This week, RBI director John Torpey interviews Enrique Desmond Arias, a professor of political science at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, about recent developments in Latin American politics. Arias delves into Peru’s recent political unrest and how it resembles the times of Fujimori’s authoritarianism and discusses the origins of polarization in the politics of Brazil.  Arias also assesses the overall political situation of Latin America and highlights four phenomena: military and police repression addressed disproportionately to historically marginalized groups (not necessarily staging coups), the complacency of some political groups about authoritarianism, people’s unhappiness about governments that don’t deliver, and, finally, the efforts of some governments to restore and strengthen democracy.

John Torpey  00:00

Not long ago, commentators thought they were observing a shift to the left in Latin America, especially in Chile and in Brazil with the return of Lula da Silva to office.  But then, soon after a democratic election in Peru, things started to turn in a bad direction.  Already Venezuela’s authoritarian regime has descended into disaster, and Nicaragua has as well.  The overall picture thus seems more like one of democratic stagnation and erosion.  What’s going on in Latin America?  

John Torpey  00:47

Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues.  My name is John Torpey, and I’m director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  

We are fortunate to have with us today Enrique Desmond Arias, who is the Marxe Chair of Western Hemisphere Affairs and Professor of Political Science at Baruch College and at the Graduate Center. He is the author of several books, including Criminal Enterprises and Governance in Latin America and the Caribbean (Cambridge University Press) and Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro: Trafficking, Social Networks, and Public Security (University of North Carolina Press), and is co-editor of Cocaine: From Coca Fields to the Streets (Duke University Press) and Violent Democracies in Latin America (Duke University Press). Thanks for being with us today, Enrique Desmond Arias.

Enrique Desmond Arias  02:00

Thank you for having me.

John Torpey  02:02

Great to have you with us. So let’s start with the current troubles in Peru. First, a new President was selected, then he tried to suddenly start ruling by decree, and was soon chased out of office. Now many Peruvians seem to want him back, even though he’s tended towards this authoritarian turn. And all this unfolds against the backdrop of a history of back and forth between democracy and authoritarianism in Peru, so can you explain to us what’s going on?

Enrique Desmond Arias  02:34

Yeah, Peru is a really complex situation. It’s a country where there hasn’t just been back and forth between democracy and authoritarianism. So you can think back to the 1990s to the Fujimori regime, which also begun with a self-coup by President Fujimori at the time in response to instability of the country, a vigorous civil conflict that was going on, as well as a host of other problems and unwillingness on the part of Fujimori to find a way to work with Congress. That became a legitimate authoritarian regime, with repression and with the security services working against different elements of the opposition in that country.

Enrique Desmond Arias  03:27

In the last six years, Peru has returned to what I would characterize as instability rather than a move back and forth with authoritarianism. That’s part of a longer history in the country. In 2016, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski was elected president and he was connected to the international system and was well respected in the academy. He had an incredibly difficult time; he was elected facing a highly polarized Congress with Fujimori’s daughter, Keiko Fujimori, leading the opposition. So she was his main opponent. Her party and allied parties have a tremendous amount of power in Congress.

Enrique Desmond Arias  04:18

And despite [the fact that] Kuczynski was leading the country as president, he didn’t have control of Congress. And so Kuczynski goes through in this highly polarized country between a right wing that’s associated with former president Fujimori and everybody else, which includes people who are more in the center like Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, and people who are on the left like Castillo. It has led to polarization over the years, so Kuczynski began his presidency under pressure from the opposition in Congress. And in fact, he was subjected to two separate impeachment processes. [For] Kuczynski, his way out of the impeachment was to negotiate and offer financial support to members of his opposition, and there were videos of this.

Enrique Desmond Arias  05:23

In addition to his implication in the Odebrecht scandals — and this gets into bigger questions related to Brazil’s Odebrecht (the Brazilian company) region-wide corruption issues, which get into questions of why there’s stagnation broadly in democracies in the region — he also was videotaped trying to purchase the votes of members of the opposition in Congress. And there was a video of this. All of this put together leads to the pressure that forces Kuczynski from office. He is succeeded by his vice president, and then this vice president is succeeded by another political official as a result of constitutional succession. So during that presidential mandate, you ultimately have three presidents before you get to Castillo’s election.

