ABSTRACT
The electoral victory of center-left regimes in the first decade of the new millennium in a swath of Latin American countries (Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay) and the search for a new ideological identity to justify their rule, led ideologues and the incumbent presidents to embrace the notion that they represent a new twenty-first century version of socialism (21cs). Prominent writers, academics and regime spokespeople celebrated a totally new variant of socialism, as completely at odds with what they dubbed the failed twentieth-century, Soviet-style socialism. The claims of the advocates and publicists of 21cs of a novel political-economic model rest on what they ascribe as a radical break with both the free market neoliberal regimes that have dominated the political landscape, and the statist version of socialism embodied by the former Soviet Union as well as China and Cuba.
