Latin America: Economy and Society

The problem with Mexico: 25 theses

2006-07-12T15:57:00.000-04:00

The problem with Mexico and especially with Mexican elections is that:

Due to poor design, mistakes of key functionaries, or lack of legitimacy, institutions remain weak.
Candidates, party leaders, and key functionaries of the federal and local governments in charge of the institutions, the federal electoral authority (Instituto Federal Electoral) included, dismissed painful recent experiences emphasizing short-term goals over long-term aims.
The election, especially the TV and radio ads, became a mudslinging contest.
The intensity of the attacks plays now a key role in preventing agreements among the political forces.
To think that “such is the modern way of a democratic polity” is misleading and appears as an ad-hoc response of the PAN to justify what was a witch-hunting campaign against López Obrador.
The TV and radio, overwhelmingly owned by private corporations, emphasize their own political agendas over their commitment with truth and the free flow of opinions.
Despite improvements in the literacy rate, the readership of newspapers and magazines is low.
Access to Internet is heavily biased by income distribution.
Numbers 4 through 8 limit our ability to communicate with each other and to reach agreements.
That is why for a large number of people, the evidence presented by the IFE and the media about the July 2nd election is hard to believe.
That is also why many Mexicans are willing to embark in vast social mobilization to challenge the outcome of the election.
Recent efforts to improve access to electronic media, via community radio stations, have been blocked by the new laws regulating the media, one of the few reforms passed during the Fox administration.
Mexico is one of the most unequal countries in a region (Latin America) known by its awful patterns of income distribution. Income distribution inequality was not invented by López Obrador and it is not true that we need to grow (more) before distributing the wealth.
Party and congressional leaders have been unable to reach agreements to introduce a major tax reform to address income distribution inequality.
Big business owners are unwilling to support reforms to address income distribution inequality.
Blaming Andrés Manuel López Obrador of preaching “class struggle” is just a partial truth.
Another partial truth is blaming Fox for not addressing the structural sources of distribution inequality or to label him as a puppet of big business.
Another partial truth is to blame the PRI for these issues.
However, the three major parties in Mexico have played a key role in preventing, at different points in time and for selfish and opportunistic reasons, tax reforms to address income inequality and to release some of the social pressure created by it.
López Obrador needs to realize that his motives are not transparent and are not equally perceived by all the political actors in the country. For many of them he is using these features of Mexican reality for selfish purposes.
Most of these failures and the source for so many partial truths come from the fact that candidates and party leaders have little or no incentives to reach agreements to confront the issues at hand, as there are much more incentives to prevent agreements.
A weak presidency combined with a strong federalism, as in contemporary Mexico, makes harder for candidates and party leaders to reach agreements and hampers the chances to consolidate democracy.
There is little or no interest among the political elites to talk about possible changes to presidentialism.
The only option presented so far to address the maladies of presidentialism, that of ballotage or a second round of presidential elections, have had negative outcomes in other countries in Latin America.
Right now, the best hope for Mexico is the Judiciary. However, a deep paradox exists there as the Judiciary was an institution heavily attacked by Andrés Manuel López Obrador during his run as mayor of Mexico City.

Technorati Tags: América Latina, Latin America, Mexico, política mexicana, Mexican politics, elecciones México 2006, Rodolfo Soriano, Social Change in Latin America

Mexico, Deep in the electoral labyrinth

2006-07-03T19:40:00.000-04:00

July 2, 2006 will go to the annals of Mexican history as the night that never ended.

After more than seven decades of relatively smooth and predictable transitions from one government to the next, Mexico found itself confronted, heavily divided, and with little or no chance of a smooth solution in the near future.

The best case scenario, as things are now in Mexico, is that populist leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador will acknowledge what appears to be an extremely narrow but consistent defeat to share the spotlight as opposition leader with other figures of Mexican politics.

However, the chances of such “best case scenario” are slim to none as Mr. López is known for his confrontational style and, more importantly, by his emphasis on mobilization politics. Not only that, even if he was willing to acknowledge he will have to deal still with many of his supporters who are far more radical and confrontational than him.

That is why it is hard to think about a possible easy way out of the current impasse in the Mexican election.

It is true, the Preliminary Electoral Results Programme (PREP, by its acronym in Spanish), has been reporting a slight advantage for the conservative candidate Felipe Calderón Hinojosa since the closing of the election booths. The advantage has been going from less than .50% to little more than 1.2%, and by Monday’s afternoon it was of little more than 300 thousand votes.

Tight rules
However, given the tight rules of the Mexican electoral laws, the Federal Electoral Institute, or IFE, was unable to declare a winner and had no confidence on its own numbers to officially declare advantage to any of the candidates. His president, Luis Carlos Ugalde, a young political scientist with little or no practical political experience, appeared twice on Mexican radio and TV to congratulate the workers of the federal electoral authority, while asking the parties and their candidates to avoid what ultimately happened.

In the absence of official numbers, the IFE decided to wait, giving both López and Calderón a chance to be declared by their parties as winners. To make matters worse, the leader of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the party that dominated 70 years of Mexican politics, decided not to acknowledge the numbers provided by the PREP.

Mariano Palacios Alcocer, a former president of a small public university and former governor of Querétaro, asked Mr. Ugalde to avoid declaring a winner on July 2. It will be hard to believe that Mr. Palacios Alcocer had the political muscle to force something like that. Mostly, because the PRI’s candidate, a former governor of Tabasco, Roberto Madrazo Pintado, had the worse performance of any PRI presidential candidate ever.

What was clear, however, is that neither Mr. López nor Mr. Calderón had the trust in their own numbers to go out and declare themselves winners. When they did so, both appear nervous. Mr. López’s fiery rhetoric was out, while Mr. Calderón appeared on TV sweating heavily, unable to spark his own plug. Both cited their own exit polls as sources, but at the same time, both lacked the spirit that shaped their performances during the electoral campaign.

Extra Bandwidth
During Monday morning and early afternoon, Mexico has been possessed by the need for extra bandwidth to keep PCs connected to the PREP’s various mirror websites where we were able to see how the data from each of the country’s electoral booths were transmitted to the IFE’s mainframe to be displayed, almost in real time, in thousands of PCs all over the country.

As much as the PAN was able to win both houses of the Congress, its candidate advantage over Mr. López never went beyond the 1.0%, probably in any other country that will be enough to settle the score of an election with a robust 59% turnout.

However, in a country marred by deep and wide social divisions, one of Mr. López’s favorite campaign topics, the rather slim margin of victory of Mr. Calderón, has prompted all kinds of conspiracy theories.

These theories find fertile ground, among many other reasons, because of the many shenanigans marring Vicente Fox’s term, most notably, his rather ludicrous attempt to promote Mrs. Fox, his wife, as his successor.

But also—and this is very important to take into consideration—because of the perception that even before election day there was a rather robust agreement among the political and entrepreneurial elites to prevent Mr. López from becoming President.

Many of the most important Mexican private firms in Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey allowed for the participation of their employees in “seminars” whose main purpose was to “prove” the kinds of risks that electing Mr. López implied for the rather weak Mexican economy.

Not only that, many of the largest firms exerted their own kind of veto by signaling their reluctance to invest in Mexico if Mr. López was elected. The message, however, was not powerful enough to prevent a strong performance of Mr. López, the best ever for a candidate of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática.

Mr. López fueled these concerns by launching bitter attacks on key leaders of the Mexican entrepreneurial elite. Most noticeable were his critiques against the former owner of Banamex, Banco Nacional de México, the eldest Mexican bank which ended up its independent life when US based Citibank swallowed the Mexican bank in a heavily contested buyout.

This issue was particularly sensitive as later it was discovered that Roberto Hernández, one of the former owners of Banamex, was able—thanks to Mexican hole-ridden tax laws—to avoid paying any kind of tax on the huge profit that he pocketed.

Naïve Politics
López Obrador was naïve enough to assume that his bitter accusations against Hernández and many other Mexican fat-cats were going to be forgiven or forgotten by the Mexican entrepreneurial elite; one of Latin America’s more organized and sensitive to any such criticisms.

Not only that. As much as López Obrador was hitting soft-spots in the relation between Fox and key Mexican businessmen, he had a rather obscure relation with several local entrepreneurs in Mexico City. Riobóo, a local builder in Mexico City, was awarded several uncontested, unpublished contracts. Also, key members of López’s party, the Democratic Revolutionary Party were involved in a video-scandal starred by Carlos Ahumada, another local builder, who handed out undisclosed amounts of US dollars to Lopez’s underlings.

Ahumada has been in a local Mexico City jail for the last two years, following a rather anomalous process that involved being deported from Cuba where several sources claim that Mr. Ahumada was “squeezed” by Fidel Castro’s underlings. It is not clear where is the “juice” of such squeezing, but the Cuban government has acknowledged that it impounded several videos taped by Mr. Ahumada himself, where political and economic operations were recorded in painful detail.

What is clear, then is that as much as Mr. López’s criticism of the wrongdoings of the Mexican business elite are perceived by many as legitimate, his own record is far from clear.

The Desafuero

Not only that. It is necessary to acknowledge that the episode of the “desafuero,” a rather arcane process, similar to an impeachment in the US political system, by which the Mexican Congress retires the immunity that high-ranking officials of the Mexican Federal and local governments have, also prompted all kinds of criticisms against Mr. López.

Mostly because he used the powers of Mexico City’s mayoralty to mobilize media, unions, students, and the elderly (whom were benefited by a bold program of universal pensions providing little more than 60 US dollars to each person older than 65), to support him in challenging both the Congress and, more importantly, the Judiciary.

The episode took Mr. López to the peak of his popularity in Mexico City, but sparked broad concerns in other regions of the country, as they were seen as the prelude to a new wave of populist politics in Mexico, bringing back—with the help of the media—bad memories from the 1970s and 1980s and, more importantly, linking the Mexican election with other elections in South America, particularly with Venezuela and Bolivia.

Those memories played, months later, during the heat of the political campaign, a key role in PAN’s mudslinging media campaign presenting Mr. López as “a treat,” and/or as the inheritor of presidents Echeverría and López Portillo style of politics.

In the end, Mr. Fox intervened blocking the accusation brought by the Judiciary against Mr. López, leaving the whole process in a politico-judiciary limbo that strained even more his government’s relation with the Revolutionary Institutional Party, a key supporter of the proceedings to stripe Mr. López from his immunity.

In the end, the election was extremely tight. Mr. Calderón was not as attractive as a candidate as his own party, in similar fashion to Mr. Madrazo, while Mr. López out-performed the coalition of parties supporting him.

If nothing changes in the coming hours, Mr. Calderón will be president and he will have weak but consistent support in the House and the Senate of the Mexican Congress. That will give Calderón an edge that neither Mr. Zedillo nor Mr. Fox have had in recent Mexican history, as both were confronted by powerful parliamentary groups of the PAN and the PRI, respectively, unwilling to collaborate with them.

The PRD will be confronted with the demons of the rather loose coalition created by Mr. López, while the PRI, heavily wounded by his presidential candidate poor performance, will remain a key player in Mexican politics, although it is almost impossible for it to avoid a deep reform.

Otherwise, if Mr. Madrazo remains in charge with no sign of a deep ideological and organizational reform, the PRI will delude rapidly through alliances with some of the other parties.

Technorati Tags: América Latina, Latin America, México, Mexico, política mexicana, elecciones México 2006, Rodolfo Soriano, Social Change in Latin America

Mussings on the Mexican Election

2006-06-26T16:03:00.000-04:00

With less than one week before the presidential election in Mexico, the dust begins to settle as the candidate of the Democratic Revolutionary Party, Andrés Manuel López Obrador has sent his first conciliatory message. His message of conciliation and willingness to prevent post-electoral conflict comes as some kind of surprise as the media campaigns in Mexico reached a new low in the relatively short history of open electoral competition.

The message reflects, on the other hand, the fact that López holds a small but consistent lead in almost all the polls taken before the poll-curfew enforced by the federal electoral authority in Mexico, the Instituto Federal Electoral.

Despite this change, it is necessary to emphasize that the Mexican election confronts unexpected challenges. The most important of them come from the Southern state of Oaxaca, where Elba Esther Gordillo, the leader of the Teachers’ Union, the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación, decided to support long-time critics of her within the union itself as a way to “get even” with the presidential candidate of the Partido Revolucionario Institutional, Roberto Madrazo.

Ms. Gordillo is still, nominally, a member of the PRI. Moreover, she was elected as General Secretary of the PRI at the same time that Madrazo was elected president of that party.

However, differences in the relation with the Mexican Federal government, and more specifically with Vicente Fox, broke the feeble alliance between Madrazo and Gordillo. Since then, Mrs. Gordillo has launched a series of attacks on Madrazo that included the creation of a new party, the Partido Nueva Alianza, who was expected to capture at least 1 million votes, as that is the number of members of the Teachers’ Union.

Despite such assumption, Nueva Alianza appears in most polls as unable to gather the minimum 1% of the overall vote to keep its registration.

The conflict in Oaxaca has deep roots as often times the local section of the Union has confronted on several issues the leadership of Mrs. Gordillo, however, at this point they found themselves in a situation in which both Mrs. Gordillo, the raucous local 22 of the Teachers’ Union in Oaxaca, and several former governors of the state hold—for different reasons—grudges against the current governor, Ulises Ruiz, and Mr. Madrazo.

This is more important, as Oaxaca is a vital reservoir of votes for Madrazo and the PRI, so preventing a relatively smooth evolution of the election in this state means trouble for Madrazo and the PRI at large, as they really need the votes from Oaxaca to boost their performance.

The key problem for Mrs. Gordillo, however, is that his election is showing how fragile is the hold that the old union leaders in Mexico have over their members and grass-roots organizations.

In recent days, as an example, the leader of the Confederación Revolucionaria de Obreros y Campesinos, decided to publicly express his support to López Obrador, a rather shocking development as the CROC has been a union relatively loyal to the PRI. So loyal, that the leader of the CROC in the Southern state of Yucatán rejected his national leader’s commitment, committing his own support to Mr. Madrazo.

As it is frequently the case in Mexico, the intensity of the conflict in Oaxaca has been overstated by the Mexican national media and by the international media paying attention to it, as both follow their own strategies of “news building.” However, it will be foolish to assume that there is no potential in the current conflict in Oaxaca to go out of control, specially now that the local 22 of the Teachers’ Union has increased its visibility, as it was able to force the creation of a commission seeking to establish some form of dialog between the state government and the union’s leaders.

It is interesting to stress the role that one of Mexico’s few representatives of the Liberation Theology, Bishop Arturo Lona will have, as his involvement in the solution of this issue appears as a sequel of that of the Catholic bishops during the conflict and talks in the neighboring state of Chiapas.

The risk, of course, in those kinds of scenarios is that, as in Chiapas, opportunistic "leaders" as Rafael Sebastián Guillén, aka Subcomandante Marcos, will try to seize control of the social movement to subordinate it to his larger agenda.

Technorati Tags: América Latina, Latin America, Mexico, México, política mexicana, Mexican Politics, elecciones México 2006, Mexican Election 2006, Oaxaca, Rodolfo Soriano, Social Change in Latin America

The Mexican Hot Summer

2006-06-19T22:37:00.000-04:00

On July 2, Mexico will elect President, members of the two houses of the federal congress, and an assortment of local officials in states such as Nuevo León, Jalisco, Sonora, Morelos, Chiapas, and the country’s capitol city, the Federal District.

The election has been on the making pretty much since the end of the 2000 election, mostly because of the ability of then recently elected mayor of Mexico City, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to position himself as a “natural” candidate to succeed Vicente Fox.

Not only that, Mr. Fox’s presidency was marred from the very beginning from a series of shortcomings. These shortcomings were connected, on the one hand, with the novelty of the whole process. After all, it was the first president elected from a party other than the Revolutionary Institutional Party in 70 years.

There was too the issue of the lack of experience of Fox himself and key top officials of his administration, such as the former secretary of the Foreign Office Jorge G. Castañeda and the former secretary of the Interior, Santiago Creel. In addition, it was possible to notice the tensions and stress created by the constant interference of Marta Sahagún de Fox, originally the spokesperson of the Presidency and later wife of Mr. Fox. Finally, it is important to stress the role played by the very flaws in Mexican institutional.

Here it is important to notice that it is there, in the shared fascination with the presidential regime where most of the problems associated with the performance of Latin American democracies exist. However, with the exception of specialized journals and textbooks on Latin American politics, there is little about the role that such flaws have.

In Mexico, those flaws were tamed by the extra-legal powers of the presidency during the years of dominance of the old PRI. Sadly, many of the reforms pursued by the De la Madrid, Salinas, and Zedillo administrations actually undermined the power of the Presidency, without compensating with similar changes in the relations between the Executive and the Judiciary and, more importantly, between the Executive and the Congress.

The Presidential Curse

Consequently, the Mexican presidency as most of its peers in the Western Hemisphere has little or no way to build winning legislative coalitions. Consequently, the ability of the Executive branch to pursue its own goals is greatly reduced and it is forced to operate within the narrow spaces allowed by the Legislative’s branch ability (or lack of it) to reach agreements.

The phenomenon has been discussed in detail in other entries of this blog as it explains many of the misfortunes of Latin American polities, especially those related with the never-ending conflicts between the presidents and their congresses that are at the core of the endless succession of weak presidencies in countries such as Ecuador or Bolivia.

Moreover, in the cases of countries such as Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, with a rather strong federal design, the governors create an additional source of tension that fractionalize power and greatly reduces the ability of the Presidency to pursue its agenda.

These flaws in the Mexican institutional design contributed to create a climate of growing confrontation with the Congress. On top of it, it is necessary to emphasize the role played by Andrés López Mexico City’s mayor, who right from the very beginning of his administration did as much as possible to differentiate and to compete with President Fox.

While Fox was having problems transitioning from candidate to President, for López there was no real change, as he designed his administration as a six-year electoral campaign for the presidency. To do so, López borrowed many of Fox’s moves during his own run as governor of the state of Guanajuato, with the relative difference that López remained for the most part in Mexico, while Fox engaged himself on a very active international agenda.

One of López’s key moves was to develop early during his term as mayor a vast network of supporters whose main commitment was to him and not to López’s Party of the Democratic Revolution. In doing so, López was able to alienate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the founder and “moral leader” of the PRD who unsuccessfully ran for the presidency in 1988, 1994, and 2000.

Besides building the network of support for his candidacy, López launched what amounts to a bloodless pogrom against Rosario Robles Berlanga, his predecessor in the city’s mayoralty. The pogrom against Robles is still going, as Robles’s former lover and financier, Carlos Ahumada Kurtz remains in one of the city’s prison.

López’s campaign faced a major roadblock when a series of mistakes from underlings at the city’s government detonated a judiciary process that could have been defused by López himself. However, being the greedy politician that he is, he saw in the confrontation with the Judiciary, and more importantly with the Supreme Court, a chance to present himself as a nation-wide champion of those affected by Mexico’s flaw ridden judiciary.

The Desafuero

Fox, his National Action Party, and the Revolutionary Institutional Party actually went through the painful process of retiring the constitutional immunity that López, as any other governor, representative, and senator in the country has. However, after gathering enough votes in the House of Representatives to remove the immunity, Fox decided not to pursue the case.

Fox’s decision was one more of a string of shortcomings when dealing with key issues in his relation with the other branches of the Mexican government. Moreover, it prevented any possible agreement with the leaders of the Revolutionary Institutional Party who had been fighting a series of small skirmishes with Fox and his party.

The outcome of such confrontation was the inability of the Mexican government to pursue any meaningful agenda, but more importantly, it provided López with broad support for his cause.

As the confrontation with López was developing, Fox was unable to prevent an avalanche of criticism against his wife, her Vamos México foundation, and—more important—against Mrs. Sahagún de Fox’s sons from an earlier matrimony.

In the first stages of this conflict, Mrs. Sahagún de Fox remained actively involved in the day-to-day management of Vamos México while keeping open a possible run for either the presidency or Mexico City’s mayoralty for her. Mr. Fox’s presidency resented the effects of the confrontation and even the leaders of the National Action Party expressed concern with such possibility, as it will open the flood of increased criticism for Mr. Fox, while undermining the credibility of the 2006 elections.

In the end, there was no candidacy for Mrs. Fox de Sahagún, but for the most part the damage was done, as a congressional committee was formed to investigate the operations of several firms owned by Mrs. Fox de Sahagún’s sons. The committee is still working and so far, it has been possible to unearth a series of questionable practices that have been heavily publicized in the Mexican media.

Meanwhile, by the end of 2005, Mr. López was elected as presidential candidate of the PRD. Roberto Madrazo, a former governor of the Southern state of Tabasco, was nominated by PRI, after his rival, the former governor of the State of Mexico, stepped out of the primary due to a tax evasion scandal.

Finally, the ruling PAN nominated Felipe Calderón, a short-lived secretary of Energy of the Fox administration, as its presidential candidate in what was a major blow for Mr. Fox within the PAN itself.

Currently, after heavy negative campaigning from both PAN and PRD, the election is—depending on the poll used—either a three-way or a two-way tie between the candidates, and it is hard to think that any new poll will provide more insight into the possible outcome of the election.

López has centered his campaign on promises of harder laws to prevent tax evasion while increasing the role of the government as provider of key goods and services. He has offered also a major tax cut for Mexicans earning more than 500 and less than 900 US dollars a month.

Similar offers have been made by Madrazo and Calderón, who is second in the most recent polls, although they lack the Robin Hood-like approach that is the trademark of López’s “messianic” speech.

Moreover, several political commentators and analysts of Mexican politics, most notably Héctor Aguilar Camín and Enrique Krauze, consider that López’s campaign and attitudes leave little or no room for his eventual, and still possible, defeat on July 2. If that is case, they assume, the country will go deep into a period of political mobilization whose consequences are hard to foresee.

On top of the uncertainty, it is necessary to take into consideration the fact that the election has been affected in recent weeks by the reemergence of rumors of imminent treats of fraud. More importantly, it has been affected by the reemergence of Rafael Sebastián Guillén, aka “Subcomandante Marcos.” After leaving Chiapas, he is now the surrealist self-appointed leader of an ghostly movement who is doing every thing within his power to magnify and capitalize minor and marginal regional movements as a way to present them as part of a large movement to introduce radical changes in Mexican politics.

The Mexican election remains, less than two weeks before the actual vote, an open game. There is little or no indication of what the future may bring to a country that has been up until now an oddity of stability a relatively good mixture of economic and political reforms in an area marred by instability, coups, and the worst income distribution patterns in the world.

Something that we do know at this point is that neither the PRD nor the PAN will be able to control the Congress. It will be once again the PRI the party on control of the Congress. If that is the case, then it is possible to assume that Mr. López's or Calderón's presidency will be marred by many of the same problems and tensions that affect other presidencies in Latin America and the United States.

As the election approaches, I will be posting more frequently in my Spanish-speaking blog México desde fuera, where you can find more information on the current election.

Technorati Tags: América Latina, Latin America, Mexico, México, Mexican politics, Mexican election 2006, Rodolfo Soriano, Social Change in Latin America

Football (and any other Sport) as a Metaphor

2006-06-12T01:08:00.000-04:00

This week and the next four, the world outside the United States devotes itself to the unique quadrennial experience of the Football World Cup, something that not even the Olympics, much less other sports, are able to match.

The wave of the World Cup affects not only the 32 national teams participating in the finals at Germany, but almost all the countries of the world, with the relative exemption of the United States(paradoxically enough one of the 32 teams participating at Germany) and Canada.

The reasons of the US disinterest in football (soccer for them) lay deep within the isolationist doctrine that populist politicians imposed as a worldview in that country back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Such worldview was matched by the development in the US of powerful leagues of professional baseball and the heated disputes (often times violent) between the owners of the two main leagues (National and American) and those of competing circuits (Federal) which ultimately were prevented from participating in professional baseball.

The prohibition, issued by the Congress, grants one of the very few monopolies that exist in the United States and has been since its inception the source of interest for economists, political scientists, and sociologists interested in analyzing the evolution of those professional leagues and, more specifically, the role that governments have in shaping not only the practice of professional sports, but—generally speaking—the practice of any sport.

Sports and Government Intervention

The protection granted to baseball guaranteed during several years a special position for the sport, despite its racist practices reflecting the reality of many communities across the United States, where racism was alive and kicking despite the Civil War and the efforts of Abraham Lincoln to put and end to slavery, hiding behind the doctrine of “equal but separate.”

