Frente De Research Articles

La política exterior de Alberto Fernández (2019-2023): Legitimidad, políticas internas y deuda externa

This article analyzes the foreign policy of the Fernández government in Argentina from its beginning on December 10, 2019, until December 2023. It aims to study the positions and decisions adopted by the government of Frente de Todos, considering different aspects as conditioning factors of the course of international policy. The hypothesis developed in this article is that the main tension has been to reconcile the content of the electoral pact that brought the government to power with the requirements implied by the renegotiation of the debt with the IMF. The political internalities that characterized the public administration in all areas were also expressed in foreign policy.

Memoryscapes of liberation: activist mnemonic labour in the queer press

ABSTRACT In this article, I will explore the role of memory in the context of homosexual liberation movements. I will do this through the lens of the queer press, which will serve as a doorway for the exploration of activist mnemonic labour. Activists undertake mnemonic labour to craft narratives that weave together historical oppression and resistance with hopes for a better future. These narratives are used to motivate and sustain activists in their present struggles. The queer press helps spread narratives across borders and creates shared memoryscapes for activism. My proposal is to view memoryscapes as schemata that inform activist mnemonic labour. On one hand, memoryscapes offer a shared purpose and direction for activists spread across different countries. On the other hand, they serve as arenas for mediation and comparison, linking distinct histories from diverse social groups and revealing their shared threads. This turns memory into a resource for building alliances across borders, and among different political and social groups. I will adopt this perspective to study two Argentinian homosexual liberation groups from the 1960s-70s: Nuestro Mundo and Frente de Liberación Homosexual (FLH). I will explore activist mnemonic labour on Nuestro Mundo’s bulletins and the FLH’s periodicals: Homosexuales and Somos. I will focus on two main aspects: (1) how activists adapt transnational narratives to the local context, and (2) how Argentinian activists weave narratives that blend historical oppression and resistance with visions of a different future.

Revolutionary State-Making in Dar es Salaam: African Liberation and the Global Cold War, 1961–1974 by George Roberts

A bomb inside a parcel bearing stamps from Moscow tragically ended Eduardo Mondlane’s life in 1969. He was forty-nine. After being educated in Portugal and the United States, and teaching at Syracuse University, he was living with his American wife and their children in a suburb of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s capital. Mozambique was still a colony of Portugal, and Mondlane, immensely likable, tall, imposing, and with a formidable presence, was the leader of Frente de Liberação de Mozambique (frelimo), a Soviet-backed liberation movement that had training bases in Tanzania and guerillas in the field against the decaying Portuguese dictatorship.The Soviet stamps were false flags. The Tanzanian police have never made arrests, but they determined that the bomb was constructed in Dar es Salaam (two others were found) and inserted into Mondlane’s mailbag by a frelimo worker. Apartheid South Africa, China, the Soviet Union, and Portugal might each have had reasons for assassinating Mondlane. So would more radical rivals within frelimo. Portugal was an obvious suspect, but eliminating Mondlane would have paved the way for a more strident antagonist to assume control of frelimo (which is exactly what occurred). Or private Mozambican business interests close to dictator Salazar may have arranged the detonation. Tanzanian officials who disliked Mondlane were also implicated.The mystery remains. But Mondlane’s death greatly transformed his own country’s liberation trajectory and, arguably, led to a civil war within independent Mozambique and the descent into corruption that now consumes the nation. Mondlane’s removal also preceded similar kinds of suspicious losses in other Tanzanian-based liberation movements, especially within the Zimbabwe African National Union (zanu), as well as atrocities amid the training camps of all of the southern African guerrilla contingents.The examination of Mondlane’s demise is this book’s most significant contribution to the workings of anti-colonial machinations in one of its main African hubs. But the book has much more of value to modern African history and politics.Supporting the liberation of Africa was the guiding star of Tanzania’s “front-line” policy under its Afro-socialist founding president, the amiable and charismatic Julius Nyerere. frelimo was but one of Nyerere (and Tanzania’s) many anti-colonial causes. Tanzania had won its independence from Britain in 1961 without much of a struggle. Thereafter it served as the safe haven and operational base for the South African African National Congress (anc), zanu, Namibia’s South-West African People’s Organization (swapo), and frelimo, among other less successful nationalist groups.Nyerere’s backing and the support of his sometimes-divided government was critical to the maturing and ultimate success of the armed struggles in all of these eventually independent countries—even distant Namibia. Nyerere shepherded zanu particularly, even when Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda, his close collaborator, preferred the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (zapu), a rival Zimbabwean movement.Roberts’ well-researched book is about the interplay of the various liberationists and ruling party Tanzanians from its own independence to the fall of the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal. There are important discussions of Tanzania’s transforming itself into the “spearhead of Third World revolution.” Tanzania, writes Roberts, “routinely adopted the most radical stances toward questions of anticolonial liberation on the international stage” (10). Indeed, as the author explains in several places, and fully explores in a very salient chapter on the Arusha Declaration of 1972, “Revolution beyond its [own] borders went hand in hand with revolution within them …” (10). Ujamaa (family community togetherness, in the sense of brotherhood) and rural transformation rather than heavy industrialization became the emphasized pathways to an envisaged prosperity and development that never matured. Millions of peasants were relocated, nomads gathered in clusters, and plantations nationalized. Media freedom was also eliminated; a very important chapter details how the press was curtailed, and then made subservient to the new nation.The state became more and more authoritarian, as this book demonstrates. Indeed, Roberts says that Nyerere’s promotion of anticolonial liberation was closely connected to its accelerating authoritarianism (15). As well, Roberts shows how authoritarianism had its internal critics, and how the early indigenous local founding political elites were replaced by more pliant “second generation” leaders—how Oscar Kambona and Paul Bomani, to give two examples, were superseded as the state drifted away from its early democratic roots.Because Roberts chose to focus on Dar es Salaam rather than Tanzania, this book is less a political history of Tanzania than it is a series of loosely related—but stimulating and intelligently crafted—essays on how Tanzania altered internally (from idealism to cynical statism) while simultaneously (and at some substantial cost to itself) helping to free southern Africa from white domination.

