Postcolonialism, Indigeneity and Struggles for Food Sovereignty by Wilson Marisa;

Author:Wilson, Marisa;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Agroecological networks

Widespread popular education networks multiplied in El Salvador at the end of the 1970s in association with the guerrilla uprisings, and through these networks, Green Revolution technologies became connected in the popular imagination with land inequalities. Perhaps surprisingly, just a decade beforehand, few of the networks or resources for revolt were in place. A survey of campesino culture conducted in 1973 by the Jesuit sociologist Segundo Montes found that the rural poor in El Salvador were fatally resigned to poverty, with low social solidarity and high competition for land and jobs (Montes and Gaibrois 1979). Wood (2003) concluded that two factors were crucial in bringing about resistance: liberation theology and the organizing practices of tiny guerrilla organizations that built upon such practices. The liberation theology movement, reaching El Salvador from other parts of Latin America, entailed the rejection of established authoritarian readings of the Bible in favour of a ‘preferential option for the poor’ (Smith 1991: 24). Previously, authority figures of the Church and State had been associated with the divine will of God. The idea that the oppression of the poor was an obstacle to God’s will created a moral impetus for organized resistance, to which many became committed to the point of losing their lives (Pearce 1986). Sparked by calls for revival at the Vatican from 1962 to 1964, Carlos Rafael Caburrús (1983: 135), a Guatemalan Jesuit, described the movement as an ‘unblocking’ of radical campesino fatalism across Latin America.

From the late 1960s radical Catholic priests inspired by liberation theology began to denounce the Salvadorian government from the pulpit and to publicly record the abusive harvesting practices of local landlords. Across El Salvador a peripatetic network of priests and other active intermediaries, known as catechists, began to provide pastoral support for covert Bible study groups in parishes (cantones) across El Salvador. The study groups drew strongly on the pedagogical principles established by the Brazilian popular educator, Paulo Freire, for his adult literacy programmes in the 1970s, which were premised on the capacity of individuals and groups to make their own interpretations of their situation. Whilst framed more in terms of cultural oppression and Marxist ideas of the ownership of production, Freire’s ideas provided the basis for postcolonial critiques of regimes throughout Latin America, legitimizing campesino readings of power relations and articulations of liberation. The ensuing feeling of equality was critical to subsequent uprisings, as it created the sense that ‘we are capable of managing these properties’ (Wood 2003: 206).

Critiques of unequal access to land and livelihoods remained central to the guerrilla uprisings that led to the civil war in El Salvador; the majority of insurgents were subsistence farmers. Two years into the war, campesinos began taking land for their basic food needs, beginning with micro-plots (microfundia). Many stopped paying rent. Coffee plantations were pulled down for firewood and many estates were destroyed, especially those belonging to uncooperative landlords. While liberation theology did not cultivate specific discourses that critiqued the environmental devastation of Green Revolution technologies and the

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