According to recent surveys 55% of the people polled said they would support the replacement of a democratic government with an authoritarian one…
Mi reflexion: One of the main problems is corruption in a short time horizon of some politicians and rent seeking groups. When I 'v talked about corruption with some people from Guatemala (and the Dominican Republic) they claim that politicians “should steal... but not too much”, “some of them exaggerate and take money without limit”. This idea reflects a deeper problem.
To faced the problem we should work in two fronts: the economic one: generating the incentives for people not to be corrupt and look for long term growth, this imply the generation of mechanisms to enforce the law. The other front is the moral one: we should generate mechanisms to establish tipping points around the right ethical decisions.
Some Latin American countries are captured in a vicious cycle where corruption is in many instances the way the game is played. The question is: can the Latin-American countries get out of the circle without an external shock? Or can they move forward smoothly toward democracy… two steps forward, one step backward…?
Democracy is pretty young in some countries anyway. As an approximation of constitutional democracies: Guatemala, 1986, Argentina, 1983; Colombia, 1991; Chile, 1990; Dominican Republic, 1994-96?; Ecuador, 1996; El Salvador, 1994; Costa Rica, longest lived, 1949. Let's give this child the chance to grow up.
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