Money from the Government in Latin America

Conditional Cash Transfer Programs and Rural Lives

Maria Elisa Balen, Martin Fotta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781032178509
• eBook ISBN: 9781351173148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

It has been almost two decades since conditional cash transfer programs first appeared on the agendas of multilateral agencies and politicians. Latin America has often been used as a testing ground for these programs, which consist of transfers of money to subsections of the population upon meeting certain conditions, such as sending their children to school or having them vaccinated. Money from the Government in Latin America takes a comparative view of the effects of this regular transfer of money, which comes with obligations, on rural communities.

Drawing on a variety of data, taken from different disciplinary perspectives, these chapters help to build an understanding of the place of conditional cash transfer programsin rural families and households, in individuals' aspirations and visions, in communities' relationships to urban areas, and in the overall character of these rural societies.

With case studies from Chile, Mexico, Peru, Brazil and Colombia, this book will interest scholars and researchers of Latin American anthropology, sociology, development, economics and politics.

Part I

Global CCT repertoires and their local translations

1 Gendering and engendering capital

Conditional cash transfers in indigenous and rural households, Yucatan, Mexico

Andrçs Dapuez

Introduction

Capitalism proposes flexible alternatives for its own future. ¹ However, the objectification and depiction of capitalist generativity cannot take the nature of capital for granted (on capitalist generativity, see Bear 2017; Bear et al. 2015). Identifying a ‘fundamental unity’ of capital, as an agent extending itself ‘far into its society and profoundly shaping and conditioning social life’ (Streeck 2017: 229), should be the starting point for answering the question of what capital is today. Economic or sociological definitions of capital, while useful as investigatory points of departure, do not fully explain how capital works and develops the new arenas in which it is reproduced. My contribution is limited to an analysis of one such area: the complex phenomena of human capital accumulation through Mexico’s conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs. By investigating social accounts of money as generative of new forms of human life, my research reveals critical moments in obtaining human capital through distributions of cash transfers. While cash transfer programs aim to accumulate human capital in the new generation of children or to create new capabilities for children (for instance, in Sen’s terms: 1997, 2009), this progress is directed towards one overarching creative cumulative process, that of economic capital. In brief, cash transfer development programs are built upon the assumption that the poor can get themselves out of poverty if, and only if, they can accumulate economic capital through the primitive accumulation of human capital.

In this chapter, I focus on three different accounts of the cash transfer distributive experience. Following Bear (2017), I seek to understand capital’s intimacies when:

• Experts search for a new generativity of capital – first, human capital and, later, economic capital – in the homes of beneficiaries of Oportunidades, Mexico’s signature CCT program;
• The Mexican middle class suspects that these CCTs work as incentives for pregnancies among poor women; and,
• Many rural and indigenous CCT recipients express fears of bodily diminution from participation in the program.

Each of these cases includes accounts of money either positively or negatively affecting some aspect of human vitality. Whether people describe money as contributing to vitality through its transformation into human capital, incentivizing the reproduction of children, or draining the poor of their bodily force, all indicate a new monetary ideology fostered by experiences of CCT programs. Cash transfers set the stage for new generation of capital as well as for the birth of a new generative type of money.

Generating human capital in every human

After first implementing Progresa in 1997, Mexico changed the program’s name to Oportunidades in 2002 and, most recently, to Prospera in 2014. According to those who first developed the CCT concept, accumulation of human capital was necessary to help children eventually enter the labor market (as laborers or capitalistic entrepreneurs) and liberate themselves from poverty’s self-reproducing cycle. But CCTs remain silent about the conditions of future labor markets. Those implementing CCT programs address only the generation of ‘human capital’ (Becker 1962; Goldin 2016) among school-age children. Consequently, if ‘[h]uman capital is the stock of skills that the labor force possesses’ (Goldin 2016: 55), there is a temporal gap – and missing condition – that stands at the basis of all these programs. Postponed over more than a generation, the accumulation of human capital does not refer to any particular set of skills needed by the future labor force. Rather, the programs rely on the adequacy of current educational and health systems to produce such skills for the future.

