Good morning Ladies and Gentlemen, distinguished friends, guests, we will begin today's program with remarks by our CEO Dr. Ken Weinstein. Thank you Ambassador Darren Bloom and good morning and welcome to Hudson Institute. I will be brief on behalf of Hudson Institute and the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, we just want to express our profound gratitude to the Lynde and Harry Bradley foundation of Milwaukee for its generous support of this new research and seminar project on democracy in Latin America. I especially want to acknowledge the presence of Dianne Sehler who is Director of Academic, International, and Cultural Programs at Bradley and we are delighted to begin this new research endeavor which will produce very fruitful results going forward, so thank you very much. Populism has become an all encompassing category, were opinion and policy makers in Washington and Latin America have tended to include equally, socialists, leftists, big fiscal spenders and the anti Americans. Yesterday I learned in reading an article by my very good friend Carlos Alberto Montaner that there are also neo populists; a grouping which Montaner places and I quote "Politicians whose heads are full of nonsense." That's quite what big place. In any event among leaders who at different times have been tagged as populists, we find Lula, Kirchner, Chavez, Evo Morales, Correa, Ortega and Tabaré Vázquez. It's obvious there are marked differences separating Lula and Vázquez from Chavez and Morales and the latter from Kirchner. What are those differences and do they really matter when formulating policies? No one more qualified to enlighten us on the meaning on policy implications of populism and its derivations than Javier Corrales. Since obtaining his PhD from that small relatively unknown University in Cambridge on the Charles River, Harvard about a decade ago Javier has become one of the outstanding scholars from Latin America and the United States. Today he chairs the Political Science Department of Amherst College and has also provided us through several books and numerous articles, new legs to guide us on the complex populist syndrome. Following Professor Corrales presentation we will be privileged to listen to Pablo Bachelet, the distinguished Chief Latin American Correspondent of the Miami Herald who will give us a lead commentary on the topics covered by Professor Corrales. After that we will welcome questions and commentaries from you all. I am pleased now to turn the podium to Professor Corrales. Thank you very much. Well good morning to every one and thank you so much for coming to this talk. I am more used smaller audiences because my courses at Amherst are smaller. So I am really impressed, thank you for being here, thank you to the Hudson Institute for the invitation and having me for for making this event possible. What I was asked to speak about is the question of leftism in Latin America, populism, and specifically whether the Chavez model in Venezuela is replicable elsewhere in the region. And what I am going to argue is that let me just begin quickly by saying that, the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela is hard to replicate because it is an expensive revolution. It requires a lot of money. And a lot of people look at how much money the revolution is spending and say therefore other countries cannot afford a similar type of political movement, because they won't have the money to fulfill it. And that is in many ways very true and I am not going to dispute that it is very difficult to replicate the model, when you don't when you don't when you are not governing a petrol state like Venezuela is. Nevertheless there is enough with in Chavez model, outside of the money that I think is relatively replicable in other countries of the region, perhaps not replicable to the same degree of extremism and radicalism but nevertheless features can be developed elsewhere. And for me to be able to make that point I am going to have to talk a little about the difference between the left the difference between the left and populism and focus on the political issues of Chavez Model populism in order to be able to convince you that some of it is replicable in Latin America. Let me begin by talking about this distinction between the left and populism. Scholars don't really know what to do with this. We know that the left and populism sometimes go together, they go hand in hand, sometimes they don't. Up until the late 80s people used to think that populism essentially always came during episodes of enormous "statism" when the state was expanding its intervention in the economy. But one thing that we saw in the 1990s is the rise of right wing populists, folks who were implementing market oriented economic policies but were nevertheless developing populist features and perhaps the best example of this could very well be Alberto Fujimori in Peru. And now that Chavez has come back and has created the return of the left with populism there has been some conceptual confusion as well, because how can we make sense of this. So this is my attempt to try to make sense of this divide between the left and populism and I want to make sure that you follow me on this because I am going to need the clarifications I am about to make, I need those in order to be able to make the point that Chavez that Chavez model replicable elsewhere. From my point of view leftism in politics is a general desire to use the state to block the market. You can name it. Essentially in economic policy the left is any type of orientation that seeks to impose certain degrees of market institutions and economic freedoms. This is a strong tradition in Latin America, in fact between the 1920s still about the late 1980s, so almost all political administrations in Latin America, of different persuasions were statist, were on the left, were devoted to imposing restrictions, perhaps