Jeffery R. Webber is presently a Senior Lecturer of International Political Economy at Goldsmiths, University of London. In January 2020, he will take up a new position as Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at York University, Toronto. He is the author most recently of The Last Day of Oppression, and the First Day of the Same: The Politics and Economics of the New Latin American Left (Haymarket, 2017). He is working on a new book for Verso, The Latin American Crucible: Politics and Power in the New Era.
Not even a year into the Bolsonaro experience, it is still early to try to map the country’s varied fronts of resistance. But what follows provides at least some initial elements, touching on education, political scandal, the labor movement, feminist and black liberation fronts, state repression, tactical and strategic debates on the Left, the overweening legacy of the PT, and the meaning of fires in the Amazon.
There has not been a counter-revolution, there has been a process of advance for the Right, but with popular resistance. And it’s interesting that there is a new generation. Those who struggle now have processed the experience of the progressive cycle. We will see how they translate this politically, we don’t know. But the generation that produced the earlier cycle did it without experience, arising out of pure neoliberalism. Now, the new generation is leading this process.
For the indigenous population of the Americas, 1492 signifies the closure of self-determined history and the beginning of near demographic annihilation. From the vantage point of Spanish and Portuguese rulers, the same moment signals the ascent of far-reaching feudal empires and the concomitant rewards of extraordinary geographic preponderance.
By Jeffery R. Webber. The prolific writings of Vice-President Álvaro García Linera offer one window into the complexities of the political, ideological, and economic developments that have transpired since Morales first assumed office. With that in mind, the following detailed exposition and critical interrogation of the core arguments advanced in his 2011 book, Tensiones creativas de la revolución , is meant to shed some light on what is at stake in the competing characterizations of the “process of change” unfolding in Bolivia since 2006.
Viewpoint Magazine