Dissident Peace in Colombia

By Anthony Dest

November 30, 2025

Source: Ojalá

A youth smokes in front of a mural in Puerto Resistencia, Cali, July 2021. Photo © Anthony Dest.

This week, we’re sharing an excerpt from Anthony Dest’s new book Dissident Peace: Autonomous Struggles and the State in Colombia, published by Stanford University Press earlier this year. The book interrogates the foundations of peace and points to the deeper questions that have—in large part— been left unresolved —Eds.

On October 5, 2017, state forces opened fire on a group of protesters in the small community of El Tandil close to the border with Ecuador. During the 10 days leading up to the massacre, coca growers in El Tandil demanded that the Colombian government implement the 2016 Peace Accords with the FARC-EP. The accords supposedly guaranteed support for coca growers willing to substitute their illicit crops and transition into a legal economy. Instead of providing the coca growers with alternatives, the state killed seven people and injured more than 20.

Although government officials later blamed the violence on so-called FARC-EP dissidents (disidentes), witnesses affirmed that the massacre was unprovoked. More than five years later, the perpetrators of the massacre still have not faced justice, and the coca cultivations in the region around El Tandil continue to produce cocaine for the global market.

José Hernán de la Cruz, one of the survivors of the massacre, told El Espectador:

I think we are dealing with a ruse [engaño]—those of us living amid bullets, amid the armed conflict. What a damn ruse to learn that the military and police arrive and that it’s practically the same as dealing with your worst enemies!

How am I supposed to trust them after what they did to me? They destroyed my arm. All of this arm is reconstructed. [. . .]

It still does not make sense in my mind or for my way of living that I could exercise my rights before this authority and that same authority would start shooting at us, the peasants.

We were demanding something that was just.

The El Tandil Massacre shattered the illusion of peace that the Colombian government tried to project to the world, but it was not a surprise to people familiar with the violent means used to suppress social change in the country. In the immediate aftermath of the Peace Accords, the communities that stood to benefit the most from peace continued to face oppression, and the steady elimination of former FARC-EP combatants who participated in the process had already begun. War continued.

The “ruse” that de la Cruz referred to after the El Tandil Massacre is at the core of the social contract that theoretically holds together the place called Colombia. It is the foundational and ever-present violence of the state and capitalism. The state, like capitalism, is not a transhistorical feature of human history. It is a historically specific form of patriarchal authority whose birth was intertwined with the racist foundations of colonial-capitalist modernity. 

A violent state-centric model 

Colombia, as one such instantiation of a state, gained its independence from Spain in 1819, and its rulers set out to establish dominion within its perennially changing borders through violence and the rule of law. With Christopher Columbus as its namesake, Colombia forged a citizenry and national identity over the course of centuries. As a state in search of subjects, the discourse of national belonging hinged on forms of racialized and gendered dominance with creole whiteness as its idealized form. 

This established Indigenous peoples and the descendants of enslaved Africans— along with their diverse and at times contradictory relationships to the territory—as an obstacle to Colombian state formation. Thus, the Colombian state took shape through the inherently violent imposition of a social contract premised on the maintenance of colonial capitalism.

In 2022—260 years after Rousseau wrote On the Social Contract; or, Principles of Political Right—Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez promised a “new social contract” on the first page of their program that pledged to turn Colombia into a “world power for life” and bring about “total peace.” Their election marked the inauguration of the first progressive government in the country’s history. 

Petro, a former M-19 guerrilla who claimed that Rousseau inspired his interest in history as an adolescent, embarked on a mission to transform the state by expanding its realm of influence. During his victory speech, he told the crowd, “We are going to develop capitalism in Colombia. Not because we worship it, but because first we must overcome premodernity in Colombia.” 

In doing so, he reiterated a popular trope about state formation that attributes violence, backwardness, and underdevelopment to the absence of capitalism and the state. This trope not only concealed the multiple ways in which the state and capital are present in regions labeled as unruly frontiers; it also established the state and capital as the solution to violence, thereby ignoring their active role in producing it. Despite the claims of newness, the Petro administration’s approach to the social contract and what would become known as total peace remained explicitly committed to a form of capitalist development facilitated by the state.

Pacification and colonial control 

For centuries, the idea of social contract as the basis of political community has served as one of the primary justifications for the sovereignty of states. Through the social contract—so the story goes— men submit to a higher authority in the name of a loosely defined common good. However, the term “contract” suggests conscious agreement consummated by law, and the countless people slaughtered in the name of state formation did not willingly sign their lives away in its service. 

Writing in 1762 as the forces of European colonialism continued to expand throughout the globe, Rousseau included the following warning in his treatise on the social contract: “Under bad governments this equality is only apparent and illusory; it serves only to keep the poor in their misery and the rich in their usurpations. In fact, laws are always useful to those who possess and injurious to those that have nothing.” As de la Cruz attested in his denunciation of the El Tandil Massacre, the social contract was not as democratic, just, or egalitarian as it might seem.

