CONSTRUCTING CONSERVATIVE IDENTITY:
PEASANT MOBILIZATION AGAINST REVOLUTION IN NICARAGUA*
Lynn R. Horton†
This article explores the centrality of conservative “peasant” identity in the large-scale armed
mobilization of rural Nicaraguans to oppose revolutionary change in the 1980s. Drawing on
fieldwork in the municipio of Quilalí, an epicenter of rural resistance, I argue that the
construction of a grassroots “peasant” identity, its content and boundaries, was a contested
process strongly influenced by dynamics of social class and shifting concentrations of social,
military, and political power. This case study also highlights tensions between goals of
recognition (in identity movements) and distribution (in social justice movements), and the
dilemmas that conservative movements present for those who seek to evaluate, analytically
and normatively, social movement impact.
In the 1970s, Juana Gómez lived a precarious existence working harvests and washing clothes
in a one room hut on land “borrowed” from a local cattle rancher in the mountains of northern
Nicaragua. After the revolutionary Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) took power
in 1979, government officials proposed expropriating the properties of her patrón and giving
part of the land to Juana and her two sons. Juana, however, reacted with indignation: “It
would be unjust for us to allow the Sandinistas to confiscate [the property] of the man who
out of generosity gave us our land and our house. We could never pay our patrón back in that
manner. We would never accept that.”1 Soon afterwards, Juana’s two sons joined the contra
rebels and Juana became an active civilian collaborator.
In the 1980s, more than 30,000 interior peasants (campesinos)2 like Juana served as
collaborators and combatants with the contra forces that, with extensive U.S. government
support, waged a decade-long war against the FSLN (Horton 1999). Years after the conflict
ended in 1990 with the FSLN’s electoral defeat and the contra demobilization, Juana was still
poor, landless, and as deeply opposed to the revolution as ever. Her story raises difficult
questions. Why did thousands of poor campesinos mobilize against a revolutionary
government that sought to redistribute land and resources in their favor, acting seemingly
against their own material interests? This article explores one key piece of this puzzle—the
emergence a rural collective identity and how it mediates perceptions of material interest.
Over the past decade, many Latin Americanists, disillusioned with the region’s
formal, elite-pacted democracies and hegemonic policies of economic neoliberalism, turned to
new social movement theory to explore the liberating potential of Latin American social
movements—which had in earlier decades opposed military dictatorships—to deepen
democratic practices at the grassroots (Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998; Escobar and
*
The author thanks Michael Young and the anonymous Mobilization reviewers for comments on an earlier version of
the manuscript.
†
Direct correspondenct to Lynn Horton, Department of Sociology, Chapman University, 1 University Drive, Orange,
CA 92866. E-mail: [email protected].
© Mobilization: An International Journal 9(2): 167-180
167
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Mobilization
Alvarez 1992; Roberts 1997; Slater 1994). While the strongly celebratory tone of earlier
writings has now been tempered, research has continued to highlight progressive, urban-based
social movements, while relatively few studies have explored conservative mobilization in
contemporary Latin America (Edelman 2001; Gonzalez and Kampwirth 2001).
This report broadens the comparative range of case studies by focusing on a rightwing social movement: the emergent phase of the contra mobilization in Quilalí, Nicaragua, a
center of rural resistance to the revolution. I first examine the processes through which rural
popular culture and embedded social and economic hierarchies influenced the content and
boundaries of collective identity, as local elites drew on preexisting networks and cultural
forms to shape a shared “peasant” identity in opposition to revolutionary discourse and
programs. Next, I analyze the dynamic interplay of action-reaction between state policies and
movement tactics and goals. In addition, I consider the ways in which conservative
movements like the contras may open and expand discursive space through their assertion of
“difference,” and simultaneously embody and reinforce authoritarian practices, presenting a
dilemma for those who seek to evaluate normatively social movement impact.
COLLECTIVE IDENTITY AND LATIN AMERICAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
Both resource mobilization and political opportunity structure theory have approached
grassroots grievances as relatively unproblematic, widespread, and persistent across societies.
Attention has focused instead on identifying conditions under which such grievances are
openly articulated and expressed through collective action; specifically the availability of
resources, effective organizational structures, and sets of opportunities in broader political
contexts. In Latin America, scholars have linked popular grievances to the region’s crisis in
development—broad patterns of economic and political exclusion and social authoritarianism
that persist even under formal democracy—which, it is argued, have fomented new identitybased social movements (Alvarez et al. 1998). The explanatory power of this analysis remains
limited, however, as forms of economic and social exclusion have existed in the region for
centuries. This article follows Otero and Jugenitz’s (2003) lead by exploring how culture and
class intersect to shape the emergence and timing of grievances. Specifically, it asks how
longstanding structural inequalities are transformed into subjective discontent that is acted
upon collectively (Polletta and Jasper 2001).
