Latin American atrophy

The succession of crises and failures seems to support Octavio Paz's conviction that the only contribution of Latin America to the history of political thought has been the figure of the leader. The conversion of collective intelligence into critical judgment about the weakness of institutionalism and the integration of efforts is as stunted as remote harmonization of a contradictory subcontinent, lacking its own identity and regional citizenship. When we assumed that the peace of the cemeteries of the dictatorship had established Chile as a guide, the lack of protection against inequalities, insecurity and corruption equals republics whose first thinkers only contributed to forging a Latin American civilization because their intellectual production was subaltern, tributary of the Spanish backwardness and the European academy. The faults are not from the US but their own.

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• Guatemala, 40 years later

The emergence of the president of El Salvador in Congress with a platoon of military personnel was the last constitutional astracanada of political and economic elites that were poorly illustrated, who ignored the Industrial Revolution, and in 200 years of independent life were unable to eradicate political absolutes and digression The gringa voracity, the sophistry and the aftermath of the oligarchic states restrained the consolidation of liberal democracies and the backbone of ideas. The corollary is as harmful as the greats of the seventies, the capitalist cruelties, and the undemocratic conspiracies of the miniatures who dream of resembling Getúlio Vargas, Perón or Fidel Castro.

As symbols, beliefs, processions and folklore are also political culture, evangelistic sermons reached the government palaces of Brazil and Guatemala, co-founded with the demagogue troop that gallops through Latin America on horseback of ignorance and discontent. Welfare states may embry them, but when they are fragile and do not meet basic needs, camouflaged charlatans and tyranniles take advantage of the ballot boxes in dysfunctional democracies or authoritarianisms that destroy the separation of powers.

The distrust in the institutions responds to the lousy functioning of justice and security. That disaffection links with the structural evils behind the Chilean uprisings, the Mexican murder championship, the Argentine trile and the ex-ruined fascistoids of Brazil.

The letter of 1830 from Simón Bolívar to General Juan José Flores is elegy and prediction about the ungovernable homeland, the agglomeration of fools without any capacity to administer and the popular outbursts that establish despotisms. "The only thing that can be done in America is to emigrate." About 30 million of its inhabitants did it pushed by the misgovernment, fed up with dictatorships and democracies tied to generate despair and exile.

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