Eduardo FeinmanArgentine lawyer and journalist with a long career has just published the book, Populism. For your interest we reproduce below these lines some fragments of the first chapter of this title, which illustrates in detail one of the evils that plagues a large part of Latin America and the world.
Neither right nor left
Populism is neither right nor left. Rather, it doesn’t matter if it’s from the right or the left: it’s populism. Spot. Ideology is not interested, it is a methodology. The same happens with dictatorships, what changes if the dictator is from the right or from the left? Dictatorships are dictatorships and populism is populism. Or, as the president of the Community of Madrid says Isabel Diaz Ayuso“now we call populism what was demagogy all our lives.”
Demagogy is one of the keys to understanding populism.
Demagogy is one of the keys to understanding populism.
Let’s see the simplest meaning of the word, which we can find in the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy. By the way, a digression, throughout these pages we are going to resort to it permanently, because the dictionary –like the Constitution– is the framework of everything, there are all the definitions. “Political practice consisting of flattery winning popular favor”, that is the first meaning of the word “demagogy”. very clear And the second one brings us even closer to understanding the populist phenomenon, this germ that has been spreading throughout Latin America: «Degeneration of democracy, consisting of the fact that politicians, through concessions and flattery to the elemental feelings of citizens, treat to get or keep power.
Keys to populism
Staying in power is another of the keys to populism. What he always seeks is to perpetuate himself, he uses democracy to establish himself in power and not move from there. It is a kind of monarchy made up by the polls.
A system that is a poor create and reproduce machine
we saw it in Venezuela con chavez and now with Madurowe see it in Nicaragua con the Ortega marriage. Both dictatorships came to government through elections governed by democratic institutions and, once in power, they devastated everything. They put together a state – and parastatal – framework tailored to their interests that ended with democracy. They generated social division, fostered civil confrontations, annihilated private initiative, destroyed the economy, and impoverished the people. In other words: they installed populism, a system that is a machine for creating and reproducing the poor, trying to hold them captive through perks, social plans and grandiose stories.
“Crumbs and Lies”
Bread and circuses, like in the Roman Empire. In this case, crumbs and lies. Also repression – a lot of repression – because those who do not believe the lies or settle for the crumbs have no rights for these despots, populists in speech and authoritarian oligarchs in power.
In it narcochavism chaired by Nicolas Maduro the numbers of deaths from violent causes are stinging. He says it with all the letters and in a very brave way. Venezuelan Violence Observatory (OVV): «Violence has taken over the country. The crime that used to be concentrated in a few municipalities now covers almost the entire country. According to the parameters of the World Health Organization, it can be clearly stated that an epidemic of violence is spreading throughout the national territory. The OVV is a Non-Governmental Organization and they are the only ones in the country that provide rigorous data, since the dictatorship closed the official statistics on the matter in 2003 (populists in power who violate official data, does it ring a bell?). His annual reports report that in the last decade they were murdered more than 200 thousand people.
Nicaragua
If we go to Nicaragua, we cannot forget the brutal repression carried out in 2018 by the security forces of Daniel Ortega and that left hundreds of Nicaraguans murdered, more than 650 according to the survey of the Nicaraguan Association for Human Rights (ANPDH). Many of those victims were students.
And in Cubato the historical outrages that Castro’s communism has been carrying out for more than sixty years, we must add the criminal response that the government of Diaz-Canel it had with the citizen protests of July 2021. “They have had the response they deserve, as they have had in Venezuela,” the dictator boasted.
The pirates of the caribbean
Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba. Maduro, Ortega and Diaz-Canel, “the pirates of the Caribbean”, as the former Bolivian president called them Jorge Quiroga In a recent characterization of the political landscape in Argentina and the region:
It is sad to see how such a wonderful opportunity has been wasted in Argentina because they have that populist project. Argentina is not a dictatorial, tyrannical, absolute government like the three tyrannies of the Pirates of the Caribbean -of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua– but it hurts deeply to see how large democracies, the older brothers of the hemisphere, end up being appeasing godfathers of these tyrannies; I am speaking specifically of the governments of Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Argentina. Those four countries are two thirds of the population of Latin America, there are three quarters of the GDP of the continent, and one would expect those older brothers not only to take advantage of the economic situation that has been wasted, but also to be firm in the defense of democracy and freedom with respect to these three tyrannies.
Blood and death
The only thing that populism distributes is blood and death. They seduce the public with great promises and flowery speeches of love and happiness for the whole world, with smiling and friendly faces they participate in the democratic system and then destroy it from within, degrade it, pervert it. “They are a Trojan donkey that get inside democratic systems and implode them from within,” as one of the interviewees for this book, the Spanish-Argentine deputy of the Spanish Parliament, often says. Cayetana Alvarez de Toledo. They fill their mouths talking about the protection of the poor, the weak, the oppressed, the neglected, the excluded, and in their name they end up hijacking the institutions for their own benefit. Populists are hypocrites living in opulence, rich leaders for increasingly poor citizens. That is the variant of populism that we have on our continent.
Populism is a germ that has spread throughout the world, as did the Covid
Populism is a germ that has spread throughout the world, as did Covid. The original strain is Russia and China and the first variant that arrived in Latin America, as we have seen, was socialism and dictatorship in Cubathen Castroism was setting the aspirational rhythm of the chavezlos Kirchner, los Castillolos Ortegalos Boriclos Evo Moraleslos Lula. Like the delta, the omicron and the other letters of the Greek alphabet, each of these political monstrosities are different variants of the same virus that has spread throughout Latin America.
That original strain, like the virus that emerged in China, spread to different places and later variations with slightly different characteristics appeared: some were more deadly, there were others that only spread without killing, and some super contagious that also killed. .
mutant germ
Populism is a highly mutant germ, which could even arrive with a less harmful variant in the United States with Biden and even earlier with Trump. Of course, the most dangerous, the one that is devastating a large part of Latin America, did not reach the first power in the world —at least until now—, because there they have developed antibodies, especially in some states and cities. The mayor of Miami once told me, Francis Xavier Suarez:
«The fraud of socialism is something that we understand here in a deep way, in a concrete way and it is not a theory for us, it is not an abstract concept, it is a very concrete concept that has created a lot of destruction, many murders and a lot of trauma. for our community.”
Old ideas that delay and fail. that is populism
Old ideas that delay and fail. That is populism. A form of superficial thought that is based on the simplification of problems, whose leaders lack consistent government plans and are dedicated to promising impossible and unattainable things that in the long term only generate more problems and frustration. as the teacher says Loris Zanatta –who will also accompany us on these pages–, “through populism the limits between the political and the religious have been mixed in an extraordinary way, today rational solutions are no longer at the center of public debate”.
Although the populist disaster not only produces long-term infeasibility: the fourth Kirchner government in Argentina, led from the vice presidency by the woman convicted of corruption Cristina Fernandez de Kirchnerhas shown that everything can also be destroyed in a very short time.
