In New Book, SIPA Professor Examines Rural Protests in Latin America

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Starting around 2000, the world witnessed a massive commodities boom, driven by demand for natural resources from economies like China. Prices for agricultural products and raw materials surged, including in Latin America, where commodity-exporting countries benefited from supercharged global trade.

That should mean flush times for farmers in such countries, but Maria Victoria Murillo, chair of the department of political science at the School of International and Public Affairs, noticed something odd during this period: an increase in political protest among rural actors, both farmers and peasants.

“Most of the literature tells you [rural actors] protest when there is a negative shock – a price decline, a climate disaster – and so they are desperate,” Murillo says. 

But here, prices were shooting up. “Since I study South America, I was surprised to see an increase in the number of protests facing these positive shocks,” she adds.

That puzzle prompted the research for Murillo’s new book Shocks, Democracy, and Rural Unrest (Cambridge University Press), which she coauthored with Jorge Mangonnet, an assistant professor in the political science department at Vanderbilt University.,

To answer this question, Murillo and Mangonnet examined the period between 2000 and 2014, conducting extensive field research in their two case-study countries, Paraguay and Argentina. They also included two comparison, or “shadow” cases, Bolivia and Brazil, which mirror Paraguay’s unitary and Argentina's federal government structure, respectively.

What Murillo and Mangonnet found is that even boom times can generate grievances from both farmers and peasants, though what fuels their anger is often quite different. “Shocks, both positive and negative, can produce grievances, and these grievances sometimes result in collective action and protest – and sometimes they don't,” Murillo says.

Shocks, Democracy, and Rural Unrest finds that protests typically don’t happen when farmers or peasants can access the political system and sway policy directly – farmers, say, block an export tax. But if a new party takes over and their influence breaks down, protests may be the fallback. This helps explain movements like Paraguay’s 2008 tractorazo, where farmers protested by parking their tractors on roadsides and marched to the capital. 

Though the authors are focused on specific countries in a specific period, their research has broader implications for how actors behave in democracies in both booms and busts. Murillo, who has a deep body of research on the political economy of Latin America, spoke with SIPA News about her latest book and what lessons we can draw from this research for today’s price shocks and political unrest. 

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did this research come about?
This project emerged from the reality of a puzzle. The literature tells you it's very hard to mobilize rural actors, whether farmers or peasants, because they're all dispersed. It's very hard to organize them and establish collective action. The peasants have very few resources, and they're almost always at subsistence level, and the cost of protesting is high for both [peasants and farmers] because they could be working the land instead. 

Most of the literature tells you they protest when there is a negative shock – a price decline, a climate disaster – and so they are desperate. In the early 2000s, there was a commodity boom as a result of the entry of China into the World Trade Organization and its big demand for natural resources. The price of agricultural products shot up. It's really a positive shock, and since I study South America, I was surprised to see an increase in the number of protests facing these positive shocks. 

That puzzle brought me to do the research that ends in this book, which analyzes how shocks, both positive and negative, can produce grievances, and these grievances sometimes result in collective action and protest – and sometimes they don't.

The other thing that I try to do here is that most of the prior analysis either studies peasants or farmers, and I think the innovation of this framework is that [this research] puts both actors together.

Why did you analyze peasants and farmers together?
They have always been analyzed separately, with the farmers analyzed by the interest group literature and the peasants through social movement or revolutionary violence literature. 

However, this comes from deep fieldwork, and in talking to these human beings and taking their agency seriously, they try to create organizations. They act strategically regarding political action.

They have very different resources, different grievances. They even fight with each other. 

But the way they operate under democracy in terms of demands to the state, I think, could be understood within the same framework.

What kind of fieldwork did you undertake for a project like this?
I spent quite a lot of time both in Paraguay and in Argentina, doing interviews, gathering data, putting together a team in both countries to gather data that comes from local newspapers or data on protests that's pretty granular and not readily available on the internet. And, of course, I interview the actors, I visit the places, and I try to get a sense of their perspectives on these issues. 

What were the central findings of this book?
The positive commodity shock produced two different types of grievances. 

The countries that were coming from negative economic times, the governments needed money, and it generated an incentive to try to tax the farmers that are producing for export. The farmers that have undergone the bad periods don't want to pay more taxes. So there is a defense of their income as grievance. 

On the other hand, because of those high [commodity] prices, land that's not so suitable suddenly becomes profitable because, even if the yield is lower, the price is so high you want to sell in world markets. There is a huge expansion of the agrarian frontier into areas that were occupied by peasants or were forests. There is both the process of deforestation, and a process of land encroachment. 

This is particularly the case with soybeans that grew the most in price and expanded most rapidly in South America. It's very capital-intensive. It doesn't require much labor, so [farmers] want the land of peasants, but don't want to hire the peasants. If you are a peasant and your land is next to the soybean plantation, and those soybean farmers use glyphosate [a herbicide], and you have fruits or vegetables or little animals for subsistence, the glyphosate would kill them. So, even if farmers didn't take your land, you would not be able to cultivate for subsistence. That generates a defensive grievance from peasants.

Do those grievances lead to protests?
The common characteristic is that when both actors have political influence, have access to political parties, to the legislature, to the executive, they prefer not to protest because protest is very expensive. It's only when they don't have that political influence that they protest. 

