Latin America's Crisis of Representation

Jorge Domínguez

From Foreign Affairs, January/ February 1997

Article preview: first 500 of 4,646 words total.

Summary:  Once the land of the unfree and the home of the coup, Latin America now exhibits many of the hallmarks of democracy: free and fair elections, smooth successions, free-market economies, and the birth of political parties. In spite of these recent advances, the region remains haunted by "fracasomania," or an obsession with failure. While Latin America has achieved the broad brushstrokes of democracy, it must confront corruption, protect the rights of indigenous peoples, and distribute wealth more evenly to resolve its crisis of representation.

Jorge I. Dominguez is the Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs and Director of the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. This essay is drawn in part from his work (joint with Jeanne Kinney Giraldo) for the Inter-American Dialogue and the book Constructing Democratic Governance: Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1990s, eds. Jorge I. Dominguez and Abraham F. Lowenthal, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

AN OBSESSION WITH FAILURE?

Latin America could once have been described as the land of the unfree and the home of the coup. Yet since 1976 in the Spanish-American countries and Brazil, no civilian constitutional president elected in free and fair elections has been overthrown by the armed forces. And fair elections now occur regularly in countries where they were once rare.

During the 1980s, despite growth in the world economy, most Latin American economies performed dismally. The region's combined per capita GDP fell about eight percent during that decade; only Colombia and Chile posted meager economic gains. However, in the first half of the 1990s, despite a recession in the United States, there was growth in per capita GDP in Brazil and all the Spanish-American countries except Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, incumbent political parties in Latin America were defeated at least once in nearly every country that held free and fair elections. In the mid-1990s, the electorates have rewarded the good performance of various politicians with reelection, particularly noteworthy in the cases of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile.

And yet a persistent fear haunts the region, what the economist Albert Hirschman once called fracasomania or an obsession with failure. Many still believe that economic success is ephemeral and that democracy's worst enemies are the politicians who claim to speak in its name. There is also a sense that levels of official corruption are intolerably high, as evidenced in the 1990s by the impeachments of President Fernando Collor de Melo in Brazil and President Carlos Andres Perez in Venezuela, by the drug money-laundering allegations that have plagued the administration of President Ernesto Samper in Colombia, and by the grave accusations against the brother of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari in Mexico. The fact that Presidents Collor, Perez, and Salinas had portrayed themselves as crusading reformers early in their administrations has only fueled skepticism about new proponents of reform.

This skepticism, to be sure, is long-standing. Decades ago, the Brazilian author Jorge Amado, in his renowned novel Gabriela: Cravo e canela, commented on the dismal prospects for political reform through conversations between young would-be reformers in the small town of Ilh?us. One says to another, "You'll earn twice as much if you get into politics and change the existing situation." Reformers, this political tradition suggests, are crooks waiting in the opposition.

There are fundamental changes under way in Latin America, but these changes are producing complex, contentious, and sometimes contradictory outcomes. Consequently, today's Latin America ought to be analyzed neither as an exemplar of how governments fail, nor as the new beacon of democratic prosperity. Instead, we should focus on the crisis in representation. This crisis consists of a series of pressing questions: How can a diverse public shape the choice of rulers and policies? How can political parties reduce the likelihood of social violence and increase the prospects for consolidating democracy? How can new opposition voices reshape the terms of public debate? ...

End of preview: first 500 of 4,646 words total.