Opinion Sur
No matter how much it is tried the social dynamic, clarification, and understanding cannot be frozen. In the middle of setbacks and submissions, the determination to stop abuse, to stand up overcoming the huge uneasiness, emerge. Transforming breezes reappear; they are worth encouraging and protecting.
Latin America, as other regions of the world, suffered a colonizing aggression that decimated native populations, destroyed civilizations, and imposed their geopolitical and economic interests. Those colonies were structured according to what was convenient for the colonial power, submitting, first by force and then culturally, the peoples that lived in the region. They wrote history from their perspective and values, burying voices and world visions of the oppressed.
Since those remote times, there were periods of freedom and decisional independence followed by setbacks, dictatorial governments, losses of sovereignty, a variety of new ways of popular submission. It is a long history of dignities and indignities, of commitments that honor us and deaf cowardice, of a mixture of generosities and pettiness. The present is better understood when we know where we come from; letting us head with full conscience of risks and challenges towards a referential utopia that cares for Mother Earth and shelters us all.
The XXI century dawned under diverse springs. New leaderships perceived that there were spaces of popular outcry to start another phase of transformations, and so they tried it; as always with successes and errors, with braves and traitors. They transformed as much as they could; for some a lot, for others not much. However, they transformed enough so that sectors controlling economic and decisional power felt their privileged positions threaten and launched open or undercover counter reforms. Springs were shaken and transforming voices muted and discredited. Popular movements returned from governments to their territories with desertions; opportunists were easily co-opted, old fundamentalisms once again proclaimed that there is only one truth, theirs, broadcasted as undeniable, loaded with lies, falsehoods, undercover interests. As always two countries, that of the owners (a small fraction) and the rest, beaten, confused, repressed, punished with an impious ideological and judicial torrent to get them surrender their strenuously conquered rights. The old but prettied up siren calls explaining once again that present pains are unavoidable for a later (an undetermined later) recovery of the welfare that is now being stolen from us. This way we are reaching the third decade of the century.
However, no matter how hard it is tried the social dynamic, understanding, and clarification cannot be frozen. In the middle of setbacks and submissions, the determination to stop abuse, to stand up overcoming the huge uneasiness, emerge. Transforming breezes are reappearing.
Where to aim?
It will be necessary to go from resistance to recovering rights, gaining access to governments, and dismounting what sustains economic and cultural submission. We should go further than just rebuilding; building the new and the conditions so that nobody, sooner or later, can impose setbacks once more.
Mechanisms used to preserve economic and decisional power are known even when they operate undercover. Strategies should be orientated towards those mechanisms. It will be needed to transform the productive matrix to secure an organic growth that avoids falling into recurrent bottlenecks of the external sector and the subordination to foreign decision centers. Moreover, it will be necessary to strengthen value chains by establishing fair relations between large leading enterprises and the rest of the productive fabric; therefore, it will be needed to establish spaces for negotiating fair prices and non-abusive commercialization conditions. We have noted that it is indispensable to transform our fiscal systems to secure the progressivity that they lack today (affluent groups and individuals should effectively pay more without evading their fiscal responsibility); wage negotiations to favor workers’ income need to be reinforced; it is critical to establish middle-size productive ventures that include workers, small entrepreneurs, and strategic partners; to accomplish this developers of inclusive ventures and Dignity Trusts could be used. We must end indigence and minimize or eliminate poverty. Huge inequality is unacceptable; its effects shattering.
Most of the sustainability of transformations is played from the cultural dimension as depending on how our subjectivities were molded, clarified or conquered freewill will be reinforced. Therefore, it is necessary to democratize voices away from echoes that reiterate imposed messages; instead of alienating hegemonies, we should try to diversify contributions and promote contents away from the insubstantial. Hard work will be needed to vanish values of greed and indifference towards others, promoting those that support responsible, solidary, and accompaniment actions towards those who suffer. New transforming breezes require defending the oppressed, the usually punished, lending hands, advancing in clarification, widening the invitations to build citizenship aware of its rights and obligations, firm and sensible at the same time.
Transforming measures need to be deployed according to circumstances and sequences without sliding towards risky voluntarisms. On the contrary, efforts should be placed in mobilizing talents and determination by altering the correlation of prevailing forces. Advancements will be fragile if power is not built to secure the renovation and sustainability of social progress. There are no recipes for this but rather case-by-case solutions that orientate efforts towards liberating currently captured democracies, away from any democratic fundamentalism.
Strengthening organization and clarification
A transforming path needs strong popular-based social and political organizations. It will be necessary to reinforce organizations that retain credibility and establish other new that promote and defend innovative spaces currently unoccupied. There are no immutable social contexts but rather situations that change in different directions and at different speed. The own dynamic of social processes requires periodic revisions of the transforming action. Those revisions are done at the national level but also considering sectorial and territorial specificities that cannot be captured but through the groups and people that live them. They will know how to implement in their spaces transforming national orientations and will be ready to propose adjustments and specificities to secure social viability for them. Thus, it is critical to extend in the widest form possible the call for participation in the transforming effort.
It is not an easy challenge to convene and integrate into a national transformation effort ever more groups and people; there is a lot and diverse inside the popular universe. It is worth insisting on the fact that it is not just to invite them to be closer to support the ideas of the leadership but rather to enrich the transforming effort with new ideas and proposals in the multiple fronts and dimensions of national reality. Frequently, the ones that tend to be listened are those attuned with national leaders what leaves a huge unexploited potential and, in not so few cases, resentful or frustrated people. It is a mistake to avoid, especially when new transforming breezes that need to be encouraged and protected start to emerge.
Which channels exist and are available to convene, listen, and integrate wills into transforming action? Social or political movements have activists that work in sectors and territories and are in fact channels for establishing relations with different stratums of the population. They are people that fit within the values, mottos, and proposals of the movements in which they act; even though they are an important channel to convene other participants they do need to be trained in the specific task of identifying, receiving, doing a first analysis and draw their leaders’ attention to the proposals made by people or collectives that exist in their territory or sector.
This training should be threefold: activists and their trainers learning together with the popular bases they help mobilize. There is no need to create bureaucratic structures, but rather agile and effective teams, respectful of the diversity of perspectives, with good criteria to collect proposals and identify solutions. Some proposals may require better developments but, instead of dismissing them, it is worth identifying internal elements that can serve to understand and build up eventual solutions. It is not easy to capture the essence, deep motivation, and interests that nest in every proposal; however, it is a challenge that must be addressed to add substance and credibility to the effort of widening the popular field.
Encourage and protect transforming breezes
It will be naïve to think that those who have decisional power and have forced social setbacks will graciously resign their privileges. They never did that and it is likely to believe that they will not do it in a situation where transforming breezes once again start to rise. On the contrary, in their recent offensive they have restructured prevailing institutions to better resist eventual transforming attempts. The popular field needs to join forces, rise up above secondary differences to encourage and protect the coming change of an era. Dispersion is no good, nor is narcissism or making personal interests prevail over those of the social whole. We would have to be able to discern responsible from opportunistic individuals, recognize honest voices far different from the gibber of minstrels of selfishness and discord.
Everybody, absolutely everybody, need to move towards clarifying why these things happen the way they do, understand the hard consequences of perpetrated mistakes. It is outrageous to maintain courses that only serve the interests of narrow minorities. As in any crossroads, we need to identify wiles and build the required power to overcome them. The nested solutions and the sense of living in an ever more full democracy grows; a democracy for everybody. In a path full of challenges, pettiness, and altruism, it is an effort that makes us proud.
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