REGIONAL EYE
Latin America: The New New World
Is Latin America doomed to be ruled by caudillos? Does political turmoil in Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, and Ecuador mean that Latin America’s democratic revolution has run its course? How important are regional trading blocs? Whatever happened to "Liberation Theology"? Whither Cuba after Fidel Castro?
Latin America has endured two decades of political and economic change on a scale unseen on the continent since Bolivar’s wars of liberation. In the wake of vast free market reforms, militarism, Marxism, and populism are making a comeback. Soldiers are winning elections as khaki socialists, and real democracies have become insecure.
From Venezuela to Bolivia to Nicaragua, new model caudillos are challenging free market orthodoxy and seeking a return to the dominant model of the past – authoritarian governance and a closed economy driven by populist giveaways. Political power is being increasingly centralized, budgets are becoming bloated, and property is nationalized at the government’s whim.
Were the social costs of Latin America’s liberalizing reforms of the 1990’s simply too high? Across the continent, free market crusaders have been toppled, and pressure for new social spending is building. But many countries – even where the left has come to power – do not appear to be turning their back from economic reform.
Under the editorship of Roberto Guareschi, a former managing editor for the newspaper Clarín in Buenos Aires and currently a writer and university lecturer, Project Syndicate’s monthly series LATIN AMERICA: THE NEW NEW WORLD presents the region’s leading thinkers, politicians, and economists. These have included President of Costa Rica and Nobel Laureate Oscar Arias, Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel, editor and journalist Carlos Chamorro, and former Uruguayan President Julio Maria Sanguinetti.
