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Debt Peonage in Granada, Nicaragua, 1870–1930: Labor in a Noncapitalist Transition

2003; Duke University Press; Volume: 83; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-83-3-521

1527-1900

Elizabeth Dore,

Cuban History and Society

The rise of coffee cultivation was a watershed in Nicaraguan history. Prior to the 1880s, most land was common property; thereafter, land in coffee districts was privately owned. Before coffee, peasants labored largely in household and communal production; afterward, many rural Nicaraguans worked on coffee estates for several months out of the year.1 In the past, historians viewed this revolution in land and labor as Nicaragua’s capitalist transition. Notwithstanding major disagreements about how capitalism developed, they agreed that land privatization dispossessed the peasantry and promoted the spread of free wage labor.2 This interpretation fit the prevailing Central American historiography: namely, that the coffee boom was the region’s great capitalist transformation.3 In the 1990s, Central American historians overturned part of this orthodoxy by demonstrating that the expansion of coffee cultivation did not separate most peasants from the land.4 However, on the dual issue of wage labor and the rise of capitalism, the earlier consensus largely retained its hold.5 For Nicaragua, there is mounting evidence that between 1870 and 1930 the production regime on coffee plantations was not a capitalist one. Recently, Jeffrey Gould argued that free labor did not prevail in the highlands coffee zone.6 My study of labor relations in Diriomo, a municipality in the department of Granada, reaches similar conclusions. In the southern coffee zone, debt peonage was a largely coercive production regime, more dissimilar than similar to free wage labor.This history of upheaval in the countryside is told largely by the men and women of Diriomo. The words of peons, planters, and local officials who lived a century ago have survived in court records, official correspondence, estate papers, and the mountain of paperwork generated by Nicaragua’s forced-labor regime. Alongside voices from generations past are contemporary Diriomeños’ stories, handed down from the epoch of the great coffee boom to the present day. Their memories come from the oral histories I collected in the pueblo in the 1990s. The great diversity of voices, past and present, vividly describes the everyday lives of peasants, planters, and politicians who willingly and unwillingly found themselves drawn into the fabric of Nicaragua’s debt peonage regime.Some 20 years ago, historians’ understanding of Latin American debt peonage changed dramatically. Before the 1970s, peonage was considered a coercive labor regime that exemplified Latin American “feudalism.”7 In the 1980s, historians turned this interpretation upside down and portrayed peonage as a largely consensual system that accelerated the development of agrarian capitalism. The writings of Arnold Bauer and Alan Knight were pivotal to this paradigmatic shift.8 Convinced that the older literature had flattened out the complexities of unfree labor, Bauer examined how the market came to dominate labor relations in the countryside. Drawing on Karl Polanyi’s study of Europe’s great capitalist transformations, Bauer proposed that similar upheavals occurred between 1870 and 1930 in Latin America.9 In his view, most planters deployed debt as a market incentive to coax peasants away from subsistence production and into the wage labor force of the region’s expanding capitalist economies. He concluded that debt peonage undermined nonmarket relations throughout the countryside and gave rise to societies based on free wage labor.Widening the temporal and conceptual reach of Bauer’s model, Knight developed a typology that sorted peonage into three categories. In type I, debts represented salary advances within an incipient system of free wage labor; in type II, debts were derivative of voluntary and mainly market relations between landlords and peons; in type III, debts were coercive measures—”an excuse for servitude.”10 Knight argued that in Mexico type II was probably the most common form of peonage from the colonial period until the early nineteenth century, when proto–free wage labor (type I) came to prevail. In recognition of its ubiquity, he called type II “traditional peonage” and proposed that in most circumstances debt was a “peasant credit facility”—a benefit rather than a bond. Overall, Knight emphasized the long-standing predominance of market relations in Latin American rural labor systems, stating, “In general terms . . . peonage rested on non-coercive foundations.”11These reinterpretations of debt peonage cracked open the monolithic model inherited from earlier generations and largely redefined debt peonage as a labor system governed not by overt coercion but by market forces.12 Following in the footsteps of Bauer and Knight, subsequent accounts of peonage have