Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes 9781626371576

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STRUGGLES FOR LOCAL DEMOCRACY IN THE ANDES

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STRUGGLES FOR LOCAL DEMOCRACY IN THE ANDES

John Cameron

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Published in the United States of America in 2010 by FirstForumPress A division of Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.firstforumpress.com and in the United Kingdom by FirstForumPress A division of Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2010 by FirstForumPress. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cameron, John, 1969– Struggles for local democracy in the Andes / by John Cameron. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-935049-16-6 (hc : alk. paper) 1. Local government—Andes Region. 2. Municipal government— Andes Region. 3. Democratization—Andes Region. 4. Indians of South America—Andes Region—Politics and government. 5. Indigenous peoples— Andes Region—Politics and government. I. Title. JS2300.C36 2010 320.8098—dc22 2009034308 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. This book was produced from digital files prepared by the author using the FirstForumComposer. Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5 4 3 2 1

To Susan, Maggie and Fiona

Contents

List of Tables Acronyms Map of Research Area Acknowledgments

ix xi xv xvii

1

Introduction

2

Municipal Democratization After Agrarian Reform in Guamote, Ecuador

31

Municipal Democratization in a Context of Structural Inequality in Cotacachi, Ecuador

79

3 4

5 6 7 8

1

The Difficult Marriage of Liberal and Indigenous Democracy in Jesús de Machaca, Bolivia with Gonzalo Colque

139

Struggles for Municipal Power Among NGOs, Peasant Organizations and Local Elites in Mizque, Bolivia

187

From Clientelism to Democracy and Back in Limatambo, Peru

227

Municipal Democratization After Political Violence in Haquira, Peru

271

Conclusion

307

Bibliography Index

341 365

vii

Tables

2.1 Selected Social Data, Guamote, Ecuador

32

2.2 Land Ownership in Guamote, 1974

34

2.3 Percentages of Land Area and Percentages of Haciendas Over 100 Hectares Affected by Agrarian Reform Laws in Chimborazo Province, 1964–1988

40

2.4 Demographic Change in Guamote, 1974–1990

42

2.5 Development Projects Administered by the Local Development Committee, Guamote

64

2.6 Poverty and Extreme Poverty in Guamote, 1990–2001

67

3.1 Selected Social Data, Cotacachi, Ecuador

80

3.2 Land Ownership in Cotacachi, 1974

83

3.3 Average Regional Distribution of Public Works Investments in Cotacachi, 2001–2006

109

4.1 Selected Social Data, Jesús de Machaca, Bolivia

144

5.1 Selected Social Data, Mizque, Bolivia

189

5.2 Indicators of Well-Being in Rural Communities in Mizque, 1992, 2001

222

6.1 Selected Social Data, Limatambo, Peru

230

6.2 Pre-Agrarian Reform Land Tenure in the Province of Anta, Peru, 1972

232

6.3 Land Tenure in Limatambo, 1994

234

ix

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7.1 Selected Social Data, Haquira, Peru

274

7.2 Land Distribution in the Province of Cotabambas and District of Haquira, 1972, 1994

280

7.3 Formal Education by Year of Birth in Haquira, 1993

282

Acronyms

ASP CAAP CACJMA CAPA CCP CDL CEDEAGRO CEDER

CEDHU CEFOA CENDA

Asemblea para la Soberanía de los Pueblos (Assembly for the Sovereignty of the Peoples) Centro Andino de Acción Popular (Andean Center for Popular Action) Central Agraria Campesina de Jesús de Machaca (Peasant Agrarian Central of Jesús de Machaca) Central Agraria de la Parcial Arriba (Agrarian Central of the Upper Part), Jesús de Machaca, Bolivia Confederación Campesina del Perú (Peasant Confederation of Peru) Comité de Desarrollo Local (Local Development Committee), Guamote, Ecuador Centro de Desarrollo Agropecuario (Center for Agricultural Development) The fictionalized name of a real NGO that worked in Limatambo, Peru. (Name changed to protect the identities of interviewees.) Comisión Ecumenica de Derechos Humanos (Ecumenical Commission on Human Rights), Ecuador Centro de Formación de Alturas de Raqaypampa (Highlands Training Center), Raqaypampa, Bolivia Centro de Comunicación y Desarrollo Andino (Andean Center for Communication and Development)

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CETHA CIDA CIPCA COB CODECAL

CONAIE CRSUCIR

CSTCB

CSUTCB

CTE DECOIN FADI FEDICAL FEI

Centro de Eduación Técnica Humanistica Agropecuaria (Center for Humanistic Agrarian Technical Education) Comité Interamericano de Desarrollo Agrícola (Interamerican Committee on Agricultural Development) Centro de Investigación y Promoción del Campesinado (Center for Peasant Research and Promotion) Central Obrera Boliviana (Bolivian Workers’ Central) Comité de Desarrollo de las Comunidades Altas de Limatambo (Committee for the Development of Highland Communities of Limatambo) Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador) Central Regional Sindical Única de Campesinos Indígenas de Raqaypampa (Regional Autonomous Syndicate Central of Indigenous Peasants of Raqaypampa) Confederación Sindical de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (Syndicate Confederation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia) Confederación Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (Unitary Syndicate Confederation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia) Confederación de Trabajadores Ecuatorianos (Ecuadorian Confederation of Labour) Defensa y Conservación del Intag (Defence and Conservation of Intag) Frente Amplio Democratico de la Izquierda (Broad Front of the Democratic Left) Federación Distrital de Campesinos de Limatambo (District Federation of Peasants of Limatambo) Federación Ecuatoriana de Indios (Ecuadorian Federation of Indians)

Acronyms

FENOC FENOCIN

FIS FODERUMA HIPC ID IEE IERAC INEC INEI INRA ISI LPP MACOAS MACOJMA

MAS MBL MICH

xiii

Federación Nacional de Organizaciones Campesinas (National Federation of Peasant Organizations) Federación Nacional de Organizaciones Campesinas, Indígenas y Negras (National Federation of Peasant, Indigenous and Black Organizations) Fondo de Inversión Social (Social Investment Fund) Fondo de Desarrollo Rural Marginal (Fund for Marginal Rural Development) Highly Indebted Poor Countries Izquierda Democrática (Democratic Left) Instituto de Estudios Ecuatorianos (Institute of Ecuadorian Studies) Instituto Ecuatoriano de Reforma Agraria y Colonización (Ecuadorian Institute of Agrarian Reform and Colonization) Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Censo (National Census and Statistics Institute) Instituto Nacional de Estadistica e Información (National Institute of Statistics and Information) Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria (National Institute of Agrarian Reform) Import Substitution Industrialization Ley de Participación Popular (Law of Popular Participation) Marka de Ayllus y Comunidades Originarias de Arax Suxta (Marka of Ayllus and Ancestral Communities of Arax Zuxta) Marka de Ayllus y Comunidades Originarias de Jesús de Machaca (Marka of Ayllus and Ancestral Communities of Jesús de Machaca) Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Towards Socialism) Movimiento Bolivia Libre (Free Bolivia Movement) Movimiento Indígena de Chimborazo (Indigenous Movement of Chimborazo)

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MNR NGO OSG OTB PDM POA PRODER

PSC SAP SEDRI TCO UCIG UCS UNORCAC USAID

Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario (National Revolutionary Movement) Non-Governmental Organization Organización de Segundo Grado (Second Level Organization) Organizacion Territorial de Base (Territorial Base Organizations) Plan de Desarrollo Municipal (Municipal Development Plan) Plan Operativo Annual (Annual Operating Plan) The fictionalized name of a real NGO that worked in Limatambo, Peru. (Name changed to protect the identities of interviewees.) Partido Social Cristiano (Social Christian Party) Structural Adjustment Program Secretaría de Desarrollo Rural Integrado (Secretariat of Integrated Rural Development) Tierras Comunitarias de Origen (Ancestral Community Lands) Unión de Campesinos Indígenas de Guamote (Union of Indigenous Peasants of Guamote) Unidad Civica Solidaridad (Civic Solidarity Union) Unión de Organizaciones Campesinas de Cotacachi (Union of Peasant Organizations of Cotacachi) United States Agency for International Development

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Map of Research Area

Cotacachi •

* Quito ECUADOR • Guamote

PERU

* Lima Limatambo •

* Cusco

BOLIVIA

• Haquira

* La Paz * Cochabamba • Jesús de Machaca * Country capital * Regional city

• Case study site

• Mizque

Acknowledgments

This book is the product of support from many people who generously contributed their time, energy, ideas, contacts and moral support. I am particularly grateful to Liisa North, who pointed me towards this research project in the first place and then provided challenging feedback on research in progress, contacts in Ecuador, and most importantly friendship. Both Liisa North and Kent Eaton read the entire manuscript and provided very helpful feedback. Jessica Gribble at FirstForumPress was also enthusiastic about the project and offered everything an author could hope for from an editor. Much of the research on which this book is based was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Research in Peru was also made possible by a grant from the Consorcio de Investigación Económica y Social (CIES), funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). I also owe special thanks to the three universities with which I have been affiliated during the course of this project: York University, the University of Toronto and Dalhousie University. At Dalhousie, I am especially thankful to Marian Mackinnon in the Department of International Development Studies and to Shashi Sharma in the Lester Pearson International Office, who provided essential logistical support and helped me to manage various research grants. Jocelyn Burr, Anna Haanstra, Nicholas Kaufman and Cristian Rangel also provided very helpful assistance at various stages of research. Jennifer Harris provided outstanding editorial assistance. I am of course particularly indebted to the mayors and leaders of the peasant and Indigenous federations in the six municipalities analysed in the book. None of this research would have been possible without their support and the contacts and information which they provided. Research in Bolivia was facilitated by several colleagues. Most importantly, Gonzalo Colque, the co-author of Chapter Four, offered friendship, knowledge and contacts, without which it would have been impossible to conduct research in Jesús de Machaca. The many hours of conversation and the process of writing Chapter Four collaboratively also introduced new ideas for the rest of the research project. Juan Tellez

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helped to arrange initial contacts and provided challenging feedback during many discussions of research in progress. Rafael Arramayo and Luis Paz graciously provided crucial logistical support and many hours of stimulating discussion. In Jesús de Machaca, staff with the nongovernmental organization CETHA provided helpful contacts, stimulating conversation and a bed with warm blankets on several occasions. In Cochabamba and Mizque, the staffs of CEDEAGRO and CENDA were very helpful in providing contacts, introductions and unpublished documents. Although research from the municipality of Potosí does not appear in the book, two people there—Ernesto Loza and Juan Rollano— generously contributed ideas that had an important influence on my thinking and the broader research process. Finally, throughout the research process in Bolivia, the Centro Boliviano de Estudios Multidiciplinarios (CEBEM) and José Blanes in particular provided a friendly and stimulating environment for conducting research. In Ecuador, I owe very special thank-yous to the faculty and staff of the Facultad Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) in Quito, especially Fernando Carrión, Adrian Bonilla, Fernando García Gioconda Herrera, Luciano Martínez and Simón Pachano, who provided valuable contacts and feedback and an extremely stimulating environment for conducting field research. I am also grateful to Sara Baez, the director of Terranueva; Victor Hugo Torres at COMUNIDEC; and Anna María Larrea, Fernando Larrea, Fernando Guerrero, Angel Bonilla and Pablo Ospina at the Instituto de Estudios Ecuatorianos, who generously shared their time and ideas on multiple occasions. Despite a very busy workload, Jomar Cevallos also made time to provide documents and share ideas in both Cotacachi and Guamote. Pablo Andrade and Glenda Villamarin graciously provided a home away from home on various visits to Quito and helped to make field research both fun and stimulating. Manuela Picq also offered good company and a welcome home in Riobamba. In Peru, the Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos Bartolomé de las Casas (CBC) in Cusco provided an extremely supportive and challenging intellectual climate as well as essential logistical support for field research. I am particularly grateful to Marco Zeiser, Gustavo Hernandez and Xavier Ricard for their enthusiastic support of this research project and for many stimulating and challenging conversations. I am also especially grateful to Paty Paredes, who facilitated research contacts and provided important opportunities for exchanging ideas with the staff of the Casa Campesina at the CBC. In Haquira, Ricardo Vega Villafuerte and the staff of the regional office of CADEP contributed not

Acknowledgments

xix

just a place to stay but also contacts, ideas, good company and shared meals on cold Andean nights. My deepest gratitude and greatest debt is to my wife, Susan McClure, and to my daughters, Maggie and Fiona. In 1999 Susan and Maggie (then just three months old) accompanied me on my first extended research trip to Ecuador. In 2003–2004 Susan, Maggie (then four years old) and Fiona (six months old) traveled with me for another extended research trip to Bolivia. Traveling with my daughters to research sites opened many doors that would likely have remained otherwise closed, as many people in rural Ecuador and Bolivia were fascinated with these two little gringas. On many other shorter research trips, Susan, Maggie and Fiona had to put up with my absence, which was never easy for any of us. Despite the exhilaration of field research, it is always a bittersweet experience when it means being away from the people you love the most. Although the demands of family perhaps slowed down the completion of this book, they also provided many healthy distractions.

1 Introduction

This book is about political struggles by peasant and Indigenous groups and their supporters to control and to democratize rural municipal governments in the highland regions of Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. Municipal governments in Latin America now play a much greater role in the politics and social and economic development of the region than they did in the past. Two key trends lie behind this change; one has come from above and the other from below. First, since the 1980s and 1990s, decentralization reforms have significantly increased the administrative responsibilities of municipal governments and the financial resources available to them. In many countries, decentralization has also involved new legal regulations that ostensibly aim to make municipal decision making more participatory and more accountable to local populations. Second, well before decentralization reforms were implemented, popular movements in many locales initiated struggles to wrest municipal power from the control of local elites. In the Andean region, locally based Indigenous and peasant organizations initiated political projects to control municipal governments as central elements of their strategies for territorial autonomy and resource control; those specific struggles for municipal power followed decades and in some cases centuries of struggles for local political power and autonomy. Popular struggles for municipal power intensified in the wake of decentralization and in some countries, such as Bolivia and Ecuador, national Indigenous and peasant organizations explicitly prioritized efforts to win control of municipal governments as a central element of their broader political strategies. As municipal governments have acquired more financial resources and more administrative authority, and as struggles to control municipal power have intensified, questions about the depth of municipal democracy need to be taken more seriously than they have been in the past. The widespread assumption that decentralization would automatically promote democratization by moving government ‘closer

1

2

Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

to the people,’ which accompanied the initial implementation of decentralization policies, has given way to a more nuanced recognition among academics and policymakers that decentralization can foster democratic deepening but it can also reinforce the power of undemocratic elites. However, understanding of the factors that actually promote municipal democratization and of the wide variations in the depth of municipal democracy in Latin America are both still weak. Indeed, as the authors of a comparative analysis of decentralization and democratization in Africa, Asia and Latin America concluded, “we know very little about the reasons why some sub-national governments become successful innovators in democratic governance while others reinforce authoritarian patterns” (Selee and Tulchin 2004: 314). The goal of this book is to better understand the forces that shape the possibilities for municipal democratization in rural Latin America. The central argument of the book is that municipal democracy is shaped in important ways by the historical evolution of economic, social and political power relations among local political actors. The analysis of struggles for municipal democracy in this book draws from approaches to national democratic transitions that explicitly emphasize economic, social and political power relations in order to better understand local democratic transitions. The relative depth of democracy in rural municipalities requires an analysis of the historically structured relations of power within civil society that form the contexts within which municipal institutions and municipal leaders operate. Economic, social and political power relations can vary considerably between municipalities as a result of different ecological contexts, differences in the historical development of capitalism, and different degrees of intervention by outside actors—ranging from the state to political parties, churches and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)—all of which need to be taken into consideration in order to understand the wide variations in the depth of municipal democracy in the Andean region and in other parts of the world. The rural Andes are the site of both some of the most interesting experiments in municipal democracy and also some of the most exclusionary, elite dominated systems of local government in Latin America. In addition to these wide variations in patterns of rural municipal governance, there are several other compelling reasons to focus attention on struggles for municipal democracy in the rural Andes, and in rural Latin America more broadly. First, the vast majority of the more than fourteen thousand municipalities in Latin America are small and contain highly dispersed populations that are heavily dependent on agricultural production for their livelihoods (Nickson 1995: 1). While

Introduction

3

national populations are increasingly centralized in large urban centers, most municipal governments represent rural areas—where poverty is also disproportionately concentrated. Globally, the World Bank (2002) reports that more than eighty percent of the billion people who live in abject poverty live in rural areas. In the Andean region, World Bank data similarly indicates that poverty is much higher in the countryside than in cities.1 The role that municipal governments might play in improving rural living conditions and livelihoods hinges heavily on the extent to which they are managed democratically and seek to represent and respond to the concerns of their constituents. Second, as the level of the state that is ‘closest to the people,’ municipal governments play important roles in both the promotion and the denial of citizen’s rights—with crucial implications for people’s sense of dignity and the formation of their political identities. As Jonathan Fox wrote in the context of rural Mexico, it is at the local level “where most citizens either gain access to or find themselves excluded from the state” (1994: 106). In the rural Andes, where the legacies of racism and the highly unequal servile social relations that characterized neo-feudal systems of agriculture remain strong, local governments have a particularly important role to play in fostering political cultures of democratic citizenship. Third, rural municipal governments are key nodes within broader regional and national Indigenous and peasant social movements in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. Indigenous and peasant struggles for municipal power have generated national social movement leaders, popular bases of Indigenous and peasant movement support, and important ideas for alternative forms of governance. In Bolivia and Ecuador, Indigenous and peasant political parties prioritized struggles for municipal power as crucial opportunities for developing administrative experience, for building local bases of support, and for experimenting with alternative political systems that might later be scaled up to higher levels of politics. Indeed, recent constitutional reforms in both Bolivia and Ecuador that expand the possibilities for Indigenous political autonomy are based on institutional experiments in rural municipal governments in their respective countries. Nevertheless, very little recent research on Indigenous and peasant social movements in the Andes has paid careful attention to the dynamics of municipal power struggles. From a methodological perspective, there are also important reasons for studying struggles to democratize rural municipalities separately from the politics of large urban centers. First, throughout much of Latin America, and in the Andean region in particular, the legacies of feudal

4

Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

agricultural, social and political systems based on racial exploitation remain much stronger in the countryside than in urban centers. Those feudal legacies—coupled with the widespread absence of industry, dependence on labor migration, physical isolation and the dispersion of rural populations—mean that the factors that shape economic, social and political power relations among local actors in rural areas are distinct from those of large cities. Second, rural municipalities confront different challenges from those faced by large urban centers—in particular, the challenges of responding to the massive historical debt of unmet basic services and infrastructure in highly dispersed rural communities with miniscule budgets and tiny staffs with inadequate training. Moreover, the education levels of rural constituents are generally much lower than those in cities, while media coverage of municipal affairs is frequently non-existent and political parties are often much less institutionalized. Municipal democratization means different things to different social actors in the rural Andes. Municipal governments have been elected in Ecuador and Peru since 1979 and in Bolivia since 1994. However, in many instances these municipal administrations do not satisfy even minimalist definitions of formal democracy. Both coercion and bribery of voters are common during elections, as are other forms of corruption, including clientelism, nepotism and kickback schemes. Moreover, municipal governments in the region have been historically dominated by local elites that have demonstrated systematic biases against rural peasants and especially Indigenous populations in both the allocation of municipal resources and treatment by municipal officials. It is not uncommon for rural municipal governments to allocate the vast majority of their investment resources to urban infrastructure projects in the small towns where local elites typically reside and to literally ignore the needs of rural communities within their jurisdiction, even when the vast majority of the population of the municipality lives in dispersed agricultural communities. It is also common to find municipal officials who cannot or will not speak the languages of local Indigenous majorities and who expect personal favors or political support in return for the allocation of supposedly ‘public’ services, jobs and infrastructure. Thus, despite the advent of municipal elections, there is significant space for deepening municipal democracy in the region. Outside actors such as aid donor officials, NGO personnel and urban academics generally articulate understandings of municipal democratization based on changes in the ways in which municipal governments make decisions; that is, they emphasize political process. By contrast, as the cases examined in this book make clear, the members of rural communities often convey a different understanding of

Introduction

5

municipal democratization that prioritizes the redistribution of municipal investment resources over specific changes in the ways in which decisions are actually made; in short, changes in the distribution of resources rather than changes in modes of decision making are seen as the most important feature of municipal democratization. A second element of democratization that motivates many of the peasant and Indigenous actors involved in the struggles to control municipal governments that are examined in this book concerns the desire for dignified treatment by municipal officials—in contrast to the racist and exclusionary practices that remain widespread in rural municipalities. The tensions between understandings of municipal democratization that emphasize changes in political process and those that highlight the redistribution of resources and dignified treatment create very real challenges for rural municipal governments that are often caught between very different expectations of what democracy and democratization mean. How rural municipal governments respond to those tensions is one of the central themes examined in this book. Social scientists have long debated the possibilities of democratization in rural settings. As Jonathan Fox (1990: 13) noted, neoclassical analysis of collective action dilemmas in dispersed and isolated rural settings corresponds closely with Marx’s widely cited argument that the modes of production, geographic isolation, poor means of communication and poverty that characterize peasants also work to isolate them from one another and undermine both their political capabilities and the possibilities for rural democracy (1963 [1869]: 123– 124). Similarly, various analyses of popular struggles for democracy have drawn attention to industrialization and urbanization as crucial processes, which have pulled members of subordinate social groups away from rural environments and into urban settings that are presumed to facilitate popular political organization and democratization (Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens 1992: 58; Therborn 1977, 1979; Collier 1999). The goal of this book is not to dispute earlier analyses that viewed peasants as incapable of political struggle or rural areas as unpropitious sites for democracy, but rather to examine the ways in which rural settings and rural political actors changed over the course of the twentieth century in ways that may facilitate democratization. For example, understandings of what it means to be a campesino (peasant) in the rural Andes at the beginning of the twenty-first century have little in common with objective definitions based on relations to the means of production, and are instead more closely connected to self-identification based on ties to a rural community (see Kearney 1996). Cyclical labor migration, frequently across national borders, combined with economic

6

Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

differentiation and expanded opportunities for education means that many ‘peasant’ leaders in the Andes have significant urban and even international experiences and strong academic backgrounds. Their capacities for political agency are very different from the French peasants that Marx wrote about in The Eighteenth Brumaire.2 Similarly, agrarian reforms that have redistributed land and interventions by external actors to help peasant and Indigenous groups to organize politically have in fact spurned significant processes of democratization in some rural municipalities in the Andes. In an effort to better understand rural municipal democratization in the Andean region, this book poses three sets of questions. The first set of questions concerns the factors that best help to explain the deepening of democracy in rural municipalities. The second set of questions relates to the forms of democracy that are emerging in rural municipalities— from participatory to corporatist to clientelist, and including both western and Indigenous systems of governance. The third set of questions concerns the impacts of municipal democratization on rural populations, understood in terms of their material well-being, their dignity, their political identities, and their capacities for political action. By posing and seeking to answer these questions I hope to generate a better understanding of the forces that have promoted democratization in rural municipalities in the Andes, the possibilities for democratization in other municipalities, and the implications of municipal democratization for rural populations. Theoretical Approaches to Municipal Democratization

Most recent analysis of municipal governance in Latin America has focused on technical issues of service delivery and administrative capacity rather than democracy. Within the smaller body of research that has focused on municipal democratization, the predominant methodological approaches have privileged questions about the design of decentralization frameworks and municipal institutions as well as the administrative and political strategies of municipal leaders. Policy proposals have highlighted the importance of good leadership (Rosales 1994; Campbell 2003; Campbell and Fuhr 2004), but have put particular emphasis on the institutional design of municipal governments and decentralization frameworks as the key factors involved in deepening municipal democracy. For example, the World Bank’s 2004 World Development Report titled Making Services Work for Poor People asserted that making municipal governments into more effective and more democratic service providers was primarily a matter of putting in

Introduction

7

place “the right institutional incentives” (World Bank 2004: 185). Specific institutional reforms that have been recommended to deepen municipal democracy include electoral reforms,3 the use of performance indicators, access to information legislation, and the creation of institutionalized spaces for citizen participation in municipal decision making, particularly in the allocation of municipal budgets (Peterson 1997; Burki, Perry and Dillinger 1999: 32; USAID 2000: 37). Academic analyses have also identified the design of municipal institutions, national decentralization frameworks and municipal leadership as key explanatory factors for municipal democratization. For example, Campbell (2003) proposed an explicit framework for the analysis of municipal governance in Latin America that emphasized municipal leadership and the structure of incentives for democratic municipal governance created by national decentralization laws. Similarly, the editors of a collection of essays on decentralization and democracy in Latin America argued that institutionalist approaches provide the most effective methodologies for understanding municipal democracy in the region (Montero and Samuels 2004), and a recent two volume analysis of decentralization in Bolivia focused entirely on the institutional design of the country’s decentralization framework and municipal governments (Fundación Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and ILDIS 2004). Analysis of participatory budgeting, which first emerged in Porto Alegre, Brazil but has since spread throughout Latin America, has also focused overwhelmingly on questions of institutional design and political leadership. In the specific context of the Andes, Van Cott’s (2008) examination of Indigenous run municipal governments in Bolivia and Ecuador focused explicitly on political leadership and Indigenous political parties as the two key variables behind municipal democratization, while Grindle’s (2007) analysis of municipal governments in Mexico highlighted the leadership of municipal officials as the single most important factor behind changes in patterns of local governance. The prominent attention given to questions about the design of municipal institutions and decentralization follows a broader methodological trend within the discipline of political science that privileges analysis of the design of government institutions as the key variable that explains political behavior.4 In short, an increasing number of political scientists assert that ‘institutions matter.’ The difficulty with this approach is not that institutions do not matter, but rather that they are not all that matters. Because institutionalist perspectives have dominated the study of municipal governance, non-institutionalist approaches that scholars have long used to understand national

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Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

democratization have been largely ignored. However, comparative research clearly indicates that within individual countries with a single design for all municipal governments, there are very wide variations in the depth of local democracy that closely relate to variations in local power relations (Fox 1994, 2007; Remick 2002; Selee and Tulchin 2004). A narrow focus on questions of institutional design fails to recognize the ways in which other factors and especially social, political and economic power relations shape both the creation of institutions and the ways in which they operate on the ground. As Douglas North, one of the leading proponents of the New Institutional Economics and a Nobel prize winner, pointed out in an analysis of the relationship between institutional design and economic growth, institutions “are not necessarily or even usually created to be socially efficient” but rather are “created to serve the interests of those with the bargaining power to devise new rules” (1990: 16). Similarly, the ways in which institutions function in practice is a product not just of their specific design but also of the particular social and economic context in which they operate. Analysis of municipal democratization or any process of political change thus requires that we ask questions about the relative importance of the design of institutions in comparison with other factors, such as ecological context and social and economic power relations. As Vedi Hadiz argued in a critique of institutionalist approaches to decentralization and democracy in Indonesia, rather than the result of institutional tinkering, “democracy, public participation, accountability and social and economic rights are all historically tied to the outcomes of struggles of social forces and interests…the product of grinding social change over centuries, colored by often violent and bloody confrontations, not least between social classes” (Hadiz 2004: 702). Similarly, in her analysis of municipal governance in Mexico, Grindle argued that [l]egislating and regulating institutions, particularly from above, may not be enough to ensure that they are put in place and then serve useful purposes. Sustaining change may require more engaged civil societies that are able to insist on the continuity of structures and processes that provide good results…. The challenges ahead may focus less on building institutions from the top down than on sustaining them from the bottom up (2007: 182).

In the specific context of the Andean region, the Spanish aphorism ‘small village, big hell’ (pueblo chico, infierno grande) similarly alludes to the social, economic, political and personal tensions and struggles

Introduction

9

over power that exist even in the smallest rural communities. An understanding of those tensions and struggles is essential to any effective analysis of rural municipal governance. The significant attention paid to questions of municipal leadership as a central variable in the democratization of municipal governments in Latin America similarly distracts attention away from the role that longterm historical changes in local power relations play in shaping the context in which municipal leaders operate. For example, Van Cott asserted that “exceptional mayors” were necessary to initiate and guide the radical democratic institutional innovations that she studied in Ecuador and Bolivia (2008: 58), while Grindle emphasized that in the Mexican municipal governments that she examined, “the agents of innovation were overwhelmingly public officials” (2007: 22). Similarly, Tender’s (1997) analysis of regional and municipal governance in northeastern Brazil also highlighted the key role of municipal leaders in improving the quality of local governance. Within such perspectives that highlight the specific short-term time periods in which democratic innovations actually take place, municipal leadership—especially that of mayors—does indeed appear to be a central factor in explaining municipal democratization, as particular institutional reforms generally can be traced to the leadership of the particular individuals formally responsible for their implementation. However, such a focus overlooks questions about longer-term changes in local power relations that shape the contexts in which municipal leaders are able—or not able—to implement particular institutional or policy reforms. Indeed, Van Cott’s categorization of municipal leadership partly conflates the context within which leaders operate with leadership itself (2008: 62–63), which results in an overemphasis on the relative importance of leadership at the expense of contextual factors. Moreover, strong municipal leaders who operate in the absence of political power relations that favor municipal democratization may succeed in creating new municipal institutions and policies, but those innovations are rarely to be sustained over time. Throughout the rural Andes, local political actors refer to the problem of ‘alcaldecentrismo’ (mayor-centrism), that is, the excessive reliance on the leadership of a particular mayor to bring about hoped-for changes. Without a broader context of democratic power relations and a supportive social movement, those changes generally failed to emerge or could not be sustained beyond the tenure of the particular mayor associated with them. Rather than disregard the ways in which the design of political institutions and political leadership shape political change in favor of an emphasis on social power relations and political struggle, the challenge

10

Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

is to understand the relative importance of these different factors in democratization processes. In an analysis of decentralization in South Africa, Kerala (India) and Porto Alegre (Brazil), Patrick Heller asserted that technocratic perspectives on decentralization “reify institutions at the expense of [political] mobilization” while anarchist and communitarian perspectives “reify mobilization at the expense of institutions” (2001: 36). Heller also highlights the importance of creating institutions that can consolidate and sustain the gains of social and political struggles for democratization. Similarly, Van Cott argued in the specific context of the Andean region that “improvements in democratic quality cannot rely on existing institutional designs and processes” (2006: 7). Baiocchi (2003) highlighted Gramsci’s observation that the deepening of democracy requires a ‘long march through institutions’—that is, careful attention to the design and functioning of institutional arrangements to guide and promote citizen engagement—which cannot be sustained in the long-term on the basis of ad hoc social mobilization. At the same time, however, Baiocchi also emphasized the dangers of popular movement demobilization and bureaucratization that come from close engagement with state institutions, including those created by popular movements. Some recent research has incorporated, at least implicitly, an analysis of the relationship between local level power relations and municipal governance. For example, Abers’ (2000) study of the now well-known participatory budgeting process in Porto Alegre, Brazil alludes to the connections between changes in the balance of socioeconomic power in the city and the relative success of the participatory budget. Most notably, she pointed out that municipal leaders were able to exploit divisions within the city’s business elite and to forge an alliance between construction contractors and the city’s poor and working class neighborhood organizations against large-scale property owners. Goldfrank (2003, 2007) also refers to the absence of a united opposition as an important factor behind the success of the participatory budget in Porto Alegre. In her research on good governance in the Brazilian state of Ceará, Tendler (1997) highlighted the efforts of the state government to curb the power of elite-based municipal politicians in relation to local popular sectors as a key condition for improved service delivery. By contrast, Campbell (2003) drew attention to the ways in which national governments and international agencies in Latin America used their power to limit experiments in democracy and developmental governance at the municipal level during the 1990s in order to maintain fiscal stability. Incorporating a clear analysis of social power relations into their examination of the performance of anti-

Introduction

11

poverty programs managed by Mexican municipalities, Fox and Aranda (1996, 2000) drew attention to the strength of local popular movements, municipal autonomy from higher levels of government, and class and ethnic polarization between rural towns and outlying communities. Unfortunately, their analysis stopped short of examining the historical forces behind these factors that enhanced municipal service delivery. Heller (2001), Radcliffe, Laurie and Andolina (2001) and Van Cott (2006, 2008) all draw attention to political power relations in their respective analyses of conditions that support municipal democracy, but focus on aspects of power related much more closely to contemporary political agency than long-term historical changes in economic and social structures. Heller highlights the importance of the political will and capacity of the central state to promote municipal democratization along with the need for well-developed civil society organizations and political party leadership to champion democratic decentralization. Radcliffe, Laurie and Andolina focus attention on alliances among grassroots organizations, support from aid donors and NGOs, and multicultural political strategies of municipal leaders. In turn, Van Cott (2006, 2008) places particular emphasis on the roles of Indigenous political parties in deepening municipal democracy. Grindle’s presentation of comparative institutionalist approaches to the study of political change highlights several of the key factors that relative power approaches to democratization emphasize, in particular the ways in which historical contexts shape the relations of economic and political power among political actors who in turn determine public policy (2000: 25–26). Grindle’s more recent analysis of local governance in Mexico also highlights the ways in which historical factors shape the performance of municipal governments, but she emphasizes the legacies of political traditions such as clientelism rather than historically structured economic power relations. Moreover, while Grindle argues that entrepreneurial leadership by municipal officials is the single most important factor behind innovations in governance in the thirty medium sized Mexican municipalities that she analyzed, she also concludes that in order to be sustained, those innovations need to be supported by engaged civil societies (2007: 182)—a reflection of the importance of equitable power relations to municipal democracy. Similarly, Avritzer (2002) elaborates an approach to the study of democratization in Latin America that emphasizes the importance of democratic practices in civil society as the starting point for the democratization of government decision making, although he stresses cultural practices in the public sphere rather than social and economic power relations. Looking back to earlier research on municipal

12

Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

democratization, Robert Dahl’s (1961) analysis of the gradual transition from oligarchic rule to pluralism in New Haven, Connecticut over the course of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries can be read as an account of the ways in which the development of capitalism in the northeastern United States lay behind shifts in political power. Indeed, Dahl’s account of democratization in New Haven makes little reference to changes in the design of municipal institutions at all. Numerous anthropological studies have also examined the dynamics of social and economic power relations in rural micro-regions in the Andes and provide excellent examples of how local power can be analyzed and understood.5 The only difficulties are that very few of these works have identified specific connections between local power relations and patterns of municipal governance and that almost all of them concentrate on single case studies, which makes systematic comparison of cases difficult because different authors ask different questions and employ different research methods. The challenge, which this book takes up, is to find a balance between thick ethnographic examination of local power relations and comparative analysis of a variety of cases –which makes it possible to at least suggest generalizable relationships between municipal democratization and different patterns of local power relations. Attention to local level social and economic power relations can be found in other works on municipal governance, such as those by Baud and Post (2002), Fox (2007), Mitlin (2001), Myers and Dietz (2002), and Schonwalder (1997). However, an understanding of the ways in which relations of social and economic power shape the functioning of municipal governments remains incipient. Selee and Tulchin’s analysis of decentralization and democracy on three continents concludes only that evidence of the impact of local power relations on municipal governance is “inconclusive” and that “we suspect that the success of decentralization initiatives in improving democratic governance depends in part on the restructuring of local power relationships by empowering previously excluded sectors” (2004: 311, emphasis added). In order to better understand and promote municipal democratization, an integrated framework is needed that explicitly examines not only the broader constellation of forces that shape municipal democratization—including municipal leadership and the design of municipal institutions and decentralization laws—but also incorporates historical changes in local social and economic power relations and local ecological factors.

Introduction

13

A Relative Power Approach to Municipal Democratization

Analysis of the political trajectories of Latin American states from comparative historical political economy perspectives offers an important methodological starting point for more careful examination of municipal governance in the region. Included in this tradition are works by Collier (1999), Huber and Safford (1995), Paige (1997), Roseberry, Gudmondson and Samper (1995), Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens (1992), Huber, Rueschemeyer and Stephens (1997), Therborn (1979), Williams (1994), and Yashar (1997), all of whom draw on Barrington Moore, Jr.’s (1966) seminal work on the relationships between agrarian structures and state formation. These works draw attention to the ways in which the political trajectories of states have been shaped by historical changes in social, economic and political power relations, and they understand democratization as a process of institutional change that results from increased equality in the balance of social, economic and political power. To borrow from Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens (1992), this body of work represents a relative power approach to democratization.6 As they argue, “it is power relations that most importantly determine whether democracy can emerge, stabilize, and then maintain itself in the face of adverse conditions” (1992: 5, emphasis added). To explain the varied democratic and authoritarian trajectories of different states in Latin America, authors working within the relative power approach have emphasized the following factors, which I list here in approximate order of importance:
historical changes in the distribution of productive assets and the balance of social, economic, and political power of different groups in national society;
the political organization of subordinate groups;
divisions among dominant groups and coalitions among subordinate groups;
the relative autonomy of the state from social forces, especially elites;
the impact of global political and economic forces on the relative power of national political actors. Within the context of these factors, the relative power approach also examines the impact of the design of state institutions and the strategies of key political actors on national political trajectories.

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Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

In order to explain the historical changes in power relations that lie behind democratization, the relative power approach draws particular attention to the contradictions of capitalist economic development. For example, Collier (1999) and Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens (1992) argue that gradual industrialization and urbanization created conditions in which working class organizations formed and struggled for political inclusion. Other authors, such as Huber and Safford (1995), Paige (1997), Roseberry, Gudmondson and Samper (1995), and Williams (1995) direct primary attention to the ways in which different paths of capitalist agricultural production in Latin America shaped the formation of nation states and the exercise of political power. More specifically, they highlight the ways in which systems of agricultural production based on extensive land control and repressive labor relations generated authoritarian political systems while democracy was associated with more egalitarian systems of landholding, agricultural production, and marketing. Significantly, many of the works that have used relative power approaches to analyze the political trajectories of Latin American states have noted considerable regional and local variations in the historical development of agrarian structures and socioeconomic power relations within individual states. In particular, Williams argued that because of the widespread local differences in the development of agrarian production systems and labor relations in nineteenth century Central America, analysis of historical changes in agrarian structures and power relations was much more useful for explaining different patterns of municipal governance than the behavior of national governments. As Williams stated simply, “[t]he particular agrarian social formation of an area strongly influenced the behavior of town hall” (1995: 238). The relative power approach thus also points to the ways in which micro-regional variations in patterns of capitalist economic development in turn have shaped local economic and social power relations and the exercise of political power at the municipal level. Most of the works within the relative power tradition give analytical priority to historical changes in the balance of power among different classes, defined primarily in objective terms as a relationship to the means of economic production. However, in order to understand the prospects for municipal democratization it is also essential to examine changes in other social power relations and the ways in which they influence municipal governance. In addition to class, social power in rural Latin America is also often sharply divided along lines of ethnicity, gender, generation and religion as well as between migrants and nonmigrants and between the residents of rural towns and the surrounding

Introduction

15

countryside. In many rural municipalities in the Andes, the principle cleavage of social, economic, and political power is based on differences between town-based, petty-bourgeois, white mestizos and rural, Indigenous, semi-proletarian peasants. But within each of those groups there are also other important inequalities of power based on gender, generation, religion, migration, education and economic strata. As Tanya Korovkin pointed out, in “the complexities of Andean politics...ethnicity, class, political ideology, and religion intertwine, producing political outcomes not easily understood when any one of these factors is considered in isolation from the others” (1997: 31). Moreover, these categories are not objective but rather are socially constructed, and the decisions of individuals to self-identify and organize around specific identities—such as peasant or Indigenous— both shape and are shaped by local power relations. With these considerations in mind, the relative power approach can be adapted to the analysis of municipal democratization. The approach focuses attention on historical changes in the balance of local social, economic and political power. This analysis in turn requires an examination of:
changes in the distribution of productive assets such as land, water, credit, infrastructure and the control of marketing networks;
political organization and the social construction of local class, gender, and ethnic identities (amongst others) among both subordinate and dominant political actors;
coalitions between members of different social groups (i.e. between rural Indigenous peasants and town-based mestizo petty bourgeoisies or between Catholic and Evangelical peasant organizations);
political divisions within different social sectors;
the impact of global and national actors and forces (i.e. aid donors, NGOs, political parties; central state actors; macroeconomic policies). In the context of historical changes in local power relations, the relative power approach to municipal democratization also examines the institutional design of municipal governments and the political strategies of the key actors involved in struggles over municipal power. While analysis of these factors can help to explain the relative depth of municipal democracy and the particular forms it has taken in different locales, it is also important to ask questions about the impacts of

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Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

municipal democratization on rural populations. To what extent has the deepening of municipal democracy generated better access to infrastructure and social services and to improved livelihoods? What impacts has municipal democratization had on the dignity and identity of historically excluded groups as citizens and how important are such non-material changes for local populations? It is also important to examine the implications of municipal democratization—and especially the control of municipal power—for the political strategies and capacities of historically marginalized rural populations. Does it enhance their abilities to contest the political and economic structures that have marginalized them, or is municipal democratization a means of incorporating and taming rural social movements in a way that is ultimately disempowering? Scholars have long been deeply divided over this question. Scholarly proponents of decentralization and of popular struggles for municipal power have echoed Tocqueville’s (1968 [1848]) arguments that local governments are a crucial site for political education and a training ground for higher levels of politics. Indeed, the leaders of national Indigenous and peasant organizations and political parties in Bolivia and Ecuador dedicated a high priority to local struggles for municipal power precisely in order to increase the political and administrative capacities of their respective movements. By contrast, within the context of much broader debates about social movement engagement in formal politics and the implications of such participation (Day 2005; Holloway 2002; Michels 2001 [1915]), two different sets of critics have argued against social movement involvement in local governance. The first line of criticism asserts that decentralization and participation in local politics is a “neoliberal cul-de-sac,” devised by states, northern aid agencies, and international financial institutions as a strategy to fragment popular social movements and divert their attention away from national politics to parochial issues of local governance (Schuurman 1997; see also Petras and Veltmeyer 2005; Regalsky 2006; Kohl 2002; Harvey 1989: 237, 277, 296; Mohan and Stokke 2001). A second line of criticism argues that engagement in local governance fosters what Foucault (1991) described as ‘governmentality’ or the self-discipline of the governed. Governmentality refers not to topdown coercion or discipline, but rather to “the conduct of conduct” (Dean 1999: 10)—that is, the strategies of states and other powerful actors to create self-regulating subjects. As Ferguson and Gupta explain, “governmentality does not name a negative relationship of power, one characterized entirely by discipline and regulation; rather, the emphasis is on its productive dimension” (2002: 989). Peasant and Indigenous

Introduction

17

efforts to control municipal power can reflect these positive or productive elements of governmentality, first through political struggles to control municipal power and then through the expansion of legal knowledge and administrative capacities to manage municipal governments. Struggles for municipal power in the Andes have not been imposed by the states in a coercive manner, but rather have been actively pursued by Indigenous and peasant leaders as strategies of individual and collective empowerment. Rather than contesting the western bureaucratic rationale of central states, some Indigenous and peasant groups in the Andes have thus actively struggled to be incorporated into the logic of state laws and bureaucratic procedures in order to gain control of municipal power and resources. Similarly, some analysts of Brazilian municipalities that have implemented participatory budget procedures have noted changes in popular political activism away from oppositional, protest-oriented actions towards more bureaucratic, technical engagement with municipal accounting—a shift from ‘shouting to counting’ (Alvarez 2007; Heller and Baiocchi 2007; Rubin 2007). Charles Hale also draws attention to the ways in which multicultural reforms in Latin America that appear to empower Indigenous populations by granting them new rights simultaneously “perpetuate their subordination” by placing other, primarily economic rights off limits (2004: 19). Arguably, Indigenous control of municipal governance, like multicultural citizenship reforms, fosters what Hale calls the “indio permitido” (the authorized Indian) while undermining alternative political identities and forms of action. As Hale argues, “the indio permitido has passed the test of modernity, substituted ‘protest’ with ‘proposal,’ and learned to be both authentic and fully conversant with the dominant milieu. Its Other is unruly, vindictive and conflict prone” (2004: 19). Various scholars have also analyzed the emergence of a particular form of neoliberal governmentality characterized by the “devolution of risk” to individuals and communities and “the ‘responsabilization’ of subjects who are increasingly ‘empowered’ to discipline themselves” (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 989; Postero 2007). As Tanya Li explained in an analysis of neoliberal governmentality in Indonesia, the goal is to create “empowered communities” that “would be able to plan their own projects, manage conflicts, and reform the state apparatus from below” (2007: 230). From this perspective, popular struggles to exercise municipal power can be seen as self-directed struggles to be made governable and to be ‘governmentalized.’ What is less clear, however, is the extent to which state efforts have actually been successful in promoting the self-disciplining of political

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Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

subjects through the creation of new opportunities to engage in municipal governance. While Foucault’s analysis of governmentality is compelling, it is crucial, as Lukes asserted, to examine “how and to what extent the governed are rendered governable” (2005: 98). Anthropologists such as Mosse and Lewis (2006) and Lund (2001) have drawn attention to the ways in which the recipients of development aid often perform rather than internalize compliance with the goals and rationales of neoliberal aid donors. Similarly, Rossi’s (2006) analysis of rural development projects in Niger led her to argue that governmentality can be very fragile and even illusory: “recipients are less locked into a lifeworld than they are temporarily attempting to turn development rationales to their own ends” (2006: 29).7 Rossi points out that a major challenge for students of development “consists in distinguishing between conscious strategic action (i.e. when brokers in development perform a ‘role’ to attract projects to their village) and attitudes and dispositions that are produced unconsciously” (2006: 30). Thus, rather than assume that governmentality is inevitable and to search for evidence of it, the challenge for the analysis of struggles to control and administer municipal power in the rural Andes is to understand the extent to which Indigenous and peasant political actors have genuinely internalized the rationale underlying the laws that regulate municipal governance—a reflection of governmentality—and the extent to which they are strategically performing for the state and aid donors in order to gain access to municipal power and resources. The important questions are thus, first, whether deeper engagement in municipal politics has diverted the attention of local Indigenous and peasant organizations away from other avenues of political change, and, second, whether peasant leaders could easily step away from the state-imposed logic of municipal governance if they decided that municipal power no longer constituted a worthwhile political opportunity. Finally, if evidence of governmentality does exist, it is important to consider whether it represents a necessary cost of ‘success’ in struggles to democratize rural municipal governance. A crucial element of the relative power approach to democracy is its attention to long-term historical changes in social, economic and political power relations and not just the dynamics of the specific shortterm moments in which new institutions are created or transitions from one political regime to another take place. The French historian Fernand Braudel conceptualized historical time according to three different speeds or timeframes in a way that is useful for analyzing democratization at the municipal (and other) level(s) of politics. Braudel (1978, 1980) distinguished between l’histoire événementielle or the

Introduction

19

short time span of particular events, a medium-term conjunctural perspective that analyzes historical changes over the course of decades, and a long-term perspective, which he called the longue durée that draws attention to very gradual changes in socio-economic structures and cultural patterns over the course of centuries. Municipal democratization needs to be analyzed from all three perspectives of historical time. In the Andean context, the longue durée highlights not only the gradual transition from neo-feudal to capitalist agrarian production systems and labor relations but also the implications of that transition for social and political power relations. Significantly, while the shift from feudal to capitalist industrial agriculture took place over the course of centuries in Europe, the breakdown of semi-feudal production systems in the Andes occurred much more recently and quickly during the middle of the twentieth century. As a result, the crucial historical period for understanding municipal democratization in the rural Andes starts with the crisis of feudal agriculture that began in the early twentieth century in most of the region, although it is also important to be attentive to the deeper historical roots of that crisis as well as the precolonial origins of some of the democratization initiatives pursued by local Indigenous organizations. The transformation of agricultural production systems and labor relations was a necessary but insufficient condition for democratization in rural municipalities. The cases examined in this volume indicate that even where favorable structural conditions were present, the factors that explained actual changes in municipal governance were connected much more closely to the agency of particular individuals and groups than sweeping structural changes. The conjunctural perspective focuses attention on the ways in which patterns of economic development since the breakdown of feudal agriculture have influenced local power relations; it also calls attention to the impacts of changes in political regimes at the national level on local systems of government, such as the shifts from military to elected civilian regimes and the transition from highly centralized systems of governance towards decentralization. The perspective of l’histoire événementielle highlights the particular events and decisions that have shaped efforts to deepen municipal democracy within the context of more gradual changes in local power relations. The case studies in this book aim to understand municipal democratization in terms of all three perspectives on historical time, beginning with gradual long-term shifts in land tenure and rural labor relations, then analyzing changes in local power relations and patterns of municipal governance over the twentieth century, and, finally, examining the implications of recent

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Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

decentralization reforms and efforts by Indigenous and peasant groups to contest municipal elections. Before proceeding further, it is important to acknowledge three possible problems with the relative power approach to municipal democratization. The first is that the approach yields few easily applicable policy lessons for promoting municipal democracy in the contemporary Latin American political and economic context. Policymakers have favored the institutional approaches to democratization that I criticized above precisely because they offer potentially viable strategies for shaping political behavior. By shifting attention away from the design of decentralization frameworks and municipal institutions and from technical questions of administrative capacity and resource transfers to long-term shifts in political power relations, the relative power approach focuses attention on issues that are much more difficult for policymakers and development experts to influence. Indeed, when I presented an earlier version of this research to the Canadian International Development Agency, one official explained that the only elements of it that were of any real interest to the agency were those that could be influenced within the scope of a typical two- to five-year development project. The second problem is that the relative power approach employs a qualitative methodology that limits the number of cases to which it can be easily applied for comparative purposes. Scholars working from quantitative or less holistic perspectives will argue that there are too few cases and too many variables for the approach to yield any broadly generalizable conclusions. There is much merit to this criticism. Nevertheless, the relative power approach encourages scholars and policymakers to consider a series of factors that have important implications for municipal democratization in Latin America but which have been largely ignored to date. Finally, there is also a danger that efforts to explain contemporary political outcomes through reference to historical changes may be clouded by the ways in which history has been recorded, and may thus overemphasize certain elements of the past and miss the significance of others. However, in spite of these dangers, the attention to historical change in the relative power approach is crucial in order to counterbalance the relative ahistoricism of much contemporary analysis of municipal democratization, which focuses attention only on the recent strategies of political actors and changes in the design of political institutions.

Introduction

21

Research Methodology

To put the relative power approach into practice, I conducted research in eight rural municipalities in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru from 1999 through 2007, six of which are featured in this book.8 By examining the histories of democratization in two municipalities in each of the three countries, this book aims to strike a balance between a thick and thin analysis that allows both a careful examination of each case but also a comparative analysis of multiple cases. Since one of the goals of this research was to understand the conditions and strategies that favored municipal democratization and some criteria were needed to select a feasible number of case studies from the more than 2,500 rural municipal governments that exist in the three countries, I initially chose to conduct research in municipalities that were widely viewed in government, NGO, academic and media circles in each country as ‘success stories’ of decentralization and municipal democratization. They were all seen by a wide array of development experts as exceptional experiences of good governance and participatory democracy that departed from the much more common patterns of corruption, racist exclusion and weak administrative capacity. Government, NGO and academic observers also highlighted these cases as ‘models’ of municipal democracy and encouraged other municipalities to emulate their apparent successes, which seemed to make it even more important to understand the factors underlying the democratization of these particular municipal governments. I also chose to examine apparently successful cases of municipal democratization in order to better understand the tensions and challenges that ‘successful’ struggles for municipal power created for Indigenous and peasant groups. Nevertheless, it very quickly became apparent when I began to conduct research in the selected municipalities that accounts of their success were often wildly exaggerated. Laudatory descriptions of participatory democracy often masked some rather undemocratic practices including domination by NGOs and small cliques of local leaders, clientelism, and the marginalization of base members— especially women—from decision making. Moreover, the subsequent breakdown of some of the initiatives to deepen municipal democracy made it clear that municipal democracy can be much more fragile than enthusiastic proponents of decentralization have recognized. It also became clear that the governments, aid agencies, NGOs, and academics who were heavily engaged in decentralization initiatives needed success stories in order to justify and legitimate their efforts. As a result, this

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Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

research project also became an effort to interrogate success stories in order to understand whether participatory forms of democracy were really flourishing to the extent that outside reports often suggested. Thus, rather than successful democratic outcomes, what unites all of the cases examined here is that they were the sites of significant struggles by Indigenous and peasant groups and well-intentioned outsiders to make rural municipal governments more democratic. The municipalities examined in this book also share a number of other important features in common. They all have relatively small populations of between 10,000 and 35,000 that are highly dispersed among rural communities and depend heavily on a combination of agriculture and labor migration for their livelihoods. The municipal governments themselves are also small in terms of their annual budgets, which ranged from just under $1 million to just over $4 million, and the size of their staffs, which varied from ten to seventy people. The cases examined are also all located in the highland regions of their respective countries, which is significant not just because of the ecological context but also because of the zones’ long histories of interaction with colonial and republican governments, which most municipalities in the Amazon regions of Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru did not experience. All of the cases are marked by long histories of domination by local elites who were— and in some cases remain—geographically concentrated in the small towns where local government offices and most local businesses and services are also located. Beyond these common features, the six municipalities reveal significant variations in land tenure and the distribution of economic power, local histories of capitalist development, ethnic self-identification, ecology, and intervention by outside actors such as state agents, political parties, and NGOs. Research itself involved analysis of municipal documents and semiformal interviews with thirty to forty key political actors in each of the six municipalities as well as many other informal conversations with local residents and observation of meetings held by municipal officials and Indigenous and peasant organizations. I made multiple trips to each municipality between 1999 and the end of 2007 and was able to observe changes in municipal governance over the course of at least two and sometimes three electoral periods. While the eight-year time frame of the field research was primarily a result of the distractions of university teaching and family rather than conscious planning, it did make it possible to analyze the unfolding dynamics of local power relations and municipal governance over an important period of time, which included the collapse of some initially successful democratization initiatives. Historical analysis of the six cases is based on secondary sources and

Introduction

23

oral histories, which in some cases leave important questions unanswered that could only be addressed through meticulous archival research. The pressures of time in a research project that involved six research sites in three different countries means that such research will have to wait for other investigators. Decentralization in the Andes

As I explained above, this book does not seek to explain the political and economic forces behind decentralization in the Andes, which have already been carefully analyzed by numerous other scholars.9 Rather, the focus is on the field of forces that shape municipal governance, which include but are not limited to decentralization laws. However, four particular issues connected to the political, administrative and fiscal dimensions of decentralization in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru are particularly important for the analysis of the cases of municipal democratization in this book. The first key issue concerns the historical timing of political decentralization—that is, the creation of municipal districts and selection of municipal leaders through public elections. In all three countries, municipalities (rather than provinces or regional levels of government) have been the privileged focus of decentralization reforms. In Bolivia, the 1994 Law of Popular Participation and the 1995 Law of Administrative Decentralization marked a decisive shift from centralized political management to decentralized governance. The new legislation created 311 municipal governments (328 as of 2008), mandated the transfer to them of twenty percent of state revenue (proportional to population size) as well as administrative authority for a variety of policy areas, and established specific procedures for citizen participation in municipal decision making. Because municipal governments did not exist at all in most areas of Bolivia before 1994, there were very few struggles to control or democratize municipal power. Struggles for local power were widespread prior to 1994, but they focused on other institutions such as peasant federations, unions, schools, marketing networks and informal social power relations. Municipal governments have had a much longer presence in rural Ecuador and Peru but have only been elected through universal suffrage since 1979 and 1980, respectively. In many rural municipalities, the opportunity to elect mayors and municipal councilors was the most important institutional change that led peasant and Indigenous groups to fight for municipal power. Indeed, most of the struggles for municipal power analyzed in this book began with the first municipal elections under conditions of

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Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

universal suffrage in their respective countries. However, it is essential to make clear that struggles over local power have had much deeper roots; it was simply with the advent of universal suffrage in municipal elections that those struggles began to focus on the control of municipal institutions. A second important element of political decentralization concerns the creation of new institutions for citizen participation in municipal decision making. Andrea Cornwall and other scholars associated with the Institute for Development Studies have distinguished between two different kinds of spaces for citizen participation in government decision making: “invited spaces” created from above and “popular or autonomous spaces” created from below, and they argue that the dynamics of these distinct types of participatory space need to be understood differently (Cornwall 2002: 1; Brock et al. 2001). Similarly, Van Cott (2008) highlighted the differences between the legal frameworks for decentralization in Ecuador and Bolivia. In Ecuador, decentralization has involved no specific measures to promote the deepening of democracy in municipal governance. A minimalist but very flexible legal framework for municipal governance allows municipal governments a wide degree of freedom to experiment with new institutions for citizen participation but imposes very few regulations to encourage citizen involvement in local governance. As a result, the emergence of new institutions to increase citizen involvement in municipal governance resulted entirely from local sui generis processes in specific municipalities that can be understood only by analyzing local factors. By contrast, Bolivia’s 1994 Law of Popular Participation and subsequent legal reforms have created a strict framework of regulations that impose from above specific mechanisms for citizen participation, which makes bottom-up experimentation more difficult. However, while national laws imposed a uniform institutional design on all municipal governments in the country, the actual functioning of those institutions and the extent to which other institutions have been created to deepen municipal democracy requires careful analysis of local power relations. Similarly, in Peru, decentralization initiatives were accompanied by specific reforms to increase citizen involvement in municipal governance, most notably the 2003 Law of Participatory Budgets. Significantly, in both Bolivia and Peru, there have been wide variations in the extent to which the new institutions for citizen participation have actually promoted more democratic political behavior. Moreover, the national imposition of a common set of institutions for citizen participation in all municipalities has tended to displace local sui generis institutional innovations and has

Introduction

25

made it more difficult for local actors to experiment with alternative institutional arrangements for popular involvement in municipal decision making, a concern also raised by Goldfrank (2007) and Van Cott (2008). Administrative decentralization—that is, the transfer of administrative responsibilities from central to municipal governments— also has important implications for municipal democratization because it determines the degree of jurisdiction that municipal governments can exercise over issues that can generate serious political cleavages and conflicts. Municipal democracy is important to the extent that municipal governments have jurisdiction over issues that matter to local populations. In settings in which municipal governments have no authority over issues that divide local populations or affect the interests of locally powerful actors, municipal democratization may be quite compatible with highly unequal patterns of social, economic and political power. However, as municipal governments become responsible for the delivery of a broader range of goods and services and new areas of regulation and policymaking, the possibility of serious conflict—and the importance of local power relations to municipal governance—increases substantially. Finally, fiscal decentralization, or the transfer of financial resources from central to sub-national governments—the most widely cited indicator of decentralization—seems to have important but only indirect impacts on municipal democratization.10 There is certainly no direct connection between the resources available to municipal governments and the depth of democracy, but competition over municipal power clearly has increased as monetary transfers to municipal governments have grown. However, in many cases the result of increased political competition has been a growth in the number of individual power brokers seeking access to municipal resources and a fragmentation of peasant and Indigenous votes rather than a strengthening of municipal democracy. While the transfers of resources to rural municipalities in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru have increased significantly over the past fifteen years, municipal budgets remain woefully inadequate in comparison with the unmet basic needs and new administrative responsibilities of municipal governments. This problem of “unfunded mandates” (Bond 2008) has sparked an additional trend that has important implications for municipal democracy. Because rural municipalities lack sufficient resources to fulfill their basic mandates, ambitious mayors have actively sought out additional financial and technical resources, primarily from aid donors and NGOs—many of which have become keen supporters of municipal decentralization.

26

Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

Municipal efforts to broker external aid have thus introduced new national and international actors into the field of forces that shape municipal governance and democratization—though not always in positive ways. In some cases, aid donors and NGOs have given crucial political and technical support to democratization efforts and have contributed resources that have helped to legitimate participatory forms of governance; in other cases, they have imposed external views of how democratic institutions should be designed and have even taken over the leadership of municipal democratization efforts. Overview of the Book

The six case studies of Indigenous and peasant struggles for municipal power are analyzed in Chapters Two through Seven. Chapter Two examines the long and difficult struggle for municipal power by Indigenous peasants in the municipality of Guamote, in the highland province of Chimborazo in central Ecuador. Guamote experienced a profound transformation of social and political power from the hands of a tiny elite of neo-feudal landowners that dominated local government until the late 1970s into the hands of a new elite of politically savvy Indigenous leaders. The changes in economic, social and political power relations that made possible the transition from neo-feudal to Indigenous control of Guamote’s municipal government were closely connected to the unusually thorough implementation of agrarian reform laws that redistributed agricultural land to the Indigenous majority and broke the economic and political power of the neo-feudal elite. The democratization of power relations was also facilitated by the interventions of numerous external actors—ranging from left political parties to radical Catholic priests, to progressive NGOs—that helped to organize the local Indigenous population as collective political actors. The experience of Guamote also highlights the ways in which some of the factors that initially facilitated municipal democratization—such as poor conditions for agricultural production and peasant differentiation— subsequently came to pose serious challenges to democratic deepening. Indeed, as a result of Guamote’s difficult ecological and geographic setting, Indigenous leaders in the municipal government found the promotion of local economic development to be an almost impossible challenge. Moreover, the gradual process of economic differentiation that contributed to the emergence of the well-educated Indigenous leaders who took on positions of municipal authority also enabled them to dominate municipal decision-making with few effective checks from the rest of the local population.

Introduction

27

Chapter Three examines the very different history of local governance in the municipality of Cotacachi in Ecuador’s northern highland province of Imbabura. Although agrarian reform laws were never implemented in Cotacachi and land distribution remains highly unequal, its municipal government has received international recognition for initiatives to promote citizen participation and to defend local residents against multinational mining corporations. The chapter examines the factors behind the apparent contradiction between the extremely unequal relations of economic power in Cotacachi and a highly participatory municipal government. The chapter clearly demonstrates that highly unequal power relations do not necessarily block the democratization of some elements of municipal governance, but powerful economic actors can and do seriously constrain the jurisdiction of municipal governments and the specific policy areas in which they are able to act. In Cotacachi, powerful landowners were able to keep key political issues such as property taxation and the regulation of water and chemical pesticides off the municipal agenda. Chapter Four, researched and written with Gonzalo Colque, shifts attention to the efforts of Aymara peasants in the recently created municipality of Jesús de Machaca in the Bolivian altiplano to merge reconstructed forms of Indigenous governance with the complex system of laws that regulate municipal governments in Bolivia. The chapter pays particular attention to the ways in which unique land tenure arrangements and a centuries-long struggle for political autonomy shaped local economic and social power relations and converged in the context of Bolivia’s 1994 Law of Popular Participation to create an opportunity for the creation of the new municipality and subsequent efforts to govern it in accordance with Indigenous norms of decision making. It also examines the serious tensions between western and Indigenous forms of governance, and the dilemmas that the control of municipal power poses for Indigenous organizations. Chapter Five examines the vicissitudes of municipal governance and the deep tensions between peasant leaders, non-governmental organizations, political parties and municipal politicians in their respective efforts to control municipal power in the municipality of Mizque, in Bolivia’s Cochabamba department. As a result of initiatives by a Cochabamba NGO that effectively controlled municipal power for ten years, municipal governance practices in Mizque became key elements of Bolivia’s 1994 Law of Popular Participation, and during the 1990s it was one of the most widely touted municipal success stories in the country. However, tensions rooted in the unequal relations of economic and political power between peasant leaders on the one hand,

28

Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

and on the other hand the Cochabamba NGO and its representatives in the municipal government, ultimately ended the ten-year experiment and opened a new chapter in the history of municipal power. The NGO had carefully engineered a shift in political power away from the old townbased commercial elite that had dominated municipal power since Bolivia’s 1953 Agrarian Reform Law undermined the power of quasifeudal landlords. However, by the early 2000s the increased political power of Mizque’s peasant federation—in part a product of efforts by the NGO—in association with the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) political party enabled peasant leaders to force the NGO out of power and to claim control of the municipal government for themselves, although without support from NGOs or any other outside actors. Chapter Six analyzes the shift from a highly clientelist system of municipal governance to more democratic forms of decision making and the subsequent return to clientelism in the municipality of Limatambo, in the southern highland department of Cuzco, Peru. The municipality of Limatambo gained national attention because of the efforts of a charismatic NGO staff member who was elected as mayor for three consecutive terms in office during the 1990s, and who implemented a series of significant pro-peasant initiatives that abruptly ended the control of municipal power by the local elite of town-based landowners and merchants. The chapter highlights the ways in which agrarian reform in Peru weakened but did not destroy the economic and political power of local agricultural elites, which retained sufficient power to undermine the democratic initiatives of the pro-peasant mayor. Significantly, the deepening of municipal democracy in Limatambo took place during a period characterized by the extreme centralization of political power and active hostility towards municipal democratization by then-President Alberto Fujimori. Ironically, the municipal democratization process broke down in the early 2000s, precisely when Peru’s national government began to decentralize and implemented national legislation to promote citizen participation in municipal decision making. Indeed, the nation-wide reforms that were implemented in the early 2000s to promote municipal democratization actually weakened municipal democracy in Limatambo by replacing institutions that had been created by the grassroots with much less participatory institutions created by central government bureaucrats in Lima. Chapter Seven explores the history of municipal governance in the isolated municipality of Haquira, in Peru’s southern highland department of Apurímac, in the context of changes in local power relations from the 1920s to the early 2000s. Like Limatambo, Haquira

Introduction

29

gained national attention in the 1990s as a result of initiatives by an NGO staff member-turned-mayor to engage the local peasant population in municipal decision making. Although there was no history of largescale landholding in Haquira, municipal politics had long been controlled by a local elite of medium-scale landowners and merchants. It was only during the 1980s, in the wake of the political violence inflicted by Sendero Luminoso guerrillas and state military forces in Haquira, that many of the elite families fled the area and political power relations began to shift in favor of the peasant majority. When Peru’s civil war ended in the mid-1990s, NGO staff members and closely associated peasant leaders were able to take advantage of the new political space to establish a series of institutional changes aimed at increasing peasant involvement in municipal decision making. Although municipal political power remained firmly under the control of peasant leaders, the institutional changes pioneered in the 1990s failed to resonate with the local population and non-participatory, clientelist forms of governance were re-established under peasant leadership. Significantly, as in Limatambo, municipal democratization initiatives in Haquira collapsed just as Peru’s national government implemented measures intended to increase citizen involvement in municipal governance and national government reforms ostensibly intended to promote municipal democratization actually weakened it. Chapter Eight concludes the book with a comparative analysis of the central factors behind the relative success and failure of struggles to control and democratize municipal power in the rural Andes. The chapter also responds to the questions posed at the beginning of this chapter about the forms of municipal democracy that are emerging in the rural Andes and their implications for the material well-being and political identities of rural populations. The chapter also highlights the difficult challenges and contradictions that confront Indigenous and peasant groups after they have taken control of municipal governments.

Notes 1 According to the World Bank (2007: 290–291), rural and urban poverty levels in the three countries were: Bolivia—rural poverty: 77.3 percent, urban poverty: 53.8 percent; Ecuador—rural poverty: 56.0 percent, urban poverty: 19.0 percent; Peru—rural poverty: 67 percent, urban poverty: 46.1 percent. The national censuses on which the World Bank relies are somewhat outdated and should be interpreted as very approximate. Nevertheless, they give a clear indication of the differences between urban and rural poverty levels.

30

Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

2 Marx famously asserted in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that French peasants in the mid-nineteenth century were isolated from one another and were thus incapable of political action (1963 [1852]: 123–124). 3 Proposed reforms include ward-based electoral systems, the direct election of mayors, the separation of national and local elections, the elimination of systems of voting by closed party lists, and the abolition of requirements to contest municipal elections through political parties. 4 See, for example, March and Olsen (1984); Evans, Reuschemeyer and Skocpol (1985); Pierson and Skocpol (2002); Goodin and Klingeman (1996); and Boin (2008) for a concise review. 5 See, for example, Ejdesgaard Jeppesen (2002); Gelles (2000); Goudsmit (2006); Harvey (2002); Lagos (1994); McNeish (2001, 2002); Orlove (1980); Rasnake (1988); Rockefeller (1998); Roper (2003); Seligman (1995); Smith (1989); Striffler (2002). 6 Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens propose a “relative class power approach” to democratization (1992: 47). 7 Foucault’s own writing varies between explanations of governmentality as a highly structured, totalizing process and more flexible descriptions in which there is greater room for oppositional agency or transgression. Bevir (1999: 25) distinguishes between Foucault’s “excitable” and “composed” writing on governmentality to highlight these differences. I thank Molly den Heyer for bringing this distinction to my attention. 8 Two cases—the municipality of Bolívar de Carchi in Ecuador and the municipality of Potosí in Bolivia—are not discussed here for simple reasons of space. The case of Bolívar is examined in Cameron (2003a, 2003b and 2005). 9 For comparative perspectives on decentralization in the three countries, see Carrión (2003) and O’Neill (2005). On decentralization in Bolivia, see: Booth (1997), Grindle (2000), Molina Monasterios (1997); Van Cott (2000). On decentralization in Ecuador, see Barrera, Gallegos and Rodríguez (1999); Muñoz (1999); Ojeda Segovia (1998, 2000, 2002, 2004); Harbers and Illerhues (2006). On decentralization in Peru, see Gonzales de Olarte (2004); Grupo Propuesta Ciudadana (2006); Planas (1998). 10 World Bank statistics indicate that in 2004, municipal governments accounted for approximately thirty-five percent of public spending in Bolivia, twenty percent in Ecuador and fifteen percent in Peru—up from single-digit figures in the early 1980s. (www1.worldbank.org/publicscector/ decentralization).

2 Municipal Democratization After Agrarian Reform in Guamote, Ecuador

Once a bastion of socio-economic and ethnic inequality and of servile social relations, the municipality of Guamote, located in Ecuador’s central highland province of Chimborazo, was recognized internationally in the 1990s as the site of one of Ecuador’s most participatory and inclusive municipal governments. In the wake of a profound redistribution of land and local social and economic power from semi-feudal estate owners to the local Indigenous peasant majority,1 Indigenous leaders in Guamote gained control of the municipal government following the election of the municipality’s first Indigenous mayor, Mariano Curicama, in 1992.2 Curicama’s election symbolized not only the transfer of municipal power into Indigenous hands, but also a remarkable attempt to deepen democracy and to institutionalize new spaces for citizen engagement in—and control over—local governance. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the municipality created a series of institutions with innovative participatory designs that promised to radically increase the roles of local Indigenous peasant organizations in municipal decision making and to promote socially inclusive forms of local economic development. However, the transformation of local governance in Guamote was also marked by serious internal tensions and contradictions. Indeed, some of the factors that facilitated the changes in socio-economic and political power in the municipality that are explored in this chapter— such as poor ecological conditions, backward agricultural estates, high population density, peasant differentiation, and external aid—also generated new challenges for political and especially economic development. In 2007, after fifteen years of Indigenous control of local government, poverty levels were higher than ever (see Table 2.1), local political power was controlled by a small Indigenous elite that was

31

32

Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

fiercely divided along partisan and religious lines, the participatory institutions that had been created a decade earlier were effectively defunct, and most of the outside institutions that had earlier supported the democratization of local governance had withdrawn from the municipality. Although some local actors hoped that the process of local democratization could be revived under new leadership, historical legacies continued to pose serious challenges to the possibilities for democratic deepening and local development in Guamote. Table 2.1 Selected Social Data, Guamote, Ecuador Indicator Total population Rural population Self-identification as Indigenous Poverty Extreme poverty Infant mortality (x / 1000 live births) Chronic child malnutrition (under 5 years) Illiteracy (males over 15 years) Illiteracy (females over 15 years) Average years of schooling (males over 15 years) Average years of schooling (females over 15 years) Primary school attendance (males 5– 14 years) Primary school attendance (females 5–14 years) Secondary school attendance (males 12–17 years) Secondary school attendance (females 12–17 years) Houses with potable water Houses with sewage disposal Houses with electricity Agricultural workers in economically active population

1990

2001

28,058 89.2% N/I 89.2% 68.3% 122.6

35,210 95.3% 95.3% 96.1% 87.9% N/I

70.3%

N/I

33.1% 54.3%

23.9% 40.8%

2.7

3.4

1.3

2.2

79.4%

93.4%

75.7%

86.0%

12.3%

23.7%

9.1%

15.3%

9.9% 22.9% 39.3%

N/I 46.4% 80.7%

83.7%

N/I

An understanding of the vicissitudes of local governance in Guamote requires an analysis of the ways in which national and global political and economic transformations took shape at the local level, interacting with local social actors and the local ecological setting to

Municipal Democratization in Guamote, Ecuador

33

generate profound but also contradictory changes in municipal governance. The chapter begins in Section I with an analysis of transformations in the pattern of land ownership and socio-economic power in Guamote that began in the 1940s and intensified after the implementation of Ecuador’s 1964 and, especially, 1973 Agrarian Reform Laws. Section II then examines the emergence of local Indigenous peasant organizations under the influence of leftist political parties, the radical Catholic Church, the central state, and NGOs. Section III analyzes the gradual rise to local political power of an elite group of Indigenous peasant leaders and the institutional changes they implemented to create at least the appearance of a more participatory and transparent model of municipal governance in the municipality. Finally, Section IV explores the internal tensions of municipal governance in Guamote and the challenges that the municipal government and related institutions have encountered in their efforts to promote economic and social development. Agrarian Transformation and Political Power in Guamote

Prior to the implementation of Ecuador’s 1973 Agrarian Reform Law, the distribution of land in Guamote was among the most unequal in Latin America and social relations were notoriously brutal.3 Large haciendas, many of which operated according to a pre-capitalist production logic until the mid-1970s, held an almost complete monopoly on land. In fact, Guamote was one of the most thoroughly hacienda-controlled municipalities in Ecuador (Haney and Haney 1987). In 1974, the nine largest haciendas were owned by six families that controlled almost seventy-two percent of all land in the municipality. Another forty-three families, with haciendas that varied in size between 40 and 2500 hectares, controlled almost all of the remaining land. The almost three thousand peasant minifundios that represented 74.9 percent of farms in Guamote controlled only 6.6 percent of the municipality’s land, a situation that seriously restricted the productive and reproductive capacities of Indigenous peasant families and which facilitated the domination of local social and political power by the tiny hacienda elite. In its 1965 report on land tenure and agricultural development in Ecuador, the Comité Interamericano de Desarrollo Agrícola (Interamerican Committee on Agricultural Development—CIDA) described living conditions in rural Chimborazo, where Guamote is located, as “so anachronistic as to be inconceivable” and characterized the province’s haciendas as “extremely parasitic” (CIDA 1965: 275– 276). The haciendas that operated in Guamote were considered to be the

34

Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

most backward in the entire country, both in terms of their pre-capitalist production systems and their repressive labor relations (Haney and Haney 1987, cited in Bebbington 1990: 45). Table 2.2 Land Ownership in Guamote, 1974 Size of farm in hectares

# of farms

% of farms

Total hectares owned

% of land owned

Average farm size (hectares)

Under 5

2,945

74.9

6,720

6.7

2.2

5 to 10

737

18.8

4,613

4.6

6.2

10 to 20

134

3.4

1,710

1.7

12.7

20 to 50

65

1.7

2,309

2.3

35.5

50 to 100

13

0.33

847

0.8

65.1

100 to 500

19

0.48

4,186

4.2

220.3

500 to 1000

7

0.17

4,870

4.8

695.0

1000 to 2500

2

0.05

2,954

2.9

1,477.0

Over 2500 ha

6

0.15

72,385

72.0

12,000.0

Total

3,928

100

100,594

100

25.6

Source: Elaborated from INEC (1974: 145).

Hacienda production in Guamote and much of the rest of Chimborazo was characterized by minimal investments of capital in productivity enhancing technology and infrastructure. Haney and Haney referred to the “very primitive technology” of landed estates in the zone in the mid-1970s (1984: 138), while the records of the state agency responsible for agrarian reform revealed the total absence of agricultural infrastructure and machinery on many large haciendas in Guamote and the surrounding region as late as 1976–1978 (cited in Sylva 1986: 192– 193).4 Soil fertility was maintained only through the use of manure obtained from grazing sheep and cattle, and through very long fallow periods made possible by the control of vast amounts of land. 5 Moreover, hacienda profits were generally transferred out of the region or spent on imported luxury consumer goods (Gangotena 1981: 64, 84). The lack of local reinvestment meant that almost no economic

Municipal Democratization in Guamote, Ecuador

35

diversification occurred in the region and that rural infrastructure remained very poor, phenomena that had lasting repercussions for efforts to promote economic and social development in Guamote following the dissolution of the hacienda regime and rise to political power of the Indigenous peasant majority. Under the hacienda regime, land control was also the basis for labor control. For local peasants (huasipungueros), usufruct rights to a small plot of land (the huasipungo) and access to natural resources on the hacienda—such as firewood, water and pasture land—was conditional on the provision of labor to the estate. As the haciendas in Guamote held virtually monopolistic control over land, almost all of the peasant population was inscribed within the servile social and labor relations of the hacienda system (Gangotena 1981: 58–60). Hacienda access to peasant labor was further reinforced through debt obligations, systems of fictive kinship, the employment of Indigenous peasants as farm managers (mayordomos and mayorales) and an always uncertain moral economy based on small favors, loans and the sponsorship of religious festivals in peasant communities (Thurner 1993; Lentz 1986, 1988; Lyons 2006). It also bears emphasizing that the relations of exchange between peasants and landowners were not uniform among or even within haciendas in Guamote. Indigenous peasants who were trusted by hacienda owners and employed as managers generally had access to larger and better plots of land and were able to use their positions of authority for personal benefit (see Bebbington 1990: 155). Those variations in personal relationships, peasant land access and peasant political authority had a significant impact on the distribution of socioeconomic and political power within Indigenous peasant communities after the haciendas were broken up and municipal authority shifted into Indigenous hands. Monopoly control of land in Guamote enabled local hacienda owners to control almost all other aspects of economic and political life in the municipality, including the administration of justice and the local offices of the central state, all with the blessings and ideological support of the Catholic Church.6 Even within peasant communities, positions of social power related to ceremonial rituals and cultural traditions were heavily influenced by the estate owners (see Thurner 1993; Lentz 1986, 1988). The system of formal political and institutional control by hacienda owners in Guamote was further reinforced by what might be termed the ‘infrapolitics’ of the powerful (cf. Scott 1985)—the interconnected systems of subtle but nonetheless symbolically significant codes of language and gesture that buttressed the social and political power of the white-mestizo minority. Indigenous peasants were

36

Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

expected to tip their hats to white and mestizo residents, to address them with their gaze lowered in a gesture of subservience, and in some cases to kiss their hands—but without actual physical contact, and when shaking hands, Indigenous peasants were expected to keep their hand underneath their poncho so as not to soil the skin of white and mestizo superiors (see Maynard 1966: 4; Tolen 1995). In turn, the white-mestizo minority used diminutive forms of speech with Indigenous peasants, encoding social inequality within the structure of spoken language. Much less subtle means of enforcing the social hierarchy included the periodic beating and rape of Indigenous peasants by estate owners and local mestizos.7 Indeed, academic research conducted in the 1960s consistently identified social relations in Guamote as among the most brutal in Ecuador (see Burgos 1970; Maynard 1966). The hacienda regime in Guamote broke down very gradually over the course of the 1960s and 1970s as local estate owners proved unable to make the shift from semi-feudal to capitalist production systems that had begun in other parts of highland Ecuador in the 1920s and 1930s and which had been promoted by the country’s 1964 and 1973 Agrarian Reform Laws. The failure of local hacendados to modernize production and labor relations was not, however, a simple expression of backwardness, since some estate owners did attempt to modernize production (Sylva 1986). Rather, it resulted primarily from ecological, social, and institutional obstacles to capitalist transformation in the region. Ecological conditions seriously constrained agricultural productivity in the municipality. Guamote’s high altitude (3,000–3,800 meters) means that growing seasons are short and the risk of cropdamaging frost is high. Moreover, most of the land in the municipality is considered inappropriate for agriculture. According to a 1974 report by the Instituto Ecuatoriano de Reforma Agraria y Colonización (Ecuadorian Institute of Agrarian Reform and Colonization—IERAC), seventy percent of the land in Guamote was “lowland paramo with sandy and dry soil” which made it unsuitable for crop production (cited in Sylva 1986: 114). The very hilly terrain and sandy soil also make land in the municipality highly susceptible to erosion from the strong winds that affect the area. Already in 1957, ninety percent of land in the municipality was considered to be suffering from erosion (Peñaherrera 1957, cited in CIDA 1965: 277). By the 1990s, as a result of these ecological factors, much of the municipality’s land area was a virtual desert. Relatively low amounts of annual rainfall, including extended periods of drought, further compounded the difficulties of agricultural production. Moreover, relative isolation from the major agricultural markets of Quito, Guayaquil, Riobamba and Cuenca caused by poor

Municipal Democratization in Guamote, Ecuador

37

road infrastructure created serious marketing challenges for local estates (Sylva 1986: 117). In sum, in the context of local geographic challenges, Guamote’s hacienda owners were unwilling to make any serious productivity enhancing capital investments on their estates (Sylva 1986: 115), a logic that continued to pose serious challenges for local economic development long after the breakdown of the hacienda regime. Indigenous peasant resistance against the hacienda regime in Guamote became intense in the late 1950s and early 1960s. That resistance was in part a response to growing population density in the context of monopolistic land control, which meant that alternative means of access to agricultural land and livelihoods were not available. 8 As Sylva argued, peasant mobilization against haciendas in Ecuador was most intense in the areas where land was most concentrated in the hands of estate owners (1986: 153, 169). Similarly, reliance on repressive forms of labor control at the historical juncture in which many agricultural estates in highland Ecuador were shifting to less repressive systems of wage relations generated particularly intense resentment towards the hacienda regime in Guamote. Indeed, Sylva found that peasant mobilization was most radical on the haciendas with the most repressive mechanisms of labor control and least intense on those haciendas that adopted capitalist labor relations (1986: 88, 126), findings similar to those of Cervone in the neighboring parish of Tixán, to the immediate south of Guamote (1996: 164). The most prevalent forms of peasant resistance to landlord domination were subtle, individual and generally hidden attacks on the productive apparatus of the hacienda—or what Scott describes as “everyday forms of peasant resistance” (Scott 1986, 1990; Colburn 1989). Belying the outward appearance of passivity and docility, everyday forms of Indigenous peasant resistance in Guamote included the theft of grain, seeds, and even livestock from estate owners, the gradual extension of usufruct plots onto hacienda property, the grazing of sheep on hacienda pastures, and ‘footdragging’ (Sylva 1986; Bebbington 1990; Interviews in Guamote: June to December 1999). Although these collectively sanctioned forms of hidden resistance were primarily symbolic as individual acts, because they were widespread, they seriously reduced the productivity of hacienda-based agriculture and weakened the capacity of pre-capitalist haciendas to make the shift to capitalist forms of production (see Sylva 1986: 37). The gradual movement towards the dissolution of the hacienda regime in Guamote was further propelled by Ecuador’s 1963 Agrarian Reform Law. The law was designed primarily to promote the capitalist

38

Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

modernization of agriculture in Ecuador by abolishing pre-capitalist labor relations based on the huasipungo and other forms of servicetenancy (Barsky 1984; Zevallos 1989). While the 1963 Agrarian Reform Law had almost no effect on the distribution of land in Guamote, 9 it did establish a legal basis for peasant struggles for the payment of wages and access to land. As the system of feudal labor control began to break down, a pattern of temporary labor migration from Guamote and other parts of rural Chimborazo to the coastal city of Guayaquil emerged, which exposed many young male peasants to labor organizers affiliated with the Socialist and Communist Parties (see Lentz 1986, 1988). At the same time, as some peasants acquired legal possession of their own small plots of land in the wake of the 1964 Agrarian Reform, they also began to resist pressures to work on their former haciendas, and when they did continue to provide labor their productivity was often deliberately very low (Sylva 1986: 120–121). The difficulty of securing access to a stable labor supply further eroded the productive capacity of many haciendas in Guamote to the point of undermining their economic viability (Sylva 1986: 122–123). Indigenous peasants in Guamote also made other, much more explicit efforts to undermine the hacienda regime and increase their access to agricultural land. Indeed, Indigenous peasant mobilization against the hacienda regime marked Guamote as one of the most conflictive areas in Ecuador (see Sylva 1986: 118; Bebbington 1990: 77–80). Historically, the area had been a focal point of Indigenous peasant rebellion, perhaps most dramatically in 1790 and 1803, when thousands of peasants rebelled against the imposition of new taxes by the Spanish colonial administration (Moreno Yáñez 1976, cited in Van Aken 1981: 436). Although those and other subsequent rebellions were isolated and brutally repressed by landlords and the state, they remained in the historical memory of Indigenous peasants in the municipality and helped to inspire more systematic resistance and rebellion in the twentieth century. The mobilization of Indigenous peasants that led to the final downfall of the landed estates in Guamote was initiated and supported by a variety of external actors, including the Ecuadorian Communist Party and the radical Catholic Church. Beginning in the 1930s, activists from the Communist Party worked to organize peasants in Guamote and other parts of Chimborazo into a rural union movement that struggled primarily for the payment of wages, which were required by Ecuador’s 1932 Labor Code but generally not paid by hacienda owners (Sylva 1986: 32–34). In 1944, the Communist Party and the Confederación de Trabajadores Ecuatorianos (Ecuadorian Confederation of Labor—CTE)

Municipal Democratization in Guamote, Ecuador

39

created the Federación Ecuatoriana de Indios (Federation of Ecuadorian Indians—FEI), which took over the leading role in organizing Indigenous peasant communities and provided political and legal support to the political struggle for wage payments. The FEI supported the first peasant strike in Chimborazo in 1953 on the hacienda Galte in Guamote. In 1968, a second major strike began on the hacienda Pul, which spread to other large haciendas and at one point obstructed more than half of Guamote’s agricultural production (Sylva 1986: 127). In 1970, after running more than two years, a second peasant strike on hacienda Galte succeeded in breaking up the estate, which sparked an explosion of other strikes and hacienda occupations and ultimately led to the breakup of other large haciendas in the municipality (Sylva 1986: 169). The political influence of the FEI began to decline in the late 1960s when the Catholic Church in Chimborazo, under the leadership of the Bishop of Riobamba, Monsignor Leonidas Proaño, began to promote forms of peasant organization and activism that paid more attention to Indigenous traditions and ethnic discrimination.10 Proaño, who became known as the ‘Bishop of the Indians,’ interpreted the Catholic Church’s adoption of a ‘preferential option for the poor’ at the Second Episcopal Conference in Medellín in 1968 to require active support for Indigenous peasant organization and the struggle for the redistribution of agricultural land as well as support for the revival of Indigenous language and cultural traditions. In Guamote, the Church was represented by a particularly radical priest, who settled in the municipality in 1970 and quietly encouraged Indigenous peasants to take over the haciendas on which they worked. The initial response of the Ecuadorian state to Indigenous peasant strikes and land takeovers was to support the hacienda owners, or at least not to interfere with their efforts to repress challenges to their control of land and local power. However, by the late 1960s the central state became increasingly reluctant to support Guamote’s pre-capitalist hacienda owners.11 In addition to the impact of Indigenous peasant mobilization and the concerns of the Ecuadorian state to increase agricultural production, pressure and technical assistance from the U.S. government to implement agrarian reforms in order to undermine the spread of communism conspired in favor of the implementation of Ecuador’s 1973 Agrarian Reform Law in Guamote. The reform spelled the end of the hacienda regime in the municipality (see Sylva 1986: 170–171). Following the passage of that law and in direct response to Indigenous peasant mobilization, IERAC, the state agency responsible for administering agrarian reform, made Guamote specifically a

40

Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

“priority zone” (Sylva 1986: 148), which resulted in the high proportion of land redistribution seen in the municipality (see Table 2.3). Table 2.3 Percentages of Land Area and Percentages of Haciendas Over 100 Hectares Affected by Agrarian Reform Laws in Chimborazo Province, 1964–1988 Percentage of land area affected (A)

Percentage of haciendas over 100 hectares affected (B)

Guamote

52.9

54.3

Riobamba

4.6

38.8

Colta

23.6

32.3

Alausí

15.6

17.7

Chunchi

9.1

5.0

Guano

0.7

2.5

Total for Chimborazo

19.3

N/A

Municipality

Source: A: Banco Central del Ecuador (1988: 92), cited in Bebbington (1990: 80); B: Zamosc (1995: 82–83).

The transformation of land ownership that followed agrarian reform in Guamote was profound. IERAC oversaw the transfer of 52.9 percent of the land area in Guamote from haciendas to Indigenous peasants, a larger proportion than in any other municipality in the province of Chimborazo (see Table 2.3), which saw more of its land area redistributed than most other provinces in Ecuador. By 1980, all of the large haciendas in Guamote had been either broken up by IERAC or sold to peasants, generally under extreme political pressure. In all, almost seventy percent of the municipality’s land passed into peasant hands (Vidal León 1982: 62). Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, the sale of hacienda lands—facilitated by financial support from various NGOs—saw the last of the municipality’s estates broken up and sold to peasant farmers (see Vallejo, Navarro and Villaverde 1996; North, Kit and Koep 2003). By the late 1990s, land distribution in Guamote was relatively equal in comparison with other parts of the country: landholdings averaged 2.7 hectares per household and the largest holdings were 35 hectares (Municipalidad de Guamote 1999: 92). Nevertheless, despite the redistribution of land, significant

Municipal Democratization in Guamote, Ecuador

41

improvements in the incomes and social well-being of Indigenous peasants in the municipality were blocked by the combination of local ecological and climatic conditions, the small size of peasant plots, the lack of irrigation and other productive infrastructure, and inappropriately designed, poorly implemented and underfunded rural development programs. Social and political power relations in Guamote changed only gradually following the dissolution of the hacienda regime in the municipality. As the haciendas broke up, control of political and social power in the municipality was assumed by local town-based mestizo residents—merchants, money lenders, and teachers—who used a variety of exploitative strategies to maintain their positions in the social hierarchy. Mestizo money lenders (chulqueros) and alcohol vendors (chicheros) imposed usurious credit arrangements that frequently resulted in the loss of land, which was offered as collateral by Indigenous peasants. Local school teachers and local state officials expected ‘gifts’—know as camaris—of eggs, chickens, and even sheep in return for their ‘public’ services. Fictive kinship relations between mestizos and Indigenous peasants also operated unequally to provide the former with easy access to labor and cheap agricultural goods while the latter received access to credit, but generally only on the exploitative terms described above. Mestizos who operated in the local agricultural market and provided transportation services were also notoriously abusive and exploitative of Indigenous peasants. Moreover, these informal social practices were embedded in patterns of verbal and physical interaction that reinforced the social and ethnic hierarchy by infantilizing and humiliating Indigenous peasants.12 However, two parallel processes, both of which began in the late 1960s, helped to shift social and political power towards the Indigenous peasant majority in Guamote. The first process, discussed below, involved the out-migration of mestizo families from Guamote. The second process, which is the focus of Section II, involved the gradual formation and strengthening of local Indigenous peasant organizations that challenged the political and social domination of the municipality by the village-based mestizo minority. An important demographic shift followed the transformation of land control in Guamote and further facilitated the gradual rise to political power of Indigenous peasant leaders. Even before the 1964 Agrarian Reform Law, early steps towards economic modernization in Ecuador had prompted the most prosperous mestizo families in the town centers of Guamote and other rural municipalities in Chimborazo to migrate permanently to larger urban centers, primarily to Riobamba, Quito, and

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Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

Guayaquil. The out-migration of local mestizos accelerated following the construction of the Pan-American Highway in the 1960s, which displaced the Quito-Guayaquil railroad that had been the basis for the livelihoods of many mestizo agricultural traders in Guamote and other highland towns along the railroad.13 As the hacienda regime began to crumble in the 1960s and 1970s, the exodus of village-based mestizos further accelerated. The decline of the hacienda order meant the disappearance of economic opportunities and positions of power for mestizo town folk within that regime. At the same time, both concern for their children’s education and fear inspired by the growing numbers of land seizures by Indigenous peasants provided additional incentives to leave the municipality’s three village centers for larger towns and cities. The net impact of mestizo emigration from Guamote was a decline in the size and wealth of the municipality’s town-based mestizo population. As Table 2.4 indicates, between 1950 and 1990, the population of the town center of Guamote shrank from 14.4 percent to 6.4 percent of the municipality’s total population, while the combined population of the municipality’s two smaller towns, Palmira and Cebadas, declined from 3.1 percent to 1.9 percent between 1974 and 1990. The mestizo exodus from Guamote had important political implications for the subsequent efforts of the municipality’s Indigenous peasant population to gain control of the municipal government. The ability of local mestizo residents to get themselves elected—and their capacity to prevent Indigenous community members’ ascent to municipal power—gradually declined as the mestizo population decreased. Table 2.4: Demographic Change in Guamote, 1974–1990 Percentage of Municipal Population Guamote

1950

1962

1974

1982

1990

Town center of Guamote

14.4

13.2

10.8

9.0

6.4

Smaller towns (Palmira, Cebadas)

n/a

n/a

3.1

2.1

1.9

Rural communities

n/a

n/a

86.1

88.9

91.7

Total

100

100

100

100

100

Source: Elaborated from Carrasco (1997: 35) and Bebbington (1990: 48).

