Know Your Enemy - UNLOCKED: A New Pink Tide? (w/ Thea Riofrancos & David Adler)

Sam's conversation with David Adler and Thea Riofrancos about the return of the Latin American left — unlocked from Patreon in advance of hugely consequential elections in Colombia this weekend!!

Duration: 1h 23m
Broadcast on: 25 May 2022
Audio Format: other

A conversation with David Adler and Thea Riofrancos about the return of the Latin American left — unlocked from Patreon in advance of hugely consequential elections in Colombia this weekend!! (Originally published May 15, 2022.)

Hope for the American left is at a fairly low ebb, at the moment, but our counterparts in Latin America are on the march and succeeding at beating back repressive right wing governments across the region. What can we learn from them? And given extremely volatile global conditions — and the continued role of the US in defending the interests of capital in the region — what can these new left-wing governments hope to accomplish?

Sam is joined by political scientist Thea Riofrancos and David Adler, the General Coordinator of the Progressive International, to discuss left populism in Chile, Colombia, Brazil, and elsewhere.

Further Reading:

Thea Riofrancos & David Adler, "Gabriel Boric and Latin America’s new pink tide," New Statesman, Mar 11, 2022.

Thea Riofrancos, "The rush to ‘go electric’ comes with a hidden cost: destructive lithium mining," Guardian, Jun 14, 2021.

— "The View from Latin America," Boston Review, Apr 27, 2020.

— "Ecuador After Correa," n+1, Fall 2017.

John Bartlett, "Chilean journalist dies after being shot while covering Workers’ Day marches," Guardian, May 12, 2022

...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Welcome, listeners, to a special bonus episode of Know Your Enemy. I'm Sam Adler-Bell, and I'm here without my great friend, Matthew Sitman, because he's busy doing something else. What could be more important than chatting with his great friend? I don't know. But luckily, I was joined earlier this week by two brilliant people, Theo Rio Franco's and David Adler, no relation, to discuss something near and dear to my heart, the return of the Latin American Left. Hope for the American Left is at a fairly low ebb at the moment, as you all might have noticed, but our counterparts in Latin America are on the march. They're succeeding at beating back repressive right-wing governments across Central and South America. And so I had these two scholars on to ask what we can learn from them, and also given extremely volatile global conditions and the continued role of the US in defending the interests of capital in the region, what can these left-wing governments hope to accomplish? Thea and David were great, perfect pair for helping to answer these questions, and I'll just give you their bios. Theo Rio Franco's is a Carnegie Fellow, an associate professor of political science at Providence College and the author of resource radicals from petronationalism to post-extractivism in Ecuador. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy in The Guardian, and she's a brilliant scholar. David Adler is a returning guest, and he's a political economist, and the general coordinator of the Progressive International. His research in writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and Foreign Affairs. I won't delay any further, here's that conversation with David and Thea on Latin America's new pink tide. Enjoy. All right, Theo Rio Franco's and David Adler, welcome to Know Your Enemy. Thanks for having us. Always a pleasure, Sam. I'm so happy you're here. I'm sorry that Matt is not. He hates talking about the left, so he refused to participate in this conversation, but what we are going to do is do a little bit of a Know Your Friends episode of Know Your Enemy and talk about what's been going on with the revived left-wing political movements and governments in Latin America over the past few years and a few elections that are coming up. I think this will be really useful for our listeners because we're also going to be sort of identifying how was it that the old pink tide receded right-wing governments came to power and then a new pink tide beat them back at a time when in the US and US politics, the left seems to be losing very badly. We might look to some of these popular movements and governments in Latin America for some guidance or at least some points of comparison. Sounds great. Let's do it. So one of the fun things about this conversation is both of you have been traveling in Latin America in the past few weeks and months, where have each of you been? I just got back a little over a week ago from two weeks in Santiago, Chile.

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Sam's conversation with David Adler and Thea Riofrancos about the return of the Latin American left — unlocked from Patreon in advance of hugely consequential elections in Colombia this weekend!!