tended to emphasize its consensual character and its market mechanisms.13 This essay revisits the debt peonage debate: a controversy that was, and remains, central to understanding Latin American transitions to capitalism. Analyzing everyday experiences of peonage in southwestern Nicaragua, I aim to contribute to long-standing disputes about labor coercion and consent and to recent reappraisals of capitalism under colonialism and postcolonialism.14Karl Polanyi and Robert Brenner made major contributions to Marxist debates about the differences between capitalist and noncapitalist societies.15 In The Great Transformation, Polanyi emphasized the distinction between “market societies” and “societies with markets.”16 He argued that while markets are not unique to capitalism, the role they play in capitalism is unique. Although markets, money, and wage labor long predated the rise of capitalism, this trinity regulates social and political life only in capitalist societies. In “societies with markets,” although people may intermittently work for wages or sell products, most households have land and produce most of what they consume. Under these conditions, markets govern neither labor relations nor the subsistence economy; consequently, markets play but a marginal role in social reproduction. Market societies, in contrast, are decisively different because most households are landless or land poor and do not survive on what they produce themselves. Necessity continually drives people to sell their labor in order to survive; consequently, market forces come to govern labor relations and the wider social order. To paraphrase Polanyi, under noncapitalist conditions markets are an adjunct to society, but under capitalism society is an adjunct to the market.17Polanyi’s interpretation of the transition to capitalism—the great transformation—rests on the idea that when most households have land, landlords’ control over labor is organized primarily on the basis of extra-economic coercion and consent. For instance, where the peasantry relies on household production for consumption, market mechanisms simply do not supply and discipline labor effectively. In contrast, where rural people are dispossessed and compelled to survive via wage labor, capitalists organize and control labor primarily, but not exclusively, by market means. The key distinction here is not between coerced versus consensual labor arrangements, but between overt and covert forms of coercion. Polanyi described how the market coerces labor in capitalist societies, a process some people have called the “invisible hand.” He demonstrated that in Europe and the United States capitalism did not evolve naturally, through invisible machinations of the market. Rather, the seismic shift from societies with markets to market societies required continual state interventions aimed at depriving households of land and the means of livelihood. The Great Transformation is a pathbreaking political and economic history of how politicians and property-owning classes remade the world so that every transaction is commercial, every open space is a market, every person is a consumer, and everything has a price.As Polanyi’s lucid analysis is broadly similar to Marx’s interpretation of capitalist transition, my rehearsal of his basic argument may strike some readers as unnecessary.18 Yet I include it; experience has taught me that highly sophisticated younger historians are frequently unfamiliar with the fundamentals of Marxist theory. Polanyi’s powerful book might encourage a new generation of scholars to revisit debates about transitions to capitalism, bringing to them insights honed in contemporary theoretical controversies.Turning to similar but less familiar terrain: like Polanyi, Brenner viewed the birth of agrarian capitalism as a highly unnatural process. He proposed that precapitalist societies of landlords and peasants cannot evolve into market societies, even when production is organized for export, as is the case with coffee. Brenner elaborated four hypotheses to demonstrate that transformations to capitalism require an exogenous shock and “rarely, if ever” evolve out of non-market relations.19 He argued that the behavior of landlords and peasants thwarts social and technological changes that give rise to agrarian capitalism. Out of necessity, peasants prioritize subsistence production and allocate family labor accordingly. In retaliation, landlords divert resources away from commercial production in order to develop a “politico-military apparatus” to appropriate peasants’ labor coercively. As a consequence, in landlord-peasant societies, export production does not stimulate technological change and capitalist development, but rather results in the atrophy of both the subsistence and export sectors.Unlike historians who emphasize the construction of consent, Brenner argued that landlords’ power rests on totalizing coercion. While dismissal of workers is the ultimate labor discipline in capitalist societies, in noncapitalist