Froemming, Steven John; 1999; Rational Choice and Collective Action in an Andean Community. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Washington, Seattle. Excerpt from Chapter 9 (pages 587-597).

Fines

Fines for Shirking Obligations

The formal tool that the community has for enforcing attendance at community meetings and work parties is the application of a fine for those that are faltado ('absent').

A fine is applied for failure to vote for community officials in the biannual elections. In the election that I witnessed in 1990, attendance was very high. Most people who didn't vote were living outside the community and had not changed their voting registry. Few fines were collected. So little money was in the community treasury at the time of the election that the president of the electoral committee had to hike to Calca and pay his own way to Cusco to deliver the results.⁽¹⁾

Generally, there are no penalties for failure to attend the asamblea general. A head count is taken, but not a roll call of those present. When attendance at an assembly is obligatory, the list of heads of households is used to assess fines. The election of the comité electoral and the selection of candidates to run for office in the junta directiva are among the special circumstances under which attendance at the assemblies is mandatory.

Fines are commonly used to assure attendance at work parties. After every phayna, the secretary of the junta directiva, the secretary of the consejo de menores, or the secretary of the committee or work group directing the phayna reads the roll call of comuneros obligated to attend. People's presence or absence is recorded in a notebook before all assembled, and this list is used to determine who needs to make up work or pay fines. The cost of the fine is set at an asamblea general and is usually project specific. The fine for the major building project in 1989 -- reroofing of the church -- was 3000 intis (89¢) per day missed. At the assembly where the fine was determined, a vote was taken between 1000, 2000, and 3000 intis, and the higher amount won. All told, each comunero had to contribute fifty adobe block and six work days.

The next year, 1990, the major building project was construction of a new high school. Each comunero was expected to contribute one hundred adobe block and work on one of the construction teams. The fine for failure to attend a construction phayna for the school was 500,000 intis ($1.17). There were eight phayna for the school, so a comunero who missed all of them owed 8,000,000 intis. In some cases, individuals judged their other activities to be more pressing or lucrative than attendance. One of my compadres missed four phayna working as a porter on the Inca trail, but he earned four times as much per day working as a porter as he lost by his absence. Another missed all of the days because he was in Ocobamba trying to establish a homestead. The head of my host family missed six days because he was tending to his cattle herd.⁽²⁾ The workers were divided into seven teams, each with a capitán, secretario, and vocal. The teams kept track of their own attendance and collected their own fines. Little money actually appears to have been collected, as absentees could make up their time, teams could decide that those who had worked more could rest to even the workload out, and the project was not completed, so that for most groups, a final reconciliation of accounts was not done. The destination of any money collected from the fines was left up to each team. The one group that talked to me about their intentions said that they planned to buy alcohol with the money as it was windy on the site where the school was being built and they needed it for ánimo ('spirit', 'fortitude') and to keep warm. The money was not predestined for the community treasury or for purchasing building materials for the school.

Most often, those that are absent from these work parties are not fined at all. For most ongoing projects, they are able to make the work up on another day. Sometimes, special work parties are called for absentees. Despite a general work party to fence off the hatun papa potato sector in P'alqa in 1991, for example, the crops suffered considerable animal damage and the general assembly decided that a second phayna was needed. Those who had attended the first were exempt from attending the second.

Fines are levied in cash rather than agricultural products, increasing their liquidity, but making them harder to collect. Collection is a difficult and thankless task, and a debt may drag on for months, or be forgiven or forgotten. Debts to the community may give one a bad reputation, but second order sanctioning is more difficult than first, and the community has few options if someone does not pay. If one owes a neighbor a few day's labor in ayni, it behooves one to make them up if one wants the cooperation of one's neighbor to continue into the future. The reciprocal nature of ongoing dyadic relationships makes them self-reinforcing. This is not the case with obligations to the community. Sizeable debts in time or money owed can be built up, and no particular individual has a vested interest in collecting them. As an ultimate resort, the assembly can place someone on probation -- withdraw their empadronado status -- but I am not aware of any instances where this sanction has been applied for failure to pay one's fines. Many absences from work parties fell between the cracks of the system. Organized efforts to sanction faltados were few, and the listing of absentees at work parties often lacked follow-up.