Key to this process is the formation of collective identities, defined by Melucci
(1985: 793) as “a shared definition of the field of opportunities and constraints offered to
collective action” in which “shared means constructed and negotiated through a repeated
process of ‘activation’ of social relationships connecting actors.” Collective identities shape
actors’ worldviews and undergird broad mobilization frames, which in turn mold grievances
against the state and types of actions to be pursued (Benford and Snow 2000). Processes of
shaping and defining collective identity are intrinsically linked to the articulation of initial and
ongoing grievances—emphasizing certain complaints, excluding others, and defining
trajectories of collective action. Actors in Latin America potentially occupy multiple subject
positions in terms of social class, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, nationality, locality,
etc. These mobilizing axes of identity are critical in delimiting the bundle of grievances that
give impetus to social organizing; yet the dynamics of collective identity formation and
maintenance are still relatively unexplored in the literature.
Much of the new social movement theory writing on collective identity formation in
Latin America assumes a priori a sharp divide between the realms of the state and the market,
which are infused with material and power inequalities, and the egalitarian peasant lifeworld as
an organic crucible of popular rebellion (Alvarez et al. 1998). This emphasis on the autonomy of
rural culture and consciousness is echoed in much of the literature on peasant mobilization in
Latin America.3 Such rural autonomy can be manifested through geographic isolation, limited
penetration of market relations, remoteness from the state, and distance from elites, which
Constructing Conservative Identity
169
enable the formation and maintenance of a more independent and critical rural consciousness.
The cultural and structural autonomy of Latin America’s grassroots may be
overstated, however. I would argue that in rural areas of Latin America, patronage and
clientelistic networks, machismo, and other exclusionary practices have not been limited to
formal political arenas, but also have penetrated civil society and the practices of everyday
life at the levels of popular culture (see Hellman 1992). Given that Latin American popular
culture incorporates both democratic and authoritarian elements, I suggest that the emergence
of identities, discourses, and movements as hegemonic or counterhegemonic should be seen
as problematic, not as a given. One can envision a struggle not simply between communities
and the state, but also within communities as to their essential values and beliefs and content
of their collective identity. Identity construction may be not simply a product of spontaneous,
organic, creative agency, but also a more self-conscious and strategic effort by more limited,
embedded or external social groups or institutions (Polletta and Jasper 2001). In other words,
a bottom-up emergence of identity does not preclude a simultaneous exercise of top-down
power in which certain actors, by virtue of their class origins, gender, etc. exercise
disproportionate influence in ongoing processes of identity formation in ways that enhance
their own power and wealth.
In addition to embedded values, norms, social networks, and hierarchies, collective
identity formation is also influenced by external institutions and actors and state responses, in
particular the form and intensity of state repression (Polletta and Jasper 2001). State policies
may contribute to an “oppositional identity” by marginalizing or discriminating against
subordinate groups—thus strengthening a collective identity that may take priority over the
internal group differences and divisions. If initial moderate movement claims are met with
state repression and violence, this may strengthen collective identity and radicalize tactics and
goals. In turn, more extreme forms of repression by the state and elites may serve to
demobilize and distance individuals from collective identities. Studies of political
consciousness in Nicaragua reinforce this notion of the dynamic nature of rural identities,
which cannot simply be “read” from structural positions, but rather are linked to complex
interactions of collective social memory, colonialism, relations with agrarian elites, market
processes, state policies, and participation in collective institutions.4
LIFE ON THE AGRICULTURAL FRONTIER
This study draws on interviews with 102 contra ex-combatants and civilian collaborators, as
well as Sandinista supporters and community leaders, in the rural municipio of Quilalí.5
Quilalí is an ideal site to explore the internal origins of the contra movement as it was the site
of the first uprising against the FSLN in 1980, and the place of origin of many of the contras’
top field commanders. During the 1980s, as many as 2,000 Quilalí residents fought or
collaborated with the contras, while in the 1990s, the most active “recontra” guerrilla
movement was based in the municipio.
Push and pull factors drew thousands of campesino migrants to the Quilalí zone in
the 1960s and 1970s to squat on government land and cut down forests to create farms and
ranches. By the mid-1970s, on the eve of the Sandinista revolution, increased market
integration and a growing scarcity of land available for settlement undermined earlier patterns
of relative economic equality. A dozen absentee large landowners (terratenientes) with close
ties to the Somoza family dictatorship controlled almost all of the muncipio’s most fertile
valley land producing cattle, tobacco, and other products for national and international
markets. After the FSLN took power, most went into exile and played little direct role in the
conflict that followed. Below them, a sector of well-off farmers and ranchers, or finqueros
with farms ranging from 100 to 500 manzanas, comprised 7% of the population and
controlled roughly one-third of Quilalí’s total land.6 Another one-third of the municipio’s
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population was middle peasants; while 58% of the population was poor peasants who owned
less than ten manzanas of land or were landless (calculated from MIDINRA 1987).
Yet, if by economic criteria social classes had emerged in the Quilalí zone, “class
consciousness,” a sense of shared identity and interests among the poor, was limited and
expressions of open class conflict were almost non-existent. Such issues are illustrated in the
experience of Noris Pardo. Too poor to purchase land of their own, Pardo’s parents worked
clearing forested land for one of Quilalí’s largest landowners. Noris Pardo explains that in the
pre-revolutionary period the poor accommodated themselves to social hierarchy:
People respected their patrones. They were like your family, your father.
