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At the time when this translation went into production (January 2020), Latin America had exploded. The streets of Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, and Colombia filled with people protesting against government policies and ruling elites. Argentina elected a progressive president after a wave of social protests against the neoliberal policies of the administration of Mauricio Macri, policies that reduced social benefits, increased poverty, and ultimately led to hyper-inflation, placing the country once again under the fiscal control of the International Monetary Fund. Peru was still reeling from a constitutional conflict between the provisional president (replacing a dismissed president) and congress. Brazil was painfully waking up to the reality of Jair Bolsonaro’s authoritarianism. Venezuela persisted in a political stalemate, a conflict between the president and congress resulting in frequent and violent street confrontations. Uruguay, the most stable country in South America, suddenly turned to the right thanks to popular support for an ultra-conservative force led by a retired general defending the country’s military dictatorship. And Mexico was facing a new round of assaults by violent narcos, who went so far as to occupy the city of Culiacán, capital of Sinaloa, for a day, after defeating the army unit sent to arrest their leader at the request of the US Drug Enforcement Administration. In each of these cases, the causes of the protests and of the ensuing political instability were specific to the individual countries. However, a number of common threads can help to explain the conflicts and confrontations that emerged from beneath a misleading calm. This book identifies and investigates the processes that led to the emergence of simultaneous social and political crises in most of Latin America. Indeed, when a decade ago we sought to understand Latin America’s transformation in the twenty-first century, we did not intend to study each country in isolation. Instead, we explored a few trends that, taken together, explained the transformations that we observed in every country, although these changes had different degrees of relevance to and intensity in each of the societies we studied.

There are connections between the key developments identified in this book and the events that took place in the second half of 2019 and shocked South America’s elites. In fact, these events did not surprise us. We did not predict them, as prediction is not the task of social scientists like us. We simply detected and explained traits and trends in the social structure and social dynamics whose unfolding has resulted in the social disruption and political change that we are witnessing.

We started our investigation, and this book, by studying the contradictory processes through which Latin America was incorporated into the global economy at the turn of the millennium. For the sake of simplicity, we identified two successive economic models that guided the globalization of Latin America. We named these neoliberalism and neo-developmentalism. Under neoliberalism, market forces provided the template for restructuring both the economy and society, for implementing the mantra of the so-called “Washington Consensus”. In most cases, these policies induced export-oriented economic growth, increased competitiveness, and improved technological infrastructures, particularly in telecommunications, digitization, and transportation.

Yet full-scale privatization and reductions in social spending resulted in poverty, rampant inequality, low wages, a lack of social benefits, particularly in pensions, and an expansion of the informal economy, as economic growth was not matched by growth in employment. Key services such as education and healthcare were left to self-financing by families, creating unbearable debt burdens. Erratic fiscal policies in several countries, in the absence of effective taxation of elites and corporations, prompted bursts of inflation that were controlled by sharp policy turns to austerity, destabilizing the economy and social life. The social inequity of this model triggered a wave of protests that shook up political order, although the timing of these protests, and their political impact varied from country to country. The neoliberal model ultimately collapsed in all countries under the pressure of social protests and political alternatives.

The emergence of left-wing governments with different ideological orientations, particularly in Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Mexico, changed the political map of Latin America. Government policies shifted to a new model, one that we call neo-developmentalism. This model was characterized by active state intervention, an emphasis on the development of productive infrastructure, and an export-oriented model of what we call informational extractivism, guided by the state, together with substantial efforts at social redistribution and anti-poverty policies. Neo-developmentalism triggered new forms of social opposition that ultimately led to its political demise. The sources of this opposition were, on the one hand, the hostility of business elites who found their privileges threatened, particularly in terms of taxation, and, on the other hand, the growing corruption of state bureaucracies, largely to support the parties in government, in a context of rapid state expansion. Paradoxically, a segment of the new middle classes created by the redistribution of incomes and opportunities opposed left-wing governments, as these middle classes also came to defend their newly acquired privileges.

Thus the neo-developmental model, like the neoliberal one, crumbled under the pressure of socio-political opposition from large sectors of society. After two decades of successive rise and fall of the two models, entire Latin American economies and societies were in disarray, and this opened the path to a potentially chaotic situation. However, the timing of the rise and fall of the two models varied, and this complicates our interpretation of the situations in various countries. Venezuela exploded first to counter a corrupt elite that had sent the majority of the population in a rich country into poverty. The country collapsed as a corrupt military elite took over, replacing the old conservative elites and resisting new demands for democracy, inducing a systemic crisis whose denouement is perhaps still to come in Caracas. Chile exploded last, in part because of the inclusionary social orientation of the neoliberalism introduced by the Concertación, which gave way to a completely free market system under Sebastián Piñera, ultimately provoking a groundswell of opposition in the entire region. Colombia, a case of economic neoliberalism with extreme inequality, lived through a long period of institutional uncertainty under the effects of the longest-lasting guerrilla war in Latin America, made crueler by drug cartels and the paramilitary forces created by the US-designed “Plan Colombia.” As soon as the country started to live in relative peace, its citizens joined the movement of street protests, which included new political actors at the local level. Mexico emerged from a deadly combination of neoliberalism and narco-terrorism with a last call for survival under the presidency of Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador. The new president, elected by a large majority, went in search of policies that would have learned from the mistakes of both preceding models in Latin America.

