Social Movements on the Net
Osvaldo León, Sally Burch, Eduardo Tamayo
ALAI, september 2001
http://alainet.org/publica/msred/

PART II
Latin @merica: movimientos.org

Chapter 3.
Exclusion and Resistance in Latin America

The Neoliberal Wave

With the outbreak of the “foreign debt crisis” in 1982, the model of import substitution, which had prevailed in Latin America since the post-war years, was sharply eclipsed, then supplanted by neoliberal policies of structural adjustment and export promotion, encouraged by international financial agencies and world power centers.

Privatization, deregulation and liberalization of economies thus became the keystones of economic policy as applied in the region, which has resulted in a transfer of national assets to private enterprise, governmental downsizing, reduction of the government’s role in the economy and its social responsibilities, flexibilization of markets and trade, total openness to foreign capital, dismantling of labor laws, promotion of export-oriented production, internationalization of the domestic market, application of severe monetarist policies, freezing of salaries and reduction of public subsidies, among others.

These policies, according to the neoliberal view, should have led to reestablishment of internal and external balance and rapid economic growth, while creating the conditions – with a change in the economic rules of play – for insertion of the region into the globalized economy. However, two decades later, reality indicates that such measures have not only aggravated the problems they were supposed to correct, but have given rise to others. This is evident in the new forms of vulnerability and the increasingly exclusive nature of the economic base, expansion and intensification of ecological deterioration, widening of the gap between poor and rich, accelerating growth of poverty and generalized deterioration of social conditions. This panorama has also become a spur for both migratory flows and the development of organized crime.

These policies have had such an impact that governments have been forced to moderate their adjustment packets and implement palliative “compensatory” measures, to forestall subsequent social convulsions. However, since these “compensations” cannot prevent the victims of this model from expressing their legitimate reactions anyway, repression has actually come to play the role of “social policy.”

The fact that governmental agendas no longer view social action as a priority has also led to degradation in the strife-weary democracy that was regained in the region during the 1980s, after a lengthy period of dictatorship. Adjustment policies mean that fewer and fewer people are in a position to enjoy their rights as citizens, since increasing poverty intrinsically leaves people with no goal but survival. This also deepens the gap between the real country and the political country, where dirty deals abound, in the corruption associated with privatization, impunity, dual discourse, drug traffic and so on. In sum, this panorama overlays the economic, social and environmental crisis with a crisis of the legitimacy of the political system.

Rebuilding Social Organization

In a desperate effort not to be swept into the jaws of the adjustment policy trap, the grass-roots sectors were forced to concentrate their efforts on meeting their day-to-day survival needs, any way they could. In this struggle to survive, individualism took root (“every man for himself”) as encouraged by neoliberal ideology, according to which there is no point in finding a solution with everyone else, but against the rest. This generalized a sort of “assumed marginalization” leading to an estrangement both from politics and from any form of organized formulation of demands.

Under these new conditions, social organization processes were seriously affected. And not only by the adverse structural factors (unemployment, migration, impoverishment, social fragmentation, etc.) but also by a clear policy orientation. In order to pave the way to implement adjustment policies, politicians sought to dismantle the social fabric of grass roots organization, using every available means: direct repression, co-opting, systematic discrediting of their leaders, disqualifying their demands, wearing down their ways of protest, refusing to recognize their status as social spokespersons, etc.

However, as Héctor de la Cueva, coordinator of the Hemispheric Social Alliance, (2000: 3-4) has pointed out, “after the numbness of the first years of neoliberal offensive, social reactivation and intensive search for answers have recovered remarkably, even overcoming the ideological and political backsliding.”

In this process, the leading role acquired by rural organizations stands out in this region. For example, 1994 will be remembered as a year that epitomized grass-roots resistance, because of the powerful indigenous and rural demands, in terms of both discourse and actions, in the arena of sociopolitical conflicts. That year began with the armed uprising of the Chiapas indigenous in Mexico, led by the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), followed by another indigenous/ rural uprising in Ecuador, and the mobilizations of the landless in Brazil and Paraguay, as well as the marches of coca workers in Bolivia.

Since then, social protest has not only picked up momentum, but has been nourished by the presence of new organized grass-roots expressions, to cope with the increasing pauperization or make specific demands (women, indigenous, youth, human rights, ecology, unemployed, etc.). Moreover, the labor movement has begun to show signs of reactivation, demonstrating its capacity to “regenerate and transform, adapting to new situations, changing forms and strategies, to survive and come back the next day and keep struggling,” as Ronaldo Munk (1999: 11-12) has put it.

So, in Latin America, we are witnessing a rebuilding of the organizational social fabric, with new faces and approaches. Initiatives oriented toward curbing dispersion and isolation have played an outstanding role in this process. The Continental Campaign of 500 Years of Indigenous, Black and Popular Resistance was outstanding, both because of its circumstances and timing, and because of the processes and directions it has triggered.

