Disclaimer: The author of this post has never been south of the Rio Grande, is not fluent in Spanish or Portuguese, and gets over 80% of his analysis on Latin America from a single source, The Economist. Please consider this an essay of ignorance that welcomes any and all comments and corrections.
When Ferdinand Magellan hit the southern tip of South America on his famous Around the World in a Helluva Lot More Than 80 Days tour, he believed (according to Wiki) he was seeing the fires of the native Yaghan people in the distance, waiting to ambush the armada. So he called it Tierra del Fuego, “Land of Fire.”
Today, Latin America is on fire.
Massive protests have engulfed nearly every country along the range of the Andes mountains. In Ecuador to the north, protests began around October 3rd, forcing the government to convene outside the capital; nearly simultaneously, protests erupted in its southern neighbor Peru, which is undergoing a constitutional crisis; roughly a week later, Chile erupted into such massive protests that the army was deployed in the streets for the first time since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship; and a couple of weeks after that, hundreds of thousands of Bolivians took to the streets as well. Combined with ongoing, if smoldering, protest movements in Nicaragua and Venezuela, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that something larger is going on in the region.
Not so fast
It’s worth resisting the temptation of the eagle’s eye regional view; the flames may look the same, but the causes are very different.
Peru is a unique case. The protesters, by and large, are not marching against the reformist president; rather they are marching in support of his administration and against the Congress, which is controlled by his political opponents (known as the “Fujimoristas,” named after former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori, whose daughter is the current party leader). Vizcarra has attempted to enact sweeping reforms after a recent history indisputably wracked by political corruption and scandal (Vizcarra’s predecessor was impeached and jailed; the following predecessor was arrested; his predecessor committed suicide as police were planning to arrest him; his predecessor was arrested in the US and awaits extradition; his predecessor was the aforementioned strongman Fujimori, who was impeached and is currently serving 25 years in prison. All for corruption (and the latter also for death squads)). Vizcarra dissolved Congress (under debatable legal circumstances), which in turn declared an alternate interim president. The people are broadly protesting to support the president.
Protests in Ecuador and Chile are of a similar “flavor” to one another, though Chile is much richer in both GDP and the depth of its democratic institutions. Both countries are led by center-right politicians (Ecuador’s Lenín Moreno and Chile’s Sebastian Piñera) who recently succeeded left-leaning leaders (in 2017 and 2018, respectively). Both protests were nominally triggered by rises in the cost of living and austerity measures (cancellation of fuel subsidies in Ecuador, a rise in the metro fare in Chile).
A word of caution. People do not leave their families and jobs in their hundreds of thousands, often risking arrest and injury, to march in the streets to protest a 5 cent fare hike on the metro. If you want one “easy” explanation for protests in the region, one variable lends itself easily. Ask any economist and they’ll tell you that a defining economic characteristic of Latin American economies is income inequality. Take a look at this map of Gini coefficients in 2014, the leading (if imperfect) measure of income inequality (with thanks to Wiki):
Only Southern Africa, a far poorer region, competes with Latin America in this race. If you thought America has a problem with inequality, consider that Argentina– the most equal big economy of the region– is (slightly) worse on the gini index. According to one list, of the 42 most unequal countries in the world, 19 are Latin American.
De-Moralesation
Enter Bolivia. Evo Morales, president since 2006, has been hailed as the first indigenous president in the country’s 200-year history. Along with Rafael Correa (Moreno’s predecessor in Ecuador), Morales has a strong claim to not only have declared war on poverty and inequality, but to have actually done an admirable job of it. According to World Bank figures, the percentage of Bolivians with incomes below $2,000 (in 2011 USD) plummeted from 48.1% when he took power to 25% in 2017. Inequality plummeted. Unlike some of his fellow self-proclaimed socialists, typified by Hugo Chávez, he seems to have done this while running the economy responsibly: average annual per capita GDP growth was reliably over 3% per year during his 13 years in power, well above the regional average. Much of this was fueled by a commodities boom, but it was a well-managed boom.
It is therefore all the more tragic that he chose to end his reign with a lurch toward autocracy. Latin American countries, scarred by decades of rule by strongmen, tend to feel strongly about term limits (Mexican, Paraguayan and Colombian leaders, for example, may not run for re-election at all). Morales called a constitutional referendum to relax the 2-term limit to allow him to run for a fourth consecutive term (the court ruled that his first didn’t count because it preceded the constitutional limit). He lost the vote, but ran for re-election anyway after the court questionably ruled that not allowing him to run again violated his basic human rights. Initial returns from the elections on October 20th indicated he would be forced into a runoff that he ran a significant risk of losing. Then, in what observers have argued was blatant electoral fraud, the count stopped abruptly, and when it resumed, his vote tally was conveniently just above the threshold required to avoid a runoff.
The ensuing protests, then, had a very simple explanation: the president was trying to cheat his way out of an electoral defeat, as demonstrated by a report from the Organization of American States (whose secretary general is a left-wing Uruguayan politician). To Morales’ credit– or perhaps his security forces’– protesters were not shot indiscriminately as in Nicaragua and Venezuela. Once it became clear that both the international community and internal forces, especially the police and military, were not on his side, he resigned and went into exile.
Much a “coup” about nothing
In theory, this moment should be celebrated by democrats (and Democrats) everywhere. A brazen attempt to subvert an election was foiled; widespread pro-democracy protests were successful without significant loss of life; a lurch toward autocracy was nipped in the bud. Yay!
