Ambassador Heine is Chile’s former ambassador to India.
Jamaica Gleaner News – Sunday | October 12, 2008

On September 28, Ecuador approved, by a comfortable majority, a new Constitution. Over the past decade five new constitutions have seen the light in the Andean region – the broad arc that goes from Venezuela to Colombia and Ecuador all the way down the Pacific coast to Peru, and then into Bolivia. This is a big victory for President Rafael Correa, a United States-trained economist, who made the proposal of a new Constitution a key item of his election plank.

President Evo Morales of Bolivia is facing opposition to his own new Constitution in the low-land, Eastern provinces like Santa Cruz, and President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela suffered a defeat in the referendum on reforms to his own Constitution in December 2007.

Why is this happening in the Andes, rather than, say, in the Southern Cone or Central America? Quite apart from a long tradition of weak ‘stateness’, over the past three decades these countries have had difficulties in adapting to a changing global environment, unable to find a suitable niche for their exports – except for their most prized one, illegal drugs.

Poorest and hardest hit

Bolivia and Ecuador are the poorest and hardest hit, despite their valiant efforts at economic reform and to apply the ‘Washington Consensus’ to the letter and beyond. Ecuador went so far as to adopt in 2000 the US dollar as its national currency, with the predictable inflationary effect.

Bolivia and Ecuador have also been highly unstable – since 1995 Ecuador has had eight presidents, and Bolivia nine. The notion that a key problem in these countries is excessive concentration of power in the executive branch, or that the new constitutions would somehow exacerbate such an existing problem, is oxymoronic. These are countries in which the very fact of a president finishing his or her term in office is a major achievement.

As Samuel P. Huntington put it 40 years ago in his classic Political Order in Changing Societies, “There is a failure to recognise that most such countries are suffering from the absence of power in their political systems. The problem is not to seize power but to make power, to mobilise groups into politics and to organism their participation in politics.”

And this is precisely what presidents like Rafael Correa and Evo Morales are doing.

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South American leaders gathering at the United Nations this week have been touting their own new political union, which was hailed as a coming of age for the continent.

The regional leaders gathered for a closed-door meeting Wednesday of the Union of South American Nations, a collection of 12 countries.

Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, who hosted the body’s first emergency meeting last week, hailed the union as a signal that South America could finally manage its own problems.

Last week’s Santiago summit, which dealt with a political crisis in Bolivia, “tells us that the values of democracy, dialogue, human rights and peace are becoming stronger than ever in Latin America,” Bachelet said.

“It tells us that the region wants to leave behind the dark moments of its history,” she said in a speech before the UN General Assembly.

South American leaders offered strong backing to embattled Bolivian President Evo Morales at the Santiago meeting, warning the country’s opposition to refrain from staging a coup and splitting the country. The unrest in resource-rich eastern Bolivia has centred on the region’s demands for greater income from natural gas deposits and provincial autonomy.

Morales welcomed the support in his own speech before the assembly Tuesday and launched into a tirade against the United States, whom he accused of fomenting the unrest in Bolivia that has left at least 25 people dead. Bolivia earlier this month expelled the US ambassador from La Paz.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva echoed Bachelet’s remarks in his own address Tuesday. He noted that while advanced economies were battling a financial crisis, developing countries in the Southern Hemisphere were gaining strength and political power.

The South American union gave the region a capacity to find solutions to its own problems without looking to the continent’s northern neighbour, Lula said.

The bloc, launched in May, consists of Argentina,
Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru,
Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Yet the region is still pushing trade ties with the world’s
largest economy. US President George W Bush on Wednesday met with 11
Latin American leaders at the Council of Americas in New York,
launching a new forum to boost trade between the two continents.

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