Cleaving a False Divide in Latin America (IRC)

Cleaving a False Divide in Latin America
By Juan Antonio Montecino

As Latin America shifts further left on the political spectrum, U.S. pundits are frantically struggling to synthetically partition the continent’s leftist leaders between so-called populist demagogues and sound pragmatists.

While most analysts wrongly see a Latin America torn between Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Chile’s Michelle Bachelet—between ideological and pragmatic governance—the new wave of leftist leaders all blame the last 20 years of neo-liberal “reforms” for the continent’s present ills and agree on the need for new and alternative development models. What is surprising is that for all the praise of pragmatic thinking present in the debate, this dichotomy is itself ideological to the core.

Juan Antonio Montecino, a former Institute for Policy Studies intern, is a student at the University of British Columbia and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus (online at www.fpif.org).

See new FPIF article online at:

http://fpif.org/fpiftxt/3554