Enrique Desmond Arias  06:28

And the results of Castillo’s election are roughly the same. It’s an incredibly close election. There’s less than one percentage difference. And Castillo also doesn’t control the Congress. The midpoint of the Congress runs through a large group of independents, who are not particularly beholden to any party. And there is a strong right wing opposition in Congress organized around Keiko Fujimori’s party. And Castillo himself comes from the left in Peruvian politics. He’s far on the left. So different from Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, who is under pressure because of opposition issues [related to] what Fujimori is trying to do [given] the general dynamics of Peruvian politics.

Enrique Desmond Arias  07:17

And he kind of gets mired in this opposition dynamic and then his own corruption issues. Castillo makes people a little bit more anxious, because he’s further to the left. And he represents a different kind of approach to Peruvian politics. He represents the possibility of more radical changes. Now, he doesn’t control Congress, so that’s how far he can go with any of these changes or hopes of reforms in the country. But he is further over to the left, which makes people on the right even more anxious. Castillo was subjected to, during his relatively brief time in office, three separate impeachment proceedings. 

Enrique Desmond Arias  08:09

Impeachment is something that I probably need to draw some attention to in Peruvian politics because I’ve now talked about five impeachments of the President in just the opening minutes of this podcast. There aren’t really any restrictions on when an impeachment can be brought in the Peruvian Congress. There are norms in the Peruvian constitution that say you can impeach people for this or that, but they’re incredibly broad. So, Castillo was impeached for a kind of moral incapacity, which is very general. So he’s impeached multiple times by the Congress where there are multiple attempts at impeachment, which creates ‘stresses’ in the administration. And then he eventually responds to this pressure from the right with a self-coup attempt.

Enrique Desmond Arias  08:57

When he comes on TV and says, “I’m closing Congress” – and the last person to do this in Peru was, of course, Alberto Fujimori back in the 90s. And he’s doing this against a Congress that’s ultimately at this point controlled, if somewhat marginally, but controlled by putting on his daughter. So he attempts to self-coup, but the self-coup is a complete failure. On the positive side, and I think what’s at least modestly encouraging about that particular part of this episode in Peruvian history, people in the military and in Castillo’s cabinet somewhat did not align themselves with the coup attempt. People started resigning. There was pushback on this immediately, and the self-coup failed. And that reflects over the course of 30 years a greater commitment to democracy. However flawed, that ‘democracy’ has improved a greater commitment to democracy in the country, at least at the elite level. And maybe I’ve overdrew this a bit, but I found that the fact that he didn’t achieve the coup was somewhat encouraging.

John Torpey  10:05

Well, indeed, that does sound somewhat encouraging. I have to say that I have a student who just returned just a couple of days ago from Peru, and he was clearly very spooked. Very kind of distressed about what was going on in his country, his family there, he’s very worried. And what you say sounds like a positive development. Indeed it is. But how do you think this is going to play out?

Enrique Desmond Arias  10:33

Yeah, so that was what I was gonna get to. So I thought that moment of him not achieving the coup was kind of a good thing. But now, of course, things have kind of gone in the wrong direction. So he’s been replaced by Dina Boluarte. She’s, as I understand it, somewhat not on the far right. But nevertheless, she is someone who is leading the country in her efforts to address the social unrest associated with Castillo’s downfall in a somewhat repressive way.

Enrique Desmond Arias  11:12

[For] Peru today — with the legitimate concerns of a population that’s been excluded from political power for much of the country’s history and who elected a reformist president — this isn’t accepted. He’s been forced from power. He had a substantial degree of popular legitimacy, he won the election, even if by a small margin, that’s still winning the election. And, people have protested against the change, people have protested against the shift of the government to the right; he was succeeded not by somebody closely associated with his political agenda. But, politics begins to move in the country. And people are dissatisfied with this. People are protesting.

Enrique Desmond Arias  12:16

There’s a history in recent years of “estallidos sociales,” social explosions in Latin America, in Chile. In Colombia, there have been major protests. When I was in Panama this summer, there was something approaching an “estallido”, which is more like a labor strike, massive labor strikes that shut the country down for a couple of weeks. But there’s been a process of these types of major protests going on. And these types of major protests are often associated with some type of repression, which happened in Chile and Colombia. I think the repression has been quite acute in Peru. And it’s led to injuries, massacres, often in regional capitals such as Ayacucho. And they reflected a degradation of the commitment to democracy and the commitment to the rule of law in terms of the practices of the government, as it interacts with everyday people.

