiday instituted by Augusto B. Leguía in 1930.2 The Día del Indio served as the symbolic piece of the social engineering process

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that transformed Indigenous comunidades into ideal sites to remanufacture the human geography of the Peruvian sierra. In relabeling the Día del Indio as the Día del Campesino, the military-controlled state meant to recast the social relations of production that linked rural villagers and state powers at agrarian levels. Coinciding with the promulgation of the agrarian reform law, the Día del Campesino ultimately became a political celebration of the military government’s reformism. During the first few years of membership within the SAIS, Ondores followed military expectations and held this celebration. Nowadays, the Día del Campesino is defiantly neglected, and every rhetorical piece associated with the agrarian reform—including the revolutionary icon of Túpac Amaru, a symbol of the military government’s radical politics—is linked with the pervasiveness of the SAIS. Ondores has consciously depoliticized this central agrarian holiday and moved back to a religiously framed narrative of agrarianism. The other main celebration on Ondores’s calendar corresponds to the “foundation” of the comunidad. This holiday takes place every September 12, and many campesinos consider it even more important than the San Juan Bautista patron day. Families of campesinos from all over the country, and even many foreign countries, return to the comunidad to celebrate. Many descendants of comuneros and campesinos visit for the first time the place where their families come from. Other neighboring comunidades and villages join the celebration and the central parade, bringing dancing troupes and livestock. A mayordomo leads the festivities and organizes food and drinks—primarily mutton and aguardiente—for all attendees. The position of mayordomo of the anniversary of Ondores brings much prestige and demands a greater investment than that of the mayordomía of the fiesta patronal. As central as this celebration has become, very few campesinos in Ondores know the history of the foundation of the comunidad on September 12. When asked about the celebration, most refer to the immemorial ayllus that existed in Ondores before Spanish colonization. In reality, Ondores received legal status and personhood as a comunidad in the twentieth century. While the paperwork had been filed in the early 1930s, the many existent disputes over boundaries with the Atocsaico hacienda—which involved the village and the Sociedad Ganadera Junín—made official mapping virtually impossible and thus delayed the recognition of Ondores. After many conciliations and legal settlements with the Sociedad Ganadera Junín and other neighboring hacendados, the village finally received comunidad status on September 12, 1940. Thus, the celebration of the “foundation”

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of the comunidad does, in fact, commemorate its legal status as conferred by the state. Without being conceived or perceived as such, the most important holiday of the comunidad vindicates a seminal moment of communal subjection to state powers. Other than these two holidays, the social landscape in contemporary Ondores remains quite desolate. Besides a handful of municipal workers and a small group of shepherds, little traffic circulates on the streets of Ondores. Only two stores supply staples for the entire comunidad, including foodstuffs and meals for the handful of campesinos that remain in the comunidad during weekdays. A few years ago, the municipal administration attempted to launch a tourism project promoting the Chinchaycocha lake, involving the comunidades of Ondores and San Pedro de Pari in hopes—like many more Indigenous and campesino peoples elsewhere in the Peruvian Andes—that tourism could bring people back, interweaving social networks and creating sizeable profits in an age of neoliberal deregulation.3 The Chinchaycocha project, however, faced infrastructural challenges. The road that connects Ondores with Junín is an unpaved trail of approximately twelve miles that goes across the western shore of the lake. Campesinos from Ondores and Pari have called on the state to pave this road many times over the last couple of decades. While initial requests were simply dismissed, latter demands addressed to the Ministry of Transportation and Communication finally received a response. If Ondores and Pari wanted to have the trail paved, technical studies conducted by engineers commissioned by the ministry needed to demonstrate a daily transit of at least five hundred vehicles. The drivers of the colectivos—small to midsize cars that serve as collective taxis for people commuting between Junín and Ondores—who wait for a minimum of five passengers to fill their cars and make the trip worthwhile, report that each car makes up to eight round-trips per day. On a regular day, between five and ten colectivos drivers drive between Junín and Ondores. With each of them making eight round-trips, a rare occurrence unless there is a special event in the comunidad, the road could reach a maximum of 160 round-trips. This number does not get anywhere close to the minimum requirement of the ministry, and hence the trail remains unpaved. The only remnant of the tourism project is an abandoned swimming pool that campesinos expect to fill with thermal waters from the Chinchaycocha. This trail, the tourism project, and the contemporary condition of the comunidad symbolize the legacy of the twentieth-century relationship between rural villagers and state powers. The ultimate outcome

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of every socioeconomic process has structured the intimacy of comunidades, and these outcomes also affect their current social position and state perception. The lack of movement along the trail reflects a twofold abandonment of the comunidad, within and without. Very few campesino families remain in the urbanized area of the comunidad. Many families migrated to Lima during the Internal Armed Conflict, joining a larger sierra migration to the capital during a decade of violence, environmental challenges, starvation, and sociopolitical meltdown. While violence occasionally motivated Ondores migration, the larger dynamics of social mobilization that fueled the movement of thousands of campesinos to the margins of Lima—and rural villagers elsewhere in the world— link the perils of Andean families with global stories of displacement. Like many other villagers and campesinos elsewhere, upon relocating to nearby urban settlements, Ondores migrants and their descendants formed associations in Lima—Hijos Legítimos de Ondores—which became pivotal social components of a transforming communal societal organization.4 Other campesinos moved to the mining towns of La Oroya and Morococha, the same towns that decades before had welcomed their relatives seeking wage labor and family subsistence. Migrants in mining towns also formed associations, remaining politically linked to the communal organization, and retained their status of campesinos and comuneros while actively engaging in communal assemblies. Still, many more families moved to Junín and the nearby town of Tarma in search of increasingly urban lives while also remaining attached to their rural estates. This particular set of families often did not own property in the urban sector of Ondores, but instead had been granted family plots of pastures in the portion of the Atocsaico hacienda that became parceled when comuneros and campesinos returned to the comunidad as violence began fading away. The different places where Ondores campesinos and comuneros moved showed differing degrees of social disenfranchisement that families experienced after 1990. Those who moved to Lima or abroad lost their land either before or after their relocation. When disenfranchisement occurred before they moved, the lack of family plots and the access to a minimum of capital—resulting from the sale of their lands— enabled their migration. When disenfranchisement did not occur before migrating, comuneros’ sustained absence triggered land speculation within the comunidad, along with many questions about their legitimate status as comuneros and campesinos. While many retained their status, their absence often led to land disenfranchisement. In both situa-

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tions, land was alienated and sold, and it became the property of wealthier comuneros. Campesino families who moved to mining centers had also been part of the process of parceling of the original communal lands, which later became the urbanized center. Compared to other fleeing campesinos, these families retained control of their lands. Many faced no pressures due to the extent or the location of land they held. Still others simply refused to sell their land, legally “protected” by the internal statute of the comunidad that prevented land alienation and the rise of gamonalillos or hacendado-like practices among campesinos. These comuneros began migrating because of the parceling of the urban sector that made ranching in these lands simply unviable. In response to this challenge, communal authorities authorized permanent residents of this area to move their herds to the pastures of Atocsaico. Once there, campesinos realized that the topography of communal domains made travel from the mining towns to Atocsaico much shorter and easier than from the urban sector. Their migration and relocation became an efficient economic strategy that favored land exploitation of communal domains. Finally, families that moved to Junín and Tarma were typically wealthier campesinos who appropriated larger portions of land in the urban sector while they were also permitted to move their herds to Atocsaico. As had happened with the mining town migrants, campesinos living in Junín and Tarma found that transit from an increasingly socially abandoned urban center to Atocsaico took more effort than commuting from either of those cities. These groups of wealthier comuneros could afford to move to seemingly more expensive locations and yet retain important positions in the organization of the comunidad. Many of the recent past presidents of the comunidad were, in fact, permanent residents of Junín or Tarma. Furthermore, their position of power inside the comunidad also nurtured later political campaigns for office in the district, in many cases with successful results. Much of the power held by these campesinos relied on the control of lands and livestock—basic means of life inside the comunidad—as well as the control of an agrarian cooperative established with communal funds. However, their ascents to power also depended on their capacity to avoid direct involvement in the exploitation of both resources. In recent years, particularly after the Internal Armed Conflict, wealthier and increasingly powerful comuneros and campesinos had been able to recruit sheepherding labor from nearby impoverished provinces. Huánuco and Cerro de Pasco provided many of these landless laborers, who have

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become shepherds of many small communal landholders. The stories of the recruitment of these migrants and the poverty in which they live problematize what we think we know about rural Peru. Most of these shepherds were typically hired on a combination of wage labor and land leases. Typically, a group of neighboring communal landowners with immediate adjacent properties joined together to employ one shepherd and his family. The shepherd would become responsible for the flocks of all communal landowners and receive just one salary. In addition to this salary, the shepherds were permitted to bring their own sheep—usually of very inferior quality to those of the flocks of his employers. However, when the Chueco cooperative employed shepherds, they were not allowed to bring any private flocks to prevent breeding with high-quality sheep. The shepherd held no social or political status in the organization of the comunidad. Likewise, the collective of shepherds did not have any representation before communal authorities. Shepherds were socioeconomic pariahs in the formation of a hacienda-like type of land exploitation put together by a group of powerful comuneros and sanctioned by the comunidad.5 In struggling to recover their means of life, the comunidad became what they so adamantly fought against. The Long-Term History of Rura l States

A dominant vision among different literatures usually highlights the historical fractures between states and rural communities in the Andes and elsewhere in Latin America. Contrasting this vision, the trajectories of San Juan de Ondores and the Peruvian state illustrate the many proximities that state powers and rural peoples also held, at least throughout most of the past century. In Peru, the fracture between Indigenous communities and campesino groups vis-à-vis state powers seemingly did emerge during the last decades of the twentieth century, when political violence engulfed communal livelihoods. Before then, as I have discussed, rural populations and state powers remained a lot closer, shaping and molding each other in intended and unintended ways. State powers, colonial and contemporary, “made” Indigenous communities and campesino groups through different interventions, from territorial resettlement to agrarian reform. Conversely, Indigenous and campesino groups also “made” the state, triggering the establishment of institutions, bureaucracies, political agendas, and a larger rural governmentality that fully emerged, consolidated, and collapsed over the last century.

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Indigenous populations in Andean Peru, those who survived and gradually recovered from demographic crises, transitioned from colonial to republican times, gaining and retaining internal social and economic organizations that resulted from adaptation to the rationality of the state. A colonial state’s rationality brought territorial resettlement and reorganization of Indigenous populations for the maximization of production and extraction, including the monetization of tribute. Indigenous peoples mobilized over tributary practices, developing a sense of belonging with newly emerged central powers that replaced pre-Columbian statehood. Pueblos de indios attained initial recognition, personhood, and legibility at large through their commitment to abide by colonial structures of domination. These same pueblos de indios progressively sought to reposition themselves amid evolving socioeconomic environments. In the case of the Peruvian central highlands, and probably in other regions beyond them, mining and demographic pressures reshaped Indigenous environments and their demands. Mining dynamics encouraged expanding legibility and strengthened pacts through Indigenous tax paying, primarily as labor through the mita system. Demographic pressures stimulated the search for new ecological horizons, especially when pueblos faced land scarcity and wandering forasteros needed to locate venues for settlement. Ondores’s early origins as a colonial pueblo unveils the birth of Indigenous communities as a pivotal element of the human geography of Peru’s highlands and some of their persistent features. The advent of republican times in the nineteenth century brought further challenges for Indigenous peoples and rural communities. First, the Wars of Independence (1820–1824) heavily affected the rural estates of the central sierra and undermined the productivity of haciendas. The economic stagnation of haciendas deteriorated the capacity of land to provide directly or indirectly for pueblos de indios. The few lands that had remained in the hands of pueblos usually faced military occupation, and their flocks were seized by both patriot and royalist forces. Second, nineteenth-century liberal ideals—individualization and marketization of property, in particular—obscured the legal personhood of pueblos de indios. Their collective organization, labeled as communal by a nineteenth-century vocabulary of dispossession, became covered by a legal veil. Land liberalization alienated communal holdings and triggered a process of land concentration by expanding the hacienda system. Many of the haciendas surrounding Ondores, including Atocsaico, formed and expanded during this period. In spite of dispossession and displacement, struggling communities like Ondores survived and adapted to liberal

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policies. In facing disenfranchisement, a pueblo became a community sharing both present challenges and myriad images of future restitutions. Communal existence in the early twentieth century—as claimed by both intellectuals and Indigenous peoples alike—seemed rooted in the social organization of pre-Columbian ayllus. Before 1921, many communities, Ondores included, claimed immemoriality as an ancestral principle of identity linked with both colonial and pre-Columbian pasts. At the core, alleged immemoriality served as a discourse for expressing collective formations over shared material interests. In the case of Ondores, a grazing economy required cohesiveness and collective social values, and a political culture that emphasized the group. Internally, social and economic differentiation occurred. Some families held control of more lands and pastures, others less; some family flocks were numerous, others meager; some Ondorinos worked for other Ondorinos, sometimes in precarious conditions. Externally, though, every image projected upon and from emerging communities emphasized consolidation, cohesiveness, collectivity, and commonality. Since 1921, when the Peruvian state unleashed a new project of governmentality upon the countryside and rural communities, questions about the identity and importance of Indigenous communities became central to national debates about the future of the country. A closer look at the multiple projects of state development throughout the past century, offered throughout the previous pages, reveals the centrality of a questions and ideas about the countryside, indigeneity, and the comunero as a national subject.6 The regime of Augusto B. Leguía, known as the Patria Nueva (1919–1930), envisioned another state intervention upon rural populations, launching a major project of social engineering for recasting the role of Indigenous populations. When President Leguía acknowledged the legal status of Indigenous collectivities and encouraged their official incorporation as social cells of the state, a search for the meaning of comunidades began. Upon outlining the legal contours of Indigenous comunidades, the state implemented a large platform of institutions and projects designed for defining an ideal indigeneity. In crafting an initial ideal of indigeneity, sanctioning the source of identity of an officially recognized comunidad became a pivotal goal. Many comunidades claimed a principle of immemoriality as the basis of formal recognition by the state. Upon filing their requests to earn legal status, prospective comunidades needed to submit their titles—any form of documental proof that asserted their existence, usually in territorial terms. When submitting these titles, immemoriality often came

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to mean some form of colonial heritage, usually encapsulated within a physical document. Without a better legal framework to reframe the political belonging of comunidades, the state proceeded to recognize these documents and the principle of immemoriality as feasible sources of communal identity and legibility.7 Other comunidades, however, also claimed the same immemoriality without any form of documental support. Experiencing a cadastral anxiety and an obsession with an integral remaking of the human geography of the highlands, Peruvian state makers implemented rural and communal cartography as survey instruments for sanctioning the legibility of an official comunidad. When Indigenous groups could not present colonial titles, the Ministerio de Fomento dispatched engineers to survey the lands claimed as the territories of the comunidad, mapping their extents and elaborating a cartographic record of communal personhood. After earning personhood in a comunidad, newly labeled comuneros adapted their internal organization to state stipulations. Comunidades had to reposition themselves as socially vital, economically active, and politically willing to engage with the state powers. In other words, comunidades needed to become the nuclear cells of a nation-state leaning toward political and economic modernization. The state established and enforced new ways to survey the internal life of comunidades, including internal censuses, reports, and periodic visits. Comunidades, in turn, submitted internal statuses, framing their social life and economic activities in a language of developmentalism. As comuneros abided and adapted, the state projected and promoted images of rural development allegedly intended to foster the material and political modernization of comunidades. Such projects included literacy campaigns, infrastructure development, and technification of agrarian activities, among others. In turn, comunidades welcomed state projects while amassing mounting levels of autonomy. Communal economies prospered at the expense of hacienda hegemony. The dynamic grazing economies of comuneros faced challenges to communal autonomy from corporate capitalism. Ondores represented an age of legal struggles between comunidades and corporations, in which the former proved to be experienced in navigating state networks of power for securing and advancing their socioeconomic position. Notions such as private property, accumulation, surplus, wages, and development took root in the daily vocabulary of Indigenous comunidades. The state succeeded in promoting “modern” values within communal realms. The unexpected result of the appropriation of such

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values, however, was the economic autonomy of the comunidad. The state originally intended to fuel the material modernization of the countryside from within rural comunidades. By the same token, the state enforced inefficient structures to centralize communal economic dynamism. Much of the agrarian production of comunidades outplayed hacienda production. Wool produced in granjas comunales offered better quality than that of Sociedades Ganaderas, without any mechanism to centralize communal production, mediate between comunidades and multilayered markets, and appropriate agrarian surplus. At the same time, a vocabulary of agrarian reformism entered communal realms, soothing social conditions of upheaval and centralizing agrarian production. Comuneros perceived agrarian reform as a further assertion of communal autonomy amid a context of economic prosperity. Praxis and lexis of agrarian reform clashed, and so did the interests of reformers and comuneros. Agrarian reform in Peru materialized in an unforeseeable way. Unable to be delivered by reformist and progressive politicians as a mechanism for soothing contradictions in the countryside, agrarian reform finally arrived via a self-proclaimed “radical” group of military officers. While these “radical” officers intended to bring a much more comprehensive reform of the structures of land ownership in the countryside, the 1969 agrarian reform was one thing in theory and something else in practice. Technocrats of agrarian reform had warned state officials since the early 1960s about ecological factors that limited a major reformation of land ownership. The national agrarian frontier was much more limited than state powers envisioned. On top of that, much of the agrarian frontier was not agricultural land but instead natural pastures suitable for grazing. Grazing, however, could not flourish under a family-based subdivision of land. According to this diagnosis, fragmenting grazing estates for direct family distribution of land affected the productivity of the national grazing economy. Finally, much of the land suitable for agrarian reform was already in the hands of thousands of comunidades that had received legal status over the previous decades. With these constraints in place, the 1969 agrarian reform promoted a radical rhetorical discourse while unfolding something entirely different in practice. Rhetorically, Indigenous comunidades were relabeled as campesinos to remove the colonial values inherent in their indigeneity. Campesinización of comunidades, on the other hand, was intended to reinforce their sense of economic dynamism and autonomy. Land expropriations followed, with regional differentiations depending on the polit-

