Brian Winter is the editor-in-chief of America's quarterly.

He covers the politics of Latin America.

Has been watching over the last few weeks as protests rolled through Ecuador and Chile and eventually Bolivia.

It's chaos, right?

But it's been slowly building and more slowly building than most people believe.

So it's been a surprise the way it's happened, but the alarms have been flashing yellow for quite some time.

Brian could really see these alarms flashing when he looked at the commodities market.

Why commodities? Because, you know, the 2000s were really a great decade for the region.

You saw tens of millions of people come out of poverty and under the middle class. You saw the middle class become the single biggest group of Latin Americans for the first time in

the region's history. And that was all fine and good, but it also created high expectations.

And recently those boom times have come to an end. Demand for oil and metals, it was floating not just entire economies, but political careers, too.

Brian saw this up close when he was living in Brazil.

Looking back at the last decade, he says this commodities boom, it looks like the main ingredient

in a successful Latin

American presidency. And now that the boom has gone bust, you can feel the anxiety.

So I am a Brazil guy above all. I work there as a reporter for five years from 2010 to

2015. And I go back about once every two or three months. And what surprised me

being back now was the degree to which people were kind of freaked out. You know, when I was there

and I always make a point of talking to a really wide variety of people. And I spoke to folks who

were worried even about a, you know,

an invasion of radicals or people from Bolivia coming across the border into Matto Grosso

state, which is Brazil's soy belt and is the state that borders Bolivia. And I think that's,

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