The Latin American left reached its lowest point in living memory in the early 1990s. At that time, it would have been difficult to foresee that in less than a decade, the region would transform itself into the leading edge of anti-neoliberal resistance.

Large swathes of the Left and its associated organizations had been eliminated by force in the preceding years. In Brazil and the Southern Cone of South America — Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay — a series of right-wing military dictatorships targeted human rights organizations and rank-and-file activists in socialist, trade union, and peasant movements. These regimes left a trail of death and sociopolitical, not to mention psychological, destruction in their wake, ensuring that the future re-articulation of the Left would be halting and hesitant.

In Central America, a similar military attack was launched in the 1970s and 1980s, this time in the form of counter-revolutionary authoritarian regimes facing off against mass guerrilla organizations such as the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) in El Salvador and the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG) in Guatemala. The peace processes and accords that closed those civil wars in the 1990s were hardly a compromise between two equal sides. Rather, they left behind them hundreds of thousands killed at the hands of military and paramilitary forces, and radical forces utterly routed.