10 hours ago
Pink tide recedes as Latin America looks right
There is something theatrical, even vaudevillian, about Latin American politics and not only because of Andrew Lloyd Webber's passion for Argentinian populists. No surprise then, when Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the former Argentine president and ardent Peronista, recently celebrated the first full day of a six-year house arrest sentence on corruption charges by addressing hundreds of supporters from her balcony, Evita-style. But she will not be enjoying a comeback. The left-wing leaders who came to power in Latin America, riding the commodities boom of the early 2000s, are either burnt out or being replaced by right-wingers. Across the region, the mood is turning.
The latest presidential elections, in Bolivia on Sunday, marked the end of almost 20 years of socialist rule. The second-round run-off in October will pit a soft-right economic reformer against an austerity-minded hard-right political veteran. Both agreed that the left-wing rule of Evo Morales and his successors had shunted the economy into the doldrums. Inflation — at 25 per cent last month — fuel shortages and investor concern about socialist mismanagement made Bolivia seem like a poor bet.A similar pattern of imploding leftist incumbencies could hit Chile in November's presidential election, Peru next April, Colombia then Brazil.
This is partly down to incumbency fatigue. The so-called pink tide of the early 2000s left six of the seven most populous Latin American countries with left-of-centre governments by 2023. That has started to change, for three reasons.
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The first is the uncontrolled spread of organised crime and the perceived feebleness of the government response. Typically, the flamboyant Mexican leftwinger Andrés Manuel López Obrador introduced a policy of 'hugs not bullets' — Abrazos no balazos — in dealing with young criminals. Colombia's president Gustavo Petro announced a policy of 'total peace' towards gangs, a more civilised approach, he thought, to dealing with the drugs problem than turning the police into paramilitaries.
Both misread the popular mood. The global cocaine business is shifting; legal systems cannot keep up with crime groups diversifying into other businesses. 'Criminals are now starting to accumulate revenue at the scale of national GDPs, with none of the burdens of a state,' says Ricardo Zuniga, formerly a senior US government expert on Latin America.
Second, the awarding of public contracts has become deeply flawed. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Brazilian president, has swollen the role of the state across the economy. The result: huge public debt, uncontrolled infrastructure spending, the politicisation of technical jobs.
Finally, the economic collapse of Venezuela — the country's per capita income plunged by more than 70 per cent in the 2010s — drove six million to flee across borders, making them a burden to neighbours, a source of friction and destabilisation in host societies. They were taken in but as migrant children grew older, and with no sign of a change in the Nicolas Maduro regime in Caracas, so part of the solution became to allow them to move northwards to the United States. Voters understood but acknowledged this was both a failure of their governments and a way of pre-programming conflict with the US.
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The political answer to these slow-burn problems came not from incumbent governments but the right. There was not one single response but irrespective of whether the leader was like Argentina's president Javier Milei, a libertarian admirer of Margaret Thatcher's Austrian guru Friedrich Hayek, or like El Salvador's gang-busting president Nayib Bukele, who calls himself 'the world's coolest dictator', what matters most is that they get on just fine with the Trump White House.
Joe Biden, notoriously, neglected central and south America. Trump's team have found a way of connecting with different brands of conservatism. Elon Musk's enthusiasm for the anarcho-capitalist Milei's chainsaw, a graphic commitment to getting rid of superfluous bureaucracy, has helped make Milei acceptable in the White House. Trump probably regards him as a bit of a freak — not many at Mar-a-Lago will have cloned their dead English mastiff and named the bio-engineered pooches after prominent monetarists — but he will admire the guts of someone willing to deploy shock therapy to turn around the budget. Likewise, Bukele is not a conventional conservative. After re-election in 2024 he holds near-total control of the country's institutions. His appeal to Trump is that he has cracked down on violent crime: the murder rate has dropped from several thousand a year to just over 100, fewer than Canada. He has created huge prisons and filled them; Trump sends him deportees, alleged gang members.
Neither Milei nor Bukele will ever be described as men of the centre right and the problem with Trump stamping them with his seal of approval — the way forward, as he sees it, for a dysfunctional Latin America — is that they generate short-term results. Milei has still to win the congressional majority he needs to get on with labour law reform and big privatisation. Ruling by decree remains his default option. As for Bukele, being tough on crime and illegal immigration has resulted in mass, unscrutinised arrests. He is only a hop away from outright (not 'cool') dictatorship.
Resource-rich Latin America needs a coherent revolution in good governance, not autocrats from left or right; not generals in sunglasses but competent, fair-minded modernisers. If Trump does not get on to this soon, China will occupy the vacuum.
