INTRODUCTION

The preceding chapters have provided wide-ranging assessments of the economic and social policies, the political strategies, and the performance of four left governments in contemporary Latin America. The authors have examined rich and thorough information on ongoing transformation processes that have attracted a great deal of attention from academics and other observers, including the U.S. government. Capturing the dynamics and grasping the direction of political and socioeconomic change in midstream is always a difficult undertaking. The editors therefore commissioned renowned country experts whose deep familiarity with the national and international context and the long-term development trajectories of these countries allow for a grounded and nuanced interpretation of leftist reform efforts. The chapters examine recent reform efforts and policy programs as well as their potential impact on each country's development model. In these ways, the present volume seeks to capture new political experiences and interesting policy experiments in a comprehensive fashion.

As the introduction explained, the main purpose of this volume is to examine the differences in policy and performance among Latin America's contemporary left. Precisely for that reason, it bears emphasizing that these obvious differences have played out inside broad bounds of similarity. Although Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and Bolivia's Evo Morales have clearly diverged from the path followed by Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the Chilean Concertación governments headed by Ricardo Lagos and Michelle Bachelet, all of these administrations have stayed within an economic and political–institutional framework that has become fairly consolidated in the region.