In short, the process of human capital accumulation depends on a whole series of assumptions in the CCT equation: that the money will be used well by recipient mothers; that governmental health and education services function perfectly; and that children will grow up to be strong, healthy and educated. The ultimate assumption is that all these favorable conditions will result in the accumulation of the human capital necessary not only for future employment, but for the jobs that the labor market will actually demand in the future. In this manner, developmental economists have posited and peddled a purely fictional chain of capital formation. In other words, barren economic capital, incapable of creating capital for the majority of people, has been justified using the language of philosophical anthropology. Deficiencies of human capital and ‘capabilities’ among those people on the margins of capitalism represent one more deprivation of the human being called poor, and this lack explains poverty (Sen 1997).

While existing research on cash transfers has focused on a number of their effects, few have explored one of their major consequences: the reconfiguration of money as a behavioral tool for the generation of capital. The global proliferation of CCT programs indicates a broad shift in economics but also, more precisely, a shift in the role that money should play in development processes. The spread of CCTs does more than just increase liquidity, in terms of what monetarists refer to as ‘quantitative easing’, but this time for the poor’s living conditions. The concomitant use of money as a medium to reinforce behavior reconfigures money as a life-generating token. In this contribution, I examine three important perspectives on this emerging phenomenon: those of development economists, those of the Mexican lower middle classes, and those of poor recipient mothers among indigenous Mayan households.

Development economists, believing that transferring cash to the poor will enable at least some of them to become wage laborers and capitalists, also worry that CCT investments will multiply the numbers of the poor. To address this concern, the Oportunidades program limited the number of transfers to a maximum of three children per family. This stipulation came in response to popular suspicions that women become pregnant solely to receive cash transfers. Congruent with other evidence, however, the stipulation also highlights the notion that the reproduction of capital requires that the mother redirects some of her generative capacities – previously used to produce more children – to capital.

The lower middle classes, on the other hand, take it as established that CCTs result in increased reproduction among the poor. They do not believe it possible that money distributed to the poor will result in the production of capitalist entrepreneurs or suitable workers. Moreover, they also suspect that there is a ‘factory of the poor’ at work, or, as a paper explains this popular concern in Mexico, as an intentional state-driven method of reproducing the poor in order to control them as an electoral resource (CAM 2014).

Finally, burdening recipient mothers with conditionalities of CCT programs indicates more than a feminization of poverty. The rural and indigenous poor’s troubles with the cash they receive relate directly to how poor mothers are held responsible, specifically, for their inability to generate human capital while giving birth to ‘too many children’. How does the ostensibly new generative capability of CCT money make mothers responsible for their inability to generate human capital from their own capabilities and resources? First, as I explore in the following section, by reassuring these mothers that it is better to bear fewer children.

How to get poor people to accumulate capital rather than children

During my research at the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) during six non-consecutive months (between 2006 and 2008 in Washington, DC), I interviewed economists in charge of the Procampo and Oportunidades CCT programs. One economist, Juan, was a friend of a friend whom I had met previously. While we were talking one day, Juan mentioned that family planning issues were difficult to address ‘at the Bank’ in a straightforward manner. Misunderstanding him, I asked if he was referring to his own family or mine, as we both had two young children at the time. Juan clarified that he was speaking of family planning as a tool to fight poverty more generally, explaining that reducing poverty would be much easier if the Latin American poor did not have so many children. In plain Spanish, however, Juan assured me that Bank authorities did not look favorably upon directly recommending that Latin American governments reduce the fertility rate of their poor populations. Neither the Latin American governments, nor the Catholic economists in the Bank, wanted to upset the Catholic Church, he continued, so his progressive policy advice should be handled delicately. In particular, this economist suggested that CCT enterprises, financed by the Bank throughout the Americas, should incorporate sexual health conditionalities into their programs. More concretely, he wanted the Bank to indirectly push for the legalization of abortion, improve sex education, and promote the use of contraceptives throughout Latin America, with the aim of reducing the ranks of the poor. Juan based his policy suggestions on the rationalization that breaking the reproductive cycle of poverty can be accomplished by reducing the reproductive cycle of the poor. His approach to the poverty problem related two variables directly: the population of the poor and per capita net income. By limiting the former, the Bank could increase the latter.

