Democracy and Latin America

Octavio Paz

[From an essay in the book, One Earth, Four or Five Worlds:
Reflections on Contemporary History, 1990]

… For almost two centuries now, misapprehensions about the historical reality of Latin America have been accumulating. Even the names used to designate it are inexact: Latin America, Hispanic America, Iberoamerica, Indio-america. Each of these names leaves out a part of reality. Nor are the economic, social, and political labels that are pinned on it any more apt. The notion of underdevelopment, for example, can be applied to economics and technology, but not to art, literature, ethics, or politics. The expression "Third World" is even vaguer, a term that is not only imprecise but actually misleading: what relation is there between Argentina and Angola, between Thailand and Costa Rica, between Tunisia and Brazil?...

Architecture is the mirror of societies, but a mirror that shows us enigmatic images that we must decipher. The opulence and refinement of Mexico City or Puebla in the middle of the eighteenth century stand in sharp contrast to the austere simplicity, bordering on poverty, of Boston or Philadelphia. A deceptive splendor: what was a dawn in the United States was a twilight in Hispanic America. Americans were born with the Reformation and the Enlightenment -- that is, with the modern world; we were born with the Counter-Reformation and Neo-Scholasticism -- that is, against the modern world. We had neither an intellectual revolution nor a democratic revolution of the bourgeoisie. The philosophical foundation of the absolute Catholic monarchy was the body of thought of Francisco Suarez and his disciples of the Society of Jesus. These theologians renovated, with genius, traditional Thomism and converted it into a philosophical fortress. The historian Richard Morse has shown, with penetrating insight, that the function of Neo-Thomism was twofold: on the one hand, at times explicitly and at others implicitly, it was the ideological cornerstone of the imposing political, juridical, and economic edifice that we call the Spanish Empire; on the other, it was the school of our intellectual class and modeled their habits and their attitudes. In this sense -- not as a philosophy but as a mental attitude -- its influence still lingers on among Latin American intellectuals.

In the beginning, Neo-Thomism was a system of thought aimed at defending orthodox beliefs against Lutheran and Calvinist heresies, which were the first expressions of modernity. Unlike the other philosophical tendencies of that era, it was not a method for exploring the unknown but a system for defending the known and the established. The Modern Age began with a criticism of first principles; Neo-Scholasticism set out to defend those principles and demonstrate their necessary, eternal, and inviolable nature. Although this philosophy vanished from the intellectual horizon of Latin America in the eighteenth century, the attitudes and habits that were consubstantial with it have persisted up to our own day. Our intellectuals have successively embraced liberalism, positivism, and now Marxism-Leninism; nonetheless, in almost all of them, whatever their philosophy, it is not difficult to discern -- buried deep but still alive -- the moral and psychological attitudes of the old champions of Neo-Scholasticism. Thus they display a paradoxical modernity: the ideas are today's; the attitudes yesterday's. Their grandfathers swore by Saint Thomas and they swear by Marx, yet both have seen in reason a weapon in the service of a Truth with a capital T, which it is the mission of intellectuals to defend. They have a polemical and militant idea of culture and of thought: they are crusaders. Thus there has been perpetuated in our lands an intellectual tradition that has little respect for the opinion of others, that prefers ideas to reality and intellectual systems to the critique of systems. ...

... [I]t may be said that the nineteenth century began with three great revolutions: those waged by the American colonies, by the French, and by the nations of Latin America. All three won a victory on the battlefield, but the political and social results were quite different in each case. In the United States the revolution brought the birth of the very first society that was wholly modern, despite the taint it bore of black slavery and the extermination of the Indians. Although the French nation suffered substantial and radical changes, the new society that emerged from its revolution, as Tocqueville demonstrated, was in many respects a continuation of the centralist France of Richelieu and Louis XIV. In Latin America, the various peoples achieved independence and began to govern themselves; the revolutionaries, however, did not succeed in establishing, except on paper, regimes and institutions that were truly free and democratic. The American Revolution founded a nation; the French Revolution changed and renewed a society; the Latin American revolutions failed to achieve one of their fundamental objectives: political, social, and economic modernization.

The French and American revolutions were the consequence of the historical evolution of the two nations; the Latin American movements were limited to the adoption of the doctrines and programs of others. I underscore the word: "adoption," not "adaptation." In Latin America the intellectual tradition that, since the Reformation and the Enlightenment, had shaped the minds and consciences of the French and American elite, did not exist; nor did there exist the social classes that corresponded, historically, to the new liberal and democratic ideology. A middle class barely existed, and our bourgeoisie had scarcely gone beyond the mercantilist stage. There had been an organic relationship between the revolutionary groups in France and their ideas, and the same thing can be said of the American Revolution; in our case, ideas did not correspond to social classes. Ideas served the function of masks; they were thus converted into an ideology, in the negative sense of that word -- that is, into veils that interfere with and distort the perception of reality. Ideology converts ideas into masks: they hide the person who wears them, and at the same time they keep him from seeing reality. They deceive both others and ourselves. ...

