In both popular and academic parlance, the term “populism” has taken on a more or less uniformly negative connotation. It implies being an enemy of democracy, anti-immigrant and, most obviously, irrationally under the sway of a charismatic leader. Yet in Latin America, populism has been an integral element of the development and democratization process and plays an important role in the contemporary process of social transformation under the left-of-centre governments that have emerged since the turn of the century. Thus, we need to deconstruct the term “populism” and explore its diverse historical manifestations, to rethink its meaning and its prospects moving forward.

This introduction to a volume consisting of detailed case studies of Latin American populism, or populism in Latin America, advances in several moments. First, I will approach the burgeoning international debate on rethinking populism to distil some broad lines of investigation, that might serve to guide our research. I distinguish between a structural/ocioeconomic frame for understanding populism, another where the focus is on populism as political strategy/style and, finally, one where populism is seen within an ideational or discursive frame. I also introduce the complex, and sometimes contradictory, relationship between populism and development, democracy and social transformation. A second section introduces several Latin American perspectives on populism in a broad conceptual sense. It examines the structural functionalist approach of the 1950s, the dependent development “compromise state” interpretation of the 1970s and, finally, the discourse approach and its critiques that dominated in the 1990s. We then move from the abstract to the concrete, with two stylized accounts of the classical populism of the 1930– 70 period and the contemporary populism that has emerged in the 1990s and, particularly, in the context of the progressive governments post-2000. This account is set in a broadly political economy frame, with a focus on the changing patterns of capital accumulation, the role of the state and the waves of popular mobilization that have characterized Latin America since 1930.

INTRODUCTION

Hugo Chávez won the presidential elections in December 1998 after a decade of neoliberal policies in Venezuela. The previous period had seen: two successive governments implementing neoliberal economic programmes; the spontaneous popular uprising of February– March 1989, which shook the two-party political system in place since 1958; two nationalist and leftist military uprisings; and a sitting president removed from office by parliament on charges of corruption.

The so-called “Bolivarian process”, that began in Venezuela with the electoral triumph of Hugo Chávez in 1998, was the popular response to the crisis of legitimacy of the political model of representative democracy that had been in place since 1958 (López Maya 1994: 32; Carvallo & López Maya 1989: 49). The failure of the productive model of import substitution, the foundation of representative democracy for 30 years, had become evident by the mid-1980s, with a profound economic crisis that worsened with the fall in oil prices in 1986.

The spontaneous popular uprising of 27– 28 February 1989, known as the “Caracazo” (Barrios-Ferrer 1990: 55; España 1989: 118), revealed the great discontent of the population with a political-economic system that did not satisfy their fundamental needs. The government's brutal repressive response caused hundreds of deaths in the neighbourhoods of Caracas and nearby cities. It reinforced the view that those who governed did not deserve to enjoy the popular support that had sustained the ruling two-party political model for three decades. The two parties in question were the Acción Democrática (AD [Democratic Action]) and Partido Socialcristiano (COPEI [Social Christian party]).

However, in the absence of alternative political options, and with a left in crisis, both in its electoral versions and in the groups that maintained the armed struggle, the two-party system would remain in power for another decade. But the decomposition of the political model continued, and in 1992 two military uprisings followed one after the other. They both failed but they showed that the ship of representative democracy was still sinking.

Beginning with the mysterious problem of the so-called “caste system,” this introduction questions the ubiquitous scholarly understanding of the monarchy as a cabal of lawmakers determined to legislate every detail of vassals’ lives. It introduces a very different perspective – namely, that subjects submitting gobierno or administrative-legislative petitions not only prompted the vast majority of the empire’s dizzying thousands of royal decrees – including those concerning novel categories of human difference. It explains how both liberal-era and Habsburg mythologies of Spanish imperial rule envisioned the king as the primary author of these texts, and proposes a labor-oriented, Actor-Network Theory-inspired alternative explanation. It introduces the petition-and-response system, explaining that early modern participants sought intimate lord–ruler dialogue, in which vassals and lords endowed their writings with voluntad or volition, in order to save the consciences of all involved. It also argues that in order for this communication to thrive, a number of legal fictions – including the transfer of voluntad across the globe – was necessary. Also lurking in the distance was violence against the saboteurs of this ruler–ruled dialogue. Lastly, this segment introduces the source material and book structure.

Continuing with Lina’s story, this chapter looks into the various ways in which the FARC victimhood frame is contested. Starting with the government, and drawing on interviews with soldiers, psychologists, police officers, and other disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration experts, this chapter outlines the government’s main contestation of the guerrilla victimhood frame: specifically, that they are perpetrators against their own comrades, especially the female ones. But the paramilitaries – illustrated by stories from various former AUC members – also contest the guerrilla victimhood frame with frames of their own, saying that they are the true self-defense forces and that they never would have had to take up guns if not for the guerrillas. This chapter shows the complexity and blurred lines between perpetrators and victims and analyzes the problematic outcomes of such contentious and highly gendered framing contests when ex-combatants demobilize and try to become civilians alongside each other.

This chapter outlines the archetypical framing contest found in many conflicts: that of terrorist versus revolutionary. While this contest is hardly novel, the ways in which combatants navigate these contests and their corresponding identities, and how such contests affect disengagement decisions and reintegration experiences, is not well understood. This chapter starts by going back to Mari, the FARC loyalist who introduced the book. Mari discusses her anger around how women have been framed by the government – as prostitutes, bad mothers, and manipulated victims. She and many other FARC combatants claim that these stories are made up by government informants and infiltrators, weaving a picture in which any woman who claims they were abused in FARC ranks is painted as a lying traitor.

This chapter illustrates the disputes around the revolution frame discussed in Chapter 6 and the impact of these contests. Supplemented by interviews with government officials, police officers, soldiers, and other ex-combatants, this chapter examines the long-term effects of government framing strategies that demonize rebel actors who may later become political figures. In particular, this chapter looks at how the “narco-terrorist” framing utilizes women guerrillas in particular to discredit the FARC and ELN and positions the government as the savior for these women. But upon demobilization, decades of stigmatization from these framing contests mean that ex-combatant are in constant fear of being discovered and have to hide their pasts. Indeed, many of them have lost homes and jobs once “outed” as former rebels.

Sixteenth-century Spain was at the vanguard of European collegiate bureaucratic rule and imperial governance. This chapter argues that although in the 1490s to 1540s council ministers’ operations were considerably patrimonialist, determined largely by each member’s family interests, by the 1540s to 1590s the Council became substantially more impartial. This occurred in large part due to the influence of women. Vassals’ attempts to shape ministers’ decisions via female connections prompted the council’s fundamental 1542 and 1571 guidelines. Subsequently, Madrid’s anxieties about women’s sway, and surfeits of Indies commodities, stirred misogynistic treatises, royal scrutiny, and an increasingly explicit masculine ministerial ethos. More concretely, monarchs and ministers feared that some of their colleagues and subalterns would become the playthings of court women, who themselves had connections with vassals seeking their cases’ resolution. The actions of indigenous artisans here were particularly notable, as subjects regaled female courtiers with their exquisite goldwork. The resulting backlash against powerful women ensured that gobierno petitioning did not become the domain of the powerful few in the 1500s, and the fiction of the council as mere instruments for the monarchs persisted strongly throughout the second half of the century.

In the political analysis of Latin America and Brazil, when we mention “populism”, we immediately think about the long tradition of figures such as Getúlio Vargas (Brazil), Juan Domingo Perón (Argentina), Lázaro Cárdenas del Rio (Mexico) or José María Velasco Ibarra (Ecuador). It relates to a time when Latin America was going through a period of intense and complex processes of modernization and inclusion of the working class, within the framework of labour laws and political democracy. More recently, we have witnessed a “return” of populism in Latin America as elsewhere, but now in a conservative version and in a particular context in macroeconomic terms. Unlike the “classical” era of populism, the current neoliberal hegemony has led to a reduction of the role of the state, in favour of greater freedom for capital flows and a shrinking of the labour market, of social policies, of labour rights, and so on. Latin American presidents, characterized by their populist appeal, were very much part of this conjuncture, such as Alberto Fujimori (Peru) and Fernando Collor de Mello (Brazil). What does this new populism of the right signify? How does it relate to the classic populism and the original incorporation of the masses into the democratic order?

These debates are not just a concern from a historiographical or sociological point of view. They are part of the current political process itself, in the sense of building a political programme and claiming political traditions. In this sense, as a way of trying to counteract the neoliberal agenda put into practice in Brazil throughout the 1990s, and also of forming a political opposition to the governments of Fernando Collor de Mello and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the Workers’ Party – Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) – claimed the tradition of national developmentalism (Perlatto 2016). This tradition, which came from Getúlio Vargas (and the subsequent governments of Juscelino Kubitschek and João Goulart) implied a commitment to industrialization and modernization of the country and included the incorporation of the working population into citizenship via the Labour Court. However, it was achieved without shaking the foundations of the primary sector of the economy, based on the large exporting rural areas, and thus was some kind of compromise state.

