Reply: Solidarity

Abstract

Before looking at a solidarity campaign that has emerged in response to the human and labor rights abuses within the multinational-dominated Colombian coal industry, the following briefly traces the history of Latin America solidarity movements within Latin America more broadly. What we suggest is that although the contemporary Colombia solidarity movement grows most immediately from the Central America solidarity movement of the 1980s, it also draws on a wide range of progressive forces that have emerged or reemerged in the 1990s, including a US labor movement that is moving beyond Cold War thinking; an environmental movement that is working from an increasingly global understanding of labor and human rights; a fair trade movement that offers alternative models of development; consumer activism that has begun to take social and environmental justice seriously; and an indigenous-ethnic movement that offers a variety of challenges to both northern activists and neoliberal capitalism. The multiplicity of progressive forces, each with their respective issues, offers a challenge and opportunity to North-South solidarity in general and to our campaign in particular. Central America solidarity had roots in the ways that religious and revolutionary thought began to link with each other in the 1960s and 1970s. After the Cuban revolution, the Second Vatican Council, followed by meetings of the Latin American bishops in Puebla, Mexico and Medellin, Colombia, traced (or revived) a form of progressive Catholicism that asked Catholics to fulfill God's will by working for social justice, on earth, including through revolutionary change. In Brazil in the early 1960s and Chile in the early 1970s, leftist-elected governments opened spaces for popular and labor mobilization and raised hopes for a model of revolutionary change through democratic means. The overthrow of Goulart in Brazil in 1964 and Allende in Chile in 1973 each led to huge waves of repression against the left, and the exodus of left-leaning students, intellectuals and