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ical values of the landowning elite of each region. On the northern coast, the cradle of the traditional oligarchy of cotton and sugar estate owners, the expropriation of haciendas paved the way for the cooperativization of comunidades with limited state centralization. In the central sierra, ranching estates perceived as advanced, industrious, and productive, could not be subdivided and directly redistributed. In the central sierra, state centralization thus became pivotal for the success of the agrarian reform. Contrary to what Ondores expected, the agrarian reform did not deliver the promised restitution of Atocsaico. In reality, the establishment of the SAIS Túpac Amaru dispossessed campesinos from the land they held, arguing the need for cooperativizing the properties of neighboring comunidades and the remaking of grazing economies in the central highlands at an industrial scale. Far from being a socialist-like experiment, the 1969 agrarian reform represented the ultimate attempt of the Peruvian state to recentralize decades of state investment in fueling communal economies. As the state realized that the elements for launching a major project of agrarian capitalism lay at the core of comunidades, a process of campesinización and agrarian reform became the unquestionable expression of the centralizing aims and capacities of the state. During the coexistence of SAIS and comunidad, campesinos faced new experiences of impoverishment. The property of the comunidad was passed into the direct control of the state through the SAIS. Production and redistribution only happened through SAIS means and mandates, based on an economic rationality indifferent to that of the comunidad. Cooperativization barred family production and individual accumulation, practices considered to be antagonistic to the values of agrarian reform. Wages were limited to administrative positions of the SAIS, typically held by people from outside partnering comunidades. When campesinos held one of these positions, conflict arose over their status inside their respective comunidades. As the entire autonomy of comunidades became threatened by the centralizing principles of agrarian reform, the SAIS eroded the social tissue of the campesinos and brought communal life into dismay. The 1979 massacre of Ondores inaugurated the period of Internal Armed Conflict in Junín. A few months later, in 1980, political violence redefined the relationship between the state and comunidades throughout most of the Peruvian highlands. An instrumental understanding of violence had been part of state-comunidad relationships, placing upheaval and contestation as functional stages of political renegotiation and consensus. The type of violence unleashed in the Peruvian coun-

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tryside after 1980 showcased an unprecedented level of deterioration of both the internal social tissue of comunidades and their relationship with the state. The Internal Armed Conflict was much more than a conflagration between the state and Sendero Luminoso with the campesinado placed in between two threats. As the impact of political violence in the central sierra illustrates, every element that had framed the vitality of comunidades throughout the twentieth century fell apart. Social networks that linked comunidades with urban centers were wiped out. Principles of internal authority within comunidades were replaced by a revolutionary rhetoric that positioned the communal identities as reactionary values. Comunidades and campesinos became voiceless, unable to assert the autonomy they once held and incapable of coming to new terms with the state, engulfed by daunting political violence. In turn, the state embraced a widespread practice of massacre as a feature of counterrevolutionary doctrines, exerting violence that increasingly led to the demise of comunidades and campesinos. In the 1990s, as the state seemed unable to win the conflict with Sendero Luminoso solely through military means, dozens of comuneros were dragged into militias to “defend the nation”—as had happened during the Wars of Independence and the War of the Pacific. The mobilization of these campesino militias proved to be critical for bringing an end to the Internal Armed Conflict in many areas of the countryside. The same decade, however, coincided with the arrival of a global economic model paired with a bureaucratic authoritarian regime. Contrasting previous models of economic formation, pivotally state-sponsored capitalism, neoliberalism did not require legitimization from within. Foreign corporations, multinational organizations, local businessmen, and international markets provided the morality of neoliberal policies. Civilian populations, campesinos included, had little or no role in sanctioning the legitimacy of neoliberalism as a dominant economic framework. The urban focus of neoliberal development also placed rurality as a secondary aspect, solely useful for the extraction of natural resources but completely forsaken for the spread of the revenues that such resources might produce. Rural populations also faced civil disenfranchisement, being often considered and referred to as “second-class citizens.” Their very existence problematizes the exploitation of natural resources that foster neoliberalism. Abandoned sierra landscapes, Ondores as an example, are completely functional for the interests of neoliberalism and its rural agents—agro-industrial corporations, tourism, and reconstituted haciendas. Far from being the sole result of migratory

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movements, abandonment resulted from a deliberate agenda of state and capital in promoting disenfranchisement, pauperization, and deregulation in rural environments. In recent years mining has become, once again, the primary source of dynamism within the Peruvian economy, displacing the once central agrarian economies. Amid twenty-first-century extractivism, comunidades have faced marginalization, exclusion, repression, and different attempts at obliteration. Environmentalism and reindigenization have become potential discourses for contesting the overwhelming attack of neoliberal capital, though neither allow comunidades to do much more than endure and resist. Rural people, as indígenas or campesinos, are no longer the same comuneros that early twentieth-century state makers envisioned as cores of the agrarian industrialism of the country; nor are they the campesinos that the agrarian reform envisioned as the politicized source of state-sponsored capitalism. Current comuneros from Ondores assert that they are not campesinos but indígenas, denying their historical legacy as partners of the state in the making of twentiethcentury agrarian Peru—a country eroded by political conflict and further riddled by neoliberal capitalism. Tracing the history of these erosions required finding and navigating resources as fragmented and fractured as contemporary communal livelihood itself. On the eve of a promise of a “second agrarian reform” by President Pedro Castillo’s administration (2021–2026), the fate of hundreds of comunidades like Ondores seems to be moving back to the center of a rural state for a third episode of communal remaking.

Glossary

Abigeato: rural criminality, sometimes in the form of cattle rustling. Aborígenes: anachronistic term for referring to native, Indigenous peoples. Actas comunales: minutes recording weekly and extraordinary communal assemblies. Aguardiente: a distilled liquor made from different crops, including anise, grapes, and sugar cane, the latter one particularly prevalent in the central sierra. Alcalde de varas (see also varayos/varayoc): a traditional authority of Indigenous towns and pueblos, often translated as “mayor.” The original Quechua term comes from carrying a “vara,” stick, as a symbol of their authority. Aprista: a member of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA) party. Arrendatario: temporary tenants of a portion of a larger rural property or estate, usually unsalaried. Asamblea comunal: assembly of all the legally recognized comuneros and comuneras of any given community. Asentamiento humano: precarious forms of semipermanent and permanent territorial dwelling by newcomers, usually displaced as a result of a land seizure and/or property invasion. Ayllus: pre-Columbian sociopolitical and economic formations that expanded based on kinship relationships and networks. Baldío: the state-sanctioned condition of vacant, unexploited, and therefore available-for-grant land. Belaúndista: a supporter of President Fernando Belaúnde Terry, typically associated with moderately progressive positions in the 1960s.

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Caciquismo: a form of exerting autocratic and despotic political power, perceived to be colonial in nature. Campesina/Campesino: the legal condition of belonging to rural communities subject to the socioeconomic transformations unleashed by the 1969 agrarian reform. Campesinado: the national body of campesino communities as envisioned by the 1969 agrarian reform. Campesinización: the socioeconomic and legal transformation of Indigenous comunidades into campesinos as framed by the 1969 agrarian reform. Chusco: mixed-breed animal; used for referring to low-quality ones. Civilistas: members of the Partido Civil, a Lima-based elite political party established in the nineteenth century, which held a preeminent role in Peruvian politics until the early twentieth century. Colectivos: small and midsize cars used as collective public transportation for medium-term distances. Comité de defensa: communal organization focused on the defense of the political, social, and economic integrity of a comunidad. Comité de lucha: communal organization focused on organizing the sociopolitical struggle of comuneros and campesinos. Comités de socorro: Sendero Luminoso’s popular committees for the logistical support of guerrilla warfare. Comunera/comunero: legally recognized member of an Indigenous community, a term more frequently used after 1920. Comunidades: rural Indigenous communities, whose legal status is sanctioned by the Peruvian state after 1920. Concientización: term used by Sendero Luminoso members to refer to the ideological process by which comuneros and campesinos would enhance their class-based and allegedly “revolutionary” consciousness. Cordillera: mountains and, more generally, higher elevation zones of the Andean region, typically beyond fifteen thousand feet above sea level. Deslinde: legal trial that resolved territorial disputes between neighboring landholders, including villages and haciendas. Empresas comunales: communal enterprises; economic associations within comunidades, linked together—usually through state sponsorship—for pursuing a shared goal.

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Enganchado/enganchada: the condition of being subject to an enganche labor contract. Enganchadores: agents responsible for conducting enganche contracts with Indigenous workers. Enganche: a labor practice that leads workers to become indentured. Private agents would offer workers, usually Indigenous, a contract with an advance and stipulations for housing, food, and other necessities. By the time workers had worked enough to pay back the advance, they would have acquired other large debts (for housing, etc.), forcing them to continue to remain indentured in increasingly opprobrious conditions. Escrituras públicas: public documents, typically signaling property rights. Ferias regionales: regional fairs; historically rooted market spaces for regional trade among comuneros, pueblos, and comunidades. Fiesta patronal: agrarian-framed communal festivities centered on a patron saint’s day. Fiscal: communal prosecutor. Fomento: as used in the case of the Ministerio de Fomento, fomento entailed the promotion and administration of developmental efforts—material, political, institutional, and otherwise. Forastero: wandering stranger, usually perceived as a potential threat for the comunidad. Frente único: unified sociopolitical front that encompassed the mobilization of different groups/classes. Gamonal: a despotic and autarchic landowner. Gamonalillo: individuals behaving like petty gamonales. Gamonalismo: a despotic and autarchic form of rural power that structured land ownership and local politics in the Peruvian highlands. Granjas indígena/granjas comunal granjas modelos: community-based project of  collectivized grazing economies, sponsored and funded by the Peruvian state. Huaccha: mixed-breed animal; used for referring to low-quality ones. See also chusco. Indígenas: the condition of belonging to state-sanctioned Indigenous communities, abiding to both state regulations and internal statues.

210 | Glossary

Indigenismo: an early twentieth-century hemispheric intellectual and political movement centered on the vindication of Indigenous peoples. Informe final: the final report of the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, released in 2003. Juez de tierra: land judge; judicial state authority in charge of the administration of land property rights. Juicios de reivindicación: restitution trials of land ownership rights pursued among communities and, more often, by communities against external agents. Junta comunal/directiva: the group of executive authorities of a community, elected by the communal assembly. Ligas agrarias: agrarian confederations of comunidades and campesinos. Límite de afectación/afectabilidad: maximum limit for making rural properties subject to state interventions, including agrarian reform. Mal gobierno: bad government; the principle by which experiencing poor governance is attributed to local authorities, hence preserving the morality of the central government. Mayordomo: central communal authority during a fiesta patronal. Memorial: a collective letter written by the community, as a whole, addressing a political authority; often for submitting a request or filing a grievance. Mestizo/mestizaje: culturally or racially miscegenated, hybridized. Mojones: boundary stones used to demarcate the limits of communal land properties. Montaña: the upper region of the Peruvian Amazon basin, where the rainforest intersects the eastern slopes of the Andes. Montonero: a rural bandit. Originario/originaria: native or Indigenous. Padrón: a roll or register for listing the number of officially recognized comuneros and comuneras. Pascana (or sitios de pascana): sites for mules and muleteers to rest during their journeys across the highlands. Pasquín: a politically loaded pamphlet, usually displayed in a very public setting. Patria: homeland.

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Personero/personera: communally elected representative, typically serving as a legal liaison between a comunidad and the central state. Picantería: traditional lunchtime restaurant, particularly prevalent in the southerncentral highlands, famous for serving spicy stews and corn beer (chicha). Pongaje: hacienda-based indentured labor or peonage. Prefecto/prefecta: chief political authority at the local level, appointed by the central government, usually for a period of up to four years. Presidentes comunales: communally elected leading authorities of Indigenous and campesino communities. Pueblo/pueblo de indios: the colonial and modern ideal of Indigenous collectivities, often casting Indigenous people as inheritors of pre-Columbian or colonial towns. Quebrada: ravine. Registro de comuneros/comuneras: communal census; record of comuneros and comuneras holding full legal status. Repúblicas de indios: Indigenous socioeconomic collectivities, legally established in Peru through the General Resettlement of Indians by the Viceroy Francisco de Toledo (1570–1575). Rondas campesinas: campesino militias. Secretario de actas: deputy secretary responsible for writing and storing the minutes of communal assemblies. Secretario de correspondencia: deputy secretary responsible for communications between the junta comunal and the diverse instances of the local, regional, and central governments. Senderistas: members of Sendero Luminoso, the Communist Party of Peru. Serrano: person of the highlands; sometimes used with derogatory connotations. Sierra: a specific view of the Peruvian highlands, and particularly upland regions, recast by capitalists and state makers throughout the twentieth century. Soroche: hypoxia, also known as altitude sickness. Sub-prefecto: chief political authority deputy at the local level, usually appointed by the prefecto. Terruco: a derogatory term derived from the Spanish word for terrorist (“terrorista”), referring to a Sendero Luminoso militant.

212 | Glossary

Tesorero contador: communal accountant. Tesorero recolector: communal tax collector. Varayos/varayoc (see also alcalde de vara): traditional authorities of Indigenous towns and pueblos, often translated as “mayors.” Their name comes from carrying a “vara,” stick, as a symbol of their authority. Zona liberada: a region “liberated” from hegemonic state governance and control and thus claimed by/for Sendero Luminoso.

Notes

Introduction 1. Marx, Capital, vol. 1. 2. Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, conclusion of Informe final. 3. Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, Informe final, appendix 2, 19. 4. Mayer, Articulated Peasant, xv. The origins and historical trajectories of Peruvian Andean communities deserve an extended, interdisciplinary conversation strongly focused on the agrarian reform question. See Arellano Hoffman, “Los títulos de comunidades como fuentes”; Kapsoli, El campesinado peruano; Matos Mar, Hacienda, comunidad y campesinado; Remy, Historia de las comunidades indígenas. 5. On the particularities of Andean rationalities, see the classic work of Jürgen Golte, La racionalidad de la organización andina. 6. James Scott, following Stuart Schwartz and Frank Salomon, reaffirms the importance of acknowledging a seminal difference between hill and valley peoples in the Americas since the times of Spanish colonization. Resembling seemingly global patterns of rural settlement, hill and upland livelihood entailed important degrees of autonomy from the centralizing muscle of the state. See Scott, Art of Not Being Governed, 25. 7. For a critical understanding of early capitalism in the Americas, see John Tutino’s Making a New World, especially the prologue and introduction. 8. Zileri, “En el siglo XVIII.” 9. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, 277. 10. On the role of campesinos in the history of Russia, see Retish, Russia’s Peasants in Revolution. Literature on the Mexican Revolution is vast and complex. However, John Womack’s Zapata and the Mexican Revolution remains the best account of what a Mexican campesino upon the beginning of the struggle was and what the role of rural groups in defining revolutionary Mexico was. 11. Moore, Injustice.

214 | Notes to Pages 5–9

12. Scott, Weapons of the Weak. The question of when campesinos revolt has nurtured a fruitful multidisciplinary conversation. James C. Scott places an ideal of “moral economy” at the core of rural senses of justice, unfairness, and the necessity for rebelling. See Scott, Moral Economy of the Peasant. Transcending the somewhat mechanist approach of Scott, John Tutino has brought attention to the “ecological autonomy” of rural communities and their material capacity for sustaining men in arms. See Tutino, “Revolutionary Capacity of Rural Communities.” 13. Luis González provides a good case on how “typicalness” is a source of strength for historical studies in his seminal study of San José de Gracia. See González, San José de Gracia. Donald Wright has also provided an essential example of “glocal” history, shedding light upon the advantage of landing macro narratives on “small places,” thus providing a vivid human texture to global processes. See Wright, World and a Very Small Place. 14. Archive of the Fourth Russell Tribunal on the Rights of the Indians of the Americas. 15. Smith, Livelihood and Resistance. 16. See Asensio, El Apóstol de los Andes; Cant, “Land for Those Who Work It”; Dorais, La crítica Maoísta peruana; Mayer, Ugly Stories; Martín Sánchez, La revolución peruana; Roca-Rey, La propaganda visual; Seligman, Between Reform and Revolution. Núria Sala i Vila addresses the agrarian reform influence on Peruvian rural historiography in the XIV Congress of Agrarian History in Badajoz, Extremadura. See Sala i Vila, “La historiografía rural peruana.” 17. Lowenthal, Peruvian Experiment. Also see Lowenthal and McClintock, Peruvian Experiment Reconsidered. 18. McClintock, Peasant Cooperatives and Political Change. 19. Thorp and Bertram, Peru, 1890–1977. 20. Paulo Drinot and Alan Knight have put together a useful compilation on the impact of the Great Depression in Latin America. Carlos Contreras and Paulo Drinot’s chapter on Peru traces the important intersection between local political outcomes and international economic trends. See Drinot and Knight, Great Depression in Latin America. 21. Kruijt, Labor Relations and Multinational Corporations. For social studies about the impact of the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation, see DeWind, Peasants Become Miners; Flores Galindo, Los mineros de la Cerro de Pasco; Kapsoli, Los movimientos campesinos. 22. The term “arrendatario” refers to a mode of land exploitation in which an agreement is established between a landed agent and a landless peasant. The landless peasant is granted an extension of land within the property of the landed agent as compensation for their labor. The peasant is entitled to grow their own crops and ranch their own livestock as long as they fulfill the duties of their condition as shepherd. In other words, salary is replaced by a temporary land grant. 23. I am particularly referring to the lasting and ambivalent legacy of Scott’s study on the Southeast Asian peasantry. See Scott, Moral Economy of the Peasant.