The CONCP in Southern Africa and the OAU’s Liberation Committee: Settling Internal Disputes for the Independence of Angola and Mozambique

An important but surprisingly neglected player in the history of the struggle for independence in the African Portuguese colonies is the Conferência das Organizações Nacionalistas das Colónias Portuguesas (CONCP), an umbrella organisation uniting the Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC), for Guinea Bissau, the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA), for Angola, the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo), for Mozambique and the Movimento de Libertação de São Tomé e Príncipe (MLSTP), for São Tomé e Príncipe. Founded in Casablanca in 1961, the CONCP was not a participant in military action, but it strengthened the movements’ ideological cohesion and international diplomacy. Its most controversial goals were perhaps the settlement of internal divisions among the nationalists of Angola and Mozambique and the endorsement of the MPLA and Frelimo as the sole legitimate liberation movements in their countries. To this end, it also established a strategic relationship with specific nationalist movements in southern Africa opposing the white minority regimes and with the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) Liberation Committee. After its second conference, held in Dar es Salaam in 1965, the CONCP intensified its pressures to secure the MPLA and Frelimo exclusive recognition and support by the OAU, but it was successful only in the second case.

Toward a Trans* Masculine Genealogy in South America

Toward a Trans* Masculine Genealogy in South America

Experiencia de doce médicos recién graduados al frente de un hotel sanitarizado durante la crisis COVID-19

Experiencia de doce médicos recién graduados al frente de un hotel sanitarizado durante la crisis COVID-19

Simango, Gwenjere and the Politics of the Past in Mozambique

The fractious history of Mozambique’s anti-colonial movement remains politically charged, just as in other post-colonial states where opposition movements have challenged the ruling party’s exclusive claim to the legacy of national liberation. This article examines the debates over the legacy of the former Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo) vice-president Uria Simango and the Catholic priest Mateus Gwenjere, who continue to be denounced as traitors by the current Frelimo government, and of the protests against the Frelimo leadership by student exiles at the Mozambique Institute in Dar es Salaam in 1967–68. I argue that, for critics of the current government, the figures of Simango and Gwenjere represent a vision that is opposed to the direction taken by Frelimo after Simango was ousted from the leadership in 1969. The events surrounding the protests provide a basis for a narrative about the supposedly exclusive and undemocratic character of the current regime. As Frelimo remains entrenched in power through violence and patronage, the opposition contestation of the official history can be seen as an appeal for a more inclusive imagining of the nation, valorising historic Frelimo figures denigrated by the official version of history, while not challenging the centrality of Frelimo in Mozambique’s liberation.

