Enrique
Krauze

Latin American history has long been dominated by four grand and enduring paradigms: militarism, Marxism (both revolutionary and academic), demagogic populism, and the closed economy. For different reasons, all four have entered into a common and definitive crisis. Let us consider each in turn.

Scarcely 40 years ago, all of Latin America seemed hopelessly trapped in a tyrannical backwater of the nineteenth century. In 1950, the distinguished Mexican historian and man of letters Daniel Cosío Villegas estimated that of the 20 countries commonly regarded as forming Latin America, seven (Nicaragua, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic) "lived under regimes of unquestionable tyranny," while nine (EI Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Paraguay, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, and Haiti) had political systems so fragile that the slightest push could tumble them into despotism. Only four nations (Mexico, Guatemala, Cuba, and Uruguay) had viable civic orders, said Cosío Villegas, and even these were far from immune to the traditional Latin American political maladies. Latin America continued to be the domain par excellence of dictators and dictatorships. A succession of "gorillas" (the local parlance for military rulers), often supported by the United States, tended to look on their countries as a form of personal property. The phenomenon persisted until just a short while ago, ending with the fall of two of the most sinister dictators in the history of Latin America: General Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay (a throwback to a nineteenth-century brand of caudillismo) and General Augusto Pinochet of Chile (an apt student of the methods used by totalitarians in our own century).

Soon after Fidel Castro seized control of Cuba in early 1959, a wave of intense revolutionary messianism swept over the entire region. At the onset both liberal and conservative Latin Americans saw the Cuban Revolution as a fresh departure that promised to combine the continents panning destiny projected by Simon Bolívar and Jose Marti with the prophecies of Karl Marx in a surprising new way. Over time, the prestige of Castro's revolution would wane sharply, but not before making a deep impression on two generations of Latin university students, who then sought incessantly to replicate it elsewhere in the region. Few were mindful of the harsh truths that lay behind the ideological wall (higher and thicker than the one in Berlin) that divided the West from the "socialist countries"; police states, labor camps, millions of peasants sacrificed to agricultural collectivization, and economic catastrophe beyond measure. All the Latin American students and much of the younger political class "knew"-and all they thought they needed to know-was that this socialist world was the polar opposite of North American capitalism. Nothing else mattered.

Even the Soviet Union's brutal extinguishment of the Hungarian revolution in 1956 and the Prague Spring in 1968 was not enough to stir serious doubt. When Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago appeared in 1973, it was dismissed as a long-winded reactionary pamphlet. Instead, the 19705 were a time of revolutionary action in Latin America, as young admirers of CM Guevara, Trotsky, and Mao threw themselves into urban and rural guerrilla warfare. In Argentina and Uruguay, this upsurge of leftist violence helped to revive military dictatorships, as generals in both countries used the threat of revolutionary violence to justify the overthrow of civilian governments. Something similar happened in Chile, the only place in the area where a left-wing government won power through elections. The generation of the 1970s -peaceful radicals and violent revolutionaries alike- ended up being sacrificed in a holocaust of assassination, torture, and exile. The revolution triumphed only in Nicaragua, where the Sandinista comandantes consciously modeled themselves on Castro and boldly proclaimed their plans to make their country "the second liberated territory of Latin America."

A third historical paradigm -populism- came back stronger than ever in the 1970s. One rubbed unbelieving eyes at the spectacle of Juan Peron, now nearly 80 years old, returning to an Argentina completely entranced by myths left over from the 1940s. In Venezuela, meanwhile, President Carlos Andres Perez outdid himself in paroxysms of "Third World" bombast. In Mexico, President Luis Echeverria toured the country distributing largesse that would have to be paid for by generations yet unborn. His successor, Jose López Portillo, wasted immense oil wealth on pointless prestige projects and thousands of make-work patronage jobs for the regime's loyal supporters. In just 12 years, Mexico acquired a foreign debt of nearly $70 billion. Each step toward bankruptcy was taken, needless to say, for the sake of the People and Social Justice. At the end of his administration, when the bill fell due a bit ahead of schedule, López Portillo, instead of admitting his error, blamed the private banks and "nationalized" (i.e., expropriated) their deposits. The manifest futility of this measure did not dissuade his Peruvian counterpart, Alan García, from a like course of action. Indeed, García can claim the distinction of having achieved in 4 years (1986-90) what it took the Mexicans 12 to accomplish: the utter destruction of the nation's economy.

