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Bolivia's Growing Regional ConflictJames S. Henry and Donald K. Ranvaud

The new year is already off to a turbulent start in Bolivia. During the week of January 7 to 15, up to six thousands supporters of President Evo Morales' MAS party-- mainly cocaleros from the Chapare coca-growing region,  campesinos, and indigenous groups --  showed up in Cochabamba,  Bolivia's third largest city of 800,000,  in the country's center. 

They had come to demand the resignation of Cochabamba's   right-wing Governor, Manfred Villa-Reyes, who has become an outspoken supporter of the "autonomista" movement, which is seeking greater "states rights" for the country's nine provinces -- especially the wealthier, "whiter" eastern and southern provinces of Beni, Pando, Santa Cruz, and Tarija, where most of Bolivia's natural gas and richest farms are located.

As shown in this exclusive video footage from Cochabamba (See Parts I and Part II). shot by Bolivian film crews working under the direction of  our colleague, award-winning Hollywood producer Donald K.Ranvaud (The Constant Gardener, City of God, Central Station, etc.), the MAS supporters encountered a fierce reaction from the city's middle-class residents and pro-autonomista forces, including a crowd of more than well-organized thousand stick-waiving people who reportedly attacked the cocaleros and campesinos aggressively on January 13th. In the ensuing conflict, at least two people were killed and more than 150 were injured.

By Saturday January 14th, calm had returned to the city. Governor Manfred returned from Santa Cruz, where he had apparently fled out of concerns for his own safety, and  Evo Morales also returned from Nicaragua, where he had been attending Daniel Ortega's inauguration. Steps have been taken on all sides to pacify the situation.

However, as we'll discuss below, the potential for renewed conflict is very high. This is not only because none of the fundamental economic and political causes of the conflict have been addressed. It is also because on all sides,  Bolivia's political leaders have not exactly shown the capacity for compromise and the maturity that will be essential to avoid a "lose lose" outcome for Bolivians of all backgrounds and social classes.   

CUBA'S HEALTH CARE REVOLUTION, LATIN AMERICA'S HIDDEN HOLOCAUSTSomething for Fidel to Be Proud OfJames S. Henry

While US media conglomerates like Time and Fox have been obsessing for months about whether or not 80-year old Fidel Castro is finally about to meet El Fabricante,  Cuba has been busy setting health records -- helping its 11.4 million citizens achieve lower mortality and longer lives than almost anywhere else in the developing world.

Now that a leading Madrid surgeon has made it clear -- contrary to USG agitprop -- that Fidel is not suffering from terminal cancer, and, indeed, is recovering well from last summer's stomach operation,   perhaps this other Cuban health story will finally receive the attention that it deserves. 

Just this month Cuba announced that its infant mortality rate has reached the First World average of just 5.3 per thousand -- on a par with the latest rates for the UK, Canada and New Zealand, even lower than the 6.7 US average,  and less than half the 14.1 average rate for all African-Americans in the US.

LATIN AMERICA'S HIDDEN HOLOCAUST

Even more to the point, Cuba's infant mortality rate is also the lowest in Latin America and the Caribbean, and indeed, the lowest for any developing country in the world.

The corollary is another important story. This is the fact that while Fidel's tiny, isolated, centrally-planned, highly-inefficient, antediluvian island economy has managed to set record after record on public health, education, poverty reduction, and gender equality since the 1970s,  the "non-revolutionary" rest of Latin America has lagged far behind. Over time, the cumulative impact has been huge.

For example, as we'll see below, if other Latin American and Caribbean countries had simply kept pace with Cuba's percentage improvements in infant mortality from the 1960s to 2005, an additional 6.4 million infants -- an average of 184,000 per year for the region as a whole -- would have survived the first year of childbirth.

In effect, all these "missing children" amount to nothing less than a continuing hidden holocaust -- attributable at least in part to the pro-elite development paths that most of these countries have pursued.

