Agribusiness and maize peasants in La Frailesca: vulnerability and resistances

Abstract

This article reviews the articulations between the heterogenous agribusiness actors, as long as the adjustments and resistances of peasants in the territory, in order to identify the impacts of the neoliberal political restructuration, and the alternatives and challenges that peasants confront. This analysis is taken in the Frailesca region, in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. In the first part, the Frailesca historical configuration is reviewed, highlighting some specific processes that gave its attribute as an agricultural region. After that, the territorial change promoted by the political and economic neoliberal restructuring is described, particularly in the eighties and nineties decades. Adjustments, resistances and alternatives taken by small farmers and peasants are discussed. Soils degradation, income and poetry, are the distinctive features of the regional agriculture. Even in this context, the diverse producers have been able to deploy initiatives and responses that, although they do not counteract broad-based forms of domination, do represent strategies of resistance and adaptation to the agrarian model, and allow them better subsistence conditions in that context.