Municipal Democratization in Guamote, Ecuador

43

External Interventions and the Emergence of Indigenous Peasant Organizations

The formation of legally recognized Indigenous peasant organizations was integral to the gradual shift in the balance of social and political power relations in Guamote. The central role played by external actors in Indigenous peasant organization, however, had contradictory implications for the subsequent political and economic development of the municipality, as the paternalistic nature of many of the external development interventions also promoted a culture of dependence and fostered clientelist leadership and competition among local organizations for the control of development projects and outside resources. Moreover, the failure of external actors to encourage Indigenous women to organize or even to participate actively in local decision making contributed to the already profound male biases within the municipality. These phenomena continue to pose serious challenges for future social and economic development efforts in the municipality. Formal organizations of Indigenous peasants in Guamote were first established in the 1950s under the leadership of activists from the Communist Party and the Federation of Ecuadorian Indians (FEI). Building on pre-existing communal traditions, these activists played key roles in the mobilization of Indigenous peasant communities, first around the issue of unpaid wages and later, in the 1960s and 1970s, in the land occupations and legal battles for the implementation of agrarian reform laws. In the 1970s the radical Catholic Church took over the central organizing role and also incorporated explicit emphasis on issues connected to ethnicity—such as language and racism—into its organizing efforts. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was the framework of legal and financial incentives created by the Ecuadorian state, combined with the organizational efforts of public and private development agencies, that most profoundly shaped the form and structure of Indigenous peasant organizations in Guamote. While the vast array of external development interventions in the municipality generated a very large number of community organizations and helped to produce an important cadre of powerful Indigenous leaders, those interventions generally failed to strengthen the grassroots base of Guamote’s Indigenous peasant organizations, a shortcoming that became painfully clear in the early 2000s. The most important institutional form of Indigenous peasant organization in Guamote and throughout the Ecuadorian highlands is the comuna (commune), provided for by Ecuador’s 1937 Ley de Comunas. However, it was not until the period of agrarian reform that a new

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generation of leaders prompted Indigenous peasant communities to abandon traditional forms of organization, encouraged by hacienda owners, which had focused energy on customary festivals. Instead, peasant communities began to legally constitute themselves as comunas,14 a status that facilitated access to state resources for local development.15 Initially, the number of comunas and other forms of legally recognized organization in Guamote corresponded directly with the fifty-two peasant communities that had been inscribed within the municipality’s haciendas. However, as a result of internal community conflicts, efforts to access external resources, and the political aspirations of community leaders, the number rose steadily to seventynine in 1989, 121 in 1999, and 162 in 2007. The financial incentives for Indigenous peasant communities to seek legal status as a comuna increased significantly in the early 1980s when, in the wake of agrarian reform, the state created new sources of funding to promote rural development that were conditional on the formation of state-sanctioned peasant organizations. In 1979—only months before the transition of power from military authorities to the elected civilian government of Jaime Roldos and Osvaldo Hurtado and under intense pressure from large landowners—the state passed the Ley de Fomento y Desarrollo Agrario (Law of Agricultural Promotion and Development), which marked the end of agrarian reform in Ecuador and the shift to the less controversial strategy of ‘integrated rural development’ which focused on the (inadequate) provision of rural infrastructure, credit and technical assistance to make agriculture more productive (Haney and Haney 1987: 20; de Janvry 1981: 224; Martínez 2003; Bretón 1997). The state agencies created to promote integrated rural development made Guamote a priority zone for their efforts, partly as an attempt to undermine the roots of Indigenous peasant radicalism, but also as a reflection of the genuine concern of progressive officials within those agencies about social conditions in the municipality. The Fondo de Desarrollo Rural Marginal (Fund for Marginal Rural Development— FODERUMA), created in 1978 under the direction of Ecuador’s Central Bank to channel credit to peasant farmers, set up its first project in Guamote (Bebbington 1990: 82). The Secretaría de Desarrollo Rural Integrado (Secretariat of Integrated Rural Development—SEDRI), the key agency created by the center-left Roldos-Hurtado administration in 1980 to promote rural development, also located one of its twenty-two major rural development initiatives in Guamote. Both agencies made peasant organization at the community and inter-community level a condition for the distribution of rural development resources.

Municipal Democratization in Guamote, Ecuador

45

The influx of new resources for development not only created an important incentive for Indigenous peasants to organize, but the state agencies themselves also deliberately fostered local peasant organizations. SEDRI and FODERUMA sought to work with and create federations of community-based peasant organizations, known in Ecuador as Organizaciones de Segundo Grado (Second Level Organizations—OSGs), that could operate on a broader scale than individual comunas. Observers of this process have argued that in some cases Indigenous peasants were “practically forced to organize” (Sylva 1991: 53) and that OSGs were often “imposed” upon them (Dubly 1985: 18, cited in Sylva 1991: 253, endnote 5). When state-led rural development efforts were curtailed as a result of neoliberal structural adjustment programs (SAPs) in the mid-1980s, NGOs continued to promote the formation of new OSGs. Significantly, rather than working to strengthen existing OSGs, both state agencies and NGOs often preferred to sponsor new organizations with leaders who were willing to accept their ideological perspectives and project plans. For example, Korovkin explains how FODERUMA, which was reluctant to work with the politically powerful Guamote OSG Jatun Ayllu, sponsored the formation of a more conciliatory organization to operate as its local partner—the Unión de Campesinos Indígenas de Guamote (the Union of Indigenous Peasants of Guamote—UCIG) (1997: 40). Nowhere in Ecuador was the phenomenon of state and NGO-sponsored OSGs more pronounced than in Guamote. By 1999, twelve OSGs had been created in Guamote—the highest number in both absolute and per capita terms in any municipality in highland Ecuador (see Bretón 2001: 134–135); by 2002 there were sixteen OSGs in the municipality. Far from a quantitative indicator of a strong civil society, the proliferation of peasant organizations in Guamote represented growing divisions and internal competition between and within the Indigenous peasant organizations. OSGs came to represent vehicles for the personal political aspirations of local Indigenous leaders and mechanisms for the quasiclientelist administration of development resources for state agencies and NGOs. The leaders of OSGs jealously protected their right to represent member communities which they tended to manage as clientelist caudillos. They also refused to cooperate on projects that required them to cede authority to other leaders and competed for access to external resources, thereby undermining rather than strengthening local political and administrative capacities. As one Indigenous activist in Guamote explained to me in a 2007 interview, “peasant leaders refer to my bases, my organizations, and my communities as if they were their personal property.” In 2000, Ecuadorian law mandated the election of

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Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

councils to represent rural parishes, a sub-municipal administrative category. Although intended to be a democratic reform, in Guamote and many other rural municipalities, the law simply created another set of Indigenous peasant organizations whose leaders competed with already existing peasant federations to implement projects and to broker resources (see Larrea, Andrade and Bonilla 2006: 51). In the context of the clientelist promotion of peasant organizations by state agencies, NGOs and local peasant leaders, many Indigenous peasants in Guamote came to see local organization from a purely instrumental and apolitical perspective as a necessary means of accessing external resources in a context defined by state agencies and NGOs that only worked with ‘organized’ communities (Bebbington 1990: 85). This does not mean that some local leaders did not also understand organization in more political terms. For example, by the early 1990s, two OSGs, UCIG and Jatun Ayllu, had developed a high degree of administrative autonomy from external actors as well as a powerful political consciousness among their members. However, many of the other OSGs sponsored by external actors failed to become effective either as representatives of their member communities or as agents of local economic and social development, and by the early 2000s clientelist management by local Indigenous authorities had weakened even the strongest OSGs in the municipality. The problems and contradictions associated with state and NGO-led rural development efforts in Guamote were not limited to the top-down creation of local Indigenous peasant organizations. Initially, under the Roldos-Hurtado administration, the state agencies SEDRI and FODERUMA managed to attract progressive, left-leaning professionals with a genuine commitment to improving peasant incomes and living conditions (Jordán Bucheli 1988). Indeed, the integrated rural development project initiated in Guamote by SEDRI in 1981 was widely perceived as being particularly radical, with a highly committed staff who were often accused of supporting Indigenous peasant hacienda takeovers (Bebbington 1990: 110). However, when León FebresCordero, a representative of Ecuador’s coastal export elite, was elected president in 1984, progressive staff were fired and replaced with supporters of the ruling party—the Partido Social Cristiano (Social Christian Party—PSC). Moreover, individual development projects increasingly became vehicles for clientelist vote-buying as communities were told that access to state resources for local development projects was subject to their electoral support for particular candidates (Bebbington 1990: 112; interviews in Guamote: June-October 1999). Indigenous peasant participation in the selection and design of projects

Municipal Democratization in Guamote, Ecuador

47

was extremely limited, which resulted not only in frequently inappropriate and poorly designed projects, but also in Indigenous peasant resentment even in communities where the state did provide significant resources. The lack of Indigenous peasant involvement was further aggravated by the attitudes of social and racial superiority displayed by many state development agents.16 All of these problems were compounded by the chronic under-funding of state-led rural development efforts, which disappeared almost completely following the implementation of SAPs (see North and Cameron 2003). As the state reduced its role in rural development activities, the number of NGOs operating development projects in Guamote grew steadily. By the late 1990s, Guamote had the sixth highest concentration of NGO projects of all municipalities in Ecuador (Bretón 2001: 139) and Guamote’s 1999 development plan identified fifty-one state agencies and NGOs operating in the municipality (Municipalidad de Guamote et al. 1999: 39). However, despite their progressive discourse and relative freedom from political manipulation, NGOs exhibited many of the same practices as state-based development agencies; projects were frequently implemented with little consultation or meaningful participation by Indigenous peasant communities. In that context, the influx of external resources and technical assistance had relatively little impact on peasants’ livelihoods or political capacities, but it did reinforce the power of the emerging Indigenous political elite in the municipality. The shift in emphasis from agrarian reform to ‘integrated rural development’ in Ecuador induced important changes in both leadership formation and the qualities that were valued in Indigenous peasant leaders in Guamote. The political and legal struggles for land reform required and helped to create local leaders with the capacity to mobilize large numbers of Indigenous peasants in radical forms of direct action. These were men (and a very small number of women) who could stand defiant in the face of intense pressure and violent attacks from hacienda owners and representatives of the state. The most celebrated Indigenous peasant leader from the era of land struggles in Guamote, Ambrosio Lasso, was most respected for his mobilization capacity and his ability to impose the discipline needed for successful strikes and hacienda takeovers. However, the end of the agrarian reform period in the late 1970s and the subsequent shift towards the official strategy of integrated rural development led to a devaluation of the political skills required to lead strikes and land takeovers, and to a new emphasis on the skills required to administer rural development projects and manage community-based enterprises. Fluent literacy in Spanish, accounting skills, the ability to

48

Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

put together project proposals and the cultural capacity to negotiate the details of development projects with the white-mestizo—and often foreign—staff of state agencies and NGOs became the essential skills for the new generation of Indigenous peasant leaders (see Bebbington 1990; Bretón 2001; Lentz 1986). The capacity to acquire these skills was not evenly distributed among all Indigenous peasants but rather was shaped by processes of socio-economic differentiation in peasant communities. Most importantly, the literacy skills and fluency in Spanish required of new leaders demanded at least the completion of primary if not secondary school. However, in Guamote, where economic conditions mitigated against the completion of even primary school by many children, the average number of years of schooling in 1990 was 2.7 for men and 1.3 for women (see Table 2.1). Moreover, when I asked Guamoteños about the factors that influenced the capacity of peasant families to educate their children, they all responded—without prompting—that the amount of land they owned was crucial, an observation also made by Haney and Haney (1987: 124). As Martínez (2003) points out, poverty leads to the premature use of child labor in family productive strategies, making the completion of even primary school a luxury that many families cannot afford for their children. The very high levels of chronic child malnutrition in Guamote (70.3 percent in 1990) also seriously limited the cognitive development and learning capacity of large numbers of children in the municipality (see Larrea and Freire 2002). The legitimacy of Indigenous peasant leaders in Guamote increasingly came to depend on their ability to broker external resources from the state or NGOs for local development projects. Those brokering skills required not just proficiency in Spanish but also practical knowledge of state and NGO development discourses and practices, contacts with development agency personnel, as well as strong connections with social networks in the municipality. All of these criteria required potential leaders to have a relatively permanent physical presence in their communities. This was only possible if they possessed sufficient productive assets to enable them to earn enough income locally to avoid long periods of labor migration (see Bebbington 1990: 169), a condition that excluded the vast majority of the local population.17 In addition to the material constraints on leadership formation, a cultural bias also operated against individuals who owned very little or no property—i.e. land or cattle—which prevented them from assuming top leadership positions in local Indigenous peasant organizations.

Municipal Democratization in Guamote, Ecuador

49

Although the transformation of the agrarian structure in Guamote resulted in a much more equitable pattern of land distribution than in most other parts of the country, significant inequality within the Indigenous peasant population still existed and indeed increased over time. Three main factors account for differentiation within the local Indigenous peasant population. The first factor was related to the dissolution of local haciendas. In those cases that were not mediated by IERAC, the division and sale of hacienda land was controlled by landlords and took place through the market (Gangotena 1981: 97). Those peasants who were able to raise sufficient capital (i.e. through the sale of sheep) or who were favored by their former landlords were able to acquire much larger than average plots of land. Research by Bebbington in several communities in Guamote found that it was primarily the children of those peasants that acquired larger plots of land during the period of agrarian reform who made up the new generation of community leaders (Bebbington 1990: 169). Land assets enabled them to acquire better than average levels of education and to live in their communities on a relatively permanent basis, in turn enabling them to make strong connections with local social networks and with development agency personnel (Bebbington 1990: 167–174). Capital accumulation through labor migration was a second means through which some families acquired more land and productive assets (such as trucks) than others. It was in this way that the family of Guamote’s first Indigenous mayor, Mariano Curicama, was able to purchase 35 hectares of land and to support his education and development as a local leader. Third, hacienda dissolution and land redistribution resulted in the transfer of land titles only to men; Indigenous peasant women did not directly benefit from either process and formally acquired no land. Thus, the connection between land ownership and local leadership among Indigenous men in the municipality was not similarly experienced by Indigenous women, and the leadership of peasant communities and organizations remained an almost exclusively male affair. By the early 2000s, the political implications of the relatively exclusive process of leadership development in Guamote were clear. Political power in the municipality was highly concentrated in a very small elite of Indigenous leaders who struggled for control of the municipal government and who managed both the institutions of local governance and local peasant organizations in a top-down and clientelist manner, despite using a democratic discourse and the creation of formal institutions for citizen participation. As Norman Uphoff argued in reference to Michels (1962 [1911]), those who become leaders in socioeconomic contexts characterized by poverty and poor education are

50

Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

likely themselves to have relatively higher levels of education and social status, and are likely to be reluctant to give up the benefits that come with “higher status, knowledge and income” (1996: 29). One young Indigenous leader in Guamote also attributed the concentration of local political power in the hands of a small Indigenous elite to the sociocultural legacies of the hacienda regime, a legacy also noted by Lyons (2006). The young Indigenous leader from Guamote compared Guamote’s top Indigenous authorities to the Indigenous administrators or mayordomos, who had managed peasant labor on behalf of hacienda owners: Since the era of the hacienda regime in Guamote, there were always some Indigenous peasants who managed to acquire significant power and status through their association with the hacienda, for example as mayordomo or mayoral. Those who were most intimately connected to the hacienda owners always acquired political and economic power through the control of hacienda workers. This cultural system has still not been totally eliminated. The hacienda has been eliminated, but not the cultural logic of the Indigenous mayordomo. The concentration of power—and the popular acceptance of it have not been eliminated (Interview: May 14, 2007).

In Guamote, the powerful Indigenous elite that controls the institutions of local governance and local peasant organizations remains one of the central challenges facing the broader struggle for local democracy and development in the municipality. Indigenous Peasant Political Power and the Struggle for Local Democracy

As the political and administrative capacities of the leaders of Indigenous peasant federations in Guamote grew stronger, they also began to engage in municipal electoral politics as a strategy for expanding their political power and influence over local development activities. The return to an electoral regime in 1979—after almost a decade of military rule—and the simultaneous reform of Ecuador’s electoral code that gave illiterate citizens the right to vote dramatically increased the electoral significance of the country’s rural Indigenous population and created new opportunities for Indigenous and peasant political activism. In an effort to capitalize on the new importance of Indigenous peasants as voters, various political parties, particularly those on the left, encouraged Indigenous peasant leaders to contest local elections. In Guamote it was primarily the Izquierda Democrática

Municipal Democratization in Guamote, Ecuador

51

(Democratic Left—ID) party that played that role. However, Indigenous peasant candidates were nominated only as alternate secondary candidates (suplentes), a strategy which helped the ID to attract Indigenous peasant votes without the significant risk that Indigenous peasant candidates would actually be elected to positions of political power. Nevertheless, in spite of the manipulation by the ID and other political parties, local Indigenous peasant leaders asserted that contesting municipal elections, even as alternate candidates, had enormous symbolic significance and was also important for the political learning that eventually did lead to the election of Indigenous peasant candidates as municipal councilors and mayors. At the same time, however, experience in municipal elections and later in municipal government contributed to what might be called political differentiation as an already small elite of Indigenous peasant leaders developed new political skills that further widened the gaps in knowledge and power between leaders and the rest of the Indigenous peasant population, a phenomena that was observed throughout the country in the 1990s (see Larrea, Andrade and Bonilla 2006: 35). Indigenous peasant federations in Guamote organized relatively quickly to launch their own primary candidates in the 1984 municipal elections and succeeded in electing one Indigenous councilor while still in association with the ID. That first victory was followed in 1988 by the election of two Indigenous councilors. The 1992 elections produced two Indigenous councilors and an Indigenous mayor, Mariano Curicama, who had been an alternate candidate in the previous three elections. In 1996, Curicama was re-elected by a wide margin alongside a team of five Indigenous councilors (of a total of seven). In 2000 a second Indigenous mayor, José Delgado, and a full slate of Indigenous councilors were elected to the municipal council. In 2004, Indigenous control of the municipality was again made clear with the election of a third Indigenous mayor, Juan de Dios Roldán—who faced no nonIndigenous candidates—and a fully Indigenous council. It is important to emphasize that the pursuit of municipal political power by Indigenous leaders in Guamote preceded and was not a result of the formation of the Indigenous political parties. Indeed, until 1995, when the first Indigenous political party in Ecuador—Pachakutik—was established, the strategy of electoral participation in Guamote conflicted with the official policy of electoral abstention of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador—CONAIE), Ecuador’s most important national Indigenous organization. Until 1995, CONAIE leaders argued that the lack of representation of Indigenous issues by political parties and elite

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control of national politics made electoral participation futile (see Maldonado 1993: 305–310).18 Indigenous engagement in local electoral contests in Guamote thus highlighted the significant degree of autonomy of local organizations within the broader structure of Ecuador’s regional and national Indigenous movements. In fact, it was the electoral success of Indigenous candidates in Guamote and other rural municipalities that played a key role in the CONAIE’s 1995 decision to form a political party and to give strategic priority to municipal elections (Macas 1995: 6). The transition from mestizo to Indigenous peasant control of municipal government in Guamote was fraught with ethnic tension. Until 1992, the mestizo-dominated municipal council successfully marginalized Indigenous councilors by excluding them from important committees and decisions (Curicama, interview: June 17, 1999). The balance of political power in the municipal government began to shift to the representatives of Guamote’s Indigenous majority when Mariano Curicama was elected as mayor in 1992. However, Curicama still had to overcome fierce resistance from local village-based mestizos and had to threaten an Indigenous boycott of mestizo businesses before he could assume his office as mayor (see Stanton 1998). Moreover, it was only with the backing of over five thousand Indigenous supporters, physically gathered behind him, that Curicama was able to move past the mestizo residents who threatened to block his entrance to the municipal building on his first day in his new position (Interviews in Guamote: June 1999; Vallejo Real 1996: 210). Curicama’s first six months in office were particularly difficult because of resistance to his leadership from mestizo residents of the municipality and mestizo municipal staff and officials. Many municipal employees refused to speak to Curicama for weeks following his inauguration while others only grudgingly accepted the authority of the Indigenous mayor. Labor legislation in Ecuador allows elected municipal officials to replace the heads of municipal departments but not to replace other municipal employees. So when Curicama assumed the position of mayor, he was legally obliged to work with the same municipal employees who had actively discriminated against Indigenous residents under previous mestizo administrations. However, Curicama also made no effort to replace the mestizo department heads with Indigenous leaders or even sympathetic mestizos. Not only were there no qualified Indigenous candidates who could replace the mestizo officials, but Curicama also feared that to fire municipal department heads, several of whom were leading members of the local mestizo

Municipal Democratization in Guamote, Ecuador

53

population with strong local family connections, would have generated major ethnic conflicts that he wanted to avoid. Efforts to improve the performance of the municipal government thus had to be pursued within a setting in which municipal employees were generally unmotivated, often racist, and were resistant to changes in municipal administration. As Guamote’s second Indigenous mayor, José Delgado, explained, many municipal employees “saw themselves as the owners of their positions and as untouchable...their only responsibility being their [physical] presence in the municipal building for eight hours a day” (Interview: June 13, 2002). Elected Indigenous authorities in the municipality tried to improve employee performance through training workshops and public recognition of dedicated staff. The municipality also introduced a requirement that all new employees speak both Spanish and Kichwa, which made it easier to hire Indigenous employees whose strong motivation at least partly made up for their lack of professional training and experience. However, resistance to change among mestizo employees persisted, and Delgado—elected as mayor in 2000—concluded that the municipality would have to wait for some employees to retire before certain administrative problems could be resolved (Interview: June 13, 2002). As a result, elected Indigenous authorities in the municipality often found themselves caught between Indigenous peasant organizations that were very effective in making demands on the municipal government and an administrative structure that was very inefficient in meeting those demands. Nevertheless, under Curicama’s leadership, ethnic relations between Guamote’s rural Indigenous majority and the mestizo-dominated population of the town center gradually improved. For example, Indigenous residents widely reported in conversations that treatment by mestizo merchants, transport operators and municipal employees improved considerably after 1992. Some observers have attributed the improvement in inter-ethnic relations in Guamote and other Indigenousled municipalities to the development of “inter-culturality,” a term intended to describe cross-cultural respect (i.e. Radcliffe 2001: 8). However, in Guamote, interviews with local mestizos suggested that their acceptance of Indigenous political control was primarily motivated by a combination of resignation and fear of reprisals. While outward expressions of racism and ethnic exclusion declined, local mestizos were not at all hesitant to share their frustration and racist attitudes with a foreign white-skinned researcher. In spite of the ethnic tensions and the challenges of managing unresponsive municipal employees, Curicama’s first term as mayor, from 1992 to 1996, produced discrete but important changes in the

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operation of the municipal government that were facilitated by incipient moves towards administrative and fiscal decentralization in Ecuador. Before Curicama was first elected in 1992, the municipality had a tiny budget and almost no capacity to undertake public works projects. It was administratively weak and was perceived by the local Indigenous peasant population as indifferent if not hostile to their interests. As one former Indigenous municipal councilor recalled, the municipality’s road-building machinery consisted of only one old dump truck that was almost always broken (Interview: May 15, 2007). However, as a result of Curicama’s skills as a resource broker, coupled with increased transfers of resources from the central state, the municipality’s budget increased from approximately $60,000 in 1991 to over $700,000 by 1993 and subsequently to $2.2 million by 2007. Curicama also extended his efforts to broker resources beyond the central state to NGOs and international aid donors, which further increased the capacity of the municipality and local peasant organizations to execute public works projects. During his tenure as mayor, Curicama traveled to the United States, Mexico, Costa Rica, Venezuela, and Bolivia to seek aid and to participate in international conferences with the goal of raising Guamote’s international profile and attracting new funds for local development. Nevertheless, the municipality remained almost completely dependent on external resources as its capacity to generate income remained negligible: in 2007, less than one percent of municipal revenue derived from local sources. Although still woefully inadequate when measured against local needs, the municipality used the new resources to begin an aggressive campaign of public works in rural communities, many of which had been completely ignored by municipal authorities before 1992. Those works included, most importantly, the construction of roads to rural communities that had been previously accessible only by foot, the improvement of existing roads, the construction and repair of secondary and tertiary irrigation canals, and the construction of community health centers, schools and grain storage facilities. The municipality was able to significantly stretch its public works budget and increase feelings of community ownership for public infrastructure by requiring rural communities to provide the labor for all infrastructure projects through mingas, the traditional form of Indigenous labor for community works projects that is voluntary but subject to fines if not provided. Curicama was highly critical of the legacies of paternalism and dependency created by state agencies and NGOs that had delivered projects without local involvement. As a result he adamantly insisted that municipal investments in public works were

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conditional on the provision of labor from beneficiary communities (Curicama, interview: June 17, 1999). The ability to generate broad participation through mingas in rural communities was largely based on the respect that the municipal government earned under Curicama’s leadership. Other mayors in Ecuador who tried to use mingas to extend the public works capacity of their municipalities—but who did not enjoy the same respect as Curicama—were much less successful in attracting participants (see Cameron 2003b: Chapter Five). Even more important than the extension of the municipality’s public works capacity, however, were the open lines of communication established with the Indigenous peasant residents of the municipality’s rural communities. Marking an about-face from the history of municipal neglect, Curicama went to great lengths to make the municipality accessible to Indigenous peasants, welcoming them into the municipality’s offices and insisting that municipal employees respond to requests from Indigenous peasants courteously and efficiently. Curicama also made himself available to the general public every Thursday morning when rural residents descended to the town center to buy and sell in the weekly agricultural market, a tradition continued by his successors, José Delgado and Juan de Dios Roldán. As one local Indigenous resident commented on the increased public access to the mayor: “Before 1992, they [municipal employees] would tell you that they don’t have time or to come back tomorrow. Now, we can go to see the mayor [on Thursday mornings] and he will tell us what is missing on a form or what office we need to go to. It was not like this before” (June 13, 2002). Moreover, Curicama spent an average of three days a week consulting and overseeing municipal works projects in the municipality’s rural communities (Interview: June 17, 1999). The municipality also began to work closely with the local OSGs to implement public works and rural development projects. These changes represented the first time that Indigenous residents were treated and encouraged to see themselves as local citizens. Once sites of discrimination and abuse, where Indigenous petitioners were made to wait endlessly to see municipal officials, where ‘gifts’ were required to receive public attention, and where there was little expectation that conflicts with mestizo residents would ever be settled in their favor, Indigenous peasant residents of Guamote began to see the municipal offices as belonging to them, breezing in and out with almost the same comfort as when visiting their local community centers or the offices of local Indigenous peasant federations. However, the close relations that Curicama fostered with local residents, community leaders and the directors of the OSGs also bore

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important markings of clientelist and quasi-caudillistic management, and municipal authority continued to be heavily concentrated in the office of the mayor. For example, most of the requests and questions from local residents on Thursday mornings could have been responded to by municipal staff—the authority of the mayor was not needed to explain how to fill out forms or which office to take a water bill to—but Curicama and his successors used the opportunity to foster direct personal relations and to cultivate bases of support among local Indigenous residents. Personalistic and clientelist management remained relatively subtle during Curicama’s tenure as mayor, but following the election of José Delgado in 2000 it increased significantly and became a serious threat to local democratization efforts. In 1996, Curicama was re-elected as mayor by a wide margin and five of the seven municipal council seats were filled by local Indigenous leaders, all of whom were affiliated with the Pachakutik political party. With a solid majority on the council to support him and with technical support from a small group of Quito-based NGOs, Curicama initiated a series of profound institutional changes in the municipal decisionmaking structure that were designed to increase the role of community and OSG leaders in the governance of the municipality and to promote local economic and social development. Foremost among these institutional changes were the creation of both the Indigenous Parliament (Parlamento Indígena) and the Local Development Committee (Comité de Desarrollo Local) in 1997, the elaboration of a Local Development Plan in 1999 along with the creation of a series of Coordination Roundtables (Mesas de Concertación) to oversee the implementation of the Plan, and the establishment of an Indigenous Chamber of Commerce in 2000 to find markets for local agricultural products and to provide credit to local producers. In an effort to increase the formal representation of women in the municipality, the municipal council also passed an ordinance requiring at least three of the seven councilors to be women. While these institutional innovations appeared to mark a shift towards a more participatory form of local governance and attracted significant national and international attention to the municipality, they were also marked by serious internal tensions rooted in local political culture and local political-economic forces that would later almost completely undermine them. The Indigenous Parliament

The Indigenous Parliament was created by the municipality as an institution to formally represent the municipality’s rural communities in

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municipal decision making. The Parliament was assigned three specific roles in the governance of the municipality: 1) to debate and present legislation to the mayor and municipal council, 2) to monitor the activities of the municipality and external development actors in the municipality, such as state agencies and NGOs, and 3) to audit the accounts of the municipality and external development actors. During Curicama’s tenure as mayor, the Parliament was responsible for the nomination of candidates for municipal, provincial, and national elections as well as for the unelected representatives of the central state in the municipality.19 Between 1997 and 2007, the Parliament also decided on the allocation of municipal investment resources for public works and social development projects. All three of Guamote’s Indigenous mayors insisted that the Parlamento was the highest instance of representation in the municipality and that the mayor and municipal council had the moral—although not the legal—obligation to implement its resolutions. The Parlamento initially met on an ad hoc basis between two and twelve times per year, but subsequently settled on a timetable of four meetings per year. Guamote’s Indigenous Parliament, the first institution of its kind in Ecuador, appeared to be an important institutional mechanism for deepening the system of representative democracy in municipal governance, for promoting a culture of local citizenship in the municipality, and for holding accountable and auditing the municipal government and external development actors present in the municipality. It promised to give the representatives of rural communities a much greater voice in local governance and to exercise control over development institutions that had operated in an uncoordinated, unaccountable, and paternalistic manner in the past. In an important symbolic act, the Indigenous Parliament took over the building that had previously housed the offices of the Ecuadorian state’s Integrated Rural Development program, thus marking yet another element of the transition of local power to Indigenous control. However, despite its democratic design and initial success in bringing together representatives of rural communities to discuss challenges facing the municipality, the Parliament was marked from the beginning by a number of serious tensions related to its own internal dynamics and its dependence on the mayor and municipal government, all of which prevented it from fulfilling any of the roles assigned to it. Foremost among the internal tensions were the passive participation of community representatives and the systematic marginalization of women within the Parliament. Regarding passive participation, the Parliament’s president lamented in 2002, “members come to listen but

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do not talk. They do not propose ideas and generally just follow the direction of the executive council or certain prominent leaders in deciding how to vote. There is often very little analysis or reflection before voting” (Interview: June 16, 2003). The president and the other three executive members of the Parliament, elected annually from and by its members, attributed the problem of passive participation both to the low levels of education of many of its members, which restricted their analytical capacities and their self-confidence to speak in public, and to the persistent legacies of servile social relations and paternalist development interventions in the municipality, which lay behind a cultural tendency to defer to authority and to look outside the municipality for solutions to local problems. Gender inequality within the Parliament was profound. In 2002, only two of the 121 comuna presidents represented in the Parliament were women—and of the 162 comuna representatives in the Parliament in 2007, none were women. Moreover, in 2002 the Parliament’s male treasurer attested that other male members intentionally and systematically intimidated the female representatives by interrupting them and heckling them whenever they did speak (Interview: June 14, 2002). Thus, female Indigenous staff members of the municipality that had observed many meetings of the Parliament quipped with irony “that Indigenous women’s participation in the Parliament and other meetings generally consists of their ‘presence’ but not their ‘voice’” (Interview: October 8, 1999). While the Parliament’s executive did make some efforts to promote an awareness of gender inequalities by hosting NGOrun workshops in rural communities, male dominance of the institution remained solid. Executive council members insisted that they could not force rural communities to elect women to be the presidents of their comuna councils and the Parliament was either unwilling or unable to contemplate alternative mechanisms to increase women’s participation. An additional internal difficulty was the failure of the Parliament to represent the interests of the mestizo-dominated town center of Guamote. Although the name of the institution was officially expanded in 1999 to become the Popular and Indigenous Parliament, the new name was neither used by its members nor did it represent any genuine opening for local mestizos. Representatives of the mestizo-based neighborhood associations in Guamote’s town center did attend a few meetings of the Parliament in 1999, but quickly lost interest as it became clear that their involvement was not valued and that their lack of fluency in Kichwa would effectively exclude them from discussion. As the former president of one predominantly mestizo neighborhood association explained, “at the Parliament meetings, they would always

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start to speak Kichwa and we couldn’t understand. So there was no point in going to the meetings” (Interview: May 15, 2007). The effectiveness of the Parliament in carrying out its roles further suffered as the elected executive sought and obtained municipal resources to execute public works projects in rural communities, marking a complete distortion of its stated purpose and a confusion and duplication of the mandates of the other institutions of local governance in the municipality. The Parliament’s turn to project management was a response to the powerful conception among community members that the legitimacy of any institution or leader depended upon their capacity to deliver material resources to the community and a reflection of the individual leadership aspirations of its executive members, who recognized that public works in rural communities, not vigilant monitoring and auditing activities, would enable them to build clientelist networks of supporters. At the same time, the efforts by Guamote’s Indigenous mayors—especially those who followed Mariano Curicama—to undermine opposition and to reward supporters with positions in local public institutions like the Parliament further eroded the capacity of the institution to play its intended roles. Indeed, as the president of the Parliament in 2007 explained, the efforts by local Indigenous leaders in the Parliament to build clientelist support networks in rural communities led to a complete confusion of the initial division of labor among the institutions of local governance in Guamote: The bases became accustomed to the idea that the Parliament did projects. And the leaders of the Parliament and other institutions managed and executed projects as a way of building a clientelist support base. So the number of institutions executing projects multiplied. All of the institutions became focused on projects: the Parliament had its projects, the municipality had its projects, the Local Development Committee had its projects, the OSGs had their projects, the Parish Organizations (Juntas Parroquiales) had their projects, the Teniente Politico had its projects—there was a huge number of projects. And instead of all of the institutions going together to a community with one project, they all went with their own projects. The activities doubled and tripled, but there was no accountability or monitoring of any of them (Interview: May 16, 2007).

The deviation of the Parliament into the management of public works projects also marked the beginning of a slide into corruption among the institution’s leaders. As the 2007 president of the Parliament asserted, “When the Parliament started to manage projects, corruption began. The Parliament couldn’t execute projects and audit itself at the

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same time. The Parliament then also lost its ability to legislate and audit, because it was too involved in managing projects” (Interview: May 16, 2007). During Mariano Curicama’s tenure as mayor, the Parliament was able to operate with some autonomy from the municipality, and indeed for two years was led by one of Curicama’s bitter political rivals. However, after Curicama left the municipality in 2000 and was succeeded by José Delgado, the direct manipulation of the Parlamento increased substantially. The clearest symptom of the Parliament’s lack of autonomy was its total financial dependence on the municipal government. Municipal authorities were never willing to give the Parliament the formal legal status it needed to receive and administer its own sources of revenue, which made it entirely dependent on the municipality and undermined its capacity and willingness to monitor municipal actions and audit municipal finances. The Parliament initially received technical support from a small group of NGOs, but its budget, set at $8,000 in 1997, was composed entirely of municipal resources and was totally swallowed up by basic administrative expenses. The lack of resources made it impossible to provide transportation subsidies, honorariums or even meals to its elected members, who were regularly called upon to take part in one- to two-day meetings and were required to pay their own costs, something that many members were reluctant or unable to do. As a result, the president of the Parliament estimated in 2007 that the representatives of thirty percent of the municipality’s rural communities never took part in Parliament meetings (Interview: May 16, 2007). The small budget also meant that the Parliament could not afford to employ technical staff, such as accountants, or even to pay salaries to its vice-president and treasurer. By 2004, the Parliament had effectively ceded its right to elect its own executive to the mayor, who used the paid positions to reward supporters who would not make any serious efforts to monitor municipal accounts or activities. After control of the mayor’s office shifted from Delgado to Juan de Dios Roldán in 2005, the municipality reduced the budget allocation for the Parliament to $5,000, which further restricted its operating capacity, and then formally transferred responsibility for Guamote’s Participatory Budget from the Parliament to the municipality, claiming that the Parliament was incapable of effectively managing the process. By 2007 the Parliament existed in little more than its name and physical office space. As its own president freely admitted in an interview in his office:

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The role of the Parliament was supposed to be to audit, monitor and legislate, but it has done nothing. Nothing! It has not generated any information about any of the institutions [government agencies and NGOs], about spending, about actions, about where they work. Nothing! Regarding legislation, the Parliament has not accomplished anything. No legislation has come out of the Parliament. Nothing! (Interview: May 16, 2007)

While the president of the Parliament insisted that he would try to steer the institution away from project management and back to its original purposes, he also recognized that without financial resources and the political will of the mayor, he was presiding over a powerless institution. As another local Indigenous intellectual who had taken part in the initial design of the Parliament asserted, “it is urgent to revise the mandate of the Parliament. There is little reason for it to continue operating with its official purposes. It needs a different role” (Interview: May 14, 2007). The Local Development Committee

In 1997, in a departure from the widespread lack of engagement by municipal governments in local economic development initiatives and in response to the total absence of coordination among the dozens of external development actors present in the municipality and their systematic failure to account to their supposed beneficiaries, the municipality of Guamote created the Local Development Committee (Comité de Desarrollo Local—CDL) with a major grant from a foreign donor. The stated purpose of the Local Development Committee was to bring together all of the Indigenous peasant federations and external development actors in Guamote within a single institution that would coordinate economic development initiatives throughout the municipality. It was composed of a political branch, created to bring together the presidents of the municipality’s twelve Indigenous peasant federations, NGOs and state agencies, and a technical branch, made up of engineers and technical staff who oversaw the day-to-day operation of specific development projects managed by the Committee. The mayor of Guamote occupied the presidency of the Committee, ostensibly to ensure overall coordination, although in practice it became clear that the presidency of the Committee provided the mayor with an important vehicle for clientelist manipulation. The Local Development Committee never functioned as it was intended to. The design of the Committee had been largely imposed by the foreign donor and was never accepted by the leaders of the OSGs in

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the municipality, who refused to give up their control over local development projects. As a result, the political branch of the Committee stopped meeting almost as soon as it was created. As one NGO observer who had worked closely with the Committee explained, “the political branch of the Local Development Committee simply does not exist ” (Interview: June 20, 2002). The technical branch of the Comité did continue to function despite the collapse of the political branch. According to the original design of the Local Development Committee, each of its projects was supposed to be managed by one municipal councilor and one OSG, with support from the Committee’s technical branch. The objective was to strengthen the management capacities of the Indigenous peasant federations, so that they could eventually assume full responsibility for the projects, and to ensure effective coordination of local development initiatives. However, the six development projects that the Local Development Committee initiated by 1999 were still under its direction in 2007 (see table 2.5) and local observers asserted that the management capacity of the OSGs had actually declined (see also Bebbington and Torres 2001). In 2007, a senior technical staff member with the Committee acknowledged, “the Committee’s projects continue to operate but there is little participation from the Indigenous peasant federations” (Interview: May 16, 2007). While technical staff asserted that all of the projects were functioning relatively well, it was clear that none of them had generated any significant economic benefits for local residents or contributed to a broader process of local economic development. As of 2007, the Committee’s six projects had created a total of thirteen permanent jobs and forty to fifty temporary term positions, all of which were dependent on subsidies from the municipal government (see Table 2.5). As the succession of Indigenous mayors asserted their control over the institutions of local governance, the Local Development Committee became little more than a branch of the mayor’s office, which, once the grant from the foreign donor expired, also became the Committee’s only source of revenue. With no autonomy from the municipal government, the Committee quickly became a mechanism for clientelist management by the mayor, who rewarded the leaders of Guamote’s Indigenous peasant federations with work on the Local Development Committee’s projects in return for political support. As a technical staff member of the Committee lamented, “Everything has become a struggle for jobs, in the Local Development Committee, in the Parliamento, in the municipality. All of the leaders want jobs and will support the mayor in order to get them” (Interview: May 16, 2007). Similarly, a local Indigenous leader with a long history of involvement in the struggles

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over municipal power asserted that “the Local Development Committee and the Parliament have become little more than institutions for rewarding political supporters that provide unconditional support to the mayor” (Interview: May 14, 2007). In the context of the absence of local sources of employment and the need to leave the municipality to find paid work, the pressure from local leaders for positions and contracts in the institutions of local governance in Guamote is readily understandable. Rather than demonstrating moral deviance (as some observers claim), they have simply demonstrated that in the context of extreme poverty and the absence of local employment opportunities, it is unrealistic to expect institutions such as the Parliament and Local Development Committee to operate free from individual strategic calculations. Extreme poverty makes clientelist management both inexpensive and attractive to populations whose short-term needs for income far outweigh their long-term interests in well-functioning democratic institutions. The Local Development Plan

Shortly after his re-election as mayor in 1996, Mariano Curicama launched an initiative to create a local development plan to guide both external and local development interventions in Guamote until the year 2012. Local development plans have since proliferated throughout the Andean region in response to the efforts of aid donors to increase the effectiveness of development assistance by requiring all levels of government to produce such plans as a condition for aid. In this context, municipal governments hired teams of consultants, who, through nominally participatory workshops, have produced local development plans which are remarkably similar to one another, are oriented primarily towards the concerns of the donor agencies and which are generally relegated to dusty storage closets once they have served the function of securing access to state and donor resources. In contrast to this widespread practice of local development planning, Guamote’s plan promised to be different and generated widespread enthusiasm in Ecuador about the future of development in the municipality. It was also created through a much slower and more participatory process than most other plans in the country.20 Moreover, it represented the first time that the municipality of Guamote had ever operated on a mass scale in Kichwa, the first language of the majority of the municipality’s citizens, to actively solicit local residents’ opinions and ideas.

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Table 2.5 Development Projects Administered by the Local Development Committee, Guamote Project

Accomplishments

# Jobs Created

Reforestation

· production of 1.2 million seedlings per year · reforestation of 9,000 hectares of land (July 2001)

no information

Trout hatchery

· production of 4,800 kg of trout per year · profits reinvested in the Local Development Committee

3 permanent

Composting facility

· 2 tonnes of organic waste processed per week · humus sold locally to improve soil quality

2 permanent

Grain processing center

No information

no information

Meeting center / hostel

· Partial renovation of the buildings of the former hacienda Totorillos into a meeting center and 80-bed hostel.

2 permanent

Music Group

· group formed to perform at local functions · cassette tape recorded

6 occasional

Source: Interviews: Coordinator of Local Development Committee (1999, 2002); Sub-Coordinator of Local Development Committee (2007).

Nevertheless, despite the enthusiasm that initially surrounded Guamote’s development plan and the widespread community participation in the workshops on which it was purportedly based, the final document revealed that Guamote’s Indigenous leaders were not immune to implicit pressures to please donor agencies. While conducting field research in Guamote in 1999, I attended several of the community-based planning meetings and read a preliminary draft of the municipal plan, which offered a frank and detailed analysis of challenges facing the municipality and hard but constructive criticism of the main institutions engaged in local development efforts, including the municipality, central state agencies, NGOs, comuna councils, the Parliament, and the Local Development Committee. The draft plan criticized the comuna councils for authoritarian leadership, the members

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of the Parliament for their failure to be more proactive, and NGOs for paternalistic and uncoordinated interventions as well as for imposing concepts and projects based on foreign priorities—with gender equity and environmental sustainability singled out as examples. In short, the draft plan clearly reflected local concerns and was not produced to cater to donor agendas. Almost immediately after I next returned to Guamote in 2002, a municipal official presented me with the final published version of the Local Development Plan (Municipalidad de Guamote 1999). However, as I pored over the plan one evening, I discovered that the version of the plan that I held in my hands bore little resemblance to the draft I had read three years earlier. Indeed, the constructive criticism of both local and outside institutions was nowhere to be found, while the importance of gender equity and environmental sustainability were highlighted throughout the text. When I later asked the technical staff what had happened to the plan between the draft they had prepared and the publication of the final document, they explained that it had been revised and edited by the mayor and senior Indigenous leaders in the municipality. A comparison of the two versions of the plan made it clear that despite all of the local input into planning meetings, the final content of the plan was determined more by the mayor’s perceptions of donor expectations and as a tool for brokering external aid than as a genuine guide for local development initiatives. In short, the plan was produced for external, not internal, consumption; it represented a “performance” of administrative modernization for donors rather than a genuine internalization of planning principles and prevailing development discourse (Lund 2001: 858, cited in Rossi 2006: 47).21 When I returned to Guamote again in 2007, there was little talk of the plan, which had experienced the same fate as the plans produced by many other municipalities—that of gathering dust in closets and storage lockers. The Indigenous Chamber of Commerce

A final important institutional innovation undertaken by the municipality in 1999 was the creation of the Indigenous Chamber of Commerce (Cámara de Commercio Indígena), an initiative of Mariano Curicama to bypass the often exploitative intermediaries who dominated local commerce and who took advantage of efforts by the traditionally conservative National Federation of Chambers of Commerce to expand its base. In its first two years of operation, the Chamber of Commerce signed up over 250 members, and focused its energy on the production of organic carrots and onions for markets in Europe and on the

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development of a Savings and Loan Cooperative (Director, Indigenous Chamber of Commerce, interview: June 13, 2002). However, by 2007 the Chamber of Commerce had been run into the ground by the same partisan struggles among Indigenous political elites that had undermined other institutional innovations in Guamote. As the Chamber’s own director explained in 2007: The Chamber of Commerce is effectively inactive. It has no economic, social or political projects or programs. Although the Chamber still exists on paper and I am still its director, for all intents and purposes it is defunct. There are about sixty members left, but they only exist on paper. Since 2003, the Chamber of Commerce has not held a single General Assembly (Interview: May 14, 2007).

While the Chamber prospered for a brief period under Curicama’s leadership, it succumbed to political manipulation under his successors in the mayor’s office. By 2003, the Chamber of Commerce and the Savings and Credit Cooperative had become little more than sources of employment for political supporters of the mayor. Indeed, politically motivated decisions about loan management brought the Cooperative to the brink of bankruptcy in 2003. The Cooperative avoided that fate through the initiative of a group of young, technically-oriented Indigenous leaders who insisted that the institution required autonomy from political actors and needed to be managed professionally if it was to survive. Four years later, their efforts had generated significant results: the Cooperative had almost 6,000 members and over 15,000 clients with branches in Guamote, the coastal province of Guayas, and the neighboring province of Cañar (both home to large numbers of labor migrants); its loan portfolio had also increased to over $1 million, and it was working to be able to accept deposits from migrant workers in Spain and Italy. Nevertheless, as the director of both the Chamber of Commerce and the Savings and Credit Cooperative readily acknowledged, both the levels of investment and the willingness of local and external actors to invest in employment generating business ventures in Guamote needed to increase exponentially if the high levels of poverty in the municipality and corresponding high rates of outmigration were to be reduced (Interviews: May 14 and 15, 2007), an issue further examined in Section IV (below).

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The Challenges of Economic and Social Development in Guamote

Despite the transformation of local social power relations, the solid control of the institutions of local governance by Indigenous leaders, and increased municipal resources in Guamote, poverty in the municipality actually increased over the course of the 1990s. The increases in poverty cannot, however, be attributed entirely to the problems of local governance under Indigenous control. Local ecological conditions, the historical absence of local investment, and Ecuador’s macroeconomic context also contributed to the chronically high levels of poverty in Guamote. Indeed, some of the same factors that facilitated the transformation of Guamote’s agrarian structure and the subsequent Indigenous control of municipal power continued to pose serious obstacles to local economic development in the municipality, while Ecuador’s broader macroeconomic policy context created serious challenges to local development even in settings where local governance was well-managed (see Chapter Three on the municipality of Cotacachi). A careful comparison of municipal data from Ecuador’s 1990 and 2001 censuses conducted by Carlos Larrea (2005) reveals that while access to education and some basic infrastructure, especially electricity, had improved, the percentage of Guamote’s population living in poverty and extreme poverty increased despite modest improvements in living standards in both the national average and the average for the rural highlands (see Tables 2.1 and 2.6). Table 2.6 Poverty and Extreme Poverty in Guamote, 1990–2001

Guamote Rural Highlands Total Ecuador

Poverty 1990 2001 89.3% 93.5% 80.4% 74.9% 58.3% 56.7%

Extreme Poverty 1990 2001 68.3% 70.0% 41.1% 37.7% 21.4% 21.2%

Source: Larrea (2005: 136), based on 1990 and 2001 census data.

While the clientelist management of local political power by Indigenous elites, the subsequent deterioration of the institutions of local governance and the departure of NGOs marked a failure to meaningfully promote local economic development in Guamote, the absence of economic growth and the increases in poverty also need to be understood in the context of local ecological conditions and the process

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of agrarian transformation in the municipality. The same ecological factors that blocked the ability of hacienda owners to make the capital investments needed to transform their estates into modern capitalist agribusinesses—and which contributed to the dissolution of the hacienda regime in Guamote in the 1970s—continued to plague smallscale agricultural producers in the municipality thirty years later. The poor soil quality, steep and uneven terrain, susceptibility to wind erosion, low rainfall and the high altitude of the municipality make small-scale agriculture even more challenging and less profitable than in many other parts of the rural highlands. This problem is not unique to Guamote, although it is particularly extreme there. As Korovkin (1997) reported, the Ecuadorian state generally redistributed land only on the least productive haciendas. Precisely because land reform was implemented only on the most backward estates that were unable to convert to capitalist systems of production, the possibilities for subsequent development on those lands were often weak from the very beginning, regardless of the other factors that influenced local development. Moreover, the failure of the Ecuadorian state to make up for the absence of capital investment on local haciendas through spending on local infrastructure—such as community access roads, irrigation and electricity, and in rural education and health services—left a deep void of unmet basic needs that stood in the way of efforts to promote economic growth. For example, a 2002 feasibility study estimated that the total cost of a project to provide irrigation water to approximately 1,500 hectares of land in thirty-six communities in Guamote would exceed $30 million, an amount well beyond the capacity of the municipal government to finance (Irrigation Engineer, Municipality of Guamote, interview: June 14, 2002). Moreover, the Indigenous struggle for hacienda land coupled with the presence of liberation theology priests and leftist union organizers in the municipality in the 1970s marked Guamote as a ‘red zone’ that was widely perceived to be dominated by communists and to be avoided by potential investors and entrepreneurs, including some who lived in Guamote but invested their capital elsewhere. Thus, the redistribution of land and the transformation of social power relations in the municipality came at the cost of local investment. In the context of low levels of agricultural productivity and the absence of non-agricultural employment in the municipality, labor migration became the prevailing strategy to supplement rural livelihoods. Guamote’s Development Plan calculated that in 1999, at any given time, eighteen percent of the adult population was working outside of the municipality and that migrant remittances represented thirty-eight percent of household income

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(Municipalidad de Guamote 1999: 35–36). However, while migrant labor generated ever-growing remittances, little of that money was invested in local economic development. Rather, as the director of Guamote’s Indigenous Chamber of Commerce explained, The question is how are households that receive remittances or migrants who return with money actually investing those resources? In the best of cases, remittances are invested in the construction of houses, which creates some local employment and demand for local materials. But in most cases, remittances are simply spent on imported consumer products such as electric appliances and commercially produced food. It is certain that remittances are coming to Guamote, but they are not being invested in Guamote. They are invested in Guayaquil, Quito, Riobamba, Ambato and in the purchase of imported consumer goods. So, what kind of development does migration lead to? The social cost for Guamote of migration is very high, but remittances are invested in the same places as always. There are even people who have migrated from Guamote who are now successful entrepreneurs in Guayaquil and Quito and who return to the fiestas patronales [annual party for Guamote’s patron saint] to spend their money as if they were crazy, but they don’t invest here. Guamote remains a forgotten town (Interview: May 14, 2007).

The director of the Chamber of Commerce also remarked with frustration that while migrants from the municipality invested an average of $10,000 to secure work in Spain and Italy, they were unwilling to invest that same money in local business ventures. Thus, those with hopes for economic growth in Guamote continue to face not only ecological conditions that pose serious challenges to agricultural production but also a massive deficit of productive infrastructure and a widespread unwillingness to invest financial resources that includes the municipality’s own residents. The persistence of poverty and the absence of economic development in Guamote also need to be understood in the context of Ecuador’s macroeconomic policy history and very weak patterns of national economic growth since the early 1980s. As Carlos Larrea (2005) explains, two decades of sustained economic growth based on successive export ‘booms’ of bananas and petroleum came to an end in the early 1980s and were followed by the debt crisis, a series of major natural disasters (El Niño in 1986 and 1998, an earthquake in 1987), and a devastating financial crisis in 1999. In that context, neoliberal adjustment policies and efforts to promote economic growth based on export expansion failed to reduce poverty in Ecuador. Indeed, while the national census data cited above point to a very modest reduction in

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national poverty levels between 1990 and 2001, research published by the World Bank (using somewhat different indicators of poverty) found that poverty levels increased from forty percent to forty-five percent in the same time period (World Bank 2003, cited in Larrea 2005: 131). Although the increased levels of poverty in 2001 partly reflected a massive spike in poverty in the wake of the 1999 financial crisis, data from the National Census and Statistics Institute (Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Censo—INEC) indicated that poverty levels were still significantly higher in 2003 than in 1995, showing an increase from 55.9 percent to 59.6 percent of the country’s total population (Larrea 2005: 132). Viewed against the background of national poverty indicators, the absence of economic growth and increases in poverty are clearly not unique to Guamote and cannot be attributed solely to the problems of local governance or even local ecological conditions. Consideration of Ecuador’s macroeconomic policy context highlights serious obstacles to local economic development that face all rural municipalities, no matter how they are governed. Many of the forces that shape local economies are simply beyond the control of rural municipal governments—such as the distribution of productive assets, the terms of trade for agricultural products, the costs of productive inputs, the financial resources for major infrastructure investments, access to employment, and macroeconomic policies. Indigenous organizations and leaders in Guamote recognized the limitations of municipal power and were well connected to broader provincial and national Indigenous struggles against macroeconomic policies that threatened local economic development. Indigenous leaders from Guamote held important positions in the provincial level Indigenous Movement of Chimborazo (Movimiento Indígena de Chimborazo—MICH) and the national Indigenous organization CONAIE and its affiliated political party, Pachakutik.22 Beginning with the massive 1990 Indigenous uprising that paralyzed transportation networks in the country for close to two weeks, these organizations played leading roles in protests against the country’s neoliberal policy framework, and Guamote was a key node in those protest actions. 23 Indigenous leaders, including successive mayors and municipal councilors, were instrumental in mobilizing local residents to take part in national protest actions, which involved both blockades of the PanAmerican highway in Guamote and travel to protest actions in Riobamba and Quito. José Delgado, mayor of Guamote from 2000 to 2004, explained what he saw as the role of the mayor in protest actions—a position that was also reflected in the behaviour of his

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predecessor Mariano Curicama and his successor Juan de Dios Roldán: “We are the leaders of the local population. We are morally obliged to be at the front of the protests. We expect municipal employees and workers to take part in the protests also. We also use municipal vehicles and machines to transport people to protest sites, even though it is prohibited by law” (Interview: June 13, 2002). Thus, while individual struggles for positions of political power frequently dominated local politics in Guamote, during national Indigenous mobilizations the local Indigenous population acted in a relatively unified manner to protest against the national government’s economic policies that were perceived as detrimental to the well-being of rural Indigenous peasant communities.24 Moreover, the mass mobilization in national protest actions suggests that Guamote’s Indigenous movement was able to combine strategies of institutional participation and “disruptive mischief” (Szasz 1995: 155), which some students of social movements have asserted are incompatible (Szasz 1995; Petras and Veltmeyer 2005). Nevertheless, Ecuador’s broader national Indigenous movement also faced many of the same internal challenges that plagued Indigenous politics in Guamote—in particular, persistent internal struggles for individual positions of political power. In the wake of disappointments with the Presidency of Lucio Gutierrez (2003 to 2005), which CONAIE and Pachakutik had initially supported, many leaders and base members of regional and national Indigenous organizations began to seriously question the strategy of electoral politics and engagement with state institutions that was officially adopted in 1995 (see Van Cott 2008: 124–127). When I took part in a roundtable conversation with leaders from CONAIE and Pachakutik about local governments in 2007, there was widespread concern about divisions and corruption within the movement that had resulted from competition for positions of political and bureaucratic power.25 Thus, while Indigenous organizations in Guamote were closely connected with the much broader national Indigenous movement that was engaged in struggles against state policies that threatened local development, that movement had relatively little impact on actually bringing about such changes. Conclusion: The Crisis of Participatory Democracy in Guamote

In spite of the inability of Indigenous leaders, and the institutions of local governance that they created, to live up to the high expectations that they would democratize local governance and transform Guamote’s economy, it is important not to dismiss the struggle for local democracy

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in the municipality as a failure. Although informal conversations with local Indigenous residents revealed widespread frustration with the lack of economic progress in the municipality in the fifteen years since they had elected the first Indigenous mayor, they consistently emphasized important changes that had taken place, in particular the elimination of racism from municipal institutions and an overall improvement in dayto-day inter-ethnic relations. These changes were reflected in better treatment of Indigenous residents by local merchants and transport operators, by the local police, and especially by municipal officials. Such a reshaping of community dynamics was highly valued by both male and female Indigenous residents, who spoke of a new capacity to conduct daily affairs with a dignity that was not possible before 1992. The struggle for dignity and respect had been a central element of Indigenous politics in Ecuador, alongside material and economic demands, since the earliest days of the Indigenous movement in the 1970s (Larrea, Andrade and Bonilla 2006: 22). Moreover, many local leaders and Indigenous political activists clearly recognized the challenges that accompanied the democratization of local governance and hoped that the process of municipal democratization could be revived. Indeed, in conversations in May 2007, local political activists with the Pachakutik political party—with which Mariano Curicama and José Delgado were affiliated—asserted that they had learned important lessons from the loss of the 2004 municipal election to Juan de Dios Roldán and the Amauta party, which was affiliated with the Indigenous Evangelical movement. They readily acknowledged that their failure to prevent individual leaders from concentrating and manipulating political power had jeopardized the entire process of municipal democratization and their role in it, and they insisted that future mayors affiliated with their movement would be subjected to much closer scrutiny than in the past.26 The breakdown of democratic decision making within the specific institutions of municipal governance in Guamote, within the broader context of the long-term democratization of economic and social power, points to an important distinction in contemporary analysis of rural municipal governance in Latin America. Methodological approaches that focus on short-term historical changes, institutional design and political leadership have highlighted the collapse of municipal democratization in Guamote. Indeed, from this perspective, the recent history of municipal governance in Guamote is very similar to the municipal democratization projects analysed by Van Cott (2008) and Grindle (2008) that do not survive the mandate of a particular mayor. However, in addition to the short-term story of institutional collapse and

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clientelist leadership, the municipal democratization in Guamote can also be understood as a longer-term story of shifting social and economic power relations. From this perspective, municipal democracy has not collapsed but rather continues to be characterized by a deep transformation of local power from a mestizo neo-feudal elite to the Indigenous majority which has brought about important changes in local governance—particularly the ways in which Indigeous peasants are treated by the municipal government. Both of these perspectives are crucial for understanding the history and current challenges of municipal democratization in Guamote and other rural municipalities. Indeed, while the agency of Indigenous activists is crucial to the future of local governance in Guamote, the legacies of history continue to weigh heavily on the opportunities for deepening democracy in the municipality. The implementation of Ecuador’s land reform laws in the 1970s and the subsequent redistribution of land and social power resulted in part from difficult environmental conditions that limited the ability of the municipality’s semi-feudal land owners to modernize agricultural production. Those same conditions continue to challenge agricultural production and economic development in the municipality. Moreover, the high levels of Indigenous political mobilization and the support of political activists in left political parties, labor unions and the Catholic Church, which helped to ensure that land reform laws were implemented in Guamote, also marked the municipality as a ‘red zone’ that was still widely perceived as unfavorable for capital investments at the time of my last visit in 2006. Similarly, the demographic shift that took place as mestizo families moved out of the municipality in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, which facilitated the Indigenous takeover of municipal power, represented the flight of capital as well. Had the capital remained in the municipality, it might have generated sources of local employment and reduced the need for labor migration. The concentration of political power in the hands of Guamote’s Indigenous mayors also needs to be understood in the context of local history. On one hand, the formation of a local Indigenous elite was a direct product of the process of peasant differentiation that began with the breakup of Guamote’s landed estates as some peasant families acquired more land than others or had better luck in urban labor markets and were able to invest in their children’s education. On the other hand, the absence of a single, cohesive Indigenous peasant federation that might have held Indigenous leaders accountable—which instead led to the proliferation of Indigenous peasant organizations whose leaders were willing to give up political influence in return for access to jobs and development projects—was a product of the multiple interventions by state agencies

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and NGOs that had engaged in clientelist relations with local Indigenous leaders. The jealous competition among the large number of Indigenous peasant organizations and the significant economic distance between prominent Indigenous leaders and the majority of the local population stand out as particular challenges for the future of municipal democracy in Guamote. The history of the Indigenous struggle for municipal power in Guamote also highlights important questions for similar struggles in other rural municipalities. Most importantly, the redistribution of land and the profound transformation of ethnic and class power in the municipality marked important steps toward the democratization of municipal governance, but were not sufficient conditions for it. Many local actors and outside observers had assumed that a collective Indigenous identity would function as a social glue to unite the local Indigenous population despite significant internal class differences and inequalities in education and the capacity to manage political power and broker outside resources. The experience of Guamote indicates that ethnic identity was not as powerful a glue as many had hoped.27 In the context of peasant differentiation, the proliferation of peasant federations promoted by clientelist state agencies and NGOs, and the clientelist political culture that pervades Ecuador, the mass-based Indigenous struggle to control and democratize municipal power in Guamote was transformed into a struggle by individual Indigenous leaders for positions of political power. The ‘organic intellectuals’ of the local Indigenous movement who led the struggle for local democracy turned out not to be as ‘organic’ as many observers had initially believed. Commenting on the process of leadership formation in Guamote, one of the local Indigenous intellectuals who had been involved in the struggle to democratize municipal power since the 1980s explained that the goal of the movement had been to generate organic intellectuals from rural communities who would govern in close association with their social bases: That was the ideal path that we were looking for, that leaders would come to power with solid social support from communities, barrios, organizations; that they would really represent their supporters and that decisions would not be made by a small group of leaders in the middle of the night. But in practice this didn’t happen. Rather, the heads of the movement met on their own to take the important decisions. The process of democracy wasn’t working as it had at the beginning. It became nothing more than a mask of democracy. It became an imposition of small groups onto the organizations using political manipulation to maintain power. […] Perhaps from the

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outside it is still seen as a process that emerged from the organizations, the communities, and rose up to the municipal government. That sounds interesting as a case of real democracy. But in practice, this is not what happened. Rather, the leaders of the organizations, four or so, would meet to make the important decisions. It is an imposition of small groups of political power onto the organizations. It is political manipulation to maintain power. That is where the problem lies (Interview: May 14, 2007).

The Indigenous leaders who have controlled the struggle for local power in Guamote are much less representative of the local population than many observers believed or hoped, despite a common Indigenous and peasant ancestry. The official discourses of those leaders—which highlighted both community-based forms of democracy and the ideals of the prevailing ‘good governance’ agenda—as well as the formal design of the institutions of local governance that they created proved to be more a performance of democratization for outside audiences than a reflection of substantive changes within the municipality. The struggle for local democracy in Guamote has also been marked by the persistent marginalization of women from political decision making. While Guamote experienced a profound shift in both class and ethnic power relations, the democratization of gender power relations lags far behind. Municipal leaders made some efforts to improve the representation of women in formal decision making institutions, but were unwilling or unable to promote any notable changes in gender power relations at the community or household levels. Moreover, despite formal quotas for female representation on the municipal council, in the day-to-day operation of the institutions of local governance, such as the Indigenous Parliament, female representatives were routinely intimidated and humiliated. Thus, from a gendered perspective, the process of municipal democratization in Guamote was incipient at best. Nevertheless, at least some male leaders in Guamote appeared to take the problem of gender inequality seriously and historic patterns of discrimination against girls and women also appeared to be slowly changing, as is demonstrated by census data from 1990 that indicated that boys and girls in the municipality attended school in almost equal proportions.28 The increased rates of male labor migration and subsequent rise in the number of temporary female household heads may also bring about changes in gender power relations in the municipality, although there is no evidence yet of such changes in the institutions of local governance. Despite the challenges that still face efforts to deepen municipal democracy in Guamote, the transformation of class and ethnic power in

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the municipality has been profound and political power lies firmly in the hands of the local Indigenous majority—the product of decades of political struggle. However, in this new political setting, the struggle for local democracy in Guamote has moved beyond the struggle for the redistribution of ethnic and class power but has nonetheless developed into an internal struggle—still incipient—within the local Indigenous population to hold leaders accountable and to prevent local Indigenous elites from dominating political power

Notes 1 According to Guamote’s 1999 municipal development plan, more than ninety percent of the population of the municipality self-identifies as Indigenous in the municipality (Municipalidad de Guamote 1999: 33–34). 2 Guamote became a municipality in 1944. The three parishes belonging to the municipality—Guamote, Cebadas and Palmira—had previously been part of the municipality of Colta, to the immediate north. 3 In 1974, prior to the implementation of Ecuador’s 1973 Agrarian Reform Law in Guamote, the Gini coefficient for land in Guamote was 0.98 (Barskey 1984: 363, cited in Haney and Haney 1987: 61). 4 Using data from CIDA (1965), Gangotena points out that the rate of profit on invested capital on the most productive estates in Guamote was 2.8 percent, in comparison with returns as high as 13.5 percent and 18.6 percent respectively on estates in the northern highland provinces of Imbabura and Pichincha that enjoyed better productive settings and easier access to markets (Gangotena 1981: 81, 85). 5 The proportion of cultivated land to the total area controlled by haciendas in Chimborazo averaged barely fifteen percent and decreased as the size of haciendas increased. For example, Sylva reported that on estates with more than 2500 ha, only 8.3 percent of land was cultivated in any given year (1986: 94). 6 See Casagrande and Piper (1969) for an analysis of the hacienda-churchstate “trilogy of power” in the neighboring municipality of Colta. 7 According to a local priest in Guamote, it was not uncommon even in the 1970s for mestizo children as young as six to make a sport of beating up adult Indigenous peasants (Interview: October 7, 1999). Rape was used systematically by hacienda owners and managers to discipline local peasants—especially agitators (see Gangotena 1981: 76). 8 Gangotena notes that until the 1970s, very little agricultural land in Guamote was available for purchase at prices that peasants could afford (1981: Chapter 3). 9 Only 4.79 percent of land in Guamote was redistributed as a result of the 1963 Agrarian Reform Law (Sylva 1986: 114). 10 In a very carefully documented analysis, Becker (2008) provides convincing evidence that during the 1920s to 1940s, the Ecuadorian left— including the FEI (established in 1944)—made serious efforts to incorporate

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Indigenous issues into political agendas and that it was only in the second half of the twentieth century that leftist organizations became more narrowly focused on a class-based agenda. As Becker argues, to interpret the entire history of the Ecuadorian left only through an analysis of the mid- to late twentieth century is a distortion of history. 11 By the mid-1970s, even Chimborazo’s Chamber of Agriculture, which represented hacienda owners in the province, refused to actively intervene on behalf of Guamote’s landowners (Sylva 1986: 171). 12 See Kleymeyer (1985) for a “fictionalized but true” account of ethnic discrimination in the area around Guamote, and Cervone (1996) for an analysis of ethnic social relations in the parish of Tixán, to the immediate south of Guamote. 13 I thank Fernando García for pointing this out. For an analysis of how the railroad and subsequent construction of the Pan-American highway affected social power relations in the towns of Tixán and Alausí, to the immediate south of Guamote, see Cervone (1996: 185) and Clark (1998), respectively. 14 For an analysis of traditional forms of community organization and the local politics that were involved in the formation of comunas in other parts of Chimborazo, see Lentz (1986, 1988); Thurner (1993); Casagrande and Piper (1969). 15 In the province of Chimborazo between 1937 and 1964, 156 comunas were established. Comuna formation increased rapidly following the 1964 Agrarian Reform Law: between 1965 and 1991, 356 comunas were legally recognized (Korovkin 1997: 29). 16 Bebbington notes that the technical staff of the Ministry of Agriculture were particularly notorious in Guamote for offering agricultural advice from the windows of four wheel drive jeeps and for refusing to actually go out into the fields of their Indigenous peasant clients (1990: 114). 17 In 1983, the Ministry of Agriculture reported that almost all Indigenous peasant families in Guamote had at least one member working outside of the municipality (MAG 1983, cited in Korovkin 1997: 34). 18 CONAIE’s position on electoral non-participation was reflected in very high rates of both abstention and of null or void votes in areas with high Indigenous populations (see Wray 1993: 311). Voting is required by law in Ecuador. 19 These positions include the Teniente Político (parish civil officer), the Jefe Político (municipal civil officer), the Hospital Director, and the Comisario Nacional (national commissioner). 20 Guamote’s Plan was initially based on twenty-nine two-day communitybased workshops, conducted entirely in Kichwa. In total, 2,207 people (representing roughly eight percent of the municipality’s population) took part—1,482 men (sixty-seven percent), 620 women (twenty-eight percent), and 105 children (five percent) (Municipalidad de Guamote 1999: 20–21). 21 Indeed, Curicama acknowledged that the municipality sought to pay for fifty percent of the cost of the projects prioritized in the plan with funding from international donors (Interview: June 17, 1999). 22 Following his tenure as mayor of Guamote, Mariano Curicama was elected as governor of the province of Chimborazo in 2000.

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23 For more on the history of national Indigenous uprisings in Ecuador, see Almeida et al. (1993); Becker (2008); Van Cott (2006). 24 Reports from the Riobamba-based newspaper La Prensa, as well as local accounts, highlighted the massive involvement of Indigenous residents from Guamote in the 1990 national Indigenous uprising, the 1994 protests against a proposed Agrarian Development Law, protests in 1994, 1997 and 1998 against the neoliberal economic policies, and the 2001 protests against the adoption of the U.S. dollar as Ecuador’s currency (Source: reports in La Prensa (Riobamba), 1990–2001. For further details, see Cameron (2003: 261). 25 The roundtable took place at the Instituto de Estudios Ecuatorianos (IEE) on May 8, 2007. For other recent analysis of Indigenous movements in Ecuador, see Becker (2008); Becker and Clark (2007); Larrea, Andrade and Bonilla (2006); Lucero (2007); Ospina (2006). 26 Nevertheless, in the 2008 municipal elections Juan de Dios Roldán, representing the Amauta party, was again elected as mayor with 38.5 percent of the popular vote, while the Pachakutik candidate received 29.6 percent of the vote (Consejo Nacional Electoral 2009). 27 In an analysis of national-level Indigenous politics, Bretón similarly highlighted the efforts of the Indigenous intelligentsia in Ecuador to foster a common ethnic identity that glossed over class inequalities within the Indigenous movement (2001: 27). 28 According to Ecuador’s 1990 census, 79.4 percent of school-aged boys and 75.7 percent of school-aged girls actually attended school on a regular basis (ODEPLAN 1999).

3 Municipal Democratization in a Context of Structural Inequality in Cotacachi, Ecuador

Under the leadership of an Indigenous mayor named Auki Tituaña, the rural municipality of Cotacachi, in Ecuador’s northern province of Imbabura, became the country’s most widely celebrated case of municipal democratization. In 1996, Tituaña became the first Indigenous mayor of Cotacachi since its legal incorporation as a municipality in 1861, despite the fact that close to forty percent of the population selfidentified as Indigenous. Under his leadership, the municipality established a highly participatory system of local governance that won international recognition, with prizes from UN Habitat in 2000, the Inter-American Forum for the Rights of Children and Youth in 2001, and from UNESCO in 2002.1 The centerpiece of local democracy in Cotacachi is the Assembly of Canton Unity (Asemblea de Unidad Cantonal).2 It was established in 1996 as a three-day citizen’s forum to discuss local development priorities but subsequently became a permanent and highly autonomous institution that played a central role in the deepening of municipal democracy. The municipal government also established a participatory budgeting system, decentralized important areas of decision making to Inter-Sectoral Councils that were composed of local civil society representatives, and actively promoted the creation and strengthening of local civil society organizations. Moreover, the mayor and other municipal leaders in Cotacachi mobilized local residents in protests against neoliberal macroeconomic policies and took a leading role in struggles against transnational mining corporations in the municipality.

79

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Table 3.1 Selected Social Data, Cotacachi, Ecuador3 Indicator Total population Rural population Self-identification as Indigenous Poverty Extreme poverty Infant mortality (x / 1000 live births) Chronic child malnutrition (under 5 years) Illiteracy (males over 15 years) Illiteracy (females over 15 years) Average years of schooling (males over 15 years) Average years of schooling (females over 15 years) Primary school attendance (males 5–14 years) Primary school attendance (females 5– 14 years) Secondary school attendance (males 12–17 years) Secondary school attendance (females 12–17 years) Houses with potable water Houses with sewage disposal Houses with electricity Agricultural workers in economically active population

1990 33,250 81.8 % N/I 84.2 % 56.2 % 74.9

2001 37,215 N/I 36.9 % 77.7 % 52.4 % N/I

65.5 %

N/I

26.1 % 37.3 %

17.7 % 27.1 %

3.8

4.8

3.1

4.2

79.4 %

89.6 %

80.3 %

90.8 %

18.2 %

32.1 %

22.1 %

38.0 %

24.5 % 23.9 % 39.2 %

N/I 54.4 % 69.5 %

57.5 %

N/I

Remarkably, the democratization of local governance in Cotacachi took place in a setting characterized by deep inequality in the distribution of land and other productive assets, the domination of local agricultural production by a small number of transnational cut-flower and vegetable operations, high rates of temporary labor migration, and nefarious interventions in local politics by transnational mining corporations. To understand how municipal governance became more democratic in such a context requires an analysis of the history of agrarian transformation, peasant organization and external intervention in the municipality, an examination of the municipal management and democratization strategies employed by Mayor Tituaña, and a recognition of the constraints on local democracy and development created by powerful external actors and the unequal distribution of productive assets. Moreover, in addition to the challenges created by

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outside actors, the process of municipal democratization in Cotacachi is also marked by a number of serious internal tensions that threaten its sustainability, including heavy dependence on the political will of the mayor, reliance on international aid, the emergence of a quasicorporatist system of local democracy, and low levels of participation by women. Furthermore, in spite of significant political development and improvements in social services and basic public infrastructure, ten years of municipal democratization had only a minimal impact on economic development and the reduction of poverty in the municipality. The examination of these tensions begins in Section I with an analysis of the history of agrarian transformation and the emergence of a powerful peasant organization in Cotacachi’s highland zone. Section II analyses the ascent of Indigenous leaders to municipal power and the subsequent efforts to democratize municipal governance and to promote social and economic development in the municipality. Section III examines the tensions, obstacles and possible limits of local democracy in Cotacachi. It is important to note that Cotacachi is geographically divided into two distinct ecological zones with very different demographic and political dynamics: a mountainous highland region and the lush subtropical lowland region of Intag. The highland region is located close to the Pan-American Highway and the urban centers of Ibarra and Otavalo and was historically dominated by large haciendas. It is home to sixty percent of the canton’s total population of 37,215 and is also the region in which the municipality’s Indigenous population is concentrated. The sub-tropical Intag zone, which is home to forty percent of the canton’s population, was settled by mestizo and Afro-Ecuadorian colonists from other parts of the country in the late 1960s but remains geographically isolated from the rest of the municipality and the country due to poor road access.4 As a result, the trajectory of municipal politics in Cotacachi was historically determined in the highland zone, although the incursions of transnational mining corporations into Intag in the early 1990s and the subsequent political mobilization against mining increased the area’s relative political importance. Power relations in the two zones are also very different, both in terms of the distribution of productive assets and socio-political organization. The highland zone was historically characterized by extreme inequality in the distribution of land and the control of irrigation water between large haciendas and tiny peasant minifundios. However, those power relations were reshaped by high levels of Indigenous peasant organization. By the 1980s almost all of the rural Indigenous communities in the highland zone were organized as legally recognized comunas with active community councils and high levels of community attachment. They were also

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represented by a well-organized and politically powerful peasant federation, the Union of Peasant Organizations of Cotacachi (Unión de Organizaciones Campesinas de Cotacachi—UNORCAC), which played a central role in struggles for municipal power beginning in the late 1970s. By contrast, the colonization of the Intag zone in the 1960s and 1970s produced a more equitable distribution of land, but serious efforts to create peasant and other popular organizations began only in the mid1990s and were still incipient in 2007, a social context that facilitated control by clientelist power brokers. Structural Inequality in Cotacachi: The Context for Municipal Democratization

In contrast to Guamote (Chapter Two), Ecuador’s agrarian reform laws had almost no effect on the distribution of land in the highland zone of Cotacachi. Local hacienda owners avoided government intervention to redistribute agricultural land by modernizing production, which was one of the goals of both the 1964 and 1973 Agrarian Reform Laws. As a result, in 1990, less than 3.5 percent of cultivated land in the municipality had been redistributed by the Instituto Ecuatoriano de Reforma Agraria y Colonización (Ecuadorian Institute of Agrarian Reform and Colonization—IERAC), the state agency responsible for administering agrarian reform (Zamosc 1995: 82; García Bravo 2002: 288). Only two haciendas had been completely broken up, neither of which had been privately owned.5 Table 3.2 reveals that in 1974, the 3,671 peasant landholdings under ten hectares, which represented over three quarters of all farms in the municipality, controlled only ten percent of cultivated land. By contrast, ninety-three haciendas in the highland zone, which represented only two percent of farms, controlled over half of the cultivated land. The largest nine of those haciendas together controlled over thirty percent of cultivated land in the municipality (INEC 1974: 133). A lack of comparable data makes it difficult to track the changes in land ownership over time, but available statistics do make clear that peasants’ access to land in the highland zone of the municipality did not improve significantly as a result of Ecuador’s agrarian reform laws. The division of large properties through inheritance and the sale of hacienda land to finance agricultural modernization did result in a decline in the size of the largest farms and a growth in the number of modernized medium sized farms (i.e. 50 to 100 hectares). However, little of that land was acquired by peasant farmers. A 1988 study by the Ecuadorian government’s Fondo de Desarrollo Rural Marginal (Fund for Marginal

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Rural Development—FODERUMA) records that of 2,764 peasant households in thirty-nine highland communities in the municipality, eighty-eight percent owned less than 1 hectare, thirteen percent owned between 1 and 5 hectares, 2.6 percent owned between 10 and 50 hectares and none owned more than 50 hectares (cited in Pallares 2002: 76). Similarly, data collected in 1990 by the Ecuadorian NGO Centro Andino de Acción Popular (Andean Center for Popular Action—CAAP) found that 89.9 percent of cultivated land in the highland zone was controlled by the 18.6 percent of farms that were larger than 50 hectares. The remaining 81.4 percent of farms smaller than 50 hectarescontrolled only 11.2 percent of cultivated land in the municipality (CAAP 1991: 69). Technical staff in Cotacachi’s Canton Assembly subsequently calculated that 57.3 percent of the agricultural land in the highland zone was controlled by 1.1 percent of agricultural operations (Asemblea de Unidad Cantonal 2002a: 2) and that average peasant landholdings in the highland zone were 0.5 hectares(Asemblea de Unidad Cantonal 2007: 9), an area so small that ninety-four percent of peasant crops were produced for consumption and only six percent reached the market and provided a source of income (Asemblea de Unidad Cantonal 2002a: 42). Table 3.2 Land Ownership in Cotacachi, 1974 Size of Farm (hectares)

# of farms

% of farms

Total hectares of land owned

% of land owned

Average farm size (hectares)

Without land

132

2.8

0

0

0 ha

Under 5

3,324

71.1

4,330

6.7

1.28

5 to 10

347

7.4

2,209

3.4

6.3

10 to 20

296

6.3

3,825

5.9

12.9

20 to 50

282

6.0

8,103

12.6

28.7

50 to 100

196

4.2

11,513

17.9

58.7

100 to 500

84

1.8

14,566

22.6

173.4

500 to 1000

8

0.2

4648

7.2

581.0

1000 to 2500

-

-

-

-

-

Over 2500

1

0.02

15,000

23.3

15,000

Total

4,670

100

64,194

100

13.7

Source: Elaborated from INEC (1974: 133).

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In sharp contrast to the experience of Guamote, agrarian change in Cotacachi thus followed a Junker path, characterized by the capitalist transformation of semi-feudal estates into modern agricultural businesses (see Barsky 1984; de Janvry 1981; Moore, Jr. 1966). The impacts of agrarian reform legislation in the municipality were limited to the establishment of wage-based labor relations between estate owners and former peasant tenants and the conversion of local estates from low-productivity crop production to low-productivity dairy production. Thus, not only did agrarian reforms largely fail to redistribute agricultural land to peasant farmers, but the conversion of most local haciendas to dairy production also reduced the number of jobs on local estates. A 1991 study described haciendas in the municipality as inefficient and capital-intensive, and noted that they generated little employment, did not reinvest profits and were “not incorporated into the process of development in the micro-region” (CAAP 1991, 98). In the late 1980s, a sub-sector of highly capital-intensive, exportoriented agricultural producers began to emerge among Cotacachi’s haciendas. By 1999, seven of the municipality’s haciendas had become producers of cut flowers for export, primarily to North American markets, and a larger number produced asparagus and other vegetables for export. These crops, and especially cut flowers, are both capital and labor intensive, employing between twelve and fifteen workers per hectare (Korovkin 2002). A 1997 study estimated that cut-flower operations in the municipality employed 589 workers, of which 324 were from communities in Cotacachi, representing approximately two percent of the estimated economically active population of 16,100 (Asemblea de Unidad Cantonal 1997: 6) The same study also indicated that wages in the cut-flower sector were significantly higher than in other agricultural enterprises (Asemblea de Unidad Cantonal 1997: 39– 41). However, beyond the modest increase in employment opportunities and higher wages, the cut-flower producers and other agro-exporters in Cotacachi made little contribution to local economic development. They generated few forward or backward linkages to other sectors of the local economy and paid taxes only in Quito, where they were legally registered. As a result of the highly unequal control of land and the tiny size of peasant landholdings in the highland zone, agriculture is not a viable livelihood and most rural households depend on labor migration to survive.6 The 1991 study by CAAP found that only ten percent of local peasant families possessed enough land and access to irrigation water to produce sufficient food and income through agriculture to guarantee

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their subsistence. The remaining ninety percent of the rural highland population was forced into patterns of temporary labor migration in order to supplement the income and produce of their small agricultural plots (CAAP 1991: 74). A 1998 study of migration patterns in Cotacachi found that 28.9 percent of the rural highland population regularly worked outside of the municipality (Flora 1998: 64). However, because of the relative proximity of labor markets in the nearby towns of Ibarra and Otavalo as well as in Quito, it has been possible for many labor migrants to return to their rural communities on a daily or weekly basis (Flora 1998), thus making it possible to remain at least partly involved in community-based social and political organizations. Despite the highly polarized system of land control, Indigenous peasants in Cotacachi never seriously struggled for land redistribution. Peasants openly contested the control of hacienda land in only two rural communities, and their efforts were successful only in one of those cases.7 There were four main reasons for the lack of land struggle in Cotacachi.8 First, most peasant households and communities owned at least some land and were free from direct hacienda control, unlike their counterparts in Guamote, which reduced the material motives for land struggles.9 Second, although the conversion of local haciendas to dairy production in the 1960s and 1970s reduced local employment opportunities, agricultural modernization in nearby areas, especially sisal grass plantations in the Intag zone and sugar cane plantations in the Chota Valley to the north, increased opportunities for sources of income that did not depend on access to land. Third, the conservative orientation of the Catholic Church in the province of Imbabura dissuaded many peasants from engaging in land struggles. Indeed, local priests actively discouraged peasants from organizing politically and verbally attacked politicized Indigenous leaders from the pulpit and in their pastoral work until the 1980s. Finally, external organizing agents did not actively encourage Indigenous peasants in Cotacachi to struggle for land redistribution. Although both the Communist Party-allied Ecuadorian Federation of Indians (Federación Ecuatoriana de Indios—FEI) and the National Federation of Peasant Organizations (Federación Nacional de Organizaciones Campesinas—FENOC) actively promoted peasant organization in Cotacachi, they gave priority to peasant struggles against the payment of tithes to the Church rather than land redistribution. As a result of this combination of factors, there was little political will among Indigenous peasants in Cotacachi to struggle for the redistribution of agricultural land. The perception among Indigenous leaders that the local police would support hacienda owners further diminished their willingness to engage in land struggles (Alfonso Morales, interview:

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June 9, 2002; see also Pallares 2002: 76–83; García Bravo 2002: 288– 289). While Indigenous leaders did not seriously contest the unequal distribution of land in Cotacachi, they did establish a powerful peasant federation that challenged racist social relations and the exclusionary system of municipal governance in the municipality. Building on earlier organizational efforts that had focused on culture and sports, a group of young Indigenous activists from both the town center and rural communities created the Union of Peasant Organizations of Cotacachi (Unión de Organizaciones Campesinas de Cotacachi—UNORCAC) in 1977. Against the backdrop of rising levels of economic differentiation and new educational opportunities for some—mostly male Indigenous children—the relatively well-educated and well-off young Indigenous activists who led UNORCAC focused their attention on the systemic, racist abuse they experienced in interactions with local mestizos, including within municipal and state institutions. As Pallares explained, the gradual breakdown of the hacienda regime over the course of the 1970s meant that the haciendas no longer mediated between rural Indigenous peasants and town-based mestizo residents and inter-ethnic relations became increasingly tense and frequently violent (2002: 78– 84). Town-based mestizos responded to the decay of the prevailing social order with a discourse that cast Indigenous residents as “a threat to public morality” (Pallares 2002: 8), which fueled systematic, racially motivated abuse by the local police. Against the backdrop of the crumbling hacienda regime, Indigenous youth also became more defiant and refused to accept mestizo abuse passively, which contributed to a further spiral of abuse by the police and increased racial tension. Pallares further explained that while some upwardly mobile Indigenous residents confronted racial discrimination and abuse with strategies of mestizaje (abandoning markers of Indigenous identity in favor of mestizo ones), others responded with both individual and organized acts of resistance. In 1977, shortly after UNORCAC was established, the beating death of a young Indigenous man, Rafael Perugachi, by a mestizo police officer galvanized the local Indigenous population and firmly established UNORCAC as the legitimate representative of rural Indigenous communities (Pallares 2002: 82–84). In 1979, UNORCAC became formally affiliated with the National Federation of Peasant Organizations (Federación Nacional de Organizaciones Campesinas— FENOC), a national peasant federation linked to the Socialist Party. FENOC provided legal, technical and financial resources which further consolidated UNORCAC’s role as the intermediary between rural highland Indigenous communities and outside institutions.

