@e_flux wrote:
In The Nation, Omar G. Encarnación traces the emergence and eventual dissolution of Latin America's "Pink Tide"—the left-wing, non-communist governments and social movements that arose in countries like Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Ecuador, and Bolivia in the mid-2000s. Encarnación attributes the fall of the Pink Tide to an economic downtown and corruption, as well as to the backlash of traditional right-wing elites in Latin America. Read an excerpt from the article below, or the full text here:
All this said, largely overlooked in obituaries of the Pink Tide is the right-wing backlash that it provoked. This backlash aimed to reverse the shift in power brought on by the Pink Tide—a shift away from the power brokers that have historically controlled Latin America, such as the military, the Catholic Church, and the oligarchy, and toward those sectors of society that have been marginalized: women, the poor, sexual minorities, and indigenous peoples. Rousseff’s impeachment in 2016 perfectly exemplifies the retaliation organized by the country’s traditional elites. Engineered by members of the Brazilian Congress, a body that is only 11 percent female and has deep ties to industrial barons, rural oligarchs, and powerful evangelical pastors, the impeachment process was nothing short of a patriarchal coup.
In a 2017 interview, Rousseff made note of the “very misogynist element in the coup against me.… They accused me of being overly tough and harsh, while a man would have been considered firm, strong. Or they would say I was too emotional and fragile, when a man would have been considered sensitive.” In support of her case, Rousseff pointed out that previous Brazilian presidents committed the same “crime” she was accused of (fudging the national budget to hide deficits at reelection time), without any political consequence. As if to underscore the misogyny, Rousseff’s successor, Michel Temer, came into office with an all-male cabinet.
Image: Brazil's ex-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva surrenders to authorities to serve a twelve-year prison sentence, April 2018. Via Axios.
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