Pink Tide

The Pink Tide is a nickname given to the wave of progressive governments in Latin America after the consecutive elections of Hugo Chávez in 1998 in Venezuela and Lula da Silva in Brazil. The term is a reference to the nature of these political movements, as they are not outright communist (normally identified by red), but some more moderate version of the left (thus pink). However, the term has been criticized for being vague and simplistic, as it connects several quite different political movements with only one major thing in common, that being their tendency to be more left-wing than the traditional parties or regimes that precede them. The ideologies of these governments range from democratic socialism, social-democracy, libertarian socialism and left populism to even far-left and authoritarian governments. It has also been argued that there was a second Pink Tide starting in 2019, in response to the far-right governments that replaced many of the governments of the former Pink Tide.Latin America’s second ‘Pink Tide’ is a result of right-wing government failures, Diana Flores, Commonwealth Times 18 March 2022 In fact, the second Pink Tide has surpassed the first in terms of how many Latin American governments had left-leaning leaders at the same time, even if many of them were elected in close, highly divisive elections.
But, although these governments tend to be grouped together, other than mutual international diplomatic support for geostrategic reasons, each one has very little in common internally. While some are clearly authoritarian with questionable ethics and blatant antidemocratic behaviors, like Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, others tend more towards socio-liberal or libertarian socialist tendencies with socially liberal policies (support of LGBTI rights including gay marriage, abortion, marijuana legalization, etc.), others are moderate and economically progressive such as Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, and Costa Rica. Some others are also more socially conservative, being disdainful towards LGBT issues and women's rights. Others are somewhere in between like El Salvador and Ecuador. Even so, English-speaking media has been accused of accentuating the negatives and often overlooking important gains of these governments in aspects such as poverty reduction, indigenous peoples' rights, and economic growth.
==Origins==
The reasons behind the sudden turn to the left of many Latin American countries include such things as the infamous a series of US-backed operations in South America that included economic warfare, political murders, coups, and sponsorship of brutal far-right regimes in order to fight communism and everything that looks like it. These activities provoked the overthrow of several democratically-elected progressive governments during the 1960s and 1970s, including among others, Salvador Allende in Chile, Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala, Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina, and even João Goulart of Brazil, followed by far-right dictatorships that committed all sorts of human rights violations, including internment camps, torture, rape, political kidnappings, forced disappearances, child trafficking, and other obscene acts under the supervision of the CIA."Los secretos de la guerra sucia continental de la dictadura" (The secrets of the continental dirty war of the dictators), Clarin, 24 March 2006Greg Grandin (2011). The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. University of Chicago Press. p. 75. ISBN 9780226306902.Walter L. Hixson (2009). The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy. Yale University Press. p. 223. ISBN 0300151314. Nonetheless, the opinion of the region on the United States remained high in most countries. Unsurprisingly, the people living in said countries tended to be rather upset about the state of affairs Operation Condor brought about.
To be fair, once the crimes of these dictatorships and the US government support became common knowledge, public outcry did happen among the American public and some sectors of the Democratic Party (Democrats were the opposition for most of this time). They pushed for American withdrawal of South and Central America and a cessation of support for these regimes. In fact, international pressure from the US (particularly during Jimmy Carter's government), Europe, and the Latin American countries not under far-right dictatorships was part of the reason why most of these regimes fell. The first decades after the end of the dictatorships was followed by very heterogeneous policies, with some countries, such as Brazil and Chile, achieving a remarkable economic stability, while others, such as Argentina and Mexico, sinking deep into recessions due to 
==The Pink Tide in maps==
Red indicates left-wing governments and blue indicates right-wing governments.
File:Foro sao paulo members (August 2011).svg|The Pink Tide at its original peak, 2011.
File:Foro sao paulo members (June 2018).svg|The Pink tide at its minimum, 2018.
File:Foro sao paulo members.svg|Central and South America in January 2023, in the midst of the second Pink Tide.
