Agustín Cueva and the Construction of Democracy in Latin America

The Historical Context of Cueva’s Thought

Born in Ecuador in 1937, Cueva was one of the most brilliant of a generation characterized by a broad theoretical and sociological debate. His context was a Latin America in which, when emerging social movements questioned the political and economic order, the response was not to democratize the political system but to increase state violence and establish military and authoritarian regimes. Cueva analyzed not only the structural conditions that determined underdevelopment and economic dependency but the relations of domination and political power that configured economic, political, and cultural groups in Latin American societies. In addition to writing on the social problems of the continent, he was president of the Asociación Latinoamericana de Sociología (Latin American Sociological Association) and director of the Division of Higher Studies of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. His oeuvre has inspired theses, books, and papers addressing his schooling, his trajectory, and his contributions to Latin American theory. Our goal is to recover his contributions to the analysis of the region’s contemporary political reality.

After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Latin America experienced a series of social movements and the emergence of revolutionary fronts in Central and South America. The international environment was dominated by the Cold War and policies for containing communism, and military dictatorships were established in several countries. Civil war broke out in Guatemala in 1960 with the emergence of armed groups such as the Movimiento Revolucionario 13 de Noviembre (November 13 Revolutionary Movement— MR-13), which demanded improvement in the conditions of inequality that affected peasant groups, indigenous people, the popular sectors, and students. The social conflict and armed struggle in Guatemala would last 36 years, with devastating consequences such as repression, the disappearance of rural communities, civilian opposition, and the displacement of thousands.

Nicaragua’s Sandinista Revolution, led by the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (Sandinista National Liberation Front—FSLN) triumphed in 1979, overthrowing the dictatorship of General Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the last representative of the Somoza family, which had ruled the country since 1937. This led to the creation of a pluralistic government that carried out a series of economic and social changes ending in the election of Violeta Chamorro as president after years of counterinsurgency and the resulting economic crisis. For Cueva, Chamorro’s triumph was the product of direct U.S. intervention aimed at overthrowing the Sandinista regime, including the organization and financing of the counterinsurgency (Cueva, 1991b: 48):

What is . . . striking . . . is that most developed democracies have validated an election held in a country with a mercenary army armed and advised (openly and notoriously) by a foreign power and elections in which, even more suspiciously, that power’s candidate was victorious. Can these be called clean and free elections? Apparently not; it is, rather, one more episode of “low-intensity” warfare, another triumph of the North over the South.

In El Salvador, the uprising of the Frente Farabundo Martí de Liberación Nacional (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front—FMLN), a leftist guerrilla force made up of peasant groups and urban workers, sought to seize power and achieve political and social objectives such as land distribution and the establishment of a democratic government after a history of military governments and coups d’état. This led to a civil war that lasted from 1979 to 1992, when the FMLN became a political party and continued its struggle in the electoral arena. The rest of the region also experienced the active participation of social movements demanding more democracy and social justice. Social struggles as a result of unequal economic development have been a constant in our continent, and Cueva saw this as a result of capitalism’s contradictions.

Dictatorships were also part of the historical context for Cueva’s work in sociology. The coups that took place in the region sought to stop the advance of the Latin American left, establishing military regimes in Paraguay in 1954, Brazil in 1964, Bolivia in 1971, Uruguay in 1973, Chile in 1973, Peru in 1968 and 1975, and Argentina in 1976. They repressed social and intellectual movements and leaders, leading to the exile or self-exile of important thinkers such as Cueva. After the “auto-coup” of José María Velasco Ibarra in Ecuador in 1970 and the closing of the Universidad Central, where Cueva directed the School of Sociology, he had a brief stay in Chile before his arrival in Mexico in 1972 (Báez, 2016). The radicalization of the political struggle and the escalation of conflict led to greater political violence. Left-wing organizations struggled for structural transformation and the overthrow of dictatorial and authoritarian regimes. Guerrilla groups included the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in Peru, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (Revolutionary Armed Forces) and M-19 in Colombia, the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional Tupamaros (Tupamaros National Liberation Movement) in Uruguay, the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army) in Bolivia, the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (People’s Revolutionary Army) and the Montoneros in Argentina, and the Movimiento 14 de Mayo (May 14 Movement) in Paraguay.

