It is well known that democracies are suffering all over the world. The fact that only 30% of the world’s population is governed by these rules is sad and worrying to see that the quality of their application is deteriorating everywhere.
But if there is a continent where these symptoms are producing successive scandals that reveal the worst signs of the democratic crisis, it is the American continent. Let us begin with the United States, the cradle of modern democracies, an example of checks and balances, that is, of powerful counterpowers to the Executive and one of the societies most firmly anchored in the pillars of the rule of law. The events of January 2021, the assault on the Capitol, as the culmination of two months of open questioning of the electoral count, were the most flagrant violation of the fundamental rule of democracy: alternation and acceptance of defeat.
The same, extremely serious behavior occurred in Brazil two years later and is occurring right now in Venezuela. But in the United States and Brazil the institutional system held up and the popular will expressed at the polls was respected. Not in Venezuela. There the government has falsified that will, manipulated it and claimed an electoral victory that does not correspond to what the people voted for. To commit such a deception it needed to control all the powers at play: the Electoral Committee, the Judiciary and, of course, then the Police and the Armed Forces to repress the protests.
Everything seems to indicate that the regime is hardening and retreating into the cave of its solitude, thus integrating, together with Cuba and Nicaragua, the triangle of a totalitarian left that we should not even call left. I have always thought that socialism is freedom and that, without it, the aspirations for justice and equality that characterize it are totalitarian alibis.
But democratic concerns do not end there. Many Latin American societies are experiencing populist phenomena that undermine their democracies. We are talking about electoral systems and government presidencies obtained in full democracy, complying with all the rules, which, however, abuse their power and/or undermine the separation of powers.
The repressive policy against violence in El Salvador is proving effective in the first instance (more dubious in the long term) and the electoral support received is thus understandable, but that does not prevent us from highlighting the enormous moral setback imposed by such a flagrant violation of the procedural legal principles that the world had conquered in the last century. It is very worrying that the delicate line that separates security from freedom is being swept away by the former and that fundamental human rights are being trampled on by the State.
It may seem more democratic to say that justice comes from the people and that judges should therefore be elected by the citizens, but it is a populist principle as big as a pine tree.
The main virtue of justice is independence, that is, not being subject to any pressure and applying the law objectively and fairly. Transferring the election of judges to the party game, through lists of candidates that will be submitted to the public, is putting judges in a gear of spurious interests and thereby putting the entire judicial system in the shop window of political dependence.
It is another kind of populism, but no less reprehensible, that which appropriates freedom and denies it to others. “Freedom, damn it!!!”, as if this condition of human dignity and democracy is only guaranteed by an illiberal and individualistic right, which forgets the dimensions of co-responsibility in its exercise. It is a new authoritarianism that conceives freedom as an unlimited faculty, alien to the existence of others, which disregards the links with the community and which is based on competitiveness and self-sufficiency.
It is true that these authoritarian temptations also affect us. It is enough to look at some leaders of the European far right and observe the dangerous anti-immigration tendencies that are being imposed by some parties that have reached power in such important countries as Italy, Hungary, the Netherlands, Croatia, Finland, Slovakia and, I fear, soon in Austria.
But in Latin America there are other circumstances that place the democratic debate at the centre of the political debate. Two of them deserve special mention. The first is drug trafficking and its powerful gangs. The extension of its criminal organisations towards the south of the continent accentuates the enormous difficulties of the States to confront its deadly law: “Either money or lead”. Experience shows us that drug trafficking is like a termite that destroys institutions and the democratic order. Its metastasis, together with corruption, attacks the core of democratic legitimacy: trust in the institutions and in the parties that support it.
The other is the macroeconomic weakness of most Latin American states. The capacity of the state to face the structural challenges of these societies (labor formality, digital interconnectivity, low productivity, etc., all conditions of growth and redistribution) is very weak because its fiscal income is very low. Some middle classes, born in the first decade of this century, demand better public services in justice, security, health and education and when they do not receive them, their confidence in democracy is shaken. There is, therefore, a serious problem of the effectiveness of democratic governments, which must legitimize themselves based on the success in the management of these basic elements.
Latin America is right to ask the international community for a different solution to the problem of drug trafficking. But until that happens, the urgent thing is to strengthen the State, ensure the effective and respectful functioning of its institutions and structure the representative system of its political forces, in the most exquisite respect for political pluralism and democratic freedoms.
#American #Democracy