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A New Stage of Insurgencies: Latin American Popular Movements, the Gwangju Uprising, and the Occupy Movement

Grassroots insurgencies are today multiplying across the planet. Not organized by any one party or organization, the current wave of uprisings appears to be derived in opposition to local injustices, yet in significant ways, these various struggle share essential characteristics and prefigure a global revolution with pluralist and decentralized forms. In the 1980s, Asian uprisings were directed against corrupt, “crony” regimes and succeeded in sweeping several dictatorships into the dustbin of history.1 In the same decade, Africans rose against IMFimposed austerity programs, as did Latin Americans who also opposed US imperialism. Today, on all continents, grassroots insurgencies target global capitalism, and the struggles increasingly resemble each other in their internal organization despite national, linguistic, cultural, political, and economic differences. In this article, we seek to portray these similarities to help provide unity to the now fragmented global movement. At first glance, the armed citizens’ uprising that erupted in response to severe military brutality in Gwangju, South Korea beginning on May 18, 1980 may appear to be worlds apart from Latin American social movements and the relatively peaceful protests against the corrupt system benefiting the global financial elite (the 1%) that resulted in occupations of hundreds of public places in the United States last year. The political and cultural contexts of these social movements differ strikingly, and their short-term outcomes have little in common: the US-mandated onslaught of the South Korean military on May 27, 1980 involved tanks, helicopters and guns, resulting in scores of people being killed, wounded, and arrested, while the occupy movement was cleared out of the parks and squares relatively peacefully as winter approached. In Latin America, the February 1989 popular uprising in Caracas (Venezuela) against IMF/WB sponsored program of economy austerity marked the beginning of an extraordinary wave of anti-systemic mobilizations across the region. The spotlight focused on the progressive presidents – the majority in a region not so long ago considered the US backyard – has eclipsed the fact that their way to power was paved by a myriad of subaltern mobilizations.