By Carolina Vásquez Araya on June 15, 2021
photo: Bill Hackwell
Our societies suffer from preventable and treatable diseases. The only thing missing is medicine.
Our countries of Latin America stand out for the abundance of investigations and denunciations of the incessant increase in corruption and criminal violence and, although they have not yielded the desired results, we cannot ignore certain advances of great impact on the way democratic forces are reordered in some of them, with the potential to reverse the origins of these situations that have the power to put an end to democracies. However, there are always painful exceptions, such as the examples of two countries whose geographic location and history of corruption have turned them into drug transit points and where the incessant migratory route is concentrated. These are Honduras and Guatemala, two nations whose indicators show the worst living conditions for their inhabitants and where their rulers lead the charts of human rights violations and State crimes.
How has the decomposition -which today seems irreversible- occurred in these nations? Are there no control mechanisms capable of sustaining a minimum of institutionality and justice with the power to rebuild a mock State? To begin to unravel the web that now ensnares their institutions, it is important to review history and dust off the evidence of the immense influence of corporate interests, whose power over much more powerful governments has put a “so far” to their attempts at democratization.
However, these are not the only countries that are taking the blows against their claims to political and economic independence. During the recent elections in other nations of the continent, it has been possible to appreciate the fear of the middle classes of a change in the control of their internal policies and their relations with big international capital. This shows that the underhanded and sustained war for decades against democratic processes, whose objective has been the independence and economic sustainability of developing countries, has caused moral damage of such dimensions, that its sponsors do not even bother to insist with cold war type campaigns to insert in the brains of millions of human beings the prejudices against anything that smells of social justice. The fear of change seems to be installed and the efforts to eradicate it barely touched, if at all, half of those who decide the course of politics by means of their vote, where the merit on that positive parity is mostly taken by the youth.
In this respect, that of the generations eager for new winds, it is important to emphasize how strategies aimed at maintaining status have been clashing, time and again, against the need to redirect the march towards forms of government more sensitive to the needs of this immense sector of new citizens. Although this only fails in those countries whose states are captive to organized crime, such as those mentioned above, the inevitable march towards favorable changes with the restoration of democratic processes seems to be inevitable. Our continent has experienced the force of coups against its attempts at independence and, as a result, suffers from an endemic malady embodied in a suspicious attitude towards new rules of the political game. However, the events of recent years, with the advance of popular force in most countries, reveal that the medicine against conformism and apathy has verifiable results and, thanks to its effects, opens the prospect of new airs for the times to come.
There is hope for change despite the hackneyed recourse to fear.
Source: El Quinto Patio, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English