Latinoamérica: laboratorio político mundial.

 

World Citizen: Latin America, the World's Democracy Lab

By Frida Ghitis | 05 Jul 2012

Jefes de Estado latinoamericanos.

In the past few decades, Latin America has emerged as the world's unlikely laboratory for democracy. No other region has produced the sheer diversity of democratic configurations and permutations, including some that at times appear to undermine the very essence of democratic principles.

The region that for so many years made news due to violence and authoritarianism is now an active workshop, tinkering with and sometimes transforming the shape of democracy.

Latin America became the stage for the rise of iconic figures such as former Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, to name just two of the powerful personalities who have led the region’s political experimentation. Both were democratically elected and committed to social change, but each had a sharply different approach to addressing their country's problems.

The search for new solutions has resulted in successes and disappointments. In some places it has come full circle, returning to power the representatives of old regimes after testing out the alternatives. Such was the case in Mexico, where a few days ago voters elected as president Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had ruled the country as a private fiefdom for seven decades until losing power a dozen years ago. Guatemalan voters, too, recently returned to power the retired Gen. Otto Perez Molina.

Despite a growing middle class and a small sliver of extremely wealthy families, poverty and inequality remain a constant source of discontent and an always-looming threat of instability in the region, creating urgent pressure to address those serious ills. Democracy has become accepted as the principal ingredient in any effort to do, the organizing principle of political order. That's a most dramatic change from the not-very-distant past.

Even those regional leaders that govern in the most undemocratic ways always take pains to portray themselves as acting within constitutional bounds. That's because experimentation, no matter what results it generates, risks rejection if it is not perceived as democratic. Democracy, with all its flaws and discontents, remains the indispensable element of legitimacy and acceptability.

Gone are the days of old-fashioned military coups, with generals sending tanks rumbling to the presidential palace and replacing a suit-and-tie president with a junta of uniformed men.

Every country in Latin America, with the exception of Cuba, now has a system that manages to meet the most basic requirements of democracy, albeit some just barely. But the experimentation, which continues to this day, has created a wide array of compounds and concoctions, mixing elements that include varying amounts of free market forces, state economic intervention, authoritarianism, populism, cronyism and manipulation of the rules.

Chavez and Lula, both of whom always stood clearly on the left of the political spectrum, pursued radically different agendas to achieve their objectives.

They both sought to improve the lot of the poor, but Lula did it without turning against the wealthy, while Chavez turned the "oligarchy" -- and the U.S. -- into the enemy. While Lula, and those who have followed his model, respected private property and the independence of other institutions, Chavez and his emulators hollowed out any possibility of checks and balances, creating a 21st century version of the Marxists’ “the ends justify the means” approach to social reform.

Democracy in Latin America has created a new set of rules for what continue to be fierce political battles. The disputes that triggered armed conflict in the past now tend to spark bitter legislative maneuvers, even thinly disguised coups, punctuated with street protests that sometimes turn violent, but eventually die off.

Latin America still contains the ingredients for violent social conflict, but the willingness to experiment within the elusive parameters of democracy has kept armed conflict to a minimum. It has meant that even when the system disappoints, there is always another democratic path to chart, another formula to concoct.

To be sure, violence is far from defeated. Central American countries have some of the highest murder rates in the world as a result of drug trafficking. Mexico has seen some 50,000 die in the battle to defeat the narco-gangs. The decades-old insurgency in Colombia is not finished, and street protests occasionally turn deadly throughout the region.

But it's a long way from the civil wars and the "dirty wars" that characterized the region in the second half of the 20th century. Then, the routine means of deciding the shape of the political and economic system was by taking up arms and killing those on the other side of the ideological divide. No more.

Latin America has produced security-minded, market-oriented leaders, such as former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, who ruthlessly decimated a stubborn and deadly insurgency. Mexico's lame-duck President Felipe Calderón also took on brutal drug gangs with just as much vigor, if not as much success.

The region has given us Evo Morales in Bolivia, a leftist indigenous leader and former coca grower turned charismatic and controversial president; the practical-minded Dilma Rousseff, Lula's successor in Brazil; and the dramatic Cristina Fernandez, Argentina’s president, who continued the unorthodox blend of fiery populism of her late husband and predecessor, Nestor Kirchner, while tinkering with economic statistics and private property with an inimitably Argentinian flare.

In Venezuela, Chavez pioneered what he called "21st-century socialism," a creeping authoritarianism that centralized power and massed it in the hands of the elected leader, while gradually cutting off the opposition without completely destroying it. On the economic front, he allowed the country to remain a market economy, but one where private property became increasingly vulnerable to the whims of the state, which granted itself the power to expropriate businesses it deemed vital to the country’s interests. Chavez’s approach became a model for Bolivia and Ecuador and to some degree Argentina, while inspiring others to introduce a system that carefully skirts the boundaries of dictatorship.

Fear that his example would be followed in Honduras led to a coup there against President Manuel Zelaya in 2009. But even then, coup plotters took pains to justify their actions on constitutional grounds. A similar move came last month in Paraguay, where the democratically elected President Fernando Lugo was overthrown through impeachment by an elected legislature claiming it acted within the law.

From Mexico to Paraguay, the region has quietly turned into a political testing ground. The very fact that it has garnered so little attention is proof that the system has achieved at least one major accomplishment: After decades of civil wars and military coups, Latin America hardly ever makes the headlines.

Frida Ghitis is an independent commentator on world affairs and a World Politics Review contributing editor. Her weekly column, World Citizen, appears every Thursday.