Challenges to Democracy in the Andes: Strongmen, Broken Constitutions, and Regimes in Crisis

272 Pages·2022·2.97 MB·English

by  Maxwell A. Cameron, Grace M. Jaramillo (eds.)

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CHALLENGES to
D A
EMOCRACY in the NDES
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C
HALLENGES to
D A
EMOCRACY in the NDES
Strongmen,
Broken Constitutions,
Regimes Crisis
and in
edited by
Maxwell A. Cameron and
Grace M. Jaramillo
boulder
london
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Published in the United States of America in 2022 by
Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.
1800 30th Street, Suite 314, Boulder, Colorado 80301
www.rienner.com

and in the United Kingdom by
Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.
Gray’s Inn House, 127 Clerkenwell Road, London EC1 5DB
www.eurospanbookstore.com/rienner

© 2022 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cameron, Maxwell A., editor. | Jaramillo, Grace, editor.
Title: Challenges to democracy in the Andes : strongmen, broken
constitutions, and regimes in crisis / edited by Maxwell A. Cameron and
Grace Jaramillo.
Description: Boulder, Colorado : Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc, [2022] |
Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Explores
challenges to democracy in the Andes—Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru,
and Venezuela—through the lens of political crises caused by elected
leaders who abuse their power, often with broad public approval”—
Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022000842 | ISBN 9781955055420 (Hardcover : alk. paper)
| ISBN 9781955055598 (eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Democracy—Andes region. | Democratization—Andes region. |
Authoritarianism—Andes region. | Abuse of administrative power—Andes
region. | Andes region—Politics and government—21st century.
Classification: LCC JL1866 .C53 2022 | DDC 320.98—dc23/eng/20220518
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022000842

British Cataloguing in Publication Data
A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book
is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements
of the American National Standard for Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992.