The fourth classic paradigm in Latin American life is the closed economy. Like the other three, it has deep roots in the past, especially the three centuries of Spanish domination. In the twentieth century, Keynesian ideas and other notions connected with the welfare state converged to shape a regional economic ideology that stressed the alleged need for import substitution, an overvalued exchange rate, and an omnipotent state to act as supervisor, spender, entrepreneur, and regulator. This credo dictated that economies should be guided not by the invisible hand of the market, but rather by the all-too-visible hand of the state.

The Fading of the Four Paradigms

Throughout the 1980s, and to an increasingly perceptible degree, these four paradigms began to lose ground. Militarism sent itself into what might almost be called voluntary retirement-sometimes through manifest incompetence, sometimes through the combined effects of internal democratic pressure and international sanctions. Either way, the political generals found themselves becoming anachronisms-more appropriate to the national museum than the presidential palace. Today the man on horseback provides material less for dramatic novels than for Hollywood spoofs. Unfortunately for the Sandinistas, the news arrived late in Nicaragua. It was only in the final stages of his presidential campaign that Comandante Daniel Ortega realized too late that his military costume inspired more fear and distaste than support. In the last few days before his defeat, he was always seen in a flowery sportshirt.

The messianic tension originally produced by the Cuban Revolution has gradually dissipated for diverse reasons. Perhaps the first among these is the worldwide discredit into which the classic revolutionary model has fallen-particularly with regard to its claim to hold the key to the problem of social justice. The peaceful revolutions of 1989 provided no validation of the tradition of 1789. On the contrary, the velvet revolutionaries of 1989 showed an acute awareness of the human costs of modem revolutionary politics, costs that have been obscured for much of the past two hundred years by a mist of romanticism and historicism. A growing critique of the Russian Revolution was bound to have some impact upon its ideological progeny in China and Cuba.

No less important has been the great awakening that has seized the countries of Central Europe. Immersed in its revolutionary daydreaming, the Latin American generation of 1968 paid little heed to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and a decade later looked on the war in Afghanistan with almost complete indifference. Things began to change with the rise of Solidarity in Poland. Here were the workers themselves-the supposed subjects of Marxist redemption-protesting against their redeemers. The ideal universe of Marxist theory was punctured by bad news from reality. The shadow of doubt and discredit reached even these lands of perennial credulity. The Salvadoran people ignored their guerrillas' repeated calls for a general insurgency; the Nicaraguan people, tired of war, scarcity, and speeches, voted with and for common sense. During an unexpected attack of candor, Sandinista patriarch Tomas Borge admitted that perhaps his ideas about reality did not quite coincide with ... well, reality, and that it was not reality that was at fault after all: "We were guilty of intolerance and arrogance."

Along with military rule and Marxism, populism has also fallen into a certain disrepute. Luis "Lula" da Silva lost his bid for the presidency of Brazil, and though Carlos Menem won election in Argentina on a populist platform, he quickly discarded its economic planks. What remained was local color-his penchant for playing football with the Argentine national team, racing sportscars, and spouting glib rhetoric. The same thing has happened, to a lesser degree, with the new-model Carlos Andrés Pérez, who today bears scant resemblance to the demagogic orator of the 1970s. The preeminent populist of the 1980s was without a doubt Alan García, whose case reveals the incredible speed with which, in today's world, populism runs head on into economic reality. In Peru's 1990 elections, García's APRA party-supposedly the country's best-organized-won barely 16 percent of the vote.

In the same period, state-dominated economies piled up a clear record of relative failure. Meanwhile, it was becoming impossible to ignore the success of the alternative model typified by the export-driven economies of East Asia's "four dragons" (Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea), which began their cycle of development much later than Latin America, in fact a mere three decades ago. But one need not wander that far afield: the excellent results of the market-oriented therapies administered in Bolivia and Chile speak for themselves. It is no accident that almost all the nations of Latin America are opting, with local variations, to put their economies in order by recourse to the invisible hand of the market.

