After the first two decades of the 21st century, the region is once again grappling with a multifaceted crisis, with the state question again at its heart. Following the rise and subsequent collapse of the governments known as “progressive” or what the Working Group has termed the “cycle of challenge to neoliberalism in Latin America” (CINAL) in its research, the resurgence of right-wing forces and a resurgence of neoliberalism and the interference of global power centers on a continental scale have become evident. The assessment of the preceding period, still open to debate, reveals, among other things, that the cycle began with the wave of mobilization in the late 1990s, in response to the stark imposition of neoliberalism, but also that it has suffered a profound economic, social, and political-ideological crisis.

From a platform of popular struggles, not necessarily fully represented in the CINAL governments, and within the framework of an increase in the price of commodities During the first ten years, a scenario of relative autonomy was configured for such government apparatuses in the face of traditional local powers and the interventionism of powers, particularly the United States, a situation that allowed the establishment - to varying degrees depending on each case - of a range of social conquests demanded from the protest and proposed an important alteration in the pattern of hegemony both nationally and regionally, which included a deepening of economic-financial ties with China.

In the first area, the revival of the debate on the role of the State in the face of the social destitution that marked the end of the 20th century proved fundamental, and the implementation of “consumption and employment pacts” played a significant role, granting the poorest sectors access to consumer goods and laying the material foundations for a possible new hegemony. However, these actions were not accompanied by the construction of independent forms of power, embodied in a new state institutional framework and sustained from the grassroots as an alternative to liberal representative democracy, nor by a broader sociocultural transformation that would give solid roots to challenges to the preaching of individualism, the predatory practices, and the extreme commodification of life itself that characterize the current stage of global capitalism. This situation became even more evident from 2008 onwards with the fall in oil prices and the loss of the surpluses that enabled the expansion of consumption and public spending, signaling some of the limits of extractivism and economic dependence on primary-export goods.

At the regional level, one of the most important distinguishing features of the Latin American Integration Forum (CINAL) emerged: the recovery of Latin American identity through the formation of blocs capable of limiting US interventionism, as demonstrated by the dismantling of the Free Trade Area of ​​the Americas (FTAA). However, it proved impossible to transcend the stage of neoliberal accumulation. On the contrary, the countries' dependence on global power centers tended to intensify, and the primary export nature of their economies was exacerbated, with China playing an increasingly relevant role as a geopolitical and economic actor in the regional dispute. This, coupled with the advancement of bilateral agreements between the United States and countries where neoliberalism assumed its most extreme form throughout the CINAL period, fostered a reproduction of the center-periphery pattern in terms of trade, re-primarization, and productive specialization.

Throughout the development of CINAL, the space of the state remained in constant dispute. Given the lack of response from governments to some of the most critical issues of the period—a factor that, among others, kept social mobilization alive—and under the covert influence of the United States and the active participation of regional governments that remained steadfastly aligned with neoliberalism, such as those of Colombia and Mexico, the right wing of the continent deployed a renewed offensive repertoire in order to recover the ground lost in terms of control of state apparatuses and hegemonic construction. This gave rise to various forms of coups d'état, media warfare, economic sabotage, and new transnational phenomena such as... lawfare -legal warfare to delegitimize the forces of so-called "progressivism", as in the emblematic case of Brazil- or the active political participation of evangelism which, in its most reactionary aspects, has led a true ideological and cultural crusade of an ultraconservative nature.

This amalgamation of elements, with the particularities of each case, became fertile ground for a critical transformation in the balance of power that had sustained the CINAL governments, fostering their extreme weakening, as in Venezuela and Ecuador, and even their complete downfall, as in the cases of Brazil and Argentina, for example. This open-ended transition in which the region finds itself has brought to the forefront the intensification of several cross-cutting problems, such as corruption—which has jeopardized institutional integrity in diverse countries like Peru, Haiti, and Puerto Rico—the increase in social violence, as well as political violence through the persecution of social activists, the growing militarization of daily life, the environmental crisis, and the surge in migration at multiple points along the conflict-ridden borders throughout the continent, all within the crucible of the semi-permanent global economic crisis that has persisted for more than a decade.

This is a state of affairs that calls for discussion and reflection on the lessons learned from CINAL, to analyze the characteristics of this renewal of the right wing and neoliberalism in the region, but also to identify the points of escape, the alternatives and the transformative possibilities that emerge with a new cycle of popular struggles, particularly feminist, territorial-environmental, student, as well as multiple processes of building local power from the community and at subnational levels of the state.

