Best (and worst) South American leader?

[Dr. MB]

Pick your poison.

I'd go with Arce for best and Bolsonaro for worst. Sagasti seems alright. Same with Fernandez. None of the rest are too great.

[SWE]

Arce/Bolsanaro

[Lexii, harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy]

Lacalle Pou/Maduro

Arce gets disqualified pretty easily because of his atrocious Covid-19 "cures", traditional herbal medicine, ivermectin  chlorine dioxide necklace cards and deciding when to uphold or eliminate Covid restrictions for purely opportunistic reasons

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Arce/Bolsonaro

[GeneralMacArthur]

Bolsonaro is probably the worst leader of any nation in the world today with the possible exception of Kim Jong Un, and it's a shame that the virus he called a hoax didn't kill him.

[President Johnson]

Arce seems the best out of default; Bolsonaro is the worst, and it's not even close. Probably the worst national leader worldwide at this point, aside from Kim. Even worse than Putin or Duterte.

[LM Brazilian Citizen]

From best to the worst:

1. Alberto Fernández
2. Luís Lacalle Pou
3. Francisco Sagasti
4. Luis Arce
5. Mario Abdo Benítez
6. Iván Duque
7. Sebastián Piñera
8. Lenín Moreno
9. Nicolás Maduro
10. Jair Bolsonaro (Bozo)

[Bakersfield Uber Alles]

No Vote/Bolsonaro

[they don't love you like i love you]

Best: It's pretty poor pickings in general, but Arce wins out for being the only truly left of center and democratic leader on the list. I had reservations about Morales and thought he shouldn't have ran again or been allowed to under Bolivia's term limits laws but the coup against him was obviously much worse, so despite some worrying authoritarian tendencies from him for now Arce gets the benefit of the doubt. Moreno actually did some good, but he also did a lot of bad too alas. Uruguay is also generally a pretty inoffensive country (well now, it did have some nasty dictatorships during the Cold War), but Pou is from a center-right party.

Worst: The only true contenders are Bolsonaro and Maduro, who are miles ahead of everyone else. Went with Bolsonaro because he poses much more of a global problem.

[Vosem]

Lacalle Pou/Maduro

I think you can have arguments about who is the best leader on this list, but Maduro is extremely clearly the worst because he is the only actual brutal dictator. Bolsonaro may want to be a brutal dictator, but that's nowhere near the same thing.

[bagelman]

Lacalle Pou/Maduro

I think you can have arguments about who is the best leader on this list, but Maduro is extremely clearly the worst because he is the only actual brutal dictator. Bolsonaro may want to be a brutal dictator, but that's nowhere near the same thing.

I understand your argument, though if both were dictators of their respective countries Bozo would still be worse. There's also a nonzero chance Bozo may make himself a dictator, it's not like Brazilian Democracy is nearly as sturdy as ours.

[Crane]

Best: Luis Arce or Alberto Fernández
Worst: Iván Duque Márquez (with Sebastián Piñera as #2)

[kaoras]

I know that Bolsonaro and Maduro are objectively worse but I just cannot emphasize enough how absolutely awful Piñera is.

Miserable, corrupt, and incompetent, so inept he couldn't even maintain a semblance of public order despite mass repression and human rights violations. He is now going full Orban with his attacks on the press and the education superintendence going after a teacher who dared to teach about police brutality.

This country is falling apart little by little thanks to his criminal rule.

[Red Velvet]

Bolsonaro the worst — I can see the argument for Maduro, but Brazil is just so large & the scale of deforestation there has such significant global impacts that it's hard for me to come to any other answer.

Uruguay is probably the country about which I've heard the fewest bad things over the past couple years, so I guess Lacalle Pou.

That’s pretty much the standard rule for Uruguay though, regardless of who they elect president. South America can go to hell with political turmoil and Uruguay will still be forever standing as the sole paradise of stability.

It’s the perfect place to be a political refugee, live in an isolated farm and get older having a calmer life in a small country.

Argentina and Bolivia currently have my favorite leaders. Uruguay completes the top 3 by default.

Brazil, Chile and Venezuela are my top 3 worst. But Paraguay one is only not more hated because most people don’t pay as much attention to Paraguayan politics.

[Starry Eyed Jagaloon]

Worst: Iván Duque Márquez (with Sebastián Piñera as #2)

I really don't get how you can come to that conclusion when Bolsonaro (and Maduro) exist.

[Crane]

Worst: Iván Duque Márquez (with Sebastián Piñera as #2)

I really don't get how you can come to that conclusion when Bolsonaro (and Maduro) exist.

