{"id":47970,"date":"2014-09-29T12:00:37","date_gmt":"2014-09-29T11:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=47970"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:29:42","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:29:42","slug":"until-the-rulers-obey-learning-from-latin-americas-social-movements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/09\/until-the-rulers-obey-learning-from-latin-americas-social-movements\/","title":{"rendered":"Until the Rulers Obey: Learning from Latin America\u2019s Social Movements"},"content":{"rendered":"

An excerpt from the introduction to <\/em>Until the Rulers Obey: Voices of from Latin American Social Movements<\/a>, edited by Clifton Ross and Marcy Rein (Oakland: PM Press, 2014)<\/em><\/p>\n

\"0-1-0-rulerobeybook2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A wave of change rolled through Latin America at the turn of the twenty-first century, sweeping away neoliberal two-party governments, bringing calls to re-found the states based on broad participation and democratically drafted constitutions. The power and motion of this wave, often referred to as the \u201cPink Tide,\u201d came from the social movements that had been gathering force for over a decade\u2014rebuilding in spaces opened by the fall of US-backed military dictatorships, rethinking in the spaces opened by the crumbling of the Soviet socialist models.<\/p>\n

These movements galvanized long-silent\u2014or silenced\u2014sectors of society: indigenous people, campesinos, students, the LGBT community, the unemployed and all those left out of the promised utopia of a globalized economy.\u00a0 They have deployed a wide array of strategies and actions to some common ends. They march against mines and agribusiness; they occupy physical spaces, rural and urban, and social space won through recognition of language, culture, and equal participation; they mobilize villages, towns, cities and even nations for community and environmental survival.\u00a0 They are sloughing off the skin of the twentieth-century bipolar world, synthesizing old ways of working and finding new paths into an uncertain future.<\/p>\n

Same story, different century<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Conquest of the Americas continues as an ongoing process of \u201cprimitive accumulation,\u201d that is, through brutal dispossession, only changed in detail. The looting, once only of gold and silver picked or shoveled from mines by slaves to satisfy the greed of Conquistadores, has increased exponentially in recent decades to feed transnational Capital. This behemoth has left behind the sword to devastate the region with an arsenal of new tools for plunder: strip-mining \u201cmegaprojects\u201d with giant machines that dig for lithium, copper and gold, laying waste to landscapes; countless drills for oil, poisoning rivers; dams for hydroelectric power that flood indigenous lands; battalions of tractors sowing industrial soy for cattle and biofuel, or cane for sugar and biofuel, or eucalyptus for paper mills, or other monocultures that raze entire ecosystems and steal peoples\u2019 ways of life\u2026.<\/p>\n

The United States, of course, has played a major role in the modernization of the instruments of domination for plunder, only in recent years so \u201chumanely\u201d refined. During the more savage era of the Cold War, Washington fomented coups to dislodge nationalist and socialist governments across the continent\u2014Arbenz in Guatemala, 1954; Goulart in Brazil, 1964; Allende in Chile, 1973\u2014installing military dictatorships in their place. By the mid-1970s, most of Central and South America was under the rule of dictatorships armed, trained, directed and financed by the United States. Hundreds of thousands were tortured, murdered and disappeared, in some cases decapitating an entire generation of artists, writers, intellectuals and activists.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

These dictatorships imposed a particularly virulent form of capitalism on the people of Latin America. Years before neoliberalism came to the United States and Europe, \u201cthe restructuring of the Latin American economies had begun in earnest when Pinochet invited the \u2018Chicago boys,\u2019 neoliberal academics from the USA, to run the dictatorship\u2019s economic policy. The socio-economic consequence for the majority in Latin America was catastrophic devastation.\u201d[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

By the 1980s these military regimes had already begun to collapse and give way to democratic governments, beginning in Central America with the overthrow of Nicaragua\u2019s Somoza dictatorship by the Sandinistas (FSLN) in 1979, and in South America with the fall of Argentina\u2019s military dictatorship in 1983. Nevertheless, the dictatorships left behind massive debts, devastated economies, decimated social movements, traumatized societies, and neoliberal constitutions, some of which continue to direct national policies to this day.<\/p>\n

