Conclusion

Summary

The search for an alternative and non-Western concept capable of challenging “Hispanic America” or “Latin America” did not culminate in the Indo-American project. APRA’s Indo-América was by the 1940s much more a product of north–south conciliations than of the anti-colonial vindication of Indigenous’ rights in once claimed to represent. Nevertheless, the work of trying to envision the rebirth of the Americas in new ways did contribute to nourishing the ethos of continental unity and Latin American solidarity as a catalyst for opposing oligarchic rule and foreign hegemony. Radical elements from APRA’s continental program passed on to subsequent generations in Latin America. These new generations borrowed from APRA’s anti-imperialism while adding their own visions of social utopias, just as Apristas had inherited from their predecessors dreams of better futures that nestled within the mystique of united geographies.

APRA means different things to different actors. During the period under study in this book, Aprismo alternately designated a revolutionary social movement, a left-wing reformist national party, an anti-imperialist and anti-oligarchic doctrine, and an alternative to communism in the Southern Hemisphere. For many Aprista followers in Peru it even came to signify a moral code of conduct and a unique, holistic way of being. One reason that explains this array of definitions is that the revolutionary ideology of APRA was in fact an encompassing and malleable mantle that sutured together disparate ideological tendencies.¹ At its beginnings, the APRA argued that Latin American countries had to come together and unite as a means to better expose and resist US imperialism. APRA’s anti-imperialism was rooted in Latin American nationalism. Starting at the turn of the century, the advance of North American capital in Latin America and the repeated interventions by the US marines in Central America and the Caribbean (ostensibly in the name of law and order but really to protect US business interests abroad) left a strong legacy of anti-Americanism in the region.² Apristas, like many of their contemporaries, censured Washington’s expansionist policies in the Western Hemisphere.³ The revolutionary outbursts in Mexico (1910) and Russia (1917) also contributed to shaping the Aprista doctrine, or Aprismo. They yielded the promise of social change and made the young founders of APRA dream of emancipated nations and fairer societies.⁴

Although the APRA party did not achieve national power until 1985, under the leadership of the young and dynamic Alan García, decades of popular support and influence in Congress positioned the party at the head of ongoing struggles to forge an inclusive Peruvian state during most of the past century. Yet by the time García took office, the APRA looked quite different than it did during the period under study in this book. From the 1920s radical anti-imperialist movement to the 1930s and 1940s Peruvian leftist and nationalist party, the APRA ended up forging alliances with Peruvian conservative elites in the 1950s and 1960s. By the 1970s, following a wave a defection in the party, the APRA struggled to maintain relevance: the reformist military government of Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968–1975) implemented much of the APRA programs’ social demands. To this day, it is Velasco – not APRA – who Peruvians remember as the agent who first attempted to incorporate all Peruvians in the nation.⁵ So when an Aprista finally took hold of the presidency in the mid-1980s, the stakes ran high for party members. That García had run on a bold social-democratic platform in the midst of an acute economic crisis and of the Shining Path’s violent insurrection made his rise to power all the more significant for leftist observers as well. Unfortunately, after a few years of successful policies and high approval rates in Peru, García’s first term in office ended in disaster.⁶ By the time he left office in 1990, only 6 per cent of Peruvians approved of him.⁷ That isn’t surprising. García was then embroiled in corruption scandals, the country was mired in a policymaking crisis, and the economy was collapsing under hyperinflation. There seemed nothing left to be saved of APRA. As Daniel Alarcón bluntly notes: “[García’s] reputation as the bright young hope of the Latin-American left had been destroyed.”⁸

Many critics have chastised in hindsight the conservative drift of the party’s program. These critics suppose that over the course of the past century, APRA’s political agenda has followed a left-wing to right-wing linear, inexorable progression. In these accounts, the social-democratic agenda of Alan García’s first period in office (1985–1990) appears as an awkward parenthesis – the exception to the rule. And effectively, the neoliberal policies that characterized his second presidential term (2006–2011) appear to prove these critics correct. In a 2011 publication, García openly parted with the party’s social-democrat tradition by defining democracy in terms of consumer rights and market opportunities. García’s Contra el temor económico: Creer en el Perú argues that the pursuit of a neoliberal political agenda will bring Peru into modernity and help solve its social problems. As a result, García let go of the Indo-American dream, enthusiastically promoting La Alianza del Pacifico (Chile, Peru, Colombia Mexico, Panama) instead as the best plan for regional integration.⁹ In the 2010s, the expansion of free-trade markets was driving García’s internationalism, not the necessity of Latin American solidarity, much less resistance to foreign imperialism.¹⁰

