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Michelle Bachelet's electoral victory in Chile last month roughly coincided with the inauguration of fellow socialist Evo Morales who won a landslide election last December in neighboring Bolivia. Since 2000, leftists have democratically taken power in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela while left-leaning candidates are favored to win elections in Mexico and Peru later this year. Some analysts speculate that the trend signifies a rejection of U.S. backed economic policies in the region, sometimes referred to as "neo-liberalism", and a shift towards socialism.

Bachelet, who is Chile's first female president, ran on a platform of gender equality and social benefits. Her father, an air force general, was tortured to death under Pinochet who seized power in a U.S.-backed coup in 1973. Bachelet and her mother were also tortured and sent into exile, first to Australia and then to Eastern Germany. She returned to Chile in 1979 and became active in socialist party politics.

Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian, is Bolivia's first indigenous president. A trenchant critic of the free trade policies favored by the United States, his frequent pledges to impose greater state control over Bolivia's substantial gas and oil reserves have raised concerns in Washington. Morales has also vowed to legalize the cultivation of coca and expel the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration which provides funding to proxy forces that have been accused of human rights violations. For two decades now, the United States has spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to eradicate coca plants in its war against drugs.

This month CIAO examines the shifting political landscape in Latin America.



From CIAO's database:

Harvesting the Past: The Social Mobilization of Bolivia's Indigenous Peoples

The Last Days of Bolivia?

Bolivia Alert: A Primer on Bolivia's Elections

Coca Eradication

Pinochet's Chile: The United States, Human Rights, and International Terrorism

Economic Survey of Chile, 2003

Democracy and the Future of Civil-Military Relations in Chile: An Exercise in Historical Comparison



Outside Links*:

Bolivia and the WTO
http://www.wto.org/English/thewto_e/countries_e/bolivia_e.htm

U.S. Department of State: Bolivia
http://www.state.gov/p/wha/ci/c2841.htm

Latin American Network Information Center: Bolivia
http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/sa/bolivia/

Bolivia Coca Cultivation Survey (UN Office on Drugs and crime)
http://www.unodc.org/pdf/bolivia/bolivia_coca_survey_2003.pdf

Latin American Network Information Center: Chile
http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/chile/

U.S. Department of State: Chile
http://www.state.gov/p/wha/ci/c2851.htm




* Outside links are not maintained. For broken outside links, CIAO recommends the Way Back Machine [http://www.archive.org/].

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