“Today a new political force of transformation is born!” As former president Manuel “Mel” Zelaya’s speech on June 26, 2011 reached its crescendo, hundreds of delegates from every corner of Honduras roared. After a short but heated debate that day, the 1,500-member assembly of the National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP) approved resolutions paving the way for a new political party: Libertad y Refundación (Liberty and Refoundation), or LIBRE (“FREE” in Spanish). Those supporting the resolutions wanted the party to serve as an instrument of systemic change. With it they’d win the 2013 general elections and, once in power, convene a constituyente, a constituent assembly tasked with drafting a new constitution for Honduras.

The decision to create LIBRE came nearly two years after the June 28, 2009 coup d’état that forced Zelaya into exile and sparked a mass movement of civil resistance throughout Honduras. In the days, weeks, and months that followed the coup, hundreds of thousands of Hondurans, many entirely new to activism, took to the streets nearly every day to demand the immediate restoration of Zelaya’s presidency and democracy. Their peaceful demonstrations were met with brutal repression, and the few media outlets that relayed their demands were frequently shut down by state security forces.

The FNRP emerged out of the opposition to the coup and quickly developed into the largest social movement in Honduran history. Loosely organized into collectives at the local and regional level, the resistance includes a rainbow of movements: union activists, teachers, lawyers, artists, indigenous and Afro-indigenous villagers, small farmers, LGBT activists, and human rights defenders, with ideological tendencies ranging from the center left to the far left. United in their opposition to the coup, resistance members also oppose Honduras’s corrupt and deeply conservative political system, which is tightly controlled by the country’s wealthiest families in tandem with the leadership of the nearly indistinguishable Liberal and National parties.

Elections were not initially on the FNRP’s agenda. Many grassroots leaders felt that the movement should maintain autonomy from party politics and refrain from participating in elections widely seen as rigged. Instead, they favored broadening the resistance and intensifying peaceful mobilizations against the coup government’s most retrograde policies and in support of a constituyente. But when Zelaya began playing a more direct leadership role in the resistance after he returned from exile in May 2011, he pushed it toward electoral politics. By the time the FNRP’s June national assembly took place, the membership favored creating a new party that would compete in the 2013 presidential, legislative, and municipal elections.

In the months that followed, dissenting voices were submerged in a tidal wave of support for LIBRE. Bright red LIBRE caps, T-shirts, and banners were on display in communities all over the country. Hundreds of thousands of LIBRE supporters participated in party primaries in November 2012 and elected Xiomara Castro, wife of Zelaya and prominent resistance figure, as their presidential candidate. Major media overwhelmingly favored the National Party candidate, Juan Orlando Hernández, and dozens of LIBRE candidates and activists were killed or injured in violent attacks by unidentified gunmen. Yet as the electoral campaign hit full swing, it seemed that victory was inevitable, with nearly all major pollsters putting Xiomara in the lead.

The Honduran resistance movement and LIBRE can only be understood in the context of political developments in other parts of Latin America. Over the last fifteen years, much of the region has experienced a steady chain of political eruptions as a number of left movements have come to power through the ballot box. Once in office, they have radically revised their countries’ domestic and foreign policy agendas and, in several cases, their nations’ constitutional frameworks.

In the late 1980s, as the Cold War era of U.S.-backed military dictatorships came to an end, many of the region’s traditional left parties were in disarray or had veered to the right, while conservative governments had increasingly adopted neoliberal economic “reforms” promoted and often imposed by the United States and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These policies included the privatization of state enterprises, the deregulation of labor and financial markets, and the removal of trade barriers. The reforms failed to have the positive, “trickle-down” effects that policymakers promised and instead resulted in a dramatic decline in economic growth throughout the region and increased poverty and income inequality.

By the mid-1990s a grassroots rebellion had begun to swell throughout the region. A first eruption broke out in Chiapas in southern Mexico, where an armed indigenous “Zapatista” movement declared its autonomy from the Mexican state in dozens of communities on January 1, 1994, the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement came into effect. Another upheaval took place in 1999, when a former lieutenant colonel who had led a failed military coup seven years earlier was elected president of Venezuela on a platform of opposition to neoliberalism and the country’s corrupt and deeply unpopular two-party system. Once in power, Hugo Chávez declared the country’s 1958 constitution “moribund” and organized elections for a constituent assembly.

Venezuela’s “Bolivarian Revolution” emboldened left movements throughout the region and was followed by a wave of left-wing electoral victories in neighboring countries.

Venezuela’s “Bolivarian Revolution” emboldened left movements throughout the region and was followed by a wave of left-wing electoral victories in neighboring countries. In Bolivia, social movements that had coalesced during the anti-neoliberal water and gas wars of the early 2000s helped bring Aymara coca grower leader Evo Morales to power in the country’s 2005 elections. Left-wing economist Rafael Correa was elected president of Ecuador in 2006. In Nicaragua, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega was reelected president seventeen years after being voted out of office, while in El Salvador the former leftist guerilla group FMLN won the country’s 2009 and 2014 presidential elections. Left candidates also won decisively in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay.

Like Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador both convened constituyentes that drafted progressive constitutions approved by voters in national referenda. Under its 2009 constitution, Bolivia became a plurinational, secular state with firm public control over natural resources and some measure of legal and political autonomy for indigenous communities. Ecuador’s constitution established the “rights of nature”—protecting fragile ecosystems—and the principle of food sovereignty: the obligation of the state to guarantee its people “self-sufficiency in healthy food.” Brazil, where former steelworker Lula da Silva ascended to the presidency in 2003, has offered a more moderate example. Though they have implemented popular anti-poverty policies, Lula and his successor Dilma Roussef haven’t sought to restructure the political system or pushed for a much greater state role in the economy.

Despite clear policy differences between the region’s left governments, there is still a tangible sense of community that unites them. Over the last decade or so, they have worked collectively to deepen Latin American integration through the creation of the new regional groups Unasur—the Union of South American Nations—and CELAC—the Community of Latin American and Caribbean Nations. These organizations promote a common social agenda and adopt foreign policy positions often at odds with those of the United States.

Many Latin American leaders have referred to the region’s profound political shift as a “second independence,” a movement striving to fulfill the promise of emancipation that was never truly achieved during the independence struggles of the early nineteenth century. The focus of this movement, at the rhetorical level if not always in practice, is twofold: empowering the marginalized in the face of the traditional domination of conservative elites, and promoting greater unity to better counter U.S. economic and political dominance.

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Alexander Main is Senior Associate for International Policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.