Supporting a Counterfactual Futurity: Cash Transfers and the Interface between Multilateral Banks, the Mexican State and its People

ANDRES DAPUEZ

The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology

John Wiley & Sons Inc

Lugar: Malden MA 02148, USA; Año: 2016 vol. 21 p. 560 - 583

Despite evidence that Conditional CashTransfer (CCT) programs have neither substantially improved educational achievement nor complied with their main stated objective of permanently lifting beneficiaries out of poverty, they continue to be implemented throughout the world. Their popularity among international policy makers can betraced back to the sophisticated implementation and evaluation systems of one of the first CCT programs, Mexico´s Progresa-Oportunidades. Validated not only through statistics and qualitative analysis but also on the "experimental methods of impact evaluation" performed by the same multilateral banks thatfunded it (v.g. the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank), Progresa-Oportunidades was devised to facilitate the conversion of Mexican peasant children into an adult urban labor force. Through interviews with development functionaries and an analysis of historical evidence, I argue that, instead of being addressed to break the reproductive cycle of poverty once and for all, Mexico´s cash transfer programs Procampo (1993) and Progresa-Oportunidades (1997) were implemented to facilitate the structural adjustment of the Mexican countryside towards NAFTA, maintain a steady migration from rural to urban areas, "convert" peasant children to new economic activities, monetize the rural economy, propose new forms of political leadership and abolish "traditional caciquism". Today the development industrystill relies on a "counterfactual" dimension of (pseudo) Randomly Controlled Trials to prove the efficacy of these and other development recipes. Therefore, I conclude that CCTs "counterfactual" proof of their efficacy relates more to redundant causality that associates progress and development with urban life and its indicators than with the achievement of their stated results.