By Andrés Serbin*

Protests in Chile/ Diego Correa/ Flickr/ Creative Commons License (not modified)

The year 2019 was an annus horribilis for Latin America, but 2020 – with its pandemic and economic slowdown – has more seriously worsened an array of structural challenges that will prompt even greater instability in the post-pandemic era. Last year’s meager and slowing economic growth, barely reaching 0.1 percent, prompted social protests that shook governments on both the left and right, driving a reconfiguration of the political map of the region. This year’s challenges will affect countries differently and more deeply.

• The Informe Iberoamérica 2020, recently published by the Fundación Alternativas in Madrid, warns of the current and looming challenges to the region. Preexisting inequality has already been affecting stability, as have the growing demands and expectations, associated with advances made in previous years, of greater redistribution, and better public policies. The worst economic performance in 60 years deepened the structural problems of a region that has generally failed to diversify and develop productive structures and overcome its excessive dependency on exports of raw materials (and on Chinese demand for them). Low confidence in political institutions and disillusionment with political elites and leaders’ ability to meet citizens’ needs (and those leaders’ subsequent delegitimization) signal a crisis of representation and steps backward for democracy.

The political polarization generated by this ominous combination of factors is not only worsening ideological fractures in society; it is reducing the region’s ability to develop responses to an international situation that also entails a complex transition: the rivalry between the United States and China is not the only driver of this process.

• These and other extraregional actors, including Russia, Turkey, Iran, and most recently India, are increasingly making Latin America and the Caribbean, despite the region’s apparent peripheral importance, into a battlefield of geopolitical and geo-economic confrontation that is complicating its struggle to maintain some degree of autonomy from external pressures and to diversify its foreign policies.
• Three other related factors are aggravating this multi-faceted crisis. The corruption that has traditionally characterized the elites has spread throughout Latin American societies. Military forces are reappearing as political actors in a process that is threatening weakened democratic institutions and giving rise to diverse authoritarian models. Organized crime in its various incarnations – from trafficking in drugs to trafficking in humans – is expanding.

Within this context, to the challenge of leading during a pandemic are added several monumental tasks. Leaders will confront a recession and economic crisis that threatens to ravage the most vulnerable sectors and harm the whole of society. They will be confronted by demands to restore the resilience of democracy and its weakened institutions through strategies and public policies that reflect citizens’ needs.

• More than ever before, the region’s leaders have an incentive to develop coordinated regional strategies that efficiently deal with these problems as well as other global challenges in ways that promote Latin American and Caribbean international integration with greater autonomy and diversification. Challenges in tough times demand complex, sophisticated social contracts and a deeper regional consensus – all difficult to achieve in a polarized and fragmented region, particularly while grappling with the combined and divisive impact of the pandemic and the economic crisis.

August 3, 2020

* Andrés Serbin is an international analyst and president of the Regional Coordinator of Economic and Social Research (CRIES), a network of more than 70 research centers, think tanks, NGOs, and other organizations focused on Latin America and the Caribbean. This article is adapted from one published in Clarín.