Marketing Democracy: Power and Social Movements in Post-Dictatorship Chile

Latin American Politics and Society, Winter 2002 by Pessoa, Carlos

Paley argues that this process of appropriating meaning became especially acute in regard to popular participation (chapter 5). The democratic regime that replaced the Pinochet dictatorship encouraged and established a participatory role for civic groups. That role, however, was limited to implementing programs the state had left aside during and after economic restructuring (pp. 143-47). Paley demonstrates how the organizations in La Bandera contested the narrowing of participation. The author's emphasis is on how grassroots movements can question dominant discourse in different political contexts. For example, after a cholera outbreak in April 1991, La Bandera's health group challenged the Chilean Ministry of Health's essentially clinical analysis of the problem. The movement launched a campaign to depict the cholera episode as the result of problems in broader political and economic institutions (p. 156).

The last chapter (chapter 6) unpacks the question of political strategies taken by grassroots movements. Paley demonstrates how marginalized sectors of Chilean society were able to appropriate the dominant discourse and reorient it to satisfy the political aims of social movements. She recounts how grassroots health groups decided to use more professional presentation techniques in order to be taken seriously. Paley believes that this approach forced the health groups to conform to dominant ways to legitimate knowledge. The health groups, however, used surveys, charts, and overhead slides to question the narrow view given to health problems by the political elite. Health issues were not reduced simply to their immediate biological and environmental elements but were represented as social, political, and economic problems. In this way, the "professionalization of knowledge" became an important tool to achieve the political ends of social movements.

By focusing on these techniques of reappropriation, Paley has produced an important contribution to the voluminous literature on democratic consolidation.

Carlos Pessoa

University of Essex