The Financial Times, April 22, 2004
John Authers in Mexico City
Most Latin Americans are unconvinced that their lives have improved under democracy, and a majority would prefer authoritarian rule if it would improve their economic well-being, a new United Nations report says.
Democracy in Latin America, the report from the UN Development Programme, concludes that democracy, after making startling advances in the last quarter of a century, was suffering a "profound crisis of confidence" throughout the region.
Democratic regimes needed to prove that they could successfully attack inequality and poverty if they were to be seen as legitimate, the report says. The study follows two years of research, including polls of almost 20,000 people, and interviews with 231 political and business leaders across the region, excluding Cuba.
Kofi Annan, United Nations secretary-general, described the results as "lamentable".
Judicial reform - principally to demonstrate that people other than the rich could assert their rights - was a priority. Only 17.8 per cent of people across the region thought the poor could obtain justice. In Mexico, the largest economy in the region, this figure was just 5.6 per cent.
Distrust of political parties runs rampant across the region, but 42 per cent said they accepted corruption in government as the price of "making sure things happen".
Almost all the leaders interviewed agreed that democracy had advanced in the past 25 years, and that for the first time all the countries in the region satisfied the conditions of an electoral democracy.
Support for a return to authoritarianism is strongest in Chile and the Mercosur countries - Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay.