(Un)Knotting Democracy. A Proposal for Latin America

Abstract

The importance of democracy, in terms of its political implication, will extend to Latin American countries until the last third of the XX Century. Once democracy turned into a group of institutions, which have acted as functioning regulators, it came back in the form of oligarchic powers. In this context, the social battlefield of the new democracies felt unready touphold the people’s movements, expressions, actions and social struggles that, since the 1990s, have modified and transformed our political and social view. Consequently, the idea of democracy cannot be visualized as a simple and closed concept but rather as a changing process of contradictions that defines and redefines everything, including the correlation of social forces.