ABSTRACT
After Philippe Schmitter depicted the twentieth century as the century of corporatism, the new millennium seems to have ushered in the era of populism, as dramatically corroborated by Donald Trump’s presidential victory in the global paragon of liberalism, the United States. This form of personalistic, plebiscitarian rule had long had a strong foothold in Latin America. The classical populism of Juan Perón, Lázaro Cárdenas, and Getúlio Vargas shaped the political and socioeconomic trajectories of the major countries in the region. Even the repressive military regimes of the 1960s and 1970s did not manage to eradicate populism, which made a striking comeback after re-democratization. Similarly, populism survived the drastic market reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, even helping to enact them via the neoliberal populism of Carlos Menem, Alberto Fujimori, and Fernando Collor de Mello. The backlash against neoliberalism then gave rise to another wave of populism, this time in a leftwing, nationalist variant, as exemplified by Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, and Néstor and Cristina Kirchner.
