Confronting Neoliberalism
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the col- lapse of the Soviet Union three years later created a world fundamentally different from the one in which the Latin American left had been active....
...A year later NACLA published a letter from a Shining Path supporter that argued that Molano had resisted the legitimate presence of Shining Path in her community, and so the guerrillas "had no alternative but to end her life...
...It had become apparent to the Naclistas of the early 1990s that the principal contradictions of the era, the ones that NACLA should cover, appeared not in armed conflict but in the consolidation of the power of global capital...
...support...
...At that time, then-associate editor Deidre McFadyen wrote a series of self-critical "Taking Note" editorials about the solidarity movements' incomplete vision and lack of staying power...
...the financial industry, had gained almost instantaneous health & Hunger mobility-the ability to provide and withdraw its "services" at a moment's notice...
...This was particularly the case with the Shining Path guerrillas in Peru and, more subtly, with the FARC in Colombia...
...But under the guidance of McFadyen and other editors, NACLA's contributors over the past ten years have attempted to report and analyze the very "grayness" that has discouraged so many activists...
...El Fisg6n (The Inquisitive One) is the pen name of Rafael Barajas, an artist-activist whose cartoons regularly appear in the Mpxico6 City daily La Jornada...
...gender and sexuality...
...Under Kawell's direction, NACLA is expanding its on-line coverage, the better to respond to events in a fashion more timely than that allowed in a bimonthly format...
...Latino communities in 1992 in Reports called "Coming North" and "Roots of Empowerment...
...The old questions, of course, remain...
...Above all, NACLA remains the kind of project that only makes sense within the context of a larger community of activists and scholars...
...T]he idea of 'human security' must be incorporated in our notion of human rights," wrote editor Jo-Marie Burt in the JulyAugust 2000 Report called "Rethinking Human Rights," so as to "encompass the broad spectrum of rights that must be guaranteed to an> individual so that he or she 8 can live a life of dignity...
...Then, in February 1993, NACLA published "A Market Solution For the Americas?: The Rise of Wealth and Hunger...
...the drug war...
...Aided by the proliferation of U.S.-supported free-market think tanks, all the models of growth and development that involve some state intervention were lumped into one and that one model declared a failure...
...The MIR-UP and partybuilding conflicts of the 1970s had led NACLA to refrain from taking sides in inter-left disputes, and to adopt a non-exclusionary stance toward groups that identified themselves as leftist, progressive or revolutionary...
...NNACLA: A 35 YEAR RETROSPECTIVE 1989," she remembers, crediting then-editor Fried with the "courage" to cover the topic...
...This has been reflected in NACLA's critique...
...The compact was highly uneven and guaranteed the hegemony of capital--especially U.S...
...This was the ideological tide that NACLA, along with the Latin American solidarity movements and the rest of the left, found itself swimming against in the early 1990s...
...In the new political atmosphere of the last decade, the organizing agenda with which NACLA has most identified itself is the growing "globalization from below," a cross-border coming together of groups that challenge global capital on a local or regional basis...
...It also laid out the critique of neoliberalism that would later be taken up by the "anti-globalization" movement...
...supporters for representing everything the left should be fighting against: extreme intolerance, secretive organization, violence against civilians, a willingness to kill everyone who stood in its way to power...
...The Soviet Union's demise, much to the surprise of many anti-Soviet leftists, almost entirely removed from public discourse not just one particular alternative to the present capitalist system, but also the belief that any real alternative was possible...
...This was followed by a flood of letters, including a response from Vargas, denouncing Shining Path and its U.S...
...These issues had been considered marginal to the grand narratives of social transformation and the analyses of corporate structure that characterized the earlier periods...
...Lines were drawn in an exchange following the May 1992 publication of an essay by Peruvian feminist Virginia Vargas called "Women: Tragic Encounters with the Left," which decried the lack of open debate and democracy within the left, its refusal to take women's struggles seriously, and mourned the assassination of the Peruvian community organizer Maria Elena Molano by Shining Path...
...This was not a critique of all capitalist models...
...Who writes...
...capital-but it was a pact in which large segments of the population were included, and it legitimized the idea of the state's responsibility for the social well-being of its citizens...
...Looking back on her solidarity experience, McFadyen remembers defining the Central America conflict as a "conflict of values": Basic justice and human rights were counterposed to the brutality that seemed time and time again to have U.S...
...He has published several booklength cartoon commentaries on Mexico's neoliberal politics as well as a history of political cartooning in 'Mexico, a. portion of which appeared in NACLA's May/June 2000 issue as "The Transformative Power of Art: Mexico's Combat Cartoonists...
...As the Sandinistas attempted to chart a new course in Nicaragua, "social rights"education, health care, housing, employment-were added to the human rights framework...
...In 1999the was awarded Mexico's National Journalism Prize...
...Ten years later it is one of the key issues...
...his first cover was for the "Mexico' Out of Balance" Report of July/August 1994...
...gender and sexuality were dealt with on their own terms [see "The Long March to Feminism," p. 36] in a number of Reports beginning in the mid 1990s...
...What goes in...
...His first NACLA cartoon appeared in the May/June 1994 issue...
...By the mid 1980s, NACLA had already begun paying close attention to the debt crises and free-market restructurings that were just beginning NCLA to become the scourge of the region and its working popu- lations...
...Because of Central America's extreme poverty and the horrendous brutality of its old regimes, the two began to merge...
