168 lines
8.8 KiB
Plaintext
168 lines
8.8 KiB
Plaintext
8 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS IN LATIN AMERICA IN '94
|
|
|
|
- Most to be held in one year since the 1920's -
|
|
|
|
by Arthur Golden: Staff writer.
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Armed rebellion in the Mexican state of Chiapas sounds a warning
|
|
about the elusive goal of democracy in Mexico and the seven other Latin
|
|
American nations where presidential elections will be held this year.
|
|
|
|
In each nation, a democratically elected civilian leader is expected to
|
|
hand over power to a freely elected civilian successor, an accomplishment that
|
|
would have been unthinkable just 15 years ago, when the military ruled most of
|
|
Latin America.
|
|
|
|
Yet, despite the progress at the polls, experts say, basic institutions
|
|
must be made more responsive to the will of the people before representative
|
|
government can flourish in Latin America.
|
|
|
|
Furthermore, the elections come at a time of wrenching free-market
|
|
reforms that have failed to bring economic benefits to many Latin Americans,
|
|
particularly the poorest sectors of society. And that raises the question as to
|
|
whether democracy can be strenghtened when people are suffering from the very
|
|
economic reforms that freely elected governments have spearheaded.
|
|
|
|
The eight presidential elections are the most in Latin America in a
|
|
single year since at least the 1920's. The presidential terms range from four
|
|
to six years. Elections will be held this year in Mexico, El Salvador, Costa
|
|
Rica, Panama, The Dominican Republic, Brazil, Colombia, and Uruguay.
|
|
|
|
The uprising in Chiapas, launched by indigenous people who claimed
|
|
generations of economic and political injustice, is a "warning" for Mexico
|
|
and the seven other Latin American nations where elections will be held this
|
|
year, said political scientist Peter H. Smith, director of the Center for
|
|
Iberian and Latin American Studies at UCSD (University of California, San
|
|
Diego).
|
|
|
|
PROCESS REMAINS SUSPECT
|
|
|
|
Despite a strong (and sometimes repressive) government, and policies
|
|
that at least attempted to cushion the impact of free-market reforms, Smith
|
|
said, Mexico still failed to prevent the Chiapas rebellion by people who felt
|
|
they remained the victims of "exacerbated social inequality".
|
|
|
|
Douglas Payne, director of hemispheric studies at Freedom House in New
|
|
York City, which monitor civil liberties worldwide, said Latin America's eight
|
|
presidential elections this year "are a necessary but insufficient part of
|
|
democratic governance. In essence, what is missing in most of Latin America is
|
|
a rule of law in which people can hold their governments accountable in
|
|
between elections."
|
|
|
|
A State Department official added: "If a nation elects its leaders
|
|
through a fair process, that constitutes a narrow measure of democracy. But a
|
|
broader measure is whether the society itself is democratic. And that is where
|
|
a lot of work needs to be done in Latin America."
|
|
|
|
Indeed, Nicolas Ardito-Barletta, a former democratically elected pre-
|
|
sident of Panama who was overthrown by his nation's military, said that
|
|
although elections are important, most Latin American nations must modernize
|
|
their political and legal systems as essential conditions to achieve authentic
|
|
democracy.
|
|
|
|
Some progress has been made, Ardito-Barletta said from Panama City, but
|
|
at least 10 to 15 years will probably have to elapse before political and legal
|
|
systems are made responsive to the needs of the people throughout Latin America.
|
|
|
|
A MIXED BAG OF CANDIDATES
|
|
|
|
The long Latin American electoral cavalcade will begin Feb. 6 in Costa
|
|
Rica. But the immediate focus of international attention is the March 20
|
|
elections in El Salvador, which has emerged form 12 years of civil war. Polls
|
|
show that Ruben Zamora, a moderate leftist who has the support of El Salvador's
|
|
former guerrillas, is rapidly closing in on Armando Calderon Sol, presidential
|
|
candidate of the ruling rightist Arena party.
|
|
|
|
On May 8, salsa singer Ruben Blades will make his first bid for elec-
|
|
tive office in the race for president of Panama. His opponents will include
|
|
Mireya Gruber, widow of legendary populist president Arnulfo Arias, and
|
|
Ernesto Valladares, a former close associate of ousted dictator-convicted drug
|
|
dealer Manuel Antonio Noriega.
