Latin America

This contribution has two main interrelated goals. First, it offers a broad historical overview of the different populist waves in Latin America: populist phenomena that were on the rise in different times and under different contexts in Latin America, going back to the so-called classic populisms (from the 1930s to the 1950s: Cardenism, Varguism, Peronism) and including both the neopopulisms in the 1990s (e.g. Menemism, Fujimorism) and the left-wing populisms that played a central role within the Latin American Pink Tide after that. Second, this contribution explores how the concept of populism itself has been theorized and employed to analyse such different waves and how it has evolved in chronological terms, in order to emphasize differences with the ‘European’ elaboration of the concept. The chapter thus points to how concepts such as ‘the people’, ‘exclusion’, ‘incorporation’ and ‘nationalism’ have been interpreted in connection with populism and then linked to either conservative or progressive (sometimes both conservative and progressive) populist phenomena in Latin America in order to address the limits of the Eurocentric evolution of the debates around populism during the last two decades.