All posts tagged Democratic Governance

Who Will Attend the OAS Presidential Summit in Panama?

By Fulton Armstrong and Eric Hershberg

OAE-OAS & tgraham / Flickr / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

OAE-OAS & tgraham / Flickr / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The Summit of the Americas isn’t until next April, but interest in how Panama as host handles near-unanimous pressure from Latin America to invite Cuban President Raúl Castro, and how the United States and Cuba will respond, is growing fast.  Speaking to reporters at the United Nations last week, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Roberta Jacobson answered several questions on the U.S. position.  Key excerpts follow:

  • Asked “if the United States is still opposed to Cuba attending.”  On the Summit of the Americas, I think we’ve been pretty clear in our position on the summit, which is that obviously Panama is the host country for the summit, and as the host country they will make the decisions on invitations to that summit.  …  And the fact of the matter is we have said from the start that we look forward to a summit that can include a democratic Cuba at the table.  We also have said that the summit process, ever since Quebec in 2001, has made a commitment to democracy, and we think that’s an important part of the summit process.  But the decision about invitations is not ours to make, and obviously there’s been no invitations formally issued to the United States and other countries. And so there is no acceptance or rejection yet called for or made. …
  • Asked “is there a chance that the U.S. might refuse going.”  Again, I think you won’t be surprised to hear me say that we’re really not going to answer hypotheticals in the future yet.  Obviously, the Summit of the Americas is in April and that’s not a situation that we can answer, although I think we have made clear that we believe the summit process is committed to democratic governance and we think that the governments that are sitting at that table ought to be committed to the summit principles, which include democratic governance. And therefore that’s our position at this point.  Obviously, we have a position on Cuba which does not at this point see them as upholding those principles.

Panama’s likely invitation to Cuba – reflecting the consensus of 32 hemispheric nations at the last Summit – will draw protests from official quarters in Washington.  But it’s far from certain that the Obama Administration would risk blame for torpedoing the 20-year Summit process.  Obama survived a handshake with Raúl Castro at Nelson Mandela’s funeral last December, and being in the same room with him again as a President in the second half of his second term will have little political consequence.  A workshop in Mexico City in June, in which CLALS researchers participated, and another in Ottawa in September, sponsored by the Center and the University of Ottawa, explored likely outcomes.  Mexican international relations specialists speculated that a reasonable outcome was for the United States to show up like a polite guest, and thus avoid having the anachronism of U.S. antagonism toward Cuba overshadow its broader relations with Latin America.  Canadian experts were deeply concerned that Cuba’s inclusion might undermine the centrality to the OAS of the Inter-American Democratic Charter, but they agreed that failure to convene a Summit would constitute a serious blow to the OAS and to the regular summits that provide Canada a seat at the inter-governmental table.

The reality is that Cuba does not conform to the Democratic Charter or to the broader OAS criteria of democratic rule, but equally real is that Latin America sees Cuba as a full member of the hemisphere and has lost all patience with those in Washington who would deny that.  Either Washington — and Ottawa — set aside their objections to Cuba’s inclusion or they bid farewell to such fora and their constructive impact on regional relationships that ought to matter to them.  Moreover, if they acquiesce to Cuban participation but then try to commandeer the agenda and make the Summit a seminar on democracy and human rights, it will only reinforce the widespread sense in the region that Washington cannot move beyond its obsession with the trivial matter of Cuba and get on with a serious conversation among equal partners.  They would thus sacrifice an opportunity to discuss issues on which significant, substantive advances are possible through dialogue among leaders of countries throughout the hemisphere.  The value of the Summit rests with the capacity of all involved to act like grownups.  President Obama did so at Mandela’s funeral, and it will be telling whether he can do it again in Panama this coming April.

