From Juan Perón to Hugo Chávez and Back: Populism Reconsidered

© 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 22656 2

Shifting Frontiers of Citizenship: The Latin American Experience

Edited by

Mario SznajderLuis Roniger

Carlos A. Forment

LEIDEN • BOSTON2013


CONTENTS

Preface ........................................................................................................................ xiList of Contributors ...............................................................................................xiiiList of Tables and Figures ...................................................................................xvii

Shifting Frontiers of Citizenship: The Latin American Experience ............ 1 Luis Roniger and Mario Sznajder

PART I

SHIFTING CITIZENSHIP IN LATIN AMERICA – COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES

Alternative Models of Democracy in Latin America ....................................23 Laurence Whitehead

Latin America and the Problem of Multiple Modernities ...........................43 Shmuel N. Eisenstadt

Four Models of Citizenship: From Authoritarianism to Consumer Citizenship ......................................................................................55

Bryan S. Turner

Democracy, Freedom and Domination: A Theoretical Discussion with Special Reference to Brazil via India ...................................................83

José Maurício Domingues

PART II

CITIZENSHIP AND THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY

Identity, Social Justice and Corporatism: The Resilience of Republican Citizenship ................................................................................. 101

David Lehmann


viii contents

The Perils of Constituent Power and Multicultural Citizenship in Bolivia............................................................................................................ 133

Robert Albro

Political Citizenship and Gender ..................................................................... 155 Gisela Zaremberg

Argentina’s Recuperated Factory Movement and Citizenship: An Arendtian Perspective ............................................................................. 187

Carlos A. Forment

PART III

POPULAR PARTICIPATION AND CITIZENSHIP

The Crisis of Political Representation and the Emergence of New Forms of Political Participation in Latin America ........................ 219

Leonardo Avritzer

Popular Impeachments: Ecuador in Comparative Perspective .............. 237 Leon Zamosc

Electoral Revolutions, Populism, and Citizenship in Latin America ..... 267 Carlos de la Torre

From Juan Perón to Hugo Chávez and Back: Populism Reconsidered .................................................................................................... 289

Raanan Rein

PART IV

TRANSNATIONAL TRENDS AND CITIZENSHIP

States and Transnationalism: The Janus-Face of Citizenship in Central America ......................................................................................... 313

Luis Roniger


contents ix

Being National, Being Transnational: Snapshots of Belonging and Citizenship ............................................................................................... 343

Judit Bokser Liwerant

Exiled Citizens: Chilean Political Leaders in Italy ...................................... 367 Maria Rosaria Stabili

The Latin American Diasporas: New Collective Identities and Citizenship Practices ............................................................................. 385

Leonardo Senkman

PART V

MARKET SOCIETIES AND INSTITUTIONAL FAILURES

Citizenship and the Contradictions of Free Market Policies in Chile and Latin America .......................................................................... 411

Mario Sznajder

Institutions and Citizenship: Reflections on the Illicit .............................. 431 Deborah Yashar

National Insecurity and the Citizenship Gap in Latin America ............. 459 Alison Brysk

When Everything Seems to Change, Why Do We Still Call it ‘Citizenship’? .................................................................................................... 475

Philip Oxhorn

Bibliography .......................................................................................................... 497

Index ........................................................................................................................ 537


* This is a thoroughly revised version of my essay ‘De la Casa Rosada al Palacio de Miraflores: populismos de ayer y de hoy,’ in Antonio Hermosa Andújar and Samuel Schmidt eds. Pensar Iberamérica (Buenos Aires 2009), pp. 75–94.

FROM JUAN PERÓN TO HUGO CHÁVEZ AND BACK: POPULISM RECONSIDERED*

Raanan Rein

In an interview conducted by political scientist Anthony Peter Spanakos, a Venezuelan teacher in Barquisimeto, the capital city of the State of Lara, tried to explain the new political process under Hugo Chávez’s rule:

The proceso has affected the common citizen. Never before was there so much protagonism in the political process. Here the people were mute. They voted and returned to their house […] Now, you are not only an observer of politics, you are participating in politics […] Now [the people] think ‘I am a protagonist in my own process’ (Spanakos 2008: 528).

Almost 60 years earlier, in late 1951, Juan Perón called upon his fellow Argentines to send him their suggestions for the upcoming Second Five-Year Plan, that is, for the social and economic policies that his government should adopt for his second presidential term. The President’s call was issued under the slogan ‘Perón Wants to Know What the People Want.’ And indeed, as shown by Eduardo Elena, tens of thousands of letters and petitions were sent in from all over the country (Elena 2005). One of these letters—all of which were deposited in the Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires—was sent by a woman named Zulema, from the city of Santiago del Estero, and it is most relevant to any discussion of citizenship and political participation under populist governments in Latin America.

Zulema told President Perón how skeptical she had been in 1946 about the promises for social and economic reforms in Argentina. She showed several Peronist pamphlets to her boss, a ‘señor español,’ as she character-ized him, who replied: ‘As a project this is beautiful, señorita, but it’s a utopia, do you know what a utopia is? Well, it’s this, something one dreams but doesn’t achieve.’

After six years of Peronist rule, Zulema was less skeptical, and in her letter she put forward her opinions about national economic policy, labor relations, and public works projects: ‘Today, having learned my lesson,’ she


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wrote to the President, ‘I put before your consideration another utopia, as that señor would say, because I know that you have the power to make [it] real’ (Elena 2005: 81).

These two examples illustrate the role and social dimension assigned to the state, as well as the new model of citizenship offered by both the so-called ‘classic populism’ of the second third of the twentieth century and by the current ‘left-wing populism’ or ‘radical populism’ of leaders such as Hugo Chávez and his Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, and, to a lesser extent, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador (March 2007). These two phases of populism, with their emphasis on citizen rights and responsibilities, stand in sharp contrast to the weak and passive citizen-ship offered by liberal oligarchical politics, with the electoral fraud of the pre-populist era, or by the so-called ‘neo-populists’ of the neo-liberal 1990s.

