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Social Movements

Colombian Left May Be On The Verge Of Winning Power

May 31, 2022 Andrew Willis Garcés, Andrea Parra, and Nikki Marín Baena, Convergence. , , ,
The Colombian Left has seen its greatest electoral successes ever in 2022. In March, during the combined congressional general election and presidential primary (yes, they do both on the same day), for the first time ever, the Left party alliance won the most congressional seats of any party, and the two Left presidential candidates came in first and third, respectively, in votes received across all parties. The governing right-wing party has almost totally collapsed, winning only 12% of the vote. Those elected to Congress in March included a few leaders of an historic general strike last May, including a college student who went viral conducting an outdoor protest orchestra. Most U.S. news coverage of Colombia references gang violence and drug cartels, masking the vibrant web of Afro-Colombian, indigenous, feminist, student, campesino and worker movements that have shaken the country with mobilizations and now electoral wins over the last year.

Gustavo Petro Wins Today In Colombia

May 30, 2022 Ana Perdigón, Orinoco Tribune. , ,
Gustavo Petro and Rodolfo Hernández are the candidates for the presidency of Colombia that will be measured in a second round, after not reaching the necessary number of votes defined by the Colombian rule of 50% plus 1. Colombia’s National Registry, the electoral authority, reported with 99.16% of the pre-counted votes that the candidates who will contest the second round on June 19 are Gustavo Petro and Rodolfo Hernández. Gustavo Petro, candidate for the Historical Pact, obtained 8,479,095 votes, equivalent to 40.31% of the votes, while Hernández obtained 5,931,722 votes, representing 28.20%. Although Petro’s result was expected, since he was the favorite in the polls, Hernández’s results on the contrary was a surprise given that he managed to consolidate himself during the last stretch of the campaign, when, in the polls, he began to approach the candidate of the right Federico Gutierrez.

Learning From Each Other’s Struggles Is Vital To Long-Term Success

May 21, 2022 Laurence Cox, Waging Nonviolence. , ,
When we’re up against the state or powerful corporations, patriarchal or racial structures, we can’t take success or even survival for granted. What we do and how — our strategy and tactics, our understanding and skill — matters for the outcome. The stakes are high, and the cost of defeat is severe. This makes movement learning an ethical, as well as a practical, necessity. Reinventing the wheel — only learning when we and our movements go through something ourselves — is a recipe for intensified and prolonged suffering. Meanwhile, a “Do something, anything” mentality is often justified by a macho celebration of action for its own sake, a preference for drama over results, or even our own past suffering. After all, if other people have successfully oppressed and exploited us for a long time, we have the moral high ground of having suffered, resisted and survived.

Bolivia: “We Are The Center Of The World”

May 17, 2022 Rogelio Mayta, Resumen English. , , ,
Humanity is at a turning point. Not only war and climate change threaten life on our planet. Ideologies and some people as well. We know that money and the production of wealth and well-being have created a widening and deepening gap between people, neighborhoods, cities and countries that has been exacerbated in the wake of the pandemic. So I would like to stop thinking of ourselves as the poor periphery of an unequal, colonial and racist globalization. In Bolivia, since the beginning of this century, we have been struggling with some of the most important and decisive issues for the future of the human species: water, our sacred coca leaf, the goods that we can distribute thanks to the generosity of the Pachamama and – of course – the right to decide collectively about our lives.

‘It’s Time For Our America’: ALBA Movements Assembly Concludes

May 4, 2022 People's Dispatch. , , ,
After four days of debates and reflection, the III Continental Assembly of ALBA Movements came to an end on Saturday, April 30. 300 delegates from 23 countries had gathered in Buenos Aires, Argentina to debate, discuss, and make concrete work plans for the next period. In the closing panel of the Assembly, leaders from across the region talked about the experiences of people’s movements and organizations in achieving the right to land and work, resisting attacks from the right-wing and imperialism, and building national and international unity of people in struggle. Speakers included Juan Grabois and Ofelia Fernandez, from Argentina’s Frente Patria Grande, Esteban “Gringo” Castro, from the Union of Workers from the Popular Economy (UTEP), Thays Carvalho from Movimiento Brasil Popular, Carlos Ron, Venezuelan Vice-Minister for North America, and Zaira Arias from the Free Peru party.

