Large swathes of the left in Brazil claim that the only way President Dilma Rousseff’s mandate will survive intact in coming months is if she makes significant changes to her economic policy. Such an approach is doomed from the start because it implies that her economic policy is indefensible.

It has become a cliché to note that the left is in retreat throughout Latin America. If the prosperity of the first decade of the century propelled it forward, the economic crises of the second have stopped it in its tracks.

According to Chile’s Servicio Electoral, there are currently ten new political parties being formed in the country and six more that are being officially registered. Given the fact that thirteen parties already exist, if all the new initiatives meet with success Chile will be home to nearly thirty political parties.

“Transfuguismo,” or the act of changing one’s party affiliation, has become endemic in the Dominican Republic. In a country plagued by corruption and irresponsibility, the phenomenon has become an expression of the times, an alarming symptom of an era in which “consciences are bought and votes are sold.”

A number of vociferous critics are holding the left responsible for all of Colombia’s current ills and evoking the Peñalosa era as a golden age to which the country should return.

“Regarding the massive discontent people feel toward both political parties and the political class in general, it has been said that there is a growing sense of anti-politics among the citizenry, one that might very well erode the viability of democracy and lead to authoritarian experimentation on the one hand or a breakdown in social

An unusually deep-seated apathy toward politics has taken root in Brazil in recent years.

During recent years Venezuela has become the country with the world’s most stagnant economy and poorest rate of development. It heads the list on the Index of International Misery and has among the lowest credit ratings of any nation on earth, according to the Bloomberg Agency.

One of the main reasons for the rise of the Sendero Luminoso (The Shining Path) during the 1980s in Peru was the fact that the peasant uprisings of the previous decades had been crushed under the iron fist of the second Belaunde government, a political reconfiguration in which the rural population definitively lost its voice.

The latest fiscal reform bill in Mexico is raising hackles among several of that nation’s most powerful businessmen, many of whom are complaining that it will affect their companies’ capacity for future investment.