This is a CTP of initiative: La Via Campesina/MNCI (Argentina)
The origins of the MNCI date back to the 1970s, when the first peasant organizations were consolidated in which the agrarian leagues (associated with the Argentine Agrarian Federation) were consolidated, groups of technicians of the National Institute of Agricultural Technology and others Groups linked to the Catholic Church (particularly some priests engaged in the liberation theology).
Since then, different agrarian and peasant movements have been organized in different provinces. However, in the 1990s there was a complex articulation between rural producers, human rights groups and young professionals.
The creation of the MNCI was the culmination of almost 20 years of work in which the space was consolidated through local organizations. The referents of the movement define it as follows:
"Our idea was to achieve a national construction that is genuine, not that we got together five and signed a document and then we say that we are the movement. That took us ten years, already with the organizations consolidated provincially and with a strong national articulation. It was ten years for us to call ourselves the National Indigenous Peasant Movement. It was in 2003 after a long process that we just say that we are the National Indigenous Peasant Movement."
From that moment, the movement established as central axes of its work to advance in an Integral Agrarian Reform and the Food Sovereignty through Popular Organization.
The MNCI understands very well how was the process of co-production that took place for its creation as a national movement:
“The economic and political changes that our country has experienced since the mid-1970s have gone through all activities and regions. Peasant families have not been foreign to them. The privatization of public goods, the concentration of our wealth, the deregulation that made the most powerful strong and the external opening that gave us defenseless hands to the market basically hit the popular sectors. By the hand of all that increased the poverty, the unemployment and our revenues fell. This happened in the countryside and in the cities, from the north to the south of our country.
But other things happened in the country. It also happened that the neoliberal model applied its own recipe for the field, something similar to the other, but with some condiments of its own. Neoliberalism formed a model of agribusiness driven and dominated by large transnational corporations and the technologies they control. They are the main link in a chain that did not leave space without coopting: from the supermarkets that distribute the food to the large industry that processes them, from the companies producing seeds to those of pesticides.
This model impacted the lives of our families because it displaced and subordinated our productions, which are oriented to popular consumption, which are based on family work and community exploitation, which are concerned with the care of the environment in which our families have lived since Several generations ago.
The new model pushed the expansion of the agricultural frontier, which is sometimes referred to as a success, but which meant nothing more than the expansion of monocultures and transgenics over fruit trees, pigs, cows, sheep, Corn, cotton, legumes, that is, over the productive diversity we had and needed, over our mountains and our Yungas, all that allowed to ensure a varied, sufficient and accessible food supply for our towns and cities.
All this, all these transformations lived in the countryside and the city during these last thirty years pushed us to come together, to discuss our reality, our problems and proposals, to organize ourselves.
The organizations of the National Indigenous Peasant Movement were born to defend us from the fate of hunger and misery to which we are subjected by the neoliberal model applied in the country. But on the way we were getting to know our strength and our voice.”
On the other hand, co-production was also developed in the process of articulation between different social groups, including small producers, institutions such as INTA, religious groups, political parties and relations with other organizations in bordering countries such as the of the brazilian movement of Landless Peasants and the CLOC.
The birth of the National Indigenous Peasant Movement occurs as a consequence of the effects produced by the application of neoliberal policies in Argentina during the 1990s. Within the framework of these policies, the nation's agriculture secretariat approved in 1996 the use of Transgenic seeds of the main export crops in the country (soybean, maize and wheat).
This measure strengthened a trend of concentration of land tenure that had already been in place since the 1970s. This process was accompanied by a process of depopulation of rural areas and the settlement of an increasingly rural population in the margins of the big cities. Agricultural production based on the use of transgenics led to a reorientation of production in export crops such as soybeans. The genetic improvements also allowed to extend the agricultural frontier causing tensions with the peasant populations that were located in those zones. These tensions resulted in open conflicts in which agricultural entrepreneurs received the help of different provincial governments and judicial officials.
On the other hand, in 1994 a reform of the Argentine National Constitution materialized. One of the changes that were introduced was the recognition of the rights of the native inhabitants of the national territory before the organization of the state. Among the recognized rights was that of community tenure of land. Since the mid-1990s, different conflicts have emerged as a result of attempts by large producers to evict peasant populations.
This situation was aggravated at the beginning of the decade of the 2000 from the deep economic, political and social crisis that suffered the country in late 2001 and early 2002. The devaluation of the peso made the export of agricultural products more profitable and deepened Tensions over the exploitation of land.