ALBA Movements’ Assembly Kicks Off In Argentina

April 28, 2022 People's Dispatch. , , ,
For the next four days, delegates from people’s movements, trade unions, and left political forces will be gathered in Buenos Aires, Argentina in the third Continental Assembly of ALBA Movements. Members of ALBA Movements announced the launch of the assembly in a press conference organized on Monday April 25 in the headquarters of the Argentine Federation of Press Workers (Fatpren). Manuel Bertoldi, a member of Frente Patria Grande of Argentina and the International Peoples’ Assembly secretary told members of the press: “This third continental assembly is taking place here in Argentina, understanding that we are going through a moment in our continent of a lot of struggles and resistance.

Amid Global Uncertainty, ALBA Movements Forge Unity And Hope

April 23, 2022 Zoe Alexandra, People's Dispatch. , , ,
In Latin America, a series of electoral victories have allowed for the arrival of new governments of a popular, progressive nature or for at least a break with the neoliberal hegemony in those countries which we can say remained steeped in neoliberalism during the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century. We are talking about Chile and Peru. We also have the recovery of democracy in Bolivia after the coup d’état and we have a series of upcoming elections in Brazil and Colombia, where there are also possibilities of new forces coming to power. To this we must also add the victory in Honduras [of Xiomara Castro], which defeated the coup d’état that had removed Zelaya. At the same time, within the realm of people’s movements, there have been new struggles and we have seen new sectors that have taken to the streets before and during the pandemic, because the States did not respond to the basic demands related to health, food, decent work, etc.

Why We Need To Shift From Crisis Mode To Sustainable Organizing

April 21, 2022 Matthew Arlyck, Resilience. ,
As we in this part of the world are entering the spring season, it seems like a good time to consider the cycles in our ongoing struggle to become Martin Luther King Jr.’s beloved community. Just as King’s political strategy and moral concerns evolved and even shifted radically during his life, most of us involved in justice work have experienced growth in our consciousness. I’m personally starting to understand how movements work, and why they change. I recently had the opportunity to reflect on my time with Occupy Wall Street as the Fellowship of Reconciliation was creating a documentary film on the 10th anniversary of the movement. In September 2011, I was starting an internship with FOR, and through my involvement with a student group from Union Theological Seminary, called the Protest Chaplains, I became one of FOR’s on-the-ground respondents to the Occupy movement.

The Triumph Of A Pedagogy Of The Oppressed In Progress

April 15, 2022 Charo Mina Rojas, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
It is very interesting and important how Francia has learned to be respectful and coherent in echoing the voices of the people, instead of the phony politicking to which we are used to. The enormous growth in her political narrative is not only due to her beautiful and natural intelligence, (not in vain blessed by [the Orisha] Orunmila). It’s also fundamentally due thanks to her life experience as a Being who has suffered all the forms of oppression, against which she rosed up in rebellion, allowing her a capacity for listening and transcending words in action and deeds, resonating in those of us who come from the same place. These are capabilities and attitudes only typical of those who always dare to know that, with nothing more to lose in a white-male supremacist, arrogant, violent predatory world like this one, at the end of the day we have everything to gain by facing risk. Risks that are existential because either we are, or we are not.

How Movements Can Maintain Their Radical Vision While Winning Reforms

April 15, 2022 Mark Engler And Paul Engler , Waging Nonviolence. , , ,
For movements in the U.S. and beyond wondering how they can engage with the system without being co-opted, the MST offers a powerful example. Many social movement scholars believe that movements can institutionalize their wins over the long-term by having the state and mainstream political parties adopt their demands and programs. However, these scholars also contend that such institutionalization comes at a price: too often, as movement programs are incorporated into mainstream structures, grassroots forces become demobilized, dull their radical edge and lose their ability to exercise disruptive power.

