Dannenberg, A.N. The Catholic Church and the “Left Turn” in the Latin America.

Abstract: Throughout the latest decades the Latin America is traditionally viewed as a region, where the “Leftist” influence is strong, and it is also reflected upon the Latin American Catholicism, which has formed its own theological tradition — “the liberation theology”. To what extent is one to discuss the “left turn” in the Latin America and what is the fortune of the “left” theological tradition in the subcontinental state? What is the position of the Catholic Church on this issue? The failure of the neo-liberal experiment in the Latin America in 1990s has ended in the socalled “left turn” in the subcontinent in the later period. The 1990s have became the time of a new turn of historical development of the Latin America, and it was based upon the attempt to acquire democratic values in the conditions of radical economic reforms. In fact by the start of the last decade of the XX century, all of the Latin American states were developing without dictators for the first time in its history, and the constitutional representative democracy regimes ruled in almost all of the Latin American states, except Cuba and Haiti (military dictators in the period between 1991 and 1994). The new democratic regimes were to an extent formal due to the specific features of the regional development as well as the political historical heritage (presidential republics, electoral apathy, lack of legal culture, etc.). The situation was made worse by the active neo-liberal reforms in economics, which lead to marginalization and poverty among a large portion of the population.

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