the military coup or conspiracy against Evo Morales in Bolivia shows that we were wrong. Something similar may also happen in Venezuela, itself a military dictatorship. Probably our naïve belief in the stability of elected governments was based on the waning of US interventionism during the Obama administration, something that was reversed by Trump. Moreover, “Brazilian sub-imperialism” is now at work, with Bolsonaro playing the role of chief conspirator on behalf of the Latin American elites who feel threatened in their domination. If this dark hypothesis is verified, this will add another sinister touch to our already gloomy conclusion in this volume, where we discuss the spread of the kamanchaka in most of Latin America. (On the meaning of the word, consult our final chapter in this volume.) However, our last word in the book refers to “the color of hope,” to the social movements, mainly supported by youth, women, environmentalists, and indigenous peoples, that might reconstruct life from the ground up. This process has indeed started, as we foresaw it would. But if social explosions overtake social movements, then such outrage may or may not open the path to hope. Saying “enough” to violence, and to repression entails understanding that social life – regardless of political, ideological, cultural, or economic affiliations – can only be balanced through the acknowledgment of social pluralism and the unequivocal defense of human rights, dignity, and diversity. The elements for understanding future developments in Latin America are the subject of this volume, which is rooted in the observation of the recent past.
F.C. and M.C.
January 2020
INTRODUCTION: THE NEW LATIN AMERICA
At the dawn of the third millennium of the Common Era, Latin America and its people have experienced a profound transformation. The region has been fully integrated into globalization, which dominates both the world economy and world culture. This does not mean, however, that everything or everyone in Latin America has been integrated into this global process, because globalization, operating at a planetary scale, is both inclusive and exclusive. It simultaneously involves selective incorporation and structural marginalization, as we have argued elsewhere (Calderón, 2003). In a context of technological and informational revolution, the restructuring of Latin America has entailed a profound modernization of the processes of production and corporate management necessary to compete in global markets for goods, services, and capital. A new model of production – informational extractivism – has become central to many Latin American economies and to the largest of these economies in particular. Technological modernization has rapidly expanded into the realms of communication and culture, globalizing the media and leading to the diffusion of internet networks, which have become vectors for the transformation of culture and everyday life for new generations. At the same time, and as in the rest of the world, globalization and digitization have not produced a homogeneous global culture or relegated the diverse cultures produced by human experience to the dustbin of history, where they would await gradual destruction. The ideology that defines modernization as a vector of cultural domination has thus been disproven again. In fact, the opposite has occurred. From the depths of the souls of Latin American people, a constellation of identities has forcefully reemerged. These were created in the context of an everyday life that has never been fully subjugated and that retains a character of its own, allowing for the survival of an oral tradition and giving rise to a specific form of life. This form of life is human, to be sure – more human, even, than the standards of behavior implicit in the market as a form of life and not only an economy. But it is made up of practices rooted in secular sharing, fraught with sufferings and hopes. Indigenous peoples have thus asserted themselves except in those lands where genocide has led to their extermination. But so, too, have other identities, regional, local, and religious, except in the case of the dominant religion of the region, Catholicism, whose crisis we will consider in this book, investigating both its causes and its consequences.
New identities have likewise emerged as result of a complex process of transformation that has challenged the patriarchy, which is at the root of an institutional domination that has lasted for millennia. Women, feminists, lesbians, gays, transgender people, and bisexuals have all affirmed their right to love and to be loved by anyone they want, setting aside the dictates of sexual repression. And alongside these personal identities, new ways of relating nature and culture have emerged, giving rise to the recognition of animals as our companion species. A systematic questioning of the dark side of institutionally imposed culture has also taken place.
Moreover, in a globalized world, national identity has forcefully reemerged as a means by which to resist the force of history and to reassert the rights of those who live in delimited territories, and who cannot become “citizens of the world” because they do not have the resources to do so. At the same time, however, these people feel themselves to be in solidarity with the planet and their fellow human beings, without thereby wanting to lose the protection of the national institutions that remain available to them.
Caught between globalization and identities, the nation-state is beset by the onslaughts of history. In general, the nation-state seeks to integrate itself into globalization in order to maximize its access to wealth and power, forming transnational networks. In the process, the distance between the state and the nation grows, as does the distance between global imperatives and local representation. Hence the repeated emergence of a longing and ultimately a politics that seek to regain control of the nation. These register the people’s responses to the flight of their elites, after the latter become members of a club run by the owners of the world, by networks of power and capital that operate in a space of flows that have become increasingly abstracted from those who seek to maintain control over their restless subjects.
In this conjuncture, the mechanism by which the state relates to its citizens – that is, the political system – has also been beset by the onslaughts of recent history. On the one hand, the institutions of liberal democracy, which were constantly subverted in the twentieth century by military coups generally supported by the United States, became the rule in Latin America during the last decade of that century. We note the possible exception of Cuba (which was not a liberal democracy, but whose government enjoyed a certain kind of popular support) as well as the range of opinions about other regimes in the region, such as those in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras (which were formally liberal democracies but with diminishing levels of support from their citizens). In any case, at the turn of the millennium, Latin America appeared to have reached a phase of democratic stability after centuries of blood, sweat, and tears shed in order to reach this point. But the current crisis of political legitimacy and state corruption in the vast majority of Latin American countries has, in just a few years, destroyed the minimal confidence that formerly bound those who govern to the governed, leading to a fragmentation of society and calling into question both neo-populist leaders and the deceptive facades of electoral democracies. The why and how of these processes are the objects of our investigation in this book.
In the end, however, beyond the economy, technology, and institutions, there are people’s lives. And for the vast majority of the population, the new Latin America, even with a considerable improvement in basic indicators of human development – including education, health, and (mainly informal) employment – is marked by damage to the natural habitat caused by destructive metropolises. This Latin America is also marked by an urbanization driven by speculation, a process that affects 80 percent of the population. It is marked, moreover, by a toxic environment, by the destruction of the region’s marvelous ecology, and by violence and fear as forms of life, while criminal gangs teem everywhere, killing, destroying, and intimidating millions of people, often enabled by the passivity or the complicity of those charged with providing protection.
This new Latin America is made up of light and shadows, but the light has increasingly faded, and the shadows already envelop the lives of countless people. This leads to the emergence of new kinds of individual awareness, prompting a search for collective alternatives that might yet make another Latin America possible. Hence our determination to observe and acknowledge the new historical territory in this book – because it is only by acknowledging where we are that we can know how we might get to where we want to
