IV Online magazine - Archive

More than 40 years after the coup d’état that defeated the Chilean road to socialism and 30 years since the foundation of the largest social movement on the continent, the Movimiento de trabajadores rurales sin tierra (MST - Movement of Landless Rural Workers) of Brazil; 20 years since the Zapatista cry of “Ya basta!” in Chiapas against neoliberalism and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), more than 15 years since the electoral victory of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela (and more than two years after his death), the peoples of South America and their attempts to build an emancipatory project seem to be at a new turning point. A, social, political and economic cycle of medium length gradually seems to be becoming exhausted, but not in a uniform or linear manner. With its real (but relative) progress, its difficulties and significant limitations, the experiences of the different and varied “progressive" governments of the region, whether centre-left, social liberal, or radical national-popular, claiming to be anti-imperialist or characterised in conservative circles as “populist", the Bolivarian, Ando-Amazonian or “citizen” revolutions or simple institutional progressive changes, these political processes seem to be encountering big endogenous problems, a strong conservative backlash (national and global ) and not a few unresolved strategic dilemmas.