ROUTLEDGE STUDIES IN LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS Transnational Activism and Nationa Movements in Latin America Bridging the Divide Edited by Eduardo Silva oeTransnational Activism and National Movements in Latin America Bridging the Divide Edited by Eduardo Silva 2 Routled iQ Routledge | IEW YORK AND LONDONFirst published 2013 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Patk Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge 1s an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, ‘an informa business © 2013 Taylor & Francis ‘The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial ‘material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted, in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, All rights reserved, No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known of hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, ot in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing, from the publishers. ‘Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks of registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation \without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ‘Transnational activism and national movements in Latin America bridging the divide / edited by Eduardo Silva pages em. — (Routledge studies in Latin American polities; 8) 1. Social movements—Latin America International cooperation. I. Silva, Eduardo, 1950— HNI83.5.173 2013 303.48'4098--de23 2012046736 ISBN: 978-0-415-83237-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-48990-1 (ebk) ‘Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLCContents List of Tables and Figures Acknowledgments About the Editor and Contributors 1 Transnational Activism and National Movements in Latin America: Concepts, Theories, and Expectations EDUARDO SILVA 2 Transnational Networks and National Action: El Salvador’s Antimining Movement ROSE J. SPALDING 3. The Politics of Scale Shift and Coalition Building: The Case of the Brazilian Network for the Integration of the Peoples MARISA VON BULOW 4 Seeing Like an International NGO: Encountering Development and Indigenous Politics in the Andes JOSE ANTONIO LUCERO 5 Network Dynamics and Local Labor Rights Movements in Puebla, Mexico KIMBERLY A. NOLAN GARCIA. 6 Juggling Multiple Agendas: The Struggle of Trade Unions against National, Continental, and International Neoliberalism in Argentina FEDERICO M. ROSSI 7 Feeding the Nation while Mobilizing the Planet? La Via Campesina, Food Sovercignty, and Transnational Movements in Brazil HANNAH WITTMAN xi xiii 56 80 106 141 161viii Contents 8 The Road Traveled 186 KATHRYN HOCHSTETLER, WILLIAM C. SMITH, AND EDUARDO SILVA Index 207Tables and Figures Tables 3.1. REBRIP’s Brokerage Roles and Tasks 3.2. REBRIP’s Four Phases Figures 3.1 REBRIP’s Timeline (1997-2011) 6.1 Networks of Actors that Established the Issues of the Autonconvocatoria No al ALCA, No a la Deuda, No a la Militarizacion, and No a la Pobreza, 2002-2005 6.2 Poster for the Final March (left) and Poster for the People’s Summit (right), November 1-4, 2005 (Mar del Plata, Argentina) 6.3 “Multiple, Parallel Agendas” of the Central de Trabajadores de la Argentina, 1996-2010 7.1 Number of Land Occupations, 1988-2009 63 64 65 146 149 ASS 173This page intentionally left blankAcknowledgments This book began as a response to reviewer comments that I had neglected the transnational connections of the social movements I wrote about in Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America, which was about the resilience of domestic resistance to neoliberal globalization. This piqued my interest in exploring the subject further, and I organized a seminar on transnational movements in the spring semester of 2009. Thus, my first heartfelt thank you for their contributions to this enterprise goes to the graduate students of the Department of Political Science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who took that seminar, If not for them, their willingness to follow where the dis- cussion led, and their confidence that our conclusions were worth the effort, Iwould never have discovered the gap in the literature this book is intended to fill. I then organized a panel for the Latin American Studies Association International Congress of 2010 to gather a core group of collaborators. I am greatly indebted to Margaret Keck who was one of our discussants. She generously shared her extensive, expert knowledge on transnational activ- ism, saved us from pitfalls, and pointed us in the right direction. In the fall of 2010, I moved to Tulane University. There, Ludovico Feoli, director of the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research (CIPR), generously sup- ported this project, beginning with a workshop in April 2011 in which we discussed our revised papers over a very productive two days. I am extremely grateful to the staff of CIPR, with special mention of Angela Reed, for pull- ing off the workshop without a hitch. I am also much indebted to Kelly Jones at CIPR for her competent work in preparing the final typescript and for her cheerful, soothing approach to the task. My nerves were, shall we say, frazzled from time to time and they needed soothing. My gratitude extends to the Department of Political Science, Tulane University, and to the resources of the Friezo Family Foundation Chair in Political Science, which supported this project at critical junctures. Our volume is much the stronger for the critical, constructive, and clear suggestions for revisions by the two reviewers of the manuscript. Commentary from persons who attended our panels at LASA 2010 and 2012 were equally rich and helpful. The remaining faults are, of course, my responsibility, It has been a great pleasure to work with Natalja Mortensen, Acquisitions Editor for Political Science Researchxii Acknowledgments at Routledge, who enthusiastically supported this book from the beginning: Darcy Bullock, Editorial Assistant Political Science, who graciously and efficiently shepherded the project through the production process; and the production staff of Routledge for delivering a fine book. And so, we come to the end of our journey. It was truly a collective enterprise, and I have been very fortunate to work with such positive, creative, committed, and sup- portive colleagues. The discussions that shaped what we believe to be our major contributions were, as they say, the best. [learned a lot from them, and it was fun. Eduardo Silva New Orleans, November 2012About the Editor and Contributors EDITOR Eduardo Silva holds the Friezo Family Foundation Chair in Political Science and is Professor of Political Science and a Research Associate of the Cen- ter for Inter-American Policy and Research at Tulane University. He is the author of Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America (Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 2009) and The State and Capital in Chile (Westview, 1996). Silva is coeditor with Francisco Durand of Organized Business, Economic Change, and Democracy in Latin America (1998) and with Paul W. Drake of Elections and Democratization in Latin America, 1980-85 (1986). Silva has published extensively in journals and edited volumes on social mobilization, environmental politics, and business-state relations. CONTRIBUTOR BIOS Kathryn Hochstetler is CIGI Chair of Governance in the Americas at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and Professor of Political Sci- ence at the University of Waterloo, in Canada. Her most cecent book is the prize-winning Greening Brazil: Environmental Activist in State and Society (Duke University Press, 2007, with Margaret E. Keck). She has published widely on social movements and environmental politics in Bra zil, Mercosur, and United Nations conferences. Her current research is a study of the role of the emerging powers in climate change negotiations, with a focus on energy politics in Brazil and South Africa José Antonio Lucero is the Joff Hanauer Professor of Western Civilization at the University of Washington, where he is also Chair of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. He was born in El Paso, Texas, and raised on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border. His main research and teaching interests include Indigenous politics, social movements, Latin American politics, and borderlands. In addition to numerous articles, Lucero is the author of Struggles of Voice: The Politics of Indigenous Representationxiv About the Editor and Contributors in the Andes (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008) and the coeditor of the Oxford Handbook of Indigenous Peoples Politics (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). He is currently working on two research projects that examine the cultural politics of (1) conflicts between Indigenous peo- ples and the agents of extractive industry in Peru, and (2) human rights activism, religion, and Indigenous politics in the Mexico/U.S./Tohono O’odham borderlands. Kimberly A. Nolan Garcia is an Assistant Professor in the International Stud- ies Division at CIDE, the Centro de Investigacién y Docencia Econémicas in Mexico City. Her research interests are generally in the area of inter- national political economy and include the protection of labor rights in the international system, transnational political advocacy around non- traditional trade issues, and the politics of U.S. trade policy. Her most recent article, “Transnational Actors and Labor Rights Enforcement in the North American Free Trade Agreement,” appears in Latin American Politics and Society (53, no. 2 [2011}). Federico M. Rossi (PhD, European University Institute, Florence) is a Post- doctoral Fellow at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research at Tulane University, His research interests have included national and transnational social movements, protest, trade unions, democratization, and youth political participation. He has published his work in Interna tional Sociology, Mobilization, Latin American Perspectives, Desarrollo Econdmico, América Latina Hoy, European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and several volumes. William C, Smith (PhD Stanford University) is Professor of International Studies at the University of Miami. His research interests focus on democ- ratization, the political economy of economic restructuring, and conten- tious politics and transnational social movements. Smith has taught and conducted research in Brazil at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, the Universidade Pontificia Catdlica, and the Instituto Universitario de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro (IUPERJ). He also has been affiliated in Argentina with the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella and the Centro de Estudios de Estado y Sociedad. In addition to articles in scholarly journals, Smith is the author of Autboritarianism and the Crisis of the Argentine Political Economy (1991) and the editor of numerous edited volumes, including most recently Market, State, and Society in Contemporary Latin America (2010) and Latin American Democratic Transformations (2009). Smith is also the editor of Latin American Politics and Society. Rose J. Spalding is Professor of Political Science at DePaul University. Her recent publications include Reform and Resistance: Trade Politics in Central America (University of Texas Press, forthcoming) and “SocialAbout the Editor and Contributors xv Movements” in the forthcoming Handbook on Central American Gover- nance (Routledge). Her previous books include Capitalists ard Revolution in Nicaragua (University of North Carolina Press) and an edited collection, The Political Economy of Revolutionary Nicaragua (Allen and Unwin). Marisa von Biilow is a Professor at the Political Science Institute of the Pon- tificia Universidad Catélica in Chile, She is the author of Building Trans- national Networks: The Politics of Trade in the Americas (Cambridge, 2010), which won the Luciano Tomassini Latin American International Relations Book Award, given by the Latin American Studies Association in 2012. She is also the author of numerous articles on transnational col- lective action and social movements. Hannah Wittman is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Land and Food Systems and the Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainabil- ity at the University of British Columbia. Her research examines how the rights to produce and consume food are contested and transformed through struggles for agrarian reform, food sovereignty, and agrarian citizenship, with empirical focus in Canada, Brazil, and Guatemala. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Peasant Studies, Journal of Rural Studies, Agriculture and Human Values, Rural Sociology, Society and Natural Resources, Food, Culture and Society, and Environment and Society. She recently coedited Environment and Citizenship in Latin America: Natures, Subjects and Struggles (Berghahn, 2012).This page intentionally left blank1. Transnational Activism and National Movements in Latin America Concepts, Theories, and Expectations Eduardo Silva This book addresses a significant gap in the literature on transnational collee- tive action, In the 1990s, the intensification of neoliberal globalization (world convergence on free-market economics) and internationalization (increased institutionalized cooperation among states) caused a surge in transnational activism, Given the widespread perception of declining state sovereignty, activists and social movement organizations formed transnational networks and coalitions to pressure both intergovernmental organizations and national governments on a variety of issues, such as social justice, democracy, trade, human rights, civil rights, and environmental sustainability. The trend for nationally and subnationally rooted activists and movement organizations to “go transnational”—to “scale up” to the transnational level—captured the imagination of scholars, practitioners, and observers. We have learned a great deal about the formation of transnational networks, campaigns, and coalitions; their objectives, strategies, and tactics; and even, on occasion, their impact. Against this tide, another strand in the literature on neoliberal global- ization argues that the domestic level remains a highly relevant arena for struggle because states, domestic institutions, and partisan politics continue to play a significant mediating role between global pressures and domes- tic responses. Moreover, the literature increasingly recognizes that activists and social movement organizations operate at both the transnational and national levels in an interactive relationship in issue areas that span the two scales. The continued relevance of the domestic level as an arena of struggle against neoliberal globalization and the multilevel characteristics of transna- tional activism raise an important yet understudied problem. We know little about how participation in transnational networks influences national-level mobilization.’ What positive and negative effects has the experience of social movement organizations at the transnational scale had for their development at the national scale? Are there processes of adaptation and/or diffusion of frames, strategies, tactics, and repertoires of contention that help national movements to advance their domestic agendas? What conditions affect whether those processes take place, how they unfold, and their effectiveness in achieving goals?2 Eduardo Silva We address this gap in the literature by building on approaches that stress the multilevel characteristics of transnational relations. The literature recognizes that transnational activists and movement organizations are fre~ quently rooted in the national arena and, therefore, also pursue domestic agendas; hence, there is an expectation of reciprocal effects across scales. However, what those effects might be when we move from the transnational to the national scale has yet to be systematically explored. This book adds considerably to our empirical knowledge of those processes, including on questions of effectiveness and goal attainment. It also addresses theoretical issues. It explores the utility of relational approaches to transnational col- lective action in contrast to more linear models, The midrange theorizing of the empirical chapters, along with the mix of positive and negative cases, raises new hypotheses for future testing and new questions for further study. The book contributes to our understanding of resistance to neoliberalism because it focuses on a set of shared problems that activists face at both the transnational and national levels.” Neoliberal globalization and internation- alization have weakened key social actors of the past, mainly labor unions, and greatly diversified the social landscape with the proliferation of move- ments focused on identity politics, rights, and environmental issues. Thus, at the transnational and domestic levels alike, the expanding heterogencity of social actors and the increased complexity of shifting political opportunity structures present special challenges. Building and sustaining heterogenous coalitions, inclusive of diversity and less hierarchically organized, is one of them. Another lies in the capacity to identify favorable changes in opportunity structures and to figure out how to exploit them. Activists and movement organizations involved at the transnational level have gained significant expe- rience in both exercises. If the challenges they face at the domestic level are similar, it becomes very relevant to inquire how participation in transnational networks shapes national-level mobilization, the circumstances under which activists draw on that storehouse of experience, and with what outcomes. GOING TRANSNATIONAL The emergence and consolidation of sovereign national states in the cigh- teenth and twentieth centuries had a profound impact on the nature of social protest: it contributed to the rise of moder national social movements. The centralization of political power over more extensive territories caused challengers to make this new locus of authority the target of mobilization. Deepening democratization after World War II, suggested that social move- ments had become an almost routine aspect of nonelectoral political par- ticipation in national politics, coining the term movement societies (Smith and Fetner 2010, 14-17; Tarrow 1998). However, at the turn of the twen- tieth century, significant changes in well-worn patterns of protest occurred. In ever-increasing numbers, national movements and activists were “goingTransnational Activism and National Movements in Latin America 3 transnational.” They forged networks and coalitions across borders to pro- test the policies of international organizations, multilateral agencies, and multinational corporations. Cross-national campaigns for human rights, economic and social justice, and democracy aimed at these targets prolif- erated around the globe (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Bandy and Smith 2005; Khagram, Riker, and Sikkink 2002). Scholars scrambled to understand this complex new phenomenon and to explain why movements were “going transnational.” A structural approach argued that the intensification of globalization at the turn of the twentieth century significantly eroded the sovereignty of national states. This change in the structure of political opportunities and threats drove the dramatic expansion of transnational activism. As national states ceded sovereignty to transnational regimes and institutions, activists shifted their organizing strategies, tactics, and targets accordingly (Smith 2008). Globalization is a complex phenomenon, and the literature distinguished between processes of complex internationalization and neoliberal globaliza~ tion (Smith and Fetner 2010; Tarrow 2005). Internationalization referred to the proliferation of cooperative relations among states, usually by creating international organizations and intergovernmental agencies. Their techno- cratic decision-making styles and supranational character generated threats to national sovereignty, diversity, and equality. Yet, at the same time, these international political arenas created opportunities for activists to organize, seeking to influence principles, norms, rules, and procedures of these interna~ tional institutions as well as their policies (Tarrow 2005, 25-28). By contrast, neoliberal globalization referred to the worldwide expansion of laissez-faire economics, which placed key elements of economic policy making beyond the control of national states (Silva 2012). The relevant decision-making centers switched to multinational corporations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization (WTO), among others. Activists joined in transnational coalitions and waged campaigns to resist the perceived eco- nomic and social injustices that accompanied neoliberal globalization, such as international debt relief, food sovereignty, the solidarity economy, and anti-free trade and investment agreements (Tarrow 2005, 5-7; Smith 2008). Analysts were aware of the complexity of the relationship between national and international levels of collective action. However, the rapid deepening of globalization and the explosion of transnational activism that accompanied it in the closing decades of the twentieth century—especially after the end of the Cold War—focused attention on the factors that drove activists and national movement organizations to forge transnational net- works and coalitions in their struggles for rights, equality, and diversity (Khagram, Riker, and Sikkink 2002; Bandy and Smith 2005; della Porta and Tarrow 2005). Some even attempted to construct transnational social move- ments, such as the global justice movement centered on the World Social Forum and the slogan “Another World Is Possible” (Reitan 2007; Smith 2008; della Porta 2007; Fisher and Ponniah 2003; Munk 2007).4 Eduardo Silva Sidney Tarrow (2005), in an impressive synthesis of international rela~ tions and social movements theorizing, developed an influential theory to explain the process of scaling up to transnational contention. He argued that internationalization and neoliberal globalization certainly had changed the structure of political opportunities and threats facing activists. Political opportunities referred to changes in economic and institutional contexts, including contingent factors such as elections, that “promote the expansion of social protest and the emergence of social movements” (Smith and Fet- ner 2010, 16). Threats—the opposite of an opportunity—stimulated collee- tive action because people mobilize to prevent bad ends. Opportunities and threat influenced framing (the formulation of shared definitions of what is happening), resource mobilization (organization building), and repertoires of contention (culturally informed ways in which people protest). But Tarrow, and others, also argued that these were essentially static fac~ tors. Studies based on this approach provided a good “baseline model of social movements” (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001, 18), but the frame- work formulated a linear model of social movements. Social change ere- ates shifting opportunities and threats that push people to organize, frame issues, protest, and, ultimately, to form a social movement as they engage authorities in sustained interaction over time to obtain their goals. More- over, the political process model, as it became known, focused on single unified actors in national states with democratic regimes. This approach missed the dynamic, interactive, and unpredictable aspects of contentious polities—their plasticity—and was not very useful for understanding collee- tive action in other types of political regimes. Given these limitations, in his work on transnational activism, Tarrow turned to the dynamics of contention approach (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001). The approach is relational because instead of emphasizing structures and their effects, it focuses on key recurring mechanisms and processes that drive contentious politics (Tarrow 2005, 24). Mechanisms are the building blocks, defined as “a delimited class of events that alter relations among specified elements in identical or closely similar ways over a variety of situations” (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001, 11). They can be environmental (externally generated events that affect people), cognitive (those that alter the perceptions of individuals or collectivities), or rela- tional (those that prompt changes in how people, groups, and networks connect to each other). Processes are “recurring combination[s] of mecha- nisms that can be observed in a variety of episodes of contentious poli- tics” (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001, 11). Thus, Tarrow argued that the process of upward scale shift resulted from the combination of specific mechanisms: coordination among local activists across borders facilitated by brokerage and integrating frames. This, in turn, permitted a shift in claims, targets, and identity as contention moved from the domestic to the transnational scale (Tarrow 2005, 123; 2009; Hadden and Tarrow 20073 Tarrow and McAdam 2005).Transnational Activism and National Movements in Latin America 5 Significantly, for our purposes, Tarrow also observed that transnational activism had strong domestic roots, and that this influenced downward scale shifts from the transnational to the domestic level. Downward scale shift occurs when local-level activists inspired by their participation in transna- tional organizing “take on local targets and make local claims in new and dif- ferent ways” (Tarrow 2005, 132). In this process, the relational mechanisms of diffusion and brokerage encouraged certification of higher-scale practices and mobilization at the domestic scale. This resulted in local adaptation of transnational collective action (Tarrow 2005, 187). After all, he argued, “a domestic movement that shifts in scale to the international level does not, as a result, automatically become a global movement and cease its local exis- tence . . . Even as they access global frames and international opportunities for scale shift, most activists remain rooted in and constrained by domestic political realities” (Tarrow 2005, 139). Meanwhile, Hochstetler and Keck (2007) highlighted the importance of studying how activists juggle the two scales. They stressed the tension between mobilizing transnational and national networks and resources and that resolving those tensions requires an accurate perception of political opportunities and threats. Tarrow and others, such as Ruth Reitan (2007), made significant con- ceptual and theoretical contributions to the study of transnational collective action. They identified key processes, built on the notion of contentious pol- itics to accommodate the broad range of contentious transnational collective action under a common conceptual approach. They also developed descrip tive explanatory models for processes, such as upward and downward scale shift. However, from our standpoint, although this literature recognizes that the interaction of the transnational and domestic scales complicates decision making and action greatly for domestically rooted activists, it does not go on to explore the issue in any depth. It is more focused on specifying the mechanisms that explain how local action scales up to the transnational level or on explanations of downscaling in the form of local chapters of transnational networks.‘ Ironically, for a dynamic relational approach these authors generally develop rather unilinear models more concerned with the directionality of processes up or down the scale than with the interaction between multiple scales and the effects on domestically rooted activists.® RESILIENCE OF THE NATIONAL LEVEL The resilience of the national level in world politics gives urgency to the question of how participation at the transnational scale affects domesti- cally rooted activists. Regime theory and constructivism showed that states play important roles in shaping international institutions and can, to vary- ing degrees, protect themselves from them. Although international regimes constrain states, state interests are not fixed and they may exert pressure to change regimes (Katzenstein, Keohane, and Krasner 1999; Ruggie 1998).6 Eduardo Silva The stalemate of the WTO Doha Round of trade negotiations in the WTO (Gallagher 2008) and the abandonment of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) initiative (von Billow, this volume) are two prominent examples. Perhaps even more forcefully, international political economists and scholars in comparative polities have shown that despite internationaliza~ tion and economic globalization there is, nonetheless, space for states and civil society actors to maneuver and that they do indeed exploit those spaces (Weiss 2003).° They insist on the continued vitality of state regulation of markets as a way to counteract the ill effects of globalization—such as the race-to-the-bottom thesis. For example, states make room to maneuver for industrial policies under WTO rules (Weiss 2005a, 2005b; Mosely 2005). They may also devise institutions that fulfill the functional requirements of development and that substitute for those prescribed by neoclassical eco- nomic orthodoxy without clashing with explicit prohibitions enforced by international regimes (Rodrik 2007; Hall and Soskice 2001; Huber 2003). In short, this approach argues against views, such as Susan Strange’s (1996), that there is a “fixed” quantity of power that shifts to either the super- national or subnational level. Rather, state power, reach, and territoriality may be augmented, extended, or transformed—for example, in the form of increased state protection against the risks of markets. Because states, domestic institutions, and partisan politics play essential roles in mediating the intersection between global pressures and domestic responses, national political space constitutes a central arena for conten- tious politics resisting neoliberal globalization. Realization among ana- lysts that the decline of state sovereignty was overstated contributed to a reevaluation of the national level as a locus of struggle. For example, Imig and Tarrow (2001) found that the bulk of transnational activism is focused on the national state, demanding that it protect citizens from the ill effects of neoliberal globalization. Donatella della Porta (2007) concluded much the same in a study of the European global justice movement. Their focus, however, was on scaling down processes and how national chapters of transnational movements mobilized, frequently in coordinated efforts and usually against national states, to protect them against neoliberal glo- balization (della Porta and Tarrow 2005).” How national movement orga- nizations and activists involved in transnational coalitions and campaigns navigated participation in both scales, and the effects of that interaction, were not addressed.