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what is meant by “Campesino” and what do they do?
- Were the majority until the 20th Century
- Can be indigenous or mestizo
- usually considered poor
- produce food for the internal market
- State and urban population depends on the peasantry,but...
- Peasantry does not really depend on the urban population and can challenge capitalist models of export-led growth and industrialization.
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What is the Agrarian Problem?
- How to make food for everyone?
- How todistribute land and become most productive?
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What is meant by “agrarian structure,”?
- set of institutions, norms, social,
- political and economic relationships governing the access to and use of land as a productive resource.
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What is the “the agrarian questions,”?
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What is the “agrarian reform” – and its potential consequences in LA?
- can be reformed to suit the desires of local elites;
- foreign corporations
Or to meet the needs of campesinos
- Eg.
- “Land to whomever farms it;” “No land can be left idle for extended periods of
- time,” etc.
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who is “La Via Campesina;”(the peasant way)?
According to Boyer and Penalva, how it did not become more popular in Honduras?
- radical international peasant organization of small and medium-scale farmers, rural women, farm workers and indigenous agrarian communities in response to neoliberalism
- Emphasizes “food sovereignty” more than just “food security” and the producers’ control over land, seeds, and water
- Boyer and Penalva argue that they dont see the need to support the more radical organizations because
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What is food sovereignty
- involves putting the food system into the communities hands
- giving control over quantity and quality of what is produced and how it is consumed
- is not subjected to fluctuating internal markets
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What is food security
- means literally just having access to food
- no choice as to how it is produced or consumed
- taking what is available
- often used interchangeably with food soverignty, but it considerably different
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Who is Rigborta Menchu
- Nobel peace prize winner
- Guatemalan peasant who claims link to the Mayan culture (quichua)
- involved with social reforms
- addressed socioeconomic inequalities in the region, particularly against landless peasants
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what lead up to the US-backed military coup against Guatemalan president Arbenz?
what happened in the aftermath?
- In guatemala president Arevalo - supported the peasantry, but couldnt do much about getting rid of the UFC because they were in charge of employing the vast majority of the population
- Arevalo began to enforce the taxes that UFC had to pay because they never legally reported the correct amount of their revenue
- President Arbenz - wanted to build a highway to bypass relying on these monopolies. He reduced rail way tariffs and so the UFC laid off thousands of workers in response to this.
- Arbenz then decided to confiscate thousands of farm acres from the company
- he decided to look at what the UFC land was worth and decided to pay them what the land was worth according to their tax documents
- UFC refused to pay the amount of what the land was worth
- in spite of this, a CIA sponsored coup is initiated and Arbenz is ousted
- a us military government is then put in place
- elites in both latin america and north america were responsible for making these rules and policies
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What are the implications (suggestions) of the “Alliance for Progress”
- Kennedy's Aim to support moderate social reforms as a means to prevent socialist revolutions, trying to prevent another Cuban revolution
- These reforms aimed to:
- calm landless angry peasantry…
- while at the same time not fundamentally undermining economic elites
- and never appearing too far to the Left…to avoid a coup!
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