Political anatomy of the South American conjuncture : images of development and new social conflict in the present period

The essay translated below was first published in November 2014 on Lobo Suelto, a blog linked to the Argentine militant research group Colectivo Situaciones. Its appearance followed the reelection of Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and the election of Tabare Vasquez in Uruguay (who returned to the office for a second, non-consecutive term on the popularity of his predecessor and party-mate José Mujica). Despite these ostensibly “progressive” victories, Sandro Mezzadra and Diego Sztulwark argue that the region’s period of left-wing state dominance may have reached its limits, and in some cases, fallen into outright conservatism. Consequently, they call for a re-activation of political struggle at the grassroots level to overcome the inertia of the political cycle. This analysis continues to resonate, as several successors to the original pink tide leadership are gearing up for another round of electoral politics this year, with a general election in Argentina (October 25) and an important parliamentary vote for Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro (December 6). The outcomes of these elections and the political trajectories generated by them will call for yet more conjunctural analysis; Mezzadra and Sztulwark therefore offer an essential theoretical starting point. With this in mind, we present the following translation with the occasional editorial addition of in-text links to English-language coverage of referenced events.