Chileans voted by 80% to get rid of the 1980 Constitution and begin the process of writing a new one; Bolivia’s presidential election repudiated the right wing that had taken over the government when Evo Morales was forced to flee last year; and in Colombia, thousands of Indigenous people marched hundreds of miles to Bogotá demanding a meeting with the president to protest extreme violence against their peoples.
Evo Morales
The fall of Morales; whither Bolivia?
January 22, 2020Important human forces in Bolivia are strongly opposing the threat of a developing fascism, and at the same time have not shied away from criticizing the contradictions of Evo Morales’s rule.
Bolivia’s extreme right consolidates power
December 3, 2019Important human forces in Bolivia are strongly opposing the threat of a developing fascism, and at the same time have not shied away from criticizing the contradictions of Evo Morales’s rule.
Essay: The masses in Latin America face a duality
November 30, 2016The essay takes a critical look at the “Latin American Pink Tide” (a decade of progressive governments in South America), its limits and contradictions, and poses the question: Is there a way forward that does not substitute statism for the action and thought of the masses?
V. Toward organizational new beginnings
May 13, 2016Part V of the Draft Perspectives 2016: Together with the depths of counter-revolution, the passion for philosophy points to both the need for and the potential for totally new beginnings in the transformation of society, for new banners of freedom as a polarizing force.
Readers’ Views: March-April 2016, Part 1
March 30, 2016Readers’ Views on: Environment, Labor, Race and Philosophy; Queer Liberation; Black Lives Matter; Bolivian Social Movements; Trumpery’s Fascism & Racism.
Latin America ‘statism’ challenged by movements
September 6, 2015Governments which could never have come to power without the social movements’ mobilizations are using vague expressions of anti-capitalism, socialism, resource nationalism, anti-imperialism, etc., to impose developmentalism on their populations, often in collaboration with neoliberalism.
Lima climate talks betray future
January 29, 2015The 20th “Conference of Parties” was held in Lima, Peru, and, rather than action, issued a “Call for Climate Action” without binding commitments or effective monitoring. The U.S. and other nations as good as admitted the bankruptcy of capitalism by arguing that binding commitments had no chance of being adopted.
Bolivia’s two worlds
May 11, 2014A new conflict broke out in Bolivia at the end of March. Thousands of miners blocked highways in five departments of Bolivia to protest a pending new mining law. Three miners were killed by the national police, while the miners took dozens of police hostage.
Latin America in view
July 10, 2013Bolivia’s Statism; Guatemala’s Genocide Trial in Disarray; Honduras coup anniversary
Climate change and development
May 3, 2013Another devastating sign of capitalism’s degeneracy is its failure even to slow down climate change. Youth have spearheaded a new movement to control it. It is the actual social relations, relations of production, forms of labor, relationship to the land and other means of production, by which we can judge what must be uprooted, and to what extent any society has or has not moved to a path of development that breaks from capitalism’s never-ending growth of capital, or, as Marx put it, production for production’s sake.
Bolivia’s two roads
December 2, 2011From the November-December 2011 issue of News & Letters:
Bolivia’s two roads
Indigenous protestors from the Bolivian Amazon won a victory when they forced President Evo Morales’ government to cancel a road-building project through the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS), a supposedly protected region in eastern Bolivia. The victory [=>]
World in View: Whither Bolivia?
April 22, 2011It took five days of protests, but the social movements, which brought Evo Morales to power in 2006 forced his government to back off of a huge increase in the price of gasoline at the end of 2010. In El Alto, government offices were broken into and striking bus drivers stridently enforced their stop-work action [=>]