by Claudia Heiss*

This joint effort by El Colegio de México in Mexico City, Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, and Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, supported by the Ford Foundation, deserves to be celebrated. The report is the result of a series of meetings and scholarly works meant to contribute to the agenda coming from the Summit of the Americas by including the perspective of academia and civil society. Its main message is the need to strengthen multilateralism and Inter-American cooperation. 

The weakening of intergovernmental dialogue, coordination, and action that we witness today goes hand in hand with the weakening of democracies at home. Democratic backsliding and the increase in authoritarianism in the world signal bad times for deliberative and participatory democracies at the national and international levels.  

The report pays attention to the needs not just of intergovernmental politics, but also stresses the role of academia and civil society by incorporating experts from different backgrounds. It proposes an Inter-American strategic agenda: a roadmap for collective international action around three priority areas of inequality, migration, and climate change. I would like to focus on the first. 

According to the World Inequality Report 2022, the richest 10% of the region’s population owns 75% of wealth, whereas the poorest 50% barely owns 2%. Inequality worsened with the pandemic. The share of the wealth captured by Latin American multimillionaires increased by 14% between 2019 and 2021. 

Inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean is rooted in a historical legacy and economic models based on the extraction and export of commodities, and an institutional structure that perpetuates it. This is what Roberto Gargarella (2010) calls “the legal foundations of inequality.” Political struggles between radicals, liberals, and conservatives in the early days of the new republics, he argues, ended up constitutionalizing an exclusionary political structure. 

Unlike poverty, inequality is a disputed topic in public policy. This report makes the case for addressing it as a specific challenge to building cohesive societies capable of dealing with their needs and protecting political pluralism. The study shows that the economic and social gap increased after the COVID-19 pandemic, creating a worrisome social regression that feeds political discontent. “Regionally, the social agenda is a top priority,”—states the report—”Policies agreed at an inter-State and transnational level are needed to reduce entrenched socioeconomic inequalities, eradicate poverty, expand rights for everyone, and provide universal access to basic services.” The discussion of this topic ends with concrete recommendations: 

• Empowering sectors of the population that have been left behind. This includes narrowing the gap between formal and substantive equality and building more democratic and participatory institutions. 
• Promoting fiscal reform which is necessary for building an inclusive welfare state and improving wealth redistribution.  
• Reducing gaps between more dynamic and poorer regions. 
• Establishing a minimum basic income and more universally accessible public assets, including innovative connections between public, private, social, and community associations. 
• Gender equality policies, including caregiving, political representation (electoral gender parity), and measures to eradicate violence against women. 
• Improve multilateral cooperation programs. 

Interdependence: Democracy and Equality 

This work is based on decades of social research analyzing the tension between inequality and democracy. Inequality is inseparable from the current crisis of political representation and the failure of political parties to effectively channel social diversity. In Latin America, economic development built on inequality has been coupled with a constitutional structure that preserves the power of economic minorities (Gargarella 2021). Understanding and addressing inequality requires considering the conditions for both economic and political exclusion. Democracy, which is a promise of political equality, becomes meaningless in the face of wealth inequality and the absence of mechanisms to alleviate the material struggles of citizens.  

Exclusion in the social and political spheres have recently triggered massive protests, as seen in Brazil (2015), Venezuela (2017), Nicaragua (2018), Ecuador and Chile (2019), Colombia, Paraguay, and Cuba (2021), Bolivia (2019, 2020), and Peru (2020 and 2022). In a recent work, Roberto Gargarella (2022) advocates for what he calls a “conversation among equals,” which leads to broadening popular participation and creating more inclusive deliberation to overcome this distrust in politics. In a similar vein, María Victoria Murillo (2021) argues that citizens with unsatisfied demands look for a democracy that listens, pays attention, and seats them at the table where decisions are made. For Murillo, this demand for democratic legitimacy is more important than the limits on public policy inherited from the previous military, which made scholars of transitions to democracy fearful of military regression (see also Garretón 2023). 

While this diagnostic seems correct, I believe the legacies of dictatorship are deep and permeate current politics in ways that need further attention. The increased worldwide tolerance of and even support for authoritarianism should not be studied without reference to Latin America’s recent political history. To make the return to democracy possible, elites often negotiated impunity for state crimes, accepted military-imposed limitations over the political process, and suffered significant constraints on the authority of the incoming governments (Loveman and Davies 1997). After transitions, many democracies were weakened by severe restrictions on political participation and inclusion as well as on public contestation of political decisions. Restrictions on mass media, political opposition, the right to organize, labor unions, and the exercise of civil rights and liberties remained. 