October 2, 2014

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by clalsstaff on October 2, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on October 2, 2014

https://aulablog.net/2014/10/02/who-will-attend-the-oas-presidential-summit-in-panama/

Downsides of Decentralization: Lessons from Peru

By Eric Hershberg
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Decentralization – the buzzword among Washington-based specialists on governance during the 1990s and well into the first decade of the 21st century – failed to fulfill technocrats’ lofty expectations wherever it was implemented in the absence of a strong central government.  In one country after another, the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and USAID prescribed political and administrative decentralization as a recipe for deepening democracy and boosting efficiencies in the delivery of governmental services.  An alliance of strange bedfellows united behind the “good governance” cause of decentralization, including grassroots democracy activists of the left who, in the aftermath of authoritarian rule, valued the notion of devolving decision-making authority to the citizenry.  Neoliberal economists, in turn, were attracted to virtually any initiative that would diminish the authority of central states, which they considered to be incorrigible bastions of inefficiency, rent-seeking and patronage.  Cautionary notes from skeptical political scientists were routinely dismissed as anachronistic.  At a seminar in Lima around a decade ago, USAID staff were utterly perplexed by the suggestion that, in the absence of central institutions holding the new regional authorities accountable, the headlong quest to political decentralization in Peru could bring extremely serious adverse consequences for democratic governance.  In their view, the capabilities of the central government had nothing to do with the success of decentralization.

Their enthusiasm was not entirely misplaced – but in many places the reforms eventually backfired.  The authoritarian regime of Alberto Fujimori (1990- 2000) had centralized power excessively, eliminating the handful of regional governments that had been created during the 1980s and ensuring that the social programs they had administered would be entirely dependent on the executive branch.  Fiscal decentralization, already minimal, was eliminated to make provincial municipalities completely dependent on transfers from the central government.  The few regional authorities who survived the Fujimori period were appointed by the president.  When President Alejandro Toledo (2001-06) and his Peru Posible party took office, the need to restore some decentralization was clear, but the two traditional parties – the APRA and Acción Popular –gradually coopted the movimientos regionales, creating clientelistic networks employing mafia-style tactics.  In the Ancash Department, for example, a rogue president is associated not only with corruption scandals – common in regional governments – but also with the assassination of his political enemies, including a political opponent murdered in March.  President Ollanta Humala has frozen the region’s assets, thereby putting a stop to some of the corruption but at the same time delaying needed infrastructure projects and social services.

The emergence of authoritarian enclaves was predictable of fledgling democratic regimes in Latin America, and the phenomenon is not unique to Peru (click here).  Sub-national authorities have access to vast resources to distribute to their clients (and themselves), and all too often the central state lacks the capacity or control over the purse strings to rein them in.  Social scientists have long been aware of the “paradox of decentralization,” and indeed at American University it is a concept that we typically teach freshmen in Comparative Politics – that decentralization only promotes democracy when it follows the consolidation of a strong central state.  This insight escaped the gaze of the technocrats so enamored of decentralization in Peru.  There, as elsewhere, the absence of horizontal accountability – that is, the ability of different branches of government to check one another’s authority – is aggravated by the inability of civil society to hold leaders accountable and allows for the emergence of local mafias in control of sub-national institutions.  Decentralization took on such steam at a time when Latin America’s national governments had been weakened by the economic crisis of the 1980s and the ideological assault on the central state that continued well into the current century.  It will take many years to rectify the damage.  

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by clalsstaff on May 5, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on May 5, 2014

https://aulablog.net/2014/05/05/downsides-of-decentralization-lessons-from-peru/

Will Costa Rica Seize the Opportunity?

By Fulton Armstrong

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Costa Rican voters have given President-elect Luis Guillermo Solís a mandate for change, but they have also given him a Legislature and culture of political inertia that will make revitalizing the country’s democracy very difficult.  The withdrawal of opponent Johnny Araya from the presidential runoff on Sunday threatened to trigger such low voter turnout that Solís feared his legitimacy would be questioned from the start, but he received 78 percent (1.3 million) of the total votes – more than any other recent presidential victor.  Although he was deeply involved in the National Liberation Party (PLN) until nine years ago, he established himself and the Citizen Action Party (PAC) as viable alternatives to the PLN and Costa Rica’s other discredited traditional party, the PUSC.  His public persona – as a university history professor, former diplomat, a non-corrupt political neophyte, and an unglamorous campaigner – has engendered sympathy even if, as the head of a party with no record, people don’t really know what they’re getting in terms of policy.  Various business groups have signaled they can work with him and presented their wish lists – all touching on energy availability and prices – but that agenda also remains vague.

