Democracy and the Public Space in Latin America

This is a book about democracy in Latin America and democratic theory. It tells a story about democratization in three Latin American countries--Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico--during the recent, "third wave" of democratization.1 This story emphasizes the role of popular participation through human rights organizations, groups devoted to a more just distribution of local resources and groups in charge of electoral monitoring, during the process of democratization.
My analysis of Latin American democratization challenges an assumption that lies at the heart of conventional theories of democratization: that all processes of democratization must cope with anti-institutional mass mobilizations of a kind that led to the breakdown of democracy in Europe during the first wave of democratization, and that the only way to produce stable democracy in the face of those mobilizations is--as in Europe after World War II--to narrow the scope of democracy to the selection of elites through periodic elections. This theoretical approach is known as democratic elitism. By showing how democratic collective action in Latin America opened a space for popular participation and transformed traditional (hierarchical and clientelist) understandings of politics, I hope to demonstrate the limits of democratic elitism as a general theory of democracy. Instead of applying an elitist framework derived from the particulars of European experience to Latin America, I use Latin American experience to support a more generous and hopeful understanding of democratic possibilities.

The recent wave of Latin American democratization marked a significant departure from the region's long-standing lack of civic activity. In Argentina, for example, democratization was connected to the growth of a human rights movement that insisted on democratic politics and a moral commitment to life and physical integrity as the foundation of such politics. In the wake of the authoritarian regime's withdrawal from the political scene in 1983, human rights groups marched in the streets of Buenos Aires demanding full state accountability for the fates of missing individuals. By joining a human rights program to demand government accountability, these movements sought to restore the relation between morality and political competition in the new Argentine democracy.
Democratization in Brazil also implied a broad, long-term change from the traditional lack of popular activity in the public space and the Congress's lack of accountability to societal actors. In the first months of 1984, millions of people occupied the streets of Rio de Janeiro, S�o Paulo, and dozens of other Brazilian cities to demand the completion of transition that had begun eleven years earlier. The Brazilian diretas movement occupied the streets to call for a reconnection between public opinion and a Congress accustomed to responding to pressures from an authoritarian regime and resistant to mechanisms of popular accountability. The movement sought a new democracy in which public opinion is connected to the political system and, thus, able to craft a new relation between state and society.
Democratization has just come to completion in Mexico. One novelty has already been incorporated into the country's political system: the monitoring of elections by members of the Alianza C�vica, which was created in response to citizen concerns about political fraud and the view that only a political movement could restore the moral background needed for a decent electoral process. More than 18,000 monitors scrutinized electoral districts in order to assure the cleanliness of the 1994 presidential election. Alianza C�vica changed the political landscape of the country by restoring a moral component to the process of electoral competition. In 1996, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), the institution in charge of organizing the electoral process in Mexico, introduced the principle of citizen councilors as the organizers and supervisors of the electoral process. In the July 2000 elections, more than 450,000 individuals participated in the organization and monitoring of the presidential elections. Democratization in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico shows a new phenomenon in these polities: the emergence of democratic forms of collective action.
A central dimension of democratization in Latin America was the role of forms of collective action that took place at the public level. Human rights movements in Brazil and Argentina retrieved the moral component of politics just as authoritarianism was destroying the most basic bonds of solidarity.