Marcus Kurtz makes his contribution to a sizable body of works examining the impact of economic liberalization on political opening in Latin America, arguing that the countryside in Latin America offers us a crucial piece of the puzzle of why transitions to democracies may succeed despite widening social inequalities. The answer to this paradox, Kurtz argues, is that “competitive national-level democracy [is] based in part on conservative hegemony and peasant quiescence in the countryside” (p. 21). He contends that processes put in place by market-based policies, rather than coercion or clientelism, explain why peasants and rural workers continued to back the politicians who initiated and deepened programs of credit deregulation, price liberalization, and trade opening. Thus, the grim lesson of Free Market Democracy and the Chilean and Mexican Countryside: If those with the most to lose in neoliberal conditions are quickly atomized and dispossessed by transitions to market-based conditions, competitive multiparty electoral systems will endure at national levels. Or, in a semantic twist worthy of Alice in the rabbit hole, in modern conditions, democracy thrives on a certain lack of it.

Kurtz's conclusion is depressing but unsurprising, and it echoes works by a growing number of scholars, such as Kenneth Roberts or Guillermo O'Donnell, who find Latin American democracies in their present form not terribly inclusive and too often plagued by graft and petty autocracy. Kurtz argues that democratization in Mexico and Chile succeeded in part because neoliberal restructuring prevented the rural lower classes from mobilizing around their own interests, thus keeping elites from scuttling the process. The problem with this argument, however, is that one of his empirical premises is wrong, at least in Mexico. In that case, a better question might be why a transition to a competitive multiparty electoral system held up despite the fact that the rural lower classes did launch a substantial and widespread protest against neoliberal restructuring.

Kurtz insists on looking for evidence of his central variable—collective rural resistance to economic liberalization—in voting tallies and in panel data on union affiliation, reckoning that if rural lower classes had resisted neoliberal restructuring, they would have done so by voting for left-wing parties in federal elections. This makes little sense given what we know about the historical dynamics of rural collective action. The author duly cites important theorists of peasant rebellion, such as James Scott, Eric Wolf, E. P. Thompson, and Charles Tilly, but he seems not to have heeded the lesson that rural resistance is generally local and most often comes in the form of direct action, such as petitions, blockades, occupations, price riots, charivaris, and popular “liberation” of goods in dispute. As for union activity, affiliation to rural unions often is a weak measure of militance in the countryside because of legal and logistical constraints to collective bargaining in agro-industry. It is, then, rather astonishing that the author would carry out a book-length project examining a sector's capacity for collective action without ever collecting any data on protest events in the countryside. If he had done so, he might have found little unrest in the Chilean case but considerable peasant mobilization in Mexico. Beyond the Chiapas rebellion, which he dismisses unwisely as an anomaly that does not fit his case (it does, in fact), he ignores significant peasant protest in the states of Jalisco, Nayarit, Puebla, Morelos, Guanajuato, Sonora, Zacatecas, and Michoacan in the years 1993 to 2003. Significantly, where neoliberal restructuring affected them in the form of debt, termination of credit lines, and low prices at the marketplaces, peasants merged their grievances first with larger farmers and later with urban debtors. The most significant movement of this type, the Barzón Movement, claimed 500,000 members, placed several of its leaders in federal and state offices, and compelled federal authorities to offer several rounds of debt relief to bankrupt farmers in the countryside.

Problems mount when one examines the data the author presents as evidence. The heart of his case is that despite being steamrollered by Augusto Pinochet's neoliberal Chicago Boys and Carlos Salinas's Harvard-trained technocrats, poor rural voters in Chile mysteriously became a bulwark of support for conservative parties, and that rural voters in Mexico remained a reliable reservoir of votes for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). These data are intriguing but seemingly incomplete in the Chilean case; the data on Mexico are frankly deceptive. Kurtz includes data from three federal elections in Chile (1989, 1993, 1997) and two federal elections in Mexico (1994 and 1997). However, while the Chilean elections may in fact have been fairly open, the author's contention that votes in the 1994 elections or even the 1997 elections in the countryside were free and transparent is simply not accurate. Rural areas unfortunately lagged behind the cities in the march toward free elections.

According to Alianza Cívica, a well-respected election watchdog organization in Mexico, lower-class voters in the countryside were routinely threatened by PRI caciques with the loss of subsidies for planting and household consumption. The Mexican case becomes even more complicated if one examines municipal and state-level elections over time in Mexico, which Kurtz does not do. Here, support for the PRI is not uniform over time, indicating that rural voters did have the capacity to mobilize their discontent at the polls in a fair number of cases. While the PRI clung to power at the federal level throughout much of the 1990s, opposition parties made significant gains in municipal government and state legislatures. Opposition governors were elected in rural states like Morelos, Tlaxcala, Zacatecas, Chihuahua, and eventually Michoacan. Notably, whether or not they were in a position to deliver relief, where opposition party candidates got votes, they did so by promising small farmers they would address mounting producer debts, foreign competition in the marketplace, and low commodity prices. Even more incredibly, these choices were not always without consequences for rural voters. Constituents backing opposition candidates in Guerrero in 1989 and 1992 were attacked by police; more than two dozen were “disappeared” and killed and hundreds were wounded. Two years later in 1994 in the troubled state of Chiapas, municipalities who elected left-opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution candidates almost uniformly found block grants for administration and infrastructure cut off by the PRI-controlled state government. (This situation, in fact, was so grave that the Zapatista Army of National Liberation advised its members to boycott municipal elections in 1997.)

It is too early to tell, but it may be that history will turn Kurtz's argument on its head. Certainly, recent rounds of rural mobilization in Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil suggest that peasants may indeed retain some capacity for mobilization in a neoliberal world. If Kurtz's contention is that successful national transitions to democracy in neoliberal economies owe much to peasant acquiescence, unfolding events in Latin America today suggest that national transitions to democracy may not be terribly stable, that the rural poor are never so atomized and incapable of collective action as federal voting tallies seem to suggest.