The composition of the Legislature, elected in February, poses a formidable obstacle to any agenda that Solís develops.  (Click here to see AULABLOG’s first read on this.)  His PAC won two more seats in Parliament – up to 13 out of a total of 57 – but the PLN won 18, the Broad Front (FA) won nine, and the PUSC won eight.  Outgoing President Chinchilla, of the PLN, had a broader base – 24 seats – but obstructionism from across the political spectrum made Executive-Legislative relations rough throughout her term.  The country’s premier economic newspaper, El Financiero, last week gave a generally positive review of President Chinchilla’s performance in ten crucial economic policies – poverty, unemployment, exports, fiscal deficit, and more – and even if that assessment is too generous, the Costa Rican political machines have treated her like an unmitigated failure.  With both traditional parties out of the Executive, maneuvering in the parliament is likely to intensify and be more damaging.

Statements by Costa Rican academics and opinion makers since the lackluster, non-substantive campaigning in the recent elections, suggest a concern that the country is in a funk over the quality of its democracy and democratic institutions.  The political elites are held in low regard for putting their own (often pecuniary) interests before all others.  When Solís takes office on May 8, Costa Ricans will have an opportunity to shake themselves out of that mentality, taking advantage of the new president’s outsider image and his lack of a political machine eager to attach itself as a parasite on the government and economy.  Johnny Araya’s cowardice and his failure to even pretend to have a political program worth fighting for in the second-round campaign, however, bodes poorly for whether the traditional parties are interested in revitalizing Costa Rican politics.  Being the best democracy in Central America has been important to Costa Ricans for decades; being the best it can be is the new challenge.

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by clalsstaff on April 10, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on April 10, 2014

https://aulablog.net/2014/04/10/will-costa-rica-seize-the-opportunity/

Haiti: Crisis as Usual

By CLALS Staff

World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim and Haitian President Michel Martelly / Photo credit: World Bank Photo Collection / Foter / CC-BY-NC-ND

World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim and Haitian President Michel Martelly / Photo credit: World Bank Photo Collection / Foter / CC-BY-NC-ND

Half way through his term, President Martelly and his opponents have shown the same weak leadership and shallow commitment to democracy and transparency that has long plagued Haitian politics.  The IMF recently reported preliminary data indicating that Haiti’s GDP grew around 4 percent in FY2013; that inflation dropped from almost 8 percent to 4.5 percent; and that, although the fiscal deficit was larger than planned, domestic revenues were in line with projections.  On the streets, however, popular suffering shows no sign of abating.  Some 170,000 remain homeless since the earthquake almost four years ago; hundreds of thousands still have no prospect of employment, and poverty rates remain sky-high.  Suspicions about the whereabouts of more than a billion dollars in foreign aid are growing.  The World Bank last week criticized the lack of government transparency regarding funds from Venezuela’s “Petrocaribe” program, worth about $300 million a year to Haiti, and repeated its call for an end to the government’s use of “non-compete” contracts.  Corruption, a perennial concern, was a main theme of several large protests last month, involving thousands of citizens demanding Martelly’s resignation.

United Nations officials have repeatedly called on Haiti to hold parliamentary elections originally scheduled for two years ago.  The lower house of parliament in November passed a bill protecting the tenure of certain members of the senate – which the UN Secretary General’s senior representative in Haiti praised as “an important step for the organization of inclusive, transparent, and democratic elections” – but myriad other preparations remain undone.  The UN last August found that failure to hold elections by next month “runs the risk of [the Parliament] becoming inoperative,” but the Security Council went ahead and renewed the MINUSTAH mission for yet another year, albeit with fewer troops and police.

