LATIN AMERICA: Scholars Pin Hopes on Rural Movements

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Nov 1 1997 (IPS) - As the fortunes of the urban left decline in Latin America, analysts contend that the hopes for progressive activism in the region rely increasingly on rural-based movements — from the Zapatistas in Mexico to Brazil’s landless protesters.

Since the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the left in Latin America has been adrift, U.S. and Latin American scholars attending the thirtieth anniversary this week of the leftist North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) agreed.

However, scholars are drawing hope of renewed activism among the left from the growth in recent years of campaigns such as that of Ecuadoran Indians angered by the environmental damage caused by oil companies, and the seizure of land by Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (or MST).

“Grassroots movements can be a real challenge” to modern-day, neo-liberal states in Latin America, says Roger Burbach, director of the Centre for the Study of the Americas at the University of California-Berkeley. “This is where we have to start building our alternative.”

“The countryside is in turmoil,” agrees Gerardo Renique, a professor and specialist on Peruvian affairs at the City College of New York. At the same time that Marxist intellectuals and other urban leftists have been in retreat, he argues, groups like Mexico’s Zapatista rebels and the MST have taken the lead in pointing to the vast economic disparities that remain throughout the region.

“The MST is the most visible popular movement in Brazil today,” notes professor Jack Hammond of New York’s Hunter College. The homeless movement has become so popular for its demonstrations and land takeovers, he contends, that the leader of the opposition Workers’ Party, Luis Inacio (Lula) da Silva, acknowledges the MST as Brazil’s most influential group.

The MST has even achieved the pinnacle of recognition in Brazil, Hammond adds: a popular ‘telenovela’, or soap opera, on Brazil’s TV Globo focused on the subject of land occupation.

The interest in countryside activism comes at a time, the scholars attending the NACLA anniversary at New York’s New School for Social Research agreed, when traditional Marxist and socialist forces seem adrift. “We don’t have a clear emancipatory project,” concedes Burbach.

Sandra Levenson, a professor at Boston College, says that during her recent stay in Guatemala, she noticed a revealing shift among activists of the leftist Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit (URNG) and its allies: they had stopped using words like ‘capitalism’, ‘exploitation’, ‘imperialism’ and ‘workers’. Instead, she says, they discussed poverty, often in language “inspired by people who make alliances with non-governmental organisations.”

By contrast, says Levenson, the student left in Guatemala is idle. “Currently among students, a cynical pragmatism prevails,” she says. “An unhappy and gloomy reality is just accepted as if there is no exit.”

On the one hand, argues Renique, the Latin American left is in retreat because many of its key ideas — including the democratisation and modernisation of the region — have been co- opted into the mainstream. Burbach notes that even neo-liberalism has changed since the heyday of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, since it now explicitly includes democratic ideals in its programme.

On the other hand, economic globalisation and the radical free- market measures — from privatisation to social-service cutbacks — that have accompanied it have also laid bare the continuing inequality in Latin American society. As the gap between haves and have-nots grows, many rural groups have been the first to react.

“Brazil still has the highest concentration of land in the world,” says Hammond. “Vast extensions of land still lie fallow,” he adds — but paramilitaries and death squads often forcibly prevent the landless from occupying those lands. In such a climate, he argues, the MST is a response to “the missing history of agrarian reform in Brazil.”

There are many problems with promoting the rural demonstrators as the vanguard of any new regional leftism, Hammond concedes. For one thing, to the traditional urban left, “there are many ways in which the MST appears to be backward,” he argues. Even a largely sympathetic article in Brazil’s ‘Veia’ magazine described the landless activists as having “rotten teeth, vermin under the skin and little schooling.”

Mexico’s Zapatista rebels have garnered a more impressive mystique, thanks in part to their articulate spokesman, Subcomandante Marcos, says Fred Rosen, editor of NACLA’s bimonthly ‘Report on the Americas’. But he warns that there is a danger of overstating the rebellion in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas as a broad assault against the globalised economy.

The Zapatista movement is “not a response to globalisation, neo- liberalism and so on, but a historical response to rights,” Rosen argues. Rather, the Zapatistas are the latest in a series of Mexican popular movements who seek to make good on the promise of a “right to land” enshrined by the Mexican Revolution but never formally delivered by the government, he says.

While many scholars see the new energy for the left coming primarily from the countryside, some of those present for the NACLA anniversary also hope for a revitalised labour movement that can link workers’ rights among North and Latin Americans.

“The battle in privatisation has not been won,” argues professor Hobart Spalding of Brooklyn College. “The (neo-liberal) economic model demands a weak labour movement: fewer benefits, lower pay and so forth…The whole privatisation issue has really raised workers’ consciousness.”

U.S. labour movements have also become more aware of their common interests with Latin American workers as U.S. businesses rely more on overseas assembly of apparel and other key products, says Jeff Hermanson, director of organising for the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE).

Only one-third of garment assembly for U.S. companies is performed in the United States, and only one-third of those U.S. workers belong to unions, Hermanson notes. As a result, he argues, U.S. unions have realised the importance of maintaining working standards in North America by fighting for higher pay and better conditions in sweatshops in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Mexico and other major centres of U.S. apparel construction.

“Is this a new attitude (by the U.S. labour movement) or is it a desperate, defensive measure? Well, it’s both,” Hermanson concedes. But he adds that the alliance among U.S. and Latin American unions has already put pressure on major conglomerates and improved conditions in free trade zone factories in the Dominican Republic, with future workers’ rights campaigns planned for Central America.