Democracy is under stress around the world from authoritarians and dictatorships—even as citizens make steady and historic progress in advancing newer forms of participatory and direct democracy, said a panel of democracy scholars and practitioners at a Zócalo/Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy event, titled “Should Global Democracy Become More Direct?”

The four panelists appeared together via live-stream from their home countries, all touching the Pacific Ocean—Chile, Mexico, Taiwan, and the U.S.—and told stories of democratic setbacks and advances from Brazil to Switzerland, and from Turkey to Latvia. But they focused on tools of participatory and direct democracy that allow citizens themselves to set budgets, determine government spending, enact laws, and amend constitutions.

“Direct democracy is a real opportunity to move away from, and imagine bigger, than the status quo,” said panelist Shari Davis, the California-based executive director of the Participatory Budgeting Project, which works across the U.S. and around the world to help communities make democratic decisions in the times between elections.

The evening’s moderator, Noēma Magazine executive editor Kathleen Miles, pressed the panelists on ways that direct democracy—which can refer broadly to popular votes on issues—can be used both for good and for ill.

Davis, the Participatory Budgeting Project leader, said that communities and nations, in trying to democratize and move past previous traumas, “are up against really oppressive systems … and those systems defend themselves very well.” Nevertheless, she noted that participatory budgeting had advanced rapidly from its beginnings in Brazil 30 years ago. Today, participatory budgeting, which refers to processes in which everyday people decide budgets for their communities’ regions, is practiced around the United States and the world. As people participate directly in democratic decision-making, they learn and make advances, Davis said, pointing to a current project in the Phoenix public schools where students themselves reimagine and redesign the policies and budgets for their school safety.

When evaluating direct democracy, it’s important to remember that different countries do direct democracy differently, said the Uruguayan political scientist David Altman, another panelist, who teaches at Catholic University in Santiago, Chile, and is a leading scholar of direct democracy globally. The details of the process—from how money influences the voting to how courts protect minority rights when people vote on issues—matter greatly.

It’s especially important to be aware of the source of a proposal for a law or budget or constitution for direct democratic vote. “Does it come from the citizens from a process of signature gathering? Or does it come from the authorities?” Altman asked, pointing to recent troubling votes, from Russia to Guinea, in which leaders used referenda to lift limits on their own terms.

It’s common to experience both democratic progress and regression at the same time and place, said panelist Greta Rios, founder of Mexico City-based youth participation group Ollín. She noted that Mexico City was supposed to enact a new participatory democracy law, but that she had to sue when the local congress failed to act and also stripped away the existing law. Rios won the lawsuit. “One of the lessons I learned is that powerful citizenship can really help us,” she said.

But Rios also noted that, under the label of direct democracy, leaders can do very anti-democratic things. She criticized the way Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador uses “consultas” that don’t meet democratic standards to advance his populist agenda. Recently, he’s been demanding a referendum on whether to prosecute his presidential predecessors.

In response to a question from Miles about whether direct democracy represented tyranny of the majority, Rios quipped, “I would love to feel under the danger of the tyranny of the majority.” Even as politicians try to use participatory processes, too few everyday citizens are participating. Greater citizen participation in direct democracy is the way to improve the process, she suggested.

The fourth panelist, Michael Kau, a former Taiwanese diplomat and Brown University professor who founded the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, talked about Taiwan’s uneven progress in advancing democracy over the past 30 years. The process can be frustrating, he said. A 2003 law establishing the referendum in Taiwan was so weak that it was dubbed “The Bird’s Cage,” with real democracy being the confined bird.

A 2018 update of the law opened up direct democracy and occasioned nationwide votes on multiple measures. But there have also been setbacks, including Chinese interference in democratic politics. “In some ways we are making progress,” he said. “In some ways there is still a lot of confusion.”

“We are still debating a lot how the law can be more liberalized, and reasonable,” Kau added.

The event closed with a wide range of questions from the moderator and from the online audience, who tuned in from around the world. In response to a question about whether the U.S., which has never had a national referendum, should allow such votes, Davis of the Participatory Budgeting Project said that the public’s desire to make decisions is clear, but that the country also needs to change its systems and culture to make sure democratic votes on issues are accessible to all, and advance equality and inclusion.

