The Precarious Sustainability of Democracy in Latin America

Abstract

This article examines the contrast between the expectations aroused by the establishment of democratic regimes and the poor results of neo-liberal economic policies, the consequent disillusionment and loss of faith in democracy and neo-liberal economic policies, and the reactions and responses that are currently taking place. Particular attention is paid to the surfacing of long-repressed and/or dormant sectors of the population in countries with large poor indigenous and/or black populations. This essay begins with some references to the sociopolitical, institutional, and cultural background inherited from colonial Latin America. It then refers to the development and modernization processes that took place during the second half of the 19 th century and to the consequences of the Great Depression, which through a widened and more active role of the state in the economic, social, and international realms changed the Latin American development and modernization scenarios from the 1940s to the 1970s. This is followed by a reference to the consequences of the onset of the globalization process in the 1970s, the debt and development crises of the early 1980s, and the dramatic change from state-centric to market-centric economic policies, leading to the coincidence of the adoption of free market economics on the one hand and the establishment of electoral democracies on the other. The last section refers to the revival of the structuralist approach to development of the 1950s to the 1970s, renewed and updated in the light of a critique of its earlier shortcomings and of the new circumstances of the globalization process.