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Despite the absence of struggles for land redistribution in Cotacachi, the direct political control of municipal politics by local hacienda owners steadily declined over the course of the 1970s. The shift from semi-feudal to wage-based labor relations and the granting of usufruct plots to their former tenants that followed the 1963 Agrarian Reform Law weakened the direct power of landlords over the highland peasant population in the municipality. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, many hacienda families moved from Cotacachi to Quito and to the provincial capital of Ibarra, leaving their estates in the hands of local managers. In the mid-1970s, in the context of economic expansion fueled by Ecuador’s petroleum boom, the estate owners who had traditionally controlled Cotacachi’s municipal council shifted their attention to national politics, which opened spaces for new political actors to enter the local political arena (Martínez 1985: 51), an opportunity that was quickly seized by Cotacachi’s town-based mestizo petite bourgeoisie of artisans and small-scale merchants. The political influence of the Catholic Church in Cotacachi also declined in parallel with that of the landowning elite that had helped to bolster its power. By the late 1970s, municipal power had shifted from the local hacienda elite, which no longer intervened actively in local politics, to the town-based mestizo petite bourgeoisie. Since the early twentieth century, Cotacachi has been the site of an important artisan-based leather-working industry.10 Although local leather production suffered a serious decline after the Second World War as plastic goods entered the mass market, the construction of paved roads in the 1970s that connected Cotacachi with Quito to the south and Colombia to the north helped to revive the market for Cotacachi’s leather goods. Studies of the industry indicate that the number of small-scale leather workshops in Cotacachi increased from 150 in 1970 to 407 in 1997 (Asemblea de Unidad Cantonal 1997: 47). The small-scale production of leather goods also fueled the development of over 120 retail leather outlets clustered along the main streets of the town center. By the early 1980s, the combination of leather retail outlets with a nearby volcanic lake, the Laguna Cuicocha, helped to make Cotacachi an important tourist destination and generated further growth in the size and relative economic, social and political power of the town-based mestizo petite bourgeoisie. Despite the growing political power of UNORCAC, this group of mestizos effectively controlled municipal political power in the municipality from 1980 to 1996 and ensured that the bulk of municipal resources were channeled to the town center, despite the fact that it represented less than twenty percent of the municipality’s total population. Even after the election of the Indigenous mayor, Auki

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Tituaña, in 1996, the town-based mestizos remained an important political constituency that continued to play an important role in shaping the trajectory of local politics. Settlement in the sub-tropical Intag zone of Cotacachi by mestizo and black colonists from other parts of the country began in the late 1960s as the result of efforts by the Ecuadorian state to promote peasant colonization in lowland areas. By 2001, Intag’s population had grown to almost 15,000, approximately forty percent of the municipality’s total population. Because there were never any haciendas in Intag, the distribution of land in the zone was much less unequal than in the highland region. In 1990, fifty-eight percent of all agricultural units and seventy-seven percent of all cultivated land was controlled by peasant farms of less than 10 hectares, while properties over 50 hectares controlled just over six percent of cultivated land (CAAP 1991: 81). However, despite greater access to land, the lack of credit and other state supports for peasant agriculture and the difficult market access caused by the poor road network posed serious obstacles to peasant livelihoods in Intag. The domination of agricultural marketing by exploitative intermediaries, who purchased agricultural products from local farms and transported them to regional markets in the highland region, also drained a large proportion of the locally generated surplus from the zone (Asemblea de Unidad Cantonal 1997: 40). Serious efforts to organize the predominantly peasant population of Intag did not begin until the mid-1990s, and ten years later popular political organization in the zone still remained incipient, complicated by large distances between communities, poor roads, the absence of public transportation and a weak sense of local identity. In 1990, only nineteen percent of Intag’s population was incorporated into legally recognized comunas—a sharp contrast to the highland region, where almost seventy-five percent of rural communities were legally constituted as comunas and had formally elected leadership structures (CAAP 1991: 109). Although the creation of a comuna does not necessarily indicate internal social cohesion, the fact that most communities in Intag had not become legally recognized comunas, which enjoy greater access to state and NGO resources, is a strong indicator of weak patterns of community organization. It was not until the late 1990s, when many of the area’s communities were threatened by transnational mineral exploration, that popular organization by Intag residents began to intensify. In 1995, an Intag-based environmental organization, the Defence and Conservation of Intag (Defensa y Conservación del Intag—DECOIN), was created by a local liberation theology priest and a Cuban-born farmer and eco-

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tourism operator to confront Japanese mineral exploration (see www.decoin.org). With a well-educated and media-savvy leadership and support from national and international environmental NGOs and human rights organizations,11 DECOIN put heavy pressure on both the municipality of Cotacachi and the Intag population to adopt an environmentally sensitive development agenda and to fight against mining activity. In 1997, the municipality of Cotacachi sponsored the creation of the Intag Zone Development Committee (Comité de Desarrollo Zonal de Intag) as a formal organization to represent the zone in negotiations with outside actors. As mineral exploration intensified in the early 2000s and serious environmental impacts were predicted for several communities, local organization and political mobilization also increased substantially, with support from national and international environmental groups, and the Intag zone began to play a much more prominent role in municipal politics (see Bebbington 2007; Rogge 2008). To sum up, in the mid-1990s, the constellation of socio-economic and political power relations in the municipality of Cotacachi was characterized by a politically powerful mestizo middle class, based in the town center of the municipality, which controlled municipal politics; an economically powerful sector of large-scale landowners that had been largely uninvolved in municipal politics since the late 1970s but who offered latent support to the town-based mestizos that governed the municipality; a highly organized rural Indigenous population in the highland zone with extremely limited access to agricultural land; and nascent peasant organizations in the Intag zone. It was in this somewhat unlikely context that Cotacachi elected an Indigenous mayor and became one of the most celebrated cases of municipal democratization in Ecuador. The rest of this chapter examines the transformation of municipal governance in Cotacachi and the challenges for municipal democratization that emerged from this context. Municipal Democratization in Cotacachi: Shifting Power Relations and Municipal Institution-Building

As in many other municipalities in rural Ecuador, the pattern of municipal administration that developed in Cotacachi between the 1970s and 1990s was clientelist, nepotistic, corrupt, racist and highly exclusionary. Until the mid-1970s, municipal authorities regularly forced Indigenous peasants to provide free labor for municipal public works projects (García Bravo 2002: 289). Another frequently recounted example of the systematic racism and exclusion practiced by the

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municipal government was its response to the first attempt by newly elected UNORCAC leaders in 1977 to petition the mayor for public works projects in rural communities. The mayor refused to allow the Indigenous leaders to enter the municipal building, claiming that they would “dirty the floors and carpets” (Alberto Andrango, interview: June 25, 2002). Even mestizo residents of the town center recalled that the administrative capacity of municipal governments during that period was extremely weak—a reflection of both the lack of political will and the prevailing bureaucratic incompetence within the municipal government, as well as the highly centralized system of governance that prevailed in Ecuador from the 1960s to the 1980s. Local development initiatives by the municipality were limited to small, unplanned public works projects in the town center, completed without public consultation by contractors whose family and political ties to municipal politicians were generally much stronger than their technical competence. In 1990, an Ecuadorian NGO that worked in Cotacachi from the late 1970s until the early 1990s described the municipal government as having “a limited margin of action and minimal capacity to manage local resources” (CAAP 1991: iv). Indigenous residents perceived the municipal building in Cotacachi’s town center as a site of systemic exclusion. Municipal authorities made few infrastructure investments in rural communities and actively discouraged Indigenous peasant organization (Alberto Andrango, interview: June 25, 2002; García Bravo 2002: 289). The limited success of some rural communities in securing basic public infrastructure, such as electricity and community centers, was rooted primarily on the clientelist provision of support to local politicians who agreed to direct central state funds to those communities (Alberto Andrango, interview: June 25, 2002). For the most part, however, the municipal government simply ignored its rural constituents. Indigenous Peasant Struggles for Municipal Power, 1979–1996

It was in this context of an administratively weak and exclusionary system of municipal governance that Indigenous leaders associated with UNORCAC began to struggle for municipal power. Early in its history, UNORCAC identified Cotacachi’s municipal government as an important political arena for improving basic infrastructure in rural communities. It was with the specific goal of gaining access to resources for rural infrastructure that UNORCAC leaders decided to launch candidates in Ecuador’s 1979 municipal elections—the first elections after almost a decade of military rule and after the 1979 constitutional

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reform that removed literacy requirements for voting. Forced by law to contest the elections under the banner of a legally recognized political party, UNORCAC leaders affiliated with the Broad Front of the Democratic Left (Frente Amplio Democratico de la Izquierda—FADI). Garnering a much larger proportion of the municipality’s eligible voters than ever before as a result of the removal of literacy requirements for voting, UNORCAC leaders were able to mobilize enough votes from rural communities to elect the organization’s president—then Alberto Andrango—as a municipal councilor in 1979. UNORCAC leaders adopted what they called a “double layer thesis” that alternated between an emphasis on the class exploitation of peasants and the racist exclusion of Indigenous people, and which reflected broader debates within Ecuadorian peasant and Indigenous movements at that time (see Pallares 2002: 84–87). The flexibility of UNORCAC’s discourse made it possible for the organization’s leaders to justify electoral alliances with town-based mestizos affiliated with FADI and later the Ecuadorian Socialist Party that were necessary in order to win elections given the relatively large mestizo population. As Pallares explained, UNORCAC leaders “were able to emphasize Indianness when Indigenous candidates were running and poverty and inclusiveness when mestizo candidates were running. In addition, separating poverty from Indianness allowed for a broader definition of Indian, by linking Indians who were peasants with migrant workers, merchants and urban professionals” (2002: 93). Electoral alliances with mestizo leftists helped UNORCAC to win some important municipal election victories. In every election after 1979, the organization placed at least one and sometimes two of its chosen candidates on the municipal council, making it one of the most consistently successful peasant organizations in Ecuadorian municipal politics. However, while UNORCAC representatives on the municipal council were able to secure some increased investment in public works for rural highland communities, the governance of the municipality did not change substantially and the mestizo alliances generally ended quickly after each election. Against this historical backdrop, Auki Tituaña was nominated in 1995 as the first Indigenous candidate for mayor in the history of the municipality. Tituaña’s background made his nomination a complicated process but it also enabled him to forge crucial cross-class and interethnic alliances that not only resulted in three consecutive election victories but also facilitated the democratization of municipal governance in the municipality. Tituaña was neither a member of UNORCAC nor from a rural community. The son of entrepreneurial artisans who lived in Cotacachi’s town center, Tituaña was one of very

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few Indigenous residents in Cotacachi to complete secondary school. In 1984 he received a scholarship to study economics at the University of Havana and returned to Ecuador in 1990 to take up a position as a teacher in a polytechnic school in Chimborazo. He was subsequently hired by the national Indigenous organization, CONAIE, to work in the planning and implementation of local development projects, a role that enabled him to acquire important experience in development project management, to become familiar with aid donor discourse and to make important personal contacts with the directors and staff of NGOs and international donors (Auki Tituaña, interview: September 2, 1999). Following the 1995 decision by CONAIE to create the Pachakutik political party and to enter the arena of electoral politics (see Van Cott 2005), CONAIE promoted Tituaña’s candidacy for the position of mayor in Cotacachi. Tituaña’s association with CONAIE and his lack of close connections to UNORCAC, which was affiliated with FENOCIN (formerly FENOC)—CONAIE’s principal but weaker rival in the national Indigenous movement—posed a serious challenge for UNORCAC’s leaders.12 They only agreed to support Tituaña’s candidacy after intense negotiations with CONAIE and following the recognition that Tituaña’s technical competence and title as an economist made him a very strong candidate with a good chance of winning the election for mayor.Tituaña’s personal and professional background enabled him to attract mestizo and Indigenous votes, both of which were essential for his narrow election victory.13 With less than four hundred dollars for his election campaign, Tituaña’s victory depended on the capacity of UNORCAC’s leaders to mobilize Indigenous votes, a task that was facilitated considerably by UNORCAC’s long history of engagement in municipal politics (Cornelio Orbes, President of UNORCAC, interview: August 27, 1999). At the same time, Tituaña’s urban professional background enabled him to appeal to left-leaning mestizos from Cotacachi’s town center that would not have supported a rural Indigenous candidate more closely connected to UNORCAC. Indeed, local political activists, both mestizo and Indigenous, asserted that Tituaña’s urban and professional background combined with his title of ‘Economist’ and his lack of close connections to UNORCAC effectively ‘whitened’ him in the eyes of many mestizo voters and distinguished him from rural Indigenous peasants. When he appeared in public, Tituaña always dressed in the traditional Indigenous clothing of the area—a wide-brimmed fedora, navy blue woolen poncho, and white calf-length pants—but the immaculate manner in which he wore these clothes helped town-based mestizos to distinguish him from rural peasants. The fact that Tituaña’s

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wife, Luz Marina Vega, was a practicing medical doctor, also trained in Cuba, added to his image of professional competence. Tituaña’s election campaign built upon UNORCAC’s flexible ‘double layer thesis’ (Pallares 2002: 84–87), which alternated between Indigenous ethnicity and class exploitation depending on the specific context, but it focused primarily on improving municipal governance with an emphasis on transparency, accountability, technically competent public works, increased participation by local residents in municipal decision making and an end to local government corruption. Once elected, Tituaña’s background enhanced his autonomy from local pressure groups and strengthened his capacity to promote an agenda of municipal democratization. Tituaña had strong connections to both rural Indigenous constituents and to town-based mestizos but he was beholden to neither group—unlike the Indigenous councilors who had preceded him that operated exclusively to promote the interests of UNORCAC and its member communities. He was thus well-positioned to resist pressures from both sectors to govern solely or even predominantly in their interests, a factor which was central to his efforts to forge a cross-class and inter-ethnic coalition supportive of his agenda for municipal democratization and local development. In an effort to explain the capacity of developmental states at the national level to promote economic and social development, Evans emphasized the importance of “embedded autonomy,” which he described as an apparently “contradictory combination of close relations with a particular social constituency and insulation from it” (1995: 238). In Cotacachi, Tituaña’s capacity to foster close relationships with the rural Indigenous population and the town-based mestizo population while simultaneously remaining relatively autonomous from them and without being perceived by either group as exclusively representing the interests of the other was central to his relative success in promoting municipal democracy. As discussed below, Tituaña’s success at brokering financial support from aid donors and NGOs further enhanced the relative autonomy of the municipal government from local social forces and enabled him to make important changes in municipal governance. The Democratization of Municipal Governance in Cotacachi

Tituaña’s election marked the beginning of a profound and rapid democratization of municipal governance in Cotacachi. Under Tituaña’s leadership, the municipality of Cotacachi actively promoted the formation of autonomous neighborhood, youth, women’s, environmental, and artisans’ organizations as well as a federation to

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represent rural communities in Intag; it organized annual citizens’ assemblies to guide and monitor municipal activities; it decentralized important areas of municipal decision making to local Inter-Sectoral Councils with significant popular representation; it reorganized the municipal bureaucracy to make it more responsive and friendly to local citizens (and Indigenous peasants in particular); it established a participatory budgeting process; and it substantially increased the quantity and quality of public works projects in both rural communities and the town center. In order to understand how it was possible to make these changes in a relatively short period of time, it is necessary to analyze the shifts in the balance of local power relations and increases in external financial support that occurred under Tituaña’s leadership as well as the limitations and internal tensions of the changes that did occur. A crucial element of the political dynamics that enabled Tituaña to promote municipal democratization was the large volume of financial and technical support from international aid donors and Ecuadorian NGOs. In a policy context in which decentralization and support to Indigenous peoples were becoming increasingly popular among donor agencies, the combination of Tituaña’s knowledge of development practice, his discourse, his training as an economist, his agenda of municipal democratization, and his strategic self-representation as an Indigenous professional made Cotacachi’s municipal government very appealing to aid donors and NGOs. As such, these organizations became increasingly interested in supporting innovative municipal governments in the mid-1990s. Tituaña’s agenda of transparency, accountability, efficiency, and effectiveness also marked his clear acceptance of the central principles of the ‘good governance’ agenda promoted by aid donors and further increased his capacity to attract international funding. Even before his election victory, Tituaña had begun to court NGOs and donor agencies, and during his first term as mayor from 1996 to 1999, he traveled to the United States, Japan, Germany, and Spain with the explicit intention of attracting international assistance to Cotacachi (see La Hora 1999). During that period, he also traveled to Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala, and Nicaragua to participate in international conferences and hosted numerous delegations from visiting development agencies and municipal governments in Ecuador and other Latin American countries (see Diario del Norte 1999). Thus it was that during his first term as mayor from 1996 to 1999, Tituaña succeeded in attracting over two million dollars in NGO and donor funding to the municipality, an amount roughly equivalent to one third of all other sources of municipal revenue combined (see Cameron 2003: 475–480).

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In 2002 and 2005, funding from international donors and NGOs almost doubled the municipality’s investment budget.14 Like his counterparts in Guamote, Tituaña’s capacity to execute public works projects also benefited from the incipient process of decentralization in Ecuador, which generated additional new sources of revenue for the municipality. Between 1996 and 2006, Cotacachi’s annual municipal budget grew from just over $1 million to more than $4.3 million, largely as a result of central state transfers; international aid was accounted for separately from the municipal budget. The financial, technical, and symbolic support from NGOs and aid donors helped to shift the balance of political power in Cotacachi in favor of Tituaña’s agenda in three important ways. First, NGO funds were directed primarily towards infrastructure projects and social services in Cotacachi’s rural communities, particularly in the highland zone. The influx of new resources enabled the municipality to respond relatively quickly to the very high expectations for municipal services and infrastructure in long-neglected Indigenous communities. Second, the significant increase in funds for rural public works allowed Tituaña to expand the municipality’s attention to rural communities while simultaneously increasing the number of infrastructure projects in the town center. Following his election, Tituaña immediately embarked on a series of highly visible public works projects in Cotacachi’s town center, including repairs to the Catholic Church and the town’s central plaza, making improvements to street lighting, extensive street and sidewalk repairs, and the construction of an impressive entranceway into the town center. The municipality later brokered assistance from UNESCO to renovate historic buildings in the town center and replaced the open-air municipal market space with a modern building. Those public works projects quickly reassured local town-based mestizos that the Indigenous mayor would not discriminate against them and helped Tituaña to legitimate his leadership among town-based constituents. As Tituaña himself asserted during a public meeting in 1999, “the Indigenous mayor is not spending all of the municipality’s money in the rural communities” (September 15, 1999). The vice-president of the town-based Neighborhood Federation backed up Tituaña’s assertion in 2002, arguing that the town center was better off under Tituaña’s leadership even though it received a smaller proportion of the municipal budget (Interview: June 5, 2002). Indeed, in 1998, a newspaper from the nearby city of Ibarra dubbed Tituaña “the mayor of public works” (La Verdad 1998). The termination of corrupt contracting procedures and Tituaña’s legitimacy to convoke mingas in rural communities—which meant that the municipality did not

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need to pay for unskilled labor—further enhanced the municipality’s capacity to carry out public works projects. In fact, in another break from tradition, Tituaña was also able to convoke mingas of mestizo residents for public works projects in neighborhoods of the town center. The third way in which external aid helped to tip the balance of local political power in favor of Tituaña’s leadership was primarily symbolic. The financial support from aid donors and NGOs, the praise for the municipality’s efforts from visiting delegations, and invitations to the mayor to speak in foreign countries—all widely publicized by local newspapers and the municipal radio station—brought international validation and legitimacy to bear on local public opinion and played an important role in shaping the views of local mestizo residents. The nomination of the municipality of Cotacachi for UNESCO’s ‘Cities for Peace Award’ in 1999 and the actual winning of the award in 2002, in addition to the Dubai International Award in 2000, further reinforced the positive response of town-based residents to the municipal agenda of the Indigenous mayor. NGO and donor funding also enhanced the relative autonomy of Cotacachi’s municipal government from both local social forces and Ecuador’s central government. Because donor and NGO funds had to be spent on specific projects, they were not subject to pressures from local interest groups in the way that central state transfers and local tax revenues were. With a significant source of financial revenue that was connected neither to the central state nor to local taxes, the municipality was able to operate relatively autonomously in relation to both organized popular actors, such as UNORCAC, and economically powerful groups, such as the town-based mestizos and local hacienda owners. The relatively large amounts of NGO and donor support also enabled the municipality to weather Ecuador’s 1999–2000 financial crisis much more successfully than many of its counterparts. The opportunities for Mayor Tituaña and his team to create innovative new institutions in Cotacachi was also a product of Ecuador’s timid approach to decentralization, which neither legislated nor prohibited any specific institutional designs for participatory decision making at the municipal level (see Van Cott 2008: 35–39; Eaton 2004; Ojeda Segovia 2002, 2004; Harbers and Illerhues 2006). Ecuador’s decentralization framework thus contrasted sharply with Bolivia’s 1994 Law of Popular Participation and Peru’s 2003 Law of Participatory Budgets, both of which imposed detailed regulations for popular participation in municipal governance that left individual municipalities with much less flexibility than their Ecuadorian counterparts—although room for innovation did exist (see Chapters Four to Seven). Ecuador’s

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1998 Constitution also gave municipal governments the option to negotiate the transfer of administrative jurisdiction and corresponding resources from the central state to different areas of policy, including education, health care, tourism and natural resource management. Municipal leaders in Cotacachi were thus able to strategically choose which areas of policymaking to expand and which to leave in the hands of the central state, an option that was not open to Bolivian or Peruvian municipalities, which all received the same new areas of jurisdiction. In that flexible environment, the municipality successfully negotiated the transfer of responsibility for tourism promotion and health care and very actively pursued the decentralization of authority over natural resources as part of a strategy to increase control over mining operations. However, the municipality avoided the decentralization of responsibility for education since it did not want to become embroiled in divisive conflicts with the powerful national teacher’s union, especially as many of its members in Cotacachi were town-based mestizos and prominent players in local politics (President, Inter-Sectoral Education Committee, interview: June 18, 2002). The relative importance of power relations among different sectors of civil society and between civil society organizations and the municipal government was thus contingent on the jurisdiction of the municipal government over different policy areas. Power relations between teachers and the municipal government, which could have been highly conflictive, had little impact on the democratization process in Cotacachi because the municipality did not seek out authority over education policy. Municipal officials pursued the decentralization of new areas of jurisdiction only over issues in which they believed that they could control political conflicts—such as health care and tourism—or for issues in which the stakes were so high and popular pressure so strong that they were effectively forced to tackle highly conflictual issues such as the prohibition of mining activity. The shift in local power relations brought about by the tentative de facto alliance of the rural Indigenous population with much of the townbased mestizo petite-bourgeoisie, as well as the construction of a broad support base through the execution of public works projects and the increased autonomy of the municipal government, allowed Mayor Tituaña to bring about important changes in local governance. The most important of those initiatives included the creation of the Assembly of Canton Unity (Asemblea de Unidad Cantonal), the decentralization of municipal responsibilities to a series of Inter-Sectoral Councils, the promotion of autonomous civil society organizations, the implementation of a participatory budget system, and the leadership of

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popular challenges against local haciendas and transnational mining corporations. The Assembly of Canton Unity

The Assembly of Canton Unity, or Canton Assembly as it is generally called in Cotacachi, was first organized in 1996 under Tituaña’s leadership with significant support and influence from Ecuadorian NGOs. It began as a three-day public forum to discuss the challenges and priorities for local development, which served as the basis for the subsequent elaboration of a municipal development plan (Asemblea de Unidad Cantonal 1997). Over the following years, the Canton Assembly evolved into a permanent and highly autonomous institution that played an important role in monitoring and auditing the municipal government and pushing it to actively represent the local population on a number of highly contentious issues. Moreover, the nature of participation in the annual Assemblies also changed from traditional demand-making on the municipal government to a spirit of genuine engagement in local governance. Nevertheless, the consolidation of the Canton Assembly also created difficult tensions vis-à-vis the municipal council and UNORCAC, both of which felt that their respective roles in the prevailing system of local governance were threatened by the new institution. The design of the Assembly also signified the emergence of a neo-corporatist form of democracy in Cotacachi, which, despite significant participation by representatives of organized civil society groups, failed to make space for individuals who did not hold leadership positions in local organizations. Moreover, in spite of its high degree of autonomy from municipal interference, the capacity of the Assembly to influence municipal decision making depended heavily on the political will of the mayor and on financial support from aid donors and NGOs. Indeed, the financial dependence of the Assembly on short-term financial support from NGOs and aid donors and the absence of mechanisms to represent citizens who did not belong to formal organizations were two of the strongest criticisms of the institution in a 2007 external evaluation conducted by the Institute of Ecuadorian Studies (IEE 2007: 26). The Canton Assembly evolved to include a series of individual institutions, which included an annual three-day citizen’s forum (the General Assembly), a permanent executive body called the Development and Management Council, and five Inter-Sectoral Committees which were responsible for proposing and designing municipal policies in the different areas of municipal jurisdiction.

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Beginning in 1996, the General Assembly was convened for three days every year to give the representatives of local civil society organizations the opportunity to question municipal leaders and to debate and propose resolutions that would guide the municipal government for the following year. Although the mayor and municipal council were not legally obliged to follow the resolutions of the General Assembly, Mayor Tituaña insisted that the Assembly was the “maximum decision making institution” in the municipality and that the municipal government was morally obligated to act on its resolutions in a timely manner. However, because the General Assembly undermined the legislative role of the municipal council—the official legal legislative body at the municipal level—it generated fierce resistance from mestizo representatives on the municipal council who refused to recognize the Assembly’s authority. As a result, it was not until 2000, when a majority of councilors supported Tituaña and his democratization project, that the council passed an official ordinance that formally recognized the Canton Assembly and officially outlined its roles in local governance (Asemblea de Unidad Cantonal 2000). Nevertheless, the role of the Assembly remained heavily dependent on the political will of the mayor, as the ordinance could be overturned by future mayors and councilors, and Ecuador’s constitutional framework provided no legal support for such institutions. At the same time, some of the opposing councilors did find that they could avoid politically difficult issues by turning them over to the Assemblies, which occurred in the case of increases to water rates in 1999 and to property taxes in 2001. Participation in the General Assembly was initially open to all local residents. However, after the first Assembly, in which almost all of the 177 participants were from rural Indigenous communities and almost no mestizos from the town center took part, Tituaña and his collaborators recognized that participation in the Assemblies needed to be organized more carefully if it was to avoid being perceived as an institution that only represented rural Indigenous communities and instead become a legitimate representative body of Cotacachi’s entire civil society. Thus, while the General Assembly shared some similarities with Guamote’s Indigenous Parliament, it also represented a much broader array of social actors, reflecting the very different compositions of local power relations in the two municipalities. While the Indigenous Parliament effectively represented only rural community councils, the General Assembly convened the representatives of all of the civil society organizations in Cotacachi, ranging from UNORCAC to the mestizodominated leather producers and transport operator unions. By 1999, the Assembly consistently brought together approximately six hundred

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representatives of local civil society organizations. Although any local residents could attend the Assembly, only officially recognized representatives of local civil society organizations enjoyed voting rights, and indeed almost all of the participants were official representatives of local organizations. Although the Canton Assembly was characterized by the dynamic participation of many of those who actually took part in it, the Assembly was also marked by neo-corporatist elements that highlighted the tensions between Indigenous and liberal forms of democracy in the Andes (Ospina 2005). Participation in the Assembly was predicated on institutionalized forms of organization. While the rules of the Assembly did not prevent ordinary citizens from attending the meetings, they did privilege the participation and voting of representatives of formallyorganized civil society groups. The vast majority of participants did not take part as individual citizens but rather in their capacity as representatives of local organizations. There was little space and no priority or voting privileges given to individuals who did not hold leadership positions in local groups. Such individuals were effectively excluded from most of the mechanisms of Cotacachi’s system of ‘participatory’ democracy. Although municipal authorities and civil society leaders in the Assembly proudly asserted that the institution was fostering a new culture of active citizenship in the municipality, that culture was limited to a relatively small group of people that held leadership positions in local organizations; the six hundred or so representatives who took part in the Assembly’s annual meetings accounted for 1.6 percent of the municipality’s total population. The remainder of the population had little connection to or understanding of the Assembly. A survey of six hundred local residents conducted in 2005 found that almost half of those surveyed had never heard of the Canton Assembly and less than ten percent had ever taken part in any activity associated with it. Of those who had heard of the Assembly, twenty percent believed that its role was to organize the annual celebration of Cotacachi’s patron saint and another ten percent believed that its role was to organize annual Easter celebrations, neither of which were in any way related to the Assembly’s mandate or practice (Ospina 2005: 44). Concerns about the neo-corporatist character of the Canton Assembly also reflected the tensions between Indigenous and liberal conceptions of democracy in the Andes. While liberal conceptions of democracy give priority to individual rights and participation in politics by individual citizens, the prevailing discourse of Indigenous democracy in Cotacachi and other parts of the Andes privileges collective rights and

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the power of communities rather than individuals. In this conception, the significant authority granted to community leaders to represent community interests in the Canton Assembly was not seen as inconsistent with participatory democracy. However, despite the powerful discourse of Indigenous democracy, Indigenous leaders themselves expressed concerns with the model of democracy in the Canton Assembly, which excluded from participation those who did not hold leadership positions in local organizations. Although the prevailing discourse of Indigenous democracy remained strong in the public statements of Indigenous leaders in Cotacachi, in private interviews those same leaders expressed concerns with the Indigenous model and clearly perceived the dangers of a model of democracy that privileged communal over individual interests—not only because of the hostility it could generate among town-based mestizos, but also because of its inability to generate a strong base of support in rural Indigenous communities. Low levels of education were also a serious impediment to effective participation in the Assembly for many of the delegates. In 2001, the average number of years of schooling for adult men was 4.8 and for women it was 4.2 (SIISE 2001). In that setting, the agenda for the Assembly, the general direction of major discussions and the outcome of those discussions was dominated by the minority of bettereducated participants—a tendency that was clear in the deliberations of the 1999 and 2002 General Assemblies (Author’s field notes). Thus, while the Assembly did represent an important deepening of municipal democracy, albeit with certain neo-corporatist and elitist tendencies, claims that it symbolized the emergence of participatory democracy and a culture of active citizenship were exaggerated. Although the Assembly may not be as participatory as some of its proponents claimed, it did pass a number of provocative resolutions that helped to further transform local socio-political power relations in the municipality and pushed the municipal government to take an active stand on behalf of rural communities on a number of highly controversial issues. These included resolutions in 1996 to organize parallel General Assemblies in the Intag and to create a civic organization to represent the zone; 1998 resolutions to organize a townbased Neighborhood Federation and to require the municipality to take concrete steps to make Cotacachi a ‘Healthy Municipality;’ a 1999 motion that required the municipality to operate as an ‘Ecological Municipality’ which, when adopted by the municipal council as a formal ordinance in September 2000, resulted in the prohibition of both mining activity and new cut-flower operations (Asemblea de Unidad Cantonal

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1999; Cotacachi 2000b); a 2000 resolution to conduct an environmental and health impact assessment of cut-flower operations in Cotacachi— the first of its kind in Ecuador (Asemblea de Unidad Cantonal 2000); and a resolution from an extra-ordinary meeting of the General Assembly in 2005 that required the municipal government to actively work in association with local civil society organizations to block transnational mining operations in the municipality. It was the role of the Canton Assembly’s Development and Management Council to monitor and audit the municipal government and to ensure that it respected the resolutions of the annual General Assemblies. The sixteen-member Development and Management Council was elected by the Assembly every two years. Although the mayor held a seat on the council, the rules of the institution prevented him from holding the position of president, which enhanced the Assembly’s autonomy from municipal interference.15 The autonomy of the Council was further strengthened by the support of NGOs and aid donors, which provided funding for a permanent office complex on Cotacachi’s central plaza, salaries for the elected members of the Management Council and the permanent technical and support staff, as well as funding for a variety of projects that focused primarily on education and capacity-building.16 It was not clear to what extent the municipal government’s adherence to the resolutions of the Assembly resulted from the strong political will of Mayor Tituaña and to what extent it reflected the technical capacity and political legitimacy of the Assembly executive officials and technical staff. However, it was clear that the resolutions of the General Assembly and the monitoring role of the Development and Management Council played important roles in shaping municipal government policymaking and pushed the mayor and municipal councilors to take actions that they would otherwise not likely have pursued—as in the cases of confrontations with local cut-flower operations and mining corporations explored below. The Council also sought to regulate the interventions by state agencies and NGOs in the municipality to ensure that they complied with local development priorities. Although not on the same scale as Guamote, Cotacachi has had a history of relatively high levels of external intervention by NGOs and aid donors.17 Although some of those outside projects were channeled through UNORCAC, most of them were unregulated by local actors and were not coordinated with the interventions of other outside initiatives. As in Guamote, this resulted in inappropriate, poorly designed projects implemented with little local participation or support, which often not only failed to achieve the intended results but also helped to generate a culture of paternalism and

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dependence within the local population. In an effort to make outside actors more accountable to local concerns, the Development and Management Council required that all external agencies operating in the municipality submit regular reports and meet with the Council to discuss project design and implementation. While the Council had relatively little success in asserting its regulatory authority over central state agencies, it did succeed in regulating the interventions of NGOs and established a much higher level of coordination among them than had ever existed in the past. At the same time, however, the new role of the Development and Management Council in brokering and regulating outside aid to the municipality encroached on one of the roles that UNORCAC had played in rural highland communities in the municipality and weakened one of UNORCAC’s most important sources of financing and power. Similarly, the role of the Assembly as the primary institution for mediating between local civil society and external institutions—including the municipal government—also weakened UNORCAC’s role as the broker between rural highland communities and the outside world. These encroachments created serious tensions between UNORCAC and the Assembly and fostered ambivalence towards the Assembly among UNORCAC leaders, whose support was crucial for its survival. Municipal Decentralization to Inter-Sectoral Councils

It is ironic in the context of widespread enthusiasm for decentralization to municipal governments in Latin America that municipal operations are often more highly centralized than those of national governments. In contrast to this widespread trend, the municipality of Cotacachi decentralized municipal planning authority to a series of Inter-Sectoral Councils that were created through resolutions of the annual General Assemblies. These included representatives of local civil society organizations, the municipal government, central state agencies and NGOs. While the mayor retained ultimate executive authority, the InterSectoral Councils came to play important roles in research, planning and policy creation that significantly expanded the policymaking capacity of the municipal government. Between 1996 and 2002, the Assembly created five Inter-Sectoral Councils in the areas of health, education and culture, natural resource management, production and tourism. The first and most active of the Councils was the Inter-Sectoral Health Council, established in 1996. The Health Council was created to bring together all of the local health care providers in Cotacachi with representatives of local popular organizations, such as UNORCAC and

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the Federation of Neighborhoods, and outside agencies to improve the provision of health care, particularly in rural communities. With funding and technical support from a wide variety of public agencies, aid donors and NGOs, the Health Council conducted extensive studies of the state of health and health care in the municipality (CEPAR 1998; Consejo Intersectorial de Salud 2005a, 2005b, 2005c); established an intercultural health care system that incorporated both western and Indigenous medical practices with special attention to preventative health and the incorporation of Indigenous midwives into the mainstream health care system; and worked to ensure better treatment for the local Indigenous population in the municipality’s medical centers and hospitals.18 Building on the connections between Auki Tituaña and his wife Luz Marina Vega with the Government of Cuba, the Health Council brokered an agreement with the Cuban Ministry of Health to send a brigade of over 200 Cuban health professionals to work in Cotacachi’s hospitals and health clinics and to provide roving health care services in rural communities. With the support of the Cuban medical team, the Health Council succeeded in establishing the reputation of Cotacachi’s hospital as one of the best in northern Ecuador. Indeed, anecdotal reports revealed that a growing number of residents from the provincial capital of Ibarra preferred to seek medical attention in Cotacachi’s hospital rather than those in their own much larger city. Building on its successes in improving local health and health care services, the Health Council actively pursued the formal decentralization of responsibility for health care from Ecuador’s central government to the municipality.19 Following a resolution of the 1999 General Assembly to prioritize education and particularly the high rates of adult illiteracy in Cotacachi, the Canton Assembly created the Inter-Sectoral Education Council. It boasted two major accomplishments: a reform of the primary and secondary school curricula to incorporate greater sensitivity to local history, environmental issues and Indigenous cultural traditions, and a major adult literacy campaign financed and designed by the Government of Cuba. The literacy campaign, implemented between 2002 and 2005, succeeded in reducing the official rate of adult illiteracy in Cotacachi from 22.3 percent to 3.9 percent (Consejo Intersectorial de Salud 2005: 73). The model of adult literacy training developed in Cotacachi generated widespread attention from outside the municipality and was subsequently adopted by numerous other municipal governments in Ecuador. In 2007, the Education Council launched a post-literacy campaign focused on history, politics and accounting. The Education Council also became responsible for the promotion of inter-cultural

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understanding among the different ethnic groups in the municipality— Indigenous, mestizo, Afro-Ecuadorian—and it engaged in a number of efforts to combat racism and to celebrate the three different cultural traditions. Nevertheless, many of those initiatives were marked by superficial understandings of culture that focused on traditional celebrations, music and dance and generally avoided any discussion of the dynamics between the various cultural and ethnic groups in Cotacachi (IEE 2007: 122). The Tourism Council was composed primarily of local hotel and restaurant owners that had never before worked closely together. The Council took over the management of two of the municipality’s most important tourist assets—a restaurant complex and boat tour operation on a volcanic lake near the town center and a thermal bath complex in the Intag zone. Both operations had long been owned by the municipality but were poorly managed and generated little revenue. The Tourism Council created joint public-private enterprises to re-capitalize the two tourist operations, selling forty-nine percent of shares to local residents and retaining the controlling fifty-one percent of shares. With the new capital, the Council was able to carry out necessary repairs and improve the management of the operations so that by 2002, they were both self-financing and generating revenue that was shared by the Council, the municipality, and the communities located close to the tourist operations. The Tourism Council focused its attention on the creation of rural community-based tourist operations that would generate revenue for rural communities and on marketing Cotacachi at the national and international levels as a tourist destination. The Inter-Sectoral Production Council was created through a resolution of the 2000 General Assembly, primarily to support the family-operated leather working enterprises in the municipality that were severely affected by Ecuador’s 1999 financial crisis and subsequent adoption of the U.S. dollar as its official currency. Although there were five associations of leather workers in Cotacachi, several of which were more than seventy years old, none of them had ever played an active role in improving the production or marketing of local leather products. Rather, they were primarily social organizations that held parties and dances, but left their members to face the market as individuals. By contrast, the Production Council sought to establish cooperative arrangements among the 450 or so leather enterprises in the municipality for the purchase of raw materials and leather tanning; access to credit and training; and research on new designs, national and international marketing, and the coordination needed in order to be able to fill very large orders. By 2002, the Council had established a raw

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material cooperative that also provided credit,20 a local retail cooperative, regular training courses in leather design and small business management, and had found new markets for Cotacachi leather goods in Ecuador and Europe. The medium term goals of the Council included the opening of cooperative retail outlets in Ecuador’s largest cities, further marketing initiatives in Europe, and the creation of a single Cotacachi brand name for all local leather products. With a clear brand identity, the Production Council hoped to find niche markets for fairly traded, environmentally friendly leather products in Europe and North America. The Natural Resource Council was created through a resolution in the 2000 General Assembly that responded to growing concerns in rural highland communities about the negative impacts of pesticide use on local water supplies and the health of workers in the cut-flower operations of the region. Pushed by resolutions in the General Assemblies of 2000 and 2001, the Council’s most important accomplishment was the negotiation of terms of reference for a major environmental and health impact assessment of the cut-flower industry in Cotacachi. The owners of the cut-flower farms had consistently resisted municipal efforts to regulate their operations and were initially very hostile to the idea of the environmental impact assessment. Nevertheless, by 2002, they had agreed to the basic terms of reference for the study, the first of its kind in Ecuador. While the study found that the health and environmental impacts of the cut-flower operations were much less harmful than local public opinion had suspected, it also lead to considerable improvements in their environmental, health and labor practices, including reduced use of pesticides, water treatment, the provision of health services to employees, and increased pay and longerterm contracts.21 Indeed, the response of the cut-flower producers to the impact assessment was sufficiently positive that the technical coordinator of environmental issues in the Canton Assembly asserted in 2007, “cut-flower production is no longer a source of conflict in Cotacachi” (Interview: May 2, 2007), a remarkable accomplishment given the environmental and labor conflicts created by similar operations in other parts of the Andean region (see Wright and Madrid 2007). The Promotion of Civic and Producers’ Organizations

In addition to creating new institutionalized spaces for involvement in municipal governance by the representatives of already existing civil society organizations, the municipal government and Canton Assembly

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actively encouraged unorganized residents to form new organizations. Prior to 1996, with the exception of UNORCAC, which represented rural highland communities, there were very few well-organized civic associations in Cotacachi. The mayor and other proponents of municipal democratization were particularly concerned that UNORCAC would dominate any new spaces for participation in local governance and thereby undermine their legitimacy in the eyes of other sectors of the local population. Responding to those concerns, the municipality and Canton Assembly provided technical and financial support to help create fifteen neighborhood associations as well as the Federation of Neighborhood Associations to represent residents of the town center, a federation of Intag communities called the Intag Zone Development Committee (Comité de Desarrollo Zonal de Intag), women’s organizations in the town center and Intag zone to complement the already existing organization of women within UNORCAC, groups to represent youth in Intag and the town center, and an association of local professionals. The municipal government also supported efforts by local producers to market their products more effectively; in 1999 Mayor Tituaña traveled to Japan to help establish a purchasing agreement between a cooperative of over four hundred organic coffee producers in the Intag Zone and Japanese fair trade coffee importers, and beginning in 2001, the municipal government organized an annual trade fair in Quito to promote Cotacachi leather producers. It is important to emphasize that the municipal government’s promotion of civic and producers’ organizations was not marked by clientelist expectations of political allegiance, although the support provided to local organizations did generate considerable public support for the mayor. Commenting on the central role of the municipal government in the promotion of the neighborhood associations and the Federation of Neighborhood Organizations, the president of the Neighborhood Federation in 2002—a prominent town resident who had previously belonged to the right-wing Social Christian Party and had opposed Auki Tituaña’s candidacy in 1996—asserted that “without the municipality, there would be no Federation” (Interview: June 5, 2002). Nevertheless, he and other Neighborhood Federation leaders also credited Tituaña with non-intervention in the internal decisions of the Federation and respect for its autonomy. Similarly, while municipal government support to the Intag Zone Development Committee included the brokering of NGO funds and the donation of motorcycles as well as logistical and legal assistance, the President of the Committee praised the municipal government for its respect of the Committee’s autonomy

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and for not mediating its internal affairs (Interview: September 17, 1999). The Participatory Budget

In an effort to democratize municipal decision making inspired by the model of participatory budgeting pioneered in Porto Alegre, Brazil (see Abers 2000; Baiocchi 2005), the municipality of Cotacachi established its own participatory budget system in 2001. Both the design and the actual functioning of the participatory budget in Cotacachi were shaped in important ways by local social, economic and political power relations.22 Municipal authorities recognized that the Porto Alegre budget system, which allocated resources to different zones of the city on the basis of a variety of criteria that included population, poverty levels and unmet infrastructure needs, could not be imported directly into the very different social setting of Cotacachi. They recognized that to distribute municipal resources on the basis of the population, poverty levels and unmet basic needs of the municipality’s neighborhoods and rural communities would have resulted in a radical reallocation of resources from the town center to rural communities. Although such a redistribution of municipal resources was desirable from an equity perspective, local authorities also recognized that it would have generated a backlash from the town-based mestizo middle class, which had long benefited from highly disproportionate spending by the municipality. To attempt to wipe out that tradition of privilege would have jeopardized the entire effort to democratize the budget process. As a result, rather than allocate municipal investment resources on the basis of the population or unmet needs, the participatory budget allocated one third of available resources to each of the urban, rural highland and Intag zones—reflecting the relative political power of the urban center, which represented only eighteen percent of the municipality’s population, and had much lower levels of poverty and unmet infrastructure needs. Although working groups in the annual General Assemblies proposed modifications to the criteria for allocating resources in the participatory budget that would have given priority to population, literacy levels and access to basic infrastructure (Asemblea de Unidad Cantonal 2003, 2004a, 2005a), the formula established in 2001 was still intact at the end of 2006. Indeed, in 2006 the urban center received over fifty percent of the municipal resources allocated through the participatory budget. By contrast, the rural highland zone, which represented fifty percent of the total population, and the Intag zone, which represented forty percent of the population, were respectively allocated 24.3 percent and 23.6

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percent of the participatory budget resources (Asemblea de Unidad Cantonal 2006: 16–22). When the resources allocated through the participatory budget are viewed in combination with other municipal investment spending, the overall distribution of municipal resources to the three different regions is somewhat more equitable but still represents a difficult balance between considerations of equity and political pragmatism (see Table 3.3). Table 3.3 Average Regional Distribution of Public Works Investments in Cotacachi, 2001–2006 Sub-municipal region Cotacachi town Rural highland zone Intag zone

% of public works investments 40.0 38.6

% of municipal population 18.6 41.9

21.4

39.5

Source: Elaborated with data from IEE 2007: 44–45.

Efforts to make the municipal budget more participatory did relatively little to increase its impact on economic and social development, the officially stated purpose of the participatory budget (Asemblea de Unidad Cantonal 2002a: 109–111). As a combined result of both its design and participant choices, the participatory budget process in Cotacachi consistently generated long lists of small-scale infrastructure projects with relatively little developmental impact. The municipality allocated thirty percent of its annual revenue through the participatory budget, an amount equal to just under half of its resources available for investment in public works projects and social programs. 23 In 2006, out of the total municipal budget of $4.3 million, slightly more than $1.3 million was allocated through the participatory budget process. One third of the participatory budget resources ($424,560) was dedicated towards projects that were purported to serve the interests of the entire municipality, with the remaining two thirds divided among the three principle geographic zones and then sub-divided again among the parishes and communities of each zone. In 2006, this formula resulted in the assignment of $221,750 to the rural highland zone, $215,450 to the Intag zone, and $472,460 to the urban zone. Given the large number of communities in each zone, all of them vying for access to the municipal budget, the size of budget allocations for each community was small, averaging $8,200 (Asemblea de Unidad Cantonal 2006: 16–22).

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While the small amounts of money available for individual communities from the participatory budget restricted its social and development impact from the outset, the types of projects prioritized by local residents in participatory budget meetings appeared to undermine the participatory budget’s developmental impact even further. A review of the projects prioritized in the 2006 participatory budget reveals a large number of projects that did not appear to respond in any way to the situation of extreme poverty that faced over fifty percent of the municipality’s population. For example, representatives of the rural parish of Cuellaje in the Intag zone chose to allocate almost half of their $23,800 share of participatory budget resources to repairs to the plaza in the center of the community and another $4,000 for the construction of an outdoor volleyball court, despite the fact that over half of the community’s households lacked access to safe drinking water (Consejo Intersectorial de Salud 2005: 61). Representatives of the rural Intag parish of Peñaherrera chose to spend their budget allocation on a volleyball court ($4,000), playground equipment ($1,500), a community center ($10,000) and public washrooms ($6,000). Representatives of Garcia Moreno, another Intag parish, allocated a third of their $66,550 portion of the budget to the construction of two community centers and another $6,000 to the construction of a church. Representatives of the rural highland parish of Quiroga chose to spend $39,500 of their budget allocation on playground equipment and another $1,500 on the installation of electric lights for an outdoor volleyball court. Indeed, all of the participatory budget resources for 2006 were allocated to smallscale public works projects that typically involved large amounts of cement but appeared to have few prospects for contributing to local economic or social development. While volleyball courts, church buildings, community centers and playgrounds may make important contributions to people’s well-being, they did not reflect the concerns with literacy, health and livelihoods that were outlined in Cotacachi’s Municipal Development Plan and which were also consistently highlighted by participants in the annual General Assemblies. A serious tension thus appeared in Cotacachi between participation in budget decision making on the one hand and the investment of municipal resources in ways that might promote local social and economic development on the other. As a municipal employee involved in the participatory budget process stated with frustration: “If participation is the only criteria [for budget allocation] and priorities for municipal intervention are based only on local knowledge and experience, then we would end up with a nondevelopmental budget with a very short-term perspective of

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development based only on small infrastructure projects” (Interview: June 4, 2002). The same staff member also explained that in the context of municipal efforts to promote popular participation in local governance, it was extremely difficult to criticize participatory initiatives, even if criticism was intended to be constructive: “Participation is becoming a dogma. To criticize it is to be seen as antidemocratic” (ibid.). By 2007, many of the participants in the annual budget meetings themselves had become frustrated with the allocation of investment resources to small-scale cement projects that did not contribute to the broader social and economic development goals that were discussed and agreed upon in the annual Canton Assemblies. The 2007 evaluation of Cotacachi’s democratization experiments asserted that numerous participants in the budget meetings had argued that “too much democracy without a proper process of critical reflection is not good” (IEE 2007: 58, emphasis added). The municipal government quietly responded to concerns about the non-developmental impact of participatory budgeting by allocating more than half of its investment resources according to technical rather than participatory criteria. Indeed, the municipal investments that appear to have the biggest impacts on local livelihoods and well-being—such as the installation of potable water and sewage systems, rural electrification, the expansion of health services and the construction of roads to rural communities— resulted not from participatory budget meetings but from decisions made by the mayor and municipal technical staff. However, in 2007, neither the municipal government nor the Canton Assembly had yet proposed any clear measures that might redirect the allocations of municipal resources in the participatory budget process away from small-scale cement projects to broader initiatives that might contribute to social and economic development. It remains important, however, to try to understand why the participatory budget process in Cotacachi consistently generated lists of projects with little apparent impact on local development and which did not fit into the priorities outlined in the local development plan. A number of possible explanations exist. First, the types of projects frequently prioritized in the participatory budget meetings, such as volleyball courts, street lights, and improvements to village parks and plazas, could be interpreted as reflections of the interests of the most influential actors in those meetings—typically the wealthiest men. The fact that in most rural communities only men play volleyball suggests that a powerful gender bias operated within the participatory budget process and that it did not equally reflect the interests of men and women in the communities. Second, as Cooke explained in a critique of

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the participatory mechanisms employed by many development NGOs, the participants in such decision making fora often prioritize the types of projects that they believe are reasonable to hope for—that is, they ask for what they think they can get (Cooke 2001). In this respect, it is important to note that small-scale public works projects were precisely the type of projects that politicians at all levels of politics had offered in return for electoral support; they were projects that local residents knew it was reasonable to expect on the basis of historical experience. Third, reflecting the powerful legacies of clientelism in Ecuador, the presidents of rural communities and urban neighborhoods in Cotacachi pushed hard in the budget meetings for visible public works projects that could be completed in a relatively short time period that would serve as evidence of their leadership—a trend that the 2007 evaluation of democratization in Cotacachi labeled “democratic clientelism” (IEE 2007: 58). Fourth, many of the projects prioritized in participatory budget meetings also reflected a particular concern with portraying a public image of modernity and urban development. The high priority given to investments in town plazas, playground equipment, streetlights, and volleyball courts all reflected concerns with the image presented to outside visitors based on socially constructed conceptions of development and modernity. As in the rural Peruvian municipalities of Limatambo and Haquira analyzed in Chapters Six and Seven, this concern was especially evident in the insistence by many residents that buildings be constructed from ‘modern’ and ‘noble’ materials such as cement walls and tin roofs rather than traditional materials, such as adobe, which were believed to reflect an image of poverty and backwardness. Finally, following Lewis and Mosse (2006), the emphasis on small-scale physical public works projects may have represented an ‘infra-political’ strategy by the male residents of rural communities to generate a demand for rural construction labor that would provide an income to at least some members of the community (see Chapter Seven). In a setting characterized by very high rates of male labor migration, small-scale construction projects created one of very few sources of income in rural communities. For the residents of rural communities, the income-earning opportunities created by a municipal infrastructure projects may have been just as important as the project itself. Reorganization of the Municipal Bureaucracy

When he was first elected in 1996, Mayor Tituaña inherited a municipal staff that was accustomed to a clientelist, paternalistic and

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developmentally restricted style of politics. In 2002, the municipality of Cotacachi had seventy inside workers and sixty-two outside workers. Many of those employees had been hired before 1996 for clientelist reasons or as personal favors, and their levels of training and motivation as public servants were generally very low. Municipal staff were widely perceived as impolite, irresponsible, frequently absent from work, unethical, racist and unconcerned for the public they were supposed to serve (Asemblea de Unidad Cantonal 1997: 2). When Tituaña began working as mayor he faced a municipal staff that was both resistant to change and reluctant to accept the authority of an Indian (Auki Tituaña, interview: September 2, 1999). The new developmental and participatory agenda depended in many ways on cooperation and support from municipal employees and created new and more complex responsibilities for them. Although Ecuadorian law prohibited elected officials from firing municipal employees for political reasons, this was not the primary reason that motivated Tituaña to keep the existing staff. In fact, the directors of municipal departments, who can be legally replaced by newly elected mayors, also retained their positions. Despite the limited professional commitment and racism evident among many employees, Tituaña recognized that the accumulated institutional knowledge and willingness of the municipal bureaucrats to work for very low salaries made them difficult to replace.24 Moreover, like the Indigenous mayors of Guamote, he was highly conscious of the need to avoid the deterioration of inter-ethnic and rural-town relations—which firing municipal employees would have provoked, since all of them were mestizo residents of the town Efforts to improve public service performance and to build enthusiasm among employees for municipal democratization in Cotacachi focused primarily on the provision of training courses, motivational speeches, positive feedback, small prizes to reward good performance and shuffling staff positions. Tituaña used disciplinary measures such as withholding pay in very few cases of extremely poor performance. These mechanisms had some positive results. Racist abuse of Indigenous residents declined quickly and public satisfaction with municipal services increased significantly. Some employees even became enthusiastic champions of the new municipal agenda and began to see their positions as potential stepping stones to more lucrative careers in other public and non-governmental institutions. However, the majority of municipal employees were at best complacent about municipal democratization. Many of them were either unwilling or incapable of taking on the new roles and broader responsibilities that the expanded municipal agenda implied. Staff members from several NGOs

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that supported the municipal government in Cotacachi argued that the municipal bureaucracy represented the weakest link in municipal democratization efforts. As in Guamote, municipal leaders in Cotacachi recognized that they would simply have to wait until some employees retired and could be replaced with more dedicated staff before they could confront certain internal administrative problems. With only moderately committed municipal employees, Mayor Tituaña was only able to build the team of committed professionals needed to support municipal democratization with the technical and financial support of NGOs. By working through the Inter-Sectoral Councils and the Canton Assembly, with their newly hired and highly committed staffs and volunteer members, Tituaña was able to partially circumvent the problems created by recalcitrant employees. This strategy had the benefit of producing positive results in a relatively short period of time. However, it also limited the involvement of the municipal employees in the process of change. As a result, the institutional capacity of the municipal bureaucracy lagged far behind the broader democratization process. Municipal Planning

In addition to efforts to reorganize the municipal bureaucracy, Mayor Tituaña also placed a heavy emphasis on municipal planning. Before 1996, the municipality had never created or followed any type of public plan. Rather, an ad hoc clientelist logic had dominated decision making about municipal public works and services. Similarly, municipal governments of the past had not articulated any vision for the future development of the municipality. Marking a break from that tradition, starting in 1996 the municipality developed a series of medium-term plans intended to guide local and external initiatives in the municipality. Cotacachi’s Municipal Development Plan, produced following the 1996 General Assembly (Asemblea de Unidad Cantonal 1997) was one of the first municipal development plans produced in Ecuador. Due to this, however, it could not draw on the experience of other rural municipalities and so suffered from a variety of problems that undermined its subsequent usefulness. Although the plan was based on seventeen community-based workshops with residents throughout the municipality as well as the deliberations of the 1996 General Assembly, it was hastily prepared, lacked reliable data, and proposed only a very vague vision of economic and social development for the municipality. However, the subsequent expansion of the 1997 plan with up-to-date data in 2002 and the production of much more specific plans focused on

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health, natural resource management and economic production helped to overcome some of the weaknesses of the initial plan. More important than the production of the specific plans, however, was the commitment of municipal authorities to the principle of planning itself and the relative power of the Canton Assembly and local civil society organizations to hold the municipal government and other external institutions accountable to the priorities outlined in the various plans. In contrast to Guamote and many other rural municipalities where local development plans have been ignored by both municipal politicians and local populations, a review of the minutes of the annual General Assemblies in Cotacachi revealed consistent references to the various plans by participants in the Assemblies who cited the plans as a way of generating legitimacy for specific proposals and resolutions. For example, community activists opposed to mining activity in the Intag Zone repeatedly referred to the municipality’s Strategic Plan for Environmental and Natural Resource Management and to the 1999 municipal ordinance to make Cotacachi an ‘Ecological Municipality’ as a way of trying to legitimize their political position. The internalization and strategic use of local planning documents by some participants in the annual General Assemblies did not, however, contradict the practical disregard for planning priorities expressed in the participatory budget meetings. Rather, it pointed to the emergence of a ‘participatory elite’ in Cotacachi, the small percentage of the local population that actively engaged in the meetings of the Canton Assembly and the Inter-Sectoral Councils in representation of different civil society organizations. 25 Whether the participatory elite genuinely embraced the principles of planning or simply made strategic use of planning documents to further their own interests remains uncertain, but it was clear that they were at least familiar with the planning documents and understood that they could be used to influence the decisions of the municipal government and Canton Assembly. At the same time, however, the emergence of a relatively well-educated and politically articulate participatory elite also pointed to the neo-corporatist elements of the municipal democratization process in Cotacachi. Moreover, as in the case of Guamote, the technical language and abundant use of statistical data in Cotacachi’s planning documents suggest that they were produced as much for consumption by external actors—i.e. potential donors—as for internal reference. Municipal Political Strategies: From Participation to Protest

Reflecting long histories of debate within Ecuador’s broader Indigenous movement (see Beck 2008; Larrea 2006; Ospina 2005), municipal

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strategies for promoting local development in Cotacachi were not limited to working through local institutions but also included tactics of direct action and protest that targeted Ecuador’s macroeconomic policy framework. Speeches by Mayor Tituaña and other local leaders as well as municipal planning documents consistently and explicitly asserted that many of the problems faced by the municipality were related to central state policies and national political processes and could not be addressed through changes in municipal institutions. For example, in the forward to Cotacachi’s development plan, Tituaña specifically attributed the social, economic and environmental crises facing Cotacachi to “political corruption and the application of the neoliberal economic model” at the national level (Asemblea de Unidad Cantonal 1997: iv). As a political response to that broader context, Tituaña used his authority as mayor of Cotacachi to mobilize local residents to support nationwide Indigenous protests for macro-policy changes. In nationwide uprisings in 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2005, the municipality rented buses and trucks to transport protesters from rural communities and the town center of Cotacachi to blockades on the Pan-American Highway. In addition, municipal employees were expected to participate (with pay) in the protests. Tituaña also attracted widespread media attention following the January-February 2001 uprising by calling for sanctions against other mayors who belonged to the Pachakutik political party who did not actively support the Indigenous uprising.26 As Tituaña asserted in an interview after the 2001 uprising, “they [the Pachakutik mayors who did not mobilize support for uprising] have deceived me. In difficult times, leaders must be with their people...and not behind their desks” (El Comercio 2001). The strategy for democratizing local governance and promoting local development in Cotacachi was thus two-pronged. While it was focused on the creation and exploitation of political opportunities at the local level through legal-institutional tactics, Tituaña and other municipal leaders were also quick to recognize the limitations of that strategy and to use direct action and protest tactics when considered appropriate. This double strategy was particularly evident in the municipal response to the incursions of transnational mining corporations in the municipality, discussed below. As in Guamote, however, the effectiveness of the two-pronged strategy of institutional participation and political protest depended on the political capacity of the Indigenous movement and broader coalition of left social movements and political parties at the national level, which was well beyond the influence of Cotacachi’s civil society leaders and municipal officials.

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The recent history of municipal democratization in Cotacachi thus presents conflicting evidence of what Foucault described as ‘governmentality,’ that is, the self-discipline of the governed, as discussed in Chapter One. On the one hand, local Indigenous activists and civil society leaders appeared to have channeled much of their political energy into the Canton Assembly and other institutionalized forms of participation that complied with Ecuadorian law and that focused on legal-bureaucratic political strategies. From this perspective, the Indigenous struggle to control and democratize municipal power in Cotacachi could be seen as a gradual process of governmentalization— that is, of being rendered governable. On the other hand, however, local leaders and community members were quick to recognize the limits of institutional strategies and to opt for extra-legal political strategies such as road blockades and civil disobedience when deemed necessary. This ability and willingness to shift back and forth from well-behaved and highly governable citizens to unruly political subjects suggests that the process of creating governmentality may be much weaker and less certain than some analysts suggest. Challenges for Democracy and Development in Cotacachi

The decade that followed the first election of Auki Tituaña as mayor of Cotacachi in 1996 was marked by significant progress in the democratization of local governance and important changes in the everyday lives of many local residents brought about by improvement in the delivery of municipal services, the extension of basic infrastructure to rural communities, literacy and health campaigns, and improvements in inter-ethnic relations. However, difficult challenges persisted that were connected to both the internal dynamics of the democratization process and the legacies of local history as well as broader national and transnational policy agendas and power relations. Eight challenges posed particularly serious threats to the democratization project in Cotacachi. They involved the heavy dependence on the political will and leadership of the mayor, dependence on external financial support, tensions between the new institutions for participatory governance and UNORCAC, restrictions on local development rooted in the unequal distribution of local agricultural land, the lack of improvements in local livelihoods, incursions into local politics by transnational mining corporations, the persistence of inter-ethnic tensions, and the dominance of ‘participatory’ spaces by men.

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Dependence on the Political Leadership and Political Will of the Mayor

Mayor Tituaña played a central role in the transformation of municipal governance in Cotacachi. While those changes must be understood as the product of a long process of political struggle and cannot be attributed to Tituaña alone, it is unlikely that they would have occurred without his leadership. In contrast to the case of Guamote where the struggle for Indigenous control of municipal power was driven by a variety of Indigenous leaders, municipal democratization in Cotacachi was not a product of pressure from local civil society organizations. Although UNORCAC had a long record of electing municipal councilors in Cotacachi, its energy was devoted to improving public works and services in rural highland communities rather than bringing about changes in the operation of the municipality itself. UNORCAC’s experience in the municipal government and its support for Tituaña in the 1996 and 2000 election campaigns were crucial conditions for the success of Tituaña’s initiatives, but pressure from UNORCAC was not the driving force behind those changes. Put differently, historically rooted social forces in Cotacachi created an opportunity to democratize important aspects of municipal governance, but taking advantage of that opportunity depended on the leadership of an exceptionally talented mayor. There were other Indigenous leaders in Cotacachi with the knowledge, administrative experience, and leadership capacity to become competent mayors, but their direct ties to UNORCAC and its historically confrontational relationship with the municipal government would likely have undermined the town-based mestizo political support that was crucial to the relative success of democratization efforts. Moreover, it is very unlikely that they could have emulated Tituaña’s success as a broker of international financial assistance and NGO support, which was facilitated by his experience of working with CONAIE and of studying in Cuba. Although popular support for the agenda of municipal democratization initiated by Tituaña gained momentum over the course of his tenure as mayor, it was still uncertain in 2007 that the process would continue without his political will and leadership. In spite of municipal ordinances that gave formal legal support to many of the initiatives that characterized the municipal democratization process— such as the creation of the Canton Assembly—civil society leaders were still concerned in 2007 that an unsupportive mayor could undermine them. Tituaña ran for a fourth term as mayor in 2008 but lost by a wide margin to Alberto Andrango, the former UNORCAC president and the

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first Indigenous leader to be elected as a municipal councillor in 1979.27 Andrango came to the mayor’s office with considerable political experience at all levels of government in Ecuador and is a highly astute politician, but it remains to be seen what direction municipal governance will take under his leadership and the extent to which the municipal democratization process in Cotacachi can be sustained independently of the particular mayor who initiated it. Dependence on NGOs and External Financial Support

The relative success of municipal democratization in Cotacachi was also highly dependent on the extraordinary amounts of private external funding that the municipality and Canton Assembly received from NGOs and foreign donors. In the context of small local tax revenues and resource transfers from the central state, NGO and donor funding enabled the municipality to simultaneously expand public works and social services in both rural areas and the town center. The municipality was thus able to avoid alienating town-based mestizo voters and disappointing rural Indigenous voters, whose high expectations of the Indigenous mayor could have easily overwhelmed municipal resources. Indeed, many of the most significant accomplishments of Tituaña’s tenure as mayor were almost entirely financed by foreign resources, such as the Cuban medical and literacy brigades. Similarly, the Canton Assembly’s high degree of autonomy and its capacity to exert political pressure on the municipal government was closely connected to its financial independence from the municipal government made possible by external funding, a sharp contrast to the experience of the Indigenous Parliament in Guamote. Ironically, Tituaña labeled the municipality’s access to private NGO funding as a form of autogestión (self-generated income) to emphasize the greater independence from state funding that Cotacachi enjoyed in comparison with other small municipalities. However, Cotacachi’s longterm access to such large amounts of foreign aid and NGO support was far from certain. Mayor Tituaña was elected at a particular historical moment when his extensive NGO contacts, explicit Indigenous selfrepresentation, predominantly Indigenous constituency and municipal democratization project resonated with international donors and NGOs that were eager to support Indigenous movements, decentralization and ‘good governance’ at the municipal level. While the municipality and Canton Assembly were successful in brokering outside resources for over a decade, the priorities of international donors and NGOs can also be expected to change, especially as the participatory process in

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Cotacachi loses its luster of newness. It is uncertain exactly what effect a decline of external financial support would have on municipal democratization in Cotacachi, but it is likely that civil society institutions such as the Canton Assembly would lose autonomy and the capacity to exert political pressure, and that public enthusiasm for the democratization process would decline. As research on other efforts to promote popular participation in Latin America has revealed, poor people with limited amounts of discretionary time generally only participate actively in participatory forums when they perceive immediate and tangible benefits (Abers 2000; Carroll 1992). Tensions Between the Municipality and UNORCAC

The experience of Cotacachi indicates that the relationships between civil society organizations that seek to influence or control municipal power and participatory municipal governments can be very difficult and full of dangers for the autonomy and sustainability of both. As municipal governance in Cotacachi became more democratic and focused on the interests of rural communities, the distinctions between the institutions of local governance and those of civil society were blurred and the role of UNORCAC, the oldest and strongest civil society organization in the municipality, was increasingly questioned by many residents. While municipal democratization generated many gains for the rural communities that UNORCAC represented, it also posed serious threats to the institutional strength of UNORCAC itself. As a result, its leaders articulated ambiguous attitudes towards the municipal government, the Canton Assembly and the other institutions of participatory governance in Cotacachi. That ambiguity posed a serious latent challenge to the sustainability of the municipal democratization process itself, since the support of UNORCAC and its members was crucial to the social and electoral alliance that supported it. At the core of the tensions between UNORCAC and the institutions of municipal governance in Cotacachi was a conflict over the respective relationships between the two institutions and the rural indigenous communities that they both sought to represent. From the time of UNORCAC’s creation, its leaders worked to cement their role as the exclusive representatives of rural Indigenous communities in Cotacachi’s highland zone and as the exclusive local counterparts for all external development interventions within their sphere of influence. Indeed, the authority and influence of UNORCAC was predicated on its roles as the intermediary or broker between local communities and outside institutions, and much of the energy of its leaders was dedicated

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to maintaining and expanding that role—which was seriously threatened by the municipal government following Auki Tituaña’s election in 1996. UNORCAC’s role as the intermediary between rural highland communities and outside institutions began in the late 1970s, when FENOC helped the nascent peasant organization to gain access to funds from the state-run FODERUMA, which provided loans and grants for rural development projects to peasant federations (García Bravo 2002: 292). Access to FODERUMA funds enabled UNORCAC to carry out public works projects and to provide key services to its member communities, and it provided a critical source of legitimacy for the organization in the eyes of its members. UNORCAC leaders were able to strengthen that legitimacy by administering funds from other state agencies, such as the Bilingual and Bi-Cultural Education program and the Secretariat for Integrated Rural Development (SEDRI). As state funds for rural development were cut in the early 1980s and the number of NGOs in the region began to grow, UNORCAC established itself as the exclusive intermediary for NGO projects in rural highland communities in Cotacachi. In a 1983 interview, Alberto Andrango, then president of UNORCAC, asserted that “all of the actions that are carried out in the communities must be channeled through the federation [UNORCAC], whether they are public works of the municipality or any other institution” (Román 1983: 180). According to García Bravo, by the late 1980s, “UNORCAC had become the privileged counterpart for negotiating with the state and NGOs for development programs in Cotacachi” (2002: 293). By 1999, UNORCAC had established funding agreements with eight Ecuadorian NGOs, ten international development agencies, and five state-run agencies, and it was completely dependent on those agreements for its $80,000 budget (García Bravo 2002: 330). However, even the relationships between UNORCAC and those outside institutions were fraught with tension as UNORCAC leaders struggled with NGOs over the control of the funds that they provided. In 1992, UNORCAC members forcibly occupied the offices of the Centro Andino de Acción Popular (Andean Center for Popular Action—CAAP) in Cotacachi to bolster UNORCAC’s position in negotiations over the administration of CAAP funds, a tactic which resulted in CAAP’s withdrawal from Cotacachi and the permanent takeover of its office complex by UNORCAC. In the mid-1990s, tense relations also developed between UNORCAC and the NGO Doctors Without Boarders over the control and administration of project funds. Until 1996, the relationship between the municipality and UNORCAC’s member communities was characterized primarily by neglect. When the municipality did provide funds for public works

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projects in rural highland communities, it generally allowed UNORCAC to administer those projects, albeit in return for electoral support. Auki Tituaña’s efforts to establish direct relations with the long-overlooked rural communities through investments in infrastructure and social services and to create new institutions for popular participation in local governance thus created serious challenges for UNORCAC’s role as a broker. As the president of UNORCAC in 1999 put it, “Auki Tituaña wants the municipality to be the focal point of everything” (Interview: August 27, 1999). UNORCAC’s position was made even more precarious by the positive response of its member communities to the municipality’s efforts. Moreover, Tituaña’s skill in brokering funding agreements with NGOs and international aid agencies and the newly discovered interest of many NGOs in municipal governments also threatened to weaken UNORCAC’s only source of financing by shifting funds away from the organization to the municipality. The consolidation of the Canton Assembly as the peak representative organization of civil society in Cotacachi also threatened UNORCAC’s traditional intermediary role, although the Assembly’s neo-corporatist design meant that UNORCAC was still able to maintain significant authority within it. Nevertheless, the blurring of the roles between the two institutions weakened the support of UNORCAC’s leaders for the Assembly. UNORCAC leaders also felt that the struggles of highland zone Indigenous communities had been sidelined by the municipality and Canton Assembly, both of which also sought to confront the challenges faced by the residents of the town center and the Intag zone. For UNORCAC, the purpose of the two-decade struggle for municipal power was to pursue the interests of its member communities in the rural highland zone. In the wake of that struggle, UNORCAC leaders resented efforts by the municipal government and Canton Assembly to respond to the concerns of other regions—such as the mining conflicts in Intag— and they expressed little interest in the concerns of the municipality as a whole that extended beyond rural highland communities (IEE 2007: 26). The ambiguous attitude of UNORCAC’s leaders towards the municipal democratization process in Cotacachi reached a crisis point in the lead-up to Ecuador’s 2000 municipal elections when they came very close to withdrawing their political support for Auki Tituaña to promote a candidate of their own. Such a move would almost certainly have split the local Indigenous and peasant vote and resulted in the election victory of Tituaña’s closest electoral rival, a mestizo candidate with a weak commitment to citizen participation in municipal governance. In the wake of the 2000 pre-election crisis, the relationship between the

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municipality and UNORCAC improved as Tituaña and other municipal leaders recognized that social and electoral support for the democratization project depended on municipal respect for UNORCAC’s autonomy and traditional sphere of influence. At the same time, UNORCAC leaders recognized that the autonomy of the peasant federation required a clear distinction from the municipal government, which they promoted by resolving that the members of UNORCAC’s executive could not simultaneously serve as municipal councilors or as mayor. Nevertheless, the process of democratic deepening still weakened UNORCAC’s relative political power, and the resulting ambivalence of UNORCAC leaders towards the municipal democratization process threatened its consolidation. Ironically, the democratization of municipal governance weakened the very organization that had initiated the struggle for municipal power in the first place and thus threatened to undermine municipal democratization as well, a problem that also challenged Indigenous-controlled municipalities in Bolivia (see Chapter Four). Finding ways to deepen municipal democracy without simultaneously weakening the Indigenous and peasant organizations struggling for it remains a central challenge of municipal democratization in the rural Andes. Structural Inequality and the Limits to Municipal Jurisdiction

Cotacachi’s experience demonstrates that municipal democratization can take place in the context of profound structural inequalities, but it also reveals the limits of participatory institutions that operate in such settings. The large-scale landowners who controlled the bulk of agricultural land in Cotacachi and who had historically controlled local political power did not try to obstruct the changes in municipal governance that took place after 1996. Nor, however, were they willing to be taxed or regulated by the municipal government and they provided no support to the municipal democratization process. Large-scale landowners did not seek to undermine democratization efforts because they were mostly able to operate beyond the reach of such initiatives. Because local hacienda owners did not produce for local markets and they generally lived and registered their businesses in Quito (where they also paid business taxes), they were generally not interested in local politics. Indeed, they had largely disengaged from active involvement in the local political arena by the end of the 1970s. Their outlook was instead oriented towards the national and global markets and policy frameworks that affected the prices of their products in those markets.

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However, the latent political power of the municipality’s hacienda owners also restricted the regulatory and taxation authority of the municipal government in important ways. Two of the issues of greatest concern to residents in Cotacachi’s rural highland zone, where most of the haciendas are located, were the management of irrigation water and the contamination of that water by pesticides used in cut-flower and other agro-export operations. Hacienda owners refused to negotiate with the municipality about both issues. It was only in the context of extreme political pressure from UNORCAC and the circulation of rumours that pesticide poisoning had caused several deaths that flower growers allowed the independent impact assessment of their operations in 2002 and subsequently made some changes in pesticide use and water management on a voluntary basis. Similarly, hacienda owners also avoided the payment of taxes in Cotacachi. The problem of municipal taxation is both technical and political. As a result of historically high rates of inflation, property tax assessments in Ecuador very quickly became outdated. The combination of weak municipal administration and political pressure from landlords ensured that tax assessments were not updated. Rural property taxes in Cotacachi were so nominal that the Director of the Municipality’s Department of Finance insisted that it was not worth the municipality’s effort to collect them (Interview: June 6, 2002). Indeed, for most rural residents it cost more to travel to the town center by bus than it did to pay the taxes themselves. Moreover, in municipalities like Cotacachi where tax assessments have fallen so far out of date, updating them is an expensive proposition that requires aerial photography and extensive onthe-ground research. The director of property assessments in the Association of Ecuadorian Municipalities explained in 2002 that conducting new rural property assessment surveys would cost approximately $8 per hectare (Interview: June 24, 2002), representing a total cost of over $1 million for a municipality the size of Cotacachi—an amount equivalent to fifty percent of its total budget in 2002 and far beyond its means. The Ecuadorian state, in cooperation with the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank, made loans available to finance the costs of urban property tax assessments in the late 1990s but no such funds were made available to update rural property assessments in subsequent years. In addition, an unlikely de facto alliance existed between hacienda owners and UNORCAC leaders on the issue of rural property taxes—which neither group wanted to see increase. Thus, even if the technical challenges of rural property tax assessment were resolved, a very considerable political challenge remained in forcing land owners to actually pay the taxes on their properties.

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The ability of local hacienda owners to resist the municipality’s regulatory efforts and to avoid municipal taxation appeared to be an unspoken condition for their tolerance of the municipal democratization process. Municipal leaders acknowledged that as long as participatory decision making was restricted to areas of municipal jurisdiction that did not directly affect the interests of hacienda owners, such as health care, education and the distribution of public works budgets, they appeared willing to tolerate the process. Although local hacienda owners had openly supported candidates opposed to Mayor Tituaña in the 1996, 2000 and 2004 municipal elections, the financial support that they had provided to those campaigns had not raised concerns for supporters of Tituaña or for the broader democratization process. However, local political activists were certain that that efforts by the municipality to regulate or tax the local estates would lead to increased intervention by their owners in local politics and in opposition to Tituaña. It also bears emphasizing that although the large-scale enterprises that were already established in Cotacachi prior to 1996 tolerated the municipal democratization initiatives, innovations in local governance did not attract any significant new sources of private investment in Cotacachi. The only major sources of potential investment to express interest in the municipality after 1996 were transnational mining corporations, which a majority of local residents were determined to prevent from operating there. Municipal democratization efforts appealed to aid agencies and NGOs but not to private sources of investment. As a result, the economic development that did occur in Cotacachi after 1996 was largely dependent on already existing local sources of capital and the relatively modest external assistance from aid donors and NGOs. The price for the acquiescence of the owners of the cut-flower and vegetable export businesses appeared to be their unwillingness to become engaged in processes of municipal democratization and local development. As the former director of one of the NGOs most closely connected to democratization efforts in Cotacachi asserted: One of the most serious problems for economic development [in Cotacachi] is the lack of participation and the disinterest of local private businesses in the [participatory] processes. The businessmen don’t pay taxes in the municipality, they don’t reinvest their profits in the municipality, they don’t take part in the processes [of participation] and they display no social or environmental responsibility. Although their businesses are located in the municipality, they don’t even live there, and as a result they have little interest in what happens (Larrea 2006: 81).

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Structural Inequality and the Limits to Economic Development

Although the highly unequal control of agricultural land in the highland zone of Cotacachi did not block municipal democratization initiatives, it did create serious obstacles for efforts to improve local livelihoods and to reduce labor migration. While over fifty-seven percent of the municipality’s population was classified as rural in 2005 and fifty-two percent identified agriculture as their primary occupation (Consejo Intersectorial de Salud 2005), economic development initiatives predicated on small-scale agriculture presented little potential for improving local livelihoods because of the small size of local landholdings, as least in the highland zone. A 2002 report by the Canton Assembly’s Economic Development Unit asserted that “the highly inequitable distribution of land…keeps a large proportion of the rural population in a condition of minuscule production and forces them to work for low wages for the benefit of the large-scale agricultural estates or forces them into patterns of temporary labor migration” (Asemblea de Unidad Cantonal 2002b: 1). Indeed, while the political changes in Cotacachi after 1996 were noteworthy, there was little evidence of economic development or poverty reduction. The report from the Economic Development Unit went on to note, “in spite of the positive effects of the democratic and transparent political environment...the impact on the reduction of poverty continues to be minimal.” (Asemblea de Unidad Cantonal 2002b: 7). A comparative analysis of census data from 1990 and 2001 by Carlos Larrea pointed towards a moderate decline in poverty rates in Cotacachi from 90.0 percent to 86.5 percent in rural zones and from 72.8 percent to 68.7 percent in the urban center. Nevertheless, the same data set also indicated that poverty rates in Cotacachi declined less than in the rest of the rural highlands, where census data indicated a drop in poverty from 80.4 percent in 1990 to 74.9 percent in 2001 (2006: 136). The survey of Cotacachi residents conducted by the Instituto de Estudios Ecuatorianos found that 23.0 percent of local residents felt that their economic situation had deteriorated since 1996; 14.8 percent felt that it had improved; and 60.5 percent perceived no change at all (Ospina 2005: 297). The lack of economic growth and progress towards poverty reduction in Cotacachi cannot be attributed only to the municipality’s inequitable land distribution. Macroeconomic variables and Ecuador’s 1999–2000 financial crisis and subsequent adoption of the U.S. dollar as its official currency had devastating impacts on local production and livelihoods, especially in the leather sector. Dollarization resulted in

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drastic increases in the costs of inputs for agricultural and artisan producers in Cotacachi,28 with the result that many of their goods became uncompetitive in both national markets and in nearby Colombia, where they had previously enjoyed a competitive advantage. Similarly, over-valuation of Ecuador’s dollar currency also meant that the country was no longer an inexpensive destination for Colombian tourists, who had comprised much of the tourist market in Cotacachi. The Canton Assembly’s Economic Development Unit also attributed the lack of economic progress in the municipality to inadequate market information, lack of credit, and inadequate technical assistance to support the production of goods that could be competitive in national and international markets (Asemblea de Unidad Cantonal 2002b). Local producers, civil society leaders and technical staff with the municipality and Canton Assembly all acknowledged that the major forces that shaped the municipality’s economy were situated outside of its boundaries and beyond its jurisdiction. Indeed, the frequent discussion of the need to provide training courses for migrant workers from the municipality to help them access better-paying jobs was a telling indication that many local residents saw labor migration as the only serious option for improving their livelihoods (Author’s fieldnotes 1999, 2002, 2007). In sum, in the context of inequitable patterns of land ownership, national macroeconomic policies, disinterest in the municipality by large-scale investors on terms that were acceptable to the local population and a lack of capacity among most local producers to compete effectively in national and global markets, even the best efforts of the municipal government and Canton Assembly had little impact on the reduction of poverty and out-migration. Transnational Mining Corporations and the Limits of Municipal Power

The Indigenous struggle to control and democratize municipal power in Cotacachi and many other rural municipalities in the Andes in many ways reflected a broader struggle to control local territory (see Korovkin 1997; Ospina 2005: 17–18; Postero and Zamosc 2004: 16). In Cotacachi, the most direct challenge to the limits of municipal power and the capacity of local actors to shape the social and economic development of the municipality was rooted in conflicts with transnational mining corporations over mineral exploration rights in the Intag zone (see Muñoz 2006; Bebbington 2007; Rogge 2008; True Nature Films 2006). Mining conflicts highlight important limits to municipal power as a means of controlling local territory.

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The conflict over mining in Cotacachi began in the early 1990s, when the Japanese mining firm Mitsubushi Metals initiated mineral exploration activity in the Intag zone with permits from Ecuador’s Ministry of Mining. Local opposition to mining activity grew as communities close to the exploration sites experienced deforestation, soil erosion and contamination of local water supplies. In 1995 a group of local environmental activists formed an organization called the Defence and Conservation of Intag (Defensa y Conservación del Intag— DECOIN), which, with support from a prominent Quito-based environmental NGO, became the leading actor in the struggle against mining activity in the municipality. Over the course of the second half of the 1990s, DECOIN pressured the municipal government and Canton Assembly to take action to prevent mining activity in Cotacachi, including the creation of a municipal ordinance to declare Cotacachi an ‘Ecological Municipality’ (Municipalidad de Cotacachi 2001). In 1997, after legal strategies to prevent further mineral exploration by Mitsubushi Metals appeared to have failed, residents of the communities affected by mining operations and DECOIN activists occupied the company’s exploration camp and seized the camp’s equipment. In an effort to diffuse the conflict in favor of the Intag communities, Mayor Tituaña agreed to take the equipment into safekeeping and to return it to Mitsubushi on the condition that the company cease its activities in the municipality, terms that Mitsubushi eventually agreed to (Zorilla 1999). In 2004, the Canadian-registered mineral exploration company Ascendant Copper acquired mineral exploration rights for a large section of Intag and initiated an aggressive campaign to generate local support for mineral exploration and extraction.29 In addition to the distribution of gifts such as soccer uniforms and cooking fuel, representatives of Ascendant Copper created and financed a ‘civil society’ organization called CODEGAM to create the appearance of legitimate popular support for mining activity. In 2004, CODEGAM leaders violently occupied Cotacachi’s municipal building to protest the municipality’s stand against mining; they also began legal action to separate the region in which mining operations were located from the rest of Cotacachi and to create a new municipality. In 2005, as relations between the advocates and opponents of mining activity deteriorated, residents from fifteen Intag communities occupied and dismantled an exploration camp and blocked roads to prevent exploration teams from entering the area. In response, Ascendant Copper sent heavily armed private security guards to protect its operations. In December 2006, the area attracted international media attention when a group of those guards fired live ammunition and tear gas at local protesters who responded by occupying

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the guards’ camp and taking them hostage for five days (see True Nature Films 2006). Under pressure from DECOIN and leaders from the communities affected by mineral exploration, the municipality of Cotacachi and the Canton Assembly assumed central roles in the struggle against mining activity in Cotacachi. However, their legal power to block mining operations was severely limited by Ecuador’s national constitutional framework, which granted jurisdiction over sub-surface natural resources to the central government. The municipal government provided legal support to the leading anti-mining activists who were the subjects of criminal charges laid by Ascendant Copper. It also dedicated several staff members to the anti-mining campaign, pressured the central government to decentralize jurisdiction over environmental management and road infrastructure in order to increase its legal capacity to stop mining activity, lobbied UNESCO to declare Cotacachi a ‘patrimony of humanity’ on the basis of the very high levels of biodiversity in the Intag zone, and initiated a legal campaign against Ascendant Copper, arguing that it had violated the national laws that required community consultation prior to mineral exploration activity. At the same time, in response to a resolution from the 2004 annual General Assembly, the Canton Assembly organized an extra-ordinary Assembly to discuss and pass resolutions on mining activity in the municipality. That meeting resolved to oppose all mining activity in Cotacachi. The meeting also resolved to create a commission to examine the use of extra-legal strategies such as “protest marches, the occupation of government offices and road blockades at the local, provincial and national levels,” and to seek international support for the anti-mining struggle (Asemblea de Unidad Cantonal 2004b). By 2006, the anti-mining movement in Cotacachi enjoyed the support of Ecuador’s Ecumenical Commission on Human Rights (CEDHU) as well as the backing of a variety of international environmental organizations including Friends of the Earth, Rainforest Concern, and Mining Watch. Nevertheless, it was clear that the legal power of the municipal government and other institutions of local governance in Cotacachi to regulate and control sub-surface natural resources in the municipality was extremely limited. The most that local governance institutions could do was to represent their constituents in legal challenges to central state institutions and rally support from international environmental organizations that might represent the anti-mining struggle in Cotacachi on a global scale.30

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The Limits to Inter-Cultural Understanding

In the context of the long history of race-based exploitation and political exclusion, the institutions of municipal governance made significant progress in creating new spaces for Indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian residents to participate in municipal decision making and in the reduction of the most overt forms of racism. In a 2005 survey of 605 Cotacachi residents, 69.2 percent of all respondents and 69.7 percent of Indigenous respondents agreed that “now there is more respect among blacks, indigenous and mestizos” (Ospina 2005: 299). However, despite these improvements, more subtle forms of racism persisted along with significant inter-ethnic tensions. Moreover, the acceptance of the increased political power of the Indigenous population by the townbased mestizo population was marked as much by resignation as by any genuine respect for cultural differences. Initiatives by the municipality, the Canton Assembly and different civil society organizations to celebrate the distinct cultural traditions in Cotacachi largely failed to generate significant cross-cultural interaction and instead tended to be restricted to the specific ethnic group whose culture was celebrated in any particular event. The authors of the 2007 evaluation of local governance in Cotacachi asserted that “culture has substituted for interculturality” and pointed out that the organizations representing different ethnic groups tended to operate “in their own worlds without opening up to each other” (IEE 2007: 123). The lack of inter-cultural engagement was very clearly reflected in the relations between two cultural institutions in Cotacachi—the Museum of Culture (Museo de la Cultura) and the House of Culture (Casa de la Cultura), both located within a few blocks of the town’s central plaza. The Museum of Culture was managed and operated by town-based mestizo ‘notables’ and its exhibits and events highlighted the European heritage of the local mestizo population—despite pressure from municipal leaders to expand the museum’s attention to reflect the Indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian populations. In response to the recalcitrance of the directors of the Museum of Culture, the municipality brokered a large grant from UNESCO to renovate a historical building, which subsequently became the Casa de la Cultura—and which gave priority to Afro-Ecuadorian and especially Indigenous cultural expressions. The latent tensions between the two institutions and the lack of inter-cultural engagement that those tensions represented were especially pronounced during the annual Inti Raymi celebrations in June 2006—the most important annual Indigenous cultural event in Cotacachi and in much of the rest of highland Ecuador. While a parade of

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indigenous residents that had been heavily advertised by the Casa de Cultura took place in Cotacachi’s central plaza, the Museo de la Cultura—located only two blocks away—expressed its disinterest in Indigenous culture by organizing an afternoon of champagne and chamber music.31 The Indigenous and mestizo populations operated as if they lived in separate worlds. Similarly, after eleven years the most heated debates in the annual Canton Assemblies were still based largely on the regional, ethnic and class identities and interests that distinguished the urban, rural highland and Intag zones (IEE 2007: 26). The Domination of Participatory Spaces by Men

Despite some important changes, popular participation in municipal decision making in Cotacachi remained a predominantly male affair. The formal representation of women to elected positions in municipal institutions increased substantially after 1996: while only one of the seven municipal councilors elected in 1996 was female, three women were elected to the council in 2000, and five were elected in 2004. One of those women, a medical doctor named Patricia Espinoza, subsequently became the president of the Canton Assembly and was widely viewed as a possible successor to Auki Tituaña in the post of mayor. In the elections for Cotacachi’s ten parish councils, held for the first time in 2000, three women were elected as presidents in 2000 and again in 2004. However, women continued to be heavily underrepresented at lower levels of formal political representation and in the deliberations of the annual Canton Assemblies and other purportedly participatory forums. In 2006, of the elected presidents of Cotacachi’s fifty-two rural communities and fifteen neighborhoods in the town center, just two were women. Moreover, despite a quota rule that required one third of the delegates to the Canton Assembly to be female and the near equal physical representation of men and women,32 the actual debates within the Assemblies were overwhelmingly dominated by men (Author’s field notes; IEE 2007: 115–116). The municipal government and the executive council of the Canton Assembly have made some efforts to address the gender imbalance in local governance, such as instituting the quota rule and through very actively supporting the women’s organizations in both the town center and rural communities. However, the activities and orientation of those women’s organizations often reinforced rather than challenged traditional gender roles and generally focused attention on householdbased income-generation projects that were compatible with the still pervasive view that women’s societal roles revolved around domesticity.

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In a survey of attitudes towards women’s participation in civil society organizations and local politics, Ospina found that thirty-two percent of the 602 respondents agreed that “women should not participate in civil society organizations because if they do households will be neglected” and thirty-six percent of respondents agreed that “women are still not capable of governing Cotacachi” (2005: 300). In both cases, the majority of those who agreed with the statements were women, indicating a high degree of internalization of attitudes that supported inequitable gender roles. The persistence of these views, although among a minority of the population, continues to pose serious challenges for the active involvement of women in local governance in Cotacachi. Largely as a result of pervasive machismo and the legacy of the much lower levels of formal education among women, the self-confidence of many women to take part in public debates and local decision making remained low (Interviews with local women leaders: June 2002). The president of the Coordinating Committee of Urban Women in Cotacachi pointed to subtle changes that had resulted from the efforts of the municipality and Canton Assembly to promote women’s involvement in local governance: “Before, women had neither voice nor vote. Now women do participate, but mostly by listening to the men, but this is slowly starting to change” (Interview: June 6, 2002). Nevertheless, from a gendered perspective, the democratization of municipal governance in Cotacachi remains an incipient process. Conclusion

Cotacachi’s experience suggests that democratization can occur in rural municipal governments even in contexts of deep structural inequality. The combination of the well-organized Indigenous peasant organizations, the political will of municipal authorities, astute leadership, the careful design of participatory institutions, and external financial and technical support can bring about significant improvements in the democratic performance of rural municipal governments. However, socio-economic and ethnic inequality also puts serious limitations on the regulatory capacity of municipal governments and on their abilities to reduce poverty and promote economic growth. The consequences of structural inequality are compounded by macroeconomic policies that not only fail to support local economic development, but in fact undermine it. The combination of extreme inequality and a hostile macroeconomic framework stifled efforts by the municipality of Cotacachi to bring about any significant improvements

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in the livelihoods of its constituents, despite its efforts to actively involve them in local governance. The heavy dependence of democratization in Cotacachi on the political will of one mayor who held office for three consecutive terms and on high levels of technical and financial support from NGOs also made the future of the democratization process uncertain and severely limited the possibilities of replicating it in other rural municipalities. The volume of donor and NGO resources available in Ecuador simply cannot support municipal democratization on a broad scale in other parts of the country to the same extent that they did in Cotacachi. The experience of Cotacachi also raises important questions about the kind of democracy that is emerging there and in other municipalities in the rural Andes. Although municipal leaders assert that a highly participatory form of democracy has been established, evidence suggests that the model of democracy in Cotacachi is also marked by significant elements of corporatism, since the basis for participation is leadership of a recognized organization—which effectively excludes all individuals who do not hold those positions. While the large number of civil society organizations in Cotacachi meant that the numbers of representatives involved were high, the absence of any mechanism for participation by unorganized individuals or those who do not occupy leadership positions in civil society organizations marginalized many local residents from involvement in local governance and fostered the emergence of a participatory elite. As a result, the social support base for municipal democratization in Cotacachi remained relatively thin. Moreover, the consolidation of new formal institutions of municipal governance, such as the Canton Assembly and the Inter-Sectoral Committees, challenged and partly undermined the position of UNORCAC, the most important civil society organization in Cotacachi and the crucial base of support for municipal democratization. The sometimes tense relationship between UNORCAC and the institutions of municipal governance—and the ambiguous attitudes of UNORCAC leaders towards those institutions—highlights the challenges that even relatively successful cases of municipal democratization can pose for the civil society organizations behind them. Municipal democratization in Cotacachi was also marked by important elements of clientelism, especially among community leaders. Despite a pervasive discourse of participatory democracy and explicit efforts by the municipal government to weaken the clientelist political culture in Cotacachi, much of the popular support for Tituaña and the democratization process was based on the completion of public works projects rather than the creation of new participatory institutions. Indeed,

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Tituaña was widely perceived to be a good mayor primarily because of his heavy investments in public works, suggesting that traditional popular expectations of municipal governance did not keep pace with institutional innovations. The clientelist attitudes of community and neighborhood leaders similarly undermined the potential impacts of Cotacachi’s participatory budget on local social and economic development. Keen to demonstrate their effectiveness as leaders by brokering visible public works projects, community leaders directed the participatory budget meetings towards the construction of numerous small-scale infrastructure projects with little developmental impact, and they generally blocked the allocation of participatory budget funds to more ambitious efforts to improve the quality of social services or to promote economic growth and poverty reduction—much rhetoric to the contrary. The consequences of the relative lack of economic progress in Cotacachi remain uncertain. Many municipal officials and leaders of the Canton Assembly worried that popular enthusiasm for the local democratization initiatives would begin to wane if the process did not generate tangible improvements in people’s livelihoods. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that economic growth and improvements in livelihoods were not the only priorities for local residents. Indeed, UNORCAC’s quest for municipal power was first motivated by a struggle for inter-ethnic respect and dignity. The improvements in interethnic relations and the more dignified treatment that Indigenous residents experienced in both municipal offices and in other public and private transactions with local mestizos after 1996 were thus important and widely acknowledged gains. Cotacachi’s experiments with municipal democratization also had important impacts on the expansion of the political identities of Cotacacheños as citizens and on their capabilities for political action. In contrast to observers who have argued that decentralization and participation in local governance fragments political and social movements by diverting popular political energy into highly localized, parochial issues (i.e. Petras and Veltmeyer 2005; Schuurman 1997), the experience of Cotacachi indicates that increased popular engagement in local governance can contribute to heightened levels of political activism that extend beyond municipal boundaries and involve both legal and extra-legal tactics. In Cotacachi, the municipal government actively encouraged and facilitated popular involvement in Indigenous uprisings, protest marches and illegal road blockades against national governments. Similarly, the Canton Assembly and municipal government played key roles in shifting debates about mineral extraction

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beyond the sphere of municipal jurisdiction to the national and global political arenas and did not exclude the possible use of illegal tactics to block mining operations in the municipality. In both cases, the crucial factor that shaped the political activism of municipal officials was pressure from well-organized civil society organizations at both the local and national levels. At the same time, municipal officials were careful about when and where to push the boundaries of municipal jurisdiction; for example, although Cotacachi’s development plans highlight the challenges that the extremely unequal distribution of agricultural land creates for efforts to improve the livelihoods of local residents, they made no efforts to challenge the prevailing land tenure in the municipality. Nevertheless, there was little evidence in Cotacachi that the deeper levels of popular involvement in municipal governance had contributed to either a shift from confrontational forms of political activism at the national level to technocratic forms of politics at the local level or to a concern with local affairs at the expense of national political issues.

