Romina Akemi & Javier Sethness-Castro
After authoring dozens of books on classical Greek and anarchist philosophy, Ángel Cappelletti dedicated his last monograph to a forgotten history of anarchism in the region. The publication of Anarchism in Latin America (El Anarquismo en America Latina) in 1990 coincided with important historical impasses such as the fall of the Soviet Union and the aggressive spread of neoliberalism. These events roused disillusionment about whether socialism was even still a viable option while, at the same time, frustration with austerity measures across the region catalyzed a revival of social movements after decades of military rule and civil wars. Cappelletti explains that his work is not intended to be “a comprehensive history of Latin American anarchism” but to fill a gap in labor and revolutionary literature dominated by Marxist historians who either glossed over or erased the contributions of anarchists. Cappelletti did not live long enough to see the revival of anarchism across the region, in which his work became an important fixture in the arsenal of ideas for a new generation seeking tenets to aid their struggles for liberation and the coming of socialist revolution.
Cappelletti’s research covers the development of anarchism in the Americas, marking its origins in the mid-nineteenth century with the arrival of European migrants who brought with them ideas about socialist utopianism. The beginning of his chapters emphasize the role of the anarchist press in disseminating their ideas. The printed press is an obvious go-to in terms of archival research. But, at least in his description of Argentina, there is a sense that the press, literature, and popular poets were a prime force in spreading revolutionary prefigurative dreams among the popular classes. A combination of cultural and political language influenced the broader working class culture to embrace and familiarize themselves with the meaning of solidarity, mutualism, and autogestión (or self-management), even if they were not militants or partisans faithful to those ideas. He spotlights the role of workers’ mutual aid societies in Venezuela and Mexico, some of which developed into prominent proto-syndicalist resistance societies, as well as numerous examples of anarchistic utopian experiments, such as the Cecilia colony (1890–1894), the Cosmos commune, and the potentially Tolstoyan Varpa community, all established in Brazil, to say nothing of the two utopian communities founded by Vasco de Quiroja in sixteenth-century Mexico, which strived to emulate Thomas More’s Utopia. Though Cappelletti acknowledges Robert Owen’s proposal (1828) to the Mexican government to establish a utopian-socialist colony in Texas, which remained merely abstract, he doesn’t mention the Spiritual Franciscans’s earlier attempts to construct Christian communism with Nahua people in Mexico.1 He does focus attention on Plotino Rhodakanaty, the Greek anarcho-physician and missionary who founded several revolutionary collectivist organizations in Mexico after migrating there in the mid-nineteenth century with an eye to propagating Charles Fourier and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s social prescriptions. In this way, the two strongest currents in Latin America soon became anarcho-syndicalism and anarchist-communism; while individualism developed into a regional anarchist tenet over time, it played a less significant role in comparison to Europe or the US. The relationship with Iberian anarchism remains particularly close up to this day, partly due to the colonial legacy, but mostly due to language that facilitated the easy exchange of ideas. This connection was most felt during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), when many Cuban anarchists joined the CNT-FAI in resisting fascism, but particularly in light of the thousands of refugees who arrived to the continent after their defeat by the combined forces of Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler.
Cappelletti correctly highlights the role of European migrants as central in bringing revolutionary traditions to the continent but misses the opportunity to connect anarchism with the region’s prior revolutionary traditions. Latin America’s regional characteristics, especially between 1860 and 1920, were more rooted in transculturation.2 In other words, Latin American anarchism, with all its regional variants, was the product of a confluence of local and exogenous ideas, practices, and realities, the combination of economic and political pressures produced by the regional nation-states and imperialist forces and the modalities of struggle from below to resist hegemonic power.
Why is Cappelletti’s Book Relevant for Anarchists in the United States?
National histories and languages influence how we think about political legacies and with whom we communicate. Residents of the US are bound to the Americas in terms of geography and migration, and due to the legacy of imperialism that rests heavily on its economic and military expansion over the region. US leftists tend to be influenced by European traditions thanks to the availability of English-language books and online resources, and the influence of a Western-centric education. However, with an ever-growing Latinx population, already a majority ethnic population in many US states, there is a growing group of bilingual speakers who also have regular communication with organizations south of the Río Grande. This heightens the need for US revolutionaries to become fluent in Spanish, and for the production and publication of more pamphlets and books either in Spanish or in bilingual form.
The power and violence relating to national borders and citizenship increases day by day. While heads-of-state expound nationalism and xenophobia in Latin America, the popular classes are bound together by colonial legacy and imperialist domination. It is not uncommon for a US citizen traveling in Latin America to refer to themselves as “American” and to be quickly corrected by a local that we, across the continent, are all Americans—yet only one country declares ownership. The reason for emphasizing this is to highlight two things: the need to challenge US exceptionalism in Left politics, and the reality that anarchist-communist revolution cannot succeed if only realized in one country.
The publishing of Cappelletti’s monograph by AK Press feeds a growing hunger by Latinx anarchists who want to read more about their history, and for gringo anarchists to become further acquainted with a history to which they are historically bound. This connection ranges from the role of US Wobbly seafarers in forming the IWW in Chile in the early 1920s to the case of Magón and the revolutionary-anarchist Mexican Liberal Party (PLM), based importantly in Los Angeles, California.3 The book is also a useful encyclopedic list of organizations and individuals to reference. It details some interesting political debates and challenges in organization-building. Too many books published about Latin America are geared toward a US audience, often emphasizing the continent’s exotic revolutionary character, focusing less on political theory and analysis. For example, the many books and articles published in the 1990s—and, in fact, still being published4—highlighting the image and word of Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, thus downplaying the organizational form of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). This was Marcos’s precise point in announcing his “death” and subsequent resurrection as Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano, named after an EZLN support-base comrade who was murdered in a paramilitary attack on the La Realidad caracol in 2014: the media’s emphasis on spectacle ensured that the focus would be on Marcos’s style and appearance, based on his hegemonic and familiar European features, thus marginalizing the EZLN’s base and the rest of its leadership, which is comprised of Tsotsil, Tseltal, Ch’ol, Zoque, Tojolabal, and Mam peoples.5 Since this announcement, the indigenous Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés has taken over the role of EZLN spokesperson.
Thus, while US-based anarchists have more familiarity with the European historical tradition, Latin America is where we can learn more about cross-race solidarity and organizing in both its positive implementation and its disastrous effects due to racism and patriarchy. This includes indigenous autogestión, quilombo politics, and a regional common identity threatening the strength of national boundaries. Cappelletti does at times underscore the importance of certain figures such as Malatesta in Argentina or Fourier, Proudhon, and Mikhail Bakunin in Mexico, but their influence and ideas, while important guiding voices, were part of something larger than themselves during this time period. Also, rather than continually exoticizing Latin American figures, ranging from Clotario Blest to Flores Magón, without knowing their political opinions, we need to see these individuals too as participants in broader political movements.
Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua: National Liberation, Anti-Militarism, Social Revolution
The extensive regional historical entries that Cappelletti shares in this volume contain multitudes of lessons, which resonate through time. Past anarchist efforts in Latin America continue to inform ongoing struggles on the continent, holding great promise for the prospect of global emancipation from capitalism, militarism, and authority. Given the historical weight of colonialism and neo-colonialism hanging over the continent, anarchism in Latin America has intersected critically with national-liberation and anti-militarist movements to present a social-revolutionary challenge to the oppression upheld by imperialists in conjunction with local elites. This dynamic brings to mind the luminous observation made by the Nicaraguan radical Augusto Sandino, that “only the workers and peasants will go all the way, only their organized force will attain victory” for the social revolution.6 As anarchists, we are critical of the nation-state as either a stage or end goal for social liberation, but we nevertheless embrace the spirit of autonomous organizing against colonial oppression and the intersection of such proletarian-peasant unity with struggles for libertarian communism. With that in mind, we’d like to highlight important lessons for anarchists from the revolutionary national-liberation movements in Cuba, Mexico, and Nicaragua during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, struggles that persist to this day.
Alongside Puerto Rico, Cuba was the last of the Spanish colonies in Latin America to gain formal independence, in 1902, four years after the end of the Spanish-American War, which saw the former colonial power replaced by US military occupation. Cappelletti stresses that Cuban anarchists participated enthusiastically in the national-liberation movement, anticipating a future liberated from the “colonial authoritarian spirit and bureaucratic structure[s].” In this way, they echoed Bakunin and Alexander Herzen’s agitation in favor of Polish emancipation from tsarist domination, and Rhodakanaty’s participation in the 1848 Hungarian war of independence. In their struggle, the Cuban anarchists directly confronted racism in labor, opposed the neo-colonial stipulations of the Platt Amendment (1901), and organized numerous strikes among sugarcane workers and other proletarian sectors against the post-colonial State. Through the efforts of individuals such as Alfredo López and groups like the General Union of Industrial Fabric Workers and the Workers’s Federation of La Havana (FOH), together with a vibrant libertarian press, anarcho-syndicalism became the predominant ideology among the Cuban working class. While Cuban anarchists continued to organize workers and the oppressed after independence from Spain and the US, conflict with the Communists undermined their effectiveness. The Communist’s emphasis on the construction of parties led them, during the dictatorships of Gerardo Machado (1933) and Fulgencio Batista (1935), respectively, to actively disrupt strikes organized by anarcho-syndicalists. Such undermining of anarchist efforts, presaging the generalized repression after the 1959 Revolution, would prepare the way for its Stalinization, a development that echoed the fate of the Russian Revolution four decades prior. Indeed, throughout Latin America, the fate of the Russian Revolution considerably accentuated the differences between anarchists and authoritarian socialists, divergences that have resonated in the distinct tactics and strategies taken up by radicals on the continent since.
Shifting southwest, the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) should be considered a national-liberation struggle of sorts, in light of the vast foreign control of land and resources that underpinned the Porfiriato, or Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship (1876–1911), perpetuating the titanic social discontent that would explode during the upheaval. Indeed, collectivist anarchism and anarcho-communism had melded with indigenous autonomy in Mexico to propel the specter of a libertarian-emancipatory revolution, summarized by the slogan “¡Tierra y Libertad!” (“Land and Freedom!”) This very slogan, in fact, was developed by Herzen and Bakunin through their collaboration with the Polish opposition, taken up and propagated by Ricardo Flores Magón and the Liberal Mexican Party (PLM) in their renowned newspaper Regeneración, and ultimately emblazoned in the program and banners of the Zapatista Ejército Libertador del Sur during the Revolution.7 Whereas the PLMistas organized via networks of Clubes Liberales on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border and championed strikes and insurrections as the means to restore popular control over the fields, factories, and workshops, the revolutionary potential of the PLM’s vision was inhibited by the targeted imprisonment and martyrdom of its leading figures, including Magón and Praxedis Guerrero.8
In contrast La Casa del Obrero Mundial (The House of the Global Worker), a syndicalist union founded in 1912 by some ex-comrades of Magón’s in Mexico City, represented a more “successful” anarchist movement at the time. As La Casa faced immediate repression at the hands of the Huerta dictatorship that overthrew Madero in 1913, its membership anticipated Huerta’s defeat by the combined forces of Zapata, Pancho Villa, and the Constitutionalists. Yet geographical and cultural differences between the more rationalist anarchist workers and the indigenous-campesinx Zapatistas led the former to find affinity with the Constitutionalists. In fact, in 1915 La Casa made a fatal deal to support the latter’s counter-insurgent efforts by supplying troops for the Batallones Rojos that were used specifically against Zapata and Villa’s armies. In exchange, La Casa was allowed to organize labor freely, resulting in the establishment of numerous sections throughout the country. La Casa sealed the fate of the Revolution with this move, serving to disrupt the potentially emancipatory unity of proletariat and peasantry, as recognized by the PLM and Sandino alike, thus greatly facilitating the nationalist integration of labor into the post-revolutionary State.9 Nonetheless, perhaps preserving a future hope for a profound social revolution uniting proletariat and peasantry, Cappelletti auspiciously clarifies that his research on the Batallones Rojos suggests that La Casa’s rank-and-file membership disagreed with the leadership over this fateful decision.
Unfortunately, the 1979 Sandinista Revolution to depose General Somoza was similarly constrained by the insurgents’ opting to seize state power rather than seeking its abolition. All this despite the fact that the FSLN (Sandinista Front for National Liberation) was named for the anarcho-syndicalist guerrilla Sandino, whose peasant army expelled the US Marines in 1933. Since that time, the nominally left-wing FSLN has struck deals with the far-right to prohibit abortion, advance free-trade agreements, and effectively become a brand that represents the interests of a small elite of families content with managing the “hacienda feudalism” that the revolution had sought to abolish.10 Self-evidently, Sandino’s emphasis on cooperative labor and his followers’ historical anti-dictatorial orientation retain all their relevance today.