the country that broke away from that model, the first was Chile, but up until the late 1980s this was a predominant sentiment. Now, we know that in Latin America, in the year, in the 2000 most countries have elected leaders and movements that are on the left, that are coming to office precisely to in different degrees impose restrictions on the market. All right populism. Populism, one tends to assume that it is excessive spending, lack of constraint from macro economic balance and to spend that in certain groups in order to be able to elicit loyalties. Now notice that type of definition which is very typical also is predicated heavily on economics. But what I want to emphasis is that populism is mostly a political phenomenon because populism is a way to deal with the opposition. This is what distinguishes really, in my opinion, the left from populism. Any type of populist movement seeks to create, and these are the elements, concentration of power in the executive branch, not all leftist want that, but many do. So number one, concentration of power in the executive branch, you then you state resources to mobilize newly empowered sectors, political groups, folks who were not unionized, groups that are emerging outside of traditional political parties, slum dwellers etcetera. So you use the state to then mobilize the non organized groups of society and then you take it one step further and that is, what you do with organized opposition. Populism also includes enormous restrictions on the operations of the organized opposition. Notice the difference, leftism is in my opinion and approach to the market. Populism in Latin America is an approach to the opposition. It's bad news for the opposition because it is a political movement that turns itself decidedly and ruthlessly against organized political activity. And this is what Chavez set out to do even from the very beginning, even before he declared himself a socialist. He had a campaign of being anti political parties, anti established politicians, anti established labor unions and to try to displace them from the political scene and empower a new group. It is not a new model. Essentially this is many it's exactly what Peron in Argentina in the 1940s and Vargas in Brazil and many other classic populists have always done. So my first point is that it makes sense to try to think of leftism and populism according to these two dimensions, you should have a handout and I will take this chance to talk a little bit about this handout. I didn't bring a power point presentation, because I am always afraid that. And instead I have a hand out which I hope you can try to follow with me. And what I do here everybody has a copy? What I try to do here is to basically illustrate these two dimensions. There the first column is economics and there you can see the whole spectrum of high statist intervention and a free market person. So one administration could be situated along this vertical axis. And so of course Cuba at the very top is a command economy. And in Latin America we really have never had a true market neo-liberal and I will show you why we don't have this so this part is kind of empty. But you can be closer from each of these ends in economics. Now look at the horizontal axis which is where I tried to plot the idea of state society relations and especially state to opposition. The one hand, you have a series of leaders who are respectful of organized politics, respectful of existing institutions, respectful of descent and do not seek necessarily to supersede them and discourage them. And that would place you on the right hand side and you can be on the left or on the right on this situation. You can be a democratic, non populist right wing administration or not and likewise with the left. Now notice this area here and for me the area covered by the circle is what I would call populism. You can be from either the left or the right in terms of economics and what really distinguishes you is precisely how you organize yourself politically. What you do with the executive branch? What are the groups of society that you mobilize unorganized groups and what you do with the opposition the organized opposition you treat it really badly, with all kinds of tricks. And so you can have an interesting array of forces and I will try to give you some illustrations, and I hope you can find Chavez there. This is where I would place him, what he has done and the way that he came to office was precisely. He wasn't the bigger that big of a leftist in terms of economic policies. But as I said from the very beginning he declared himself to be anti political parties and was not necessarily someone who was in the closet about expanding presidential power. If you look at his first year in office when he negotiated his constitution, the articles and economics are not that different from any other Latin American constitution. But the articles pertaining to executive branch power and articles pertaining to the organization of civil society are truly authoritarian in this populist fashion. The executive branch obtains enormous prerogatives, they diminish the power of the legislature, they diminish the power of some national entities. Those are all areas where the organized opposition has a stronghold and where they can actually influence, so that the President moves directly against those existing institutions. And the way that he did this was very easy. He developed an anti political party discourse which was in Venezuela in 1998 and 1999, a very appealing discourse. The notion that all politicians are bad; in fact they are catastrophic for the nation and therefore we don't need them anymore. This is the sentiment that explains Chavez's election in my opinion, his enormous upfront attack on political parties. And his first year in office that's all he devoted himself to. Until Venezuelans realized how far he had gone