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This paper argues that throughout the Cold War, the Colombian Left focused on build ing local power in the countryside, and abandoned the burgeoning urban working class, much of it informal, unwaged and unorganised, to the Right. Yet at every turn, landlords linked to local and regional political machines and military and police officials blocked or reversed reforms designed to modernise the countryside, as government-subsidised agro-industrial development replaced smallholding. Then, in successive conjunctures, landlords and their allies, including cocaine exporters from whom they were increas ingly inseparable after 1985, augmented their political power through dynamic counter insurgent paramilitary movements based in provincial cities and towns. This made democracy impossible, led to a new feudalism characterised by parcellised sovereign ties, and upheld, into the twenty-first century, the semi-authoritarian parliamentary system that has ruled Colombia since the 1880s.

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More than 5 years before events in Egypt, Tunisia, and the Arab Spring of 2011 brought revolution back to the forefront of political debate, a national-popular revolution with an indigenous face brought the government of Evo Morales and MAS (Movement for Socialism) to power in Bolivia, in December 2005. Yet the Morales government presents the familiar paradox, dear to historians, of change within continuity. It also speaks to the tensions between culture and political economy, both in the world at large and in academic analyses of it. Until recently (mid-2011), Morales and MAS enjoyed a level of popularity and legitimacy not seen in Bolivia since the early years of the MNR (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement), following the Revolution of '52. Regionally, Morales's Bolivia has enjoyed better relations with neighboring Chile, Argentina, and Brazil than any regime since General Bánzer's, during the darkest night of Plan Condor. As it has broken off relations with the US government with minimal negative consequences internationally and demonstrably positive consequences internally (in terms of regime consolidation), the Morales administration has carved out a role for itself as the representative of indigenous voices in the global arena. Therefore it has also taken the lead on issues related to climate change and coca production. Some of the known facts are worth restating in order to grasp the magnitude of the changes in official politics that followed the revolutionary cycle of 2000-2005: elected with 54% of the vote on an 85% turnout in 2005, in 2009, Morales was reelected with 60% of the vote on a turnout of 90%. In 2005, MAS won a bare majority in the Chamber of Deputies (65 out of 130), and 12 of 27 Senate seats, but in 2009, MAS took 25 of 36 Senate seats and 82 of 130 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. After taking 33% in Santa Cruz in 2005, Morales took 41% of votes in the heartland of rightwing reaction in 2009. In the other departments of the rightwing media luna (the ''half moon'' refers to the four easterly departments that shape the