A reflection from Ojalá on the subversion of everyday life and the refusal to be goverened

Opinion • Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar and Dawn Marie Paley, March 1, 2023. Leer en castellano.

Communal, feminist and popular wisdom demonstrate the importance of giving meaning to what we do, and of organizing our lived experience as clearly as possible.

These are fast moving and contradictory times, and it feels like everything is in dispute. The world often presents itself to us broken, hostile and ambiguous. It’s useful to remember that the present has been woven through efforts of collective struggle that, in different places and moments, shape the space and time we inhabit.

We hope to continue this tradition, following three multicolored threads.

The first is the sometimes sweet and often bitter path of territorial disputes, by which diverse networks of men and women fight to sustain their material lives.

The second is the attention to collective skills and knowledge that are produced and expanded through daily activities of sustenance and struggle.

The third, which connects and ties the first two together, is the thread representing women, queer folks and gender dissidents who are in a pitched battle to subvert the terms of our current existence.

There is another way of understanding these times, of course. It is through a story told from above, which attributes social change to the audacity of great men and their cunning in management and government.

Their version erases and confuses efforts from below, and pushes us towards silence and oblivion. 

Our way of approaching the story of these times is different. We are, once again, here to contradict.

From antagonism to the polls

In the nineties, global north thinkers predicted the end of history, and technocrats exported rigid versions of liberal, procedural and disciplinary democracy. States privatized what had been public and assisted corporations in campaigns of dispossession. 

At the same time, in many countries of the continent’s south, political upheavals cropped up and charted a different course.

Since the Zapatista uprising almost 30 years ago, popular aspirations have manifested as uprisings and rebellions. Multiple paths of autonomous struggle and construction were invented and tested. Some of these creative forces endure today. Others have collided with worn but still effective mechanisms of containment. 

Great currents of combative energy flowed through various regions of the continent for several years, bringing about the emergence of a first wave of progressive governments in Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay and Ecuador. 

These governments presented themselves as repositories of the energy of regional and local struggles. Over time they were revealed to be refined national mechanisms of expropriation and disorganization of the same forces that opened the halls of power to them. 

But said governments too often acted with insufficiency and arrogance. They took ownership and management of processes of struggle that were not theirs to control. They rebranded subjugation to the extractivist and dispossessing logics of transnational capital.

War against the people

In countries where rebellions in the 1990s and early aughts did not succeed in altering government regimes, expanded counterinsurgency began to take root. This reactionary counteroffensive was carried out—and continues—under the guise of the so-called war on drugs and organized crime.

This phenomenon is well studied in Colombia and Mexico. But it also happened in countries where previous wars of national liberation did not achieve their goals and ended in bitter negotiations, such as El Salvador and Guatemala. Hondurans have suffered the same.

When there have been struggles, uprisings and rebellions in these regions, the people have been subjected to expanded counterinsurgency, which treats the population at large, its organizations and its creations as the enemy. This repressive approach has been applied together with the production of confusion and the difficulty of understanding who is carrying out massacres and disappearances. 

These territories have witnessed decades of systematic attacks on communal and popular ways of life, which are aimed at overcoming their potential resistance and undermining their capacities. Repressive practices that date back to conquest and colony have re-appeared. 

Expanded counterinsurgency has been the answer from above to the struggle deployed by thousands of people. In some countries, this strategy is explicit and generalized. In others, it is veiled and diffuse.

The traditional understanding of politics has ignored the terror that has been ingrained in cities and territories. Instead, it leans on discourses that criminalize communities, people in struggle and victims of violence. Other times, allusions are made to crossfire or mistaken identities, depoliticizing the appearance of clandestine graves and mass dispossessions.

Amidst this counterinsurgent strategy, while war is waged on the people, there is talk of macroeconomic stability and defense of sovereignty. Women have been the first to put their bodies on the line and raise their voices in opposition.

Women rising

In emblematic uprisings of the last decade, whether in Cherán, in México, in the Isiboro-Sécure (TIPNIS), in Bolivia, or elsewhere, women have been at the forefront of struggle. They’ve fought for the defense of life and of the commons expropriated by so-called organized crime or under threat by profitable and progressive development projects.

They named things differently and encouraged renewed acts of resistance.

Forcefully and almost simultaneously since 2016, women, trans and nonbinary people in Argentina, Uruguay in Chile began to take to the streets and squares.

Stagnant and sterile official feminism agendas proved insufficient in public spaces. Women’s struggles today repudiate the violence imposed on our bodies and rise up in defense of life, for the right to decide whether or not to raise children, and for the conditions to do so in dignity. These struggles demand and produce justice.

Times of frenetic and creative activity have opened up for many women, especially young women, who have given themselves permission to break the silence that chains bodies. Their energies, debates and testing of life-sustaining practices beyond nuclear families have upended the deep foundations of the exploitative and patriarchal social structure.

More recently, during the intense waves of mobilizations and uprisings in Chile (2019-2020), Ecuador (2019), and Colombia (2021), as well as in an ongoing struggle the Peruvian highlands, the strength of women, younger generations and of the weavings that sustain communal and popular lifeways is clearly visible.

In collective practices, there is a wisdom that engenders a politicization that doesn’t fit into the liberal framework of politics in the criollo republics, that is vaunted by old, white and male landowners.

These struggles are increasingly under threat. Even so, feminist, communal and popular organizing continues to open horizons and innovate new ways of resisting dispossession.

It is precisely at that point that we have set the needle of Ojalá’s compass.

Translated by María José López.