Winter comes to the South American left. Venezuela’s electoral defeat and Mauricio Macri’s victory in Argentina are just the tip of the iceberg. The constitutional change that could allow the fourth re-election of Evo Morales did not go ahead in the referendum, and now it seems that Rafael Correa will not stand for the 2017 presidential elections in Ecuador. In Brazil, there is no environment either, the attack on Dilma Rousseff is very important for the entire continent. He is behaving with the dirty right, completely violating the impeachment mechanism. For the time being, the vote has been suspended by the president of Congress, although the leaflet is likely to continue with new chapters, according to parliamentary sources.

The arrival of the left in power in the Latin American countries was a decisive step forward in the process of democratization. Until then, much of society was in a systematic situation outside the public sphere, until the leftist governments placed the conditions for channelling their normalized democratic participation. The regulation of precarious housing allowed them to be censored, income redistribution policies brought millions of people out of poverty and basic educational projects facilitated political socialization.

Each country has developed its own path to carry out its redistribution policies, but in general the goal has not been so much to change the economic system, but to fill the refrigerators of the poorest through extractivist and consumer economic growth. The arrival of more money in the pockets of the citizens does not mean a change in production relations or in economic structures. Taking control of raw materials has undoubtedly resulted in benefits from redistribution policies, but their dependence is too high. A change in the economic structure has not been invented. We could take as an example the small size of public sectors and, above all, less efficient tax policies. On the other hand, the consumerist model has been reinforced in society. Redistribution policies have created a new middle class based on consumption, linked to the ideology of neoliberalism. Hence another important opposition against leftist governments.

The economic model has not been the only problem. In most cases, insecurity and violence in the public sphere have not been resolved and efforts to improve the situation of corruption have not been successful. These two elements have been exploited by the right-wing media against leftist governments, such as the hegemonic ones in the communicative system, now in Brazil.

Finally, from a geopolitical point of view, Latin American economic integration in recent years now seems to be a mirage. The decline in raw material prices has slowed down and slowed down. The process can be defined as a lost option. It is true that not all countries have put the same force in the process, but, in general, the key has once again been Brazil. The largest country behaves as a regional power and, on many occasions, has taken precedence over its national interests to the detriment of regional integration. He was not the only person responsible, of course. The point is that the leftist populists have made nationalist speeches that, in one way or another, have generated tensions with the other fundamental integrative objective they wanted to promote.

This project has to return to the political agenda before it is late, if Latin America wants to stop being a colony and wants to achieve real independence.