Old Paradigms & New Openings, Journal of Democracy, January 1992, Obra Poltica

Old Paradigms & New Openings in Latin America

Enrique Krauze is a historian of Mexican development and democracy and editor
of the Mexican magazine Vuelta. He is the author of several books and
numerous essays on cultural and political history. His major study of Mexican
democracy, Democracy Without Adjectives, has gone through five printings since
its release in 1986. His eight-volume study Biography of Power, which features
biographies of eight major twentieth century Mexican leaders, will be published in
English in all abridged one-volume edition by HarperCollins. We hope to publish
comments by other scholars on Mr. Krauze's essay in a subsequent issue.
Latin American history has long been dominated by four grand and enduring
paradigms: militarism, Marxism (both revolutionary and academic), demagogic
populism, and the closed economy. For different reasons, all four have entered
into a common and definitive crisis. Let us consider each in turn.
Scarcely 40 years ago, all of Latin America seemed hopelessly trapped in a
tyrannical backwater of the nineteenth century. In 1950, the distinguished
Mexican historian and man of letters Daniel Coso Villegas estimated that of the
20 countries commonly regarded as forming Latin America, seven (Nicaragua,
Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic)
"lived under regimes of unquestionable tyranny," while nine (EI Salvador,
Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Paraguay, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, and Haiti)
had political systems so fragile that the slightest push could tumble them into
despotism. Only four nations (Mexico, Guatemala, Cuba, and Uruguay) had
viable civic orders, said Coso Villegas, and even these were far from immune to
the traditional Latin American political maladies. Latin America continued to be
the domain par excellence of dictators and dictatorships. A succession of

Old Paradigms & New Openings, Journal of Democracy, January 1992, Obra Poltica

"gorillas" (the local parlance for military rulers), often supported by the United
States, tended to look on their countries as a form of personal property. The
phenomenon persisted until just a short while ago, ending with the fall of two of
the most sinister dictators in the history of Latin America: General Alfredo
Stroessner of Paraguay (a throwback to a nineteenth-century brand of
caudillismo) and General Augusto Pinochet of Chile (an apt student of the
methods used by totalitarians in our own century).
Soon after Fidel Castro seized control of Cuba in early 1959, a wave of intense
revolutionary messianism swept over the entire region. At the onset both liberal
and conservative Latin Americans saw the Cuban Revolution as a fresh
departure that promised to combine the continents panning destiny projected by
Simon Bolvar and Jose Marti with the prophecies of Karl Marx in a surprising
new way. Over time, the prestige of Castro's revolution would wane sharply, but
not before making a deep impression on two generations of Latin university
students, who then sought incessantly to replicate it elsewhere in the region. Few
were mindful of the harsh truths that lay behind the ideological wall (higher and
thicker than the one in Berlin) that divided the West from the "socialist countries";
police states, labor camps, millions of peasants sacrificed to agricultural
collectivization, and economic catastrophe beyond measure. All the Latin
American students and much of the younger political class "knew"-and all they
thought they needed to know-was that this socialist world was the polar opposite
of North American capitalism. Nothing else mattered.
Even the Soviet Union's brutal extinguishment of the Hungarian revolution in
1956 and the Prague Spring in 1968 was not enough to stir serious doubt. When
Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago appeared in 1973, it was dismissed as a longwinded reactionary pamphlet. Instead, the 19705 were a time of revolutionary

