Some characteristics of peoples/societies in movement

During the last months of 2019, social outbursts and uprisings took place in several countries, including Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, Haiti, Bolivia and Nicaragua. In Brazil and Argentina there had already been huge mobilisations, in 2013 in the former and in 2017 in the latter. In all cases, neoliberal extractive policies have been in the crosshairs of collective action, whether under right-wing or left-wing, conservative or progressive governments.

In March 2020, when the pandemic led governments to decree a quarantine, the people on the move were still active, but they could no longer occupy the great avenues but had to try new paths, unprecedented for the majority. At this point, we must stop for a short conceptual and historical detour. Demonstrations, marches and rallies, the public acts of the movements, have been the main way in which they have made themselves visible. But they are by no means the main aspect of a social movement, let alone of peoples on the move, whose main collective action is the re-construction of their own world. In the first place, the demonstration is a relatively recent political-cultural fact, born in Europe in the 19th century, the offspring of processions and military parades, transmuted by the workers' movement and modernity into the elementary and, not infrequently, almost the only tool of struggle, although generally as an appendix to the strike.

In Latin America, the demonstration was one of the innovative repertoires of the labour movement between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, thanks to immigrant workers who created the first trade union organisations. As some studies point out, as in other regions of the Third World, it was “a paradoxical importation of colonisation or westernisation and the resistance to it” (Tartakowski and Fillieule, 2020).

In our continent, the demonstration coexists with many other expressions of indigenous, black and popular protest: sacrificial walks, marches from rural areas to the cities, road blockades, uprisings, insurrections and social outbursts, symbolic or permanent occupation of space or public buildings, seizure of peri-urban land to build neighbourhoods and housing, recovery of land by peasants and indigenous people, among others. Unlike in the developed world, demonstrations are not the main tool of collective action, but just one more. In fact, many movements do not hold demonstrations, or only hold them in an extraordinary way, except for trade union movements.

Photo Credit: Kim Castro Begnozzi, Grafitti 2, Cuba

The second issue is that indigenous and black peoples hardly ever use them and, when they do, they have different connotations, more linked to the defence or affirmation of territory, to the affirmation of their cosmovisions and cultures. Unlike workers' demonstrations, or other movements, which, through them, make demands on the state, a government or an employer, the peoples act in defence, recovery and affirmation of their territories. We are not dealing with forms of action centred on demands to the state, which does not mean that these are non-existent. The type of relationship that the peoples on the move maintain with the state is more complex than a simple demand: basically, they are not seeking “rights” but rather recognition as peoples, that is, self-government in their own territories, with authorities elected by them according to their customs and traditions.

How many demonstrations have the Zapatistas, the Mapuche or the Nasa carried out? Mapuche “mobilisation” revolves around land, to occupy it, resist eviction and reoccupy it when possible and necessary. It is about turning land into territory, or re-territorialising themselves as a people. It is a long process that begins in the community bonfire (kutral), where decisions take on collective force, and become visible in the occupation of the estates (Pairicán, 2014 and Pineda, 2018). The Mapuche repertoire of public action revolves around the reconstitution of territory: the recovery of estates, attacks on forestry company trucks and the burning of pine plantations. They make some demonstrations, but these are by no means the focus of their actions.

Something similar can be said of the Zapatistas and Nasa. The latter have carried out several mingas (community work), the most relevant being the 2008 Minga Social y Comunitaria, a series of marches involving between 45 and 60,000 indigenous people who marched from Santander de Quilichao in Cauca to Bogotá over a two-week period. The Guardia Indígena (Indigenous Guard) is in charge of security. The objectives revolve around respect for previous agreements signed with the state, the repeal of constitutional reforms that “subject the peoples to exclusion and death”, and the construction of the Agenda of the Indigenous Peoples.The objectives revolve around respecting previous agreements signed with the state, repealing constitutional reforms that “subject peoples to exclusion and death” and building the Peoples' Agenda, which arises from “sharing and feeling the pain of other peoples and processes” (Zibechi, 2008).

Thirdly, we are witnessing the transformation of demonstration into spectacle. This is a relatively recent phenomenon, in which the role of the media is relevant. On the one hand, the media, particularly television, seek to depoliticise social protest by showing clips of it, in order to offer public opinion images that are either criminalising or sweetened, but always reductionist and decontextualised in terms of the causes of the mobilisation.

On the side of social protest, in recent years several movements have carried out collective actions that “fit the criteria of spectacle”, as a way of overcoming citizen indifference, media invisibility and government hostility (Silva, 2015: 47). In order to impact on society, some movements have taken on the spectacle as a new repertoire of collective action, to break through the computer fence and attempt to instrumentalise television. However, the apolitical language of spectacle can not only keep movement demands on the political agenda, but also 'risks being subjected to a process of media domestication' (Silva, 2015: 48).

