The Estallido Social as a source of creation of collective representativeness: the laboratory of the Mandato Ciudadano in Barranquilla (Colombia)

In recent years, Latin America has been crossed by a new strong wave of social conflicts characterized by significant transversality and heterogeneity which, on the one hand, have highlighted the unsolved systemic debts in terms of social justice of evidently dysfunctional democracies, on the other hand they are leading the region towards a new cycle of political and institutional redefinitions. This article, being part of traditional socio-political studies relating to the problematization of the relationships and dynamics that arise between social movements and social conflict, analyses - with a qualitative methodology- the case of the Estallido Social (Social Outbreak) that was registered in Colombia over the last year and, in particular, focuses on the Mandato Ciudadano (Citizen Mandate) social movement experiment that materialized in the city of Barranquilla following the social revolts, where the demands for democracy, pluralism and bottom-up democratic participation, as well as social justice and respect for human rights, took shape. The objective of this article is to study the movement's possibilities for impact and pressure at the political-institutional level, a possibility that will be fundamental for a country that has just started an epochal change, with the victory of the forces of the left in the presidential elections, and which, therefore, will have to deal with the structuring of a new socio-economic and political-institutional model that is capable of realizing the voice that has come from the street.