... On the collapse of the Spanish Empire and its administration, power fell into the hands of two groups: economic power fell to the native oligarchs, political power to the military. The oligarchies did not have sufficient power to govern in their own name. Under the Spanish regime, civil society, far from prospering and developing as it had elsewhere in the West, had lived in die shadow of the State. The focal reality in our countries, as in Spain, was the patrimonialist system. Under this system, the head of government -- prince or viceroy, caudillo or president -- directs the State and the nation as an extension of his own patrimony-that is, as though it were his own household. The oligarchies, made up of owners of large estates and traders, had lived in subordination to authority and lacked both political experience and influence on the populace. On the other hand, the ascendancy of the clergy was enormous, as was, though to a lesser degree, that of lawyers, doctors, and other members of die liberal professions. These groups -- the seed of the modern intellectual class -- embraced, immediately and fervently, the ideologies of the era, some liberal and others conservative. The other force, the decisive one, was the military. In countries without democratic experience, with rich oligarchies and poor governments, the struggle between political factions inevitably led to violence. The liberals were no less violent than the conservatives -- or, rather, they were as fanatical as their adversaries. The endemic civil war produced militarism, and militarism produced dictatorship.

For more than a century, Latin America has lived amid disorder and tyranny, anarchical violence and despotism. Attempts have been made to attribute the persistence of these evils to the absence of the social classes and the economic structures that made democracy possible in Europe and in the United States. That is quite true: we have lacked really modern bourgeoisies; the middle class has been weak and numerically small; the proletariat is recent. But democracy is not simply the result of the social and economic conditions inherent in capitalism and the industrial revolution. Castoriadis has shown that democracy is a genuine political creation -- that is to say, a totality of ideas, institutions, and practices that constitute a collective invention. Democracy has been invented twice, once in Greece and again in the West. In both cases it was born of die conjunction of die theories and ideas of several generations and die actions of different groups and classes, such as die bourgeoisie, die proletariat, and other sectors of society. Democracy is not a superstructure, but a popular creation. Moreover, it is die condition, die basis, of modern civilization. ...

... [I]t is significant that die frequency of military coups d'etat has never obscured die principle of democratic legitimacy in die awareness of our peoples. Its moral authority has never been challenged. Hence, invariably, on taking over power, all dictators solemnly declare that their rule is provisional and that they are prepared to restore democratic institutions die moment circumstances permit. They very seldom keep their promise, it is true; but this does not matter. What strikes me as revealing and worth stressing is that they feel obliged to make die promise. This is a phenomenon of major importance, die meaning of which very few have pondered: until die second half of die twentieth century, no one dared challenge die proposition that democracy represents historical and constitutional legitimacy in Latin America. Our nations were democratic by birth, and, despite crimes and tyrannies, democracy was a sort of historic act of baptism for our peoples. The situation has changed in die last twenty-five years, and this change calls for comment.

Fidel Castro's movement stirred the imagination of many Latin Americans, particularly students and intellectuals. He appeared as the heir to the great traditions of our peoples: the independence and unity of Latin America, anti-imperialism, a program of radical and necessary social reforms, the restoration of democracy. One by one these illusions have vanished. The story of the degeneration of the Cuban Revolution has been recounted a number of times, among others by such direct participants in the revolution as Carlos Franqui, so I shall not repeat the details yet again. I shall merely note that the unfortunate involution of the Castro regime has been the result of a concatenation of circumstances: the very personality of the revolutionary leader, who is a typical Latin American caudillo in the Hispano-Arabic tradition; the totalitarian structure of the Cuban Communist Party, which was the political instrument for the imposition of the Soviet model of bureaucratic domination; the insensitivity and obtuse arrogance of Washington, especially during the first phase of the Cuban Revolution, before it was taken over by the communist bureaucracy; and finally, as in the other countries of Latin America, the weakness of our democratic traditions. This last circumstance explains why, even though its despotic nature becomes more palpable and the failures of its economic and social policy more widely known with each passing day, the regime still preserves part of its initial ascendancy among young university students and certain intellectuals. ...