* We argue subsequently that multilevel approaches to the interaction between the transnational and domestic seales offer a more useful point of departure for these questions, In this way, we bridge the international relations and international political economy literatures regarding the continuing central role of the domestic level on the one hand, with that of comparative politics and comparative political economy, which argues that the national state remains a critical actor mediating the effects of globalization, on the other hand.Transnational Activism and National Movements in Latin America 7 NATIONAL MOVEMENTS AND TRANSNATIONAL ACTIVISM IN LATIN AMERICA ‘The resilience of the national level as a site of resistance to neoliberal global- ization was strong in Latin America from the mid-1980s to the carly 2000s. Unions, peasants, Indigenous peoples, informal labor in poor working-class neighborhoods and shantytowns, and professional associations mobilized against perceived threats of socioeconomic and political exclusion as their governments implemented neoliberal policies. Mobilization took a variety of forms. There were expanding waves of street protests in opposition to free-market policies, sporadic efforts to negotiate policy change with the authorities, and electoral mobilization in support of left parties in Argen- tina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Brazil, Mexico, and Uruguay (Silva 2009; Petras and Veltmeyer 2005). By the mid-2000s, with the exception of Mex- ico, in all of these countries mobilization helped to usher in left or center-left governments committed to supporting social, economic, and political rights threatened by neoliberal policies (Levitsky and Roberts 2011; Weyland, Madrid, and Hunter 2010; Murillo, Oliveros, and Vaishnav 2010; Baker and Greene 2011). Important national social movement organizations developed out of these struggles, In Ecuador, highland and lowland Indigenous peoples—who had a prior history of organizing—united to form the Confederacién Nacional de Indigenas Ecuatorianos (CONAIE). It became the leading Ecuadorian social movement capable of articulating demands from a much broader social spectrum. It staged “uprisings” that shut down the country and con- tributed to the ouster of several presidents in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Becker 2011), In Argentina, a new union movement (the Confederacién de Trabajadores Argentinos, or CTA) alongside newly organized urban infor- mal sectors, the piqueteros, played a key role in escalating cycles of conten- tion from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s chat paralyzed the country in 2001 (Svampa and Pereyra 2003). Those protests paved the way for the electoral victory of the center-left Peronist governments of Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (2003-present), In Brazil, rural landless workers (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra [MST]} and the union movement (Central Unica dos Trabalhadores [CUT]) supported the Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores [PT]) that elected President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva to two terms (2003-2010) and a successor PT government under Dilma Rousseff (2011-present) (Hunter 2010). In Bolivia, peasant/ Indigenous groups (Confederacién Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesi- nos Bolivianos [CSUTCB]) and other Indigenous peoples’ movements led to escalating cycles of mobilization.’ These culminated in the Water War of Cochabamba (2000) and the Gas War of 2003, the latter ousting the incumbent president. In 2005, violent protests against the rightward drift of President Carlos Mesa’s reformist government caused him to resign, paving the way for Evo Morale’s left government (2006-present) (Silva 2009). The8 Eduardo Silva Zapatistas in Mexico (1994) reignited protest for socioeconomic equality, Indigenous peoples’ rights, and a peasant-friendly agrarian policy. Mean- while, independent labor unions struggled for recognition and expansion, while government-sanctioned corporatist unions fought for membership and extending labor rights to unorganized or underrepresented sectors (Nolan Garcia, this volume). Many of these leading organizations forged heterogeneous coalitions with different kinds of movements, as the previous account suggests. In Argentina, labor unions allied with new informal sector organizations orga- nized around neighborhoods. In Brazil, rural peasant unions joined with urban labor unions. Bolivian peasants and Indigenous peoples coordinated protests along with labor unions and informal sector workers organized as neighborhood associations. CONAIE articulated coalitions with labor unions and informal urban sector organizations. Forming heterogeneous coalitions augmented the power of individual movement organizations, per- mitting massive nationwide mobilizations at times repudiating not only gov- ernment policies but also challenging “neoliberal” governments themselves and opening political space for left governments and politics. These social movement organizations frequently linked up with transna- tional activists and coalitions as intcrnationalization and neoliberal global- ization intensified throughout the region in the 1990s—and everyone met up at the World Social Forum. Deepening free-trade initiatives in Latin America were a key source of concern. Initially, proposals for a North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) between the U.S., Canadian, and Mexican governments caused labor unions and other activists from those countries to join in transnational activism to stop or modify increased economic inte- gration. After the NAFTA treaty came into force in 1994, U.S.-led efforts to establish an FTAA stimulated a new and more extensive episode of trans- national activism, These antecedents inform Kimberly A. Nolan Garcia’s chapter on Mexican unions in this volume. By the same token, the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) created subregional incentives to organize across borders to influence policies related to intraregional trade and investments, which informs Rose J. Spalding’s chapter on antimining campaigns in El Salvador. The Hemispheric Social Alliance (HSA) was the principal Latin American transnational coalition created to resist the FTAA and related free-market economic treaties (von Billow 2010; Massicotte 2003). Those treaties cur- tailed state sovereignty. They opened markets to international corporations that crowded out domestic business, weakened labor, and overwhelmingly favored agribusiness over farmers and smallholders. Consequently, citizens groups, progressive ecumenical groups that supported debtor organizations linked to Jubilee 2000 (South), and labor unions joined (Smith and Korze- niewicz 2007; Korzeniewicz and Smith 2005; Friedman, Hochstetler, and Clark 2001). In this volume, Marisa von Bitlow’s chapter on Brazilian resis- tance to the FTAA analyzes such a coalition, as does Federico M. Rossi’sTransnational Activism and National Movements in Latin America 9 on the Argentine CTA. Peasant unions and Indigenous organizations—such as the Bolivian CSUTCB, Ecuadorian CONAIE, and Brazilian MST—also joined HSA. By the same token, the MST was a founding member of Via Campesina, a worldwide transnational peasant coalition struggling for peas- ant and farmer food sovereignty against the spread of agribusiness (Reitan 2007; Borras, Edelman, and Kay 2008; Desmarais 2002, 2007). The MST is the subject of Hannah Wittman’s chapter. Internationalization created nodal points for hitherto unrelated move- ment organizations and activists to connect. Interministerial negotiations offered unions and civil society organizations such opportunities as they engaged negotiating teams in the policy formulation stage of the process. The same applied to Summits of the Americas that were periodically orga- nized beginning in 1994 to push the FTAA process. Meanwhile, United Nations commissions, programs, and year-long thematic designations bro- kered interaction among Indigenous, human rights, and women’s organi- zations and activists, as did international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs). These were also battlegrounds for the definition and recognition of key actors, as we see in José Antonio Lucero’s chapter on Indigenous identity building in the Andes. QUESTIONS AND THEMES Here, then, were activists and movement organizations deeply rooted in the domestic level that also participated in regional and global transnational networks and coalitions, sometimes in leading roles. Nevertheless, the bulk of their activism still focused on domestic politics: they sought to expand associational power and engage national authorities in a sustained man- ner in order to influence a change in policy and, perhaps, in the national state. This straddling of scales raises new questions. Can we specify how the transnational and domestic levels interact to affect perceptions of opportu- nities and threats? How do national movement organizations and activists involved in transnational coalitions and campaigns navigate participation in both scales? What are the consequences of that interaction for national- level activism? Does it strengthen or weaken national movements? How does it affect choices of strategies, tactics, and repertoire of contention at the national and community levels? Is there learning from the transnational to the national level—for example, in building and managing heterogeneous coalitions, or vice versa, from grassroots organizing locally to transnational coalitions? What are the consequences for the effectiveness of national movements and coalitions? This volume addresses these questions across four distinct themes to which the empirical chapters contribute. We now turn to a discussion of those themes in which we highlight theory-driven expectations for outcomes, although here we only introduce those expectations as a general guide to the10 Eduardo Silva empirical chapters, leaving readers to make their own evaluations as they go along. Following the empirical chapters, in the concluding chapter, we offer our own assessment of the extent to which the evidence supports the expectations raised here. Building a Transnational Relations Approach to Multilevel Interaction We start from a transnational relations approach to activism across borders because it recognizes that social movements “operate in both a domestic and international environment” (Sikkink 2005, 151). Multilevel interaction shapes the context in which activists and social movement organizations act. We combine this approach with political process theorizing from the social movements literature that argues that the structure of political opportunities and threats shapes the development of social movements (Tarrow 1998) Thus, we focus on multilayered structures of opportunities and threats. However, as von Bilow argues in this volume, we are sensitive to critiques of the political process model, especially that these processes are quite fluid rather than fixed realities determined by invariant structures. Similarly situ- ated actors may perceive opportunitics and threats differently (Smith and Fetner 2010). Given the limitations of the political process approach previously men- tioned, we also turn to the relational approach pioneered by McAdam, Tar- row, and Tilly (2001) to better understand multilayered interactions. We focus on a specific set of cognitive and relational mechanisms because they appear in many of the cases in this volume. Recurring cognitive elements include framing, certification, and attribution of similarity. Frames are inter- pretive schemes that “organize experience and guide action . . . collective action frames are constructed by movement organizers to attract supporters, signal their intentions, and gain media attention” (Tarrow 2005, 61). Cer- tification involves the “validation of actors, their performances, and their claims by authorities” (Tarrow 2005, 194). The reverse, decertification, can also occur. Attribution of similarity refers to the recognition by two or more actors that they share similar problems and conditions. Meanwhile, broker- age and relational diffusion emerged as the principal recurring relational mechanism. Brokerage occurs when two parties are brought together by an unrelated third actor, Relational diffusion happens when an actor that has a prior relationship with another brings in new ideas that the second actor adopts. In various chapters, these elements help us to understand percep- tions of opportunities and threats, movement organizational development and strategies, coalition formation and shifts, choice of targets, power rela tionships with authorities, and, to some extent, outcomes. The transnational relations approach posits that nonstate actors cooper- ate across borders in the context of international and domestic structures of opportunities and threats (Risse-Kappen 1995, 2002; Sikkink 2005;Transnational Activism and National Movements in Latin America 11 Smith and Korzeniewicz 2007). Research focused on specifying interna- tional opportunity structures, especially the relative closure or openness of international regimes to civil society organizations. Relatively closed inter- national opportunity structures encourage activists to organize networks and coalitions across borders and to pressure for change by mounting pro- tests and campaigns. Conversely, international organizations more open to civil society organizations, like the United Nations, encourage engagement and become organizing nodes for and allies of activists (Smith 2008). Risse- Kappen (1995) built on this, but turned attention to how domestic structures influenced the effectiveness of transnational activists. State structures could be centralized or fragmented, social structures could be weak or strong, and policy networks consensual or polarized. In short, “differences in domestic structures determine variation in the policy impact of transnational actors” (Risse-Kappen 1995, 25). Brysk (2002) pushed the argument forward pro- posing that globalization creates both constraints and opportunities, but that how globalization affects what happens at the domestic level depends on state structure. Sikkink (2005) moved the discussion on the relationship between activ- ism and domestic and transnational structures of opportunities and threats yet another step forward. She differentiated among four types of interac: tion between domestic and international opportunity structures linked to four patterns of activism: (1) Closed domestic and international opportunity structures discourage activism. (2) closed domestic and open international opportunity structures encourage the classic boomerang and spiral forms of transnational activism. Activists use transnational networks to pressure national governments to change their policies—for example, on human rights or the environment (Keck and Sikkink 1998). (3) Open domestic and closed international opportunity structures most likely result in democratic deficit and defensive transnational activism. In this type, technocratic mul- tilateral or bilateral institutions closed to civil society organizations suffer from democratic deficits, which leads activists to focus on the state to pro- tect them and to lobby for changes in those organizations. This is the case of the global justice movement in some countries (Smith 2008). (4) Open domestic and international opportunity structures promote insider-outsider coalitions. In this scenario, domestically rooted activists focus on the state to protect them from developments at the international level because they are “closer to home.” However, as a secondary tactic, they may use connections to international institutions to generate additional pressure on the state. In this scenario, activists alternatively exploit connections to institutionalized politics to advance their agendas (insider tactics) or resort to protest (out- sider tactics) to press their point (Smith and Korzeniewicz 2007; Fox and Brown 1998) Of course, the structures of opportunity and threats at both the inter- national and domestic levels vary over issue area, region, and time (Risse- Kappen 1995; Sikkink 2005). Thus, we expect changes in them to influence12 Eduardo Silva whether activists emphasize the national or the transnational scale and how participation in transnational activism affects domestic-level activism. Build ing on this proposition, the chapters in our volume suggest that the effects of multilevel interaction are highly contingent on contextual factors within multilayered structures of opportunities, threats, and constraints. Thus, we expect these contingent, shifting multilayered structures of opportunity and threats to have an impact at the domestic level on coalitional strategies and tactics, issue framing, how activists engage the state, and the repertoire of contention. The authors in this volume explore the effects of changes in international opportunity structures (the nature of the threat), the domestic opportunity structures (turn to left governments), the perceptions of move- ment leaders, and the relationship of activists and movement organizations to institutionalized politics. With respect to the relationship of movement organizations to domestic political institutions. Goldstone (2003) argued that social movements fr quently act inside established political institutions as well as outside of them. They engage not only in protest but also in conventional politics, acting practically as lobbies. This is particularly the case once social movements have existed long enough to become institutionalized. In short, states and movements are also in an interactive relationship. Movements try to influ- ence states, but states also try to influence movements. The structure and dynamics of this relationship can influence outcomes. We refine the analysis by asking an additional set of questions about the relationship between par- ties and movements. Was the party born as an instrument of movements? How did bureaucratization of the party affect the connection to the move- ment? Do parties rely on movements for votes only? How activists perceive opportunities and threats is another significant factor influencing contingent outcomes in the interaction between the trans- national and the national levels. McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly (2001) stressed that opportunities and threats are not just objective structural conditions. Whether and how activists respond to them depends on how they interpret them. In short, cognitive factors matter. They mediate between objective conditions and action. We expect the fit between objective structural condi- tions and perceptions about them to have a strong impact on the domestic coalitional behavior, strategies, and tactics of domestically rooted activ- ists. Von Bilow, Nolan Garcia, Spalding, and Lucero analyze the effects of aligned and misaligned fits in Brazil, Mexico, El Salvador, and the Andes, respectively. Lucero pushes the point further arguing that the issue goes deeper than an instrumental approach to perceptions. He emphasizes the role of culture as a foundation for perceptions. Perceptions and preferences are not fixed and external to the actors but are intersubjective, with percep- tions emergent from the process of political conflict and struggle (Lichbach and Zuckerman 1997). Lastly, returning to McAdams, Tarrow, and Tilly’s (2001) focus on non- structural relational elements, we also examine the role of brokerage in con-Transnational Activism and National Movements in Latin America 13 necting the transnational and domestic levels of activism. Brokerage can be defined as “the linking of two or more previously unconnected social actors by a unit that mediates their relations with one and other and/or with yet other sites” (Tarrow 2005, 190). Given the arguments presented previously, we expect that how brokerage affects outcomes depends on the structural context in which the key actors find themselves. Spalding’s chapter on anti- mining campaigns in El Salvador, Lucero’s chapter on Indigenous identity, and von Biilow’s analysis of domestic anti-free trade coalitions address the role of brokerage in their analysis. They also identify emulation as an alter- native to brokerage—as well as attributions of similarities in processes of diffusion. Transnational Relations and Left Governments The election of left governments implies a potentially significant change in the domestic opportunity structure for activists seeking protection from neo- liberal globalization and/or alternatives to it. Four of our cases experienced left turns—El Salvador, Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia. Left governments in these countries came to power in part on the backs of mobilized societie: Their campaigns promised increases in civil society participation in politics and the policy process more generally, social equality, strengthening sover- cignty, greater state involvement in the economy, Indigenous peoples’ rights, expanding citizenship rights in general, improving environmental protec- tion, and many other progressive issues." To varying degrees, left govern- ments have addressed these issues. Based on these developments, it would seem that left governments rep- resented a positive change in domestic opportunity structures for activists in anti-neoliberal globalization campaigns. Following Sikkink (2005), they constituted a further opening of opportunity structures, and we would expect social movement organizations active at the transnational scale to concentrate more on domestic-level activities. Moreover, governments could now be allies and create opportunities for positive activism. Under these assumptions, we would expect left turns to alter the political context in ways that encourage diffusion, adaptation, frame extension, and organizational practices (such as building heterogeneous coalitions) derived from the expe- rience of transnational activism. We would also expect an increase in the effectiveness of activists. The empirical chapters in this volume offer rich evidence to evaluate such expectations. The turn to left governments features strongly in Spalding’s chapter on mobilization against transnational mining ventures in El Salva~ dor, Wittman’s analysis of the MST in Brazil, von Bilow’s chapter on the Brazilian Network for the Integration of the Peoples, and Rossi’s chapter on the CTA in Argentina. As previously mentioned, we offer our own evalua- tion in the concluding chapter; however, readers will immediately notice that the evidence is mixed.14 Eduardo Silva North-South Linkages and South-South Linkages The chapters in this book address a third major question. How do North- South versus South-South linkages between transnational social movement organizations affect the ways in which activists borrow from their cross- border experiences as they intensify their domestic campaigns? The general literature has found a tendency for North-South relationships to be more hierarchical, with the organizations from the global North more dominant. This, for example, was the case with Jubilee 2000. Tensions often flourish between them (sometimes tearing them apart) because of strong differences in objectives, strategies, and tactics, which can diminish effectiveness (Sik- kink 2002). Jubilee North and Jubilee South essentially went their own ways even if they did not officially split (Donnelly 2002). More horizontal South- South relationships frequently lack these built-in tensions. They are less hierarchical and may cooperate more easily (Sikkink 2002). Jubilee South’s sustained activism in Latin America is one such example. The chapters in this volume on Mexican labor organization (Nolan Gar- cfa), Indigenous peoples’ organizing in the Andes (Lucero), and one of the coalitions in El Salvador’s antimining development campaign (Spalding) involve North-South linkages. Based on the general literature, we would expect North-South linkages to be more hierarchical, with the northern activists dominating; more material resource oriented; and less robust in terms of what activists bring home from their transnational experience. By the same token, the aforementioned Salvadorian case is largely about South- South linkages, so are Brazil's MST and food sovereignty campaign (Wit- tman), Brazilian participation in the HSA (von Biilow), and the Argentine labor movement's involvement in the HSA (Rossi). In these cases, we expect more horizontal interaction from South-South linkages and a greater soli- darity and effectiveness in transference of experience. The Normalization of Labor Three of the chapters in this volume involve labor unions. They are bureau- cratized, and they are the inheritors and primary representatives of the labor movement. Their institutionalized characteristics frequently separate labor unions from analyses of transnational activism, which are more focused on protest and loosely organized, horizontal networks (Reitan 2007; della Porta mith 2008). We argue for the normalization of organized labor in the analysis of social movements. As previously stated, after World War II deepening democratization caused social movements, like labor, to become a routine aspect of nonelectoral political participation in national pol- ities (Smith and Fetner 2010, 17; Tarrow 1998; Goldstone 2003). Labor seem- ingly occupied a special place due to extensive state regulation, its high level of bureaucratization, and its extensive participation in routine politics. For much of the time, it behaved like any other organized interest group. And yet, as the literature also points out, when it took an adversarial stance to authoritiesTransnational Activism and National Movements in Latin America 15 it resorted to protest and extrainstitutional mobilization. In short, labor, like many other institutionalized movements (and even some not so institutional- ized) played an “insider-outsider” game (Goldstone 2003). If it is common for more institutionalized social movement organizations to play this game, then we see little reason to isolate labor. The main question becomes, Under what circumstances does it play the insider or the outsider game? Ir seems clear that neoliberal globalization threatens national labor move- ments. It does so in generally similar ways by promoting labor flexibility, labor codes hostile to unions, and downward pressure on wages and ben- efits (Burgess 2004; Murillo 2001). In advanced economies, the loss of jobs due to the relocation of companies to the developing world is an added threat. This may drive a wedge between the labor movement of advanced and developing economies. But it is also clear that commonalities can out- weigh differences, Labor unions do form coalitions across the North-South divide (Anner and Evans 2004). They also join in heterogeneous coalitions seeking to strengthen national sovereignty in the interest of protecting citi- zens in general, and working classes in particular, from declining conditions. They do this at the domestic and the transnational scales (von Biilow 20103 Murillo and Schrank 2005). Latin American labor organizations participated in transnational cam- paigns in coalition with diverse social movement organizations and networks (von Biilow 2010; Anner and Evans 2004). They also mobilized against neo- liberal globalization at the national level in similarly heterogeneous domestic coalitions (Petras and Veltmeyer 2005; Silva 2009). What effects did transna- tional activism have on their domestic struggles? At the transnational scale, Latin American labor organizations were dealing with strong threats and rela- tively closed opportunity structures, National governments often were not much more open on free-trade and probusiness policies but permitted some democratic play of interests and hence greater recourse to outsider tactics (mobilization and protest) at the domestic level. Given these observations, we expect the chapters on union movements to confirm or disconfirm three expectations. First, we would expect labor organizations that participated in transnational activism in the struggle against neoliberal globalization to rely more on their movement qualities (outsider tactics) at the national level, Second, social movement organizations and activists in coalition with labor should gain greater access to the policy-making process than they would have on their own. Third, this should increase the chances for affecting outcomes. Again, we reserve the discussion about the degree to which the evidence from the empirical chapters confirms these expectations for the concluding chapter. SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTERS Chapter I introduced the book’s major themes, questions, and theory-driven expectations. Although it drew on empirical chapters, readers may find a synopsis of them useful as a guide of what is to come.16 Eduardo Silva In chapter 2, “Transnational Activism and National Action: El Salvador’s Antimining Movement,” Rose J. Spalding uses the case of the antimining movement in El Salvador to analyze the ways in which national-level net- works adapt and deploy resources mobilized through transnational alliances in order to build a domestic resistance movement. She explores strategies and frames through which local community groups, environmental rights organizations, epistemic allies, and the Catholic Church leadership, each with their own set of interlinked transnational alliances, stitched together a reform coalition that fueled national policy change. The analysis extends beyond upward and downward scale shifts to include horizontal shifts in ideas and repertoires. This approach highlights the kinds of resources that local organizations extract from transnational allies. It identifies different types of INGOs, including one variation (the domesticating INGO) that is particularly well adapted for national-level collaboration." Arguing for the utility of a politically embedded campaign analysis, Spalding explores the intersection between social movements and formal politics, giving special attention to critical junctures when electoral calculations foster elite realign- ment and national policy change. Chapter 3, “The Politics of Scale Shifting and Coalition Building: The Case of the Brazilian Network for the Integration of the Peoples,” by Marisa von Bilow, argues that the political context has changed radically in Latin America in the past decade. Asa result, many civil society actors now per- ceive that they have a better chance at pushing their agendas in domestic forums rather than across borders. Based on an analysis of Brazilian civil society organizations that were active members of transnational collective action networks in the past decade, this chapter argues