Rondas Campesinas Research Articles

Reclaim Conservation: Conservation Discourse and Initiatives of the Rondas Campesinas, North-Eastern Peru

Global conservation fails to stop or, as in most cases, even reduce the rapidly intensifying extinction crisis. Hence, alternatives to current dominant conservation ideologies and practices need to be explored. The Rondas Campesinas (Peasant Patrols) drive the largest and most influential grassroots movement in northeastern Peru, one of the most biodiverse and environmentally-threatened places on Earth. The environment is of paramount importance to the Rondas Campesinas and plays a central role in their culture. Rondas Campesinas members take on dynamic roles as leaders and initiators of conservation efforts in their local area, including creation of reserves, implementation of control of natural resource use and transnational extractive operations, and environmental education. This article argues that, although inexperienced, the Rondas Campesinas provide a template for effective in-situ conservation solutions, while highlighting the shortfalls of current mainstream conservation.

Securitisation and militias during civil war in Peru

The article analyses the effects of the rhetoric and politics of security on everyday lives in indigenous communities during civil war in Peru, 1980–1995. The article draws attention to the rise of accidental killings, intra- and inter-communal rivalry and violence, and the long-term disruption of traditional mechanisms of conflict resolution as direct effects of the operationalisation of threat as the basis for recruitment of rondas campesinas, peasant self-defence groups, in counter-insurgency operations against Sendero Luminoso. The article utilises the analysis of the effects of securitisation in the Peruvian case to reflect broadly on academic debates on counter-insurgency (COIN), non-state armed actors and subnational dynamics during violent conflict. In particular, the co-optation of local militias is critically discussed from a principal-agent dilemma perspective. While local proxies are useful for defeating insurgent groups, once given autonomy in material (i.e. arms) and immaterial (i.e. legitimacy) ways these forces can get out of (state) hand.

Struggle from the margins: Juridical processes and entanglements with the Peruvian state in the era of mega-mining

This paper examines the creation of spaces of legal marginalization for anti-mining activists in the region of Cajamarca, Peru. Central state interests in promoting the course of extractive ‘development’ have simultaneously undermined many of the legal conditions for political participation and rights assumed in ‘developed’ liberal democratic states. Based on a series of interviews in Cajamarca, I examine how legal marginalization is experienced in a nation-state where citizens are “guaranteed” fundamental human and indigenous rights. I highlight two processes: the transfer of jurisdiction of Conga Mine cases from Cajamarca to Lambayeque and the systematic archiving of activists’ claims. These processes reveal the manner in which political actors co-produce paradoxical spaces of law that are played out in the daily lives of activists. I argue that the “Rule of Law” is rendered flexible and that members of rural communities and grass-roots organizations, such as the legally-recognized Rondas Campesinas, are actively positioned in marginalized legal spaces outside the functioning of regular juridical processes.

No todas las rondas son comites de autodefensa y viceversa. Los tipos de rondas campesinas

En el prescntc texto se Presen tan los rasgos generales de la insri rución con ocida C(.1mo la ronda campesina -su origen, su historia, su distribución y sus caracterisricas-e- en términos gcncrale», Pero se insiste en 1;1 importancia de distinguir entre los diversos tipos de rondas campesinas, pues tienen dinámicas sociales y culturales muy diferentes. Se preselllóln cuatro tipos de rondas campesinas: las rondas campesinas originales que nacieron en regiones del norte del Perú donde se había llevado a cabo la reforma agraria y donde los campesinos son dueños de sus propias granjas, las rondas campesinas en comunidades con tenencia comunal de la tierra, las rondas campesinas en la selva amazónica y [inulmcnte los comités de aurodefcnsa quc fueron ideadas desde arriba, desde el gobierno.

La ronda campesina en una comunidad campesina en el norte del Perú: La Toma en Cajamarca.

Este artículo analiza las rondas campesinas como instituciones de autodefensa creadas por las comunidades serranas del Perú. El caso en estudio trata de las rondas de la comunidad La Toma, Cajamarca, en la sierra norte del Perú. Las rondas campesinas fueron creadas durante la década de 1970 para evitar las agresiones a la propiedad comunal tanto de parte del Estado como de los terratenientes. Además, las rondas campesinas sirvieron como una organización poderosa durante el conflicto interno contra Sendero Luminoso desde 1980 hasta entrada la década de 1990. En tales procesos, las rondas de La Toma demostraron ser una institución verdaderamente representativa de los derechos de su comunidad y esta es la hipótesis que se busca demostrar.

