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Latin American Populism in the Twenty-First Century edited by Carlos de la Torre and Cynthia J. Arnson BY JOHN M. CAREY Legend has it that on his deathbed, Juan Domingo Perón, the former President of Argentina, uttered a curse condemning any would-be biographer to dedicate his or her career to defining populism. Or perhaps the curse was issued on the lost page of the late Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas’ suicide note, or slipped in among the bills in an envelope passed surreptitiously by Alberto Fujimori to some Peruvian legislator, or whispered by the recently deceased Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez into the ear of his successor, Nicolás Maduro. No matter. Whoever first uttered the curse, it worked: political scientists studying the region have wrestled and been obsessed with the concept for decades. We want to write about populism. Indeed, we need to write about it, because populism is among the most important and persistent phenomena in modern Latin American politics. But because the populist label has been applied to such a broad array of phenomena, we are condemned to define it before we can embark on any serious analysis. Academic exactitude being what it is, this leads first to extended consideration of what others have held populism to be, followed by a self-perpetuating and seemingly inescapable cycle of judgment, distinction and justification. Latin American Populism in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Carlos de la Torre and Cynthia J. Arnson, does not escape the curse. Much of the volume is consumed by rehearsing the well-known facts. Leaders commonly designated as populist have: Spanned the economic policy spectrum from expansionary statist redistributionists to privatizing deregulators; Pulled support from varied and inconsistent constituencies—urban and rural, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, working and middle- class, but with smatterings of industrialists and boligarchs; Sometimes built longstanding parties, whereas others left virtually no institutional footprints; and Sometimes sought to re-found their nation’s political systems, whereas others have enfranchised previously excluded groups via corporatist inclusion into the existing system. And as a couple of the authors in this volume note, if we expand our scope beyond Latin America, the meanings multiply further still. In Europe, populism is generally equated with nationalist, xenophobic political movements that do not even share the pretense of expanding political inclusion. So what does this new volume on populism in Latin America add, in terms of conceptual clarity? The chapters in the book are organized around two principal approaches. The first approach addresses populism’s relationship to broad themes such as the role of political parties, democracy and social policy in a comparative perspective. The second provides case studies that survey the populist experience in Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia. De la Torre and Arnson brought together an outstanding group of scholars for this project, so it is not surprising that the individual chapters are well-crafted and authoritative. Any observer of Latin American politics will find insight in Kenneth Roberts’ typology of political parties according to their posture toward neoliberal economics and their institutional stability; in Kurt Weyland’s assessment of the tension between dynamism in the creation of social welfare programs and their fiscal sustainability; in Cynthia McClintock’s distinctions between the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana’s (APRA) indifference to Peru’s ethnic divisions and the strategic overtures toward Indigenous Peruvians by Fujimori and then by Ollanta Humala; or in John Crabtree’s overview of how agrarian demands both fueled and were channeled by the distinctive populisms of Bolivia’s Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) in the 1950s and 1960s, then by Evo Morales’s Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) currently. Almost all the chapters, however, also engage the question of what populism is and whether the concept is analytically fruitful. Here, as usual, opinions diverge. In the course of an outstanding historical overview of Argentine Peronism, Hector Schamis advocates limiting the label to governments that pursue classic import substitution industrialization (ISI) policies. Most of the other chapters adopt a less restrictive posture. The authors appear to share a core belief that something binds Juan Perón of Argentina, Getúlio Vargas of Brazil, José María Velasco Ibarra of Ecuador, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre of Peru, together with Hugo Chávez, Néstor and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, and even with Alberto Fujimori, Carlos Menem, and Fernando Collor de Mello (although probably not Álvaro Uribe). The challenge is to figure out what binds all these leaders together. Certain words and images recur throughout these discussions: redemption, acclamation, solidarity, unity, agency, plebiscitary, unmediated relationship, charisma, and refounding are among them. But the common denominator is a politics of antagonism, pitting “the people” against an elite enemy (or network), rather than of pluralism, in which politics is the resolution of competing interests. The basic idea of pluralism holds no expectation that politics could ever consist of anything other than competing interests because it regards society as made up of interests that are politically legitimate even if they are mutually at odds. In contrast, the common denominator among most contributors to this volume is that populism’s core characteristic is faith in the Rousseauian concept of an identifiable popular will that is elevated above others. If a society, like an individual, has a will, then a leader who can articulate that will embody the society. As Eliécer Gaitán—a Colombian politician and leader of that country’s populist movement during the 1940s—is quoted in Francisco Panizza’s chapter: “Yo no soy un hombre, soy un pueblo” (“I am not a man, I am a people”). Among this book’s strengths are quotations like this, from leaders such as Perón and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, that