Keywords

Introduction

Scholarship reviewing the relationship between state repression and mobilization is plentiful in both sociology and political science; most of this research explores cases in the global North, but there is also a vast literature that examines the role of repression and mobilization in Latin America (e.g., Brockett 1991, 2005; Eckstein 2001; Almeida, 2003, 2008b; Carey 2006; Trejo 2012) . State repression towards mobilization is a particular form of political control in which “the purpose of the control is to prevent or diminish direct and noninstitutional challenges to social, cultural, and/or political power (i.e., protest, activism, and social movements)” (Earl 2011, p. 262) . Therefore, state repression against mobilizations can be manifested in very diverse ways that range from nonviolent and covert to violent and overt forms (e.g., harassment, censorship, arrests, violent threats, police violence, disappearances, massacres), can be carried out by different actors (e.g., armed forces, police forces, death squads) at different levels (national, state, and local), and its characteristics can vary by the type of regime in which it occurs (e.g., democratic, semi-democratic, authoritarian) and/or the particular opponent that the state is trying to repress (i.e., do they pose a serious threat to the regime or can they be coopted) amongst others .

Given the myriad ways in which this relationship can be (and has been) explored, I use the sociopolitical history of the region to divide this essay into two periods. The chapter first explores the pre-democratization era (1900s–1980s), where most mobilization was undertaken by social movements with a desire to transform the authoritarian and highly corporatist governments into more flexible, democratic, representative ones. Mobilizations occurring from 1900 through the 1920s were mainly struggles to gain labor and agrarian rights. These efforts were stalled in the 1930s–1950s by various authoritarianisms brought on in response to the effects of the Great Depression on the region, and the 1960s–1980s were marked by struggles against long-term dictatorships and entrenched authoritarian corporatist regimes. The state repressive responses to these challenges were highly coercive, usually swift, and sometimes brutal, which led to the radicalization of many movements, the appearance of guerrillas in several countries (Wickham Crowley 2001) , and ultimately to a wave of transitions to democracy .

The second part of the chapter explores state repression and mobilization during the post-authoritarian period (1990s—present). Within this period, as most Latin American states completed their transitions to electoral democracies, the more overt, harsh, coercive forms of state repression diminished, giving way to less severe forms of repression (e.g., more professionalized police forces, the use of nonlethal weapons). As a result, the opportunities for mobilization began to open, resulting in the rapid growth of social rights movements and identity-based movements (e.g., Eckstein and Wickham Crowley 2003; Cleary 2007; Stahler-Sholk et al. 2008) , and movements in response to globalization and neoliberal policies (e.g., Johnston and Almeida 2006; Petras and Veltmeyer 2011) .

Repression and Mobilization in Latin America During the Authoritarian Period

As Eckstein aptly notes, “twentieth century Latin American history has been punctuated by shifts between authoritarian and democratic rule” (2001, p. 11). However, these swings have mostly been between authoritarianism and highly populist and/or corporatist low-intensity democracies (Gills 2000) . This created an atmosphere where civil society had brief windows of political opportunity (McAdam 1982; Tarrow 1998) to generate ties and networks, form and coordinate civic organizations, and organize nonviolent mobilizations during the periods of low-intensity democratization. Moreover, those same structures could be used for more radical and violent repertoires of contention (Tilly 1986) when regimes would close opportunities by becoming even more authoritarian and repressive, as Almeida (2003) fittingly notes while examining the case of El Salvador. This pattern of political opportunity-based mobilization and threat-induced mobilization (Goldstone and Tilly 2001) occurs in most Latin American countries during the twentieth century, with some states more efficiently destroying the organizational capacity for dissent than others during the authoritarian periods—mainly due to the strength of their military and control over their territory (Goodwin 2001; Ortiz 2007, 2013) .

Incipient Nations: Social Movements and State Repression After Independence

Between 1900 and 1920, Latin America was a region of emergent nations that had gained their independence in the previous century from major colonial powers. Its precarious regimes were trying to build political and social institutions to strengthen their countries, and fend off the interventionist policies of the USA and its expansionist Monroe Doctrine (Vanden and Prevost 2009) . Most nations were still weak, unstable, or in turmoil. They had highly contested sociopolitical institutions in which the divided political elites were trying to enforce their newly acquired power (Wiarda and Kline 2007) , and most were still operating under economically exploitative systems created by the legacies of colonial structures (Rock 1994; Thomas 2012) . Some countries, such as Mexico (1876–1910) and Venezuela (1908–1935),established personalistic dictatorships. Several, such as Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, and Brazil, established oligarchic low-intensity democracies. Others, including Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, were occupied by US Marines .

At the same time, the struggles of the burgeoning organized labor movement in the late part of the nineteenth century, and the Russian Revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century, had a tremendous impact in the organization and formation of labor and peasant movements in Latin America. This environment fostered popular dissent in the form of peasant and labor related protests—fueled by anarchist and socialist tendencies in some countries—that were generally met with severe state repression and a growing tendency of states towards authoritarianism and corporatism (Thomas 2012) .

