LATIN AMERICA: Politics in the Khaki Embrace

Democracy wins some and loses some

In most of South America, political power is conferred by the barracks rather than the ballot box. Only two of the continent’s Latin nations (Colombia and Venezuela) are Western-style democracies; Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Chile remain under more or less strict military control. In a few countries, however, the armed forces have been trying to ease their khaki embrace—so far with mixed results.

In traditionally turbulent Bolivia, where there has never been an untainted election, the results of yet another crooked one led last week to a sudden coup. Juan Pereda Asbún, 47, an air force general, led his right-wing military followers in seizing key buildings in the city of Santa Cruz. Reason: an electoral court had thrown out the results of the July 9 presidential balloting, the country’s first election since 1966, which had established Pereda as the apparent winner. Bolivia’s military leaders, headed by General Hugo Bánzer Suárez, 52, declared a national state of siege. Then Bánzer abruptly resigned, turning over power to a junta with Pereda as its head.

Pereda had been the armed forces’ preferred candidate for President. The difficulty with the election was that he turned out to be the choice on entirely too many ballots. The electoral court noted that there were 49,412 more votes cast than there were registered Bolivian voters. Pereda had been credited with 50.13% of the total vote when the counting stopped, less than two-thirds completed.

Bánzer was partly to blame for this calamitous brush with democracy. He had wanted to put off civilian elections until 1980, but came under heavy U.S. pressure to move the date forward. The way things now stand, a 1980 election might have been the better idea after all.

In Ecuador, where the armed forces have ruled since a 1972 coup, free elections produced at least the prospect of a civilian winner. In fact, there are now two runoff candidates for the country’s presidency. The current favorite is the candidate least beloved by the Ecuadorian military: Jaime Roldós Aguilera, 37, leader of the populist Concentration of Popular Forces party (CFP). Roldós received 31% of the 1,408,316 votes cast. His closest rival in a six-candidate field was Sixto Duran Ballén, 57, the army’s favorite, with 23%. The runoff election, expected in the fall, promises to be a close one, but the real wonder is that Roldós has been allowed to campaign at all. He is the protégé of Assad Bucaram, a podium-pounding founder of the CFP, whose threatened accession to the presidency prompted the 1972 military coup. Yet Junta Leader Alfredo Poveda has repeatedly promised to respect the election results. If he does, it will mark a step forward for Ecuador, which has averaged a new government every two years since 1830, when it gained independence from Spain.

In Peru, a new national constituent assembly held its inaugural meeting last week as the country moved back toward democracy. A junta headed by General Francisco Morales Bermúdez Cerruti hopes to hold general elections by 1980. They would be Peru’s first since the late General Juan Velasco Alvarado took over in 1968 and launched a messianic crusade for a “noncapitalist, nonCommunist, socialistic, fully participatory state.” After seven years of nationalization and squandering of Peru’s wealth, Velasco was replaced by Bermúdez.

The military has since tried to get the country back on its economic feet by backing away from his particular brand of socialism, but there is a long way to go. Peru has a foreign debt of $8.3 billion, which requires 56% of the country’s export revenues to service. The country’s central bank has “negative reserves” of $1.3 billion. Annual inflation is running at 65%, and only half of the 5.3 million-person labor force is fully employed. Brutal austerity measures are required, and the military estimates that only a popularly elected government can carry them out and survive. As Bermúdez somewhat optimistically puts it: “Democracy is an inevitable condition to successfully cope with our economic problems.” ∙