Each country experiences its problems as exceptional. But when viewed from the global perspective with which Moisés Naím analyzes contemporary phenomena, the problems are more common than supposed.
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During this interview, which he gave by video call from his home in Washington, questions about Latin America were returned with globalized responses on topics such as organized crime, journalism, autocracies devouring democracies, demagogy.
This perspective is reflected in the columns he publishes in different newspapers around the world, including this newspaper, and in hundreds of thousands of books sold in more than twenty languages.
It is not often that a Latin American voice has such international ascendancy and is summoned to spaces such as the Davos Economic Forum. As strange as that Mark Zuckeberg, the CEO of Meta, has recommended his book The End of Power to start his book club on Facebook.
“Scientists and experts are going through a credibility crisis,” he says. The world surprises us. Every time there is something different: a pandemic, a financial crisis, the rise in the most powerful country of a character like Trump… The list of surprises is very long”. However, Naím is also capable of putting, on the other side of the scale, positive events or “greatest successes”, as he calls them.
For example, the “miraculous” vaccine against covid-19. “People thought it would take years, but while politicians were fighting over their country’s ventilator quota, scientists were achieving something that has saved hundreds of millions of lives,” he says.
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“On the one hand, it is to celebrate how humanity reacted and was able to contain the pandemic. At the same time, social networks amplified messages of pessimism and conspiracy theories. They may have been just a few, but they have a powerful loudspeaker that casts doubt on whether what they are telling us is correct or is it fake news”.
Within this state of uncertainty, artificial intelligence (AI) now appears. In a recent article, you distance yourself from those who have a pessimistic outlook and argue that this technology is here to stay.
-There have been dangerous or threatening technologies in history that had to be contained and tried not to proliferate. But once the technology appears, it’s hard to put it back in the box. We have seen it with the proliferation of nuclear weapons, albeit on a smaller scale than anticipated. But it is there, there are more and more countries with nuclear weapons, with the danger that this nuclear arsenal could fall into the hands of nefarious actors, such as terrorists. AI is going to change everything. This technology and related developments are going to change the world in a very significant way.
Some specialists are asking for the regulation of AI, how do you see this solution in Latin America, a region with few institutional guarantees?
-I would not mention only A. Latina. Everywhere there are nefarious actors who are going to take advantage of these new technologies. Criminal and transnational networks are often the first users of the technologies and opportunities that globalization creates.
In Latin America only 4 percent of democracies are full, and those with a purely electoral profile with an autocratic tendency are growing. Is this related to the expansion of organized crime?
-This is not exclusive to A. Latina. You only have to look at what is happening in Russia, Belarus, the Balkans as a center of crime, Turkey, Iran. Some of those operating in Latin America are naive creatures compared to these global networks of crime and terrorism. Doors have been opened for them that did not exist before. And now they know how to open them even more.
These open doors also evoke the massive departures of refugees and migrants, how do you assess this phenomenon?
-This is one of those global social problems that has no easy solution. Building a wall between two countries can be a relief for a while, but they’re going to find a way in. Refugees are desperate human beings who have no other choice. They are trying to survive and many times, unfortunately, they don’t succeed. Behind the very human need to migrate is the famous phrase: it is easier to change the country than the government. Many of them escape from corrupt governments, criminals, murderers. We are seeing it in North Africa and Central America.
How is your own migrant story intertwined with that?
I am deeply Venezuelan. Despite not having been born there (he was born in Libya), I arrived in Venezuela at the age of five. It is my country and it is my people. I live in the US, but my migration is not compared to what my compatriots are going through. I am privileged. I came from Venezuela to be part of the board of directors of the World Bank, a unique experience, while literally millions of my compatriots are suffering inhumane, unacceptable, tragic conditions against which I fight and try to help. But the need is infinite.
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His essay books on global politics are recognized throughout the world, but to tell his country he has chosen fiction. What does literature contribute to the understanding of social reality?
