ABSTRACT
Colombia was, along with Chile and Brazil, one of the countries that received most financial assistance from the United States during the Alliance for Progress, becoming a model of the promises of modernization and democratization that would serve as antidotes against communism in Latin America. This chapter analyzes one of the most important policies implemented during this period, the Community Action Councils (JAC in Spanish), territorial-based committees for local action that between 1958 and 1970 organized the popular participation all over the country. Using several levels and scales of analysis, this chapter untangles the contradictory ways in which these developmentalist policy articulated the local and the transnational to forge a modular global discourse on development and popular participation that could be actualized in specific forms and carried out in concrete experiences. The chapter argues that the central problem of the JAC program was the conflictive articulation between the self-help ideal of the U.S.-designed cooperation programs and the social forms of mass politics that defined collective action in Latin America at the time.