Fines for Setting Fires

Grass and timber fires are a problem in Ccachín during the dry season. Most of the blazes are the result of carelessness, fires set to cook food or clear land that get out of hand. The community attempts to discourage wildfires and recoup damages to forest resources through the assessment of fines. As with most sanctions, these fines are set by the general assembly. In 1991 the base rate was 500,000 intis (62¢) per hectare, with the understanding that this could be adjusted according to the damage done, degree of negligence, and other individual circumstances. After a rash of fires in July and August of 1991, the president of the community traveled to Cusco to inform the Ministerio de Agricultura. According to comuneros, the Peruvian government was the ultimate owner of the community's forest resources, and the comunidad campesina would have to pay a fine to the Ministry of Agriculture for their destruction. They would also have to pay the costs of having government engineers come to the village to inspect the damage. A month later, two government engineers attended the asamblea general in Ccachín to help resolve the fire problem.

A hearing was held at the September assembly and judgements were brought against eighteen people, including one who set a fire eight years earlier. For each case, the person who set the fire was given a chance to explain to the assembly what happened, and testimony was added by others who had knowledge of the event. A tentative fine was calculated at the head table by community officials, and this was put before the defendant and the assembly for discussion, revision and consensus. The worst fire of the year was set by the Inca Alcalde-elect for 1992 (less than a month after his selection) in the sector known as Ankawachana. Apparently, he set a small fire to warm his chicha and drive away the ch'uspi ('small biting insects'), and it smoldered underground for a few days before resurfacing a few meters away. The fire destroyed 125 hectares, including forty-five wooded hectares and a sector of bunch grass set aside for building material. An emergency phayna had to be called to beat the fire out.⁽³⁾ Privately, comuneros talked about the severity of the infraction and suggested that he should be fined up to three toros ('bulls') for the damage. The FAO-Holanda reforestation agent for the area reported that the comunero could receive up to three years imprisonment for the offense. At the assembly, however, perhaps out of solidarity with a native son in proceedings carried out under the watchful eyes of government engineers, perhaps out of recognition of the upcoming expense the fellow would have as Inca alcalde, and guided by the charitable penalty schedule that had been worked out (500,000 intis/hectare was only half the rate assessed for having one's cow or horse cause damage in the same sector), the comunero was fined a single bull for his negligence.

In another case, two boys playing with matches while herding destroyed eighteen to twenty-five hectares along the trail to Qochayoq, three of them wooded. Their parents were held responsible. The parents of one of the boys were padrino and madrina for a first-haircutting ceremony during the fiesta of Santiago. After a night of celebration and drinking, they were too tired the next morning to prepare a lunch to send with their son to pasture the family's sheep. Instead, the mother gave her son matches to build a fire and boil some potatoes, which he did. The next day, the two boys returned to pasture their sheep in the same area and discovered that their qoncha ('hearth', 'fire pit') was still burning. In play, they decided to make torches from some dried grass, and the fire got away from them. The pasture was consumed by the blaze. Twenty-three of thirty sheep of one boy's flock were destroyed, twenty-four of the other's. The boys themselves almost lost their lives, but a comunero and his son were cutting wood nearby and rescued them. The son heard sheep bleating, and the pair went to investigate. The boy couldn't handle the dense smoke and stayed behind as his father entered the blaze. The comunero found the two young herders trapped and covered with smoke. He took the boys to the river and washed them up, and together they hiked back to Ccachín to report the incident. At the assembly, the community determined that the parents of one of the boys were not responsible. The family had suffered enough with the loss of their herd. The parents of the boy who had built the cook fire, however, were fined 12,500,000 ($12.50) for negligence. The feeling was that they should have never given the boy the matches. The hero of this affair later complained to me that he had lost a lot of time in the rescue and in the aftermath of paperwork, and that he was never compensated by either of the families for his efforts.⁽⁴⁾

After hearing a number of cases and judging that the penalties assigned by the assembly were inordinately light, the representative from the Ministry of Agriculture stood up and lectured the assembly about the seriousness of the problem. At the time, the community had just agreed to a fine a comunero 5,000,000 intis ($5.00) for burning about twenty hectares of community land. Using the case as an example, the engineer argued that ten times that amount would be more appropriate. Turning to the comunero, he asked him what he thought was fair. Taken aback by the figure suggested by the engineer, the comunero replied "15,000,000 intis." People laughed, and reminded their compatriot that he was only being assessed a third of that, and that being the case, it was better to keep quiet.

