A student in a class asked, “does the economy run the other areas, like social and political areas?
“Yes, “another student said, “money can even make monkeys dance.” Everyone laughed. The teacher took out a cardboard block on whose sides were written “economy”, “culture”, “politics” and “social”; the top surface said “religion” and the bottom one said “biology”. “What do you see”, the teacher asked a student; she read that side and said, “culture”; another student located on the opposite side said “politics”, and so on. The teacher wrapped up: “it depends on the side that you are reading, reality appears to you to be one thing or another, in the end it is all the same block, the same reality.
This story reminds us of the story about the five blind wise men and the elephant, who touch different parts of the elephant and each believe it is something else, but it is the same elephant. Things not only are interconnected, they are embedded in one another and are the same realities which are expressed in different ways. In this article we show variables that, connected to one another, warn us about disruptions, shocks, that tend to make events that threaten humanity worse. Having that image the question emerges about how to prepare ourselves in the face of these disruptions, specifically about how the peasantry and indigenous peoples can contribute their grain of sand in this challenge.
1. Tendences that warn us of possible shocks
In 1972 Meadows and his colleagues[2] published a report for the project of the Club of Rome on the prediction for humanity. In this publication, guided by indicators on pollution, food, population, industrial products and non-renewable resources for 200 years between 1900 and 2100, they predicted the collapse of the world system in these current years. 50 years later this graph from 1972 from Meadows, et al (19972:124) was adapted by Earth4All (https://www.earth4all.life/), and its results are even more concerning: See graph.
All the variables of the graph have increased, except for the non-renewable resources; and here let us clarify what are not “resources”, they are assets that have agency, they are assets that once they are exploited, are slowly renewed over millions of years, for example, oil, natural gas, carbon, gold, water, etc. The population increased from 1.6 million in 1900 to 3.5 billion in 1970 and in November of 2022 it will be 8 billion, it will continue increasing some more and the decline will begin. Industrial production and food per capita grows and then goes down. Non-renewable resources (read assets) have already been dropping since 1970. Contamination will continue increasing until the years 2035-2040.
The graph shows how the belief that “growing is progress” leads to the fact that food, industrial production and population would grow to the point that their basis of assets forces them to stagnate and decline. If food gets scarce and health services get worse, there are more deaths, population decreases. In 1997 the scientists who pushed the Kyoto Protocol warned that the existence of planet earth was in greater danger year after year. Twenty five years later we see that the Kyoto accords were not implemented and what they said was going to happen is happening.
What do we have now? Finding ourselves in that tendency illustrated by the graph, in 2011 the world experienced a financial crisis, which was expressed in the price volatility of food and in political disturbances in the Arab world, from Burkina Faso to Bangladesh. Now in the midst of the pandemic (COVID 19), the war between Russia and Ukraine added gasoline to the fire: the prices for oil and food shot up. We should not be surprised that political disturbances might appear in different regions of the world, that this situation would be made even worse by climate change: floods, droughts, and crop losses. In May of this year India, a country called to cushion the scarcity of wheat from Ukraine, restricted its wheat exports because it experienced a mega-drought and wants to protect its population. In July of this year in Panama, precisely because of the conjunction of elements that we have described in this text, in addition to the raw inequality that Panamanian society suffers, there were prolonged political demonstrations. See? Everything is connected, the realities are diverse and at the same time all one reality.
Said another way, the disruptions that we might experience with prices, climate change and political disturbances, are going to cause food scarcity and intensify damage to nature, among other effects.
2. Disruptions in the countryside with global impact
When rivers rule
We had a commitment with peasant communities in 4 Eaquinas. It was 22 kms by foot and horseback. The rain kept falling and we were told that the Rio Tuma was howling. So we decided to take 250 km route around by vehicle. It took 5 long hours. At the end of the second day we were supposed to return, but the Rio Ubú and Palanón were roaring coming down the Musán mountain. Meeting together, Mencho pronounced, “Wait or stay, here humans are not in charge, the rivers rule!” We waited. We crossed the Ubú. We started into the Rio Palanón, which grabbed and dragged us 2 meters. It left us weak-kneed! Frightened, we recognized that really here t rivers rule.
This story takes us back to environmental, economic, social and cultural issues…When rivers rule, transportation is stopped, there are humans and animals who die, and the river transports the fertility of the soil which the rains wash away – rivers are assets, they rule. Excess rains make raising beans shaky which is increasing, milk become more watery, transportation stops, increasing costs of production and expenses. They are days and weeks when work is not done, more food is eaten and stress is heightened. The more a zone is one of mono-cropping agriculture, the more extreme become the floods and droughts, the more despotic and vertical are the structures of families and mediation.[3] Migration takes off, family erosion worsens, religious fanaticism increases and the idea that “nothing can be done here” pulsates in human minds.
This “soup” boils up more with the variables expressed in the graph, the disruptions are near. Meadows et al (1972) predicted the decline in food by 2030, but the conjunction of elements that we just listed is advancing the food crisis by a decade; the curve that we see in the graph is a decade early. For the peasantry and indigenous peoples, the risk of the loss of food crops is real, they have experienced it many times, but now they tend to become more frequent and their effects harsher. Can something different be expected when there practically are no more forests and there is no land to mark out? Can something different be expected when mono-cropping agriculture sustained by commercial enterprises and financial institutions is crushing all peasant and indigenous agriculture, and corralling women in the kitchen more and more with less food?
Crop loss also has effects on the urban population that in Central America depends in large measure on peasant indigenous beans and corn, for example. And let us recall once again the image of the block, talking about crop loss has economic, social, environmental, political and culture sides to it…The underground movements of discontent will irrupt at any point. In this context the story “when rivers rule” brings to mind the popular saying that says “God is forgiving, but nature is not.”
3. We prevent or prepare ourselves in the face of possible disruptions
Crises give birth to ideas, changes and collective actions. Crises are overcome in groups, in solidarity connected with dozens of people and nature in its diverse expressions. We invite people who read us to produce ideas, change and act collectively.[4] Here we begin that process with the following idea: creating funds to address the challenge of crop losses.
3.1 Type of “funds” that have functioned or now function
A first type of “fund” has been diversified farms and their forests. Historically indigenous and peasant families have diversified their crops, processed their food and even have made their clothing and footwear in the indigenous towns of Mesoamerica. This has been their way of ensuring their food through the year and their sustainability. If they lost the harvest of one crop, they were left with several other crops, poultry, pigs or processed food (cheese, dried fruit, marmalade). The forests (patches of trees) have been another “fund”, they provide wood for their homes, firewood for their kitchens, medicines, water, food…[5]
These peasant and indigenous strategies have been praiseworthy practices, but limited to months and taken up by one or a few families; it is a practice which is more and more corralled by that logic of “whoever has, save yourself”. An improvement would be that entire communities store their food and take care of their forested areas, for example. These communities do exist, but they are fewer and far between.
A second type of “fund”, more institutional, functions in Alaska in the United States, a fund created in 1976. What does it consist in? Oil companies are charged for using a common good and for contaminating the planet, with this fund they have a fund of “dirty money” that they redistribute in equal parts to their citizens, year after year. In 2021, for example, each citizen in Alaska received $1,114 dollars. It is redistribution and not a gift nor social assistance. At the same time, it has something of equity because they charge the richest owners of those businesses; with this collection of “dirty money” they seek to disincentivize them from continuing to ruin planet earth. That amount of $1,114 is important for most people, for the wealthy it is nothing. Probably its biggest limitation is that that common asset which companies are exploiting does not belong just to the citizens of Alaska; but it belongs to all of humanity.
Inspired by this event in Alaska, the governments of Latin America (and other continents), in addition to the taxes that they collect, could create a fund based on charging oil, mining and wood companies that emit greenhouse gases and exploit assets that belong to societies[6]. From this fund of “dirty money” they can redistribute each year by equal parts to all the citizenry of a country so that each person might ensure their food purchasing from the “peasant fund”; or, to do something better, they can provide those funds to each citizen through their forms of organization, be it churches, first tier cooperatives, associations, community organizations, neighborhood organizations, mutual benefit societies, small groups that can innovate in alliances with peasant and indigenous organizations in ways to confront food scarcity; this proposed way obviously requires maturity on the part of governments to not co-opt popular organizations[7] as they have done in the past. The State can put some independent entity, for example, universities in each province, in charge of auditing those organizations. Let us recall, it is not a gift, it is a right of each citizen over common assets, and it is an obligation to financially penalize the companies that do damage to the common home. It is a realistic option even though we recognize it does not resolve the in-depth problem of the “common evil” of the oil industry.
The connection between both types of “funds” becomes strategic. If the peasant and indigenous “fund”, due to the tsunami of market elites and their own divisions, goes further into crisis and disappears, as they have disappeared in Europe and the United States, the food basis for humanity will be at serious risk. If the fund from “dirty money” makes the population connect with the peasant and indigenous “fund”, we will be starting to resolve the crisis.
3.2 Type of funds that should be organized
Where there is more experience in fund management is with associative organizations, particularly cooperatives, be they social funds, investment funds or educational funds. The principle of distribution of surpluses with equity is included in the statutes of cooperatives, this means that if a cooperative has 100 dollars of surplus, let us say 20% goes to a social fund, 10% to legal reserves, 20% to a savings fund and 50% is to be distributed among the members in accordance wi4th their contributions in cash, labor or in-kind. We recognize, nevertheless, that it is a minority of these organizations that follow this principle and do it effectively.
Of those cases where they do carry it out, what are the lessons in the management of those funds? They are the resources of the members (a percentage which is deducted from the surplus of the organization, collective activities like festivals to raise those funds, social premium for selling products within the framework of Fair Trade). They have precise rules for that fund to fulfill its purpose and not be prematurely used up. Examples of a social fund: could be something to respond to the death of a member or their spouse; providing an amount in cash and the casket; this keeps the family from going into debt over funeral costs. It could cover a daughter or son of a member with a university scholarship (fixed amount) for 5 years. In the case of it being a community store, a social fund so that members who reach the age of 75 would receive a set amount each month; this recognizes the contribution that the person made to society and provides a cushion for their loss of ability to generate income for their own support.
Starting from these experiences, an associative and/or community organization could create a food or seed fund for crop losses. That could include a seed and food exchange between communities and organizations that have different planting times. They could create an environmental fund to face disasters like floods and droughts. They could create an ecological fertilizer fund for buying “green fertilizer” (canavalia, pigeon peas or velvet beans) to systematically improve the soil where basic grains and perennial crops are grown. Each associative organization in the world can innovate in the proposed direction and enlighten the world with this path of prevention in the face of disasters.
4. Concluding
Within the framework of the variables shown in the graph, energy and food insecurity is worse today, while the world economic recession knocks at our doors. Disruptions are becoming more frequent and require prevention strategies. A drought is not just a natural event, it is also a social, economic, cultural and political event. The same is true for floods, crop losses or political demonstrations. Everything is interconnected. They are the same realities which are understood better from the rural periphery, particularly when we get involved in processes that move “ at the edge of the table.” This understanding empowers us to take the next step.
The destruction of the planet by oil, mining and wood companies, or better said a world system dependent on fossil fuels, should be de-incentivized and societies compensated. Each inhabitant of humanity pays for its environmental, economic, social and political costs, which is why the societies to be compensated would be – in theory – all of humanity. This is possible if all governments of the world were able to organize those funds. Is it illusory? Undertaking these actions will help all of humanity to awaken to the benefit of their common home.
This global measure can be exercised on the micro level by organizations and communities that organize in concrete ways. Associative organizations which are democratic, transparent and equitable, can organize and manage different types of funds (social fund, food fund, environmental fund, seed fund…) which would cushion the disruptions to the benefit of their membership and their communities. “Time is greater than space”, says Pope Francis. With this he criticizes the fact that imperialisms seek to occupy spaces, while peoples begin processes; that nevertheless is more a western rationality that prioritizes time over space endeavoring to find quick profits, while the spaces where natural assets and the common home exist are made cheaper. The peasantry and indigenous peoples who organize to overcome that time and space division are starting processes of change in their own spaces conceived as their common home.
Having associative experiences and having in associative organizations a non-co-optable pugnacious counterpart, the initiatives of creating funds should be also taken up by municipal and national governments – I hope the “pink wave” of leftist governments in Latin America, having made their respective self-criticisms, and having freed themselves from their neoliberal leftism, would champion this proposal. Also financial institutions that generally have anti-ecological practices and are pushing the food crisis, can organize funds, let´s say deducting 0.5% of the loan amounts to their clients and 0.5% of bank earnings, to respond to the food crisis in specific areas, with complete transparency to the people who are the owners of those funds. Churches can do it in each neighborhood and community where they are found.
Creating and managing these different “funds” and connecting them with one another, could be the beginning of the end of the world crisis that we are already suffering. Consequently, communities that, precisely because of their multiple varieties, organize following the principle that the whole is greater than its parts, are communities capable of moving mountains to connect with one another and to deepen their bonds of solidarity.
[1] René has a PhD in development studies and accompanies rural organizations in Central America. He is an associate researcher of IOB-Antwerp University and collaborator of the Winds of Peace Foundation, http://peacewinds.org/research/ . We write this article based on our immersion in rural organizations. Your comments are welcome.
[3] The climate also has more intense variations, see for example the heat wave these days in Europe and Canada.
[4] There are several groups in the world working for change. Earth4all, for example, is an international initiative that seeks change in the energy system that sustains the industrial economy: abandoning fossil fuels, changes in agriculture and transportation.
[5] Europe in the Middle Ages had large extensions of forests. From the XIII to XVI centuries they deforested. As an effect of that deforestation, lacking wood for cooking and heating, hundreds of people died from hunger and cold. Now we see in Europe that they have plantations of forests as a product of their reforestation.
[6] Vaclav Smil (2022), in his book “How The World Really Works” responds to the question about what makes the modern world work. Vaclav lists 4 responses concerning the big transitions of civilization: population, agriculture, energy and economics. There he reveals the total dependency of humanity on oil, which is the dominant development model in the entire world.
[7] The“pink wave” of leftist government is irrupting once again in Latin America. The first “wave” was in the decade of 2000, marked by the “raw material boom”, a wave that contributed little to democracy, took on a nefarious neo-extractivism and to a large extent co-opted popular organizations. The second “wave” has been coming since 2020 including Mexico, Peru and Colombia, now in a period of crisis and with popular organizations difficult to co-opt. If these leftist governments were self-critical, they would be able to take on this proposal and improve it in each country and promote it within frameworks of regional integration.
Article dedicated to Anabell Cardoza and Jesner Pérez, who seek their own path in the midst of “social tsunamis”
Indifference
Juanito would constantly go by the house where Juanita lived, he 20 and she 13. The mother detected that her daughter was restless, and concerned she went to the pastor of her church, and asked for his prayers and advice. But the pastor, with complete indifference, said to her, “what is so strange? This is normal, my 12 year-old daughter was taken.” The mother had gone to the wrong place for advice, along the way she unburdened herself with her friend, “If he was only a hard-working man, but he is a bum!”
Elie Wiesel, Nobel Prize winner and holocaust survivor, said once, “The opposite of love is not hate but indifference.” In the story the pastor shows complete indifference to the fact that girls who are minors are “taken” by their (future) husbands, even taking agency (decision) away from the women. It is an indifference shared by most of the adults of the rural area, school teachers, State officials, and members of organizations. The mother herself in the story, even though concerned about her daughter, resigns herself to this rule: “If only he was a hard-working man” – a phrase that is like “Love Valeriana”, hoping that in a plate of rice you find some chicken meat, that the man ends up being “hard-working” even though he is covered with a lot of “rice” (abuse and unfaithfulness). How did this social fact of “taking her” became normalized and how can rural societies awaken and cultivate love?
1. Normalizing “taking her”
While in European societies forming couples is delayed to the age of 30, in rural areas of Central America it seems to move up to less than 16 years of age. Most girls between 12 and 16 are “taken” by their (future) husbands who are older than 18, or “they go” with them one night when dogs bark at the “thief” and the men grieve their past lovers. From that moment they truncate their adolescence (12 to 18 years of age), do not experience their youth (14 to 26) and move directly to being mothers; they become child mothers.
Here they move in together between 12 and 16 years of age. A little while ago a 12 year-old girl moved in with a 19 year old. Her parents went to take her away and after a few days the girl went back to him. Another 13 year-old was taken, and returned in two weeks with a 20 year old man. They are at the age of madness. When people find out they say, “That poor Mom, she took such great care of her, and it did not matter!” All this becomes normal. In my time we moved in at 16 and 18, now they do it even younger. (Luvian Rivas, community of Villanueva, El Jícaro).
