How the left blew it in Latin America
In the end, the populist revolutionaries who swept to power in Latin America a decade ago proved to be worse than the corrupt oligarchs they replaced. Instead of ushering in a new day of good governance and transparency, the Bolivarian revolution is fizzling out under the weight of its own massive corruption, ties to organized crime, intolerance and megalomania.
The promises of the rule of law, democratic openings, and authentic “people’s power” were mirages that have vanished. It will take years for the continent to recover from the wreckage of authoritarian populism that many initially thought held so much promise.
What is most disillusioning is that this discredited generation of revolutionary leaders had a real chance to substantially remake Latin America by offering a more inclusive, fair and less corrupt model of government.
Many of the leaders (Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, his successor Dilma, Rousseff in Brazil; Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua; Salvador Sánchez Cerén in El Salvador) had actually put their lives on the line to defeat the old authoritarian and exclusionary order. Others like Rafael Correa in Ecuador; Hugo Chávez in Venezuela; Evo Morales in Bolivia were genuine political outsiders with a real opportunity to create new governance models unmoored from the chokehold of traditional elites. Some, like Argentina’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, were simply megalomaniacal. All failed abysmally.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article73237642.html?ref=yfp#storylink=cpy