Generally, however, the comments of the government engineers were directed toward settling the cases, rather than toward settling them in any particular way. When all of the cases had been heard, the head engineer asked the assembly to set a time limit for payment of the fines. He suggested fifteen days. There were protests from those who had been fined. One said that he needed at least a month; another needed two. Upon hearing this, others grumbled. The feeling of the majority was that this was too long. Ultimately, the assembly decided to give the assessed families until the next assembly to pay, a period of twenty days. The October asamblea general was later canceled, however, because people had too much work to do in their fields, and the next general assembly was held two months later. At that meeting, the junta directiva reported that none of the fines had yet been paid. The assembly decided to turn the matter over to the Ministerio de Agricultura. When I left Ccachín a few months later, the payments were still pending.⁽⁵⁾

Fines for Animal Damage

Fines for daño ('animal damage') are set by the asamblea general, and are reconsidered occasionally to adjust for inflation. The readjustments take place when a new sector is closed to animals or when the community has a pressing need for money and the issue becomes critical, but the adjustments are infrequent and fail to keep up with inflation in the short term. Table 9.2 gives an idea of the variance in the severity of fines, as well as a comparison of the relative value of the fines for animal damage, fire damage, and failure to fulfill one's obligations to the community. Typically, the fines are highest when first set by the Assembly. The lowest values were recorded later, as the real value of the fines plummeted due to the declining value of the inti. To take a single time slice, the fines for the new agricultural season were as follows when first set in October 1990:

Immature animals were assessed at half the rate of adults. The rates above were for the first twenty-four hours only. If the varayoq or others delegated to manage the corral had to feed and water the animals, the rate was substantially higher. Cattle and horses, for example, were charged at $3.00/day/head, to compensate for the added labor. The money went into the community treasury, not to the individuals doing the work. Grazing animals were taken by day to the cemetery, where they could be locked in to browse between the graves. Ideally, all of the offending animals in a sector are captured and herded to the corral, but if a captor is short of help to drive them, one animal is lassoed and hauled away and the rest counted. In extreme cases, with animals that are repeat offenders, and when their owner makes no attempt to resolve the problem, comuneros can petition officials and receive approval to kill the animals when they trespass again.⁽⁶⁾ In principle, the owner must pay for the total number of his animals trespassing in the field to get the one released, but insufficient evidence and the lack of animals in hand reduces the bargaining power of the community and makes this hard to enforce. Since enforcement is difficult in any case, people recognize that the community's need to collect money needs to be balanced with the ability of people to pay. If the fines are set too high, people will be less willing and able to pay, and there will be a lot of hard feelings with little additional money collected.

Animals may stray into a sector at any time during the growing season, but the most serious problems arise around the transition points -- plantings and harvests -- where labor is at a premium, and when established herding patterns are disrupted and adjusted. During a one-month period for which I have records -- from mid-October to mid-November 1991 (just after the spring corn and potato plantings and the closing of these respective sectors) -- forty comuneros were assessed $187 in fines on a total of 120 animals caught damaging the fields. Pigs (40%) and horses (40%) made up the bulk of animals caught, with cattle a distant third (15%). Unlike sheep and goats, all of these animals are left to graze unattended. At harvest, however, the percentage of cattle dramatically increases as people bring their animals from the cattle pastures in anticipation of the opening of the maway papa and corn sectors. Of the total amount of fines assessed, 55% were collected in cash and 8% were collected in goods (normally, goods are not accepted, but in this case, corn, meat, and prizes were needed for the community anniversary). In addition, 10% were backed by pawns held for later resale. The remaining 27% was lost in never paid IOUs (animals released without pawns) or reduction in the fines because of lack of funds or unwillingness to pay. 65% of the comuneros did not pay their debts immediately, but left pawns to get their animals out of the corral. Most later paid, but 27% never paid and never reclaimed their pawns. These statistics are drawn from the work of the Anniversary Committee, and the committee was more aggressive than the varayoq typically are in patrolling the fields and collecting fines.

