The resurgent right in Latin America and the challenge for revolutionaries
SANTIAGO—Only six years ago, the left in Latin America was hailing the estadillo social (social explosion) in Chile as a marker of a continental resurgence in the class struggle. Similar developments were occurring in Ecuador.
Fast forward to this year, and Ecuador’s leader, Daniel Noboa, was one of three Latin American presidents to attend Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington, along with Argentina’s Javier Milei and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. Milei has just claimed a victory in the midterm elections and is preparing to extend the workday to twelve hours and make holiday leave an employer prerogative. Most emblematically, the political party-movement that for many represented the hopes of a sustained resurgence of popular struggles and a left political alternative, the Movement for Socialism (MAS) in Bolivia, has completely imploded.
With the Cochabamba rebellion in 2000, the emergent political movement in Bolivia had re-awakened the left’s imagination and put the issue of movements “taking power” back on the debate stage. Bolivia became an international reference point. John Holloway’s Change the World Without Taking Power played out in all its messiness on this stage. In its early days, the MAS’s “democratic and cultural revolution” was celebrated as the success of a new model. In the 2009 elections, the MAS won 64 percent of the votes, which was unheard of in Bolivian political history. Then it won 61 percent in 2014 and a still convincing 55 percent in 2020.
In August, the MAS lost 73 seats, leaving it with two in a lower house of 130. Bolivia is now back on the merry-go-round, like Brazil and Peru, of alternating centre-left and far-right regimes trying to resuscitate the neoliberal model. In Peru, the far-right-dominated coalition is taking no chances. On 24 October, the judiciary sentenced leftist congressional representative Guillermo Bermejo to fifteen years in prison for allegedly having ties to leaders of Shining Path, an outlawed guerrilla organisation. Bermejo was emerging as a potential presidential challenger.
Enter Chile, Latin America’s model neoliberal regime and origin story of capitalist shock treatment economics under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-89). For decades, Chile has been lauded by neoliberal ideologues for its so-called economic stability, market freedoms, competitiveness and innovation. The country boasts the highest GDP per capita in Latin America and is one of just four continental members of the World Bank’s high-income category. The 2025 Allianz Global Wealth Report ranks Chile 34th in the world, above Mexico (43rd), Brazil (45th), Colombia (49th), Peru (51st) and Argentina (55th).
Chile encapsulates the meaning of neoliberal “success”. In plain language, you find something that the national economy can produce and profitably sell on the world market, you squeeze the working class for every possible cent to maximise productivity, and bingo, economic growth (for some). Chile’s extractivist economy—highly specialised in and dependent on copper and lithium exports—has maintained high growth rates at the expense of manufacturing, and with a susceptibility to commodity price fluctuations and a generally weak currency, leading to high import prices.
The result of this neoliberal “success” is that Chile remains one of the most unequal countries in the world: only 28 of 151 countries with data collected in the World Inequality Database present worse than Chile. The richest 10 percent own 80 percent of all national wealth; the top 1 percent own half. Almost half of Chilean workers earn less than 600,000 pesos monthly, equivalent to less than A$1,000. Only 5 percent of workers earn more than A$4,000 a month. Yet the cost of living is not far off Australia, a litre of milk here setting you back around A$2. In addition, unemployment, at 8.5 percent, is high even by Latin American standards, and 26.2 per cent of employment is in the informal sector.
Not surprisingly, Chile’s “success” comes with permanent volatility—and not just economic. Working-class history here is steeped in struggle. Over the course of a century, it birthed several mass party organisations influenced or led by Marxists: the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Revolutionary Left Movement, and the Popular Unitary Action Movement, to name a few.
This history casts a shadow over capitalist stability, so much so that post-dictatorship neoliberalism has relied on the calming influence of centre-left governments, which have held six out of eight presidencies since 1990. The two Pinochetista presidencies of Sebastián Piñera (2010-14 and 2018-22) both fuelled important estadillos sociales: the mass student-led protests of 2011 and the even bigger explosion of 2019, which demanded a new constitution. Both governments controlled by the traditional right in these years generated institutional crises for Chilean capitalism.