Cine político en México (1968–2017) ed. by Adriana Estrada Álvarez, Nicolás Défossé and Diego Zavala

Reviewed by: Cine político en México (1968–2017) ed. by Adriana Estrada Álvarez, Nicolás Défossé and Diego Zavala María Luisa Ruiz Adriana Estrada Álvarez, Nicolás Défossé, and Diego Zavala, editores. Cine político en México (1968–2017). Peter Lang, 2019. Pp. 350. ISBN 978-1-43315-912-1. The second book in Peter Lang’s Transamerican Film and Literature Series, Cine político en México (1968–2017) is ambitious and expansive. Written in Spanish, it critically addresses the role of politically engaged cinema and video in contemporary Mexican culture. Using the 1968 student movement as its point of departure, the edited volume suggests that film and video provide creative spaces in which the complex and challenging social, political and cultural changes in Mexico can be narrated and challenged. Ultimately, the editors assert, cinema has great potential to imagine a more peaceful and democratic nation. With its diverse selection of academic articles and first-person accounts, its inclusion of works by less-known film makers and artists, the volume deftly establishes an important [End Page 127] connection between a community of creators and academics and highlights the relationship between social and cultural movements and the historical, political and social dimensions of cinema and video in Mexico. The book is organized into two sections. The first, titled “Miradas,” uses 1968 as its starting point—a politically and cinematographically significant year for Mexico in which several events have left an indelible mark on its collective national memory—. The 1968 Olympic Games (hosted for the first time by Mexico), the student activists who demanded changes by the entrenched PRI political machine, and the Mexican government’s brutal response to the student movement that was later named “La Noche de Tlalteloco” continue to be, as Carlos Monsiváis asserted, días de guardar. The introductory essay considers important documentaries, films and multimedia efforts that try to make sense of the state violence perpetrated against the student activists. It also discusses Héctor Bonilla’s influential film about the event, Rojo amanecer (1989). Essays in this section also provide critical discussions of other key moments in Mexico’s national history, including one that looks at the documentaries that shine a light on the state violence and repression suffered in San Salvador Atenco in 2006. This essay discusses the documentary films produced by the Frente de pueblos en defensa de la tierra about this event, in which state policemen were brought in to brutally put down protests stemming from the eviction of 40 flower vendors, all linked to a land-rights group, from their market stalls. Two people were killed, hundreds were arrested, including dozens of women who reported being sexually abused by the police. The author argues that these documentary films can help create space in Mexico’s national imaginary for indigenous voices and, more importantly, serve as a way to build solidarity among marginalized communities who challenge hegemonic economic systems and hierarchies of power. Many of these pivotal events in Mexico’s recent political history have been narrated not just on film, but also on video and other forms of visual media (multimedia, documentaries, and more recently, YouTube and social media). As Claudia Magallanes Blanco, author of one of the chapters, affirms, because of relatively easy access to handheld cameras, the ability to quickly make copies of a film, and ease in distribution, in the 1980s and 1990s video becomes a democratic medium by which marginalized groups and non-corporate interests can contest official narratives. Other articles in this section include analyses of films and documentaries related to the 1994 Zapatista movement, life under NAFTA, and the ways narcotraffic has been narrated in film, documentary photography and video-installations. The second section, titled, “Experiencias,” provides readers with the reflections and personal stories of filmmakers. These considerations include one by cinematographer and filmmaker Diego Quemada Díez, in which he describes the inspiration behind, the creation and the reception of his 2013 achingly lyrical film Jaula de oro, a film which recounts the journey thousands of migrants take on the train, dubbed La bestia, from Central America, through Mexico to the United States, told from the point...

La cancelación del proyecto del Nuevo Aeropuerto Internacional de México (NAIM): resistencia socioambiental en el lago de Texcoco

This article explores how the Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra, a peasant organization from the metropolitan area of the Valley of Mexico, created a political space to protest against the construction of Mexico City’s New International Airport (NAIM). It describes how a traditional peasant movement managed to renew its political struggle by incorporating a socio-environmental discourse, based on the protection of water sources, the fight against climate change and the conservation of a system of wetlands that sustain the life of all the inhabitants of Mexico’s Central Basin.

Ecología política del sufrimiento hídrico: El caso del Nuevo Aeropuerto Internacional Felipe Ángeles y el Frente de Pueblos Originarios por la Defensa del Agua

This article analyzes the relationship between megaprojects, water suffering and political action, from the Felipe Angeles International Airport and the Front of Original Peoples for the Defense of Water (FPODA). Are explained the political-economic power relations in the construction of this macro-work and how it is a threat to the Cuautitlan-Pachuca aquifer and the community water supply wells of the nearby indigenous peoples. Are analyzed the subjects’ experiences of water suffering, how the FPODA arises, their actions and discourses. For this, official documents and data, journalistic notes, Geographic Information Systems and some testimonies are used, with the intention of enriching the field of political water ecology in Mexico.

