The demise of the Pink Tide in Latin America has sparked much discussion as to whether this represents the end of leftist governmental experiments in the region and a return to what seems to be the status quo domination of right-wing conservative politics. Perhaps a more indicting implication of this debate is whether the Pink Tide represents an alternative to neoliberalism or whether it constitutes a particular typology of this system. Left-leaning scholars (Ackerman 2016; García Linera 2006; López Segrera 2016, among others) and activists counter this view by arguing that the Pink Tide has sufficiently overturned traditional structures of...

This chapter investigates state corporatization in Mexico. It does so with a particular concern with the praxis of war/warfare, which I present as a key feature of current trends in the evolution of statehood and its logics of domination. The prominence of warfare is particularly evident in a country like Mexico, where the nexus of power is being shaped by fluid and mutating assemblages of conventional state agencies, organized crime and private enterprises and corporations – crystallizing in real war machines operating on (and ruthlessly transforming) the national territory.

This research develops work published in 2018 (Zagato 2018), where, starting from...

In 2016, the Brazilian congress voted to impeach the country’s first female president, Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party (PT). The removal of the PT from power through a ‘constitutional’ coup d’état might seem puzzling. Having abandoned socialism for neoliberalized social democracy and class conciliation, the PT had become the ‘acceptable face’ of the Latin American Pink Tide in Washington and provided generous subsidies to Brazilian capitalists. In this chapter, we will examine specifically Brazilian dimensions of the fall of the PT and the political polarization that has resulted from the coup. Yet Brazilian experience also mirrors broader global trends....

Up until a few decades ago, the indigenous Bolivians who constitute the vast majority of this landlocked country were not even allowed to walk on the cities’ sidewalks, not to mention vote. In 2005, however, the country elected its first indigenous President, Evo Morales Ayma. His government while having up to a certain extent empowered the previously excluded has done so in a ‘controlled’ manner and without disempowering the country’s economic elites. At the same time, the type of social change that has been brought about in Bolivia in the past fourteen years has not been as radical as some...

On Sunday 4 February 2018, President Lenín Moreno continued one of Ecuador’s most prominent political rituals of recent times: the consulta popular. The popular consultation is a country-wide survey administered by the National Electoral Council (CNE) and intended to gauge the views of citizens on a range of possible constitutional amendments. It requires citizens to vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in response to a series of questions pertaining to key governance issues – from bureaucratic corruption to indefinite presidential terms. Consultas and referenda have been performed repeatedly over the past decade by the country’s ruling leftist party, Alianza País (AP). The survey...

The corporatization of the state in Chile occurred under a neoliberal economic model imposed by the 1973–1990 military dictatorship, which even today still transversally affects different aspects of people’s lives. By analysing indigenous policies and indigenous tourism, this chapter examines the relationship between the corporate state and the country’s indigenous peoples in a bid to gain a deeper understanding of the different forms of expression of corporatization and the role of the market, both in public and private actions.

Indigenous peoples have historically been most disadvantaged by state actions, and this is still apparent today. State occupation of their...

‘There is no government!’ The taxi driver whispered it, as if talking to himself. We were stuck in La Libertador, one of the main communication arteries in Ciudad Bolívar. This road has two lanes for each direction, and traffic is generally fluid. But not that day. Ahead of us, a funeral rally blocked the way, occupying both lanes. No one used the horn to complain – no one dared. A malandro was being buried,¹ one close to the powerful chief-in-command at Vista Alegre, the local jail. The coffin, surrounded by family and friends, was placed on top of an uncovered truck,...

Historically, Cuba has been exposed to different state models. From the Spanish colonial extractivist state, Cuba became a neo-colony of the US, inextricably linked to US industrial and corporate capital. Property and resources were either owned by North American magnates or in the hands of Cuban elites that responded to US interests. After the 1959 Revolution, and particularly since the mid 1960s, Cuba became integrated into the Soviet economy and was under the influence of state corporatism of the USSR, where the Soviet Party controlled both economic and political processes. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba has developed...

Peru is sometimes described as a neoliberal experiment, especially due to the reforms initiated by Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s, sharing several traits of similarity with the austerity measures later introduced in European countries due to the financial crisis. Governments after Fujimori have more or less followed in his footsteps in terms of economic policy, thus setting Peru apart from the so-called ‘Pink Tide’ in Latin America. During these decades, the numbers of Peruvians involved in informal economic activities, especially through different forms of small-scale trade, have increased. This expansion of economic activities at the margins of the formal economy¹...

The current authoritarian turn in neoliberal capitalism is providing further evidence that the dominant economic system is inseparable from the state apparatus – and, in this particular moment, from processes of state corporatization. Currently, tendencies like neoliberalism and state corporatization constitute two sides of the same coin. According to David Harvey (Jipson and Jitheesh 2019), this adherence is due to the fact that neoliberalism ‘no longer commands the consent of the mass of the population’. It has lost its legitimacy. According to this author,

neo-liberalism could not actually survive without entering into an alliance with state authoritarianism. It now is moving...

William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy (2019) wonderfully reminds us that India, the jewel in the crown of Imperial Britain, was born in the rapacious actions of a trading corporation, the East India Company, oriented to extraction of maximum profit. Citing Edmund Burke: ‘. . . the Company would, at last, like a viper, be the destruction of the country which fostered it at its bosom’. In the virtual anarchy that the Company wrought, as Dalrymple describes, was its emergence as the colonial state, eventually to metamorphose, via reforms, resistance and the achievement of national independence, into the contemporary nation-state of the...