Argentinians seem to have learnt, painfully, that the state cannot be the main source and sponsor of growth. In so doing, the pendulum of politics has swung wildly from the populist Perónist left of former president Cristina Kirchner to the hard-right represented by President Javier Milei’s La Libertad Avanza (Liberty Advances), a libertarian coalition that propelled him to the presidency in 2023.

Milei’s party advocates an “anarcho-capitalist” formula of radical economic liberalisation, reduced government spending, and free-market capitalism.

Argentine society has changed to make the “right” trendier and socially acceptable, with Milei’s popularity being notable, especially among younger voters. This has inverted the traditional axiom that “if you are 20 and not a socialist, you don’t have a heart, and 40 and not a capitalist, you don’t have a brain”. But it’s also illustrative of how the left has run out of political credibility and puff – for now – with the removal of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela in January and the curbing of the actions of his populist Chavistas.

Donald Trump’s “Shield of the Americas” summit on 7 March is one sign of change and a challenge to the region’s history of glorious revolutionary failure.

Led by Milei, the group hosted by Trump included 11 other Latin American and Caribbean nations aligned with Washington's interests: Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, Nasry “Tito” Asfura and José Antonio Kast as the newly-elected presidents of Honduras and Chile, respectively, Santiago Peña of Paraguay, Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa, Luis Abinader of the Dominican Republic, Rodrigo Chaves Robles from Costa Rica, Guyana’s Mohamed Irfaan Ali, Rodrigo Paz Pereira of Bolivia, Panamanian president José Raúl Mulino, and Kamla Persad-Bissessar from Trinidad and Tobago.

Described in a parody of the 19th century Monroe Doctrine as part of a “Donroe Doctrine”, the “Shield of the Americas” aims at asserting Washington’s sphere of influence in the Western hemisphere in countering Chinese economic and political interests.

Kristi Noem, who recently stepped down as the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, is now the United States (US) special envoy to the coalition.

“This is intended to be a group that works together to ensure we’re defending our own sovereignty,” she said. “We’re each defending our own security and economic prosperity”, creating a "powerful example to the rest of the world about what’s possible.”

These may not be the only right-leaners among the 33 countries considered Latin American and Caribbean.

Peru’s Fragile Politics and Robust Economy

On 12 April, Peru will go to the polls to elect a new president and Congress. The country will return to a bicameral legislative system for the first time since 1992, with voters electing both a Senate and a Chamber of Deputies. Should no candidate secure more than 50% of the vote in the first round, there will be a run-off in June.

A record 36 presidential candidates are expected to compete, up from 21 in 2021.

The leading figures in opinion polls include: Rafael López Aliaga of Popular Renewal, a former Mayor of Lima and ultra-conservative businessman better known by his nickname “Porky”; Keiko Fujimori of Popular Force, the daughter of former president Alberto Fujimori, who is making her fourth presidential bid; Alfonso López-Chau of the centre-left Now Nation, a former central bank director; Carlos Álvarez, representing Country for All, a comedian and political satirist; and César Acuña of Alliance for Progress, a successful education entrepreneur and former governor. The top four polling candidates are from the right in a highly fragmented system, together some 30%.

But the top candidate – Aliaga – is polling at just 11%, with the undecided voters around 40%. A large percentage of undecided voters have historically made polling a tricky business and have often voted for the left.

While it would certainly make life easier to have a stable political system in order to build institutionality, though it may have hindered it has not stopped Peru’s progress in the last 30 years. There has been limited scope for radical changes, all the more so with the introduction of a bicameral chamber after this election.

Extraordinary Growth

Peru has enjoyed a period of extraordinary economic growth this century, driven by a revolution in mining and agriculture, and facilitated by investments in port infrastructure. It has been driven by the private sector, responsible for 80% of all investments.

As a result, Peru is the world’s third-largest producer of copper after Chile and Congo, with 2.7 million tonnes annually, or $62 billion. Mining comprises nearly 70% of total exports, up from $3 billion in 2000, driven by annual average foreign investments of over $5 billion over the last 15 years.

It is the world’s largest exporter of blueberries, grapes, asparagus, and quinoa. It is also the second-largest exporter of avocados and ginger, and among the top ten globally for coffee and cocoa. Agricultural exports have surged, with total exports surpassing $12.5 billion in 2025 from just $645 million in 2000.

As a result, GDP per capita more than doubled in real terms from $3 286 in 2000 to $6 711 in 2024. The fragile politics of Peru – with eight presidents in the last ten years, of which half have gone to jail, and where two others, Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (2016-18), also spent time – have been held together by a disciplined Central Bank.

This is down to the strategic move led by the much-maligned Fujimori (he was in jail for 16 years before his death in September 2024) to ensure that the Central Bank was not only independent but operated under a constitutional mandate from 1993 in preserving monetary stability. This included a prohibition of direct government financing of the Treasury (thus encouraging the printing of money) and a board with terms longer than the presidency.

The 1993 Constitution laid the foundation of the market economic model.

This is deepened by an effective trade tariff of 1.5%, and a zero percent tariff on capital goods, along with 19 free-trade agreements with some 84% of the global economy.