The crises of both neoliberalism and neo-developmentalism must be seen in a historical perspective. The understanding of the new Latin America should start from the premise that looking at history is a requirement for the recovery of social meaning in a context of dramatic changes like those discussed in this book.

In a moment of multidimensional global restructuring, multinational companies are being substantially reorganized at the productive, financial, and commercial levels. Latin America has always been defined by global powers and companies as a territory for the extraction of commodities and natural resources; currently this mainly means lithium, copper, iron, rare and precious minerals, agricultural products, forestry, oil, gas, and coca leaves, among others. However, the networks of economic power that connect extractive territories to global developments driven by companies in sharp competition (as in the Chinese, German, Australian, and Japanese companies caught in disputes over lithium) are still in flux. These conflicts have an increasing influence on the dynamics of crisis and political confrontation in the region. This can be seen in the breaking of the agreement between the Bolivian government and German companies, meant to allow the latter to extract lithium, a break that resulted from the criticisms and protests that took place in the second half of 2019 in the Potosí Department in Bolivia.

In political terms, threats to liberal democracy are also related to profound changes in the international arena, particularly given the United States’ aggressive policy toward Latin America under the Trump administration. This policy appears to represent a return to the Cold War era, when conspiracies and misinformation were the norm and contributed to the deterioration of democracy in the region. Thus, new crises and conflicts lead to fragmentation, with military forces once again taking center stage. The more socio-institutional processes and agreements fail, the greater the power and influence of the military will become. This phenomenon is furthered by the resurgence of hyper-ideologization, which has found a perfect vehicle for expression in social media.

The crisis has resulted in various social outcomes. On the one hand, in Chile, citizens have demanded democratic participation in local governments as well as a new constitution and a more inclusive economic model. On the other hand, in Bolivia, a process of social polarization has taken place, despite all the positive changes made by the government led by the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS). After the November 2019 electoral mess, an authoritarian regime, with significant representation of the military and police forces, seized power. This democratic regression in Bolivia was facilitated by the territorial polarization that, once again, split the country, dividing Amazonian from Andean regions and rural from urban. At the time of writing, we observe a breakdown in the social fabric, which will be difficult to reconstitute in the future.

The crises of the neoliberal and neo-developmental models are part of a multidimensional global crisis. This is leading to the rise of a new set of social conflicts, which are modifying daily life as well as the social bond itself. The outcomes of these crises are uncertain not least because of the frailty of institutions and their incapacity to provide social support. Hostility permeates inter-personal relations and cultures.

What kind of new model could be implemented given the region’s now irreversible integration in the global economy? The answers to this question ultimately depend on the social conflicts and political arrangements in each country. But to understand both the region’s recent past and its future prospects, we have to consider other factors that are distinct from class interests and economic policies, which are only windows that open onto a much more complex reality.

This is particularly the case with the political awakening of indigenous peoples, and the social-racist reaction of elites against these peoples’ coming to power through democratic elections, as in Ecuador and, more significantly, in Bolivia. The latter country enjoyed steady economic growth and modernization for over a decade, together with a substantial improvement in living conditions and reduction of poverty. Yet the charismatic leadership of Evo Morales – an indigenous, peasant trade unionist – and the election of indigenous people, particularly “cholas,” to key state positions were not tolerated by the white elite, especially in the pro-business province of Santa Cruz. This hostility ultimately led to a military coup that took advantage of the mistakes made by Morales, including his attempt to stay in power by bureaucratic maneuvers that may (or may not) have included electoral fraud. A similar socio-cultural conflict underlies the social explosion in Ecuador, where the rural indigenous populations have been suffering under the austerity policies imposed by the traditional oligarchy with the support of the armed forces and foreign powers. We should note as well the tensions surging in Chile among the Mapuche and among the Indian minorities in Mexico. Guatemala is constantly shaken by white elites’ violent attempts to subdue the marginalized 70 percent of the population of indigenous descent.

However, to understand processes of social and political change like the ones we are now witnessing in Latin America, we need to move beyond the study of social structures and institutions. We need to identify the actors responsible for social change. We have spent considerable time and effort studying social movements and forms of social protest. And in this book we have identified the main social actors involved in these processes, actors who are at the forefront of the protests that have shaken multiple countries in the last wave of street mobilizations. They are made up of youth first and foremost, usually student movements, including secondary education students, but more broadly young people in all social conditions, whether they are students or not. In this volume, we explain the profound transformations that have shaped new generations in Latin American, generations that are more educated, better informed, and empowered by their communicative autonomy in digital networks. In every instance, youth have initiated protests, and they have been those who sustain it when harsh repression comes. They are fearless, having overcome the terror that their parents experienced under bloody dictatorships. Moreover, they often revolt on behalf of their grandparents, as was explicitly the case in Chile when they tried repeatedly to attack the high-rise building of the Costanera Center in Providencia, because it was the symbol of the distress of the elderly without pensions, who frequently used that building to commit suicide. A vivid notion of intergenerational solidarity informed the protests, as when protestors demanded access to free decent education because their parents had gone into debt to pay for it.

