The Young Democracies of Latin America and the Caribbean

What Latin America and the Caribbean Can Teach the USA About Democracy

When Americans think about politics in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), the cliché images that might come to mind are of military coups, tanks rolling, and generals in sunglasses. The news Americans hear about current politics from the region usually deals with democracies that have died or are under assault, as is the case in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and El Salvador (Azpuru, 2021; Freidenberg & Saavedra, 2020, p. 9; Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, p. 4; Thaler & Mosinger, 2022, pp. 133, 138, 141). So informed, many Americans would find the idea that LAC could teach the USA anything positive about democracy to be downright laughable.

But things have really changed. Although there remain serious issues for LAC’s democracies, it is nonetheless fair to say that most of region is governed by emerging democracies these days (Polga-Hecimovich, 2023, p. 190; Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, p. 3; Malamud & Núñez, 2021, pp. 1, 2, 4; Freidenberg & Saavedra, 2020, pp. 1–2, 14).

This was not always so. In the 1960s and 1970s, during the bad old days of the Cold War, the militaries held power in much of LAC. These reliably anti-communist regimes were nearly always backed by US economic, political, and military power (sometimes aided by the Central Intelligence Agency). But beginning in 1978, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic stepped toward democracy. Soon democracy was advancing across the region, concluding with the end of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile in 1990. LAC joined the “third wave” of emerging democracies in the developing world. Across the region, vast numbers of people cast meaningful ballots for the first time in their lives (Freidenberg & Saavedra, 2020, pp. 1–2, 14, 32; Malamud & Núñez, 2021, pp. 1–2).

One useful way of focusing on the changes that have come in recent years, and the lessons about democracy that can be learned, is to begin by thinking of most democracies around the world as falling basically into one of two categories: (a) old, tight democracies and (b) young, loose democracies.

Old democracies, especially like that in the USA, have institutions and rules that can make them hardy and more likely to endure, but this very resilience can function to make old democracies highly resistant to much-needed change.

Citizens of old democracies can often confuse the elements of their own political system as the very essence and singular definition of democracy. In the USA, that can mean concluding that a proper democracy must have a house and a senate, four-year presidential terms, a nine-member supreme court, along with all the other long-standing aspects of the American political system. To this view, attempting to modify or update any of the time-honored institutions or customs would mean threatening the very foundations of democracy itself.

The implication of this, however, is that old, tight democracies can become burdened with recalcitrant institutions and increasingly problematic political habits. Together, these can render old, tight democracies incapable of reforming themselves and powerless to revitalize. Democracy can become buried under the rubble of centuries-old political deal-making and long-ago compromises of expediency that had only been intended to solve the impasses of those moments in time. In the USA, this nearly always meant yielding to the demands of slaveholders and, after the Civil War, caving in to the mandates of White southern racists seeking to keep Black people disenfranchised, segregated, and threatened.

The resulting political system in old, tight democracies can become one that is permanently stuck, unable to carry out even the most basic political chores such as passing a national budget. In this manner, old democracies can be slowly transformed into a democracy in name only, succeeding only in obstructing the democratic will of the majority of the electorate.

In the USA, ossified institutions and practices—the electoral college; the filibuster rule in the Senate; the allocation of Senate seats favoring scant rural populations while grossly under-representing urban populations, especially people of color; the lifetime appointments to the US Supreme Court without a mandatory retirement age—are not the very definition of democracy (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2023, pp. 148, 164, 170). Rather, they are the nation’s greatest hindrances to the realization of full democracy. In the USA today, just 41 senators representing but 10% of the nation’s population can use the Senate filibuster rule to kill any legislation sought by the other 90% of the people (Menand, 2022, p. 66).

Exasperated citizens look at this situation and may just opt out, the act of voting seen as, at best, a waste of time, at worst, a tacit endorsement of a deeply dysfunctional and undemocratic political system.

But young, loose democracies, like those found across LAC, are not so encumbered. No weight of long-established traditions stands in the way of change. Young, loose democracies are not nearly as hindered from making the modifications that voters seek, taking the steps needed to make their nation more democratic and better governed. The more fluid these newer democracies are, the more readily malleable the rules of governance are.

The people of the LAC region have been busy experimenting with their new democracies, looking for the best institutional format for their particular nation. LAC democracies now often include a fourth major branch of government, one that oversees elections (Freidenberg & Saavedra, 2020, p. 20). Some LAC democracies allow recall votes on the presidency, as has occurred in Venezuela in 2004 and in Mexico in 2023. Ecuador and Bolivia both wrote the protection of the environment into their constitutions, conferring rights on Pachamama, Mother Earth.