Old Paradigms & New Openings, Journal of Democracy, January 1992, Obra Poltica

action in Latin America, as young admirers of CM Guevara, Trotsky, and Mao

threw themselves into urban and rural guerrilla warfare. In Argentina and
Uruguay, this upsurge of leftist violence helped to revive military dictatorships, as
generals in both countries used the threat of revolutionary violence to justify the
overthrow of civilian governments. Something similar happened in Chile, the only
place in the area where a left-wing government won power through elections.
The generation of the 1970s -peaceful radicals and violent revolutionaries alikeended up being sacrificed in a holocaust of assassination, torture, and exile. The
revolution triumphed only in Nicaragua, where the Sandinista comandantes
consciously modeled themselves on Castro and boldly proclaimed their plans to
make their country "the second liberated territory of Latin America."
A third historical paradigm -populism- came back stronger than ever in the 1970s.
One rubbed unbelieving eyes at the spectacle of Juan Peron, now nearly 80
years old, returning to an Argentina completely entranced by myths left over from
the 1940s. In Venezuela, meanwhile, President Carlos Andres Perez outdid
himself in paroxysms of "Third World" bombast. In Mexico, President Luis
Echeverria toured the country distributing largesse that would have to be paid for
by generations yet unborn. His successor, Jose Lpez Portillo, wasted immense
oil wealth on pointless prestige projects and thousands of make-work patronage
jobs for the regime's loyal supporters. In just 12 years, Mexico acquired a foreign
debt of nearly $70 billion. Each step toward bankruptcy was taken, needless to
say, for the sake of the People and Social Justice. At the end of his
administration, when the bill fell due a bit ahead of schedule, Lpez Portillo,
instead of admitting his error, blamed the private banks and "nationalized" (i.e.,
expropriated) their deposits. The manifest futility of this measure did not dissuade
his Peruvian counterpart, Alan Garca, from a like course of action. Indeed,

Old Paradigms & New Openings, Journal of Democracy, January 1992, Obra Poltica

Garca can claim the distinction of having achieved in 4 years (1986-90) what it
took the Mexicans 12 to accomplish: the utter destruction of the nation's
economy.
The fourth classic paradigm in Latin American life is the closed economy. Like the
other three, it has deep roots in the past, especially the three centuries of
Spanish domination. In the twentieth century, Keynesian ideas and other notions
connected with the welfare state converged to shape a regional economic
ideology that stressed the alleged need for import substitution, an overvalued
exchange rate, and an omnipotent state to act as supervisor, spender,
entrepreneur, and regulator. This credo dictated that economies should be guided
not by the invisible hand of the market, but rather by the all-too-visible hand of
the state.

The Fading of the Four Paradigms

Throughout the 1980s, and to an increasingly perceptible degree, these four
paradigms began to lose ground. Militarism sent itself into what might almost be
called voluntary retirement-sometimes through manifest incompetence,
sometimes through the combined effects of internal democratic pressure and
international sanctions. Either way, the political generals found themselves
becoming anachronisms-more appropriate to the national museum than the
presidential palace. Today the man on horseback provides material less for
dramatic novels than for Hollywood spoofs. Unfortunately for the Sandinistas, the
news arrived late in Nicaragua. It was only in the final stages of his presidential
campaign that Comandante Daniel Ortega realized too late that his military

Old Paradigms & New Openings, Journal of Democracy, January 1992, Obra Poltica

costume inspired more fear and distaste than support. In the last few days before
his defeat, he was always seen in a flowery sportshirt.
The messianic tension originally produced by the Cuban Revolution has
gradually dissipated for diverse reasons. Perhaps the first among these is the
worldwide discredit into which the classic revolutionary model has fallenparticularly with regard to its claim to hold the key to the problem of social justice.
The peaceful revolutions of 1989 provided no validation of the tradition of 1789.
On the contrary, the velvet revolutionaries of 1989 showed an acute awareness
of the human costs of modem revolutionary politics, costs that have been
obscured for much of the past two hundred years by a mist of romanticism and
historicism. A growing critique of the Russian Revolution was bound to have
some impact upon its ideological progeny in China and Cuba.
No less important has been the great awakening that has seized the countries of
Central Europe. Immersed in its revolutionary daydreaming, the Latin American
generation of 1968 paid little heed to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and
a decade later looked on the war in Afghanistan with almost complete
indifference. Things began to change with the rise of Solidarity in Poland. Here
were the workers themselves-the supposed subjects of Marxist redemptionprotesting against their redeemers. The ideal universe of Marxist theory was
punctured by bad news from reality. The shadow of doubt and discredit reached
even these lands of perennial credulity. The Salvadoran people ignored their
guerrillas' repeated calls for a general insurgency; the Nicaraguan people, tired of
war, scarcity, and speeches, voted with and for common sense. During an
unexpected attack of candor, Sandinista patriarch Tomas Borge admitted that
perhaps his ideas about reality did not quite coincide with ... well, reality, and that
it was not reality that was at fault after all: "We were guilty of intolerance and

