Latin America

This session will explore the power of cooperatives working across three very different contexts: Seikatsu Club Consumers’ Cooperative, Cecosesola and Ventures. It will explore how the cooperative economic model provides benefits both for employees and the communities they serve. 

Uruguayan Federation of Mutual Aid Housing Cooperatives (FUCVAM), founded in May 1970, embodies the spirit of community and support. Serving 35,000 families through 760 cooperatives in a nation of approximately 3.5 million inhabitants, they are a beacon of collaboration. With a cooperative school for children and numerous consumer, distribution, and worker cooperatives linked to their vision, they are shaping a brighter future.

The unique communities described in great detail in the recently published Worker Cooperatives and Deep Democracy are utopian in vision but thoroughly practical in their everyday functioning.

Fishing is Palmarito’s backnone, connecting nearly every household to the lake. Yet agriculture, hunting, and tourism also sustain the community, contributing to its resilience in hard times.

The Puerto Rico Social Solidarity Network is a platform that connects people and organizations to promote and foster the social solidarity economy. The network emerged after a series of economical disasters and from the coop and community development movements to influence economic transformation for a sustainable, integral, human development for the common good.

On the southern shore of Lake Maracaibo, Palmarito is an Afro-Venezuelan community shaped by centuries of history, culture, and resilience. Its people carry forward traditions rooted in their African heritage and in the fishing trade. Central to Palmarito’s way of life is the socialist commune, a form of popular self-government that transforms everyday life and work into a shared project.

Chile has emerged from decades of often brutal dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet with a dynamic and growing economy—and deepened social and economic inequalities. 

 The ‘empresas recuperadas' or worker-recovered enterprise movement in Argentina emerged as a response to the country's sovereign debt crisis of 2001, with workers fighting for their right to run abandoned factories. Central to the movement is an ethos of solidarity, with worker-owned enterprises based on horizontal authority, collective decision-making and shared returns from the business.

Centered on Argentina’s Chasqui Project, an e-commerce platform for socially and cooperatively produced goods, the report examines the project’s decade-long development as a collaborative endeavor between public universities, tech cooperatives, and grassroots organizations.

This study explores the role of solidarity finance in promoting local development and the empowerment of marginalized communities through financial inclusion and access to community credits. It focuses on how solidarity-based financial mechanisms provide accessible credit with fewer barriers, fostering productive activities and economic resilience.