Peasant Resistance in Times of Economic Affluence: Lessons From Paraguay

• Published date: 01 March 2025
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140241237478
• Author: Liliana Rocío Duarte Recalde,Germán Feierherd,Jorge Mangonnet,María Victoria Murillo
• Date: 01 March 2025

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2025, Vol. 58(3) 494–525

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140241237478

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Peasant Resistance in

Times of Economic

Aff‌luence: Lessons From

Paraguay

Liliana Roc´

ıo Duarte Recalde

1

, Germ´

an Feierherd

2

,

Jorge Mangonnet

3

, and Mar´

ıa Victoria Murillo

4



Abstract

Contrary to the established belief that low agricultural prices fuel peasant

rebellion, our study investigates the surge in peasant unrest during a period of

high agricultural prices. The transition to capital-intensive agriculture, char-

acterized by reduced labor demand and heightened entry barriers, prompts

landowners to expand into the agricultural frontier during periods of price

increases. In these frontier regions, the soils, while comparatively less suitable,

become economically viable for commercial agriculture when crop prices are

high. This scenario sets the stage for heightened collective resistance, partic-

ularly where organizational capacities and subsistence communities provide

peasants with symbolic and material resources to resist land encroachment.

We provide evidence of this argument by using unique municipal-level data

from Paraguay between2000 and 2014, a period of rising yet f‌luctuating prices.

Our study shows how the interplay between technological advancements in

agricultureand global market forcesreshape the geography of peasantrebellion.

1

Universidad Católica de Asunción, Asunción, Paraguay

2

Universidad de San Andr´

es, Buenos Aires, Argentina

3

Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

4

Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jorge Mangonnet, Department of Political Science, Vanderbilt University, 230 Appleton Place,

Nashville, TN 37203, USA.

Email: jorge.mangonnet@vanderbilt.edu

Data Availability Statement included at the end of the article

Keywords

conf‌lict processes, social movements, politics of growth/development, Latin

American politics

Introduction

Scholarly studies suggest that low agricultural prices fuel peasant rebellion

(Dube & Vargas, 2013;Guardado, 2018;Hidalgo et al., 2010;Scott, 1976).

However, the 2000s surge in peasant unrest occurred during a period of

booming prices. Peasants in the agricultural frontiers of Africa, Latin

America, and Southeast Asia mobilized to resist the expansion of agro-

industrial production (e.g., Clements & Fernandes, 2013;Grasse, 2022;

Lapegna, 2016;Lund, 2018;Ondetti, 2008). This raises a critical question:

What drives cycles of peasant unrest during times of high agricultural prices?

The prevailing assumption in the literature is that commercial agriculture is

labor-intensive (Samuels & Thomson, 2021,2022), an assumption held true

for certain crops like coffee or rice. However, the recent shift towards capital-

intensive agriculture reduces labor demand (Nin-Pratt et al., 2015) while

raising the cost of entry to new producers of agricultural commodities

(Gunderson et al., 2014). Additionally, capital-intensive agriculture facilitates

the expansion of commercial farming activities to agricultural frontiers, where

soils tend to be less suitable (Newell-McGloughlin & Burke, 2014;Rada,

2013).

This shift to capital-intensive agriculture has a profound impact on peasant

livelihoods and patterns of peasant rebellion. First, capital-intensive agri-

culture requires costly technologies (e.g., mechanization) that reduce the need

for farm labor and create barriers to entry for new producers. Excluded from

commercial agriculture, peasants then become increasingly reliant on land

access for survival, settling on agricultural frontiers where lands are available

but less suitable for commercial production. Second, rising prices of capital-

intensive crops makes frontier lands appealing for prof‌it as new technologies

allow commercial production in less suitable soils, hence incentivizing

landowners to expand into the agricultural frontier where peasant cultivators

are now settled. This expansion of capital-intensive crops generates dis-

tributive conf‌lict over land that may prompt peasant resistance.

When confronted with land encroachment, peasants can either exit—by

selling their land and migrating to cities—or engage in collective resistance.

Resistance requires material and symbolic resources to coordinate contentious

collective action. Local organizational capacities—i.e., peasant support

groups such as leagues, cooperatives, or committees—provide leadership,

skills, and frames (Brockett, 2005;Kurtz, 2004), whereas the communal

practice of subsistence agriculture promote autonomy, solidarity, and

Duarte Recalde et al. 495

reciprocity (Scott, 1976;Wolf, 1969), thus facilitating collective defensive

behavior. Therefore, we expect increased peasant resistance against land

encroachment during price hikes where organizational capacities and sub-

sistence communities are prevalent.

We examine this argument in Paraguay during the 2000s commodities

boom. In this period, Paraguay became a top producer of capital-intensive

crops, especially soybeans, expanding commercial agriculture eastward into

the country’s agricultural frontier, the Eastern Region, where peasants had

settled in the 1960s and 1970s.

We collected unique municipal-level data on various types of rural

unrest based on newspaper archives spanning 2000–2014, a time of high

yet f‌luctuating agricultural prices (Kabundi & Zahid, 2023). We combine

cross-sectional variation in land suitability, as determined by agroclimatic

factors, for Paraguay’s most exported capital-intensive agricultural

commodities—soybean, maize, and sugar—with exogenous annual vari-

ation in the international prices of these crops to asses how the expansion

of capitalized agriculture sparks peasant resistance. Our regression models

indicate that a rise in prices heightens the intensity of peasant resistance,

especially in the Eastern Region’s municipalities. We also show that this

differential effect is heightened in municipalities where organizational

capacities and communal subsistence agriculture are prevalent. We sup-

plement these econometric f‌indings with qualitative evidence, including an

anthropologist’s ethnographic account and semi-structured, in-depth in-

terviews contextualized through hyperlinks—as suggested by Moravcsik

(2010).

1

Two conditions delimit the scope of our argument. One is a geographic

dualism in agricultural production (e.g., Duncan & Rutledge, 1978). That is, a

frontier region separated from the modern, central belts of commercial ag-

riculture and state presence, lacking integration into markets, property rights,

access to credit, sparsely settled, and mostly dedicated to subsistence activities

by a local peasantry. Critically, state weakness on the frontier—in particular,

in the form of absent or ill-def‌ined property rights—is what enables land-

owners to encroach on peasant lands.

2

A second condition is democracy (e.g.,

Brockett, 2005). Military dictatorships in the 1970s repressed, incarcerated,

and killed peasant activists, forcing them to go underground. Democracies can

resort to coercive means to dissuade disruptive contentious activities, but they

are less likely to suppress peasants by employing violence in an unconf‌ined

manner. Thus, democracies afford aggrieved peasants the opportunity to

collectively resist land encroachment.

Our argument on positive price shocks, capital-intensive crops, and or-

ganizational resources in the context of dual rural societies and democracy is

not unique to Paraguay. Northeastern rural unions and the Landless Workers’

Movement stirred peasants in the Argentine Chaco (Lapegna, 2016) and

496 Comparative Political Studies 58(3)