It is realistic in young, loose democracies to think of setting aside a constitution that is just not working and writing a new one. Ecuador did exactly this in 2008, and Bolivia followed suit in 2009. Significantly, the rules for approval of these new constitutions were established on the fly, just as they were in the case of the USA when it was once a young, loose democracy and was adopting its first and only constitution. Meanwhile, Chile has held two referendums on new constitutions, both of which voters rejected, in September 2022 and again in December 2023 (Latin American Weekly Report, 2023b, p. 8).

The young democracies have some important lessons to teach old democracies. They remind us all that democracy is perhaps our greatest human experiment, but one that must be continually recreated to reflect changing social realities, clearing away the wreckage from the past that can continually frustrate our current democratic aspirations.

As recent history demonstrates, old, tight democracies can come unglued in trying to meet a novel and serious criminal challenge to the basic survival of democracy. Such a development seemed unthinkable in the USA, until the coup attempt led by President Donald Trump on January 6 after he lost the 2020 election. As he and others are now being called before the courts to face criminal trials for their actions, some supporters of the former president have seen these steps as illegitimate, the “weaponization of the criminal justice system,” the actions of a “banana republic.” This is a slur that most Latin Americans would have no trouble recognizing.

But LAC’s democracies today actually provide examples of how best to meet the challenge of effectively holding former and current lawbreaking leaders accountable. Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2022) is now barred from running for office until 2030 due to his gross misuse of official powers, including, among many crimes, fomenting insurrection (Latin American Weekly Report, 2023a, p. 9; Lawler & Saric, 2023).

The sweeping Odebrecht corruption scandal provides another example. Odebrecht, the giant multinational construction firm, admitted in 2016 in US court to the crimes of paying out millions in hefty bribes to lawmakers all over the Americas (Bissio, 2021, pp. 93–96; Durand, 2019; Ghitis, 2017; Lawler & Saric, 2023). Nearly all of the many current and former LAC leaders who took Odebrecht bribes are now either in prison or will soon be. It is precisely because these young democracies are more flexible in their rules, less burdened by the weight of tradition in their democracies, that they have been able to handle with greater adaptability and success the political stress test that has come up all around the Americas: dealing with lawbreaking current or former leaders.

In bringing criminal charges against lawbreaking leaders, LAC is at last moving toward honoring the rule of law, the principle of equality before the courts without exception. In fact, the presence of an ongoing criminal case of a current or recent political leader should not be seen as evidence of the undermining of democracy but instead as providing proof that a nation is taking necessary steps, if difficult ones, to help ensure democracy.

In calling the former US President Trump to account, the USA is becoming more like LAC, moving into alignment with hopeful hemispheric political trends. This is progress. If the USA is no longer the best example of and inspiration for democracy in the hemisphere, it still could be. One important way to achieve this would be to bring an ex-leader to justice and to make certain that they could not hold office again. LAC nations will think no worse of the USA for this. In fact, they are getting very good at doing this themselves. The USA should look to their example.

The State of Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean

If young, loose democracies have some clear advantages, especially the possibilities for change and renewal, there are dangers too. Young democracies, less bound by tradition, can more readily be subject to changes that could undermine the very existence of their still-emerging democracy. The roots of their young democracies are shallower, and democratic habits and customs, the “soft guardrails of democracy,” as scholars Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have put it, are likely to be less well consolidated and socially normalized (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, pp. 9, 100–101).

To evaluate the overall democratic trends in LAC, we first need a clear definition of the basic tenets of what constitutes democracy. Probably the best definition is a straightforward one, such as that provided by scholars Anna Lührmann and Staffan Lindberg in their recent essay, “A Third Wave of Autocratization Is Here,” published in the journal Democratization (Lührmann & Lindberg, 2019). The authors offer a succinct summation of democracy: “clean elections, freedom of association, universal suffrage, an elected executive, as well as freedom of expression and alternative sources of information” (Lührmann & Lindberg, 2019, p. 1096). It is not enough to be elected democratically; the political leadership must also govern democratically (Freidenberg & Saavedra, 2020, p. 12). Most important for the survival of democracy is a loyal opposition, good losers who accept their defeats and remain steadfast in their fundamental commitment to democracy. Democracy’s survival anywhere, as Levitsky and Ziblatt correctly underscore, depends on mutual toleration and forbearance (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, pp. 9, 102). This definition, however, does not always match conditions in LAC.

Not all of LAC has joined in the advent of democracy. Indeed, some parts of the region have never been democracies. In the circum-Caribbean zone, there are 16 territories that remain colonial-era holdovers, and several of these lack meaningful representation in the halls of power of the imperialist nations to which they remain attached.