We were the same; all on the same level. And no one spoke out or
complained. He [the patrón] told you, ‘I’ll give you this much,’ and no one
ever complained. . . At that time we [campesinos] were ignorant of so many
things. I didn’t know what exploitation was. Before the revolution, I was so
naïve that I thought that we the campesinos were exploiting the large
landowner (terrateniente), that he was doing us a favor when he lent us
land. (interview with author, April 1993)
In his analysis of peasant resistance in Asia, Scott (1976) highlights the importance of
the historically rooted shared norms and values of rural peoples, what he terms “moral
economy” which is nurtured within the space of rural communities that retain a large degree of
geographic and cultural autonomy. As Pardo’s comments suggest, however, in Quilalí the welloff were not geographically or culturally distant, but rather were located at the heart of local
social networks. The finqueros in particular, developed strong patron-client ties with poor
peasants and played a key ideological role as a filters and framers of information received by
Quilalí’s poor majority who had limited formal education and few alterative sources of
information.7 These patron-client ties and networks were more than simply discursive or cultural
constructs or remnants of a past era, however, as they also incorporated strong material
elements. While potentially exploitative, they also offered the poor opportunities for wage labor,
and access to land and loans, animals, and farming implements in isolated regions where state
services were extremely limited. At the same time, the local elites employed coercive measures,
such as setting cattle loose on the fields of peasants to destroy their crops, and calling upon
Somoza’s National Guard to control recalcitrant peasants.
RISE OF THE MILPAS
In the mid-1970s, small groups of FSLN guerrillas, seeking to overthrow the forty-year
Somoza family dictatorship, entered Quilalí and neighboring zones. Rather than confronting
embedded rural hierarchies, the FSLN guerrillas contacted local finqueros and utilized
preexisting family and patron-client networks to recruit collaborators and combatants. One
finquero that the FSLN recruited was Antonio Mendoza who was young, charismatic, and
upwardly mobile on the eve of the revolution, “I lived a comfortable life, with everything my
own. In 1976, I had two trucks.… I had my farm and a warehouse in town.” (interviewed May
1993). Mendoza states that he joined the FSLN guerrillas because, “We dreamed of having a
democracy, not the same as, but better than Costa Rica.” Within a year of the FLSN victory,
however, Mendoza and many of the same Quilalí finqueros who had fought against Somoza
began to organize against the revolution. In July 1980, Mendoza and other local finqueros,
organized guerrilla groups known as MILPAS (“cornfields” in Spanish) and attacked the town
of Quilalí. These small and poorly armed MILPA bands carried out limited local attacks for
the next year. By 1981, however, the material incentive of access to the burgeoning flow of
U.S. military aid led most of the original MILPA leaders like Mendoza to join the contra
forces organized by Somoza’s ex-National Guardsmen along the Honduran border.
Constructing Conservative Identity
171
Many studies from the 1980s in particular portray the contra movement as primarily
a product of external forces, specifically the U.S. government and its policies of Low Intensity
Warfare, a series of diplomatic, political, economic, and military measures against the FSLN,
which included some $400 million in military aid to the contra guerrillas (Horton 1999).8
Other studies highlight FSLN policies of the 1980s—land reform, market controls and
interventions, as well as coercive actions by Sandinista State Security and the army—which, it
is argued, created resentment among Nicaragua’s national and regional elites who perceived a
threat to their fundamental interests (Paige 1997; Spalding 1994). Such grievances were
echoed at the local level by Quilalí finqueros as the revolutionary state attempted to extend its
authority both geographically and in terms of its scope and functions in 1979 and 1980.
Finqueros like Mendoza resisted such state “encroachments” into the realms of private
property and markets on grounds of both material interests and moral outrage.9 Mendoza describes the moment when he discovered the expropriation of his grandparents’ coffee farm:
I went to my mother’s house to visit her. I asked her about our truck. I
asked about the oxen I had left there. I asked about all of our possessions.
With tears in he eyes she responded, “I told you it was communism and you
said it wasn’t. Today can’t you see what they’ve [the Sandinistas] done with
our property. Eighty families have occupied our land, taking two manzanas
each …And I was filled with anger, a person grudge against the Sandinistas.
I made my final decision to go [and join the anti-Sandinista guerrillas].
(interview with author, May 1993)
In reality, fewer than a dozen Quilalí finqueros lost their farms in the FSLN land reform in the
early 1980s, which primarily targeted the Somocista large landowners, but such individuals
were at the center of powerful family and social networks. In addition to loss of economic
privilege, these finqueros also felt their social authority threatened by new state incursions
into the their base of power, civil society, as the FSLN sought to organize the poor around a
class-based discourse. Antonio Mendoza states,
Then came a ton (un montón) of [revolutionary] organizations that the
people had never seen before, that even the [ex-FSLN] combatants had
never seen.… When they [the FSLN] organized in this way, there was
always that word, bourgeoisie.” (interview with author, May 1993)
Competing identities
Over the next three years, finqueros turned contra field commanders made numerous
recruitment incursions into Nicaragua’s mountainous interior. They were successful in
expanding contra combatants from under 1,000 to over 8,500 by the mid-1980s, while many
thousands more civilian peasant collaborators provided information, food, shelter, and others
types of support (Morales Carazo 1989: 57). In Nicaragua’s northern and central highlands,
the revolutionary government and the contra forces competed intensely to gain the support of
the middle and poor peasant majority and key to this was rural residents’ understanding and
expression of their primary identity. Through a dynamic process of state and contra actions
and reactions detailed below, two increasingly polarized identities and linked world views
emerged in Quilalí in the early 1980s: residents who identified themselves as “poor” and
“Nicaraguan,” members of broad nationalist-popular coalition joined in struggle against the
“rich” and U.S. imperialist machinations; and “peasants,” defined by a loyalty to place,
sharing a common way of life and set of interests with other settlers of Nicaragua’s rural
interior, united against urban revolutionaries and their “foreign” ideology and programs.
