From Neoliberalism to Post-Neoliberalism: Dilemmas, Strategies and Tactics  of the Latin American Left

The 1980s and 1990s were a difficult period for the Left across the world. Depleted by the brutal repression of authoritarian regimes that had cropped up in various parts of the developing world in the 1970s, discouraged by the collapse of the Soviet Union and severely weakened by the neoliberal turn, it almost seemed as if Left politics was heading towards increasing irrelevance.

All that changed when in 1998, Hugo Chávez, who until then was a complete outsider to Venezuelan electoral politics, rose to power in a spectacular electoral debut. Apart from the fact that he was a relative newbie fighting elections in what was historically a highly institutionalised political system, what took the world by surprise was that he won despite having an explicitly leftist political programme. In a region where neoliberalism was supposedly hegemonic and where government after government had pursued extremely liberal policies, the victory of the Left was not something that observers of the region had expected. This momentous occasion was followed by a series of victories of Left parties in Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador amongst other countries; a process that has been dubbed the ‘pink tide’. A little over a decade after Fukuyama’s optimistic prognostications about the ‘end of history’, the Left was back on the international political agenda