The Discourse of Demobilization: Shifts in Activist Priorities and the Framing of Political Opportunities in a Peasant Land Struggle

Abstract

This paper integrates the political opportunity and framing paradigms to analyze the discursive processes that were involved in the demobilization of a peasant land struggle in El Salvador. The framing paradigm provides a basis for analyzing how activist rhetoric shapes interpretations of opportunities and grievances among social movement participants to alter the goals and intensity of grassroots protest. As the land struggle demonstrates, leaders communicating with grassroots participants in a process of struggle may, over time, underemphasize shifts occurring in some dimensions of political opportunities, while framing more stable dimensions as having changed. They may also alter their framing of grievances.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research for this paper was funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). I am also grateful to Neil McLaughlin, John McMullan, Alfredo Schulte-Bockholt, and the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments on previous drafts.

NOTES

Notes

¹ Though many scholars concur, for example, that repression has a curvilinear effect, research has yielded contradictory findings as to the direction of the mobilization curve (see Brockett 2001, 2003).

² The analysis of political opportunities as structure is exemplified in Kresi (1995) and Meyer (1993). The dynamic or processual aspect of opportunities is highlighted in studies by Diani (1996), Meyer and Staggenborg (1996), and Schumaker (1975).

³ ONUV was the descendent of the larger United Nations Observer Mission in El Salvador (ONUSAL), which was established in July 1991 to oversee implementation of the 1992 Peace Accords.

⁴ Department-level meetings began only in June 1996.

⁵ Article 105 was amended to the Constitution in 1983. It substituted and softened a component of the 1980 Agrarian Reform (Phase II) that would have expropriated properties larger than 100 hectares, but which had been blocked by the coffee oligarchy. Article 105 raised the limit to 245 hectares and gave owners of properties in excess of this limit three years to enclose the area they wished to keep, register it officially, and sell or otherwise transfer the remainder (the excedente) to peasants or small farmers excepting close relatives. Under Article 267, also amended in 1983, excess holdings that had not been transferred by the three-year deadline could be subject to expropriation by the state, and the owner need not be financially compensated.

⁶ García, Mayra, “Rechazan Pena Contra Campesinos por Tomas de Tierra (Rejection of sanction against peasants for taking land),”Diario Latino, October 26, 1995, p. 3.

⁷ The principle debtors were cooperatives and individual landholders—85,000 families—who received land through the 1980 Agrarian Reform, and secondly, beneficiaries of the Land Transfer Program (PTT) carried out under the 1992 Peace Accords. The PTT provided land to demobilized soldiers, guerrilla combatants of the FMLN, and civilians in former conflict zones—about 37,000 in total.

⁸ Asi Somos 1:3 (August 1995), p. 11.

⁹ Así Somos 1:3 (August 1995), p. 11.

¹⁰ Untitled correspondence received by the Assembly on October 31, 1995.

¹¹ This was the July 3^rd Accord, a land transfer agreement that became part of the 1992 Peace Accords.

¹² Bolaños, Daniel, “Campesinos Exigen Cumplir Constitución (Peasants demand fulfillment of Constitution),”CoLatino, October 25, 1995, p. 1; Bolaños, Daniel and Fidel Chávez, “Campesinos Abandonan Hoy Tierras (Peasants abandon lands today),”CoLatino, October 26, 1995.

¹³ These and other anomalies are described in Informe Lucha por los Excedentes de la Tierra Desarrollada por la Asociación Nacional de Trabajadores Agropecuarios ANTA (Report on Struggle for the Excedentes [lands in excess of 245 hectares] carried out by the National Association of Agricultural Workers), June 4, 1996; ADC and ATAES, “Informe Narrativo de la Situación Actual de la Problemática Agraria: Excedentes, Acuerdo 3 de Julio y Tierra del Estado (Narrative Report on the Current Agrarian Situation: Excedentes, July 3 Accord, and State Lands),” September 1996; a letter from the Foro to Alvaro de Soto, September 18, 1996; and a letter from the FMLN's Adjunct Coordinator to Ricardo Vigil, Special Representative of the UN Secretary General in El Salvador, September 12, 1996.

¹⁴ One can only speculate as to why the FMLN threw so much support behind the debt struggle, and not the land struggle, without interview data on this question. But it is probable that the approximately 22,000 FMLN members with agrarian debt in the PTT program was an important consideration. As well, the party undoubtedly saw the other PTT beneficiaries—the former government soldiers—as a potential electoral support base. Indeed, the FMLN members worked successfully to bring associations of former soldiers into in the new agrarian policy coalition they helped to create, the Foro. At the same time, the FMLN's lack of enthusiasm for the excedentes struggle was not a departure from its normal agenda; it had been distancing itself from redistributive reform since before the end of the civil war.

¹⁵ Though the leaders acknowledged the FMLN's lack of support for the struggle, this was not part of their argument for postponing protest; in fact, they reported that the party was considering renewing its role as an ally.

¹⁶ Meeting at site of protest encampment, April 28, 1996.

¹⁷ Informe de la ADC sobre el Incumplimiento e los Acuerdos de Paz en Materia Agraria, Presentado a las Naciones Unidas (ADC Report on the Lack of Fulfillment of the Peace Accords in Agrarian Matters, presented to the United Nations), April 1997.

¹⁸ Statement by Pedro Torres, ANTA assembly for the western region, September 1996.

¹⁹ The Salvadorean National Indigenous Association, not a member of the ADC.

²⁰ ATAES, the Association of Agricultural Workers of El Salvador, was a rival organization of ANTA and the ADC headed by Reynaldo García.

²¹ ANTA, “Antecedentes Históricos de la Lucha por los Excedentes y Ocupaciones de Octubre de 1995 (Historical Antecedents of the Excedentes Struggle and the October 1995 Occupations),” June 1997.

²² Interview October 1996.

²³ “We recognize that in many mobilizations for the [debt] cancellation theme, there were more landless peasants than cooperativists” (Interview July 2002).

²⁴ Interview with ISTA President Miguel Tomás López, December 2002.