Peasant and indigenous autonomy before and after the pink tide in Latin America

Autonomy should not be understood as an inherent quality of rural subjects but as fundamentally a political and cultural project. This paper will present an overview of the evolution of the idea, project, and practice of peasant and indigenous autonomy in Latin America from the 1990s to today. It will trace the origins of the process and examine how the different dimensions of the concept of autonomy (economic, political, ideological, and ethnic) came together in the early 1990s to form a coherent although contradictory political project, which attempted to present an alternative to neoliberalism and political paternalism. The paper will assess the extent to which this project addressed the main challenges that the different sectors of the peasantry faced with the neoliberal restructuring of the economy and the deployment of neoliberal multiculturalism in the region. Through the case studies of Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Mexico, the paper will argue that the autonomy projects entailed serious contradictions since their inception because by wanting to solve some problems through certain mechanisms, rural movements exacerbated other problems. The paper also highlights the difficulty that peasant and indigenous movements had through the years in maintaining a strong alliances with each other.