This story is common in almost any rural community. What has happened for these practices to become normal? Several reasons are heard in the recesses of rural communities.
Fathers and Mothers do not let their daughters leave the home nor let them have friends, which is why girls feel obligated to flirt in secret or by chat.
In churches they preach that contraceptive measures are sinful, and that a girl that has one and then another boyfriend is shallow, in contrast if a boy has only one girlfriend they say he is not much of a man.
Girls believe they will be free by getting out of the house.
There is social pressure that a girl is not single when she reaches 18, “the train is going to leave you behind,” “an old hen is hard to cook”.
Girls dress as little women, with short skirts, thus boys try to seduce them. It is when down below heats up what is above does not think…”when they take to the alley no one stops them.”
These responses are like leaves on trees. What sustains them? In the figure we list the beliefs that move human minds in a hostile way for adolescent girls.
Adolescent girls are bullied: “It is out of fashion for a girl to be a virgin”, adolescent boys and girls see being a virgin as “something of the past”. What does this mean? In a context of low population density and stable communities, with little migration or immigration, the community value of “getting to marriage as a virgin”, in spite of expressing inequality between women and men, avoids early pregnancies and pushes couples to be of age. The context of the last 30 years is different, there are very unstable communities and also communities that are captives of religious conservatism that see using contraception as “sin”; let us read again “the advice” of the pastor in the story “indifference”, advice that is not based on the Bible but on an informal rule of patriarchy. This change in context left the value of “being or not being a virgin” hanging, without getting pregnant nor moving in together, which is why a young girl who gets pregnant without wanting to, sees herself forced to move in together (or marry) at whatever age she is, “so that the man vindicates me and does not leave me as a damaged woman.” A tacit rule is “you get pregnant, and you move in together.”
Mothers and Fathers treat their daughters and their sons differently. It is rare for a boy 16 years old or younger to move in together or marry. His Mother and Father would immediately advise him, ”Do not take on a woman, do not take on responsibility by bringing in a woman; if you take on a woman you are going to have to work harder.” While they advise their daughter differently, “you are going to get yourself pregnant,” they assume that any “outing” is already sex; they do not tell her, “be careful, I love you, I don´t want anything bad for you”; nor do they tell her how to be careful, “sex without pregnancy.” Why the difference? The mentality of the Mother and the Father is that the daughter is an expense for the family and that if she goes (or “is taken”) it is “one less mouth to feed”; in other words, indirectly but effectively they are expelling (“handing over”) their daughter. An unspoken rule in families is that “the son brings in a woman and the daughter leaves the home.”
In many communities there is only education available up to the 6th grade. Most Mothers and Fathers do not insist that their daughters continue studying. “What for, if she is going to leave me” – they justify it. In the 6th grade adolescents are 12 years old, which is why the phrase insinuates “that she should go.” If the daughter was finishing her secondary at 17 or 18 years of age, being close to studying in the university, that same phrase would be interpreted differently, like having few resources.
The family rule that does the most damage to daughters is that they are born without the right to the inheritance of land. This rule corresponds to the previously expressed idea, that daughters are an expense and a family “burden.”
All these rules are maintained by authoritarian institutions of the family, church and State. They are like a tsunami which it is difficult for the daughters to be able to escape; “tsunami” is a wave of such dimensions that it wipes away everything in its path, I am using it in its figurative sense. “You were born to tend the fire”. “You are a burden for the family”, “you are an additional mouth”,”you will not have an inheritance”, “it is sin to have sex without giving birth”, “you are not going to study because you are going to leave”, “we do not love you like we love your brother”, “leave the home…” It is difficult for anyone to be able to resist that tsunami of attitudes and actions. This is how one moves from the control of the father to the control of the husband, always under the institution of the family, legitimized by the conservative church: “Obey your husband, fast to find forgiveness”; in other words, even being dragged along by the “social tsunami”, she continues appearing to be “guilty”. And this under the indifference of society – brothers, adult people, organizations and institutions.
These unequal and authoritarian realities have been normalized by asymmetric power structures. In the religious sphere they conceal it manipulating the Bible, that “the male is the head of the household, said the Lord”; but Jesus did not say that, rather Jesus directly attacked that patriarchal and authoritarian family (see Matt 12: 46-50). In the family sphere, saying “she was taken” makes the family appear to be a victim, as the “owner” of the daughter where she is a “takeable” object, which is “superfluous” and that her destiny is to be maintained (and controlled) by a man. Behind all of this is patriarchal capitalism that pushes the family toward monocropping, dividing up their land and expelling their daughters to give birth at an early age to cheap labor.
In other words, Mom and Dad, along with religious, are subjected to the institution of patriarchal capitalism. In this system that “takes” the girl or adolescent, because they see her as a thing, as social kindling, as a “uterus” for birthing cheap labor. This practice, even when the girl or adolescent says that she is leaving from her own will, is against her will; it is the abuse of that system that makes her repeat that “they took her with her willingness”. Or, are there people in their right mind that want to be “taken” so as to not experience their youth, to go from girls to mothers and to eventually becoming “single mothers”?
2. Facing the challenge of changing things
Awakening and cultivating love. How? In the previous section we deconstructed “what is normal” and we showed that these realities are connected and maintained by different institutions which we are a part of. That is a path for awakening.
Later rural societies should trace out goals for cultivating change. A community can propose that their daughters and sons move in together or marry after the age of 18[2]. This would allow them
Degrees of love
In an interview, Alejandro Jodorowsky, artist and writer, explains the degrees of love.
– Physical love is eating and working together; “I need your company”
– Sexual love is passionate, once there is pleasure there is discussion
– Emotional love is that we are interested in loving one another, “I want you to love me”
– Intellectual love continues to experience company and sexuality
– Conscious love is uniting consciousness (souls), “I want to love you”, seeing that the other person grows, progresses
– Divine love is union in interior strength, supporting one another, we do not want anything for ourselves that is not for others
to experience their adolescence and begin their young adulthood, a phase in which they find their love, their soul in another person, that conscious and divine love that Jodorowsky describes (see sidebar) in which love is wanting the other person to progress along their own path. Young people will have more time to cultivate their capacity to discern what they want to be, and not want society wants them to be. With this goal the risk will be reduced that their daughters and sons, granddaughters and grandsons grow up as orphans, and the probability will increase that the new couple would reproduce awareness like their memory and identity, instead of subjecting themselves to the belief that “children are provided by God”.
This perspective could be possible if the churches followed Jesus, if in the schools the teachers gave sex education classes based on science and not on religious prejudices, if the State penalized couples formed with minors, and if Dad and Mom understood that their love for their children should not discriminate against their daughters.
How can we achieve that goal? Let us begin at home. A family that loves equally their sons and daughters, can instill in them the idea that they can fall in love responsibly (without getting pregnant) and that they have equal rights to family inheritance and studies without regard to sex, which is why there is no reason for “leaving” the home nor “taking” anyone before 18 years of age. The family can even be more specific with their daughter: “I will leave you land when you are of age, and if you want you can work 1 mz of land already;” “study every day and as much as you can, we will do all we can to support you and your brother.”
This practice of the family can be supported by associative organizations and cooperatives that, like the wind, can remove the rotten leaves of harmful beliefs. Member families who are able to keep their daughters from “leaving” before the age of 18 can be supported by the cooperative with scholarships so that the young woman can study in the university. Daughters of members between 12 and 16 years of age can also be provided a calf or a pig so that they learn to save and invest.[3]. These practices would help increase the self-esteem of the daughters and sons and would contribute to the fact that schools and churches would appraise their attitudes and recognize that adolescent girls have the right to love and to experiencing their youth. The phrases most heard would be “I love you daughter, the same as your brother”, “we will give you an equal inheritance”, “study daughter and son, we will help you all we can”, “my daughter and son are my treasure and never a burden”.
3. By way of conclusion
At the beginning of this article, we asked ourselves how “being taken” got normalized and how rural societies can open up to love. We identified several beliefs that sustain these adversities against daughters. Sex as a sin, men as those who maintain women, daughters as an expense, daughters without the right to either study or inheritance. All that is like a tsunami: “daughter, leave home.”
Part of awakening is becoming aware of these realities. With this starting point, communities can propose removing the indifference cemented into our societies, and work so that no one forms a couple before the age of 18.
To achieve this goal two things must happen. One, that families assure their daughters and sons their equal rights in terms of the inheritance of land and ability to study, precisely as the fruit of their love for them. Two, that cooperatives and associations support families so they do not de-peasantize themselves, teach the daughters of members to save and invest at an early age and provide them scholarships for university studies.
Correspondingly, a community with girls who reach the age of 18 without forming couples or marrying could be an indicator that we are facing a living community where indifference is being eroded, there are no child mothers and that it is a society that also cultivates love.
[1] René has a PhD in Development Studies, an associate researcher of IOB-Antwerp University, member of COSERPROSS and a collaborator of the Winds of Peace Foundation. rmvidaurre@gmail.com
[2] It is interesting to observe in the culture of the Caribbean Coast, whose culture is summarized in the Palo de Mayo dance, that they do not allow girls to enter to see what the women are doing (dance around the May Pole). That dance expresses the fertility of nature and human fertility, precisely in the month of May when the rains begin. Figuratively it refers to the mayaya god. “Mayaya lost the key”; without the key the woman and man cannot enter their home and therefore cannot procreate. In other words, having babies is for adults. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aM6HXl8ygBA
[3] The Community Social Enterprises (CSE) in San Juan del Río Coco (Nicaragua), for example, provide the value of 50% of one share (C$1000) to a daughter or granddaughter of a member of the CSE, if the members puts up the other 50% of the value of 1 share. This fund comes with the contribution of the people who have more than 100 shares in the CSEs. This shows that when there is a will, there is a way.
-How are we doing? Asked the caterpillar of the spider
-Walking, and you?
-Walking. I want to tell you about a dream I had, from the mountaintop I saw the beauty of the valley. I am going up there, would you come with me?
-Hahaha., the spider laughed, for you a rock is a mountain and a pool of water the ocean! Hahaha…the same thing happened with every animal that she met on the path, all made fun of her.
The caterpillar continued. And continued in the midst of suffocating heat and ridicule. Within days the caterpillar died. The spider, grasshopper, beetle, and frog witnessed her body, it was a symbol of ambitious stubborn people and a warning for audacious beings. But then they saw that from the remains of the caterpillar emerged a beautiful butterfly that flew to the top of that mountain.
.
After an exceptional 2020 thinking optimistically about 2021 and beyond requires a lot of human energy – stubbornness and audacity. It is like filling ourselves with the determination of that “caterpillar” to see the “mountaintop”, even more than that, it is dreaming of “seeing the beauty of the valley from the mountaintop” – societies that organize and revive communities.
We the members of grassroots organizations and the people who accompany them at the start of the year review data and make plans. This start of 2021 is not like any other. It is really the year destined to make a difference. For everything that we have experienced in 2020: COVID 19. And because also in Central America Hurricanes ETA and IOTA blew away from us more than “leaves.”
I hope that we are like the “caterpillar”, that we have that fire inside so that, regardless of the “suffocating heat” or the ridicule of those who watch us, we pursue our dreams and are capable of making wings sprout on us through organizations for following those dreams. We have the biggest challenge of our lives: to dream (have vision) of seeing from “the mountaintop”, and then to have to transform ourselves from “caterpillars” (let “die” what has to die) to “butterflies” (give life to what should live), which in our case would be organizations reinvented for pursuing those visions.
That is why we write these pages. In what follows we start with what is global, showing what is predicted for Latin America in terms of the economy. Then we list the risks and prospects. Then we show some interesting things that have been done in 2020. And finally, we chart a path for grassroots organizations and their allies to use to dream about their “valleys” and reach “the mountaintop” to be able to see their “valleys”.
1. Latin America and the Caribbean
There is a certain respite in the world after Trumpism lost the election in the United States. This respite is charged with hope with the vaccine against COVID 19 that, in spite of more than 1.5 million deaths, is now getting to some countries.
Table. Latin America and the Caribbean: 2020- 2021 Growth Projections
Latin America and the Caribbean
GDP Growth
2020
2021
Latin America and the Caribbean
-7.7
3.7
Argentina
-10.5
4.9
Bolivia
-8
5.1
Brazil
-5.3
3.2
Chile
-6
5
Colombia
-7
5
Ecuador
-9
1
Paraguay
-1.6
3.5
Perú
-12.9
9
Venezuela
-30
-7
South America
-7.3
3.7
Costa Rica
-4.8
3
Cuba
-8.5
3
El Salvador
-8.6
3.5
Guatemala
-2.5
3.5
Haiti
-3
2
Honduras
-8
4.5
México
-9
3.8
Nicaragua
-4
1.3
Panamá
-4
5.5
Dominican Republic
-5.5
5
Central America and Mexico
-8.5
3.8
Central America
-6.5
3.8
Latin America
-7.7
3.7
The Caribbean
-7.9
4.2
Source: ECLACL, Preliminary Overview of the Economies of Latin America and the Caribbean 2020. Note: Central America includes Cuba, Haití and the Dominican Republic
With this hope let us look at the Table for economic growth done by ECLAC. This table provides us with a first point. The entire region of Latin America and the Caribbean in 2020 had a negative growth rate of -7.7, and in 2021 they estimate that they will grow by 3.7%, at least according to the assumptions of stability that they predict for 2021 – if the realities end up differently, these estimates could improve or worsen. Central America will grow 3.8% in 2021, if there are no big surprises. The data for Central America are in the darker colors[2].
Covid-19 revealed structural problems that our countries were already experiencing prior to this:
Inequality
Poverty
Low productivity, even worse under the system of monocropping and environmental degradation
High levels of labor informality or underemployment
Low social protections. Privatization of health care left the world on its knees in the face of the virus.
Let us also take note of what is good, the virus accelerated digital, robotic transformations and alternative energy. And gave free rein to thinking about the meaning of life implied by the uncertainty and “normality”.
2. Risks and prospects for 2021
Risks:
Uncertainty in the evolution of the pandemic. The vaccine is a hope. Even though new outbreaks persist, and the virus can evolve and modify its strain.
What will happen if monetary and fiscal stimuli which have been applied in most countries are lifted too early.
Financing is important, but if the pandemic is not controlled, it can continued being held back.
It is estimated that the prices of basic products will increase. That could be, but we also know that it will be difficult for the mediation chain to allow more to trickle down to producer families, which will also impact consumers.
Possible increase in social and geopolitical tensions. The unemployment, poverty and inequality can make the “boiling pot blow its top”, the latent social tensions could intensify.
For Central America, an additional factor was the impact of Hurricanes ETA and IOTA – impact on production, nature and the impoverishment of people[3]. In countries like Nicaragua, an additional element is that 2021 is an electoral year.
The biggest risk is only focusing on the economics and the short term: 2021.
Prospects:
There will be economic growth, even with setbacks, economic improvement is at the gates, at least compared with 2020. But we already know that growing without equity is damaging for the world.
The international agenda for climate change will be reinforced, because we realize that greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 fell by 7%, which is a “beneficial effect” of COVID 19, while putting the brakes on the type of damaging economics that have prevailed in the planet; now we realize that there is a direct relationship between human actions and the climate.
We also have observed that government can spend a lot in the face of emergencies like COVID 19, which is why with friendly but real pressure, governments can invest in clean energy technologies, sustainable agriculture, preventive health…
World awareness about the fact that social investment in health should be free from the interests of markets (elites), and that the State can govern it as a public good.
The reference about what is a good government was shaken in 2020 with COVID 19. It was believed that effective governments for resolving adversities like pandemics were from countries with larger incomes and apparently more democratic, led by the United States and England[4], but it ends up that countries like Senegal, Sri Lanka and Vietnam, with much lower GHSI rankings, had better results. How? They prepared themselves well to face the virus as soon as the WHO put out the worldwide alert, they set forth a strategy uniting their citizenry, carried out a massive public communication campaign and worked with networks of community organizations (see Woods, 2021). Organization means a lot!
Human awareness on the fragility of humanity and the planet, particularly if we continue working under the idea of “only me” and “leave it to me”, coordinating collective actions can result in us leaving this world better than when we found it when we were born.
The agricultural sector in the region has cushioned the impact of the negative economic growth and will continue being an important element for any growth with equity.
Looking at 2020 in the rearview mirror, and recovering our gaze on 2021 and beyond, we recall the German poet and playwright, Bertolt Brecht, who said: “Because things are the way they are, things will not stay they way they are”. Under this hope, on a general level we should work to:
Reactivate strategic sectors in each country taking into account investment in entrepreneurial ventures, social equity and environmental sustainability.
