It’s been a bad three years for socialism in Latin America.
José Antonio Kast, a man who campaigned on fiscal responsibility, smaller government, and ending illegal immigration, won Chile’s presidential election last Sunday in a landslide.
The country now follows Argentina, Bolivia, Honduras, Ecuador and Venezuela in electing right-leaning presidential candidates since 2023 (whether they were installed as presidents or not is another question).
These elections show a vibe-shift toward free markets and democracy. When Kast ran four years ago, he lost by nearly 11%. This year, he won by 16%.
Democracy’s tumultuous history in Latin America
Daniel Di Martino — a Venezuelan immigrant and Manhattan Institute fellow, pursuing a doctoral degree in economics at Columbia University — explained Latin America’s political history to the Deseret News.
Civil wars and political instability plagued the continent in the 1800s, and by the end of the century, most countries were ruled by dictators or oligarchies. Continuous democratic rule only really took hold after World War II.
In a very short period of time, “Latin America experimented with all the ideologies,” Di Martino said. And one very prevelant ideology was socialism. Di Martino defined socialism as “government ownership or control over the means of production, and it is not a switch, it’s a spectrum.”
Marxist influence from Cuba, which originated from the Soviet Union, planted seeds for socialism in Venezuela, Nicaragua and elsewhere. Then when Hugo Chávez won Venezuela’s presidential election in 1998, he catalyzed the “pink tide.”
“The pink tide was this wave of elections beginning with Chávez in 1998, where left wing candidates won in Latin America,” Di Martino said. These candidates were part of the São Paulo Forum, which was founded by Fidel Castro in Cuba and Chávez in Venezuela.
Javier Milei sparked change in Latin America after winning in Argentina
Argentina’s election of the free-market-loving libertarian Javier Milei “marks a very noticeable turning point in South American history,” Washington Abdala, a lawyer, professor and former Uruguayan congressman, told the Deseret News.
But “the only way somebody with (Milei’s) very radical, pro-free market ideas, somebody who describes himself as an anarcho-capitalist, could win is with Argentina being so destroyed with inflation, shortages and poverty,” Di Martino said.
Before Milei’s election in 2023, Argentina’s poverty rate was 45%, inflation was at 25% per month and the country was experiencing a recession of 1.6%, per the Friedrich Naumann Foundation.
One month into his term, Milei cut Argentina’s budget by 30% and balanced it for the first time in over a decade. He shrank Argentina’s departments from 18 to 8, eliminating its Department of Education, Labor, Environment, Women, Gender & Diversity and more, per the Buenos Aires Times.
Though these changes came with opposition, Argentina seems to be latching onto Milei and his ideas. During the country’s midterm elections in October, his La Libertad Avanza party brought in nearly 41% of the national vote, winning about half of the seats up for grabs and tripling his parliamentary base.
And the rest of Latin America is watching.
Since Milei’s election, presidential candidates in other Latin American countries “now have a real opportunity they simply didn’t have before,” Abdala said.
Milei “lent credibility to the idea that somebody like him could win in other countries in Latin America,” Di Martino added. “He succeeded with his policies, and other countries’ populations saw that and thought, ‘Wow, I want that too.’”
Presidential elections are scheduled next year in Colombia and Brazil.
Why have socialist countries in Latin America struggled?
Di Martino’s grandparents immigrated to Venezuela from Spain and Italy, after World War II. His family has since returned returned to Europe.
“Socialism is such a plague. It has destroyed so many lives,” Di Martino said. “I would have never left Venezuela. I was very happy, you know, I loved my family. We all lived in the same city. Now we’re all apart over four countries.”
Given its rich, natural resources, “Venezuela should have become like Dubai this century, and instead we became like Haiti,” he said. “It’s not oil that makes a country rich. It’s the freedom. And so, these countries failed.”
Corruption in socialist countries is not what causes economies to slow, Di Martino added. Economies slow, because “socialism destroys the incentives that allow people to be rich.”
“Even if you had no corruption, socialism would fail — even in the country with the largest oil reserves on the planet,” he said. Venezuela’s natural resources should provide “plenty of money to give all the free things you want, but it still fails. And if anything, socialism actually encourages corruption, because by giving more power and money to the state, politicians can steal more.”
Abdala added, “There is empirical evidence that walking down a path without real funding is essentially madness. So there’s a kind of awakening happening.” The awakening is “the logical response to the irresponsible spending of the left,” he said.
Latin America’s recent elections show socialism is not inevitable
Socialism’s original ideologue Karl Marx famously wrote that socialism is inevitable, and capitalism “produces its own grave-diggers.” The recent political shift in Latin America may be proving this statement false.
When asked if socialism is inevitable, Di Martino responded, “I don’t think anything is inevitable.”
“Nothing. Nobody’s pre-predestined to anything. We shape our own destiny,” he said.
But in the U.S., socialism is gaining popularity. A survey conducted by YouGov last winter found that 32% of respondents had a favorable view of capitalism, and 43% had a favorable view of socialism. And in early 2026, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani will take office as mayor of the country’s most populous city.
From visiting schools and universities across the U.S. with the Young America Foundation, Di Martino told the Deseret News, he thinks most young people don’t understand what socialism is. “A lot of people just think we need more welfare or something like that,” he said.
In Latin America, socialism’s merits have “failed to deliver, and in doing so, has harmed the quality of democracy,” Abdala said.
Igniting prosperity in the U.S.
U.S. spending has increased significantly over the past century, and as of late-December, the national debt sits at $38.5 trillion.
Without clamping down on rampant government spending, Di Martino fears the U.S. economy will stagnate and provide “little opportunity for youth, young people, immigrants and anybody who isn’t already well-established or a boomer that owns property.”
At the federal level, the U.S. should “get entitlements under control and reduce spending growth on Social Security and Medicare,” Di Martino said. “We need to reduce welfare, we need to reform Medicaid, we need to reform all these Obamacare subsidies ... we need to get rid of all these programs, and we need to have a simple system that only helps people in need, not the middle class.”
At the local level, states should lead reforms, he said. “We need states to stop zoning things — the government chooses where a hospital or supermarket can be built. Let the private market figure that out."
“By pursuing common sense free market reforms in the U.S., we can ignite so much more prosperity,” he said.
As he concluded his thoughts, Abdala mused on the broader implications of Latin America’s shift to the right. “Maybe we can lead a historical change,” he said.