Ocupar, recuperar, resistir: la lucha por el territorio en el Chaco argentino

Abstract

This article analyzes the territorial strategies of indigenous peasants participating in the National Peasant Federation (FNC) of Argentina’s Chaco province, associated with the occupation and recovery of land, and collective resistance to judicial eviction operations. These are understood as a response to the social and economic crisis resulting from the disarticulation of the regional economy and the advance of a new cycle of accumulation that promotes land privatization and concentration, destroys native forests, and creates new conditions of dispossession in local communities. The methodological approach consisted in ethnography: we worked with in-depth interviews with men and women —mostly young— who are currently living in land occupations or who participated in them and were involved in situations of judicial eviction. Participant observation was carried out in political instances of the FNC during visits to the occupied properties. The article describes the social phenomenon of land occupation and its general characteristics and identifies different instances of collective action. It also argues that these events are not spontaneous, but structured practices anchored in long-standing processes of resistance and ethnopolitical struggle, which update the historical conflict over land and incorporate other elements into the tension over access to property that are relatively new in the spectrum of social protest. The article concludes that these problems transcend the legal sphere and are positioned as a social and political dilemma concerning the potential economic and extractive use of the territory. The originality of the article lies in the fact that, by differentiating instances, it is possible to identify the key elements that intervene in peasants’ permanence in rural areas and go beyond the legality (or not) of the acts.

Keywords

• argentina
• evictions
• indigenous population
• land takeovers
• peasants