Extend basic income to people in poverty but “teaching them to fish”, to be self-sustaining
Finance small enterprise and the agricultural sector – not monocropping; not purchasing liabilities; finance the means that generate financial returns
Universalize the social protection system, particularly health care with conventional medicine and natural medicine
Work on these and other points in a global alliance, along with governments, international aid agencies and businesses, and above all with community or grassroots organizations, like in those 3 countries that we just mentioned.
3. Coordinations that generate hope
COVID-19 was produced by human action, its effects are regrettable because of the lives lost, but it also helps us realize that human actions can overcome COVID-19 (see: Mendoza, 2020b[5]). Human actions had to do with Hurricanes ETA and IOTA, like the fact that their impacts either mitigate or intensify it. (see: Mendoza, 2020a).
The experience of Senegal, Sri Lanka and Vietnam show us the good that we people have, regardless of our financial resources. They show us what we are capable of through organizing and connecting with several actors to deal with serious adversities.
There were also coordinated actions among international and local organizations that have mitigated the effects of COVID-19. We mention three:
Fair trade organizations from Germany (WeltPartner and El Puente), supervised by the German Aid Agency (GIZ), and partner cooperatives and associations of the south with whom they sell products like coffee, worked on joint initiatives to counteract COVID-19 in the short and medium term[6].
Aid agencies linked to European Churches, like Cafod, Broederlijk Delen, Trocaire and Misereor, as well as agencies from the United States like EcoViva, along with their partners in countries in the south, reacted quickly to help the families with whom they tend to work
In the case of Nicaragua, aid agencies (Common Fund) from European countries and civil society organizations (NGOs, associations and cooperatives) joined forces so that populations could deal with COVID-19.
Likewise, there are community organizations that have responded to their communities.
Community stores in the region held health campaigns to prevent COVID-19, in some cases they promoted gardens with plants for family consumption and medicinal plants to strengthen their “defenses” (immunological system).
Cooperatives and their networks helped families affected by COVID-19 and the people affected by the hurricanes to receive proper attention in hospitals and to recover their crops. “42 of us planted 3 mzs of beans for our brother who is in the hospital,” said a leader of a community in Waslala (Nicaragua).
Cooperatives and community stores that respond to their communities collected beans to help their communities and are coordinating to grow beans free from glyphosate. Associations that respond to the communities where their grassroots members are from in order to improve their forms of organization and their information systems.
These experiences illustrate different degrees of coordination, above all they show us that we can resist large adversities and coordinate collective actions within a global and local framework. They provide testimony about what is possible to do within a framework of global and local coalitions. Unfortunately, they are not well known nor studied, but they exist and are praiseworthy.
4. What are we cooperatives, associations, stores and associative enterprises doing?
Our societies harbor the hope for good changes. That begins with grassroots organizations – cooperatives, associations, consumer stores, associative enterprises and community organizations, along with them are global organizations like fair trade organizations, cooperatives from other countries, businesses, B-corporations, Universities… How can we start off on a new path?
A good number of rural organizations and international organizations have experiences for analyzing when collective actions function and when they do not, when coordination among different organizations work and when it does not, when rules and value work and when they do not. Reassessing this diversity of knowledge is a key point for rethinking our actions in light of 2021 and beyond. This rethinking should include:
Having a good strategy with a good vision around which all the associated people can unite, to do so it is important to shake off the poverty mentality that “we can´t because we don´tt have any money”, and it is important to analyze the risks.
Having mental openness to what is different in order to build and deepen good alliances with communities
Designing social investment with a multiplier effect and which is sustainable, something which neither private enterprise nor the state invest in nor will invest, something innovative.
Being coherent with the mitigation of climate change, let us not leave the planet off worse than when we found it on our birth; each action of organizations should take into account the environmental component, which will help prevent viruses and hurricanes.
Being coherent with social equity: if our children and neighbors are going to other countries to harvest coffee, when there is coffee on our farms and the need for pickers, it is clear that we are not paying coffee pickers well, and we have low productivity; if our organizations have on average 20% female membership, it is clear that our organizations are not responding to the diversity of economic areas and that they are committed only to the trap of “raw materials” (without processing what we produce). Monocropping excludes women or, they wisely resist submitting themselves to monocropping.
We should look to different markets: not just the international market, not just to cities, but also to the municipal market and to our own communities. We should consume the best of what we produce, let us increase the variety of foods on our plates. We should look for ways to produce without glyphosate, store products, process them, cultivate medicinal plants. We should realize that having children “all over the place” dehumanizes us…
Being democratic – democratizing information, positions of responsibility and relationships. The most unhappy communities and organizations are the ones that need eternal managers and presidents. Rural organizations and their allies should be lights of democracy.
Having these elements, or precisely to spell out these elements, organizations should:
Talk with member families under the idea that each person has multiple histories–it is not just ONE crop, it is not just THE farm, it is not just BUYING one product or providing JUST credit. It is so many things, many things…
Reflecting in open assemblies to listen to one another about our first story, the second, the third…
Analyzing what we hear and what we see, a lot of what we hear are ideas from elites which they have us reproduce (“we always need a patron”, “God made me poor”, “the cooperative is to give myself a loan”, “nothing can be done without money”), which is why we need to listen to the “current under the waves” (“help yourself and I will help you”, venture initiatives, innovations).
Weaving a new path.
2021 is a year of opportunities to do something different. We can, like the caterpillar, transform ourselves and see from the mountaintop. What are we going to see? Societies with social and environmental equity, communities lighting up the world.
[1] This is an open text. You can correct it, expand on it, and use it in accordance with your realities and needs. If you need the author to help you to “put words to your dreams (visions) and to accompany you in your transformation from “caterpillar” to “butterfly”, we will be ready to support you. rmvidaurre@gmail.com cell: +505-85100007
[2] If you want to read a little more about each country, ECLAC does summaries based on the official data of each country in Spanish.
[4] Wood (2021, “The brutal lessons of governance of 2020”) tells us that just before COVID-19 a coalition of foundations published the Global Health Security Index (GHSI); there they rated the capacity of countries to prevent, detect and report an infection, and quickly respond to disease outbreaks”. And obviously the countries with higher incomes appeared as the most capable, the United States and England were first. One year after that ranking, Haider et al (September 2020, “The Global Health Security Index and Joint External Evaluation score for health preparedness are not correlated with countries’ COVID-19 detection response time and mortality outcome”, following the hypothesis of the GHSI (and the Joint External Evaluation JEE), that higher income countries would more quickly detect the virus and would experience less mortality, the study found that there is no correlation between them: “the 10 countries most affected by COVID-19 in terms of deaths per million inhabitants were among the first 20 countries in terms of their general results in the GHSI”.
[5] R. Mendoza, 2020b, “A Coronavirus Firewall”, in Revista Envio, No 466. In: https://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/5776
[6] This shows us that in the global context, almost irrespective of states, there are commercial transactions around products like coffee and cacao which include international buyers, certifiers, roasters, distributors, cooperatives and associations, that extend from Europe and the United States to communities in the countries of the south. Many of these networks are stable coalitions with a long history.
The nails creaked and the rooves of the homes thundered
The wind howled like lightening trapped among the trees
Rivers overflowed and washed away even the gasps of the most incredulous
A cry emerged from the mouth of the soil and the impoverished people
It is a prolonged cry of pain and hope.
Hurricanes ETA and IOTA arrived in Central America just a few days apart, one behind the other. 2020 set a record of 30 tropical storms, 12 of them hurricanes. In this article we sketch the effects of the hurricanes, their causes, we argue in favor of aid that helps and we look for opportunity in the midst of adversity.
1. Impact of hurricanes
They have two sides. In their passing they destroy homes and causes landslides, while at the same time they revive dozens of water sources. They pulverize the work of an entire life of many families, while at the same time they are a window for designing another path. They topple bridges clogged with garbage and at the same time clean rivers and creeks. They impose desolate areas for some days, areas that in a few days revive like never before. They fell trees and plantains in farms and forests, while new plants and young trees break through. They beat the foundations of families and religious fanaticism that hope that some supernatural being might protect them, while at the same time awaken interest in collective actions – people cleaning bridges in the midst of the rainfall to keep the river from destroying them, people helping their neighbor so their roof does not sprout wings, institutions supporting the citizenry to get to safety, peasants with picks in hand going to the cry of the Peñas Blancas Cliffs, El Puyú mountain, and people smothered by the landslide in the community of San Martin and Mulukukú (Nicaragua).
2. Causes
The impact of hurricanes leaves us stunned, moments in which we reflect and understand that hurricanes have natural and human causes. Hurricanes are formed in hot seasons between June and November in template ocean waters like the Atlantic Ocean; when the temperature reaches 270 Centigrade the warm waters evaporate, that heat gets transferred to the air, with that tons of water rise to the atmosphere each hour and generate an immense amount of energy; in the altitude that vapor is condensed into clouds and releases its heat, raising the temperature of the air around it several degrees; as that air is heated more vapor is condensed producing winds that raise the clouds up to 15 kilometers high where, due to the rotation of the earth, they form circles, giving birth to a hurricane. Note the increase in the temperature is the basis for hurricanes, that warming is produced by human actions, “by the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere, a product of human activities such as the use of carbon, oil and gas, and the felling and burning of forests.”
Let us give some examples from Central America. Monocropping and extensive ranching deforest, contribute to global warming and reinforce the effects of hurricanes, the soil hardens because of the lack of trees, they keep water from entering the soil, make the water run above ground and add to the creeks and rivers; this monocropping system is promoted by commercial enterprises of agrochemicals, financial institutions, international buyers and certifiers, and by a growing number of peasant families who were expelled by the capital of the valleys to the mountains in the last 150 years. Religious beliefs turn impoverished people into beings dependent on a God who writes their destiny, make them pray or worship without actions, deeds that paralyze people who could organize themselves better and be preventive if they depended on themselves and their collective capacities. There are cooperatives and churches that in the face of hurricanes do not even call on their members to mobilize to benefit their communities. The intellectual class, people with university studies, coopted from the 1990s by the soft side and harsh side of capitalism, work for donors and capital, and not for the communities, with which hurricanes are not explained but seen as something natural and external, like a “punishment” and that some “god will stop.” It is not a matter of hiding “this country of my soul so that no one else might beat it”, it is that we are part of the destruction and the construction of that “my soul.”
3. The aid that does not help
This inaction and this hijacked thinking reinforces the negative effects of hurricanes and even makes the aid that arrives not be beneficial. If they bring in imported products to a community, let´s say rice or powdered milk, the small producers will not be able to sell their beans nor the milk from their cows, the small stores already affected by the hurricanes will lose their customers, which could make the community lose their storefront. If they bring in potato seed so that they leave behind their native seed and become dependent on imported seed, is that also aid? We say potato seed, but the same is true for the marsellesa variety of coffee, vegetables or other products.
It is known that aid is channeled under the logic of “trickle down”, most is left in the higher parts and less gets down to the lower parts, while hierarchical structures and social asymmetries intensify. Those who donate and those who mediate donations, are they aware of the consequences of their actions, eroding community efforts?
4. The aid that does help
One of the aids that would make a difference in favor of rural populations is quit hurting them and undertaking more humanizing policies and actions. Financial and commercial institutions should change their policies: providing loans with interest rates under 10%, no longer for monocropping systems nor for extensive ranching, but for diversified systems. Not importing more agrochemicals like glyphosate, a carcinogen prohibited in countries in Europe and some states in the United States, but instead promoting sustainable agriculture. International enterprises that buy peasant products should buy from grassroots organizations that are democratic, transparent and that distribute their surplus, because buying from them without ensuring that they comply with these principles is to reinforce hurricanes. Intellectuals should recover their autonomy and turn their focus on peasant families, producing ideas and innovations along with them. Universities should quit only teaching the monocropping system and the neoliberal logic that is ruining our planet, and allow peasant and indigenous rationalities, like sustainable agriculture and small enterprises, to enter the classroom, and that fields become “open classrooms”. Grassroots organizations can organize the sale of beans to prevent scarcity in these crucial months, they can promote high quality varieties to replace the coffee and cacao plants damaged by the hurricane, and they can study the “new” soil and reorganize their farms; in this the global chain of actors allied with the cooperatives can support them with innovative financial modalities that strengthen community efforts. This aid can help the communities that are organized to have economic autonomy and self-determination.
5. Moment for rethinking our ideas and actions
There will continue to be hurricanes. They serve to revitalize nature, cool the planet and clean contaminated air. They can also be an opportunity for us to rethink our actions.
Their effects can be more benevolent under the following conditions. If in agrarian landscapes diversified and ecological systems prevail. If the logic of life prevails over the logic of money. If grassroots organizations energize communities with more gardens, more diversified systems, with their social fund invested in actions that no one else invests in, with community stores that not just bring in products from outside but also channel products from within and between communities… If schools and churches, far from indoctrinating, teach their members to think. If enterprises and international organizations look not just at products but also the people who produce them and the social networks that make it possible for them to emerge…
If we people understand that hurricanes are caused by natural and social causes, and that their effects can be more or less tragic depending on our actions, maybe we could make, through better thought-out actions and through grassroots organizations (cooperatives, community stores, associations) there be less hurricanes, and when they do exist their effects be more benevolent. If this happens, we could make their cry be more of “hope” than of “pain.” Before then, are we listening to that cry?
Article dedicated to Fr. Jack Moynihan and Sr. Maria Alicia McCabe[2]
Visit
-Why are you coming to visit us? María Jesús asked, the grandmother of the community. Not even the priests visit us now–she took charge of the conversation.
-The world is getting more difficult. Without us, it will be difficult for you to improve; and without you, we don´t even know where we are going- I responded.
-Is that right? Whispered the grandmother, inviting me to coffee.
Thirty years ago in most of Central America corn and beans were planted without using glyphosate nor gramoxone; now gramoxone is used even for harvesting beans, in part to keep the rain from making the beans “sprout”. Not to mention vegetables, coffee and cacao. Much less sugar cane, peanuts or sesame. Probably beef and pork meat is more organic than carrots or beans. Where did this come from? The costs of production of a peasant family have increased drastically, but not the prices they are paid for their products; this makes desperation spread, tension and violence intensify, biodiversity erode, and climate variability proliferate.
There are many explanations for these realities. In this article I focus on intellectuals, who dedicate themselves to meditating and studying the realities, preparing projects and/or policies, teaching or preaching; they are writers, scientists, artists, scholars; they are “people of culture” who move in different circles from most people on our planet, a separation which at times is concealed by words, an abysmal separation. We use the word “apartheid” to denote this invidious separation. By way of hypothesis we say that the separation between intellectuals and the communities where most people live has impaired humanity for at least five centuries, when friars (intellectuals), soldiers, tax collectors and traders burst upon these lands. How can they work together and write a new history? I reflect on this question from the heterogeneity of the rural world.
That wall of intellectual apartheid
We read articles in newspapers and magazines about political issues where generally the rural reality or life in neighborhoods do not appear, and if they do, they are reduced to topics of violence where their structural causes are ignored. There are NGOs with rural agendas whose intellectuals respond to the market expressed in donors or business associations, who sporadically show up in rural communities to do surveys or interviews, they show up once and never return. These people are governed by the market mentality which deforms intellectuals themselves into field technicians, who go out with donations and prescriptions in hand, enlarge their wall to not listen to the people, and allow arrogance and discrimination guide them along their path. In fact, in the last 20-30 years, there are practically no intellectuals who write about the rural realities of Central America in a systematic way.
At the same time there are young rural women and men who have studied different majors. Finishing their studies, their dream does not tend to be to work with rural populations. They work for companies, the government, donors, or they migrate to other countries to work in what they can. If they stay, they go back to agriculture or to being housewives, leaving aside their intellectual role that could give them the possibility of writing peasant and indigenous histories in plural, from their perspectives, and tracing out new futures.
What happened to us? The Fordist and Taylorist colonial mentality that separates experts from workers has nested in our minds, regardless of the political ideology that we might exude. This mental model makes one believe that there is nothing to be learned from rural communities, like some two thousand years ago: “Nazareth! –exclaimed Nathanael. Can anything good come from Nazareth?” (Jn 1:46). This mental model makes intellectuals believe that they are superior: “I am an accountant”, “I am an engineer”, “I am a professor”, “I am a pastor, anointed by God”, “I am a doctor” or “I am an economist”. This intellectual arrogance means that we do not mingle with peasant or indigenous people, that that hidden or submerged population lives in the “middle ages” – a Eurocentric reading, as if Latin America had an “ancient age”, “middle age” and “modern age” like Europe.
