Somos una revista independiente que sobrevive gracias a tu apoyo. ¿Quieres ser parte de este proyecto? ¡Bríndanos un café al mes!
Mariza Bafile
Mariza Bafile - viceversa magazine

The destruction caused by populism

The recent elections in Ecuador compel a deep reflection. After 10 years of government by the current President Rafael Correa, the country has returned to the polls with many wounds, and with few remedies for old and new problems.

Every time a populist comes to power, with all the force of his/her overwhelming personality, an aggressive speech, thousands of promises and convinced of being the only messiah capable of righting the wrongs of his/her country, we look for the causes that have led him/her to the presidency. And those causes always exist. It is unavoidable.

Politics condition and decide our lives; they are also therefore the great culprit of all our dissatisfactions. Almost all societies incubate many evils: poverty, corruption, social differences, unemployment; evils that are breeding ground for frustrations, rages, disappointments, fears, that populist leaders use as a launching pad.

Unfortunately, as easy as it is to explain the reasons why they rise to power, it is also possible to predict wounds, often deep fractures that a government in the hands of populism will leave behind. Due to survival reasons the populist needs to lie: during the electoral campaign, making unfullfilable promises; when choosing the guilty one he needs to justify his failures; when speaking of his/her achievements, with figures and statistics built ad hoc.

To sustain this world of lies the first thing he/she does is to try and silence the press that exposes the nakedness of the king.

It is the ritornello, spiced with insults, threats, retaliation of various genres, that we have witnessed in recent years in many countries of Latin America and, in particular, in Venezuela, Argentina, Nicaragua and Bolivia. It is what we are seeing also in the United States. Here, in the country par excellence of the free uncensored press; of journalism that has exposed scandals such as the Watergate, the White House closed its doors to several important media and accused them of being the great enemies of the people.

Correa has not been an exception. The verbal violence he has used, during his Saturday programs, against several journalists, cinema operators and humorists, addressing them unnecessarily by their full names, have been a constant. Freedom is too big a word for any populist and authoritarian government.

Vulgarity, rude language, neighborhood-thug attitude are features accompanying politicians who, through their example, facilitate the emergence of a society that does not know the rules of respect, decency and tolerance.

Little by little they inoculate the virus of hatred, fear, resentment, envy; and far from overcoming the problems for which they were elected, deepen the divisions and rely on them. Society starts changing, political opponents become personal enemies, friendships are lost and families are divided.

Thus, after a long populist government, the countries in the vast majority of cases face problems as serious as or worse than those that they had hoped to solve one day, because the old evils add a trail of wounds difficult to heal.

And when they return to the polls, the official candidates face radical opponents, the result of the hatred of the harassed and oppressed minority. It is a dangerous pendulum that, moving from one end to the other, produces devastating telluric failures within societies.

The recent elections in Ecuador have exposed those fractures fed by President Correa, who has behaved all the time with the arrogance of a foreman rather than the diplomacy of a Head of State. Although the official candidate Lenin Moreno seems more given to the dialogue and has tried to create a profile very different from the one of Correa, there is much mistrust among its opponents. On the other hand the opposition candidate, the conservative Guillermo Lasso, scares the other half of the country, which fears a government «for and by the rich».

The three days delay of the electoral power in announcing the official results deepened the climate of tension and mistrust; aggravated, later on, by the shadow of the military.

After ten years of populist rule, Ecuador has plunged into an economic crisis, due to the fall of oil prices; but, above all, due to poor management and corruption that expanded as a metastasis in the years of the fat cows.

The next round of presidential elections will take place on April 2. On that date the Ecuadorians will decide on the next course of the country. The only thing desirable is that little by little the fractures can be healed to recover a country where the free press and the diversity of opinions are respected, without neglecting policies that reduce poverty, inequality and corruption. A way up that, whoever becomes the new President, will have to face.

In the midst of so much uncertainty, the statements of President Correa arrive as a shrill dissonance, assuring that, were Lasso to win, he would feel obliged to leave Belgium – a country in which he intends to spend some years – to return to Ecuador and resume the struggle Against capital, imperialism, the international right, and so on, etc., etc. He is certain that nobody else can do it better than him: Once again, he shall have to «sacrifice» himself for the common good.

Populists’ egos definitely know no limits.

Hey you,
¿nos brindas un café?