Since the earliest days of colonization, the law—particularly in relation to private property—has been crucial for the codification and continuation of colonial capitalism and state formation. From the resguardo (Indigenous reservation) system and gracias al sacar (the legal right of enslaved Africans to “purchase whiteness”) established by the Spanish Empire to contemporary forms of multicultural recognition, these laws extended the promise of what Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui calls “conditional inclusion” to those willing to abide by the rules of the colonial project and punishment for those who rebel. This colonial project has hinged on ensuring submission to a particular form of authority emanating from Europe that derived its strength by eliminating alternatives to the system through violence and assimilation.

Framed in this light, the prevailing discourse around peace in Colombia should be understood within a longer history of pacification (pacificación), which shares the Latin root word pax. 

The origins of pacification in what is now called Colombia can be traced at least as far back as 1573 with King Felipe II’s mandate to abandon the language of conquista (conquest) for that of pacificación (pacification). The Spanish Empire’s “Ordinances Concerning Discovery, New Settlements, and Pacification of the Indies” were made law amid self-serving critiques from other European powers about Spain’s ostensibly exceptional brutality as a colonizing force. 

The rhetorical shift toward pacification in the official language of the Spanish Empire did not inspire a divergence from the genocidal structure of colonial capitalist development, but it did reveal an anxiety about exposing the hollowness of the religious and moral convictions that served as ideological justifications for colonization. 

In The Conquest of America, Tzvetan Todorov argues, “The text [of the Ordinances] could not be more explicit on this point: it is not conquests that are to be banished, but the word conquest; ‘pacification’ is nothing but another word to designate the same thing.” 

By the 20th century, “pacification” became part of the lingua franca of counterinsurgency as colonial powers the world over attempted to quell native resistance and consolidate their control over land and life. Returning, then, to the root word of both “peace” and “pacification” is instructive. 

According to Mark Neocleous in War Power, Police Power, “What is connoted by the word pax, and thus ‘peace,’ is not an absence of conflict or making of a pact but, rather, the imposition of hegemony and domination achieved through conquest and maintained by arms [. . .]. Pax was and is a victor’s peace achieved by war and conquest.” By operating through the seemingly more palatable language of pax, pacification served as one of the primary methods of settlement in the Americas and peace its progeny.

Shattering the discourse 

This book explores how the dominant discourse of peace in Colombia is shaped by and shapes colonial capitalism. By establishing the consolidation of the state’s sovereignty as the antidote to violence, it takes for granted how state-centric peace consists of a totalizing form of settlement dependent on genocide and the elimination of alternatives to it. Peace, like war, imposes a framework for thinking and acting politically that shapes social relations. This process of subjugation, however, is always incomplete.

Another one of the survivors of the El Tandil Massacre described his efforts to achieve justice through the legal system as “swimming against the river.” This frustration has emerged at nearly every meeting, march, or mobilization that I have attended. 

From survivors of the El Tandil Massacre to Afro-Colombian community councils on the Pacific coast to resistance points in the city of Cali, people share stories about how violence, capitalism, and the state impede their ability to live freely as they struggle for a better future. In theory, the state should be there to protect them, but instead it mostly manifests in the form of a hostile police officer or a useless bureaucrat. Dissident forms of peace emerge from their rejection of the status quo and the potential of their struggles for autonomy from it.Email

Anthony Dest

Anthony Dest is Assistant Professor and Gussenhoven Fellow in Geography and Latin American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His work is based on long-standing collaborations with Black and Indigenous social movements in Colombia

Was the Pentecostal Boom in Latin America a CIA Psyop?

Capitalism, Protestant Missions, and the War on Liberation Theology

By Colten Barnaby

November 30, 2025

Source: Kensington Koan

The surge of Protestant missionaries and charismatic revivals across South America didn’t happen in a vacuum; it unfolded within a Cold War landscape where the United States actively sought religious movements that could blunt the rise of Catholic liberation theology.

If you look closely at the historical record, declassified CIA cables, State Department memos, USAID contracts, congressional hearings, and the work of historians like Greg Grandin, Stephen Rabe, David Stoll, Martin-Baró, and Linda Rabben, the answer is no longer a dramatic conspiracy theory. It’s simply what happened. Not in the sense that every missionary was a covert agent. But because U.S. intelligence and diplomatic officials, from the 1950s through the 1980s, intentionally used Protestant missions as one tool in a broad counterinsurgency strategy designed to weaken liberation theology and preserve U.S.-aligned capitalist order in Latin America.

