Is a second “pink tide” underway in Latin America?
It’s too early to tell; and based on the original pink tide, it might not be a good thing
On June 16th Novara Media, a UK-based leftist outlet, declared that a “second pink tide” was sweeping Latin America after Pedro Castillo’s victory in the Peruvian election, and asserted — unsurprisingly — that that would be a good thing for the region’s poor. Both assumptions are questionable. First, the policies of the first pink tide did not create sustainable development that could reduce inequalities in the region in the long-term; and second, some of the leaders that Novara Media claims are leftist are not very progressive at all. Though economic growth and social inclusion certainly expanded under pink tide presidents, neither was sustainable. Instead, the main legacy of the pink tide was to deepen the region’s dependence on raw materials and in some countries, especially Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Ecuador, to erode democracy. This blogpost is a deep dive into the emergence and legacy of the pink tide, and seeks to explain why it’s too early to tell if a second one is underway.
This post is quite long, so I have split it into three parts:
I. The first looks at how and why the original pink tide came about
II. The second looks at whether the two main promises of the pink tide were achieved. Part (i) is about how the pink tide enhanced and eroded democracy, and part (ii) looks at efforts to reduce inequalities.
III. The third section briefly explains why I believe it’s too early to call a second pink tide
I. What was the pink tide and why did it happen?
The pink tide refers to a wave of electoral victories for left-of-centre governments in Latin America in the early 2000s. This marked a shift away from a decade of neoliberal consensus. It began with the election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 1998; by 2009, 15 out of 21 Latin American countries had a left-of-centre president, including Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, Honduras, and Nicaragua (Blanco & Grier, 2013: 68).
Two long-term factors created the conditions for the rise of the left: democratisation and neoliberal fatigue. In the 1980s almost all countries in the region went from being authoritarian to holding democratic elections. This allowed leftist parties to win power at a local level, thus gaining experience and building up a reputation for administrative competence without fear of military reprisals (Levitsky & Roberts, 2011: 9). Left-of-centre mayors were elected in Brasília, São Paulo, Montevideo, Caracas and elsewhere throughout the 1990s — an experience that led many to moderate their stances (Panizza, 2009: 223).
Neoliberal fatigue accompanied the later stages of democratisation. Democratisation in the 1980s coincided with the so-called ‘lost decade,’ when many countries in the region defaulted on their debts and experienced severe hyperinflation. This forced governments to adopt neoliberal policies, partially because loans from Washington-based international financing institutions were conditional on their implementation, and partly because heterodox attempts to rein in inflation worsened the problem, such as under Alan García in Peru. By the 1990s most countries in Latin America had adopted market-oriented reforms.
Such reforms enjoyed early support. Presidents that campaigned on neoliberal platforms were consistently elected throughout the 1980s and 1990s (Armijo and Faucher, 2002). This support is largely explained by the severity of economic crisis in many countries: in Peru, inflation reached 63.2% in July 1990; Bolivia suffered one of the worst bouts of hyperinflation in Latin American history, reaching an annualized rate of 60,000% from May to August of 1985 (Weyland, 1998). Similar figures existed in Argentina and Brazil.
But mounting social costs eventually weakened support. Rising inequality and unemployment, disappointingly low growth in most countries, and financial volatility in the late 1990s kindled a desire for moderate policy change (Baker & Greene, 2011; 2016). Neo-liberalism’s heyday was over: even international financial institutions softened their allegiance to the Washington Consensus. This created the space for new political movements.
The types of leftist governments that came to power in the 2000s differed widely. You can hardly compare the policies and governing styles of Ricardo Lagos and Michelle Bachelet in Chile to Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. What accounted for these differences? The most convincing reason is party system institutionalisation (Flores-Macias, 2012). In Chile, Brazil and Uruguay, where political systems were institutionalised and leftist parties had some experience in local politics, they were more likely to play by the electoral rules and undertake moderate policy reforms upon taking office. In the Andean countries, such as Bolivia and Ecuador, as well as Venezuela, party systems collapsed in the 1990s, creating a vacuum for populists with zero political experience to come to power (lower GDP in some Andean countries and oil rents in Venezuela also played an important role).
Despite their differences, pink tide governments were initially united by two aims: they shared a commitment to expanding democracy through participatory processes, and a willingness to use state resources to reduce inequalities and correct for perceived market failures — underpinned by an unprecedented commodities boom in the early 2000s. How did they do on these two fronts?