Donor fatigue – when the international community tires of lending a hand – seems to have been overtaken by donor disinterest, and the Haitian political elite appears much obliged.  Martelly, whose stage name was Sweet Micky during his singing career, has failed to use his fame and charm to promote serious reform among Haitians, as he promised, nor has he weaned his government and its supporters off the lucre of corruption.  His detractors, like those organized against Presidents Préval and Aristide before him, are better at mobilizing opposition than they are at mustering support for any political alternatives.  The Obama Administration’s commitment after the earthquake to help Haiti “build back better” has faded.  A central element of its vision was construction of an industrial park in northern Haiti, which more than a year after its inauguration has created fewer than 2,000 of the 65,000 jobs it promised.  As long as Haitians and their international supporters are satisfied with bandaid solutions to systemic problems, the country will wallow in its misery until the next crisis makes things yet worse again.

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by clalsstaff on December 10, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on December 10, 2013

https://aulablog.net/2013/12/10/haiti-crisis-as-usual/

Subnational Regimes Reveal Uneven Nature of Democracy

By Agustina Giraudy

Peruvian mayoral campaign poster / Photo credit: Pedro Rivas Ugaz / Flickr / CC-BY

Peruvian mayoral campaign poster / Photo credit: Pedro Rivas Ugaz / Flickr / CC-BY

Most Latin American countries have transitioned away from autocracy and authoritarianism over the past three decades, but much of their democratic advancement has been territorially uneven and mostly limited to the national level.  In Argentina, Peru, Brazil, Bolivia, Mexico and other countries, democracy has not trickled down to subnational levels of government.  Many provinces, states, and municipalities in these (and other) countries continue to be governed in ways that resemble the period of undemocratic rule.  In these subnational undemocratic regimes (SURs), the political and civic rights of regular citizens and the political opposition are severely curtailed.

In SURs such as Formosa, San Luis or La Rioja in Argentina; Oaxaca (pre 2010), Puebla (pre 2010), or Tabasco in Mexico; and Goiás in Brazil, provincial autocrats use a variety of undemocratic, illegal, and informal actions – such as electoral fraud, electoral violence, and changes in electoral rules and political institutions – to prevent the opposition from gaining access to state positions.  My research and others’ indicates that, to further protect their own power, these subnational rulers frequently and arbitrarily reshuffle provincial- and state-level supreme courts, capriciously remove opposition mayors from office, deny funding to municipalities controlled by the opposition, and arbitrarily commission provincial- and state-level audits to investigate contrived financial misdeeds of opposition mayors.  They also co-opt or divide local organized groups, such as small unions, social movements, and street vendors, to undermine potential opposition.

The existence of SURs within national democracies underscores the difficulty of assessing the quality of a democracy from a purely national perspective.  As recent research has shown, the continuation of SURs in national democracies requires that we take a different approach and, importantly, grasp how seemingly democratic national-level leaders benefit from and, in some circumstances, encourage the SURs as a reliable base outside the capital.  Subnational undemocratic rulers, who typically control voters and legislators in the national congress, are seen by national officials as key partners for crafting winning electoral and legislative coalitions.  To the extent that national democratic incumbents succeed at inducing and securing autocrats’ cooperation, the former have strong incentives to help the latter stay in power.  Ironically, the accepted practice of democratic coalition-building contributes to the obstruction of democratization at the subnational level.  In the second decade of the 21st century, the quality of Latin American democracies depends at least as much on subnational democracy – and reducing the influence of SURs – as on the quality of national-level institutions.

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by clalsstaff on December 6, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Regional Snapshot
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Posted by clalsstaff on December 6, 2013

https://aulablog.net/2013/12/06/subnational-regimes-reveal-uneven-nature-of-democracy/

Honduran Election Crisis Marks New Phase in Country’s Agony

By CLALS Staff

Juan Orlando Hernández Photo credit: Tercera Informacion / wikimedia commons / and Xiomara Castro / Photo credit: hablaguate / Flickr / Creative Commons

Juan Orlando Hernández Photo credit: Tercera Informacion / wikimedia commons / and Xiomara Castro / Photo credit: hablaguate / Flickr / Creative Commons

