South America’s Left Turns

South America’s dramatic shift to the left has triggered a wave of publications that analyze the significance of this development. While this academic work conceptually advances our understandings of these new left governments, much of it remains confined within fairly narrowly defined disciplinary boundaries. Perhaps naturally, these writings are heavily oriented toward political science and share a concern for the preservation of existing institutional structures. Few of the contributors to the works under review in this essay overtly support the political projects they examine. Nor do they pay much attention to the organizing practices that arguably were key to opening up the political spaces from which these governments could emerge. As a result, too often the contributions advance establishment perspectives rather than encouraging new ways of thinking about political developments in Latin America.

As this issue of Latin American Perspectives illustrates, the field of study has moved well beyond the “two-lefts” theory that Teodoro Petkoff (2005) introduced and Jorge Castañeda (2006) popularized for an English-speaking audience. Perhaps the only point of consensus that has emerged is that the current Latin American left is much more diverse than this “two-lefts” construction implies. Despite that recognition, too many scholars still fall into the simplistic grouping of different experiments into broad categories. In a textbook on Latin American politics, for example, Peter Smith (2012) frames his discussion of the rise of a new Latin American left as a matter of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez versus Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Indeed, Chávez and Lula grace the cover of Castañeda and Morales’s Leftovers, while Weyland, Madrid, and Hunter’s Leftist Governments in Latin America has Chile’s Michelle Bachelet joining Lula and Bolivia’s Evo Morales joining Chávez.

As notable as the tendency to categorize are the inconsistencies of these categorizations. Kurt Weyland contrasts a “contestatory” left in Venezuela and Bolivia with a more moderate social democratic left in Brazil and Chile, but his intent to divide Latin America into Castañeda’s “good” and “bad” lefts remains intact. Levitsky and Roberts describe Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay as following an institutional path to power and Venezuela and Ecuador as representing a populist left and Bolivia a movement left, but the contributors to their collection diverge quite significantly from that characterization. Jennifer Pribble and Evelyne Huber group Chile and Uruguay together as two countries that are moving toward the development of an effective social democratic welfare state. In contrast, Samuel Handlin and Ruth Berins Collier compare the weak union linkages with leftist parties in Brazil and Chile with the stronger ones in Uruguay and Venezuela. Raúl Madrid groups Bolivia with Argentina and Ecuador in pursuing heterodox policies rather than Venezuela’s statist ones. In contrast, Sebastian Etchemendy and Candelaria Garay claim that the Kirchner governments in Argentina defy easy categorization but largely occupy a middle ground between Venezuela and Brazil. In their conclusion to the volume, the editors question whether Argentina should even be included because of its leaders’ vague and populist ideologies.

In Latin America’s Left Turns, Cameron and Hershberg largely frame the discussion as a comparison of Venezuela and Bolivia, but they argue that attempts to divide the left into radical populists and more moderate social democrats does little more than reproduce old divisions between reform and revolution. In The New Mole, Sader argues that these efforts at categorization, particularly those that divide current governments into good and bad lefts, only favor the right in its attempts to divide the left, co-opt moderate sectors, and isolate radical ones. We could also debate how “new” these governments are, but, as Roberts observes, except for the socialists in Chile and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua none of these current leftist governments had previously held power.

The edited volumes under review have their roots in conferences and workshops. Burdick, Oxhorn, and Roberts draw from a 2005 conference at Syracuse University; Castañeda and Morales from a graduate seminar at New York University from 2005 to 2007; Levitsky and Roberts from discussions at Cornell in 2006 and Harvard in 2008; Cameron and Hershberg from workshops at the University of British Columbia in 2007 and 2008; and Weyland, Madrid, and Hunter from a 2008 conference at the University of Texas at Austin, where the three of them teach. Some of the contributors make multiple appearances across the volumes, and one senses a closed and limited discussion with scholars talking amongst themselves rather than engaging a larger audience. Excluded are the protagonists of a new Latin American left that Barrett, Chavez, and Rodríguez Garavito (2008) deliberately include in their work.