that, in such a con- text, civil society actors face two basic challenges: to profit from changes in perceived political opportunities domestically without abandoning the transnational coalitions they helped to create in the past and to maintain unity in the absence of a common enemy. In chapter 4, “Seeing Like an International NGO: Encountering Develop- ment and Indigenous Politics in the Andes,” José Antonio Lucero draws inspi- ration from the critical literature on postdevelopment. His chapter explores the global and local nature of Indigenous politics through a comparative historical and ethnographic analysis of “development encounters” between Indigenous peoples and their international supporters. Based on field research in Bolivia and Peru, Lucero presents a case study of Oxfam America, where he examines the role of INGOs in Indigenous politics and of Indigenous organi- zations in INGO politics. Examining international cooperation (cooperacion internacional) as a “contact zone,” Lucero argues that “contentious politics” approaches of transnational politics should be complemented by cultural anal- yses of the very terms of “local-global” encounters. While boomerang effects are crucial for Indigenous politics, Lucero contends that we must apprehend their constitutive effects (allowing the emergence of new kinds of Indigenous identities and actors) in addition to their causal ones (helping certain actorsTransnational Activism and National Movements in Latin America 17 at certain times more than others). Paying attention to both kinds of impacts can help us gain a deeper understanding of the politics of “certification” and shed light on how progressive NGOs both enable transnational networks of solidarity and activism and (re)produce tensions between and among Indig- enous communities and their transnational advocates. Kimberly A. Nolan Garcia, in chapter 5, “Network Dynamics and Local Labor Rights Movements in Puebla, Mexico,” evaluates the impact of partic- ipation in transnational movements on local efforts to promote democratic unionization in the garment export sector in Puebla, Mexico. It explores the difficulties of recreating the successful cases of transnational advocacy when local-level actors take over leadership and strategy development roles. Nolan Garefa compares levels of transnational support for workers’ efforts to register an independent union in three assembly plants to emphasize that access to network resources conditioned the ability of local actors to meet movement goals once the network was led by local labor rights groups In the first factory, Kukdong, deep transnational support, the provision of material resources, and the inclusion of key groups in the network ulti- mately led state officials to recognize the incipient worker’s organization as an independent union. However, once local advocates attempted to recreate this success at the local level in two additional factories—first at Matam- oros Garment and finally at Tarrant Ajalpan—the absence of key network participants meant that the relative lack of material resources, organizing expertise, and network contacts disadvantaged the local labor rights groups, ultimately leading to the collapse of these two unionization campaigns. As such, Nolan Garcia uses the lessons from the Puebla cases to emphasize how network dynamics, and, specifically, how access to organizational resources once networks move to the local level, can condition when transnational advocacy ends in cases of failure. In chapter 6, “Juggling Multiple Agendas: The Struggle of Trade Unions against National, Continental, and International Neoliberalism in Argen- tina,” Federico M. Rossi analyzes the virtually “parallel agendas” that the CTA developed at the national, continental, and international levels for almost a decade. The CTA played a key role in the resistance to neoliberal reforms on the national level. While carrying out these activities, it also participated in the main continental campaign against the FTAA. However, these were largely parallel agendas in which the CTA’s transnational activ- ism did not significantly influence its domestic strategic plans. Rossi shows how although the CTA was actively participating in the continental cam- paigns against neoliberal globalization, its participation in these campaigns was the result of a nationally focused agenda. Moreover, since the 1990s, the only CTA program of action at the international relations has been on the Mercado Comin del Sur (MERCOSUR), and has not suffered from any significant changes as a result of the CTA participation in the campaigns against the FTAA, In sum, this chapter analyzes the reasons for the CTA’s application of three contemporary parallel agendas of action in an attempt18 Eduardo Silva to answer the problem of the influence of transnational activism on national contentious actors during their resistance to neoliberalism. Chapter 7, “Feeding the Nation while Cooling the Planet? La Via Campe- sina, Food Sovereignty, and Transnational Movements in Brazil,” by Hannah Wittman, charts the reemergence and transformation of a multilayered “agrar- ian citizenship” as a product of domestic and transnational mobilization around contemporary agroecological change. She argues that the cosmopoli- tan nature of agrarian citizenship is not only based on relations of agricultural rights and obligations vis-a-vis states, but also involves practices of strategic alliance building, identity formation, and “horizontal integration” between a wide range of local, global, and national peasant movements. This form of agrarian resistance and citizenship is exemplified by the international peas- ant movement La Via Campesina’s call for food sovereignty. The food sov- ereignty model, founded on practices of agrarian citizenship and ecologically sustainable local food production, is analyzed for its potential to challenge the dominant model of large-scale, capitalist, and export-based agriculture in the Brazilian context. The concluding chapter by Kathryn Hochstetles, William C. Smith, and Eduardo Silva assesses the contributions of the empirical chapters to the general themes, concepts, and theory-driven expectations raised in the intro- duction. We discusses how, in our view, the book sharpens key concepts. It evaluates the extent to which the evidence from the empirical chapters confirms or disconfirms theory-driven expectations. It explores gray areas and topics for future research. We believe this book deepens our understanding of domestic and trans- national interactions among civil society forces in the continent and draws out key processes between community organizations, political parties, gov- ernments, and INGOs. It contributes to the literature on transnational social movement organizing by elucidating the interaction between transnational and national-level organizing. Unlike some of the more cosmopolitan contri- butions to this literature, we emphasize the continuing importance of national- level contestation, without denying the importance of the transnational. This collection also contributes to the emerging literature on Latin America’s move away from the neoliberal era with the turn to left governments. That literature is methodologically focused on the national level. We show how transnational and national factors dynamically interact in that process, although the con- trast with countries that have not joined that trend remains ever present in the Mexican case and in the analysis of pre-left turn periods. NOTES 1. Andrews (2011) and Kashnabish (2010) are exceptions to this generalization. 2. For a Polanyian political economy interpretation of deep underlying causes for resistance to neoliberalism, see Silva (2012).Transnational Activism and National Movements in Latin America 19 3. Diffusion involves the adoption of ideas, concepts, strategies, and tactics transmitted by known agents or channels. It can be relational when the agent is a person or organization, or nonrelational in the case of media. Certifica- tion involves the “validation of actors, their performances, and their claims by authorities” (Tarrow 2005, 194). 4, Dowascaling, however, remains largely a theoretical proposition yet to be studied empirically. Rose J. Spalding’s chapter in this volume explores the utility of the model in the ease of antimining campaigns in El Salvador. . The approach also tends to undervalue or assume the power and influence of local actors who first needed to organize and make visible the legitimacy of their struggles in order to gain credentials, attention, and allies at other scales. In other words, activists at the transnational level have first been politicized in specific local contexts. Such activists now have to assess trade-offs as they decide about strategies, targets, tactics, and campaigns that involve multiple seales. 6. Our volume sees the state as a contested space. Social movements engage state authorities in a sustained manner to influence social, economic, politi- cal, or cultural change, hence, ultimately, to effect some change in the state itself. However, some cultural studies, feminist, and postcolonial Gramscian approaches are more critical of the centrality of the state as a key space of contention, This literature emphasizes opting out of confronting the state. The principal challenge is to create autonomous spheres of counterhegemonic awareness, social practices, organization, and power. As these spheres expand, established. structures will crumble. See, for example, Dominguez. (2002), Laxer and Halperin (2003), Amoore (2005), and Fisher and Pooniah (2003). These are the processes of internalization and domestication. Internaliza- tion refers to “domestic claims-making against international or foreign targets ... or... the mounting of domestic disputes in the language of global- ization” (Tarrow 2005, 122). Domestication occurs when conflicts that origi nate externally play themselves out on domestic territory (Tarrow 2005, 2). 8. As we discuss below, sonthern and northern movement organizations had different approaches, goals, strategies, and tactics, which, at times, caused tension between them 9, The most important “other” indigenous peoples movements were the low- land Confederacién de Pucblos Indigenas de Bolivia and the highland Con- sejo Nacional de Ayllus y Markas del Qullasusyu. 10. For left turns in Latin America, sce Levtisky and Roberts (2011); Weyland, Madrid, and Hunter (2010); Murillo, Oliveros, and Vaishany (2010); and Baker and Greene (2011). 11, Domestication occurs when conflicts that originate externally play them- selves out in the domestic arena (Tarrow 2005: 2). For a full definition of domesticating INGOs see Spalding’ chapter in this volume. REFERENCES Amoore, Louise, ed. (2005). The Global Resistance Reader. New York: Routledge. Andrews, Abigail. 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New York: Cambridge University Press. “Two Activists2 Transnational Networks and National Action El Salvador’s Antimining Movement! Rose J. Spalding INTRODUCTION For almost two decades, neoliberal market reform advanced steadily in Cen- tral America, These reforms were particularly deep in El Salvador, where successive governments moved quickly to privatize banks, electricity, and telecommunications; liberalize trade; provide investor guarantees; and dol- latize the economy. The Central America and Dominican Republic Free- Trade Agreement with the United States, CAFTA-DR (henceforth CAFTA), consolidated market reform by encasing the economy in a series of durable rules regarding trade, investment, property rights, and dispute settlement procedures. Anumber of Salvadoran civil society organizations and movements resisted these changes, questioning the pace and direction of economic reform. Look- ing for ways to enhance economic security and protect their communities, these sectors mobilized to resist, evade, and escape these market disciplines. As political space opened in the aftermath of the 1980s civil war, these popu- lar sectors constructed fluid networks and sought out transnational alliances to bolster their efforts For much of this period, these mobilizations were defeated. Promarket elite coalitions were forceful, enjoying strong international support and a broad electoral base during the long period (1989-2009) of Alianza Repub- licana Nacionalista (ARENA) party dominance. Yet recurring experiences in market resistance left an organizational trace on which successive mobiliza- tions built. As popular support for market reform wavered in El Salvador, prior policies were called into question. Tightening political competition fostered elite realignment and, at least temporarily, derailed the market opening in the mining sector. When Frente Farabundo Marti para la Liber- acién Nacional (FMLN) candidate Mauricio Funes won the presidency in 2009 after two decades of ARENA governments, a new coalition of political forces emerged, one less inclined to endorse simple market orthodoxy. This chapter explores the ways that local resistance movements inter- laced with transnational networks to slow neoliberal reform and advance adjustments in the market model. It forms part of a larger analysis of reform24 Rose J. Spalding and resistance in Central America (Spalding, forthcoming), which builds on Karl Polanyi’s ({1944] 2001) construct of the “double movement.”? Using the case of the antimining movement in El Salvador, this chapter analyzes the ways in which a national-level network adapted and deployed resources mobilized through transnational alliances in order to build a domestic resis- tance movement. As the introduction to this volume notes, resistance movements in Latin America build on diverse social actors and attempt to construct coalitions in “fragmented social landscapes.” With labor too weak to play a hegemonic role, heterogeneous sectors need to collaborate on the resistance project. This chapter explores the bridging and bonding techniques (Putnam 2000) through which various social sectors and organizations came together to support a social movement in the Salvadoran antimining case. Local com- munity groups, environmental rights organizations, epistemic allies, and the Catholic Church leadership, each with their own set of interlinked trans- national alliances, stitched together a reform coalition that fueled national policy change. This chapter uses an expansive definition of resistance networks, including research centers as well as movements and organizations. It also employs a broad approach to transnational networking, including analysis of informal, cross-border linkages as well as formal, membership-based coalitions. This approach allowsus to investigate not only the impact of better-institutionalized transnational networks, which emerge over time, but also the influence of embryonic cross-border coalitions, which often appear in carly stages of net- work formation. These fluid, informal ties are often neglected in more formal analysis of movement transnationalism. Four sections make up this analysis: (1) a brief discussion of alternative multiscaler mechanisms that link domestic and transnational social move- ments; (2) a six-part analysis of the connections between an emerging anti- mining alliance in El Salvador and the transnational networks with which it collaborated; (3) a discussion of the way shifts accumulated in national-level politics leading to domestic policy change; and (4) the conclusions, which summarize theoretical observations drawn from the analysis. Although this chapter argues that transnational networks made a signifi- cant contribution to this resistance movement, local organizations are not presented as passive receptacles of transnational direction. They are under- stood as active agents involved in the work of constructing transnational alliances and borrowing strategically from the transnational repertoire. This work identifies not only conventional upward and downward scale shifts but also horizontal shifts in resources, ideas, and repertoires, in which similarly situated domestic networks collaborate with social actors in neighboring countries to confront shared challenges. It highlights the variety of resource: that local organizations may extract from transnational allies and identifies a type of international nongovernmental organization (the domesticating INGO) that may be particularly well adapted for this process.Transnational Networks and National Action 25 As the introductory chapter to this volume indicates, resistance activists need to be able to recognize and respond to changing political opportunity structures. Arguing for the utility of a politically embedded campaign anal) sis, this chapter explores the intersection between social movements and formal politics. It gives special attention to critical junctures when shifting electoral calculations and heightened perceptions of opportunity fostered elite realignment leading to national policy change. BOOMERANGS AND LOOPS In Activists Beyond Borders, Keck and Sikkink pioneered the concept of a “boomerang” to map a prominent pattern in transnational activism. The boomerang was described in the following way: When channels between the state and its domestic actors are blocked, the boomerang pattern of influence characteristic of transnational networks may occur: domestic NGOs bypass their state and directly search out international allies to try to bring pressure on their states from outside. (1998, 12) Although sometimes found in formally democratic countries, boomerang patterns often occur in nondemoeratic settings, “where governments are inaccessible or deaf to groups whose claims may nonetheless resonate else- where” (13). In these cases, governments may be more responsive to external pressures from international organizations or powerful states than to their own citizens. Boomerang patterns have been identified in campaigns for human rights, environmental protection, women’s rights, and Indigenous rights; they have been found less successful in campaigns for social justice and economic change (della Porta and Tarrow 2005, 6), although Nolan Garcia’s chapter in this volume demonstrates how a boomerang pattern can also operate in transnational labor mobilization. As formal democratization advanced in Latin America in the 1990s, large- scale episodes of state violence abated, and space for rights monitoring and social mobilization expanded. The blockage between civil society organiza- tions and the state loosened, creating new possibilities for organized publics to advance their cause directly, Formal and informal mechanisms developed, allowing local actors to exert more pressure on their own state appara- tus through candidate placement, campaigns and elections, lobbying, issue education, media outreach, and coalition building. The boomerang pattern remained significant, particularly for minority sectors or rights-based move- ments with limited political capital, but was joined now by other processe reflecting the shift in political opportunity structures (Sikkink 2005). This chapter highlights one of the alternatives emerging with formal democratization: the domestic loop variation. This national-transnational26 Rose J. Spalding linkage mechanism involves strategic, multiscaler resource leveraging, as in the boomerang pattern, but now with the direction reversed. In this second process, domestic groups use information, material resources, frames, and symbols, some of which were constructed through participation in transna tional networks, to pressure their own states for reform. Instead of depend- ing on transnational allies to press for home state reforms using exogenous processes, they use domestic political instruments themselves, assisted by resources from transnational campaigns. Movement transnationalism could thus play a role in two kinds of mul- tiscaler linkage processes. In the classic boomerang, local organizations collaborate with transnational allies to engage external actors (including other states and international governmental organizations) to apply exog- enous pressure for change on the local state. The domestic loop variation traces interactions between local organizations and transnational networks that strengthen domestic coalitions in their struggle to influence home states directly. In theory, a full linkage cycle, involving the simultaneous or sequential operation of both processes, could exercise stronger influence on the state than either pattern operating alone. The domestic loop has a strong affinity with democratic politics and is the most common linkage process, at least when the political opportunity structure is receptive to popular organizing. Relationships between local and transnational networks are complex, beginning with the definitional problem, Campaigns that appear to be transnational may, in effect, be disguised national ones if overly dominated by actors from one state; purported local organizations may in fact be lit- tle more than outposts of external organizations if actually directed from abroad. With the flow of external resources and migratory processes play ing such a critical role and the tendency of network brokers to wear hats as representatives of both internal and external actors, differentiation between local actors and transnational ones in order to delineate their respective roles can be challenging. When authentic national and transnational networks are distinguishable along conceptual and observable lines, the relationships that emerge are fre~ quently laden with tension and do not necessarily produce synergistic coop- eration. Early work on transnational resistance tended to deemphasize these tensions and focus on movement convergence, but a second generation of research has given closer attention to conflicts between domestic movements and their transnational allies (see, for example, Bandy and Smith 2005, 237-40; von Biilow 2009; Edelman 2008; Andrews 2010; and Lucero, this volume). These tensions may be particularly acute when transnational net- works link across the global North and South, where unequal access to power and resources replicates hierarchies that undercut the purportedly shared commitment to change (Petras 1997; Pearce 2010). The study of transnational activism requires ongoing attention to patterns of conflict and competition as well as cooperation.Transnational Networks and National Action 27 In spite of these problems, transnational alliances prove quite durable at times, and INGO links with local groups may also be often mutually rein~ forcing. As research on this relationship advances, a third form of inquiry rejects both easy synergistic assumptions about domestic-transnational movement linkages and claims about invariably harmful distortions imposed on local actors by their transnational allies. This body of research attempts to identify the particular set of circumstances under which engagement with transnational networks has particular consequences (see, ¢.g., Risse-Kappen 1995), including those that benefit national-level movements. Alliances nec- essarily come with costs in terms of unit-level autonomy. The question is, Under what circumstances do those costs outweigh the benefits, from the perspective of transnational alliance participants? As research advances on this issue, we should be better able to identify the issue areas, organizational characteristics, and dynamics that tend to disempower local groups and those that, on balance, produce greater complementarity. Struggles to pursue collaboration without sacrificing independence and authenticity may be advanced through cultivation of intersubjective under- standing and solidarity, or negotiated based on strategic calculations of mutual gain. Transnational networks offer space to explore the relationship between universalistic principles that connect across boundaries and the kinds of par- ticularlisms of place that commonly energize local groups and authenticate a struggle. The concept of “convergence space” (Cumbers, Routledge, and Nativel 2008, 192-97) captures this process of ongoing dialogue, as does an abundant literature on “frame bridging” and “brokers,” who articulate connections across difference (Tarrow 2005; Smith 2008), and “grassroot- ing vectors” and “imagineers,” who “represent the connective tissue across geographic space” (Cumbers, Routledge, and Nativel 2008, 196). ANTIMINING MOVEMENT IN EL SALVADOR After a decade of civil conflict ended with a United Nations-brokered peace agreement in 1992, the victorious market architects in Bl Salvador intro- duced various reforms to encourage foreign investment. Market reforms included a new investment law in 1999, which allowed foreign investors to bring disputes to the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) for settlement, rather than depend on local courts. This effort was supplemented with the 2000 creation of the Agencia de Promocién de Exportaciones ¢ Inversiones de El Salvador (PROESA), an investment promotion agency, and the Ley de Integracién Monetaria, approved and implemented in a matter of weeks at the end of 2000, which ushered in dollarization. The reduced exchange risk for investors was expected to catalyze a new round of foreign investment, which had slowed following bank, telecommunications, and electricity privatization in the 1990s, One promising area for new investment was gold mining.28 Rose J. Spalding Mining promotion in El Salvador followed the Latin American regional trend in extractive sector expansion. With active encouragement from the World Bank in the 1990s, governments across the region had relaxed and redefined mining regulations, privatized ownership, and adjusted tax provi- sions to encourage new investments (see Fox, Onorato, and Strongman 1998; Sanchez Albavera, Ortiz, and Moussa 2001). To reactivate and expand the industry, the ARENA government rewrote the Salvadoran mining law in 1996 and followed with further encouragement in the 2001 Cédigo de Min- eria, which reduced mining royalties from 4 percent to 2 percent (Henriquez 2008, 28). Generous terms drew investor attention to Central America, and rising gold and silver prices created an incentive for exploratory work. By 2006, eight international gold-mining companies had established a pres- ence in El Salvador (Direccién de Hidrocarburos y Minas, Ministerio de Economia, Anuario Minero Nacional 2006, as cited in Henriquez [2008, 19}). Exploration drilling soon verified commercial quantities of gold and silver, and the push to pioneer was on. In 2005, a national antimining network consolidated to counter the pro- cess. Over the next five years, this movement drew on international alliances to help orchestrate a national confrontation over the future of the industry. ‘My rescarch suggests the significance of several sets of actors, particularly a local resistance network with strong ties to affected communities; a group of tenacious advocacy organizations focused on environmental and social rights; an emerging network of activist-oriented researchers and special- ists; a religious network, led by Catholic Church bishops, who undertook a doctrinally based policy intervention to thwart the mining advance; and an expanding cluster of interconnected international allies and INGOs that supported their work. This alliance built on and expanded beyond an ear- lier phase of struggle and activism during the revolutionary conflict in the 1980s. As mining opponents made inroads into public opinion, political support for mining eroded and elected officials realigned, now with oppos- ing forces in the lead. National Resistance Network Transnational networking builds on national actors who provide vital grounding for collaborative activities (Tarrow 2005; see also Hochstetler and Keck 2007; Rodrigues 2004). Local affiliates construct a shared inter- pretation of an issue around which diverse groups can mobilize, and they disseminate evidence of wrongdoing on which a campaign builds. In his study of antimining conflicts in Peru, Guatemala, and Honduras, Keith Slack (2009) found antimining coalitions commonly link two sets of local actors: community groups, which focus on the physical or sociological dislocation in nearby towns caused by mine development; and national environmental organizations, which highlight long-term environmental costs and help iden- tify sustainable alternatives.Transnational Networks and National Action 29 Launched in September 2005, El Salvador’s Mesa Nacional Frente a la Mineria Metalica (henceforth, Mesa Nacional) was composed of thirteen organizations that had long been active in neoliberal resistance movements.° The Mesa Nacional played a critical brokerage role, linking across community, environmental, human rights, activist research, and religious organizations. Brokerage work was facilitated by a prior history of neoliberal resistance col- laboration shared by many of these organizations and, in some cases, a his- torical association with the FMLN, a 1980s revolutionary movement that had become the dominant opposition party following the peace agreement.* Most of the Mesa Nacional affiliates represented communities located in or near the Gold Belt, an area identified as resource rich by mining com- panies during the exploration process. The Gold Belt ran across northern E] Salvador, crossing a mountainous zone where conflict during the civil war had been intense. Some communities in the departments of Chalat- enango, Cabafias, and Morazén had a long history of organizing around land rights; this area also included communities where liberation theology had flourished and sparked social action (Wood 2003, 89-99). Military sweeps and scorched-earth campaigns in the early 1980s dislocated com- munities throughout this region but proved unable to wipe out rebel forces. Protection provided to flecing residents by sectors of the FMLN sometimes forged a durable alliance and reinforced local resistance. As the war intensified, thousands of refugees from the zone scattered across the border to encampments in Honduras, particularly at Mesa Grande. The need for strong organization during their subsequent return to El Salvador and the repopulation of “guerrilla towns,” even as the war continued in 1987 and 1988, often deepened community solidarity. Smith-Nonini’s (2010) study of grassroots health care initiatives in two repopulated communities highlights their organization, autonomy, and solidarity. The postwar period, which brought demobilized guerrillas home but offered little in terms of basic government services, reinforced the local commitment to self-reliance and crystallized antagonism to the central government in these scattered outposts of civic rebellion. Built around small-scale agricultural production, these communities emphasized traditional ideas about the primacy of land and water, food cultivation for local needs, collectivism, and reciprocity. Frame bridging with activist-oriented environmental organizations lay- ered in ecological principles and knowledge and allowed the movement to align the claims of various publics. Over time, frame bridging advanced toward frame transformation, as environmental concerns became the anti- mining movement centerpiece.’ Focus on damage to communities located near the mines expanded as questions arose about the impact of acid mine drainage in the regional river system and the release of other contaminants in the Lempa River watershed, the major source of the nation’s water sup- ply. Prior organizing around water rights by environmentalists had already identified water shortages and contaminated water as important national concerns (Haglund 2010).30 Rose J. Spalding Grassroots Community Transnationalism Tarrow (2005, 101-2) identifies three ways in which a movement can expand beyond the local level: through “relational” mechanisms (trust networks), “non-relational” means (mass media, Internet), and movement brokers (“mediated diffusion”). The origin stories presented by Salvadoran antimining leaders contain references to both relational and broker mecha- nisms (Belloso 2010; Rivera 2010). In explaining the initial linkages of their movement to cross-border networks, several community leaders focused on personal relationships, and contacts forged out of their wartime refu- gee experience in Honduras, highlighting elements of relational networking. Conventional brokerage networks, built out of conscious frame-building exercises in cross-regional resistance gatherings, were also identified as a tool for cooperation and information sharing. ‘The wartime refugee experience in Honduras, which involved whole fam- ilies and endured up to a decade for some, built grassroots, binational ties that contributed in a distinctive way to transnational activism. Relationships between dislocated Salvadorans and Honduran sympathizers forged a sense of connection anchored in lived experience. Salvadoran refugee children were born in Honduras or lived through much of their childhood theres par- ents and grandparents were buried at the refugee camp in Mesa Grande. The subsequent return of survivors to El Salvador and the repopulation of their communities at the end of the 1980s left behind a layer of cross-border con- nections on which future alliances could be built. Return visits were orga- nized, even after the camp was dismantled, to keep these memories alive. According to Bernardo Belloso (2010), vice president of Asociacién de Comunidades Rurales para el Desarrollo de El Salvador (CRIPDES) and Mesa Nacional leader, these connections facilitated cross-border informa tion sharing as new issues emerged. With no prior experience in gold mining, Salvadoran community activists claimed they were initially uncertain about how to respond to the prospect of mines opening in their region, Interac- tions with Honduran resistance activists reportedly convinced them to be skeptical. Belloso explained: This [exchange with Honduran activists] helped us to open our eyes. We asked them, does mining help there or not? We need jobs. Mining, they said, would be here only five, seven, eight years, it depends. It brings maybe 100 jobs, but 50 will be only during measurement and construe- tion. In one year, those people will be out of work. Experts from outside will be brought in to fill jobs after the building is done. Convinced that mining would bring no real local employment benefits, these community activists homed in on the costs, particularly the loss of land available for agriculture, breakdown of community cohesion, and, increas- ingly, health dangers associated with the industry.Transnational Networks and National Action 31 Gold mining had developed quickly in Honduras following mining law reform in 1998, and activists had begun mobilizing several years earlier. Their campaign focused on two open-pit mines, San Andrés (Santa Rosa de Copan) and San Martin (Valle de Siria), and highlighted both popula- tion displacement and environmental contamination (Slack 2009, 125-26). Honduran antimining forces received important support from Catholic Church leaders, with Cardinal Oscar Andrés Rodriguez leading a pivotal protest march in March 2002. Ongoing community complaints about con- tamination of local water sources, including a cyanide spill at the San Andrés mine that killed fish in the Lara Rives, led to repeated marches and demon- strations coordinated by local government and church officials. With con- flict escalating, the Honduran government suspended new mining permits in July 2004, a position sustained by the Mel Zelaya administration prior to his ouster in July 2009. Visits by Salvadoran community activists to the Valle de Siria in Hondu- ras offered firsthand exposure to community health complaints.° Similarly situated in terms of social and economic power, residents of the town adja- cent to the mine were identified as trusted counterparts; this “attribution of similarity” fostered processes of “emulation” (Tarrow and McAdam 2005, 128). The Hondurans’ description of health problems associated with expo- sure to mine waste was perceived as credible; rejection of these claims by mine officials was interpreted as a display of arrogant indifference to the well-being of the poor. These direct experiences reinforced the resistance to gold mining among Salvadoran community activists, who brought back educational materials and organized meetings throughout their networks to share their observations (Rivera 2010). Interactions between Honduran, Salvadoran, and, subsequently, Guatemalan antimining coalitions helped to identify commonalities and shared vulnerabilities. These links were rein- forced by the cross-border migration of gold mine capital and of mine waste flowing through interconnected water systems passing inexorably across national borders. Mediated Diffusion and Regional Organizing In addition to the “relational” mechanisms that built on personal connections between community activists in neighboring countries, contentious mining politics spread through “mediated diffusion” that employed purposeful bridging processes undertaken by movement brokers. Information sharing over the Internet (“non-relational mechanisms”) plays a well-documented role in building transnational networks (della Porta et al 2006, 92-117), but social movement theory also emphasizes the usefulness of international gatherings where brokers can perform coalition building in face-to-face interactions (Fox and Brown 1998). Many of the transnational networks active in Central America have had a regional focus, reflecting gradations of Central American identity and shared32. Rose J. Spalding histories across recent decades. The collective experiences of war and civil conflict during the 1980s, with violence spilling over from war zones into neighboring territory, mobilized human rights and peace-building networks that connected across borders within Central America. Region-wide natural disasters, including mudslides, flooding, drought, and hurricanes, as with Hurricane Mitch in 1998, and subsequent reconstruction projects fostered cross-border civil society collaboration, in part at the behest of international donors (Gass 2002). Repeated episodes of “regional neoliberalism” also inspired regional resistance. “Regional neoliberalism” involved ambitious projects of cross- national market development that entailed simultaneous structural reform throughout the region (Spalding 2008, 324-27). Two significant examples occurred in the early 2000s: Plan Puebla-Panama (PPP), a Mesoamerican infrastructural development project sponsored by the Inter-American Devel- opment Bank; and CAFTA, a free-trade agreement between the U.S. and Central American countries to which the Dominican Republic was subse- quently added. The shared experience of engaging regional development initiatives encouraged cross-border organizing within the affected region.” PPP and CAFTA functioned as “condensing symbols” (Tarrow 2005, 73), which galvanized opposition and consolidated regional resistance networks. Beginning in 2001, the Foro Mesoamericano por la Autodeterminacin y Resistencia de los Pueblos (henceforth Foro Mesoamericano) gathered activists from hundreds of organizations from southern Mexico and Cen- tral America for information gathering and concerted strategizing (Spald- ing 2007). Using a forum that rotated from country to country, organizers shared responsibility for a sustained campaign against “megaprojects” of highways, ports, and electrical networks that would deepen Mesoamerican integration into the global economy. The 2002 announcement by U.S. presi- dent George W. Bush of a free-trade negotiation between the U.S. and Cen- tral American countries expanded the target and intensified the opposition. The annual meetings of the Foro Mesoamericano helped to introduce activists across the region to each other so they could “see how the shoe fits over there” (Unidad Ecolégica Salvadoreha [UNES] 2004). As atten dance grew and subthemes became more numerous, specialized miniforums and spin-offs developed, offering more focused discussion of specific issues within the master framework of neoliberal resistance. The Foro Mesoameri- cano reached its organizational peak in 2004, the year when the CAFTA agreement was officially completed and signed by its seven member states.® As von Billow notes in this volume, the failure of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiation removed a key target of resistance mobi- lization in Brazil, resulting in subsequent network erosion. Ironically, pas- sage of a free trade agreement (FTA) can also deactivate a movement, at least temporarily, in that failure after an intense campaign can be dispiriting and the next steps are not clear, As anticipated problems become realities or other threats emerge, however, resistance movements often demonstrateTransnational Networks and National Action 33 the capacity to reactivate and reconfigure, building on prior learning and relationships in new manifestations of struggle, as Wittman’s chapter on La Via Campesina suggests. As the Foro Mesoamericano process began to lose focus in the wake of CAFTA approval, subgroups spun off into new, related movements. When mining conflicts erupted in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Costa Rica, Central American antimining activists called their first regional meeting in 2004, an effort that culminated in the May 2007 formal constitution of the Alianza Centroamericana contra la Mineria Metalica at a gathering in Cabaita ground zero for El Salvador’s mining struggle. Denouncing metal mining as a “nefarious activity” that negatively impacted the right to life, health, food sovereignty, and natural resources, their declaration called for an “incor- ruptible struggle” against metal mining throughout the region (Alianza Cen- troamericana contra la Minerfa Metélica 2007).” Interpersonal cross-border connections built at the local level and the bridging work undertaken by regional brokers facilitated a process of “dif- fusion,” that is, the “transfer of claims or forms of contention from one site to another” (Tarrow 2005, 32; see also Giugni 2002). Salvadoran activ- ists appropriated and adapted frames deployed by neighboring resistance movements where contentious mining politics was a step ahead. Although the national adaptation of ideas, strategies, repertoires, and resources con- structed at the transnational level is commonly referred to as a “downward scale shift,” this cross-regional learning had a stronger horizontal dimension than the upward-downward construct implies. Large transnational networks with global or continental reach include members with wide variation in resources, stature, and influence, leading to hierarchies that elevate some organizations above others, as von Billow’s (2010) analysis of networks of trade resistance organizations in the Ameri- cas demonstrates. Lateral networking helps to break down hierarchical structures and connect activists to most similar others, where strategic caleu- lations might be more readily shared. My concept of a horizontal or lateral shift refers to the transnational circulation of ideas, frames, and repertoires among similarly situated resistance organizations among which there are few or no asymmetries of power. Unlike the lopsided interactions that fre- quently develop in transnational networks that connect well-resourced and institutionalized organizations with others that lack formal structur. staffing, and research capacity, lateral transnationalism refers to exchanges among networks of organizations with modest power differences and exten- sive commonalities. In the latter, similarities in struggles and challenges facil- itate a more fluid flow of information. These linkages may be informal and cross-border, as in local exchanges between antimining groups in Honduras and El Salvador, When resistance networks link across North and South, stratification may be particularly pronounced. Successful borrowing and adaptation of frames under conditions of organizational and national inequality present34 Rose J. Spalding special challenges. Linkages among similar networks in a less formal system, bringing together groups from neighboring countries that are grappling with similar problems, may form a distinct subset of transnational networks or represent a different phase in their development. Generally South-South, activists in these networks may have an easier time agreeing on diagnostics, although South-South resistance networks are not without subimperial ten~ dencies and complexities. Theorizing this variation in resistance network composition may prove useful in an effort to understand the circumstances under which transnational borrowing is fluid and repertoire adaptations for national use are better designed for local settings. El Salvador’s Mesa Nacional provided an organizational vehicle through which transnational learning at the local and regional levels could be dif- fused and adapted, and useful information disseminated. With two paid staff, monthly press conferences, friendly coverage from the small run Diario Co-Latino, and a blog (esnomineria), the Mesa Nacional opened an office in a building shared with CRIPDES and the Sister Cities project. Its 2008 “repertoire of contention” included organized marches (with the symbolic burial of gold-mining companies), petition campaigns (collecting more than 10,000 letters), and radio “sociodramas” focusing on government trickery and company abuse. Alternative Epistemic Communities, or “In [Our] Scientists We Trust” In the meantime, gold exploration advanced in El Salvador. Commercially viable deposits were identified, with Canadian company Pacific Rim, holder of the exploration license for the El Dorado project in Cabafias, taking the lead, Having acquired an exploration concession in 2002, Pacific Rim bid for an extraction permit in 2004. The first step in the process required the company to produce an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). A feasibil- ity study was to follow, demonstrating, among other items, legal rights to the land on which the mine would be constructed. Preparing to challenge the application on environmental grounds, the Asociacién de Desarrollo Econémico y Social (ADES), a community devel- opment association in the repopulated town Santa Marta, contracted Robert E. Moran, a U.S.-based hydrologist and geochemist, to produce an evalua- tion of the El Dorado EIA. Thus began a process of layering in rival scientific and expert analysis to expose the environmental problems posed by mining. After two decades of government and corporate experience in mining, Moran had begun collaborating with nonprofit organizations in 1996, find- ing that he was “tired of the half truths” that characterized consultant reports for the industry (Moran 2010). In 1998, he published “Cyanide Uncertain- ties: Observations on the Chemistry, Toxicity, and Analysis of Cyanide in Mining-Related Waters” with the Mining Policy Center (now Earthworks). The activist networks forming around mining hazards brought him a stringTransnational Networks and National Action 35 of consulting invitations from alternative development and environmental coalitions in Latin America. Beginning in Honduras in 2001, as the conflicts around the San Andrés mine erupted, Moran rotated through eight Latin American countries over the next nine years (and more than two dozen assignments in other parts of the world). In several cases, scrutinized mines were subsequently closed, or extraction permits were suspended.” When approached about the El Dorado EIA, Moran was in the mid- dle of an assessment of the controversial Marlin Mine in Guatemala, and he agreed to extend his regional work to El Salvador. Moran’s El Dorado report, released at a public gathering in October 2005 in the Cabaiias capital city of Sensuntepeque, questioned the quality of the preparatory work done by Vector Colorado, the U.S.-based consulting company that prepared the EIAs for both El Dorado and Marlin Mine. Among the many deficiencies he cited, Moran targeted inadequate dis- cussion of remediation measures to be taken in the event of a cyanide spill, residual hazards posed by tailings solutions produced in the cyanide detoxi- fication process, insufficient baseline research on current water levels and quality, and missing financial guarantees to cover compensation in the event of mine disaster. In addition, Moran denounced the public feedback and community consultation processes stipulated in Salvadoran mining regula- tions. The community was given only ten days to respond to the single copy of a complex and confusing 1,400-page report. Adding insult to injury, they were required to consult the document at the environmental ministry office in San Salvador—no photocopying was allowed. In area after area, Moran noted how far short the EIA fell relative to the standards and safeguards that governed mining permit processes in the United States and Canada. Moran’s assessment was the opening salvo in the resistance network’s effort to mobilize support from an alternative epistemic community of scien- tists and experts. As Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) reminds us, scientific subcultures are communities of knowers that are constituted both socially and historically. In bidding for authority, expert actors bargain with other actors in an often-conflictual strategic game where outcomes are fluid and winning coalitions are temporary (Dunlop 2000). The relationship between knowledge and power, following Michel Foucault, has increasingly become a subject of critical inquiry. In their study of the way “universals” in neoliberal economics and the legal human rights agenda migrated between dominant intellectual and policy centers in the United States and Europe and such circles in Latin America, Dezalay and Garth (2002, 8) locate epistemic communities in national and international “fields of power.” Kiitting and Lipschutz (2009) advance this inquiry, focusing on the way the knowledge debate informs disputes over environmental governance. Power webs shape the way knowledge is variously absorbed, challenged, redefined, and deflected, and even what counts as worthy information. In the Salvadoran mining case, a host of authorities in the ministries of economy and environment had endorsed mining development and granted36 Rose J. Spalding initial rounds of approval, backed by experts at international financial insti- tutions and consultants at firms like Vector that validated specific projects as low risk. The resistance network now counterattacked by mobilizing its own set of authorities, who offered a strikingly different assessment of the environmental risks. The Mesa Nacional membership included a research center, Centro de Investigacién sobre Inversién y Comercio (CEICOM), which produced and distributed mission-driven publications written either by its own staff mem- bers or consultants. A second member, UNES, combined research and activ- ism on a number of environmental issues including the costs of free-trade agreements and the protection of water rights. While largely directed by local experts, these networks periodically incorporated specialists from U.S. or European universities with experience in the mining sector. Collaboration with external experts allowed Salvadoran resistance networks to tap the cultural capital possessed by thickly credentialed scientists from the global North, making it more difficult for mine defenders to dismiss their claims. In quick succession, Moran’s review was supplemented by the work of other experts from the opposition camp." This cluster of expert reports challenged the adequacy of El Salvador’s environmental review process, both in terms of risk assessment and citizen engagement. It questioned the eco- nomic benefits and development impact of mining and raised a red flag on the country’s institutional and regulatory capacity. The construction of rival expert assessments provided an additional rool for resistance networks seck- ing to counter the monopoly knowledge claims of mining promoters. The availability of alternative expertise derived, in part, from years of prior sup~ port provided by a set of development- and social-justice-oriented INGOs. 2 Religious Communities, a Variant Neoliberal resistance networks are often small, attracting only a fraction of the total population. If they aspire to influence the direction of national life, they must cultivate multiple alliances and build broader coalitions. In times of extreme volatility and crisis, when established authority structures are in question, anti-neoliberal alliances may be able to expand their influ- ence quickly and successfully challenge a neoliberal regime (Silva 2009). In the absence of a disarticulating crisis and other key conditions, the process of constructing a reform coalition may be long and hard. The job requires a capacity for both “bonding” (connecting with socially homogeneous oth- ers) and “bridging” (building connections with those outside or beyond their social network, producing a heterogeneous alliance) (Putnam 2000, 22-24), In the Salvadoran case, bridging connections were forged through an alliance with the upper echelons of the Catholic Church, a generally con- servative political force.'* These loose networks constructed around shared objection to metal mining allowed the movement to expand its influence and recruit beyond its base.Transnational Networks and National Action 37 “Liberation theology” as a religious orientation had been severely weak- ened in El Salvador by years of warfare and official church hostility. Some sectors of church activists retained the call, however, particularly in faith- in-action nodes and resistance communities. Caritas, the Catholic Church’s official international relief, development, and social service agency, promoted advocacy on issues such as access to water, climate change, dam construction, mining, health, and prisons in El Salvador." Leaders of this organization became active participants in the antimining coalition; Céritas-El Salvador was one of the Mesa’s founding members. Networking with Caritas organizations elsewhere in Central America, Caritas El Salvador leaders worked to persuade Salvadoran bishops of min- ing dangers through peer consultation, bringing in bishops from Honduras and Guatemala, countries where church leaders were already in the fore- front of antimining coalitions (Jones 2010). Church officials in El Salvador were initially reticent to endorse the cause. The archbishop of San Salvador (1995-2009), Fernando Saenz Lacalle, was a politically conservative Opus Dei member, and the Conferencia Episcopal de El Salvador (CEDES) over which he presided was a badly fractured body. When they ultimately pro- nounced on the issue, however, their proclamation, “Cuidemos la Casa de Todos” (“Let’s Take Care of Everyone’s Home”), provided clear testimony of transnational learning, stating: The experience of our brother and neighboring countries, which have permitted gold and silver mining, is truly sad and lamentable. The bish- ops of those nations have raised their voice. We also wish to pronounce ‘on this issue, before it is too late. (CEDES 2007) The bishops declared that “this class of mining causes irreversible damage to the environment and surrounding communities,” with resulting health problems, water and subsoil contamination, and harmful effects on veg- etation, agriculture, livestock, and fish. In a small and densely populated country like El Salvador, the effects would be widely felt. Metal mining in El Salvador, they concluded, “should not be permitted.” Trained as a chemist at the Universidad de Zaragoza in Spain, Arch- bishop Saenz Lacalle remained unpersuaded by company claims about cya- nide evaporation and the detoxification processes associated with “green mining.” Under his leadership, the bishops’ comunicado was signed by all eleven CEDES members, a rare expression of unity among El Salvador’s often divided bishops. Bonding processes, built along doctrinal lines with fellow Central American bishops, facilitated bridging connections, which linked top church officials with more ideologically radical resistance act ists at home The Salvadoran bishops’ position not only echoed the concerns of other Central American bishops, but also anticipated the environmental pronouncements issued only a few days later at the V Consejo Episcopal38 Rose J. Spalding Latinoamericano (CELAM) conference of 160 Latin American bishops in Aparecida, Brazil. The “Care for the Environment” section of the CELAM concluding document declared: Today the natural wealth of Latin America and the Caribbean is being subjected to an irrational exploitation that is leaving ruin and even death in its wake, throughout our region. A great deal [of] responsibility in this entire process must be attributed to the current economic model which prizes unfettered pursuit of riches over the life of individual per- sons and peoples and rational respect for nature . . . A similar warn ing must be made about resource-extraction industries which, when they fail to control and offset their harmful effects on the surrounding environment, destroy forests and contaminate water, and turn the areas exploited into vast deserts. (CELAM 2007, para, 473)'* Although the Catholic Church’s reach in El Salvador had tended to decline over time, as elsewhere in Latin America, Catholicism remained the domi- nant religion in the country.