Taking a global view, we see that Cuba’s national-liberation struggle shares some similarities with those of South Asia and Algeria, considering the militant and, sometimes, anarchist network known as the Ghadar movement that was central to the resistance against the British Raj, giving rise to India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and the widespread autogestion that arose in the fields and factories abandoned by French settlers in Algeria following its victory in the independence war. Whereas formal independence ultimately yielded despotic, centralized post-colonial power elites in Cuba and Algeria—Castro and the Communist Party and the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), respectively—as well as repression of the Kabyle minority and a brutal civil war between Islamists and the Algerian State, India since independence has vacillated between domination by neo-liberal parliamentarism and neo-fascist communalism, both of which perpetuate vast human suffering.11
Visibilizing Gender Relations
While Cappelletti’s book is groundbreaking, it nevertheless overlooks the contributions by women in the development of Latin American anarchism. He does mention some anarchist-feminists by name, including the Argentine Virginia Bolten who was editor of the Rosario-based La Voz de la Mujer—the only anarchist-communist newspaper dedicated to women’s emancipation at the turn of the last century.12 However, there are major omissions, such as Luisa Capetillo, a central figure in the Puerto Rican labor movement, and Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza, an anarchist journalist who joined Madero temporarily after Magón had her expelled from the PLM for being a lesbian, only to unite with the Zapatistas, co-author the Plan de Ayala, and serve as comandanta in the Ejército Libertador.13 Yet, beyond individual female mentions, the overall analysis fails to weave in how these women contributed, the issues they emphasized, the challenges they faced, and how patriarchy affected solidarity and movement building. These issues and experiences cannot be separated from the history of anarchism.
Beyond the purview of this book, we would like to use this opportunity to urge readers and future researchers to devote themselves to developing the history of anarchist-feminism and gender relations within the movement. In the period that this book covers, female anarchists were part of a larger current of revolutionary and militant women who defined themselves against the First Wave of middle-class and elite feminism that fought for suffrage. These women did not want political equality under capitalism, they sought revolution; they did not center their activism on charity and social uplift, but instead on autonomy and autogestión. Some of the best theoretical and organizational contributions by anarchist women during this time were critiques about the family, support for free love, and the creation of mutualism and labor unions by and for women. In reviewing many writings in which these women are mentioned or were written about, we see two elements emerging: First, that many of these revolutionary-minded women across the globe were in communication with each other; second, they tended to suppress their gendered hardships for the good of the movement.14 In the case of Virginia Bolten, she was in direct correspondence with Emma Goldman and Louise Michel.15 The Chilean anarchist Flora Sanhueza owed a great deal of her political development to when she travelled to Spain in 1935 to subsume herself in the libertarian struggle.16 There is also the story of the Argentine anarchist Mika Feldman de Etchebéhère, who was active in Mujeres Libres and a captain in a POUM squadron.17 Even though there are many books that discuss the impact of the Spanish Civil War in Latin America, there are no studies on whether Mujeres Libres influenced the anarchist movement on the continent.18 In the article “Breaking the Waves: Challenging the Liberal Tendency in Anarchist-Feminism,” Bree Busk and Romina Akemi explain the difficulty in defining anarchist-feminism due to the lack of a historical narrative that describes its contributions within the movement rather than placing individuals on pedestals.19 There are also examples in Latin American anarchism of innate challenges to gender politics and patriarchy, in which the most striking cases emerged during the Mexican Revolution; a moment at which social order and gender expectations were in question. This ranged from the role by the soldaderas, also known as Adelitas, who challenged the masculine assumption of soldiering that was tied to citizenship, and individuals such as the Zapatista Amelio Robles who, assigned female at birth, emerged a colonel and recognized veteran for his role in the revolution.20 These histories are often treated as side stories, and we still struggle today to discuss them as examples that molded, guided, and influenced the politics of anarchism.
In the 60s and 70s, Latin America experienced continental revolutionary upheaval inspired by the 1959 Cuban Revolution and in reaction to growing economic crises. The second wave feminist movement that swept through Western countries had little resonance in the Global South, which was embroiled in national liberation movements and US sponsored military dictatorships. Women and queer militants in these revolutionary movements had minimal space to engage or discuss their political struggles and incorporate them into their organizational programs and praxis. In countries that fell under dictatorial rule, many social gains, especially those made by the working class, as well as indigenous and women’s rights, were severely rolled back. According to the Chilean feminist Julieta Kirkwood, the military dictatorship was the embodiment of patriarchy.21 In the case of Chile, feminism grew from a social movement in the 1980s resisting Pinochet’s dictatorship. Feminists used their position as women—perceived as the weaker and fragile sex—to create political space. Such scenes were repeated across the continent, especially by the mothers of the disappeared from Guatemala to Argentina who became symbols of political and feminist resistance. By the 1990s with the return of liberal democracies and the growing influence of anarchism, women began to openly discuss the pressures and labors of double-duty militancy—as members of their political or social organizations and, in addition, their feminist work. Issues that were once deemed “private matters” or “between couples” began to be discussed more openly. And by the mid-2000s a feminist movement was brewing that drew from women’s past political experiences yet was informed by the present, embracing demands for the legalization of abortion and the end of femicide. Now it was up to their political and social organizations taking up the banner of feminism and sexual dissidence and supporting their demands as part of a prefigurative program. When a group of female members of the Chilean Federación de Estudiantes Libertarios (FEL), or the Libertarian Student Federation, decided in 2012 to organize an informal meeting to discuss patriarchal behavior within the student movement, rather than receiving support from their comrades, they were bullied and mocked. Such hostility motivated several of these women, along with male accomplices, to form La Alzada-Acción Feminista Libertario in 2013.22 This example marks a historical shift within anarchism and feminism, when for most of the twentieth century, the formation of separate anarchist spaces by and for women was openly criticized. Instead of accusing anarchist feminists, queers, and sexual dissidents of dividing the movement, we should use the opportunity to challenge our own presumptions. As Latin American revolutionary feminists exclaim: “la revolución será feminista, ¡o no será! (“the revolution will be feminist or it will not be!”).
Is Anarchism an Ideology that Transcends the European Experience?
The question of whether radical ideologies such as Marxism and anarchism are European or white impositions that have no place in anti-colonial struggles or resistance among people of color is raised more in the US than in Latin America—but nonetheless, it warrants engagement. Initially, we can say that anarchism shares little of Marx and Engels’s enthusiasm for British colonialism in India or US victory in the Mexican-American War of 1848, respectively, regardless of the degree to which the former rethought his stance later in life after studying anthropology and history more closely.23 Though Bakunin doubtless was, like Proudhon, a vile anti-Semite, he consistently supported national-liberation struggles and stressed the importance of coordinated global revolution against all empires and despots: “But states do not topple of their own accord; they can only be toppled by a multi-national, multi-racial, world-wide social revolution.”24 Additionally, his critique of Marx’s deterministic stages theory of history can be considered anti-racist in that it rejects the illogic that demands the full development of imperialism and capitalism—whether in India, Mexico, or elsewhere—as a precondition for the flowering of communism.
