Democracy, Free Markets, and the Rightist Dilemma in Latin America

Abstract

During the first decade of the 21st century, the political Right was on the defensive in much of Latin America. This was an unexpected turn of events, given the alignment of political forces in the region at the end of the Cold War. Although the region’s political shift to the left after the late 1990s became a focal point of scholarly attention, its flip side — the decline of the Right — has too often been neglected. What explains this decline, and why did it follow so quickly on the heels of the Right’s advantageous position at the beginning of the 1990s? This paper explores the political challenges encountered by the Latin American Right during the unique historical juncture of the 1990s and early 2000s, a period with three distinctive political markers: it was post-Cold War, post-democratic transition, and post-economic adjustment. The confluence of these three factors buttressed the political position of the Right in the short-term, but over the longer term they weakened the institutionalized (i.e., partisan) political representation of conservative forces in much of the region, while creating new opportunities for a variety of leftist contenders.