“We can’t get it right unless those voices that have historically been excluded are centered,” Davis said.

Other questions involved how to keep direct democracy from infringing on human rights (Altman pointed to a pre-vote check on measures in Bolivia), about internet signature gathering for petitions (Kau said there was progress in Taiwan), direct democracy’s growth at the local level, and how to create more space and time for people with difficult jobs and caregiving obligations to participate (Davis said that the best ideas for including more people come from listening to communities).

A final question involved the global problem of climate change, and whether direct and participatory process could create a global democratic process for collective action and legislation.

In response, Altman, author of two leading books on direct democracy worldwide, said “it’s absolutely something that sounds cool,” but that it’s impossible at the moment because the world lacks global institutions to make such a process fruitful.

In democracy, Altman concluded, “there is no silver bullet. Representation has its problems. Direct democracy has its problems. Every aspect of democracy has its problems.”

The post For Global Democracy, These Are the Worst of Times, but Also the Best of Times appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But for Hitler, this air of imminent national revolution had come too soon—because no one yet realized that he should be Germany’s natural leader.

This was his own fault. For years, he had steadfastly refused to be photographed and had not given anything about himself away in his speeches. Instead, he had relied solely on the power of his voice to create a following for himself. And while his carefully choreographed speeches had been sufficient to turn him into the enfant terrible of Bavarian politics, Hitler concluded that his chances of becoming the face, or at least a face, of the national revolution were close to nil if people did not even know what he looked like.

So he went to the opposite extreme—producing picture postcards of himself and distributing them widely.

Hitler’s radical recasting of his public image in 1923 went further than that—and said a great deal about the kind of leader he was aspiring to become. A garden-variety demagogue might have simply created an outsized image for himself, an inadvertent sort of cartoon. Hitler did something more sophisticated. He made the case for a new kind of leader, and created a semi-fictional alternative version of himself that would fit his own job description.

To sell the idea that he was Germany’s savior-in-waiting, and to boost his profile outside of Bavaria, he wrote a very short autobiography to be published together with a selection of his speeches. In the autobiography, he told the story of how his experiences as a young man provided him with revelations about the nature of politics that would allow him to save Germany from misery and make it safe for all times.

But publishing such a self-aggrandizing portrait would have repelled Germany’s traditional conservatives, so Hitler searched for a writer with impeccable conservative credentials willing to pretend to have written the book. Doing so would come with a double payoff: Hitler’s shameless act of self-promotion would be concealed, while the impression would be created that he already was in receipt of widespread support among traditional conservatives.

This led Hitler to Victor von Koerber, a blue-eyed and blond young military hero and writer. A North-German aristocrat, von Koerber was attracted by the promise of a new conservatism fused with the youthful idealism of National Socialism.

The book—published under the title Adolf Hitler, sein Leben, seine Reden (Adolf Hitler: His Life and His Speeches)—was banned soon after publication, limiting its intended impact. Yet the book sheds light on how Hitler—in a moment rife for demagoguery—managed to rise to the top against all odds.

Hitler often paid lip service to the myth—which tends to be believed by historians to the present day—that he was only “a drummer” who was doing the bidding of others and had no ambitions to lead Germany into the future. But in the book, he put into the mouth of Koerber his own determination that he was “the leader of the most radically honest national movement […] who is ready as well as prepared to lead the German struggle for liberation.”

Hiding behind Koerber’s name, Hitler could get away with pronouncing himself Germany’s “messiah.” His autobiography-in-disguise repeatedly uses biblical language, arguing that the book should “become the new bible of today as well as the ‘Book of the German People.’” It also directly compares Hitler to Jesus, likening the purported moment of his politicization in Pasewalk to Jesus’s resurrection:

“This man, destined to eternal night, who during this hour endured crucifixion on pitiless Calvary, who suffered in body and soul; one of the most wretched from among this crowd of broken heroes: this man’s eyes shall be opened! Calm shall be restored to his convulsed features. In the ecstasy that is only granted to the dying seer, his dead eyes shall be filled with new light, new splendor, new life!”