In the 1990s, it was fashionable to speak of presidents Carlos Menem in Argentina, Alberto Fujimori in Peru, and Fernando Color in Brazil as rep-resentatives of ‘neo-populism’ (Weyland 1996, 2003; Philip 1998; Roberts 1995). These leaders tended to adopt economic policies that were favor-able to the free market. They eliminated high levels of inflation through liberal-inspired stabilization programs that had a very high social price. This was in stark contrast to the ‘classic’ populists who embraced anti-imperialist rhetoric and waved the banners of nationalization and state interventionism. Menem and Fujimori oriented their policies toward privatization and an alliance with financial organisms, whereas classic populism was characterized by its redistributive policies and defiance of the international financial system. Nowadays, contemporary populist leaders, such as Chávez or Correa, evoke much more markedly the ‘classic populism’ identified mainly with Juan Domingo Perón’s leadership in Argentina and, to some extent, the myth of Getúlio Vargas as the ‘Father of the Poor’ in Brazil and the legacy of Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico (On Vargas, see Fausto 2006; Hentschke 2006; Levine 1998. On Cárdenas, see Krauze 1999; Becker 1995; Niblo 2000).

Extensive research has been done on Latin American populism and still there is much controversy surrounding it (classic works include Germani 1978; Weffort 1978; Cardoso and Faletto 1979; Conniff 1982; and Knight 1998. More recent works include Freidenberg 2007; March 2007; De la Torre and Peruzzotti 2008; Spanakos 2008, Zanatta 2008; Di Piramo 2009). In this chapter I would like to sketch 10 key components necessary for a better understanding of present and past populist politicians and movements in Latin America and their challenge to the liberal meanings


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of citizenship. After all, as Spanakos claimed, we are talking about ‘new wine’ in ‘old bottles’. My argument is that Latin American populism has offered a new model of citizenship which is not only inclusive by nature but also encourages politically engaged citizens. Under populist govern-ments, citizenship is understood, among other things, as an antagonistic struggle against both internal and external enemies, real and imagined, who have robbed the people of their agency as citizens. Furthermore, the ability to consume has become a fundamental component of people’s identity as citizens under these regimes. A brief historical perspective of the rise of populism in Latin America seems in place here before we turn our attention to more contemporary phenomena and currents.

Classic Populism: Origins and Development

Populism is one of the most nebulous concepts in the modern political lexicon, for various reasons. First, populist movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have worn different aspects in different places (the narodniki of Czarist Russia, the late nineteenth-century US agrarian movement, and the primarily urban Latin American populism). Second, while socialists and communists of the twentieth century usually thought it important to indicate their ideological and political identity through the names of their parties, the populists did not. It is we—historians, soci-ologists, and political scientists—who must identify and classify populist movements as such.

Of course, the lack of a coherent, systematic ideology such as liberalism or Marxism does not make the researcher’s task any easier. The long, zig-zagging careers of many populist politicians compound the problem, especially in the case of charismatic leaders who changed their policies, strategies, and ideological principles over the course of several decades (for example, Perón in Argentina or Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre in Peru). However, what makes it even more difficult to differentiate populist move-ments from other political formations is that the word ‘populism’ has fre-quently been employed as a derogatory term that both right-wing and left-wing politicians throw at each other when they want to accuse their rivals of conducting policies in which considerations of short-term popu-larity outweigh those of ‘the good of the nation’ or ‘the interests of the state’.

Manifestly left-leaning researchers have also tended to adopt simplistic definitions that do nothing to elucidate the phenomenon, reducing it to


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manipulation on the part of the leaders and irrationality on the part of the followers, or presenting it as synonymous with demagoguery and corrup-tion. According to Dale Johnson, for example, populism was little more than the skilful demagoguery of bourgeois elites appealing to ‘certain non–property holding sectors of the middle class, workers, and the enfran-chised sectors of the urban mass who are able to control labor and popu-lar organizations’ (quoted in Schoultz 1983: 4).

Experts in this field have been periodically stumbling over the concept of populism for more than four decades already. In the 1960s, Ghita Ionescu and Ernest Gellner wrote:

There can, at present, be no doubt about the importance of populism. But no one is quite clear just what it is. As a doctrine or as a movement, it is elusive and protean. It bobs up everywhere, but in many and contradictory shapes. Does it have any underlying unity, or does one name cover a multi-tude of unconnected tendencies? (Ionescu and Gellner 1969: 1)

In fact, the roots of Latin American populism, like those of European fas-cism, can be found in the same political, social and cultural phenomenon known as the entry of the masses into politics (this does not mean, of course, that the two political movements are necessarily similar). In post-World War I Latin America, rapid urbanization, the development of import-substitution industries, the transportation and communica-tion ‘revolutions’, and the expansion of the state apparatus—all pro-cesses that had taken place in Europe some time earlier—began to create a new economic and social environment that provided fertile ground for the development of new ideas and new leadership. The lives of millions of people changed enormously, giving rise to great expecta-tions of expanded political participation for the entire population, improved living conditions for the working class, and a less distorted distribution of wealth.

In most Latin American countries in the early 1900s, however, the old oligarchies continued to rule, promoting, in cooperation with the eco-nomic metropolis (Great Britain or the US), an economy based on agricul-ture and raw materials for export. In general, these oligarchies refused to relinquish their monopoly on political rule or the privileges they had enjoyed in one way or another since the Latin American republics had gained their political independence in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Authoritarian regimes of various types were striving to defend oligarchic interests against the ‘dangers’ of political democratization and social radicalization. The unfulfilled expectations of the masses began to stir up social ferment.



