Challenges for Systemic Change: Perspectives from Latin American Realities
Johanna Luz Shorack y Juan Andrés Ortiz Villa
Lee en Español
The term “systemic change” has recently become popular in certain spaces in Latin America, yet it remains unfamiliar and unknown in others. However, systemic perspective is certainly not a newly invented concept and is deeply embedded in our Latin American ways of thinking and feeling.
This article explores systemic change from the perspectives of individuals from this region who live, feel, and think, aiming to delve into critical perspectives and profound questions that arise from realities of inequity, diverse forms of organizing, alternative notions of time, and the crises of the present. Here, we give voice to these perspectives through written and video testimonials from interviews, inviting us to engage in the conversation through questions such as:
— What tensions arise when considering the intersection of systemic change, equity, and collective leadership in Latin American contexts?
— In scenarios of racism, oppression, inequity, and other forms of structural violence, how do we navigate the tension between the “social time” required for consensus among different actors and the urgency to address pressing rights and needs today?
— What should be done about the colonial legacy in power distribution that perpetuates inequity, low or nonexistent social mobility, and the excessive exploitation of our biocultural wealth?
The individuals who participated in this inquiry have dedicated their lives to processes aimed at transforming reality in various parts of Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, primarily. Below, these individuals who have dedicated their lives to bringing about change in different areas and sectors of society share a bit of their journey:
Darío Castillo Sandoval
An economist with postgraduate studies in Rural Development and in Territorial Planning and Local Development. He was Executive President of the Confederation of Cooperatives of Colombia and director of the Unicossol Network, an organization dedicated to the development of the solidarity sector in Colombia. Beyond his career in management, teaching, and research, he identifies himself as a lover, passionate about social and solidarity economy as a proposal for a new system that addresses structural inequities stemming from the degradation of our relationship networks in an economic system that privileges individualism and wealth accumulation.
Mauricio de la Puente
Urban dweller by origin. He has lived for several decades in various communities in Mexico dedicated to fishing, hunting, gathering, agriculture, salt, and other activities, all in contexts of conflicts associated with the fragmentation and degradation of the territory. His path has led him to participate in various experiences of restoring ancestral languages in territory regeneration processes. For him, it is evident that our awareness of environmental degradation is not the same as our awareness of semiotic environment degradation, and to work for sustainability, we must have a view of the same order of complexity with the subject with which we must interact, where we can articulate ourselves in systemic terms, because we cannot base public policy on metaphors, let alone on simple metaphors that cannot reflect the real complexity of the system.
Jose Peñate
Since he was young, he has sought to transform the neighborhood and the structures that commit so much injustice and generate poverty. This led him to join the struggles of the Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation in his native El Salvador, and later to continue his work out of love for others as a leader within the organization Cambio Interno. He has dedicated himself to accompanying young gang members and prisoners in California, working in communities in conditions of extreme vulnerability on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and more recently, to accompanying migrants at the border between the US and Mexico.
Pamela Carmona
In her nearly 10-year career in human rights-promoting NGOs and faced with a series of disappointments due to the gap between her discourse and reality, she became a content creator with her project Autonomías, focused on bringing to life powerful stories that raise awareness and promote social change. She is an activist, an anarchist at heart, and a fervent believer that self-management will save humanity and the planet. She is a facilitator in sociocracy and in processes of community building and active participation.
Dora María Ruiz Galindo
A teacher, mother of 5, and grandmother of 8. She is the founder of the Centro Educacional Tanesque, having studied Psychology and specializing in Education, in her quest to seek equity by supporting the development of skills, abilities, and empowerment in others as pathways to pursue their projects of happiness. She has been on this journey for 50 years, working with peasant and indigenous communities, betting on intercultural education in the face of a homogenizing public education system in a country that hosts 68 indigenous peoples.
Sergio Atehortúa Gómez
A lawyer and political scientist who, in his journey to understand and reconcile the conditions of inequity and violence in Colombia, worked in the Presidential High Council for Post-Conflict. He also worked with the IOM and the National Land Agency in conflict-affected areas, in the land titling strategy for peasant populations. Later, he worked at the Constitutional Court analyzing public policy to understand how to guarantee the rights of internally displaced persons seeking lasting solutions to one of the longest armed conflicts in the world.
Ajq’ij (Time Keeper) Maya in Iximulew (Guatemala). In search of meanings and reaffirmation of spirituality in Maya Cosmology, recovering ancient rituals and knowledge painfully destroyed by over 500 years of colonization. He is dedicated to integrating Maya spirituality into all aspects of life: individual identity, interpersonal relationships, community, work, and the public sphere. Some of the projects he has been involved in include: how a local government can address social problems from the emotions and energetic life of people in the Netherlands, art to move consciences, feelings, and thoughts around water in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, and the film, DraMAYAma, which investigates Maya spirituality from its connection to astrological rituals and in the Dravidian Temples of Southern Vedic India. Branly is an artist, cultural manager, economist, and currently in charge of art at the Intercultural Center of Quetzaltenango.
What do these people have to tell us?