II. The legacy of the pink tide
i. Democratic renewal or retreat?
The pink tide governments sought to include the poor, indigenous and marginalised communities into the democratic process. They did so by re-writing constitutions, expanding participatory mechanisms, and reaching out to diverse electoral coalitions including workers and peasants unions, feminist organisations, and environmental and indigenous groups.
Many efforts were laudable. For example, in Bolivia, the Moviemiento al Socialismo (MAS), which sprang up in the late 1990s from Quechua-speaking coca growers’ unions in rural Cochabamba, made vigorous efforts to reach out to other ethnic groups from the 2000s, becoming a genuinely inclusive party. It recruited hundreds of Aymara leaders (including Evo Morales), and chose white or mestizo candidates for vice president in 2002 (Antonio Peredo) and 2005 (Alvaro Linera). Once in power, the MAS called an assembly that produced a more inclusive constitution in 2009, which redefined the state as ‘plurinational’ and recognised 36 indigenous languages alongside Spanish, whilst also increasing parliamentary seats for ethnic minorities. Morales’ election increased support for democracy among people who self-identify as indigenous, an important achievement in a country where support for democracy was abysmally low (Boulding et al, 2019: 61).
In Ecuador, President Rafael Correa also sought to expand rights via a constituent assembly, which in 2008 produced the first constitution in the world to recognise the “rights of nature” (Grugel & Fontana: 724). Venezuela’s 1999 constitution contained 350 articles that include rights to free education, free health care, access to a clean environment, and minority rights, as well as stipulating the participation of civil society organisations in the nomination of judges (including to the Supreme Court) and members of the Electoral Commission.
Other examples of participatory mechanisms abound: In Brazil, the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) set up an Economic and Social Development Council (CDES) with the aim of bringing together lawmakers with leaders in business, labour and social organisations to shape policies together. A similar group was created in Uruguay under the Frente Amplio (FA) to discuss economic policy (neither group had much clout). Women were also included in policymaking in some countries. In Argentina, women headed 25% of the ministries under Cristina Kirchner (a figure that fell to less than 10% under her conservative successor, Mauricio Macri). Michelle Bachelet in Chile appointed an equal number of men and women to her cabinet and created a Ministry of Gender Equality. Greater gender representation may have contributed to abortion finally being partially legalised in 2018.
But for all their symbolic, discursive and legislative attempts at inclusion, civil and political rights eroded significantly in a number of important pink tide countries, while indigenous and environmental rights remained largely theoretical. This led to fatigue with the pink tide experiment: public trust in leftist leaders weakened when the commodities boom ended, with right-wing presidents coming to power in every pink tide country except Nicaragua and Venezuela (where free elections aren’t allowed).
A few case studies illustrate how pink tide efforts to expand democratic participation had limited effects or eroded democracy. Venezuela is an obvious example. The key role the constitution assigns to civil society in the nomination of public authorities has not been matched by any significant influence in these processes (Alvarez, 2003). Instead, the levers of power were concentrated in the hands of the executive and the military, whose influence was expanded massively in the 1999 constitution.
During his 15 years in power, Chavez undermined all the institutions of democracy, from the independent judiciary to the free press. He stuffed the National Electoral Council and Supreme Court with cronies, which allowed him to abolish presidential term limits in 2009 (even though citizens rejected the proposal in a 2007 referendum). In 2010, after the opposition won a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly, a law was passed that allowed Chavez to rule by decree for eighteen months, during which time congressional districts were redrawn so that his party retained a majority. The free press was also hounded: in 2009, the telecommunications regulator Conatel, whose members Chávez appointed, shut down and seized equipment at more than 30 radio stations on trumped-up charges, after years of removing the licenses of critical opposition television channels. Chavez also cowed trade unions and civil society organisations critical of his rule. He fired a third of employees in the state-owned oil company, PDVSA, after they demanded a new presidential election, and purged dissidents in the public sector in 2004. Chavez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, stands accused of committing crimes against humanity by the UN.