Thus, central questions arise about the level of reversibility and conservative restructuring of the gains—not without certain limitations and ambiguities, but crystallized in certain public policies and expansion of rights—after the neoliberal debacle and the fall of CINAL, and to what extent these right-wing forces, the political elites and the dominant classes will manage to build a new hegemony through "active consensus", or will they privilege the domination, force and violence (political and/or monetary) of multiple signs—albeit selective, in increasingly broad degrees—in the face of the changing circumstances.

At the same time, it is important to clearly identify what is new in this recomposition of neoliberal logic, taking into account the critical situation that this form of social, economic and political-ideological organization went through at the end of the 20th century. Is it the reincarnation of what was considered moribund or does it entail new expressions of capitalist dynamics in the region?

The Working Group's proposal is based on the enriching experience of previous groups (which have shared the same research focus for 10 years), comprised of almost all the members of this new renewal project. This experience allowed us to explore the particularities, commonalities, and transformations of statehood in Latin America and the Caribbean, both in terms of its configuration and historical development, and in the context of the unstable continental situation of recent years. Between 2010 and 2019, our group advanced a detailed analysis of the internal morphology of Latin American states, examining their internal changes and continuities in relation to existing power dynamics, regional constraints, and the global capitalist system. From diverse perspectives and interpretations, we were able to account for the complex reality of these states, both in their most general aspects and in relation to specific national and/or plurinational issues. We start from the observation that at the dawn of the new century in the region a cycle began in which the state role began to acquire a renewed centrality, both in the value-ideological level and in concrete practices, which we choose to define as "cycle of challenge to neoliberalism in Latin America" ​​(CINAL).

Likewise, on an analytical level, we assume that the State—as an arena of conflict and the material embodiment of a correlation of forces that is by definition asymmetrical and unstable—while not a neutral entity, cannot be considered a monolithic bloc at the service of the dominant classes. Rather, it must be viewed as a constitutively contradictory sphere marked by struggles and disputes. Therefore, the cycle inaugurated in the region by the governments generically termed "progressive" cannot be interpreted homogeneously across the continent. This is because, during the last fifteen to twenty years, Latin America and the Caribbean have experienced dissimilar realities, both in terms of their duration and their challenge to the traditional neoliberal framework, with varying degrees and nuances in their levels of radicalism and distancing from it.

However, certain shifts in the balance of power within some countries have intensified, impacting regional, continental (and even global) levels. This has led to a clear setback in the proposals and consensus developed years ago by these governments. Indeed, the current regional situation appears to be marked by decline, an abrupt loss of legitimacy, and direct confrontation with almost all of these progressive governments, several of which have been ousted from power. This has occurred alongside a notable rise of right-wing coalitions in electoral contests and an imperial counteroffensive that spares no resources to foster the institutional destabilization of some of these ongoing processes.

This change in the balance of power at the regional level seems to have cast a shadow over the cycle of challenging neoliberalism that we alluded to in the previous phase of the GT, which in recent times has given rise to conflicting readings about its exhaustion, slowing down, closure or fracture, depending on how it is interpreted, opening up a new variety of topics that nourish future research.

Given the panorama of extreme instability and ambivalence that we have described, some of the transformations that we will try to analyze during this new stage of the Working Group are the following: the construction of a form of State with a renewed authoritarian profile that threatens the fragile democracies of the region and tends to exacerbate certain neoliberal policies, the patriarchal dimension of domination and the consequences of gender struggles in terms of public policies, the dynamics of lawfare and criminalization of politics, the horizons and limitations evidenced in the construction of plurinational States, the tensions and initiatives for the reconfiguration of the regional blocs created in the ongoing integration processes, vis-à-vis the centers of global power, as well as the disputes surrounding remunicipalization projects and modalities of citizen participation at the subnational level, are some of the axes that will guide our reflections. In turn, we are witnessing the possible renewal of political forces in countries like Argentina and Bolivia, which, together with Mexico, the erosion of political legitimacy, and a certain decline evidenced at the socio-economic level in Brazil, put the lens on the new forms that the condensation of progressive interests will assume on the continent.

In sum, the new phase of the GT will redouble efforts to unveil the transformations of the contemporary State in the region, as well as the relationships between State, power and civil society, or what we call in Gramscian terms the integral State, with a view to provoking concrete and comparative analyses that address the tensions, paths, practices and representations in which statehood crystallizes in the different open scenarios of Latin America and the Caribbean.