I have already pointed out that Latin American dictatorships consider themselves to be exceptional, provisional regimes. None of our dictators, not even the most brazen of them, has ever denied the historical legitimacy of democracy. The first regime to have dared to proclaim a different sort of legitimacy was Castro's. The foundation of his power is not the will of the majority as expressed by free and secret vote, but a conception that, despite its scientific pretensions, bears a certain resemblance to the Mandate of Heaven of ancient China. This conception, fabricated out of bits and pieces of Marxism (both the true variety and the apocryphal ones), is the official credo of the Soviet Union and of the other bureaucratic dictatorships. I shall repeat the hackneyed formula: the general, ascendant movement of history is embodied in a class, the proletariat, which hands it over to a party, which delegates it to a committee, which entrusts it to a leader. Castro governs in the name of history. Like divine will, history is a superior authority, immune to the erratic and contradictory opinions of the masses. ...

... [T]he absolute monarch exercised power in the name of a superior and supernatural authority, God; in totalitarianism, the leader exercises power in the name of his identification with the party, the proletariat, and the laws that govern historical development. The leader is universal history in person. The transcendent God of the theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries descends to earth and becomes "the historical process"; "the historical process" in turn becomes incarnate in this or that leader: Stalin, Mao, Fidel. Totalitarianism usurps religious forms, empties them of their content, and cloaks itself with them. Modern democracy had completed the separation between religion and politics; totalitarianism unites them once more, but they are now inverted: the content of the politics of the absolute monarch was religious; today politics is the content of totalitarian pseudo-religion.

The antidemocratic nature of this conception is as disturbing as its pseudo-scientific pretensions. Not only are the acts and the politics of the Castro regime a negation of democracy; so, likewise, are the very principles on which it is founded. In this sense the Cuban bureaucratic dictatorship is a real historical novelty on our continent: with it began not socialism but a "revolutionary legitimacy" aimed at taking the place of the historical legitimacy of democracy. Thus the tradition on which Latin America was founded has been broken. ...

The problems of Latin America, it is said, are those of an underdeveloped continent, yet the term "underdeveloped" is misleading: it is not a description but a judgment That statement says something without explaining. Under-development of what, why, and in relation to what model or paradigm? It is a technocratic concept that disdains the true values of a civilization, the physiognomy and soul of each society, an ethnocentric concept. This does not mean that we should ignore the problems of our countries: economic, political, and intellectual dependence on the outside, iniquitous social inequalities, extreme poverty side by side with wealth and extravagance, lack of civil freedoms, repression, militarism, unstable institutions, disorder, demagogy, mythomania, empty eloquence, falsehood and its masks, corruption, archaic moral attitudes, machismo, backward technology and scientific lag, intolerance in the realm of opinion, belief, and mores.

The problems are real; are the remedies equally real? The most radical of them, after twenty-five years of application, has produced the following results: the Cubans today are as poor as or poorer than they were before, and far less free; inequality has not disappeared: the hierarchies are different, and yet they are not less rigid but more rigid and draconian; repression is like the island's heat: continuous, intense, and inescapable; it continues to be economically dependent on sugar, and politically dependent on the Soviet Union. The Cuban Revolution has petrified: it is a millstone about the people's neck. At the other extreme, military dictatorships have perpetuated the disastrous and unjust status quo, abolished civil rights, practiced the crudest repression, succeeded in resolving none of the economic problems, and in many cases exacerbated the social ones. And, gravest of all, they have been and are incapable of resolving the central political problem of our societies: that of the succession -- that is, of the legitimacy -- of governments. Thus, far from doing away with instability, they foster it.

Latin American democracy was a late arrival on the scene, and it has been disfigured and betrayed time and time again. It has been weak, hesitant, rebellious, its own worst enemy, all too eager to worship the demagogue, corrupted by money, riddled with favoritism and nepotism. And yet almost everything good that has been achieved in Latin America in the last century and a half has been accomplished under democratic rule, or, as in Mexico, a rule heading toward democracy. A great deal still remains to be done. Our countries need changes and reforms, at once radical and in accord with the tradition and the genius of each people. In countries where attempts have been made to change the economic and social structures while at the same time dismantling democratic institutions, injustice, oppression, and inequality have become stronger forces than ever. The cause of the workers requires, above all else, freedom of association and the right to strike, yet this is the very first thing that their liberators strip them of. Without democracy, changes are counterproductive; or, rather, they are not changes at all.

To repeat again, for on this point we must be unyielding: changes are inseparable from democracy. To defend democracy is to defend the possibility of change; in turn, changes alone can strengthen democracy and enable it to be embodied in social life. This is a tremendous, twofold task Not only for Latin Americans: for all of us. The battle is a worldwide one. What is more, the outcome is uncertain, dubious. No matter: the battle must be waged.