Three fundamental characteristics distinguish the pink wave that swept Latin America in the early 2000s from the one that began to consolidate with the victory of the left in Chile, preceded by elections in Mexico, Argentina and Bolivia, and which could gain a new dimension with the perspective of progressive governments in Colombia and Brazil.
The first characteristic is generational. Gabriel Boric, 36, built his political trajectory in defense of democracy, while his predecessors gave their lives to fighting the military dictatorships of the 1970s. The weight of history shaped the actions of first wave governments on at least two fronts.
By being succeeded by other democratic governments, they took the step of freeing Latin Americans from the past of coups, repression and torture. But regional solidarity, forged by decades of joint militancy, has also proved to be an obstacle when it comes to denouncing the authoritarian drift in allied countries in the region. In his inauguration, Boric dared and assumed the will to turn the page: he revered Salvador Allende and the Latin American resistance, but did not invite the leaders of Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba.
The second feature is economical. The coming to power of the first wave coincided with China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 and the triggering of the commodity supercycle.
In a world where the increase in income generation seemed infinite (the supercycle only reached its peak in 2011), all utopias were allowed. The centrality of oil in Latin America’s economic prosperity supported decades of theses on the relationship between the struggle for sovereignty, the strengthening of industry and the management of natural resources.
Today’s reality is more uncertain. If the context of rising commodities is repeated, the paradigm of international political economy has changed radically. The imperative of the energy transition, made inevitable by the climate crisis, forces the new rulers to look at the fossil industry not as the beginning, but the end of an economic era for the region.
The third characteristic is precisely the way the left thinks about the future of Latin America. At the beginning of the century, the pink wave united all governments, including those not ideologically aligned, around the need to give a single voice to the region after a century of US hegemony.
But everything has changed in the last decade. China has not just become the region’s biggest trading partner. It also took advantage of Mercosur’s divisions to accelerate the incorporation of member countries within its geopolitical space and even negotiated bilateral free trade agreements.
Superpower competition opens up extraordinary possibilities for second pink wave governments. But they can only be realized if Latin America unites around a progressive platform that allows it to act as a geopolitical unit within a multipolar world.
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