Rather than including the poor and marginalised in decision-making processes, the military and Chavez’s inner circle were empowered. The army now controls a significant share of Venezuela’s state-run companies, as well as almost a third of all government ministries. Between 2005 and 2015, Venezuela’s National Development Fund allocated $6.9bn to the military, compared to $2.6bn allocated to education and health over the same period. Chavez loyalists have engaged in enormous amounts of corruption, with his daughter rumoured to be the richest person in Venezuela. The opposition-controlled National Assembly alleges that government officials have stolen $200bn in food-import scams alone since 2003. A currency exchange system introduced in 2008 was used by insiders to amass huge fortunes, which led to several individuals being sanctioned by international powers. Loyalists made extra cash by engaging in drug-trafficking, with the military rumoured to head the shadowy Cartel of the Suns and Maduro’s nephews serving jail time in the U.S. for trying to bring in a plane-full of cocaine.
The failures of the Bolivarian Revolution are well known, but it’s worth re-stating them here: Venezuela, once Latin America’s wealthiest and most stable democracy, has been driven to near-total collapse. In 2017, almost 75% of people reported having lost an average of 8.7 kilos in the previous year due to chronic food shortages. Hyperinflation reached 10 million percent in 2019, and GDP shrank by 65% from 2013 to 2019 — comparable to (or worse than) the economic contraction in Syria since the civil war started in 2011 (though exact numbers are hard to come by). This contraction preceded tougher international sanctions by a number of years, though they have undoubtedly made life harder for most Venezuelans. Infectious diseases eradicated long ago, such as malaria, diphtheria and measles, have roared back. 5.4 million refugees have left the country since 2014, the biggest displacement in Latin American history. So much for the poor and democracy.
Some critics might say that Venezuela is an isolated and extreme example. It certainly is the most extreme, but the deterioration of democracy under pink tide presidents is not unusual. Similar erosions have taken place in Nicaragua, Bolivia and Ecuador.
In Bolivia, the Morales government approved the 2008 Constitution in a legally controversial manner that allowed for Morales’ re-election. Later, he proposed ending presidential term limits altogether. When this proposal was rejected in a referendum in 2016, he turned to the Supreme Court and Constitutional Tribunal, which he had stuffed with cronies, who ruled that it violated his ‘human rights’ not to be able to stand for re-election. The government also hounded the opposition, levelling criminal charges against five former presidents and barring opposition candidates from running in regional and local elections in 2015, as well as sponsoring recall referenda to remove opposition governors in La Paz and Cochabamba (Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán, 2015: 117; Sanchez-Sibony, 2021: 126). Meanwhile, the free press was curtailed: critical outlets were gradually bought up by MAS loyalists and turned into parastatal outfits, while vaguely-worded laws were passed to curb critical coverage of the government (Sanchez-Sobiny, 2021: 134). Morales became a megalomaniac, building a $7ml dollar museum about himself in the middle of the desert.
Rafael Correa’s government in Ecuador also followed the authoritarian playbook. The 2008 constitution concentrated powers in the executive and allowed presidential re-election; in 2015 Correa pushed for reforms of the constitution that abolished term limits. Like Chávez and Morales, Correa expropriated, shut down or co-opted opposition news outlets, especially after 2013. In 2016, the country’s main teachers union and other critical civil society organisations were dissolved. Since leaving office, massive corruption under Correa’s government has come to light: his first vice-president is serving a six-year jail term for taking $13.5 million in bribes from Odebrecht, a Brazilian construction firm, while the former head of the state oil company is also in prison; other Correa allies fled to Miami to avoid facing corruption charges at home (de la Torre, 2018: 84). Correa himself is on the run: an Ecuadorean court summoned him to provide evidence in a case after a former police officer said that Correa knew of a plan to kidnap an opposition politician in Colombia in 2012. Correa refused to show up and is in exile in Belgium, where he runs a radio show for Russia Today.
In Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, greater indigenous and environmental rights clashed with governments’ increased reliance on resource extraction to generate economic growth. In Ecuador, Correa’s government arrested 213 demonstrators against mining projects for “sabotage and terrorism,” and disbanded Fundacion Pachamama, the country’s pre-eminent indigenous and environmental rights organization (Svampa: 70; Grugel & Fontana: 717). In Bolivia, the Morales administration repressed groups protesting the construction of a highway through the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory in 2011, and proceeded to build it anyway (Svampa: 73). In 2015 the government opened up protected areas for oil and gas exploration, and President Morales threatened to shut down any civil society organization or foundation that “harms the exploration of natural resources.” His administration banned 38 organisations from operating in the country for protesting against extraction. As a result of such policies, both Ecuador and Bolivia witnessed an explosion of social conflicts under their pink tide presidents (Svampa, 2015: 69). In Venezuela, the government decreed in 2016 that a section of the Amazon rainforest covering 12% of Venezuela’s territory would become a “mining development zone,” directly contradicting the constitution, which enshrines environmental and indigenous rights.
