Latin America as a "Island": a libertarian utopian project

Abstract

Conceived as a contribution to the dossier "Latin America: you are here!”, proposed by the V!RUS journal, this article addresses a political-cultural project formulated by Latin American anarchists in the 1950s. Their proposal, in general terms, aimed at the libertarian reconfiguration of the political, social, geographical, and economic borders of the continent. Understanding anarchism as an internationalist movement, we analyze, at first, the organization of meetings and conferences to strengthen a universalist movement capable of aggregating different peoples around the same goal: the achievement of the libertarian utopia. Next, we analyze a specific case, involving the proposition of a Latin American society held at the American Anarchist Conference of Montevideo (1957). This conference was attended by representatives of anarchism from different regions of the American continent and had as its main agenda the need for integrating their countries into a single "island", where political, social, geographical, or economic borders would be abolished in favor of the consolidation of a libertarian federalist society.