Poverty in Latin America

The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean released a report that includes discussion of poverty. In the aggregate, poverty decreased from 2002-2014 and then started to increase again in 2015 and 2016.

At the same time, poverty actually continued to decrease almost everywhere. The aggregate trend comes largely from Brazil and Venezuela when their economies tanked. You could reasonably hypothesize that the decreased was attributable in large part to leftist governments that focused on the problem, and the increase was attributable to two long-term leftist governments that did not plan well long-term. Venezuela in particular will skew regional data for years to come.