Enrique Desmond Arias  13:30

And I think this is an important moment to kind of distinguish between what I said was kind of positive about the turning back of Castillo’s coup attempt last year, and what’s happened since then. So, a couple of minutes ago, I said, “Hey, it’s really good. You know, the elite kind of came together and said, hey, we’re not going to have a coup.” That was good. But that’s the elite saying to itself, “You know, we respect the Constitution, however flawed the Constitution is, however flawed contemporary politics are, and we are going to follow the rules that leave us as an elite in power.” But it’s something else to say, “Okay, now, we took out this president with a certain degree of popular legitimacy, people are protesting, we’re going to engage in full blown repression against that population and massacre people.”

Enrique Desmond Arias  14:27

So the elites respect themselves. [They] are respecting on some level the constitutional order, but the way in which that constitutional order gets applied to the population, especially the poor in the country, is very different. People are being injured, people are getting massacred.

Enrique Desmond Arias  14:41

And I think that gap between those two outcomes reflects a lot about what’s going on with Latin American politics today and a lot about the stagnation that we’re going to talk about a little bit more explicitly later in the podcast, which is that there’s a commitment to liberal order on some level. So more so than there was in the 70s, or the 80s.

Enrique Desmond Arias  15:03

The elite are interested in kind of respecting that [and] protecting themselves. There’s a broader commitment to that, and very often from sectors of the elite that historically haven’t been right. The military often are more committed to the constitutional order, perhaps not perfectly committed to the constitutional order than they were back in the 70s, when they were staging coups and massive repression in many countries. At the same time, the way in which the police, the military and the elites think about the treatment of protesters, think about the treatment of the poor and the working class often operates utterly outside the robust guarantees of basic rights that are in the liberal constitutions. These elites purport to respect when they’re talking about their own power, and their own relationship with each other at the highest levels of government. 

John Torpey  16:01

Right. Well, that does indeed all lead into the larger discussion of stagnation, erosion, etc, which you obviously have important things to say about. But let’s look at one other important recent case of elections. The biggest country in the region, of course, is Brazil. And it’s had its kind of ‘Trumpy’ experience. I suppose you could say that Trump knock-off, Bolsonaro, has lost an election and replaced by Lula da Silva, who, of course, ran the country in the past before being sent to jail on dubious corruption charges. But I wonder what you would say about the status of democracy there. Bolsonaro made a lot of noises about not recognizing the outcome, but then he left for Florida. And then when his people seem to have attacked the government buildings, it looks sort of like January 6, but in a certain sense, was very different. There were very few people actually, I guess, in those buildings at the time, and the leader of the movement, insofar as that’s the way to describe him, was really no longer in the country. So he wasn’t directing this operation in the same kind of way. So tell us, how do you see what’s happened in Brazil as a result of these elections and a result of the apparent departure of Bolsonaro from politics?

Enrique Desmond Arias  17:37

So Brazil’s experience in recent years is not so different from Peru’s. They’re obviously very different countries; Brazil is a much wealthier, more powerful country. There’s a different dynamic to politics. Lula da Silva is not Castillo, he’s a more moderate and experienced leader, a sophisticated leader of the country. And, indeed, even a historic leader of the country, having served two terms as president and having run in almost every presidential election since 1989.

Enrique Desmond Arias  18:09

And having been an important leader in the movement away from demand from authoritarianism in the 1970s and 1980s. But the story, despite all of that, isn’t that different. The election of Lula was really close last year. He had less than 51% of the vote, it was a slightly more than 1% victory against Bolsonaro. And I think to put that narrow victory in perspective, it’s important to reflect on how that victory was achieved. So Lula’s vice president is a man named Geraldo Alckmin, who is a powerful politician with the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB). Alckmin was, I believe, the governor of Sao Paulo. He was a candidate for president himself. He was a major antagonist of Lula when he was president. The PSDB is the only other main party, other than Bolsonaro, that has competed for the presidency since 1994 with the Workers Party, the PT. 

