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If trade unions aren't up to the task of bargaining for worker rights, "new forms of mass organizations of the semi-employed and unemployed workers will likely emerge" to do it in their place by applying direct action tactics - "paralyzing the roadways and transport networks, and occupying closed plants and public buildings," as in Argentina from 2000 - 2003.
Popular struggles "will be directed to conserve jobs, block mass layoffs and" occupy factories and enterprises. Greater state involvement may be demanded as recessionary effects deepen. During crisis-ridden times, renewed opportunities arise to advance social movements. With imperial capital power in decline and Washington struggling to preserve it, US-Latin American strains will grow.
The 1990 - 99 "Golden Age of Imperial Pillage" has passed. "Popular urban uprisings, massive rural movements, and the emergence of Indian-based takeovers of regional and local governments" replaced it - undermining America's influence and shifting the balance of power center-left even without "enforcing any fundamental changes in property or class relations."
From 2005 - 08, Washington focused on foreign wars and occupations, the Global War on Terror, and backing Israel's serial aggression. It freed Latin America "to pursue a more autonomous political agenda, including greater regional integrations...."
From 2008 to the present, grim economic times have prevailed. Regional exports, growth and reserves declined, but later than in America and Europe. Currently, however, Latin America is feeling the recession's full brunt that's sparing no country anywhere. A familiar regional pattern is repeating. Its "debt trap....awaits." It can't "sustain (or even stabilize its) growth...not in an ocean of depressed advanced capitalist countries" it depends on.
Capitalism and socialism are now weak. "The question becomes which side will be able to intervene, reorganize and recompose its forces to take advantage of the other." Recent mass mobilizations were in Argentina (1999 - 2003), "the Brazilian Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST - from 1985 - 2002, but in decline under Lula since 2003), and the Bolivian workers-peasant/Indian (2000, 2003 and 2005) urban insurrections."
Between 2000 - 2005, the most successful mobilizations occurred, followed by a relative decline from that time to the present as "fragmentation, dispersion and internal conflict among Leftist parties" limited their effectiveness. With "sectoral leadership" alone, and without independent financial and material resources, they're unable to exert power for social change.
As for relations with America, they're "profoundly influenced by political-economic-military contingencies, such as: war and peace, economic booms....recessions (and) crises, revolutions, uprisings and reactionary coups." Even so, all of Latin America, "from independent (Venezuela), autonomous competitive capitalist (Brazil), autonomous and critical (Bolivia), selective collaborator (Chile) to....imperial collaborators (Colombia, Mexico and Peru) operate within a capitalist economy and class system, in which market relations and the capitalist classes are still central players."
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