For example, in 1907 in Argentina, the recently founded Federación Obrera Regional Argentina (FORA)—an anarchist workers’ union—led 140,000 families in a no-payment protest to oppose the lack of dwelling regulations in vecindades amid rising rent prices and terrible living conditions in Buenos Aires (Godio 2000) . The response of the Argentine authorities was to use the police and firefighters to violently evict all protesting workers’ families by using pressurized hoses with freezing water to disperse them during the winter months (Godio 2000, p. 147) . This pattern of repression continued until 1909, when the FORA organized a May Day march that was severely repressed by the Buenos Aires mounted police, who fired shots at a crowd of more than 15,000 workers gathered at the Plaza Lorea-killing a dozen workers, injuring another 80, and arresting 16 anarchist leaders in the following days (Schiller 2005) . In response, the FORA decided to call for a general worker’s strike demanding the removal of the police chief, and garnered the support of the Partido Socialista (PS) and the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT). In the following days, the police fired shots at the funeral procession of those killed in the May Day massacre and closed down union shops and offices. In the end, the strike was lifted when the government granted concessions by freeing the arrested workers and labor leaders and reopening the union shops .

In Mexico, in June 1906, more than 2000 mineworkers at an American company operating in Cananea, Sonora demanded the same wages and treatment as their American counterparts. Porfirio Díaz’s rural police opened fire on the Mexican strikers killing 23 and injuring a similar number (Novelo 1980; Cárdenas 1998) . By the third day of the strike, Díaz declared martial law, arrested all the union leaders, and reopened the mining company. On January 7 th of the following year in Veracruz, thousands of workers threw rocks and stood naked in front of the Río Blanco textile factory. Mounted police and military soldiers dispersed the rioting workers who fled to nearby cities, looting houses, and disrupting streetcar service (Gamboa 1991) . The response of the military forces was to open fire against workers and their families, killing around 500 workers, and arresting 200 more (García Díaz 2007) . The Cananea and Río Blanco labor strikes transcended worker’s demands by highlighting the repressive nature of the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, and are widely considered precursor movements to the Mexican Revolution. The worker’s role in the subsequent revolution continued with the creation of the Casa del Obrero Mundial (COM) in 1912, a socialist congregation of workers that supported the Carranza revolutionary faction in exchange for social and economic worker’s rights (Carr 1976; Bizberg and Zapata 2010) . This would mark the beginning of a system of corporatist representation based on clientelistic relationships.

This wave of labor and peasant protests in Latin America intensified between 1917 and 1920. State responses were highly violent and repressive including the use of police and military forces, paramilitary squads, laws restricting labor organization, and suspension of civil liberties in most countries such as Argentina (Adelman 1993) , Bolivia (Klein 1969) , Brazil, (Wolfe 1991) , Chile (Albert 1988) , Colombia (Valencia 1984) , Ecuador (Ycaza 1991) , Honduras (Meza 1985) , Paraguay (Alexander 1965) , Peru (Collier and Collier 1991) , and Uruguay (Sala de Touron and Landinelli 1984) .

The Effects of the Great Depression on Movement and States in Latin America

By the late 1920s, political reformists—aided by a generalized fear of communism among economic elites—began to push for more liberal democratic practices and an incorporation of disenfranchised groups through state intervention policies in most Latin American countries (Calvert and Calvert 1990; Korzeniewitz 2000) . But this increased political incorporation and liberalization was short lived, and the onset of the Great Depression would undermine both the relative economic prosperity and political openness that most regimes were experiencing (Halperín Donghi 1993) . For example, Almeida (2008a) notes how by the late 1920s, El Salvador entered a period of increased political liberalization that led to the formation of semiautonomous labor and peasant unions under the auspices of the state. However, by 1930 the effects of the Great Depression on coffee prices led to significant decline in workers’ wages, which caused nonviolent protests in several parts of the country. The civilian government responded with a series of repressive strategies, such as arrests, police violence, and laws curbing rights of public assembly (Almeida 2008a). By the end of 1931, after a successful coup d’état and the arrival of a new military dictatorship, the level of violent repression and persecution increased, forcing the labor and peasant movements to become more radicalized and to operate clandestinely. Increasing state authoritarianism paired with peasant and labor movements radicalization, led to a mass insurgent uprising in 1932 that culminated in the massacre of tens of thousands in this massacre ushered in a new period of highly repressive authoritarian governance in El Salvador (Almeida 2003, 2008a) .