Notes 1 In 2000, the municipality of Cotacachi won the UN-Habitat sponsored Dubai International Prize for ‘Best Practices in the Democratization of Municipal Management for Equitable and Sustainable Development.’ In 2001, it was awarded the ‘Little Dreamer’ (Duende Soñador) Prize by the InterAmerican Forum for the Rights of Children and Youth for its promotion of participation by children and youth in local governance. In 2002, it was selected as the Latin American recipient of UNESCO’s ‘Cities for Peace Prize’ (see: www.cotacachi.gov.ec). 2 The canton is the geographic territory associated with municipal government in Ecuador. 3 Source for 1990 data is ODEPLAN (1999), based on Ecuador’s 1990 Census. Source for 2001 data is SIISE (2001), based on Ecuador’s 2001 Census. 4 Afro-Ecuadorians represent approximately six percent of Cotacachi’s population and live almost exclusively in the Intag zone (IEE 2007: 8). 5 One hacienda, Peribuela, was owned by the Social Assistance department of the Ecuadorian state and the other, Quitumba, was owned by the Catholic Church (García Bravo 2002: 288). 6 Flora found that 47.3 percent of 276 interviewees in seventeen rural communities regularly worked outside of their home community; 28.9 percent worked outside of the canton of Cotacachi altogether (Flora 1998: 64). 7 IERAC allocated the community of Tunibamba 200 hectares of former hacienda land in 1994 after a twelve-year legal battle. 8 This paragraph is based on interviews with Alberto Andrango (June 25, 2002), and Francisco Rhon (June 17, 2002) and on Martínez 1985: 48–49.

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9 Local Indigenous leaders asserted that in the early and mid-twentieth century there were very few huasipungueros (usufruct peasants) in Cotacachi and that most peasant households had possessed their own small plots of land and worked on the haciendas for two to three days a week in return for access to hacienda resources (pastures, water, firewood, roads) and to repay debts. 10 Cotacachi’s Artisans’ Society (Sociedad de Artesanos) was established in 1911 to represent the producers of leather goods in the canton (Camilo Haro, president of the Sociedad de Artesanos, Interview: August 30, 1999). 11 DECOIN received logistical support and publicity from Acción Ecologica and the Ecuadorian Ecumenical Commission on Human Rights as well as Mining Watch, Friends of the Earth and Rainforest Concern. 12 FENOC subsequently expanded its name to become the Federación Nacional de Organizaciones Campesinas, Indígenas y Negras (National Federation of Peasant, Indigenous and Black Organizations—FENOCIN). 13 Tituaña won the 1996 elections with 24.1 percent of the popular vote, only 73 votes ahead of his closest competitor. 14 In 2002, funding from international aid donors and NGOs increased Cotacachi’s municipal investment budget from $1,457,000 to almost $3 million. In 2005, donor and NGO support amounted to $1,386,000, which increased the municipal investment budget from $1,510,000 to $2,896,000 (IEE 2007: 53). 15 The members of the Council included: the president of UNORCAC, the president of the Federation of Neighborhoods, three women’s representatives, one children’s representative, one youth representative, the mayor, one municipal councilor, the president of the Association of Municipal Employees, and five parish council presidents. 16 In 2006, financial support to the Assembly of Canton Unity from donor agencies and NGOs amounted to $265,011, compared to $50,000 from the municipal government (Asemblea de Unidad Cantonal 2006: 14). 17 Data compiled by Bretón (2001: 139) indicated that in 1999, 4.7 percent of NGOs operating in Ecuador were working in Cotacachi, placing it in the top eighteen municipalities in the country in terms NGO activity. 18 Racial discrimination is a significant cause of poor health among Ecuador’s Indigenous population. When all other variables are held constant (i.e. income, quality of housing, etc.), health indicators such as child malnutrition and life expectancy are still worse for the Indigenous population than for the mestizo population (Larrea and Freire 2002). 19 In spite of the apparent flexibility of Ecuador’s decentralization legislation, negotiations between the municipality and the Ministries of Health and Finance were extremely difficult and lengthy. 20 Established with a $10,000 contribution from the municipality, one third of the prize money from the 2002 Dubai International Prize (see endnote 1). 21 A controversial condition that the cut-flower operators imposed on the study was that it could not be released to the public. 22 This section is based on interviews conducted in 2002 and 2007 with municipal employees, who spoke on condition of anonymity. 23 Ecuadorian law states that municipal governments can spend no more than twenty-five percent of central state transfers on administration. Municipal governments are free to allocate up to one hundred percent of locally generated revenue to administrative costs, but since most municipalities raise very little

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revenue themselves, the legally imposed cap on administration spending generally determines the relative proportions of administrative and investment (public works) spending. In Cotacachi, between 1996 and 2006, administrative spending averaged twenty-four percent of total annual revenues, with the remainder dedicated to investment in public works and services and to the service of a small debt (Municipal financial records 1996–2006). 24 Ecuador’s municipal code stipulates that a maximum of twenty-five percent of central state transfers can be spent on wages and other administrative costs. For small municipalities without strong local tax bases, this means that salaries are generally very low. Moreover, the municipal code also prohibits white-collar municipal employees from collective bargaining—a right given only to blue-collar workers—which further dampens wages and morale among municipal employees. 25 A 2005 survey of 602 residents of Cotacachi found that 7.9 percent had participated in the elaboration of one of the local development plans; 5.0 percent had participated in a meeting of one of the Councils of the Canton Assembly; 7.8 percent had participated in a participatory budget meeting; and 9.0 percent had participated in one of the annual General Assemblies (Ospina 2005: 295). 26 See: “Mayor Auki Tituaña deplores the lack of political support in Imbabura” El Comercio (Quito), February 15, 2001, electronic edition. 27 Andrango received 45.9 percent of the vote, Tituaña received 27.9 percent and a third competitor from the town center received 26.1 percent (Consejo Nacional Electoral 2009). 28 The president of the Canton Assembly’s Production Council calculated that the cost of the inputs for leather production had increased by seventy percent in the wake of dollarization (Interview: June 7, 2002). 29 For a detailed history and media archives of mining conflicts in Cotacachi, see www.decoin.org. 30 In December 2006 the Ecuadorian government suspended Ascendant Copper’s mining concession in Intag, but the future of the concession and of mining operations in Intag remain uncertain. For a detailed history of conflicts over mining operations in Intag, see the media archive at www.decoin.org. 31 This story was recounted to me on several different occasions in June 2007 by municipal authorities and one mestizo resident. 32 In the eleven annual Canton Assemblies from 1996 through 2006, women represented 45.8 percent of all participants. Women represented 48.3 percent of all participants in the participatory budget meetings held between 2000 and 2006 (IEE 2007: 114).

4 The Difficult Marriage of Liberal and Indigenous Democracy in Jesús de Machaca, Bolivia with Gonzalo Colque

In the pre-dawn hours of March 12, 1921, over three thousand Aymaraspeaking peasants marched into the small altiplano village of Jesús de Machaca, where they lynched the government-appointed corregidor and his family along with the members of several other local haciendaowning families. The rural mob then set fire to the homes of the corregidor, local hacendados, and other mestizo notables before returning to their communities. Sparked by the starvation death of an Indigenous community leader in the local prison, the 1921 uprising was also part of a broader struggle across Bolivia’s altiplano that pushed for Indigenous control of local governance and access to education, and also fought against hacienda encroachment on community lands and abuse by local hacendados and government officials. Two days after the uprising, in spite of some indications of political support for Aymara communities from the government of President Bautista Saavedra, the Bolivian army dispatched the Avaroa Calvary Regiment from the nearby town of Guaqui to Jesús de Machaca, where soldiers hunted down and massacred dozens of local peasants suspected of participating in the uprising, indiscriminately burned hundreds of houses and killed livestock (see Choque and Ticona 1996).1 Eighty-three years later, the 1921 uprising and subsequent massacre had become key events in the historical memory of Jesús de Machaca. Indeed, just after dawn on the morning of March 12, 2004 we watched together as over a thousand Aymara-speaking Machaqueños re-enacted the historic march into the village of Jesús de Machaca, wearing the traditional Indigenous dress of the area, waving the rainbow-colored

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whipala flags of Bolivia’s Indigenous movement and shooting off homemade firecrackers. Two thousand and four marked the thirteenth consecutive year the uprising and massacre had been commemorated. The annual commemoration represented a core symbolic element of a much broader re-construction and re-invigoration of Indigenous traditions, and highlighted the struggle for political autonomy and territorial control in Jesús de Machaca in the new political context of municipal decentralization in Bolivia. Indeed, former President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada and Vice President Victor Hugo Cárdenas chose the 1994 commemorative ceremonies in Jesús de Machaca as the site to launch the Law of Popular Participation, which formed the crux of Bolivia’s decentralization framework, as part of a strategic effort to bolster support for decentralization among Indigenous groups (see Ticona and Albó 1997: 281–286). The mood among the marchers on the morning of the 2004 commemoration march was buoyant—not simply because they were celebrating a key event in local history, but also because they were on the verge of what appeared to be an important victory in the centurieslong struggle to protect and enhance local Indigenous political autonomy. Machaqueños had already celebrated the passage of legislation in Bolivia’s National Congress in 2003 that granted formal municipal status to the Indigenous marka of Jesús de Machaca. They were now awaiting the December 2004 municipal elections, which they expected would give formal municipal power to the candidates chosen by the Marka de Ayllus y Comunidades Originarias de Jesús de Machaca (Federation of Ayllus and Ancestral Communities of Jesús de Machaca—MACOJMA), which was leading the struggle for municipal power.2 Nine months later, Bolivia’s 2004 municipal elections resulted in the inauguration of a full slate of local Aymara-speaking community leaders in the Mayor’s office and municipal council (four men and two women), although not all of them were the candidates nominated by MACOJMA. The mayor and three of the councilors, including both women, had been pre-selected by MACOJMA following the traditional practices of public voting, while the other two councilors were affiliated with the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Towards Socialism— MAS). The 2004 municipal election victory marked the beginning of a much more difficult struggle to create an ‘Indigenous municipality’ in Jesús de Machaca—that is, a municipal government not simply controlled by Indigenous leaders but also governed in accordance with Indigenous cultural practices and decision making institutions, and subject to the moral authority of MACOJMA’s governing council, the

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Cabildo. The proponents of Bolivia’s 1994 Law of Popular Participation (LPP) claimed that it would facilitate the incorporation of Indigenous customs and practices (usos y costumbres) into municipal governance, but early experiences in Jesús de Machaca quickly revealed that the merging of the logic and design of western liberal state institutions with Indigenous modes of decision making was a much more complex challenge than many first recognized. The relative success of Indigenous leaders in Jesús de Machaca in making use of the Law of Popular Participation and subsequent decentralization laws to pursue their struggle for local autonomy put them at the forefront of Bolivia’s Indigenous ayllu movement (see Andolina 2001). However, the powerful tensions that already existed between the dominant framework of liberal representative democracy and ayllu-based modes of governance (see Rivera Cusicanqui 2003) became even more pronounced in the context of decentralization and the efforts to formally marry Indigenous forms of governance with Bolivia’s liberal municipal legal framework. While some scholars have emphasized the deeply democratic and deliberative features of contemporary ayllu governance (Carter and Albó 1988: 477; Rivera Cusicanqui 2003; Van Cott 2008), others have pointed out that democratic tendencies coexist with quasiauthoritarian and corporatist features, such as the expectation that decisions made by consensus in the Cabildo will not be challenged (see Ströbele-Gregor 1994, 1996), and the de facto exclusion of youth and women from positions of social and political leadership. The quest to formally incorporate ayllu-based modes of decision making into the system of municipal governance has also generated difficult internal tensions in Jesús de Machaca as Machaqueños themselves debate and struggle with the relative merits of liberal and ayllu-based modes of democracy. In this context, it became evident that the initial success of the Indigenous municipality project in Jesús de Machaca actually created new challenges to the broader struggle for political autonomy it was initially intended to promote. This chapter examines the Indigenous struggle to control municipal power and to marry it to community and ayllu-based forms of governance in Jesús de Machaca. The chapter concentrates on the period between 1994 and 2008 in an effort to complement the work of scholars associated with the Centro de Investigación y Promoción del Campesinado (CIPCA) in La Paz, which carefully documented the history of Jesús de Machaca from its pre-colonial roots to the late twentieth century (see Astvaldsson 1997; Choque 2003; Choque and Ticona 1996; Ticona and Albó 1997). Understanding the contemporary challenges of Indigenous municipal governance in Jesús de Machaca

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requires analysis of the specific historical trajectory of the region. Section I examines the historical roots of the contemporary system of community and ayllu-based governance in Jesús de Machaca, with a particular emphasis on the historical evolution of the prevailing local system of land tenure and contemporary patterns of migration. It argues that the particular strength of community-based forms of governance is very closely connected to the deeply established system of communal land control and a remarkably equitable distribution of land. Section II analyzes the recent political context in which the struggle to create an Indigenous municipality emerged in Jesús de Machaca with an emphasis on the vicissitudes of ayllu-based forms of governance and the ongoing re-construction of communal traditions. Section III examines the ways in which Machaqueños responded to municipal decentralization in Bolivia, and Section IV analyzes the tensions that have emerged in the uneasy marriage between Bolivia’s national decentralization framework and Indigenous community-based forms of governance in the new municipality. The Historical Roots of Community and Ayllu-Based Governance in Jesús de Machaca

Jesús de Machaca is a marka or federation of twenty-four ayllus with deep pre-colonial roots. Following Aymara cosmovision, the marka is divided into two parts, the Upper Part (parcial arriba) and the Lower Part (parcial abajo). At the time of writing, the Lower Part, called Manqha Suxta, was composed of eighteen ayllus, covered seventy percent of the territory and was home to eighty percent of the population of Jesús de Machaca. It was represented by MACOJMA and was most commonly referred to by that name.3 The Upper Part, known as Arax Suxta, was composed of six ayllus, covered thirty percent of the territory of the marka and was home to the remaining twenty percent of the population. It was represented by a parallel but less powerful federation of ayllus, called the Marka of Ayllus and Ancestral Communities of Arax Zuxta (Marka de Ayllus y Comunidades Originarias de Arax Suxta—MACOAS). In the early 1990s, MACOJMA became the driving force behind the struggle for municipal power. As noted above, in 2004 Jesús de Machaca became a state-sanctioned municipality with geographic-administrative boundaries that corresponded almost identically to those of the marka of the same name. The near perfect coincidence of the administrative boundaries of the marka with those of the municipality distinguish Jesús de Machaca from most other markas and municipalities in Bolivia, where ancestral territories are divided and

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fragmented by state-imposed administrative boundaries and struggles for Indigenous autonomy cannot be so easily merged with efforts to control the government of a single municipality. By contrast, Jesús de Machaca is both a marka and a municipality and is governed by two parallel systems of decision making—one with pre-colonial origins based on Aymara cosmovision and ayllu-based forms of governance, and the other based on the state-imposed laws that regulate municipal governments. Having struggled for municipal status as a strategy for enhancing local cultural and political autonomy, the challenge Machaqueños faced after 2004 was to take advantage of the new opportunities that municipal power opened up without simultaneously undermining the system of ayllu-based governance that it was intended to protect in the first place; that is, to create an “autochthonous form of modernity” (Ströbele-Gregor 1996: 82). The municipality of Jesús de Machaca is physically located in the province of Ingavi in the altiplano department of La Paz, about a threehour bus ride from the city of El Alto, which adjoins Bolivia’s capital of La Paz. The topography of the municipality’s 939 square kilometers is dominated by a mountain chain in the north, which blocks the warming impact of nearby Lake Titicaca. Local soils are shallow, sandy and rocky, which, given the municipality’s altitude (3,800 m.a.s.l. at its lowest elevation) means that only very hardy plant varieties that are resistant to severe climatic stress can survive. Most crop production is destined for family consumption and feed for livestock (primarily cattle and llamas), and the sale of meat and milk is the primary source of cash income. While Andean agronomists estimate that five hectares of land in the altiplano region are required to provide fodder for one cow and while cattle production is the main source of income in Jesús de Machaca, average household land access is just seven hectares (Colque 2005: 42). As a result of the dependence of local livelihoods on agricultural and livestock production in the fragile and high-risk ecosystem, the municipality’s 13,247 predominantly Indigenous residents have been unable to escape very high levels of material poverty. Household incomes hover between four hundred and five hundred dollars per year (Colque 2006: 40) and according to Bolivia’s 2001 census, barely one in ten homes had electricity, only two in ten homes had piped water, and nine in ten homes relied on manure as the primary form of cooking fuel. Less than one percent of households owned a television, refrigerator, vehicle or cellular telephone and ninetyfour percent of houses had dirt floors (MACOJMA 2005: 78, 83). A health diagnosis conducted in the late 1980s indicated that close to sixty

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percent of all children in the marka suffered from chronic malnutrition (CIPCA 1989: 15). Table 4.1 Selected Social Data, Jesús de Machaca, Bolivia4 Total land area (2001) Total population (2001) Male population (2001) Female population (2001) First language Aymara (2001) First language Spanish (2001) Ethnic self-identification as Aymara (2001) Literacy—males over 15 (2001) Literacy—females over 15 (2001) Average years formal education for men > 15 years (2001) Average years of formal education for women > 15 years (2001) Infant mortality (2001) Livelihoods and incomes (2004)5 Average total household incomes Incomes from agriculture and livestock Non-agricultural incomes (migration) Non-labor incomes (State BONOSOL payments, remittances) Housing Roofs made of thatch Roofs made of tin, wood, or cement Earth floors Floors of cement, brick or wood Houses with piped water Houses with electricity

2

939 km 13,247 6,387 6,860 88.9% 10.5% 93.7% 91.6 % 70.3 % 6.7 3.8

69.7 / 1000 live births $397 (100%) $235 (59%) $70 (18%) $92 (23%) 61.6% 38.3% 93.7% 6.2% 21.5% 9.5%

Material poverty in Jesús de Machaca has been accompanied by an unusually cohesive system of community-based governance and sociopolitical organization, rooted in the tradition of thakhi, or ‘path of life,’ which regulates the communal responsibilities and leadership roles of community members. The survival of the thakhi system, which has broken down partially or completely in many other parts of the Bolivian altiplano, is very closely connected to the system of communal land control in Jesús de Machaca. The latter system had pre-colonial origins but was re-established after local Indigenous caciques purchased their traditional land back from the Spanish Crown in the sixteenth and

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seventeenth centuries, which was fiercely defended in the subsequent period of liberalism and hacienda expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Access to communally controlled land is conditional on the fulfillment of community responsibilities prescribed through the thakhi system—a powerful incentive to take on local leadership roles and to take part in locally-based decision making. Nevertheless, the system of communal land control that lies behind the relative strength of community-based forms of governance in Jesús de Machaca exists in an uneasy tension with patterns of permanent and temporary migration that simultaneously facilitate and challenge the political power of MACOJMA and community-based forms of decision making. The Aymara concept of thakhi is perhaps best described as a predetermined pathway through life composed of responsibilities and leadership roles which must be fulfilled in order to be considered a full member of one’s community and in order to enjoy the rights of community membership, including access to community-controlled land (see Ticona and Albó 1997: 65–88; Plata, Colque and Calle 2003). As one Indigenous community member described the thakhi, “it is a school of life in which people learn in order to serve the community” (Plata, Colque and Calle 2003: 57). The thakhi system lies at the core of the relative strength of community-based forms of governance and political power in Jesús de Machaca, but it is also a source of social and political tension as Machaqueños try to navigate the uneasy relationship between deeply rooted systems of community governance designed to promote survival in a difficult ecological setting and the forces of modernization, state-building and globalization. In the wake of Bolivia’s 1952 Revolution, successive governments made systematic efforts to undermine traditional forms of organization and governance in the name of modernization. Moreover, in an economic context where continual migration back and forth between urban labor markets and rural communities is a necessary element of local livelihoods, Machaqueños must continually negotiate between obligations to the community on one hand and, on the other hand, a modern, individualistic and urban cultural logic. This tension is mediated to a certain extent in Jesús de Machaca by a highly exceptional system of communal land control in which access to land is conditional on the fulfillment of community obligations in the thakhi, but modernizing urban cultural influences remain strong. Community members formally begin the pathway of the thakhi when they marry. From that point on they are expected to provide a predetermined set of services to the community, theoretically as a male and female pair following the Andean concept of chachawarmi or

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gender complementarity (see Harris 1978). Such services range from the provision of physical labor for community infrastructure projects to the leadership of ritual community events and celebrations. As community members gain experience and move through the thakhi, they are expected to take on greater levels of responsibility, beginning with the position of mallku originario or community leader, and moving up through the position of jiliri mallku (ayllu leader) and jach’a mallku (leader of the marka). In addition to the material incentives for the fulfillment of community responsibilities, Ströbele-Gregor points out that Aymara cosmovision reinforces the tradition of service to the community: “Only by fulfilling all of one’s obligations to them [dead ancestors and supernatural beings] and to the community can one be confident of the protection and generosity of the supernatural forces” (1996: 78). The key forum for decision making in MACOJMA is the Cabildo or council of mallkus, who represent the seventy communities that make up the eighteen ayllus of the Lower Part (manqha suxta) of Jesús de Machaca. In practice, positions of leadership are exercised only by men but male leaders must have the symbolic support and be accompanied to Cabildo meetings by a complementary female. In the thakhi system, leadership is an obligation assigned to community members based on their fulfillment of previous responsibilities; in theory, only those who have fulfilled the role of mallku can be considered for the role of jach’a mallku and so on. Because leadership is an obligation rather than a product of individual merit or political machination, it is also unremunerated; leaders of communities, ayllus and the marka must pay all of the expenses associated with their position from their own pockets. As a result, the monetary costs of leadership can be very high and community members are often heavily indebted for five or six years after fulfilling a senior leadership position. To mitigate these costs and to prevent a concentration of power, leadership positions are assigned on a rotating annual basis, with elections taking place every July. The thakhi system and the powerful socio-political organization it has helped to sustain has survived in large part because of the highly exceptional system of communal land tenure in Jesús de Machaca, which, nevertheless, also faces serious internal and external challenges (see Colque 2005 for a more detailed analysis). Agricultural land in the ayllus of Jesús de Machaca is managed and farmed on a day-to-day basis almost entirely by individual families. Access to land is passed from generation to generation, but ultimately all land is communally controlled and access to it depends on the fulfillment of community obligations. In Jesús de Machaca, social pressure to fulfill the

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community responsibilities prescribed in the thakhi is very strong. Typical mechanisms for ensuring that community members comply with their assigned duties and roles involve public humiliation, threats and the loss of the right to participate in community meetings. More extreme measures include the seizure of livestock and ultimately the repossession of communally controlled land (see Plata, Colque and Calle 2003: 71). This system of land control generates frequent and intense conflicts within communities but its legitimacy is largely unquestioned, as is made clear by the regular return of migrants from El Alto and La Paz to Jesús de Machaca to take up positions of community leadership in order to retain access to community land. When migrants are unable to fulfill community responsibilities, they either arrange for family members to take those roles on their behalf or they forfeit their right to community land. In sum, communal land control is the central material factor sustaining the socio-political organization of both individual communities and the larger marka of Jesús de Machaca. As Julia Ströbele-Gregor similarly observed in other Aymara regions of the altiplano that were not deeply penetrated by haciendas, “communal decision-making power concerning the disposition of land…created an economic foundation for the maintenance of communal structures and ‘traditional’ organizational patterns” (1996: 77). Historically, community and ayllu-based land control guaranteed access to agricultural and pasture land in different ecological zones and even different geographical regions as a means of promoting food security in a high-risk environmental setting. In Jesús de Machaca, community controlled land cannot be bought or sold and is not rented, although sharecropping does take place on a small scale. Although part of the reason for the exclusion of community land from the market lies in its low productive potential, the persistence of community control has ensured a very high degree of equality in land access. A case study of land tenure in the ayllu of Titikani Takaka, typical of the other twentythree ayllus in Jesús de Machaca, found that the Gini coefficient for land use in the ayllu was an exceptionally equitable 0.16 (see Colque 2005: 37–38). Moreover, while household access to land ranged from 2 to 20 hectares, communal decisions ensured a balance between the quality and quantity of land, so that households with less land enjoyed access to more productive soils than those with more land. As a result, household incomes in the ayllu were also remarkably equitable, as represented by a Gini coefficient of 0.20, which contrasts sharply with the Gini coefficient of 0.65 for income in the rest of rural Bolivia (Colque 2005: 42). Income differentiation is also mediated by the thakhi system and requirement that community members pay from their own pockets the

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costs associated with various leadership positions, including travel to government offices in La Paz, payments to lawyers and ritual celebrations. Thus, powerful social mechanisms exist to redistribute wealth across the community and ayllu, which has helped to prevent a concentration of economic and political power in any particular individuals or families. Nevertheless, the high degree of land and income equality in Jesús de Machaca should not be romanticized, as it is almost synonymous with very high levels of poverty and depends on high levels of out-migration (see below). As Urioste (1989) asserted, in rural Bolivia high levels of socio-economic equality are only found in extremely poor communities. The roots of communal land control in the ayllus of Jesús de Machaca lie in communal land purchases from the Spanish Crown in 1585 and 1645 and the protection of that land from hacienda expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the colonial period, the Spanish Crown claimed ownership of all land in what was then known as Alto Peru, but did allow Indigenous communities to purchase from the crown the land that they had historically occupied. While very few communities were able to take advantage of that opportunity, powerful caciques in Jesús de Machaca collected enough payment from community members to legally purchase their traditional land (see Choque 2003: 77–124, 295–326; Ticona and Albo 1997: 31– 32).6 Even following the passage of the Law of Expropriation (Ley de Exvinculación) in 1874, which paved the way for widespread hacienda expansion onto communally controlled land across Bolivia, the ayllus of Jesús de Machaca retained a high degree of land control due in part to the poor productive potential of the land and partly because of fierce resistance to hacienda expansion.7 Indeed, only four haciendas were ever established in Jesús de Machaca, and they controlled a relatively small proportion of land in the marka in comparison with the rest of the Bolivian altiplano, where hacienda expansion was almost indiscriminate during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Ticona and Albó 1997: 171–180).8 Bolivia’s 1952 Revolution and subsequent 1953 Agrarian Reform had a profound influence on land distribution in much of Bolivia by breaking up neo-feudal haciendas and redistributing land on an individual basis to former serfs; the goal was to create a rural land market that would promote the modernization of agricultural production. As a result, throughout the country, community-based land control declined substantially after 1953—and, with it, the capacity of many communities to enforce any connection between community service and land access. Individual land ownership also fostered economic

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differentiation, which in turn bred asymmetrical power relations that further weakened community cohesion in much of the altiplano region. By contrast, the relative absence of haciendas in Jesús de Machaca meant that the Agrarian Reform had little impact on the communally controlled land tenure system in the marka. The survival of communal land tenure not only enabled the link between service to the community and access to community controlled land to persist in Jesús de Machaca while it broke down in many other parts of the altiplano, but also meant that economic differentiation within the marka was less pronounced than in other parts of the highland region (see Ticona and Albó 1997: 167– 199). The implementation of Bolivia’s INRA Law (Ley INRA) in 1996 created an opportunity for the ayllus of Jesús de Machaca to officially register their territories as Ancestral Community Lands (Tierras Comunitarias de Origen—TCOs),9 which legally protected communal lands from market forces (see Colque 2005: 26–27, 47–49; Hernáiz and Pacheco 2000).10 By 2007, twenty-two of the twenty-four ayllus in Jesús de Machaca had successfully acquired TCO status for their territories. Nevertheless, most community members remained skeptical of the value of state-based mechanisms for protecting communal land tenure and were also frustrated that the INRA law contained no mechanisms for resolving intra-community disputes over land rights (see Colque 2005: 47–49). They placed their ultimate trust in ayllu organization and MACOJMA—not the state—to protect territorial control. While the system of communal land control in Jesús de Machaca survived the colonial and republican periods as well as the modernizing goals of the 1953 Agrarian Reform, it persisted only in the context of very high rates of out-migration, which had the contradictory impacts of strengthening some aspects of socio-political organization while weakening others. By the 1990s, demographic pressure on agricultural and pasture land in Jesús de Machaca reached a point where any further sub-division of household-based landholdings would have completely undermined the viability of agricultural livelihoods. At the same time, the influence of urban consumption patterns on diet, dress and personal aspirations generated increased demand for urban incomes and lifestyles, especially among young people (see Plata, Colque and Calle 2003). In this context, the rates of out-migration by the current generation of young and middle-aged adults increased to the point that in most families, only one adult child remained in the marka to inherit and farm family landholdings, while in some families no children remained at all (see Colque 2005: 32). A middle-aged member of the community of Taypi explained his own experience: “I have four brothers and two sisters…and all have left for other parts of the country.

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They still have rights to land in the community if they want to return, but since I am the one fulfilling the community obligations, the land is mine to farm for the time being” (cited in Colque 2005: 33). However, not all out-migration from Jesús de Machaca is permanent, nor is it adequately described by the patterns of temporary and cyclical migration that were first widely noted in the 1970s. Rather, there is an almost continual movement between rural communities and urban centers, marking an intense and highly fluid transfer of resources and ideas between the countryside and the city, as well as the formation of family networks that mutually depend on agricultural production from the countryside and non-agricultural activities in the city. As noted in Table 4.1, eighteen percent of household incomes in Jesús de Machaca derive from non-agricultural sources, mostly urban labor, while a further twenty-three percent derives from non-labor sources, primarily remittances from other family members and the old age supplement (Bono de Solidaridad), paid to those over sixty-five by the Bolivian state since 2002 (Colque 2005: 40). Migrants can be classified as either ‘definitive migrants’ or ‘connected migrants’ depending on the relative strength of their connections to their communities of origin. Definitive migrants are those who have renounced their rights to land access and their membership in the community. Although they often send remittances to their families and frequently return for annual carnival celebrations, they cannot be called upon to fill community leadership positions. Connected migrants, by contrast, maintain a much more fluid relationship between their homes in the city and in their rural communities. While they may spend most of their time living and working in the city or in other parts of Bolivia, they remain full members of their rural communities with both the social obligations and land rights that such membership entails. For example, in a pattern typical throughout the marka, the primary residence of 22.5 percent of the membership of the ayllu Titikani Takaka is outside the ayllu itself, primarily in the cities of El Alto, La Paz and Santa Cruz (Colque 2005: 30). In this context, migration does not necessarily mean withdrawal from the ayllu, but rather marks the effective extension of the ayllu to include El Alto, La Paz and other parts of Bolivia and, indeed, Latin America—in keeping with the historical model of ayllus spreading across discontinuous geographical zones as a strategy for mitigating risk (ibid.). In order to retain their access to land and status as community and ayllu members, connected migrants must return to their communities to take on leadership positions when called upon by the community or ayllu.

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The social networks linking connected migrants with their rural communities and ayllus diverge from the norm of relationships between rural community members (comunarios) and urban migrants (generally referred to as residentes) present in most other rural municipalities in Bolivia. Typically, residentes represent a mostly absent but economically and political powerful social force that is largely beyond the control of community-based social pressure. In Jesús de Machaca, by contrast, residentes who wish to retain access to land in their communities must submit to the authority of their community and ayllu councils (Cabildos) and periodically return to live in the community to take on positions of leadership. As a result, an informal social alliance exists in the marka between comunarios and residentes that has helped to sustain a high level of socio-political organization and has facilitated the merging of traditional and modern forms of local governance. From a purely practical perspective, the urban residence and experience of residentes is an important resource for community leaders who need a place to stay in the city and who may need help navigating the labyrinthine bureaucratic systems, especially in La Paz and El Alto. Nevertheless, the dependence of the communal land tenure system on high levels of out-migration has also created serious problems in many communities. The central challenges resulting from out-migration are the aging of the population and the loss of human capital. While the median age in Bolivia is twenty-five, in Jesús de Machaca it is thirty-one (Colque 2005: 30). The relative aging of the population is most clearly reflected in the near total absence of young and middle-aged adults in many communities (Plata, Colque and Calle 2003: 58), which generates serious economic and socio-political challenges for those who remain. Elderly community members tend to plant crops and to employ livelihood strategies that require less labor power and physical strength and which, as a result, are often less productive than the strategies of their younger counterparts. Their economic strategies also tend to be more conservative and they frequently demonstrate greater difficulty in adapting to technological innovations (Colque 2005: 30). From a sociopolitical perspective, the high levels of out-migration have made it much more difficult to find suitable candidates for community leadership positions. As a member of one rural community explained simply: “There is nobody left here to fulfill community responsibilities” (cited in Plata, Colque and Calle 2003: 58). As a result, leadership positions often go unfilled and the individuals who do remain in rural localities must take on heavier loads of community duties, which undermines community-based political power. Moreover, young people who do stay in their communities are increasingly put in leadership positions as

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mallkus before they have fulfilled the prior roles prescribed by the thakhi. While ‘connected’ migrants do return to take on key leadership positions as mallkus of their community or ayllu, the general perception is that they fulfill only the minimum obligations to retain community membership and land rights and fail to contribute to smaller, routine tasks such as the maintenance of community infrastructure. They also tend to bring very different cultural values and political priorities to their positions of leadership than comunarios typically do, placing very little emphasis on ceremonial rituals and much more emphasis on brokering financial support for development projects. Over the course of the twentieth century, the relative absence of local economic opportunities also influenced the decisions of mestizo families to abandon the small rural towns of Jesús de Machaca in favor of larger urban centers, and by the 1990s they no longer represented an important political force. Although they dominated local politics until the early 1920s, the 1921 uprising sparked the beginning of a steady exodus of mestizo families from the marka, which accelerated in the decades that followed. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the social and political influence of the remaining mestizo families who ran shops and other small businesses was negligible to the course of political events. As the jach’a mallku asserted in 2004 in response to a question about the political influence of local mestizos: “we are not concerned about them” (Interview: February 28, 2004). Indeed, the total exclusion from municipal decision making of mestizos and anyone not integrated into the community and ayllu-based system of governance after Jesús de Machaca gained municipal status in 2004 made it clear that inter-ethnic rivalry no longer posed any challenge to the Indigenous struggle for municipal power. The Vicissitudes of Communal Organization

The struggle for local territorial control and political autonomy in Jesús de Machaca, which has been reflected most recently in the struggle for municipal status and political power, can only be understood in the historical context of the local system of communal land tenure and its connection to the thakhi system, which underlies the relative strength of community-, ayllu- and marka-based socio-political organization. However, although the thakhi system and local modes of governance have long histories that pre-date the Spanish conquest, they are not static. Rather, they have changed frequently as a result of both external dictates and local strategizing.11 Most significant for an understanding of the Indigenous municipality project is the post-1952 deterioration of

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ayllu-based modes of governance and their subsequent (selective) reconstruction and re-invigoration beginning in the late 1980s. The possibilities for combining ayllu-based governance with the framework for municipal decentralization are dependent on the ongoing flexible reconstruction of tradition in Jesús de Machaca, which, experience suggests, is neither an easy nor rapid process. From Ayllus to Sindicatos: The Breakdown of Traditional Organization

Although some of the post-1952 efforts to modernize Bolivia’s political system, economy and rural society contributed to a gradual process of social and political democratization—including the break up of the hacienda regime, the establishment of universal suffrage and the expansion of the public education system—other changes contributed to a profound deterioration of ayllu-based cultural practices and modes of socio-political organization. The post-1952 system of agrarian syndicalism and the extension of the administrative structures of the central state into rural communities had particularly powerful impacts (see Dandler 1969, 1976). It was actively promoted by both the MNR political party that had led the 1952 Revolution and by subsequent military governments through the infamous Military-Peasant Pact (Pacto Militar Campesino) (see Dunkerly 1983; Malloy 1970). The creation of peasant sindicatos or unions was part of a broader effort by the Bolivian state to modernize agricultural production and rural society and to exercise political control over the rural population. State resources for rural development were channeled through the corporatist structure of the sindicato system. Community-level sindicatos were at the base of the system, which was organized hierarchically with sindicatos grouped together in sub-centrales agrarios, then centrales agrarios, then department-level federations, and ultimately the peak level Syndicated Confederation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia (Confederación Sindical de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia—CSTCB) which formed a key branch of the state-sponsored Bolivian Workers’ Union (Central Obrera Boliviana—COB). The sindicato system was instituted in Jesús de Machaca and throughout the altiplano through a combination of state coercion and clientelist seduction, as well as through the leadership of Aymara peasants who internalized and promoted the modernizing ideology of the state (see Ticona and Albó 1997: 167–244). From the 1950s to the early 1990s, the sindicato system operated in an uneasy and at times violent tension with pre-existing community-,

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ayllu- and marka-based organizations. While all rural communities established sindicatos, the extent to which the new institutions displaced traditional modes of governance varied widely from community to community. The key factor behind the relative depth of the acceptance and penetration of the sindicatos was the extent to which haciendas had dominated the local population during the colonial and republican eras. As Ticona and Albó (1997: 172) explained, where haciendas had penetrated most deeply, as in the valleys of the Cochabamba region (see Chapter Five on Mizque), traditional modes of organization and communal governance were destroyed and the logic of individualism and capitalist commerce was well advanced by the mid-twentieth century (see also Ströbele-Gregor 1996: 77; Larson 1998). Subsequently, as Albó noted, “the MNR’s populist model [of sindicatos] took root most in areas long dominated by the hacienda…[where] the colonos’ dependence on the government was strengthened…. [I]n the regions dominated by the communities rather than haciendas, this dependent relationship, although present, did not penetrate as deeply” (1987: 384–385). Thus, in rural zones formerly dominated by haciendas, the sindicatos became the core institutions of local decision making. By contrast, in places where haciendas were not so firmly established, as in Jesús de Machaca and other parts of the altiplano and Amazon regions, traditional forms of communal organization continued to function through to the mid-twentieth century and were not easily swept away with the new sindicato system. In those settings, the conflicts between traditional and ‘modern’ modes of organization were intense, while the cultural logics and institutional designs of both systems became intertwined. In Jesús de Machaca, some community-level Cabildos continued to function in parallel with the sindicatos, while in other regions of Bolivia they ceased to function completely. In the 1950s and 1960s, community leaders who advocated traditional forms of organization faced physical violence from local state agents and other modernizing peasants that on occasion tore away their ponchos and symbolic markers of traditional authority and aggressively attacked traditional modes of governance as archaic and backward (see Ticona and Albó: 186). The rejection of traditional forms of organization was particularly strong in those communities where Adventist missionaries had established themselves, which began in the 1920s (see Ticona and Albó 1997: 163, 214–217). Some aspects of the conversion from ayllu to sindicato organization were largely symbolic, such as the changes of the names of leadership positions from Aymara to Spanish (i.e. jilaqata of the Cabildo to Secretaria General of the Central Campesina), and the thakhi system

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and principle of rotating leadership persisted within the sindicatos. Nevertheless, the institutional design of the sindicato system did seriously undermine traditional modes of governance in Jesús de Machaca, especially at the levels of ayllu and marka. By the 1970s, most ayllus had been formally replaced by sub-centrales agrarios, and the predominance of the Central Agrario Campesino de Jesús de Machaca (Peasant Agrarian Central of Jesús de Machaca—CACJMA) was reflected in the almost complete disarticulation of the Cabildo as an institution for inter-community governance (Ticona and Albó 1997: 196). Moreover, where traditional organizations and positions of authority did persist, they were largely relegated to ritual ceremonial affairs and intra-community issues, while the sindicato organizations became the primary forums for political decision making and discussion of inter-community affairs. The corporatist structure of the sindicato system also concentrated power in the position of the Secretary General of each sindicato, sub-central and central, who became much more powerful than the mallkus and jilaqatas had been (see Plata, Colque and Calle 2003: 38; Puente 1992: 29). As Ticona and Albó observed, by the early 1970s, “the Central Campesina had assumed many functions from the Cabildo and…the Secretary General [of the Central] had become the maximum authority [of Jesús de Machaca]” (1997: 196–197). Similarly, the liberal and modernist ideology of the sindicato system also undermined the principles and practice of gender complementarity that had been practiced in the ayllu system, and the role of women in community and inter-community decision making declined considerably. The breakdown of traditional modes of organization was further accelerated by the fragmentation of communities and ayllus as they subdivided to form new sindicatos and sub-centrales as strategies for gaining access to state resources. The allocation of state funds for the construction of new rural schools had a particularly important impact on the fragmentation of old communities, as new hamlets and villages formed around new schools and then established their own sindicatos and federated into new sub-centrales (Ticona and Albó 1997: 204). By the mid-1980s, the traditional six ayllus of the Parcial Arriba had subdivided into eighteen sub-centrales. Similarly, the quest for state resources and services led the growing rural villages within the marka to pursue status as cantónes (cantons). Designation as a cantón brought with it increased opportunities for state funding for schools, health posts and market buildings as well as the right to form a sub-central agrario, which entailed access to other state funds as well as to local positions of formal political power (Plata, Colque and Calle 2003: 45–46). In the

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context of the quest for canton status and the access to state resources that status represented, tensions between communities and ayllus over land and boundaries also intensified. The state’s appointment of canton agents, even though they were often Indigenous members of rural communities, contributed to a further weakening of the moral authority and political power of the traditional ayllu-based system of governance. While all of Jesús de Machaca had been a single cantón from 1856 to 1957, by the late 1990s it had been sub-divided into twelve cantons. The construction of a new highway in the 1960s through the north-west corner of the marka further contributed to the breakdown of social cohesion and the authority of the Cabildo by facilitating direct communication and transport linkages between the Parcial Abajo (located close to the highway) and La Paz, while simultaneously undermining communication between the Parcial Abajo and the Parcial Arriba, which were connected only by an old and slow dirt road (Ticona and Albó 1997: 203). After years of tension and growing social distance, in 1987 the sub-centrales of the Parcial Arriba separated from the rest of the marka to form their own Central Agraria de la Parcial Arriba (CAPA). However, the restructuring of local space and the emergence of new sindicatos and cantón authorities brought about by the formation of new villages also contributed to the decline in the social and political power of the local mestizo elite, which had been physically concentrated in the town of Jesús de Machaca (Ticona and Albó 1997: 210). As new administrative centers emerged where local peasants could access state resources and services through Aymara-speaking officials, mestizo administrative and political control over the local offices of the central state quickly eroded, which in turn accelerated mestizo emigration from the region and with it the shift in ethnic power relations from the mestizo minority that had historically controlled local social power to the Aymara majority. From Sindicatos to Ayllus: The Re-Construction of Tradition

While post-1952 state-based modernization schemes seriously weakened traditional forms of organization and governance, such customary systems never disappeared completely. Indeed, as the fragmentation of rural communities and the breakdown of the Cabildo peaked in the mid1980s, a new movement for the re-valorization of Indigenous identities and the re-establishment of traditional Ayllu-based modes of governance steadily gained force in Jesús de Machaca and other parts of the altiplano (Andolina 2001; Postero 2007; Rivera Cusicanqui 2003). The

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ideas on which that movement was based had been percolating since the late 1960s as the result of a variety of external influences that included urban Indigenous intellectuals, the progressive Catholic Church and NGOs. Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) used the concept of “invented traditions” to highlight the ways in which colonial authorities and other power holders have manipulated and even created popular ‘traditions’ as a strategy for legitimating their power. In Jesús de Machaca and other parts of the altiplano, the selective re-creation of certain historical elements of Aymara governance is much more a grassroots strategy than a top-down mechanism of control, although local Indigenous elites do seem to benefit disproportionately from the selective re-creation of ‘traditional’ forms of governance (see McNeish 2002). Thus, rather than use the term ‘re-invention’ of tradition, which denotes top-down techniques of manipulation and control, I follow Zorne (1997), Moreno and Littrell (2001), Eisenstadt (1972) and other scholars who refer instead to the ‘re-construction’ of tradition to call attention to the ways in which grassroots movements socially construct traditions and memories of the past in strategic attempts to legitimate contemporary political objectives. As McNeish observed in another rural part of the Bolivian altiplano, “the past—or rather the way in which the past is understood and (re)interpreted in the present—is a key ideological and political resource in the course of current decision-making by those at the rural grassroots” (2002: 246–247). After then-President General René Barrientos was killed in an airplane crash in 1969, the relationship between peasants and the Bolivian state that had been forged by the MNR from 1952 to 1964 and through the Military-Peasant Pact after 1964 steadily eroded. Peasant leaders and Indigenous intellectuals began to question the benefits of modernization and citizenship in the broader context of the persistence of racist and classist discrimination (see Albó 1987; Rivera Cusicanqui 2003), and the emergent current of Aymara-based cultural-political questioning gradually congealed into the Katarista movement of La Pazbased Aymara intellectuals,12 which had an important influence on Jesús de Machaca. Frequent movement back and forth to urban labor markets contributed the transmission of urban cultural values and practices to rural communities in the marka, but it also facilitated the transmission of Katarista ideas that emphasized the importance of Indigenous language and cultural practices as well as the quest for Aymara political power in the altiplano region. Equally important in spreading the new current of Aymara cultural revival were the Aymara language radio stations established in La Paz in the late 1960s, which broadcast radio soap operas, produced by Katarista intellectuals, that dramatized and re-

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valorized Aymara history. One particularly influential soap opera that was produced in 1988 focused specifically on the history of Jesús de Machaca for 120 episodes. The broadcast of the radio soap opera and subsequent re-discovery of local history contributed directly to the decision by local leaders in 1989 to officially commemorate the 1921 uprising and massacre for the first time (Ticona and Albó 1997: 255– 256). The gradual re-valorization of ayllu-based cultural practices in Jesús de Machaca was also stimulated by interventions of the progressive Catholic Church. Even before the Second Vatican Council’s 1968 declaration of a ‘preferential option for the poor’ that marked the emergence of liberation theology, individual priests working in the altiplano had already established what was informally known as the Aymara Church (Iglesia Aymara), which worshipped in the Aymara language, incorporated Aymara music into religious ceremonies and promoted the formation of Aymara catechists in rural communities. One of the most influential advocates of the Aymara Church in the late-1960s was the priest of Jesús de Machaca, Adhemar Esquivel, who subsequently became the bishop of the altiplano in 1969 (Ticona and Albó 1997: 253). Esquivel was replaced in Jesús de Machaca by another particularly progressive Jesuit priest, known as Father PPH, who continued to actively promote Aymara language and culture until he left the marka for health reasons in the early 2000s. A serious drought throughout much of Bolivia and highland Peru in 1983–84 sparked interventions in Jesús de Machaca by two Jesuit-based Bolivian NGOs, CIPCA and the Center for Humanistic Technical Agrarian Education (Centro de Educación Técnica Humanistica Agropecuaria—CETHA), which explicitly promoted traditional forms of organization and governance as the institutional basis for local economic development, health and education initiatives in the marka. Their initial emergency response to the drought evolved into a long-term integrated rural development strategy for Jesús de Machaca, widely known as Plan Machaca, which also claimed to promote traditional modes of community, ayllu and marka governance, and resource management. Nevertheless, despite the stated goals of Plan Machaca, the actual practice of the various NGOs involved in it generated difficult tensions between the principles of traditional governance and the goals of development, which would re-appear in the effort to create an Indigenous municipality. As Ticona and Albó explained, the implementation of Plan Machaca required sophisticated technical knowledge and a long-term institutional memory, both of which were

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undermined by the annual rotation of leadership positions and the appointment of leaders on the basis of community service as prescribed by the thakhi (197: 274–277). In that context, NGO staff who possessed technical knowledge and who did not rotate in and out of their positions gradually came to dominate decision making related to the plan. Although traditional forms of decision making and governance were praised in theory, they were marginalized in practice, marking what Ströbele-Gregor described as “the paternalism of well-intentioned supporters” (1994: 119). As Ticona and Albó explained, Machaqueños came to perceive technical assistance and credit from NGOs “not as forms of support but rather as mechanisms of control” (1997: 275). Moreover, the modern business administration approach to economic development promoted by NGO staff was perceived by many comunarios as a challenge to the principles of the thakhi, which valued service to the community and local experience over formal technical knowledge. Plan Machaca also generated high expectations for economic progress in the marka, and comunarios invested considerable energy and money in the building of infrastructure and also borrowed heavily from NGO credit schemes to invest in productive projects. When those initiatives failed to satisfy heightened expectations, many Machaqueños felt that they had been deceived by Plan Machaca and the NGOs associated with it. When the Cabildo was re-established in the 1990s (see below), its members became frustrated with what they perceived as a lack of accountability from the NGOs to the Cabildo, and they also became increasingly adamant in insisting on financial and other reports, which the NGOs refused to provide, thereby contributing to a growing climate of distrust. In the context of the growing selfconfidence of its members, the Cabildo leadership also began to insist on conducting meetings in Aymara, which excluded unilingual NGO staff. Experiences with Plan Machaca provoked a deep suspicion of NGOs among many local residents, especially among the mallkus and jach’a mallkus who had interacted with them most closely. Thus, rather than seeking out and brokering financial and technical support from NGOs, local leaders were much more active in keeping them away. After the 2004 elections, when Jesús de Machaca became a statesanctioned municipality, the new municipal government was approached with offers of assistance from more than ten NGOs, keen to be associated with the Indigenous municipality project. However, the Cabildo rejected almost all of those offers and set very strict conditions on the two offers that it did accept in order to be able to hold the NGOs strictly accountable.

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The re-invigoration of ayllu-based forms of governance in Jesús de Machaca received another major boost in the early 1990s from the Americas-wide campaign against the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Columbus. The anti-quincentenary campaign fed the growth of a movement across the altiplano of reconverting agrarian sindicatos into ayllus and the re-construction of ayllu-based forms of governance (see Andolina 2001). Over the course of the 1990s, sindicato organizations in Jesús de Machaca and other parts of the altiplano were dismantled and a re-constructed form of the ayllu-based system was established as the basis for local governance in the marka. At a superficial level, the re-construction of cultural traditions and the so-called re-conversion of sindicatos back to ayllus was marked by organizational name changes and a re-adoption of the dress and markers of authority traditionally worn by the mallkus and mallku taytas (the female counterparts to the mallkus). In 1992, the sindicato-based Agrarian Central of Jesús de Machaca (Central Agraria Campesina de Jesús de Machaca—CACJMA) changed its name and legal status to become the Ayllu Central of Jesús de Machaca (Central de Ayllus y Comunidades de Jesús de Machaca—still CACJMA). In 2000, CACJMA changed its name again to become the Marka of Ayllus and Ancestral Communities of Jesús de Machaca (Marka de Ayllus y Comunidades Originarias de Jesús de Machaca—MACOJMA). At a deeper level, the re-invigoration of ayllu-based governance was marked by a renewed emphasis on the thakhi system as the basis for leadership, the strengthening of the Cabildo as the highest source of moral and political authority in the marka, and a re-invigoration of the principle of chachawarmi or gender complementarity in local governance—which was most evident in the Cabildo, where male mallkus had to be accompanied by their female counterparts. In practice, the female mallku taytas did not participate actively in debates within the Cabildo, but their physical presence did represent progress from the sindicato system in which they had not been represented at all. The Cabildo also asserted its right to designate candidates for state-based administrative positions, such as the canton agents, and was able to insist on regular reports from local representatives of state institutions as well as from the directors of the NGOs working in the marka. More generally, the Cabildo, which met monthly, asserted its position as the highest moral and political authority in the marka and assumed an increasingly self-confident position in negotiations with higher levels of government, nongovernmental organizations and local Machaqueños. The Cabildo of mallkus that was re-established in the 1990s was not the same as the Cabildo that had existed before the spread of agrarian

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syndicalism. One important change was the growth in the number of communities and ayllus represented in the Cabildo. In 1952 the Cabildo had represented six ayllus, but after three decades of the creation and sub-division of sindicatos and sub-centrales, twelve new sub-centrales had been formed that subsequently converted themselves into ayllus—so that when the Cabildo was formally re-established in 1992 it represented eighteen ayllus, twelve of which had no history prior to 1953. The experience of four decades of permanent and cyclical migration from Jesús de Machaca also had important implications for the political and social orientation of the Cabildo. Under the influence of mallkus and jach’a mallkus with significant urban experience, the Cabildo adopted much more urban and ‘modern’ positions on its conceptions of development, political strategy and governance, and political and economic affairs came to represent higher priorities than culturalreligious matters—although significant tensions persisted within the Cabildo between more traditional comunarios and urban residentes. Moreover, just as the earlier adoption of syndicated organizations had reflected many elements of ayllu-based governance, the re-conversion to the ayllu system and resuscitation of the Cabildo was similarly marked by many elements of sindicalismo, most notably a heavy concentration of authority in the figure of the jach’a mallku, a position that was reshaped under the influence of the position of Secretary General of the corporatist system of Agrarian Centrals. The political and institutional divide between MACOJMA and MACOAS was also much greater than the distinction between the parcial arriba and the parcial abajo had been prior to the 1952 Revolution as a result of political competition over state resources during four decades of sindicalismo. Tensions Between the Logic of the Ayllu and the Logic of Liberal Democracy

While the Cabildo had already been significantly transformed as a result of the experiences of its members with syndicalism and urban migration, it was still marked by a number of difficult tensions between the communitarian logic of the ayllu system and the broader social, political and economic context within which the Cabildo operated. Those tensions became even more challenging when Jesús de Machaca acquired formal municipal status. The most important tension resulted from the annual rotation of community, ayllu and marka leaders, which reflected the communitarian logic of the thakhi system and prevented a concentration of political power but also undermined the institutional memory of those

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organizations and made it difficult for leaders to acquire the technical and legal knowledge needed to negotiate effectively in the growing number of interactions with state agencies and NGOs. Moreover, the strengthened authority of the Cabildo generated an increased number of meetings, which became difficult for many mallkus to attend. The official statutes of the Cabildo called for at least one gathering per month, but the quest for moral and political authority by the Cabildo meant that many more meetings took place. The increased complexity of many of the issues debated at Cabildo meetings also made it more difficult for mallkus to relay ideas and decisions back and forth between the Cabildo and their communities, the latter of which were supposed to be the traditional base of political authority. As a staff member with an NGO that had worked in the marka since the 1980s commented after a meeting of the Cabildo to discuss the state-based system of municipal development planning: Unfortunately there is very little sharing of information between the mallkus and their communities. Part of the problem is time. The responsibilities of being a mallku are very time consuming. So they do not take the time to share information with members of their communities. From this workshop, they will probably just tell people that they learned about municipal development plans and the legal requirement that each municipality create a plan. Similarly, there is very little sharing of information between the members of the Cabildo and community members about discussions and decisions in the Cabildo. For the most part, community members simply put their confidence in their mallku to represent their interests (Interview: March 20, 2004).

The weak communication of technical and legal information from the Cabildo to the communities is problematic when viewed through the liberal lens of participatory democracy, which places high value on the active involvement of individuals in decision making. It thus marks a tension with the tendency within ayllu-based forms of governance to place a high degree of trust in community members that hold positions of authority because of the wisdom and experience they are seen to have gained through the fulfillment of the thakhi. The thakhi system also encountered new challenges as young people who enjoyed formal political rights as citizens of Bolivia, and many of whom could boast significant educational accomplishments, were effectively excluded from decision making in community, ayllu and marka councils. The traditional logic of the thakhi system had served communities well in an era when formal education opportunities did not

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exist and when leadership was oriented to intra-community issues. However, in the eyes of many young Machaqueños, this made much less sense in the context of the formal education and technical knowledge required to be an effective community leader at the turn of the twentyfirst century. Although the thakhi system had gradually changed to put greater emphasis on formal education as a requirement for leadership, many young people in the marka continued to feel excluded from community-based decision making. A further challenge concerned the role of women in the Cabildo and other arenas of decision making. The traditional system of authority in Aymara communities was based on the complementary duality of men and women and required that positions of authority be held by malefemale pairs, usually a husband and wife. This tradition had broken down over the course of the twentieth century, particularly after 1952, and although Cabildo leaders sought to revive it in the 1990s, it was practiced in a superficial manner. The male mallkus were accompanied to meetings of the Cabildo with their wives (mallku taytas) but the role of women in decision making was negligible and they almost never spoke in meetings of the Cabildo. Moreover, in the day-to-day leadership activities of the mallkus and jach’a mallkus, the mallku taytas were generally nowhere to be seen. The male domination of decision making and the other tensions within the Cabildo and thakhi system would be even further aggravated when Jesús de Machaca became a state-sanctioned municipality in 2004. Decentralization and the Struggle for Municipal Power

The historical timing of the process of ayllu re-conversion and the reconstruction of local traditions in Jesús de Machaca coincided very closely with state-driven process of municipal decentralization in Bolivia, which channeled almost all of MACOJMA’s energy into a political struggle for municipal power. In Jesús de Machaca and most other rural areas of Bolivia prior to 1994, political struggles over municipal power were negligible, as municipal governments had almost no revenue and were for the most part irrelevant to the exercise of political power. That situation changed very quickly following the implementation of the Law of Popular Participation (Ley de Participación Popular—LPP) in 1994. National level peasant, Indigenous and labor organizations initially condemned the LPP as one of three ‘damned laws’ (leyes malditas) because of its connection to the broader package of neoliberal economic and political reforms aimed at the modernization of the state.13 National peasant and labor leaders were

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particularly concerned that the framework for municipal decentralization laid out in the LPP would fragment and undermine the power of peak level social movement organizations that had grown powerful in the pre1985 corporatist framework of the Bolivian state. Nevertheless, as in many other rural areas of the country, the criticisms of national leaders failed to resonate in Jesús de Machaca, where Indigenous leaders almost immediately began to mobilize to gain access to new municipal resources and power that the LPP represented. The Law of Popular Participation had four principal implications for municipal governments and locally-based civil society groups. First, it established 311 new municipalities in Bolivia on the basis of the arbitrarily assigned administrative boundaries marked by provincial sections (secciones de provincia), which, until 1994, had been politically meaningless. In this new administrative scheme, Jesús de Machaca became part of the municipality of Viacha, which was one of the largest rural municipalities on the altiplano in terms of both surface area (over 3,000 km2) and population (64,000 residents). As with many other municipalities that had been created arbitrarily on the basis of provincial sections, the municipality of Viacha made little sense from an administrative perspective. Its territory was not only very large, but it also lacked a coherent road network to connect Jesús de Machaca with the town center of Viacha, located three hours away on the outskirts of El Alto and La Paz. The urban orientation and mestizo domination of Viacha’s municipal government coupled with perceptions of racist discrimination and the inability of municipal employees to speak Aymara further alienated community representatives from Jesús de Machaca who found that the new political context created by the LPP required frequent interaction with the municipal government. Moreover, political infighting and corruption within the municipal government almost completely undermined its administrative capacity.14 The second important impact of the LPP was the assignment of twenty percent of the budget of the central state to municipal governments, followed by further subsequent increases in municipal transfers through special funds and the implementation of the Dialogue Law (Ley Dialogo) in 2001, which transferred resources from the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) agreement to municipal governments (Van Cott 2008: 45). The third core implication of the LPP involved the transfer of new areas of administrative jurisdiction to municipal governments. This initially included responsibilities for education and health buildings, rural roads, secondary and tertiary irrigation canals, and was later expanded to include responsibility for personnel in education and health care. The fourth key impact of the LPP was the

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implementation of new institutional rules for the participation of representatives from territorially-based civil society organizations in municipal planning, budgeting and citizen oversight, through accreditation as Territorial Base Organizations (Organizaciones Territoriales de Base—OTBs), which could elect representatives to municipal level Oversight Committees (Comites de Vigilancia). Following the implementation of the LPP, MACOJMA mobilized rapidly to take advantage of what its members perceived as a new political opportunity to access state resources and enhance the political autonomy of the marka. In Bolivia’s 1995 municipal elections, MACOJMA succeeded in electing two representatives affiliated with the Civic Solidarity Union (Unidad Civica Solidaridad—UCS) political party to Viacha’s otherwise urban and mestizo dominated municipal council.15 However, MACOJMA’s Cabildo very quickly concluded that Jesús de Machaca’s inclusion in the municipality of Viacha threatened their political and cultural autonomy and they began to lobby the national government to grant municipal status to the marka—part of a much broader trend towards the proliferation of new municipalities that has followed decentralization in Bolivia and throughout Latin America (Nickson 1995). After seven years of almost continual lobbying that involved hundreds of trips back and forth to government offices in La Paz by successive jach’a mallkus, on May 7, 2002, then-President of Bolivia Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada promulgated Law 2351 which established Jesús de Machaca as a state-sanctioned municipality.16 The law established that the new municipality would begin its formal existence following the election of a mayor and municipal councilors in the country’s December 2004 municipal elections. Having won the legal battle for municipal status, MACOJMA began to prepare for the 2004 elections—and the much more complex process of figuring out how to administer the municipal government in such a way as to subject it to the authority of the Cabildo- and the ayllu-based system of governance while simultaneously respecting the strict legal framework for municipal governance in Bolivia. The effort to combine the liberal political orientation of the national laws that regulated municipal governments with the ayllu-based mode of democracy produced a difficult and highly uncertain marriage of contradictory institutions, which many mallkus feared would undermine the ayllu-based system of governance that its control of municipal power was initially intended to protect and strengthen.

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The Difficult Marriage Between Ayllu Democracy and Liberal Democracy

Bolivia’s 2004 municipal elections presented both the first major opportunity and difficult new challenges in the quest to create an Indigenous municipality in Jesús de Machaca. The Cabildo insisted that it be the forum for the election of the mayor and municipal councilors and that the electoral process take place according to ayllu traditions (usos y costumbres) of public voting. While the members of the Cabildo recognized the need to comply with the state-sanctioned electoral process, they saw this as a mere formality that would simply confer the legitimacy of the state on the more important elections organized by MACOJMA. The Cabildo expected community members to respect its decisions and not to vote independently, a position that was criticized by some urban residentes as a violation of individual political rights. The Cabildo was also particularly concerned about minimizing the interference of political parties in the electoral process and in municipal governance in general. This objective was facilitated by changes to Bolivia’s electoral laws just five months before the 2004 elections that allowed Indigenous and citizen groups to contest municipal elections without any political party affiliation. The new Law of Citizen Groups and Indigenous Peoples (Ley de Agrupaciones Ciudadanas y Pueblos Indigenas—Law 2771) had been a demand of popular organizations and Indigenous groups since the mid-1990s because of the tendency of political parties to impose party discipline and partisan logic on local representatives (see Albó 2002: 83; Van Cott 2008: 47).17 The new electoral law enabled MACOJMA to present its own slate of candidates in the 2004 elections but did not eliminate partisan competition from the local electoral process. MACOJMA’s quest to control the outcome of the 2004 municipal elections was only partly successful and revealed divisions among the population of Jesús de Machaca over the competing principles of liberal and ayllu democracy. Prior to the elections, the members of the Cabildo agreed to divide the twenty-four ayllus of the marka into five regions with relatively equal populations in order to ensure a regional balance on the municipal council. Such balance was not guaranteed by Bolivia’s municipal election system, which simply provides for at-large council positions. Each group of ayllus would elect one candidate for the municipal council, whose position would simply be confirmed in the state-based municipal elections. The candidate for mayor was elected by the Cabildo itself, with the understanding that the position would rotate through each of the five regions with each new electoral period. In order

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to be elected as a municipal councilor, the Cabildo insisted that candidates had to have held the position of mallku in their community. To be chosen for the position of mayor, candidates had to have held the position of jiliri jach’a mallku of the marka (i.e. leader of the Cabildo)—stipulations that excluded women, youth and anyone without community membership. The elections within the Cabildo and five groups of ayllus for the positions of municipal authority took place through the traditional method of voters publicly lining up behind the candidate of their choice in the large field in the center of the village of Jesús de Machaca. In the predominantly oral tradition of rural Aymara communities, this method was broadly perceived as more transparent than the secret ballot used in state-sanctioned elections, which was widely seen as a vehicle for fraud. While critics of public voting asserted that it created possibilities for voter intimidation, the relative equality of economic and political power relations among Cabildo members and the system of restraints on leaders diminished this possibility, even if it did not remove it completely. At the end of the internal election process, MACOJMA had a mayoral candidate, as well as three male and two female candidates for the municipal council, the latter candidates a response to the state quota law that at least thirty percent of candidates be women. However, the carefully negotiated process for the pre-election of candidates within MACOJMA was undermined by the entrance into the electoral competition of two community members who were unhappy with the candidate selection process and who asserted their individual rights to contest the elections in affiliation with the MAS party. The MNR party also launched candidates, but they were not community members and were thus not viewed as credible contestants; in fact, the candidates later admitted that they had not even been consulted by the party before it chose them as candidates. Efforts by the Cabildo to persuade the two MAS candidates to withdraw from the electoral contest failed and when election day arrived, MACOJMA’s candidates were accompanied on the ballots by those of the MAS and the MNR. Nevertheless, MACOJMA’s inability to keep other candidates off the ballot needs to be seen in comparison with the extreme political fragmentation in other rural municipalities, where it was common for ten or more parties to contest municipal elections and for Indigenous and peasant organizations to have little influence over voter choices. The results of the election revealed that MACOJMA’s moral authority to pre-elect candidates was not as strong as its leading members had hoped. Only three of MACOJMA’s five candidates—including the two female candidates—were elected; the other two MACOJMA candidates lost to

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the MAS candidates, who were supported by other community members frustrated by the internal election process within MACOJMA.18 Although MACOJMA clearly won the elections and could look forward to considerable influence over the new municipal government, its leaders were still frustrated by the election results, which strengthened their resolve to prevent partisan interference in future elections. The election of the two MAS councilors undermined the carefully negotiated regional balance of councilors within the marka and meant that two of the five groups of ayllus had no representation on the municipal council. Following the elections, the two MAS councilors were expelled from MACOJMA and were also marginalized within the municipal council. The Cabildo also put heavy pressure on them to prioritize community concerns over those of the MAS. In this regard, MACOJMA was largely successful in eliminating partisan interference in municipal governance and consolidating its position as the sole authority to which the mayor and councilors were accountable, which ayllu and marka leaders repeatedly claimed in interviews to be one of their most important accomplishments. The election of municipal authorities and the subsequent inauguration of the new municipal government in May 2005 marked new challenges for both the municipal government and the Cabildo as well as the surfacing of difficult tensions between ayllu traditions and state laws in the emerging system of municipal governance. Indeed, confronted with the considerable imbalance of legal and financial power between MACOJMA and the new municipal government, many members of the Cabildo began to worry that the quest to create an Indigenous municipality would be undermined by the array of central state laws that the municipal government was subject to. It was with those concerns foremost in his mind that the jach’a mallku of MACOJMA in 2004 expressed fear that he would be the last mallku of Jesús de Machaca and that the Cabildo itself would become superfluous (Interview: February 28, 2004). The key source of tension in the efforts to create an Indigenous municipality concerned the relationship between the ayllu-based authority of the Cabildo and the municipal government’s basis of authority in the laws of the central state. Challenges Facing the Cabildo

In the new political context marked by the inauguration of Jesús de Machaca’s municipal government in 2004, the core elements of the ayllu-based system of governance valued by the Cabildo also posed serious challenges to its capacity to effectively monitor and hold the

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municipal government accountable. The greatest single challenge was the annual rotation of leadership positions, which contrasted sharply with the five-year terms of elected municipal officials. Although the annual rotation of leadership posts reflected the obligation of community service and barred the concentration of political power in the marka, it also prevented Cabildo leaders, including the jiliri jach’a mallku, from acquiring the legal and technical knowledge required to effectively monitor and negotiate with the municipal government and meant that Cabildo suffered from a lack of continuity in leadership and institutional memory. Moreover, the understanding of leadership as a responsibility that falls on all (men) rather than only on those who are particularly capable also meant that community members were frequently chosen to be mallkus because it was their turn, even though they lacked strong leadership capabilities. For example, the jiliri jach’a mallku elected to lead the Cabildo in 2005 was widely seen as ineffective and uncooperative, and the mayor described him as “a total zero” (Interview: November 15, 2006), but he was chosen for the position because it was his turn.19 Faced with these problems, the Bolivian anthropologist Xavier Albó has argued that the ayllu-based system of governance needs to adapt to the new political context created by municipal decentralization: [I]t is vital that more apt leaders be appointed, probably for longer terms of office and with possibilities of re-election, so that a real capacity for negotiation and oversight can be achieved. Otherwise communal authorities will end up atrophying and be limited to purely ceremonial activities (2002: 97).

Cabildo members recognized the problems created by the system of leadership rotation but they were also very reluctant to make any changes to it, in part because the high costs associated with positions of leadership could not be sustained by most community members for more than a year at a time, and also because any substantial changes to the principle of leadership and community service as an obligation could undermine the social cohesion that held Jesús de Machaca together in the first place. The response of the first mayor of the new municipality was to call for a massive training campaign so that all community members would understand the laws that regulated the municipal government (Interview: November 15, 2006). However, while such a strategy might help to generate a better basic understanding of municipal governance, it could not effectively substitute the specific legal and technical knowledge that could only be acquired through experience,

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and it would not resolve the lack of continuity and loss of institutional memory inherent in the annual rotation of leadership positions. A shift in the financial obligations associated with leadership from individual mallkus to MACOJMA might also make longer periods of leadership possible, but it would require MACOJMA to develop a new system of taxation—which, as histories of state-building demonstrate, is not an easy process (see Tilly 1990). The personal sacrifice required of leaders also involves time away from paid labor and agricultural production, which is more difficult to reimburse. Moreover, the principle of leadership as an obligation, which is deeply engrained in Aymara cosmovision, and the requirement that leaders assume the financial costs associated with their positions as a mechanism for slowing socioeconomic differentiation would mean that changes to the current system require not just new fundraising efforts but deep transformations of the cultural logic of the ayllu-based system of governance –which the Cabildo’s struggle for municipal power was intended to strengthen, not undermine. Moreover, because of the system of rotating and voluntary leadership in the Cabildo, it enjoys a very high level of public legitimacy and moral authority but very often lacks the technical and legal expertise to exercise its social and political power in a productive manner. As a result, municipal authorities reported that they frequently felt trapped between the social power of the Cabildo and the legal obligation to comply with the state laws. The mayor of Jesús de Machaca asserted with frustration that the simultaneously high moral authority and low technical knowledge of the Cabildo resulted in the frequent exercise of “inappropriate and unconstructive forms of social control” (Interview: November 15, 2006). For example, municipal authorities had little choice but to comply with the regular demands from the Cabildo for reports on municipal activities, but the Cabildo members generally lacked the professional capacity to constructively engage with municipal authorities in the search for legally and economically viable solutions to many of the challenges facing the municipality/marka. Part of this problem was also rooted in the Cabildo’s fierce defense of its autonomy from the state and its subsequent refusal to be subjected to the state-imposed rules that governed the roles of civil society organizations in municipal governance in Bolivia. The Law of Popular Participation allowed locally based civil society organizations like OTBs to elect representatives to the legally mandated municipal Oversight Committees, which were assigned the task of monitoring municipal governments and holding them accountable. Throughout Bolivia, the

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Oversight Committees have been plagued by weak monitoring capacities and corruption, which is largely rooted in their dependence on municipal authorities for their basic operating expenses and the subsequent subordinate political position that dependence created. However, what is particularly important for the case of Jesús de Machaca is that the Oversight Committees not only have legal rights but also responsibilities, including stipulations that requests for information from municipal governments be made within specific time periods. To date, the Cabildo has taken a principled stand of refusing to incorporate itself as an OTB or to operate through the Oversight Committee in its relations with the municipal government, choosing instead to deal with municipal authorities directly. Nevertheless, in 2006 some mallkus were beginning to acknowledge the need to clarify the respective roles and responsibilities of the Cabildo and the municipal government and recognized the potential of the Oversight Committee to operate as a technical arm of the Cabildo that would provide some of the technical capacity, institutional memory and continuity it lacked. The thakhi system posed another challenge to the effectiveness of the Cabildo in the new political context of municipal governance. While the fulfillment of community responsibilities inscribed in the thakhi system helped to ensure social cohesion, an active system of governance and effective leadership training for intra-communal affairs, it did not recognize the formal education and extra-community experience that community, ayllu and marka leaders increasingly needed in order to negotiate effectively with external institutions—including the new municipal government. Over the course of the late 1990s and early 2000s, in response to pressure from urban residentes and especially youth with tertiary education as well as experience interacting with government and business institutions, Cabildo members gradually began to accept that formal education and urban experience should be considered in addition to the fulfillment of thakhi-based community responsibilities as the basis for selecting ayllu and marka leaders. Nevertheless, a strong tension persisted within the Cabildo between urban residentes who pushed for a greater recognition of formal education and work experience outside of the community on one hand and, on the other hand, comunarios in the Cabildo who placed much greater emphasis on community service, deep knowledge of the marka and respect for tradition. For example, a comunario won the 2005 Cabildo elections for the position of jiliri jach’a mallku against a welleducated and highly capable residente largely because Cabildo members feared that the residente would not respect certain key ceremonial traditions. In the same year, a widely respected young Machaqueño

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lawyer from La Paz returned to his community in Jesús de Machaca and wanted to become the mallku but was rejected because he had not yet passed through all of the necessary stages of the thakhi. Despite ongoing debates within the Cabildo about the relative importance of the thakhi in relation to formal education and practical experience outside the marka, the Cabildo continued to place greater emphasis on traditional thakhibased prerequisites for leadership. Given the key role that the thakhi system has played in sustaining social cohesion and communal governance, the apparent conservatism of the Cabildo may be wellfounded, but it also meant that MACOJMA was often represented by leaders that did not specifically possess the strongest capacities in the community for negotiating with and monitoring the municipal government or other outside institutions. A final core challenge to the authority and political effectiveness of the Cabildo in its relations with the new municipal government was the simple asymmetry of financial resources. In 2006, the municipal government had ten full-time paid staff members in addition to the mayor and councilors and a total operating budget of approximately $850,000 (Municipalidad de Jesús de Machaca 2006), while MACOJMA was completely dependent on the scarce personal resources of its leaders. Thus, despite the high degree of legitimacy and moral authority that MACOJMA enjoyed, it could not compete with the financial capacity of the municipal government to execute projects and to hire labor. Faced with this financial asymmetry, members of the Cabildo feared that MACOJMA’s position as the highest source of moral and political authority in the marka would begin to slip away as the financial and technical power of the municipal government grew and community leaders were tempted to bypass the Cabildo and negotiate directly with municipal authorities for infrastructure and services. Challenges Facing the New Municipal Government

The new municipal government faced a distinct set of challenges, connected both to the goal of creating an Indigenous system of municipal governance and to the practical administrative demands faced by all small, rural municipal governments—especially brand new ones. However, in the context of the strict laws imposed by the central state to regulate municipal governments and in the face of the immense challenge of creating a new municipal administration from scratch, the time and energy of municipal authorities was focused more on practical day-to-day administration than on the deeper task of incorporating ayllu traditions into its operating systems. As a result, the emerging system of

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municipal governance in Jesús de Machaca was shaped much more profoundly by the laws and regulations of the central state than by ayllubased traditions, although efforts to combine the two systems of governance persisted. The intense demands involved in the start-up of the new municipal government consumed almost all of the time and energy of municipal authorities for their first three years in office. As the mayor of Jesús de Machaca explained eighteen months into his first term: “We had to start with nothing. On the first day [of operation], the municipality had nothing—no building, no office equipment, not even a single piece of paper. It was horrible” (Interview: November 15, 2006). In such a context, it is perhaps understandable that both the mayor and the chief administrative officer (oficial mayor) highlighted the institutional consolidation of the municipal government as the chief accomplishment of the first year and a half of operations, with emphasis on practical achievements such as the acquisition of office furniture, computers, and construction machinery for public works projects (Interviews: November 15, 2006). However, although the new municipal authorities gradually established an administrative presence for the municipal government, circumstances frequently required them to set aside aspirations to incorporate ayllu-based practices into administrative procedures. A key symbolic issue for MACOJMA and the new municipal authorities was the physical location of municipal offices. MACOJMA was determined that the municipal building would not be located on the central plaza of the town of Jesús de Machaca; this was broadly perceived as a symbolic site of colonial and mestizo power, as it was framed by the town’s massive colonial church and the houses of former mestizo elites. However, without the financial resources to construct a new building, the municipal government had little choice but to make an agreement with the central state to house municipal offices in a vacant state-owned building located on the central plaza, directly opposite the colonial church, thus marking a difficult symbolic accommodation of mestizo power and colonial history. Staffing the new municipal offices also proved difficult. The Cabildo wanted the staff of the municipal government to be composed of Machaqueños who could speak in Aymara with community members and who lived in the marka and had a deep knowledge of it. Indeed, a core feature of the ‘Indigenous municipality’ that local leaders aspired to was that its staff be Indigenous. However, the need for staff that was qualified technically proved to be incompatible with the desire to hire community members; of the ten employees hired to administer the municipality, only the chief administrative officer and three junior

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support staff were from Jesús de Machaca. The other seven staff members were monolingual mestizos who commuted back and forth from El Alto. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that the municipal staff were not hired according to the so-called system of political quotas (in which elected authorities are given the opportunity to hire their supporters as public employees on the basis of the proportion of votes they receive), a practice that is almost institutionalized in many other municipalities. The central challenge emphasized by the new municipal administrators was the need to learn and comply with the complex and strict framework of central government laws regulating municipal governments. In response to widespread problems of municipal corruption and administrative mismanagement in the years following the initial implementation of the Law of Popular Participation in 1994, Bolivia’s central state put in place an increasingly dense set of laws and mechanisms to regulate and monitor municipal governments, to ensure their compliance with the municipal legal framework, and to combat municipal corruption and mismanagement. The two-volume compendium of laws and administrative norms for municipal governments in Bolivia includes 112 separate laws and government decrees that occupy more than 1,500 pages. In order to receive central state transfers, municipal governments must comply with rigorous financial reporting procedures and assign specific percentages of their revenue to various budget lines such as education and health infrastructure. While the strict regulatory and monitoring system represents an administrative challenge for large municipal governments, it was simply beyond the capacity of Jesús de Machaca’s municipal staff of ten to keep track of and comply with the municipal legal framework, leaving them to simply hope that their lack of administrative capacity would not be seriously punished by the central state. Moreover, a key consequence of the strict legal framework is the limitation of autonomy and freedom for the administrative creativity that is necessary to incorporate alternative ayllu-based modes of governance into municipal administrative practices. Indeed, only a year after the legal establishment of the new municipality, Cabildo members began to wonder whether the goal of creating an Indigenous municipality was viable within Bolivia’s municipal legal framework, and they placed high hopes on the process of Constitutional reform then underway to make the task more straightforward (see below).20 The challenges of complying with the central state’s legal norms were further compounded by the tight control exercised by the Cabildo over the municipal government’s administrative expenditures. Bolivian

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law allows municipal governments to allocate up to twenty-five percent of state transfers to administrative expenses, but the Cabildo pushed for a much lower amount so that more resources could be dedicated to public infrastructure and economic development projects. Disagreement over the appropriate level of administrative spending was intense. In 2006 the Cabildo and municipal authorities eventually agreed to assign nineteen percent of state transfers to administrative costs, but the Cabildo hoped that the amount would subsequently decline while municipal officials wanted it to increase. The ongoing disagreement remained the biggest single source of controversy between the two institutions. While low administrative spending may be laudable in principle, in small municipalities such as Jesús de Machaca, it can also undermine municipal capacity to actually execute public works projects and to deliver social services. The political authority of the Cabildo, unaccompanied by an adequate understanding of the administrative needs of the municipal government, thus marked another example of the ‘unconstructive forms of social control’ highlighted by the mayor. In spite of the organizational challenges faced by the new municipal government in its first years of operation, it could claim some successes from the perspectives of both central government administrative standards and the efforts to create an Indigenous municipality. One of the most celebrated accomplishments was the municipal government’s high degree of autonomy from political parties, which provided at least some margin for increasing the role of the Cabildo and the ayllus in municipal governance. Although two of the five municipal councilors had been elected as candidates of the MAS party, the Cabildo and the remaining councilors who had been elected as representatives of MACOJMA put heavy pressure on them to ignore the dictates of the party hierarchy whenever they conflicted with local priorities. The autonomy from partisan interference was reflected not only in the selection of municipal staff noted above, but also in the absence of the clientelist exchanges of municipal services and infrastructure investments for political support (see below). Similarly, Cabildo members were confident that the elected municipal authorities were not engaging in acts of corruption. Nevertheless, the disappearance of the municipality’s Director of Finances in November 2006, after he had been caught soliciting kickbacks from a construction company in El Alto, highlighted the difficulties of combating deeply embedded forms of corruption even in the context of national legal norms and high levels of political will among elected municipal officials and civil society leaders.21

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The larger project to create the institutional framework for an Indigenous municipality was largely sidelined by the more urgent concerns of municipal authorities to simply establish the basic administrative infrastructure of the new municipal government. Although the project was marked both by some early successes and disappointments, it remained more an idea than actual practice. The Cabildo and municipal officials had hoped that the process of creating the Municipal Development Plan (Plan de Desarrollo Municipal— PDM)—a requirement for central government funding stipulated in the Law of Popular Participation—would provide the opportunity to negotiate and formally establish the institutional mechanisms for incorporating ayllu-based modes of decision making into the framework for municipal governance. However, the NGO that the Cabildo and municipal government contracted to produce the PDM arrived in Jesús de Machaca with its own pre-established methodology that did not include space for designing the institutional architecture for an Indigenous municipality. As a result, the organization and content of the Municipal Development Plan for Jesús de Machaca was virtually identical to those of most other rural municipalities in Bolivia and the institutional design of the municipality remained similar to the official blueprint outlined by central state laws. One initial marker of success in the Indigenous municipality project involved what municipal and Cabildo authorities referred to as a minidecentralization of authority to the twenty-four ayllus in the municipality. The Cabildo and municipal government agreed that the ayllu authorities and the Cabildo—and not community-level authorities—would be the central nodes of interaction between the municipal government and local civil society. This conscious decision to strengthen the role of the ayllus in municipal governance at the partial expense of individual communities and their leaders was reflected most clearly in the process of elaborating the municipality’s Annual Operating Plans (Plan Operativo Annual—POA), a requirement imposed by the Law of Popular Participation to create opportunities for civil society involvement in municipal budget making. The municipal government made the ayllus the basic administrative-geographic jurisdiction for community participation in setting priorities for the annual municipal budget. The Cabildo and municipal government reached an agreement that thirty percent of the municipality’s annual investment budget would be dedicated to municipality-wide initiatives and the remaining seventy percent would be divided among the twentyfour ayllus in direct proportion to their respective populations. Municipal and Cabildo leaders hoped that this mechanism for allocating

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investment resources would prevent the excessive fragmentation of municipal budgets into insignificant community-level public works projects and minimize the fierce competition among communities over municipal resources that characterized the POAs of many other rural municipalities (see Blanes 1999). Nevertheless, in a manner reminiscent of the ‘democratic clientelism’ discussed in Chapter Three, community leaders put heavy pressure on ayllu and municipal authorities to divide POA funds by community in an effort to demonstrate their leadership, a practice with a long history in Bolivia and other parts of the Andes. As Dandler noted on the basis of research in the late 1960s and early 1970s: “During my interviews with many [peasant] leaders, I found that a persistent theme was their concern with demonstrating their effectiveness by means of some concrete delivery of resources or services to their home communities and their followers in other villages” (1976: 344). Some ayllus withstood the pressures from individual community leaders and invested POA resources only in ayllu-wide projects, such as the expansion of electricity networks, while others simply followed the pattern of other rural municipalities and divided their POA allocations of approximately $50 per capita into tiny funds for each community. Nevertheless, the allocation of municipal investment funds through the ayllus significantly diminished clientelist pressures on the mayor to provide jobs, services and infrastructure investments, which were no longer seen as part of the mayor’s area of authority. In spite of agreement on the mechanisms for budget allocation and the pre-election of candidates for municipal office according to traditional public voting practices, most other elements of the design of the Indigenous municipality remained undefined and hotly contested. The most controversial issue concerned the specific role of the Cabildo in municipal governance. While the mayor and municipal councilors that represented MACOJMA willingly acknowledged the moral and political authority of the Cabildo, they resisted efforts by the jiliri jach’a mallku and other Cabildo leaders to influence what they considered to be internal administrative issues, such as the hiring of staff, decisions about salaries, and the purchase of goods and services—which were also subject to stringent oversight from the central state and required careful technical consideration. The Cabildo’s expectations that it share administrative authority with the municipal government over a wide range of issues created serious difficulties for municipal officials, who were frequently caught between the competing logics of decision making of the Cabildo and the central state. Compliance with state laws and access to state funds demanded an intense pace of work as well as a high level of technical and legal knowledge and frequently required that

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municipal authorities make decisions quickly. By contrast, the Cabildo, made up of part-time volunteers with little technical and legal understanding of municipal affairs, demanded not only that it be heavily involved in municipal governance but also insisted on its right to employ inherently slow, deliberative modes of consensus decision making that frequently clashed with the timelines for making decisions imposed by the state. The Cabildo and municipality were thus both caught in a contradictory situation. On one hand, the goal of the long struggle for municipal power by the Cabildo was to enhance political autonomy and to strengthen the ayllu-based system of governance. However, the need for compliance with state-imposed regulations threatened to undermine traditional modes of decision making while the high level of intervention in civic governance that Cabildo members considered appropriate undermined the effective operation of the municipal government. Ultimately, the municipal government was caught in the struggle between local Indigenous decision making ideologies and the bureaucratic, time-sensitive structures of the Bolivian state. The role of the two female members of the municipal council marked another tension between the re-constructed traditions of ayllu governance and the laws of the central state. In idealized representations of Aymara cosmovision, men and women share authority as two complementary elements of a pair; a male mallku can only hold his positions in association with a female mallku tayta (usually his wife, but sometimes his mother or sister). Nevertheless, the theoretical concept and symbolic elements of gender complementarity contrasted sharply with actual practice, in which the voice and influence of women was very clearly secondary to that of men. Women rarely spoke in ayllu meetings or in MACOJMA’s Cabildo and they did not take part in the day-to-day tasks of leadership with their male partners. The subordinate role of women in leadership and political decision making was partly rooted in an historical pattern of discrimination against girls and women in the field of education. This is reflected in significantly lower levels of literacy and formal schooling for women (see Table 4.1) and, as a result, in women’s weak self-confidence in public speaking, which is reinforced by de facto gender norms. In spite of the highly gendered way in which authority is exercised in Jesús de Machaca, MACOJMA complied with the state law that required at least thirty percent of its candidates for the municipal council be female by nominating two women in its group of five chosen contenders for council positions. However, from the first meeting of the new municipal council in 2005, the two female councilors were accompanied by their husbands, who also did most of the talking—a practice that was accepted by the mayor

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and other male councilors (who were not accompanied by their female partners). The gender dynamics on the council were partly rooted in the prevailing machista cultural norms, but they also reflected the low levels of formal schooling of the two female councilors and their relative lack of leadership experience—which they referred to in order to explain their own preferences to have their husbands with them at council meetings. The intersection of Aymara cosmology, prevailing gender relations, and state laws to promote women’s participation in formal politics thus marked an unanticipated but highly significant tension within the ‘Indigenous municipality’ project and highlights the challenges involved in trying to combine Aymara and liberal principles in the institutional design of the municipality. While the primary goal of the struggle for municipal power in Jesús de Machaca was to create an Indigenous municipality, a key secondary goal was to use municipal power to improve local livelihoods by strengthening family-based economies. However, at the time of writing (in 2007), initiatives to create a ‘productive municipality’ had not moved beyond superficial rhetoric and optimistic local development schemes that contrasted sharply with actual investments of municipal revenue and the position of Jesús de Machaca in regional and national economic dynamics. The mayor and chief administrative officer spoke hopefully about ideas to create a “closed local economy,” a sort of municipal version of Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI). As the mayor put it, “the money that comes into Jesús de Machaca needs to stay here. Right now most of the money that comes in is not spent locally and thus does not support local economic development” (Interview: November 15, 2006). Hopes for economic development included the establishment of a municipal brick factory that would both create jobs and produce low-cost building materials for the local population; the creation of associations of dairy, potato and quinoa producers that would improve production and marketing and also engage in value-added initiatives such as yogurt production; and the creation of a municipal microfinance institution to promote the capitalization of household economies, which generally lack the capital to start small businesses. Nevertheless, despite these ideas, the actual allocations of municipal revenue in the 2006 annual operating plans were directed to much more traditional smallscale infrastructure projects (school buildings, pedestrian bridges, community centers) and electrification—which reflected both the shortterm orientation of community-based demands for immediate and tangible investments as well as the absence of basic infrastructure (roads, electricity), the latter of which is needed before viable businesses can operate in many of the municipality’s rural communities.

