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Chapter 8
Explaining Insurgent Collective Action
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On my first visit to the Cooperativa Candelaria Un Nuevo Amanecer and the Cooperativa
Montecristo, two groups of insurgent campesinos occupying properties high on the
side of a war-ravaged volcano north of San Jorge (recall Figures 3.5 and 3.6),
I arrived a bit late at the meeting place, an isolated peasant home. I had reached
there by driving about an hour up a dry river bed (whether it was the right river
bed or not was not clear until the very end), a definite challenge for my small
pickup. As arranged at a regional meeting of the Las Marías Land Defense
Commission the previous week, I expected to meet with cooperative leaders to discuss
the history of the difficult emergence of the cooperatives in the midst of the
civil war. Rather than three or four people, I found over fifteen people gathered
in the farmyard. Another seven soon arrived. The interview took four hours, as
almost everyone, men and women alike, wanted to speak, to tell what had happened
to a brother or sister, or to tell a story of the time they occupied some property.
At the end of the interview, I asked for the names of a few people for whom
I could inquire when I returned to visit again, as I feared that I would not again
succeed in finding the place. I reiterated the strict confidence with which I
would treat the names, for the political situation was far from settled and violence
against those occupying land continued. The meeting broke up, and with their permission
I recorded the names of the leaders of the cooperatives in a notebook I kept separate
from my notes of the meeting. A few more asked if their names could also be written
down. Then one by one, every person attending the meeting came to recite his or
her name and solemnly to watch it be recorded.
As I found my way down the riverbed to the road I reflected on how this apparently
simple act of naming and being named becomes an extraordinary testament when set
in the context of a war in which tens of thousands of civilians were killed, including
loved ones of those present that day, often for nothing more than having participated
in just such a cooperative meeting.
Why are people sometimes "brave to the point of foolishness,"
bearing risks not explicable on the basis of expected outcomes (Calhoun 1991:
51)? Why did people so similarly situated in terms of their economic circumstances
before the war act so differently from one another? Why, as we have seen across
the distinct agricultural regions of Usulután, did campesinos with such
different holdings of land and relationships to landlords sometimes act so similarly?
Why in the face of mounting repression did protest deepen to armed insurgency?
And if repression played a role in the emergence of insurgency, moving a small
core of committed activists from non-violent protest to support for the armed
guerrillas, why did participation in insurgent activities continue to grow after
repression subsided significantly?
Conventional explanations for collective action based on strong communities,
political opportunity, class position, and selective incentives, while illuminating
some aspects of the Salvadoran insurgency, do not take us far in explaining insurgent
collective action in circumstances of such high risk, as we have seen in previous
chapters. Pre-existing communities and social networks were too weak to provide
the social sanctions and ongoing social bonds sufficient to overcome the collective
action problem. Networks played important roles to be sure, but they emerged during
mobilization and in part as its consequence. Liberationist networks developed
in the mid 1970s, as did covert guerrilla networks. Protest deepened to insurgency
as political opportunity narrowed in the late 1970s. After the suppression of
those networks during the period of extreme state violence, insurgent networks
gradually re-emerged as the FMLN forced authorities from some of the case-study
areas, and then spread as collective action proved feasible. Aside from the obvious
absence of medium and large landlords in insurgent ranks, support for the insurgency
once war began was only weakly related to pre-war class position. Broadly speaking,
the Salvadoran civil war pitted an insurgency championing the demands of the socially
and economically excluded against the traditional alliance of the economic elite
and the military, only a very few of whom took the risk entailed by supporting
the insurgency. But among the excluded, as we have seen, economic class position
did not map local residents neatly into the categories of insurgent and government
supporters.
Nor do material selective benefits explain participation. During the period
of extreme state violence, some residents retreated with the FMLN and thereby
gained some short-run protection from government forces (sometimes a safer course
than attempting to remain or to move toward government-held areas), but they did
not subsequently support the FMLN. Moreover, the FMLN did not attempt to protect
particular households or communities in the case-study areas. During the military
stalemate, those who did not support the insurgency had access to the meager material
benefits of the insurgency – land – without paying any contribution
beyond the coerced minimum whenever supporters did. In this sense, the insurgents
provided public goods and most residents were free-riders. In most of the Usulután
case-study areas, all households had access to land for subsistence cultivation
as a result of the FMLN’s having expelled government forces and landlords
from the area. It was the armed presence of the FMLN, not membership in a cooperative,
that assured access to land from year to year. So neither protection nor access
to land explains participation in insurgent cooperatives. Even more striking,
some of those who gained land as a result of the government’s agrarian reform
also supported the FMLN.
I first summarize the empirical findings from the case-study areas, in light
of which I give my interpretation of insurgent collective action in rural El Salvador.
(A formal model of this account is in the Appendix.) Because the empirical evidence
is inevitably open to a variety of interpretations, I consider two caveats and
then offer two additional considerations supporting the plausibility of my account.
The first is the accumulating evidence from social science experiments that reasons
similar to those I emphasize help explain the responses of subjects in experiments
exploring their propensity to cooperate in various well-controlled situations.
The second is my account’s consistency with other cases of collective action
on the part of long-subordinate social actors. In conclusion I address the implications
of the argument of this book for more general issues in the literature on collective
action, social movements, and peasant rebellion.
Continued
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