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24. Worldwide scholarship owes James Scott an adaptation of E. P. Thompson’s notion of “moral economy” for rural environments. While the paradigm has not been particularly pivotal in Peruvian historiography, at least in explicit terms, Latin America historiography was indeed nurtured by the moral economy paradigm. For a criticism of this paradigm, see Larson, “Explotación y economía moral.” 25. Deere, Household and Class Relations; Mallon, Defense of Community; Manrique, Mercado interno y región. 26. For a detailed historiographical review of the regional history development in Peru, see Aldana, “La otra historia.” 27. There seems to be a connection between this lost interest in the central sierra and the diagnosis the CVR’s Informe final elaborated about the region, as well as previous publications on the subject. According to Nelson Manrique, the central sierra became a major theater of war for the Internal Armed Conflict, and yet the strong communal structuration of social relations seemed to prevent the ultimate spark of uncontainable violence. In the same vein, the Informe final asserts that the central sierra remained fairly peripheral to a conflict that had engulfed the Ayacucho province and other regions further south. 28. Méndez and Granados Moya, “Las guerras olvidadas.” 29. Mallon, Defense of Community. 30. Caballero, Economía agraria de la sierra peruana. 31. Deustua, Bewitchment of Silver. Deustua’s early works on the campesinización of Indigenous communities before the “official campesinización” in 1969 are equally foundational for understanding social relations of production in the upper region of the central sierra. See “¡Campesino, el patrón no comerá más de tu pobreza!” and “Mining Markets, Peasants, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Peru.” For a discussion about the dynamics of early republican internal markets in the region and its national impact, see “Routes, Roads, and Silver Trade in Cerro de Pasco, 1820–1860.” 32. Flores Galindo, Los Mineros de la Cerro de Pasco. 33. DeWind, Peasants Become Miners. 34. Manrique, Campesinado y nación. This work became one of the fronts of perhaps the most recent and important debate in Peruvian historiography, which positioned Manrique—along with Florencia Mallon—against Heraclio Bonilla. Bonilla, representing the most hardcore intellectual Marxism, had asserted the inexistence of popular nationalism during the War of the Pacific due to the lack of certain traditional elements associated with the rise of nationalist sentiments, namely industrialization, a national bourgeoisie, and a proletariat. Given that the popular classes that participated in the resistance against the Chilean invader were rural, it was impossible to affirm that campesinos could develop something remotely resembling a national spirit. Mallon’s and Manrique’s studies about the montoneros of the central sierra and the peasant confederation in Comas in the aftermath of the War of the Pacific proved otherwise. For a summary of the debate, see the section on the topic included in Stern, Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness. Regarding the

216 | Notes to Pages 12–18

collective position of Mallon and Manrique, Cecilia Méndez has criticized the recognition earned by Mallon’s contribution to the detriment of the earlier publication of Manrique’s work. See Méndez, “El Inglés y los subalternos.” 35. Manrique, Mercado interno y región. 36. Mayer, Articulated Peasant. 37. Cadena, Earth Beings. 38. Mayer, Ugly Stories. 39. The best study about Ayacucho in the years leaning toward the conflict is Carlos Iván Degregori’s El surgimiento de Sendero Luminoso. The historiography about Shining Path is abundant, to say the least. It is important to mention Gustavo Gorriti’s Shining Path, an in-depth political examination of the role of Sendero Luminoso in the revolutionary trajectory of the Peruvian Left. Sociologist Gonzalo Portocarrero has provided two extraordinary works on the cultures of violence promoted by Shining Path’s discourse. His analysis on school narratives and political violence in Razones de sangre highlights the appeal of radical rhetoric among disenfranchised urban populations. His study of the cultural roots of Shining Path’s leaders in Profetas del odio is a revealing cultural prosopography of the insurrectional figures that led this group. Jose Luis Rénique’s study of the prisons and their role as political and military cadres of Sendero Luminoso in La voluntad encarcelada sheds light upon a critical space for the making of Sendero Luminoso’s political culture. Lewis Taylor’s works on the Peruvian northern highlands during the Internal Armed Conflict and the role of Maoism as an ideological principle are essential. Steve Stern’s edited volume still remains as the most comprehensive approach to the multiple aspects of Shining Path and the Internal Armed Conflict available to the English-speaking scholar. 40. Heilman, Before the Shining Path. 41. La Serna, Corner of the Living. 42. On the making of the documental corpus of the agrarian reform, see Rodríguez Pastor, “El archivo del Fuero Agario.” 43. To name only a few, see Klaren, La formación de las haciendas; Burga, De la encomienda a la hacienda capitalista; Flores Galindo, Los mineros de la Cerro de Pasco; Jacobsen, Mirages of Transition; Peloso, Peasants on Plantations; and Mallon, Defense of Community. 44. For the idea of political violence against history, see Steve Stern’s introduction to the English version of Degregori et al., How Difficult It Is. 45. Puente Valdivia, “Archivos Campesinos.” 46. For the Mexican case, see Craib, Cartographic Mexico. 47. Two important works about similar issues are Salomon and Niño-Murcia, Lettered Mountain; and Rappaport and Cummins, Beyond the Lettered City.

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Chapter 1: Reimagining the Peruvian Andes 1. Riva-Agüero and Porras Barrenechea, Paisajes Peruanos. 2. Flores Galindo, Buscando un Inca, 153. Víctor Vich has also analyzed the “tragedy” of Riva Agüero’s view of the highlands. See Vich, “Vicisitudes trágicas.” 3. Delbourgo and Dew, Science and Empire, 5. 4. The participation of indios and Indigenous guerrillas stimulated a major historiographical debate centered on the question of the existence of subaltern forms of nationalism, which confronted Florencia Mallon, Nelson Manrique, and Heraclio Bonilla. See Stern, Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness, part 3. 5. Estuardo Núñez provides the best compilation available on travel accounts. See Núñez, El Perú visto por viajeros. 6. Harvey, Spaces of Capital, 110. According to David Harvey, commercial geography is a degenerate version of a larger geographical tradition rooted in the close, ethnographic observation of places and spaces. Practices of compilation favored a prompt intervention of capitalist exploitation “through unequal or forced exchange, the imposition of wage labor through primitive accumulation, the redistribution of labor supplies through forced migration, and the sophisticated manipulation of indigenous economies and political power structures to extract surpluses.” Most, if not all, of these processes have been observed and studied in the economic history of the Peruvian sierra. 7. Bonn et al., Drivers of Environmental Change, 1. 8. While the archives of Duncan, Fox & Co. have been lost, and there is no systematic treatment of the Atocsaico Hacienda available, the work of scholars such as Rory Miller have shed light upon this and other British firms in the Peruvian Andes. See Miller, Empresas británicas. 9. Scott, Seeing like a State, 4. 10. Florencia Mallon has provided a detailed description about the combined advantages of economic settlements in the central sierra. See Mallon, Defense of Community, particularly chapter 1, “The Human Geography.” 11. Sempat Assadourian, Minería y espacio económico, 46. 12. Ministerio de Fomento, Guía del Perú, 25. 13. Ministerio de Fomento, Guía del Perú. The English translation was published in 1903 under the authorship of the Dirección de Obras Públicas. 14. The guide established that the variability of territory allowed Peru “to produce all fruits from cold, temperate, and warm countries, which constitute the basis of its internal and external trade,” and yet “population in Peru could be estimated in three million inhabitants, according to the census of 1876 . . . which meant a density of 1.66 per square kilometer.” Ministerio de Fomento, Guía del Perú, 5. Subsequent references are to the English version of this publication. 15. Long and Roberts, Miners, Peasants, and Entrepreneurs, 44. 16. Dirección de Obras Públicas, Peru: A Sketch, 15. 17. Dirección de Obras Públicas, Peru: A Sketch, 14.

218 | Notes to Pages 29–33

18. Cosgrove, Geography and Vision, 110. 19. Basadre, Historia de la República del Perú, 11:136. 20. Cisneros, Reseña económica del Perú, v. 21. Cisneros, Reseña económica del Perú, vi. 22. Cisneros, Reseña económica del Perú, 196. 23. Boyer, Political Landscapes, 10. 24. Declerck, El mejoramiento del ganado nacional, 16. 25. Declerck, El mejoramiento del ganado nacional, 16. 26. León, Lanas, pelos y plumas, 4. 27. León, El ganado en el Departamento de Junín, 9. 28. León, El ganado en el Departamento de Junín, 54. 29. “Unfortunately, [Indians] lack of a thrifty spirit. All the money they earn is spent immediately, and almost all the time on alcoholic beverages, without worrying about the well-being of their family.” Helguero, Viajando por la República, 9. 30. Helguero, Viajando por la República, 103. 31. Helguero, Viajando por la República, 107. 32. Helguero, Viajando por la República, 118. 33. The merge of mining and grazing capitalism ultimately promoted hybrid forms of capitalism, largely centered on an ambivalent participation of Indigenous populations within. In her pivotal study of the impact of industrial capitalism upon existent social relations among rural villagers, Florencia Mallon describes the capacity of household economies to endure industrializing times, maintaining precapitalist relations by resorting to patron-client relations within haciendas. However accurate this dual understanding of economic development may be, discourses and policies on the central sierra and the upland landscapes also leaned toward the consolidation of mining and grazing environments as a unit. See Mallon, Defense of Community. 34. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 39. 35. Pratt, Imperial Eyes. 36. Wiborg, Commercial Traveller in South America. Wiborg departed from critically asserting the need of American businessmen to resist the expansion of European capital on American soil, blaming the commercial class of the United States for not having crafted a common “trade language,” furthering the disparity between the commercial practices of South America and the United States. Wiborg aimed to challenge the hegemony of British capital in Peru and South America, which had profited the most from Andean resources in the first century of the national period. The commercial enterprise envisioned by Wiborg went beyond the mere establishment of trade outposts. In claiming the urgency of mobilizing US capital, Wiborg’s venture acquired a modern neocolonial dimension, claiming, “Good men [should be dispatched] to South America, even if they [cannot] speak the language, and encourage them to study it as they would [study] anything at home, which [could be] distinctively advantageous to their business careers.” In the view of Wiborg, the South American Andes constituted the ultimate geographic frontier for US capital-

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ist exploration and settlement. See Wiborg, Commercial Traveller in South America, x, 155–156. 37. Wiborg had originally intended to travel to this area, though problems with the train service in La Oroya, a pivotal mining capital within the region, prevented him from visiting the greater Cerro de Pasco region and its mines. See Wiborg, Commercial Traveller in South America, 59. 38. For a detailed evaluation of British informal imperialism, see Miller, Britain and Latin America. 39. Martin, Peru of the Twentieth Century, v, vi. 40. Martin, Peru of the Twentieth Century, viii. Emphasis added. 41. Martin, Peru of the Twentieth Century, 98. 42. Martin, Peru of the Twentieth Century, 286. 43. Martin, Peru of the Twentieth Century, 178. 44. Martin, Peru of the Twentieth Century, 179. 45. Martin, Peru of the Twentieth Century, 320. Even hacienda properties remained territorially undefined and contested. On the historical trajectory of the hacienda, see Mörner, “Spanish American Hacienda.” 46. Enock, Peru, 6. 47. Enock, Peru, 9. 48. Enock, Peru, 233. 49. Enock, Peru, 146. 50. Beyond the property regime, Enock also argued that the capitalist transformation of the rural countryside faced seemingly insurmountable obstacles at the human level. First, indios had a natural inclination to keep embracing subsistence activities, producing only for their domestic consumption. The vastness of natural abundance in the sierra demanded more profit and surplus-oriented work ethics. Second, indios subject to social disciplines enforced through Catholicism and alcohol had diminished moral and physical capacities. In turn, the melancholic existence of indios fostered many of the bucolic aspects of the central sierra. Nevertheless, indios remained the best-suited individuals for labor in upland landscapes, representing an unparalleled energy potential, as they embodied “many good qualities” that remained unexploited. According to Enock, both the government and statesmen needed to realize such qualities in order to improve the overall Indigenous condition. While claiming the absorption of Indigenous landholdings into the realm of capital, Enock also warned about any threats that might lead to the physical extermination of indios, which would turn the countryside into an “uninhabited desert.” Without indios, no other social group would “perform the manual labour at the great elevation that form their habitat.” In other words, it was the presence of vast and yet immobilized Indigenous settlements that turned a hostile environment into a space suited for capitalist developments. See Enock, Peru, 147–148. 51. Clairmont, Guide to Modern Peru, i. 52. Clairmont, Guide to Modern Peru, ii–iii. 53. Clairmont, Guide to Modern Peru, 14.

220 | Notes to Pages 38–41

54. Clairmont, Guide to Modern Peru, 17. 55. Clairmont, Guide to Modern Peru, 20. 56. Clairmont, Guide to Modern Peru. On the history of Peruvian immigration, see Bonfiglio, “Introducción al estudio de la inmigración europea,” 93–131. 57. Clairmont, Guide to Modern Peru, 33. 58. Clairmont, Guide to Modern Peru, 61. 59. For an interesting study about the commodification of village commons in Mexico, see Boyer, Political Landscapes, 30–35. 60. Garland, Peru in 1906 and After, viii. 61. Railways, the quintessential symbol of nineteenth-century material and social progress, continued to play a focal role in the capitalist remaking of the central sierra. After the War of the Pacific, the Peruvian state signed three contracts (in 1890, 1907, and 1928) with the Peruvian Corporation, a British company, projecting the massive expansion of the national railway system. The reconstruction of the central railway that connected Cerro de Pasco and Lima went through areas largely dominated by village commons properties. On the history of the Peruvian Corporation in the early twentieth century, see Tacunán Bonifacio, Peruvian Corporation. 62. Garland, Peru in 1906 and After, 17. 63. Garland’s estimation, based on the 1876 census, was of 2,250,000 inhabitants covering an area of 270,000 square kilometers, therefore offering a population density of 5.32 inhabitants per square kilometer. See Garland, Peru in 1906 and After, 101. 64. Garland, Peru in 1906 and After, 206. 65. Garland, Peru in 1906 and After, 230. 66. On the rise of indigenismo and industry, see Andrés García, Indigenismo, izquierda, indio. 67. Mayer de Zulen, Conduct of the Cerro de Pasco, 5–6. 68. Through the enganche, the hirer, or enganchador, made an advance payment for the future labor of the Indigenous worker, or enganchado. During their term as laborers, most enganchados fell into unpayable debt and were forced to remain working for as long as needed to compensate the enganchadores. On the enganche system, see Kapsoli, El campesinado peruano. José Matos Mar and José Manuel Mejía have argued that the enganche system facilitated the proletarianization of the Peruvian campesinado. See Mar and Mejía, La reforma agraria. 69. Mar and Mejía, La reforma agraria. 70. Mar and Mejía, La reforma agraria, 7. 71. Mar and Mejía, La reforma agraria, 9. 72. Mar and Mejía, La reforma agraria. 73. Mayer de Zulen refers here to an episode of earth-slip in 1909 that congested the traffic between Lima and the central highlands, in which the central railway gave preference to satisfying the commercial needs of the corporation instead of guaranteeing the supply of necessities of major cities like Tarma. See Mayer de Zulen, Conduct of the Cerro de Pasco, 12.

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74. Mayer de Zulen, Conduct of the Cerro de Pasco, 17. 75. Processes of deslinde have been a major legal issue between villagers, communities—Indigenous and campesino—and other agents in rural Peru throughout the twentieth century. A deslinde aimed to establish and legally sanction the territorial limits of rural estates; it often involved the participation of local judicial authorities and many times did not need to go through a trial. After the formation of the Ministerio de Fomento and the foundation of the Office of Indigenous Affairs (1921), deslindes moved to the sphere of the executive branch. 76. Mayer de Zulen, Conduct of the Cerro de Pasco, 20. 77. AGN, Prefecturas, Junín, “Letter from Manuel Francisco Diez Canseco to the Director of Government,” Tarma, January 17, 1902. 78. Bonilla Mayta, El Minero de los Andes, 16. 79. AGN, Prefecturas, Junín, “Letter from Manuel Francisco Diez Canseco to the Director of Government,” Tarma, December 27, 1904. 80. “Letter from Manuel Francisco Diez Canseco to the Director of Government,” Tarma, December 27, 1904. 81. Diez Canseco also reported the presence of weapons in Indigenous towns, something that local authorities perceived as threatening the enforcement of social order; the authorities demanded greater assistance from the central government in the form of police aid. “Letter from Manuel Francisco Diez Canseco to the Director of Government,” Tarma, December 27, 1904. 82. AGN, Prefecturas, Junín, “Letter from Manuel Francisco Diez Canseco to the Director of Government,” Tarma, March 4, 1902. 83. AGN, Prefecturas, Junín, “Letter from Carlos B. Lissón to the Coronel Prefect of the Department,” Lima, March 31, 1902. Villagers claimed to be illegally taxed for the use of infrastructure that had been originally built by their ancestors. Taxes varied from twenty cents for a horse or a mule to two soles for a tumbril with more than six horses. The legitimacy of taxing the use of these roads, which connected Tambo Colorado with La Oroya, was based on a law that followed the Mining Code of July 1900, enacted in November 1900, establishing the rightfulness of the corporation to expropriate private properties if such expropriation was for building a work considered of public interest. AGN, Prefecturas, Junín, “Letter from Manuel Francisco Diez Canseco to the Director of Government,” Tarma, March 31, 1902. 84. AGN, Prefecturas, Junín, “Ban by Prefect Bruno E. Bueno against the illegal imprisonments of citizens,” Cerro de Pasco, January 15, 1903. Aided by local police, villagers were held in custody until fines were paid, sometimes in the form of cattle and sheep. 85. AGN, Prefecturas, Junín, “Ban by Prefect Bruno E. Bueno against pongaje and other forms of semi-slaved labor,” Tarma, September 20, 1903. Indigenous laborers, according to the description provided by Bueno, were compensated exclusively through the de facto exploitation of lands that sometimes belonged to them, without acknowledging their legitimate rights as property owners. Both private

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agents and local state authorities colluded in this endeavor. In the reasoning behind the banning of pongaje, authorities emphasized the role of wages as an alleged vehicle for education and the moral redemption of local populations against the “immorality” of the perpetuation of indentured labor. 86. AGN, Prefecturas, Junín, “Letter to the Director of Government about a strike in Cerro de Pasco,” Tarma, March 22, 1907. 87. AGN, Prefecturas, Junín, “Report about the strike of the miners of Goyllarisquizga,” Tarma, April 10, 1907. 88. AGN, Prefecturas, Junín, “Report about the accusation of the Municipality of Cerro de Pasco against the American enterprise over the control of Patarcocha,” [Tarma], May 3, 1907. 89. AGN, Prefecturas, Junín, “Report about the building of a wall in the Tingahuarco village,” Cerro de Pasco, March 8, 1912. 90. AGN, Prefecturas, Junín, “Letter from the neighbors of Vinchos, in the District of Huariaca, to the Prefect of Junín,” Vinchos, October 1, 1916. 91. AGN, Prefecturas, Junín, “List of demands of the Goyllarisquizga strikers,” May 25, 1917. 92. AGN, Prefecturas, Junín, “Conclusions agreed between delegates of workers of the Cerro de Pasco Mining Corporation and the representatives of the latter,” Cerro de Pasco, May 30, 1917. 93. AGN, Prefecturas, Junín, “Report about fire and telegraphic outage in the foundry,” [Cerro de Pasco], August 21, 1917. 94. AGN, Prefecturas, Junín, “Letter from the Prefect of Junín to the Minister of Government,” Cerro de Pasco, October 7, 1921.

Chapter 2: Making Indigenous Communities 1. Loayza, Condición legal de las comunidades indígenas, 3. 2. Loayza, Condición legal de las comunidades indígenas, 3. 3. Matos Mar, Desborde popular y crisis del Estado. John McNeill posits cities as one of the two “powerful twin surges” of the twentieth century. See McNeill, Something New under the Sun, particularly the chapter “More People, Bigger Cities.” In Latin America, informal dwelling has characterized urban formations since their inceptions. Brodwyn Fischer, Bryan McCann, and Javier Auyero offer a brief, comprehensive appraisal of the making of Latin American cities in Cities from Scratch. 4. See Jacobsen, Mirages of Transition, particularly “The Oligarchization of Liberal Visions.” 5. A similar institution emerged in Chile around the same time, under the name of protector de indígenas. See Bengoa, Historia del pueblo Mapuche, 337. 6. Bustamante Cisneros, Condición jurídica de las comunidades indígenas. 7. Bustamante Cisneros, Condición jurídica de las comunidades indígenas, 68.