A theme that runs through these works is the attempt to explain the political swing from rightist to leftist governments in South America. Writing within the constraints of a social science methodology, most of the contributors are unwilling to entertain voluntarist interpretations. Instead, Levitsky and Roberts point to a broad range of factors, including persistent inequality, financial crises, commodity booms, and an increase in electoral space to explain the development. Marfa Victoria Murillo, Virginia Oliveros, and Milan Vaishnav (in Levitsky and Roberts) relate the left’s electoral success to an increase in the value of exports that allowed for redistributive policies and argue that the left’s political prospects could change with the economic situation. Several writers, including Marco Morales (in Castañeda and Morales) and Jason Arnold and David Samuels (in Levitsky and Roberts) contend that Latin Americans are fundamentally conservative and that in terms of ideology voters have not shifted left. Roberts contends that what is more dramatic is how far right the positions of the Chilean socialists have shifted since the time of Allende.

Contributors point to a left swing as a product of the financial crises of the neoliberal market economy (most of them are loath to use the word “capitalism”) as voters search for alternatives. In this environment, voters respond well to populist leaders who create political parties around their own personalities. Arnold and Samuels interpret the left swing as part of a natural rotation of a representative democracy and consider the perceived shift as more hype than anything substantive. In exploring the left turns, Catherine Conaghan (in Levitsky and Roberts) succinctly contends that “campaigns matter.” From her perspective, leftist candidates are successful because they have learned to run effective electoral campaigns.

A related and hotly debated topic is what difference a leftist government makes, particularly in terms of redistributing wealth and strengthening participatory forms of governance. Weyland, among others, contends that the moderate left performs better economically than its radical counterparts, a contention that Levitsky and Roberts challenge. Patricio Navia (in Burdick, Oxhorn, and Roberts), drawing on factors ranging from Freedom House data on individual liberties to economic indicators, argues that Michelle Bachelet’s and Ricardo Lagos’s socialist governments demonstrably improved conditions in Chile. In contrast, Castañeda contends that most of these governments follow policies similar to those of their conservative predecessors and are no more successful in terms of promoting economic growth, distribution of wealth, or social change. These competing and contradictory interpretations might lead one to a cynical or even nihilistic position that social scientists simply manipulate statistics to prove whatever point they wish to make—that many are more interested in advancing their own political perspectives than in gaining a deeper understanding of what is happening in Latin America.

A final theme is whether any of these new governments should truly be characterized as leftist. A charge that both moderate and more radical governments face is that they are more concerned with economic growth than with a redistribution of wealth and that they follow pragmatic policies out of fear of alienating powerful political and economic interests, in both the domestic and international realms. Levitsky and Roberts resist identifying any of the governments as socialist. Weyland justifies calling governments “contestatory” rather than radical because they fail to go to the core of capitalist oppression and do not implement policies as radical as those of the Cuban Revolution, Allende’s government in Chile, or the first Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Even Chávez’s radical policies are closer to those of Carlos Andrés Pérez’s 1970s petro state than to any radical alternative. Weyland contends that the current left will save rather than destroy capitalism. Furthermore, he is critical of “contestatory” left leadership for pushing through changes that are not sustainable, arguing that the moderate left governments in Brazil and Chile present the possibility of more solid and sustainable social and economic accomplishments. He contends that the radical anticapitalist left marginalizes itself and fails to provide a viable alternative to the region’s problems. Similarly, Madrid (in Levitsky and Roberts) maintains that key aspects of Morales’s government in Bolivia such as ideas of Andean capitalism and sumak kawsay are too vague to be operationalized and indicate the ideological weakness of the left.

Half a century ago, T. H. Marshall (1964) made key distinctions between civil, political, and social rights that still inform work in the field. Civil rights refer to individual freedoms including those of association, religion, and property. Political rights are largely those of suffrage, while social rights include economic concerns such as education and health care. In a chapter on citizenship rights (in Levitsky and Roberts), Deborah Yashar argues for a need to include and balance all three. Nevertheless, most of these writers prioritize individual civil rights over social ones. Many engage political rights in a discussion of representative versus participatory and plebiscitarian forms of democracy, with liberal forms of representative democracy being the preferred model and participatory and plebiscitarian forms commonly being discussed only in derogatory terms (Benjamin Goldfrank in Levitsky and Roberts being a notable exception).

