This chapter focuses on co-operatives in four representative Latin American countries—Argentina, Chile, Cuba, and Mexico—in order to highlight their historical trajectories, evolutionary trends, and potential for further development. These representative countries reflect the range of co-operative development in Latin America, both historically and contemporaneously. Each country, for instance, shows different paths of co-operative development related to, among other factors, different levels of support by their governments, community-based responses to neoliberal policies, and varying connections to broader social movements and other forms of grass-roots organizations. This chapter will also present a number of experiences that are of particular interest today in the region, such as worker-recuperated enterprises and other forms of workers’nself-management, indigenous co-operatives, community-owned agricultural co-operatives, co-operatives managing general-interest social services, and, most controversially, public-services and work-for-welfare co-operatives created by the state.
Community-based management of environmental challenges in Latin America and the Caribbean