Such doctrine existed even in baseball. Besides the two “major” leagues and the complex network of “minor” leagues developing “talent” for the “majors”, it was possible to find the so-called Negro Leagues, where players of African American and Afro-Caribbean ancestry “were allowed” to play.

In Latin America it is impossible to find something similar when thinking of any given sport practiced in the region. No government has granted similar monopolies to any professional sports league and, despite some bouts of racism plaguing the histories of the professional leagues in Peru, Brazil, and other countries with sizeable populations of persons of African ancestry, sports has played since the early 1930s, a key role in the development and evolution of the nation-states, the so-called “imagined communities.”

However, if one analyzes carefully some of the histories of success and failure in the region it will be possible to observe that one key feature in, let’s say the success of the Brazilian or Argentine football national teams, has been the active (or not) role of the authorities.

At different levels the cases of Mexico and Chile, on the one hand, and Brazil and Argentina, on the other, reflect this reality. While no one would be willing to question the interest (“passion” is the code word that one finds in the Sports from all over the world) of the fans and even the level of sophistication of their professional leagues, neither Mexico nor Chile have been able to come close to Brazil or Argentina when one thinks of success.

Moreover, sadly enough the fortunes or misfortunes of the teams playing the World Cup provides fertile ground for the emergence of all types of fatalistic, providentialist, and racist “explanations.”

The “Green Mice”-Cachirules Generations

In Mexico, as one of many possible examples, up until the late 1980s and early 1990s it was possible to find references to the so-called “ratones verdes” or “green mice,” a metaphor developed out of the desperation and exasperation that caused in Mexico the elimination from the World Cup played in the (then) German Federal Republic in 1974.

Mexico was coming from a rather good performance (for Mexican standards) during the World Cup played in Mexico in 1970, so there were all sorts of expectations and hopes about the possibility of becoming a regional football powerhouse in the North, Central American and Caribbean Football Confederation.

However, Mexico was humiliated in the qualifiers to the World cup played in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti’s capital city. Four years after the painful performance in Haitian fields, Mexico was able to qualify with relative ease for the World Cup hosted by the military regime in Argentina in 1978.

The Mexican team was assumed to be a major contender after the Olympic selection was able to win, in an odd decision, with Brazil the Gold in the Pan-American games celebrated in Mexico in 1975. Many of the players in the Olympic team (especially Hugo Sánchez) who won the gold in the Pan-Am Games, during many years Mexico’s best feat, went to Argentina.

Sadly enough, Mexico was crushed in the first round. First Tunisia, then West Germany, the ruling World Champion, and finally Poland. The Mexican team received 12 goals and was able to score only two (to Tunisia and Poland) in what has been probably the worse record for a Mexican team in the World Cup. After the humiliation in Argentina, things were still far from any improvement. Not only that, the self-defeating nick-name of “Green mice” came to summarize both the performance of the Mexican national team and, up to a certain extent, the overall attitude of many Mexicans when thinking about themselves. For the tournament in Spain (1982) Mexico was unable to qualify.

In 1986, Mexico found itself with the chance of being, once again, the host of the World Cup. With no need to go through the qualification process, the country was able to concentrate on developing a consistent team under the guidance of Velibor Milutinovic, one of the most successful coaches in the national league with the Pumas of the Universidad Nacional team. Successful especially when thinking about the development of new talent and in achieving titles in the local league.

The Mexican team ended sixth, after a painful tie with Germany that was solved with a series of penalty kicks. Despite the relative success of the Mexican team in that tournament, things went even worse before improving.

For the Cup played in Italy, in 1990, the Mexican Football Federation reached one of its all-time lows when its chairman, Rafael del Castillo, was found responsible of registering players with fake certificates of birth and fake IDs for one of the juvenile tournaments organized by FIFA. The episode came to be known as the “cachirules,” a slang term used in Mexico to depict a crooked situation.

Del Castillo was forced out as chair of the Mexican league in the middle of a scandal fueled by the pressure of the then State-owned TV corporation Imevisión (Instituto Mexicano de Televisión) exposing the corruption plaguing the relation between Femexfut and the Mexican TV giant Televisa.

After the “cachirules” episode a process of change and adjustment in the Femexfut started but it is clear that despite the more stable performance of the Mexican national team in the tournaments held in the US in 1994, France 1998, and Korea-Japan 2002, and more importantly in the regional tournaments in North (Golden Cup) and South America (Copa América), Mexico still lags behind Brazil or Argentina when it comes to the performance of their national teams and the ability of the countries to produce football cracks.

Football, Fascism, and Populism

If one considers Argentina’s or Brazil’s football history it will be possible to find a completely different account mostly because of early and very aggressive interventions of the governments of both countries in shaping, on the one hand, the institutional framework regulating sports education and activity since the mid and late 1930s and early 1940s.

For the governments of Argentina and Brazil sports’ promotion and participation became a matter of public policy because, unlike Mexico, their governments found—early in the twentieth century—that there were a series of premiums to their involvement in this activity.

It is not out of coincidence that it was at that time that the fascist governments in Germany and Italy were colleting the fruits of their interventions in the school system favoring a more active role of physical education activities. In Germany’s case, the roots of such activities existed deep in the early and mid nineteenth century, and from there similar programs expanded to other countries in continental Europe.

Italy, as Argentina, and Brazil, found themselves developing these kinds of very aggressive and interventionist programs of physical education within the contexts of the emergence of Benito Mussolini’s fascism, the Conservative Restoration of the military governments during the 1930s in Argentina, and the populist regime of Getulio Vargas in Brazil.

It is not a coincidence that even if Mexico was living also its own populist or national-revolutionary experience with Lázaro Cárdenas del Río, in Mexico there was no real emphasis on developing aggressive programs of physical education tailored after the models in place in Germany, Italy, Brazil, or Argentina.

Moreover, in the case of Argentina it was possible to observe independent and earlier developments as byproducts of the explosive rate of European immigration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the concomitant expansion of civil rights of the governments of the Unión Cívica Radical.

These developments put athletic and sporting clubs at the center of processes of political mobilization that increased the interest of politicians in promoting the development of strong athletic traditions. This happened, among other reasons, because it was in there, in nurturing those athletic traditions were local political leaders emerged despite the gentrified and British titles of many of these organizations (as in the case of Gimnasia y Esgrima or Newells’ Old Boys).

Mexican "Exceptionality"

In Mexico, on the other hand, the early evolution of sports and more specifically of football was less dependent on the intervention of political leaders. Moreover, unlike Argentina, Brazil or, for these purposes, the rest of Latin America, where the only sport that allowed for the development of professional leagues was football, in Mexico it was possible to find as early as the late 1920s, despite the consequences of the Mexican Revolution, strong traditions of practice of baseball (as good as to beat twice the star-filled team of the United States in the first Baseball World Classic), and other sports such as boxing and wrestling that followed, as in the case of football, baseball, and even American football (another oddity in the Latin American context), independent paths of institutionalization and in some cases of professionalization, without the intervention of the State.

Of course, in Argentina and other South American countries it is possible to find also strong traditions of practice of rugby and even cricket, but they did not allowed for the professionalization of the sport as in the case of football or as in the case of baseball in Mexico.

It is in this important distinction between Mexico on the one hand and Argentina and Brazil on the other, where it is necessary to find the reasons that explain the differences in the performance of the three countries in the World Cup. This is more relevant when one takes into consideration the fact that despite the apparently low level or organization of the Mexican football players, the Mexican league pays higher salaries than most of the leagues of the Western Hemisphere.

This is not to say that in Mexico there has been no attempts of intervention of the public sector in sports promotion or organization. As early as the 1930s it was possible to find attempts of the Mexican government to intervene in the sector, but these attempts were not as organized as those carried by their Brazilian or Argentine colleagues.

The trademark of the intervention of the Mexican government has been, up until Vicente Fox’s support to the bid of Guadalajara to host the Pan-American games, to provide the kinds of supports necessary to host tournaments. With the games to be organized in Guadalajara in 2011, Mexico will be the only country in the region to host those games for the third time.

Moreover, it is the only one to host the Olympics, and the only one in the region to host the Football World Cup twice. It has hosted several times the Central American and Caribbean games and other international competitions such as the Universiada or World University Games.

Here is noticeable that other Latin American countries have tried to be hosts of the Olympics, and yet the International Olympic Committee has been unwilling to favor their proposals.

Structural reasons, Racist Excuses

Regardless of the outcome of the World Cup, when talking about the differences in the performances of countries with strong football traditions it is necessary to take into consideration the structural reasons that explain the differences in the performance of the teams.

“Explanations” as those spurred after the “Green Mice” generation shed little or no light on the issues at hand. Quite the opposite, they blur behind a curtain of inverse racism the true reasons behind Mexico’s “failure” in World football competitions and they converge in a rather explosive combination with other self-deprecatory “explanations” of Mexican “failure” as the epithet about the “raza de bronce” (bronze race) as a way to talk about the difficulties that Mexican athletes face to achieve more than third places (or bronze medals) in international competitions, connecting it with the coloration of the skin of large groups of Mexicans.

Moreover, those kinds of explanations blur also the deep regional and class divisions that explain in Mexico attendance and/or practice of different sports. Among the first type of divisions, it is necessary to take into consideration the fact that in many cities in the Northwest and Southeast of Mexico (Hermosillo and Mérida, among others) football is second in the hearts and minds of their inhabitants after baseball, and that for many generations now in large urban areas such as Mexico and Monterrey (where baseball is also very important) football competes with strong traditions of practice and attendance via TV of American football.

For many young urban males from the middle and upper classes, football expresses at different levels all that is wrong in Mexico, while American football, a sport deeply connected with what the United States represent and requiring heavy public or private investment in training facilities, equipment, and medical services, expresses better than any other sport their desire to overcome Mexico’s backwardness.

Such fixation with American football (good enough for the National Football League to take pre-season and regular season games to Mexico City’s Azteca Stadium) reflects deeper class- and race-based cleavages, frequently blurred by double standards when dealing with issues of race and national origin: highly critical of racism in the United States and yet very discriminatory of foreigners (as in the case of Ricardo Antonio LaVolpe, the Argentine -born coach of the football team) and of Mexican Indians.

The paradoxes grow deeper, because as much as many in the country remain—at least until this Sunday morning—skeptical about LaVolpe’s role as national coach mostly because of issues of national origin (see as awful examples of it Hugo Sánchez’s trashing of La Volpe on the grounds of national origin and alleged sexual preference) many Mexicans also find comfort in rooting for the Brazilian national team as soon as the national team is eliminated in international competitions.

On a personal level, I rather stay with the “flawed” Mexican model of minimal or no governmental intervention on the field of professional or high performance sport. I think that it reflects the true nature of the authoritarian but non-ideological regime that existed in Mexico from 1929 until 1997.

However, it is almost impossible to observe how, ultimately, the lack of interventionism on this issue could play a significant role in explaining the legitimacy deficits that the Mexican polity confronted since the late 1960s. This is even more relevant when one takes into consideration not only the stories of success in football coming from Argentina and Brazil, but also the case of Cuba when it comes to baseball and other sports.

The three countries have been able, at different points in time and with different strategies, to use the successes of their national teams in different sports and international competitions to compensate for similar or even worse legitimacy deficits that those happening in Mexico after the 1960s.

The problem, of course, is that as profitable as the investment in sports programs and facilities is, questions exist regarding the legitimacy of diverting public investment into sports programs.

Technorati Tags: América Latina, Latin America, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Football World Cup, Negro Leagues, Baseball World Classic, Rodolfo Soriano, Social Change in Latin America

Alan García or the Ultimate Latin American Paradox

2006-06-03T23:45:00.000-04:00

This Sunday Peruvians will finish the process to elect a new President for their country. The two finalists in the second round of the election are the former President Alan García and Ollanta Humala, a rather unknown leader of marginalized groups in the Peruvian countryside who follows, for the most part, the recipes of confrontation and radical mobilization that helped Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia.

The latest polls showed García as the frontrunner in a heavily contested election that has been deeply affected by Venezuelan interventionism and, strangely enough, by the ability of García to gather unexpected expressions of support from those who, few years ago, were his fiercest critics.

Public figures like Mario Vargas Llosa, who lost in a similar runoff to Alberto Fujimori back in 1990, and many others have expressed, one way or the other, their support for former President García.

The fact that they are doing so is not so much an expression of belief in García’s proposals or because of “happy memories” associated with his presidential term. Quite the opposite. They express one of Peru's most dramatic and painful paradoxes.

To stress the very nature of the paradox, it is interesting to hear Hugo Chávez throwing at García similar darts to those thrown at García by Vargas Llosa and other figures of the Peruvian national scene back in the 1980s.

Chávez's bitter depiction of García as “a thief” and responsible of one of the worst crisis in Peruvian (and Latin American) history is, for the most part, accurate. It reminds me of the kind of things that people said of García at the end of the 1980s, when Mr García left an exhausted Peruvian economy, and a country at the brink of civil war.

At that time, I was a junior editor in the International Desk at Mexico City’s Excélsior, then the largest newspaper in Mexico, and I read with a sense of both awe and pain the reports of both Excélsior’s correspondent, the envoys, and the wires from the Associated Press, EFE, Xinhua, and France Press.

Not only that, I was a subscriber of the Mexican literary and critical magazine Vuelta, whose director was no other than Octavio Paz, a close friend of Vargas Llosa and my pundit, at a time in which, because of my age, my personal views on the region were developing. Vuelta supported, of course, Vargas Llosa's bid, although I still remember how disappointed was don Octavio because, in his mind, Latin America was about to loose one of its brightest writers.

Also, a few years later, I was lucky enough to have in one of my courses a student of mine a beautiful and very inteligent Peruvian student, Vanessa, who gave detailed depictions of what it was for her, as a teenager, to grow up in a country thorn by Civil War, hyperinflation, and the (mis)deeds orf irresponsible politicians as Mr García.

I was hoping for a victory of Vargas Llosa. He was unable to win, and instead Fujimori-san took over as President launching very aggressive policies to curb inflation, as at some point at the end of the García era, it was spiraling beyond the 3000 percent mark yearly, something only surpassed by the even worse situation in Brazil and Argentina. (For an analysis of those years in Latin America click here).

Fujimori led a bloodless auto-coup d’Etat, mercilessly killed guerrilla partisans, forced the resignation of the country’s Supreme Court and Congress, and, more importantly, was able to bring some sense of order to the Peruvian markets, going through a painful renegotiation of the debt with the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank.

Peru’s renegotiation was harder than others in Latin America, because by the end of his term, Mr García decided to withhold the payments of his country’s debt while launching a desperate diplomatic blitz to gather support from other Latin American countries.

García, did so with many of the gimmicks that Chávez does nowadays. I remember a picture of him with a Mariachi hat in the very famous Garibaldi square in Mexico City, singing with a large crowd of Mariachis, his own entourage, and innocent bystanders, after seeeking to secure the support of the Mexican government.

However, as with Chávez, the gimmicks achieve little or no success outside of their countries, although, unlike Chávez, García was a “pobre Presidente de un país más pobre” (a poor President from an even poorer country), so any appeal was made on the grounds of solidarity and the Boliviarian rhetoric that is always used in these kinds of situations. Chávez, on the other hand, has oil and the support of the efficient Cuban Foreign Office to pursue his agenda.

Interestingly enough, the Peruvian citizens, as it is often the case in Latin America, dug their own grave. When confronted with the proposals made by Vargas Llosa (a “shock” plan to bring the economy back in line with an aggressive negotiation with the multinational financial institutions), Peruvians decided to elect Fujimori-san.

Unlike Vargas Llosa the writer, Fujimori-san, the populist outsider, then a bureacrat in one empoverished public college, with little or no political experience, presented himseld as unwilling to perform the “shock” plan that years before Chile and Mexico had performed. Instead, he offered a guilt-free and pain-free solution to the Peruvian crisis…

Of course, he was lying. Fujimori-san, the Peruvian samurai, applied a “shock” plan harder than the one originally proposed by Vargas Llosa and, at least when dealing with the economy and the Shining Path guerrilla, he was very successful. Vargas Llosa went back to writing and eventually became a citizen of Spain, disconnecting himself from the tensions and erosion of partisan Peruvian politics.

As it is possible to see, there are no real reasons to think that Mr García will be the best possible choice for Peru. Moreover, unlike Ollanta Humala, García has been “vetoed” by Chávez, the self-appointed oil emperor of Latin America, unless… No reasons unless one considers Ollanta Humala’s propositions, marred by the same rhetoric and ideas that one finds in Evo Morales's and Hugo Chávez's speeches.

The Peruvian electorate is, to my mind as immature as it was back in 1990 when they chose Fujimori over Vargas Llosa, and that expresses itself in the outcome of the first round of the Presidential election, as much as it expresses on many of the attitudes that distinguish Peruvian political debate. The Peruvian section at Blogalaxia provides a good sample of the kind of excesses that bloggers from that country do when arguing about politics, with more passion for personal insults and attacks and the ever present racial remarks that have marred Peru since its very origins, than with any sense of the kinds of pressures that Peru is confronting.

They are, as in many other Latin American countries, trapped in a "victim centered" discourse of their own misfortunes, unwilling to acknowledge how they have contributed, over time, to build one of the worse case scenarios of what, accurately enough, Chilean sociologist Manuel Antonio Garretón identifies as "regressions from democratic to authoritarian regimes." The other regressions in Garretón's framework are, interestingly enough, Ecuador. Bolivia, and Venezuela.

However, I think that this time around García is the lesser of two possible evils. One hopes that he will succeed not only for the sake of Peru, but also for the sake of Latin American politics at large. The last thing we need at this point is to have Peru as the fourth jewel in Chávez’s crown, although as Vanessa used to tell me, “When it comes to Peruvian politics, you never know.”

PS: I thank David McDuff, authior of One Step at a Time, for encouraging me to update this blog again. I will do my best to do it so more frecuently.

Technorati Tags: América Latina, Latin America, Perú, Alan García, Ollanta Humala, Mario Vargas Llosa, Manuel Antonio Garretón, Alberto Fujimori, Rodolfo Soriano, Social Change in Latin America

Malvinas Argentinas, but...

2006-02-10T21:34:00.000-05:00

One of the open wounds in Latin American history has been since the mid 1800s the British occupation of the relatively small but strategic Archipelago of Malvinas, or Falkland as the British cynical stubbornness insist in calling them. The Archipelago became in the early 1980s the source of an armed conflict that unexpectedly ended the Military Junta rule in Argentina.

Unexpectedly, because the military assumed that by waging war against Britain, the people in Argentina (energized after the victory in the 1978 Football World Cup), would be willing to forget the many human rights abuses. After all, nothing suits better the needs of a weak government, than a patriotic war, as many of George Bush’s decisions attest.

Moreover, the gorillas in charge in Buenos Aires assumed that the political cleansing carried out in Argentina itself against the guerrillas, and the help they provided to the U.S. in Central America by training the counter-insurgency in Central America, were enough to guarantee that the U.S. was going to step aside in the event of a war against Britain. Not only that, the Argentine military assumed that the agreements with the then ruling military elites of other South American countries were enough to secure their support against Britain.

As it usually happens with grandiose projects, they were dead wrong. The U.S. would rather die than breaking away from their alliance with Britain (after all the Cold War was quite hot at that time), Pinochet had too much in common with Margaret Thatcher, and the Central American governments were too deep in their own problems to provide any help to Argentina.

Only Brazil assisted to Argentina during the war, and it was mostly marginal help in the form of information on the movements of the British Navy, and in the form of fuel for Argentine vessels and planes guarding-off the Argentine North-East shore.

Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan president reopened the Malvinas’ wound by throwing his darts at Tony Blair’s face after the British Prime Minister criticized the close relations between Venezuela and Iran.

I certainly believe that the Malvinas Archipelago is rightfully Argentine territory and, eventually, the British must leave the islands. However, the question is if in actuality throwing the Malvinas issue to the mix of the Iranian conflict, as Mr. Chávez did, is the best path to secure the return of Malvinas to Argentine sovereignty, especially when one takes into consideration the role that the Venezuelan leader has played in providing some sort of legitimacy to Iran’s nuclear program.

I do not think so. Not only it is absurd to use once again the issue of Malvinas to polarize popular support (whether in Argentina or in Latin America at large) against a real or fictional threat, it is even more when one is doing it by connecting that legitimate claim of Argentina with the ongoing conflict between Teheran and Washington.

Moreover, Mr. Chávez attack on Mr. Blair (who is certainly a puppet of U.S. interests as any other British government would be) comes together with the decision of the Venezuelan Treasury to buy, at the request of its Argentine counterpart, bonds issued for 308 million USD. In doing so, Venezuela has become a key financier of Mr. Kirchner’s government buying since May 2005 2,300 million USD in bonds issued by the Argentine Treasury.

Paradoxically enough, as the Argentine newspaper La Nación reports, the Argentine bonds are in high demand in the Venezuelan market because it is one way that Venezuelan investors have to bypass the tight exchange controls in their own country:

La compra de bonos locales le genera un buen negocio al gobierno de Venezuela, que ya revendió más de US$ 600 millones a bancos de su país que los colocaron entre clientes deseosos de contar con un vehículo de inversión que les permita fugar dólares y evitar los férreos controles cambiarios. Tal vez por este motivo, el ministro de Finanzas de Venezuela, Nelson Merentes, afirmó recientemente que su país compraría bonos argentinos cada vez que desde aquí se lo pidan.

It is noteworthy that the Argentine media did not highlight Mr. Chávez’s request to the British government. La Nación published a brief note on this Friday February 10^th edition (page 3) with a picture of Mr. Chávez rallying in Venezuela. Clarín omitted any reference to Mr.Chávez’s cry. Even the leftist and pro-Kirchner Página 12 buried Mr. Chávez’s reference down in its page 17, publishing merely two paragraphs with a small picture of the Venezuelan leader.

Apparently, the Argentine media know better how to deal with the Malvinas issue. This is more relevant when one takes into consideration how painful is this issue. Not only there are, as with many other wars, many veterans affected by the loss of limbs wandering in the streets of Buenos Aires, seeking a coin or two as a way to deal with their needs, but also Argentina is starting to acknowledge the magnitude of the hoax posed by the military Junta. It is as a part of such process, that Iluminados por el fuego, a film on the war in Malvinas, received the Goya a few days ago, the equivalent of the Oscar in Spain to the best foreign film.

To my mind, Mr. Chávez’s attitudes provide little or no fope for a solution to the Malvinas issue. More so now that he has decided to tie this issue with the larger and broader conflict between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the U.S. government. It is not that I believe in Mr. Bush’s claims about Iran, especially when one takes into consideration how the U.S.“intelligence” services faked information on Iraq, but because the path of conflict and confrontation that Mr. Chávez follows is very dangerous not only for Venezuela but for the entire region.

Technorati Tags: América Latina, Latin America, Hugo Chávez, Malvinas, Argentina, Tony Blair, Venezuela, Rodolfo Soriano, Latin America: Economy and Society, Social Change in Latin America

Inflation's Intimidating Return in South America

2006-01-24T12:55:00.000-05:00

In the last two weeks newspapers and magazines in Argentina and Brazil have been commenting on the growing rate of inflation in both countries. Moreover, in Argentina, Ernesto Kirchner's government attempted to establish some mechanism to prevent sudden changes in the prices of key products.

Kirchner's efforts, however, confronted an unwilling Sociedad Rural Argentina, a powerful association of meat and grains producers that has a long history of confrontations with the current president that reached a peak when in the (austral) winter of 2004 the President decided not to assist to the yearly expo and convention of "la Rural," as the association is popularly known.

With La Rural other two major groups (the Confederaciones Rurales Argentinas and the Centro de Consignatarios de Hacienda) representing most of the 190 thousand meat producers in Argentina rejected the agreement proposed by Felisa Miceli, the Economics Minister. Soon after La Rural's rejection, Aníbal Fernández, the Interior Minister announced that the Argentine government will not hesitate to increase the taxes that the Argentine national government imposes on meat's exports.

How rejecting an agreement to limit increases on the price of the meat connects with the need to raise taxes is--at least to my mind--impossible. Taxes should never be tools to punish unwilling political or social actors, much less economic agents and yet--in its desperation to prevent increases in the rate of inflation--the Argentine government seems to be willing to go down a road that will only increase the level of conflict and distrust in its ability to conduct the economy, which ultimately will lead to more tension, distrust, and yes, more inflation.