During the pandemic and prevented from demonstrating, popular, feminist and indigenous peoples' organisations had to modify their forms of action. In the second part of this paper, I take a look at some rural and urban movements in a large part of the Latin American region. What follows is an attempt to systematise these experiences, in the knowledge that this is only a provisional approach to rapidly changing realities.

  1. A shift inwards, either in the territories that had been reconquered by the people or in new rural and urban spaces created during the pandemic. Many communities have spontaneously decided to block the entry and exit of people, as the EZLN has done in Chiapas. Establishing controls that delimit the territory is a way of ordering and protecting at the same time, as there is a clear awareness that the disease comes from outside and that one's own resources allow one to confront it.

In addition to Zapatismo, with the closure of its 43 spaces, the most diverse communities have intensified territorial control, with the role of the Nasa Indigenous Guard in the Colombian Cauca region standing out. Seven thousand guards armed with command sticks control seventy points, ensuring that only vehicles and persons authorised by the cabildos, the Nasa authorities in the territories, enter. The Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC) decided to implement A Minga inwards, which can be read as a synthesis of what rural and urban peoples and communities are doing throughout Latin America. The keys to the “inwards”, in all cases, is the strengthening of community relations through their material and symbolic dimensions, ranging from greater food autonomy to the reinforcement of internal authorities anchored in assembly practices and decision-making by consensus, to collective harmonisation through rituals in sacred places such as the lakes in Cauca, bonfires and smoke-smoking with the participation of traditional doctors.

Unlike the hegemonic system, which achieves social consensus by agitating an external enemy - from communism and viruses to the immigrant and the other - the peoples on the move do so through the actualisation of ancestral rituals that harmonise between people and between human and non-human collectives, mountains, lagoons, plants and animals. While the first is a logic of homogeneity for and through war, the second is based on the care and reproduction of life. This territorial closure should not be interpreted as isolation, but as the drawing of a border that leads to the strengthening of non-capitalist and mercantile relations, putting use values before exchange values, solidarity and twinning between those at the bottom as opposed to the individualism proposed and imposed by the system. Because the “Stay at home” proposal does not work and is replaced by the “Stay in the neighbourhood” in the Argentinean slums or the “Stay in the community” of peasants and indigenous and black peoples.

In short, in the face of the impossible individuality of the middle classes, a collectivisation of public space emerges, which is nothing more than the extension of the usual practices of the popular sectors to the pandemic situation. This reality opens up two still incipient debates: the role of collective work, mingas or tequios, in the creation of other worlds, and the way of approaching care, not in a state/institutional and individual key, but in a collective and community key.

2.- The deepening and/or search for food autonomy. In all the experiences recorded, there is a return to the land, an attempt to build self-managed collective organic vegetable gardens, also in the urban peripheries where this task is more complex. It can be said that it constitutes, at the same time, an attempt to overcome the economic consequences of the pandemic, but also a desire to do so collectively, breaking the individual-family isolation imposed by the state.

Photo Credit: Fotomovimiento, Black Lives Matter: Xavi Ariza

During the pandemic, we can observe that a hunger for land and territory has grown among the urban popular sectors, native peoples, blacks and peasants. Witness to this trend is the multiplicity of urban initiatives that we have been recording: the 200 territorial assemblies formed in the heat of the outbreak in Chile which, during the pandemic, set up supply networks outside the market, in direct contact with producers. In the urban peripheries, as in Temuco (Chile), Popayán (Colombia), Córdoba (Argentina) and Montevideo (Uruguay), thousands of people occupied land to build houses or to grow crops, in a frontal challenge to private property and the state.

It is clear that in rural areas, food autonomy (a concept I prefer to food sovereignty, which is always linked to the state) is more far-reaching and has a long and fruitful trajectory. The indigenous movements are the ones that have most vigorously tackled the delimitation and defence of their territories. The EZLN,in its 43 spaces in Chiapas, closed the caracoles (snails1)), leaving the communities in charge of concrete decisions. The Guardia Indigena del Cauca, for its part, controls seventy entry and exit points to and from its territories with around seven thousand guards who rotate their duties. Throughout Latin America, many peasants have blocked the entrance and exit of their villages to ensure that the virus does not enter their communities.

For several decades now, there has been a dialogue between territories and autonomy/self-government, which now urgently needs to be updated. Particularly in cities and urban peripheries. That is why I believe it is necessary to pay attention to what is being done in Cherán, the self-governed city of 20,000 inhabitants in Michoacán (Mexico), the neighbourhood self-management being tried out by the eight communities of the Popular Francisco Villa organisation of the Independent Left in Mexico City, and the territorial assemblies in Santiago and Valparaíso in Chile. Or the case of Errekaleor in Vitoria (Euskal Herria) or the cities of Kurdistan in northern Syria such as Qamishli.

