CHAPTER 1

REVOLUTION ANDRETRENCHMENTIlluminating the Present in Latin AmericaMark Goodale and Nancy Postero

This volume examines the ways inwhich Latin America, during the last decade, has becomea global laboratory. There, new forms of governance, economic structuring,and social mobilization are responding to and at times challenging thecontinuing hegemony of what the anthropologist James Ferguson (2006)describes as the "neoliberal world order." Yet despite the fact that politicalleaders in countries like Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela articulatethese responses in the language of revolution, these most radical of regionalexperiments remain outliers, the exceptions that prove the general rulethat the global consolidation of late capitalism through neoliberalism hasbeen merely, if revealingly, interrupted in Latin America. Nevertheless, weargue that these interruptions have important consequences and reveal newhorizons of possibility—social, political, economic, theoretical—within abroader, post–Cold War world in which many of the traditional alternativesto late capitalism and neoliberal forms of governance have lost ideologicallegitimacy and in which even the idea of revolution itself—with its mythologicalinvocations of radical change, righteous violence, and social and moralrenewal—is often seen as an anachronism.

At the same time, we also examine the problem of widespread retrenchmentof neoliberalism in Latin America, a set of pro cesses that both bringsinto starker contrast the significance of the exceptional challenges to neoliberalismand underscores the ways in which neoliberal forms of governance andsocial life have become ideologically detached from their historical contingencies.Without the ever-present specter of the Cold War looming over ongoingstruggles over land, racism, and political marginalization, it has becomemore difficult for social and political radicals in Latin America to bringhome the point that the assumptions and structures that perpetuate differentforms of in equality are not inevitable. Indeed, as we will see, neoliberal governmentalityin Latin America is as naturalizing as elsewhere. Even the mostrobust and earnest provocations of the conditions that produce vulnerabilitycome up against the lingering effects of the Washington Consensus in LatinAmerica, through which regional political economies came into a forced alignmentaround market demo cratization, the withdrawal of the state from ser vicesectors, trade liberalization, and the codification of a high-liberal property-rightsregime that extended legal inequalities into new areas like intellectualproperty and bioge ne tics (see, e.g., Dezalay and Garth 2002; Oxhorn andDucatenzeiler 1998).

If in its broadest reach our volume is a critical study of one slice of thecontemporary life of neoliberalism in Latin America, it is perhaps not surprisingthat we have chosen to bring together a diverse group of scholars andintellectuals, both Latin American and Latin Americanist, who present arange of disciplinary, regional, and theoretical perspectives. Neoliberalism,Interrupted revolves around case studies of the everyday lives of people andtheir institutions, caught up in moments of social change and processes ofcontested governance. The volume's perspectives move between the groundedexperiences of neoliberalism in Latin America and more synthetic reflectionson meaning, consequence, and the possibility of regional responses to neoliberalhegemony and the articulation of formal alternatives to it. These perspectivesare enriched by the critical voices of several prominent Latin Americanresearchers and writers, one of whom (the Venezuelan sociologist MiguelÁngel Contreras Natera), in a provocative postscript to the volume, productivelyobscures the line between politics and scholarship, manifesto and intellectualinspiration, in a full-throated and deeply theorized plea for a newkind of politics in Latin America.

Taken together, the different critical studies in the volume demonstratethe ways in which the history and politics of contemporary Latin Americacarry important lessons for scholars, activists, and political leaders in otherparts of world with similar histories and structural conditions, including legaciesof extractive colonialism and neocolonial ism, the influence of Cold Warproxyism, interethnic conflict, strong regional identity, and traditions of institutionalinstability. In this way, the volume adds its collective voice to agrowing debate on the meaning and significance of responses to neoliberalismin Latin America and beyond (see, e.g., Arditti 2008; Escobar 2010; Gudynas,Guevara, and Roque 2008; Hershberg and Rosen 2006; Macdonaldand Ruckert 2009; Panizza 2009). This body of work reveals a spectrum ofresponses to what can be described as "maturing neoliberalism," from a Bolivianrevolution that is framed as a formal rejection of neoliberalism, toColombia's deepening recommitment to the full suite of neoliberal social,political, and economic practices.