Yet in parallel to the anti-Semitic associations he would make between Jews and political centralism, Bakunin subscribed to some rather questionable racialism, particularly in Statism and Anarchy from 1873, where he expounds his views on the German nation and Pan-Germanism, both of which he considered great centralizing threats, no doubt due at least in part to Marx’s expulsion of himself and his comrade James Guillaume from the First International. In this text, the anarcho-collectivist further expresses Sinophobia, worrying that China is “a threat by virtue of [its] numbers alone.” Bakunin’s caricatures about Germans being “intrinsically bourgeois and thereby statist” are hence nearly as absurd as Engels’s celebration of California having been taken by the white-settler State from the “lazy Mexicans [sic].”25 Nevertheless, Bakunin’s alarm over the “danger” supposedly “threatening us from the East” likely springs from a similar source as does Marx and Engels’s chauvinism.26 Still, whether ironically or not, both Marxism and anarchism have inspired revolt and revolution in Latin America and much of the rest of the Global South. Cappelletti clarifies, however, that among radical Cuban workers of the late nineteenth century, “[n]o one speaks about Marx or Engels,” whereas Bakunin, Malatesta, Peter Kropotkin, Élisée Reclus, and Anselmo Lorenzo were “read and interpreted on a daily basis.”27
Cappelletti premises his presentation by underlining the role of Spanish and Italian migrants in spreading socialist utopianism and anarchism in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Anarchism has had a mass appeal in Latin America due to its ability to transcend and connect with material demands for autonomy and better living conditions, including those sought by indigenous peoples. More in passing, Cappelletti offers some examples in which indigenous communities viewed anarchism as either a useful tool for struggle or an ideology that complemented their own struggle for land and autonomy. For example, in his chapter on Peru he notes the attempt to organize the Federación Regional de Obreros Indios (Regional Federation of Indian Workers) in 1923. In Bolivia, he highlights the role of a ch’ixi mechanic, Luis Cusicanqui, in keeping anarcho-syndicalism alive at a moment when Marxism was gaining ground among the working classes.28 In Brazil, the author identifies the quilombos established by former slaves as “indigenous precedents to the anarchist movement,” and in Mexico, Cappelletti points out the commonalities between anarchism and Zapatismo, though he underplays the specifically indigenous dimension of the latter movement, portraying it as primarily rural and campesino.
There are at least three issues with Cappelletti’s analysis that should be mentioned here. First, he begins his historical arch with Spanish, Italian, and Greek proselytizers of the faith as active subjects while indigenous and mestizo people are described as the objects who consume the faith. In various chapters, Cappelletti insists that anarchism was introduced throughout the region only through contact with Euro-American workers and migrants. For example, in the Brazil section, the author simply mentions how a Frenchman named P. Berthelot “made contact with some indigenous tribes and attempted to promote libertarian organization among them” in the early twentieth century. There is no explicit recognition of the neo-colonial dimensions of these or related relationships, including Owen’s proposal to establish socialist colonies in Texas or Giovanni Rossi’s acceptance of Emperor Pedro’s granting of land to the Cecilia colony. Second, the author mentions the Aztec calpulli and the Andean ayllu systems as being important foundations for political commonality, but does not clarify why those pre-Columbian governing systems complemented socialist utopianism. We presume that this is due to a shared emphasis on the importance of the commons, as is reflected in the overlap between Zapatismo and the PLM’s anarchism. Third, Cappelletti presents an over-idealization of the Aztec and Inka empires that does not take into account the oppressive role those empires played in colonizing and enslaving surrounding indigenous communities, though at times he does point out how the anarcho-agrarian revolts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries echoed ancestral indigenous organizing practices against European and native imperialism alike. Although his points about endogenous and exogenous connections that defined Latin American anarchism were not fully developed in understanding indigenous and African influences, he nevertheless touches on a few historical threads and ideas about their confluence that need to be examined more closely by future researchers.
Many historians have glossed over indigenous identities, emphasizing their class relationships instead and encompassing them in the larger category of peasant or urban worker, ignoring the reasons why indigenous communities supported land reform and where those reasons contrasted those of mestizo or criollo peasants. Identifying those disparate reasons does not minimize the material conditions that brought them together; this form of alliance building needs to be replicated more and not less. The Peruvian anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena explains how the Quechua paqo leader, Mariano Turpo, described this legacy: “From him I learned that indigenous utilization of class rhetoric was a political option that did not represent the loss of indigenous culture, but was rather a strategy toward its empowerment.”29 She learned that at times indigenous communities minimized their ethnic identity in their political slogans to create alliances or have broader appeal that could be read by some as de-indianization. Other times their cultural or ethnic identities were emphasized to gain ground or make certain claims to the state. Such intentionality to the outside viewer has often been misinterpreted as a progressive loss of identity or a Foucaultian submission to the state and its economic system, rather than calculated decisions. What appears as a growth of indigenous identities in Latin America beginning in the 1990s is actually the consequence of greater visibility by which these communities have been able to assert themselves in the public arena and make political demands to reclaim stolen resources and land, as well as combat against imposed political and economic systems from European to nation-state colonialism. Wingka anarchists—to use the Mapuzungun term—rooted by their experiences with national-liberation, have learned the need to support indigenous demands and become accomplices in their struggles.30 Liberation from capitalist oppression and imperialism will require alliances, trust-building, and respect for autonomy in many spheres.
Autonomy and Ecology in Latin America
The environmentalist and ecological movements in Latin America have produced their own martyrs, including Chico Mendes and Berta Cáceres, Mariano Abarca, and Bernardo Vásquez Sánchez—anti-mining organizers from Chiapas and Oaxaca, respectively—along with countless others. Indeed, ecologists and land defenders have been singled out for repression at the hands of the state and private interests in Latin America, with hundreds of organizers killed annually in the past few years.31 The severity of such suppression reflects the fears of the ruling classes regarding the potential for autonomous indigenous, communalist, and anarchist movements engaging in radical ecological praxis: recovering and communizing the land, expropriating the expropriators, employing agroecology, abolishing or at least minimizing alienated labor, completely redistributing wealth and resources, redesigning the cities for collective living and sustainability, reducing pollution and productivism, halting economic growth, delineating biosphere reserves, and equilibrating the overall relationship between humanity and nature.