The largest example of this undemocratic condition is the US commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Despite its population of 3.3 million (greater than six of the US states that enjoy full political representation in the USA), Puerto Rico remains without any voting representation in the US Congress and has no say in federal presidential elections (although oddly, Puerto Ricans may vote in the presidential primaries). It would literally take an act of the US Congress to change Puerto Rico’s inferior political status. The Boricuas (Puerto Ricans) living in the Caribbean are not living in a democracy.

Another non-democracy is Cuba. Indeed, Cuba arguably has never had an inclusive democracy of any form and certainly has not been under the regime in place since 1959.

Three Latin American nations—Nicaragua, Venezuela, and El Salvador—that were until very recently strongly democratic have now moved, under their present political leadership, far toward authoritarianism. Both Nicaragua (since 2007) and Venezuela (since 2013) supply examples of LAC leftist governments that have traveled far down the path to hardened authoritarianism regimes. To a less certain, nonetheless troubling, extent, El Salvador seems headed in the same direction. These three nations provide cautionary tales of democratic backsliding, providing examples of what some scholars have termed “hyper-presidentialism,” illustrating how democracy can weaken and die (Malamud & Núñez, 2021, p. 4). (Although Haiti might be considered another case of democratic backsliding, its chaos seems not so much an example of the deconstruction of democratic governance as the end to all government authority of any type.)

Nicaraguan Authoritarianism

Nicaragua in recent years has fallen under the increasingly autocratic grip of dictator Daniel Ortega. Ortega was once a democratically governing president from 1979 to 1990 after the Sandinista rebels overthrew the longstanding dictatorship of the corrupt and violent Somoza dynasty. However, Ortega’s most recent turn in power, from 2007 to the present, shows how democracy can be slowly lost, the step-by-step methods by which democracy is most commonly throttled nowadays.

Nicaragua has suffered a quiet but steady erosion of its democracy as Ortega consolidated power in the years from 2011 during his third term of presidency (the constitution had stipulated but two turns in office). Most Nicaraguans seemed indifferent to this gradual change, or perhaps just did not notice it, at least as long as Ortega’s government under the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (Sandinista National Liberation Front, FSLN) delivered poverty reduction and social benefits and the nation remained free of the gang violence that plagued other Central American nations. This situation continued until the economy turned sour in 2018. It was at that point that angry voters learned that it was no longer possible to change the nation’s leadership. All opposition was banned from competing in elections. This brought an explosion of mass protests in 2018 and 2019. The government’s violent repression of the popular demonstrations left hundreds dead and brought widespread international denunciation of the Ortega regime (Looney, 2024; Thaler & Mosinger, 2022, p. 138).

The 2021 presidential elections made striking clear what Nicaragua had devolved into. Ortega jailed his top seven potential opponents, leaving voters the choice of picking through those somehow missed in Ortega’s winnowing of the field, or else just voting for Ortega. Ortega won with 76% of the votes cast, a number that may just reflect not much more than a successful voting stealing campaign. Eight of 10 Nicaraguans did not bother to vote (Looney, 2024; Thaler & Mosinger, 2022, pp. 133, 141).

Nicaragua demonstrates one favored tactic of autocrats: bringing criminal charges against political opponents that effectively eliminates them from running for office. But it does not follow from this that any time criminal charges are levied against a politician and that this is evidence of abuse of power. Nor can this bring an automatic affirmation in the other direction that bringing charges is a vindication of the rule of law. In every case, the particular facts of the matter have to be examined. It is possible that an autocrat can bring justified prosecutions of opposition leaders and that democracies can sometimes bring unjust prosecutions.

International agencies and foreign governments provide the most disinterested accountings of a regime’s abuse of the legal system when deployed unfairly against enemies. In the case of Nicaragua, the Organization of American States (O.A.S.) condemned the 2021 elections, and Nicaragua shortly thereafter withdrew from the O.A.S. (Thaler & Mosinger, 2022, p. 143).

Two other examples serve to highlight the variations in the effectiveness of foreign pressure to keep or restore democracy in LAC. In Guatemala, the USA under President Joe Biden exerted significant and effective pressure on the corrupt and antidemocratic government of Alejandro Giammattei (2020–2024), forcing the regime to accept the recent election results and stand aside as newly elected Bernardo Arévalo took office (Latin American Weekly Report, 2024d, p. 3). In the case of Venezuela, however, the nine years of economic sanctions from the European Union and the USA have completely failed to bring any meaningful steps toward the restoration of democracy there (Latin American Weekly Report, 2024f, p. 7).