For Cueva, the social struggles of the 1960s and 1970s were the result of class contradictions resulting from the unequal incorporation of Latin American societies into the capitalist system, which increased the repressiveness of the Latin American state. Upon his arrival in Mexico, he joined the UNAM’s Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos, where he wrote one of his most important works, El desarrollo del capitalismo en América Latina (1977). It was a time of vigorous theoretical debate around the ideas of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and dependency theory. Major intellectuals who made important theoretical contributions to the critical analysis of Latin American reality at the time included José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930), Ruy Mauro Marini (1932–1997), Vânia Bambirra (1940–2015), Aníbal Quijano (1928–2018), René Zavaleta (1937–1984), André Gunder Frank (1929–2005), Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1931–), Theotônio Dos Santos (1936–2018), and Enzo Faletto (1935–2003). Cueva actively participated in these debates and recognized Mariátegui as the first to analyze the development of capitalism in Latin America from a Marxist perspective: “José Carlos Mariátegui opened the way to a Marxist critique of adversarial ideologies, above all through his debates over idealism and populism. He pioneered the revolutionary and socialist way of solving Latin American problems and justified it scientifically through the analysis of our specific capitalist development” (Cueva, 1987a: 182).

Faced with the “democratic transition” of the 1980s, Cueva pointed out the risks posed by the political right and the establishment of democracies alien to the regional reality and the interests of its popular classes (Cueva, 1986). His reflection on these topics was colored by his intellectual and political commitment to the pursuit of regional social transformation. Cueva was not affiliated with any party. For him, political militancy was a matter of generating consciousness and public opinion—constructing a particular representation of the world (Quevedo, 2015).

Cueva’s Contributions to Latin American Political and Sociological Thought

Alejandro Moreano (2007) points to three phases in the development of Cueva’s output: (1) the shift from literary and social essays to sociological research and from Weber and Durkheim to Marx; (2) focus on the rise and fall of popular movements in the 1970s, especially in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, and the failure to consolidate a democracy that incorporated the social and political demands of the popular classes; and (3), with the rise of neoliberalism and what he called the “conservative turn,” concern about the right-wing leanings of the West. His methodological and theoretical position (Marxism) and his political choices led him to challenge “objective and technical” views of Latin American problems (Cueva, 1987a).

Cueva developed a historical analysis of the economic conditions of Latin America as an underdeveloped and dependent region and their role in the development of capitalism (Cueva, 1977). He looked at the configuration of economic and political power groups in the region, zeroing in on national particularities. For him, capitalist development and democratization had to be analyzed with a “reconstructive analytical radiography much denser than their economic identity as dependent countries” (Sosa, 1991: 7). In this connection, he identified the historical study of regional economic and social formations and their contradictions as an analytical tool for the understanding of social and political struggles in the framework of world capitalism. He underlined the need to understand how political and social movements were articulated throughout regional history and what relationships could be expected vis-à-vis the dominant groups across several modes of production (Cueva, 1977).

For Cueva, explaining regional social processes required, beyond the analysis of the structural conditions of economic dependency, examination of social classes and their struggle (Tzeiman, 2017: 59). Therefore one of his main criticisms of dependency theory was the absence of a dialectical treatment of both external and internal relations, which he saw as leading to “the postulation of mechanical schemes in which there is no engine of history other than external determination” (Cueva, 2008: 101). He pursued deeper explanations that could account for endogenous elements, such as the enabling of subordination by political classes and bourgeoisies (Stolowicz, 1992: 348). For him, underdevelopment was a result of the unequal incorporation into the capitalist system linked to colonization and the role of the region in original capital accumulation, but he also analyzed the alliances of the Latin American economic classes with transnational economic interests that led to the establishment of an “apparatus of domination” representing the hegemonic interests of the capitalist system (Cueva, 1977: 237). The achievement of national sovereignty and self-determination would have to come from class struggle and the triumph of popular mass movements, whose aspirations were being repressed “for the sake of the accumulation of wealth and power in the hegemonic centers and to the detriment of the tasks conducive to a profound democratization of our nations in the political, economic, and social fields” (Cueva, 1989: 67). With the end of the dictatorships and the transition to democracy, he strongly criticized those who defended this strictly procedural “democracy without adjectives” and argued that it lacked the adjustments necessary for the establishment of more just societies. Rather, it was a dependent democracy built and shaped by hegemonic powers and groups (Cueva, 1989: 66). For him, democracy had to be built from the social needs of the popular classes.

