Dictatorship fodder

Carlos Alberto Montaner

As I write this, the elections in Peru still have not been held, but, for the purposes of what I want to say, that makes no difference. An alarmed voice phones me from Lima and tells me two surveys give Ollanta Humala as the winner. Another poll favors Alan García.

Humala is the collectivist candidate. If he attains power, he will take apart the Peruvian republic, along with its three independent branches -- that fragile system of checks and balances -- and in their place, after he changes the Constitution, he will build a Chavist grotesquerie, wasteful and corrupt, based on a vertical authority that he will wield at will, while leaning on the armed forces.

Such an outcome is possible. Either candidate, if he wins, will win by a handful of ballots. In Peru and all of South America, in varying degrees, there is a high percentage of antidemocratic and antirepublican voters who would be perfectly happy to be governed by an enlightened caudillo. They are dictatorship fodder.

Engineer Alberto Fujimori was something like a right-wing Ollanta Humala, and he always had a lot of backing. In 1992, when he staged a coup from the seat of power and dissolved Parliament, 62 percent of all Peruvians supported that monstrosity, surveys said. That same year, a similar percentage of Venezuelans applauded Lieut. Col. Hugo Chávez when he attempted to overthrow by force the legitimate government of Carlos Andrés Pérez, despite the hundreds of cadavers strewn over the streets of a blood-drenched Caracas.

Why are so many Latin Americans hostile to the republican ideals that were surely the same ideals held by the heroes of their independence? The obvious answer is that, in their opinion, the State that embodies republican thought has failed them. In large areas of Latin America there are no democratic convictions because the State has not fulfilled its basic commitment to guarantee life, security, property and justice, those natural rights supposedly enjoyed by individuals.

Good government was supposed to come with the republic but, in general, that has not been the case. The most visible perception is that presidents are incompetent and corrupt. Justice works late, badly or never. Parliament is the most discredited of all institutions. Education and public health are usually disastrous. The police is sometimes as prone to crime as a gang of criminals, except that the number of policemen is greater.

Of course, we musn't generalize. There are at least three Latin American societies where the people seem to feel relatively comfortable with the republican institutions: Chile, Costa Rica and Uruguay. Panama and El Salvador may be about to join that group. And in those three countries we observe the same encouraging sign: a reasonably efficient State where the big majorities, formed by the poorest sectors, obtain an acceptable minimum of public services. Practically everybody can study, be cured of illness, appeal to justice and call the police without the fear that the cops will ransack the house, rape the grandmother or extort a bribe.

Then there's the horrendous disgrace of the marginalized people in that huge Group E, who live in unhealthy and brutal urban slums, who generally lack an education and a job, who will never find regular employment in a formal and organized enterprise, all of which condemns them to eke a living from an unstable mixture of crimes, tenuous commercial activities on the streets, and the compassion of other, less unfortunate people.

In countries like the Dominican Republic, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras and Venezuela, that Group E accounts for about 20 percent of the population. And that rate doesn't decline easily because -- to make things worse -- the women in that group have a high fertility rate, which goes hand in hand with a perennially irresponsible paternity, thus guaranteeing the perpetuation of the circle of misery.

What loyalty to the State or to republican ideals can be expected from that crowd without hope or illusions, people who live from miracles without clearly understanding the origin of their misery? Not surprisingly, the attitude of many of those people is one of resentment and anger, accompanied by the understandable inclination to follow the music of any demagogic Hamelin Pied Piper armed with a revolutionary discourse who assures them he will pluck them from the horror in which they live, even though his only achievement will be to destroy the middle classes, impoverish the wealthy, weaken the entrepreneurial fabric and "Calcuttize" the urban environment.

The result of this disastrous performance? More dictatorship fodder that will support the candidate in the next election.

June 4, 2006

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