New movements born from the ashes of the old<\/strong><\/p>\n

The 1989 collapse of the USSR set off a worldwide \u201ccrisis of the left,\u201d which had dramatic repercussions in Latin America.\u00a0 Cuba underwent the \u201cSpecial Period,\u201d its government forced to concern itself more with survival than with extending solidarity to international revolutionary struggles. In Nicaragua the Sandinistas lost power in elections in February 1990, after fighting what the International Court of Justice in 1986 ruled to be US\u00a0 \u201cterrorism\u201d for several years. Within just a few years, the armed movements in El Salvador and Guatemala negotiated agreements with their respective governments, leaving only Colombia\u2019s ELN (National Liberation Army) and FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), the first and last of the Marxist-Leninist guerrilla battling the United States \u201chyper-empire.\u201d<\/p>\n

The region\u2019s labor unions and workers\u2019 movements, which had anchored the left up to that moment, were struggling for survival, their leaders and membership still suffering from the blows of Operation Condor and other similar programs[3]<\/a> and the gutting of the state sector and manufacturing infrastructure under neoliberal programs. With the end of the Cold War there was a \u201cshift from \u2018straight power concepts\u2019\u201d such as dictatorships, \u201cto \u2018persuasion\u2019… predicated on a new component in US foreign policy: what policymakers call the \u2018promotion of democracy.\u2019\u201d[4]<\/a> New democratic governments\u2014often with \u201cleft\u201d parties at the helm\u2014obediently continued the policies of neoliberal austerity throughout the region. Union membership, activity and power dropped significantly from 1991 \u2013 2001, as governments pursued privatization, trade liberalization, and price stabilization, and the contingent workforce swelled.[5]<\/a><\/p>\n

The neoliberal model, expressed as \u201cTINA\u201d (\u201cThere Is No Alternative\u201d) by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and affirmed by her US counterparts, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, reigned supreme as opponents experienced \u201cthe collapse of the class-based model of the traditional left.\u201d[6]<\/a> However, despite this collapse, what a majority of Latin Americans envisioned in its place was another kind of \u201cleft,\u201d since capitalism has never been, as it once was in the United States, a \u201cpopular\u201d ideology advanced even by the working class.<\/p>\n

Some form of socialism or communitarianism is embedded in the cultural matrix of the entire southern continent, in the indigenous concept of the \u201cminga,\u201d \u201cminka,\u201d or \u201ccayapa,\u201d meaning \u201ccommunity work for the collective good without self-interest.\u201d The Roman Catholic Church\u2014especially Liberation Theology\u2014 posed community as the way to redemption, unlike Protestantism in which salvation has generally been considered an individual matter. When left to their own devices, Latin Americans have often chosen communal forms of mutual aid and populist, corporatist or even socialist governments that advocated for the interests of the working majority.\u00a0 In any case, in the neoliberal globalizing world of TINA, Latin America seemed not to have gotten the memo that socialism was dead and Capital was writing history\u2019s final chapter.<\/p>\n

Even before the empire wrote that memo, the situation was changing in Latin America, and not going well for its neoliberal governments of \u201cdemocratic transition.\u201d Tens of thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets in February 1989, their tolerance for neoliberal policies pushed past the breaking point by an increase in transit fares. Police and military killed an unknown number in what later became known as the \u201cCaracazo,\u201d but the event began a slow-moving transformation that would have profound consequences within a few years. In neighboring Ecuador, a little over a year later, in June of 1990, thousands of indigenous people rose up and marched on the capital under the banner, \u201cNever again a nation without us\u201d and small, local mobilizations that became national marches began in Bolivia, uniting lowlands indigenous people with the highland Aymara.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, indigenous people from all the Americas began to gear up for the Intercontinental Chaski for Self-Determination and other actions to protest five hundred years of genocide and celebrate five hundred years of resistance. Environmentalists began linking up with native peoples to protest everything from logging of virgin forests to mining on native lands. These bonds and a widening circle of concerns that incorporated new actors led to the founding of Via Campesina in 1993, bringing concerns for healthy, humane food production and food producers to public consciousness.<\/p>\n

Remaining workers\u2019 movements and unions in the United States and Mexico began to organize against the imperial agenda behind \u201cglobalization\u201d in the form of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) being pushed by then-President Bill Clinton. Their efforts failed, but as the treaty went into effect, precisely at midnight on January 1, 1994, the Zapatistas (EZLN, Zapatista National Liberation Army) emerged from the jungles of Chiapas, Mexico to take five small towns and capture the left imagination by presenting a \u201ccounter power\u201d to what seemed an invincible unipolar empire in expansion.<\/p>\n