The historian Michael Conniff divides the classic populist movements in Latin America into two periods. Those that emerged between the two world wars presented primarily political demands and sought a legiti-mate, representative government. These movements instituted a politics of the masses, but did not raise any significant social issues. In Argentina the prime example was the Radical Party under the leadership of Hipólito Yrigoyen, who came to power in 1916 (Tamarin 1999). The populist move-ments after World War II, in contrast, faced different economic and social conditions, engendered by local industrialization processes. These newer movements typically transferred their focus and resources from agricul-ture to industry, and sought to increase the working class’s share of the national income.

The new populist leaders tended to embrace greater authoritarianism in their efforts to impose the economic and social solutions necessary for national development. They struggled to mobilize voters by means of the mass media, recognizing the crucial importance of working-class support and realizing that improving workers’ economic conditions was the price they had to pay for it. The populist movements of this second period, like those of the first, crossed class lines, although most of their power derived from the support of the urban working class and the national industrial middle class. The prime example of this in Argentina was, of course, the Peronist movement, a coalition (or counter-hegemonic bloc, if you will) including various sectors of the middle class, some of the national bour-geoisie, that part of the army that advocated industrialization as a way of insuring national greatness, and, of course, most of the working class. It was accurately described by Di Tella’s working definition of populism: ‘a political movement which enjoys the support of the mass urban work-ing class and/or peasantry but which does not result from the autono-mous organizational power of either of these sectors. It is also supported by non-working-class sectors upholding an anti-status quo ideology’ (Di Tella 1965: 47). This ideology represented the protests of the excluded, marginal groups who wanted power in society to be redistributed in favor of the majority and the meaning of liberal citizenship reconsidered.

Solving the ‘social problem’ by politically and socially integrating the masses as a means of preventing revolutionary ferment among them was the very core of Latin American populism. Carlos Waisman even went so far as to argue that Peronism was essentially a counterrevolutionary movement (Waisman 1987: 168–173). Of course, this did not yet constitute a real ideology. The populist doctrines were eclectic, and often contained contradictory elements (Stanley 2008). Sometimes the lack of intellectual


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consistency is deliberate. Therefore, it might make more sense to talk about a collection or a group of values and beliefs that, although not sys-tematically organized, do reflect a certain world vision. What seemed to be ideological ambiguity stemmed, above all, from the fact that the popu-list movements were broad coalitions representing virtually all social sec-tors except the traditional elites and the revolutionary opposition.

Peronism, as a populist movement, offered non-violent solutions to some of the main problems of Argentine urban society. It rejected the oli-garchy on one hand and the socialist revolution on the other, proposing a reformist middle way that stressed statist values, namely state control of social and economic affairs in order to prevent distortions and ensure progress, yet without challenging the principle of capitalist private prop-erty. Chávez follows a similar line, despite his frequent rhetorical refer-ences to socialism. It was no coincidence that when the former Argentine president Néstor Kirschner visited Venezuela and signed agreements in the Palacio de Miraflores, Chávez’s fans shouted ‘Perón, Perón […].’

As in most populist movements, nationalism was a central component of Peronism, as was a certain dose of anti-imperialist rhetoric and, as we will show later, efforts to achieve a greater margin of economic indepen-dence. This characteristic is much more notable in the discourse and the politics adopted by Chávez (Ellner 2008; Tinker Salas 2009; Kozloff 2007).

At the same time, Peronism promised social solidarity in order to con-tend with the alienation engendered in the working class by modern industrial capitalism, particularly among the migrants who poured into Buenos Aires and other large cities from the interior of the country. Peronism glorified work and workers (Perón himself rejoiced in the sobri-quet of ‘First Worker’, and customarily participated in mass assemblies in his shirtsleeves), recognized the workers’ trade unions and encouraged their expansion, and took steps towards rehabilitating various aspects of popular culture and folklore that had previously been viewed with con-tempt by the European-oriented elites. That is, a new symbolic hierarchy of society was established. After all, the symbolic expressions of social integration and political incorporation were no less important than their material, concrete expressions.

In Venezuela, political and social elites reacted with amazement and panic to the sudden appearance of the popular masses on the political scene. Just like the mass mobilization in Argentina on 17 October 1945, the Venezuelan Caracazo in February 1989 was interpreted as an invasion of center stage by the ‘uncivilized’—the antithesis of reason and refinement



(Torre 1995; Ellner and Hellinger 2003). Once in power, the Chavistas have not limited their campaign to the economic and social spheres but have tried to reshape the cultural field as well, incorporating the indige-nous, African, and Latin American identity components into the new national identity that they have offered to the Venezuelans. In this con-text, they have also challenged the traditional historiography, reinterpret-ing the national history. According to them, history should be rewritten from the perspective of the social and popular movements, the true actors in the nation’s history and the true agents of the Venezuelan nation. Ellner and Tinker Salas have convincingly shown the contemporary efforts to question, for example, the passive image of the Venezuelan people during the years 1830–1936 (Ellner and Tinker Salas 2007). In any case, as in other places and for other reasons, the Chavistas have often resorted to manipu-lating nationalist sentiments along with the nation’s history, in order to further unite their base of support. One example is the previously men-tioned public ceremony at the Palacio de Miraflores, when Chávez referred to himself and to Kirchner as ‘the sons of Bolívar and San Martín’s embrace in Guayaquil,’ and asserted that ‘those two giants are demanding from us today that we continue the path we embarked on several years ago.’ As Carlos Malamud has pointed out, Chávez wanted to unify the myths of the two Liberators, Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín, in the context of his own political project of continental integration (Malamud 2006). How-ever, what Chávez preferred to ignore is that the embrace at Guayaquil marked the moment at which the two heroes of Latin American indepen-dence in fact parted ways, since it proved impossible for them to share leadership in the war-torn region. Their personalities, as well as their political visions, were incompatible. Therefore, San Martín opted for silence and exile in France, as far as possible from the political conflicts and manipulations of his rivals.

