OLD PARADIGMS & NEW

OPENINGS IN LATIN AMERICA

Enrique Krauze

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 biograph&s of eight major twentiethcentury Mexican leaders, will be published in English in an abridged
one-volume edition by HarperCollins. We hope to publish comments by
other scholars on Mr. Krauze's essay in a subsequent issue.

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 Cosfo 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 (El 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 Cosfo 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
Journal of Democracy

Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1992

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Journal of Democracy

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
outset, both liberal and conservative Latin Americans saw the Cuban
Revolution as a fresh departure that promised to combine the continentspanning destiny projected by Sim6n Bolivar and Jos6 Martl 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 1970s were a time of revolutionary action in Latin America, as
young admirers of Ch6 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
Per6n, now nearly 80 years old, returning to an Argentina completely
entranced by myths left over from the 1940s. In Venezuela, meanwhile,
President Carlos AndrEs P~rez outdid himself in paroxysms of "Third
World" bombast. In Mexico, President Luis Echeverrfa toured the country

Enrique Krauze

17

distributing largesse that would have to be paid for by generations yet

unborn. His successor, Jose L6pez 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, L6pez 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 Garcia, from a like course of action. Indeed, Garcfa
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

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Journal of Democracy

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 Tom,is Borge admitted that perhaps his ideas about reality did
not quite coincide w i t h . . , 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. Lufs "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 Andrrs Prrez, who today bears scant resemblance to the
demagogic orator of the 1970s. The preeminent populist of the 1980s
was without a doubt Alan Garcfa, whose case reveals the incredible
speed with which, in today's world, populism runs head on into
economic reality. In Peru's 1990 elections, Garcfa'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

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Enrique Krauze

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 Gonzglez) 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 C o n s o l i d a t i o n
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 Hero,in BiJchi 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.

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Journal of Democracy

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

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Enrique Krauze

microeconomic revolution, Until now, the only two prophets of this

revolution have been men well ahead of their times: the Peruvian
Hemando 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--levelling 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--depends upon the proliferation of
small, independent proprietors. If the modern 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?

T o w a r d an Intellectual R e f o r m a t i o n
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,
V~iclav 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

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Journal of Democracy

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 (196875), 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
modern "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

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Enrique Krauze

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, Cuauhtrmoc C~denas,
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 PRI.
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

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Journal of Democracy

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, Efrain Rfos
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
will 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.