Given that he wrote this stuff, Hitler’s need to pretend to be a mere “drummer” is simple: He had to square the circle. On the one hand, he desired to put himself in a position to head a national revolution. On the other hand, Germany’s conservatives had their own political ambitions. Hitler could only advance by pretending that he would be their tool, while attempting to create the impression that his support among them was already larger than it really was.

The Hitler of this episode belies the common misconception that he was a primitive, raging, and nihilistic dark elemental force. Rather, he was a man with an emerging deep understanding of how political processes, systems, and the public sphere worked. His study of propaganda techniques while serving in World War I had provided him with an appreciation for political narratives that would help him plot his way to power.

Getting Koerber to release his autobiography helped Hitler create a politically useful narrative. By making the case for a new kind of leader, without explicitly naming Hitler, it insidiously created the public perception of a gap that only he could fill: a man without a pedigree coming out of nowhere with an innate gift for seeing the hidden architecture of the world and hence to build a new Germany. In short, Hitler cleverly exploited the way the German political system and the public sphere worked, so as to build a place for himself.

Demagogues come in several varieties, from populists with no genuine core beliefs to ideologues of various political convictions. They include rational as well as irrational actors. Some are figures who know when to retreat to moderation, and others never know where to stop, thus planting the seed of their regime’s self-destruction. The problem is that it is only in hindsight that we can tell how any specific demagogue will develop.

Koerber and other conservatives thought that they simply could use Hitler. But they did not understand, at least in 1923, how the common language and style of demagogues-in-the-making looks very similar at the beginning, while their inner selves vary greatly. Unlike many others, Koerber of course knew how clever a political operative Hitler was, but the young aristocrat could not really see into Hitler and misjudged him.

When confronted with emerging demagogues, in moments when people yearn for strongmen and novel kinds of leaders, history thus cannot tell us until it is too late whether an individual is a Hitler, a Franco, a Lenin—or, for instance, a populist who, while flirting with authoritarianism, ultimately manages to withstand its seduction.

Victor von Koerber eventually learned the hard way that the person he had imagined Hitler to be when lending his name to him was a very different man from the one who would rule Germany. He grew disillusioned with Hitler in the mid-1920s after seeing how he presented himself once his trial (in the wake of his failed putsch) had finally transformed him into a public figure.

In the late 1920s, Koerber began issuing warnings about the dangers Hitler posed to the world. But by then, it was already too late to stop him. Once the Nazi Party was in power, Koerber helped a prominent German Jew to get out of the country. And then Koerber began to feed the British military attaché in Berlin with intelligence. Koerber ultimately landed in one of Hitler’s concentration camps, which he barely survived.

The post When Does a Garden-Variety Demagogue Become Dangerous? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Humorous protest is a very sophisticated—and even tricky—tool to deploy against authoritarian regimes. As Hannah Arendt wrote in On Violence: “The greatest enemy of authority … is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.” But laughter has political advantages as well as limitations, as I have discovered while studying its impact in Serbia and in my home country, Thailand.

Serbia offers a striking example of how humor can be used to resist an oppressive government. In the 1990s, this southeastern European nation faced numerous crises stemming from the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, including wars with newly independent neighboring countries, international sanctions, surging domestic crime rates, and the fearsome rule of Slobodan Milošević, the president of Serbia and, later, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Many civic groups took to the streets to challenge the rule of Milošević, who retained strong support among rural Serbians. A heavy NATO bombing campaign in 1999 and mounting international pressure had weakened Milošević’s authority.

Members of the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) or Red Shirt cheer for news report of the by-election at Lumpini park in Bangkok, Thailand, July 2010. About 200 UDD members took part in the gathering to show their unity and to defy the country’s security act. Photo by Apichart Weerawong/Associated Press.

