The Latin American Pink Tide did not simply aim to reduce poverty and inequality. Equally important were the promises of popular participation, which arose out of disillusion with the hollow democracies established after the military dictatorships. More radical voices within the Pink Tide demanded both workers’ self-management of enterprises and participatory control of government policy. Gabriel Hetland's Democracy on the Ground addresses the latter dimension, analyzing experiments in local participatory government in Bolivia and Venezuela between the mid-2000s and mid-2010s. Based on nearly two years of ethnographic fieldwork and some 200 interviews, it is one of the most thorough studies of the topic.
Fifteen years ago most progressive observers saw Evo Morales as a more organic expression of popular movements than Hugo Chávez: Morales was a union leader elected president on the heels of mass rebellions, while Chávez was a former military officer with a tenuous social base when first...