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Contents
Preface vii
1 The Dilemmas of Democratization in the Andes 1
Maxwell A. Cameron and Grace M. Jaramillo
2 Political Regimes: Components, Crises, and Change 23
Maxwell A. Cameron
3 Venezuela: From Democracy to Authoritarianism 47
Michael McCarthy
4 Bolivia: Paradoxes of Inclusion and Contestation 75
Santiago Anria and Jennifer Cyr
5 Ecuador: From Muerte Lenta to Democratic Renewal? 97
Grace M. Jaramillo
6 Peru: Democratic Erosion Under Neoliberalism 121
Carmen Ilizarbe
7 Colombia: A Liberal Democracy Besieged 143
Jan Boesten
8 Enabling—and Impeding—the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 167
Jason Tockman
9 The Covid-19 Pandemic and Democratic Erosion 187
Verónica Hurtado and Paolo Sosa-Villagarcia
v
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vi Contents
10 Strongmen and the Dispute over Democracy 199
Maxwell A. Cameron
List of Acronyms 221
References 223
List of Contributors 253
Index 257
About the Book 263
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Preface
This book explores challenges to democracy in Venezuela, Bolivia,
Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia through the lens of regime crises caused by
elected leaders, many of whom seek to alter or undermine constitutional
constraints on their power. We focus, in particular, on the political dynamics
of executive aggrandizement, of which the self-coup is perhaps the most
extreme example. A self-coup occurs when a president closes Congress, sus-
pends the constitution, and rules by decree. When successful, such measures
may be retrospectively legitimated by a referendum on new constitutional
arrangements that expand executive power. To a US audience, the self-coup
might have seemed like an obscure or exotic problem before January 6, 2021.
The storming of the US Capitol looked to all intents and purposes like the
early stages of such a regime crisis. Fortunately, that did not happen. But it
did happen in Latin America—specifically, in Peru in 1992. This led to a
major debate about whether democracy could be destroyed from within by
democratically elected leaders. The debate intensified when Venezuela’s
Hugo Chávez marginalized Congress and had his nation’s constitution rewrit-
ten by means of a constituent assembly. The dynamic this unleashed, like
Fujimori’s self-coup, ultimately contributed to the breakdown of democracy.
Similar efforts to rewrite constitutions occurred in Ecuador and Bolivia, and
this book explores their political legacies.
At a conceptual level, the issues raised by self-coups, overweening
executives, and the use of constituent assemblies are familiar to observers of
Latin American politics. For years we have written about delegative forms
of rule, encroachment by one branch of power on another, and problems of
horizontal accountability and the rule of law. Much of our work in this book
is inspired by and extends the well-known contributions of Guillermo
O’Donnell. The book opens new avenues of inquiry into the functioning of
contemporary democratic regimes. The theoretical groundwork is laid out in
vii
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viii Preface
the introductory and theory chapters, which pick up where Maxwell A.
Cameron’s 2018 article in Latin American Politics and Society left off.
Rather than using liberal democracy as our normative baseline, we follow
O’Donnell by treating democracy, liberalism, and republicanism as three
distinct intellectual traditions that often reinforce one another but are also
sometimes in tension. We also distinguish three dimensions of democracy:
electoral components, concomitant conditions, and constitutional guaran-
tees. This allows us to disaggregate the components of political regimes,
thereby capturing greater diversity in types of democracy as well as varia-
tion in the quality of democracy.
The book is a successor to previous work conducted under the aegis of
the Andean Democracy Research Network at the University of British
Columbia (UBC), which was created in 2007 with the goal of assessing the
state of democracy in the Andes. That initiative—which was funded by the
Glyn Berry Fund and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Coun-
cil of Canada (SSHRC)—resulted in an edited book titled Democracia en
la Región Andina; another titled New Institutions for Participatory Democ-
racy in Latin America, funded by the Ford Foundation and the International
Development Research Centre in Ottawa; and an edited book titled Latin
America’s Left Turns. At the time, the Andean subregion of South America
was seen as the site of both some of the most precarious democracies and
some of the most interesting experiments in participatory governance in
Latin America. In this book we use our earlier findings as a baseline and
assess advances and backsliding in the subsequent decade.
Our work has been generously supported by the SSHRC (grant number
435-2018-0393), as well as a Research Excellence Cluster grant from the
Office of the Vice-President, Research and Innovation at UBC. Work
regarding this project began in Costa Rica in May 2017. We are grateful for
the feedback we received from participants in two workshops, including
Jorge Vargas Cullell, George Gray Molina, Gabriela Ippolito-O’Donnell,
Enrique Peruzotti, Eric Hershberg, Jon Beasley-Murray, Brian Wampler,
Manuel Alcántara, Felipe Alpízar, Francoise Montambeault, and Evelyn
Villarreal. Drafts of all the chapters were presented at the Latin American
Studies Association meeting in Boston in 2019. Several research assistants
made important contributions, including Verónica Hurtado and Paolo Sosa-
Villagarcia—both contributing authors—as well as Gabriela Ruíz, Zaraí
Toledo, and Ritwik Bhattacharjee. Rebecca Monnerat provided indispens-
able project management.
—Maxwell A. Cameron
—Grace M. Jaramillo
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1
The Dilemmas of
Democratization in
the Andes
Maxwell A. Cameron and
Grace M. Jaramillo
“DISOLVER!” PROCLAIMED ALBERTO FUJIMORI WHEN HE APPEARED ON
national television on April 5, 1992; “dissolve,” he repeated for emphasis,
“the Congress of the Republic.” This was the most dramatic of several
exceptional measures to “restructure” the state, but the president of Peru
also announced he was reorganizing the judiciary, the Constitutional Tri-
bunal, the Public Ministry, and the office of the comptroller general.1 To the
surprise of many observers, Fujimori’s “self-coup” (or autogolpe in Span-
ish) met with broad public approval and was backed by the armed forces.
Since his actions were unconstitutional, however, they were subject not
only to legal objections by the democratic opposition but also to resistance
from members of his own cabinet, some of whom had strong international
connections and influence among creditors.
In an attempt to placate critics and remain in good standing with the
international community, Fujimori announced at a meeting of the Organi-
zation of American States (OAS) that he would convene a constituent body,
called the Democratic Constituent Congress (CCD), to replace the dis-
solved legislature and to rewrite the 1979 constitution. A newly drafted
constitution, with broader executive powers, was produced by that body
and submitted for approval by referendum in 1993. A key article of the
1993 constitution was a provision for one immediate reelection, thereby
opening the door for Fujimori to run for another term in office in 1995.2
Fujimori’s self-coup broke constitutional arrangements—what Machi-
avelli called “dikes and dams”—designed to disperse, balance, and pre-
vent the abuse of power.3 The result was to concentrate power in the exec-
utive branch of government and erode mechanisms of accountability. The
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2 Maxwell A. Cameron and Grace M. Jaramillo
Supreme Court, Tribunal of Constitutional Guarantees, and office of the
Public Prosecutor were neutralized and brought under the control of the
executive. The National Intelligence Service under Fujimori’s corrupt
spymaster, Vladimiro Montesinos, became so powerful that Fujimori
made its headquarters, the “little Pentagon,” his domicile.4 A series of
mafias emerged inside the state which began to assume functions of gov-
ernment hidden from public scrutiny or control. Fujimori’s government
collapsed when the president resigned and fled to Japan in the wake of a
massive corruption and bribery scandal that broke in the middle of his
efforts to seek an unconstitutional third term in 2000 (see Carrión 2006).
Why did Peruvians place their trust and faith in a strongman who tore
up their constitution?5 For starters, the country was in an existential crisis.6
Many people feared that the state had entered a “strategic equilibrium” with
the fanatical Shining Path insurgency.7 Much of rural Peru was already
under de facto military rule, and the insurgency, following a “prolonged
peoples’ war” strategy of surrounding the cities from the countryside,
seemed to be strangling Lima. Voters had chosen Fujimori in 1990 because
he promised to address problems that establishment politicians had
neglected—including the need for a more efficient counter-insurgency
effort. To achieve this, the temporary suspension of Congress did not seem
like a high price to pay, and few people denied that Peru’s notoriously cor-
rupt judiciary needed reorganization. The capture of the Shining Path’s
leader Abimael Gúzman just a few months after Fujimori’s autogolpe
seemed to confirm that the self-coup had been a good decision.8 Buoyed by
this success, Fujimori’s electoral vehicle Cambio 90-Nueva Majoría won
44 of 80 seats in the CCD. The new Magna Carta was approved by 52 per-
cent of the ballots cast in a referendum. After years of political violence and
economic depression, Peruvians began to experience a sense of optimism
about the future. Fujimori was reelected with 64 percent of the vote in
1995, securing 67 of 120 seats in the new Congress.
Fujimori was shrewd, if not prudent.9 Growing up, he acquired the
qualities of audacity and cunning that are celebrated in Peru’s popular cul-
ture. He reveled in the role of the outsider, someone who had never been a
member of an established party or held public office at any level of gov-
ernment. Once in office, he did not hesitate to use his power in a manner
incompatible with his oath to uphold the constitution. Nor did he hesitate to
make what Max Weber called alliances with “diabolical forces.”10 A few
months before he closed Congress and suspended the constitution in 1992,
Fujimori authorized a horrific massacre in the Barrios Altos neighborhood
of Lima. Thus, he knew, even though most Peruvians did not, that he was
in legal jeopardy. He had thrown his lot in with the most dangerous and
ruthless elements of Peru’s armed forces. By weakening mechanisms of
accountability within an already precarious constitutional order, Fujimori