Tulia Falleti and Emilio Parrado have put together a group of stellar scholars to discuss a great variety of topics that have been central in the last decades of Latin American social dynamics. The panorama includes contributors who go beyond political science, including sociologists, anthropologists, lawyers, historians, and economists. Even though individual chapters are not interdisciplinary, the volume offers a multidisciplinary perspective focused on the social, political, cultural, economic, and legal dimensions of Latin America.
This edited volume is structured in four parts that organize the enormous variety of topics covered, a difficult task given so many foci from such diverse points of view and scholarly approaches. The topics are covered by a first section on “models of development,” a second on “democracy,” a third on “citizenship,” and a final one on “decolonization.” However, the chapters within each section cover many more issues in addition to those mentioned. For instance, in the first section, only the first chapter by Maristella Svampa actually discusses a model of development: neoextractivism. The other chapters discuss regional integration and social and fiscal policies.
There are some chapters that offer (implicit) dialogues among contributors, such as the discussion about key policies that might allow for the reduction of socioeconomic inequality in Latin America. On the one hand, Nora Lustig and Claudiney Pereira demonstrate that there was an impressive reduction of inequality under some left-wing governments (mainly in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay), and sparse improvements in countries that continued with the neoliberal path (mainly Peru and Mexico) due to a different combination of fiscal and social policies. On the other hand, Evelyne Huber and John Stephens show that social investment on education is as important as redistributive policies from a long-term perspective (since 1960) for the whole region.
There are some chapters that cover topics linked to the book title, such as the debate concerning the interpretation of the path and type of transformation ongoing in Venezuela since the Bolivarian Revolution. George Ciccariello-Maher says that Venezuela is more than postneoliberal, moving “toward the consolidation of a dispersed form of communal power that coexists tensely and, increasingly, in open antagonism toward the liberal-representative apparatus” (p. 115). David Smilde offers a different interpretation of the course taken by Bolivarian Venezuela. Inspired by Michael Mann’s (1986–2013) The Sources of Social Power perspective, Smilde applies an original neo-Weberian argument: he argues that Venezuela is going toward a full conflict (i.e., composed of a multidimensional network of conflicts) that polarizes society. Beyond their different interpretations, Ciccariello-Maher and Smilde agree that purely liberal understandings of processes such as the Bolivarian Revolution are too narrow.
Other authors draw our attention to the way in which liberalism’s interpretive presuppositions themselves produce a liberal ethos that affects many scholars when studying the democratic experimentation happening in Latin America. For instance, Oscar Vega Camacho proposes an analysis that combines decolonial thought and the idea of plurinationality in Bolivia. And on the basis of an analysis of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, and Venezuela, Thamy Pogrebinschi argues that “[o]nly a proper appraisal of Latin America’s experimentation with participation and deliberation and its interfaces with representative institutions may explain why the latter have supposedly constantly failed” (p. 260). Different from this is the view of Gisela Zaremberg, Ernesto Isunza Vera, and Adrian Gurza Lavalle, who distrust these participatory experiences when analyzing Mexico.
The contributions also include chapters that do not engage in dialogue directly with others in the volume, such as Maristella Svampa’s argument that there is apparently a new consensus on economic policy based on a neoextractivist model that dominates twenty-first-century economies in Latin America. Unfortunately, the lack of debate (even implicit) with other contributions to this volume on a topic that is so controversial is a major limitation. Left unanswered is the question of the long-term economic analysis of the reprimarization of Latin American economies that had been happening long before the Left entered into power. We could think not only of long-term cases such as Chile’s rentier logic based on copper and Venezuela’s rentier state based on oil, but also of a quasi-colonial pattern that is constantly present in banana, coffee, cacao, or petroleum-based economies, such as Ecuador, Costa Rica, Colombia, Venezuela, and—to a certain extent—even Mexico. Thus, it is unclear if—in stricto sensu—neoextractivism is so new for Latin America, or if it is a legacy of the colonial period that has persisted until the present day neoliberal insertion of the region into the global economy.
At its best, this collection offers a sometimes difficult dialogue among chapters that provides a rewarding overview of many important issues being grappled within Latin America. For this reason, the volume’s title seems misleading, as it is not a collection that is focused on the Left in government, and not even on transformations that happened in the region since the Left entered into power. The volume also covers right-wing/neoliberal governments (Mexico, Colombia, Peru, mainly) as well as left-wing/populist cases (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela, mainly).
Moreover, the volume also covers topics that are completely unrelated to the twenty-first century (a period characterized by the left turn or second wave of incorporation), or even those that started in the 1980s and continued beyond the second incorporation, such as regional integration through Mercosur (Isabella Alcañiz) and intraregional migration (Marcela Cerrutti). The variety of topics that are not linked to the left turn include, among others, Roberto Gargarella’s analysis of the origins of nineteenth-century constitutionalism and early twentieth-century bills of rights in Latin America’s hyper-presidentialisms; Irina Carlotta (Lotti) Silber’s ethnography of postwar El Salvador and the historical longue durée of wars; and Juliet Hooker’s historiographic debate on the anti-imperialist thoughts of José Vasconcelos and the links with his idea of the Latin American multicultural mestizo identity. While quite interesting on their own, these chapters also add complexity to the central focus promised by the volume’s title.
As such, Latin America since the Left Turn does not fit in easily with the discussions of the “pink tide,” “left turn,” or “second wave of incorporation” that have been developing among scholars from the North and South of the Americas, as well as some UK colleagues. Nevertheless, while lacking a common focus, the volume offers an extremely wide panorama of different interpretations of Latin America. Perhaps, though a couple of chapters might not have fit perfectly, it could have been called Perspectives on Contemporary Latin America. This title might have prepared the reader for a guide book to some of the crucial contemporary debates in Latin America that go beyond the “Left Turn.”