By September 1588, Pedro Rengifo had been living and languishing in Spain for some four years; an illness was partly responsible.1 He had petitioned for a three-year renewal on his expired travel license and made clear his desire to return to Peru, complaining that his long stay in Madrid had bankrupted him.2 There is little information about the ordeal of his return, other than that he left with his legislation in hand. The mestizo was in Lima by October 24, 1592 at the latest, when he and his wife, Juana Rodríguez de Castro, received yet another power of attorney – this time to petition the Charcas High Court for privileges on a client’s behalf.3 Once home in La Paz he clearly thrived, for between 1597 and 1599 he appears to be lending considerable sums of money and selling llamas, wheat, and wine to local merchants and officials.4

INTRODUCTION

There is only one great consensus about populism, and that is that it is a phenomenon that is difficult to define. Indeed, although Latin America has had different populist experiences since the beginning of the twentieth century, it is no less true that its conceptualization continues to be complex. At the beginning of the 1970s, Octavio Ianni, one of the intellectuals who most deeply explored this issue, argued that, despite the dissimilar historical experiences lived by the countries of the region, populism burst into most of them as a mass movement that was installed in the centre of the structural ruptures that accompanied the crises of the world capitalist system and, by extension, of the Latin American oligarchies (Ianni 1973: 85). From these crises and with the masses constituted as political actors, the state was restructured under bourgeois leadership. The new ruling elites, supported by different social sectors, especially workers and the middle classes, carried out a profound reorganization of the economy, emphasizing state dirigisme, and based on it, redistributed part of the income expressed as social policy. This, in turn, operated as a strategy of clientelism which, on the one hand, consolidated the adhesion of the masses to charismatic leaderships and, on the other, reconfigured power relations (Ianni 1973: 106– 49). The regime of passions and emotions played a fundamental role in this, which in the perspective of Rosanvallon, activated the populist mobilization and rooted the bond of relationship with the leader (Rosanvallon 2020: 53– 5).

However, the historical rhythms of this process, as Osmar González (2007: 87– 92) points out, were different. In some countries, such as Peru under Guillermo Billinghurst (1912– 14) or Uruguay during the second period of José Batlle y Ordóñez (1911– 15), the process began at the beginning of the twentieth century. In others, such as Brazil under Getúlio Vargas (1930– 45) or Mexico under Lázaro Cárdenas (1934– 40), the process began in the 1930s.

But populism is not reduced only to the type of state, or to the power relations that were constituted at a given historical moment, nor is it restricted to the leader who embodied it. It also refers to the people, meaning the masses that give political force to the movement. According to this perspective, populist movements were heterogeneous.

Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega began a fourth consecutive term in office in January 2022, in the midst of a political and economic crisis that portends protracted instability in the Central American country. Since returning to office in 2007, Ortega and his wife, and vice-president, Rosario Murillo have dressed in a quasi-leftist discourse of “Christian, Socialist, and Solidarity”, their programme of constructing a populist multiclass alliance under the firm hegemony of capital and Sandinista state elites. This alliance began to unravel in the second decade of the century, and then collapsed entirely in the aftermath of the government's violent repression of a 2018 mass popular uprising. The repression – which according to Amnesty International involved excessive use of force, extrajudicial executions, control of the media and the deployment of pro-government paramilitary squads against protesters (Amnesty International 2018) – left several hundred dead and sent tens of thousands more into exile.

With seven opposition presidential candidates imprisoned and held incommunicado in the months leading up to the November 2021 vote, and all the remaining contenders but one coming from small parties allied with Ortega and Murillo and his Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), the results of the presidential elections were a foregone conclusion. In a complete breakdown of the rule of law, Ortega carried out a wave of repression from May to October, arresting, and detaining without trial, under various draconian national security laws, several dozen opposition figures. Among them were presidential candidates; peasant, labour and student leaders; journalists; and environmentalists. Several hundred others were forced into exile or underground.

Those arrested or forced underground in the pre-electoral crackdown included a number of historical revolutionary leaders, among them legendary guerrilla commanders Dora María Téllez and Hugo Torres. Both had participated in the 1978 raid on the National Palace that forced the Somoza dictatorship to free 60 political prisoners, and Torres had also participated in the daring 1974 Christmas party raid that forced Somoza to release Daniel Ortega from prison. Among those exiled were celebrated novelist, and Ortega's vice-president during the 1980s revolution, Sergio Ramirez.