This intervention offers a series of preliminary analytical arguments on the current Latin American political conjuncture. It argues that the period of progressive hegemony that characterized Latin America in the first decade and a half of this century has been succeeded by a much more volatile political period of ‘desitituent impasse’. The new era is marked by fragmentation and ephemerality, above all, but with a built-in, tendential advantage for the far-right, and novel structural challenges of global stagnation and inter-imperial rivalry for those new left and centrist-populist experiments that persist.
Pablo Stefanoni describes the present Latin American scenario as a ‘destituent moment’ – pervasive negative rejection of the political elite, inconformity, electoral volatility, the ascendance of ‘outsiders’, a crisis of representation, short-sighted political horizons, citizen discontent, and the absence of a sustained and coherent political and ideological north star (on the right or the left) (Stefanoni 2024). More than polarization and attendant contests for hegemony, it is rather fragmentation, fluidity, and the absence of hegemony that appear to constitute the order of the day. In this schema, the distinctive, cross-ideological characteristic of those in office throughout Latin America is precisely their ephemeral legitimacy, fleeting power, and fragile social composition.
Take Dina Boluarte, who became the President of Peru after serving as vice president in the short-lived, ostensibly left-wing administration of Pedro Castillo. Boluarte assumed office after the farce of Castillo’s attempted autogolpe, or self-coup, in December 2022. Boluarte quickly aligned with the right in Congress and gave the armed forces carte blanche to deal with mass protests calling for an end to her presidency. The result was over 60 killed. Today she continues to govern as the most unpopular president in the region, boasting a disapproval rating of almost 90% (Drinot 2022a, 2022b; Emanuele 2024; Stefanoni 2024: 4–5).
Latin America has entered a period of volatility, a novel political impasse, in which some progressive governments have stayed in office but at the cost of moving to the right and becoming more bureaucratic and authoritarian (Venezuela and Nicaragua), while others have been defeated by centre- or far-right governments through election (Mauricio Macri’s centrist defeat of the Peronists in Argentina in 2015 is an example of the former, and Javier Milei’s defeat of the Peronists in the same country in 2023 an example of the latter), while still others have been ousted by right-wing coup d’états (the Brazilian coup of 2016 that toppled Dilma Rousseff, and the Bolivian coup in 2019 that prevented Evo Morales from assuming office for a new presidential term, are two salient examples) (Gaudichaud et al. 2022).
The far-right
Unsurprisingly, there are signs of far-right resurgence that mirror trends across much of the rest of the world (The Economist 2024). The administrations of Milei (Argentina), Nayib Bukele (El Salvador), Daniel Noboa (Ecuador), and Luis Abinader (Dominican Republic) stand out (Dammert 2023; Ospina Peralta 2024; Piva 2023; Rodríguez 2024). Although Jair Bolsonaro is out of office in Brazil after his defeat at the hands of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in 2022, Bolsonarismo remains a potent socio-political force in the country and a leading light for the far-right throughout the region (Iamamoto et al. 2023; Nunes 2024; Webber 2020a). Luis Lacalle Pou’s right-wing coalitional government in Uruguay includes within it a far-right minority under the banner of Cabildo Abierto (Townhall Meeting) (Caetano 2023). In an effort to court far-right votes during his successful 2023 electoral campaign, Paraguay’s president Santiago Peña eulogized the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship (1954–1989) as a source of stability in the country’s history (Última Hora 2023). Although progressive candidate Gabriel Boric ultimately won the second round of the 2021 Chilean presidential elections, far-right José Antonio Kast – whose father was a Nazi and brother the labour minister and later president of the Central Bank under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship – won the first round and was key to the successful far-right mobilization to disapprove a new progressive constitution in a popular referendum on the draft text in 2022 (Heiss 2023).
New lefts
The destituent impasse likewise sets limits on the possibilities of the latest left governments in Chile under Gabriel Boric, and Colombia under Gustavo Petro. While Boric came to office riding the tailwinds of the 2019 social rebellion against neoliberalism in Chile, his administration quickly accommodated itself to lowering social expectations in an austere economic scenario, while realigning with figures from the discredited centre-left of the Concertación. The anti-neoliberal sentiments behind the 2019 rebellion were quickly displaced by the animating themes of crime and immigration. Kast’s far-right coalition capitalized on the new structures of feeling, promising an iron fist approach to law and order with an openly racist border policy, accumulating in the process sufficient momentum to defeat the proposed draft for a new progressive constitution in the popular referendum of 2022. Paradoxically, though, Kast’s brand of politics succumbed just as quickly to the destituent dynamics of the moment. After defeating the draft of the progressive constitution in a referendum, the far-right’s own attempt to build on that political momentum to pass a new Chilean constitution of its own making was also thwarted by popular plebiscite. The predominant sense of Boric’s administration, then, is one of missed opportunity and centrist accommodation. The constitutional impasse remains unresolved. At the same time, the momentum that Kast’s forces had enjoyed following the defeat of the progressive draft of the constitution rapidly dissolved in the wake of the right’s own failure to garner sufficient support for a constitutional rewrite of its own. Kast’s prospects for the next presidential election have been thrown into jeopardy as a result (Heiss 2023; Leighton 2024; Stefanoni 2024: 7–10).