‘Until every cage is empty’: frames of justice in the radical animal liberation movement

ABSTRACT The Radical Animal Liberation Movement (RALM) in North America, including the notorious Animal Liberation Front (ALF) of Canada and the United States and the Frente de Liberación Animal (FLA) in Mexico, is a direct action-focused movement which has been condemned and heavily repressed by media, legislators, and animal industry lobbyists. The question of whether the criminalization of RALM activists is justified or not has been the source of lively activist and academic debate. Yet what is less often examined is how RALM activists perceive justice. Drawing on Pelton’s conception of frames of justice and Foucault’s understandings of intersubjective and diffuse power, this qualitative content analysis of 268 online documents from RALM activists explores how notions of just deserts and life affirmation justice are reflected through activists’ perspectives on innocence and criminality, solidarity, and critiques of the formal criminal justice system.

Right-Wing Populism and Evangelicalism in Guatemala: the Presidency of Jimmy Morales

In the fall of 2015, Jimmy Morales—an outspoken evangelical Christian, comedian, and well-known local TV actor—won the presidential elections in Guatemala. In what was a surprise victory, Morales succeeded as the candidate of the small, conservative, and right-wing Frente de Convergencia Nacional (FCN-Nacion). This article seeks to (a) illuminate the Christian background and political-military network behind Jimmy Morales, (b) explain the overlap between the Christian evangelical and right-wing discourses (specifically, Morales’ anti-establishment rhetoric; his claims to fight the corrupt elite; his defense of the traditional family; his support for the death penalty; and his opposition to same-sex marriage, LGTBQ rights, and abortion), and (c) to understand the broader socio-historical context of his presidency. Why did Guatemalans elect as their president a right-wing, evangelical entertainer with almost no previous political experience? This final inquiry includes an examination of earlier presidencies, including those of the neo-Pentecostal, right-wing dictator General Efrain Rios Montt and the Protestant President Jorge Serrano Elias.

Los vencedores (derrotados) de la Guerra Civil: Falangistas en el cine. Imaginario y representación

After the end of the Spanish Civil War, the New State was constituted. The different families which had concurred in supporting the cause of the rebelled militia against the Second Republic became what has been called Franco´s regime. It is from those war victorious families that became, without a doubt, unusually prominent the Falange, known as “the Movement” (from 1937 as “Traditionalist Spanish Falange” and of the “JONS (Committee of the National-Syndicalist Offensive)”, after its unification with the Carlists), which had turned from a minority fascist party to one of masses in the post-war period. The military triumph led them to try to impose their political ideology through culture and mass media. The representation of the war and the ideology of the Falange in the film industry is clearly going to show us its short life and its quick defeat against the conservatism of Franco´s regime, through a series of selected films arranging from Frente de Madrid —Carmen fra i rossi— (1940) to La prima Angelica (1974). Jose Antonio´s Falange won the war but got lost in the peace; therefore, it would focus on being the social base of Franco´s regime (through its feminine section), albeit divested of everything which made it the first Spanish fascist party.

El discurso del Partido Comunista de Chile sobre la democracia, 1956-1964

The article examines the discourse elaborated by the Communist Party of Chile regarding democracy and the problem of its participation in what they considered to be the institutions of bourgeois democracy. The period that ranges from 1956 to 1964 was crucial for the Communist because, after the failure of the Popular Front, they developed a new political guideline, the Frente de Liberacion Nacional (National Liberation Front) and adopted the pacific road to socialism as part of their strategy. It is argued that, thanks to these changes, the Communist Party was able to effectively integrate to its discourse some elements of representative democracy, even when they were alien to its Marxist theory.

Las publicaciones sobre la organización del Frente de Juventudes (1940-1961). Adiestramiento de las mujeres en las actividades en la naturaleza”

Este trabajo estudia la diferente orientación que promulgaba la Falange, único partido admitido legalmente, en la formación masculina y femenina en el ámbito de las actividades de “Aire Libre” durante el periodo de la organización del Frente de Juventudes (1940-1961). Para ello, se analiza la información que aparece publicada en leyes, revistas y diferentes publicaciones de la época. Los resultados ponen de manifiesto la trasmisión de la ideología del “movimiento” donde el papel de la mujer quedaba relegado a un segundo plano, con un marcado contenido estereotipado y con una función de apoyo al espacio prioritario que ocupaban los hombres.

