After the Decolonial. David Lehmann

Preface: In the time of COVID

      Being a Latin Americanist is an emotional involvement. Over fifty years, my life has been enhanced immeasurably, and sometimes dominated, by the irresistible embrace of friendships, partnerships and solidarities. It is like a force field, a vortex, not infrequently tied to utopian imaginaries and the political crises in which they lie buried – crises which in these fatal, murderous years of 2020 and 2021 (as so often, everywhere but Uruguay and Costa Rica) have tested the frontiers of credibility.

      It has been an intellectual, professional and personal roller-coaster rising and falling between ephemeral victories of progress and justice and long periods of despondency – the pain of Chile’s September 1973, of Argentina’s dirty war, of Peru’s Sendero Luminoso … Few of us do not have friends and colleagues who have suffered exile, imprisonment, torture and death, and that was before the unspeakable, indescribable cruelty of the current occupant of the Brazilian presidency and the irresponsibility of his Mexican counterpart, together presiding over the deaths of hundreds of thousands from disease and organized violence – a multiple of all the dictatorships together.

      In the 1970s, Latin American Studies were a festival of ideas and conviviality shrouded in the hope that eventually times would improve and that we would contribute to that improvement. Debates and disputes among the theoretical-political factions raged – in the days when we used to speak to each other. Ours is the luckiest generation ever – something for which future, less fortunate generations may not forgive us. We have been blessed with an abundance of research and travel funding, and the internationalization of postgraduate education which has opened the way to enduring intellectual partnerships and personal friendships.

If I write a book which is quite critical of some of the most influential progressive ideas of our time in Latin America and beyond, it is because of those experiences and those tragedies. The record of left wing and progressive governments in the region is deeply disappointing: the only truly successful ones were the two terms of Lula’s presidency in Brazil, and Mujica in Uruguay. But even Lula’s time in office was tarnished by corruption, and then retrospectively by the trials (literally) and tribulations of his successor Dilma Roussef. The impeachment of Dilma, in her second term, was ruthlessly unfair, subjecting her to cruel, shameless, misogynistic vilification. The only other truly left-wing governments were Chile’s Unidad Popular, the first period of the Peruvian military regime inaugurated in 1968, and the early Sandinistas, but