The Success of the Left in Latin America: Untainted Parties, Market Reforms, and Voting Behavior

Introduction

Introduction The Rise of Leftist Parties in Latin America The Existence of a Leftist Trend S ince the final years of the twentieth century, many Latin American countries have elected governments that identi- fied themselves with the ideological Left. In 1999 Hugo Chávez, a former participant in a plot to overthrow the government, was elected president of Venezuela after campaigning against market-oriented reforms and promising to upend the old social order and improve the lives of the poor. Brazil also veered toward the Left with the victory of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) candidate, Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, in the 2002 general elections. Lula was reelected in the second round of the 2006 election. The permanence of the PT was tested in the 2010 election : Lula was not allowed to compete for reelection again, but Brazilians voted for his political protégée, Dilma Rousseff, who became the first female president of the country. In Argentina a left-wing political faction of the Peronist Party headed by Néstor Kirchner won the 2003 election; and again in 2007 the party’s candidate, this time Kirchner’s wife, Cristina Fernández, won the presidency. In neighboring Uruguay, the Frente Amplio , a left-leaning coalition party that has steadily increased its electoral base since its founding in 1971, finally gained the presidency in 2004.The Frente Amplio was reelected in 2009, and José Mujica, a former member 1 of theTupamaros urban guerrilla group, became president. Chile was governed by Concertación, a Center-Left coalition, from its return to democracy in 1989 until 2010, when a right-of-center coalition headed by Sebasti án Piñera won the election. Prior to 2010, the Chilean government alternated between social democrats and socialists. The Concertación party’s candidate, Michelle Bachelet, a member of the Socialist Party who campaigned in favor of a more egalitarian income distribution, also won the 2005 presidential election. Also in 2005, Bolivians elected Evo Morales , the presidential candidate of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) and an important leader of the coca producers’ union, giving him the reins of one of the poorest and most unequal countries in Latin America. In Mexico, Manuel López Obrador, the presidential candidate for the Partido Revolucionario Democrático (PRD), lost the election held in July 2006 by less than 1 percent of the votes in a very controversial contest. At the end of 2006, Nicaragua and Ecuador chose leftist political parties to lead their governments. Daniel Ortega, president of Nicaragua from 1985 to 1990 and leader of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN), was reelected in November 2006. In Ecuador, Rafael Correa won the presidency in the second round of the election with the support of leftist political parties and indigenous movements. More recently, Alvaro Colom and his Center-Left party, Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE), won the 2007 election in Guatemala; and in the 2008 presidential election in Paraguay, Fernando Lugo, candidate of Alianza Patriótica por el Cambio (APC), a coalition that includes leftist parties and social organizations, defeated the Colorado Party, which had governed for sixtyone years. The last country that elected a left-of-center government is El Salvador. After several years during which the right-wing Alianza Republicana Nacional, known as Arena, had been in charge of the government, the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) won the 2009 election, bringing to the presidency Mauricio Funes, the first FMLN candidate who is not a former guerrilla commander. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it was possible to question the very existence of a movement toward the Left, as countries such as Colombia and Mexico had elected governments that positioned 2 The Success of the Left in Latin America themselves closer to the ideological Right. After a decade, however, almost two-thirds of the region is under the “pink tide” (fig. 0.1), a term used by New York Times reporter Larry Rohter in 2005 to express the idea that a diluted trend leftward is sweeping the continent. Rohter, describing the success of the leftist Frente Amplio in Uruguay, refers to ideological changes in the region as “not so much a red tide as a pink one” (Rohter 2005). There is no doubt that, pink or red, most of the governments elected during the first ten years of the century are located on the left...