Between the 1930s and the 1950s, most Latin American countries experienced similar shifts between authoritarianism in the form of dictatorship and political openings in the form of low-intensity democracies. Dictatorships were mainly brief in nature, with the military supporting certain oligarchic or populist reforms, installing new civilian governments to support those changes, and stepping out of government (Blake 2005) . By the mid-1930s, repressive military dictatorships had come and gone in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile , Cuba, Ecuador, Honduras , Peru, and Uruguay , but the ones in Brazil , the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Nicaragua were more stable. Additionally, by 1950 most countries in Latin America had turned into an economic system of import substitution industrialization (ISI), closing their markets to foreign investments in lieu of developing strong national industrial economies (Blake 2005; Zapata 2010) .

Most Central American and Caribbean dictatorships were brutally repressive and able to curb most forms of overt protest, providing very limited political opportunities for social movements and forcing most opposition to remain hidden and organize covertly (Bulmer-Thomas 1987). For example, repressive policies were characteristic of the Ubico regime (1931–1944) in Guatemala who regularly tortured and killed political opponents, and signed several laws which would condone executions of laborers by landowners as a “disciplinary” measure (Grieb 1979) . In Honduras , the government of Tiburcio Carías Andino (1932–1949) restricted civil liberties, created a secret police, and started a campaign of censorship and repression against any opposition (Meza 1985; Dodd 2005) . And in Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza assassinated Augusto Sandino and 300 of his followers in Wiwili, used the National Guard as a spy network, and persecuted and killed any popular social movement that opposed his political power (Walter 1993) .

In contrast, some Southern cone dictatorships—though still repressive—were more permissive towards social organization of workers and peasants. This resulted in more opportunities for mobilization and patterns of repression and accommodation that sometimes led to the fall of dictatorial regimes. In Uruguay , for example, the short-lived dictatorship of General Terra (1933–1938) could not effectively repress a series of general strikes organized by the labor movement; this created enough pressure to make him call for elections that resulted in a more liberal government lasting through the 1950s (Korzeniewitz 2000) . During the late 1930s, Bolivian workers gained the right to collective bargaining with support from left-wing political parties in Congress. In 1942, during the more repressive government of Enrique Peñaranda, two large miners’ unions called for a strike demanding wage increases. Instead of negotiating with workers, Peñaranda’s government arrested union leaders and killed seven miners. When the strike grew in force, Peñaranda ordered the Bolivian military to open fire on the crowd of 7000 protesters, killing as many as 400 (Klein 1971). This led directly to a coup d’état and the fall of the Peñaranda regime in 1943.

In Argentina, a military dictatorship gave way to a series of fraudulent low-intensity conservative democratic governments that produced a large agrarian crisis in the 1930s. This led to a massive internal migration to urban areas by poor and dispossessed rural immigrants (Di Tella 1990; Rossi 2013a) and another military coup in 1943. Juan Perón became the Minister of War and the Minister of Welfare during the dictatorship and was highly popular among workers. When other members of the military junta fired and imprisoned him, a mass protest of union workers and new immigrants forced his liberation. He ran for the presidency in 1946 after making alliances with union leaders and other underrepresented elites (Di Tella 1990). Perón incorporated most of the labor unions, new immigrants, and other popular sectors into a political coalition that he effectively managed to mobilize for his support (Rossi 2013a) .

The Mexican case was sui generis in that the Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI)Footnote 1 reigned as the de facto ruling party for more than 70 years (Krauze 1997) . Though not a dictatorship, Mexico became a highly authoritarian, corporatist regime with a facade of democratic electoral politics. Still, the PRI was highly successful in incorporating labor and peasant demands into state-created and controlled organizations and then electorally mobilizing those groups and organizations for the support of the party (Collier and Collier 1991; Favela 2010; Zapata 2010) . They institutionalized national workers’ rights into law (Ley Federal del Trabajo), and created the Confederación de Tabajadores Mexicanos (CTM) and the Confederación Nacional Campesina (CNC), a pair of national associations that incorporated most local and regional union and agrarian organizations into single national associations that were the official mediator between workers’ and peasants’ interests and the state. Popular organizations that did not want to tie themselves with the party would be allowed to exist autonomously, but they would also be forced to survive without any support for their demands (Hellman 1988) . Nevertheless, there were a number of organizations that would regularly express their demands peacefully through classic mobilization tactics such as demonstrations, marches, and occupations of public spaces during this period (Hellman 2008). The PRI was quite accommodating to these types of social mobilization during this time, and several nonaffiliated syndicates (e.g., railroads, oil, and mining) mounted significant protests campaigns during the 1938–1948 period that ended with the state accommodating to their demands .

Military-Bureaucratic Authoritarianism, Movement Radicalization, and Democratization

By the 1960s, the rapid urbanization and industrialization processes of the ISI model started to place severe economic and political strains on Latin American countries. Domestically, Latin American countries accrued large debts to fund industrialization projects, but were unable to deliver the promised social reforms. Internationally, the Cold War and the Cuban revolution also had two important consequences for the region. First, they increased military interventionism by the USA to prevent a “turn to socialism” (Wiarda and Kline 2007) . Second, a successful socialist regime in the region encouraged the political aspirations of the left and their redistributive policies, which were also fueled by the growth of new alternatives in Western Europe and the Communist world (Collier 2001) .