and at that point they had no more recourse and so they had to those in the opposition had to then rely on street protests because they had very few alternative channels the opposition had very few alternative channels. Chavez had dismantled them. And so notice that this was the most important thing that Chavez did in the very beginning. He then became a socialist and started to turn more and more to the left in terms of economic policy. But this was the beginning. And so my question now and this is the second part of my talk and then I will just conclude after this part is is this replicable? Could this model be repeated? The answer is yes but not randomly and not anywhere. I am going to argue that you need certain certain conditions for this. And I in my opinion some countries have it more than others. The first thing is all these leftist presidents are in order to get themselves elected; they need to mobilize many sectors at once. I publish a little article in foreign policy on the different constituencies on the left and they cover a wide spectrum; from protectionists to NGOs, to nationalists, to military folks, to people without jobs and without decent living standards. All kinds of people and all these administrations need to be able to create a grand coalition in order to able to get 50 percent of the vote. And most of these constituencies disagree with one another on every any number any number of polices. And they all come all these administrations from the left have had to rely on what is putting together a coalition of; one could argue incompatible interests. Sometimes for example some social democrats who vote for these leftist folks are not populist. But nevertheless these administrations may need to group them together. So all these administrations come to office with a ruling party or a governing coalition that is incredibly diverse, non homogenous and if you want a better way to capture this is they they go from being very radical about what to do with economics and what to do with politics with more moderate. This is true of all the leftist presidents who have gotten elected. The radicals and the moderate don't dominate, they are both present in these systems and a lot of what happens once they are in office depends of which of these factions comes to prevail in that particular administration. Under Hugo Chavez the more radicals have come to prevail and the moderates have left. So in many ways the first thing that one needs to look at is let's look at the ruling party and let's look at the collision that come to office and try to have a balance of are the moderates the predominant group or is it the radicals, or what could move one group to become more predominant than the other. Clearly if you have had a bumpy experience with market reforms in the 1990s and the leftist administrations get elected at a time when there is economic chaos, chances are that the more radical folks, the more anti markets folks are going to be having the upper hand to some extend. That brings you to the moment of election. But then one need to be able to understand what happens after a government takes power because still the moderates are around even if the radicals are having the upper hand and this is something that I argue can be manipulated. One of the things that I have said about Hugo Chavez in Venezuela is how he has actually created polarization in his own country deliberately in order to get the middle folks those in the centre to deflate to pick sides, to either turn completely against him or to then support the radicals. The strategy that Chavez has used is this idea of lets deflate the centre. Let's make sure that my other extreme, my opposition that my opposition becomes extreme so that they lose moderates and I will then also undermine my own moderates and turn everybody radical. This strategy of deliberate polarization is very replicable. You don't need a lot of money for that. All you have to do is provoke the opposition to turn a little bit extremist and crazy and this in many ways was Chavez's formula once in office, to ensure that the moderates, both in the opposition and in his on party are turned more extremists one way or another and it worked; it absolutely worked. By 2004 most Chaviztas stopped being moderate. The moderates might have left but many of them became much more radical. And they became much more radical because they were observing the opposition in many ways turning more extremists. But the opposition had turned extremists because the opposition was facing a state that was unfavorable to the opposition. So you entering to this dynamic that is a dynamic of polarization in which the state instead of trying to govern with the middle, what the state does is it sides with one of the extremes; provoke the other side and this creates a defection of voters away from the centre in to one of the poles, and you stay there and you try to do that. Now Chavez has also try to deal with the centre by spending money. But the important thing that this deliberate polarization that Chavez has attempted is replicable. And what is interesting about Venezuela is that Venezuela has demonstrated to the rest of Latin America that that strategy can work. In the 1980s and in the1990s the consensus among Latin American politicians was that you have to go to the middle because in the middle you have the preponderance of voters. So you had a transition to democracy that was in most countries exemplary in terms of both the left and the right gravitating toward the middle. Chavez ended that game and has made extremism popular again, appealing to politicians. And this is going to be very difficult for the region to recover from. In many ways it erases the most important game in democratic politics in Latin America since the 1980s which was the desire to be moderate, to compromise, to try to listen to the other side. Now imitators of Chavez