I mentioned last month in TWL #299 that the pink tide is receding in Latin America and that the continent’s political leadership was shifting to the right. On Sunday, the right-wing candidate (“far-right” according to people who only read The Guardian) José Antonio Kast won the presidency of Chile, ending the rule of socialist Gabriel Boric. When he was elected, Boric was hailed as a new page for Chile and for the continent, but his actions in office were less impactful than anticipated.
A conservative on social issues, Kast is a staunch opponent of abortion with no exceptions allowed for rape, incest, risks to the mother or viability of the fetus. Kast also opposes same-sex marriage, adoption by same-sex couples and “gender identity ideology”. Unlike his Argentinian counterpart Javier Milei who is single and childless, Kast has nine children from the same mother, lawyer María Pía Adriasola, to whom he has been married for 34 years.
A good question from my perspective is whether this rightward shift is merely the result of frustration about the economy or whether it signals a deep change of attitude toward social issues. When it comes to annual births for example, they have been declining in Chile since 1991, but they declined even faster starting in the mid 2010s.
As to Argentina, annual births have fallen off a cliff by a full third since 2015 (chart), mainly due to 1) a program initiated in 2017 to combat teenage pregnancy, and 2) the legalization of abortion in 2020.
The total fertility rate (TFR) has been falling for several decades in Argentina, Chile, and Latin America/the Caribbean, much as it has in the rest of the world. The ultimate social test of the rightward shift in politics is in the TFR and in annual births. If they stabilize or start to edge upward, we will know that the continent has turned a page, not only in politics and economics, but also in social attitudes. But because social notions are slow-moving and difficult to change, my guess is that we will not see meaningful reversals in annual births.
The majority of Latin American and Caribbean countries forbid or restrict abortions. Abortion was legalized or decriminalized in Cuba (1965), Uruguay (2012), Argentina (2020), Colombia (2022) and Mexico (2023). Other countries such as Chile, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia etc. allow abortions under very limited circumstances. But El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Jamaica have total or near-total bans.