The combination of these factors served to polarize Latin American countries even moreduring the 1960s and 1970s.A wave of escalating political mobilization and protest fueled conservative fears and facilitated the discouragement of democratic practices in favor of sharp turns towards right-wing authoritarianisms. By the late 1960s, most Latin American countries were either military dictatorships or highly authoritarian civilian regimes—often backed or condoned by the US government, military, or intelligence agencies. Only Venezuela and Costa Rica were stable democracies (Wiarda and Kline 2007), and Colombia—although democratic—suffered from a lingering low-intensity asymmetric conflict. This wave of dictatorships was different from those of the first part of the twentieth century. Instead of personalistic short-term regimes the military took power for an extended period of time (Blake 2005). Military-bureaucratic authoritarianisms were imposed (especially in South America) as a way to bring sociopolitical order and foster economic development (O’Donnell 1975, 1982) . According to Collier (2001) , most of these regimes had the clear intention of promoting economic growth by postponing redistribution policies and attempting to control or destroy left-leaning political groups, peasant, and labor movements .

Although the level of state-sponsored violence varied from country to country, common state repressive actions included continuous infringements to civil liberties, rampant human rights violations, forced deportations, unwarranted arrests, detentions without trials, torture, disappearances, assassinations, and massacres—all perpetrated by militarized forces (e.g., Wood 2003; Pereira 2005) . Over time, these brutal efforts to eliminate civil associations and mobilization often pushed social movements, dissident groups, and their members to either radicalize or join radical organizations, fostering the appearance of urban and rural guerrillas with violent tactics in several countries (e.g., Almeida 2003, 2008a; Pereira 2005; Brockett 2005) . This also affected the movements’ repertoires of contention. Tactics such as guerilla warfare, public-building occupations, small town take-overs, high-profile elite hijackings, armed attacks, and bombings increased with the growing radicalization of the opposition movements (e.g., Salazar 2006) . The military, in turn, would use the threat of the guerrillas as justification for escalating violent repressive practices and civil rights violations (Blake 2005) , causing either the destruction of or escalation in hostile backlash by guerrillas and other dissident groups (Martin 2007; Ortiz 2007, 2013) .

A vast number of case and comparative studies details the atrocities committed by the dictatorial regimes and the responses from radical and guerilla groups in Latin America during this time (e.g., Wright 2007; Sikkink 2008; Hayner 2010; Stern 2010; DeGregori 2012) . In El Salvador (Viterna 2006, 2013; Wood 2003; Almeida 2008a) and Guatemala (Brockett 1991, 2005; Brett 2008; Rothenberg 2012) , the escalating quid pro quo violence between the military and the guerrillas—Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) and Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG), respectively—culminated in protracted civil wars that extended into the early 1990s. Hundreds of thousands were killed and several thousand more disappeared. Similarly, the radicalizing effects of the brutally repressive Somoza regime on a vast array of civilian associations and social movement groups in Nicaragua, led to the formation and growth of the Frente Sandinista Liberación Nacional (FSLN) that used its violent contentious tactics (Molyneux 1985; Wickham Crowley 1992; Spalding 1994) , to oust the Somoza clan out of power .

In Southern cone countries such as Chile, the military suspended the constitution, imprisoned nearly 40,000 people without a trial in a stadium that served as a detention center, tortured tens of thousands at Villa Grimaldi and other concentration camps, executed almost 2500, and disappeared more than 1300 political activists, students, workers, others considered “subversive” (Gómez-Barris 2010) . The brutal repression quelled most forms of protests, though some symbolic protests like the La Cueca Sola dance, where widows of the disappeared dance alone (García Castro 2002), continued to exist. On the other hand, there was a growth in radicalized urban groups such as the pobladores (Salman 1994; Garcés 2002) , and urban guerrilla groups such as Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), and Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez (FPMR) who bombed buildings, kidnapped and killed military officials, and even conducted a failed assassination attempt of Pinochet (Salazar 2006) . Similarly, the “dirty war” perpetuated by the Argentinean military and its death squads resulted in the disappearance, killing, torture, and illegal detention of tens of thousands of civilians and dissidents (CONADEP 1984; Novaro and Palermo 2003) . The Argentine state repression was challenged by the unfaltering mobilization of nonviolent groups such as Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Álvarez 1990; Navarro 2001; Borland 2006) , and the growth of radical urban and rural guerrillas such as the Montoneros and Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP) (Gillespie 1982; Lewis 2001) whose violent repertoire included armed attacks, civilian and nongovernmental bombings, and abductions of prominent civilians and politicians, (Novaro and Palermo 2003) .

