Lula da Silva, former president of Brazil, gives a speech in Diadema, in a public event launching further social assistance in the form of subsidized housing and Bolsa Família credits. Photo: Ricardo Stuckert/PR. Some rights reserved.
In a recent interview, Noam Chomsky took stock of the main successes and failures of the so-called "progressive left" in Latin America. As for the mistakes, he criticized economic projects that had entered the region, as ever, through global trade and production chains. Their entering the market was, as always, to Latin America's disadvantage, as its economies became little more than auction sites for raw materials destined for the industrialized countries of the North, China and other emerging powers.
According to Chomsky, increased exports of primary products initially created better conditions for countries like Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador and Bolivia to increase their spending on social policies. So, intensive investment in infrastructure and accelerated export of natural resources made it possible to remedy some of the ills of the neoliberal agenda, in force in the 1990s. During this period, poverty and destitution would advance at a metastatic rate, declining only from the first decade of the 2000s, during the leftist governments' peak. The following ECLAC figures clearly reflect this trend:
