Populist Seduction in Latin America. Carlos de la Torre
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him during his exiles. My father, the late Carlos de la Torre Reyes, who was the editor of El tiempo, a Quito newspaper, was an opponent of Velasco. As a liberal, my father was committed to a struggle for fundamental democratic freedoms that were not always respected by the populist caudillo, and faced many attacks by Velasco’s supporters. For instance, El tiempo was at the forefront of the opposition against Velasco’s autogolpe (self-inflicted coup d’état) in 1970. I remember watching how Velasco’s nephew and minister of defense, Jorge Acosta Velasco, insulted and falsely accused my father on television and how my father’s office in El tiempo was vandalized by Velasquista crowds. In this climate of political instability and lack of rights for the opposition, we were always ready to face my father’s imprisonment. Fortunately that never occurred.
Reflections on the late 1960s and early 1970s also brings back memories of large crowds and collective action. I was impressed by the large crowds that Velasco attracted when giving public speeches. I also remember the traffic jams and the smell of tear gas left by police repression of student demonstrations against Velasco’s regime.
Several years later, in 1988, as a student at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, I returned to Ecuador to define my dissertation topic. I was surprised by the passion aroused by Abdalá Bucaram, a new populist caudillo. In this election he faced Rodrigo Borja, a moderate Social Democrat. Most scholars and journalists saw in Borja the promise of a social democratic modernity. After all, his party, Izquierda Democrática, was a modern political organization with a clear ideological platform. Borja was committed to the respect of human and civil rights and the reconciliation of the nation after the authoritarian excesses of León Febres Cordero’s regime (1984–88). With the excuse of stopping “subversion,” Febres Cordero had abused the human rights of his opponents. Several guerrilla members, including some of my friends, had been tortured and killed by the government. Conflicts between the executive and congress and the judiciary had plagued Febres Cordero’s administration. He had also faced a military insurrection led by General Frank Vargas. After these years of political instability, most journalists and intellectuals saw the 1988 elections as a contest between a modern party with a concrete ideology and program of modernization and democratization and the populist politics of the past, represented by Abdalá Bucaram.
Journalists and social scientists constructed Bucaram as the embodiment of the rabble and a charlatan who charmed ignorant masses. They argued that poverty and lack of education explained poor people’s support for Bucaram (Fernández and Ortiz 1988). He was seen as a corrupt demagogue and a danger to democracy. In spite of what the press and some academics were expressing, Bucaram’s populist movement was obviously more than manipulation. Only middle-class prejudices could reduce his followers to ignorant masses misled by a charlatan. When, out of curiosity, I attended some of Bucaram’s mass meetings, I was impressed. Bucaram drew on popular culture and humor to attack the well-established “white” elites and champion the dignity and self-worth of his supporters. During these mass meetings, Bucaram established a dialogue with the audience. He focused on everyday life to politicize the humiliations of common mestizo Ecuadorians. He transformed the servants, the poor, and the excluded into the essence of the real Ecuadorian nation, and their bosses into effeminate antinational oligarchies. I was also terrified to see how this self-appointed messiah saw himself as the embodiment of the people’s will that stood above and beyond any democratic institution or procedure.
The tensions and ambiguities between the authoritarian appropriation of the people’s will and the inclusion of previously excluded people into the political community that was so clearly revealed in Bucaram’s populism are what attracted me to the study of these phenomena. I wanted to understand how populist leaders appealed to those they led without assuming manipulation by leaders, irrationality of followers, or the reduction of populism to models of instrumental rationality that explained politics by the exchange of votes for goods and services. I became determined to understand the complexities of populist seductions and explore the tensions between liberal democracies and populism.
The study of populism is certainly puzzling. In Latin America, populism is generally viewed in negative terms. For most it implies an abnormality, an anomaly, and a passing phenomenon that will eventually, and hopefully, go away. That is why most studies of populism begin by focusing on its negative characteristics, on what populism is not when it is compared with other political ideologies, parties, movements, or regimes. For instance, unlike liberalism or socialism, populism lacks an ideology. Populist movements are not the political expression of the economic interest of a particular social class. Nor can populism be specified as a type of political regime. Because of populism’s negative characteristics, modernization theory, for example, considered it a temporary event, an aberration produced by abrupt processes of social change.
Populism is also associated with leaders who manipulate, followers who are betrayed, and overall backwardness. Modernization theorists, influenced by mass-society models, interpreted populist caudillos as charlatans who duped backward masses left in a state of anomie after sudden processes of social change. From the opposite ideological angle, orthodox Marxists have tried to explain the historical abnormalities that have not allowed the proletariat to discover its own class interests when it has been misled by populist leaders. José Álvarez Junco (1994, 16) illustrates how this orthodox Marxist thesis of the proletariat as a revolutionary class whose historical mission is the struggle against capitalism and bourgeois domination is based on erroneous assumptions that have substituted dogma for historical research. Álvarez Junco claims the thesis is based on a view that assigns a priori an essence to historical subjects even before their historical appearance. The proletariat has been constructed as a revolutionary subject whose historical mission has been predetermined by a teleological evolutionary theory of society.
Populism is not only viewed as a negative and ephemeral phenomenon, it is also a profoundly ambiguous category. In 1967 a leading group of scholars met at the London School of Economics to try to define the new specter haunting the world: populism. The result of this endeavor was not fully satisfactory because many and contradictory definitions of this term emerged. The editors of the volume based on this conference, Ghit¸a Ionescu and Ernest Gellner, wrote, “There can, at present, be no doubt about the importance of populism. But no one is quite clear just what it is. As a doctrine or as movement, it is elusive and protean. It bobs up everywhere, but in many contradictory shapes. Does it have an underlying unity, or does one name cover a multitude of unconnected tendencies?” (1969, 1; emphasis in original).
Despite the increasing number of case studies of populist experiences and the efforts to develop a theory of populism, at present we are as perplexed as these scholars were almost thirty years ago. There is no underlying definition of the term or a convincing theory of populism. Moreover, there are so many objections to the use of the category populism that perhaps we should forget about it and abandon its study for good. What can another book on populism offer to the debate on a phenomenon that we cannot even define?
Margaret Canovan urges us to retain the term populism, arguing that at least “it provides a pointer, however shaky, to an interesting and largely unexplored area of political and social experience” (1981, 6). The term populism, as Felipe Burbano (1998) argues, continues to allow us to compare historical experiences by reflecting on key issues of political sociology such as the generation of political identities, the study of political discourses, the analysis of political cultures and clientelism, and the research of the particularities of citizenship and democracy in Latin America. Because the categories offered by the detractors of populism tend to be reductionist in that they squeeze these phenomena into the utilitarian exchange of political loyalty for material goods or the study of the economic policies of these regimes, the term populism at least allows for the study of the multidimensional aspects of these experiences.
I see populism as a modern political phenomenon that cannot be shortened to a historical phase in the history of Latin America or to specific economic policies. Contrary to the hypothesis of modernization theory, populism is not the anomalous result of rapid processes of political mobilization. Nor is it a phase in the history of the region closely linked to import substitution industrialization, as dependency theorists have argued. Populism has adapted itself to a new neoliberal conjuncture characterized by the privatization of state