%* The Catholic Church consistently received the highest institutional trust scores in public opinion polls, with 41 percent of Salvadoran respondents indicating “much” confidence in this institution in 2008 (vs. 7% for businesspeople, 6.5% for political parties, and 6% of the national legislature), a figure that rose to 47 percent in the 2009 survey (Insti- tuto Universitario de Opinion Pablica [[UDOP] 2008, 57; 2009b, 54). The call by the Salvadoran bishops for greater environmental protection, in keep- ing with pronouncements from other church authorities in Central America and beyond, presented the mining industry with a serious challenge. “Domesticating INGOs” and “the Allies” INGOs proved key strategic partners in the antimining campaign, operating both to pressure through international nodes (the classic boomerang pat- tern) and to amplify resources available to local networks (the domestic loop model). For our purposes, itis useful to distinguish between INGOs that are adept at conventional boomerang polities and those that are well designed for domestically focused political alliances. Local networks may need dif- ferent kinds of resources from their transnational allies in each of these processes. In the boomerang form, national groups need external allies with deep knowledge of the rules and pressure points operating in international power centers such as the U.S. government (to get aid flows cut to human rights violators, for example) and international financial institutions (to get loans to transgressive states suspended). For linkage processes in which local groups focus on building their case at home, on the other hand, domestic activists need transnational allies to support the acquisition of validating information from alternative epistemic communities, as we have seen, or funding to cover local operating expenses, support for research by localTransnational Networks and National Action 39 experts, and communication strategies. At the conceptual level, we might distinguish between power node INGOs, which emphasize the former roles, and domesticating INGOs, which emphasize the latter. Unlike power node INGOs, which tend to be located in global cities and power centers, domesticating INGOs are characterized by their long-term presence in the periphery; close mission identification with local allies; and dense, multistrand linkages with a durable set of partners. They may pres- ent themselves as active agents in local debates, organize and participate in domestic policy forums, and lobby government officials directly. Deeply knowledgeable of the local political scene, these INGOs are well positioned to facilitate a “downward scale shift” and support the national policy work of their domestic allies. Their relationship with national organizations is not friction free, but this INGO variant works to manage these tensions and avoid costly ruptures. EI Salvador has 145 legally registered INGOs (Holiday 2010), some of which have deep roots in El Salvador and function as quasi-local organiza- tions. The brutality of the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s and debate about the U.S. role in it sparked solidarity activism and cross-national bonds (Perla 2008), and a network of INGOs was built on that foundation. The return migration and repopulation discussed previously was achieved with “accompaniment” from organizations like the Salvadoran Humanitarian Aid, Research and Education Foundation (SHARE), the Committee in Soli- darity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), and the Sister Cities proj- ect. These domesticating INGOs had a nontransferable mission in that they worked exclusively in El Salvador. They nurtured deep and enduring ties to local “communities in resistance,” pushing to validate the community's alternative development model and to support these partners financially. These solidarity-based INGOs shared a strong commitment to Salvadoran sovereignty and opposition to neoliberal globalization, which they found destructive to the poor and vulnerable. Informally calling themselves simply “the allies,” leaders of these deeply anchored transnational organizations coalesced around mining as conflict escalated, looking for ways to help their partners advance the cause (Sister Cities 2010) A second group of domesticating INGOs was centered in the international development and human rights communities. The postwar peace process and repeated reconstruction efforts following natural disasters drew in an array of human rights, social justice, and development-oriented INGOs from Europe and the United States. Although there was considerable convergence in terms of goals between these organizations and their local allies, these INGOS had a formally geocentric mandate and global vision. As internationally recog- zed organizations with professional staff and funds to support campaigns, organizations such as Oxfam America financed conferences, research, public outreach, local projects, and operating expenses. Though not defined by a country-specific mission, their long-term presence and dense, multilayered project support tightly connected this group of INGOs to local networks.”40 Rose J. Spalding These INGOs provided much more than financial support. A review of Oxfam’s engagement with the mining issue is illustrative. Oxfam America’s regional Central America, Mexico, and Caribbean office was located in San Salvador, giving resident staff a bird’s-eye view of emerging national issues. At the beginning of the decade, Oxfam America launched their global “Right to Know, Right to Decide” campaign, challenging common argu- ments about the benefits of the extractive sector and calling for informed community participation in decision making about natural resource devel- opment (Ross 2001; Oxfam America 2009). Long supportive of the Foro Mesoamericano regional resistance movement and local NGO empower- ment initiatives, Oxfam America was an early backer of El Salvador’s Mesa Nacional, providing important operational funds and publicity (McKinley 2010), Oxfam’s commitment to informed consent was not identical to the Mesa Nacional demand for a mining ban, creating space in which tensions could emerge. Shared views on mining dangers, however, facilitated close cooperation as the movement developed. In addition to supporting local partners, Oxfam representatives also lob- bied Salvadoran government officials directly, cultivating contacts in the Ministry of Economy and distributing the organization’s growing body of research on mining problems. As pressure built and the mining industry mounted its public relations counterattack (discussed subsequently), Oxfam America commissioned a public opinion poll in prospective mining commu- nities to interrogate claims of community support (IUDOP 2007). Research on transnational activism demonstrates that high levels of external support can be a mixed blessing; while providing needed support, transnational alliances can be damaging to local networks. Petras (1997), focusing on top-down service sector delivery by nonprofits, has accused foreign NGOs of introducing a new kind of colonialism and “deradicaliz~ ing whole areas of social life” (6) in Latin America. Edelman (1999, 2008) found that intervention by external allies and funders can overwhelm a local group, disconnecting it from its membership base and its locally derived mission. Overfunding and spotlight attention to some local actors combined with neglect of equally meritorious others can leave a wreckage of intra~ movement competition and ill will (Bob 2005). Efforts by local coalitions to assert autonomy and set limits on external partners (Andrews 2010) respond to real contradictions. Indeed, as Lucero’s chapter in this volume demon- strates, Oxfam America exercised power in controversial ways in Andean Indigenous identity struggles in Peru and Bolivia. Transnational alliances are encased in power relationships that produce sustained tensions, often with problematic results, At the same time, many INGO leaders, particularly those of the “domes- ticating” variety discussed previously, are aware of the problem caused by top-down control and struggle to navigate these shoals." This particu- lar subtype of INGO may adopt a variety of practices to reduce external distortion, including decentralized policy making to allow regional officeTransnational Networks and National Action 41 autonomy and local staffing with national activists or long-term, embedded residents. In recognition of this conundrum, Jenny Pearce (2010) has called for a national-transnational commitment to “critical reflexivity” in order to promote ongoing INGO dialogue about “the coherence of their internal dynamics with the values that they espouse” (632). This reflection practice may be more successful when INGOs staff their national offices with local or well-rooted actors and when local orthodoxy or uniformity is not a precondition for partnership. The prospects for transna- tional partnerships that are perceived positively by local actors may also be better in some issue areas than others. Movements characterized by a greater degree of activist consensus, for example, may lend themselves more readily to transnational partnership than movements in highly contested arenas, such as the minefield of Indigenous identity politics, in which local activists themselves are often divided. In settings where resources are scarce and con- frontation means a lopsided battle with wealthy and powerful antagonists, multilayered collaboration with INGOs may be critical to the development and durability of popular resistance networks, Clearer identification of the circumstances under which transnational collaboration empowers/disem- powers local actors offers a fruitful arena for future research. BRINGING IT HOME: MINING MOMENTUM CHECKED To advance their case, the mining companies adopted a two-part strategy to push the Salvadoran government forward. First came the carrot—a pub- lic relations push that emphasized the corporation’s good citizenship and environmentally friendly technologies. Second came the stick—the threat of costly legal action against the government unless it complied. Using guar- antees provided under the newly implemented CAFTA agreement as well as investor protections embedded in the 1999 Investment Law, mining officials threatened to turn to ICSID and present a claim of “indirect expropriation.” This would allow them to demand full compensation for lost profits if the government halted the advance of the permit process. The economic and environmental case was put forward in a 2007 report by Manuel Enrique Hinds, a former minister of finance during an earlier phase of El Salvador’s market transition.” Having worked with the World Bank during the 1980s, he brought the message of market orthodoxy home to El Salvador when he returned as an architect of market reform. Now defending the previous government’s decision to encourage gold explora- tion, his argument turned on two points: the country would derive important economic benefits from gold mining; and mining would be done without noteworthy environmental damage (Hinds 2007).2° This new message was accompanied by a vigorous media campaign to advance the idea of “green mining.” Ads on TV and radio announced the benefits of green mining technology, and protesters gathered outside the42 Rose J. Spalding National Cathedral and the Oxfam office to denounce church and INGO opposition as “antiworker.” Collaborating with local mayors in the pro- posed El Dorado mine region, the Canadian mining company Pacific Rim developed a social investment portfolio to demonstrate good citizenship and cultivate public support.” Company representatives claimed to have secured the clusive “social license” provided by community approval. Testing the claim that mining companies had consulted adequately with the affected communities and won local consent for these projects, Oxfam’s regional office commissioned a survey of attitudes toward mining in the region. In October 2007, IUDOP, a well-regarded public opinion polling institute located at the Jesuit-run Universidad Centroamericana (UCA), ran the survey in the 24 municipios where mining exploration permits had been authorized. When asked, “Do you consider El Salvador an appropriate country for metal mining?” 62 percent of those surveyed responded “no” (IUDOP 2007, 54). Cued to think about mining in relation to their own community, a mod- est majority (54%) disagreed with the statement, “The mining companies promote the development of the municipio” (37). Concern was particularly pronounced when asked about the impact of metal mining on the environ- ment and the trade- off with alternative economic activities. When framed in these terms, the majority indicated “much” concern about the damage that would be done to fishing (66%), agriculture (57%), livestock (59%), and ecotourism (53%). This concern was especially strong among women and better-educated respondents. These results suggested that the mining indus- try had failed to win the war of public opinion in the zone under exploration. Critical Junctures: Politically Embedded Campaign Analysis The relationship between movement mobilization, public attitudes, elite policy positions, and policy-making activities of government officials is com- plex and frequently underanalyzed in social movement theory. Many social movement activists organizing around opposition to economic globalization consciously reject engagement with formal politics, even when they operate within representative democracies. These critics call for direct, contentious, and participatory politics that is designed to change society, rather than rou- tine and institutional politics, which they characterize as bureaucratized, pro- fessionalized, and sterile (della Porta et al. 2006, 199-231; Menser 2009). Other activists and researchers have called for greater attention to social movement engagement with political institutions (Smith 2008, 231-42; Rob- erts 2008; Silva 2009; von Billow 2010). Goldstone (2003) argues against overemphasis on the divide between movement and formal institutional politics, characterizing the boundary as “fuzzy and permeable” (2). Noting that “[b]oth democratization and social movements built on the same basic principle, that ordinary people are politically worthy of consultation” (8), he finds these forms of participation to be complementary and transitionsTransnational Networks and National Action 43 between them to be frequent and rapid. Research on these intersections requires us to not only bring the state back in but also attend to linkages between movements, parties, elections, and public policy in the region. This kind of politically embedded campaign analysis highlights connections between social movement campaigns and domestic politics. The rise of an electoral left in much of Latin America invigorated this dis- cussion. As the prospects improved for victories by left-leaning candidates and parties, many on the left in Latin American social movements came to see the state and political parties as significant, if not exclusive, mechanisms for achieving change. In the Salvadoran case, the sequential advance of sev- eral resistance movements in the carly 2000s coincided with and contributed to the weakening of ARENA’s hold on political power. Paul Almeida (2008) documented a rising “protest wave” in opposition to health care privatiza- tion in El Salvador, and other mobilizations over environmental and water rights soon followed (Haglund 2010). Public support for a market economy trended downward between 1998 and 2007 in El Salvador, as elsewhere in Latin America (see Baker and Greene 2011), even before the U.S. recession induced losses at the end of the decade. Although public opinion data can be volatile and should be approached with caution, the annual Latinobaré- metro poll indicated a fall off in support for a market-oriented economy in EI Salvador across the decade. The percent of Salvadoran respondents who agreed with the statement, “A market economy is best (lo mas conveniente) for the country” fell from 78 percent in 1998 to $2 percent in 2007 (Lati- nobarémetro 2009, 91). Likewise, the percent of respondents who agreed with the statement “A market economy is the only system through which to become a developed country” declined from 56 percent in 2003 to 47 percent in 2007 (93). The recent electoral shift to the left in Latin America is generally attributed to rising economic dissatisfaction with the neoliberal model, although con- troversy remains about the specific features at play (Stokes 2009; Baker and Greene 2011). El Salvador bucked the regional trend for several years, with continuous ARENA victories at the presidential level, in part through well- worked fears about communism and the hostility a left victory would inspire in the United States (Wolf 2009). By 2008, these fears had dissipated.?* As Dinorah Azpuru’s (2010) study of ideology and presidential elections in El Salvador from 1994 to 2009 demonstrates, mean ideological self-placement had shifted leftward. From its rightward peak of 6.89 in 2004 (on a ten-point scale, with 1 representing the extreme left and 10 the extreme right), mean ideological self-placement dropped to 5.3 in 2008, declining still further to 4,96 in 2009 (124). By 2008, El Salvador’s mean ideology score was already one of Latin America’s lowest (furthest to the left, albeit with marked polar- ization), along with Uruguay (5.09), Bolivia (5.17), Venezuela (5.25), and Ecuador (5.37) (123). The FMLN still drew unrelenting hostility in some quarters, and it stum- bled over internal divisions and poor candidate choices. Over time, however,44° Rose J. Spalding the party’s electoral capacity grew. It achieved significant gains in the 2003 local and legislative elections. Learning from sweeping defeat in the 2004 presidential election, the party chose center-left, independent leader Mauri- cio Funes as its candidate for the 2009 presidential election and won ample public approval for that selection, Funes, a popular journalist and politi- cal commentator, previously had a long-running interview program on TV Canal 12 and was well known for his independent and critical style. ‘As momentum faded on the right, ARENA president “Tony” Saca began to publicly distance his administration from some traditional party posi- tions. One area in which this division can be observed is in his emerging position on the mining concessions, which he began to question publicly in 2008 (Lépez 2008).2* As electoral challenges loomed, Saca went further. In February 2009, on the eve of the March presidential election, the president called in to a Catholic radio station program on the mining controversy and pledged that he would “not grant a single permit” (L6pez Piche 2009, 2). On the legal complaint that Pacific Rim threatened to bring against the govern- ment, Saca continued: “They are about to file an international claim and I want to make this clear: I would prefer to pay the $90 million than to give them a permit” (ibid., 2). Saca’s antimining position increasingly coincided with that taken by Funes on the campaign trail. During a stop in Cabafias of his “Caravan of Hope” a year before the election, Funes had declared, “As long as [the mining companies] fail to demonstrate that these projects do not contami- nate the envionment and [do not damage] the health of our population, we are not going to permit metal mining” (Redaccién Diario Co Latino 2008). The official position of the FMLN, as declared in its campaign plat- form, was that the mining law should be reformed to ban metal mining outright (FMLN 2008, 19). ARENA candidate Rodrigo Avila, in contrast, reportedly took no position on the issue (Mesa Nacional Frente a la Minerfa 2009), leaving open the possibility that gold mining would advance under his administration. Victory depended on the candidates’ ability to mobilize votes beyond their party base. Outspent more than two to one by ARENA (Rodriguez, Padilla, and Torres 2009, 38, 35), the Funes campaign depended heavily on a volunteer base of activists to mobilize support and get out the vote. The social movements and resistance organizations that had mounted campaigns against health and water privatization and in favor of labor and environ mental rights were now organized into the “Concertacién por el Cambio” coalition to support Funes’ election (Almeida 2009, 2010; Menjivar 2010). Although some social organizations supporting the Funes campaign were heavily populated by FMLN activists, many regarded themselves as inde- pendent. Their mobilization allowed the campaign to reach beyond core party activists to secure support from the critical wavering and undecided voter. The race got tighter in the final lap, but Funes received 51.3 percent of the total vote to Avila’s 48.7 percent, and El Salvador joined Latin America’sTransnational Networks and National Action 45 leftward electoral shift. In the months that followed, Funes pledged to main- tain the country’s de facto mining moratorium (Quintanilla 2010). Within weeks of Funes’ election, two mining companies, Pacific Rim and Commerce Group, lodged official complaints against the Salvadoran gov- ernment alleging violations of investor guarantees provided under CAFTA and under the 1999 Investment Law. They filed their claims with the World Bank’s ICSID, where together they demanded $170 million in compensa tion (Pac Rim Cayman LLC, Claimant, v. Republic of El Salvador, Respon- dent 2009; Commerce Group Corp., Claimant, vs. Republic of El Salvador, Respondent 2009). As the conflict shifted to ICSID, affiliates of the Mesa Nacional sought out new transnational allies from among the “power node INGOs” that were strategically located in global power centers. Activists affiliated with set of INGOs used specialized knowledge of political structures and pro- cesses in the United States and Canada to design a deleveraging campaign These organizations focused pressure on transnational corporations, power- ful states, and international organizations, rather than supporting their local allies’ efforts to influence policy at home. Organizations like the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies and the Center for International Environmental Law, and the Ottawa-based MiningWatch Canada and Council of Canadians, took up this campaign against the mining companies. These organizations lobbied the U.S. Con- gress and Canadian Parliament to prevent interventions on behalf of the cor- porations, helped local Salvadoran communities and the Mesa Nacional to prepare an amicus curiae brief to present to the ICSID tribunal, and targeted shareholders of mining companies to alert them to the conflict and mobilize pressure on the corporate executives (see, e.g., Center for International Envi- ronmental Law [CIEL] 2011). As the legal dispute made its way slowly through the ICSID process,” the Salvadoran antimining coalition, working closely with FMLN allies, pushed forward a legislative proposal to ban metal mining in El Salvador. The Funes administration advanced an alternative proposal, one that would permit metals mining, but only if the country first developed a rigorous regulatory capacity. Although this prospect was so distant that the mining morato- rium seemed unlikely to be lifted, Mesa leaders opposed the bill, fearing that a future administration would use this opening to reactivate the mining advance. CONCLUSIONS This chapter concludes with four general observations about the interactions between national and transnational networks in local resistance struggles. First, in contrast with images of transnational actors sweeping in to direct the activities of social movements in the global South, this analysis found46 Rose J. Spalding that national movements in Central America actively participated in the construction of their own transnational alliances, with different movement segments developing distinctive kinds of alliance structures. Resilient local communities, environmental groups, research centers, and religious activists formed robust networks and worked to define connections with external partners. Vibrant linkages emerged out of lived experiences of migration and displacement and through relationships with similarly situated neighbors who pursued a common agenda. These connections helped promote shared cross-national understandings, deepening knowledge, and common ethical grounding, which facilitated movement survival and growth. Second, regional connections and alliances, as opposed to hemispheric or global ones, were central players in this process, particularly in early phases of movement development, Transnational alliances may have particular value when they connect actors across a region, as in Mesoamerican alliances or regional social forums.” Movement regionalism suggests that the flow of ideas, frames, and logics detected in national-transnational networks does not always proceed upward and downward, but may also develop horizon- zal elements. Lateral connections may be critical in subregions of the global South where particular kinds of shared challenges and opportunities con- verge. The depth and fluidity of regionally brokered connections also allow alliances to reconfigure around new campaigns as resistance targets shift. Third, although frequently criticized by movement analysts for their deracinating and distorting qualities, alliances with INGOs, even those that hail from the global North, can provide vital resources and permit knowl- edge sharing that allows domestic networks to thicken. This chapter suggests that in the “domestic loop” process such alliances work best when national networks collaborate with domesticating INGOs (ie. a type of interna- tional organization that is strongly invested in the local environment), such as long-term solidarity and development organizations with thin bureaucra- cies and a willingness to accommodate substantial partner autonomy. Trans- national activists found in this kind of INGO may have a greater capacity to adjust to local dynamics and engage in the “critical reflexivity” that sustains local authenticity (Pearce 2010). In contrast, when the transnational alliance focuses on deleveraging external pressure to allow popular preferences to shape local government policy, INGOs of the “power node” variety may be preferred partners. Further research comparing transnational-domestic alli- ances that fail with those that succeed would allow us to more fully specify the parameters for each. INGOs can also facilitate the dissemination of counterhegemonic knowl- edge by supporting both local research capacity and collaboration with sym- pathetic outside experts, Just as the construction of alternative communities of knowledge plays an important role in mobilizing support beyond the initial core, so too do bridging alliances forged with Catholic Church elites. As a domestically rooted transnational actor with a universalistic agenda, the church is well designed to translate global messages to local communitiesTransnational Networks and National Action 47 and to connect these communities across the divide of class, ethnicity, and gender. Clearly, Catholic leaders have varied widely on these issues and often stood in opposition to popular mobilizations. But church officials have also been key actors challenging exclusionary consequences of inadequately reg- ulated market systems in Latin America. When they do so, the agglutinative capacities of the organization allow it to become a powerful contributor to transnational-national networks and national policy reform. Fourth, this chapter demonstrates the usefulness of research conducted at the intersection of contentious and formal politics. Unlike some social move- ment research that focuses more narrowly on internal framing and brokerage within the national and transnational networks, this chapter attends to the connections between social movements and larger political processes under- way. This politically embedded campaign analysis allows us to explore tip- ping points or critical junctures in which transnationally connected national movements converge with a broader political recalibration to advance elec toral transition, policy adjustment, and local behavioral change. As Keck and Sikkink remind us, social movement achievements are highly varied, including relatively simple effects such as raising awareness and add- ing new issues to a national agenda (1998, 25). At critical conjunctions, how- ever, movements may have larger impacts on national or international polic: Changes in economic attitudes combined with new political alliances open space for adjustments in the neoliberal model. Connections between mobi- lized resistance movements and left political parties can advance a reform agenda through electoral transitions; as this case demonstrates, recalibration may even precede electoral transitions, as conservative and business-oriented political leaders attempt to avoid electoral penalty. The modest and piece- meal changes underway in El Salvador, although failing to inspire erstwhile allies on the left, may still help to tip the development direction away from market orthodoxy and toward a better-buffered development model. In the end, the change achieved depends on the way these domestic dynamics intersect with larger processes in the global economy. As the Sal- vadoran case demonstrates, adjustments made in the local economic model can trigger challenges from those who stand to lose, and powerful internz tional economic and legal alliances may mobilize to prevent “reneging” on neoliberal commitments. Movement victories may be only partial or tem- porary. Long-term change will require ongoing national and transnational activism that supports both domestic reform and change in the international economic architecture. NOTES 1. Field research in El Salvador in July-August 2010 was conducted with sup- port from the College of Liberal Arts and Science of DePaul University. Emily Thenhaus provided research assistance. The author thanks Mimi Keck, Bill Smith, Kathryn Hochstetler, and the participants in the April 2011 Tulane48 Rose J. Spalding University workshop “The Domestic Effects of Transnational Activism” for generous and constructive commentary on earlier versions of this chapter. This chapter draws on material from Trade Politics in Central America: Reform and Resistance, forthcoming with the University of Texas Press, with permission. Karl Polanyi’ ({1944] 2001) analysis of this “double movement” in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe presents resistance to the “self-regulating market” as less class based and ideological than heterogeneous and self- protective (see 158-70). My work borrows from this approach but goes beyond by exploring the way domestic movements intersect with transnational ones. . The local communities from the proposed mining region were represented by the Asociacién de Comunidades Rurales para el Desarrollo de El Salvador (CRIPDES) and several of its affiliates from “repopulated communities” such as the Asociacién de Desarrollo Econémico y Social, Santa Marta (ADES). High profile national-level organizations included the Unidad Ecolégica Sal vadoreiia (UNES), an activist-oriented environmental organization, and the Fundacién de Estudios para la Aplicacién del Derecho (FESPAD), a legally oriented human rights organization that gave special attention to economic, social, and cultural rights (Moreno et al. 2009). Research support was pro- vided by the Centro de Investigacién sobre Inversién y Comercio (CEICOM). For a full list of Mesa Nacional members, see Henriquez (2008, 2915). . The extent and current meaning of the FMLN relationship was variable and difficult to specify. Leaders of resistance-oriented organizations often described this connection in tactical terms, and they sometimes expressed skepticism about the deals, trade-offs, and political calculations made by FMLN national leaders. Nonetheless, the FMLN had brokerage capacity that encouraged linkages among resistance-oriented activists and helped to shape discussion of alternative policies. Although itself forged out of differ- ent organizations during the 1980s civil war, and periodically splintering in the postwar era, the party retained a solid core of militants and sympathizers that provided a bridge to social movements. . For discussion of frame bridging and frame transformation in the environ- mental justice movement, see Faber (2005). . See, for example, Mesa Nacional (2008) for a blog on the October 17, 2008 trip by a youth delegation to Valle de Siria. . See Kay (2005) for discussion of the impact of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on cross-border labor networking between the United States and Mexico. . The V Foro Mesoamericano held in San Salvador in July 2004 brought together 1,747 participants in a three-day forum funded by OxfamAmerica, Pan para el Mundo, NOVIB, SHARE, and Desarrollo y Paz (Canada) in a forceful denunciation of this neoliberal victory (Spalding 2007, 96). The gathering was organized and directed by national hosts. UNES, FESPAD, and CRIPDES, all founding members of El Salvador’s Mesa Nacional Frente a la Mineria Metalica, took on the task of coordinating workshops and syn- thesizing comments in reports to the plenary, thereby assuming regional bro- kerage roles. The Mesa Nacional and two of its members subsequently affiliated with the Observatorio de Conflictos Mineros de América Latina (OCMAL), a continent-wide network monitoring mining conflicts, particularly in the Andes, that was launched in Oruro, Bolivia, in March 2007. OCMAL regis- tered 133 mining confliets in fifteen Latin American and Caribbean countries mid-2010 (http:/Avww.olca.cofocmal, accessed August 1, 2010).Transnational Networks and National Action 49 10. Moran (2010) received a doctorate in geological sciences from the University of Texas, Austin in 1974. He worked six years in the Water Resources Divi- sion of the U.S. Geological Survey, followed by twenty years as a hydroge- ologist for private clients, including mining companies. After he shifted to community contracts, his curriculum vitae notes projects in Honduras, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador, Bolivia, and Colombia, as well as other regions of the world and the United States. See Moran (2005a, 2005b) for his research reports on mining projects in Guatemala and El Salvador. 11, UNES leaders collaborated with Florian Erzingen, an environmental science and development studies specialist from the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, to produce E! Lado Oscuro del Oro (Exzinger, Gonzalez, and Ibarra 2008). Dina Larios de Lépez, a Salvadoran geochemist and hydroge- ologist and professor of geology at Ohio University with a specialization in acid mine drainage, coauthored *Riesgos y posibles impactos de la mineria metalica en El Salvador” with CEICOM (Lépez, Guzman, and Mira 2008). Other aca- demic specialists were contracted directly by INGOs. Thomas M. Power, an economist at the University of Montana, for example, wrote Metals Mining and Sustainable Development in Central America, a 2008 Oxfam research report that, reviewing academic and policy literature, showed the weakness of the link between mining production, economic geowth, and development. 