In Brazil, though the violent repression was less extensive than in Chile and Argentina, there was a similar pattern of disregard for civil liberties, including mass imprisonments, torture, and military courts leading to executions and disappearances. Initially, students mounted massive protests against the new regime, but the military suspended habeas corpus, declared a state of siege, and violently repressed the students (Skidmore 1990; Pereira 2005; Codato 2006) . Several factions of the antimilitary movement radicalized and formed urban guerrilla movements such as the Ação Libertadora Nacional (ALN) and Movimento Revolucionário 8 de Outubro (M8) that resorted to violent contentious tactics. But the regime only became more brutal in its repression against the guerrillas, which eventually led to their decline (Rose 2005) . By the mid 1970s a more moderate military group had ascended to power and started a gradual abertura process, restoring civil liberties, and gradually moving towards democratization . This brought forth an unprecedented amount of nonviolent social movement organization against the military that led to the massive civil society diretas já mobilization campaign, which spread over several years and sites and culminated with the election of the first civilian president in 1985 (Mainwaring and Viola 1984; Hochstetler 2000) .

By the mid 1980s, the brutal legacy of nearly two decades of violent military rule had created widespread discontent about human rights violations in Latin America. In addition, the worsening economic conditions due to the failure of the ISI model in an increasing interdependent world economy, and the growing elite and military divisions (Blake 2005) would create a push towards the dismantling of the military rule in most countries. Internationally, the economic weakening of the USSR, the impending fall of the Berlin Wall, and the end of the Cold War would cause the USA to ease its interventionist policies in support of “stable” military regimes in Latin America (Vanden and Prevost 2009) . The combination of these factors would mean that most of Latin America would undergo a period of transition to democratic rule known as the third-wave of democratization (Hagopian and Mainwaring 2005) .

Repression and Mobilization in Latin America After the Transitions to Democracy

There is no doubt that social movements had a role to play in the wave of transitions to democracy that occurred in Latin America between 1978 and 1992. As in the case of Brazil, the role that social movement organizations (SMOs) played during democratic transitions in other Latin American countries would be crucial for ousting military regimes and returning to democratic rule. Social movements either forced out the military via a combination of guerrilla groups and civil society , such as in the case of El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras (Wood 2003; Booth et al. 2006; Johnston and Almeida 2006; Brett 2008) or pressured the military regimes to open via a coalition of labor, church, student, and other civil society organizations (Mainwaring 1986; Foweraker and Landman 1997; Collier 1999) . While most Latin American countries transitioned to democracy by the late 1990s, the Mexican case was somewhat different. The country did not go through a dictatorship, but kept its authoritarian regime, dubbed a dictablanda (soft dictatorship), until the end of the twentieth century. By the mid 1960s, there were clear signs that the highly authoritarian and corporatist regime of the PRI was not as representative and inclusive as it was in the late 1930s and 1940s. A series of mobilizations starting with the student protest and massacre of 1968, and followed by the 1985 protests by those affected by the earthquake, the mobilizations for electoral reform after the 1988 election fraud, and the Zapatista rebellion and Barzón movements in 1994, all led to gradual political liberalization and a delayed but peaceful opening to democracy in 2000 that culminated in the election of president Vicente Fox of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN)—the first non-PRI president in the history of the country.

As national democratization projects advanced during the 1980s, the economic crises in Latin America worsened. Highly indebted from the massive expenses required to build industrial capacities—as demanded by the ISI project— and faced with a global recession fueled by the drastic drop of the oil prices, Mexico and several other countries in the region declared themselves incapable of paying their external debts (Pastor 1989; Blake 2005) . To resolve this situation, national banks had to restructure their debts through the acquisition of new loans from international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The loans conditioned governments to enact a host of neoliberal reforms such as cutting government expenditures in housing, health care services, education, and retirement accounts (Garuda 2000; Przeworski and Vreeland 2000) ; prescribing increases in the levels of taxation, reduction of wages and credit restraints (Crisp and Kelly 1999) ; and the privatization of nationalized industries such as health care, oil production, electrical energy, and telecommunications (Brown 2009) .

As a result, most social movement mobilizations of the twenty-first century in the region grew out of a combination of the opening of political opportunities driven by the process of democratization, and the opposition to the reduction of social and economic rights driven by the implementation of structural adjustment policies and neoliberal programs. The newly transitioning regimes were much more permissive of the existence of social movements and civic organizations, which meant that grievances related to the threat of repression were not as salient, and the imperative desire to oppose the military was not the central associational force it was under the authoritarian regimes. At the same time, social and economic rights that were established in the previous decades were being rapidly eroded by the privatization of public goods and economic policies that emphasized cutting jobs, increasing taxes, and the rapid opening of previously protected industries, leading to increased poverty and income inequality (Cleary 2007; Brown 2009) .