Nevertheless, the left-wing versus right-wing debate is too simplistic to capture the full complexity behind APRA’s ideological disagreements and evolution over time, mainly because it focuses exclusively on the national scene to explain these transformations. Journey to Indo-América deepens our comprehension of APRA’s ideological production by exploring the context in which APRA’s project of hemispheric unity first came to life and evolved thereafter.

Drawing on original research in underutilized archives in the United States, France, Mexico, and Peru, this book reconfigures APRA history as transnational and hemispheric history. By tracing the journey that underpinned the creation and development of Indo-América, first as a cultural hemispheric consciousness in the 1920s, then as a political hemispheric project beginning in the 1930s, Journey to Indo-América reveals the worlds of transnational radical activism that carried this project through the wheel of time. This book seeks to understand better the evolution of Indo-América through an innovative approach that enabled me to tell an untold story about APRA. To do so, I shift the analytical gaze away from exclusive Peruvian politics to pay attention to the global connections that underlay the history of this Latin American anti-imperialist movement. I also shift the analytical gaze away from either undying tales of betrayal or celebrations of a legendary and uncontested leader, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, and focus my attention instead on the radical worlds that fostered the emergence and evolution of APRA during the interwar period. Probing, on the one hand, the experience of life in exile as a culturally and politically innovative diaspora of anti-imperialist thinkers, while granting attention, on the other, to life rooted in Peru, illuminates APRA’s project of social inclusion and the radical militancy of its founders. Doing so also puts on display the limiting factors that contributed to moderating APRA’s radical critiques of empire in later years. A yearning for an anti-oligarchic state in Peru, and in the Latin American (or Indo-American) republics more broadly, took root in the exchanged desires and sensibilities that defined interwar communities of exiles, bohemians, and activists in key cities in the Americas and Europe.

While the scope of this study is limited to the early experience of APRA, and thus cannot explain in full the ideological transition of this movement over the full course of the past century, it sheds new light on the initial transformation of APRA, the period in which many critical accounts locate the beginning of APRA’s tergiversations. Understanding how and why Apristas came to imagine Indo-América during the interwar period as they battled for the return of democracy in Peru on one side, while navigating and using, on the other, a heteroclite web of transnational solidarity networks to help them withstand state persecution, contributes to shedding new light on what happened.

As a result, a central endeavour of this book is to historicize the workings of transnational solidarity networks that assisted the development of APRA as a persecuted political group. To do so, I highlight the role that North American and European allies adopted for the Aprista solidarity networks during the interwar period. Foreign intermediaries like Anna Melissa Graves and John A. Mackay contributed to assuring the political vitality and collective integrity of APRA in the face of recurrent state persecution.¹¹ The impact that these actors had on public opinion outside Peru as well as the pressure that they exerted on Peruvian state actors helped the APRA fight political repression. It likewise contributed to gathering international supporters to APRA’s cause, and specifically to a moderate, democratic and anti-communist APRA placed under the headship of the Hayista faction. Starting in the early 1920s, Christian pacifist actors and solidarity activists tapped into home-based networks to bolster international awareness of the student leader Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, and to attract attention more broadly to the Reform-minded university students’ project of moral regeneration for Peru. As APRA developed, and as its political project crystallized, the support of these foreign actors changed in nature but remained strong nevertheless. The emotional weight of their early friendships in exile gradually developed to form stable political alliances where parties engaged on an equal footing with one another. In the early 1930s, Mackay and Graves used their respective international contacts to advocate in favour of APRA. They published favourable reviews of the movement and readily celebrated the work of an anti-communist and anti-imperialist APRA in the Western Hemisphere.

