The Latin American Social Movement-1-10
The Latin American Social Movement-1-10
The Latin American Social Movement-1-10
Abstract
This article addresses the changing repertoire of resistance movements in Latin America,
as the economic and political conditions adapted to regional changes: the shift from
import substitution industrialisation to neoliberalism, populist based regimes via dicta-
torships to democratic rule, and growing awareness of global norms concerning social,
economic and political rights. Increasing industrialisation and the rise in living costs
meant agrarian protests dwindled and labour movements grew in number, though their
focus shifted from work conditions to the increased cost of consumption. Similarly, stu-
dents protested against the rising cost of schooling and inequities in access to education,
rather than Marxist-Leninist inspired movements for radical societal change. Women
shifted their focus from human to gender rights. Further, indigenous and race-based
movements gained traction, which had been ignored by class-based and modernisation
theories.
Introduction
This article details how and why the repertoire of social movements changed in Latin
America since the mid-twentieth century. It shifted as peoples in the region experienced
new economic deprivations, inequities, and injustices, and new conceptions of rights,
in the context of globally embedded structural, normative, and ideological changes. Yet,
the formation of movements, and their effectiveness, hinged on Latin Americans with
shared identities and experiences opting to seek collective improvements to their lives,
but also on the strategies movement leaders pursued, and responses by those with power
and authority. Some movements were country specific, owing to distinctive conditions,
but many transpired in a multitude of countries in the region, and even elsewhere in the
developing world, that shared experiences. After describing macroeconomic and political
conditions and how they evolved, the article addresses the shifting landscape of Latin
American social movements in the countryside and then in cities, and among women,
race/indigenous groups, and students.
part, on state structures, policies, priorities, and capacities.1 Political opportunity struc-
ture theory, in particular, alerts us to ways politics and polities shape the formation and
accomplishments of social movements (for example party competition and civil society
“spaces” to organise, free of repression).2
When faced with structural or normative constraints, the politically and economi-
cally weak at times accomplish more through covertly coordinated informal resistance
than through visibly coordinated collective protest.3 Overt challenges to authority may
be met with violence and repression, such that the risks are great, while covert modes
of resistance may quietly undermine what persons in authority can accomplish, to the
point that they feel compelled to institute significant reforms. Albert Hirschman, in
turn, alerts us to the possibility that the dissatisfied may opt for “exit” over “voice,” that
is, they may perceive themselves to have more to gain by leaving situations they dislike
than by remaining and trying to change conditions where they are.4
Ultimately, social movement formation, strategies, demands, and accomplishments
hinge on features of the movements themselves. Resource mobilisation theory alerts us to
the importance of leadership, group alliances, and other mobiliseable resources.5
Below I detail shifts in the repertoire of social movements in Latin America in the last
half century, against the backdrop of the changes at the macro political and economic
level.6 Within the shared context, social movements and their accomplishments have
1 See Joe Foweraker: Popular Mobilization in Mexico: The Teachers’ Movement, 1977–1988,
Cambridge 1993.
2 Sidney Tarrow: Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action, and Politics, 2nd
ed., Cambridge 1998.
3 James C. Scott: Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven
1985; James C. Scott: Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven
1990.
4 Albert Hirschman: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations,
and States, Cambridge 1970; Mala Htun: Sex and the State in Latin America: Abortion,
Divorce, and the Family under Latin American Dictatorships and Democracies, Cambridge/
New York 2003.
5 John D. McCarthy/Mayer N. Zald (eds.): Social Movements in an Organizational Society.
Collected Essays, New Brunswick 1987; Betilde Muñoz-Pogossian: Electoral Rules and the
Transformation of Bolivian Politics: The Rise of Evo Morales, New York 2008.