Almost all of the contributors to these volumes are political scientists, and the shortcomings of their perspective, particularly in placing value on institutions to the exclusion of social justice, are obvious. In fact, many of the contributions say more about their authors’ political beliefs and perspectives than about what is happening in Latin America. An almost universal preference for the more moderate governments of Brazil and Chile reveals the relatively conservative political beliefs of many of these scholars.

On the surface, Jorge Castañeda’s latest contribution to discussions of the Latin American left might indicate just how far to the right he has drifted. Reading his earlier work through the lens of Leftovers, however, casts it in a new light. Utopia Unarmed (1993), for example, presents the left as an irrelevant historical curiosity and focuses on power politics and their implications for U.S. imperial concerns. Democracy is interpreted exclusively in terms of its electoral, representative aspects, and the left is condemned for not being committed to this narrow view. Even here, Castañeda declares that he would find only a moderate, market-oriented, neoliberal “left” acceptable. The essays collected in Leftovers are overly quantitative and uniformly conservative in their ideological outlook. Following the construction presented in Castañeda’s (2006) essay, the contributors consider socialists such as those in Chile who continue neoliberal policies “good” and those who engage in more radical structural reforms “bad.”

Silva’s Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America and the essays in Burdick, Oxhorn, and Roberts’s Beyond Neoliberalism in Latin America? examine how popular mobilizations contributed to the collapse of neoliberal governments and the emergence of new models. Silva surveys resistance to neoliberal reforms in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Peru, and Chile. He examines the difficulties that capitalism faces in constructing a just and equitable society and the way it contributed to social discontent and opposition. Popular protests paved the way for an openness to more government intervention in the economy and in the process created political space for the emergence of new left governments.

The contributors to Beyond Neoliberalism in Latin America? examine responses to neoliberalism in four areas: electoral politics, identity politics, environmental governance, and transnational migration. In contrast to the top-down political science approach that informs the rest of the works reviewed here, the approach of this volume is bottom-up and multidisciplinary. Looking beyond governments and policy choices, contributors examine new social and political actors and the socioeconomic and cultural terrains in which they operate. Drawing on his previous research, Goldfrank examines electoral politics through the lens of the experiences of local leftist governments in Lima, Porto Alegre, Montevideo, Caracas, and Mexico City. José Antonio Lucero and Jan Hoffman French provide probing analyses of the way identity politics formed subaltern challenges to neoliberal policies in the Andes and the Brazilian Northeast. While Beyond Neoliberalism in Latin America? is the oldest and in a sense the most dated of the works under consideration, it provides the best model for the work that needs to be done to advance our understanding of how and why this new left emerged.

The key essays in Cameron and Hershberg’s Latin America’s Left Turns are reprinted from a special issue of Third World Quarterly that the editors also organized. Central concerns for these essays are social democracy, socialism, populism, and post-neoliberal forms of governance. The book is divided into three sections. The first and most useful, “Thinking About the Left,” provides broad reflections on Latin America’s left turns. Juan Pablo Luna, for example, observes that Chávez came to power in the political vacuum created by the collapse of existing power structures, while Morales rode the energy of social movements into power. The second section, “Politics Beyond Liberalism,” features a contribution from Jennifer McCoy, whose writings have been consistently critical of what she considers to be Chávez’s illiberal forms of governance. A final section examines changes in political economies under new left governments.

Weyland, Madrid, and Hunter argue in Leftist Governments in Latin America that the moderate governments of Brazil and Chile are better positioned than the radical ones of Venezuela and Bolivia to address the failures of neoliberalism. They see social democratic governments as being more successful in realizing economic growth, reducing inequality, and deepening democratic pluralism than their radical alternatives. These writers contend that, while radical governments have increased popular participation and attained economic and social successes, this comes at the cost of provoking conflict that undermines their economic and institutional sustainability. They claim that the “contestatory” left undermines rather than deepens democracy. In their estimation, even the moderate governments come up short of their promised expectations, including expanding participatory forms of governance. Their contentions, of course, are by no means universally accepted and appear to be more ideologically driven than demonstrable. Most important for them are a defense of capitalism and representative forms of government even when they do not function to the benefit of the vast majority of a country’s population. They appear to fear participatory democracy for the same reason that powerful economic and political interests have always opposed it: it is not a force that they can easily manipulate to their own benefit.