Enrique Desmond Arias  19:24

So Brazil has a complex multiparty system due to its voting process for Congress. Peru has a similarly diffused legislative structure, which is part of where these challenges are coming from. Parties aren’t really well aggregated and organized. But at the presidential level it’s been a bipartisan system for the past almost 30 years between the PSDB on the center-right and the PT on the center left in Brazil. So how does Lula ultimately win? In the election, he established an alliance with the other main pro-democratic party, the only other party that held power other than the PT between 1994 and 2016. In addition to that, they also incorporated into their coalition a few other parties, which actually go back to including all of the parties to win presidential elections before Bolsonaro.

Enrique Desmond Arias  20:28

Since 1989, and I was researching this a little bit last night, I was surprised, because the president who was elected in 1989, Fernando Collor de Mello, pursued a kind of radical inflation cutting agenda. He became involved and mired in scandals and was forced from office. So I hadn’t quite digested how that piece of the Brazilian political establishment actually had been incorporated into this alliance. But basically, the entire upper level of the political establishment aligns with Lula to run against Bolsonaro because they feel so threatened by the politics of this kind of ‘Trumpish’ populist movement. But they only win by a little bit more than 1% of the votes. And so that’s an important thing to keep in mind here like they won.

Enrique Desmond Arias  21:22

But the entire political establishment got together, and they kind of just pulled it off. Maybe that was closest to Pedro Castillo, a little bit more margin of error, but not too much. And that reflects polarization in Brazil, frustration by a large portion of the population in Brazil with different policies and dynamics in the country. And it reflects a relatively weak commitment to– if not democratic process, which I think is a little bit more complicated– a relatively weak commitment to addressing the meaningful reforms that are required to kind of get Brazil moving forward. And I would say if we want to think about Brazil, and the latter part of your question, which is, can Lula fend the right off?

Enrique Desmond Arias  22:17

I think we have to bring this question back to 2016. And again, look at Congress a bit. So between 2002 and 2014, the Workers Party won four straight presidential elections, Lula won twice. And then he was succeeded by his chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff in 2010 and 2014. During this period of time, the Workers Party developed an alliance with centrist elements of the Brazilian political establishment. To keep themselves in power, they become really dominant. They play important roles in leading different parts of the country, they elect governors in the Northeast, which was unexpected when Lula originally came to power. And they are actually successful policy wise with developing programs like the Bolsa Familia (the Family Scholarship is sort of what it translates to) which is a conditional cash transfer program, which was successful in modestly reducing wealth inequality in Brazil, one of the most unequal countries in the world.

Enrique Desmond Arias  23:27

So these are our remarkable substantive policy accomplishments that aren’t terribly radical. These are achieved by cash transfers. There’s no land reform. This isn’t major wealth transfers. This is people being taxed the way they’re taxed in Brazil and just having more of that money dedicated to putting money in the pockets of the poor, or people from families that have been excluded and disadvantaged over the course of Brazilian history.

Enrique Desmond Arias  24:03

So they achieved getting elected in part out of alliances. In the 2000s, there were a couple of scandals, very significant scandals in Brazil, where the Lula administration at the time was buying the votes of members of centrist parties in order to pass legislation. So this was the Mensalão scandal, the Monthly Payments scandal and the Post Office scandal. They were all involved in these kinds of petty payoffs to members of Congress.

Enrique Desmond Arias  24:35

Dilma Rousseff is elected and another scandal emerges, which is more serious, which is the Lava Jato scandal. Lava Jato translates to Car Wash in English, and it was named such because the payments were kind of made in a car wash. But the Car Wash scandal was associated with payoffs from major contractors in Brazil being diverted to different political factions in the country. So one of the meaningful accomplishments of the Lula administration was actually empowering the Brazilian federal police to investigate the elite and the political class.

Enrique Desmond Arias  25:21

So there’s a very serious investigation going on of the political class. The investigations were being led by a judge in the south, Sergio Moro, who is pursuing a lot of different avenues. And some of these are becoming more acute. And that’s kind of where things begin to become complicated.

Enrique Desmond Arias  25:45

Ater the 2014 election, the Brazilian economy is kind of stagnant. They’re in a serious recession. You have a series of scandals getting more acute. They’re working their way up, Lula becomes implicated in these scandals. Politicians begin pushing back against them. Rouseff herself doesn’t want to stop these investigations, she’s not accommodating of that as President. And the political establishment decides to impeach her. And she is forced from office and she is replaced by her vice president, Michel Temer, who comes from a centrist party. [It is one] of these not particularly ideological parties in the middle that they develop, which is a powerful but not particularly ideological party that is implicated in a lot of this different stuff. They don’t have a particular agenda, much more than staying in power and having power.

