Democracy and Dictatorship

...Peru is a textbook case: until quite recently the only way from Lima to the Amazonian outpost of Leticia led not straight across the Andes but thousands of miles around the whole continent and up the entire length of the Amazon...

...the decisions are made by the people directly involved...

...10...

...Political democracy, to be effective, must provide an answer to this fear...

...Latin America is tired of being the eternal "Continent of the Future," a phrase that has become a bitter joke there...

...But these patterns also throw a very important light on questions of political democracy...

...and this is why Latin America produced one dictator after another...

...The first thing the Mayas did was to cut down the sisal-bearing henequen plants and plant corn...

...It gives a small minority of mankind certain rights and privileges denied to the majority...

...The population of Latin America is, on the whole, sparse and badly distributed...

...We who believe in political democracy may well be cheered by the ending of Martin Fierro: the hero voluntarily submits to the Iaw because he finally realizes that, for all its injustices, it satisfies man more deeply than lawlessness...

...In a few countries, like Uruguay and Costa Rica, geography provides an equable climate, a fruitful soil, easy communications...

...Another current explanation of Latin America's economic inferiority raises more fundamental issues...

...7. This dichotomy between "primitive" and "civilized" is vital for any consideration of political democracy in Latin America...

...Latin America is unlikely to go whole-heartedly democratic unless it is lifted from its present under-privileged position vis-a-vis the better developed and more powerful countries of the world...

...Old-fashioned paternalism, which may have mitigated the evils of these systems, is on the wane...

...Leaders like Betancourt or Figueres are no longer lonely men with a handful of followers—they have had considerable success in giving democracy a mass backing...

...The Negro has not had a dominant influence except in some limited areas, primarily the Caribbean and Brazil...

...Nor is it easy for an outsider to appreciate the barriers of hate and distrust that the compulsory incorporation in a modern economic system creates...

...Latin America is no longer living in isolation from the rest of the world, neither is it any longer a kind of American "backyard" in which the United States exercises, in Secretary Olney's phrase, "a practical sovereignty...

...Air-conditioning may prove as revolutionary as the airplane...

...The social sciences have of late begun to make up for the historian's errors, but the real nature of primitive man is still veiled by "civilized" hostility and prejudice...

...it must be willingly accepted from below...

...Pitiless exploitation and ruthless defense of the status quo are much more common...

...On the one hand, it has produced and partly backed the new leaders who are determined at least to make it a reality...

...Somebody took a potshot at him from a few yards—and missed...

...But the problem is more complex in Latin America...

...The two basic strains are the Hispanic and the Indian...

...on the other, there are many indications that it wants to follow the course of previous Latin American elites and keep itself in power...

...The Communists alternately woo this new middle class and attack it in the name of the masses, whose championship they claim...

...After two years of the "War of the Castes" the population of Yucatan was reduced from 500,000 to 200,000...

...Hidalgo abol ished slavery and the Indian tribute...

...Yet it was not an intellectual who entered upon Bolivar's heritage but the barely literate Juan Antonio Paez...

...The other side of this personal approach shows itself in a remarkable toleration for individual peculiarities, far more common in Latin America than in most industrialized countries...

...In only a few places has land reform given substantial land to the landlords...

...Why do measures of social justice, like land reforms, nationalizations or welfare laws, so often reduce productivity...

...4. Much has been written about the economic ills from which Latin America suffers, which is not so surprising for these quickly leap to the eye...

...They are defeated, and resume their passivity...

...You are a very bad shot," said Paez, "go away...

...Much of Latin America is still waiting for the capitalist revolution...

...The whole theme remains shrouded in ignorance which has only recently begun to lift somewhat...

...These ethnological patterns help to explain the problems and prospects of economic democracy in Latin America, especially if it is remembered that a man like Vasco de Quiroga was not only Bishop of Michoacan but also a social and economic reformer inspired by More's Utopia and that the Tarascan Indians still practice the industrial arts he taught them 400 years ago...

