Resisting Violence

Emotional Communities in Latin America

Morna Macleod, Natalia De Marinis, Morna Macleod, Natalia De Marinis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319663166
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319663173
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book focuses on emotional engagement in academic research with victims of violence and testimonial documentation in Latin America. It examines the recent history of resistance to violence and political repression in Latin America, highlighting the role of emotions in the political sphere. The authors analyse the role of researchers committed to social change and question the mandate of distance and neutrality in academic research in contexts of extreme violence. They use case studies of social resistance to political violence in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia and Chile.

© The Author(s) 2018

Morna Macleod and Natalia De Marinis (eds.)Resisting Violencehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66317-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Resisting Violence: Emotional Communities in Latin America

Natalia De Marinis¹ and Morna Macleod²

(1)

Center for Research and Postgraduate Studies in Social Anthropology, Veracruz, Mexico

(2)

Autonomous Morelos State University, Morelos, Mexico

End Abstract

Introduction

This book maps different experiences in recent Latin American history of ordinary women and men’s organized resistance to violence. Emotions in social movements have been the object of study in recent years (Jasper 2011), and growing attention has been paid to the role emotions play in social organizing, in the ways memories are evoked, testimony is given, and narratives of pain are transmitted (Das 1995; Taylor 2003; Jelin 2002). Our study takes us a step further. Developing the notion of “emotional communities,” a term coined by Colombian anthropologist Myriam Jimeno , we explore the emotions and bonds established between victim-survivors, their political and emotional ties created with committed academics, social activists, and others, the ways in which emotions are embodied, enacted, and performed as a kind of cultural politics (Ahmed 2015) to reach a wider audience . The concept of “emotional communities” is our starting point to rethink experiences from new perspectives and becomes a hub where our concerns as researchers and activists intersect.

Recent history , testimony, and memory work are the cornerstone of our study of emotions in contexts of resisting violence. We analyze various intentionally heterogeneous experiences and the political and affective bonds and alliances created between victim-survivors and ourselves as academics committed to social justice . Authors broaden the concept of emotional communities, adding new nuances, variations, and methodological approaches to think through the intersections between emotions and political action in diverse contexts of local collaborative research. Some experiences took place at the end of last century, but their testimonies have traveled through time acquiring new meanings in Latin America’s current context of violence. Thus, examining, contributing, and adding to the notion of emotional communities is central to this book, in an exploration that takes the reader on a journey to different countries, experiences, periods of time, and forms of violence in Latin America.

Context

Over the past 40 years, Latin America has been wracked by different kinds of violence: military dictatorships, armed conflicts, and more recently, particularly in Mesoamerica, spiraling violence resulting from entrenched impunity and corruption, organized crime embedded in state institutions (Azaola 2012; Buscaglia 2014), and increasing inequality in wealth distribution (Reygadas 2008). During the Cold War, scholars and social actors tended to highlight political violence, isolating it from other forms of everyday violence, and thus not foreseeing the multiple forms of violence that would come into play after peace accords were signed and military regimes ceded power to civilian administrations (Scheper Hughes and Bourgois 2004).

This lack of breadth and foresight pushes us to assume a much broader concept, where political repression constantly interacts with other forms of everyday violence, including Galtung’s trilogy of direct, structural, and cultural violence (2003), as well as Scheper Hughes and Bourgois’ (2004) continuum of violence. A broader understanding of polyvalent violence allows us to understand the way intimate and domestic violence intertwines with public displays of brutality. It also highlights how traditional male socializing and gender roles illuminate the ways violence plays out, particularly among men (Pearce 2006).

The 1959 Cuban Revolution set an example that social change was possible, but political violence throughout the continent curtailed such expectations. Different strategies, including Chile’s 1970 “peaceful road” to socialism and Nicaragua’s armed struggle leading to revolutionary triumph in 1979, were fleeting experiences during which younger generations could yearn for brighter futures. Instead, military dictatorships, torture , imprisonment, forced disappearance, massacres , and scorched-earth national-security policies¹ squashed dreams of equality and social transformation in Latin America.