The formation of friendships between the Reformista generation of Latin American university students and Christian missionaries and internationalist pacifists reveals an important dimension of the worlds of radical activism that foregrounded the initial formation of Indo-América. In a world shaken by the recent experience of World War I, where once solid points of reference went adrift in a sea of despair, shared disillusions and hopes proved more important than common ideological ground to engage in alliances. For both North American Christian pacifists and Latin American leftist activists, as we have seen, the Americas stood as a utopian geography where civilization might rise again, and be saved.

In addition to the social connections made necessary by political despair, these alliances were sustained by similar ideologies. These groups shared the same aversion to positivist and materialist philosophies. They were also distrustful of the nation-state as an inclusive and emancipatory form of human organization. These North American, European, and Latin American radicals recognized each other as dreamers who were willing to give their lives to the service of a higher cause. And although this “higher cause” was still ill defined at the beginning of the 1920s, these historical protagonists were equally convinced of one thing: the necessity to rethink the future of the Americas was tantamount to solving the problems that plagued the postwar Western World.

The Cuban José Martí is one of the first intellectuals to have foreseen and clearly expressed the danger that US expansion represented for Latin American republics. To this day, Martí is praised for having interpreted the struggle for national liberation in nineteenth-century Cuba as a way to gain political independence from Spain as well as to contain the advance of US imperialism in the region. His anti-colonial thoughts are reflected in what he called “Our America,” a vision of hemispheric unity free from US oppression, which furthermore boasted the Indigenous and African origins of Latin America.¹² The following generation of anti-imperialist thinkers in Latin America walked in his footsteps. Though initiated through the earlier work of Simon Bolívar and José Martí, the forefathers of continental nationalism, the rise of hemispheric consciousness progressed most definitely as young APRA members travelled back and forth between Peru and places of exile. This generation had inherited from their forefathers a commitment toward hemispheric solidarity as well as the resolve to imagine the Americas in new ways. While their ability to do so was all but certain in the late 1910s, the experience of exile, beginning in the 1920s, triggered in them a capacity for original creation regarding the future of the Americas.

Studying what exile entailed for young APRA members at this personal and intimate level, therefore, helps to illuminate how new knowledge on the Americas emerged in the 1920s. Before they were able to conceive differently of collective identities, the student activists and radical poets who began to imagine Indo-América and who built the anti-imperialist APRA had to realign, first, how they approached and conceived of their own individual identity. Apristas, or soon-to-be Apristas, I argue, had to come of age individually before they could come of age as a group. The lived experience of exile both prompted and assisted these respective experiences of personal emancipation. Whether it was feelings of alienation from the homeland or feelings of bliss in the face of new possibilities, these emotions intensified the connection that many of them developed with radical communities abroad. In both cases, intellectual engagement was intimately intertwined with the emotional weight that came with group dynamics (or the lack thereof) particular to life in exile. The lived experience of exile enabled this generation of anti-imperialist thinkers to produce original political knowledge on Latin American unity. Importantly, because in exile alliances were crucial to secure access to rare resources, the need to compromise on certain ideals in order to insure political survival also positioned the ideal of collaboration at the forefront of their work.

This ideal of collaboration offered resiliency to APRA throughout the 1920s. Collaboration prompted a series of cultural and intellectual exchanges regarding the future of the Americas rather than yielding clearly defined ideologies. Before the new cultural consciousnesses of the 1920s crystallized into firm political positions in the following decade, in effect, the pursuit of hemispheric unity in the Americas continued to be paramount. It surpassed the need to closely identify with communism, socialism, or nationalist anti-imperialism, not only because these movements were still in formation at the time but also because they all advocated the same end-point: the nation-state had to be re-imagined entirely if humanity was to survive. Furthermore, this desire to forego the nation-state was only confirmed in APRA by the impossibility of taking an active part in Peruvian politics because of unremitting state persecution. Such a distrust for the nation-state made alliances possible between protagonists, who like Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre and José Carlos Mariátegui, disagreed over the exact meaning of Indo-América: the latter mattered less than did the intention to imagine Peru and the Americas in new ways. In the 1920s, acknowledging intellectual, political, and tactical differences in the APRA movement did not entail ceasing relations with opposing factions. To the contrary, it was still possible at the time to suspend political and doctrinal disagreements if this meant serving the larger cause of “Nuestra América.”