...They tend to be as passionately attached to their own "backward" values as the modernizers and industrializers to their "progressive" ones...

...He could even become a dictator...

...It may well be said that this is the least of its troubles, but that would be taking a very short-sighted view...

...This is the background to the painful conflict between economic efficiency and social justice which plagues Latin America and which Toynbee tried to analyze in the lectures he gave at the University of Puerto Rico in February 1962...

...This respect for the individual is something that political democracy needs as much as its more abstract forms...

...For all the advance of economic nationalism, a good deal of Latin America's economy is still controlled by foreign interests...

...But will the new middle class be able to do so...

...It is not for nothing that Castro talks for hours and hours...

...Though relations between the various racial strains have often fallen short of ideal, Latin America is free from ideological racism, and the worst atrocities occurred within a few years of the "trauma of the Conquest," a phrase still current in Mexico...

...One after another, the old-fashioned dictators have been put out of business, until only three small countries—Haiti, Nicaragua and Paraguay— are left under their rule...

...they want to become its active subjects...

...The Mexican Ministry of Education is decorated with a long list of animals, vegetables and minerals which the Indians put to use and passed on to the Europeans...

...The villagers of Viru (Peru) won themselves a mention in textbooks of sociology by refusing to accept the artesian wells offered to them under a UN-sponsored scheme...

...National unity tends to be extremely fragile, and government has to be strong if there is to be a government at all...

...The centralized Aztec and Inca empires were actually similar straitjackets, imposed by a victorious tribe on the tribes it had conquered...

...Nor is there any indication that the new generation of entrepreneurs, managers and technicians now growing up is inferior to their equivalents elsewhere...

...Nor was political democracy an easy thing to explain to the average Latin American...

...Finally, another reference to a wider context...

...The primitive population of Latin America shows certain clearly marked and recurring patterns...

...Moreover, the rule of the local elites has always been supported by—and exercised for the benefit of—powerful foreign interests: Spanish, Portuguese, British, French, American, and now, in Cuba, Russian...

...When Bolivar died, Venezuela had a sizable intellectual elite...

...Viewed in the light of this distinction, the system of great powers is a clear contradiction of external democracy...

...But if the middle class is willing to make democracy a working political tool of the majority, it must also make up its mind to accept two fundamental changes...

...The Mexican Guillermo Prieto saw it fifty years later with the clarity of a poet: "Since Independence, we [i.e., the mestizos] have become the gachupines [peninsular Spaniards] of the Indians...

...The primitive finds it difficult, if not impossible, to grasp general and abstract ideas above a certain level, the state, the nation, the ideology and the political party among them...

...The protest of the majority has, all too often, taken the form of a revolution which set up a dictatorship...

...And the historian of Latin America recalls how Father Hidalgo spoke, in 1810, to 100,000 Mexican Indians gathered in the meadow of Salamanca—it took him many hours to explain to them why they should rise against the Spanish rulers...

...In other countries of Latin America democracy may be far from perfect, but in many of them it is at last beginning to grapple with the national problems...

...The minority may, according to international standards now current, plunge mankind into atomic war or poison its future generations by radiation, without even consulting the majority...

...This assumption, however correct it may be in itself, requires some serious correctives...

...But most of Latin America suffers from all kinds of geographical handicaps—impassable mountain ranges, extremes of heat, cold and humidity, tropical forests, steppes, deserts, etc...

...And are they so completely wrong...

...6. There are some serious misconceptions about the political outlook of both the Indian aborigines and the Iberian immigrants...

...Toynbee hopes that this is but a temporary stage in Latin America just as it was in Western Europe and the United States...

...The new middle class has not yet fully shown its hand as far as political democracy is concerned...

...Such is the case in Peru, which may well be "the saddest country in the world," as one of its leading intellectuals, Juan Luis Valesquez, claims with bitter pride...

