What Lies Ahead for Latin American Liberty?

    

The flourishing of liberty worldwide clearly derived much from its resilient Iberian rootstock. Like all tangled growths, however, the process has been anything but consistent or uniform. Liberty, especially in Latin America, is in a precarious position today and it is not at all clear where the trend lies. While there are beacons of hope, they stand in a fog of repressive, kleptocratic statism. Vast human and natural resources are lost in the gloom.

What will the next century bring in terms of liberty’s prospects, especially in the Spanish-speaking world? A Peruvian Uber driver working the airport circuit in Washington, DC gave me perhaps the clearest account: he said that the primary obstacle holding back freedom in Latin America is “police who steal.” And he is right: abstract cultural attachments to liberty are one thing, but it requires a robust framework of law to make those abstractions tangible—that generate the kind of prosperity that makes it unnecessary to move to “el otro lado” to make a living. Rule of law, upheld within an institutional apparatus that insulates against political whims, is paramount.

Those nations in Latin America that occupy the lowest ranks on the liberty index—Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti—are those where liberty is a commodity, a provisional asset to be doled out by the authorities, generally at the whim of corrupt police officials. The state, with its monopoly on violence, operates on the principle of personality rather than systematic, impartial application of justice.

This brings the argument full circle: Miguel Cervantes, writing over four hundred years ago, noted that liberty was “…one of the most precious gifts given by heaven to mankind.” The sentiment captured Spain’s popular attachment to freedom but also contained an implicit warning: arbitrary acts of “justice” under an unchecked king were antithetical to liberty. Sancho Panza warns Don Quixote: “Be careful, your grace, for Justice, which is the king himself, …is punishing [these prisoners] for their crimes.” The crimes were transparently false, however, thereby highlighting the point that liberty could only exist under disinterested rule of law.

How Latin America (and the Americas more broadly for that matter) grapples with the relationship between state power and individual liberty will have enormous implications. The liberal project gained an immense boost from the Spanish Enlightenment—how it proceeds will depend on how well its lessons have been learned.