LDPI Working Paper 42. Reclaiming the Worker’s Property. Coffee, Land Grabbing, and Farmworker Resistance in Nicaragua
Abstract
In this paper I explore a land grabbing resistance movement composed of unemployed coffee workers in Central Nicaragua. Between 1996 and 2000 a private agro-export conglomerate appropriated 60 worker-owned coffee estates previously designated as the Area Propiedad del Los Trabajadores (APT), or the Worker’s Property. Following mass protests between 2001 and 2006, worker representatives from the Asociación de Trabajadores del Campo (ATC) and government officials negotiated and signed the Las Tunas Accords which provided redistributed land from nineteen of those coffee estates to 2,500 families. Drawing on archival research and interviews with movement participants I argue that land grabbing in the coffee lands of Central Nicaragua was embedded within past dispossessions and triggered memories of struggle against dispossession that provided the moral legitimacy and motivated a movement of farmworkers to reclaim land promised to them in the Nicaraguan revolution.
Citation
Wilson, B. LDPI Working Paper 42. Reclaiming the Worker’s Property. Coffee, Land Grabbing, and Farmworker Resistance in Nicaragua. The Land Deal Politics Initiative, (2013) 23 pp.
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