Before I expound I should let the reader know that I am no stranger to the world of Christian missions. I grew up the son of a Pentecostal pastor and went to school to get two degrees in church history. During college and seminary, I led and participated in mission trips to Fiji, the Philippines, and El Salvador. I worked at Oral Roberts University coordinating student missions trips across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. My intentions were completely sincere. Everyone around me believed we were spreading the gospel. What I didn’t understand at the time, what most missionaries never understand, is that the infrastructure we were plugged into had been shaped for decades by the Cold War, and that evangelical missions, especially the charismatic and Pentecostal branches, had been intentionally cultivated and supported by U.S. political and intelligence structures as an ideological counterweight to the very Christian movements the poor in Latin America were building for themselves.

To see why, you have to understand liberation theology. In the 1960s and 70s, Catholic priests, nuns, and laypeople across Latin America began reading the Bible with the poor in small base communities, and their work was shaped by theologians who helped give this movement its intellectual clarity. Gustavo Gutierrez in Peru, whose book A Theology of Liberation named the movement, argued that faith without a commitment to justice was empty. Leonardo Boff and Clodovis Boff in Brazil taught that the Gospel required solidarity with the poor and resistance to the structures that kept them poor. In El Salvador, thinkers like Jon Sobrino and Ignacio Ellacuria described the oppressed as the “crucified people,” showing that Christian faith was tested in the concrete suffering of those pushed to the margins.

These theologians did not invent liberation theology from above. They put into words what Christian base communities were discovering for themselves as they studied scripture in the shadow of military dictatorships, land monopolies, and U.S. backed elites. These communities did not just pray together. They examined the conditions of their lives. They asked why their societies were structured to benefit a small ruling class and what it meant that Jesus identified with the poor. Liberation theology took those questions seriously and treated them as a call to collective action, offering ordinary people new tools to interpret their own oppression and to organize for land reform, workers’ rights, literacy, and democracy.

Washington saw this as a threat because it encouraged people the empire needed to stay quiet to start asking political questions. The U.S. had already watched Cuba fall out of its orbit, and it was not interested in watching the rest of Latin America follow. So in the late 1960s, U.S. intelligence reports start describing liberation theology as a “subversive movement.” State Department briefings warned that Catholic priests sympathetic to the poor were helping create “pre-revolutionary conditions” in rural areas. The CIA produced internal assessments describing certain bishops as “radicalizing forces.” When the Brazilian bishops issued statements against torture under the military dictatorship, the U.S. embassy cabled Washington expressing concern that the Church was becoming politicized “in dangerous ways.”

So how do you stop a religious movement you can’t outlaw, that is spread through small communities, and whose leaders are clergy protected by the Vatican? The U.S. didn’t try to crush liberation theology directly. It tried to dilute it. Replace it. Counterprogram it. And evangelical missions became one of the most effective instruments for doing that.

This was not merely accidental alignment. It was intentional policy. The U.S. did this in several ways.

The first was through direct coordination with evangelical missionary organizations. One of the clearest examples is the Summer Institute of Linguistics, or SIL, the academic wing of Wycliffe Bible Translators. SIL specialized in going into remote Indigenous regions, studying unwritten languages, creating alphabets, and translating the Bible. These were trained linguists, many with graduate degrees. Their work, on the surface, was scholarly and humanitarian. But during the Cold War, SIL received contracts and grants from USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was a core part of U.S. soft-power strategy abroad. In several countries, including Guatemala, Peru, Brazil, and Ecuador, USAID partnered with SIL to carry out literacy programs among Indigenous groups. These literacy materials often included explicitly anti-communist lessons woven into biblical stories. In Guatemala, SIL teams operated in areas where leftist guerrillas were active, and the military government, backed by the U.S., gave SIL extraordinary freedoms and protection because they saw the missionaries as tools to pacify Indigenous resistance.

Anthropologists who worked in those regions documented how the presence of SIL often coincided with government resettlement programs designed to pull Indigenous people out of autonomous territories and bring them under state control. This was not because SIL itself was designing counterinsurgency tactics, but because SIL created the infrastructure, the literacy programs, the airstrips, the missionary aviation networks, that the state could use. Their aviation service, JAARS (Jungle Aviation and Radio Service), transported missionaries, medical supplies, literacy materials, and occasionally state officials in regions where guerrilla movements operated. JAARS pilots were not CIA assets, but they were operating in regions largely inaccessible to government forces without them, and the cooperation was mutually beneficial.

The second major example involves the Assemblies of God and Pentecostal missions more broadly. In Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Guatemala, especially during their military dictatorships, the U.S. government openly preferred evangelical churches to the Catholic Church. During the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, U.S. officials praised Pentecostal churches for “keeping the masses calm” and for reducing support for the left. In Brazil’s Amazon region, the military dictatorship encouraged American Pentecostal missions to expand because they provided a religious alternative to the radical priests who were helping Indigenous communities organize against land seizures. U.S. diplomatic cables from the 1970s note with approval that Pentecostal movements “lack the politicizing tendencies of certain Catholic clergy.”