Women were also powerful actors who sought to overthrow patriarchy and end violence against women, defending their rights over their own bodies and their personal freedom. The intensity of women’s mobilizations in Argentina, for instance, was a decisive factor in political change in that country, but it was also present in other countries, particularly in Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, and Mexico.

While workers’ demands and unions were significant in the mobilizations, particularly in Argentina where Peronist trade unions are a major force, the new social movements brought together very different actors, including urban social movements, environmentalists, animal rights defenders, ethnic minorities, LGBT activists, human rights advocates, and artists. A common banner united these disparate actors: dignity.

Dignity was the word used as the rallying cry in most of these movements, as it has been in the majority of networked social movements taking place around the world during the last decade, from Spain to Hong Kong and from New York to Chile. In this context, dignity means something other than claiming the right to a decent livelihood. It is a demand for the right to be treated as dignified human beings, with respect from elites who despise what they see as an ignorant populace and refuse to be accountable to those who elect and pay them.

The new social movements in Latin America, like those emerging elsewhere, can only be understood in the context of a widespread crisis of legitimacy affecting social institutions, a crisis that we document and analyze in this book. Political parties, parliaments, governments, courts of justice, police forces, financial institutions, mainstream media outlets: all are distrusted by a large majority of citizens (83 percent in Latin America as a whole in 2019, according to the United Nations Development Program). Implicated in this collapse of moral authority is the Catholic Church, whose demise we study in this book. This demise has left an empty space in the lives of many in Latin America, depriving people of a place of psychological refuge that helped them to endure the harsh reality of existence. This space is now being filled by a myriad of unscrupulous Evangelical churches that generally are the main support for reactionary demands for “law and order” that can pave the way for authoritarian rule.

At the heart of this widespread crisis of legitimacy is state corruption, a decisive feature of almost all Latin American countries. Denunciations of corruption recur and even predominate in all recent mobilizations in the region, indicating a deep distrust of the institutions responsible for managing people’s lives. A factor in the increasing state corruption is the relentless expansion of the criminal economy, whose causes and consequences are covered in detail in chapter 3. But the corruption extends beyond the pervasive presence of criminal elements. It is rooted in the systemic illegal financing of political parties; it derives from the role of the Latin American states in connecting global networks with local networks in the new economy. And it is related to the importance of public markets as sources of capital accumulation for oligopolistic companies ready to buy presidents and other politicians, because of profitable investments in infrastructure linked to modernization projects, and to the chaotic urbanization of Latin America. A paradigmatic case concerns the Brazilian multinational Odebrecht, responsible for corruption of political leaders in Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Chile, and Mexico, among other countries. The causes and effects of state corruption are the themes of the penultimate chapter of our book. This corruption underlies the collapse of public institutions and ultimately the social explosions taking place throughout the region.

There was, however, one development that we did not foresee: the return of the military as a political actor. Because of our empirical knowledge of the new make-up of the armed forces in different countries, we thought that the military had learned the lessons of past criminal adventures and had surrendered power to the political authorities in exchange for legitimacy, as well as, in some cases, favorable treatment in shady deals. The case of the military coup or conspiracy against Evo Morales in Bolivia shows that we were wrong. Something similar may also happen in Venezuela, itself a military dictatorship. Probably our naïve belief in the stability of elected governments was based on the waning of US interventionism during the Obama administration, something that was reversed by Trump. Moreover, “Brazilian sub-imperialism” is now at work, with Bolsonaro playing the role of chief conspirator on behalf of the Latin American elites who feel threatened in their domination. If this dark hypothesis is verified, this will add another sinister touch to our already gloomy conclusion in this volume, where we discuss the spread of the kamanchaka in most of Latin America. (On the meaning of the word, consult our final chapter in this volume.) However, our last word in the book refers to “the color of hope,” to the social movements, mainly supported by youth, women, environmentalists, and indigenous peoples, that might reconstruct life from the ground up. This process has indeed started, as we foresaw it would. But if social explosions overtake social movements, then such outrage may or may not open the path to hope. Saying “enough” to violence, and to repression entails understanding that social life – regardless of political, ideological, cultural, or economic affiliations – can only be balanced through the acknowledgment of social pluralism and the unequivocal defense of human rights, dignity, and diversity. The elements for understanding future developments in Latin America are the subject of this volume, which is rooted in the observation of the recent past.

F.C. and M.C.

January 2020