Military government and social movement of coffee farmers in Peru (1968/ 1980): cooptation or alliance?

Abstract

Coffee farmer’s cooperatives received certain privileges, commercials,
mainly, from the military regime that governed Peru between 1968 and 1980. There is a consensus, among several scholars, that this regime tried “to co-opt” popular organizations by integration then in a institution ruled by the state and/ or controlling then through the use of distributives measures in their benefit. Coffee producers were one of the few groups of farmers that, from an institutional point of view, managed to congregate themselves nationwide in an autonomous way. Nevertheless, through the experiences of the leaders of the coffee growers’ movement, this paper tries to understand if the benefits given by the military regime implied a cooptation of this movement by the government or if the relation between then was an alliance, that is, some kind of pact or deal that  ries to achieve common objectives and not just those of the most powerful side (as normally occurs in the situations where there is any kind of cooptation).