The Spirit of Democracy, page 23
With a better understanding of the kinds of economic policies that promote development and of the technical means to fight disease, increase crop yields, and improve human capacity, most developing countries today have the potential to grow faster than India did during its first four decades. But the lesson of India’s remarkable experience is that even modest but consistent economic development, combined with a decent functioning and gradual deepening of democratic institutions, can sustain a free political system just about anywhere.
THE PROSPECTS FOR
GLOBAL DEMOCRACY
LATIN AMERICA’S UNEASY PROGRESS
Alejandro Toledo does not fit the image of a Latin American president. His skin is too dark; his nose is too prominent; his hair is too long. When he was elected president of Peru in 2001, he was the first member of the country’s majority of indigenous descent to be democratically chosen for the post. And his story is in some ways a metaphor for the hopes and travails of democracy in Latin America.
Toledo was born in the Peruvian highlands, twelve thousand feet above sea level, the son a bricklayer and a maid and the eighth of sixteen children—seven of whom died in infancy or early childhood. The family had no access to medical care; as a boy of five, he cut the umbilical cord of his newborn brother (his father had left to find work in a mine). At that early age, while tending the family’s sheep and pigs and sleeping in a room with fourteen people, he became “an Indian rebellious against poverty.”1 When the family moved to the fishing village of Chimbote, Alejandro took any job he could get, carrying bags at the train station, shining shoes, selling newspapers and lottery tickets. His father was egalitarian, determined that each of his children attend elementary school. But each had to work to support the family as the next child took a turn at school. Finding in Alejandro a student of prodigious intellect and ambition, his teachers urged the family to send him to high school. His father said no, the family needed him to work, but Toledo found a way to do both, attending school by day while shining shoes at night and selling shaved ice on the weekends.
In his third year of high school, at age fourteen, Toledo met and befriended two American Peace Corps volunteers who had arrived in Chimbote and were looking for housing. By then, the reality of his class and ethnic background was catching up with him. “I wanted to go to university, but I knew there was no possibility,” he told me. “Concluding high school would be my maximal accomplishment academically.” His goal was to go into a business, maybe as a mechanic, “to be a little higher than my father.” Nevertheless, the Americans encouraged him, gave him philosophy books, and, in hours of conversations, helped him learn English. He soared academically and became president of his high school class. He won a writing contest and became the Chimbote political correspondent for La Prensa, the leading national newspaper. He was still shining shoes and selling lottery tickets when he experienced the first flush of pride at being published, and the humiliation of his place in life when the man whose shoes he was shining laughed at the thought that an Amerindian shoeshine boy could possibly have been the author of the newspaper article he was reading.
Then Toledo got another break. He won a Rotary Club scholarship for a year of study at the University of San Francisco (USF). It only covered tuition for one year, so again he had to struggle to support himself, while keeping up with college courses. Shortly after arriving in San Francisco, he took a job doing household work for a European family in exchange for housing. Never having seen electrical appliances, he burned the toast, botched the chores, and was berated for his incompetence. The family told the Peace Corps volunteers, who had helped him find the job, “You brought this person to satisfy your own ego. The best thing you can do is send him back to his tribe.” It was not the only indignity he suffered. He was Hispanic. He was Indian. He wore his hair very long, falling down his back. People would ask, “Are you a Navajo? What reservation do you come from?” But Toledo was determined. He went to night school and pumped gas on the late-night shift. From 7:00 AM to noon he slept. From noon to 1:30 PM he washed dishes at school. From 2:00 to 5:00 PM he played soccer on a university scholarship that covered his tuition for his final three years. In this way, he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from USF in 1970 and won full funding to do a Ph.D. in international development at the Stanford School of Education. He went on to earn two master’s degrees (one in economics) as well as a Ph.D.
