Organising Negation: Neoliberal Hopelessness, Insurgent Hope (Mexico)

During the 1980s and 1990s, Latin America became the privileged site for both neoliberal experimentation and the emergence of laboratories of resistance against and beyond it, in the jungle, the forest, the neighbourhoods, the settlement, the outskirts, the city: a ‘laboring laboratory possibilis salutis’ (Bloch, 1977: 389). Recent studies of Latin American social movements frame this period as one of intense ‘opposition to’ neoliberalism (Deere and Royce, 2009; Sader and Gentili, 2003; Boron et al., 1999; Burdick et al., 2009; De Almeida and Ruiz Sánchez, 2000; Grugel and Riggirozzi, 2012; Roberts, 2009; Veltmeyer et al., 1997). Indeed, opposition, i.e. the demunciatory moment was initially reflected in a wave of citizens’ protests motivated by different reasons, which led to the departure of nine presidents ahead of time: in Brazil in 1992, in Venezuela and Guatemala in 1993, in Ecuador in 1997 and 2000, in Paraguay in 1999, in Peru in 2000 and twice in Argentina in December 2001 (Ollier, 2003: 170), followed by process of movement formation led by the landless, anti-labour bureaucracy and local trade unions, the unemployed and the urban poor.