Introduction: Social Movements in Latin America,Part 2

In Part 1 of this double issue on social movements (Latin American Perspectives 47 [4], July 2020), we emphasized that during the preceding two decades, as a variety of progressive governments gained and lost power, new forms of political participation and organization by social movements took shape. The articles in that issue examined how they fared in the shifting political terrain and what we can learn from their experiences. Rejecting mechanistic concepts of “cycles” to explain movement achievements and setbacks, we highlighted the complex interplay of political and social struggles that we briefly recap here.

The neoliberal hegemony of the early 1990s was challenged by popular revolts led by indigenous and peasant movements and the emergence of urban mass movements such as those in Argentina and Bolivia. These represented a diverse and complex panorama of dissent that united broad coalitions of anti-neoliberal forces. Some of these social forces directed their action toward the state and were fundamental to bringing anti-neoliberal governments to power, whether through an alliance-building process that created “social movement parties” (e.g., the Movimiento al Socialismo [MAS] in Bolivia, the Frente Amplio in Uruguay, the Partido dos Trabalhadores [PT] in Brazil, and the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional in El Salvador) or as a result of more crisis-generated coalitions (e.g., Chavismo developing from the 1989 Caracazo and Kirchnerismo following the Argentine collapse of 2001). Part 1 explored the alternative visions, innovations, and strategies that emerged as social movements engaged with left-leaning governments.

Other movements such as the Zapatistas and piqueteros privileged autonomy over the struggle for state power and sought to create noncapitalist social relations through everyday practices, new horizontal relationships, and popular democratic capacities. The Zapatistas’ juntas de buen gobierno, the Bolivian ayllus, the recovered factories and popular assemblies in Argentina, and participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre exemplify the multiplicity of counterpractices that arose.

The articles in Part 1 examined the shifting relationships between movements and parties in power and the tensions involved in working both inside and outside the state. We proposed that social movement autonomy, in contrast to total independence, involves the terms on which the movement-state relationship is negotiated and raises the issue of co-optation. Both governments and movements engaged in a balancing act between implementing social transformation and defending against attacks from the right. The progressive governments were perhaps anti-neoliberal in rhetoric and social democratic in practice. They saw the state as the driver of the economy and practiced redistributionist policies to reduce poverty. However, they remained integrated into the global economy and relied on extractivist rents. As activists were drawn into the new governments, their increased power within the state was paralleled by a weakening of communities and popular movements outside the state. Even the more radical experiments in grassroots empowerment, such as the Bolivian constituent assembly and the Venezuela’s Bolivarian communal councils, involved a shift in the internal balance of forces toward the state. Nonetheless, some social movements such as the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) in Brazil and the feminist movements in El Salvador made efforts to avoid co-optation and demobilization.

The various political contexts examined in Part 1 raised strategic questions about how best to build and strengthen popular power and challenge capitalism within the constraints of liberal democracy, among them whether, given the tensions that surrounded the progressive government strategy, electoral strategy was still a viable option for radical politics. There is no single strategy for how social movements can revitalize state institutions without becoming subordinated to state power, but they will continue to confront the challenge of creating emancipatory visions and practices while engaging with the dominant institutions, particularly the state. In Part 2 we continue the critical review of social movement engagement with the state in an ever-changing scenario now dominated by the growing spread of conservative governments.

The first article below, by Karina Ponce and colleagues, describes the indigenous and citizen uprising in Ecuador in October 2019, showing how it emerged after a period of seeming retreat by the indigenous movement since the big rebellions of the early 2000s. Following the day-by-day evolution of the rising on the streets and within the social movements, it captures the sheer unpredictability of social movements and the fact that their evolution is not always on the surface or in the media. It also points to the limits of the neoliberal counteroffensive after the decline of the progressive governments. The 2019 events have led to the articulation of a new future from within the indigenous movement and a partial, still fraught alliance with the labor movements.

Emelio Betances follows up with a close analysis of another social movement that rose and fell in the Dominican Republic around the Odebrecht corruption case in 2017–2018. The Marcha Verde (Green March) brought many hundreds of thousands onto the streets to protest the state functionaries’ receipt of US$92 million from Odebrecht’s slush fund, which had a direct impact on the presidential elections. Why were the guilty not brought to justice? Part of the answer lies in the political fragmentation of the protest campaign and the involvement of mainstream politicians, which, when it came to it, prevented decisive action. We can learn from movements that win their demands (Ecuador in 2019) but also from those that, despite mass mobilizations, do not (the Dominican Republic in 2017–2018).

A third case study, by Pablo Forni, shows us the complex social and cultural makeup of social movements with regard to the Argentine piqueteros referred to above. Forni examines a particular small organization, the Misioneros de Francisco, founded in 2014 by social movements aligned with the Theology of the People and the message (la palabra) of Pope Francis in particular. We see how this movement was able to generate actions cutting across social, religious, and political divides. It reminds us how specific social movements can be and how important the symbolic and cultural element is in their creation, not least in Latin America. No formula can predict how social movements emerge and generate social change.