While left-leaning governments have attempted to change these stipulations, to do so, they require a two-thirds majority over two legislative periods, almost impossible in a fragmented society. It’s easy to change a president through the “moral incapacity” of a president with a single two-thirds majority vote in Congress.

As a result, in spite of the political tumult, the ship has steadied under Julio Velarde, the Central Bank Governor. He is seen as more important than any president, not least since the leadership of the government has been so whimsical and corrupt.

While institutionality is weak in many places in government, exacerbated by the high turnover in leadership, Velarde has been in place since 2006. As he comes to the end of his fourth term, Peru is experiencing its best terms of trade since 1951. It has increased exports 11-fold since 2000, compared to Argentina’s four-fold increase, and the two-fold change in Colombia, placing Peru behind only the Dominican Republic and Panama in terms of regional front-runners. There has been a year-on-year rise in non-commodity exports of 15%, inflation at 1.5%, and a stable deficit of just 1.8% in 2025.

Institutional weakness is most keenly felt in security, the biggest issue in the upcoming election. This is felt not only in the capital, Lima, which has one-third of Peru’s 32 million people, but across the country. It is notable for rampant extortion, drug trafficking, and illegal mining, which has turned some areas, such as the second-largest city of Trujillo in the north, into virtual no-go areas. Illegal mining – now comprising more than half of $23 billion’s worth of annual gold production, for instance – reflects systemic governance malfeasance. There are 267 000 formal sector mining employees, and 2.5 million informal. The informal economy comprises 20% of GDP and 60% of employment.

Congress is at the heart of the system, at least until now, with the bulk of public representatives on the left and the right implicated. And turkeys seldom vote for Christmas.

Informality is also a useful place to wash drug money. Peru now ranks alongside Colombia and Bolivia in the cultivation and trafficking of cocaine.

“We are still a poor country,” says Governor Velarde. “Terrible governments in the 1970s and 1980s lost us three decades. It took us 36 years to recover our per capita GDP peak of 1967.” Yet he maintains that it is possible to get back to 6% growth, a level enjoyed between 2000 and 2014.

“What we need is to continue to grow the middle class to provide stability,” he says. “While Peru will maintain the fundamentals of no currency controls, low inflation, and high reserves, and an independent Central Bank allows stability, thus favouring growth, it does not help that you have a continuous change of ministers with changes of government.”

Colombia’s Rightward Shift

Little over a month following Peru’s election, Colombia will host its own presidential poll on 31 May. In a race marred until now by violence, including the killing of presidential candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay, and the kidnapping of a senator, there is much to play for, especially given the direction taken by the left-leaning government of Gustavo Petro, under whom there is rising public concern over corruption and criminality. This reflects the government’s failure to rein in armed insurgent groups as coca production and drug trafficking have boomed in recent years. Petro’s own guerrilla past is seen to have directly assisted his former comrades.

Today, coca production in Colombia has reached record highs. United Nations data from 2023 shows a 10% increase in cultivated area to 253 000 hectares with a 53% surge in cocaine production, touching 2 700 tonnes. This marked the tenth consecutive year of increasing production as a result of a larger area under cultivation, the end of government spraying, and better agronomy.

This surge is also seen as an outcome of the 2016 peace deal led by then-president Juan-Manuel Santos. The Final Agreement to End the Armed Conflict and Build a Stable and Lasting Peace brought to an official end the half-century of conflict between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (known by its Spanish abbreviation, FARC). This war resulted in over 220 000 deaths and millions of displaced persons. The cost was to bring the FARC into government, which had the effect of legitimising its criminal activities, expedited especially once Gustavo Petro took office as the country’s first left-wing leader in August 2022.

Robust economic performance between 2000, when the government took the fight to the guerrillas as part of the US-sponsored PLAN Colombia, and the peace of 2016 drove a steep fall in extreme poverty from 18% to 8.5%. Between 2006 and 2015, growth averaged 5%, almost twice the Latin American number. Since 2016, annual economic growth has averaged around 2.5%.

Primaries

After the presidential primaries on 8 March, only one thing is for certain: Petro won’t remain president, as he cannot stand again.

The primaries determined who would represent the various coalitions: centre-left, centre, and centre-right in the elections. The candidate of the left-wing Historical Pact of President Petro in Iván Cepeda did not compete in the primaries, as he had already been selected. Similarly, the hard right’s Abelardo de la Espriella, a businessman and lawyer, also skipped the primary to go straight to the 31 May first-round competition.

Like Peru, if one candidate does not win 50% plus one in that round, there will be a run-off with the top two candidates.

Senator Paloma Valencia’s win in the centre-right coalition has reset the race. Backed by former president Álvaro Uribe, she won 3.23 million votes (roughly 46% of total primary ballots). The centre was headed by Roy Barreras, a former ambassador to Britain, who defeated Medellín mayor Daniel Quintero, but with just 200 000 votes; the centre-left pact was won by Claudia López, the former Bogotá mayor, with a relatively low turnout of half a million votes.

