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2018 was not a good year for the left in Latin America. Many thought the highly dubious election of far-right authoritarian figure Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, the region’s largest and most important country, sounded the death knell for the progressive anti-imperialist wave that swept across much of the Western hemisphere. Writing in Bloomberg, a retired Admiral and former Supreme Commander of NATO, James Stavridis, boasted that with Bolsonaro in power, the United States had completed a virtual “clean sweep” of South America, with US clients in charge in most capitals except Caracas, Venezuela, and that it was only a matter of time before its President, Nicolas Maduro could not hold on any longer. The mainstream press in the US was similarly salivating at the idea of a US-backed coup in the country. As a Washington Post headline read, “the odds of a military coup are going up. But coups can sometimes lead to democracy.”

A New Hope

Yet from the darkness of 2018, a series of election victories and huge protest movements have re-emboldened the left. Bolivia’s socialist President Evo Morales was re-elected in October for another five years, without the need for a runoff. Even more recently, Argentina decisively rejected neoliberal President Mauricio Macri, instead sweeping the progressive Peronist alliance back into power. A series of poorly planned coups have fallen totally flat in Venezuela, as Washington unwisely backed the inept and hopelessly corrupt Juan Guaído.

Furthermore, huge anti-austerity protest movements are shaking Chilean and Haitian society. While rarely acknowledged in the media, the character of these protests are explicitly anti-neoliberal. Meanwhile in Ecuador, the government of Lenin Moreno caved to demonstrators’ demands, canceling his austerity package after countrywide resistance. Moreno had been originally elected on a promise to continue his predecessor Rafael Correa’s leftist policies, which saw poverty slashed by 27%, unemployment drop and a massive increase in public spending and access to healthcare. Once in power, however, Moreno broke his promises, implementing a right-wing, pro-Washington agenda that delighted the US government but angered the population. And if Lula da Silva, by far the most popular candidate, had been allowed to stand for President in Brazil rather than been thrown in prison on false charges by a corrupt judge, there is little doubt that a huge leftist wave as strong as the first “pink tide” that swept across the region in the 2000s would be building.

The Rebel Alliance

Starting with Venezuela in 1998, one after another, a series of countries in the region elected leftist governments equally critical of the neoliberal system that wrecked their economies in the 1980s and 1990s and the US government that forced the so-called “Washington Consensus” on them. In 2002, Brazil elected Lula, a former shoeshine boy and union leader as President. In 2006, the Bolivian people chose the indigenous activist and unionist Evo Morales to lead the country. A year later the Sandinistas returned to power in Nicaragua. By 2011, the large majority of Latin Americans lived under leftist governments. For the first time in decades, indicators of social well-being began to improve, and rapidly, as governments used the windfall from the booming economy to fund social programs that aided the people. Bolivia’s poverty rate, for example, fell from 65% in 2005 to just 35% last year, while Venezuela’s halved in the ten years between 2003 and 2013. Although every movement had a differing outlook and political priority, they all agreed true independence and freedom could only be achieved through unity, insisting upon their independence from foreign (i.e. American) rule. Together they began to build international institutions based on solidarity and equality that would replace American dominated ones.

The Empire Strikes Back

But 2011 marked the high point for the pink tide. The worldwide economic decline of 2008 and the Chinese economic slowdown hit Latin America particularly hard. The right used the downturn to come back to power, often through highly dubious means, like the 2012 constitutional coup that removed Fernando Lugo from office in Paraguay or the 2016 impeachment of Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff. For some time it appeared as if the region would go back to being America’s “backyard”.

Yet these new political events have shown that the spirit of rebellion is far from dead. Of course, there are always caveats. Uruguay’s ruling Broad Front has been forced into a run-off election this month, for instance. But for Latin American leftists, it is possible to dream again. As they say south of the border, another world is possible.

*(Top image: Alberto Fernández (L) and Cristina Kirchner (R). Credit: Alberto Fernández/ Twitter)