The agenda of the XXVII Plenary Meeting of the Círculo de Montevideo was entitled “Pandemic and war: human, political and cultural destruction”.
It could have had an alternative formulation.
The one proposed by its leader, Julio María Sanguinetti, in the splendid opening speech.
The former president of Uruguay painted a landscape of the present in which the uncertainty of innovation coexists with the anachronism of violence and plague.
The observation and analysis of these two factors dominated, from different perspectives, the meetings that took place in Mexico City on Thursday and Friday of last week.
The Círculo de Montevideo is an institution founded by Sanguinetti twenty-six years ago, which has the business presidency of Carlos Slim, who this year officiated as host in his country.
In addition to them, the members who participated on this occasion were the former President of the Government of Spain, Felipe González;
the former president of Chile, Ricardo Lagos;
the former president of the Dominican Republic, Leonel Fernández Reyna;
the former president of the IDB, Enrique Iglesias;
the executive superintendent of the Fernando Henrique Cardoso Institute, Sergio Fausto;
political scientist María Soledad Loaeza;
the businessman Enrique Manhard;
the diplomat Martín Santiago, and the economist Ignacio Munyo.
Sanguinetti described a bewildering world, dominated by rapid technological change and in which leaders work on the unexpected.
Slim stopped to examine the fears and opportunities introduced into this panorama by the mutation of a structuring institution: work.
He explained the impact of the digital economy and proposed a reformulation of the working day and the retirement regime to preserve the level of employment.
The systematic Manhard developed the other day in great detail, the peculiarities that this change of productive regime presents.
Felipe González would return to the same perplexities to refer to the leadership crisis.
“What is expected of a leader is that he provides certainty.
But how to provide certainty when we live in a context in which the only certainty is uncertainty?
He confessed that, faced with this stupor, he is capable of accepting "that politicians mess up", not to mention when they "put their hand in".
And he humorously claimed: “Of course, when they screw up, they take it out soon.
Because it is very common for them to insist on continuing to insert it out of sheer obstinacy”.
Ricardo Lagos hinted that it is almost inevitable to "screw up" for a far-reaching reason: we are facing a change of era that leaves industrial society behind to make way for digital society.
However, this mutation has not been accompanied by a conceptual change.
Sanguinetti pointed out that, against this dynamic backdrop, in which leaderships become inconsistent, two regressive phenomena broke out.
The pandemic and the war.
"A Napoleonic war, of territorial invasion, of nations and borders."
Slim added a vision of Vladimir Putin the next day that matched Sanguinetti's: "He has an agricultural mentality, in which what prevails is the conquest of more land."
The analytical effort of the exhibitors was put into warning that political progress is not guaranteed.
That the past can come back.
Sanguinetti cited the
Persian Letters
in which Montesquieu is terrified imagining that the day could come when a weapon would destroy entire cities.
A much more accurate hypothesis than the one defended by Carlos Marx, a century and a half later, as the Uruguayan recalled: the idea that civilization had reached a stage in which war was impossible.
The past can also continue to be the past.
Sanguinetti argued that it is a mistake to think of the international scene as a new Cold War, because “China does not want to expand.
He's just looking for commercial dominance."
The next day, Enrique Iglesias, who at 92 maintains a youthful intellectual freshness, noted that a dangerous approach is emerging in the competition between China and the United States.
It is the concept of "security" that could threaten one of the most successful experiences in human history: the unfolding of free trade starting in 1945. Iglesias drew attention to a similar risk that, for other reasons, weighs heavily on Latin America: the possibility of frustrating a regional integration strategy, understood as a path to development,
that was made in that part of the world over the last 70 years.
Iglesias was referring to a process that had him as the main protagonist.
These changes in the global scene pose challenges to the organization of power and the management of governments.
That is, they raise questions about the legitimacy of those in charge.
Lagos reflected on the impact that the digital revolution has on communication, which is an essential dimension of political action.
María Soledad Loaeza analyzed, from an academic perspective, some of the practices that corrode democracy.
Authoritarianism, automatic polarization and the tendency of electorates to vote against and not in favor of a project or program.
On the horizon of these concerns, Sergio Fausto focused on the Brazil that Lula da Silva should govern.
He anticipated that the new president will not enjoy a honeymoon with the Brazilians.
He is weakened by a very fragmentary electoral support,
that excludes the middle classes and the elites, and that proved elusive in the most dynamic areas of the country.
These limitations will force him to negotiate with great skill the constitution of a parliamentary majority that he lacks today.
There is, then, a deficit in the legitimacy of origin that will become mortifying in the face of the uncomfortable inventory of economic issues that Lula will have to face: a society with a long list of demands due to the long stagnation, which contrasts with an excessively restricted fiscal margin.
Sanguinetti had rescued the victory of the PT candidate as a demonstration of the good sense of the electorate.
It was also verified in the United States, where the prophecies about an overwhelming advance of the Republican wing linked to Donald Trump, in the end, did not come true.
Or in Chile, where voters asked for a constitutional reform, but rejected the one that, after all, the constituents provided them.
They are moderate movements that contrast with some processes of radicalization in the political offer.
An asymmetric polarization prevails in several countries of the region.
The right seeks an extreme, while the left, forced by the imperative of governability, tends to the center.
The design seems to be close to the model recommended by Felipe González: "We should look for a centrality in which consensus and,
Sanguinetti and González defined the spirit of this time with the famous aphorism: “When we had all the answers, all the questions changed”.
It is the problem of the citizens;
It is, especially, the problem of leaders.
In Latin American societies, this disorientation is leading leaders to seek guidance from their origins.
In Argentina, biographies about Raúl Alfonsín are published and his government is studied.
The trial of the military juntas, which he promoted, reaches the cinema, by the hand of Darín.
In Spain, Pedro Sánchez seeks to recover the vitality of socialism by commemorating the triumph of 1982, embodied in Felipe González.
Another of the attendees at the meeting in Mexico, Ricardo Lagos, has become a discreet adviser to his compatriot Gabriel Boric.
In Brazil,
Lula took the first step back to power during a lunch with Cardoso.
And, in Uruguay, the white government of Luis Lacalle Pou would not be possible without the persevering embroidery of the red Sanguinetti to formulate a competitive electoral proposal.
Here lay the tacit wealth of the meeting held in Mexico.
The presence of a group of statesmen who refer to a Latin America that, compared to today, seems the Athens of Pericles.
Specimens of a rare genus.
successful leaders.
The presence of a group of statesmen who refer to a Latin America that, compared to today, seems the Athens of Pericles.
Specimens of a rare genus.
successful leaders.
The presence of a group of statesmen who refer to a Latin America that, compared to today, seems the Athens of Pericles.
Specimens of a rare genus.
successful leaders.