Focus: Latin America's trade union landscape

Abstract

ers in the political coalitions that controlled the State. For example, the General Confederation of Workers, in Argentina, and the Confederation of Mexican Workers became the strongest pillars, respectively, of the Peronist Party and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Venezuela, Argentina and Mexico had strong labour movements closely allied to the ruling political parties during the mid / late 20th Century. Both Brazil and Argentina provided for a State-imposed, top-down trade union structure. Cuba’s state socialism provided an ideological counterpart but it also built union structures in close alliance with the State. While these models incorporated trade unionism within certain parameters they also restricted union rights, insisting that public sector workers organise separately, or restricting public sector organising rights. Public sector unions in Brazil, for example, had no legal framework for organising or bargaining in this period1 . With the restoration of democracy and the 1988 Constitution public sector unions in Brazil then acquired a broad sweep of Constitutional rights, although due to a lack of legal enactments the courts have subsequently chipped away at these freedoms, creating an overall much more complex pattern than in the private sector. These models produced at first growth and stability, but ultimately debt, inflation, and corruption. Military rule of one form or another followed corporatism in several countries. Towards the latter half of the 20th Century neoliberal market reforms began to be implemented as debt-ridden corporatist economies stalled and countries experimented with, or were forced to accept, IMF-promoted strategies such as privatisation and liberalisation. Where these reforms saw unemployment rise and social benefits fall, matched with the loss of food and energy subsidies , social unrest followed, and was put down brutally in a last gasp of corporatist authoritarianism , as in Venezuela in 1989, when police equipped with what the Inter-American Court of Human Rights described as ‘assault weapons’, ended a protest demonstration by killing at least 276 people, including seven children. In other countries throughout the region violence and conflict also continued as wealthy land-owners and right-wing interests (in some cases back up by US military intervention) clashed with leftist guerrilla movements seeking to promote revolutionary socialism. These conflicts produced dreadful violence and in many cases have now subsided (Colombia’s paramilitaries have – in theory if not in practice – disbanded, and both of the country’s guerrilla movements are now negotiating with the authorities in a peace process). Since the late 1990s the region has experimented with a distinctive blend of socialist politics, dubbed ‘21st Century Socialism’, and promoted A long history underwrites conflict between landless peasants, indigenous coca farmers, traditional miners, and multinational companies and the State INTERNATIONAL union rights Page 24 Volume 23 Issue 1 2016 DANIEL BLACKBURN is the Director of ICTUR. He holds an MA in human rights and globalisation and has worked on international trade union rights for nearly two decades, prior to which he qualified as a barrister T he regional power balance in the Americas, long tilted towards the North, is changing: Brazil, despite a troubled recent past that saw the country experience economic stagnation and a crisis sufficient to warrant an IMF loan has been on a relentless upwards trajectory, and is the world’s seventh largest economy. Argentina, which defaulted on debt repayments, similarly posted extraordinary economic recoveries over recent years, and both have been notable for their efforts to increase social spending and to tackle serious problems of poverty. Two stark facts about the history of the Americas are key to understanding the evolution of the modern region. The first of these is that the region was largely settled by forceful conquest: in distinct waves, indigenous peoples’ communities were decimated, and their land claims buried beneath the complexity of European legal and commercial manoeuvring. Many were brought to the Americas against their will as part of the transatlantic slave trade: more slaves were brought to Brazil than to any other country or region; Brazil was also the last nation in the Western hemisphere to formally abolish slavery in 1888. These histories underwrite contemporary disputes between movements of landless peasants, indigenous coca farmers, traditional and artisanal miners, and the modern nation State and multinational resource extraction and land...