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In the last few years, there has been a resurgence of social movements and left parties in Latin America with a strength and power unparalleled in the recent history of the region. Left and left-of-centre political forces with different historical trajectories and ideological nuances have achieved first municipal power and later national office in several Latin American countries. At the same time, social movements—from indigenous and peasant movements in Bolivia, Ecuador and Mexico to the piquetero movement in Argentina—have become central forces in the political life of those countries, to the point of decisively shaping the profile and rhythm of change of local and national governments. The most recent and visible example of the advance of the left is the election of Fernando Lugo as President of Paraguay, a country with a very long tradition of rule by the right and ultra-right. The victory by the Catholic Bishop and leader of the Alianza Patriótica para el Cambio (APC, Patriotic Alliance for Change) put an end to 61 years of authoritarian and corrupt administration by the Colorado Party (PC), the same party that had sustained the brutal dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner. In statements recorded in the Spanish newspaper El País, Lugo declared that the electoral results of 20 April 2008 amounted to “a victory for the new Latin American left” and that his government would be based on a “preferential option for the poor”. This resurgence has taken social and political analysts by surprise, and their work is thus yet to take systematic account of them. As for the few analyses that do exist—thoroughly reviewed in Chapter I—two gaps are discernible. One is a lack of comparative or regional perspective. The other is the lack of an overview of the left that includes parties, governments and social movements, and the relationships between these three types of political actors, as work to date has tended to concentrate only on either partisan politics or on grassroots moblisation. This book is a product of the realisation that there is a gap to bridge between recent political trends and actual research-based knowledge about them. In an effort to provide such a bridge, we organised a three-year study on the emergence and consolidation of a new Latin American left. Due to the breadth and the explicitly comparative character of the project, we invited a group of Latin American political and social analysts with outstanding academic track records to examine the past, present and future of the left in their countries of origin. On the basis of a common research agenda and the collective discussion of drafts, authors analysed parties, governments and social movements in ten countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Uruguay and Venezuela. Seven case studies were finally included in this volume, with those on Ecuador, El Salvador and Nicaragua being excluded for strictly editorial reasons. The country studies are complemented by an introductory text and two essays taking a broader look at the new left in Latin America. The original studies were presented at an international conference on The New Latin American Left: Origins and Future Trajectory, held in Madison on 29 April 29 to 2 May 2004 and jointly organised by the A.E. Havens Center for the Study of Social Structure and Social Change at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute (TNI). The conference offered an unprecedented space for constructive, critical dialogue involving both activists and analysts, authors of the case studies as well as political and social leaders of the left in ten countries. The participation of social and political leaders enriched not only the quality and depth of debate at the meeting, but also the subsequent exchanges around the case studies resulting in this book. . . . A first version of this book was published in Spanish in April 2005: La Nueva Izquierda en América Latina: Sus Orígenes y Trayectoria Futura (Bogota: Grupo Editorial Norma). Given the rapid succession of developments in Latin America since the previous edition’s publication—in which history appears to be advancing at a much more accelerated pace than in other regions in the world—all the texts of the original version were revised and updated by the authors through May 2007 (with some subsequent corrections).
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