Despite the partial failure with the foodstuffs producers, Kirchner's ministers have been able to sign agreements with U.S. based Procter & Gamble and with the Molinos firm, that produces and distributes all sorts of foods, breads, and groceries in Argentina. Procter & Gamble will freeze the prices of 31 of its products and Molinos will do it with 9 key products (oil, rice, bread, and pasta).

In Brazil things are not easier for the government of former labor leader Luiz Lula da Silva. On the one hand, the prices of fuel keep growing despite the efforts of the Brazilian government to reach an agreement with the producers along the lines of the one negotiated with the meat producers in Argentina. The key price of the hydrated alcohol went from R$ 1.724 on January 14, to R$ 1.735 on January 21, as a sign of the weakness of an agreement that included this critical type of fuel for the Brazilian market.

As a consequence, the Brazilian equivalent of the Federal Reserve Bank, the Banco Central do Brasil issued a less than optimistic forecast for the Consumer Prices' Index. Two weeks ago, the Banco Central forecasted a 4.58 yearly for 2006. One week later, the Index had gone to 4.61 yearly for 2006, with a rate of growth for the year of 3.5. It is important to notice, however, that for the twelve months going from November 2004 to November 2005, the Banco Central set an inflation rate of 6.22 per cent.

The inflation rates in both Argentina and Brazil still far from the rates reached by the mid and late 1980s that forced the shock plans, but they prove that there is something wrong in the economies of both countries and that the work of the political leaders is not enough to induce the trust to help prevent any new growth of the inflation. Both countries and Latin America at large are aware of the consequences that inflation had for the markets in the 1970s and 1980s and yet, trapped in the labyrinth of populist politics á la Chávez, the political leaders leaders of the region seem to be unable to find the right combination to secure growth and to avoid inflation.

If you are interested on the issue of inflation you can also read from the Archives of this website:

Latin America before the Neo-Liberal Wave

Technorati Tags: América Latina, Latin America, inflation, Ernesto Kirchner, Lula da Silva, Brazil, Argentina, Rodolfo Soriano, Social Change in Latin America

Parallel Presidencies?

2006-01-16T11:15:00.000-05:00

This weekend, two issues overwhelmed Latin American news services. On the one hand, the public relations blitzkrieg launched from La Paz, Bolivia, by former coca-growers’ leader and new President Evo Morales. Hurricane Evo visited four continents in the short period between his election and his inauguration. In some cases, he brought relief, as in Brazil, as Morales seems to have changed his mind about expropriating several oil refineries of Brazilian capital, and in some others, as in Mexico, heightened concerns about the future of Bolivia and its role in the Latin American relations, as Morales hinted the possibility of limiting the exports of gas to Mexico.

On the other hand, in Chile it was all about good news. Michelle Bachelet not only confirmed her success in the presidential election, as hinted in the first round of the elections, but she was able to increase the margin of support for the Concertación, expanding the base of social support for the coalition that Christian-Democrats and Socialists have maintained in Chile for almost 20 years now.

Both electoral stories provide interesting hints about the possible future of the rest of the region. On the one hand, Morales faces challenges that seem to overwhelm him. Not only he already is backing away (for good) from offers made during his presidential campaign, but he has decided to ignite other conflicts in the region with a rhetoric that seems carbon copied from, and in some cases more radical, than Hugo Chávez’s. The difference is that Venezuela never actually confronted a major process of structural reform, while Bolivia confronted the exact opposite situation.

It should not come as a surprise that in one interview with Argentine newspaper Página 12, Morales expressed nothing but rejection for the policies sponsored by the International Monetary Fund. It is important to stress, however, that the tragedy of Bolivia during the 1990s was co-written by the IMF and local politicians as Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. Moreover, it is necessary to stress—once again—that in the 1980s and 1990s the IMF sponsored many different policies in Latin America and elsewhere.

The radical policies pursued by Sánchez de Lozada may appear as similar to those sponsored by the Concertación in Chile or by Carlos Menem in Argentina or by Carlos Salinas in Mexico, but there were key differences that is necessary to keep in mind for a meaningful analysis of contemporary Latin America. For starters, neither Mexico nor Chile denationalized key industries such as the oil or copper, while in Argentina and Bolivia, the political elites carried away what in the 1990s were called “Garage sales” of pretty much all within their reach, so to assume that it was only the IMF’s fault is, to say the least, absurd.

Moreover, in Morales's interview with Página 12, Bolivia's new president emphasizes how there are not going to be anymore "imported models," just to talk immediately about the micro-credits program that he will launch. And of course, any person that has read a little bit the programs of micro-lending sponsored by the World Bank, the sister institution of the International Monetary Fund, cannot but smile at Morales's naïve attitude, because even on that policy, he will be following a program brought from outside, revealing once again the pattern of lies that constitute the backbone of the recent wave of Latin American populists. Read here, by the way, a critique authored by Aminur Rahman of such microlending programs in Bangladesh, following a rationale developed by Indian economist Amartya Sen.

Sadly enough, the excesses of liberal (conservative in the U.S.) president Sánchez de Lozada, combined with the structural failure of Latin American presidentialism (and particularly with the Bolivian version of it) had created all the necessary conditions for the emergence of these kinds of nationalist and nativist approaches emobodied by Morales. These nativist approaches assume that only what has been thought in Latin America or more specifically in their own countries is good to deal with delicate issues. Such approach seems out of line, because as rich as the Aymara tradition is it would be ludicrous to assume that a mere return to such roots will guarantee the solution of Bolivia's problems.

Morales will help himself by turning his head to Lima, the capital of Peru, to see the troubled presidency of the other Aymara president in contemporary Latin America, Alejandro Toledo, who assumed the presidency of Peru under similar circumstances to find himself, 4 years, later pretty much unable to do anything with a political leadership that appears exhausted and confronting a disillusioned public opinion.

Here it is important to stress how in Bolivia all the market-centered fallacies of the liberalism (or conservatism in the United States) were applied. The all-encompassing privatization carried by President Sánchez de Lozada left thousands of persons without access to water and other public goods and services, triggering a popular movement to resist any form of market-inspired solution to the issues affecting the Andean country. It should not come as a surprise that the privatization launched in Bolivia has now, as one of its unexpected consequences, the emergence of Morales's charismatic leadership, with all its contradictions and risks not only for Bolivia itself but also for the entire region.

Interestingly enough, on the other side of the Andes, in Chile, Michelle Bachelet—the first female to be president in Chile—appeared with a fresh and conciliatory message in her discourse, and more important without any pretension to have all the answers in the backpack of Chilean or Latin American “culture.”

Quite the opposite, President Bachelet appears willing to embrace more intensely than ever the Chilean vocation to open markets with a very active and very responsible public sector willing to intervene whenever such interventions seems necessary, while acknowledging the role that markets should play in allocating scarce resources.

This is more relevant when one takes into consideration key aspects of her biography. She and her family suffered the excesses of César Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship. Bachelet’s presidency will be more important because she is the only true socialist in a continent where many populist leaders, as Hugo Chávez or Ernesto Kirchner, disguise themselves as leftists, whithout having gone through the painful experience that represented for the Chilean Socialist Party acknowledging its own mistakes in pursuing its policy goals without paying attention to the delicate mechanisms of the market.

Technorati Tags: América Latina, Latin America, Evo Morales, Michelle Bachelet, Alejandro Toledo, Carlos Salinas, Bolivia, Chile, Hugo Chávez, microlending, Rodolfo Soriano, Social Change in Latin America

Peruvian Shadows

2006-01-10T11:40:00.000-05:00

This Tuesday January 11, the Board of Elections in Peru decided to refuse former President Alberto Fujimori a chance to seek what would have been his third Presidency. The decision hardly surprises anybody, but it provides an excellent chance to see at the painful state of contemporary Peruvian politics.

As with other countries that I have considered in this blog before, I do not think that we should assume that what is happening nowadays in Peru will happen later in Argentina or Mexico. The intricacies of Peruvian politics prevent from any possible contagion, and yet it is possible to see in Fujimori's biography some glimpses of the kinds of things that are wrong region wide in Latin America.

First it is necessary to acknowledge that as repulsive as Fujimori may be for some in Latin America he was able to address critical issues in Peruvian politics that many others before him were unable or unwilling to address. The problem, of course, exists in the kind of means that he used to pursue his goals. For one, we have the case of Vladimiro Montesinos, the former chief of the political police in Peru who gained fame as one of the bloodiest torturers in a region full of them.

In addition, one can think of Fujimori's decision to dissolve the Peruvian Congress and Supreme Court. The "auto-golpe" or "self-coup" as it came to be known in the early 1990s was with his aggressive counter-terrorist tactics and his economic shock plan, the features that gained "El Chino" (The Chinese), as he came to be known, world fame. By the way, if you are interested in Peruvian politics and you like movies, watch The Dancer Upstairs, an excellent movie directed by John Malkovich dealing precisely with aspects of the counter-terrorist tactics used by Fujimori and Montesinos.

These aspects of Fujimori's biography have been the subject of many commentaries and criticism, some of them accurate and fair, some of them exaggerated by Fujimori's foes. What is more relevant, however, is to ask how a former professor in a technical university (Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina), ended up walking the path Fujimori walked.

To my mind, Peru and Fujimori provide a text-book case to understand what is wrong with presidential regimes and the kind of contradictions that constitute the core of such regimes. I cannot think that a guy such a Fujimori, a college professor in Agronomy, was since his early youth the corrupted and mischievous politician that was forced out of his country to seek refuge in his unique condition as both former President of Peru and Japanese citizen.

Quite the contrary, people who knew the early Fujimori, the one who came to be the president of his Alma Mater, have expressed over and over their surprise with the kind of policies, and more specifically with the decisionmaking processes used by Fujimori as President of Peru.

First, of course his decision to shutdown the Peruvian congress and Supreme Court. He did so after it was clear that his government had no chance to overcome the grip that before him had affected former presidents Fernando Belaúnde Terry and Alán García during their terms. Belaúnde ended up being ousted by a coup back in the 1960s, and García avoided any further confrontarion with the Congress by becoming more radical than the Congress and the leaders of APRA itself.

No wonder, by the end of his term Peru was deep into the worst crisis of its history confronting two choices, Alberto Fujimori as the rather surprising candidate of Cambio 90, and Mario Vargas Llosa, the novelist turned into politician who was unable to defeat Fujimori when El Chino was able to gather the support of García and other leaders of APRA who expected to be able to control his presidency.

Fujimori himself contributed to such perception as his first presidential campaign was based on a bold rejection of the structural reform policies that Vargas Llosa openly proposed to the Peruvian electors. However, Fujimori proved to be a resourceful politician gathering the support of the Armed Forces to launch, rather late when compared with other Latin American countries, an ambitious reform program. The program included not only the usual shock policies to freeze the mounting inflation rate, but also a broad diplomatic effort to recast Peru's relation with the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

Fifteen years later, Fujimori is nothing but a shadow of his old self, and sadly, Peru is in no better shape. After Fujimori's exile in Japan, the administration of Alejandro Toledo faced, as his predecessors did, the negative consequences of presidential regimes, making the very process of government almost impossible.

Despite the decision of the Peruvian electoral board it is important to stress that the Fujimoris are coming. Keiko, the former president's daughter and Santiago, the former president's brother are already registered as candidates. It is not clear, however, who will takeover as Santiago running mate, now that it is clear that Alberto will not be able to run as presidential candidate to compete with Ollanta Humala and another shadow from the past, former President Alán García who expects to become the newest of Hugo Chávez's partners in Latin American politics.

The problem, however, is in the institutional designs and more specifically in presidentialism. That is why politicians with different approaches to politics such as Belaúnde, García, Fujimori, and Toledo share all similar fates, similar flaws. It is not in the Peruvian or in the Latin American "culture," but in the rules of a perverse game that we are unable to stop.

Technorati Tags: América Latina, Latin America, Peru, Alberto Fujimori, Alejandro Toledo, Ollanta Humala, Alán García, Populist Politics, Rodolfo Soriano, Social Change in Latin America

Kirchner's Full Payment

2006-01-03T10:55:00.000-05:00

Today January 2, 2006, the media in Buenos Aires and elsewhere in Latin America and the United States, call attention on the decision of the Argentine government to pay in full the country's debt with the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF was informed of President Ernesto Kirchner's decision to pay in full in mid December. At that time, the IMF released a brief statement on the issue with little or no comment on the reasons and the consequences of the decision, which is, by itself, a good sign of the ability of the Argentine economy to recover .

In Argentina, the decision has polarized the opinions of economists, politicians, and journalists who have expressed in some cases satisfaction and in some others caution with a decision that leaves the Argentine Treasury with little more than 18 thousand 500 million U.S. dollars in reserves after paying little more than 9 thousand 500 million to the IMF.

To my mind there are two issues that one needs to pay attention to try to understand the reach of this decision and its possible consequences in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America. More so, because Mr. Kirchner and his ministers have emphasized the idea, rather ludicrous, that they have decided to pay in full as a way to have more "freedom" to pursue their own economic policies.

First, it is necessary to take into consideration that those 9,500 million are only little more than 10 percent of the overall Argentine debt, which—as with most of the Latin American countries—comes from credits with private banks, and not with multinational institutions as the IMF or the Inter-American Development Bank . This is relevant because, actually, the credits with the IMF usually are less abusive than those with the private banks. That is something that has remained absent in most of Kirchner's statements on the issue.

To my mind, if one really wants to achieve more freedom in the design of the economic policy, what is really important is to repay the debt with the private banks and not to seek the easy applause that comes out of slapping the IMF's face. More so, when it is clear that the measure appears as designed to achieve two goals. On the one hand, to fascinate certain leftist media in Argentina and Latin America (one only needs to pay attention to Página 12's take on the issue to understand it) than to pursue a major goal and, on the other, to insist in the rather ludicrous idea that the crises that Argentina and other countries in the region confront are the consequence of the "tight" controls that the IMF impose on the countries.

The fact, however, is that such controls have been rather loose and that is why it has been possible to witness the abuses as that of former President Menem and his one-peso-to-one -dollar policy of the 1990s. One only needs to go over the files of the IMF and other multilateral financial institutions to see how even if at one point the IMF praised the fixed-parity as a way to address the hyper-inflation of the 1980s (5000 percent yearly in 1988-9), there were many warnings about the negative consequences of the policy.

Moreover, many in Argentina and elsewhere insisted in the need to change the monetary policy, but Menem was unwilling to do so out of fear of the possible consequences. Something similar can be said of the rather dumb decision of the Mexican government to pursue a semi-fixed parity in the early 1990s while reducing the fiscal revenue by lowering the VAT rate from 15 to 10 percent in the last two years of the Salinas administration. Neither Menem’s nor Salinas’s policies were imposed by the IMF.

The same can be said of the unwillingness of many governments in Latin America to pursue sound fiscal policies during the 1980s and 1990s. Otherwise, all the countries in region would be either disasters as Bolivia or buoyant economies as Chile. In actuality, however, there are variations that go from the performance of Chile and Mexico to the failure of Argentina, Bolivia, and Ecuador.

However, in contemporary Latin American blaming the IMF for all the wrongdoings of irresponsible politicians is the best way to secure an ovation.

In any case, the question now is what Argentina will do with the “freedom” that— if one accepts Kirchner’s hypothesis—comes after the decision to pay in full the debt with the IMF.

One discouraging sign can be found in the decision of the Venezuelan government to increase its role as financier of Kirchner. Because that is the aspect of Kirchner’s move that has not been really taken into consideration in the analysis. Only during the last three months of 2005, Venezuela bought 1,500 million dollars of Argentine bonds and the expectation is that Caracas will lend more money to Buenos Aires. It will be naïve—to say the least—to think that Hugo Chávez’s government will do it without seeking to impose its own economic agenda on Argentina.

In any case, questions about the future of the Argentine economy remain open. Hopefully, for the sake of the millions and millions of Argentines who have survived the economic catastrophe co-authored by Menem and De La Rúa, Kirchner will pursue sound policies to guarantee a better distribution of the wealth in that country.

Technorati Tags: América Latina, Latin America, Argentina, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, Ernesto Kirchner, Carlos Menem, Rodolfo Soriano, Social Change in Latin America

Evo Morales president

2005-12-19T06:43:00.000-05:00

This Sunday, Evo Morales, leader of the leftist Movimiento al Socialismo, won the presidential election in Bolivia. He did it with an astounding 50% of the vote, leaving behind one of Bolivia’s recurring nightmares (that of the so-called ballotage) and more important, giving the new president the hope of a more stable Presidency than Morales’s predecessors. If that is the case, Morales’s presidency will be an immediate paradox as he played a key role in forcing-out of the Presidency both Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and Carlos Mesa.

Morales played a key role in the mobilizations that swept Bolivia at the beginning of 2005, and—as such—he can be blamed of pretty much the same misdemeanors or Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan president who actively supporter Morales in his quest for the Presidency.

However, to the so-called “pundits” that immediately want to draw inaccurate comparisons between Bolivia and Venezuela it is important to remind them that the similarities that actually exist are more the function of similar institutional designs than the product of similar “cultures”. Both Bolivia and Venezuela were for many years Centralist republics, a feature that made both countries, as others in South America, prone to instability, that on top of the instability that is inherent to presidential regimes.

The fact that both Bolivia and Venezuela have been commodities exporting economies, with little or no ability to industrialize, just compounds the overall weaknesses of the presidential regime institutional design. To make matters worse, as far as the institutional design is concerned, Bolivia’s reliance on the ballotage system, a political pipe-dream cooked and long-time ago dropped by the French, put Bolivia—over and over—in extremely fragile situations since 1982.

One key difference that is necessary to keep in mind has to do with the processes of structural adjustment of the late 1980s are early 1990s. While Bolivia followed a rather brutal path of “neo-liberal” (neo-conservative in the U.S.) adjustment, in Venezuela nothing like that has ever happened, despite the whining and crying of Chávez and his Bolivarian Movement Fifth Republic.

Morales reaches the Presidency of his country facing mounting pressure to address the many problems inherited by the draconian economic policies pursued, with little or no success (besides cooling down the mammoth inflation rate) during the 1980s . His warning about changes in his dealings with the firms that invested in the exploration and exploitation of the vast gas fields in his nation already had a negative effect pushing up the prices of the product in the World markets.

He is already assuming that his presidency will have the kinds of cash flows that have allowed Chávez to become the leading voice of those who criticize the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as the main culprit for what often times is presented as a dark conspiracy, however they should know better. If—as they say—all the suffering is the IMF’s and WB’s fault, then we should see the exact same outcomes in all the countries when structural adjustment policies were pursued; the fact, however, is that there are important differences from country to country, and those differences are closely related to the specific policies pursued by the political leaders.

That is, however something that we will never hear from Morales and much less from Chávez who is the main beneficiary of the Bolivian election. Not only now he has a reliable partner, willing to reproduce and amplify Chavez’s anti U.S., and anti IMF, discourse. Moreales will do it with two features that Chávez neve has had. On the one hand, Morales brings an ethnic base that can resonate with the rest of Latin America that Chávez never had before. Second, unlike Lula in Brazil or Kirchner in Argentina, Morales will command a clear majority in a government that, with the gas revenue, can be rich as Venezuela’s.

For the U.S., Morales represents a challenge like never before. Not only he is close to Chávez, but he is also close to Castro. Cuba will then has a chance to expand its now narrow trade and, as such, will contribute to facilitate Morales’s decision to denounce or breach the contracts with the forms involved in the exploitation of gas, as such firms will be forced to choose between being at odds with the absurd trade embargo imposed on Cuba and those doing business with Cuba, or fighting a legal battle that is doomed in the Bolivian courts.

Morales will not have, despite the gas related income, an easy ride. On the contrary, the “rebel” province of Santa Cruz still seeks its independence from the rest of Bolivia and it is there where the bulk of the gas is, setting the stage for what will be an epic battle. Also, it is important to keep in mind, despite the current buzz about Morales's ethnic origin, that Alejandro Toledo, the Peruvian president, is also a pure Aymara, and that heritage provided little or no advantage to his troubled presidency.

Elections in South America, Truce in Mexico

2005-12-12T13:15:00.000-05:00

After six months of involuntary but unavoidable absence, I am writing in this corner of the web. I finished the dissertation, so I am free again to write about Mexico and Latin America.

While in Mexico a truce in the electoral campaigns during the Holiday season (Dec. 12-Jan. 12) was engineered by the Federal Electoral Institute, in Santiago de Chile, socialist presidential hopeful Michelle Bachelet reached the second round of the presidential election.

Bachelet's partial victory allows seeing deep changes among the Chilean voters that, for the first time since the end of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship, decided not to give the candidates of the Christian Democrat and Socialist coalition a win in the first round of the presidential contest.
Moreover, the Chilean voters gave the center-to-right and right opposition of President Ricardo Lagos more votes than those gathered by Bachelet, although almost all pollsters assume that Bachelet, a former Health and Defense minister in Lagos's cabinet, will win in the second round to happen on January 2006. If Bachelet wins, the Christian democrat-Socialist coalition will extend their control of Chilean politics for 20 years.

During the last 15 years, the coalition has not affected the institutional design of Pinochet's dictatorship on financial, economic, and trade matters, but it has deepen the logic and the direction of the reforms originally launched by the military government at the beginning of the 1980s. Here it is important to stress that until the arrival of the so-called Chicago boys to the Chilean government, Pinochet's dictatorship was not only as brutal, but also as inefficient as the Argentine Military Junta.

However, what is more relevant to consider at this point is that the willingness of the Socialist government led by Lagos in Chile to preserve Pinochet's institutional design, stands in sharp contrast with the policies pursued by "leftist" governments in other countries of Latin America, and more important in sharper contrast with the propositions made many of the presidential candidates in other countries of the region. This difference is often times overlooked as the recent, rather poor reports of Juan Forero and Larry Rother of The New York Times exemplify.

To think, as an example, that Bachelet is closer to Andrés Manuel López Obrador than to Carlos Salinas de Gortari would imply a naivety the size of the Andes. Not only Bachelet, but Lagos and the representatives and senators elected under the banner of the Chilean Socialist Party have been wise enough to build a healthy and cooperative relation with their colleagues of the Christian Democrat Party, they have been unwilling to relinquish the political leadership of their country as that would favor the parties closer to Pinochet.

They have not done so, unlike the conspiracy theories of López Obrador and the insults of Felipe Calderón. Bachelet, Lagos, Zaldívar and other Chilean politicians of the Christian democrat-Socialist coalition have been able to conduct themselves with a maturity that is unseen in these days in Latin America. The same can be said of any comparison between Bachelet and Ernesto Kirchner, Bachelet and Hugo Chávez, or Bachelet and who appears to be the next president of Bolivia, the former leader of the coca producers Evo Morales.

Now that everything seems to indicate a new defeat of the PRI in the July 2006 elections in Mexico, the concern that I have is how many years would the political watch go back with mister López as President? Would he be willing to risk the last of Mexican oil reserves in a desperate attempt to be more like his chief financial officer, Mr. Hugo Chávez?

These kinds of questions are more pressing when one considers how López has started already a personal war against the Banco de México chairman Guillermo Ortiz Martínez, and has already challenged any reform to the financial system because in his conspiratorial mind any reform is aimed at tying his hands.

In any case, I cannot but express my happiness for the outcome of the Chilean election, and more specifically for the success of the coalition. As far as Mexico is concerned, all I can do is to get ready to swim deep into six years of populism, irresponsibility and paranoia starting on July 2006.

Religion, Politics, and Football

2005-06-26T21:38:00.000-04:00

While the football (soccer) national teams of Mexico and Argentina were playing a delightful semifinal of the Confederations Cup at Hanover, Germany, the newspapers of both countries were reporting, among many other things, of a couple of messages released by the Catholic bishops of both countries.

Both messages deal with politics in their countries and, more important, both put forward severe critiques of the performance of the political parties in both Argentina and Mexico.

In Argentina, Jorge Cardinal Bergoglio, the archbishop-cardinal of Buenos Aires, one of the few Latin American members of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuitas, promoted by John Paul II to become bishops and, even more, to become archbishop and cardinal during his long pontificate, issued a lengthy message (28 pages) in which he criticizes the performance of political leaders in his country stressing the negative role that political struggles have had for the development of democracy in Argentina.

