By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Feb 12 1997 (IPS)

Venezuela had three presidents in ten days in 1993, Ecuador has just broken records by having three at the same time, Peru’s leader bent the other powers to his will in a 1992 coup, and his Colombian counterpart faced a political trial in 1996.

These are trying times for the democratic institutions of all the Andean nations, except Bolivia, which – after living with a coup every nine months – has seemed a positive oasis of political stability this decade.

Venezuela’s former foreign minister Simon Alberto Consalvi, said these events should not be seen as a tendency, but as independent incidents, even though they occured so close together in time, while the whole subregion is undergoing economic reforms and changes in the political model which are affecting their stability.

“In one way or another we are living through the end of a period,” which tends to be simplified in the application of neoliberal economic measures, and traditional leaders and political newcomers provoke and confront crisis in all of Latin America with many different readings, Consalvi told IPS.

“Democratic legitimacy was undermined,” this is how the open political crisis of Thursday 6, following two days of general strike and popular demonstrations against former president Abdala Bucaram, was resolved, according to The New York Times.

Ecuador’s single chamber Congress performed a “back to front Fujimorazo,” claimed a group of Bucaram’s supporters, replacing the ruler with Fabian Alarcon because of his “mental incapacity as a ruler.”

In April 1992, Peru’s President Alberto Fujimori intervened in the Legislative and Judicial powers to push through an authoritarian reform, making it easier for him to be re-elected for a second term in 1995.

Two month’s earlier, Venezuela’s President Carlos Andres Perez had faced the first of two serious uprisings in 1992, but was forced out of power in May 1993, when the Supreme Court found him guilty of mismanagement of secret funds.

In 1996, Perez was found guilty of having diverted part of the funds for cooperation with Nicaragua, something very different from the accusation for misappropriation at the opening of the trial, making it possible to believe the Court was the legal instrument used to push the governor out.

Last year it was the Colombian Ernesto Samper’s turn to see his presidency wobble, although he was eventually cleared of charges of knowing narcotrafficking funds had gone into his election campaign in a parliamentary trial.

But the mud thrown by the case stuck, affecting the national and international reputation of the ruler despite the outcome of the case.

Consalvi, a leader of the Contadora group, which sought a negotiated way out of the Central American crisis of the eighties, and founder of the Latin American consultation mechanism of the Rio Group, denied these convulsions had helped strengthen democracy.

But he added one of the basic causes of Ecuador’s crisis was that Bucaram “as a personality is absolutely anomalous in the presidency of a country,” and that his extravagances fed rejection of his economic programme.

Consalvi said that in six months “the chaotic personality of Bucaram” in a government post “for which he was totally unsuitable” had wrecked the relative stability of Ecuador under a series of civil governments since 1979.

Nor must we forget, he added, that the Ecuadoran political class is “pretty close to” anarchy and fragmentation which has produced bizarre episodes in Congress in the past and which also affected the recent crisis.

But Perez added that beyond the importance of the figure of Bucaram, the fact the various civil powers are using constitutional quirks to follow “the dictates of the street” against other institutional powers, “opening a very dangerous way forward for the regional democracies.”

Some analysts said there could be a sort of “choose now, decide later” mentality being implanted in the region, the antithesis of the presidential democracies, where changing popularity will carriy more weight than votes in the polling stations.

For Consalvi, it seems as though the Latin American countries “have been passing through a purgatory of all the failures shaking them,” and this has even led the military to reconsider the role they are called upon to fulfill.

“No one has suffered more than the Armed Forces, military intervention in politics has exhausted them too much,” he said, one of the many elements which go towards explaining the stability in Bolivia after the continuous coups.

Fujimori’s shakeup was made possible by this rethinking of the peculiar and classist Peruvian armed forces, for he made “an evident entente” allowing him to modify the institutions, even as far as combatting terrorism and tackling economic reform, said Consalvi.

In Ecuador, the peaceful solution with the Constitution in hand – although critics say the action taken was unconstitutional – also had the military as arbiters, providing an eloquent expression of their lack of interest in recovering political power, at least directly.

Consalvi said that amongst the many lessons of the crisis in the Andean countries, or the ousting of Fernando Collor de Melo from the Brazilian presidency in 1992, was the fact that few people have been able to understand the new role of the media.

The current Latin American situation is characterised by many crises coming together, including the end of the traditional leaderships and the lack of courage of the emergence of new replacements, selfishly waiting for the clouds to clear.

The result is that these leaderships, the parties, have been substituted by the media “and the explosion of the media has modified politics.”

And this phenomenon has not worked solely for good, “as the media often have interests in one specific person, which they substitute for a country, while cultivating indifference and ignorance through banality,” according to Consalvi.

This forces the governors to communicate and explain the economic reform processes and the role of the State better, for if the people are not convinced, “not even a dictatorship” could have had success in some countries or could have it in the future.

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