REIMAGINING LATIN AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

In Mexico And Colombia, Fair Elections Don't Guarantee Full
Participation

Recent events in Mexico and Colombia have drawn attention to the
importance of democracy. Democratic political competition may become a
reality next week in Mexico, where opposition presidential candidate
Vicente Fox is poised to unseat the 70-year rule of the Institutional
Revolutionary Party (PRI).

The US Senate has just approved unprecedented levels of military aid
to Colombia to shore up its democratic government and prevent regional
crisis.

What's overlooked about these virtually simultaneous events is that
Colombia has had, for more than 25 years, just what Mexico might be
about to get - procedural democracy and alternation of power at the
national level.

In Colombia, this form of democracy didn't prevent guerrilla war,
widening inequality, or explosive growth of drug trafficking. There's
no reason to believe democracy in Mexico will be more successful in
accomplishing these basic social and economic tasks, especially with
the Zapatista rebellion continuing in Chiapas, government human rights
abuses escalating throughout the south, and the drug trade claiming
new levels of political influence. And there is no reason to believe
US aid will improve the situation in Colombia. Unless the meaning and
practice of democracy change in the process.

Democracy didn't bring relative equality and social peace in Colombia
because democracy reinforced, rather than challenged, economic and
cultural exclusion. Workers, peasants, blacks, and Indians remained
poor and were relegated to secondary status in education and culture.
In Medellin, to be a modern citizen meant to be hard-working and to
know your place.

Violence was used as a tool to enforce this social order. Today's
violence is rooted in the politics of the 1940s and 1950s, an era
known as La Violencia. When liberal and conservative elites disagreed
about who should run Colombia, they rallied ordinary people behind
them in violent campaigns. But when rural peasants began to advance
their own claims, elites came together, established the beginnings of
democracy at the national level, and sponsored paramilitary squads to
prevent change. Colombia's guerrilla movements are rural movements
fought by people who have never been treated as citizens.

Also, democracy did not bring forms of equality and participation to
Colombians because of narcotics consumption by Americans. And
ironically, it was the drug wealth in Medellin that began to challenge
the social order, as democracy had never done. Drug money and the
popular culture that developed around it showed people who had long
been excluded from wealth and prosperity an alternative economic path
and cultural stance.

To speak for democracy as it exists in Colombia - and oppose
guerrillas and drug traffickers - in part is to speak for maintaining
exclusion. That's why US aid won't bring peace, and democracy won't
bring well-being.

In Mexico, both the ruling PRI and the opposition National Action
Party (PAN) have perpetuated just this sort of restricted democracy,
characterized by markets without unions, wealth without well-being,
sweatshop assembly plants with no environmental regulation, and
Indians in museums, not running schools or legislatures. As in
Colombia, the PRI and the PAN assume that if rules of democratic
competition are followed, and a modicum of civil liberties respected
for the middle class, then well-being and social peace will follow.
But if Mexican democracy mirrors Colombian democracy, it will do
little to solve fundamental social problems - unless democracy is
reimagined. Democratic innovations have flourished all over Latin
America, often in isolation.

In Brazil's southern city of Porto Alegre, participatory budgeting has
created new democratic procedures and brought basic services to the
poor. And the state of Ceara transformed rural healthcare,
strengthened small businesses, and carried out effective drought
relief by investing in these areas and giving control of programs to
talented and respected municipal employees.

Innovation in these places was made possible by democratic competition
and fiscal decentralization. But innovation worked, and improved
lives, by creating new ways to run bureaucracies, organize economies,
and carry out political debate.

These new procedures were democratic because they gave power and
respect to ordinary people in places where fair elections were also
occurring. Democratic innovation, then, is about creating new forms of
participation and well-being where electoral competition already exists.

Black communities on Colombia's Pacific coast have made use of
constitutional reforms to foster a vibrant cultural identity and
develop new environmental practices. The Pan-Mayan movement responded
to Guatemala's genocidal violence, and the peace talks that followed,
by placing Indian languages and political autonomy on the political
agenda. Likewise, the Zapatistas in Chiapas argue that a democratic
Mexico needs new ways of choosing representatives and organizing
governing bodies, as well as new conceptions of what it means to be a
citizen of a Mexican nation.

In all of these examples, once-marginalized people combine a focus on
elections with explicit attention to the kinds of new ideas, policies,
and procedures that give rich and deep meaning to the notion of democracy.