This mentality adds cement to the millennial wall of intellectual apartheid of a “Latin America” where indigenous and peasant people are absent. Peasant and indigenous people are moving on one rail, and intellectuals on another, going in different directions.
I have learned a lesson working for decades with rural populations. Alone, it will be difficult for peasant and indigenous peoples to innovate with their economies and societies; alone, intellectuals will continue exuding Eurocentrism and allowing the spirit of Nathanael to control them.
Experiences that seem to knock this wall down
Fortunately, there are experiences in which that wall is knocked down, even though just a part of it, and even though just for a time. The most well-known came in the 1960s and 1970s when several lines of thinking coincided. The opening of the Catholic Church with the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), Medellin (1968) and Puebla (1979), a church open to the poor; the momentum of the Cuban revolution (1959); popular education under the influence of Pablo Freire; and the dependency theory of Singer and Prebisch. It was a period in which public universities were spaces of debate, where majors in sociology, philosophy and political science prevailed.
Under this framework, university students and professors, priests, sisters and politicians, went into communities and neighborhoods accompanying indigenous, peasant and impoverished people from urban neighborhoods. Churches, classrooms, auditoriums and offices broke down their walls and let their intellectuals leave. In Central America the experience of the community of Solentiname (Nicaragua) stands out with Ernesto Cardenal, where they produced the Gospel of Solentiname; the experience of the community of Aguilares (El Salvador), the experience of hundreds of Base Christian Communities. One outstanding regional experience is that of the Radiophonic Schools, where intellectuals (religious and lay) promoted literacy, health care and agriculture, a framework in which many people organized into cooperatives and peasant stores, which – though very much in a diminished form – still exist today. Those were good seeds!
It is a period in which part of that wall was knocked down. The mentality was that God and freedom were in the impoverished people who seek justice, that people can organize with their own resources, that honesty and solidarity are values that are also found in humble people. To a large extent, with this process all the military dictatorships were brought down, and democracy was installed throughout Latin America.
But this harmful wall was repaired and enlarged after the years of the 1980s. The institutional church closed itself back up in church buildings and persecuted those religious who refused to leave the communities that were building the Reign of God on earth. Banking style education returned to the classrooms. Political revolutions and democracies took over the military bases and offices, feeling at home under hierarchical and authoritarian structures. Studies in business administration, accounting and law led public and private universities with the dream of making money. Teachings and training put learning to one side. The spirit of Nathanael returned to the minds of intellectuals, separating them from people with calloused hands who paid for the studies of a good part of those intellectuals. This is the reality that made María ask Jesús, “Why are you coming to visit us?”
Breaking the wall and combining ideas and efforts
Visiting people like María Jesús, we jump over that wall of apartheid – we just “jump”- and only “for a time.” Here we list four ways of knocking the wall down, which, like a constellation of stars could show us one of the paths: getting involved in the real lives of the majorities, experiencing changes, co-investing in initiatives and recognizing several languages.
Intellectuals need to get involved in the real lives of the majorities, combine being in churches, classrooms, auditoriums, offices and conference rooms, with living in rural communities, organizing however they may be, experiencing what it means to generate collective actions beyond one´s own family, and outside of their own “synagogue” (church, office…. ). If it is a matter of improving agriculture and the lives of human and natural communities, food not being poisoned, it is unacceptable that the rural population walk along the rail that the market pulls them on, and that intellectuals walk along another rail, also pulled by the market. Separated but kneeling before the market!
The topic of beans involves technology, soils, climate, property, institutions like sharecropping, sharing labor, and land rental, it is intermediation and crop lien lending, it is weighing and quality, it is official data and real data, it is new bean soup and refried beans; all of this varies from year to year. The same with coffee, cacao, corn, squash or lemongrass, gardens, cornfields and farms. It is ethically and scientifically questionable to make proposals without being involved in that world, without studying them and studying ourselves to free us from the control of the market over our minds. We need to re-understand commercial relationships, not as commodities subjected to the totalitarianism of the market, but as the means for “good living”, as they say in the Andean countries, or the “I am because you are”, as one of the inspiring perspectives from Africa expresses it.
The topic of violence, specifically violence against women, is an issue of millennial social and religious rules, laws, power relationships, production systems that expelled women from agriculture and its processing, it is family and structures embedded in religious, political and economic institutions, it is the law of the jungle and human dispositions. It is not possible to reduce and terminate that violence if we do not identify its causes and do not accompany women in their non-violent paths in their own communities.
On the topic of rural organizations, it is cooperation in the midst of conflict, democracy in authoritarian societies, distribution of profits within a context of “trickle-down economics”, it is transparency in the midst of secretive mafias, it is accounting for peasant stores and cooperatives when universities are teaching accounting for companies and corporations…One can advise organizations only if they teach us how to advise them. What is learned in universities is how to subject rural organizations to the market, not how people can cooperate and overcome problems that individually they cannot resolve.
All this shows us that intellectuals should visit the most marginalized and “discarded” people to understand their virtues, capacities and human spirit, help to build favorable conditions (collective actions, networks) so that people connect to one another and others. All this requires time and dedication, like all good things, and requires that peasants and intellectuals conceptualize their processes in order to take new steps.
Intellectuals need to experience the changes along with rural people. An idea that is tested, adapted, adjusted, redone, finds legitimacy, motivates, is corrected and polished, is an idea that takes on life, that changes even the details or precisely because of the details. Experimenting in the organization of cooperatives, associations, associative enterprises, community stores or rural banks, helps to establish different processes. Experimenting is digging into decolonializing ourselves, and getting ourselves out of the orbit of Eurocentrism, which is presented as the measure of all things. The same thing happens on the side of rural populations, there are peasant and indigenous people who become pastors, delegates of the word, healers and agricultural and community advisors, many of them also dig into and realize that what is happening and what has happened to them is not natural nor determined by some supernatural being, in this way putting a crack in the wall of apartheid.
As we dig further, we run into powerful beliefs that support the wall, but we also find people who find their source of motivation in those depths in unimaginable ways. After administering a community store for one year, Yesenia Hernández expressed in an assembly: “I used to sell and I did not understand the numbers, because they say “women are for the kitchen and men for documents”; I set myself to understand the numbers, now they don´t make my head hurt, I am also a “woman of documents”. It is not just accounting, it is an issue of beliefs and ways of getting into the numbers, it is working together to adjust those audits of cash and inventory each month. When these improvements happen, other colonial “demons” emerge from political, economic and religious intermediation, and from within ourselves, intellectuals and peasant and indigenous people. It is not just focusing on the community store, it is also studying those surroundings and adjusting and polishing the changes.
In many cases it is co-investing in initiatives like community stores. If intellectuals and people from the communities invest in these initiatives, they will be concerned about their resources and will study them, because “where your treasure is, there your heart will be.” In addition to the financial element, co-investing is training in generating initiatives, capacities for empathy and a sense of mission in peasant people intellectualizing, and in intellectuals “peasantizing.” It is combining oral and written traditions that reveal the paths to follow or showing the pedagogy of associativism where three or more people cooperate. In this way, in the midst of tensions and disagreements that collective actions imply, they will produce new ideas, far from just kneeling down before the market of products and knowledge. This interaction or alliance are part of the basic conditions for freedom of thought, in order to decolonialize ourselves.
Finally, breaking down the wall is recognizing several “languages”. The language of accounting talks about “liabilities”, “assets”, “equity”, “expenses”, “cash out” and “inventory”; likewise economics or law have their own language…Peasant language talks about “payment adjustment”, “piglet” (savings), “scraping by” (look for earnings and savings, like a chicken that scrapes the ground looking for food), “snug” (balance without debt), “cornsilk” (small earnings)…These words underly different rationalities, they are communication vehicles for walking together over long distances and times, be it co-investing, experiencing changes or getting ourselves involved in the real lives of peasant and indigenous people.
Concluding
We began the article alluding to the fact that in Central America there are practically no beans without the application of agrochemicals prohibited in Europe like glyphosate. Out of several responses that there might be, we have focused on the separation between intellectuals and peasant and indigenous people, as an explanation that has led to the imposition of capitalism expressed in monocropping, dependency on agrochemicals, environmental degradation, violence and authoritarianism. From the beginning of the article we asked ourselves, how can these two groups work together and write a new history. What follows are the answers encountered.
Good changes walk on two feet, intellectuals and peasants/indigenous who organize. With two feet one can re-perceive commercial relationships governed by societies, and rethink ideas from a perspective of decolonialization from the south. No foot can believe itself to be superior and take leaps without the other foot. As the Italian writer, Luciano de Crescenzo says, “we are all angels with only one wing, and we can only fly if we embrace someone else”; in our case, peasant individuals can fly through associative organizations, but only in an embrace with intellectuals, and intellectuals can only fly in an embrace with peasants who organize.
In this we need to have a long-term perspective of histories, changes that last and deepen over centuries; it is like planting and not restricting ourselves to just one crop. Seen in this way, the innovative experience of the 1960s and 1970s that I mentioned just lasted 20-30 years, after which neoliberalism and religious and political conservatism absorbed them, or as Franz Hinkelammert would say, the totalitarianism of the market controlled the state and societies; even though some flashes of that brief period of knocking down walls persist. In contrast, European enlightenment broke down that wall and lasted 74 years (1715-1789), and its impact lasted for centuries in Europe. The same with the Protestant Reformation that smashed into pieces the Catholic wall that had abducted the Bible, it lasted 144 years (1454-1598) and its effect continues today. But the wall of the apartheid of “culture” and “ignorance” is a long wall that is rebuilt and has lasted for thousands of years.
Having these two feet and this long-term perspective, we want intellectuals to “peasantize” themselves and indigenous and peasant people to intellectualize themselves. How? Let both organize and rewrite the histories of our peoples, on paper, in our minds and in our futures. In this way they would conceptualize, synthesize ongoing processes, study themselves, analyze in the light of different approaches, create parables like Jesus to communicate and provoke reflection, and do it in an ongoing way. These different futures can be written or designed to the extent that “the other” is rescued; indigenous and peasant people who emerge from way down below where they were condemned for centuries, fighting with so many imposed demons (beliefs and rules of elites); intellectuals who also fight against so many other demons (beliefs and rules of elites) which have led them to stay on the opposite side of the street. It is a matter of mutually rescuing one another, keeping their organizations from falling into neoliberalism reduced to maximizing their earnings, or the colonialism of “we always need a patron”. It is a matter of decolonializing rural organizations, churches, classrooms, auditoriums, offices, conferences and farms. Doing it day after day, year after year.
If we take this step, it could make María de Jesús, the grandmother with the long view, whisper to us, “is that right?” And we will share coffee with rosquillas, even though at that time, like the stardust that we are, we will then be within the energies of the universe.
[1] René has a PhD in development studies and accompanies rural organizations in Central America. He is a member of Coserpross (http://coserpross.org/es/home/), associate researcher of IOB-Antwerp University and a collaborator of the Winds of Peace Foundation (http://peacewinds.org/research/).
[2] Jack learned how to accompany grassroots communities from an African American evangelical pastor in a neighborhood in New York– according to what our friend Mark Lester tells us. With this knowledge, Jack accompanied rural communities in Bolivia and Central America, and now accompanies marginalized people in the United States. Maria Alicia accompanied communities in Brazil and communities in Nicaragua, now accompanies migrants from Latin America who struggle to enter the United States. Both are living examples of how to break this wall of apartheid.
Article dedicated to Fr. Jack Moynihan and Sr. Maria Alicia McCabe[2]
Visit
-Why are you coming to visit us? María Jesús asked, the grandmother of the community. Not even the priests visit us now–she took charge of the conversation.
-The world is getting more difficult. Without us, it will be difficult for you to improve; and without you, we don´t even know where we are going- I responded.
-Is that right? Whispered the grandmother, inviting me to coffee.
Thirty years ago in most of Central America corn and beans were planted without using glyphosate nor gramoxone; now gramoxone is used even for harvesting beans, in part to keep the rain from making the beans “sprout”. Not to mention vegetables, coffee and cacao. Much less sugar cane, peanuts or sesame. Probably beef and pork meat is more organic than carrots or beans. Where did this come from? The costs of production of a peasant family have increased drastically, but not the prices they are paid for their products; this makes desperation spread, tension and violence intensify, biodiversity erode, and climate variability proliferate.
There are many explanations for these realities. In this article I focus on intellectuals, who dedicate an important part of their time to studying the realities, preparing projects and/or policies, teaching or preaching; they are writers, scientists, artists, scholars; they are “people of culture” who move in different circles from most people, a separation which at times is concealed but abysmal. We use the word “apartheid” to denote this intolerable separation. By way of hypothesis we say that the separation between intellectuals and the communities where most of people live has impaired humanity for at least five centuries, when friars (intellectuals), soldiers, tax collectors and traders burst upon these lands. How can they work together and write a new history? I reflect on this question from the heterogeneity of the rural world.
That wall of intellectual apartheid
We read articles in newspapers and magazines about political issues where generally the rural reality does not appear, and if it does, it is reduced to topics of violence where its structural causes are ignored. There are NGOs with rural agendas whose intellectuals respond to donors, sporadically they show up in rural communities to do surveys or interviews, they show up once and never return. In fact, in the last 20-30 years, there are practically no intellectuals who write about the rural realities of Central America in a systematic way.
At the same time there are young rural women and men who have studied different majors. Finishing their studies, their dream is not to work with rural populations. They work for companies, the government, or they migrate to other countries to work in what they can. If they stay, they go back to agriculture or to be housewives, leaving aside their intellectual role that could give them the possibility of writing peasant and indigenous history from their perspectives, and writing about new futures.
What happened to us? The Fordist and Taylorist colonial mentality that separates experts from workers has nested in our minds, regardless of the political ideology that we might exude. This mental model makes one believe that there is nothing to be learned from rural communities, like some two thousand years ago: “Nazareth! –exclaimed Nathanael. Can anything good come from Nazareth?” (Jn 1:46). This mental model makes intellectuals believe that they are superior: “I am an accountant”, “I am an engineer”, “I am a professor”, “I am a pastor, anointed by God”, “I am a doctor” or “I am an economist”. This intellectual arrogance means that we do not mix with peasant or indigenous people, that that hidden or submerged population live in the “middle ages” – a Eurocentric reading, as if Latin America had an “ancient age”, “middle age” and “modern age”.
This mentality adds cement to the millennial wall of intellectual apartheid of a “Latin America” where indigenous and peasant people are absent. Peasant and indigenous people walk on their own and intellectuals do so as well, each one on different rails.
I have learned a lesson working for decades with rural populations. Alone, peasants and indigenous, it will be difficult for them to innovate with their economies and societies; alone, we intellectuals will continue exuding Eurocentrism and allowing the spirit of Nathanael to control us.
Experiences that seem to knock this wall down
Fortunately, there are experiences in which that wall is knocked down, even though just a part of it, and just for some period of time. The most well-known came in the 1960s and 1970s when several lines of thinking coincided. The opening of the Catholic Church with the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), Medellin (1968) and Puebla (1979), a church open to the poor; the momentum of the Cuban revolution (1959); popular education under the influence of Pablo Freire; and the dependency theory of Singer and Prebisch. It was a period in which public universities were spaces of debate, where majors in sociology, philosophy and political science prevailed.
Under this framework, university students and professors, priests, sisters and politicians, went into communities and neighborhoods accompanying indigenous, peasant and impoverished people from urban neighborhoods. Churches, classrooms, auditoriums and offices let their intellectuals leave. In Central America the experience of the community of Solentiname (Nicaragua) stands out with Ernesto Cardenal, where they produced the Gospel of Solentiname; the experience of the community of Aguilares (El Salvador), the experience of hundreds of Base Christian Communities. One outstanding regional experience is that of the Radiophonic Schools, where intellectuals (religious and lay) promoted literacy, health care and agriculture, a framework in which many people organized into cooperatives and peasant stores, which still exist today, though very much in a diminished way.
It is a period in which part of that wall was felled; the mentality was that God and freedom were in the impoverished people who seek justice, that people can organize with their own resources, that honesty and solidarity are values that are found in humble people. To a large extent, with this process all the military dictatorships were brought down and democracy was installed throughout Latin America.
