by ANDREW SELF
Since the advances made by various social movements across the Latin American continent, from the Brazilian landless workers movement to indigenous movements in the Andean nations, there has been added focus on their role in ushering in Latin America’s “pink tide” governments. As more and more leftist governments were voted in after the initial election of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in 1998, the participation, or at least influence of social movements has been one of the key features.
Much of the journalistic and scholarly work in the Anglophone world has focused on the leadership of presidents like Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, and Rafeal Correa, thereby deleting by omission the role of the social movements. Countervailing this, is academic work which places too much influence on the role of social movements, as if a politician or political party was only created from the bottom up. Both these methodologies in their own way separate the state from society, and are unable to see the complex, and often indefinable relation between the two.
What can be learned from the debate on “new social movements” is that the new generation of movements, which the Zapatistas have become emblematic of, is that the majority have no interest in taking state power. Instead, they have acted in social mobilization — and even overthrowing presidents — which could be said is a more powerful social position than the social movements linked directly to the state in the past. For example, in 2000 people stormed the government in Ecuador to oust President Jamil Mahuad, in which the government was eventually taken over by the colonel Lucio Gutierrez who was overthrown just four years later by the same people after reneging on his initial anti neo-liberal policies.
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