Editing History of South America (section)

===A turn to the left===

According to the BBC, a "common element of the 'pink tide' is a clean break with what was known at the outset of the 1990s as the '[[Washington consensus]]', the mixture of [[open market]]s and [[privatisation]] pushed by the United States".<ref name="bbc4"/> According to [[Cristina Fernández de Kirchner]], a [[pink tide]] president herself, [[Hugo Chávez]] of Venezuela (inaugurated 1999), [[Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva]] of Brazil (inaugurated 2003) and [[Evo Morales]] of Bolivia (inaugurated 2006) were "the three musketeers" of the left in South America.<ref name=VICEtideTURN>{{cite news|last1=Noel|first1=Andrea|title=The Year the 'Pink Tide' Turned: Latin America in 2015 |url= https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-year-the-pink-tide-turned-latin-america-in-2015/|access-date=30 December 2015|work=[[Vice News|VICE News]]|date=29 December 2015|language=en-US}}</ref> By 2005, the [[BBC]] reported that out of 350 million people in South America, three out of four of them lived in countries ruled by "left-leaning [[President (government title)|presidents]]" elected during the preceding six years.<ref name="bbc4"/>

Despite the presence of a number of Latin American governments which profess to embrace a leftist ideology, it is difficult to categorize Latin American states "according to dominant political tendencies, like a [[Red states and blue states|red-blue post-electoral map of the United States]]."<ref name="ips">{{cite web|url=http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3806 |title=Foreign Policy in Focus &#124; Latin America's Pink Tide? |access-date=March 24, 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090910093646/http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3806 |archive-date=September 10, 2009 }} Institute for Policy Studies: Latin America's Pink Tide?</ref> According to the [[Institute for Policy Studies]], a [[Liberalism|liberal]] [[non-profit organization|non-profit]] [[think-tank]] based in Washington, D.C.: "a deeper analysis of elections in Ecuador, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Mexico indicates that the "pink tide" interpretation—that a diluted trend leftward is sweeping the continent—may be insufficient to understand the complexity of what's really taking place in each country and the region as a whole".<ref name="ips"/>

While this political shift is difficult to quantify, its effects are widely noticed. According to the Institute for Policy Studies, 2006 meetings of the South American Summit of Nations and the Social Forum for the Integration of Peoples demonstrated that certain discussions that "used to take place on the margins of the dominant discourse of [[neoliberalism]], (have) now moved to the centre of [[Public sphere|public debate]]."<ref name="ips"/>