While I don't have any data on what portion of the total amount of community income generated from animal damage is collected in the month that the anniversary committee is in charge, the corral is empty for most of the year, and based on the number of animals present in monthly spot checks, it seems likely that 50% or more of the total revenue from damage is collected by the committee. The number of animals caught, even under aggressive monitoring, represents but the tip of the iceberg of the total number of animals (or animal × days, a better measure) of animals encroaching on areas where they don't belong. The corral, fines, and delegation of authority to patrol the fields and collect the fines are a collective attempt to resolve incongruities between agriculture and pastoralism in a mixed peasant economy. The lack of capital and labor for extensive fencing necessitates open range foraging, and as McCorkle (1987) points out, the complex and spatially dispersed pattern of resource use and scheduling of cultivation and herding duties exacerbates the difficulties of integrating the two modes of production.

These same factors likewise constrain the community's attempts to limit damage through institutional means. The labor required to minimize animal damage to levels comparable with stabling or fencing is beyond the capacity of the community to provide. Individual field owners have a strong incentive to patrol their own fields and do so when they are working in a particular sector, but they face the double task of controlling their own animals while guarding widely-scattered crops, and they can't be everywhere at once. A diffuse system of each-for-their-own would require more labor time than any household can employ. There are gains from cooperation. Because of their own subsistence needs, however, those delegated the job can only patrol part-time, and they are not materially compensated for doing so. The responsibility takes time and energy away from their own household production, while the benefits of their labor accrue to all.

The established system balances conflicting needs, but it only reduces -- it does not eliminate -- the risks. Consequently, at certain times of the year, there is an undercurrent of anger in the community, and accusations and arguments over animal damage break out with the slightest provocation at communal work parties and at assemblies. These public disputes put pressure on the varayoq -- who otherwise tend to let their obligation to patrol the fields slide -- to act. Comuneros in turn try to keep a step ahead of the movements of the varayoq, or when active, the Anniversary Committee, to avoid having their animals being caught. The control of animal damage is marked by the ebb and flow of energy around these sporadic roundups rather than the steadiness of daily pressure or a sense of public duty.

Notes

1. The president of the electoral committee asked me for a loan to cover the cost of the bus trip from Calca to Cusco (70¢). He eventually paid me back with money from the fines collected for failure to vote. The Comité Electoral must meet a deadline in submitting the election results to the Ministerio de Agricultura in Cusco. Communities are subject to a fine for failure to present their election results in proper order by the deadline. Given the late date of the election in 1990, the committee had only five days to do so, subject to a 100,000,000 inti ($200) fine.

2. Since the head of my host family was outside of the community tending to his animals, I was given the option of taking his place so that the family would get a work day's credit. Instead, I chose to collaborate without reward on the days that I worked, helping teams that were shorthanded so that I could spread myself around among the teams.

3. The work party was mandatory, and a fine was assessed on those who couldn't attend. One of my compadres was out of the community at the time, so his wife (my comadre) went in his place to avoid paying a fine.

4. According to the women in my host family, the mother was at fault not only for giving her son matches, but for getting so drunk that she could not cook for her son in the first place. They reported that the community assessed the couple with a stiff fine because the woman was argumentative at the assemblies where the incident was discussed. I did not have an opportunity to check out this interpretation with others, but it is certainly plausible. It should be noted, however, that the women held a great deal of animosity toward the mother of the boy: they believed that she was one of two people that had set fire to her house.

5. Unfortunately, it was never clear to me whether the money to be collected from the fines belonged to the Ministerio de Agricultura or to the community. The Ministry's allowing the asamblea general to determine the nature of the fines and the repayment period implies the former. The community's turning the affair over to the Ministry of Agriculture implies the latter.

6. This right to kill policy was explained to me by an irrate compadre who had just discovered that all of the squash he had planted had been rooted out by three pigs. The same three had done damage to his cornfield on several previous occasions. He was not sure who their owner was, and said that he would petition the community to get rid of them. I am not aware of any instance while I was in the village, however, where anyone actually killed an animal that had caused damage to his crops.

Table 9.2: Fines for Property Damage and Noncooperation

Inti values have been converted to U.S. dollars.

References Cited

McCorkle, Constance M.
1987 Punas, Pastures, and Fields: Grazing Strategies and the Agropastoral Dialectic in an Indigenous Andean Community. In Arid Land Use Strategies and Risk Management in the Andes: A Regional Anthropological Perspective. David L. Browman, ed. Pp. 57-79. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.