These contributions were based on a deep analysis of democracy as imposed by external interests, mainly through U.S. intervention, and linked to transnational economic interests (Cueva, 1986). Cueva was disappointed with the acceptance of liberal democracy by some sectors of the Latin American left: “By not posing the problem of the contents of democracy and considering it unilaterally as ‘a form/end in itself’ (which sounds very elegant, philosophically), the left does nothing more than align itself with the masses, as unfortunately has been the case in much of our continent” (Cueva, 1986: 54). He pointed out that the formal democracy implanted was an “empty shell,” an illusion, a “popular mirage” consisting of the belief that the masses would participate in power. It reflected the Latin American left’s failure to offer alternatives (Cueva, 1991a: 55): “The left on this side of the world has failed to address the limits of our underdeveloped democracies and consequently has not sought a way to stretch them, conferring on them a social content (it rather seems to have embraced the neorightist slogan of democracy without adjectives).” This questioning of Latin American democracy pointed to the need to use adjectives, to characterize it as “restricted” democracy (Cueva, 1991a: 54). The viability of democracy had to be based on the region’s reality and the incorporation of its social needs, struggles, and historical demands, enabling the construction of a national project based on the reinforcement of identity, sovereignty, and self-determination.

Sociology as a Commitment to Action and Political Struggle

For Cueva, sociology and Latin American studies were not just academic disciplines: “They are not constituted solely around a field of knowledge, but simultaneously within a field of struggle. . . . In our view, it is not only a cultural community and a historical community but also a common structural location that determines a similar style of underdevelopment and basic problems to be solved” (Cueva, 1995: 381). Analyzing conceptual approaches to the study of Latin America, he highlighted their contributions and, at the same time, questioned the idea of neutral or only technical political positions: “We think it erroneous to consider that the ECLAC’s theses constitute an economic, virtually neutral interpretation” (Cueva, 1995: 383).

In the late 1980s, before the rise of neoliberalism, Cueva called attention to the increasing rightist leanings of the West. He saw a retreat from radical sociology and the emergence of a more technocratic sociology that shied away from political debate. With the emergence of neoliberalism, the “logic of capital” became the spirit of the times as political conservatism and economic neoliberalism advanced: “It is true that certain sectors of the old Latin American left have become Europeanized and some groups of intellectuals seem to be giving in, [but] the vast majority of the Latin American intelligentsia has not renounced its Promethean vision or the best of its Jacobin, libertarian, anti-imperialist, and even Leninist tradition” (Cueva, 1987a: 26).

Later he would criticize what he called the “social democratization” of sociology, the shift from an active, militant discipline to a more professional, technical, and supposedly neutral discipline: “The radical, totalizing, critical sociology . . . that characterized the period from approximately 1965 to 1975 not only collapsed under the weight of its contradictions and limitations (which of course it did) but was the victim of one of the most violent cultural (and certainly political) counterrevolutions in Latin American history” (Cueva, 1995: 386). The triumph of neoliberal ideology produced changes in the social sciences; sociology became pragmatic and lost its former critical stance (Cueva, 1995: 389–390):

The privatization of the social sciences of the region changed working conditions and ways of perceiving the profession. . . . In the course of privatization, we have moved from the spirit of the book to that of the report. Rather than communicate with a relatively wide audience, rather than influence national opinion or even part of it, it seeks to comply with certain institutional requirements. . . . This is the typical format of the report that guarantees approval for the next stage of the project or a new one.

He did not fail to point out, however, the important role that Latin American sociology should have in the critical interpretation of regional reality and its responsibility to produce theory committed to history and its contradictions. A sociology politically committed to the fundamental concern of improving living conditions and social justice should include rigorous theoretical training, cultural breadth, and, above all, intense sensitivity to the “underground movements of history and to the winds that shake the foundations of the social structure” (Cueva, 1988: 15).