Then there’s Campus Crusade for Christ, better known today as Cru. The founder, Bill Bright, made anti-communism a central part of his ministry from the 1950s onward. Campus Crusade programs were supported by U.S. embassies in various countries, especially during the authoritarian rule of Brazil’s military junta. In 1974, Bright launched the “Here’s Life” campaign in Brazil with the blessing of the U.S.-backed government. Internal documents show coordination between Campus Crusade and U.S. consular officials, who saw the campaign as a way to promote a depoliticized Christianity that discouraged support for leftist organizing. This was part of a broader U.S. strategy: if liberation theology created politically conscious Christians, evangelical revivalism created inward-focused ones.

The third major mechanism involved what the CIA called “psychological operations.” U.S. information agencies like USIA produced materials portraying liberation theologians as Marxist infiltrators who wanted to destroy the Church. These were circulated to conservative Catholic bishops, Protestant leaders, and local elites. The CIA also supported radio networks like Trans World Radio and HCJB (based in Ecuador), which broadcast sermons across the continent preaching submission to authority, anti-communism, and personal salvation rather than social transformation. Historians have shown that these broadcasts increased sharply in regions where liberation theology was strongest.

And then there is Guatemala under Efraín Ríos Montt. If there is a single moment when evangelical Christianity and U.S. counterinsurgency fully merged, it is this period. Ríos Montt was a general who took power in a 1982 military coup. He was a born-again Pentecostal and a member of an American-affiliated charismatic church. His weekly national TV addresses sounded like sermons, mixing Bible verses with calls for total obedience to the state. His government carried out one of the worst genocides in Latin American history against the Maya. Ríos Montt was not just supported by the U.S., Ronald Reagan personally praised him as “a man of great integrity.” American evangelical leaders visited him, prayed with him, and publicly defended him. Meanwhile, Catholic priests who supported Indigenous rights were being assassinated or disappeared.

Ríos Montt’s rule was not an outlier. It was the logical end of a decades-long project: replace politically engaged Catholicism with a politically harmless Protestantism, so that the structures of inequality remained untouched.

Even in countries without open dictatorships, the same pattern emerges. In Brazil, as Catholic base communities organized unions and landless workers, the Assemblies of God exploded in membership. In Chile, Pentecostal revivals surged under Pinochet. In Peru, evangelical missions expanded rapidly in the 1980s as Catholic priests began speaking against the military’s human rights abuses. In every case, U.S. officials described Protestant growth as a stabilizing force.

What makes all of this chilling is that it worked. By the 1990s, liberation theology had been sharply weakened. The Vatican, under pressure from conservative factions and geopolitical concerns, disciplined liberation theologians. Meanwhile, Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity had become the fastest-growing religious movement in Latin America. Today, Pentecostals form one of the strongest voting blocs for right-wing and authoritarian politicians across the continent.

Most missionaries who participated in this never knew. Their intentions were honest. Mine were honest. But the structure, the funding, the partnerships, the diplomatic support, the propaganda, the development projects, had been engineered long before any of us arrived. The U.S. didn’t need missionaries to be CIA agents. It just needed them to preach a version of Christianity that left the economic order untouched.

And that is exactly what happened.

---

Further Reading and Sources

For readers who want to investigate this history in more depth, the following books and primary source collections offer the most reliable and well documented accounts of the relationship between U.S. foreign policy, Protestant missions, and the suppression of liberation theology.

Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre. A detailed study of Guatemala and the Cold War with extensive analysis of how the U.S. opposed liberation theology and supported evangelical alternatives.

David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth. A careful examination of why evangelical missions expanded during military regimes and how that growth intersected with U.S. strategic priorities.

Phillip Berryman, Liberation Theology and The Religious Roots of Rebellion. Clear introductions to liberation theology and its political context.

Stephen Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America. Focuses on U.S. foreign policy in Latin America with discussion of religious dynamics under military regimes.

Linda Rabben, Unnatural Selection. Documents missionary involvement in Indigenous regions and the political implications of their presence.

Manuel Vasquez and Anna Peterson, Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas. A broader contextual look at how Christianity and politics interact in Latin America.

National Security Archive, Cold War in Latin America Collections. Declassified U.S. embassy cables, CIA reports, and military documents.

CIA CREST Database. Digitized declassified files related to psychological operations, USAID partnerships, and religious influence programs.

These sources provide the clearest window into how religious movements became instruments within larger geopolitical strategies across the Western Hemisphere.

 Ufmg.br

gpde.direito.ufmg.br/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/MAX-WEBER.pdf

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

' R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Page 3. Page 4 ...

