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1. La lucha por el futuro: El veneno del populismo y la cura de la democracia

Author:
Robert F. Noriega
Publication Date:
12-2006
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
Abstract:
Mientras que la atención del mundo está centrada en la lucha contra Irak y el ascenso de China, se está librando una batalla por el alma de las Américas más cerca de nuestro país. En términos simplistas, esta confrontación podría describirse como una lucha de poder entre la visión del presidente de Estados Unidos, George W. Bush, y la visión de quien se autoproclamó su némesis, el presidente venezolano Hugo Chávez. Igualmente engañosas son las caracterizaciones que describen esta situación como un enfrentamiento entre la izquierda y la derecha, los ricos y los pobres, el norte y el sur. Pero ésta no es una batalla entre dos líderes poderosos o entre las ideologías de la izquierda y la derecha. La lucha que se está librando en el hemisferio occidental concierne a la democracia en sí: ¿puede satisfacer a un público impaciente? Por un lado, están los líderes de la izquierda y la derecha que consideran que las instituciones democráticas y el Estado de Derecho son indispensables para la prosperidad y la libertad.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Democracy, Populism, and Hugo Chavez
Political Geography:
Latin America and Venezuela

2. An Emerging Populist Threat?

Author:
Mark Falcoff
Publication Date:
06-2001
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
Abstract:
On May 14, Jackson Diehl, the deputy foreign editor of the Washington Post, raised an intriguing question in an op-ed for that newspaper: Is Latin America about to “drift back toward its one-time status as semi-hostile territory for the United States”? Some of the evidence he cited was certainly enough to give pause. In Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, that country’s former Marxist president—voted out of office in 1990—seemed poised to finally regain power later this year. In Peru, Alan García, the leftist-populist windbag—the consummate Latin demagogue, almost a caricature of the type—who drove his country to the verge of collapse in the 1980s, has reemerged as a presidential possibility in a runoff scheduled for June 3. In Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the perennial standard-bearer of the Left, is leading in the polls for next year’s presidential race. “Even in El Salvador,” Diehl writes, President Bush “may see the election of former FMLN guerrillas.” As to Venezuela, the machinations of its president, Hugo Chávez, hardly require comment; he makes no secret of the fact that his principal foreign policy objective is to forge a new, worldwide, anti-U.S. alliance.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Economics, Populism, and Hugo Chavez
Political Geography:
South America, Latin America, and Venezuela