Media 68

1968 in Latin America is not a watershed date as it is for Europe and the United States.
The twelve months of that year do not see the appearance of new social subjects, new themes and new protagonists (although the characteristic that unifies it with the other ’68 movements can be found in the role of the students and in that of the change from the centrality of the countryside to that of the urban areas). There is no "before" and "after", so much as the continuation of the processes that had already taken root in Latin America at the beginning of the Sixties: guerrilla warfare, militarist authoritarianism and student revolts, but also a tumultuous development of critical culture, from literature to cinema, to social sciences horizontally cover almost all the most important countries of this area.

The "Third Worldism" of 1968 is a European acquisition that tends to bring to the fore the strongest contradiction of capitalism-imperialism of that phase of the underdeveloped and emancipating countries (Algeria, Vietnam and Cuba are three situation-symbols that for the first time place at the centre of world politics what is happening in Africa, Asia and Latin America).

The first important episode of that year, marked by the peak of an extraordinary flourishing of literature that had accompanied the whole decade, is the Cultural Congress that takes place in Havana from 4 to 11 January. For a week intellectuals and representatives of the liberation movements of the whole world meet in the Cuban capital.

The meeting opens with the reading of a message from the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and ends with the resolution which fixes the tasks of the women and men of culture in the service of the revolutions emerging in the Third World. The Congress "greets in the Commander Ernest Che Guevara the example of the revolutionary intellectual of our time who, abandoning roles and honours, goes to fight for any oppressed people of the earth". This is the confirmation that Cuba is in that period the reference point for the whole of Latin America.

The revolution of 1959, which was declared "Socialist" in 1961, is the key event that characterizes the decade up to the slow downflow towards the river-bed of the Soviet Union and of "real Socialism" which will relentlessly follow the death of Guevara in Bolivia (9 October 1967).

But the 1968 of Cuba is also that of the unexpected Soviet invasion of Prague, which ratifies the end of a period, that of the search for an independent strategy for itself and for the other Latin American countries.

With the Cuban revolution for the first time in Latin America the possibility takes shape of assuming Socialism as an alternative to the old idea that was dominant in the parties of the left, which believed that it was necessary to carry out a middle class revolution before thinking of more advanced ideas.

The guerrilla movements, which in many situations try to imitate what Fidel Castro and Ernesto Guevara had done with the 26^th July Movement in Cuba, are opposed by the strategy of the United States which since 1962 – with the Alianza para el progresso, launched by President John Fitzgerald Kennedy – recover full control of the Latin American area by linking economic and financial investments to its own political dominion.

Almost all the guerrilla movements, in response to Washington, draw on the ideas of Guevara and a theoretical text written in 1967 by the Frenchman Regis Debray, Revolution in the revolution?: the traditional democratic and middle class fragility of Latin America is identified as a chance and not as a handicap; the chosen method of action is that of the armed struggle.

The death of Che in 1967 gives an idea of what would have happened in the following period: the defeat of Bolivia puts an end symbolically to the hope of a rapid spread of victorious guerrillas in other Latin American countries (Guevara thought that after Bolivia he would have gone to Perù and to Argentina) which would have avoided the Cuban withdrawal towards Moscow and increased the possibility of deliverance of this part of the world.

As had already happened in the previous years (military dictatorship in Brazil beginning from 1964) the tug of war between guerrillas and repression under the form of coups and of submission of the few civil governments to the indications of the oligarchies linked to Washington, will continue up to the symbolic date of 11 September 1973, when the coup d’état of General Augusto Pinochet in Santiago del Chile will show that Socialism cannot be pursued in a painless way or with the theories of the guerrilla foco or with the electoral methods pursued by President Salvator Allende.

If we re-read the chronology of 1968 in Latin America, the most important episodes are an indicator of that tug of war with no holds barred. On 16 January, in the City of Guatemala, a group of guerrillas of the FAR movement kills two officers of the American command present in that capital: the United States are pointed at as being responsible for the assassination of at least four thousand Guatemaltecans in just a few years.

The response to the guerrilla action is a state of siege throughout the country.

In June, revolt breaks out in Argentina, while the government is celebrating the anniversary of the coup d’état of General Juan Carlos Onganía: in Buenos Aires alone there are five hundred arrests. On 13 June Pacheco Areco, president of Uruguay, announces the limitation of civil rights: the movement of the Tupamaros abandons legality and chooses guerrilla warfare; gun-fights and demonstrations will continue throughout 1968. On 28^th July the student revolt of Mexico City begins, while the police respond with bazookas and tanks.

