Reclaiming the worker's property: control grabbing, farmworkers and the Las Tunas Accords in Nicaragua

Abstract

In this paper I explore a land grabbing resistance movement composed of unemployed coffee workers in Central Nicaragua. Between 1996 and 2000, a private agro-export conglomerate appropriated worker-owned coffee estates previously designated as the Area Propiedad del Los Trabajadores (APT), or the Worker's Property. Following mass protests between 2001 and 2004, worker representatives from the Asociación de Trabajadores del Campo (ATC) and government officials negotiated and signed the Las Tunas Accords which provided redistributed land from 18 of those coffee estates to 2500 families. Drawing on interviews with movement participants carried out between 2003 and 2012, I argue that the roots of the control grab and the resistance movement can be traced to the contradictions of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN)-led agrarian reform in the 1980s, the conflicts over property in the post-war period and the failed consensus on how rural labor should organize and be represented in the face of land re-concentration and capitalist consolidation.

Keywords:

• farmworkers
• control grabbing
• dispossession
• resistance
• coffee
• Nicaragua

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI) organizing committee, Cynthia Gorman and three anonymous reviewers for their critical comments and encouragement. Most importantly, I would also like to recognize the farmworkers of Matagalpa and, specifically, participants in the Las Tunas movement whose testimonies form the basis for this work. Their daily struggles against injustice in the coffee lands are a constant reminder of the violence of dispossession perpetuated by land grabbing.

Funding

This research was made possible by funding from Fulbright, a small grant from the LDPI and a Faculty Development and International Travel grant from West Virginia University.

Notes

¹The encampments symbolized the Nicaraguan experience of the global coffee price crisis and illustrated the extreme vulnerability of landless workers whose livelihoods depended upon permanent or seasonal wage employment and housing in the coffee estates (Wilson 2013).

²The research for this paper was conducted over a total of 16 months in 2003 and 2005–2007, and in follow-up interviews conducted in 2012. I conducted 71 interviews and repeated field visits in 11 worker communities/estates that were active in the Las Tunas movement. Eight of these worker communities/estates were selected because they have been occupied by workers since at least 2002 and appear in the Las Tunas Accords documents as properties in worker possession. The other three communities/estates did not appear in the accords and movement participants in those sites remain landless and/or are reported to have not received benefits from their participation. In each community/estate, I completed at least three oral histories, in an effort to grasp the particularities of my informants’ experiences as well as background on each location for the sake of comparison. To understand other institutional and political perspectives, I also conducted interviews with signatories of the Las Tunas Accords, including the mayors of San Ramon and La Dalia in 2002, FSLN party officials in Matagalpa, representatives from the Union of Farmers and Ranchers (UNAG), the Catholic Church and the directors of the Rural Workers Association (ATC) in Matagalpa. I have used pseudonyms throughout the paper to protect the anonymity of my informants.

³In addition to the thousands moving to roadside encampments, thousands more left the estates and sought refuge in the city of Matagalpa, Managua, or migrated abroad. The Red Cross in Matagalpa fashioned an encampment in a city park to treat some 850 people with health problems caused by malnutrition (Rocha 2001), and the regional campus of the National University created an encampment supported by donations from students, faculty and community members to help some 1200 people with no place to go. But many more stayed behind in the hinterlands.

⁴Since the nineteenth century, land grabbing by domestic and transnational investors has established massive inequalities in resource control, produced a class of landless laborers and created the conditions of possibility for successive export booms. As Biderman explained, “the process of dispossession and ‘commodification’ of land which began in the coffee areas during the late nineteenth century was generalized and intensified after 1950, during the cotton and cattle booms. In addition to making land a commodity which was increasingly appropriated by larger capitalist producers, the dispossession of small food producers forced them to sell their labor power (at least on a seasonal basis) in order to survive. Though some proletarianization did occur, the expansion of coffee did not eliminate servile or precapitalist social relations, which continued to predominate … [yet] even this interpretation may exaggerate the extent to which there was a real evolution towards capitalist development (as opposed to continued primitive accumulation)” (Biderman 1983, 11).

Additional information

Bradley Wilson is an assistant professor of geography at West Virginia University. He received his PhD in geography from Rutgers University. His research focuses on agrarian conflicts, agro-food certification, ethical commodity networks and the politics of humanitarianism and solidarity in Central America and the United States.