ISSUE V : Note from the Editor
The very scale of our solitude
By Sean Jacobs
In the last two issues, I suggested readers of THE NEW CONTEXT to revisit Black Internationalism and the legacies of Global South politics—Bandung, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the Tricontinental. Here I want to add Latin America specifically, which though parts of the above legacies, should also be highlighted on its own. As platforms like TikTok and X nudge Gen Z toward authoritarian populists like Ibrahim Traoré in Burkina Faso, Latin America offers more compelling, democratic political alternatives. The passing on May 13, 2025, of Pepe Mujica, President of Uruguay between 2010 and 2015, reminded me again of this legacy.
The West—especially beyond Euro-America, where entrenched right-wing politics and feckless liberalism dominate—offers little in the way of democratic or transformative models. Latin America, by contrast, has demonstrated how to dismantle the power structures of compliant, undemocratic elites aligned with the West, multinationals, neoliberalism, and authoritarian violence.
Recent transformations echo the earlier “Pink Tide” and reject the logic of neoliberal authoritarianism, ethnonationalism, and Afropessimism. Mexico’s Morena party, led by AMLO and now Claudia Sheinbaum, has secured broad popular support by implementing universal social programs, opposing privatization and deregulation, and addressing working-class and rural needs. Sheinbaum also challenges biased media narratives, including U.S. ones.
Xiomara Castro’s 2021 election marked a return to the left in Honduras after the 2009 U.S.-backed coup against her husband, President Manuel Zelaya. Castro’s victory, the fruit of sustained resistance, signaled a rupture with Washington’s grip and neoliberal orthodoxy.
Gabriel Boric’s election in Chile, born of a student revolt and feminist-socialist municipal victories, further illustrates the potential for transformative politics. The constitutional convention he championed, with gender parity and Indigenous leadership, ultimately failed to replace Pinochet’s legacy charter. Yet Chile underscores the urgency of building class alliances.
Gustavo Petro, elected president of Colombia in June 2022, has shifted the country’s foreign policy to emphasize independence from the West. His administration has prioritized climate change and aims to position Colombia as a middle power by reducing reliance on the U.S. and Europe, while seeking ties with BRICS and China’s Belt and Road Initiative. In May 2024, Colombia suspended diplomatic relations with Israel over its actions in Gaza—a major break from past policies aligned with Western powers. This move signaled a clear departure from the centrist and center-right traditions that had long shaped Colombia’s international stance.
These examples from Latin America remind us: alternatives exist. They are grounded in mass movements, resistance to empire, and commitments to redistribution and dignity.
I am reminded of part of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s statement as he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982:
“Latin America neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become a Western aspiration. However, the navigational advances that have narrowed such distances between our Americas and Europe seem, conversely, to have accentuated our cultural remoteness. Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change? Why think that the social justice sought by progressive Europeans for their own countries cannot also be a goal for Latin America, with different methods for dissimilar conditions? No: the immeasurable violence and pain of our history are the result of age-old inequities and untold bitterness, and not a conspiracy plotted three thousand leagues from our home. But many European leaders and thinkers have thought so, with the childishness of old-timers who have forgotten the fruitful excess of their youth as if it were impossible to find another destiny than to live at the mercy of the two great masters of the world. This, my friends, is the very scale of our solitude.”