Many of those critics on the Right who like to rail against the deficiencies of Castro's regime -- its admitted lack of US-style national elections and market freedoms, its shortage of big fancy cars and other consumer goods -- also profess to be profoundly concerned about human rights,  the welfare of Elian Gonzalez, "the rights of the unborn," and so forth.

Perhaps they will now bring themselves to admit that at least in one respect, Fidel's Revolution is actually a role model -- and that naked capitalist development also has very high costs. 

This goes a long way to explain why, far from being the pariah that USG has tried to make him, Fidel is today treated with greater respect and admiration throughout Latin America than ever before -- certainly in comparison with former US-backed right-wing thugs like Pinochet, Rios Montt, Banzer, Fujimori, and the Argentine and Brazilian juntas.

Consistent with this, on October 28, 2006, the UN General Assembly voted for the 13th year in a row to condemn the US embargo on Cuba. Every Latin American and Caribbean country voted to support the resolution, joining 179 countries that did so. Only four countries voted against it -- the US, Israel, the Marshall Islands, and Palau.

In any case, whatever the quality of life in Cuba for adults today, the fact is that if you are an unborn infant of average means who somehow gets to decide where in the entire developing world to be born, there's no contest.

(For all the gory statistical details, read on below):

 

REMEMBERING THE GENERALPart I: OverviewJames S. Henry

---

I was born a Chilean,  I am a Chilean,
I will die a Chilean.
They, the fascists, were born traitors,
live as traitors, and will be remembered forever as fascist traitors.

-- Orlando Letelier, 1932-76

---

Both Chile's General Augusto Pinochet and Saddam Hussein, two formerly US-backed dictators, have at last had to confront Higher Authorities that they were unable to intimidate, compromise, or evade.

However, unlike Saddam, who was hanged in the middle of a night on December 30, 2006, by a nervous Iraqi Government tribunal,  Pinochet managed to escape human justice for his crimes, and died of natural causes at the age of 91. 

How does the General deserve to be remembered? Did he not richly deserve the same fate as Saddam? And how did he manage to avoid it? 

Was he simply a ruthless, corrupt right-wing tyrant, the puppet of foreign interests and their handmaidens, like ITT,  Nixon, Kissinger, the CIA, George H.W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, and Reagan?   

Or was he, as many of his defenders still maintain,  an essential bulwark against the Leftist Horde in Latin America?

If perhaps not exactly the world's staunchest defender of political liberalism, was he at least -- as Thatcher, some neoliberal  economists, The Wall Street Journal, and even supposedly "liberal" newspapers like The Washington Post now maintain --  a staunch defender of  "free markets" who deserves much of the credit for Chile's economic performance since the 1970s?

As we'll see,  most conventional portraits of General Pinochet are flat-out wrong, not only with respect to his alleged role in combating Soviet expansionism, but also with respect to his regime's alleged beneficial influence on Chile's economy.

First,  Pinochet was at best only a non-essential bit player in the anti-Soviet struggle. Allende's broad-based social democratic "revolution" was never taken seriously by Moscow or Havana. Nor was it strong enough to mount a Cuban-style revolution, or even to precipitate a civil war. Left to its own devices, Allende's "leftish" alliance would probably have burned itself out by the next election or plebiscite in 1974.

Furthermore, even if Chile's leftists had somehow managed to create a "Soviet Republic of Patagonia," tiny Chile was already completely surrounded by other countries that had much greater strategic importance to the West.

By 1973, they either already had their own right-wing dictatorships (Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia), or were well on the way (Argentina and Uruguay).

In short,  killing off Chile's long-standing democracy was gratuitous -- the political equivalent of exaggeratinging Iraq's "slam dunk" WMD threat.

All the repression was for nothing.

On the economic front, Pinochet's interregnum was also a costly, needless detour. 

Indeed, one key reason why Chile's so-called "economic miracle" has proved to be so successful in the long run -- with great help from human capital finally brought back home by many well-educated returning "Leftists" who were  driven out of country in 1973-90 -- was precisely because Pinochet's first decade of experiments with "Los Chicago economics" proved to be so disastrous. Giving Pinochet credit for the subsequent corrective reforms is like crediting Leonid Brezhnev with last decade's revival of economic growth in Eastern Europe.

