Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro said that leftist governments in Latin America will eventually crash into the “rocks of reality” as their socialist policies wreck their countries, in the latest episode of his YouTube show “Facts.”
In the episode, Shapiro pointed to the “wonderful” election of Right-leaning libertarian Javier Milei in Argentina as a sign that the leftist governments that had risen to power throughout the region during so-called Pink Waves were faltering.
“That Pink Wave isn’t an iron wall, as it was with Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe – it is popularly elected Leftist governments in South and Latin America that have increasingly pursued not only economic redistributionism and nationalism of industry, but outright tyranny and anti-Americanism,” Shapiro explained.
Shapiro pointed out how the American press often talked of the danger of authoritarianism abroad while ignoring the threat of socialism, which has taken hold of many Latin American countries.
Throughout the rest of the episode, Shapiro explained the history of the first and second Pink Wave in Latin America and how it was propelled forward by the Sao Paolo Forum, a conference of leftist parties in the region that was founded in the 1990s to rebrand socialism and communism after the Soviet Union collapsed.
The first Pink Wave took place after the Cold War with leaders like Hugo Chavez taking power in Venezuela and Lula da Silva being elected in Brazil in 2003. This wave later floundered in the years following the Great Recession in 2008. However, after 2018, leftist parties again began to take back power in countries like Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Honduras, and Chile.
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The consequences of leftist rule in these countries have been disastrous, Shapiro said. For example, countries like Venezuela and Argentina have faced rampant inflation, while corruption constantly plagues countries like Mexico and Bolivia.
“The pink tide that has risen, receded, and risen again will ultimately crash against the rocks of reality as it has in the past. Corruption and lack of rule of law create the preconditions for dissatisfaction with any government, but Left-wing governments in Latin and South America have channeled that dissatisfaction into anti-democratic centralization of power and impoverishment of their own citizenry,” Shapiro concluded, saying that he hoped that Milei’s election was only the beginning of a shift away from Left-wing politics in the region.
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