6 On Latin American social movements, see also Maria da Glória Gohn: Teorias dos movi-
mentos sociais, 6th ed., São Paulo 2007; Margarita López Maya/Nicolás Iñigo Carrera/Pilar
Calveiro: Luchas contrahegemónicas y cambios políticas recientes de América Latina, Buenos
Aires 2008; Richard Stahler-Sholk/Harry Vanden/Glen David Kuecker (eds.): Latin American
Social Movements in the Twenty-First Century: Resistance, Power, and Democracy, Lanham
2008.
varied somewhat among countries in the region, owing to different state policies on the
one hand and to different leadership, alliances, and strategies on the other hand.
collective invasions of public lands and unfarmed and fraudulently claimed privately
owned lands. Since the early 2000s it also invaded and despoiled agri-businesses that
produced genetically modified crops and caused environmental degradation. Emphasis-
ing community building within, and solidarity among, the encampments land-invaders
set up, the MST proceeded to set up schools, health clinics, and agricultural extensive
services for the families involved. In terms of strategy, the movement relied not only
on land-takeovers, but also on large marches and road blockades, and, beginning in
the mid-1990s, even on working within the state. Members deliberately and strategi-
cally secured public sector jobs through which they promoted MST interests, including
through accessing state funds.
The MST must be understood in political context, namely Brazil’s (re)democratisa-
tion. The country’s changed “political opportunity structure” reduced the risks of rebel-
lion. And so too is the MST best understood in economic context, namely the transition
to neoliberalism, which exacerbated rural inequalities, as agribusinesses expanded their
holdings and marginalised small farmers. Yet, it was savvy, committed leadership that
capitalised on the changed milieu to build up a movement which helped improve the
well-being of landless rural Brazilians.
Given how abysmally low rural wages are and how many agriculturalists are landless
in Latin America, the infrequency of protest is striking. Instead, disgruntled rural peo-
ples in the region have been mainly voting with their feet, opting for “exit” over “voice”.
In so doing they have turned to individual/family, over collective, efforts to improve their
lot through rural-to-urban migration. Large-scale migration began during the import
substitution era, when governments favored industry over agriculture, and urban over
rural peoples. In the process, Latin America became the most urbanised region in the
Third World, nearly as urban as the rich countries.
Beginning in the mid-1980s Latin Americans who voted with their feet increasingly
turned to emigration over rural-to-urban migration. Cities ceased to be seen as solutions
to rural (and new urban) plight. The shift came with the transitions to neoliberalism.
Brazilian Landless Farmworkers’ Movement, in: Bulletin of Latin American Research 18:4
(1999), pp. 469–489; John L. Hammond: Land Occupations, Violence, and the Politics of
Agrarian Reform in Brazil, in: Latin American Perspectives 36:4 (2009), pp. 156–177; John
L. Hammond/Federico Rossi: Landless Workers Movement (MST) Brazil, in: David Snow
et al. (eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, London
2013, pp. 680–683; Gabriel Ondetti: Land, Protest, and Politics: The Landless Movement
and the Struggle for Agrarian Reform in Brazil, University Park 2008; Zander Navarro: The
Brazilian Landless Movement (MST), in: Critical Times. REDES 15:1 (2010), pp. 196–223;
Wendy Wolford: This Land is Ours Now: Social Mobilizations and the Meaning of Land in
Brazil, Durham 2010; Miguel Carter: Between Orishas and Revolution: The Expression of
Racial Inequalities in Post-Soviet Cuba, in: Paul Gootenberg/Luis Reygadas (eds.), Indelible
Inequalities in Latin America, Durham 2010, pp. 139–168.
Urban living costs spiraled as the neoliberal governments cut back food, fuel, and other
subsidies. At the same time, employment opportunities contracted. New, profit-oriented
private owners of former state-owned enterprises reduced enterprise payrolls, and many
of the inefficient but labour-absorbing local businesses could not compete with foreign
imports once Latin American governments lifted tariffs. Also, debt-ridden governments
cut back employment to reduce their expenditures.
