Latin America is returning to the international foreground. On the one hand, a new political reality has emerged, expressed in electoral victories for the forces of the left and centre-left. On the other hand, the economic conjuncture is characterized by renewal of economic growth, reduction of external debt, an increase in trade surpluses and the appearance of large currency reserves. These changes become even more vibrant in conjunction with a strong movement for regional integration and the emergence of increasingly active and effective regional diplomacy, not just at the continental level but also on the international level.

These facts alarm the centres of world power. It is very clear that those centres, whether they be transnational corporations or the nation states which accommodate, protect and stimulate them, feel powerless to control the situation. On the other hand, those corporations and governments are pleased with the economic evolution of the region and do not have serious confrontations with the economic policies in play in most of the countries.

We have spoken in these articles of a real mutation of collective consciousness in the region, with the inclusion of the perspectives of ethnic groups and of gender, of the dispossessed and socially marginalized, of young people, and so many other social sectors excluded for years and years from the centres of decision-making which strongly affect their own lives.

The democratic wave that is expanding across the world is the result of the increase in communications among peoples and between struggles against dictatorships and for the defense of human rights, which brought down with a greater or lesser degree of radicalism, the dictatorships installed on an international scale during the dismal years of the terrorist offensive led by the United States in opposition to the popular advances in the decade of the 60’s and the beginning the seventies.

It became and it remains very difficult to hold back a movement that comes from below, capitalizing on the anti-authoritarian breaches opened by those same centres of world power, when they decided to get rid of the military regimes which they themselves had put into power.

In this general movement overcoming the political, economic and ideological framework dominated by the “unilinear thinking” of neo-liberal origin, the increasingly clear role of Latin American political and socio-economic thought is highlighted. It is a question of overcoming a false “universalism”, praised by “third-rate” economists of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, amongst others, as they “teach” economics to some of the best economists in the world. In the course of the 1950’s, 1960’s and 1970’s, Latin America developed a line of social thinking of high quality and international impact.

Institutions such as CEPAL (the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America), ALAS (the Latin American Sociology Association), FLACSO (the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences), and CLACSO (the Latin American Council for the Social Sciences) have enabled the establishment of high quality professional practice and awareness in the continent, and above all have opened the way toward increasingly profound regional thinking, accompanied by an enormous store of statistics and empirical investigations.

It is very heartening to see how these institutions have managed to maintain their continuity in a continent assaulted by military coups and violent confrontations. It is a fact that national universities and basic planning institutions (much weakened by the delirium of neo-liberal free-traders) have managed to survive in spite of all the attacks they have suffered. They have enabled us to maintain an intellectual substratum on the continent despite censorship and other attacks by a triumphant anachronism which predominated in the name of modernity.

As the theoretical weakness of the patrons of “unilinear thinking” was being revealed by the fiasco of its policies, the authentic intellectuals, social scientists and artists started to raise their heads again and to join in the great offensive underway on the international and regional planes, against those who have subjugated and intimidated human consciousness, through physical, moral and intellectual repressive terror. At the end of this month of May, in Cochabamba, we will participate in a meeting of the Network for the Defense of Humanity on the role of the media in this process; and in June in Havana, at the 5th International Gathering on Culture and Development, on a similar issue.

In the coming months, we will attend several moments of reaffirmation of the institutions that survived the wave of barbarity. ALAS will hold is 26th Congress in August (13 to 18), in Guadalajara. FLACSO will commemorate 50 years in October (29 to 31); CLACSO with 40 years in October (25 to 27), in Bogota. And as well, many other institutions were created and developed in this period and it would be very difficult to enumerate them in a short article.

I would just like to mention that in November of this year in Caracas, the Academy and Network of UNESCO and the United Nations University for Global Economy and Sustainable Development (REGGEN, refer to www.reggen.org.br), which I direct and which brings together research centres from various continents, will meet to assess the changes, together with the various Latin American and international institutions which make up REGGEN, and with the special participation of various working groups from CLACSO and the Network for World Economics headquartered in Puebla, Mexico, in addition to a great number of intellectuals from various parts of the world who come together in the Miranda International Centre, which will host the event.

I firmly believe that a great theoretical change is underway and that this opportunity will help to make it explicit so as to decisively liberate our thought from a theoretical counter-revolution similar to that represented by the Catholic inquisition confronting the emergency of a new bourgeois society and new thought on a world scale, in the 15th to 18th centuries. It is worth noting and verifying how, in the 21st century, an attempt to return to the ideas of a free market economy instituted in the 18th century and completely outdated by the economic reality of our time, can gain credibility. (Translation: Donald Lee and ALAI).

- Theotonio Dos Santos is Director and Academic President of the UNESCO University for Global Economy and Sustainable Development (www.reggen.org.br) and Visiting Professor at the State University of Paraiba (UEPB).