...The fate of internal political democracy in Latin America is intimately linked with its quest for external democracy...

...But industrialization has failed, so far, to raise the standards of living at a speed matching the increase in population...

...the same applies to the non-Hispanic European immigrant—the main exceptions here are Argentina and Uruguay...

...it was originally created by Philip II to preserve the Indians from the devastating effects of the free enterprise practiced by the conquistadores...

...This frustration finds an outlet in the kind of thinking exemplified by former President Kubitschek's Brazilian election slogan: "Fifty Years of Progress in Five Years...

...Statistics may be made to prove anything (especially in Latin America, where Luis Alberto Sanchez, rector of the University of Lima, classifies them as "poetry"), but most of them are pessimistic...

...It is a two-way process possible only on the basis of "Free with free...

...If it can, political democracy in Latin America will remain in its present exceedingly fragile state...

...The United States is now backing it as the most reliable Latin American ally...

...Again, if Latin Americans bow too quickly to tyrants, they have never lacked the courage to get rid of them...

...The conquistadores pioneered in mining technology, and as late as the last century the now world-wide cultivation of sisal was started by a group of Yucatan landowners, one of whom invented an essential piece of machinery still called the Solis wheel...

...or should be...

...It is not imposed from above, like the collective farm...

...Salvador de Madariaga has coined the most acceptable formula to describe this kind of politics, the alternative of "hierarchy or anarchy...

...External democracy is, by definition, opposed to imperial and colonial relations, even if the more powerful partner is as democratic as he possibly could be...

...Much will depend on the new middle class of Latin America, which has been the most conscious advocate of these changes and their chief, if not only, beneficiary so far...

...Formal democracy, with all its trappings, was adopted by the new republics at the very moment of their birth...

...Industrialization can claim in Latin America some spectacular successes...

...they preferred to go thirsty...

...Portales, the Chilean conservative leader who gave his country a century of relative stability, was a ruthless and stolid man, but he confessed to a deathly fear of "the dark night of anarchy...

...But they can hardly become masters in their own house except as part of a new world-wide political set-up in which the present unrestrained rule of the great powers is subjected to the Qverriding interest of humanity...

...One example is worth recalling here: Felipe Carrillo Puerto, a mestizo, learned Maya to organize the peons of Yuca tan...

...But the Indian political experience also included popular assemblies, common among warrior tribes from the Apaches to the Araucanians, and such political devices as the Maya league of city states...

...The Catholic Kings passed laws permitting the intermarriage of Indians and Spaniards...

...History has been made by both the primitive and the civilized, but only the civilized wrote it...

...3. The facts of life in Latin America begin with geography, which is far more decisive than in Europe or the United States...

...equal with equal," the motto of the Polish Legion which fought under Napoleon...

...The winning of national independence of the twenty national republics merely replaced one ruling elite, of European "peninsular" origin, by another with more local roots but no less determined to rule...

...Perhaps the greatest obstacle to political democracy in the mind of the primitive is that his politics are those of passion, not of reason...

...A sculpture from Palenque shows a Maya with each of his feet standing on the neck of a cowering subject...

...When Felipe Carrillo Puerto became the revolutionary governor of Yucatan, he gave back to the Indians of his native village of Motul the lands they had been deprived of by the landlords...

...It has two main enemies: The old ruling class which refuses to give up its monopoly of power, and the new kind of dictator, forecast by Peron and exemplified by Castro, who tells the masses that the old elite will yield the fruits of power only at gunpoint...

...Also, to preserve in politics the great potentialities that slumber within primitive man and to give him constructive release...

...But for the average citizen in Latin America, Church and Army provided almost his only chances to rise in the world...

...Partly because the work of its democratic pioneers, from men like Hidalgo onwards, is beginning to bear fruit, but also because a new generation of democratic leaders has come to the fore since the end of World War II, who are determined to make democracy a reality for the many as well as the few...

...Here are some of them: new means of communication which reduce the effective distances...

