COVID-19’s battering of Latin America overshadows regional turmoil underway long before the pandemic. The health disaster is exacerbating an economic and political crisis for which governing classes have no answers. Populists have upturned governments in Mexico and Brazil, while rebellion has shaken the foundations of Chile’s regime, leaving this exemplary liberalizer in an uneasy political stalemate. Activists, analysts, and elites all hope to grasp where the instability is headed. Getting a handle on how these crises will unfold, and the direction of Latin American politics more generally, requires an examination of the ruling strategies that led to this situation.

Since its 2010 rebound from global recession, Latin America had been engulfed in a deepening economic contraction, even before the pandemic hit. After posting 6.3 percent growth in 2010, the region’s economic expansion had slowed by more than half by 2013 and has flatlined since 2016. Following the post-recession ricochet effect, Latin America’s top ten economies have expanded at an anemic rate of 1.5 percent. Even excluding Venezuela, whose double-digit contractions since 2015 amplify the depth of economic woes, the region was performing worse than during the 1990s, roundly considered a lost decade.

For those in power, nothing has worked. The first major crisis of neoliberalism in Latin America produced a wave of reform governments known as the Pink Tide. The question confronting the region today is: Will this crisis also have dramatic reverberations, as its predecessor did? Some optimistic observers see the rise of a “Latin Spring.” Others contend that the crisis is pushing Latin America onto a reactionary course with a resurgent neo-authoritarian right asserting itself throughout. But is it possible that the crisis of neoliberalism might steer Latin American countries in multiple and unpredictable directions?