When he left Stanford, Toledo took a number of positions and consultancies in international development, working for the United Nations and the World Bank among others. He interspersed these with periods in Peru chairing the board of economic advisers of the president of the central bank and teaching at Peru’s leading business school. From 1991 to 1994, he served as a scholar in residence at the Harvard Institute for International Development and a guest professor at Waseda University in Tokyo. From abroad, he watched with alarm as President Alberto Fujimori seized power in his autogolpe in 1992, dissolving congress, decimating independent centers of power, and twisting Peru’s institutions into a pseudodemocracy. Appalled by Fujimori’s destruction of democracy, and frustrated that he was writing about poverty but having no impact on the lives of the poor, Toledo resolved to enter politics. In August 1994, he arrived in Peru and launched an independent candidacy to challenge Fujimori in the 1995 presidential election. With Fujimori at the peak of his popularity, Toledo was trounced, winning only 3 percent of the vote. Still, he persisted. Despite deepening authoritarianism and (by his own account) over a hundred death threats, he founded a new political party, Perú Posible, in 1999 and again challenged Fujimori in the 2000 election. Through relentless political effort, Toledo emerged as the principal challenger to Fujimori, who was seeking a third term in violation of the constitutional ban. When Fujimori massively tilted the playing field for the first round of voting, and then the count was riddled with charges of fraud, OAS monitors condemned the election and Toledo withdrew from the second round. Donning a headband, he led the opposition in protest, as hundreds of thousands of Peruvians came out in the streets to demand a return to genuine democracy. When Fujimori’s corruption was exposed some months later and he was forced to resign, Toledo contested again and was elected president in 2001.
Toledo’s five years as president were on balance a governance but not a political success. During his term, the Peruvian economy recorded its best performance in six decades, averaging 5 percent annual economic growth, one of the best rates in the entire region. “Inflation remained low and fiscal management was prudent.”2 The annual fiscal deficit shrank from 3.3 percent of the gross domestic product to almost nothing, and the rate of nonperforming loans in the banking sector fell by over 80 percent. By 2006, Peru had one of the lowest levels of country risk of any Latin American country, so foreign investment poured in, increasing 50 percent during Toledo’s tenure. With expanded investment in the critical mining sector, Peru’s export earnings tripled.3 Yet, the core dilemma of development in Latin America—enormous poverty and massive inequality that ranks the region worst in distribution of income and wealth in the world—continued to frustrate the public and the president himself. “The benefits of growth were limited primarily to the top third of the income distribution and barely reached the poor, who make up 48 percent of the population. Unemployment remained stubbornly high. Real wages were stagnant, and job security provisions continued to erode.”4 To some extent, all countries that implement fiscal restraint and economic reform confront such difficulties in the face of globalization, with its intense mobility of capital and its downward pressure on wages. Toledo’s efforts delivered some reductions in absolute poverty (by one-quarter) and infant and child mortality, as state expenditures in social programs and in basic health and education increased, but it was much less than his constituencies—particularly Peru’s long-deprived indigenous people—were expecting.5
On the political side, Toledo sacked the country’s top military chiefs and began to restructure the armed forces. In 2002, a reform of Peru’s highly centralized system “gave new regional governments almost a quarter of the national budget and a range of powers that had long been the province of the central government.”6 But these changes threatened powerful interests, and Toledo had to contend with the daunting legacy of a decade of authoritarian rule under Fujimori and his intelligence chief, Vladimir Montesinos, who had systematically corrupted much of the Peruvian political, social, and corporate elite. As prosecutors sought to extradite the former president from his exile in Japan and prosecuted Montesinos and a number of other prominent Fujimoriera officials, the old guard fought back viciously. The Toledo government’s investigation of some 1,500 people on corruption charges “threatened a significant swath of elites.” Many powerful business and media magnates—dubbed “the Montesinos mafia”—“retaliated by scheming to bring about Toledo’s downfall, hoping that a new government would approve an amnesty.”7 They did not succeed, but they did generate relentlessly negative and humiliating media coverage, ridiculing the president at every turn. And Toledo himself made mistakes, raising his salary in his first year, alienating some of his original cabinet members, and initially refusing to acknowledge paternity of an out-of-wedlock daughter. Although he governed with a degree of integrity and restraint that was rare in Peruvian history, the hostile media did its best to portray him as a high-living politician insensitive to the poor, part of a corrupt political class, while barely mentioning that “it was Fujimori’s government that had stolen $1.8 billion from the state.”8 Consequently, Toledo’s approval ratings plunged as low as 10 percent amid public cynicism about politicians as a class.
