Moisés Naím / Foreign Policy

In 2003, Latin America had another normal year: Growth was meager, instability high, poverty widespread, inequality deep, and politics nasty. In other words, there was nothing new. Indeed, for the 44 percent of the region’s population (some 227 million people) living in poverty, "nothing new" means dreadful. For decades, political and economic elites in Latin America have grown accustomed to this tragic normalcy, and even those suffering the most took their dire conditions for granted. Recently, however, this acceptance has been disrupted throughout the region. Unnoticed by an international community that remains preoccupied with other emergencies and other latitudes, new political actors are emerging throughout Latin America to challenge the region’s peaceful coexistence with intolerable conditions.

Bolivia’s ongoing troubles illustrate this phenomenon. In recent years, the landlocked Andean nation has endured deep social divisions, a poor economy, and pro-market reforms that promised more than they delivered. Last year, street protests led to the ouster of Bolivian President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, a reform-minded and democratically elected leader. In a departure from the region’s history of military coups, Sánchez de Lozada’s removal was led by historically disenfranchised indigenous groups and by coca growers (cocaleros) who had been forced by the U.S. war on drugs to stop cultivating their ancestral crop.

Bolivia’s cocaleros are not an isolated case. Mexico’s Zapatista National Liberation Army, Brazilian movements such as the sem terra (the landless) and sem teto (the roofless), Venezuela’s Bolivarianos, Argentina’s piqueteros (picketers), and Peru’s Humala rebels are all examples of new political players who are challenging entrenched elites. Their influence and political platforms are as different as the grievances that inspired them — crop eradication in Bolivia, unequal access to land and housing in Brazil, or joblessness and financial crisis in Argentina.

But these diverse movements share much in common. They feed off the politics of rage, race, and revenge that traditional political parties in Latin America have usually avoided. They are intensely nationalistic and claim roots to the oldest traditions of their countries. Nonetheless, their success owes as much to recent events as to ancient history. The increased material well-being that was promised if Latin America embraced privatization, fiscal austerity, and free trade during the 1990s has yet to reach much of the region’s population. Instead, corruption, higher utility fees, banking crashes, and unemployment seem to have become the norm. A newly unbridled media throughout Latin America probes aggressively into high-level malfeasance and gives daily evidence of the region’s legendary gaps between rich and poor. The deepening of democracy in some countries in the region during the 1990s also allowed individuals with similar interests to organize and gain a voice that had long been suppressed. Not surprisingly, traditional political parties saw their membership and influence dwindle. With no compelling message, discredited leaders, and fewer public-sector jobs with which to reward supporters, the old parties became easy prey for new political contenders. Venezuela — where one of the region’s oldest and best-organized party systems collapsed nearly overnight — offers the most extreme example of this pattern.

The new movements stepped in to fill this leadership void. Most of the groups boast charismatic leaders with few qualms in resorting to violence. In contrast to traditional parties, which usually included the middle class and the wealthy, these new movements are led and supported by the poor. Many of these new social movements are vehemently based on race. They are also rabidly anti-American — a natural posture given their nationalism and hostility toward traditional elites whose interests often align with those of the United States. Finally, they are all deeply critical of globalization. The Zapatistas, for example, burst into the spotlight the day the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in 1994, arguing that the treaty would hurt small farmers in the poor southern Mexican state of Chiapas. The Zapatistas also criticized the Mexican government’s embrace of neoliberalism (a universal critique of these groups).

As is often the case with other organized anti-globalization groups, Latin America’s new political actors have in fact benefited greatly from globalization. Cheaper travel and communications technologies have accelerated and deepened their links with like-minded allies in the region, the United States, and Europe. Ironically, while these groups were engendered by local conditions in some of the world’s poorest communities, their ascent has also been fueled by their almost seamless integration into a global network of activists, politicians, and even governments that provides financial and political assistance. As a result of such internationalization, these groups are quickly becoming the closest Latin America has had to a multinational political movement in a long time.

While many of these new political groups have ascended rapidly, most of them have a long way to go before becoming mainstream political forces. Some could eventually be co-opted by traditional political parties. Moreover, in the long run, their influence may be severely impaired by their almost universal lack of reliable and practical policy proposals. These new groups’ effectiveness and intelligence in exploiting the politics of rage, race, and revenge contrast with their inability to articulate credible ideas to deal with the problems they denounce. At best, they simply advocate turning back the clock toward policies — such as land reform, trade protectionism, and state-led development — that failed in the past and have been rightfully discarded.

Ultimately, the true danger such new political groups pose is not that they are rupturing Latin America’s peaceful coexistence with tragic normalcy; that is actually a welcome development. Instead, these groups threaten to bring back another of the region’s historical maladies: peaceful coexistence with policy lunacy.