Guest Editorial: Left Retrenchment and Right Resurgence in Latin America: Neoliberalism Redux?

Barry Cannon

This issue of Policy and Practice on the theme ‘New Models of Development: Lessons from Latin America’ is very welcome for a number of reasons.

First, Latin America is rarely discussed in terms of development these days – many agencies are pulling out of the region and indeed some of its larger states are now known as ‘emerging economies’ rather than developing countries. Yet some countries in the region – such as Honduras, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Paraguay or, indeed, Haiti if we include the Caribbean region – remain very poor and can only really be regarded as developing.

Second, the emphasis on learning from Latin America is welcome. Latin America’s development experience, I would contend, is not simply applicable to the ‘development context’ but also, if we take Payne and Phillips’s (2010) wider political economy concept of development, as relevant to all states including those traditionally regarded as ‘developed’.

Third, the issue is timely as Latin America may be going through one of its periodic historic shifts, as Gutiérrez and Vega Cantor’s article on the Latin American Left here seems to suggest, with a waning of the post-neoliberal Left, dominant in the region since the beginning of the millennium, and a resurgence of the neoliberal Right.

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