On The Third No Kings Day of Protest, a Brief History of Nonviolent Resistance in Our Hemisphere — and Why it Works
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Let me start by saying I, like the great Karl Pilkington, hate anything that reeks of “forced fun.” I’m not a joiner. I never had school spirit. I don’t enjoy parades. My idea of hell is karaoke night with coworkers. Come to think of it, my idea of hell might just be coworkers, period. The farther I am from people and, worse, crowds of people united in their quest to All Be Doing Something The Same Way, the happier I am.
But today, like tens of thousands of other cerebral introverts who’d rather be reading in a hammock, I’m lacing up my sneakers, picking up a handmade sign, and throwing myself into a throng of People Who Are Just Fucking Done With This Shit, as I attend one of the 29 No Kings protests scheduled here in New Mexico. I will need days and days in the forest to recover.
I’m going because it’s important. I didn’t used to think it was. I was one of those cynics who’d ask: Does protest actually do anything? But rather than just assume the worst, I decided to do what I always do, and research the answer before spewing an opinion. Imagine my surprise when I was proven wrong by, you know, facts.
Massive nonviolent protest works.
It works a lot better than armed protest.
In 2011, Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth published what became one of the most cited works in the study of political change. She had started her research expecting to prove the opposite — that armed resistance was more effective than nonviolent campaigns. The results upended everything she thought she knew. According to Chenoweth and her co-author Maria Stephan, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. Their dataset of 323 major campaigns showed that 53 percent of nonviolent campaigns succeeded — against just 26 percent of violent revolutions.
Chenoweth also found a threshold, what she called the 3.5 percent rule: every movement that mobilized at least 3.5 percent of a country’s population was uniformly successful. In the United States today, that number is roughly 11.5 million people. The No Kings movement is moving in that direction, faster than most movements in American history.
The question isn’t whether protest works. The question is whether we have the patience and the creativity to see it through. And as we’re facing what amounts to a rising fascist dictatorship backed by American intelligence operations, it might make sense to see how some of our hemispheric neighbors have handled something similar in the past.
Argentina, 1977
On April 30, 1977, fourteen women walked to the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires and stood in front of the Casa Rosada. The U.S.-backed far-right military junta had been in power for a year. Its regime, with the help of our tax dollars, had abducted, tortured, and killed thousands of leftist political opponents, stolen children born to women in prison, and obliterated any trace of its victims. The women who gathered that afternoon were apolitical housewives. They were looking for their children.
By the following year, hundreds were participating. On Mother’s Day, October 5, 1977, 237 mothers published a half-page advertisement in the national newspaper La Prensa with their names and identity card numbers, demanding the truth about their disappeared children. The junta responded by trying to eliminate the movement at its source. Three of the founding mothers — Azucena Villaflor de Vincenti, Mary Ponce de Bianco, and Esther Ballestrino de Careaga — were abducted, tortured, and thrown from an airplane into the South Atlantic. Other members were beaten and detained. They kept marching.
What the Madres understood, before any political scientist quantified it, was that their moral authority was the weapon. The repeated Thursday marches in the Plaza de Mayo formed, as Fernando Bosco wrote in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, socially charged public spaces where memory, grief, and resistance were shared collectively, directly confronting state violence. The regime called them madwomen. The world watched.
The political transition that brought down the junta in 1983 was driven, in large part, by the unrest the Madres had sustained for six years. Democratic elections resumed. Hundreds of military officials were eventually prosecuted — evidence gathered, pressure maintained, by women who would not stop walking circles on a Thursday afternoon.
Their influence extended far beyond Argentina’s borders. According to the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, their tactics and their example directly inspired similar movements in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Turkey. The Madres didn’t just help end a dictatorship. They invented a template.
Chile, 1983–1988
Augusto Pinochet came to power in a CIA-backed coup in 1973. For the next decade, his regime disappeared, tortured, and exiled tens of thousands of Chileans. By the early 1980s, an economic crisis had cracked the surface of what the regime liked to call a Chilean miracle. The cracks became an opening.