Where our volume diverges most starkly from this ongoing critical conversationis in the way our case studies lead to a thoroughgoing skepticismabout the conventional dichotomies that are used to make sense of socialchange and contested governance in Latin America: neoliberalism vs. socialism;the Right vs. the Left; indigenous vs. mestizo; national vs. transnational.Instead, we focus on the ways in which a range of unresolved contradictionsinterconnects various projects for change and resistance to change in LatinAmerica. There is no question that "neoliberalism" remains a powerful discursiveframework within which these different moments of crisis and evenrupture play out. But our volume suggests that a new ideological landscapeis coming into view in Latin America and that it has the potential to dramaticallyre orient the ways in which social and political change itself is understood,conceptualized, and practiced in the region and beyond.

ILLUMINATING THE PRESENT IN LATIN AMERICA

The present in Latin America is marked by both extraordinary moments ofsocial, political, and economic experimentation and moments of violent resistanceand retrenchment. And yet the case studies in this volume resist mostof the easy dialectics that have provided analytical cover for those who seekto encompass Latin America within the grand and all-too-often reductivesweep. If it is true, as Walter Mignolo (2005b) argues, that the space of "LatinAmerica" must be apprehended first and foremost as a contested idea, then itis also true that there are multiple strategies for illuminating this ever-shiftingand highly fraught idea. We agree with Mignolo that the integrative geospacialconcept of "Latin America" remains relevant and indeed, over the last decade,has been even more so. However, we also believe that the kind of coherenceMignolo urges can be understood only through close engagement with actualpoints of crisis, from the grand (the "refounding" of Bolivia through constitutionalreform) to the less visible (the creation of local development alternativesin rural Colombia), from the urban and deeply national (the emergence of anew class of working poor in Chile's cities) to the transnational (the constructionof transborder policing strategies between El Salvador and the UnitedStates). As Perreault and Martin suggest, neoliberalism produces locally specificand scalar expressions (2005).

For the remainder of this chapter, we draw together the collective lessonsfrom the book's chapters. Taken together, they demonstrate that Latin Americahas emerged over the last twenty years as a leading edge of social, political,and economic possibility at the same time that specific regions andcountries of Latin America reflect the intractability of a range of historicallegacies of structural vulnerability. Indeed, the case studies in the volume illuminatethe ways in which the currents of neoliberalism create new forms ofcontestation while simultaneously choking off other possible ideologies andprograms for radical social change. This means that in contemporary LatinAmerica, real challenges to the "neoliberal world order" coexist with andeven reinforce enduring patterns of exploitation and violence.

Fractured tectonics

In the postscript to the volume, Contreras Natera argues that the disjuncturesof the present in Latin America are the result of a prevailing conditionhe characterizes as "fractured tectonics." What he means is that the contemporaryexamples of experimentation and contestation in contemporary LatinAmerica are closely entwined with both previously and actually existing ideologiesand exploitative practices they seek to overcome. This is not a simpledialectics, however, since the relationship between what he calls "insurgentimaginaries" and their hegemonic antitheses is both variable within differentregions and histories of Latin America and much less predictably unstable.Even in the most self-consciously revolutionary nations of Latin America,namely Venezuela and Bolivia, the discursive frame is in fact quite ambiguoussince the clarion call for radical social change is at least in part dependenton the language and logics of existing frameworks of governance, economicrelations, and social and cultural practices.

In order to understand these multiple fractured tectonics empirically, wemust adopt an archaeological methodology that seeks to reveal the ways inwhich these insurgent frames interpenetrate the national neoliberalisms whoselegacies suggest their own contradictions and possibilities. Indeed, as the contributorsto this volume demonstrate, the essential task of the critical observerof contemporary Latin America is to clear a path among the rubble that iscreated when these discursive layers shift, often violently, in order to answermore fundamental questions: What really are the meaningful challenges toneoliberalism now? Are they in the melding of human rights discourse withrevolutionary socialism, as in Bolivia? Are they in the more gradualist andcompromising constitutional reforms of Ecuador? Or are they in the hybridsocialist anti-imperialist nationalism of Chávez's Bolivarian Venezuela? Conversely,does the conservative neoliberal deepening in Peru, Chile, Colombia,and much of Central America, including Mexico, stand apart from the processesof insurgence elsewhere, or does it, in a sense, bracket them?