Old Paradigms & New Openings, Journal of Democracy, January 1992, Obra Poltica

arrogance."
Along with military rule and Marxism, populism has also fallen into a certain
disrepute. Luis "Lula" da Silva lost his bid for the presidency of Brazil, and though
Carlos Menem won election in Argentina on a populist platform, he quickly
discarded its economic planks. What remained was local color-his penchant for
playing football with the Argentine national team, racing sportscars, and spouting
glib rhetoric. The same thing has happened, to a lesser degree, with the newmodel Carlos Andrs Prez, who today bears scant resemblance to the
demagogic orator of the 1970s. The preeminent populist of the 1980s was
without a doubt Alan Garca, whose case reveals the incredible speed with
which, in today's world, populism runs head on into economic reality. In Peru's
1990 elections, Garca's APRA party-supposedly the country's best-organizedwon barely 16 percent of the vote.
In the same period, state-dominated economies piled up a clear record of relative
failure. Meanwhile, it was becoming impossible to ignore the success of the
alternative model typified by the export-driven economies of East Asia's "four
dragons" (Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea), which began their
cycle of development much later than Latin America, in fact a mere three
decades ago. But one need not wander that far afield: the excellent results of the
market-oriented therapies administered in Bolivia and Chile speak for
themselves. It is no accident that almost all the nations of Latin America are
opting, with local variations, to put their economies in order by recourse to the
invisible hand of the market.
The fading of these four grand paradigms may be the principal aspect of the
changes now under way in Latin America, but it is not the only one; we must

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consider as well the positive image that both democracy and economic freedom
now enjoy. Spain's successful transition to democracy (together with the adoption
of an open economic model by the Socialist government of Premier Felipe
Gnzalez) had an exemplary impact beginning in the late 1970s. But beyond
influences and theories, the most crucial catalysts of change were the voters of
Chile, Nicaragua, Argentina, and El Salvador. We speak here of a virtual
continental plebiscite on how to deal with disagreements through peaceful
means; how to achieve an orderly, legal transition from one regime to another;
how to build a market economy in which the state acts as an efficient, imaginative
promoter of justice and welfare, not a bureaucratic monster-cold, impersonal, and
unproductive to boot. Only Fidel Castro's Caribbean island-prison still boasts the
four signs of Latin American backwardness: olive-drab uniforms, huge posters of
Marx and Lenin, endless speeches, and an economy that devours the means of
its own subsistence. But apart from this regrettable vestige of the past, Latin
America is tending toward equilibrium, realism, and responsibility-which is to say,
toward genuine maturity.

Paths to Consolidation
Although some countries will be more susceptible to backsliding than others, it is
possible to imagine that if present trends persist for another ten years, Latin
America will enter the twenty-first century with governments that are more
respectful of law and liberty, and with societies that are both more just and more
prosperous. The region can gain all this, moreover, without necessarily losing its
cultural and historical identity.
The first thing needed for the consolidation of this new maturity is a scrupulous
respect for the rules of the democratic game. There is much talk of the recent