Building from José Martí’s utopian vision, the Latin American anti-imperialist left during the interwar period also collaborated with North American non-state actors who similarly pondered projects of continental integration. Some simply wanted more cooperation and more mutual understanding between the people of the Americas. Others objected to Pan-American definitions that exclusively focused on commercial exchange and financial interest. These factions actively sought to envision alternative, more democratic visions of Pan-Americanism. Regardless of their differences, all readily put ideological dissent aside whenever it served their cause best. The growth of solidarity networks between the Peruvian vanguard and foreign allies rested on the shared project of building a new continental utopia. In this scenario, mutual interdependence and the need to gain access to rare resources also helped surpass the inevitability of political factions.

But APRA’s reliance on foreign solidarity activists to ensure personal and political survival also came with a price. This strategy resulted over time in moderating Apristas’ critiques of US imperialism and global capitalism and limiting the possibilities for social change they first envisioned in the 1920s during their time in exile. These changes were clearly felt in APRA’s project of hemispheric unity. While the reliance on allies abroad, including US critiques of empire who peddled a softer anti-imperialism, informed APRA’s decision to placate its anti-US sentiments on one side, it nevertheless confirmed APRA’s appeal toward regional alliances. As APRA’s anti-imperialism lost momentum starting in the mid-1930s, the continental integration project of Indo-América gained in both specificity and notoriety.

This book also highlights the permanence of conflict in APRA. Rather than focusing on the ruptures that have rocked this movement in the course of its history, Journey to Indo-América draws attention to the possibilities embedded within conflict. This enables me to probe the question of APRA’s leadership with different premises in mind: Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, I argue, was not the uncontested leader of APRA as early or as consistently as imagined. The constant internecine strife to determine which faction was in control of the movement had major consequences for the development of APRA’s project of hemispheric unity in the 1930s and 1940s. That these battles took place in the midst of unremitting political repression contributed to converting Indo-América, an ill-defined and flexible utopia for the Americas in the 1920s and early 1930s, into a precise instrument of political survival by the 1940s.

Thus, by exploring the group dynamics particular to the transnational APRA and unveiling the symbolic politics that turned Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre – certainly an important leader in the movement but not the only one – into the only legitimate representative and ideologue of APRA, this book not only helps to decentre the study of Aprismo. It in fact tells an entirely different story, one that traces the multifaceted rise of anti-imperialist projects of hemispheric unity in the Americas and reveals the possibilities for social and political transformation that visions for Latin American unity have enabled in the past century, as well as the important limitations and contradictions that nestled within them.

The creation of the Peruvian APRA party (PAP) in October of 1930 marked the onset of a new era for both Apristas and APRA’s continental program. Before the promise of a democratic Peru with the fall of Augusto B. Leguía in the Peruvian winter of that year, APRA exiles returned home and began to organize their movement at the national level. The newly founded PAP faced two main challenges. First, APRA leaders in Peru had to homogenize the movement’s ideology: they worked to integrate political positions particular to different APRA exiles into a single philosophy of action. Second, APRA leaders needed to translate their anti-imperialist project of hemispheric unity in a way that would be appealing to the Peruvian population. They had to adapt their internationalist prose and put forward a unified proposal that Peruvian people could understand, recognize, and identify with. References to past travels and to the experience of exile in the 1920s proved useful to accomplish these tasks. In this lay the genesis of what soon became the political appeal of Indo-América: if the Americas supported APRA, went the storyline promoted by the Hayista faction, then the Americas would support a Peru placed under the guidance of the Peruvian APRA party.