Nicaragua is another case where the pink tide undermined rather than improved democracy. President Daniel Ortega’s party, the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN), dominates all branches of government and has consolidated control over the media since returning to power in 2007. In 2014 the Supreme Court abolished term limits and passed laws allowing the president to alter tax policy without legislative approval. Before the general election in 2016, the Supreme Court expelled the main opposition candidate and 16 other opposition members from the National Assembly. Ortega chose his wife, Rosario Murillo, as his vice-president in that election. In April 2018, the government clamped down brutally on demonstrators protesting against cuts to the social security system. Some 350 people were killed and more than 100,000 have fled the country since. Recently, the government passed a series of laws to smother the opposition, and has put them to use: it arrested six opposition presidential candidates and dozens of journalists and activists in the past month alone, the most brazen attack on democracy in the region since the end of the Cold War.
Growing authoritarianism, successive corruption scandals, and the collapse of Venezuela led to fatigue with the leftist experiment: conservative governments have come to power in every pink tide country in the past decade, except in Nicaragua and Venezuela (where, as already stated, free elections aren’t allowed). In Argentina, Cristina Kirchner stepped down from office in 2015, mired in nearly a dozen corruption investigations, while her hand-picked successor lost the presidential election to Mauricio Macri (though she has since become vice-president). Ecuador’s new president is a former Goldman Sachs banker. In Brazil, Dilma Rousseff was impeached in 2016 and her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was jailed after both were ensnared in one of the biggest corruption scandals in history. Though Lula has since been released from jail after evidence surfaced that his arrest may have been politically motivated, the fact that the Lava Jato scandal happened under his watch, with dozens of his party-members implicated, and that Dilma Rousseff was president of the board at Petrobras when the scandal started, cost them the confidence of voters. Tellingly, electoral preferences haven’t been altered: public opinion data suggests that the average Latin American voter remains on the centre-right, similar to the 1990s (Martinez Baracaldo and Kernecker, 2011; Baker & Greene, 2011; 2016).
In sum, almost a third of pink tide countries witnessed severe democratic erosions. This obviously does not absolve the right of its significant failings: the interim government in Bolivia after Morales fled was, to put it mildly, nutty. Jeanine Añez called indigenous people “savages” and went after Evo Morales for “terrorism” (the president after her, from the MAS, has used the same overblown excuse to imprison her). Her short-lived rule was also hit by corruption scandals. President Bolsonaro in Brazil is far more dangerous than Lula or Rousseff ever were, and him and his sons have been implicated in numerous criminal cases, ranging from corruption in vaccine contracts and graft in public sector wages, to murder. In Honduras, right-wing forces ousted President Manuel Zelaya in 2009 in the first military coup on the continent since democratisation (with U.S. approval), for fear that he was becoming too close to Chávez.
And the Novara Media article is right to point out that Peru’s right-wing opposition is deeply undemocratic. Taking a page straight out of Trump’s playbook, Keiko Fujimori is refusing to concede electoral defeat and claiming widespread fraud, calling for hundreds of thousands of votes from poorer, indigenous highland regions to be discounted (which carries clear racial and classist overtones). Dozens of retired military officers, and former right-wing heads of state from other countries, have pandered to this view. The former head of the intelligence services, Vladimiro Montesinos, who is in jail for all sorts of crimes ranging from forced disappearances to arms and drugs trafficking, was caught on telephone advising a retired military officer to bribe three of the electoral tribunal’s four judges in order to swing the vote count. Keiko has also been charged with corruption and money laundering.
But the point is: just because many Latin American right-wing parties are undemocratic doesn’t mean that we should ignore the repression exercised by leftist rulers during the pink tide. Many leftists, environmentalists and feminists felt betrayed by the empty promises of leaders like Chávez, Morales, Ortega and Correa. Novara Media shouldn’t ignore this reality and white-wash the pink tide of its significant shortcomings.