By the time he left office, Toledo had recovered considerably in public approval (to about 50 percent) as the scope of his policy achievements began to sink in.9 “For the first time in its republican history, a presidential transition” was taking place in Peru “while its politics is democratic, social peace reigns, the economy grows apace, and world markets shine on Peruvian products.”10 But Toledo had learned some crucial lessons, with much wider implications for democracy in Latin America. His economic understanding, democratic commitment, and good intentions had not been enough. He had respected human rights, freedom of the press, and the independence of democratic institutions, garnering Peru its best freedom ratings in many years. He had instigated sorely needed economic reforms and overseen a skillful management of the national economy. But, he realized, economic reforms had to be coupled with “much earlier and deeper social projects targeted on the urban and rural extreme poor, those who live on less than one dollar a day.” And, further, to be successful politically, a president must battle for public opinion. The problem, he is convinced, is not Peru’s alone.
If these levels of poverty are not reduced dramatically, if we don’t deal with the social exclusion, then there will be much louder noises in the streets, from the unions, the coca cultivators, the indigenous people, and these noises will impede capital investment. You can’t redistribute poverty, so we need sustained rates of economic growth. But to grow, we need investment, and for that we need economic, social, and legal stability. We can’t get that stability with the levels of inequality and poverty we have in Latin America today. We need specific social projects targeted at the extreme poor, to go along side by side with longer-term investments in basic health and education. Without those short-term improvements, we may not have the time to respond to popular expectations and protests. Democracy in Latin America may not be at risk, but democratic governability is. With each new term, presidents have less time to respond.11
DEMOCRATIC HOPES IN THE AMERICAS
Peru is hardly the most challenged case of democracy in the Americas. Inequality is at least as great in Brazil, the exclusion of the indigenous majority (until very recently) has been even more severe in Bolivia, and in Ecuador, populist mobilization and poor governance have forced out one president after another. Since the mid-1980s, sixteen Latin American presidents have not completed their terms.12 Nevertheless, the success of the democratic system in Latin America and the Caribbean has been nothing short of remarkable. If in 1975 someone had predicted that within a generation every military regime in the region would be dismantled and virtually the entire region would be democratic, that person would have been considered a wildly naive optimist. Yet, for more than a decade, that has been the case in Latin America. Cuba’s Communist regime persists as the last overt dictatorship in the region. After a long period of democratic decline, Venezuela has descended into authoritarian strongman rule. And, since the fall of the Duvalier dynasty in the 1980s, Haiti has had competitive elections but not democracy. Apart from these three countries, however, the other thirty states of Latin America and the Caribbean are all, in the least, electoral democracies in which government leaders are selected and can be—and frequently are—replaced in regular, more or less free and fair elections.13 Typically, these elections elicit high rates of participation on the national level and yield results that are widely viewed as legitimate.14 In fact, Latin America has made great strides in institutionalizing the culture and the administrative infrastructure of multiparty electoral competition—an extraordinary achievement for a region with so much history of vote buying, electoral rigging, intimidation, and violent struggle for power. Moreover, when eleven Latin American countries elected new presidents in 2006, with the exception of the closely fought contest in Mexico, “all the losing candidates accepted defeat,” and a growing respect for the electoral process and the independent institutions that oversee it was apparent.15 Military influence over politics has steadily receded.