(For more details, see Parts II and III...)

 

   

EVO'S HISTORIC VICTORYBolivia's Democratic RevolutionJames S. Henry LaPaz, Bolivia

The mood at Tuto Quiroga's well-appointed campaign headquarters at the Hotel Radisson in downtown LaPaz was funereal, while across town at MAS Party headquarters in the former Brazilian Embassy, and later on in the impoverished township of El Alto,  people were chanting and singing in the streets late into the night. Not long after the polls in Bolivia closed late this Sunday afternoonn,  it was already clear that the country's impoverished majority had finally elected one of their own as the country´s next President -- and by a much larger margin than any foreign policy expert, journalist, or Latin America political pundit had expected.

This is easily one of the most surprising and important elections in the history of Latin American democracy. For fans of the "neoliberal," free-market approach to development, as well as coca eradication, it is also a time for soul-searching.

Evo Morales, the 46-year old working-class meztizo, cocalero organizer, and leader of the neo-left "Movement Toward Socialism" party, has soundly defeated the seven other Presidential candidates in the race, capturing close to 50 percent of the nationwide vote.

While the final vote tally still has to be certifed by Bolivia's Electoral Court,  this clearly puts Evo within reach of becoming the first Bolivian President ever to have won a first-round victory outright -- without having the choice default to Bolivia`s fractious, "rent-seeking" Congress.

From an historical perspective, Evo's performance is an all-time record for a Bolivian Presidential candidate, far surpassing the 31 percent received by the second-place candidate, the free-market oriented-former President, Tuto Quiroga. It also surpasses the previous all-time high registered by Hernan Solis in 1982, as well as the 34 percent captured by neoliberal businessman "Goni" Sanchez de Lozada in 1993.

For that matter, relative to other recent elections in the Western Hemisphere, Evo has also outperformed the victory margins achieved by the US´President Bush, Brazil´s Lula, and Argentina's Kirchner. Whatever one thinks of Evo's economic platform -- and it certainly contains more than a little wishful thinking-- there is no doubt that, at least for the moment, he has far more credibility with the Bolivian people than his opponents.

A DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION?

Even more important than the historical records,  Bolivians have clearly voted en masse in favor of at least three fundamental changes in Bolivia`s social and political landscape -- all of them supported by MAS.

 

• Reasserting public control over Bolivia`s natural resources, especially its huge natural gas reserves -- already, in official terms, the second largest in Latin America, and quite possibly much more.

  Evo's vague, rhetorical shorthand for this is "nationalization," but there is a whole range of policy options that MAS is considering to increase the public`s share of the income generated by its natural resources, and add more value, and generate more jobs by using these resources at home. Whether or not any of these will make practical economic sense is far from clear. But it is hard to argue that this program will  necessarily be any more disappointing for ordinary people than the last two decades of neoliberal policies.

 

• Rejecting (US-backed) coca eradication programs. This supply-side approach to cocaine trade has been pursued by Bolivia since at least the mid-1980s, especially under the Banzer-Quiroga administration from 1997 to 2002.

  Unfortunately, as most observers outside the "drug enforcement complex" now agree -- including good solid conservatives like Milton Friedman and Steve Forbes --  the impact on ultimate cocaine supplies have been limited at best.

  At the same time,  the social, political, and economic impacts on countries like Bolivia, Columbia, and Peru have been disastrous.

  Oddly enough, with respect to drug enforcement, Evo is the true "neoliberal."  He believes that a poor country like Bolivia has a right to grow crops like coca if it makes economic sense, that punishing them for doing so is like punishing Dupont because some of its chemicals end up in illicit drugs, and that Bolivian farms should not be made to pay for the fact that  Americans and Brazilians can't control their bad habits.

  From this angle, his election is just one in a growing series of "corrective interviews" that Andean countries are giving to Washington on the huge costs of the failed supply-side drug control strategy. To summarize the matter quickly -- wouldn't the American people really have preferred to be buying several million cubit feet per day of LNG from Bolivia this winter, rather than pursue coca eradication policies in Bolivia that have had little impact on drug supplies while fostering a hostile political movement?

