Environmental Movements in Latin America as a Socio-Political Answer to Global Development

Faced with the exhaustion of the political-ideological project of the State as intervener and benefactor in Latin America, as well as its inability to continue assuming its responsibilities autonomously, a new actor, Civic Society, is viewed as emerging with relative force in the developing scenarios that orient the transition of the Latin American context towards the 21st century. This new actor's performance (under the figures of peaceful, urban. feminist, popular, and ecological social movements), represents an important political force which has assumed both the accusations against and the criticism of the "system" and of the shared values of modernity in its claim for participation and new spaces for the solution to many of the problems that modernization has engendered. Among them are environmental deterioration and the growth of poverty. In the case of environmental movements in particular, the socio-political demands that are proposed as a social answer to global changes and the implications of affecting vital spaces will be analyzed.