Revolutions, populism and democracies: from legacy to practice in the Latin American left

Abstract

This essay reviews some of the main historiographical debates on the Latin American revolutions and populisms of the 20th century, in order to explore a constitutive tradition of the political culture of the 21st century Lefts. The text seeks to make explicit the tension between a narrative of Latin American history, which simplifies and homogenizes that legacy, and the generalized democratic form of government that has occurred in recent decades. The review of the positions of the ruling Lefts on the Russian invasion of Ukraine allows us to illustrate another dimension of the ambivalence towards the democratic regime, related to the growing subordination of ideology to geopolitics.