After the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990, former land owners returned to Nicaragua from the USA and began to take back their former estates, through legal and less than legal manoeuvering. This ‘agrarian counter-reform’ as it became known left many hundreds of rural people landless in its wake during the 1990s and the early 2000s. Now a national union has adopted agroecology and is leading the way for peasant farmers to work their way out of poverty, collectively.