On 19 June 2022, Petro won the second round of Colombia’s presidential election with 51% of the vote, defeating Rodolfo Hernández, the right-wing candidate, who obtained 47.4%. The politics of Petro’s eclectic coalition, Historic Pact, span from popular movements on the left associated with recent popular rebellions through to centre-right liberals whose commitments to change end with heterodox adjustments to the country’s neoliberal political economy (Jimenez Martin 2024). Petro’s victory in 2022 is only explicable against a backdrop of a pre-existing social crisis of deteriorating living conditions for millions of Colombians made sharply worse by the mishandling of the pandemic, a cycle of protests and movement-building over the last decade – peaking with the national strike of 2019, the youth demonstrations against police violence in 2020, and the unprecedented social rebellion in April 2021 – and the 2016 peace agreement, which despite subsequent setbacks opened up a new common sense rooted in a genuine horizon of possibility for transition out of war for the country (Jimenez Martin 2024).
Seen from the vantage point of Colombia’s comparatively violent and conservative political history – a century and a half of ‘oligarchic Conservative-Liberal duopoly’, followed in 2002 by Álvaro Uribe’s ‘hard-right counterinsurgency regime’ (responsible for ‘450,566 dead and another 121,768 “disappeared”, as well as 50,770 kidnapped and 8 million displaced’), and violent neoliberal continuity under Uribe’s successors, Juan Manuel Santos (2010–2018) and Iván Duque (2018–2022) – Petro’s accession to the presidency marks a sharp rupture. After all, he ran on a platform pledging ‘total peace’ through a renewal of the faltering peace process, progressive reforms in public health, education, pensions, labour law, gender and racial discrimination, and a green transition away from dependency on mining, agro-industry, and, especially, oil extraction (Hylton & Tauss 2022: 87). This remains true, even if Petro’s team implausibly imagines all of this to be achievable through the construction of, in the words of the inaugural presidential address, ‘a democratic, productive, non-speculative capitalism’, and even if the Historic Pact controls only 48 of 268 congressional seats, and so congressional stalemates have been inevitable (Jimenez Martin 2024). And yet, viewed from the perspective of the world conjuncture (ongoing stagnation, inter-imperial rivalry, far-right resurgence) and regional scenario (worsening stagnation and general political impasse, with poorer prospects for progressive forces than those on the far-right), it was immediately clear that the realization of even the most modest elements of Petro’s platform would be difficult to carry forward. And, indeed, that has proven to be the case over his first 2 years in office, with only tepid advances in tax reform, major setbacks to ‘total peace’, no signs of a green transition, and the absence of meaningful agrarian reform. The national development plan, pension reform, labour reform, and educational reform have all been indefinitely stalled or defeated in a hostile Congress.
Centrist populism
In Brazil, meanwhile, Lula has returned to office for a third term as president, narrowly defeating Bolsonaro in October 2022. However, when Lula opened his presidency in January 2023, he promised only a vacuous mix of ‘unity and reconstruction’, with no specific policy aims or political horizon, apart from the negative rejection of bolsonarismo. Such ‘slow-motion Lulismo’ has been characterized thus far by ‘dealmaking with capital and Congress, which remained dominated by conservative forces’, with ‘the overall effect’, being ‘to put [the] weak reformism [of his first two administrations] into an even lower gear’ (Singer & Rugitsky 2024). Meanwhile, the core supporters of bolsonarismo remain a potent socio-political force in the country, with a much more coherent ideological and political basis than, say, Milei enjoys in neighbouring Argentina (Webber 2020c).
A new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, was inaugurated in Mexico in October 2024. Succeeding Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Sheinbaum is likely to turn away from the charismatic theatre of AMLO’s personalism, and towards a more technocratic, social-democratic administrative governance style, even as Sheinbaum’s loyalty and debts to her predecessor will need to be performed so as to ensure the continuing support of the popular base he built, as well as to undergird her position in the face of inevitable new rounds of right-wing hostility. As the commentary on regional developments thus far has suggested, the terrain on which the new president will be forced to operate is much less hospitable to left-populism than was the era of AMLO’s popular rise during the mass mobilizations against electoral fraud in 2005–2006, as well the mass-mobilizational electoral campaign in 2018 out of which Morena’s so-called Fourth Transformation (4T) project was born. One tentatively optimistic reading suggests that ‘her victory may well bolster the region’s left in the face of the wider right-wing upsurge’ (Wood 2024: 68). Of course, it remains to be seen how well-grounded in global, regional, and domestic realities such optimism proves to be, but the present directionality across all these scales seems to foreshadow much stormier weather ahead. On the one hand, there is the historic momentum of the landslide electoral victory and the political significance of Sheinbaum being the country’s first female president, and yet the counter-veiling forces are considerable: an unpromising economic conjuncture, the likely renewal of a strong and aggressive right-wing opposition, heightening instabilities of ecological crisis, the persistence of organized criminal violence, and the internal divisions within Morena itself (Modonesi 2024). Added to all of this, of course, is the fact that, in November 2024, Donald Trump was re-elected to lead the behemoth north of Mexico.
The world-system
What is playing out in the Latin American scenario is a product of, as well as contribution to, the fluid global conjuncture. The world economy stagnates. The COVID-19 pandemic – or better, the dominant state responses to it – produces widespread inurement to mass death and largely makes invisible its crippling afterlives. The geopolitical terrain is marked by inter-imperial rivalry, war, and genocide. The cataclysmic ecological horizon is almost too grim to contemplate. The far-right is ascending through the interstices of a corroding liberal order. Regional trends in Latin America flow from and contribute to the international scenario just described.
The effect of the unprecedented stimulus policies in the core economies following the 2008–2009 crisis was double-sided. On the one hand, the global capitalist system was stabilized and a full-scale depression averted:
Classically, the system has used deep recessions to purge the least efficient capitals from the economy and therefore open up the road to a new wave of restructuring, technological innovation, managerial reorganizations, and much larger concentrations of capital that enable a new boom. (McNally 2024)
In the absence of a purge of the most inefficient capitals, no new boom has been forthcoming. Indeed the dominant capitalist economies have been in a ‘long depression’ since 2008, with slow growth trends in production, investment, and trade that are likely to persist throughout the remainder of this decade, at least. On this view, there have been only two comparative periods in the earlier history of modern capitalism, trending from about 1873 to 1895, and from 1929 to 1946 (Roberts 2024). The geopolitical path out of those long depressions involved heightening rivalry between extant great powers and newly emergent rivals – arms races, protectionism, and eventually two world wars (Anievas 2014; Silver 2003: chapter 4).
According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), average annual growth in the region was only 1% between 2015 and 2024. After a sharp contraction of −6.9% in 2020, growth rates were 7.0, 4.0, and 2.3% in 2021, 2022, and 2023, respectively (CEPAL 2024: 162). At the World Economic Annual Forum in 2023, ECLAC’s executive secretary, José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, pointed out that the regional growth rate between 2014 and 2023 was less than half the rate experienced in the ignominious ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s (ECLAC 2023a). Part of this story, of course, has been the destructive fallout of the pandemic, expressed economically in the deep recession of 2020, and sociologically in the extraordinary figures of excess mortality, alongside steep hikes in poverty, inequality, and unemployment. But it is crystal clear that even prior to the onset of COVID-19 the social situation in much of Latin America and the Caribbean had already deteriorated gravely since at least 2013, with the reversal of many of the modest but important improvements in poverty rates and income inequality achieved during the global commodity boom (2003–2012) (Webber 2020b). Estimated regional growth in 2024 was only 2.2%, and ECLAC projects roughly more of the same, 2.4% growth, for 2025. In recent years, the region has contributed less and less to world growth and employment expansion has been consistently low (CEPAL 2024: 11). Although the inflation rate has diminished from recent peaks, it continues to be higher than pre-pandemic levels and is expected to remain on that trend. Public debt levels are high, domestic and external interest rates remain high, and tax revenues are in decline, translating into a generalized contraction of fiscal room for manoeuvre. ECLAC foresees weakening job growth and investment alongside heightening social demands. The effects of financial volatility and waning growth and trade on a global scale are reverberating through much of the region (ECLAC 2023b). The structural limits of left-populism in the 21st century have contributed to the regional political scenario, and the Latin American left will need to imagine and experiment beyond the horizons of left-populist revival if it is to have any hope of escaping the destituent morass that characterizes the contemporary moment.
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Article and author details
This article was originally published by Sage in Capital & Class, and reproduced here under the terms of Creative Commons CC BY 4.0. Full citation: Webber, J. R. (2025). Latin America’s destituent impasse. Capital & Class, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/03098168251353413
Jeffery R Webber is a Professor in the Department of Politics at York University, Toronto. He is the author of a number of books on Latin American politics. Most recently, he is co-author of ‘The Impasse of the Latin American Left’ (Duke University Press, 2022). Webber is a member of the editorial board of Historical Materialism. https://orcid.org/0009-0005-7478-1529
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