Gilly is an Argentine writer who wrote for many years for the famed Montevideo diario, Marcha. He spent several years incarcerated in Mexico and is a figure who connects radical social movements across the Americas from Arbenz to Subcomondante Marcos. This book of collected essays is remarkable in the breath of its scope, with the writer acting as witness to the Cuban revolution up until the Zapatistas, and as such capable of lending his overarching gaze to more recent developments in the push-me pull-you of Latin American politics, as countries lurch from right to left in a post-dictatorship world. Gilly, who at one point mentions having meetings with a youthful Galeano, offers an astute analysis of the way in which leftist revolt so often connects with an underground stream of indigenous resistance, whose roots go back to the Spanish conquest and before. Much of this is based on time he spent in Bolivia and Mexico, societies where the indigenous cultures have retained a strong independence, for whom defeat is not a reality, with these things being no more than setbacks in a struggle destined to last centuries. Likewise, resistance on the part of these communities to the neo-liberal aspects of globalisation goes hand in hand with the fight to maintain an identity in the face of a world which seeks to erase them. Gilly’s observations on the continued sacking of resources by neoliberalism actually goes hand in hand with the observations of Zavala in his book Drug Cartels do Not Exist. Neo-liberalism in this sense is nothing more than an extension of neo-colonialism, a 21st century action which Gilly helps to define.
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