==Where are they now?==
The countries in the region have experienced the Pink Tide differently. In some countries, the leftist parties still remain democratically in power, while in others, there has been a peaceful transition away to the conservatives (and sometimes back again to the leftists).
* Néstor Kirchner died in 2010, after leaving office in 2007 to the winner of that year's election, his wife Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. After ruining most of the Argentinian economy, she was replaced in 2015 by the incompetent right-wing president Mauricio Macri, who couldn't resolve the problems. Left-wing Peronism came back to power in 2019 after Cristina's protégé, Alberto Fernández, won the election. With Fernández, however, the already bleak situation deteriorated faster than ever: the GDP fell by 2.2% in 2019, with a double-digit drop in 2020. In 2023, inflation reached almost 200%, despite the strenuous efforts by the government to forcefully freeze pricesPreliminary Overview of the Economies of Latin America and the Caribbean -2020 Meanwhile, the country defaulted for the ninth timeArgentina defaults yet again, but hopes to get off lightly and more than 40% of the Argentinian population is living in poverty.Argentina’s Economy Buckles After Leader Puts Politics First Since there is nothing so bad that it couldn't be worse, Argentina was also among the worst affected countries by the COVID-19 pandemic, being the 15th with the highest number of cases per capita and the 11th with the highest number of deaths by July 2021.https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases In 2022, Cristina Kirchner was found guilty of corruption, and sentenced to six years in prison. Weary of their incompetent and corrupt government, Argentina decided to elect the far-right libertarian Javier Milei by the end of 2023.
* The resilient president Evo Morales finally met his political downfall in November 2019. He lost a referendum on whether or not he should be allowed to run for a fourth term in October 2019, but the Bolivian Supreme Court reversed the decision and allowed him to run.https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/03/evo-morales-bolivia-president-election-limits Disputes over that issue as well as allegations of election fraud led to massive protests and, just a few hours after Morales announced a new election, the military called for his resignation and he accepted. He was replaced in what some have called a couphttps://apnews.com/article/evo-morales-did-a-coup-force-6b2c94306089451d9761878c9f7ce2f1 by far-right Christian nationalist Jeanine Áñez Chávez, who proclaimed herself president and walked into the presidential palace brandishing an oversized Bible.https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-11/bolivia-faces-power-vacuum-and-more-chaos-after-morales-quits A new election was held in October 2020, and Arce, the candidate put up by Morales's party, won.https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/19/bolivia-election-exit-polls-suggest-thumping-win-evo-morales Áñez would later be charged for abuses of power committed during her interim government,https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/10/bolivia-jeanine-anez-arce-coup/ including the torture of opposition figures.https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/17/bolivia-government-tortured-executed-opponents-report
* Lula da Silva left office to his protégé Dilma Rousseff. The all-consuming scandal resulted in Rousseff's impeachment, and Lula's conviction, and seems to be touching politicians in Brazil regardless of their ideological backgrounds (here's looking at you, Temer). Hypothetically, Lula might have won the 2018 elections; however, he was disqualified due to his controversial conviction. Instead, the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro managed to prevail, and things got worse during his term. However, in 2022, Lula was able to defeat Bolsonaro in a narrow election, making Bolsonaro the first incumbent president to be defeated in Brazil since their 1985 return to democracy.Lula defeats Bolsonaro to again become Brazil’s president, Mauricio Saverese and Diane Jeantet, AP News 30 October 2022
* The political pendulum seems to swing back and forth in Chile. Socialist Michelle Bachelet ended her second term peacefully in 2018 and conservative businessman and Pinochet-wannabe Sebastián Piñera was president from 2018-2022. His authoritarian regime struggled with widespread protests against neoliberalism and economic inequality, and he would be ousted by the left-wing 
* Historically one of the most conservative countries in Latin America, a leftist president, Gustavo Petro, was finally elected in 2022 in response to the rising inequality in the country that was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
* Carlos Alvarado Quesada from the center-left Citizens' Action Party won the 2018 election. He peacefully transitioned power to the conservative Rodrigo Chaves in 2022.