Sunrise's comment was so terrible that I used it as the basis for mine. But yeah Bolsonaro is obviously one of the worst.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I know that Bolsonaro and Maduro are objectively worse but I just cannot emphasize enough how absolutely awful Piñera is.

Miserable, corrupt, and incompetent, so inept he couldn't even maintain a semblance of public order despite mass repression and human rights violations. He is now going full Orban with his attacks on the press and the education superintendence going after a teacher who dared to teach about police brutality.

This country is falling apart little by little thanks to his criminal rule.

What is it about South America, why do they consistently end up with such terrible leaders?  Is there just too much conflict for populists to use as ammunition?

[Diabolical Materialism]

I know that Bolsonaro and Maduro are objectively worse but I just cannot emphasize enough how absolutely awful Piñera is.

Miserable, corrupt, and incompetent, so inept he couldn't even maintain a semblance of public order despite mass repression and human rights violations. He is now going full Orban with his attacks on the press and the education superintendence going after a teacher who dared to teach about police brutality.

This country is falling apart little by little thanks to his criminal rule.

What is it about South America, why do they consistently end up with such terrible leaders?  Is there just too much conflict for populists to use as ammunition?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Intelligence_Agency

[GeneralMacArthur]

I know that Bolsonaro and Maduro are objectively worse but I just cannot emphasize enough how absolutely awful Piñera is.

Miserable, corrupt, and incompetent, so inept he couldn't even maintain a semblance of public order despite mass repression and human rights violations. He is now going full Orban with his attacks on the press and the education superintendence going after a teacher who dared to teach about police brutality.

This country is falling apart little by little thanks to his criminal rule.

What is it about South America, why do they consistently end up with such terrible leaders?  Is there just too much conflict for populists to use as ammunition?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Intelligence_Agency

Right, the CIA put Maduro in charge of Venezuela.  All the problems in the world are the CIA's fault and the Cold War never ended.

[Sirius_]

Let's see this is really not a good list. Almost all of them are bad, Bozo is a wannabe fascist dictator, Maduro is a current fascist dictator, I generally have no faith in any of the pink tide archetypes that are shockingly similar when you think about it, actual Argnetinians will tell you that Fernandez is an abject failure so I don't get people saying he's good, Chile is doing great with vaccines but other than that Pinera seems to be bad, Duque is just bad. We aren't left with much. Sagasti is, in theory, my closest ideological match, but he's also hard to judge as an interim, and we know that Peru is going to hell anyway. And then there's Uruguay, which always seems to be OK.

[kaoras]

I know that Bolsonaro and Maduro are objectively worse but I just cannot emphasize enough how absolutely awful Piñera is.

Miserable, corrupt, and incompetent, so inept he couldn't even maintain a semblance of public order despite mass repression and human rights violations. He is now going full Orban with his attacks on the press and the education superintendence going after a teacher who dared to teach about police brutality.

This country is falling apart little by little thanks to his criminal rule.

What is it about South America, why do they consistently end up with such terrible leaders?  Is there just too much conflict for populists to use as ammunition?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Intelligence_Agency

Right, the CIA put Maduro in charge of Venezuela.  All the problems in the world are the CIA's fault and the Cold War never ended.

Well, in the case of Chile I think it does come from the fact that the right is fundamentally unreformed at their core since Pinochet. They only care about human rights or democracy if it is in Cuba or Venezuela. Today the army and the government released a press statement saying it was unacceptable for a TV channel to parody the military (Keep in mind, the TV channel they went after is going to Inter-American Commission on Human Rights because of presidential pressures for their editorial line). Also their political project is basically to change as little as possible the economic and political system left by the dictatorship. This immobilism tends to explode in their faces and cause huge chaos when they are in power.

[SWE]

I know that Bolsonaro and Maduro are objectively worse but I just cannot emphasize enough how absolutely awful Piñera is.

Miserable, corrupt, and incompetent, so inept he couldn't even maintain a semblance of public order despite mass repression and human rights violations. He is now going full Orban with his attacks on the press and the education superintendence going after a teacher who dared to teach about police brutality.

This country is falling apart little by little thanks to his criminal rule.

What is it about South America, why do they consistently end up with such terrible leaders?  Is there just too much conflict for populists to use as ammunition?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Intelligence_Agency

Right, the CIA put Maduro in charge of Venezuela.  All the problems in the world are the CIA's fault and the Cold War never ended.

Good point, events that happened in the past never influence the present

[Red Velvet]

I know that Bolsonaro and Maduro are objectively worse but I just cannot emphasize enough how absolutely awful Piñera is.