• Much greater effective representation for Bolivia´s impoverished, excluded, indigenous and meztizo majority. In this case the cliche happens to be true -- for centuries, the Bolivian people have stood by and watched the country´s incredible raw materials -- silver, tin, iron ore, guano, rubber, and now natural gas -- being expropriated by private interests or elite-controlled state companies, while the vast majority have remained dirt poor.

  Futhermore, since the 1990s, Bolivia has been a virtual laboratory for neoliberal economics, as well as coca eradication. The country ended up with its most valuable assets in private hands, while more than half the population remained poor and inequality increased dramatically. Evo´s election sends a message, loud and clear, that Bolivians have had enough. Indeed, from this standpoint, their voting behavior is not particularly radical -- in capitalist terms, they are  simply a group of shareholders who have finally decided to show incompetent managers the door.

This  is a message that will reverbrate throughout the region -- in next year's elections in Peru, Colombia, and even Mexico, for example. This is a message that the US, in particular -- so obsessed with implanting "democracy" in the Middle East, and recently so careless about paying attention to Latin America's troubled democracies closer to home -- ignores at its peril.    

EVO'S ALLIES?

There is an old Russian proverb that says, "Keep an eye on your friends -- your enemies will take care of themselves."

Of course it is to be expected that hard-line America haters like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Cuba's Fidel Castro, as well as leading Latin leftlists like Lula and Kirchner,  will take pleasure in Evo's victory, just as many simple-minded American neoconservatives will regard it as an unmitigated setback. 

But Evo's erstwhile left-wing allies should be careful not to celebrate too soon.

In Fidel's case, the key question is, how soon is he prepared to give Cubans the same democratic rights that Bolivians have just exercized?   

In Hugo's case, the question is, is he prepared to make up all for the economic aid, debt relief, and lost exports that Bolivia will lose if it alienates the US and the international community by adopting policies like coca legalization and gas nationalization?  Isn't it just possible that he may well prefer for Bolivia's gas to stay in the ground, where it can't compete with Venezuela's proposed pipeline to Brazil and its proposed LNG exports to the US? 

In the case of Lula's Brazil and Kirchner's Argentina, the question is, are they really willing to renegotiate the lucrative gas export contracts they now have with Bolivia, helping Evo by sharply increasing the prices that they pay, while increasing their Bolivian investments? Assuming that Bolivia is going to export at least part of its gas, shouldn't it consider competitors to Brazil and Argentina, rather than continue to be a captive supplier to these monopsonists?

Overall, therefore, it is easy for Latin America's kneejerk Left to celebrate Evo's rise as yet another defeat for Yankee imperialism -- and, indeed, there is just enough truth in that story to keep the brew bubbling. 

But every day that  Evo wakes up, he needs to remind himself that it was not the Yankees who are responsible for the fact that his country is one-half the size that it was 150 years ago;  that it is not Yankees who consumed most of his country's silver and other resources; that it is not Yankees that are consuming up to 30 million cubic feet per day of Bolivian gas at prices less than a fifth of US market levels (but Brazil and Argentina -- and Chile, by way of Argentina);  that it not Yankees who are content to keep Bolivia landlocked. On the other hand, it IS Yankees who have provided Bolivia with more foreign aid per capita than almost any other Third World country since 1948 -- much of which was admittedly wasted, but much of which undoubtedly did some good. 

In short, now that Evo is President, and not just an angry outside critic of the system, he will have to take responsibility for governing, and admit that Venezuelan, Brazilian, Argentine, and Chilean imperialism -- or, indeed, Chinese imperialism --  are no better than gringo imperialism.

As I`ll argue in Part II, none of these changes will be easy for Evo to implement within the bounds of Bolivia's existing political system, with its increasing regional polarities.   

Indeed, he faces an extraordinary list of challenges -- the least of which will be to become an effective head of government.  He will need a great deal of help. The US could usefully start by lifting its ban on holding discussions with him, and by granting him a visa. 