think that the solution is to turn more radical and to scare the opposition and you can still win more than 50 percent of the vote. Now so that was on the issue of the ruling party. Let me now talk about the opposition. If it is true, what I have argued, that populism and autocracy depends on how you deal with the opposition and which faction in the ruling party comes to prevail it also matters how strong your opposition is, because the only obstacle to populism right now or to these type of attack from the part of the state is the organized opposition, the political parties. And Latin American countries vary significantly in the extent to which both the ruling party, but especially opposition parties are capable of fighting back, capable of defending themselves against the assault from these populist impulse. And one could then create a ranking of countries governed by the left, a ranking that would tell you how institution allows your opposition is. And what you find is that where the opposition is organized according to political parties that are strong, stable, institutionalized, have roots in society are well liked, populism cannot go too far. But where the political parties are in disarray, suffering defections, suffering the political chaos, instability and especially defections, this is a situation were the populist can act more decisively. They don't face barriers to what they are trying to do. And in fact usually in countries were political parties are getting weaker one of things that one of the symptoms that you observe simultaneously is that citizens hate political parties more. So if you want to find out whether Chavez model is replicable you want to then look at how was your experience with economics, with market reforms, the bump here the more likely that the ruling party is going to have a more radical faction in office. And then you want to look at the extent to which a particular president is eager to take the risks of engaging in deliberate polarizing techniques because that deflates the middle even further and makes the two poles more in transition which is exactly what the state wants. And then how far you can go to destroy the opposition which depends on the strength of the opposition. Let me before I conclude try to illustrate that point with another of my handout. It's this one right here, it's called it's table four, it comes from another paper. And in this table I tried to capture what I have been arguing, which is you have a list of very prominent administrations that are leftist, relatively they declare themselves to be leftist, not necessarily in terms of policy but in terms of how they campaign and come to office. And you have a some big cases starting with Chile from 1990 to the present and Argentina in 2003 and even Bolivia in 2005. And what I tried to do is to then give you an idea of the asymmetries of institutionalization of both the ruling party and the opposition. Let me discuss the first set of cases, Chile, Brazil and Uruguay. There what you have is; the left comes to office not by organizing groups that were unorganized before. But they come through an existing political party. When you come through existing political parties those parties are going to impose breaks in you. So in some ways whether you come from an existing political party or not is an antidote against some forms of populism. But then notice that in all these three cases the opposition was also fairly strong institutionally. The result is that the executive even if he or she wants to is not going to be able to turn adversarial toward the opposition, his or her own party will stop him or her or the opposition will stop them. But for that you need to have politics organized by solid well liked by the population, political parties. Now, the second cluster includes Argentina, Ecuador, Venezuela in the very beginning and Peru. And there what you have is a ruling party that's relatively new, not institutionalized, the President puts together a coalition for an election that is not part of an existing political party and in many ways its deliberately anti political parties; and that type of system then one has to look at what the opposition does. And what you find in these cases is that the ruling party was far more non-institutionalized than the opposition, so who wins in this type of system, the opposition prevails. What you get here is grid lock, what you get here is presidents who cannot govern, what you get here is policy incoherence, short lasting administrations. The president has no anchor because his ruling party is relatively weak and the opposition is strong and there fore capable of blocking the system. In some ways these leftist administrations perished because of these two factors, the non institutionalized nature of the ruling party and how different the opposition was on the same scheme. Now the last cluster, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Argentina also vary in degrees of party institutionalization. Let me just quickly mention some thing about Venezuela. After eight years in office the state has been able to create a much more institutionalized political party with secretaries, with offices, with position and so now the ruling party in Venezuela is much stronger than it was in the very beginning, but the opposition is much weaker; hence the radicalization of Hugo Chavez in economics and in almost everything else in 2004. Let me compare that Bolivia which is the case that many people argue is comes closer. Now it's hard in Bolivia and there was the election of Evo Morales who campaign explicitly on the left, unlike Chavez who did not campaign on the left or an extreme radical in the left but Evo Morales is doing it on the left explicitly and he wants to be a populist. He has already shown many, many times that he has no patience for the opposition, he uses the same names that Chavez uses to talk about