1989/2009 Shaping Freedom

The new era that dawned around the world in 1989 coincided with specific developments in Latin America. The common denominators were the end of dictatorships and neoliberal crisis.













In retrospect, Latin America in 1989 appears to have been plagued by highly disparate events. In Paraguay, the dictator Alfredo Stroessner was deposed in a coup. In Venezuela, the population rebelled against its newly-elected president’s neoliberal economic policy, and the repression cost hundreds of lives. In Argentina, devastating hyperinflation raged and President Alfonsín was forced to step down, to be replaced by Carlos Menem. In the middle of a disastrous economic crisis, a wave of revolt by the guerrilla group Sendero Luminoso broke out in Peru, and more than 4,000 people died in the turmoil of guerrilla and state repression. The USA marched into Panama and deposed its former ally General Noriega. In Brazil, a third election after the military dictatorship was held. Collor de Mello won with a small majority over Ignacio Lula da Silva. In Nicaragua, the war between the Contras and the Sandinista government ended; in Chile, elections took place for the first time after 17 years of military dictatorship.

Mood of apocalypse or of new departures? It is always deceptive to want to interpret developments in Latin America according to one single pattern. Two common denominators may be seen, however: redemocratisation and neoliberalism. The departure of the last two dictators, Stroessner in Paraguay and Pinochet in Chile, marked the end of an era of military dictatorships that had begun around 1930. Only Venezuela, Costa Rica and Mexico remained untouched by this curse of the eternal return of the military.

So can it be said of Latin America, too, that 1989 was a “Year of Miracles”, as British historian Timothy Garton Ash has described it? It would be hard to find Latin American intellectuals who would agree with this eulogy to the end of the Cold War as an unstoppable victory for liberal democracy. For one thing, the time of “transición”, as redemocratisation was called, had already come in around 1980, when the politically and economically weakened military regimes of Ecuador, Brazil and Argentina began to clear the field. For another, formal democracy did not keep all its promises, soon leading to resignation.

Neoliberal powerlessness

Chile in particular is an example of how the power constellation maintained by the military dictatorships continued to exist under the cloak of democracy long after 1989. Under military dictatorship, Chile had been an experimental laboratory of neoliberalism per excellence. The “Chilean model” led to a new society marked by fear and individualism. Even after Pinochet’s demise, the “guarded democracy,” which had enshrined the dictator in a new constitution, and the neoliberal consensus between politics, the media and the elites bore their fruits. The effects of the “night of dictatorship” persisted. The real turnaround only came when Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998.












In 1989, the now notorious Washington Consensus was reached. At that time, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other financial institutions decided to continue to finance highly-indebted developing countries only if they radically restructured their economies. The recipe was for privatisation, deregulation, and trade and fiscal liberalisation. Argentina, Ecuador and soon Mexico and Brazil, too, immediately submitted to the neoliberal dictate.

Economic restructuring led to a major push towards modernisation. Yet there was a heavy price to pay for privatising ailing state-owned enterprises, and no social network cushioned mass redundancies. For countries such as Argentina, Brazil and Chile, which had had a tradition of redistributing wealth and trade-union achievements, the turbocapitalist transformation only led to powerlessness.

Crisis of representation

That liberal democracy did not necessarily go hand in hand with an improvement in living conditions was particularly conspicuous in Venezuela, hitherto viewed as a Latin American showcase of democracy. When the newly-elected President Carlos Andrés Pérez broke his election promise less than two weeks after taking up office, imposing a neoliberal austerity programme, the largest revolt in Venezuela’s history broke out. In an alternative histiography of Latin America, the “Caracazo” is regarded as one of the first uprisings against neoliberalism anywhere in the world, and President Hugo Chávez declared it to be the birth of his “Bolivarian Revolution”.

The experience of uprising and repression led to a deep crisis of political representation. The old parties were no longer relevant and the social movements had emerged as a new political entity. Powerlessness soon turned into revolt.