Join us in navigating from this diversity of perspectives the implications of considering the intersection between equity, systemic change, and collective leadership in contexts marked by deep wounds derived from colonialism and conflict, but also from the inspiration of alternative ways of being with the world and with others, in the cultivation of a more supportive and empathetic present.
Guiding Principles for Facilitating Systemic Change Processes in a Latin American Context…
Navigating Tensions
Receiving the testimonies of the interviewees opened the door to different ways of understanding and carrying out transformations in reality, representing and honoring the experiences and aspirations of different subjectivities that are as worthy as our own. Little by little, as we listened to their words, tensions between values that initially seemed irreconcilable became visible, yet their integration generates more powerful effects than choosing just one of them.
We often tend to see situations from an exclusionary perspective: it’s either one or the other. In some cases, it’s useful (such as choosing between 2 methodologies or embarking on a new project or not) based on the principle that, in the end, everything boils down to deciding between incompatible alternatives. This way of thinking reinforces our preferences and, in its iteration, our biases of one value over another. But what happens when this need to choose is based on a false choice? Where we cannot discriminate a value because, by ignoring it, the quality of the one we do choose is reduced. That’s what happened in this process: our preferences and assumptions about what we should prioritize to transform the social, political, and environmental reality of our region were challenged by other emerging values that indicated we were seeing the solution in only one color.
For this, it was useful to process these findings under the framework of polarities (Johnson, 1992; CoCreative, 2020), which allows for making explicit the interdependence between values that initially seem to be mutually exclusive through a simple process: highlighting the positive outcomes offered by focusing our work based on both values, as well as the negative outcomes of focusing on only one without taking the other into consideration. In any case, opting for only one will inevitably result in unproductive and detrimental processes for the parties involved. On the contrary, leveraging the virtues of both will allow transcending polarization and achieving solutions where different needs and preferences are equitably addressed.
Tension 1: Honoring the Past and Building the Future
Colonial heritage and its power dynamics are still present in every aspect and scale of everyday life, such as the coloniality of power, being, and knowledge (Rincón et al., 2015; López, 2022). Focusing on “building the future” without honoring the past further embeds Western thinking and delegitimizes cosmovisions, legacies, and autonomous systems of knowledge, appropriating them without necessarily acknowledging them when they are considered. It also perpetuates violent structures and beliefs of racism, patriarchy, and domination. Are we going to repeat the past or are we going to embark on very long paths to arrive at ideas, conclusions, or even technologies developed in the past?
Whose voices, knowledge, and wisdom are heard, made visible, communicated, and validated? Whose are not? This is a space of dispute when it comes to talking about equity.
“If you go back to the origins of why there are poor people and why there are rich people, you will realize that there are decisions of economic policy, public policy, rules of the game, that have made this inefficient, in the case of Colombia and in many countries in Latin America….That’s why I believe that, if you ask me what needs to be changed, I believe that the structures need to be changed so that people can be happier. I summarize it in that way.” (Darío)
This raises very important questions for people who are born with privileges: How can I assume my privileges, not from guilt, but in a way that contributes to a well-being beyond my own? It is not enough to recognize my privileges if we don’t understand how they can lead me to live more justly with other beings.
Doris shares with us how she responds to this dilemma. She is born as the daughter of landowners with an indigenous lineage and tells us that she decides to dedicate her life to “seeking equity through supporting the development of skills, abilities, or empowerment in others so that they can pursue their own project of happiness, not to do it ourselves, but so that others can walk towards their own project, in other words, to think for themselves. For me, this is non-negotiable.” She specifically works with vulnerable communities and youth so that they can achieve their projects for a dignified and autonomous life. Her commitment to education from an intercultural perspective honors the past (legacy, tradition, identity) with a view towards building the future.
“We have to assume and try to understand, put ourselves in the shoes of the other, and it doesn’t occur to those of us who have opportunities, What do you have to do to put yourself in the shoes of the other? In the city they say take a picture, in the communities they say: change places. ‘conquerors never change places’. This is what interculturality does in this struggle for equity… And it’s easier to work with communities than with people with opportunities because they don’t want to look the other way.” — Doris
By recognizing our own role in a system that generates suffering and inequalities, our work requires recognizing and preserving what has been inherited that does generate good for all and changing what does not.
Tension 2: Healing and Resisting
To build a future of well-being that honors the past, it is necessary to both heal systemic traumas and resist oppression, marginalization, and degradation dynamics, not only at an individual level but also relationally and systemically.
In the face of suffering, there is the concern of how to fully heal: What is the risk of wanting to heal individually without an awareness of collective historical trauma?
And what happens if we resist without the awareness of healing?.. José shares his experience as a young revolutionary in the war in his country (El Salvador) for the rights of the poor, “We achieved many things, but people suffer. It is a very high price, I can say that project failed, collectively we failed. In my heart, the phrase of Monsignor Romero changed me a lot: new people for a new society. It wasn’t just about changing the structures but we also had to change ourselves.”