The Rise of the New Right

The 1970s were years of crisis for capitalism. Faced with a recession, neoliberals and neoconservatives identified state intervention—public spending, high taxes, and labor benefits that prevented capitalist expansion—as the source of it. The rise of Margaret Thatcher in Britain in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in the United States in 1980 was the confirmation of this empowered global new right, which was conservative politically and neoliberal economically. Cueva warned of the consequences: privatization, job insecurity, informality, increasing dependency, and the reassertion of capitalism. He even warned about violence: “Absolute pauperization also creates a climate conducive to the development of violence and criminality” (Cueva, 1991a: 28).

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the USSR favored the expansion of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, and the world seemed to have no alternatives. The Cold War that dictated international politics after World War II ended with the United States as the hegemonic power, economically as well as militarily. Cueva thought that this correlation of forces also resulted in the end of East-West confrontation and the beginning of North-South conflict evidenced by open and direct U.S. intervention in the political and economic life of Latin America (Cueva, 1991a: 45), including the military invasion of Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989 and participation in the overthrow of the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua—the financing and training of a counterrevolutionary army and support for presidential candidate Violeta Chamorro in the 1990 elections: “Democracy, which is a legitimate aspiration of ours, is instrumentalized by the United States for its imperial ends” (54).

The repositioning of U.S. hegemony after the events of the 1980s translated into the adoption of the neoliberal model, an economic opening via trade agreements, and what Cueva considered “a practical and theoretical disintegration of our subcontinent” (Cueva, 1991a: 52): “Each Latin American ruler tries to please the current American administration as much as he can, first to avoid being ‘disturbed’ and then—his greatest hope—to try to become the privileged ally. The creation of a common market with the United States, or at least a joint free-trade area, is everyone’s dream” (53). Since Cueva’s death in 1992, the neoliberal and neoconservative project has continued expanding in the region and across the world, and two problems that he addressed remain: the democratization of political systems and the concomitant deepening and reorganization of capitalism.

Cueva called for a critical position and for not separating the issue of democracy from the critique of capitalism. “A true historical divorce has been inexorably created, which looks like the most characteristic feature of Latin America’s current moment: the split between political democracy, on the one hand, and justice and social welfare, on the other” (Cueva, 1991a: 26). Given the urgency of a political solution to the problem of dictatorship and authoritarianism, the demand for a transformation of the economic system to meet popular needs and demands for social justice was postponed (26–27):

There are those who believe that democracy should not have adjectives or be evaluated in connection with the whole of historical development, being a strictly political category that can ultimately be reduced to a set of “rules of the game.” . . . It would therefore be illegitimate to mix problems from different spheres, as we have just done in linking democracy to national sovereignty, economic development, and social justice. The problem is that they cannot be separated into watertight compartments, and not just because we theorize that society is a structured totality but because its own movement shows that it is so.

For this reason, it was important for intellectuals to maintain their critical position and interpret the whole and not just one sphere (political democracy), since doing so obscured inequality and social injustice. It also concealed the vulnerability of processes of political democratization: “Economic and political dependency weakens the fragile Latin American democracies, generating the delegitimization of their governments, and this lack of legitimacy produces greater dependency” (27).

The 1980s and 1990s saw the rise of economic neoliberalism and a right that aimed to be global promoting modernization and development. Its discourse painted populist and nationalist governments rather than global capitalist restructuring as responsible for the crisis. These governments came to power with the aim of inserting the region into the global economy to resume development. Presidents such as Carlos Salinas de Gortari in Mexico (1988–1994), Carlos Saúl Menem in Argentina (1989–1989), and Fernando Collor de Mello in Brazil (1990–1992) are emblematic of the last decade of the twentieth century. They promoted the neoliberal model: economic opening, privatization of companies, deregulation of wage negotiations, and cuts in social programs. They achieved a restructuring of economies but at a social cost: deterioration of public services, precarious employment, and increased economic dependency. Resistance movements multiplied. In Brazil a great mobilization led to the impeachment and resignation of Collor de Mello due to accusations of corruption in 1992. In Mexico, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation—EZLN) emerged in 1994. Argentina saw movements such as the piqueteros. Later, via the electoral route and after intense social mobilization, several governments that questioned neoliberal policies came to power. In the twenty-first century, the new right emphasizes security in the face of the deterioration of society and the neoliberal state.