societies the objective of labor discipline is to bond workers. Therefore, although coercive mechanisms reduce the profitability of commercial enterprises, landlords must rely on them to appropriate labor. For Brenner, this is the basic and irresolvable contradiction of noncapitalist societies. Consequently, where capitalism emerges, it does so not by reforming landlord-peasant relations but by destroying them. This essay assesses whether peonage on Granadan coffee estates generated a market society or a society with markets, and whether the Nicaraguan case fits Brenner’s model of absolute coercion.Before the great expansion of coffee cultivation in the 1870s, Diriomo’s comunidad indígena controlled most of the land in the municipality. Indian communal land encompassed much of the Mombacho volcano that towers over the city of Granada on one side and the municipality of Diriomo on the other. Before coffee, Diriomo’s comuneros used woodlands on the volcano’s slopes primarily for hunting and gathering. By 1910, however, Diriomo’s common lands had been privatized, and the volcano was at the center of a highly productive coffee zone.20Land privatization in Diriomo was part of a nationwide upheaval. Between 1870 and 1910, successive governments promoted coffee production by abolishing common land rights. The 1906 Decree on Indigenous Communities and Ejidal Lands, a landmark in this upheaval, declared, “[A]ll common lands and Indian communities [are] extinguished forever more.”21 The decree instructed municipal officials to divide up and distribute half of the Indians’ common lands to individuals of “la casta indígena” and to sell the other half to buyers “preferably not of the indigenous caste,” concluding that “[o]nce the division of communal land has been completed, the [Indian] communities will be extinguished . . . and the authority of Indian mayors [alcaldes indígenas] will be null and void.”The 1906 decree was the death knell for Diriomo’s Indian community. Although the privatization of Indian common lands that had begun in the 1880s was virtually completed by 1906, the decree was still keenly felt in the township. It hastened the sale of the remaining communal lands, terminated the authority of the alcalde indígena, and all but ended the political life of the Indian community.22 In Diriomo, this property revolution had a fourfold effect: it transformed the Indians’ common lands into individual private property, it accentuated the social stratification of the peasantry, it hastened the demise of the Indian community and Indian identity, and it accelerated the development of large coffee plantations on Mombacho. Despite all this, the property revolution did not dispossess the peasantry. Quite the contrary: in the Granada countryside, the new property regime created a mosaic of large and medium coffee estates on the volcano, surrounded by heterogeneous peasant properties scattered over the hills and valleys. By 1910 Diriomo was a stratified peasant community, ruled in the first instance by the town’s commercial planters, who themselves were subjugated by Granada’s landed elite.Turn-of-the-century property registers, compiled by Diriomo’s mayors (alcaldes municipales) to monitor changes in land tenure, provide a picture of landholding after the first waves of privatization (table 1).23 Out of the 704 households (with a total population of 4,188), acutely land-poor families (those owning less than four manzanas) accounted for 4 percent. This tiny stratum of landless peasants was composed largely of Indian families. The vast majority of households (76 percent) farmed between 4 and 15 manzanas. These families, for the most part also of Indian origin, comprised the poor and middle peasantry. By standards of the time, even Diriomo’s poor peasantry had enough land for subsistence.24 The next stratum was Diriomo’s rich peasantry, who accounted for 19 percent of households; it included farmers who combined cash-crop farming, small-scale trade, and subsistence production. Most rich peasant families were ladino, but a small minority was Indian.25 At the top of local society stood Diriomo’s commercial planters, who accounted for less than 2 percent of households in the municipality. These ladino planters ruled the municipality, rotating the top posts in local government among themselves.Landholding in Diriomo was overlaid, almost literally, by the coffee estates on Mombacho, which were owned in the main by Granada’s leading families. Production was highly concentrated in large estates: 20 fincas with more than one hundred manzanas of coffee trees, all belonging to Granadans, dominated the sector (table 2). These fincas produced 94 percent of the coffee in the department. Diriomeños owned several medium and a number of small fincas on the volcano.In some senses, the social order in the Diriomo-Granada coffee zone conformed to Brenner’s model landlord-peasant society. However, a broad-brush characterization of this type obscures the economic and ethnic differentiation