Right?
Well, about that…
So first, let’s get our terminology straight.
Merriam-Webster’s defines a coup as “A change of regime apart from a national election that goes against the people I’m sympathetic to.”
Wait, no, sorry, it’s “a sudden, violent, and illegal seizure of power from a government” (personally I would add “precipitated by security forces”). Except that there was nothing violent about Morales’ departure: he resigned after massive protests against him. There was also nothing illegal about it, though there certainly was something illegal about his attempt to cheat in the elections. In fact, in many ways it’s more correct to think of this as a foiled coup on Morales’ part than a successful one against him. But it would be better not to apply the term at all to this situation.
The red badgerers of coup-rage are hanging on to one particular detail of the affair: Morales resigned immediately after the military called on him to step down (the police had previously sided with the protesters). In fairness, when the military calls on you to step down, they do so backed by guns. And it is true that despotic generals have often come to power on the back of genuine and legitimate mass protests. I still recall my euphoria when another democratically elected president was ejected in a coup on the wave of mass protests against his creeping autocracy. Yet Egypt today is less free than under Morsi.
But there are two key reasons not to call this a coup. First, the military’s move merely capped what was then an inevitable process. Following the damning report of the Organization of American States, which substantiated the fraud claims, Morales had already agreed to new elections and had not said whether he’d run again. The end was clear when the police stood down and joined the protesters. The military called on him to resign and said it would defend protesters if they were attacked– hardly “a violent seizure of power” per Occasio-Cortez.
Crucially, moreover, the military itself has not seized power. I haven’t seen any evidence that the military has taken control, suspended the constitution or otherwise exerted authority over the executive. The current interim leader is the next in line of succession, former Senator Jeanine Áñez. That she is from the opposition should not be a surprise– the socialist leadership all resigned. Incidentally, there’s a lot of chutzpah in the claim that the interim president is illegitimate because she doesn’t have a quorum in Congress– the reason she doesn’t is that Morales’ allies are refusing to participate even though he has already resigned.
It is important to note that since Morales’ resignation, an unacceptable level of violence has been turned on his supporters, according to reports. Dozens have been killed by security forces. Throughout the crisis, mobs on both sides have turned violent. Moreover, the interim president, Áñez, has made statements against Morales, his party and his supporters that go beyond the democratic pale.
All this should be condemned, but it does not change the facts of the initial protest movement and the context of the resignation itself.
The States of America, United
Given the astoundingly rich cultural and historical diversity of Latin America, it is surprising how much regularity one can find in its political history. Nearly all countries in the region became independent in the first three decades of the 19th century. Wikipedia notes that in the latter half of the 20th century nearly every Latin American country (with the notable exception of Costa Rica) was ruled at some point by a US-backed right-wing military dictator. Most of these countries relatively stable democracies in the last few decades of the 20th century.
It was democracy that brought about the “pink tide” of the 21st century. Another striking graph from wikipedia shows how nearly every Latin American country has had a left-wing or socialist leader since 1999:
To be fair, putting all these leaders under the same rubric is too coarse. There is no equivalence between the moderate-left regime of Chile’s Michelle Bachelet, the populism of the Kirchners in Argentina and the radical authoritarian socialism of Maduro in Venezuela. But again, the regularity is striking: being labeled “left” in 2000s and 2010s Latin America tended to be a political boon. A subset of these were explicitly anti-American, particularly the regimes in Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Bolivia. It is hard to escape the sense that this was explicitly a reaction to the earlier years of right-wing, US-backed repression.
Now look at the right edge of that graph. The ousting of Bolivia’s leader– at a referendum and elections that preceded the resignation– marks the counter-reaction to the “pink tide”. Nearly every self-proclaimed socialist leader has been discredited by authoritarianism or corruption. In Venezuela and Nicaragua, leaders remain in power solely due to their willingness to shoot protesters and rig elections. In Ecuador, a socialist regime has been replaced by a center-right reformer from the ruling party. And in Brazil, endemic corruption by the worker’s party led to the revolting presidency of the right-wing Jair Bolsonaro. The last long-standing left-leaning regime in the region, Uruguay’s, was deposed in elections just last month.
Is this the beginning of a new cycle, an upswing of right-wing politics for the next two decades or so? I’m not so sure. The fires of protest of October and November targeted the center-right leaders of Ecuador and Chile as well as the socialist leadership of Bolivia. Bolsonaro’s approval ratings are some of the lowest on record for any Brazilian leader. So I cannot help but wonder if what we are seeing is not a new right-wing cycle, but an end to predictable, uniform cycles altogether. Democracy tends to engender a periodical rejection of incumbents, all the more so when the incumbents took power or kept it through undemocratic ways. With the autocracies of Latin America either fallen or falling, perhaps– just perhaps– what we will see in the coming years is a glorious unpredictability, a break in the “tides” and “cycles” such that every leader will know that they can and will be booted should they ignore the will of their masters, the people. The final unifying trend in Latin American politics may yet be the end of trends.
Albert Hirschman, the great economist who loved Latin America deeply, once wrote about “the right to a nonprojected future as one of the truly inalienable rights of every person and nation.” I have no idea what will happen next in the diverse tapestry of Latin American politics, nor do I think anyone else does. How beautiful is that?
