Long live 'efficiency'!

Weeks ago, at the Central American Journalism Forum, which began 14 years ago in San Salvador but is now exiled in Antigua Guatemala, an exiled journalist from El Salvador and one exiled from Nicaragua compared their stories and their realities.

–You at least have a guerrilla commander as a dictator who defeated a long dictatorship, who did something in life.

Ours, on the other hand, is nothing more than a daddy's son, a nightclub manager.

The Salvadoran said, and it was true: his president Nayib Bukele was.

In those days, Bukele undermined the Constitution of his country by presenting himself as a candidate for re-election, which that constitution prohibits.

This Sunday he will win those elections by scandal, he will retain the presidency, he will become perfectly illegal and will maintain the support of four out of five compatriots.

But what hurt the exile from El Salvador the most was the smallness of the character: a man with no history or particular light - and who, however, has unprecedented support that ensures his deceitful re-election.

(In those days the Bukele aesthetic was limited to his country; it had not yet begun to be copied as the Ecuadorian Daniel Noboa does now with the exhibition of half-naked and piled-up prisoners to mark the humiliation. The States have been so corrupt, so permissive with the illegals that can now only be imposed by force of illegality.)

Those exiles argued, competed in misfortunes.

It was clear that the Nicaraguan dictator only had his past to “justify” his dictatorship;

The Salvadoran has a present in which – to “justify” his – he achieved something that his compatriots needed: containing the armed gangs.

For this, he destroyed two decisive types of legality: the freedom of his citizens, which he imprisons without evidence, mistreats, tortures, and the democratic rules of his country, which he fails to comply with by re-electing himself.

Many rightly reproach us for this, but, at times, it seems that we are trying too hard in ways that do not produce what they should.

At the end of the day, Bukele will be voted for by 80% or 90% of his fellow citizens: a great democratic victory that will endorse the breaking of democratic rules.

You can blame social networks, twisted news, the perfidy of the few or the spirit of the hive, but nothing threatens Latin American democracies as much as their inability to solve the problems of their citizens.

To sustain democracy, a kind of religious faith is required of us: we must believe in it because it is “the best possible system.”

But it turns out that this better system, in our countries, has produced misery and despair.

Democracy has lost prestige: it is no longer a decisive value.

We older people came to believe – after years of bloody dictatorships – that it would serve to feed, cure, educate everyone, but now hundreds of millions of Americans prove that no, that it is nothing more than the institutional form in which they have lived, all their lives, lives that are not the ones they would want or the ones they deserve.

And then they begin to believe that it is more important to solve their problems than the tool or system with which they are solved: they want, they demand efficiency.

Or perhaps we should call it

efficiency

: the government of those who are capable of achieving something desired by many, regardless of the way in which they do it.

Bukele has achieved it;

Other rulers in the region do not, but their people say every time – in surveys and studies – that they would not mind if there was some type of authoritarian government, a military coup, if it solved their problems: if it were effective.

In Argentina – I am not going to continue disguising – the trend is stark: Javier Milei has no intention of pretending to respect democratic rules, debate, separation of powers, that nonsense.

He says that they only delay him and that he must be effective, for which he has to do what he wants how he wants when he wants.

And he justifies himself by saying that it was those rules that, applied for twenty years, led us to the current disaster.

It happens in many of our countries: it is not that these messianic leaders of the great right triumph because suddenly the populations have become fascist;

It is that democracy and its politics are losing space due to their insufficiencies, due to the errors and shortcomings of their leaders, due to their sad social effects – and these gentlemen take the opportunity to fill the resulting void.

The difference seems banal but I think it is decisive: it would mean that the only way to end this authoritarian reaction would be to build democracies that were not just a kinder and more tolerant way of living together, that were not a formality, that were not the choice of the least bad always worse, but tools to end misery and transform our countries into places where all their citizens can and want to develop their lives.

For that, of course, democracy as we know it should change: stop being the instrument for a few to defend their privileges so well.

It would be good if that different system were called democracy;

If it is not, it will not be important.

It could even be called

effectiveness

, if we agree on what field it should be effective in.

Efficiency is perfectly reasonable: it matters to all

of

us that those who govern us manage to solve our main problems.

To do so, the system of representation or government, democracy or autocracy is not – a priori – important.

And

efficiency

is not bad in itself.

The problem is that it has managed to convince millions that, for it to work, it must be exercised beyond any legality: that it is somehow incompatible with democratic participation.

Efficiency can cloud your vision, convincing

you

that it is the only thing that matters.

It is not;

It is also important to put legal and structural frameworks in place so that it does not become the basis of new dictatorships.

In other words: so that we can discuss in which areas we want to apply it, and with what restrictions and care.

Being effective in locking up and torturing alleged gang members is not the same as being effective in ending hunger;

Being effective in prohibiting the right to strike is not the same as being effective in ensuring work and reasonable salaries;

Being effective in representing is not the same as being effective in imposing.

In short: the task is to ensure that the

efficiency

, so necessary, works with democratic mechanisms.

That is to say: that citizens can define what these main problems are and how and in what sense they should be effectively solved, and that their representatives – chosen for their possibilities of providing these solutions – represent them and do so.

And let all those who fill their mouths with talk of democracy understand that if they do not fill democracy with something more than pompous puffs there is no chance of it resisting.

We will have to debate it – that is what democracy was for – but, above all, we will have to know how to do it.

If not, the monsters will continue to feast on the food of which, we already know, we are all.

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