of the peasantry, features that were crucial in the making of debt peonage in Diriomo. Land privatization impeded, rather than promoted, proletarianization in rural Granada. Despite pressures accentuating the divide between richer and poorer households, Diriomo’s subsistence peasantry survived well into the twentieth century.26 In principle, a subsistence peasantry may be simultaneously compatible and incompatible with large-scale coffee production. Coffee cultivation is highly seasonal: planters need a large labor force during the three-month harvest season but only a small number of permanent workers. Subsistence agriculture might allow planters to pay wages well below what would be required to sustain a rural family, and plantation labor might allow peasants to supplement subsistence activities with wages.27 Nevertheless, a subsistence peasantry may be problematic for large-scale coffee production insofar as peasants’ necessity to work for wages is mitigated by their own production for household consumption. In Nicaragua, the basic contradiction of the coffee sector was the incompatibility of plantation labor with subsistence production. The government attempted to resolve this contradiction through a forced-labor regime.The 1862 “Ley de Agricultura” was the first in a long line of legislation designed to compel peasants to work in plantation agriculture.28 Enacted during the infancy of large-scale coffee production, the law required peasants without employment or the means of subsistence to work for commercial planters.29 Although earlier labor legislation had signaled the same intent, the 1862 law was the first to address the problem of enforcement. In tacit recognition of Nicaragua’s feeble state, implementation of the forced-labor regime was left to municipal officials. The law instructed large property owners to elect a rural magistrate (juez de agricultura) whose job was to put the poor to work:In coffee production, timing is everything. In an attempt to guarantee that planters had enough laborers, the law criminalized peasants who left fincas before the harvest ended or otherwise evaded plantation labor:31The 1862 law designed a public-private system to police the workforce. Peons convicted of running away from an estate, or even of “falling behind” in their labor obligations, were liable to two separate rounds of punishments: first under the auspices of the municipality, then under the rules of the patron. The official punishment for first offenders was hard labor; for three-time offenders it was 18 months in the army. In both cases, after the “criminal” served his (or her) time, he was returned to his patron, who then had the right to punish him as he saw fit: in the words of the law, “according to the practices and customs of the patron.”33 Rather than curtailing double jeopardy and planters’ arbitrary power, the law guaranteed both and described how they should operate in practice.34 The law was unambiguous on the issue of planters’ control over peasants. It stated, “Landlords and entrepreneurs have the duty to use whatever means necessary to ensure that no disturbances occur on their fincas, including those resulting from drunkenness. If peons commit a crime, the landlord should arrest the offenders.”35 Patrons’ authority to use whatever means necessary to maintain order on their fincas, to arrest peons, and to punish workers according to customary practices shows that lawmakers and planters anticipated resistance to the labor regime. To preempt opposition from below, the law fortified landlords’ social control over the peasantry.The government made no pretense that landlord and peasant were equal before the law. The 1862 decree stated that in disputes between planters and peons, judges “should presume peons are guilty unless there is manifest evidence to the contrary.” Yet, although planters’ legal powers were extensive, their authority was not without formal limits. The labor law penalized planters who defrauded workers and established a schedule of fines for planters who knowingly hired peasants already contracted elsewhere.36If Nicaraguan lawmakers left little to the imagination with regard to how to put the poor to work, they were vague about who exactly was subject to the labor regime. In contrast to provisions spelling out property requirements for the posts of alcalde municipal and juez de agricultura, the law failed to define “employment” or “means of subsistence” sufficient to exempt a peasant from forced labor.37 This imprecision, in all probability, was an act of commission, not omission; it allowed local planters to cut and shape the law to suit their needs. It also exempted “administrators, foremen, overseers, llaveros [turnkeys, custodians], and guards”—in short, planters’ entire supervisory corps—from all public obligations, including the army and the labor draft.38 Finally, in line with liberal precepts of the times, the law made no reference to race or ethnicity. Formally, the government treated forced labor as a class