...Formal democracy on the Western model was introduced into Latin America by the ruling elite and has been used by it ever since to buttress its interests...

...This is an enormous but by no means hopeless task...

...Instead, he judges issues in terms of personalities...

...The absolute monarchy which put the American colonies of both Spain and Portugal under an iron rule was, in both countries, a rather recent innovation...

...2. Now, after 150 years, democracy can become as deeply rooted in Latin America as in areas with a happier history...

...His oratory put Khrushchev to sleep at the UN, but it keeps his Cuban audiences on the alert...

...Political democracy must develop new tools and techniques, adapted to the local conditions and the mentality of primitive man, to make the will of the majority prevail and to abolish its recurring need of dictators...

...The victims remain passive and even develop a masochistic pleasure in their sufferings...

...political parties and ideologies which begin to replace allegiances to personalities...

...Other countries can show little to match this...

...Its basic defect is that it fails to take into account the point of view of the people immediately concerned, those about to be industrialized and modernized...

...Gunnar Myrdal has established an important distinction between internal democracy, applied within any country, and external democracy, applied to relations among countries...

...Their subjects showed what they thought of their claim when the Maya capital, Mayapan, was burned down in the 15th century by "the people beyond the walls," Toynbee's "internal proletariat...

...The primitive has expressed himself by action rather than words...

...Many missionaries made the protection of the victims of the Conquest a labor of love, and the Jesuits, led by Lainez, a man of partly Jewish extraction, made the Council of Trent adopt the thesis that all men, regardless of their skin color, have souls capable of achieving salvation...

...It sees the root of the trouble in the existence of two parallel economies, one modern and advanced and the other old-established and backward...

...The Mexicans are rightly proud of Monterrey, the Brazilians of Volta Redonda...

...Moreover, both the Indians and the Hispanic peoples who came to rule them have the same basic social dichotomy, which has been perpetuated to this day in Latin American politics...

...The present world set-up has been imposed after a victorious war for the preservation of democracy...

...As with the Spanish and Portuguese, so with the Indians...

...Morelos worked out a program of giving land to the landless, put into practice only a hundred years later...

...First is the realization that political democracy cannot be imposed from above...

...A poor man could become a general or a bishop, and thus break through the barriers which made the good things of life a monopoly of the elite...

...This is the kind of relationship that the best of Latin Americans want to establish with the United States, for mutual benefit...

...Today countries like Brazil and Mexico have established a measure of racial democracy that should make them models for South Africa or the American South (and, for that matter, the American North...

...His name is unknown and his social position is merely guessed at when he is called "priest-king...

...It is usually assumed that the latter must yield to the former if Latin America is to find a way out of its present economic morass...

...The success of Latin American democracy will largely depend on the success of modern technological devices in overcoming these geographical handicaps...

...5. The reasons for this caution become clearer when the population structure of Latin America is examined...

...A good deal of the credit must be given to the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church...

...8. If it has done little to provide such an answer so far, the explanation lies in history...

...Man has left a much smaller imprint on Latin America...

...Its guiding economic function may well be the equal sharing of poverty, which tends to perpetuate poverty—but at least it is an equal sharing...

...Its primary function, exercised today by the dictatorships of Franco and Salazar, was that of a straitjacket to restrain the explosive anarchism of the subjects...

...Recent history offers a good deal of evidence to support this pessimism, but history also supplies a corrective...

...and technological revolutions which make possible economic revolutions...

...they did not even fit well with the accepted cliches of democracy...

...But he surely belonged to the Halach Huinic, the Maya ruling caste who called themselves "the (only) real men...

...Then they rise, and indulge in a frenzied orgy of killing, rape, robbery and destruction...

...If economic democracy is to be achieved there, ways and means have to be worked out to persuade the people to enter modern economy while yet preserving the good in pre-modern values...

...The ruling elite fears—and not entirely without reason—that political democracy, if introduced prematurely, would mean the end of civilization as they understand it...