The cardinal stresses the negative role of political struggles within the context of the forthcoming primary elections in Argentina. La Nación, a distant equivalent of The New York Times in Argentine journalism, endorsed Bergoglio’s critique of the politicos’ performance with extensive front page coverage. Moreover, La Nación quotes Bergoglio’s as saying that “political struggles are the great illness of Argentina.”

The second paragraph of La Nación’s note is a full quote of Bergoglio’s message stressing how: “while various interests play their game, afar from the needs of all, it is possible to see in the horizon the shadow of a cloud of social disarray.”

However, and this is relevant to understand the role and the aims of the Church in Latin American countries, Bergoglio’s document displays a broad and sound diagnosis of the situation in contemporary Argentina, the sources of the conflicts, and—more important—it offers a enlightening interpretation of the parable of the good Samaritan as an image to try build a solution for the conundrum of contemporary Argentinean politics.

Interestingly enough, La Nación—a newspaper that can hardly be identified as Catholic—provides a link to download the full message from Cardinal Bergoglio.

As far as Mexico is concerned, Terra, a pan-Latin American web-based service quotes the auxiliary bishop of Mexico City Felipe Tejeda who criticized the primary elections of the presidential candidates saying that the “expenses associated (with such elections) are scandalous and useless.” Here is necessary to stress that the ruling National Action Party (Christian democrat right-to-center) alone has authorized expenses of 350 million pesos (34 million U.S. dollars) for each of its four presidential hopefuls. It is not clear yet how much will the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI, social democrat) will authorize its pre-candidates to spend.

The “leftist” Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) has not set a limit, but one of its most likely candidates, Mexico City’s mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador benefits from the huge budgets of the public relations and media areas of the City’s local government.

Moreover, once the candidates are nominated by the parties, the Electoral Federal Institute (IFE) will allocate federal public monies, plus time in the national, and regional TV and radio networks, plus the monies that the parties will get from the local governments in states (like Nuevo León or the Federal District) where on top of the federal election, local elections happen simultaneously, plus marginal private contributions that the parties and candidates could raise for up to a ten percent of the total public contributions to their campaigns.

These sums will be pre-set by the IFE by September 2005. Then the Secretary of the Treasury (Hacienda) will incorporate such request in the National Budgets that will present some time between the end of September and the end of October 2006, waiting for approval by Mexico’s lower chamber (Cámara de Diputados).

The Church is not the first, and will hardly be the last to criticize how much money the Mexican parties get from the Treasury. In Argentina, the Church’s criticism of the politicos’ behavior is a concern shared by many other political actors in that country. What is relevant, however, is the fact that the Church enjoys in both countries and all over Latin America great levels of trust and public support. However, it is not clear what will the Church make out of such trust when confronting increasingly complex, impoverished, and fractured societies.

Criticizing the expenditure in political struggles is a rather easy task. What is necessary now is to confront the challenge to become an efficient political actor to promote agreements and reforms in countries in great need of them. It could be possible for the Church to perform that important role, although it is clear that it will be necessary to improve its ability to facilitate the dialogue without seeking to push forward its own institutional agenda.

That is easier in Mexico, where the Church does not receive and is not asking for public subsidies. In Argentina, because of the agreements signed during the 1960s (civil governments), ratified by the military rulers of the 1970s and Mr. Menem's democratically elected governments is harder. Mostly, because for the Church there is always the risk of opening a debate that could make them loose more than they could get, especially in the topic of religious education.

The Church: Silence and Expectations

2005-06-15T15:11:00.000-04:00

A constant in different polls carried all over Latin America is the great level of trust (confianza) that the Catholic Church enjoys. Latinobarómetro, Consulta Mitofsky, and many other pollsters regularly register trust levels for the Catholic Church well into the 70 and even 80 percent.

This perception (which is nothing but that) is the source of great tension and debates inside and outside the Church. Do such measures represent an unrestrained ability of the Church to set the public agenda in the countries of the region, in ways similar to those of Italy? Hardly.

Is the Catholic Church falling in patterns similar to those of Europe? Hardly. Is competition with other Christian (Baptists, Evangelicals, Pentecostals) or non-Christian (Jehovah’s Witnesses) or para-Christian (Mormons) denominations shaping the Latin American landscape in similar ways to those observed since the mid 18^th century in what is nowadays the United States? I do not think so.

The evolution of Catholic Church, and religion at large, in the region follows historically situated patterns. There are some similarities with processes going on in different countries of Europe, and some with processes occurring in the United States, but for the most part, Latin America poses a key challenge to the future of Catholicism.

I think that even the Vatican itself is having a hard time figuring out how to address the religious conundrum posed by Latin America. A way to measure the problems that the Vatican is having trying to develop pastoral policies for the region is to observe the silence of the newly elected Pope Benedict XVI. So far, there has been no specific statement on Latin America as a region. The pope expressed his concern with the evolution of the conflict in Bolivia, but that has been it, with the dubius addition of a brief prayer in Spanish before an image of the Virgion of Guadalupe a few days after his election.

However, the clock is ticking and some definitions will come in the coming days. Such possibility is stressed by the fact that it is expected that the pope will attend, as his predecessors did, the General Conference of the Latin American Episcopal Council (CELAM, for its initials in Spanish). It is not clear yet if what will be the Fifth of such conferences will happen either in Argentina or in Chile.

What is clear is that, after a statement of Msgr. Carlos Aguiar Retes, first vice-president of the CELAM, on the possibility of such trip a wave of expectation swept both Argentina and Chile.

Benedict XVI’s silence about Latin America is more compelling when one considers that the region is the global stronghold of Roman Catholicism, and that Brazil, Mexico, and the United States (with a large Hispanic population) are the three countries with the largest Catholic populations worldwide.

The pope, so far, has been trying to smooth the relations with the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches. The move makes sense from an European perspective when one considers the challenges that Catholics, Orthodox, and Lutheran churches face there, and the fact that it is far easier to find a solution to the dispute with the Orthodox churches than to find it with the Lutheran or Anglican churches, mostly because of the issue of the female priesthood.

It is clear that if the Catholic and Orthodox churches expect to have a future in Europe they need to learn to coexist. Moreover, they need to learn to share resources and to face together the challenges of the double process of de-Christianization of Europe: on the one hand, the pressure created by the Islam, and on the other hand, the changes brought by the secularization process in Europe (although such process is far from being universal).

However, it would be a huge mistake if the Vatican forgets Latin America. In Latin America, the Church faces equally important challenges that require not only resources, but above all the imagination and compromise of the church’s grassroots organizations, hierarchies, and the laypersons. Moreover, unlike Europe, where it is forced to seek collaboration and support from the Orthodox churches, in Latin America the Church goes by itself.

New President, New Hopes?

2005-06-10T16:06:00.000-04:00

Carlos Mesa's presidency in Bolivia finally ended when the Congress decided to accept his resignation. Mesa’s, the most recent “interrupted presidency” in the long lineage of “interrupted presidencies” in the poorest country in South America, was an actor of a process that put the country at the brink of civil war and, eventually, of its disintegration.

The independent movement based in Santa Cruz, the wealthiest province in Bolivia, has achieved an unexpected level of support that has created expectations about a possible quick, easy solution to the longstanding problems or poverty and marginalization that have plagued the country since its very origins.

So far, it is not clear if the recently appointed president, Eduardo Rodríguez Veltzé, the former Chief Justice of Bolivia’s Supreme Court, will be able to carry the reforms he has sketched so far. What is necessary to keep in mind is that there is no easy way out to Bolivia’s legacy of poverty and institutional conflict. In addition, at least in the coming days, Rodríguez Veltzé will be forced to perform his duties as president under the same rules and with the same institutional design that damaged Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada’s and Carlos Mesa’s presidencies.

Moreover, that institutional design has been behind the long chain of “interrupted presidencies,” coups, and political instability that has plagued Bolivia’s history in the twentieth century.

So far, his main proposal implies a significant change in the institutional design: moving the country from a central presidential design, into something similar to a federal presidential system although interestingly enough I have not been able to find specific references to a reform aimed to move Bolivia from its status as a centralist regime into a federalist one.

It is important to stress that he has been appointed for a very short, six-month term, which will give him little or no effective power to carry away the kind of deep reforms that Bolivia needs at this point. The risk, of course is that his presidency could end up becoming some sort of lame duck and that the truce he requested will be actually granted just as a way to set the stage for the new presidential election. And here a painful remainder, such election will be affected (unless an overhaul of the electoral system is achieved before Christmas), once again, by the institutional design flaws (ballotage, as an example) that explain Bolivia’s never ending crisis.

Mexico's Electoral Labyrinth

2005-06-08T11:19:00.000-04:00

In July, Mexico's most populated state, the State of Mexico (hehe, we had some problems figuring out new names for the states) will held its gubernatorial election.

Traditionally, since the late 1970s that race has been seen as the key match of the electoral calendar of the year, but mostly it has been seen as a general rehearsal for the general elections that are usually held one year after. This year, however, the situation will not be like that. The numbers in the state race will hardly match the expected numbers in the presidential election.

As far as the state election is concerned, the candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the old PRI, Enrique Peña Nieto, has a relatively easy advantage on most polls and will be, if nothing changes, the winner of the election, however such win will mean little or nothing for the outcome of the presidential election in 2006.

The “leftist” candidate (and I use such term as loosely as possible) of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) Yeidckol Polevensky Gurvitz has a dark history of name changes (she is not Polish as her name will hint), family conflicts and lies that have been haunting her electoral bid. Fortunately, she is far behind in the race with little or no chances of a come back.

Rubén Mendoza Ayala, the candidate of the National Action Party (PAN) started the race with some advantage, however poor decision-making, and the lack any relevant ideas has put him in an increasingly weak position. During the weekend, he starred one of Mexico’s worst displays of electoral behavior. While heading a rally with sympathizers in a small town, he charged against the owner of a pick-up truck filled with balls marked with propaganda of the PRI’s candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto. Moreover, he instigated the crowd to take over the balls and to hit the owner of the truck.

As of yesterday, the candidate had repaid the balls, and did a tour of some of Mexico’s news outlets claiming that was the victim of a conspiracy. Fortunately, someone in the crowd had a video camera on, so his speech instigating the crowd, insulting the PRI’s candidate and charging against the owner of the pick-up were all recorded in vivid colors and displayed by Mexico’s newscasts. In the video, it is possible to see Mendoza Ayala calling himself “ugly as all other Mexicans” and yet, claiming that the electoral race is not a beauty contest. Mendoza’s rant and rave came very close to mutiny.

As usual in contemporary Mexico, Mendoza has been talking of a media conspiracy instead of acknowledging his responsibility in the violent behavior of his sympathizers, while making all sorts of sexual innuendos with references to the balls, his alleged ugliness, and—to fully integrate the picture—with sexual insults that involve the mother of the candidate of the PRI.

What a shame.

In any case, I expect a close call in the election in the state of Mexico, with Enrique Peña Nieto as the winner, but with all sorts of pressure from the “leftist” PRD’s candidate who is running with the support of Mexico City’s mayor and future presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The candidate of the PAN, the party of Vicente Fox, the President of the country, will continue with his allegations of conspiracy and perhaps electoral fraud, which ultimately will be dismissed by his own party.

Perhaps the only good thing that will come out of this is the realization among the PRI leaders that they cannot waste time or effort in more internal conflicts. If so, they will be able to concentrate their efforts in the election of 2006, which will be—by all accounts—the toughest in Mexico’s history, a new and more painful labyrinth for which the old easy recipes of democratization and dismissal of the old authoritarian regime will not work any more.

Bolivia or the eternal crisis

2005-06-07T12:28:00.000-04:00

A few hours after Carlos Mesa's new attempt to step down as president of Bolivia (his most recent attempt happened in March of this year), the Congress has been unable to reach an agreement to hold the joint session that will analyze if they accept or not (as it happened in March) the president's decision to resign. Unfortunately, the solution to this conflict will hardly come that easy.

When Mesa first tried to resign, he proposed a series of reforms that included the disolution of the Congress in order to build a new representation of the Congress. A new Congress able to better represent Bolivia. That, as many other propositions, was rejected by the Congress. All his other propositions to push forward a political and a fiscal reform were rejected too.

What is left now is a country sunk in the worst crisis of its history, with little or no hope for a solution. Again, the answer to many of its troubles lie deep in the very configuration of its institutions. It is not out of chance that Bolivia has been one of the most unstable and poor countries of the region. It is because its institutions are designed to perpetuate chaos and instability by over-emphasizing a separation of powers that is so perfect that prevents any collaboration.

Bolivia, Once Again

2005-06-06T23:24:00.000-04:00

Tonight, as I was doing my last tour of the day over the Internet, I found the information of Carlos Mesa's resignation as president of Bolivia.

What a shame, and what a waste.

Mesa has been trying to find a solution to Bolivia's catastrophe, to Bolivia's labyrinth since the end of 2004 with little or no success A few weeks ago, he tried to find a solution to this conflict by resigning his post. The congress, immersed as it has been in the kinds of power struggles that are the trademark of presidential regimes and lie at the very core of Bolivia's longstanding history of instability, conflict, and poverty, will have, one more time a chance to try to find some sort of solution to its own riddle.

Unfortunately, I am skeptic about a possible solution in the short run. On the contrary, I think that the contradictions that have affected Bolivia in the last 15 years are for from solved. That is the case of the debate about the nationalization of the oil industry, a measure that will prompt the immediate rejection of the United States, its oil industry, and the I International Monetary Fund.

Again in the Times

2005-06-06T17:27:00.000-04:00

This Monday, The New York Times published a brief piece about an angry Condolezza Rice criticizing the major Latin American countries (Mexico, Argentina, Brazil) for being unwilling to support the latest pipe dream of George Bush as far as Latin America is concerned.

Mr. Bush wants the Organization of American States to develop "a process to assess, as appropriate, situations that may affect the development of a member state's democratic political institutional process or the legitimate exercise of power."

Wisely enough, the ambassadors of the aforementioned countries plus Chile, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela, let Mrs. Rice know in advance that they were going to oppose the creation of such "process," signaling the death of this veiled intervention sponsored by the White House on the internal affairs of the countries of the region.

The piece published by the Times emphasizes the fact that Venezuela was the undisclosed destinatary of the so-called "process," while stressing also how hard it was for Mrs. Rice to digest this new defeat for the Bush administration and their aim to become the benchmark of democratic practices all over the world.

And of course, hehe, the irony of it all is that when one compares the U.S. democracy, its standards, its abuses, the gerrymandering with other democracies of the world, there is no way to think that mr. Bush could go around lecturing on (and, what is worse, sanctioning) democratic practices.

Bolivia: Back in the Times

2005-06-03T21:49:00.000-04:00

Sadly, Bolivia is once again in the pages of The New York Times. Sadly, because unlike what happens with China, Japan, or Europe, Latin American countries reach the pages of The Times only when tragedies have happened or are about to happen. Bolivia is actually a special case among the sea of tragedies that happen on a regular basis in the region. So many, that the very definition of tragedy has gone through an overhaul when one needs to address whatever happens in that country.

With the patronizing tone that erases from his name and skin the sin of being a "Latino ," Juan Forero, the Times correspondent in Santa Fe de Bogota, offers a sketchy account of Bolivia's recent crisis, with little or no context to understand it. In any case, English speaking audiences have now a glimpse to one of South America's sadest stories ever, even if they get it from Colombia, which is as absurd a if I was writing a a journalist from New York about stories happening in Toronto or Montreal, Canada.

They do so, but unfortunately little or no change can be expected as a consequence of the sudden notoriety of that country's crisis. In the short term, little or nothing will change, mostly because the country is deep in a political deadlock hard to break, and whose consequences are even harder to foresee. The fact that Bolivia is the poorest country in South America makes the whole situation even worse, because it will always be possible to keep large sectors of Bolivia's poor mobilized and as radicalized as possible, preventing any solution to the many issues that affect that country.

The Organization of American States has been traditionally unable to address crises like this, and the fact that OAS has now a Chilean general-secretary, former Interior minister Luis Miguel Insulza, will make any intervention of the regional organization harder, since Bolivia and Chile have no diplomatic relations, because of Chile's military aggression that locked out Bolivia in the 19th century.

Bolivian President Carlos Mesa has been trying to reach an agreement with Evo Morales, the leader of the coca growers and the radical voice of the opposition, pretty much since his inauguration, with no success at all. Moreover,the fact that the country is a centralized presidential republic, with a very unfair income distribution, and a very unstable political system, only makes harder to achieve the kinds of agreements that the country needs, mostly because as soon as a new president is inaugurated the cycle comes to life again.

Mesa is offering a broad overhauling of the country's institutional design, mainly he is offering more autonomy to Bolivia's deportments, but so far no word on a possible change from the current presidential regime to a parliamentary one.

The Dutch No to Europe

2005-06-02T16:00:00.000-04:00

As I was teaching today it came to me. Of course, the happiest guy in the World now that Europe has imploded is George Bush.

The French and Dutch have decided to blow away a great political and economic experiment that would have been the only rational counterweight, the check-and-balance, to the military and market led globalization heralded by the U.S. Now, the only possibiity to overcome George Bush's unipolar pipe dream is China.

The fear of the Polish plumber and the Turkish laborer was more powerful than the hope of a better, more humane form of globlization. So much for the French crap when criticizing the U.S. voters for choosing Bush on the grounds of fear. Both French and Dutch voters decided on similar grounds with the same outcome: giving Bush more power to do whatever he wants worldwide.

The European Constitution: A View From Latin America

2005-05-31T11:35:00.000-04:00

The defeat of the European Constitution in its French referendum has many implications for Latin America. One of them is that it means bad news for the processes of globalization and regionalization that are not driven by the market.

One of the beauties of the European Union process was, up until this last weekend of May, that it represented a chance for a politically driven process of globalization and regionalization. It was more relevant because it dwarfed other processes that exist in other regions of the world, mainly in the NAFTA-CAFTA region (Canada, United States, Mexico, Chile, and Central America), and the Mercosur region (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay). It was an exercise of political imagination with no parallel in the history of the world: countries willing to peacefully give up their sovereignty in order to create larger markets paying consideration to social issues.

Not only that, the configuration of the European Union as a single political unit played a key role in shaping, as one of many possible examples, some of the political changes in countries like Mexico. In 1995-6, as an example, the Mexican government was forced to broaden and to institutionalize some of the changes that allowed the final drive to democratize the country in the elections of 1997 and 2000.

Without the "democratic clause" that the European Union required as a requisite of its trade agreement with

Mexico

, such agreement would have never been possible. Notice that the

U.S.

Canada

required nothing like that in 1992-3 during the NAFTA talks. Moreover, in recent years the European Union played a key role in promoting socially responsible business practices in Central America.

Furthermore, the effort carried until this weekend by the European Union was a frequent example of a different kind of globalization-regionalization frequently used in Latin American circles as a counterfactual to the kind of insensitive practices that dominate the relation between the "partners" of the NAFTA region, and by those who oppose the Central American Free Trade Agreement.

The worst aspect of the defeat of the European constitution in France is the fact that it was driven by the fear to the "Polish plumber," which is the same fear to the Mexican or Central American immigrant here in the United States. It is a fear based in the unwillingness of the relatively wealthy populations of France, Britain, Holland, and the United States to share some of the privileges that they have had for 100 or 150 years.

Finally, such defeat opens up a series of questions regarding the possible future role of China in Latin America in moments when it is clear that the U.S. economy is unable to assume a leading role in the region. Unfortunately, it is clear for me that the kind of capitalism that China develops is far more aggressive and disrespectful of social, human, and environmental considerations than those practiced by the United States or the, now fragmented, European Union.

Chilean lessons

2005-05-23T04:08:00.000-04:00

This year we are living the 20^th anniversary of the beginning of the wave of democratization that swept Latin America. It seems to me that is a good moment to see behind, to see around and to try look forward.

These two decades were marked not only but the change in the leadership of the countries in the region. They were marked, above all, by a rather naive desire to bring to life democracy in the region. We have tried to do it so however, without the kind of changes that were required to make democracy not only a desirable goal, which it is but-above all- without the support that would have made our democracies viable.

Of course, the exception to the rule is Chile and, up to a certain extent, Mexico. Both countries used some of the features of their authoritarian regimes to carry away economic reform programs that have provided, up until now, the stability that distinguishes both countries when one compares then with the rest of the region. The fact, however is that Mexico has lost for the most part its stability. All that has been left behind is an empty shell that is about to collapse.

As far as Chile is concerned, the country seems to be on its way to preserve its stability and, above all, on its way to keep growth at rates higher than the rest of the region, but also with the benefit of social and political stability.

Part of Chile's story of success is related to long-standing agreements among the country's elites that go all the way back to the 19^th century. Such agreements explain, as an example, their ability to defeat Peru and Bolivia in the wars that they have fought against each other but also in their ability to manipulate in their favor the relation they had in the 19^th century with Britain.

Such agreements explain also the stability of the Chilean democracy up until the 1960s and, paradoxically enough, Salvador Allende's presidential bid and the coup d'Etat that defrocked him in 1973. Moreover, such ability to strike deals and to build coalitions was used by Augusto Pinochet himself to gain the support of the Christian Democrats, who later decided to switch their loyalty and to become the head of the coalition that rules Chile since the late 1980s.

Now, when conflict ravages all the region, Chile stands not only as the less “democratic” of all the countries in the region (see the Electoral Democracy Index built by the United Nations Development Programme) but also as the only one that has been able to effectively reduce poverty and to develop a truly progressive tax regime.

At the core of such paradoxical success, it is possible to find political elites willing and able to reach compromises. The most important of such compromises, however, has hot been with other groups or parties, but above all with the country’s conflicting authoritarian legacy. Even the socialist President Ricardo Lagos, a political refugee during Pinochet's regime, has been willing to preserve, untouched, the market reforms carried by Pinochet.

Such ability puts the Chilean politicians well beyond their peers from other countries.

Overhauling Social Change in Contemporary Latin America

2005-05-22T10:08:00.000-04:00

Social Change in Contemporary Latin America changes. The website originally designed as a tool to my students at Fordham University changes to become a Website to foster commentary on contemporary Latin America in English and Spanish.

Each week I will try to provide some contextualized commentary on topics relevant for the region. I hope that the Website will foster a more nuanced understanding of contemporary Latin America and, above all, I hope that it will help to address some of the region's more pressing issues.

Presidential and Parliamentary regimes (again!)

2005-05-01T15:04:00.000-04:00

I would like to present here an edited version of an e-mail I sent to Christina Domínguez about our discussion on presidential and parliamentary regimes:

My concern with Presidential regimes comes not only out of the readings we have considered in the course. It comes out of my own experience in Mexico, dealing precisely with the effects of presidential regime, out of the consideration of the Argentinean and Venezuelan experiences, but also out of the consideration of other readings dealing with the issue of the negative consequences of presidential regimes, even if we forget about a possible comparison with parliamentary regimes.

It is not that I am obsessed with stability. I am not. I am very much concerned and committed with social change. I cannot stand poverty in Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America. I cannot stand corruption. I hate the irresponsible power games in which Mexican, Argentinean, or Bolivian politicians engage themselves paying little or no consideration to the consequences of their behavior.

However, I believe that as long as the market economy exists the way it exists nowadays, the chances to promote social change outside of the extremely tight limits of the market economy are rather slim. Even Cuba has been forced to develop forms of market economy or at least to insert itself into such economy.

In other countries of the region, the pressures are even harder. Mexico, as an example, because of the closeness with the U.S. and because of the existence of a very powerful bourgeoisie, is pretty much unable to attempt any form of social change that goes against it. You can say, well the EZLN is there as an example of the opposite, and I would agree with you. Unfortunately, I do not think that their chances to induce change in the long run are that good.

Therefore, we need to find a way to facilitate social change (for the better, of course) without disrupting the kinds of equilibriums that a market economy requires. That is where the parliamentary regimes come to my mind and the minds of others area specialists as one specific solution to one specific set of problems.

I do not think that the shift from presidential to parliamentary regimes will be enough to address all the problems in many of the countries of the region. I do believe, however, that some of the Latin American countries will benefit themselves from such change. Mostly, because parliamentary regimes deal with social and political conflict in better ways than presidential regimes.

It would be impossible for me to go over the entire literature on parliamentary regimes to explain why they have proved to be better suited to deal with social and political conflict than presidential regimes. What I can say at this point is to suggest you to keep your options for political analysis open.

