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Why Are Latin America’s Right-Wing Governments Struggling?

By Patricio Navia

Bold reform is needed, or else the new generation of leaders may be tossed out, too.

Since the commodity boom ended four years ago, right-wing presidents are becoming the norm in Latin America. But their performance in office has been anything but stellar. Why? And what can these governments do to recover before it’s too late?

After a decade in which most countries in Latin America were ruled by left-wing governments, today only Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua neatly fit into that category. In Argentina and Peru, market-friendly candidates Mauricio Macri and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (PPK) replaced leftist leaders after elections in 2015 and 2016. In Brazil, after the...

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