issue: property ownership and professional standing determined who was and was not subject to the labor regime.The 1862 law lacked specificity on a second critical issue: funding for the enforcement apparatus. Beyond the magistrate and his constable (alguacil), whose salaries derived mainly from the fines they collected from peons, lawmakers made no provisions to fund a rural police.39 The law instructed alcaldes municipales “to enlist men to help maintain law and order whenever necessary.” In tacit recognition of the scarcity of public funds, the law signaled official intention to place the burden of law enforcement largely in the private realm.The 1862 labor law was written on the eve of social upheaval in the countryside, as the government was moving to abolish customary land rights. Under these circumstances, the Nicaraguan elite feared opposition to the labor law and attempted to obfuscate its coercive character. The law described peasants’ obligation to work for planters as “their duty to render public service.”40 Apparently, the planter class held out some hope that peasants might accept the legitimacy of unfree labor if it was disguised as “public service.” Long after new labor laws came into effect, Granada’s planters continued to cite the 1862 law, calling it the fundamental charter of the labor regime.Between 1865 and 1925, the Nicaraguan government enacted more than 50 labor laws.41 The mountain of legislation created a confusing regulatory framework for Nicaragua’s planters and peons. Even officials charged with implementing the labor laws complained they were unable to keep abreast of the changes.42 With new laws piled on top of old, the legal structure for forced labor became a maze of contradictory provisions. However, two inseparable objectives guided government policy in this period: to force the Nicaraguan masses to work for planters, and to create an effective enforcement apparatus. Peasant resistance to unfree labor and planters’ disputes over how to forge a workforce also shaped the direction of government policy.43 But behind these conflicts lay the central contradiction of the labor regime: the incompatibility of subsistence production and plantation labor. This contradiction, and the social struggles it generated, pushed the government to pass increasingly coercive labor laws.The administration of president José Santos Zelaya (1893–1909) moved aggressively to expand the scope of the labor draft. It required vagrants to work on coffee plantations and defined vagrancy so broadly that it embraced most of the population. Article 1 of the 1899 vagrancy law stated, “Anyone is considered a vagrant who: 1. does not have a profession, income from property, salary, trade, or legal means of subsistence, 2. having a profession, trade, or employment, is not regularly engaged in performing those activities, 3. has an income, but not enough for subsistence, who is not engaged in a legal trade, and who regularly frequents bars and pool halls.”44Just two years later, lawmakers abandoned the pretense that the forced-labor regime applied only to vagrants, the poor, and men who loitered outside the boundaries of home and church. The 1901 labor law decreed, “[A]ll persons above the age of sixteen, male or female, who possess property or income valued at less than 500 pesos are required to support themselves by working and must obtain a laborers’ workbook [libreta de trabajadores].”45 This bold move unambiguously expanded the labor regime to virtually the entire population, including females; the property ceiling exempted only the wealthy.Zelaya’s administration not only broadened the sweep of the labor draft but also centralized and promised to fund the enforcement apparatus. The government created a national agency with branches throughout the coffee districts to capture runaway peons.46 To police the population, the government required all rural Nicaraguans to carry workbooks. However, central funds for the repressive apparatus remained scarce, and a national rural police force was not created until 1904.47 With national law enforcement agencies chronically starved of funds, compliance with the labor laws was left in the hands of planters, local officials, and civilian patrols composed of peasant volunteers.Lawmakers attempted to complement the labor draft by regulating debt peonage, which in practice was an integral part of the production regime. Intricate laws codified debt ceilings, repayment periods, and prison terms for peons who defaulted on loans. The government established an elaborate system of affidavits designed to both prevent peons from evading debts and ensure that planters paid their wages. The affidavit system proved unworkable, however. Opponents of the labor regime claimed that documentation designed to protect peons had the opposite effect, fortifying planters’ control over the peasantry.48In the first decade of the twentieth century, the labor question provoked fierce debate among the country’s elite. The planter class was divided