12. Robert E. Moran’s 2010 resume, for example, listed Oxfam, Friends of the Earth, Christian Aid, Greenpeace, the International Development Research Center, Diakonia, Heinrich Boll Foundation, and Pax Christi, among others, as funders for his consulting and research reports on Latin American 13. The hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church and its formal li authority distinguish this organization from the kinds of networks that nor- mally populate international social movement and civil society theory. Syn- cretistic characteristics of the church, however, suggest elements of dialogue and “convergence space” in which local and international actors within the church negotiate strategies of cooperation and alignment. In this sense, dis- cussion of the church as a special kind of INGO, one that both domesticates and globalizes, may be useful. 14. See Caritas El Salvador at http://caritas.org/worldmap/latin_America/elsal- vadorsheml (accessed August 19, 2010). 15. Concern about the moral and ethical meaning of environmental destruction has long roots in various religious traditions, Catholicism among them (Jen- kins 2008). 16. In an Instituto Universitario de Opinién Publica (IUDOP) (2008, 11) poll, 52 percent of Salvadoran respondents identified as Catholic, 29.5 percent as Evangelical, and 17 percent as having no religious affiliation. 17. Evidence of such INGO support looms large on the websites of El Salvador’s neoliberal resistance-oriented NGOs and the covers of their many publications. The Mesa Nacional’s research affiliate, CEICOM, for example, lists five funders, on its website: the Heinrich Ball Foundation of Germany, the Netherlands-based ICCO, Eusko Jaularitza of the Basque government, the Swedish DIAKONIA, and Oxfam America. In addition to these sources, CEICOM’s publications on the history of mining in El Salvador, the environmental and social problems generated, and the processes involved in the ICSID case received financial support from the Spanish labor rights foundation Paz y Solidaridad and ewo Salvadoran organizations, the Universidad Luterana Salvadoreiia and ADES, themselves recipients of INGO funding (Henriquez 2008; Ramos 2009). 18. During the CAFTA debate, for example, Oxfam America provided finan- cial support for two rival Central American networks (Iniciativa Comercio,50 Rose J. Spalding 19. 20. 21, 23. 26. 27. Integracién y Desarrollo [CID] and Foro Mesoamericano) to avoid stifling discussion or intensifying competition by assisting only one (Spalding 2007). Hinds received an MA in economics from Northwestern University in 1973, and he served briefly as El Salvador’s minister of economy in 1979-1980. Following a stint with the World Bank in the 1980s, he returned as finance minister for four years during the Calderén Sol administration (1994-1999), and hc helped to usher in dollarization under Francisco Flores (1999-2004). The Hinds report projected that the development of four mines would increase tax revenues, generate substantial new employment, and reduce the extreme poverty rate, all “without any environmental cost” since environ- mental damage associated with mining was much lower than that associated with other “normal” activities in El Salvador (Hinds 2007, 4). The methods and findings in the Hinds report were critiqued in Power (2008). See testimony by Pacific Rim Mining Company President and CEO Thomas Shrake (2010) during committee hearings on mining law reform in the Cana- dian Parliament, in which he discusses the company’s community eye care and reforestation projects in El Salvador. . On ecotourism, for example, 57 percent of women indicated that there would be “much” damage to this sector if a mining project opened, whereas only 49 percent of men chose that response. In terms of variation by education level, 76 percent of those in the top grade classification (*superior”) indicated that there ‘would be “much” damage to ecotourism, whereas 47 percent of those with less than a primary school education chose that response (IUDOP 2007, 53) In their survey of neoliberal resistance activists at the G8 protest in Genoa in 2001 and the European Social Forum in Florence in 2002, della Porta et al. (2006) found generally low levels of confidence in political parties and national legislatures, although the degree of distrust varied by national delegation. Note that support for a market economy rebounded in El Salvador in 2009 fol- lowing the March election of Mauricio Funes (Latinobarémetro 2009, 91, 93). . Asked in an IUDOP 2008 poll whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement, “If the FMLN wins the elections, will El Salvador turn into another Cuba and will Venezuela have a strong influence?” 64 percent said they disagreed; the same percentage disagreed with the statement that a FMIN presidential victory would negatively affect diplomatic relations with the United States (IUDOP 2009a, 131, 133). Factors other than public opinion and electoral demands may have played a role in Saca’s rejection of mining. Internal tensions in ARENA, which ultimately led to a party fissure (the defection of a faction of ARENA diputados in fall 2009 and Saca’s expulsion from the party in December), may have played a role, as, might intraclite disputes over mining versus tourism investment alternatives. The ICSID tribunal dismissed the claims asserted by Commerce Group because of its concurrent case in Salvadoran domestic courts and disallowed Pacific Rim’s effort to use CAFTA provisions because of its lack of substan- tial business interest in the United States. However, the tribunal’s June 2012 ruling allowed the case to go forward under El Salvador’s 1999 Investment Law. As of October 2012, a decision is still pending. As this issue came to a head in Washington, it also came to a head in Caba- fas, where local antimining activists faced rising threats and violence. Three activists in the antimining campaign were murdered between June and December 2009, in a surge of violence that drew rising national and interna~ tional attention (Steiner 2010; Anderson et al. 2010). . 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The Politics of Scale Shift and Coalition Building The Case of the Brazilian Network for the Integration of the Peoples! Marisa von Biilow* INTRODUCTION The literature on transnationalism has emphasized the positive impacts of the creation of tics among civil society organizations (CSOs) from different countries. It has demonstrated that, through the boomerang effect, joint actions, or simply the exchange of information, CSOs use their collaborative ties to actors in other countries as leverage in domestic and international forums.’ According to these studies, transnationalization has had, in general terms, a positive impact on actors’ abilities to reach their goals. In spite of the importance of this finding, it tells us only one part of the story. The positive results of transnationalization would lead us to expect to see more and more of this process going on. However, engaging in trans- national activities is seldom an obvious option, and never a cost-free one. Furthermore, transnational collective action can take many forms. My own previous work has emphasized that CSOs can choose among multiple path- ways to transnationality, understood as “the routes built by CSOs to link debates and actions across scales” (von Billow 2010, 6). Although I empha- sized that the choice of pathways could (and did) vary through time, not enough attention was given to the analysis of the resulting trajectories. This chapter contributes to addressing this gap by analyzing the story of the rise and decline of a Brazilian trade coalition in the past fifteen years, the Brazilian Network for the Integration of the Peoples (REBRIP). REBRIP is a broad coalition of CSOs that brings together labor unions, multiple types of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and rural movements. It was created at the end of the 1990s to influence trade negotiations. It is at the same time a domestic and a transnational organization, formed by domestic CSOs and affiliated to the Hemispheric Social Alliance (HSA). In the beginning of the 2000s, it was the most successful of the HSA’s national chapters in terms of its ability to mobilize people and to gather a broad spectrum of key CSOs.* However, as this chapter shows, in the past few years REBRIP has lost at least part of these abilities, as it tried to respond to and influence profound domestic and international changes. In fact, in the 2000s, Brazilian CSOs came to face challenges that were radically different from the ones they hadThe Politics of Scale Shift and Coalition Building S57 to face during the 1990s, Domestically, the coming to power of a center- to-left coalition in 2003 brought sweeping (if not consensual) changes to public policies and to civil society’s roles in them. Looking beyond national politics, the scenery also looked very different from the recent past. Most importantly for the goals of this chapter, hemispheric and global trade nego- tiations have gone dormant. REBRIP’s trajectory of rise and decline is best explained by linking the debate in social movement theory on political opportunity and threat struc- tures and the debate in the transnationalism literature on processes of scale shift. | propose a critical revision of both of these concepts, which allows me to emphasize the interaction between domestic and international structures of opportunity and threat (versus one-scale approaches), of considering the dynamics of change (versus a more static analysis), and of the agency of actors in responding to these changes (in detriment of more structural expla- nations). Thus, I will argue that REBRIP’s trajectory is explained by the absence of a clear threat at the international scale, and, at the same time, by diverging interpretations of the impacts of the election of new governments in the region (both at the domestic scale and in other countries). The analysis is based on documents produced by the coalition and its members and on qualitative interviews with key civil society actors, done between August and December 2011 (see the list of interviewees in the appen- dix at the end of this chapter). It also draws from previous research on trade coalitions in the Americas, undertaken between 2004 and 2008 (von Billow 2010, 2011). The next section presents in greater detail the theoretical debate about scale shift and political opportunity structures. I go on to explain the process of transnationalization of Brazilian civil society, putting the creation of REBRIP in this broader context. The third section analyzes the coalition’s trajectory, by differentiating among four phases in the past fifteen years. THE POLITICS OF SCALE SHIFTS At the end of their book on Brazilian environmentalism, Kathryn Hoch- stetler and Margaret Keck conclude that “as the relevant layers stretch from the local to the global, one of the most important challenges for those who want to deepen environmental protections in Brazil is to learn how to move across those levels” (Hochstetler and Keck 2007, 230). This chapter argues that such a challenge has become an integral part of transnational activism in general. Students of transnationalism have analyzed this movement across scales through the concept of scale shift, defined as “a change in the number and level of coordinated contentious actions to a different focal point, involving a new range of actors, different objects, and broadened claims” (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001, 331). Thus, shifts in scale “are not simply the repro- duction, at a different level, of the claims, targets, and constituencies of58 Marisa von Bilow the sites where contention begins; they produce new alliances, new targets, and changes in the foci of claims and perhaps even new identities” (Tarrow 2005, 121). While the literature has focused mostly on “upward” scale shift, from the national to the global scale, the opposite direction is also possible, producing a “downward” scale shift (ibid.). When we consider transnational collective action in the long term, it is clear that our understanding of the process of scale shift should not imply a one-time decision on the part of individuals or organizations. For an increas- ing number of civil society actors, changes in scale have become a constant, although the direction it takes is often hard to foresee. Furthermore, it does not imply an either/or type of decision. Actors do not choose to act solely at the domestic or solely at the regional or global scales, but at various moments in time they prioritize different sites of action and are constantly adjusting these priorities. This is particularly visible in the case of coalitions such as REBRIP. As a coalition that is part of a transnational alliance but is sustained by domestically rooted members, REBRIP’s mission is based on its ability to constantly crisscross scales, acting as a broker to access and diffuse infor- mation, debate common strategies, and coordinate joint actions (more on this in the next section; sce Table 3.1). Perhaps the reason why the literature has not paid enough attention to the dynamics of scale shifting is that most of the cross-border coalitions studied in the transnational collective action literature have been constructed to last for a limited amount of time, around a set of specific demands. Most are “event coalitions” (Levi and Murphy 2006) or “instrumental coalitions” (Tarrow 2005, chap. 9) based on short- term cooperation. Fewer of these are enduring coalitions like REBRIP. In this chapter, I refer to the “politics of scale shifting” to underscore the agency involved and the dynamic character of that process. More spe- cifically, I argue that choices concerning the scale of contention are directly linked to actors’ interpretation of international and domestic political con- texts. By doing so, I am borrowing from the political process tradition in social movement theory, which has demonstrated that social movements are impacted by changes in the political environment, or, more specifically, by changes in the “political opportunity structure.”* This widely quoted con- cept has been defined by Sidney Tarrow as “consistent—but not necessarily formal or permanent—dimensions of the political environment that provide incentives for collective action by affecting people’s expectations for success or failure” (Tarrow 1998, 76-77). However, my use of the idea of political opportunities incorporates recent critiques and proposes further revisions. First, it should be clear that politi- cal opportunity and threat structures are not given objective realities that impact all civil society actors in the same way (Goodwin and Jasper 1999, 33). They can be interpreted differently by similarly situated actors, who may themselves have an impact on the opening or closing of opportunities/ threats. Furthermore, as Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles TillyThe Politics of Scale Shift and Coalition Building 59 have argued, the attribution of threat and/or opportunity is the result of inter- action among actors (2001, 47), and thus environmental changes cannot be analyzed separately from how actors debate the meaning of these changes. Iwish to pursue this line of thinking further, by arguing that an important part of this process of attribution involves a debate about degrees of oppor- tunity and threat. As this chapter will show, actors may disagree not only with respect to the presence or absence of openings or closures for action, but also to the extent to which these represent concrete possibilities of exer- cising influence in specific contexts and issue areas. Understanding how actors relate to and react to changes in the political environment has become a more relevant task not only in Brazil, but in the Americas, as the balance of power shifted in the region, pending toward the political forces that had been critical of the economic policies that were characteristic of the 1990s. The new presidents of Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela, elected between 1999 and 2011, were all—in spite of significant differences among them— much more prone to enhancing the role of the state in development efforts and much more critical of trade liberalization than their predecessors. In the United States, the Democratic Party won the majority in Congress in 2006 and went on to elect the president in 2008, based in pazt on a critical evalu- ation of free-trade agreements and their impacts. On the one hand, these changes were seen by many challengers of free- trade agreements as a positive turn, one in which several of them had played an active role. On the other hand, disagreements remained over to what extent the presence of allies in government represented an “opportunity” to be acted upon. Another important revision made to the traditional use of the concept of political opportunity structure relates to the fact that the literature has focused almost exclusively on domestic changes.° In a 2005 article on the relationship between activism and domestic and transnational political opportunity structures, Kathryn Sikkink defined domestic and international opportunity structures in terms of the degree of openness of institutions to the participation of civil society actors (Sikkink 2005, 156-157). Impor- tantly, the author emphasized that openness and closure vary according to issue areas, so there isn’t a single opportunity structure (ibid.). I propose to broaden Sikkink’s understanding of political opportunity structures in two senses. First, itis important to consider not only the degree of openness or closure of institutions to CSOs, but also the existence of an arena of deliberation, which precedes the possibility of participation. In the case of Brazil, the diminished interest in international trade negotiations is not due to a change in the degree of openness of the World Trade Organi- zation (WTO). It is due to the fact that both hemispheric and global trade negotiations reached a period of stagnation, and there is no clear agenda for governments to move forward either on the Doha Round or on the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Changes in the agendas, and,60 Marisa von Biilow consequently, on the sites where key decisions are taking place has, as will be seen in the empirical analysis, important impacts on CSOs’ decisions about where to invest (or not) their resources and on which targets to focus. Second, although Sikkink emphasizes in her analysis the impacts of oppor tunities for activism, it is equally important, as the literature that focuses on the domestic scale has emphasized (e.g., McAdam 1999; McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001), to consider the collective attribution of threats. There are many examples in the transnational collective action literature of mobiliza- tions around threats even in cases of closed domestic and international chan- nels for participation. The mobilization against the FTAA is a good example of how a wide variety of civil society actors from the Americas came to the conclusion that this agreement constituted an important threat to be acted upon even if there were few openings for civil society participation in the negotiations. In trying to understand the impacts of the relationship between domestic and international political opportunity structures on collective action, Sik- kink proposes to differentiate among four types of interaction, which, in turn, lead to four patterns of activism: diminished opportunities for activ- ism (closed domestic and international opportunity structures), boomerang and spirals (closed domestic and open international opportunity structures), democratic deficit and defensive transnationalization (open domestic and closed international opportunity structures), and insider-outsider coalitions (open domestic and international opportunity structures) (Sikkink 2005, 156-165). For the purposes of this chapter, 1 am especially interested in the third type of activism differentiated by Sikkink. According to the author, when activists perceive domestic political opportunities as open and inter- national opportunities as closed, activists “are more likely to use a wide range of domestic protest and political pressure activities. They also lobby their governments to try to block particular international commitments or to open up international organizations” (ibid., 164). Arguably, in the past few years REBRIP has moved toward this ideal type of activism, reaching out to its allies in the new government and becoming less active at the hemispheric and global scales. However, this conclusion is too simplistic. REBRIP members disagree over the degree of opportunity opening domestically. They also disagree over which arenas to prioritize and which strategies should be pursued both domestically and across borders. As a result, there is a deepening process of fragmentation within the coalition, with different members making different choices with regard to scales and arenas of collective action. This case underscores the increased complexity of collective action in a globalizing world, in which actors have to con- stantly assess changes at various scales and adapt their strategies. In other words, what is relevant is not so much the impact of changes in the political opportunity and threat structure per se, but how and why civil society actors reacted in the way they did, and what this means in terms of the outcomes of collective action and the sustainability of coalitions.The Politics of Scale Shift and Coalition Building 61 BRAZILIAN CSOz THE TURN TO THE TRANSNATIONAL In the past two decades, an increasingly large group of Brazilian individuals and CSOs started to participate in transnational collective action. Before we go further, it is important to make a conceptual distinction between the internationalization of civil society and the transnationalization of collec~ tive action. The former is a broader historical process of creation of ties and communication among CSOs and individuals across national boundaries. It includes activities such as exchange of information, informal conversations, financial transactions, and other forms of contact. Transnational collective action implies a more specific and complicated process of joint mobilization around issues, goals, and targets that link the domestic and international arenas (von Blow 2010, 5). Thus, while we can speak of a strong and con- tinuous process of internationalization of Brazilian civil society actors since at least the 1970s, this chapter argues that transnationalization of collective action has been a less linear and ubiquitous process. Itis only in the 1990s that we can really speak of a significant turn to trans- national collective action by Brazilian CSOs. During that decade, several things happened simultaneously. The cycle of United Nations (UN)conferences and the creation of the WTO provided the “coral reef” around which an increas- ing number of CSOs coalesced (Tarrow 2011). The 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, the first of its kind to be held in Brazil, was an important juncture. Less visible but also relevant was the involvement of CSOs—especially labor organizations organized in the Coordinator of South- ern Cone Labor Centrals—in the debates about integration among Southern Cone countries since the beginning of the 1990s (von Biilow 2009). The dozens of preparatory meetings for international conferences and the parallel summits organized during official multilateral meetings through- out the 1990s provided the international ties, the political learning, and the basic trust that helped make possible, in the first years of the 2000s, the launching of the Continental Campaign against the FTAA, and the process of the World Social Forum, both of which had Brazilian actors occupying center stage. This experience also led toa limited but important opening of spaces for dialogue between civil society and the state, most especially with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where contacts with civil society had been sparse and difficult in the past. Thus, when the negotiations for a FTAA were launched, a broad group of Brazilian CSOs had ties to allies in other countries and had at least some experience of working together. The proposal of a trade agreement that encompassed the whole hemisphere was received with mistrust and fear by many of Brazil’s most important CSOs, which perceived in it an important threat to jobs and to national sovereignty. Never before had an international agreement under negotiation been the focus of such an intense process of mobilization as the FTAA. However, Brazilians were latecomers to mobiliza- tions on the topic, if compared, for example, with the Mexican CSOs that62 Marisa von Biilow participated in the debates about the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) since the end of the 1980s. Of twenty-five key Brazilian CSOs that participated in the mobilizations against the FTAA, interviewed in 2005, fourteen had had less than five years of collaboration with other Brazil- ian organizations on the issue of trade. Transnational ties were even more recent, and transnational networks less dense. In spite of that, Brazilian CSOs were able to create a broad domestic coalition, REBRIP, and quickly became central actors in a hemispheric mobilization against the FTAA. THE CASE OF REBRIP REBRIP is at the same time the outcome of the process of engagement of Brazilian civil society in transnational collective action and a key factor in expanding this process. It was created to be a space of negotiation and coordination of meanings, positions, and actions among civil society actors on trade, at the domestic and transnational scales. It presents itself as “an articulation of NGOs, social movements, labor organizations and plural and autonomous professional associations, which acts upon processes of trade and regional integration, committed to building a democratic society based in an economic, social, cultural, ethical and sustainable development. These organizations search for alternatives for hemispheric integration that are opposed to the logic of trade and financial liberalization that has been predominant in ongoing economic agreements.” More specifically, REBRIP was created to perform four key political bro- kerage roles: the role of translator, to gather and diffuse knowledge; the role of coordinator, to organize the distribution of resources, responsibilities, and information; the role of articulator, to bridge across cleavages, bringing together actors and negotiating common positions; and the role of represen= tative in events and meetings (von Billow 2011, 169). Table 3.1 presents the main tasks associated with these roles. Since its creation, REBRIP has undergone four phases, each of them characterized by a different set of challenges that are played out at various scales (see Table 3.2, “REBRIP’s Four Phases,” and Figure 3.1, “REBRIP’s Timeline”). These four phases are the result of two interrelated dynam- ics: changes in the domestic and international political environment, and changes in REBRIP’s strategies, part of which include a constant reevalu- ation of possible threats and opportunities. Such dynamics crisscross in a complicated pattern of cause and effect, because actors in civil society have contributed to changes in the political environment, while at the same time these changes have impacted civil society's politics of scale shifting. ‘The first phase was one of institutionalization of the coalition domesti- cally, of learning about the (very technical) issues in the agenda of free-trade negotiations, and, on the transnational scale, of activating ties with allies in other countries, and building the HSA. The second phase was a period ofThe Politics of Scale Shift and Coalition Building 63 Table 3.1 REBRIP’s Brokerage Roles and Tasks Type of Brokerage Role ‘Main Tasks Translator Knowledge diffusion (publications, websites, workshops, seminars) Coordinator Division of labor among members Reception and distribution of resources, responsibilities, and information Reaching out to new potential participants Reaching out to contacts across cleavages Articulator Promotion of dialogue to build consensus Capacity building Monitoring of negotiations and/or debates Representative Interviews to the press Declarations Speaking in the name of others in civil society events Speaking in the name of others in official meetings Occupation of seats in committees, councils, public audiences, and/or negotiating tables Source: von Biilow, 2011: 169, consolidation of the coalition. Between 2002 and 2003, it became a central actor in the mobilizations against the FTAA. The third and fourth phases were characterized by deepening uncertainty with regard to the coalition’s future. In the third phase, between the years of 2004 and 2008, it struggled to adapt its strategies to the political domestic and international changes, with, as we will see, a tendency to prioritize even more the domestic scale of action. The last phase is still ongoing and is characterized by a deepening of the trend toward the fragmentation of the coalition in more or less autono- mous subgroups that act on specific issues. From Creation to Consolidation During this first phase, the brokerage roles of “translator” and “coordina- tor” were especially important, given the difficulties nonstate actors faced in having access to international and domestic negotiators, and the need to build the foundations of the coalition, In fact, during these years, the main demands of CSOs across the hemisphere were greater transparency and access to negotiations, as the “logic of exclusion” of nonstate actors pre~ dominated in the international negotiations (Smith and Korzeniewicz 2007,64 Marisa von Biilow Table 3.2 REBRIP’s Four Phases Coalition Phases Main Challenges Scales of Action Creation: 1997-2001 Create internal Domestic, governance rules hemispheric ther and diffuse knowledge Build transnational network Follow-up negotiations Consolidation: Mobilize Domestic, 2002-2003 Create and diffuse knowledge hemispheric, global Formulate alternative proposals Follow-up negotiations Adaptation: Move from defensive to Domestic, South 2004-2008 proactive strategies American, global Learn about global negotiations and regional integration Follow-up negotiations Formulate alternative proposals Maintain autonomy in the relationship with federal government Create and diffuse knowledge Fragmentation? 