On 21 September, in the Mexican capital, new clashes break out: 736 people are arrested. On 30 September the University of Vera Cruz in Mexico is occupied. On 3 October in Peru, the civil government of President Belaunde Terry is deposed by the military. On the same day, in the square of the Three Cultures of Mexico City, ten thousand students are attacked by the police who open fire with machine guns: there are over 300 dead.

On 12 October a coup d’état deposes President Arias in Panama. On 14 December the military government of Brazil carries out yet another turn of the screw (a coup within a coup): 3 thousand people are arrested and deprived of political rights; President Costa e Silva suspends constitutional guarantees.

The fochiste theories are an answer to the new social emergences of Latin America and denounce the weakness of the Marxist analyses on that geographical area that did not consider the specificities with which the national states were formed. Even Karl Marx himself – in his few writings on the subject – had spoken about "nations without history", while in those countries it was the military who had redrawn the geographical frontiers, aiming at the creation of national markets, and specific forms of populist caudillism could take root in the absence of alternatives (the exemplary case is that of Juan Domingo Perón and of Peronism in Argentina).

Latin America of the Sixties decade continues to flee the interpretative models of Marxisms, both those which drew on the "colonial question", and those that sought to indicate in the achievement of the industrial revolution the phase of passage necessary for thinking of advanced forms of organization and struggle. The Cuban case tries to become paradigmatic with the method of guerrilla warfare, because the Castro’s revolution was able to win by virtue of the break-up of the army: a circumstance that will be revealed, however, as an exception and not a rule (Castrism remains a sui generis fusion of nationalism and humanist socialism).

The young leaders who will attempt to follow the example of Cuba come in fact from the crises of the nationalistic movements or from small schisms of the Soviet-orientated Communist parties.

In 1968 some processes of long duration appear on the scene in Latin America: the demographic boom (from 209 million inhabitants of 1960, the number rises to almost 275); the concentration of the population which goes to live in the metropolises and abandons the countryside; the poverty of the intermediate social classes which increases the sector of the marginalized; the middle classes increase in quantity, but end up by having qualitatively less importance within those societies as a whole; the progressive dependence of the new oligarchies on the economy of the United States before a populism that had gained ground in the Fifties.

The impoverishment of the continent as a structural factor is also explained with its dependence on the international market and with the incapacity of its own industrial infrastructure to modernize itself, thus keeping in step with the world economy. Typical is the problem of agriculture which permits the production of consistent profits for only the great landowners. Finally, the State industry develops in a way that does not compete with private industry.

The Latin American puzzle of the end of the Sixties offers an interesting question of a theoretical nature, destined to continue right up to the Nineties: although connected to the economy and politics of Washington, it is not able to reproduce advanced forms of capitalistic development, even in the giants: Mexico, Argentina, Brazil.

The underdevelopment appears dependent and functional on the development of the United States. Indeed, in the subsequent years the dependence will grow taking the form of the exorbitant foreign debt for the individual national economies. Thus all the hypotheses of rapid desarrollo for the most industrially and socially advanced Latin American countries enter in crisis.

The Latin American 1968 shows all the signs of what would have marked the defeat of the ideas of Guevara: emergence of a new militarism (institutional and not caudillesco), isolation of the national guerrilla movements, the division of the traditional and Communist left over which there is the shadow of the break-up of the international Communist movement, following the schism between Moscow and Peking. Havana, moreover, after the death of Che restrains and institutionalizes its revolution, slackening its relations with insurrectional movements.

But in this part of the world the birth of a "Catholic question" should also be noted; it produces the so-called "theology of liberation" and unites Marxist revolutionary aspirations and those of Catholic origin, as happens emblematically in the figure of the guerrilla priest Camilo Torres (this is the result of the modernizing impact of the Second Vatican Council on Latin America).

With just a bit of straining it can be sustained that the Latin American 1968 brings with it clear signs of the impending defeat. While the long wave of the European 1968 will continue for the entire decade of the Seventies, and will at least manage to cause a "passive revolution"(change of styles of life and of the dominant cultures), in Latin America the Seventies and Eighties are for the most part "black" decades, in spite of the Sandinista revolution that wins in Nicaragua in 1979.

Capitalism-Imperialism will return to dominate the entire area, even while not managing to break the isolated resistance of Cuba, which will survive with the help of Moscow in a sort of golden ghetto, thanks to the enormous economic aid that will come from the countries of "real socialism" and which will permit it to hold out against the embargo, unilaterally declared by the government of Washington in 1962.