From Enthusiasm to Disconcertion. The View of the European Left on Latin America and the Fear of Populism

If in the sixties and seventies the European Left viewed Latin America as the continent where those dreams no longer viable in the Old Continent could finally become reality, nowadays they observe the political changes with a certain perplexity. The rise of political figures like Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales and Rafael Correa provokes uneasiness among European intellectuals and politicians, who recur to the idea of populism in order to identify them. But populism is a very elastic concept and says less about those who supposedly practice it, than about those who use it in a pejorative way, as is now the case of a European Left that no longer finds in Latin America the same "good revolutionaries" so admired in the past. Adapted from the source document.