Miserable, corrupt, and incompetent, so inept he couldn't even maintain a semblance of public order despite mass repression and human rights violations. He is now going full Orban with his attacks on the press and the education superintendence going after a teacher who dared to teach about police brutality.

This country is falling apart little by little thanks to his criminal rule.

What is it about South America, why do they consistently end up with such terrible leaders?  Is there just too much conflict for populists to use as ammunition?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Intelligence_Agency

Right, the CIA put Maduro in charge of Venezuela.  All the problems in the world are the CIA's fault and the Cold War never ended.

Definetely not ALL, but certainly many at the very least.

It helped Maduro strengthen the narrative in his favor though. The Guaidó recognition put him as the sole representative of the Anti-Maduro opposition, stimulating a polarization that “normalized” Maduro for many Venezuelans who dislike both figures. There’s also stuff from the past that help elevate that kind of opposition to power.

Not to mention the involvement with Car-Wash operation, which is directly related to the rise of Bolsonaro and the populist far-right who always ride on that empty anticorruption rhetoric of penal populism since Cold War.

https://mobile.twitter.com/RitaLisauskas/status/1381249147085455367
That also had effects in Peru’s distrust of the system and explains part of why they picked such strong antagonizing figures like Keiko Fujimori and Pedro Castillo to run against each other.

The narrative that interference is to “help” is just a fairytale created to morally legitimate those actions. Real interests are always economical and political:

1. Prevent the region to get more independence so that you always have a safe consumer market to push your products into even if Europe starts to slowly turns their backs at you.

2. Kill regional competition from international companies before it passes the limit of the acceptable. A strong Latin America with more global influence is considered a threat to business.

3. Keeping an unipolar global order. It’s one thing if a bunch of small and white European countries are rich, but countries/regions that are similar to US in area and population cannot achieve same levels without being considered threats to global order.

And Latin America has the differential of being more similar to US because of colonial history, culture and religion. So it is way harder (although definitely not impossible) to vilify them as evil enemies like it is done to places in Asia, Africa or the Middle East, places with more distinct cultures that are interpreted as completely alien to western audiences and easier to stimulate xenophobic sentiment against.

That’s why interference techniques have to be way more sophisticated and hidden behind the curtains in Latin America. You have to be significantly more reliable on soft power, local allies that make things look like they come only from the countries (without US involvement) and you also usually got to try to appeal to cultural similarities. That’s mostly why there wasn’t a war in Venezuela or Cuba like it easily happens in Asia (Vietnam), Africa (Libya) or Middle East (Iraq).

A war in the continent would not only be negative to US because the conflict would be so close to them. It would affect its reputation as a regional ally that neighbors look up to. If people here already hated Bush because of Iraq war, just imagine the effects of a conflict inside the continent!

But at the same time that you don’t want to apply hard power, you also don’t want the place to grow too much for the reasons already mentioned. This is why it’s more complicated to understand the strategies used.

Like, It’s one thing to put tons and tons of money into a small and distant country like South Korea so that it can quickly develop themselves and stay out of USSR’s area of influence, in order to stay independent and capitalist. That was done during Cold War.

Another very different one is to put tons of money into small Central American countries in order to stop mass immigration when you also DON’T WANT these places to be too independent if it means getting out of your area of influence.

And for bigger countries like Mexico it is even worst of a deal. Because they’re bigger, they represent a larger potential of uncontrolled competition than the Guatemalas or El Salvadors of the continent.

It’s a bit kinda like what happened/happens to East European countries that live really close to Russia for comparison sake. Or Asian countries that are neighbors to China.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

I voted Bolsonaro as the worst, but I honestly think Marito might trump him. Something about Paraguayan leaders, man.

[TDAS04]

Bolsonaro the worst — I can see the argument for Maduro, but Brazil is just so large & the scale of deforestation there has such significant global impacts that it's hard for me to come to any other answer.

Uruguay is probably the country about which I've heard the fewest bad things over the past couple years, so I guess Lacalle Pou.

That’s pretty much the standard rule for Uruguay though, regardless of who they elect president. South America can go to hell with political turmoil and Uruguay will still be forever standing as the sole paradise of stability.

It’s the perfect place to be a political refugee, live in an isolated farm and get older having a calmer life in a small country.

Argentina and Bolivia currently have my favorite leaders. Uruguay completes the top 3 by default.

Brazil, Chile and Venezuela are my top 3 worst. But Paraguay one is only not more hated because most people don’t pay as much attention to Paraguayan politics.

The -guays are so different.  One -guay is so progressive, the other -guay so backward...