CETRI
A reactionary political wave is sweeping the continent. Wherever leftist and progressive movements are collapsing due to their own mistakes (Argentina, El Salvador, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile), an unabashed anti-egalitarianism is attacking collective aspirations in an attempt to dismantle hard-won popular rights and recognition. Wherever the progressive wave persists (Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay, Honduras), it is besieged and fractured from all sides in an attempt to overthrow it. Where possible (Venezuela), foreign interventions are attempted.
Latin America has always been a turbulent and extreme continent, marked by popular revolutions, coups d’état, and military dictatorships, but also by cycles of institutional stability. Neoliberalism, for example, which in some cases began under dictatorships (Chile, Argentina) or during periods of democratic transition (Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador, Brazil), gave rise to a 20-year period of relative normalization of the economic accumulation regime and a system of political parties converging on the dismantling of unions, the privatization of public enterprises, and trade liberalization. While initially not without social resistance, it succeeded in shaping the predictive horizon of these societies.
Similarly, the progressive and left-wing governments that emerged in much of the continent at the beginning of the 21st century also managed to stabilize economic growth and the political system for more than a decade. In the case of Bolivia, this lasted for nearly two decades.
However, despite this apparent similarity in timing and territorial scope, these are qualitatively very different processes. Neoliberalism emerged through an alliance of major exporters, financiers, the educated middle class, and large Western corporations, advised by international financial institutions (IMF, World Bank). Resistance to its implementation was led by the declining wage-earning classes linked to the import substitution policies of the state capitalist era. Progressivism, on the other hand, arose from flexible coalitions of those aggrieved by neoliberalism : non-unionized wage-earning workers, middle classes displaced by management elites , multi-skilled workers in peri-urban areas, pockets of union members, and, in the cases of Bolivia and Ecuador, a powerful peasant and indigenous movement.
But, moreover—and this would prove decisive in understanding the present—continental neoliberal stability was built on the pillars of a general reform of the global economic and political order : the US and Europe were gradually dismantling the social pacts of the welfare state built since the 1930s. China embraced “free trade,” and the planned economy of the USSR was crumbling before the onslaught of global markets. The Thatcherite pronouncement of “there is no alternative,” in its brutality, found plausible support in a triumphant globalization legitimized by a tempered political liberalism. Latin American leaders of that time had nothing to invent to displace the national development model in crisis. They simply had to copy and paste and translate IMF papers to present themselves as “statesmen” to an electorate eager for alternatives.
The Latin American progressive cycle, on the other hand, had to swim against the globalist current. Back when it emerged between 2000 and 2006, it did so by breaking some, or many depending on the case, of the prevailing global norms : expanding social rights, re-unionizing, protecting local production, raising taxes on foreign corporations, redistributing wealth, nationalizing companies, and so on. In other words, it implemented policies contrary to the neoliberal common sense still dominant in the world (with the exception of China). And therein lay its creativity and audacity. In fact, the continent was 15 years ahead of what the “developed” economies themselves are now selectively trying to implement under the umbrella of “industrial policies,” “protectionism,” or tariff wars. But this decoupling of timelines between the continent and the rest of the world has also contributed to the current weariness and instability of Latin American progressivism, which now leads it to coexist alongside an ultraright-wing wave.
The left-wing wave
Neoliberalism in the Americas had two periods of consolidation. The first was when it managed to halt the inflation that emerged from the debt crisis of the 1980s by contracting public investment and liberalizing imports. The second was when it stimulated the domestic economy with the injection of foreign capital attracted by the auctioning of state-owned enterprises. However, this laid the groundwork for its subsequent downfall. “Fiscal adjustment” eroded the basic social safety net that any state in the world uses to support its population ; meanwhile, with privatization, foreign capital began to externalize the profits from its investments, leading to a further flight of capital. This, coupled with the fall in commodity prices, plunged regional economies into stagnation, inflation, and subsequent economic recession.
The various left-wing and progressive governments in Latin America are the social response to that structural decline of continental neoliberalism at the beginning of the 21st century.
Collective material frustration was accompanied by a erosion of loyalties to competitive individualism and the party system that legitimized it. A general national crisis ensued in most countries. It was then that various forms of popular activism emerged, revitalizing new, predictive horizons rooted in equality, social justice, and sovereignty.
Collective action is not merely a legitimate mechanism for societal protest. When it is broad and expansive, taking the form of uprisings, mass protests, rebellions, or insurrections, it also produces new shared cognitive frameworks through which people reshape their place in the world and reinvent the shared lives of communities. It generates a general social willingness to reject old beliefs associated with disappointment and failure, while simultaneously encouraging adherence to new systems of certainty capable of projecting other possible destinies.
It is on this underlying collective spirit, and its limitations, that the current left-wing and progressive movements across the continent carried out a series of economic and social reforms between 2003 and 2015. They succeeded in stabilizing the economy and expanding collective rights. With variations in each country, some taxes on exporting companies were raised. In other cases, privatized companies were nationalized, resulting in greater retention of the surplus, which was redistributed to broad sectors of the population through universal and targeted social protection policies. Increased public investment stimulated the economy and expanded domestic consumption. At the same time, selective trade liberalization policies, which boosted exports, were combined with protectionist measures for local industries. Social welfare improved.
In a decade and a half, the economy returned to healthy growth rates, nearly 70 million Latin Americans were lifted out of poverty, and there was remarkable upward social mobility for the working class, particularly in Bolivia, where this was largely the case for indigenous people.
But, around 2015, this reform program began to show signs of exhaustion and translate into electoral defeats for those left-wing forces that were in government.
