This month marks five years since the publication of the book Dancing with Dynamite: Social Movements and States in Latin America. The dance with dynamite between social movements and states in Latin America that the book followed in 2010 continues today, but in a transformed political landscape.
Inequality is not a symptom of the ills of global capitalism, it is its fuel. Austerity measures won’t change this; they simply maintain an unjust system that needs to be transformed from the bottom up.
The world lost one of its great writers today. Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano died at age 74 in Montevideo. With the small mountain of books and articles he left behind, Galeano gives us a language of hope, a way feel to feel rage toward the world while also loving it, a way to understand the past while carving out a better possible future.
Following defeats for Evo Morales’ MAS party in Bolivian regional elections, new checks and balances to MAS power from a variety of political positions may continue to open up spaces of dissent, debate and contestation that will deepen Bolivia’s wider process of change, a process that the MAS doesn’t, nor did it ever, completely control.
Bolivia’s road toward decolonization is a rocky and contested one. But, as Bolivia's Vice Minister of Decolonization Félix Cárdenas argues below, in a bleak world full of capitalist tyrants, bloody wars and racist exploitation, the country's Process of Change under President Evo Morales continues to shine as an alternative to the dominant global order.
Elisa Vega Sillo, a member of Bolivia's Vice Ministry of Decolonization, speaks about the unique work of the Vice Ministry, the role of historical memory in the country’s radical politics, and the importance of decolonizing Bolivia’s history of indigenous resistance.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019