Until the impeachment and arrest of Peruvian President Pedro Castillo on 7 December, 2022 was looking like a successful year for South America’s electoral Left. Earlier in the year, Lula in Brazil and Gustavo Petro in Colombia had both won presidential elections, joining other regional leftist leaders such as Luis Arce in Bolivia (elected in 2020), Gabriel Boric in Chile (2021) and Alberto Fernández in Argentina (2019). For the first time in history, it appeared that the six most populous countries in South America—Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Venezuela and Chile—would simultaneously be ruled by left-of-centre governments. However, Castillo’s downfall highlighted the fragile hold on power exercised by this second wave of ‘Pink Tide’ leaders. Other indications of instability include the failed constitutional referendum in Chile, the conviction on corruption charges of Argentina’s ex-president Cristina Kirchner and the spectacular invasion of all three branches of the Brazilian government by Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters in January 2023.
Questions also remain about the capacity of these governments to slow down the current, devastating wave of deforestation in South America. Due to its sheer size and hold on the global imagination, the Amazon rainforest receives most of the international media’s attention, but there has also been heavy recent clearing south of the Amazon, in the Cerrado savanna (Brazil), the dry Chaco forests (Bolivia, Argentina and Paraguay) and the last vestiges of the Atlantic rainforest (Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay). Due to the outsize role they play as carbon sinks, the fight for South America’s tropical forest biomes are a crucial front in the global struggle against climate change. Below I provide a summary of the electoral situation in each country in South America, excluding the Guianas, along with an overview of what these developments mean for South America’s forests….