Cooperation as a field of dispute: organizational tensions and divergent meanings in Misiones agriculture.

Abstract

This article proposes a comparative analysis of cooperative trajectories in two citrus-growing areas of the province of Misiones - Alto Paraná and Alto Uruguay - based on a key tension: the ambivalence of agrarian cooperativism as an organizational form that can function both as a strategy for peasant autonomy and as an instrument of corporate control. Through historical and ethnographic reconstruction, the conditions of emergence and transformation of two emblematic cooperative experiences are examined. On the one hand, the Agricultural Cooperative of Eldorado (CAE), with a mutualist and vindicative orientation, emerged in the first decades of colonization, and on the other, the Misiones Tobacco Cooperative (CTM), with a business profile, consolidated as a mediator within a scheme of vertical integration. The analysis suggests that this difference cannot be reduced to a chronological or institutional issue, but rather expresses differentiated regimes of articulation between producers, markets and state devices. By problematizing the label “cooperative” as a signifier in dispute, the article provides a situated view on the mutations of cooperativism in Misiones in contexts of structural change and opens questions on whether these models represent a historical evolution or the coexistence of divergent and conflicting organizational projects in regional agriculture.