Darío shared the case of cooperatives in Colombia that resist violence and inequality in wealth distribution: “Where there are cooperatives, war does not come, and if it does, it doesn’t stick,” while advocating for the relational nature of the human species (see 1, 2, and 3): “There are a number of voids in the world that will not be resolved solely by market force (…) There is a need to change the vision of the human being in its relationship with the other human being. It is necessary to understand that we are part of a ship where we all share risks, where we all share profits.” Likewise, José currently works not only to transform the reality of people in conditions of poverty and violence but also to transform people’s consciousness. They are dedicated to training local leaders in these territories with values based on spirituality and with a heart of service to their community.
We can say, in the words of Vijayakumar (2023), that systems contain trauma because they are relational and therefore require systemic healing. And that the systems that require the most healing are the ones that resist the most. We can see both in José’s and Darío’s work how they are dedicated to healing relational dynamics between people, thus betting on a change of behavior of a greater order.
Tension 3: Individuality and Community
How can I be part, as an individual, of the healing of historical wounds and the resistance to their perpetuation, from the understanding that these are collective processes?
Starting from the fact that many of the people who come from large cities in Latin America come from a dominant culture that privileges individuality (Luja Portilla et al., 2015), How can we integrate a more collective life? What does this imply and what kind of leadership is required for this?
In some Maya communities in Mesoamerica, to lead you have to go through various service roles where all positions are covered until the community recognizes the developed skills and an attitude of service. Many of these indigenous communities live from communality:
“Communality for the indigenous peoples of Mexico, from the Maya perspective, is harmony with oneself, one’s family, one’s community, nature, and with God. This is the good life, and they have fought together to have this. And I could call this collective leadership. Authorities are not someone who is appointed or voted in, but who have gone through all the steps of service. This is also seen in the ‘guelaguetza’ in Oaxaca: you for me, me for you. And you see it: first, they miss work rather than community service. That which we have lost is an example that communality has in Latin America, and that we have to rescue. We can make other communities. Nowadays, we cannot walk alone. We have to learn how it’s done” — Doris
Facing what is required of us as individuals to assume a life where my own benefits come from a commitment to the collective, Darío shares with us: “If there is no vision of vulnerability, the possibility of cooperation becomes fragile, (…) [There has to be] the ability to convince people that you are capable of earning more if you cooperate, convince them of the profit of cooperation. When the expected benefit of cooperation is greater, people cooperate. When it is less or equal, people prefer not to cooperate (…) Excessive ego is a big problem, it doesn’t allow people to cooperate. People won’t want to give up their power: people kill and eat the dead.”
Faced with this, Branly shares with us what identity is from a relational standpoint:
The invitation is to see ourselves and make sense of our life and purpose within the collective, either by learning from the living heritage of indigenous communalism or new ways of associating ourselves such as cooperatives or by deeply connecting to the networks to which we already belong, such as the flow of water in the basin or the care networks that sustain us. And to lead from there.
Tension 4: Addressing Urgent Needs and Reaching Consensus
The Times are Urgent: Let’s Slow Down Bayo Akomolafe
The tensions mentioned above are understood within the delicate reality that these collective processes, of healing and resistance and of honoring the past for a more inclusive and just construction of the future, are processes that require time to happen and, above all, to reach an agreement on how we want them to happen. But, how do we do this in the face of pressing urgent needs? According to Pamela, with structures where equity in decision-making and leadership in solutions are guaranteed:
We can say then that dedicating time to reaching an agreement and assuming our power to self-manage our collective needs, organize, and reach consensus, is an investment that allows inclusion, appropriation of a process, and benefit for all parties.
For his part, Mauricio highlights the value of urgency: “I believe that the urgency of making decisions about what each person commits to makes things more efficient and for that, each decision-making network has to obey the rhythm of the subject on which it makes decisions or at least the pace at which that subject changes.” However, we cannot ignore the complexity of which we are part, where “you are going to have to address both that social time, that diversity of generational social times with a series of urgencies that you also have to address (…) When we have only one historical line where we do only one thing in the network, tensions are generated or tensions are exacerbated because they coincide in having the need to have an urgency and maintain a time.”
For this, he proposes, the best way to leverage this tension is polyrhythm, which implies developing the ability to manage our attention and the quality of our presence, to be as efficient as effective, as Mauricio shares with us:
Conclusions
The integration of all these tensions creates conditions for both more agile and deeper systemic change.
From its main intersections as conditions for systemic change is that all in one way or another seek to nurture the quality of human relationships and to make every process a fuller and more enriching experience, where each person is responsible both for the process and for nurturing the continuity of the networks that care for us, our community, and our land. This is one way in which systemic change intersects with collective leadership. Caring for networks is healing the fabric.
While the 4 tensions explored here are key, there are many others that we must navigate to better tune our practice increasingly with the complex reality of living systems. Faced with a legacy of cultural impositions that privileged rational and Cartesian thinking over other ways of knowing, an example of other tensions to reconcile is that of Feeling and Thinking (see sentipensar).
The colonialism of thought tells us that tensions are actually contradictions and that one is better and worthy of imposing itself over the other. That is the reason for the importance of pluralities, of integrating polarities, allowing and respecting multiple realities. A world where there are multiple worlds and where betting on a life more centered on community (or any other form of life not normalized by the dominant hegemonic system) does not have to become a defense for existence.
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