Rural Struggles against Land Dispossession: A Comparative Analysis of Peasant Movements from Honduras and Mexico


Jasmin Hristov, University of Guelph

This paper is about the widespread and pervasive use of violence by state and non-state actors in uprooting peasants from their land to make way for large capitalist enterprises. It exposes how violence, operates in tandem with neoliberal legislation towards securing favourable conditions for land acquisition as well as the extraction and appropriation of natural resources by foreign and local corporations in the Global South. The book reveals the dynamics of violent land dispossession under globalization by examining the struggles of two peasant movements – the Agrarian Platform (Honduras) and the National Front of Struggle for Socialism (Mexico). Since the early 2000s, both movements have had many of their members assassinated and many others have been thrown in jail or face arrest warrants based on fabricated accusations. The analysis presented in this paper starts from the premise that land has always been of historical importance for capital accumulation, but especially so in the era of globalization due to the expansion of extractive industries and commercial agriculture. Therefore, far from being a thing of the past, peasant movements today constitute a force of paramount significance at the forefront of struggles for social and environmental justice, challenging the essence of the capitalist state. Regardless of whether we are looking at long-standing sustained movements or spontaneous mobilizations and regardless of whether they are referred to as ‘land and environmental defenders’ or peasants, the demands of these rural struggles are incompatible with the capitalist logic which requires guaranteed access to resources and private property for the accumulation of capital. Such movements, therefore, are essentially (or have the potential to be) anti-systemic struggles. It is not surprising then that they are targeted by states and large-scale capital through the systematic use of violent and legal means aimed at silencing them. Given all this, it is imperative to understand both, on one hand the dynamics of peasant movements and on the other hand the structures generating violence that is functional to capital, the actors that enact it, the modalities it takes, and the mechanisms that enable it. This paper’s objective is to capture the present-day dialectic between peasant movements (which are perceived by capital as a threat) and the violence exercised by state and non-state armed actors against peasants on behalf of capital, by integrating the author’s novel theory of pro-capitalist violence. To this end, the paper offers a comparative analysis of the origins, structure, objectives, strategies of resistance, achievements and experiences of violence of the two movements. It draws on seven years of research supported by two grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). The data collected during fieldwork in both countries , includes more than 130 interviews and focus groups.  

This paper will be presented at the following session: