POLITICS, POLITICAL PARTIES, AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN LATIN AMERICA TODAY

Talk delivered at a conference on Tendencias Mundiales y su Impacto en Latino America, I Encuentor Venezuela en Boston Boston University, June 28-30.

Not for quotation or circulation without permission.

Maxwell A. Cameron Department of Political Science The University of British Columbia

The new face of political power in Latin America today is perhaps symbolized best not by the party organizer but by the social movement leader. No politician better personifies the rise of social movements than Bolivian President Evo Morales. He owes his power not to successful maneuvering through smoke-filled backrooms, nor to the confidence of colleagues who have selected him because of his instinct for power in the daily verbal combat of parliamentary politicshe was, after all, expelled from congress in 2002. Morales owes his power to years of organizing social movements and accompanying them in their struggles to control land, water, and gas, and to oppose the eradication of coca crops. It is true that Morales leads a party, but the malapropist MAS (or Movement Toward Socialism) is more of a political instrument for rural and indigenous movements and unions than a real political party (Hochstetler and
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Friedman 2008: 9).

Hugo Chavez was not brought to power by social movements, and his prior political experience was limited to organizing clandestine factions and a coup-attempt from within the military. Nevertheless he has used political office to promote social mobilization from above. Chavez began to organize a political party only after his recent re-election in 2006. The primary elections in the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) were just completed this June, 2008, and 2
million people (of 5.7 million members) participated.

Others in this conference would be better able to say to how the organization of the PSUV has altered the balance between government officials, legislators, and other elites, on the one hand, and Bolivarian circles, communal councils, and grassroots activists, on the other. But the PSUV certainly appears to have much more top-down command and control structure than, say, the MAS, which is a model admired by many grassroots activists. For some activists, is may seem like an attempt to coopt the grassroots through clientelism and bureaucratic control (Fernandez 2007). Indeed, this may help explain the referendum rebuff in December 2007.

Lula comes out of the labor movement, but in Brazil the labor movement has a political party, the Workers Party, and so the President of Brazil is at once a party operator and a social movement leaderthough I would argue he is more the former than the latter. Others have used elections to mobilize social movements. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador reaches his
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greatest oratorical heights as a convener of mass demonstrations. From the moment that the Fox government tried to remove him from office as mayor of Mexico City, AMLO demonstrated an uncommon ability to move the masses in the streets. Later, when he failed to win the 2006 election, he clogged the arteries of Mexico City with protesters. Just when AMLOs career seemed on the verge of fizzling, Calderons decision to privatize PEMEX has restored him to life. That said, the relationship between AMLO and the PRD is extraordinarily fraught. The legitimate president of Mexico (as it is now illegal in Mexico to call him) and his party allies dont appear to be able to agree on the results of internal elections any more than they did the results of the 2006 election.

Another hybrid is what Omar Sanchez (2008: 315) calls candidatecentered movements. Rafael Correa, in one of the greatest practical tributes to hyper-presidentialism in Latin American history, did not even both to run a slate of candidates for congress when he ran for the presidency in Ecuador. Correa has emerged as the evening and morning star of Ecuadorian politics, but unlike Morales, his relationship with social movements is ambivalent. In fact, CONAIE recently withdrew its support for Correas constitutional proposal on the grounds that it does not provide the kind of control over resources and territory desired by Ecuadors indigenous movements.

The neoVelasquista Ollanta Humala, the top vote winner in the first round of the election in Peru, built his candidacy on his brothers movement of reservistsveterans of Perus war with Ecuador and the Shining Path who felt betrayed by their nations political leadership. Unable to register his
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own party in time for the 2006 election, he borrowed another partythe Union for Peru, or UPPall of whose incumbents were abruptly forced to resign in the name of renewal.

Colombia has not been impervious to the anti-party trend. What are the para-politicos if not the political wing of a social movement, the paramilitares, seeking to colonize the party system? Alvaro Uribe, who just the other day offered us a perfect example of plebiscitary leadership when he attacked the Supreme Court for investigating whether bribes were paid to legislators for their vote to enable his recent re-election, is himself a creature of the decay of the party system. The parties supporting him are heterogeneous, inorganic coalitions (Sanchez 2008: 319) unlikely to outlive their leader. Just this month the senate buried a political reform bill that would have purged the congress of dozens of members linked to the paramilitaries (32 of whom have been jailed, 30 more are under investigation). But it would also have sanctioned parties with para-politicos by taking away their seats. This was unpalatable to Uribe, because he would have risked losing his legislative majoritythe key to the extensive presidential powers that are at the core of his popularity.

If, as I claim, social movements are the new face of power, what are we to make of this development? The first point I would make is that Latin Americas so-called left turns began not in 1998 with the election of Chavez, but much earlier. I would date the underlying tectonic shift that produced the electoral earthquakes to the Caracazo, the uprising of the Zapatistas, the water and gas wars in Bolivia, in other words, to a series of social mobilizations that electoral left turns epiphenomenally reflect at the
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political level. These mobilizations have challenged the neoliberal parameters of policy-making; and give voice to dissatisfaction with the performance of democratic institutions.

There are some who celebrate the idea that citizens across the world have shifted from older traditional forms of representation, such as political parties and unions, to newer modes, such as social movements, informal citizen groups and nongovernmental organizations (Chandoke cited in Hochstetler and Friedman 2008: 1). Social movements are a new poder moderador, which can sanction, hold accountable, even remove leaders from power (Hochstetler and Friedman 2008: 7).

My objection to this line of reasoning is not: who elected the NGOs? There are forms of representation outside the electoral arena: the lawyer represents his client; the Red Cross represents prisoners of war; the environmentalist represents nature or future generations. My point is that these forms of discursive and political representation do not supplant or replace parties. The political leaders who have emerged from fissures of change (Evo, Chavez, AMLO, Humala, Correa) tend to be outsiders who are hostile to political parties; they disrupt the functioning of party systems; their preferred strategy is not to negotiate with existing forces, but to appeal to the constituent power of the people, to take power by changing the constitution. To quote Omar Sanchez again: Political outsiders atop improvised electoral vehicles, and candidate-centered parties, are capturing more and expanding spheres of political power, at the expense of established political parties (2008: 316).

Reviled as divisive, and dismissed as parasitic, parties often inspire more contempt that any other democratic institution. But weak parties and party systems undermine governability and legitimacy, invite corruption and abuse of power, diminish responsiveness, and erode horizontal and vertical accountability (that is, the checks and balances inherent in a system of separation of powers). This, in turn, can create conditions propitious to outsiders. In other words, outsiders are an effect of the system. They are leaders who seek not to compete within the system, but to overturn it; they are not interested in competition but in hegemony.

Under assault from outsiders, party systems may collapse, as in Peru under Fujimori; Venezuela under Chavez; Ecuador under Correa. Today, in the Andes, only APRA represents an established party. Of course there is a difference between having a party in power and having a functioning party system. In Peru, a substantial part of the electorate routinely votes for outsiders (Fujimori, Toledo, Humala).

A common theme among today's political outsiders is the idea of constituent power. This started with Chavez. Languishing in jail after his failed coup attempt, Hugo Chavez contemplated taking his struggle onto enemy territory and to seek power by means of elections. But this could not mean submitting to the Venezuelas moribund democratic system. So he hit on the idea of constituent power as a form of revolutionary power. In an extended interview, he explained the distinction: In France in 1789 constituent power exploded. This is the power to constitute a people against what is constituted, that simple. But this transformative power, as against the established, constituted power, has to be very great. (Quoted
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in Blanco Muoz 1998: 530).

