America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

FOR ABOUT A DECADE, DEMOCRACY HAS BEEN ON A roll. The revolution began in Latin America, as one junta after another gave way to an elected civilian government. Then, with the collapse of Soviet communism, people power spread to Eastern Europe and much of Eurasia. In several areas of Africa and the Far East too, despotism and minority rule are on the defensive or in retreat.

Recently, however, there have been stirrings of counterrevolution. Again the early warning signs are in Latin America. In February an obscure Venezuelan army officer, Lieut. Colonel Hugo Chavez Frias, came within a hairbreadth of toppling President Carlos Andres Perez. Three weeks ago, President Alberto Fujimori of Peru pulled off an auto-golpe, or self-coup, and in effect imposed martial law.

What was most disturbing, and certainly most paradoxical, about both these flagrantly antidemocratic actions was that they had widespread local support. Just before he was hauled off to jail, Chavez, resplendent in his uniform, was allowed to make a televised valedictory. He was a great hit, not just in the fetid barrios around Caracas but in many middle-class households as well. Likewise, when Fujimori threw in his lot with his own restless colonels and put many legislators under house arrest, his popularity initially skyrocketed.

There's a lesson here: to sustain a stable democracy, a country needs more than elections and a parliament; it also needs a strong state. Once elected, politicians must be able to provide basic services to the population as a whole and to stand up to special interests such as Big Labor, the military establishment, the monied elite and organized crime. Otherwise, regardless of how legitimately they came into office, leaders will lose that legitimacy where it matters most, in the eyes of their own constituents.

That's what happened in Peru, a country burdened with appalling poverty, gaping social and racial inequalities, and a brutal, beleaguered military that is fighting two guerrilla movements and the personal armies of various drug lords. When so much of the populace fears death by starvation, disease or gunfire, the state is not just weak -- it has virtually ceased to exist. When the people see themselves as victims rather than beneficiaries of the system, they have little use for the ballot box and little regard for constitutional procedure. All they want is a modicum of safety, equity and discipline, which is what Fujimori and the Peruvian military are promising.

Venezuela is a more complicated case. It is one of the oldest democracies in Latin America. It is also, not coincidentally, one of the most prosperous nations in the region. While Peru is cursed with the deadliest of exports, cocaine, Venezuela is blessed with vast petroleum reserves.

But therein, ironically, lies part of the reason for the February coup. In the '70s, when Perez first served as President, the world price of oil tripled. Suddenly awash in petrodollars, Perez's government splurged on public $ works and inefficient state-owned enterprises. Kickbacks, bribes and currency scams became fairly common business practices. The middle class could patronize private clinics and schools. Since almost everyone had a piece of the action, few complained.

When Perez returned to the presidency a little more than three years ago, the boom was over, and he was like a reformed alcoholic preaching fiscal temperance. He cut government spending, moved to privatize industries and embarked on what was in many ways a model program for the developing world.

But like the consolidation of democratic rule, the transition from socialism to a free-market economy requires a strong state. Venezuela today barely qualifies. Perez II is saddled with the legacy of Perez I. Many of those high- visibility projects that he unveiled in his first term have become rusted and potholed monuments to governmental incompetence. The reputation for corruption that many bureaucrats, businessmen, bankers, judges and journalists acquired back in the '70s and '80s now feeds cynicism and alienation in those sectors of society that are feeling the crunch of austerity. No longer able to afford expensive alternatives, the middle class has had to reacquaint itself with the inadequacies of public health and education.

It's against that backdrop that so many Venezuelans, otherwise a sophisticated people, could hail as a hero a banana-republic primitive like Colonel Chavez.

Something similar could happen elsewhere, and not only in Latin America. Throughout the former Soviet bloc, the new leaders are asking their citizens to pay for the sins of the old regime; they are embarked on free-market reforms that entail massive hardships in the short and middle run. And they are doing all this without the benefit of a strong state. For decades, the Soviet-style state was identified with a defunct ideology and with corrupt, repressive institutions, notably the Communist Party. Now those institutions have self-destructed, opening the way for both freedom and its dark underside, which is anarchy.

In such conditions, a character like Chavez could emerge any day from the barracks, or one like Fujimori from the presidential palace, to proclaim himself the champion of the people's fears and frustrations. And it's all too easy to imagine the crowds cheering.