Even for those sections of the left- and there were many of them Latin America- which never saw the Soviet Union as some kind of paradise, it was ideologically confusing for the one counter-weight to fall. Ideologically there is a situation where the Soviet Union and its client states are collapsing. Neo-liberal re-structuring could not have unfolded in the 1980s and 1990s without the preliminary assault on those forces that might have been able to in at least a defensive way slow those measures. So there is a physical annihilation in much of Central and South America of the old forces of organization, and that was a very important and very poorly understood initiator for neo-liberalism. It was very successful seen from their own perspective in Guatemala, there are 200,000 dead in just two years in the early 1980s. During the 1980s under Ronald Reagan’s support in the US, there is a counter-insurgent project to eliminate the entire wave of those forces. In Guatemala and El Salvador, major guerrilla forces with a mass base are fighting stalemates with right wing authoritarian regimes in Nicaragua there is the successful Sandinista revolution that lasts from 1979 all the way until the 1990s. In Central America there is a similar example of physical annihilation of huge layers of the organized left, mostly through counter-insurgency targeting of guerrilla organizations. As you might expect, it takes generations to re-organize these bases even after electoral democracy has re-emerged. To take one example, in Argentina between 19, the bureaucratic authoritarian regime eliminates 30,000 organized activists. So if you look in the Southern Cone (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile), you have a period between the 1960s and mid-80s of brutal authoritarian assaults on labour unions, peasant associations, left parties, human rights organisations and their family members. These are important if we going to try and understand how the left re-articulated its project, and should be of interest to those trying to re-articulate left projects in Europe and North America.īack in the early 1990s you have a situation where physically much of the organizational bases of the traditional Latin American left had been destroyed by military power. Jeffery Webber: If you go back in history to the early 1990s, the Latin American left had reached its nadir, its lowest point in the 20 th century, and there are a number of reasons for this. Ishan Cader talks to Dr.Jeffery Webber, Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London about how and why the neo- liberal regimes in ‘the US’s back yard’ were ousted by left and centre-left governments in Latin America.
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