Yesterday’s election in Honduras was peaceful and orderly – the 61 percent voter turnout forced polls to remain open an extra hour – but anomalies in the vote count have cast a dark shadow over the legitimacy of the results. Although most polls for months indicated that Libre candidate Xiomara Castro had a several-point lead over National Party candidate Juan Orlando Hernández (and a few polls showed they were in a dead heat), the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE) said the Nationalist beat Castro by more than a five percentage point  margin – 34.2 percent to 28.6 percent. Castro and other candidates had repeatedly claimed the National Party activist who heads the TSE (which has no representative from the nontraditional parties or Libre) would skew the results and, citing exit polls, she has alleged that fraud tainted up to 20 percent of yesterday’s votes. The TSE’s claim that, of more than 1.6 million ballots cast, there were no null or blank votes – when party poll watchers reported many – has also drawn attacks on its credibility. Nonetheless, the U.S. Ambassador and the European Union observer team hastily declared the process transparent and clean.

Hernández and Castro have both declared victory – promising high tensions in at least the short term. Castro is the wife of former President Mel Zelaya, who was ousted in a coup in 2009, and has assembled a broad and deep popular base in Libre outside of Honduras’s two traditional parties. The government, military, economy and, importantly, news media are all dominated by elites that have long resisted the sort of popular movement she has built.  Few observers believe that, particularly with U.S. endorsement of the election results, Castro’s demands for a recount or other review of the results will be heeded.

If the results had been seen as accurate and fair, the election could have helped Honduras close the dark chapter of tensions and violence that started when the military forced President Zelaya into exile three and a half years ago. If Hernández is allowed to take office, his low vote – barely a third of all votes cast – alone promises a prolonged crisis like that which has plagued current President Lobo since his inauguration, a period during which both criminal and political violence has skyrocketed, public finances have deteriorated alarmingly, and political polarization has reached unprecedented heights. Under a Hernández presidency, the crisis may become even worse. Castro ran a campaign explicitly committed to peace and reconciliation and consistently urged her supporters to give democratic process a chance. She has never shown even the slightest inclination to call her supporters to violence, but popular anger has festered since the 2009 coup and there’s no guarantee that some frustration will not spill into the streets.  The surge in right-wing violence in Honduras since the coup – reminiscent of death squad activities in other Central American countries in the 1980s – has persuaded many protesters to keep their heads down, but this election may lead to desperate acts which the death squads will be eager to respond to, threatening a spiral of violence the hemisphere’s second-poorest country can ill-afford.

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by clalsstaff on November 25, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on November 25, 2013

https://aulablog.net/2013/11/25/honduran-election-crisis-marks-new-phase-in-countrys-agony/

Costa Rica: Losing Faith in Democratic Institutions?

By Fulton Armstrong

Supreme Elections Tribunal President Luis Antonio Sobrado / Photo credit: izahorsky / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

Supreme Elections Tribunal President Luis Antonio Sobrado / Photo credit: izahorsky / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

Costa Rica is approaching February’s presidential and legislative elections with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, if not with dread.  Most international surveys present Costa Rica as the “world’s happiest country” (the Happy Planet Index), or in the elite club of the world’s “full democracies” (ahead of Japan and Belgium in The Economist’s list), or as the 48th least-corrupt country (out of 174 reviewed by Transparency International).  The economy is expected to grow about 3 percent this year, and the country’s access to foreign direct investment is blunting the impact of the government’s fiscal deficit of about 5 percent of GDP.  Crime is on the rise, but Ticos know that their pain is small compared to that wreaked by the narcos and maras in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.

Reputable polls show, however, that Costa Ricans are gloomy about the state of their political institutions and specifically about their upcoming elections.  According to polls, about 32 percent of the country’s 3 million eligible voters say they plan to abstain, citing corruption, a lack of leadership, insensitivity to the average citizen, and unemployment as reasons to reject not just the candidates but also the political elite in general.  The President of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), Luis Antonio Sobrado, acknowledged last month that the election was taking place in the context of “citizen uneasiness … and a lot of anger with politics and politicians.”  Abstentionism was high in 2006 (35 percent) and 2010 (32 percent), but commentators sense a much deeper and darker alienation this time around.  A columnist lamented that the “multiparty” system has been replaced by “atomization,” and another said the political parties have “disconnected themselves from the national reality.”

