As Covid-19 has washed over Latin America like a tsunami and the pillars of shaky economies have shuddered under lockdowns, the priority of profits over public welfare stands out in starker relief, restating the need for effective public policies and demanding government intervention more than ever. Such an unprecedented moment poses strong challenges for the left and Latin America’s social movements. Remobilizing in the wake of Covid and building lasting, independent social movement power are key tasks ahead.

Progressives glimpsed a ray of hope in Bolivia, where the landslide, 2020 presidential election of former finance minister Luis Arce in October stoked the momentum of left politics in the region. Journalists and left intellectuals speculated whether another ‘pink tide’ was in the making, as signs of left political vitality and opposition to right-wing governments bubbled up from Colombia to Chile. The so-called pink tide had comprised a surge of left-leaning, heads-of-state who came to power in the early 2000s as part of a backlash against neoliberal austerity (Mollona 2016). The new leaders included Luiz Ignacio ‘Lula’ da Silva in Brazil, Raphael Correa in Ecuador, Nestor Kirchner in Argentina, and the flamboyant Hugo Chávez in Venezuela who advocated for “21^st Century Socialism.” Yet by 2019, Evo Morales, Bolivia’s longest serving and first indigenous president (2006-2019), was the last remaining pink tide figure still in power. That year, a far-right coup supported by the United States and Brazil deposed him and persecuted members of his Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party, after he fled into exile. Although the resounding victory of Arce, a member of MAS and a Morales ally, against a violent, authoritarian regime was cause for optimism, the conservative counteroffensive that followed the pink tide in Latin America was far from derailed, and the future is still up for grabs.

In the early 21^st century, powerful social movements in Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Venezuela, and Argentina backed progressive leaders who rode a China-driven boom in prices for primary export commodities, such as oil, natural gas, minerals, and agro-industrial products, to power. State treasuries experienced massive revenue increases that funded a variety of targeted redistribution programs through cash transfers and other social welfare programs. These initiatives lowered unemployment and lifted people out of poverty for a time, without undermining the profits of multinational corporations or challenging the power of domestic elites to accumulate wealth. Venezuela led the way. High oil prices allowed the Chávez administration (1999-2103) to direct state revenues into a series of social programs in health, education, and housing known as misiones that drove a 57.8 percent drop in extreme poverty between 1999 and 2011 (Webber 2017: 20). Such redistributive programs, coupled with high rates of growth, lifted the popularity of Hugo Chávez to stratospheric levels among the poor, undergirded his international reputation, and enabled him to survive a coup and the ferocious hostility of an enflamed opposition. Yet the personality cult that surrounded Chávez, as well as other pink tide presidents, did little to further the organizational growth of the social movements that brought them to power. As these movements became partly incorporated into the state apparatus, their capacity for independent expression decreased, generating divisions among supporters.

Tensions within pink tide government coalitions became more apparent after 2012, when the commodity boom went bust, leaving state bureaucrats floundering and countries even more deeply subordinated to global capital since the 1980s shift to neoliberalism. Several leaders had already modified their positions to appease the domestic right and neutralize harsh opposition from the United States, the Organization of American States, and MERCOSUR, the South American trade bloc. As export earnings dried up, they socialized the costs of austerity to their bases to varying degrees, rather than directly challenging the power of capital (Webber 2017, Ellner 2019), and bureaucratized social movements did not mount an effective resistance. Popular support ebbed, and the door opened for the return of right-wing regimes through legal elections in some countries (e.g., Argentina and Ecuador) and illegal or quasi-illegal methods in others (Honduras and Brazil).

As pink tide governments lost power, their right-wing replacements cut back the social welfare programs that had lifted people out of poverty. They turned again to the privatization of public assets and sought closer political connections with the United States, while orthodox neoliberalism consolidated in Colombia under Álvaro Uríbe (2002-2010) and in Mexico under Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018). The rightward shift continued with the 2018 election of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and the 2019 conservative rout of the Uruguayan left-leaning Frente Amplio, which lost the presidency and its majority in the Chamber of Representatives and the Senate, after a decade and a half in power. These right-wing victories jolted the left, as Venezuela descended into chaos under the increasingly authoritarian rule of Chávez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro. They laid bare deep class and regional cleavages, as well as fractures within leftist coalitions.

Yet even before Arce’s landslide election in Bolivia, the resurgence of the left was visible in many countries. In Argentina, voters ejected Mauricio Macri in 2019 and swept the Peronist, former pink-tide president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner back to power as Alberto Fernández’s vice-president, where she positioned herself as a pivotal figure. Lula positioned himself to run again for president in Brazil, and in Ecuador, Andrés Arauz, a Correa protégé, was leading in the polls ahead of the presidential elections in February. In Chile, protests over metro fares in 2019 burgeoned into massive demonstrations against the right-wing administration of multi-millionaire President Sebastián Piñera and Chile’s deepening inequality, culminating in a 2020 national plebiscite to ditch the dictatorship-era constitution that put the private sector in charge of health, education, and pensions. In Colombia, what began as a labor strike in 2019 morphed into the largest anti-government protests in decades. Between 200,000 and a million people, led by indigenous people, student groups, and labor unions, mobilized in a series of demonstrations against inequality, corruption, police brutality, the weak implementation of the historic 2016 peace accords, and the continuing murder of rural activists under the government of far-right president, and Uríbe protégé, Ivan Duque. 