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8. Here I build upon the notion of “legibility” as proposed by James C. Scott. The central quest of the construction of Indigenous legibility, and any other legibility, is an act of simplification. Functional to this simplification, the state relies on a combination of “ignorance” and “incompleteness.” As ethnographic sophistication may lead to governance fragmentation, the state enforces the making of a “one-sizefits-all” ideal. See Scott, Seeing like a State. 9. Castro Pozo, Nuestra comunidad indígena. 10. As Fiona Wilson contends, Leguía’s legal initiatives targeted the “normalization” of the Indigenous personhood under a corporative understanding of societal rearrangement with some form of indigenista inspiration. See Wilson, “Leguía y la política indigenista.” 11. The Primer Congreso Indigenista Interamericano was held in Pátzcuaro, México, in April 1940. The congress led to the creation of the Instituto Indigenista Interamericano (III) and the establishment of the Día del Aborígen Americano. Furthermore, Pátzcuaro constituted the epicenter of the foundation of various indigenista institutes throughout Latin America. See Giraudo, “Neither ‘Scientific’ nor Colonialist.’” 12. The parliamentary debates on Indigenous communities and their constitution and recognition is summarized in Balbi and Madalengoitia, Parlamento y lucha política. 13. Yarlequé, La raza indígena. 14. Yarlequé, La raza indígena, 8. 15. Yarlequé, La raza indígena, 1. Caciquismo entailed a clientelist political culture deeply rooted in Latin American rural domains. Mexico has been critical for the study of caciques and their role in the making of Latin American nation-states. See Knight and Pansters, Caciquismo in Twentieth-Century Mexico. The term was never fully appropriated in Peru, neither historically nor historiographically. 16. Yarlequé, La raza indígena, 35. 17. Pérez Armendáriz, La individualización de la propiedad comunal indígena. 18. On the question of the social correlates of the adaptation to high elevation environments in the Peruvian Andes, see Lossio, El peruano y su entorno. 19. Lossio, El peruano y su entorno, 18. 20. Guillén, La reintegración de la propiedad comunal indígena. 21. Guillén, La reintegración de la propiedad comunal indígena, 63. 22. Wilmer, Indigenous Voice in World Politics. On the issue of early twentiethcentury land legislation and the question of “immemoriality,” see Jacobsen, Liberalism and Indian Communities. In most circumstances, the term “immemorial” actually appealed to colonial provisions of property rights. Scarlett O’Phelan has also explored the mobilization of colonial documentation for immemoriality claims. See O’Phelan, “Tiempo inmemorial, tiempo colonial,” 3–20. 23. Valdez de la Torre, Evolución de las comunidades indígenas. 24. Carlos Ramos has offered a comprehensive analysis of the legal innovations put forward by Augusto B. Leguía. See Ramos Núñez, Ley y justicia.

224 | Notes to Pages 53–56

25. The Patria Nueva (1919–1930) is a major historical and historiographical turn. As Marta Irurozqui explains, Leguía’s seemingly autocratic regime was a point of origin of many political and social developments that engulfed the country throughout the rest of the last century. See Irurozqui, “El Perú de Leguía,” 85–101. Augusto Ruiz Zevallos has carefully warned that this incorporation of the Indigenous question into national policy making, an apparent protective attitude, only lasted until 1923, when Leguía became anti-campesino and anti-Indigenous. See Ruiz Zevallos, Movilización sin revolución. A major reevaluation of the multilayered meanings of the Patria Nueva in Peru is available in Drinot, La Patria Nueva. 26. For a detailed review of Peruvian legislation on Indigenous and peasant communities, see Robles Mendoza, Legislación peruana sobre comunidades campesinas. 27. AGN, Interior, Prefectura de Lima, Ley de Creación de Asuntos Indígenas. 28. Prefectura de Lima, Ley de Creación de Asuntos Indígenas. 29. The Patronato was presided over by the archbishop of Lima. Similarly to the Office of Indigenous Affairs, requesting assistance from the Patronato demanded that Indigenous populations temporarily move to Lima. In most circumstances, according to Margarita Guerra, accusation presented before the Patronato led to further violence against indios. Guerra Martinière, “La ‘Patria Nueva’ de Leguía.” 30. AGN, Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, 1922, folio 4. 31. AGN, Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, 1922, folio 4. 32. AGN, Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, 1923, folio 43. 33. The enganche system is one of the most widely studied aspects of rural labor in Latin America. Departing from Magnus Mörner’s foundational examination of Spanish American haciendas, works on peonage in Peru and other central areas of the region are abundant. In the case of the central sierra, Florencia Mallon’s The Defense of the Community in the Peruvian Central Highlands and Heraclio Bonilla Mayta’s El minero de los Andes have offered some of the most insightful perspectives on Indigenous peonage. 34. AGN, Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, 1924, folio 8. 35. Falconí later reported that communities identified and listed in his cadaster—which included Oroya Antigua, Huaynacancha, Saco, Pachachaca, Yauli, Pomacocha, Suitucancha, Huayhuay, Huari, Chacapalca, Llocllapampa, and Canchayllo—“had split, denying the benefits of compensations to each other.” Yet ultimately he was able to offer a well-detailed list of communities and their members after surpassing initial conflict. AGN, Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, 1924, folio 022.a. 36. Robles Mendoza, Legislación peruana sobre comunidades campesinas, 64. 37. The law was also known as the Servicio de Caminos and originally was directed toward all male residents of Peru, national and foreign alike, between eighteen and sixty years old. Conscription lasted between six and twelve days per year, depending on age, and had to be completed in a province other than the conscript’s. However, the law established the possibility of redeeming conscription by paying the wage corresponding to the number of days that a given individual was supposed

Notes to Pages 56–62 | 225

to be recruited for. Likewise, the conscript could also send a person on his behalf to work for him during his conscription. The state guaranteed all necessary measures for the adequate fulfillment of the conscription, including “coca leaves,” and the conscript received his “libreta” of conscription, an ID that proved his current legal status. AGN: Prefectura de Lima: Ley de Conscripción Vial. While a seminal legal device for understanding state-Indigenous affairs in early twentieth-century Peru, the Ley de Conscripción Vial has not yet received enough attention. Mario Meza has offered the most comprehensive, up-to-date examination of this law in Meza Bazán, “Estado, modernización y la ley.” 38. AGN, Interior, Prefectura de Lima, Asuntos Indígenas y Fomento, 1925. 39. AGN, Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, 1925, folio 61. 40. AGN, Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, 1925, folio 61. 41. AGN, Interior, Prefectura de Lima, Asuntos Indígenas y Fomento, 1925. 42. AGN, Interior, Prefectura de Lima, Asuntos Indígenas y Fomento, 1931. 43. AGN, Interior, Prefectura de Junín, 1930. 44. AGN, Interior, Prefectura de Junín, 1930. 45. See Drinot and Knight, Great Depression in Latin America, particularly the chapter on Peru by Paulo Drinot and Carlos Contreras. 46. Robles Mendoza, Legislación peruana sobre comunidades campesinas, 66. 47. We still know little about the manifold origins of colonial titles in Latin America, and even less about the role of emphyteusis in shaping land property. Carmen Arellano has studied the role of communal titles in reconstructing the history of minor pre-Columbian ethnic groups, explicating their controversial nature. See Arellano Hoffman, “Los títulos de comunidades.” For an overall review about the evolution of land property rights in Peru, see Martínez, “Evolución de la propiedad territorial.” 48. AGN, Prefecturas, Lima, Trabajo y Asuntos Indígenas, 1937. 49. AGN, Prefecturas, Lima, Trabajo y Asuntos Indígenas, 1930. 50. In the year 1930 alone, approximately 602 formal complaints were filed in the Office of Indigenous Affairs. The number of resolved cases went up to 1,578, of which only 15 percent had to do with personal issues. This incommensurable number of legal processes had nurtured the rise of tinterillos, legal mediators who worked out a para-legal system, often taking advantage from comunidades and otherwise decentering the administration of justice. In provinces such as Huánuco, tinterillos had tried to pass as actual communal representatives, mobilizing local populations against hacendados and their estates, and contributing with land-based social struggle and unrest. See AGN, Prefecturas, Lima, Trabajo y Asuntos Indígenas, 1930 and 1935. 51. Pascana sites were spots for muleteers to rest and feed their mules. 52. AGN, Prefecturas, Lima, Trabajo y Asuntos Indígenas, 1930. 53. AGN, Prefecturas, Lima, Trabajo y Asuntos Indígenas, 1930. 54. AGN, Prefecturas, Lima, Trabajo y Asuntos Indígenas, 1930. 55. AGN, Prefecturas, Lima, Trabajo y Asuntos Indígenas, 1930.

226 | Notes to Pages 62–69

56. Murra, Reciprocity and Redistribution. 57. AGN, Prefecturas, Lima, Trabajo y Asuntos Indígenas, 1938. On the political role of personeros, see Leonardo Amarillo, Las memorias del personero. 58. The term would be extended to four years by the supreme decree of January  13, 1941. See Robles Mendoza, Legislación peruana sobre comunidades campesinas, 73. 59. José Carlos Mariátegui’s role as an innovative Marxist thinker in the larger intellectual landscape of the early twentieth century has not been fully explored. Marc Becker has explored the international impact of his seminal work, Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, and his hemispheric contribution to the alignment of race and class analysis beyond Peru. See Becker, Mariátegui and Latin American Marxist Theory. In Peruvian historiography, Alberto Flores Galindo published the best interpretation of the heterodox thinking of Mariátegui and his utopian value for reconciling race and class as antagonistic analytical and political units. See Flores Galindo, La agonía de Mariátegui. 60. AGN, Interior, Prefecturas, Junín, 1934. 61. Candela Jiménez, El régimen de Óscar R. Benavides. 62. AGN, Interior, Prefecturas, Junín, 1935. 63. AGN, Interior, Prefecturas, Unidad de acción, Junín, 1935. 64. Unidad de acción, 7. 65. AGN, Interior, Prefecturas, En el centenario: Marcha de hambre, Junín, 1935. 66. En el centenario: Marcha de hambre. 67. It is important to mention the widespread presence of the APRA Party in the unionization of agrarian workers, particularly on the northern coast, and their incipient presence elsewhere. See Klaren, La formación de las haciendas. 68. The term referred to the Lima elites who organized around the Partido Civil in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it meant to highlight the continuity between their exclusionary political project and the current situation under General Benavides. 69. Manifiesto de la Comisión Central Nacional Indígena y Campesina del Partido Comunista del Perú, 2. 70. Comisión Central Nacional Indígena y Campesina del Partido Comunista del Perú, Huelga y Marcha de Hambre, 1. 71. Comisión Central Nacional Indígena y Campesina del Partido Comunista del Perú, Hoz y Martillo, 4. 72. Biblioteca Nacional del Perú, Periódicas, El Eco de los Andes, April 8, 1920, 1. 73. Biblioteca Nacional del Perú, Periódicas, El Indio [Lima], July 21, 1934, 2. 74. Biblioteca Nacional del Perú, Periódicas, El Campesino y la Escuela, [ca. 1937], 2. 75. El Campesino y la Escuela, 2. 76. AGN, Prefecturas, Lima, Trabajo y Asuntos Indígenas, 1937.

Notes to Pages 71–77 | 227

Chapter 3: Reconciling the State and Communities 1. Amy Offner has offered a very compelling account of the intertwinement of urban and rural projects in the making of the developmentalist state. See Offner, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy. 2. Geoffrey Bertram studied the role of granjas, particularly in Puno and the Peruvian altiplano, as the forefront of the modernization of the wool industry in Peru. See Bertram, “Modernización y cambio.” The literature on Manuel Prado’s administration is scarce. However, Gonzalo Portocarrero’s study of the transitional years from José Luis Bustamante y Rivero’s brief administration (1945–1948) to the authoritarian regimen of Manuel A. Odría (1948–1956) provides some key insights about the reorientation of the state toward renewed forms of internal governance. See Portocarrero Maisch, De Bustamante a Odría, 46–47. 3. AGN, Ministerio de Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, folder 2. 4. AGN, Ministerio de Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, folder 2. 5. AGN, Ministerio de Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, folder 2. 6. AGN, Ministerio de Hacienda, Impresos, Ministerio de Agricultura, Memorias, Memoria que presenta la Junta de Industria Lanar por el año 1946, 3. 7. On the capitalization of the altiplano economy, see Bertram, “Modernización y cambio,“ and Jacobsen, Mirages of Transition. 8. AGN, Ministerio de Hacienda, Impresos, Ministerio de Agricultura, Memorias, Memoria que presenta la Junta de Industria Lanar por el año 1947, 12. 9. Memoria que presenta la Junta de Industria Lanar por el año 1947, 13. 10. AGN, Ministerio de Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, folder 2. 11. AGN, Ministerio de Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, folder 2. 12. AGN, Ministerio de Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, folder 2. 13. Memoria que presenta la Junta de Industria Lanar por el año 1947, 18. In the years after the end of World War II, there was a consistent decrease in the international price of sheep wool. See Roche, International Wool Trade. 14. Memoria que presenta la Junta de Industria Lanar por el año 1947, 18. 15. Memoria que presenta la Junta de Industria Lanar por el año 1946, 18. 16. Memoria que presenta la Junta de Industria Lanar por el Año 1947, 19. 17. AGN, Ministerio de Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, file 2. The group of deputies included the representative of Camaná, Gustavo Gorriti, and the representative of Andahuaylas, G. Cáceres Gaudet. 18. In a comprehensive appraisal of agrarian reform in Latin America, Jacques Chonchol explains how Peru and Chile, unlike other countries in the region, did not contemplate the colonizing model of agrarian reform. While More’s proposal never quite took off, his vision aligned with other prospects and projects of agrarian reform elsewhere. See Chonchol, “La reforma agraria.” 19. AGN, Ministerio de Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, folder 2. 20. AGN, Ministerio de Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, folder 2.

228 | Notes to Pages 77–81

21. AGN, Ministerio de Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, folder 2. 22. AGN, Ministerio de Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, folder 2. 23. AGN, Ministerio de Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, folder 2. 24. AGN, Ministerio de Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, folder 2. 25. AGN, Ministerio de Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, folder 3. 26. AGN, Ministerio de Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, folder 3. 27. Galván also mentions the participation of the United Nations in sponsoring the migration and colonization of the montaña region. In his ideal, newly established comunidades of the montaña would replicate the experiences of lowland communities such as Muquiyauyo, where Indigenous people had consistently evolved toward cooperativism and were “constituting an example worth imitating by all Peruvians.” 28. AGN, Ministerio de Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, Varios, folder 17. 29. AGN, Ministerio de Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, Varios, folder 17. 30. AGN, Ministerio de Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, Resoluciones Supremas, folder 9. 31. A specific reference is made about the creation of the United States Housing Authority in 1937. 32. On the institutional trajectory in the creation of the Instituto Indigenista Peruano, see Gonzales, “Instituto Indigenista Peruano.” 33. These are years in which contacts between Peruvian and US institutions were first established regarding cooperation related to the improvement of the material conditions of the Indigenous household. In 1941, John Collier—the director of the National Indian Institute, an affiliate of the US Department of the Interior— submitted a group of issues of the journal Indians at Work to Monge, then an independent intellectual and scholar. PUCP, Special Collections, Monge, Instituto Indigenista Peruano, folio 1. 34. PUCP, Special Collections, Monge, Instituto Indigenista Peruano, folio 2. 35. PUCP, Special Collections, Monge, Instituto Indigenista Peruano, folio 17. Some of the points that had to be discussed in Cusco were special education for the Indian, the role of rural communities, the regime of rural property, the problem of migration, the American Indigenous census of 1950, the preservation of Indigenous values, the problem of Indigenous feeding habits, and other matters of a sanitary nature. 36. Ricardo Salvatore has offered a comprehensive analysis of the role of USsponsored disciplines in reinventing Latin America, particularly South America, as a governable space. See Salvatore, Disciplinary Conquest. 37. Tschopik, Highland Communities of Central Peru, iv. 38. Tschopik, Highland Communities of Central Peru, iv. 39. The report about the central sierra states that much had been done about the southern highlands and even the Indigenous northern coast, whereas the central highlands had remained little explored albeit its cultural, economic, and social complexity.

Notes to Pages 81–86 | 229

40. Julian H. Steward, the director of the Smithsonian Institute, and Luis E. Valcárcel, the minister of education, designated Tschopik as representative of the Institute of Social Anthropology and commissioned him along with Peruvian ethnologists such as Jorge C. Muelle, Gabriel Escobar, and Jose M. B. Farfán. For more information about Tschopik’s career, see Rowe, “Harry Tschopik, Jr.” 41. Tschopik, Highland Communities of Central Peru, iv. 42. Tschopik, Highland Communities of Central Peru, 1. 43. Tschopik, Highland Communities of Central Peru, 6. 44. Tschopik, Highland Communities of Central Peru, 4. 45. Tschopik, Highland Communities of Central Peru, 5. 46. Tschopik, Highland Communities of Central Peru, 5. 47. According to the numbers provided by Tschopik, the 1940 Peruvian census established that out of a total national population of seven million inhabitants, approximately 2,850,000 were listed as Indians, while 3,300,000 were listed as mestizos. The Statistical Extract of Peru, which states that the population in the region of Junín is 61.5 percent Indians and 37.9 percent mestizo, including white mestizos, complements this information. Linguistically, the Stage of Instruction in Peru According to the 1940 Census report, released in 1942, established that Junín was 21.98 percent Spanish-only speakers, 31.06 percent Quechua-only speakers, and a relative majority of 46.96 percent bilingual speakers. The population total for Junín was approximately 403,212 inhabitants; it was second to Ayacucho in number of inhabitants but the most densely populated province of the central highlands, with a ratio of 13.9 inhabitants per square kilometer. Of this total, about 60.9 percent of the population was defined as rural, whereas 39.1 percent was defined as urban. In all these calculations, Junín includes the current province of Pasco. Tschopik, Highland Communities of Central Peru, 11–15. 48. Tschopik, Highland Communities of Central Peru, 14. The term used is “peasant” instead of “Indigenous.” Emphasis added. 49. Tschopik, Highland Communities of Central Peru, 14. 50. Tschopik, Highland Communities of Central Peru, 35. 51. Tschopik, Highland Communities of Central Peru, 36. 52. Tschopik, Highland Communities of Central Peru, 37. 53. Tschopik, Highland Communities of Central Peru, 50. 54. Tschopik, Highland Communities of Central Peru, 52. 55. Tschopik, Highland Communities of Central Peru, 51. 56. Tschopik, Highland Communities of Central Peru, 55. 57. Tschopik, Highland Communities of Central Peru, 55. 58. AGN, Ministerio de Agricultura, Dirección General de Comunidades Campesinas, Correspondencia, Comunidades de Indígenas, Parcialidades, Caseríos, Estancias, Aldeas, Haciendas y Fundos existentes en el Territorio Peruano, 1940–1953. 59. AGN, Ministerio del Interior, Prefecturas, Junín, 1944, Acta de Fundación de Patria y Bandera.