Venezuelan Authoritarianism

Venezuela too has abandoned democracy, beginning gradually in 2003 under President Hugo Chávez (1999–2013) and then with clear finality under current leader President Nicolás Maduro (2013–present). (Maduro had assumed power after Chávez died of cancer.) After 2012, Venezuela’s dominant export oil fell steadily in price, and Venezuela commenced an economic nosedive from which it is yet to pull out. In 2014, political opposition began to appear to Maduro’s ruling Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (United Socialist Party of Venezuela or PSUV). The growing popular protest movement was met by violent government repression and mass arrests. In the following years, over 15,000 were jailed for simply protesting against the government (Ayuso & Gratius, 2024).

Maduro did not show any sign of letting up in his march toward authoritarianism. Under his leadership, economic conditions steadily worsened, the economy contracted by 35% in 2019, and the inflation rate for the next year topped 1 million percent. Further aggravating the situation, the USA and European Union economic sanctions helped trigger the largest human exodus in the history of South America: nearly 8 million refugees have now fled Venezuela, today a shrinking nation of 29 million, down from 31 million in 2016 (Ayuso & Gratius, 2024).

In an attempt to resolve his multitude of problems, Maduro settled on one solution for them all: repression. In just one week in mid-January, 2024, Maduro’s regime jailed 33 critics (Latin American Weekly Report, 2024g, p. 1). In March of 2024, the United Nations Independent Fact Finding Mission on Venezuela reported that there was continuing “violent … repression by authorities,” resulting in “human rights violations against real or perceived opponents of the government” (Latin American Weekly Report, 2024j, p. 5). Meanwhile, Maduro has repeatedly used his control of all government institutions to disqualify any significant opposition candidate. This includes free market enthusiast María Corina Machado, who was favored to win the presidential election this year until she was barred by the government from running (Latin American Weekly Report, 2023e, p. 2). The transparently antidemocratic strategy of disqualifying all leading opposition candidates on highly dubious grounds has been used repeatedly, the go-to tactic for democratic backsliding regimes, twisting the political rules to disqualify any opposing candidates with any chance of winning (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, p. 4).

El Salvador

The undeniable success of the anti-gang policies of El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele (2019–present) provides perhaps the most worrisome example for the eroding of democracy. El Salvador had long endured relentless gang violence, suffering by far the highest homicide rates in the LAC region, peaking at 103 murders per 100,000 people in 2015—one of the worst levels the world has ever seen (Moddie, 2024).

Three years after Bukele took office, the nation was horrified by an especially ugly spike in gang violence, with 87 Salvadorans killed in just a month. In the face of this crisis, President Bukele suspended most constitutional liberties. Bukele’s Nueva Ideas (New Ideas) government set up a policy of jailing all gang members, real or suspected. In the recurrent sweeps, sometimes targeting political opponents to go along with actual or potential gang members, Bukele swelled the prison population in El Salvador to over 100,000, up from 40,000. Given the nation’s current total population of 6.4 million, El Salvador has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. If the goal was to reduce violent crime at any price, then Bukele’s actions have been a smashing success. According to government figures, the nation suffered 495 homicides in 2022, but after Bukele’s extreme measures, the number of murder victims in the nation fell to 194 in 2023 (Krauze, 2023; Latin American Weekly Report, 2024c, p. 15; Latin American Special Report, 2024, p. 1; Moddie, 2024).

Very few of those locked up in the mass roundups have ever been tried for any alleged crime; only 7,000 of those jailed have subsequently been released. In spite, or maybe because, of this, Bukele enjoys approval ratings that have reached north of 90%, as independent polling has consistently confirmed (Latin American Special Report, 2024, p. 1). The nation is quiet and safe for residents now, or at least for those who live beyond the walls of El Salvador’s notorious prisons, places of torture and death, places where the gangs yet hold sway.

Although expressly prohibited by the constitution, Bukele was reelected to a second term in February 2024 with 85% of vote, defeating only token opposition. With his supermajority in the congress, Bukele is free to do whatever he wants. As the Vice-President Félix Ulloa explained, “to those people who say democracy is being dismantled, my answer is yes … we are eliminating it” (Kitroeff, 2024, p. A4).

The “Bukele-effect” represents the most disturbing recent development among the various threats to democracy in LAC. In Ecuador, for example, an explosion of gang-related violence erupted in early 2024 in seven of the nation’s prisons, with two warring drug kingpins escaping in the chaos. Meanwhile, armed intruders took over a television station in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s leading port and largest city, widely broadcasting their message of terror to an alarmed citizenry. Then, the prosecutor assigned to investigate these matters was assassinated within just two weeks of his appointment (Latin American Weekly Report, 2024e, p. 4). Ecuador’s homicide rate nearly doubled in 2023: at 40 per 100,000 it now ranks amongst the worst in LAC (Latin American Weekly Report, 2024a, p. 2).

