Introduction

Abstract

The defeat of the Free Trade Areas of the Americas at the summit of Mar del Plata in 2005 by Latin America’s new leaders, including Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, and Néstor Carlos Kirchner, marked one of the most notorious political points of the “pink tide” that had been engulfing the region since 2003. For Latin America, a region that has produced exciting experiences for socialist activists and thinkers of the Left of the world, a new and hopeful historical moment opened in the early twenty-first century. The electoral shift of the political parties, social movements, and candidates committed to greater equality through the control of the state over the economy provided the evidence to claim that an emerging “new Continentalism” was creating the conditions to break with the ideas and policies promoted by the “Washington Consensus.”