them, they are all part of the oligarchy, the empires, the white oppressors that's a Bolivian addition, to talk about the opposition in terms of white oppressors, business elites etcetera. And he has no interest in governing with them because this revolution is for the revolutionaries. This is typical populism because it is an approach toward we are going to favor my loyalists and we are going to dis-favor this significantly my opposition. Now, what is interesting is that the MAS which is Evo Morales's party, today relative to Chavez's party in 1980 is a bit more organized, has many more traditional structures. In the 1990s the MAS became a strong party. They they govern certain. They had they held municipal posts, it is less of a personalistic system than you have in Venezuela. And so in some ways one can expect some breaks to happen within Bolivia's Ruling Party because their party is a little bit more institutionalized. Now of course Evo Morales can de-institutionalize his own party if he wants to and I think he is going to. But this is an element that will hold Morales will restrain him to some extent. But the most important different is also at the level of the opposition. The opposition in Bolivia is far stronger than it was in Venezuela in 1989, when the constitution was enacted. They have done a very smart thing. The opposition in order to get themselves to survive this; and that is they have come up with a wonderful ideology to counter the ideology of the ruling party. The ideology of the ruling party is [0:29:49] ____ we are going to empower the majority Indians. We are going to concentrate power in the executive branch and we are going to go against our traditional politicians. Now in Latin America to challenge populism, it's not a good idea to say we want more markets because Latin Americans don't like that political discourse. This was the problem that Venezuela's opposition had when dealing with Chavez's and it didn't really have a discourse other than let's do more market, when everybody knows or everybody knew in Venezuela that was not a winning discourse. What the Bolivian opposition has done and this is actually one could say brilliant is to develop an alternative strategy which is al dinamismo. If the president concentrates too much power then the regions are going to say, "You can't do that because you have to respect local autonomies". It's not separatismo, it's not a desire to succeed, but it's a desire of defending the local. This is an interesting phenomenon because I argue in another paper I am writing, it is a wonderful way to compete with the centralizing populist tendency of the executive branch. The discourse in favor of al dinamismo cuts across and steals some of Evo Morales's constituencies. It is a discourse that appeals to some indigenous folks who always talk about [0:31:09] lasovedania the loss of way of loss, the sovereignty of people. It appeals to some socialists who like decentralization. It appeals to some of the folks who voted for Evo Morales because they were anti political parties, because this is seen as a discourse that is moving away from traditional political parties and empowering localities. And it even attracts hyper nationalists. Hyper nationalists don't like the extent to which Bolivia has gravitated to the side of Cuba and to the side of Hugo Chavez. And the call for al dinamismo in some ways takes some of these nationalists away from the ruling party. So my only point is that, in Bolivia you have the same tendency from the part on the part of the executive branch. You want to be on the left in economics and you want to be populist. It's facing huge obstacles at the moment, in part because the opposition is much more organized and has been able to come with a very interesting Bolivia based type of discourse that allows the opposition to do relatively well in some elections. And this is the bargaining strategy that's taking place in Bolivia. In Venezuela, in 1999 the opposition did not have organization, did not have strength, and did not have a competing discourse other than invoking social democracy or neo-liberalism and that doesn't do it. So let me just conclude by saying that is Chavez model replicable? In terms of economics, I have told you, very hard to do, it's an expensive revolution in Latin American countries even to this day face financial restraints and they cannot spent as much as Chavez. But in terms of trying to undermine the opposition it is replicable. For that you need to have radicals in office. You need to have a ruling party that is very personal, very dependent on the person and more importantly you need to have political parties in the opposition that are weak. And not all Latin American countries suffer from this weakness. And so populism has gone far in Venezuela in many ways because it was an interesting case of a moment in time when the ruling party was very strong in terms of energy and the opposition was very weak and their executive branch took advantage of this. In Bolivia the same attempt by the executive branch is proving very difficult for the president to sustain because the opposition has the elements it need to fight back. So the policy recommendation is there is very little we can do to stop the preference for the leftist policies in economics. But it's much that international community can do to stop the populist tendencies. And in many ways that best policy strategy would be to strengthen opposition parties and organized politics because that is the only antidote that the region would have against a political movement that has always been appealing in the Latin American politics since the early 20th century and to this day which is this complete disregard to organized opposition. So thank you very much for your attention and I will be more than happy to oh I think I Pablo is going to have some comments and I hope that I didn't confuse you. Thank you.