Neoliberalism, Post-Neoliberalism, and Democracy

According to Wallerstein (1996: 69), “It is absolutely impossible for Latin America to develop, no matter what the government policies are, because what is developed is not the countries. What develops is the capitalist world-economy, and this world-economy is polarizing in nature. The capitalist world-economy is developing so successfully that it is getting destroyed.” With the establishment of electoral systems and periodic elections, the electoral path was strengthened as the route to political change even though neoliberalism continued to predominate as an economic model. Tensions between the neoliberal economic model, which fueled inequality, and a political system that sought inclusion became visible. A new wave of protest spread across the continent (Nercesian, 2017: 2):

The year 1998 was a turning point, when Hugo Chávez triumphed in Venezuela. From then on, different countries such as Brazil (2003), Argentina (2003), Uruguay (2005), Bolivia (2005), Ecuador (2007), Nicaragua (2007), Paraguay (2008), and El Salvador (2009) started to demolish, with their governmental policies, some of the foundations of the neoliberal architecture. Generally, there were economic changes, with expansionary and heterodox policies, greater state intervention in different areas of the economy, and an expansion of social rights aimed at a sizable portion of society, although differently by country.

Electoral groups challenged neoliberalism and managed to lead their candidates to victory, opening the way for change in neoliberal policies of privatization, economic opening, and labor precarity. These governments, referred to as post-neoliberal (López, 2016), employed different policies depending on the context, but they all distanced themselves from neoliberal policies, established social programs to reduce poverty and privatizations, and returned the management of strategic goods and services to the state: “The state energizes national economies via reforms that correct market failures, redistributing national wealth and regaining control of strategic sectors, but does not dismantle or drastically question the existing capitalist system” (López, 2016: 64).

The Latin American governments that took power in the late 1990s and rejected neoliberalism experienced the tensions that Cueva identified between democracy and capitalism. Although the post-neoliberal label is applied to this historical stage of social-movement-backed governments (also called “progressive”), this concept has generated debate over the role that these regimes have played in the continuity and reproduction of the capitalist system.

As Cueva pointed out, the Latin American political class has links to transnational capital. Post-neoliberal regimes came to power with a discourse that sought political legitimacy and consensus by breaking with the prevailing neoliberalism. For some analysts, however, they failed to break with capitalist dynamics and established models of extractivist primary-export accumulation, leading to the destruction of natural resources and labor exploitation through a restructuring of the capitalist system (Stolowicz, 2017; Svampa, 2013). Others saw post-neoliberalism as a new geopolitical strategy that sought to separate the region from the U.S. sphere of influence and the neoliberal model (Borón, 2012). While they acknowledged that capitalism was an obstacle to the development of democracy, they also underlined the importance of establishing regimes that questioned the capitalist model and designing strategies in a differentiated way, with inclusive social and political programs as a path toward the construction of more just societies (Borón, 2003). There was, however, a problem that capitalism could not solve: the contradiction between a mode of production based on the extraction of surplus value and democratic political representation. Democracy canceled out, at least theoretically, the possibility of indefinitely extracting surplus value (Borón, 2003: 82).

Between 2004 and 2008, the region experienced an economic expansion, with an average growth of 5.1 percent of the gross domestic product. This growth was largely due to a rise in primary exports such as oil, iron, copper, and some foods, which led to regional reprimarization (Mateo, 2015: 204–205). This economic expansion made it possible to finance social programs. However, the economic crisis of 2008 reduced growth and governmental abilities to maintain these welfare programs: “Latin America has based its growth on the rise of exogenous factors, which have historically shown great volatility. A clear example of the undeveloped nature of its economic structure also persists, namely in its great dependence on imports of means of production, so that the expansion deepens the region’s subordinate integration into the world economy” (Mateo, 2015: 218).

With the decline in the prices of regional export products, a phase of low growth led to a crisis of legitimacy for both neoliberal and post-neoliberal administrations. The economic crisis brought about political changes. The intense political struggle was framed in terms of a global capitalist model, and the conditions of Latin American dependent capitalism limit the political and economic action of national governments. Conflicts occurred primarily in the electoral and legal spheres, and this led to rapid political alternations. Fundamentally, as Cueva pointed out, capitalist development limited and conditioned democratic expansion (from a political democracy “without adjectives” to a democracy with justice and social welfare) not only within Latin American dependent capitalism but also in relation to the role played by political elites conditioned to the economic model of world capitalism. The deepening of social reforms (justice and welfare) depended, to a large extent, on the organization and political cohesion of the progressive sectors. If there was no mobilization, policies of redistribution and democratic expansion could hardly be maintained.

