SOUTH AMERICA:Persistent gross inequalities across the continent have helped promote a resurgence of the left, reports Tom Henniganin São Paulo
This year saw South America's resurgent left consolidate its grip on presidential palaces across the region as one election after another demonstrated that the continent's so-called "pink tide" has reached a new high water mark and shows no signs of receding.
The left comfortably held power in Brazil, Venezuela and Chile while left-wing challengers won in Ecuador and Peru. In January a leftist was inaugurated as Bolivia's first indigenous president after winning elections there last December. In Argentina, the left-wing incumbent is widely expected to hold on to power if he decides to run for a second term next year.
Only Colombia, where right-winger Álvaro Uribe was re-elected for a second term, bucked the trend and even here a new left-wing bloc emerged as a significant force winning second place. The left won almost a quarter of the vote in a country where the democratic left has long been caught between communist guerrillas in the jungles and reactionary right-wing forces in the cities.
The left's current political supremacy in South America is a dramatic reversal of fortune from the 1990s. Then right-wing parties held sway and the dominant creed was of market liberalisation and privatisation which was sold as the path to modernising the region's insular economies and socially rigid societies.
But while this decade of insertion into the global economy resulted in great economic changes, it failed to address the fundamental fact about South America that has bedevilled its development for centuries - the gross inequalities within its societies.
The left has skilfully capitalised on this and has been aided by the failure of right-wing governments to cure South America of one of its most crippling vices, corruption. Right-wing parties in much of the region remain vulnerable to charges that when in power they sold off the family silver to foreigners in return for massive kickbacks.
Now privatisations have largely come to a halt and in key areas have been reversed. This is particularly true in the energy sector.
One of the pink tide's foremost figures, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, has forced foreign firms into agreeing a far greater role for the state energy giant PDVSA in exploiting South America's biggest oil fields.
In October Evo Morales in Bolivia forced the same sort of settlement on foreign investors in his country's huge gas fields and recently elected Rafael Correa in oil-rich Ecuador threatens to do likewise once he is inaugurated.
This focus on the energy sector is driven by high international prices which promise a financial windfall for any leader who can get their hands on the revenue pumping out of the ground.
This explains the extraordinary global prominence of Chávez, who has spent Venezuela's petrodollars on winning an international role as one of the most vocal critics of the United States, while using the cash to mask a myriad of populist mistakes in economic management at home since taking power in 1998.
Chávez is perhaps the most prominent of the region's leaders, frequently grabbing global headlines with his theatrical taunts of US president George Bush, whom he called the devil in a speech before the UN General Assembly in September.
But despite the backslapping at regional get-togethers there are different hues of pink on display when the region's leaders meet and the populism of Chávez and Morales sometimes obscures a more conservative streak in their left-wing peers and those who voted for them.
Running as a friend of Chávez did Correa no harm in last month's presidential election in Ecuador but it helped torpedo the candidacy of Ollanta Humala in Peru in June.
Faced with a self-proclaimed admirer and friend of the Venezuelan leader, Peruvian voters instead selected former president Alan García.
His own populist background is impeccable. He nationalised banks in the late 1980s and watched the economy crash and inflation spiral out of sight. But the García voters elected in June says he is a reformed character who understands that inflation hurts the poor most and who will this time work with business and not against it.
García's transformation reflects an often little acknowledged fact about the legacy of the right-wing's years in power in the 1990s.
Much of the right's legitimacy rested on the fact that it brought rampant inflation under control, usually through painful financial shock therapy. Most of the new generation of left-wing leaders have been careful to promise to respect that macro-economic settlement, often proving as hawkish on inflation as their ideologically opposed predecessors.
Argentina and Brazil, the continent's two biggest economies, were for decades accustomed to running huge public deficits which they covered with devalued paper that resulted in inflation and occasional defaults. But four years of left-wing governments have seen four years of large fiscal surpluses that have drawn praise from the International Monetary Fund and anger from many of their own left-wing militants who want more government investment in jobs and poverty reduction programmes.
Therefore the challenge for left-wing governments without the benefits of a Chávez-like cash windfall has become to tackle poverty and inequality without resorting to the wilder populist measures of their predecessors which typically scared off capital and ended in the rampant inflation voters have made clear they will no longer tolerate.
For all the benefits of Lula's Bolsa Família programme of social assistance in Brazil, or Nestor Kirchner's success in slashing Argentina's poverty levels from more than half the population to less than a third, doing so is slow work. It can seem even slower when compared to the populist measures being enacted in Venezuela.
With the United States largely disengaged from the region since September 11th and local right-wing parties yet to come up with a message about the future that resonates with voters, which experiment proves the more successful will determine the future of the continent in the coming years.