...The issue, later expanded into a book called Free Trade and Economic Restructuring in Latin America, was a close examination of the neoliberal model-privatization, deregulation, a reduction of the public sector through "fiscal balance," integration into the global economy on the terms of the dominant economic powers and, perhaps above all, a cranking up of labor discipline-in a number of key countries...
...The latter was the subject of "IntroCAIOSo" bA IL 4 e .. ,. t ilk-JAL T.I.Ax EL FISG6N duction to Hope: The Left in Local Politics," published in July-August 1995...
...The days of black-and-white situations and clear-cut solutions are gone," she wrote in December 1992, and "this grayness seems to have In Memoriam Warren Dean Peter Henig Hector Melo Warren Plaut Jane Rothenberg Richard Shaull Glen Smiley Rini Templeton induced paralysis and indifference among former activists...
...In fact, leftists began to be portrayed as conservatives, as antiquarians holding out against the one true faith of free-market capitalism...
...This model had been incorporated in many Latin American countries by way of state-sponsored import-substitution industrialization, state-run systems of social security, and highly regulated trade and investment relations with the developed world...
...The "no-enemies-on-the-left" days were over...
...NACLA looked at immigration and U.S...
...But these principles were strained to the breaking point in the 1990s as NACLA attempted to reconcile a focus on human rights with leftist guerrilla movements that targeted civilians-in many cases civilians belonging to rival leftist groups...
...That's a big change...
...It was not only existing socialism, but existing social democracy that was deemed to have collapsed...
...All alternatives were declared dead and buried by powerful "opinion makers," mostly based in the North...
...N Transnational capital, largely through a series of treaties brokered by multilateral SOLUTION lenders and innovations in kMERICAS...
...Just as NACLA was strongly influenced by the emergence of Latin American armed struggle in the 1960s and 1970s as well as the apparent success of Cuba's Leninist regime, its analysis has most recently been strongly affected by changes in Latin American politics in the 1990s, particularly the significant weakening of the state and the parallel growth of popular movements fighting for specific reforms and local initiatives...
...race and ethnicity...
...for politicalicartooning...
...In the greatest neoliberal success stories, the editors wrote, "macroeconomic growth was accompanied by stagnant or declining real wages, an unambiguous NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS A MARK] FOR THE The Rise of growth of poverty, a loss of social benefits, a breakdown of community and explosive growth of the informal, marginal sector of society...
...Over the years, NACLA has constantly refreshed and renewed itself...
...by the early 1990s, human rights and internal democracy had joined the struggle for social justice as touchstones of NACLA's analysis and coverage...
...Current editor JoAnn Kawell had authored a Report called "Coca: The Real Green Revolution" in 1989 and edited one called "Drug Economies of the Americas" in 2002: "It was very hard to bring up the drug issue in 35 El Fisg6n, one of Mexico's foremost political cartoonists, began drawing cartoons and illustrating covers for NACLA in 1994...
...they now seemed more central to multidimensional analyses of domination and liberation...
...The overriding goal of the "congress" founded 35 years ago in the ferment of the "New Left," is to continue its tradition of publishing material that is useful-useful to activists, scholars and citizens trying to make sense of the world in order to change it...
...The old global economic model, after all, put in place in the capitalist world by the Bretton Woods agreements at the close of World War II, was based, however inconsistently, on a kind of social compact...
...NACLA's mission today remains the same as it has been for over 35 years: to reveal, to document, and to analyze the structures of exploitation, as well as to document and celebrate the social movements, the popular and democratic politics, the cultures and the communities of the Americas...
...Another change is the much greater emphasis on questions of human rights...
...This new era has also seen an emphasis on new kinds of issues: immigration and Latin American communities in the United States...
...the Central American solidarity movements spent a great deal of time and energy documenting human rights abuses, as well as "accompanying" targeted local activists, especially in Guatemala, in order to afford them greater protection...
...to provide concise, readable, and thoughtful reports on Latin America and the Caribbean to its readers...
...Solidarity activism had brought human rights to the forefront of NACLA's coverage, especially in the context of Central America...
...It was then considered to be marginal to the debate on U.S.-Latin American relations...
...The current staff has come on board over the past few years: Marisa Maack began as an intern in 1996 and joined the staff a year later...
...Who do we reach...
...For years, the left had considered "human rights," with its individualistic focus, secondary to "social justice...
...NACLA has now committed itself to serve this new movement not only in the content, but in the form of its coverage...
...JoAnn Kawell, Terry Gibbs and Jordi Pius Llopart, the remainder of the current staff-there is one soon-to-be-filled openinghave come to NACLA over the past two years...
...The enemy of the "anti-globalization" movement has become "neoliberalism," not "capitalism...
...They have, for the most part, taken the stance of "critical journalism" that won the day in the 1980s...
...From that point on, NACLA's coverage of Shining Path reflected that critical opposition, and NACLA has given itself permission-to a degree not present in the past--to adopt an oppositional stance toward any group that regularly violates human rights...
...The past two decades, however, have seen the gutting of that old model and the evaporation of the social compact-with a vengeance throughout Latin America-and its replacement with the neoliberal scramble for wealth and survival...
...NACLA's coverage of neoliberal globalization anticipated the emergence of the full-blown anti-globalization movement in Seattle...
Vol. 36 • November 2002 • No. 3