However, in addition to electoral fronts, certain movements have maintained their autonomy and resisted neoliberalism and conservatism: the Zapatista insurrection in Mexico, the piqueteros in Argentina, the São Paulo Forum in Brazil, the indigenous movement, feminism, and the environmental groups that question extractivism, among others. Globally, we have such groups as the Progressive International, headed by Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Yanis Varoufakis. and Fernando Haddad, whose goal is the unification and coordination of political movements and parties that promote solidarity, equality, and the defense of democracy. At the core of many of these movements we find Cueva’s critique of neoliberalism and limited democracy. In the neoliberal state, the “sovereignty” of capital over social rights and needs has led to social polarization, whereby a protected and modern society emerges while another is abandoned to its fate amid violence and daily poverty. As Cueva (1991a: 53–54) argued, while the neoliberal model and economic opening would bring the modernization of certain Latin American cutting-edge economic sectors, this would benefit not the whole of society but “illustrative poles of a new and very accentuated structural heterogeneity.” As Cansino (2009: 465) has put it, “The democratization of Latin America cannot be limited to simply the restructuring of the political regime, overlooking the need to carry out profound reforms in social structures to put an end to injustice and move toward the legitimization of democratic governments.”

Neoliberal dynamics have diminished the presence of the state in education, health, and welfare but reinforced it in the political control of social protests: “This is an acceleration of the exit from democracy. This exit has two complementary aspects: on the one hand, the renewed power of the oligarchic offensive against the social and economic rights of citizens; on the other, the multiplication of security mechanisms directed against the civil rights of the citizens themselves” (Dardot and Laval, 2017: 9). In view of this, we have to build an inclusive and democratic government and society and replace the neoliberal order with another that respects justice, well-being, and democracy. As Cueva saw it, this means incorporating the social demands historically present in our continent and expanding the concept and the practice of democracy, guaranteeing, as a political system, the well-being of the majorities excluded by the current economic model. Hence the importance of social struggles and the acknowledgment of popular demands for real structural transformation: “Nothing guarantees that our oppressed peoples will emerge triumphant, at least in the short term; but that dose of uncertainty inherent to every struggle does not justify giving up in advance” (Cueva, 1987b).

Final Thoughts

Cueva’s contributions are undoubtedly still valid. He stressed understanding the many realities of Latin American countries, identifying not only the external conditioning factors related to their incorporation into the capitalist system of production but the role of political, economic, and cultural groups in the region in reproducing the capitalist system and perpetuating dependency and underdevelopment. The problem of relations between political democracy, sovereignty, capitalism, and social justice remains because democracy has yet to be constructed in Latin America. He also stressed political commitment rather than mere aseptic and technocratic description of national reality. We must see sociology as a field of struggle contributing to the construction of more just societies.

The post-neoliberal governments have moved away from neoliberal discourse and established welfare programs but failed to modify the capitalist economic structure. The democratization undertaken in the region has its limits. The importance of Cueva’s legacy lies in his thinking about democracy as not separate from the economic sphere or from the social and historical conditions of the region. Democracy must incorporate the social demands of broad and excluded sectors of the population.

Current neoliberal governments have a double challenge: to implement social policies within a capitalist system, which blocks progressive economic reforms, and simultaneously expand their social bases. A substantive democracy with social justice and well-being comes into conflict with the neoliberal economic model just as Cueva argued. However, one of Cueva’s contributions was not limiting himself to a deterministic and mechanistic analysis that makes change impossible. The expansion of democracy and the consolidation of an alternative economic model depend on the capacity of political movements and parties to propose a project and organize. Faced with the emergence of a new conservative wave that seeks to maintain inequality and reduce social rights, resistance and the construction of an alternative social order must continue. In this context, Cueva helps us to think about the world as a whole but also to attend to the particularities of national historical processes.