-My novel Two Spies in Caracas (2018) responds to my need to tell the story as I believe it originally happened. The central approach was brought to the screen as The Commander (2017) by Sony Television. It was one of the biggest projects in Spanish that Sony did in Latin America. But then it entered the machinery of a television series of these times and that was not the story that I wanted to tell. So I wanted to tell it as I think it happened and I opted for fiction so that nobody claims that I am making it up. And I do it using the figure of the spy: a Mexican woman who is the leader of United States intelligence in Venezuela; and a Cuban sent by the Fidel Castro regime to guarantee that Hugo Chávez continues to be Cuba’s central support at that time.
The other protagonist is a journalist, a profession that you exercise as a columnist. How do you evaluate journalism in Venezuela?
-Heroic, difficult, insufficient. It is heroic to go out into the streets in Venezuela to try to report the misdeeds committed by the current rulers and money laundering and drugs. Journalists, first, have great difficulty accessing information, but, second, if they get it and publish it, it is very dangerous for them. This does not only happen in Venezuela. It happens in Mexico, in Nicaragua, in Colombia. Despite all these obstacles, ideas, stories, stories and reports leave Venezuela, but with gigantic limitations.
He once said: a young man who had been a mediocre student left Venezuela to go to the most demanding school in the United States… What did that education leave him with?
-In high school I was a very bad student. But at one point I realized that I couldn’t go on like this and I started to study. I graduated from the Metropolitan University in Venezuela and then I had the opportunity to study at a university that was ranked as the best in the world: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where I got a Ph.D.
What did this training contribute to your work method?
-Thinking globally. Each country believes that it is exceptional and many times what exists are global trends that people repeat. What happened with my latest book The Revenge of the Powerful (2022) has been very revealing, which talks about how politics is working in these times based on three ‘pes’: populism, polarization and post-truth. Unlike what happened with my previous books like Illicit (2010) or The End of Power (2012), where international promotions were very limited, now I had very interesting experiences via videoconference. Inevitably, when I present the book, someone in the audience raises their hand and asks why I chose their country as an example, without mentioning it.
That’s where I answer that you get in line, because there are many other countries that are sure that this book arose from your experience. What happens is that post-truth, polarization and populism are everywhere. Each one occurs in a unique institutional, historical and geographical framework but, in the end, they converge in their ways of acting. It is unusual to see that Donald Trump and Hugo Chávez were doing the same thing, even though they couldn’t be more different, in two countries that couldn’t be more different.
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Do you consider yourself a writer, analyst or journalist?
I have the privilege of writing once a week, eight hundred words with my opinion on a subject that I hope will interest people. That defines who I am. I have been doing this job for thirty years. Every week I write a column. In each one I try to present evidence, and put the dots on the i’s on a relevant topic.
What are you working on now?
-There are two books. I am in the middle of a novel that has to do with a story of oligarchs and their women. And I’m writing a nonfiction book with my colleague Francisco Toro about how easy it is to be fooled by demagogues. Part of the question of what makes human beings such easy prey for liars, demagogues and cheats. The demagogues are rational, they are doing what is convenient for them and they act based on their interests, but those who follow them are not. And demagogues make them act based on bad ideas that harm them. This book analyzes, to my great surprise, how huge human groups hand their fate over to liars.
It seems that he was talking about Argentine democracy
– Get in line (laughs). We are impressed by the number of liars operating in the world and who are believed in the field of astrology, religions, wellness, nutrition, magical remedies, politics, religion. We have a long list of cases.
How much of these practices determine that democracies are threatened by authoritarianism?
I think democracy is in danger, without a doubt. He narrowly escaped the US in the last election, but in the 2024 elections Trump could again be a presidential candidate and, to the surprise of the world, win. That would generate institutional crises, because it would trigger legal consequences of all kinds for a long time. If Trump wins and does what he says he wants to do, the democracy of the United States and the world will lose.
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