Betting, as is often done in Latin America and in many Latin American studies centres here in the United States on the possibilities of social mobilization and social movements denies, on the one hand, the ability to consider the negative impacts that cycles of political instability have on Latin American polities and economies. I understand that approach: it is good, it is healthy to get rid of bad politicians, and I agree with it, the problem is that to do so in a presidential regime is much harder than to do it in a parliamentary one.

Why? Mostly because of the time and effort that you need to defrock a president. I am not thinking about creating conflict-free environments or polities. On the contrary, I think we need healthy ways to process conflict, because conflict is unavoidable, more so in contexts of deep inequality as the ones that exist in Latin America. I believe, in this sense, that parliamentary regimes provide a better set up to get rid of bad politicians, and that presidential regimes are not good for that.

Other source of concern about the presidential regimes is connected with the potential they have for widespread conflict and cycles of violence, that getting rid of a bad ruler creates. Think of La Violencia in Colombia. Nobody thought that it was going to turn out the way it did. Because as much as it happens with wars, with cycles of violence is easy to know when they start, but very hard to end them.

A third source of concern about the ways in which presidential regimes get rid of bad rulers, is connected with the negative consequences that instability has for the poor and middle classes in countries that already have very fragile economies. If you are already poor, and you depend on the government for your income or to have access to goods and/or services (publicly or privately run), these cycles of instability are nothing but bad news. Prices soar, distrust in economic exchanges grows, and uncertainty takes over as the key feature of political, social, and economic interactions, and because of that it is increasingly harder to attract investment (national or foreign). Instability provides the perfect foundation for the reproduction and entrenchment of poverty, it is a recipe for disaster.

Not only that, but since you have a long standing tradition of clientelism in the region, there are questions about the nature and origins of social movements aiming to defrock presidents.

Moreover, following other more qualified analysts of Latin American politics (as Juan José Linz) I am mostly concerned with the pervasive effects that these cycles of instability have for the overall performance of the economy and for the possibilities of economic development. Think, as an example, how much a country loses (in terms of time and money but especially in terms of trust) every time you get into a cycle of instability.

Rich people with bank accounts in Miami will not suffer from them; moreover, in some cases they are able to profit from them, because they have the connections and the expertise to do it. However, you can be sure that the poor and the middle classes will suffer from these cycles: they will loose income, they will have problems to access basic public services, schools often times will close, and the roots of inequality will grow deeper.

The discussion goes well beyond the defense of Lucio Gutiérrez or Abdalá Buccaram in Ecuador, or Fernando de la Rúa in Argentina. In other words, is not that I am defending Lucio Gutiérrez. I am sure he made mistakes; the problem is that within the context of presidential polities, it is harder to find a way out of such mistakes. Allegations of corruption, mismanagement, or dereliction of duty are commonplace in the exchanges among politicians (think of Clinton again). You can charge any politician, anywhere in the world with them. The problem is that in the context of the institutions of presidential politics it becomes very hard to prove them and to force a president out of power.

In parliamentary regimes, all you need to do is to present a vote of confidence in the floor and if you win it, then the government is over. Again, Italy is a perfect example of a very conflictive polity that has been able to process the dissolution of governments very easily, thanks to the framework provided by the parliamentary regime.

Finally, as I mentioned in class, the main problem for me is that if defrocking presidents were good for a polity, then Ecuador should be by now, after several “interrupted presidencies” a paradise, the best country in Latin America. Sadly, it is not.

Ultimately, all I am asking, as I said in class, is to keep your options open. To allow for the consideration of a different institutional arrangement to process social differences, because I am certain that presidential regimes make extremely hard for those polities to process such differences, and actually are responsible of increasing many of the problems that the region confronts.

Bolivia and the Misadventures of Presidential Regimes

2005-03-10T03:38:00.000-05:00

Hi class,

As I go over the Latin American newspaper before our class I was able to find several clips on the ongoing crisis in Bolivia. I could be willing to say that we are fortunate to have this crisis as a prime example of the problems and tensions that presidential regimes face and create due to their institutional design, if I were not haunted immediately by the idea of how costly are these kinds of situations for the region, and more costly for the poorest country of South America.

Part of the reason why presidential regimes are less efficient and more expensive, derives from the fact that in situations like the one Bolivia faced during the weekend and the first days of this week, the country as such enters in a cycle of social mobilization and protest that creates by itself too many problems: investment, production, planning, classes, are just a few examples of the kinds of problems that countries entering a crisis face.

The question, of course is, what could it happened if, facing the exact same type of situation Bolivia were a parliamentary regime? Fortunately, we have enough evidence from Europe during the 1970s and 1980s, to know how parliamentary regimes deal with situations of crisis.

Italy faced endless number of cabinet crises during the 1970s and 1980s. Several governments were created and ceased to exist as a consequence of such crises. However, the economy, the country as such, was able to keep working. Uncertainty was minimal, since the government, meaning the bureaucratic layers of it, was able to keep the show running with little or no interference, because of the provisions in the legal framework.

The problem with the crisis in Bolivia, on the other hand, as well as the crises that Argentina, Ecuador, and many other countries in the region have faced in recent years, is that once deadlock among political elites emerges, there is no way out. Then, the only possible solutions are (1) a clash of political forces, armwrestling to see who is able to put more people out in the streets (Bolivia and Ecuador); (2) the resignation of the President (Argentina, with president Fernando de la Rúa); (3) a coup d'Etat (Mexico in 1913 or Chile in 1973); (4) the president ruling by decree, with or without the support of the Congress (Colombia during the 1970s and 1980s, which creates much more tensions); or (5) an authoritarian regime like the one that existed in Mexico from 1934 to 2000, where deadlock was impossible because of the legal and meta-legal powers of the President.

As I mentioned in class and in my previous postings in this blog, it is impossible to assume that the experience of the United States is somehow replicable in Latin America, so do your best to detach yourselves from the relatively succesful experience of the U.S. and try to understand that Latin American economies are much more fragile, and that any political crisis inflicts severe damages to our economies.

Moreover, if you consider the information published so far about the kind of agreement that Carlos Mesa was able to reach with the Congress, you will be able to see that it has been extremely costly: almost six months in a deadlock, with continuous popular mobilization, deployment of police and army, uncertainty, erosion of an already battered economy.

Here I present you excerpts from Latin American constitutions on the issue of the resignation of the President.

Mexico

Think also, that the presidents are not elected by the congresses, so the idea of resigning before the Congress is a last resort kind of thing. If you go over the Mexican Constitution, as an example considers the possibility of a resignation only in the case of:

SECTION 86. The office of President of the Republic can be resigned only for grave cause, which shall be passed upon by the Congress of the Union, to which the resignation must be presented.

That is all the instruction contained in the Constitution. There is no specific rule, and no clear definition of what constitutes a "grave cause".

Argentina

The Constitution of Argentina offers no improvement:

SECTION 88. In case of illness, absence from the Capital City, death, resignation, or removal of the President from office, the Executive Power shall devolve upon the Vice-President of the Nation. In case of removal, death, resignation, or inability of the President and the Vice-President of the Nation, Congress shall determine the public officer who shall exercise the Presidency until the ceasing of the grounds of inability or the election of a new President.

Bolivia

The Bolivian Constitution is even more criptic when it comes to the issue of the resignation of the President. Here I use the Spanish original since there is no available translation (or at least I was unable to find it):

ARTICULO 93º I. En caso de impedimento o ausencia temporal del Presidente de la República, antes o después de su proclamación, lo reemplazará el Vicepresidente y, a falta de éste y en forma sucesiva, el Presidente del Senado, el de la Cámara de Diputados o el de la Corte Suprema de Justicia.

II. El Vicepresidente asumirá la Presidencia de la República si ésa quedare vacante antes o después de la proclamación del Presidente Electo, y la ejercerá hasta la finalización del período constitucional.

III. Cuando la Presidencia y Vicepresidencia de la República queden vacantes, harán sus veces el Presidente del Senado y en su defecto, el Presidente de la Cámara de Diputados y el de la Corte Suprema de Justicia, en estricta prelación. En este caso se convocará de inmediato a nuevas elecciones generales que serán realizadas dentro de los siguientes ciento ochenta días de emitirse la convocatoria.

Peru

In Peru the situation does not change significantly:

Artículo 113º La Presidencia de la República vaca por:
1. Muerte del Presidente de la República.
2. Su permanente incapacidad moral o física, declarada por el Congreso.
3. Aceptación de su renuncia por el Congreso.
4. Salir del territorio nacional sin permiso del Congreso o no regresar a él dentro del plazo fijado. Y
5. Destitución, tras haber sido sancionado por alguna de las infracciones mencionadas en el Artículo 117 de la Constitución.

Artículo 114º El ejercicio de la Presidencia de la República se suspende por:
1. Incapacidad temporal del Presidente, declarada por el Congreso, o
2. Hallarse éste sometido a proceso judicial, conforme al Artículo 117 de la Constitución.

Ecuador

On the other hand, the Ecuadoran Constitution includes a more detailed explanation of the process, however, the basic arrangement is the same:

Art. 130.- El Congreso Nacional tendrá los siguientes deberes y atribuciones:
Presionar al Presidente y Vicepresidente de la República proclamados electos por el Tribunal Supremo Electoral.

Conocer sus renuncias, destituirlos, previo enjuiciamento político;
establecer su incapacidad física o mental o abandono del cargo, y declararlos cesantes.
Elegir Presidente de la República en el caso del Art. 168, inciso segundo, y Vicepresidente, de la terna propuesta por el Presidente de la República, en caso de falta definitiva.

Art. 167.- El Presidente de la República cesará en sus funciones y dejará vacante el cargo en los casos siguientes:

Por terminación del período para el cual fue elegido.
Por muerte.
Por renuncia aceptada por el Congreso Nacional.
Por incapacidad física o mental que le impida ejercer el cargo, legalmente comprobada y declarada por el Congreso Nacional.
Por destitución, previo enjuiciamiento político.
Por abandono del cargo, declarado por el Congreso Nacional.

Art. 168.- En caso de falta definitiva del Presidente de la República, le subrogará el Vicepresidente por el tiempo que falte para completar el correspondiente período constitucional.
Si faltaren simultánea y definitivamente el Presidente y el Vicepresidente de la República, el Presidente del Congreso Nacional asumirá temporalmente la Presidencia y convocará al Congreso Nacional para que, dentro del plazo de diez días, elija al Preside nte de la República que permanecerá en sus funciones hasta completar el respectivo período presidencial.

Notice that the Ecuadoran Constitution includes provisions that ultimately put the President at the mercy of the Congress. This comes as a consequence of the impeachement process (enjuiciamiento político), which opens the door for any majority in the Congress able to gather enough votes to defrock the President.

If any of you needs a more precise translation of a any of these constitutional sections, I will be very happy to do it for you. We will continue this dialogue later.

Presidential Regimes and Institutional Designs II

2005-03-09T02:10:00.000-05:00

I have found more information that can help us understand a little bit better the negative consequences of presidential regimes in Latin America, and why it is hard--to say the least--to assume that the succesful example of the U.S. can be used as a benchmark for the rest of the countries with that kind of political regime.

First, I would like to suggest a study that is particularly relevant for Rosemary. Their subject is the impact of political institutions on corruption. The authors Daniel Lederman, Norman Loayza, and Rodrigo Reis Soares summarize their article as a study that:

[U]ses a cross-country panel to examine the determinants of corruption, paying particular attention to political institutions that increase political accountability. Previous empirical studies have not analyzed the role of political institutions, even though both political science and economics theoretical literatures have indicated their importance in determining corruption. The main theoretical hypothesis guiding our empirical investigation is that political institutions affect corruption through two channels: political accountability and the structure of provision of public goods. The main results show that political institutions seem to be extremely important in determining the prevalence of corruption. In short, democracies, parliamentary systems, political stability, and freedom of press are all associated with lower corruption. Additionally, we show that common results of the previous empirical literature on the determinants of corruption––related to openness and legal tradition––do not hold once political variables are taken into account.

In their analysis of the data, the authors were able to find that:

... the most consistent results regarding the political variables are related to democracy, presidential systems, time of democratic stability, and freedom of press. The estimated coefficients in columns (4) to (8) imply the following relations between these variables and perceived corruption: democracy reduces corruption by 0.7 points; presidential systems in a democracy, as opposed to parliamentary systems, increase corruption by 0.8 points; each additional 20 years of uninterrupted democracy reduce corruption by 0.5 points; and 50 points more in the freedom of press index (as from the level of Turkey to the level of the United Kingdom) reduces corruption by 0.5 points. These main results are robust to the inclusion of the government wages variable in the right hand side, which typically reduces the sample to less than 200 observations.

Go over the article to get the full analysis. Many of you could benefit from it. You can find it here.

Other relevant reading for our understanding on presidential and parliamentary regimes summarizes why is so hard for other countries than the U.S. to run stable presidential polities. The author, Seymor Martin Lipset is one of the heavyweights of social and political science in the United States, and this particular article ("The social requisites of democracy revisited") is a classic of political analysis.

The article, according to its abstract, deals with:

The factors and processes affecting the prospects for the institutionalization of democracy throughout the world are discussed. Because new democracies have low levels of legitimacy, there is a need for considerable caution about the longtermprospects for their stability.

When explaining the failure in Latin America and its success in the United States, Lipset states:

In considering the relation of government structure to legitimacy it has been suggested that republics with powerful presidents will, all other things being equal, be more unstable than parliamentary ones in which powerless royalty or elected heads of state try to act out the role of a constitutional monarch. In the former, where the executive is chief of state, symbolic authority and effective power are combined in one person, while in the latter they are divided. With a single top office, it is difficult for the public to separate feelings about the regime from those held toward the policy makers.

The difficulties in institutionalizing democracy in the many Latin American presidential regimes over the last century and a half may reflect this problem. The United States presents a special case, in which, despite combining the symbolic authority and power into the Presidency, the Constitution has been so hallowed by ideology and prolonged effectiveness for over 200 years, that it, rather than those who occupy the offices it specifies, has become the accepted ultimate source of authority.

This constitutional (legal-rational) legitimacy took many decades to develop. Strong secessionist efforts occurred a number of times before the Civil War (e.g., by New England states during the War of 1812, by South Carolina in 1832, and by leading abolitionists in the 1840s who rejected a Constitution that upheld slavery). The Civil War and subsequent long-term economic growth legitimated the American constitutional regime.

You can find the article here.

Samuels and Eaton published in 2002 "Presidentialism And, Or, and Versus Parliamentarism: The State of the Literature and an Agenda for Future Research". The authors explore these three hypothesis:

H1: institutions promoting unilateral executive power and separation of purpose are more likely under presidentialism;

H2: the core institutional differences between regime types are necessary and sufficient causes of differences in political output;

H3: similar configurations of non-core institutions have a greater impact under presidentialism, thus generating additional differences in political output.

Particularly, this article is valuable, among many other reasons, because it subscribes the claims made by Lederman, Loayza, and Reis Soares about the consequences that presidential regimes have for corruption (take notice Rosemary), but also about the costs of policy building and policy implementation in presidential regimes as compared to parliamentary ones.

[D]espite variation within both presidential and parliamentary regimes, the unity of survival in parliamentary systems limits how responsive legislators can be to lobbies. In contrast, in all presidential systems, separate survival allows legislators to more aggressively court interest groups without risking the fall of the government and losing their jobs. Even in systems where presidents have high powers, the simple right to review legislation in combination with separate survival can lead legislators to demand substantive modifications in response to interest group and other pressures (Eaton 2002). As suggested in our earlier analysis of “resoluteness,” a greater number of entry points for interest groups in presidentialism suggests that the costs to building legislative support for policy-making may be more costly in presidential systems, under both unified and divided government (however, see Persson and Tabellini 1999).

Using a similar logic, scholars have also suggested that corruption may be greater in presidential systems (see e.g. Gerring and Thacker 2001; Kunicova and Rose-Ackerman 2001; Kunicova 2001). This in turn suggests an unexplored answer to the issue of democratic breakdown: holding everything else constant (including fragmentation and polarization), perhaps the separation of powers increases the costs in terms of side-payments of maintaining support for the incumbent government and thus the existing regime. (pp. 36-7)

In other words, presidential regimes are more expensive and less efficient than parliamentary ones. You can access this article here.

Also, for Rosemary, Christina, and Brianne I suggest this piece about Mexico. It is not an article, but a proposal. However, it has plenty of information about recent changes in Mexico that could be helpful for the development of your papers.

Presidential Regimes and Institutional Designs

2005-03-08T01:50:00.000-05:00

One of the main problems that Latin American polities have faced over the years has been the instability of their political regimes. Instability is critical to understand the problems that region confronts for several reasons and forces us to raise questions about its origins. Above all, instability is extremely expensive for the countries suffering it.

Instability has negative consequences for the countries suffering it because:

It induces uncertainty in the political processes, in the management of public goods and services,
It delays and in some cases cancels the development and implementation of policies,
It contributes to inflationary cycles (and we have already consider the nature of inflation as a regressive tax in previous postings),
It prevents local and foreign long term investment,
It exacerbates radical positions on both extremes of the political spectrum,
Even when it comes as a consequence of democratic procedures, puts democracy at risk

Yi Feng, of the School of Politics and Economics of Claremont Graduate University, developed a detailed analysis of the consequences that political instability has for policy uncertainty, political freedoms, the formation of human capital, and economic growth. The title is: "Political Freedom, Political Instability, and Policy Uncertainty: A Study of Political Institutions and Private Investment in Developing Countries". It was published by the International Studies Quarterly (June 2001, vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 271-294(24)). You can get access to it through the Ebsco-Host link of the Library's website.

Now, since the only known political regime in the region has been presidential, we can assume that it has at least some consequences for the performance of the governments, and the outcomes that the political systems produce.

If we are unwilling to consider this feature, then the finding a possible answer to the issue of instability needs to go to other features: the so-called "political culture", the Iberian and indigenous legacies, the racial or ethnic features, and the like.

If we assume that this is an issue of "political culture", following the rationale of S. P. Huntington or Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, then we will have to ask if there is a solution to it. From the "clash of civilizations" perspective developed by Huntington, there is no way out. "Culture", and "political culture" in particular cannot be changed, they are the consequence of the "corrupted" legacies that reside at the very core of Latin American identities: Iberian and indigineous for cases like Mexico, Peru, El Salvador, Guatemala, Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, Paraguay; Iberian and Gaucho for cases like Argentina, Uruguay, and to a certain extent Brazil, and even worse for countries with a triple "negative" legacy like the Dominican Republic, Panamá, Honduras, Colombia, Venezuela, and regions of Peru: Iberian, indigenous, and African.

From this approach, identities have existed as such since the days of the Protestant Reformation and the colonization of Latin America, and people like myself, mestizo, Catholic, and Latin American are little more than beasts, unable to conduct ourselves according to the needs of a democratic polity. Of course, a new problem arises for this approach when we consider the experiences of Spain and Portugal in the 20th century, but then again, perhaps since they are European and there is less or no trace of indigenous or African legacies there they have been successful when compared with Latin American failures.

As you can imagine, I have several reasons to reject these kinds of explanations. The most important of them is that it leaves more than 500 million persons without any possible redemption.

Then, if you reject the cultural and racial explanations (that ultimately are one and the same), we need to figure out other possible explanations for the current situation, and to avoid similar situations in the future. Again, because of the consequences of instability.

Since presidential regimes are the only known regime in the region and the Presidency as such concentrates so much legal and extra-legal powers, you cannot rule it out as a source of instability.

Moreover, consider beyond the successful experience of the U.S. (which would require and entirely separate explanation) the ammount of scholarship produced on the subject in recent years. Just going over the citations and references of the articles by Arturo Valenzuela and Joe Forewaker, gives you an idea of how relevant it is, how intense is the debate.

Consider also the fact that, even if there is no agreement among the two authors considered about the possibility of inducing a radical change in the political regimes (going from presidential to parliamentary regimes--my own personal Mexican utopy), both agree on the need to introduce major changes in the institutional designs of the region to prevent instability. Moreover, both agree that without those changes Latin American democracies are at great risk.

Forewaker provides a superb account of the kinds of outcomes that the Latin American presidential systems produce. He also provides insights about possible ways to improve the systems' performance and overall outcomes. Valenzuela's identifies for the most part similar sources of instability, but he is more ambitious when proposing possible solutions and more aggressive in the analysis of the Latin American presidencies. Reread pages 14 and 15 of his article, when he compares "minority presidents" (those with less than 45% of the Legislative) with "majority presidents" and how, in Venezuela's case, Carlos Andrés Pérez was unable to control his own party in the Congress.

For those interested in the topic and able to read Spanish, I suggest to read Bruce Ackerman's article "¿Hacia una síntesis latinoamericana?" published as a part of the book Contribuciones para el debate. Contribuciones ... is part of the studies commisioned by the United Nations Programme on Development for the study Democracy in Latin America. We read in session two a summary in English of that study.

When comparing presidential and parliamentary regimes (p. 93 of Contribuciones para el debate) Ackerman says:

I propose to put aside the academic debate about the advantages or disadvantages of presidential regimes for democratic politics, and consider the impact that it has in the functioning of the courts and the bureaucracies of a country.

To enhance our understanding of the problem, I will use Guillermo O'Donnell's distinction between regime and State. As far as the organization of their political regime, Latin Americans refused the possibility of following the European model of parliamentary democracy to pick, instead, the presidential system following the U.S. style. But as far as the State, the Latin Americans were much more eurocentrist to organize their bureaucracies and tribunals, following an ethno-nationalist model. Hence, we are before a typical Latin American synthesis: a regime following the U.S. model within a European like State. Is this peculiar synthesis particularly propitious or particularly disastrous?

I am sorry to spell it out, but my approach is the gloomiest.

Ackerman's argument is extremely useful to understand both the outcomes of presidential regimes, the instability that affects them. I will try to find if he has published a similar piece in English.

Not only Ackerman. Other heavyweights of political analysis in the region discuss this topic and many other topics, so try to read it. You can get it here.

Hypothesis Building in Latin American Contexts

2005-03-03T22:57:00.000-05:00

Hi class,

After today's class I went over your hypotheses. Some of them are ready to be the cornerstone of your final paper, some others need some work, but overall I am happy with what we have been able to accomplish so far.

Also, I have been trying to find additional readings for those of you having problems or interested in improving or developing your abilities to conceptualize and develop hypothesis.

I was able to find a reading by Michael Coppedge ("Theory Building and Hypothesis Testing: Large- vs. Small-N Research on Democratization"). He is a professor at Notre Dame University. Moreover, he is an "area specialist" with specific interests in Venezuela and Mexico, so the paper I am suggesting for you to read is mostly concerned with issues and examples from the region.

Moreover, Coppedge discusses hypothesis testing and building for case studies, which is what many of you are trying to do for this course, so it should be helpful for your own research.

Go over it, try to relate with the discussions that we have had in our course, and above all relate it with your own final paper.

Enjoy the weekend.

Decentralization and Federalism

2005-02-24T17:12:00.000-05:00

Hi class,

Decentralization is relevant as a process that tries to address hierarchies. Hierarchies are problematic for economists and public and private managers because they create much more problems while managing resources (especially public resources) than markets. This happens, mostly, because of the way they tend to organize themselves.

Broadly speaking, a hierarchy is any structure of power. Churches, especially the Catholic Church, explicitly acknowledge the existence of such structures and they call them hierarchies. In organizational studies, any structure of power is a hierarchy. They are problematic because when they become too large, they tend to impose political, personal, or clientele criteria in the use and distribution of the resources, reducing the overall efficiency of the processes they perform. This is what economists and managers call externalities.

Historically, the move towards decentralization as a concept goes all the way back to the works of Alexis de Tocqueville, the author of Democracy in America.

Tocqueville wrote:

Decentralization has, not only an administrative value, but also a civic dimension, since it increases the opportunities for citizens to take interest in public affairs; it makes them get accustomed to using freedom. And from the accumulation of these local, active, persnickety freedoms, is born the most efficient counterweight against the claims of the central government, even if it were supported by an impersonal, collective will.

More recently, the observation of bureaucracies and the externalities they face prompted a series of changes in the late 1960s in highly centralized countries as France (a unitary, Presidential polity) after the defeat of Gen. Charles de Gaulle in the plebiscite called in 1968. However, it is possible to find examples of this need to decentralize in large U.S. corporations such as General Motors, Ford, General Electric, and the like during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The U.S. government itself acknowledged this problem when, in the early 1970s, forced the partition of "Ol' Mamma Bell" into the Baby Bells. Not only Big Bell had a monopoly over telephone communications, but it was very inefficient in providing that kind of service.