2009= Maintain internal unity Domestic, South Integrate working groups American, global Maintain autonomy in the relationship with federal government Create and diffuse knowledge Source: Author’s own elaboration 161). The creation of REBRIP cannot be explained without considering that a broad spectrum of CSOs saw great obstacles in their individual power to influence negotiators, at the same time as they considered the FTAA a clear collective threat that could not be ignored. Internally, the key challenge for the coalition in this period was the cre- ation of governance arrangements that allowed a wide array of CSOs to reach agreement on transnational commitments while maintaining their various domestic claims and goals. When REBRIP held its first assembly, in 1999 (see Figure 3.1), this became the coalition’s main decision-making forum, in which representatives of all members participate. The assembly elects a coordination, which, among other things, is in charge of elaborating the coalition’s program, and an executive secretary that implements decisions and coordinates commu- nication with allies and within the coalition. In 2001, an important addition was made to this organizational structure, when the coalition created a series of thematic working groups whose job was to debate a common agenda,UoREIOgLe UmO s,s0yznY 2224708 (Lroz-deol) Neu SarUGAA T'¢ 2484 (6002) euoneyuowiberg (e00z-r002) (002-2002) uoneprosuog aseyd yunod woneidepy ‘sed PUL saseyd puosas (1002-2664) woneeio oseua 1s:1366 Marisa von Biilow negotiate positions, and build and diffuse knowledge on five themes: agricul- ture, the envionment, intellectual property, services, and gender. Instead of relying on paid staff and external resources, the secretariat of the coalition was headquartered in a previously existing NGO, the Federation of Organisms for Social and Educational Assistance (Federagio de Orgaos para Assisténcia Social e Educacional—FASE), where it stayed until 2010. Arriving at this structure, however, was not easy. In part, it was the result of a process of transnational diffusion of an organizational repertoire that was inaugurated in Canada at the end of the 1980s, where the first multisee- toral coalition on trade was created—the Action Canada Network (ACN). This Canadian coalition influenced the creation of similar types of organi- zations in the United States and in Mexico during the negotiations of the NAFTA (yon Biilow 2010). When the FTAA negotiations were launched, other coalitions were created throughout the hemisphere. However, in each case, these coalitions were impacted by the embeddedness of actors in spe- cific—and dynamic—political contexts.* In their internal evaluation of this first phase, REBRIP’s members argued thar in Brazil the debate about internal governance was put in these terms: “whether to be closer to the model created by the World Social Forum process—i.c., as a space where organizations that act on the issue of trade converge to define common actions and initiatives—or more of a network dynamic, which maintains a minimum of permanent structure of interaction, planning and common goals, even if it is not based on unified political posi- tions on every issue” (REBRIP 2007 n.p.). In 2007, the coalition’s coordina- tion came to the conclusion that this initial debate was misplaced, because “we are both a space and a network. We are not like the WSF process, because we take clear positions and these shape our actions, but we also are not a rigid structure that limits the autonomy of its members. We act upon clear positions, but with the limitation of having to find the minimum com- mon denominator possible” (ibid. n.p. This first phase was characterized also by the activation of international ties with allies all over the hemisphere. Differently from other domestic trade coalitions, which had been created earlier, REBRIP was born together with the HSA, a transnational alliance that brought together national chapters and international CSOs from the whole hemisphere. Through the HSA, REBRIP quickly became a central node in a transnational network of free-trade chal- lengers (von Billow 2010). In 2001, together with its international allies, REBRIP members came to the conclusion that, instead of trying to influence the negotiations, they should organize the opposition to the FTAA.” This defi- nition marked the transition to a second phase in the life of the coalition, Between 2002 and 2003, REBRIP consolidated its role as a domestic and international actor. This second phase was characterized by numerous collective action initiatives, most of them geared toward stopping the FTAA negotiations and debating the potential domestic impacts of this agreement. During the see- ond edition of the World Social Forum, held in Porto Alegre from January 31The Politics of Scale Shift and Coalition Building 67 to February St, 2002, CSOs launched the Continental and the Brazilian Cam- paigns against the FTAA. REBRIP members participated in this initiative, but these campaigns went beyond the boundaries of both the HSA and its national chapter, bringing together an even broader array of CSOs that had not, until then, participated in the debates about the agreement." In September of that same year, the Brazilian Campaign organized a plebiscite on the FTAA, as a means of raising popular awareness as well as fostering opposition to the negotiations. Although its results were not binding, the fact that approximately ten million people cast their vote showed the mobilization capacity of sectors opposed to the agreement."' Other countries were also supposed to organize similar public consultations, but none came close to mobilizing as many people. The plebiscite was also meant to pressure political authorities by showing that a large number of Brazilians opposed the agreement. It was organized a few weeks before the presidential election, which was won by the center-left coalition led by the Workers’ Party (PT). Many participants of the social move- ments that were campaigning against the FTAA were a part of this change, either doubling as party activists or simply as voters for the PT coalition, and several went on to occupy key positions in the federal government." This does not mean that the relationships between anti-FTAA activists and the PT campaign were free of tensions. On the contrary, REBRIP and the Brazilian Campaign expected the presidential candidate to denounce the FTAA negotia- tions, but that never occurred. Nor could the campaign convince the candidate to incorporate the proposal of an official plebiscite to its platform. Within both REBRIP and the National Campaign, civil society actors disagreed on the amount of pressure to put on the candidate and, later on, on the clected president, a disagreement that only deepened throughout 2003." This second phase of the coalition was characterized by intense mobiliza- tion, radicalization of the position on the FTAA negotiations, broadening of alliances, and simultaneous domestic and transnational collective action. This simultaneity, however, does not implicate that equal priority was given to both scales of action. Change at the domestic arena remained the priority even for actors engaged in transnational collective action, as was the case of REBRIP’s members. In their analysis about the issue of environmental protection, Hoch~ stetler and Keck argue that, during the process of preparation for the UNCED, debates “focused on national problems rather than cither the official con- ference agenda or how to construct an international NGO agenda . . . Most striking is the degree to which most (though not all) Brazilian environmen- talists were much more intent upon discussing Brazil in the global system than the global system per se” (Hochstetler and Keck 2007, 123). A similar argument can be made with respect to the free-trade debates. Mobilizations against the FTAA were much more intent on debating its potential impacts on domestic public policies and the ability of the state to implement them than on cross-border issues such as environment or migration. The motto of the Brazilian Campaign against the FTAA—Sovereignty, yes! The FTAA no!”— symbolizes the national, sovereignty-based framing adopted by those actors.68 Marisa von Biilow It is also true, however, that REBRIP’s members promoted a more trans- national approach to debates on trade than many of the actors that limited their participation to the National Campaign against the FTAA. More spe- cifically, during this period the coalition participated actively in international events, such as the Ministerial Meeting of the FTAA held in November of 2003 in Miami. Not only did REBRIP have a representative within the Bra- zilian official delegation, but it also helped organize meetings and protests in the streets. It also became an increasingly important actor within the HSA. During this period, REBRIP participated in an effort toward reaching agreement among CSOs from the whole hemisphere on what could be an acceptable process of integration among countries of the region. This debate had begun before REBRIP was born. In 1998, the HSA published the first edition of the document “Alternatives for the Americas,” which was revised and republished four more times between then and 2005. In sum, this second phase began with intense mobilization against what REBRIP members perceived as a clear threat and ended with a great deal of uncertainty about the future of negotiations, both at the transnational scale— because the November 2003 meeting of the FTAA negotiators had not arrived at a clear agreement—and domestically—because the new government did not have a consensual approach to the issue and because CSOs did not have a unified strategy to influence the PT-led coalition. More to the point, as a whole REBRIP did not perceive the political change that came with the Lula govern- ment, as important as it was, as necessarily opening a clear new opportunity to influence decision-making on foreign policy. The evaluation of the results of the VIII Ministerial Meeting of the FTAA (2003) by the Executive Secretariat makes this explicit: It is hard to say with safety what are the real goals of the Brazilian government (to negotiate or not negotiate the FTAA), or, better put, if [emphasis in the original] there are common goals to which Brazil- ian negotiators adhere . . . or whether they are constantly adapting to the permanent arm wrestling that characterizes this government. (Mello 2003, 3; author’s translation) This uncertainty and the need to adapt to very dynamic political contexts only deepened in the next phases of the coalition, as it tried to move from being a fundamentally defensive organization to being more proactive. Phase Three: Collective Action after the FTAA In early February 2004, the FTAA Trade Negotiating Committee (TNC) met officially for the last time in Puebla, Mexico. A series of informal meetings followed, but the new political topography of the region made the goal of reaching a consensus even less probable than it was before. Contrary to the cases of Peru, Colombia, or Panama, Brazil did not go on to negotiate aThe Politics of Scale Shift and Coalition Building 69 bilateral trade deal with the United States. As a participant argues, the freez~ ing of hemispheric negotiations created a lot of uncertainty within REBRIP: Civil society [REBRIP and the Brazilian Campaign against the FTAA] did not know what to do when the FTAA negotiations froze. It is the story of the dog that runs barking after the car. When the car stops, it doesn’t know what to do.'* Initially, REBRIP decided to redirect its attention to the global trade nego- tiations. The WTO was thought to be the key realm in which agreements on the future of free-trade negotiations would take place, and thus the threat rep- resented by the FTAA migrated to the global arena. In terms of the scale of col- lective action, at first glance this decision led to what the literature has called an “upward scale shift,” from the hemispheric to the global scale. The coali- tion became a participant in the network Our World Is Not for Sale; organized several debates about the possible impacts of the Doha Round; published papers and bulletins with analysis of the negotiations; promoted participation in ministerial conferences; and, in 2005, sent two representatives to follow-up talks held in Geneva prior to the Hong Kong Ministerial Meeting. As in the case of the FTAA, participation in transnational coalitions and collaboration with partners from other countries was undertaken in parallel with action at the national scale. Interestingly, however, national strategies became increasingly more relevant. As the person in charge of the coali- tion’s Executive Secretariat explained in January of 2006, the perception of a more prominent Brazilian role in international relations had asa result an even greater focus than in the previous phase on the domestic arena, or a “downward scale shift” Given that the Brazilian government is one of the key players in the negotiating process, the Brazilian networks and campaigns against free trade can try to take action at the national stage, criticizing and chang- ing the government's negotiating positions, focusing always on the con- sequences that these positions will have for large sectors of the Brazilian society. (Mello 2006, 5) As argued previously, this was not a result of the perception of an unequiv- ocal opportunity, but of the mistrust with which many members of REBRIP saw a government in which they had, nevertheless, several allies. As two key actors in the mobilizations on trade wrote in 2004, the new governments of both Brazil and Argentina were perceived by them as playing “a double game, always on the limit between, on the one hand, the defense of sovereign posi- tions and, on the other, yielding to the pressure to sign onto agreements” (Ber- ron and Freire 2004, 298; author's translation). In spite of the many political differences among REBRIP’s members, which put them as closer or more dis- tant to the Lula government, such a view was shared by many (if not by all).70 Marisa von Biilow However, there was little time to test REBRIP’s strategy. Global negotia- tions came to an almost complete halt after the Hong Kong 2005 Ministerial Meeting, after a series of failed attempts to reach consensus. Civil society interest on the WTO declined accordingly.’ Once more, REBRIP adapted its agenda, strategies, and priorities. Given the void created by the absence of clear global or regional threats around which to mobilize opposition, during its fourth general assembly, held in 2007, REBRIP’s members decided to shift their attention to ongoing regional integration processes in South America. This turn to the regional scale made sense for three main reasons. First, thematically it coincided with REBRIP’s identity as a coalition that was dedicated primarily to trade and integration policies. Second, Brazil had been a key player in a “boom” of regional cooperation initiatives, which included ongoing processes (most importantly the Common Market of the Southern Cone (MERCOSUR) and the reform and expansion of pre- vious initiatives, the most important of which are the Unién de Naciones Suramericanas (UNASUR; a successor of the South American Community of Nations launched in 2004) and, most recently, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC, which substitutes the Rio Group, an international organization that existed since 1986 but that did not gather all Latin American and Caribbean countries). As in the case of the WTO, at least some REBRIP members thought they could try to influence these initia- tives through lobbying the Brazilian government. Third, the decision to par- ticipate in regional integration initiatives was shared broadly by REBRIP’s allies in the HSA, and thus presented new possibilities in terms of regional civil society cooperation. The report of the meeting held between the HSA and the Coordinator of Labor Unions of the Southern Cone, in April 2006, summarizes the basic consensus among those two coalitions at that time. They differentiated between two stages of action: The first “stage” is the one of the fight against free trade, which in this period means the WTO negotiations and the bilateral free trade agree- ments [between the United States and Latin American countries}. The second “stage” is that of regional integration, which means the ongoing negotiations of MERCOSUR, South American Community of Nations, Trade Agreements among Peoples and the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas.'* In the first stage, our agenda is fundamentally “defensive”. In the second, we aim at being “proactive”. In the first, we try to resist. In the second, depending on the course of state policies, we try to be a driving force. (Alianga Social Continental/Coordenadora de Centrais Sindicais do Cone Sul 2006 n.p.; author's translation) However, the turn toward regional integration initiatives was not as straightforward as it may seem. While various members of REBRIP had a long history of participation in MERCOSUR (especially the Unified Work- ers’ Central—CUT), up until 2007 the coalition did not have a clear positionThe Politics of Scale Shift and Coalition Building 71 on the integration of the Southern Cone. Many organizations had either ignored this process or had seen it as just another expression of “neoliberal policies” in the region (Berrén 2009, 15). Thus, members of the coalition did not have a homogeneous view of regional integration processes, nor did they share a consensus on which of various regional processes could best constitute an acceptable alternative to U.S.-led regionalism. In terms of perceptions of opportunities, they were divided in three groups: those that saw in the MERCOSUR process the best potential for incidence, those that opted to participate in the Bolivarian Alternative for the Amerieas (Alterna- tiva Bolivariana para las Américas—ALBA), and a third group that did not see either as an important opportunity nor as a clear threat. This division was not new but gained different contours and deepened in the post-FTAA context. In the previous period, having a stand on regional integration initia- tives such as the MERCOSUR was second to the unity against the FTAA. Furthermore, finding the balance between resistance and proposition proved to be a formidable task. REBRIP was born as much more than a coalition to debate protectionism and liberalization policies. Its participants named the coalition “for the peoples’ integration” in a direct reference to the goal of building alternatives, which meant going beyond saying no to the FTAA. The agenda of trade negotiations was linked to issues such as intel- lectual property, investment rights, and labor rights, among others. This, from the beginning, obligated CSOs to study these issues and take position on them, But this movement of broadening the agenda linked to trade was also the result of civil society activism. Especially with regard to issues such as labor rights, environmental protection and impact, gender rights, and access to medicines, these were all included in the debates—if not necessarily on the agenda of negotiations—by CSOs (von Biilow 2010, esp. chap. 2). In trying to find a balance between resistance and proposition, REBRIP engaged in various activities at the domestic and international scales, such as lobbying the federal government, organizing seminars, and attending international civil society meetings. Furthermore, the coalition became a member of the Consultative Forum on Economic and Social Issues (FCES), a MERCOSUR organism that gathers representatives of labor unions, busi- ness organizations, and NGOs from the four countries of the bloc. With other actors, it promoted debates on integration policies and civil society strategies." It also sponsored several publications in its continuing role as a “translator” (see Table 3.1). Between May 2005 and April 2008, it published thirteen bulletins that presented ongoing negotiations in a clear language (including a glossary of terms). In 2006, together with the HSA and the Bra- zilian Campaign against the FTAA, it published a booklet that presented the characteristics of the main regional integration initiatives and launched an agenda of debate, in preparation for the Social Summit for the Integra- tion of the Peoples, held that same year in Cochabamba, Bolivia (Alianga Social Continental, Campanha Brasileira contra a Area de Livre Comércio das Américas/Organizacio Mundial do Comércio, and REBRIP 2006).72 Marisa von Biilow However even among those that decided it was worth focusing on regional integration initiatives, being proactive was neither automatic nor easy. In the political evaluation made by the coalition during its fourth assembly, held in October of 2007, the participants argued that they were living an unprecedented moment, which defies us to think of a counter- hegemonic project at the regional scale, and that, most of all, obligates us to engage in a dialogue with the concrete approaches and proposals that are on the table, instead of engaging with abstract debates. The problem is that the need to react to concrete initiatives that are ongoing in the region entails the responsibility of acting on a brand new stage, different from the previous period, when we analyzed issues with a distance . .. if regional integration is seen by us as a real alternative to neoliberalism and to impe- rialism, which integration model do we want? Which campaigns can we launch about regional integration? Which are our demands? ... How do Wwe go on combining the necessary resistance actions with the building of alternatives? (REBRIP 2007n.p.s author's translation) Divisions among CSOs on how to answer these questions are related to the different political positions sponsored by them, and to the different char- acteristics of regional integration processes themselves. While in the cases of MERCOSUR and UNASUR, trade liberalization has not been questioned, in the case of ALBA the documents state the “opposition to free market reforms” and emphasize the need for the state to regulate markets (Serbin 2010, 13). Furthermore, that process had been clearly presented by its proponents as an alternative to the FTAA, not as a possible complementary initiative, to which Alternatives for the Americas, the HSA document mentioned previously, was a source of inspiration." All of this led various CSOs to defend the ALBA as the best alternative regional integration process. In the case of UNASUR, accord ing to Gonzalo Berrén, civil society participation was justified because it was the broadest regional integration initiative, in terms of geographic extension and number of countries . . . This broadness favored an also broader dynamic of articulation of social movements, and even though in 2006 it was an “empty shell”, it was estimated that together with the group of presidents that were closer to the ideology—or to the origins— of the movements there was a big chance of participating and making propositions. (2009, 13) Such expectation of influencing governments’ positions on the UNASUR was always, however, seen in terms of a possibility and not as a done deal, as is clear in a declaration signed in 2008 by both REBRIP and the HSA, among other networks: After the defeat of the FTAA, the creation of a community of nations through UNASUR—South American Union of Nations—has becomeThe Politics of Scale Shift and Coalition Building 73 one of the strategies of governments to incorporate the region with sov- ereignty in the global stages, and it may come to be a space for the defense of the popular sectors’ interests in the countries involved. However, this process still does not present a clear definition in favor of the peoples? interests, which indicates the need to dispute its course of action.” The person in charge of REBRIP’s Executive Secretariat up until 2010 put it clearly: Our great dispute is [to influence] where are the governments headed, because those are coalition governments, in which we have never been hegemonic. This is the gigantic task we face today. And depending on what we achieve it will define, to a great extent, the possibilities at the regional and international scales.2? Thus, this third phase was characterized by the efforts of REBRIP’s mem- bers to make the transition from being a mostly defensive alliance of CSOs united around what they perceived as a clear threat, to being a proactive alli- ance that aimed at influencing at least some aspects of foreign policy making. Fourth Phase: Deepening Fragmentation The severe financial crisis that spread from the United States unevenly to the rest of the world after 2008 made it even harder for national govern- ments to find consensus on a global trade agreement. Although the WTO by no means remained totally idle during this period, in effect the conclusion of the Doha Round has been indefinitely postponed. In parallel, the South American process of regional integration has advanced very slowly, generat- ing frustration with this lack of progress as well as with the lack of influence by CSOs (Berrén 2007a, 22).2" REBRIP’s fourth and ongoing phase is characterized by a deepening of the trends of previous years. The tendency for fragmentation within the coalition became more pronounced, as it struggled to find common interests among members and common positions on issues. In this period, interview- ees agree that there has been less attention paid to transnational coalition building, more specifically to the HSA. Furthermore, REBRIP has remained formally a part of the FCES/MERCOSUR but has failed to send a repre- sentative to the meetings, which symbolizes the lack of a common position on this integration process.” It also does not participate as a coalition in the ALBA process, although some of its members remain committed to it.?* This diminished international presence does not mean, however, that there was a decision made by the coalition to “downward scale shift.” In fact, interviewees have emphasized that this has been the result more of the dif- ficult to maintain unity within the coalition—and thus perform its tasks as a political broker between the national and international scales—than of a strategic decision to prioritize one scale or another.74 Marisa von Biilow One participant argued that REBRIP has changed from a “space of mobi- lization” to a “space of reflection.” Still, the coalition attempted to adapt yet again, by making organizational changes and redefining priorities. In 2010, it created a new working group, on “international economic archi- tecture,” to debate and follow up on the financial G-20, in which Brazil has participated. In this period, the subgroup on climate has tried to help forge a consensus among Brazilian CSOs in preparation for the Conference Rio+20. A third working group has remained particularly active: the Work- ing Group on Intellectual Property (Grupo de Trabalho sobre Propriedade Intelectual—GTPI). The organizations that participate in GTPI have kept the pressure on the Brazilian government to issue compulsory licenses for antiretroviral drugs used in the Brazilian Aids Programme, sometimes with help from allies in other countries.’* However, this group has focused its attention on the issue of access to medicine, with little dialogue with the other working groups. REBRIP also opened a Twitter account, but it was active only between September 2009 and November 2010, In this period, 69 tweets were posted, or approximately 6 per month. In January of 2012, the account was still open but not active, and REBRIP still had 176 followers. By comparison, the only working group with a Twitter account, the GTPI, has remained active in this virtual space, having posted more than 1,000 tweets, and in January 2012, it had 445 followers.” As was explained in the previous section, Lula’s election meant walking a very thin line between maintaining autonomy with respect to the new administration while at the same time not burning too many bridges with allies in government. There was no consensual formula to do this. Thus, it is interesting to note that it was in the context of the election of Lula’s suc- cessor that the coalition was able to temporarily unify their scattered mem- bers. During the 2010 presidential elections, REBRIP publicly announced its support for the PT candidate, Dilma Rousseff. In an open letter, the coali- tion defended the foreign policy of the previous eight years, criticized the opposition, and at the same time presented demands that were meant to “go even further and expand what has been achieved” (REBRIP 2010, n.p.). It is important to note, however, that the decision to position itself so clearly in the electoral debate was only taken after Dilma Rousseff failed to win the election in the first round. Between the first and second rounds, even social movements that were highly critical of the previous administration, such as the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), decided to announce its support for the PT candidate, as the lesser of two evils. I will not pretend to be able to anticipate what will happen in REBRIP’s future. The coalition could last a long time functioning as it has during this fourth phase: as a unified space for negotiation of common positions trig- gered by members only in key moments—such as during an election—and as a fragmented space for debate among specific subgroups that have a lot of autonomy to develop their own positions in different scales and arenas.The Politics of Scale Shift and Coalition Building 75 CONCLUSION The REBRIP has been, for the past fifteen years, the only multisectoral space for Brazilian CSOs to debate free-trade agreements and regional integra~ tion processes, and to coordinate common positions and actions at various scales. For some time it was very successful, but in the last few years its rel- evance has diminished. This chapter argued that REBRIP’s trajectory is best explained by the absence of a common threat at the international level and by diverging interpretations of the opportunity presented by the election of a new government at the domestic scale. After the FTAA negotiations stopped and the Lula government had been elected, it wasn’t enough for the coalition to maintain a (mainly) defensive approach to free-trade negotiations. However, its members were never able to build a strong consensus on how to try and influence regional integration processes in South America, in spite of the fact that they agrce that “there is no alternative outside of regional integration.”