From Popular to Insurgent Intellectuals

Leigh Binford's monograph offers an in-depth portrait of peasant society in northern Morazán before and during the Salvadoran civil war (1980–92). He weaves his ethnographically informed history around the biography of Fabio Argueta, born in 1943 into a middle peasant family. Binford interviewed Argueta a dozen times over several years, and as a result the reader gains very rare access to the life of a Central American campesino. That level of detail and understanding makes this book a must-read for anyone interested in contemporary Central American rural history.Binford emphasizes several events in Argueta's life. A property line dispute with his father's alcoholic cousin caused his parents to sell their farm and move to another village. Among other problems, the move stunted Argueta's education; he always regretted not being able to study beyond third grade. When his father passed away, he took over their small farm producing henequen and grains, in addition to participating in smalltime commerce. Binford offers much detail about Argueta's experience at the peasant education center El Castaño. Clergy and laypeople introduced him to the basic concepts of liberation theology and to a sociological and historical analysis of Salvadoran society. He then devoted the next two decades to work as a catechist in Christian base communities, primarily in his home region. In the base communities, which grew to include perhaps one-third of northern Morazán's inhabitants, priests performed basic religious and ritual tasks, with a liberation theological perspective. Moreover, the base communities developed a highly egalitarian ethic that included communal work projects and mutual aid. Binford depicts how Argueta's Catholic activism blended into an increasingly radical politics, eventually leading to a commitment to armed revolution. In so doing, Binford describes within a Gramscian framework the arc stated in the book's title, from a popular to an insurgent intellectual.Binford provides a clear and convincing portrait of Miguel Ventura, a liberation theology–inspired priest from a peasant background who dynamized and expanded the iglesia popular in Morazán. This charismatic and revered religious leader provided the link between the peasants and the nascent Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo. However, Binford as well as other scholars (myself included) have not been able to fully explain why Christian base community activists in 1974–75 opted to join an armed revolutionary movement when they themselves had not experienced direct repression. The lack of repression challenges the interpretation that the subaltern actors joined the revolutionary movement “as a last resort” (p. 149). Binford, following Argueta, suggests that a combination of the National Guard's vigilance and the peasants’ knowledge of repression elsewhere in the country was the main factor. He also suggests, using an interesting analysis of local folklore and the information that the Christian Democratic Party had some support, that there also existed a somewhat subversive, if subterranean, local culture. We might add that political dissidence in northern Morazán was significant: the opposition Christian Democratic Party won the municipal elections in Jocoaitique in 1968, and they also had an election stolen from them in 1972, followed by protests and repression. Moreover, the play of collective memory is suggestive: all the former activists and local guerrillas whom I interviewed ascribed their decision to join the revolution in 1974 to violent repression that in fact, as Binford points out, only began in November 1977.The advantage of Binford's largely biographical focus is that it allows for an intimate understanding of the iglesia popular, among the most significant social movements in contemporary Latin American history. Binford ably supplements the biographical narrative with historical, sociological, and political context. He also interviewed many other peasant activists. Nevertheless, there are limitations to this approach, in which the primary scholarly effort resides in the synthetic recounting and analysis of Argueta's life. However representative of a larger community and historical process, the northern Morazán experience was somewhat unique in that the transition from Christian base activism to a revolutionary commitment in other parts of the country involved participation in major agrarian conflicts, often organized by the Bloque Popular Revolucionario, a move that often debilitated the base communities.In his criticism of my interpretation in Solidarity under Siege of the period following the 1979 coup, he suggests that I do not take into account the memory of failed coups (p. 152). Perhaps. However, more consequential was the failure of the revolutionary Left to conceptualize and respond to the dramatic changes on the ground—namely, 90 land takeovers, including one in which 1,500 workers occupied and ran a cotton plantation and mill, in the context of a six-week truce that witnessed a virtual absence of state repression. The limited view of the reformist junta from Morazán during that period was probably skewed by the killings of local activists during a demonstration in San Salvador the week before the truce.From Popular to Insurgent Intellectuals presents a valuable, in-depth view of liberation theology's impact on a large group of peasants in northern Morazán. Moreover, the largely biographical format makes it very accessible to scholars and the general public alike. It will provide a highly useful addition to any college syllabus in anthropology or modern Latin American history

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