The Angry Tide of the Latin American far right

By Vijay Prashad

November 30, 2025

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Protesters invade the National Congress of Brazil

The far right in Latin America is angry. Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Argentina’s Javier Milei always look furious, and they always speak loudly and aggressively. Testosterone leaks from their pores, a toxic sweat that has spread across the region. It would be easy to say that this is the impact of Donald Trump’s own brand of neo-fascism, but this is not true. The far right has much deeper pedigrees, linked to the defence of the oligarchical families that have roots in the colonial era across the virreinatos (viceroyalties) from New Spain to Rio de la Plata. Certainly, these far right men and women are inspired by Trump’s aggressiveness and by the entry of Marco Rubio, a furious defender of the far right in Latin America, to the position of US Secretary of State. This inspiration and support are important but not the reason for the return of the far right, an angry tide that has been growing across Latin America.

On the surface, it looks as if the far right has suffered some defeats. Jair Bolsonaro is in prison for a very long time because of his role in the failed coup d’état on January 8, 2023 (inspired by Trump’s own failed coup attempt on January 6, 2021). In the first round of the presidential election in Chile, the candidate of the Communist Party, Jeannette Jara won the most votes and will lead the centre-left bloc into the second round (December 14). Despite every attempt to overthrow the government of Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro remains in charge and has mobilised large sections of the population to defend the Bolivarian Revolution against any threats. And, in late October 2025, most of the world’s countries voted for a UN General Assembly resolution that demands an end to the blockade on Cuba. These indicators —from Bolsonaro’s imprisonment to the vote on Cuba— suggest that the far right has not been able to move its agenda in every place and through every channel.

However, beneath the surface, there are indications that Latin America is not seeing the resurgence of what had been called the Pink Tide (after the election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 1998) but is experiencing the emergence of an angry tide that slowly has begun to sweep the region from Central America down to the Southern Cone.

Elections in South America

The first round of the Chilean presidential election produced a worrying result. While Jara of the Communist Party won 26.85 percent of an 85.26 percent turnout, the far right’s José Antonio Kast came in second with 23.92 percent. Evelyn Matthei of the traditional Right won 12.5 percent, while the extreme right candidate who was once with Kast and now to his right, Johannes Kaiser, won 14 percent. It is likely that Jara will pick up some of the votes of the centre, but not enough to overcome the advantage of the far right which looks to have at least more than 50 percent of the voters on its side. The so-called social liberal, Franco Parisi, who came in third, endorsed Kast in 2021 and will likely endorse him again. That means that in Chile, the presidency will be in the hands of a man of the far right whose ancestry is rooted in German Nazism (his father was a member of the Nazi Party who escaped justice through the intercession of the Vatican) and who believes that the dictatorship in Chile from 1973 to 1990 was on balance a good idea.

North of Chile, in Bolivia, the new president Rodrigo Paz Pereria, son of a former president, beat the far right’s Jorge Tuto Quiroga (a former president) in the second round of the election that had no candidate of the left (this after the Movement for Socialism governed Bolivia continuously from 2006 to 2025). Paz’ own party has a minority position in the legislature and he will therefore have to align himself with the Quiroga’s Libre coalition and he will likely adopt a pro-US foreign policy and a libertarian economic policy. Peru will have its own election in April, where the former mayor of Lima —Rafael López Aliaga— is expected to win. He rejects the label far right but adopts all the generic policies of the far right (ultra-conservative Catholic, advocate for harsh security measures, and favours a libertarian economic agenda). Iván Cepeda of Colombia is the left’s likely candidate in their presidential election in May 2026, since Colombia does not permit second terms (so President Gustavo Petro cannot run again). Cepeda will face strong opposition from Colombia’s oligarchy which will want to return the country to their rule. It is too early to say who Cepeda will face, but it might be journalist Vicky Dávila, whose far right opposition to Petro is finding traction in unexpected parts of Colombian society. It is likely that by the middle of 2026, most of the states along the western edge of South America (from Chile to Colombia) will be governed by the far right.

Even as Bolsonaro is in prison, his party, the PL (or Liberal Party), is the largest bloc in Brazil’s National Congress. It is likely that Lula will be re-elected to the presidency next year due to his immense personal connection with the electorate. The far right’s candidate – who will be either Tarcísio de Freitas, the governor of São Paulo state, or one of the Bolsonaro’s (wife Michelle or son Flavio) – will struggle against him. But the PL will make inroads into the Senate. Their control over the legislature has already tightened the reins on the government (at COP30, Lula’s representative made no proposals to confront the climate catastrophe), and a Senate win will further their control over the country.

