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Virtual Exhibit Hall
Twilight of the Vanguard: Social Movements and the Reinvention of Leftist Politics in Post-Revolutionary Central America
Sat, May 25, 10:45am to 12:15pm, TBAAbstract
As examples of “pink tide” governments, the leftist administrations of the FMLN in El Salvador and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua have been some of the least studied, despite constituting the contemporary political manifestations of two of the most frequently studied cases of revolution. The leaders of these countries’ leftist governments also led the previous revolutionary struggles, though their popular bases have now formed a diversity of social movements in democratic contexts. With electoral defeats mounting in El Salvador, and popular rebellion festering in Nicaragua, I argue—in consonance with regional and global trends—that we are seeing the twilight of the Central American “vanguard”, in both organizational and ideological terms. In its place, social movements grounded in revolutionary traditions but nourished by “new” discourses of collective liberation are reinventing leftist politics and forging democratically innovative practices that illuminate new horizons for social struggle in the region. My extensive ethnographic fieldwork demonstrates how and why these practices and horizons look quite different in the two countries. In El Salvador, the FMLN’s relative openness has enabled movement-state negotiations leading to “critical collaboration” and “co-governance” on certain issues, while in Nicaragua, the Ortega regime’s authoritarianism has closed all spaces for negotiation and demonized autonomous movements, leading to movement efforts for “self-governance”, even before the current crisis. While myriad obstacles and contradictions—including “NGO-ization”—continue to threaten popular agendas, post-revolutionary leftist politics in Central America are increasingly movement-led, more flexible and autonomous vis a vis traditional political structures, and more internally egalitarian.