In their discourse, the populist charismatic leaders, from Perón and Vargas to Chávez, have assigned new meanings to the key words and con-cepts of their respective political cultures (Laclau 1977; 2005). Perón radi-cally changed the connotations of words previously used to denigrate different social groups, such as descamisados (‘shirtless’), turning them instead into the essence of the new Argentine identity (James 1998). Like most populist leaders, he incorporated colloquialisms and other elements of popular culture into his rhetoric: Buenos Aires slang, verses from Martín Fierro (the epic poem of José Hernández, considered a typical example of the gauchesco genre), and direct or indirect allusions to familiar tango lyrics. In mass meetings, Perón attacked the established elites and the


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antinational oligarchy, thereby boosting his followers’ sense of dignity and self-esteem. According to the sociologist Álvarez Junco,

by convoking them as ‘a people’ and describing them as ‘the backbone of the country’, the populist leader gives them a sense of community and a set of beliefs that protect them against the helplessness engendered by modern life, and against the annihilation of the religious view of the world and the traditional ties and ways of life (Alvarez Junco 1994: 27).

Certainly the working class’s great and enduring loyalty to Peronism can be attributed to this combination of material improvement in workers’ lives and the fostering of a strong sense of symbolic dignity, of being an important and inseparable part of the Argentine nation.

José María Velasco Ibarra in Ecuador and Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in Colombia also tried to dignify ‘those from below’ (‘los de abajo’), giving new meanings to insults directed at the lower classes, such as ‘chusma’, and establishing these social groups as the essence of the nation (Braun 1985; De la Torre 1993; Tahar Chaouch 2009). In the case of Venezuela, many Venezuelans’ loyalty toward Chávez—as well as the opposition’s hatred and hostility—appears, for the time being, to be no less pro-nounced than that expressed by Argentines toward Juan Perón (as dem-onstrated by his recurring electoral victories). This has led the Venezuelan political commentator Manuel Caballero to remark that as in the case of the Argentine leader, only a military coup could put an end to Chávez’s regime (Caballero 2008).

The Dialogue between Past and Present

Here, then, are the ten basic characteristics of populist movements and governments, over and beyond their efforts towards the social, political, and economic incorporation of the masses as citizens in Latin America. The order of these characteristics is irrelevant for two basic reasons: a) populist leaders often have very long political careers and in different periods they emphasize different elements; and b) the order would vary as we analyzed the populist experience of Perón, Vargas, Haya de la Torre, Chávez or Correa and certainly in any evaluation of Evo Morales and his government.

1. Relying on statism and state interventionism in the economy and in all spheres of public life, together with a certain degree of autarky. The basic assumption is that only the state can regulate social relations and prevent any chaos resulting from distortions in the



distribution of the national pie, thus ensuring progress. In most cases, these proposals and policies are put forward without chal-lenging the principle of capitalist private property. Therefore, although Ernesto Laclau called socialism ‘the highest form of popu-lism,’ revolutionary groups often oppose populist governments. In cases where they initially support these governments, they end up gradually moving apart from them, willingly or not. A good example might be the conflicted relationship between Juan Perón and the Montoneros, which reached complete rupture in 1974. Already back in 1944, at a meeting with a group of businessmen, Perón had char-acterized his social program as a ‘preventive revolution’ that in the medium and long term would benefit them as well. Do Chávez’s or Evo Morales’s policies and the so-called ‘socialism of the twenty-first century’ aim at a different goal nowadays? I doubt it. This socialism looks more like state capitalism than anything else, with the traditional emphasis on import substitution industries. Indeed, the Chávez government has modified its previous definition of the rights of private property ownership. Its policy of taking over uncultivated land and companies that have closed down, while pay-ing owners compensation based on what is claimed to be their mar-ket value, reveals a new definition of private property that stresses social responsibility. This concept contrasts with the massive expro-priations of socialist revolutions. At the same time, although classic populist governments employed a similar discourse on the social responsibility of private property, they limited expropriations to strategic natural resources. All populist governments tend to pres-ent themselves as revolutionary. However, although they might depose ruling elites or weaken their power, they do not fundamen-tally change the social order.

2. In this context, I would like to highlight the fact that populist efforts to include previously excluded groups in the economic sphere are noticeable in the area of consumption in general and food con-sumption in particular. As Eduardo Elena has shown for the Argentine case and Spanakos for the Venezuelan case, both Perón’s and Chávez’s policies of economic distribution have encouraged consumption, and being able to consume has become a fundamen-tal component of people’s identity as citizens. Juan Carlos Torre and Elisa Pastoriza viewed this policy as part of what they termed ‘the democratization of well-being’ in the Argentina of the 1940s and 1950s (Torre and Pastoriza 1998).


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The image of a happy working-class family enjoying a plentiful meal was prominent in Peronist Argentina. ‘From the beginning of the Peronist administration,’ says Natalia Milanesio, ‘food consump-tion was both a significant object of state policy and a central com-ponent of official propaganda’ (Milanesio 2010: 75). Indeed, by giving preference to internal consumers over external markets, Peronist food politics (in particular, beef politics) contributed to the elabora-tion of ideas about empowering the poor, as well as about economic sovereignty.

