Latin America's political map has shifted fast. The "pink tide" that swept the region for two decades has receded, and right or center-right leaders have taken its place: Javier Milei in Argentina since 2023, Daniel Noboa in Ecuador, José Raúl Mulino in Panama since 2024, and now two more arrivals, Abelardo De La Espriella taking office in Colombia on August 7 and Keiko Fujimori in Peru on July 28. The pendulum is swinging, and it is swinging hard.
Peaceful transfers of power in a democracy are always worth welcoming. But after 44 years watching this region closely as a diplomat, one thing concerns me about the current moment, and it is not the rightward direction itself. It is that politics across the region has come to lean on emotion and image far more than on long-term national strategy.
Dopamine Politics
Modern political communication is optimized for the social media feed, not the policy brief. A chainsaw swung on stage in Argentina. Lion and tiger imagery adopted as a personal brand across multiple campaigns. "Mano dura," the hard-hand rhetoric aimed at crime, deployed as a applause line rather than a policy framework. Each of these produces a real, measurable hit of public dopamine. None of them is a strategy.
Worse, some leaders have leaned into this style so hard that it hardens society into an us-versus-them binary, turning politics into what feels like a war of annihilation rather than the ordinary business of negotiation and compromise. That has a direct, practical cost: it inflates the political risk premium international investors attach to the country, at exactly the moment these economies need capital willing to commit for the long term.
The Missing Industrial Policy
What is conspicuously absent from most of these platforms is anything resembling a real industrial policy. In a moment defined by the fourth industrial revolution and the reshuffling of global supply chains, the agendas on offer are largely repeats of ideas that have circulated for decades. There is little sign of an ambitious national agenda, let alone a concrete vision capable of reshaping a country's position in a future industry. Economic historians have a name for this: a deficit of strategic imagination. Staying anchored in resource-dependent thinking while the rest of the world reorganizes around AI, advanced manufacturing, and critical supply chains is one of the clearest reasons Latin America struggles to hold a durable competitive edge.
Diplomacy, Each Country on Its Own
The region's diplomatic fragmentation is just as costly. Latin America has historically maximized its negotiating leverage internationally through regional solidarity and multilateralism, even across real ideological differences. That has changed. Some of the newer leaders have abandoned the region's more careful diplomatic traditions altogether, reversing core positions, on relations with the United States, on Israel, on other central questions, in a matter of months, sometimes completely. Foreign policy is increasingly set by a leader's personal political orientation rather than the country's long-term interests. International relations analysts describe this as political polarization eroding diplomatic consistency. Rather than building a shared regional agenda, countries are retreating into national-first, camp-first thinking, and in doing so, quietly erasing whatever collective external influence the region once had as a bloc.
What People Actually Want
I understand the public appetite for decisive leadership after years of dysfunction. But can a lion, a tiger, or a blunt slogan actually stand in for a real blueprint on education, science and technology, and industrial policy? Political theater that never converts into an actual national strategy ends in one place: a burst of enthusiasm followed by hollow disappointment.
An election is how power changes hands. It is not, by itself, how a country is governed. Public security is a good example: crime has structural roots, lack of educational opportunity, youth unemployment, an opaque judicial system, and no amount of tough-on-crime rhetoric that ignores those roots produces a durable solution. What the region needs right now is not the image of a "strong government." It is the language of markets and the future: finding comparative advantage, cooperating with partners, and actually following through on transparent institutional reform.
Strong Institutions, Not Strong Symbols
I am not opposed to the rightward shift itself. But if the right genuinely prioritizes the national interest and national competitiveness, what it needs is not an animal with a strong image. It is strong institutions and a strong strategy. In 44 years of watching this region, I have seen a continent of vast potential, rich in resources and cultural diversity. My hope is simply that this potential is not spent on a temporary political thrill.
People do not want a strong animal. People want a strong nation. History remembers the leaders who designed a better future for their people, not the ones who excited them the most. My hope is that Latin America's countries move past the politics of image and into a real era of national competitiveness.
