Why Latin Democracies Are Waning

Democracy in Latin America is again in trouble. In Haiti the army has slaughtered civilians attempting to exercise their right to vote. In Panama, Brig. Gen. Manuel A. Noriega, who heads a corrupt regime, has been indicted in U.S. courts on drug-dealing and racketeering charges.

In Honduras, right-wing death squads have renewed their activities. In El Salvador, the government has seized on provisions of the Arias plan to halt efforts to bring to justice army officers charged with participation in the murder, torture and kidnaping of government opponents.

Nor is the news better further south. In Argentina, the military launches repeated challenges against the civilian government of Raul Alfonsin, who survives but at the cost of crippling concessions. Last summer he was forced to grant amnesty to all but 50 officers charged with participating in the “dirty war” to eliminate all those sullying Argentine political purity as interpreted by the generals. Next door in Chile, Gen. Augusto Pinochet seems to be succeeding in his effort to outmaneuver the democratic opposition and preserve his repressive regime. In Ecuador in 1986, air force officers kidnaped the president to free a jailed colleague--who is now running for president.

Everywhere the grim effects of the debt crisis reduce prospects for democracy. In Mexico, the fiscal situation is so dire, even after the most recent rescue, that seasoned observers are beginning to worry that the vaunted Mexican arrangement for picking presidents may for the first time produce a winner unable to govern.

Collectively these developments are a stunning setback for the Reagan Administration, which felt so confident of the democratic trends in the Western Hemisphere that it proclaimed, in a major policy statement last March, that the recent democratic advances “could mark a watershed between a past of instability and authoritarianism and a future of greater freedom.” The new optimism was critical to the Administration’s effort to garner support for the President’s overall foreign policy, the Reagan Doctrine. In the words of the 1987 report, “Support for democracy, the very essence of American society, is becoming the new organizing principle for American foreign policy.” In his State of the Union speech President Reagan returned to this theme.

Why such a reversal in only a few months?

The main reason seems to be that the trend toward democratization was never as strong as the Administration contended. To be sure, a number of civilian governments did formally replace military dictatorships throughout the hemisphere. In 1976, roughly 75% of the people in the hemisphere outside Canada and the United States lived under military governments. By 1987, more than 90% lived under civilian governments.

But much of the transformation took place at the surface. What Americans saw as democracy was democratic formalism. Elections were held but some were fraudulent; when elections were fair, the individuals who won often did not have real power, which the military retained.

The problem is better understood by looking at Central America. The Administration correctly called attention to the anti-democratic character of Nicaragua’s Sandinista leadership. But in its effort to isolate Managua, the Administration decided to try to prove Nicaragua’s anti-democratic character was a regional aberration. It began to argue that democracy had taken root everywhere in Central America--except Nicaragua. It cited as evidence the election to office of relatively decent men in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

But essentially free elections, as important as they are, do not alone enable a country to become democratic. Those who win office by elections must then be given real power. And in all three countries this transfer of power never took place.

In El Salvador, Jose Napoleon Duarte, presumably out of fear, was forced to violate his pledge to his electors that he would name a commission to look into the death squads that had slaughtered tens of thousands of his countrymen. In Guatemala, Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo was compelled to violate a similar promise. He did not dare bring to justice officers who murdered tens of thousands of Indian peasants because those officers held the real political power. Now in Honduras a similar miscarriage of justice is taking place, if on a smaller scale. The government is blocking efforts to bring to justice military officers who helped plan the murder of the country’s leading human-rights activist.

Yet North Americans should hesitate before criticizing Central American leaders. After all, consider the history of this country. How many in the South had the courage to speak out against the Klu Klux Klan when the law seemed powerless and the klan was able to control the politics of an entire region through lynchings and terror? It was only when principled individuals knew that the federal government would defend them against intimidation that they started to speak out.

A similar phenomenon may explain the tentative steps toward democracy in Central America. Beginning with Jimmy Carter’s human-rights policy and continuing with congressional and then Administration pressure for the spread of democratic values in the hemisphere, Latin American military leaders finally realized they had to change their ways if they wished to receive U.S. aid. But there is an important difference between the U.S. South and Central America. The role of the federal government in the U.S. South was and is decisive. The role of the U.S. government in Central America is only important. The result, in places like El Salvador, is therefore not extirpation of the forces of terror but only a pause in their activity to see whether the North Americans are serious this time and how emboldened the local opposition becomes as it enjoys temporary safety.

Does this mean the cause of democracy in Latin America is hopeless? Not at all. But the U.S. time perspective must be longer and its policy more closely linked to Latin American realities if lasting progress to democracy is to be made.

The key is the military. There is nothing inherently anti-democratic about Latin American military leaders. Americans, for example, tend to think of the Argentine military as incorrigibly anti-democratic. But at the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th, Argentina enjoyed 65 years of orderly transfers of power while the political life of most other Latin states was convulsed by military coups and countercoups.

At that time the military officers of Argentina were drawn from the professional classes and trained on the battlefield in wars with Brazil and Paraguay. But at the beginning of the 20th Century, Argentina established a military academy on the Prussian model. Most instructors were German and in the early 1920s it was estimated that more than half the Argentine officers had studied in Germany. The military began to think of itself much like the German professional army--as a special caste with responsibilities larger than those entrusted to mere political figures. This army trained Col. Enrique Bermudez, the leading military figure of the Contras. He is a graduate of the Argentine Military Academy. So was the former president of Honduras, Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, another favorite of those in the Reagan Administration carrying out the Contra policy.

Anti-democratic attitudes among the Latin American military can be turned around but only over time and with a determined effort. For the effort to succeed, the United States will have to order its own military and intelligence organizations to eschew the kinds of associations with many of the more corrupt and violent members of the Latin American military that have come to light in recent years. It will have to make a clear decision that future U.S. interests lie with the hemisphere’s civilian authorities. The United States must do its share to bring the men with the guns under control.