Contenu du sommaire : Paysans de l'Amérique des Cordillères

Paysans de l'amérique des cordillères

• Des paysanneries minoritaires - Olivier Dollfus p. 5-24
  Peasantries as Minorities. Peasants are a minority in the population of the Andes and their economic weight is even smaller than their demographic importance. This new situation is a consequence of the extremely rapid urban growth which has been taking place in the last decades. These different peasantries have had a largely common history since the Spanish conquest. Most of the people concerned live in the torrid zone and in mountains that are cultivated up to above 4 000 m. The contrast between the great landowners and the minifundio which have marked the agricultural history of the last centuries is still very important, but new problems are now arising. Following agricultural reforms, average farms, well integrated into the market, have reinforced their role, and at the same time, poorer peasants have had to look for other jobs, which was made difficult by the state of the labour market. Efforts are now being made to maintain peasants in the country, using the rebirth of an ethnic feeling which was long opposed and weakened, but they seem to have little chance of success in societies where the growth of urbanization is irrevocable.
• L'État et la paysannerie en Mésoamérique et dans les Andes - Henri Favre p. 25-55
  State and Peasantry in Mesoamerica and the Andes. The expansion of the state has called forth varied and contradictory reactions among the peasantry in Mesoamerica and the Andes. State expansionism tends to determine a new position for peasants in society. At first, it helped to liberate the rural labour force from the traditional landowners, and attach them to the capitalist oligarchies of planters and mine-owners. In the forties, it originated the insertion of rural populations into the goods and services market required by the new industry. However, the demographic growth and the exhaustion of the old type of development now prompt some governments to engage in new politics concerning the supernumerary populations which cannot be integrated into society.
• Nouveau contexte, encadrement et évolution de la petite exploitation paysanne en Amérique centrale et dans les pays andins - Roberto Santana p. 57-72
  New Context, Organization and Tendencies in Small Farming in Central America and the Andes. A growing destabilization of peasant economies has been taking place for the last ten years, as a result of the capitalist transformation of Latin American agriculture. This process operates thanks to the liberalization of markets and farming policies. It is expressed through an increasing regional specialization, and changes in the old fields of specialization. Capitalist firms are at the heart of this process. At present, the greater part of the rural population working on small farms has two chief characteristics : they actually sell, or seek to sell their labour force, and they have to sell their goods at a low price. This sale of surplus working force, on the level of the minifundio, is the central point of the crisis and it particularly underlines the fact that smaller farms help to absorb the shock of the rural unemployment resulting from the modernization of capitalist concerns. The deterioration of the minifundio is a consequence of the demographic growth and the reduction in the economic surplus available to the rural population, because of the open market small producers are less and less able to compete with capitalist firms. The accumulation of capital by fanners remains very rare. The question of the development of peasant population cannot be seen as a straightforward sector-based problem : it cannot be solved by a mere search for better forms of administrative and technical support.
• La petite exploitation agricole au Chili. Front populaire-gouvernement militaire (1938-1979) - Ximena Valdés. S. p. 73-88
  The Small Chilean Agricultural Farm. Popular Front-Military Government (1938-1979). The petty agricultural household has undergone during the past forty years all the consequences of the social and economic transformations of the country. The small farmers who had been until 1962 subordinated to the hacienda system, became suddenly dependant on the co-operative and the agro-food industries created by the various reforms promoting the modernization of agriculture (1962-1973). But rare were the minifundios which managed to survive though they were the main supply of basic food items consumed by the poor rural and urban population. The rural depopulation increases faster in spite of the fact that the urban labor market is totally saturated since 1950. Forms of precarious work amplify. Migrants settle on small plots on the outskirts of the towns and form a rural proletariat surviving only due to the multiplicity of its occupations, while concentration brings land in the hands of a few wealthy people.
• Variations actuelles sur un vieux thème andin : l'idéal vertical - Antoinette Fioravanti-Molinié p. 89-107