The tendency spread out to other Western countries during the late 1970s, mixed in many cases with the rise of what here and in Britain is called conservatism and in the rest of the world is called neoliberalism, the case of Britain and Margaret Thatcher is paradigmatic of this convergence. That leads some uncritical observers of Latin American reality to mix-and-match neoliberalism with decentralization.

However, it is necessary to acknowledge that way before the emergence of the International Monetary Fund as the factotum of policy in the region, the governments of Latin America were already aware of the need to promote some forms of decentralization or administrative reform.

Decentralization as a theory rejects the assumption that we need some form of hierarchy or structure of power, seeking to raise specific questions about the specific types of hierarchies that are necessary in any given circumstance. It sees hierarchies (for that purpose any form of authority) as arbitrary. After this first question about the need of structures of power, decentralization asks for the specific forms of structures of power that are better for the processes we are addressing or considering.

Decentralization does not reject authority or hierarchies per se, but acknowledges the need to challenge systematically the specific forms of authority or hierarchy to develop at any given moment the best form of authority possible.

From a very abstract perspective, decentralization de-sacralizes power that is why it rejects fixed structures of power and seeks to develop fluent exchanges of information between service providers and clients.

Our Readings

Falleti is mostly concerned with the relations between executive authorities at the three levels of government in the four largest countries in the region. Willis, Garman and Haggard are concerned with the role that political parties have had in these processes.

Their key findings are:

Decentralization is a sequential and path dependent PROCESS. Falleti´s emphasis on the procedural character of decentralization seeks to highlight the fact that we cannot understand these processes as black or white kind of processes. Up until today in Mexico, as an example, there are political actors seeking a broader decentralization, while—of course—there are other actors seeking to expand the role of the Federal Government at the expense of the local and state governments.

Decentralization happens or not regardless of: the type of regime (democratic or authoritarian); the Constitutional structure (federal or unitary); and who is in charge (civil or military). The four cases used by Falleti provide different examples of this. Mexico was formally a Federal republic, but it was in actuality a very centralized polity; Colombia was a extreme case of political centralization, ridden with extreme illegal organizations (the guerrilla and the drug lords) challenging the ability of the State to control territory and to provide for the needs of the population. Argentina was a very stiff military regime, unable to open itself to the kind of progressive reform that happened in Brazil, where the military tried to combine a strong authoritarian leadership at the national level, with democratically elected subnational leaders.

The reason for it, and this is my own take from the Mexican experience, is that it happens because decentralization as well as federalism and other buzzwords of Latin American political jargon, are usually labels behind the “real” policies. In Mexico’s case, a very centralist and authoritarian government, labeled, however as federalist and democratic, started in the late 1970s a decentralization process. It was their way to deal with hierarchies and their externalities (in simple language with bureaucracies and the red tape they crate). Among the problems were: the inefficiency of local political bosses to aggregate political support for the PRI. With the challenge presented by different political actors, some of them legitimate as the Partido Acción Nacional and some others marginal or even illegal as the guerrilla organizations active during the mid 1970s. In addition, with the externalities (problems) created by the hierarchies. Moreover, the Mexican political elites’ response to these challenge was paradoxical, because on the one hand—as Willis et al. nicely explain—it actually decentralized by allocating more resources to the states and municipalities, although—on the other hand—it also centralized power in the figure of the Secretary of Budget and Planning. Interestingly enough, three of the last four presidents of Mexico were before their election heads of that secretary (Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León). That gives you an idea of how powerful that position in the cabinet was. Moreover, it was that secretary the one in charge of the decentralization process in Mexico up until its fusion with the Secretary of the Treasury in 1992.

The different outcomes of the decentralization PROCESS are less a result of particular or individual policies, and more the product of the EVOLUTION of such reforms and the type of actors empowered along the way. The path dependent nature of the PROCESS is clear when one considers how their decentralization programme developed within the context of the Argentine military regime and how it has evolved over time. Conversely, the Colombian process reflects the willingness of the national government at the beginning of the PROCESS to introduce deep changes in the structure of the polity. One could argue, considering the evidence provided by Willis et al., that the failure of Venezuelan democracy is correlated, at least partially, with the externalities that a unitary, centralist, presidential government creates in terms of the hierarchies running the show. Is not a surprise that the main problem with Partidocracia (Party-cracy) was precisely in terms of corruption (el cogollo).

Willis, Garman, and Haggard’s piece is valuable because it introduces the issue of the role of the national political parties as a key aspect of the decentralization process. It is not a surprise that polities where the parties were under severe constraints (Argentina during the military dictatorship banned the Peronista party, as an example) had poor outcomes. The same can be said of Federalist polities where the President does not enjoy a legislative majority (hence Mr. Fox problems in Mexico nowadays with the fiscal reform). Divided governments (like the situation that Bill Clinton faced here in the States during much of his term) produce (as contemporary Mexico confirms) deadlock.

Although decentralization can have positive impacts on poverty and other key topics, we cannot be too optimistic about the outcomes of decentralization processes. The best example of it comes from Colombia. But, of course, as Leah wisely pointed out, the main problem there is that the old centralist, unitary, and presidential system confronted the additional challenges brought by the guerrilla and the drug lords. Here you can get a brief newsletter analyzing some of the negative and positive processes of decentralization worldwide.

We could analyze these processes also by using Foucault’s approach on governmentality. The national governments display their technologies of power, which are confronted by the subnational governments’ technologies of self and their own technologies of power, and out of the interplay of these two forms of technologies, of specialized knowledge expected and unexpected consequences emerge.

I believe, as I already mentioned in class, that when analyzing processes like decentralization or federalization it is necessary to pay attention to the specific policies and path dependent and non-path dependent processes. Moreover, whether as policymakers or as social entrepreneurs or as social scientists or even as simple citizens here in the US, in Latin America or in Europe, we need to pay attention to this interplay of technologies of self and technologies of power and be ready for unexpected consequences.

One way to avoid some of the unexpected consequences brought by large scale planning (the six-year National Development Plan that Mexican presidents must submit to the Congress during the first year of their term could be a good example) is by considering as much voices as possible in the processes: think, as an example of the kinds of audiences that the MTA or many other agencies hold here in NYC everytime they need to raise fares or when they decide to expand a line or to renew or close a station.

If you want to get some more information on the topic, go to the Website of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

I also mentioned in class the existence of these new forms of organizations called heterarchies, something in between a market and a hierarchy. A heterarchy can be defined as "horizontal self-organization among mutually interdependent actors." If you are interested in that topic read this brief paper (12 pages).

Latin American Cities and Capitalist Development

2005-02-23T02:56:00.000-05:00

Hi class,

Today’s readings offered a good summary of most of the research and most of the policies carried in Latin America in the last 40 years.

Portes’s reading is relevant not only because of the literature review he offers, but also because of the way in which he connects the (mis)adventures of Capitalist development with the attempts to plan and regulate the growth of Latin American cities.

Angotti’s piece is relevant because it connects at one level with Portes’s in stressing the role that capitalist development has in shaping the city as a privileged space for the exercise of different forms of power, but also because of the consideration of the kinds of constraints that such type of development puts on the city.

Rosie’s question regarding the ability of the governments to plan or not the development or the growth of the city it is relevant at many different levels. On the one hand, it can be answered by saying yes, there is planning, plenty of it. The budgets of Latin American cities are filled with studies and analysis seeking ways to improve the quality of life, the goods provided, and so on. However, of course, the problem is that almost all those plans require money to be carried and money is not easy to find, especially if you are under severe fiscal constraints.

Moreover, it could be argued that Latin American cities (as any cities in the world) provide good examples of the kinds of contradictions, tensions, and unexpected consequences that capitalist development generates. Back in the 1970s, French philosopher Michel Foulcault (I can see Matthew scared and running away from this one) came up with the concept of Governmentality as a key tool to try to address the complexities that attempts to regulate the use of physical space have all over the world.
Of course, the unexpected consequences are most evident in cities in fragile fiscal shape for obvious reasons, but the problems exist regardless.

Foucault coined the notion of governmentality as an attempt to encompass in one single concept the uses, tensions, intentions, contradictions, unexpected consequences, and strategies to challenge and to resist power.

I know is big as a bomb. However, one way we can breakdown such concept is by thinking of governmentality as 1) a research strategy, and 2) a conception of governing. As research strategy governmentality «seeks to explore power relations, particularly in the domain of what constitutes conduct» (Lechte, John Key Contemporary Concepts. Sage, 2003, p. 98). As a conception of governing, it is connected with the concept of government, but is not reduced to it. That is to say, not only the government has strategies of governmentality: firms, small and large; churches; sports organizations, and so forth and so on. Any organization that has some goal or aim needs to display some form of governmentality at some point.
It is important to stress that, unlike Marxist thinking and some other radical approaches to power; Foucault’s radical-ity when dealing with power resides in the fact that for him power is not «a limit to freedom … governmentality must be understood as a set of actions or practices enacted over free individuals, actions realized only to the extent that individuals are free» (Lechte 99).

Moreover, Foucault’s governmentality «points to a domain which covers more than the legitimate forms of politics and government; it is imbricated in all the actions of people; for this is what the art of government entails. In itself it is neither good nor bad, desirable nor undesirable. Rather is the very field of contestation itself, should there be contestation, as it is the very field of acquiescence, should there be acquiescence» (Lechte 99).

I do not think that is necessary to elaborate too much on how the policies and plans to regulate the development and growth of the city (Mexico City, New York, London, or Beijing) fit nicely for analyses based on this approach. Mostly, because it is there in the endless battles to shape the form and the function of areas of the city that is possible to see contestation and acquiescence.

Now, when we analyze processes like those considered by Portes and Angotti, using governmentality it is necessary to identify within each interaction between individuals and the power three different sub-processes:

a. Technologies of domination
b. Technologies of self
c. Both unexpected and expected consequences coming out of the interaction between both technologies

(In this section, I will be using and adapting extensively Jennifer Smith-Maguire’s article “Michel Foucault: Sport, Power, Technologies and Governmentality” in Theory, Sport and Society. All the portions in quotation come from this article.)

a. Technologies of domination

The technologies of domination seek to «optimize the use of resources» of all type, from the resources of the body to the resources of polity. To achieve such optimization one follows what Weber would have called a rationally oriented (social) action: one tries to find the optimal means to achieve the stated goals or aims. The operations required to select such means involve «systematic, specialized forms of classification and categorization of human life» (censuses and the like) reflecting relations of power. Such relations of power will never generate zero-sum outcomes and are positive exercises of power, at least theoretically, technologies of domination seek to «constrain choices, such that individuals more often than not are productive and active in ways that more often than not, reproduce the social order. As the range of choice narrows, the degree of domination rises.»

Technologies of domination (or power) «fall within two broad modes, reflecting the ongoing tension between, on the one hand, the state indirectly relying upon individuals to maintain social order» (the market), and on the other «the state directly governing the productivity of the population as a whole» (the law). That is, «technologies of domination work in both individualizing and totalizing modes, producing different, interrelated bodies of knowledge that work through the same rationality of optimization through normalization» (plans to regulate urban growth or development).

b. Technologies of self

Technologies of power or domination aim at shaping individual and collective choices among those targeted by such technologies. According to Foucault technologies of self: «permit individuals to effect, by their own means or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, immortality» Michel Foucault (1988) “Technologies of Self” in Technologies of Self: a Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst UMA Press.

Technologies of self are useful, as one of many possible examples, to explain the decision of many Latin Americans to leave their towns of origin heading to Mexico City, Buenos Aires or Río de Janeiro, and in some cases, from there to Los Angeles, Madrid, or Lisbon. They are useful to explain also autopoietic initiatives that seek to articulate groups or organizations in trying to improve their lives even if it is only at the level of survival strategies. Often times, technologies of self involve doses of conscious and deliberate resistance and rejection of the technologies of domination or power.

Moreover, technologies of power (think of many laws here in the US or elsewhere) have what Smith-Maguire calls «contradictory or ambivalent effects … lying at the heart of opportunities for resistance» (p. 304). That is the case of laws or planning and development programmes that aimed, with the best imaginable intentions, at solving or at least taming specific problems or issues, but that in the end create «new and different problems. »

c. Unexpected and expected consequences coming out of the interaction between both technologies

Here is where governmentality becomes problematic and critical to understand the successes of some policies (beautification of urban spaces or gentrification, as an example) and the failure of others (annihilation of local traditions and knowledge, social conflict, and the like).

Both Angotti and Portes provide good solid examples of technologies of power, of technologies of self, and of governmentality as this random interaction between technologies of self and domination.

If any of you are interested in exploring more the concept of governmentality let me know, I will point you in the direction of some interesting articles.

About Lawson's and Mainwaring's articles

2005-02-17T10:23:00.000-05:00

Hi class,

The academic, policy, and political debates regarding the nature of political regimes in Latin America are relevant because the definition of what is democratic, under what circumstances and with what kinds of trade-offs, rests at the very core of social change in the region.

All the actors in the region present themselves as advancing some form of democratic agenda in the region. Your own papers will make at some points judgments about the democratic nature of country X or Y.

So precisely, because we are aware of the risks associated with broad generalizations, poor classifications, and with orientalism, it is necessary to sharpen our concepts, which are the tools to carry analysis and research.

Lawson

Lawson’s piece is particularly relevant because of its critique of conceptual relativism (p. 191) and its acknowledgement of democracy and democratic governance as both theoretical and normative concepts. We cannot deny this double function. We need to acknowledge it and work through it in order advance our academic/political interests.

A valuable feature is her adoption of constitutional opposition as the key criteria to define democratic rule. Without it, there is no way to talk about democracy. Moreover, such concept works both ways. It helps to analyze the regimes and governments’ policies and decisions, but it is also helpful to analyze opposition movements.

This is relevant because at different points in history and all over the region it is possible to find new social movements, political parties, and leaders that, claiming to be democratic, deny the value of Lawson’s criteria.

Another valuable contribution of the paper is its use of the concept of democracy’s "internal complexity" (p. 192). The relevance of it lies in the fact that democracies and especially poor democracies as Latin American democracies are, are frequently confronted with pressures to prioritize following different criteria than those used by democratic regimes in developed countries.

Mainwaring

Classifications are relevant among many other reasons because all of you at some point of your papers will develop some basic or elaborate definition/classification of democracy as a way to explain whatever issue you are interested in analyzing.

One can “read” Latin America’s recent history in the key of the construction of democracy and democratic governance. From that perspective, Mainwaring’s text is valuable for its review of some of the most heated debates regarding regime classification, democratic regime viability, and the conditions required to achieve such durability.

One could argue, however, against Mainwaring by using Landman’s evidence on the relation between democracy and development and Sokoloff’s evidence on the role of religion.

From other perspective, it could be argued that in actuality no country in Latin America could be a good “host” for democratic governance since no one will provide the ideal set up for democratic regimes. What is relevant, however, is that democracy is still perceived as both possible and necessary.

One interesting aspect of Mainwaring’s piece is its account of the role of the left and how, after the collapse of the Soviet Union the left radically changed both its methods and its political discourse. I think he is too harsh when dealing with the Latin American left's reasons and methods, mostly because it is nearsighted when it comes to dealing with the issues of the cycles of violence detonated by U.S. military interventions and by its supports to “sons of bitches” like the Somozas.

Moreover, questions remain at least at two different levels. On the one hand, as to establish if the emergence and resilience of revolutionary left groups in Central America, Colombia, and Bolivia was connected to the support of the U.S. government to firms such as the United Fruit and to ruthless military or despotic regimes? On the other, what was and has been the responsibility of the extinct Soviet Union and Cuba in breeding and feeding those groups.

The Mexican deal with the Cubans provides a good counter-factual to other cases in the region. It shows how in the absence of Cuban and/or Soviet support leftist revolutionary groups had a hard time reproducing themselves.

However, since we are dealing here with the realm of politics and not classical physics there is nothing straight, simple, and plain. The Mexican upper hand with Cubans during the 1960s, 1970s, and well into the 1980s would have not been as successful if other countries in the region (as Panama did it during the Torrijos’ regime) were willing to reach similar deals with the Cubans.

It is noticeable that now that the Cubans have “no dough” to share with revolutionary groups, the problems associated with poverty and exclusion remain, and therefore the ability of groups to promote radical programs of social transformation and that is proved by the emergence of new guerrilla groups in Mexico after the implosion of the Soviet Union. Moreover, one major problem created by this pact with the Cuban government is that the extreme left groups in Mexico deprived of “natural” connections with other similar groups in the region, sought help and collaboration from the organized crime.

Latin America Before the Neo-Liberal Wave

2005-02-15T03:27:00.000-05:00

Hi Class,

I know that perhaps I was not as clear as required during my exposition in class today, so I will try to put ideas in order here. I will do this in several parts. First I will try to give you an overall account of the kind of situations that prevailed in Latin America prior to the neo-liberal wave of the late 1980s. In future deliveries, I will address the theory behind market convergence, the change in the role of the State and some of the reasons behind the claim for fiscal discipline.

Latin American Economies at the End of the 1970s

Why Latin America came to be at the mid 1980s such a fertile ground for policies generally associated with neo-liberalism? The answer to such question must be found in the role that the states, the countries' governments assumed after a long period of expansion, during the 1970s. I will use Mexico’s example with some references to other countries in the region.

By the end of the 1960s Mexico was at the end of what was called the “Mexican miracle”. Forty years of internal peace and fifty years without a foreign, either U.S. or European, military intervention had allowed for a series of key changes in the country. The only similar period of internal peace and absence of foreign conflict were the 30 years of Porfirio Díaz as president from 1880 to 1910. As a consequence several key indicators of consumption, wellbeing and public expenditure registered key changes. The country had just hosted the Olympic Games (1968) and the Soccer World Cup (1970). However, social tension existed. That is why we had at the end of the 1960s the awful massacre at Tlaltelolco as the corollary to a series of repressed social mobilizations.

The expansion of the economy had happened under the hypotheses developed right after the Great Depression of 1929, the end of a globalization period itself. The key assumption in Mexico, the rest of Latin America, the US and Europe was that you cannot trust that much global processes of economic integration because a global crisis has devastating consequences. The sound conclusion to such premise was that the state had a key role in shaping policy through what was known as “interventionist” and/or Keynesian (honoring British economist John Maynard Keynes) or expansionist policies.

Keynesian or expansionist policies generally assume that to induce growth or to improve the performance of any given economy it is necessary to increase or to expand (hence their second label) the government's spending. These expansionist policies were behind the recovery of the U.S. economy during the 1930s, but to be successful you must be able to increase the availability of cash, either by printing more bills and/or by lowering the credit rates. Also, you must be ready to deal with inflation.

On the other hand, a good example of interventionist policies in the U.S. are the policies of affirmative action or, as they are called in Europe, “positive discrimination.” Other good examples of such policies are the housing projects developed in large agglomerations like New York. The ideas behind such intervention were, on the one hand, at a general level regardless of the level of development of your country, that the state, the government, was intervening to address a failure or insufficiency in the market.

You can have both policies at the same time (interventionist and expansionist), or as it happens nowadays, only interventionist policies that try to adhere to some notion of fiscal discipline, however back in the 1970s in Latin America almost all programs were both interventionist and expansionist.

The second assumption, specific to Latin American countries, was that such intervention had to develop self sufficient economies, following the criteria that, as one of many possible examples,
Max Weber set in Economy and Society. Hence the need to carry the import substitution policies and, among others, the protectionist policies aimed at guaranteeing the development of a national, self-sufficient, economy.

In Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America those “interventionist” policies took the form of direct and universal subsidies to different goods and services: public health (universal free vaccination, as an example), public education, and so forth and so on. However, and this is relevant to connect the issues considered on the readings on citizenship those policies were implemented with a great doses of clientelism.

In the region "interventionist" policies were almost always coupled with "expansionist" policies. This happened because governments were either unable or unwilling to collect taxes to increase their ability to intervene. Here you can see some of damaging effects of oil revenue. Instead of collecting taxes while carrying an aggressive interventionist program (as is the case of Sweden or Norway), they preferred to either print cheap money or to borrow it from foreign lenders, assuming that commodity markets will go their way. Clientelism was perceived as politically viable precisely because the governments in the region expected to be able to cash in the profits of their commodities.

The Culmination of the Miracle

To illustrate my point I will use the example of the public housing policies developed in Mexico at the beginning of the 1970s. At that time, the Federal Government founded the Instituto del Fondo Nacional de la Vivienda de los Trabajadores (Infonavit, Institute of the National Fund for Worker’s Housing). The idea was to provide cheap housing to the families of workers in the formal circuits of the economy.

Back in those days most unions in the country were part of one of the major workers’ centrals in the country: Central de Trabajadores de México (CTM), Confederación Regional Obrera Campesina (CROC), or were a part of the Worker’s Congress (CT) a federation of unions. However, and here is where the plot thickens, the CTM, the CROC and many other unions were a part of the Workers’ Sector within the ruling Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI). The workers of the federal government belong up until today to the Federación de Sindicatos de Trabajadores al Servicio del Estado, which was also at that time a part a of the PRI.

Even if the original draft of the law that created the Infonavit proposed a raffle as the mechanism to assign housing to the workers, the labor caucus in the Federal Congress (all of them leaders of some of the major unions affiliated with the Workers’ Congress if not directly with the CTM) decided that such mechanism was not adequate. They decided that the worker must have the approval of his/her union’s leader in order to be eligible for the raffle.

As you can imagine, this kind of mechanism gave all sorts of power to the union leaders to decide who were eligible for that raffle. Ultimately, the beneficiary of such concentration of power was the PRI and its bosses. That mechanism fits nicely within Lucy Taylor’s argument regarding the existence of two mechanisms of political participation in the region’s polities: citizenship and client-ship.

Moreover, the law that created the Infonavit established that all housing units were going to be built by Infonavit itself. You might think well, that is cool, not? Well, not really. The main problem with that kind of approach is that again, as in the case of the football clubs, the government was adding yet another activity to its extensive portfolio of activities. As I mentioned in class, in some cases the government took over bankrupted firms arguing that it was better to preserve the existing jobs, than to let the firms (and the jobs) die. The willingness of the government to take over bankrupted firms made it the owner of professional soccer clubs, bike factories, one bar (El Patio), movie theatres, studios, radio stations, TV networks, and so forth and so on.

This ever growing public sector created problems, due to the size of the government. There is a huge debate about the issue of the size of the organizations. Some assume that large organizations create a series of problems of management because of the “hierarchies” created within such large conglomerates. Those hierarchies make decision making/decision taking a matter of personal and group interest and not a matter of efficiency. Of course, as any thing in this world, there are those who assume that the critiques to large organizations are ideologically biased and that evidence is not conclusive. I personally adhere to the first group. I have carried research in Mexican dioceses, and I have found that, as a rule of thumb, small dioceses where the bishop knows personally his priests and the lay leaders outperform large (arch)dioceses where decisions are made by bureaucrats and where relations between the (arch)bishop and his priests and lay leaders are distant.

Moreover, there is evidence of how, by the end of the 1980s Infonavit (and other similar housing governmental programs as FOVI and Fovissste) had enormous bureaucracies, producing poor quality housing, that often times were unsuitable for living. Take as an example many of the housing units built by Infonavit in states like Veracruz, Tabasco or Guerrero. In those states average temperatures around the year resemble the kind of weather you have here in New York during the summer, with similar levels of humidity. A house or apartment designed following the criteria set by Infonavit for houses in Mexico City (low ceilings with no air conditioning) makes no sense in tropical areas of Mexico where temperatures are extremely hot and humid.

So, not only you had this bureaucratic gateway to decide who were eligible to get housing from Infonavit, FOVI or Fovissste. You also had problems with the quality of the construction and, of course, with the prices set by the government acting as developer or realtor, because being the government the main builder it had a privileged position to set prices. This not to mention all the problems associated with the actual operation of the construction sites, often times full of what was called at the time "ant's robbery" (robo hormiga) or with large scale fraud with the criteria to buy cement, bricks, and other construction materials.

Again, the problem here is not the intentions. The intentions of the government in Mexico were, as almost always is the case, very noble. The problem was the choice of policies to achieve the aims.