Against such ends stand foreign and domestic capital and the state. Canadian capital, for example, owns between 50–70% of all mines in Latin America, and for this reason is responsible for vast environmental destruction and widespread human-rights abuses.32 In many cases, Latin American states facilitate these extractive ventures, or themselves greatly accelerate domestic extractivist projects. We see this in the “Pink Tide” countries of Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, and Uruguay that are pursuing a “Twenty-First Century Socialism” that closely mimics neoliberalism.33 Such productivism in turn belies these states’ claims to be environmental champions: while Brazil commits itself to the goal of “zero illegal deforestation” by 2030, researchers project that the majority of Amazonian tree species will be extinct by mid-century at current rates of clearance.34 The Brazilian Labor Party has also encouraged the construction of hundreds of dams in the Amazon, with the most notorious being the Belo Monte mega-dam on the Xingu River, a project that would flood vast expanses of the rainforest, forcibly displace tens of thousands, threaten the survival of indigenous peoples, and affect peasants both in Brazil and regionally.35 The stipulation that nature or Pacha Mama has a right to be “comprehensively respected,” as enshrined in the Ecuadorean Constitution since 2008, has not stopped petroleum extraction from the highly biodiverse Yasuní National Park.36 For its part, the resistance of the US government to decriminalizing or legalizing drugs effectively perpetuates the power of the cartels, whose paramilitary-capitalist operations involve considerable environmental damage. Direct military support from the US for Mexican and Colombian counter-insurgency operations and its coordination of trade and investment throughout the hemisphere help maintain profits at the expense of the environment and society.37
Let us briefly consider revolutionary indigenous movements in Colombia and Mexico that represent dialectical inversions of the dominant, globally ecocidal, and thanotic trends. First, in southwestern Colombia, the Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca (Regional Indigenous Council of the Cauca, or CRIC), is a collective organization of 120 indigenous council governments comprised of Coconuco, Nasa, Misak, Totoró, Ambalueño, Quizgüeño, Heperara, and Inga peoples. Founded in 1971, the CRIC is engaged in the recuperation of the commons, the expropriation of privately-owned lands, the furtherance of cooperatives, the maintenance and expansion of indigenous government, resistance to megamines, organizing in favor of political prisoners, and advocating a popular and reconstructive resolution to the country’s civil war. Similar to the repression faced by the EZLN, the seizure of lands by CRIC communards for purposes of communal subsistence often meets with direct military and paramilitary repression, particularly during days of collective labor.38 Paramilitary violence against organized indigenous-campesinx communities in Cauca seeks to clear the way for capitalist development, such that only the “the dedicated and sincere organization, actions in solidarity, and struggle of all the oppressed social classes and sectors” can do away with “the unhappy world of mineral and agro-industrial exploitation of the land and labor.”39
In several states of southern Mexico, communal self-defense groups and autogestive processes have arisen in recent years to resist caciques (local bosses), the state, foreign extractive industries, and narco-traffickers alike. In Guerrero, the Regional Coordinator of Communal Authorities-Communal Police (CRAC-PC) has been defending indigenous communities from these forces for two decades, while in April 2011, women from the P’ur’hépecha community of Cherán K’eri, Michoacán, rose up to overthrow the hegemonic drug cartels engaged in mass-deforestation, establishing an emancipatory Commune in the process.40 In 2013, autodefensas surged elsewhere in Michoacán to resist societal domination by the Knights Templar cartel, leading President Peña Nieto to send the Army in to quell and disarm the revolt. Though these autodefensa brigades, some of whom explicitly organized in the model of popular security, achieved a great deal in a short period of time, many of them ultimately integrated into the state or the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, rivals to the Knights Templar.41 In contrast, in Ayutla de los Libres, Guerrero, home of several of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa who were forcibly disappeared in Iguala in September, 2014, the majority of neighborhoods and communities opted for autogestión via popular assemblies during a vote in June 2017, thus exercising their right to associate according to indigenous “uses and customs,” rejecting electoralism.42 This right, recognized by the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169, is hardly binding on states, being part of international law. Current events and the history of Latin America clearly reveal a systematic disregard from above for indigenous autonomy, human rights, collective liberation, and environmental balance. Within such a context, amidst the utter failure of capital and authority to address such radical demands, these hegemonic forces must be swept away so that the rest of us can get on with reorganizing society. Today, a hundred years since the Russian Revolution, the time is ripe for another global rebellion against capital and the state: another Mexican Revolution, a worldwide neo-Zapatista uprising.
The Re-Emergence of Anarchism as a Viable Current
This book follows on the heels of other books by AK Press concerned with the region, including the English translated editions of Horizontalism (edited by Marina Sitrin), Osvaldo Bayer’s classic Rebellion in Patagonia, and Juan Suriano’s Paradoxes of Utopia, among other publications. However, anarchist history and theory produced in Latin America, past and present, is extremely vast and difficult to detail. It should be noted that Cappelletti’s book marks the beginning of a reengagement with libertarianism after decades of its being overshadowed by Marxism. The 90s anarchist revival was more than a social movement phenomenon, as more people sought to revisit their anarchist predecessors once deemed “ultra-leftists” or proto-communists, engendering new research by academics and worker-intellectuals alike.43
The worldwide rebirth of anarchism in the 90s was spurred on by the failures by authoritarian socialism, exemplified in the fall of the Soviet Union, the aggressive spread of neoliberal policies disguised as globalization, and the breaking down of class identities that asserted individual identities and activism, as well as support for specific causes. There is a tendency to assume that these patterns manifested in the same way across the world as in the US. However, the overly-individualistic modality seen in US anarchist circles is not universal across the Americas, where anarchism remains a political ideology and not an individual identity or lifestyle. This is not to say that squats and communal living did not spread across the continent—they did, especially in the early 2000s. Living together did not create de-facto prefigurative politics, but fighting together to demand housing and land rights was foundational. As Sitrin covers in Horizontalism, the deep economic crisis experienced in Argentina in the 90s impulsed many to organize and create new forms of social movement organizations that were rooted in autogestión, becoming the living embodiment of popular power.
Cappelletti’s book ends around the middle of the twentieth century. For those unfamiliar with anarchist and autonomist organizing since then, we will offer some highlights. In his chapter on Uruguay, he notes the formation of the Federación Anarquista Uruguaya (FAU), founded in 1956. The FAU, after surviving state terrorism and dictatorship, proved influential in the development of organized anarchism across the southern region. FAU was founded by mostly Spanish anarchist refugees fleeing General Franco’s fascist forces who realized the need for a specific anarchist organization that they termed especifismo. Their social insertion work has centered on constructing autogestión neighborhood centers and social insertion work in industrial unions constructing an independent militant class politic. For young libertarians seeking guidance on how to build an organized presence within their class, a pilgrimage to the FAU headquarters in Montevideo was imperative in the 90s and 00s. The FAU’s steady work with young anarchists in the neighboring Brazilian province of Rio Grande do Sul led to the eventual formation of the Federação Anarquista Gaúcha (FAG) in 1996. The FAG militants eventually influenced the formation of especifista groupings in Brazil, including the Federação Anarquista do Rio do Janeiro (FARJ). During the FARJ’s 2008 congress, the document “Social Anarchism and Organization” emerged from their discussions about strategy, rooted in their current organizational and social movement experiences. They eventually joined efforts made by the Forum of Organized Anarchism (FAO) that evolved into the larger federative network—Coordenação Anarquista Brasileira (CAB)—that includes locals from 11 cities. In the realm of anarchist stratagem to organize for revolution, the FAU’s main contributions were especifismo, while the FARJ, in discussion with other libertarian militants in Brazil, gave social insertion greater emphasis as a method of struggle to insert ourselves into the organizations and movements that are the best expressions of resistance by our class. Social insertion is both a commitment to those spaces to flourish into healthy organizations and, at the same time, a means to assert our core ideological principles as we fight for the hearts and minds of the working class.