Institutional Barriers to Change 

It is true that deep institutional change took place in most countries (notable exceptions are Panama and Chile). The constitution-making in Latin America after transitions to democracy shows a tendency towards the expansion of social and political rights, but as Gargarella (2013) argues, the concentration of power in the executive remained. In recent years, political crises in Latin America have often been constitutional crises: ones that combine redistributive struggles with disagreement about which the basic political rules should be. 

An important legacy of military dictatorships was the supposedly “apolitical” nature of their institutional arrangements: ones that, while claiming to be above party and ideological disputes, severely restricted the political scope of action of new democracies (Loveman and Davies 1997). This fed into the institutional crisis of highly unequal societies unable to build effective and legitimate mediating capacities. Attempts to overcome these difficulties have included new constitutions guaranteeing social rights, granting new group rights to indigenous peoples, and creating participatory and deliberative mechanisms. Unfortunately, the latter have often increased the capacity for unilateral decision-making by power holders rather than empowering citizens or civil society (Heiss 2022). 

Victoria Murillo (2021) argues that this difficult coexistence between democracy and inequality has been exacerbated by the recent explosion of discontent in the context of economic and health crises, creating unstable political equilibria. Legitimacy is necessary to sustain democracy, but it must be associated with a hope for greater social well-being—a combination of inclusion and responsiveness. 

The Chilean Example 

This September 11 of 2023, was the 50th anniversary of the military coup that ultimately ended the life of Salvador Allende, a democratic leftist that sought to reduce inequality and include the people as a political subject in an unprecedented way. The anniversary finds the country more divided than a decade ago. Chile has a prosperous economy when compared to other countries in the region, but at the same time, the country is among the most unequal. Its economic model of a “subsidiary state” that gives primacy to the private provision of public needs has been protected from change by institutional authoritarian legacies. A dysfunctional political system, described as “uprooted but stable” (Luna and Altman 2011), has resulted in the inability to adequately channel social demands.  

The rejection of institutions and political parties led to a search for “independents” in 2022 and for “experts” in 2023 to try to recompose political legitimacy. However, as Cristina Lafont (2020) has argued, there are no shortcuts to participatory deliberative democracy. Inequality is a fertile ground for left and right populists to capitalize on this discontent. It is sad that on the 50th anniversary of the coup in Chile, we see the appeal of right-wing authoritarianism threatening to come back. 

International cooperation reflects the will of governments, dominated by their local priorities. Thus, we should not expect miracles from a forum like the Summit of the Americas. However, the recommendations for “(Co)building a strategic agenda for the Americas” contained in this report are an important contribution to building an international public discourse that works for increased democratization and against the pernicious trend created by economic and political inequality. 

* Claudia Heiss is Head of Political Science at Universidad de Chile and Research Fellow at American University’s Center for Latin American & Latino Studies.

References 

El Colegio de México (2023). (Co)Building a Strategic Agenda for the Americas. URL: https://americas-tiempos-adversos.colmex.mx/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/co-building-a-strategic-agenda-for-the-americas.pdf (accessed 12 Sep 2023) 

Gargarella, Roberto (2010). The Legal Foundations of Inequality. Cambridge University Press. 

Gargarella, Roberto (2013). Latin American Constitutionalism, 1810–2010: The Engine Room of the Constitution. Oxford University Press. 

Gargarella, Roberto (2022). The Law as a Conversation Among Equals. Cambridge University Press. 

Garretón, Manuel Antonio. (2003). Incomplete Democracy. University of North Carolina Press. 

Heiss, Claudia (2022). “What Can a Constitution Do? Seeking to Deepen Democracy through Constitution-Making in Latin America“. LASA Forum 53:3, 10-15 

Loveman, Brian, and Thomas M. Davies Jr., eds. (1997). The Politics of Antipolitics: The Military in Latin America. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources. 

Lafont, Cristina (2020). Democracy without Shortcuts. A Participatory Conception of Deliberative Democracy. Oxford University Press. 

Luna, Juna Pablo and David Altman (2011). “Uprooted but Stable: Chilean Parties and the Concept of Party System Institutionalization”. Latin American Politics and Society, 53(2), 1-28. 

Murillo, Ma. Victoria (2021). “Protestas, descontento y democracia en América Latina”. Nueva Sociedad 294, 4-13.