Latin America’s democracies hold strong

SANTIAGO — Just in recent months, Peru’s president attempted to dissolve congress, Argentina’s vice president was convicted of fraud and Brazil’s incumbent president threatened not to leave office if he lost the upcoming election. Add the consolidation of dictatorships in Venezuela and Nicaragua and the Salvadoran president’s announcement that he will seek reelection despite constitutional limits, and it would seem that democracy is in trouble in Latin America.

But a closer look reveals a different picture. The Peruvian president who tried to shut down congress was peacefully removed by it. And while Brazil’s outgoing president spent the past six weeks sulking in his compound — Donald Trump-style — his chief aide let it be known that the transfer of power would proceed unimpeded. Similarly, though Argentina has plenty of other problems, Argentinians can be thankful that they at least have judges who can indict powerful government officials.

These may not be the best of times for liberal democracy in Latin America, but they are not the worst of times, either. As crises have come and gone, the culture and institutions of democracy have proven unexpectedly resilient in many countries.

Peru’s impeached leader, Pedro Castillo, was the first small-town schoolteacher to become president, but he was also comically incompetent and woefully unprepared for the job. In less than a year and a half, he went through five Cabinets and more than 80 ministers. After the country’s chief prosecutor accused him and several members of his family of corruption, he tried to assume dictatorial powers.

But this gambit merely confirmed his incompetence. He failed to secure the support of the armed forces and the police, whose leaders swiftly announced that they would not back him. Even members of his own Cabinet disavowed the power grab. Within hours, he had been impeached and arrested, and Vice President Dina Boluarte was sworn in as Peru’s first woman president.

With Castillo’s supporters having taken to the streets to protest, sometimes violently, Boluarte has proposed, and congress has agreed, to hold the next general election in April 2024, nearly two years ahead of schedule. No tanks have rolled down the streets, and there are reasons to remain cautiously optimistic about the country’s political future.

In Brazil, the fear instilled by president Jair Bolsonaro’s anti-democratic threats was strong enough to impel centrist politicians and even business leaders to hold their noses and support the leftist candidate, LuizInácio Lula da Silva. The fate of Brazil’s democracy mattered more to them than their short-term partisan preferences. Lula will not be inaugurated until January 1, but the chances of anything derailing the peaceful transfer of power now seem vanishingly small.

Amid the corruption scandals of the 2010s, former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso offered a now-famous quip to explain how he knew that Brazilian democracy was making progress. In the past, he observed, everyone knew the names of the generals who might stage a putsch, whereas now everyone knows the names of the judges and prosecutors who pursue allegedly corrupt officials (including Lula, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison, but released after 580 days, in 2019, when his conviction was annulled on a technicality). For a while, Bolsonaro, who packed his Cabinet with men in uniform, seemed prepared to prove Cardoso wrong. But in the end, democracy prevailed.

In Argentina, the economy looks as shaky as ever, as evidenced by the multiplicity of different exchange rates — including one specifically for football fans who travelled to Qatar for the World Cup. Nonetheless, democratic politics remain safely rooted. The next general election is due in 2023, and current polls suggest that the opposition will win if it can present a united front.

While Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner claims that she will not run for any office when her current term is up, political analysts are sceptical. She is expected to appeal her recent conviction on fraud charges, and retirement would mean that she is no longer immune from arrest. In Argentina’s not-so-distant past, the ruling party might have responded by having the offending magistrate shot, or by sending thugs into the streets. But this time around, all Kirchner could do was emulate Eva Perón and paint herself as a victim — in this case, of a judicial “mafia”.

Kirchner is not the only Latin American leader clashing with the courts. In Mexico, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO) has called for a judicial house cleaning and accused judges of defending the interests of unidentified “groups” instead of “the people”. Just as Trump relies on “alternative facts”, AMLO has previously backed his claims by alluding to “other data” that cannot be fact-checked. But when he recently tried to change the constitution to weaken the National Electoral Institute (INE), Mexican society decided that enough was enough.

Intellectuals and opinion leaders sent letters and signed petitions, and a quarter-million people took to the streets in Mexico City to oppose the proposed change. In the end, even the leader of AMLO’s own party in the senate voted against the reform, saying, “I only want the constitution respected.” But though he could not muster the supermajority needed to amend the constitution, AMLO did get enough votes to curtail the INE’s autonomy, slash its budget, and remove many members of its current staff. The opposition will now take its challenge to the supreme court, where it will argue that the bill violates the constitution. While Mexican democracy has been shaken, Mexican democrats have been stirred into action.

So, too, have Chilean democrats, who in late 2019 ended violent street protests by launching a process of constitutional reform. While the first attempt at writing a new constitution misfired, a broad swath of parties has now agreed on the procedures that will govern a second try. By the end of 2023, Chile will likely have a new constitution to replace the one that Gen. Augusto Pinochet oversaw back in 1980.

Liberal democracy lives in statutes, rulebooks and institutions. But, more importantly, it lives in people’s hearts and habits of mind. Democracy — whatever its imperfections — is now the natural system of government for the nearly 700 million people who call Latin America home. The alternatives seem increasingly implausible. As the annus horribilis of 2022 draws to a close, the resilience of the region’s democracies is cause enough for cheer.

Andrés Velasco, a former presidential candidate and finance minister of Chile, is dean of the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of numerous books and papers on international economics and development, and has served on the faculty at Harvard, Columbia, and New York Universities.  Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2022. www.project-syndicate.org