ABSTRACT
There are now many places that provide spaces for the expression of citizens' demands, for citizens' control and monitoring of municipal administration, and for joint participation of social organizations and local government in city management. A new space opens up for democratic discourse, for elections and participation. This chapter provides some reflections about the relationship between social movements, democracy, and inequality, based on the realities of Latin America in the 1990s. Recent transformations and current processes—marked by the transition to democracy and to an open-market economy—point to new changes, to still more diversified patterns, to multiple meanings, to fragmentation. While democratic discourse becomes hegemonic, the reality of economic relations is in contradiction to it. In bigger and more developed countries, international cooperation has less economic and political weight, and local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) constitute only one of the organizational forms of civil society.
