DURING the student-led protests that shook Chile a few years ago, a prominent rallying cry was “neoliberalism was born in Chile and will die in Chile.”

It points to the front-line place Latin America has had when it comes to clashes between economic systems and between imperialism and decolonisation. Many of the Latin American revolutionary projects that inspire us, that lots of us come to Adelante! to hear more about, are independence struggles as well as class struggles.

The two are bound together. The poverty and underdevelopment of much of the Third World is down to the domination of economies by Western corporations controlling their natural resources.

Decolonisation remained partial if it was not accompanied by social revolution because formal independence did not necessarily give a country control of its own resources if private property relations, maintaining ultimate Western ownership in many cases, stayed in place. And social revolution was not possible without confronting the power and property of the West. Though it has often been forgotten or deliberately erased since the collapse of the Soviet Union, this explains the close association between communist and decolonisation movements through the 20th century.

In Latin America the confrontation between global North and global South runs through country after country. One example is the issue of race.

In the violent guarimbas, or right-wing street uprisings, in Venezuela in 2014 and 2017, it was typically black Venezuelans who were attacked as suspected “Chavistas” or supporters of the revolution. In one infamous example from 2017, a young black man, Orlando Figuera, was beaten, knifed and set on fire. He was suspected of being a government supporter because he was black.

In Bolivia and Peru, right-wing coups have mobilised white supremacism in assertions of dominance over indigenous communities and culture.

During the US and British-backed military coup in Bolivia in 2019, carried out against Bolivia’s first indigenous president Evo Morales, the Christian fundamentalist leader Luis Fernando Camacho stormed the presidential palace, tore down the Pachamama flag representing indigenous Andean traditions, and swore on the Bible that “Bolivia belongs to Christ.” Though Latin American Christian politics is not uniformly right-wing — this is the home continent of Liberation Theology and the Chavista movement in Venezuela has often referenced its Christian roots — the symbolism of Camacho’s actions was clear, a re-enactment of the conquest of the continent by Europeans and the imposition of their religious tradition over that of the native population.

It would be the indigenous Aymara people of Bolivia who, maintaining their defiance despite lethal state violence against demonstrators that killed hundreds, organised the protest movement that forced the coup government to hold new elections after a year, which Morales’s Movement Towards Socialism won, though he was in exile and not allowed to lead it into them. Today, the division between Morales and his former ally, current President Luis Arce, is also one in which indigenous opinion is overwhelmingly behind Morales.

In Peru, the 2021 election of Pedro Castillo showcased the same division: not only was Castillo indigenous but his opponent, Keiko Fujimori, was the daughter of former dictator Alberto Fujimori, who in the 1990s had enacted a programme of forced sterilisation of indigenous women. Castillo was overthrown in a congressional coup the next year, and again the protesters shot down in the streets for demonstrating against the new government were mainly indigenous.

These struggles show decolonisation is at the heart of domestic politics in Latin America. But it is also key to the continent’s relationship with the United States.

The US has asserted its right to dominate the continent and keep out rival powers since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. For much of the world, US imperialism has been an adversary since the second world war, but in Latin America it goes back much further.

This encourages US tendencies to view Latin America as its “backyard,” and Washington’s exceptional enmity against “rebel” states like Cuba. The blockade against Cuba is unique, in place far longer than economic measures directed at any other country.

Of course it is ideologically motivated — the United States hates the example of a different, socialist society that Cuba provides, one that exports education and healthcare rather than war and weapons. But it is also spiteful and irrational, not comparable to US policy towards other socialist states, even ones which have humiliated the US militarily like Vietnam. US imperialism sees socialist Cuba’s very existence as an insult — because it is in Latin America.

This poses particular threats to Latin American revolutions. Cuba has had its 60-year blockade. Venezuela is subjected to economic warfare. Both are victims of piracy on the high seas, the US seizure of their property and trade — Iranian oil headed for Venezuela, Chinese medical equipment bound for Cuba during the Covid pandemic.

The US was involved in the coup in Bolivia; the recently retired head of its Southern Command, General Laura Richardson, referencing the importance of it controlling a “lithium triangle” of Bolivia, Chile and Argentina.

It is in contact with — new Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said as much — forces in its traditional ally Colombia hostile to the left-wing presidency of Gustavo Petro. It backed the Brazilian right in overthrowing Dilma Rousseff, and Ecuador’s turncoat president Lenin Moreno’s economic lurch rightwards was accompanied by opening the country to US military bases.

Domestic and international policy in Latin America are two sides of the same coin — redistributive governments who want to use their natural resources to benefit their populations have to break with the US; right-wing governments maintaining the power of traditional elites depend on the US.

But the US’s “backyard” can also be a testing ground for policies later taken up at the heart of the “empire.” The slogan we began with referenced this: Pinochet’s Chile was the laboratory for the neoliberal economic policies of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, considered impossibly extreme by the mainstream Western economists of the postwar period.

This blood-soaked regime proved a “success” in privatising public assets, weakening social provision and transferring wealth from workers to owners, and the lessons were then rolled out through Reaganomics in the US and Thatcherism in Britain.

Today, Argentina’s Javier Milei is at the forefront of efforts to again redefine the role of the state, to remove democratic curbs on corporate power, turning it into a purer instrument of ruling-class repression shorn of all social, economic or environmental obligations. This project is openly cited as an inspiration by the Trump government in the US itself.

Yet Latin America is at the same time where efforts to redefine the state in a totally different direction have taken place, with Bolivia’s attempt to enshrine rights for nature and the planet in the constitution, to make access to clean water and food human rights. The continent pitches, more sharply than any other, the alternative paths before humanity in the 21st century.

This is part of a “new cold war” because the new cold war is itself the result of the rise of the global South.

Building a multipolar world is a decolonisation process: one in which countries prevented till now from exercising full sovereignty because their resources are controlled by others are able to “stand up,” as Chairman Mao put it in 1949.

They are able to do so because China’s peaceful rise has created an economic counterweight to the West and the network of financial institutions and treaties that maintain Western hegemony. The Belt & Road Initiative replaced the World Bank as the biggest source of development loans globally in 2020, and Chinese infrastructure loans come without the political strings attached to loans from the World Bank or International Monetary Fund, which often require deregulation of economies to open them up to foreign exploitation.

But it is not just an economic counterweight, but an ideological one, given China’s planned economy, focus on poverty alleviation, rejection of war as a means of resolving disputes and determination to build an “ecological civilisation” as the world leader in renewable and green technology.

The left-right divisions in Latin America reflect these two clashing global ideologies. So left leaders in Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil stand explicitly with Palestine in the face of an Israeli genocide. So the leader of the continent’s hard-right counter-revolution, Javier Milei, even before coming to office, announced he would tear up agreements with China and align Argentina with the United States and Israel.

The outcome of the struggle in Latin America matters to the whole world, because it is a struggle, as Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said at the summit of the G77+China in Havana in 2023, for “the right to development in an increasingly exclusive, unfair, unjust and plundering international order,” and a struggle to replace that order with its opposite.

This article is based on a talk Ben Chacko gave at the Adelante! Latin America conference at the weekend.