For several decades we have witnessed a global reorganization of capitalism around political and economic principles of a

neoliberal. While these have predominated globally, since the beginning of this century, Latin America has attempted to develop alternative forms of social and political organization, with varying degrees of success.

In the first wave, notable examples included Venezuela, which proposed what was called 21st-century socialism, and Ecuador and Bolivia, where constitutional reforms aimed at incorporating community practices were achieved, leading to the formation of multicultural and plurinational states. In others, such as Argentina and Brazil, popular governments developed, supported by movements with broad grassroots support and high levels of mobilization. These and other experiences changed the political landscape of the continent at that time and eroded the historical dominance of the United States in the region, although they also reached a limit in their reforms and were displaced, in some of those countries, by right-wing movements that reversed many of the gains achieved with counter-reforms that deepened neoliberalism, as occurred with Mauricio Macri in Argentina, Sebastián Piñera in Chile, Iván Duque in Colombia, and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.

In this context, neoliberal governance—which never completely ceased in the region—accelerated and deepened, with different

Forms of accumulation by dispossession; megaprojects with the consequent environmental depredation; weakening of the social role of the State and increase in repressive practices; association of criminal networks with factions of the state apparatus; prominence of mass media as a substantive part of governmentality and of the production of depoliticized subjectivities aligned with market logic

All these factors led to a proliferation of violence, both public and private. Undoubtedly, neoliberalism has deepened structural violence—by increasing social and economic polarization—as well as state-repressive and criminal violence, often in association with fragments of the state, which should therefore be considered public-private forms of violence. All of this generates enormous insecurity and fear, which are exploited for population control and to foster security-driven and punitive social demands. This results in weak and restrictive democracies with clearly authoritarian and racist practices that deepen the legacy of colonialism. Thus, a biopower develops that administers, regulates, and selects which lives can and should be preserved and which are discarded as disposable.

All these elements were aggravated in the context of the pandemic, which deepened social and economic polarization, as well as population control practices that, supposedly for health purposes, were applied to prevent or dismantle different protest processes, very markedly in the case of Chile.

In this context, the resistance practices on which our GT project focuses are revealed as fundamental, since they allow us to oppose and create alternatives to a model that has proven so predatory and yet continues to rise in many countries of the region and is trying to reinforce itself from increasingly violent and radicalized right-wing groups, as can be seen in the cases of Argentina, Peru and others.

As part of the resistance emerging within the institutional framework of political systems, we could speak of a second wave of popular governments attempting to oppose neoliberal governance, including those of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico; Alberto Fernández in Argentina; Pedro Castillo in Peru; and, more recently, Gabriel Boric in Chile and Gustavo Petro in Colombia. The victory of Lula da Silva in Brazil, Latin America's largest economy, also appears likely. All of these projects are constrained by existing institutions and national and international circumstances, but they undoubtedly strive to build more participatory and inclusive alternatives.

On the other hand, we have witnessed the proliferation of massive protest movements that constituted genuine popular uprisings, as seen first in Chile, and then in Colombia and Nicaragua. These movements involved the participation of diverse groups, and, very notably, feminist organizations. These social explosions indicate the exhaustion of a system that, nevertheless, continues to impose itself through various strategies, based not only on force but also on manipulation and the construction of a profoundly conservative ideology through communication networks.

Finally, a multitude of local and community resistances are verified, most markedly those coming from the indigenous world, whose worldview is presented as an alternative to the capitalist and Western modernity in which the current coloniality is based.

All these diverse and not necessarily coordinated forms of resistance are, by definition, always new. Otherwise, they could not be effective in the face of changing situations like those we are currently experiencing. However, to build something new, it is essential to draw on past experiences, both old and recent. In this sense, collective memories play a crucial role when they help recover what has been learned from other resistance movements for use in the face of present-day dangers. We can see this in government proposals, in street movements, and especially in Indigenous, peasant, and feminist communities.

Observing resistance movements in our countries reveals their persistence and proliferation in the present day. All of them draw upon previous experiences, ranging from ancient and ancestral knowledge to that stemming from very recent political struggles. In this sense, we are interested in observing and analyzing what current resistance practices recover and how they do so, from the knowledge of Indigenous peoples to the positive and negative aspects of the most recent experiences of the 21st century. We are interested in understanding what they recover, what they preserve, and what they modify—that is, how they articulate the new and the old, constructing living and active memories.

We want to focus particularly on the role of collective memories as instruments of resistance, so that our work can contribute to such practices. These are memories capable of articulating past experiences with the construction of the new; repetition with reformulation and creation. We also intend to delve deeper into the links between national cases and the general process in Latin America, which we have explored in the previous period, in order to arrive at a better understanding of neoliberal governance and its characteristics in the present moment, as well as the contributions, effectiveness, and limitations of the respective resistances to neoliberalism.

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This group defines its field of work as the articulation between collective memory processes and resistance practices in the context of current neoliberalism, with the aim of understanding, decoding and influencing the new sociopolitical reality.