Enrique Desmond Arias  26:48

So she’s forced from office and this curtails this investigative process somewhat. Moro continues investigations of Lula and continues to push this line, continues to push the investigations. Lula becomes more implicated in this, and is arrested. And Brazil starts passing through a very difficult time: you have this fragmented polarized Congress, you now switch from having a Workers Party president to a president from a centrist party who begins, after this impeachment, leading a right-wing government that doesn’t really have much legitimacy in terms of how people voted, which only exacerbates polarization and emphasizes kind of the corruption of the Brazilian system. You have this very public prosecution of this former president who’s implicated in the scandal. And this is where Bolsonaro comes from.

Enrique Desmond Arias  27:48

My familiarity with Bolsonaro was – I researched criminal groups – and when I first heard that Bolsonaro was running for office, I said, “Isn’t he mixed up with the militias in Rio de Janeiro?” And the militias are these paramilitary police connected extortion rackets that run neighborhoods, murder civic leaders in opposition and demand taxes from the residents of neighborhoods, take over businesses and run them in rackets. Especially in poor suburban areas of Rio de Janeiro. They’re a very frightening, dangerous type of organization.

Enrique Desmond Arias  28:21

Bolsonaro and his family are involved in politics in Rio de Janeiro. Bolsonaro was a congressman in Rio de Janeiro, very closely connected with the militias. They have these relationships. These relationships are often important in Rio de Janeiro for getting elected, because a militia can restrict who can campaign in the neighborhood, and they can promote certain candidates in those neighborhoods.

Enrique Desmond Arias  28:47

So, during my research for criminal governance in Rio de Janeiro, I spent some time in a church that was connected to a militia. And they brought a police officer who was running for city council to the neighborhood, and they promoted his candidacy in the community and supported that. So Bolsonaro and his children are involved in this. One of his children was a Rio city councilor and he gave an award to a prominent member of militias. The members of that militia’s family were there where it worked for him. Members of these militias were involved in assassinating a prominent socialist member of the Rio city council, [who was] an Afro-Brazilian member of the city council from the poor community. She died, it kind of rocked the Rio political establishment itself. And so when I heard that he was running I was very troubled by that.

John Torpey  30:01

A little nervous. Yeah.

Enrique Desmond Arias  30:02

The militias themselves at Rio de Janeiro did have a tremendous amount of impact on his government itself. That just became kind of the populist, kind of pro-dictatorship nostalgia, which Bolsonaro himself was supportive of. He was an Army officer during the dictatorship. So what happens between 2016 and 2018 is the entire political establishment, because of the 2016 impeachment plus the investigations and corruption, becomes discredited. Bolsonaro himself is a kind of longtime backbench congressman, he’s not particularly prominent in this. He’s involved in all sorts of unsavory things in Rio de Janeiro, in my view, but he’s not quite high enough up to be involved in the worst of Brazilian scandals.

Enrique Desmond Arias  30:55

So he can run as cleaning up the political establishment. Lula tries to run. Sergio Moro, who’s doing the investigations, keeps pressure on Lula to keep him out of the race. Later on, information comes out that Sergio Moro kind of manipulated the case a bit to ensure that Lula couldn’t run to disadvantage Lula. And then Bolsonaro gets elected. And there are people in Brazil who are frustrated with the direction of things. There is populist resentment, especially populist resentment against the poor, who are often blamed for violence in the country, unfairly. And so then you get four years of Bolsonaro’s leadership.

Enrique Desmond Arias  31:43

Where are we today? There’s a radicalized portion of Brazil’s population. They were camping out on military bases seeking to promote [and] foment a coup by the military. That led in part to the January 8 invasion of Congress. As you said, like nothing was really going on January 8. I think it was more of an act on the part of these protesters to get the military which had been tolerating them camping out on their bases, which is not something that the military is supposed to be allowing them to do. In part because I believe there’s sympathy among some segments of the military for them, for this political position to get the military to rise up as a moderating power, in Portuguese “a força do moderador,” which is something that goes back to the Brazilian military’s coup in 1964.