But this harmful wall resurged after the years of the 1980s. The institutional church closed itself back up in church buildings and persecuted those religious who refused to leave the communities which were building the Reign of God on earth. Banking style education returned to the classrooms. Political revolutions and democracies took over the military bases and offices, feeling at home under hierarchical and authoritarian structures. Studies in business administration, accounting and law led public and private universities with the dream of making money. The teachings and trainings put learning aside. The spirit of Nathanael returned to the minds of intellectuals, separating them from people with calloused hands who paid for the studies of these intellectuals. This is the reality that made María Jesús ask, “Why are you coming to visit us?”
Breaking the wall and combining ideas and efforts
Visiting people like María Jesús, we jump over that wall of apartheid – we just “jump”. Here we list four ways of knocking the wall down, which, like a constellation of stars could show us one of the paths: get involved in the real lives of the majorities, experience the changes, co-invest in initiatives and recognize several languages.
Intellectuals need to get involved in the real lives of the majorities, combine being in our churches, classrooms, auditoriums, offices and conference rooms, with living in rural communities, organized however they may be, experiencing what it means to generate collective actions beyond one´s own family, and outside of the “synagogue” itself (church, office…. ). If it is a matter of the fact that agriculture and the lives of human and natural communities might improve, food not be poisoned, it is unacceptable that the rural population walk along the rail that the market pulls them on, and that intellectuals walk along another rail, also pulled by the market.
The issue of beans is technology, soils, climate, property, institutions like sharecropping, sharing labor, and land rental, it is intermediation and crop lien lending, it is weighing and quality, it is official data and real data, it is new bean soup and refried beans; all of this varies from year to year. The same with coffee, cacao, corn, squash or lemongrass, gardens, cornfields and farms. It is ethically and scientifically questionable to make proposals without being involved in that world, without studying them and studying oneself. We need to re-understand commercial relationships, not as commodities subjected to the totalitarianism of the market, but as the means for “good living”, as they say in the Andean countries, or the “I am because you are”, as one of the profound perspectives from Africa expresses it.
The topic of violence, specifically violence against women, is an issue of millennial social and religious rules, laws, power relationships, family and structures embedded in religious, political and economic institutions, it is the law of the jungle and human dispositions. It is not possible to reduce and terminate that violence if we do not identify its causes and do not accompany women in their non-violent paths in their own communities.
On the topic of rural organizations, it is cooperation in the midst of conflict, democracy in authoritarian societies, distribution of profits within a context of “trickle-down economics”, it is transparency in the midst of secretive mafias, it is accounting for peasant stores and cooperatives when universities are teaching accounting for companies and corporations…One can advise organizations only if we learn from them how to advise them.
Intellectuals need to experience the changes along with rural people. An idea that is tested, adapted, adjusted, redone, finds legitimacy, motivates, is corrected and polished, is an idea that takes on life, that changes even the details or precisely because of the details. Experimenting in the organization of cooperatives, associations, associative enterprises, community stores or rural banks, helps to establish different processes. Experimenting is digging into decolonializing ourselves, and getting ourselves out of the orbit of Eurocentrism, which is presented as the measure of all things. The same thing happens on the side of rural populations, there are peasant and indigenous people who become pastors, delegates of the word, healers and agricultural and community advisors, many of them also dig into and realize that what is happening and what has happened to them is not natural nor determined by some supernatural being, in this way putting a crack in the wall of apartheid.
As we dig further, we run into more powerful beliefs that support e wall, but we also find people who find their source of motivation in those depths in unimaginable ways. After administering a community store for one year, Yesenia Hernández expressed in an assembly: “I used to sell and I did not understand the numbers, because they say “women are for the kitchen and men for documents”; I prepared myself to understand the numbers, now they don´t make my head hurt, I am also a “woman of documents”. It is not just accounting, it is beliefs and ways of getting into the numbers, it is working together to adjust those audits of cash and inventory each month. When these improvements happen, other colonial “demons” emerge from political, economic and religious intermediations, and from within ourselves, intellectuals and peasant and indigenous people. It is not just focusing on the community store, it is also studying those surroundings and adjusting and polishing the changes.
In many cases it is co-investing in initiatives like community stores. If intellectuals and people from the communities invest in these initiatives, they will be concerned about their resources and will study the stores, because “where your treasure is, there your heart will be.” In this way, in the midst of tensions and disagreements that collective actions imply, they will produce new ideas, far from just kneeling down before the market of products and knowledge. This interaction or alliance are part of the basic conditions for freedom of thought, in order to be decolonialized.
Finally, breaking down the wall is recognizing several “languages”. The language of accounting talks about “liabilities”, “assets”, “equity”, “expenses”, “cash out” and “inventory”; likewise economics or law have their own language…Peasant language talks about “payment adjustment”, “piglet” (savings), “scraping by” (look for earnings and savings, like a chicken that scrapes the ground looking for food), “tight” (balance without debt), “cornsilk” (small earnings)…These words underly different rationalities, they are communication vehicles for walking together over long distances and times, be it co-investing, experiencing changes or getting ourselves involved in the real lives of peasant and indigenous people.
Concluding
Good changes walk with two feet, intellectuals and peasants/indigenous who organize. With two feet one can re-perceive commercial relationships governed by societies, and rethink ideas from a perspective of decolonialization from the south. No foot can believe itself to be superior and take leaps without the other foot. As the Italian writer, Luciano de Crescenzo says, “we are all angels with only one wing, and we can only fly if we embrace someone else”; in our case, peasant individuals can fly through associative organizations, but only in an embrace with intellectuals, and intellectuals can only fly in an embrace with peasants who organize.
In this we need to have a long-term perspective of the histories, the changes that might last and deepen over centuries. Seen in this way, the innovative experience of the 1960s and 1970s that I mentioned lasted barely 20-30 years, after which neoliberalism and religious and political conservatism absorbed them, or as Franz Hinkelammert would say, the totalitarianism of the market controlled the state and societies; even though some flashes of that time persist. In contrast, European enlightenment broke down that wall and lasted 74 years (1715-1789), and its impact lasted for centuries in Europe. The same with the Protestant Reformation that broke the Catholic wall into pieces, which had abducted the Bible, lasted 144 years (1454-1598) and its which is remade and has lasted for thousands of years.
How can this wall of intellectual colonialist apartheid, subjected to the totalitarianism of the market, be breached? Our response is that intellectuals and indigenous and peasant peoples organize, and together rewrite the histories of our peoples, on paper, in our minds and in our futures. Rewriting implies conceptualizing, synthesizing processes, self-studying, analyzing actions in the light of different approaches, creating parables like Jesus to communicate and provoke reflection; doing it in an ongoing way, together, not once a year or as project systematizations/intermediate evaluations. These different futures can be written or designed to the extent that “the other” is rescued; rescuing indigenous and peasant people who emerge from the way down below where they were condemned for centuries; they emerge fighting with so many demons (beliefs and rules of the elites) which have been imposed on them; that the peasantry also rescue intellectuals, who also fight against so many other demons (beliefs and rules of the elites) which have led them to walk only on their side of the street; mutually rescuing one another, reflecting with images and parables, synthesizing their paths for sharing and keeping their organizations from falling into neoliberalism, reduced to maximizing their earnings, or the colonialism of “we always need a patron”. Doing it year by year, decade by decade, and century after century, decolonializing rural organizations, churches, classrooms, auditoriums, offices, conferences and farms.
Taking this step will make María de Jesús, the grandmother with the long view, whisper to us, “is that right?” And we will share coffee with rosquillas, even though at that time, like the stardust that we are, we will then be within the energies of the universe.
[1] René has a PhD in development studies and accompanies rural organizations in Central America. He is a member of Coserpross (http://coserpross.org/es/home/), associate researcher of IOB-Antwerp University and a collaborator of the Winds of Peace Foundation (http://peacewinds.org/research/).
[2] Jack learned how to accompany grassroots communities from an African American evangelical pastor in a neighborhood in New York– according to what our friend Mark Lester tells us. With this knowledge, Jack accompanied rural communities in Bolivia and Central America, and now accompanies marginalized people in the United States. Maria Alicia accompanied communities in Brazil and communities in Nicaragua, now accompanies migrants from Latin America who struggle to enter the United States. Both are living examples of how to break this wall of apartheid.
Strengthening our “defenses” with “my Mom´s Green thumb”
René Mendoza Vidaurre, Fabiola Zeledón and Esmelda Suazo with Anabel Cardoza, Glensis Carrasco, Selenia Cornejo, Adalis Orozco, Milson Cantarero and Jarithmar Gonzalez
COVID-19 is a cowardly virus that attacks the most vulnerable people whose immunological system is weak. Strengthening those “defenses” of people is imperative. This would be possible if each family had their own garden.
It seems simple. But it is not. Many times, aid organizations and governments have promoted gardens and farm diversification wanting families to “nourish themselves.” These projects last as long as the donation does. Why? How can families take up gardening? We write this article from our experience of wrestling with these questions in the communities.
Why have rural families quit planting gardens?
As the colonial and patriarchal capitalist institution of mono-cropping was imposed, backed by universities, credit, technical assistance and organizations established by external initiatives, crop diversity and biodiversity ended up cornered, and on the road to disappearing. The garden was swept up in that dynamic as well.
What is important with mono-cropping is money, that comes once a year with the harvest of that crop, and it is the man (husband or father) who is responsible for that monocrop in terms of markets for capital, the product itself, its agrochemicals and knowledge. Nothing is comparable to the monocrop: “I am not going to neglect my coffee by monitoring a squash plant”. Their rule is: “everything is bought with the coffee”, “our food is bought with the sugar cane money”. The women who used to work on diversified farms and were responsible for gardens, lost that space and were confined to the kitchen, while their menu of food said goodbye to soups and stews. At the same time, people ended up reproducing the idea of the elites: “There is no room for a garden”.
Seen in this way, it is funny to see governments and aid agencies promoting gardens, when they have backed mono-cropping over the last 200 years, as if peasant families did not have a memory. More than funny, we recognize their anti-peasant intentionality in their formula: they give away seeds of crops demanded by the market (carrots, lettuce, cabbage or tomatoes, mini-vegetables) as opposed to “weeds” (mint, oregano, rue, native garlic, medicinal plants) that are more for family and community consumption; they promote gardens in spaces separated from the home; done collectively, connected to a leader. All these elements are contrary to the peasant practice of gardens, which is why they are silently resisted by the peasantry.
In addition to deconstructing mono-cropping which undermines gardens, and the fact that its modern promoters follow ahistorical rules, we also identify beliefs and rules that are counter to peasant viability, but are reproduced by peasant people themselves. “I do not have room”, as if the garden required “additional space” to what is available. “With coffee I buy everything else”, when people live in debt for depending on one crop, and time and time again end up dividing up their land. “I am not a cow to be eating grasses”, rejecting vegetable foods that could strengthen their “defenses.”
How can women and their families recover their gardens?
Parallel to deconstructing, we dig into peasant memory. Our grandmothers and grandfathers still remember the gardens of their Mothers. What do they remember? They talk about “My Mom´s green thumb”. That is the garden, indigenous “chacra” in the Andean countries. This small area that exists along with the chickens, turkeys and pigs. What is this garden for? “To give flavor to food, aroma to drink, and medicine to the sick.” They were products that today, coming from the cities, are called “wild”: mint, rue, oregano, native garlic, chayote, squash, passion fruit, lemongrass, smilax, onions, peppers, chicory, wormseed, camphorweed, guava; many of them are used as medicine for parasites, treating fevers and anemia and hemorrhaging.
The more we dig into the memories of our grandmothers and grandfathers, the more practices emerge full of life. It was the women who mobilized the family labor force to take care of the garden. Plants like mint were on any tree trunk. Gardens were close to the house to grow under the eye of the women who cared for them from the kitchen. They were the product of family effort and neighborly exchanges; it was farming that was done by hand and using a mini-hoe. Its production, consumption and social relations were linked; the more diverse the garden a family had, the less debts they had, and less domestic violence was suffered in the home. Decisions were decentralized, women led the garden in a family where seed and fertilizer was obtained in the house itself and the community.
When we establish gardens, women leave their homes, walk around the yard, touch the plants, daughters and sons join in …and the husband. This practice clashes with that rule of “man as provider”, reduces pressure on men, helps the family increase their income, and return soups and stews to the menu, adds tea to the table and medicine to communities. Neighbors visit one another more, the exchange of products increases, their “defenses” are strengthened…
If the advantages are obvious, how can we recover and expand them?
If we recover our memory of “my Mom´s green thumb” and we light our interior fire to do gardens, the steps to follow are: obtain seed and plants, which in part are found dispersed in the community itself; the plants can include ginger, garlic, onions, cilantro, chicory, oregano, lemongrass, mint, peppers, tomatoes, celery, beets, cabbage, squash, cucumbers, rue, basil, wormseed, camphorweed, guava, smilax…
On establishing the gardens, people see different uses for it: “Before we were disorderly, chicory growing in the pastures, now with the garden it is more orderly, they are all in one place; previously we cleaned mangos on our pants, now we wash them with water.” Hygiene and the garden go hand in hand.
As we harvest, we can enjoy teas, soups, stews and salads, use them as medicine. This strengthens health, helps to appreciate what we have, and we are making ideas enter through the tongue. We recommend the book of Jaime Wheelock (1998, La comida Nicaraguense), it is a book that summarizes indigenous food, Spanish food, and the confluence of both.
Few rules are needed. Which ones? That women take on the leadership of the garden and that the entire family collaborate with the garden. That the cooperative, the community store, the school or the church offer seed or plants to be paid for by the harvest, following the principle of “help those who help themselves” (Law of talents, Matt 25). If a family prepares the soil, they are provided seed for 5 crops; if they plant those 5 crops, they are provided another 5. The evolution of each garden is observed by the family, and it is the leader, her daughter or son, who records the data on that evolution – by crop, behavior, health of the plant… The organization or institution that accompanies them, helps them to analyze that data and consequently to innovate in their gardens, diet and health.
To multiply gardens, organizations or institutions can create a prize for the best garden every 3 months. As the gardens become realities, they will catalyze new initiatives: people who want to set up nurseries, dry fruit and bananas, people who buy products to sell them in the neighboring communities, community stores that sell small amounts of seed (retail), community technical advisers; healers; community celebrations; product exchanges….
Are there risks that the gardens will not work?
Assuming that we overcome the anti-peasant practices that we identified in the projects, there are also risks in gardens worked by families. Chickens can dig up and eat the plants, pigs can have a party in the garden, some birds tend to call in their communities to wipe out gardens…In the face of this risk, each family takes measures: protecting the garden with barbed wire, using banana leaves to form a fence, placing a doll with a red rag to frighten off the birds, putting wire and cone on the pigs…The entire family observes each difficulty and achievement, innovates in intense discussions to overcome these difficulties, studying more and more their own data…
A second risk is that the men take control over the garden, the risk here is like with the projects that look for “the head of the family”, and where he is guided by custom that has become law: work with machete, some days of the month, imposition of “women in the kitchen and taking care of the children” and only work on crops to be sold. One measure that can be taken is to work every day in the garden, and over time attract the other members of the family, in this way the person who is in the house every day ends up assuming shared leadership. A second measure is that the youth discover how boring the mono-cropping system is, where you only have to weed, fertilize and harvest, while the garden is a space for intensive, fun group therapy, open to innovation based on recording and analyzing information, and it is very participatory. A third measure is being open to men also trying their hand at cooking; it is not just the fact that men want to experiment, women also have to encourage them to do so; on this topic the article of Sergio Ramírez is enlightening (“El diablo en la cocina”, in El Faro, https://elfaro.net/es/202002/columnas/24037/El-diablo-en-la-cocina.htm‘P) it captures the assumptions/beliefs that keep men from going into the kitchen.
Do the gardens have an impact on changes in rural organizations?
Organizations tend to dance to the music of mono-cropping. Their membership tends to be mostly male, their structure more hierarchical, dependent on the market as its patron. The peasant garden, not promoted by market forces, can help them to change, because of the diversity of the crops, the demand to innovate in small areas, and the fact that families do not go into debt. Organizations can reorganize themselves to process and sell surplus products from the garden, they can provide technical accompaniment services, they can decentralize their decisions, they can get closer to working by hand, hoe farming or garden farming.
Organizations, hand in hand with women, can change for the good of humanity. For example, a peasant community store should have “a peasant face”: selling products from outside and also peasant products, hanging a bunch of plantains and bananas in the window, selling cooked palm fruit, potted plants, cassava, bunches of peppermint, eggs, baked goods. More than just a business, vegetables, and a garden, behind those products is the recreation of indigenous and peasant culture.
Here is the beginning of one of the alternative paths to colonial and patriarchal capitalism. A peasant path, organized, de-centralized, and with organizations that respond to these realities, more democratic and closer to the people. “My Mom´s green thumb” is capable of mobilizing vivid determination.
