Latin America in China's Peaceful Rise

In Latin America, the historical development of democracy has been both restricted and distorted. Oligarchic democracies of the nineteenth century's agro-and mineral-export economies were extremely limited and frequently fell victim to caudillo rule. Over some 40-50 years we had the authoritarianism of the Latin American political regimes which undemocratically represented the interests of domestic and international capital or we had varieties of those 'modern oligarchic democratic regimes' which primarily represented the same interests. This chapter presents three closely interacting matrices: a regime of globalizing capitalist accumulation; a regime of hegemonic global and globalizing security; and a hegemonizing ideological and discursive regime of formal liberal democracy. The processes of globalization and the agency of transnational social forces with the power to direct large amounts of capital take various forms. Karl Polanyi understood the same basic tendencies of capital accumulation that Marx identified as contradictions within his conception of dialectical and historical materialism.