I believe that each urban experience, however specific it may be, must be thought of collectively because in reality there are very few, considering that the majority of the planet's population is already urban.

3.- The links between the rural-urban bottom, as an opening to autonomy. Cities are not autonomous in terms of food and water, nor are rural areas autonomous in terms of health and technological developments. The popular sectors living in the peripheries need each other and the organised workers, because they cannot save themselves alone and have common interests and enemies. The support of Uruguayan trade unions for the soup kitchens in the peripheral neighbourhoods, the donations of food from rural producers to urban dwellers, are just one example of how, during the pandemic, links between the rural and urban poor are being forged. Perhaps the most striking action, due to its explicit expression of solidarity, is that of the Bañados de Asunción. Dozens of soup kitchens are operating under the slogan “The state does not take care of us. The poor take care of each other”, in a broad work of solidarity that connects students and professionals with organised inhabitants living in extreme poverty.

The support of Brazilian Landless Movement (MST) settlements to the urban poor, sending tons of food, as well as the exchange of products between rural and urban Nasa, is an excellent example of mutual support between peoples. Centuries of capitalist domination have segmented and fragmented peoples, particularly their knowledge and skills. So we must rebuild ourselves, as peoples, by recovering lost knowledge. A good example is how the Zapatistas have recovered the art of the hueseras (traditional osteopath), which was being lost.

4.- They strengthen the world of use values. Among the peasant and indigenous populations of Bolivia, Colombia and Mexico, exchange and other ancestral practices outside the capitalist market are widespread. Barter fairs are held at previously agreed points and on previously agreed days, without currency, but no equivalents are exchanged; rather, each person does so on the basis of need. These are practices that have been carried out for a long time, but in the midst of the health emergency they take ona double meaning of collective resistance and an alternative to capitalism.

In agriculture, experiments are beginning to be carried out with circular gardens, which respond to an ancestral indigenous logic, linked on the one hand to their own worldviews and, on the other, to water saving, crop complementation and the division of labour based on mutual help. In some cities, remarkable community care practices are being developed, with the identification of the most vulnerable people in order to supply them with food without them having to leave their homes.

Some supply networks have made it possible for families in cities to buy not from supermarkets but directly from rural producers who participate in the networks. Mini-banks are also proliferating as a means of community savings and redistribution to families with the most urgent needs. In short, non- capitalist practices of dispersion, not concentration of goods, based on the production and distribution of use values, denying the possibility of their becoming exchange values. The non-capitalist economy is making inroads during the pandemic, multiplying possibilities that until now seemed marginal. From these experiences, we see the importance of the existence of practices that are heterogeneous with respect to the hegemonic or counter-hegemonic ones, regardless of whether they are minority, local, or even marginal, as is so often pointed out by those who have opted for the big, which is inevitably the state/capitalist. It is important that they exist because when people need them, they multiply them.

References

Pairicán, Fernando (2014) Malón. La rebelión del movimiento mapuche 1990-2013, Santiago, Pehuén. • Pineda, Enrique (2018) Arde el Wallmapu, Mexico, Bajo Tierra.
• Silva, Juan Pablo (2015) “La fabricación mediática de la protesta social”, Anagramas, Vol. 13, No. 26, Universidad de Medellín, January-June, pp. 43-56, at http://www.scielo.org.co/pdf/angr/v13n26/v13n26a03.pdf (accessed, 16/05/2020).
• Tartakowsky, Danielle and Fillieule, Olivier (2020) “La manifestación: el origen de una forma de protesta”, Nueva Sociedad No 286, March-April, at https://www.nuso.org/articulo/manifestacion- origen-forma-protesta/ (accessed on 16/05/2020).
• Zibechi, Raúl (2008) “La Otra Colombia”, La Jornada, 24 October, at https://www.jornada.com.mx/2008/10/24/index.php?section=opinion&article=028a1pol (accessed on 11/05/2020)


About Author(s)

Raúl Zibechi is a researcher in social movements, journalist and writer. He is a columnist and international analyst for La Jornada. His books translated into English are Dispersing Power (2010) and Territories in Resistance (2012) both in AK Press.

1)
Caracoles (snails): On December 19, 1994, the EZLN, (Zapatista National Liberation Army) took control of 38 municipalities in the state of Chiapas. They were ruled by self-government through autonomous councils. On August 9, 2003, they created five Zapatista Caracoles to replace the previous Aguascalientes, built-in 1995 as meeting points between Zapatista people and the other cultures of Mexico and the world. They complement the role of the Juntas de Buen Gobierno (Good Governance Boards or, simply, Juntas) true networks of power from below. https://chiapas-support.org/2019/09/05/the-zapatista-caracoles/