Report
Fifty years have passed since the historic Bandung conference, one of the first meetings of countries from the “Global South” seeking to chart their own conceptions of international order and progress. A large repertoire of counter-hegemonic ideas and actions has emerged since that time, ideas and actions that have sought—and seek—to connect the world horizontally, from South to South.
Since trade unionist Luiz Inácio lula da Silva won Brazil’s 2002 presidential elections, he has surprised his own supporters as well as international bankers by rigorously complying with the economic prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The world has changed considerably since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. Unlike 1959, the world is now characterized by economic globalization and unipolar imperial domination, especially in Latin America. At the same time, in many locations, it is characterized by a much greater resistance on the part of civil society.
For the past century, U.S. domination over Latin America has been a multifaceted process with military, economic, technological, financial, cultural and intellectual dimensions. Depending on the historical moment, the United States has employed particular aspects of this power through a mutually re-enforcing pattern of persuasion and coercion.
Talk of empire is back in vogue. Despite repeated reassurances from Donald Rumsfeld (“We’re not imperialistic. We never have been.”) and George W. Bush (“We have no territorial ambitions; we don’t seek an Empire.”), the imperialist deployment of U.S. power is undeniable.
The Zapatista movement is probably one of the best-known examples of dissent against the neoliberal model of economic globalization. On January 1, 1994, over 3,000 indigenous people staged an armed uprising against the government of then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and issued a list of demands for basic social and political rights.
At a house armed services committee meeting in March 2004, the then-commander of the U.S. Southern Command (Southcom), Gen. James Hill, made the obligatory mentions of terrorism and narco-trafficking as pressing issues of “hemispheric security.”
The continued ability of president Hugo Chávez to carry out significant reforms in the face of U.S. hostility and an aggressive U.S.-supported domestic opposition has important implications for progressive Latin American struggles.
By most accounts, the opening salvo in Bolivia’s ongoing revolutionary cycle occurred in 2000.1 Mothers, unionists, campesinos, students, in fact, citizens of all kinds seized the streets and plazas of Cochabamba to take back their water. Management of city’s waterworks had been privatized in September the year before, and within weeks household water bills had skyrocketed by 200%.