Different Perspectives on Twenty-first-Century Latin America

• Author: Steve Ellner
• Date: 01 January 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18808772
• Published date: 01 January 2019
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 224, Vol. 46 No. 1, January 2019, 282–284

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18808772

© 2018 Latin American Perspectives

282

Book Review

Different Perspectives on Twenty-first-Century

Latin America

by

Steve Ellner

Tulia G. Falleti and Emilio A. Parrado (eds.) Latin America since the Left Turn.

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.

The 15 essays in Falleti and Parrado’s Latin America since the Left Turn take in a wide

range of topics dealing with Latin American developments over recent decades: judicial

power (two chapters), constitutional change, extractivism, social expenditures, regional

integration, regional migration, Venezuela (two chapters), populism, Mexico (two

chapters), race identity in the writings of José Vasconcelos, and violence in El Salvador.

In this respect, the title of the book is somewhat misleading, since few of the contribu-

tions focus on Latin America’s pink tide. If there is one overriding thesis defended in

various chapters, though from widely different perspectives, it is that the notion of

“liberal democracy” tends to misrepresent developments in twenty-first-century Latin

America. The contributors’ recognition of the limitations of liberal democracy is a logi-

cal response to the trend initiated by pink-tide governments and particularly the new

constitutions in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, which, in the Rousseauian tradition,

place a premium on direct participation of the general populace in decision making.

This argument is most consistently and persuasively formulated by Thamy

Pogrebinschi in “Experimenting with Participation and Deliberation in Latin America.”

She points to the diverse types of participatory experiments in the region and the con-

current decline in support of political parties but adds that democratic institutions have

nevertheless remained viable. Progressive governments have promoted “innovations

aiming at social inclusion,” while conservative ones have followed the lead with their

own participatory projects but with an emphasis on “accountability and responsive-

ness” in accordance with “the Right’s repertoire” (249). Pogrebinschi calls on scholars

to examine “the interplay between participatory innovations and delivery of social

policies to find out whether there is any causality” (258) between the two. She ends her

piece by suggesting that “if the liberal paradigm is put to one side” in favor of a focus

on experimental participatory schemes, “Latin America might provide new and more

creative recipes to make democracy fit less liberal times” (260).

The two chapters on Venezuela also question the usefulness of the liberal-democracy

framework but present diametrically opposite viewpoints on events in that nation.

Writing in an extremely polemical style, George Ciccariello-Maher criticizes Daniel H.

Levine for his “unfortunate” use of the term “postdemocratic” (113) to describe the

Chávez government as far back as 2002. Relying on the works of Antonio Gramsci and

Enrique Dussel, he argues that the separation of powers, which he considers the bed-

rock of liberal democracy, is designed to hold back change. The “dispersed form of

communal power” that is emerging in Venezuela is “increasingly in open antagonism

toward the liberal-representative apparatus,” a dynamic that “static conceptions . . .

Steve Ellner taught economic history and political science at the Universidad de Oriente in

Venezuela from 1977 to 2003.

808772LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X18808772Latin American PerspectivesEllner / Book Review

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