What followed was one of the most tactically creative nonviolent campaigns in modern history. According to the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, resistance organizers — working largely through church networks, trade unions, and universities — used public demonstrations, economic boycotts, public singing, and symbolic slow-downs: on designated days, Chileans simply drove and walked very slowly. The regime couldn’t arrest everyone moving at half speed. That’s the genius of it. Nonviolent resistance can expand to include people who can’t afford to be arrested — the elderly, the sick, the mother with a child on her hip, the worker who can’t lose her job but can walk slowly to it.
In 1988, Pinochet called a plebiscite — a yes or no vote on whether he should remain in power. He expected to win. What he got instead was the No campaign: a nationally organized, media-savvy, coalition-driven effort that registered voters, deployed tens of thousands of poll watchers, and used their allotted 15 minutes of daily television airtime to expose the regime’s abuses. The No side won with 56 percent of the vote.
The National Security Archive has since declassified documents showing that Pinochet never intended to honor the result. The CIA, the DIA, and the U.S. Embassy obtained intelligence indicating his determination to use violence on whatever scale necessary to retain power. The plot collapsed when key officials within his own military refused to go along — exactly the loyalty shift that Chenoweth’s research later identified as the decisive variable in successful civil resistance. When the security apparatus won’t shoot the protesters, the regime is finished.
Mexico: the long game
Mexico’s story is both the longest and the most instructive, because it required a generation of losses before it produced a transformation.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador — known throughout Mexico as AMLO — lost the 2006 presidential election under circumstances his supporters, and substantial evidence, suggest were fraudulent. In response, he did something that looked, at the time, like the act of a sore loser: he set up tent cities. Across 47 encampments stretching kilometers down Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma — one of the most elegant boulevards in the Western Hemisphere — his supporters slowed traffic, played soccer in the roadbed, did tai chi, held a dance contest they called the Bailongo Against the Fraud, and refused to move for 47 days. He lost the legal battle. He packed up the tents and kept organizing.
In 2012, he lost again. He founded MORENA — the National Regeneration Movement — as a civil association, then built it into a political party from the ground up. He visited, by his own account, each of Mexico’s 2,477 municipalities. His organizing principle, borrowed from Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. — he cited both explicitly — was that only organized people can save the nation.
In 2018, he won. His campaign carried 92 percent of Mexico’s electoral districts. He received the first outright majority in a Mexican presidential election since the Revolution.
He called it the Fourth Transformation — la Cuarta Transformación — framing his movement as the country’s first peaceful revolution in a lineage that included the violent War of Independence (1810), the Reform War (1858), and the Mexican Revolution (1910). As AMLO said in July 2019: “We want to carry out the Fourth Transformation of Mexico’s public life without violence, peacefully. The three transformations our ancestors made, due to circumstances, were carried out with weapons; but now we have the good fortune to be able to carry out true change, a peaceful transformation.”
The 4T reversed decades of neoliberal (better known in the United States as right-wing trickle-down economic policy, the ‘liberal’ here refers to supposedly ‘free’ markets, not people) without a coup, without bloodshed, without a single military action. According to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the combined efforts of AMLO’s term and his successor Claudia Sheinbaum’s first year have lifted 21 million Mexicans out of poverty. Sheinbaum won her own election in 2024 with 65 percent of the vote — one of the largest electoral mandates in Mexican history — and declared herself building the “second floor” of the transformation AMLO began.
The Mexico case is the one that should interest Americans most today, because it took 12 years of losses, encampments, defeated lawsuits, and unglamorous municipal organizing before it produced anything that looked like victory. And then it produced one of the most dramatic democratic reversals of neoliberalism in the modern world.
Brazil, 1978–2002
The Brazilian story runs on the same logic. In 1978, a 32-year-old metalworker named Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva led a massive strike in the industrial outskirts of São Paulo against the military dictatorship’s anti-worker policies. Similar strikes followed in 1979 and 1980. As Dissent magazine’s Leonardo Avritzer has written, what made Lula’s coalition effective was its ability to combine grassroots disruption with institutional pressure, without demanding ideological purity from all participants.
