Stages of populism in Latin America

Abstract

This article presents three striking moments of populism, in which two ideas deserve to be clarified in more depth: populism developed in Latin America as a possibility of modernization, made possible through the change of axis of the mechanisms of domination, of the old European colonialism, for North American financial capitalism. The other issue concerns the correlation between populism and patrimonialism, in that both bring progress, but “freeze” and become obstacles to new advances, especially with regard to strengthening organized civil society. Therefore, to a large extent, they begin to receive a very negative conceptual and academic interpretation. In this sense, understanding populism means permanently making a historical movement, back and forth, between politics and economics, to understand Latin America in its specificities, derailments, and accelerated resumptions of movement in search of an idealized future.