We understand collective memory as a social, political, and cultural process and product through which people give meaning to their personal and collective histories (Halbwachs 1950; Vázquez 2001; Piper et al. 2013). We begin with the assumption that memory is realized in the present and is related to the social and political context in which it is produced and to the social position from which it unfolds. It forms part of the network of power relations, such that collective memory practices constitute a field of conflict where versions of the past struggle to establish themselves according to the hegemonies of the present and the projects for the future.

We consider resistance in relation to the set of practices, strategies, and institutions that come together in what Foucault called governmentality, understanding it as a complex form of power that “has as its main target the population, as its major form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical instrument security apparatuses” (Foucault, 2006, p. 136). It encompasses the practices of a specific power regime, over a specific population, including techniques and procedures designed to direct people’s behavior and serving as a “grid for analyzing power relations” (Foucault, 2007, p. 192). In this sense, we can clearly speak of a neoliberal governmentality that, while acknowledging the general characteristics mentioned in the previous section, is articulated with the specific features of each national or local reality. At the same time, we take as our starting point the forms of resistance to different types of power, based on a radical consideration: “politics is, nothing more and nothing less, what is born with resistance to governmentality.” (Foucault, 2006, pp. 450-451).

The research of this Working Group will contribute to understanding the specific characteristics of this form of governmentality in the different countries of the region under investigation, through the analysis of diverse histories of struggle and resistance. We understand resistance as those practices—generally carried out from the margins—lateral and even underground, that seek to build alternatives and, in doing so, erode and divert hegemonic processes. Currently, this resistance is often local. Examples include Indigenous movements and their community-based practices; organizations defending natural and energy resources, which oppose the penetration of megaprojects and corporations in various regions; movements for the defense of women's rights and the rights of sexual minorities; and organizations defending migrants, women, and others. At first glance, these movements might seem insignificant in relation to the extraordinary powers they confront. However, they often achieve significant victories and a rethinking of politics, despite hegemonic powers, including those of the media.

For the current period, our working group intends to delve deeper into various processes and experiences of memory and resistance.

We have considered examining community resistance, especially autonomous resistance, in both Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities. We are particularly interested in their capacity to build from the margins of the state, giving rise to new forms of sociability, politics, and legal systems that recover interlegality.

From a feminist and critical epistemology, intersectional perspectives will be addressed, with special attention to the social and ethnic dimensions, drawing on community and Afro-feminisms in dialogue with other perspectives. The work will focus on gender identities and non-normative sexualities, as well as experiences of grassroots feminisms, with particular attention to women's organizations and their diverse contexts, bringing into dialogue past and present experiences of resistance. We are interested in the process of forming women's spaces and collectives and their dynamics, in connection with other organizations and social movements, as well as exploring what memories they articulate, enact, and their impact.

Likewise, we propose to delve deeper into the Central American context, investigating the processes of memory construction from the armed conflict, the impact that the violence of war has had on new generations and on the practices of resistance, inherited, learned or new, with which the population survives and opposes the new forces of hegemonic repression and violence, in particular, in the current situation of Nicaragua.

Likewise, we want to explore the participation of various subaltern subjects -community, urban, feminist- in different spaces of mobilization and social organization, in which they deploy different strategies of struggle, building important contributions in organizational and epistemological terms.

During this period, we are interested in starting the analysis of the role and construction of memories in migrant organizations as well as their links with the other areas of work of the GT.

All the resistance movements we propose to analyze draw on practices of memory in their daily actions, giving meaning to past experiences and articulating them with the needs of the present. In this sense, we construct and analyze memories of resistance; that is, we seek to understand how memory is used in the context of current counter-hegemonic struggles. We are interested in understanding the space created by the intersection between a micro-politics of remembrance and a geo-politics of the administration of the past (Castillejo, 2017), as well as analyzing public memory policies for their critical evaluation in political terms. This means asking ourselves to what extent they are functional to neoliberal narratives or, on the contrary, distance themselves from them to align with counter-hegemonic movements. This will allow us to continue the critical analysis, already begun, of government policies, in order to propose alternatives that do not functionalize memory for the currently prevailing order.

We believe that these works can contribute to the conceptualization of current governmentality, as well as to rethinking new forms of democracy that—by articulating direct and representative practices—open up other possible forms of politics in late capitalism. This involves delving into non-colonial perspectives, based on Latin American social and political experiences and theories, to envision resilient alternatives that contribute to critical thinking.

Analyzing the experiences described, which transcend the state and partisan logics of representative democracy, we propose to investigate to what extent this transcendence is irreversible or whether it is possible to articulate autonomous, non-partisan, horizontal, and network-based experiences with the formal political system. The possibility, or impossibility, of such articulation, which we have been developing since the previous stage of this Working Group, is part of a broad debate involving a growing number of autonomous experiences, as well as older theoretical reflections that have been continually reformulated (Gasparello, 2018a, 2018b; 2016a; Holloway, 2004; Zibecchi, 2003; Gargallo, 2012; Toledo and Ortíz, 2012).

The aim is to analyze the contributions offered by different modes of action, organization and relationship with the political system to confront violence and overcome fear as an instrument of social control.

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