Environmentalism and Social Protest: The Contemporary Anti‐mining Mobilization in the Province of San Marcos and the Condebamba Valley, Peru

During recent years, a rapid expansion in large‐scale mining activity has generated a host of protests in Peru, as rural populations have attempted to defend their livelihood and environment. This article examines the genesis and trajectory of one such mobilization that emerged in the province of San Marcos and neighbouring Condebamba Valley, located in the northern Andean department of Cajamarca. The social movement's internal organization, strategy, tactics and repertoires of struggle are analyzed. Practices inherited from the rondas campesinas (nightwatch patrols) are seen to have exercised an important influence in shaping its modus operandi, which contrasts in key respects with the behaviour of other anti‐mining protests in Peru, such as Majaz. The article concludes with an assessment of how shifting power relations within the state might influence the chances of successful collective action in the countryside.

Rondas Campesinas in the Peruvian Civil War: Peasant Self‐defence Organisations in Ayacucho

Despite the fact that the Shining Path guerrilla movement in Peru enjoyed initial peasant support, the emergence and spread of rondas campesinas or self‐defence committees in the Andean highlands of Ayacucho was principally a response against coercion and violence exerted by Shining Path against the very same peasantry. This article seeks to demonstrate that the ronda phenomenon must be understood as part of the complex changes brought about by the proliferation of violence in the Peruvian Andes. The spread of rondas campesinas cannot be reduced to a mere counterinsurgent strategy imposed by the security forces on the rural communities; communal initiative and peasant ‘agency’ were, at certain stages, at least as important. Only with the rise to power of Fujimori were the self‐defence committees formally incorporated in the state’s anti‐guerrilla strategy. Subsequently, with the reduction in the level of violence, self‐defence committees have been seeking new roles in relation to the challenges of re‐civilianisation and reconstruction.

Nightwatch: The Politics of Protest in the Andes (review)

Nightwatch: The Politics of Protest in the Andes. ORIN STARK. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1999; 330 pp. In his ambitiously understated book Nightwatch, Orin Starn offers an ethnography of peasant patrols (rondas campesinas) in Peru. The book traces the rondas from their emergence in the mid-1970s through their apparent decline in the late 1990s. These dates bracket a set of strikingly transformative moments in a range of overlapping fields of inquiry of interest to Starn. In Peru they span a period marked by increasing evidence of the limits of land reforms implemented in the late 1960s, by economic crises of debt and spiraling inflation, by the increasing violence and terror resulting from the Sendero Luminoso and Tupac Amaru guerrilla movements as well as from government counterinsurgency efforts, and by the socioeconomic impact of neo-liberal economic reforms and correlated political and social developments under the regime of Alberto Fujimori. These dates also bookend a period of shifting conventional wisdom about the politics and possibilities of peasant mobilization and revolutionary reforms in post Cold War Latin America, as well as elsewhere. Finally, the period of the rondas is marked by sharp challenges to anthropology and the questioning of many of the conventions of Andean ethnography. One way to view this book is as an effort to line up these various issues as they are refracted through the lens of the rondas-or, perhaps better, through the lens of Stam's encounter with the rondas. While this effort is largely successful, the breadth of themes Starn strives to weave together sometimes limits the depth of analysis presented in the book. The rondas emerged as a local response to a moment of crisis. Despite land reforms that promised to end generations of oppression and injustice, these conditions endured compounded by a national economy spinning out of control. Faced with what is remembered today as a period of chaos and lawlessness characterized by an epidemic of cattle rustling, highlands farmers organized nightly civil patrols. On the nightwatch, peasant ronderos did more than keep their cattle from being poached. They sought to reestablish conditions of local integrity, a sense of social order that was not being provided by the state. In many cases the community they consolidated came to be defined in part through participation in the rondas themselves, and through tenets of law, order, and right conduct enforced by the patrols. Marital disputes and sexual scandal along with rustling and thievery became objects of ronda vigilance. So too did the corruption and laziness of local police and government officials. From their point of origin in the town of Chota, the rondas emerged as a widespread self-conscious peasant movement, celebrated by NGOs, by some political parties, in media accounts, and in popular music. Analytically, Stam's account is poised somewhere between the situated texture of a given ronda (focused largely on two cases: the community of Tunnel Six in northern Peru, and the Chota valley in the vicinity of Cajamarca) and a wider view of the rondero movement. His main chapters review the history of the rondas, the practices of ronda justice, the position of women in the rondas, the articulation of the rondas with translocal and transnational networks of NGOs, and the eventual decline of ronda leadership in the confluence of local in-fighting, the corruption of power, and the shifting terrain of Peruvian civil society in the last decade. The account is larded with rich ethnographic data evocatively presented; this is a nicely written book. Yet Stam's dogged commitment to leaving no levels of analysis unlinked has the curious effect in places of flattening the ethnographic texture of the work, of rendering what is a well fleshed out narrative as a string of thinner anecdotes. The multifaceted insightfulness of Starn's analysis-with regard to Andean themes, with regard to scholarship on Latin America, and with regard to broader discussion in anthropology and cognate disciplines-is impressively evident throughout the book. …

Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980-1995

Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980-1995

The Rise of theRondas Campesinasin Peru

The rondas campesinas (literally, 'peasant rounds') in Peru are organs of community justice. Existing primarily in rural communities, they have a history of several centuries, but have undergone recent transformations in their functions and their relationship with the state. The rondas campesinas are formed by their own members in the peasant communities. Their primary objective is the fight against abigeas (cattle rustlers). To this end they were organized in shifts with compulsory participation by the men. They were found necessary as a result of the widespread corruption of officials, mainly the police and the judiciary who persistently failed to prosecute these criminals and who in many cases were suspected of complicity in their activities. Their functions have been progressively expanded to include activities other than self-defence and nightwatch patrols. They have come to cover activities of daily life such as development projects, the control and prosecution of some officials, and the settlement of family, land and other disputes in a parallel administration of justice (Bonifaz 1991: 165). They were finally recognized officially in the 1980s. In the early 1990s government set up Self-Defence Committees or Armed Rondas Campesinas modelled on the popular rondas campesinas Origins and Evolution The origins of the rondas campesinas cannot be strictly determined. We cannot say that they were born in a given time in the country's history. We can however locate their emergence if we refer to the historical research done on the Incanato. In the social organization of the old Inca empire, we find three large groups, those of royalty, nobility and the common people. This last stratum was formed by three orders: the hatun runa, the mitimaes and the yanaconas. Historians agree that the most prominent sector was that of the mitimaes. They had the most important role

The Making of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity, Strategy, and Democracy.

* Introduction: Theory and Protest in Latin America Today Arturo Escobar and Sonia E. Alvarez. Conceptualizing Social Movements In Contemporary Latin America * Social Movements: Actors, Theories, Expectations Fernando Caldern, Alejandro Piscitelli, and Jos Luis Reyna. * Marxism, Feminism, and the Struggle for Democracy in Latin America Norma Stoltz Chinchilla. * The Study of New Social Movements in Latin America and the Question of Autonomy Judith Adler Hellman. * Culture, Economics, and Politics in Latin American Social Movements Theory and Research A. Escobar. The Making Of Collective Identities * I Dreamed of Foxes and Hawks'': Reflections on Peasant Protest, New Social Movements, and the Rondas Campesinas of Northern Peru Orin Starn. * From Resistance to Social Movement: The Indigenous Authorities Movement in Colombia Mara Teresa Findji. * Power, Gender, and Development: Popular Women's Organizations and the Politics of Needs in Ecuador Amy Conger Lind. * The Venezuelan Ecology Movement: Symbolic Effectiveness, Social Practices, and Political Strategies Mara Pilar Garca. * Rethinking the Study of Social Movements: The Case of Christian Base Communities in Urban Brazil John Burdick. * Homosexual Identities in Transitional Brazilian Politics Edward MacRae. Articulating Strategies And Democratizing Democracy * Feminisms in Latin America: From Bogot to San Bernardo Nancy Saporta Sternbach, Marysa Navarro-Aranguren, Patricia Chuchryk, and S. E. Alvarez. * The Evolution of Urban Popular Movements in Mexico Between 1968 and 1988 Vivienne Bennett. * Radical Opposition Parties and Squatters Movements in Pinochet's Chile Cathy Schneider. * Democratization and the Decline of Urban Social Movements in Uruguay: A Political-Institutional Account Eduardo Canel. * Popular Movements in the Context of the Consolidation of Democracy in Brazil Ruth Corra Leite Cardoso. * Social Movements and Political Power in Latin America Orlando Fals Borda. * Conclusion: Theoretical and Political Horizons of Change in Contemporary Latin American Social Movements S. E. Alvarez and A. Escobar. *

Peasant Vigilante Committees in Northern Peru

In December, 1976, the peasants of Cuyumalca, a small, dispersed rural settlement in the northern Peruvian mountain department of Cajamarca, organized the first of what have become known as the rondas campesinas, village level vigilante committees whose primordial aim was from the first and continues to be that of putting an end to robbery, both professional cattle rustling and petty thievery. The rondas patrol roads, trails, pastures and fields