Different Perspectives on Twenty-first-Century Latin America

The 15 essays in Falleti and Parrado’s Latin America since the Left Turn take in a wide range of topics dealing with Latin American developments over recent decades: judicial power (two chapters), constitutional change, extractivism, social expenditures, regional integration, regional migration, Venezuela (two chapters), populism, Mexico (two chapters), race identity in the writings of José Vasconcelos, and violence in El Salvador. In this respect, the title of the book is somewhat misleading, since few of the contributions focus on Latin America’s pink tide. If there is one overriding thesis defended in various chapters, though from widely different perspectives, it is that the notion of “liberal democracy” tends to misrepresent developments in twenty-first-century Latin America. The contributors’ recognition of the limitations of liberal democracy is a logical response to the trend initiated by pink-tide governments and particularly the new constitutions in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, which, in the Rousseauian tradition, place a premium on direct participation of the general populace in decision making.

This argument is most consistently and persuasively formulated by Thamy Pogrebinschi in “Experimenting with Participation and Deliberation in Latin America.” She points to the diverse types of participatory experiments in the region and the concurrent decline in support of political parties but adds that democratic institutions have nevertheless remained viable. Progressive governments have promoted “innovations aiming at social inclusion,” while conservative ones have followed the lead with their own participatory projects but with an emphasis on “accountability and responsiveness” in accordance with “the Right’s repertoire” (249). Pogrebinschi calls on scholars to examine “the interplay between participatory innovations and delivery of social policies to find out whether there is any causality” (258) between the two. She ends her piece by suggesting that “if the liberal paradigm is put to one side” in favor of a focus on experimental participatory schemes, “Latin America might provide new and more creative recipes to make democracy fit less liberal times” (260).

The two chapters on Venezuela also question the usefulness of the liberal-democracy framework but present diametrically opposite viewpoints on events in that nation. Writing in an extremely polemical style, George Ciccariello-Maher criticizes Daniel H. Levine for his “unfortunate” use of the term “postdemocratic” (113) to describe the Chávez government as far back as 2002. Relying on the works of Antonio Gramsci and Enrique Dussel, he argues that the separation of powers, which he considers the bedrock of liberal democracy, is designed to hold back change. The “dispersed form of communal power” that is emerging in Venezuela is “increasingly in open antagonism toward the liberal-representative apparatus,” a dynamic that “static conceptions . . . drawn from the arsenal of liberal-representative democracy” (115) are incapable of grasping. In Venezuela the concept of separation of powers was translated into institutional autonomy for the Central Bank, the state oil company PDVSA, and local and state governments, whereby the people ceded decision making “to the cold sterility of technocratic institutions” (118). It may be added that, as did Chávez, Marx embraced totality over fragmentation. I would suggest, though, that Ciccariello-Maher’s view of the inherent defects of the separation of powers confronts a problem of timing. The consolidation of the new democratic model is bound to be a drawn-out process, and meanwhile the mechanisms of control associated with the old model have to be maintained or replaced only gradually until new ones become well-established and viable. Otherwise the gaps will be filled in ways conducive to corruption and inefficiency, two thorny problems that Venezuela currently faces.

The second chapter on Venezuela, written by David Smilde, is also critical of liberal-democracy thinking. Smilde begins by criticizing the political scientist Kurt Weyland for ignoring the Chavista government’s accomplishments “in addressing social, economic, and cultural inequalities” and instead focusing exclusively on the abuse of power. For Weyland, he says, “the story begins with a will to power and ends with the concentration of power” (139), and this makes it “virtually impossible to understand why Chavismo has won so many elections” and in fact obliges him to attribute Chávez’s reelection in 2012 to unfair electoral practices. But Smilde is hardly a champion of Chavismo. He faults the Spanish intellectual and Chávez sympathizer Juan Carlos Monedero for failing to see that the concentration of executive power is “inherent to socialism” (140), though the only support he offers for this assertion is a reference to the writings of Robert Michels and others. Smilde claims that the rise of pink-tide governments has produced a “paradigmatic crisis” in that “attempts to understand [them] . . . in terms of bounded political actors vying for power in a formal political arena simply do not capture the breadth” (160–161) of what is happening. His corrective is a multidimensional approach that recognizes that factors such as abuse of power and social improvements are not always evenly balanced and thus objectivity does not necessarily translate into “neutrality or a lack of value commitments” (143).

In another critical examination of the analytical paradigm of liberal democracy, Paulina Ochoa Espejo deals with the veritable crisis produced by current Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador when he refused to accept the official results of the presidential elections of 2006. She argues that a new “theoretical lens” is needed to distinguish between populist and liberal-democratic leadership in situations of crisis, since otherwise populism becomes “‘the term we use to describe the democratic movements that we don’t like’” (166). She therefore insists on the need to contextualize. Her argument is cogent: the defenders of liberal democracy who condemn populism for disregarding established institutions ignore the fact that in moments of crisis institutions may fall into disrepute, thus enhancing the credibility of a populist appeal. Her corrective, however, seems overly abstract and rhetorical. A truly democratic movement, she maintains, “does not claim to know the content of the people’s will, and it does not claim to be the final authority regarding . . . democratic principles” (176). It recognizes that the people’s will is never static. She claims that López Obrador, with his expression of absolute faith in the infallibility of the people, acted more like a populist than like an authentic democrat. He “portrayed the people as the classical unified popular sovereign” and insisted that “the people are always right, and thus there can be only one unified voice and will” (180–181). Nevertheless, much more important in determining whether he was a populist in the pejorative sense than his choice of words was whether his claims of electoral fraud in 2006 were plausible. Here Ochoa Espejo skirts the issue by failing to go into specifics other than footnoting several studies and citing the allegation of Kathleen Bruhn—herself a staunch critic of López Obrador—of the lack of “‘solid proof of irregularities’” (180). In fact, López Obrador’s supporters presented abundant evidence backing their claim at the time.

The book’s multiplicity of topics and diversity of viewpoints make it useful for understanding contemporary Latin America. There is, however, one major omission in this collection, whose “main objective,” in the words of the editors, is “evaluating” (2) the changes that have taken place since the outset of the “left turn.” It leaves untouched the resistance to pink-tide governments of elite groups that receive multiple types of support from Washington and other developed nations. This resistance has gone far beyond what could be expected from any opposition group in a normal political setting. It includes casting doubt on the government’s legitimacy in an intense ongoing media campaign, illegal and sometimes violent mobilizations, successful and unsuccessful coup attempts, disinvestment, international sanctions, and acquisition of substantial financial backing from abroad.

Some analysts argue that hostile actions of this nature should have been anticipated and thus should not be factored into the evaluation of progressives in power and the setbacks they have suffered. Nevertheless, having anticipated the resistance would not necessarily have made effective responses to it any easier. Thus, for instance, there is no consensus, not even on the left, as to what Salvador Allende should have done to avoid his tragic fate and that of his nation. Furthermore, even if progressives are to blame for failing to foresee the intensity of the reaction, the issue cannot be dismissed. Progressives in power reacted to the aggressive actions of powerful elite groups by devising unholy alliances with members of the business sector and other nonleftists and implementing policies that undermined the achievement of their original goals. In all fairness to the book’s editors, however, underestimation of the impact of the destabilization efforts against progressive governments characterizes much analytical work in the field and even includes some scholars on the left end of the political spectrum.