Further reflecting the malaise, President Chinchilla’s support has nosedived – a July poll showed only 9 percent of voters said she was “good” and none said “very good” – and pundits cite her ineffectiveness as the cause of collapsed highways, dengue outbreaks, and other calamities.  The nominee of her Partido de Liberación Nacional (PLN), Johnny Araya, is widely thought to have an edge in February, but his 12 years as mayor of San José have coincided with a deterioration in the city’s infrastructure and security, and his personal lifestyle (including five marriages) may be a factor in popular skepticism.  The government’s recent announcement that it will contract the services of 4,125 new employees in 2014, mostly in the education sector, drew immediate criticism as yet another example of political patronage to influence the race.

The self-doubt seems at this point indicative of concerns about Chinchilla and the crop of candidates, rather than a rejection of democracy.  Costa Ricans comparing themselves with the rest of Central America still feel good about themselves, and the green image that eco-tourists reinforce is comforting.  But crumbling infrastructure – including collapsing bridges and the exorbitant cost of repeated repairs – and shocking crimes, such as the recent assassination of an environmentalist protecting turtles on a Caribbean beach, fuel the sort of doubts that only effective political and economic leadership can quell. 

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by clalsstaff on November 11, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on November 11, 2013

https://aulablog.net/2013/11/11/costa-rica-losing-faith-in-democratic-institutions/

Honduras Elections: Serious Challenges Ahead

Honduras coat of arms / public domain

Honduras coat of arms / public domain

Honduras faces an enormous challenge in the next two months:  ensuring that elections in November – when Hondurans go to the polls to elect their next president, 128 National Assembly deputies, and municipal authorities – are clean and transparent.  The elections are especially important because they are the first conducted outside the framework of the coup of 2009.  The elections that year, held five months after the coup, were conducted under the black cloud of the break in constitutional order and gave rise to the transition government headed by President Porfirio Lobo.  This year, nine parties are participating – a clear signal that the country’s traditional two-party system is ending.  The Freedom and Refoundation Party (LIBRE), with a base among supporters of ousted President Mel Zelaya, has nominated his wife, Xiomara Castro, as its Presidential candidate, and the Anticorruption Party, led by sports journalist Salvador Nasrala, represent a true challenge to the traditional political elite.

All of the polls give the edge to Xiomara Castro, with a lead ranging anywhere from two to eight percentage points, over the candidate of the National Party, Juan Orlando Hernández, who is President of the Congress.  The polls also show that a majority of the population, having witnessed multiple accusations of fraud during the primaries held by the two traditional parties (including Hernández’s), expect the elections to be marred by fraud.  Casting further doubt on the credibility of the outcome is the narrow representation of the parties and lack of professionalism of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), which is charged with organizing and supervising the elections.  Only the three traditional parties have representatives serving on the TSE and, unlike in other countries, they are distinguished as militants of their parties rather than independents or experts in electoral processes.

Should the results of the election not be seen as legitimate, the potential for conflict is worrisome, and there are ample grounds for concern that the security forces that have proliferated under the Lobo government could be deployed to suppress protest.  Only strong international pressure and strong citizen pressure can guarantee that the elections will be clean and open the possibility for Honduras to overcome the political crisis that has now been damaging the country for several years. 

A number of events – including the firing of Supreme Court justices last December and the National Congress’s intervention in matters far outside its jurisdiction – underscore the continuing tendency toward authoritarian and illegal actions to suit ambitious politicians’ pursuit of power, with potentially dire consequences for the elections. An ongoing economic crisis, including a nearly 50 percent unemployment rate, and a serious deterioration of government finances, also contributes to political fragility. Against this backdrop, the United States and the rest of the international community can play a positive role in promoting elections that are fair and impartial and taking proactive measures to ensure that security forces ill-suited to managing social unrest not be deployed to suppress political dissent.  Failing to do so would waste an opportunity to help effect a truly democratic outcome in Honduras, and invite a further deterioration of a political, economic and social climate that is the most worrisome in Central America.