* Miguel Díaz-Canel is the country's first leader outside the Castro family since the Revolution in 1959. Being born on 1960, he's also relatively young (well, compared to his immediate predecessors). Cuba saw asking for economic and political reforms, which were met with brutality. Since then, the political and economic situation in Cuba is getting worse and worse, with food and fuel shortages and more repression from an already authoritarian government, leading to a massive exodus to the US.
* While the PLD was ousted from power after 16 years in 2020, they were succeeded by another center-left candidate, Luis Abinader, from the Modern Revolutionary Party. 
* Lenín Moreno of Rafael Correa's party won a narrow victory in 2017. However, Moreno is way more conservative than his predecessor and began distancing himself from left-wing populism after he took office. He secured a referendum to impose term limits on the president's office, thereby locking Correa out of office.https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/02/05/a-referendum-in-ecuador-is-another-defeat-for-south-americas-left-wing-populists/?utm_term=.d60f8386dc45 In 2023, Correa's candidate, Luisa Gonzales, lost to Daniel Noboa. In 2024, Noboa ordered a raid on the Mexican embassy in Quito, violating international law under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
* The FMLN party (formerly a communist guerrilla) won two straight elections before coming in last in a three-way race to a third-party ex-FMLN candidate, Nayib Bukele.
* Álvaro Colom peacefully transitioned power to his right-wing successor in 2012. The center-left would only elect a president again, Bernardo Arévalo, of the Movimiento Semilla, in 2023. This transition was less-than-peaceful though.
* Liberal-turned-left-wing-populist Manuel Zelaya was removed in a bloody US-backed military coup in 2009. Right-wing leaders have since tightened their grip on the country, including "winning" the However, by 2022, leftists regained control with 
* Leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) won the 2018 election in a landslide after having lost both the 2006 election (the result of which was… rather questionable, to say the least) and the 2012 election, securing over 50% of the vote and his party and allies securing the first majority in both chambers of the country in decades, probably in response to the "Orange Tide" that happened in the United States. To be honest, everyone expected him to win after the disastrous government of Enrique Peña Nieto, but he still managed to disrupt pollsters who did not think he would win by that much. Mexico saw a severe democratic backslide under AMLO as he pushed to silence critics and erode democratic checks and balances. Perhaps his most frontal attack on Mexican democracy was his attempts to crumble the country's judiciary system, especially by enacting electoral laws that aimed at diluting the power of electoral institutions while casting a shadow on the legitimacy of the 2024 elections with analysts comparing his government with the period when the country was ruled by the Despite these accusations, AMLO's successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, also won the 2024 election in a landslide, becoming Mexico's first female and Jewish president. Sheinbaum also received the most votes ever in Mexican history for a presidential candidate, surpassing López Obrador's record in 2018, and achieved the highest vote percentage for any candidate since 1982. These results were attributed to a reduction in poverty under AMLO's government through the expansion of the welfare state, raising the minimum wage, and investments in infrastructure projects, and viewed as voters backing these policies.
* Daniel Ortega returned to power in 2007. In 2018, he responded violently to and experienced demands for his resignation. Following Hugo Chávez's path, Ortega has eroded more and more the democratic institutions in Nicaragua,Daniel Ortega tears up all pretence of democracy in Nicaragua arresting opposition leaders as well as journalists and activists.https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/06/nicaragua-police-arrest-opposition-leaders-ortega-treason-lawshttps://www.npr.org/2021/06/23/1009339843/has-nicaraguas-president-become-a-dictator-hes-jailing-political-opponents In June 2021, the top US diplomat for Latin America, Julie Chung, tweeted that the arrests "should resolve any remaining doubts about Ortega's credentials as a dictator."https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210622-timeline-nicaragua-s-authoritarian-slide
* The center-left won the presidential election of 2019, promising to take care of the corruption that was exposed by the Panama Papers.
