A much-touted move to the left masks something more complex: the rebirth of an influential Latin American political tradition
Latin America, it is widely asserted, is moving to the left. The recent election victories of Evo Morales in Bolivia, of Chile's Michelle Bachelet, and of Ollanta Humala in the first round of Peru's presidential ballot (see article) are seen as forming part of a seamless web of leftism which also envelops Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Argentina's Néstor Kirchner and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the front-runner in Mexico's presidential election. But this glib formula lumps together some strange bedfellows and fails to capture what is really changing in Latin America.
Some of the region's new or newish presidents are of the moderate, social-democratic left. They include Lula, Ms Bachelet in Chile, Óscar Arias in Costa Rica and Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay. Broadly speaking, they stand for prudent macroeconomic policies and the retention of the liberalising reforms of the 1990s, but combined with better social policies.
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