Chile heads into presidential elections this month with a sense of trepidation. On the one hand, the right has been gaining ground since the defeat of the 2019 estadillo’s aspirations: while 80 percent of voters in an October 2020 plebiscite supported constitutional change, only 38 percent voted for the proposed new constitution the following year. Once students and the working class had been demobilised, the right took the initiative.
Since former student leader Gabriel Boric was elected president in 2022, the political situation has worsened. His centre-left government’s tepidness has increasingly emboldened the traditional right and invited the growth of a new radical far right. A recently published survey suggests that, in the five years since the estadillo, the proportion of people identifying with right-wing ideas has increased from 18 percent to 38 percent. The shift is fundamentally due to the centre-left’s association with neoliberal politics sprinkled with piecemeal, symbolic and inadequate social measures.
Dissatisfaction with centre-left politics manifested clearly in the June primaries organised by the ruling centre-left block. The Communist Party’s candidate, Jeanette Jara (minister for labour and social provision in Boric’s government), trounced her main opposition, Carolina Tohá (from the Party for Democracy, a right-wing split from the Socialist Party) and Gonzalo Winter (from Boric’s Broad Front). Jara’s 60 percent reflected aspirations for a more decisive left-wing program.
In the historical spirit of the Communist Party, fearing a radicalisation that would split the Popular Front with the bourgeois political parties that are part of the current government, Jara’s campaign since June has largely followed the agenda set by the right. She has emphasised her anti-immigration and public security credentials while wooing the most right-wing elements in the governing coalition, in particular the Christian Democrats.
Jara will win the first round of the presidential elections but will likely face one of three right-wing candidates in the run-off: Evelyn Matthei, the candidate of the Independent Democratic Union, representing the traditional, unreconstructed Pinochetista right and a mirror political reflection of the Chilean capitalist class; José Antonio Kast, from the far-right Republican Party; or Johannes Kaiser, founder of the radical far-right National Libertarian Party, styled along Trump and Milei lines but arguably more offensive.
Regardless of her opponent, Jara will come armed with a blunt instrument: a centre-left program incapable of fundamentally tackling the country’s social and economic problems and bound to a government associated with growing unemployment and underemployment, social spending cuts and the repression of mobilised opposition.
Jara’s opposition will be armed with a far-right, populist agenda that claims to understand the general discontent and promises a new, shinier nationalism, robed in racist anti-immigrant rhetoric, and blaming everyone but the capitalist class for the country’s problems.
In the global context of authoritarianism becoming the new normal of capitalist democracy, a victorious far right will double down on every channel of exploitation (pushing down wages, pensions and social spending) with a confidence that will not spare state repression, aiming to isolate the more politically advanced sections of the working class. If Jara wins, it will be “más de lo mismo” (more of the same), a continuing weight holding down the radicalisation of larger contingents of the working class, unable to resolve the problems borne of a model of accumulation nearing exhaustion, and fanning the spread of far-right ideas.
If Chile does elect a “communist” president, it will not signal any major change. However, it will create new contradictions and opportunities for the revolutionary left. The Communist Party is not the post-Marxist left of the Broad Front. The CP’s history, especially its role in the anti-dictatorship movement in the 1980s, ties it to a political memory that the new left cannot claim. That political memory is an important glue shared by the working class’s more combative and radicalised elements. Every high school and university student protest, every major workers’ struggle, all manifest this political memory.
This combativeness has barely got a look in during the presidential elections, bar the propagandistic interventions of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers Party, running 23 candidates in the parliamentary elections, and the Maoist Chilean Communist Party (Proletarian Action), whose presidential candidate has raised demands such as the nationalisation of the mines, an issue the centre-left won’t touch but which is critical to any meaningful left governmental program.
If Chile elects a far-right president, it will encourage the hawkish sensibilities of the Trump administration. US imperialism hopes to regain influence in Latin America in order to boost its global pretensions. An alignment of far-right governments in Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia might even give a green light to the unimaginable—a US intervention in Venezuela. That would be a particularly complicated endeavour given that the Venezuelan military is not a ready-made proxy for imperialism.
The challenge for the revolutionary movement continent-wide is to build influence amid the instability of a spent economic model that creates a merry-go-round of governments, dissolving previously long-lasting parties and alliances, creating monsters in an instant, and seemingly scattering political memory in the whirlwind.
It’s a challenge that must be accepted.