Enrique Desmond Arias  32:44

So the Brazilian military, up through the 1970s, really did believe it was a moderating force in Brazilian politics who was opposed to force. [It also believed] that it had a role in making sure that the political establishment, which was often seen as corrupt, same as today, would be suited to the Constitution. Between the establishment of the Brazilian Republic, the end of the monarchy at the end of the 19th century, and 1964, there have been a number of military risings and coups in Brazil. It was common practice for the military to intervene in politics during this time. There was a lot of work done in the 1970s by military leadership in preparation for the return to democracy, as Eddie Asvary has shown, to get the military to professionalize and not engage in coups or other types of risings to either overturn the popular will, the constitutional order, or otherwise pressure the political leadership of the country. And this was remarkably successful. So it’s been almost 50 years since the last coup, almost 60 years. It’s been a long time. It’s been 58 years. And that’s a huge accomplishment for Brazil.

John Torpey  34:08

Right. So maybe we should start to get into the larger [picture]. This obviously, was a major development in Latin America, and I do want to have time to talk a little bit about this broader picture. We talked beforehand about this article by Scott Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez-Liñán, in Journal of Democracy and this kind of region wide assessment of what’s going on. As somebody who pays more attention certainly to Europe, when people talk about Europe, the question about who I call when I want to talk to Europe remains a significant one. Even though there is this thing called the European Union now, but so there’s this kind of assessment that they make that democracy in America, in Latin America is sort of stuck. And there’s this tendency to stagnation and erosion as they put it. And you’ve given some reason to think that’s not entirely incorrect. But it’s not clear to what extent one can validly assess an entire region? A lot of different countries that we’re talking about with different systems and situations, but how would you assess the larger picture of democracy in Latin America today?

Enrique Desmond Arias  35:26

Yeah, so where Brazil is today kind of reflects some of that. You have an increasing commitment to constitutional order by various elite segments, if imperfectly. The military have been a little bit ambivalent here and there about supporting the constitutional order, but come down on the right side. But you have also at the same time, these fragmented polarized polities. So Lula doesn’t have control of Congress, you could have a similar dynamic where Lula is forced out in impeachment in a few years if things don’t go his way. But that’s layered on to these very serious problems of corruption and violence against the poor and the working class. So part of Bolsanaro’s policy, his ideas, his dictatorial nostalgia, is this engagement with the militias. This idea that the police or paramilitary groups will go out and they will repress crime, disproportionately by slaughtering the poor and the working class, and members of the large Afro-Brazilian population that is a plurality, not a majority of the country. And this is a huge issue.

Enrique Desmond Arias  36:49

The kind of disjuncture, as Teresa Caldeira and James Holston put it so eloquently 20 years ago, between a constitution and a constitutional order that most politicians and leading actors and governments are committed to, and the practices and the treatment of the population. The abuses that the Brazilian police in particular exercise against the poor and the working class, a majority of the country, and the Peruvian police in Peru –which is facing a popular a wave of popular protest exercise against the poor in that country– are reflective, in many ways, of the limitations of these political systems, and the state that the place that those political systems are at.

Enrique Desmond Arias  37:46

And so, Mainwaring and Perez-Liñan say there are kind of three pieces to this argument. And they say the three reasons why the state stagnation is going on in Latin America. There are authoritarian holdouts in the state. And by this, I think most precisely you’d identify police and military, weren’t necessarily in many cases trying to stage coups, but who were perfectly happy abusing, or are comfortable abusing rights in the context of advancing their different agendas. And in the context of just kind of inefficiently carrying out their mandates.

Enrique Desmond Arias  38:30

Disproportionately the people who are suffering this are not the wealthy, the well-connected by people occupying political offices. It’s the poor, it’s people from disenfranchised segments of the population that have been discriminated against, indigenous peoples, descendants of indigenous peoples, members of the Afro-Latin American, Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Colombian communities, in these countries that are systematically excluded, discriminated against, and subjected to historic abuses in these countries.

Enrique Desmond Arias  39:10

There are also, of course, within the government, lines of political thought in Congress that are not terribly sympathetic to democracy. As scholars, back during the transition to democracy and in the analysis of the collapse of democratic regimes in the middle to late 20th century, said there are some parties that are really committed to democracy, but there are some parties that are conditionally committed to democracy.