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Moreover, ecological factors and broader economic forces posed very serious challenges to the hopes for economic development in Jesús de Machaca. The municipality’s fragile and high-risk ecological setting cannot sustain significant growth based on agriculture or livestock production, even with projects to improve pastures, animal husbandry and marketing. Indeed, similar to the experience of Guamote in Ecuador, the relative success of the Indigenous struggle for municipal power in Jesús de Machaca was facilitated by an ecological setting that was not propitious for either hacienda expansion or for contemporary economic growth In the context of low levels of agricultural production and productivity, and the ever declining terms of trade for altiplano agricultural products, many would say the primary role of Jesús de Machaca in Bolivia’s economy is to provide cheap labor to the informal labor markets of El Alto and La Paz. In the context of these structural factors, there may not be a great deal that the municipal government of Jesús de Machaca can do to improve local livelihoods, especially given the meager resources at its disposal. New sources of income are more likely to come from the earnings of temporary migrants or remittances sent home by family members working in El Alto, La Paz and Santa Cruz than from development schemes planned by the municipality. However, to evaluate the success of the Indigenous municipality project solely on the basis of economic growth and improvements in material well-being would be to overlook the importance of the struggles for dignity and political autonomy, which were the primary motives that led the ayllus of Jesús de Machaca into the realm of municipal politics in the first place. At the same time, without some changes to the economic trajectory of the municipality, which is marked by extremely high rates of material poverty and out-migration, dignity may be difficult to achieve and its value called into question. Conclusion

As in the other cases examined in this volume, the relative success of the Indigenous struggle to control municipal power in Jesús de Machaca was the result of a long historical process of shifting power relations— which also generated new tensions and challenges. The social and political strength of Indigenous peasant communities in Jesús de Machaca, represented by MACOJMA, is rooted in the exceptionally cohesive system of communal land control that resulted from land purchases from the Spanish crown in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and successful efforts to block hacienda expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While powerful cultural norms

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of community service and leadership as an obligation have helped to sustain high levels of communal and ayllu organization, access to communal land remains an important material motive for Machaqueños to provide service to their communities, and it gives community members considerable latitude to employ quasi-coercive tactics to encourage others to do the same. Thus political power in Jesús de Machaca is very much tied to the distribution of economic power that is rooted in the communal system of land tenure. At the same time, it is important to recognize that the system of communal land control survived partly because of the ecological fragility and low productive potential of the land itself. This made Jesús de Machaca a relatively unappealing target for hacienda expansion in the colonial and republican eras, but it also poses a difficult challenge to the contemporary quest for economic development in the new municipality. Moreover, in the context of the high-risk ecological setting, the continued functioning of the communal land tenure system—and the re-construction of ayllu-based modes of governance that are tied to it—are also conditional on very high rates of temporary and permanent out-migration. On one hand, out-migration has reduced population pressure on ayllu lands, which has made the ongoing link between land access and community service possible. However, on the other hand, migration not only represents a loss of human capital, but the urban experiences of those migrants, especially the youth, who remain linked to their home communities have also generated new pressures to incorporate ‘modern’ urban values, priorities, and modes of decision making into ayllu-based modes of governance: the survival of tradition thus depends on patterns of behavior that simultaneously also challenge and force such conventions to change. It is also important to highlight the ways in which the combination of communal land control and the system of rotating leadership has slowed socio-economic differentiation and the formation of an Indigenous economic and political elite in Jesús de Machaca, which distinguishes it from many other peasant and Indigenous-controlled municipalities, including most of those examined in this book. The relative equality of economic power and the practice of leadership rotation that has kept political inequalities in check have helped MACOJMA to generate a very high level of socio-political power and moral authority, which lies behind the relative successes of the struggle for municipal power and to create an Indigenous municipality. Those successes are marked by autonomy from political parties, a high degree of transparency and lack of corruption in municipal politics, the absence of a dominant mayor and the introduction of at least some elements of

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ayllu-based governance into municipal administration. At the same time, neither MACOJMA nor the municipal government has found an effective way to translate MACOJMA’s moral authority and social power into the technical capacity that is needed for MACOJMA to engage effectively in municipal decision making. As a result, the autonomy of municipal officials from MACOJMA was extremely limited. Moreover, the only mechanism the municipal government was able to employ to carve autonomy away from MACOJMA was its reference to the state-imposed framework of laws that regulate municipal governments, which left municipal authorities squeezed between opposing pressures from the state and civil society, with very little space for autonomous decision making. Nevertheless, in spite of MACOJMA’s considerable social and political power, the emerging design and practice of the ‘Indigenous municipality’ that it struggled to create was marked much more profoundly by its liberal democratic features than by the incorporation of Indigenous traditions and modes of governance. Although Bolivia’s Law of Popular Participation promised to facilitate the incorporation of Indigenous modes of decision making into municipal administration, the marriage of ayllu-based forms of governance with the liberal foundations of the state-based framework for municipal governance has been much more difficult in practice than many Machaqueños had anticipated. Although the Indigenous municipality project is still in its infancy and it remains too early to pronounce its success or failure, early signs suggest that the project has generated new tensions that will be very difficult to resolve. While Machaqueños initially saw the struggle for municipal power as a means of defending cultural practices and reconstructed modes of ayllu-based governance, engagement in municipal governance has drawn Indigenous leaders in Jesús de Machaca closer to the liberal logic of the state than they ever had been in the past, and it threatens to weaken the authority of MACOJMA itself, since the municipal government enjoys access to significant state resources that MACOJMA does not. In January 2009, after more than eighteen months of intense deliberations, Bolivia’s national congress approved a new constitution that included specific provisions to facilitate the creation of new institutions of ‘Indigenous autonomy,’ referred to in the Constitution as “autonomía indígena originaria campesina” (Indigenous First Peoples Peasant Autonomy) (Asemblea Constituyente de Bolivia 2008: Articles 289–296). However, the specific implications of the Indigenous autonomy clauses in Bolivia’s 2009 constitution for efforts to combine re-constructed traditions of ayllu governance with the modern state-

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based logic of sub-national public administration in Jesús de Machaca and other parts of Bolivia remain far from clear. The jurisdiction of Indigenous autonomies under the new constitution corresponds very closely to that of municipal governments, and Indigenous controlled municipal governments can convert themselves into Indigenous autonomies.22 The hopes of Machaqueños were high that the tensions between liberal and ayllu democracy could be resolved by the new constitution and Cabildo leaders quickly completed the paperwork required by the state to hold a referendum in December 2009 to convert the Indigenous municipality into an ‘Indigenous autonomy,’ which will be entitled to create its own internal administrative and decision making structures in accordance with local norms and community-based modes of governance (Asemblea Constituyente de Bolivia 2008: Article 304). While the new legal framework of Bolivia’s constitution will free Jesús de Machaca from some of the constraints of state regulations for municipal governance, the tensions between the liberal logic of statebased public administration and the communitarian logic of the ayllu will persist, as the new mechanisms of Indigenous autonomy must still comply with the administrative logic of the state. As a result, conceptions of what it means to be Indigenous and how ‘Indigenous autonomy’ should function will continue to be contested in Jesús de Machaca. The strongest lines of tension will be marked by the ruralurban differences between comuneros and residentes and the generational differences between and elders and youth, but also by the different visions of Indigenous leaders who are actually engaged in municipal administration. In this setting, the worst fears of Machaqueños—that the struggle to create an Indigenous municipality will lead to the disappearance of the last mallku and the deterioration of ayllu-based governance—seem unlikely to materialize, but what it means to be a mallku and how the ayllus actually govern themselves are both very likely to change significantly. Moreover, while MACOJMA’s Cabildo remains fiercely defensive of its autonomy and adamant about its position as the ultimate arbiter of moral authority in Jesús de Machaca, there is also clear evidence that its energy has focused very narrowly on the sphere of municipal politics. The energy that MACOJMA has invested in the struggle for municipal power highlights the concerns of other scholars that popular engagement in struggles for municipal democracy can bring about shifts ‘from shouting to counting’ that represent an acceptance and internalization of the rules and logic of municipal governance or an expansion of what Foucault called ‘governmentality’—that is, the self-discipline of the governed (see Chapter One). In contrast to radical protest actions aimed at the national

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government and the formation of militant Aymara organizations such as the Ponchos Rojos (Red Ponchos) in nearby parts of the altiplano in the early 2000s, Indigenous leaders in Jesús de Machaca concentrated their attention on municipal administration. However, MACOJMA’s relative lack of engagement in radical Aymara politics also reflected a fierce determination to retain autonomy from the authoritarian tendencies within the national Indigenous peasant movement in Bolivia and a refusal to be manipulated by national Indigenous leaders such as Evo Morales and Felipe Quispe. In this sense, MACOJMA’s political strategy can be understood as a form of “resistant adaptation” (Stern 1987: 11), marked by efforts to take advantage of political opportunities to expand political autonomy in a context of unequal power relations, despite the dangers and contradictions entailed in pursuing those opportunities.

Notes 1 The exact number of deaths is unknown; sources suggest that sixteen mestizos were killed in the March 12 uprising and that somewhere between twenty and 118 Indigenous peasants were killed in the subsequent massacre (see Choque and Ticona 1996: 74). 2 An ayllu is an Andean form of socio-political organization with precolonial origins. Ayllus are typically composed of various communities connected by imagined and real kinship. Historically, most ayllus were composed of discontinuous geographic zones in different ecological settings as a strategy for ensuring food security in the difficult environmental conditions of the Andes. A marka is larger territorial and socio-political entity that is composed of anywhere from two to twenty ayllus. In Aymara cosmology, a marka represents a human body and each ayllu represents a specific part of the body—see Astvaldsson (1997), Condarco y Murra (1987); Harris (1987); Platt (1982); Rasnake (1989); Rivera Cusicanqui (1990); Taller de Historia Oral Andina (1995); Ticona and Albó (1997). 3 The marka of Jesús de Machaca was historically composed of twelve ayllus, six in the parcial arriba and six in the parcial abajo. Subsequent internal conflicts and efforts to gain access to state resources resulted in the sub-division of the six ayllus in the parcial abajo into the eighteen ayllus that exist today and make up MACOJMA. 4 Source: MACOJMA (2005). 5 Source for data on livelihoods and incomes: Colque (2005: 40). 6 The control of land after 1645 and 1585 did not free Indigenous Machaqueños from either forced labor in the mines of Potosí (the mita) or obligations to pay tribute taxes to the Spanish crown and later the republican government (see Plata, Colque and Calle 2003: 43; Choque 2003). 7 According to Grieshaber (1991: 114), between 1881 and 1920, 12,158 communal landholdings were “sold” to hacienda owners in the legal context of

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the Ley de Exvinculación. Eighty-six percent of those land transfers took place in the areas immediately surrounding Jesús de Machaca (cited in Choque 2003: 268). 8 Documents from 1893 indicate that haciendas controlled 4,450 hectaresof the 26,539 hectaresof cultivatable land (Choque 2003: 270). 9 The full name of the law is the Law of the National Agrarian Reform Service (Ley del Servicio National de Reforma Agraria—Ley 1715). INRA is the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria), which was responsible for the design of the law. 10 The INRA Law was a product of competing pressures from multiple sources, including both large-scale landowners in the eastern lowlands of Bolivia and small-scale Indigenous peasants in the highlands. As a result, the neoliberal goal of establishing individual land titles throughout the country as a way of fostering a more active market in agricultural land was tempered by provisions that enabled Indigenous and peasant communities to collectively own land—which could not be bought or sold (see Urioste, Barragán and Colque 2006; Hernáiz and Pacheco 2000; Urioste 2003). 11 For example, the Cabildo was originally an imposition by Spanish colonial authorities and was controlled by the colonial corregidor; only in the early nineteenth century did ayllu leaders re-appropriate the Cabildo as an Indigenous institution (see Ticona and Albó 1997: 126). Similarly, the social movement of caciques apoderados (“Empowered Caciques”) of the early twentieth century, which culminated in the 1921 uprising, re-appropriated the position of cacique, which had been imposed by the Spanish as part of a strategy of indirect colonial administration (see Choque 2003: 49–76). Notably, the principle of rotating leadership, which has come under increased stress in the context of municipal decentralization (see below), was not practiced by the Caciques Apoderados; nor was the principle of chachawarmi or gender complementarity (see Ticona and Albó 1997: 117, 120). To recognize the ongoing dynamism of tradition does not undermine the legitimacy of local cultural practices and modes of decision making, but simply highlights the notion that tradition is never static. 12 Named after the hero of the 1781 Indigenous uprising, Túpac Katari. 13 The other two laws were the Law of Capitalization (which privatized state corporations) and the Law of Education Reform (which promoted bilingual education and grassroots involvement in the education system but also threatened to weaken the national teachers’ union). 14 In 2004, the mayor of Viacha was convicted and jailed on corruption charges for embezzlement of municipal funds and for selling used clothes that had been donated to the municipality by foreign church groups. During 2003– 2004, two municipal councilors claimed the position of mayor, with one of them in control of the municipal finances and the other controlling municipal buildings and equipment. 15 Until 2004, Bolivian law required that all candidates in municipal elections be affiliated with a registered political party. 16 For a detailed description of the early stages of this process, see Ticona and Albó (1997: 279–312). 17 Although the new law was implemented partly in response to pressure from grassroots-based Indigenous and civil society groups, it may also have

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been intended to undermine the electoral prospects of the Movement towards Socialism (MAS) political party at the municipal level. While intentionality is impossible to determine, the law did result in the decision of many Indigenous groups to launch their own candidates rather than affiliate with the MAS. 18 In total, MACOJMA received 2,567 votes while the MAS received 1,296 votes (Corte Nacional Electoral 2005). 19 Community members can hold the position of jiliri jach’a mallku more than once, although few are willing to accept the financial obligations of the position for more than one term. 20 Following the election of MAS leader Evo Morales as President of Bolivia on January 22, 2006, Bolivia’s government convoked a Constituent Assembly in April 2006 to design a new national constitution that would allow greater political autonomy for the country’s Indigenous peoples and incorporate Indigenous forms of governance into national laws. After considerable conflict between Indigenous supporters of the new Constitution and opponents based primarily in eastern Bolivia, the Constitution was passed by Bolivia’s Congress on October 22, 2008. The Constitution was formally approved following a national referendum on January 25, 2009. 21 Private businesses and municipal officials in Bolivia have found various ways to circumvent state laws intended to limit corruption. For example, ten percent kickbacks, known as diezmos, have been practically institutionalized in the transactions between municipal governments and firms that provide construction materials. Hardware stores in El Alto are known to have multiple sets of letterhead with different company names in order to help municipal officials cover up kickback schemes by providing evidence of multiple bids for purchase orders. 22 Chapter 8, Article 303 of the 2008 Constitution states that the institutions of Indigenous First Peoples Peasant autonomy “will assume the competencies of municipal government” while Article 304 lists specific competencies of new autonomous institutions which are very similar to those of municipal governments.

5 Struggles for Municipal Power Among NGOs, Peasant Organizations and Local Elites in Mizque, Bolivia

During the 1980s, El Bien Amado, a popular Brazilian soap opera that was broadcast all over Latin America, followed the intrigues of Odorico Paraguassu, the mayor of the fictional Brazilian town of Sucupira. Mayor Paraguassu committed all conceivable sins of ‘bad governance’ in an effort to construct a grandiose municipal cemetery to reflect a much-inflated perception of himself and his municipality. Although the soap opera was intended to be humorous, it captured many of the realities of municipal politics in small towns throughout Latin America. Far from the offices of Teleglobo in Brazil where El Bien Amado was produced, Orlando Soriano, the mayor of the small rural town of Mizque—located in the province of the same name in Bolivia’s Cochabamba department—was so amused by the story of Odorico Paraguassu that the first public work he inaugurated after becoming mayor in 1989 was a renovation of the municipal cemetery (see Table 5.1 for selected data on Mizque). However, despite Orlando Soriano’s fascination with the fictional mayor portrayed in El Bien Amado, Mizque was hailed throughout Bolivia as a star case of ‘good governance’ at the municipal level. Observers highlighted the municipal government’s role in initiating an unusually high degree of coordination among external and local development actors, its incorporation of peasant representatives into the structures of municipal power and the development of new models of participatory planning. Over the course of the late 1980s and 1990s, a new political alliance that included Mayor Soriano, a non-governmental organization (NGO) based in Cochabamba and the leaders of the local peasant federation also displaced Mizque’s traditional elite from their once omnipotent positions in municipal politics. During Soriano’s tenure as mayor, Mizque was transformed from an isolated, stagnant backwater into a dynamic center of rural

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development—at least, according to reports by outsiders. Indeed, the institutional innovations pioneered by Mizque’s municipal government in the late 1980s and early 1990s were central to the design of both Bolivia’s 1994 Law of Popular Participation and a major World Bankfunded rural development initiative implemented in ninety-seven other municipalities.1 The municipality of Mizque was widely praised as a model for other rural municipalities to follow, and it attracted widespread attention from the media, academics, the World Bank and even then-President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, who traveled to Mizque several times during his first term as president (1993–1997) to bring attention to the municipality as an example of the positive impact of Bolivia’s Law of Popular Participation (Kohl 2002: 76).2 However, the widespread portrayal of Mizque as a success story covered up a much more complex reality that actually shared more in common with the fictional tale of bad governance in El Bien Amado than many observers realized. The success story of participatory and developmental governance presented to outsiders camouflaged the domination and manipulation of local civil society by the NGO and municipal authorities. That top-down manipulation eventually generated a powerful political backlash from local peasant leaders that coincided with the growth in political power of the cocalero (coca growers)-based national peasant movement. It also marked the beginning of a new chapter in the history of municipal governance in Mizque, in which peasant leaders played the central roles. The apparent dynamism of municipal governance subsequently declined but also made space for a deeper democratization both of local social power relations and of the relations between peasant organizations, NGOs and the municipal government, albeit not without serious internal tensions. At the same time, however, the rise of local peasant leaders to municipal power was also marked by the gradual bureaucratization of peasant politics, even as peasant leaders became more radical in their political rhetoric. This chapter examines the vicissitudes of municipal governance in Mizque, beginning in Section I with an analysis of long-term historical changes in social, economic, and political power relations in the region. Section II then examines the apparent democratization of local governance that resulted from NGOs’ interventions in the 1980s and 1990s and the political tensions generated by those interventions. Section III analyses the breakdown of the NGO-led municipal democratization project and the assent to municipal power of local peasant leaders as well as the challenges that those leaders faced in municipal administration. Finally, the conclusion addresses the uncertain benefits of peasant-controlled municipal power in Mizque.

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Table 5.1 Selected Social Data, Mizque, Bolivia3 2

Total land area 1,859 km Total population (2001) 26,659 Urban population 2,677 (10.0%) Rural population 23,982 (90.0%) % of population below poverty line 93.0% Human Development Index (PNUD 2004) 0.460 Poverty ranking (x 314 municipalities) 284 Self-identification as Indigenous (Quechua) Males 92.6% Females 93.5% Illiteracy: urban males over 15 11.1% Illiteracy: urban females over 15 23.2% Illiteracy: rural males over 15 27.2% Illiteracy: rural females over 15 54.9% Average # of years of formal education for adults > 19 years Urban males 7.8 Urban females 5.8 Rural males 3.5 Rural females 2.0 Infant mortality (deaths / 1000 live births) 112 Livelihoods (% of economically active population) Agriculture 62.7% Mining, construction, and manufactur12.7% ing Commerce 4.0% Professional / technical 2.2% Unqualified labor 18.2% Houses with piped water 29.0% Houses with electricity 23.2% Houses with sewage 11.9%

The Historical Transformation of Social Power in Mizque

Struggles over social, political and economic power in Mizque have been shaped profoundly by the town’s geographical and ecological setting. Mizque is located approximately 100 km southeast of the city of Cochabamba and 200 km north of the city and mines of Potosí. That physical location, combined with the highly productive soil and climate of Mizque’s lowland valleys, attracted very early interest from Spanish colonizers in search of land to produce food on a commercial scale to sell in the Potosí market. Mizque was one of the first parts of the fertile Cochabamba valley region to be settled by Spanish encomenderos in the 1540s and 1550s, but by the early seventeenth century colonial land

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acquisition was occurring primarily through an active land market, with numerous land sales registered, ranging from Indigenous caciques to Spanish hacendados as well as between Spanish landowners (Regalsky 2003: 51–52; Rojas 1999: 74–77). Mizque, which was officially established in 1603 as La Villa de Salinas del Rio Pisuerga (Viscarra 1967: 211), quickly became an important center of hacienda-based agricultural production, primarily supplying wheat, wine and maize beer (chicha). At its height in the early seventeenth century, colonial Mizque had a population of 20,000 and was known as “the city of five hundred parasols” (La ciudad de los quiñientos quitasoles) because of the large numbers of wealthy women who carried parasols while strolling through the town (see Céspedes Paz 1987; Paulson 1992: 75–80; Viscarra 1967). Prior to the arrival of the Spanish, Mizque was on the frontier of the Incan Empire, and in an effort to secure its borders, the Incas had imported loyal caciques (Indigenous chiefs) from other regions to govern the local population (Rojas 1999: 23–28; Larson 1989: Chapter 1). However, the allegiance of local Indigenous communities to the imported caciques was weak. Faced with the imposition of the onerous tribute payments and forced labor in the Potosí mines (the mita), which the caciques were responsible for extracting from Indigenous community members, many Indigenous people abandoned their communities to seek refuge on the growing numbers of haciendas in the Mizque valley, where they were freed from tribute obligations (Larson 1989: 84; Sanchez Albornoz 1978: 113). Moreover, in 1605, Catholic Church authorities moved the seat of the diocese of Santa Cruz to Mizque, sparking the construction of eight convents, significant urban growth and further hacienda expansion, which, through a combination of coercion and consent, drew even more people out of Indigenous communities and into feudal social and economic relations (Rojas 1999). Historical records also indicate that the Indigenous population of Mizque was devastated by malaria after contact with the Spaniards (Calvo and Reglasky 1994: 17). Throughout the Cochabamba valley region, the combination of disease, flight from tribute obligations and hacienda expansion led to the number of registered tribute-paying members of Indigenous communities in Mizque declining precipitously over the course of the seventeenth century, from 305 in 1573 to 51 in 1683 (Sanchez Albornoz 1978: 31, cited in Regalsky 2003: 51).4 In contrast to the altiplano region, where ayllu-based modes of governance remained relatively autonomous from Spanish authorities throughout the colonial period—in return for tribute payments and mita labor— Indigenous forms of social and political organization were thoroughly undermined in Mizque and other Cochabamba valleys as a twin result of

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the early colonial land grabbing and the flight of Indigenous community members from tribute and mita obligations to their externally-imposed caciques (Regalsky 2003: 52). Thus, in contrast to the altiplano, where the 1874 Ley de Exvinculación had a profound impact on many Indigenous communities by undermining communal land titles and ayllu-based governance, it had almost no impact in Mizque, where the hacienda regime had already destroyed Indigenous communal landholdings and governance systems and where an active land market already existed (Paulson 1992: 7–35; Regalsky 2003: 61; Rojas 1999: 83). The early dissolution of Indigenous communities and forms of governance, especially in the fertile Mizque valley where haciendas were concentrated, also resulted in the weakening of explicitly Indigenous identities and the adoption of mestizo cultural identities— although use of the Quechua language remained strong. The relative weakness of Indigenous identities in the Mizque valley had important implications for local power relations in contemporary Mizque as it facilitated the much deeper penetration of the corporatist sindicato system of peasant organization—established by the Bolivian state after the 1952 Revolution—into the Cochabamba valleys in comparison with the altiplano region, where hacienda expansion took place much later and sindicato organizations penetrated less deeply (see Larson 1989: 92–102; Stoebelle-Gregor 1996: 77). The geographical division of the municipality of Mizque into two distinct ecological zones also played an important role in shaping the development of local land and labor markets, and in turn social, political and economic power relations. The valley region, referred to above, is characterized by a warm climate, fertile soils and access to irrigation, which attracted early colonizers who compared it favorably to Spain (Larson 1989: 74). In that setting, an agricultural land market emerged early in the colonial era and agricultural production on both hacienda land and peasant plots was heavily oriented towards the market.5 By contrast, the southern highland zone of Mizque, known as Raqaypampa, which borders the northern edge of the department of Potosí, is characterized by a much higher altitude and higher-risk mountainside ecology as well as lack of access to irrigated water. Although Raqaypampa was also incorporated into the hacienda regime in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the less productive agricultural setting did not foster the development of either an active land market or the thorough incorporation of peasant producers into the market economy. Rather, well into the twenty-first century, peasant production in Raqaypampa remained primarily oriented towards subsistence (Ledezma and Vargas 2005; Calvo and Regalsky 1994;

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Hosse 1994; Regalsky 2003).6 The prevalence of subsistence production in Raqaypampa helps to explain the historically weak penetration of the intertwined market, political, and administrative power of Mizque valley elites in the region and the high prevalence of monolingual Quechua speakers, both of which reinforced Indigenous ethnic identities in Raqaypampa—in contrast to the Mizque valley, where they remained very weak.7 Moreover, after Mizque’s haciendas were broken up and redistributed to their former peasant tenants following Bolivia’s 1953 Agrarian Reform, the ecological differences between the valley region and the Raqaympampa highlands contributed to a rapid process of class differentiation. Highland peasants, or Raqaypampeños, became laborers on the irrigated peasant farms of the Mizque valley (Regalsky 2003: 108).8 That process of class differentiation, combined with the different agricultural characteristics and a much higher proportion of non-Spanish speakers in the highland zone, contributed to the gradual emergence of a distinctive class and Indigenous ethnic identity in Raqaypampa, which, as will become clear below, also had important implications for struggles over local political power in Mizque. In the second half of the twentieth century, Mizque valley communities self-identified and organized primarily as peasants (campesinos) and articulated a classbased discourse that was largely devoid of ethnic references, while Raqaypampa communities constructed an identity that highlighted their Indigenous ethnicity as well as class-based concerns. This chapter focuses primarily on the shifts in power relations and struggles to control political power in the broader municipality of Mizque rather than the more specific struggles for Indigenous autonomy in the district of Raqaypampa. While the struggles of Raqaypampeños played an important role in larger struggles over municipal power, they also deserve separate analysis as a case of a distinct struggle for Indigenous territorial autonomy from the municipality of Mizque. Unfortunately, for logistical reasons, field research in Raqaypampa was not possible. A local NGO that played a brokering role between Raqaypampa and the outside world (discussed further below) was highly protective of both its privileged position and Raqaypampa communities themselves—perhaps for good reasons—and effectively blocked access to the district, an experience also encountered by other researchers. Thus, although numerous Raqaypampa leaders were very willing to recount their history and share their ideas with me when they came to the town of Mizque for meetings of the provincial peasant federation, I was unable to conduct field research in the district of Raqaypampa itself. The relative economic strength of Mizque’s haciendas during the colonial and early republican eras was heavily influenced by the boom

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and bust cycle of mineral production in Bolivia and the corresponding cycles of demand for agricultural products. The decline of Bolivia’s mining economy from the late seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century (Klein 2003) combined with the impact of various epidemics to thoroughly undermine Mizque’s former colonial grandeur, and it impoverished hacienda owners as well as peasants. A visitor to Mizque in 1830 wrote: “It was formerly one of the most fruitful regions of Alto Peru, thanks to the great variety of crops that grew well there. But while it was once so populated, the region has become so inhospitable that it is almost a desert, at least in the valleys where epidemics rage” (D’Orbigny 1830, quoted in Paulson 1992: 79). The revival of mineral production in the late nineteenth century largely failed to revive the economic vitality of Mizque’s haciendas because of foreign competition in agricultural markets. Like many other landed estates in Cochabamba, haciendas in Mizque struggled to remain financially solvent during the era of import liberalization policies implemented in the late 1800s and new railroads constructed in the early decades of the 1900s that allowed cheap foodstuffs from Chile to flood Bolivia’s urban and mining markets (Arrieta and De la Fuente 1998: 103). By the early twentieth century, hacienda lands were being sub-divided and sold with considerable frequency, as their owners were unable to sustain heavy debt loads and tax payments to the state (Rojas 1999: 82–83). Although the economic crisis of hacienda production created opportunities for large numbers of peasants in other parts of Cochabamba to purchase land and become independent small-holders (see Larson 1989), hacienda owners continued to dominate Mizque both economically and politically until the 1953 Agrarian Reform (Barnes de von Marshcall and Torrico Angulo 1971: 1–3). Indeed, until 1953, the province of Mizque had the highest concentration of large haciendas of any province in the department of Cochabamba. In 1900, out of a departmental total of 561 haciendas with more than 500 hectares of land, 188 (thirty-three percent) were based in the two neighboring provinces of Mizque and Campero.9 By contrast, while there were close to 30,000 peasant small-holdings in the central valley of Cochabamba in 1900, there were less than 1,200 such peasant properties in the provinces of Mizque and Campero combined (Rivera Pizarro 1992: 53, cited in Miro I Pascual 2000: 146). The construction of railroads to Chile and Argentina in the early twentieth century led to increased competition in regional agricultural markets. Efforts by hacienda owners in Mizque to extract higher rents from their tenants as a strategy to confront the increasing rivalry they felt with the new food imports provoked a resistance movement among

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local peasants that gained further momentum from the broader national political climate generated by the 1932–35 Chaco War and the reforms implemented by the governments of Presidents Busch and Villarroel in the 1940s (see Calderón and Dandler 1984).10 Under the influence of both Toribio Miranda, a peasant leader from Oruro who had been involved in the 1899 national Indigenous peasant rebellion, and Manuel Andia, a Raqaypampa peasant leader, an intense peasant movement for land rights, local political autonomy and the establishment of peasant schools emerged in the late 1930s in the southern zone of Mizque and the northern Potosí Department (see Regalsky 2003: 97–100; Vallejos 1995). In reaction to a peasant strike on Mizque haciendas in 1948, local hacendados called in the Bolivian police, who brutally assassinated Manuel Andia and imprisoned other leaders. This sparked an even larger peasant uprising and even more vicious repression of peasant leaders by the Bolivian army, which soon completely disarticulated the peasant movement in Mizque (Arias 1995: 67–72; Vallejos 1995: 4–14). The brutal repression of the Mizque peasant rebellions in 1948 and 1949 undermined the organizational capacities of peasants to take over local haciendas in the same way as had occurred in other parts of rural Cochabamba in the wake of the 1952 National Revolution and 1953 Agrarian Reform Law (Regalsky 2003: 99). Although Mizque peasants did occupy and gain control of local haciendas under the leadership of peasant organizers from Ucureúña (de Jong 1995), which was at the epicenter of the Cochabamba peasant movement (see Dandler 1969), they were unable to establish autonomous organizations. The peasant takeover of hacienda land prompted many landowning families to leave Mizque and re-settle in Cochabamba, but some ex-hacendados did remain in Mizque and re-established themselves as agricultural traders. Together with a new group of small-scale merchants and truck drivers from peasant backgrounds, Mizque’s town-based commercial elite consolidated a dense web of economic, social, political and administrative power that endured well into the 1980s.11 The redistribution of agricultural land in Mizque in the early 1950s was an important precursor to the subsequent gradual democratization of municipal politics, but on its own it was an insufficient condition to break the power of the ex-landowning elite. The economic power of Mizque’s commercial elite was rooted primarily in their roles as agricultural intermediaries, providers of credit and transport operators who enjoyed a near monopoly on control over access to regional markets. Although they no longer controlled vast expanses of land, ex-hacendados frequently entered into sharecropping agreements with local landowning peasants, providing agricultural

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inputs in return for a share of peasant crops. The social power of the town-based commercial elite was further reinforced through fictive kinship relations with local peasants and family ties with the growing class of state administrators, merchants and teachers. Indeed, rural schools became particularly important components of the local network of clientelist control in Mizque and throughout Bolivia (see Regalsky 2003).12 Ex-hacendados and their relatives also became the local operatives of the National Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario—MNR), which controlled central state bureaucracy from 1952 to 1965. As the MNR-dominated state established the corporatist system of peasant sindicatos to control Bolivian peasants, MNR-affiliated ex-hacendados in Mizque were able to manipulate the elections and major decisions in the local sindicato federations—although the community level sindicatos did retain the autonomy to elect their own leaders as long as they did not directly challenge the status quo. The administrative-political power of the MNR and the socio-economic power of the ex-hacendados in Mizque were completely intertwined. In that context, as Dunkerley asserted for Bolivia as a whole, the sindicato system quickly “replace[d] the hacienda as the central mechanism of social control” (1984: 74). Independent peasant leadership in Mizque was brutally repressed. Fermín Vallejos, a Raqaypampa peasant leader from the 1940s through the 1990s, recalled that ex-hacendados effectively controlled the peasant federations (sub-centrales and the Central Campesina) in Mizque until the late 1970s and could rely on the cooperation of both the local police and Catholic Church to discipline local peasants and to block peasant struggles for political autonomy. Vallejos himself was jailed various times in the 1950s and 1960s for organizational activity (Vallejos 1995: 17). The strategic alliance between ex-hacendados and local Catholic priests meant that the conversion of peasants to evangelical protestant denominations was perceived as a direct political threat and was punished accordingly. Court records from the neighboring town of Aiquile taken in 1958 report Mizque peasants being imprisoned for periods between eight and twenty-five days and being severely beaten by MNR-installed leaders of the Central Campesina for conversion to evangelical denominations (de Jong 1995: 34–39). As Regalsky carefully explains, the allocation of rural teaching posts as tools of political patronage by the ex-hacendado-dominated institutions of the local MNR political apparatus helped to further extend the dense web of social and political power of the ex-landowning elite into rural Mizque (2003: 159–199).

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The social and political power of local ex-hacendados was further consolidated through the Military-Peasant Pact established by President Barrientos in 1965, which operated until the corporatist system of peasant organization was undermined in 1979 by the creation of an autonomous national peasant federation, the Confederación Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (Unitary Syndicate Confederation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia—CSUTCB). The military regime extended its control over the peasant sindicato system through the creation of sub-centrales campesinas, which facilitated the subordination of the community level sindicatos to the Centrales Campesinas. In Mizque, when the new sub-centrales were established in the 1960s, they were fully incorporated into the local network of stateallied economic, political, administrative and social power dominated by ex-hacendados (Regalsky 2003: 108–109). For the first three decades after the 1952 Revolution, municipal authority in Mizque was tightly controlled by the local ex-landowning elite that resided primarily in the town center of Mizque. Nevertheless, the municipality’s access to resources was so limited that the institution had little serious social or political power. As a former mayor from the early 1980s—the son of an ex-hacendado—recalled, municipal revenue was limited to taxes on the sale of chicha (maize beer) and the municipality had only four paid employees in addition to him: an administrative officer, a treasurer, an intendente responsible for public cleanliness and a police officer. Until 1984, the implementation of even modest public works projects by the municipal government required the creation of ad hoc committees to mobilize state resources through clientelist networks (Interview: February 17, 2004). Vecino domination of municipal power generated a deep-rooted assumption, reinforced by Bolivian law and administrative practice, that the purpose of the municipal government was to serve the interests of Mizque’s vecinodominated town center and that rural areas and residents were completely outside the municipality’s area of responsibility. The erosion of the Military-Peasant Pact in Bolivia over the course of the 1970s and the creation of the independent national peasant federation, the CSUTCB, in 1979 opened new opportunities for peasant leaders in Mizque to contest the external and elite control of the sindicato system. It was in the highland region of Raqaypampa, where land markets were less developed, peasant production was less thoroughly integrated into the market-based networks of clientelism and fictive kinship of the Mizque valley, and Indigenous ethnic identities remained strong, that the movement for sindicato autonomy first emerged and became most active. Because market power and socio-

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political power in the Mizque valley were so tightly intertwined, the possibility of peasant political autonomy from dominant political forces was highly restricted. In contrast to the relatively fertile and irrigated land of the Mizque valley, the ecology of the Raqaypampa zone did not support monocrop agricultural production, but it did allow production for self-consumption. As Regalsky (1994: 147) explains, the orientation towards self-consumption was a response to an ecological setting where a lack of irrigation and the dispersion of peasant landholdings into as many as thirty separate plots in multiple ecological zones (ranging from 1,700 m to 3,500 m) meant conditions were unfavorable for market production, while access to cool, high altitude zones facilitated longterm food storage and thus production for self-consumption. In the late 1980s, only one quarter of Raqaypampa’s agricultural produce was sold in the market (Regalsky 1994: 154). The weak development of land markets in the mountainous and unirrigated terrain of Raqaypampa enabled the highland sindicatos to collectively retain a much higher degree of control over local land, which in turn reinforced the relative political power of the local Raqaypampa sindicatos. Although an incipient land market emerged in the sixteenth century with sales of land from caciques to hacendados and subsequently among hacendados, following the 1953 Agrarian Reform the land market in Raqaypampa virtually disappeared. The Reform resulted in the allocation of individual land titles for the plots of land that colonos had farmed on local haciendas and the allocation of collective titles for the remaining hacienda land to the peasant sindicatos. Although the Raqaypampa sindicatos had assigned much of that collectively controlled land to individual families by the early 1990s, as in Jesús de Machaca they retained ultimate authority over it and could revoke access to it when sindicato members left their communities and failed to farm their land. Ledezma and Vargas further assert that the dependence on rain (rather than irrigation) and the fragmentation of agricultural land into multiple tiny plots meant that a complex system of social organization was necessary in order to make agricultural production possible, which in turn strengthened intracommunity linkages and communal organization (2005: 25). Thus, as in Jesús de Machaca, there were strong material incentives for sindicato members to maintain community connections, which helped the Raqaypampa sindicatos to acquire significant moral authority. Moreover, by the 1980s, as the population grew, inheritance became virtually the only means to access agricultural and pasture land, and it accounted for ninety-nine percent of all land transactions in Raqaypampa in 2003 (Ledezma and Vargas 2005: 89). The collective

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moral authority of the General Assemblies of the sindicatos also stood in the way of the sale of land to outsiders. By contrast, in the fertile, irrigated lands of the Mizque valley— with its extensive monocrop production for local and regional markets— land markets were much stronger and peasant sindicatos had very little moral authority to control or prohibit land sales. Although they did sometimes contest the sale of land to outsiders, such efforts were generally unsuccessful (see Regalsky 2003: 123). Given the much higher degree of market production, Mizque valley peasants were also much more thoroughly incorporated into the networks of debt relations, fictive kinship and clientelism of valley-based intermediaries, who also controlled most local state institutions. Over the course of the 1970s, in explicit defiance of the state / exlandlord controlled Central Campesina based in the town of Mizque, highland sindicatos created two autonomous sub-centrales. Despite the repressive efforts of valley-based peasant leaders and administrative authorities, the numbers of Raqaypampa peasant communities affiliated with the independent sub-centrales grew steadily and by 1985 there were five autonomous sub-centrales which represented forty-one sindicatos (see Regalsky 2003: 119–126). Although Raqaypampa peasant leaders contested the leadership of the Central Campesina in Mizque, it remained under the control of valley-based peasant leaders that were incorporated into the ex-landlord dominated networks of clientelist, fictive kinship and market-based power. After the MilitaryPeasant Pact broke down and the CSUTCB was established, a faction of valley-based sindicatos also broke away from the official (oficialista) Central Campesina in the early 1980s and created an autonomous valley-based Central. Throughout the 1980s, the members of the oficialista and autonomous Centrales battled for the leadership of Mizque peasants using strategies of clientelism and fictive kinship as well as coercive tactics and occasional violence (Interviews: JanuaryMarch 2004; July 2006), although never on the scale of the so-called Ch’ampa war between rival sindicato federations that took place in Cochabamba’s central valley during the early 1960s (see Dandler 1986). The higher degree of market-oriented monocrop production among Mizque valley peasants did not lead to significantly higher levels of material prosperity or well-being vis-à-vis their highland counterparts. Indeed, research conducted by a regional NGO found that rates of chronic malnutrition were higher in the valley than in the highland region (Hosse 1994). However, in the context of the domination of local marketing networks by ex-landowners, commercial monocrop production did contribute to high levels of socio-economic

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differentiation within valley communities. For example, by 1991 in the community of Tipa Tipa, thirty percent of agricultural profits were concentrated among seven percent of families, while in the community of Rumi Cancha, twelve percent of families enjoyed agricultural earnings that were ten times greater than those of the other eighty-eight percent of families, and those twelve percent of families owned fifteen times more livestock (Regalsky 1994: 148). Similarly, in the valley community of Tipajara, Miro I Pascual found that in 1996, the wealthiest twenty percent of families owned 57.2 percent of land and 78.5 percent of the irrigated land while the poorest sixty percent of families owned only twenty-two percent of agricultural land, none of which was irrigated (2000: 148). Due to long-term deterioration in the terms of trade for agricultural products vis-à-vis chemical inputs and commercially produced staples, peasant agriculture in both the Mizque valley and Raqaypampa was also characterized by a vicious cycle of land degradation and declining productivity as fallow periods became shorter, the agricultural frontier extended into hillside and highland areas inappropriate for agriculture, and the livestock population exceeded the carrying capacity of local pasture lands (see Ledezma and Vargas 2005: 121–179). As observers from a Swiss technical assistance organization explained following their decision to withdraw from Mizque in 1983 after more than a decade of work in the region: [T]he heavy baggage of the gradual degradation of soil, the expansion of the agricultural frontier, rural poverty, the growth of the population in the central valley with irrigation, pesticide contamination, deforestation, desertification, the erosion and loss of productive lands, the loss of flora and fauna are reducing the productive capacity of the Mizque valley ecosystem (COTESU 1994: 15, cited in Arrieta and De La Fuente 1998: 106).

Faced with declining rates of agricultural productivity and falling crop prices, rates of temporary and permanent migration from Mizque also increased, particularly to the coca-producing region of the Chaparé in northern Cochabamba. Mizque’s physical isolation in relation to other parts of rural Cochabamba also increased over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, as the construction of new roads in other parts of the department shortened travel time to urban markets while the road between Mizque and the city of Cochabamba deteriorated; in dry weather, the 150 km road required ten to twelve hours of travel time and during the rainy season it was frequently impassable. Thus

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disadvantaged in comparison with other parts of rural Cochabamba, both local peasant leaders and town-based vecinos asserted that in the early 1980s Mizque’s economy was stagnant. One prominent vecino described Mizque in that period as “an abandoned rural town” (quoted in Sandóval et al. 1998: 92). From an ‘Abandoned Rural Town’ to a Model of Rural Development?

The severe drought that affected much of Bolivia and southern Peru in 1982–83 further undermined peasant production in Mizque, but it also prompted a small Cochabamba-based NGO, the Centro de Desarrollo Agropecuario (Center for Agricultural Development–CEDEAGRO), to provide emergency relief and subsequently to implement economic development projects in the Mizque valley.13 Over the course of the following seventeen years, CEDEAGRO’s interventions profoundly transformed political dynamics in Mizque by uniting and strengthening valley-based sindicatos within a single Central Campesina, bringing new economic resources and technical support to rural communities, and bolstering the autonomy of the municipal government from the local exlandowning commercial elite. CEDEAGRO fostered a very close relationship with the Central Campesina and municipal government, which many local peasant leaders described by holding up two clenched fists with intertwining fingers. Working together, the three institutions transformed local social and political power relations in Mizque and significantly increased their collective capacity to broker external financial support and to implement rural development projects. As a result of those collaborative efforts, Mizque became widely identified as a developmental or ‘productive’ municipality (municipio productivo), in the early 1990s, well before the term became common in the lexicon of development and decentralization in Bolivia. The same vecino who described Mizque as an abandoned rural town in the early 1980s had a very different view in the mid-1990s: “Now there is more dynamism, more commercial activity; every day crowds of Cochabamba people come and go. This town has come to life again thanks to the Mayor’s office and CEDEAGRO” (cited in Sandoval et al. 1998: 92). While CEDEAGRO’s initiatives attracted significant praise from outside observers, they also sparked new tensions that ultimately led to the forced withdrawal of the NGO from the region and the opening of a new chapter in Mizque’s political history that involved peasant control of municipal power coupled with a decline in external development projects.

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Following its initial provision of emergency assistance during the 1982–83 drought, CEDEAGRO was able to take advantage of a particular conjuncture in the U.S.-led ‘war on drugs’ in Bolivia to gain access to large amounts of funding and to solidify its presence in the region. In the wake of the drought, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) substantially increased levels of aid to areas within Bolivia, including Mizque, that generated large flows of migrant labor for coca production in the Chaparé region. CEDEAGRO successfully bid for much of USAID’s assistance to Mizque (see Kohl 1999: 171–172). The NGO also built upon Swiss aid agency COSETU’s earlier efforts (from 1966 to 1984) to promote peasant cooperative production, which had collapsed largely as a result of the hyperinflation that ravaged Bolivia in the early 1980s (Arrieta and De La Fuente 1998: 105; Miro I Pascual 2000: 186). CEDEAGRO’s work in Mizque was primarily technically oriented and aimed at bringing about improvements in peasant-based agricultural production and marketing through the provision of Green Revolution technology, basic infrastructure, extension services and value-added processing. The NGO organized a number of new productive activities—including the introduction of new fruits to the region as well as the production of honey, yogurt, pasta, wine and butchered meat— that were ostensibly managed by peasant-run producers’ associations. CEDEAGRO also invested heavily in both formal and informal education, especially for girls, and attracted the large volumes of external resources needed to make important investments in local infrastructure—including irrigation and road improvements that cut travel time to the city of Cochabamba from ten to four hours, even during the rainy season. CEDEAGRO also spearheaded the creation of a provincial level institution, the Mizque Province Development Council, which coordinated the development efforts of NGOs, public institutions and civil society groups in the larger province of Mizque, which includes the municipality of Mizque (see Consejo Provincial de Desarrollo 1993; Suarez 1993). As two observers of that initiative wrote, “the efforts to improve production conditions and the quality of life, integrated with local value-added production, improved infrastructure, and the marketing of peasant products acquired an integrated quality in Mizque that is rare in Bolivia” (Arrieta and De La Fuente 1998: 110). Even more important than the technical assistance CEDEAGRO provided was the shift in local power relations that the NGO helped to bring about. Most importantly, CEDEAGRO was able to broker the merging of the official and autonomous Centrales Campesinas under the leadership of the latter and helped to substantially increase the number

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of peasant communities affiliated with the new consolidated Central. In principle, the new Central represented all of the peasant sindicatos in the province of Mizque, which included districts that later became three separate municipalities. However, in practice the Central was dominated by peasant leaders from the rural valley-bottom communities that were closest to the town of Mizque and whose attention to development initiatives and political power were overwhelmingly focused on the municipality of Mizque. CEDEAGRO helped to strengthen the Central by working with it to deliver infrastructure and services to its member communities. In 1987, CEDEAGRO signed a formal agreement with Central leaders to provide integrated rural development services in all of its member communities. By implementing projects in conjunction with the Central, CEDEAGRO substantially bolstered the legitimacy of the peasant organization and its leaders and, as a result, the number of community-based sindicatos affiliated with the Central increased from 143 in 1987 to 191 in 1996 (Miro I Pascual 2000: 188). In 1992, CEDEAGRO also brokered funding to purchase land and to construct a well-equipped office complex for the Central on the outskirts of Mizque’s town center. Significantly, however, CEDEAGRO made no effort to mobilize peasant communities around Indigenous ethnic identities or to encourage pride in Indigenous ancestry. Indeed, CEDEAGRO’s education initiatives reflected a clear modernizing current with their emphasis on Spanish language instruction for children from Quechua-speaking families—a marked contrast to the efforts of a second NGO that became active in Raqaypampa (see below). CEDEAGRO’s distinctively non-ethnic agenda and organizing strategies helps to explain the prevalence of class-based identities and absence of ethnic self-identification and mobilization in the Mizque valley. In addition to their efforts to improve peasant agriculture and marketing, CEDEAGRO and the Central also challenged the elite domination of local politics. In the lead up to Bolivia’s 1989 municipal elections, leaders of the Central agreed to support a bid by Orlando Soriano, then CEDEAGRO’s director, to run for the position of mayor of Mizque. With the support of the Central, Soriano won the 1989 election. He was re-elected again in 1991, 1993 and 1995, and spent a total of ten consecutive years as mayor of Mizque. On the basis of CEDEAGRO’s technical knowledge and carefully maintained connections with aid donors, political parties, and national and departmental bureaucrats, Soriano was able to negotiate significant outside resources for the municipal government. By the late 1990s, because of skillful brokering, almost seventy percent of municipal

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revenue came from international donors and the discretionary funds administered by the central state (De La Fuente and Vásquez 2004: 37). Significantly, political support for Soriano was based not just among the local peasant population, but also among much of the townbased elite. The local merchants, business owners and transport operators who had traditionally controlled municipal politics in Mizque came to recognize the benefits they received from the influx of new donor resources and infrastructure as well as the increased business from local peasant producers and outside contractors, and they actively supported both Mayor Soriano and CEDEAGRO. Urban residents expressed particularly warm affection for CEDEAGRO’s director, Marta García, and for Orlando Soriano, who many referred to in informal conversations as ‘the hope of Mizque.’ Mizque’s town-based elite also supported Soriano’s leadership despite his close relationship with local Indigenous peasants, because, in their words he was ‘bien educado’—implying not just that he was well-educated but also that he was from a mestizo-European racial background and was from the right social class—indeed, he was the son of a former Mizque hacienda owner. The displacement of the local elite from municipal power was thus relatively conflict-free. Although the town-based elite resisted the incursions of peasant leaders into positions of municipal power, the violent conflicts, murders and arson that characterized struggles over political power between peasants and elites in some other Bolivian municipalities were absent in Mizque.14 However, the relationship between Mizque’s municipal government, CEDEAGRO and the Central Campesina was never an equal one. The NGO’s efforts to improve peasant livelihoods were well-intentioned but also paternalistic. CEDEAGRO was always the dominant actor and retained control over outside financial resources and the technical knowledge and political connections needed to broker those resources from the state and aid donors. The organization transferred little administrative and technical capacity to either the municipal government or to peasant leaders. A World Bank team that conducted research on local governance in Mizque in the mid-1990s found that apparent improvements in municipal administrative capacity were entirely dependent on technical support from CEDEAGRO and that it was often “difficult to draw a clear line between the NGO and the municipal government” (Sandoval et al. 1998: 91). They also noted that that the mayor and two municipal councilors were former staff members of the NGO, that CEDEAGRO directors actively participated in municipal council meetings, and that CEDEAGRO brokered external resources and executed projects for the municipal government. CEDEAGRO also

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frequently acted in the place of local peasant organizations. Another observer of local politics in Mizque in the mid-1990s noted that CEDEAGRO tended to speak on behalf of peasant communities in negotiations with the state and aid donors and that the NGO determined how financial resources for rural communities would be spent, while peasant participation “was in the implementation of projects, not their identification, monitoring or evaluation” (Miro I Pascual 2000: 220– 224). The same observer argued that “the assemblies [of the Central] were used to ratify previously made decisions between peasant leaders and CEDEAGRO staff” and that “what appeared as active participation to outsiders was in fact an instrumental mobilization of the peasantry” (Miro I Pascual 2000: 254, 225). Indeed, peasant leaders in Mizque asserted in 2004 that CEDEAGRO’s power vis-à-vis the municipal government and the Central had steadily expanded over the course of the 1990s so that the relationship had become even more unequal over time. The leaders of the Central initially tolerated their unequal position in the partnership with CEDEAGRO and the municipality because it strengthened their authority in member communities and also provided them with direct personal benefits, including regular salaries from CEDEAGRO. As long as outside resources flowed into Mizque valley communities and provided both collective and individual benefits for rural community members, there was little grassroots contestation of the unequal balance of power between CEDEAGRO and the Central. The subordinate position of the Central in the partnership with the municipality and CEDEAGRO became a source of increasing frustration for senior peasant leaders, particularly in the second half of the 1990s when CEDEAGRO and the municipal government developed close links with the Bolivian state and the MNR political party, which made it even more difficult for peasant leaders influence municipal decision making. Miro I Pascual carefully documented a shift in CEDEAGRO’s core funding over the course of the 1990s away from international aid donors and towards the Bolivian state. CEDEAGRO’s leaders argued that the change in funding source was a necessary response to the short time frames and unrealistic demands of foreign donors, but Miro I Pascual asserted that increased dependence on state funds also made CEDEAGRO less attentive and accountable to peasant communities and more concerned with satisfying the demands of state agencies such as the Fondo de Inversión Social (Social Investment Fund—FIS) (Miro I Pascual 2000: 173–178). Politically, CEDEAGRO’s directors had initially aligned themselves with the Movimiento Bolivia Libre political party (Free Bolivia Movement—MBL), an alliance of left-leaning urban intellectuals and NGOs with peasant supporters, and contested the 1989,

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1991, 1993 and 1995 municipal elections under the MBL banner. After Bolivia’s 1993 presidential elections, the MBL joined the MNR-led coalition government under Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada and CEDEAGRO director Marta García became the director of the National Secretariat of Rural Development, which further reinforced the NGO’s ties to the central state and also generated increased outside interest in Mizque. When the MBL lost party status in 1997 due to a decline in voter support, CEDEAGRO’s partisan loyalties shifted to MNR, which remained Bolivia’s dominant political party until 2004. Although the strong connections to the ruling party generated increased access to central state resources, peasant leaders observed a contraction in the responsiveness and downward accountability of the NGO. Peasant leaders were particularly angered by their lack of influence over the financial resources that CEDEAGRO brokered in their name but would not allow them to control, especially the money that CEDEAGRO invested in its extensive office complex and training center, experimental farm, new four-wheel drive vehicles and other machinery, as well as a staff of over 150 employees. Interviews with senior peasant leaders made it clear that the resentment represented both a collective irritation over the subordination of Mizque peasant organizations by CEDEAGRO and the municipal government as well as their own individual frustrations with the obstacles to their own political ambitions and quests for greater personal control over local development resources. The growth of the political movement of peasant coca growers, led by Evo Morales, lent an important ideological component to the struggle for political control among Mizque peasant leaders. The political power of the peasant coca growers’ unions increased steadily through the 1980s and 1990s (see Healy 1991; Sanabria 1993), and by 1995 they had created a national level political party, the Asemblea para la Soberanía de los Pueblos (Assembly for the Sovereignty of the Peoples—ASP), which became a particularly powerful political force in rural Cochabamba. The ASP’s agenda of peasant political autonomy from other political parties and NGOs had a powerful impact in Mizque, both as a result of direct communication between the ASP and Mizque peasant leaders and as an indirect result of the thousands of Mizque peasants who migrated each year to work in the Chaparé and developed significant practical experience with the powerful coca growers’ organizations that formed the core bases of the ASP. In 2000, the ASP was transformed into the Movimiento Al Socialismo (Movement Towards Socialism—MAS) political party, which continued to grow as a national political force and to exert heavy ideological and strategic

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influence on the leaders of the Mizque Central.15 Over the course of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Mizque peasant leaders became increasingly adamant about the need for autonomous political power, which they considered to be possible only through an affiliation with the MAS. Another serious tension in the local political and development process in Mizque was the effective territorial division of the municipality between CEDEAGRO, which worked with the Central Campesina in the Mizque valley, and a second NGO, the Centro de Comunicación y Desarrollo Andino (Andean Center for Communication and Development—CENDA), which worked with the sub-centrales in the highland district of Raqaypampa. The geographic, economic, political and cultural differences between Raqaypampa and the Mizque valley discussed earlier were further reinforced by deep ideological differences and institutional competition between CEDEAGRO and CENDA. While CEDEAGRO promoted an agenda of cultural and technical modernization based heavily on the application of Green Revolution technology and the reinforcement of class-based mestizo peasant identities, CENDA promoted organic agriculture and an ethnodevelopment agenda that prioritized Indigenous self-identification and cultural survival over modernization (see Mair 1996; Kohl 1999: 166– 176). The two NGOs both jealously guarded their spheres of geographic power and eventually established a tacit agreement not to interfere in each other’s territories of influence. As a result, there was very little coordination between the two NGOs and only weak interaction between the peasant organizations which they supported. The most extreme example of the NGO-induced political division of Mizque occurred in 1997, when Raqaypampa leaders boycotted a municipal planning process that resulted in the complete exclusion of Raqaypampa from Mizque’s five-year development plan for the period 1997–2002 and a disproportionately low allocation of municipal resources to the district. 16 Thus, while CEDEAGRO helped to strengthen the Central Campesina within its sphere of territorial influence, it also fostered a division within the broader peasant population in Mizque that helped to keep the Central in a subordinate political position. In the context of Raqaypampa’s marginalization from municipal power, the district’s Indigenous peasant leaders sought political autonomy from both the municipality of Mizque and the Central Campesina. With technical, political and ideological support from CENDA, the Raqaypampa peasant sindicatos and sub-centrales substantially increased their administrative capacities and their political power relative to other actors in the district.17 Particularly important was a struggle with the Ministry of Education to make the school curriculum

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and calendar more responsive to local needs and to reflect the Indigenous ethnic identities of Raqaypampa communities, which culminated in the mid-1990s in a model of local control over education policy that was unprecedented in Bolivia (see Herrera Alvárez 1997; Regalsky 2004: 159–203). In 1997, the Raqaypampa peasant sindicatos and sub-centrales formed their own Central Campesina, the Central Regional Sindical Única de Campesinos Indígenas de Raqaypampa (Regional Autonomous Syndicate Central of Indigenous Peasants of Raqaypampa—CRSUCIR), which still officially belonged to the provincial level Mizque Central, but largely acted as an autonomous organization. In 1998, CRSUCIR leaders began to actively pursue independent municipal status for the district. They quickly acquired status as an official ‘Indigenous District,’ which guaranteed Raqaypampa a share of municipal investment resources based on its proportion of the municipal population, but CRSUCIR’s lobbying for full municipal status had little impact. The tensions among the local development actors in Mizque reached the final breaking point in the lead up to Bolivia’s 1999 municipal elections, partly as a result of the unequal power relations among them and partly because of the raw political ambitions of the senior leaders of the Central Campesina. Orlando Soriano did not stand for re-election in 1999 but instead supported another CEDEAGRO employee who ran as a candidate with the MNR party. CEDEAGRO’s MNR candidate was elected as the municipal councilor with the largest number of votes, which would normally have secured him the appointment by the municipal council to the position of mayor. However, the other newly elected municipal councilors, who represented both Mizque’s town center and rural communities, banded together to block the CEDEAGRO candidate from becoming mayor and instead supported the councilor with the second highest vote count, a peasant leader from a Mizque valley community with a university engineering degree who was not closely connected with the Central Campesina. The condition that both the town-based and peasant members of the municipal council demanded in return for their support of the new mayor was that he sever ties between the municipality and CEDEAGRO. By ousting CEDEAGRO from the relationship with the municipality and the Central, local peasant and town-based leaders hoped that they would gain more control over the resources that CEDEAGRO had previously commanded. However, without CEDEAGRO’s technical knowledge and political connections, the capacity of the municipality and Central to attract development resources quickly diminished. In 2004, the General Secretary of the Central, who subsequently became Mizque’s mayor,

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acknowledged with frustration that the Central no longer had financial support from any NGOs. Municipal budget documents revealed a similar decline in donor support. After the 1999 election, CEDEAGRO ceased almost all of its development work in Mizque and by 2006 it had sold off its production facilities and office complex. CEDEAGRO’s withdrawal from Mizque had contradictory implications for local political power relations and economic development initiatives. Without CEDEAGRO, the external resources that had flowed into Mizque in the 1990s very quickly dried up and the productive activities that the NGO had fostered quickly floundered. By 2004, most of CEDEAGRO’s productive initiatives had ceased functioning entirely and no other NGOs, including CENDA, arrived to take over CEDEAGRO’s projects. At the same time, however, the forced departure of CEDEAGRO opened the political space for Raqaypampa leaders to expand their influence on municipal decision making, and they began to play a much more active role in both the Central Campesina and in municipal politics. With the political power of the local commercial elite weakened after CEDEAGO’s decade-long control of the municipal government and with the NGO now gone from the municipality, the newly strengthened Central began to push hard for greater control of municipal governance in Mizque. From 1999 to 2004, the Central Campesina had supported Mizque’s peasant mayor and the mestizo-dominated municipal council both through its public discourse and through the votes of the single councilor it had nominated and helped to elect. However, over the course of those four years, relations between the Central and the municipal government grew increasingly tense as the Central became more radical in its political pronouncements under the influence of the ASP and then the MAS political parties and insisted on higher levels of accountability from the mayor and municipal council. With no advance warning, leaders of the Central regularly summoned the mayor to general membership meetings to account for municipal decisions, and they demanded a steady flow of detailed reports from the municipality, completely bypassing the municipal Oversight Committee (Comité de Vigilancia), which was the institution mandated by Bolivia’s 1994 Popular Participation Law to play the role of holding the municipal government accountable. In the December 2004 municipal elections, the Central finally gained control of Mizque’s municipal government, winning four out of seven seats on the council and the position of mayor in affiliation with the MAS.18 Raqaypampa and valley peasant leaders each occupied two of the seven council seats, while the position of mayor went to the former Secretary General of the Central, Jhonny Pardo, a young peasant

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leader from the Mizque valley. The remaining three seats were captured by a loose citizens’ coalition that included both Mizque’s Indigenous former mayor and representatives of the town-based mestizo elite. 19 Control of the municipal government by the Central Campesina represented a tentative step towards the democratization of municipal governance in Mizque, but it also created new challenges as peasant leaders became increasingly engaged in the day-to-day aspects of municipal administration. Changes and Continuities in Municipal Administration Under Peasant Control

The greatest practical challenges facing the newly elected peasant leaders in Mizque’s municipal government involved learning how to administer the municipality in accordance with the complex system of laws that regulate municipal governments in Bolivia while satisfying the central state’s demands for accountability, which had intensified steadily after 1994 as municipal transfer payments had increased and in the context of municipal corruption scandals throughout Bolivia. The newly elected municipal officials readily acknowledged that their prior administrative experience was weak and that their leadership of peasant organizations did not fully prepare them for the challenges of municipal administration. Moreover, because the mayor did not feel he could trust the senior administrative officials who had been appointed by previous mayors, he replaced them—as is common—which meant that the institutional memory and cumulative administrative experience within the municipal government was very weak. In this context, the new mayor and councilors often struggled simply to comply with the existing laws that regulated municipal governance rather than working to transform them in accordance with peasant and Indigenous modes of decision making. The new municipal administration did, however, make the allocation of municipal resources for public works projects and social services more transparent than it had been in the past. It established a formula that assigned resources to sub-municipal districts (cantons) on the basis of population rather than political brokering, which resulted in an increased share of resources for rural communities and much greater equity in the distribution of municipal resources. However, the traditional conception of the municipal government as responsible for small-scale infrastructure projects remained firmly intact. Indeed, the very measures introduced to make the allocation of investment resources more equitable also served to carve up the municipal budget into so many tiny slices that nothing

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more ambitious than traditional small-scale community public works projects were even possible. The mayor also revealed a highly traditional understanding of municipal government as responsible for public works projects when he proudly proclaimed in an interview that he hoped to leave a lasting legacy of his tenure in office in the form of a major building or other physical infrastructure project (Interview: November 10, 2006). Although state transfers to municipal governments in Bolivia increased significantly over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s,20 the resources controlled by Mizque’s municipal government remained meager in relation to the demands of rural communities for basic services such as potable water, electricity and access roads. In 2006, the total municipal budget was $1.8 million. The peasant leaders in municipal power quickly realized that the municipal government could not satisfy all of the demands of peasant communities. As a municipal councilor from Raqaypampa explained, “we won’t be able to solve all of our problems with municipal power, there are just not enough resources” (Interview: November 8, 2006). The responses of peasant leaders in the municipal government to the imbalance between community needs and municipal resources varied widely. For the councilor quoted above, the lack of resources highlighted the need for Indigenous and peasant organizations to engage in higher levels of politics: “We have to think beyond the municipal level to strategies such as the revision of contracts between the national government and foreign petroleum enterprises” (ibid.). However, Mizque’s peasant mayor was less ambitious in his political outlook; he simply asserted that the new administration needed to find additional resources to supplement central government transfers, but had little idea of where such resources might be found. When I mentioned the international aid brokering initiatives of the mayor of Cotacachi in Ecuador, Mayor Pardo laughed and admitted that he did not even have a passport (Interview: November 10, 2008). Budget documents further revealed that in his first two years in office, Mayor Pardo did not attract any new non-state resources to Mizque. In spite of the lack of resources and absence of significant administrative changes, community level peasant leaders asserted that the new peasant-led administration had made very important changes in the relations between the municipal government and rural communities that were especially evident when peasants entered municipal offices. Despite of the apparent commitment of Mayor Soriano and the directors of CEDEAGRO to the well-being of Mizque peasants, many community leaders asserted that they had never felt welcome in municipal offices and had been treated poorly and insulted by municipal staff. As one

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community leader contended, “CEDEAGRO and Mayor Soriano only worked with the top-level leaders of the peasant federation, not ordinary peasants. Poor peasants could not access municipal institutions. We were treated poorly by municipal staff and we were frightened to enter municipal buildings” (Interview: November 9, 2006). Peasants from Raqaypampa—who could be easily identified by their distinctive clothing—were treated especially badly by municipal staff and officials, which further aggravated the tensions created by the rivalry between CEDEAGRO and CENDA. In this context, one of the principal expectations of Mizque peasants—especially those from Raqaypampa— for the peasant-controlled municipal government was that they be treated with dignity when conducting municipal business such as paying taxes or requesting municipal services or public works for their communities. As one community leader explained when asked about changes in the municipal administration after the election of Mayor Pardo and the replacement of many municipal bureaucrats: “people who wear sandals [as opposed to shoes; i.e. peasants] are now welcome in municipal offices” (Interview: November 8, 2006). Indeed, conversations with community leaders in 2006 consistently made it clear that they considered the changes in the way they were treated by municipal staff and officials after 2004 to be more important than material improvements in their lives. It is uncertain for how long Mizque peasants will be satisfied with improved treatment by the municipality that is not also accompanied by material improvements, but the emphasis they placed on being ‘treated well’ does highlight the important role that the desire for dignity plays within struggles for municipal power. Peasant concerns about dignified treatment by municipal staff also serve as a reminder that municipal institutions are generally the first point of contact with the state and that it is at the municipal level that state-based discrimination and exclusion are most regularly experienced in everyday life, even if central state authorities are responsible for the most extreme but less frequent forms of marginalization and repression. The Challenges of Administering Municipal Power

Peasant control of municipal power in Mizque generated two particularly difficult challenges for peasant leaders both outside and inside the municipal administration. The central challenge for the leaders of the Central Campesina was to support the peasant-led administration while simultaneously holding it accountable. The primary test confronting peasant leaders in new positions of municipal authority

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was to improve municipal governance and to better serve rural communities without allowing central state regulations to completely determine the character of the peasant-run municipality. The 2004 election of a peasant mayor and peasant-controlled municipal council created a new dilemma for peasant leaders in Mizque’s Central Campesina. Since the end of Soriano’s tenure as mayor in 1999, leaders of the Central had adopted an increasingly adversarial relationship with the municipal government and sought to hold the municipal administration to a high degree of accountability— although this was not always pursued effectively. With their own chosen candidates in control of municipal offices and the Central, peasant leaders in the Central were faced with the challenge of working out a new relationship with the municipal government that balanced support with accountability. Two years after the 2004 elections, the dynamics of that balance still seemed to elude peasant leaders. As a delegate of the Central on Mizque’s municipal Oversight Committee explained, “we see the mayor and councilors as our own people” (Interview: November 9, 2006). Another prominent peasant leader, who had expressed highly critical views of the municipal government in Mizque (and virtually all other political institutions in Bolivia) when we first met in early 2004, had not a word of criticism for the peasant-led municipal administration when we met again in late 2006. Conversations with other peasant leaders and outside observers indicated that this lack of critique did not simply represent an unwillingness to air the ‘dirty laundry’ in front of an outsider but rather genuinely reflected a failure by the leaders of the Central to engage in any serious debate about either the performance of the peasant-led municipal administration or even the value of controlling municipal power itself. Indeed, a staff member with one of the few NGOs that still worked in the Mizque area asserted that the Central Campesina, which completely controlled the municipal Oversight Committee, not only effectively gave up the role of holding the municipal government accountable after the 2004 elections but also undermined the efforts of any other individuals or groups to oversee the work of the municipal administration (Interview: November 13, 2006). The Central’s high degree of political support for the peasant-led municipal government may have been important for the initial transition of municipal political power into peasant control, but by 2006 both peasant and town-based observers generally agreed that political power was unlikely to ever return to vecino control. In the new context of peasant supervision of civic power in Mizque, the inability or unwillingness of peasant leaders to hold the municipal government to

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account did not bode well for the future of municipal governance in Mizque. The lack of criticism from peasant leaders towards Mizque’s municipal government also reflected a second challenge—the absence of any alternative vision of governance and the danger that the peasant-run municipal administration would simply adopt the bureaucratic logic of the state, which in Bolivia includes strong currents of clientelism and corruption. Prior to the 2004 municipal elections, peasant leaders in Mizque saw the municipal government primarily as an institution that controlled resources for public works in their communities, and this perception did not change significantly after 2004. As a group of analysts from CENDA asserted regarding peasant leaders in Raqaypampa, “they understand the municipality as a state institution whose role and function is to distribute state resources to communities in the form of public works” (Ledezma and Vargas 2005: 80). Having implemented a new and more equitable formula for the allocation of municipal resources and with the increased transfer of funds from the central state, most community leaders were content with the amplified flow of funding for public works projects to their communities. In contrast to Jesús de Machaca and to national Indigenous and peasant organizations, peasant leaders from the Mizque valley did not articulate any alternative vision of governance beyond the redistribution of the public works budget from the town center to rural communities. Although Raqaypampa leaders continued to promote the use of Indigenous modes of governance in the Indigenous district of Raqaypampa, they had little influence over the vision of governance for the municipality of Mizque. Indeed, the mayor and municipal councilors, as well as the Central’s designated representatives on the municipal Oversight Committee, all indicated that the primary challenge they faced in their new positions was to learn and comply with the extensive array of central state laws that regulated municipal governments and upon which the transfer of funds to the municipality was conditioned. They all referred to the difficulties of understanding central state regulations, but not one of them questioned those regulations. Rather, they highlighted the importance of complying with central state laws in order to legitimate peasant control of municipal power in the eyes of skeptical observers. As one particularly articulate member of the Oversight Committee asserted, “we have to demonstrate that we can govern better than the previous administrations” (Interview: November 9, 2006). Even the peasant leader cited above, who had been highly polemical when we first discussed municipal politics in 2004, appeared to have shifted his energies to the study of municipal legal

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regulations when we met again in 2006, most likely in the hope of attaining an administrative post or being elected to the municipal council. The more sophisticated critique of dominant modes of administration by Raqaypampa peasant leaders and the alternative model of community-based decision making they had developed to manage local schools and other community resources (see Ledezma and Vargas 2005) was not reflected in the political statements of any municipal officials—including the two Raqaypampeños on the municipal council. The efforts by peasant leaders in Mizque not just to learn and comply with municipal regulations but, indeed, to demonstrate that they could govern more transparently and effectively than previous mestizo administrations highlight what Foucault (1991) described as ‘governmentality’ or the self-discipline of the governed (see Chapter One). In Mizque, peasant leaders experienced governmentality through positive struggle—first to control municipal power and then to expand their legal knowledge and their administrative capacities. These struggles were not imposed by the state but instead were actively pursued by peasant leaders as strategies of individual and collective political empowerment. Rather than contesting the administrative logic of the central state, peasant leaders in Mizque actively imposed it upon themselves in order to demonstrate that they could effectively operate within that logic, the condition for retaining control of municipal resources and administrative power. In Bolivia, the central state clearly attempted to make rural populations more responsible for their own livelihoods through both the Law of Popular Participation and through discursive emphasis on the concept of productive municipalities and good municipal governance (see Postero 2007; Medieros 2001). What is less clear, however, is the extent to which the pursuit of governmentality—in Bolivia generally and Mizque specifically—has actually been successful. Recent ethnographic analyses of development projects in various parts of the world have highlighted the ways in which peasant leaders and other recipients of development aid often ‘perform’ compliance with government and donor goals while pursuing quite different goals backstage (Lund 2001; Mosse and Lewis 2006; Rossi 2006). In Mizque, the challenge is to understand the extent to which peasant leaders have internalized the rationale underlying the laws that regulate municipal governance—a reflection of governmentality—and the extent to which they are performing for the state in order to gain access to municipal power and resources. The question that remains is whether peasant leaders could easily step away from the state-imposed logic of municipal governance

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if they decide that municipal power no longer constitutes a worthwhile political opportunity, a debate that had not yet taken place in Mizque when I most recently spoke with peasant leaders there in 2006. Two other reflections on governmentality that emerge from Mizque are important here. First, the ‘governmentalization’ of Mizque peasant leaders—if in fact it has occurred—is a product of a decades-long struggle for local power. While Foucault and others have emphasized the ‘productive’ elements of governmentality as a voluntary process that involves the relative empowerment of political subjects, the experience of Mizque indicates that peasants had to engage in long-term political struggles over local socio-political power for the ‘privilege’ of being governmentalized. When Mizque peasants were completely excluded from local political power, governmentality was not a question; it was only when they were in a position to seriously contest and control municipal power that the possibilities of governmentality emerged. Second, with the absence of both strong lines of accountability within Mizque’s peasant federation and grassroots pressure to debate the benefits of municipal power, governmentality—or at least the performance of governmentality—seems to be one of the costs of controlling municipal power. Few political opportunities open up for subordinate or marginalized groups that do not entail compromises and trade-offs. An acceptance or partial acceptance of the neoliberal logic of good municipal governance may be one of the compromises that Mizque peasants need to make in order to control municipal power. The question, which I address further below, is whether the acceptance of the state’s rules for municipal governance by Mizque peasant leaders has generated worthwhile benefits for Mizque’s historically excluded peasant population. Struggles for Democracy Within Mizque Peasant Organizations

The increased presence of Mizque’s Central Campesina in the dynamics of municipal power after 2004 brought the internal tensions within the organization to the forefront of local politics. Most importantly, peasant control of municipal power highlighted the relative weakness of democracy within the Central, which was a product of multiple historical legacies: the early breakdown of Indigenous forms of local governance in the sixteenth century, the manipulation of peasant sindicatos by ex-landlords and government agents in three decades immediately following Bolivia’s 1952 Revolution, the subsequent experience of quasi-corporatist governance during the era of Orlando Soriano and CEDEAGRO, and the process of economic and educational

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differentiation among local peasants. Despite widespread reference to the Andean principle of leadership rotation, analysis of the bi-annual election results of the Central revealed the circulation of a small group of peasant leaders through the key executive positions in the Central, a concentration of power that the internal critics of the peasant organization also highlighted in interviews. One outspoken female peasant leader asserted that “the executive members [of the Central] do change positions, but they simply rotate through the different positions on the executive. Essentially the same group of people is always in power” (Interview: February 16, 2004). Similarly, Mayor Pardo explained that before becoming the General Secretary of the Central, he had been elected as president of his community for five years in a row— perhaps an indication of good leadership, but also a sign of concentration of power. Although external efforts to manipulate and control Mizque peasants had centered primarily on the Central Campesina and the sub-centrales rather than individual community level sindicatos, the latter of which had retained a somewhat greater degree of autonomy, democratic decision making did not flourish in community sindicatos either. As Susan Paulson observed in the late 1980s, “Much of the organizational strength and leadership of sindicatos is based in kin and campadrazgo [fictive kin] ties rather than ‘democratic’ relations.… Household networks and nepotism are powerful organizational channels that influence all sindicato processes” (1992: 197). The few peasant leaders who were willing to voice criticisms of the internal politics of the Central argued that the relative weakness of democratic decision making within the organization was also reflected in the large number of closed-door meetings between the leaders of the Central and municipal officials, the withholding of information from base members and the marginalization of women from positions of authority. The voice and political power of peasant women in the Mizque Central was particularly weak—in 2006, no communities in Mizque were represented by women and there were no women in any of the sixteen positions of executive power within the Central, only a parallel women’s organization that lacked any real political power.21 Moreover, none of the Central’s five leaders elected to positions of municipal power in 2004 were women, despite a Bolivian law that requires at least thirty percent of all candidates to be female. The absence of women leaders and gender awareness in the Central was also reflected in the municipal government, which made almost no initiatives to support women’s interests as different from those of men. Indeed, annual budget documents revealed a sum total of two municipal initiatives focused on women—hygiene training courses in fifteen

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communities and the donation of raw materials to women’s artisan cooperatives in thirty communities—worth a combined total of roughly $6,000. The reappearance of exactly the same two ‘gender projects’ in the annual budgets for 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006 suggested the absence of any serious consideration of gender issues within either the municipal government or the Central Campesina. The weakness of democracy within the Central reflected not just the historical legacies of outside control but also differentiation among Mizque peasants, particularly in the Mizque valley communities that dominated the Central. Inequalities in both ownership of agricultural land and access to irrigation water combined with wide variations in earnings from labor migration had fostered the emergence of a small strata of relatively well educated, completely bilingual (QuechuaSpanish) and mostly male peasants who not only dominated the executive positions of the Central but who also saw themselves as distinct from the mass of poorer peasants that they claimed to represent. For example, the peasant leader who occupied the position of president of the municipal Oversight Committee in 2006 had completed a high school degree and numerous administrative training courses—a sharp contrast to the average 3.5 years of formal schooling among rural men in Mizque (see table 5.1). Moreover, he implicitly identified himself as belonging to a separate category than the majority of Mizque peasants, whom he referred to as “those poor rural people.” (Interview: November 9, 2006).22 Conversely, rural peasants also identified their well-educated leaders in positions of power as members of a separate group, often referring to them with the term ‘professional’ in a manner that implied not just a shift in class but also in ethnicity—that is, from Indigenous peasant to mestizo professional.23 Mizque’s mayor from 2000 to 2004, Daniel Velasco, similarly pointed out that since he had graduated from university, many rural peasants in Mizque identified him as a mestizo, despite his upbringing in a near-landless Quechua-speaking peasant family (Interview: January 11, 2004). Significantly, education rather than economic wealth was the key determinant of peasant differentiation in the access to positions of political power within the Central Campesina, and education was not always connected to the ownership of land or other productive resources. For example, Mizque’s two mayors from peasant backgrounds, Jhonny Pardo and Daniel Velasco, both grew up in relatively poor, female-headed peasant households with less than 1 hectare of land and no other productive resources. It was through a combination of opportunities during their obligatory military service, persistence, intelligence and good luck that both managed to finish high

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school—and it was their literacy and numeracy that both claimed had led their communities to nominate them to positions of leadership. The posts of peasant political power in the Central and the municipal government in Mizque are dominated by a small group of comparatively well-educated leaders who still reside in rural communities but who see themselves—and, moreover, are seen by poorer peasants—as belonging to a distinct category of class and ethnicity. The educational divide has facilitated a concentration of technical knowledge of laws, administrative procedures and the ability to interact effectively with outside actors among an elite group of peasant leaders. Through their superior education, these leaders tended to control rather than be controlled by the base members of Mizque’s peasant organizations, all rhetoric to the contrary. The close affiliation between Mizque’s Central Campesina and the MAS political party further reinforced the political power of the educated elite within the Central. For example, despite a frequently repeated claim that peasant leaders ‘govern by obeying’ the grassroots (mandar obediciendo), Mayor Pardo explained with pride the intervention of Evo Morales into a conflict within the Central over the selection of the mayoral candidate for the MAS in Mizque—and the decision by Morales, rather than the base members of the Central, to make Pardo the candidate. It was not clear to what extent senior leaders within the MAS party intervened in other decisions within the Central, but the political allegiance of Pardo and other Central leaders to the MAS, which won Bolivia’s 2005 presidential election, clearly contributed to the relative absence of internal debate within the Central over the drawbacks and benefits of controlling municipal power. It was also apparent that democratic decision making was not a high priority for many of the peasant leaders that represented their community sindicatos in the bi-weekly meetings of the Central. They articulated a strong concern for the allocation of funds for infrastructure and public services to their communities and a desire for respect from municipal officials, but few concerns about democratic process. Based on observations in the mid-1990s, Miro I Pascual argued that In practice, the main goal of the Central was not to democratize the political system but to establish itself as a local force that could attract state concessions and international aid.... An internally democratic functioning of both CEDEAGRO and the Central was not of paramount importance to the rank and file, but the ability of both to deliver goods and attract material benefits to the area. A greater value was placed on the ability to attract concessions than on participatory decision-making (2000: 249).

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Similarly, when I spoke with community leaders in 2004 and 2006, their complaints about CEDEAGRO focused not on the corporatist political system that had excluded them from decision making, but rather the poor quality of CEDEAGRO’s infrastructure projects and uneven distribution of CEDEAGRO and municipal funds to rural communities. Community leaders also demonstrated that they were quite willing to engage in classic clientelist trades of votes for infrastructure investments in their communities, as occurred in 2004 when peasant leaders from one community arranged with Mayor Velasco to truck in their community members to vote in favor of the 2004 civic budget in return for extra municipal funds. What outraged the leaders of other communities after this secret arrangement was discovered was not the clientelist purchase of votes, but rather the allocation of a greater share of resources to another community. When speaking about efforts to halt corruption among municipal employees, Mayor Pardo complained that community members and leaders were mostly uncritical of corruption as long as it remained within accepted limits (Interview: November 10, 2006). In this setting, there was little bottom-up pressure from peasant communities to make the governance of either the municipality or the Central more democratic, and efforts to improve the well-being of rural communities remained almost entirely within the control of the elite group of peasant leaders that controlled the Central and municipal government. It is possible that the increased role in the Central of community leaders from Raqaypampa—where peasant differentiation is less pronounced and bottom-up demands for accountability from leaders are stronger—will create new pressures for internal democratization, but the Raqaypampa leaders with whom I spoke in 2006 did not reveal such an agenda. Conclusion

The gradual deepening of municipal democracy in Mizque has followed a highly uncertain and far from linear trajectory, and has been shaped as much by internal contradictions as by deliberate efforts to democratize municipal governance. While almost all analyses of municipal governance in Mizque have focused attention on the NGO-led innovations of the 1990s, the subsequent path of municipal politics in the twenty-first century indicates that a longer-term historical perspective is needed in order to understand both the factors that have shaped local governance and the relative strength of municipal democracy now. The changes in local power relations engineered by CEDEAGRO during the 1980s and 1990s did play an important role in

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the democratization of municipal governance in Mizque, but they were not the only important factors. Those changes took place in the broader context of long-term transformations in local power that began with the expansion of the hacienda regime and the destruction of Indigenous forms of governance in the sixteenth century; this was followed by the eventual breakdown of feudal agriculture after the 1953 Agrarian Reform and the transition to a highly clientelist political system dominated by ex-landowning elites who re-established themselves as merchants and traders. The changes in municipal governance brought about by CEDEAGRO in the 1990s created an appearance of democratization that attracted much outside attention and did help to shift power away from the town-based mestizo commercial elite, but it also generated new tensions that ultimately undermined the NGO-led democratization project and resulted in the takeover of municipal power by the leaders of Mizque’s peasant movement. In many ways, the peasant leaders who took over municipal governance simply kept the previous hierarchical systems of government in place and uncritically accepted the state-imposed mechanisms of municipal administration. The form of municipal democracy that has emerged under peasant political control has also been shaped in important ways by historical legacies—in particular, the early destruction of Indigenous forms of local governance in the sixteenth century and the period of state corporatism and clientelism from the 1950s through the 1980s that blocked democratic development within local peasant organizations and seriously weakened Indigenous self-identification in the Mizque valley. Moreover, differentiation within peasant communities coupled with uncertain and unequal access to secondary and higher education fostered the emergence of a small elite of well-educated peasant leaders who managed municipal power with relatively weak lines of accountability to rural peasant communities. In that context, peasant leaders have struggled to adapt to Bolivia’s strict legal framework for municipal governance and there have been few peasant-led changes in the formal design or functioning of Mizque’s municipal government. The recent changes in municipal governance in Mizque have been marked more by struggles for municipal power by peasant leaders than by any clear project of municipal democratization. The deepening of municipal democracy has been most evident in the redistribution of municipal investment resources away from the town center and towards rural communities. However, the division of those resources into tiny allocations to each of Mizque’s 140 rural communities undermined the possibility of any significant efforts to improve the livelihoods and wellbeing of rural Mizqueños.

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Indeed, almost twenty years after the initial election of Mayor Soriano in 1989 and the subsequent formation of the tri-partite alliance between CEDEAGRO, the municipal government and the executive leaders of the Central Campesina, the evidence of material benefits from the transfer of municipal power remained unclear. Few Mizqueños disputed that economic activity in the municipality increased under the combined leadership of CEDEAGRO and Mayor Soriano or that the transition of municipal power to peasant control represented an important—although incomplete—step toward the deepening of municipal democratization. However, municipal and NGO efforts were unable to counteract the impacts of broader economic forces such as the declining terms of trade for agricultural products. For example, a World Bank research team found that in the late 1990s, small-scale farmers in Mizque often sold their crops for prices that were below the costs of production (Sandoval et al. 1998: 33). Moreover, the apparent economic dynamism of the CEDEAGRO era quickly disappeared when access to outside resources dried up following the NGO’s forced withdrawal from Mizque in 2000. Furthermore, many of the infrastructure projects that had been constructed by CEDEAGRO—especially irrigation reservoirs and canals and potable water systems—had begun to decay even before the NGO retired from the area, thus reducing the positive impacts of those investments. A comparison of census data from 1992 and 2001 in Table 5.2 indicates some modest improvements in access to basic services, such as electricity and sewage, and slightly improved indicators for education and literacy—which may help to generate economic growth in the future—but little overall improvement in the well-being of Mizqueños: poverty declined by only two percentage points, from ninety-five to ninety-three percent of the population, while life expectancy increased by just one year, from fifty-one to fifty-two years—not the improvements that were expected of a municipality that was presented as a ‘star case’ of good governance and rural development. As one external evaluator of development initiatives in Mizque concluded: “Despite efforts, there has been little progress toward poverty reduction in Mizque” (Rivero 2002: 39). The prevailing response of rural Mizqueños to the lack of improvements in local livelihoods was out-migration. Research conducted by CENDA in Raqaypampa indicated an increase in temporary labor migration from eighteen percent of the population in 1989 to twenty-eight percent in 1999 and an increase in permanent outmigration from 1.2 percent to 3.2 percent during the same time period (Ledezma and Vargas 2005: 38). Anecdotal evidence from Mizque valley residents indicated a similar growth in out-migration there as

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well, both within Bolivia and to Argentina and Spain. Although labor migration has become a necessary component of peasant livelihoods, it also undermines horizontal social relations within rural communities. Paulson found that sindicato meetings in rural Mizque were often postponed because not enough members were present for the fifty percent quorum, and that community members were increasingly unable to rely on reciprocal exchanges of labor with one another because of high rates of labor migration, which in turn fueled a vicious cycle of further labor migration and ongoing erosion of reciprocal relations (1992: 110, 202–203). Table 5.2 Indicators of Well-Being in Rural Communities in Mizque, 1992, 2001 Poverty Life expectancy (years) Illiteracy in rural communities Women Men School attendance in rural communities (ages 6–19) Girls Boys Households with piped water Households with electricity Households with sewage

1992 95% 51

2001 93% 52

59.4% 34.9%

54.8% 27.2%

51.3% 57.9% 26.7% 7.8% 6.5%

70.6% 66.8% 29.1% 23.2% 12.0%

Source: INE 2001.

It is not clear whether the failure to improve the well-being of rural Mizqueños can be most effectively explained by local dynamics such as the design of development projects, the relative weakness of democratic decision making and political infighting or by structural and external factors over which the municipality had little or no control, such as peasant access to land, the declining terms of trade for local agricultural products, structural adjustment policies, and the vicious cycle of poverty and natural resource degradation. However, it is clear that municipal and peasant leaders were unable to mitigate the negative impacts of those structural and outside forces and that they remained primarily ‘administrators of rural poverty.’ Nevertheless, the three-decade long shift in municipal power relations away from the ex-landlord elite to CEDEAGRO to local peasant leaders should not be evaluated only in terms of easily

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measurable indicators of incomes and infrastructure. Community leaders in Mizque were adamant that the control of municipal power by peasant leaders had generated important improvements in the ways in which they were treated by municipal officials and their corresponding sense of dignity and self-worth. Even if it did not generate important material benefits, control of municipal power represented an important victory for peasants, for whom the municipal government had long represented a regular source of humiliation, exclusion and exploitation. Nonetheless, the consequences of the decision by Mizque peasant leaders to concentrate their political energy on the administration of municipal power also remained unclear. In 2006, peasant leaders and community members had not yet begun to debate the limitations of municipal power or the new challenges that it posed, including the self-disciplining of peasant leaders to central government laws. The experience of the first two years of peasant-led municipal governance suggested that the primary benefits of controlling municipal power were rooted more in dignity than improvements in material well-being.

Notes 1 The Mizque development ‘model’ became the basis for the Bolivian government’s Rural Community Development Program (Programa de Desarrollo de Comunidades Rurales) which operated between 1993 and 1997 with a total budget of over U.S. $25 million, 46.2 percent of which was financed by the World Bank (Arrieta and De la Fuente 1998: 99). 2 See, for example, Arrieta and De la Fuente (1998); Campero and Gray Molina (2001); Grootaert and Naryayan (2000); Kohl (1999); Lazcano (1998); Miro I Pascual (2000); Sandóval et al. (1998); Suarez (1996). The critical tone of some of these analyses did not affect the widespread public perception of Mizque as a success story. 3 Source unless otherwise indicated is INE 2001. 4 In the Department of Cochabamba as a whole, the number of tribute payers declined by ninety percent between 1683 and 1773 (Sanchez Albornoz 1978: 36, cited in Regalsky 2003: 51). 5 See Larson (1989) for a broader analysis of the early emergence of peasant-based market production in the Cochabamba region. 6 Research conducted by the Cochabamba-based NGO CENDA in 1986– 1987 found that twenty-seven percent of agricultural production in Raqaypampa was for the market and the remaining seventy-three percent was for consumption (Regalsky 1994: 154). 7 Close to seventy-five percent of the population of Raqaypampa selfidentify as monolingual Quechua speakers (CRSUCIR 2003: no page number). 8 By the 1980s, approximately seventy percent of Mizque valley peasant farms had access to irrigation (Hosse 1994: 106).

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9 One hundred and thirty-one of those large landholdings controlled between 500 and 1000 hectares while fifty-seven of them controlled between 1000 and 10,500 hectares (Rivera Pizarro 1992: 53, cited in Miro I Pascual 2000: 146). 10 Competition with imported food from Chile provoked a crisis on Bolivian haciendas that supplied the mining markets in Potosí and Oruro. In Mizque, many hacendados responded to the competitive pressure by increasing the traditional diezmos (one tenth of the harvest and animals) to septimas (one seventh of production) and also increased the already heavy burden of chicha preparation (Arias 1995: 65). 11 See Lagos (1994) for a detailed analysis of the emergence of a pettybourgeois elite in the rural Cochabamba town of Tiraque following the 1952 revolution. 12 Regalsky tells of one education supervisor in the 1980s, responsible for assigning teachers to rural teaching posts, who was an important regional agent of the MNR and a member of an extended family of transport operators, merchants and agricultural intermediaries (2004: 120). 13 CEDEAGRO was founded in 1981 in the city of Cochabamba by three former staff members of the Jesuit-influenced Centro de Investigación y Promoción del Campesinado (CIPCA), one of Bolivia’s oldest rural development NGOs. 14 For example, in the municipality of San Iganacio de Moxos in the Amazon Department of Beni, the murder of the mestizo mayor, who represented the local cattle-ranching elite, led his outraged supporters to destroy the offices of an NGO that worked with local Indigenous peasant groups and forced many Indigenous peasant leaders into hiding (see Calisaya and Antezana 2003; Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders 2006: 12; see also Booth et al. 1996: 68–74; Roper 2003). 15 In 2003, national level leaders of the MAS decided to prioritize the December 2004 municipal elections as one of the central components of the party’s political strategy and actively encouraged local affiliates, including Mizque’s Central Campesina, to pursue the control of rural municipal governments more aggressively (Senior MAS strategist, interview: March 9, 2004). 16 The introduction to Mizque’s 1997 Municipal Development Plan states that the plan “considers six cantons, covering ninety of the 135 communities of the municipality. The remaining communities [all in Raqaypampa] decided, of their own volition, not to participate in the process and are not being considered in the five year investment plan.” 17 For example, in 1997 Raqaypampa peasant leaders signed an agreement with CENDA and a university in Cochabamba to create an administrative and teacher training center, the Centro de Formación de Alturas de Raqaypampa (Raqaypampa Highlands Training Center—CEFOA). 18 The Central candidates affiliated with the MAS won a total of sixty percent of the 3,941 votes cast, while the mostly town-based citizen’s coalition captured the remaining forty percent (www.cne.org.bo). 19 Bolivia’s 2004 electoral law (Ley de Agrupaciones Ciudadanas y Pueblos Indígenas) enabled citizens’ and Indigenous groups to contest elections without affiliations to political parties (www.cne.org.bo/index.html).

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20 Particularly important was the 2001 Dialogue Law (Ley Dialogo), which transferred funds from the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) agreement to municipal governments for spending in the areas of health, education and basic infrastructure. 21 In 1991, Paulson calculated that seventeen percent of all sindicato members in Mizque were women—that is, they were the official household representative to their community sindicato (1992: 159)—and that in some sindicatos as many as thirty percent of official members were women (1992: 197). For a broader analysis of women’s involvement and marginalization within Mizque sindicatos, see Paulson (1992); and, on the nationwide scale, see Alanes Bravo (1997). 22 “Esa pobre gente del campo.” 23 See Garcia (2005: Chapter 5) for a broader discussion of the challenges Indigenous Peruvians and Bolivians face in merging professional and ethnic identities.

