Beyond Neoliberalism: Popular Responses to Social Change in Latin America

In recent years voters in Latin America have elected a series of left-of-center presidents, starting with Venezuela in 1998 and continuing (to date) with Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Paraguay. Although this political “left turn” has bypassed a number of countries, and the new governments that are part of it comprise a remarkably heterogeneous lot, there seems little doubt that the political winds have shifted in the region. The turn to the left has followed a decade-and-a-half of free market or “neoliberal” reform, when technocrats throughout the region—with staunch support from the U.S. government and international financial institutions—forged a powerful policymaking consensus around the virtues of free trade, deregulated markets, and private entrepreneurship. Since it is not clear whether the region’s new leftist governments have identified, much less consolidated, viable alternatives to market liberalism, it is far too early to claim that Latin America has entered a post-neoliberal era of development. What is clear, however, is that the shift to the left signals a “repoliticization” of development issues in Latin America—that is, a demise of the “Washington Consensus” (Williamson 1990) for free market capitalism and the onset of a highly contested search for alternatives that lie “beyond neoliberalism.#x201D;