The Zapatistas were a new kind of guerrilla, emerging out of the encounter between left (Maoist) and indigenous people in the backwoods of Southern Mexico, and they quickly began to occupy not only largely indigenous towns in Chiapas but also the newly created territory of cyberspace. The Zapatista spokesperson, Subcommander Marcos, called for social movements from all over the world to gather in territory liberated by the EZLN for the First International Encuentro for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism in 1996, which became the basis of the later World Social Forum gatherings, beginning in 2001.<\/p>\n

The anti-globalization movements, inspired by the Zapatistas and other emerging actors in what was to be the \u201cautonomist\u201d side of a new left movement, joined forces with labor, environmental groups, and an array of social justice organizations to battle the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and other institutions of domination used by international capital.<\/p>\n

The rising \u201cPink Tide\u201d and the new movements<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hugo Ch\u00e1vez and his Polo Patri\u00f3tico movement won the Venezuelan election in 1998, setting the stage for the whole cast of new governments that came to power in the first decade of the new century, aided by the social movements that flourished again in the new context. With Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva, \u201cLula,\u201d as its candidate for the presidency, the Workers\u2019 Party took power in Brazil in 2002. Next door in Uruguay the left coalition, Frente Amplio (Broad Front) beat the traditional Red (Colorado) and White parties and won with their candidate, Tabar\u00e9 Vazquez, in 2005. In early 2006 Evo Morales was inaugurated as Bolivia\u2019s first indigenous president; later that same year Rafael Correa was elected president of Ecuador under the party he formed, \u201cAlianza Pa\u00eds.\u201d In 2008, Fernando Lugo, known as the \u201cRed Bishop,\u201d won the presidency in Paraguay with the help of massive social mobilizations, although his term came to an abrupt end with a June 2012 impeachment, which many saw as a golpe<\/em> (coup).<\/p>\n

These governments of the \u201cPink Tide\u201d surged to power on the backs of social movements\u2014both the new activism that arose from the changed circumstances of the 1990s, and organizing like that of the Landless Workers\u2019 Movement of Brazil (MST) and other groups that dated back to the 1970s and had grown and adapted since. Many new left groups and grassroots community organizations began to occupy and flourish in the spaces vacated by the old left parties.<\/p>\n

At the core of these new movements is a diverse cross-section of the marginalized and the excluded: slum dwellers, the unemployed, indigenous people, disaffected urban youth, LGBT communities, women, Afro-descendants, students, and many more \u201cinvisibilized\u201d new actors, now determined to take center stage in their world. While it would be impossible to generalize about such a varied collection of people, some common themes emerge in many of the movements in Latin America.<\/p>\n

First, they often attempt to occupy a \u201cterritory.\u201d Facing displacement by the modern-day enclosures that come with the extractive economy, poor people, campesinos and indigenous, stake claims to land for their very survival: Witness the Zapatistas in Chiapas, the MST across vast swaths of Brazil, indigenous defending ancestral and sacred lands, and slum-dwellers throughout Latin America. In these liberated territories, protagonists redesign their society outside the control of capital, and promote a \u201cdispersed\u201d autonomy that facilitates a strengthened resistance.<\/p>\n

As the members of the Galp\u00f3n de Corrales, an anarchist community center in Montevideo, Uruguay, tell us, many of these territories organize horizontal relationships of power, often implementing a concept of \u201cleadership as service.\u201d In this model, dramatically different from the democratic centralism of a vanguard organization, leadership arises from the base and is accountable to its base. It serves; it does not rule. This is consistent with the influential Liberation Theology that emerged in the 1970s in Latin America, as well as with indigenous ideas of leadership. As the Zapatistas put it, leaders are to \u201cgovern by obeying.\u201d<\/p>\n

As they stake out their territories, these movements sink ideological roots in local wisdom and symbol systems. Heroes of history and myth reinvent themselves in the emerging millions who relive the old stories, determined to write a new ending to the master narrative of the Conquest. The new movements see themselves as part of a heritage stretching back through more than five hundred years of resistance.<\/p>\n