Despite all the obstacles, it is not too early to pronounce the strong, unified outpouring in favor of this program a ¨democratic revolution.¨

And what is perhaps most striking about this particular one is that Bolivia's people have made it on their own -- without the costly outside intervention that has been required to construct Lego-democracy in other well-known energy-rich developing countries.

(c)SubmergingMarkets, 2005

BUSH HEADS SOUTHReceives Rousing Welcome In Argentina...Fox News Analysis

President Bush received an incredibly warm welcome at the 34-nation Summit of the Americas in Mar de la Plata, as thousands of ordinary people from all over the Continent turned out to hail his presence.

The effervescent US President was clearly buoyed by polls that showed that he still commands the support of an incredible 80 percent of Republicans -- otherwise known as his "base."

True, "non-base" support is reportedly a little less certain. Overall, in this week's latest polls, 59 percent expressed "disapproval," while 42 percent expressed "strong" disapproval." A quarter of the US population surveyed reported "violent morning sickness...."

However, knowledgeable insiders have called this a "temporary setback" that will be easily corrected if and when Presidential advisor Karl Rove, recently distracted by the Pflame investigation, starts covering the bases again.

The President, speaking through an interpreter, voiced optimism that "Free trade and liberal investment policies, plus a few billion dollars on defense, corn subsidiies, and our brand new military base in Paraguay" would completely change the lifestyles of the estimated 100 million Latin Americans who remain below the $1 per day world poverty line.

Said Bush, "These policies have only been tried for a decade or two. They need to be given a chance. Right here in Argentina, you've seen how well they've worked, right?"

Bush's sentiments were echoed by Vincente Fox, Mexico's amazingly popular lame-duck President, and Paul Martin, the astonishing Canadian PM, whose own popularity ratings have recently been taken to record levels by the Gomery Report, which documented the disappearance of $250 million of government funds, mainly by way of Mr. Martin's own party.

Said Martin: "We are quite pleased to have become a wholly-owned subsidiary of US multinationals. We didn't think we'd like the sensation, but it has become an experience that we really look forward to every night. You will also learn to enjoy it. Now if only the US would pay us that $3.5 billion...."

Said Fox: "Yes, it is true, millions of Mexican small farmers have been wiped out by free trade. But this criticism is baseless. Just look at all the remittances they are sending back home from the US !"

Meanwhile, the US President had an especially warm greeting from Diego Maradona, the famous Argentine soccer star, now in recovery. Maradona used a colloquial Argentine expression to describe just how delighted he is to finally have this particular American President visit his country.

Elsewhere, Cuba's Fidel Castro, who was not permitted to attend the summit, was reported to have decided to remove all restrictions on US trade and investment with Cuba, after having listened to President Bush's persuasive arguments.

Said the aging inveterate leftist leader, "I knew we were doing something wrong. Now I finally know what it was. We were way off base!"

After a prolonged negotiating session on Saturday, in which Summit delegates basically agreed to continue to debate the merits of free trade for a long time to come, Bush departed for a Sunday meeting in Brasiia with yet another embattled President, Luis Ignacio da Silva ("Lula.")

Brasilia is a pretty lonely, desolate, and distinctly un-Brazilian place on a Saturday night, because all the whores and politicians have flown back to Rio or Sao Paulo for the weekend, and one is just left with all these 1950s-vintage monuments to Brazil's cement industry. But perhaps President Bush will find a little solace taking a moonlit walk on the empty esplanades, wandering through the otherwise flat, lifeless landscape that Robert Campos once called "the revenge of a Communist architect against capitalist society."

(c)SubmergingMarkets, 2005

MOTH MADNESS!The Latest Crazy Scheme in the Hapless "War on Drugs"James S. Henry and Jeremy Bigwood

In the midst of the war in Iraq, the war on terror, and the Bush Adminstration’s war on Social Security, Americans may perhaps be forgiven for having forgotten that their government is still waging a "global war on drugs" that costs at least $30-$40 billion per year, and also causes a great deal of other political, social, and environmental damage at home and abroad.

