Manifestation or revolt?

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(Credit: CLAUDIO REYES / AFP via Getty Images)

Editor's Note: Carlos Alberto Montaner is a writer and political analyst at CNN. His columns are published in dozens of newspapers in Spain, the United States and Latin America. Montaner is also vice president of the Liberal International.

(CNN Spanish) - There are or were recently popular demonstrations in Hong Kong, Mexico, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paris, Catalonia and other nations, regions or cities.

It is impossible to obtain a common minimum denominator that explains what happens on the planet.

In some places the demonstrations are in favor of freedom and in others, as in Chile or Mexico, they are, I think, against democratic institutions and against property, whether public or private.

I guess you have to believe Maduro and Diosdado when they said they would be fulfilling the plans of the Sao Paulo Forum.

But that, if true, would not be the only trigger for the crisis in the region.

There is the element of imitation. If the absurd massacres of schoolchildren are imitated, how can it be surprising that some high school boys, stimulated by the adrenaline rush, have fun destroying outside stained glass windows, and beginning generalized looting?

In my opinion, the price of public transport or gasoline, the amount of pensions, or social inequalities, more than legitimate reasons, that could be, are curtailed to try to explain criminal behavior.

Faced with these behaviors, the worst thing that can be done is appeasement. Andrés Manuel López Obrador did it in Mexico, when he thought that grandmothers should punish their granddaughters Vandals, and Sebastián Piñera did it in Chile, when he accepted the argument of the arsonists for not using the hard hand.

If there are criminal codes, they must be followed even if it is uncomfortable. It is the only way for liberal democracy to prevail. The entropy principle, that innate tendency to disorganization, also operates in social structures. The application of fair laws is the only way to delay it.