3. A strong nationalist element, which emphasizes economic sover-eignty and evinces anti-imperialist and anti-American undertones. In the 1946 Argentine elections, the slogan ‘Braden or Perón’ (Spruille Braden was the U.S. ambassador in Buenos Aires at that time) helped Perón win the elections. Chávez, for his part, used a wide variety of unflattering names and adjectives to describe President George W. Bush—‘donkey’ or ‘the devil’ being the most polite (Eastwood 2007). Meeting with President Barack Obama in April 2009, Chávez gave him a copy of Uruguayan intellectual Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. The book, originally published in 1971, offers, among other things, a critique of U.S. intervention in Latin America. By the end of 2009, Chávez was already accusing Obama of continuing Bush’s satanic policies. Perón’s nationalization of the railways in mid-1940s Argentina and Chávez’s petroleum and steel policies can be seen as part of their efforts to establish sovereignty over the country’s major natu-ral resources and industries (Ellner 2008; Kozloff 2007; Tinker Salas 2009). Nationalist rhetoric can be directed by populist leaders against various external enemies, real or imagined, such as U.S. imperialism or Communism, Protestantism or Freemasonry, global-ization or the International Monetary Fund. Nationalism is a key component even in these times of globalization, and it brings the ‘nation’ back to a prominent position just at a time when the ‘trans-nation,’ or perhaps no nation at all, is often an unquestioned assumption. At the same time, solidarity campaigns with other ‘oppressed’ peoples or countries form part of the inherent anti-imperialist dis-course of populist movements and regimes. If Argentina initiated the Plan Perón in order to extend a helping hand to Francoist Spain, excluded from the Marshall Plan (Rein 1993), Chávez purchased



parts of the Ecuadorean and Argentine debts, sold Venezuelan petroleum at a discount to friendly countries, and has supported the FARC in Colombia and the Zapatistas in Mexico, among other groups. The most ambitious program to counter neo-liberalism and U.S. policy is, of course, the ALBA initiative, aiming at closer eco-nomic cooperation, incorporating advanced social content, among Latin American countries.

4. Populism’s progressiveness is combined with a deep anti-liberalism, especially anti-liberal forms of representation in the name of one kind or another of a supposedly direct or participatory democracy. This has often led populist leaders to seek a purported ‘third position’, as well as manifesting blatant anti-Marxism. In Argentina, the slogan was: ‘Ni yanquis ni marxistas, peronistas’ (‘Neither Ameri-cans nor Marxists, Peronists!’). The anti-liberalism I speak of here applies to the economic, social and political realms. This does not mean that we can talk of a coherent, systematic populist ideology, such as liberalism or Marxism; on the contrary, the heterogeneity of the populist movement’s social base makes this impossible. Furthermore, populist movements are generally less concerned with doctrinal purity and class-consciousness than the traditional left.

5. The presence of a charismatic, and often authoritarian, leader. The concept of charisma derives from a Greek word usually translated as ‘gift of grace’. The term is commonly defined as a special quality, power, or talent that gives its possessor various abilities, the first of them being the power to inspire passionate popular support for a mission or for the possessor’s own guidance in human affairs (Simonton 1984). Populist leaders often exploit their sexual attri-butes (machismo). In fact, many of them—like Juan Perón, Juan Velasco Alvarado, Omar Torrijos, and Hugo Chávez—have military backgrounds and are thus identified with an institution that claimed for decades to represent national unity and viewed itself as the guardian of national sovereignty. The case of Eva Perón (Evita), who epitomized a feminine charismatic leadership, was exceptional. Many populist leaders have also highlighted their ethnic origins or features (populist leaders are often mestizos). This has fed a certain racism on the part of the elites, who already tended to despise the cholo. A case in point is that of Augusto Leguía in Peru in the 1920s, or the more recent cases of Gutiérrez in Ecuador and Chávez in Venezuela.


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The charisma of the populist leader has inspired a great many works that either glorify or demonize the Líder Máximo, tending to see his influence behind any move or policy. The omnipresence of leaders such as Perón or Chávez in the printed and electronic media and public spaces contributes to this impression. Still, sometimes we have to regard these charismatic leaders as a general metaphor under which various competing groups operate (to borrow from Ian Kershaw’s works on Nazi Germany).

6. In the case of Chávez, his weekly television show, Aló Presidente, serves to legitimize and rehabilitate popular culture, as well as reaf-firm indigenous African and Latin American identities. And this is an additional characteristic of populist movements and govern-ments. The new constitutions of Venezuela and Bolivia reflect these efforts to reshape collective identities. Populist movements and gov-ernments also seek to challenge traditional historiography and rein-terpret their countries’ past. In this respect, what they are in fact doing is questioning the image of their people as supposedly passive during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

7. A supposedly direct link between the charismatic leader and the masses that obviates the intermediary role played by established political parties. It also leads to the formation of heterogeneous mass movements that differ from the more organized democratic parties. I consider this supposedly unmediated relationship a myth. Many appear to have fallen for the populist rhetoric about such a bond. As a result, many scholars have, in fact, contributed to the personalization of Latin American politics and the way they are understood. Even if in the formative stages of their careers, Perón and Chávez eschewed the institutionalized party channels while turning to diverse social sectors, neither leader could avoid the need to establish alternative channels of mediation in order to mobilize popular support (Rein 2008). It is the task of researchers to identify these alternative channels, which might be persons, associations or institutions (more on this in the next section). This belief in the direct link between the charismatic leader and the masses strengthens the false description of populist regimes as being characterized by only top-down politics. In fact, various schol-ars have shown that there is an important bottom-up component (Ellner 2007), which explains Latin American populism’s durable legacy in ‘shaping the political arena’ (as pointed out by Collier and Collier 1991) and imbuing the concept of citizenship with new



meanings. In Venezuela both the trade unions and the community councils, and even several of the Círculos Bolivarianos, represent fascinating examples of political involvement, and display more autonomy than might be expected (Fernández 2007; Hawkins and Hansen 2006; Arenqs 2004. On Correa’s 2006 election campaign, during which he blended classic populist discourse with forward-looking appeals for change, see De la Torre and Conaghan 2009). Peronism, for its part, would not have survived the fall of the popu-list regime in September 1955 without an important bottom-up component.

