CHAPTER 4 Rearming the Left The previous chapters have outlined the record of left governments in Brazil and Venezuela and have pointed to the challenges that they have faced since they first came to power in the early 2000s. In both countries the rise of the left has to be seen in the context of a long cycle of popular struggles that began in the early twentieth century. But the immediate spark that lit the path for the pink tide was the transition to neoliberalism that was initiated in the 1980s. In Brazil as we have noted, the transition towards neoliberalism occurred hand in hand with the demise of the mili- tary regime that had been in power since the early 1960s (Cook 2002). The interlacing of the neoliberal and democratic transitions meant that neoliberal reforms for their very inception took a very different form than they did in Venezuela. More precisely, in a newly minted democracy where social and labour movements were extremely well organized, neoliberal economic adjustments contained in them a heterodox touch which was visible in the deployment of structuralist recipes to tackle in inflation in the 1980s. By the early 1990s even as Cardoso’s Real Plan dropped these pretensions and wholeheartedly integrated the Brazilian economy deeper into the web of global markets, by steadying the economy and by bringing inflation under control it did reverse the erosion of purchasing power that had begun after the hyperinflationary episode which began in 1982. As a result of this, neoliberal reforms while wide ranging were nonetheless calibrated and thus retained a certain amount of legitimacy within society. That was until of course even these minimal benefits started to peter out © The Author(s) 2021 R. A. Sirohi and S. Bhupatiraju, Reassessing the Pink Tide, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8674-3_4 151