  Modern Variations on an Old Andean Theme : the Vertical Ideal. It is now time to make a synthesis of the various expressions in present day Andean societies of the vertical ideal of self-sufficiency as defined by J.V. Murra for the pre-hispanic Andes. The author makes a typology of these expressions, emphasizing both its limited and provisional character. She illustrates it with examples taken from her personal investigations as well as from works already published or in preparation. She distinguishes two types of access to the ressources of the various ecological levels to be found in the Andes : the control of a territory located at different levels and the access to their products through barter. In the first category two types are distinguished : control of the multiple levels amongst a group of families, as exemplified by the Macha and the Laymi, North of Potosi ; control of the multiple levels within each family, which can take two different forms according to whether the territory of the community is continuous or discontinuous. The first form is illustrated by the Q'eros (Cuzco) whose territory is made up of levels which are distant from one another, and by San Juan (in the valley of Chancay) whose territory is made of levels which are close to each other ; the second form is illustrated by Sibayo (Caylloma) which takes the type of a pre-hispanic «archipelago», and by various examples taken from the Sacred Valley of Cuzco which show the adaptation of the vertical ideal to the colonial type hacienda, to the market economy and finally to the co-operatives set up ty the peruvian land reform. The different forms of barter are analysed inasmuch as the follow up territorial control. Finally these variations in the present manifestations of the vertical ideal suggest the notion of a development cycle in the tactics of control.
• Le système d'exploitation des communautés de San Juan de Uchucuanicu (Pérou) et de Mojsa-Huma (Bolivie) - François Greslou p. 109-125
  The Exploitation Systems of San Juan de Uchucuanicu (Peru) and Mojsa-Huma (Bolivia) Communities. The national economic system has different effects on peasant communities depending upon their production systems and their socio-economic context. San Juan comuneros are integrated into the national economy through speculative fruit production. Because of the strong communal organization and resource management of San Juan, economic development will occur simultaneously for all the producers. Mojsa-Huma comuneros are integrated into the national economy through the labor market and its communal structures are weaker. In this community the economic development of some members will be at the expense of others, who have to migrate.
• La paysannerie indienne des hautes terres du Chiapas (Mexique). De l'intégration au développement séparé - Henri Favre p. 127-156
  The Indian Peasantry in the Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. From Integration to a Separate Development. At the end of the fifties, the society in the highlands of Chiapas, South Mexico, was htill traditional and divided into Indians and Ladinos. But in the sixties, important changes occured as a consequence of the integration of the area into the national market, which altered the social relationships as a whole. The structure of domination which maintained the peasantry in their Indian habits disaggregated. Communities became stratified and changed into open rural collectivities. Their members partly ceased to be peasants. But the saturation of the labour market induced the government to give up their efforts to integration and assimilation, and started to organize the Indians within their ethnic structures, apart from the rest of society.
• Quelques aspects spécifiques de la colonisation tzeltal dans la forêt Lacandone (Mexique) - Frédérick Port-Levet p. 157-172
  Some Specific Aspects of the Tzeltal Colonization in the Lacandone Forest. The Tzeltal migration in Chiapas, Mexico, is an interesting example for many reasons. It shows the extreme disintegration of the traditional structure of the old indegenous lands. It also testifies to the Tzeltal's spontaneous and definite will to find a place that might compensate the many forms of deprivations endured by the Indian societies in Latin America. The article does not discuss all the events experienced by the Tzeltal peasantry, but only their specific aspects and particularly the contradictions they have known ; then it tries to show how the new communities' plans for living in the forest were made impossible as soon as the area was given clear productive aims by the national society. The settlers' coercive authority and the gathering of thousands of them, have neutralized and distorted the collective plan of the migrant natives ; they have also allowed an incoherent and preposterous intervention which has placed the natives in an extreme situation, an impasse which irrevocably impairs their conquest of an autonomous status.
• Le café en Colombie. Une production, une paysannerie. - Pierre Gilhodes p. 173-188
  Coffee Growing in Columbia : Production and Peasantry. Columbia has been producing coffee for a century. The country has become the second exporter in the world. For the last ten years the world coffee market has been brnefeting the producers. This new situation has favoured a revolution in growing habits, and the conditions of production in Columbian plantations are being transformed. After the eviction of many small producers, new classes of important planters and above all, of average farmers, all relatively prosperous, are now rising and supporting the political and social regime in Columbia. These new and geographically restricted structures will be consolidated according to the future prospects of the world market and the ability of coffee growers to negotiate with the Columbian state. Will the Federation of coffee growers have the power to represent these planters and play the required part ?

• Notes et commentaires

  • Les agriculteurs des Cordillères sont-ils des paysans ? Éléments pour un débat - Isac Chiva p. 189-205
• Orientations documentaires - M.-E. Handman, J. Angelopoulos p. 207-217