8. Constant instigation towards social polarization and an effort to maintain permanent tensions are inherent in this form of govern-ment, with its permanent political campaign (De la Torre 2008). Society is divided between la patria (the Fatherland) and the anti-patria, or vendepatria. This is a false dichotomy, a Manichean vision of the struggle between utmost goodness and utmost evil, where all those who do not side with the leader or with the regime incarnate the anti-patria and are considered allies of the oligarchy, foreign interests, and imperialism. In such circumstances, the legitimacy of political opposition and a free press is denied, while open social confrontation and the polarization of society are fostered. In this context, citizenship is understood as an antagonistic struggle against both internal and external enemies who have robbed the people of their agency as citizens. These enemies might be the oligarchy or local elites, the United States, world capitalism, globalization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, neighboring coun-tries such as Colombia, or even the State of Israel. Luis Roniger recently pointed out the way Israel and Israeli actions in the occu-pied territories are portrayed in official discourses and the Venezuelan media (Roniger 2009). Loris Zanatta has recently introduced a religious element into the discussion of populism. For Zanatta, populism represents ‘the mod-ern transfiguration, to some extent secularized and adapted to the era of popular sovereignty, of an old social imagery, an essen-tially religious imagery’ (Zanatta 2008). Zanatta highlights—with some exaggeration, in my opinion—the religious inspiration of populism:

[T]he Manicheism of Latin American populism reveals its inseparable link with an ever more vital and concrete religious universe, especially among the masses—a universe whose symbols and liturgies, which populism has


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made its own, have appeared and often still appear to these masses more familiar, significant, and understandable than the complex institutional mechanisms of the estate of law, which are generally reserved for the world of the social and cultural elites. The heir, conscious or not, of Catholic-based organic imagery from the colonial era, but at the same time profoundly modern by virtue of its legitimation in popular sovereignty, populism secu-larizes it to the point of claiming to be the founder of a new creed, sustained by a kind of moral fundamentalism and ideological exclusiveness (Zanatta 2008: 39).

9. A predominance of clientelism that presupposes a discretionary use of the State’s budget and public funds, violating, more often than not, the limits of legality. Within the realm of politics, clien-telism is associated with the mobilization of votes and support in exchange for jobs and other material benefits. Clientelism in this sense undermines the institutionalization of public account-ability and mechanisms of administrative control. At the same time, as various scholars have stressed, clientelism might be ‘sensitive to local sentiment, may solve existential problems, provide access for migrant populations, and serve political entrepreneurs’ (Roniger 2004: 355; Auyero; Gay; Barozet). At any rate, populists do not have a monopoly on clientelism or corruption in Latin America. Clientelistic practices and patronage-ridden politics are a result of the limitations of state power and the absence of the rule of law in Latin America. State authorities in these countries often do not protect the majority of the population and typically provide unequal access to state resources. For this rea-son, common citizens have to look out for themselves via informal activities, law infringements, tax evasion, or bribing state agents and officials. These phenomena have to do with the following and last component of populist movements and governments.

10. The final characteristic is little respect for legality and liberal demo-cratic norms. The rule of populist leaders, past and present, is char-acterized by a growing authoritarianism, as well as increasing manipulation of the mass media in order to mobilize voters and supporters. This does not mean that we can ignore the nature of populism as an important democratizing force that has mobilized various social sectors previously excluded; but we should differenti-ate between earlier stages of populist movements, when this dimen-sion is more pronounced, and later stages, especially following their rise to power, when their authoritarian face becomes more apparent.



Here we should also emphasize the electoral nature of populist regimes. They constantly seek an electoral mandate from ‘the people’. Chávez, for example, was a candidate in or presided over 11 elections in 11 years, ‘including consultative elections about whether to hold a constituent assembly, voting on the new constitution, a referendum to revoke the president’s mandate, and a vote on proposed constitutional amendments’ (Spanakos 2008: 528). Perón for his part participated or presided over presidential elections in 1946, parliamentarian elections in 1948, elections for an assembly to revise the constitution in 1949, an additional presiden-tial election in 1951, and another round of parliamentary elections in 1954. From this narrow perspective only, citizens in both Argentina and Venezuela thus had the opportunity to take a more active part in the polit-ical process.

The electoral or plebiscitary nature of populism reflects its ambiguous relations with liberal democracy. For some people, populism represents the democratization of Latin American societies, since the masses feel they have become active participants in the political process. For others, it represents the biggest threat to democracy in the region, since it does not respect the procedures and institutions of liberal democracy, nor does it respect the civil rights of its rivals. Certainly the efforts to include large sectors of society—the poor, the excluded, the non-whites—in the public sphere and assure them of some participation in the political process can-not be ignored. At the same time, there is an almost inherent authoritar-ian tendency in the populist movements of Latin America. Populist governments reiterate the supposed identification of ‘the people’ with their political leader, and therefore almost any opposition is considered to betray the popular will, incarnated in the figure of the charismatic leader. In addition, populist movements and governments have privileged alter-native forms of political participation, such as marches, mass political gatherings, popular assemblies, or the occupation of public spaces, and they do not allow room for pluralism and dissent (De la Torre 2008; Arditi 2005; Canovan 1999).

Populist movements were in vogue in the 1940s and 1950s throughout Latin America. However, since the Cuban revolution and up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba and its leader, Fidel Castro, represented for many the only option for profound social change. Populist movements lost much of their appeal and Castro himself expressed his reservations about them. In recent years, things have changed and, paradoxically, Castro, or at least his public image, has become the strongest supporter of those politicians and governments


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that are most attuned to populism, such as Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, Rafael Corea, and Ollanta Humala. It is precisely in the support provided by Castro that we might find a political explanation for the abandonment of the search for a Third Position in favor of the rhetoric about ‘socialism of the twenty-first century’, which, like Peronism, reveals a significant dash of Christianity.