The fading of these four grand paradigms may be the principal aspect of the changes now under way in Latin America, but it is not the only one; we must consider as well the positive image that both democracy and economic freedom now enjoy. Spain's successful transition to democracy (together with the adoption of an open economic model by the Socialist government of Premier Felipe Gónzalez) had an exemplary impact beginning in the late 1970s. But beyond influences and theories, the most crucial catalysts of change were the voters of Chile, Nicaragua, Argentina, and El Salvador. We speak here of a virtual continental plebiscite on how to deal with disagreements through peaceful means; how to achieve an orderly, legal transition from one regime to another; how to build a market economy in which the state acts as an efficient, imaginative promoter of justice and welfare, not a bureaucratic monster-cold, impersonal, and unproductive to boot. Only Fidel Castro's Caribbean island-prison still boasts the four signs of Latin American backwardness: olive-drab uniforms, huge posters of Marx and Lenin, endless speeches, and an economy that devours the means of its own subsistence. But apart from this regrettable vestige of the past, Latin America is tending toward equilibrium, realism, and responsibility-which is to say, toward genuine maturity.

Paths to Consolidation

Although some countries will be more susceptible to backsliding than others, it is possible to imagine that if present trends persist for another ten years, Latin America will enter the twenty-first century with governments that are more respectful of law and liberty, and with societies that are both more just and more prosperous. The region can gain all this, moreover, without necessarily losing its cultural and historical identity.

The first thing needed for the consolidation of this new maturity is a scrupulous respect for the rules of the democratic game. There is much talk of the recent economic success of Chile under the dictatorship of General Pinochet. There are even those who go so far as to argue that economic freedom is fully compatible with political dictatorship. But the defeats, first of Pinochet himself in the 1988 plebiscite, and then of his finance minister and would-be successor Hernán Büchi in the 1989 presidential race, show that Chileans regard political freedom as desirable in itself. Something quite similar occurred in Spain under Franco. With time and a broader perspective, it will be seen that the maturity that has generally characterized Chilean politics over the past hundred years-and which has survived two decades of chaos and dictatorship-has favored economic development.

The state must learn to limit itself to its proper role and dimensions. It would be naive to think that the ghost of the old Spanish colonial state-with its enduring paternalism, corruption, bureaucracy, and extreme centralization-can be exorcised completely. Rather it will in all likelihood continue to exert a profound influence over Latin America's political culture. But total exorcism is not really necessary, for with very few exceptions (Argentina during the "dirty war," the first decade of the Pinochet regime in Chile) the Latin American state has never seriously sought either to enslave civil society or to assert total control over the economy. (The only Latin American state that has persistently tried to do both is Castro's Cuba.) The state in Latin America has always had a legitimate mission-usually carried out inefficiently-to provide social services, an echo of the Thomistic notion of the "common good" that infused the original political theology of these societies. A sense of the natural equality of men has prevented these countries from engaging in violent ethnic, racial, or national conflicts, typically fueled by the state itself. A no less deeply rooted idea of natural liberty (at times shading toward chaos and anarchy in actual practice) has prevented the consolidation of serious police states.

Latin American governments ought to take advantage of these conditions, which furnish them a modest stock of inherited legitimacy, to begin working for institutional changes starting with the state itself. The reforms should aim not only at curbing excesses in the size and role of the state, but should also seek to facilitate rather than obstruct the energies of civil society. If the major political task of Latin American politics in the nineteenth century was the separation of church and state, the twentieth should conclude with the undoing of the state's excessive entanglement in economic life. Here Cuba is the most extreme case of all. Castro's legitimacy has never been put to the test at the ballot box, but perhaps it exists for all that. Its origin, as odd as it might seem, lies in the old Spanish colonial political culture, in which the peoples of America did not delegate power, but rather surrendered it to a leader who personified the general will. To be sure, it was not a matter of unconditional surrender: in the event of flagrant abuses of power, some neo-Thomist philosophers like the sixteenth-century Jesuit, Juan de Mariana, prescribed a more drastic remedy than impeachment or a referendum-namely, tyrannicide. Castro's security forces have no need to leaf through the classics of early Spanish political thought to know this.

The implementation of a new economic policy in Latin America will require time and patience. The previous experiments in economic populism were given decades to prove that they did not work; the new dispensation deserves no less of a chance to prove itself. But beyond the macroeconomic requisites of balanced budgets, realistic exchange rates, consolidated debt, and competitive prices, Latin America needs a microeconomic revolution. Until now, the only two prophets of this revolution have been men well ahead of their times: the Peruvian Hernando de Soto and the Mexican Gabriel Zaid.

The original ideas of de Soto on the informal economy are far better known than those of his Mexican colleague, who since 1973 has been proposing a "Copernican revolution" involving the transfer of cheap means of production to the poor. According to Zaid, the hegemony of our dominant cultural cliques (always predominantly academic and urban) prevents us from comprehending and respecting peasant life and culture on its own terms. Thus we seek a demagogic -that is, impossible- leveling through government employment dispensed from above, instead of attempting the same thing from below through fostering individual economic empowerment.