6 From Clientelism to Democracy and Back in Limatambo, Peru

In the late afternoon of August 26, 1980, on a side street near the central plaza of Limatambo, a small Peruvian town in a lush, sub-tropical valley about 80 km west of Cusco, five members of one of the town’s ‘notable’ families of ex-hacienda owners confronted the district mayor, a Jesuit Priest named Pius Hugo Camenisch, and beat him unconscious. As a result of his injuries, Father Camenisch returned to his native Switzerland for medical treatment and gave up the post of mayor, to which he had been appointed during the final months of the military regime that had then been led by General Francisco Morales Bermúdez (Asemblea Pastoral de la Arquidiócesis del Cusco 1980). The attack on the mayor was but one incident in a desperate struggle by the elite families of Limatambo to retain their privileged positions of local economic, social and political power in the wake of Peru’s 1969 Agrarian Reform. The four Jesuit priests who had preceded Father Camenisch in the post of parish priest had all left Limatambo because of conflicts with local elite families that felt threatened by the political support the priests gave to local peasants. Father Camenisch, heavily influenced by the liberation theology that prevailed in the Archdiocese of Cusco in the 1970s and 1980s (Olson 2006) had committed the similar ‘crime’ of working to shift the balance of local social and political power away from the tiny elite of local ex-hacienda families, who lived in the town center of Limatambo, and in favor of the local peasant majority (Asemblea Pastoral de la Arquidiócesis del Cusco 1980). Although municipal governments in Peru at that time had very limited administrative authority and financial resources (Nickson 1995: 237–249; Zas Fritz Burga 1998), local elites in Limatambo fiercely protected their control of the municipal government as a tool for reproducing neo-feudal social and economic power relations. In spite of the re-establishment of municipal elections and extension of voting rights to illiterate citizens following the end of military rule in

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Peru in 1980,1 the local elite of ex-hacienda owners and town-based merchants regained control of Limatambo’s municipal government following Father Camenisch’s forced departure. However, the struggles over municipal power did not end. The newly formed federation of Limatambo peasant organizations almost immediately began to contest municipal elections with the support of Cusco-based labor unions and NGOs. After the loss of three successive election bids, their chosen candidate, an NGO cooperant named Wilbert Rozas, was elected in 1993 for the first of three terms as mayor, and he remained in that position until 2002. During his ten years as mayor, Rozas redistributed municipal resources in favor of the rural peasant majority and established a series of new institutions that aimed to make municipal governance more transparent, participatory and accountable—despite the extreme centralization of national political power by then-President Fujimori and the hostility of Limatambo’s local elite. Indeed, during the 1990s Limatambo was widely considered to be “one of the most advanced cases of municipal democratization in Peru” (Quedena 2003: 23; see also Ávila 2004a), and it became an important model for national reforms implemented to promote municipal democratization after the fall of the Fujimori regime.2 In 2001, then-President Alejandro Toledo traveled to Limatambo to inaugurate a new public employment program, declared Limatambo’s mayor, Wilbert Rozas, to be among the best in the country and praised the participatory nature of municipal governance in the district as a model for the rest of Peru (El Peruano 2001). The World Bank also highlighted the participatory institutions created in Limatambo as models of democratic decision making to promote rural development in highland Peru (2002). Ironically, just as new national laws to promote municipal democratization throughout Peru were implemented in 2002 and 2003, the process of democratic deepening in Limatambo collapsed following the election of a new mayor who re-established traditional forms of clientelist control and vertical decision making. As one local actor observed, ten years of municipal democratization efforts were “blown out like a match” (Interview: July 15, 2005). Heightening this irony, the top-down reforms implemented by the central state that ostensibly aimed to enhance municipal democracy actually weakened it in Limatambo. The design of the new nationwide laws imposed by the state was much less participatory than those that were constructed through grassroots experimentation in Limatambo, but the central government’s laws for municipal democratization carried with them the legal authority and legitimacy of the state. As a result, the clientelist mayor elected in 2002 was not only able to subvert the democratic intent of the new laws with

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relative ease, but he was also able to claim—with legal legitimacy—that his compliance with the letter of the new laws made the locally constructed institutions of municipal democracy redundant. The history of struggle to democratize municipal governance in Limatambo is thus a powerful example of the importance of locally designed—rather than nationally imposed—institutions of participatory decision making. Even well-intentioned reforms to promote municipal democracy that are imposed in a top-down manner by outside institutions can weaken and indeed destroy much more participatory processes that have been painstakingly crafted from below. This chapter examines the rise and subsequent fall of struggles to deepen municipal democracy in Limatambo, with an emphasis on the long-term shifts in socio-economic and political power that followed the implementation of Peru’s 1969 Agrarian Reform Law in the district, the political strategies of the key actors involved in the process, and the design of the institutions that were created to facilitate popular participation in municipal governance. The central argument of the chapter is that Peru’s agrarian reform weakened but did not destroy the economic, social and political power of Limatambo’s local elite, which remained a potent political force opposed to changes in municipal governance that threatened its privileged position. Moreover, despite the appearance of highly participatory municipal governance under Mayor Rozas’ leadership, the ideas and institutions of municipal democratization in Limatambo were also external to the local peasant population and failed to gain deep political support. Peasant leaders supported Mayor Rozas and the democratization process primarily as a means to access public works projects for their communities rather than as an end in itself. As the trajectory of municipal politics after 2002 revealed, many peasant leaders were equally willing to engage in clientelist forms of governance as long as this enabled them to deliver public works and services to their communities, thus highlighting understandings of municipal democratization based primarily on the redistribution of resources rather than changes in the local political process. The chapter begins in Section I with an analysis of the geographic, economic, social, and political setting of Limatambo. Section II then examines the history of struggles over municipal power from the late 1960s to 1993 and efforts to democratize municipal governance from 1993 to 2002. Section III analyzes the subsequent breakdown of the democratization project and the return of clientelist governance. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the legacies of both authoritarian and democratic currents in municipal governance in Limatambo after 2002.

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Table 6.1 Selected Social Data, Limatambo, Peru 1993

Total land area Altitude of town center; variation Total population Rural population Male literacy (over 15 years) Female literacy (over 15 years) First language: Quechua Chronic malnutrition Primary source of livelihoods Agriculture Manual labor Houses with piped water Houses with sewage Electricity Human Development Index (HDI)4 HDI Rank (x / 1,828 municipal districts)5 Life expectancy6

2005 26,296 ha 2,554 m 2,300–4,200 m.a.s.l. 8,413 8,615 7,552 (89.7 7,490 %) (86.9%) 88.7%3 72.6 % 54.6 % 72.5% 85.5 % n/a 47.8 % n/a 44.0 % 37.6 % 25.5 % 15.9 % 11.6 % n/a

n/a n/a 18.6 % 13.7 % 69.0 % 0.520

n/a

1,325th

n/a

65.1 years

Source for 1993 data unless otherwise noted is INEI (1993). Source for 2005 data unless otherwise noted is INEI (2005).

Agrarian Change and Struggles for Local Power in Limatambo

Limatambo’s geography is marked by three ecological zones, which have played an important role in shaping local economic and political power relations between the residents of the town center of Limatambo and the thirty-three rural communities in the district. Driving west from the city of Cusco on the highway to the city of Abancay, one crosses into the municipal district of Limatambo on the altiplano that surrounds Cusco at an altitude of about 3,300 m.a.s.l. The road then rapidly descends to the small town of Limatambo at the bottom of the deep valley created by the Colorado River, a tributary of the Apurímac. At an altitude of approximately 2,500 m.a.s.l., the town of Limatambo and the eleven communities located at the bottom of the valley enjoy a subtropical climate and a supply of irrigation water that supports two annual harvests of a wide variety of relatively profitable commercial crops, including oranges, peaches, tomatoes and avocados. By contrast, the eleven communities located in the highland zone and the fourteen communities located on the mountain slopes between the valley floor

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and the highlands generally lack access to irrigation water and are subject to cooler temperatures, higher winds and frequent frosts that limit agricultural production to one harvest per year of less valuable crops, such as potatoes and onions, which complements the keeping of small-scale livestock. The eleven rural communities and the town of Limatambo itself, which are located close to the road from Cusco to Abancay, also have relatively easy physical access to regional agricultural and labor markets as well as communication links with government and political actors. By contrast, for the residents of Limatambo’s highland communities, many of which lack vehicle access, the trip to the town center requires a four- to eight-hour walk, which limits their access to both regional markets and to local political power. Because of its sub-tropical climate and relative proximity to Cusco, the Limatambo valley was subject to colonial land control early in the sixteenth century (Heffernan 1996). Colonial encommiendas and later haciendas incorporated most of the area’s Indigenous communities into usufruct systems of land and labor control in which access to small plots of land depended on the provision of labor to the colonial estates. In 1572, the Spanish Viceroy Francisco Toledo implemented policy processes of forced population relocation into designated rural towns called reducciones, which forced much of the local Indigenous peasant population into four towns in the Limatambo region and thoroughly undermined the remaining elements of pre-colonial governance, which were rooted in the ayllu system (Quedena 2003: 25). Peru’s 1972 Agrarian Census highlights the dominance of haciendabased agricultural production throughout the province of Anta (of which Limatambo is a municipal district) well into the twentieth century. Until the 1970s, large, semi-feudal estates controlled almost all of the land in Limatambo and relied on coercive forms of labor control rather than capital investments to generate profits.7 Land distribution was marked by a large number of tiny peasant minifundios and a much smaller number of large-scale latifundia. Agricultural modernization was minimal and was concentrated primarily on the small number of medium sized farms (INE 1972b: 557). For example, 1972 census data on the use of farm machinery reveals that 68.42 percent of the agricultural units in the province of Anta with more than 50 hectares of land had never used a tractor. On the nine largest estates, which together controlled 61.2 percent of land in the province of Anta, seven had never used a tractor, implying a very heavy reliance on servile labor (INE 1972a: 4; 1972b: 557). Anecdotal evidence from peasants with strong memories of pre-agrarian reform agricultural practices in Limatambo suggests that the situation there was very similar to that suggested by

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census data for the province as a whole. As in other parts of the Andes, agricultural production based on extensive land control and minimal capital investment also depended on servile social relations, feudal land tenure and elite domination of political institutions. Hacienda-dominated social and political power relations in Limatambo did not go uncontested by the local peasant population, but local peasant struggles were not as well organized or combative as those in the neighboring region of Antapampa to the east or the province of La Convención to the immediate north, both of which gained international attention in the late 1960s and 1970s (see Blanco 1972; Hobsbawm 1969; Guillet 1978; Craig 1969; Saván 1982; Handelman 1975: 70–76, 248). Although a few peasant communities did succeed in gaining control of hacienda land through legal means and land invasions prior to agrarian reform (see Quedena 2003: 26), land control in Limatambo remained highly concentrated until the mid-1970s (see table 6.2). A comparison of agricultural census data for the province of Anta from both 1961 and 1972 indicates only very modest changes in land distribution.8 Nascent market forces did generate some changes in land distribution and agricultural production, with a slight decline in the number of large estates and in the area of land which they controlled, but at a pace that was almost glacial. Table 6.2 Pre-Agrarian Reform Land Tenure in the Province of Anta, Peru, 1972 Land area in hectares 0.1–4.9 5.0–49.9 50.0–2,500 Total

# hectares 10,353.6 4,845.6 79,790.8 94,990.1

% of total land 10.9 5.1 84.0 100.0

# of producers 10,305 344 114 10,763

% of producers 95.7 3.2 1.1 100

Source: INE (1972: 4), elaboration by the author.

Although market forces had weakened the hacienda regime in the southern Peruvian Andes by the late 1960s, it was the implementation of the 1969 Agrarian Reform Law by the reformist military government of General Juan Velasco Alvarado that led to the dissolution of the haciendas and the redistribution of agricultural land in Limatambo and much of the southern Peruvian highlands. Peru’s Agrarian Reform Law was one of the most far-reaching in Latin America, and it was implemented particularly thoroughly in the southern Andean region

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where peasant mobilization was most intense and hacienda-based agricultural production was especially slow to modernize (Handelman 1975: 251–252). In Limatambo, which is physically located in between two of the regions where peasant mobilization against the hacienda regime in Peru was most radical (the province of La Convención to the north and the region of Antapampa to the east), the implementation of the Agrarian Reform Law in 1973 resulted in the expropriation of all of the district’s thirty-one haciendas.9 The National Office of Agrarian Reform (Oficina Nacional de Reforma Agraria—ONRA) transferred most of the fertile valley-bottom land to state-run agrarian cooperatives (cooperativas agrarias de producción—CAPs) while ownership of other, less productive land—especially in the highland and middle altitude zones—was transferred directly to legally incorporated peasant communities (Quedena 2004: 26; Interviews: July 2005, May 2006). Data from Peru’s third Agrarian Census, conducted in 1994, indicate that despite some re-concentration of land in the two decades that followed agrarian reform, land tenure in Limatambo was still relatively equitable—although the productivity of land did vary considerably. In 1994, almost seventy-seven percent of the district’s land was owned collectively by twenty-one peasant communities and seventy-three producers’ organizations; however, in practice there was no collective production and the appearance of collective ownership covered up significant economic differentiation among Limatambo peasants. Nevertheless, both the census data and local peasant leaders clearly indicated that peasant producers controlled the bulk of land in the district. The remaining twenty-three percent of land that was individually controlled was divided more or less evenly between small-, medium- and large-scale landowners (see Table 6.3). Although agrarian reform destroyed the hacienda-based system of semi-feudal agricultural production in Limatambo, it did not completely undermine the social, political and economic power of the exlandowning elite. While land redistribution in Limatambo was farreaching, a provision in the Agrarian Reform Law allowed hacienda owners to retain their estate houses and a small plot of land (known as the minimo inefectable or unidad familiar) that ranged from 5 to 12 hectares and was generally the most productive land from their former estates. The implementation of agrarian reform represented a massive blow to the economic power of Limatambo’s landowning elite, but in relative terms they remained a privileged group and still controlled larger and more productive plots of land than most other producers in the district. Following the agrarian reform, some hacienda families sold their remaining land and moved to Cusco, but others, including some of

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the most powerful families, chose to stay. Since post-reform landholdings in the fertile and fully irrigated valley lands still allowed two harvests per year and enjoyed relatively easy access to urban markets in Cusco, the ex-hacendados remained the dominant economic and political actors in the district, especially as they diversified into local commercial activities, including agricultural trade, the sale of farm supplies, transportation, restaurants and money lending. Moreover, despite the progressive influence of liberation theology priests in Limatambo in the 1970s, shortly after Father Camenisch was attacked in 1980, control of the Archdiocese of Cusco shifted to a conservative Bishop, and subsequent priests in Limatambo played much less active roles in local politics—neither supporting nor criticizing local politicians. Table 6.3 Land Tenure in Limatambo, 1994 Surface area (hectares) Collectively controlled land (hectares)

% of surface area

# of producers

% of producers

20,236.6

76.9

21 peasant communities: 19,724 ha 73 producers associations: 512 ha

n/a

1,754 individual producers

100% of individual producers

Individually controlled land (hectares) 0.1–4.9 5.0–49.9 50 +

6,060.0

23.0

2,656.7 1,960.5 1,442.7

10.1 7.4 5.4

Total

26,296.7

100

1,555 184 15 94 collective producers + 1,754 individual producers

88.7% 10.5% 0.8% n/a

Source: INEI 1994 (elaboration by the author).

Thus, in spite of land redistribution, pre-reform social and political power relations in the district were slow to change. Through lobbying efforts and the careful tending of clientelist relations with politicians in Cusco and Lima, Limatambo’s notable families were able to maintain nearly exclusive control of local state offices until the early 1990s— including the positions of justice of the peace (juez de paz), governor

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(gobernador) and mayor. For example, prior to the appointment of Father Camenisch in 1980, the mayor of Limatambo had been the matron of one of the district’s leading notable families and her husband had been the justice of the peace.10 The previous mayor had been the patron of the town’s most powerful family (Asemblea Pastoral de la Arquidiócesis del Cusco 1980). The social and political power of the exhacienda families in Limatambo was further reinforced through control of the only local radio station in the district, manipulation of patronage and fictive kinship networks, and their roles as the principal sources of credit available to local peasants. Anecdotal evidence suggests that in this setting, servile social relations persisted much longer in Limatambo than they did in other parts of the highlands after agrarian reform, and that the exercise of power by local notable families in Limatambo was unusually arbitrary and coercive. For example, until 1993, peasant communities were expected to provide volunteer labor to clean the central plaza, streets and sewage ditches of Limatambo’s town center. Similarly, peasant leaders recalled that in the late 1980s, the mayor prior to Wilbert Rozas had disciplined a group of peasants for spreading rumors about him by forcing them to drop their pants and then spanking them in his office (Landa 2004: 103), thus reinforcing their de facto status as children. In that political setting, the municipal government operated exclusively in the interests of the town center of Limatambo. Control of local economic, political and social power in Limatambo did become less concentrated after agrarian reform as some peasant families were able to diversify and expand their economic activities into petty commerce, often as the result of temporary labor migration, which increased following the break up of the haciendas. Nevertheless, as they moved from rural communities to Limatambo’s town center, the small but growing sector of truck and bus drivers and small-scale merchants gradually shed their peasant political allegiances and became important allies of the ex-hacienda elite in an emerging political cleavage between rural peasant communities and the town center—the geographic center of local elite power.11 Following the implementation of the Agrarian Reform Law in Limatambo, the ONRA established a series of state-run agrarian cooperatives as part of its broader effort to boost agricultural production (see Brass 2007; Korovkin 1990; McClintock 1981). Peasant leaders who were involved in the cooperatives in the 1970s described them with bitterness and frustration. They asserted that Limatambo peasants had resented the cooperatives primarily because they denied peasants individual control over what they perceived as their own land, an indignity that was compounded by the quasi-feudal behavior of state-

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appointed cooperative managers, who included several former administrators (mayordomos) of local haciendas and the sons of exhacienda owners from other parts of the southern Andes.12 When it became evident in the late 1970s that the system of agricultural cooperatives had failed to increase production in relation to population growth and it was abandoned by the military government (see Caballero 1986), the peasant members of Limatambo’s cooperatives mobilized quickly to dissolve the system. While most of the cooperative land was transferred to the collective control of peasant communities, in practice, agricultural production became an entirely individual endeavor and only pasture land was managed collectively. In theory, participation in the management of agricultural cooperatives might have strengthened the organizational capacities of Limatambo peasants. However, in reality, the cooperatives were managed by government-appointed administrators who, local peasant leaders asserted, operated in an authoritarian manner similar to that of pre-agrarian reform hacienda managers. As a result, between the implementation of the Agrarian Reform Law in Limatambo in 1973 and the final dissolution of the cooperative system in 1979, Limatambo peasants focused their political energy on struggles to break up the agricultural cooperatives. In research in other parts of the southern highlands, McClintock (1981) found evidence of significant changes in the attitudes of peasants towards the principles of collective participation that resulted from their involvement in agricultural cooperatives. However, in Limatambo, peasant leaders from the 1970s asserted that they learned more from struggling against the cooperatives than from participating in their management. Together with the elimination of the literacy requirement for voting in 1979 and the transition from military to elected civilian rule in 1980, the termination of the cooperative system marked the beginning of a new political context in which the energy of Limatambo’s peasant leaders shifted away from struggles over land access and cooperative management to struggles for municipal power. In the midst of the transition from military to civilian rule and the final dismemberment of the cooperative system, peasant leaders from two valley-bottom communities near the town of Limatambo created the District Peasant Federation of Limatambo (Federación Distrital de Campesinos de Limatambo—FEDICAL) with support from the Departmental Peasant Federation in Cusco, a branch of the Peruvian Peasant Confederation (Confederación Campesina del Perú—CCP) that was then dominated by members of competing radical left political parties (see Handelman 1975: 132–135; Van Cott 2005: 146–150). Although FEDICAL

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officially represented all of the peasant communities in Limatambo, in practice it was dominated by relatively well-off peasant leaders from the valley-bottom communities with good land that had the most frequent interaction with the town center, departmental peasant leaders in Cusco and NGO staff. In spite of their relatively privileged economic situations, FEDICAL leaders nevertheless adopted the discourses of the radical left peasant leaders in the Cusco Federation of Peasants and emphasized the need to struggle for political power rather than concentrate on production and marketing issues.13 In the mid-1980s, FEDICAL began to receive financial and logistical support from a Cusco-based NGO, represented in Limatambo by Wilbert Rozas, who continued to support FEDICAL’s radical political discourse and its focus on struggling for political power rather than delivering technical services Struggles for Municipal Democracy in Limatambo

Efforts by peasant leaders to oust the ex-hacienda elite from municipal power in Limatambo began with the first municipal elections after the period of military rule ended in 1980. Initially the quest converged with the political project to promote participatory municipal democracy of the United Left (Izquierda Unida—IU), a national coalition of seven left political parties (see Remy 2005: 23–31; Roberts 1995: 222–230).14 In Limatambo, the IU contested the municipal elections of 1983, 1986 and 1989 with official support from the peasant federation, but lost by wide margins in all three attempts to members of the local ex-hacienda elite. In contrast to its discourse of participatory democracy, the decision making structures of the IU in Limatambo were hierarchical. Rozas, himself an IU member at that time, acknowledged that candidates and election platforms were determined by party cadres rather than the district peasant federation, and they failed to reflect the concerns of local peasants or to develop an organic relationship with them (Interview: May 18, 2006). Indeed, in 1983 the IU selected its mayoral candidate for Limatambo on the basis of his seniority in the party rather than political experience in Limatambo. Although he received formal support from the leaders of the peasant federation, he received few votes from rural peasant communities (Wilbert Rozas, interview: May 18, 2006). Thus, despite its participatory rhetoric and practice in other parts of Peru, in Limatambo the IU was marked by what Guerrero referred to as the “ventriloquism of the left,” that is, the tendency of leftist activists to speak for marginalized social actors rather than encourage them to represent themselves (1993). As De la Cadena argued, this tendency

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reflected deeply engrained views of Indigenous peasants as “illiterate, rural simpletons who needed guidance from more educated classes” (2000: 192). The ventriloquism of the IU leaders in Limatambo was reinforced through the parallel tendency of the peasant federation to seek out external intermediaries to represent it in municipal elections and in interactions with higher levels of government. As Seligman (1995) observed in the nearby district of Huanoquite, Quechua peasant communities have frequently lacked confidence in their own capacity to effectively negotiate with the outside, Spanish-speaking world of formal politics and urban culture, and have often selected local political actors with lighter skin, higher levels of education and urban backgrounds as brokers to mediate relations with outside institutions. Similarly, Guillet identified the key qualities that peasants in the nearby communities of Anta thought were most important for the representatives of their communities to posses in the late 1970s: literacy, bilingualism, oratorical ability and an ability to interact effectively with the outside institutions. He then noted that “there are few peasants…who have all of [these] requirements” (1979: 158), which explained the frequent preference for outside actors to mediate between peasant communities and external institutions. In Limatambo, the preference for outside intermediaries was reflected in the support from the leaders of the peasant federation for Father Camenisch, the candidates of the IU, and later for Wilbert Rozas, the latter of whom was then the director of a local NGO. In spite of its participatory discourse and agenda, the United Left marginalized local peasants from the central positions of political agency in local politics throughout the 1980s. However, a new political conjuncture opened at the end of the 1980s, when the IU disintegrated as a result of internal factionalism (see Roberts 1995: Chapter 8). In the lead up to Peru’s 1993 municipal elections, peasant groups throughout the province of Anta decided to create their own political party—the Popular Peasant Union (Unidad Campesina Popular—UCP)—and to launch their own candidates in the elections. In early 1992, FEDICAL chose a slate of candidates for the municipal council (all leaders of the federation) and a candidate for mayor, Wilbert Rozas, who was known locally simply as compañero Wilbert. Like previous intermediaries, Rozas was light-skinned, university educated and from an urban background. Rozas was well aware of the tendencies of peasant communities to choose outside intermediaries to represent their interests as well as the dangers of well-intentioned paternalism. He claimed that he was not a typical “white-skinned savior” who thinks that he has all the answers and asserted that “for me, the

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most important thing is not what class you come from, but what class you struggle for” (Interview: May 18, 2006). Rozas’ experience in peasant communities in Limatambo and the surrounding region and his commitment to them was indeed much deeper than that of many other outsiders and involved more than two decades of political activism and development work in the area. In the 1970s, Rozas had been an active leader in the peasant struggles against the state-run agrarian cooperatives in the nearby district of Anta, which were some of the most radical in Peru at that time. In the early 1980s, he moved to Limatambo, where he began to work as a cooperant with a Cuzco-based rural development NGO, married a local woman and started a family. Over the course of the 1980s, Rozas was also actively involved in the political campaigns of the IU in Limatambo. Although never a candidate, Rozas’ vision of municipal politics was very much shaped by his experience in the IU as well as his previous involvement in more radical clandestine and vanguardist politics in the 1970s, as was evident in his articulation of both vanguardist and participatory approaches to local politics. More important, however, from the perspective of the local peasant population was Rozas’ track record as a local ‘aid broker’ who brought outside resources from the NGO to rural communities. Rozas’ class and education combined with his NGO management skills, his fluency in Quechua, and work experience in local communities to make him an ideal intermediary. It was largely on the basis of those skills that the peasant federation chose Rozas as its mayoral candidate in 1992. Initially reluctant, Rozas eventually accepted the nomination. Following the elections that were postponed to early 1993 after President Fujimori’s 1992 self-coup, Rozas was elected as mayor with sixty-five percent of the popular vote (Landa 2005: 73). Nevertheless, despite his history in Limatambo and deep commitment to peasant struggles, Rozas remained an outsider, and his overly optimistic understanding of peasant commitments to municipal democracy ultimately contributed to the collapse of democratization efforts in Limatambo. In the campaign for the 1993 municipal elections, Rozas and the slate of candidates for the municipal council chosen by FEDICAL deliberately highlighted and deepened the social cleavage between the local elite based in the town center and the rural communities of Limatambo in an effort to generate peasant support. Rozas and his supporters consistently referred to the town-based elite and their candidates as llaqta taytas, a Quechua term which literally means ‘fathers of the town’ but which also refers to the authoritarianism and abuse of pre-agrarian reform semi-feudal landlords. Rozas repeatedly called attention to the past abuses of the pre-reform elite as a strategy to

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undermine support for the candidates of the town center. There was little evidence of the inter-cultural strategy pursued by Auki Tituaña in Cotacachi, Ecuador to generate political support among the local mestizo elite (see Chapter Three). As a result, the election of Rozas and four of the five peasant candidates nominated by FEDICAL to positions of municipal authority came at the expense of a growing political divide between the rural peasant population and the town-based pettybourgeois and ex-landowning elite. That divide subsequently created serious challenges for Rozas’ tenure as mayor and for the broader project of municipal democratization. Indeed, leading members of the local ex-hacienda elite referred to Rozas’ tenure as mayor as a period of “class warfare against the vecinos of the town” (Interview: July 2005). In response to Rozas’ efforts to undermine their control of the municipal government, the town-based elite responded with their own war-like political strategies, which had considerable impact. It is important to note that Rozas’ deliberate efforts to highlight and exacerbate rural-urban tensions explicitly played on class and geographic identities but only referred to ethnicity in very implicit ways. Although roughly ninety percent of the population of Limatambo speaks Quechua as a first language and can claim Indigenous ancestry (Quedena 2003: 25), as in most of the rest of highland Peru rural communities have not self-identified or mobilized politically as Indigenous. Some scholars have sought to explain the absence of Indigenous political mobilization in Peru through analyzing the lack of political opportunities for Indigenous organizing and the deep penetration of class-based discourses and organizational forms into rural communities in the latter part of the twentieth century, which contrasts with the experiences of Bolivia and Ecuador (Van Cott 2005; Yashar 2005). Other scholars have emphasized the avoidance of explicit forms of Indigenous identification by Quechua-speaking peasants as a strategy for confronting racism and social exclusion (i.e. De la Cadena 2000). As García (2005) argued, Quechua-speaking parents in rural highland communities resoundingly rejected the Peruvian state’s proposals for bilingual education because they associated explicit markers of Indigenous culture with discrimination and exclusion that would limit the life chances of their children. Nevertheless, as both García (2005) and De la Cadena (2000) make clear, although Quechua-speaking peasants did not explicitly rally around ethnic banners, elements of Indigenous culture—including language and other practices—were clearly woven into their political identities and practices. Both scholars also encourage other researchers not to focus attention on the apparent absence of Indigenous identities and political mobilization in Peru but,

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rather, to direct analysis towards the identities and political strategies that have emerged in rural highland communities. It is impossible to know how much the absence of a strong Indigenous identity in Limatambo shaped the struggle for municipal power and the experiment in municipal democratization. It was clear that the deep penetration of colonial and republican institutions into rural communities—from haciendas to agrarian cooperatives—had severely weakened Indigenous forms of governance such as the ayllu and that it was very unlikely that local peasants would mobilize around any political project to re-construct forms of governance that were explicitly labeled as Indigenous. However, as De la Cadena pointed out, Andean peasant culture has remained an important—if not explicit— part of everyday politics in highland Peru (2000: 326). In Limatambo, the struggle against racist abuse and for dignified treatment and respect from local officials was an important part of the quest for municipal power by peasant leaders. Moreover, Quechua became the de facto language of local politics as municipal governance became more inclusive of rural peasants. The design of new municipal institutions was also based on community-based modes of governance, which did still include traditions of leadership rotation and consensus decision making despite the influence of the competitive, hierarchical and clientelist institutions imposed by the Peruvian state. Elements of Indigenous culture and governance were thus clearly interwoven into the struggle for municipal power in Limatambo, though they were never explicitly identified as such. Nevertheless, much more important to the struggles for local power in Limatambo were the hostility of local elites and the relative weakness of FEDICAL. These two elements created a situation that was marked by a wide gap between the highly politicized class discourse and strategic orientation of its top leaders and the pragmatic concerns with daily survival of its base members. Following the 1993 election, Rozas and his team of councilors immediately made it clear that their government would represent only the interests of peasant communities—to the exclusion of the vecinos of the town center, whom they actively portrayed as directly connected to the pre-agrarian reform landlords. This approach was necessary, they argued, in order to rectify the injustices of hundreds of years of systematic exclusion and exploitation. According to the accounts of many vecinos, it was an unintended symbolic act that impressed upon them most clearly the pro-peasant orientation of the new municipal government. Shortly after Rozas’ inauguration as mayor, the municipality held a two-day meeting with male and female representatives from all of the district’s rural communities to plan the

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terms for community involvement in municipal governance. At the end of the first day, a group of young mothers hung their children’s freshly washed but well-worn diapers from the second floor balcony of the mayor’s office facing the town plaza. Based on the many times that local vecinos recounted this story to me, it was clear that the image of the ragged diapers blowing in the wind on the balcony of the mayor’s office signaled the shift in control of municipal power—and their exclusion from it—even more powerfully than the official election results. Rozas and his team outlined more specific plans for the governance of Limatambo in a municipal development plan that was published shortly after the inauguration. Unlike the highly technical and detailed development plans that began to emerge from other rural municipalities in the early 1990s in an effort to attract international aid, Plan Limatambo was short, straightforward and written primarily for local community leaders rather than development professionals. In its three pages, the plan indicated that the new focus of the municipal government would be to incorporate peasant communities into municipal decision making and to invest municipal resources in public works for rural communities, with a focus on potable water and access roads.15 While it was Rozas’ democratization project that gained the most attention from NGO, academic and media circles, peasant support for Rozas was much more closely tied to new investments in rural infrastructure than to changes in municipal decision making structures. Efforts to respond to the basic infrastructure needs of rural communities enabled Rozas to win re-election bids in 1996 and 1999 (with seventysix percent and fifty-six percent of the popular vote, respectively).16 The strong electoral endorsement led both Rozas and his supporters, as well as many outside observers, to confuse peasant backing for rural infrastructure projects with commitments to new democratic institutions and to overestimate peasant commitments to the new decision making structures that Rozas put in place. The centerpiece of Rozas’ efforts to democratize municipal governance in Limatambo was the Consejo Comunal (Communal Council), which was created to give peasant communities an active voice in municipal decision making through elected community representatives. The Consejo was composed of three male and three female representatives from each of Limatambo’s thirty-three rural communities—and none from the town center, which was completely excluded from the new institution. The Consejo members were elected to the executive in community meetings for two-year terms. The executive of the Consejo was responsible for communicating decisions with the municipal government and other external actors; it also rotated

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with each meeting in an effort to prevent concentrations of power in individual community leaders. Initially, the Consejo met monthly, but the large number of meetings proved to be unsustainable and was scaled back to four meetings per year. The specific functions assigned to the Consejo were to allocate municipal investment resources, to monitor the progress of public works projects, and to hold municipal authorities financially accountable. The Consejo Comunal also nominated the candidates for positions of local political authority, including the justice of the peace, district governor, and candidates for mayor and council. Although it had no formal legal status, for Rozas and the leaders of the peasant federation the Consejo Comunal was the institution with the highest moral authority in the municipality—like the Parlamento Indígena in Guamote, the Asemblea Cantonal in Cotacachi, and the Cabildo in Jesús de Machaca—and the municipal government was morally but not legally obliged to accept its decisions. In politicalinstitutional terms, the Consejo took over de facto legislative functions from the municipal council—which saw its relative authority erode, while the mayor (with some participation from the municipal council) played the role of municipal executive, implementing the decisions of the Consejo Comunal. The most immediate impact of the Consejo Comunal in Limatambo was a radical redistribution of the municipal investment budget from its historically established focus on the town center towards the rural communities of the district. Although municipal budget documents from the period were not available,17 Rozas and municipal councilors from his three terms in office asserted that they had inverted the proportion of municipal investment in the town center and rural communities from seventy and thirty percent respectively to thirty and seventy percent—a radical change from the perspective of both local peasants and vecinos— even though the municipality’s total budget was still meager. The responses of local vecinos to the Consejo Comunal varied from a refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of an institution that they perceived to be “dominated by ignorant people from rural communities” (Interview: July 17, 2005) to systematic efforts to undermine both the Consejo Comunal and Rozas, whom they quite correctly identified as the central actor responsible for the institution’s existence. Rozas himself described his first term in office, from 1993 to 1995, as a “virtual war” (Interview: May 18, 2006). Shortly after his election, he began to receive death threats and found dead cats and chickens nailed to the door of his house. Later in 1993, a group of masked thugs broke into Rozas’ house and beat him in front of his family—an incident that provoked a mass protest march by peasants from several nearby

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communities to the homes of Limatambo’s leading ex-hacienda families, who were presumed to be responsible for the attack. When it became clear that the use of physical violence to oust Rozas from power could backfire against them, local vecinos adopted more subtle strategies to undermine the mayor’s authority. In the context of the internal war between the Peruvian state and the Sendero Luminoso guerillas in other parts of southern Peru, Rozas was anonymously denounced four times to the police anti-terrorist agency for terrorist activity, and the Consejo Comunal was officially denounced as a terrorist training school. Although Rozas was eventually declared innocent of all four allegations and the operation of the Consejo was not interrupted, Rozas was forced to dedicate a great deal of time and energy to his legal defense—which distracted his attention from the governance of Limatambo. When the war with Sendero ended in the mid-1990s, political opponents concocted evidence with which to accuse him of other crimes. First, they paid a prostitute to declare (untruthfully) in court that Rozas had raped her when she was six years old. When that case collapsed they presented another case against Rozas, claiming that the allocation of municipal investment resources by the Consejo Communal—rather than by the municipal council—constituted a misuse of public funds. Opponents filed charges against Rozas for the embezzlement of funds equal to the total amount of all resources allocated by the Consejo during his tenure in office, a case that was still ongoing in 2008. In a weak effort to improve relations with the town center, the members of the Consejo Comunal voted in 1995 to change the name of the institution to become the Consejo Comunal y Vecinal (Community and Neighborhood Council—CCV) and amended its internal structures to make room for representatives from Limatambo’s town center. Although some vecinos did take part in the meetings of the CCV, those I spoke with made it clear that they perceived the name change as a purely rhetorical gesture that did nothing to alter the domination of the institution by peasant communities and they remained hostile to Rozas’ administration. The effective functioning of the CCV and the appearance of participatory democracy in Limatambo were both heavily dependent on the externalization of conflict from the formal institutions of municipal governance. The CCV was able to operate as a deliberative body because the deeply rooted class and ethnic cleavages in Limatambo were not given political expression within it, but rather clashed outside it instead. Few vecinos took part in the meetings of the CCV and most of them continued to oppose not just Rozas’ leadership but the very existence of the CCV as well. In the context of the relatively

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homogeneous social base of the CCV members—overwhelmingly from rural peasant communities—the internal functioning of the institution was relatively harmonious. For outsiders, that apparent harmony created the impression of a highly inclusive and participatory institution and helped to generate Limatambo’s reputation as a star case of participatory democracy in Peru. However, the externalization of conflict from the CCV was not sustainable in the long term since the vecinos who felt excluded from the CCV never accepted it as a legitimate mechanism for municipal decision making. Because they were given no real opportunities to voice their concerns within the new institution, they sought to undermine it completely. Moreover, the close association of the CCV with Rozas’ leadership seriously weakened its autonomy—at least in the eyes of local vecinos, who saw it as a political instrument of Rozas and FEDICAL leaders rather than a neutral space for collective decision making. Peru’s central government, controlled by President Alberto Fujimori from 1990 to 2000, also responded to the political experiment in Limatambo with hostility, and systematically used its tightly controlled and highly centralized clientelist system of governance to weaken local democratization initiatives (Revesz 1998; Cotler and Grompone 2000). Fujimori’s 1993 Decree Law 776 not only cut state transfers to municipal governments by almost eighty percent but also gave the central government complete discretionary control over those transfers (O’Neill 2005: 202). As one Peruvian analyst argued, Decree Law 776 …not only asphyxiated [the municipalities] economically, it severely restricted their autonomy…. It introduces the most gross arbitrariness, the most obvious verticalism, the most absolute subordination, and the most blatant manipulation into the relations between the Central Government and the municipalities (Delgado Silva 1995: 14, 27, cited in O’Neill 2005: 202).

In Limatambo, Rozas and former municipal councilors from the 1990s asserted that central government transfers to the municipality were frequently withheld in a highly arbitrary manner to punish the municipality for the implicit critique of Fujimori’s regime that the Consejo Comunal represented, a trend that was also noted by Quedena in several other municipal governments in Peru (2003: 13). It is thus important to emphasize that the experiment in democratic deepening in Limatambo developed not only in the complete absence of decentralization or municipal democratization legislation, but in a context of active aggression from the central state.

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Although peasants from Limatambo’s rural communities were supportive of the Consejo Comunal and the subsequent Consejo Comunal y Vecinal (CCV), it became clear that their support was more pragmatic and less based on principles of democracy than Rozas and other proponents of the institution had hoped for. The leaders of peasant communities recounted in interviews that they considered the CCV to be important primarily because of the access that it gave rural communities to municipal resources for small public works projects. As in the other experiments in municipal democracy examined in this book, it was not so much the decision making process within the CCV that peasants claimed to value, but rather its effectiveness at generating resources for their communities. The priority concern that peasant delegates to the CCV placed on the allocation of municipal resources rather than issues of transparency and democratic process was clear from the energy that they dedicated to lobbying for public works projects during the meetings of the CCV, to the exclusion of almost all other matters of local governance. Part of the role of the CCV was supposed to be financial oversight of municipal spending, and by all accounts Rozas made significant efforts to account for municipal spending to the CCV, which was a rare novelty in Peru during the 1990s. However, in a frank assessment of the weaknesses of the institution, Rozas noted that even when encouraged by him or municipal councilors, community representatives asked very few questions about municipal finances and focused almost all of their energy on debates about public works projects for their communities (Interview: July 17, 2006). As became clear following the 2002 municipal elections, many peasants were also quite willing to engage in clientelist relations with local politicians that promised to provide public works and jobs to their communities; they had supported the CCV primarily because of its efficacy in allocating public works and employment in them to their communities. As Ávila noted in a study of municipal democratization efforts in the highland department of Ayacucho, peasant communities in rural Peru are frequently characterized by “a local political culture which considers that public works are a synonym for good governance—with little consideration of the procedures (democratic or otherwise) through which public resources are allocated” (2003: 5). Similarly, Salman used the term “apocryphal citizenship” to describe the highly pragmatic ways in which poor people in Latin America typically engage with state institutions—not on the basis of their perceptions of their rights as citizens but, rather, in what they perceive as the more viable strategies of pursuing favors or clientelist exchanges from those in power(2004: 853). Through their behavior in the CCV, peasants in Limatambo made it

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clear that they understood democratization primarily in terms of the redistribution of material resources, not changes in political process. Although its proponents claimed that the CCV was designed to reflect the internal decision making processes of peasant communities, peasant perceptions wavered ambiguously between perceptions of the CCV and municipal government under Rozas as internal institutions rooted in peasant communities and external bodies with external funding (Landa 2004: 98). Accounts from those who had participated in and observed the meetings of the CCV made it clear that peasant delegates to the institutions saw it primarily as an intermediary institution for negotiating public works projects rather than a forum for working out strategies for responding to the challenges that faced their communities. Moreover, the municipal resources that the CCV administered were also almost completely external; central state transfers accounted for ninetyeight percent of the municipality’s budget. The external origin of municipal resources further contributed to the perception of the CCV amongst peasants as “an institution for soliciting services and public works in front of which they had only rights and no responsibilities” (Landa 2004: 100). In a manner similar to Cotacachi’s participatory budget system (see Chapter Three), the CCV’s representatives of rural communities acted in ways that reflected perceptions of good leadership that were closely connected to success in brokering services, jobs and infrastructure projects, and were quite willing to use clientelist strategies to broker those goods—thus marking the CCV with a strong element of ‘clientelist democracy’ exerted from the bottom up. The design of the CCV, heavily influenced by Rozas and his experiences with the United Left from the 1980s, also presupposed a highly organized, homogeneous and horizontal civil society in Limatambo’s rural communities. In practice, the internal politics of rural communities in Limatambo were much more heterogeneous and divided as a result of socio-economic differentiation, small-scale clientelist networks controlled by shop owners who regulated access to credit, and the many personal rivalries and feuds that frequently characterize small communities. The common experiences of domination by the hacienda regime and frustration with vecinos’ control of municipal government were not sufficiently potent unifying forces to overcome the economic, political and personal factors that divided community members. The effective functioning of the CCV required that communities meet to discuss their concerns and priorities before its quarterly meetings and that delegates to the CCV report back on the deliberations of the institution to their fellow community members; however, such meetings and communication often did not occur in practice. As Mayor Rozas

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later reflected, one of the key errors that he and other designers of the CCV had made was to assume that the community delegates to the CCV would communicate closely with their communities and that adding a new layer of political representation through the CCV would generate widespread popular engagement in and ownership of municipal governance (Interview: May 18, 2006). The CCV developed a relatively strong base of support amongst the community representatives who were formally involved in its deliberations, but it remained poorly understood and only weakly supported by most peasants in Limatambo, who ended up having no direct experience with it. Although the CCV did contribute an additional degree of representation to the political process in Limatambo, it was never really either a ‘participatory’ or ‘deliberative’ institution. Only a small minority of local peasants ever had any direct involvement in it and discussions focused much more on dividing up municipal investment resources than on debating solutions to local problems. As a staff member from one of the NGOs that worked in Limatambo pointed out to me, and as Rozas also acknowledged, internal decision making processes in Limatambo’s rural communities diverged substantially from the idealistic vision on which the CCV was based. In many communities, participation in the CCV meetings was dominated by local brokers and their close supporters, who communicated very selectively with their communities and the other representatives to the CCV (Wilbert Rozas, interview: May 17, 2006). The lack of strong concern with democratic process—as opposed to redistribution—among individual rural communities and the relatively weak support for the peasant federation (FEDICAL) can be understood as a combined result of the long history of clientelist social relations in Peru and the highly political orientation of FEDICAL itself. As Salman (2004) argued, in political settings characterized by long legacies of clientelism, popular claims based on clientelist exchanges are broadly perceived as more likely to bring about desired outcomes than claims based on abstract principles of democracy and citizenship. The relatively short experience of peasant involvement in the CCV was insufficient to bring about a shift in peasant political behavior from pragmatic brokering to democratic citizenship. Moreover, the highly political orientation of FEDICAL leaders, who were generally from the strata of better-off valley-bottom peasants, and their focus on struggles for local political power rather than efforts to improve peasant production and marketing also contributed to the relative failure of the federation to establish a strong base of supporters. From its origins, FEDICAL’s leaders had adopted the highly politicized class-based discourse and confrontational political strategies of the Departmental Federation of

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Peasants in Cusco, and they had focused their energy on contesting local power relations rather than on more technical issues related to agricultural production and marketing. Indeed, in discussing what he saw as the strength of FEDICAL, a former municipal councilor and FEDICAL leader asserted that “the federation was always very strong and active—it was involved in many protest marches” (Interview: July 17, 2005). That political orientation was central to the eventual ascent to municipal power of Rozas and his team of peasant councilors, but it also carried a political price. Without a strong focus on the immediate challenges to local peasant livelihoods, FEDICAL did not ever develop a strong base of popular support in rural communities. The core group of leaders, primarily from valley-bottom communities close to the town center of Limatambo, tried to rally ideological commitment to the local peasant struggle for political power. But outside of those communities, peasants saw relatively few practical benefits from involvement in the federation and maintained only a lukewarm commitment to it that was based primarily on its capacity to deliver tangible resources. FEDICAL’s attention to practical production issues did increase in the second half of the 1980s and 1990s when it acquired modest financial and technical assistance from two non-governmental organizations—first PROCAMPO and later CEDER (both of which had employed Wilbert Rozas).18 The infusion of outside aid from those NGOs helped to bolster support in rural communities for the peasant federation as it acquired the capacity to influence the distribution of NGO resources. However, that support remained shallow and was based more on the quasi-clientelist pragmatism of local peasants than a genuine commitment to FEDICAL, as would become painfully clear following the departure of both Rozas and CEDER from Limatambo in 2003 (see below). FEDICAL’s inability to ensure the sustained operation of the CCV beyond Rozas’ tenure as mayor was further compounded by its failure to maintain organizational autonomy from the municipal government and Rozas. Following the 1993 election victory, FEDICAL provided crucial political support to Rozas’ efforts to create the CCV and to redistribute municipal resources in favor of peasant communities. However, in pouring its energy into Rozas’ democratization project, FEDICAL also lost its autonomy from Rozas and the municipal government. In the context of hostility from local vecinos and the lack of support from the national government, FEDICAL leaders dedicated significant energy and time to providing political support for Rozas and the CCV, including numerous public marches in both Limatambo and Cusco to support Rozas against the accusations of terrorism, rape and

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embezzlement described above. In that setting, FEDICAL leaders could not devote sufficient resources to monitoring municipal officials or to holding them accountable. By the end of the 1990s, FEDICAL was broadly perceived by its opponents in the town center, as well as by some of its own members, as an organization that was dedicated more to the political protection of the mayor than to serving the interests of local peasants. However, the only explicit opposition or critique of the participatory project in Limatambo came from vecinos, who were determined to destroy the project completely. In sum, the political struggle to support the CCV and Rozas’ pro-peasant agenda ultimately weakened both FEDICAL and its capacity to sustain its struggle for municipal political power. Following the 2003 municipal elections, FEDICAL was even further weakened by the clientelist strategies of the new mayor, who deliberately sought to destroy the CCV and other elements of the democratization project in Limatambo. The Breakdown of Municipal Democratization: A Chronicle Foretold?

The 2002 municipal election was the decisive conjuncture that marked the breakdown of democratization efforts in Limatambo, but the speed with which the project broke down following those elections also reflected more deeply rooted problems. When Rozas neared the end of his third term as mayor in 2002, he recognized that after serving as mayor for ten years, his chances of re-election in Limatambo were small. His personal political ambitions led him to contest the mayorship of the province of Anta (of which Limatambo is a district),19 which he subsequently won. In Limatambo, Rozas arranged for a young protégé who had served with him on the municipal council to take his place as the candidate for mayor. Peasant leaders asserted that the mood among voters in their communities in 2002 had favored a change in mayors but that support for the CCV and the ongoing role of peasant communities in municipal decision making remained strong. Peasant leaders had expected that regardless of who won the election, the CCV would continue to function as before since all of the mayoral candidates had pledged support for the institution. The defeat of the mayoral candidate supported by Rozas and the election of a new mayor with little interest in the municipal democracy project resulted from a combination of both strategic political errors and changes in Peru’s broader structural and institutional context. The central factor that Rozas and other former councilors emphasized in their post-mortem analysis of the 2002 elections was that the candidate

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they had supported lacked political experience and was overly confident that he would win the elections, so he did not campaign as actively as he should have. They also acknowledged that popular support for the candidate supported by Rozas declined following a conflict over the control of a central government development fund between Rozas and the Secretary General of FEDICAL, who subsequently launched his own mayoral campaign that split electoral support for candidates affiliated with democratization initiatives. The proliferation of mayoral candidates that followed the increased decentralization of resources to municipal governments in Peru in the early 2000s further undermined support for Rozas’ preferred candidate. In 1995, representatives of five political parties had contested the municipal elections in Limatambo; in 1998, there were nine parties; and in 2002, twelve parties ran in the elections. As in many other parts of Peru, the growth in the number of candidates did not represent an increase in the number of ideological or policy options on offer, but simply an increased number of personal quests for municipal political power (Remy 2005). In the context of such a large number of candidates, it not only became increasingly difficult for any one candidate to attract a statistically large proportion of the local vote, but FEDICAL leaders also found that they lacked the authority and legitimacy to rally peasant support around a single candidate and that peasant votes were highly fragmented. The results of the 2002 elections also made it clear that support for the Consejo Comunal y Vecinal in rural communities was not as deep as many outside observers had believed. The widespread perception of both the design of the CCV and the funds that it allocated as external to Limatambo’s rural communities undercut peasant support for the institution. At the same time, the deep animosity that Rozas and the CCV generated among vecinos who felt excluded from municipal decision making created a strong base of opposition against the CCV itself and the democratization project more broadly. Although the vecinos of the town center represented a small minority of Limatambo’s population, they still enjoyed disproportionate political influence as a result of their relative wealth, control of fictive kinship and clientelist networks, and with their physical proximity to municipal offices. The failure of Rozas and his team to generate support—or at least acquiescence—from the vecinos in the town center ultimately contributed to the downfall of the democratization project in Limatambo—an important contrast with other municipalities such as Guamote and Jesús de Machaca, where the political power of vecinos was weak and could be safely ignored.

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The breakdown of the democratization project also highlighted the heavy dependence on the leadership of Wilbert Rozas as mayor. As one long-time peasant leader acknowledged, “Everything had depended on Wilbert. But we did not recognize that until it was too late” (Interview: July 24, 2005). Although FEDICAL had initiated the broad struggle for municipal power in the early 1980s, following his election in 1993, Rozas had played the lead role in determining the strategies and institutional design of municipal governance. Staff members of the NGOs that had worked in Limatambo during Rozas’ tenure as mayor all agreed that the CCV was much more a personal project of Rozas’ than an initiative of FEDICAL. Moreover, the combination of a relatively weak social movement for municipal democratization and elite hostility against it facilitated opportunities for quasi-authoritarian behavior by Rozas. The peasant leader quoted above argued that there was a widespread feeling of frustration within FEDICAL that “Wilbert would be mayor forever, that he always had to be at the top, in charge of everything” (ibid.). While some analysts have identified talented and charismatic leadership as a key condition for democratization and good governance (Van Cott 2008; Tendler 1997), it was clear in Limatambo that the central role of the mayor in the democratization project was a sign of weakness rather than an asset. After three terms as mayor, the struggle for municipal democracy in Limatambo had become so closely associated with Rozas that it could not survive his departure from the mayor’s office. As a staff member of a Cusco NGO that had worked closely with dozens of rural municipal governments pointed out, the history of municipal democratization initiatives in the rural highlands was littered with innovative experiments that began and ended with the leadership of a particular mayor (Interview: May 18, 2006). In the absence of strong social movements for municipal democracy and in the presence of elite groups hostile to efforts to undermine their political power, the heavy reliance of municipal democratization efforts on individual mayors like Rozas poses a difficult dilemma. On the one hand, in such contexts, mayoral leadership necessarily plays a central role in efforts to democratize municipal governance; on the other hand, however, democratization efforts that heavily rely on mayoral leadership have consistently collapsed when those mayors have been replaced. It is thus crucial that analyses of municipal democratization initiatives distinguish between political projects that are directed primarily by an individual mayor and those backed and promoted by much broader social movements that are capable of sustaining political and institutional changes for more than one term in office. At the same time, the experience of Rozas as mayor of Limatambo highlights the ways in

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which struggles for municipal democracy in the Andes and elsewhere interweave participatory discourses and strategies with pragmatic tactics of clientelism, fictive kinship and quasi-authoritarian practices. The candidate who won the mayoral elections, Victor Vera, astutely played on the opposition to Rozas’ democratization initiatives among vecinos, the desire for public works projects and employment in rural communities, and the increased frustration with Rozas’ overbearing role in local governance. Although Vera had unsuccessfully contested the three previous municipal elections as a candidate with the Cambio 90 party that had been created by Alberto Fujimori, he had developed a sophisticated understanding of local politics. As a Quechua-speaking accountant from a peasant family in the rural community of Pampacanga, which was on the road to Cusco, Vera was able to simultaneously appeal to both vecinos and peasants. He also had strong fictive kinship connections to Limatambo’s leading ex-hacienda family, through which he enjoyed access to an important base of electoral resources—and he employed these resources to full effect in his campaign. Numerous peasant leaders, including some who acknowledged that they had voted for Vera, asserted that he had actively employed clientelist electoral tactics of offering individual employment, public works projects and outright offers of cash in return for votes. Several community leaders explained that members of their communities had voted for Vera in response to bribes for as little as one sole (roughly thirty cents) and that promises for both permanent jobs in the municipal government and casual employment in public works projects had been widespread. Indeed, after Vera was inaugurated as mayor in early 2003 the number of part-time and full-time workers employed by the municipality swelled from thirteen to forty-eight— many of whom were leaders from peasant communities who were rewarded for their political support. The success of the clientelist electoral strategies that Vera used in rural communities revealed the relative shallowness of support for the principles of participatory democracy. When Vera presented an alternative, clientelist political option to rural voters that promised similar results in terms of rural public works and employment, many peasants chose it. At the same time, several peasant leaders also argued that in the context of the ongoing crisis of small-scale agriculture, many peasants were more susceptible to clientelist offers than they had been in the recent past when they felt their livelihoods to be less precarious. There is no local data to back up these assertions, but the perception among small-scale producers in Limatambo of a steady deterioration in the prices they received for their crops since the early 1990s was widespread and

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coincides with analysis of national agricultural production trends (Crabtree 2002; Eguren 2004: 62–64; 68–71; Vargas Mas 2004; Gonzales de Olarte 1996). Over the course of his four years as mayor, Vera worked systematically to undermine the democratization project in Limatambo, the civil society organizations that had supported it, and the legitimacy of its leading proponent—Wilbert Rozas. In the first meeting of the CCV following Vera’s inauguration as mayor, he made it clear that he did not recognize the institution’s moral authority and did not feel obliged to follow its decisions (Landa 2005: 74) Without the political support of the new mayor, FEDICAL leaders and CCV members were unable to sustain the institution and by the end of 2003 it had stopped meeting completely. The inability of FEDICAL to sustain the CCV was further compounded by Vera’s success in establishing individual clientelist relations with the elected leaders of numerous rural communities in the district: in return for cash payments, employment in municipal public works projects and even in the municipality itself, leaders stayed quiet as Vera ignored the CCV and worked to undermine FEDICAL and other local peasant-based civil society organizations. Vera’s strategy for undermining FEDICAL involved not just the establishment of clientelist relations with community leaders who belonged to the federation, but also the creation of alternative civil society organizations and the establishment of collective clientelist ties with them. As an alternative to FEDICAL in valley-bottom communities, Vera orchestrated the creation of a new district level Agrarian League (Liga Agraria) to promote the production interests of local small-scale farmers with irrigated land. Vera brokered new external assistance for the Agrarian League and also generated the impression that he was responsible for other outside support that had already existed. In July 2006, the Agrarian League negotiated the final details of an agreement with a World Bank-financed development fund to provide credit and technical assistance to its members to help them grow and market export-grade fruit crops, primarily avocados. By creating and then also brokering external assistance for the Agrarian League, Vera capitalized on the genuine frustration among many peasants with the failure of FEDICAL to work on livelihood and production issues. As a result, many small-scale producers with irrigated valley-bottom land shifted their allegiance from FEDICAL to the new Agrarian League. In the context of negotiations for the free trade agreement between Peru and the United States, which was signed in 2006, many valley-bottom agricultural producers indicated that they felt their only hopes of economic survival lay in the acquisition of loans and

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technical support that would enable them to produce competitively for external markets, and they were willing to pay the price of political acquiescence to Vera in return for such technical and financial support, thus further debilitating FEDICAL. The Secretary General of FEDICAL blamed the capacity of Mayor Vera to undermine the peasant federation and the broader democratization project on the lack of “education” and political maturity among the peasant population: “Local peasants have still not matured politically. They accept clientelist offers of public works, jobs, chicha, money, even a box of matches for their votes. The CCV died because people sold their political consciousness for gifts” (Interview: July 24, 2005). In Limatambo’s eight highland communities, Vera fostered the break away from FEDICAL of the Committee for the Development of Highland Communities of Limatambo (Comité de Desarrollo de las Comunidades Altas de Limatambo—CODECAL), which had previously been part of the district-wide peasant federation. He also managed to arrange the election of a close supporter as the first president of the newly independent peasant organization. In the town center, Vera encouraged vecinos to organize the Front for the Defense of the Interests of Limatambo (Frente de Defensa de los Intereses de Limatambo) as a way of helping to legitimize the demands of the local elite under the guise of a formal civil society organization. The first president of the Frente de Defensa in 2003 was the son of the former owners of the Hacienda Tarawasi—one of largest haciendas in the district until 1973. Mayor Vera also effectively silenced the district level Organization of Peasant Women (Organizacion de Mujeres Campesinas de Limatambo), which had been an important ally of FEDICAL in the struggle for municipal power in the 1980s and 1990s. Mayor Vera was able to seriously weaken the women’s organization through clientelist manipulation of the state-sponsored Glass of Milk (Vaso de Leche) program, which had been created in 1980 to provide milk and other basic food staples to impoverished families with small children. Fearful of losing access to free and subsidized food, many of the presidents of community level women’s organizations became deliberately passive in the face of Vera’s efforts to undermine both their own organization and the larger peasant federation. Moreover, Vera gave the president of the Vaso de Leche organization in Limatambo a full-time job in the municipal government, which effectively secured her political support and the acquiescence of the organization. As a result of Mayor Vera’s clientelist political tactics and deliberate efforts to undermine the municipal democratization project in Limatambo, the two NGOs that had previously worked closely with

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local peasant organizations ceased their activities in the district. The first NGO, CEDER, had worked with rural communities in Limatambo since the mid-1980s and had been very closely associated with Rozas, FEDICAL and the peasant struggle for political power in the district; indeed, Rozas had worked as a cooperant with CEDER during the late 1980s and early 1990s before becoming mayor. Because of its close association with Rozas and FEDICAL, Mayor Vera forced CEDER to end its development activities in Limatambo (Director of CEDER, interview: July 21, 2005). The second NGO, PRODER, had established an agreement in 2002 to work with CODECAL and the eight highland communities that it represented when CODECAL was still part of FEDICAL and Wilbert Rozas was still mayor. However, after Vera was inaugurated in 2003, PRODER cooperants found that their efforts were undermined by a lack of cooperation from the municipality as well as the new mayor’s deliberate efforts to manipulate and undermine CODECAL. As a result, in early 2005 PRODER formally ended its activities in Limatambo and withdrew all of its funding from CODECAL. As the director of PRODER later asserted, “development work is not possible in these conditions” (Interview: May 19, 2006). The withdrawal of the two NGOs meant that FEDICAL and CODECAL lost their only sources of external funding. For FEDICAL, the loss of funding meant that it could no longer bolster its legitimacy by brokering development projects for member communities. As a result, peasant participation in the organization and support for its leaders began to wane even further. For CODECAL, the loss of external funding helped to accelerate the acceptance of clientelist relations with Mayor Vera. A third NGO, which provided technical support for municipal planning, continued to work with the municipality under Mayor Vera’s leadership in the hopes that it could coax him towards increased transparency and openness in decision making, but it offered no support to any of the peasant organizations. In this context, the director of PRODER concluded that “there is no bottom-up agenda for democracy in Limatambo” (Interview: May 19, 2006). A staff member from PRODER provided a similar assessment of the state of municipal democratization efforts in 2005: “Now there is nothing. The process depended completely on the leadership of the mayor [Wilbert Rozas] and even after three terms in office that spread over ten years, the participatory process was not internalized and appropriated by the local population. It was blown out like a match” (Interview: July 15, 2005).

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Legacies of Municipal Democratization

Although the central elements of municipal democratization efforts in Limatambo ceased to function after 2002, the process did leave some important legacies toward the peasant struggle for municipal power. First, although Mayor Vera worked to undermine the democratization project, he himself was a partial beneficiary of it as the first Quechua mayor of the district. In spite of his hostility to the expansion of popular involvement in municipal decision making, he clearly demonstrated to local mestizo vecinos that, as an NGO observer put it, “an Indian [sic] could be mayor” (Interview: July 15, 2005). Another enduring legacy was that Quechua-speaking peasants from rural communities continued to be perceived as legitimate municipal authorities. Indeed, all of the political parties that contested the 2002 and 2006 elections included candidates from rural communities among the top positions on their electoral lists, a phenomenon that did not exist before Wilbert Rozas was first elected mayor in 1993, when the candidates were overwhelmingly town-based mestizos (Wilbert Rozas, interview: May 17, 2006). Second, under Vera’s direction, the relative distribution of municipal resources continued to favor rural communities and the municipality continued to invest heavily in rural public works projects.20 Indeed, although Vera undermined the project of peasant-based political power in the municipality, his crucial base of electoral and political support still came from rural communities. Although town-based vecinos enjoyed much more influence over municipal affairs during Vera’s administration than they had during Rozas’ tenure as mayor, they could no longer dominate municipal affairs to serve their own political and economic interests as they had prior to 1993. The semi-feudal social and political power relations between local ex-hacienda families and rural peasants remained seriously weakened. The ex-hacienda families had lost their privileged positions of social and political power; they could no longer coerce local peasants with threats of physical violence or monopoly control of local public institutions and had to rely on much more subtle and uncertain mechanisms to influence local politics such as legal denunciations, fictive kinship relations and the spreading of rumors. Moreover, as the director of an NGO with strong ties to Limatambo explained, peasant differentiation in Limatambo had generated new Quechua-speaking patrons in rural communities with sufficient wealth to generate their own localized networks of fictive kinship and clientelist political control, which weakened the larger clientelist networks of the ex-

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hacienda families. In this context, patron-client and fictive kinship relations in Limatambo were becoming de-racialized, and the ethnic and ideological basis of local political cleavages weakened as a growing number of Quechua-speaking patrons emerged to contest the economic and social power of the former ex-hacienda elite. Despite the changes in social power relations in Limatambo, clientelism continued to flourish, although in different forms than those that existed in the pre-1993 period. First, as Fox (1994) argued in the case of Mexico, after the 1990s clientelism in Limatambo was no longer backed up by the threat of physical violence. Second, clientelist relations became much less stable and were connected less with the economic and social power of particular families and more with the temporary political power of whoever happened to be in a position of authority to control access to political resources (jobs and public works). As Landa (2005) argued, by the late twentieth century, clientelism in rural Peru had become much more flexible than it had been in the past and clients were able to abandon patrons who did not hold up their end of the tacit bargains that sustain clientelist relations. Thus, while patron-client relations were still unequal, the dependency of clients on their patrons and the control that patrons exercised over their clients has diminished significantly over the past two decades. In Limatambo, Mayor Vera was able to undermine the project of municipal democratization by establishing extensive clientelist networks that undermined the political power of the district peasant federation. Nevertheless, the relative durability of those networks was weak and Vera’s power as a patron depended entirely on his temporary position as mayor, which came to an end after he lost his bid for re-election in 2006 and was replaced by a new mayor affiliated with the APRA party of President Alán García (2007–2011). The Disconnect Between Decentralization and Democratization in Limatambo

Ironically, municipal democratization efforts in Limatambo collapsed just as Peru’s national congress passed new legislation, in 2002 and 2003, to decentralize financial resources and administrative authority to municipal governments and to deepen municipal democracy in a drive to reverse the extreme centralization of government power and resources engineered by the Fujimori regime.21 Indeed, the new laws actually contributed to the weakening of municipal democracy in Limatambo by substituting nationally designed institutions for citizen involvement in municipal decision making that were significantly less representative

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than the Consejo Comunal y Vecinal that had been operating in the district for ten years. Although in principle the new legislation created a more solid legal basis that local political actors could draw on in struggles to deepen municipal democracy, in practice the capacity of municipal authorities to evade and manipulate the new laws proved to be much stronger than the abilities of local citizens to use them as political resources. Two new laws and associated institutions played particularly important roles in creating the appearance of municipal democratization in Limatambo while simultaneously weakening it in practice. The first was the Participatory Budget Law, passed in 2003, which required all municipal and provincial governments in Peru to implement specific procedures to incorporate civil society participation into budget allocation processes. The second was Law 27783, passed in 2002, which established Local Coordination Councils (Consejos de Coordinación Local—CCL) as a new mechanism for civil society participation in municipal governance. The respective designs of the Participatory Budget Law and the Local Coordination Council (CCL) were both much less participatory than the CCV, and both institutions were easily subject to political manipulation. Although the names and acronyms for the CCL and CCV were very similar, the design and operation of the institutions were very different. While the CCV created spaces for the formal participation of more than 180 community representatives in its quarter-annual meetings—half of them women—the CCLs are composed of the mayor, municipal councilors and civil society representatives in a 60:40 ratio, so that in districts like Limatambo with a mayor and five councilors, the CCLs include four unpaid civil society representatives. As a result of the new legal requirement and a national media campaign to promote the CCLs, Mayor Vera and municipal councilors could ignore Limatambo’s CCV while still maintaining an illusion of participatory democracy. As one councilor explained when I asked her about the role of the CCV in municipal governance, “now we have the CCL instead” (Interview: July 18, 2005). Similarly, several senior peasant leaders acknowledged that in the context of the legal mandate for CCL, it would be extremely difficult to revive the CCV, which had no formal basis in Peruvian law. Despite detailed rules, the laws that regulated participatory budgeting in Peruvian municipalities were easily manipulated by municipal authorities in Limatambo who complied with the letter but not spirit of the law.22 Such manipulation was relatively easy in rural settings such as Limatambo’s, where information about the laws was difficult to acquire and popular knowledge about them was extremely

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weak.23 Compliance with the Participatory Budget Law is required in order for municipal governments to receive transfer payments from the central government. However, as a municipal official in the provincial government of Anta explained, The Law of Participatory Budgets is relatively easy to satisfy in terms of the amount of citizen participation that is required to create and approve a so-called ‘participatory budget.’ The participation of the members of the CCL is sufficient for a budget to qualify as ‘participatory’ [and therefore be approved by the central government]” (Interview: May 16, 2006).

In Limatambo, Mayor Vera was able to orchestrate the nomination of political supporters to the four civil society seats on the CCL and to move through the legally required steps of the participatory budget process with very little public participation. I attended the meetings in which the municipal budget was presented for civil society approval in Limatambo in 2005 and 2006, and in both cases the majority of those in attendance were political supporters of Mayor Vera affiliated with the Liga Agraria. FEDICAL leaders did not attend and claimed that they had not been invited. During the meetings, which lasted for roughly three hours, municipal officials presented detailed accounts of public works investments from the previous year and the proposed municipal investments for the following year—the latter of which had already been worked out by the CCL. Attendees did not have the opportunity to review financial information before the meeting and few appeared to take careful note of any numbers except for those that applied directly to their own communities. Attendees were then asked to vote publicly to approve the budget—which they did with no visible dissent. While municipal officials satisfied legal requirements by subsequently submitting budget data to the provincial government in Anta, FEDICAL leaders asserted that municipal officials did not make the same information available to local constituents—in spite of the new laws created to promote transparency and citizen oversight of municipal governance. I was similarly unable to gain access to basic budget information from municipal officials in Limatambo—although their counterparts in the province of Anta readily provided the same information. FEDICAL leaders and other residents of Limatambo that had supported Rozas’ democratization efforts initially responded to the election of Vera with organized hostility. Almost immediately after his election, they began to collect names on a formal petition to revoke

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Vera’s mandate as mayor, taking advantage of a provision in Peru’s 1994 Law of Participation Rights and Citizen Control.24 As in many other parts of Peru, the use of the right to recall elected authorities represented much less an exercise in citizen control than it did a political tool for rival political factions to contest political power (Weiner Bravo 2004). To the dismay of his opponents, Vera won the recall vote held by Peru’s national electoral commission in July 2005 and was able to continue in his position as mayor. After the failed recall vote, the political attitudes of FEDICAL leaders shifted from hostility to passive resignation. They readily acknowledged in interviews that without the political will of the mayor, the prospects for the re-establishment of the Consejo Comunal and Vecinal and the broader democratization of municipal governance were extremely weak. Vera lost his bid for reelection in 2006 but he was succeeded by a town-based candidate affiliated with the APRA party who made no efforts to revive the CCV. Of the slate of candidates supported by FEDICAL, only one was elected as a councilor while the other four positions on council were occupied by leaders from rural communities affiliated with APRA (Jurado Nacional de Elecciones 2008), a strategic effort to align themselves with the party that they anticipated—correctly—would win Peru’s 2006 presidential election. In that context, rather than being revived as a potential vehicle for rural peasant participation, the CCV was simply consigned to an interesting but short-lived period of Limatambo’s history. The Shift in the Democratization Project from Limatambo to Anta

The rapid breakdown of democratization efforts following the departure of Wilbert Rozas from Limatambo in 2002 highlighted the extent to which those efforts had heavily depended on his leadership as mayor of the district. Rozas’ initial goal in leaving to seek the post of mayor of the province was to expand the democratization process from Limatambo to the entire province of Anta, which includes eight other municipal districts and a total population of roughly 70,000. However, although provincial governments in Peru in principle represent a higher tier of government above the municipal level, in practice they are little different from municipal governments and effectively operate only as the municipal government for the district in which they are based.25 In that context, Rozas was unable to expand democratization efforts beyond the district of Anta, in which the provincial government was located, and could do nothing to stop the breakdown of municipal democratization initiatives in Limatambo, let alone further consolidate

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them. As Rozas himself explained, “we started out with the goal of becoming a genuinely ‘provincial’ government rather than simply the government of the provincial capital. But in reality, this has not been possible” (Interview: May 18, 2006). A brief examination of Rozas’ efforts to deepen democracy at the provincial level highlights some important parallels with Limatambo. The history of agrarian change in the district of Anta in the 1960s and 1970s was characterized by very high levels of peasant mobilization and the thorough destruction of the economic, political and social power of the former landowning elite (García Sayán 1982; Guillet 1979). Nevertheless, in spite of the significant transformation of local power relations that followed the implementation of agrarian reform and the subsequent dismantling of state-managed agricultural cooperatives in Anta, there was significant opposition to Rozas’ democratization project. In the wake of intense peasant mobilization and hacienda occupations in the 1960s supported by the Trotskyist Cusco Federation of Students, the 1969 Agrarian Reform Law was implemented quickly and thoroughly in Anta. By 1973, all hacienda land had been expropriated and all of the hacendados had left the district (Guillet 1979: 112). Over the course of the following two decades, a new commercial elite—based in the town of Anta but from peasant backgrounds—gradually emerged and became a powerful political force, largely through the control of local radio stations and extensive clientelist and fictive kinship connections with power brokers in rural communities.26 Rozas’ democratization project sought to end the control of the provincial government by Anta’s commercial elite and instead shift both decision making power and investment resources to rural communities. As in Limatambo, his political strategy to pursue that goal involved both the promotion of participatory decision making and topdown forms of governance. Rozas also made it clear that he had learned important lessons from his experience as mayor of Limatambo and was much more careful to nurture bases of political support in the town center of Anta and to involve rural community members in municipal decision making directly, rather than rely on community representatives that were often the local nodes in broader clientelist networks. In an effort to undermine the power of Anta’s commercial elite and community level brokers, Rozas decentralized the participatory budget process to Anta’s twenty-two rural communities, holding separate budget meetings in each of them with large numbers of community members to decide on the allocation of investment resources rather than simply holding meetings with community representatives in the provincial capital as the Law of Participatory Budgets requires. Through

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this process, Rozas was able to increase the allocation of resources to rural communities in the district of Anta from approximately thirty percent to seventy percent of provincial investment resources. Nevertheless, he was also careful to foster a political support base in the district capital through investments in potable water and sewage systems—which he had failed to do in Limatambo. Through such public works projects, Rozas was able to build a base of political support that enabled him to win a second term as provincial mayor in 2006. Nevertheless, in the absence of a well-organized peasant movement for provincial government democratization and in the presence of a politically astute opposition that controlled local radio stations and clientelist networks, Rozas was keenly aware that the redistribution of investment resources and decision making power in Anta heavily depended on his power as mayor to strategically open certain decisions to participation but not others. An employee of the provincial government described Rozas as a ‘participatory caudillo,’ explaining that: Wilbert [Rozas] has created a new Consejo Comunal y Vecinal in Anta but it only meets once a year because Wilbert is afraid that his enemies will use the new participatory spaces that he has created to attack him. He is also aware that the participatory process depends heavily on his leadership. So there is a difficult simultaneous negotiation of participation, clientelism, and neo-caudillismo (Interview: May 17, 2006).

Although support for Rozas’ democratization initiatives in rural communities in Anta was strong, it was not at all clear that such support extended beyond a pragmatic response to the redistribution of investment resources or that rural communities could rally effectively to ensure the continued redistribution of resources and the decentralization of resource allocation without the leadership of Rozas as provincial mayor. Conclusion

From the perspective of many outsiders, the changes in municipal governance put in place by Mayor Wilbert Rozas between 1993 and 2002 represented a profound democratization of municipal power. However, despite the active involvement of Limatambo’s peasant federation in the initial struggle for municipal power and their support of key peasant leaders, the democratization of municipal governance in

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Limatambo was almost entirely dependent on the political will and leadership of Mayor Rozas himself. While some scholars have highlighted the importance of municipal leadership for local democratization (i.e. Van Cott 2008; Grindle 2007), in Limatambo the central role of the mayor in implementing democratic reforms was clearly a weakness. When Rozas’ tenure in the mayor’s office ended after ten years, the institutions that he had created to incorporate the representatives of peasant communities into municipal decision making quickly collapsed. The rise and subsequent fall of municipal democratization efforts in Limatambo were both heavily influenced by local social and political power relations and the political strategies that Mayor Rozas and his supporters adopted to confront them. Although Peru’s 1969 Agrarian Reform Law weakened the economic, social and political power of Limatambo’s landowning elite, it did not destroy their power completely and they remained an economically and politically powerful group that saw the control of municipal government as crucial to the reproduction of their power. The weakened position of the local landowning elite after 1969 made the subsequent moves towards municipal democratization possible, but the local elite’s continued access to economic power also enabled them to systematically challenge and ultimately undermine those initiatives. Rozas’ strategy to generate political support among peasant communities exacerbated the already existing hostility among Limatambo’s elite families towards municipal democratization efforts and they engaged in systematic efforts to undermine both those initiatives and Rozas’ leadership. At the same time, the concentration of political energy by Rozas and leaders of the Limatambo peasant federation during the political war with the notable families of the town center diverted attention from efforts to improve the well-being of rural peasants. The peasant federation itself was largely directed by relatively well-off peasant leaders with productive valleybottom land that was close to roads and to the municipal offices in the town center. The high priority they placed on the struggle for municipal power did not always reflect the more immediate and practical concerns of base members with challenges of daily survival. Moreover, the peasant federation’s lack of autonomy from the mayor severely weakened the federation itself when Rozas was ousted from office and left it incapable of sustaining the struggle for peasant control of municipal power. The involvement of representatives of Limatambo’s peasant communities in municipal governance reflected an understanding of democratization that was very heavily tied to the redistribution of

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municipal investment resources towards peasant communities. Such an understanding placed much less importance on the political process through which those resources were allocated: it was the outcome, not the process, which mattered most. While outside observers were most excited by the creation of new institutions for community involvement in municipal governance, community members themselves were more concerned with access to municipal infrastructure projects and employment in them. The priority placed on the redistribution of resources rather than on democratic processes reflected both the high levels of poverty in peasant communities and the long legacies of clientelist politics. As a result of their experience with the political system, Limatambo peasants acted pragmatically to pursue ‘favors’ in the form of public works projects and temporary jobs rather than ‘rights’ to political participation, thus reflecting what Salman (2004: 853) called “apocryphal citizenship.” In that setting, when Mayor Rozas’ chosen candidate lost the 2002 municipal elections to succeed him in the post of mayor for largely conjunctural reasons, rural community leaders quickly acquiesced to the clientelist strategies of a mayor that destroyed the existing institutions for peasant involvement in municipal governance but continued to distribute municipal resources in favor of rural communities. Thus, although the process of municipal democratization, understood as changes in political process, ended abruptly in 2002, democratization understood as redistribution continued—and was for the most part compatible with coercive and clientelist political strategies in the mayor’s office. A second element of the peasant understandings of municipal democracy was a concern to end racist and classist abuse and exploitation by local elites in general and municipal officials in particular. From this perspective as well, the democratization process also survived Mayor Rozas’ departure from the mayor’s office. During Rozas’ tenure as mayor, treatment of local peasants by municipal officials became much more dignified and the use of the municipal government as a tool for exploiting local peasants ended. But even after the collapse of Rozas’ democratization project, treatment by municipal politicians and officials was based less on class and ethnicity and more on the provision of political support for the mayor—supporters were favored and opponents were unwelcome regardless of their class or ethnic background. Clientelism persisted, but it was largely stripped of its overtly racist and classist elements. The key institution that Mayor Rozas created to facilitate the involvement of peasant communities in municipal governance—the Consejo Comunal y Vecinal (CCV)—appeared in its design to be highly participatory and led many outside observers to describe municipal

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governance under Rozas as ‘participatory democracy’ (i.e. Quedena 2004). However, in practice the CCV marked a deepening of representative democracy more than a shift to participatory democracy. The CCV presupposed active discussion in peasant communities before and after its quarter-annual meetings, but in practice communication between the representatives to the CCV and their communities was weak and the institution failed to generate the involvement of local communities in municipal governance that it was predicated upon. Moreover, the focus of peasant representatives in the CCV on brokering municipal works projects and services for their communities rather than debating larger questions of strategies for local development gave the institution a strong flavor of bottom-up clientelism. At the same time, the hostility of local elites coupled with the relatively weak support for the principles of democratic participation from the peasant federation encouraged quasi-authoritarian tactics by Mayor Rozas to defend and expand the redistribution of municipal power and resources. Limatambo’s experience thus highlights the ways in which apparently participatory experiences of municipal democratization can also be characterized by what one local observer described as a mixture of “participation, clientelism, and neo-caudillismo” (Interview: May 17, 2006). Nevertheless, despite its shortcomings, the institutions for citizen participation in municipal governance that were carefully crafted through grassroots experimentation under Rozas’s leadership were much more democratic in their design and functioning than the state-imposed laws for participatory budgets and local coordination councils that replaced them. Ironically, the central state’s implementation of laws alleged to promote municipal democratization actually weakened it in Limatambo—a powerful reminder that national frameworks that aim to promote municipal democracy need to leave space for local grassroots experimentation with institutional designs that may exceed stateimposed mechanisms and norms. In practical terms, ten years of municipal democratization efforts generated some modest improvements in the basic infrastructure of rural communities in Limatambo. Although no formal data was available, anecdotal evidence indicated increased access to electricity, potable water and tertiary access roads in many rural communities. However, in the broader context of declining prices for peasant crops and the withdrawal of state support for peasant agriculture, improvements in peasant livelihoods were minimal. Indeed, peasant leaders asserted that local livelihoods were less secure in 2006 than they had been a decade earlier. Similarly, conceptions of citizenship in Limatambo changed

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relatively little over ten years of municipal democratization efforts as local residents continued to prioritize the distribution of material resources over changes in the process of political decision making. Nevertheless, Rozas’ leadership as mayor did generate continued expectations that Limatambo’s municipal government should function primarily to respond to the demands of rural communities rather than the residents of the town center, which did mark an important change from the past. Although the benefits of the municipal democratization in Limatambo were much more modest than many optimistic observers had believed, these gains were still important for both the well-being and the dignity of rural community members.

Notes 1 For a history of municipal elections in Peru, see Nickson (1995) and Zas Frias Burga (1998). Peru’s 1892 Organic Law of Municipalities established municipal elections based on suffrage by literate adults over the age of twentyone, an extremely small elite at that time. However, after 1909, central governments assumed the power to appoint municipal authorities, which was formally established in law in 1919. Municipal elections were re-established in 1963 by President Balaunde but were suspended again following the 1968 military coup until 1980. 2 In spite of the centralization of power under Fujimori, processes of local consensus-building and the democratization of local governance emerged in other parts of Peru as well, generally with leadership or high levels of technical and financial support from NGOs. See, for example, Ávila Molero (2002, 2004a, 2004b); Coronel (1999); Degregori, Coronel and Del Pino (1998); Quedena (2003); Sulmont (2000); Valderrama (1999); Vargas (1998). 3 PNUD calculated the combined male and female literacy rate for Limatambo to be 72.9 percent in 2005 (PNUD 2005). 4 Source: PNUD (2006). 5 Source: PNUD (2006). 6 Source: PNUD (2006). 7 In 1961, seventy-five percent of agricultural land in highland regions of Peru was controlled by large estates, which represented only 1.3 percent of all landholdings. By contrast, small and very small peasant farms (minifundios) represented 95.9 percent of landholdings, but controlled just 9.5 percent of agricultural land (CIDA 1966: 107, cited in Handelman 1975: 23). 8 In 1961, thirty-one estates with over 500 hectares controlled 83.3 percent of land in the province, while ninety-two percent of all agricultural units were under 5 hectares and they collectively controlled only five percent of provincial land (Oficina Nacional de Estadisticas y Censos 1961: 264). In 1972, the number of estates over 500 hectares declined to twenty and they controlled 69.2 percent of all land in the province, but 83.99 percent of land in Anta remained under the control of 114 landowners with more than 50 hectares of land. Peasant farms with less than 5 hectares represented 95.74 percent of all agricultural units

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and they controlled 10.89 percent of agricultural land—roughly six percent more than they had in 1961 (INE 1972a: 4). 9 Quedena (2004: 26) found records of thirty-one haciendas in Limatambo in 1973, while Castillo (1995) reported the existence of only eighteen haciendas—possibly the result of ownership of several haciendas by some families. 10 Indeed, it was only because of extreme abuses of their authority that the mayor and justice of the peace were removed from their positions and that Padre Camenisch was appointed by the military government as the mayor (Asemblea Pastoral de la Arquidiócesis del Cusco 1980). 11 De La Cadena (2000) similarly examines the ways in which mestizos with Indigenous backgrounds in Cusco re-invented Indigenous traditions as mestizo ones as part of their changing position in the class structure of the region. 12 For descriptions of the continuities of pre-agrarian reform social relations and management practices, as well as the centralization of decision making power in the new agrarian bureaucracy on agricultural cooperatives in the nearby Pampa de Anta (Plains of Anta), see Guillet (1979: 135–161) and García Sayán (1982: 123–188). For analyses of other agricultural cooperatives in Peru, see Fernández and Gonzales (1990); Hunefeld (1997); Korovkin (1990); and McClintock (1981). On the basis of research in the province of La Convención, Brass (2007) points out the significant differences in the relative power and class interests of peasant members and workers in the agricultural cooperatives and argues that the principle opposition to the cooperative bureaucracy came from relatively wealthy peasants and that the interventions of agricultural bureaucrats often benefited poorer peasants in relation to their wealthier neighbors. It is not clear to what extent these political differences existed in Limatambo, as the former cooperative leaders that I was able to interview all appeared to be from the strata of wealthier peasants, but they nonetheless claimed to speak for the entire peasant population. 13 Brass (1989) similarly highlights the use of Trotskyist discourses by wealthy peasants in the province of La Convención in ways that masked the significant difference in power and economic interests among wealthy, middle and poor peasants in the region. 14 In the 1983 nationwide municipal elections, the IU won 28.8 percent of the popular vote and elected mayors in thirty-three municipal districts, including fifteen of the sixteen districts that make up the city of Lima as well as the mayorship of metropolitan Lima (Roberts 1995: 225). The IU’s vision of municipal democracy and of the opportunities that municipal government offered for the Peruvian left developed significantly in the early 1980s, especially in Lima (Roberts 1995: 226; see also Pease 1989). 15 No original copies of the plan could be found, but its basic contents were separately confirmed by several interviewees. 16 Local political actors asserted that the decline in the percentage of the popular vote for Rozas in 1999 was the result of an increased number of candidates for the position of mayor rather than popular dissatisfaction with Rozas’ performance.

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17 The mayor in office during the period of research (2005–6) and municipal officials were either unwilling or unable to provide access to municipal records from the previous administration. 18 The names of all NGOs referred to in this chapter have been changed. The specific amounts of funding provided by the two NGOs could not be calculated. 19 In Peru, mayors are elected to lead the governments of both municipal districts and the larger provincial districts to which municipalities belong. 20 Even Vera’s most ardent opponents in FEDICAL acknowledged that the proportion of municipal investments in rural communities remained relatively high during Vera’s administration. 21 The key laws included Law No. 27680 (Law of Constitutional Reform on Decentralization—2002), Law No. 27783 (Base Decentralization Law—2002), Law No. 27292 (Organic Law of Municipalities—2003), Law No. 28056 (Framework Law of Participatory Budgets—2003). 22 Detailed description and analysis of the rules of participatory budgeting in Peru are available on the USAID-financed website of Grupo Propuesta Ciudadana: http://www.propuestaciudadana.org.pe/ It is important to note that few members of rural communities in Limatambo enjoyed the internet access or computer literacy necessary to access such information. Following the general framework provided by the 2003 Law of Participatory Budgets, much more specific rules for participatory budgets were introduced by the Ministry of Economy and Finance. 23 Llona and Soria (2004: 20) note the similar lack of information about the rules for participatory budgets in other rural districts in Peru. 24 Law 26300 (Articles 20–23) allows for a vote to recall elected authorities at the municipal, provincial, and departmental levels if twenty-five percent of eligible voters sign a petition. The recall of elected authorities requires fifty percent plus one of eligible votes. 25 For example, approximately ninety percent of investment resources in the budget of the province of Anta are allocated to the district of Anta, with only ten percent is allocated to the rest of the province (Director of Finance, Province of Anta, interview: May 16, 2006). Moreover, despite Rozas’ efforts to foster a province-wide development strategy, the power of precedent resulted in a simple division of the remaining provincial investment resources among the nine districts, with the district mayors deciding how to spend their portions of the provincial budget (Provincial Budget Meeting, Anta: July 20, 2005). 26 Rozas’ election in 2002 marked the first time that the post of provincial mayor had not been held by a resident of the district capital of Anta.