Challenging the Commonly Held Assumption of the Supposed Direct Bond between the Charismatic Leader and the Masses

Nearly all research on charismatic authority emphasizes the existence of an unmediated bond between the charismatic leader and the masses, but this approach, in my view, is inadequate, and should be reassessed with respect to Peronism as well as other past and present populist leaders, including Hugo Chávez. Douglas Madsen and Peter Snow, for example, have written an important book that transfers the focus from the charis-matic leader himself to the masses that support and empower him. They define the concept of charisma as:

an influence relationship marked by asymmetry, directness, and, for the follower, great passion. Asymmetry means that the leader has profound influence on attitudes and behavior of the following but that the opposite is not true; the following does provide the all-important empowering responses […], but its other influence on the leader is muted. Directness means the absence of significant mediation of the relationship, by either formal structures or informal networks (Madsen and Snow 1991: 5; my emphasis).

Edward Shils, in an earlier but no less important work, characterized pop-ulist movements as those that recognize the supremacy of the people over every other standard and desire a direct relationship between the people and their leader, unmediated by institutions (Shils 1956: 98. For a recent example of the persistence of this assumption, see Mansilla 2009).

Many of the works that speak of the direct relationship between the leader and the masses also refer to the ‘irrationality’ of the masses’ devo-tion. This irrationality is attributed to actors who ‘did not correctly see what their ‘true’ self-interests were, for reasons of emotionality [or] false consciousness’—as though the ‘true’ interests of any particular social group can always be determined.

Just as the argument à la Gino Germani concerning the supposed divi-sion of the Argentine working class in the early 1940s does not help us



understand the broad support Perón enjoyed in 1945–1946, in my view the notion of a direct and unmediated bond between the charismatic leader and the masses does not help us understand the development of the Peronist and Chavista movements and their doctrine. My own research indicates that the various historians studying Argentina have fallen into the trap of believing the Peronist rhetoric concerning this alleged bond, and have ignored almost completely the intermediary role of people from various social and political sectors who contributed, in their own respec-tive ways, to the mobilization of support for Perón, the structuring of his leadership, and the development of the justicialist doctrine. Although admittedly Perón did not use well-established party and institutional channels to mobilize support and to transmit messages to the masses in the years 1943–1946, it cannot be said that he dispensed with mediating agents and was able by himself to create a direct and sustained bond with the masses and rally them for his own purposes.

Although Madsen and Snow, like Edward Shils and others, do see a point at which the relations between the charismatic leader and the masses are mediated, in their view this point comes only later—after the leader becomes head of state—during the ‘routinization’ of charisma: ‘Routinization,’ they say, involves the gradual transformation of charisma from a direct, concentrated, and emotionally intense relationship to an indirect, dispersed, and less passionate one.

As I have contended elsewhere, however, these intermediary roles do not emerge as a result of success, since success is not possible without them. Accordingly, the view that the intermediaries and the specific way they built up power and prestige became a relevant issue only after Perón was sworn in as president in June 1946 (and some claim only after his overthrow in September 1955) will hinder any understanding of the process that shaped Peronism as a movement and a doctrine in the three years between June 1943 and Perón’s ascension to power in June 1946.

Some researchers of populism see Perón in the guise of a nineteenth-century caudillo, perhaps as a result of propaganda disseminated by the enemies of Peronism during Perón’s rule, which portrayed his regime as a new edition of the dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas. However, the image of Rosas cannot reasonably be transplanted to the situation and conditions of a society in the midst of post-World-War-II modernization. The direct bond with the masses that was possible in a proto-urban, pre-industrial society was no longer possible in the Argentina of the 1940s or Venezuela of the 1990s.


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For the masses to be moved by the charismatic leader’s rhetoric and thereby induced to vote him into power, they had to be prepared first by intermediary agents, which in Perón’s case were neither the veteran par-ties nor the organizations already deeply rooted in local political life, but rather a variety of relatively new persons and organizations that emerged shortly before his rise to power; after he assumed the presidency, these were augmented by assorted government agencies. Historiography, which has devoted so many pages to Perón and the woman at his side, Evita, has so far hardly mentioned the role played by the second line of Peronist leadership. Such personalities as Juan Atilio Bramuglia and Angel Borlenghi served as important liaisons in the mobilization of working-class support and in the definition of the social content of Peronism; Colonel Domingo Mercante helped Perón maintain his hold on both the Argentine army and the labor unions; the industrialist Miguel Miranda promoted Peronism among the new national industrialist bourgeoisie; and the ideological background José Figuerola had brought from Spain helped him strengthen the nationalist and corporativist orientations of the justicialist doctrine.

As time passed, Perón himself fell for his own rhetoric, and began to believe that he did not need any help to mobilize mass support. He saw himself as the incarnation of the will of the people, which went above and beyond all persons and institutions. He gradually got rid of most of the people who had played important roles in his rise and the consolidation of his power, including Bramuglia, Mercante, Figuerola, and Miranda, and surrounded himself instead with yes-men who had no independent sup-port bases or mobilizing ability of their own—what Guido Di Tella once described as the ‘very personalist, arbitrary practices that had cost him [Perón] so much […] in terms of respectability and public acceptance […] the inevitable characteristic of a charismatic leader who cannot tolerate any competition whatsoever’ (Di Tella 1983: 108).

In my view, this behavior probably contributed to a certain detachment on Perón’s part from what was happening in society. But, more than that, it was one of the factors in the atrophy of Peronism in power, and its con-version from reformist populism to authoritarian populism, leading ulti-mately to the overthrow of the regime. In this connection, a distinction should be made between two kinds of intermediary bureaucracy: repre-sentative bureaucracy, in which functionaries enjoy status and prestige in their own right and belong to different social sectors; and purely techno-cratic, functional bureaucracy, in which functionaries have no ties with different sectors or any real power of their own, but serve merely as tools



in the hands of the leader for the purpose of ruling the people. When a regime is based on this second type of bureaucracy, it is cut off from its original social base, and the masses grow increasingly alienated.