230 | Notes to Pages 87–89

60. AGN, Ministerio del Interior, Prefecturas, Junín, 1944, Expediente de la Sociedad Civilizadora Chongos Alto. 61. Expediente de la Sociedad Civilizadora Chongos Alto. 62. AGN, Ministerio de Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, folder 3. 63. AGN, Ministerio de Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, folder 3. 64. AGN, Ministerio de Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, folder 3. 65. AGN, Ministerio de Trabajo, Asuntos Indígenas, folder 2. 66. Ondorino intellectuals have further enhanced a mythical narrative about the origins of Ondores. Rubén Terrel Zevallos has compiled a series of myths and legends present in the region surrounding Lake Junín, including an explanation of the toponymy of Ondores and the larger history of the community. According to Terrel, the name San Juan de Ondores comes from two names: Kuntur Llactay, Quechua for “Place of Condors”; and San Juan for Saint John the Baptist, often referred to as the patron of sheep. Terrel indicates that during colonial times, Ondores belonged to the Chinchaycocha repartimiento, which in turn was part of the Villar corregimiento covering the villages of Reyes, Carhuamayo, Vicco, Paucartambo, Quiparacra, San Miguel de Ulcumayo, Huayllay, Pari, Carhuacayán, San Juan de Ondores, and several other smaller villages. See Terrel Zevallos, Leyenda de los pueblos circundantes, 16 and others. 67. Archivo de la Dirección Regional de Junín, San Juan de Ondores, Reglamento interno de la comunidad de indígenas de San Juan de Ondores. This archive once was part of the Tribunal Agrario’s archive that later became the bulk of the documentation of the Organismo para la Formalización de la Propiedad Informal, or COFOPRI. In 2010, the Peruvian government decentralized the functions of COFOPRI, assigning regional governments to manage these processes, and therefore authorized the fracture of the archive. Most of the documentation compiled by the Oficina de Reforma Agraria about rural land ownership is now lost, and the little pieces available are remarkably difficult to find and access. A copy of the supreme resolution that recognized the legal personhood of San Juan de Ondores can be found in the “San Juan de Ondores” file at the Dirección Regional Agraria of the Ministerio de Agricultura, in the Subdirección de Comunidades Campesinas y Nativas. 68. The statute says, “[The comunidad’s] origin goes back to the Incan era and during the Colony it survived as a community until being officially recognized in the current republican era.” Reglamento interno de la comunidad de indígenas de San Juan de Ondores, 1. Recent literature about communities in nineteenth-century Peru have emphasized the colonial color of the term “immemorial,” establishing that while the term is often used to refer to time before Spanish domination, it is in fact a term based on colonial legislation. For a groundbreaking study about Indigenous communities, liberalism, and the state in nineteenth-century Peru, see Pereyra Chávez, Bases documentales para el estudio. 69. According to the statute, the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation paid the amount of the census to the community, in the sum of “ochenta soles de oro,” which

Notes to Pages 89–93 | 231

the community established to be equivalent to “cien pesos ensayados de la época colonial.” The prevalence of this census as a legal tool for land possession and occupation shows two important aspects of agrarian legislation in twentieth-century Peru. On the one hand is the lack of modern legislation pertaining to land ownership even in cases of regional presence of modern, capitalist interests. On the other hand is the prevalence of legal negotiation between community and external agents over issues related to a critical aspect of their existence. 70. Ondores divided its boundaries into two categories. The first featured the boundaries of the communal lands to date: in the north with the community of Pari, in the south with the pastures of Atocsaico, in the east with Lake Junín and some communal lands of Junín, and in the west with the haciendas Diezmo and Conococha, divided by the Mantaro River. The second featured the boundaries of Atocsaico, which is presented as cedido to the corporation: in the north with the “free lands” of the community of Ondores, in the south with the “casa-hacienda” Atocsaico, in the east with the lands of the community of Junín, and in the west with the haciendas Conococha and Corpacancha, divided by the Mantaro River. 71. Reglamento interno de la comunidad de indígenas de San Juan de Ondores, 2. 72. Reglamento interno de la comunidad de indígenas de San Juan de Ondores, 6. 73. Reglamento interno de la comunidad de indígenas de San Juan de Ondores, 7. 74. Reglamento interno de la comunidad de indígenas de San Juan de Ondores, 8. 75. Reglamento interno de la comunidad de indígenas de San Juan de Ondores, 14. The term derives from “gamonal,” a word that describes autarchic landowners of the south-central Andean region of Peru, whose main characteristic was the absolutist exertion of socioeconomic and political power upon its territorial domains and the people living and working within them. 76. Reglamento interno de la comunidad de indígenas de San Juan de Ondores, 15. 77. The Junta de Industria Lanar was a conglomerate of the most important wool producers of the central highlands, sponsored by the Ministerio de Fomento. Members of the Junta de Industria Lanar included the major Sociedades Ganaderas of the central highlands, important private hacendados, the Livestock Division of the Cerro de Pasco Corporation, and other important Lima-based wool traders. The project of granjas comunales was a state-driven attempt to promote agrarian industrialism in the core of Indigenous communities, and its role is further addressed in a subsequent part of this chapter. 78. Reglamento interno de la comunidad de indígenas de San Juan de Ondores, 17. 79. Reglamento interno de la comunidad de indígenas de San Juan de Ondores, 18. 80. Reglamento interno de la comunidad de indígenas de San Juan de Ondores, 18. 81. These matters included support to widows for covering burial costs, and assistance in situations of medical emergency when an injured comunero or his family could not cover expenses. Reglamento interno de la comunidad de indígenas de San Juan de Ondores, 21. 82. Reglamento interno de la comunidad de indígenas de San Juan de Ondores, 18.

232 | Notes to Pages 93–99

83. One of the publications mentioned in the communal collection was La Vida Agrícola, a publication issued by the Departamento de Veterinaria of the División Ganadera of the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation. 84. Reglamento interno de la comunidad de indígenas de San Juan de Ondores, 20. 85. Basically, after every communal assembly, the secretario de actas was responsible for writing a report with all major points discussed during the gathering. These actas were stored in the communal library. 86. A collector treasurer had the responsibility of collecting all communal rents for the caja comunal. 87. Reglamento interno de la comunidad de indígenas de San Juan de Ondores, 29. 88. AGN, Ministerio de Agricultura, Dirección General de Comunidades Campesinas, Correspondencia, 1942, folio 3. 89. AGN, Ministerio de Agricultura, Dirección General de Comunidades Campesinas, Correspondencia, 1942, folio 5. 90. AGN, Ministerio de Agricultura, Dirección General de Comunidades Campesinas, Correspondencia, 1942, folio 7. 91. AGN, Ministerio de Agricultura, Dirección General de Comunidades Campesinas, Correspondencia, 1942, folio 18. 92. AGN, Ministerio de Agricultura, Dirección General de Comunidades Campesinas, Correspondencia, 1942, folio 15. 93. AGN, Ministerio de Agricultura, Dirección General de Comunidades Campesinas, Correspondencia, 1942, folio 15. 94. AGN, Ministerio de Agricultura, Dirección General de Comunidades Campesinas, Correspondencia, 1942, folio 16.

Chapter 4: Reforming without Revolution 1. Scorza, Redoble por rancas. 2. See Mayer, Ugly Stories, 80. For an interesting study about land occupation as nonviolent strategy, see Huizer, “Land Invasion as a Non-violent Strategy.” 3. The Confederación Campesina del Perú (CCP) had been founded in 1947, largely as a result of a strong politicization of rural politics and the increasing presence of different parties in the countryside and the central sierra—including socialists, apristas, and communists. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the politics of comunidades indígenas dominated the national debate about economic progress and political modernization. Carlos Monge has documented how communal demands for land and further political representation reached a peak between 1956 and 1964. See Monge, Perú. On the history of the participation of political parties, and particularly communists, in the reactivation of the CCP, see Caro Cárdenas, Demonios encarnados. Caro explains how rural politics really challenged the cultural and ideological hegemony of Marxism-Leninism and working-class politics in the eve of the Peruvian 1960s.

Notes to Pages 99–104 | 233

4. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 7, folio 218. 5. According to Heraclio Bonilla, the 1960s were not only a decade of campesino mobilizations but also larger transformations that placed land ownership, the hacienda system, and terratenientes (landowners) at the core of a national debate about the material progress of the country. Bonilla contends that communal struggles gradually disputed the material bases of hacienda and terrateniente power. See Bonilla Mayta, La defensa del espacio comunal, 24. 6. Reviel Netz has provided an insightful ecological account about the role of barbed wire in preventing motion and, thus, enforcing ideas about property and confinement. See Reviel Netz, Barbed Wire. 7. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 7, folio 286. 8. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 7, folio 286. 9. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 8, folio 51. 10. The agrarian distress of the community rooted in the need for expanding their land and property rights was not limited to ranching and Atocsaico. Another pivotal struggle was undertaken by the Echevarría brothers over the Chaccumayo hacienda, the brothers’ property. These lands were used for cultivation of potatoes, and its contested possession unleashed many communal sessions, dealings with the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs, and a brief confrontation with local police on November 3, 1960. See Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 8. 11. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 8. 12. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 8, folio 52. 13. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 8, folio 71. 14. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 8, folio 81. 15. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 8, folio 85. 16. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 8, folio 84. 17. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 8, folio 90. 18. Brass, introduction to Latin American Peasants, 3. 19. Comisión para la Reforma Agraria y la Vivienda, La reforma agraria en el Perú, 9–10. 20. BNP, Periódicas, Ernesto More, Reforma Agraria [Lima], vol. 1, no. 1, April 1961, 3. 21. More, Reforma Agraria, 3. 22. More, Reforma Agraria, 3. 23. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 9, folio 26. 24. Diego García-Sayán offers an important analysis of peasant mobilization and land seizure. García-Sayán argues that much of the peasant dynamism emerged as a result of increasing capitalist practices and mounting mercantilist relations within the same community and among regional ones. Following the “baseless triangle model” proposed by Julio Cotler to explain the hegemony of the hacienda system, García-Sayán suggests that further interactions through peasant organizations became the base of the triangle and hence challenged the rule of haciendas and the countryside. With regional variations, land seizures started by the end of the 1950s,

234 | Notes to Pages 104–110

continued strongly during the 1960s, and reached their peak amid the period of military agrarian reform in the 1970s. See García-Sayán, Tomas de tierras en el Perú. 25. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 9, folio 45. 26. The leadership of Hugo Blanco, La Convención, and land seizures became central topics discussed during this Congreso Nacional Campesino. The Confederación Campesina del Perú echoed FENCAP’s congress and organized a new meeting five months later, in June 1962. This atmosphere of rural unrest preceded the military coup of General Pérez Godoy, the establishment of a short-lived military junta, and the legal sanction of a number of land seizures as a mechanism for decompressing social anxieties in the countryside. See Vazelesk, “De la lucha por la tierra.” 27. In the early 1960s, the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA) had already made its so-called ideological turn, making a political truce with the oligarchic sectors of Peruvian politics that had condemned Apristas to illegality and exile. A thorough review of APRA’s history is available in Manrique, ¡Usted fue Aprista! 28. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 9, folio 52–53. 29. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 9, folio 53. 30. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 9, folio 54. 31. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 9, folio 65. 32. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 9, folio 67. 33. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 9, folio 77. 34. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 9, folio 87. 35. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 9, folio 96. 36. On the impact of Fernando Belaúnde’s campaign in rural politics, see “The Last Will Be First,” in Heilman, Before the Shining Path. 37. BNP, Impresos, Dirección de Promoción Agraria, Boletín Túpac Amaru. Boletín Mensual de la Dirección de Promoción y Difusión Agraria, November 1969, 1. 38. BNP, Impresos, Oficina Nacional de Reforma Agraria, Reforma Agraria, 1963, i. 39. Reforma Agraria, 1. 40. Reforma Agraria, 5. 41. Reforma Agraria, 5. 42. Reforma Agraria, 35. 43. Reforma Agraria, 35. 44. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 10, folio 5. 45. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 10, folio 35. 46. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 11, folio 33. 47. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 11, folio 40. 48. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 11, folio 55. 49. Reforma Agraria, 70. 50. Ley 15.037, Ley de Reforma Agraria, Article 94. 51. As Enrique Mayer suggests, agrarian reform was based on the premise of generating “models” of state intervention that required, at their core, applying “a

Notes to Pages 110–116 | 235

scientifically correct formula . . . designed and enforced to change human character and behavior.” See Mayer, Ugly Stories, 4. 52. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 12, folio 27–28. 53. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 12, folio 49. 54. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 12, folio 77. 55. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 12, folio 88. 56. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 12, folio 109. 57. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 12, folio 171. 58. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 12, folio 171. 59. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 12, folio 171. 60. On the intricacies of the APRA-UNO coalition, see Manrique, ¡Usted fue Aprista! 61. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 13, folio 8. 62. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 13, folio 35. 63. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 13, folio 61. 64. The historiography on the Gobierno Revolucionario de la Fuerza Armada is vast and impossible to fully recap. Recently, Carlos Aguirre and Paulo Drinot have brought back a conversation on the military regime, providing a comprehensive reappraisal of its roots, development, and enduring legacies. See Aguirre and Drinot, Peculiar Revolution. 65. On the promotion of the revolution and its political discourse, see Cant, “Promoting the Revolution.” The Sistema Nacional de Movilización Social (National System of Social Mobilization), first established in 1971, became a major institution for disseminating the language of agrarian reform among comunidades and newly coined campesinos. 66. See Puente Valdivia, “Military Grammar of Agrarian Reform.” 67. Discourse delivered in the Centro de Altos Estudios Militares (CAEM), December 4, 1968, in Velasco Alvarado, La política del Gobierno Revolucionario. The CAEM itself had an important role to explain the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces. As Victor Villanueva has asserted, the military junta empowered with Velasco was instructed within the paradigm of a highly politicized army, committed to so-called national development. The army, thus, had a double influence. On the one hand, it was structured following the French model after the Franco-Prussian war. On the other hand, it had the influence of the Brazilian model, and more specifically the Superior School of War (ESG), which already had had an intervention in Brazilian politics earlier in the sixties. For further analysis of the CAEM and the political identity of the Peruvian army, see Villanueva, El CAEM y la revolución. 68. Velasco Alvarado, “Discurso del Presidente de la República en el Día del Ejército,” in La política del Gobierno Revolucionario. 69. McClintock, Peasant Cooperatives and Political Change. 70. McClintock, Peasant Cooperatives and Political Change. 71. Velasco Alvarado, “Discurso a las Fuerzas Armadas,” in La política del Gobierno Revolucionario.

236 | Notes to Pages 116–121

72. Velasco Alvarado, “Discurso a la Nación, 148 aniversario de la independencia nacional,” in La política del Gobierno Revolucionario. 73. PUCP, Colecciones Especiales, Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, 1969, folio 2. 74. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, October 7, 1968, folio 5. 75. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, October 14, 1968, folio 1. 76. On Peru-US relations during Velasco’s years, see Walter, Peru and the United States, particularly chapters 6 and 7. 77. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, November 5, 1968, folio 7. 78. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, November 8, 1968, folio 1. 79. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, November 26, 1968, folio 1. 80. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, January 14, 1969, folio 2. 81. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, May 14, 1969, folio 5. 82. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, May 27, 1969, folio 1. 83. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, May 27, 1969, folio 1. 84. In examining all possible models of redistribution of land, Máximo Vargas—one of the directors of SAIS Túpac Amaru—said, The Commission [of Agrarian Reform] examined four models of adjudication. The first one proposed to perform a division into smaller unities, but efficient; these were supposed to be administered by the communities who would receive them in a form of adjudication, considering that they had historic and legal claims for those lands. One of these unities would remain in hands of the state to manage it as a leading one with high technology that would provide support for the rest of them. The second model postulated to return the land to the communities, but to maintain a core of advanced communities from which it would be possible to facilitate technical support and benefits to the comunidades that would receive such adjudications. The third model proposed to create a centralized cooperative that would include big part of the haciendas’ lands, which finally would be granted to each of the partner comunidades while they were being capacitated in livestock technology, and in principles of cooperativism. . . . The fourth model consisted in creating the equivalent of an enterprise or corporation, and to adjudicate it to the comunidades; the latter would become a sort of actionists or co-owners of the enterprise. In other words, land would not be redistributed but property instead[, avoiding internal conflict].

Notes to Pages 121–129 | 237

See Mayer, Ugly Tales, 264. 85. Mayer, Ugly Tales, 264. 86. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, July 13, 1969, folio 1. 87. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, July 22, 1969, folio 1. 88. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, August 19, 1969, folio 1. 89. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, September 9, 1969, folio 2. 90. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, August 1, 1969, folio 4. 91. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, September 23, 1969, folio 1. 92. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, October 21, 1969, folio 4. 93. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, November 18, 1969, folio 2. 94. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, January 20, 1970. 95. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, April 21, 1970. 96. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, July 3, 1970, folio 3.