Tupac Amaru and Tupac Katari inspire the activists of Peru and Bolivia just as Rumi\u00f1ahui is present in the struggle of indigenous Ecuadorans. Votan Zapata, an invention of the Zapatistas, blends Tzeltal Mayan myth with the hero of the Mexican Revolution from Chiapas, Emiliano Zapata. Subcommander Marcos seems to be as comfortable quoting the Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Mag\u00f3n as he does Marx, or more so, as do members of MORENA (the movement coming out Andres M.L. Obrador\u2019s bid for the Mexican presidency in 2012), not to mention those of Oaxaca, birthplace of Mag\u00f3n, where the image of the martyred anarchist was resurrected as protective and inspirational symbol in the 2006 uprising.<\/p>\n

This phenomenon is region-wide, with Venezuelans referring back to Bolivar, the Honduran resistance to Francisco Moraz\u00e1n, and Nicaraguans to Augusto Sandino, etc. This isn\u2019t a new phenomenon, but in the absence of a dominant Communist Party and its hegemonic symbology, regional systems of thought and histories have emerged into the foreground.<\/p>\n

The new social movements also value the work of formation and education. This is at the core of both the Zapatista struggle and the MST, but it plays a role in all the social movements. Not only do they emphasize the formation of their members, but they also carry political education into the community at large. This has been an important corrective to much of the old left approach that downplayed the \u201csubjective\u201d elements of struggle in favor of the \u201ctransformation of material conditions.\u201d Without taking the other extreme and focusing exclusively on the subjective and affective dimension of social change, the new movements work to transform individual subjectivities (through education) as well as objective conditions and social structures.<\/p>\n

The new movements share a practice of unity in diversity. The urban social movements represent every corner in the margins of the city: LGBT, squatters, unemployed, the \u201ccontingent\u201d and self-employed workers such as recyclers, etc. There are indigenous movements like CONAIE or ECUARUNARI and other similar organizations that incorporate diverse tribes and peoples and make alliances across ethnicities\u2026.<\/p>\n

Just as the new social movements have no single guiding ideology, nor a single type of actor, neither do they work with a single form of organization or structure. While most movements tend to favor \u201chorizontal\u201d or non-hierarchical forms of organization, organizational models are extremely diverse.<\/p>\n

Beyond binaries<\/strong><\/p>\n

Debate rages among social movement scholars over the most effective relations between movements and the state. For the most part, their opinions break down along the historic fault line in the left between the anarchists, libertarian or \u201cautonomist,\u201d and the socialists and communists who contest for state power. This is what some have called the \u201cpseudo-debate,\u201d[7]<\/a> but the problem is real, though it need not\u2014and should not\u2014be understood as a binary. William I. Robinson frames it better as a problem to be resolved when he writes, \u201cAt some point, the popular movements must work out how the vertical and horizontal intersect.\u201d[8]<\/a> At present, as revealed in the interviews presented in this book, activists and movement intellectuals are generally conscious of this problem to which they take a pragmatic, nuanced approach, keeping a sober critique of capitalism and its power always in view\u2026.<\/p>\n

Most of the nations represented in this book have \u201cprogressive\u201d governments, but none are in a \u201crevolutionary process\u201d in which a vanguard party controls state power and the mass of social forces submit to its authority and integrate themselves into that \u201cprocess.\u201d The states in the fifteen countries represented here range from quasi-military \u201cdemocracies\u201d of the right (Guatemala) to governments that say they are \u201con the road to socialism,\u201d but which are actually \u201creformist\u201d at best.[9]<\/a> They, as well as their political parties, also claim to represent \u201cthe people.\u201d But in fact, the interests of civil society, as organized in social movements, rarely converge with those of parties and states, because reformist states must respond to the pressures of international capital, local oligarchies, and other forces that directly oppose the interests of the majority.[10]<\/a><\/p>\n

This situation often leads to conflicts between even the most \u201cprogressive\u201d governments and social movements, most often over the government\u2019s development model. Most of the leaders of these states, particularly Correa in Ecuador and Morales in Bolivia, have expressed concern for \u201cPachamama\u201d (Mother Earth) and adopted the language of\u00a0 \u201cthe socialism of the twenty-first century\u201d promoted by Venezuelan President Ch\u00e1vez and now his successor, Nicolas Maduro. But none of the Latin American governments are making a serious attempt to develop socialism. Instead, they are building welfare states, following the model of Robert McNamara when he served as president of the World Bank (after his tenure as Secretary of Defense in the Johnson administration, where he helped design the genocide of the Vietnam War).<\/p>\n