But it took the subversive humor of the Otpor movement (the Serbian word for “resistance”) to finally oust Milošević. Otpor did satirical street theater, parodic protests, and carnivalesque events—all of which were fun and easy to participate in. One of their most famous street skits was “Beating of a Barrel.” In the middle of Belgrade’s busy pedestrian streets, activists placed an empty petrol barrel with an image of Milošević on it. They invited passersby to hit the barrel with a stick they provided. Soon people were lining up to beat the barrel to show their resentment toward the regime. These actions conveyed a critical message to the Serbian public: Milošević was not to be feared, he was no longer legitimate as a leader, and there was a political alternative to him.

As the confrontation escalated, Otpor ratcheted up the ridicule. When the regime baselessly accused Otpor of being a terrorist organization, the activists didn’t respond by defending themselves with words, but instead dressed up in theatrical military uniforms and paraded around toting toy rifles. The crews walked through the streets ignoring traffic signs. Afterward, they proclaimed ironically, “This is a terrorist act because we didn’t obey the traffic sign. This is the kind of terrorists we are.”

Otpor also organized rock concerts and parties (sometimes joined by celebrities) to encourage people across Serbia to imagine a different Serbia without wars, poverty, and political instability. In October 2000, the persistent nonviolent campaigns waged by Otpor and other opposition parties helped remove the weakened Milošević from power. Leading activists from Otpor continued their nonviolent crusades, transferring knowledge of nonviolent protest strategies to other movements in countries such as Ukraine, Georgia, Lebanon, Iran, the Maldives, Burma, and more recently Egypt.

A member of the UDD or Red Shirt puts makeup on her face as a dead person at Lumpini park in Bangkok, Thailand, July 2010. Photo by Apichart Weerawong/Associated Press.

A decade later, humorous tactics showed up in Thailand, an unlikely spot because it’s a place where anti-elite jokes and gossip are considered weapons of “the weak.” But in 2010, a loosely-organized movement emerged that used humor to shake up a society that has been politically and economically dominated by the monarchy, army, and aristocratic elites for decades. Since the early 2000s, an alternative, democratic political party has gained increasing support. It was led by Thaksin Shinawatra, a Thai businessman who served as the country’s prime minister for five and a half years before being overthrown in a 2006 military coup. The party’s supporters, from the rural North and Northeast of Thailand, where inequality hit hardest, are sometimes known as the Red Shirts.

The political establishment saw this as a threat, mobilizing their partisan supporters—who became known as the Yellow Shirts—to the street, increasing the bitter political polarization that still grips Thailand today. In 2010, pro-establishment government forces cracked down on the anti-establishment Red Shirts, raising fears that the protesters would morph into an armed underground guerrilla group. Others worried that the government’s new draconian laws prohibiting public assembly would silence all opposition.

Out of this frightening moment came a group named Red Sunday. Led by Sombat Boongnamanong, a social activist, freedom fighter, and former theater performer, Red Sunday’s activities were intended to create a friendlier public face for opposition activities that wouldn’t run afoul of the government. They fused everyday activities (such as dining, donning certain outfits, shopping, and exercising) with political protest. In this way, Red Sunday’s demonstration did not look exactly like a conventional protest, except that they often used the color red.

An unidentified Belgrade boy holds a plastic toy gun mocking police officers in Belgrade, Serbia, May 2000. Members of the pro-opposition student group Otpor, or Resistance, gave out flowers to policemen and appealed for their restraint in the worsening government crackdown on political opponents. Photo by Darko Vojinovic/Associated Press.

One of Red Sunday’s most memorable skits was an aerobic dance at the biggest public park in Bangkok in July 2010. Around 400 participants dressed in red sports outfits and ghost makeup intended to remind the public of the crackdown that had taken place few months ago. Like other park visitors, they gathered for a group aerobic dance routine popular among Thais. But theirs was unusual. The “instructor” led them in dancing to Red Shirt songs and in different silly steps that made the multigenerational crowd laugh and captured the attention of passersby. At other times, protesters would dress as ghosts, walk downtown, and hop on the monorail, reminding other passengers of the regime’s repressiveness. Protesters also would meet up for a picnic in a public park, go shopping at the mall en masse, or ride bicycles through Bangkok streets.