In line with the editors’ ideologically driven argument, contributors Evelyne Huber, Jennifer Pribble, and John Stephens applaud the moderate, pro-market approaches of Lagos and Bachelet in Chile. Javier Corrales contributes a stridently anti-Chavista piece in line with his other writings. Out of step with the editors’ ideology and message, two coauthored chapters on Brazil note disappointment with the government’s moderate market-driven policies in solving problems of poverty and inequality and observe that market-oriented policies do not necessarily help a country overcome underdevelopment. Similarly, George Gray Molina adopts a technocratic approach to Morales’s administration that ultimately does not portray Bolivia as part of a “bad” populist left.

The longest and most comprehensive of the works reviewed here is Levitsky and Roberts’s long-awaited The Resurgence of the Latin American Left. Its 16 essays embrace a wide range of ideological perspectives and are grouped into thematic chapters and case studies that emphasize comparative analyses. The purpose of the volume is to explain the apparent sudden revival of the left, variation among the governments involved, and their implications for development and democracy in the region. Levitsky and Roberts open the volume with a solid essay that seeks to explain the presence of leftist governments in South America as they moved from an anomaly to a general trend and provides an apt summary not only of the volume’s contributions but also of broader debates on the subject.

By far the most thoughtful contribution among these works and one that readers of Latin American Perspectives will want to peruse is Sader’s The New Mole. Sader draws on Marx’s reference to the mole that burrows away silently and ceaselessly underground only to emerge when we least expect it to disrupt the established order. While many observers point to the uniqueness of South America’s current red tide, Sader notes that revolutionary processes always appear to be new. He is also critical of ultra-left positions that destabilize positive reforms by wanting to move too fast, emphasizing ideology over human needs, and making dogmatic criticisms without forwarding concrete suggestions. While the left has traditionally been torn between reform and revolution, he argues, “there is no necessary or fundamental contradiction between the two” (111). He focuses primarily on the example of Lula in Brazil and defends his government from charges that he was a manager of neoliberalism. Sader opposes such frontal attacks on sympathetic governments. Despite allegations from the left, he argues, moderate new left governments are demonstrably better than the old ones, and such attacks fail to recognize their advances. He urges leftist opponents not to mistake “a vacillating ally for the enemy” (104). Rather, he encourages dissidents to work with progressive sectors in the government in order to push the entire project leftward. It is notable that both Sader and Weyland argue that moderate leftist governments provide a better solution to Latin America’s chronic problems, but they do so for ideologically opposite reasons.

The extensive and somewhat repetitive nature of the contributions in the books under review may give the impression that there is little room left for additional contributions to the field, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Two perspectives are almost universally excluded from these works. The first is one that is explicitly sympathetic to radical tendencies in the Latin American left that challenge unjust social structures, and the second is a left critique of current left-wing governments. Such perspectives do exist, as the essays in this issue of Latin American Perspectives make clear. Readers of this journal will be familiar with the pioneering contributions of Steve Ellner and Greg Wilpert, none of which appear in these volumes. In contrast, Ponniah and Eastwood (2011) make a point of including these perspectives in their excellent collection of essays on Venezuela. Webber and Carr (2013) provide room for what some will derogatorily dismiss as an ultra-left perspective. Those looking for a synthetic, sympathetic, and accessible treatment of the new Latin American left that would be appropriate for an introductory Latin American class will be better served by Burbach, Fox, and Fuentes (2013).

