Activist Faith

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Activism and Its Aftermath

Women were active during the dictatorship because of the political problem that existed in those years . . . and the need to denounce and organize—for example, the soup kitchens. Our involvement was motivated by our needs. We did not get involved just for the sake of doing it, but because of the dire need. If we organized human rights committees, it was because someone had their rights trampled. Women became leaders then.

—Maritza Sandoval, Santa Cruz de Mayo base community, Villa O’Higgins)

Maritza Sandoval’s story is that of many poor Brazilian and Chilean women. The Brazilian (1964–85) and Chilean (1973–90) military regimes that set out to control and depoliticize civil society ended up creating new and unexpected sources of opposition from people such as Maritza. Although many had never previously joined any kind of organized group outside the home, poor women heroically rose to meet the challenges facing their families and communities during military rule. Mobilized by the Catholic Church through its base communities, women activists represent all that was new and promising in the “new” social movements.

More recently, however, the kinds of social movements that characterized the democratic transitions—church-based movements, poor women’s movements—have been nearly invisible in the new democracies of both countries. As a result, the question of the long-term impact of base communities and military-era social movements need to be revisited. Authors of previous studies have explained the reasons for the declining salience of social movement organizing through the church and by poor women in the new democracies. In this book, by contrast, a different question will be addressed. We begin from the assumption that a decline in social movement activism is to be expected and ask instead what becomes of activists and whether and how they seek to maintain their movements in changed political and social contexts.

We place the base community movement and its women activists in the contexts of social movements and of theories examining movement cycles. Doing so allows us to recognize the absence of protest without assuming that it means “failure” for the movement. We focus, instead, on what may be taking the place of earlier kinds of activism. By looking at the experiences of the women from the base communities from this theoretical perspective, we can specify ways in which their organizing may have had a less visible, but a long-term, impact on civil society. The theory of movement cycles leads us to look for personal change and empowerment, but also for the creation of new organizations dedicated to both action and movement maintenance and possibly the creation of activist networks as well. To the extent that we can demonstrate that former activists such as Maritza Sandoval are actively maintaining their movements and creating new networks, we can offer powerful evidence that base communities and their associated social movements have indeed made a lasting contribution to strengthening civil society. Although the current context may inhibit activism of the sort these women engaged in earlier, they may nonetheless today be building new organizational venues and networks that could become sites for future activism.

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