An explosion of protest, a howl of rage – but not a Latin American spring

Tanks on the streets in Chile. Barricades and bloodshed in Bolivia. Weeks of unrest that have pushed Haiti to the brink and forced Ecuador’s president to relocate his government.

“This is a social revolution,” said Andrea Lyn, a 61-year-old actor who took to the streets of Santiago this week. “It is us saying: no more.”

Latin America has been called “the forgotten continent” – but in recent weeks it has hardly been out of the news.

A succession of dramatic – and in several cases unforeseen – social explosions have catapulted the region into the global consciousness and left some asking if a Latin American spring has arrived. A headline in Mexico’s El Universal newspaper this week declared Latin America and the Caribbean “red hot”.

In an enormous and disparate region of 33 countries, more than 630 million people and governments from authoritarian left to far right, there is no single explanation for the political and social tremors currently rattling the region, from Quito to Caracas.

But longtime observers do see some common threads linking many of the convulsions.

Michael Reid, the author of Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America’s Soul, saw three key catalysts: the economic discontent of an emerging middle class, fury over political roguery, and the influence of other global protest movements shaking cities from Paris and Barcelona to Hong Kong.

Six years of economic stagnation had brought an abrupt end to a commodity-fuelled 12-year period of growth