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Turning first to the FSLN, as predicated by state institutions and grassroots
organizations closely tied to the party, a core element of revolutionary discourse was the
concept of class-based conflict, and specifically the exploitation of the poor by the rich.10 By
the 1970s, economic stratification was an objective reality of the Quilalí zone, but what the
FSLN did in its nationalist, class-based discourse was openly question the inevitability and
moral correctness of such social and material inequality. The accumulation of land and wealth
was reframed as a largely “zero sum” process. The basis of collective identity and action by
Quilalí’s “poor Nicaraguans” lay in the common experiences of suffering under repressive
dictatorship, U.S. imperialism, and class subordination. Core values of this identity were
social justice and egalitarianism, an affirmation of the “right to life” in subsistence terms,
which implied in practice measures by the state to redistribute land and economic resources.
This revolutionary identity was also strongly nationalistic and consequently critical of the
United States and its historical pattern of intervention in the region and earlier support for the
Somoza dictatorship.
In contrast, the contra leadership strategically shaped a “peasant” identity of the
agricultural frontier that drew a fundamental divide between a unique place-linked, rural way
of life (modo de vivir) and “urban” revolutionary discourse and practices. The collective
“peasant” identity drew together the wealthy, middle, and poor residents united by rural
origins and daily life experiences of isolation, demanding physical labor, machismo, ongoing
hardship, and respect for and intimate knowledge of local environments. From the contra
“peasant” perspective, wealth in pre-revolutionary Quilalí was expansive, rather than limited,
and elites were “good men” to be emulated. This collective identity was not egalitarian, but
rather posited a social hierarchy, both in terms of social class and gender, that was
“inevitable” and “the will of God.”11 Poor campesino and ex-contra combatant Miguel
Abrego expresses this perspective:
I was talking with an EPS [Sandinista Army] lieutenant who told me…
“The rich man exploits the labor of the poor.” But I told him, “the rich need
the poor and the poor need the rich.” Now, if we’re all on the same level
what can we do? If I have someone sick, who is going to lend me 100 pesos
[córdobas]? No one. Because we’re all in the same situation. But if I go to
the rich man, he’ll lend me the money, although sooner or later I’ll have to
work with a machete for him. The rich sustain the poor. We poor need the
rich, unless we are all well off, which is never going to happen. (interview
with author, March 1993)
Abrego argues that the rich and poor are mutually dependent and that a core value of Quilalí
poor campesinos, subsistence security, is best obtained by accepting their place at the bottom
of a hierarchy where life may be hard, but at least survival is assured. And, at the core of the
contras’ mobilizing frame was the argument that all Quilalí residents, wealthy and poor, were
better off before the FSLN brought war to the mountains, a message that resonated particularly strongly from 1983 onwards, as the conflict intensified and brought tremendous dislocation, fear, and economic hardship to Quilalí residents. This conceptualization of inequality as
inevitable, and to a degree benevolent, also carried over to the international arena as Quilalí
contra leaders represented the U.S. government as a friend of Nicaragua who fulfilled a
patrón like role, protecting and guiding the weaker, poorer nation of Nicaragua. Other core
values of the contra collective “peasant” identity of the agricultural frontier included respect
for private property, a strong work ethic, patriarchy, honor, and self-sufficiency. In their discourse, contra leaders framed the Sandinista land reform not as an act of social justice, but
rather as the theft of private property, the product of a man’s hard labor. Contra leaders also
highlighted values of rural independence and self-sufficiency in contrast to FSLN policies that
Constructing Conservative Identity
173
which extended state controls over the sale of crops and rationed the sale of basic food and
consumer goods.12
By 1984, the contras had established a semi-permanent military presence and strong
civilian collaborator networks among poor peasants in virtually all of the muncipio’s outlying
communities. The FSLN in turn maintained military control and political influence over the
main roads and town of Quilalí, as well as in river valley cooperatives. Yet the very presence
of such local, revolutionary campesinos—neighbors, friends, and family members—
challenged the contra construction of collective “peasant” identity. It raised the sticky question, could one be a “true campesino,” practice and defend a rural way of life, and at the same
time support revolutionary change?