Chapter 5: Making Campesino Communities 1. PUCP, Colecciones Especiales, Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, April 27, 1971, folios 2–3. Enrique Mayer has provided a detailed ethnographic study of land management and labor inside the SAIS of the central sierra. As Mayer vividly portrays, most of the reformed land (37 percent), almost three million hectares of land, fell under SAIS administration. Surpassing cooperatives (29 percent), grupos campesinos (21 percent), and comunidades (10 percent), the SAIS became the dominant model of land and rural labor administration in Peru during the years of agrarian reform. See Mayer, Ugly Stories, 23. 2. Mayer, Ugly Stories, 23. 3. On the cooperativization of northern coastal haciendas and campesino self-management, see McClintock, Peasant Cooperatives and Political Change. McClintock carefully documented the changes in the political culture of campesinos resulting from the transformations in land tenure. Despite the emphasis on the rupture of the hacienda system and its clientelist relations, McClintock also

238 | Notes to Pages 129–130

acknowledges the level of campesino dissatisfaction with the agrarian reform shortly after the promulgation of Law 17.716. 4. Actas del Consejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, June 15, 1971, folio 2. 5. Víctor Caballero and Elena Álvarez established a pivotal distinction between “entrepreneurial” and “non-entrepreneurial” forms of agrarian management. The former included Cooperativas Agrarias de Producción (CAPs), Sociedades Agrarias de Interés Social (SAIS), and Empresas de Propiedad Social (EPS), all of which entailed various degrees of state centralization. The latter, a marginal form of land and labor administration in agrarian reform Peru, included the scarce adjudications to campesino communities, campesino groups, and a handful of individuals. See Caballero and Álvarez, Aspectos cuantitativos de la reforma agraria, 23–25. 6. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, July 18, 1972, folio 12. 7. Studies on the Peruvian agrarian reform are vast and diverse. Cynthia McClintock provided a seminal study of agrarian reform as an experience of selfmanagement and a transformative moment in the political culture of the Peruvian campesinado while contemplating the ultimate failure of the reform as the seed of future socioeconomic precariousness. See McClintock, Peasant Cooperatives and Political Change. Early on, Abraham Lowenthal put together a major collective appraisal of the “Peruvian experiment,” including pivotal contributions about the rural transformations unleashed through agrarian reform, campesino responses, and further sociopolitical conflict upon state interventions. See Lowenthal, Peruvian Experiment. McClintock and Lowenthal reevaluated the military regime after its conclusion, placing its policies—including a failed agrarian reform—within a historical and political perspective. See Lowenthal and McClintock, Peruvian Experiment Reconsidered. Jose María Caballero wrote a massive study of the Peruvian sierra before the 1969 agrarian reform, shedding light upon the “statistical illusion” of land concentration and the actual structures of property before expropriations and cooperativization began. See Caballero, Economía agraria de la sierra peruana. Recently, Enrique Mayer brought back the study of the agrarian reform through an anthropological lens focused on the liminal memories shaped during these transformative years. See Mayer, Ugly Stories. Finally, Carlos Aguirre and Paulo Drinot have edited the most comprehensive effort in evaluating the military experiment, with a strong emphasis on the campesino disenchantment with the reform. See Aguirre and Drinot, Peculiar Revolution. 8. Alberti and Sánchez Enríquez, Poder y conflicto social, 45. 9. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, August 15, 1972. On the relationship between Velasco and Washington, see Walter, Peru and the United States, particularly chapter 7. Walter explains how the International Petroleum Company question triggered a major debate about the geopolitical appraisal of Velasco’s 1968 coup, but the company ultimately remained financially uncompensated. By February 1974, Prime Minister Edgardo Mercado

Notes to Pages 131–133 | 239

announced that the regime would pay monetary compensation to five US companies, including the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation. 10. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, March 20, 1973, folio 3. 11. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, April 3, 1973, folio 3. 12. Along with the Dirección General de Reforma Agraria and the Sistema Nacional de Movilización Social, the Tribunal Agrario was one of the three transforming institutions established by the 1969 agrarian reform as a special judicial realm for the delivery of agrarian justice. On the institutional reordering of agrarian reform, see Matos Mar and Mejía, La reforma agraria. 13. On the legal and historical use of communal titles in the central sierra, see Arellano Hoffman, “Los títulos de comunidades.” 14. Christopher Boyer presents a similar process in post-revolutionary Mexico in his seminal study Becoming Campesinos. In the Peruvian case, Genevieve Dorais has eloquently explained how only communal titles issued after 1920 secured property rights for comunidades after the 1969 agrarian reform. See Dorais, La crítica maoísta peruana. In the upper central sierra, not even post-1920 titles retained their sociopolitical value on the eve of the reform. 15. On the role of agrarian reformism within the making of state rural capitalism in Peru, see Puente Valdivia, “Military Grammar of Agrarian Reform.” 16. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, January 10, 1974. 17. According to José Matos Mar, the first desborde popular—a major demographic deruralization and destructured urbanization of the country—occurred in 1963, in the midst of hacienda strikes and land seizures in Cusco, Puno, and Cerro de Pasco. In 1968, after the military coup, the state responded to this desborde and the larger crisis of the “creole state” with “ideological instruments and a technocratic language,” including that of the agrarian reform. See Matos Mar, Desborde popular, 38. 18. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, December 2, 1974, folio 10. 19. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, January 28, 1975, folio 4. 20. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, January 28, 1975, folio 4. 21. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, May 13, 1975, folio 3. 22. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, August 26, 1975. 23. General Juan Velasco Alvarado died on December 23, 1977, following a prolonged health deterioration and the gradual demise of his reformism. Adrián Lerner has thoroughly labeled this transition from “revolution” to “counterrevolution” as

240 | Notes to Pages 133–146

the foremost paradigm in the political history of modern Peru. See Lerner, “Who Drove the Revolution Hearse?,” 74. 24. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, September 9, 1975, folio 15. 25. Actas del Concejo de Ministros del Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, September 16, 1975, folio 7. Population growth increased at an annual rate of 3.1 percent and food demand at 4.6 percent, while production could only be improved to sustain 2.3 percent of annual growth at best. 26. Long and Roberts, Miners, Peasants, and Entrepreneurs, 95. 27. Matos Mar and Mejía, La reforma agraria, 138. 28. Mayer, Ugly Stories, 20. 29. Scott, Seeing like a State, 184. 30. Mayer, Ugly Stories, 19. 31. PUCP, CEDOC, SINAMOS, Evaluación de las SAIS Túpac Amaru, Libertador Ramón Castilla y de las Cooperativas Agrarias de Producción Lancari y Pacoyán (Sierra Central), 5. 32. Evaluación de las SAIS Túpac Amaru, 5. 33. García-Sayán, Tomas de Tierras. 34. Borras, Pro-Poor Land Reform, 281. 35. Dirección Nacional de Reforma Agraria, Ministerio de Agricultura, Lima, May 1971. Information included in the ONERN Report. 36. Dirección Nacional de Reforma Agraria, Ministerio de Agricultura, Lima, May 1971. Information included in the ONERN Report. 37. Caballero, Economía agraria de la sierra peruana. 38. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 13, folio 112. 39. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 13, folio 113. 40. On the crisis of the Partido Aprista Peruano, see Manrique, ¡Usted Fue Aprista! Osmar González links the rise of the Apra Rebelde and the subsequent foundation of the Movimiento the Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) with the origins of the Peruvian New Left. See Gonzalez, “La izquierda peruana.” 41. BNP, Impresos, APRA Rebelde, Tierra para los campesinos. 42. APRA Rebelde, Tierra para los campesinos, 1–2. 43. APRA Rebelde, Tierra para los campesinos, 5. 44. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 13, folio 133. 45. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 13, folio 146. 46. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 13, folio 164. 47. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 13, folio 164. 48. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 13, folio 192. 49. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 13, folio 198–199. 50. According to José Matos Mar and José Manuel Mejía, the establishment of the Tribunal Agrario was one of the central components of the “bureaucratization” of the agrarian reform management, along with the Dirección General de Reforma Agraria and the Ministerio de Agricultura; these were institutional rearrangements

Notes to Pages 146–152 | 241

destined to facilitate the administration of transforming socioeconomic conditions. See Matos Mar and Mejía, La reforma agraria, 123–124. 51. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 14, folio 65. 52. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 15, folio 36. 53. On the social meaning of gossip, see Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance. According to Scott, gossip and other forms of powerless discourse actually  are  a substantial critique of power in circumstances of overwhelming subordination. 54. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 15, folio 56. 55. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 15, folio 68. 56. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 15, folio 112. 57. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 15, folio 135–136. 58. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 16, folio 38. 59. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 16, folio 110. 60. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 16, folio 110. 61. In August 1975, General Francisco Morales Bermúdez led a coup against a physically diminished and politically undermined Juan Velasco Alvarado, inaugurating the “second phase” of the Peruvian Revolution. In reality, as Enrique Mayer explains, the military regime unveiled a truly dictatorial spirit while reversing most of the transformations unleashed in Velasco’s time. See Mayer, Ugly Stories. For an economic appraisal of the contraction of agrarian reform and the campesino sector, see Figueroa, Capitalist Development, particularly chapter 8, “Economic Crisis and the Peasant Economy, 1975–1980.” 62. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 16, folio 126–127. 63. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 16, folio 171. 64. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 17, folio 11. 65. Building upon Weber’s understanding of power, John Tutino contends that ruling structures strive for legitimacy and moral sanction by those subordinated. In spite of burdens and perils, people who experience the weight of power need to accept such conditions as just. Such justness is often nurtured through promoted visions of the status quo and the bien común held by the powerful few over the powerless many. See Tutino, Making a New World, particularly the introductory essay. 66. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 17, folio 147–148. 67. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 17, folio 97. 68. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 17, folio 99. 69. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 17, folio 175. 70. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 17, folio 178. 71. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 17, folio 180. 72. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 17, folio 186. 73. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 17, folio 198. 74. Archive of the Fourth Russell Tribunal, “Carta de la comunidad de Ondores al Presidente de la República,” October 29, 1979, folio 3. 75. “Carta de la comunidad de Ondores al Presidente de la República,” 3.

242 | Notes to Pages 153–163

76. Archive of the Fourth Russell Tribunal, “Comunicado de la Confederación Nacional Agraria,” Lima, December 20, 1979. 77. Archive of the Fourth Russell Tribunal, Revista Marka, “Ondores: Pormenores de un Despojo,” October 11, 1979. 78. Revista Marka, “Ondores: Pormenores de un Despojo.” 79. Revista Marka, “Ondores: Pormenores de un Despojo.” 80. The CCP had signed several open letters, including the one published in Marka, condemning the repression of the military government against campesinos. One of these letters had even international repercussion, since it was a matter of discussion for the Latin Letter bulletin in the United States. Archive of the Fourth Russell Tribunal, “Carta Abierta de la Confederación Campesina del Perú,” October 8, 1979. On the Huanta events and the origins of Shining Path, see Heilman, Before the Shining Path. 81. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 18, folio 20. 82. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 18, folio 26.

Chapter 6: Tilling an Agrarian Conflict 1. Centro de Información para la Memoria Colectiva y los Derechos Humanos (CIMCDH), testimonial 309501. 2. CIMCDH, testimonial 309501. 3. Smith, Livelihood and Resistance. 4. On Sendero Luminoso’s ideology, see Degregori et al., How Difficult It Is. Degregori also produced the first account of the origins of Sendero Luminoso; see El surgimiento de Sendero Luminoso. The literature on Sendero Luminoso is more than vast and is still growing, with recent works paying attention to the local dynamics of the conflict. For an early overview of the national impact of Sendero Luminoso, see Stern, Shining and Other Paths. On the larger political trends of Ayacucho before the rise of Sendero Luminoso, see Heilman, Before the Shining Path. On the differentiated impact of political violence at the interior of Ayacucho villages, see La Serna, Corner of the Living. 5. Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, Informe final, vol. 2, chap. 1, 22. 6. Degregori, Las Rondas Campesinas, 25. 7. On the impact of political violence in the central sierra, see Manrique, “War for the Central Sierra.” Nelson Manrique has produced the dominant narrative among the few specialists of the region, which highlights the resistance of socioeconomically dynamic villages against Sendero Luminoso. This resistance would be the latter manifestation of a larger history of political mobilization of campesinos from this region, which included key participants in the Wars of Independence (1821–1824) and the War of the Pacific (1879–1883). In examining the Internal Armed Conflict in the central highlands, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Notes to Pages 163–168 | 243

has reinforced this narrative and has dismissed the central highlands as a space of conflict as seminal as Ayacucho. 8. Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, conclusion to Informe final. 9. Recent literature has problematized the limits of agrarian reform as a moment of campesino enfranchisement. On the memory of agrarian reform, see Mayer, Ugly Stories. Based on Mayer’s argument, it is possible to assert that the Internal Armed Conflict did not start with Sendero Luminoso’s insurrection but with the intromission of the state in village affairs and the cooperativization of land and labor in grazing environments. Elsewhere, I have detailed the traumatizing effects of agrarian reform in Ondores and the violent nature of its execution, including the perpetration of a massacre in 1979. On the history of Ondores during the agrarian reform, see chapter 5 and elsewhere. 10. Dirección Regional Agraria de Junín, Sub-Dirección de Comunidades Campesinas e Indígenas, Archivo de Comunidades Campesinas e Indígenas, Ondores, Estatuto de la Comunidad de Indígenas San Juan de Ondores. 11. AGN, Hacienda, Fomento, Memoria de la Junta de Industria Lanar, 1946. 12. AGN, Asuntos Indígenas, file 18. 13. Following an appraisal of the ecology of grazing and the possibility directly redistributing land among households, the state and the military government opted for the cooperativization of grazing estates and the making of a SAIS, in which a number of communities became socias, sharing obligations and profits on proportional parts. The history of land and labor cooperativization in Ondores is detailed in chapter 5. For an overview of cooperativism and campesino politics, see McClintock, Peasant Cooperatives and Political Change. 14. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 19, folio 143–144. 15. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 18, folio 108. 16. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 19, folio 25. 17. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 19, folio 26. 18. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 18, folio 90. 19. On the history of Ondores minutes and the role of campesino archives for reconstructing agrarian history in Peru, see Puente Valdivia, “Archivos Campesinos.“ 20. On the role of waqcha sheep, see Martínez Alier, Los huacchilleros del Perú. For a revision of the role of waqcha sheep and the views of Martínez Alier in relation to family herding and market dynamics, see Caro, “Incorporation or Resistance?” 21. CIMCDH, testimonial 302356. 22. CIMCDH, testimonial 302356. The Usibamba campesinos Máximo and Néstor Quinto were accused of the murder of Aquilino Samaniego. They were taken by police forces to the city of Huancayo, and there they were interrogated and tortured. The police could not prove anything, so they were released on conditional liberty and had to sign their names in a notebook at the police base every month. In the following months, Néstor Quinto was assassinated by senderistas in the main square of Usibamba. Máximo was kidnapped, injured, and forced to participate in

244 | Notes to Pages 168–176

the killing of César Damián. After killing Damián, Máximo was brought to the main square of Usibamba, where he met with his brother, who was also being put to a village trial, and was accused of stealing from local stores. While Néstor was executed, the senderistas let Máximo live. 23. CIMCDH, testimonial 301353. 24. CIMCDH, testimonial 301353. 25. On sheep and pastures, see Spedding, Sheep Production and Grazing Management. 26. Kent, “Geographical Dimensions of the Shining Path Insurgency.” 27. On the differentiated impact of Sendero Luminoso in effectively displacing state control, see La Serna, Corner of the Living. 28. As Kent correctly emphasizes, repression in the core areas of Sendero Luminoso control—particularly Ayacucho and Andahuaylas—“encouraged geographical dispersal and intensification of the insurgency elsewhere.” See “Geographical Dimensions of the Shining Path Insurgency,” 445. 29. Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, Informe final, 4:133. 30. Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, Informe final, 4:133. 31. On the impact of political violence in the region, see Manrique, “War of the Central Sierra.” Quote appears on 195. 32. CIMCDH, interview 0204200010000013. 33. CIMCDH, interview 0204200010000013. Many of these peasant leaders were affiliated with the Communist Party, which had managed to spread its influence among many peasant organizations—including the Federación Departamental de Campesinos—establishing an ideological and military alliance with communities. This alliance was formed with the intention of disputing Sendero Luminoso on the human battleground by avoiding further cooptation of campesino leaders. Throughout the development of the conflict, the position of the Communist Party within specific comunidades and federations proved to be pivotal to understanding the position of a given population toward political violence. 34. Far from what the name indicates, the montaña region refers to the eastern lowlands of the Andes, near the natural frontier with Amazon basin. This region has been an elusive landscape for state power, which has constantly attempted to legally and physically colonize it through multiple projects. 35. CIMCDH, interview 0204200010000013. 36. CIMCDH, interview 0204200010000013. 37. CIMCDH, interview 0204200010000013. 38. CIMCDH, interview 0204200010000009. 39. CIMCDH, interview 0204200010000009. 40. CIMCDH, testimonial 342038. 41. CIMCDH, testimonial 342038. 42. Adrián’s father could recognize them because one was wearing the same poncho he had given them days before. In fact, he had marked the poncho with his initials, which led to him being interrogated by police. Fearing that cooperating with

Notes to Pages 176–180 | 245

the investigation could lead to retribution, Adrián’s father understood that it was better to remain silent from then on. 43. CIMCDH, testimonial 302348. “Morocos” was one of the many terms used by communities to refer to agents of violence. 44. On the world of miners and the organization of migrant associations, see Bonilla Mayta, El minero de los Andes. On the migratory experience of campesinos, see Altamirano, “Migración y Estrategias de Supervivencia.” 45. CIMCDH, testimonial 3016901. 46. CIMCDH, testimonial 301744. 47. Cantoral was one of the most prominent syndical leaders of Peru during the Internal Armed Conflict. He was allegedly killed, along with the social worker Consuelo García, by a paramilitary group while he was preparing to participate in an international congress of mining unions in Zimbabwe. In spite of the importance of Cantoral and the major blow his assassination caused to the politics of unions in Peru, there has been no thorough academic reflection about this event. 48. APRA historically had been the populist party of Peru and had won elections for the first time in 1985, led by the young lawyer Alan García Pérez. This alleged paramilitary group had been named after an APRA leader who was murdered by Sendero Luminoso in 1987. On the role of Rodrigo Franco’s paramilitary group and the larger counterinsurgency campaign, see Cornell and Roberts, “Democracy, Counterinsurgency, and Human Rights.” 49. CIMCDH, testimonial 305063. 50. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 18, folio 29. 51. A question that has concerned historians and other social scientists of rural Latin America is whether rural villagers are able to think politically in ways that transcend the real and imagined limits of their villages, as if the only possibility of expressing statehood and state politics was at a national level. On the role of villagers in nation-making processes, see Mallon, Peasant and Nation. So far, the village has been scrutinized as a microcosm of the politics of violence that struck the Peruvian countryside for a decade. Consequently, “villager” was a useful term for referring to the inhabitant of any given village, a fully recognized member of a politically and socioeconomically legible polity. The term “peasant” has been purposely avoided due to the connotations it carries—impoverishment, landlessness, and general atavism. On the other hand, the word “campesino,” as John Womack Jr. once discussed, is extremely useful in describing the human complexity of rural villagers, as it denotes a fundamental aspect of their identity—belonging to the campo, the countryside. Regarding this twofold defining aspect of their identities—as villagers and campesinos—it is worth asking what was at stake for them during the age of terror. 52. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 18, folio 44. 53. Genevieve Dorais has explored the history and influence of Maoism during the military government years (1969–1980), in which Maoist parties consolidated their positions among peasant organizations. While the early pamphlets of the APRA Rebelde had indirectly reinforced the type of agrarian reform conducted by

246 | Notes to Pages 180–185

the military government, the two most important Maoist parties—Patria Roja (PR) and Bandera Roja (BR)—were adamantly opposed to what they considered “a fake agrarian reform” that was fascist and corporatist in nature, and that represented only the interests of an agrarian bourgeoisie. In that sense, what Velasco had carried out was far from a truly revolutionary experience and instead meant the establishment of state capitalism. This did not really differ from what Belaúnde and Beltran had foreseen in terms of US- and Alliance for Progress–sponsored agrarian reform. 54. The comunidad remembered the unfulfilled promise of 1962, and Belaúnde and Acción Popular became more present than ever in the discussions of the community. The discussions surrounding Belaúnde and Acción Popular added to a great level of awareness among the community about the contemporary political environment. 55. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 18, folio 98. 56. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 20, folio 44. 57. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 21, folio 8. 58. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 21, folio 41. 59. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 21, folio 63. 60. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 21, folio 95. 61. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 21, folio 159. 62. Ventocilla earned ninety-five votes, Blanco earned fifty-two, and Tueros earned fifty-three. There were twenty-seven blank votes and seven tainted votes. While there was no indication of the political position of each candidate, based on the previous interventions of all of them in matters such as the Atocsaico issue, Ventocilla seemed to represent the ideal of the community’s remaining within the boundaries of legal struggle over the recovery of their land (more than Blanco and Tueros, who had supported another occupation of Atocsaico). 63. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 22, folio 24. 64. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 22, folio 27. 65. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 22, folio 31. According to Lázaro, these events were the personal vendetta of Willy Guadalupe, a representative of the SAIS and former comunero of Ondores. 66. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 22, folio 35. 67. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 22, folio 39. 68. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 22, folio 39. 69. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 22, folio 39. 70. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 22, folio 41–42. 71. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 22, folio 45. 72. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 22, folio 46. 73. On the massacre of Ondores, see chapter 5. 74. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 22, folio 50. 75. In other cases of robbery, the assembly openly denounced the involvement of the comuneros Basualdo and Ambrosio as well as some of their relatives. This de-

Notes to Pages 185–201 | 247

nunciation largely dismissed the possibility that acts of sedition were coming solely from without the comunidad. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 22, folio 116. 76. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 22, folio 52. 77. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 22, folio 55. 78. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 22, folio 111. 79. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 22, folio 137. 80. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 22, folio 137. 81. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 22, folio 137. 82. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 22, folio 148. 83. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 22, folio 200–202. 84. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 22, folio 200–202. 85. Archivo Comunal de Ondores, book 22, folio 213.