ii. Marshalling state resources to reduce inequalities
The second promise of pink tide presidents was to reduce poverty and inequality. Apart from Venezuela, most countries did a better job here; but growth depended so much on resource extraction that it was unsustainable in the long-term. Since the end of the commodities boom, poverty and inequality have stagnated or risen in most countries: altogether, there has been no significant reduction in poverty in the region since 2012 and the number of people living in extreme poverty has stayed constant at around 12% since 2007 (Rigirozzi & Grugel, 2018: 556). Instead of offering a plausible alternative to capitalism, the left encouraged what the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) has called the “re-primarisation” of the economy by encouraging resource extraction to raise revenues for redistribution. Redistributive policies may reduce poverty in the short and medium term, but they don’t ensure high-quality jobs. The structural reasons for poverty and inequality in the region, such as low skills and poor educational outcomes, low tax revenues, low productivity, low investment in R&D, and endemic corruption, went largely unaddressed during the pink tide. Without economic diversification, it’s not clear where jobs and development in Latin America will come from in the next decades.
First, the good news. Across the region, the World Bank estimates that between 2000 and 2014, poverty decreased from 27% to 12%, and inequality fell by 11%. By 2015 the middle class comprised around a third of Latin Americans, double the number in 2001 — a remarkable feat given that it had virtually not grown since 1980. The performance of leftist governments in the 2000s was better on average in reducing poverty and income inequality, and increasing access to education, pensions, food and housing, than compared to non-left governments (Grugel & Fontana: 722).
Governments expanded social provisions in most pink tide countries. In Argentina the Kirchner’s introduced new schemes such as a universal child benefit in 2010, created a minimum wage for non-unionised workers, and forced private healthcare companies to extend and cheapen their coverage (Grugel & Riggirozzi: 9). In Bolivia, Morales introduced a cash transfer scheme linked to school attendance in 2006 that reaches over 1ml children, and expanded access to pensions for informal workers for the first time (Flores-Macias: 40; Grugel & Fontana: 719). Under Correa, cash transfer allowances more than doubled, and a new grant was established for people with disabilities — one of the most progressive in the region — while spending on higher education rose from 0.7% to 2.1% of GDP. Even in Uruguay, where welfare spending was already high, grants were created for domestic workers (Grugel & Fontana: 721).
Not all the praise should go to pink tide presidents. Conditional cash transfers were an invention of centrist presidents in the 1990s, and much of the growth of the early 2000s built on sound macroeconomic foundations established by heads of state during neoliberalism’s heyday. Indeed, by far most pink tide governments — except Venezuela and Ecuador — adhered to orthodox economic principles during their tenure for pragmatic reasons (Flores-Macias, 2012). Most importantly, the pink tide coincided with an enormous increase in demand for raw materials from China, which boosted commodities prices and filled state coffers across South America. This led to vastly improved terms-of-trade for many countries in the region, which generated gains of 51% of GDP between 2004–14 (though even then, Latin American governments overspent during the commodities boom!) (Ocampo, 2017). This created enormous amounts of essentially ‘easy’ money to spend on redistribution.
Brazil offers a good example of the continuities, differences, and failures of pink tide policy. In the 1990s President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a centrist, stabilized the economy, bringing the four-digit annual inflation rates down to 7% by 1997. He also introduced conditional cash transfers for the poorest households. Cardoso was re-elected twice with huge leads, which taught his successor, Lula da Silva, a lesson: market-friendly policies were popular at home. Lula made his support for such policies clear in his ‘Letter to the Brazilian People’ in 2002 and by sticking to neoliberal orthodoxy in his first term (Panizza, 2009: 216). In fact, Lula was more austere in his first term in office than Cardoso had been, which contributed to serious losses in key cities for the PT in the mid-term elections of 2004 .
When the commodities boom kicked off and Lula’s approval ratings rose, he started to expand welfare provisions. His flagship programme, Bolsa Familia, a conditional cash grant created in 2003 by consolidating four existing social security programmes from the Cardoso era, grew to reach almost a quarter of Brazil’s population (Panizza, 2009: 235; Flores-Macias: 48). The minimum wage was raised by 75% in real terms. Under Lula, the share of poor Brazilians dropped from 25% to 11%, while the Gini index fell from 0.58 in 2002 to 0.51 by 2015, an important achievement in one of the world’s most unequal countries.
