◼ POLITICS Bloomberg Businessweek November 25, 2019DAVID DIAZ ARCOS/BLOOMBERG. *SCOTLAND AND WALES POLL FROM SEPTEMBER 2019, NORTHERN IRELAND POLL FROM JUNE 2018
● The protests upending governments were
both a total surprise and entirely predictableLatin America
Splits at the Seams
▼ An indigenous woman
at a protest in EcuadorIn Chile it was sparked by a minor increase in the
capital’s subway fare. In Ecuador it was the end of
fuel subsidies; in Bolivia, election irregularities. But
the result has been the same: Across the region, the
people are in revolt.
With almost three dozen countries and more
than 600 million inhabitants, Latin America defies
easy generalization, which makes it difficult to pre-
dict what will come next. In that sense, the current
state of widespread, down-with-the-system rage has
parallels with the Arab Spring, which began in 2010,
and the collapse of the Soviet Union two decades
earlier. “There were a lot of cracks, but no one saw
it coming,” says Javier Corrales, a professor of polit-
ical science at Amherst College in Massachusetts, of
events in Bolivia and elsewhere in the region.
Two common factors stand out, he suggests:
commodity dependence and the middle income
trap, the stagnation that often sets in after a popula-
tion climbs out of extreme poverty and then strug-
gles to achieve further development. Latin Americais the most unequal, lowest-growth major region
in the world right now, offering a cautionary tale
for other parts of the globe with similar dynamics.
“Inequality is the main cause of the disenchant-
ment being felt by citizens throughout the region
in the face of a stunned political establishment yet
to understand that the current development model
is unsustainable,” wrote Alicia Bárcena, the exec-
utive secretary of the United Nations’ Economic
Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean,
in a recent essay. The people want to eradicate the
culture of privilege, she added.
Theregionis caughtbetweencompetingmod-
elsofgovernment:leftistpopulismandmarket-
oriented liberalism. Governments of each type have
been plagued by incompetence, corruption, and a
failure to meet social demands. “People are angry
at their political systems,” says James Bosworth,
author of the weekly newsletter Latin America Risk
Report. “There’s an anti-incumbent wave, and gov-
ernments haven’t dealt with the roots of the prob-
lem, and those problems aren’t going away.”
Politicalleadershipremainsinthehandsofa
few,whosomehowkeepcyclingback.Bolivia’sEvo
Moraleshadrunthecountryfor 14 years before the
military forced him to resign in the face of protests.
Chile’s Sebastián Piñera and Michelle Bachelet have
alternated in power since 2006, and Argentina’s
Cristina Fernández is coming back as a vice pres-
ident after ruling from 2007 to 2015. Having left
jail on Nov. 9, Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,35