In The World, There Are Many Traps, And It Is Necessary To Shatter Them

March 25, 2022 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , ,
On 31 March 1964, the Brazilian military initiated a coup d’état against the democratically-elected progressive government of President João Goulart. The next day, Goulart was deposed and, ten days later, the 295 members of the National Congress handed the state over to General Castello Branco and a military junta. The military ruled over Brazil for the next twenty-one years. The Brazilian military is an institution with deep roots in society and constitutes the second largest military force in the Americas, after the United States. The 1964 coup was not the first time that the military left the barracks and seized power over the state. Along with its role in overthrowing the Brazilian Empire (1822–1889), the military entered to remove President Washington Luís in the Revolution of 1930, replacing him with Getúlio Vargas, and then intervening in 1945 to end Vargas’ Estado Novo, also known as the Third Brazilian Republic.

The Unity Of Theory And Practice

March 9, 2022 Yanis Iqbal, Orinoco Tribune. , , ,
In 1969, Fred Hampton – chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party – said: “we saying that theory’s cool, but theory with no practice ain’t shit.” He elaborated this statement in another speech that he gave in the same year: “I don’t care how much theory you got, if it don’t have any practice applied to it, then that theory happens to be irrelevant. Right? Any theory you get, practice it. And when you practice it you make some mistakes. When you make a mistake, you correct that theory, and then it will be corrected theory that will be able to be applied and used in any situation. That’s what we’ve got to be able to do.” Hampton’s words continue to be relevant. In the current conjuncture, Western Leftists – with a few principled exceptions – have been denigrating and viciously condemning concrete mass struggles and socialistic experiments in the Global South from a perspective of self-congratulatory moral purism.

The Left Has Culture, But The World Still Belongs To The Banks

February 11, 2022 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , ,
‘[T]here is great intellectual poverty on the part of the right wing’, Héctor Béjar says in our latest dossier, A Map of Latin America’s Present: An Interview with Héctor Béjar (February 2022). ‘There is a lack of right-wing intellectuals everywhere’. Béjar speaks with a great deal of authority on these matters because, for the past sixty years, he has been intimately involved in the intellectual and political debates which have taken place in his native Peru and across Latin America. ‘In the cultural world’, Béjar notes, ‘the left has everything, the right has nothing’. When it comes to the great cultural debates of our time, which are manifest in the political sphere around social changes (the rights of women and minorities, the responsibility to nature and to human survival, etc.), the needle of history bends almost fully to the left.

Buenaventura, Colombia Strikes Against Racial Capitalism

January 30, 2022 Herrinson Campara Campaz, Anthony Dest, and Esther Ojulari, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
In 2017, Junior Jein, a rapper from Buenaventura [Colombia], released a song that became the anthem of a protest. But he did not appear in the music video. Instead, karaoke-style lyrics play alongside a CGI television set that shows clips of police motorcades patrolling the city, cops raiding neighborhoods, and children choking on tear gas. In the background, a steady fire burns through a chain link fence bordered by the yellow and green flags of Buenaventura. The chorus repeats: “ESMAD, fucking ESMAD. Esa es la respuesta que el gobierno nos da.” ESMAD, that’s the response that the government gives us. Junior Jein’s song, aptly named “Fucking ESMAD,” goes on to describe the conditions of state violence in the city: “If we ask for water, they send us ESMAD.

Movements And Leaders Have Seasons

January 27, 2022 Carlos Saavedra , Waging Nonviolence. , , ,
Over the last two years, social movements, organizations and leaders around the world have been thrust into a period of tumult, transition and uncertainty. These moments of crisis in our personal lives and in society can force sudden changes in our capacity to respond. What happens when we are not able to offer leadership like we used to? Or inversely, what happens when we do have the energy and capacity to respond, but our efforts don’t yield the results that are expected? Responsibility is the essence of leadership, and millions of community leaders who are working hard to resolve difficult, structural problems are uncomfortable when they feel like they need to respond to the moment, but are unable to. This can lead to burnout, or worse: leaders leaving the movement altogether, creating vacuums of leadership that don’t honor the cycles of our own development.
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