Several leaders in the region are now drifting toward Bukele-style policies: Ecuador under Daniel Noboa (2023–present), Honduras under President Xiomara Castro (2022–present), and Peru under Dina Bolurate (2022–present). Other would-be Bukeles seem sure to follow (Latin American Special Report, 2023, p. 14; Latin American Weekly Report, 2023h, p. 3; Malamud & Núñez, 2021, p. 12). So long as the USA continues to pursue its failed war on drugs in the hemisphere, there will continue to be great profits to be gained by the cartels and gangs involved in the trade in illegal drugs. The bodies will continue to pile up, and the threats to democracy from the Bukele-effect will continue its stunning rise.

Numerical Scores: Seeking to Measure Democracy

In an effort to make sense of what is happening with LAC and other regions’ democracies, social science scholars who track global political trends often use complex mathematical tools that produce numerical scores for democracies. These calculation systems include V-Dem, Freedom House, The Economist, and International Idea (Azpuru, 2021). While there are certainly issues with the reduction of a social reality as complex as democracy to a single number, it is worth noting some of the shared conclusions of these evaluative systems. Whether one finds democracy to be strong or weak most likely depends a good deal on how the experts doing the counting define democracy. Generally, these analysts’ definition of democracy privileges the US and Western European-style democracies. Nevertheless, within the LAC countries, when measured against each other, the consistent finding is that Costa Rica, Chile, and Uruguay rank as the top three democracies, while Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela come at the bottom, with El Salvador dropping fast to join them (Azpuru, 2021; Davis-Castro, 2023; Freidenberg & Saavedra, 2020, pp. 9, 34).

Some may be quick to notice that the low-ranking LAC nations are socialist or socialist-oriented, and that therefore there must be some connection between left-wing governments and the end to democracy. Such a conclusion would be mistaken.

The evidence is not hard to find: nearly every LAC nation has elected at least one left-oriented leader in the years starting around 2000, and in all except Venezuela, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, democracy has held. And it is not as if right-wing leaders have posed no threat to democracy: Bolsonaro is only the most infamous example, and Brazil, it is worth noting, has come back from the brink, returning to democracy in 2023 with the election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–2011; 2023–present). Meanwhile in Mexico, the left-wing MORENA Party (Movimiento Regeneración Nacional [National Regeneration Movement]), led by President Andres Manuel López Obrador (2018–2024), continues to hold meaningful elections, and Mexico routinely changes leaders every six years with no possibility for presidential reelection (Dresser, 2022; Freeman et al., 2023).

The challenges to democracy cannot simply be attributed to either left-wing or right-wing governments. The old ways of thinking about democracy in LAC are failing to take into account the new conditions and situations that do not match conventional notions.

Old Threats, New Threats

Straight-up, old-style military coups are rare these days, and military governments have entirely disappeared from the entire region. This is a remarkable change from the years of the Cold War (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, p. 3).

Indeed, there are only a few recent examples of the involvement of the military in political affairs in LAC. In Honduras in 2009, a muddled series of events brought an end to the elected government of the left-leaning Manuel Zelaya (2006–2009). President Zelaya was seeking a nonbinding consultative vote on whether or not a second term for the president might be something the public wanted. Business interests (legal ones and otherwise) opposed Zelaya and sought the assistance of the military in removing him, shipping Zelaya off into exile. Because the Honduran military played the leading role in Zelaya’s ouster, most analysts see this as a military coup. These events in Honduras in 2009 are generally considered the last example of a coup in Latin American and the Caribbean.

Nowadays, however, the military can still play an important role in politics if it decides as an institution to demonstrate that it will, or will not, support whomever is in power. In fact, a public withdrawal of the military’s backing of a government can bring its swift downfall. The most recent example of this situation came in Bolivia in 2019. After the closely contested election that year, the Bolivian military loudly announced its withdrawal of support for President Evo Morales (2006–2019). This action left Morales no choice but to leave office and head into exile. Yet even in this case, civilians, not the military, remained in authority (Polga-Hecimovich, pp.188, 190).

Free elections returned to Bolivia in 2020, and although Morales was blocked from being a candidate, his left-oriented political party, the Movimiento a Socialismo (Movement Toward Socialism, MAS) was not excluded. The MAS candidate, Luis Arce (2020–present), won the election. The right-wing opposition leaders, including the previous interim president Jeanine Áñez (2019–2020) who had earlier pushed for the removal of Morales and seized power themselves, were voted out. They were subsequently tried for human rights crimes in their violent repression of popular protests, as well as for their actions against free elections and democratic governance. They have been convicted and are now in prison. The military sat on the sidelines as the restoration of democracy unfolded.