7 Municipal Democratization After Political Violence in Haquira, Peru

After a twelve-hour bus ride from the city of Cuzco followed by a threehour ride in the back of an open dump truck and a final two hours in the back of a pick-up truck—all on a single-lane dirt road—had barely scratched into the edges of the steep mountainsides that drop thousands of feet to the Apurímac and Santo Tomás rivers, what most impressed me when I first arrived in Haquira, Peru in July 2005 was its profound isolation. Haquira is located in the province of Cotabambas, on the eastern edge of the southern highland department of Apurímac. It is part of a region known in southern Peru as the ‘high provinces’ (provincias altas), which includes neighboring provinces in the departments of Apurímac and Cusco.1 As Deborah Poole explained, the high provinces are considered to be “an identifiable cultural and historical region” characterized by “physical isolation, economic backwardness and a reputation for cattle theft and violence” (1994: 11–13). As in Limatambo and much of the rest of the rural highlands in Peru, the vast majority of the local population speaks Quechua as a first language, but does not self-identify as ‘Indigenous.’ The region’s isolation is primarily a product of the extremely uneven topography: high altitude grasslands (puna), mountains and deep river canyons make road construction extremely difficult. Dirt roads did not reach Haquira until 1967 and vehicle traffic in and out of Haquira is still infrequent, as are foreign visitors—news of the arrival of a gringo researcher (me) preceded me to the town. Most of the land in the district is only suitable for limited potato production and low density livestock grazing. Regular agricultural production is only possible on small plots of land on the steep slopes at the bottom of the river canyons (see Table 7.1). Largely as a result of their isolation, Haquira and other parts of the high provinces experienced a particularly abusive form of gamonalismo or hacienda domination that survived well into the 1980s—more than fifteen years after neo-feudal haciendas had been expropriated in other

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parts of Peru. On the basis of research conducted in the mid-1980s, Poole argued that “the provincias altas have functioned as an effective ‘region of refuge’…for a gamonal culture which depends for its reproduction on the extra-legal use of violence and the monopoly of local state office” (1994: 20). Geographic isolation also facilitated the brutal incursion of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerillas into the district in 1988 (Contreras 1991: 35; CVR 2003: 264, 268), which was followed by the establishment of an armed forces base in 1989. For seven years both Sendero and the Peruvian military committed brutal human rights violations, which prompted a mass exodus of those who were able to flee the region as well as the rapid breakdown of social and political organization. Haquira’s physical isolation, its long history of brutal domination by landlords and cattle ranchers, and the subsequent regime of fear instigated by Sendero and military forces made it an unlikely site for experiments in municipal democratization. However, following the 1998 election of an NGO staff member named William Gonzales to the post of mayor, the municipal government implemented a variety of new initiatives to promote popular organization, popular participation in municipal decision making, and the increased coordination of state and non-state actors in local development initiatives—which attracted both national and international attention. The most notable innovations in municipal governance included one of the first district level development plans in Peru and the creation of four Coordination Roundtables (Mesas de Concertación) to bring together local civil society and state and non-state actors in initiatives focused on health, education, agriculture and socio-political organization, respectively. Gonzales’ administration also actively fostered the creation of autonomous peasant and women’s organizations, and it initiated a highly successful campaign against the sale of methylic alcohol (alcol metílico)—an inexpensive industrial derivative with damaging effects when consumed by humans—as well as making serious efforts to curb domestic violence and cattle theft. It was also the central force behind the creation of an association of the six municipal districts in the Santo Tomás river watershed (Associación de Municipalidades de la Cuenca del Rio Santo Tomás—AMSAT), which worked together to share heavy equipment and technical staff and to collectively address common environmental and economic challenges.2 Like Limatambo, the democratic innovations pioneered in Haquira during the late 1990s had an important influence on the subsequent design of national legislation in the early 2000s that mandated district level Local Coordinating Councils (Consejos de Coordinación Locales—CCLs) and annual

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participatory budgets in all of the country’s municipal and provincial governments. In a principled stand against Alberto Fujimori’s manipulation of Peruvian law to contest a third presidential election, Gonzales made it clear that he would not run for re-election in 2002. However, his chosen successor, also an NGO staff member, lost the contest for mayor. The mayor and five councilors that were elected in 2002 all came from peasant backgrounds but they displayed little interest in the NGO inspired agenda for participation and coordination that Gonzales had promoted. The new mayor claimed that his focus was on “public works projects, not training workshops and meetings.” In that context, the democratization initiatives launched by Gonzales’ administration quickly withered and were replaced by a much more traditional clientelist form of governance based on the exchange of public works and municipal employment for political support. Nevertheless, the election of a peasant mayor and full slate of peasant councilors highlighted a major shift in social power relations in Haquira from the era—only two decades earlier—when semi-feudal mestizo landowners had thoroughly controlled municipal politics in the district. This chapter examines the historical changes in local power relations that help to explain the rise and fall of the short-lived experiment in municipal democracy in Haquira as well as the broader long-term shift in power away from the old hacienda elite to a new class of educated peasant leaders. While a series of often contradictory changes facilitated the gradual rise of a new political elite of relatively privileged peasants who successfully contested municipal elections, the specific institutions for democratic governance put in place by Gonzales were largely foreign to Haquira and were influenced more by the ideas of NGOs and aid donors than rural communities. The design and even terminology of municipal institutions to facilitate popular participation in municipal governance could have drawn on community-based practices and the Quechua language but instead they drew much more heavily on the ideas and institutional designs that prevailed among Lima-based NGOs and international aid agency officials. There were certainly parallels between the new institutions created by Gonzales and pre-existing community-based modes of governance, but Gonzales and his team failed to highlight those connections in ways that might have made the new institutions meaningful to the local population. In short, although it was the gradual democratization of social power that made it possible for Gonzales and his team to establish new institutions to democratize governance in Haquira in the first place, the design of those institutions and Gonzales’ broader political project were disconnected from local social power relations and cultural practices. As a result, the

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project failed to resonate in the peasant communities that were supposed to be its primary beneficiaries and the initiatives eventually collapsed. The experiment in democratic governance in Haquira was also marked by elitist tendencies. NGO representatives and a handful of peasant federation leaders were central actors, but ordinary community members were generally excluded from any meaningful participation, and even the community leaders played secondary roles in a process that was heavily influenced by NGO and aid donor agendas and expertise. Section I examines the history of changes in local power relations up to the late 1990s, when William Gonzales was elected mayor of Haquira. Section II then analyzes the democratization initiatives pursued by Gonzales’ administration and the reasons why they failed to resonate with much of the local population. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the long-term shift in local social power relations and its implications for municipal governance as well as a brief examination of the central future challenge that was looming on Haquira’s political horizon in 2008—a massive multinational copper mining project. Table 7.1 Selected Social Data, Haquira, Peru Total land area Altitude Total population Rural population Male literacy (over 15 years) Female literacy (over 15 years) First language: Quechua Infant mortality chronic malnutrition Primary source of livelihoods Agriculture Manual labor Houses with piped water Houses with sewage Houses with electricity Human Development Index (HDI)6 HDI Rank (x / 1,828 municipal districts)7 Life expectancy8

19933 2005 38,578 ha–47,546 hectares 4 2,950–4,800 m.a.s.l. 9,784 10,593 7,928 (81.0%) 7,199 (67.9%) 72.5% 86.3% 43.2% 61.6% 95.6% n/a 85.4 to 120 / 1000 n/a live births5 79.3% n/a 84.6% 11.8% 7.4% 2.4% 7.9% n/a

n/a n/a 45.8% 7.24% 30.4% 0.474

n/a

1,738

n/a

61.0 years

th

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Historical Changes in Local Power Relations in Haquira

In spite of the extreme isolation of Haquira and the other ‘high provinces,’ the region was still thoroughly incorporated into colonial economic and administrative systems. During the colonial era, Haquira was at the center of an important mining region and played a key role in providing food and labor to local gold and silver mines as well as to larger mines to the south in Arequipa and Espinar. In 1578, Haquira was established as the administrative center for the four provinces of Cotabambas, Chumbivilcas, Grau and Paruro, and also became an important center for the Catholic Church, which constructed four ornate stone churches in the district during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and engaged in an active program of proselytization (Municipalidad de Haquira 2000: 40–42). While evidence from Haquira and the surrounding districts suggests that some hacienda expansion onto Indigenous ayllu lands took place during the colonial and early republican periods, the most contentious and significant usurpation of Indigenous territory by the hacienda regime did not occur until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, following the late nineteenth century shift in the economic orientation of the southern Peruvian highlands from mining to wool production (Spalding 1980; Orlove 1977; Poole 1988, 1994a; Jacobsen 1993; Pozo-Vergnes 2004). As the value of sheep, llama and alpaca wool exports grew over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, so too did the value of the pasture land that represented most of the territory in Haquira and the other high provinces.9 Faced with increased opportunities for the sale of wool and limited capital to legally purchase land, hacienda owners in Haquira and the other provincias altas used brutal violence to intimidate Indigenous communities and expand their de facto control of land, livestock, wool and agricultural products. In the context of the near total absence of central state authority in the region, local hacendados were not only able to use local administrative, judicial and police offices to extend their power, but frequently resorted to blatantly criminal strategies without fear of legal repercussions. Deborah Poole (1988) traced the evolution of hacendado controlled gangs of armed and mounted thugs (pandillas) in the high provinces from 1830 to 1930. On the basis of criminal records, she argued that the gangs were initially created to protect and expand the factionalized fiefdoms of competing hacendados but that by the 1890s they were increasingly used to steal livestock and land from Indigenous communities and to control Indigenous labor. As she explained, the gangs “which included between twenty and forty men armed with

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revolvers, carbines and other arms…not only stole cattle. They also evicted Indians from their homes and burned pasture lands to force the Indians to work…” (1994: 108). In Haquira, evidence from legal records collected by Valderrama and Escalante (1981) indicated a steady increase in the abuses committed by local hacendados and their gangs in the first two decades of the twentieth century and the escalation of violence between haciendas and Indigenous communities. Included in legal records were complaints from Indigenous communities about the brutal beatings and murder of community leaders, mass rapes of Indigenous women, forced takeovers of communal lands, forced land sales, livestock theft, wool and produce theft, and the forced sale of wool and agricultural goods at below market prices by local hacendados, their gangs and local state authorities. In the early twentieth century, most Indigenous communities controlled land in all of the ecological zones of the district, but by 1920 almost all of them had lost their land in the valley-bottom areas where agricultural production was possible and their access to high altitude pasture lands had diminished significantly (Valderrama and Escalante 1981: 11). Faced with growing levels of abuse in the context of hacendado control of the police and courts, Indigenous communities also adopted increasingly violent tactics to protect their land, livestock and personal security. Between 1922 and 1924, Indigenous gangs in Haquira and the neighboring district of Quiñota stole livestock back from local haciendas, burned numerous hacienda buildings, held several hacienda families hostage and killed two hacienda owners (Valderrama and Escalante 1981: 17–29) as part of a wave of Indigenous peasant uprisings throughout the southern Peruvian highlands (Poole 1994b: 115; Spalding 1980: 95) that paralleled the resistance to hacienda expansion and landlord abuse in Jesús de Machaca and other parts of the Bolivian altiplano (see Chapter Four). However, unlike in Jesús de Machaca, historical memories of the 1922–24 uprising in Haquira were never mythologized in a politically significant way and peasant leaders were unable to use historical memories as a strategy to strengthen peasant political identities and commitments to local peasant organization—although the name of one of the Indigenous leaders that was killed in retaliation for the uprising, Esteban Huillcapacco, was incorporated into the name of the District Peasant Federation in 1998. The so-called ‘uprising’ of 1922–24 culminated with the assassination and imprisonment of the Indigenous leaders behind it. Although reports of violence and the illegal seizure of land, livestock and produce diminished somewhat in the decades that followed, local hacendados retained firm control of social and political power in the

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district. Valderrama and Escalante’s review of legal records from the 1920s found that “the hacendados controlled all of the posts of public administration including the positions of governor and mayor through which they assigned lower ranking positions of authority to loyal supporters” (1981: 8). The most powerful family in the district—the Arrendondos—“controlled the position of mayor as if it were hereditary and used it to increase their wealth” (1981: 9). A female peasant leader from Haquira recalled the leadership style of Alberto Arrendondo, a mayor of Haquira in the early 1960s: “He believed that he controlled everything, that he was all-powerful, that he controlled the law, that his word was the law…I remember how he abused people, he beat them to force them to work for him” (cited in Quedena 2003: 83). However, domination of municipal government did not give the hacienda elite in Haquira any particularly important legal power or control over financial resources, as the de facto jurisdiction of municipal governments and fiscal transfers from the central state were extremely limited until the late 1980s (Nickson 1995: 237–249; Zas Fritz Burga 1998). Rather, municipal power was important as a means to pursue extra-legal activities, to reward political clienteles with government posts, to coerce labor and to block the pursuit of justice by Indigenous peasants. It was one element of a broader strategy that included the direct control of local judicial and police power, the careful establishment of kinship and fictive kinship relations with provincial and departmental authorities, and outright fraud, theft and coercive violence to reproduce local social, political and economic power. The monopoly control of local political power by hacendados began to weaken very gradually after the 1920s as the Peruvian state slowly expanded its presence in the hinterlands of the southern highlands, but they remained the dominant political force in Haquira and other parts of the high provinces until the late 1980s. As Paponnet-Cantat asserted on the basis of field research conducted in the neighboring district of Capacmarca in the mid-1980s, “the fact that Capacmarca’s gamonales continue to rule over local affairs contradicts the belief that gamonalismo is dead in Peru” (1994: 219). Initially, the changing dynamics of power in Haquira were reflected only in subtle shifts in political behaviour such as the withdrawal of hacendados from direct participation in the pandillas (Poole 1994: 114) and a shift in the site of the mayor’s office from rural estate houses to the municipal building on the central plaza of Haquira’s town center. The construction of a road from Cusco to Arequipa through the town of Santo Tomás (80 km south of Haquira) in 1960 and the subsequent extension of that road to Haquira in 1967 facilitated labor migration and communication with the

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rest of Peru—although road conditions and thus access in and out of the community remained difficult. In the mid-1980s, travel to the cities of Cusco and Arequipa on the new road still took fifteen to eighteen hours in a small truck and thirty to forty hours in the more common large trucks—in good conditions (CICDA 1987: 13)—and in 2000 the entire district of Haquira still had just one telephone (Municipalidad de Haquira 2000: 103). Throughout the 1960s, radical left groups based in Cusco organized peasant takeovers of hacienda land in neighboring districts (Gose 1994; Paponet-Cantat 1994), but made no serious efforts to mobilize peasants in Haquira. Thus, although a political climate of peasant agitation and challenge to the hacienda regime spread throughout the region, there were few direct attacks on local haciendas in Haquira.10 The first real challenge to gamonal domination of social and political power in Haquira came from the 1969 Agrarian Reform Law and the expansion of rural education by the reformist military government of General Velasco, which seized power in 1968. Although local gamonales found new ways to hold on to local political power for another two decades, the post-1968 reforms sparked gradual changes at the local and national levels that contributed to both the erosion of the material bases of gamonal power and the emergence of a small but important group of educated peasant leaders who would eventually contest and gain control of social and political power in the district. Evidence indicates that Haquira was not a priority zone for the application of the Agrarian Reform Law. Land did pass into peasant control, but the state made no serious attempts to improve agricultural production in the district. A comparison of data from Peru’s 1972 and 1994 Agrarian Censuses suggests a substantial redistribution of land in favor of small-scale producers, although the lack of district level data from 1972 makes direct comparisons impossible (see Table 7.2). However, it is crucial to recognize the significant variations in the productivity of land in the different agricultural zones in the district; hacienda owners generally managed to retain the most productive agricultural and pasture land, something the census data does not reveal. For example, agricultural land in the valley bottoms (below 2,900 m.a.s.l.) could be harvested annually with no fallow periods and could support the production of a wide variety of fruits, vegetables and grains; high puna land (over 4,200 m.a.s.l.), however, only supported the production of extremely hardy varieties of potatoes and required fallow periods of six to nine years between harvests (Municipalidad de Haquira 2000: 116). Although the state did expropriate the largest landholdings and put an end to openly feudal labor relations, it did not set up

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agricultural cooperatives as it did elsewhere (see Chapter Six) and simply allowed peasant communities to take over most of the land in the district. Distance from markets, the lack of good agricultural and pasture land, low agricultural and livestock productivity, relatively low levels of peasant mobilization and the relatively small size of hacienda landholdings in the district are all probable factors that contributed to the apparent lack of interest in Haquira by the National Office of Agrarian Reform (Oficina Nacional de Reforma Agraria—ONRA). Given the negative experiences with cooperative enterprises in Limatambo and other parts of the southern Sierra (see Chapter Six), the lack of state interference may have been a mixed blessing. Nevertheless, apart from minimal road construction, the state also failed to make even basic investments to support small-scale agricultural and livestock production in the district. An economic and social analysis of Haquira conducted in 1987 by the NGO CICDA (Centro Internacional de Cooperación para el Desarrollo Agrícola—International Center for Cooperation for Agricultural Development) highlighted “the total absence of technical assistance from state institutions” (CICDA 1987: 46). Thus, while agrarian reform did redistribute agricultural land in Haquira and undermined the core material base of gamonal power in the district, the economic consequences of land redistribution were much more modest than a cursory analysis of census data would suggest. The gamonales retained their most productive land while peasant communities did not acquire either sufficient land or access to inputs and technical support to generate even modest livelihoods. The evaluation of agricultural production in Haquira conducted by CICDA calculated that in the context of the long fallow periods required between harvests in the high altitude zones that represented much of the district’s land base, over eighty-five percent of peasant producers harvested less than 1 hectare of land per year in the late 1980s (CICDA 1987: 52). As a result, almost all agricultural production was oriented to self-consumption while barter remained the predominant mode of exchange. Less than ten percent of the peasant population was able to satisfy its basic subsistence needs through agriculture. CICDA asserted that only two percent of peasant households had initiated a process of capitalist accumulation (1987: 51–57). Results from Peru’s 1994 Agricultural Census suggested that conditions had not improved significantly seven years later.11 More than ninety-six percent of agricultural producers consumed all of the food they produced (INEI 1994: Table 24) and almost seventy percent indicated that they did not produce sufficient food to cover their subsistence needs (INEI 1994: Table 6). Moreover, near drought-like conditions during the annual dry

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season posed a systematic challenge to livestock production as the lack of pasture resulted in elevated rates of livestock weight loss, disease and mortality, and very low rates of milk production and fertility. In this context, few peasant households were able to build up herds of cattle that could sustain rural livelihoods (Municipalidad de Haquira 2000: 109–110). Thus, in spite of significant land redistribution, inequalities in livelihoods and economic power between the subsistence-oriented majority of peasant producers and the weakened but still privileged exhacienda elite remained significant. Inequality within and between peasant communities also increased in the wake of agrarian reform as some communities and individual peasant households were able to hold on to or acquire productive land in multiple ecological zones, while most had access only to high altitude paramo land (CICDA 1987: 40). By outlawing feudal labor relations, agrarian reform also facilitated increased labor migration and created new opportunities for some peasants to educate their children, which in turn fed an ongoing process of peasant differentiation and the gradual formation of what would eventually become a new class of professionals from peasant communities. Table 7.2 Land Distribution in the Province of Cotabambas and District of Haquira, 1972, 199412 Land tenure in the province of Cotabambas, Peru (1972)13 Farm size Surface area % of total # of % of (hectares) (hectares) land producers producers 0.1–4.9 10,385.4 51.11 8,278 94.8 5.0–49.9 3,544.4 17.44 434 4.9 50.0–2,500+ 6,385.8 31.43 15 0.3 Total 20,315.6 100 8,727 100 Land tenure in the district of Haquira, Peru (1994)14 % of total Surface area # of surface (hectares) producers area % of Collectively 14 peasant producers controlled 32,102.00 83.3 communities land Individually controlled 6,476.5 16.7 1,866 land 0.1–4.9 2,447.5 6.5 1,585 85.1 5.0 –49.9 3,292.2 8.7 272 14.6 50+ 736.8 1.9 9 0.3 Total 38,578.8 100 1880 100

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The Agrarian Reform Law and peasant uprisings in other parts of the southern Peruvian highlands in the late 1960s and 1970s contributed to a nascent spirit of peasant political activism and organization in Haquira. In 1979, organizers from the Peruvian Communist Party helped local peasant leaders to create the District Peasant Federation of Haquira to represent the thirty-eight peasant communities in the district. However, in the context of relatively weak ties to the Communist Party and the powerful influence of the local ex-hacienda elite, the peasant federation was undermined by clientelist manipulation and did not became a strong voice for peasant interests. In 1984, the NGO CICDA established a permanent presence in Haquira and worked to strengthen both community-based organizations and the district level peasant federation, but with relatively little success. CICDA’s 1987 report on agricultural production in Haquira noted that “levels of organization vary from community to community but are generally weak” (1987: 12). The report highlighted unequal land distribution within communities, a lack of collective land and water management, low participation in communal assemblies and work parties (faenas), and the predominant role of outside teachers and government officials in community decision making as the key causes and symptoms of weak social and political organization (CICDA 1987: 13). Access to education for peasant children in Haquira improved only modestly following the 1968 revolution, in spite of the emphasis the military government placed on rural schooling. Table 7.3 indicates the levels of formal educational by year of birth in Haquira in 1993 and reveals gradual improvements in access to education for school aged children over the course of the 1960s through the 1980s against a broader backdrop of alarmingly low levels of formal education. In 1993, twenty-seven percent of men and fifty-seven percent of women were counted as illiterate (Municipalidad de Haquira 2000: 68). Nevertheless, when those figures are disaggregated by date of birth, it is clear that rates of literacy steadily improved in the 1970s and 1980s: 77.56 percent of those born between 1974 and 1978 were considered literate in comparison with only 32.47 percent of those born between 1954 and 1963 (ibid.).

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Table 7.3 Formal Education by Year of Birth in Haquira, 1993 Level of education in 1993 None (%) Primary (%) Secondary (%) Post-secondary (%)

1979 –83 5.4 86.5 7.1 0

1974 –78 12.1 51.4 34.3 0

Year of birth 1964 1954 –73 –63 28.0 43.9 45.2 37.6 21.5 12.0 4.6 5.3

1929 –53 65.3 28.8 3.2 1.0

Before 1929 77.0 18.4 2.3 0.3

Source: Municipalidad de Haquira 2000: 69, elaboration by the author.

Rising levels of literacy and formal education had a very gradual impact on the democratization of local politics in Haquira. No municipal elections were held at all in Peru between 1963 and 1980, and up until 1979 Peru’s Constitution barred illiterate people from voting. In that context, very few Haquireños were able to participate in formal politics. The establishment of universal suffrage in the 1979 Constitution expanded voting rights in principle, but in practice lack of access to official identity cards prevented many people, especially peasant women, from exercising their citizenship rights. Paredes calculated that in 2007, seventeen percent of adults in the southern Andean region of Peru remained disenfranchised because they did not hold identification cards (2008: 10). Moreover, in spite of the expansion of voting rights in 1980, Haquira’s local elite managed to reproduce its political power through clientelism, fictive kinship and outright coercion. Although increased access to education helped to equalize access to information and the capacity of peasants to negotiate with local merchants and power brokers, the implications for actual election results were slow to appear. It was not until the mid-1990s that peasant access to post-secondary and tertiary education began to have direct and visible impacts on municipal politics. Over the course of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, the improved but still limited access to education for children from peasant families fostered the gradual emergence of a small group of educated (male) professionals from peasant backgrounds. From that group emerged the peasant leaders who successfully contested and captured municipal political power in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Among them was William Gonzales, the mayor of Haquira from 1998 to 2002, who completed elementary school in Haquira, secondary school in Cusco and earned credentials as a nurse in Cusco in the 1980s. Modesto Huayno, who held the post of mayor from 2002 to 2006, also completed secondary school and post-secondary health care training. Thus,

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although levels of education and literacy in Haquira were among the lowest in Peru,15 economic differentiation within peasant communities enabled a small number of upwardly mobile peasant youth to earn secondary and post-secondary degrees. The responses of hacienda-owning families to the implementation of agrarian reform and the loss of estate land in Haquira varied, but as a group their control of local social and political power was very slow to erode. As Paponnet-Cantat asserted in the case of the neighboring district of Capacmarca, local gamonales “rapidly found alternative methods to re-assert their hegemony through authoritarian modes of imposition” (1994: 200). Some families left the area permanently and migrated to Cusco, Abancay and other highland cities, but a significant number, including the Arrendondos and some of the other most powerful families, maintained a strong presence in Haquira. The most direct response to agrarian reform was an increase in cattle rustling and crop theft as a strategy to make up for the economic losses associated with expropriated land. The CICDA report highlighted an increase in cattle and crop theft after 1970, with armed gangs of ten to thirty men stealing entire herds and harvests and then selling them in urban markets (1987: 38). A report from a 1985 peasant forum in the province of Chumbivilcas, which borders Haquira, explicitly stated that “exlandlords [who were] socially and economically affected by the reform are the ‘intellectual authors’ of rustling” (FORUM 1985: 26, cited in Paponnet-Cantat 1994: 213). A local peasant leader’s account of cattle theft in Haquira in the late 1970s and early 1980s is also quoted in the final report of Peru’s 2003 Truth and Reconciliation Commission: The cattle rustlers assaulted the peasants, stole their cows and alpacas. They also broke into our homes to steal potatoes and corn. Peasants were becoming poorer. There was no peace. The authorities were abusive, especially the Justice of the Peace. He always acted in favor of the cattle rustlers. Justice was for the cattle rustlers. Those who had been robbed never found justice. The cattle rustlers raped the wives and children of anyone who denounced them. The police also acted in favor of the rustlers (Comisión de Verdad y Reconciliación 2003: 302– 303).

More subtle and sophisticated responses to the agrarian reform by ex-hacienda families included the pursuit of professional careers, especially teaching, by the children of former hacienda owners. Indeed, based on research in 1984, Paponnet-Cantat argued that the domination of rural teaching posts in the high provinces by the children of exhacienda owners represented a “new and more modern avenue of

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power” for controlling local social and political relations (1994: 217). The expansion of educational opportunities for children in peasant communities after 1968 was thus a contradictory process as the social relations between teachers and the communities they were supposed to serve were widely characterized by racist abuse, exploitation and political manipulation. Ex-hacendados and their political clienteles also retained control of local government and police posts. Until the 1998 municipal election, control of the mayor’s office in Haquira simply switched back and forth between two competing clientelist powerbrokers, both the children of former hacienda owners. The NGO CICDA made some efforts in the mid-1980s to encourage peasant political organization and to challenge the political and social power of the ex-hacienda elite in Haquira. However, other outside actors, such as leftist political parties, were largely absent from the local political arena—or, like the Catholic Church, silently acquiesced to the existing social order. Political Violence and Changes in Local Power Relations

Political and social power relations in Haquira changed abruptly in 1988 when the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrilla movement and Peruvian military forces began to struggle for control of Haquira and the surrounding region. In the early morning of December 6, 1988, approximately forty masked and well-armed Sendero Luminoso guerrillas took over the town center of Haquira. After forcing local residents to the town plaza to hear a long political speech, they executed the Justice of the Peace, one municipal staff member and three staff members from the NGO CICDA, who Sendero leaders denounced as agents of imperialism. William Gonzales, who then worked for CICDA, was severely tortured. The Sendero guerrillas also burned down the municipal office building and CICDA headquarters and threatened the mayor, municipal councilors and remaining NGO staff with death if they did not resign from their positions. Over the following month, Sendero Luminoso guerrillas assassinated approximately fifty other people in neighboring districts in the provinces of Cotabambas and Chumbivilcas—primarily local government officials (Commision de Verdad y Reconciliación 2003: 306–307). In March 1989, Peruvian military forces responded to the Sendero attacks by establishing a permanent military base in Haquira and forcing peasant communities to create armed self-defense committees (rondas campesinas) to fight against Sendero militants. As in the rest of Peru, the primary victims of the conflict between the military and Sendero Luminoso were unarmed

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peasant civilians, who suffered gross violations of human rights by both sides (CVR 2003; Sullca Tito 2004; Stern 1998).16 An analysis done by Eduardo Contreras of the impacts of political violence in the department of Apurímac concluded that “the strategies of the armed forces and police to control the subversive actions of Sendero Luminoso involved constant violations of human rights, including disappearances and torture…and the total closure of democratic political space” (Contreras 1991: 75). The climate of fear created by Sendero and the military forces had profound but contradictory implications for social and political power relations in Haquira. Municipal government and state offices stopped functioning, NGOs withdrew from the region, and social and political organization ground to a halt.17 At the same time, however, livestock theft and abuse by cattle rustlers and ex-hacendados also diminished, and peasants were able to graze their livestock without fear of rustlers. The most important change was a massive out-migration from both peasant communities and the town center of Haquira. However, townbased professionals and merchants from Haquira, including many families with hacienda backgrounds, represented a disproportionate number of those who fled from the district.18 While many of those families associated with Haquira’s town-based elite returned after 1995, following the defeat of Sendero Luminoso and the withdrawal of the military, they were never able to re-establish their moral authority and capacity to dominate social and political power relations. The peasant leaders I interviewed all asserted that after the period of violence ended in 1995 local elites no longer controlled social and political power relations as they had before, a change also noted by Ávila, who argued that the period of political violence marked a clear “before and after” in the dynamics of local power relations (2004: 10). The end of the period of political violence in 1995 opened a new political context in Haquira that was marked not only by the weakened social power of the old elite, but also by the return of state agencies and NGOs to the district, a new enthusiasm among international aid donors for decentralization and municipal democracy, and a growing awareness of Indigenous and peasant-run municipal governments in neighboring Bolivia. Although the candidates elected as mayor and most of the municipal councilors in 1995 represented the old clientelist elite, they were no longer able to dominate and manipulate local politics in the ways they had before 1988, even in the absence of strong peasant or community organizations. Moreover, the composition of the municipal council had also begun to change. Representatives of the ex-hacienda families were joined by two young professionals from peasant

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backgrounds—including William Gonzalez, who then worked as a health promoter in Haquira with a Cusco-based NGO. The two welleducated young men from peasant communities on the municipal council did not articulate any particular political agenda at that point, but they did make their intelligence and capacity to govern clear to other Haquireños. Municipal Democratization Efforts in the Wake of Political Violence

In 1998 William Gonzales launched a campaign to become mayor of Haquira with a political platform that highlighted the promotion of popular organization, popular participation in municipal decision making, long-term planning, coordination with state agencies and NGOs, and strategic alliances with neighboring municipalities. Gonzalez also promised to confront the problems of alcoholism, family violence and cattle theft—which had increased after the departure of the military and Sendero in 1995. As mentioned above, once Gonzales was elected he acted quickly to put his platform into practice through the creation of a series of Coordination Roundtables (Mesas de Concertación) to discuss and implement local development initiatives. Gonzales actively encouraged local peasants to form a new district level peasant federation and helped it to acquire formal legal status. He also fostered the creation of district-wide federations of women and youth and helped to arrange NGO support for capacity-building workshops for federation members. While Gonzales was active in the creation of the new civil society organizations and expected them to be involved in local decision making, he was never accused by local peasants of manipulating them for political ends. The district development plan—still a novelty in rural Peru in the late 1990s—was prepared with the financial support and technical direction of a Cusco-based NGO that conducted workshops in Haquira’s thirty-eight rural communities (Municipalidad Distrital de Haquira 2000). Gonzales then established four Coordination Roundtables to manage action on the priority issues that emerged from the planning workshops: health and family violence, education, agriculture and the environment, and popular organization. The four Coordination Roundtables included representatives of the municipal government, local civil society organizations, government agencies and NGOs, and each roundtable was made responsible for coordinating the planning and implementation of strategic development initiatives in its area of focus.

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Gonzales’ administration quickly caught the attention of NGOs and aid donors, which not only brought significant financial resources to the district but also helped to foster an image of Haquira as a model of participatory democracy in Peru. As a result of more than a decade of work with rural development NGOs, Gonzales was able to skillfully employ the prevailing discourse of good governance and its emphasis on participation, concertación and planning to broker NGO support for his democratization project—which itself was heavily influenced by NGO and donor ideas and terminology. Gonzales also traveled widely to international forums on municipal governance in France, Cuba, Ecuador and other parts of Peru, where he raised the profile of Haquira and brokered NGO and aid donor support for local development projects. Specific data on the financial commitments of NGOs in Haquira during Gonzales’ tenure was not available, but the district development plan refers to the active involvement of eight NGOs during the period between 1998 and 2000, a large number given Haquira’s isolation. After numerous conversations with Gonzales and many of those who had worked with him, I was convinced that his use of the preferred language and work methods of aid donors and NGOs was not a conscious manipulation or performance for strategic purposes but rather a reflection of his genuine internalization of the ideas and practices of rural development NGOs. Indeed, many of Gonzales’ former colleagues described him as an ‘NGO man through and through.’19 Gonzales’ administration was characterized by numerous training workshops and planning meetings as well as a significant increase in the traffic of fourwheel drive vehicles with NGO and government logos on their doors, all of which generated significant expectations within Haquira’s population for material improvements in their daily lives. However, in keeping with his NGO background, Gonzales—and the NGOs that supported his project—gave priority to social development goals over traditional public works projects. The initiatives that received the most energy and attention included the organization of Rondas Campesinas (peasant brigades) to confront cattle theft, the promotion of peasant, women’s and youth organizations, a campaign against the sale and consumption of methylic alcohol, and a campaign against domestic violence—which included efforts to encourage the local police force to take such violence seriously. While these initiatives were all celebrated as highly successful by outside observers, they failed to satisfy many local residents, who expected to see and to benefit from concrete public works projects and to receive direct financial benefits from the increased outside investment in the district.

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The Contradictions of Democratization in Haquira

Gonzales’ democratization project broke down quickly following the election of a new mayor and team of municipal councilors in 2002. Gonzales had pledged in his initial 1998 election campaign that he would not seek re-election in 2002, a symbolic critique of then-President Fujimori’s manipulation of Peru’s constitution to orchestrate a third term in office. However, Gonzales did actively campaign for the continuation of his democratization initiatives and the candidacy of his chosen successor—a staff member from the same NGO that Gonzales had worked for prior to his election as mayor. Nevertheless, despite political support from Gonzales, his chosen candidate lost the 2002 elections. The subsequent mayor, Modesto Huayno, and the full slate of five new councilors all came from peasant backgrounds and all but one of the new councilors were affiliated with the New Left Movement (Movimiento Nueva Izquierda—MNI), a political party, that, in spite of its name, employed a radical class-based discourse but nonetheless traditional clientelist political strategies. Although the new mayor and councilors all lived in peasant communities, they had not been involved in the District Peasant Federation or Gonzales’ democratization initiatives. The new mayor and councilors demonstrated very little interest in Gonzales’ political project to involve peasant communities in municipal decision making and his political project quickly decayed through neglect. The speed with which the apparently democratic institutions established by Gonzales broke down following the inauguration of the new mayor and councilors revealed how fragile the municipal democratization project in Haquira had been. Within months of taking office, the new mayor made it clear that the municipal government would no longer participate in the Mesas de Concertación, which quickly ceased to function at all in the absence of leadership and political will from the municipality. Following the party line of the MNI, which denounced NGOs as ‘agents of imperialism,’ the new mayor severed connections with all of the NGOs that had been involved in the democratization project and all but one of them withdrew completely from the district. It was also clear that the MNI mayor saw the NGOs as political competitors and an unwelcome source of political pressure and accountability. The new administration ended the close working relationship that had been established with the District Peasant Federation and the organizations of women and youth, which had been active participants in the Mesas de Concertación and had been consulted regularly by Gonzales. The new mayor and councilors also asserted that

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the municipal government would give priority to “public works projects, not training workshops and meetings” (Interview: November 21, 2005). Finally, local residents who had supported Gonzales and his political project quickly found that their access to employment in municipal public works projects and to government-funded programs managed by the municipality—such as the Vaso de Leche (Glass of Milk) program that supplied subsidized food—were conditional on their acquiescence to the new mayor. As in Limatambo, the new mayor was also able to use the implementation of the 2003 Law of Participatory Budgets and the 2002 law that mandated the creation of Local Coordination Councils (Consejos de Coordinación Local—CCL) as a justification to withdraw from the Mesas de Concertación. As he put it bluntly, “The Mesas have been replaced by the CCL and the Participatory Budget” (Interview: November 21, 2005). However, the design and functioning of the CCL was significantly less democratic than the Mesas de Concertación had been. By law, the CCL was required only to include the mayor, five councilors and four unpaid civil society representatives, whose election was heavily engineered by the mayor. By contrast, the Mesas had involved a much broader cross-section of civil society, municipal and central government officials, and non-governmental representatives. The design of the Participatory Budget Law suggested in theory that municipal budgeting would become more democratic, but in practice the municipal budget process was participatory in name only. According to local peasant leaders and NGO staff, the mayor and councilors employed a variety of tactics to simultaneously comply with the letter of the law while undermining any real opportunities for meaningful citizen involvement in the budget process. Those techniques involved minimal advertising of public budget meetings, the delaying of meetings, the failure to provide training and background information on how to effectively take part in the budget process, and the rejection of community proposals on the basis of technical criteria. The mayor also made it clear that he would accept individual petitions from community members for specific public works, which undermined the incentives for community leaders to prepare and present proposals at open budget meetings. Ironically, although the election of the MNI mayor and councilors in 2002 led to the breakdown of the specific political project to deepen municipal democracy in Haquira led by Gonzales, it also represented a continuation of the long-term changes in local social power relations that had facilitated Gonzales’ 1998 election. That the new mayor and councilors were all from peasant backgrounds, all lived in peasant

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communities and all spoke Quechua as their first language was a remarkable indication of the shift in social and political power and moral authority away from the old elite of ex-hacienda families to the new political elite of ‘peasants’ with post-secondary training and professional or technical qualifications. All of the residents of the town center with whom I spoke, as well as supporters of the new mayor and supporters of Gonzales and his political project, agreed that municipal power had definitively passed into the control of peasant leaders and that members of the old town-based elite would never again control local politics. Nevertheless, the gradual democratization of local social power relations did not automatically lead to the implementation and consolidation of new political institutions and practices. Rather, the ongoing shift of social and political power to the emerging elite of well-educated peasant leaders led to the breakdown of a specific project of municipal democratization that had been participatory in appearance but which was largely based on outside ideas and had failed to resonate in the rural peasant communities it had been intended to benefit. In its place, the new peasant mayor and councilors re-established a clientelist system of municipal governance. The history of the political project to deepen municipal democracy in Haquira thus highlights a number of important strategic lessons that are analyzed in further detail in the following section. The most serious problem with the democratization project in Haquira is that it was largely foreign to local political culture and popular experience and was perceived by much of the local population as highly bureaucratic. The vision of democracy shared by Gonzales and his collaborators was shaped primarily by their experience of working with internationally funded NGOs. The concepts and discourses of concertación, participation and strategic long-term planning that lay at the heart of democratization initiatives in Haquira did not emerge from local experiences of community-based decision making but rather from the prevailing donor and NGO-driven vision of what participatory democracy and good governance at the municipal level should look like. The concept of concertación in particular and the institutional mechanisms for putting the concept into practice were especially privileged by the central government administrations of Presidents Toledo and Paniagua between 2000 and 2006 (see Remy 2005). Gonzales and his team genuinely believed in that vision of democracy and perhaps as a result of that belief did not make sufficient efforts to translate or transform the foreign concepts in ways that would have made it easier for the local population to understand and embrace them. For example, at a very basic level, words themselves such as

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concertación had little or no meaning for most local residents. As one of Gonzales’ former collaborators suggested, even a superficial name change from concertación to a Quechua term such as faena—a form of collective labor—might have helped to generate greater understanding and support for the democratization project. More importantly, however, the project of municipal democratization itself—and the new institutions that were created as part of that project—did not emerge as a grassrootsbased struggle to gain control of municipal power but rather as a wellintentioned but also partly paternalistic effort by outside NGO staff and privileged peasant leaders to improve municipal governance for local peasant communities. The intended beneficiaries of that project were certainly peasant communities, but the key actors were NGOs and top level peasant leaders. Moreover, Gonzales’ efforts to broker outside support from NGOs and aid donors shaped not just the design of the new institutions of municipal governance in Haquira—such as the Mesas de Concertación—but also the types of development initiatives pursued by the municipal government. An NGO staff member who had worked closely with Gonzales during his term as mayor acknowledged that the decision to focus attention on cattle theft, family violence and addiction to methylic alcohol had been only partly driven by community concerns. The choice of those specific initiatives had also been heavily shaped by an effort to identify projects that fit into respective donor priorities for human security, gender, and health (Interview: February 16, 2006). The external orientation of the democratization project towards donor and NGO priorities was also reflected in the District Plan for Haquira (Municipalidad Distrital de Haquira 2000). Like many other municipal development plans, it was clearly oriented towards an external audience of potential aid donors, NGOs and government agencies—not for use by the local population, most of which was not aware that the plan even existed. Indeed, employees from some of the NGOs that worked in Haquira while the plan was being created asserted that community members had played the role of ‘informants’ or sources of data for the plan, rather than genuine participants in the identification of strategic priorities, which had already been chosen by Gonzales and the staff members of the NGO that prepared the plan. In addition to its external inspiration and orientation, the democratization project in Haquira was marked by elitist tendencies and failed to involve ordinary members of rural communities. The Mesas de Concertación added a new layer of representation to municipal governance in the district by inviting the leaders of communities and civil society organizations to take part in strategic decision making, but

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most of the population had no opportunity to be involved and a large proportion of the population was not aware that the Mesas existed at all (see Landa 2004: 63). Looking back on their efforts, Gonzales and his collaborators recognized that they had worked too closely with a select group of community and district level leaders and had made insufficient efforts to involve ordinary Haquireños in local governance. They also acknowledged that they had assumed the civil society leaders who took part in the Mesas would communicate with their communities and organizations before and after the regular meetings of the Mesas but that in practice this did not happen. As a result, the vast majority of community members had little knowledge of the discussions that occurred within the Mesas. The elitist character of the Mesas de Concertación resulted in part from their institutional design, which privileged the participation of civil society leaders over base members, but it also reflected the ongoing process of peasant differentiation and inequality in rural communities. According to former staff members from the NGOs that had taken part in the Mesas, the community leaders and representatives of the civil society organizations who were most active in them were typically the most educated, most fluently bilingual, and wealthiest ‘peasants’ in their communities. Although they were generally the most articulate and politically savvy leaders, they did not necessarily represent the experiences and concerns of the rest of their communities. The most serious problem of elitism in the Mesas specifically—and the democratization project more generally—was the dominant role of outside professionals from NGOs and central government ministries. Unlike the Local Development Committee (Comité de Desarrollo Local—CDL) in Guamote, Ecuador (see Chapter Two), where NGOs had the right to voice but not vote, the NGO and government representatives in Haquira’s Mesas de Concertación were full voting members. Their heavy influence over Haquira’s democratization project resulted in part from the much higher levels of education, professional training and connections to the aid industry and other branches of government that NGO and government staff possessed in comparison with the civil society representatives on the Mesas. However, the dominant roles of the professional outsiders were also bolstered by their election to coordinating positions in the Mesas by the representatives of Haquira’s communities and civil society organizations, a reflection both of the tendency of many peasant communities in Peru to choose external intermediaries to represent them (see Chapter Six) and of the ‘ventriloquist’ tendencies of well-meaning professionals to speak for marginalized populations (see Chapter Two). Two of the Mesas de

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Concertación elected NGO representatives as their coordinators while the other two Mesas chose representatives from government ministries. The external actors who took on the coordinating roles were adept at preparing funding proposals and maintaining good communications with aid donors and central government offices, but they failed to ensure that the discussions and decisions within the Mesas reflected the concerns and priorities of the rural peasant majority rather than their own vision of democratization and development, which prioritized institutionalized modes of participation and a social development agenda. The external origins of the democratization project in Haquira and its elitist elements both came to the fore in the process of selecting a mayoral candidate for the 2002 municipal elections. Despite the discourse of concertación and participation, Gonzales and his key collaborators chose a mayoral candidate in a top-down manner that alienated and angered the leaders of the District Peasant Federation, who felt they had a right to be involved in the nomination process. Aware of how much the democratization process depended on the political will and leadership of the mayor, Gonzales and his key collaborators wanted to ensure that his successor possessed the skills to move the process forward. Their chosen candidate for the post was a staff member with an NGO that had collaborated closely with Gonzales but who had been born and raised in Cusco. The clear lack of confidence by Gonzales and his collaborators in the leaders of the peasant federation to carry on the democratization project further frustrated federation leaders. Without their active support in the 2002 election campaign, Gonzales’ chosen candidate lost to a peasant leader who was not connected to either the peasant federation or the Mesas, and who quickly ran the municipal democratization project into the ground. The democratization project in Haquira also failed to generate a broad base of support because it did not respond adequately to shortterm livelihood concerns in peasant communities. The process of development planning and concertación combined with the increased presence of NGO and government officials to generate widespread expectations for tangible improvements in livelihoods and well-being. However, the concentration of external and municipal resources into planning meetings and training workshops as well as the prioritization of a social development agenda that focused on cattle theft, family violence and methylic alchohol meant that the municipal government invested proportionately few resources into the traditional public works projects that are widely viewed in the rural Andes as the central role of municipal governments.20 As in Limatambo, peasant leaders in Haquira understood municipal democratization primarily as the redistribution of municipal

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resources in favor of rural communities rather than as changes in decision making processes. NGO staff and aid officials often criticized the widespread tendency of rural municipal governments to invest resources in public works projects that typically involve large amounts of cement but have little visible impact on local development, and they highlighted the central role that such projects play in kick-back schemes and the clientelist management of unskilled labor. However, often overlooked are the reasons why local populations may also prefer traditional cement-based infrastructure projects to the social development agenda promoted by aid agencies and NGOs. Not only are buildings constructed from cement widely viewed as important symbols of modernity in rural communities in the Andes—which contrast with much more prevalent adobe construction—but cement projects also generate an important source of unskilled employment in rural communities that social development projects generally do not (see Cameron forthcoming). While the capacity-building workshops and education and health initiatives promoted by Gonzales and his NGO collaborators generated employment for well-trained professionals and some long-term benefits for rural communities, they did not produce income for unskilled rural workers. By contrast, short-term employment in the construction of public works projects represented one of the few opportunities in many rural communities to earn cash income that did not require urban labor migration. In short, even if the developmental impact of many traditional public works projects is small, they can also serve as important markers of modernity in rural communities and as key sources of employment, priorities that should not be overlooked or underestimated. Moreover, although involvement in the Mesas de Concertación and other ostensibly participatory decision making forums might have generated important benefits for peasant communities in the long-run, in the short run they required that community leaders invest significantly more time and energy than was required by the traditional clientelist strategy of petitioning the mayor directly with collective requests for public works projects or individual requests for employment. Gonzales’ administration had tried to implement a more transparent, rational and equitable system of allocating municipal investment resources by requiring communities to prepare project proposals, which they would present, discuss and prioritize at district-wide meetings—a precursor to Peru’s 2003 Law of Participatory Budgets. One of the NGOs closely connected to Gonzales provided extensive training to community leaders on how to prepare the basic project profiles. Nevertheless, while community leaders generally did attend the resource allocation

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meetings, they rarely brought with them the project proposals that Gonzales asked for and clearly preferred to make direct private requests to the mayor for assistance to their communities, a practice that Gonzales’ successor actively encouraged. Previous analyses of democratization initiatives in Haquira and other rural communities have focused much more attention on the design of participatory schemes and on the political strategies of mayors and key civil society leaders to make those schemes work rather than on the actual responses of ordinary community members and representatives to those schemes (i.e. Quedena 2003; Landa 2005).21 These approaches have tended to overestimate the impact of the design of participatory institutions on the actual behaviour of those who participate in them and to overlook the space for forms of agency that diverge from the design of those institutions. In particular, they fail to recognize the difference between the “public performances” and hidden transcripts or “backstage commentaries” of participants in development projects (Rossi 2006: 47). Research by James Scott (1985, 1990) and others on ‘hidden’ or ‘everyday forms of resistance’ suggests that the compliance of poor and marginalized people with the policies and institutions of more powerful actors is rarely absolute, even in the case of interventions with benevolent goals. In the contexts of material poverty and socio-political marginalization, rural people often cannot afford to explicitly challenge or reject externally imposed schemes or policies but they do consistently find subtle and creative ways—ranging from foot-dragging to theft—to challenge and even undermine interventions they perceive as detrimental to their own interests. Even in the context of externally inspired schemes intended to benefit them, Scott’s research suggests that the goals and strategies of poor and marginalized people frequently diverge from those of more powerful actors—even benevolent ones—and that poor and marginalized individuals engage in hidden forms of ‘infrapolitics’ to pursue their own goals while maintaining the appearance of compliance with the powerful. Similarly, as noted in Chapter Four, Stern (1987: 11) used the concept of “resistant adaptation” to explain the response of Peruvian peasants in other parts of the southern highlands to outside interventions with which they disagreed but could not afford to explicitly oppose. The responses of rural community leaders in Haquira to Gonzales’ democratization efforts did not represent resistance so much as a strategic adaptation to a new style of municipal governance. They ‘performed’ in a manner that suggested compliance with the goals and institutional arrangements for municipal resource allocation—by attending and taking part in the Mesas de Concertación and other

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meetings—but continued to quietly use their own strategies for gaining access to individual and collective resources. Similarly, while community leaders formally and publicly supported the initiatives of Gonzales and NGOs to combat cattle theft, family violence and methylic alcohol consumption, they used ‘backstage’ strategies to push for more traditional public works projects that would generate paid labor and symbols of modernity in their communities. As David Mosse insightfully argued in the case of a large-scale rural development project in India, “while beneficiaries may consent to dominant models—using the authorized scripts given to them by projects—they make of them something quite different” (2004: 645). Other observers have also noted the ways in which ‘participants’ have engaged in Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) activities—as if performing in “a show staged for the benefit of foreign development workers” (Salemink 2006: 113)—and have highlighted the “hidden agendas and strategic maneuvers” that mark people’s behaviour and discourse in participatory exercises (Pottier 1997: 221). In Haquira, community leaders similarly appeared to comply with externally inspired democratization efforts, but their public performances masked their preferences for concrete public works projects over social development initiatives and for individual rather than collective mechanisms for allocating resources. To be sure, Mayor Gonzales’ administration did invest in some tangible public works projects that generated both employment and an image of modernization—in particular a new high school building in the town center—but not on the scale that many Haquireños had expected given all of the planning meetings and NGO workshops. In that context, the promise of Modesto Huayno, who won the 2002 mayoral elections, to prioritize ‘public works projects, not training workshops and meetings’ resonated widely with the perception of democratization as redistribution, especially when combined with the populist discourse of peasant power in the MNI political party. The stalled experience of municipal democratization in Haquira does not mean that efforts to promote participation and planning cannot succeed in the rural Andes, but rather that such political projects also need to respond to the short-term expectations of rural populations and need to be based on local experiences of democratic governance (see Avritzer 2002). From the perspective of NGOs and aid donors, the collapse of the democratization project in Haquira can be viewed as a strategic failure both to adequately respond to these imperatives and to overcome the deeply rooted traditions of clientelism as well as the power of local brokers within clientelist networks. At the same time, the apparent failure of the NGO and donor inspired democratization project

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in Haquira can also be seen as a successful case of peasant resistance to externally inspired schemes to improve their condition (Scott 1998). The failure of Gonzales’ democratization project to take root in Haquira also suggested that rural communities and their leaders were not seduced into a new mode of governmentality that might have offered some benefits but would also have incorporated them into a system of governance that delineated the forms and limits of political participation in accordance with outside ideas of what municipal democracy should look like, and would have transferred increased responsibility for poverty reduction to rural communities. The Collapse of the Democratization Project in Haquira

The municipal administration controlled by the MNI mayor and councilors from 2002 to 2006 was marked by both abrupt changes and more subtle continuities in the process of municipal democratization. Most noticeably, the institutional changes and more open, transparent, participatory and consensus-oriented decision making practices that Gonzales had promoted came to a sudden end. Ironically, as in Limatambo, the democratization project in Haquira collapsed just as the Peruvian state passed new legislation aimed at making municipal governance more participatory and accountable throughout the country. And, as also occurred in Limatambo, the new mayor and councilors were able to justify their disregard for the democratization initiatives of the previous administration by claiming that they had been replaced by the new central state legislation—in particular the 2003 Law of Participatory Budgets. The MNI administration was able to comply with the letter of the new municipal democratization laws while flagrantly ignoring their spirit and successfully established a system of clientelist political management. As an NGO staff member with a long work history in Haquira noted, “paternalist, clientelist domination has reemerged, but now behind a mask of participatory democracy and peasant power” (Interview: May 23, 2006). However, despite the apparent disruption of the municipal democratization process that followed the 2002 elections in Haquira, some important legacies of Gonzales’ administration did continue. First, peasant backgrounds were no longer bases for exclusion from municipal power. Indeed, while Gonzales had been careful to make space for mestizos from the town center in his administration in order to avoid an anti-peasant backlash, the municipal councils elected in 2002 and 2006 were entirely dominated by Quechua-speaking peasant representatives from rural communities. As one of the municipal councilors elected in

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2002 asserted, “now we are all from the countryside and we will continue to be governed by our brothers from the countryside. The old power group is now minimal” (Interview: November 21, 2005). Second, in line with the control of municipal power by peasant leaders, the shift in municipal resource allocation away from the town center in favor of rural communities also persisted. Despite disagreements with the clientelist mode of governance employed by the MNI administration between 2002 and 2006, leaders of the District Peasant Federation did acknowledge that the municipal government was investing most of its resources in rural communities. Finally, the experience of participation in municipal decision making between 1998 and 2002 created expectations among at least some local peasant leaders—especially women—that municipal governance should be participatory and transparent and that it should follow collectively agreed upon goals—if not NGO designed development plans. At the same time, the collapse of Gonzales’ democratization project in Haquira also marked the opening of new opportunities. Perhaps most importantly, the forced withdrawal of most of the NGOs that had been involved in the democratization initiatives of Gonzales’ administration meant that the process of political change in Haquira took on a greater sui generis character that reflected local capabilities, identities and power relations much more than the external designs encouraged by aid donors and NGOs. While the loss of NGO technical and financial support was seen as a setback by some, it also opened more space for local peasant leaders to debate and struggle for their own visions of municipal governance. Indeed, in 2006 the District Peasant Federation of Haquira nominated its own slate of candidates, and won the position of mayor and four of the five council seats under the banner of the Llapanchik political party.22 I have not returned to Haquira since the 2006 elections, but personal communications with some of the former NGO staff have indicated that the municipal government had again established a close working relationship with the peasant federation and that its leaders exercised considerable influence in municipal decision making, although the Mesas de Concertación and the municipal development plan had not been revived. While the federation was clearly marked by elements of clientelism, sexism and the domination of decision making by an elite of educated peasant leaders, its major decisions were made largely by consensus in open, noisy and wellattended general assemblies and it was the most democratic and broadly representative civil society organization in Haquira. Numerous scholars have highlighted the apparent weakness of Indigenous identities and Indigenous political mobilization in Peru,

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especially in comparison with Bolivia and Ecuador (Yashar 2005; Van Cott 2005; Rice and Van Cott 2006; Paredes 2008). In Haquira, as in much of the rest of Peru, those who speak the Quechua language and engage in Quechua cultural practices have not self-identified as Indigenous or organized politically around explicitly Indigenous issues. Indeed, Quechua-speaking parents have actively resisted efforts by Peru’s Ministry of Education to implement a bilingual education program and advocated for their children to be educated in Spanish (Municipalidad de Haquira 2000: 81; see also García 2005). However, as María Elena García (2005) argued in her analysis of the struggles of Quechua-speaking parents against bilingual education programs in other parts of the southern highlands, scholarly analysis of the absence of explicitly Indigenous identities and social movements has diverted attention away from the identities and forms of politics that do exist in rural Quechua-speaking communities. Similarly, Marisol de la Cadena (2000) highlighted the ways in social constructions of which what it meant to be mestizo in twentieth-century Cuzco incorporated significant elements of what might otherwise have been considered Indigenous cultural practices. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to examine the meaning and relative strength of Indigenous and mestizo identities in Haquira, but it is clear that while rural Quechua-speaking communities and their leaders have engaged in local politics, they have simply not drawn explicit attention to their ethnicity when doing so. The relative weakness of explicitly Indigenous forms of political mobilization in Haquira is reflected in the focus of popular political struggles on gaining access to resources and political power through the institutional arrangements established by the Peruvian state rather than on establishing new mechanisms for municipal decision making based on ‘Indigenous’ forms of governance. The leaders of the Llapanchik party in the department of Apurímac did make efforts to construct an Indigenous political identity and to mobilize voters with an explicitly Indigenous political discourse in the 2002 and 2006 elections (see Pajuelo 2007: 97–113). Nevertheless, as various analysts have argued, the Llapanchik party’s attention to Indigenous identities has been primarily rhetorical; in its actual practice, the party has put much more emphasis on regional class-based peasant identities and political issues (see Pajuelo 2007: 104; Rice and Van Cott 2006: 715). However, questions about the extent to which political actors have attempted to reconstruct and mobilize voters around Indigenous identities should not distract attention away from the ways in which local politics are actively unfolding on the ground in Haquira and other parts of the rural Andes, whether they can be easily categorized as Indigenous or not.

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New Challenges to Local Democracy

Efforts to deepen municipal democracy in Haquira encountered a new and potentially even more serious challenge in 2004 when Xstrata PLC, a multinational mining enterprise based in Switzerland, acquired mineral exploration rights for a 36,000 hectare area that includes much of the province of Cotabambas, in which Haquira is located, and parts of the neighboring province of Grau. The mineral exploration area, known as ‘Las Bambas,’ purportedly contains some of the richest copper deposits in the world. Although Xstrata had not yet decided in 2008 whether to establish a mine in Las Bambas, the government of Peru predicted that copper extraction from the zone would increase Peru’s overall mineral exports by thirty percent and its total gross domestic product by more than one percent (Proinversión, no date). In 2008, the Las Bambas project was still in the exploration phase, and the impacts and conflicts it generated were still relatively minor. However, the massive scale of the possible mine coupled with the experiences of other regions of Peru where large mines have been established raises major concerns. The district of Haquira itself does not lie within the formal boundaries of Las Bambas, but its close proximity to the zone has generated serious worries about the environmental, social, economic and cultural impacts of the possible mine and its impact on local politics. In a country-wide study of mining activity in Peru, De Echave and Torres found a consistent negative correlation between mining activity and life expectancy, years of schooling, literacy rates and per capita income (2005: 129). Similarly, other authors who have studied the impacts of mining activity on rural communities in Peru have argued that mineral extraction and rural community development are incompatible (Glave and Kuramoto 2002; Ormachea 2005). In Haquira, the Las Bambas mine can be expected to generate difficult environmental, social, economic and cultural conflicts within and between rural communities (Gouley 2005). Experience elsewhere suggests that those conflicts will strain the possibilities of democratic governance and aggravate tensions between municipal officials and community leaders (Ormachea 2005; Bebbington et al. 2008). The creation of a $45.5 million social development fund in 2004 to benefit regions affected by the Las Bambas operations had already created serious political fissions. While the vast majority of the local population in Cotabambas and Grau expressed opposition to proposals for the mining project (Gouley 2005: 72) and the district and provincial peasant federations organized protests against it, all of the municipal governments in the region—including Haquira’s—chose to support it in

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October 2003,23 decisions that were no doubt heavily influenced by the central role of municipal governments in the administration of the social development fund. Although there were no reports of direct interventions by Xstrata into municipal decision making in Haquira, local NGO staff noted that in neighboring districts efforts by supporters of the mine—but not Xstrata itself—to curry favor with local politicians had resulted in several corruption scandals and cases of violence. If Xstrata’s operations in Las Bambas continue to the extraction phase—a decision expected in 2009—serious challenges to municipal democratization in Haquira can be anticipated as well. Conclusion

The history of municipal democratization in Haquira has been characterized by vicissitudes and contradictions. While the specific democratization project led by Mayor Gonzales between 1998 and 2002 largely failed, more subtle long-term changes in local social, economic and political power relations continued in ways that contributed to the gradual deepening of democratic governance in the district. Although the changes in local governance that occurred after 2002 were not reflected in the creation of innovative new municipal institutions and did not capture the attention of outside observers in the same ways that Gonzales’ initiatives did, they were more likely to be sustained because they were rooted in the changing dynamics of local power relations and were not dependent on the political will and leadership of a particular mayor. Until the mid-1990s, conditions in Haquira did not appear to favor municipal democratization. The combination of geographic isolation, the entrenched social, economic and political power of ex-landowning elites, weak organization within and between rural communities, fragile connections with outside actors that might have supported peasant struggles for local political power, and the debilitation of local organizational activity as a result of six years of political violence all pointed towards the ongoing control of municipal governments by clientelist power brokers. Nevertheless, the erosion of the moral authority and social power of the old landowning elite, which followed the latter’s exodus from the district during the years of political violence, combined with the emergence of a new social and political elite of well-educated peasant leaders to mark an important break with the past that opened new possibilities for municipal democratization. The specific strategies and institutional innovations promoted by Mayor Gonzales and the NGOs that collaborated with him had relatively few

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lasting effects once his term in office ended in 2002, but the longer term and more gradual shift in power relations continued and the control of moral authority and political power by peasant leaders deepened. The particular forms of democracy and the institutions in which it was embodied changed over the course of the three municipal administrations that held office between 1998 and 2008. The model of democracy favored by Mayor Gonzales was participatory and deliberative in appearance, but in practice only expanded active political participation to a relatively small and privileged group of top peasant leaders and the representatives of NGOs and state agencies. In this sense it shared the neo-corporatist elements of the emergent model of democracy in other rural municipalities such as Cotacachi (Chapter Three), in which the leaders of recognized communities and civil society organizations were invited to take part in municipal decision making but the ordinary members of those communities and organizations were not. The participation in municipal decision making of those who did not hold leadership positions depended entirely on the internal dynamics of their communities and organizations. In some cases—in particular, with the federation of women’s organizations—deliberation was active, but in most cases—including most peasant communities and the federation of peasants—regular communication between leaders and base members was relatively weak. As a result, decision making in the peak level forums such as the Mesas de Concertación was not based on extensive prior deliberation within rural communities or other civil society organizations. Nevertheless, the model of democracy that emerged from 1998 to 2002 was significantly more democratic than the populist and clientelist version of municipal democracy that replaced it. While the actual distribution of municipal resources remained relatively equitable, the process through which decisions were made about the allocation of those resources was based on the clientelist provision of favors and the efforts of the mayor to maintain a base of support in peasant communities rather than being based on transparent deliberation in open meetings. The return to municipal power of leaders of the District Peasant Federation in 2006 marked a re-invigoration of democratic institutions in Haquira but not the re-establishment of the NGO-inspired model of democracy promoted by Gonzales. The new mayor and councilors did not revive the Mesas de Concertación and largely ignored the Municipal Development Plan. The peak leaders of the peasant federation also remained the key actors in the process, and although they enjoyed considerable levels of moral authority, decision making was often highly vertical. The future of municipal democracy in Haquira thus depends as much on the internal power relations within the District

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Peasant Federation and the extent to which its base members can hold their leaders accountable as much as it does on institutional innovations in municipal governance. The gradual deepening of municipal democracy in Haquira had few tangible impacts on the material well-being of the local population. The most visible impacts involved the redistribution of municipal investment resources away from the town center towards numerous small-scale infrastructure projects in the rural communities that represent the vast majority of the population. However, the scale of unmet demands for basic infrastructure (such as roads, electricity, irrigation, potable water) and basic services (such as education and human and animal health care) remains enormous even with the increases in municipal transfer funds from the central government since the 1990s. Haquira remains one of the poorest districts in Peru, with one of the lowest levels of human development (see Table 7.1). In the context of the ongoing isolation of the district, distance to urban markets, unfavorable ecological conditions for agricultural and livestock production, lack of credit and technical support available to local producers and the continued liberalization of the Peruvian economy, there may be relatively little that even a highly democratic municipal government could do to foster significant improvements in the material well-being of the local population. Moreover, based on experience in other parts of Peru, the possibility of a major multinational mining operation just outside the district does not point towards improvements in local livelihoods or levels of human development and may pose serious challenges to the democratic governance of the district. However, despite the relative lack of material progress in Haquira, there were signs of less visible but still highly important changes in the sense of dignity among rural community members and the increased respect for basic civil and political rights by all levels of government since the 1980s. The firm control of municipal politics by peasant leaders generated a widely remarked-upon sense of confidence that the era of humiliation and human rights violations by the local elite of ex-hacendados had clearly come to an end.

Notes 1 The ‘high provinces’ include the Apurímac provinces of Antabamba, Cotabambas and Grau, and the Cusco provinces of Chumbivilcas, Espinar and Canas. 2 The municipal districts in the Santo Tomás watershed are Haquira and Tambobamba in the province of Cotabambas (Apurímac Department) and

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Colquemarca, Lusco, Quiñota and Santo Tomás in the province of Chumbivilcas (Cusco Department). 3 Data from 1993 is from Municipalidad de Haquira (2000), which in turn is based primarily on Peru’s 1993 Population and Housing Census and the 1994 Agricultural Census. It is important to note that both of these censuses were conducted during the conflict between Shining Path and the Peruvian military— which casts doubt on their reliability, especially in conflict zones such as Haquira. Nevertheless, the data can be interpreted as very general indicators of demographic and housing trends. 4 INEI reports that the surface area of Haquira is 38,578 hectares (INEI 1994), while the municipality of Haquira, using other data from INEI, asserts that the surface area is 47,546 hectares (Municipalidad de Haquira 2000: 1). The Ministry of Agriculture, INEI, the Instituto Geografico Militar, and the residents of Haquira all disagree on the boundaries of the district (Municipalidad de Haquira 2000: 5). 5 The authors of Haquira’s Strategic Development Plan assert that the statistics on infant mortality reported by the Ministry of Health (85.4 / 1000 live births) are highly questionable given a provincial infant mortality rate of 118.8 / 1000 live births (Municipalidad de Haquira 2000: 85). 6 Source: PNUD 2006. 7 Source: PNUD 2006. 8 Source: PNUD 2006. 9 The export of wool was facilitated by the construction of railway lines from Arequipa to Puno and Cusco to Lima in the late nineteenth century as well as by the expansion of the road network in some parts of the southern highlands in the early twentieth century (Spalding 1980: 82; Orlove 1977: 46). 10 During interviews conducted by the author between 2005 through 2007, peasant leaders with memories of the 1960s did not recall any significant efforts by leftist organizations to mobilize peasant activism in Haquira. 11 As noted above, the data on Haquira from the 1994 Agricultural Census must be interpreted as very approximate given the presence of Sendero Luminoso and the Peruvian military in the district when the census data was collected. 12 This table provides a rough indication of land distribution in the province of Cotabambas in 1972 and the district of Haquira in 1994. Census data on land distribution at the district level was not collected in the 1972 census, so it is not possible to compare land tenure changes at the district level. Nevertheless, the proportions of land controlled by small-, medium- and largescale landowners do give some indication of changes in the distribution of land between 1972 and 1994. 13 Instituto Nacional de Estadistica (INE) 1972. II Censo Agropecuario: Departamento de Cuzco. Tomo I. Lima: INE: 4. 14 Instituto Nacional de Estadistica e Información (INEI). 1994. III Censo Nacional Agropecuario. Lima: INEI (www.1.inei.gob.pe/inicio.htm). The data on Haquira from the 1994 Agricultural Census must be interpreted as very approximate, as it was collected in the context of the climate of fear created by Sendero Luminoso and the Peruvian military, which were both present in Haquira at the time of the census.

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15 The UNDP’s 2006 Human Development Report for Peru indicates an overall adult literacy rate of 67.7 percent for Haquira, placing it in the rank of 1,735th out of 1,828 municipal districts (PNUD 2006). 16 Haquireños recalled beatings, rapes and assassinations of peasants by both Sendero and the military. In April 1990, in the neighboring province of Chumbivilcas, an army patrol killed twenty-one peasants, many of whom were also tortured and raped (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights 1996: 1). 17 Peru’s 1994 Agrarian Census indicates that virtually the only social organization that agricultural producers in Haquira acknowledged participating in at the time of the census were the Rondas Campesinas—armed self-defense patrols that peasants were forced to take part in by the military (INEI 1994: Table 15). 18 No statistical data is available to back up this assertion, but both peasant leaders and town-based residents agreed that most of the better-off families from the town center of Haquira left the district during the years of political violence. 19 “Puramente un hombre de ONGs.” 20 Table 7.1 does highlight significant improvements in access to piped water and electricity between 1993 and 2005, but there were fewer investments in more traditional public works such as community centers and school rooms. 21 This paragraph and the next draw heavily on Cameron (forthcoming). 22 The Llapanchik party was founded in 2002 in the department of Apurímac and is composed primarily of well-educated peasant leaders and leftleaning development professionals, and thus bears some important similarities to Gonzales’ political project. In 2006 it won several district and provincial mayorships as well as the presidency of the department of Apurímac. For further analysis, see Pajuelo (2006: 99–114). 23 The mayors of the municipalities affected by the project declared their support for it in the Declaration of Challhuahuacho, which was signed on October 2, 2003 by the president of the department of Apurímac, the provincial mayor of Cotabambas, and all of the respective district mayors.

8 Conclusion

On a cool night in July 2002, municipal officials in Guamote, Ecuador mixed with community leaders and their families at a party to celebrate the inauguration of a new municipal development project. As we danced under the sky to a techno-Kichwa band and shared chicha beer from a plastic jug, the tensions within the Indigenous struggle to control and to democratize municipal governance in Guamote were palpable. The festivities took place at a recently established Indigenous leadership training center and experimental farm on the site of the former hacienda Tortorillas, which had been one of the largest and most repressive haciendas in Ecuador until the mid-1970s. The conversion of the former estate into an Indigenous-controlled leadership training center and experimental farm was a powerful symbol of the radical transformation of land control and political power from a tiny landowning mestizo elite to the local Indigenous majority. However, one of the central challenges to the Indigenous peasant struggle for municipal power became apparent when the former Indigenous mayor, who then occupied a senior position in the Ministry of Agriculture, arrived at the party with members of Ecuador’s Congress from the Indigenous political party Pachakutik and military body guards in a parade of massive sport utility vehicles. Although the former mayor was a respected community leader who had been heavily involved in the decades-long political struggle to gain control of Guamote’s municipal government, it was now evident that he represented a new Indigenous political elite that was quickly becoming disconnected from the members of rural Indigenous communities in the municipality. The struggle for municipal democracy that began in the early 1980s had been sidelined by struggles for political power among the local Indigenous political elite. Two years later in Bolivia, I listened sympathetically as the jacha mallku of the twenty-four ayllus that make up the marka and municipality of Jesús de Machaca, Bolivia confessed his fear that Indigenous control of the newly created municipality would undermine

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the ayllu-based system of governance and that he would be the last jacha mallku with any real authority. The ayllu system in Jesús de Machaca has continued to function but the tensions between it and the state-based system of municipal governance dominate the local political agenda. In November 2006 in Mizque, Bolivia I visited with a peasant leader I had come to know well on an earlier research trip and was startled by the change in his political discourse. In 2004, before Mizque’s Peasant Federation controlled municipal power, he had spoken with me for more than two hours about the political challenges facing peasants in Mizque, in Bolivia and around the world and the need for organized political struggle. However, in 2006, after the Peasant Federation had gained control of the mayor’s office and municipal council he had redirected his energy towards training courses in accounting and technical aspects of municipal administration and had little to say about larger political issues. These three episodes highlight the internal tensions that have been unleashed by Indigenous and peasant struggles for municipal power and which now constitute some of the most difficult challenges facing the democratization of municipal governance in those rural municipalities in the Andes where municipal power is controlled by Indigenous and peasant groups. Municipal power is not a panacea for Indigenous and peasant populations. Not only has control of municipal power created new political tensions but it has also proven to be insufficient to influence some of the central forces that shape the livelihoods, wellbeing and political efficacy of Indigenous and peasant groups, such as the operations of multinational corporations and macroeconomic policymaking. Indeed, even in the rural municipalities where Indigenous and peasant struggles to democratize municipal governance have been most successful, there have been few notable improvements in local livelihoods or material well-being. Moreover, the decisions by Indigenous and peasant groups to struggle for municipal power bring with them serious dangers of cooptation into the bureaucratic logic of the state—or what Foucault described as ‘governmentality’—and a diversion away from broader political struggles for human rights and land redistribution. At the same time, however, Indigenous and peasant struggles to control and democratize municipal power have had important positive impacts on the sense of dignity and respect perceived by formerly excluded rural populations, and which are most notable in the reduction of racist exclusion by municipal employees and politicians. The struggles by Indigenous and peasant groups to control rural municipal power need to be understood as a form of “strategic

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adaptation” (Stern 1987: 11) to a changing political and economic context that they do not control and which offers both new political opportunities and risks. That context is shaped by the trend towards municipal decentralization, the ‘good governance’ agenda of aid donors and international financial institutions, NGO and donor support for municipal democracy, the ongoing implementation of neoliberal macroeconomic policies, and the long histories of race- and class-based exclusion from local political power in the Andes. This chapter seeks to answer the three questions that I posed in Chapter One about the factors that best explain rural municipal democratization in the Andes, the forms of municipal democracy that are emerging in the region, and the impacts of rural municipal democratization on the well-being, dignity, and political capabilities of Indigenous and peasant populations. The conclusions presented here are based on analysis of the experiences of the six rural municipalities examined in Chapters Two through Seven. The six case studies cannot be considered as representative of the more than two thousand other rural municipalities in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru but they do highlight the factors that have supported and undermined municipal democracy in rural areas and thus have much to say about the possibilities for rural municipal democratization in other parts of the Andean region, the rest of Latin America, and perhaps other parts of the world as well. Moreover, the case studies also draw attention towards the difficult challenges involved in struggles to control and democratize municipal power. The rest of this chapter is divided into three sections which address the three questions about rural municipal democratization outlined above. What Factors Best Explain Rural Municipal Democratization?

In Chapter One I pointed out that the prevailing methodological approaches to the study of municipal democratization have focused on the institutional design of municipal governments and on the leadership of municipal officials, particularly mayors. The six cases examined in this book indicate that the creation and design of institutions to deepen municipal democracy and the leadership of municipal officials do indeed play important roles in the democratization of municipal governance, but only in the context of broader historical transformations in relations of local social, economic and political power. In short, the dynamics of local power relations shape both the functioning of municipal institutions and the strategies that municipal leaders employ to manage and democratize municipal governance. Analysis of the six cases does

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not highlight any single path or pattern of power relations that leads towards the democratization of rural municipal governments. Rather, the wide variations in the patterns of municipal governance examined in this book reflect similarly wide variations in the geographic, socioeconomic, and political contexts within which municipal governments and leaders operate. However, the cases do reveal certain common features in the relationship between the dynamics of local economic, social and political power on the one hand, and on the other hand, the democratization of rural municipal governance. In all six cases, efforts to democratize municipal governance followed the breakdown of feudal power relations and the gradual redistribution of class and ethnic power away from tiny elites of hacienda owners to somewhat larger but still privileged groups of town-based merchants and professionals and finally to the representatives of local Indigenous and peasant majorities. Central to these changes in local power relations was the combination of agrarian reform legislation, the capitalist modernization of agricultural production, the out-migration of local elites, the political organization of peasant and Indigenous populations, class differentiation within peasant and Indigenous groups, the emergence of well-educated Indigenous and peasant leaders, and the outside interventions of leftist political parties, progressive Catholic priests and non-governmental organizations. Analysis of the six cases also highlights the ways in which local geographic and ecological settings shape local power relations and the possibilities of rural municipal democratization. Indeed, there was a close connection between the relative ecological degradation and economic marginality of rural geographic spaces and the democratization of economic, social and political power in those spaces. In a similar manner, Jonathan Fox found that in rural Mexico “only those municipalities that are too small, remote and poor to be worth trying to control” escaped the pattern of political manipulation by authoritarian and corrupt elites (2007: 530). The case studies thus suggest that analysis of Indigenous and peasant political quests for municipal power needs to take seriously David Harvey’s observations about the relationships between class struggle and geographic space. Harvey argued that “one of the principal tasks of the capitalist state is to locate power in the spaces which the bourgeoisie controls, and disempower those spaces which oppositional movements have the greatest potentiality to command” (1989: 237). A similar pattern appears in the rural Andes in which the spaces that Indigenous and peasant groups control are those in which powerful economic actors have little interest.

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In all but two of the cases examined—Cotacachi in Ecuador and Limatambo in Peru—a combination of degraded and fragile ecosystems, economic marginality and the subsequent absence of powerful economic actors played an important role in the transformation of local power relations but also posed serious challenges to the efforts of Indigenous and peasant-led municipal governments to improve the material wellbeing of rural populations. The other four municipalities—Guamote in Ecuador, Jesús de Machaca and Mizque in Bolivia, and Haquira in Peru—not only consistently ranked among the poorest municipalities in their respective countries, but were also marked by highly degraded natural environments and low potential for agricultural productivity. In Guamote, the intervention of the Ecuadorian state to implement agrarian reform legislation in the 1970s and the breakdown of the hacienda regime were very closely connected to the municipality’s low agricultural potential in the context of high elevation, sandy soils and a lack of natural sources of water for irrigation. Similarly, in Jesús de Machaca, the historical absence of haciendas was in part a result of the micro-region’s very low agricultural potential, which was characterized by cold temperatures and very thin soil. By the 1990s there was no real local economic elite with which Indigenous peasant leaders had to contend. In Mizque, the isolation from regional markets caused by poor roads and the degradation of agricultural land contributed to the stagnation of the local economy and created a context in which local commercial elites were willing to support the initiatives of an outside NGO to promote the economic development of rural communities and to transform local governance, despite the implications for their control of local political power. In Haquira, the high altitude, rugged topography and extreme isolation from regional markets created an ecological context in which local landowning elites were relatively powerful in local terms, but were marginal in broader regional and national perspectives. However, the arrival of multinational mining operations near Haquira and the possibilities that the municipality will be incorporated into the dynamics of global capitalism much more directly and intensively than it has been in the recent past threatens to pose serious challenges to municipal democracy. In Cotacachi, multinational mining corporations also posed serious challenges to the democratic governance of the municipality. The case of Cotacachi is also significant, because unlike most of the other municipalities examined here, it is the site of highly productive and highly capitalized agricultural operations that produce cut flowers and vegetables for export to North America. The case thus suggests that rural municipal democratization is compatible with the presence of powerful economic actors, a dynamic

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local economy and gross inequality. However, the coexistence of multinational agricultural operations with one of the most democratic municipal governments in the Andean region was predicated in part on the inability of the municipality to regulate or tax the large farms and the corresponding disinterest of their owners and managers in municipal politics. In short, municipal democratization was compatible with the presence of powerful economic actors largely because the municipal government could not regulate or control them. Finally, in Limatambo, the retention of small but highly fertile plots of valley-bottom land by the former hacienda owners was a key factor behind the persistence of their economic and political power after the implementation of agrarian reform. With only small plots of land local elites were unable to expand into national and global markets and their livelihoods remained much more dependent on the control of local political power than their counterparts in Cotacachi. The ecological settings and the relative dynamism of local economies certainly did not determine the outcome of struggles to control and to democratize municipal governance but they did clearly shape those struggles in important ways. The relative absence of powerful economic actors with a stake in municipal politics made it much easier for Indigenous and peasant organizations to gain control of municipal governments. Marginalization from the dynamics of regional, national and global capitalism thus appears to be an important but contradictory factor that simultaneously facilitates the democratization of rural municipal governance but also poses serious challenges to rural poverty reduction. The varied histories of agrarian transformation and especially the implementation of agrarian reform laws also had important impacts on the democratization of economic, social and political power in the six municipalities. Analysis of the six cases highlights the wide historical variations in the control of local space and power by haciendas as well as the extent to which agrarian reform laws were actually implemented at the local level in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. In Guamote, the profound redistribution of agricultural land that followed the unusually rigorous application of Ecuador’s 1973 Agrarian Reform Law in the municipality was the crucial factor behind the transformation of local power relations that made Indigenous peasant control of municipal power possible. In Cotacachi, the relationship between agrarian transformation and municipal democratization was more complex. Agrarian reform had almost no impact on the distribution of land in Cotacachi, but did play an important role in the modernization of agricultural estates and the shift in the political interests of local estate

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owners from municipal to national politics. Moreover, the capacity of the highly modernized and capitalized agricultural operations in Cotacachi to function beyond the regulatory control of the municipal government—almost as if they were not even part of the municipality— circumscribed the effective jurisdiction of Cotacachi’s municipal government to those areas of policymaking in which estate owners had no interest. The emergence of a relatively powerful group of town-based artisans and merchants in Cotacachi also meant that municipal democratization efforts had to respond carefully to their interests, while in other municipalities such as Guamote and Jesús de Machaca the weakened power of local elites created a context in which their interests were almost completely ignored—in both the design and the functioning of new municipal institutions for citizen participation. In Jesús de Machaca, analysis also revealed a very close connection not only between the highly equitable distribution of land and Indigenous peasant control of municipal power, but also between the specific form of collective land tenure and the design and functioning of municipal institutions. The relative strength of the ayllu-based system of governance and the efforts to combine it with municipal government were intimately tied to the system of collective land management in which access to land depended on the fulfillment of leadership roles in community and inter-community organizations. In Mizque, the takeover of agricultural land by local peasants after Bolivia’s 1953 agrarian reform weakened but did not destroy the economic power of local agricultural elites, who were able to re-establish themselves as merchants and as local brokers in the highly clientelist system of national governance that developed in the second half of the twentieth century. In that setting, changes in the control of municipal power were very gradual and took place only in the context of the leadership of a mayor who did not directly threaten the political power or the access to municipal investment funds of the mestizo petty-bourgeoisie of Mizque’s town center. In Limatambo, agrarian reforms similarly weakened the power of local agricultural elites but left them with enough productive land that they were able to hold on to considerable economic and political power and could effectively challenge and ultimately undermine efforts to democratize municipal governance. In Haquira, agricultural elites were also able to retain their most productive land after agrarian reform, and their political power was similarly slow to break down. It was not until the 1990s, when they fled the region to escape the political violence of Sendero Luminoso and the Peruvian armed forces, that political power finally shifted to representatives of the local peasant majority.

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The available secondary information on the colonial and early republican histories of the six municipalities also made clear that the relative strength of the hacienda regime had an important impact on the dissolution or survival of Indigenous modes of decision making and the extent to which those forms of decision making were later incorporated into municipal governance in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In areas where the hacienda regime was established early and penetrated deeply, such as Mizque and other valleys of the Cochabamba region in Bolivia, Indigenous modes of organization and local governance were largely destroyed. As a result, after Bolivia’s 1952 Revolution the state-based corporatist system of rural sindicatos became the most important form of peasant organization and subsequent efforts to democratize municipal governance involved few efforts to reconstruct and incorporate ‘traditional’ modes of decision making. By contrast, in Jesús de Machaca, where the hacienda regime never established a strong foothold, Indigenous modes of communal and intercommunal organization survived the colonial and republican periods as well as post-1952 efforts to replace them with the corporatist sindicato system. In that setting, the incorporation of Indigenous modes of decision making into the state-based system of municipal governance became a central feature of the Indigenous peasant struggle to control and to democratize municipal power. Little secondary information could be found on the colonial histories of the other four municipalities studied in this volume, but it was clear in all of them that the hacienda regime was well-established by in the late nineteenth century and that many if not most local residents were incorporated into the system of servile social relations based on usufruct labor. In those settings, traditional modes of decision making remained relevant only at the community level, where decision making by consensus persisted, but such modes were heavily fused with the influences of the hacienda regime and subsequent state-based modes of peasant organization; traditional Indigenous practices such as leadership rotation disappeared completely. The relative balance of local class and ethnic power relations also had important impacts on the design and functioning of new municipal institutions and on the political strategies adopted by municipal leaders in efforts to deepen municipal democracy. Indeed, the design of the different participatory institutions that were created in the six municipalities cannot be understood without an examination of the local contexts of class and ethnic power within which they operated. In Guamote, the thorough implementation of agrarian reform and farreaching transformation of agrarian social relations severely weakened the economic, social and political power of formerly privileged groups,

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whom Indigenous leaders effectively ignored once they gained control of municipal power. They did expand the name of the Indigenous Parliament (Parlamento Indígena) to call it the Indigenous and Popular Parliament as a token gesture to open spaces for mestizo residents of Guamote’s town center. However, in practice mestizos were never welcomed into the institution. Guamote’s Indigenous mayors were also able to engineer a thorough shift of municipal investment resources away from the town center towards rural communities with little concern for the reactions of mestizo town dwellers. By contrast, the very different pattern of economic and social power in Cotacachi required different strategies to democratize municipal governance. As explained above and in Chapter Three, by the 1980s the landowning elite no longer actively engaged in municipal politics, but a powerful sector of mestizo petty-bourgeois artisans and merchants in the town center had emerged that very actively defended its privileged control of municipal power and resources. In that setting, the design of new municipal institutions for participatory decision making—the Canton Assembly and the Participatory Budget—very carefully responded to the political power of town-based mestizos and the mayor invested heavily in new infrastructure projects in the town center as a strategy to curry much-needed political support. Similarly, the efforts to promote ‘inter-culturalism’ by municipal leaders in Cotacachi did not emerge from a vacuum but rather reflected the sensitive balance of power between the largely rural Indigenous sector and the town-based mestizo population. It is not surprising that in the different context of Guamote, discussion of inter-culturalism was nowhere to be found. When Jesús de Machaca was legally established as a municipality in 2004, the local Indigenous population dominated local power even more thoroughly than in Guamote. In that setting, municipal officials completely ignored the interests of the few remaining mestizo residents and created no opportunities for them to take part in municipal governance other than voting in municipal elections. In Limatambo, the mayor tried to govern as if the interests of the local town-based elite could be ignored, but his systematic bias in favor of rural peasant communities generated fierce and effective opposition from a group that still held significant economic and political power and which played a central role in the eventual collapse of democratization efforts. In Mizque, the relative economic and political strength of the town-based sector of merchants meant that the transition from hacienda to peasant control of municipal power was a very gradual one. The transition took place only following ten years of leadership by a mayor who was very careful to respond to the interests of residents from both the town center

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and rural communities and a very gradual expansion of the political power of the Mizque peasant federation until it was able to take complete control of municipal authority. In Haquira, it was not until local elites fled the municipality to escape the political violence of the early 1990s that political power shifted in favor of the peasant majority, but even then the mayor was careful to respond to the interests of the town center and to make space for the participation of its representatives on the municipal council and in the new institutions of municipal governance that he established. It was only after 2002, when the capacity of peasant leaders to govern without carefully responding to the interests of the town-based elite became clearer, that municipal political power shifted more firmly towards the peasant majority. It also bears emphasizing that the extent to which women were involved in municipal decision making reflected the prevailing relations of gender power in the six municipalities. Although several municipalities made formal institutional changes to make space for women’s representation on municipal councils and in new participatory institutions, in actual practice women’s voices were generally either silent or ignored. The de facto exclusion of women from municipal governance was most pronounced in the municipalities with the largest Indigenous populations, where gendered inequalities in literacy were also greatest. Other scholars have examined the ways in which gender relations in Indigenous communities in the Andes were shaped and exacerbated by colonial and republican laws and social norms (O’Connor 2007). Here I can only point out that a difficult tension persists in all of the six municipalities between the democratization of municipal governance from class and ethnic perspectives on the one hand, and gendered perspectives on the other hand. Viewed through lenses focused exclusively on gender power relations, there was little evidence of municipal democratization in any of the six municipalities despite profound transformations of class and ethnic power. Internal class differentiation within peasant communities was another element of the long-term transformation of rural power relations that had deep implications for the political trajectories of the six municipalities. Other scholars have highlighted the importance of entrepreneurial and charismatic leadership as central factors in the promotion of transparent and democratic municipal governance in rural Latin America (Grindle 2007; Van Cott 2008). However, few observers have carefully analyzed the class and educational backgrounds of the peasant and Indigenous leaders who have become central actors in struggles over municipal power. In the six municipalities studied in this book, the peasant and Indigenous leaders who became mayors,

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municipal councilors and the top leaders of local peasant federations almost all came from very different class and educational backgrounds than the vast majority of their constituents. In the specific cases of the twelve mayors who governed in the six municipalities during the period of study from 1999 to 2008 and who came from peasant families, six had some post-secondary education and six had completed university degrees. Most of these leaders also came from relatively well-off peasant families that had managed to acquire more land and capital than others and who invested in the education of their sons. Only two of the mayors—Jhonny Pardo in Mizque and José Delgado in Guamote—were from less privileged backgrounds and had managed to acquire secondary education—through military service in the case of the former and the benevolence of a local priest in the case of the latter. What bears emphasizing is that the opportunities to acquire the necessary secondary and tertiary education to become an effective mayor, municipal councilor or leader of a peasant federation were not widely available in any of the six municipalities or indeed anywhere in the rural Andes. It was only through the process of class differentiation that followed agrarian reform in which some peasant families acquired sufficient resources to invest in the education of their (mostly male) children that a new political elite of relatively well-off, well-educated and bilingual Indigenous and peasant leaders emerged that could effectively lead and manage rural municipal governments. As Ospina pointed out in the Ecuadorian context, “the large majority of Indigenous leaders have emerged from the process of differentiation within peasant societies” (2005: 94). This issue is important because it highlights the significant class and educational divide between the Indigenous and peasant leaders who have played the leading roles in struggles for rural municipal power and the majority of poorer and less well-educated constituents that they claim to represent. It is thus not surprising that the struggles for municipal power often reflected the individual political ambitions of particular leaders as much as they did the broader goals of Indigenous and peasant organizations. The importance of peasant differentiation to rural municipal democratization also underscores that what it means to be a ‘peasant’ or to be ‘Indigenous’ in the rural Andes has changed dramatically since the 1970s and is now based more on selfidentification, family background and ties to a rural community than on agricultural livelihoods or traditional peasant modes of production. The political organization of peasant and Indigenous populations was also a crucial factor in the transformations of rural power relations that created political opportunities for municipal democratization. In all of the cases examined in this book, municipal level federations of

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community-based peasant or Indigenous organizations played central roles in efforts to democratize municipal power. Indeed, the extent to which struggles for municipal power were embedded in local peasant and Indigenous federations was closely—although not entirely— connected to the relative success of those struggles. In Guamote, Cotacachi, Jesús de Machaca, Mizque and Limatambo the initial idea to contest municipal power had come from Indigenous and peasant organizations. In Haquira, the idea to contest municipal power first came from a pro-peasant mayor, but the peasant federation eventually took control of municipal power. In all of the cases, Indigenous and peasant federations played crucial roles in debating municipal strategy, nominating candidates for positions of municipal authority, campaigning for those candidates in municipal elections and then pressuring them to remain accountable to their grassroots supporters. Moreover, many of the Indigenous and peasant mayors and almost all of the Indigenous and peasant councilors who were elected in the six municipalities had developed important political and administrative skills as senior leaders of their respective organizations; these organizations were by far the single most important training ground for municipal officials from Indigenous and peasant backgrounds. In the cases where the mayors involved in efforts to democratize municipal power did not emerge directly from an Indigenous or peasant federation—as in Cotacachi (1996–present), Limatambo (1992–2002), Mizque (1999–2000) and Haquira (1998–2002)—they had been nominated or at least preapproved by the local federation prior to municipal elections and operated in very close connection with them throughout their terms in office. On the basis of research in medium sized municipalities in Mexico, Merilee Grindle similarly argued that the central challenge that faced efforts to promote good governance was not the introduction of new ideas and reforms, but rather the ability to institutionalize and sustain those reforms beyond the term in office of a particular mayor. “Sustaining change,” she argued, “may require more engaged civil societies that are able to insist on the continuity of structures and processes that provide good results… The challenges ahead may focus less on building institutions from the top down than on sustaining them from the bottom up” (2007: 182). The struggles for municipal democracy examined in this book further confirm this observation—that politically powerful Indigenous and peasant federations are crucial conditions for rural municipal democratization. However, the efforts to democratize municipal governance examined in this book were also marked by ambiguous and sometimes very difficult relationships between municipal governments and local

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Indigenous or peasant federations. The key issues at the center of those tensions were the relative autonomy of each actor from the other and their respective relationships with individual rural communities. The relative success of efforts to deepen rural municipal democracy depended on a delicate balance of power between Indigenous or peasant federations and the leaders that they nominated for positions of municipal authority. On the one hand, the redistribution of municipal investment resources, the creation of new participatory institutions for municipal governance, and overall responsiveness to grassroots concerns required heavy political pressure from Indigenous and peasant federations and their active involvement in municipal governance. On the other hand, however, the day-to-day operation of municipal governments, the capacity of municipal officials to pursue long-term goals rather than simply respond to short-term demands for jobs and public works projects, and the accountability of municipal officials all depended on municipal government autonomy from Indigenous and peasant federations. For example, in the case of Jesús de Machaca, the leaders of the Indigenous peasant federation sought to hold the municipal government to such a high degree of accountability and to micro-manage municipal decision making to such an extent that the elected municipal officials felt they could not govern effectively. By contrast, in Mizque, after the peasant federation gained control of municipal power in 2004, its leaders were so heavily involved in the actual administration of the municipality that they effectively forfeited any role in holding elected municipal officials accountable. A similar problem emerged in Limatambo, where the leaders of the peasant federation became so involved in political battles to defend the mayor that they not only failed to play an effective role in holding municipal officials accountable, but they were also completely marginalized from municipal power when the mayor they supported was no longer in office. In Guamote, where a clique of privileged peasant leaders gained control of municipal power and local peasant federations were divided among themselves, the accountability of leaders to their bases deteriorated and the project to democratize municipal governance largely collapsed. Indigenous and peasant control of municipal power also posed a difficult new challenge for Indigenous and peasant federations, which found that they were no longer the exclusive intermediaries or brokers between the rural communities they represented and outside actors and institutions. Indeed, in some cases the leaders of Indigenous and peasant federations feared that as their municipal governments became more responsive to the needs of rural communities, the role of the federations

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as intermediaries would be completely undermined. In Jesús de Machaca, Indigenous leaders recognized that the Indigenous federation—the Cabildo—could simply not compete with the municipal government in terms of its capacity for administration, its ability to execute public works projects, to negotiate with outside institutions or to pay its senior leaders and staff. Indigenous leaders were very concerned that community members and leaders would cease to recognize the Cabildo as the most important source of authority in the municipality and would bypass it to deal directly with municipal officials and staff. Similarly, in Cotacachi the leaders of the Indigenous federation— UNORCAC—were concerned that as the municipal government responded more effectively to community demands for public works projects, their role as brokers of outside assistance and the legitimacy that those roles generated would be weakened. Difficult negotiations that lasted several years were required to sort out the respective roles of municipal governments and the Indigenous and peasant federations that supported them. In both Cotacachi and Jesús de Machaca, municipal officials and federation leaders did eventually recognize the need for mutual autonomy and a clear division of roles, although the details of those negotiations were still often tense. Peter Evans’ (1995) concept of “embedded autonomy” provides a useful tool for understanding the relative autonomy of municipal governments and civil society organizations. In a manner similar to the national cases examined by Evans, municipal democratization was most successful where municipal officials were deeply embedded in local civil societies and highly accountable to them, but also enjoyed sufficient autonomy from Indigenous and peasant federations that they could manage the day-today affairs of their municipal governments without undue interference. This meant that they could pursue initiatives that would benefit the longterm well-being of local populations rather than simply respond to immediate short-term demands for jobs and public works projects. While the active involvement of Indigenous and peasant federations was a key factor behind the relative success of struggles for municipal power and democratization, the role that outside actors played in creating and supporting Indigenous and peasant federations, and subsequently in supporting Indigenous- and peasant-led municipal governments, also deserves careful attention. As Marc Becker (2008) explains in the case of Ecuador, contemporary Indigenous and peasant organizations have deep roots and complex histories of external involvement. In all of the municipalities examined in this book, outside actors such as activists from left political parties and urban labor unions, progressive Catholic priests and later NGOs played important roles in

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the creation of Indigenous and peasant federations through the provision of legal support, financial assistance and, in some cases, direct leadership. However, the support provided to Indigenous and peasant organizations was often characterized by clientelism and paternalism, and outside supporters often spoke for nascent organizations rather than encouraging them to represent themselves. In all of the six municipalities, the capacity of Indigenous and peasant federations to eventually regulate and even reject the support of outside actors became an important component of struggles to democratize municipal governance. Outside actors also played important roles in the design of municipal policies and institutions. The role of non-governmental organizations in municipal democratization deserves particular attention because it is more complex and problematic than most observers have recognized. Some analysts have highlighted the positive roles that NGOs can play in providing technical support to boost the administrative and planning capacity of municipal governments as well as financial resources for municipal infrastructure projects (Keese and Freire Agudo 2006; Reilly 1995). In some of the cases examined in this book, NGOs played similarly important support roles, such as the provision of funding for Cotacachi’s Canton Assembly and external financial assistance for rural development projects that enabled municipal governments to avoid zero-sum redistributions of municipal resources from town centers to rural communities. However, in other cases the well-intentioned paternalism of NGOs had less positive impacts. In the most extreme cases, such as Haquira and Mizque, NGO staff effectively took over control of municipal governments and governed on behalf of peasant and Indigenous populations rather than supporting them to govern themselves. In Haquira, the mayor and a small team of NGO supporters created institutions for citizen participation in municipal governance that reflected the prevailing NGO vision of what municipal democracy should look like—based on the concept of concertación—but which was largely divorced from grassroots concerns. Municipal development initiatives were also carefully designed to fit the priorities of international aid donors and did not always reflect local concerns. Similarly, in Guamote, NGOs imposed an institutional design for a committee that was supposed to coordinate and plan local development efforts. However, this design proved to be so inappropriate that the committee completely ceased to function. Thus, while technical and financial support from NGOs for Indigenous and peasant-led municipal governments contributed to municipal administrative capacity and the ability to execute

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infrastructure projects, the relative success of democratization efforts also depended on the capacity of municipal leaders to effectively regulate those outside interventions and in some cases to reject them completely. It is thus important for researchers and policymakers to distinguish much more carefully between processes of municipal democratization that are led by popular organizations and those that are led by NGOs. It also bears emphasizing that given the large numbers of rural municipalities and the comparatively small numbers and budgets of NGOs, the role that these actors have played in the democratization of some rural municipal governments is neither replicable on a broad scale nor likely to be sustained for long periods of time. The role of political parties in municipal democratization also deserves special attention. In the six municipalities examined here, political parties were much less important than other scholars have suggested in other cases. Moreover, when political parties did become heavily involved in municipal politics, the partisan conflicts that they ignited tended to weaken rather than strengthen municipal democracy. Van Cott (2008) argued that Indigenous political parties played central roles in pushing for the democratization of rural municipal governance in Bolivia and Ecuador. Indeed, Indigenous political parties such as Pachakutik in Ecuador as well as the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) and the Pachakuti Indigenous Movement (MIP) in Bolivia did give high priority to winning municipal elections in the second half of the 1990s and into the 2000s. Nevertheless, in all of the cases examined here political parties either played secondary roles or actually weakened efforts to democratize municipal governance. In Guamote and Cotacachi, Indigenous peasant struggles for municipal power began more than fifteen years before the creation of the Pachakutik party at a time when national Indigenous movement leaders encouraged their members to boycott elections or to spoil their ballots. In Guamote, the subsequent involvement of Indigenous political parties in municipal politics—especially the Pachakutik and the Amauta parties connected to the Evangelical Indigenous movement—fueled the personal and partisan conflicts that led to the collapse of municipal democratization efforts. In Cotacachi, the ambiguous relationship between the mayor, who was affiliated with the Pachakutik party, and the peasant federation UNORCAC, which had strong ties to the Socialist Party, was a latent source of tension that Indigenous leaders prevented from undermining municipal democratization only by downplaying their partisan alliances. In Jesús de Machaca, Indigenous leaders explicitly identified efforts to escape from partisan politics as a core element of the struggle for municipal democracy; the nomination by the MAS party of two

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candidates for the municipal council in 2004 directly challenged the struggle for local political autonomy by the Indigenous peasant federation and undermined the accountability of municipal councilors to local communities. In Mizque, there were also clear signs of interference by the MAS party in municipal politics in ways that put the concerns of the party ahead of those of local peasants. In Limatambo and Haquira, peasant struggles for municipal power were associated with highly localized political parties that were created by local peasant leaders simply in order to contest local elections and had almost no independent existence from the local peasant organizations themselves. Thus, in all six cases, relative autonomy from political parties was an important factor behind municipal democratization. At the same time, however, the connection between local struggles for municipal power and broader social movements and political parties was an important factor that helped local Indigenous and peasant organizations to engage in the larger struggles over redistributive reforms, macroeconomic policies and constitutional rights at the national level, which are crucial if their hopes for improved livelihoods, dignity, respect and political power are to be realized. The challenge is for Indigenous and peasant controlled municipal governments to find ways of connecting to those broader political movements without being manipulated by them. The design of municipal institutions also had important impacts on the outcomes of those struggles, but only in the broader context of local power relations. Whether municipal leaders respected institutions that had been designed to promote municipal democracy or manipulated them to pursue undemocratic objectives was much more closely connected to local relations of political power than the specific design of national laws or municipal ordinances to promote municipal democracy. Three particularly important observations emerge from analysis of the six cases about the relationship between the design of municipal institutions and the deepening of municipal democracy. First, the institutional designs that worked most effectively to promote municipal government accountability and citizen participation in municipal governance were created locally by civil society organizations in cooperation with municipal leaders, not imposed from the top down by national governments or outside experts—an observation also made by Goldfrank (2007b) and Van Cott (2008). The municipal institutions that actually worked to deepen municipal democracy were those that reflected local power relations and the capabilities of local actors and which were supported by municipal leaders. Institutions that did not share those qualities either collapsed completely or were subverted by municipal officials, no matter how

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democratic they appeared to be on paper. For example, Guamote’s Local Development Committee, Limatambo’s Community and Neighborhood Council, and Haquira’s Coordination Roundtables all eventually collapsed in large part because they did not reflect the interests and political capabilities of local Indigenous and peasant actors and overlooked local power relations. The design of the Local Development Committee in Guamote, imposed by a well-intentioned NGO, required a high level of cooperation among local Indigenous peasant federations that the leaders of those federations were simply not willing to comply with, so the institution ceased to function. The Community and Neighborhood Council in Limatambo, designed by a very wellintentioned mayor, failed to create effective spaces for political opposition within the institution, so political opponents worked to undermine it completely. The Coordination Roundtables in Haquira, also designed by a well-meaning mayor and NGO supporters, reflected a paternalistic vision of municipal governance in which development professionals played the leading roles. Not surprisingly, that model of governance failed to generate enthusiasm from local peasant communities and collapsed when the mayor left office. Where institutions for municipal democratization were imposed by national governments, they fared even less well. In Limatambo and Haquira, the mayors who governed between 2002 and 2006 were easily able to subvert the democratic designs of Peru’s Participatory Budget Law and the Local Coordination Councils. Similarly, in Mizque, the mayor who governed from 2000 to 2004 was able to manipulate Bolivia’s Law of Popular Participation by both ensuring that the Municipal Oversight committee remained weak and through clientelist tactics to ensure the approval of Annual Operating Plans. It was only in Cotacachi and Jesús de Machaca—where local institutions for municipal governance were created by local civil society organizations and reflected local power relations—that the institutions operated more or less effectively. In Cotacachi, municipal officials were careful to design the Canton Assembly and the Participatory Budget to reflect the relatively powerful position of the town center and not allow rural communities to completely dominate decision making. In Jesús de Machaca, the Cabildo that represented the municipality’s rural communities and ayllus was not a municipal institution at all but rather a creation of local civil society that was able to assert its moral authority on the municipal government. Similarly, in Mizque after 2004 the most important institution of citizen participation in municipal governance was the Peasant Federation, which operated independently of the municipal government and the national laws that regulated it.

