Neoliberal globalization appears to have reached a turning point, making the impossibility of unipolar hegemony increasingly evident. Faced with the inevitability of this scenario, which has been developing for some time, the major powers are rushing to define their spheres of influence and control. Among them are the United States, China, Russia, the European Union—with a low profile and increasingly dependent on the United States—and a new player, the BRICS, made up of countries from the so-called "Global South," which nevertheless account for a significant percentage of the world's population and trade.

Especially since Donald Trump's second presidency, the United States has sought to retreat into itself—which will likely accelerate its decline—limit its external economic dependence, and defend itself against perceived "dangers" such as immigration and internal dissent. This has led to a clear form of discriminatory, repressive, and violent "social immunization," which resonates with the new right wing. From an openly colonial perspective, coercive forms of control are maintained over territories considered as its own, both in Latin America and around the world.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, however, our region has experimented with alternative forms of social and political organization, with varying degrees of success. In Venezuela, projects aimed at refounding socialism were promoted, and despite their weakening, they remain in effect under the growing threat of armed intervention by the United States. In Ecuador and Bolivia, constitutional and institutional reforms were promoted that incorporated community practices and gave rise to plurinational and multicultural states, with experiences of legal pluralism that were ultimately eroded and displaced by new waves of neoliberalism.

These and other experiences altered the continental political landscape and eroded the historical US dominance in the region, which is now attempting to regain control. The confrontation between the United States and Brazil over the condemnation of Jair Bolsonaro and Brazil's membership in the BRICS is particularly illustrative, as the Latin American country has maintained a sovereign stance in the face of strong US pressure. Equally illustrative is the pressure exerted on the governments of Colombia and Mexico—which maintain relative autonomy—and, above all, the military deployment in the Caribbean, with its clearly imperialist and intimidating bias. Therefore, popular, national, and anti-neoliberal projects—even those with significant social impact—have encountered supranational—as well as internal—limitations that have prevented them from definitively breaking with neoliberal governance.

Currently, alternative governments—which continue to explore ways to broaden popular participation in income, politics, and culture—coexist in the region with the rise of new, violent, repressive, and anti-democratic right-wing movements, as is particularly evident in Argentina and El Salvador. Although they share ideological traits with Trumpism, such as xenophobia, anti-feminism, and punitivism, instead of strengthening national sovereignty they adopt openly subservient policies that subordinate them economically, politically, and culturally to the United States. Their aspiration for "greatness" is reduced to obeying the dictates of imperial power.

In this context, the components of neoliberal governance deepen and become more radical. Among its current features are:

Accumulation by dispossession manifests itself in the intensification of privatization and the transfer of public resources to the private sector, as well as in the expansion of extractive megaprojects that accelerate environmental degradation, displacement, and the dispossession of broad social sectors. Popular governments attempt to halt and reverse decades of these practices, with mixed results.

The weakening of the nation-state, both due to its subordination to external forces and its internal fragmentation. While the new right dismantles the remnants of the welfare state and strengthens the repressive apparatus, populist governments strive to restore its social functions and the dignity of politics.

The territorial reorganization of centers and peripheries, on a global scale and within states themselves, gives rise to "local sovereignties" where regional political elites, corporate interests, and illegal economies converge, producing territories of high insecurity and violence, governed by the principle of "performance" and "profit" without regard for their social costs.

The construction of a supposed "war" against criminal organizations, when these can only consolidate themselves through the protection of state apparatuses or factions thereof. The case of the "war on drugs" promoted by the United States is paradigmatic: illegal actions are deployed—such as extrajudicial executions of civilian vessels in the Caribbean—to intimidate Venezuela and the countries of the region, without dismantling the distribution networks within US territory itself.

The expansion of an EFFECTIVE SYSTEM FOR PRODUCING SUBJECTIVITIES through mass media and digital platforms, from which aspirational or disposable objects, legitimate or punishable emotions are defined. A large part of today's political disputes are fought in these spaces that construct dubious "truths" from the proliferation of lies.

A GROWING SOCIAL POLARIZATION, accompanied by the normalization of xenophobic, sexist and punitive discourses and practices.

The widespread adoption of network and corporate organizational models, comprised of relatively autonomous units that protect the whole through mutual isolation, coupled with the proliferation of digital technologies, deepens individual and social isolation. In response, alternative governments and social organizations are seeking to strengthen interpersonal, community, and territorial communication networks.

The PROGRESS OF PUBLIC AND PRIVATE VIOLENCE, especially under the guise of the "fight against terrorism" and the "war on organized crime." The new right uses these arguments to repress social movements and resistance, while progressive governments attempt to reduce social inequalities, abandon state violence as the primary form of control, address the structural causes of violence, and challenge punitive models.

The growing divide between neoliberal governance—recycled by the new right—and supposed democratic principles is evident in the consolidation of the rule of the wealthy, the fostering of authoritarian practices, and the deployment of biopowers that select which lives deserve protection and which are abandoned to their fate. Vast sectors of the population are killed and left to die. In contrast, grassroots, community-based, and popular governments and organizations strive to safeguard the diversity of life by defending the most vulnerable groups, promoting equitable participation and expanding democracy, fostering gender equality, and rejecting militaristic and repressive ideologies.

In this context, memory practices and community and social political resistance—the core of our Working Group's work—are fundamental. They not only allow us to oppose a predatory model but also to imagine and build alternatives. These forms of resistance are, by definition, always new; however, their emergence depends on the capacity to articulate past experiences. Therefore, social memory, understood as a repository of political struggles rooted in our societies, is essential for recovering accumulated knowledge and applying it to the dangers of the present.