Rosita spent days thinking, until one day she said to her Mother: I want to be a doctor, will you let me go study?
Ah, my daughter, your Dad is going to get upset, María responded. That night María told her husband José that Rosita wanted to study medicine. He got upset. What? Women are for the kitchen! Who stuck those ideas in her head?
María cried the entire night.
In the morning José left to talk to his patron. He asked permission for his daughter to study. The patron reacting angrily, What? Women don´t have the head for those things. They are here to give birth to peons. Send her to me to work, the devil got into her for being lazy!
At midnight José told María what his patron has said. If you send her, she is going to be his, for a time, pronounced María between sobs.
Rosita heard that whispering. She remembered her days in school, her grandmother and her “stolen” friends. Am I myself? Am I crazy? she asked herself. There has to be another way to live, she responded and prepared her bag. She left a note and took off. The note said, “I am leaving alone with my thoughts.”
In this story appears the colonial structure where it is thought that a peasant woman cannot think (“does not have the head for that”), the patriarchal structure where is it believed that women cannot make decisions, and the capitalistic structure where women are valued if they reproduce the labor force. People move about in this triad structure, like trains on their rails. Rosita, nevertheless, detects that structure, has aspirations, achieves the support of her mother and her father, leaves, not “stolen”, secretly “alone with her thoughts”. A social enterprise is like Rosita, it thinks, acts, ponders and begins a different path. What characteristics do these types of organizations have who go “off the rails?” How are they able to continue along this different path over time?
Rosita can begin a different path, but with the passage of time abandon her thoughts and end up acting like her parents and the patron, or she can mature her “thoughts” of being different. Something similar happens with social enterprises (cooperatives, community stores and roasters). Here we begin identifying these structures that make them de-volve, and then we delve into the rural social enterprises that are going deeper along a different path.
1. Introduction
The domination triad of colonial and patriarchal capitalism rests on the assumption that the values of a society are considered universal, and assume progress as a lineal evolution where race, capital and the rod (authoritarianism) are “the rails.” We base this theoretical introduction on Quijano, Polanyi, Federici, and Lucas dos Santos and Banerjee.
Following Quijano (1992), separate from the defeat of political colonialism, a “colonization of the imagination of the dominated” persists. How did this occur?
This was the product, in the beginning, of systematic repression, not just the repression of specific beliefs, ideas, images, symbols or knowledge that did not serve global colonial domination. The repression fell, above all, on the forms of knowing, producing knowledge, perspectives, images and systems of images, symbols, forms of meaning; on resources, patterns and instruments of formalized and objectified intellectual or visual expression. It was followed by the imposition of the use of patterns of expression appropriate to those who were dominant, as well as their beliefs and images referring to the supernatural, which served not just to block the cultural production of the dominated, but also as a means of social and cultural control, when the immediate repression ceased to be constant and systematic (1992:12)
The “colonialization of the imagination” happens when a culture is repressed and replaced by another through systematic violence. In Figure 1 we lay out the detail of what Quijano proposes.
In time that “universal cultural model” became an aspiration of other cultures, particularly the “illiterate peasant subculture, condemned to oral expression” (13), who were left without a form of intellectual expression.
In this process, European culture appears as rational, belonging to “actors”, while all other cultures it is assumed are not rational, are inferior, “objects” of study. Correspondingly, in harmony with Saint-Simon, the idea emerged of an organic society, where one part of the body is in charge of the others without dispensing with them, the brain in charge of the arms. So, in society the owners are the brains and the workers are the arms. It is an image of society as a closed and hierarchical structure, where each part is subject to the totality. There history is conceived as an ongoing revolution from the primitive to the civilized, from savagery to the rational, from pre-capitalism to capitalism.
This Eurocentrism, according to Quijano (2014), is the specific logic of colonialism. The notion of race assumes that biologically some are inferior, and from capitalism the notion of the division of labor is reinforced reciprocally with race, for example that the workers by their inferiority are not worthy of wages, and the peasants should not aspire to be managers. That is where the Eurocentric myth originates of the “evolutionist perspective, of movement and unilateral and unidirectional change of human history.” (Quijano, 2014: 800).
Polanyi (2001, published for the first time in 1944) described this transformation of pre-industrial to industrial Europe in the XIX and XX centuries, the passage from a system of dispossession which led Europe from a “society with markets” to a “society of markets”, which led Germany, Portugal, Spain, Japan and Italy to fascist authoritarianism, and to the Second World War. Polanyi detected in addition forms of capitalization that were globalizing, which has been called neoliberalism, with the dominion of the force (laws and justice) of the globalizing market. Fifty years later, Stiglitz (2001:vii), rereading Polanyi, said in the prologue: “Due to the fact that the transformation of European civilization is analogous to the transformation that developing countries face throughout the world today, at times it seems as if Polanyi is speaking directly to the current situation.”
Stiglitz is correct in his observation but does not go far enough. This capitalism is colonial in the countries of the South, made worse than in the situation of Europe itself, expressed – without distinction as to political, religious or market leanings – in authoritarian structures mediated by the notion of race.
This colonial capitalism is also patriarchal. Federici (2010), studying capitalism from a feminist perspective, coincides with Marx in that primitive accumulation is salaried work separated from the means of production, she also understands it as separation from production by the market, while the reproduction of life is feminized and women are subjected to men for family sustenance. She found in the XVI and XVII centuries that capitalism caused hunger by the labor force, and that the belief was that the wealth of a nation consisted in having abundant salaried people, which is why the State and the Church, using violence, imposed witch hunting criminalizing birth control and controlling the female body, the uterus, to increase that labor force. “If in the Middle ages women had been able to use different contraceptive methods and had exercised an indisputable control over the birthing process, starting now their uteruses were transformed into political territory, controlled by men and the State: procreation was directly placed at the service of capitalist accumulation” (Federici, 2010: 138-139).
In the story at the beginning of the chapter, the patron repeats this rule of primitive accumulation, “those women are for producing peons”, and the father confirms that “women are for the kitchen.” If only 20% of land owners are women in Latin America, they are easily considered to be “arms” or a “rib”. In this way, race, capital and uterus are the rails of colonial and patriarchal capitalism, which we try to synthesize in Figure 2.
Lucas dos Santos and Banerjee (2019), from a framework of “economic colonialism” in line with Quijano (1992), observe how social enterprises are run and measured under the parameters of that framework. So, some are seen as advanced and others as backward. The authors detect five deficiencies in the functioning of social enterprises, see Table 1.
Table 1. Conception of social enterprises
Deficiencies
What these deficiencies ignore
Assumptions
1. Concern about the technical aspect and their performance
Economic democracy goes with different community rationalities, not just performance with predefined results
Collective innovation is replaced by quick technical responses; collective solutions take time.
2. Under-representation of subordinate people in decision making processes
A broad perspective should include subordinated groups, whose voices should not be interpreted nor edited
Subordinate groups have different conditions and meanings to negotiate
3. Vision of pacifist civil society focused on organization
Voices, whispers, and silences express participation; principles of distribution, reciprocity and family maintenance.
Minorities do not have voice in social enterprises; markets shape the economy in the social and political order.
4. No attention to gender issues
Role of women in reciprocity, distribution and family maintenance should appear in debates.
More women participate in social enterprises, but theoretical debates with a feminist perspective are scarce.
5. Non problematization of the political and economic dimension
Economic autonomy, publc voice and visibility, unique solutions and protection networks in alternative arenas.
Alternative economies are defined by economic colonialism. Challenge of decolonializing social enterprises.
Source: based on Lucas dos Santos and Banerjee (2019)
Lucas dos Santos and Banerjee (2019) assume that promoting economic democracy in order to overcome “economic colonialism” requires addressing these five deficiencies. Cutting across these deficiencies is the idea of the market shaping social enterprises, without the perspectives of society having any importance. The authors insist that the voices of subordinate groups with their different rationalities should be made visible, even though these processes take time, and they question whether diverse and alternatives economies can be decolonialized.
2. Cooptation of social enterprises
Cooperatives were born from the womb of colonial countries and during the expansion of industrial capitalism, but in opposition to that system. That strength of “swimming against the current”, nevertheless, devolved through almost two centuries of history; today it is difficult to distinguish a cooperative from a private enterprise, to such an extent that in France they call it “cooperative capitalism” (Georges and Pascal, 2009). The word “enterprise” in its identifying definition entered for the first time in 1995 in the Congress of the International Cooperative Alliance, in the crest of the world rise of neoliberalism.
This colonial and patriarchal capitalism is reproduced by the social enterprises themselves. The deficiencies that Lucas dos Santos and Banerjee (2019) observe are taken on, for example, in the rural social enterprises in Central America, which does not lack any of them. The economic successes are emphasized without distributing surpluses, decisions are centralized without being transparent with information, are controlled by the market and technocracy, their actions and decisions are depoliticized, they exclude youth, women and workers without land. Figure 3 shows this structure that moves like one cogwheel crushing any option that goes off “the rails.”
Social enterprises are considered “the third sector”, alongside the State and the market, which is why it is expected that they might be a real counterweight, being democratic and equitable. This tends not to happen; social enterprises reproduce the hierarchical structures of the State and the market. The organizational chart of organizations has the assembly as their highest decision-making authority, but usually the assembly is only a formality. Technocratic elites in the organizations (social enterprises, business or sports associations, churches) became hierarchical, and the only gateway for the members to markets, states and gods. Markets see the social enterprise as a means to increase volume or to carry out imported projects. These elites see themselves as the “brain” embedded in the “strong man”, moving about in “black masses” (collusion among elites), from where they see the peasantry as “the arm,” “illiterate people who do not think”, that “the more brutish they are the more they produce.” For their part, aid organizations that tend to accompany them, even though bathed in discourses about democracy, are also hierarchical, reluctant to study the social enterprises, and inebriated with the technocratic belief that “they already know” the problems and solutions for the social enterprises, tacitly taking on the colonial logic that sees the social enterprises as the reflection of their past.
Most social enterprises are constituted by the State. It is assumed that forming a cooperative is a “matter of legalizing them”, promising them credit, land or some project; it is like getting married first before falling in love. This was true for the boom of cooperatives in Nicaragua in the 1980s, those of Venezuela in the first decade of the current millennium, or the rural banks in Honduras in the second decade of the current millennium. They are organized around mono-cropping systems or credit services. They are structures that see themselves only as rational businesses and individuals, neglect in practice their associative side and collective actions. They are formed under the idea that “a cooperative is for those who have” (land, coffee, sugar cane or cacao), and exclude those who “do not have anything” (women, youth and workers without land). They are organizations that are desperate to grow economically, which is why they do not distribute profits and intensify the hundred-year rule of “peasants are only for providing raw materials”.
These social enterprises have geographically dispersed membership and offices in the cities. They do not try to build trust among their membership as the basis for any action. The more they depend on markets and international aid agencies, the more they stick to formal aspects: contracts, audits, meeting minutes, and bids, disconnected from the processes of their membership. 20% of their members are women, most of them included as a formality. This low percentage is coherent with organizations dedicated to raw materials, where men are kings, while women are restricted to the kitchen and the reproduction of the labor force. The families themselves of the members are an expression of these hierarchical structures: husband/father centralizes decision making, and the family embraces the mono-cropping system. This social order is maintained even by violence, because social enterprises think that it is their duty to generate profits. The rule that governs them is “those who have, save yourselves”, at the cost of human lives and nature; it is the same rule of capitalism.
These three elements reveal the strength of colonial and patriarchal capitalism, coopting social enterprises, and using them as a means of dispossession. Table 2, reading it in a vertical way, shows what colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy are in the social enterprises, an expression of control and dependency, the superiority/inferiority duality that in the long term justifies violence. Meanwhile, reading it horizontally, it shows how embedded these three systems are: being guided by the patron, the market and men; the elite, the market and intelligent men; letting themselves be carried away by the oligarchy, the market and formality; mono-cropping, physical work and not processing products; predominance of discarding instead of change. They are intellectual sounding boards against the members, but in their name and through their own organizations. In the face of this, the elites of the market, the State and international aid organizations do not want to know whether the social enterprises are democratic, whether they distribute their profits, whether they are transparent, whether they have environmental sustainability, whether the voice of the members counts, whether subordinated groups are included…They are interested in the fact that the market rules in order to have profitable partners. The social enterprises with larger transaction volume and more working capital are praised and considered “advanced”.
Table 2. The triad reproduced by social enterprises
Colonialism
Capitalism
Patriarchy
Peasants dream about being a patron: ordering, exploiting people and having money.
Cooperative wants to be a business and an actor in the market
A couple wants a son who “wields a machete” and not a daughter who “tends the hearth”.
Elites who see themselves as “the brain”: priest, sacristan and bell ringer all in one. Member: “waits for directions from above”
The market knows more, dictates justice and gives value to products and organizations
Head of the family (law, judge and jury); women in the kitchen, women for re-producing; cooperative is for men
Formal democracy in the assembly conceals control of the oligarchy
There are no decisions to make, just working and being an enterprise.
Membership of women is a formality, just to meet a requirement.
Cooperative is for mono-cropping, anchor for elites, divorced from the land
Peasants have comparative advantages with a crop that requires physical labor.
If peasants are only for raw materials, then there is no space for women who process and sell processed goods.
Strategy of change: I remove you to take your place.
Take land away from peasant to give them a job.
Exchange your wife for someone younger.
Source: author, based on accompaniment of organizations in Central America
Can social enterprises be decolonialized? We argue that they can, if the structures in which they operate change. This we will see in the following sections.
3. Social enterprises that go “off the rails”
“Put ourselves in the shoes of others” is advised to see the world from the perspective of other people. To do so, before that, we need to “take off the shoes we are wearing.”
3.1 Case studies
In each case we include the specific context, history of the organization and its community, distinctive rules and organization.
3.1.1 Nicaragua and organizations in synergy
From several cases with similar processes, we highlight one community with 2 cooperatives, 2 community stores and 2 community roasters.
The context is a rural community 260 kms from the capital in the municipality of San Juan del Río Coco, which in the last 30 years has become dependent on coffee and on one cooperative and conventional mediation for selling that coffee.The elite of that cooperative, like the intermediaries, used to hide information from the members, took the surplus, and the president has held the post for more than 30 years. This cooperative was worse than the intermediaries in that he manipulated the contributions of the members and collected coffee in the municipal capital (not in the community, like intermediaries do). The peasants reproduced the imposed rules: only producing raw materials, staying within their “piñuela fence”, money moves everything, and being concerned only about themselves –“those who have, save yourselves”.
As a result, the members where unaware of what happened to their coffee once it left their farms, more than 85% of the added value of coffee was captured outside of the community, they left the worst coffee for their own consumption, and lost control over their cooperatives. In a parallel fashion, groups of alcoholics and the abuse of women increased, while children without fathers continued to increase. Desperation spread: the producers more and more wanted to earn quick money, work less and went more into debt. The idea of “thinking big” controlled them, but understood as having greater volume, size (i.e. more members), capital (having a loan portfolio without concern about debt), and physical investment, at the cost of nature and people´s lives.
In the face of this situation, different groups reflected on their realities based on the question what would be opposed to the dominant cooperative model? They responded: depending on our own resources, members coming from just one community, and rotating leadership, more women and youth as members, working on different products and processing them, leaving the best for their own consumption, operating the entire year and not just during the coffee season, being guided by rules collectively agreed upon, distributing profits and being transparent. Correspondingly, one group organized a new cooperative, and another group, two community stores and coffee roasters.
The cooperative collected the coffee harvest in the community, got involved in credit and trade in beans, and in alliance with another enterprise, grew cardamom as a medicinal and agro-forestry plant with demand outside and inside the country. Their financial basis came from the contributions of their membership, and from a loan through a triangulated agreement between a cooperative with a dry mill and export services, an international financial foundation, and the cooperative itself; the first processes and looks for buyers, the second provides credit and the third ensured quality coffee. Visits of board members to the members of the cooperative increased, as did their informational transparency and the distribution of profits, thus recovering the best rules of cooperativism (see Box 1). Slowly they are improving endogenous institutions of aid, like sharecropping with beans; they are recreating rules of commercial mediation, instead of “I finance you and you sell me the harvest”, “we finance you, we sell your harvest, and then we distribute the profits.”
