(Page 2 of 28) - Urban Social Movements in Peru and Ecuador: Explaining Organizational Strategy authored by Dosh, Paul.

Let me begin by posing a contrast in the outcome I seek to explain—patterns of

organizational strategy. In 1990, as Peru absorbed the initial shock of party system collapse and
Alberto Fujimori's election as president, organized groups of poor people took advantage of the
political turmoil to illegally seize vacant lands and found squatter communities. In Lima's
northern district of Los Olivos, two such groups founded "Sector C" and "Rosales" and sought to
bring electricity and piped water into their fledgling communities. The settlers of Sector C relied
primarily on legal petitioning and clientelistic deal-making, while the settlers of Rosales relied
heavily on disruptive and militant protest actions. Both groups were largely unsuccessful. Led
by veteran "Old Guard" land invaders who had seen their respective strategies work in the past,
each group's stubborn determination to make their preferred strategy work failed, and also
undermined the service initiatives of less rigid leaders. Despite repeated failures, both the Old
Guard "clients" of Sector C and the Old Guard "radicals" of Rosales generally refused to adjust
their strategies for making demands.

By contrast, in the southern Lima district of Villa El Salvador, a younger "Next

Generation" group of settlers founded the community of "Oasis" in 1994 and employed a flexible
repertoire of demand-making strategies. The Oasis settlers had grown up in invasion
neighborhoods founded by their parents, but unlike their ideologically rigid parents, the
strategically flexible younger generation employed a combination of legal and extralegal
strategies. This mix of clientelistic partnerships and disruptive militancy yielded provision of
some services, including electricity, piped water, and land titles. Although these Next
Generation settlers employed a flexible mix of strategies, however, they used the same overall
"menu" of tactics as their Old Guard parents, and did not invent any new methods of demand-
making even when the old tactics failed under highly favorable conditions.

Finally, the Villa El Salvador invasion of "Encantada" was founded in 1996 by a third

type of settlement organization that I will call the "Innovators." These settlers managed to
acquire service infrastructure and land titles for themselves, but also helped other settlers in the
same neighborhood acquire services. The Encantada settlers were similar to the Oasis group in
that they had both grown up in the invasion communities of their parents and employed a flexible
combination of legal and extralegal strategies. But unlike Oasis, Encantada employed an
innovative mix of novel tactics. Furthermore, when Encantada's acquisition of land titles
precipitated a decline in participation, the organization rejuvenated participation by reorienting
the neighborhood toward an activist mission of helping neighboring settlements. In this way, the
Encantada organization was also able to continue acquiring services for its own membership.

In the Latin American context, where illegal seizures of land and the development of

informal housing settlements have become commonplace, understanding what factors contribute
to patterns of organizational strategy for demand-making constitutes an important substantive
goal. Why did the experienced settlers of Sector C and Rosales stubbornly refuse to modify their
approach, while Oasis and Encantada's squatter neophytes flexibly employed a savvy
combination of strategies? And why did the Innovators of Encantada deploy a creative mix of
original tactics, while Oasis relied on the same old tactical "playbook" of Old Guard
organizations like Sector C and Rosales?

In this paper, I examine squatter settlement development in Peru and Ecuador through

data drawn from 10 neighborhood-level case studies of invasion organizations founded in the
1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. The study sets forth a typology that identifies three types of invasion
organizations (Old Guard, Next Generation, and Innovator), and the 10 cases include one