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Democracy in (Central) America
by Alejandro Bermudez 

Imagine it is the late second half of the 20th Century, and Alexis de Tocqueville, instead of dying April 16, 1859, has managed to stay alive and as sharp as he was when he wrote “Democracy in America.”

He then decides to travel to Central America. He crosses into Guatemala from the southern Mexican border and finds a fanatically Evangelical general, Efrain Rios Montt, running with an iron fist a country that has had almost as many presidents as years of independence.

Most of the Indian and mix-raced Guatemalans, about 80% of the population, live in abject poverty, while 24 families own about 90% of the country’s economy.

Home to the oldest guerrilla movement in Latin America, Guatemala nevertheless has a strange passion for Rios Montt, a dictator so popular that, more than 15 years later, he almost wins in a democratic presidential election.

Tocqueville then travels west into Honduras, a country with a rich Mayan past much like Guatemala that enjoyed a prosperous 300-year Spanish rule, but has been in almost complete disarray since its independence.

The Frenchman is astonished to learn that Honduras has recently lost the “Soccer War” against El Salvador, a six-day conflict that was started by border patrols and turned into a full-blown war after Honduras’ loss to El Salvador during the qualifying round for the 1970 World Cup.

Transit from Honduras to El Salvador is therefore impossible, so Tocqueville has to move south to Nicaragua, a country of proud people with a love-hate relationship with the U.S. and a long-lasting dictatorship run by two generations of the Somoza family. It’s a government, nevertheless, that is steadily crumbling under the military and political activity of the Sandinista guerrilla, a mix of Nationalist and Marxist revolutionary movements with strong ties to Fidel Castro and the Soviet Union.

On his way to Panama, a country that was once part of Colombia and that many contend was artificially created to allow for the construction of the Canal, Tocqueville may have witnessed the only oasis of development and democracy in the region: Costa Rica.

The oldest uninterrupted democracy in Latin America, Costa Rica disbanded the army – the country has only kept a police force since the late ‘50s – and focused its energy on education and the strengthening of a massive middle class.

Marred by guerrilla groups, inequality, local oligarchies and border conflicts, democracy in Central America would have seem completely unlikely by the mid 1980s.

But even if Tocqueville could have seen the region with the same insightfulness with which he saw the United States, who could have predicted how the Catholic hierarchy, leveraging on the region’s profoundly Catholic tradition, would have been able to help change the future of the region forever?

It was Latin America’s Catholic bishops, along with the leadership of Costa Rica, that in 1986 brought together the five Central American presidents in Esquipulas, Guatemala. There, they began a process that would finally settle military and guerrilla conflicts and promote national reconciliation, free elections and a timetable for the implementation of these radical reforms.

Oscar Arias, then president of Costa Rica, won a Nobel Peace Prize, but lost to history was the integral role of the region’s Catholic bishops, as well as Pope John Paul II’s bold call for reconciliation in Latin America.

Fittingly, Esquipulas – a Guatemalan city on the Honduran border – is also home to the shrine of the “black Christ,” a 400-year-old wooden statute and a pilgrimage destination for thousands of men and women from the entire region.

When Pope John Paul II visited Esquipulas in 1995, he celebrated the 400th anniversary of the shrine and called it “the spiritual center of Central America.”

Today’s almost 20 years of uninterrupted democracy in the region, despite economic turmoil, is the fruit of the two Esquipulas summits promoted by the Central American bishops and entrusted to the Christ of Esquipulas.

Esquipulas, in fact, created in the region a love for democracy and a healthy hatred for the scheming ways of oligarchies – either economic or political – to perpetually remain in power.

During the coup that followed Honduran president Manual Zelaya’s attempt to modify the national constitution in order to get reelected, the country’s 11 Catholic bishops issued a statement affirming that Zelaya’s ouster was grounded in a valid court order.

While avoiding an explicit endorsement of the interim president, the bishops’ statement said that “the institutions of the Honduran democratic state are valid and that what it has executed in juridical-legal matters has been rooted in law.”

Zelaya, currently a refuge in the Brazilian embassy, is pressing the U.S. and the European Union to disregard the results of the elections unless he is reinstated as president.

But the bishops are saying no to Zelaya, because they fear that if the logger magnate-turned Socialist gets his way, a domino effect will take place in Nicaragua and El Salvador, two countries under leftist presidents who are seriously considering following Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez model – and looking to see how it fares in Honduras.

Tocqueville argued that one of the keys to the success of democracy in America was the institutions that “impart to the people a taste for freedom and the art of being free,” and that “no class of men is more naturally disposed than Catholics to transfer the doctrine of the equality of condition into the political world.”
The great Frenchman would have certainly agreed with the Central American bishops and the vast majority of the Honduran population in rejecting Zelaya’s pretensions that he is the victim of an anti-democratic coup.

And he would certainly wish that the United States would stand in Central America for the same principles that made it great.

 

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)