The community stores and roasters provide fair prices and fair weighing for products and services that they offer. The stores, in addition to conventional products, buy and sell products from the community, and promote group initiatives: e.g. they finance ingredients for bread-making for one group, they buy their bread to resell it. The basis of these social enterprises is also a form of triangulation: shareholders from the community, shareholders from outside the community and owners of the building who administer those services. Even though shareholders are mentioned, and the word “share” comes from Corporations (Inc), the stores and roasters seek to be democratic and equitable: see Box 2 with the principal rules.
The weight of women and youth is growing in these social enterprises and in initiatives linked to them, like the processing and trade of products. These social enterprises are becoming a source of credit and jobs for the shareholders themselves (e.g. rotation in the role of supervision and distributing), and spaces where they learn accounting, social business administration, written culture (recording data, taking notes and analyzing them), organization of initiatives and correcting rules that help people in their communities. Concerning the latter point, for example, selling products on credit that does not imply getting the family of the customer into debt, distinguishing between a collective asset (the store or roaster) and an individual asset (resource that belongs to a person), which allows administering another´s asset without squandering it, promoting collective innovations like raising chickens, bread-making, sewing. People want to contribute resources if they know where their resource is going, if they receive profits, and if these enterprises benefit the community.
Seen in its entirety, that authoritarian cooperative, even though at the beginning more so because its members did not desert it, joined together to contribute to the community in road improvement and visiting some of their members. The new cooperative stands out from the old model of cooperative, and feels pressure from the community stores and roasters who are scaling up based on their own resources. This indirect interaction (see Figure 4) is pressuring them to improve their democracy, transparency and equity. Said figuratively, instead of directly correcting the twisted tree, planting other trees, which combining sun and wind, slowly correct the twisted tree (authoritarian cooperative). “Thinking big”, in this sense, is multiplying organizations in the community around actions that break the curse of “only raw materials” and “we always need a patron”. The objective is not money but energizing the community.
When a social enterprise opens up a new path to be collective action, people take that path, learn it, and have the opportunity to catalyze their own changes.
3.1.2 Honduras and community organizations
Table 3. Events in the community
1975
Los Encinos Peasant Store
1996
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA)
1999
Juan Bautista Community Store
1997-2003
Introduction of vegetables (FIA: Honduran Foundation for Agricultural Research)
2003
APRHOFI: Intibucá Association of Vegetable and Fruit Producers
2003
Inclusion of Los Encinos Store in the COMAL Network
2010
Introduction of irrigation systems (USAID)
2011
EMATE: Los Encinos Weaving Craft Enterprise
2011
Recovery of APRHOFI
2012
Introduction of ecological agriculture
2012
ESMACOL: Lenca Community Alternative Multiple Service Enterprise. (7 Stores are the owners of Esmacol)
2016
Introduction of greenhouses
In contrast to Nicaragua, the experience of Honduras is a community that organizes, expands outward based on a community store that emerged in the 1970s, and aims for the local and provincial market. It is the indigenous community of Encimos in the province of Intibucá, 115 kms from the capital.
The 1960s and 1970s were marked by changes in the social doctrine of the Catholic Church with the Second Vatican Council (1962), through which radio schools came into the rural area that taught people how to read and write and encouraged people to organize, and by the Alliance for Progress from the United States, to prevent infection from the Cuban revolution, pushing governments to carry out certain reforms to maintain control over the peasantry; in this way the National Association of Peasants of Honduras (ANACH) emerged, and the National Union of Peasants (UNC).
It was in those years that the people, harassed by large landowners and the Police, grabbed on to religion and liquor, one group visioned “bringing the store from the city to their community,” they formed the first store in 1975 and the second in 1999. Afterwards, international aid introduced technology into vegetables, created APROHOFI (business that marketed vegetables), and included the two stores in the COMAL Network, with rules and control from outside the community. It is in the decade of 2010 that the community groups scale up: they established their stores, formed EMATE in weaving, assimilated ecological agriculture and irrigation systems, took control over and corrected the rules of APROHOFI, and along with stores from other communities, co-governed ESMACOL. See Table 3.
Figure 5 shows the network in its entirety. The 3 organizations become a reference point in the community. They rescue APROHOFI from poor management; they consolidate it with governance from the community. ESMACOL, after 7 years, continues to be weak, like 5 of the 7 stores; co-governance with weak stores makes it difficult for ESMACOL to improve. A lesson that is emerging is that social enterprises tend to improve if the governance and rules come from the community itself.
What is described is the expression of a virtuous circle between technological change, markets, organization and finances: see Figure 6, supported by the image of a 4 layered onion. The organizations (stores, distributor, seller, weavings), the introduction of potatoes and vegetables, and investments in irrigation systems and greenhouses, reveals that there is an interaction between the technological, social, economic, cultural and spiritual. In other words, new crops and greater technological productivity implies more social cooperation between families, which generates economic costs and income, requires changes in the cultural sphere to the extent that agriculture intensifies and grapples with markets, which has repercussions on the spiritual-religious life of families, and this in turn on the technology…
What explains this circular process that began 45 years ago? First, the idea of “getting closer to the market” was a powerful vision within a context of political tensions and religious opening in the rural areas, a vision that assumed that the peasantry was valuable and could organize a store. A vision that later is made a reality on the basis of their own resources, learning each month to add and subtract what is bought and sold in the store, in spite of the fact that most of them did not know how to read. That vision and passion for the store to continue has accompanied them since that time.
Second, there was success with the rules for starting the store. Each member contributes 1500 Lempiras to their peasant store in January of each year, and with that they receive the equivalent of 100% of that contribution as earnings in December of each year. If a member contributes more than 1500 Lempiras, they receive 20% of that amount as earnings; that 20% continues being a greater benefit than saving it in a bank. The members get in credit the equivalent of up to twice their minimum contribution, in other words, up to 3,000 Lempiras; if the person is not able to pay in the annual term, the store is paid with the 3,000 of the distribution of profits-contribution. The stores offer products at prices slightly below market prices, while the salary of the administrator of the store is 30% of gross profits, which is why the administrator is incentivized to sell more, as the population is incentivized to make their purchases in the store. Box 3 lists the principal rules of the store and the other social enterprises.
Third, like many communities, in Encinos a good number of youth fell into alcoholism, putting the store itself at risk. The school teacher, Jenny Maraslago, saw this fact and helped to create the conditions for change. This is how Bernardo Gonzales remembers it: “In 1996 the teacher said, `such intelligent youth, it makes me sad to find them in the gutters.’ So she brought in the rules of AA; and introduced to us a friend from AA. Encouraged by my older brother, we immediately began to meet, and look, we quit getting drunk, everything changed that day.” 25 years later we found those youth, no longer in the gutters, but leading organizations. In 1975 they woke up to the possibility of bringing a store to the community, and in 1996 the rules of AA of not drinking liquor for 24 renewable hours showed them the path to take care of their community.
These three changes – vision, rules and awakening – contributed to creating the conditions so that in the years following Encinos would multiply their organizations and change their own way of farm production. After several decades of traditional agriculture, that hundred-year-old institution of “this is how I have always planted and how I always will”, gave way to “planting in furrows”, and later to ecological agriculture, and then to including greenhouse systems. They are mechanisms of identifying and applying the rules of each organization and nature itself, along with their organs taking up their respective roles, which led them to keeping just one person from playing the roles of “priest, sacristan and bell ringer”, and creating communities beyond the geographic space of Encinos. And in the opposite direction, every time that external actors consider and have an agenda foreign to that of the communities, initiatives like ESMACOL take more time to be sustainable and useful for the communities.
3.1.3 Guatemala and ecological agriculture which transcends
In Guatemala, a mostly indigenous country, a cooperative cultivates a transnational relationship and social cohesion with its members and organic agriculture. It is the cooperative of La Voz in the municipality of San Juan La Laguna, in the Province of Sololá, founded in 1979.
For decades they have experienced a context of discrimination from the people of San Pedro (non-indigenous from the neighboring town), of dispossession of their best land. Also, on the part of the Chalet owners, foreigners and non indigenous who took over the shores of Atitlan, one of the 7 wonders of the world, and built their chalets. In this context, and when organizing themselves under military dictatorships sounded like communism, a group of people understood that if they did not organize, they would die along with their relatives. They formed a cooperative and after suffering several attacks, one of them by the Police themselves, they turned themselves into an organic coffee cooperative, with a collective wet mill, even though with productive yields in weight equivalent to 60% of the conventional coffee of the San Pedro coffee growers. The first key to their persistence was their social cohesion as a group with a high rotation of members in leadership posts; the second key was their relationship with a market in the United States that were paying them well for their organic coffee. Up until 2004 that was the story of this cooperative, something unusual.
Between 2005 and 2010 the cooperative experienced a social, economic and environmental crisis. Hurricane Stan in 2005 and Agatha in 2010 made the waters of Atitlan rise, and with that a lot of land in dispute disappeared. In a parallel fashion, the cooperative fell into acts of corruption that put them at risk of going broke. In 2005 the cooperative got nearly half a million dollars in credit from a social bank and two loan sharks. In that same period the cooperative exported double the volume of their organic coffee, buying the other 50% from third parties, and passing it off as if it were fair trade, organic coffee from the cooperative. The members did not receive that loan, much less the profits for the resale of the other 50%. That was possible thanks to the complicity of the board and administrative staff of the cooperative, and the complacency of the certifiers (organic and fair trade), social banks and coffee buyers.
The members in that period of the board (2005-2006) were not aware of what was happening in the cooperative. In the next period (2007-2008) with a new board the situation was noticed because debt collectors came in, so they unraveled the origins of the debt. In the assembly they studied the causes, they met with the social banks, certifiers, buyers and aid agencies. What had led them to this crisis?
“If a member spoke well, we would say that that member was good, that he should be president. We trusted what the manager or the president would tell us, “This project is coming…sign here.” That is fine and we would sign. We did not verify the document to see what it ended up saying. They only would come in to tell us. There was no control over the travel allowance of the manager nor about the salaries they earned. We let them sign checks for the employees. Even in one season the manager was the legal representative of the cooperative. We would change everyone in each period, there were meetings, but we did not know how the administration was doing. The Credit Committee let the board authorize the loans, and we would say that it was good. As the legal representative, the manager would negotiate and talk with the buyers and the banks; we were afraid of talking to a business person and were happy with the manager doing it. Going to the capital was something we did not like to do…” (Board members of the cooperative).
The rotation of members in the posts out of formality led them to this crisis. Board members who did not take notes of the meetings that they held, did not read the minutes nor contracts, did not study the numbers of their organization, and did not ensure that the agreements from the assembly were applied, turned into decorative board members, it did not matter how good the practice of leadership rotation might be. Custom turned into law: signing oficial minutes and checks without verifying, putting in posts people that spoke well, letting the administration represent the cooperative and sign their checks, leaving the president or the manager to authorize loans instead of the credit committee, and avoiding talking with buyers and the banks. It was a “law” legitimized by the fair trade and organic certifiers´ audits.
That situation became a crisis when the bills came in and they had a new board. Realizing that the instigators of taking over the collective resources had been backed also by the organic certifier struck a blow to hundred year old beliefs that had nested in their minds: “foreign auditors have the final word”; “a person with a degree is trained to lead organizations”; “indigenous are not capable of talking nor traveling.” They were absorbed by the formality of the cooperative: the rotation of leaders was insufficient, and the audits of the international organizations were just papers. They awoke even from their cultural self enclosure: “a ladino cannot teach an indigenous person about coffee”; this idea had blocked them from benefitting from technical consultancies in order to improve their coffee. They also understood that the force of the market (maximizing individual earnings) was guiding the fair-trade organizations connected to the administration of the cooperative and the formality of its bodies.
It was a collective awakening in ongoing assemblies. There they decided to defend themselves against judicial claims of usurers; they understood that leadership rotation was insufficient if the administration was on the other side of the street, which is why the board studied the finances that the administrative area worked on. At the same time, they rebuilt their relationships with external actors: aid organizations and the State, administering resources efficiently; social banks honoring the debt, in spite of the fact that only part of those resources had gotten to the cooperatives and that the social bank had failed in their vetting mechanisms; they changed their organic certifier for another one that “visits the countryside”; and they worked with their coffee buyers so that quality requirements be connected to differentiated prices. They recognized that they could improve in their production areas, and that technical assistance from the state was useful, they hired a permanent technical promoter who accompanied the members and decided to produce organic inputs (compost worm fertilizer) that the members would buy. They got involved in roasting coffee aimed at the local market. They established a clinic for women based on their social fund, as an expression of commitment to their municipality.
Since 2010 they began to feel the changes and their results: see Figure 7. Organic agriculture bore fruit: if previously the organic coffee had a smaller yield than conventional coffee, within years the soil became so fertile that their coffee yield was better than the yield for conventional coffee. Without affecting those high yields, the families also grew corn, beans, bananas and other trees in between the rows of coffee – the rule of the certifiers that prohibited other crops is overcome if the soil is completely fertilized with organic fertilizers, feeding the soil and not the crop is “the rail.”
In addition to processing and exporting good quality organic coffee (cup score of 84), roasting coffee gave them several advantages. 5% of their total coffee was roasted, ground and sold through their coffee shops. This allowed them to know more about the yield from cherry to export coffee, to ground, roasted coffee and to the number of cups of coffee. They use this information to make their negotiations with coffee buyers transparent, because the cooperative and the buyers understand how unfair the New York stock price is, when they say that 1 lb of coffee is worth $1.50, that same pound in the United States or Europe, now roasted, ground and packaged, is worth ten times more, and even much more if it is sold as cups of coffee. The coffee shop in the cooperative is also a door to agro-ecological tourism for people connected to the coffee trade, and for the public in general. This creates environmental awareness and allows understanding what the coffee economy and part of the culture of the communities of San Juan are like. Also, coffee shops in the United States that buy coffee from the cooperative transmit live on their monitors farms in Guatemala.
In terms of results, some people from San Juan are repurchasing land from the people of San Pedro. The cooperative is creating jobs for the member families themselves on the farms, in the wet and dry mills, in the roasting and grinding of coffee, in the coffee shop and in the clinic.
Awakening to this crisis opened their minds. They learned that the relationship between the associative part and the business part, elucidated in assemblies, is what moves the cooperative, that the rotation of leaders implies getting involved in the administration of the actions of the cooperative; and that a transparent transnational alliance where each one does their part, supports social, economic and environmental equity processes for the communities. See box 4.
In spite of this progress, the cooperative and its network are not out of danger. In fact, it is said that human beings are the only animal that trips over the same stone twice. How can we make the risk less likely? From the history of social movements we learn that, after being mobilized “from below”, even the best leaders tend to believe that the people can only be mobilized “from above” – by a political vanguard, manager or the market. The more a cooperative creates mechanisms to mobilize itself “from below”, and does so within a framework of alliances with global actors, the more it distances itself from the risks of going broke. This is what this experience shows us.
3.2 Commonalities in these cases
What common waters run beneath these innovative experiences? See Table 4.
Table 4. Common elements
Context
History
Organization
Rules
Nicaragua
Community is smothered by commercial mediation and traditional cooperatives, mono-cropping and the search for money at the cost of human and natural life.
-They reflect on their situation, awaken and swim against the hierarchical “rails”
-They crawl forward with their own resources, diversify, process and sell their products.
-Alliance in international triangulation around coffee
-Alliance in local triangulation that catalyzes economic initiatives and densifies social connections.
-Contributing and distributing equitably
-Decisions in assemblies; rotation of leadership and tasks; information transparency; visiting one another.
Honduras
Under the Alliance for Progress and the opening of the Catholic Church, a community far from markets, moves in a context of harassment of large land owners, alcoholism and learning to read and write.
-Vision: Bringing stores to the community
-Religious opening: they value themselves
-Keeping honesty with monthly cash out, assemblies and through oversight board.
-diversify crops, weaving and commerce.
-Community store – distributor– seller of vegetables in the city
-Community store and weaving group in the community
-Self governance: Member families in posts of organizations
Contributing/distribution /credit which does not surpass amount to be distributed.
-Rotation of leaders that also looks at the administration
-managers that implement decisions of the organs.
Guatemala
Discrimination and dispossession of their lands in 1970-80s; now when organized they suffer theft from common crime and the Police, and later the complicity of external actors with local elites threaten to make the cooperative go broke.
-Vision: organizing is resisting as indigenous
-They find a niche: organic soil for several crops, processing and coffee shop
-They awaken to the corruption and leadership rotation without getting involved in administration.
-transnational alliance between coffee buyer, certifier who “visits the countryside” and cooperative around organic coffee
-Cooperative produces fertilizer, works wet/dry mills, roasts and coffee shop for the local market.
-Rotation of leaders directing actions of the cooperative
-Transnational alliance whose members have roles that they carry out
-Assembly is the decisive entity and follows up on actions.
