Populist Seduction in Latin America. Carlos de la Torre

Populism, old and new, is the product of a particular form of political incorporation of the popular sectors into politics—one based on strong rhetorical appeals to the people and to crowd action on behalf of a leader. As many authors have shown, citizenship is not strong in Latin America, and political and social rights have been given priority over civil rights. The poor whose rights are specified in constitutions and laws, do not have the power to exercise these rights. They have to rely on protectors who can help them to take advantage of their rights and who can defend them from the arbitrariness of the police and of the powerful. Politicians who have become such guardians have organized clientelist networks that have allowed their followers limited access to goods and services, not as rights but as concessions to interest groups. Personalized relations of domination based on unequal exchanges between leaders and led allow some politicians to present themselves as saviors of the underdog. Populist politicians have been successful in incarnating the demands of those at the bottom of society for symbolic and material dignity. Their authoritarian appropriation of the people’s will has posed fundamental challenges to the institutionalization of democracy, and their movements, which have included previously excluded groups, have not always respected the norms of liberal democracies.

      The essays and case studies in this book represent my attempt to understand Ecuadorian populism in a comparative perspective. My aim is to develop a research strategy to understand the social creation of political leaders. I want to examine how followers’ actions produce certain leaders at particular conjunctures. With the study of political symbolism and discourse, I have incorporated the analysis of material exchanges emphasized by studies grounded in notions of instrumental rationality. Velasco’s leadership in the 1940s, for instance, was based on political alliances between political parties and associations of civil society. They shared a discourse that personalized politics as the struggle between the Liberal oligarchy and the people, understood as citizens whose will has been mocked at the polls by Liberal electoral fraud. Velasco was not only successful in building his leadership on this shared populist discourse. He also became the embodiment of the democratic ideal. He presented the incarnation of a religiously based ascetic figure whose aim was to bring moral and social redemption to common people. Bucaram in the 1980s and 1990s politicized the experiences of humiliation of common mestizo Ecuadorians. He represented the world turned upside down. The well-established elites became the incarnation of foreign and effeminate lifestyles, and common people were portrayed as the incarnation of the real and authentic Ecuadorian nation to come, under the leadership of Bucaram, “the leader of the poor.”

      My engagement with populism is not just motivated by an almost masochistic intellectual interest in an object of study that defies precise categories and in a slippery and undertheorized concept that is regularly banned from the vocabulary of the social sciences. I am also politically committed to understand the appeal that so many populist leaders have had in Latin American politics since the 1940s and to explore their ambiguous impact on the construction and strengthening of democracy.

      The study of populism is a privileged site to analyze the particularities of Latin American democracies. If Latin American populism was a fundamental democratizing force that marked the entrance of common people into the political community (Vilas 1995b), the specificity of this process of inclusion needs to be explained. Most social scientists have accepted Marshall’s description (1963) of democratization in the West as the movement from civic to political to social rights. Charles Tilly argues that citizenship, defined as the “sense of rights and mutual obligations binding state agents and a category of persons defined by their legal attachment to the state,” only became “a widespread phenomenon during the nineteenth century” in Europe (1995, 375). Unlike the Western pattern, common people in Latin America are not necessarily tied to the state by citizenship. Even though there is a legislation that guarantees and specifies citizenship rights, paternalistic relationships between powerful people—“patricians,” who are above the power of laws—and their clients guarantee the access of the latter to state resources and legally recognized citizenship rights. Moreover, the civil rights of common people are not respected, and they live at the mercy of the arbitrariness of law enforcement agents (Chevigny 1995; Pinheiro 1994, 1997).

      The differentiation between common people, whose rights are not recognized in their interactions in everyday life, and powerful people, who can use laws and citizenship rights to their convenience (Matta 1991), results from the incredible economic, social, ethnic, and status inequalities in Latin America. If citizenship is not the mechanism that binds common people and the state, it is not a surprise that liberal democratic institutions and the rule of law are not always respected. As Guillermo O’Donnell (1994) has argued, Latin American delegative democracies are different from representative democracies. Delegative democracies are based on the idea that those who win an election have the popular mandate to govern according to their interpretation of the people’s will and interests. The president claims to embody the nation. He sees himself as the redeemer of the homeland. His policies, therefore, do not need to be linked to his promises during the campaign or with the agreements made with organizations and associations that supported his election. All the responsibility to rule the country falls to the president. He is perceived as the source of the country’s ills or its successes. Because he feels that his duty is to “save the nation,” he does not always have to respect democratic procedures or the rights of his political rivals.

      Hence, democracy in Latin America has been constructed differently than in the West. Populist leaders have invoked forms of direct democracy against liberal models. Modernizing elites have also used discourses of democracy as tools to exclude common people from the political decision-making process. They have used paternalistic arguments to claim that ordinary people are not prepared for democracy. However, as in the West, common people have used the rhetoric of democracy to struggle for their rights. The fact that elites have to pay at least lip service to a discourse of rights, citizenship, and democracy attests that the struggle for a more equitable and participatory political system continues. It also implies that in the future democratic struggles might cease implementing a system based on the binding consultation of citizens, the equality of citizenship, the breadth of citizenship from civic to political to social rights, and the protection of common people from the arbitrary power of the state and law enforcement agents (Tilly 1995).

      For the last ten years, I have been writing about the uneasy relationship between populism and democracy and the problem of populist leadership. Chapter 1 is a modified version of an essay first published in Social Research in 1992. This chapter reviews some works about what some scholars nowadays call classical populism. It develops a multidimensional approach to the study of populist leadership that goes beyond the binary options between rational choice and crowd psychology. I argue that to understand the social creation of populist leaders, economic and social structural processes must be analyzed together with cultural and political variables. Economic and social structural changes allowed for the emergence of populist politics. The transformations of oligarchic systems by capitalist development, urbanization, and the expansion of the state apparatus created social classes and groups that demanded their political inclusion. However, social and economic transformations do not explain why populism became the rhetoric and style of political mobilization that included previously marginalized sectors. To analyze the specificity of the populist relationship between leaders and led, all these variables must be studied. The personalistic charismatic relationship between leaders and followers must be examined together with the material and symbolic exchanges of clientelist networks and patronage relationships. The social history of populism and the autonomous expectations of the crowds need to be analyzed in conjunction with the Manichaean discourses of leaders.

      Chapter 2 builds on my dissertation, and my book, La seducción velasquista (1993). In this chapter I study the emergence of mass politics in Ecuador in the late 1930s and 1940s and the transformation of Velasco Ibarra into the redeemer of the homeland. I analyze the patterns of collective violence in a populist civilian-military insurrection against the Liberal regime and in the name of a populist politician. The shared, if contested, frame of discourse that transformed the Liberals into the embodiment of sin and the lack of democracy and the simultaneous transformation of Velasco into the incarnation of the democratic ideal