Guerrilla Auditors is a pathbreaking ethnography of peasant struggle in Paraguay. It is set in a country about which scholars produce very little, albeit one that is at the epicenter of an expanding frontier of agribusiness and militarized rule in the region. The book develops new ways of thinking about an older issue in Latin America: the rural peasantry and the struggle for livelihoods, rights, and survival. Studies of land struggles are often taken up through engagement with social movements and attendant theoretical debates. Guerrilla Auditors, as the title suggests, does some of this, but redirects our focus to the arguably more pervasive way of doing battle over land as a struggle over access to bundles of paper in ministerial offices. These bundles are titles, informes, claims, denunciations, estudios, and other documents that arise, over decades, around disputed pieces of land. Struggle over these bundles is both the hope, and the apparent doom, of the peasantry.

The book opens by tracing transparency and its ambiguities in the context of post-Stroessner Paraguay. Talk of transparency by the “comfortable classes” evokes liberal modernity, democracy, and legitimacy. Yet the struggle over land and documents reveals that transparency talk is an instrument for politicizing access to rights while dividing putatively informed elites from peasants seen as uninformed threats to democracy. Peasants are deemed tainted with the populist irrationality of the Stroessnerian past, but peasant farmers nonetheless engage the world of law and paper with the hope of being included. This entails the hope of holding land in a certain way, a hope threatened by the soy economy and the myth of liberal universality.

Chapter 1 explores the rise of the category of peasant as a “structure of aspiration.” Becoming a campesino entailed achieving the right, by way of smallholding and communal belonging, to national belonging. Within liberal modernity, this historical aspiration is disparaged as a “residual” category. The options now being forced on peasants by the agroindustrial state are urban poverty, rural proletarianization, or dependency on big business as a small productor. Chapter 2 examines how the National Peasant Front (FNC) uses “self-defeating” protest to advance land claims. The violence of the state response paradoxically instructs peasants that the legitimate arena of struggle is the law. Hetherington offers a sophisticated tour through analytical tensions linking violence and the rule of law.

Chapter 3 explores legal shifts that undermine peasant ways of owning land. Here the complex world of types of land ownership is detailed against the backdrop of a longer history of peasant studies, economic anthropology, and liberal theories of property. At base, the legal positivism of abstract private property collides with the peasants’ “structure of aspiration” to “property as sovereignty in the making.” Chapters 4 and 5 take the reader into the world of documents, as peasant delegations travel to bureaucratic offices and try to enter the conversation about the mounds of bundled paper there. Here the reader is offered insights on the politics of information and on populist reasoning. Again, the analysis returns to the peasants’ dilemma: determined to operate through the rule of law, they are ever excluded by elites who see all peasant politics as a totalitarian threat.

This work is a must-read for students of Latin American politics, social movements, and the state. The approach to the discursive and material significance of the world of paper is a necessary addition to our methodological and analytical toolbox. The only lingering discomfort is compounded by the benefit of hindsight, coming as it does after the 2012 coup that toppled Fernando Lugo (with whose 2008 election the book ends). Hetherington's gentle critique of the exclusionary effects of transparency talk is combined with ambivalence toward (in his terms, “vague solidarity” with) the peasantry. Taking nothing away from this sophisticated ethnography, might we ask for a less ambivalent positioning in the “terrain of struggle” and a clearer examination of liberal totalitarianism, beyond the bundles of paper? Even so, if we read with more subtlety, the book raises a critical question: are rural alternatives doomed if movements resign themselves to the “self-defeating” embrace of transparency and the liberal rule of law?