Beyond the “Duality of the World”: Guerrilla Experience and Political Ecology (Apropos Omar Cabeza’s La montaña es algo más que una inmensa estepa verde)

Abstract

Beyond the “Duality of the World”: Guerrilla Experience and Political Ecology (Apropos Omar Cabeza’s La montaña es algo más que una inmensa estepa verde) Alejandro Quin In his most recent book, Latin Americanism After 9/11, John Beverley provocatively revisits the discussion surrounding the legacy of armed struggle in Latin American political culture; or, more precisely, the question of how the period of revolutionary guerrilla warfare that extends from 1959 to 1990 is remembered today. This periodization corresponds, of course, to the historical cycle that opened with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and came to an end with the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua (Beverley 95–96). Beverley’s own way of addressing this question leads to a critique of what he calls the “paradigm of disillusion” – in short, the tendency, prominent among a number of leftist intellectuals active in the period, to remember the armed struggle as a romantic but ultimately mistaken conception about social change in Latin America.1 It is not my intention to debate in this article Beverley’s claims that “there is a correlation between how one thinks about the armed struggle in Latin America and how one thinks about the nature and possibilities of the new governments of the marea rosada” (95), or that one’s vision of the armed struggle defines one’s position vis-à-vis the “neoliberal hegemony” in the region (98). As many commentators have pointed out, these are highly problematic assumptions leading to broad generalizations and simplistic Manichean readings of the Latin American political field.2 However, I do find intriguing his underlying invitation to [End Page 37] reflect on the tensions, legacies, and contradictions of this turbulent period. After all, even as tragic attempts to overcome inequality and injustice, the events, ideas, and practices surrounding the revolutionary cycle showed a certain uniqueness in their configuration, while also leaving, for better and worse, permanent traces in the social, political, and cultural fabric of many Latin American societies. One could easily acknowledge that, even if the original conditions that brought together guerrilla warfare and revolutionary politics in the 20th century (poverty, exclusion, discrimination, exploitation) have not disappeared and continue to be as pressing as ever, today the belief in the efficacy of armed struggle has certainly lost its force and become impractical as a form of social and political change in the region. Furthermore, some of the ideological assumptions that framed these projects have often been found questionable and denounced as still hierarchical and authoritarian, a top-down model blind to gender and ethnic diversity, imbued with sacrificial messianism, and, as Beverley himself suggests, responsible for “polarizing society” between “friends and enemies” in addition to being at times reckless regarding the loss of human lives (97). It is in fact difficult to refute accusations that leftist guerrilla groups in Latin American favored “a predominantly masculine ethos” which in some cases could “only be fully realized through death” (Franco 121; 127), or that they promoted a vertical conception of the political in which the masculine revolutionary subject “pretends to speak in the name of the collectivity” (Rodríguez 32). Equally problematic is perhaps what María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo has termed as the “development-revolution convergence,” that is, the implicit reproduction of developmentalist models of political subjectivity, human agency, and socio-historical progress within the project of the revolutionary left (4–7).3 A reflection on the potential legacies of the cycle of armed revolution in Latin America (or elsewhere) should certainly remain critical of, and be careful not to repeat or justify, these ideological components. It should not necessarily translate into an apology of violent guerrilla tactics, or (and here we have to depart from Beverley’s perspective) into clear-cut dichotomic subdivisions of contemporary political [End Page 38] configurations or knee-jerk loyalties to constituted governments, be they of the so-called marea rosada or any other kind. Quite the contrary, a reflection on the legacies of this period should strive to find other terrains of inquiry and approach that which has remained marginal and unthought in hopes of actualizing or discarding its potential relevance for the present. The possibilities could...