Marxism in Latin America

Where possible, mainline communist parties tended to support a moderate strategy of trade unionism and broad electoral alliances. In 1970 the Chilean Marxist Salvador Allende was elected president at the head of a shaky coalition of radical, socialist, and communist parties. The Chilean Unidad Popular (UP) embarked on a modest program of social reforms within a constitutional framework. Strategic industries such as coal and steel were nationalized. With the government's sometimes reluctant backing, workers began seizing factories and transforming them into social property, including properties of U.S..-based multinationals such as Ford and ITT. The government also embarked on a far-reaching agrarian reform; by 1973, 60 percent of Chile's agricultural land had been expropriated and distributed to peasants. Nonetheless, the opposition maintained control of the Chilean congress, and the UP itself was deeply divided. United States economic sanctions and sabotage by producers, landowners, and merchants led to inflation and shortages, undermining the UP's support from an already skittish middle class. From the beginning the United States worked for Allende's overthrow, and on 11 September 1973, his government was toppled in a CIA-sponsored military coup.

One of the more novel movements of the 1970s was the marriage of older traditions of social Catholicism and popular religiosity with Marxist ideas and political organization. In what has become a foundational text of this "liberation theology," the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez founded a new reading of biblical and church writings in Marxist dependency theory. Other religious activists—most famously the Colombian priest Camilo Torres and the Nicaraguan padre Ernesto Cardenal—embraced an insurrectionary strategy and participated in armed revolutionary movements. Many other priests and pastoral lay workers helped members of marginal barrios and villages form affinity groups known as comunidades eclesiales de base (CEBs), viewing popular communitarian ideals as a revindication of the primitive church. Founding their work in a process of participatory education known as concientización (roughly, "consciousness-raising" or "conscience-raising"), radical religious activists encouraged CEB members to apply biblical writings to their own concrete social reality.

Other communitarian traditions continued to be instrumental in Marxist ideas and movements in the final decades of the twentieth century. In Nicaragua, the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN), a broad, if shaky, coalition of Marxist guerrilla movements and liberal dissidents, overthrew the brutally repressive Somoza dictatorship in 1979. The movement's heterogeneity, its deep roots in autochthonous liberal and communitarian traditions, and the somewhat lukewarm support of Cuba and the Soviet Union meant that the Sandinista government tended to abjure Leninist party organization in favor of liberal principles of electoral democracy. It also engaged in a moderate program of land reform (generally along cooperative rather than collectivist lines), improved education and other public services, and enacted progressive social legislation. The Sandinista government survived an eleven-year CIA-sponsored campaign of intimidation, assassination, and sabotage that cost Nicaragua more than thirty thousand lives, and in 1990 it peacefully ceded power to the liberal opposition following an internationally supervised democratic election.

The years following the disintegration of the Soviet Union were a period of retrenchment in Latin America's Marxist left. The fall of the Soviet Union, the aging of the revolutionary elite, and the coming of age of a postrevolutionary generation forced the Cuban government to adopt a program of economic flexibility and Guevarist moral incentives, opening limited spaces for private entrepreneurs and developing ties with European social democracies. In much of the rest of Latin America, the economic crises at the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first changed the profile of the Marxist left's social bases, displacing much of the rural poor, impoverishing the urban working class, and weakening the middle class. At the same time, the transnational movement of people, information, capital, and commodities—and the negotiation of bilateral and multilateral trade agreements—spurred a new transnational focus in the Marxist left.

On 1 January 1994, the same day the so-called North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación (EZLN) captured four municipalities in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas—and captured, too, the world's imagination through its creative use of political theater, mass media, and the Internet. Founded some eleven years earlier, the EZLN's founders had adopted the classic Maoist strategy of "prolonged people's war," forming ties with communities in the Chiapas highlands and learning the local Tzotzil language. Unlike Peru's Sendero Luminoso, however, which shared the EZLN's focus on an indigenous social base and initial Maoist strategy, the EZLN abandoned Marxist schemes of revolutionary organization, adopting a democratic decision-making process and turning leadership over to indigenous communities. Like many other Latin American popular movements in the 1980s and 1990s, the EZLN foreswore armed seizure of power in favor of "armed negotiation," seeking a democratic opening in Mexico's political system and legal protections for its indigenous communities. In this regard it was perhaps inspired by recent Latin American guerrilla movements, which during the 1990s were able to negotiate democratic openings in their respective countries.

The EZLN shared with other contemporary Marxist-influenced popular movements and Marxist thought an out-spoken opposition to the neoliberal hegemony in Latin America and around the world. These movements continued to draw from other popular traditions of community and protest as well as recent analyses of imperialism and modernity. Despite the near-disappearance of Latin American communist parties by the start of the twenty-first century, Marxist critiques of poverty, inequality, and foreign domination—and Marxist-inspired social movements—remained powerful influences in Latin American scholarly debates and political struggles.