Red Sunday’s small acts of defiance carved out a space for political activism in a time of repression and despair, and normalized the act of resistance for Thailand’s middle class, which has traditionally supported the political establishment. The regime would have appeared ridiculous if it had cracked down on a bunch of aerobic dancers. This tactical advantage, called the “dilemma action” because of the bind it places the leadership in, is particularly useful for activists trapped under authoritarian—and unimaginative—rule. Red Sunday’s playful actions paved the way for the resurgence of the anti-establishment movement, which won an important electoral victory in 2011.

The experiences of Serbia and Thailand show how humor can be deployed differently, and toward different ends. In Serbia, Otpor used humorous protest actions in a systematic way, with a well-crafted strategy of nonviolent defiance, with hundreds of local chapters across the country attracting broad-based support. As a result, as the number of humorous events increased, their impact was multiplied. In contrast, Thailand’s Red Sunday was an ad hoc group working on a smaller scale.

Serbian children play with flour around an activist of the anti-government group Otpor, or Resistance, during a protest action entitled “Let’s spice up the food,” meant to bring awareness of the importance of Yugoslav national elections in September 2000 in Belgrade. Photo by Darko Vojinovic/Associated Press.

More importantly, while Otpor used humor offensively, Red Sunday used it defensively. Otpor wanted to step up the political momentum to topple Milošević and transform the Serbian political landscape. Red Sunday’s humor, on the other hand, sustained nonviolence as a movement when the Red Shirts were on the brink of becoming militarized, a transformation that could have undermined their long-term goals by provoking another government crackdown.

But the two campaigns also had a lot in common. Both helped reduce fear among the populace and induced participation in protest activities. They also drew media attention to protest movements, increasing publicity and political momentum. And they reversed the effects of repression by exposing the incongruity between a regime’s claims and the reality of its rule.

Finally, both demonstrate how humorous protest can offer a space for utopian enactment: encouraging people to imagine other political possibilities through parties, concerts, and festivals. This ability to imagine is extremely crucial for social change. People can be politically submissive if they think there is no alternative and change is not possible.

For activists, there are no limits to the supply of humor—after all, it comes from deep within our different cultures—but there are limits to how it can be used. Joking “with” others rather than “at” others is important, as is knowing what crosses the line and violates norms, and what does not. Jokes do not fly if they are out of context. Activists who know what, culturally, triggers laughter can use that knowledge to their advantage, even against the most seemingly omnipotent governments.

The post To Defy a Dictator, Send in the Clowns appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On June 1, after more than five months of discussion with the Polish government elected in October 2015, the European Commission issued an opinion expressing its concerns over the new conservative government’s packing of the country’s constitutional tribunal and changes to the public broadcasting law.

Compared to Venezuela, which has suffered from a steady two-decade-long erosion of its democratic checks and balances, Poland’s peccadilloes are pretty small stuff. Since his assumption of the presidency in 1999, former president Hugo Chávez and then his handpicked successor Nicolas Maduro (elected with a slim 1.5 percent margin in 2013 after Chávez died from cancer), have diminished democratic institutions, politicized the state, harassed and imprisoned political opponents, and closed down independent media.

In 2004 Chávez and the Chavista-dominated National Assembly expanded the supreme court from 20 to 32 judges, packing it with partisan jurists. Lower courts have suffered the same fate. Opposition mayors and local governments found their funds cut and the creation of parallel pro-Chávez offices showered with resources from the once-flush (back when oil prices were high) federal government. Independent media were shuttered for trumped up reasons or passed to mysterious pro-government owners in inflated buyouts. Independent journalists and political opposition leaders have been harassed and attacked by the government and by state-created private militias, such as La Piedrita, los Tupamaros, Simón Bolívar y Alexis Vive. In 2014, the sexual assault of a university student sparked national protests that led to more than 40 deaths, the arrest of more than 200 opposition politicians and well-documented charges of arbitrary detentions and torture by state security forces.

