Across Latin America, struggles over land, dignity, and self-determination are unfolding simultaneously in the streets and at the ballot box. From Indigenous blockades in Bolivia to contested elections in Colombia, from Gen Z uprisings in Peru to cross-border worker solidarity at Ecuador's frontier, communities across the region are asserting their right to exist on their own terms, against governments increasingly aligned with Washington's conservative agenda and the economic interests of elites.
What began as resistance to legislation that threatened Indigenous and rural land rights evolved into one of the most powerful popular uprisings Bolivia has seen in years. Miners, teachers, Aymara communities, and coca farmers maintained 69 roadblocks across the country for nearly two months, effectively isolating major cities and forcing the government into repeated concessions, while being met with escalating repression.
Photo: Kawsachun News
But this wasn't Bolivia's first act of resistance. Earlier this year, Bolivians had already won a major campaign against fuel price hikes, a movement called the gazolinazo, using marches, hunger striker picket lines, and sustained road blockades over six weeks. The government restored fuel subsidies and was forced into a more measured approach to the economic crisis. It was a textbook demonstration of disciplined, multi-tactic nonviolent pressure that worked.
The current uprising drew on that same tradition. On June 20, President Rodrigo Paz declared a nationwide state of emergency, authorizing the military to forcibly clear roads and prohibiting any blockades. The Legislative Assembly approved the decree within hours and cities woke up under military occupation. The government had paved the legal road to this moment weeks earlier, when Congress repealed every prior restriction on the use of military force against civilian unrest. Paz framed it to the nation as liberation: "This is not a state of emergency to restrict people's lives. It is a state of emergency to give freedom back to the people."
The Trump administration provided political cover throughout, with President Trump labeling these communities "narco-terrorists" attempting a coup. Behind the repression lies a struggle over Bolivia's national resources: Paz is opening Bolivia's lithium reserves to foreign capital, with U.S. companies among those in line to benefit. As of June 21, authorities reported no active blockades, but rights observers warn that a military response that fails to address the underlying economic crisis, 40-year-high inflation, fuel shortages, and vanishing foreign reserves, is more likely to compound unrest than resolve it.
While Bolivians confronted military repression in the streets, Colombians were contesting the direction of their country's future at the ballot box. The presidential election on June 20 produced a razor-thin result: far-right political newcomer Abelardo de la Espriella defeated left-wing human rights senator Iván Cepeda by less than one percent of the vote. De la Espriella ran on a culture war platform backed by evangelical networks and endorsed by Donald Trump, promising to govern by emergency decree. Cepeda's party is challenging results from tens of thousands of polling stations.
That electoral contest sits alongside a longer story of Colombian movements winning real victories. Earlier this year, President Gustavo Petro ordered the national oil company to cancel a fracking venture that would have produced 90,000 barrels of oil per day — a significant win for environmental campaigners who had organized against it. And at the Ecuador-Colombia border, Colombian and Ecuadorian truckers staged a joint protest against escalating trade tariffs between their governments — cross-border worker solidarity in action, at a moment when economic nationalism was pulling the region apart.
In Peru, right-wing candidate Keiko Fujimori is projected to win the June 7 runoff. She is the daughter of Alberto Fujimori, the former dictator who carried out a self-coup in 1992 and whose government oversaw a massive forced sterilization campaign targeting over 272,000 Indigenous women. Communities across Peru protested Keiko Fujimori's candidacy, fearing a return to authoritarian rule, but the resistance pre-dates this election. Earlier this year, Peru's Gen Z took to the streets despite a state of emergency, following the killing of Eduardo Ruiz, a rapper known as Truko, shot by a plainclothes police officer during a large anti-government march in Lima. Young protesters declared the Peruvian government a "dictatorship disguised as democracy."
In October, Brazilians go to the polls in what may be the most consequential election in the region this year. Incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva faces Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the eldest son of imprisoned former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is currently serving a 27-year sentence for orchestrating a coup attempt following his 2022 election loss. His son is running to carry the family's far-right movement forward and has explicitly pledged to seek his father's release if elected. The polls are currently tied, and a Flávio Bolsonaro victory would return Bolsonarism to power, put a convicted coup plotter's family back in the presidential palace, and mark the definitive end of the post-2022 democratic stabilization.
The resistance has a regional solidarity dimension that often goes underreported. Large demonstrations swept Mexico as people from across the political spectrum rallied against U.S. imperialism, boycotting American brands and demanding their government stand firm against Washington's economic pressure. Latin American leaders publicly condemned Trump over extrajudicial killings and the bombing of boats, invoking the long history of U.S. interventionism across the region. In Puerto Rico, a group called Madres Contra La Guerra — Mothers Against War — continues its decades-long work to end the island's role at the center of the U.S. war machine in Latin America.
What connects these moments
All these examples reflect a region-wide pattern: progressive candidates who center human rights, land reform, and peace are being narrowly defeated by right-wing outsiders who weaponize fear of crime and cultural backlash. These swings do not happen in isolation — the so-called pink tide of the early 2000s swept left governments into power from Bolivia to Brazil to Ecuador, riding a commodity boom that gave progressive governments the resources to deliver. When commodity prices collapsed after 2013, so did much of that political project. What's emerging now is a mirror dynamic: transnational evangelical networks, WhatsApp-driven misinformation, and a specific brand of masculine anti-establishment politics operating across borders simultaneously.
Yet beneath all this lies a deeper pattern: the criminalization of Indigenous resistance, the alignment of governments with foreign capital over their own peoples, and the narrowing of democratic space for those who have historically been excluded. The movements on the ground, the blockaders, the Gen Z marchers, the border truckers, the mothers, the water defenders, are building something more durable than any single electoral cycle.
This past weekend, members of the Nonviolence International team were at the Resistance Studies conference at UMass Amherst, where we had the privilege of hearing from Vivian, an Indigenous woman from the Quechua people. Her words grounded everything we had been watching unfold across the region. She spoke about resistance not as a political strategy but as a way of being, rooted in a relationship with the earth that no government decree can legislate away.
That perspective felt urgent as we followed the news from Latin America in real time. The region is refusing to accept the terms it has been handed. Nonviolent resistance, blockades, marches, legal challenges, creative action, organizing, voting, remains the most powerful tool communities have. And across Latin America right now, communities are using all of it.