Unity in Diversity

The 500-Years Campaign, waged from October 1989 through October 1992, on the occasion of the 500^th anniversary of the arrival of Spaniards in the Americas, was the starting-point for a process of bringing social forces together for interaction that, although strongly-rooted at the national level, had no international bonds. The protagonist of this Campaign was not the labor movement, as in the past, but a group of sectors that had been hard-hit by neoliberal policies: rural people, indigenous, black communities, women, and working-class neighborhoods.

The “unity in diversity” slogan adopted by the Campaign, suggested by the indigenous organizations, indicates the renewed meaning brought by this initiative, with an eye to stopping the trend toward fragmentation and scattering of grass-roots sectors, and keeping pyramidal and centralized organizational concepts at bay. The idea was not to create a federation or confederation or to appoint leadership that would “set the policy guidelines for the grass roots” but to emphasize the discussion about common policy agendas. From this vantage point, each stakeholder preserved their autonomy, but with a commitment to act in accordance with the common themes, so the Campaign would make a greater impact.

The Campaign’s organizational structure was built from the bottom up and horizontally: broad national committees worked together regionally and nominated their delegates to a continental coordinating team, which in turn had an operational secretariat as a liaison to facilitate information exchange. Local initiatives provided the foundation for starting to act globally, and not the other way around. From this standpoint, information sharing, creation of communication webs, networks, and interaction forums proved to be fundamental for the coordination work.

Beyond the immediate outcomes of this Campaign, which managed to neutralize the festive character that the Spanish government and the elites of the region wanted to give the 500^th anniversary, the processes of coming together for collective interaction that the Campaign unleashed were so intense that they continued over time and resulted, subsequently, in the formation of sector groupings that have generally adopted the organizational parameters implemented by the Campaign. That is, they coordinate on a consensus basis, respecting the autonomy and rhythm of each component organization, and have no centralized structure, but rather an operational coordinating body that generally rotates among the membership.

This is the specific framework within which the Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Organizaciones del Campo (Latin American Coordination of Rural Organizations – CLOC), the Network of Afro-Latin American and Afro-Caribbean Women (RMAA from the Spanish acronym) and the Asamblea del Pueblo de Dios (Assembly of Peoples of God – APD) have gotten organized; mechanisms have been created to coordinate indigenous women and peoples, and those of Afro-descendant organizations; the Continental Front of Communal Organizations (FCOC in Spanish) has been re-activated; and the connections have been strengthened among women’s, youth and human rights organizations.

The Challenge of Communication

Insofar as the new modes of coordination among social organizations place more emphasis on consensus, exchange and information flows than on hierarchical, formal arrangements and relations, the issue of communication practically becomes unavoidable. Also along these lines, the 500-Year Campaign was innovative.

In fact, the Campaign’s decentralized format, said one of its promoters, “ended up placing the communications issue as a pressing need. At the beginning, this was not so clear, but as the Campaign proceeded and broadened its scope, the need grew to maintain regular exchange at least among the operational secretariat and the regional offices. This inclined them toward e-mail, especially because it was cheaper than telephone and fax.” The First Meeting (Bogota, October 1989) stated “we talked about e-mail and even though it went no further than that, the idea floated around in the environment and something like a year and more after that the coordinators saw that all their members should have e-mail access. Since this was difficult for the organizations themselves, in many cases the solution was to borrow from some friendly NGO, but for practical purposes the coordinators could use this medium for intercommunication and also more broadly disseminate the press releases, statements, reports, etc. This part picked up momentum after the Second Meeting (Guatemala City, October 1991), since they had decided to back the candidacy of our Mayan leader, Rigoberta Menchú for the Nobel Peace Prize (1992). This made the dissemination activities more intense.”

Although at that time the number of organizations with computerized communication was minimal, they were not unaware of the development that the Campaign achieved using this technological base. Along these lines, one could talk of the “demonstration effect” on the organizational processes that used e-mail to work together.

So, both CLOC and RMAA recognized that the Campaign had enabled them to value the importance of incorporating communications tools in order to guarantee ongoing exchange among member organizations, and to achieve a higher public profile and political positioning in the international arena.

Therefore, CLOC, starting with its first constitutional congress (Lima, 1994) has defined communication as one of its central themes. Even before formally coming together, the organizations promoting this coordinating body had decided to join forces to be able to produce a joint publication, the Boletín Campesino-Indígena de Intercambio Informativo (Rural-Indigenous Information Exchange Bulletin). Its first issue circulated in June 1990 and, as of the first Congress, became CLOC’s official organ. This publication has been used not only as a medium for denunciations and building solidarity, but also as an element of internal cohesion and public presence for the Coordination.

The use of e-mail in CLOC resulted from the need to intercommunicate both among organizations and with the operational secretariat. By 1997, out of the 46 organizations participating in the Second Congress in Brasilia, 26 had e-mail. That was the basis for setting up an electronic exchange list to act especially at times of conflict and repression.

Networking reinforces organizations’ belonging to a larger, supranational entity, to a resistance movement, which makes policy and builds international-scale agendas. Organizations no longer feel weak and isolated, but discover the value of collective action and international solidarity.