There appeared a slight ray of hope in December 2015 when the unified opposition bloc—defying a biased electoral system—won what appeared to be a supermajority of two-thirds of the National Assembly.

The hope, though, was short lived. Before the new legislature could be seated, the pro-government electoral commission refused to accept the victories of the deputies from Amazonas province (three of whom were opposition and one Chavista), alleging pre-electoral violations, thus denying the opposition its super majority. And since the new legislature has been sworn in, the reduced opposition majority has seen its bills rejected by the supreme court and the executive branch, including a bill to provide amnesty to political prisoners and one for a presidential recall referendum.

Today, there are more than 100 political prisoners in Venezuelan jails, including one of the leading opposition figures, Leopoldo López, who was indicted for sending “subliminal messages”—yes, you read that right—to supporters allegedly inciting them to violence. López has since been declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. At the same time, the economy is in shambles, with GDP expected to contract by more than 7 percent this year and inflation expected to hit four digits.

The only constitutional means of resolving the country’s deep polarization and the unpopularity of the government is a recall referendum triggered by 20 percent of voters. Earlier this year, citizens collected several million signatures requesting such a referendum. The effort, though, has been mocked by the president and vice president and the decision of whether to allow citizens to continue to collect more signatures is in the hands of the solidly pro-government electoral commission (the Comision National Electoral—CNE).

Venezuela’s slide into authoritarianism has elicited hardly a collective peep from the region’s many multilateral organizations, almost all of them purporting to defend democracy and human rights. In fact, Latin America and the Caribbean may have the distinction of being the most heavily networked, multilateralized, summit-oriented region in the world. There’s the 70-year-old Organization of American States (OAS) and its Inter-American system of human rights, the Southern Cone Common Market (MERCOSUR), and the more recent creations of the Union of South American Republics (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC)—all of which count Venezuela as a member, and are supposedly committed to defending and protecting democracy and human rights.

There were two reasons for the muted response to Venezuela’s drift away from democratic rule. First, all of those hemispheric democracy clauses are couched in a traditional respect for national sovereignty and an aversion to intervention in the affairs of other countries. When there were any rumblings of concern over the situation in Venezuela or the need for credible election monitors, Chávez, Maduro, and their allies in the region immediately raised the flag of national sovereignty and accused critics of being interventionists doing the bidding of the gringos. Unfortunately, the long history of U.S. interference in the region and a misstep by the Bush administration to embrace an anti-Chávez coup in 2002 gave the Venezuelan government fertile ground for those fevered conspiracy claims.

Luis Almagro during his inauguration as OAS Secretary General in 2015.

But it wasn’t always this way. Not long ago the OAS established a series of unambiguous resolutions to safeguard democracy on the continent. The first, Resolution 1080, adopted in 1991, committed the organization to convene its permanent council in the event of an interruption of the constitutional order (read: a coup) for a country’s possible suspension from the organization, and the imposition of sanctions by the other member states. The OAS has acted on this resolution in Haiti (1991), Peru (1992), Guatemala (1993), and Paraguay (1996).

Over time it became clear that the greatest threat to democracy was no longer the old bugaboo of military golpes but the erosion of democracy from within—of elected presidents steamrolling the checks and balances of power, intimidating free media, and shutting out opponents. In response, in 2001 the OAS approved the Democratic Charter, recommitting the regional body to the same steps as Resolution 1080, but this time defining democracy as representative democracy and detailing the set of transgressions, such as an attack on freedoms of the press, that violated representative democracy.

Problem was, the lines are fuzzy, and it has been difficult to determine at what point measures that diminish the independence of media or the judiciary should trigger collective action. The Charter’s target transgressions lacked the clarity of a coup, and the OAS, as a body of presidentially-appointed ambassadors, tends to favor executives. Indeed, until now the Charter has only been invoked in cases of the removal of presidents. This is made all the more difficult by OAS rules and tradition that the body’s decisions need to be made, if not unanimously, then by consensus—meaning that any government that may be sympathetic or tied to a rogue elected president could effectively veto any concerted regional action.

