Report
The morning mist begins to lift from the small rural settlement of Lucio Cabañas, revealing hints—both welcome and ominous—that a clear sunny day lies ahead. Drying his coffee on the basketball court in the center of the community, a Tzeltal Maya man named Cornelius is pleased with the sight of the sun, a promising sign that the coffee-drying process can begin in earnest after an unusual series of January rains.
At about 9:45 on the morning of January 21, a thousand protesters, mostly indigenous people from the Ecuadorian highlands, burst through a military cordon and rushed the National Congress building. The soldiers who had placed large spirals of barbed wire fencing around the Congress the day before to protect it from the demonstrators had stepped aside, indicating that a faction of the military had shifted support from the government of Jamil Mahuad to the indigenous protesters.
Founded in 1984, the Landless Rural Workers' Movement (MST) is today the largest social movement in Brazil and perhaps the best organized grassroots organization in all of Latin America. It is the only movement in Brazil that has successfully built a national organizational structure, and is the first grassroots movement to have effected radical changes in the political priorities of the national government.
The social struggles of Brazil's landless agricultural workers and small producers over the past two decades have developed in the broader context of a general resurgence of popular movements. This resurgence began in the late 1970s, toward the tail end of the 1964-1985 military dictatorship, and was stimulated by a number of factors, three of which stand out.
In the pre-dawn hours of June 7, 1998, Mexican Army troops surrounded a small schoolhouse in El Charco, a Mixtec community in the municipality of Ayutla de los Libres, in the southern state of Guerrero. An informant had revealed that a guerrilla unit—presumably from the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR), a clandestine movement that had been active in southern Mexico since 1996—was holding a two-day meeting in the village with civilian sympathizers.
In the mid-1990s, the World Bank reported that for the first time in history less than half the world's labor force—49%—worked in agriculture.[1] While the numbers are declining, and while orthodox Marxists and conservative free marketeers alike have long predicted and hoped for the disappearance of the peasantry, as we enter the twenty-first century, peasants are very much still with us.
At age 41, Antonio Vargas, an Amazonian Quichua, is a 20-year veteran of the indigenous movement. President of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) since 1996, he has been largely responsible for keeping the organization intact and helping it recover successfully from a major institutional crisis.
Economic restructuring, embraced by Mexico's leaders after its 1982 crisis of external debt, has reached deeply into the Mexican countryside. In 1992, the Mexican government rewrote Article 27, the agrarian reform section of the Mexican Constitution, bringing an end to the land reform policies that shaped the government's relationship to the peasantry for half a century.[1]
