This article appears to give an excellent, up-to-date summary of the political conditions throughout Latin America with emphasis on "progressive states" in South America (Bolivia, Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil) and the problems encountered by radical movements who aligned themselves with these states.
It seems that after the brutal overthrow of the Chilean socialist government in 1973 and the Nicaraguan government ultimately in 1989 by subversive forces of the Empire, the Empire favored the implementation of soft power to continue their neoliberal policies especially in states that harbored revolutionary movements.
The Conquest of the Americas continues as an ongoing process of “primitive accumulation,” that is, through brutal dispossession, only changed in detail. The looting, once only of gold and silver picked or shoveled from mines by slaves to satisfy the greed of Conquistadores, has increased exponentially in recent decades to feed transnational Capital. This behemoth has left behind the sword to devastate the region with an arsenal of new tools for plunder: strip-mining “megaprojects” with giant machines that dig for lithium, copper and gold, laying waste to landscapes; countless drills for oil, poisoning rivers; dams for hydroelectric power that flood indigenous lands; battalions of tractors sowing industrial soy for cattle and biofuel, or cane for sugar and biofuel, or eucalyptus for paper mills, or other monocultures that raze entire ecosystems and steal peoples’ ways of life….Still, there is hope given the unique cultural fact of strong communitarian values of the indigenous people in this area. They have achieved some successes, and more promising is that they are learning a lot of lessons which may serve them in overcoming these powerful neoliberal forces. We activists in North America can learn much from their experience.
Some form of socialism or communitarianism is embedded in the cultural matrix of the entire southern continent, in the indigenous concept of the “minga,” “minka,” or “cayapa,” meaning “community work for the collective good without self-interest.” The Roman Catholic Church—especially Liberation Theology— posed community as the way to redemption, unlike Protestantism in which salvation has generally been considered an individual matter. When left to their own devices, Latin Americans have often chosen communal forms of mutual aid and populist, corporatist or even socialist governments that advocated for the interests of the working majority. In any case, in the neoliberal globalizing world of TINA, Latin America seemed not to have gotten the memo that socialism was dead and Capital was writing history’s final chapter.