|
|
|
|
On Aug. 21 in a test of traditional one-party dominance, Luis Donaldo
|
|
Colosio, presidential candidate of Mexico's long-ruling Institutional Revolu-
|
|
cionary Party, will face a powerful challenge from Cuhauhtemoc Cardenas, of the
|
|
left-of-center Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), and Diego Fernandez de
|
|
Cevallos, of the conservative National Action Party (PAN). The PRI has been
|
|
shaken by the fierce and bloody rebellion of the Mayan Indians this month in
|
|
Chiapas, which ended when the government declared a unilateral cease-fire and
|
|
sought a negotiated settlement with the rebels.
|
|
|
|
3 OTHERS WILL VOTE IN '95
|
|
|
|
Voters in Brazil, the region's biggest, most populous country, which is
|
|
plagued by widespread governmental corruption and four-digit annual inflation,
|
|
will elect a new president Oct. 5. Recent polls give a commanding lead to labor
|
|
leader Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, a socialist. Lula finished second in the 1980
|
|
presidential election, which was won by Fernando Collor de Mello. Collor was
|
|
impeached and removed from office in December 1992 on charges profiting from a
|
|
multi-million-dollar graft ring and he was replaced by Itamar Franco, his
|
|
elected vice-president.
|
|
|
|
Presidential elections will also be held this year in Colombia, the
|
|
Dominican Republic, and Uruguay, continuing a process that began last fal with
|
|
the election of new civilian presidents in Honduras, Venezuela, and Chile.
|
|
|
|
The democratic trend will be further consolidated in 1995 with presi-
|
|
dential elections in Argentina and Guatemala, and even in Peru, where Authori-
|
|
tarian President Alberto Fujimori suspended some constitutional guarantees two
|
|
years ago because he said he needed widened powers to fight fanatical leftist
|
|
guerrillas.
|
|
|
|
In fact, the regional movement towards free choice at the polls has
|
|
only two holdouts: the communist regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba, and the
|
|
repressive military rulers of Haiti, who, in 1992, tousted that nation's first
|
|
freely elected president, Jean-Bernard Aristide.
|
|
|
|
"You can't have a democracy without elections," said retired U.S.
|
|
diplomat Kim Flower, executive vice-president of the Council of the Americas,
|
|
a private think tank in New York City. "It may be true that elections aren't
|
|
always fair as they may be or that in some countries there is considerable
|
|
corruption," Flower said in New York City. "Nevertheless, the evidence of
|
|
elections is the first thing you look at when you are trying to decide to
|
|
what degree a people is a free people."
|
|
|
|
POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS WEAK
|
|
|
|
Robert Pastor, professor of Latin American Studies at Emory University,
|
|
in Atlanta, said the eight elections are hardly a panacea for each of the
|
|
nation's problems. But without free elections, Pastor said from Atlanta, the
|
|
prospects of long-term solutions to those problems are much dimmer.
|
|
|
|
Expressing a more bleak view, Freedom House analyst Payne said from New
|
|
York City: "What I see in most of Latin America is extremely weak democratic
|
|
and political institutions, and a still weak independent civic society. With a
|
|
few exceptions, the result is that politics is still monopolized by traditio-
|
|
nally corrupt political and socio-economical elites."
|
|
|
|
Carlos Waisman, an Argentine-born political sociologist and Latin
|
|
American specialist at UCSD, called the Brazilian situation "very worrisome."
|
|
Should Lula win in October and adopt inflationary, anti-business policies that
|
|
cause the weakened Brazilian economy to collapse, Waisman said, "I can see the
|
|
military re-entering politics to re-establish order. This is not the option I
|
|
prefer." The military ruled Brazil from 1964-1985.
|
|
|
|
With the impeachment of Collor and new scandals surfacing every day,
|
|
Waisman said, democracy has not been very effective in Brazil. "This doesn't
|
|
mean, of course, a non-democratic regime is the answer," he said. "We are just
|
|
judging performance rather than assessing whether alternatives would have
|
|
been more effective."
|
|
|
|
Joseph Grunwald, adjunct professor of economics at UCSD and the
|
|
founding president of its Institute of the Americas research center, said he
|
|
doubts whether any of the presidents to be elected this year would reverse the
|
|
broad Latin American thrust toward a free-market economy.
|
|
|
|
On the other hand, Grunwald said, some of the newly elected presidents
|
|
may slow the pace of privatization and take other steps "to protect those
|
|
sector of the economy that have borne the brunt" of the free market reforms.
|
|
"There is now a realization that you have to do something about the enormous
|
|
social cost" of the reforms, he said.
|
|
|
|
As for the economic advantages of democracy, Grunwald said foreign
|
|
businessmen would prefer to invest in a Latin American nation where the
|
|
president is freely elected rather than one ruled by a dictator - even if an
|
|
authoritarian leader would make attractive promises about future profits.
|
|
|