Preface: In the time of COVID

Being a Latin Americanist is an emotional involvement. Over fifty years, my life has been enhanced immeasurably, and sometimes dominated, by the irresistible embrace of friendships, partnerships and solidarities. It is like a force field, a vortex, not infrequently tied to utopian imaginaries and the political crises in which they lie buried - crises which in these fatal, murderous years of 2020 and 2021 (as so often, everywhere but Uruguay and Costa Rica) have tested the frontiers of credibility.

It has been an intellectual, professional and personal roller-coaster rising and falling between ephemeral victories of progress and justice and long periods of despondency - the pain of Chile's September 1973, of Argentina's dirty war, of Peru's Sendero Luminoso . Few of us do not have friends and colleagues who have suffered exile, imprisonment, torture and death, and that was before the unspeakable, indescribable cruelty of the current occupant of the Brazilian presidency and the irresponsibility of his Mexican counterpart, together presiding over the deaths of hundreds of thousands from disease and organized violence - a multiple of all the dictatorships together.

In the 1970s, Latin American Studies were a festival of ideas and conviviality shrouded in the hope that eventually times would improve and that we would contribute to that improvement. Debates and disputes among the theoretical-political factions raged - in the days when we used to speak to each other. Ours is the luckiest generation ever - something for which future, less fortunate generations may not forgive us. We have been blessed with an abundance of research and travel funding, and the internationalization of postgraduate education which has opened the way to enduring intellectual partnerships and personal friendships.

If I write a book which is quite critical of some of the most influential progressive ideas of our time in Latin America and beyond, it is because of those experiences and those tragedies. The record of left wing and progressive governments in the region is deeply disappointing: the only truly successful ones were the two terms of Lula's presidency in Brazil, and Mujica in Uruguay. But even Lula's time in office was tarnished by corruption, and then retrospectively by the trials (literally) and tribulations of his successor Dilma Roussef. The impeachment of Dilma, in her second term, was ruthlessly unfair, subjecting her to cruel, shameless, misogynistic vilification. The only other truly left-wing governments were Chile's Unidad Popular, the first period of the Peruvian military regime inaugurated in 1968, and the early Sandinistas, but they all crashed out in military overthrow, economic crisis or armed insurrection openly supported by US intervention. In the light of subsequent prevailing orthodoxies, even the Christian Democrat government that preceded Unidad Popular, could be regarded as left wing. I do not regard post-1973 Peronism as a left-wing, let alone socialist, force, nor will I confer that title on Chavez-Maduro or Correa. They used control of the state to perpetuate themselves in power and neuter opposition, without undertaking sustainable universalist programmes to eliminate poverty or reduce inequality: instead they have distributed benefits to their followers and prebends to their associates and sought to suffocate the media. Evo Morales, like Lula-Dilma, did undertake consistent left-wing reforms only to fall victim to his own abuse of power. Cuba belongs in another category: while Castro's road to power has been imitated, without success save, briefly, in Nicaragua, no political force has ever proclaimed Cuba as a model of government or development.

The leading figures of the decolonial have assembled in a single category the highly diverse group of Chavez-Maduro, Correa, Morales, Mujica and Lula-Dilma, and adopt a dismissive attitude to Marxism; their interpretations privilege culture and colonialism, race and ethnicity over economics, capitalism and class. I ask whether they offer a convincing diagnosis of the current situation and its origins and whether it offers a basis for a historical project to pursue social justice.

I use the words social justice in a universalist sense: sustainable redistribution of income and wealth that extends into the future and is not undone by coups d'état or economic crisis. It is a demanding criterion, for sustainability means that reforms are not undone even in the event of electoral defeat. If they are not politically sustainable, what is the point?

The decolonial is likely to label such universalism 'neoliberal' and 'Eurocentric'. Yet, when I look beyond the grand schema to the research it inspires and the movements it applauds, I find, despite explicit or implicit protestations to the contrary, that the aspirations of legal and feminist anthropologists and indigenist movements like the Zapatistas, especially indigenous women leaders, are universalist. They are sceptical of projects of cultural regeneration unless they go together with commitments to gender equality, to a reduction of class inequality and to an end to the organized violence which is more pervasive in Latin America than in almost any other part of the world.

The leading figures of the decolonial (its 'gurus') - Aníbal Quijano, Boaventura de Souza Santos, and Water Mignolo - give a 'Latin-style' voice to the social science 'cultural turn'. Rejecting Marxism and, implicitly, its cousin dependencia, as Eurocentric, they replace demonization of US imperialism with demonization of European colonialism, and they have shifted the stakes in the global confrontation between the peoples of the Global South and the predatory forces of world capitalism onto the cultural terrain. Colonialism still refers back to the sixteenth century, but the ethnocidal culture and the epistemicide of that period is projected forward to the present and the word is applied to almost any structural power relationship. Latin America's social polarization is conceived in binary racialized terms, perpetuated by cultural inauthenticity and a colonialist modernity inspired by 'Europe'.

It cannot be denied that the decolonial has captured the spirit of the times. Their disinterest in economics mirrors the abandonment of the 'neoliberal' free market ideas by white nationalists in the United States and illiberal democrats in Europe, and the science-denying, COVID-negating 'anti-globalists' surrounding the current Brazilian president. But the decolonial, lacking the radio and TV stations and the billionaire funders to confront those machines, shies away from the politics of the street or the ballot box and confines itself to the podiums of academia.

COVID has arrived as if sent by the merchants of culture war to provide the most dangerous of battlefields the region has known since the Conquest itself, which brought an epidemic that killed 90 per cent of the indigenous population. More murderous than all the twentieth century revolutions, and counter-revolutions, the pandemic has not only revealed cruel inequalities of class and race in the light of day. It has also revealed intractable cultural rifts and has shown that these do not follow ethnic, let alone racial, frontiers. Rather they divide different concepts of religion (those who claim to know God and his will from those for whom religion is tradition and an ethos) and different epistemologies (those who trust science from those who trust only what they themselves are able or willing to see and hear). Today's denialists are as guilty as the colonial invaders and, in response to those who think that adherence to indigenous knowledge and belief systems stands in contradiction to modern science, I have yet to hear that any are to be found among indigenous peoples, their leaders, their shamans or their healers. Denialists doubt the authority of modernity in the form of science, yet in the name of a perverted notion of modernity disguised as predatory development, they attack indigenous physical and cultural survival. The decolonial denounces modernity for its destruction of indigenous knowledge and the imposition of Eurocentric science, yet today's 'Eurocentrics' seek to destroy indigenous societies in the name of science-scepticism while leaders of indigenous peoples look to the science of climate change and biodiversity, and of course to vaccination, to defend themselves.

As we have known ever since the founding of development economics in the post-war period, Latin America desperately needs a redistribution of income and wealth. By now, it is widely recognized that racial exclusion and gender inequality were missing from the reformisms of that time. But gender and race are neither precisely comparable nor stable categories, as Rogers Brubaker found in his sharply insightful Trans (Brubaker 2016). Brubaker was surprised to find that the two words have, so to speak, changed places, notably in the United States: whereas it was for a long time thought that race is a 'construct' while gender was taken to be a stable objective category, it was increasingly being claimed that race was neither a construct nor a matter of self-assignment, whereas gender had become much more fluid and a matter to some extent of personal choice. This controversy will come to the fore when we discuss the role of judges and committees in deciding whether Brazilian university applicants qualify for quota places reserved for blacks.

My argument in the...