The lodestars of the Latin American left used to be clear: the Cuban revolution, the beret-clad guerrilla leader Che Guevara, the state as engine of industrial development and bastion of anti-imperialism.
The map of the region has once again turned pink but the ideological sky is murkier. Progressive presidents govern Latin America’s six biggest economies touting agendas so varied as to raise the question of whether they constitute a bloc at all.
Chile’s 37-year-old president Gabriel Boric, the standard-bearer for a new generation of progressives, has highlighted the differences. He has publicly attacked Nicaragua’s “family dictatorship” led by Sandinista revolutionary Daniel Ortega and his vice-president wife Rosario Murillo. Ortega, a veteran of the 1980s Central American wars more than twice Boric’s age, shot back that the Chilean was a mere lapdog of the “Yankee empire”.
Cecilia Nicolini, a co-ordinator of the Puebla Group uniting regional progressives, insists that despite differences of culture and history, Latin America’s left is still bound by common ideals. “We don’t negotiate on the fight against poverty and inequality,” she says. “We continue to insist on the right to a decent life and to social justice.”
Nicolini, who is state secretary for climate change in Argentina’s leftist government, believes progressive ideas have never been more relevant to the multiple crises besetting the world’s most unequal region: poverty, social exclusion, racism and machismo. “The neoliberal approach has been exhausted,” she argues.
The fight for social justice certainly remains a potent unifying force, bringing together figures as diverse as Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Colombia’s leader Gustavo Petro. But while Petro wants to end new oil and gas development and go green, Mexico’s leftist leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador is spending at least $14bn on a new oil refinery.
The differences are not merely age-related. At 77, Lula belongs to a previous generation of leaders but has embraced gender equality, racial justice and indigenous rights with the passion of a millennial. López Obrador, by contrast, attracts the ire of feminists for failing to tackle a wave of femicides and accuses women’s groups of being manipulated by conservatives.
The Mexican leader presents other contradictions. A champion of fiscal austerity, he stood almost alone in the region in refusing to increase government spending during the pandemic. Yet his unwavering support for Cuba, his nationalism and his attacks on business come straight from the traditional Latin American left.
López Obrador’s contradictions are rooted in his past. The 69-year-old Mexican leader cut his political teeth in the 1970s in the Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI) which ruled for 71 uninterrupted years, sometimes with the help of electoral black magic.
López Obrador’s PRI past helps explain his authoritarian leanings, including legal pressure on political rivals, attacks on the media and intimidation of the courts and the independent election body.
Rebecca Bill Chávez, president of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, believes that measuring Latin America’s leaders on a traditional political axis is outmoded. Instead of the left-right scale, she argues, it makes more sense to distinguish between democrats and authoritarians.
Into the authoritarian camp would go Nicaragua’s Ortega, along with Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and Miguel Díaz-Canel of Cuba — and probably conservatives such as Nayib Bukele of El Salvador and Alejandro Giammattei of Guatemala, plus Bolivia’s far-left government. López Obrador is drifting in that direction too.
In Latin America’s democratic corner sit Boric, Argentina’s Alberto Fernández, Lula and Petro. Peru’s Dina Boluarte is more controversial for the progressives: elected as vice-president on a far-left ticket in 2021, she assumed the top job last December after the president, Pedro Castillo, was impeached for trying to suspend congress and rule by decree.
Although the change of Peruvian president was constitutional, Petro and López Obrador have insisted since that Castillo was the victim of a coup and remains Peru’s legitimate president (Lula has maintained a respectful distance).
Perhaps the biggest contradiction of all concerns Cuba. Rights groups have criticised Díaz-Canel for increasing repression, including locking up more than 700 anti-government protesters since July 2021. The economy is in dire straits and emigration has spiked. Few Latin American presidents praise Havana these days (though Petro’s vice-president Francia Márquez is a recent exception). But criticising Cuba is still a step too far, even for Boric.
“Cuba remains the last bastion of the ideological left,” notes Marta Lagos, a Chilean pollster. “It’s a question of symbolism and nostalgia”.
Che Guevara has ceded some ideological space to the less racy Thomas Piketty among today’s Latin American left, but the myth of the Cuban revolution lives on.