The combination of these two trends led to the decrease of support for guerrilla movements and encouraged the rapid growth and diversification of social movements with a much wider spectrum of grievances than in the previous decade; these new movements addressed concerns such as anti-neoliberal reforms, the environment, human rights, women’s rights, race and ethnic discrimination , LGBT rights, and indigenous rights, amongst others (Eckstein and Álvarez 1992; Álvarez et al. 1998; Almeida and Johnston 2006) . Accordingly, the movements’ repertoires of contention during this period also became increasingly less radical. Tactics such as high-profile elite hijackings, armed attacks, and bombings were used less frequently, while support for peaceful—though still disruptive—marches, roadblocks, strikes, demonstrations, public space occupations, and sit-ins increased. Governments, in turn, refrained from the frequent use of the military to control protests, replacing them with highly specialized and professionalized riot police units that were organized, deployed, trained, and armed specifically to confront and control crowds. As a result, mass civil rights violations and violent coercive practices such as disappearances, torture, and massive illegal imprisonments were largely diminished. Even so, police abuses such as shootings, beatings, tear gas use, rubber bullet use and other human rights abuses were still common (e.g., Cleary 2007) . Similarly, some violent repertoires of contention such as the use of Molotov cocktails, defacing of public property, breaking into buildings, and rock throwing occurred; even classic guerrilla movements—e.g., the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) and the Ejército Popular Revolucionario (EPR) in Mexico—arose during this period, but this was a much less frequent occurrence than during the 1960s and 1970s.

Democratization and Neoliberalism: Backlash Against Austerity Policies

Given the circumstances described above, many protests during this period were directly or indirectly linked to both the participation in and implementation of IMF and World Bank economic programs and the austerity policies promoted by these organizations (Auyero 2001; Almeida 2008b; Rossi 2013b; Silva 2009; Arce 2010) . Citizens engaged in mobilizations against the international agencies themselves (Almeida 2007; Silva 2009) and protested the loss of legitimacy of their domestic governments (Auyero 2004; Ortiz and Béjar 2013) . With close to 300 contentious actions occurring in the region between 1995 and 2001, anti-neoliberal protest campaigns have formed a sustained wave of mobilization that begins in the early 1990s and continues until now (Almeida 2007, 2010) .

For example in Buenos Aires, Argentina on December 19th and 20th, 2001, thousands of people took to the streets, hitting pots and pans ( cacerolazos) and shouting “Que se vayan todos” in protest against the government’s decision to limit the amount of money people could withdraw from their bank accounts weekly to prevent further defunding of the bank system. This was the last of a series of neoliberal measures adopted by the Argentine government after the signature of an IMF agreement. The resulting massive, violent protests included the defacing of banks’ facades, breaking of banks’ windows, and the breaking into and occupying of banks by force even after a state of siege was enacted. These protests were the peak of a cycle of contention that included many unemployed workers’ ( piqueteros) road blockades, protests, lootings, and riots that resulted in the resignation of President Fernando de la Rua and continued through 2003 (Auyero 2001; Rossi 2013c; Alcañiz and Scheier 2008; Villalón 2008; Silva 2009) .

In a similar case, Bolivian protesters used massive protests, roadblocks, and a general strike demanding the resignation of president Hugo Banzer during the 2 weeks that followed the government’s attempt at selling the Cochabamba public water system to the multinational Aguas del Tunari, in what is now known as the first water war (Arce and Rice 2009) . The Bolivian government sent riot police who used tear gas and rubber bullets to stop the demonstrators, who then responded by throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails. Violence escalated when the president declared a state of siege and used the army to enforce it. In April 2000, after a couple of months of confrontations, soldiers removed most of the roadblocks but killed a teenage boy in the process. This radicalized the protests and brought more than 100,000 angry protesters to the streets where they overwhelmed soldiers and used their weapons against them. The government quickly decided to reverse plans for privatizing the public water system (Olivera and Lewis 2004, Spronk and Webber 2008) .

Ecuador also experienced massive protests in 2001 as a response to austerity measures, plans for privatization in the electricity and telecommunications sectors, and the granting of a 30-year concession to a foreign company for the supply of water and sewage services to the city of Guayaquil. On January 21 and 22, the Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (CONAIE) and the Federación Nacional de Organizaciones Campesinas, Indígenas y Negras (FENOCIN)—the two largest indigenous and peasant organizations in the country—along with coalitions of students and workers, coordinated national mobilization campaigns that consisted of marches and roadblocks throughout the country, as well as the takeover of a couple of TV and radio stations in the Chimborazo area. The government responded by imposing a national state of emergency, limiting public meetings and nationwide travel, and deploying the army and police to arrest protest leaders. Still, thousands of indigenous workers and peasants marched into Quito on February 7, forcing President Noboa to meet with them and retract the implementation of austerity measures (Perrault and Valdivia 2010) .