I’ll leave for another time the debate about the causes of this political setback, especially those who speak of an induced « passivity, » the omnipresent role of social media, or « ungrateful » popular classes. These are counterfactual speculations. The reality was that those reforms, successful in resolving the main problems that plagued the population in the first decade of the 21st century, were already insufficient by the second decade. This led to a sense of exhaustion due to mere compliance. The initial reforms modified the social structure. The expansion of basic services, the improvement of wages from the bottom up, and the increase in consumption among broad popular and indigenous sectors—a fundamental aspect of social justice—modified the demands of these sectors, as well as their organizational structures. And with it, their aspirational positioning in the world. But this social transformation, a product of the very work of progressivism, was not understood by him, and he continued to refer to the popular classes as if they remained the same as before the reforms. Since then, some of the proposals of the left and progressivism have become anachronistic. In Argentina, the current inability to engage with sectors of the so-called « popular economy, » which now encompasses more than 50% of the workforce, is paradigmatic. In the Bolivian case, the lack of understanding of the demands of the emerging indigenous-popular middle classes is equally dramatic when it comes to trying to rebuild political majorities with state power.
This was compounded by the decline of collective action (with the exception of Chile and Colombia) and changes in the global context. The fall in commodity prices since 2013 and the slowdown of the global economy reduced public revenues and jeopardized the redistributive policies of the left. All these realities required, and still require, a second generation of progressive initiatives. The first phase internalized the economic surplus and redistributed it according to parameters of social justice. This new phase requires a bold approach to production and tax policies that will ensure the long-term sustainability of redistributive actions. This involves a program of state-led industrial investment policies, guided by the state and directed toward the private sector of small and medium-sized enterprises, as well as services. Likewise, a substantial modification of the current regressive tax system is needed. A shift to progressivity is necessary so that millionaires, less than 1% of the population, pay significantly more, without affecting middle and lower-income sectors. This reduces the inequality gap and concentrates the discontent in a small, wealthy minority.
But these measures were not taken. In fact, to this day, this or other actions that would allow for regaining the political initiative and calling for a new, hopeful future are not even being debated. What we see is a melancholic longing for the “good old days” and the past achievements of progressivism, but amidst a frustrating lack of new horizons to overcome existing hardships. Thus, progressivism is going through, hopefully only temporarily, a defensive and low-intensity phase of its movement, appealing to the preservation of what has been won so that the future is not worse than the present. When in reality, what is at stake in the hegemonic political struggle is the fight for the monopoly on a future that is better, much better, than the present and the past. One measure of the current proactive conservatism of progressivism is seeing it simply formulate more “humane” versions of the same macroeconomic adjustment policies implemented by the right-wing bloc.
The far-right wave
As in the rest of the world, authoritarian and anti-egalitarian far-right movements are not new. For a long time, they have languished as marginal political forces within a neoliberal right-wing political center that has absorbed almost the entire conservative political spectrum. But economic crises, as with the left as well, offer the opportunity for their emergence. This is the defining characteristic of our current liminal times.
Liminal time is the turbulent and confusing historical period that separates, sometimes by decades, a relatively stable cycle of economic accumulation and political legitimation from another cycle.
Of course, faced with an economic crisis that exposes the limitations or failures of the previously prevailing regime, the way out of this impasse pushes political forces to diverge from one another and make room for emerging political forces. When the crisis manifests itself under a right-wing government, it creates opportunities for left-wing or progressive coalitions championing proposals for equality, social justice, and the expansion of state-owned commons. However, the far right will also grow simultaneously, advocating an authoritarian way to restore the lost order. When the economic crisis is not resolved or is exacerbated by the management of a progressive government, the conditions for a far-right governing coalition will develop, proposing cuts to collective rights, restrictions on democratic participation, and reductions in public goods.
But even with successful and relatively stable progressive governments, authoritarian right-wing movements are growing. They are the flip side of expanding equality. Whether due to the social mobility of working-class and indigenous sectors, the empowerment of women, increased consumer spending, or the successful integration of migrants into the workforce, these developments will give rise to a moral panic among traditional middle-class sectors who will believe they are seeing their long-held, small privileges devalued. Hence the middle-class, and to some extent working-class, base of the extreme right. They are the virulent and cruel expression of an anti-egalitarian backlash against the loss of status.
However, the far-right regime is not yet the beginning of a new cycle of accumulation and legitimation. Bolsonaro’s authoritarian neoliberalism in Brazil failed to consolidate and gave way to the return of progressivism. Milei’s pseudo-libertarian experiment ultimately had to eat its words about the virtues of the « invisible hand of the market » and kneel before the visible hand of the (American) state. The presence of left-wing governments in Brazil and Mexico, the continent’s largest economies, maintains the region’s unstable equilibrium.
In reality, over the next decade, the continent will continue to serve as a laboratory for simultaneous progressive waves and right-wing counter-waves . It is a time of simultaneous short victories and short defeats. And, if neither wave prevails decisively, the outcome will come on a global scale, driven by the world’s most influential economies, capable of providing the technological and organizational foundation for a new cycle of global accumulation and legitimation.
Álvaro García Linera is one of the most important intellectual figures in Latin American Marxism. A mathematics student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), he participated in the founding of the Tupaj Katari Guerrilla Army (EGTK) and spent several years as a political prisoner in Chonchocoro prison in La Paz. He was elected Vice President of Bolivia in 2006 and re-elected until the 2019 coup that forced him into exile along with President Evo Morales. Author of more than twenty books, his latest work is « The Concept of the State in Marx : The Commons Through Monopolies » (Akal, 2025).