The other region with an important organized libertarian network is Chile. The presence of anarchism within the labor movement from the 1950s to the 1990s is owed to syndicalists such as Clotario Blest, Celso Poblete, Ernesto Miranda, José Ego-Aguirre, and Hugo Cárter. Ego-Aguirre and Cárter, older anarcho-syndicalists, influenced a group of young people in the 1980s that led to the foundation of the Hombre y Sociedad (Man and Society) newspaper that ran from 1985 until 1988, with financial support from anarchists exiled in Europe, including Nestor Vega and Urbano Burgos.44 From then on, other small publications emerged across the country, including El Ácrata and Acción Directa. The multi-generational formation associated with Hombre y Sociedad became an important confluence of experience and new ideas.
According to the Chilean anarchist José Antonio Gutiérrez Danton, the 1990s can be described as “a virtual ‘boom’ of anarchist ideas and practices” and a “rediscovery” of anarchism as a historical current in Chile. In 1998 the publication of George Fontenis’s El Manifiesto Comunista Libertario sparked polemics among libertarian circles and helped consolidate those interested in forming an anarchist-communist organization, motivating a sector that were mostly punk rock anarchists to become serious political actors. The Congreso de Unificación Anarco Comunista (CUAC), founded in November 1999, was an important milestone for a new generation of libertarian revolutionaries attempting to expand their political work into various social sectors—bolstered by their unity around a set of agreed-upon principles, in a single organization. CUAC was formed in the construction workers union hall, FETRACOMA, which also functioned as their headquarters. This proximity helped develop deeper bonds and integration with the labor movement. CUAC owes a greater deal of its political development to the Chilean Marxist organizations such as the Movimiento Izquierda Revolucionario (MIR) and the Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez (FPMR). CUAC played a key role in initiating discussions about the need for organized presence within the burgeoning student movement that led to the formation of the Frente de Estudiantes Libertarios (FEL) in May 2003.45 The CUAC split in 2003, leading to the formation of two currents: the Organización Comunista Libertaria (Communist Libertarian Organization—OCL) and the Corriente Revolucionaria Anarquista (Anarchist Revolutionary Current—CRA), while the FEL remained aligned with the OCL. The eventual explosion of a militant high school student movement in 2006, calling for free education, evolved into a well-strategized (yet very top-down) university student movement. The movement climaxed in 2011, and has assured anarchism’s ideological viability in Chile today.
Another important turning point in organized anarchism in Chile occurred in 2013. A sector within OCL and FEL called Red Libertaria (Libertarian Network—RL) who “firmly and enthusiastically joined the ‘Todos a la Moneda’ (Everyone to La Moneda) platform, whose candidate was Marcel Claude.”46 In an article penned by Gutiérrez Danton and Rafael Agacino, they underscore, “But it was not only the decision itself to participate in an election that produced this seismic reaction within the Chilean libertarian movement; it was the manner in which the decision was made,” especially the secrecy by a sector within OCL and FEL that left many of their comrades dumbfounded and feeling betrayed. Those who questioned the creation of RL and a move toward electoralism were expelled, sparking resignations. The expelled grouping, along with other collectives and individuals not associated with OCL, organized the Communist Libertarian Congress over the course of two years that led to the founding of Solidaridad-Federación Comunista Libertaria (Solidarity—Communist Libertarian Federation) in January 2016.
This organizational split placed the FEL in a difficult position when anarchists gained the presidency of the Chilean University Student Federation (FECH) with their candidate Melissa Sepúlveda, a feat not accomplished since the 1920s. A decision was made to postpone the FEL split until the end of Sepúlveda’s term. Sepúlveda, who ran on an explicit feminist and anarchist platform, was a political departure from Camila Vallejo, a Communist Party member and FECH president in 2011 who received international attention. Sepúlveda publically supported student-worker alliances and autonomous organizing amongst the working class. At the end of her term in April 2015, Sepúlveda, along with other FEL dissidents who opposed the electoralism move, founded Acción Libertaria (Libertarian Action—AL).
While authoritarian dictatorships claimed the lives of thousands in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, Mexico’s “Dirty War” of the 60s and 70s saw the full repressive power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) directed against leftists, youth, organizers, and the landless peasantry in the wake of the Tlatelolco massacre of October 2, 1968. The State murdered hundreds of students in Mexico City that day, and the PRI forcibly disappeared and extrajudicially executed thousands more as part of its counter-insurgency strategy to suppress the generalized societal outrage provoked by the same.47 The EZLN itself was founded in 1983 as a union between landless indigenous Chiapanecxs and urban-based mestizo and European-descended militants from the Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional (FLN), which had been created in 196948—much as the ten-year Colombian civil war known as La Violencia, which claimed thousands of lives catalyzed the founding in 1964 of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and the ELN (National Liberation Army).49 The neo-Zapatista insurrection on January 1, 1994, proclaimed a radical halt to the ceaseless ethnocide targeting indigenous peoples since the Spanish conquest. The rapid response of domestic and international civil society to the uprising limited the intensity of direct repression by the Mexican Army, resulting paradoxically in the PRI’s resorting instead to employing paramilitary terror against Zapatista support-bases and Zapatista-sympathizing communities in Chiapas—a strategy that continues to this day. Following the inevitable breakdown of negotiations with a racist state failing to observe the San Andrés Accords (1996), the EZLN focused intensely on furthering communal autonomy by strengthening the participatory alternate institutions that comprise the movement. These insitutions, including cooperatives, autonomous education, the public health sector, and popular assemblies, exist alongside the military structures. This project of autonomy advanced importantly in 2003 with the announcement of the Good-Government Councils (JBG’s), comprised of delegates, sometimes as young as adolescents, who rotate in the administration of the five regions of Chiapas where the EZLN has a presence.