Brazil in 2022 provides another example of what military action or inaction can mean for democracy in recent times. Before Brazil’s presidential elections that year President Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2022) met with the nation’s generals and urged them to carry out a coup to assure that Bolsonaro would continue in power. The military rejected the idea. After losing the election, Bolsonaro departed for exile, never conceding that he had been defeated at the polls. The winning candidate, left-wing leader Lula de Silva, assumed the presidency (Latin American Special Report, 2023, p. 6; Latin American Weekly Report, 2023a, p. 9). Pro-Bolsonaro supporters who accepted uncritically the lies from their defeated leaders about purported election theft, stormed government buildings in the capital on January 8, 2023. The police arrested thousands. Trials are proceeding, and many of the rioters have already been convicted. But it is worth noting that only one army officer, one who joined the would-be insurrectionists, has been found guilty. This is quiet testimony to just how far the military’s role in politics in the region has diminished (Latin American Weekly Report, 2024b, p. 8; Latin American Weekly Report, 2023c, p. 4).

The Dangers of Popular Dissatisfaction with Democracy

If the military has usually remained in the barracks rather than interfere with politics and elections these days, there is a different threat to democracy emerging in LAC. Beginning in 2019, people’s anger at poor economic conditions—the GDP for the region had essentially stalled since 2014—and the failure of their malfunctioning political systems to meaningfully address the situation led to large and unruly street protests in several nations, especially in Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, and Ecuador (Llanos & Marsteintredet, 2023a, p. 1; Malamud & Núñez, 2021, p. 1). It is an old rule in politics: during economic hard times people will blame whoever is in power. For young democracies during economic contractions, the threat of an end to a nation’s still young democratic experiment is quite real (Polga-Hecimovich, p. 191).

It is always difficult to democratically govern poor nations, for it will always be hard to respond to people’s urgent demands for relief from the harsh realities of poverty. Going from normally bad economic conditions to abnormally bad economic conditions can be deadly for a young democracy. We are at such an inflection point right now in parts of LAC, most notably in Argentina.

What people of LAC are most concerned about is not that difficult to surmise: gangs, violence, crime, poverty, lack of jobs, lack of affordable health care, and economic inequality. Failure to see any real improvement in most or all of these areas leaves people ready to give up on the democratic experiment and try something else. LAC polls have repeatedly shown that people would be ready to abandon democracy if they could see meaningful progress on the issues that they see as vital. Ominously, of all the major institutions, the executive branch, congress, the courts, or the military, people of LAC consistently express the greatest level of confidence in the military (Freidenberg & Saavedra, 2020, pp. 30–31, 33; Llanos & Marsteintredet, 2023a, p. 2).

One of the enduring problems in poorer nations is that corruption is more likely. Law enforcement officers and low-ranking government officials are not paid enough to get by on their government salary, so the mordida, as it is known in Mexico (literally, the little bite), small bribes, or ad hoc user fees are a steady nuisance. One poll in Mexico found that half of those interviewed reported having to pay a bribe in order to get access to government services (Felbab-Brown, 2019, as cited in Jones & Taussig, 2019).

But low-level corruption is hardly the only challenge to democracy in LAC, as top leadership has often been snarled in corruption scandals. News of the far-reaching Odebrecht bribery scheme has splashed across the daily headlines. The criminal audacity of Odebrecht hit an astonishing new low; the company actually had a dedicated department whose sole mission was to keep track of the bribes that they paid out to politicians in at least 10 nations in the region. Odebrecht’s bribe division handed out $778 million dollars between 2001 and 2016 to secure the award of billions of dollars in over 100 big-ticket construction projects (Bissio, 2021, p. 93; Durand, 2019; Ghitis, 2017). These infrastructure projects usually had the blessing of the World Bank, raising an awkward question: Did the World Bank know about the countless bribes, and just sat idly by, reporting nothing, or were World Bank officials utterly in the dark about truly spectacular levels of Odebrecht corruption (Bissio, 2021, pp. 93–96)?

After Odebrecht reached its 2016 plea agreement with the US Department of Justice under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the company came clean on its many illegal acts. Marcelo Odebrecht, the former company CEO, confessed his role in the scandal but is now free after serving 7 years of his initial sentence of 19 years. Odebrecht currently owes an estimated payout of somewhere between $2.6 and $3.6 billion USD in settlements (Bissio, 2021, p. 95; Durand, 2019; Ghitis, 2017).

As for the project of building democracy in LAC, it is reassuring that the LAC region has largely met the challenge of resolving the Odebrecht scandal. However, it is hard to have any confidence that this will be the end of dishonest official practices in the region. Unfortunately, pervasive corruption remains deeply embedded in the political culture of LAC, a reality that continues to weaken citizens’ basic confidence in democratic governance.