Now, this model got a boost in the mid 1970s when, all of the sudden the Mexican petroleum firm Pemex discovered vast oil fields in the states of Tabasco and Campeche. José López Portillo’s government assumed that with the new cash flow from the oil boom at that time (the barrel of petroleum reached a peak after the boycott by Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries) what the country required was not a democratic reform as Luis Echeverria’s government had unsuccessfully tried. What was necessary was a more interventionist government able to provide for all the needs of the population, which in turn will allow appeasing any criticism to his government that, by the way, suffered from the outset because López Portillo ran in 1976 as the sole and uncontested candidate of three different parties (the center-to-right opposition of the Partido Acción Nacional split in a heavily disputed convention and was unable to nominate a candidate).

Once aware of the new riches, López Portillo’s State of the Union address in September 1st 1977 made a call to “manage the abundance” (administrar la abundancia). Since then, and especially after the painful aftermath of his government, the phrase “administrar la abundancia” has been used to make fun of grandiose projects that have unexpected negative consequences.

Tweaking the Peso

Now, as I mentioned in class, other key area of governmental intervention is that of the currency exchange rate. During the 1950s and 1960s the general hypothesis applied in the major economies of the region was that a fixed rate of exchange with the dollar was not only possible but better for the performance of the economy. A fixed exchange rate helps some sectors of the economy (especially those buying technology, machinery, or intermediate goods outside the country), but it hurts other sectors (especially those exporting commodities). Moreover, a fixed rate also has other (unexpected negative) effects. Among them, it subsidizes sumptuary consumption. At some point in Mexico, in the 1960s, as an example, it was cheaper to get a washing machine in Texas than to buy it in Nuevo León, so people had incentives to go to Texas to buy those kind of goods or, even worse, to buy them as contraband in Mexico City.

The situation with contraband in Mexico City in the 1970s was so bad that an entire section of the city (Tepito) became a sort of “free-port,” where the federal and local governments, for reasons connected with corruption of the police corps, decided not to exercise their authority. Similar phenomena happened all over the region. The consequences of this situation were similar to the ones created in the US by the Volstead Act (Alcohol Prohibition). On the one hand, you have a noble but rather unrealistic aim (to protect the Mexican industry or to prevent alcoholism in the US). On the other hand, you have “creative” entrepreneurs willing to challenge the governments’ noble aims. Those “creative” entrepreneurs are known here and in Mexico as organized crime for reasons that are easy to understand.

On top of it were yet more problems. Another way in which governments end up subsidizing sumptuary consumption is the case of those interested in going to spend a holiday week in Paris or here in New York. You will be getting cheap (fixed rate) dollars in Mexican banks to go to Paris to drink champagne or to Manhattan to drink a Manhattan cocktail (remember, I am talking about the 1960s and 1970s). Groovy, isn't it?

Overtime, especially when you are dealing with large quantities of dollars, these kinds of situations create big holes in public finances. You may think, well, lets control who get those cheap subsidized dollars and that is certainly a possibility, but only if you were able to eradicate the black market. Just think that even in Cuba, with the anti-U.S. sentiment and the pressure of Castro’s government to prevent the use of dollars as a mean savings, you still have a black market of U.S. currency, so Mexico with a border as porous as the one we have with your country was unable to do it. That was one of the reasons behind the decision of the government to devaluate the Mexican Peso, first in 1976 and from then on a regular basis: it was impossible for the government to keep subsidizing cheap dollars because almost always you will do it by pulling money from other programs or, what is worst, by printing money. On the other hand, when you keep a fixed exchange rate for a long period your exports will loose competitiveness in the world market. So, again, the plot thickens. How would you as a government be able to bring competitiveness back? You lower the exchange rate, making your exports cheaper. This one was yet another reason behind the decision of the Mexican government to devaluate the Peso in 1976.

The good intentions of keeping the fixed rate originally were to help some sectors of the economy to buy technology and machinery, to provide some sense of order to the entire market. The unexpected negative consequences were that your products (most of them raw materials and commodities) lost competitiveness in the world markets, because over time they became more expensive, and this in spite of the fact that, as Robinson clearly states in his article, the prices of all commodities sold by Latin America were registering significant drops. The problem of course, is why we kept depending on those kinds of exports.

The Road to Hell…

As a way to address those problems new good intentions emerged. Therefore, to regain competitiveness governments changed the exchange rate. But then again, reality came to bite back with a handful of negative unexpected consequences, the most important of them in the form of inflation. Economists will agree that a relatively low inflation rate can have in certain circumstances good effects for the entire economy.

The problem however, comes when inflation goes out of control, and that is not a decision that rests on the government. On the contrary, inflation and especially hyper-inflationary processes as the ones that Argentina, Brazil, Peru and other countries in the region experienced in the late 1970s early to mid 1980s are collective processes where all bets are off. Producers have no way to set in a rational way the prices of their products, so they raise them as much as they can to try to gain some coverage from sudden changes in the market. Unions make constant demands for wages’ increases (strikes and mobilizations included) that makes the entire operation of firms a constant challenge. Rents are set in dollars or adjusted monthly against the dollar or some other indicator (inflation rate, leading lending rate, etc.) so persons with low incomes will have a bad time finding a place to live. At some point, the banks stop lending because the entire operation becomes unmanageable, and the government itself a key economic agent, becomes dependent on relatively cheap new money by either borrowing it (inside or outside the country) or, even worse, by printing it (ab)using its right to coinage.

Also, as I mentioned in class, people in those kinds of circumstances see no benefit from saving. On the contrary, if you get your salary you better go to the store to spend the whole thing in whatever you may need for the rest of the month, because perhaps by the end of the month you will not be able to buy those goods.

Alternatively, if you are able to save, you do it by buying dollars (which is a weird bet against your own currency because ultimately the pressure to devaluate your currency grows). Or, even worse, if you can, you send your money to a U.S. bank to try to protect your savings from confiscatory policies of your own government (depriving your own country of a valuable resource and betting again against your own currency) or if you are Mr. Big Bucks you send it to off-shores, with the same outcome at a larger scale.

Regressive Tax

Now, despite its origins as a policy aimed at controlling key variables of the economy, the cycle of devaluation-inflation has by itself very disturbing consequences for the entire economy. That is why there is a school of economic thought that calls inflation a “regressive tax”. Why? Well, among many other things because people with enough money can protect their savings by converting them overnight to dollars (or back in those days German marks or British pounds). People who are unable to do so keep their income in local currency, running the risk of loosing the value of their assets overnight, as it happened in the hyperinflationary context of Brazil. Moreover, there is ample evidence on how unfair is the allocation of the burden of the inflation is, mainly because it hits harder on those who have little or no chances to save. Here you can read an article on the subject.

In some cases, as in 1976 in Mexico, the devaluation of the currency was announced to acknowledge a series of de facto situations (a huge difference between the official exchange rate and the one in the black market, subsidies to sumptuary consumption, etc.). However, in other cases governments induced this process by increasing the amount of bills and coins available at any given period (hence the relevance of the term coinage, the right that states have to make coins that I used in class) in the economy. With policies like that, all of the sudden you will have a huge amount of pesos, soles or cruzeiros available to buy dollars, giving the entire process yet another hike.

In Mexico in the late 1970s, after the 1976 devaluation and the 1977 announcement of the new oil riches in Tabasco, the government increased on the one hand the amount of bills circulating in the economy. After all, the assumption was that we were going to be floating in a sea of petro-dollars, as they were known at the time. Over time, this situation conflated with the huge borrowing of foreign and domestic debt prompted by the assumption that the country was going to be rich (administrar la abundancia), and with ridiculous patterns of consumption (both by the government, the private firms and individuals) made possible by the sudden influx of cheap petro-dollars and the lack of fiscal discipline. A flash back of Tepito, Mexico City's "free-port" in those years will let you see French wines, European chesses, and even the first models of personal computers displayed in the forefront of the houses of an apparently poor neighborhood.

Of course, not all things from this time were wrong. Mexico City’s underground, as an example, was expanded. New public schools (my own Junior High School and my University!) were built. The Social Security system was expanded (so much that it ended up owning two Premier League soccer teams, Atlante and Oaxtepec). New highways were built all over the country. Also, as an example, a nuclear plant (Laguna Verde) was built.

However, the party came to a sudden stop when the oil prices went down and interest rates in the world markets went up. Floating in debt, ridden with all sorts of problems, in June 1982 the Mexican government was forced to declare itself unable to repay the country’s foreign debt. Three months after it, during his State of the Union address on September 1st 1982, the President nationalized the banking system seizing all accounts in US dollars and blaming the Mexican bankers for the crisis. The problem is that even if it was a sound and much needed policy decision, the way in which López Portillo carried it, as a backlash against greedy bankers and to defend the Nation from a foreign treat, ended up creating more tension.

The decision was perceived by some sectors of the population as a step towards a greater interference from the government in the economy (meaning socialism or communism). Leaders of the private sector presented the measure as confiscatory and abusive. However, and interestingly enough, at the same time, the Chilean military government of Pinochet (hardly a Communist) was taking similar steps, so it was not about Communist López Portillo versus Capitalist Pinochet. It was a measure aimed at protecting their banking systems, the few assets still on them, and to protect the economy from future shocks. However, López Portillo inflamed rhetoric connecting his decision with previous nationalization experiences (the Oil in 1938 and the Electricity in 1960), made him an easy target of fierce critiques from the right. (You can find here an explanation of why it was necessary for Mexico's and Chile's governments to take over the banking systems).

Fortunately, López Portillo was at the end of his six-year term, so a new President and a new team took over in December 1982. The situation, however, continued to deteriorate. The cycle inflation-devaluation was on and the decisions of the government created more uncertainty, so there was a huge pressure to keep hiking prices. Foreign credit was hard to find, and Miguel de la Madrid presided over an intense power struggle within his cabinet.

Moreover, in 1985 a major (8.5) earthquake hit Mexico City. The earthquake, on the one hand, showed how fragile was the country’s economy and the problems that the federal government had to provide answers to situations like that. On the other hand, it was perceived as an awful display of the inability of the Mexican government to help in a crisis context. Moreover, it also created new needs as far as housing and the very reconstruction of the city were concerned, all of which was happening within the context of a relatively intense (although not as much as Brazil’s or Argentina’s) cycle of devaluation-inflation.

The Plans

That is why, at some point in the 1980s, it was unavoidable for the governments either to apply a “shock-plan” or a heterodox plan, the cornerstones of neo-liberalism in the region. The shock plans aimed at freezing at least temporarily the entire economy to try to induce a sudden stop to the (hyper)inflationary processes. That was the case of countries like Argentina and Brazil where the devaluation-inflation cycle reached the two or tree digits level. The “shock-plans” of the 1980s included a sudden reduction in the amount of cash available in the overall economy and/or the adoption of an entirely new currency (the shift from the peso to the austral in Argentina).

Mexico followed a heterodox plan since the government was able to control key prices of the economy (fuel, energy, public sector wages, etc.). The heterodox plan was labeled as the “Pacto de Solidaridad Económica” (Economic Solidarity Pact). The idea was, however, the same of the shock-plan although it was less damaging for the economy: prices will be fixed, unions will not seek increases, and producers will reduce their expectations.

This is the time when the wave of the so-called “neo-liberal” governments happened. In some cases (Mexico) the term was accurate since we had a cohort of relatively young politicians, with Carlos Salinas as their leader, with degrees in Economics from US universities who claimed to be heirs to the old Liberalism of Juárez ("social liberals" called themselves). However, the situation was not the same all over the region.

To be continued...

Oil Revenue, TV and Choice of Policies

2005-02-12T17:21:00.000-05:00

Hi Class,

Today, as I was doing my daily readings of Mexican and Latin American newspapers I found a piece in the Mexican newspaper La Crónica about Venezuela. I think it connects nicely with some of the topics that we have considered during our sessions.

The piece (I cannot put a permanent URL because of the way Crónica builds its website, but I will copy and paste the entire piece at the end of this post) talks about the decision of the government of Venezuela to constitute the Unidades de Defensa Popular (Popular Defense Units).

The creation of these units is a small part of the larger project presented by Chávez's government in November 2004 (you can get the full PDF file of the document in Spanish here). There is where you can find, among many other proposals, the idea to create TV Sur (the "Latin American Al-Jazeera"), the Universidad del Sur (Southern University), and many other ideas. Of course, all those things cost money. Venezuela has it (so far) since it has been able to cash into the current market of expensive oil.

However, the question remains. Are those projects the best policies to deal with Venezuela's and Latin America's problems. I am not so sure about that. As far as the media is concerned it is important to stress the fact that unlike what happened in the Arab world when Al-Jazeera came to exist, in Latin America we have had previous experiences of pan-Latin American TV channels that unfortunately have been unable to succeed. As I mentioned in class one was Eco, a venture of the Mexican firm Televisa. One more recent is a channel launched by the Organización de la Televisión Iberoamericana (you can see their scheduling here). They are trying something that Eco did in their last years on air. They broadcast the local newscasts from all the countries in the region as they were originally produced in the countries of origin.

Here in the US it is possible to get in Dish Network something similar to that. It is called Sur (interestingly the same name that Chávez proposed for his network)

As I mentioned in class you also can get CNN en Español, which is much more conservative than its sister network CNN International, mostly because of the dominance of Cuban journalists based in Miami. One problem I frequently have with CNN en Español is that for the most part their news about Mexico are old by the time they air them here in the U.S., although that is a bias of my own condition as newsjunkie and also of the fact that in the U.S. you can get both major networks from Mexico (Televisa and TV Azteca, plus almost all the newspapers).

That is the key difference with the Arab world, in Latin America the main issue is not censorship from the national governments (with the exception of Cuba) but the interest that the national publics have (or not) in getting their news from a continental media outlet as compared to a national or local one.

Moreover, you have very powerful private media in countries like Brazil (O'Globo), Venezuela (Venevisión), and Mexico (Televisa). These media outlets have agendas of their own and they do their best to pursue them. In Venezuela's case the media and Chávez have been on opposite sides of the table for most part of Chávez's tenure as President, however, you cannot assume that the same happens all over the region with the rulers.

Moreover, the question remains if the governments really need to outspend the private media outlets when trying to present their ideas. How much it costs? Is that the best use for the money? Where can we draw the lines between information and propaganda both for the private media outlets and the media outlets owned by the governments? Those are some of the questions that Venezuela's case prompts.

Take as an example the case of the Universidad del Sur, Southern University (page 20 of the document). It is interesting to observe that Chávez locates that proposal at the same level (Continue to impulse the new multipolar international system) than his proposals to create Petro-América and TV Sur.

Do we really need in Latin America yet another University? I do not think so. There are actually plenty of them, most of them in great need of cash.

Why he is interested in creating a new one? Why he is not offering, as an example, additional funds to existing (Venezuelan or Latin American) universities? What are the reasons behind the idea of creating an entirely new institution? Political? Educational? Geo-strategic? Unwillingness to follow academic rules and procedures?

Moreover, it is possible to find similar proposals and policies in many countries in the region. In the case of Mexico City, the mayor (Andrés Manuel López Obrador) decided to create a new public university. Now, you may think wow, that is cool, not? after all education is a good thing, but then the questions that his decision brings are many:

Why a new public university in a city that already concentrates the best public (and private institutions) in the country?

Why a new public university when all the other public universities (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, etc.) in the city are facing severe problems with their finances?

Why not giving the funds to already existing public universities?

Why, on top of everything, his decision to neglect any requirement (like GPA or a standarized test) to attend this new university?

Moreover, the decision to create this new public university in the city (Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México) contrasts with the unwillingness of the government of the city to share the fiscal burden of elementary and secondary education with the Mexican federal government, something that the rest of the states in Mexico do.

Ultimately, the question goes back to what are the specific choices, the policies, that the governments (national and local) all over the region are making, and what will be the consequences of such choices. Can we think that funding the Popular Defense Units, the "Latin American Al-Jazeera", or the Southern University are the best choices for a country living an oil-related bonanza?

If we take the lessons from the same Venezuela during the years of the first presidency of Carlos Andrés Pérez, Mexico during the years of José López Portillo (who also created a University in Mexico City, among many other things), or Ecuador during much of its recent history, the answer will be no. However, we cannot outrule any possibility at this moment.

The good thing about the Venezuelan case, for future analysis of it, is that Chávez is displaying a great deal of autonomy, of agency, in his choice of policies, there will be no way for him to blame, as the Argentinean peronistas like to do, the International Monetary Fund for the future outcome of his decisions.

* * *

Oposición acusa a Chávez de impulsar "milicias populares"
Notimex en Caracas
2005-02-12
La Crónica de Hoy, Ciudad de México

La creación de Unidades de Defensa Popular (UDP), anunciada por el gobierno venezolano, busca involucrar a la ciudadanía en "hipótesis de conflicto no tradicionales" con el fin de formar "milicias populares", advirtió hoy la oposición.

El vicepresidente del Frente Institucional Militar (FIM), Rafael Huizi, dijo a Notimex que la iniciativa responde a una nueva doctrina militar que "se pasea por hipótesis de conflicto no tradicionales" para comprometer a la población en la defensa de la soberanía.

"Estos cambios en realidad se iniciaron desde el comienzo del gobierno con la modificación del concepto de la seguridad nacional en la Constitución de 1999", afirmó el dirigente de la agrupación de militares retirados.

Huizi recordó que en la Carta Magna vigente se establece que la seguridad de la nación "no es de exclusiva competencia de la Fuerza Armada Nacional (FAN), sino corresponde a todos los ciudadanos".

Sostuvo que las continuas referencias del presidente venezolano Hugo Chávez a una eventual agresión de Estados Unidos, así como los cambios en la doctrina militar de la FAN y la creación de UDP, buscan formar "milicias populares similares a las de Cuba".

"Sería la aplicación de una guerra popular como en la que se entrenan los cubanos", afirmó el dirigente del FIM en alusión a los Comités de Defensa de la Revolución que estableció el presidente Fidel Castro.

En la celebración de su fallida intentona golpista de 1992 contra el entonces gobierno de Carlos Andrés Pérez, el presidente Chávez llamó a formar las UDP y a la vez advirtió sobre las consecuencias de una eventual agresión del "imperialismo".

"Si al imperialismo se le ocurriera meterse con Venezuela tendrían que verse con el pueblo de (el Libertador Simón) Bolívar que está dispuesto a defender su soberanía, su patria su dignidad, y su grandeza", advirtió el jefe de Estado.

"Allá en el barrio, en cada barrio, allá en la quebrada, allá en el campo, allá en la fábrica (...) en el núcleo endógeno, allí deben ir naciendo unidades de defensa popular", desde 10 hasta 500 o más personas, dijo Chávez ante miles de seguidores.

El gobernante venezolano anunció que asignará recursos extraordinarios para que las UDP "vayan naciendo y se sigan incrementando" y subrayó que asumirá directamente su mando y el de las reservas de la FAN, que estimó en 80 mil personas.

El ministro de Economía Popular, Elías Jaua, señaló en fecha reciente que el gobierno formará cooperativas agrícolas integradas por 147 mil "lanceros", campesinos a quienes se dará instrucción militar para que ejerzan la defensa de la soberanía nacional.

"Se va a dar capacitación militar como orden cerrado, maniobras militares, uso de armamentos y otras actividades propias en cualquier entrenamiento militar de una reserva en este y otros países", aseguró el funcionario en entrevista con un diario local.

Jaua agregó que la iniciativa "no debe ser motivo de alarma", pues "nuestra Constitución y la ley de la FAN estipulan el ejercicio de la reserva como un derecho y un deber de todos los venezolanos y eso es lo que ha venido aplicando este gobierno".

Desde hace cuatro años, dirigentes opositores y militares disidentes acusan a Chávez de pretender crear "milicias" al servicio de su "revolución pacífica y democrática" y de reorientar políticamente a la reserva para que sea fiel al mandatario.

"La revolución busca conformar un ejército paralelo, una milicia, pues Chávez desconfía de la Fuerza Armada", advirtió el general retirado del Ejército, Juan Herrera.

On Institutions as Habitus

2005-02-10T13:56:00.000-05:00

Hi Class,

I know that Matthew must be tired by now of hearing or reading during three semesters about habitus, however, since he and Briann are the only veterans of previous courses, I think it is necessary for me to provide some information on Habitus. It is important for us because institutions do play a key role in shaping (either by promoting or preventing) social change.

Originally, Pierre Bourdieu developed the concept of habitus as a way to address the poverty of concepts such as class to explain, as master variables, conflict and social change. He, as many others realized by the early 1950s that one of the main drawbacks of Marxist theory of society was its assumption that people will conduct themselves based on whether or not they were or were not the owners of the means of productions.

He certainly acknowledges the fact that our place within the larger economic structure has a significant impact in how we interact with others (the realm of sociology), how we interact with the political institutions (the realm of political science), and how we interact with other agents in the markets (the realm of economics).

He came to realize that such interactions were largely mediated by our experiences in what he calls habitus. A habitus is a STRUCTURED AND STRUCTURING STRUCTURE, behind such truism he is trying to emphasize the fact that structures have a key role in shaping interaction and that they seek to reproduce themselves by creating other institutions, practices, and even traditions of their own.

Examples of such structures are the school we are in, the church we attend, the market in which we exchange goods and services, the family we belong to, and even the formal and informal groups (soccer teams, political parties, etc.) in which we participate.

Those structures are structured in the sense that they exist way before us (think of the case of the Nation State or the Church or even the School) and they shape us as much as the shape other individuals. More over, as in the case of the Church or the Nation State, as institutions they shape other institutions that will also have an effect on us. Think of the case of your birth certificate and because of it with your very identity as a US citizen. Think also how it connects at some point with, as an example, your first passport, your registration at school or your Social Security Number, and how the SSN will be later in your life connected with your taxes, with your eligibility to claim benefits, and so forth and so on.

That is why at some point in his works Bourdieu explains the concept of habitus by using the metaphor of a train that builds its own track as it advances.

Usually in my Intro or my Sociology of Sports classes, I use the example of language to explain this. Spanish, English, and any other language can be assumed to be habituses in which we are raised. Moreover, if I use English here such use will force me to use more English. If I switch to Spanish at this point and being this a course on Latin America, chances are many of you will be able to continue reading what I am writing.

Pero si en lugar de cambiar a español decidiera yo cambiar a francés o alemán, entonces las posibilidades de que la comunicación continuara transcurriendo entre nosotros serían significativamente menores.

Möglicherweise lesen etwas von Ihnen französisch oder deutsches, aber ich bin sicher, daß nur ein kleiner Anteil der Gruppe sie tun kann.

(Perhaps some of you read French or German, but I am sure only a small share of the group can do it.)

With political and economic institutions, something similar happens. Once they are created, they prompt new needs directly associated with them. That is how is possible to understand how certain features of Latin American politics (presidentialism as one possible example) engenders more institutions and practices associated with the presidential institution.

You can see that happening here in the United States too. Look at the formal and informal powers of the President. Look at the secretaries, departments, committees, commissions, task forces, and the like created by or to satisfy the needs of the presidential system. Moreover, compare the presidential institution here in the United States with similar institutions like the Crown in Britain or Sweden, or with the presidency in Germany or France.

In Britain, as an example, the existence of the Crown as an institution and the Queen shapes from the national anthem (God Save the Queen or, when a male is in charge, God Save the King) to specific practices in the Parliament, the press, the courts, and other institutions.

In France, on the other hand, the coexistence of a strong presidency and a strong prime minister offers a striking contrast with the strong presidencies in US or Mexico (lacking a prime minister or something similar) and the German or Austrian presidencies (weak, ceremonial institutions that have little or no power).

The same can be said of international financial institutions such as the World Bank or the Inter-American Development Bank. They certainly impose not only specific conditions as lenders (rates, periods, payments, etc.). While doing so they also have a say in shaping financial and political institutions in the countries where they have operations. There is no agreement as far as how interventionist they really are. Evidence from Mexico and Argentina offers contradictory results. While in Mexico the IMF-WB were willing to accept a heterodox or unorthodox structural adjustment, in Argentina we can see traces of a rather orthodox program as far as the privatizations is concerned.

The problem, of course, is that for Argentinean politicians is also easier to put all the blame on the IMF-WB (institutions with very bad rankings in the Latin American public opinions) than to assume that they could have gone with a heterodox approach on privatizations and with a more realistic program on the monetary side of their structural adjustment program. Or, something that is even harder for any politician in Argentina, Mexico or the U.S.: to accept that they simply made mistakes.