Common Agenda of the Angry Tide

The Angry Tide politicians who are making waves have many things in common. Most of them are now in their fifties —Kast (born 1966), Paz (born 1967), Venezuelan politician María Corina Machado (born 1967), and Milei (born 1970). They came of age in the post-dictatorship period in Latin America (the last dictatorship to end was in Chile in 1990). The decade of the 1990s continued the economic stagnation that characterised the 1980s —The Lost Decade (La Década Perdida) that convulsed these countries with low growth rates and with poorly developed comparative advantages forced into globalisation. It was in this context that these politicians of the Angry Tide developed their common agenda:

Anti-Communism. The far right in Latin America is shaped by an anti-left agenda that it inherits from the Cold War, which means that its political formations typically endorse the era of US-backed military dictatorships. The ideas of the left, whether from the Cuban Revolution (1959) or from the era of the Pink Tide (after 1998), are anathema to these political forces; these ideas include agrarian reform, state-led finance for industrialisation, state sovereignty, and the importance of trade unions for all workers and peasants. The anti-communism of this Angry Tide is rudimentary, mother’s milk to the politicians and used cleverly to turn sections of society against others.

Libertarian Economic policies. The economic ideas of the Angry Tide are shaped by the Chilean “Chicago Boys” (including Kast’s brother Miguel who was the head of General Augusto Pinochet’s Planning Commission, his Minister of Labour, and his head of the Central Bank). They directly take their tradition from the libertarian Austrian School (Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Murray Rothbard as well as Milton Friedman). The ideas were cultivated in well-funded think tanks, such as the Centro de Estudios Macroeconómicos de Argentina (founded in 1978) and the Chilean Centro de Estudios Públicos (founded in 1980). They believe the State should be a force to discipline the workers and citizens, and that the economy must be in the hands of private interests. Milei’s famous antics with a chainsaw illuminate this politics not only of cutting social welfare (the work of neoliberalism) but of destroying the capacity of the State itself.

Culture Wars. Drawing on the wave of anti-gender ideology and anti-migration rhetoric, the Angry Tide has been able to appeal to conservative evangelical Christians and to large sections of the working class that has been disoriented by changes seen to come from above. The far right argues that the violence in working class neighbourhoods created by the drug industry is fostered by ‘liberalism’ and that only tough violence (as demonstrated by El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele) can be the solution; for this reason, they want to strengthen the military and police and set aside constitutional limitations on use of force (on October 28, the government of Bolsonaro ally Cláudio Castro in Rio de Janeiro sent in the police who killed at least 121 people in Operation Containment). It helps the far right that it adopted various conspiracy theories about how the ‘elites’ have spread ‘globalised’ ideas to damage and destroy the ‘culture’ of their nations. This is a ludicrous idea coming from far right and traditional right political forces that champion full-scale entry of US corporations into their society and culture, and that have no respect for the histories of struggle of the working class and peasantry to build their own national and regional cultural worlds. But the Angry Tide has been able to construct the idea that they are cultural warriors out to defend their heritage against the malignancies of ‘globalisation’. Part of this culture war is the promotion of the individual entrepreneur as the subject of history and the denigration of the necessity of social reproduction.

It is these three elements (anti-communism, libertarian economic policies, and the culture wars) that brings together the far right across Latin America. It provides them with a robust ideological framework to galvanise sections of the population to believe that they are the saviours of the hemisphere. This Latin American far right is backed by Trump and the international network of the Spanish far right (the Foro Madrid, created in 2020 by Fundación Disenso, the think tank of the far right Vox party). It is heavily funded by the old elite social classes, who have slowly abandoned the traditional Right for these new, aggressive far right parties.

Crisis of the Left

The Left is yet to develop a proper assessment of the emergence of these parties and has not been able to drive an agenda that sparkles with vitality. A deep ideological crisis grips the Left, which cannot properly decide whether to build a united front with the traditional right and with liberals to contest elections or to build a popular front across the working class and peasantry to build social power as a prelude to a proper electoral push. The example of the former strategy (the electoral alliance) comes from Chile, where first the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia (Concertación) formed in 1988 to keep out the parties of the dictatorship from power and second the Apruebo Dignidad formed in 2021 that brought Gabriel Boric of the centrist Broad Front to the presidency. But outside Chile, there is little evidence that this strategy works. The latter has become harder as unionisation rates have collapsed, and as uberisation individualises the working class to erode working class culture.

It is telling that Bolivia’s former socialist Vice President Álvaro García Linera looked northwards to New York City for inspiration. When Zohran Mamdani won the mayor’s race, García Linera said, “Mamdani’s victory shows that the left must commit to boldness and a new future”. It is hard to disagree with this statement; although, Mamdani’s own proposed agenda is mostly to salvage a worn-out New York infrastructure rather than to advance the city to socialism. García Linera did not mention his own time in Bolivia, when he tried with former president Evo Morales to build a socialist alternative. The left will have to be bold, and it will have to articulate a new future, but it will have to be one that emerges from its own histories of building struggles and building socialism.Email

Vijay Prashad

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. Tings Chak is the art director and a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and lead author of the study “Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China.” She is also a member of Dongsheng, an international collective of researchers interested in Chinese politics and society.