Old Paradigms & New Openings, Journal of Democracy, January 1992, Obra Poltica

economic success of Chile under the dictatorship of General Pinochet. There are
even those who go so far as to argue that economic freedom is fully compatible
with political dictatorship. But the defeats, first of Pinochet himself in the 1988
plebiscite, and then of his finance minister and would-be successor Hernn Bchi
in the 1989 presidential race, show that Chileans regard political freedom as
desirable in itself. Something quite similar occurred in Spain under Franco. With
time and a broader perspective, it will be seen that the maturity that has generally
characterized Chilean politics over the past hundred years-and which has
survived two decades of chaos and dictatorship-has favored economic
development.
The state must learn to limit itself to its proper role and dimensions. It would be
naive to think that the ghost of the old Spanish colonial state-with its enduring
paternalism, corruption, bureaucracy, and extreme centralization-can be
exorcised completely. Rather it will in all likelihood continue to exert a profound
influence over Latin America's political culture. But total exorcism is not really
necessary, for with very few exceptions (Argentina during the "dirty war," the first
decade of the Pinochet regime in Chile) the Latin American state has never
seriously sought either to enslave civil society or to assert total control over the
economy. (The only Latin American state that has persistently tried to do both is
Castro's Cuba.) The state in Latin America has always had a legitimate missionusually carried out inefficiently-to provide social services, an echo of the
Thomistic notion of the "common good" that infused the original political theology
of these societies. A sense of the natural equality of men has prevented these
countries from engaging in violent ethnic, racial, or national conflicts, typically
fueled by the state itself. A no less deeply rooted idea of natural liberty (at times
shading toward chaos and anarchy in actual practice) has prevented the

Old Paradigms & New Openings, Journal of Democracy, January 1992, Obra Poltica

consolidation of serious police states.

Latin American governments ought to take advantage of these conditions, which
furnish them a modest stock of inherited legitimacy, to begin working for
institutional changes starting with the state itself. The reforms should aim not only
at curbing excesses in the size and role of the state, but should also seek to
facilitate rather than obstruct the energies of civil society. If the major political
task of Latin American politics in the nineteenth century was the separation of
church and state, the twentieth should conclude with the undoing of the state's
excessive entanglement in economic life. Here Cuba is the most extreme case of
all. Castro's legitimacy has never been put to the test at the ballot box, but
perhaps it exists for all that. Its origin, as odd as it might seem, lies in the old
Spanish colonial political culture, in which the peoples of America did not
delegate power, but rather surrendered it to a leader who personified the general
will. To be sure, it was not a matter of unconditional surrender: in the event of
flagrant abuses of power, some neo-Thomist philosophers like the sixteenthcentury Jesuit, Juan de Mariana, prescribed a more drastic remedy than
impeachment or a referendum-namely, tyrannicide. Castro's security forces have
no need to leaf through the classics of early Spanish political thought to know
this.
The implementation of a new economic policy in Latin America will require time
and patience. The previous experiments in economic populism were given
decades to prove that they did not work; the new dispensation deserves no less
of a chance to prove itself. But beyond the macroeconomic requisites of
balanced budgets, realistic exchange rates, consolidated debt, and competitive
prices, Latin America needs a microeconomic revolution. Until now, the only two
prophets of this revolution have been men well ahead of their times: the Peruvian

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10

Hernando de Soto and the Mexican Gabriel Zaid.

The original ideas of de Soto on the informal economy are far better known than
those of his Mexican colleague, who since 1973 has been proposing a
"Copernican revolution" involving the transfer of cheap means of production to
the poor. According to Zaid, the hegemony of our dominant cultural cliques
(always predominantly academic and urban) prevents us from comprehending
and respecting peasant life and culture on its own terms. Thus we seek a
demagogic -that is, impossible- leveling through government employment
dispensed from above, instead of attempting the same thing from below through
fostering individual economic empowerment.
De Soto and Zaid believe that the prosperity of their countries-and by extension,
of all Latin America-s-depends upon the proliferation of small, independent
proprietors. If the modem Latin American state is genuinely looking for new wine
to pour into its historic bottles of social concern, the detailed ideas of these two
theoreticians are readily available. All that is needed are imaginative engineers,
entrepreneurs, and economists-but not government functionaries-to help put
them into practice.
Latin Americans are history's most prolific constitution writers. The more chaotic
the country, it seems, the more intense its interest in drawing up new
fundamental charters-Haiti has allowed itself over a hundred. Such a fever for
legislation can serve as an index of the powerlessness that the average citizen
feels before governmental authority. Latin Americans have found democratic
culture easier to essay than genuine republican institutions. There is a general
lack of solid, respected, and independent judicial bodies to mediate between the
state and the individual citizen. Latin America needs new legal systems modeled

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11

frankly and unashamedly on the Anglo-Saxon pattern. Just as the colonial

tradition disdained elections and votes, it also imparted a justice excessively
bound to codes, too much inclined toward bureaucratic delay (and bribery), and
too little anchored in a sense of individual and community responsibility. Would it
not be opportune now, for example, to introduce the jury system-selectively at
first, at the local or regional levels?