Whether or not this energy can be maintained is unclear. The challenges faced by the contemporary left are not the same as those confronted by pink tide leaders in the early 21^st century. Because the right rules in most countries, it is difficult for progressive leaders, like Fernández, to build international alliances. In addition, there is no rent-generating commodity boom to pay for social welfare initiatives. A global recession has depleted government coffers, while rising dept burdens undermine the maintenance of public services, and the uncontrolled Covid virus rampages like a zombie that refuses to die. The pandemic is tearing apart the social fabric, laying bare the contradictions of capitalism, as the death toll mounts. These interlinked phenomena have aggravated class, ethnic, gender, and regional schisms and imperiled public health. As the fault lines deepen, the contours of struggle that emerge will shape the post-pandemic future of the region.

The current recession began before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and is rooted in declining commodity prices and a slowdown of China’s growth engine. It has generated a contraction in gross domestic product (GDP), reversed improvements in the levels of absolute poverty and fed rising indices of government debt. All of this, in turn, has eroded governments’ capacity to respond to the Covid-19 crisis. According to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico are among the twenty nations with the most reported cases of Covid-19, and unsurprisingly, working class and indigenous peoples are feeling the brunt of the pandemic.

While the rich depend on private health care, indigenous and working people must turn to a shaky public health care sector, which, even in the best of times, cannot always provide adequate care due to years of government underinvestment. The Latin American Working Group reports that in the Trapeze region of the Amazon, where the borders of Brazil, Colombia and Peru meet, there are nearly 6,000 Covid cases but only two ventilators and no intensive care units to treat the most critically ill (Tisdale 2020). Similarly, in poor, urban neighborhoods across Latin America, the absence of clean water makes it impossible for residents and rural migrants to take preventive measures, like hand washing, and with families living in cramped, multi-generational households, social distancing is impossible, raising the risk of contracting the disease.

Covid has accelerated inequality in other ways, too. The decrease in remittances from migrant laborers, especially those in the United States, has deepened the economic crisis for peasants and the working class in Mexico and Central America. In El Salvador, for example, migrant remittances account for over 20 percent of GPD. Conversely, the fate of millions of migrants who have left their homeland is desperate. Nearly two million Venezuelan refugees in Colombia are ineligible for emergency resources and face rising discrimination and resentment from Colombians already pushed to the brink. They and migrants in other countries have found themselves trapped without employment or government assistance, and they are unable to return home because of travel restrictions. Stranded in precarious living environments, they are exposed to greater risk of contracting Covid.

Government lockdowns designed to tame the virus have demonstrated positive results in some areas. Yet with the informal economy becoming more generalized across the continent, they have forced citizens to choose between staying healthy and feeding their families, especially in countries like Bolivia, where 80% of the population labors in unregulated, precarious circumstances. Although governments have offered some financial aid so that people can stay home, this support is uneven and almost never enough. In Colombia, one of the strictest and longest lockdowns in Latin America made it easier for illegal groups to hunt down and kill social movement and human rights leaders in a country where 250 activists were murdered in 2020. Consequently, people not only risk their health but also the wrath of the security forces when they go out to work.

As states turn to the police and military to confront the Covid crisis, the further extension of repressive state power into daily life and the normalization of police power around compliance with public health measures becomes a matter of great concern. Once the lockdowns end, how will the security forces respond to social movement demands? How, too, will social movements, demobilized by the health crisis, regroup and make claims on the state? Pandemic restrictions have hobbled movements, limiting public mobilizations and confining leaders to social media, while the opposition ceases the political momentum.

The immediate future is likely to witness deteriorating living conditions, an ongoing health crisis, and political, economic, and social instability. Although there is some evidence that the defeat of Donald Trump and Bolsonaro’s mishandling of the pandemic are pushing politics back to the center in Brazil, after Bolsonaro’s party lost in mid-term municipal election, only time will tell. As Webber notes, one of the first post-pandemic battles to play out in Latin America will likely be around capital-led austerity drives. The fight over the austerity measures, and, most importantly, who pays for them will shapepost-pandemic political struggles and the future contours of society (Webber 2020), one which has already begun in Argentina (Goeury 2020). For a revitalized left, more directly challenging the power of the propertied class is important, so that the costs of austerity and the pandemic are not shifted onto the shoulders of indigenous people, peasants, students, working people and sectors of the middle class. Crisis represents opportunity as well as peril, and how social movements mobilize and reinvent themselves during an unprecedent pandemic will determine the policy direction of future left governments.

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Lesley Gill teaches anthropology at Vanderbilt University.

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Bibliography

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Goeury, Hugo. 2020. ‘Public Debt Defines First Year of Fernández Presidency’, NACLA Report on the Americas. https://nacla.org/news/2020/12/17/public-debt-imf-fernandez-president-argentina

Mollona, Massimiliano. 2016. “The end of the Latin American pink tide? An introduction.” FocaalBlog, 15 March. www.focaalblog.com/2016/03/15/massimiliano-mollona-the-end-of-the-latin-american-pink-tide.

Tisdale, Ian. 2020. ‘Why COVID-19 Disproportionately Damages Indigenous Communities in Latin America’. Latin America Working Group, https://www.lawg.org/why-covid-19-disproportionately-damages-indigenous-communities-in-latin-america/

Webber, Jeffrey. 2017. The Last Day of Oppression, and the First Day of the Same: The Politics and Economics of the New Latin American Left. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Webber, Jeffrey. 2020. Choosing between life and Capital in Latin America: Interview with Jeffery R. Webber. Marxist Review 20. https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/choosing-between-life-or-capital-in-latin-america-interview-with-jeffery-r-webber/

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Cite as: Gill, Lesley. 2021. “Can the Left Revive the ‘Pink Tide’ amid a Global Pandemic?” FocaalBlog, 17 January. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/01/16/lesley-gill-can-the-left-revive-the-pink-tide-amid-a-global-pandemic/