Tony Wood

The last seven years​ have brought a string of successes for the right in Latin America. In October 2018, Jair Bolsonaro won the Brazilian presidency. In June the following year, Nayib Bukele came to power in El Salvador, and that November, the Bolivian right seized on an electoral crisis and ousted Evo Morales. In Peru, after the leftist Pedro Castillo narrowly won the presidency in 2021,...

People​ love to talk about writers who once had radical sympathies but drifted rightwards with age. But the political evolution of the Peruvian writer and sometime politician Mario Vargas Llosa has been so startling as to inject life into that tired trope. Although he still describes himself as a liberal, the stances he has taken in recent years have followed a reactionary pattern. In 2018,...

On​ 10 December, the far-right libertarian economist Javier Milei takes office as Argentina’s president. To say that his victory in November’s elections was a shock would be an understatement. A few months ago, people who thought that Milei might become the next occupant of the Casa Rosada were largely dismissed as delusional. Widely known by the nickname ‘El Loco’...

The war​ in Ukraine has prompted a wave of self-critical reassessment among Western scholars of the former Soviet Union. Have studies of the USSR unthinkingly reproduced the logic of a Russian imperial project? Do we need to look at the Soviet period through the lens of ‘decolonisation’? The German historian Karl Schlögel’s own process of introspection began in 2014,...