By the time conditions in the region partially recovered from the crises that the
ISI-neoliberal transitions and civil wars unleashed, Latin Americans in many countries
in the region had established transnational personal networks that led more and more of
them to see their future in wealthier countries, not in their homelands. Central Amer-
ican, along with Caribbean, countries, rank among the countries in the world with the
highest rates of emigration. “Exit” in the form of emigration became the way whereby
both rural and urban Latin Americans increasingly sought to improve their lot. Increased
emigration notwithstanding, as countries in the region became ever more urban, protest
movements shifted there, when city-dwellers experienced conditions they considered
unjust.10
With the restoration of democracy labour took advantage of its renewed rights to
organise and strike. This led to an immediate surge in strike activity, even against the
backdrop of wage increases. However, strike activity never returned to levels of the
pre-military period, and the surge proved short-lived, after which strike activity tapered
off anew, this time for economic, not political reasons, but for economic reasons embed-
ded in neoliberal transformations. In the early 1990s, for example, more Latin American
countries experienced decreases than increases on the three standard indicators of work-
place disruption: number of strikes, number of workers involved, and workdays not
worked.11 The new governments, committed to the new, neoliberal economic model,
removed trade and investment barriers that perniciously eroded workers’ ability to exer-
cise their formally restored rights. As businesses became free to (re-)locate anywhere in
the world where they chose (and export goods to foreign market), to maximise their prof-
its, labour lost bargaining power, to the point that they came to have more to lose than to
gain from strikes.12 The greater labour costs in a country, the more likely business would
move elsewhere. In essence, the new democratically elected governments tacitly became
accomplices in the de facto retraction of rights workers regained de jure, as they aided and
abetted business over labour interests, in the new globalised economy. The strike activity
that persisted was shaped by political party and union dynamics, more than by economic
conditions of employment.13
Argentina, one of Latin America’s most industrial countries, experienced the broad-
est-based labour strife between the mid-1990s and the first years of the new millennium.
Upon losing their jobs en masse when the Carlos Menem government instituted dra-
conian neoliberal privatisations of formerly state-owned enterprises, workers formed a
movement of the unemployed and even took over factories. As the country experienced
a major economic crisis (in 2001), labour took on a political mission. In alliance with
other angry Argentinians, they brought down the government.14 A protest movement
that began with demands for economic justice, for the right to employment and a live-
11 Susan Eckstein: Epilogue: Where Have All the Movements Gone? Latin American Social
Movements at the New Millennium, in: Susan Eckstein (ed.), Power and Popular Protest:
Latin American Social Movements, Berkeley 2001, pp. 351–406, p. 369.
12 Only during the first years of the democratic transitions, and, paradoxically, against a back-
drop of wage improvements, did strike activity pick up. On Brazil, see Eduardo Noronha/
Vera Gebrim Garuti/Jorge Elias Jr.: Explicações para um ciclo excepcional de greves: o caso
brasileiro. Paper delivered at the 21st International Congress of the Latin American Studies
Association (LASA), Chicago, 24–26 September 1998.
13 Maria Victoria Murillo: Labor Unions, Partisan Coalitions, and Market-Oriented Reforms
in Latin America, Cambridge 2001.
14 Jose Daniel Benclowicz: Repensando los origines del movimiento piquetero: miseria y expe-
riencias de lucha antes de las contrarreformas de la década de 1990 en el norte argentino, in:
Latin American Research Review 46:2 (2011), pp. 79–103.
lihood, packed on demands for political justice, demanding the ouster of a government
no longer perceived as legitimate.
In most countries, remaining work-based movements centre in the public sector, and
they increasingly involve the lower middle classes, for example, teachers,15 poorly paid
and threatened by employment cutbacks as governments streamline their expenditures
(in some cases even withholding pay checks to public sector workers). But the strike
activity results also from the public sector’s inherently political nature. Since govern-
ments need to be responsive to worker demands to maintain their legitimacy, public
sector employees retain some leveraging power. And it results from governments being
somewhat shielded from the world economy in its provisioning of services. It can thereby
pass on stepped up labour costs either to consumers in the form of higher prices for pub-
lic services, or to taxpayers (although they risk angering consumers and they face civil
societies resistant to paying taxes).
Aggrieved public-sector workers expanded their repertoires of resistance in the con-
text of re-democratisation in the region, which included democratisation of media access.