In 1980, Lula co-founded the Workers’ Party — the PT — from a coalition of union activists, liberation theology Catholics, intellectuals, and former exiles. He ran for president four times. He lost three times. His most enduring campaign slogan, adopted in 1989, was the enigmatic phrase: sem medo de ser feliz — “without fear of being happy.” In 2002, he won. He received 61.3 percent of the national vote and carried all but one of Brazil’s 27 states.
The lesson of Brazil is specific: a movement rooted in organized labor, expanded by religious and intellectual coalitions, and sustained through repeated electoral defeats eventually accumulated enough mass to become irresistible. It outlasted the patience of everyone who doubted it.
The United States, today
The Civil Rights Movement is the United States template, and it is worth naming precisely what made it work. It wasn’t only the marches. It was the economic boycotts — Montgomery, Greensboro. It was the legal campaigns running parallel to the street campaigns. It was the church networks, the HBCU student networks, the NAACP infrastructure. It was, in Chenoweth’s terms, variation in methods sustained over time by a large and diverse coalition.
Today’s No Kings protests, organized by Indivisible, 50501, and the AFL-CIO, are responding to ICE operations, the killings of Renée Good, Keith Porter, and Alex Pretti, and what organizers describe as the accelerating authoritarianism of the Trump administration. According to CNN, two-thirds of the people who RSVPed for today’s events live outside major urban centers — a significant increase from the first No Kings protests in June 2025. That geographic expansion matters enormously. Movements that stay in cities stay marginal. Movements that reach rural counties, small towns, and red states become something else.
The Trump administration has already deployed the standard playbook for minimizing protest: dismissal, mockery, the claim that demonstrators are either paid operatives or unrepresentative and don’t speak for real America. Every authoritarian government in history has insisted that the people in the streets are not really the people. The Argentine junta called the Madres madwomen. Pinochet called his opponents terrorists. The result, in every case, was the same. The authoritarians ultimately lost.
The women of Plaza de Mayo knew this. The Chilean copper workers knew this. Lula knew this. AMLO knew this, in tent cities on the Paseo de la Reforma in 2006, when it looked like he had lost everything. The Civil Rights Movement knew this.
Millions of people in the USA are relearning it today, in more than 3,000 locations across this country. This is what people power looks like. It looks like Thursdays in Buenos Aires. It looks like slow walks in Santiago. It looks like 47 encampments on the most elegant boulevard in Mexico City, and then twelve more years of organizing, and then 65 percent of the vote. It looks like three introverts from New Mexico, stepping out of the quiet desert and into the crowd, because the moment demands it.
It looks like today.
Sources
Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2011)
International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, “The Mothers of the Disappeared: Challenging the Junta in Argentina 1977–1983”
International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, “Chile: Struggle Against a Military Dictator, 1985–1988”
Fernando J. Bosco, “The Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Three Decades of Human Rights’ Activism,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96, no. 2 (2006)
National Security Archive, “Chile: Pinochet’s Machiavellian Plot for Auto-coup,” Oct. 5, 2018
Leonardo Avritzer, “Lula’s Unfinished Democracy,” Dissent (October 2025)
Metta Center for Nonviolence, “What Can We Learn from Mexico’s Nonviolent Revolution of Consciences?” Waging Nonviolence (September 2025)
Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, “Mexico’s 4th Transformation: A New Era of Social and Economic Progress”
CNN, “Live Updates: No Kings Protests Across the US,” March 28, 2026
I offer these posts freely, but your support is necessary and appreciated. Please subscribe, paid if you can, and share my work if it moves you. You may also leave a one-time or ongoing tip in any amount. Thank you! A.
I will always be heartbroken about Tiananmen Square.
I LOVE your writing Alisa! Thank you so much for your thoughtful, reasoned, thoroughly researched articles that inspire me to do my part. I had another “burst out loud, laughing” moment in complete resonance & recognition, when you wrote, “The farther I am from people and, worse, crowds of people united in their quest to All Be Doing Something The Same Way, the happier I am.” Amen, sistah, amen! 🙏🏼