Hall reminds us that identities “can function as points of identification and attachment only because of their capacity to exclude, to leave out, to render ‘outside,’ abjected”
(cited in Stephen 2001: 66). To this end, the contra leadership established sharp boundaries as
to who was a “true campesino” and who was not. They labeled Quilalí residents who were
suspected of sympathizing in any way with the FSLN “communists” and piricuacos (roughly
“rabid dogs”), powerful pejorative and exclusionary terms that served to override shared place
and culture, ties of friendship and family, indeed the very humanity of these individuals. The
contra leadership also made frequent mention of Cuba in their discourse, representing Sandinismo as something, unknown, dangerous, and above all else, foreign to Nicaragua’s rural
interior. In a wartime context, of course, the consequences of such representations of local
Sandinistas were far more than discursive. Essentially, such dehumanizing representations of
local FSLN supporters enabled and served to “justify” contra actions of harassment, violence,
and even summary execution.
LINKING IDENTITIES, DISCOURSES, AND PATTERNS OF POWER
Collective identity is neither a static phenomenon, nor constructed in a vacuum, but rather is
an ongoing process that engages and builds upon on historical, preexisting networks, and
cultural patterns (Polletta and Jasper 2001). Finquero contra leaders selectively drew upon
preexisting norms, practices, values, and social networks of the agricultural frontier,
deliberately highlighting some facets of this popular culture, while deemphasizing or
excluding others. In other words, the content of the contras’ “peasant” identity was not
predetermined or fixed, but rather shaped in a complex crucible of power differentials.
Likewise, for Quilalí’s poorest and most powerless residents, articulations of identity in the
terrain of everyday life and popular culture were not simply expressions of agency, but were
also subject to social, economic, and military constraints located both within and outside the
boundaries of state power (see Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta 2001).
During the 1980s, the Sandinista state was simultaneously ambitious and weak.
Initially, FSLN incursions into Nicaragua’s rural heartland attempted to expand state power
and functions to bring radical economic and social change, and to penetrate and build support
among the grassroots. Such state policies included the distribution of some twenty percent of
Quilalí land to peasants willing to join cooperatives, generous rural credit policies, a 1980
literacy campaign, the expansion of schools and health services, grassroots mobilization, and
intense political proselytizing among the population. These measures met with limited
success, in part because as a largely urban-based movement, the FSLN had to rely on party
members and military officers from the cities, who struggled to gain credibility with Quilalí
residents.
For their part, in their efforts to shape the content of a collective “peasant” identity,
contra leaders drew upon power loci outside of the control of the state, in particular extended
family networks, patron-client ties, and long-established relationships of trust. Practices
employed by the finquero contra to shape campesino identity and build networks of support
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include utilization of affective and familial ties, propagation of rumors and exaggeration,
exertion of economic power, military expansion, and selective repression interspersed with
protective gestures. Finquero Antonio Mendoza, who led a regional command of some 800
contra combatants, describes how he helped organize one of the first MILPA bands by calling
together friends and family,
I’m a native of Quilalí, born and raised in Quilalí. I’m not a great political
speechmaker, but I have a good reputation.… I easily gathered these people
together. All these people spoke the same language and followed the same
line of thinking. (interview with author, May 1993)
As Mendoza’s comments suggest, these finquero field commanders utilized their indepth, localized knowledge not only of the geographic terrain of Nicaragua’s rural interior,
but also of its social landscapes, rural language, and symbols. Such knowledge facilitated
contra creation of what Payne (2000) refers to as the “legitimating myths of the right.” Contra
leaders carried out continuous formal and informal political proselytizing, telling campesinos
stories of the “heroic” MILPA bands, framed in terms of an FSLN “betrayal” of its initial
promises, with knowledge that themes of betrayal and revenge resonated strongly in
Nicaragua’s interior. Contra leaders also understood the power of unsubstantiated rumor and
exaggeration in this strongly oral culture and used such techniques to encourage fear and
mistrust of the Sandinistas. The contras told one woman interviewed, for instance, that the
Sandinista Army planned to kill and eat her pregnant daughter’s unborn baby, leading the
woman to make the decision to flee to a Honduran contra military base. By exaggerating
forms of Sandinista “repression” and inculcating fear, the contras were able to represent
themselves as “protectors” of the civilian population. North American scholarship has
approached identity from a largely cognitive and instrumental perspective focusing on the role
that collective identity plays in maintaining the cohesion of social movements, (McAdam,
McCarthy and Zald 1996). While this account has also highlighted the contra leadership’s
instrumental use of identity, it should also be emphasized that this movement drew heavily on
emotions such as the trust and affection in family and patron-client ties, and deep moral
outrage against FSLN coercive policies (Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta 2001).
In addition, well-off local contra supporters maintained a strong reserve of economic
power during the war. Many poor Quilalí campesinos did not find the conditions of
participation in the Sandinista land reform—namely, joining a cooperative and enduring
harassment and attacks by the contra forces—acceptable; and they chose not to accept land.
Well into the 1980s, many poor Quilalí peasants still depended on economic elites for access
to land, and as economic conditions deteriorated, access to equipment, transportation, and
loans of money.