The legitimacy granted by the experience of exile not only shaped how APRA successfully transitioned into the Peruvian APRA party (PAP) in 1930–1931 from an international movement, it also came to concurrently define the touchstone of APRA’s nationalism as well as that of Indo-América as a concept of Latin American resistance and solidarity. I argue that Indo-América as a political project was not consolidated in the heyday of transnational exile in the 1920s. Rather, Indo-América is best understood as a form of universal appeal to which the Hayista faction arrived more definitely in the 1930s to advance a political struggle inside Peru. This book asserts that imagining global communities that reach across national borders can be an effective strategy to press on local demands.¹³ Local dynamics, then, often without our knowledge, actually dictate the contours of global utopias.

The return of state persecution in Peru toward the end of 1931 impelled PAP to expand its repertoire of political actions. Facing the impossibility of democratic participation in Peruvian politics, it developed transnational strategies that could assist its political survival in Peru. Paradoxically, this precarious situation helped the Hayista faction to take control of the APRA party by August of 1933. Making use of the symbol of a democratic and internationally famous Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre served the cause of PAP, and especially that of the Hayista faction, for it had the power to attract international attention onto the exactions suffered by Apristas in Peru. Thus, APRA’s associations with the outside world and with Indo-América in particular became ever more tied to the exclusive leadership of the Haysita faction in the movement.

The APRA leaders close to the Hayista faction became very aware of the benefits that transnational networks of solidarity yielded for their political movement as well as their own position within the party. In addition to reinforcing the political legitimacy of APRA leaders in Peru in the early 1930s, exile also assisted the establishment of alliances with foreign actors and the insertion of APRA into transnational networks of solidarity. Being connected to the outside world gave them access to crucial resources, including material and symbolic capital, and thus became of paramount importance to both maintain alliances with foreign actors and to publicize in Peru their international relationships as a sign of authority. This explains why referring to APRA’s connection with the rest of Indo-América became central to the Peruvian APRA party’s defence strategy in the face of state persecution. The need to foster and maintain alliances with foreign actors shaped the way in which APRA thought of democracy and defined the political knowledge it produced.

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, during what the Aprista lore refers to as “the Era of the Catacombs,” Peruvian APRA leaders close to Haya de la Torre continued to court potential allies abroad. Engaging in information politics outside Peru proved to be a crucial strategy for the PAP to jeopardize the monopoly that Peruvian authorities maintained over media outlets in Peru. For example, the party spearheaded a transnational campaign of moral shaming against the Benavides government in an attempt to attract supporters to its cause. Communities of APRA exiles played an important role in these campaigns. They produced anti-Benavides propaganda and circulated it outside Peru. They courted foreign allies and advocated on international platforms for the right of PAP to exist as a legitimate political organization. In the articles they wrote, APRA exiles opposed to barbarian Peruvian authorities a civilized public opinion, largely associated with the Americas, which sided with Peruvian Apristas in their censure of dictatorial regimes. PAP was invariably portrayed as a model of democracy for Peru and for Latin America more broadly.

Calling attention to the notion of Latin American, or Indo-American, solidarity empowered Peruvian Apristas to formulate a line of defence that extended beyond the purview of the nation-state. Central to PAP’s political struggle, in effect, was an appeal to international democratic forces and to the representatives of free speech in the Americas. One consequence of this strategy, I show, was to put the concept of Indo-América decisively at the forefront of APRA’s intellectual production. Social scientists have stressed how advocacy groups that want to externalize a specific agenda, usually when their demands are blocked at the national level, do so by turning this agenda into universal claims that can best appeal to international allies. Because Apristas appealed to continental public opinion as a means to retrieve basic political rights in Peru, it encouraged them to retain internationalist references and their project of hemispheric unity and Indo-American solidarity as one that carried anti-imperialist aspirations, and dreams of democracy by the mid-to-late 1930s, for the continent at large.