Moreover, as David Gow (Chapter 4) illustrates, examples of challenges tothe hegemony of maturing neoliberalism in Latin America can be foundon very small scales indeed, even within a state like Colombia, whose majoritypolitics have, for the time being, definitively rejected the possibility ofsomething like a Bolivian refoundation. Moreover, although the constitutionalistreform moment of the early 1990s seems like a distant memory now,Gow's study points to the development of modest alternatives in the intersticesbetween the summarizing discursive frame of the nation-state and theequally expansive—though now perhaps fatally compromised—ideology ofthe Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). Interstitial challengeslike these are usually ignored or obscured, yet their meanings andimportance can, as here, be illuminated by the ethnographic spotlight.

Neoliberal contradictions

Within colonial societies, domination was framed by discourses of race inwhich indigenous peoples were considered either dangerous savages or childrenin need of stewardship (Hall 1996). Moreover, throughout the colonialperiod, tensions in extractive and plantation forms of accumulation producedconflict, as indigenous and slave communities periodically resisted their structuraloppression (James 1989; Serulnikov 2003; Stern 1993; Thomson 2002).

These contradictions were not resolved by the formal end of colonialismin Latin America in the first part of the nineteenth century. As they pushedfor in dependence from Spain and Portugal, Creole elites adopted the liberalideas of the Europe an Enlightenment. Anxious to break with coercive formsof governance and social control, the new Republican states sought liberalsolutions to the tensions underlying colonialism, especially the constant threatof ethnic mobilization. As Brooke Larson argues in the case of Andean elites,the effort to re create colonial societies in terms of liberalism faced a fundamentalparadox: mestizo elites looked to "impose universal definitions of freelabor and citizenship, as well as to mold national cultures into homogenouswholes (along Eurocentric ideals), while creating the symbols and categoriesof innate diff erence in order to set the limits on those 'universalistic' ideals"(Larson 2004, 13). The goal, she suggests, was to "build an apparatus of powerthat simultaneously incorporated and marginalized peasant political culturesin the forced march to modernity" (ibid., 15).

Liberalism promised universal belonging, yet it was accompanied by anew form of race thinking that merely reorganized "colonial hierarchiessubordinating Indianness ... to the Creole domain of power, civilization,and citizenship" (Larson 2004, 14; see also Mehta 1997). Thus, the promisesof liberalism were never completely fulfilled, as indigenous groups and peoplesof African descent were denied full participation in the political, economic,and cultural life of the new Republican nation-states. In the pro cess, what wemight describe as a Latin American liberalism emerged from regimes of exclusionthat cut along racial, ethnic, and intraregional lines and then tookroot. In his postscript, Contreras Natera describes this contradiction as theresult of "the colonial-modern logos," the dominant epistemological and discursiveframework for ordering social relations in the wider colonial world.

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, various responses tothe paradoxical exclusions of liberalism have marked Latin American historyand politics (see Goodale 2009; Postero 2007). At the turn of the twentiethcentury, the Zárate Willka rebellion in Bolivia reprised the insurgencies ofthe previous century, demonstrating that indigenous demands for land andautonomy had still not been met (Egan 2007; Rivera Cusicanqui 1987). Populistrevolutions, such as those in Mexico (1910), Bolivia (1952), Cuba (1959),and Nicaragua (1979), brought to the surface the still-simmering tensions overunequal land tenure and deepening class divisions (Hale 1994; Klein 1992;Knight 1990). By the 1960s and 1970s, de cades of development efforts hadfailed to increase the standards of living for the majority of Latin Americans,and the need to address structural inequalities through agrarian reform andthe redistribution of national resources took on new urgency.

In some countries, popularly elected governments—like Allende's inChile—undertook these reforms. In others—like Peru, El Salvador, andGuatemala—communist social movements in the vernacular resisted liberalreforms and instead pursued revolutionary guerrilla war and the politics ofstructural transformation in terms of a theory of history marked by cycles ofconflict (Degregori 1990; Stern 1998; Stoll 1993; Wood 2003). Many of thesemovements were in turn violently disrupted by a wave of military dictatorshipsthat swept across the region in the 1970s and 1980s. The end of the ColdWar brought this phase of violent revolution and reprisal to a close, and mostLatin American countries made the transition to formal democracy. Nevertheless,as the chapters in this volume reveal in different ways, the twinnedlegacies of revolutionary struggle and the violence of state repression continueto shape arguments for and against alternative models of social change andforms of governance in contemporary Latin America.