over how best to recruit and control rural workers. Believing that a combination of debt peonage and labor drafts was necessary, Granada’s coffee growers favored forced labor.49 However, some planters from the highlands coffee zone advocated reform. They held that the labor laws did more harm than good because coercion drove peasants away from plantation labor. One Matagalpan grower stated, “Faced with the necessity of complying with labor obligations, bound workers flee from persecution and take refuge outside the country’s borders. This practice is prejudicial to agriculture; however, until the oppressive system that now prevails is abolished, there is no remedy [for the problems of agriculture].”50 Another reformer argued, “Labor should be entirely free . . . . It is an urgent necessity to repeal all labor laws because they only perpetuate servitude [which is] contrary to our republican institutions.”51Zelaya’s government dismissed those who called for change, saying they were high minded but out of touch with conditions in the countryside. Managua’s jefe político wrote, “Free labor is a noble principle that plays an important role in the advanced ideas of pure liberalism. But notwithstanding the spirit of great deeds that promotes the common good, there are certain realities that we must respect, rules to which we must adapt, laws we must preserve. Our current labor laws, in particular workbooks, are necessary because some people who dwell in miserable hovels in the backwoods and who sustain themselves on the produce of their own communities flee from work and fall prey to petty criminality.”52 Many planters agreed with this view. An editorial in El Comercio declared, “Laborers’ workbooks will break the traditional custom of the Nicaraguan people to shy away from work. There is no shortage of workers in this country, rather an abundance of laziness.”53Many historians view Zelaya’s administration as the culmination of Nicaragua’s capitalist revolution.54 However, Nicaraguan governments systematically moved to curtail unfree labor only after Zelaya was overthrown with Washington’s assistance in 1909. In the wake of Zelaya’s defeat, the U.S. Marines occupied Nicaragua on and off for 23 years. It seems that Washington pressed its client state to eliminate what one U.S. official called “the country’s illegal slavery in peons.”55 To limit bonded servitude, the Nicaraguan congress first established a ceiling for peasant indebtedness and outlawed prison sentences for default.56 Then, in 1923, the government abolished debt peonage and all forms of forced labor. Abolition was a milestone; it changed but did not end the practice of unfree labor. Debt peonage remained central to the labor regime on coffee estates in the Granada region well into the 1950s.57Although Zelaya’s government abolished Indian communities and imposed forced labor more or less at the same time, politicians rarely, if ever, explicitly linked the two issues. Nevertheless, coded references to Indians are scattered throughout public pronouncements about the labor shortage and the necessity of forced labor. For instance, Managua’s jefe político evoked the specter of “people who . . . flee from work and fall prey to petty criminality” to support the government’s policy on forced labor. Similarly, El Comercio’s attack on Nicaraguans with “an abundance of laziness” who “shy away from work” was a transparent brief in favor of force-marching Indians into modernity.The absence of explicit references to Indians in the national debate was mirrored in Diriomo’s labor records. Reports on labor drafts and debt peonage very rarely name Indians as such. The silence is particularly striking, since the 1883 census labeled almost 75 percent of Diriomo’s population “Indian,” and the comunidad indígena played a role in everyday life until about 1910.58 However, the few times Indians appear in the records qua Indians show that Diriomo’s officials used “race” or ethnicity as criteria in applying the labor laws, at least some of the time.The Nicaraguan government sought to create a forced labor system for the coffee sector that rested on labor drafts. While Diriomo’s officials sometimes organized labor drafts, this form of labor was the exception rather than the rule. Occasionally magistrates sent posses to round up peasants, but officials simply did not have either the manpower or the resources to commandeer peasants on a regular basis.59 Instead, Mombacho’s coffee planters relied on debt peonage to mobilize labor. With laws requiring peasants to work in the plantation sector, one might well think that peonage was forced labor in disguise, and to an extent it was. However, social conditions mitigated the coercive character of debt peonage in rural Granada. First, coffee planters’ capacity to coerce labor was limited. In addition, peasants—especially those in the poorer strata—aspired to link themselves to patrons who might help them weather the vicissitudes of subsistence farming. In Granada, peonage lived on into