Hence, while it is true that the EZLN’s initial uprising sought to inspire a regional or country-wide revolution to take over the state—with the Zapatistas hoping to march on Mexico City and liberate it once again—the neo-Zapatista movement has distinguished itself from other Latin American guerrilla struggles by the anti-electoralism and anti-statism that has defined the development of its autonomy. A decade ago, the EZLN launched La Otra Campaña as an effort to unite a nation-wide anti-authoritarian left alternative to political parties and the state amidst the ongoing battle for power between the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the social-democrat candidate, in the 2006 elections. In parallel, la Sexta Declaración de la Selva Lacandona (Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle [2005]) proudly declared the movement’s autonomy in search of a new constitution that would meet its original thirteen demands.50
Yet now, after having championed autonomous social organization as a viable alternative for over a decade, the EZLN joins its comrade-representatives from the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) in endorsing the proposal for an Indigenous Government Council (CIG) and in presenting the Nahua traditional healer María de Jesús “Marichuy” Patricio Martínez as CIG spokesperson, councilor, and candidate for the 2018 presidential elections.51 The CNI describes this move as “going on the offensive,” and it paradoxically claims not to want to administer power but rather to dismantle it. Since the announcement, Marichuy and comrades have stressed that the focus is not on the ballot but rather “organization, life, and the defense of territory.” Yet the conclusion of the Fifth CNI in early 2017 is clear: the CIG is meant to “govern this country.”52 It remains to be seen how this move will play out, and how it will affect the Zapatista movement and autonomous indigenous movements elsewhere in Mexico and Latin America. We imagine that this shift toward electoralism is being met with a degree of resistance within Zapatista ranks, particularly among the youth who have been raised with the JBG’s and la Sexta.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank by name several comrades across the Americas who contributed to this introduction: José Antonio Gutiérrez D. and Pablo Abufom S. for their useful input about the history of contemporary organizations in the Southern Cone; Lorena Mans and Bree Busk whose anarchist-feminist contributions make us all better militants and more accurate writers; Joshua Savala, whose historical analysis is informed by his everyday praxis, and who can be counted on for his historical knowledge and attention to detail; also Scott Nappalos, who will ensure that our platformism does not overshadow the contribution of anarcho-syndicalists; and finally, all those in Latin America who, past and present, make anarchism a viable option and this revolutionary dream not only possible, but necessary.
1 John Leddy Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970).
2 The term “transculturation” was coined by the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz.
3 Peter DeShazo, The Industrial Workers of the World in Chile, Ph.D. Dissertation in Latin American History at University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1977.
4 See e.g. J. M. Towle, “The Savvy Guerrilla: How the Literature of Subcomandante Marcos Funds the Zapatista Rebellion,” Confluencia: Revista Hispánica De Cultura Y Literatura, 32, 2 (January 1, 2017), 7–90; Oswaldo Estrada, “The Masked Intellectual: Marcos and the Speech of the Rainforest,” Mexican Public Intellectuals, eds. D. Castillo and S. Day (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 197–216; Nick Henck, “Subcomandante Marcos: The Latest Reader.” The Latin Americanist, 58.2 (2014): 49–73.
5 Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos/Galeano, “Entre La Luz y la Sombra,” May 25, 2014. Available online: http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org
.mx/2014/05/25/entre-la-luz-y-la-sombra.
6 Quoted in William I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 208 (emphasis in original).
7 Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, trans. Constance Garnett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 581–4.
8 Ricardo Flores Magón, “Manifesto, September 23, 1911,” in Dreams of Freedom, eds. Chaz Bufe and Mitchell Cowen Verter (Oakland: AK Press, 2005), 138–44; Adolfo Gilly, The Mexican Revolution: A New People’s History (New York: New Press, 2006); Claudio Lomnitz, The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2014); Ward S. Albro, To Die On Your Feet: The Life, Times, and Writings of Praxedis Guerrero (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University, 1996); Praxedis Guerrero, I Am Action: Literary and Combat Articles, Thoughts, and Revolutionary Chronicles, trans. Javier Sethness-Castro (Chico, California: AK Press, forthcoming 2018).
9 See Ricardo Flores Magón’s caustic portrayal of the arrangement in Act IV of the play “Tierra y Libertad,” in Obra Literaria: Cuentos. Relatos. Teatro, ed. Jacinto Barrera Bassols (Ciudad de México: Dirección General de Publicaciones, 2009), 179–189.
10 Until the Rulers Obey: Voices from Latin American Social Movements, eds. Clifton Ross and Marcy Rein (Oakland: PM Press, 2014), 115–47.
11 David Porter, Eyes to the South: French Anarchists and Algeria (Oakland: AK Press, 2011); Maia Ramnath, Decolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian History of India’s Liberation Struggle (Oakland: AK Press and the Institute for Anarchist Studies, 2011) and Ramnath’s Haj to Utopia (University of California Press, 2011).
12 Maxine Molyneux, “No God, No Boss, No Husband: Anarchist Feminism in Nineteenth-Century Argentina” (Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 13, No. 1, Latin America’s Nineteenth-Century History, Winter, 1986); also see film about Bolten: Dir. Laura Mañá, Ni Dios, ni patrón, ni marido (Catalan Films, Barcelona, 2008).
13 Jorell A. Meléndez Badillo, Voces libertarias: los orígenes del anarquismo en Puerto Rico (Bloomington, IN, Secret Sailor Books, 2013); Norma Valle-Ferrer, Luisa Capetillo: Pioneer Puerto Rican Feminist (New York, Peter Lang Publishing, 2006); Kirwin R. Shaffer, Black Flag Boricuas: Anarchism, Antiauthoritarianism, and the Left in Puerto, 1897–1921 (Champaign, Il: University of Illinois Press, 2013); Lomnitz, The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón, 202–3; Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol, eds., Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 463.
14 Angelica Balabanoff, My Life as a Rebel (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1973 [1938]).
15 Anna LB, “Virginia Bolten: Ni Dios, ni patrón ni marido,” El Cosaco (30 de abril 2017): http://www.elcosaco.org/virginia-bolten-dios-patron-marido/.
16 Gaspar Garcia M. and Leyla Morales M., “Historia de Vida: Flora Sanhueza Rebolledo. Su lucha social en Iquique (1942–1974),” Centro de Estudio Miguel Enríquez en ARCHIVO CHILE (2003–2007).
17 Mika Etchebéhère, Mi Guerra en España (Oviedo, Cambalache Memoria, 2003 [1976]).
18 Martha A. Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women (Oakland, AK Press, 2005).
19 Romina Akemi and Bree Busk, “Breaking the Waves: Challenging the Liberal Tendency in Anarchist-Feminism,” in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, Issue 29 (Spring 2016): 104–119.
20 Elena Poniatowska, Las Soldaderas: Women of the Mexican Revolution (El Paso, Cinco Puntos Press, 2006); Jocelyn Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham, Duke University Press, 2005); Gabriela Cano, “Unconcealable Realities of Desires: Amelio Robles’s (Transgender) Masculinity in Revolutionary Mexico” in Sex and Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico, ed. Jocelyn Olcott et al (Durham, Duke University Press, 2007).
21 Julieta Kirkwood, Ser política en Chile: las feministas y los partidos (Santiago, FLASCO, 1986).
22 José Antonio Gutiérrez D., trans. Romina Akemi, “La Alzada: The revolution must include the feminist struggle, with and inside the libertarian,” Ideas and Action (October 2013): http://ideasandaction.info/2013/10/la-alzada-the-revolution-must-include-the-feminist-struggle-with-and-
inside-the-libertarian/. This article was originally published in Spanish on Anarkismo.net in March 2013.
