particular the Program for Latin American Studies and its director, Cynthia Arnson. I also thank Taylor Jardno for her help as research assistant at the Wilson Center. A version of chapter 5 was published in Constellations,2 and I thank Andrew Arato and Martin Plotke for their comments and suggestions. Chapter 6 builds on my collaborative work with Catherine Conaghan, a friend and mentor who deeply influenced my work. I also thank my colleagues and students at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales Sede Ecuador (FLACSO-Ecuador) for their continuous engagement with my work and for their suggestions on how to improve my arguments. Julio Aibar, Enrique Peruzzotti, Mauro Porto, Kenneth Roberts, Kurt Weyland, and Loris Zanatta have commented on my work. Finally, Carmen Martínez has always been there for me, challenging my ideas and supporting my endeavors.
Preface to the First Edition
Books tend to reflect, to a large extent, the obsessions and life histories of their authors. This volume is a result of my ambiguous feelings toward, and intellectual fascination with, Latin American populism. I remember as a child how my family life was affected by the passions stirred by populist leader José María Velasco Ibarra. Some of my uncles and aunts were passionate Velasquistas. They had supported the caudillo in his five presidencies (1934–35, 1944–47, 1952–56, 1960–61, and 1968–72), and longed for him during his exiles. My father, the late Carlos de la Torre Reyes, who was the editor of El tiempo, a Quito newspaper, was an opponent of Velasco. As a liberal, my father was committed to a struggle for fundamental democratic freedoms that were not always respected by the populist caudillo, and faced many attacks by Velasco’s supporters. For instance, El tiempo was at the forefront of the opposition against Velasco’s autogolpe (self-inflicted coup d’état) in 1970. I remember watching how Velasco’s nephew and minister of defense, Jorge Acosta Velasco, insulted and falsely accused my father on television and how my father’s office in El tiempo was vandalized by Velasquista crowds. In this climate of political instability and lack of rights for the opposition, we were always ready to face my father’s imprisonment. Fortunately that never occurred.
Reflections on the late 1960s and early 1970s also brings back memories of large crowds and collective action. I was impressed by the large crowds that Velasco attracted when giving public speeches. I also remember the traffic jams and the smell of tear gas left by police repression of student demonstrations against Velasco’s regime.
Several years later, in 1988, as a student at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, I returned to Ecuador to define my dissertation topic. I was surprised by the passion aroused by Abdalá Bucaram, a new populist caudillo. In this election he faced Rodrigo Borja, a moderate Social Democrat. Most scholars and journalists saw in Borja the promise of a social democratic modernity. After all, his party, Izquierda Democrática, was a modern political organization with a clear ideological platform. Borja was committed to the respect of human and civil rights and the reconciliation of the nation after the authoritarian excesses of León Febres Cordero’s regime (1984–88). With the excuse of stopping “subversion,” Febres Cordero had abused the human rights of his opponents. Several guerrilla members, including some of my friends, had been tortured and killed by the government. Conflicts between the executive and congress and the judiciary had plagued Febres Cordero’s administration. He had also faced a military insurrection led by General Frank Vargas. After these years of political instability, most journalists and intellectuals saw the 1988 elections as a contest between a modern party with a concrete ideology and program of modernization and democratization and the populist politics of the past, represented by Abdalá Bucaram.
Journalists and social scientists constructed Bucaram as the embodiment of the rabble and a charlatan who charmed ignorant masses. They argued that poverty and lack of education explained poor people’s support for Bucaram (Fernández and Ortiz 1988). He was seen as a corrupt demagogue and a danger to democracy. In spite of what the press and some academics were expressing, Bucaram’s populist movement was obviously more than manipulation. Only middle-class prejudices could reduce his followers to ignorant masses misled by a charlatan. When, out of curiosity, I attended some of Bucaram’s mass meetings, I was impressed. Bucaram drew on popular culture and humor to attack the well-established “white” elites and champion the dignity and self-worth of his supporters. During these mass meetings, Bucaram established a dialogue with the audience. He focused on everyday life to politicize the humiliations of common mestizo Ecuadorians. He transformed the servants, the poor, and the excluded into the essence of the real Ecuadorian nation, and their bosses into effeminate antinational oligarchies. I was also terrified to see how this self-appointed messiah saw himself as the embodiment of the people’s will that stood above and beyond any democratic institution or procedure.
The tensions and ambiguities between the authoritarian appropriation of the people’s will and the inclusion of previously excluded people into the political community that was so clearly revealed in Bucaram’s populism are what attracted me to the study of these phenomena. I wanted to understand how populist leaders appealed to those they led without assuming manipulation by leaders, irrationality of followers, or the reduction of populism to models of instrumental rationality that explained politics by the exchange of votes for goods and services. I became determined to understand the complexities of populist seductions and explore the tensions between liberal democracies and populism.
The study of populism is certainly puzzling. In Latin America, populism is generally viewed in negative terms. For most it implies an abnormality, an anomaly, and a passing phenomenon that will eventually, and hopefully, go away. That is why most studies of populism begin by focusing on its negative characteristics, on what populism is not when it is compared with other political ideologies, parties, movements, or regimes. For instance, unlike liberalism or socialism, populism lacks an ideology. Populist movements are not the political expression of the economic interest of a particular social class. Nor can populism be specified as a type of political regime. Because of populism’s negative characteristics, modernization theory, for example, considered it a temporary event, an aberration produced by abrupt processes of social change.
Populism is also associated with leaders who manipulate, followers who are betrayed, and overall backwardness. Modernization theorists, influenced by mass-society models, interpreted populist caudillos as charlatans who duped backward masses left in a state of anomie after sudden processes of social change. From the opposite ideological angle, orthodox Marxists have tried to explain the historical abnormalities that have not allowed the proletariat to discover its own class interests when it has been misled by populist leaders. José Álvarez Junco (1994, 16) illustrates how this orthodox Marxist thesis of the proletariat as a revolutionary class whose historical mission is the struggle against capitalism and bourgeois domination is based on erroneous assumptions that have substituted dogma for historical research. Álvarez Junco claims the thesis is based on a view that assigns a priori an essence to historical subjects even before their historical appearance. The proletariat has been constructed as a revolutionary subject whose historical mission has been predetermined by a teleological evolutionary theory of society.
Populism is not only viewed as a negative and ephemeral phenomenon, it is also a profoundly ambiguous category. In 1967 a leading group of scholars met at the London School of Economics to try to define the new specter haunting the world: populism. The result of this endeavor was not fully satisfactory because many and contradictory definitions of this term emerged. The editors of the volume based on this conference, Ghit¸a Ionescu and Ernest Gellner, wrote, “There can, at present, be no doubt about the importance of populism. But no one is quite clear just what it is. As a doctrine or as movement, it is elusive and protean. It bobs up everywhere, but in many contradictory shapes. Does it have an underlying unity, or does one name cover a multitude of unconnected tendencies?” (1969, 1; emphasis in original).
Despite the increasing number of case studies of populist experiences and the efforts to develop a theory
