Peasant Patrols. Power, Violence and Self-Defense in Central Cajamarca

The report analyzes the forms of peasant self-defense organized to confront cattle rustling in a recurrently violent society, settled in the central micro-region of the department of Cajamarca, in the highlands of Peru. The study focuses on the rondas campesinas that emerged from 1976 onward. However, the first chapter provides an account of the forms of self-defense that arose in Chota from the mid-nineteenth century. This first chapter situates the specific forms of self-defense and correlates them with the social and political context in which they developed (synchronic perspective). Second, the various forms of self-defense (rural guards, urban guards, estate patrols, rondas campesinas) are correlated with one another to assess whether or not there is a decisive influence between one form and its historical successor (diachronic perspective). According to the first perspective, since the central research theme concerns the relationship between forms of self-defense and violence, the characteristics of greatest interest in each conjuncture are, first, cattle rustling as the form of violence most directly linked to self-defense organization; and second, political violence, as a mechanism that encompasses and explains cattle rustling and therefore the organization of self-defense.