The contra forces also utilized military expansion to further consolidate their
campesino base of support. Substantial external material resources provided by the U.S.
government, over $400 million in military aid, allowed the contras to establish a strong
military presence in over 41,000 square kilometers of Nicaragua’s interior (Horton 1999). By
1983 the contras had established a de facto military control and extensive networks of
informants in almost all of Quilalí’s outlying communities, as almost all local residents
sympathetic to the revolution fled, seeking physical protection in the town and valley
cooperatives where the Sandinista military maintained control. The contras limited any
positive state presence in their zones of control by burning down health and educational
infrastructure and threatening government workers. State incursions into such communities
became largely militaristic, limited to recruitment missions, State Security investigations and
arrests of Quilalí residents suspected of collaborating with the contras, and military
operations. It should be noted that in choosing not to systemically apply the type of human
rights abuses that have served to terrorize and pacify rural residents of countries like
Constructing Conservative Identity
175
Guatemala, the FSLN’s more limited coercive measures were ultimately ineffective in
dismantling contra support networks, while at the same time fueling moral outrage in antiSandinista communities against FSLN “repression.”13
As the contras leaders sought to consolidate a “peasant” identity, they also utilized
selective repression to recruit new members and stifle dissent within the movement.14 Their
military power also provided discursive power, as they filtered and generally distorted the
information that these community members received about the revolution. Teófilo Aguero, a
small farmer from a community, La Vigía, which provided strong support for the contras,
explains why he initially collaborated with the contras:
We also realized that it [the revolution] wasn’t what we had hoped for
because we saw that they [the Sandinistas] had ideas different from our
ideology. We didn’t understand their ideas…. At least in terms of collective
farming, we don’t believe in working that way. We have to farm the land, to
work as farmers, but we want to work freely with no one controlling us.
(interview with author, March 1993)
On one occasion, while Aguero and small group of contras were conducting a
clandestine reconnaissance mission, they asked a young boy to guide them across a road.
When the boy refused, Aguero’s companions called the boy a “piricuaco” and pulled out their
knives to cut his throat. Aguero intervened to stop them, arguing that the “blame” lay with the
boy’s father for allowing him to become involved with “the ideologies of other people
[Sandinistas].” Aguero explains, in the understated language of Nicaraguan campesinos, the
contras’ practice of selective repression, “If you behaved well, you wouldn’t have problems
[with the contras]. If not, it was a mess.” As Aguero’s observation suggests, Quilalí peasants
who lived in these zones of contra control were well aware of the “rules of the game” in
which any perceived contact, collaboration, or sympathy for the FSLN would bring threats,
kidnapping, torture, or possible summary execution.15 While strongly identifying with the
contra cause, Aguero only reluctantly became a full combatant in 1983 because of strong
pressure from both the contras and Sandinista State Security. In interior rural zones of
Nicaragua, as the war intensified, peasants like Aguero were often caught “between two fires”
as the space for neutrality and withdrawal shrank. Campesinos were forced to choose between
“exiting,” migration to Honduras or the U.S; avoidance, generally through “pacifist”
evangelical church membership, or active collaboration and the taking up of arms.
Finally, in the decision to identify with and to support either the FSLN or the contras,
dynamics of gender and age-based power mediated through family networks, also played an
important role. Typically it was a male figure with authority in the family—a father, uncle, or
oldest son—who made initial contact or collaborated with the contras. If a male family
member was arrested, joined the contras, or was killed in the war this often served to commit
other relatives—sons, younger siblings, women, and girls—to the contra cause. Individual
opinions or emotions on the subject were often subordinated to a value of family solidarity
under patriarchal authority. The most powerless Quilalí residents, the very poor and women in
particular, appeared less to have exercised creative agency in joining the “peasant” cause, than
to have been trapped in confusing, frightening, and often overwhelming circumstances of
armed conflict.
CONCLUSION
I have argued that collective identity was a critical mediating process in contra movement of
the 1980s, which in part led poor peasants to ally with the wealthy against a revolutionary
government. A “peasant” collective identity in rural Nicaragua was both instrumental—a tool
of the contra leadership—and strongly affective—constructed and maintained through diverse
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emotions of respect, trust, fear, and anger. Rural residents of Latin America potentially
occupy a multiplicity of subject positions. For a poor peasant woman like Juana Gómez, daily
life is to be poor, a campesina, a Catholic, a wife, and a mother. She experiences a series of
potential grievances: the local landowner who charges usurious interest rates, urban FSLN
government officials who control her crop sales, or a compañero who physically abuses her.
Some of these conditions are perceived as “natural” and “inevitable,” and others as grievances
to be acted upon individually and/or collectively. In such cases it is difficult, if not
impossible, to read a priori salient identities and linked grievances from shared structural
location.
In contrast, some new social movement theory, drawing on the experiences of
European and North American middle-class activists, as applied to Latin America, leaves an
impression of disembodied identity-based discourses hovering above the material planes of
human society awaiting appropriation by active and self-conscious actors. In egalitarian
societies and subcultures with traditions and mechanisms of consensus building at the microlevel, collective identities may well emerge in an organic, democratic fashion from everyday
practices and networks. I argue, however, that under conditions of initial inequality and
embedded hierarchies, such as are found in Latin America, the processes of collective identity
formation are likely to be disproportionately influenced by a few, local elites who seek to
protect their privileges. Even in identity-based movements, class in particular still matters and
it is critical to consider the ways in which preexisting patterns resource distribution and
concentrations of power—in public and private spheres—both constrain and propel specific
processes of collective identity formation.
