A recognized public opinion poll had it in its findings: “Latin America is the most distrustful region in the world.” Latinobarómetro’s conclusive discovery comes from comparing its results with those of in the Globalbarometer surveys in other continents such as Asia, Africa and the countries of the Arab World, as well as the results of the World Values Surveys.
Latinobarómetro has made these opinion polls since 1995 in 18 Latin American countries: Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico.
They presented their last report in November 2018. Developing events in Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador make it relevant – also those that have not been solved in Venezuela and Nicaragua; the imminent elections in Argentina; the roots that continue to exert migratory pressure from the Northern Triangle towards Mexico and the United States; the violence associated with drug trafficking in Mexico: the crises that feed back into our countries.
Between June and August 2018, Latinobarómetro conducted 20,204 interviews for the survey in those 18 countries, with a 3% margin of error. They found that in Latin America trust in the public institutions did not increase and interpersonal trust registered an all-time low of 14%.
In the 2018 study, confidence in the government averaged 22%, in parliament 21% and in political parties 13%. Respondents have 24% confidence in the judiciary and 28% in their electoral bodies. Interestingly, these rates were lower than those of respondents’ confidence in the police (35%), the armed forces (44%) and the church (63%).
The perception of corruption in the region reached 65%, three points more than the previous year.
The 2018 survey asked respondents who they perceived to be involved in corruption: 51% responded that “all or almost all” members of the parliament; 50% said that it was the presidents; and 47% perceived it is the councilors or their local governments.
Marta Lagos, executive director of Latinobarómetro, called 2018 “an annus horribilis” in an article entitled “The end of the third wave of democracies”.
“The presidential authority in Latin America has suffered a strong process of questioning and erosion, where a significant part of the region considers them to be involved in corruption, as shown by the data from Latinobarómetro 2018. Governments are accused of failing to deliver on the promise of social guarantees. In other words, complaints of corruption, incompetence and poor performance weigh on democracies and their governments. It is not surprising that the approval of governments on average falls to less than half of the era of hyperpresidents, where all the faith of the democratic system was placed in the president of the republic,” Lagos wrote.
Indeed, government approval fell to 32% in the 18 countries analyzed by the survey. This was “the lowest approval rate since 1995.” Ten years ago, in 2009, approval had reached 60% and has since declined.
“Latin America’s low government approval is a good indicator of the decline of democracy. We are not talking about a government, but about governments of 18 countries that suffer from the same evil,” analyzes the Latinobarómetro report, “which is that Latin America has not been able to dismantle inequality, despite the economic growth and social mobility of a segment of the population that has allowed the existence of a new middle class.”
The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) has just identified several clear obstacles to sustainable development in the region: The persistence of poverty (30.2% of all its inhabitants, 10.2% of them in extreme poverty); structural inequalities and a culture of privilege; gaps in education, health and access to public services; lack of work and uncertainty in the labor market; partial and unequal access to social protection; the institutionalization of a social policy still under construction; insufficient social investment; and other “emerging obstacles”, such as violence, climate change and natural disasters, migrations and technological changes.
The main root of mistrust and discredit in public institutions in Latin America is this inequality, as concluded at the recent meeting “Tejedores de Confianza, vectores de la cohesión social“, organized by EuroSocial, a European and Latin American consortium for social cohesion in Latin America.
“A society in which the claims are no longer those of the poorest, but of large social or citizen majorities that have in common the asymmetries of power at all levels,” reflected on this Clarisa Hardy, former Minister of Planning of Chile and professor of Public Policy.
In her opinion – as she wrote the paper “Distrust and Inequalities: Threats to Democracy” -, reducing inequality in the region and, therefore, people’s disaffection towarsd their democracies requires guaranteeing the independence and autonomy of public powers, focusing public policy agendas on confronting inequalities of all kinds to their roots, beyond government discourses “of equal opportunities, overcoming poverty and inequities”, and fiscal policies promote more tax collection to progressively improve the distribution of the social expenditure.