 

Ecosocialism or extinction: Defending life, building free territories and ecosocialism from and for the peoples

By Various

Published 1 December, 2025

Statement from the Second Ecosocialist Meeting, held in Belém, Brazil, November 2025, with the participation of 99 organizations and more than 350 people, including a strong presence of organizations representing Indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants.

We don’t sell our land because it is like our mother. Our territory is our body. And we don’t sell our body. We don’t sell our mother. We wouldn’t sell it, because it is sacred.
And we start suffering pressures of invasion, pressure from mining, from agribusiness, which has expanded a lot, pressure from logging companies, which are deforesting our territories. And we have been resisting. 
—Auricelia Arapiun, Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB).

We gather at moment of profound capitalist attacks on life, within the framework of the actions organized by the peoples in response to COP30. This meeting has allowed us, once again, to reaffirm that both the rise of the far right and the false solutions proposed by governments that call themselves progressive (yet do not hesitate to privatize the commons or facilitate attacks against peoples and leaders who face daily the consequences of the logic of infinite capital growth in their territories) push us to struggle for a world in which living systems are at the center of all our political constructions, and to forcefully reject any attempt at intimidation.

We have seen an example of what happens when, instead of strengthening the struggles of peoples who defend their territories at the risk of their own lives, the defenders of progressive neoliberalism place themselves at the service of capital and predatory extractivism. The political threats suffered by our Indigenous comrade Auricelia Arapiun during her intervention in our roundtable on the current conjuncture clearly reveal a sector acting within communities to sow fear and fragmentation. Yet we — just as Auricelia expressed in her response to the threat — neither remain silent nor compromise.

The offensive of the far right also manifests in our territories through attempts to violate our sovereignty, reproducing the same logics of subjugation and domination that existed in the past and persist today. Against this imperialist offensive, we, ecosocialists, defend a united front to resist and protect ourselves.

Ecosocialism, as a tool to build another world, has become necessary and urgent. The accelerating destruction of ecosystems’ capacity for reproduction and the neocolonial and imperialist character of the supposed alternatives proposed by the very system that created the current climate emergency represent a threat to our continuity as a species, leading us toward a point of no return.

Faced with this challenge, the only possible path is the coordinated organization of our struggles in order to surpass the capitalist system. The organized struggle of peoples, their resistance to systems of domination, and their progress in building other worlds founded on solidarity, complementarity, and reciprocity — respecting the knowledge and cosmovisions of different peoples as well as their legitimate rights to self-defense and self-determination — form the fundamental basis of our strategy.

These days of debate brought together representatives of peoples in struggle from different regions of Abya Yala [an Indigenous name for the Americas, meaning “Continent of life” —ed.] and other continents, who have raised their voices globally to denounce that capitalist and imperialist extractivisms are causing environmental and human destruction in many territories. It is necessary to strengthen the alliances among peoples in resistance in order to combat this destruction, while consolidating forms of life-production historically developed by the peoples and today threatened by the contamination and appropriation of water, land, and air by transnational corporations and governments.

The voices of Indigenous peoples were central in this gathering, identifying a shared context of colonialism, invasion, dispossession, extractivism, and false solutions — accompanied by policies of annihilation and genocide, which not only kill but also render these peoples invisible through criminalization and persecution. At this stage, we see the relationship between body and territory as a fabric where structural violence resides, but also the struggle for life. This struggle manifests in alternative forms of resistance, through the valorization and articulation of knowledge and cosmologies in which ancestry and nature are inseparable; and through self-defense, self-determination, community life, and the importance of hope and unity across territories.

These struggles for life also appear in ecofeminisms, highlighting the struggles of women and feminized bodies across different territories of Abya Yala as they confront the close and historical relationship between capitalism and the violence inflicted on the land, the territories, and women.

From the various forms of extractivism emerges a violence expressed through the contamination and destruction of land; the predation and theft of our commons; the fragmentation of cultural perspectives; and upon the feminized, impoverished, and racialized bodies of thousands of women of the Global South.

This analysis, in addition to identifying capitalism as the structural origin of all territorial violence, also proposes solutions capable of overcoming these contradictions — such as community water management, food autonomy, self-government, community justice, and a subversive conception of care. This vision of care arises from a structural critique of the neoliberalization of the care discourse, which continues to support the logic of capital. In contrast, we position ourselves in favor of collective and community care for radical transformation.

Eco-unionism is a fundamental component of the ecosocialist struggle. The fight for more and better working conditions, combined with the awareness that the exploitation of the working class and the dispossession of our commons serve the interests of capital and mutually reinforce each other, creates the conditions needed to mobilize and advance the structural causes of the oppressions we suffer under capitalism. In this sense, rejecting fracking in Colombia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and worldwide is a task we assume with responsibility to contribute to building free territories. We know that this will only be possible if trade unions articulate with social, popular, Indigenous, and peasant movements in each country, while maintaining their autonomy in defending territories, life, and its reproduction. Through internationalist solidarity, we commit to promoting spaces that denounce violations of labor, human, and natural rights.

