Reinventing the Lefts in Latin America

The Venezuelan popular educator and activist Joel Linares tells us, in Pablo Navarrete’s 2009 film Inside the Revolution, that “one morning in Guarenas, behind the mountains [on the outskirts of Caracas], at 5 a.m. on February 27, 1989, a woman tried to get on the bus. When she refused to pay the new bus fare, the driver pushed her. When the driver pushed her, that was the beginning of everything. . . . The other passengers . . . got up from their seats and attacked the bus with sticks and then turned it upside down and burned it.” The popular uprising known as the Caracazo that emerged from this event turned isolated acts of resistance into mass rebellion and challenged “normal” politics. Those who had been silenced by the elite pact of developmentalism and its descent into neoliberalism began to speak as political subjects. The Caracazo marked the beginning of a new era of popular struggle in Venezuela and, arguably, across Latin America. As Mendieta (2008: xii) argues, the ideological prophets and political architects of neoliberalism sought to create an age of “the abolition of politics.” This “antipolitics” was primarily an effort to disarticulate, delegitimize, and criminalize popular-class political horizons and imaginaries, projects, subjectivities, moral economies,1 and ways of life. The embodied and visceral rupture of the Caracazo signaled the emergence of cracks in neoliberal elites’ ability to speak for Latin America’s popular classes. The fault lines in this project of antipolitics deepened in the following decade and eventually resulted in the election to power of various governments falling under the broad rubric of the “pink tide,” including those of Luiz Ignacio (Lula) da Silva of the Workers’ Party in Brazil, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and Evo Morales in Bolivia, and the development of social-movement and community struggles—the recovered-factories movement in Argentina, the Movimento Sem Terra (Landless Rural Workers’ Movement—MST) in Brazil, the water movements in Uruguay, the indigenous movements in Ecuador and Bolivia, the urban land committees in Venezuela, 489665LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X13489665LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVESMotta 2013