Is the “pink revolution” over?

The answer is “yes” according to this analysis from Reuters based on the results of recent presidential elections in Mexico, Colombia, and Peru. Yet the article misidentifies the left as only that of populists a la Hugo Chavez. Moderate members of the left, like Brazil’s Luis Inácio Lula da Silva are pigeonholed as “European (-style) social democrats” that are anomalies and not representative of the Latin American political left.

Meanwhile, Newsweek International takes into account that the Latin American political left is not the misrepresentative monolith the Reuters article said. Furthermore, the Newsweek International article would seem to answer the abovementioned question by saying that there is no “pink revolution”; rather, moderates on the left and right are in power instead of those on the extremes. Inasmuch as there are sharp class divisions based on “how unevenly the benefits of economic liberalization have been distributed”, political consensus has been reached in many countries.

Then again there is the conclusion that my colleague Taylor Kirk surmised in a post from last November- the “pink revolution” is a media-constructed phenomenon that oversimplifies a complex political picture.

So what do you think?

(More information on Latin America's shift to the political left can be read in this post.)

election, international politics, latin america