Social-movement perspectives and contributions are also largely absent, even though excellent recent work has been done in the field (see, for example, Prevost, Oliva Campos, and Vanden, 2012, and Stahler-Sholk, Vanden, and Kuecker, 2008). Thomas Perreault and Karl Zimmerer (in Burdick, Oxhorn, and Roberts) touch on popular resistance to neo-extractivism in Bolivia, and this is a topic that calls for much deeper exploration. Despite the important roles of the Mapuches in Chile and the Kichwas in Ecuador, Indigenous organizations rate hardly a mention. When they do, it is through Yashar’s repetition of the common but inaccurate view that the left ignores ethnic demands, which says more about her ignorance of the history of the left than about historical realities. Unfortunately, editors Levitsky and Roberts reiterate these assumptions in their concluding remarks to their volume.

While some writers examine international trade and political policies such as the Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (ALBA) and the Unión de Naciones Suramericanas (UNASUR), grassroots South-South linkages remain under the radar. The World Social Forum is scarcely mentioned, even though that annual gathering of grassroots activists played a key role in mobilizing and inspiring interest and challenges to neoliberalism and militarism. (Sader as well as Goldfrank in Burdick, Oxhorn, and Roberts are notable exceptions. Goldfrank applauds the WSF as embodied in the slogan “another world is possible,” while Sader challenges the autonomous nature of grassroots resistance and contends that government action is also necessary to implement the visions that the WSF embodies.) The lack of mention of the WSF perhaps says more about the disjunction between academia and lived realities than it does about the significance of these massive gatherings, which at their height assembled annually more than 100,000 people. Arguably, social-movement activism in the neoliberal 1990s opened political space for an electoral left in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and those who ignore their contributions do so at their peril. Although these writers discuss politics, most of them (with Sader and Goldfrank again being exceptions) find it beneath their station to engage in the dirty work of political action, even though, as Reitan (2007) argues, the methodology that scholar-activists employ is key to gaining insights and understandings into the emergence of global justice movements.

Much of the work across these volumes focuses on Venezuela and Brazil, with Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay incorporated as secondary case studies. The smaller and historically understudied countries of Ecuador and Paraguay remain marginalized, although Silva does present an overview of Ecuador in one of his chapters and Conaghan (in Levitsky and Roberts) contributes a particularly solid and well-written summary of Correa’s rise to power. Otherwise, Correa is commonly grouped with Chávez and sometimes Morales, and many scholars base their interpretations of Ecuador on observations from other countries rather than a deep understanding of the Ecuadorian case.

Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo, unfortunately, receives not even minimal treatment in any of these volumes, even though this case contains a series of key themes facing the left, including the roles of agro-export economies, liberation theology, and the limited nature of presidential power as evidenced in the June 2012 institutional coup. The omission of Paraguay comes even as Levitsky and Roberts see fit to include a counterexample from Cameron on the conservative president Alan García’s second term of office in Peru. The inclusion of Peru is even more unfortunate because by the time this book made its way into the hands of readers Ollanta Humala had been elected president, a development that further contributed to the increasingly divergent trends within the Latin America left.

While Mexico receives some attention, particularly in Castañeda and Morales, none of the essays examine Central America or the Caribbean. The leftward drift is not an exclusively South American phenomenon, even though the current trends originated there. Absent is any discussion of Cuba (perhaps because it falls outside of the simplistic categorizations for which many of the writers opt), even though it provides a model for a more extensive redistributive network than any subsequent example. Even more curious, despite the cottage industry built around publications on the Sandinistas in the 1980s, Daniel Ortega’s return to power in Nicaragua also receives little attention. A lone exception is some brief comments from Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez (in Burdick, Oxhorn, and Roberts). His government’s alliances with conservative forces and retrograde attacks on family planning and marriage rights raise significant questions about the way social movements can best position themselves to make seemingly sympathetic governments more responsive to their demands. Similarly, despite a long struggle by committed activists, Mauricio Funes’s election in El Salvador also seemingly weakened the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN). These social-movement experiences provide further insight into what the journalist Benjamin Dangl (2010) aptly terms “dancing with dynamite” and point to a theme that calls for fuller academic analysis.

The new Latin American left is too important to be left to political scientists. Historians, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, and others have important contributions to make in placing these political developments in a broader context that includes discussion of the way men and women, rural and urban dwellers, and people from different social classes and sexual orientations contribute to and experience these developments. It is time to saddle up the horses; much work remains to be done.