There\u2019s little reason to believe that these social welfare programs are working any better now in Latin America than they did in the context where they were designed as counterinsurgency programs in the United States in the 1960s under the rubric of \u201cthe War on Poverty.\u201d [11]<\/a><\/p>\n

As a matter of fact, poverty, inequality, and landlessness actually increased in Brazil under Lula, whose \u201cZero Fome<\/em> (Zero Hunger) and Bolsa Familia<\/em> (Family Basket) programs were financed by taxing the middle class and stable workers, as were the social welfare payment plans in Argentina and Uruguay.\u201d[12]<\/a> Despite these programs, in Brazil \u201cpoverty, inequality and landlessness actually increased during the Lula years.\u201d [13]<\/a> None of the Pink Tide states have structurally challenged the roots of poverty, and their social programs, while certainly more helpful to the people than the austerity regimes of prior neoliberal governments, nevertheless serve to mask the real problem of wealth. \u201cThese programs. . .\u00a0 tend to weaken autonomous mobilization from below by depoliticizing the question of poverty, turning inequality into an administrative problem, and creating a support base for the state independent of unions and social movements,\u201d Robinson writes. [14]<\/a><\/p>\n

The solution, obviously, is not to withdraw support for the poor and marginalized, but to contend with the \u201creal problem, which is wealth\u201d (Zibechi) and attack the basic structural problem. The progressive governments operate in a system that is geared exclusively to accumulate wealth for the transnational capitalist class (TCC). In the absence of powerful, critical and autonomous social movements, \u201cthe structural power of global capital can impose itself on direct state power and impose its project of global capitalism.\u201d[15]<\/a><\/p>\n

As for the environmental policies of the \u201cprogressive\u201d governments, there doesn\u2019t seem to be much improvement over their neoliberal predecessors. Despite talk of \u201cthe rights of Pachamama,\u201d the progressive governments are hostage to the resource exploitation practices of the TCC. \u00a0This contradiction is sharpest in Bolivia, where the government of Evo Morales attempted to build a highway through the Isiboro-S\u00e9cure Indigenous Territory and National Park (Territorio Ind\u00edgena y Parque Nacional Isiboro Secure<\/em>, or TIPNIS) that critics argue, would serve first and foremost Brazilian capital. \u00a0Scholar and activist Silvia Rivera calls this another \u201cdiscrepancy between discourse and practice, because [the Morales government] has talked about the Pachamama, this great Pachamama, as an enlightened position internationally, but internally what they want is a developmentalist policy with hydroelectric [dams] that would drown indigenous lands, forests and highways all for an alliance with Brazil. They\u2019re betting on serving the interests of Brazil. So it\u2019s a new colonialism.\u201d[16]<\/a> Venezuela has nationalized gold \u201cand given it to the multinational corporations, those same ones qualified as \u2018savage capitalists\u2019\u201d by the government, indigenous Pemon activist Alexis Romero observes. [17]<\/a><\/p>\n

In Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina vast swaths of the countryside are planted in cane and genetically modified soy for export, and transnationals are invading indigenous lands, destroying unique ecosystems to plant other crops for biofuels. Mining companies have exercised their muscle over governments, says Claudia Acu\u00f1a of the lavaca collective. The mining companies \u201cheld a meeting at the Government House and forced the state in some kind of mining coup against the Government, which we\u2019re now living through,\u201d Acu\u00f1a told us.[18]<\/a><\/p>\n

Wherever they are pursued, development policies based on resource extraction not only destroy the environment, original cultures and peoples; they can also gut and corrupt social movements that let go of their ability to criticize and protest. Thus, the movements often see the need to maintain a critical, autonomous stance toward these governments to navigate the gap between the rhetoric of \u201cdemocracy\u201d and the actual practice\u2014and to recognize the governments\u2019 tactics for subverting and co-opting the social and grassroots organizations.<\/p>\n

