The New Politics of Inequality in Latin America: Rethinking Participation and Representation.

• Author: Cruz, Consuelo
• Position: Review

The New Politics of Inequality in Latin America: Rethinking Participation and Representation

Douglas A. Chalmers, Carlos M. Vilas, Katherine Hire, Scott B. Martin, Kerianne Piester and Monique Segarra, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) 644 pp.

Popular lore has it that in Latin American politics nothing is as it should be. As the old saying goes: cast a stone into a pond and it floats; cast a feather and it sinks. The region's novelists and storytellers have tried to convey this haunting sense of paradox by using the pen to render fantasy real and reality fantastic. The reading public, in turn, has recognized the familiar verities that run through the outlandish fictions produced by the genre's masters.

Nothing surprising in this. Latin Americans have for long lived between barbaric fluidity and oppressive rigidity, between tumultuous clamoring and elite deal-making. They have fought countless civil wars--from the time of lances and pikes to the modern era of rapid-fire weapons--with quasi-religious fervor. But their carnage has typically culminated in dictatorial orders which, once exhausted, are buried under "amnesties" so that new orders may be constructed around "pacts." From ardor to stillness and finally to bargaining: how strange. And yet, there stand the examples--Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, E1 Salvador, Nicaragua.

Revolutions have been no less perplexing. They first amaze by mobilizing masses that seemed too docile to protest; then they dash hopes by elevating revolutionary leaders well above the common run. Recall the "revolutionary" promises and the troubling outcomes in Mexico, Peru, Cuba and Nicaragua.

Political modernity itself has been turned into a Latin American paradox by becoming a subaltern of tradition. The entrenchment of political parties--those thoroughly modern institutions crafted in Western Europe and the United States--led in Colombia to political assassinations and massive political violence in the first half of the 20th century. In Venezuela, meanwhile, party structures meant to aggregate, process and represent broad-based interests instead sustained patron-client relationships with exquisite flexibility. Even modern ideologies, which presumably enable political actors to transcend the limitations of parochial concerns and personalistic allegiances, both flourished and became entwined with the very concerns and allegiances they were meant to displace. Think of Cardenismo...