A deeply immobile continent whose inhabitants are trapped between sticky floors and ceilings, with a perverse effect: it prevents the poor from climbing and the rich keeps them from being poor. Peruvian political scientist Alberto Vergara takes up this damaged building theory in his latest editorial, “Defrauded Republics.” Can Latin America escape its traffic jam?, a book that served as the starting point for one of the most popular events and aroused the greatest expectations at the Hay Festival Arequipa 2023.
Added to Vergara’s academic perspective was the deep knowledge of the region of Jan Martínez Ahrens, director of EL PAÍS América, and also the mastery of the education sector of economist Jaime Saavedra, former Peruvian education minister during two terms as president. The table was moderated, with an extremely active participation in the discussion, by the journalist and linguist Patricia del Río in the auditorium of the Bar Association of Arequipa, a city that vibrated for four days with a hundred national and international guests.
The Republican promise, Vergara says, is being betrayed every day, regardless of the political stripe of the government in power. The social outbursts, the protest elections and the unrest expressed in the polls are expressions of a major crisis of legitimacy in which citizens are frustrated by the possibility of taking their lives into their own hands. “People are aware of this absence of freedom. Neither your effort nor your talent will allow you to escape from your design. Only 0.5% of those born in the poorest quintile will be able to move to the richest quintile. “Crime is the mechanism of social advancement in Latin America today,” explains Alberto Vergara.
For his part, Jan Martínez Ahrens emphasized that political change is no guarantee that the structural problems of Latinos will be solved. “Governments change, elections take place, but citizens realize that the problems repeat themselves. Variety is a necessary but insufficient condition. The citizen votes, but has no influence after voting. That is the step that Latin America is missing: a democratic effectiveness that it does not yet have,” he describes.
Education is a sensitive issue across much of the region, but particularly in Peru, where only 50% of children who complete primary school understand what they read. In 2011 the proportion was even worse: only 20%. Despite the reduction, the matter is still worrying. “Education allows us to be free. Without education you will do what you can and not what you want. We live in a deeply unfair country with teachers who do not have the minimum skills to teach children basic skills such as reading comprehension. And without this competition, they will not achieve success in their training process,” says Jaime Saavedra, who advocates for a strong state that regulates the private sector.
The economist who led the education reform in Peru, so often advocated in the halls of Congress, also pointed to the gap created during the pandemic by the government’s decision to close schools to supposedly avoid infections, even though there are There were no infections and there was no evidence. “Latin America and South Asia experienced two years of unacceptable school closures. It is two years of adolescence or childhood in which school has disappeared. It has disappeared as an element of social cohesion,” adds the education minister of the Ollanta Humala and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski governments.
From his point of view, Jan Martínez Ahrens believes that although the ideals and interests of individual nations are constantly repeated, the ideals and interests are very different. From their point of view, the lack of a common vision is the crucial point. “In Europe there is a stronger union of values than in Latin America, although several countries have different historical developments and speak different languages. The European Union embodies fundamental values of cooperation and solidarity. America is missing a goal. Something that will provide traction and ensure that Latin American countries, most of which have common elements, can overcome their domestic problems. The United States could have done it, but the United States does not share values, it imposes them,” says the director of EL PAÍS América.
In the final part of the event, Alberto Vergara drew attention to Peruvian politics and democratic decline. “If we are not aware of the process of dismantling the mechanisms that enable civilized coexistence such as democracy and the rule of law that is taking place in Peru, the more time that passes, the more we must do to engage.” We cannot believe that democracy is an artifact that can survive outside the will of citizens. An impoverished citizenry like ours. “That’s why we have to demand commitment from the elites,” he said.
The ninth edition of the Hay Festival in Arequipa has so far recorded 26,000 in-person visitors and 44,000 digital views. “The collective reflection on issues such as democracy, ecosystem protection and new ways of living in cities through thought, literature and journalism, as well as the search for new paradigms, was a very important part of this issue.” It leaves us with a lot of material and energy to focus on to prepare for a tenth celebration,” sums up Cristina Fuentes La Roche, international director of the Hay Festival, optimistically.