Regardless of the historical period and country, markets and States intensify hierarchical structures of inequality and discrimination that belittle people. They do it with commercial mediation, mono-cropping and tacit rules like “save yourselves those who have” (land, money), separated from human and natural life, which is why people tend to isolate themselves, drown themselves in alcohol and religious fundamentalism. When these people, organized in cooperatives, are dragged along by these waters along with their external allies, then they end up forming alliances over raw materials and the peasantry stay within their “piñuela fences” and women stay secluded “in their kitchens”.
Those who reflect on their realities, awaken, see and crawl forward with their own resources, form organizations that on a small scale become what humanity would aspire to be- that is their story. On reflecting they discover those adversities that they are presented with as something natural and/or determined by some supernatural being. Reflection leads them to awaken to the extent that they encounter their own roots, with which they can free themselves from those adversities which are reproduced in their minds and hearts. Then they envision something different, connected to their roots, the opposite of those structures. And they hold on to that vision using their own resources. These organizations are like a family that rotates their crops to maintain soil fertility, while they protect a patch of forest where their water source is; the fact of having food and water gives them a strength for negotiating with the large land owner or rancher who wants to buy their labor force and/or their land. These exceptional organizations stick to their vision. Let us illustrate what this “stick to” means with the peasants in the store in Encinos in the 1970s, they, without knowing how to read and write, sat down every month to do the cash-inventory audit of their store, they knew that they were charting a new path and that they had to persist even if fire rained down; month after month, year after year, they turned their store into one of the exceptional organizations of Central America – but not seen nor recognized as such by NGOs, aid agencies nor the State[2].
Innovative forms of organization stand out in these stories. The triangulation or agreement between three actors, one transnational, and another more local. The first is between the buyer, the financier, and the seller (cooperative) around coffee, a triangulation “conditioned” on the equitable distribution of surpluses, informational transparency and on being democratic organizations[3]. The second is between local actors with a strong interest in the processing and commercialization of a diversity of products, a triangulation “conditioned” on including women and youth as protagonists in the social enterprises. In any of these expressions, the social enterprises are self governing and rotate leadership and jobs. These social enterprises, in addition, catalyze new organizations in the same community around other initiatives, this includes more marginalized people and keeps one person from becoming a “big chief” when there is only one organization.
It highlights the fact that in order to be democratic, transparent and equitable organizations, one does not need so much money, training, nor many pages of laws and norms. Few rules are needed, implementing them, and recreating them following their spirit in accordance with the changes that the communities experience as global spaces. When their members contribute and the social enterprise distributes the surplus with equity, and it is directed by its organs, the services (credit, processing, commercialization, health care or education) are sustainable. To do so, three interdependent rules are key. The “contribute-distribute” rule generates – and is generated by – trust; if under this rule a person requests a loan for an amount equal to or less than the amount of their contribution and their possible share of the distribution of surplus, and if once the term is past that person does not pay, the social enterprise deducts that amount from that person´s resources; any person who is the object of distribution asks for information and identifies with their organization – let us recall the biblical saying “where your treasure is, there your heart will be”. The rules “only the assembly is the decisive body” and “rotation of leadership and posts” are favored because the social enterprise belongs to the community, they make the voice of all the groups be heard, allows women to participate with or without babies; information flows through the community.
Under what conditions do these rules make a difference? When they are connected to endogenous institutions of the communities, which emerge through study and self-study: the rule “contribute-distribute” is connected to relationships of indigenous-peasant exchanges, e.g. sharecropping; the rule “assembly is decisive” is connected to collective actions-decisions of indigenous peoples. These are signs of “societies with markets”.
These interconnected rules, under alliances or triangulations, around modes of production that go beyond the curse of “raw materials” and cultivate relationships of life with nature, make us walk outside the rails of capitalist and patriarchal colonialism.
4. Conceptualization of alternative processes
Let us go back to Quijano (1992), who proposes elements of decolonialization: freeing the production of knowledge, reflection and communication from the potholes of European rationality; recognizing the heterogeneity of all reality, the contradictory nature and legitimacy of what is diverse in all societies; requiring the idea of the other, what is diverse, different. For their part, Lucas dos Santos and Banerjee (2019), in order to decolonialize social enterprises, think about seeing oneself as a specific and contextualized reality within a broad framework, recognizing western discourse on development, wealth and poverty, measuring and explaining the diversity of production logics that exist in the world, revising the meaning of what “the economic” is, recognizing community knowledge in order to find solutions, promoting symbolic autonomy…
From the described cases, we are rethinking the idea of community as a heterogeneous space, conflictual, and different from capitalist and patriarchal colonialism, where social enterprises rediscover their institutional roots, they are the means for people to recreate their identities and generate spaces for building, in the midst of conflicts, trust in ones own culture – that which they are rediscovering and not that capitalist and patriarchal colonialism reproduced by those same people. These social enterprises and the processes that they generate, correct, expand and catalyze become mechanisms which, like social laboratories, produce ideas, images, symbols and knowledge that guide people to improve their lives and their communities in a holistic way – not being dragged along by the commercialization of race, capital and the uterus. See Table 5.
Table 5. Community that organizes, revives rules that are connected to social enterprises
Principles of decolonialized societies
Reinvented social enterprises
Peasant rules and values
Peasant rules and values that benefit women
Rootedness (place, origins for recreating identities, relationship with the land)
-Members come from the same community; meetings, transaction and exchanges happen in the community itself
-Not divide land into pieces nor sell it; the land is the mother, has life
-diversified farm
-Women on water committee, school boards …;
-They feed sons and daughters
-garden: my Mom´s green thumb
Growth with equity
-Distribution of profits
-Diversified and agro-industrial farms; systems for saving
-Improve roads, clínic-health
-Sharecropping
-Share voluntary labor support, seed for grains
-processing and commercializing
-saving
-sharing oregano, lard, lemon … (food)
Ownership of your organization
-Monthly cash-inventory audit;
-Oversight from within and without- with or without posts
Honesty for choosing treasurers, without regard to whether one is “learned” or not
If the social enterprise belongs to the community, women will assume leadership posts
Participatory democracy
-Decisions made in assemblies
-Connected to one another, creating more organizations, membership from different ages and genders
Let the feet (footprints) guide and ruminate (reflect) at night
-Visiting one another; visiting the sick
-Equity in inheritances
Learning apparatuses
-Diversification of services
-Space for reading, taking notes, analyzing and making decisions based on analysis.
-Farm-cornfield and forest: the landscape reveals the life of the family
-sharecropping and sharing voluntary labor
-Weaving, processing, commerce, garden
-family
-communities
Abstracting from specific cases, we find ideas, images and symbols in the peasantry and indigenous peoples. The connection of the social enterprises with the endogenous institutions of communities show other realities under construction. The farm or the cornfield is a symbol of crop diversity to ensure food for the family and cooperation with neighbors, the garden (“my Mom´s green thumb”) expresses indigenous plants (pumpkin, chayote, chile, annatto, chicory, mint…[4]), weavings, religiosities and phrases reveal beliefs, images and knowledge, many of them from prior to colonialization. Figure 8 shows this confluence of institutions and shows the collective results in terms of trust, living relationships with nature, other paths, recreation of identities …
Under this framework of community which organizes and recreates itself, several elements stand out. Discerning the specific context implies “digging” into the context in which cooperatives emerged in Europe, from workers getting off the rails of industrial capitalism (England) or from peasants freeing themselves from usury (Germany), building principles of self help, self governance and self responsibility, and of “digging” into the context of peasant and indigenous communities, to then connect both contexts out of which might emerge the spirit of social enterprises, word and change. This is “digging out” endogenous rules buried by so many layers of colonial, capitalist and patriarchal dust, in Europe as well as in our communities of Central America.
With this spirit of innovation, few rules and values emerging, social enterprises implement it through decisions made in assemblies and rotation of members in organs involved in the associative and business sides. In this way social enterprises practice self governance. When this happens, the transnational and local triangulations (alliances) generate mutually beneficial synergies, social enterprises deepen their processes, and external actors adjust their changes – because studying good changes infects one to do self-study, that it is possible to change the “rails” you are on. Behind Table 5 there are a world of cross-overs experienced: triangled contributions, distribution and credit is connected to diversified farm/cornfield, savings and collaboration (e.g. sharing pork-lard); rotation of leaders and decisions made in assemblies connected to visiting one another (“getting out of the kitchen and the home”[5]), commerce, equitable inheritances, not dividing up the farm and the forest.
In this type of social enterprises, that rule of “get rid of you to put me in”, done so that nothing changes in the mechanisms of dispossession, is left far behind.That technocratic and elite pretension of conceiving themselves as the brain and guides to community social enterprises is left aside. Those dualities of condemning the peasantry to only raw materials, women to just reproduction, or the forest as a simple symbol of waste are diluted. These social enterprises are mixtures and combinations of forces, wills, knowledge and emotions, of organizing other forms of life, communities that function in a spiral fashion, like the conch seashell, opening doors and multiplying organizations.
These social enterprises turn communities into universities. About re-understanding how to organize cooperatives, associations and stores. About re-ordering the farm/cornfield. About recovering the garden in the yard of the home, behind the phrase “My Mom´s green thumb.” About rediscovering women in multiple roles. About discerning the footprints (feet) alongside the reflection (reasoning, head). About rediscovering images, like the mountain with lush trees that produce water, wood, food and oxygen, without needing to be fertilized nor have chemical inputs applied.
5. Conclusions
We started this chapter with the question about what characterizes the type of organizations that get “off the rails” of capitalist and patriarchal colonialism, and how they are able to remain different over time. We read Quijano, Polanyi, Federici, and Lucas dos Santos and Banerjee. Afterwards we characterized the type of social enterprises dominant in Central America. Then we went into describing the cases of innovative social enterprises in Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala. From there we pulled out what is common to them. And on this basis we reconceptualized the community that organizes on their own “rails”. It is like we have followed the young woman of the story, who went away alone with her thoughts, starting another path, with the difference that we studied “Rosita” in 3 countries, finding her 45 years (Honduras), 40 years (Guatemala) and 5 years (Nicaragua) later.
These social enterprises or community forces have a history of “swimming against the current”. Instead of partnering people and providing profitable services, with managers who are eternal, hierarchical structures, subjecting women and nature, and believing that change comes from above, the social enterprises described have few rules which are decided in their assemblies and get implemented. Their members reflect, awaken and envision every day. They self govern. They break out of their “piñuela fences” and free themselves from the curse of “raw materials”, and consume the best of what they produce. They multiply organizations in the same community and at the same time build alliances in forms of triangulation where all benefit. Symbols like the farm/cornfield, the garden or the forest acquire new meaning; images like water, phrases like “eating the best of what we produce”, “my Mother´s green thumb”, and “alone with my thoughts” permeate deeply into their self esteem.
New challenges are appearing. Including more powerfully written culture. If Europe is rational, how can we be rational, emotional and intuitive looking at our footprints? Making the most marginalized people in the communities themselves become protagonists. Distinguishing more the Mesoamerican culture to find our roots and making communities even more innovative.
In the end we learn that when we lose all that technocratic emphasis and formality, that logic of volume, having more land, more money and more children, and that desire of wanting to be “the brain”, we encounter ourselves with our roots and the roots of our friends from any country.
6. Bibliography
Federici, S., 2010, Caliban y la Bruja. Mujeres, cuerpo y acumulación primitiva. Madrid: Traficiantes de Sueños.
Ferrer Valero, S., 2015, Mujeres Silenciadas en la Edad Media. España: Punto de Vista Editores
Georges, L. y Pascal, P., 2009, Les défis du capitalisme coopératif: ce que les paysans nous apprennent de l’économie. Francia: Pearson Education France.
Lucas dos Santos, L. y Banerjee, S., 2019, “Social enterprise: is it possible to decolonise this concept?” In: Eynaud P., Laville J.L., Dos Santos L.L.., Banerjee S., Hulgard H., Avelino F. (2019), Theory of social enterprise and pluralism: Social Movements, Solidarity Economy, and Global South, Routledge Publisher, Oxfordshire, pag 3-17.
Polanyi, K., 2001, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Second Edition. Google Books.
Quijano, A., 1992, Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad, Perú Indígena. 13(29).
Quijano, A., 2014, “Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina”, en: Cuestiones y horizontes: de la dependencia histórico-estructural a la colonialidad/descolonialidad del poder. Buenos Aires : CLACSO
Stiglitz, J., 2001, “Prologue” in: Polany, 2001. K. Polanyi, 2001, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Second Edition. Google Books.
Wheelock (1998), J.R., 1998, La Comida Nicaraguense, Managua: Editorial Hispamer.
[1] René has a PhD in development studies and accompanies rural organizations in Central America. He is a collaborator of the Winds of Peace Foundation (http://peacewinds.org/research/), associate researcher of IOB Antwerp University and member of Coserpross (http://coserpross.org/es/home/).
[2] In April 2018 they invited me to a meeting with the Municipal government of Intibucá. The Mayor spoke about the effort that his government made in favor of the poor. I said to him that one of the most interesting organizations of Latin America existed in his municipality. He was surprised, “What organization?” he asked. “The Store of Los Encinos; more than 40 years of existence; economically sustainable without ever having received foreign donations-projects; they distribute their profits each year; their members rotate in leadership and are leaders of other municipal organizations”. “In Encinos?” he asked. He could not get over his surprise. “Yes,” I responded.
[3] We say “conditioned” in the sense that this triangulation does not make sense if the social enterprise is not democratic, transparent and distributes its profits. That triangulation makes sense only if equity, democracy and transparency are a constituent part of the actors that make up that triangulation.
[4] In order to get inside Nicaraguan food based mostly on the garden and cornfield, see Wheelock (1998).
[5] Women who can leave their kitchens and homes, to which they were reduced by the mono-cropping system. “Leaving” signifies an institutional change, which is facilitated by the meetings of the social enterprises and/or their initiatives for commercializing products. For a broad historical perspective of influential women, see Ferrer Valero, 2015.
[6] The phrase “my Mother´s green thumb” we found among elderly people recalling the garden that their Mother had some 80-100 years ago. Gardens that have practically disappeared nowadays, replaced by the logic of mono-cropping. That phrase is like a living hieroglyph, it expresses the culture of the peasantry itself.
All the variables of the graph have increased, except for the non-renewable resources; and here let us clarify what are not “resources”, they are assets that have agency, they are assets that once they are exploited, are slowly renewed over millions of years, for example, oil, natural gas, carbon, gold, water, etc. The population increased from 1.6 million in 1900 to 3.5 billion in 1970 and in November of 2022 it will be 8 billion, it will continue increasing some more and the decline will begin. Industrial production and food per capita grows and then goes down. Non-renewable resources (read assets) have already been dropping since 1970. Contamination will continue increasing until the years 2035-2040.
Slowly they are improving endogenous institutions of aid, like sharecropping with beans; they are recreating rules of commercial mediation, instead of “I finance you and you sell me the harvest”, “we finance you, we sell your harvest, and then we distribute the profits.”
Said figuratively, instead of directly correcting the twisted tree, planting other trees, which combining sun and wind, slowly correct the twisted tree (authoritarian cooperative). “Thinking big”, in this sense, is multiplying organizations in the community around actions that break the curse of “only raw materials” and “we always need a patron”. The objective is not money but energizing the community.
The 3 organizations become a reference point in the community. They rescue APROHOFI from poor management; they consolidate it with governance from the community. ESMACOL, after 7 years, continues to be weak, like 5 of the 7 stores; co-governance with weak stores makes it difficult for ESMACOL to improve. A lesson that is emerging is that social enterprises tend to improve if the governance and rules come from the community itself.
The organizations (stores, distributor, seller, weavings), the introduction of potatoes and vegetables, and investments in irrigation systems and greenhouses, reveals that there is an interaction between the technological, social, economic, cultural and spiritual. In other words, new crops and greater technological productivity implies more social cooperation between families, which generates economic costs and income, requires changes in the cultural sphere to the extent that agriculture intensifies and grapples with markets, which has repercussions on the spiritual-religious life of families, and this in turn on the technology…
Organic agriculture bore fruit: if previously the organic coffee had a smaller yield than conventional coffee, within years the soil became so fertile that their coffee yield was better than the yield for conventional coffee. Without affecting those high yields, the families also grew corn, beans, bananas and other trees in between the rows of coffee – the rule of the certifiers that prohibited other crops is overcome if the soil is completely fertilized with organic fertilizers, feeding the soil and not the crop is “the rail.”
