In 2025, sometimes it is difficult to remember that, for two decades or so at the end of the twentieth- and start of the twenty-first century, Latin America was a place of hope. A progressive wave brought left-leaning governments to power across the region, driven by social currents fighting for new ways of organising society, politics and production; that is to say, new ways of organising life. The Zapatista uprising on the 1 January 1994 sparked excitement that Latin America could be a social laboratory once more. After being the cauldron where the economic ideas of the post-War period and the counterrevolutionary violence of the Cold War were first forged, the Zapatistas at once centred Latin America across debates over autonomy, democracy and alternatives to neoliberalism. Factory occupations by the piquetero movement in Argentina, Indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador demanding control over water and other natural resources and the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Peasants’ Movement, MST) across South America captured the imagination of a generation of critical scholars. Arguably, nowhere was this truer than in Venezuela, where the charismatic president Hugo Chávez had returned from the brink in the face of a conservative coup d’état in 2003 to pursue what he labelled ‘twenty-first century socialism’.