In late 1990s Mexico, public-sector nurses, for example, upset with medical-supply short-
ages tied to neoliberal fiscal belt-tightening, publicly drew blood from their arms with
syringes that they then squirted at the doors of hospital administrators. Also, in Mexico’s
state capital of Tabasco, public-employee street-sweepers collectively pressed for com-
pensation for the private services which politicians exacted of them, and for reinstate-
ment of jobs lost to neoliberal austerity policies. They staged a hunger strike, marched en
masse to Mexico City, and stampeded into Congress where they peeled off their clothes
to press their claims.16 In these instances angry public sector employees made use of new
media access to draw public attention to their causes.
Even the left-leaning governments elected to power in the region around the turn
of the century did not always implement policies satisfactory to workers. For example,
the state-based oil-worker “labour aristocracy” in Venezuela joined the business class in
protests designed to bring the Hugo Chávez government to heel. Oil-workers stopped
production and took to the streets to destabilise the economy. However, Chávez craftily
leveraged powers of the state to maintain the upper hand.
15 Joe Foweraker: Popular Mobilization in Mexico: The Teachers’ Movement, 1977–1988, Cam-
bridge 1993; Maria Lorena Cook: Organizing Dissent: Unions, the State, and the Democratic
Teachers’ Movement in Mexico, University Park 1996.
16 New York Times: 21 January 1997, p. 10.
Latin America also experienced social movements that focused on consumption, as dis-
tinct from production. The focus of these movements as well shifted with the transition
from import substitution to neoliberalism, and a concomitant shift in the political bases
and class biases of governments in the region. Under import substitution, movements
focused mainly on “popular sector” collective claims to individual rights to housing.
Under neoliberalism, in contrast, they focused on anger with government cutbacks in
subsidies that drove up the cost of everyday living.
17 Susan Eckstein: The Poverty of Revolution: The State and Urban Poor in Mexico, Princeton
1977.
18 David Collier: Squatters and Oligarchs: Authoritarian Rule and Policy Change in Peru, Bal-
timore 1976.
over land invasions to address pent-up demand for affordable housing,19 as well as pri-
vatisation of urban service provisioning. Venezuela, under Hugo Chávez, was one of the
only countries in the region where squatter movements continued on any scale around
the turn of the century. One of the populist leaders in the neoliberal era, he cultivated
support among urban poor, partly by politicising access to housing.
A non-squatter based housing movement emerged in Mexico amidst the transition
from import substitution to neoliberalism – in the context of a major earthquake in the
capital that left tens of thousands of city dwellers homeless. Mexico at the time had been
ruled fairly autocratically, behind a populist veneer. Yet, amidst the earthquake crisis,
new urban social movements gained a footing. With the support of politicised middle
class university students, the earthquake victims mobilised to pressure the government
to rebuild their homes and neighbourhoods. The residents involved in the movement
challenged the thinking of urbanists at the time, who perceived inner-city residents to be
apathetic, incapable of organising, and weighed down by a “culture of despair”.20 Yet, in
providing some displaced persons with new housing, while coopting movement leaders,
the government weakened the mobilisations before pressured to build housing for all
earthquake victims.
In Brazil in the 1990s a different sort of poor people’s housing movement arose, the
Roofless Peoples Movement, inspired by, and building on, the previously noted Landless
Workers Movement. Participants, in all major cities in the country, but most notably in
Sao Paolo, seized unoccupied urban buildings and vacant plots, where they erected tent
villages. Involving thousands of poor and homeless city dwellers, Movement organisers
worked with clusters of families, first to build solidarity among them, and then to over-
see land invasions, sometimes in coordination with the increasingly influential Work-
ers Party, the left-wing labour confederation, and the progressive wing of the Catholic
Church. However, the Movement helped far fewer city dwellers gain access to housing
than did squatter movements in their heyday.
19 Alain Durand-Lesserve: Law and Urban Change in Developing Countries: Trends and Issues,
in: Edesio Fernandes/Ann Varley (eds.), Illegal Cities: Law and Urban Change in Developing
Countries, London 1998, pp. 299–257, p. 236.
20 Susan Eckstein: Urbanization Revisited: Inner-City Slum of Hope and Squatter Settlement
of Despair, in: World Development 18:2 (1990), pp. 165–181.