Barry Cannon is widely known in Ireland because of his scholarly work and public statements on Bolivarian Venezuela. But in this book he has shifted his focus from chavistas and the Latin American ‘pink tide’ more generally to the Left's fierce opponents. His starting point is that that ‘pink tide’ did not turn into a tsunami and that ‘a large part of the region remains under Right or Right-leaning rule, or at least heavily influenced by neoliberal orthodoxy’ (p. 2). How did that happen? How did the Right resist the Left-inspired push of the last 15 years?
This book reflects an outstanding effort to build a multinational, cross-disciplinary and empirically-based explanation of a perennial Latin American paradox: landowners, businessmen and other capitalists have long held economic and social power, but right-wing parties have traditionally shown electoral weakness and ideological insecurity. Cannon critiques traditional political science for its narrow perspective on the Latin American Right, which has led to the perception that right-wing parties do not satisfy theoretical expectations. The novel approach of this book is how the author connects the study of Latin American right-wing actors with the study of elite power, a topic well-rooted in sociological tradition. As Cannon shows, right-wing politics can be better understood when placed in the specific context of elite political and economic practices. Skilfully employing Michael Mann's The Sources of Social Power (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Cannon shows that the socio-economic elite possess different kind of resources that inhibit radical changes and even symbolical threats to its reproduction across time and the space. Military, ideological, economic and political clusters are widely available for the elites. But Cannon includes a fifth dimension of elite's power: the transnational arena, which is a key factor for a region highly dependent on foreign investments and loans. In this account, ‘it is not Rightist political parties which predominate, but rather the paramount expressions of economic (business group), ideological (church, media, think tanks) and military power’ (p. 16).
Chapter 3 highlights the rightist discourses in four countries. Through 63 interviews, Cannon convincingly shows that the pink tide opponents share an ideological neoliberal core in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Venezuela. The author suggests strongly that ‘the emphasis on personal responsibility and effort, the lack of trust in the state, and the unwillingness to accept state action to redress inequalities all are indicative of Right-wing attitudes and infused with neoliberalism’ (p. 30). The following chapter concentrates on what the author calls ‘Right-oriented state/society complexes’, that is to say, the intricate and apparently solid ideological and economic neoliberal arrangement that reproduces local elites’ interests. Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Peru and the Central American nations have been subject to long-lasting neoliberal regimes with low levels of state control, open trade regimes, concentrated media ownership and military participation within Pentagon-controlled anti-drug war alliances. In these countries, ruling neoliberal elites have built well-fortified positions across the five power clusters, which allow them to resist counter-hegemonic threats to that dominance and reduce the effectiveness and depth of inequity-reducing policies.
The fifth chapter analyses the Left-inspired threats to the neoliberal, Washington-supported economic order. Cannon offers a map of the identified (or possible) threats in the realms of the economy, ideology, international relations, armed forces and, obviously, national politics. Using the previously mentioned five clusters and indicators, the author measures the retrenchment of neoliberal rules under Left-inspired governments. He identifies three levels of threat to neoliberal hegemony in the region, from medium to high (Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Argentina), low to medium (Brazil, Uruguay, Nicaragua and El Salvador) and non-existent to low (Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, Honduras and Costa Rica).
The final chapter shows the full-scale right-wing repertoire to contest Left-inspired public policy and political proposals. Cannon identifies three kinds of strategies displayed by the elites: within the legal frame (such as elections), mobilisation practices (such as demonstrations and street politics, media campaign, economic destabilisation) and illegal or extra-constitutional activities (such as the coup d’état in Honduras in 2009 or recent paramilitary actions in Venezuela). The book supports the idea that the higher the level of threat to neoliberal elites, the more likely the use of diverse strategies to remove or reverse the threat; this menu of resources ‘can be activated depending on the strategic circumstances’ (p. 117).
The Right in Latin America is an excellent book not just for its deft combining of sociological elite power theory and studies on right-wing parties but also for the impressive amount of data collected from numerous interviews in four countries, from press and think tank documents, and from statistical sources. Cannon opined two years ago that ‘The Right is experiencing its most concerted challenge from the Left since the armed insurgences of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and up until the end of the Central American revolutions in the 1980s’ (p. 102). Things seem to have changed incredibly rapidly since then. Macri's electoral victory in 2015, Dilma Rousseff's impeachment in 2016 and the very conflictive year that Venezuela is currently experiencing suggest that the pink tide has already ebbed.
