About the Project
“Política y poder campesino más allá del Estado: el archivo de las Rondas Campesinas de Chota” es un proyecto de archivo que buscó organizar, inventariar, y mejorar las condiciones del archivo de la Federación Provincial de Rondas Campesinas y Urbanas de Chota, Cajamarca. Lo denominamos un “archivo vivo” porque forma parte de la burocracia cotidiana que da vida a esta organización, estando en constante crecimiento desde su fundación en 1980.
El proyecto amplió la colección a conservar de 5,000 a 10,000 documentos, extendiendo el rango cronológico de 2013 a 2023. Un equipo interdisciplinario excepcional que apoyó a los investigadores principales del proyecto hizo posible este logro: los historiadores radicados en Lima José Arévalo, Sergio Díaz, y Grecia Calderón, contribuyeron con su experiencia previa en archivos, mientras Marita Barboza y María Elizabeth Tapia, profesionales de turismo y enfermería radicadas en Chota, proporcionaron el contexto para hacer sentido del material. Nuestro trabajo contó con la plena confianza en el equipo por parte de la Federación –los presidentes Aladino Burga y Belizario Idrogo nos dieron todo su apoyo y acceso libre al archivo. Asimismo, llevamos a cabo distintas mejoras del local que sobrepasaron las expectativas del proyecto y de la Federación, incluyendo reparaciones del cableado eléctrico y de filtraciones de agua, instalación de una separación de drywall entre la oficina principal y el “cuarto de archivo”, pintura completa de las oficinas, y compra de estantería, muebles y distintos materiales.
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In 1976, a group of peasants from a small rural settlement in Chota, a province of Cajamarca in the northern Peruvian Andes, organized the first Ronda Campesina, marking the genesis of one of the most significant rural movements in twentieth-century Latin America. The Rondas Campesinas emerged as village-level committees with a primary objective: safeguarding the community’s territory during the night and thwarting criminal activities. Currently, a Rondas committee can be found in nearly every peasant community across the Peruvian Andes. In Chota, a living archive of this organization’s history is safeguarded by The Federación Provincial de Rondas Campesinas, encompassing a variety of materials, including correspondence, meeting minutes recorded during internal assemblies and public congresses, drafts of public messages; cases of customary-law disputes, and more.
Project Leads
- Alejandro Diez Hurtado, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (CISEPA, Perú)
- Paulo Drinot, University College London, Latin American History
- Sandra W Rodríguez, CISEPA, Perú
- María Rodríguez Jaime, National University of Colombia
Host Institution
CISEPA, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú
More Information
Understanding the Rondas Campesinas Archive
- Demonstrates how subaltern bureaucratic practices can be a source of political power. Documentation and administrative practices enable this peasant organization to negotiate with state authorities and other institutions to secure legitimacy and recognition.
- Documents the building of an autonomous justice system. The rondas campesinas developed sophisticated mechanisms for conflict resolution and community governance, mimicking state languages and practices while creatively adapting them.
- Reveals both continuity and change (1980-2023). The collection reveals persistent strategies or rural organizing alongside adaptations to changing political and economic circumstances. One important shift that can be observed over time is how they become a local and regional authority, assuming a role as promoters of local development projects (i.e. roads, a provincial state university), as well as a crucial actor within environmental movements (i.e. protests against the Conga mining project in 2012). Within these changes, we can also observe their changing relationships with leftist parties and organizations, offering a local perspective on shifting national political landscape.
- Illuminates gendered dimensions of rural politics through the Rondera Women section.
Collection Highlights
Rondero Justice
This category identifies material related to the vernacular administration of justice system developed by the rondas and accounts for 132 folders occupying 14 of the 26 boxes. These documents trace the evolution of the system devised by rondas campesinas to administer justice: how procedures evolved to include steps guaranteeing justice while also avoiding state prosecution, aligning with state or official understandings of a “just” case. One can also trace how evidentiary practices have evolved, from small case files in the 1980s containing oral testimonies to some massive case files in the 2010s incorporating WhatsApp or Facebook chats and photographic evidence.
Of particular importance are the organized case files against ronderos themselves, accusing them usually of usurpation of state authority or kidnapping. This constitutes high-quality material for those studying the formation of institutions, truth-making and evidentiary practices, as well as the co-constitution of the state by rural actors and the disputes involved in this process.
Los Ronderos
The film, Los Ronderos, directed by Marianne Eyde, produced in 1986 and premiered in 1987 is set in the late 1970s and explains the economic and social context that gave rise to the rondas campesinas through a merging of fiction and documentary, following the tradition of militant cinema that combined testimony and dramatization. This film was co-produced with both the provincial and regional federations of rondas campesinas of Chota and Cajamarca, co-scripted by Óscar Sánchez (secretary of culture), and involved the participation of almost 500 peasants from Chota. The Federation devoted itself of the production of the film because it saw this as an opportunity to counter the generalized narrative of the rondas campesinas as outlaws and criminals –a discourse that legitimized the criminalization of its leaders.
The archive contains exceptional material regarding the production process of the film, from letters sent by the Federation to village-level committees requesting actors and explaining the need to produce the film, to original drafts of the script, cassette tapes recording interviews with the director in Lima radio stations publicizing the premiere, posters, and even two 16mm film reels.
Sharing Project Successes
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Peasants, Bureaucrats, Archivists? The Living Archive of the Rondas Campesinas of Chota, Cajamarca
In this post, Sandra Rodríguez Castañeda, a PhD student at the UCL Institute of the Americas discusses MEAP project of archival recovery in northern Peru. - default
To raise one’s head high: Living archives and subaltern bureaucracies of the Rondas Campesinas from Chota, Peru
While the rondas moved beyond their initial role as “cowwatchers” - they never became the vehicle of peasant revolution envisioned by Idrogo and Patria Roja.