Since the last decades of the twentieth century, South América has been undergoing deep political and economic changes that have moved the continent in a more democratic and liberal direction. Nonetheless, processes of political democratization and economic liberalization have not converged spontaneously within the region. On the contrary, these two structural processes have demonstrated considerable incompatibility. In answer to the neo-liberal agenda that was hegemonic throughout the 1990s, new leaders and governments have emerged at the turn of the century with more nationalist tendencies and tending toward the left of the political spectrum. Yet the heterogeneity of these movements contrasts sharply with the uniformity that prevailed in the immediately preceding decade. This article attempts to provide a brief description and explanation of these South American movements and counter-movements. The basic argument is that the rise of new leaders to power is nothing more than the plural way in which these societies have attempted to react, through the vote, to this contradiction of their times. The article provides a brief discussion of the rise and fall of neo-liberalism within the region and the limits of the nationalism that then emerges, as well as of the populist turn taken by peripheral institutionalism. It concludes by suggesting that the conventional analytical division between institutionalism and populism, or between neo-liberalism and anachronic nationalist models, will not take theoretical debate nor the practice of democracy very far. In truth, the contradictions of recent decades are promoting the re-definition of politics in South América, for the new century, in ways previously unseen and whose final results cannot be foretold.
South American politics; social change; democracy in Latin America; neo-liberalism; populism; nationalism; institutionalism