Structural Flaws in the Political Systems

Beyond the challenges of dealing with illegal activities, several aspects of the formal political institutions in LAC are making it difficult for democracy to flourish. One persistent problem across most of LAC is the weakness of political parties. Parties in LAC nearly always serve as short-term election vehicles for aspiring candidates. These political contenders are usually completely new to politics, having made their name as celebrities on television or on the Internet. Some had success in business, in which case, they use their or their family’s assets to purchase name recognition.

Across the region there are but few exceptions to this pattern of weak political parties. The most noteworthy strong political parties in LAC include the MAS Party in Bolivia; the new left-wing MORENA Party in Mexico; the Workers’ Party in Brazil (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT); and the various factions of the old Peronist Party in Argentina.

Otherwise, political parties in the region seldom function as places where collective compromises occur for the greater good and electoral aspirations of the party. The resulting extreme party fragmentation in LAC means that it can be next to impossible to build legislative coalitions (Freidenberg & Saavedra, 2020, pp. 21–22). And because nearly all LAC political systems are presidential, not parliamentary (except in former British circum-Caribbean colonies), under this fragmented party landscape, the executive usually can count on scant support in the legislature.

Worse still, voters typically select their legislature at the same time as the first round of voting for the president. This means that no one can know who the president will be when they elect their legislature. The president is nearly always elected in a subsequent runoff election, a second round of voting after the highly fragmented composition of the legislature has already been determined (Llanos & Marsteintredet, 2023b, p. 21). As a consequence, the elected president can usually find only a sliver of support in the legislature. Protracted struggles commence at once, with the president, usually a newcomer to politics, frustrated at every turn in trying to get the legislature to enact the executive’s agenda. Meanwhile, the congress works vigorously to see how much power it can strip away from the executive, before, in many cases, turning to just trying to get rid of president on all too often highly dubious grounds (Llanos & Marsteintredet, 2023a, pp. 3–4).

Peru offers the clearest illustrations of this situation. If the goal is building a sound democracy, Peru cannot provide anything other than admonitory lessons, having dashed through seven presidents in the last seven years (Barrenechea & Vergara, 2023, p. 77). Every president who has served in the nation from 1985 to 2018 (save one brief interim executive) has been arrested or charged in the Odebrecht scandal (Lawler & Saric, 2023).

As scholars Rodrigo Barrenchea and Alberto Vergara, writing in the Journal of Democracy, have put it, in Peru, “the state has trouble performing its minimal duties” (Barrenechea & Vergara, 2023, p. 77). One important lesson about building a young democracy that Peru offers is that it is essential to avoid making it too easy to impeach a president. Otherwise, the nation will be vexed by the frivolous use of the impeachment process in legislation power grabs. In Peru, under the present system of government, simple policy differences seem to always result in attempts at impeachment. The legislature is usually focused on their main task of impeaching and removing the president, although sometimes its attention is diverted to what appears to be its other leading chore: the impeachment of members of the president’s cabinet or of high-ranking judges. Whenever the opposition has enough votes in the legislature, it will always vote for impeachment of the president, casting about for some pretext for doing so, no matter how far-fetched.

For democracy to hold, the leading political institutions, the executive, courts, electoral commissions, and the legislature, must not over-apply their institutional powers, but rather, they should exercise continuing restraint (Barrenechea & Vergara, 2023, p. 81; Freeman et al., 2023; Latin American Weekly Report, 2023d, p. 5; Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, pp. 126–127, 212; Llanos & Marsteintredet, 2023b, pp. 17–35). Peru shows what happens when this rule of restraint is not honored.

A second lesson from Peru is the problem that results from banning the reelection of members of the legislature. This has meant that only political amateurs have populated the Peruvian congress (Barrenechea & Vergara, 2023, p. 84). Political greenhorns, no one around seemed to have any idea of how to do the job. The Peruvian congress has been completely ineffectual at doing anything other than removing whoever was currently the acting president. At last recognizing the problem, Peru finally moved in March of 2024 to allow the immediate reelection of senators and deputies in the legislature (Latin American Weekly Report, 2024i, p. 4).

Peru’s political structure is plainly not working. A full overhaul is in order, above all making it much harder to impeach presidents, continuing to allow reelection for legislature deputies and senators, and holding legislative elections at the same time as run-off elections for the presidency.

Large Problems, No Easy Fixes

This troubled political, economic, and social context too often means that a demagogic candidate for president can garner popular support by fanning hatreds, especially racial ones, exploiting people’s frustrations and grievances, fabricating evidence, pushing half-truths, or simply by lying, all the while promising to fix everything with a few swift, bold actions (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, p. 77; Malamud & Núñez, 2021, p. 4). Until recently, it seemed that only young democracies were vulnerable to these unctuous leaders, fabulists peddling hatred and trumpeting easy answers to every one of society’s complex ills. Young democracies may be more susceptible, but recent events have illustrated that older democracies can fall victim to demagogues as well. An anti-reality, antidemocracy, election-denying fever has spread to LAC. This “Trump effect” has had dire implications, as Trump imitators have now appeared not only in LAC but all over the globe, for example, with Marine Le Pen in France or far-right politician Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.