But they can only protest effectively if they have cohesive organizations. Cohesive organizations are not only those where the membership is homogeneous, but also are not dependent on state funds. In Latin America, the process of civil society organizing often is corporatist, where the state subsidizes [organizations], so membership could be compulsory or subsidized. So it's only organizations that are more autonomous from the state and have a more homogeneous membership that can stage what we call cycles of contention against the state.

Could you talk about what you found in the case studies you examined, starting with Paraguay?
In Paraguay, the farmers have always been aligned with the two main parties, in particular with the strongest party, the Colorado Party, which is a legacy party from the prior dictatorship. When the government – even a Colorado-led government – tries to tax farmers to raise money to pay off foreign debts, the farmers are influential enough to stop these efforts at the legislature because they have so much political influence.

During the period we study, there's only one center-left administration, which was in alliance with the peasants, led by President Fernando Lugo. When he comes to power, [farmers] lose access to the executive. They still have access to the legislature, but they have much less access to the executive, and that's when we see that for the first time the farmers in Paraguay start protesting – what they call tractorazos – where they bring their machinery, their trucks and they park for kilometers along the road and even march into the capital. They are actually so influential that Congress impeaches the president. They kick him out, and then the next president is someone that’s allied with farmers again – so again, a lot of policy influence and favorable policies, and no more protests. That's because they are very cohesive. The farmers have a single organization that's very powerful.

The peasants in Paraguay also have two very cohesive organizations, and very little influence. During most of the period, the Colorado [Party] is not responsive to them. Now, when this left-wing president [Lugo] is elected, the peasants become more influential because now they have access to the executive, even if they don't have that much access to the legislature. 

What we see is, their protests are very high all the time, and they come down during the presidency of Lugo because he's a key ally. After he's impeached, [the number of protests] go up again. When there is political influence, there is less of an incentive to protest to get what you want. 

On the other hand, both actors in Paraguay had cohesive organizations, and we show that the most cohesive organizations are the ones leading the movement. 

What about Argentina?
In Argentina, the situation is different. The farmers are fractured across many organizations, so they have less power as opposed to Paraguay. During this period, [farmers] do not have access to the executive. They have some legislative influence, but not that much. 

And so, the [Argentine] government is successful in taxing [farmers] much more than in Paraguay. There are protests, but they're very isolated. In 2008, [farmers] finally bring [multiple] organizations together into one coordinating committee. It's then when they are able to really stage strong protests.

The peasants, same thing. They are very fragmented. They don't have a lot of power to protest. The protests are more localized, and when the farmers organize and protest, the government responds by looking for an alliance with peasants that didn't exist before. So suddenly, the peasants get political access, and we see that – although [the size and scale of] protests were low – they became even lower. And in the case of Argentina, because it’s a federal country, we also analyzed differences across provinces that match the story at the level of the province. 

What is the broader takeaway from your research that might apply outside of Latin America?
The largest takeaway is to look at rural actors less as actors with difficulties for collective action, and more as actors with agency that should or could be included in policymaking. That's true certainly in the advanced democracies where these actors are particularly unhappy now, and a lot of the literature, at least the political economy literature, looks at economic shocks and the cost of protest goes down or up, and does not take these actors seriously as political actors and as organized actors, especially for the peasants.

I couldn't help but think about the US in reading your research, where farmers have a lot of political influence – and yet we are seeing their interests undercut by things like tariffs. Do you see any lessons from your research to the current political situation in the US?
We're seeing many more farmer protests in Europe than in the United States. That tells me their political influence is declining because before they didn't need to protest; they just exercised their political influence. We're not seeing these protests widely in the United States because I think they're still betting on political mechanisms, and in fact, they are betting more on one party than the other. 

They have certainly – because of the electoral system – bet [on] the Republican Party. If the Republican Party shifts, then we will start seeing maybe some changes. But one thing that's important is that the electoral system in the United States makes [farmers] very influential at the state level, but it depends on the geography of a national election. Swing states that may define [a] presidential election might not be agrarian. 

What question from your research would you still like to answer? 
We look at capital-intensive sectors so that the comparison with the United States or with Europe makes sense, but we didn't look at labor-intensive sectors. I think for those the logic might be different if you really cannot replace so much with capital. I could expect, say, soybean and berries to have different logic.

You studied this boom period, but do the rules still apply to bust times as well?
The puzzle was the boom, but the theory applies to any positive or negative shock, as long as they create grievances. The theory is more general. 

We’re seeing a lot of shocks in the global market right now – things like those US tariffs and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Are you seeing any dynamics in Latin America or elsewhere that reflect some of the tensions you explored in this book? 
I think Brazil is a case where you can see the tension between the power of soybean producers and other sectors. Lula [left-wing President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva] sought to include farmers because they were so influential and he didn't have a majority in the legislatures. He also still has inside his coalition actors that wanted to prevent deforestation, and there's only so much you can take of peasant land. The largest part of Brazil is forest, and these people want to keep expanding the agrarian frontier. And as prices go up, their incentives to expand the agrarian frontier and their resources to influence policy grow up. I'm expecting to see this tension play out, in particular in deforestation in Brazil. The project I'm looking at now really looks much more at protected land, and the consequences of these shocks.