Latin America in the last decade: balance sheets and perspectives regarding the State, social conflict and social movements.

Abstract

During the decade of the 90's, neoliberalism was consolidated throughout Latin America through a series of profound structural transformations: privatization of state assets, reform of public administration, deregulation, financialization and reprimarization of national economies based on export activities with comparative advantages, rearticulation of the dominant blocks due to the growing weight of transnational capital and the transnationalization of fractions of local capital.
However, the entire period was marked by the rise of massive protests and innovative social movements that, at regional and international level, rose up against the disastrous consequences that left behind them the first and second generation reforms (exponential growth of unemployment, poverty, marginalization and dispossession of common goods). This important cycle of social struggles that, since the middle of that decade, took place in several countries of Latin America (Zapatismo in Mexico, the MST in Brazil, the Movement of unemployed workers in Argentina, the water and gas war in Bolivia , etc.), quickly weakened the legitimacy of the neoliberal model and reversed the correlation of social forces, although with different characteristics and intensities according to national contexts.