Guerrilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay

4. Duplicitous Documents

4 Duplicitous Documents For campesinos, land titles are material objects produced through labor and struggle, a view of documents that is fundamental to the way that they understand their relation to the state. This is a straightforward enough argument, which helps explain how campesinos organize their legal incursions on land. Privatization, from this perspective, is a system for abstracting land titles from the labor that produced them and placing them in the realm governed by the Civil Code, a document addressed to a public that tacitly excludes campesinos. On the margins of this public sphere, in those places where campesinos have begun to challenge privatization ’s advances, the abstract arguments made in defense of the Civil Code break down as elites enlist increasingly materialist common sense to support their claims. But this basic understanding of documents is not exclusive to land titles; it extends to all sorts of paper artifacts with which campesinos collectively engage the state in the post–Cold War period. Just as new democratic privatizers began to imagine campesino territory as potential capital in the abstract and governance as a technical matter of managing information, campesinos began to look past the politics of land titles and to see the whole bureaucracy as a series of material entanglements built around papers. As the new masters of the lettered city worked to extend their 144 Chapter Four representational hold on rural Paraguay, campesinos began to tinker with the technologies of representation on which that mastery was built. At the center of this story is the group of young men and women I call “guerrilla auditors,” a small group of campesino activists from around Vaquer’a who form the map’s leadership. The map shared many characteristics with the fnc and the mcnoc, and other smaller regional organizations, such as the community “bases” inherited from the Ligas Agrarias of the 1970s. They were also involved in some creative political activity that while quite novel in 2002, when they started, was soon adopted by other organizations. Unlike the larger organizations that had important sources of funding, either from large, duespaying membership (the fnc) or from international support from groups like Via Campesina (the mcnoc), the map could not afford lawyers, and so they had to teach themselves enough about the law to be able to make their own cases to bureaucrats and judges. The more literate members of the regional leadership spent a great deal of time retrieving and familiarizing themselves with documents from bureaucracies in Asunci—n. They were led in this project by Jorge Galeano. Jorge and those he worked with never spoke about what they did as “audit.” In fact, they rarely spoke about it as a separate activity at all, and it took me some time to understand the complexity of what they were doing on their periodic trips to the city. In the first few months of research, I considered my field site to be rural, and spent as much time as I could getting to know people in the various communities around Vaquer’a, where the Movimiento Agrario was working. I attended meetings of the local and regional chapters of the organization , conducted interviews with as many members as I could, and desperately tried to find ways to be useful. I spent much of my free time looking at the archive that Jorge was building in his house, thousands of pages of photocopied documents of all sorts pertaining to the land they were fighting over. I mulled over these pages for hours, often understanding very little of what they said, trying to cross-reference the texts with old copies of the C—digo Civil and the Estatuto Agrario, which Jorge also had ready at hand, and in this way I eventually acquired a rudimentary understanding of Paraguayan land law. But in retrospect, it is clear that during that whole period I never really saw the documents as documents. As a researcher, I considered it fortuitous that Jorge had collected all of this information in one place, and indeed, this is how Jorge first presented his archive to me, as a handy tool to help in my research. When I asked Jorge how he had come to possess a particular document, he gave me an Duplicitous Documents 145 imperious look and said that all of this was public information in the ibr. You simply had to go and ask for it. My perspective changed...