Marc Becker

Harry E. Vanden

Richard Stahler-Sholk

This groundbreaking text explores the dramatic evolution in Latin American social movements over the past fifteen years. Assessing both the continuities in social movement dynamics and important new tendencies, this book will be essential reading for all students of Latin American politics and society.

Radical Action from Below

Rethinking Latin American Social Movements

Postwar Left -- CIA -- Coups -- Moscow Gold -- Divisions -- Transitions -- Populism -- Dissension -- Everyday Forms of Organization -- Communist Threats -- Resurgent Left -- 1959.

The CIA in Ecuador

This clear text extends our understanding of revolutions with critical narrative analysis of key case studies. Becker analyzes revolutions through the lens of participants and explores the sociopolitical conditions that led to a revolutionary situation, the differing responses to those conditions, and the outcomes of the political changes.

Contemporary Latin American Revolutions

During the Second World War, the FDR administration placed the FBI in charge of political surveillance in Latin America. Through a program called the Special Intelligence Service (SIS), 700 agents were assigned to combat Nazi influence in Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. The SIS’s mission, however, extended beyond countries with significant German populations or Nazi spy rings. As evidence of the SIS’s overreach, forty-five agents were dispatched to Ecuador, a country without any German espionage networks. Furthermore, by 1943, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover shifted the SIS’s focus from Nazism to communism. Marc Becker interrogates a trove of FBI documents from its Ecuador mission to uncover the history and purpose of the SIS’s intervention in Latin America and for the light they shed on leftist organizing efforts in Latin America. Ultimately, the FBI’s activities reveal the sustained nature of US imperial ambitions in the Americas.

The Ecuador Files

The FBI in Latin America

In June 1990, Indigenous peoples shocked Ecuadorian elites with a powerful uprising that paralyzed the country for a week. Militants insisted that the government address Indigenous demands for land ownership, education, and economic development. This uprising was a milestone in the history of Ecuador’s social justice movements, and it inspired popular organizing efforts across Latin America. While the insurrection seemed to come out of nowhere, Marc Becker demonstrates that it emerged out of years of organizing and developing strategies to advance Indigenous rights. In this richly documented account, he chronicles a long history of Indigenous political activism in Ecuador, from the creation of the first local agricultural syndicates in the 1920s through the galvanizing protests of 1990. In so doing, he reveals the central role of women in Indigenous movements and the history of productive collaborations between rural Indigenous activists and urban leftist intellectuals. Becker explains how rural laborers and urban activists worked together in Ecuador, merging ethnic and class-based struggles for social justice. Socialists were often the first to defend Indigenous languages, cultures, and social organizations. They introduced rural activists to new tactics, including demonstrations and strikes. Drawing on leftist influences, Indigenous peoples became adept at reacting to immediate, local forms of exploitation while at the same time addressing broader underlying structural inequities. Through an examination of strike activity in the 1930s, the establishment of a national-level Ecuadorian Federation of Indians in 1944, and agitation for agrarian reform in the 1960s, Becker shows that the history of Indigenous mobilizations in Ecuador is longer and deeper than many contemporary observers have recognized.

Indians and Leftists in the Making of Ecuador’s Modern Indigenous Movements

Issues of race and ethnicity in Latin America continue to gain a growing amount of academic attention. While themes of ethnic identities, indigeneity, and race relations are commonly examined in our respective disciplines, it is less common to bring together essays from scholars from such a broad variety of disciplines. The papers collected in this volume draw on a wide range of studies from across Latin America, including the examination of ethnohistory, the environment, and culture. They convey a large diversity of perspectives, disciplines, and issues that reflect the richness and complexities of the social processes that encompass the Americas. Taken as a whole, this broad range of studies on ethnohistory, environmental and legal issues, education, and culture advances our understandings of race and ethnicity in Latin America. In the process, these studies incorporate related issues of how historical and political developments in Latin America have, and continue to be, experienced differently based on varying gendered and class perspectives. These studies examine how those speaking from the margins continue to shape and reshape what we know as Latin America.

Cases of Exclusion and Mobilization of Race and Ethnicities in Latin America

Jos� Carlos Mari�tegui, the Peruvian political theorist of the 1920s, was instrumental in developing an indigenous Latin American revolutionary Marxist theory. He rejected a rigid, orthodox interpretation of Marxism and applied his own creative elements, which he believed could move a society to revolutionary action without the society having to depend upon more traditional economic factors. His interpretation of Peruvian history had a profound effect upon subsequent social movements throughout Latin America. This volume reviews the essential elements of Mari�tegui's thought and important influences on his intellectual development. It demonstrates the role he played in defining a Latin american identity, the nature of his intellectual contribution to the development of indigenous revolutionary movements in Latin America, and the inflluence he had on successful revolutionary movements in Cuba and Nicaragua. An understanding of Mari�tegui's thought is fundamental to understanding the nature of revolutionary changes in Latin America.

Marc Becker

Books

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