ABSTRACT
Political crisis in Argentina and Venezuela, social mobilisation in Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, and state failure in Colombia. This is the Latin American political landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century. There are currently few countries in the region that can be described as increasingly stable; the cases of Chile, Costa Rica and Uruguay may be the exceptions that prove the rule in this regard, although they are not without their internal divisions and conflicts. This lack of stability can be explained to a large extent by the considerable social, political and economic upheaval that took place across the region during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Following a period of state-led agricultural transformation and industrialisation during the middle decades of the century, the continent was dominated by the strategies of militarism and economic neoliberalisation during the final decades. Both of these strategies gave rise to major reconfigurations in the social relations of Latin American societies.