Conclusion 1. On the political framing and emerging vocabularies of the military agrarian reform, see Cant, Land without Masters. 2. Zoila Mendoza has explained how the establishment of the Día del Indio, and the larger indigenista politics and policies of Leguía, corresponded with the expansion of both state and capital in early twentieth-century Peru. See Mendoza, Crear y sentir lo nuestro. 3. Marisol de la Cadena correctly links neoliberal capitalism and Andean tourism as another stage in the historical relationship of rural villagers and capital. See Cadena, Earth Beings. 4. On the formation of the association of internal migrants in Lima, see the foundational study of Teófilo Altamirano, Estructuras regionales, migración y asociaciones regionales en Lima. 5. The aforementioned description of Ondores is partly based on ethnographic work conducted in the comunidad and partly grounded on the analysis of two pivotal documents for studying communal change and permanencies. These documents are the communal censuses of 1969 and 1994. 6. On the racialization of the Peruvian state, see Drinot, Allure of Labor. 7. Christopher Boyer has described a distinctively different scenario in postrevolutionary Mexico, where the state created an entirely new language of interaction for villagers claiming immemorial origins and using colonial heritages. See Boyer, Becoming Campesinos.

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Index

Abad, Manuel, 160 Acción Popular (AP), 106 Achipampa, 173 acta de conciliación, 94–97 AFA. See Archivo del Fuero Agrario AGN. See Archivo General de la Nación agrarian industrialism, 118–119 agrarian reform, 15, 77–79, 155–156, 164, 202, 234n51; of Belaúnde, 107– 108; Bermúdez on, 133; campesinos on, 122, 144–145; capitalism and, 203; Castillo, P., on, 205; in central sierra, 103–114; comunidades and, 145–146, 150; critiques of, 144– 145; entrepreneurial, 238n5; Indigenous populations and, 144–145; legitimacy of, 139–140; Ley 15.037, 110; Llosa, E. T., on, 107–108; morality of, 150; of ONRA , 106–109; SAIS Túpac Amaru affected by, 135; San Juan de Ondores and, 156; studies on, 238n7; success of, 129–130; technocracy in, 110; Vásquez on, 132–133; of Velasco Alvarado, 114, 117–126 agricultural industrialism, 77–78 aguardiente, 12, 207 Agüero, Dario, 101

Agüero, Romualdo, 180–181 Aguilar, Jorge, 135 alcaldes de vara, 63 Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA) Party, 64–65, 104–105, 112, 122, 183, 226n67; ideological turn of, 234n27 Alliance for Progress, 20–21 Alonzo, Alfredo, 44 Alvarado Morales, Victor, 154 Amauta (publication), 153 Amazon basin, 106, 140, 244n34 Ambrosio, 246n75 Andes, the: arrival of capitalism in, 8–9; liberalism affecting, 2–3; means of life and death in, 3–6. See also specific topics animal husbandry, 40 AP. See Acción Popular APRA Party. See Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana Party APRA Rebelde (AR), 144 Aquino, Amancio, 168–169, 176 Aquino, Mario, 168 AR. See APRA Rebelde Archivo del Fuero Agrario (AFA), 14–15 Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), 15–16, 105

262 | Index

Arequipa, 47 arrendatarios, 8, 207, 214n22 asambleas comunales, 147 asentamiento humano, 173, 207 Asociación de Comunidades Indígenas del Perú Central, 87 Asociación de Ganaderos del Perú, 73 Astete, Alejandro, 105 Astuhuamán, Florencio, 101 Asuntos Indígenas, 15–16 Atocsaico, 4–5, 96, 111, 125, 145; claims against holders of, 16; CPCC holding, 99–103; economic production of, 35; expansion of, 199–200; expropriation of, 113; location of, 30–31; pastures of, 100–101; possession of, 17; SAIS Túpac Amaru and, 150; San Juan de Ondores and, 146–147, 151–152, 154–155; seizure of, 151; as symbol of prosperity, 27 autarchy, 32 authoritarianism, 134–135 autonomy, 3 Ayacucho, 122, 163, 216n39 ayllus, 171, 200 Banco Agrario, 111 Bao, Constanza, 94 Bao y Barreda, Luis, 94 baseless triangle model, 233n24 Basualdo, 246n75 Bedoya, Marcelo, 74 Belaúnde, Fernando, 21, 112, 113–114, 117, 135; agrarian reforms of, 107–108 Belaúnde Terry, Fernando, 106 Beltrán, Pedro, 103, 106 Benavides, José, 119–120 Benavides, Oscar R., 64 Bermúdez, Morales, 149, 152, 241n61; on agrarian reform, 133 Bernal Cristóbal, Donato, 178 Bertram, Geoffrey, 7–8

Blanco, Hugo, 234n26 Blanco, Teófilo, 101 Blanco, Víctor, 183 Blanco Montesinos, Alicia, 87 Bombón Plateau, 4, 30, 35, 131, 175 Bonilla, Heraclio, 42, 215n34, 233n5 Borras, Saturnino, 137 Brass, Tom, 103 Bravo, Wyle, 101 Brigadas de Culturización, 80 British imperialism, in Latin America, 33 Bueno, Bruno, 43 Bustamante Cisneros, Ricardo, 47, 50 Caballero, José María, 11 caciquismo, 50 Cadena, Marisol de la, 13 CAEM. See Centro de Altos Estudios Militares Cajachagua, Antonio, 177–178 caja comunal, 91 Cajamarca, 122 Cajas, Cristina, 102 Calle Real, 84 campesinado, 117; mobilization of, 115–116 campesinos, 4, 11, 21, 134, 141; adaptation of, 9; on agrarian reform, 122, 144–145; collectivity of, 164–165; defining, 18; historiography of, 14–18; impoverishment of, 203; in Internal Armed Conflict, 187–188; labor of, 138; land ownership of, 197–198; livestock control of, 197– 198; militias, 179–180; mobilization of, 65, 103; moral economy view of, 9; political polarization of, 182; politics of consensus of, 180–188; property of, 130; property rights of, 149–150; radicalization of, 181–182, 184; repression of, 180–181; of San Juan de Ondores, 189; senderistas

Index | 263

and, 179; sheep farming of, 148, 167–168; violence and, 184–185, 189–190 Campesino y la Escuela, El, 68 Campos, Javier, 185 Canchumanya, Pedro, 176 Cantoral, Saúl, 178, 245n47 Capelo, Joaquín, 41 capitalism, 5; agrarian reform and, 203; arrival of, in Andes, 8–9; central sierra and expansion of, 41, 45–46; corporate, 11–12, 33–34; hybrid forms of, 218n33; Indigenous comunidades challenging, 29–30; in Peruvian sierra, 11–12; rural, 30–32; stratification from protean, 10–11 caporal de campo, 74 Carbajal, Juan Guillermo, 151 Caretas (journal), 4 Carhuacayán, 189 Carhuas, Anacleto, 74 Cari, 87 Carmelo, Nicolás, 166 Carta Magna, 58 Casagrande, Victor, 87 Casaracra, 105 Castillo, Braulio, 169 Castillo, Pedro, 205 Castro Pozo, Hildebrando, 58, 59; on comunidades, 49–50 Catholicism, 38, 54, 121, 193 CCP. See Confederación Campesina del Peru centralization, 161–162 central sierra: agrarian reform in, 103–114; agriculture of, 39–40; capitalist expansion in, 41, 45–46; demographics of, 83; economic development of, 30–31; geography of, 26–27, 27–28; granjas comunales in, 73–76; grazing industry in, 130; Indigenous populations in, 32, 34–35; industrialization in, 31–32; land

invasions of, 120; land ownership in, 35–37, 100; livestock industry of, 38, 39–40; mestizo communities in, 83; mining industry of, 40–41, 43–44; modernization of, 82; natural resources of, 27–29; property in, 35–37; rural capitalism in, 30–32; social class in, 83; surveys of, 81–82; upper plateau of, 124–125, 130, 175–176 Centro de Altos Estudios Militares (CAEM), 235n67 Centro Interamerican de Reforma Agraria (CIRA), 108 CENTROMIN. See Empresa Minera del Centro del Perú Cerro de Pasco, 27, 38, 39, 84; Provincial Council of, 172 Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation (CPCC), 80, 84, 95, 102, 135, 177, 230n69; Atocsaico held by, 99–103; comunero grievance against, 54–55, 111; establishment of, 8–9; expropriation from, 119–120, 130; land purchases of, 118–119; San Juan de Ondores and, 101, 105–106, 112; social history of, 11–12 Chaccha, Segundina, 95 Chavarría, Paulino, 175 Chinchaycocha, 4; tourism of, 195 Choclococha, 82 Chonchol, Jacques, 227n18 Chongos Alto, 171 Chongos Bajo, 171 Chucuito, 81 Chulpán y Cataycancha, 94–95 Chupaca, 82 Chuschi, 14, 172 Cima, La, 4 CIRA . See Centro Interamerican de Reforma Agraria Cisneros, Ernesto, 57–58 Civil Code of 1936, 59

264 | Index

Clairmont, Adolfo de, 37–38 clientelism, 223n15 CNA. See Confederación Nacional Agraria COAP. See Comité de Asesores del Presidente COFOPRI. See Organismo de Formalización de la Propiedad Informal Cold War, 20–21, 122, 164 colectivos, 195 Colley, Bernard T., 96 Collier, John, 228n33 colonialism, 2–3 Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (CVR), 5, 10, 172–173, 215n27; establishment of, 163; Informe final of, 13 Comisión de Reivindicación, 102 Comisión de Reivindicación de las Tierras Comunales de San Juan de Ondores, 101 Comisión Nacional Indígena y Campesina, 65–66 Comisión para la Reforma Agraria y la Vivienda (CRAV), 103 Comisión Pro-Indígena, 77–78 Comité Central Regional, 172 Comité de Asesores del Presidente (COAP), 115, 117, 132 comité de lucha, 181–182, 183–184, 208 Comité de Propiedad de Tierras, 149 Comité para la Defensa de Tierras Comunales, 111 Comités de Defensa de la Revolución, 124 Commercial Traveler in South America, A (Wiborg), 33 commons, enclosure of, 37–42 communal governance, state enforcement of frameworks for, 57–58 communal lands, map-making of, 60–61

communism, 5; outlawing of, 64–65 Communist Party of Peru, 173, 244n33; Central Committee, 65; pamphlets of, 64–67 comuneros, 73; against CPCC, 54–55, 111; defining, 18, 89–90, 126, 208; ecological principles of, 162; land tenure by, 91–92; material enfranchisement of, 170; in mining industry, 171–172; misconduct of, 90–91; rights of, 90; sheep farming and, 92–93. See also campesinos comunidades, 19–20; administrative posts of, 93; agrarian reform and, 145–146, 150; applications, 55–56; autonomy of, 71; blossoming of, 85–88; Castro Pozo on, 49–50; characteristics of, 3; classifications of, 52; conciliation, 94–97; constitutional recognition of, 53–54; cooperativization at, 137–138; defining, 18; economic organization of, 91; immemoriality claimed by, 59–60; in Junín, 86, 107–108; labor and, 78; in La Oroya, 160–161; leftist political trends in, 82–83; legalization of, 56–59; legal recognition of, 55–56; legibility of, 53–56, 88, 223n8; map-making and recognition of, 88; modernization of, 63, 69, 77–78, 85; moral legitimacy of, 184–185; national progress and role of, 49–50; personhood in, 201; police surveillance of, 185; property rights in, 201–202; as public spheres, 67–69; revenue redistribution at, 143–144; SAIS coexistence with, 203; SAIS Túpac Amaru and, 148; in Sicaya, 82; social capital at, 140–141; social unrest at, 63–67, 103–104; space and, 59–64; state relationship with, 69, 161–162, 170;

Index | 265

state surveillance of, 60; technocrats and, 136–137; wool markets and, 141 comunizadas, 122 Concepción, 119 Concha, Pablo Santiago, 89 concientización, 174 Confederación Campesina del Peru (CCP), 99, 149, 153–154, 183, 232n3, 242n80; delegitimization of, 188 Confederación de Artesanos Unión Universal, 69 Confederación Nacional Agraria (CNA), 149, 153 Congreso de la Sierra Central, 63 Congreso Indigenista, 81 Congreso Minero, 64 Congreso Nacional Campesino, 104 Consejo Nacional de Industrias Lanares, 165 Contreras, Simón, 182 Cooperativa de Servicios Junín, 137–139 Cooperativa Ganadera San Juan de Ondores, 144 cooperativization, 147–148, 150; at comunidades, 137–138; as disenfranchisement, 156–157 cordillera, 29 Córdova, Luis D., 94–95 corporate capitalism, 11–12, 33–34 corruption, at SAIS, 143–144 Cotler, Julio, 233n24 CPCC. See Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation CRAV. See Comisión para la Reforma Agraria y la Vivienda Crispín, Alejandro, 147, 182 Cruz, Máximo, 185 Cuban Revolution, 71 Cuéllar, Victor, 167 Cusco, 80

CVR. See Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación Damián, Gabino, 168 Declerck, Arturo, 30 decree 24.406, 183 degrees of development, 14 Delegación General de Comunidades Indígenas del Perú, 69 De León, Edmundo, 30 Departamento de Mapas y Demarcaciones, 96 desbordes populares, 2, 47 deslinde process, 41, 208, 221n75 Deustua, José, 11 development, degrees of, 14 DeWind, Josh, 12 Día de la Dignidad Nacional, 114 Día del Campesino, 115, 133; neglect of, 193–194 Día del Ejército, 114 Día del Indio, 115, 247n1; depoliticization of, 193–194; as national holiday, 193–194 Diamante mine, 43 Diario de Marka, El (publication), 153 Díaz, Juvenal, 168 Diez Canseco, Francisco, 42–43 disenfranchisement: cooperativization as, 156–157; migration and, 196–197; of rural villagers, 204–205 División Ganadera, 130, 135–136 Dorais, Genevieve, 245n53 Duncan, Fox & Co., 31 Echevarría, Juan, 184 Eco de los Andes, El (newspaper), 67 economic development: of central sierra, 30–31; travel writing linked to, 32–33 economic liberalism, 47 education: of Indigenous populations, 68; at SAIS, 139–140

266 | Index

Ejército Guerrillero Popular, 173 Empresa de Transportes San Juan de Ondores, 186 Empresa Minera del Centro del Perú (CENTROMIN), 177–178 empresas comunales, 138 En el Centenario (pamphlet), 65 enganchados, 64, 220n68 enganche system, 40, 220n68, 224n33 Enock, Charles Reginald, 36–37, 219n50 entrepreneurship, 130 environmentalism, 205 Escuela Nacional de Agricultura, 75 Espinoza, Elías, 102 Espinoza, Hipólito, 100 Facultad de Medicina Veterinaria, 75 Falconí, Victor, 55, 224n35 famine, 2–3 FAO. See Food and Agriculture Organization Faura, Manuel D., 87 Federación Nacional de Campesinos Peruanos (FENCAP), 102–104, 122 ferias regionales, 142, 209 Fernandini, Elías, 73 Ferrocarril Central, 34 fiestas patronales, 174; mayordomo of, 194, 210; in Ondores, 193 Figallo, Guillermo, 121 five-year plan, of Velasco Alvarado, 123–124 Flores Galindo, Alberto, 10, 11–12, 25 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 124 Fourth Russell Tribunal for Indigenous Peoples, 6 Franco, Rodrigo, 178 Fundación de Fomento de la Ganadería de Carne, 141

Gallagher, Manuel, 77 Galván, Luis E., 78 Gamio, Enrique, 79–80, 96 Gamio, Luis M., 89, 95–96 gamonalillos, 91, 197 gamonalismo, 66–67, 119 Garay, Juan, 102 García-Sayán, Diego, 233n24 Garland, Alexander, 38–39 Gildemeister, Enrique, 73 global south, 2 Gobierno Revolucionario de la Fuerza Armada, 4, 113–114, 235n64 Gómez, Nicolás, 101 Gómez, Wilfredo, 159 gossip, 147, 182 governmental reforms, 116 Goyllarisquizga mine, 43–44 Graham, José, 124, 129 Granados, Carla, 10 Granja Carhuas, sheep farming in, 74 Granjas, 72–73 granjas comunales, 166–167, 184–185; in central sierra, 73–76 grazing industry, 52, 243n13; in central sierra, 130 Great Depression, 8; Patria Nueva in, 58 Guadalupe, Pablo, 181, 182 guano exports, 10 Guerra, Jubina, 176 Guía del Perú para capitalistas y emigrantes, 28 Guide to Modern Peru (Clairmont), 37 Guillén, Víctor, 51–52 Guzmán, Abimael, 162–163, 172 hacienda, 1 Harvey, David, 26, 217n6 Heilman, Jaymie Patricia, 13 Hickenlooper Amendment, 120 Hijos Legítimos de Ondores, 179, 196

