Ernesto Zedillo on Latin America

In a conference given at the Coral Gables Museum in Miami, under the auspices of the International Foundation for Freedom, the former president of Mexico, Ernesto Zedillo, outlined a panorama of Latin America worth listening to.

It is a critical vision, unusual in Mexican presidents. Two of its guiding ideas are that our countries are living, from the political point of view, in a time of “democratic regression”, and from the economic and social point of view, not a “development trap” but something worse: a “democratic trap”. of pre-development”.

The democratic regression in Zedillo’s vision has its origin in the rise of populist rulers who, having come to power through democracy, dedicate their efforts to weakening and destroying it.

The democracy that we thought we had won in the wave of the disappearance of dictatorships at the end of the 20th century is once again under threat in the continent due to the anti-democratic management of populist rulers elevated by democracy itself.

70 percent of the countries of the Latin American continent are under this threat, says Zedillo, a trend that must be regretted not only because of the loss of democracy itself, but also because of the parallel destruction of the quality of governments and their ability to carry out their countries the long-promised conditions of well-being and freedom.

Clear proof of the ineffectiveness of these governments, according to Zedillo, is that among the 10 countries in the world that handled the pandemic the worst, there are seven from Latin America, among them the largest.

It was in those seven countries where there were more deaths, more job losses, greater poverty, inequality and suffering. The large countries of Latin America qualified in the mirror of the pandemic among the worst in the world.

The “pre-development trap” consists, according to Zedillo, in the fact that it seems that we must start again, almost from scratch, to combat the three great diseases that we have not been able to get out of in our history:

The disease of the absence of rule of law.

The disease of the persistence of poverty and inequality.

And the disease of rickety economies because they are not essentially guided by the only thing that can strengthen them: economic freedom.