Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This chapter focuses on two instances of Latin American inequality in which there has been a call for reparations: the Quilombo communities in Brazil that are petitioning their government for rights to their ancestral lands, and the Haitian government’s call for the French to reimburse them for their earlier debt payments. In both cases, their original context was the Atlantic triangular trade that enslaved millions of Africans. Brown shows how the Latin American Doctrine of the Social Function of Land, the idea of collective rights, and treating land as a commons can provide a framework for repairing the violations of our common humanity and for creating more just social relations.

The postscript addresses how the chapters in this edited volume have explored, from various perspectives, the interplay between deep-rooted divisions in Latin American societies and the various attempts to reverse this legacy during the Pink Tide (PT) era. Lazar points out that in spite of important gains in tackling poverty and inequality, the chapters show that these advances are vulnerable to changes in economic and political conditions. However, an important lesson to be learned from the PT era is that in spite of the deep-seated nature of intersecting social inequalities, their emergence in and through state policy is the result of political decision. Moreover, even if Latin Americans are now entering into a new phase marked by the containment or reversal of social gains made, the continent has a long history of subaltern resistance to inequality. Thus, the balance of power between oppression and resistance that has characterised the continent for centuries is likely to continue also in the years to come.