...The 19th-century liberal could not, by definition, doubt that the Church and the Army were reactionary forces...

...the majority's new will to win a place in the sun here and now...

...a more vital social conscience among some members of the elite...

...And let us not forget that the ejido was merely revived by the Mexican Revolution...

...Latin America forms part of that majority of mankind which is excluded from decision-making...

...Few of these leaders were unaware of the national realities, although many preferred to ignore them, for they did not easily fit into the patterns of democratic thought which these politicians found in European textbooks of political theory or in the Constitution of the United States...

...The second task is equally enormous...

...This exasperates the nationalists, but theirs is only an extreme reaction to the widely held view that Latin Americans lack the economic know-how to exploit their resources properly...

...The title of a Latin American classic, written by a man who is rightly acclaimed as a founder of Argentine democracy, Sarmiento, is significant: Facundo or Civilization and Barbarism...

...In both cases, a complexity of experience has been overshadowed by a spectacular achievement...

...After all, a village community like the Mexican ejido or the Andean ayllu not only maintains a community spirit and offers individual satisfactions that the industrialized city dweller has lost...

...And yet Mexico has been the biggest exception to the general rule, ever since its war of independence...

...it is necessary also to persuade—again the key word—the mass of the voters that ballots are better than bullets...

...Then, in 1846, they rose...

...It has become the object of political rivalry between two rival power blocs...

...An individual gesture means more to him than a detailed political program, and this is one of the roots of caudillismo, the indigenous form of dictatorship...

...It is still too early to say how they will affect the fate of political democracy, but there is no doubt that they are offering it a new chance...

...Paez was the idol of the masses...

...The first two leaders, both priests, wanted to give the political revolution a social content...

...Hence, a tendency towards discontinuity, which scorns the regular succession of elections and peaceful transfers of power...

...it is also, in important ways, an economic democracy...

...He started by reading to them, in their own language, the article of the Mexican constitution which abolished slavery...

...It would be a mistake to believe that this basic dichotomy was introduced into Latin America by the conquistadores...

...But it cannot be fully understood without a reference to a wider, world-wide context...

...If modern economics doesn't always make sense to those who freely live under it, all the more often does it fail to make sense to primitive people compelled to live by it...

...Latin Americans no longer want to be the passive objects of history...

...It has, indeed, preserved democracy from extinction but only by confining its effective exercise to certain countries and to certain aspects of international life...

...This is what the early leaders of Latin American democracy, by and large, failed to do...

...It is a dichotomy between a majority of people who are essentially primitive and a ruling elite which claims to have a monopoly of civilization...

...He has not accepted the civilized man's estimate of himself, but he could not prevent the civilized man from holding that estimate and imposing it wherever he could...

...One basic political pattern of primitive Latin America runs, roughly, as follows: A brutal conquest of power is followed by a long spell of exploitation...

...But democracy cannot become a national reality unless adapted to the other national realities...

...So much is obvious...

...It is not enough to provide a clean ballot...

...In some parts, it is still to be tried...

...9. The last few years introduced a number of new factors into the Latin American situation...

...The regimes of Peron and Castro cannot be understood without bearing this in mind...

...The Mayas of Yucatan remained quiet for 300 years after the Conquest...

...It is concentrated in a few favored areas which are over-exploited, leaving the majority of the country bare and barren...

...Agriculture is still dominant, and it is a feudal and colonial type of agriculture—its two chief forms, the hacienda and the plantation, represent feudalism and colonialism respectively...

...1. Clashes between democracy and dictatorship have punctuated the history of Latin America for 150 years, ever since it won its political independence...

...The "gaucho epic" Martin Fierro was written by Jose Fernandez as a deliberate assertion of popular values against Sarmiento's exclusive claim to civilization...

...But other things are not so obvious...

...It was there long before them...

...This refusal to accept the elite at its own estimate is a continuous tradition in Latin America...