De Soto and Zaid believe that the prosperity of their countries-and by extension, of all Latin America-s-depends upon the proliferation of small, independent proprietors. If the modem Latin American state is genuinely looking for new wine to pour into its historic bottles of social concern, the detailed ideas of these two theoreticians are readily available. All that is needed are imaginative engineers, entrepreneurs, and economists-but not government functionaries-to help put them into practice.

Latin Americans are history's most prolific constitution writers. The more chaotic the country, it seems, the more intense its interest in drawing up new fundamental charters-Haiti has allowed itself over a hundred. Such a fever for legislation can serve as an index of the powerlessness that the average citizen feels before governmental authority. Latin Americans have found democratic culture easier to essay than genuine republican institutions. There is a general lack of solid, respected, and independent judicial bodies to mediate between the state and the individual citizen. Latin America needs new legal systems modeled frankly and unashamedly on the Anglo-Saxon pattern. Just as the colonial tradition disdained elections and votes, it also imparted a justice excessively bound to codes, too much inclined toward bureaucratic delay (and bribery), and too little anchored in a sense of individual and community responsibility. Would it not be opportune now, for example, to introduce the jury system-selectively at first, at the local or regional levels?

Toward an Intellectual Reformation 

These and other changes would be far easier to effect if our countries had opponents of statism whose stature were comparable to that of, say, Vaclav Havel, Andrei Sakharov, or Adam Michnik. Unfortunately, in Latin America today the intelligentsia is stubbornly antiliberal and continues to favor Marxism, populism, and statism. Certain brands of militarism also hold charm, for while the intellectuals are decided enemies of generals on the right, they have not found equally repugnant certain generals of the left like Castro, Velasco Alvarado of Peru (1968- 75), and the Sandinista comandantes.

A fixation on abstract ideology has rendered our cultured classes utterly impervious to empirical evidence or rational argument. Not even the stunning events of the last three years have been enough to make them reconsider their core assumptions. They continue to denounce private property (their own excepted, of course) and cling fast to their faith in the state (which still often pays their salaries in one form or another). For them, the failure of "really existing" socialism merely seals the triumph of "ideal" socialism. Their reflexive anti-Americanism also remains unabated. While not actual combatants in guerrilla campaigns, they are accomplished warriors on the more congenial battlefields provided by university campuses, editorial pages, lecture halls, and cafe tables. In not a few countries, they dominate the whole apparatus of culture. Few among them would favor the actual installation of a communist regime, but they remain wedded to political and economic populism. Gabriel Zaid has likened this intellectual establishment to the clergy of the Counter-Reformation. Anyone who has observed these modem "clerics" closely and read their sermons or listened to their homilies cannot help suspecting that the last Stalinist on the planet will die not in the Soviet Union, but on the campus of some Latin American university.

To neutralize the influence that this bureaucratic-religious-social caste wields over Latin American intellectual life would take something on the order of the Reformation. But while we await a new Luther to challenge the guardians of orthodoxy from within the temple-or at least a new Erasmus to introduce humor, tolerance, and humanism into the dense atmosphere of secular neoscholasticism-our governments and civil societies would do well to sponsor a broader opening to the democratic West in all matters relating to the free flow and discussion of ideas. Visit any bookshop in Latin America and you will see what I mean: major intellectual traditions and important publishing industries (like Argentina's) have been ruined after decades of ideological simplification and populism.

The Roman Catholic Church-which has played an objectively liberating role in both Chile and Nicaragua-could also take advantage of its continuing prestige, which is rivaled by that of no other institution in the region. In order to do so, however, it must address itself to an urgent, but far from simple task: to recover certain liberal and Erasmian roots predating the Council of Trent, doctrines that, let us recall here, laid the groundwork for the societies of the New World. What we lack are not Catholic democrats, but Catholic intellectuals. For many years now, Latin American Catholicism has been suffering from a lack of creativity, as its attempt to imitate Marxism through liberation theology definitively proves.

The Present Situation

Even to try to sketch the roles that the four old paradigms and the new tendencies are likely to play in each country is to run the risk of trafficking in soothsaying. The countries best positioned to achieve democratic consolidation are those that can combine revived traditions of democratic governance with sensible economic policies. Chile, Uruguay, Costa Rica, and Venezuela all fall into this category. Bolivia, with its successful economic stabilization plan and its recent achievement of a political understanding between left, center, and right (the so-called National Democratic Accord), might also qualify, though in a different way. So would Colombia, were it not for the awful plague of drugs and drug-related violence that now afflicts it.