Toward an Intellectual Reformation

These and other changes would be far easier to effect if our countries had
opponents of statism whose stature were comparable to that of, say, Vaclav
Havel, Andrei Sakharov, or Adam Michnik. Unfortunately, in Latin America today
the intelligentsia is stubbornly antiliberal and continues to favor Marxism,
populism, and statism. Certain brands of militarism also hold charm, for while the
intellectuals are decided enemies of generals on the right, they have not found
equally repugnant certain generals of the left like Castro, Velasco Alvarado of
Peru (1968- 75), and the Sandinista comandantes.
A fixation on abstract ideology has rendered our cultured classes utterly
impervious to empirical evidence or rational argument. Not even the stunning
events of the last three years have been enough to make them reconsider their
core assumptions. They continue to denounce private property (their own
excepted, of course) and cling fast to their faith in the state (which still often pays
their salaries in one form or another). For them, the failure of "really existing"
socialism merely seals the triumph of "ideal" socialism. Their reflexive antiAmericanism also remains unabated. While not actual combatants in guerrilla

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campaigns, they are accomplished warriors on the more congenial battlefields

provided by university campuses, editorial pages, lecture halls, and cafe tables.
In not a few countries, they dominate the whole apparatus of culture. Few among
them would favor the actual installation of a communist regime, but they remain
wedded to political and economic populism. Gabriel Zaid has likened this
intellectual establishment to the clergy of the Counter-Reformation. Anyone who
has observed these modem "clerics" closely and read their sermons or listened
to their homilies cannot help suspecting that the last Stalinist on the planet will
die not in the Soviet Union, but on the campus of some Latin American university.
To neutralize the influence that this bureaucratic-religious-social caste wields
over Latin American intellectual life would take something on the order of the
Reformation. But while we await a new Luther to challenge the guardians of
orthodoxy from within the temple-or at least a new Erasmus to introduce humor,
tolerance, and humanism into the dense atmosphere of secular
neoscholasticism-our governments and civil societies would do well to sponsor a
broader opening to the democratic West in all matters relating to the free flow
and discussion of ideas. Visit any bookshop in Latin America and you will see
what I mean: major intellectual traditions and important publishing industries (like
Argentina's) have been ruined after decades of ideological simplification and
populism.
The Roman Catholic Church-which has played an objectively liberating role in
both Chile and Nicaragua-could also take advantage of its continuing prestige,
which is rivaled by that of no other institution in the region. In order to do so,
however, it must address itself to an urgent, but far from simple task: to recover
certain liberal and Erasmian roots predating the Council of Trent, doctrines that,
let us recall here, laid the groundwork for the societies of the New World. What

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we lack are not Catholic democrats, but Catholic intellectuals. For many years
now, Latin American Catholicism has been suffering from a lack of creativity, as
its attempt to imitate Marxism through liberation theology definitively proves.