The emergence of leftist governments across the region in the aughts, elected after Chávez in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, and elsewhere on the continent, also added a solid bloc of support for Venezuela’s “Bolivarian” government within the OAS and other multinational bodies. Whether through ideological affinity with Chávez’s self proclaimed 21st Century government or a deep-seated resistance to anything that appeared to be pro-American interventionism, this new crop of left-of-center governments turned a blind eye to the transgressions of the Venezuelan government. At the same time, through an oil-giveaway program to the energy-strapped countries of the Caribbean and Central American, the Venezuelan government has bought for itself a loyal bloc of opponents to any efforts to punish the regime for its autocratic transgressions. The few tepid efforts to raise a debate over human rights violations in Venezuela were effectively stymied by Venezuela’s Caribbean client states and allies, ranging from the Dominican Republic to Saint Kitts and Nevis and Saint Lucia and every country in between in the Caribbean Basin—each of them, by the way with one vote in the Permanent Council giving the bloc 18 votes.

The regional consensus that led to Resolution 1080 and the Democratic Charter has frayed, due to a weak definition of representative democracy, ideological feuds, and greed. Nothing meaningful has ever been done by the OAS to raise concerns about the democratic deterioration in Venezuela.

That is until now. Political changes throughout the region—the election of a conservative president in Argentina eager to redirect his country’s foreign policy away from Caracas and closer to Washington, as well as the crisis within Brazil’s ruling Labor Party—have undercut regional support, and tolerance, for Venezuela’s anti-democratic antics. At the OAS, meanwhile, a more aggressive Secretary General, Uruguay’s former foreign minister Luis Almagro, has also begun to speak out. In the lead up to Venezuela’s 2015 legislative elections, Almagro raised his voice over allegations of voter intimidation and vote-buying. His concerns provoked the usual name-calling by Maduro (who referred to him as “trash”), but helped turn global attention to the pre-electoral violations occurring and may very well have ensured a relatively balanced ensuing electoral process.

The OAS leader hasn’t backed down since. Last month, Almagro complained about the escalation of state violence in Venezuela and the growing possibility that the government was going to thwart the recall referendum. Maduro responded with the usual vitriol, accusing the OAS Secretary General of being an agent of the CIA, provoking from Almagro a surprisingly sharp open letter that not only opened with the direct, undiplomatic statement “I am not a CIA agent,” but also accused Maduro of attempting to deny “the people that [referendum] vote,” making him “just another petty dictator, like so many this hemisphere has had.”

In this public and not-so-diplomatic spat, Almagro exercised his authority under Article 20 of the Democratic Charter to convene the permanent council to consider sanctioning Venezuela for its anti-democratic actions. Almagro, in sharp contrast to his immediate predecessors leading the OAS, had aggressively asserted his power to invoke the Charter. This week, the organization’s Permanent Council will hold a long-overdue discussion on the state of democracy in Venezuela, but any further action will need to overcome the still solid bloc of Venezuela’s allies in the region (such as Bolivia and Ecuador), and the institutional quirk that requires full consensus on any action.

Will regional shifts and the leadership of a clearly strong-willed (and possibly thin-skinned) secretary general be enough to finally force a course reversal to shore up the hemisphere’s collective commitment to democracy, and to do something about Venezuela’s downward spiral? Whatever the outcome of the OAS Permanent Council’s discussions this week, the damage has already been done. Nearly 20 years of Chavismo have left Venezuela on the brink of becoming a failed state, home to one of the worst economies in the world; armed forces deeply involved in narcotics trafficking; federal, state, and local governments effectively gutted; and a deeply polarized population.

Ultimately, it will be Venezuela’s neighbors that will have to deal with the inevitable chaotic aftermath of this period. But imagine what could have been if they, like the EU’s actions regarding Poland, had started challenging Venezuela early on over its rule-of-law distress signals.

It may or may not be too late to shore up Venezuela’s democracy, but there is still time to renew this hemisphere’s commitment to democratic principles and set limits on flagrantly undemocratic and destabilizing behavior in the future.

The post Latin America Is Finally Acknowledging the Crisis of Democracy in Venezuela appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.