Latin American and Caribbean Foreign Ministers meeting, 2011. Demotix/ Nelson Gonzalez Leal. All rights reserved.How to define the last decade and a half of South American politics? There are different options. One of the most used descriptions is that what unifies the governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Venezuela is that left-to-the-center leaders govern these countries. Leaders come from traditional leftist parties, such as the Broad Front in Uruguay or the Socialists in Chile, from populist parties like the Peronists in Argentina, or from newer parties, such as the Workers’ Party in Brazil. While this is a correct way of highlighting a connection between these very diverse governments, it is not a definition that explains much of what they are actually doing.
We need to go further back in history to comprehend what contemporary South America is experiencing. Whatever we see now is inevitably linked to the past. This is not to say that we are puppets of our destiny, but that what seems to be new for us is always the result of accumulated changes that preceded us.
What took the left to power?
The process that took the left to government should be understood as part of what I call a process of disincorporation or exclusion of the poor strata of society from the socio-political arena. It was a long process that started in the 1970s and continued until the late 1990s. This period was associated with neoliberal state reforms and military authoritarian regimes. While neoliberalism increased precarious life conditions, socioeconomic inequality and marginalization; authoritarianism eliminated or substantially reduced civic and political liberties.
Latin America faced massive cycles of mobilization against neoliberalism, which in many cases led to the collapse of governments. In 2001-2002, Argentina saw four presidents in almost two weeks. Bolivia also went through four presidential breakdowns in 2002-2005. Ecuador and Venezuela experienced the collapse of their party systems and political regimes, but this was not the case in Uruguay and Brazil. Each country is very different, and when referring to such a huge process, we should not ignore these differences. However, what is common to all these countries is that the exclusionary consequences of neoliberal reforms led to the disincorporation from the socio-political arena of masses of poor people and middle-classes. In a few words, what took the left to power in these countries was the failure of neoliberalism as a sustainable developmental path.
