Specters of the past haunt every iteration of Latin America’s leftward move. There is a sense that the rise of the Left involves a rectification of history: the return to an origin, a second chance at achieving some previously derailed project. It is worth noting, however, that the specific histories being rectified are, each of them, presented as national histories, and that the imaginary points of foundation being reenacted vary from country to country. Thus, Evo Morales’s victory in Bolivia is supposed to rectify five hundred years of colonial imposition of whites over Indians; it is meant to reinstate indigenous rule. Hugo Chávez, by contrast, found the source of national redemption not in the precolonial past but rather in a return to the foundation of the nation-state, under Simón Bolívar, almost two hundred years ago.

In Mexico, the rise of the new Left occurred first in 1988 under the leadership of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, in a movement that harked back to the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (Cuauhtémoc’s father) and a period of agrarian reform and the nationalization of oil. Six years later, the Zapatista movement cast itself as a prolongation of the radical struggle of Emiliano Zapata in the armed phase of the Mexican Revolution (1910 – 20). In the recent presidential election, leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador cast himself as a new Benito Juárez, the liberal president who struggled against Mexican conservatives and their French allies in the 1860s. In Chile, Michelle Bachelet is returning to the course not taken by redeeming the democratic socialism of Salvador Allende, killed in 1973 along with Bachelet’s own father.

In Argentina, the crisis of 2002 was so deep that it turned Peronism into the only political force, the only powerful political idiom, in the country. As Beatriz Sarlo has argued, the secret of the posthumous life of Peronism lies in the obsession with lost opportunity that is the key motif in the cult of Evita.1 In turn, Lula’s electoral triumph in Brazil was perceived as the symbolic conclusion of that nation’s democratic transition, as the washing away of Brazil’s military rule that had formally concluded in 1981. Finally, in Uruguay, Tabare Vázquez’s triumph is understood as a vindication of that country’s early social democratic legacy of the 1920s.

Bolivia, Venezuela, Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Chile: five hundred years, two hundred years, ninety years, eighty years, sixty years, forty years, thirty years. Also the precolonial era, the early republican moment, the Mexican Revolution, Uruguayan social democracy, national popular regimes, democratic socialism. These are some of the ghosts that haunt the new foundationalism.

The recovery of these moments past apparently concludes the work of mourning for the shattered illusions both of the Cold War Left and of the shareholders of that era’s national “economic miracles,” grafting the hopes of that period — hopes that had been degraded, humiliated, and violently obliterated by the dictatorships of the 1970s and in the economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s — onto the emerging new regimes.

But the current rise of the Left occurs when there is no existing alternative economic system to counter capitalism. In this context, the very meaning of left and of right is difficult to pinpoint. For this reason, the “lost moments” that are being symbolically recuperated all draw on specific national traditions and images of autonomy and self-governance: the grandeur of the Incas, the cult of towering figures like Bolívar or Juárez, the frustrated avant-garde experiments of modern socialism in Uruguay and Chile, the robust national power of Brazil’s Estado Novo or of Argentine Peronism, the grassroots vindications of the Mexican Revolution. In short, the foundational discourse of the Latin American Left builds on the remnants of an older nationalist discourse that is not the special possession of the Left.