Many similar cases of mobilization campaigns against neoliberalism occurred in Latin America during the first two decades of the century, and have been explored extensively in the literature. Some of the most salient examples are the second water war of 2005 (in El Alto) and the nationwide gas wars of 2003 and 2005 in Bolivia, which led to the resignation of President Mesa (Arce and Rice 2009, Spronk and Webber 2008) , the massive health-care anti-privatization strike campaigns in El Salvador from 1999 to 2000 and 2002 to 2003 (Almeida 2008a) , several roadblock campaigns of the piquetero movement in Argentina from 1997 until now (Auyero 2003; Merklen 2005; Rossi 2013c) , the continuing land occupation campaigns of Brazil’s Movimento Sem Terra (MST) since the early 1990s (Wright and Wolford 2003; Fernandes 2005; Navarro 2007; Hammond 2009; Ondetti 2011) , and Chile’s pingüino revolution of 2006 and the university student movements against the privatization of education in 2009 and 2011–2013 (Salinas and Fraser 2012; Donoso 2013; Stromquist and Sanyal 2013; von Bülow and Bidegain Ponte in this volume) .

Rights, Accountability, and the Transformation of Democracy

Although social movements against austerity policies were the most prevalent in the region during the first part of the twenty-first century , there was also an increase in the number of movements that promoted social rights and identity issues. Social rights and identity movements—e.g., indigenous movements, land rights movements, environmental movements , LGBT movements, women’s movements—provided ways for diverse groups to articulate claims and carry out efforts to correct violations that had been long subsumed to the more pressing struggle against deposing authoritarian regimes (Eckstein and Wickham Crowley 2003) . Many of these movements aim to redefine citizenship and identity into collective constructs that are more meaningful, inclusionary, and representative of disadvantaged groups (Álvarez et al. 1998; Stahler-Sholk et al. 2008) , challenging the representativeness and accountability of their own political systems (MacKinnon and Feoli 2013) . Some of these movements seek to affect the polity in traditional ways by using the political institutions in place, while others seek autonomy from the state and favor a more horizontal and participatory process in decision making (Sitrin 2012) .

Indigenous movements in Bolivia , for example, mounted significant efforts to increase their participation and inclusion in decision-making processes through the transformation of the existing political institutions of democracy (Postero 2011) . Coca farmers’ organizations such as the Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (CSUTCB) made an alliance with the Confederación de Pueblos Indígenas de Bolivia (CIODB) to form an indigenous-peasant coalition that would mobilize for indigenous rights in La Paz in 1992. In 1995 this indigenous peasant coalition decided to form the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) party with Evo Morales as their leader. International pressure to privatize public goods such as water and attacks against “illegal” coca growers in the region led to a surprising amount of collective action in the Cochabamba and Chapare regions between 2000 and 2003 (Lucero 2013) . Besides marches and roadblocks of major highways, the coca farmers in the Chapare region used more aggressive tactics such as invading and occupying military outposts (Zibechi 2010; Barndt 2012) . The military and police responses to these tactics caused frequent violent confrontations over the removal of roadblocks and the arrest and incarceration of occupiers. Given these circumstances, MAS gained the support from the urban left, and in the 2005 election, Morales was elected president of Bolivia (Do Alto 2010) . With control of the presidency, the senate, and the house, MAS began a project of national redefinition and reconstruction (Albro 2005, 2013) in which they reformed the constitution to create a “multinational and pluricultural state based on the autonomies of the indigenous peoples” (Komadina and Geffroy 2007, p. 119; Silva in this volume) .

At the same time, other movements relied on autonomy from the state, horizontal participation, and innovative contentious performance tactics. For example, after 11 years of struggle, changes from a guerrilla movement to a nonviolent indigenous rights movement, and an agreement with the government (i.e., San Andrés Accords) that effectively failed to translate into more constitutional autonomy for indigenous groups in Mexico (Trejo 2012; Inclán in this volume) , the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) launched La Otra Campaña (The Other Campaign) in 2005. The campaign marked a departure from previous efforts of the Zapatistas to achieve their goals within the framework of institutional politics. Instead, they rearticulated their goals to advance their agenda by dissolving most power relations with governmental institutions and institutional politics (Muñoz Ramírez 2003; Mora 2008) . They created autonomous indigenous municipalities and Juntas del Buen Gobierno (good-government councils) to govern all municipalities grouped into five regional clusters named caracoles. Positions on the councils rotate and are time-delimited, so each member learns how to perform each position and all members of the municipalities can, at some point, be part of the councils.

As noted by Mora (2008, p. 157) , the councils “coordinate activities with the health, education, and agricultural commissions created to provide the EZLN bases with social programs alternative to those of the Mexican state.” In practice, all municipalities share and help others to provide education programs and materials, health-care services and medicines, agricultural training and products, and other services. It is a complex and multifaceted system of self-governance that brings autonomy from local and state political bureaucracy to the Zapatista communities . Unfortunately, this leaves the EZLN vulnerable to state aggression. Reports of police abuses, unjustified imprisonment of community members, illegal searches, and seizures of community land increased in frequency during the Calderón administration under the guise of the war on drugs (Earle and Simonelli 2011) .