Concern about the issue of communication has also been present in the process of the Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Women’s Network, but above all in their Second Meeting (San Jose, Costa Rica, 1997), which gave communication top priority on their agenda, with an eye to “internal strengthening and higher visibility for Afro-descendant women’s proposals internationally and in their countries.” Among the practical measures taken, they agreed to begin publishing the Cimarronas newsletter, focusing on the struggle against racism and gender-based discrimination, and to activate an electronic list for exchange.

In the case of the Continental Front of Communal Organizations, they have also made decisions regarding communication, but with limitations on implementation. The reason has been that, “The FCOC is not an organization or a network, has no ongoing information and communication flow, or structures that take care of things. It is called a Front because of its political diversity, but it is more like a meeting-place, a forum for exchanging information, for communicating in order to make certain agreements for unity of action. However, obviously, its shortcomings include not maintaining continual contact among its member organizations,” one coordinator explained.

The fact is that these organizational dynamics, placing communication on the table for discussion with varying degrees of intensity, end up agreeing on the need to find ways to take better advantage of computerized communication. So it is precisely because of the decentralized nature of these coordinating bodies, that the information flow becomes an indispensable requirement in order to keep them active. When information stops flowing, a network begins to fall into disuse. This need for information flow has given a very practical meaning to the use of computers and e-mail, driving the decision to invest in this technology. Otherwise, it might not have been considered a priority for organizations working at the grass-roots level.

Once e-mail began being part of these coordination initiatives’ daily lives (several of them use an electronic list or bulletin board for in-house exchange, an intranet), they turned their gaze toward the possibility of having a Website as well. And then, with the criterion that common problems call for joint solutions, the idea of the Web Community of Social Movements (WCSM) began to mature.

www.movimientos.org
The public face of the WCSM is a collective portal on the Web, with its own domain (http://www.movimientos.org) where, under the slogan of “Unity in Diversity,” the participating coordinating bodies and social networks house their own site autonomously. Being together “under the same roof,” each component achieves greater visibility, and avoids the isolation and scattering of individual sites. In turn, cybernauts find various issues and approaches to the region’s social issues in a single place.
Initial WCSM members were the Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Organizaciones del Campo (CLOC), the Continental Front of Communal Organizations (FCOC), and the Network of Afro-Latin American and Afro-Caribbean Women (RMAA). Subsequently another regional network, the Network of Women Transforming the Economy (REMTE)¹ joined, as did a number of inter-sector initiatives, such as the Cry of the Excluded, which has held an annual continent-wide campaign since 1999, the Communication and Citizenship Forum and the Forum of the Americas for Diversity and Pluralism (a venue created in the preparations for the World Conference Against Racism). However, several activities have included participation by other organizations (indigenous, human rights, women) who are on their way to joining the WCSM.
The Web site was launched publicly at the beginning of the year 2000. All the above groups have already placed their own sites on the WCSM portal, and some, in turn, host their own members’ pages. There are also other related sites, with their own domains, such as the ALAI site Latin America in Movement (http://www.alainet.org); and Mujeres Acción (http://www.mujeresaccion.org) created as the regional counterpart for the global initiative of Women Action.
The initiative’s design has been adapted to optimize the advantages and solve problems that its members share. As of August 2000, the individual sites have been accompanied by a common bulletin board for news, alerts and updates, called PasaLaVoz (Spread the word). By regularly updating it with information from the different coordinating bodies, the Website as a whole and each of the member sites becomes more dynamic and visible. This has resulted in a progressive increase in visits to the site: by March 2001, the site was receiving over 100,000 “hits” a month. Taking advantage of the possibilities on Internet of combining different communications instruments, PasaLaVoz also has a distribution list, complementing the Web service.
As a response to the Web’s international nature, several of these spaces have their home page and other basic pages in Spanish, Portuguese and English, and are configured so the internaut can enter according to the language of their web browser. Further, to facilitate quick searching and location of the desired information, common data bases and search engines have been incorporated.

As the dust settles, it is becoming clearer that, beyond the advantages that Internet offers for access to information and quick communication, its development as a system of autonomous, decentralized networks, with their multi-directional, interactive communication capacity, more than just an instrument, it is becoming a place for social struggles to be waged. Therefore, use and skill in handling it are not all that count, but also strategy-making to enhance the results of using this “space”.

So, when the WCSM took form – with ALAI’s operational support – although referring to the world of Internet, it aimed to also promote a process of exchange and joint reflection in order to move forward in policy-making that would make this action, and communication activities in general, sustainable. So, its programming was not limited to the Web page, but also included a component of training to spread information, enhance the activities of each player, and multiply the impact of joint activity, taking into account the challenges posed by the present-day world of communication. Since this is a new, complex set of issues, this component is based on the criterion that the point is to “learn how to learn”, whether in meetings and hands-on workshops or through on-line exchanges. However, it has also proven necessary to look inwardly at how the organizations relate to Internet. This is precisely the subject of the study that we shall recount in the following chapter.

Notes: