Latin America in crisis again

It wasn’t so long ago that British readers, on hearing about the incompetence and corruption of Latin America’s political leaders, could gasp, despair or smirk, depending on their own political leanings and the leaders in question, and rest assured that, for all the United Kingdom’s problems, they were immune to such folly. Institutions were stable, the rule of law was unshakeable, the economy was reliably solid and, besides, the good old Brits, born with an innate common sense that was the envy of the rest of the world, would never fall for such blatant chicanery. Those days are no more.

In Latin America, however, charlatans have long been part of the political landscape. From Mexico’s caudillos to the small-town sheriffs who ran much of Brazil’s impoverished northern half, to the military juntas that tortured and killed with impunity for much of the 1970s, the region’s familiarity with autocrats and dictators is as depressing as it is grim.

Will Grant’s book ¡Populista! The Rise of Latin America’s 21st-century Strongman is about the latest wave of those claiming to be salvadores de la patria, the leftist leaders who took power during the first part of the century. The presidents of the countries profiled — Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Cuba — mostly started out as democratic socialists, more Blair and Clinton than Marx and Engels, and for that reason their success was dubbed the Pink Tide.

The book’s title is unfortunate because not all of the presidents or regimes profiled were or are populist. Flawed though they were, the Bolivian leader Evo Morales was more popular than populist and the Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — once described by Barack Obama as ‘the man’ — was a democrat and a statesman.