Home » Archives » April 2006 » Social Movements and Progressive Governments: The Current Veins of Latin America
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04/18/2006:
"Social Movements and Progressive Governments: The Current Veins of Latin America"
Bolivia has Evo Morales. Mexico has the Zapatista movement. Argentina is Kirchner’s. Where do social movements stop when facing progressiveness that restores power? Are these governments the triumph, or the downfall of these movements? Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, a Mexican with vast experience in Bolivia, visited Buenos Aires to talk about these themes with local movements and with LaVaca.org, offering a deep look to look at the continent in its own mirror.Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar is a small and intense woman. With an academic background in mathematics and sociology, her C.V., nevertheless, focuses mainly on the unstable political sands of Latin American politics. She began in her native Mexico with exiled El Salvadorians of the FMLN, and 20 years later she continued her work in Bolivia, where she was arrested in April of ’92 on charges of armed uprising and numerous other charges, for having been part of the Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army (EGTK). In the raid, she fell alongside her companions, amongst whom were Felipe Quispe, current leader of the Pachacutik Indigenous Movement-MIP, and Alvaro García Linera, Bolivia’s brand new vice-president elect.
Raquel was released from jail on April 25, 1997, thanks to a hunger strike that forced her legal situation, and to an endless number of international protests that pressured for her liberation. In 2001 she returned to Mexico, where she currently lives and works along with a group of women, all former political prisoners. It’s logical therefore that her current work is that of linking processes so different from one another like the Mexican and Bolivian social movements.
With this history at her back, practically unknown in Argentina, Raquel arrived in Buenos Aires to share in a round table of chatting and mate in the recuperated printing press Chilavert, along with members of different local social experiences. People from MTD of Solano, MTD Maximiliano Kosteki of Guernica, the Escuela Crediendo Juntos de Moreno (the Growing Together School of Moreno), the Grupo de Arte Callejero (the Street Art Group), the UNT de Avellaneda, and several individuals from here and there came together to share, for almost three hours, an exchange over the situation of the three different countries that share a common challenge: what to do from here. The hosts of the meeting were members of the Colectivo Situaciones (Situations Collective), and were responsible for weaving together the threads and sowing the questions.
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