“For two centuries we have sung to equality in our hymns (…), but its effective exercise has been incomplete time and time again. Or flat out disappointed”, Alberto Vergara, a Peruvian political scientist and academic, maintains at the beginning of his latest book. The work, presented in Bogotá, Buenos Aires and Lima, assumes the challenge of understanding the citizen’s ennui in the region. The author answers questions from EL PAÍS from the place where this essay was conceived: his house on a 22nd floor, in Panama City, from where he has not stopped traveling around Latin America.
Ask. Martín Caparrós set out to find out what we Latin Americans are today with americayou with disappointed republics what have you searched for?
Answer. Caparrós has the carats, and let’s not talk about prose, to ask the ontological question: what are we? I could only approach the question of how are we? The book finds that, objectively, in Latin America we are stuck and, subjectively, we are upset. A nuisance that comes from orders that claim to be republican and that daily disappoint that official promise.
Q. You address very sensitive issues such as racial issues, the extremely low probability of social mobility, and you question the idea of the middle class.
R. I set out to show the various knots that prevent well-being in our countries. More than open, the veins of Latin America today are saturated. Economists place us in the middle-income trap, political scientists talk about institutions of average quality, and I suggest the existence of half-republics. Societies that, like the character of the teacher Rubén Blades, without being slaves are not free either. It seemed important to me to underline our social segregation, the organization of our cities, our capitalism, our health and education systems. In short, all these deficient areas build the traffic jam and produce discomfort, and sometimes anger as well.
Q. How is it that our streets reveal the flaws of the Republican promise?
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R. It is that a republican order in theory is one that denies the estates, that denies the possibility that the place of birth anticipates what one will be or have in life. Unfortunately in Latin America the place of birth predicts a lot. And the way our cities function deepens those disparities. The hours that someone from the periphery spends to get to work compared to the journey that the wealthy classes take ends up being a factor of citizen inequality. For example, if you have to do five hours of public transport a day and I only have one, it is clear that I will have more time to develop my life project than you.
Q. He mentions that 90% of the most powerful Latin American business groups are family groups. What is his real power?
R. We don’t have plutocracies. In addition, the level of influence of economic elites varies greatly from country to country. What I am pointing out is that we have an incompetent capitalism. In two ways, one without the ability to generate good employment for the majority. The type of capitalism we have, unsophisticated, where the formal sector provides few good jobs, while the informal sector generates a lot of bad jobs. With this uncompetitive and unproductive capitalism, it is difficult to have cohesive societies or robust democracies.
Q. What is the way out for that capitalism you describe?
R. I really do not know. My point is that the debate on capitalism in Latin America has been very weak, if not absent. And we have to start talking about that, about the relationships between our productive structures and political life. Carlos Pagni, for example, in his recent book on the Buenos Aires suburbs, goes in the right direction when he points out that the economic degradation of the middle classes is directly related to certain ways of doing politics, with certain possibilities of politics. But we talk about that very little in the region.
Q. The most significant protests in Latin America have lacked defined leadership. For what is this?
R. It is that it is easier to block what we dislike than to build what we want. Because many times we don’t even know what we want. For example, in my country, Peru, we don’t even agree on the most basic things of a democracy, on the validity and effectiveness of human rights.
Q. You explain that the citizenry is part of the republican problem because a large percentage of it is rooted in clientelism and caudillismo. Why do you think it is a paradox of our democracies?
R. It is the great paradox. Democracy can only work by trusting the citizenry, as soon as we stop trusting it, we approach any type of authoritarianism. But many times, it cannot be denied, the citizenry supports the emergence of warlords who precisely take power away from the citizenry, who undermine democracy. Peruvians loved (Alberto) Fujimori, Venezuelans voted massively five times for (Hugo) Chávez and when they wanted to get rid of Chavismo they no longer had the power to do so. It is the paradox: the citizen is the great asset of democracy, but sometimes he can also betray it.
Q. Almost forty of the fifty cities with the most homicides in the world are Latin American. How did we get to this point?
R. As in everything, we have arrived little by little. Crime, violence and the fear of suffering it is what cuts the freedom of Latin American citizens the most. But it is important to understand that crime and violence are not only criminal phenomena, they have multiple roots. A very recent book by Andreas Feldman and Juan Pablo Luna shows well how these phenomena are related to broader development problems. That’s kind of the spirit of my book too, the interrelation of our bottlenecks.
Q. Violence affects women more. Between 60% and 70% of women report having suffered some type of gender violence.
R. No matter what problem you take in Latin America, the situation is almost always worse for women. This is partly why the chapter in which I explain what a citizen is, I do it from two cases of women who are the main characters of two classic Latin American films: The official story (Argentina, 1985) and Rome (Mexico, 2018).
Q. Is there no possible freedom in sight?
R. That is a question with an important philosophical component. I believe that in our conditions a liberal freedom is more possible, let’s say, one in which some actually enjoy freedom while the majority do not; from a republican perspective, the freedom of a few and the tyranny of the estate inherited for the majority, does not resemble freedom.
Q. Can Latin America escape its traffic jam?
R. In the book I paraphrase a verse by Jaime Sabines: I do not come to entertain you with hope. As a regional block it seems difficult. Separately, some countries have a better chance of breaking free of the logjam than others. It seems to me that everyone can, but only some will.
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