23 See Karl Marx, Ethnological Notebooks (1881), trans. Lawrence Krader (available online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/ethnographical-notebooks/notebooks.pdf); Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); and Teodor Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983).
24 Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, trans. Marshall Shatz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 45.
25 Ibid, 38; Friedrich Engels, “Democratic Pan-Slavism,” in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, no. 222 (1849). Available online: http://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive
/marx/works/1849/02/15.htm.
26 Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, 99–100.
27 Anselmo Lorenzo (1841–1914) was a Spanish anarchist who participated as a delegate to the First International after befriending Giuseppe Fanelli, the revolutionary Italian emissary that Bakunin sent to Spain on a mission to propagate anarchism. Lorenzo was a co-founder of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), a comrade of Francisco Ferrer, and an advocate of rationalist education.
28 According to Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Luis Cusicanqui was a ch’ixi, which is an Aymara term that refers to a certain mestizo that is “Indian spotted with white.” For further analysis of Cusicanqui’s ideas see Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s “The Ch’ixi Identity of a Mestizo: Regarding an Anarchist Manifesto of 1929,” in No Gods, No Masters, No Peripheries: Global Anarchisms, Raymond Craib and Barry Maxwell, eds. (Oakland: PM Press, 2015).
29 Marisol de la Cadena, “Reconstructing Race: Racism, Culture and Mestizaje in Latin America,” NACLA vol. XXXIV, No. 6 (May/June 2001): 21.
30 The term “wingka” means the “new Inca” in reference to the arrival of Spanish Conquistadors. The Mapuche had resisted Inca invasion for over a century prior to Spanish arrival. The term has evolved to refer to mestizos, Chileans, Argentinian, or non-Mapuche in general.
31 Oliver Holmes, “Environmental activist murders set record as 2015 became deadliest year,” The Guardian, June 20, 2016.
32 David Hill, “Canadian mining doing serious environmental harm, the IACHR is told,” The Guardian, May 14, 2014.
33 Pablo Dávalos, “Latin America - Economic Socialism in the 21st Century: Neoliberalism Pure and Simple,” trans. Danica Jorden. Upside Down World, April 15, 2014. Available online: http://upsidedownworld.org/
archives/international/latin-america-economic-socialism-in-the-21st
-century-neo-liberalism-pure-and-simple/.
34 Jonathan Watts, “Amazon deforestation report is a major setback for Brazil ahead of climate talks,” The Guardian, November 27, 2015; Damian Carrington, “Half of tree species in Amazon at risk of extinction, say scientists,” The Guardian, November 20, 2015.
35 Jonathan Watts, “Amazonian tribes unite to demand Brazil stop hydroelectric dams,” The Guardian, April 30, 2015; “Brazil’s Belo Monte Dam: Sacrificing the Amazon and its Peoples for Dirty Energy,” Amazon Watch. Available online: http://amazonwatch.org/work/belo-monte-dam.
36 “La Constitución consagra los derechos de la naturaleza [sic],” Ministerio Coordinador de Conocimiento y Talento Humano de Ecuador (2008). Available online: http://www.conocimiento.gob.ec/la-constitucion-consagra
-los-derechos-de-la-naturaleza/; John Vidal, “Ecuador drills for oil on edge of pristine rainforest in Yasuni,” The Guardian, April 4, 2016.
37 Dawn Paley, Drug War Capitalism (Oakland: AK Press, 2014); Alexander Reid Ross, ed., Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab (Oakland: AK Press, 2014).
38 Centro de Educación y Comunicación Popular - Enraizando, “[Audio] Violento desalojo del ESMAD a proceso de liberación de la Madre Tierra.” Anarkismo, February 14, 2017. Available online: https://www.anarkismo
.net/article/29998?search_text=cauca.
39 “Solidaridad y Defensa de las Comunidades Frente al Avance del Paramilitarismo en el Cauca,” Anarkismo, February 13, 2017. Available online: https://www.anarkismo.net/article/29972.
40 María González et al., “Cherán: lo importante no es llegar sino mantenerse,” Agencia SubVersiones, May 24, 2016. Available online: https://subversiones.org/archivos/123674.
41 José Gil Olmos, “La falsa paz de Michoacán,” Proceso, September 14, 2016.
42 Fernando Camacho Servín, “Reconocen a Ayutla de los Libres derecho de elegir autoridades mediante usos y costumbres.” La Jornada, June 17, 2017.
43 There are numerous authors and some already listed in previous footnotes: Víctor Muñoz Cortés, Sin Dios Ni Patrones: Historia, diversidad y conflictos del anarquismo en la región chilena, 1890–1990 (Valparaíso, Mar y Tierra Ediciones, 2013); Sergio Grez Toso, Los anarquistas y el movimiento obrero: La alborada de “la Idea” en Chile, 1893–1915 (Santiago, LOM, 2007).
44 “Platformism without illusions: Chile, Interview with José Antonio Gutiérrez Danton,” Common Struggle/Lucha Común, North Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists. Available online: http://nefac.net/node/424.
45 “The Process of the Initial Construction of FEL,” Struggle/Lucha Común, North Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists, published January 14, 2012, http://nefac.net/node/2576.
46 José Antonio Gutiérrez D. and Rafael Agacino, “Some reflections on libertarians in Chile and electoral participation,” Libcom, January 4, 2017,
https://libcom.org/library/some-reflections-libertarians-chile-electoral
-participation.
47 Elena Poniatowska, La noche de Tlatelolco: testimonios de historia oral (México, D.F.: Ediciones Era, 2012 [1971]).
48 Raúl Romero, “EZLN: 17 de noviembre de 1983,” Rebelión, November 17, 2012.
49 Chris Kraul, “The battles began in 1964: Here’s a look at Colombia’s war with the FARC rebels,” Los Angeles Times, August 30, 2016.
50 These are: shelter (or housing), land, food, health, education, information, culture, independence, democracy, justice, freedom, and peace. Comité Clandestino Revolucionario Indígena-Comandancia General del Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (CCRI-CG EZLN), “Sexta Declaración de la Selva Lacandona,” June 2005. Available online: http://enlacezapatista
.ezln.org.mx/sdsl-es/.
51 CNI y EZLN, “Llegó la hora,” Enlace Zapatista, 28 May 2017. Available online: http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2017/05/28/llego-la-hora-
cni-ezln/.
52 “Convocatoria a la Asamblea Constitutiva del Concejo Indígena de Gobierno,” Enlace Zapatista, April 2, 2017. Available online: http://
enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2017/04/02/convocatoria-a-la-asamblea-
constitutiva-del-concejo-indigena-de-gobierno-para-mexico.