State violence , exemplified by Southern Cone military dictatorships in the 1970s and internal armed conflict in the 1980s in Central America, coincided with the critical juncture of crisis of the welfare state and the fight for socialism against new forms of increasingly entrenched neoliberal, free-market capitalism. The “drastic turn towards neoliberalism ” affected “both practice and political-economic thought ” (Harvey 2014, 19) through structural adjustment policies, privatization, and dismantling state social responsibility, while further exploiting and globalizing the workforce through free trade agreements, “treating workers and the environment as merchandise ” (Harvey 2014, 89). Although Latin American neoliberalism was piloted in Pinochet’s Chile with the “Chicago Boys” in the mid-1970s, it quickly spread into Central America following the peace accords signed there during the 1990s. Mexico’s Zapatista uprising on precisely the day the North American Free Trade Agreement came into being bridges the old with the new, offering “other ways” of fighting neoliberalism , organizationally and discursively, while experimenting with innovative forms of resistance.

More recently, state violence is increasingly joined by other forms of public violence exercised by (il)legal and (il)licit corporate actors. Narcotics traffickers are closely allied with established private enterprise in money-laundering schemes that involve banks, transport firms, and construction companies, to name a few (Calveiro 2012). Traffickers also closely collude with government institutions, military and security forces, political parties, and leaders, particularly in Mexico and the “northern triangle” of Central America (El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala).

Against this bleak backdrop, the organizing of ordinary people, often led by women in local contexts of violence, and their daily struggles for social justice and human dignity provide glimmers of hope. This book looks at various experiences of organized ordinary people resisting violence and setting examples of hope. Despite dense and apparently impermeable contexts of extreme violence, human agency is possible and paves the road for further organization and human dignity. The volume also records the alliances formed between subject/victims and other actors, particularly committed scholars, and explores how these alliances form emotional communities, where emotions such as indignation, solidarity , empathy , and courage take central stage. These lived experiences of ordinary people provide “sparks of hope,” recent accounts that need to be dug out and restored not only to history but as a groundwork for social justice in the future (Benjamin 2006; Pearce ; and Macleod in this volume). Our focus will be on experiences of resistance to violence over the past 35 years that assume different expressions and contours in Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Chile, in contexts of military dictatorship, armed conflicts, and their aftermath, structural and everyday violence, forced displacement , and organized crime. The authors’ involvement in these experiences ranges from continual close accompaniment to less direct contact in a wider commitment to social justice .

Emotional Communities

The depth and breadth of Jimeno’s notion of “emotional communities” are still in the making, nurtured by different lived experiences, theoretical debates, and reflections about the role of emotions in everyday life and social struggle. This collection of essays explores and enriches the concept by using this lens to reflect upon various experiences in Latin America over time. The notion of “emotional communities” coalesced in research carried out over several years by Jimeno and a team of students from the Center of Social Studies at the National University of Colombia with survivors of a massacre in southwest Colombia in 2001. The massacre forced the Nasa indigenous survivors to displace to lands allotted to them by the government in another part of the Cauca, where they rebuilt their lives and a new community, whi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Resisting Violence: Emotional Communities in Latin America
• 2. Violence, Emotional Communities, and Political Action in Colombia
• 3. Testimony, Social Memory, and Strategic Emotional/Political Communities in Elena Poniatowska’s Crónicas
• 4. Emotional Histories: A Historiography of Resistances in Chalatenango, El Salvador
• 5. Protesting Against Torture in Pinochet’s Chile: Movimiento Contra la Tortura Sebastián Acevedo
• 6. Emotions, Experiences, and Communities: The Return of the Guatemalan Refugees
• 7. Political-Affective Intersections: Testimonial Traces Among Forcibly Displaced Indigenous People of Oaxaca, Mexico
• 8. Affective Contestations: Engaging Emotion Through the Sepur Zarco Trial
• 9. Women Defending Women: Memories of Women Day Laborers and Emotional Communities
• Back Matter