The Use of the Past

The past has been the greatest resource to legitimize the authoritarian drift begun in 2018 with the triumph of López Obrador; forty years after the presidential election that led Carlos Salinas to the presidency and meant the starting point for the modernization of the economy and the transformation of electoral institutions, culminating in the political reform of 1996 and the beginning of democratic normalcy. 2018 marked the closure of the cyc…

Mosquera wrote this text as an editorial for issue 10 of the Jacobin Latin America Magazine, launched in the second half of 2024. The text analyzes the exhaustion of a political cycle that began in the 1990s, when progressive forces gained prominence in various parts of the world. The text revisits moments of the rise of the left, such as the growth of Syriza in Greece, of Podemos in Spain, and the campaigns of Corbyn and Sanders in the USA, in …