However, there were serious limitations to the long-term benefits of these changes. One study has found that students who received Bolsa Familia grants have faced significant difficulties finding good-quality jobs after graduating. Brazil experienced an enormous financial crisis in 2014 from which it is still recovering. The end of the commodities boom exposed structural weaknesses that Lula’s government hadn’t addressed, such as a burdensome tax system, a large informal sector, poor infrastructure, limited competition, unsustainable pensions, high costs to starting a business, and high tariffs. In addition, Brazil experienced rising inflation and a widening current account deficit as a result of increased borrowing, expanded subsidised public sector lending, and new tax exemptions for companies. At the same time, an enormous corruption scandal — perhaps the biggest in history — was uncovered in Petrobras, the state oil company. The scheme had started during Dilma Rousseff’s tenure as president of the board of directors, and ensnared Lula da Silva and many of his allies. Inequality and poverty have risen again, while Lula and Rousseff’s party suffered a humiliating electoral defeat to Jair Bolsonaro in 2018.
As the Brazil case shows, pink tide governments failed to addressed the structural reasons for poor growth and poverty in their countries. Instead, many governments focused on extracting more from existing patterns of production by renegotiating rents and increasing royalties on natural resources. For example, in his first term, Evo Morales increased Bolivia’s government revenues by 270% after renegotiating contracts within the energy sector and imposing an 18% royalty tax and 32% direct tax on hydrocarbons (Ruckert, Macdonald & Proulx, 2017: 1588; Riggirozzi & Grugel: 9). Argentina and Ecuador introduced similar measures (Riggirozzi & Grugel: 9).
The re-primarisaiton of the economy has created weak foundations for future growth. As exports of primary goods soared, the share of Latin American value-added exports shrunk. Though investments in R&D went up slightly in Argentina and Brazil, they didn’t increase much anywhere else. No Latin American economy allocates more than 25% of GDP to fixed capital formation, the share identified by UNCTAD and ECLAC as the minimum to ensure long-term income convergence with richer economies (Moreno-Brid & Garry, 2018: 154). For comparison, this rate is 45% in China and 35% in India (ECLAC, 2013: 83). Worryingly, in the era of pink tide governments foreign investment moved away from infrastructure and manufacturing and towards mining and non-tradable activities (Moreno-Brid & Garry: 155).
Maristella Svampa, a leftist Argentinian scholar, has argued that this extreme focus on commodities under pink tide governments represented a betrayal. The ‘neo-extractivist’ model builds on the Ricardian (i.e. liberal) premise that countries should specialise in areas where they have comparative advantages — in Latin America’s case, primary resources, instead of creating industrial policies that could have laid the foundations for long-term growth.
The results were not overwhelming: despite improved international conditions, Latin America’s growth rate in 2003–8 was only 3% of GDP per capita, below all other developing regions (Caldentey & Vernengo, 2018: 6). This is not much different from the 2% growth rate registered since the 1980s — in other words, there was little change to the growth trend. The pink tide did not create solid foundations for an alternative, more inclusive economic model, built on good jobs for the poor and economic diversification.
III. Why a second pink tide may not be under way
For all those who’ve made it this far, thank you! This section isn’t half as technical or long as the other two. I simply want to explain why I believe it’s premature to argue that a second ‘pink tide’ is underway. First, leaders like AMLO in Mexico and Castillo in Peru aren’t obviously leftist. Second, a possible commodities boom may not ensure that if leftist leaders are elected, they will be able to distribute resources generously like in the early 2000s. Instead, I think it’s more likely that a period of uncertainty and rising inequality and poverty as a result of the pandemic may lead to unexpected electoral victories, but without the fiscal space or mandates to implement drastic policies. The recent election of Guillermo Lasso in Ecuador, a millionaire former Goldman Sachs banker, suggests elections can go either way.
First up: are AMLO and Castillo even leftists? It’s debatable. AMLO is a populist, but he has reined in public spending massively. He loves austerity: even the IMF has asked him to expand welfare during the pandemic. He has fired bureaucrats, and cut government funds wherever he can, from scientific research to women’s shelters and the health system. Then there’s Castillo, an outsider who campaigned on a Marxist-Leninist platform only to distance himself from it later. He has since tried to assuage the markets by signalling that he would keep Julio Velarde as head of the central bank, and said he would appoint Pedro Francke, a former World Bank economist, as his main economic advisor. Francke has promised to respect the market economy and ruled out “massive interventionism.” Castillo also distanced himself from Vladimir Cerrón, the Marxist former governor who founded Perú Libre, the party Castillo took to victory. So basically: nobody really knows what to expect from Castillo. It’s too early still to call him a leftist whose election heralds a second pink tide.