Index | 267

Hoz y Martillo (pamphlet), 66 Huaccha, 82 huaccha (sheep), 141, 167, 209 Huamantuma, Alfredo, 178 Huancané, 76, 225n50 Huancayo, 16, 25, 29, 34, 44, 124 Huanta, 117, 154 Huánuco, 197–198, 225n50 Huasicancha, 7 Huaychao, 14, 85 Huayllay, 85 Huaynacanchinos, 87 Huayre, 72 Hurtado, Ernesto, 66 Hurtado, Isaías, 180–181 Hurtado, Uldarico, 180 IADB. See Inter-American Development Bank ICSCC. See Interdepartmental Committee on Scientific and Cultural Cooperation illegal industrialism, 41 imagined communities, 69, 86 immemoriality, 125, 200–201, 223n22; comunidades claiming, 59–60; land ownership and, 51–52; proof of, 60 indentured labor, 43; of Indigenous populations, 54 indigenismo, 40, 81; rejection of, 59 Indigenous populations: agrarian reform and, 144–145; capitalism challenged by, 29–30; in central sierra, 32, 34–35; domestic infrastructure of, 79; education of, 68; incorporation of, 76; indentured labor of, 54; labor of, 54; land ownership of, 36–37, 51–52; legal recognition of, 14, 53–54, 200–201; Ministerio de Fomento displacing, 29–30; mistreatment of, 54; protection of, 47; reindigenization,

205; representation of, 68; rights of, 56–57; socioeconomic position of, 193–194; state rationality and, 199. See also comunidades “Indigenous question,” 32, 51, 58, 68–69, 98 Indio, El, 68 indios, 36–37 individualism, 199 individualización de la propiedad comunal indígena, La (Pérez Armendáriz), 51 industrialization, in central sierra, 31–32 inheritance, land ownership and, 92 institutional transformations, 79–81 Instituto de Estudios Etnológicos, 81 Instituto de Reforma y Promoción Agraria (IRPA), 110–112 Instituto Indigenista Peruano, 80 Instituto Nacional de Biología Andina, 75 Instituto Rural Tecnológico Indígena, 76 integral reform, 103 Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), 124, 131, 141 Inter-American Indigenista Congress of Pátzcuaro, 77, 80 Interdepartmental Committee on Scientific and Cultural Cooperation (ICSCC), 81 Internal Armed Conflict, 2, 5, 6, 10, 17, 216n39; agrarian elements in, 162–164, 189; campesino dynamics in, 187–188; violence in, 13, 22, 170, 204 internal statues, 88–94 International Petroleum Company (IPC), 113–115, 238n9 IRPA. See Instituto de Reforma y Promoción Agraria Isaac, Claude, 105

268 | Index

juez de tierras, 188; in La Oroya, 111–112 juicios de reivindicación, 108 Junín, 72, 75–76, 87, 102–103, 131, 152; agricultural production in, 30–31, 35, 75–76; comunidades in, 86, 107–108; economic productivity of, 83–84; geography of, 26, 28; government of, 43; migration to, 196; social unrest in, 64 Junta de Industria Lanar, 9, 73–75, 76, 231n77 junta directiva, 17 Juventud del Centro, 67 Kent, Robert, 172 labor: of campesinos, 138; in central sierra, 42–45; comunidades and, 78; indentured, 43, 54; of Indigenous populations, 54; at SAIS, 138; as social capital, 140 La Brea, 114 Laguna Cormacocha, 95 land ownership, 118; of campesinos, 197–198; in central sierra, 35–37, 100; of comuneros, 91–92; immemoriality and, 51–52; of Indigenous populations, 36–37, 51–52; inheritance, 92; liberalization of, 199; reforms and, 116; regulation of, 38; in San Juan de Ondores, 100; wool markets and, 72–79 land valorization, 117–118 La Oroya, 4, 41, 55, 102–103, 184, 189; comunidades in, 160–161; juez de tierra in, 111–112; migration to, 196 La Serna, Miguel, 13–14 Latin America: British imperialism in, 33; US corporations in, 33–34 Laureano, Jorge, 182 Laureano, Obed, 16 Laureano, Pompeyo Valerio, 145

Laureano, Primitivo, 166 Law 15.035, 117 Law 16.674, 120 Law 17.716, 21, 119 Lázaro, Alberto, 101 Lázaro, Albino, 181, 184, 186 leftist political trends, 82–83. See also specific topics Leguía, Augusto B., 49, 53–54, 56, 85, 193–194, 200 Leguía y Martínez, Germán, 47 Ley 15.037, 110 Ley 17.716, 114, 117 Ley de Conscripción Vial, 56 Leyes básicas de reforma agraria, 106–107 liberalism, 199; Andes affected by, 2–3. See also neoliberalism liberalization, land, 199 liberated zones, 172 Liga Agraria José Carlos Mariátegui, 149 Liga Indígena Fraterna del Perú, 69 Ligas Agraria de Junín, 149, 151 ligas agrarias, 149 Lima, 16, 34, 56, 78, 172; migration to, 196 livestock industry: campesino control of, 197–198; of central sierra, 38, 39–40; communal ownership of, 52 Llauripoma, Genaro, 69 Llocllapampa, 143 Llosa, Enrique Torres, on agrarian reforms, 107–108 Llosa, Manuel B., 87 Loayza, Florencio, 47–48, 50 Lomada de Huaral, 56 Lowenthal, Abraham, 7 Macha, Domingo, 168 Macha, Leonardo, 168 Maguiña, Alejandrino, 57 Maguiña, Alejandro, 47

Index | 269

mal gobierno, 170, 210 Mallon, Florencia, 9, 12, 215n34, 218n33 Manrique, Nelson, 9, 10, 12, 172–173, 215n27, 215n34, 242n7 Mantaro River, 4 Mantaro Valley, 75, 84, 131 Manzano Ganoza, Alfonzo de, 93 Maoism, 180–181, 216n39, 245, 246n53 map-making: of communal lands, 60–61; comunidad recognition and, 88; Office of Indigenous Affairs in, 61–63 Mar, José Matos, 2 Marcavalle, 119 Mariátegui, José Carlos, 59, 64, 65 marriage, 89–90 Martin, Percy Falcke, on natural resource development, 34 Marx, Karl, on primitive accumulation, 1 Marxism, 64, 215n34, 226n59 masacre de la Oroya, La, 44 Mayer, Enrique, 3, 12–13, 234n51, 237n1 Mayer de Zulen, Dora, 40–41, 220n73 mayordomo, 194, 210 McClintock, Cynthia, 7, 115, 237n3, 237n7 memoria descriptiva, 60–61 Méndez, Cecilia, 10 Meneses, Carlos, 95 Mercado, Juan Luis, 62, 68–69 Merea, Agustín, 121 mestizo communities, 52, 79–80; in central sierra, 83 Mexico, 247n7 militias, 179–180 mining code of 1900, 28 mining industry, 11–12, 84; of central sierra, 40–41, 43–44; comuneros in, 171–172; strikes in, 44

Ministerio de Fomento, 53, 57, 72, 79; establishment of, 28–29; Indigenous comunidades displaced by, 29–30 Ministry of Food Administration, 133 Ministry of Transportation and Communication, 195 mita system, 199 modernization: of central sierra, 82; of comunidades, 63, 69, 77–78, 85; of San Juan de Ondores, 98 mojones, 61 Monge, Carlos, 80–81, 232n3 moral economy view struggles, 214n12, 215n24; of campesino, 9 Morales Guadalupe, Adrián, 176 Morán, Ricardo, 167 More, Ernesto, 76–77, 103 Morococha, 4, 177–178, 189; migration to, 196 Movimiento de Campesinos Pobres (MPC), 167 Mujica, Ricardo Bentín, 73 Muquiyauyo, 82 nationalism, 145 national reconstruction, 25–26 national sovereignty, 116 natural resources, 45; of central sierra, 27–29; Martin on development of, 34 Nazism, 87–88 neoliberalism, 204–205 Netz, Reviel, 233n6 Ninacaca, 73 Nuestra comunidad indígena (Castro Pozo), 49–50 Office of Indigenous Affairs, 53–54, 72, 79, 88, 91; in map-making, 61–63 Oficina Nacional de Desarrollo Comunal (ONDC), 141

270 | Index

Oficina Nacional de Evaluación de Recursos Naturales (ONERN), 140 Oficina Nacional de Reforma Agraria (ONRA): agrarian reform of, 106–109; internships at, 109–110 Olivera Vila, Alejandro, 173 ONDC. See Oficina Nacional de Desarrollo Comunal ONERN. See Oficina Nacional de Evaluación de Recursos Naturales ONRA . See Oficina Nacional de Reforma Agraria Orcotuna, 68 Organismo de Formalización de la Propiedad Informal (COFOPRI), 15, 230n67 Oroya Antigua, 87 Osores, Evaristo, 168 Osorio, Francisco, 94 Pachacayo, 176 Pachachaca, 54–55 Paisajes Peruanos (de la Riva-Agüero), 25 Palomino, Segundino, 185 pamphlets, political, 144, 182; of Communist Party of Peru, 64–67 Panama, 49 Panduro, Mateo, 74 Panti, 66 Pariñas, 114 Partido Aprista Peruano, 144 Partido Civil, 226n68 pascana sites, 60 pasquín, 44. See also pamphlets, political pastoralism, 84 Patarcocha Lagoon, 44 Patria Nueva, 53, 200, 224n25; in Great Depression, 58 Patria y Bandera, 86–87

patrimonial rights, 103–104 Patronato de la Raza Indígena, 54, 224n29 Peasant and Nation (Mallon), 12 Peña Blanca mine, 43 Pérez Armendáriz, Víctor, 51 personeros, 62–63, 211 Peruvian experiment, 7, 238n7 Peruvian sierra: agrarian historiography of, 9–14; capitalism in, 11–12; importance of, in national context, 12; market of, 12 Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 5 police surveillance, of comunidades, 185 political literacy, 18 Pomachagua, Aquiles, 102, 104–105, 110 Pomachagua, Federico, 183 Pomachagua, Honorio, 173, 183, 186; assassination of, 159–162, 168, 184, 189 pongaje, 43, 211, 222n85 Potosí-Huancavelica complex, 2 Prado, Manuel, 72, 80, 92–93, 103 pre-Columbian social organization, 36, 50, 89, 171, 199–200 primitive accumulation, Marx on, 1 property, in central sierra, 35–37 property rights, 51; of campesinos, 149–150; in comunidades, 201–202; rural, 100; at SAIS, 139–140 property titles, 88 Protectoría de Indios, 47 Provincial Council of Cerro de Pasco, 172 Pucallpa, 140 Puka Llacta, 174–175 Puno, 75 Punta del Este agreement, 20

Index | 271

Quechua language, 69, 83, 163; as official language, 132–133 Queta, 87 Quijada, Rufino, 159 Quintanilla, Juan, 167 Quispe, Honorato, 166 Quispe, Luisa, 154 Ramírez Durand, Óscar, 172 Rancas, 99 Ranés, Diego, 184 rationality, of state, 199 raza indígena, La (Yarlequé), 50 Recalde, Saturnino, 102 Redoble por Rancas (Scorza), 99 Registro Oficial de Comunidades de la República, 55 reindigenization, 205 Rénique, José Luis, 10 Reseña económica del Perú, 29 Riva-Agüero, José de la, 25 rondas campesinas, 179–180, 211 rural areas, 2; long-term history of rural states, 198–205 rural capitalism, in central sierra, 30–32 rural urbanism, 84 rural villagers, 3–4, 19; disenfranchisement of, 204–205; state power and, 195–196. See also campesinos; comuneros SAIS. See Sociedad Agrícola de Interés Social Salas, Efracio, 56–57 Salomon, Frank, 213n6 Samanéz, Benjamín, 121 Samaniego, Aquilino, 168 Samaniego, Ciles, 169 Samaniego, Marino, 169 San Blas, 175 Sánchez Cerro, Luis, 58; assassination of, 63–64

San José de Quero, 168 San Juan Bautista, 193 San Juan de Jarpa, 173 San Juan de Ondores, 1, 16, 18, 20, 21, 73–74, 88–89, 141–142, 145; agrarian reform and, 156; Atocsaico and, 146–147, 151–152, 154–155; boundaries of, 230n70; campesinos of, 189; communal conciliation, 94–97; CPCC and, 101, 105–106, 112–113; establishment of, 71; fiestas patronales in, 193; geography of, 4, 71; land ownership in, 100; massacre of, 152–155, 157, 185–186; media notoriety of, 4–5; modernization of, 98; modular history of, 6–9; origin of name of, 230n66; repression in, 180–181; SAIS Túpac Amaru and, 145–146; Sendero Luminoso in, 181; social capital of, 141; in wool trade, 75–76 San Pedro de Cajas, 72, 73–74 San Pedro de Huancayre, 56 San Pedro de Pari, 195 Sapallanga, 44 Sayán, 78 Schwartz, Stuart, 213n6 Scorza, Manuel, 99 Scott, James, 27, 213n6, 214n12, 215n24, 223n8 senderismo, 177–178 senderistas, 159–160, 172, 181; campesinos and, 179; violence of, 161–162 Sendero Luminoso, 6, 22, 159, 161, 164, 169, 179–180, 189; in Ondores, 181; state conflict with, 204; studies on, 242n4; territorial rule, 172; in Ulcumayo, 174 Seoane, Edgardo, 109 Servicio de Caminos, 224n37

272 | Index

sheep farming, 3, 164; of campesinos, 148, 167–168; in central sierra, 31–32; comuneros and, 92–93; in Granja Carhuas, 74; grazing time of, 171–172; half-blood, 92–93; huaccha, 82, 141, 167, 209; purebred, 92–93, 141; quality of, 167–168; of SAIS, 141–142 Shining Path, 216n39 Sicaya, 75; comunidades in, 82 SINAMOS. See Sistema Nacional de Movilización Social sinchis, 152 Sistema Nacional de Movilización Social (SINAMOS), 15, 116, 124 Smith, Gavin, 7, 161 SNA. See Sociedad Nacional Agraria snitches, 182 Soberana, La, 137 social capital, 138; at comunidades, 140–141; labor as, 140; of San Juan de Ondores, 141 social class, in central sierra, 83 socialism, 50, 203; state, 126–127 Social Party, 64 Sociedad Agrícola de Interés Social (SAIS), 127; comunidades coexisting with, 203; corruption at, 143–144; education at, 139–140; financial misconduct at, 147–148; labor at, 138; life and production in, 133–144; population management at, 138; property rights at, 139–140; sheep farming of, 141–142; social engineering by, 134–135; wool markets and, 141–142; worker divisionism at, 153 Sociedad Agrícola de Interés Social (SAIS) Pampa, 137 Sociedad Agrícola de Interés Social (SAIS) Túpac Amaru, 4, 21, 121, 124–125, 141–142; agrarian reforms affecting, 135; Atocsaico and, 150;

comunidades and, 148; dissent in, 150; establishment of, 137; population of, 137–138; San Juan de Ondores and, 145–146; successes of, 129 Sociedad Civilizadora Chongos Alto, 86 Sociedad de Productores de Lana, 111 Sociedad de Trabajadores Billinghurst, 44 Sociedades Ganaderas, 119, 142, 202 Sociedad Ganadera del Centro, 123 Sociedad Ganadera Junín, 9, 15, 31, 95, 100–101, 194–195 Sociedad Nacional Agraria (SNA), 108 soil exploitation, 39–40 Solís, Abelardo, 58 soroche, 3 Soto, Tomás, 185 Soviet Union, 122 Spanish language, 2, 18–19, 83 state socialism, 126–127 strikes, 154–155 Tarma, 64–65 taxation, 221n83 technocrats, 121, 123–124, 130; in agrarian reform, 110; comunidades and, 136–137; revolutionary, 136 Terrel, Rodolfo, 101–102, 104, 145, 181 territoriality, 170–180 terrorism, 166 Third International, 64 Thompson, E. P., 215n24 Thorp, Rosemary, 7–8 Tierra para los campesinos (pamphlet), 144 Tinoco, Francisco, 149 Title XI, 59 tourism, 195 transportation services, 186, 195 travel writing, 25–26; economic development linked to, 32–33

Index | 273

Tribunal Agrario, 14–15, 131, 145, 239n12, 240n50 Tschopik, Harry, 81–85, 229n40, 229n47 Tueros, Ademir, 181 Tueros, Francisco, 183, 184 Tueros, Máximo, 187 Tueros Palomino, Willy, 182 Tunán, 124 Túpac Amaru, 114, 124–125, 127, 194 Tutino, John, 241n65 Uceda, Luis de la Puente, 144 Ulcumayo, 173; Sendero Luminoso in, 174 Unidad de Acción (pamphlet), 65 unionization, 83 Union Nacional Odriísta (UNO), 112 United Left, 173 United Nations, 228n27 United States, corporations in Latin America, 33–34 UNO. See Union Nacional Odriísta urbanization, 57; in 20th century, 2 Usibamba, 143, 168–169, 176, 243n22 Valcárcel, Luis E., 80–81 Valdez de la Torre, Carlos, 52 Valerio, Abdías, 159 Valerio, Miguel, 148, 184 Vargas, Andrés Luna, 151 Vargas, Máximo, 236n84 Vásquez, Mario, on agrarian reform, 132–133 Velasco Alvarado, Juan, 4, 112, 149, 156, 238n9; agrarian reform of, 114, 117–126; death of, 238n23; on expropriations, 120–121; five-year plan of, 123–124; revolutionary discourse of, 113–115

Velasco Núñez, Manuel, 94 Véliz, Milan, 105 Ventocilla, Dionisio, 183, 188, 246n62 vertical archipelago, 62 Vicco, 176 Villarán, Manuel Vicente, 47 Vinchos, 44 violence, political, 157, 165–166, 177–178; campesinos and, 184–185, 189–190; in Internal Armed Conflict, 13, 22, 170, 204; of senderistas, 161–162 war capitalism, 2 War of the Pacific, 8, 10, 45, 204, 242n7 Wars of Independence, 27, 199, 204, 242n7 WB. See World Bank Wiborg, Frank, 218n36; on US corporate capitalism, 33–34 Wolf, Eric, 5 Womack, John, Jr., 245n51 wool markets: comunidades and, 141; land ownership and, 72–79; SAIS and, 141–142; San Juan de Ondores in, 75–76 World Bank (WB), 124, 130–131 World War II, 71, 81, 97 Yanacancha, 173 Yanacocha, 57–58, 64 Yanamarca Valley, 10 Yarlequé, Manuel, 50–51 Yauri, Catalina, 187 Yucra, Ignacio, 56–57 Zevallos, Augusto Ruiz, 224n25 Zevallos, Hipólito, 147