* The former Catholic bishop Fernando Lugo was and removed from the presidency in 2012 over a controversial handling of a land dispute that turned violent and alleged sexual abuse during his time as a Catholic bishop. The next election was a peaceful transition of power to the conservative Colorado Party, which supported the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship.
* Peru's center-left president, Ollanta Humala, was forced to withdraw from his reelection campaign because of Lava Jato. The next election was won by right-of-center Pedro Pablo Kuczynski in a very close call against the daughter of former right-wing dictator Alberto Fujimori, Keiko Fujimori. He was later impeached, and even though the impeachment process was blocked in Congress, he had to resign over further corruption scandals, also from Lava Jato. He was replaced by the increasingly authoritarian center-right Martín Vizcarra, who was impeached and removed from office after Congress declared him "morally incompetent", and was replaced by Manuel Merino, the President of the Peruvian Congress, who ran a "far-right government". This sparked mass protests from Peruvians who felt the impeachment was unfounded, an overreach of congressional power, and even many analysts, experts, and media outlets across the country called it a coup.https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/peru-president-merino-resigns-vizcarra/2020/11/15/47cb0a54-275c-11eb-92b7-6ef17b3fe3b4_story.html Five days after taking office, Merino resigned due to two deaths in the protests and was succeeded by Fransisco Sagasti, who took over as an "emergency" and "transitional" president. Come 2021, elections were finally held, with former teacher and longtime activist Pedro Castillo winning over Keiko Fujimori, who disputed the election results in a very Trumpian way, which delayed the transition period for Castillo and grounded the country to a halt. Castillo, a left-winger who wanted to replace the constitution inherited from Fujimori's regime, was finally declared president on July 19 and took office on July 28, 2021. However, Castillo couldn't accomplish much due to the aforementioned Fujimori-era constitution. In December 2022, he tried to dissolve the Peruvian Congress after they attempted to impeach him for the third time for spurious reasons. Ultimately, this was considered an attempted coup by many international observers, with Mexico's leader, López Obrador, one of the few to support Castillo.Peru's impeached president Castillo appears in court on rebellion charges, France 24 8 December 2022 In a self-fulfilling prophecy, Castillo was impeached and arrested. He was replaced by Dina Boluarte, who called for a political truce, essentially returning things to the status quo. Within her first months in office, Boluarte perpetrated the Ayacucho and Juliaca massacres, cracking down on protests against her government and undermining democracy.
* Uruguay's center-left Broad Front party managed to win three straight elections until their candidate lost to the conservative Luis Lacalle Pou in 2019. In 2024, however, Lacalle Pou failed to elect his successor and the Broad Front is set to return to power in March 2025, with 
* Hugo Chávez died in 2013 and was succeeded by Nicolás Maduro. Venezuela has been slowly spiraling into disaster after the opposition parties re-took the congress in 2015. In 2019, there was a presidential crisis on whether the self-proclaimed "acting president" Juan Guaidó or Maduro should be recognized. Countries such as the United States recognize Guaidó while countries such as Russia and China recognize Maduro. According to the Venezuelan constitution, if the president is illegitimate, then the leader of the National Assembly (Guaidó) shall be recognized as interim president to ensure free and democratic elections. Although Maduro was re-elected in 2018, the voter turnout was very low and the main opposition parties were banned from participating.https://qz.com/1283108/venezuela-election-amid-boycotts-and-irregularities-voter-turnout-was-the-lowest-in-60-years The 2024 presidential election was even more unfree and unfair as Maduro managed to control all the institutions behind the election and repressed any form of political opposition in the country. In the end, Maduro lost the election, but thanks to vote fraud and violence, managed to stay in power. Venezuela's economy sank even faster than its democracy, as the country's GDP per capita dropped almost 90% between 2013 and 2021 and its inflation rate rose to 10 million percent in 2019.
==See also==
*Pinko commie
==Notes==
==References==
category:government incompetence
Category:Socialism
Category:Americas