Chapter 3 explores the final decades of the sixteenth century, a period of deep, overlapping, and abiding crisis for the New Kingdom as a result of the limitations and failures of colonial governance. At its core was the unravelling of the authority of Indigenous rulers, who were placed under unprecedented pressures by colonial authorities who misunderstood Indigenous politics with European legal and political concepts. Engrossed in increasing competition over the leadership of the colonial project, the second archbishop of Santafé, Luis Zapata de Cárdenas, and his civil counterparts tried to pursue increasingly belligerent policies to reform the lives of Indigenous people in the final decades of the century. Their rivalries, venality, and misunderstanding of local conditions and of the limitations of their own power eventually unleashed a brutal campaign of violence and dispossession on Indigenous communities in the late 1570s, with harrowing results. The blow this struck to Indigenous political structures, and through them to the colonial tributary and extractive economy, brought the kingdom to its knees.

In the conclusion, we review the book’s chapters and argue that Latin America has experienced a resurgence of conservative forces in recent years. We analyze the supply and demand of a broad set of conservative alternatives, paying special attention to the processes of party-building, adaptation, and rebranding. We find that new right-wing forces often have weak organizations, but have been able to mobilize voters along noneconomic cleavages, including security, gender politics, and reproductive rights. The adoption of a highly conservative profile has allowed parties to access lower-class constituencies and mobilize mass support among them. The politicization of cultural issues, such as LGBT rights and religious identities, has contributed to polarization and the rise of populist radical right parties. These parties have flourished within the context of political and economic shocks and benefited from cultural backlashes and the crises of traditional right-wing parties. In these situations, politics becomes a zero-sum game and the stakes get higher. Democratic stability in the region is arguably at its most tenuous state since the age of military dictatorships. Interrupted presidencies have become realities in many countries over the past fifteen years, raising concerns about democratic stability and potential threats to democratic institutions.

This chapter explains how the Chilean right has been reconfigured due to the multidimensional crisis that has shaken Chile since the end of 2019. The authors analyze how tensions regarding competition and identity have affected relevant actors and structured their perceptions, calculations, and behaviors. They examine the ideational changes and continuities of the Chilean right’s road to moderation. They argue that the joint processes of liberalization and democratization gave rise to a gattopardista strategy of “changing so that things may remain the same.” This was characterized by the programmatic moderation of coalition candidates until the 2017 campaign, with traditional right-wing parties moving to the center to the extent that they did not threaten the pillars of the neoliberal model. However, when centrist and left-wing parties aimed to significantly reform the institutional core, the traditional right did react, and moved further to the right on the ideological continuum.

In recent decades, Latin America has experienced a resurgence of the political right after the “left turn” of the 2000s. The introduction argues that right-wing parties have adapted to social and political changes by emphasizing cultural issues, mobilizing voters along salient political cleavages, and crafting distinctive party platforms and political identities. It also introduces a typology of right-wing parties and movements that captures the diversity of the post-2000 Latin American right in both ideological and organizational terms. Looking at the demand side, the introduction sets the stage for our analysis of the changes and continuities in the attitudes of Latin American electorates. On the supply side, the introduction sets the groundwork for mapping the programmatic features that distinguish the post-2000 political right from right-wing parties created in previous eras. Finally, the introduction presents an outline of the book and summarizes its main findings.

This chapter explains why right-wing strategies of adaptation and survival had varying degrees of success during and after the left turn. It argues that right-wing parties were most likely to survive and remain competitive in national elections when they relied on strong party brands and organizations. These strong party brands and organizations depended, in turn, on when the parties were founded and whether they had roots in an authoritarian regime.

This chapter explains the performance of the Centro Democrático in Colombia and its concurrent success at the national level and underachievement at the subnational level. It argues that this disparity is linked to two interrelated variables: the security cleavage along which the Centro Democrático has developed its partisan identity, and the party’s weak subnational partisan structures. Security issues mobilize voters on the national level, but are too broad to be relevant in local elections.

Chapter 4 focuses on the early seventeenth century, when religious policy in the kingdom came to be in the hands of a determined new Audiencia president, an ambitious archbishop, and a radical group of Jesuits. With the support of a broad coalition of the kingdom’s leading settlers, these reformers took Christianisation in a new direction. The reformers focused on the promotion of the regular and frequent participation in a range of quotidian Catholic practices and institutions that their sixteenth-century predecessors had generally discouraged or withheld from Indigenous people, particularly private devotions, popular celebrations, confraternities, and public ceremony. This began in a handful of parishes entrusted to these Jesuit reformers, who had a very particular understanding of the role of ‘external’ manifestations of piety, and who used these sites as testing grounds for new approaches to Christianisation. These ultimately had the effect of affording Indigenous people space and opportunities to engage with Christianity in new – if, for the reformers, not always desirable – ways, laying the foundations for the reformation of the kingdom.

This chapter analyzes the right in Venezuela under Chavismo. It argues that the main divide of Venezuelan politics is now between democracy and autocracy rather than the ideological left and right. As authoritarianism and repression have increased and Venezuela’s socioeconomic decline has worsened, right-wing movements and factions have prioritized competitiveness through a centrist approach over an emphasis on ideological purity.

Chapter 5 focuses on the history of language policy and the treatment of Indigenous languages. In addition to refocusing Christianisation on to everyday practice, the reformers of the early seventeenth century laid to rest a long-running dispute among missionaries and administrators concerning the role that Indigenous languages should play in religious instruction. This dispute arose from efforts by the Spanish crown in the sixteenth century to impose a universal solution to the challenges of linguistic heterogeneity: First by suppressing Indigenous languages and teaching Castilian, and later by focusing on the ‘general language’ of each region. Both imperial policies not only failed to overcome the issue of linguistic heterogeneity in the New Kingdom, but were in fact radically transformed and appropriated by local authorities for their own purposes through the use of legal fictions and the selective conveyance of information across the Atlantic. The chapter examines these debates, manoeuvres, and the controversies they produced, before exploring how the seventeenth-century reformers were able to negotiate these divisions and establish a consensus around Indigenous language instruction.

The aim of this chapter is to provide an understanding of the structural constraints and opportunities for the populist radical right (PRR) in Latin America. Unlike Western Europe, material values are still of vital importance in many Latin American countries because of high levels of inequality in the region. This represents a major constraint for the emergence of the PRR, and only some parties have been able to overcome it. The author argues that the growth of the PRR relies on three factors: the appeal of the PRR’s hardline discourses, the mobilization of voters dissatisfied with sexual and reproductive rights and secularization, and a crisis of representation among the traditional parties, who are painted by PRR leaders as a corrupt elite.

The introduction reflects on the peculiar position of the New Kingdom of Granada, and the nature of colonial and scholarly writing about the region, which both developed under the shadow of the centres of Spanish colonial power in America, Mexico and Peru, showing how the expectations, assumptions, and perspectives of better studied regions have distorted our understanding of this region’s history. It outlines the book’s principal methodological arguments: the importance of an exhaustive and granular approach to colonial sources that takes into account the intellectual, institutional, and normative circumstances of their creation and transmission as a methodological imperative; the need to centre Christianisation, and the relentless challenges it posed, to understand the construction of colonial rule in the New Kingdom; and the need to overcome antiquated and counterproductive approaches to the study of religious change among Indigenous people, and instead focus on their diverse, contradictory, and complex interactions with Christianity.