The historic victory of Pedro Castillo as elected president of Peru strengthens in geopolitical terms the wing of progressive and left-wing governments and the actions of regional integration of a sovereign and united character in the region.

Beyond the virulent counter-attack that the national and international oligarchy will unleash to block this new emancipatory attempt, the triumph of the relegated people puts a chill on the right-wing restorationist advantage represented by the election of the banker Lasso in Ecuador.

While this is happening on the institutional surface, popular mobilization continues to grow in an unstoppable course despite the pandemic context, reaching the main countries defending the model of intransigent accumulation ordered by capital.

The heroic resistance of the Colombian strike against a criminal government, the resounding victory of the Chilean awakening in the constitutive elections, the avalanche of votes for a rural teacher a little less than unknown in Peru and the great march underway to defend the expressed will at the election ballot box; the mobilization in more than 170 Brazilian cities demanding loud and clear the end of a military government barely covered with a clownish facade, the triumphant return of the peasant-indigenous social movements to the government in Bolivia, even – despite its electoral definition of A regional geopolitical point of view – the relevant role of the indigenous uprising in Ecuador, are all phenomena that are part of this massive rebellion that shakes the hearts of heartless defenders of the status quo.

What does the image mean? Do institutional trends and street politics fit into the same equation? What are the intersections, what are the dissonances? What can we discern in advance?

The circumstantial draws the curtain on the structural.

The rapid, repeated and deadly expansion of Sars-CoV-2 in the region has been a very painful dagger in a social and health fabric disrupted by neoliberalism and only partially recomposed by the progressive governments of the decade that has been won. A decade in which there was no such damping, but rather a deepening of the model where the right administered barbarism, as in Colombia, Peru and Chile.

In addition to the pre-existing misery and globalized precariousness, millions of Latin American families have been added without social confinement, with no other present than that of sharing soup kitchens, with no other future than the difficulty of surviving from day to day by unworthy means. and random jobs.

At the same time, the speculative bank and its controlled multinational companies, especially those in the digital and high-tech sectors, have increased their profits astronomically.

It was not outrage at these structural contradictions, but the reaction to the resulting measures, that sparked the mass street rebellion. The cyclical worsening of neoliberal policy was the straw that broke the camel’s back. But the abuse exposed the use and the spark ignited the powder keg, calling for fundamental transformations.

The generational component

The approximately 160 million young people who live in the region are particularly affected by this panorama of inequalities and lack of a future. Against the backdrop of a systemic formal employment crisis, a tide of young people is flooding the streets with precarious jobs in order to earn a living.

Beyond this basic existential threat, those under 30 – all born in the era of global capitalism – feel the acute contradiction of perceiving the world at hand and, at the same time, of being cloistered in oppressive situations and unable to escape anywhere. They do not believe in the traditional “reasonable” outlets offered to them by an increasingly irrational adult world and seek alternatives, small and large.

Young people are also the privileged victims of discrimination and institutional violence. You only need to be young to be suspicious, which is aggravated and life-threatening if you have dark skin and live in an outlying area.

It is therefore not surprising that they are the ones at the forefront of the great rebellion, faced with the only thing the decadent system has to offer them, savage and brutal repression.

The anti-patriarchal uprising

In this period of general mobilization, the actions of women, especially the youngest, are very relevant. And no wonder. In all segments of social life, they continue to be – albeit for a little longer – the most neglected, discriminated against and violated.

The torn marks of the imposition of the creed of a colonial church still persist in Latin America; the objectification of women as simple reproducers and their exploitation as caregivers persist; archaic and multiple forms of violence such as the criminalization of abortion, feminicide, child and adolescent pregnancy, among many others, still persist.

However, in the general exhaustion of the system, in its absence of answers, the women also found a loophole to resume definitively the anti-patriarchal fight. The progressive and at the same time rapid conquest of spaces marks a historic line of no return: revolutions will be feminist, egalitarian, without any trace of gender discrimination, or they will not be.

The systemic crisis

Thanks to advances in telecommunications, humanity has become a single planetary civilization. The “global village”, in the words of Canadian sociologist Marshall Mc Luhan, is now a tangible reality. In a fully connected system, small variations can cause major changes, as suggested by meteorologist Edward Lorenz, who alluded to the distant effects of “butterfly flight” in his explanations of the chaotic behavior of unstable systems.

For his part, the Argentinian humanist Silo (literary pseudonym of Mario Luis Rodríguez Cobos), notes in his Letters to my friends: “in a closed system, one cannot expect anything other than the mechanics of general disorder. The paradox of the system informs us that in trying to order the increasing disorder, the disorder will accelerate. There is no other way out than to revolutionize the system, by opening it up to the diversity of human needs and aspirations ”.

So the world begins to be understood as a whole. The peoples seek to produce their own local demonstration effects according to their urgent needs, but with the intuition that the impact obtained will go further, positively influencing the general historical evolution.

The current Latin American rebellions, linked to those in other parts of the world, are part of this search for new and multiple models for humanity as a whole.

Mythical rebellion

Under the contingent social orography emerges a powerful cultural substrate that seeks to express itself. The ancient myths, which have many times animated the fight against collective humiliation, today stoke the interior fires of peoples.

Even under the avatar of a mixed race demography corseted in Eurocentric matrices, historical memory struggles to displace five hundred years of colonial domination, two hundred years of imported republicanism and exclusion and more than a century of supremacist imperialism. .

The Indo-American and Afro-descendant roots that greed and cruelty tried to bury, grow today with indomitable energy demanding denied justice, freedom, recognition, reparation and effective self-determination to choose their own destiny. Above all, it asks for the space necessary to take its place in the global multicultural interweaving which is already beginning to take shape.

In the current rebellion, the violent foundations of fictitious borders and imposed statutes are fading to make way for a new intercultural dialogue towards the dream of a future universal human nation.

The end of uncertainty

It is now possible to get out of the time of uncertainty. The future, although in its most basic contours, is already revealing some of its most salient contours.

The solid establishment of new founding values ​​is beginning to take place in the consciousness of large sectors of society.

Participatory democracy to replace the failing representativeness, gender parity, the need for a universal basic income to guarantee existence as well as a new and fair redistribution of the social product;

Plurinationality instead of supremacism and racism, concern for the common home instead of the absurdity of excessive consumerism, freedom of choice and diversity instead of rigid monolithism, decentralization and the dissolution of monopolies are all part of it. this new common sense.

The use of science and technology for the exclusive benefit of all mankind without restriction, nuclear disarmament, unrestricted respect for human rights, respect for the self-determination of peoples, solidarity and cooperation as a guiding principle of relations between nations, the repudiation of violence and discrimination as a maxim of life, are some of the main components of this new humanist moral contract in the making.

A contract that will place the species in a new cycle of evolutionary growth. Adjusting the transformative action to this permanent sensitivity is the task.