Examples of the attempts of governments to co-opt the movements abound in the interviews in this book. Julieta Ojeda of Mujeres Creando talks of MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo<\/em>, Evo Morales\u2019 party) having \u201cpenetrated certain organizations and divided them. They formed their own parallel organizations… entered these social movement spaces and divided.\u201d Franco Basualdo of Argentina\u2019s Prensa de Frente<\/em> talks about a \u201cgovernment claiming to have a new policy that is apparently encouraging participation but there is no opening, no room for political participation or discussion.\u201d Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa accused indigenous activist Monica Chuji of being an \u201cinfiltrator\u201d after she spoke critically in the Constitutional Assembly. This showed Chuji that\u00a0 \u201cthe power is once again in the executive. Once again the citizens have no opportunity to say anything.\u201d Arturo Albarr\u00e1n and Mar\u00eda Vicenta D\u00e1vila express concern that Venezuelan President Hugo Ch\u00e1vez generated new structures to serve as stepping-stones to the \u201csocialism of the twenty-first century,\u201d but ignored deep-rooted community organizations in the process. Orlando Chirino has an even harsher critique, contending that the \u201csocialism of the twenty-first century\u201d has been nothing more than a charade behind which to dismantle worker\u2019s organizations.<\/p>\n

And so these contradictions between discourse and practice have rightly warned the social movements to maintain a certain critical distance from the progressive states.\u00a0 Activists have also learned this lesson from painful historical experience. Those who have been through the tantalizing dance with power, people like Dioyenes Lucio and Humberto Cholango, will tell us it\u2019s crucial to work with \u201cprogressive\u201d governments, but without losing autonomy.\u00a0 Lucio and Cholango point out that CONAIE and Pachakutik lost much of their credibility and their ability to organize resistance to President Lucio Guti\u00e9rrez\u2019s neoliberal policies when they entered into a power alliance with his government and he betrayed them. Even now, ten years later, those in organizations that were former collaborators with Guti\u00e9rrez are working very hard to regain the trust of their communities.[19]<\/a><\/p>\n

FENOCIN learned from this, Lucio said. After Correa\u2019s election, \u201cWe worked out an arrangement where some of our people went to work in the government, but lower-profile people, not the leadership of the organization because that would weaken our organization, and weaken our ability to maintain a critical stance toward the government.\u201d[20]<\/a><\/p>\n

Autonomy and necessity<\/strong><\/p>\n

In times of acute social crisis\u2014and in the permanent crisis that globalization has created for the poor and the working class\u2014people have created alternative institutions, liberated spaces, simply to enable them to survive. Most famously, the Zapatistas set up their autonomous municipalities in the Lacandon jungle, claiming land for the long-dispossessed indigenous residents of Chiapas. When industrial agriculture began displacing thousands of rural families in Brazil, the Landless Workers\u2019 Movement (MST) started occupying fallow land as a way of acquiring it, and organized their liberated spaces along radically democratic lines. City dwellers have done the same thing all over the continent, from Quito to Bahia. Argentina saw an explosion of organizing after the 2001 collapse. With the economy in shards, jobs and savings gone, people took over factories, schools and clinics to keep basic services going, organizing their projects collectively, horizontally.<\/p>\n

Globalization will continue to make survival more difficult, as industrial agriculture snatches land from subsistence farmers and indigenous people, trade agreements wreck local economies, and manufacturing migrates around the world in search of the most exploitable workforces. Some form of autonomous space will be an essential base from which to struggle.<\/p>\n

But autonomy, creation of \u201ccounterpowers\u201d as an exclusive strategy, poses problems of its own. \u00a0Movements that choose to build autonomous zones under alternative \u201cgood governments\u201d are still vulnerable to the whims of the official state; even a movement as large as the MST has had to contend with harassment from the Workers\u2019 Party government in Brazil. By withdrawing into autonomous zones, the movements may not only lose the ability to affect the larger political debate, as some argue the Zapatistas did, but they might lose even their autonomous spaces, as Occupy in the United States did in the fall of 2011.[21]<\/a><\/p>\n

Autonomy, therefore, has to be carefully crafted to bring critical social movements into the center of the struggles with the state and not to further marginalize the forces built from marginalization. Only the combined power of autonomous social movements willing to engage with states and political powers beyond \u201cliberated zones\u201d can prevent, for example, a \u201cprogressive\u201d FMLN government in El Salvador from giving in to the pressure of the TCC and granting concessions to Pacific Rim to mine gold in its national territory.<\/p>\n

