Latin America’s Second Pink Tide Recedes

Latin America's 'Second Pink Tide' Has Ended. What Is Its Legacy?

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Latin America Brief:

Latin America’s Second Pink Tide Recedes

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Latin America Brief

A one-stop weekly digest of politics, economics, technology, and culture in Latin America. Delivered Friday.

Latin America’s Second Pink Tide Recedes

The latest leftward shift was shorter-lived and less accomplished than its predecessor.

!Osborn-Catherine-foreign-policy-columnist15

*Osborn-Catherine-foreign-policy-columnist15*

*Catherine Osborn*

By **Catherine Osborn**, the writer of *Foreign Policy*’s weekly Latin America Brief.

!Petro, wearing a dark suit and tie, stands with his arms clasped behind his back. Several out-of-focus people are seen behind him. The Colombian flag takes up half the foreground, waving in front of him.

*Petro, wearing a dark suit and tie, stands with his arms clasped behind his back. Several out-of-focus people are seen behind him. The Colombian flag takes up half the foreground, waving in front of him.*

Colombian President Gustavo Petro delivers a speech in Bogotá on July 20. Andres Rot/Getty Images

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August 7, 2026, 8:00 AM

Welcome back to *Foreign Policy*’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: The region’s so-called **second pink tide** comes to an end, Bolivia secures a **$1.9 billion IMF loan**, and the United States ends **deportation protections for Haitians**.

Welcome back to *Foreign Policy*’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: The region’s so-called **second pink tide** comes to an end, Bolivia secures a **$1.9 billion IMF loan**, and the United States ends **deportation protections for Haitians**.

Sign up to receive Latin America Brief in your inbox every Friday.

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Taking Stock of the Second Pink Tide

Right-wing lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella will be inaugurated as Colombia’s president on Friday. He replaces Gustavo Petro, the latest in a string of left-wing Latin American leaders to leave office amid the region’s broader shift toward the right.

When Petro and his ideological allies were elected in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, their victories were so widespread that many observers dubbedthe phenomenon a “second pink tide,” recalling the wave of left-leaning and socialist governments that swept through Latin America from the late 1990s to the early 2010s.

The first pink tide transformed the domestic and foreign policies of many South American countries, which increasingly turned toward one another to pursue a shared agenda of regional integration.

These changes were made possible in large part by a global commodities boom that increased public revenue across the region. Social spending generally went up, income inequality declined, and access to higher education expanded. By the end of the first pink tide, South American governments were cooperating regionally on health, infrastructure, and conflict resolution.

That momentum gave way in the mid-2010s as falling commodity prices, mounting economic challenges, and high-profile corruption scandals ushered in a more volatile political period.

Across the region’s democracies, voters elected a new crop of right-wing leaders whose foreign policies deprioritized regional integration. Their tenures, however, coincided with COVID-19, and many were ousted after a single term.

That political shift gave rise to the second pink tide. By 2023, leftist governments had taken office in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Peru, pledging to reduce inequality at home and resurrect regional integration as a central pillar of their foreign policies. (Mexico has also been led by the leftist Morena party since 2018, though it has prioritized integration with North America over South America.)

Latin America’s second pink tide has proved to be much shorter-lived than the first. While Morena held on to Mexico’s presidency in 2024 and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva may do the same this October, their peers elsewhere have mostly exited office.

As the ideological tides shift once again, it is a good time to ask: How much, if at all, did this pink tide change the region?

Several of these governments expanded anti-poverty efforts. In Colombia, multidimensional poverty fell to a historic low under Petro, while Brazil significantly reduced food insecurity. But without the tailwind of a commodities boom, these initiatives squeezed government budgets.

What’s more, many of the period’s most visible leaders fell short on signature progressive pledges, including Petro’s plan to reduce violence by negotiating with armed groups rather than taking a militarized approach and former Chilean President Gabriel Boric’s proposal to rewrite the country’s dictatorship-era constitution.

In foreign-policy terms, regional integration survived more than thrived. Mercosur, the South American trade bloc, expanded in 2024 to admit Bolivia and signed a long-delayed deal with the European Union this year, though keeping the group intact required careful diplomacy after Argentine President Javier Milei threatened to withdraw from it.

The leaders of the second pink tide, especially in Brazil, also revived joint work on several cross-border infrastructure corridors that had been under discussion since the early 2000s—notably the Capricorn Bioceanic Corridor, which will con