Latin America’s Populism Problem – The American Spectator

Latin America’s youth are on the march, if a recent survey is any indication — but we won’t like where they’re headed. 

As the Economist pointed out on July 20, 2023, the latest Latinobarómetro contains several troubling indicators for the future of democracy in Latin America. The Latinobarómetro is an annual opinion survey dedicated to measuring the political attitudes of Latin Americans — particularly their support for democracy. This year’s report reveals a decline in support for democracy across Latin America. In 2010, the highest number of respondents since the turn of the century stated that democracy was their preferred form of governance; in 2023, that number has dropped by about 25 percent, with only 48 percent stating a clear preference for democratic governance. 

This shift hasn’t necessarily manifested itself in increased support for authoritarian governments — only 17 percent, within the historical range for that metric, of those surveyed stated a preference for authoritarian leadership — but of note is the number of people surveyed who indicated no preference between the two forms of government, a number that has risen by a dramatic 75 percent since its lowest point in the 21st century (in 2010), from 16 percent of respondents to 28 percent. The number of those surveyed who professed openness to authoritarian governance so long as it improved conditions within their country has been steadily increasing within the last two decades, rising from 45 percent to 54 percent (a new record set within this year’s survey). These authoritarian shifts are most pronounced within Latin America’s youth. (READ MORE: Colombian Ceasefire: Bogotá and Rebels Sign an Agreement)

This should be a source of a great deal of trepidation for the United States, as this “backyard” region has immense geostrategic significance. If the authoritarian trend holds or increases within young demographics, the possibility of establishing stable democratic governments will become slimmer with each passing day.

Latin America’s History Is Not Conducive to Democracy

Building democracy anew is an arduous task. Newly established democracies are most likely to survive in nations with a previous “lost” historical experience with pluralistic self-rule. In other words, democracy is most likely to succeed if it can be painted not as a new and alien concept to a people but, rather, as a harkening back to an older and better time after a brief and aberrant authoritarian hiatus.  

This was the case in many post-Soviet Eastern European nations, where history was said to have stopped at the inception of communist totalitarianism. The newly-liberated nations spent much of the 1990s adopting or replicating — with some difficulty — the collective memory and group consciousness that existed immediately prior to their subjugation.  

Unfortunately, a majority of countries in Latin America have a tumultuous history, having been ravaged by colonization and various revolutions and then serving as an ideological battleground during the Cold War. The Soviet Union and Cuba spent much of the Cold War fomenting chaos in Latin America by sponsoring violent terrorist organizations, many of which still exist today — such as Columbia’s FARC. Cuba also saturated Latin America with Castro-ist propaganda, promoting left-wing authoritarian ideologies and fighting to bring about left-wing dictatorships in every corner of the region. To a certain extent, Russia and Cuba are still filling their traditional roles as chaos-mongers within the region, joined today by a new player: China.

With this history, many Latin American nations have developed a culture of political violence. The established cultural norm is to settle political disputes or questions with a revolution or coup rather than with discourse, debate, and elections. This leads to the delegitimization of state institutions and a culture of distrust — the latter of which is a death blow to democracy.

Populism’s Attraction and Shortcomings

Factional distrust can be described as the recipe for the creation of a failed democratic state. For democracy to succeed, members of a society must have mutual faith in one another, believing that each person — regardless of ethnic, religious, ideological, and class differences — has the same vested interests in the well-being of the society as a whole. If this trust is nonexistent, providing neighbors with the power to govern — and thus granting rights that can be used to directly harm your interests — can be a very scary prospect, indeed.

Unstable democratic states inevitably lead to corruption, public graft, extreme levels of income inequality, and widespread discontentment amongst the citizenry. It is out of this dissatisfaction that populist dictatorships are born. Populist authoritarians present the veneer of inclusion, offering those individuals who feel left out in floundering democratic societies a semblance of community and significance — but at a high cost.

Populism, by its very nature, is a movement that places power in the hands of individuals with little in the way of experience, education, and qualifications. With these individuals often come the various biases and fallacies common among those without access to opportunities for exposure to diverse characters and viewpoints.  

While populism is often mistakenly conflated with nationalism, it would be more accurate to say that populism co-opts nationalism. Populists stay in power by manipulating or weaponizing the biases of a segment of the population — forging those biases into an aggressive, hyper-exclusive, ethnoreligious concept of nationalism. The populist authoritarian cycles through conceptions of the “other” to rile his base into a frenzy, justifying his continued rule by way of fearmongering and discarding each “other” as it loses its ability to evoke panic or rage. This is how Latin American dictators have behaved for decades, and the scars left on the political community have outlasted generations by leaving behind fragmented polities characterized by factional distrust. If dictators are to come to power in Latin America’s near future, they will do so on this same path tread by the authoritarians who came before. 

Education Can Solve the Authoritarian Crisis

A deeper look into the Latinobarómetro report reveals that support for democracy fluctuates based not only on age but also on education level. In nations with a strong political community and functioning institutions, schools often serve to reinforce the notions of the collective memory that underpin the concept of nationhood, and they expose rising generations to diverse cultures and viewpoints. The data show that a willingness to accept authoritarianism isn’t necessarily the result of age but also a problem brought about by limited educational opportunities and through an institutional failure to expose younger generations to the values of democracy or to instill passion for these values and the political community in those youth. In Venezuela, the greatest threat to Maduro’s authoritarianism is the nation’s youth; in Cuba, the nation’s youth are less than half as likely to have a favorable view of the communist regime than their older counterparts, and they were by far the most passionate participants in the island-wide protests of July 11, 2021. With a little effort, this can be the case for youth in other Latin American states, too.  

The United States’ image in Latin America has begun to rebound. Across the globe, the United States is considered the bastion of liberal democracy: Our failure to model what a healthy democracy should look like appears to be an indictment of liberalism as a whole. With increasing positive views of the United States may come increasing support for democracy.

In Latin America, this is only the latest round of the fight between liberalism and authoritarianism. With rapid and targeted intervention, democracy may prevail. It would be unwise to count the region out just yet.

Logan M. Williams is a student at the University of Connecticut studying history and global studies. Presently, he is a researcher at the Center for a Free Cuba, an organization dedicated to monitoring human-rights abuses within Cuba and to advocating for Cuba’s eventual liberalization.