Yashar 1998

Incentives to Organize: State Reforms, National Access, and Local Autonomy

• State reforms in prior regimes created allegiance among rural communities that hoped to gain access to land and the state and encouraged indigenous peoples to define themselves as peasants to gain access to state resources
• State reforms unintentionally created greater local political and economic autonomy - greater state penetration into rural areas meant more protection from local landlords
• As a result of state reforms that nominally protected rural property rights, rural men and women assumed a peasant status in the eyes of the state and practiced an indigenous identity shaped by local practices
• Recent dismantling of rural programs have elicited uncertainty about property rights and indigenous peoples’ access to the state, prompting rural organizing and protest to (re)gain access to the state and to secure local autonomy
• Rural and demands are the symbolic glue that holds diverse indigenous communities together and neoliberal state reforms are their symbolic target

Capacity: Organizational Networks

• Indigenous communities have formed trans-community networks facilitated by states, churches, unions, nongovernmental organizations
• The state tried to garner support and suppress rebellion via land reforms, which led to rural organizing and cross community networks and centered the state as the target of organizing
• Churches provided means of communication/interaction and literacy skills
• Christian ideology encouraged activism and the emergence of lay leaders

Concluding with Democracy

• Latin America’s indigenous movements have emerged in response to state reforms that dismantle class rights and community autonomy, as well as incomplete political liberalization which has neglected to support indigenous rights
• Indigenous groups have mobilized around land rights to achieve survival and autonomy