Global Policy Forum

Latin America has freed itself from the military coups and dictatorships that long blighted its public life but now faces a fresh challenge to political stability from deep popular disenchantment with democratic government, according to a new United Nations report.

The report, a harsh self-analysis compiled by Latin American authors and being made public Wednesday in Lima, notes that while the region is the only one in the developing world to be governed almost wholly by democratically chosen leaders, those leaders are increasingly unable to finish their terms in office.

As evidence that the weakness of democratic governments in Latin America is breeding nostalgia for the strongman rule of the past, 55 percent of people surveyed say they would support the replacement of a democratic government with an "authoritarian" regime if it could produce economic benefits.

Fifty-eight percent of those questioned said they agreed that leaders "may go beyond the law" if they have to and 56 percent said they felt that economic development was more important than maintaining democracy.

"With an assessment this lousy, the impact could be quite amazing, and we really have to move very quickly to prevent a major crisis politically speaking," said Enrique Berruga Filloy, Mexico's ambassador to the United Nations.

"This shows that democracy is not something that has taken hold of people's minds as strongly as we had thought it would," he said.

"There seems to be some sort of democratic exhaustion, people are fatiqued, they think things take too long," the ambassador added.

The report, portrayed by its sponsor, the UN Development Program, as "written by and for Latin Americans," involved opinion surveys of 18,643 citizens and lengthy interviews with 231 political, economic, social and cultural figures, including 41 current or former presidents and vice presidents.

It argues that while unhappiness with political leadership is traditional in Latin America, people who now complain are looking at democratic governments and ending up faulting democracy itself.

Voter turnout is falling across the region, especially among the young, while civil unrest is on the rise, with protest actions threatening elected leaders.

Since 2000, four elected presidents in the 18 countries surveyed were forced to step down before the end of their terms because of plunges in public support, and others may now be in peril.

"In the country where this report is being released, the president, Alejandro Toledo, enjoys just seven percent popularity," Berruga said of the Peruvian leader.

Haiti, where President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced from office last month, was not part of the study. The countries surveyed were Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.

All of them have either introduced or consolidated electoral democracy over the past 25 years, emerging from unrepresentative one-party politics or harsh and repressive military rule. All also now hold regularly scheduled elections that meet international standards of fairness and enjoy a free press and basic civil liberties.

The report acknowledges separate circumstances in different countries, among them class conflict, the disenfranchisement of indigenous populations, popular reaction against debt burdens and guerrilla warfare. But it argues that there is a broadly shared political culture and social structure that transcends them.

"The common denominators of this phenomenon outweigh the many national differences," it says.

The report attributes the erosion of confidence in elected governments to slow economic growth, profound social inequality and ineffective legal systems and social services. Despite gains in human rights from the days of dictatorship, most Latin Americans, it says, still cannot expect equal treatment before the law because of abusive police practices, politicized judiciaries and widespread corruption.

According to the report, the first generation of Latin Americans to come of age under widespread democracy has experienced virtually no per capita income growth, and disparities in the distribution of income are widening.

The report's director, Dante Caputo, the former foreign minister of Argentina, says that Latin Americans must be wondering "why a system that is virtually a synonym for equality exists side by side with the highest level of inequality in the world."