In 2003, a process of political normalization of the country began with the holding of presidential elections in which Néstor Kirchner won.
The process of conformation and consolidation of the MNCI was incorporating challenges in an incremental way. At the beginning it was proposed as the main objective to make known the reality and the peasant struggles, to leave the invisibilization and to break in from the place of the excluded to be included in a new political system. It also aims to weave alliances and continue to build critical consensus with others and others, but fundamentally to become active political subjects and recognized by those who exercise political power, and also by the community.
At a second level, the need arises to build a consensus on a horizon that guides the actions of the different member organizations with their different trajectories. To this end, the slogans of "Agrarian Reform, Food Sovereignty, Territory, work and justice!", were established.
This construction and consolidation of critical consensus has intensified over time. In the conflict of the ruralist entities with the national government (subject to be discussed in a specific section) the peasant and indigenous movements of Argentina articulated and made a common declaration of interests.
The construction of critical consensus, based on the articulation with various organizations of the countryside and the city has been a constant in the MNCI. Food sovereignty is fully linked to the right to food of the excluded of the city. Access to healthy and cheap food is one of the great challenges facing both peasant and urban movements. That is why for years the MNCI has built marketing channels and the search for policies and exchanges that facilitate the arrival of these products to the marginal neighborhoods, organizations of unemployed, etc.
Another aspect is related to the idea of Agrarian Reform, raised in terms of the return to the field of those who were expelled from it. The miserable villages of Buenos Aires, and of the big cities, are composed in many cases of peasant families who had to emigrate because of the impossibility of reproducing their life in the countryside. For this reason the MNCI's struggle is also for the access to the land of those who do not have it and who live in absolute marginality, violence, unemployment, and urban settlement delinquency.
The formation of the MNCI in 2003 was the result of a long process experienced by the different organizations that compose it. The strengthening and expansion of the peasant movement at territorial level was a conscious process and sought by its main drivers.
It is likely that the particular situation experienced in 2001 and 2002 precipitated the events. Also, the arrival to the power of Néstor Kirchner could have been evaluated like a window of opportunity to strengthen the capacity of negotiation with the state. In particular, the position of the new government face to the liberal policies implemented during the previous decade generated new expectations:
"He was far, far away, the best president of the history of this country [...]. Peasants and indigenous peoples acceded to active public policies that were previously predetermined in programs designed by the World Bank and implemented by technocrats trained in the management of poverty.“
"What marks a very big inflection is, in 2005, the issue of the ALCA. That's when we decided that we had to look at things again, because Nestor (Kirchner) has put the country and the stadium so Chavez can say 'Fuck ALCA (Free Trade Area of the Americas)' showed that other things were being played. [...] We began to recognize that around Kirchnerism there is a Latin American project."
The learning process that can be identified in this CTP is related to the experience accumulated by the organizations that formed the MNCI from 2003. This experience goes back to decades of struggle and organization.
“When democracy returned in 1983, we implemented a rural literacy plan for Alfonsín, several of us introduced ourselves to keep up with that. That made the groups grow a little more in each place and then we began to propose to the fellow peasants to sit down with other people, to stop being isolated, since in Santiago there were people who were doing the same thing. That took us three or four years, until about 1989. Only then could we convince them that zonal organizations and cooperatives had to be established. The movement was expanded by the problem of land, there were already land problems with many buyers from Cordoba, with the subject of cotton."
At the level of public discourse, peasant organizations that are members of the MNCI are also more complex. In declarations of peasant organizations of the country that form part of the MNCI a significant discursive passage is observed. Until the 1990s, the prevailing motto was: "Land, Labor and Justice". From its link with other organizations at regional level and its process of institutionalization, variations are observed: "Integral Agrarian Reform. Food Sovereignty. Territory, Labor and Justice."
"We dream of creating a new power, popular and grassroots, where families and communities participate, with autonomy and independence, and contribute to a democratic political and participatory alternative with other sectors of the people. We love the earth and nature, we feel part of it. Our commitment is for a social change that contemplates the recovery of lands from displaced families, the return to the countryside of excluded families, and access to land and water by those who want to work it. Where there are no more evictions, transgenic crops, or exploitative entrepreneurs. Comprehensive Agrarian Reform / Food Sovereignty / Territory, Labor and Justice / is a global struggle for hope."
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