If the free and peaceful struggle for power through the ballot box is becoming entrenched in Latin America, other dimensions of democracy are not. For ethnic and racial minorities and the vast legions of poor, democracy has yet to bring full rights of citizenship. In much of the region, crime and violence are rampant, the police demand bribes and abuse individual rights, the state is corrupt and unresponsive, the judiciary is feeble and horribly backlogged, and justice is partial and agonizingly slow, if it comes at all. In short, democracy is real but shallow. Until it becomes deeper, more liberal, and more accountable, it will continue to be vulnerable to the temptations of authoritarian populism.
Despite the temptations of populist forces, Latin Americans still believe in the promise of democracy. A majority consistently (and by some measures, overwhelmingly) prefer democracy to any other form of government, though they are not happy with the way democracy is performing in their country. As measured by the annual Latinobarometer from 1995 through 2006, there was some early erosion in the belief that democracy is always preferable (declining from about 60 percent in the late 1990s to around 53 percent), but this support rebounded (to 58 percent in 2006). And the gains were greatest in precisely those countries where democratic support had previously been weak: Brazil, Paraguay, Guatemala, and Honduras.16 In comparison, the percentage of Latin Americans preferring authoritarian rule has remained virtually constant, at only 15 percent, over the course of the decade.
When Latin Americans were asked in 2005 if they would “support a military government to replace the democratic government if the situation got very bad,” 30 percent said yes—but a decisive majority, 62 percent, said no.17 And when the preference for democracy is put in a more realistic tone—“Democracy may have problems, but it’s the best system of government”—fully three-quarters of Latin Americans, on average, agree.18 Two-thirds say democracy is the only way to become a developed country.19 Moreover, across time and across most countries, a majority of Latin Americans recognize that democracy cannot exist without a congress (58 percent) and without political parties (55 percent).20
On the level of personal participation, 58 percent on average say that the way one votes “can change the way things will be in the future,”21 yet they also perceive high levels of corruption (including in the electoral process) and low levels of regime responsiveness to their concerns. Further, 70 percent see little or no equality before their country’s law. Over two-thirds think their government serves the interest of powerful groups rather than of all the people.22 As a result, they have little confidence in their politicians or in most democratic institutions. Only about one in five trusts political parties, a quarter the congress, and a third the judiciary. Elected presidents fare somewhat better of late (47 percent in 2006), but this might signal a worrying trend toward trust in personalities over institutions.23 Generally, the three most liberal and consolidated democracies—Uruguay, Chile, and Costa Rica—do better on these measures, but even Costa Rica, the region’s oldest continuous democracy, has been gripped by presidential corruption scandals of late. While the percentage of Latin Americans satisfied with the way democracy works improved noticeably in 2006—jumping by 14 percentage points or more in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Bolivia, and Panama as popular presidents delivered on some of their promises—the regional average was still a mere 38 percent, and that was the highest level in a decade.24
Latin America appears to consist of three regions rather than one. There are the countries where democracy seems deeply rooted in norms and expectations, and where people express substantial satisfaction with democratic performance and trust in democratic institutions and leaders. Among this group, Uruguay almost always ranks at the top, followed by Costa Rica and Chile, and, of late, Argentina, Panama, and the Dominican Republic, where presidents have won public confidence by delivering economic progress and avoiding massive scandals. Citizens are more optimistic, believing overwhelmingly (by two-thirds or more) that democracy can bring development. In these countries, people more positively assess the judiciary and the congress and have higher confidence in government in general (near or well above a majority). They perceive a rule of law: that the state has some capacity to enforce the laws and to deliver justice. And a higher percentage of the public (approaching 45 percent) sees some progress in the battle against corruption (compared to a regional average of just 30 percent). Venezuela also falls into this group of more optimistic, pro-democratic countries—a seeming anomaly given President Hugo Chávez’s assault on democratic institutions, but perhaps explained by his populist mobilization and massive social spending. In all seven countries in this group, people perceive a higher quality of democracy than in the rest of Latin America,25 and half of the public (on average) is satisfied with the way democracy works compared to just 27 percent in the other countries surveyed.26
