Geographies of Neoliberalism in Latin America

Introduction On the evening of 17 October 2003 people throughout Bolivia crowded around television sets in bars, restaurants, and homes to witness a curious event. President Gonzalo Sänchez de Lozada, the architect of Bolivian neoliberalism, was fleeing the country, headed for Miami aboard a commercial flight. Goni, as he is commonly known, had reluctantly resigned amid massive countrywide protests that left over fifty people dead, the vast majority of them demonstrators shot by the military (Arze and Kruse, 2004; Hilton, 2003; The Economist 2004). This widespread public unrest targeted a key portion of Goni's neoliberal policies, which sought to allow transnational firms to export natural gas to California and Mexico through a Chilean port. As a jubilant public looked on, the split screens on the national news showed the ex-president's plane taxiing down the runway at the very moment that his vice-president, Carlos Mesa, was being sworn into office as his replacement. In the aftermath of the protests, Mesa promised to revisit pieces of the market-oriented policies promulgated by Goni during the previous years, especially the Law of Hydrocarbons, the focus of attention during the October protests. As Goni boarded the plane for Miami, he joined a peculiar club of individuals, becoming one of several Latin American former presidents currently (or recently) living in exile. Others include Alberto Fujimori of Peru, now living in Japan, Carlos Salinas de Gortari of Mexico, who fled to Ireland, and Carlos Menem of Argentina, who took refuge in Chile. That these leaders were the primary architects of neoliberalism in their respective countries throughout the 1980s and 1990s is not sheer coincidence. Rather, they share similar histories of continued economic crisis, political scandal, and mobilized popular opposition. These leaders-in-exile remain, furthermore, a clear and living indictment of the failure of neoliberal policies in Latin America. Yet, although particular leaders may be on the run in Latin America, neoliberalism as a whole certainly is not. On the contrary, neoliberal policies continue to be rolled forward throughout the region as indicated by the recently signed Central American Free Trade Agreement, the expansion of targeted World Bank antipoverty programs, continued rounds of privatization, and ever-increasing transnational corporate influence (witness Wal-Mart's expansion in Mexico). Nonetheless, the tenor of contemporary neoliberalisms in Latin America is distinct from the macroeconomic `shock therapy' and `structural adjustment' policies of the 1980s and 1990s. As the papers in this theme issue indicate, for example, the environment, culture, and identity have emerged as key neoliberal frontiers. These new frontiers are linked, furthermore, to a shifting set of multiscalar state practices organized through emergent discourses of citizenship and rights. Taken together these political, economic, and cultural processes are producing new geographies of neoliberalism. Through the construction of new frontiers and externalization of its own failures, neoliberalism remains a mobile project in Latin America (Huber and Solt, 2004; Weyland, 2004). Bolivia's recent political volatility demonstrates, nonetheless, that neoliberalism continues to be challenged in a variety of ways. Such challenges have occurred not only on the streets, but in the electoral arena as well. The victories of Lu|̈s Inacio `Lula' da Silva in Brazil, Nëstor Kirchner in Argentina, and Hugo Chävez in Venezuela Guest editorial Environment and Planning A 2005, volume 37, pages 191 ^ 201