A group of researchers, academics, politicians and leaders of international organizations have joined forces to offer a reflection on the challenges for Latin America and the Caribbean after the pandemic. The publication ‘New Magazine of Politics, Culture and Art’, with the title ‘Latin America, looking to the future’ collects these reflections. Gaspard Estrada, political scientist and executive director of the Political Observatory of Latin America and the Caribbean, OPALC, of the Institute of Political Sciences.
‘Latin America Looking to the Future’ is divided into four main sections. It could be said that they are the four legs of a subcontinent whose characteristics are instability, inequality, dissatisfaction and the search for new alternatives.
“This publication shows a complicated situation after the pandemic, with a scenario of strong institutional challenges with ‘fatigued democracies,’ as Manuel Alcántara, one of the authors of the publication, puts it,” comments Estrada.
Social struggles put Latin America at the forefront
A region that also has challenges “with civil power, military power. But also a new generation of leaders, which is what I explain in the first chapter, who bring a new agenda as a result of social movements, popular mobilizations and who contribute to put Latin America ahead in some debates”.
“I am thinking, for example, of the issue of decriminalizing abortion, which has advanced in Latin America when we see that in the United States that debate is receding. I believe that the situation is not very bad, but there are very great challenges, particularly on the issue of inequality,” he adds.
Two elements appear recurrently in the twelve contributions that make up the magazine: the need for a new social contract and the need to imagine a new development model, which is not the same as growth.
For Gaspard Estrada, a viable path is “to build political majorities, coalitions that allow progress on a certain number of issues that are essential, such as tax reform.”
Fight against income concentration
How to make the region progressively see its inequality indexes decrease, and contribute to the economy functioning in a better way?, the publication proposes. “When income is too concentrated, that inhibits productivity and economic development. And for this, political majorities have to be built and the academic world has to come out of its ivory tower a bit and look to society to alert about these issues. And this is also one of the goals of this publication,” he says.
Another essential issue highlighted by the magazine is the need to reconnect society with the political and economic elite: “A good example of this is what is happening in Chile, a country that in the 1990s and 2000s was sold as a model of inclusive growth, but we saw it before the pandemic with a series of protests, very strong dissatisfaction in society, and now with a new leader, a constitutional convention that is there but faces many challenges, so I think we have to continue that with a lot of attention, but also with a positive outlook for the future.
The mirage of poverty indicators
The author Diego Sánchez Ancochea recalls that, of the twenty most unequal countries in the world, ten are Latin American: Brazil, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Mexico, even Costa Rica. Inequality is “fundamentally a political problem derived from the interaction between elites and the institutional framework.”
Sánchez Ancochea insists that the measures taken to combat inequality must have an impact over time. “In the 2000s it was possible to think that the region was improving its indicators, be it poverty, but also inequality, and what we saw the following decade is that these advances were very quickly reversible and much was lost. And with the pandemic even more “.
The new role of the military
Another theme that forms the backbone of the analyzes is the role that the Armed Forces are having, elaborated by Rut Diamint. This author recalls that after the dark period of the military dictatorships that devastated the region, the Armed Forces. AA. they had been relegated. And now they have returned with renewed vigor. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro appointed several military ministers. In 2019, many countries turned to the Army to crush protests and restore order (Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras).
“And this is not only observed in governments of the extreme right such as that of Bolsonaro, Gaspard Estrada points out. We are also talking about governments of the left, such as that of López Obrador. The prerogatives that have been given to the military have not stopped increasing. In Mexico, the Army was the one that built the new airport in Mexico City, it is in charge of the ports, it is in charge of several public works and therefore the non-pertinence of this increase in the prerogatives of the military in activities civilians.”
“Above all, it goes completely against López Obrador’s speech when he was a candidate for the presidency; the fact of changing the policy of fighting drug trafficking, which was one of his campaign axes, gave rise to great continuity in public policies. against organized crime and that unfortunately have been a failure in Mexico, but also in Colombia and in the rest of Latin America, which suggests that the axis of the fight against organized crime must be changed, and it seems to me that it must be lost the fear of saying it clearly,” warns the coordinator of the magazine ‘América Latina, Mira al Futuro’.
Rut Diamint highlights an incomplete transition of the Ministries of Defense, “although they have gone through adjustments in the transition from military to civilian governments, basically the structuring of the ministries has not really evolved, there is still a very military component strong, which also prevents the modernization of the armed forces to new challenges, new tasks, in a context in which the world is also changing and in which the Latin American armed forces have not sufficiently updated.”
#Stopover #Paris #Covid19 #Latin #America #future #fighting #demons