** For some, ALBA (in which Brazil does not participate) constitutes the key opportunity to advance civil society's agenda of integration; for others, MERCOSUR remains the focus. These differences represent an insurmountable obstacle to REBRIP’s capac- ity to participate consistently as an actor in regional integration debates A key challenge for REBRIP has been to constantly be able to adapt its priorities and scales of action, while maintaining unity within the coalition and autonomy with respect to governmental actors. It is difficult to overesti- mate the impacts of the election of Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva as Brazil’s new president in 2002. It led to important changes in the relationship between state and civil society, as well as to significant modifications in public poli- cies, Contrary to what would be expected by at least part of the literature, the rise to power of a sector of the Brazilian left in 2003 was not interpreted asa clear new opportunity in which CSOs could count on exercising greater levels of influence.” REBRIP members understood the new administration asa site of dispute of political projects, in which they were one voice among many others, struggling to have an impact. The consensus stops there. There is no agreement among CSOs on the arenas to be prioritized or on the strate~ gies to be used. Thus, diminished levels of supranational activity have been parallel to diminished levels of domestic activity. REBRIP has had to deal with a deepening trend toward the fragmentation (and the weakening) of the coalition, in spite of important efforts to adapt. This chapter contributes to the debate about political opportunity struc- tures by showing that it has become increasingly hard to consider only domestic political contexts, without also taking into account changes at the international scale and how these affect civil society: and by showing that even in cases in which there is wide agreement with respect to the possibility of exercising greater influence, civil society actors disagree with respect to how much influence is possible and which strategies to pursue in order to effectively exercise influence.76 Marisa von Biilow A longer-term analysis of coalition building across scales, such as the one presented in this chapter, shows that a key challenge for CSOs is to nurture powerful brokers that remain alive even during periods of absence of clear threats. These collaborative arenas may be reactivated in the future. REBRIP’s trajectory shows that some of its working subgroups have become larger than the coalition. This is not necessarily bad, if its members are able to maintain minimum levels of coordination, as they have been so far. APPENDIX List of Interviews Conducted between September and November 2011 Interview with Maria Silvia Portella de Castro, CUT advisor, by e-mail, September 2011. Interview with Fatima Mello, FASE, by Skype, September 13, 2011. Interview with Luis Facco, Confederacao Nacional dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura (CONTAG), by Skype, October 5, 2011. Interview with Adhemar Mineiro, REBRIP advisors, by Skype, October 7, 2011. Interview with Graciela Rodriguez, Instituto Equit, by Skype, November 28, 2011 NOTES . [thank Eduardo Silva for his comments on a previous version of this chapter as well as the Routledge anonymous reviewers. 2. Professor of the Political Science Institute at Pontificia Universidad Catélica, Chile, and professor (on leave) of the University of Brasilia, Brazil. 3. There is a large literature that focuses on the impacts of transnational ties. Sce, for example, Keck and Sikkink (1998); della Porta and Tarrow (2005); Anheier, Glasius, and Kaldor (2005); and Chandler (2005). 4. For a comparison between REBRIP and the U.S., Mexican, and Chilean chapters of the HSA, see von Billow (2010), especially chapter 8. 5. See, for example, Tilly (1978), Kriese et al. (1995), and McAdam (1999) 6. Foran carly call to study the interactions between domestic and international political opportunity structures, see Kriese et al. (1995, 249). 7. Author’s translation. Presentation of the coalition at the website, http://www. rebrip.org.br (accessed December 17, 2011). 8. For a comparison between REBRIP and the Mexican Action Network on Free Trade (RMALC), see von Billow (2011). 9. At the Québec Summit of the Americas, held in 2001, the HSA launched its new catchphrase, “The HSA says NO to the FTAA; other Americas are Pos- sible” (see Berrén 2007b, 34, 35; Smith and Korzeniewiez. 2007, 160-164). 10. Among Brazilian actors that did not participate actively in REBRIP but chose to participate in the campaign (and in the mobilization around the plebi- scite) were church groups, some labor unions, individuals, and members of13. 14, 1s. 17. 18, 20. 21, 22, 23. The Politics of Scale Shift and Coalition Building 77 political parties, who met both at the national level and in a myriad of local “popular committees” (Silva 2008). For a more thorough analysis of the mobilizations of this period, see, for example, Berrén (2007a, 2007b), Silva (2008), and von Biilow (2010). . Both the Workers’ Party (PT) and the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB) (which supported the election of Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva) participated in the Brazilian Campaign Against the FTAA. During the 12th Assembly of the National Campaign Against the FTAA, held in October 2003, various organizations argued that the diminished levels of mobilization they faced had to do with the progovernment position held by various national organizations, such as the Unified Workers’ Central (CUT) and the National Union of Students (UNE), both key members of the cam- paign (Centro de Midia Independente 2003). Talk given by Edélcio Vigna, member of REBRIP’s working group on agri- culture and of the Instituto de Estudos Socioeconémicos (INESC), at the University of Brasilia, Brasilia, Brazil, March 24, 2008 (author’s translation). One indicator of this change is the number of Brazilian CSOs accredited to attend ministerial conferences. According to the WTO, in 2003 eighteen Brazilian CSOs were accredited to attend the WTO Ministerial Meeting, and in 2009, only seven. See hetp://www.wto.org (accessed March 15, 2012). . The process of creation of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (Alter- nativa Bolivariana para las Américas—ALBA) began with an agreement between the governments of Cuba and Venezuela, signed in 2004. In the following years, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and the Caribbean islands of St, Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent, and Dominica also became members. For example, in parallel to the XXVII MERCOSUR Summit, held in Belo Horizonte in 2004, it organized a day of debates about integration poli cies. In 2005, the HSA and the Coordination of Southern Cone Labor Fed- erations organized the First Meeting of Labor and Social Organizations of MERCOSUR. Interview with Graciela Rodriguez, Instituto Equit, by Skype, November 28, 2011. . Author's translation from “Declaracio das Organizagdes da Sociedade Civil sobre a Criagao da UNASUL,” May 28, 2008, http:/Mwww.rebrip.org.br/_rebrip/ pagina.php?id=1894 (accessed March 15, 2012). Interview with Fatima Mello, FASE, by Skype, September 13, 2011. ‘This frustration has been felt especially with regard to the Southern Cone integration process. Interview with Luis Facco, Confederagao Nacional dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura (CONTAG), by Skype, October 5, 20113 and interview with Maria Silvia Portella de Castro, CUT advisor, by e-mail, Sep- tember 2011. Interview with Adhemar Mineiro, REBRIP advisor, by Skype, October 7, 2011 During the 2009 World Social Forum, a broad group of social movements, among which were some REBRIP members, approved an open letter that stated that they “wish to promote the various mechanisms and potentials offered by the ALBA, in order to foster the Latin American integration from the peoples” (see Carta de los Movimientos Sociales de las Américas, Belem, http://www.movimientos.org/noalca/albasi/show_text.php32key=13773, accessed March 13, 2012}. In 2011, the Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Organizaciones del Campo-Via Campesina (CLOC), to which REBRIP members such as the Landless Workers’ Movement are affiliated, circulated a declaration that states that its Continental Political Commission had “ana- lyzed and evaluated the need to consolidate the ALBA of the Movements process in our regions, ratifying the need to build a continental articulation78 Marisa von Bilow of rural and urban social movements in order to create a Continental Popular Project” (see “Declaracién de la Comisién Politica Continental de la CLOC- Via Campesina,” hetp://www.cloc-viacampesina-net/es/temas-principales/ reforma-agraria/691-declaracion-de-la-comision-politica-continental-de-la- cloc-via-campesina, accessed October 2, 2012). 24, Incerview with Graciela Rodriguez, Instituto Equit, via Skype, November 28, 2011. 25. Alongside several other Brazilian coalitions and CSOs, REBRIP was a mem- ber of the Brazilian Civil Society Facilitating Committee for Rio+20. 26. See, for example, the letter sent by the GTPI to the minister of foreign affairs in 2005, which was signed by 138 CSOs, half of them from other countries. 27. See the numbers published by Twitter at http:/www.twitter.com (accessed January 21, 2012). 28. Interview with Fatima Mello, FASE, by Skype, September 13, 2011. 29, The presence or absence of the left in government has been a variable in many studies about the impact of political opportunity struetures in activism, usually associated with an opening for collective action because it meant the presence of allies in power. See, for example, Kriese et al. (1995). REFERENCES Alianga Social Continental (ASC), Campanha Brasileira contra a Area de Livre Comércio das Américas/Organizacio Mundial do Comércio (ALCA/OMO), and Rede Brasileira pela Integragio dos Povos (REBRIP). 2006. Integracao na América Latina: subsidios para debater a integracao dos povos. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Cadernos de Formagio. Alianga Social Continental and Coordenadora de Centrais Sindicais do Cone Sul Meeting Report, unpublished, April 2006. Anheier, Helmut, Marlies Glasius, and Mary Kaldor, eds. 2005. Global Civil Society 2004/5. London: Sage Publications. Berrdn, Gonzalo. 2007a. “De la lucha contra el ALCA a la ‘integracién de los pueblos’: movimientos sociales y procesos de integracién.” Res Diplomatica, no. 1: 6-23. . 2007b. “Identidades ¢ Estratégias Sociais na Arena Transnacional: 0 caso do movimento social contra o livre comércio nas Américas.” PhD dissertation, Universidade de Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Braz . 2009. “Movimientos sociales del Sur: ALBA, MERCOSUR y UNASUR.” América Latina en Movimiento, no. 442: 12-16. Berrén, Gonzalo, and Rafael Freire. 2004. “Los movimientos sociales del Cono Sur contra el mal llamado ‘libre comercio’.” OSAL, V (13): 297-306. 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Hochstetler, Kathryn, and Margaret Keck. 2007. Greening Brazil: Environmental Activism in State and Society. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Keck, Margaret, and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kricse, Hanspeter, Ruud Koopmans, Jan Willem Dyvendak, and Marco 1995. New Social Movements ins Western Europe—a Comparative Analysis. Min- neapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Levi, Margaret, and Gillian H. Murphy. 2006. “Coalitions of Contention: The Case of the WTO Protests in Seattle.” Political Studies 54(4): 651-670. McAdam, Doug. 1999. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McAdam, Doug, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly. 2001. Dynamics of Contention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mello, Fatima. 2003. “Alguns pontos para uma avaliagao de Miami.” Unpublished, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 2606. “Descarrilhar o acordo de Hong Kong: prioridade para os movimen- tos e organizagoes sociais brasileiros.” Boletim REBRIP, no. 8: 4-5. Serbin, Andrés. 2010. Regionalismo y soberania nacional en América Latina: los nuevos desafios. Documentos CRIES 15. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Nueva Socie- dad/CRIES. Sikkink, Kathryn. 2005. Patterns of dynamic multilevel governance and the insider- outsider coalition. In Transnational Protest and Global Activism, ed. Donatella della Porta and Sidney Tarrow, 151-173. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Little Silva, Suylan de Almeida Midlej e. 2008. ““Ganhamos a batalha, mas nao a guerr: visio da Campanha Nacional contra a ALCA sobre a ndo-assinatura do Acordo.” PHD dissertation, University of Brasilia, Brasilia, Brazil Smith, William C., and Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz. 2007.“Insiders, Outsiders, and the Politics of Civil Society.” In Governing the Americas: Assessing Mul- tilateral Institutions, edited by Gordon Mace, Jean-Phillipe Thérien, and Paul Haslam, 151-172. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Tarrow, Sidney. 1998. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Poli- tics. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005. The New Transnational Activism. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 2011. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, Charles. 1978. From Mobilization to Revolution. Reading, MA: Addison- Wesley Publishing. von Biilow, Marisa. 2009. “Networks of Trade Protest in the Americas: Toward a New Labor Internationalism?” Latin American Politics and Society 51(2): 1-28. —. 2010. Building Transnational Networks: Civil Society and the Politics of Trade in the Americas. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 2011. “Brokers in Action: Transnational Coalitions and Trade Agreements in the Americas.” Mobilization 16(2): 165-180. gni.4 Seeing Like an International NGO Encountering Development and Indigenous Politics in the Andes! José Antonio Lucero The [Oxfam America] South America regional program maintains an office in Lima, Peru, where it is recognized in the region for help- ing local organizations revitalize Indigenous knowledge and culture, restoring pride in their customs and traditions, —Oxfam America (2013) Good global politics do not always make good local polities. —Beth Conklin (2002:1052) Since the 1960s, Indigenous people in the region have reconstituted them- selves politically through powerful acts of organization, mobilization, and other forms of self-representation across local and global scales. As many scholars have noted, an important part of this political construction of indi- geneity has involved non-Indigenous networks that include transnational actors like churches, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and interna- tional development agencies (e.g., Alb6 1991; Andolina, Laurie and Rad- cliffe 2009; Brysk 1994; Garefa 2005; Jackson 1995; Lucero 2008; Yashar 2005). As Arturo Escobar notes, itis in this way that “development operates as an arena for cultural contestation and identity construction” (1995, 15). Paying special attention to the experiences of Oxfam America, this chap- ter explores how international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) and Indigenous organizations negotiate the meanings of indigeneity and develop- ment or what is usually called in Spanish cooperacién internacional (literally “international cooperation”). While Oxfam America grants are relatively modest compared to multilateral programs, as one of the earliest funders of Indigenous activism in Latin America, lessons from its “Indigenous encoun- ter” are especially important. Additionally, Oxfam America is a particularly interesting case as it has received careful and insightful attention from other scholars (especially Andolina 2003; Spalding 2010, this volume; Huber 2007; Smith 1985). Spalding (2010, this volume) characterizes Oxfam America a “domesticating INGO,” by which she means one that helps root politics in domestic soil and “scale downward” to engage local causes and contexts. I am in broad agreement with Spalding’s argument and description of Oxfam,Seeing Like an International NGO 81 though I seek to explore some of the complications that accompany the col- laboration between INGOs and Indigenous organizations. In addition to “domesticating,” INGOs play an especially important role in, what McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly (2001) call “ certification,” the ree~ ognition and validation given to local actors by external authorities, and “decertification,” the withdrawal of outside approval. Tarrow (notes that certification is especially relevant in the case of Indigenous politics. Giving the example of the United Nations (UN), Tarrow writes, “groups that are certified as ‘indigenous’ by the UN can use that recognition as leverage to gain political influence or seek independence at home” Tarrow 2005, 194). This chapter both expands and challenges the contentious politics under- standing of the mechanism of certification. It expands it by taking an ethno- graphic view of the certifiers, or to use anthropologists Kay Warren and Jean Jackson’s (2002) term, the “authenticators.” This chapter disaggregates the notion of certification by examining the discourses and even individuals within the transnational organizations that do the work of certifying and authenticat- ing. Additionally, this chapter challenges the prevailing view of certification by illustrating the complexity of the identity and category of “Indigenous.” Tarrow’s example suggests that the validators, like the UN, are important as they select from a preexisting field of actors, identities, or performance and make a fairly straightforward claim: the group is either Indigenous or not. This chapter suggests that the process of validation is hardly that neat. As an ethnographic and culturalist intervention in the contentious politics research agenda, this case study of Oxfam America in Peru and Bolivia sheds light on the ways certification, like other modes of representation, actually constitutes actors and identities, rather than simply validating them. Examining different moments in the interactive process of certification and legitimation between INGOs such as Oxfam America and Indigenous political organizations in Peru and Bolivia, the following pages explore how actors on both sides of the development encounter shape discourses over the meanings of development and indigeneity across local and global scales. While this is a dialogical process, this chapter takes special interest in the view from the INGO side of the development “contact zone” and asks ques- tions about INGO ways of seeing (Pratt 1992). Though there is no single INGO (or even Oxfam) view of the world, keeping an ethnographic eye on the “imaginative geographies” produced by INGO regional and program- matic specializations can contribute to our understanding of transnational contention (Said [1978] 1995). This kind of close examination can shed light not only on the causal relationships between transnational funders and local movements (which enable certain outcomes and foreclose others) but also the constitutive effects of development (i.e., the construction and autho- rization of certain actors and identities) This chapter first provides a culturalist approach to transnational contact zones, ones characterized by unequal relations of power and representa- tion. It then moves to historical examination of Oxfam’s work in the Andes82. José Antonio Lucero generally and in Peru and Bolivia specifically. Finally, it concludes by sug- gesting what a cultural, contact-zone approach to transnationalism can add to the understanding of transnational certification and contentious politics. SEEING LIKE A STATE/SEEING LIKE AN NGO: TRANSNATIONAL CONTACT ZONES James Scott (1998), building on the insights of Michel Foucault, Eugen Weber, and others, has argued that statecraft is, among other things, a project of legibility. Working like forest scientists or urban planners, state-making agents simplify and standardize often chaotic and complex societies. All state formation, in Scott’s view, resembles a kind of civilizing mission: “The builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their technique of observation” (1998, 82). Like most definitions of the state (including Max Weber’s influential one), this one identifies an ideal more than a robust empirical pattern. Indeed, as many scholars note, Latin American states (and African ones, and perhaps the majority of states in the world) have an incredibly uneven reach across their national territories. Indeed, in many areas of the Amazonian and Andean rural countryside, the state (as bureau cracy or law) is notably absent. As O’Donnell argues in an influential essay that proposed a color-coded map of “stateness,” one finds fewer schools and courts the further one travels from the state-dense “blue zones” of capi- tal cities to the state-light “brown zones” of rural hinterlands (O’Donnell 1993; sce also Yashar 2005). While the national state may not be there, it is a mistake to characterize Indigenous territories as “ungoverned spaces” (to invoke a popular and current national-security formulation). Looking at Andean communities in Ecuador, Rudi Collaredo-Mansfeld (2009) argues that Scott’s dualisms (big simplifying state vs. small resisting community, high-modernism vs. local metis) mislead us by suggesting that the local community is outside of and opposed to the state. Turning Scott’s argument on its head, Collaredo-Mansfeld suggests that the state’s catego- ries and practices (like the mapping and registration of Indigenous comu- nas with state ministries) make possible the “massing” and scaling-up of Indigenous mobilization. He urges us to see how the seemingly prosaic ele- ments of Indigenous community life—marking jurisdictional lines, having lists for communal labor, and the work of local councils—are not separate and opposed to the states they are forms of “vernacular statecraft.” The term vernacular is borrowed not from linguistics but from architecture in which “builders imitate and appropriate standard elements of widely used design, adapting them for local conditions” (Collaredo-Mansfeld 2009, 17). This is a remarkably persuasive argument. Nevertheless, in the process of dissoly- ing the dualism of national state and local community, Collaredo-Mansfeld leaves untroubled the distinctions between local and global.Seeing Like an International NGO 83 Ethnographies of community governance in a range of sites—for exam- ple, Jean Jackson’s (1995) work in Colombia, Tania Li’s (2000) on Indo- nesia, James Ferguson’s (2006) on Zambia, and Andolina et al.’s (2009) comparative work in the Andes (to name only a few)—reveal that instead of reproducing the dichotomies of society/state and local/global, we should consider how thoroughly (if unevenly) transnational the tasks of disciplin- ing and governing are in much of the world. The “civilizing mission” Scott describes has been carried out by a variety of actors that includes local elites and community assemblies, transnational corporations, churches, and of course, NGOs. Rather than thinking about the vast swaths of national spaces throughout the world that are ungoverned, one should considered that these spaces are characterized by a shifting constellations of what Fer- guson (2006, 103) calls “transnational governmentality,” an apparatus of power that “does not replace the old systems of nation-states . . . but over- lays it and coexists with it.” Rather than looking for stark boundaries and frontiers between local and global, we are in a more complex transnational “contact zone,” the term used by Mary Louise Pratt (1992, 6) to identify “a social space where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in [... ] asymmetrical relations of power.” In these contact zones, INGO and Indigenous organizations play a crucial role. The collaboration of outside funders with grassroots actors involves practices and discourses across a terrain made up of uneven power relations. Yet, rather than seeing them as imperial impositions (pace Petras 1997 or Bret6n 2001), it is perhaps best to sce these actors inserted in networks that provide material and cultural resources that enable them to refashion and reposition themselves within often hostile political environments (Li 2000). Native peoples are inserted in two analytically distinet though empirically overlapping kinds of networks, ones that Arturo Escobar (2008, 277) has termed “Dominant Actor Networks” (DANS) and “Subaltern Actor Net- works” (SANS). According to Escobar, the main difference between domi- nant and subaltern networks is that logics of hierarchy (homogenization, centralized planning) predominate in DANS while nonhierarchical practices of self-organization (heterogeneity, decentralized decision making) charac- terize SANS. It is important to note that these are not faceless or nameless actors in these networks. INGOs and Indigenous organizations are led and staffed by individuals with rich sets of experiences, preferences, and ideolo- gies. As “cultural brokers” and “imagineers,” these individuals exert signiti- cant influence in the ways in which economic and cultural capital are made available to some actors and not to others. As kinds of “switchmen,” INGO professionals and Indigenous movement leaders can play important roles at “critical junctures.” Understanding c cal junctures, as Collier and Collier (1991) suggest, obligates us to identify antecedent conditions, moments of crisis or opportunity, and mechanisms that reproduce certain legacies. Additionally, I argue that beyond the struc- turalism of the Colliers, we must also be attentive to the cultural “imaginative84 José Antonio Lucero geographies” that are produced by shared and competing visions of local- global projects. Indeed, the metaphor of junctures may be too restrictive as agents do not simply help select this path or that one; rather, they help pro- duce those very paths, along with the identities, platforms, and discourses that make possible Indigenous mobilizations and movements. Accordingly, to understand how INGO and Indigenous actors see and shape a certain social landscape, one must know something about the ideas that guide INGO interventions and the historical and political context in which they operate. The experiences of Oxfam America in Peru and Bolivia offer excellent oppor- tunities to do just that. OXFAM AMERICA: SEARCHING FOR UNITY WITHIN DIVERSITY? Support for Indigenous organizations marked a trend that began in the early 1980s when Oxfam America began to fund Indigenous organizations as part of its rights-based approach to addressing social problems of poverty and social exclusion. Oxfam America is one of twelve Oxfam International affiliates, a network of nonprofit agencies that trace their beginning to the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, founded in 1942 in response to the plight of Greek war refugees. In the carly 1970s, a group of volun- teers founded Oxfam America (with support from Oxfam Great Britain) in response to humanitarian crises that accompanied the struggle for indepen- dence in Bangladesh (http:/Awww.oxfamamerica.org). In the 1980s, under the direction of U.S. anthropologist Richard Chase Smith, Oxfam America’s newly formed South American Regional Program focused its humanitarian and political work specifically toward Indigenous people (Smith, interview, May 5, 2006). Smith had conducted much research surveying the landscape of Indig- enous politics in the Andean/Amazonian region and presented his view of Indigenous politics in an oft-cited paper titled “Searching for Unity within Diversity.” Smith called for an analytical distinction between three types of Indigenous organizations: campesino labor unions, Indianista groups, and ethnic federations.’ His typology was structured along the dimen- sions of identity, autonomy, and representativity. The collective identities of “campesino” and “Indianista” organizations operated in terms of ideo- logical oppositions of class analysis, in the case of campesinos (workers vs. capital), and of anticolonialism, in the case of Indianistas (colonizers vs. colonized). Ethnic federations were less tied to grand theories and sought to articulate local identifications. In terms of autonomy, all organizations responded to some degree of outside interests. Campesino organizations were often closely connected to political parties of the left, and ethnic fed- erations counted on close NGO ties. While Indianistas were most vocal in refusing “to make any alliance with outside groups which may be ‘tinged’Seeing Like an International NGO 85 with non-Indian domination,” in practice they too often received funds from friendly European NGOs (Smith 1983, 34). Smith’s last criterion concerning representativity suggested that modern, Indigenous organizations should be independent from the rigid ideologies and the tutelage of political parties or outside actors and should connect leaders at the top with communities at the base. Smith saw Indianista groups as the least representative of all types. This conceptual view grew out of a variety of negative interactions that Smith had had with members of Indianista organizations like the South American Indian Council (el Consejo Indio Sud-Americano, or CISA). CISA was seen by Smith as a divisive and overly ideological force and was already receiving funding from the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA) in Copenhagen and had already spoken for Indigenous people at the United Nations.’ At Oxfam America, Smith’s interest was “to get more of a community-based approach as opposed to [that of the] ideologues” (interview, May 5, 2006). In this spirit, Smith, as a representative of Oxfam America, and in coordination with other advocacy groups like Cultural Survival, convened a foundational meeting between Oxfam America and Amazonian Indigenous leaders (themselves products of years of struggles between Indigenous communities, states, and social forces) from Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil in Lima, Peru. As Smith (2006) puts it, “I went into this meeting with that analysis [of the merits of campesino, indianist, and ethnic federations] already made.” Thus, this mecting serves as a kind of foundational moment in the relation- ship between Oxfam America and Indigenous organizations. It is important to emphasize that the participants at the meeting were far from blank slates, awaiting the wisdom of Oxfam, Smith, or anyone else. However, this meet- ing did represent an important opportunity to find a new articulation of South American Indigenous politics in light of the problems that had arisen with CISA (Smith, interview, May 5, 2006).* One of the Indigenous leaders at the meeting described some of those complaints as a problem of what he called the problem of indigenas sueltos (literally “loose Indians”). “These are Indigenous people without majority support. Loose Indians or cheap Indians without a clear position. Wherever there is money, there they go. When there isn’t they aren’t there. They have no real identity; they lack their own identity. They are following their own interests” (anonymous interview, Lima, Peru, May 20, 2006). Speaking of a particular Indianista activist in Peru, Smith used similar language. The Indianista leader “is not Indian, but as mestizo as you can get. He was of the school of thought that anyone could be an Indian as long as your heart is in the right place and that sounded very dangerous to me” (Smith, interview May 5, 2006). Not all accept Smith’s view. Javier Lajo, a former member of CISA, ree~ ognizes that the organization had its problems, but that it should not be up to white, U.S. anthropologists to certify or decertify who can and who cannot speak for Indigenous people (Lajo 2003). While this is an important