Marxism: Latin America

Throughout the twentieth century, Latin Americans wrestled with the enduring problems of foreign domination, social inequality, and poverty. Marxist popular movements, political parties, and intellectuals were often key players in these struggles, forming an important basis for trenchant social critique, mass social movement, and revolutionary organization. Even in countries where Marxist ideas, parties, and organizations never developed a mass following or consistent electoral presence, they exercised a broad influence on social movements, politics, and culture. Latin American Marxism cannot be abstracted from this broader social, political, and intellectual ferment. Despite the insistence of many Marxist political parties and regimes on ideological unity, the history of Latin American Marxism has been characterized by creative engagement, partisan debate, and heterodoxy.

Antecedents and Origins

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.

1929–1959: International Crises and the Search for Common Ground

Despite the independence of many Latin American Marxist thinkers, international developments also continued to shape Marxist ideas in Latin America. The global economic crash of 1929 reinforced the Comintern's turn toward ultraleftism, and in many countries communist parties broke with allies in reformist unions and organizations, established rival organizations, and vigorously contested the state. The resulting repression drove many of these parties into semiclandestine status; an attempted insurrection in El Salvador ended in catastrophe, with more than ten thousand killed. In 1935 the rise of fascism prompted the Comintern to call for a "popular front" of proletarian parties and the antifascist bourgeoisie. During World War II, Latin American communist parties also abandoned their earlier anti-imperialism in favor of a broad international alliance against fascism. They also built alliances with right-wing groups and local dictators such as Batista in Cuba and Somoza in Nicaragua. In Chile, the Popular Front of communist, socialist, and radical parties won the presidency in 1938 and pursued a program of moderate reform. In many other countries, however, communist parties lost ground to populist regimes or other left opposition movements.

The wholesale repression of communist parties—and the aggressive intervention of the United States—encouraged Latin American communists to continue alliances with liberal and democratic parties in the postwar years. Marxist intellectuals embraced Latin American liberals' age-old enthusiasm for national "development," combining sophisticated critiques of global political economy with vague tropes of modernity. Latin American poverty, they held, stemmed from its economic dependency on the United States, whereby Latin American economies exchanged raw materials for manufactured goods at disadvantageous terms. They tended to view the development of a capitalist industrial economy and urbanized society as a prerequisite for socialist revolution. In some instances, Marxist intellectuals revived Simón Bolívar's dream of a broad alliance of Latin American nations, which would permit the development of economies of scale and the political strength to stand up to an aggressive United States.

Other Marxist intellectuals, particularly in the Caribbean, emphasized connections with anticolonial struggles in other parts of the world as well as the struggle for racial justice in the United States. This trend was exemplified by C. L. R. James, whose work remains important in both international Marxist theory and cultural studies. Born in the then-English colony of Trinidad, C. L. R. James's initial focus was on his native Caribbean, and his early work included social-realist fiction set in West Indian slums as well as his classic study of the 1793 slave revolt in Saint Domingue (Haiti), The Black Jacobins (1938). He also wrote two key works on Marxist theory and practice, Notes on Dialectics (1948) and State Capitalism and World Revolution (1950). His Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways (1953) analyzed the relations among Moby Dick 's narrator, the ship's captain, and its expert "Third World" crew. Mariners anticipated James's involvement in revolutionary decolonization movements in Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, as well as among African Americans in the United States. It also presaged the broader internationalism of Latin-American Marxists following the Cuban Revolution.

Foquismo

Latin American communist parties tended to remain chary of insurrectionary strategies and labor radicalism in the postwar years. Indeed, the most militant opposition often came from other left dissidents. In Cuba, where the Communist Party had initially collaborated with the U.S.-backed military regime of Fulgencio Batista, the leadership of a nascent revolutionary movement emerged from the populist Ortodoxo Party (Partido del Pueblo Ortodoxo), and it was inspired as much by the romantic ideal of the revolutionary atentat (a spectacular act of revolutionary violence that was meant to inspire mass insurrection) as by Leninist notions of party organization. The movement's victory in 1956 was a puzzle for many Latin American Marxists as much as for U.S. cold warriors, as was the subsequent radicalization of the Cuban revolutionary regime. In the face of U.S. economic blockade and a CIA-sponsored invasion attempt, the revolutionary government in Cuba proclaimed its Marxist-Leninist orientation and accepted the Soviet Union's political support, military protection, and economic backing. Despite the Soviet Union's increased leverage, however, the revolution's leadership continued to depart from Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy.

In the years following the revolution, the revolutionary comandante Ernesto "Ché" Guevara elaborated a new theory of revolution known as foquismo, in which the revolutionary foco, a small cell of guerrillas in the countryside, replaced the vanguard party. Ché's theory contained an implicit criticism of most Latin American communist parties, which had all but abandoned revolutionary violence. Latin American revolution was not simply a possibility, foco theory held, but also a moral imperative. Revolutionaries must create "subjective" conditions for revolution rather than awaiting the proper objective conditions. The rural peasantry, rather than the urban proletariat, was the seedbed of socialist revolution. Similarly, a socialist, anti-imperialist revolution was a prerequisite for national economic development, rather than the other way around. In Ché's view, the Cuban Revolution was a beachhead for a broader Latin American revolution; the Andes would become the Sierra Maestra of South America.

Ché is conventionally portrayed as a romantic counterpoint to the authoritarian turn of the Cuban Revolution and the Soviet Union. Indeed, in his final years Ché did publicly clash with the Soviet Union and—less publicly—with Fidel Castro, and foquista guerrillas elsewhere in Latin America often clashed with mainline communist parties. But Ché's insistence on the centrality of the revolutionary foco also helped underwrite the exclusion of other groups that had been instrumental in Batista's overthrow and a rigid intolerance of political heterodoxy. Inspired by Ché's writings and example, a generation of young revolutionaries sought to establish guerrilla focos throughout Latin America, often without any advance political work, local ties, or knowledge of the terrain. Almost all of these expeditions ended in ignominious defeat—most notoriously Ché's own expedition to Bolivia—and later rural guerrilla movements, including the foquista movements that had survived the repression of the late 1960s and 1970s, tended to abjure Guevara's insurrectionary strategy in favor of a "prolonged people's war" like those waged in Vietnam and China.

One of the most severe critiques of foquismo came from Abraham Guillén, a Spanish Civil War veteran living in Argentina and Uruguay. In his Estrategia de la guerrilla urbana (1966), Guillén echoed Ché's call for popular insurrection and Latin American liberation on a continental scale, but he also insisted that the movement would be led by urban proletariat rather than the rural peasantry. During the 1960s and 1970s, urban guerrilla movements emerged throughout Latin America, most famously the Argentine Montoneros and the Uruguayan Tupamaros. None of these movements were strictly Marxist in orientation, and they often drew their leadership from the left wing of national populist movements as well as communist dissidents. Indeed, like foquista guerrillas, they tended to clash with mainline communist parties, which often viewed voluntarist and insurrectionary strategies as little more than dangerous adventures. After Ché's death at the hands of CIA-backed counterinsurgency forces—and under pressure from the Soviet Union—the Cuban government, too, abandoned its earlier support of revolutionary focos and sought a rapprochement with other Latin-American governments.

The 1970s and After: New Heterodoxies

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.

See also Communism: Latin America ; Dictatorship in Latin America ; Marxism: Overview .

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Michael Werner