Enrique Desmond Arias  39:35

So there are kind of right-wing parties out there, right-wing politicians like Bolsonaro that were perfectly happy to use democracy to get elected. But if they took power, or if they’re not holding on to power, they aren’t necessarily committed to staying democratic or keeping the country’s democratic. Their commitment to democracy is conditional on whether or not it delivers the power.

Enrique Desmond Arias  39:56

A second part of their argument is that there’s a great deal of government inefficiency. I think the governments themselves are ineffective. So people are getting frustrated and polarized about this and looking for quick solutions. After 30-40 years of democracy, not necessarily functioning so well, or accomplishing what people wanted to accomplish, especially when there’s an economic downturn. So inefficacy begins to make a difference.

Enrique Desmond Arias  40:18

And Mainwaring and Perez-Liñan recognize hybrid states where authoritarian holdouts limit democratic keeping. So you have certain parts of the state functioning, certain parts of the state not functioning, and then kind of less commitment to democracy itself. And I think the stories that I told about Peru and Brazil all reflect these particular dynamics. There is kind of growing liberalism in the region. Venezuela and Nicaragua are authoritarian, there are international pressures that often support these different types of actors in the region. Although those are probably more limited than these internal country specific pressures, I think, that are being outlined by Mainwaring and Perez-Liñan.

Enrique Desmond Arias  41:20

I would add to this, and I think it’s really important that when we think about Latin America, it’s very important to also think about the United States. I’d say, we tend to think about the United States as a country that is more like Europe. And we tend to compare the United States to Europe, but we talk about democratic stagnation, hybridity in the state, when we talk about a lack of commitment to democracy by certain factions within our political elite. And then we also talk about abuses against certain portions of the population. Indeed, historic abuses and tolerance of those abuses, especially by certain segments of our political establishment, and frustration that comes out of that. It’s really important to think about the similarities between the processes of democratic erosion in the United States and the processes of democratic erosion in places like Peru and Brazil.

John Torpey  42:08

So maybe, to conclude, is there one country that you would sort of point to as a diamond in the rough? That’s going to sort of turn things around or improve its democratic position that we should look to as a kind of regional leader.

Enrique Desmond Arias  42:30

So I think Uruguay, Chile, Costa Rica, have all been places that have seemed to be somewhat more stable today. And if you think about those countries, they all have a smaller population, which facilitates things. They all have a probably and relatively functional government in some ways. Costa Rica abolished its military back in the 1940s. Uruguay and Costa Rica and Chile have all kind of been working towards working on their politics. They have relatively low homicides; Chile has the lowest in the region, Costa Rica has relatively low homicide rates. Uruguay is an outlier in this area; they don’t have particular problems with this.

Enrique Desmond Arias  43:34

Uruguay and Chile, have sought to address their legacies of authoritarianism from the 1960s and 1970s, although in the case of Chile, they are particularly strongly baked into the Constitution. I would say right now, in terms of looking forward, the most interesting country is Chile, where there was this kind of social explosion a few years ago: A demand for a new constitution, which would remove a lot of these legacies of authoritarianism. These authoritarian reserves in the Constitution that protected the interests of the military in the far-right politically, and I could talk about those in some detail, but that might take more time than we have. They elected Gabriel Borich as president. And he’s been pursuing a constructive agenda. They also elected a constitutional assembly, which offered a progressive new constitution, which was then rejected by the public and they’re kind of working through trying to do this again. I don’t know what direction this is going to go in. I don’t know what will happen if they fail to reform the constitution, but Chile is very much trying. And they’re very much trying after this social explosion, this wave of protests. So Chile is kind of on the move, and it’ll be interesting to see where they go in the coming years.

John Torpey  45:01

Absolutely. So thanks very much. That’s a terrific overview of what’s happening, what’s been happening in two major countries and also in the region as a whole. A sort of bright spot that we might pay attention to in the years to come. But that’s it for today’s episode, I want to thank Enrique Desmond Arias for sharing his insights about contemporary Latin American politics. Look for us on the New Books Network and remember to subscribe and rate International Horizons on Spotify and Apple podcasts. I want to thank Oswaldo Mena Aguilar for his technical assistance as well as to acknowledge Duncan Mackay for sharing his song “International Horizons” as the theme music for the show. This is John Torpey, saying thanks for joining us and we look forward to having you with us for the next episode of international Horizons.