What comes next in Latin America, if the long momento neoliberal is coming to a close? Unlike earlier passages of external and internal realignment, the current one has no clear direction. This is a moment of radical uncertainty, with monsters poised to take the stage, proclaiming the virtues of harsh measures and mega-prisons. At the same time, left governments of different stripes hold power in some of the region’s largest economies—Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico. In their classic study, Dependency and Development in Latin America, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto examined the transition from the export economies of the oligarchic era of 1850–1930 to the new epoch of domestically oriented industrialization, pivoting around the post-1929 Depression.footnote¹ Another transition would take place in the 1980s: from the era of industrial development and dictatorship to that of electoral democracy and neoliberalism.

In retrospect, the 1980s turn had clear compass points and lines of orientation. Some came from within—a desire to send despots packing, to resist resource exploitation, to raise popular living standards. Some came from without—above all, pressure from world markets. But broadly speaking, the restoration of democracy and the return to market orthodoxy were a package, no matter how messy the democracy or how imperfect the markets turned out to be. After 1999, there was a more partial shift: from the Washington Consensus to the national-populist governments of the ‘pink tide’ in Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina and Ecuador, bringing important milestones in constitutional inclusion, redistribution and the expansion of public goods. Latin America is now well past the transition associated with the end of authoritarian rule; but the ‘pink tide’ of the early 2000s is over too. The new governments of the left that have come to power in Mexico City, Santiago, Brasília and Bogotá face very different conditions to their predecessors in the first decade of the millennium.

The post-Cold War ‘neoliberal moment’ is spent. It boasts no obvious successor. One might say that this is good news: there is no script for a new Washington Consensus to be rammed down Latin American throats. But this cleaner slate also comes with severe constraints. The region confronts profound uncertainties about what will drive economic growth, as globalization evolves away from traditional commodity value chains; it is contending with an unprecedented demographic transition and monstrous new forms of right-wing politics, which feed upon insecurity. At the same time, the absence of an orthodoxy, whether neoliberal or developmental, should widen the spectrum of alternative strategies available to the new left wave. To clarify their situation, it may be helpful to set the present conjuncture in the longue-durée perspective of Latin America’s political-economic cycles.

In Dependency and Development, Cardoso and Faletto contoured the relationship between the region’s location in the world economy and the alignment of its ruling blocs, arguing that conditions of dependency shaped the formation of elites and their prospective allies. Since then, a school of Latin American social science has examined the linkages between economic cycles and political systems, debating the relations between external, global conditions and internal, regional possibilities. We follow this tradition, while acknowledging that there is never an automatic, one-to-one relationship between models of economic growth and political regimes; rather, as global waves of integration ebb and flow, domestic coalitions shift and coalesce in response to the currents of capital and commodity.

Focusing on the first liberal moment, the era of the belle époque, Cardoso and Faletto mapped a correlation between export-led booms, expanding domestic markets and the push to experiment with different modes of selective inclusion, ranging from democratic welfarism in Uruguay to paternalist machine politics in post-emancipation Brazil. The form of external economic dependency—and whether it widened the scope for social mobility and autonomy for local elites and middle classes—shaped the opportunity structure for inclusive or exclusive regimes. After 1929, when the Great Depression undermined Latin America’s export pillars, ‘bourgeois’ alliances collapsed and the region turned inwards. Industrialization for domestic markets—plus a war-time boost from us demand—was combined with experiments in popular inclusion, ranging from Perón’s labourism in Argentina to land reform in Guatemala or Peru, and encompassing welfare expansion, public housing and trade-union rights.

Through to the 1960s, Latin American governments largely relied on domestic markets to power economic growth, aligned with political regimes that were for the most part more inclusive than the ones they replaced. There were exceptions, especially among the smaller countries of Central America and the Caribbean, where local markets were too small, shallow and fractured to turn inwards, and where us interests ensured that extraction was privileged over inclusion. But even there, attempts to create regional common markets in the 1960s represented efforts to reduce reliance on traditional exports of primary goods to North American markets. In general, the tripod of growing industrialization, domestic consumption and popular inclusion provided the ‘legs’ of a model that lasted through the developmental era.

By the time Cardoso and Faletto began reflecting on these long cycles in the mid-1960s, the inward turn and inclusionary strategy were unwinding, under both domestic and international pressures. On the eve of the 1968 upheavals—Cordobazo in Argentina, crack-down in Brazil, Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico—the two sociologists ended their analysis with the question: could socialism provide the outlines of a successor to technocratic-developmental elitism for mass industrial society?footnote² The answer came with the spread of military dictatorships from Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile to Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Guatemala and Honduras, matched by the authoritarianism of Mexico’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional. They marked the end of a long cycle of deep reform—a break with the model of inclusionary inward-oriented development—but also of the possibility that socialism might be more than enclaves in Cuba and Nicaragua.