The following is an excerpt from the introduction to the new book Dancing with Dynamite: Social Movements and States in Latin America, (October, 2010, AK Press).
The motorcycle thundered off the highway onto a jungle road of loose red dirt framed by trees, families lounging in front of their farmhouses, and small herds of disinterested cows. We pulled up to a dusty store to buy food for our stay in the rural community of Oñondivepá, Paraguay, and asked the woman behind the counter what was available. She nodded her head, picked up a saw, and began hacking away at a large slab of beef. We strapped the meat and a box of beer on to the back of the motorcycle and roared off down the road.
A volleyball game was going on when we arrived in the area where landless activist Pedro Caballero lived. His wife offered us fresh oranges while his children ran around in the dirt, playing with some wide-eyed kittens. The sun had set, so Caballero’s wife lifted a light bulb attached to a metal wire onto an exposed electric line above the house, casting light on our small gathering of neighbors. Suddenly, the dogs jumped to action, joining in a barking chorus, and lunged toward the edge of the woods. They had found a poisonous snake, a common cause of death in this small community far from hospitals.
“We are the landless,” Caballero, a slight young man with shoulder length black hair, explained while peeling an orange for his young daughter. As a settler on the land, he works with his neighbors and nearby relatives to produce enough food for his family to survive. But he is up against a repressive state that either actively works against landless farmers, or ignores them. “No one listens to us, so we have to take matters into our own hands,” he said. Caballero spoke of the need to occupy land as a last resort for survival. “The legal route isn’t working, so we have to go for the illegal route, which does work.”(1)
Caballero was a long-time friend and supporter of current Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo. He worked on the president’s campaign, and held out hope that after taking office, Lugo would implement much-needed land reform for the thousands of landless farmers in the country. Now he believes the president has “turned his back on the sector that gave him everything.” But Caballero, along with many other landless farmer leaders, has not stopped his militant actions. “Agrarian reform doesn’t happen in the government ministries. It happens in the streets, in the plazas; it happens with land occupations.”
He tells stories of the community’s many confrontations with Brazilian landowners who are taking over Paraguayan land to grow soy—a rapidly expanding crop which, through a dangerous cocktail of pesticides, corrupt judges, and armed thugs, is displacing Paraguayan campesinos [small farmers] at an unprecedented rate. The threat of this toxic crop, protected and encouraged by the state, literally looms on the horizon for Caballero and his family: beyond his own small farm, a soy plantation is climbing down a neighboring hill toward the river. The pesticides used on the soy are already polluting their local water supply. So far, the community has resisted the encroachment with machetes and community organizing.
Ramón Denis, Caballero’s uncle, is adamant that his self-built community will resist eviction. “We will not permit even one meter of soy in our community,” Denis said. “In this community we work together. When the community is apathetic, nothing is possible. When the community moves, anything is possible.”(2)
The story of Oñondivepá is part of the complicated relationship at the heart of this book: the dance between social movements and states. In this dance, the urgency of survival trumps the law, people acting based on the rights they were born with makes the state irrelevant, and anything is possible when the community moves.
Desperation tends to push people together, and a transformative and irrepressible power can grow from that bond. The situation a majority of people across South America find themselves in today is as dire as it was for many in the US during the Great Depression. John Steinbeck writes movingly of the solidarity that rose from that anguished period in The Grapes of Wrath:
The causes lie deep and simply—the causes are a hunger in a stomach, multiplied a million times; a hunger in a single soul, hunger for joy and some security, multiplied a million times; muscles and mind aching to grow, to work, to create, multiplied a million times… The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first “we” there grows a still more dangerous thing: “I have a little food” plus “I have none.” If from this problem the sum is “we have little food,” the thing is on its way, the movement has direction. Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours.(3)
These words speak of the hunger that pushed people to organize, that pushed them to join unions and fight against exploitative economic systems and ideologies. Decades later, a Brazilian slum dweller, Carolina María de Jesús, writes of the poverty in her community: “Hunger is the dynamite of the human body.”(4) Hunger’s dynamite can be self-destructive, but it can also force people to take radical, liberating action.
Hunger pushed Bolivian miners in the Revolution of 1952 to use their dynamite as a tool to overthrow a military dictatorship. Descending into the city of La Paz on April 10, 1952, with a full moon lighting their way, miners laid siege to the city, ushering in a new government. The “reluctant revolutionaries” brought into office had to be pushed from below to enact changes in the country.(5) Miners fought and won ownership over their mines. Landless farmers occupied large estates, forcing the government to follow through with land reform. Responding to grassroots pressure, the reluctant revolutionaries granted universal voting rights and broader access to education.
At the time, the US State Department said of the revolution in Bolivia that “the whole complex of lawlessness, combined with the government’s apparent unwillingness or inability to control, added to a considerable degree of anarchy in the country.” Historian Vijay Prashad writes that “‘anarchy’ for the United States was popular democracy for the Bolivians.”(6)
Still, the greedy moderates administering the Bolivian revolution from above would only go so far. Eventually, overcome by their own lust for power and pressure from Washington, they cracked down on the rebellious population. In the 1950s and the following decades, the government led a wave of violence against the same grassroots sectors that had swept it into power.