To be sure, changes on the international scene affected the way in which APRA ideologues thought of Indo-América. According to historian Greg Grandin, the first phase of US imperialism in Latin America, which had started in the nineteenth century with the Mexican-American war (1846–1848) and continued more brutally still with the Hispano-American war (1898), came to a close in the early 1930s. The declaration of the Good Neighbor policy in 1933, he argues, as well as the experience of the Popular Front shortly after, “dampened the anti-imperialist rhetoric of the Left” in Latin America.¹⁴ As such, APRA’s shift toward the right of the political spectrum in the 1930s was part of a larger trend that affected the Latin American left at large. By 1936, Washington had renounced its right to intervene in the region. The promise of friendly relations, after close to a century of US aggression and conceit, had every appearance of sincerity. On the other hand, the Popular Front curbed opposition between communist and socialist parties and enabled a rapprochement between the Latin American left and the United States in the face of mounting European Fascism.¹⁵ In many ways, the Popular Front strategy consolidated at a political level what was already conceivable at a cultural level. The communist and socialist parties in Latin America not only came together but they also agreed to align their respective programs of action with those of the United States.

This new world order contributed to moving problems of democracy to the forefront of APRA’s Indo-American project. It also encouraged many in the party to pacify their positions vis-à-vis the United States. APRA ideologues began to revise the party’s maximum program so as to divert its anti-imperialist attacks onto Fascism and Nazism instead of US imperialism. Cooperation between Indo-América and North America appeared in the mid-1930s onward to be a lesser evil with which to salvage democracy in the Western Hemisphere. Significantly, Indo-América was still couched in anti-imperialist vernacular. The international conjuncture, however, had contributed to transforming the nature of the imperialist threat. Imperialism was now associated with Fascism and totalitarian regimes in Europe rather than Yankee expansionism.

This book expands this argument, thanks to the dialogue I established between local and transnational levels of historical analyses. By evincing the role that local politics in Peru played in shaping definitions of Indo-América in different times and places, my work reveals an important feature of Pan-American visions. It portrays the design of hemispheric unity projects not only as a response in the face of international relations, which to be sure mattered greatly, but also as a result of local demands. Journey to Indo-América argues that Indo-América came to be portrayed as a bulwark against the rise of Fascism in Europe not only as a result of world events but also out of the necessity of political survival at the national level. The persecution of the PAP in Peru, combined with APRA’s innovative political strategies, greatly contributed to forging a sense of continental solidarity based on the defence of individual political rights and democratic regimes. Starting in the 1930s, references to Indo-América helped the PAP to externalize its domestic demands for democracy by universalizing its cause before an international public opinion.

Furthermore, local party dynamics explain why Indo-América has come to be associated exclusively with the leadership of one faction in the APRA movement. The practice of political survival in the face of recurrent state persecution in Peru favoured the rise of a leader whose fame helped project the APRA onto the world stage; a democratic Indo-América seemed indeed to support Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. When Peru’s 1945 Democratic Spring announced a return to democracy in the country, Haya de la Torre showed himself ready to engage in national politics and to help build a better Peru. Indo-América hovered by this leader’s side, pointing to democratic ideals honed by the weight of past persecution and the prospects of political inclusion and fairer societies.

The moral and radical yearnings that characterized Indo-América in the first half of the twentieth century were progressively subsumed by the demands imposed by the Cold War. As communities of radical Peruvian artists and intellectuals in the 1920s crystallized into political parties the following decade, they learned to restrain their utopian ideals and define more precisely the demands that they advanced in Peruvian politics. Starting in the mid-1930s, and ever more forcefully in the aftermath of the Second World War, the need to survive politically contributed to Indo-American ideologues’ shift away from an ideal of democracy based on socio-economic justice, and closer to the ideal of democracy advanced at the time by the United States to counter communism: a liberal democracy based on individual rights and civil liberties.¹⁶

