Learning from Latin America

Abstract

Latin Americans working at the community level would not use the term ‘community development’. They would find it a little vacuous, empty of the political content which communities need to ‘develop’, or as they might put it: gain voice and power, challenge inequalities and struggle for social justice. But Latin Americans, it might be argued, face extreme problems. Why might other parts of the world wish to learn from the region, given its particular social character and political histories? Latin America remains one of the most unequal regions in the world although most countries of the region (apart from Haiti) are in the lower middle and upper middle income World Bank ranking. An estimated 181 million (33.2 percent of the population) live in poverty and seventy-one million of these (12.9 percent) in extreme poverty or indigence (Notas de Cepal, 2008). The region is second only to South Africa in levels of crime and violence (UNOCD, 2008). It has a long history of oppressive state violence and particularly over the last two decades, urban social violence. It also has a history of revolutionary struggle in rural and urban areas, as guerrilla organizations have tried, sometimes successfully (Cuba, Nicaragua) but mostly not, to mobilize the poor against wealthy elites. Democratization processes in the 1980s and 1990s largely brought armed insurgencies to an end, except in the case of the protracted civil war in Colombia, where little progress has been made towards real social and political change. In Mexico, the Zapatistas launched an armed uprising in