highlight the confidence of both populist leaders and their acolytes in the elected leader’s ability to identify and pursue the specific will of the people. And specific it often is. The best example of the presumed ability of a populist leader to divine the specific interests of his or her people can be found in the names and themes of the gran misiones Chávez launched in the run-up to his 2012 re-election campaign (reviewed in the chapter by Margarita López Maya and Alexandra Panzarelli). Some examples: de Amor Mayor (benefi ts targeted at elderly), de Vivienda (housing), de Casa Bien Equipada (subsidized household furnishings sold in misión stores) and Hijos e Hijas de Venezuela (financial support to teenage and single mothers and those of disabled children). The motivations are unimpeachable, but the specificity of the targets also underscores the differences between them and universal policies like conditional cash transfer programs that apply uniform eligibility requirements and remain agnostic about how the transferred resources are to be used. The misión version holds that the leader is uniquely qualified to determine how redistributed resources ought to be used (home furnishings!) in order to redress the injustices his national project seeks to correct. In the end, I found myself persuaded that even a catholic conception of populism can be informative. The curse of homonymy (varied meanings for the same word) might be unavoidable when it comes to populism, but this is at least partly due to the creativity populists have exhibited in identifying their political enemies. Opponents are always portrayed as elite and as reaping unfair advantage by their control over the state. But such villains might range from large landowners and industrialists to foreign traders and state employees—or even to those with formal-sector jobs. The diversity of populist coalitions reflects the diversity of their opponents, and the fluidity of populist rhetoric reflects the adaptability of the populist style. The more streamlined definition of populism—belief in the Rousseauian popular will coupled with confidence in the individual leader’s capacity to identify and embody it—is, in my opinion, more analytically tractable, more widely applicable, and more relevant to our century. Pluralists might not applaud it or want to encourage it, but you have to afford it at least a grudging admiration. Back to top The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez BY ADRIANA LA ROTTA The 1993 death of the drug-cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar ended the bloodiest chapter in Colombia’s modern history, allowing the country—a decade later—to begin a process of collective catharsis. This catharsis first became clear on Colombian television. Once dominated by romantic melodramas, the industry began producing realistic “narco-series” that portrayed the violent and glamorous life of the narcos, with their bloody battles, yachts and country homes, and their ladies addicted to plastic surgery. Although generally crude, the narco-series were popular. They fulfilled Colombians’ need to understand how a country so marginal had produced a multinational mafia with enough power to besiege a state. In contrast, Colombian literature has produced few works that provide the same exercise in understanding and healing. The Sound of Things Falling, by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, however, should be high on every reader’s list. Vásquez gives voice to a generation that entered adulthood amid the rubble of the bombs planted by drug traffickers. In the 1980s, war was part of daily life and, as one character in the book remembers, Colombians lived every day “with the possibility that people close to us might be killed, always having to reassure our loved ones so they don’t think we are among the dead.” Although the book is set in 1996, it covers the beginnings of the drug trade in the 1960s through the early 1990s, when Escobar held the country in a bloody grip. The lead character, Antonio Yammara, is a young lawyer who spends his mornings teaching law to first-year university students, and his evenings playing billiards at a café bar in the faded and historic Bogotá neighborhood of La Candelaria. He starts a conversation with Ricardo Laverde, a shadowy former pilot weighed down by his own past involvement in the drug trade. When Yammara witnesses Laverde’s murder in a drive-by motorcycle shooting in which he is wounded, he feels compelled to find out more about Laverde—triggering a journey into Colombia’s own troubled recent history. The intersecting stories of the two men whose paths cross by chance is the fictional artifice used by the author to reconstruct the tragedy of Colombia’s civil war. It works, in large part because the book weaves the lives of his fictional characters into actual events, creating a human, personal perspective to the events during those tragic years. The fictional Yammara was 14 when Colombia’s minister of justice, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, was killed by cartel hit men as he rounded a curve on his motorcycle, and 16 when Guillermo Cano, editor of El Espectador, was gunned down a few steps away from the newspaper’s offices. And he continues: “I was nineteen and already an adult, though I hadn’t voted yet, on the day of the death of Luis Carlos Galán, a presidential candidate.” Movingly, he remembers other events that followed in a seemingly never-ending series of horrors: the Avianca airplane explosion, the bombing of the Department of Security, and more than anything else, the “things” that he remembers falling—debris from explosions of buildings and shopping centers—as the entire country was crashing down under the drug lords’ reign of terror. But the all-out war against drug traffickers waged by the governments of President Virgilio Barco (1986–1990) and President César Gaviria (1990–1994) also left scars that were just as painful. The author vividly makes clear that it was not just the immediate families of the 5,000 Colombians killed during this period who bore the impact, but an entire generation that, to a certain extent, remains trapped in a past that it still does not understand. That includes this reviewer. Almost 30 years have passed since the events described in the