_____________________________________________

As indicated in the adjacent chart, after more than three decades of this hallowed effort, drug enforcers have failed to produce any increase whatsoever in the real retail street price of illegal drugs.

Retail cocaine prices, for example, are much lower than when the drug war started. Similar charts could be also drawn for opium, marijuana, and the bevy of other new "designer drugs" that have been introduced in the last decades – a rational economic response to prohibition.

Of course, hard-core defenders of the anti-drug campaign may argue - just as Prohibitionist moralizers did about booze prices in the 1920s - that retail drug prices would be even lower, except for the war on drugs.

But it seems more likely that supply-side interdiction has failed to have any consistent impact, partly because improvements in drug dealer productivity – as many economists on all sides of the political specrum have predicted.

The collapse in retail drug prices is also consistent with the embarrassing fact that opium production has recently exploded in US-occupied Afghanistan.

The decrease in prices is also exactly what one would expect from a successful "decartelization" program, like the one that the US Government pursued with such fervor against Pablo Escobar, "Gacha" Orejuela-Rodriguez, and Manuel Noriega.

In the 1980s and 1990s that effort employed quite a few "drug busters," and provided endless material for TV and film scripts. But at the end of the day, it basically just helped to increase supply.

Now, after five years of saturating Colombia with chemical herbicides, the US government and their allies in Colombia have also failed to reduce the number of hectares under coca cultivation.

Indeed, the total area under cultivation in Colombia at the end of 2004 was slightly greater than at yearend 2003. Coca cultivation in Peru and Bolivia, have also recently been expanding. All this is consistent with a the "balloon" model, in which destroying coca in one place only increases the incentives to plant elsewhere.

It also appears likely that – like every other profit-motivated farmer on the planet – coca farmers, as well as cocaine laboratories and distributors, are not sitting still, but are working hard to improve per-hectare productivity.

This means they don’t require nearly as many hectares to produce a given amount of coca, as they used to. In calculating its estimates of "potential output," the US DEA assumes a constant 4.26 kilos of potential cocaine output per hectare of coca cultivation; UN "drug experts" assume a constant 3.56.

Even if we give the DEA the benefit of the doubt, however, it estimates that in 2004, Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia produced enough coca to make more than 640,000 kilos of pure cocaine. While this is 28 percent lower than the average potential output in 1996-2001, it is still enough coca to produce more than 2.5 billion grams per year of retail street-cut cocaine.

At today’s New York City street price for an "eight-ball" – $150 for an eighth of an ounce, or $43 a gram – even if just 20 percent of this potential output made it through, that’s a $22 billion annual market. Those who are waiting for supply-side interdiction to "win the war on drugs" will have to wait a long time.

Indeed, if one operative definition of insanity is to "do the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result," by this definition, US drug enforcement policy is bouncing off the walls.

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Confronting Venezuela Jeremy Bigwood and James S. Henry

                                                 Download venezuela_article.pdf

In recent months there have been mounting tensions between the Bush Administration and Venezuela’s popularly-elected, if left-leaning, President, Hugo Chavez. If this were the mid-20^th century, Latin America watchers might fear that they were witnessing the early stages of yet another US-backed coup, like those that ousted other popularly-elected, if left-leaning, governments in Guatemala (1954, 1963), Argentina (1962, 1976), Brazil (1964), the Dominican Republic (1965), Bolivia (1971), Chile (1973), and, indeed Venezuela itself (1948).

Today, more than 15 years into the “post-dictatorship” era, Latin America is still struggling to recover the disastrous long-term effects of these US-backed regime changes. These efforts may or may not have warded off socialist revolutions, but they undoubtedly produced a hit parade of corrupt, repressive dictatorships. They also persuaded a whole generation of progressive young Latin Americans that the only route to social justice was by way of violent revolution, and contributed mightily to the entire region’s excessive debts and economic regression -- and a surfeit of hostility  toward the US. 

Fortunately, those Cold War days are long gone – or are they?

