When Ecuador gained independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century, the country did not launch a social revolution that would overturn colonial society’s racism and inequality. Instead, the elite descendants of Spanish conquistadores now ruled on their own behalf rather than for the Spanish crown. For those beneath them, much remained as it had been.

Thus a popular slogan of the early republican period emerged in the graffiti lining the walls of Quito, the capital city: the last day of despotism, and the first day of the same; or, as Luis Macas, a leading indigenous activist remembered it in a 2010 interview with me, the last day of oppression, and the first day of the same.

This expression captures something essential about the first decade and a half of twenty-first-century Latin American politics. Indeed, some on the Left have celebrated the most recent period of the region’s history as Latin America’s Second Independence, referring to the region’s relative autonomy from the domination of the United States and the crudest dictates of orthodox neoliberalism.