book, but they remain with me as well—along with the emotions of watching too many burials of courageous men and women, and the terror that was my constant companion during those years. Reader beware: Vásquez knows very well how to awaken a ghost. He also pours salt on the wounds of the Colombian diaspora, which the author indicates is a product not of the entrepreneurial spirit of those who leave, but rather of the conviction that they inhabit a country with no future. “That’s what I would like to know,” wonders Yammara, “how many left my city feeling in one way or another that they were saving themselves, and how many felt that by saving themselves they were betraying something, turning into proverbial rats fleeing the proverbial ship by the act of fleeing the city in flames.” In this novel, Bogotá is a sad city beneath an ever-cloudy sky. But as Yammara’s journey of discovery takes him into Colombia’s rural heartland, the gloom of the book is lightened by the smells and colors—and the occasional wandering hippopotamus—of what Colombians call tierra caliente (hot land). But even the pastoral escape doesn’t relieve the gritty realism of the plot, where characters are victims of greed, of fear, or of mere naïvete. In 2011, The Sound of Things Falling deservedly won the Alfaguara Prize, one of the most important literary awards in the Spanish language. Its recent debut in English has been acclaimed by critics for the originality with which it confronts Colombia’s recent past. But in truth, the novel’s scope extends well beyond Colombia—to an entire hemisphere that has wasted thousands of lives and billions of dollars in law enforcement without seriously addressing the demand side of the drug equation. Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s characters could just as well be living in Mexico today. There will be many more Antonio Yammaras and Ricardo Laverdes before the hemisphere’s spectacularly ineffective antidrug policies are finally put to rest. Back to top Los migrantes que no importan by Óscar Martínez BY NANCY PÉREZ GARCÍA In Los migrantes que no importan (The Migrants that Don’t Matter), Óscar Martínez depicts a dark side of Mexico that few people know. The book, based on stories published in El Faro—an El Salvadoran digital newspaper whose founder is interviewed on page 53 of AQ—describes the hardships experienced by thousands of undocumented Central American migrants as they make their way through Mexico toward the United States. Divided into 14 chapters—each covering different dimensions of the 3,000-mile journey in which migrants board trains, sleep in shelters and struggle to find the money to keep going—is a poignant portrait of the men and women who are driven by economic misfortune and political insecurity to leave their home. “Their countries spit out what they don’t want, and these people are the spittle,” a would-be migrant told Martínez. Martínez, a 30-year-old freelance journalist, spent more than a year following the migrants north through Mexico—joined by a small crew of photographers and filmmakers. The journey benefited from the advice and cooperation of advocacy groups along the way. “You have to consider the social reality of our countries if you’re going to understand anything,” Luis Flores, the coordinator of the Tapachula office of the International Organization for Migration, told Martínez. The book’s key revelation, which may surprise many U.S. readers, is that few of the migrants ever reach their ultimate destination. Along the way, many are forced by tragedy or by lack of money to give up their dreams of a better life in the “north.” One important focus of Martinez’ chronicles is the tragedy of women migrants. Many end up as low-paid domestic workers and others become victims of sexual violence. According to a 2010 report released by Amnesty International, six out of 10 female Central American migrants suffer sexual abuse while crossing Mexico. For many women, their journeys end in dive bars or brothels in border cities and towns in southern Mexico, where local authorities turn a blind eye. “I went to Huitxla once to work and was stopped by the migration police,” said Connie, a Guatemalan woman whose real name is not revealed by Martínez. “The head of migration made it clear that if I had sex with him, he’d let me go,” she said. Another prominent setting in many stories is the “great iron snake,” a legendary train also known as La Bestia (The Beast). According to Martínez—who rode the train on eight occasions—The Beast is the “route par excellence of the undocumented Central American migrant.” The book reveals the mutilations, robberies, kidnappings, and murders that take place in the train’s empty cars. The author also visited migrant shelters along The Beast’s tracks to highlight another aspect of their struggle to survive: the efforts of individuals and organizations who take in the migrants, providing shelter, food, rest, and legal defense. I am proud to count myself among this group, as director of Sin Fronteras. The book also documents the abuse that migrants face at the hands of organized crime. These groups are neither isolated nor small. Their success stems from their ties to corrupt authorities and businesses in the communities where they operate. Even for the migrants who make it to the northern border with the U.S., the hardships continue. These rugged, thinly populated areas are dominated by drug traffickers who force migrants to carry drugs in exchange for help crossing the border as so-called burreros. Their only alternative is to spend whatever savings they have left to hire rapacious polleros or coyotes to guide them across the desert. These unsavory activities—and the tragedies—along the northern border are well known. But the book‘s revelations about what happens to migrants in Mexico itself add a new, chilling dimension to the story. The impunity for crimes against migrants is a grim subset of the general impunity in Mexico for human rights abuses. Los migrantes que no importan should add additional weight to demands in Mexico for greater accountability and transparency in its justice system. But it should also call much-needed attention to a group of individuals who, for reasons beyond their control, have become victims of the political and economic tragedies suffered by the entire region.