Social movements have become an important part of the political realm in Latin America, overthrowing and installing leaders as well as challenging capitalism and the state itself. This study attempts to classify social movements into four different categories by the amount of autonomy they exercise from the state and then look at the effectiveness of each of these different groups. Through examining different strategies and outcomes from social movements in Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador and Mexico, I attempt to ascertain which degree of autonomy is most effective. This study finds that while the weakened state has made autonomous movements more effective, engaging the state can still be beneficial for social movements with achieving their objectives.

Free-trade policies have opened the Guatemalan economy to international forces and sparked massive internal and international migration, creating new forms of social struggle produced by and engaging with these processes. A review of the 2008 advent of a grassroots organization in Western Highland Guatemala involved in binational United States–Guatemalan fair trade and migrant and solidarity organizing uses the concept of the platform instead of the network to highlight continuities and ruptures between past and present struggles. This perspective disrupts the vertical/horizontal dichotomy in social movement studies and sheds light on the effects of technological change on grassroots resistance to neoliberalism. Las políticas de libre comercio han abierto la economía guatemalteca a las pujanzas internacionales y provocado una migración masiva tanto interna como internacional, creando nuevas formas de lucha social producidas por y comprometidas con estos procesos. Este repaso del advenimiento, en 2008, de una organización de base en las Tierras Altas Occidentales de Guatemala involucrada en promover el comercio justo binacional entre Estados Unidos y Guatemala, así como la organización migrante y los nexos de solidaridad, utiliza el concepto de la plataforma en lugar de la red para resaltar las continuidades y rupturas entre luchas pasadas y presentes. Esta perspectiva irrumpe en la dicotomía vertical/horizontal subyacente a los estudios de movimientos sociales y nos brinda una perspectiva sobre los efectos del cambio tecnológico en las resistencias de base al neoliberalismo.

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