Gustavo Moura de Oliveira and Monika Weronika Dowbor direct our attention to the theoretical complexity of the term “autonomy” in the Brazilian and wider Latin American debates of the past decade. Autonomous social action in relation to the state is broken down into three analytical categories: the first rejects the state and seeks to construct social life beyond its reach; a second rejects the forms in which the state operates to promote an alternative mode of organization and action, while a third rejects the historical inequality of public policies and proposes alternative policies. The underlying thesis, in contrast with purist conceptions of the topic, is that autonomy can coexist with diverse processes of institutionalization of social movement organizations and demands.

In an era in which a new wave of feminist movements is coming to the fore in Latin America, Eduardo Moreira da Silva and Clarisse Goulart Paradis highlight the different ways in which feminist movements in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Chile have engaged with the state, ranging from protest to negotiation. They bring together two topics usually treated separately, social movements and public policy, showing how contentious actions can combine with state-oriented actions in diverse ways. The interaction between civil society and the state is thus shown to be more complex and multiform than some social movements theories allow. The women’s movements in Latin America have a rich history of engagement with the state that goes beyond the binary opposition between the institutionalists and the autonomists often alluded to in feminist scholarship.

Leonardo Fontes, drawing on a case study of two neighborhoods in São Paulo between 2003 and 2016, takes up the way in which political subjects were formed in the urban peripheries in the era of the progressive governments. During a period of intense socioeconomic change under dynamic progressive governments, there was a flourishing of cultural events, in particular well-attended poetry recitals. This contributed to a peripheral cultural identity struggle that led to the creation of oppositional political movements and a greater appreciation of communal ways of life. This demonstration that the state, political parties, and nongovernmental organizations are not the only arena for oppositional identity formation encourages us to include culture in our study of social movements.

Two contributions focus on the rural social movements of Brazil during the progressive PT era. Lia Pinheiro Barbosa looks at the challenges faced by the peasant movement and the rise of the new right after the constitutional coup against the last PT government. The focus of attention is the MST and the way it interacted, sometimes conflictually but also in cooperation, with the progressive governments of the PT. By contrast, under the far-right regime of Jair Bolsonaro the MST and other social movements cannot rely on the state. They necessarily promote their autonomy and seek to preserve their gains on the ground while also seeking the broadest possible alliances with the social and political forces opposed to Bolsonaro.

In a parallel contribution, Priscila Delgado de Carvalho critically examines the issue of collective action and political change in terms of the public and semipublic strategies of Brazilian rural movements from the 1990s to 2017. Rather than the more researched MST, she focuses on the Movimento dos Pequenos Agricultores (Small Farmers’ Movement—MPA), which had to deal with the emergence of the PT as the government in 2003 and with the post-2016 scenario after the transition to the Bolsonaro regime. The model developed here is based on the degree of political proximity between the movement activists and the government in power and on the level of institutionalization of that interaction. The author explores in detail the space between contentious and accommodationist ways of interacting with power.

Alberto Vergara and Viviana Baraybar analyze what they call the emergence of new postmaterial cleavages in the Andes. They compare the antibullfighting agendas in Bogotá, Lima, and Quito to get a better understanding of the relation between new social movements and the parties of the left. In 2017 more than 1,000 activists surrounded the bullring in Bogotá to try to prevent the “traditional” activities therein. They show the deep commitment of young urban residents in particular to resist this Spanish custom and the ways in which they engage with some of the left parties.

Finally, Huáscar Salazar Lohman revisits the theme of Bolivia’s plurinational state and its “progressive” nature that we dealt with in some detail in Part 1. As others have, Salazar argues that the Morales government became increasingly authoritarian and ultimately embodied a new ruling class project committed to capitalist extractivism and the systematic dismantling of oppositional social movements. The new structure of state power was, from this perspective, sustained by a concerted anticommunal drive by Morales and his government. Of course, the military/civilian coup against Morales in 2019 would suggest the need for a sober, nondogmatic reappraisal of the whole “progressive” period, listening to both supporters and opponents (on the left) of the MAS project.

As Latin America faces the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and a resurgent capitalist onslaught, there is much uncertainty about the future. Suddenly, Rosa Luxemburg’s stark choice of socialism or barbarism takes on a new immediacy. The social movements of the region are currently on the defensive, struggling to survive. But, as Fernando Coronil (2011: 235) once wrote, we face two futures. There is one in which “the future imposes its presence as a receding political horizon, inducing a sense of despondency typical of periods of decline or historical depression.” That would capture well some of the COVID-19 zeitgeist, with many commentators finding it hard to move beyond a sense of looming catastrophe, alongside a seemingly futile denunciation of capitalism in general. But Coronil offers another scenario in which “the future enters the public stage as an open horizon of expectations, as potentiality, offering a hopeful sense of possibility characteristic of liminal phases or revolution.” Are we now in a liminal phase in Latin America, between the times of cholera and an era of necessary social and political reconstruction? These are the underlying choices setting the context for the concrete analysis of concrete situations lived by the social movements in Latin America today. For these social movements there can be no return to a “normal” that condemns people to a life of misery; the struggle will continue, and today’s agents of destruction will be held to account.