Introduction To Hope: The Left in Local Politics
UnpublishedJuly/August
1995
Volume:
29
Number:
1
Article
Antonio García de León
The country's current situation reminds one of the climate in Eastern Europe just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Everyone except the government recognizes the urgent necessity of a democratic transition.
Mario Lungo
If FMLN administrations are to become an authentic expression of local self rule, they must construct a more equitable relationship with social movements and put local economic development above party militancy.
As the left slowly reinvents itself in Latin America-as in the rest of the world-it is rethinking many of its old orthodoxies, among them, the question of state power.
Reinventing Solidarity In an otherwise fine essay about North-South solidarity and human rights activism ["A Typology of Activism," March/April 1995], Margaret Keck claims that "the human rights methodology has not included expressions of shared vulnerability." In fact, organizations such as Peace Brigades International (PBI) have explicitly made shared risk an important vehicle for their human rights work.
Steve Ellner
In the 1980s, various leftists including Andres IVelsquez of the Causa R and MAS' Carlos Tablante gained prominence at the local level. Velasquez, as president of the steelworkers' union in the state of Bolivar, and Tablante, first as a city-council represen- tative and later state deputy in the industrial state of Aragua, established their credentials in struggles around concrete issues and then catapulted onto the national stage.
Steve Ellner
Venezuela's two major leftist parties have made important advances at the regional level. But articulating local strategies and experience with national needs and politics has proven problematic.
RIOS MONTT POISED TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT GUATEMALA CITY, MAY 19, 1995 Recent poll indicates that 48% of decided voters favor Efrain Rios Montt as a presidential candidate in Guatemala's upcoming November general elections. The evangelical retired general and former dictator (1982 to 1983) enjoys an overall approval rating of 80%.
Sexual Politics in Cuba: Machismo, Homosexuality, and AIDS by Marvin Leiner, Westview Press, 1994, 184 pp., $47.
DM
Disenchantment has spread among Cuban youths after the ideology which they have grown up with under Castro–that of "eternal progression"–has been squashed by the 1989 economic crisis.
Jonathan Fox
Local and state politics have turned out to be the most viable arenas in which the left can compete for power, experiment with progressive reforms, and learn how to govern.
Peter Winn
The modern history of Uruguay began in 1904 with the inauguration of Jose Batlle y Ord6fiez as president. A towering figure who was one of the most progressive national leaders of his era, Batlle mobilized immigrant workers and shopkeepers into a radical political coalition that transformed Uruguay into the continent's model democracy.
Peter Winn
Uruguay's Frente Amplio is the chief defender of the country's welfare state legacy. It is also in the forefront of the movement to reinvent local government, by decentralizing services and encouraging popular participation.
Ricardo Tavares
Participatory democracy has flourished under the control of the leftist Workers Party in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
William R. Nylen
In Brazil's Northeast–a region notorious for paternalistic, corrupt politics–the Workers Party in local power has focused less on distributive justice and more on encouraging citizens' involvement in government.
Rubén Zamora
Our struggles and hopes in Latin America, with all their contradictions and complexities, have been framed by two global processes over the past 15 years: the end of the welfare state and the fall of existing socialism. These are processes which have certainly marked the end of the twentieth century and will likely have a decisive influence on the first decades of the next.