In the 1980s in Nicaragua, contextual constraints in expression of identity emerged
as more salient for poor peasants than opportunities, and “culture” was constraining as much
as it was empowering. Power in this society was neither widely dispersed, nor particularly
subtle, but rather increasingly concentrated. To a large degree, the success of the contra
leadership in shaping a collective “peasant” identity with a very specific content and
boundaries rested upon the fluid interplay social, economic, and military power, that ranged
from the international level, with large amounts of material aid from the U.S., to very localized networks of social influence. At the same time, collective identity also contributes to
shaping, prioritizing, and delimiting sets of collective grievances. In the 1980s, Quilalí’s poor
peasant majority lived in “objectively” similar structural conditions. Yet, while FSLNidentified residents focused their grievances against the wealthy who “exploited” the poor and
U.S. “imperialism,” those who identified with the contra “peasant” cause, identified the
Sandinista state as the source of conflict and dislocation in their lives. Similarly, FSLNidentified residents fought for a broad redistribution of land and economic goods on universal
principles of social justice to meet their subsistence needs. In contrast, poor peasant contra
supporters sought a more limited, clientelistic material benefits for themselves and their
families.
Political opportunity structure theory has focused on the ways in which power shifts,
if correctly perceived and interpreted by actors, will propel collective action for change. The
contra uprising, however, was less a mobilization to seek gain, advancement of interests, and
privilege, than a perceived “defensive” response to an activist state. This experience suggests
that conservative mobilization is most likely to occur in situations in which the state (1) is
seen to threaten the loss of already existing power, privilege, and wealth; (2) attempts to
expand its authority and functions into new areas, be it geographically, or functionally, as in
economic interventions; and (3) carries out its policies in a rapid and “radical” manner.
The process of collective identity formation is also strongly shaped by dynamic
patterns of state-movement interaction. In this case, those actors who challenged the state held
significant reserves of non-state, social and economic power, as well as powerful external
allies that successfully undermined revolutionary state economic control and political
advances in Nicaragua’s rural interior. At the same time, the contras’ strongly parochial
Constructing Conservative Identity
177
character meant that it never seriously challenged the FSLN’s center of power and popular
support in urban centers. The experience of Quilalí also suggests that state policies in rural
areas unintentionally and paradoxically served to strengthen oppositional “peasant” identity.
The arrival an alternative revolutionary discourse to the rural interior led some local residents
to more clearly articulate and more strongly value a way of life that had previously been
“taken for granted,” and not the subject of self-conscious collective action. In addition, once
the cycle of violence was unleashed in rural Nicaragua, it reinforced polarization, narrowed
options of avoidance and exit, and served to intensify popular grievances against the
revolutionary state.
A final question to be addressed is how we evaluate conservative movements that
simultaneously assert identity and the right of difference. The Latin America new social
movement literature argues that identity-based movements per se hold intrinsic value and
serve both to expand discursive space and deepen democratic practices (Alvarez et al. 1998).
Yet is the assertion of identity-based difference by itself—in this case a defense of a specific
construction of a rural way of life—necessarily a normative deepening of democracy? Does it
deepen democratic practices even if the movement and its goals reinforce patterns of overall
authoritarianism and societal inequality? To what degree is shared culture and identity in a
context of fear and inequality a type of “false consciousness?” For poor campesinos, was
support for the contras a necessary strategic accommodation with positive cultural
implications, or an obstacle to a deeper form of empowerment and liberation?
Gordon (1998), Gould (1998), and Hale (1997) suggest that in the 1980s, the
nationalist-popular project of the FSLN was unable to effectively incorporate and address
concerns of specific identity groups such as the indigenous, women, and campesinos. These
studies suggest that there was a small window of opportunity in the months immediately
following Somoza’s fall, in which the FSLN might have overcome its ethnocentrism and
biases to forge links with these groups and embraced identity-based differences. Along similar
lines, Vilas (1989) argues that the Sandinistas would have had greater success in mobilizing
the grassroots through preexisting leadership networks. I have argued in this case study,
however, that there was a more fundamental and intractable tension between the relatively
egalitarian vision of the FSLN and peasant identity deeply entwined with patterns of rural
hierarchy—a tension that could not so easily be sidestepped or overcome. Revolutionary
policies of redistribution in Nicaragua implied on some level an inevitable reshaping of rural
identity, some cultural loss, and the undermining of its embedded class, and perhaps gender
and racial/ethnic, hierarchies.
Starn (1999) recommends in his study of Peruvian peasants’ militias that we be open
to ambiguity and the transformative potential of conservative rural social movements.
Following this lead, it can be argued that the contra mobilization opened space to a degree of
not only geographic, but also discursive autonomy as it forced a withdrawal of the state from
rural Nicaragua in both military and political terms. In resisting the “homogenizing” tendencies of revolutionary discourse and practices, the contra movement served to bring some
revalorization and revitalization of grassroots Nicaraguan rural culture, expressed by a number of ex-contra combatants as a sense of personal and collective empowerment from the war
years.