Building autonomous spaces to organize and experiment with alternatives is an important step toward building a movement that might challenge \u201cprogressive\u201d governments to transform national structures in such a way that people\u2019s movements can gain footing in the larger struggle against the TCC.<\/p>\n

NOTES:<\/strong><\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> See Greg Grandin, The Empire\u2019s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism<\/em> (New York, Holt Paperbacks, 2006)<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Francisco Dominguez, \u201cThe Latin Americanization of the Politics of Emancipation\u201d in Geraldine Lievesley and Steve Ludlam, Reclaiming Latin America: Experiments in Radical Social Democracy<\/em> (New York: Zed Books, 2009), 46. See also Naomi Klein\u2019s The Shock Doctrine<\/em>.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Operation Condor was a counter-insurgency terror-murder program designed particularly for the Southern Cone and other parts of South America in large part by the United States and modeled after the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, responsible for tens of thousands of lives. In South America it also took similarly large tolls on the population.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> William I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US intervention and hegemony<\/em> (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1996), 2.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Nora Lustig, Luis F. Lopez-Calva, Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez, \u201cDeclining Inequality in Latin America in the 2000s: The Cases of Argentina, Brazil and Mexico,\u201d (ECINEQ 2012-266 September 2012 found at www. ecineq.org).<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Albo, Ibid.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Patrick Bennet, Daniel Ch\u00e1vez and Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito, eds, The New Latin American Left: Utopia Reborn (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 37.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> William I. Robinson, Latin America and Global Capitalism<\/em> (Maryland: Johns Hopkins Press, 2008), 342.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> Even inside Venezuela the question of whether or not the Bolivarian process is \u201crevolutionary\u201d or \u201creformist\u201d continues to be hotly debated. Whatever the outcome, the process has clearly been one built from reforms, some coming quickly, others slowly, but the Bolivarians have yet to gain complete \u201chegemony\u201d or total control of the state and its institutions, even if they eventually \u201creform\u201d their way there.<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> See Bennet, Ch\u00e1vez and Garavito, ibid, 33-37. They conclude their discussion on this complex topic by saying that \u201cthe distinct logics driving movements, parties and governments can thus give rise to diverse relationships of collaboration or confrontation.\u201d<\/p>\n

[11]<\/a> Ra\u00fal Zibechi, Progre-Sismo: La domesticaci\u00f3n de los conflictos sociales<\/em> (Santiago: Editorial Quimant\u00fa, 2010), in particular \u201cIntroducci\u00f3n a la edici\u00f3n Chilena\u201d and Chapter one, \u201cLa \u2018lucha contra la pobreza\u2019 como contrainsurgencia\u201d<\/p>\n

[12]<\/a> Robinson, 2008, p 292.<\/p>\n

[13]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n

[14]<\/a> Ibid, p 346<\/p>\n

[15]<\/a> Ibid<\/p>\n

[16]<\/a> Clifton Ross and Marcy Rein, Until the Rulers Obey: Voices from Latin American Social Movements (Oakland: PM Press, 2014) p. 318-319<\/p>\n

[17]<\/a> ibid, pgs. 201-204<\/p>\n

[18]<\/a> ibid, p. 405<\/p>\n

[19]<\/a> Ra\u00fal Zibechi, Territories in Resistance (Oakland: AK Press, 2012), 276-278. Also Ibid Robinson, 2008, 344-345)<\/p>\n

[20]<\/a> Ross and Rein, p. 230. See also Ben Dangl, \u201cDancing with Dynamite: States and Social Movements in Latin America\u201d (Oakland: AK Press, 2010)<\/p>\n

[21]<\/a> Robinson, 2008 ibid. 343<\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n

Contact Clifton Ross and Marcy Rein, untiltherulersobey(at)gmail.com visit their website at http:\/\/www.latinamericansocialmovements.org\/<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 upsidedownworld.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A wave of change rolled through Latin America at the turn of the twenty-first century, sweeping away neoliberal two-party governments, bringing calls to re-found the states based on broad participation and democratically drafted constitutions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latin-america-and-the-caribbean"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47970"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47970\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}