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Second, the absence of national regulations for participatory municipal institutions did not stop innovative democratic municipal governments or strong Indigenous and peasant federations from creating them. Indeed, efforts to create institutions to promote citizen participation and municipal government accountability or to assert the moral and political authority of civil society institutions that already existed were central components of the struggles for municipal democracy in all six cases. The challenge or impending challenge in all of the municipalities was to sustain the authority of institutions for citizen participation beyond the tenure in office of a particular mayor and council. In the short term, the political will of a mayor and council was sufficient to create new participatory institutions, but in the long term it was inadequate to sustain them, an observation also made by Grindle (2007: 181–182). Some municipal governments passed ordinances in efforts to give legal standing to new participatory institutions, but those could be overturned by subsequent mayors and councils. Moreover, national laws offered no protection for the specific features of institutions created by individual municipalities. In this context of flawed national laws to promote municipal democracy and the absence of any effective legal instruments to protect locally designed institutions, the long-term sustainability of innovative municipal institutions depends on the capacity of local civil society organizations to hold up democratic institutions, even in the face of hostility from municipal officials and other sectors of civil society. Third, the creation of new regulations by national governments to promote municipal democratization had little notable impact on the relative strength of municipal democracy. Not only were municipal politicians able to avoid compliance with the spirit of democratic reforms, but they were also able to use them to justify efforts to undermine much more democratic local institutions that already existed. Most notably in Limatambo and Haquira, clientelist mayors used Peru’s new laws for Participatory Budgets and Local Coordinating Councils to justify their lack of support for the more democratic versions of those institutions that had been created by local actors. Although the locally designed forums for civil society participation in municipal governance were flawed in both Limatambo and Haquira, they were far more democratic than the state-imposed institutions that replaced them. Nothing in the design of national laws for municipal democratization prevented municipal governments from going beyond them, as the extension of Peru’s Participatory Budget Law to the community level by Limatambo’s former mayor in the case of Anta made clear. Even in the context of Bolivia’s comparatively strict framework for municipal

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governance, Indigenous leaders and municipal officials in Jesús de Machaca were able to deepen municipal democracy to incorporate civil society involvement in ways that were not formally recognized by Bolivian law. However, the implementation of national laws to create minimalist institutions of citizen participation, such as the laws that regulate Participatory Budgets and Local Coordinating Councils in Peru, may actually serve to weaken the possibilities of municipal democratization as they allow clientelist practices to continue behind a façade of participatory democracy. In the context of the weak enforcement capacity of national governments throughout the Andes, the actual functioning of those institutions depended far more on local power relations than on their democratic design. The design of national decentralization laws also had a number of important implications for municipal democratization. Decentralization is typically understood to involve the transfer of political, administrative and fiscal authority to sub-national governments. In the struggles for municipal democracy examined here, the most important factor was political decentralization—that is, the creation of elected municipal governments combined with universal suffrage. In all three countries, the organization of municipal elections under conditions of universal suffrage was the key factor that instigated Indigenous and peasant struggles to control municipal power. In most of the cases studied here, struggles for municipal power began at points in time when municipal governments had only weak administrative powers and few financial resources. The only exception was Jesús de Machaca, where the transfer of administrative and fiscal power took place at the same time as political decentralization, first to the municipality of Viacha and then to Jesús de Machaca itself. Nevertheless, in all of the six cases it was clear that Indigenous and peasant struggles for municipal power were motivated as much by quests for dignity and to end racist discrimination by municipal officials as they were by increases in the authority or wealth of municipal governments. The transfer of additional resources and administrative responsibilities to municipal governments expanded the jurisdictions and financial capacity of democratic municipal governments, but it also tended to generate increased competition from self-interested political actors in ways that threatened and even undermined municipal democracy. For example, the steady increase in the number of candidates for the position of mayor in Limatambo from 1992 to 2006 did not reflect an increased number of programmatic options for local voters, but rather a simple increase in the number of individual quests for political power which made it increasingly difficult for local civil society organizations to elect their chosen representatives

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to office. Overcoming that challenge required tremendous moral and political authority and probably also coercive power. One legal mechanism to help avoid this problem might be to increase the number of signatures required to nominate candidates in municipal elections to make it more difficult for self-interested politicians without strong bases of local support to run for office. Like matters of institutional design, the six municipalities studied in this book indicated that municipal leadership was important to the relative success and failure of struggles to democratize municipal governance, but only in the context of broader relations of economic, social and political power. In the absence of strong Indigenous or peasant organizations to support them, even highly talented mayors could not sustain democratization initiatives. Most of the cases were marked by strong degrees of alcaldecentrismo, that is, the perceived centrality of the mayor in bringing about political change. One of the central concerns that I heard from many local actors was that ‘everything depends on the political will of the mayor.’ Indeed, it was clear that mayoral leadership was particularly important for the overall effectiveness of municipal administrations in delivering goods and services, the redistribution of municipal investment resources, the creation of new decision making institutions, and the negotiation of external resources from higher levels of government as well as aid donors and NGOs. Nevertheless, to sustain municipal democratization initiatives over time required the support of strong Indigenous or peasant organizations. In the absence of strong Indigenous or peasant organizational support and in the context of powerful opposition groups, even charismatic and politically talented mayors such as Wilbert Rozas in Limatambo and William Gonzales in Haquira could not sustain democratization initiatives over the long term. As Van Cott (2008) noted, mayoral leadership appears to be most important where municipal institutions for democratic governance are weak. In the settings where Indigenous or peasant organizations firmly dominated local power relations and could provide political support for new institutions of governance—as in Jesús de Machaca and Mizque after 2004 and Haquira after 2006—the individual leadership qualities of particular mayors was a much less important factor. What Kinds of Municipal Democracy Are Emerging in the Rural Andes?

It is the participatory elements of Indigenous and peasant controlled municipal governance that have attracted the most attention from other

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scholars and aid donors. However, even in relatively successful cases of municipal democratization, new participatory institutions and practices coexist with strong currents of corporatism, clientelism, paternalism and sexism, all products of inequalities in power relations that have persisted alongside Indigenous and peasant control of municipal governments. Some of these elements remain deeply embedded in struggles for municipal democracy themselves and have been incorporated into the very design of new institutions of municipal governance, marking difficult internal tensions that must still be confronted and resolved. All of the cases examined in this book involved efforts to deepen municipal democracy beyond forms of local governance that met only the most minimal definitions of democracy through the periodic election of top municipal officials. Those elections themselves were widely characterized by the systematic use of clientelist and coercive political tactics, and the municipal leaders that such electoral processes produced typically represented local elites who were uninterested in, and even hostile to, the concerns of the majority of their constituents. Although elected, municipal leaders made decisions with very little transparency or accountability and virtually no participation from local citizens other than powerful elite actors; they frequently engaged in acts of corruption—including nepotism, embezzlement, and kick-back schemes; they used clientelist political strategies in a systematic manner to manipulate local populations and to undermine potential opposition; and they used their positions of political power to reinforce their privileged positions of economic and social power, systematically marginalizing other political actors on the basis of their ethnicity, class and sex. The forms of municipal democracy that are emerging in the rural Andean municipalities examined here all represent significant progress beyond the corrupted model that prevailed in the past and which still persists in many locales where power relations remain highly unequal. The three most basic goals of Indigenous and peasant efforts to gain control of municipal power were: first, to place their representatives in positions of municipal authority; second, to redistribute municipal resources in favor of rural communities; and third, to transform existing models of municipal governance by making them more accountable and transparent and expanding decision making processes to include a much broader spectrum of local populations. In no cases did Indigenous and peasant organizations consider the simple control of existing municipal institutions to be adequate for the goal of transforming municipal power. Rather, they all sought to either create new institutions for more participatory forms of decision making or to institute processes that would ensure the greater accountability of municipal governments to

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existing Indigenous and peasant organizations—such as the Cabildo in Jesús de Machaca or the Central Campesina in Mizque. It is important to emphasize that top-down schemes imposed by central governments to make municipal governance more participatory—such as the Law of Popular Participation in Bolivia and the Law of Participatory Budgets in Peru—were also considered inadequate; Indigenous and peasant organizations were struggling to create locally designed institutions and processes, not just to control institutions created by the state. After centuries of exclusion from formal political power, the control of municipal authority by Indigenous and peasant leaders was frequently marked by a sense of vindication and the exclusion of the local landowning and commercial elites that had previously held power. In some cases, such as Guamote, Jesús de Machaca and Limatambo, the new institutions of ostensibly participatory decision making effectively excluded those who were not members of rural Indigenous or peasant communities. Although easy to understand, this approach is also dangerous as it makes municipal politics into a zero-sum game in which the ethnic or class-based groups that control municipal institutions completely exclude other ethnic or class groups. In the case of Limatambo, local town-based commercial elites felt so excluded from municipal decision making that they not only worked to undermine the pro-peasant mayor but also the institutions of participatory decision making that he had created. In Guamote and Jesús de Machaca, the mestizo commercial elites were much smaller and did not possess the political power to seriously challenge Indigenous peasant control of municipal government, so they were almost completely excluded from it—left with the right to vote in municipal elections but effectively marginalized from new institutions and processes that sought to make decision making more participatory and inclusive. Only in the case of Cotacachi, where the non-Indigenous town-based population was significant did municipal officials make serious efforts to incorporate privileged groups into new decision making structures—although largely in a strategic effort to gain their acquiescence for the process of political change. The new institutions and processes of decision making put in place by Indigenous and peasant leaders did expand popular participation in municipal governance and make it more deliberative, but they were not without significant tensions and cannot be easily described with single adjectives such as ‘participatory’ or ‘radical’ democracy. Even where strong lines of accountability to widely representative forums for deliberation emerged, they were not always functional to effective municipal governance. In some cases, such as Jesús de Machaca, the

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moral authority and political power of civil society institutions significantly exceeded their technical and legal capacities and created serious challenges for municipal officials. Many of the new systems of decision making also reflected efforts to combine Indigenous- or community-based forms of governance with the state-based regulations for municipal governments. Nevertheless, the bureaucratic logic of the state posed serious challenges to the incorporation of Indigenous modes of decision making into the structures of municipal governance. While Indigenous and peasant leaders were able to claim positions of municipal authority, the institutions that they presided over remained predominantly western and liberal in their design and operation. Moreover, as mentioned above, municipal governance in all six cases was colored by currents of corporatism, clientelism, paternalism and sexism. The corporatist elements of the emergent forms of municipal democracy were evident in the restriction of participation in new institutions of municipal governance to representatives of recognized organizations. That is, the people who took part in so-called participatory institutions of municipal decision making were invited to do so in their capacity as leaders of particular organizations or communities, not as individual citizens. The number of organizations and communities represented in participatory forums ranged from relatively few, as in the case of Haquira, to hundreds, as in the case of Cotacachi—but the basic corporatist condition, that participation was predicated on the leadership of an organization rather than the rights of individual citizens, was common to all six cases. As a result, there were few opportunities for participation in municipal decision making by individual citizens in any of the six municipalities. While this trend reflected the concern for collective over individual interests that is strong in rural communities in the Andes, it also meant that the majority of local populations were in practice excluded from direct participation in municipal decision making. Moreover, the quasi-corporatist model of participation assumed a high level of consultation between community members and their delegates that often did not exist. As a result, in all of the cases examined in this book, municipal democratization was characterized more by the deepening of political representation through a corporatist model than by the creation of opportunities for individual local residents to take part in municipal decision making. This is not simply a theoretical concern rooted in the western liberal concern with individual rights but also one that was actively articulated by Indigenous and peasant leaders and community members in the six municipalities that were concerned about the implications of the corporatist model of

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participation for the sustainability of municipal democratization initiatives. The effective exclusion of large numbers of community members from involvement in allegedly participatory institutions not only meant that they were marginalized from the theoretically empowering benefits of participation but also that their political support for those institutions was often very weak. For example, in Cotacachi, the site of one of the most successful and inclusive institutions of participatory decision making in the Andes—the Assembly of Canton Unity—almost half of the 600 adults who responded to a 2004 survey had never heard of the Canton Assembly and less than ten percent had ever taken part in any activity associated with it. Of those who had heard of the Assembly, twenty percent believed that its role was to organize the annual celebration of Cotacachi’s patron saint and another ten percent believed that its role was to organize annual Easter celebrations, neither of which were in any way related to the Assembly’s mandate or practice (Ospina et al. 2005: 44). Interestingly, clientelist elements of municipal democracy were most pronounced from the bottom up by community leaders rather than from the top down by municipal officials, who in many cases made genuine efforts to curb clientelist practices. However, despite the admonitions of municipal officials, local leaders often proved quite willing to exchange political support for municipal investment resources in their quests to demonstrate their effectiveness as brokers of resources and infrastructure projects for their communities. Similarly, as Salman argued, throughout much of Latin America, people’s experiences with government institutions “have taught them not to insist on their rights but instead to try for the ‘favor’” (2004: 853). Thus far it appears that the creation of nascent institutions for citizen involvement in municipal decision making is insufficient to counteract the deeply rooted convictions among rural populations that the exchange of favors is a more effective strategy than insistence on rights or participation in formal political institutions. Indeed, given the de facto exclusion of large numbers of rural community members from participation in the institutions of municipal governance, it is perhaps not surprising that their support for those institutions was more closely tied to the resources that they made available than the decision making processes within them. Despite the efforts of some mayors to terminate patron-client systems of resource allocation and the apparent transparency of participatory budget systems, top-down forms of clientelism persisted in several cases even where social, economic and political power shifted in favor of Indigenous and peasant populations. For example, in Guamote,

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Mizque and Limatambo (after 2002), municipal officials strategically allocated municipal resources to strengthen political support and to punish political opponents. While participatory budget systems themselves generally included provisions that ensured the theoretical distribution of municipal funds on the basis of transparent criteria, municipal officials also retained considerable discretion to ignore the outcomes of participatory budgeting exercises. As a result, the investments and public works actually executed by municipal governments often diverged significantly from the much more widely publicized participatory budget documents. Nevertheless, in the context of shifts in local social power relations from neo-feudal landowning elites to Indigenous and peasant majorities, top-down forms of clientelism were generally stripped of their overtly classist and racist elements. Local politicians continued to use clientelist strategies to cultivate political support, but they generally stopped using those mechanisms to create and reinforce ethnic and class inequalities. The clientelist tendencies within the new forms of rural municipal governance examined in this book also highlight an understanding of democracy among rural populations that prioritizes the redistribution of resources over procedural changes in municipal decision making. In a pattern very similar to that noted by Grindle in Mexico (2007: 174), the strongest bottom-up pressures on the municipal governments studied here were not for the creation of new institutions of participatory decision making but rather for the construction of public works projects in rural communities. Even where municipal governments did create relatively strong institutions for popular involvement in municipal decision making—as in Cotacachi—municipal leaders recognized that the legitimacy of those institutions depended heavily on the provision of public works projects to individual rural communities. The behavior of the delegates who took part in ostensibly participatory municipal institutions similarly reflected a much higher concern with the distribution of municipal resources than with either the accountability of municipal officials or with the design and functioning of those institutions. In this context, it is important that outside observers do not overestimate local support for participatory institutions and processes, which may be tied more closely to the redistribution of resources than the dynamics of decision making. In many of the cases examined in this book it was the distributive outcome, not the process of municipal decision making, that mattered most to rural community members. Strong currents of paternalist leadership were also evident in several of the cases examined, particularly those where Indigenous and peasant organizations were relatively weak, as in Mizque, Limatambo and

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Haquira. In those cases, well-intentioned outsiders initially played the leading roles in the struggles to democratize municipal governance and acted in the place of Indigenous and peasant groups, rather than supporting nascent organizations to lead the struggles themselves. What appeared to many external observers as star examples of Indigenous and peasant control of rural municipal governments were in fact dominated by the professional staff members and former staff members of NGOs, who frequently displayed surprisingly little confidence in the capacities of Indigenous and peasant populations to govern themselves. Although beneficent development professionals were able to set up institutions that were democratic in appearance and they worked hard to promote local economic and social development, their efforts frequently proved to be both paternalistic and unsustainable. Indeed, it was largely because the well-intentioned schemes of development professionals in positions of municipal power failed to reflect the capabilities and interests of local Indigenous and peasant groups that they did not generate active bases of political support and eventually either withered away—as in Haquira— or were overturned—by elite-supported politicians in Limatambo and by peasant leaders themselves in Mizque. It is thus essential that future research on municipal democracy distinguish more carefully between municipal governments that are led by or embedded in grassroots organizations and those that are led by well-intentioned but outside professionals. Analysis of municipal democracy also needs to look beyond the creation and design of ostensibly participatory institutions to examine the actual relations of power and day-to-day interactions between municipal governments and the communities they are supposed to serve—which do not necessarily fit neatly into the roles prescribed for them by even the most participatory-looking institutions. Indeed, municipal institutions that were inclusive in design were often exclusionary in practice—particularly regarding the involvement of women. Although at least some women were elected as councilors in all of the cases examined in this book—partly as a result of laws requiring certain quotas of female candidates on political party lists in municipal elections—the proportion of women in ‘participatory’ decision making forums was typically much lower and the actual experiences of those women were widely characterized by marginalization and ridicule. In the cases where no quotas were in place to promote the representation of women in participatory spaces— Guamote, Cotacachi, Mizque and Haquira—their numbers were very small and women were generally only involved in their capacities as leaders of specifically women’s organizations. In the cases of Jesús de Machaca and Limatambo, where quota systems mandated equal

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numbers of men and women in deliberative institutions, women’s participation was effectively limited to their physical presence. As a result of the generally lower levels of education of rural women coupled with prevailing cultural norms, many women felt uncomfortable speaking in public settings, and when they did speak they were frequently heckled, ridiculed or simply ignored. The municipal governments studied in this book all made important progress towards increased inclusion in ethnic and class terms, but continued to exclude women from effective involvement in decision making. Indeed, from a perspective focused exclusively on gender it would be difficult to identify any significant elements of democratization at all. This does not mean that women did not benefit in some important ways from changes in municipal governance and resource allocation—and the treatment of Indigenous and peasant women by municipal officials certainly improved—but women’s voices remained largely absent from municipal decision making. The Impacts of Municipal Democratization on Rural Populations

It is important to understand the impacts on rural populations of Indigenous and peasant struggles to control and to democratize rural municipal governments in order to make sense out of the future directions that these struggles take, and, indeed, whether they continue at all. To date, Indigenous and peasant control of rural municipal governments has resulted in few notable improvements in poverty reduction or material well-being. However, analysis also needs to look beyond quantifiable indicators of improved livelihoods and social welfare. Quests for dignity, respect and increased political autonomy have been key motives behind Indigenous and peasant efforts to control municipal governments, and so analysis also needs to consider the extent to which these goals have been realized. The six cases examined in this book suggest that increased dignity and respect have been the primary accomplishments of Indigenous and peasant struggles for municipal power and that local political autonomy has also been enhanced, but at the cost of compliance with national regulations and laws that have exerted powerful bureaucratic influences on Indigenous and peasant organizations. The available data on poverty and human development in the six municipalities indicate only very modest improvements over the time periods associated with Indigenous and peasant control of municipal power, and in one municipality—Guamote—poverty levels actually increased. Cotacachi and Guamote in Ecuador were the only two

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municipalities where census data provided comparable statistics on poverty. In 1990, 89.2 percent of Guamote’s population was considered to be poor and 68.3 percent was considered to be extremely poor. In 2001, after nine years of Indigenous control of municipal governance, poverty levels had increased to 96.1 percent of the population and extreme poverty had increased to 87.9 percent (Chapter Two, Table 2.1). In Cotacachi, 84.2 percent of the population was considered poor in 1990 while 56.2 percent was considered extremely poor. In 2001, five years after Cotacachi’s Indigenous mayor was first elected, poverty had declined slightly to 77.7 percent and extreme poverty had dropped to 52.4 percent (Chapter Three, Table 3.1). Although similar data on poverty levels was unavailable for Bolivian and Peruvian municipalities, it is significant that no municipal officials in any of the other four municipalities studied claimed that poverty levels had declined. Some significant improvements in human development were clear in the six municipalities, but they were generally not associated with municipal governance, as municipal responsibility for health care and education was decentralized only very gradually over the second half of the 1990s in Ecuador and Bolivia and did not begin at all in Peru until after 2002. In all of the municipalities, literacy rates for both males and females improved by ten to eighteen percent over the 1990s, primarily as a result of increased levels of school attendance by children and youth and the decline in population of illiterate older people (see Tables 2.1, 3.1, 5.1, 6.1, 7.1). Similar improvements in literacy can also be seen in regional and national indicators—which suggest that changes in municipal governance had little direct impact on improved literacy. Rather, it appears much more likely that improvements in literacy that date back to the expansion of rural education in the 1970s facilitated the democratization of local power relations and municipal governance by enabling a small sector of young Indigenous and peasant leaders to acquire university and professional training that made them viable candidates for positions of municipal power. It was only in Cotacachi that the democratization of municipal governance generated clear improvements in literacy—through an agreement with the government of Cuba to implement a mass literacy campaign that reduced adult illiteracy from 22.3 percent in 2002 to 3.9 percent in 2005. Comparable data on changes in health indicators were not available for any of the municipalities, but since decentralization of responsibility for health care only occurred gradually over the late 1990s and early 2000s, it is unlikely that any positive or negative changes in health could be directly attributed to municipal governance. It was only in Cotacachi, where the municipal government launched a major initiative to combine western

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and Indigenous health care practices in the field of pre-natal and maternal health care and where Cuban medical brigades were incorporated into the local health care system, that residents spoke of significant improvements in health care. An important question for future research on rural municipal governance is whether and to what extent the democratization of municipal governance leads to reductions in poverty and improvements in service delivery and human development. The most notable material improvements in the six municipalities were related to infrastructure—especially rural electricity, and, to a lesser extent, also piped water and sewage (see Tables 2.1, 3.1, 5.1, 6.1, 7.1). These services have important impacts on livelihoods and health that were not yet evident in available census data but which will likely become evident in the future. Nevertheless, all of the municipalities were still marked by massive shortages of basic infrastructure—in particular, lack of access to safe drinking water and sewage systems. At the rate of progress indicated by census results, it will take close to two hundred years before adequate sewage and septic systems are universal in some municipalities—such as Mizque and Haquira, and more than twenty years in the places with the best records of improvement, such as Cotacachi and Guamote. Data indicates similarly slow progress towards the universal provision of piped drinking water, which must still be boiled to be safe for human consumption. Clearly, without massive increases in state resources, even highly democratic municipal governments that prioritize the needs of rural communities cannot satisfy the unmet demands for basic rural infrastructure. At the same time, however, in all of the municipalities studied, the democratization of decision making about resource allocation resulted in significant increases in the numbers of rural construction projects that typically involved large volumes of cement (see Chapter Three, Chapter Seven and Cameron 2009). It is unclear to what extent these projects— community centers, volleyball courts, medical posts and school classrooms—actually generated improvements in local livelihoods or human development. They did create short-term employment opportunities for unskilled labor in rural communities that would not otherwise have existed. However, as I argued in Chapters Three and Seven, these types of projects were probably more important because they stood as symbols of modernity in rural communities where dignity and community pride were partly connected to self-perceptions of modernization. The numerous cement projects may have had little direct impact on material well-being but evidence suggests that they did have

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important symbolic impacts on dignity and self-respect in historically neglected rural communities. To understand why rural livelihoods and poverty levels have not improved even in places where municipal decision making did become much more democratic requires analysis that goes well beyond the municipal level to examine national macroeconomic policies and global economic trends. The concept of the ‘productive municipality,’ promoted heavily by both the national government and international aid agencies in Bolivia (PADER 1999), suggests that rural municipal governments should be able to improve rural livelihoods through astute entrepreneurial planning. However, the experiences of the six municipalities analyzed here suggests that in the absence of adequate financial and human resources and supportive macroeconomic policies, even highly democratic rural municipal governments are unlikely to bring about significant improvements in rural livelihoods. Rather, broader trends such as the declining terms of trade for traditional agricultural products, the lack of state support for small-scale agriculture, the liberalization of trade and subsequent influx of cheap imported food, weak demand for unskilled migrant labor in urban labor markets, and the vicious cycle of poverty and ecological degradation have far more powerful impacts on rural livelihoods and poverty levels (Crabtree 2000; Grinspun 2003). Rural municipal governments, even very democratic and innovative ones, can do little to counteract these trends. For this reason, it is extremely important that Indigenous and peasant organizations that seek to control municipal power also take part in broader national and global movements that seek to bring about macroeconomic policy changes that would support rural development. However, even where strong rural-based Indigenous peasant social movements exist—as in Bolivia and Ecuador—it can be difficult for municipal governments and municipal level Indigenous peasant federations to find ways to take part in them without sacrificing political autonomy to national political party and social movement leaders. Moreover, national Indigenous and peasant movements face their own challenges and despite some important accomplishments, they have not yet been able to bring about the necessary macroeconomic policy changes to stop the deterioration of rural livelihoods. Perhaps the most important accomplishments of Indigenous and peasant struggles to control and to democratize rural municipal governments relate to local improvements in inter-ethnic relations, a decline of race-based social exclusion and marginalization, and a corresponding increase in the sense of dignity and political efficacy among local Indigenous and peasant populations. The struggle for

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respeto (respect) and to end racist discrimination was an important motivation for all of the Indigenous and peasant quests to control municipal power examined in this book. Although tensions persist, where Indigenous and peasant groups have gained control of municipal power, municipal governments have ceased to be used as mechanisms of race-based exclusion and exploitation, and the treatment of Indigenous and peasant constituents as second-class citizens by municipal officials has ended. This change is important because as Fox argued, it is at the municipal level “where most citizens either gain access to or find themselves excluded from the state” (1994: 106). Moreover, the demonstration by Indigenous and peasant leaders that they can manage municipal authority has further contributed both to the sense of dignity among local Indigenous and peasant populations and also to a hesitant but increased acceptance by local elites of the intellectual capacities of Indigenous people and peasants. For example, in Cotacachi, Ecuador, the 2005 survey conducted by Ospina et al. (2006) of 602 local residents found that all ethnic groups reported improvements in inter-ethnic relations and respect.1 To be sure, the increased respect afforded to Indigenous and peasant populations is partly based on fear and the resignation to shifts in political power relations among former elites rather than genuine inter-cultural understanding and the valorization of cultural differences. The increase in respect has also been disproportionately experienced by well-educated male leaders rather than women and poorer Indigenous and peasant men. Nevertheless, the Indigenous and peasant control of municipal power has firmly ended the use of municipal offices as tools of ethnic exclusion, and even the simple option of speaking their own maternal languages in municipal offices is an important gain for many rural constituents that contrasts sharply with the experiences of Indigenous and peasant groups in places where municipal power is still controlled by local elites and inter-ethnic relations remain tense and sometimes violent. The control of municipal power has also contributed to the political and administrative capabilities of Indigenous and peasant leaders, who have developed the skills needed to contest positions of power at higher levels of politics. It has also enhanced Indigenous and peasant autonomy to control local space, if only within the bounds of the legal jurisdiction accorded to municipal governments. However, the increased engagement of Indigenous and peasant leaders in municipal governance has also fostered a creeping governmentality as they have become absorbed into the bureaucratic logic of the state and have gradually shifted their attention away from contentious forms of politics to selfdisciplined efforts to learn and operate within the rules and regulations

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for municipal governments established by central states. Even where Indigenous leaders explicitly aimed to incorporate alternative modes of Indigenous decision making into municipal governance, as in Jesús de Machaca, the pressure to meet and conform with state-imposed regulations and administrative systems exerted a powerful influence that undermined important elements of the municipal democratization project. In short, although Indigenous and peasant leaders were becoming more proficient in the administration of municipal power, this was and is happening within a broader system of rules and power that they did not design and do not control. Debates about whether radical social and political changes can be accomplished by working through state institutions such as municipal governments are not new (Gramsci 1971; Michels 1962). In the Andean context, scholar-activists such as Xavier Albó have argued that to advance their political struggles, Indigenous people “will have to go beyond the realm of eye-catching mobilizations, where they have already shown such skill [and]…master the difficult art of the game of politics” (1996: 20). By contrast, other scholars such as María Isabel Remy have asserted that in the context of central state control and the bureaucratic logic of all state-based institutions, “disruptive social action is…the most effective mechanism for inducing changes in political decisions or for pressuring for reforms” (2005: 173). To understand the decisions of Indigenous and peasant groups to seek municipal power— despite the risks of cooptation into the bureaucratic logic of the state—it is useful to recall Steve Stern’s concept of “resistant adaptation” which refers to the political and livelihood strategies employed by peasants to make the best out of political settings which they do not control (1987: 11). Efforts to control municipal governments in the rural Andes represent struggles by Indigenous and peasant groups to overcome centuries-old patterns of marginalization and exploitation using the political tools available to them and taking advantage of political opportunities that they did not create. In these contradictory situations, the control of municipal power has made possible some important gains but has also generated new tensions and challenges. The control of municipal power will not resolve many of the most pressing issues that confront Indigenous and peasant populations, but it is an important and viable strategy for improving at least some aspects of their lives within a broader political and economic context over which they have little control.

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Notes 1 The survey asked: Do you agree with the statement that “Now there is more respect among blacks, Indigenous people and mestizos”? Sixty-eight percent of all respondents agreed; seventy-four percent of the predominantly mestizo town population agreed; seventy percent of the Indigenous population agreed (Ospina et al. 2006: 299).

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Index For ease of location, each applicable page locator is preceded by the municipality it references: (C) Cotacachi, (G) Guamote, (H) Haquira, (J) Jesús de Machaca, (L) Limatambo and (M) Mizque. democratization initiatives 6, 312-313; economic modernization (G) 41; hacienda out-migration (G) 41, (C) 87; lack of 27, (H) 278-279, (H) 283, land (re)distribution (G) 26, (G) 33, (G) 37-40, (G) 76(10), (J) 148149, (L) 227, (L) 232-236, (M) 192; power relations (M) 28, (C) 82, (M) 193-194, (M) 220, (L) 268n12, (H) 278-279, 310; wages (C) 84 agriculture: Andes 19; capitalist 19; production (H) 279-280, 310-311 aid donors: see donor alcaldecentrismo: see mayorcentrism Andean Center for Popular Action: see CAAP Andes: see rural Andes Anta, district of (L): 231-232, 238, 250, 260-263, 269 Assembly of Canton Unity (C): assistance of 107; creation of 79, 97; cut-flower industry 106; ‘ecological municipality’ 101, 115, 128; functioning of 98-103, 106-107, 115, 133, 315, 321, 324; ‘healthy municipality’ 101; participatory budgeting 79, 108112; tensions within 98-101, 111, 117, 120, 122, 127-132, 134, 331; Tituaña, A. 97-99; see also General Assembly autonomy: administrative (G) 46, (J) 174; ‘embedded’ (C) 93, 320; Indigenous, peasant 1, (G) 52, (G) 60, (G) 62, (C) 93, (C) 102, (C) 119-120, (J) 140-141, (J) 143,

accountability: in elections 328; indigenous peasant organizations (G) 57-59, (G) 73-74, (J) 159, (M) 215, 318-319; institutional 329-331; local 1, (C) 103, (C) 115, (J) 168, (L) 228, (H) 303, (M) 204-205; municipal democracy 319, 328-332; municipal government (C) 93-94, (J) 169-170, (M) 208-212, (L) 243, (L) 250, (H) 288, (H) 297, 320, 323; Raqaypampa (M) 219 Andean Center for Communication and Agriculture: see CENDA agencies, development: see development agencies agency: Indigenous (G) 73; labor migration 5-6; municipal democracy 19, (H) 295; peasant 5-6; political 11, (L) 238 agrarian reforms: comunas (G) 4344; comparison of 312-314; cooperatives (L) 235-236, (L) 239, (L) 241; democratization 6; differentiation (G) 49; elite power in 28, (L) 227, (L) 229-235, (L) 264; haciendas (G) 34, (G) 3740, (L) 233-235; highland zone (C) 82, (L) 235; IERAC (G) 36, 39-40, (G) 44-46 (C) 82; inequalities (G) 48-49; ‘integrated rural development’ (G) 44, (G) 47-48; labor migration (L) 235, (H) 280; land area affected (G) 40; OSGs (G) 45-46; transition (G) 44, 311-312 Agrarian Reform Law(s): capitalist production (G) 36; dairy production (C) 84;

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(J) 170, (J) 178, (J) 180-184, (M) 192, (M) 206-207, 334; municipal 11, (G) 93, (G) 96, (J) 175, (M) 200, (L) 249; political (J) 152, (J) 165, (M)194-197; viz. state 13, (L) 245; tensions within (J) 141142 ayllu-based governance: breakdown of (J) 153-156, (L) 231, (L) 241, 307-308; Church (J) 158; definition and history of (J) 184(2); incorporation of (J) 141143, (J) 153, (J) 161-163, (J) 165183, 313; Indigenous identity (J) 146, (J) 152, (J) 156-157; Plan Machaca (J) 158-159 Aymara (J): cosmovision 142-143, 145-147, 170, 178-179, 184(2); radio programs (Katarista) 157158 Bolivia: constitution (new) 182-183, 186n20; decentralization in 1, 7, 23-25, 27-28, 97, (J) 140, 153159, 193, 335; land 148-151; national peasant rebellion 194; struggles for municipal governance in 3-4, 139-141, 163166, 170, 174, 176, 178, 182-183, 196, 203-210, 212-215, 325-326; poverty in 29; see also state, the Braudel: 18-19 budget: see participatory budgeting Cabildo (J): anti-quincentenary campaign 160; authority of 167172, 174-77, 183, 243, 320; communication from 162; disarticulation of 154-156; financial capacity of 170-172; governance through 140-141, 324; history, dynamic 185n11; institutional memory, lack of 161-162, 168-169; viz. MACOJMA 140-141, 146, 166168, 172; ‘modernization’ of 160161; municipal elections 165172; viz. state regulations 170171, 328-329; technical knowledge, lack of 168-169 320;

tensions within 161-163, 168169, 178 campesino: 5-6, (M) 192 Canton Assembly: see Assembly of Canton Unity capitalist development: investment, lack of (G) 68; relative power approaches 13-14; rural Andes 19; obstacles to (G) 36-39; power relations 2, 12, (G) 33-34, 310; shift to 19, 22, (C) 84, (H) 279; see also pre-capitalist production CCL (Local Coordination Councils): 259, 324 CCP (Peruvian Peasant Federation): 236 CCV: see Community and Neighborhood Council CDL (Local Development Committee) (G): 56, 59, 61-64, 292, 324; see also Local Development Plan CEDEAGRO (Center for Agricultural Development) (M): agricultural production, focus 201; viz. CENDA 206; viz. Central Campesina 200, 202, 204-206, 218-219, 221; external funding 202-204, 221; interventions 200-202; viz. municipality 203-208; non-ethnic agenda 202; political parties 204205, 207; power relations 201203, 210-211, 215, 222; viz. Soriano, O. 202-203, 221; state relations 204-205; USAID 201; withdrawing from Mizque 207208; viz. women 201 CENDA (Andean Centre for Communication and Development) (M): 206-208, 211, 213, 224n17 Center for Agricultural Development: see CEDEAGRO Central Campesinas (M): viz. CEDEAGRO 200, 202, 204-206, 218-219, 221; control of 195, 198, 202, 207-209, 217-218; democratic process 218-219, 224n15; viz. MAS 218, 224n15;

Index

power relations 215-218; smallscale infrastructure, focus on 209210; sindicato system (J) 154155; viz. state regulation 209-210, 328-329; tensions with 198, 208212, 215-218 Church, Catholic: (G) 35, (G) 38-39, (G) 43, (C) 85, (C) 87, (J) 157158, (M) 190, (M) 195, (H) 284 citizen participation: ‘apocryphal citizenship’ (L) 246-247, (L) 265, (H) 290, (H) 302, 321, 330-331; decentralization 16, 23-24; democratization (C) 120, (C) 133, (L) 228 (H) 290, (H) 302, 321, 330-331; differentiation (G) 4950; Indigenous peasant organizations (G) 43, (G) 46-47, (C) 98-102, (J) 176, (L) 259, (H) 296-298, 313, 323-326; institutions for 7, 23-25, (G) 71, (C) 93, (C) 116-117, (C) 122, (J) 165, (L) 266, (H) 273, (H) 293; internalization of (G) 65, (C) 115, (J) 183, (L) 256, (H) 287; passive (G) 57-58, (C) 110-111, (M) 204, (L) 256, (H) 281; undermining (G) 49-52, (G) 64, (C) 132-134, (L) 236, (L) 248, (L) 256, (L) 259-260, (H) 289, (H) 292-293; women (G) 81, (C) 131-132, (L) 259; see women; see also participation civil society: autonomy of (C) 97, (C) 117-118, (J) 165, (J) 170, (J) 175, (H) 286, 320, 323-325; importance of 8, 11, (C) 79, (C) 99, (C) 102, 318; power relations 2, (G) 45, (C) 100, (C) 116, (C) 128, (C) 132-133, (L) 254-255, (L) 259-260, (H) 289, 330; responsibility to (C) 103, (C) 115, (J) 176, (H) 272, (H) 291-292, (H) 295, (H) 302-303 clientelism: Cotacachi 112, 133; viz. democratization 4, 21, (J) 177, 331-333; development efforts (G) 46; Haquira 282, 285, 288-289, 294, 296, 298; Indigenous elites (G) 67-68, (L) 265-266;

367

Indigenous Parliament (G) 59; Indigenous peasant organizations (G) 43, (G) 45, 320-321, 328333; Limatambo 28, 229, 248, 257-258; Mizque 196, 198, 313; municipal government 11, (C) 107, (M) 213, (L) 263; OSGs (G) 45-46; participatory budget (C) 112; resource distribution 331332 CODECAL (Committee for the Development of Highland Communities of Limatambo) (L): 255-256 Committee for the Development of Highland Communities of Limatambo: see CODECAL Communal Council (L): 242-245; see also Community and Neighborhood Council Communist Party: (G) 38-39, (G) 43, (C) 85, (H) 281 Community and Neighborhood Council (CCV) (L): clientelism 248, 266; design and functioning 246-248, 324; viz. FEDICAL 248-249; focus of 266; institutional structure 246-247; viz. Law of Participatory Budgets 259-260; power relations 246249; revival of 261; viz. Rozas, W. 245-248, 252-253, 266; support, façade of 251; viz. vecinos 244-245, 251; viz. Vera, V. 254, 259; see also Communal Council comunas: (G) 43-45; (G) 58, (G) 64, (G) 77n16, (C) 88 CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador): (G) 51-52, (G) 70-71, (C) 92, (C) 118 conjunctural perspective: see Braudel Cotacachi: 79-137; administrative spending 136-137n23, n24; agrarian reform laws 82-84, 312313; awards to 96; Canton Assembly 79; civil society organizations 79; clientelism 8990, 107, 112; commonalities with

368

Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

other municipalities 22; cutflower production 84, 106, 311312; decentralization 94-97, 103; differences with other municipalities 22, 311-316; 'ecological municipality' 101, 106; ecological zones 81; economic development 126-127, 137n28; employment 112; FEI 85; FENOC 85; ‘governmentality’ 117; haciendas 81-82, 84-85, 124-125; 'healthy municipality' 101; inequality in 80, 126, 132; infrastructure 9091, 109; institutionalism 117; Intag zone 81; inter-ethnic relations 338; international recognition of 79, 129, 135n1; Inter-Sectoral Councils 94, 103, 114; Junker path 84; labor migration 80, 135n6; land ownership in 83, 85, 127-129, 311-313; mestizos 86, 130; mobilization 85, 91, 116 127-129, 134-135; modernity, images of 112; municipal democratization 79, 117, 119-120, 123, 127-132, 312-313, 315; municipal development plan 110-111, 137n25; municipal governance 27, 89-90, 94-95; NGOs 136n16, n17, 311; participatory budget 108-112, 125; peasant federations 85-86; policymaking 97, 103, 313; poverty 110, 126; power relations 27, 85, 311-313, 315; public works projects 90, 109112; racism 86, 89-90, 130; resource distribution 109; social indicators 80; taxes 125; tourism 105; transnational corporations 80, 116 127-129, 311-313; UNORCAC 86, 90-91, 107, 120121, 320, 322; women, representation 137n32; see also Canton Assembly; Tituaña, A. CRSUCIR (Regional Autonomous Syndicate Central of Indigenous Peasants of Raqaypampa) (M): 207

CSUTCB (Unitary Syndicate Confederation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia) (M): 196, 198 Curicama, M. (G): accessibility 55; clientelism 55-56; Coordination Roundtables; education 49; election of 31, 52, 56; external resources, dependence 54; labor migration 49; as Indigenous mayor 31, 49, 51, 60; viz. Indigenous Parliament 56-57, 60; infrastructure 54; institutional changes 56, 65-66; Local Development Committee 56; Local Development Plan 56, 63; viz. mestizos 52-53; mingas 54; mobilization 70-71; NGOs 54, 56; OSGs 55-56; Pachakutik party 72; protests 70-71; public works projects 54-55; resource access, improvements in 54; social power relations 55-56; travel 54 decentralization: administrative 25; anarchist and communitarian perspectives on 10; in Bolivia 2425, (J) 140-141; budgets 25; citizen participation 16, 23-25; democratization 1-2, 11-12, 25, 326-327; in Ecuador 24; effects of 1, 335; elections 23; elites 2; emphasis on design of 6; fiscal 25, (G) 54; frameworks 7, 20, 2425, (J) 140; historical timing 23; in Indonesia 8; issues within 2324; institutions for 24; Law of Popular Participation, effects of (J) 163-165; legal regulations 1, 23-24; local governments 16, 104, (J) 169, (J) 176, (L) 251, 309; MACOJMA (J) 163-164; in Peru 24-25, (L) 245; policymaking (C) 94-97, (C) 103; popular struggles 1, (C) 119, (C) 134, (H) 285; power relations 12, 326-327; resources 25, (L) 263; state 19-20, 325-327; technocratic perspectives on 10; see also Law

Index

of Administrative Decentralization; see also Law of Popular Participation DECOIN (Defense and Conservation of Intag) (C): 88-89, 128-129, 136n11 democratic: deepening 2, 4, 6-7, (G) 32, (G) 57, (G) 73, (C) 101, (M) 220-221, (L) 228,(L) 265-266, (H) 301, (H) 303; institutions 1011, (H) 295, 323, 330; Delgado, J. (G): 51, 53, 55-56, 60, 70-72, 317 democratization: viz. agrarian reform 310-311; appearance of (C) 128, (M) 220, (L) 229, (L) 233, (L) 244, (L) 259-260, (H) 290, (H) 295, (H) 302, 333; assumptions of 1-2; breakdown of (L) 252; viz. capitalist modernization 310-311; centralization of (L) 245; class differentiation 310; clientelism (C) 133, (L) 245, (L) 252-253; decentralization 1-2, (L) 258-260; elites 310-311; façade of 265266, (H) 289, (H) 297, 324-326; federations, indigenous and peasant 318-320; forces that shape 2, 310, 318-320; grassroots (L) 266, 318; Indigenous peasant organizing 310; industrialization 5; inequality (C) 132; infrastructure (L) 266-267; integrated framework 12; laws (L) 228-229; leadership 9, (L) 252, 310; legacies of (L) 257259, (H) 289-290, (H) 297-298; local vs. state-imposed (L) 266, (H) 289; neoclassical analysis 5; participation in (C) 130-131, (C) 133-134; ‘path’ to 309-310; ‘performance’ of (H) 295-296; power relations 1-3, 12, 25, (G) 31-32, (L) 227-228, (H) 289-290, 309-310; progress in (C)117, (C) 119-124, (L) 227-228; realities of 1-2, (C) 117; as redistribution (H) 296; research emphasis on 6; ‘resistant adaptation’ (H) 295, 339; sustenance of 325; tensions

369

within (C) 133; transition to (L) 28, (L) 227-228; urbanization 5; women, representation (C) 131; weakening of 228, (L) 254-256, (L) 258-261 see also municipal democracy Development and Management Council (C): 98, 102-103 Dialogue Law: (J) 164, (M) 225(20) dignity: improvements to (G) 72-73, (M) 223, (L) 266-267, (H) 303, 336-338; right to 3; struggles for 5, (C) 134, (J) 180, (M) 211, (L) 240-241, 308, 323, 326, 334; differentiation: between Indigenous peasants 5, 26, (G) 31,(G) 48-51, (G) 73-74, (C) 86, (J) 149, (M) 192, (M) 216-217, (M) 220, (L) 233, (L) 257, (H) 280, (H) 283, (H) 292, 310, 316-317; mediation of (J) 147, (J) 170, (J) 181 Dios Roldán, J. de (G): 51, 55, 60, 70-72, 78n26 district peasant federations: accountability (G) 73-74, 319; autonomy 319; breakdown of (H) 288; clientelism (G) 73-74, (H) 281, (H) 298, 321; community relationships 319; creation of (H) 281-282, (H) 293; elections (G) 50-51; elitism (H) 298, (H) 302303; external actors 320-321; viz. Gonzales, W. (H) 286; importance of 318-320; involvement of (H) 298, (H) 300, (H) 302, 308, 317-325, 337; viz. municipal government 318-321; political power (G) 50-51; resource redistribution 319; sexism (H) 298; undermining of 319-320; see also FEI; see also FEDICAL donor: decentralization 25-26, (H) 285; democratization 4, 25-26, (H) 290, (H) 296; dependence on (C) 98, (C) 119, (C) 125, (C) 132133; discourse (C) 92; influence of 15, 18, (G) 54, (G) 61-65, (C) 115, (M) 204, (M) 214, (H) 273274, (H) 287, (H) 290-291, 309,

370

Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

321; municipal budget (C) 136(14); support (C) 93-96, (C) 102, (C) 104, (M) 202-203 ecological conditions: challenges of (G) 41, (G) 73, (J) 143, (M) 189, (M) 192, 310-311, 337; difficult for crop production (G) 36, (G) 67-69, 311; economic growth (G) 67-68, (J) 180-181; poverty (G) 67-70, (J) 143; Ecuador: decentralization 24-25, (G) 45-46, (G) 54, (C) 95-97, 335; Indigenous peasant organizations see Indigenous peasant organizations; ‘integrated rural development’ (G) 44, (G) 47, (G) 57; struggles for municipal governance in 1, 3-4, 7, 9, (G) 31, (G) 37, (G) 43, (G) 52, (G) 70-72, (G) 74, (C) 87, (C) 90-91, (C) 99, (C) 105, (C) 112, (C) 115, (C) 124, (C) 126-127; poverty in 29, (G) 33, (G) 36-37, (G) 67, (G) 69; see also Agrarian reform; Agrarian Reform Law(s); Guamote; Cotacachi; state, the; state relations Eighteenth Brumaire: see Marx elections, municipal: Cabildo (J) 140141, (J) 146, (J) 166-168, (J) 171; decentralization 23; Indigenous peasant groups 20, (G) 50-52, (G) 57, (C) 90-91, (J) 165, (L) 250, (H) 299, 315, 318, 322-323, 326; Limatambo 227-228, 237, 239, 251, 253, 257, 265; Mizque 195, 202, 224(15); Tituaña, A. (C) 122, (C) 125, (C) 136(13); tensions within 4, (M) 207-208, (L) 238, (L) 246, (H) 282, (H) 293, (H) 296, 328-329; women (C) 131, 333; see also suffrage elites: decentralization 1-2; economic power of 28, (M) 194-195, 312; hostility of 4, (L) 241-242, (L) 265-266; Indigenous peasant differentiation (G) 50, (G) 67-68, (G) 76, (J) 157, (H) 282-283, 313, 332; institutional control 13, 22,

(G) 50, (M) 192, (L) 227, (L) 231-232, (L) 235, (L) 257-258, (H) 301, 311-313, 328-329; interethnic relations (J) 173, (M) 203, 338; as intermediaries (M) 194195, (M) 220; out-migration of (G) 41-42, (H) 285, 310, 316; participatory budgeting 10, (C) 111-112; resignation of (G) 53, (C) 130, (L) 261, 338 Federation of Ecuadorian Indians (G): see FEI Federation of Ayllus and Ancestral Communities of Jesús de Machaca (MACOJMA): see MACOJMA FEDICAL (District Peasant Federation of Limatambo) (L): viz. CCV 248-249; viz. CODECAL 255; focus of 249; legitimacy of 248-251, 254; peasant representation 236-239; struggles of 240-241, 249-250, 254-255; viz. Vera, V. 254-256, 260-261 FEI (Federation of Ecuadorian Indians) (G): 39, 43, 76-77n6, 85 FENOC (National Federation of Peasant Organizations) (C): change to FENOCIN 92, 136(12); peasant organization: 85-86, 121 fictive kinship relations: (G) 35, (G) 41, (M) 195-196, (M) 198, (M) 216, (L) 235, (L) 251, (L) 253, (L) 257-258, (L) 262, (H) 277, (H) 288 FODERUMA (Fund for Marginal Rural Development): (G) 44-46, (C) 82-83, (C) 121 Foucault: see governmentality Fujimori, A. 28, 228, 245, 258, 267n2, 288; see also Peru Fund for Marginal Rural Development: see FODERUMA gender equality: chachawarmi (gender complementarity) (J) 145-146, (J) 155, (J) 160, (J) 178179; dignity (G) 72; lack of 14-

Index

15, 333-334; Local Development Plan (G) 64-65; representation (G) 58, (G) 75, (C) 111, (C) 131132, (M) 216-217, (H) 291, 316 General Assembly (C): creation of 98; decision-making of (C) 102, (C) 104-106, (C) 129; social power relations (C) 99-100; tensions within (C) 99-100, (C) 114 'good governance': agenda of (G) 75, (C) 94-95, (C) 119, (M) 214, (H) 287, (H) 290, 309; examples of 10, 21, (M) 187, (M) 221, (L) 246, (L) 252, 318; institutionalization of 318 Gonzales, W. (H): autonomous organizations 272; campaigns of 272-273, 286; Coordination Roundtables 272, 286, 288, 290292; democracy, ideas of 273274, 286-288; district peasant federation 286, 298; donors, attention of 287, 291; emergence of 282; viz. Huayno, M. 288; initiatives of 287; legacies of 297-298, 301-302; NGOs 287; participation 291-293; viz. public works projects 287; travel 287; weaknesses of 290-292 governmentality: Brazil 17; Cotacachi 117; development projects 18; Foucault’s theory 1618, 30; Indigenous and peasant struggles 16-17, (J) 183, (M) 214215, (H) 297, 308; ‘indio permitido’ 17; internalization 18, (G) 65, 338; Mizque 214-215; municipal power 16-17; neoliberalism 17; Niger 18; participatory budget 17; ‘responsabilization’ 17 Guamote: 31-78; Agrarian Reform Law(s) 33, 311-313; agricultural production in 33-34; commonalities viz. other municipalities 22; CONAIE 5152; democratization 31, 71-72; demographic change (G) 42; differences viz. other

371

municipalities 22, 311-316; ecological conditions 36, 311; Gini coefficient 76n4; haciendas 33-38, 311; Indigenous control of 52, 312-313; Indigenous identity 76n1; Indigenous leaders 26; Indigenous peasant mobilization 37-39, 51-52; ‘infrapolitics’ 3536; isolation of 36-37; interethnic relations 72; land ownership in 34, 37-38; Local Development Plan 56, 63-65, 77n21; mestizos in 52, 312-315; municipal development plan 77(21); municipal governance 2627, 31, 52, 307, 312-313; NGOs 321-322; political party formation 51-52; poverty in 67-68, 76n3; power relations 26-27, 31, 35-36, 72, 307; as ‘red zone’ 68, 73; social indicators 32 hacendados: power of (M) 194-195, (M) 197, (M) 224(10), (L) 234, (H) 262, (H) 278-279, (H) 303; violence of (J) 139, (M) 194, (H) 275-277, (H) 283-284 haciendas: agrarian reform (G) 3740, (G) 49 (C) 87, (J) 148-149, (M) 193; boom and bust cycles (M) 192-193; capital accumulation (G) 49; Church support for (G) 35; comunas (G) 44; control by (G) 33-35, 76n6, (M) 193, (M) 196, (L) 231-232, (L) 240-241, (L) 257-258, (H) 283-284; cut-flower production (C) 84, 123-124; effects of (G) 35; expansion (J) 148; Indigenous and peasant communities (G) 35, (G) 37-38, (C) 136n9, (H) 275278, 314; inequalities (G) 49; land redistribution (G) 39-40, (G) 49; mobilization against (G) 3738, (G) 46; as parasitic (G) 33; participatory decision making (C) 125, 314; production processes (G) 34; regime breakdown (G) 36-38, (G) 42, (C) 87; reinvestment, lack of (G) 34-35,

372

Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

(C) 84; sindicatos (J) 153-154; social power relations (G) 35, (G) 49, 314; takeovers (G) 47; taxes, avoidance of 124-125; wages (C) 84; women (G) 49 Haquira: agrarian reform 278-279, 311; agricultural production 279280; CICDA 284; clientelism 282, 285, 288-289, 294; colonial history 275; commonalities with other municipalities 22; Coordination Roundtables 272, 286, 288, 292, 324; democratization 286-298, 300301; demographic and livelihood data 274, 304n3; differences with other municipalities 22, 311-316; district peasant federation 281282, 286, 288, 293, 298, 302; education, rural 278, 281-283, 305(16); elitism 274, 285, 311, 313; gamonalismo 271-272, 277278, 285; Gonzales, W. 272-274, 286-298, 301-302; geography 271-272, 274, 303n3, n4, 311; Indigenous identity 299; inequality 280-283, 291-292; haciendas 271-272, 275-278, 283-284; Las Bambas 300-301; Llapanchik party 299; mestizo identity 299; migration 278, 285, 316; mining near 300-301, 303, 305n24, 311; land distribution 280, 304n12, n14; municipal council 285-286; municipal democracy 272-274, 286-298; municipal governance 29, 293, 302; NGOs 274, 285-286, 288, 321; peasant control 290-293, 302; Sendero Luminoso 29, 272, 284-285, 305n17, 313; state forces 29, 272, 275, 278-279, 284-285, 305n17, 313; power relations 273-277, 283-285, 292293, 300-303, 313, 316; public works projects 293-294, 299; violence 275-277, 283-286, 305n17, 316 health care: ‘Healthy Municipality’ (C): 101; initiatives (G) 54, (C)

102, (C) 106, (C) 117, (J) 158, (H) 272, (H) 294, 336; InterSectoral Health Council (C) 103104; lack of 68; Municipal Development Plan (C) 110-111, (C) 115, 335-336; policy (C) 97, 335; racism (C) 136(18) hierarchy: organizational: (J) 153, (J) 175, (M) 220, (L) 237, (L) 241; social (G) 35-36, (G) 41; see also power relations history: importance of 11-15, 20, (C) 75, (C) 80, (J) 158; lack of focus on 11; municipal democratization 15, (C) 104, (C) 117; relative power approach 18-20 huasipungueros (G) 35 Huayno, M. (H): 282-283, 288-289, 296 IERAC (Ecuadorian Institute of Agrarian Reform and Colonization): (G) 36, (G) 39-40 (G) 49, (C) 82 Indigenous Chamber of Commerce (G): 56, 65-66, 69 Indigenous municipal governance: administrative (J) 175, (M) 208209; ayllus, decentralization to (J) 176; Cabildo control (J) 174-175, 177-178; corruption within (J) 175-176; design of (J) 177-178; governmentality 338-339; incorporation of (J) 173, (L) 240241; NGO involvement in (J) 176; staffing issues (J) 173-174; viz. state laws (J) 174, (J) 177178; successes of (J) 175-177, 181-182; tensions within (J) 177178, 307-308; women, participation in (J) 178-179 Indigenous Parliament (G): clientelism 59; Coordination Roundtables 56; corruption 5960; creation of 56-57; viz. Curicama, M. 60; deepening democracy 57; viz. Delgado, J. 60; viz. Dios Roldán, J. de 60; as inaccessible 60; language 58-59; local control of 57; mandate,

Index

revision of 61; viz. mestizo interests 58-59; name expansion 58; NGOs 60; public works projects 59-60; resources, lack of 60; roles of 57; social power relations 57-59; tensions within 57-59; women, marginalization of 57-58 Indigenous peasant: dignity (G) 73, (C) 134; differentiation (G) 7374, 307, 316-318; education (M) 206-207, 317; exploitation of (G) 41; identity 317; leaders (G) 26, (G) 43, (G) 45, (G) 47-48, (G) 50-52, 310, 316-319; labor (G) 54-55, (G) 75; legal organizations (G) 43; Llapanchik party 299; 305n23; viz. mestizos (C) 86, (L) 268n11; OSGs (G) 45; Pachakutik party (G) 56, (G) 7072; participation (G) 46-47; social power relations (G) 76, (C) 86, (C) 134, 316-317; suffrage 23-24, (G) 50, (J) 153, (L) 267(1), (H) 282, 326; see also haciendas; Indigenous peasant organizations; Indigenous peasant struggles; power relations Indigenous peasant organizations: agrarian reform (G) 45-46; apolitical (G) 46; clientelism (G) 43, (G) 45; community participation in (G) 43, (G) 7071; comunas (G) 43-45; demands of (G) 53; democratization 327; external actors (G) 43; FEI (G) 43; FODERUMA (G) 44-45; forced organization (G) 45; Indigenous uprising (G) 70-71, (G) 78; larger movements (G) 70; leaders of (G) 70-71; NGOs (G) 46-47; OSGs (G) 44-45; parishes (G) 46; radical Catholic Church (G) 43; SEDRI (G) 44-45; social power relations (G) 43 (C) 89; viz. the state (G) 43, 330 Indigenous peasant struggles: agrarian reform (G) 44; autonomy (M) 194-195, (M) 206-207, 334, 337; challenges within 71, (C)

373

122; connection between 323, 337; DECOIN 128-128; democratization 334; dignity 5, (M) 210-211, (L) 240, 326, 334; direct action (G) 47, (C) 128-129; external actors (G) 43, 310; footdragging (G) 37, (H) 295; governmentality 16-17, 308, 338339; haciendas (G) 35, (G) 3739, (H) 275-278; historical (G) 38; land reform (G) 47, (G) 74, (M) 194-195; Llapanchik party 299, (H) 305(23); MACOJMA (J) see MACOJMA; viz. mestizos (G) 53-54, (G) 73, (C) 86; mobilization (G) 37-39, 323, 339; municipal governance 3, (J) 27, (J) 180-181, (M) 191-192, (M) 207-209, 326-334; national 71; poverty 334-335; racism (G) 4647, 326; strikes (G) 39; suffrage 326; transnational corporations (C) 127-129; well-being (G) 4041; see also resistance, Indigenous peasant industrialization: 5, 14, 19, (J) 179 ‘infrapolitics’: (G) 35-36, (H) 295 infrastructure: labor migration (G) 69; lack of (G) 34-35, (G) 37, (G) 41, (G) 44, (C) 90, (M) 221; mingas (G) 54-55; municipal governance 4, 15, (G) 67-68, (G) 70, (C) 108, (C) 122, (C) 129, (J) 159, (J) 172, (J) 175, (J) 179, (M) 201-202, (M) 209-210, (M) 218219, (L) 242, (L) 266-267, (H) 303, 315, 336-337; public works projects (G) 54-55, (C) 95, (C) 109, (C) 111-112, (C) 134, (H) 294, 336 INRA Law (J): 149, 185n10 institutionalist approaches: 7-11, 24; Cotacachi 117; viz. relative power approach 20; see also noninstitutionalist approaches Intag (C): 81-82, 88-89, 105, 107110, 115, 122, 127-129, 137 integrated rural development: (G) 44, (G) 46-48, (G) 57, (J) 158, (M) 202

374

Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

inter-ethnic relations: improvements in (G) 53, (C) 117, (C) 134, (J) 152, 337-338; local democracy (G) 72, (C) 113; tensions in (C) 86, (C) 130-131, 338 Inter-Sectoral Councils (C): 79, 94, 97-98, 103-106, 114-115, 133 IU (United Left party): 237-239, 268n14 Jatun Ayllu (G): 45-46 Jesús de Machaca: agrarian reform 148-149; anti-quincentenary campaign 160; autonomy 165, 181-183; ayllu-based governance 141, 149, 153-159, 313-315; Cabildo 140-141, 155, 160-163, 165-172, 320; challenges of 141143, 168-180; commonalities with other municipalities 22; differences with other municipalities 22, 311-316; ecology of 143, 80-181; geography of 143, 311; hacienda expansion 148, 311; history, local 158; Indigenous governance 27, 143, 311, 314 see also Indigenous governance; as ‘Indigenous municipality’ 140-143, 156-157, 172-183, 315; Indigenous uprising 139; Katarista movement 157-158; land control 145-149, 313, 315; Law of Popular Participation, launch of 140, 165; livelihoods 143-144; viz. MACOJMA 142, 149, 181-184; marka 142-143; MAS see MAS; municipal democratization 307; NGOs, distrust of 159; outmigration 149-152, 157; Plan Machaca 158-159; poverty of 143; referendum, Indigneous autonomy 183; sindicatos 153156, 314; viz. state, Bolivian 149, 157-158, 182-183; thakhi 144145; transparency in 181; viz. Viacha 165 labor migration: agency 5-6; agrarian reform (L) 235; capital

accumulation (G) 49, (G) 68; community isolation (M) 199; dependence on (C) 84-85; ecological degradation (M) 199; gender relations (G) 75; Indigenous peasant (G) 77n18; infrastructure (G) 69; labor generation (C)112; land struggle (C) 85-86; local employment (G) 63, (G) 68-69; macroeconomic policy 127; resource distribution (G) 48; property (G) 48, (G) 6869; to Spain (G) 69; temporary (C) 80 land control: access to (C) 84-85, (J) 144-148, (J) 150-152, (J) 184(6); agrarian reform (G) 38, (L) 232237; Canton Assembly (C) 129; child labor (G) 48; communal 144-145, 313; cooperatives, state run 233, 235-236; Cotacachi 8283; direct action (G) 47, (C) 127129; education levels (G) 48; haciendas (G) 33, (G) 37, (J) 184-185(7), (M) 193, (M) 224(9), (L) 233-235; Indigenous peasant (G) 38, (C) 127-129; integrated rural development (G) 48; labor migration (C) 85; malnutrition (G) 48; minifundios (G) 33; ownership (G) 34; in Peru 267n7, n8; redistribution (G) 40-41, (G) 68, (G) 76n10, (J) 148-149 Latin America: municipal democracy in 2, 7, 9, 11, 20, (J) 165, 309; municipal governments in 1, 6, (C) 103, (M) 187, 316; sociopolitical relations in 3, 10, 13-14, 17, (C) 120, (L) 246, 331 Law of Administrative Decentralization: 23 Law of Agricultural Promotion and Development: (G) 44 Law of Citizen’s Groups and Indigenous Peoples: (J) 166 Law of Expropriation: (J) 148, (M) 191 Law of Participation Rights and Citizen Control: (L) 261

Index

Law of Participatory Budgets: citizen involvement 24-25, 96, 262; Cotacachi 96; viz. local initiatives (L) 259-260, (H) 289, (H) 297298, 324-325, 329 Law of Popular Participation: Cotacachi 96; decentralization reforms 23; citizen involvement 24-25, 214; effects of (J) 163-165 Jesús de Machaca 140-141; Mizque 188; viz. municipal governance (M) 27-28, (J) 170171, 174, 176, 182, 208, 324, 329; power relations (J) 27 Ley de Exvinculación: see Law of Expropriation Limatambo: 227-269; accountability 228; agrarian reform 28, 227, 232-233, 312; ayllu system 231; Camenish, Fr. 227, 238; CCV see Community and Neighborhood Council; clientelism 28, 229, 255; CODECAL see CODECAL; commonalities with other municipalities 22; control of 231, 315; cooperatives, state-run 233, 235-236; democracy 28, 228, 255-261, 264-265, 315; demographic data 230; differences with other municipalities 22, 311-316; elections 228; elites 227-235, 312-313, 315; FEDICAL see FEDICAL; Fujimori regime 228, 245; geography of 230-231; haciendas 231-235, 257-258; land ownership 233, 235-237, 313; land struggles 232; livelihood data 230; NGOs 228, 255-256; literacy 267n3; participation 228, 254-256; Plan Limatambo 242 political change 229, 264-265; power relations 227-228, 230-235, 257-258, 264265, 313; public works projects 229, 257; resources 228-229, 264-265; Rozas, W. 228-229, 237-267; Sendero Luminoso 244; Vera, V. 253-258; violence 227

375

literacy: in communities (G) 32, (C) 80, (J) 144, (M) 189, (M) 221222, (L) 230, (H) 274, 335; Cotacachi Municipal Development Plan 104-105, 108, 110, 117, 119, 335; democratization (H) 281-283, (H) 305n16; leadership (G) 47-48, (M) 218, (L) 238; suffrage, universal (G) 50, (C) 91, (L) 236; women (J) 178, 316 Local Coordination Councils: see CCL Local Development Committee (G): see CDL Local Development Plan (G): see Guamote; see also CDL local governance: decentralization 326-327; democratization 325326; Guamote 31; Mexico 11; social movements 16-17; tensions within (G) 31; undermining (C) 133, 325-326 MACOJMA (J): ayllu trust 149; viz. Cabildo 140, 142, 146, 160, 166; elections 140, 165-168; governmentality 183; financial capacity of 170-172; viz. MACOAS 161; representation of 178; ‘resistant adaptation’ 184; struggle for municipal power 145, 163-165, 173, 175, 181-184 macroeconomic policy: financial crises (G) 69-70 (C)126; mobilization to change (C) 116, 323; natural disasters (G) 69; local development 15, (G) 69-70, (C) 126-127, (C) 132, (J) 180181, 308-309, 337; poverty (G) 69-70, (C) 126 mallkus (J): Cabildo system 159-163, 165, 167-172, 178; changing definitions of 155, 183, 307-308; mallku taytas 163, 178-179; responsibilities of 146, 151-152, 169, 186n19; see also thakhi marka (J): composition of 142-143, 155-157, 184n3; social and land

376

Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

control 146-153, 158, 160-163, 165, 168, 173 Marx: democratization 5; Eighteenth Brumaire 5, 30 MAS (Movement Towards Socialism): candidates marginalized (J) 140, (J) 167-168, (J) 175; Central Campesina (M) 218, (M) 224n15; evolution of (M) 205; municipal democracy 322-323; peasant governance (M) 28, (M) 206, (M) 208 mayor: -centrism (alcaldecentrismo) 9, 327; CDL (G) 61; clientelism (G) 59; dependence on (C) 132133 (L) 252-253, 327; differentiation of 317; ‘exceptional’ 9; Indigenous Parliament (G) 59; Indigenous power relations 9, 316-317; obligations of (G) 70-71; see also Curicama, M.; Delgado, J.; Dios Roldán, J.; Gonzales, W.; Pardo, J.; Rozas, W.; Soriano, O.; Tituaña, A.; Vera, V. mayorales (G) 35 mayordomos (G) 35, (G) 50 mestizos: exploitation by (G) 41; identities, Indigenous adoption (M) 191; ‘infrapolitics’ (G) 3536; leather industry (C) 87; loss of municipal control (G) 52-53, (J) 156; mestizaje (C) 86; outmigration of (G) 41-42, 73 (C) 87; municipal council (M) 208209; participatory budgeting (C) 108-109; petit bourgeoisie (C) 87; resistance to Indigenous governance (G) 52-54; social power relations (G) 41, (G) 52-54 (C) 87, (C) 89, (C) 108-109, (C) 130-131, (J) 173, (M) 208; tourism (C) 87; violence (G) 76(8), (C) 86 Mexico: 3, 7-11, (L) 258, 310, 318, 332 migrants: challenges of (C) 127, (J) 151-152, 337; ‘comunarios’ vs. ‘residentes’ 14, (J) 181, (J) 151; ‘definitive’ vs. ‘connected’ (C)

85, (J) 150; land access (J) 150152; remittances (G) 68-69, (J) 180; social networks (J) 150-152; viz. thakhi responsibilities (J) 147, (J) 151-152 migration: dependence on 22, (G) 48, (G) 68, (C) 84-85, (C) 126127, (J) 144-145, (J) 151, (M) 221-222; impacts of 5, (G) 69, (G) 73, (J) 149-150, (J) 161-163, (L) 235; land rights (G) 49, (J) 145, (J) 149-150, (J) 181; mestizo (G) 41-42, (J) 152; temporary vs. permanent (J) 148-150, (M) 191; social power relations 15, (G) 66, (G) 75, (C) 80, (C) 112, (J) 152, (M) 217, (H) 280, 310; urban centers (G) 38, (G) 41-42, (H) 294 Military-Peasant Pact: 196, 198 minifundios: see land control mining: see Haquira Mizque: administrative changes 210211, 223; agrarian reform 313; ayllu-based governance 190-191, 314; CEDEAGRO 200-208, 223; CENDA 206-207, 213; civil society 188; clientelism 198, 313; colonial history 189-191, 314; commonalities with other municipalities 22; dignity 223; democratic deepening 188; demographic and livelihood data 189; differences with other municipalities 22, 312-316; district peasant federation see district peasant federations; division of 191-192; ecology 191, 199, 311; elections 207, 224(19); elites 313; ‘good governance’ 187, 223n1; ‘governmentality’ 214-215; haciendas, 190-191, 196; Indigenous communities 190-191; Indigenous history 189191; Indigenous identities 192; infrastructure 199, 223n8; isolation of 199, 311; labor 189, 191-192, 199; land control see land control; MAS see MAS; migration 221-222; national

Index

peasant rebellion 194; NGOs, domination of 188, 311, 321; participatory planning 187; peasant leaders, backlash 188; poverty in 222; power relations 27-28, 188, 191-192, 207-208, 219-221, 313, 315-316; resources 196, 209-210, 220-221; sindicatos 195-197, 222, 314; Soriano, O. 187, 313; subcentrales 198, 208; valley 191192, 198-199; well-being 221223; see also Raqaypampa MNR (National Revolutionary Movement): (J) 153-154, (J) 157, (M) 195, (M) 204-205, (M) 207 mobilization: absence of (M) 202, (L) 240,(H) 279, (H) 298-299; ‘beyond mobilization’ viz. action 10, 339; as ‘double strategy’ 116; Indigenous peasant (G) 37-39, (G) 73, (C) 81, (C) 89, (C) 116, (M) 204, (L) 233, (L) 240-241, (L) 262, (H) 276; land reform (G) 47; national 71 modernity: images of 17, (C) 112, (J) 143, (H) 294, (H) 296, 336-337; minimal (L) 231 Morales, E.: 184, 186n20, 205-206, 218 Movement Towards Socialism: see MAS municipal democracy: agency 19; breakdown of 21-22, (H) 273274; challenges of 5, (H) 271274; context 8; deepening 4; elitism (H) 274; external ideas of 272-273; façade of 324-326; focus of 72; institutionalism 7; implications of 16; inter-ethnic relations 337-338; macroeconomic change 337; ‘models’ of 21; ‘path’ to 309310; political process 4; power relations 8, 327-328; participation in (C) 130, 327-331; political change (L) 229; political parties 322-323; progress in (C) 119124, (C) 127-131, 328; relative power approaches 15; resource

377

distribution 4-5, (L) 229; viz. the state 324-325, 338; tensions within (C) 81, (C) 130-131, (C) 132, (L) 240, 307-308, 316-328 Municipal Development Plan (C): 98, 110-111, 114-116 municipal government: accountability 319; administrative inefficiencies (G) 53, (J) 172173; autonomy 318-319; Bolivia 4, 22; Campesina Central 208209; citizen participation (G) 4950; citizen rights 3; class 316317; clientelism 4, (G) 49-50, (M) 213; corruption 4; democracy 4; democratic discourse (G) 4950; differentiation 316; direct action (C) 116; Ecuador 4, 22; election of 4; elites 4, 172-173, (M) 208-209; ethnicity 316-317; gender relations 316; goals of 319; Indigenous leadership (G) 49-50, (M) 213-214, 316-317; Indigenous peasant federations 318-319; Indigenous struggle (G) 74, (J) 179, (L) 240-241; infrastructure 4, (G) 68; local language 4, (G) 53; Mexico 8; Pachakutik party (G) 56, (G) 7071; participatory budgeting (C) 108-12; Peru 4, 22; power relations 11-12, (G) 26, (C) 27, (H) 29 (C) 127-129, (M) 220221, 318-319; public spending 30, (M) 213; regional development 1; resource distribution 4-5, 68, (L) 228; roles of 1; social movements 3; state relations 3, (J) 174, (M) 213-214; technical resource investment (C) 111; tensions within (G) 54-56, (J) 168-172, (M) 207-209, 308-309, 318-319; women, representation 316; see also Indigenous governance municipal officials: clientelism (G) 41, (G) 55, 332; democratic governance 11, (G) 52, (C) 97, (C) 116, (C) 135, (J) 175-177, (M) 209, (M) 211, (M) 214, (M)

378

Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

223, (L) 241, 309, 329-331, 334, 338; differentiation 316-319; elites 10, (L) 265; language 4-5, (G) 53, (G) 72; viz. OTBs (J) 170-171; tensions between 300, 323, 326; transparency (M) 216, (M) 218, (L) 250, (L) 260, (H) 268(17), 319-320 National Federation of Peasant Organizations: see FENOC National Revolutionary Movement: see MNR neighborhood federations (C): functions of 93, 101, 103-104, 107; Tituaña, A. 107 neoclassical analysis: 5 neoliberalism: 16-18, (G) 45, (G) 6970, (C) 79, (C) 116, (J) 163, (M) 215, 309 NGOs: decentralization 25-26; democratization 11, 25-26, (L) 228, 322; departure of (G) 67-68, (M) 208, (L) 256, (H) 285, (H) 298; growth of (G) 47; Indigenous communities (G) 40, (G) 45, (G) 47-49, (C) 112-114, (J) 159, (M) 205, (L) 249, 320; Indigenous peasant leadership 28, (G) 74, (C) 92, (C) 98, (C) 114, (C) 119, (C) 122, (C) 125, (J) 162, (L) 286-288, 332-333; influence of 15, (M) 206, (H) 291-292, (H) 294, (H) 301, 309, 320-321, 333; paternalism (G) 46, (G) 65, (C) 103, (C) 120-121, 321; regulation of (C) 102-103, (M)160, (L) 201; viz. state-based agencies (G) 47-48, (G) 54; technical resources 25-26, (G) 60, (C) 104, (C) 121, (C) 133, 321 non-governmental organizations: see NGOs OSGs (Second Level Organizations) (G): 45-46, 55-56, 61-62 OTBs (Territorial Base Organizations) (J): 165, 170-171

Oversight Committees: (J) 165, (J) 170-171, (M) 208, (M) 212-213, (M) 217, 324 Pachakutik (G): 51, 56, 70-72, 92, 116, 307, 322-323 Pardo, J. (M): 208, 211, 216-219, 317 participation: see citizen participation participatory budgeting: 7, 10, (C) 94, (C) 108-112, (L) 259-260, (H) 289, 332; see also Law of Participatory Budgets peasant: agricultural production (H) 279-280, 310-311; basic needs of (H) 303; CCP (L) 236; CCV (L) 247-251; control 310-312; differentiation (L) 233 (H) 282283, 285-286, 291-292, 307, 310; dignity (M) 210-211; divisions, political (L) 235; education (H) 281-283, (H) 286, (H) 289-290, 310; FEDICAL (L) 236-238, 248-252, (L) 254-256; IU party 237-238; leaders (M) 215, (H) 282-283 (H) 290, 310; municipal governance (M) 211-214, (L) 228, (H) 298, 308-309; organizing (H) 284, 310; participation (L) 260; Popular Peasant Union (UCP) (L) 238; representation (L) 236-238, (L) 241-242, (H) 298; repression (M) 195, (M) 211, (L) 227-228; struggles (L) 232, (L) 236-238, 308-309; see also Indigenous peasant; Indigenous peasant federations, Indigenous peasant organizations; Indigenous peasant struggles Peru: agrarian reform in 28, (J) 148, (L) 227, (L) 229, (L) 231-232, (L) 254, (L) 264, (H) 278-280; central government (L) 244-245, (H) 273, (H) 277, (H) 284-285, (H) 288; citizen participation 2425, 29, (L) 259, (H) 287, (H) 292, 324-326; decentralization frameworks 23-25, (L) 251; Indigenous peasant movements in 3, (J) 158, (L) 233, (L) 238-241,

Index

(L) 246, (L) 248, (H) 271-272, (H) 276, (H) 282, (H) 295, (H) 298-299; institutions 24-25; landholdings in 22, (M) 200, (L) 267n7, n8, (H) 275, (H) 283; mining in (H) 300-301; municipal government 4, (C) 96-97, (L) 227-229, (L) 250, (L) 258, (L) 261, (H) 276n1, 336; participatory budgeting (L) 269n22; poverty in 29, (C) 112, (H) 303; social data on (L) 230, (H) 274 Peruvian Peasant Federation: see CCP Plan Machaca (J): development of 158-159; tensions within 158-159 Porto Alegre: 10; see also participatory budgeting poverty: credit, lack of (C) 126-127; democracy 5; ecological conditions 67; Indigenous governance (G) 31-32, (G) 49, (G) 67, (C) 91, (J) 143-144, (L) 265, (H) 295, 312; labor migration (G) 48, (G) 63, (J) 148, (J) 180; lack of response to (C) 110; levels of 29, (G) 67, (G) 70, (C) 80, (C) 126, (M) 189, (M) 221-222, 335; macroeconomic policy (G) 67, (M) 69, (C) 126; migration (G) 66, (C) 127; municipal government 3, (G) 63, (C) 110, (C) 112, 311-313, 334337; resources (G) 67, (C) 108; rural Andes 2-3, (H) 297; social services (C) 132-134 power relations: agrarian reform (G) 49, (L) 268n12; anti-poverty programs, Mexico 10-11; aspects of 11; biases (G) 48; class 314315; codes of conduct (G) 35-36; decentralization 9, 25, (C) 97, 326-327; democratization 2, 8-9, 12-13, 25, (G) 72, (L) 228, (L) 257-258, 309-310, 323-326; economic 2; elections (L) 250251, (L) 257-258; elites 235, 310315 see also elites; factors affecting 2, (J) 152; feudal

379

legacies 3-4; fictive kinship (G) 41, (M) 216; footdragging (G) 37, (H) 295; haciendas, see haciendas; improvements in (G) 53-54, (G) 72-73, (C) 134; Indigenous control (G) 31, (J) 180-181, 311-314; Indigenous leaders (G) 26, (C) 133-134; institutional innovation 9, 309310; integrated framework 12; highland inequality (C) 81-82; longer-term shifts in (M) 219220; mestizo (G) 41; municipal governance 11-12, 16-17, (G) 26, (C) 27, (L) 233-235, (L) 264, 309-313; NGOs 333; participatory budgeting (C)108112; political 2, 11; ‘resistant adaptation’ (J) 184, (H) 295, 339; rural Andes 8-9, 12; servile (L) 231; social 2, (G) 26-27, (G) 31, (G) 35-36, (G) 41, (G) 43; UNORCAC (C) 82, 86; see also racism pre-capitalist production: haciendas (G) 33-34, (G) 37, (G) 39 public works projects: Cotacachi 9397, 109-112, 114, 118, 121-122, 133-134; demands for (H) 287, 319, 336-337; Guamote 54-55, 59; Indigenous Parliament (G) 57; Indigenous peasant labor for (G) 54-55, (C) 89; Jesús de Machaca 173, 175, 177; Limatambo 229; municipal government focus on (G) 54-55, (C) 90-91, (M) 187, (M) 196, (M) 209-211, (M) 213, (L) 229, (L) 242-243, (L) 246-247, (L) 253254, (L) 257, (L) 260, (H) 273, (H) 289, (H) 294, (H) 296, 320, 332; UNORCAC (C) 91 racism: confronting (G) 43, (C) 105, (L) 240; Indigenous health (C) 136n18; Indigenous peasant participation (G) 46-47, (C) 130; municipal administration (G) 5253, (C) 89, (C) 113; in rural

380

Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

Andes 3-4, (C) 130-131; violence (C) 86 Raqaypampa (M): accountability 219; agricultural production 197198; Andia, M. 194; CENDA 224n17; Central Campesina 206208; Indigenous ethnic identities in 192; as ‘Indigenous District’ 207; language 223n7; leaders, roles of 208; Mizque highlands 191-192; national peasant rebellion 194 relative power approaches: 11-12; capitalist economic development 13-14; critiques of 20; factors of 13-15; history, importance of 1315, 18-20; viz. institutional approaches 20; institutional design 13-14; methodology 2021; municipal democratization 15; state formation 14 resource distribution: clientelism (G) 46, (L) 249, (H) 293-294, 331332; Cotacachi 109; democratization 5, 13, 15, (L) 229, (L) 266-267, 332; Haquira 303; Indigenous peasant leaders (G) 48-49, (L) 243, (L) 247, (L) 257, (L) 263-265, 327, 332; municipal governance 4, (G) 44, (C) 81, (C) 108-109, (M) 213, 219-220, (L) 228-229, (L) 266267, 328-329; infrastructure 4; participatory budgeting (C) 108112 Rozas, W. (L): as ‘aid broker’ 239; Anta, district of 261-263; background of 238-240; challenges for 239-242, 252-253; concentration of power 264; democratization 261-267; dependence on 261-264; Communal Council 242-248, 252-253; election of 228-229, 250-251, 268n16; viz. elites 241242; FEDICAL 249-250; infrastructure 242; municipal decision making 242-243; NGOs 228, 239; as ‘participatory caudillo’ 263; support for 237-

239; vecino backlash 243-244; viz. Vera, V. 253-254 rural Andes: capitalist agriculture 19; Indigenous government, focus in 7; local development plans 63; municipal democracy 2-3; municipal government, roles of 3; poverty 2-3; power relations in 89; racism in 3-4 SAPs (Structural Adjustment Programs): (G) 45, (G) 47 Secretariat of Integrated Rural Development: see SEDRI SEDRI (Secretariat of Integrated Rural Development): (G) 44-46, (C) 121 Sendero Luminoso: see Haquira sindicatos: agrarian reform (M) 197198; autonomy (M) 195-197, (M) 215-216; control of land (M) 197198; creation of (J) 153, (M)195197; haciendas 153-154, (M) 191; peasant representation (M) 200, (M) 202, (M) 206-207, 314; tensions within (J) 153-156, (M) 218, (M) 222; viz. women (J) 155, (M) 225(21) social movements: autonomy of (G) 52, (G) 71, (C) 134; viz. institutions 10, 11, (C) 119; local governance 3, 16-17, (C) 116, (L) 252, 323, 337; struggles of 16, (C) 91, (J) 157, (H) 291, 310 Soriano, O. (M): 187-188, 202-203, 207, 210-212, 221 state, the: accountability (G) 57, (G) 64, (C) 103, (C) 116, (M) 209; cooperatives (L) 233, (L) 235236, (L) 239; formation 13-14, (J) 145; haciendas (G) 35 (G) 39, (M) 191, (M) 193, (M) 196, (H) 275-279; Indigenous peasant organization (G) 43-48, (G) 7374, (C) 86, (J) 141 (J) 143, (J) 149, (J) 163-168, (L) 211-213, (L) 240-241, 308, 330, 338-339; intervention 2, 22, (C) 88, (C) 102, (C) 124, (H) 278-279, 311; military forces (H) 29, (L) 244,

Index

(H) 285; relative power approaches 14; repression (M) 38, (M) 194, (H) 272 state relations: viz. Cabildo (J) 153157, (J) 160-163, (J) 170; clientelism (G) 41, (G) 46, (C) 90, (M) 198, (L) 246; governmentality 16-18, (G) 65, (C) 117, (J) 183, (M) 214-215, (H) 297, 308, 338; Indigenous peasant leaders (G) 48, (G) 54, (J) 154, (M) 203-205, (M) 213-214, 302; inter-ethnic 338; municipal democratization 11, 15-18, (L) 228, (L) 266; municipal governance 3, (G) 61, (C) 129, (J) 172-179, (J) 182-183, (L) 247, (H) 286, (H) 297, 324, 329; FODERUMA (G) 44, (C) 121; NGOs (G) 47; resources (G) 46, (G) 48, (G) 63, (G) 68, (C) 95-97, (C) 119, (J) 184(3) (M) 210, (L) 245, 336; under-funding (G) 47 structural adjustment programs: see SAPs struggles: see Indigenous peasant struggles; peasant (struggles) suffrage: 23-24, (G) 50, (J) 153, (L) 267n1, (H) 282, 326 Territorial Base Organizations: see OTBs thakhi (J): 144-148, 152-154, 159163, 171-172 Tituaña, A. (C): agenda of democratization 93, 117, 119120, 123, 128; alliances 91-92; viz. Andrango, A. 118; appeal of 92-95, 118; Assembly of Canton Unity 97-99, 114; autonomy, municipal 93, 96-98, 119; background of 91-93; challenges of 117; civil society 115; clientelism 112-114; CONAIE 92; Cuba 92-93; dependence on 81, 94-95, 117; donors 93-95, 98, 118-119; external financial support 93-98, 114, 119; as Indigenous mayor 79, 112-114, 122, 136n13; Marina Vega, L. 93;

381

medical programs 92-93; mestizo support 95-96; mingas 95-96; municipal development plan 114115; NGOs 93-95, 114, 119; participatory processes 119-120; public works projects 95-96, 133134; service provision 113, 133134; social power relations 95, 112-114, 133-134; travel 94-95; UNORCAC 92-93, 118, 122-123; see Cotacachi transnational corporations: 27, (C) 79-81, (C) 88, (C) 102, (C) 116117, (C) 125-129, (H) 274, 300301, 305(23), 311 UCIG (Union of Indigenous Peasants of Guamote) (G): 45-46 Union of Indigenous Peasants of Guamote: see UCIG Union of Peasant Organizations of Cotacachi: see UNORCAC UNORCAC (Union of Peasant Organizations of Cotacachi) (C): 81-82, 86-87, 90-93, 96, 98-99, 102-103, 107, 118, 120-124, 133134, 320, 322 Unitary Syndicate Confederation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia: see CSUTCB United Left party: see IU uprisings (Indigenous or peasant): (G) 70, (C) 116, (C) 134, (J) 139140, (J) 152, (J) 158, (J) 184(1), (M) 194, (H) 276, (H) 281 Vera, V. (L): 253-261, 269n20 women: bias against (G) 43, (G) 4849, (G) 75, (C) 101, (C) 131-132, (J) 144, (J) 178-179, (M) 222, (H) 281-282; involvement of (C) 93, (C) 107, (J) 140, (H) 272, (H) 286-287, (H) 298, (H) 302; as mallku taytas (J) 163, (J) 178179; marginalization 21, (G) 5758, (G) 75, (C) 81, (J) 141 (J) 155, (J) 163, (M) 216-217, (L) 255, (H) 288, 316, 333-334, 338; quotas (G) 56, (G) 75, (C) 131,

382

Struggles for Local Democracy in the Andes

(J) 167, (J) 178-179,(L) 259, 333334; in sindicatos (M) 225(21); Vaso de Leche (Glass of Milk) program (L) 255, (H) 289 workers: benefits to (G) 71, (C) 106; leather 105; levels of (G) 32, (C)

80, (C) 84, (C) 113, (L) 253 (H) 294; migrant (G) 50, (G) 66, (C) 91, (C) 127; see also CSTCB; CSUTCB

About the Book

John Cameron draws on power-based approaches to the study of democratization as he thoughtfully explores efforts by indigenous and peasant groups to gain control of local governments and deepen democracy in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. Cameron addresses three fundamental questions: What factors best explain the success or failure of local political movements in the Andes? What forms of democracy are emerging in indigenous- and peasantcontrolled municipalities? What are the impacts of municipal democratization on the well-being and political identities of the citizenry? As he elucidates his results, he reminds readers that, in the midst of some of the most exclusionary and elite-dominated systems of local government in Latin America, political struggles for democracy are having a profound impact. John Cameron is assistant professor in the Department of International Development Studies at Dalhousie University.

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