Whoever wins with have to build alliances in a fragmented Congress. On the same day as the primaries, voters also selected their next Congress. While Petro’s party won almost a quarter of all seats in the Senate, more than any other party, its staunchest opponent in the Democratic Centre party, led by former president Álvaro Uribe, not only secured 17 seats in the 103-member Senate, but received the most overall votes in the House of Representatives, with the Historical Pact coming in fifth place. Coalitions will be the only way forward to implement policy reform, and that usually moderates any direction.

As with Peru, the election outcome depends on who emerges from the first round, though this is likely to be a candidate from the right and one from the left. “The left has a lot of power,” warns Juan-Carlos Pinzon, a former defence minister who stood on a centre-right ticket in the primaries, and finished fourth out of nine candidates. “They have a budget for corruption, criminal cells for influence, and territorial cells for control, not unlike South Africa and Mexico.”

Francisco “Pacho” Santos was vice-president under Álvaro Uribe from 2002 to 2010. There were, he says, several reasons for the rise of the left, despite the success of the successive presidencies of Andrés Pastrana, Uribe, Juan-Manuel Santos, and Iván Duque. “Colombia is always a country of opposites. When Chavez was welcomed and deemed fantastic, we had Uribe. Now, everyone else is moving to the right, and we are on the left. Petro came in because people voted for change, the right was divided and failed to produce a candidate with energy, and Duque’s presidency was a disappointment. There was also social media disruptions in favour of the left,” he notes, “attacking Fico”, referring to the candidate of the right Federico Gutiérrez, the former mayor of Medellín. Fico did not, as a result, make it to the run-off as had been expected. The negative social media campaign against him, says Santos, was believed to emanate from external sources, likely Russia.

Santos suggests that the future agenda will be “very difficult” for the winner of the election. There is a growing fiscal crisis to manage, external debt having risen from $185 billion in 2022 to $246 billion in March 2024, a broken healthcare system, and the surge in drug trafficking. Addressing these issues will require “the right getting behind an electable candidate, one who can create a narrative and a set of policies that are both sensible and inclusive”, says the former vice-president.

Hasta Siempre, Comandante?

And then there is the crumbling state of Cuba and Nicaragua, the bastions of the left in Latin America – and also for some admirers farther afield, including the African National Congress in South Africa.

Cuba's economy is currently suffering from its worst crisis in decades, characterised by a “free fall” in production, chronic shortages, and high inflation, with the situation often compared to or considered worse than the “Special Period” of the 1990s. The economy, which experienced consecutive years of negative growth from 2023 to 2025, is now under pressure from a combination of US President Donald Trump and the decline in the number of its external supporters.

The island is facing severe, prolonged power outages, with blackouts up to 18 hours a day.

This is driven by a lack of fuel to run power plants and aging infrastructure. The island has relied on imported oil, historically from Venezuela and Mexico. With Trump in the White House, shipments from both dropped significantly  –from more than 90 000 barrels per day during the Chavez era to 35 000 barrels per day in late 2025.

On 29 January this year, following Maduro’s removal, Trump issued an executive order declaring a national emergency against the government of Cuba, ruling it an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the US and threatening to impose tariffs to stop ships from carrying petroleum to Cuba

Cuba is now largely reliant on its own oil production, amounting to about one-third of its needs, and its reserves.

There are other social effects. Rubbish has piled up as trucks lack fuel, and food and water have run low; attendance at schools and travel between regions have been restricted.

Key sectors have all but collapsed, including sugar production, which had already fallen below 200 000 tonnes in 2025, the lowest in over 200 years. The tourism sector has also fallen from over four million in 2018 to two million, and is likely to drop further in the current environment, with flights unable to refuel on the island.

Shrinking Circle

Among Cuba’s diminishing circle of friends is Nicaragua.

Under the perennial presidency of Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua's economy is currently suffering from a combination of long-term political instability, rising authoritarianism, international isolation, and its overall vulnerability to external shocks. The Central American nation is the second-poorest in the Western hemisphere after Haiti. The majority of its people are unable to afford basic goods, the annual GDP per capita averaging just $2 300.

Managua’s options have been further limited by Washington’s imposition of sanctions on high-level officials and those entities linked to corruption and human rights abuses. This has further restricted access to international funding.

But the biggest sanction is, as always, self-imposed.

Along with El Salvador, Nicaragua is one of the most remittance-dependent countries in the Western hemisphere. These inflows account for about one-third of GDP. This dependency points to the state of the domestic economy, and lessens productive capacity in favour of consumption. Over 10% of Nicaragua’s seven million population has left the country since 2018.

If the elections in Colombia and Peru were to reinforce the contemporary regional move rightwards, the noose will tighten on Cuba and Nicaragua. If (and perhaps now, when) they too change, this will have third-order effects on self-proclaimed socialist nations elsewhere, not least in reducing their options as they gain prominence.

If these elections fail to result in change, says Pacho Santos, then “we can expect greater polarisation, more than ever before. And we can expect more poverty and more violence, the staple of the left in Latin America.”

Maybe now it is no longer a case of hasta lasiempre victoria (until victory always), a revolutionary greeting popularised by Ernesto “Che” Guevara, but hastasiempre, Comandante – “Farewell, Commander”?

Mills, who has been researching in Latin America, and Hartley are with the Platform for African Democrats.