Second turn of the progressive cycle in Latin America and the Caribbean. Advances, tensions and setbacks: a provisional balance

Abstract

In Latin America and the Caribbean, since 2018 and 2019, a new political and historical turn has begun to develop that we have considered as the second turn of the progressive cycle. The electoral victory of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in Mexico, will be followed by other triumphs of social and political alliances that integrated popular interests (with greater or lesser prominence) in Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Honduras, Colombia, Brazil, Guatemala. These new progressive administrations joined the tenacious persistence of the national-popular, revolutionary or Bolivarian governments of Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia (with the interregnum of the coup d'état reversed in just one year) and other governments of the small island states (such as Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Dominica). Although the right has strengthened and radicalized as a reaction to the first phase of the progressive cycle and has generated scenarios of social and political polarization, the regressive forces have lost government positions. However, our analysis is not limited to an institutionalist view of the political cycle that only takes into account changes in government, but we have focused both on the processes of popular struggles, from below, and on their impact on political superstructures, from above, which are expressed in the modification of the relationships of institutional, governmental and state forces. In this article, our study problem consists of tracing the materialization of the correlations of forces that lead to proposing, as a working hypothesis, that a second turn of the progressive cycle is developing in Latin America and the Caribbean.