Abstract
At the beginning of the 21st century, many South American countries witnessed the ascension of progressive governments supported by a range of social and popular actors. The democratic ascension of leftist and/or populist political leaderships through direct elections reinforced the consolidation of competitive and inclusive regimes inaugurated in the nineties. The so-called Left Turns in Latin America inaugurated the Post-neoliberal cycle, referred to the capacity to “bring in” the Latin American state again to the center of the public policies. Currently, the coincidence between the global ascension of authoritarianism and the regional return of the right wing can indicate the transition to a “Post-democratic” cycle in Latin America. The Brazilian case is the best example to illustrate such dynamic, synthesizing some global tendencies of the new democracies without demos.
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Notes
- 1.
These three concepts refer to specific forms of rural power and oligarchic domination in different agrarian regions of Latin America.
- 2.
Translation from the Portuguese to English done by the author of this chapter.
- 3.
The Brazilian Truth Commission was instituted only in 2012, the latest commission of the Southern Cone.
- 4.
The temporal sequence established to each case are: Argentina: 1982 (Phase 1) and 1983 (Phases 2, 3, 4); Uruguay: 1983 (Phase 1) and 1984 (Phases 2, 3, 4); Chile: 1988 (Phase 1) and 1989 (Phases 2, 3, 4); and finally, Brazil: 1974 (Phase 1), 1985 (Phase 2), 1989 (Phase 3) and 1994 (Phase 4).
- 5.
The sentence below does not disguise the personal disgust, the negative view and the political opinion of the author over what he called as the “wrong” left: “The difference is obvious: Chavez is not Castro; he is Peron with oil. Morales is not an indigenous Che; he is a skillful and irresponsible populist. Lopez Obrador is neither Lula nor Chavez; he comes straight from the PRI of Luis Echeverria, Mexico’s president from 1970 to 1976, from which he learned how to be a cash-dispensing, authoritarian inclined populist. Kirchner is a true-blue Peronist, and proud of it” (Castañeda 2006, p. 38).
- 6.
Marx described Simon Bolívar not as a revolutionary, but as an authoritarian caudilho (Aricó, 2008).
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Ballestrin, L.M.d.A. (2019). Post-democracy and Neoliberalism in Contemporary Latin America: The Rise of the Left Turns and the Brazilian Democratic Failure. In: Puzone, V., Miguel, L. (eds) The Brazilian Left in the 21st Century. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03288-3_12
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