Marxism in Latin America

This ferment is reflected in how Latin American Marxists tell their own history. Although Marxist parties and popular organizations, strictu sensu, did not exist until the 1920s, many of the popular icons of latter-day Marxist movements have been drawn from earlier generations and other traditions of social struggle. Heterodox Marxist intellectuals have tended to echo radical currents in nineteenth-century liberalism, which suggested that village and ethnic communitarian traditions might be a foundation for radical social transformation. To some extent, these Jacobin intellectuals merely ratified a kind of organic popular liberalism, in which local and regional parties and militias sought to parlay their defense of community into broader visions of national transformation (and sometimes into effective guerrilla resistance to foreign invasions); the degree of contact and mutual influence between popular liberals and urban Jacobins is still an open question. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also saw the beginnings of a strong anarchosyndicalist and socialist movements in Latin America's nascent urban working classes, which were the foundation for many early communist parties in the 1920s.

The first communist parties in Latin America were founded in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917, but they maintained a strong bent toward ideological heterodoxy. In Brazil, for example, former anarchists formed a communist party in 1922, although many of their delegates were vetoed at Comintern congresses. The Mexican Communist Party, the first Comintern section in Latin America (and the first communist party outside Russia), became a de facto training ground for activists in the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional; murals by Communist Party members Davíd Alfaro Siquieros and Diego Rivera still adorn government buildings. In 1928 the prominent Marxist theorist José Carlos Mariátegui founded the Partido Socialista del Perú (PSP). Mariátegui insisted that Marxist ideas needed to be adapted to the distinctive reality of Latin America, particularly its indigenous traditions, and he rejected Leninist notions of party centralism. The PSP affiliated with the Comintern only after Mariátegui's death.

One of the most original Marxist thinkers in Latin America, Mariátegui gave a distinctive Marxist cast to the broad-based political movement known as indigenismo, which sought to ensure the rights of contemporary Native American peoples and to vindicate Latin America's indigenous past. Mariátegui initially worked with the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA) of Haya de la Torre and shared the APRA's characterization of the "Indian problem" as a social and political issue rather than a moral or racial one. But Mariátegui also insisted on working-class agency and insisted that socialism was not alien to Peru's indigenous peoples, viewing the pre-Hispanic Inca empire as a form of primitive communism. Anticipating many of Chairman Mao Tse-tung's ideas, he insisted that socialist revolution would result from a long "accumulation" of forces. Indeed, in the 1980s and 1990s the Maoist Sendero Luminoso claimed Mariátegui as a founding ancestor, although this legacy continues to be contested vigorously by other left opposition movements and intellectuals.