 The Journal of Agrarian Change has published a special issue on the Agrarian Political Economy of left-wing governments in Latin America. Dr. Leandro Vergara Camus, one of the editors of this special issue, will share more details about it. This special issue is a timely contribution to a larger debate in the region concerning the end of the political cycle of these governments. If I may start by asking you about the motivations behind this endeavor and how it relates to this debate. Yes, well, this cycle of left-wing politics sort of starts in the 1990s with several indigenous and peasant movement in Bolivia, Ecuador, in Brazil, mobilizing against neoliberal governments, sometimes bringing them down, changing governments, and then by the mid-2000s you have several left-wing politicians and political parties that come to power. And then we have about ten years of these experience, so we have plenty of time to be able to assess what they've managed to do, what the dynamics has been, what the challenge for social movement has been. So the issue looks at several cases. It looks at Argentina, it looks at Bolivia, it looks at Ecuador, Brazil, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and Venezuela. Our discussion is more geared at agrarian issue, at agricultural policies, but it's still very much in debate with this early debate about the role of the state in social change. The issue gathers contributions covering various countries throughout Latin America, yet in the concluding paper you and Cristobal Kay identified eight major trends around the agrarian policies of these governments. If you could now comment on some of this. There are several trends that you can identify as being the major ones, and the first one is that there hasn't been in a grand reform of substantial proportion that would have changed the historic unequal distribution of land in Latin America. In most Latin American countries you have highly unequal distribution of land, and no government really tackled that issue, even though Brazil, Bolivia, and Venezuela distributed a great amount of land. During those years Brazil has distributed about 51, 52 million hectares, Bolivia has distributed about 18 million hectares, and Venezuela about 10 million hectares, which is very, very impressive, very important, but during this same period agro-business also increased its coverage, as managed to continue its expansion, so it has not had the impact. So you have not challenged the agro-business-led model of development. Also there has been some important achievement in terms of increased support for family producers, peasant producers in terms of credits, in terms of infrastructure. A lot of policy has tried to link these producers with the commodity chains that are dominated by agro-business, for example in Soya. One thing that really stands out is policies that have improved the working and living condition of rural labor. So you've had a formalization of the labor market, you've had an increase in minimum wage, we've also seen all types of different types of cash transfer payments that go to the rural poor, and all that has contributed to help improve the living and working condition of the rural poor. As noted in the introduction to the issue, the state often fails to receive enough attention within the field of agrarian studies, so the analysis of its role is clearly another important contribution. What can be said about the role of the state under these governments, and in particular in contrast to the neoliberal period of the 1980s and 90s? The state has always been involved in agriculture directly or indirectly in Latin America, if you think of the main institution that protects private property rights as the state. And the 1990s in Latin America were characterized by a process of privatization of the access to land and the right to land. So the neoliberal governments were really involved in trying to privatize land, and the social movement were actually responding to that. But in terms of direct intervention into markets, the state had sort of retreated from directly intervening in the market and the place was taken up by agro-business. What you have with these new governments is that the state, because it was over the left wing government, came to power at the moment of an export boom, a long export boom. They actually managed to take control of more of the revenue, and they were able to deploy a little bit more supportive policies for agriculture. And they put more money, though, in agro-business than in small-scale production. The state also got involved in very often creating new institutions that did not exist before to directly serve the interests of peasant producers and small-scale producers. But our issue also does not only look at the role of the state, but it also looks at the nature of the state in Latin America. Cristobal and I think that the nature of the state in Latin America is that it's a rentier state. It's a state that is able to extract ground rent from capital, and it does that in oil, in gas, but it also does that in agriculture to a certain degree. And the different dominant classes in Latin America use their control of different spaces of the state for their wealth accumulation strategies. And I think that's what has been the major limitation of the left in general. Latin America has not been able to find strategies to deal with that rentier nature. So the dominant classes continue to use the state to block any kind of reform. While there is some variation, the findings also suggest that the interests of peasant and rural movements have not been significantly advanced. Despite these movements have been a major source of political support for these governments. How can we characterize this contradictory relationship? Yes, that is the section that sort of speaks directly to the debate that has been going on around food sovereignty. A lot of movements that fall into the food sovereignty movement or project were calling, I've been calling for an intervention state that provides support for a small-scale producer and sort of puts limit on agro-business. And the food sovereignty project also gives social movement more of a role in determining the type of market that should be established in a country, the type of food that should be produced, etc. So a lot of analysts that were waiting to see what was going on and what was going to happen with these social movements were trying to see what kind of influence social movement would have on these governments. And they actually didn't have the ability to really push the state into more radical policies. And Cristóbal and I think that it has to do with the contradiction that these movements were placed into when they decided to support these political parties or these politicians. In some cases, for example, in Ecuador, the movements were already in a decline when Correa took power. In other places, Bolivia, for example, the movement were still very much very strong when Evo Morales took power. But in many cases, the movement did not have enough power to pressure these politicians. And because of, again, the nature of the state and the relationship between political parties and social movements, it actually is the state and political party that ended up dominating, if you want, the agenda and subordinating social movement to a certain degree. What you have during these governments is that the policies are targeted towards the landed section of the peasantry. And the increased support to link them to rural business also sort of starts separating out their own interests with the interests of the rural, of other sectors of the rural poor, landless peasants, rural workers. So the peasants that are landed and that benefit from left-wing policies are much less inclined in supporting more radical types of mobilization. So you don't see any more land occupation, for example. In some cases, you see rural unions supporting agribusiness because their interest in terms of job creation is linked to agribusiness. So the policies of left-wing government actually increased peasant differentiation and made it more difficult for class unity. At the same time, the state with its clientelistic policies also went directly, if you want, established direct relationship with the grassroots membership of these movement, cutting the link between leadership of the movement and their grassroots. So it completely transformed the relationship that existed between grassroots membership, political leaders, and political parties. So to a certain degree, what we argue, Cristóbal and I, is that this form of organizing social movement and political party has come to an end with these experiments because what we've seen is that movements are not able to pressure the state when they are part of it. Finally, the relationship between these governments and landed elite has also been problematic, as shown by the impeachment process against Lugo in Paraguay and Rousseff in Brazil. What has been the role of Latin American ruling classes and how Marx's concept of coalesco-guasi can help us to eliminate the discussion? Landed classes in Latin America have always had a privileged access to the state and this has not changed in the recent decades. So what has changed, though, is that because of the rise of agribusiness and the complexification of agriculture, you've had increased linkages between landed classes, industrial bourgeoisie and finance. So in the 1980s, there were two scholars, Maurice Zetlin and Richard Ratif, that looked at the elite in the ruling classes in Chile. They actually saw that there was no separation between landlords and capitalists and they referred back to Marx's concept of the coalesced bourgeoisie, which is a situation in which there's no distinction between the landed classes and the capitalist class. So we think that within the last 30 years, this is what has happened in Latin America in general, you've seen the interest of the landed classes and the industrial classes and finance becoming way more intertwined than in the past. So we cannot speak of a landed class that is separated from the capitalist class. So this creates a situation that makes it even more difficult to transform a society because the dominant classes are much more intertwined than in the past. That is one of the main conclusions of the special issue.