Dis-integrating Rural Development

This chapter presents how politicians and planners reacted to the realization that US development was not working as planned, and not only in Nicaragua. The chapter discusses the action and pressure of the US Congress coming from a growing network of nongovernmental organizations and activists. As the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional's rebellion grew, the United States made Nicaragua the site for a new program of “integrated rural development.” While US planners used Nicaragua to reconfigure development around a new form of “benign counterinsurgency,” the chapter unveils how radicalized Nicaraguans used the image of peasant victims of human rights abuse to mobilize an international human rights campaign. With the imagery of peasants as victims of a repressive developmental order, the chapter follows the union of Nicaraguan nationalists, radical socialists, and international human rights activists around the idea that peasants were both modernization's victims and potential revolutionary subjects.