Parties and Projects

This chapter explores the cutthroat world of party politics in San Pedro, focusing on its assumptions, rules and effects on political thought and practice. Party politics is organized almost entirely around the local clientelist distribution of development “projects”—which can be anything from electricity, to water, a job, or a stove—to the exclusion of national politics. Candidates from nearly a dozen party factions promise projects for votes. This is a zero sum situation rife with corruption that structurally excludes the majority, resulting in division and resentment, as villagers take an active role in consigning their neighbors to abandonment—a brutal democratization of sovereign power. Through these processes, Sampedranos have learned to think of development in reduced and local ways rather than nationally, and to blame their leaders and each other for poverty. But this also fueled earnest critiques of clientelism and calls to distribute resources to the most vulnerable.