“The peasants of El Ceibal and access to justice. Rights over land for peasant farming affected by the precarious land tenure in Santiago del Estero, Argentina

KARINA BIDASECA

revue bilingue (russe/anglais) de recherche en sciences sociales

CISR Rusia

Lugar: Moscú; Año: 2010 vol. 2 p. 1 - 21

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The interest of this article is to interpretate the transformation processes in the argentinian agriculture in the last two decades, in light of a juridical litigation that is  taking place at the Lote El Ceibal, located on the north side of the province of Santiago del Estero. This article was thought in dialogue with the analysis made about the transformations occurred at the post-comunist Russia, studied in detail by Visser in this special edition. El Ceibal is a 10.000 hectares field inhabited by over 200 peasant families under subsistence economy. It was, in the year 2005, object of  judicial auction, wich included its residents and some of their institutions. Since several generations, the possession of the land by the families was done in fact, according to customs and usages, without the formal property title (in law), but under the protection of the so-called usucapión(usucaption) or ley de prescripcion veinteañal (twenty-years prescription law). However, the property titles of the lot, given by the province, were used as patrimonial guarantee for financial transactions by a bank. This situation was unknown by the peasants from El Ceibal. Their everyday life and the property titles financial destination had been able to coexist independently until the bankruptcy of the bank initiated the track to put them in touch. This case is understood as a symptom of a wider process of deterritorialization and conflict around property rights over land/territory that involves certain subaltern subjects in Argentina. Under the assumption that those claims that achieve to articulate can uncover the contingent character of the places assigned and modify the subjects positions, my questions are directed to listed to those low voices: Do they question that fixed identity? Do they resist the automatic identification imposed by the positive law? Does this litigation opens up processes where the community becomes a political community that disputes the normality of the whole? Is there a political voice arising from these low voices or are they merely just “noises”? As well, about what we call the high voices, defined by its oposition to a low voice and understood in terms of Hegemony, I wonder: What mechanisms are used by the high voices of the economic y financial power to reproduce their accumulation process? I will focus my analysis on the economical, political and judicial plane, where the mentioned processes are translated into forms of juridic insecurity for the former residents of the lands and in their (im)possibilities to “take the word” in a judicial process where they are not considered “part” of.