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by clalsstaff on September 19, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on September 19, 2013

https://aulablog.net/2013/09/19/honduras-elections-serious-challenges-ahead/

September 11 Coup in Chile: Global Ramifications

By Eric Hershberg

Chilean Grape export photo by Dick Howe Jr CC-BY-NC Flickr / Indictment of Pinochet, Photo by a-birdie CC-BY-NC Flickr

Chilean Grape export photo by Dick Howe Jr CC-BY-NC Flickr / Indictment of Pinochet, Photo by a-birdie CC-BY-NC Flickr

In Washington last week many events recalled the bloody coup of September 11, 1973, which overthrew the Popular Unity government of Chilean Socialist President Salvador Allende and ushered in a dictatorship that, even by South American standards of the time, stood out for its brutality.  Discussion about “the other September 11” highlighted the human cost of the coup, the role of U.S. government agencies in undermining Chilean democracy and encouraging the military’s actions, and the memories of the coup and dictatorship that remain deeply embedded in Chile today.  These and similar gatherings around the world and in Chile featured demands for the full truth about the dictatorship’s crimes – the fate of some thousand of the disappeared remains unknown today, according to the Human Rights Observatory of the Diego Portales University – and to hold those who committed them fully accountable.

The coup led by General Augusto Pinochet destroyed Latin America’s longest standing democratic regime and ended a unique experiment testing the proposition that electoral democracy could catalyze a transition to socialism.  In Chile, the coup initiated 17 years of military rule grounded in state-sponsored violence, but it also resonated far beyond that country’s borders, marking a watershed in global affairs.  To this day how people around the world conceive fundamental issues of political change, economic development and human rights is affected by September 11, 1973.  These broader legacies were the focus of a panel discussion at American University, co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies and the Washington College of Law, this week.  (Click here for details.)

We can now see three large sets of consequences that the Chilean coup had far beyond its borders. 

Political:  Across Southern Europe, it reverberated powerfully, undermining the confidence of sectors of the Left that believed fervently a socialist transition could be effected through victory at the ballot box.  After the coup, Eurocommunists in Italy and Spain came to believe that victory would require an alliance with Christian Democrats or other centrists, lest a coup coalition akin to that in Chile bring down democracy altogether. For much of the Latin American left, the Chilean experience would over time prove a wake-up call, alerting those aspiring to turn the world upside down that democracy was not a mere bourgeois luxury and suggesting that “second-best” options – more gradual change –were preferable to maximalist goals that would likely jeopardize democracy.

Economic: The coup paved the way for “neoliberal” policies that would shake the foundations of conventional thinking about development for nearly three decades.  They were prescribed across Latin America.  It would not be until the emergence of ALBA in the mid-2000’s that the region would again witness a faith (however misguided), in the capacity of import-substitution and inward-oriented redistribution to achieve lasting economic advance in the region. 

U.S. policy:  Finally, the coup set in train levels of violence and human rights abuses so abhorrent that they drove major changes in U.S. human rights policy and international jurisprudence.  In the United States, advocacy organizations, progressive majorities in Congress, and the Carter Administration introduced unprecedented legislation aimed at preserving democracy and curbing human rights abuses.  Well beyond Washington, numerous international regimes put in place to combat impunity were motivated and influenced by what had taken place in Chile and the imperative of ensuring that it not happen again.  

Just as the cataclysmic event that took place in the U.S. on 9/11/01 opened the door to extreme and ongoing changes felt around the world, so too did the Chilean tragedy that began on 9/11/73.

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by clalsstaff on September 17, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on September 17, 2013

https://aulablog.net/2013/09/17/september-11-coup-in-chile-global-ramifications/

Egypt Policy – Latin America Style

By Fulton Armstrong

U.S. Department of State Headquarters | Wikimedia Commons

U.S. Department of State Headquarters | Wikimedia Commons

We who follow U.S. policy in Latin America shouldn’t be surprised to see Washington’s policy toward Egypt drift from support for democracy to support for the status quo ante.  President Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo reaching out to Muslims – calling for an end to the “cycle of suspicion and discord” – came just six weeks after he told the Summit of the Americas that he wanted “an equal partnership” with the hemisphere and sought “a new beginning with Cuba.”  When 30-year President Hosni Mubarak stepped down in 2011, the Administration eagerly linked Egypt to the “Arab Spring” and, despite concerns about the Muslim Brotherhood roots of Egypt’s first democratically elected president, tried to make the relationship with Mohamad Morsi work.  Over time, however, Morsi – successor to an undemocratic regime in an undemocratic country with no democratic traditions and no democratic institutions – was accused of being undemocratic.  The estrangement grew so deep that the Obama Administration still cannot bring itself to call the July 3 coup against Morsi a coup, and Secretary of State Kerry saw fit to refer to the military takeover as “restoring democracy” even as the Army was firing on unarmed crowds.