From within this shared fabric, we unanimously cry out: Free Palestine, from the river to the sea; ceasefire in Gaza; and condemnation of the genocidal State of Israel for the massacre of the Palestinian people. A people who resist, who sow, who maintain the conviction to stand tall — and whom we embrace through internationalist solidarity, multiplying global actions of support such as BDS and the Flotilla, examples of grassroots resistance that the State of Israel considers threats.

We also demand that governments in the region break their relations with Israel, as in the case of agreements with Mekorot, Israel’s national water company, which has become an instrument of colonial domination. Water is a common good and, in Palestine, it is used as a political and economic weapon: Israel controls water sources, prevents Palestinians from drilling wells, collecting rainwater, or maintaining cisterns, thereby creating total dependence and a system of water apartheid. Palestine is a laboratory of domination whose techniques spread to other territories, and resistance and solidarity with the Palestinian people must be global. We, ecosocialists of the world, stand with and build active solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right to exist.

Days before the start of COP30, we once again observe that this space is incapable of responding to the needs of territories; on the contrary, it presents itself as a mechanism for the financialization of nature. This is why we reaffirm our denunciation and rejection of the payment of odious and illegitimate debts, and call for the dismantling of the international mechanisms that drive and legitimize them. These mechanisms mortgage our future in exchange for the delivery of strategic goods that capital needs for its unlimited reproduction. It is essential to dismantle the debt system, which subordinates and limits the capacity for a planned exit from the system.

We expect nothing from these spaces that propose projects such as carbon credits, which — just like TFFF — embrace the narrative that the problem is that the commons are not yet fully commodified and that there exists a “market failure” to overcome. We also denounce governments complicit in ecocidal projects, such as the Brazilian government which, only days before COP30 in Belém — an Amazonian territory — approved offshore oil exploitation at the mouth of the Amazon, and which, during COP30, approved the registration of 30 new pesticides.

We reaffirm agroecology as one of the paths that build our ecosocialist strategy. The production of agroecological food, rooted in peasant and Indigenous traditions, is not only an alternative to the dominant agro-food system — whose main actors are agribusiness and commodity production — but also a way to restore and rebuild ecosystems, and to break the alienation between countryside and city, making it fundamental in the fight against climate change. It is crucial to understand that agroecology cannot exist within green capitalism, as it involves, as a political practice, a structural transformation of current relations of production and life.

Recognizing that ecosocialism has for years worked to build manifestos and programs defining this strategy, we discussed the next steps and concluded that there can be no ecosocialism without free territories. We are certain that eco-territorial struggles and the construction of a livable world are the path we must follow, strengthening our initiatives in solidarity, and creating spaces where we can advance the construction of ecosocialism from and for the peoples.

To reach this goal, it is necessary to accumulate victories that show us the way. Carrying out mobilizations and campaigns among the different collectives engaged in building this ecosocialist project is essential to consolidate an integrated and internationalist process of coordinated resistance and shared strategy.

The continuation of this struggle and the construction of the ecosocialist program we need, along with the internationalization of the ecosocialist movement, are tasks we began ten years ago in these gatherings, and which were consolidated with the formation of the Internationalist Network of Ecosocialist Encounters in 2024, following the meeting in Buenos Aires.

Among new initiatives, we announce the Seventh Internationalist Ecosocialist Gathering, to be held in Belgium in May 2026; the International Ecosocialist Seminar, to be held in Brazil as part of the First International Anti-Fascist Conference; and the Third Latin American and Caribbean Ecosocialist Gathering, in 2027, in Colombia. We are convinced that these gatherings must transcend borders and generate common actions of struggle capable of striking simultaneously at the concentrated powers of capitalist extractivism in each territory where we are present.

However, Ecosocialist Gatherings alone are not enough to advance the construction of a program truly rooted in concrete struggles. For this reason, we propose the creation of joint actions and campaigns on Palestine, fossil fuels, mining, debt, and free trade agreements; the defense of water; the struggle against agribusiness; and forest restoration. We also propose mapping which companies are aligned with ecocidal projects in Latin American and Caribbean countries, in order to issue joint denunciations and communiqués. Additionally, we propose organizing territorial ecosocialist meetings prior to the one in Colombia, so that the debates reflect eco-territorialized formulations and proposals.

Finally, we want our space of construction to be living and diverse, capable of generating deep debates among its collectives, in order to think about and question our understanding of ecosocialism — reaffirming that ecosocialism is not a green-tinted socialism, but a proposal for a profound transformation of our relationships, both among ourselves and with nature. It is another way of doing politics, capable of building a new world, dignified and beautiful to live in, for human beings and all other living beings.