 

Democracy in America and Elsewhere:Part IIIB. Campaigns, Voting, and Representation

James S. Henry and Caleb Kleppner** Download PDF Version

As we began to explore in Part IIIA of this election-season series, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the United States of America actually has a great deal to learn from other countries – especially several young democracies -- about designing and operating electoral institutions that are truly democratic. This part of the series continues our comparison with one of those countries, Brazil.

There was perhaps a time when much of the rest of the world viewed the United States of America not just as a militaristic crusader, but as a role model for advocates of liberal democracy everywhere.

These days, however, as former President Carter’s recent caustic comments about the likelihood of continued rigged voting in Florida this year have underscored, the American beacon of liberty is flickering in the wind.

Increasingly the US is viewed by the rest of the world -- and by some of its most astute internal critics -- as an arrogant, hypocritical, sclerotic plutocracy, whose own electoral institutions, as former President Carter correctly observes, are at risk of no longer meeting even minimal international standards for democratic elections.

Meanwhile, the US has the temerity to lecture other countries (as it did, for example, just this week with respect to Hong Kong) about the meaning of “democracy,” and to selectively intervene in the affairs of other countries in the name of democracy, whenever it suits perceived US interests.

As shown in Table A, this concern with democratizing the world may be a preoccupation of US policy elites, or it may just be pure rhetoric.

A recent poll by the Chicago Center on Foreign Relations shows that for the American public at large, the goal of bringing democracy to other nations ranks last on a list of fourteen major US foreign policy goals, with only 14 percent believing it to be “very important.” This made it less than one fifth as as important as securing energy supplies, protecting US jobs, or fighting terrorism. Even among policy elites, “democratization” ranked 12th on the list.

Once again, our aim here is to help Americans understand why their own electoral system has become so anachronistic and dysfunctional. We also hope to encourage them to take more interest in the rest of the world, be a little more modest, and understand that they too live in a “developing country” – one whose own particular version of “democracy” is in dire need of rejuvenation.

Democracy in America and Elsewhere:Part III: How the US Stacks Up: - A. Qualifying Voters

James S. Henry and Caleb Kleppner

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These are curious times, with President George W. Bush, long an outspoken critic of “nation-building” and the UN, now become a radical Wilsonian, declaring to the General Assembly this week his intention to establish a “UN Democracy Fund” to propagate democracy around the world.

We certainly wish President Bush much greater success than President Woodrow Wilson, who saw his own favorite proposal to “make the world safe for democracy,” the Versailles Treaty, throttled by Republican Senators who opposed the League of Nations, and suffered a stroke in the ensuing battle.

Knowing President Bush, he will probably not be dissuaded from his mission by this unhappy history, or by the fact that many other world leaders, like France's Chirac and Brazil's Lula, are now much more concerned about fighting global poverty and taxing "global bads" like arms traffic, anonymous capital in offshore havens -- an idea we first proposed in the early 1990s -- and environmental pollution than they are about neo-Wilsonian evangelism.

But of course any suggestion by the US that democracy can actually be propagated by multilateral consensus rather than by unilateral military aggression is always to be welcomed.

Before proceeding any farther with this latest American crusade to sow democracy abroad, however, it may be helpful to examine how the US itself really stacks up as a “democracy," relative to "best democratic practices" around the world.

One approach to this subject would be to start off with a comparison with other leading First World democracies like the UK or France. After all, at the outset, one might think that only such countries have the well-educated, politically-engaged citizenry, political traditions, affluence, and technical know-how needed to implement truly state-of-the-art democratic processes.

However, following the lead of former President Jimmy Carter’s brief comparative analysis of Peru in 2001, we find it more interesting to see how the US compares with younger developing democracies that lack all these advantages – much less access to the yet-to-be-created UN Democracy Fund.

In our case, we’ve chosen Brazil, the world’s sixth most populous country, with 180 million inhabitants, two-thirds of South America’s economic activity, a federal system and a long history of slavery (like the US).

