RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Covid-19 health crisis has aggravated the low levels of support for democracy and the disenchantment with governments that most Latin American citizens displayed before the pandemic, according to the Latinobarómetro survey released on Thursday (7).
“The situation was very serious before the pandemic, but this has been exacerbated,” said Marta Lagos, director and founder of Latinobarómetro, a survey on the political climate and democracy in the region.
According to the survey, conducted in 18 Latin American countries, support for democratic regimes peaked in 2010, at 63%, after which it began a decade of generalized decline to reach 49% approval in 2020, one percentage point more than the year before.
The countries in the region with the highest levels of support for democracy are Uruguay (74%), Costa Rica (67%) and Chile (60%), while those with the lowest are Panama (35%), Ecuador (33%) and Honduras (30%).
However, 70% of Latin Americans reported being dissatisfied with their governments, a mark well above that of 2017 (58%), while 25% said they were pleased.
Among the main deficiencies are the perception of governing for a minority, the unequal distribution of wealth and the differences in access to Justice, Education and Health, the report pointed out.
In parallel, in 2020, support for authoritarianism fell from 15% to 13%, which shows “a very slow drop in support for this type of regimes,” Lagos added, with Paraguay, Mexico and Ecuador as the countries that most support this idea.
“In order to increase support for democracy, a change in the rules is required,” added the chief economist of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) for Latin America Marcela Meléndez. “It is crucial that from the streets we demand a regulation of the operation of lobbies and campaign financing that now prevent the transition to equitable societies,” she said.
“THE DECADE OF PROTESTS”
According to Lagos, the coming decade will be the “decade of protests,” in which the citizens of many countries in the region “will vindicate the vulnerabilities of democracy and demand more civic and social rights.” “The pandemic was a hiatus that in fact further exacerbated problems and inequalities. The demands are still there and when we return to normalcy, protests will be resumed,” she said.
According to the report, some 60% of the population is willing to march for better education, health and other basic services.
In parallel, the region will face the “threat” of populist governments, albeit not of coups d’état or military regimes, which according to the survey have been gradually losing adherence until now having only a minority support.
Brazil is one of the main countries at risk of having a populist government, Lagos said, while Ecuador and Colombia are the most susceptible to protests, as well as Honduras, Guatemala and Paraguay.
Chile has the challenge of organizing the demands through the constitutional reform process it is currently undergoing, which was presented as the political path to ease the 2019 social crisis, she added.
Latin America is one of the world’s most unequal regions and, with over 45 million people infected and almost 1.5 million Covid-19 deaths, one of the most affected in health and economic terms by the pandemic.
The Latinobarómetro survey interviewed more than 20,200 people over 18 years of age in 18 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, a representative sample of the over 600 million inhabitants.
This survey was conducted between October 26 and December 15, 2020 in 17 countries in person and between April 26 and May 16, 2021 in Argentina, remotely due to Covid-19 restrictions, and the error margin is 3% plus or minus.