In the economic context of the less developed economies of the LAC nations, if one of these candidates—new on the scene, brash, voluble—is actually elected, problems begin at once. When the new leader fails to fix everyone’s problems overnight, disillusionment immediately sets in. The easy explanation that many latch onto is that their leader must be corrupt, and massive protests build up to root the former messiah out of office. Once this is accomplished, a nondescript caretaker leader will usually follow until a fresh round of elections can be held. And then new faces will appear on the Internet and on TV, promising to end corruption and to govern for the people, hawking bold new initiatives that will solve everything. This cycle does not appear to have a logical end point.

The weaknesses of LAC’s democracies are similar to those of other less developed societies in the world, places with fewer financial resources. Thus, hamstrung, governments cannot afford to do very much about anything. It is understandable that voters feel frustrated with the failings of government. Without the money to address social problems, government is set up to fail.

Still, it is fair to ask whether many citizens, both in the developed world and the developing world, might have unrealistic expectations regarding what democracy can actually deliver. Having a democracy does not mean that the leader will solve the nation’s problems, that your policy preferences will be honored, or that your family’s financial situation will improve. Instead, democracy usually means frustratingly slow action, followed by half-measures. Democracy means compromise, that is, the enactment of laws that leave mostly everyone dissatisfied (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, p. 77; Singer, 2023, p. 10).

Misinformation, Disinformation

Arguably the greatest of the new threats to democracy is the wider, and today, infinitely more effective spread of misinformation (untrue information spread accidentally) and disinformation (lies spread with the intent to deceive) (Latin American Special Report, 2023). The propensity for any person to hang onto erroneous notions appears to be hard-wired in all of us. As analyst Matthew M. Singer has noted, “differences in belief about the world often persist even after … [people] are presented with information designed to correct their misperceptions,” and that “individuals … are less critical of information that reinforces prior beliefs and argue against facts that go against their preconceptions” (Singer, 2023, pp. 11, 12). The danger of misinformation and its more sinister cousin, disinformation, often coming from Internet troll farms in China and Russia, has only risen. As studies show, more people rely upon social media for their news, using far less of the old-fashioned sources like newspapers or television (Latin American Special Report, 2023, pp. 4, 11).

Conclusions: Threats and Hopes

In LAC today, the roadmap for autocrats in shutting down democracy is to pervert the functioning of the formal political institutions, gradually choking the life out of their young democracies. This approach, not sudden, violent military coups, is how democracies die in LAC these days (Aguiar Aguilar, 2023, p. 11; Lührmann & Lindberg, 2019, p. 1095). As researchers Anna Lührmann and Staffan Lindberg sum it up, “contemporary autocratizers have learned their lesson and thus now proceed in a much slower and much less noticeable way than their historical predecessors” (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, p. 7; Lührmann & Lindberg, 2019, p. 1108).

Some scholars think that the recent examples of backsliding from democracy into authoritarianism are irreversible. But such a pessimistic view misses much. Historically, LAC has had some experience with limited forms of democracy, some of which have even dated back to the nineteenth century. Admittedly, these were either restricted democracies, that is, political systems where most people were denied the right to vote, or else “scripted” ones, that is, where election outcomes did not decide which party would govern, but instead, the two leading parties signed pacts to put a stop to endless civil wars and just alternated their turns in power. These limited forms of democracy in LAC all came apart in the wave of military coups of the 1960s. However, in the 1980s, they all became democracies again, and this time vastly more inclusionary ones.

Democracy can, in fact, be restored even after it has been seriously threatened. In Ecuador in 2013, President Rafael Correa (2007–2017) pushed into law some highly restrictive limits on the free press. However, these measures were dropped after Correa left office (Malamud & Núñez, 2021, p. 8). In Honduras, the 2021 election of leftist reformer Xiomara Castro demonstrates that the democratic backsliding of the prior government does not inevitably result in an irretrievable descent into autocracy.

For all the threats facing democracy in LAC, what is most worth emphasizing is that with the exceptions of Venezuela, Nicaragua, and now El Salvador, democracy has nevertheless held. The reason for this is that the central notions of democracy are just too good, too obviously fair, to ever be irreversibly vanquished. If democracy is crushed anywhere, then the question is not can it ever come back, for it will. The real question is, in order to restore democracy, how long will it take and what will be the cost in human lives destroyed? We are at that moment.