New forms of participation, development and democraty in Latin America

Abstract

This contribution intends to purpose a possible and useful pattern to understand and reconstruct a genealogy of the current global crisis, turning a careful look at the Latin American continent. The need to revisit some South America biographies stems from an attempt to observe the failure of global neo-liberal policies since their debut. Since the end of the Seventies, indeed, most of the Southern Cone countries must have been considered open laboratories of the most extreme forms of neoliberalism. In South America, in particular, the unconditional surrender to this form of economic and sociopolitical organization coincided with the construction of a democratic bloc, shaped by the continuous practice of bio-power by a terrorist state. The law, politics and economics have been enslaved by the neo-liberal paradigm through the legalized and institutionalized violence, whose social and cultural effects (since the early nineties, also the economical ones) have been devastating. The Latin American countries have been precursor in experiencing the failure of Friedmanite theories and have endured a double form of impunity: the one linked to human right violations, which have been committed by the dictatorships, and the one linked to the social consequences of neoliberal economic policies. In the previous years, rarely the Latin American continent has been considered a possible case study compared to the political, economic and social strategies, which have been fielded by institutional actors and civil society. In spite of the same crisis, which is facing the West today, passed in North America backyard almost a decade ago.