How Far Left Has Latin America Moved?
There are, it seems to me, four different kinds of evidence that one could put forward to say that Latin America has moved leftward. The first is that all of these governments have in one way or another sought to distance themselves from the United States to one degree or another. The Bush administration would have preferred in all of these cases that their electoral opponents had won. In the past, when unfriendly governments came to power in Latin America, the United States tended to work to bring about their replacement, indeed their overthrow. But the decline of U.S. power in the world-system, and in particular the preoccupation of the United States with the wars it has been losing in the Middle East, seems to have sapped it of the political energy with which to move decisively in Latin America in ways it had previously.
Immanuel Wallerstein - 05/15/08 - via Agence Global
