After George W. Bush was inaugurated in 2001, the first country he visited was Mexico, and the first world leader he hosted at a White House state dinner was Mexican President Vicente Fox, on Sept. 5. The message was clear: The United States was going to build or rebuild bridges to Latin America. But six days later, the U.S. effectively stopped paying attention to the rest of the Western Hemisphere.
That's an exaggeration, of course. The U.S. continued to drop defoliant on Colombian coca fields, push for a hemisphere-wide trade pact, and at least tacitly back a brief coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. But after 9/11, U.S. foreign policy turned first toward Afghanistan, then Iraq, and every other country was left with one question: Are you with us or against us?
When it came to invading Iraq, Latin America was against Bush, and that was that. But if the U.S. relegated Latin America to squeaky-wheel status, Latin America was still paying attention to Washington. Whether its leaders were railing against U.S.-led economic restructuring in their nations, or portraying the U.S. as an imperialistic bogeyman, one Latin American nation after another veered to the left, sometimes pretty dramatically so.
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Chavez in Venezuela was the first, but his formula of oil revenue, expanded programs for the poor, and virulently anti-U.S. rhetoric soon took hold in Bolivia (Evo Morales, elected 2005), Ecuador (Rafael Correa, elected 2006), Nicaragua (Daniel Ortega, elected 2006), and Peru (Ollanta Humala, elected 2011). In Latin America's biggest and most developed nations, more moderate leftists took control, notably Luis Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil (2003), Nestor Kirchner in Argentina (2003), and Michelle Bachelet in Chile (2006).
(Fox, elected in Mexico as a conservative just a few months before Bush, was an anomaly in many ways, but his election was still a big change, ending 71 years of center-left, often corrupt, one-party rule by the PRI.)
As impressive as this shift leftward was the fact that it was achieved at the ballot box, through democratic elections not armed revolution. Today's Latin American left came of age during a time of repression, murder, torture, and mass disappearances by right-wing military juntas and dictatorships in the 1970s and '80s, stretching from the tip of South America all the way up to Guatemala, on Mexico's southern border.
Bachelet's father, Brig. Gen. Alberto Bachelet, died while being detained and tortured by the government of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who seized power in Chile in 1973. In Argentina, Kirchner was a sympathizer of the leftist Peronist Montenero insurgency, brutally stamped out by the junta that took control through a coup in 1976. In Brazil, Lula was briefly jailed in the late '70s by that country's military government for organizing labor union strikes. Ortega was jailed and tortured by the Anastasio Somoza government before he helped overthrow Somoza in the 1979 Sandinista revolution.
Democracy has its limitations for ambitious politicians, though, and now, in 2015, the list of Latin American leaders looks strikingly familiar: Chavez died in 2013, but his Chavista movement lives on in President Nicolas Maduro, Chavez's final vice president and current hagiographer; Morales is still president of Bolivia; Correa is still president of Ecuador; Ortega's still in charge in Nicaragua; Humala is president of Ecuador; Lula's chief of staff, Dilma Rousseff, is president of Brazil; Kirchner's wife, Cristina Fernandez, is president of Argentina (Kirchner died in 2010); and Bachelet is back in office in Chile, after a four-year break.
There are ample signs that many of these leaders have overstayed their welcome. Their approval numbers have tanked to 30 percent or lower, driven by corruption and other scandals and slowing economic growth. "Many of these governments rode frustration with high levels of inequality and corruption to power," University of Texas professor Raul L. Madrid tells The Associated Press. "But you can't rail against the establishment as effectively as you once did when you are the establishment at this point."
It's easy to be beneficent when you're popular, but many of the crop of democratically elected leftists are, to various degrees, turning to political repression as things get tough. While no government is as bad as the Operation Condor years, when right-wing caudillos killed tens of thousands of dissidents, some countries, notably Venezuela, are getting uncomfortably close to the bad old days.
Chavez became increasingly autocratic as his years in office ticked up, and Maduro has ramped up the crackdown on students, opposition politicians, and any remaining independent media. In Nicaragua, Ortega has been working to control the media and quash public dissent, and he has convinced the stacked Supreme Court to throw out Nicaragua's term limits, letting him run for office indefinitely.
Brazil's Rousseff, already working to get past one of Brazil's biggest corruption scandals, is facing widespread protests over tax hikes and increased public transportation fares. Fernandez is running Argentina like a cult of personality, declaring war on the country's largest media group, Clarin, and still reeling from the mysterious death of Alberto Nisman, a prosecutor who was apparently planning to order the president's arrest for allegedly conniving with Iran to cover up the 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish center.
The Latin American left has done much to help the long-ignored poor and marginalized in the region, but it earned its virtual lock on the region by democratically standing up to and systematically defeating the Latin American right and its excesses and abuses. It shouldn't squander that by becoming a funhouse mirror version of the repressive regimes it patiently, honorably obliterated.
