Class and race in Latin America’s left populist politics

Abstract

This article challenges the notion that populist rhetoric in Latin America primarily and consistently arose in response to recent social dislocations and involves, from the onset, a Manichean struggle of the good people against an evil enemy. Instead, this work seeks the origins of polarisation, so often associated with populism, deep in history: in colonial conquest, in highly unequal economic, social and political relations in the post-independence period, and in nation-building myths that denied the existence of exclusions involving race/culture. Through an analysis of speeches given by former president of Argentina Juan Perón and former president of Venezuela Hugo Chávez, the author demonstrates a strong early conciliatory strain in populist rhetoric that calls for the respect and inclusion of racially and culturally distinct lower-class populist followers and acceptance of their importance to the nation. Initially, this rhetoric does not exclude the opposition in the populist leader’s concept of the nation. The Manichean aspect of populist rhetoric emerges later, when populist leaders come to believe that their pleas for material and cultural/racial inclusion have been and will always be rejected by anti-populists. In this interpretation, populism is a symptom of long-standing exclusion and latent pre-existing polarisation, not its cause.