In similar ways, over the past decade many other social movements in the region have turned to horizontal organizational processes, autonomy from the state’s political institutions, and the use of innovative contentious tactics to advance their goals. Some of the most salient examples include the movimiento de asambleas (Almeyra 2004; Rossi 2005; Villalón 2008) with their public assembly tactics and their reexamination of delegative democracy in Argentina; the Frente de Esculacho Popular (FEP) in Brazil and HIJOS in Argentina, with their public humiliation protests ( esculachos or escraches) against ex-military dictators and torturers (Villalón 2008; Sitrin 2012) ; and the Movimiento Nacional de Fábricas Recuperadas with its tactics of occupying abandoned factories and reopening them via self-management (Alcañiz and Scheier 2008; Almeyra 2004; Sitrin 2012) . Most of these movements have specific goals, but they also intend to redefine social relationships with state institutions by empowering their members to actively take part in decision-making political processes-using innovative contentious tactics, rejecting classic forms of hierarchical institutional politics, redefining political participation in less institutionalized ways, and attempting to transform institutional democracy to accommodate more horizontal and inclusive patterns of political participation.

Conclusion

This chapter charted the development of mobilization and state repression in Latin America by looking at two distinct periods in the region’s history. During the pre-democratization period, social movement and civil society efforts—while diverse and multifaceted—generally mobilized for more representative and liberal political institutions, and against the authoritarian and highly corporatist governments of the region. The state responses to these movements varied according to periods of moderate liberalization or entrenched authoritarianism, resulting in a pattern of political opportunity-based and threat-induced mobilizations. During the 1960s and 1970s, an increase in authoritarianism and brutal repression led to a period of movement radicalization with the appearance of urban and rural guerrilla groups with violent contentious repertoires.

The post-democratization period featured the growth and diversification of social movements due to the opening of new political opportunities brought by the democratization process and the erosion of social rights caused by the implementation of neoliberal policies. Mobilization during this period is not solely carried out to advance identity issues, redress social rights, or struggles against anti-neoliberal policies, but also to create more direct forms of democracy and political participation that break with the established political power relationships in institutional politics . Accordingly, the contentious repertoires of social movements also expanded and diversified, adapting to the new more permissive democratic context, becoming less radical but still disruptive and even quite innovative. At the same time, state responses to mobilization became less overtly repressive and military forces were replaced with professionalized riot police units. Widespread torture, blatant human rights violations, and disappearances diminish considerably during this period. Still, police brutality and violence during the control of protests are common occurrences.

Scholars exploring the relationship between mobilization and state repression in Latin America have many potential opportunities for further research. Two areas in particular seem underdeveloped in the current literature. First, as the current movements continue to adopt new contentious strategies, the use of social media has become increasingly important (e.g., Valenzuela, Arriagada, and Scherman 2012; Valenzuela 2013) . Social media is being used not only as a resource to use in the organization and diffusion of contentious actions and social movement frames, but also as a defining feature relevant to the very identity of some movements (e.g., #YoSoy132 in Mexico; Tavera and Johnston in this volume). As the use of social media continues to grow in significance for the development of social movements in the region, it will be equally important to examine how the state will react to this trend . Will states engage in repressive tactics by restricting access and use of social media during periods of high mobilization? Will states enact legislation to restrict the use of the internet and social media sites during certain circumstances? Or will they monitor all online activities of “dissenting groups” in the name of national security issues? How will any of these actions affect social movements that rely on social media as resources to organize, diffuse their frames, and mobilize? We have already seen authoritarian regimes in other regions of the world curbing Internet use during mobilizations, such as the case of Egypt during the Arab Spring (Howard 2010; Howard and Hussain 2011) . We also have examples of democratic countries attempting to legislate restrictions to the use of the internet, enabling law enforcement to block access to entire internet domains (e.g., PIPA and SOPA in the USA), and the use of governmental agencies to monitor social media and other internet sites in the name of national security (e.g., the USA currently does both).

Finally, another significant trend of this last decade has been the development and expansion of transnational networks amongst oppositional collectivities and civil society groups. Scholars have noted that a wide variety of indigenous, worker’s, environmental, and other movements have formed large transnational networks on which they can rely to share experiences, exchange framing strategies, draw resources, and plan simultaneous contentious actions or even transnational contentious campaigns (e.g., Olesen 2006; Stewart 2006; Silva 2013) . As these transnational social movement agendas develop, it will be important to understand what—if anything—states and groups of states do to counteract such agendas. Under the authoritarian military regimes of the 1970s, the transnational networks formed by various guerrilla movements in the Southern Cone led the military regimes of Argentina , Bolivia, Brazil, Chile , Colombia, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay , and Venezuela to form regional operations to repress such networks, i.e., Operación Condor (e.g., McSherry 2002) . Will similar transnational agendas for repressing, controlling, or policing the activities of increasingly transnational social movements emerge in the region?