When Looting Becomes a Right

Abstract

The literature on Latin American social movements has traditionally focused on expressions of protest such as revolutions or large-scale rebellions that openly defied state power and material structures of exploitation. However, largely as a result of the increasing influence of moral-economy theory and the new-social-movements school, in the past decade historians and sociologists have started to explore a broader spectrum of forms of resistance and social organization. This expansion and reorganization of the field rests on three strong assumptions. In the first place, small uprisings and subtle resistance practices seem to reveal the systems of beliefs and understanding of the subaltern classes more vividly and reliably than the rare and historically exceptional processes of outright confrontation. Second, these kinds of collective actions, though in less dramatic and deliberate ways than revolutions and rebellions, can undermine both political legitimacy and the conditions of material reproduction of different systems of exploitation. Third, the trajectory of Latin American social movements during the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the widespread discrediting of teleological paradigms concerning the role of the working class and vanguard parties in transforming structures of domination, have prompted scholars to investigate patterns of social contention from the perspective of a wider plurality of collective actors. Thus, under the broad category of popular sectors, groups such as neighborhood associations, grass-roots communities, women, shantytown dwellers, and human rights advocates have gained a privileged space in studies of contemporary Latin American movements (Jelin, 1985; Filguera, 1985; Slater, 1985; Alvarez, 1990; Escobar and Alvarez, 1992). Beyond different theoretical and methodological approaches, many of the current analyses of Latin American protest share the objective of showing the deep meaning of movements and