Revista Somos y la militancia homosexual en los '70

Within the context of political, social and cultural turbulence that characterized the 1960’s and 1970’s, at the global, continental, and more specifically, in Argentina; magazine Somos. It was a dissemination organ of the Frente de Liberacion Homosexual (FLH). This research approach will seek to review the publication with the objective of establishing it as a central viewer of aspects that surrounded the FLH. For that, we will start from a historical revisionism, antecedents, documents and manifests, ideological slopes, organizational structure and its dialogue with Organizaciones Armadas and cells of the Triple A aligned to Nacionalismo Catolico in the voice of the magazine El Caudillo. The corpus of this paper is a journalistic platform of eight bimonthly editions that go from December of 1973 to January of 1976.

El Patronato de Misiones Pedagógicas, el Frente de Juventudes y la Sección Femenina: Instituciones clave en la historia de la educación musical en la enseñanza primaria española

Music education in Spain was regulated and structured in the late twentieth century by means of the Educational Act LOGSE (1990) although, previously, there were several attempts to start an educational musicality among children and youth. In the following pages we show a brief but clarifying, context of educational legislation about music education produced during the twentieth century focused primarily on the Spanish primary education. The main objective of this article is to highlight the performances of acculturation and music education carried out during the first third of the last century. For that, we want to emphasize the great innovation that even on a European level was carried out, on the one hand, by the Patronato de Misiones Pedagogicas, driven by the second Spanish Republic, under the ideology of Free Institution of Education and on the other hand, by the Seccion Femenina, with a decisive role played by both itinerant chairs and the professorships Jose Antonio and the Frente de Juventudes, sponsored by the Franco dictatorship. We used as a research method the analysis of information, maintaining objectivity and accuracy in our interpretations showed.

Turismo en espacios de conflicto. Análisis de la puesta en valor del patrimonio de la Guerra Civil Española en la Comunidad de Madrid

For more than a decade, the processes of patrimonialization of spaces and cultural assets of the Spanish Civil War have been strengthened. The Community of Madrid has not been, and is not, alien to this process. Since the creation of the Grupo de Estudios del Frente de Madrid (GEFREMA) in 2002, associations whose objective is to investigate this historical period and its material legacy, research, and patrimonialisation processes in the region have continued to increase. Arganda del Rey, Morata de Tajuña, Guadarrama, Buitrago de Lozoya, Madrid, etc., are some of the places where heritage is already available to citizens and is offered as a tourist resource. This article presents an investigation that analyzes the different spaces of the Spanish Civil War that have recovered in the region of Madrid. Based on the museological theories, which provides the communication and interpretation of the heritage, and the methodologies for the collection of quantitative and qualitative data, we have evaluated the different places in which this heritage has been valued in order to be able to Define its main variables and also be able to build proposals for its future and for future interventions elsewhere.

Dictatorial Rule and Sexual Politics in Argentina: The Case of the Frente de Liberación Homosexual, 1967–1976

Abstract The Frente de Liberación Homosexual (FLH, 1967–1976) was the first political movement of homosexual men in Argentina. Despite its short life span, this organization set the ground for future developments. The FLH emerged in the context of increasing authoritarianism rather than being the result of a transition to democracy. The relationship with homophobic Peronists and left-wing traditions was, paradoxically, crucial for the emergence of the FLH. Most homosexual activists came from the Left, and they understood homosexual liberation as one aspect of the struggle against capitalism. These activists were highly critical of anticapitalist politics as it existed in Argentina at the time, but they also actively sought to become allies of the expanding New Left during the period. Eventually, however, the 1976–1983 military dictatorship made all forms of dissidence impossible, and the FLH had to dissolve.

Mediators of Liberation: Eastern-Bloc Officials, Mozambican Diplomacy and the Origins of Soviet Support for Frelimo, 1958–1965

This article draws on recently declassified archival sources in former Eastern-bloc countries to investigate the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique’s (Frelimo) international diplomacy 1958–1965 and to examine how the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) responded to these overtures. The article begins by looking at the development of initial contact between Soviet officials and Mozambican nationalists. The middle-level Soviet officials involved had diverse personal trajectories, but many had prior experience in the international communist movement, and some had fought in the Second World War. These experiences shaped their commitment to ending colonial exploitation and their enthusiastic quest to support ‘progressive’ African nationalists. My account stresses the importance of key interlocutors in shaping initial Eastern-bloc officials’ decisions over which movements to support – emphasising in particular the mediating role played by the trusted figure of Marcelino dos Santos. Dos Santos used his connections with Eastern-bloc countries to facilitate both Frelimo’s rise over rival nationalist movements and Eduardo Mondlane’s ascendance as Frelimo leader. The Frelimo leadership’s successful pursuit of assistance from socialist countries in 1964–65 shows their capacity to leverage the Cold War to their own advantage. The article argues that the Mozambicans in this story, rather than following Moscow’s diktat, were the agents of their own emancipation.