Not everybody in APRA embraced this conversion. Although internal critiques surged all through the 1940s and the 1950s, it was ultimately the Convivencia (1956–1962) that marked for many Apristas the end of the Peruvian APRA as an anti-imperialist party. The “convivencia” government refers to the political alliance that Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre forged in 1956 with Manuel Prado Ugarteche, a Peruvian politician connected to elements of the national oligarchy in the agro-export sector, in exchange for the PAP’s return to legality and the promise to participate in the Peruvian government. Detractors and disillusioned members of APRA argued that their party no longer served the interests of the Peruvian people. According to the party’s leftist faction, not only had the PAP, presumably the anti-oligarchic party par excellence in Peru, come to terms with the national oligarchy, but it now defended the interests of these groups by tempering the demands of its labour unions and by supporting bills in congress that served the status quo. The verdict was harsh: “El PAP, sirviendo de instrumento al servicio de los intereses de la oligarquía está defraudando las más caras esperanzas del pueblo del Perú,” wrote the founders of APRA Rebelde on 10 October 1959.¹⁷ This group of Cuban-inspired militants publicly broke from APRA and founded APRA Rebelde, in their view more attuned to APRA’s original revolutionary doctrine. This group vindicated the democratic, anti-oligarchic, and anti-imperialist legacy of the Peruvian APRA party and demanded that the party return to these foundational principles.¹⁸ According to APRA Rebelde, these radical claims could not be limited to the national sphere; they had to come with a call to action to all “Indo-American revolutionaries.”¹⁹ This dissident group tapped into APRA’s long-standing internationalism, hoping to resuscitate APRA’s ethos of Latin American solidarity and resistance in the face of global injustices.

The radical legacy of Indo-América, as a project of hemispheric integration, may not have survived over time in the party’s official establishment, but it certainly did in the margins of the movement as well as in the political imaginations of the Latin American left. To be sure, the search for an alternative and non-Western concept capable of challenging “Hispanic America” or “Latin America” did no culminate in the Indo-American project, as this book has made clear. APRA’s Indo-América was in the end much more a product of north–south conciliation than of the anti-colonial vindication of Indigenous rights it once claimed to represent. But the work of trying to envision the rebirth of the Americas in new ways nevertheless contributed to nourishing the ethos of continental unity and Latin American solidarity as a catalyst for opposing oligarchic rule and foreign hegemon in the Western Hemisphere. Radical elements from APRA’s continental program passed on to subsequent generations in Latin America. These new generations borrowed from APRA’s anti-imperialist theses while adding their own visions of social utopias, just as Apristas had inherited from their predecessors dreams of better futures that nestled within the mystique of united geographies.²⁰

Pan-American visions look nowadays to be primarily linked to either free trade agreements or plans for regional market integration. In the 1980s–1990s, the NAFTA and its economic analogues in the region rose victorious. Neoliberalism seems to have diluted any project of hemispheric unity in the Western Hemisphere into mere prompts for either increased or better commercial relations and financial exchanges. Even regional projects like the MERCOSUR or the ALBA, which claimed to propose alternatives to US neoliberal proposals, primarily sought to consolidate regional economic integration. References to the necessity of cultural, spiritual, and moral collaboration in assisting the pursuit of social justice in the Americas are time and again kept on the backburner of inter-American designs.

These economic dynamics have progressed unabated in the past decade. The twenty-first century is disclosing drastic increases in income inequalities. Democracy recedes, bowing before the commands of a cosmopolitan oligarchy (more commonly referred to as the 1 per cent since September 2011, when Occupy Wall Street set up camp in Zuccotti Park, New York). The new generation of political activists, according to analysts of the so-called “New New Left,” are wary of electoral politics and are exploring ways to do politics and think of democracy differently.²¹ Activists in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere in Latin America are taking to the streets to voice their demands for participatory democracy and their discontent with a system tailored toward a restricted plutocracy. They are spearheading populist movements, gesturing to the beginning of a new era of mass politics globally.

The clash between a right- and left-wing populism, as presaged by Chantal Mouffe in For a Left Populism (2019), looks all the more inevitable today as I write these words in the midst of a global pandemic and the consolidation of the right turn in Latin America, following the Pink Tide spark of the 2000s and early 2010s. As this book studied the extent to which transnational and trans-American solidarity networks contributed to breeding the rise of the Latin American populist moment of 1930–1960, it bears keeping in mind the power that the ethos of Latin American solidarity can bring to political projects of social inclusion and human emancipation. But Journey to Indo-América also yields important forewarnings about the limitations that solidarity work can impose on revolutionary moments. Above all, perhaps, it reminds us that activists involved in solidarity work all face obstacles. Whether within their movement or external to it, these obstacles shape these actors’ organizing efforts and the limits and possibilities for solidarity and radical thought therein.