Latin America: between the anomaly and utopia. An Americanist reading of the processes of change in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela in the 21st century

Abstract

As Garabombo, the central character of the second novel by Manuel Scorza, Latin America suffered the disease of invisibility. Neither peripheral nor central Nuestramérica has remained largely in the fuzzy boundaries of Western thought. As stated José Aricó (1999) the specificity of our continent could only be conceived as deviation from the european future. The colonial heritage, its ethnically hybrid status, its discontinuous history, its economic system mired in backwardness, its mythical thought, and even his shrunken nature in comparison with the european beauty appeared in the narrative of foreigners and natives as unmistakable symptoms of an anomaly that should be corrected by all means. In this paper we propose to delve into the constituent elements of Nuestramérica in order to chart the course of some of its transformations in the process of social change in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela. The path that we intend to follow will lead us from the anomaly to the utopia, from the historical and epistemic invisibility towards the reconstruction of our primary forms. In the first section we will gather a group of conceptual vehicles that allow us to grasp the latin American specificity, in the path of an own thought. In a second moment we will board the transformations in historical process and in the visibility horizons that occurred from the cycles of popular protest against neoliberal policies in several countries of the subcontinent. Lastly we will enter discussion about tensions and courses of change processes in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela.