From Competition to Cooperation: Threats, Opportunities, and Organizational Survival in the Salvadorean Peasant Movement

1 The mid-1990s in El Salvador were marked by a resurgence of popular protest fol- lowing several years of relative quiescence in social movement activity. At the forefront of the emergent wave of protest were tens of thousands of peasants who mobilized to demand the cancellation of the deuda agropecuaria. This was an un- payable $400 million debt they had acquired as beneficiaries of the 1980 Agrarian Reform and several subsequent land transfer programmes. The debt cancellation movement, spearheaded in 1995 by the Alianza Democrática Campesina (ADC), soon broadened to include a new coalition called the Foro para la Defensa y Recu- peración del Sector Agropecuario (or Foro for short). But despite their nearly iden- tical goals, ideology, and tactics, for nearly the first year and a half of the debt can- cellation struggle, the ADC and the Foro did not combine forces. Instead, they were bitter rivals in this period. Eventually, however, they established a collabora- tive partnership that was later joined by several other organizations of indebted peasants and farm-owners. In analyzing the evolution of the relationship between the two main protago- nists of debt cancellation, this paper seeks to understand both the forces that kept them apart despite common goals and tactics, and the factors that eventually led them to unite. A growing body of research on the conditions that favour coalition building in social movements points to the importance of both threats to movement participants and political opportunities for movement success. But there have been few empirical studies of intra-movement competition, and fewer still of what hap- pens when factors exist for both cooperation and competition. The Salvadorean case illustrates the need for historical analysis which pays attention to changes over time in the degree or intensity of these factors. I argue that threats to the indebted peasants' access to land led to the birth of the debt cancellation movement and, along with the emergence of political opportunities, simulated united action within the ADC and the Foro. But threats and opportunities in the early phase of the struggle were not sufficient to overcome the resource pressures fuelling their ri- valry. It was only when incentives intensified further, and when failure to cooper- ate threatened to tarnish the public image of the movement, that the two coalitions resolved to present a united voice. Most of the research for this paper was carried out between September 1995 and August 1997, with some follow-up work in the summer of 2002. The research consisted of in-depth interviews with leaders and members of the organizations pursuing debt cancellation, analysis of movement-generated documents, news arti- cles, and secondary sources, and ethnographic observations of peasant meetings