In our lead essay, René Rojas offers a sweeping analysis of this quite dramatic reversal of fortune. Rojas echoes the observation made by Pink Tide critics, that, despite their rhetoric, the regimes failed to break out of the neoliberbal orthodoxy they had inherited. He insists, however, that this failure was not due to insufficient will, but to political capacity. Whereas the classical Latin American left in the 1960s and ‘70s acquired power in an era of rapid industrialization and growth of the working class, the Pink Tide formed amid a period of deindustrialization and labor-market informalization. The Left in Allende’s time could rely on a social base located in core economic sectors. The more recent left was based in shantytowns and a precariat which, while radical and mobilized, could not give it the leverage needed to push through reforms against bourgeois opposition.