Will Grant - Populista: The Rise of Latin Americas 21st Century Strongman

With a reporters eye and writers skill, Will Grant brings to life the colorful, flawed, and hugely consequential leaders who shaped the politics of Latin America in the early 21st century. Populista! is an ambitious, riveting and essential book that has much to teach us about the recent history of this region, and about the human impulse towards populism that continues to shape the world.

Ben Rhodes, author of The World As It Is

Grant is one of the shrewdest and best informed journalists working in Latin America today. He has spent more than a decade roving its barrios, farms, factories, chanceries and palaces, giving him a kaleidoscopic view of the region. It is on full display in Populista! A tour-de-force of reportage and analysis that makes sense of historic, complex forces that shook Latin America and in many ways foreshadowed what we are now seeing in the US, Europe and elsewhere. Grant has produced a lucid, important book.

Rory Carroll, author of Comandante

The best piece of non-fiction writing on Latin America that I have read in a long time. Will Grant meets everyone from presidents to the impoverished, and explains it all beautifully.

Giles Tremlett, author of Ghosts of Spain

Will Grant is one of the BBCs great scholar-correspondents, and without peer when it comes to explaining Latin America. In Populista! , he marries the depth of knowledge of a fine historian, with the elegant storytelling of a gifted journalist.

Nick Bryant, BBC New York Correspondent

Will Grants spirited, vivid and even handed portrait of modern Latin American populist leaders the gaping social needs and popular frustrations that helped bring the likes of Hugo Chvez and Luiz Incio Lula da Silva to power; and the broken dreams and economic ruin that they left behind is a valuable and timely guide. From the region that practically invented the term populism, it is also a sombre warning to those in more developed countries who once vainly imagined that the same could never possibly happen there. Grants Populista! describes how the playbook of charismatic autocrats and chronic cronyism can unfold anywhere.

John Paul Rathbone, of The Sugar King of Havana

Populista! is a timely, dramatic account of Latin Americas modern-day leftwing populists: Castro, Chvez, Ortega, Correa, Lula and Evo, theyre all here. Will Grant writes with close knowledge, admirable balance, and the verve of a natural storyteller. A must-read for todays volatile world.

Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che: A Revolutionary Life

Will Grant has written an elegant and vivid account of Latin Americas strongmen that radiates from the pages like bursts of Cuban sunshine. He skilfully weaves together reportage, startling modern history, and his own personal testimony, to chart the rise to power of some of the most brutal, but fascinating, authoritarian leaders of modern times. He invites us into a world of dripping jungle hideouts, dusty urban warfare, and revolutions. At times it is as if the reader has slipped into the pages of Gabriel Garcia Mrquez.

Paul Kenyon, author of Dictatorland

A sweeping, vivid and even-handed account of the populist leaders who shaped Latin America over the past twenty years. Will Grant moves deftly from palaces where he heard presidents claiming they embodied the will of the people to the barrios where their policies had most impact.

Maurice Walsh, author of Bitter Freedom

POPULISTA!

WILL GRANT

POPULISTA!

THE RISE OF LATIN AMERICAS
21ST CENTURY STRONGMAN

AN APOLLO BOOK

www.headofzeus.com

An Apollo book

First published in the UK in 2021 by Head of Zeus Ltd

Copyright Will Grant, 2021

The moral right of Will Grant to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (HB): 9781789543957

ISBN (E): 9781789543988

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For Julia and Isla

Populism is ultimately always sustained by the frustrated exasperation of ordinary people, by the cry I dont know whats going on, but Ive just had enough of it! It cannot go on! It must stop!

S LAVOJ IEK

Populism is the defining political issue of the twenty-first century. Electorates from London to Lahore, Moscow to Manila are struggling to distinguish between the half-truths and outright falsehoods being peddled by populist leaders of every political hue. In Europe, anti-democratic figures have risen to prominence in several nations, riding waves of xenophobic popular support not seen since the 1930s. In Turkey, Hungary, the Philippines and Russia, strongmen have taken hold of the apparatus of the state and show few signs of letting go. The United Kingdom is coping with a new and destabilizing current of populist discourse while the United States is being led by the most polarizing and capricious president it has ever known.

The populist leader can change a nation to its very fundament, leaving a mark so deep it takes decades to fade. But amid the handwringing and gnashing of teeth taking place in European capitals and on US campuses, an important precedent has often been overlooked: the personality-driven politics in Latin America over the past two decades. On 2 February 1999, Hugo Chvez received the presidential sash in oil-rich Venezuela following a landslide win at the polls. On 25 November 2016, his mentor and political father, Fidel Castro, died in Havana at the age of ninety. For me, those two dates bookended the so-called Pink Tide, the name given to a swing to the left across the Americas at the turn of the century.

For a decade and a half, populist left-wing presidents were in power from the Amazon to the Andes. The leaders of the Pink Tide were democratically elected and radical in their socialist reforms, though not sufficiently communist to be deemed red. Parties became secondary to individualism in Venezuela and Brazil, Central America and the Caribbean. It was a period of outsized, exuberant personalities, figures who shook up the natural order of politics in their countries and shifted the continental balance of power. Their stories are the stuff of political thrillers, from the torture victim who became Chiles first woman president to the rebirth of a Peronist presidential couple in Argentina. But six individuals from that period fascinate me the most. In order of their ascension, they are Hugo Chvez in Venezuela, Luiz Incio Lula da Silva in Brazil, the Bolivian president Evo Morales, the Ecuadorean leader Rafael Correa, and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. Plus the man who first cleared a path for their rise, father of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro.

All too often painted as a monolithic or homogenous group of radical leftists, in reality the six differ greatly as leaders and as men. A military cadet, a steelworker, a coca farmer, a boy scout, a guerrilla and a lawyer, they came from starkly different socio-economic backgrounds and geographical locations. At least two were barefoot poor while one was from the landed gentry, and their upbringings and political formation in distant corners of the continent varied considerably. If nothing else, I hope the extent of those differences becomes clearer over the following pages.