Leftist ideas and organizations have a long history in Latin America. Starting at the beginning of the twentieth century, they inspired social movements from Argentina and Chile up to Central America and Mexico. This long journey has been marked by pervasive violence. Events such as the Santa Maria de Iquique massacre (Chile, 1907), the “tragic week” in Buenos Aires (January 1919), or the great strike in Costa Rica’s banana plantations (1934) will forever remain imprinted in the labor movement’s collective memory. This history was also accompanied by an intellectual effort to adapt European ideologies (notably Marxism) to local realities. José Carlos Mariátegui’s Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality (1971) epitomizes such an attempt. Later during the Cold War,leftist movements were systematically and brutally repressed. Some turned to armed resistance, others to forced exile. All redeemed hope when the military started to plan returning to their barracks at the end of the 1970s.They would strengthen the “resurrection of 348 Legacies of the Left Turn in Latin America civil society” theorized by transition analysts (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986). During the “long night of neoliberalism,” a term coined by Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa in the 1990s, the left envisioned alternative policies that finally convinced voters during the 2000s...