But the dynamite of public demands continued exploding. In 1964, the government sent in troops against miners in Oruro who were protesting the government’s bloody crackdown on labor rights activists. A miner named Domingo spoke of the violence that began when the soldiers attacked his community: “They even entered into houses of families and took people out, forcing people into the streets in their underwear and killing them. We miners in Itos tried to defend the mines. We put up a fierce resistance with dynamite… They didn’t let us leave. We made a cordon and stayed awake all night from eight until dawn.” The soldiers won the battle, and Domingo has suffered from insomnia ever since.(7)
The dance between the government and the people can be explosive and tragic. It can also reap benefits for marginalized sectors of society. In 2007, decades after miners fought their traitorous government, they took to the streets again with their dynamite in Oruro. This time they had a different objective: to defend the government of Evo Morales from the violent and racist right wing, and help push through a new constitution. In this case, the interests of the movements intersected with those of the government. Their dance is emblematic of a larger relationship between movements and states across South America today.
This book deals with the dances between today’s nominally left-leaning South American governments and the dynamic movements that helped pave their way to power in Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, Brazil, and Paraguay. The discussion surrounding the question of changing the world through taking state power or remaining autonomous has been going on for centuries. The vitality of South America’s new social movements, and the recent shift to the left in the halls of government power, make the region a timely subject of study within this ongoing debate. Though often overlooked in contemporary reporting and analysis on the region, this dance is a central force crafting many countries’ collective destiny.
Each chapter in the book focuses on this contemporary relationship in a specific country. In Chapter 1, I discuss Bolivia’s Movement Toward Socialism, a “party of social movements,” and the complex relationships between various movements and the Evo Morales administration. In Chapter 2, I examine the rise and influence of Ecuador’s indigenous movement and the Rafael Correa administration’s betrayal of this dynamic group. In Chapter 3, I look at the Argentine piquetero, occupied factory, and human rights movements, their participation in the 2001–2002 uprising, and their subsequent relations with the Néstor Kirchner administration. In Chapter 4, I discuss the history of the Frente Amplio (FA) in Uruguay, both as a movement and party, and examine the interplay of grassroots and party logic within the FA’s electoral successes and the administrations of Tabaré Vázquez and José Mujica. In Chapter 5, I examine the popular Venezuelan forces leading to Hugo Chávez’s rise to power and the current landscape of movements, state-initiated programs, and party politics making up the Bolivarian Revolution. In Chapter 6, I look at the parallel stories of the landless movement and the Workers’ Party in Brazil, and rocky relations between the two since President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s 2002 election. Finally, looking at Paraguay in Chapter 7, I present the campesino movement’s fight against the soy business and agro-industry, and how the Fernando Lugo administration has largely worked against this movement.
Dancing with Dynamite concludes with a suggestion that lessons from South American social movements could be applied in the US by activists facing similar state, party, and economic challenges. To illustrate this proposal, I give the examples of specific actions and groups that have drawn from South American strategies, including the 2008 occupation of the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago which drew from tactics in Argentina, the movements for access to water in Detroit and Atlanta, which reflected tactics and struggles in Bolivia, and the Take Back the Land movement in Florida, which organized homeless people to occupy a vacant lot and pairs homeless families with foreclosed homes, mirroring the tactics and philosophy of the landless movement in Brazil.
From Paraguay to Detroit, people are working from below to build their utopia today. They know a better world can be created by walking toward it. “She’s on the horizon,” Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano writes of utopia. “I go two steps, she moves two steps away. I walk ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps ahead. No matter how much I walk, I’ll never reach her. What good is utopia? That’s what: it’s good for walking.”(8) I hope this book contributes to our collective journey toward utopia.
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This book is available from AK Press.
For information on Dangl’s upcoming Dancing with Dynamite book tour, visit www.DancingwithDynamite.com
Benjamin Dangl has worked as a journalist throughout Latin America for the Guardian Unlimited, The Nation, and the NACLA Report on the Americas. He is the author of The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia, and the editor of TowardFreedom.com, a progressive perspective on world events and UpsideDownWorld.org, covering activism and politics in Latin America. Email: Bendangl(at)gmail(dot)com
Notes:
1. Author interview with Pedro Caballero, April 2009.
2. Author interview with Ramón Denis, April 2009.
3. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, Penguin Classics, (New York: Viking Press, 1939).
4. The Unedited Diaries of Carolina Maria de Jesus, (Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, December 1, 1998).
5. Herbert S. Klein, A Concise History of Bolivia, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 212.
6. Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, (New York: New Press, 2007), 135–136.
7. Quoted in June Nash, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 274–275.
8. Eduardo Galeano, “Window on Utopia,” in Walking Words (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995); reprinted in The Nation (June 12, 1995).