Peasants and rural landless workers have been at the forefront of recent social movements in Latin America. In fact, we are witnessing a resurgence of ruralbased social movements precisely when some analysts are predicting the “death of the peasantry” because of the advance of capitalism. After providing some conceptual and historical background on peasants, we move on in this chapter to consider first the case of Brazil, where the MST (Movimento dos trabalhadores rurais Sem Terra: Landless Workers’ Movement) has become one of the most significant rural movements to date. This is followed by a case study of Colombia, where the peasant-based FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia: Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) once controlled a territory the size of Switzerland in “independent republics”, and is thus a unique case. The next case study is of Chile, where we have seen a more “classic” pattern of capitalist modernization of agriculture and large-scale agrarian reforms. Finally, we turn to the transnational domain, where Vía Campesina, which originated in Latin America, has for the first time shown the potential of the peasantry as a transnational counter-globalization force. This cluster of cases, taken together, shows the great capacity for resistance and innovation of Latin America's rural dwellers.

In Latin America

The second major historical social movement in Latin America after the workers’ movement is that of the peasants and landless rural workers. From the Mexican Revolution in 1910 through to the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the long-running insurgency in Colombia, peasants have been at the forefront of social and political transformation in Latin America. Old and new forms of capitalist exploitation combined in rural areas and so have the forms of rural dweller resistance. Thus, in Colombia, a long-standing tradition of rural organization and revolt going back to the 1950s was combined with communist insurgency models to turn the “independent republics” into instances of dual power. In a different way, in Brazil, we saw in the early 1960s a combination of peasant leagues organizing smallholders with a national confederation of rural workers, CONTAG (Confederação dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura: Agricultural Workers’ Confederation), organizing rural workers.