"Extractive industries, neo-developmentalist and social movements in Latin America

MARISTELLA SVAMPA

Rio de Janeiro

Seminario; Internations Semina. Global Modernity and Social Contestation; 2012

IESP-UERJ

The picture of Latin America is a very contrasting. Latin America?s geography certainly seems to be marked by the emergence and consolidation of progressive governments, many of which aim to transform the state and broaden participatory democracy to implement public policies which tend to work in favour of the conditions of life of the most vulnerable sectors. Such policies are based on a critical debate related to the neoliberalism of the 1990s and ? sooner or later ? make use of a national-popular rhetoric which emphasizes the creation of a popular pole in confronting the major groups of economic power. This national-popular narrative, in which the different countries still show their own individual particularities, nevertheless coexists with a policy which encourages, promotes and confirms the installation of a neo-extractivism model.