As far as Bourdieu is concerned, he defines at some point a habitus as “a product of history” able to produce “the collective practices and hence history, in accordance with schemes engendered by that history”. As it is possible to figure out the presidential institution (to follow our example, although there are many others) is a product of history, able to produce collective practices and hence able to produce history in accordance to schemes engendered by that history.

You can find a more detailed discussion of the origin of habitus and how it relates to the sociological or political concept of institution in this article by Omar Lizardo.

Bourdieu himself connected at some point his concept of habitus with the concept of institution in his book Homo Academicus. You can read an analysis of that book here.

A Little More on Comparisons and Orientalism

2005-02-09T01:27:00.000-05:00

Hi Class

At this moment our course is heavily into comparisons. I know I did not convice Rosemary when she asked me why it was so important for us to go over comparisons and classifications of different regimes in Latin America.

I think I said something like because is the way we advance science and I really believe so. Later I wrote, also answering a question by Rosemary, that up to certain extent comparisons are exercises of orientalism. I even provided a brief definition of orientalism.

In our Monday session and also on during Thursday's we will plunge again deep in the sea of comparison. The reason to do it is because I think that the best way to avoid the implicit orientalism that affects many comparisons is not by rejecting the very possibility of developing comparisons, but by improving the way comparisons are done.

Think, again of the example I used about Argentina and Chile military regimes. How both can be blamed with many similar problems and abuses, and yet there are aspects of the Chilean military regime (stability, economic performance, ability to prepare Chile for other processes) that are necessary to take into consideration if we want to achieve a better understanding of the forces behind both Military Juntas, their policies, their outcomes, and also their legacies to the civilian regimes.

Think, as an example, of the advantages that the Chilean civilians have had when dealing with their country's transition, as compared to the kind of general bankruptcy that the Argentinean military government left as legacy.

Now, I am not trying to dulcify Pinochet's memory. I think that there is no way to justify the collective assassination of God knows how may Chilean citizens with ties with Allende's government. That was brutal and there is no way to justify it. However, is clear that the differences in the outcomes are relevant at many levels. Those differences exist also when we deal with democratic regimes: think as an example of a possible comparison between Uruguay and Costa Rica, or with authoritarian regimes (a comparison between Mexico and Brazil from 1960 to 1988).

Oil, Privatizations and Policies

2005-02-04T19:41:00.000-05:00

Fátima wrote,
«My argument is that Ecuador's economic downfall has been a result of a devastating drop in petroleum prices, Ecuador's most important resource. Since then Ecuador's economic disability has led its banking system to collapse, a sudden change in its currency (from Sucre's to dollars) and an increase in unemployment as well as poverty.

«The country has also experienced an emergence of distinction amongst its indigenous people, to which they are trying to claim there rights to a share of the countries resources».

I replied:

But do not loose sight of the role of the military in the era previous to the drop of the oil prices. That is something that has hurt Ecuador very much. On the other hand you could argue, Why Ecuador is so dependent on oil? Isn't it?

Then Fátima wrote again:

«When you speak of the military govt, are you referring to their strong desire to control the oil investments and how they over estimated the role of ecuadors oil? If so, I will definitely incorporate that.

«Also, wouldn't the fact that oil has been an important product of Ecuador, in terms of bringing in income, acknowledge Ecuador's dependency on oil?»

And I replied:

Yes, but not only to that "strong desire" as you put it. You need to take into account the very instability that affected Ecuador during most of the 20th century, and more important the specific policies that the military and civilian governments of the 1960s and 1970s pursued.

Go to the Timeline in the CD-ROM and follow Ecuador's political history. You will see how, unlike other military regimes that brought stability to their countries, in Ecuador even military Juntas were very unstable. Now, the issue with oil is that you do not need to depend completely on it. Oil as any other commodity can be used to boost economic growth, to provide education, or to pursue other aims.

That is the main problem of Ecuador and Venezuela, and many other oil producers worldwide. With the oil revenue you can develop other sources of revenue. Look at Mexico. In the 1970s the country became totally dependent on oil revenue. After the 1982 crisis made evident that it was suicidal to do that, the Miguel de la Madrid's government introduced a series of changes to diversify the economy and to depend less and less on oil. Nowadays oil revenue is still very important for the Mexican government, but a drop in the oil prices does not kill the entire economy as it happened in the early 1980s.

Again, as I said with the case of globalization and military dictatorships it is necessary to look at the details, and not to assume that one feature will be able to determine the performance of the entire economy or the whole country.

The key question with oil in Ecuador, Argentina, Venezuela, or Mexico is what the governments are doing or did with such a precious resource.

In Argentina’s case, as an example, the ideological application of neoliberalism (ideological in the sense that it was blind to specific features of reality) made them put each and every asset on sale, a gigantic garage sale that, of course, ended up in the tragedy that you can see there now. Today, they are trying to rebuild a public sector, but of course, they are strapped for cash because they are still trying to renegotiate their agreements with the US.

In Mexico’s case we had many privatizations: phones, newspapers, TV stations, etc., but the Oil company was never even mentioned as a possibility.

Venezuela tried to follow a pattern similar to that of Mexico, so that is why up until now there is no talk of privatization of PDVSA, although there you have a different set of problems.

In Ecuador all those things that you talk about happened, but they happened within the context of a specific government (very unstable, lacking a long term project, etc.). Where, as an example, is Ecuador's oil revenue? Schools? Roads? Military equipment? Health services?

You can do similar comparisons with, as an example, the phone companies: Why Mexico’s Telmex is nowadays a major player in the region’s sector while Argentinean firms are down the drain? Well, because Mexican privatization followed different assumptions. It was very unorthodox or heterodox if you want, it preserved the monopolistic nature of the firm (and that of course makes angry many people in my country), but at the same time you protected jobs, investments, and avoided the carnage that happened, as an example, in Argentina.

But also in Mexico we had very bad privatization processes, as it was the case of the banking system. Nowadays there is only one major Mexican bank. The rest are local branches of either US, Spanish, or Canadian banks. But then again, the major problem was not privatization by itself, but how the owners of the newly privatized banks carried their businesses, because again, you still have one Mexican bank that was able to survive that carnage.

So, again, look at the specific problems and the specific policies. Do not assume that there is one single feature (globalization, neoliberalism, privatization, military dictatorships, communism, etc.) that explains each and everything happening in the countries. That is fine if you are running for major of Buenos Aires, Mexico City or Caracas, but if you are doing academic research, you really need to understand what specific forces are shaping the processes you are analyzing.

Regime Classification, Comparisons and Cleavages

2005-02-03T15:46:00.000-05:00

Hi Class,

Fátima is very active writing to me, and I am very happy answering her questions (or at least doing my best) so here are some additional questions followed by my answers:

* Would my topic still stand although it is a generalization. Of course I would speak of the importance of liberties to Latin Americans but I do not want to get into the political issues between cuba and the US, or should I? Or would it be less broad if I concentrate on just one case(country) and its social and civil issues.

* Would it be best to compare Cuba before Fidel and the present with Fidel, such that I compare the social and economic changes without referring to the citizens preferences. I can incorporate the US relations with Cuba without encompassing the entire paper of their sticky relationship. Or should I stay away from Cuba?

* My interest stems from the documentary, and I just feel that covering all of Cuba-US's relationship will take over my paper, I want to deal with the socioeconomic changes within a country that come from govt changes, is there a country that would better suit this topic.

The problem with Cuba is that there is no way to put the confrontation with the US government aside. All over La Habana, Santiago and any other city you can see the traces of the confrontation. You can see it from Mexico or form the Dominican Republic. It is a bleeding wound and many actors profit from it: Cuba's totalitarian government, the US imperialist foreign policy. Moreover, it definetely shapes preferences and choices of individual actors outside and inside the Island. It shapes programs like Radio Martí and all the phony (to say the least) "fellowships" that some leaders of the Cuban opposition receive from rather hard to identify foundations here in the States (Have you seen Oliver Stone's documentary and interview with Fidel?).

I am sure that in many cases (I know specific persons in Mexico, as an example) that will be willing to trade-off freedoms for a Welfare State, but the specifics must be reviewed on a case by case basis, being aware that generalizations at a regional level are hard to support, unless you have very specific information.

Now, I am not denying the value of your argument. I can see it even here in the States (you can say that such happens also here in the US with the very intrusive monitoring of activities of groups seen as "dangerous" by the US Department of Homeland Security), I am just saying that you need to be aware of the national differences.

Any comparisson is plausible and possible. Cuba and Mexico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Argentina. Cuba pre and post-Fidel. The issue here is availability of information. How much info do you have on pre-Fidel Cuba? How much would you be able to gather from here until, one month?

The question is more Are you really interested in Cuba? If so, go for it. If you only have a marginal interest on Cuba (and perhaps that is why you do not want to deal with the US-Cuba rift) then do not go there, because there is no way to understand how people in Cuba deal with the regime if you do not take into account the US-Cuba quarrel.

The US-Cuba relation is a critical feature for any research dealing with Cuba, no matter if it is sport, religion, family or any other topic. I do not think that you should be worried about touching ground on it. You can dedicate two pages to that issue as a part of the context and that is it. You do not need to re-do the history of the US-Cuba conflict. There are excellent summaries already available for that.

For all countries you will be able to find topics like that, that are crucial to understand that country. Lets say, if you are writing about Mexico you cannot avoid talking about the 70 years of government from one-single party. If you do it about Argentina you cannot avoid talking about the Partido Justicialista (Peronismo), and so forth and so on. You can think of these topics as cleavages. Political Scientists use that concept to talk about issue that divide deeply a country: Church-State relations in Mexico, Spain or Italy; abortion in the case of the US; the US in the case of Cuba. For any country you can find a topic like that, a topic that is so central that yes, it looks as if it could take over a paper on other topics, but is not a forced outcome, you can control that.

Again, any country, any combination of countries is fine. You just need to say the word: Cuba, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Argentina...

Ah, and of course, for any country in the region you can find evidence of that connection, and also of the trade-off freedom-goods/services, but you need to consider it within the specific context of that country.

A final word on cleavages.

The paper Cleavages by Stefano Bartolini of the European University Institute, offers a good introduction to its use and gives you a sense of how you can apply it to different topics.

More About Regime Classification

2005-02-01T14:54:00.000-05:00

Hi Class,

Fátima Santana sent me a question about her paper, I think that my answer can be relevant for all of you.

Fátima's question:

I am very interested in Cuba and was hoping to compare their Socialist regime to that of another LA country that is more democratic. Since I believe that although cubans are stripped of many civil liberties their new govt has infiltrated many social programs, whereas in a democratic LA country they are given civil liberties but are stripped from their social programs, a major reason why many L Americans would rather have an authoritarian govt.

My answer:

Very interesting. There is a good chunk of empirical evidence supporting that claim. Check the polls by Latinobarómetro. Of course, the problem remains. Freedoms are also cherished by many Latino Americans.

Just do not fall in the trap of essentializing Latin American "identities" or "culture" with authoritarianism. That has been done many times and I think is very unfair and misleading, because the problem is that even in authoritarian regimes that were very effective in providing opportunities up until the end of the 1960s, the tensions brought by the confrontation between those claiming more civil rights and liberties and the regime were just too much. Look at the cases of Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and even Uruguay. If people had been just willing to accept the trade-off, then the Tlaltelolco Massacre would had never happened.

Later, in the 1980s, many of us Mexicans were aware of how efficient the PRI was to provide a series of goods and services that no other government in Latin America was able to provide. Moreover, we had no experience of a "dirty war" at the scale that, lets say, Argentina or Chile lived. And yet, in spite of it, there were large sectors of the Mexican society willing to mobilize to democratize the country. Among many other reasons, because authoritarian regimes are good to spread some benefits, but they are also ridden with corruption, abuses, and irrationality that--at least theoretically--you can control through democratic institutions.

Moreover, I would say that in the case of Mexico the authoritarian regime of the 1960s was trapped by its own democratic discourse, because that is another feature of authoritarianism it is extremely fragile and can only justify itself by claiming to be a temporary, would I dare to say extra-ordinary solution, while the country gets ready to other forms of political regime. That is a constant from Mexico to Argentina, and from Chile to Cuba.

Also, be careful when dealing with the Cuban case. You must be aware of the role that US interventionism plays there. That, by itself plays an extremely big role in shaping choices and preferences of Cubans, because there is a real threat of military aggression by the US expressed in the very use of its soil to house the military base at Guantánamo, or the Platt Amendment, just to name the two most obvious features.

I think that is necessary to go on a case by case basis. Also, because not all authoritarianisms are the same: if you compare the Mexican PRI'ismo of the 1950s with that of the 1990s there are plenty of differences, and the same happens for most of the countries, perhaps with the exception of a personalist dictatorship like that of Stroessner in Paraguay. That is why the readings on regime classification are so important for us, because when we hypothesize about how specific forms of government shape choices and preferences is important to be aware of the differences between regimes. Otherwise you come up with these broad and almost meaningless generalizations about authoritarianism or democracy and the so-called "political culture" of the countries.

Latin America, Democracy, and Orientalism

2005-01-31T13:46:00.000-05:00

Hi Class,

After we finished our class, Rosemary came to my office to talk about her paper and she raised a very important question regarding the classifications of regimes that we considered during our class this Monday.

She asked me if these regime classifications are, for the most part, an example of Orientalism. I told her yes.

This is important and for those of you who are not familiar with the concept of Orientalism I will suggest some very basic readings. One, from the books I use for my Introduction to Sociology course. British sociologist Karim Murji tells us in page 237-8 of Uses of Sociology that Orientalism is:

A systematic form of cultural discourse that creates and reproduces various interlinked oriental stereotypes--ideas of 'the East' characterized by sexual exoticism, religious mysticism and corrupt despotism, for instance. These distinctive ways of conceptualizing the Orient as 'different' set up a 'we-them' opposition or distinction to the 'West' through which exoticism of the former is contrasted with the morality of the latter.

It is important to underline that in Said's argument ideas about 'us' and 'them' are mutually constituted: they depend upon one another. They also establish the link between knowledge, power and government (...)

Said maintained that Orientalist discourse is to be found in the writings of academics as well as government officials. The academic category included historians, geographers, anthropologists and sociologists. Their writings dichotomize the East and the West and produced seemingly authoritative ways for Westerners to 'see' the Orient, its places and people. Orientalist discourse therefore shapes notions about civility, purity, cleanliness, and so on, which places--or rather centres--the 'West' on one side and 'the rest' on the other, on the periphery. Again the imagined location of the 'West' depends upon, indeed it is constituted by, the notion of 'the other' as being on the margin. As Chandra Mohanty says: 'it is only insofar as ... the East [is] defined as Other, or as peripheral that (Western) man/humanism can represent him/itself as the centre. It is not the centre that determines the periphery, but the periphery that in its boundedness determines the periphery. For Said, the 'gaze' of sociological--as well as other disciplines--knowledge and expertise was instrumental in making and legitimating such distinctions.

I think it is quite easy to see how frequently political regimes and entire societies in Latin America and other regions are labeled as democratic or non-democratic with paradoxical consequences. On the one hand, the pressure put on those societies to adopt democratic rule as a standard to be measured against, has prevented many Human Rights abuses; on the other hand, that pressure has been frequently an excuse to debunk legitimate regimes.

Moreover, in the case of the US foreign policy, a key variable when dealing with Latin American topics, it is possible to observe overtime how the democratic criteria changes and does not fit a clear standard. The best possible examples of this double standard are Cuba and China. While in the case of Cuba there is tremendous pressure to deny any merit to its government with China there is plenty of room to accommodation.

However, the question of who is democratic and who is not is still relevant. I already spelled out some of the reasons why I think it is important to raise those kinds of questions. One additional reason that we will consider later in the course connects with the quest to expand citizenship rights in the region. For this kind of questions substantive analysis of the conditions to classify a regime as democratic not democratic are relevant.

Of course, here we come to clash with the old question about the universality of a concept as Human Rights. Can we really believe that there is such thing as a universal concept of Human Rights? Foucault and many other post-moderns and post-structuralists will say no, no way. I, a habermasian, reconstructed Catholic believe that it is possible to find elements of Human Rights beliefs and practices in almost all known societies, and that even if there are some that lack such tradition in specific aspects of it (lets say as in the case of female "circumcision"), it is necessary to push for changes in that direction. Of course, I do not believe in military interventions, not even in the kind of regime-harassment so common nowadays in the US foreign policy parlance.

So even if the classifications that we consider today at class follow, up to a certain extent, the pattern of Said's 'sociological gaze', I also believe that the debate about the requisites to consider a country a democracy is relevant and necessary because such debate happens, as I mentioned during class, not only outside of the country, but also within the countries themselves.

If you want more information about the connection between Orientalism, democracy, Latin America and the United States click here. A very brief summary and review of Said's Orientalism can be found here.

If you want a brief article by Said himself celebrating 25 years of the publication of Orientalism, click here. Finally, a brief review of Orientalism from 1980 can be found here. A good, more contemporary book by Said is Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said and is available at Rose Hill with the call number CB18.S25 A3 2001B .

Bolivia and Santa Cruz

2005-01-27T15:40:00.000-05:00

Hi Class,

Just in case you want to access more information on Bolivia's conflict with the province of Santa Cruz, I am writing here some data and providing some hyperlinks. Not all is in English, but try your Spanish, I am sure you will learn a lot.

Keep in mind that Bolivia is a country with a long standing history of regional rift, ethnic tension, and foreign intervention, and that up until today has territorial disputes with Chile and Peru. Here you can see a map of the territories lost by Bolivia over time.

The conflict, as many other conflicts in World history, has a complex history. On top of the geographic isolation of La Paz and the relatively privileged position of Santa Cruz as food producer and now as natural gas producer, the national government of Bolivia recently passed an increase in the price of diesel. The measure has come to be known in the country media as the "dieselazo".

(In Spanish when you add the suffix -azo to a word it means that you were hit with that thing: martillazo means that you were hit with a hammer, trapazo means that you were hit with a rag, so diesel-azo means that you were hit with an increase in the price of diesel).

The "dieselazo" came as a consequence of policies aimed at keeping "fiscal discipline". Fiscal discipline is a big thing for the international lending institutions (International Monetary Fund and Inter-American Development Bank) and risk rating firms (I give you more information on them at the end). Fiscal discipline seeks to keep prices of nationally produced goods (such as gas or oil) "real" by adjusting them to the prices of the foreign markets in US dollars or euros. Bolivia has had a very bad experience with "fiscal discipline" as you were able to read in "Economics of Empire".

Moreover, the dieselazo came at a bad timing, and as any increase in fuels all over the world has a direct impact on the prices of transportation, and also on the prices of food. This is critical for a country like Bolivia where is so expensive to take the food from lower regions as Santa Cruz to regions in the hills.

As I mentioned in class Santa Cruz is pretty much at sea level, while all the other major cities in the country are above the 2 500 metres mark: La Paz: 3 658; Cochabamba: 2 558; Sucre: 2 790; Potosí: 4 200. The issue with transportation in countries like Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, México, and Chile is then not only distance from point A to point B, but the amount of fuel required to go from sea level to 2500 or 3000 metres above sea level. That is why a hike in the price of diesel will have a chain-reaction effect on the entire economy, from fares in the public transportation to prices of food and other goods (here you can get some pictures of Bolivia).

After the "dieselazo" was announced by the government in La Paz, different groups in Santa Cruz started a "civic" movement to seek autonomy, and ultimately independence from Bolivia. The "civic" movement has scheduled a mobilization for this coming weekend.

As I mentioned in class today one key aspect that we should considered when analyzing this kinds of social or political movements is the institutional design of the country. For this case is more relevant because unlike what happens in Argentina, Brazil, or Mexico (federal republics, like the United States) Bolivia (like Chile) is a central republic. That means that the President has a great deal of power to appoint the prefect of the province. The movement originally started with demands to elect a governor.

Bolivia's case also allows me to introduce the issue of the qualification of risk. This "grading" is given by firms like PNC
and CRG. For a more academic take on country risk analysis you can go to the website of the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.

All Latin American countries are heavily scrutinized by these firms and, as a consequence of the political instability in Bolivia, their country risk rating was increased. This rating is so important for some countries, that--as an example--Argentinean newspapers will include it in the frontpage of their daily editions. You can see here
La Nación Argentina's most influential newspaper. Go to where it says "Índices de Mercado" (Market Indices) and see the 5022 points of Risk Country given to Argentina.

Risk country ratings are given sometimes as points, some times as grading letters (AAA for very good countries), and some times as groups (Group III for a country like Mexico, Group V for a country like Argentina). Almost always the rating tries to capture how risky is for a private foreign investor to put his/her money in that specific country. The higher the country risk the bigger the premium a country will have to give to investors going to their country.

Lets say that Mexico, Argentina, and Bolivia want to attract investment, Mexico is a group III or a B+ country in most ratings, while Argentina and Bolivia are group V or C in others. That means that if the Federal Reserve here in the States is paying 1.25 to investors of its bonds, Mexico will have to give more than that, and Argentina and Bolivia much more than that (if they are actually able to find investors willing to take the risk of investing there).

It is important to emphasize that there are many valorations of Risk Country and that none is totally objective. The most recent published by The Economist Intelligence Unit, a special division of The Economist Group in London puts Chile with 20/100, Mexico with 42/100, and Argentina with 76/100. Moody's, as an example, gave Mexico in January 2005 a "Baa1", up from a "Baa2" rating in August 2004.

Welcome / Bienvenidos / Bem-vindos

2004-12-13T01:36:00.000-05:00

Welcome,

I have created this blog as a tool to help us understand contemporary social change in Latin America during our course at Fordham University. Blog posting will be a component of your final grade, but beyond that I believe that the best way to learn in courses like this is by exchanging as much information as possible.

My postings will be in English, with some additional commentaries and links to external Websites in Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, and English from Latin American studies academic programs, media, governments, multinational institutions, NGO's, political parties, among others.

Your grade for this component of your final grade, will be based exclusively on your posting in English. However, feel free to practice as much as possible your Spanish and/or Portuguese. I do believe that if you have an interest, either academic, professional, or personal in contemporary social change in Latin America, you should be able to understand if not communicate in Spanish and/or Portuguese depending on your country/topic of interest.

Bienvenidos,

He creado este blog como una herramienta para ayudarnos a comprender el cambio social contemporáneo en América Latina en el contexto de nuestro curso en la Universidad de Fordham, Nueva York. La publicación de materiales en este blog será una parte de su calificación final, pero más allá de ello creo que la mejor manera de aprender en cursos como éste es mediante el intercambio de tanta información como sea posible.

Mis mensajes estarán escritos en inglés, con algunos comentarios adicionales y vínculos a sitios externos en español, portugués, alemán, francés e inglés, de programas de estudios latinoamericanos, medios de comunicación, gobiernos, organismos multilaterales, organizaciones no gubernamentales y partidos políticos, entre otros.

Su calificación en este elemento de su calificación final, dependerá exclusivamente de sus notas en inglés. Sin embargo, siéntanse en libertad de practicar tanto como sea posible su español o portugués. Creo que si ustedes tienen un interés, sea académico, profesional o personal en el cambio social en América Latina, deben ser capaces de entender sino es que de comunicarse en español o portugués, dependiendo de su país o tema de interés.

Bem-vindos,

Gerei este blog como uma ferramenta para nos ajudar a comprender a mudança social na América Latina na atualidade como parte de nosso curso na Universidade da Fordham, New York. A publicação de materiais neste blog serão uma parte de sua qualificação final, mais alem disso, acho que a melhor maneira de aprender em cursos como este é mediante o intercâmbio de tanta informação como seja posivel.

Os meus mensagens estarão escritos em inglês, com algums commentaries adicionais e vinculos a sites externos em espanhol, português, alemão, francês e inglês, de programas de estudos latinoamericanos, meios de comunicação, governos, organizações multi-laterais, organizações não guvernamentais e partidos politicos, entre outros.

A sua qualificação neste elemento da sua qualificação final, dependera exclusivamente de suas notas em inglês. Porem, sintaosse em libertade de praticar no possivel seu espanhol ou português. Acho que se vocês tiver um interesse, seja acadêmico, profissional ou pessoal na mudança social na América Latina, deven ser capazes de entender, senao é que de comunicar-se, em espanhol ou português dependendo do seu pais ou o assunto do interesse.