The Present Situation

Even to try to sketch the roles that the four old paradigms and the new
tendencies are likely to play in each country is to run the risk of trafficking in
soothsaying. The countries best positioned to achieve democratic consolidation
are those that can combine revived traditions of democratic governance with
sensible economic policies. Chile, Uruguay, Costa Rica, and Venezuela all fall
into this category. Bolivia, with its successful economic stabilization plan and its
recent achievement of a political understanding between left, center, and right
(the so-called National Democratic Accord), might also qualify, though in a
different way. So would Colombia, were it not for the awful plague of drugs and
drug-related violence that now afflicts it.
Five countries whose common problem is the residue of caudillismo are currently
lingering in the shadows of political uncertainty. They are Honduras, Ecuador,
Paraguay, the Dominican Republic, and Panama. The relapse of any of these
countries into despotism would scarcely have continent-wide repercussions. One
cannot say as much if a reversion to historic type occurred in Argentina, Brazil,
Mexico, or Nicaragua. A penchant for strongly populist politics survives in all four.
In Argentina, for example, the rhetorical populism currently practiced by
President Menem could be overtaken by the sort of real populism that his
quondam followers, the Peronist descamisados, still cherish. In Brazil, Lula
continues to present serious opposition to the government of President Collor de
Mello. Who nonetheless still enjoys the double blessing of popularity and

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legitimacy. In Mexico, Cuauhtmoc Crdenas, son of the most popular populist

president of the twentieth century, leads a tenacious opposition to the
government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. The latter has achieved an
impressive personal respect and credibility, but has not yet been able to transmit
legitimacy to his party, the hidebound and retrograde PRl.
The Mexican government and its institutions are strong; the new economic policy
has been well and truly crafted; still, the country is gripped by a vague
uncertainty. Mexico has not yet achieved its transition to democracy, and the
country's powerful populist movements are still firmly allied to the antiliberal
orthodoxy of the universities. Cardenismo may yet spring some surprises in the
elections of 1994.
In Nicaragua, the risk of a new Cuba has passed, but lingering populism will
continue to delay the recuperation of a country that has suffered terribly from war,
natural disaster, and poverty. Even so, one cannot but feel that if the Sandinistas
do manage to return to power in the future, they will govern in a more open and
intelligent manner than before. The fiction that the comandantes represent the
whole Nicaraguan people ended the day the latter was able to exercise its right
to vote.
Peru still suffers from an apparently interminable internal war that could
eventually push it into the kind of disintegration which has overtaken Lebanon;
fortunately, it has veered off the path to economic disaster, and continues to be a
democracy. El Salvador is on the verge of becoming one. Haiti seems fated to
remain chaotic. In still fragile Guatemala, guerrilla warfare could reescalate,
perhaps precipitating the entry of a new populist strongman. The former dictator,
Efran Ros Montt, had until recently been lurking in the wings, apparently waiting

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to play just this role. Cuba, as always, is a case apart. Some hope that Castro
will go peacefully. But a considerable portion of the population still seems to
believe that to suffer a chronic lack of both bread and liberty is to achieve a
glorious destiny, and Castro himself keeps preaching "Socialism or Death." Who
knows what will come of all this?
On the whole, however, the picture is far from discouraging. Indeed, we are
witnessing the highest degree of maturity that Latin America has attained in this
century. The end of the Cold War has written finis to real socialism-the socialism
that has actually been practiced, as distinguished from the Utopia of sentimental
dreamers. This circumstance holds two additional benefits for Latin America: the
North Americans wiII abandon their penchant for paranoia ("The Russians are
coming!"), and the Latin Americans their penchant for blackmail ("Yes . . . the
Reds are coming!"). As mutual distrust wanes, Latin America may yet discover
what Albert Hirschman calls "the attractions of being attractive." As for the United
States, it may respond to this attraction with a new attitude of respect and with
investments, which up till now it has largely withheld.
If the generals remain in salutary retirement, only one thing remains to darken
Latin American life: the unholy alliance between the Latin American intellectual
clerisy and the populist politicians. Were they to achieve power, they would
reverse the recent gains in maturity and start new cycles of economic
deterioration. Worse still, the people might fail to hold such leaders fully
accountable for the results of their folly. For the secret of populism is as old as
demagoguery itself: to postpone answers, to avoid responsibility, to confound
society's efforts to judge those who govern it. The exploitation of cheap sentiment
and popular ignorance will always seem like an easy way out. But at this point in
the century, to close the economies of these countries and impoverish still further

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their public life would mean not merely to lose a few more years, but to sacrifice
the future itself.

Journal of Democracy, January 1992