Fraser’s analysis of the recognition-distribution dilemma suggests we strive toward a
“critical theory” of recognition, “one that identifies and defends only those versions of the
cultural politics of difference that can be coherently combined with the social politics of
equality” (2001: 12). Such was not the case with the collective identity articulated by the
contras, which was exclusionary not only in the sense of excluding peasants who sympathized
with the revolution, but also in general eclipsing, at least temporarily, other possible
constructions and expressions of what it was to “be” a Nicaraguan campesino. Overall, given
the contras’ acts of repression and lack of internal democracy; the persistent inequalities
Mobilization
178
within the movement and in the policies it fought for; as well as the deep human suffering and
economic loss brought by the war, it is difficult to view this as an “emancipating” movement.
This suggests that the Nicaraguan contra movement is a case in which expression of
“difference” on normative grounds, can not easily be celebrated, and potentially more
liberating alternatives might have been found in the “universalizing” discourses and identities
it opposed.
ENDNOTES
1
Interview with author, August 1994. All names are pseudonyms and all translations are the author’s.
The term campesino, as used in Nicaragua, includes both rural workers and small landholders. It refers broadly to
those individuals who live and work in the countryside in a generally subordinate position.
3
Studies of peasant mobilization have focused on the revolutionary potential of peasants, in particular the identification of those sectors of the peasantry most likely to support guerrilla movements; circumstances under which peasants
move from “everyday resistance” to open rebellion; and the role of political opportunity structures (see Brockett
1991; Paige 1975; Scott 1976; Wickham-Crowley 1992).
4
Hale (1994) and Gordon’s (1998) studies on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast explore shifting and at times contradictory
forms of consciousness associated with indigenous and Creole identities respectively; historically rooted Angloaffinity; and post-1979 revolutionary state policies. Gould’s (1990) study of campesino mobilization in the in prerevolutionary cotton boom era highlights transformations from dependent elite controlled discourse to more critical
forms of rural consciousness. Enriquez (1997) explores the ways in which Sandinista agrarian reform both strengthened and undermined revolutionary consciousness, providing opportunities for collective participation in cooperatives and reinforcing an independent and capitalist smallholder class.
5
Because of the insecure conditions in the zone at the time of my research in the mid-1990s, a random sample of the
municipio was not possible. Instead I conducted semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of Quilalí residents selected to reflect as much as possible the diversity of viewpoints and experiences of the zone. The criteria
employed were: (1) political orientation, pro- or anti-Sandinista; (2) role in supporting the contras, collaborator or
combatant; (3) class origin; (4) zone of origin, mountains, river valley, or town; and (5) gender.
6
One manzana equals 1.7 acres.
7
In contrast, on Nicaragua’s pacific coast, the rapid post-World War II expansion of export crops such as cotton and
sugar strongly undermined patron-client ties in the countryside (see Gould 1990).
8
Clearly, the large amounts of U.S. support were critical factor in the rapid expansion, breadth, and military strength
of the contra movement. Yet, like resource mobilization theory, this perspective offers limited insight into the set of
grievances behind this mobilization. On U.S. government funding and logistical support for the contras see Kornbluh
1987; Robinson and Norsworthy 1987; and Sklar 1988. See Bendaña 1991; Brown 2000; Horton 1999; and Morales
Carazo 1989 on the origins and development of the contra forces.
9
See Spalding (1994) for further discussion of this moral outrage among Nicaraguan elites.
10
While in this section I contrast FSLN and contra discourses, overall Sandinista policy toward the wealthy was more
ambiguous and complex than the somewhat simplified perspective presented here. In practice, FSLN programs economically benefited a number of finqueros, and politically the FSLN made efforts to coopt these “patriotic producers”
(see Spalding 1994).
11
This social hierarchy was reflected within the contra leadership structure. Until the late 1980s, top administrative
posts were dominated by ex-National Guardsmen; field commanders were largely finqueros; while poor peasants
made up the majority of foot soldiers.
12
In contrast their sharp, oppositional “mirror image” response to FSLN policies, other key, potential elements of the
contra struggle—specifically, how a new “democratic” Nicaragua would function—were left deliberately ambiguous
Potential, indeed probable, future distributive, material conflicts between well-off and poor peasants in the contra
coalition were subsumed in the immediate struggle against the “common enemy,” the Sandinistas. Within the broad
space of shared relational and cultural identity, the wealthy and poor were free to imagine, and to fight for, their
distinct visions of a “free” Nicaragua.
13
Studies of rightwing rural mobilization in Peru and Guatemala have highlighted the key role of both state and guerrilla violence in motivating peasants to mobilize collectively on the side of the forces that appeared most able to
protect them from violence and disruption (see Starn 1999; Stoll 1993).
14
In stratified societies, an outward projection of sameness may conceal internal conflicts in which the boundaries and
meanings of identity that are continually negotiated and re-negotiated (Stephen 2001: 55). Collective identity formation is
both an empowering process and constraining as “unity based on identity is not natural or inevitable but the result of
continual construction of closure against the constant grain of difference” (Hall cited in Stephen 2001: 59).
15
The contra leadership and most participants I interviewed represented the contra movement as one that received
overwhelming support from rural communities. The role of repression and internal dissent within the contra movement were suppressed during the war years. After the war years, contra field commanders spoke more openly of
divisions within the movement. Few, however, were willing to speak of the systematic and well-documented human
rights abuses committed by the contras (see Americas Watch 1990).
2
Constructing Conservative Identity
179
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