I contend that focusing on this ‘second line’ of intermediary support might provide a valid model for measuring similar regimes. This method could probably be applied to the Chávez regime as well. We should look for the mediators who coordinated his initial victory in the elections and helped establish him in power, besides shaping the populist Bolivarian doctrine, eclectic in nature as it is. Carlos de la Torre was correct in his conclusion as to the need to explain the concrete mechanisms by which leaders mobilize followers and in his discussion of brokers as intermediar-ies between populist politicians and the poor (De la Torre 2008). However, it seems to me that this is only part of the picture: it still leaves a huge, unmapped gap between the charismatic leader and the masses. The net-works described by De la Torre appear to operate at the local level—bro-kers helping to get access to a hospital bed or providing information about where to go in order to request a favor. It is as if at least one level is still missing between national politics and the local networks. There is a need for additional research on people and groups in the trade union move-ment, the armed forces, business sectors, the media, and various political organizations and their role in shaping ideology and mobilizing popular support: the chavista parties Podemos, Patria Para Todos, and the ortho-dox Communist Party. Steve Ellner did some pioneering work on Chávez and radicalized workers’ groups. Kirk Hawkins and David Hansen made a later attempt in this direction with their article on the Círculos Bolivarianos (Hawkins and David Hansen 2006), although they tend to emphasize the clientelistic and instrumentalist nature of these circles.

Conclusions

Populist leaders continue to be the major protagonists of Latin America’s political history even at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century. Concepts and terminology associated with populism once again permeate the lexicon of this region’s analysts.

Latin American populist movements, past and present, have offered a new model of citizenship that has challenged both traditional liberal and more recent neo-liberal concepts of citizenship. This populist model of citizenship not only is inclusive in nature, but it also encourages politi-cally engaged citizens. Not in vain does the new Venezuelan constitution,


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adopted in the year 1999, declare the country ‘a participatory and protago-nistic democracy’. Citizenship is also understood as a constant struggle against both internal and external enemies who have robbed the people of their agency as citizens.

Populist regimes adopt the statist model of an interventionist state in all spheres of life. State capitalism and an emphasis on import substitu-tion industrialization characterize these regimes, rather than socialism. The ‘moral people versus corrupt elite’ dichotomy is central to their ideology.

As mentioned earlier, the ability to consume has become a fundamen-tal component of people’s identity as citizens under populist govern-ments. Moreover, the nationalist character of populist regimes inclines them to anti-imperialist rhetoric and action. In this context, solidarity campaigns with other ‘oppressed’ peoples are important. This was true of Peronist Argentina in the 1940s and 1950s, as it is true for Chavista Venezuela since the 1990s.

Latin American populist movements are not a mere reflection of one stage or another in the political and economic development of a peripheral region; consequently, they have not disappeared from the political scene. At the same time, explanations which tied the rise of pop-ulist movements to crisis circumstances have tended to view populism wrongly as a transitory phenomenon, a parenthesis in the development of the continent. As Alan Knight has correctly emphasized, populism has existed in ‘normal’ as well as ‘crisis’ periods (Knight 1998: 227). Scholars and politicians who announced the death of populism were proved wrong time and again. By now it is clear that this is a recurrent phenom-enon that will not disappear as long as social and economic conditions do not change, the rule of law remains shaky, and social gaps continue to yawn.

In other words, as long as the state does not improve the situation of the poor and the excluded, thus reducing dualism and generating the con-ditions for the expansion of citizenship, populist movements will con-tinue to be attractive to large sectors of the population. Antagonistic rhetoric and the Manichean confrontation between the ‘people’—a con-cept constructed in an authoritarian and exclusive way—and the ‘oligar-chy’ will also continue to be popular. Moreover, it would be erroneous to regard populism as merely a political style or strategy devoid of social con-tent. It should be viewed as a proposal that can, under certain conditions, contribute to a renovation of democracy and to the effort to deal with the deficits and limitations of liberal democracy.



At the same time, populist movements can easily become increasingly authoritarian. Since they consider the leader as the personification or redeemer of the nation, they deposit in his hands all responsibility for the future of the country and do not tolerate any criticism of the way he runs the state. Like the classic populism of Perón or Vargas, Chavismo is characterized by ambivalence toward liberal democracy. It does respect some of the rules of the democratic game, but not all of them. And it insists on the Manichean view of politics and society as an antagonistic struggle, an ethical and moral conflict between ‘the people’, incarnated by its leader, and the oligarchy. After all, ‘the people’ have no single voice, and their interests are heterogeneous and often conflicting. However, populism cannot be reduced to mere demagoguery and manip-ulation on the part of a charismatic leader. In the radical populism of Chávez, as well as in classic populism, the popular sectors take advantage of the opening of the system in order to fight for agendas that go far beyond efforts to mobilize support from above; in so doing, they contrib-ute to the persistence of populism in Latin America (Waisman and Rein 2005).

Populism’s criticism of the elites and glorification of the common peo-ple promote the integration into the political process of people hitherto little interested in politics, and in this way may help revitalize the demo-cratic ideal. The goal is to encourage the common people—who are gen-erally unable to find institutionalized channels to express their will—to participate in the political game. To a certain extent, the antagonism between the masses and the oligarchy serves to maintain public debate about alternative social and economic policies, guarding against the false belief that the current social and political order is the best solution for everyone. Obviously, however, populist governments all too often exceed this point and leave no space for pluralism.

Finally, populist movements have added ethnic nuances to the con-cepts of citizenship. With their emphasis on collective rights, they have often opened their arms to people of minority ethnic groups, such as Asian immigrants, Jews, and Arabs, not just indigenous people or people of African descent. Populism appears to have created an atmosphere in which diasporic citizenship is legitimated, and this has been part of the challenge to liberalism, with its emphasis on individual rights (Rein 2009; Senkman 2006). The ethnic aspect of populism is, in general, a topic that has received no attention from scholars in the field, and is one that deserves further research, especially since populism clearly continues to be a driving force in Latin America.

From Juan Perón to Hugo Chávez and Back: Populism Reconsidered

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