Social memory, the central focus of this Working Group, is deeply intertwined with resistance movements, insofar as these movements draw upon past struggles to create and recreate their political repertoires in the present. By focusing on resistant memories, observing the powers they confront becomes part of our research. Considering memories as a constitutive element of resistance thus leads to an analysis of the transformations in the organization of contemporary political power, a central issue in the current context of Latin America and the Caribbean. Therefore, the reflections of this Working Group are crucial for understanding the current configuration of power, the ways in which resistance movements erode and overwhelm it, and the role of social memories as catalysts for new struggles.

Within this framework, our work seeks to contribute to a reconceptualization of the State, democracy, and resistance in light of memory practices. The fragmentation of the state apparatus—due to supranational pressures and internal dynamics—as well as its profound penetration by legal and illegal corporate networks, reveals a mutation in the forms of power. Therefore, we consider it necessary to shift the exclusive focus from "the state" to the set of practices, strategies, and institutions that operate in the control of territories and populations; that is, to move from a centrality of the State to an analysis of more complex power networks. To this end, we revisit Foucault's concept of governmentality as a "highly complex form of power" whose primary target is the population, whose privileged knowledge is political economy, and whose essential technical instrument is security apparatuses (Foucault, 2006, p. 136), which converges with the central features of neoliberalism. We are particularly interested in understanding "the way in which behavior is conducted." from the state and non-state power apparatuses and use this notion as a grid for analyzing power relations (Foucault, 2007, p. 192) in the region, in each country and in the local realities we address.

However, if we start with institutions to understand power, we arrive at a theory of the "subject of law" (Lazzarato, 2015, p. 5) trapped in state logic and, therefore, not very productive for understanding resistance. Instead, we propose "taking as our starting point the forms of resistance to different types of power," following the radical consideration that "politics is, nothing more and nothing less, what is born with resistance to governmentality" (Foucault, 2006, pp. 450-451). Thus, the study of resistances that, within the framework of a neoliberal governmentality with biopolitics of control and selection of life, deploy practices of defending the diversity of life in all its dimensions, becomes central.

In empirical terms, the Working Group focuses on different forms of resistance. Urban resistance, which we explore in one of our research lines, has adopted confrontational forms, sometimes with ambiguous results, but which challenge and hinder initiatives of the neoliberal establishment. Peasant, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant struggles, on the other hand, generally focus on the medium and long term, seeking to avoid state and criminal violence that surrounds their territories and developing alternative organizational strategies. Hence our interest in community resistance in Mesoamerican, Andean, and Afro-descendant contexts, where we identify a remarkable capacity for political construction from the margins of the state, generating new forms of sociability, political engagement, and legal-political organization, which offer keys to imagining alternatives to current governance.

In these community spaces, the relationship between violence and sacredness, in dialogue with social memory, opens an analytical field that is often overlooked in academic production but is of great relevance: in the face of state and criminal violence, resistant practices emerge—sometimes armed or confrontational—which we can call "resisting violence"—that challenge the prevailing principles of legitimacy. Likewise, the political nature of the practices that unfold within the realm of the "sacred" is evident, expanding the field of politics.

Another key dimension to the relevance of our approach is the intergenerational dialogue in the recreation and circulation of memories. The intergenerational "passage" of experiences of insurgent violence from the recent past and the marks left by state violence are fundamental to understanding current collective representations and subjectivities and their impact on the reconfiguration of social memory.

We also believe that cultural and artistic devices are enormously relevant to memory practices, as they bring together diverse actors and enable listening and transmission mechanisms in the public sphere, amplifying their reception. From public shaming protests and silhouette demonstrations to theatrical works, audiovisual productions, songs, murals, installations, and a multitude of artistic and memorial devices, the transmission of social memory intensifies, and new ways of viewing the past and present emerge. Along these lines, the GT's theoretical framework records and analyzes these creative repertoires and their political power in the current context of uncertainty and loss of hope.

At the intersection of all these dimensions lie feminisms, in the plural, their objectives, and organizational proposals, which have acquired increasing relevance and maintain strong connections with our lines of work. They are linked to community and its practices—assembly-based organizing, horizontal structures, cooperation—and refer to genealogies of long-standing struggle: “from our ancestors, as women who transgressed all the historical oppressions of the original patriarchy” (Gargallo, 2012, p. 180) and from community resistance against the State. Therefore, we propose that feminism should constitute a cross-cutting axis across all the lines of the Working Group, as well as two other axes that we consider equally essential: the ethical and methodological dimensions.

Taken together, these forms of resilient memory allow us to theorize and intervene socially and intellectually in current political practices across diverse contexts in Latin America, in intergenerational relationships, and in cultural and artistic representations rooted in present-day struggles and needs. Memory functions simultaneously as a reservoir and a trigger for past and present battles. It is about recovering a social memory that prioritizes non-Eurocentric worldviews, reclaims ancestral practices and knowledge, and updates itself to respond to contemporary problems, such as neo-extractivism or the expansion of criminal networks. This brings us closer to understanding current struggles, their forms of organization and representation, their scope, and their limitations in the face of a constantly reshaping government. Examining memories means examining resistance and, from that perspective, power relations; understanding one helps us decipher the other. In this sense, we maintain that our work on memories and resistances contributes to a better conceptualization of the ongoing transformations of power, the State and democracy in late capitalism, offering situated theoretical, social and intellectual tools to think about alternatives from Latin America and the Caribbean.