Both presidents are also extremely socially conservative, which sits awkwardly with leftist principles elsewhere in the world. Like in the first pink tide, they love their fossil fuels and mining. AMLO has reversed Mexico’s historic attempts to make its energy grid more sustainable, actively thwarting renewable projects led by the private sector which promised not only to be cleaner, but also cheaper than energy from fossil fuels, while he has prioritised the state oil firm. He is even pushing to re-activate coal plants across the country. Castillo won in the mining regions of Peru because he promises to increase the revenues that the country receives from its mining operations, especially in copper and silver — again focusing on extracting more from an unsustainable economic model rather than pushing for sustainable development and better-quality jobs.
On social justice issues, both leaders fare badly, too. AMLO has ignored or bashed feminist protests, which swept the country from 2018 after record-high femicide rates. He literally erected a ten-foot-high wall around the presidential palace during the feminist protests. Meanwhile, Castillo has made a bizarre argument that femicide in Peru is due to male “idleness” generated by capitalism, while he has also blasted what he calls “gender ideology” taught in Peruvian schools. It’s not clear to me that either leader is very progressive. Rather, they seem like machista populists whose modest backgrounds have led a wide swath of poorer and rural people to identify with them, but neither has strong ideological leanings.
The second reason why I’m wary of calling a second pink tide is because that may be confusing another issue: greater electoral volatility in times of uncertainty and crisis. Latin America has become the new epicentre of the pandemic, with some of the highest death rates per capita in the world. Its children have been out of school the longest of any region. Poverty and inequality are set to rise to horrific levels. It is facing the worst economic crisis in its history. By the end of this year, it will have contracted more than any other region in the world, while the recovery will take years, if not decades. In such a climate, electoral outcomes can go either way. Given that many of the ruling presidents during the pandemic were right-wing, it may be the case that left-wing presidents are elected just because of a desire for change. This could partially explain the fact that leftist candidates are rising in the polls in Colombia and Brazil (the success of independent and left-leaning candidates in Chile’s Constitutional Assembly is rooted in deeper discontent about the country’s post-Pinochet democracy). But it doesn’t necessarily betray a shift to the left among voter preferences. Most recently, a right-wing president was elected in Ecuador.
Finally, the depth of the economic crisis means that most governments, whether left or right, will not have the fiscal space to implement the kind of generous redistributive policies that were enacted during the pink tide. Though a commodities boom is currently underway — and will continue as the rich world opens up post-pandemic — demand for oil in the long-term is decreasing. Copper and lithium, two important elements used in solar and wind energy generation, electric cars and the construction of battery-charging infrastructure, could be used to fuel green growth. That bodes well for countries like Chile, Bolivia and Peru, which contain large reserves of both minerals. But as political risk in the Andes rises because of high debt levels, the impact of COVID-19, and potential electoral shocks, it’s not clear that investors would pour into the region.
Basically, however boring it sounds, my conclusion is that it may be too early to tell whether a second pink tide is underway, whether that’s a good thing, and whether leftist leaders who would be elected in 2021/2 would be able to govern on the left like their predecessors in the early 2000s.
The pink tide started with great promise, but its results disappointed many. In several countries, it has left a legacy of authoritarian repression. All pink tide countries became more dependent on the export of primary resources. None seriously addressed the structural issues underlying social and economic exclusion in the region. Right-wing governments haven’t necessarily done a better job, but the point is: rather than clap for a second wave of leftist leaders, can we focus on good policies? The leaders that have made the biggest difference to their countries were centrists/centre-left leaders who combined moderate economic policies with greater social inclusion and respect for democratic institutions: they include Michelle Bachelet in Chile, Henrique Fernando Cardoso in Brazil and Pepe Mujica and Tabaré Vásquez in Uruguay (this is a subject for another blogpost!). All largely retained neoliberal economic policies, but expanded social safety nets, in the vein of European social democracies. And all, especially Uruguay, made efforts to be more inclusive: Bachelet pushed for the legalisation of same-sex marriage and to expand reproductive rights, Cardoso made significant gains in reducing economic inequalities, and Uruguay legalised abortion, same-sex marriage and recreational marijuana as well as becoming one of only two countries in Latin America (the other being Chile) to achieve ‘high-income’ status. In the coming decade of uncertainty, Latin America needs more centrist leaders with sound policies and respect for democratic institutions, rather than a new pink tide or wave of electoral upsets based on identity politics and a desire for radical change.