Chavez outlined a process starting with his election, followed by a plebiscite to convene a constituent assembly, which would then assume all power. It can remove the president of the republic, it can dissolve the national congress, the CSJ, the tribunals, governors, it can dissolve the legislative assembly. That is to say, everything that is constituted power, it has the sovereign power, represented there, to dissolve it or ratify it. (Quoted in Blanco Muoz 1998: 533). The constituent assembly should demolish established power. Only then will it be a truly revolutionary. (Quoted in Blanco Muoz 1998: 534).

The tension between constituted and constituent power is inherent in liberal democracy, and it speaks to liberalisms insufficiencies. In my remaining minutes I would like to outline two critiques of the theory of democracy as the exercise of constituent power. The first line of criticism is the familiar liberal or social democratic complaint about the lack of respect for the separation of powers, the rule of law, the spread of corruption, and the mirage of stability that comes from the performance of persons rather than institutions. We see evidence for this in the increasingly erratic behavior of Chavezwitness his about face on the intelligence law and sudden call for FARC to seek peaceperhaps reflecting an accumulation of pressures and tensions within a political system without self-correcting mechanisms.

This criticism takes representative democracy as its normative grounding (Cameron, Beasley-Murray, Hershberg 2008). Yet one could say that the separation of powers has always been weak in most of the countries of the
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region; the rule of law unevenly applied, corruption endemic, and instability the norm. Why should new leaders representing previously excluded sectors respect what established elites long neglected? I think a more persuasive critique interrogates the idea of the people as a constituent power. There are five key problems.

First, the constituent assemblies operating in the region tend to be sovereign as long as they obey the executive. Con Chavez, el pueblo manda. If Venezuela is a democracy, the people rule with Chavez or without him. If a leader is needed to enable a people to constitute itself then the leader is the real constituent.

Second, constituent assemblies should write constitutions not govern. There is a basic conflict of interest when those who design institutions also exercise power.

Third, constituent assemblies should be truly deliberative. Alberto Acosta, the leader of Ecuadors constituent assembly has insisted that if the new constitution is going to bring about a better democracy it must be achieved through a democratic process. He proposed postponing elections in Ecuador to allow the constituent assembly to work beyond the initial July 29 deadline. Correa sacked him and replaced him with a yes-man who approved 33 articles in just three hours.

Fourth, a constituent assembly should be plural: not just a reflection of the will of MVR, MAS, Alianza Pas.

Fifth, it should have legitimacy. Evo Morales tried to respect basic constitutional rules in designing the Bolivian constitution, and he undertook broad consultations, but in the end he found himself with a draft that was approved only by the MAS, with out the requisite 2/3rds support, and a series of referenda for autonomy led by crescent moon prefectures, who have mobilized broadly based social movements against the central government. They now reject Morales proposed recall elections in August. Morales finds himself in the curious position of having to insist that the prefects respect legality.

To conclude, I argue that participation and representation are not antimonies; the choice is not either the one or the other. They are mutually reinforcing, and interdependent. The new face of power in the future should be Janus-headed. One face should be an organized and vibrant civil society; the other should be powerful representative institutions. Parties are as essential to building this new power as social movements.

Sources:

Cameron, Maxwell A., Jon Beasley-Murray, and Eric Hershberg (2007). Left Turns: An Introduction. Paper presented at a workshop on Left Turns: Progressive Parties, Insurgent Movements, and Alternative Policies in Latin America, Simon Fraser University, April 18-19, 2008. Blanco Muoz, Agustn (1998). Habla el Comandante. Caracas: Catedra Pio Tamayo/CEHA/IIES/FACES/UCV. Fernandez, Sujatha (2007, March 22). Political Parties and Social Change in Venezuela, Venezuelanalysis.com.

Hochstetler, Kathryn and Elisabeth Jay Friedman (2008). Can Civil Society Organizations Solve the Crisis of Partisan Representation in Latin America. Latin American Politics and Society, Vol. 50, no. 2. Romero, Simon (2008, June 28). Colombian President Calls for Election, The New York Times. Sanchez, Omar (2008). Transformation and Decay: the deinstitutionalization of party systems in South America, Third World Quarterly. Vol 29, no. 2, pp. 315-337.