As we’ll see, our overall finding is that while Brazil’s democracy has plenty of room for improvement, it already boasts a much more democratic electoral system than the United States of America.

Democracy in America and Elsewhere:Part II: Recent Global Trends Toward Democracy

James S. Henry and Caleb Kleppner

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Most Americans are probably used to viewing their own political system as a shining example of “representative democracy” – not only one of modern democracy’s original pioneers, but also a contemporary role model for other emerging democracies around the globe.

Of course we are also very proud of our free markets, our relative affluence, and our occasional ambitions -- at the moment, perhaps a bit muted -- to provide equal opportunities for all our citizens.

However, when we really try to market our country’s best features to the rest of the world, or teach our children to be proud of their country, it is not the economy that we brag about.

Even self-styled “conservatives” usually lead, not with glowing descriptions of perfect markets and all the opportunities for unlimited private gain, but with our supposedly distinctive commitment to defending and expanding political democracy and human rights, both at home and abroad.

Indeed, one of the most important official justifications for our recent forays into the Middle East, as well as many other US foreign interventions, has been to help bring “democracy” to supposedly backward, undemocratic societies like Iraq and Afghanistan (…and before that, Haiti, Colombia, Panama, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Guyana, Guatemala, Iran, Laos, Vietnam, the Philippines, etc. etc. etc.)

Even though, time and again, this noble commitment to sowing democracy abroad has turned out to be pure rhetoric, it provides such an elastic cover story for all our many transgressions that it keeps on being recycled, over and over.

THE EMERGING DEMOCRACY GAP

Whatever the truth about US motives for such interventions, it may come as a surprise to learn that in the last two decades, the United States itself has actually fallen behind the rest of the democratic world in terms of “best democratic practices” and the overall representativeness of our own domestic political institutions.

Meanwhile, many developing countries have recently been making very strong progress toward representative democracy, without much help from us.

Indeed, in some cases, like South Africa, this progress was made in the face of opposition from many of the very same neoimperialists who have lately voiced so much concern about transplanting democracy to the Middle East.

While we have been resting on our democratic laurels, or even slipping backwards, the fact is that emerging democracies like Brazil, India, and South Africa, as well as many of our First World peers, have been adopting procedures for electing governments that are much more democratic at almost every stage of the electoral process than those found in the US.

The institutions they have been developing include such bedrock elements of electoral democracy as the rules for:

• (1) Apportioning geographic boundaries for congressional districts;


• (2) Selecting candidates and conducting campaigns;


• (3) Qualifying and registering voters;


• (4) Establishing effective controls over campaign finance;


• (5) Providing equitable access to the public airwaves for campaign advertising;


• (6) Encouraging voter turnout;


• (7) Preventing outright vote fraud;


• (8) Insuring that votes are accurately and quickly counted – and, if necessary, recounted;


• (9) Insuring that voter preferences are fairly and proportionately represented in the legislative and executive branches of government; and


• (10) Enforcing other helpful provisions, like run-off and recall provisions.

Of course effective democracy has many other crucial elements beside electoral processes alone. These include (1) the relative influence of legislative, executive, and judicial branches; (2) the concrete opportunities that ordinary citizens have -- as compared with highly-organized special interests and professional lobbyists -- to influence government decisions between elections; (3) the respective influence of private interests, religious groups, and the state; (4) the degree to which the rule of law prevails over corruption and "insider" interests; and (5) the overall degree of political consciousness and know-how.

However, fair and open electoral processes are clearly a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for effective democracy -- all these other elements simply cannot make up for their absence.

We hope that increasing the recognition of this “electoral democracy gap” between the US and the rest of the democratic world will be helpful in several ways:

• It may make Americans more modest about our own accomplishments, and less patronizing toward other countries;
• It may spur us to consider that we may actually have something to learn about democracy from other countries.
• It may provide an antidote for the recent revival of anti-democratic doctrines in the US, some of have acquired a disturbing level of influence among our political elites.
• It may help to show how our own idiosyncratic version of democracy is exerting a profound influence on this year’s profoundly dissatisfying Presidential race.