At the time, I did not have a clear-cut opinion on this economist’s policy suggestion. Although I agreed with most pro-choice movements and organizations, the top-down promotion of such policies sometimes reminded me of Jonathan Swift’s ‘modest proposal’ (1729). Further, having decreased my own per capita income by having a third child, it seemed hypocritical of me to suggest a household child limit for others. I was reminded of my conversations with Juan when I revisited cash transfer legislation for my dissertation in 2013 and discovered changes in the official materials. In line with Juan’s opinions on pursuing a more aggressive agenda to reduce fertility cycles among poor populations, one item in the Oportunidades regulation book, Reglas de Operación Oportunidades 2012, restates the same ‘rights, co-responsibilities, obligations and suspensions of the beneficiary families’ (Oportunidades 2010: 28) that were found in previous legislation. For the first time, however, the 2012 version of the Oportunidades rules also lists five exceptional circumstances under which families might be excused from attending obligatory health talks and Oportunidades’ meetings. Families with a member who falls within one of the following categories were now exempt from that co-responsibility:

A. an anemic or undernourished child,

B. a diabetic,

C. a ‘sexually active woman’ who uses a long-term contraceptive method,

D. a ‘sexually active man’ who has had a vasectomy,

E. a pregnant woman with health checks and undernourished pregnant women.

It occurred to me that program designers included exceptions C and D to encourage a reduction in the number of poor household members. As I was repeatedly told during my fieldwork in a Yucatec village (2003–2011), attending regular meetings was considered a ‘nuisance’ and a ‘burden’ for many women. Exceptions C and D offer families who practice fertility control a reprieve from this requirement, which is otherwise a condition for the program. It is not unreasonable to suggest that waiving the health meeting requirement constitutes the removal of a bothersome incentive or, borrowing terminology from behavioral economics, a ‘negative reinforcement’ for some beneficiaries.

I have not had the opportunity to ask Juan if he, or his co-workers in the IADB, encouraged Mexican officials to include these new measures in the Oportunidades program to reduce pregnancy rates among beneficiaries. However, following Murphy’s insights on the economization of populations, I am inclined to understand that such behavioral reinforcements aim to reduce life itself to a ‘form of capital’. As the reproduction of life itself is managed according to experimental governance techniques (Murphy 2017: 9), the cash transfer designers believe that they can propel human capital formation first, and later economic capital formation, by inducing a reduction of the fertility rate among the cash transfer receivers. Therefore, the authors of both CCT programs and development literature claim that capital can arise if, and only if, vitality is not channeled in multifarious and polymorphic ways. In the language of experts, this might include ‘too many children’ or ‘too much alcohol’ as examples of the wasteful economies toward which CCT recipients may inappropriately direct their cash transfers.

From the standpoint of the CCT’s architects, it follows that the successful accumulation of capital must proceed in a ‘responsible’ manner, flowing appropriately through certain monetary and investment practices. Through the conditionalities enumerated in its CCT program, the Mexican state seeks to condition mothers to receive and administer money in a way that first generates human capital before being transformed into economic capital through engagement in the formal labor market. If we consider government policies to reduce fertility among poor populations as an indirect conditionality and collateral outcome of CCTs, we may then ask, what characteristics will money acquire when it is used over decades by development programs as a form of behavioral reinforcement to reduce human fertility?

CCTs brand new fertile money

According to well-known statistics, the world’s fertility rate fell from around five live births per woman in 1950–1955 to 2.5 births in 2010–2015 (UNDP 2016). In large part, this seems to be due to a documented decrease in male fertility. A comprehensive meta-analysis (Levine et al. 2017) suggests that sperm counts declined significantly among men across North America, Europe and Australia bet...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Rearticulations of rural lives through conditional cash transfers
• Part I: Global CCT repertoires and their local translations
• Part II: CCTs organizing community relations
• Part III: Envisioning futures through CCTs
• Afterwod: From affirmative to transformative distributive politics
• Index