ABSTRACT

Elections in Latin America keep showing that the region retains its capacity to surprise observers, as well as a potential to generate expectations. The election in 2002 of a trade union leader as Brazilian President was followed by the perhaps equally unexpected election of a relatively unknown former left-wing politician from Patagonia as President of Argentina in 2003 and by that of Tabaré Vásquez in 2004, in the first center-left victory since Uruguay’s return to democracy in the mid-1980s. What appeared to be a regional shift to the left was confirmed by the failure of the Venezuelan opposition to recall President Hugo Chávez at the 2004 referendum, allowing him to cement a close alliance with the Cuban government and to stand in defiance of Washington within the region. The trend then appeared to continue with the election of Michelle Bachelet as President of Chile and Evo Morales as President of Bolivia: respectively, an agnostic, divorced, single mother, former victim of torture under the military, stemming from the most militant wing of the Socialist Party, and an Amerindian leader, former head of the coca farmers’ movement and also a militant leftist, both equally unorthodox. That was followed by Chávez’s reelection and by the victories of Rafael Correa in Ecuador, the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and more recently of Alvaro Colom in Guatemala.