Five countries whose common problem is the residue of caudillismo are currently lingering in the shadows of political uncertainty. They are Honduras, Ecuador, Paraguay, the Dominican Republic, and Panama. The relapse of any of these countries into despotism would scarcely have continent-wide repercussions. One cannot say as much if a reversion to historic type occurred in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, or Nicaragua. A penchant for strongly populist politics survives in all four. In Argentina, for example, the rhetorical populism currently practiced by President Menem could be overtaken by the sort of real populism that his quondam followers, the Peronist descamisados, still cherish. In Brazil, Lula continues to present serious opposition to the government of President Collor de Mello. Who nonetheless still enjoys the double blessing of popularity and legitimacy. In Mexico, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, son of the most popular populist president of the twentieth century, leads a tenacious opposition to the government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. The latter has achieved an impressive personal respect and credibility, but has not yet been able to transmit legitimacy to his party, the hidebound and retrograde PRl.

The Mexican government and its institutions are strong; the new economic policy has been well and truly crafted; still, the country is gripped by a vague uncertainty. Mexico has not yet achieved its transition to democracy, and the country's powerful populist movements are still firmly allied to the antiliberal orthodoxy of the universities. Cardenismo may yet spring some surprises in the elections of 1994.

In Nicaragua, the risk of a new Cuba has passed, but lingering populism will continue to delay the recuperation of a country that has suffered terribly from war, natural disaster, and poverty. Even so, one cannot but feel that if the Sandinistas do manage to return to power in the future, they will govern in a more open and intelligent manner than before. The fiction that the comandantes represent the whole Nicaraguan people ended the day the latter was able to exercise its right to vote.

Peru still suffers from an apparently interminable internal war that could eventually push it into the kind of disintegration which has overtaken Lebanon; fortunately, it has veered off the path to economic disaster, and continues to be a democracy. El Salvador is on the verge of becoming one. Haiti seems fated to remain chaotic. In still fragile Guatemala, guerrilla warfare could reescalate, perhaps precipitating the entry of a new populist strongman. The former dictator, Efraín Ríos Montt, had until recently been lurking in the wings, apparently waiting to play just this role. Cuba, as always, is a case apart. Some hope that Castro will go peacefully. But a considerable portion of the population still seems to believe that to suffer a chronic lack of both bread and liberty is to achieve a glorious destiny, and Castro himself keeps preaching "Socialism or Death." Who knows what will come of all this?

On the whole, however, the picture is far from discouraging. Indeed, we are witnessing the highest degree of maturity that Latin America has attained in this century. The end of the Cold War has written finis to real socialism-the socialism that has actually been practiced, as distinguished from the Utopia of sentimental dreamers. This circumstance holds two additional benefits for Latin America: the North Americans wiII abandon their penchant for paranoia ("The Russians are coming!"), and the Latin Americans their penchant for blackmail ("Yes . . . the Reds are coming!"). As mutual distrust wanes, Latin America may yet discover what Albert Hirschman calls "the attractions of being attractive." As for the United States, it may respond to this attraction with a new attitude of respect and with investments, which up till now it has largely withheld.

If the generals remain in salutary retirement, only one thing remains to darken Latin American life: the unholy alliance between the Latin American intellectual clerisy and the populist politicians. Were they to achieve power, they would reverse the recent gains in maturity and start new cycles of economic deterioration. Worse still, the people might fail to hold such leaders fully accountable for the results of their folly. For the secret of populism is as old as demagoguery itself: to postpone answers, to avoid responsibility, to confound society's efforts to judge those who govern it. The exploitation of cheap sentiment and popular ignorance will always seem like an easy way out. But at this point in the century, to close the economies of these countries and impoverish still further their public life would mean not merely to lose a few more years, but to sacrifice the future itself.

Enrique Krauze is a historian of Mexican development and democracy and editor of the Mexican magazine Vuelta. He is the author of several books and numerous essays on cultural and political history. His major study of Mexican democracy, Democracy Without Adjectives, has gone through five printings since its release in 1986. His eight-volume study Biography of Power, which features biographies of eight major twentieth century Mexican leaders, will be published in English in all abridged one-volume edition by HarperCollins. We hope to publish comments by other scholars on Mr. Krauze's essay in a subsequent issue.

Journal of Democracy