To Latin America watchers, this chronology is reminiscent of U.S. policy in our own hemisphere.  The case of Honduran President Mel Zelaya is clearest.  The Honduran military removed Zelaya– in his pajamas – from his home and country in June 2009 for proposing a referendum that, the putschists claimed, violated the Honduran constitution.  The Obama Administration’s nominee to be Assistant Secretary of State at the time, Arturo Valenzuela, testified that the action was, in his opinion, a coup, but the State Department never categorized it as such and, despite rhetoric committing to restore Zelaya, the Administration let the interim regime consolidate power.  Amidst a state of emergency, media closures, and other irregularities, the State Department also gave its blessing to elections held several months later.  Zelaya’s rhetoric before the coup was caustic, and he squandered political capital in needless confrontations, but he never threatened Honduran “democracy” or violated human rights as the interim regime did.  Nor did he preside over a steady deterioration of security, civil rights, and the economy as the current government has.  Yet, ironically, the Obama Administration has never set the history of the coup straight – just as the Bush Administration never rectified its disastrous support for the 2002 coup against Chávez in Venezuela.

The excesses of some leaders, like Zelaya and Chávez, make supporting or turning a blind eye to a coup very tempting.  But Washington has also shelved its moral outrage when much less provocative presidents – democratically elected but progressive-leaning – have been removed from power, if not with a gun at their head.  The “constitutional coup” against President Lugo in Paraguay last year is the most recent example.  The gap between U.S. rhetoric about democracy, rule of law, and due process on the one hand and its tangible actions on the other has a number of causes. 

  • American “exceptionalism” – the sense that U.S. success gives it a right to judge others and intervene even when national interests are not at stake – sometimes leads Washington to over-extend and make rash decisions.
  • Eagerness to act quickly – to appear decisive – often makes policymakers confuse the symptoms of problems, which seem amenable to quick solutions, and the essence of the problems themselves.  Policies address the short-term while neglecting the strategic.
  • Washington lobbies – the pro-Israel lobby in the case of any matter in the Middle East and the Cuban-American lobby in Latin America – are able to dominate U.S. perceptions of events, pushing administrations into a corner. 
  • Administrations embarrass themselves when they throw around words like “Arab Spring” and “democracy.”  When the inevitable bumps in the road occur, they act betrayed rather than admit they got carried away by wishful thinking. 
  • Double-standards –the expectation that progressives succeeding authoritarians will be perfectly democratic and flawlessly inclusive – make it difficult for Washington to avoid prematurely throwing a potential ally overboard. 
  • Another factor, and potentially the most important, is that the U.S. government builds deeper relationships with elites and the security services that do their bidding than with any other forces.  During the Bush Administration’s “War on Terror,” the U.S. Government entrusted Egypt with extremely sensitive operations, including the interrogation (and alleged torture) of suspected terrorists, and Washington relies on Latin American security services to prosecute the “war on drugs.” 

When U.S. interagency committees discuss how to respond to crises, the departments and agencies with the deepest ties in the country under discussion claim more influence over events there than anyone else – and win most policy debates.  The problem is that their ties are mostly to political and economic elites – or the military and intelligence services that back them – which are rarely agents of change.  Washington winds up allied with forces that suppress the new voices essential for the “springs” and “democracies” that it says it wants.

 

 

1 Comment
by clalsstaff on September 5, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Honduras, Middle East, United States
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Posted by clalsstaff on September 5, 2013

https://aulablog.net/2013/09/05/egypt-policy-latin-america-style/

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