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The Opinion Pages

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

The
Curse
of
Hypercorrection
in
Latin
America
By JAVIER CORRALES NOV. 23, 2016

BOGOT, Colombia In the late 2000s, leftist politicians were leading countries
all across Latin America. Today, most are in retreat, challenged by a new crop of
would-be leaders promising to fix the problems created by the left. In Argentina,
Paraguay and Peru, these challengers have won elections. In Brazil, they took office
this year as a result of a presidential impeachment and, as in Chile, gained ground
in municipal elections. In Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela, they are regaining
electoral strength.
Because these new leaders are defying the left, it is tempting to call them rightwing. Some, such as President Mauricio Macri of Argentina and President Michel
Temer of Brazil, would not necessarily repudiate that label. But another way to
describe them is as hypercorrectors. They see themselves as on a mission to tidy up
the messes left by their predecessors.
Will they succeed as cleaners in chief? There is reason for optimism, but also
for concern. In some areas, they may well repeat mistakes of the past because the

politics of hypercorrection, regardless of what policies are adopted, are prone to

overreach. Fixating on huge crises prompts politicians to go overboard, become too
improvisational and ignore other issues.
Hypercorrection has been the essence of Latin American democratic politics
since the 1980s. Back then, Latin America was making the transition to democracy.
Presidents came with a mandate to end the human rights abuses and authoritarian
practices of their dictatorial predecessors. As as result, they often went too far in
decentralizing government authority, leading to unstable administrations. They
obsessed over taking away power from the military and paid insufficient attention
to the economy, leading to escalating inflation.
Neoliberal economics came next. The champions of this approach arrived in the
late 80s with an ambitious agenda. They did rectify macroeconomic imbalances,
but they also overcompensated with privatizations and deregulation, which left a
legacy of price-fixing and financial frailty. They also paid less attention to poverty,
leading to rising income inequality.
In the late 90s, leftist leaders intent on correcting the problems of the
neoliberal era began to assume power. They, too, responded by overshooting the
mark. To deal with income inequality, they expanded the reach of the state and
reinforced their economies dependency on the export of natural resources, leading
to rampant corruption, low savings and political sectarianism. In some cases, they
neglected fiscal discipline, causing ballooning debts and deficits.
And now its time for post-left presidents. An encore performance of
overcompensation and neglect is in the works.
Lets begin with economics. On the plus side, todays reformers have fewer
reasons than in the past to overcorrect. Except for Venezuela and Brazil, Latin
American countries are not facing imminent economic collapse. So there is less
need for so-called big-bang reforms of the past, which produce a lot of mistakes
and pain.
The real risk is misfiring that is, going after the wrong target. The regions
key economic problem is overdependence on natural resources, yet most of the
new hypercorrectors are ignoring the issue. In Peru, President Pedro Pablo

Kuczynski went to China on his first foreign trip, an odd choice considering Chinas
contribution to keeping Peru reliant on mining.
To the extent that the new reformers propose a solution, it is to attract foreign
investment by relaxing rules on exports. Such liberalization might increase
investment, but as a policy to minimize dependence on exporting natural
resources, it fails. If anything, it increases dependence on foreign partners.
Reducing such dependence requires instead establishing stabilization funds,
improving education so workers learn more skills, and creating a more diversified
service economy. Sadly, todays presidents hardly talk about these tasks.
A second big item of the reform agenda is corruption. No other issue seems to
mobilize the electorate more than disgust with corruption. Allegations of
corruption destroyed the electoral strength of once-popular leftist presidents like
Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, Cristina Fernndez de Kirchner in Argentina, Mauricio
Funes in El Salvador and Evo Morales in Bolivia.
On corruption especially, Latin American presidents have a long history of
misfiring. Under neoliberalism, the preferred strategy to deal with corruption was
to roll back the state, in the assumption that a smaller public sector offered fewer
opportunities for corruption. Under leftist presidents, the preferred strategy was to
punish parties and expand participatory democracy in the hope that giving
ordinary citizens more power to make decisions would turn them into effective
watchdogs.
As antidotes to corruption, neither approach worked. Rolling back the state
through privatizations produced new opportunities for collusion with the private
sector and made oversight more difficult. Participatory democracy also failed to
deliver: Many groups that signed up for it were too eager to be co-opted, which
made them susceptible to collusion with corrupt officials. In Venezuela under
Hugo Chvez, more than 70,000 community councils were created to help with
community projects, receiving close to $8 billion in state aid, according to Reuters.
Today, theres little to show for all this money spent.
This time around, presidents, rather than rolling back the state, should build a
rules-based state. Rather than relying only on citizen participation, they should

give more power to a narrower constituency: the courts.

There are obstacles. Making the state more bound by rules and giving the
courts more teeth limit the discretion of the executive branch, which presidents
dislike. Sometimes, as in Brazil, the parties that support such moves are tainted by
corruption scandals. And hypercorrectors, in particular, think that judicial checks
hamstring them in their effort to overhaul a dysfunctional status quo.
Finally, todays reformers have also inherited the problem of political
sectarianism the tendency of ruling parties to provide special favors mostly to
loyalists and ignore opponents. Latin Americas radical left proved notoriously
sectarian. Followers were rewarded with extraordinary state largess, often in the
form of welfare benefits; dissidents were punished by being barred from such
benefits. Opponents felt, rightly, that the state was using social policy to
discriminate against them.
This kind of sectarianism is the reason for one of Latin Americas most
remarkable paradoxes since the late 2000s: Poverty and inequality declined, but
political tensions increased not so much because social programs relied on
redistribution (their funding actually came from exports rather than tax increases),
but on favoritism. This produced a vicious cycle: Social programs made presidents
popular, and that popularity encouraged them to create more rules that were
biased against opponents, leading to polarization.
Todays reformers face the challenge of reducing this dynamic. But its not
clear that todays hypercorrectors can; their electoral coalitions might not allow it.
In some countries, like Argentina and Peru, these coalitions consist of your
typical anti-populist front: middle-class voters, technocrats and business, all
aligned against inefficient government spending. They demand an exclusive focus
on macroeconomic discipline.
In other cases, the electoral coalition behind todays reformers is more
religious, as is the case with Donald J. Trump in the United States. An alliance of
evangelicals and Catholics is taking shape across the Americas, aiming to advance a
very conservative agenda on sexuality and security. This new coalition, which is
strongest in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Central America, wants presidents to

commit to restrictive policies on abortion, gay rights, drug use and crime. Their
latest target is gender ideology, the idea that gender identity is socially
constructed rather than biologically determined. These groups claim that gender
ideology is anti-biblical and oppose policies to protect gay and transgender people,
family planners and nontraditional families.
Coalitions like this helped place Mr. Temer in power in Brazil and Jimmy
Morales in Guatemala. In Mexico, they pressured the Congress to shelve a samesex-marriage bill. In Colombia, they helped the right defeat, in a referendum, the
governments peace agreement with the FARC guerrilla group. In Nicaragua, they
encouraged President Daniel Ortega, a former Marxist, to adopt an anti-abortion
position. In Chile, they helped elect a significant number of mayors in the most
recent municipal elections.
Like the radical leftists of the 2000s, these religious groups have adopted
intransigent positions on issues they care about. Presidents owing their victories to
religious conservatives may feel too indebted to these groups, and this is a recipe
for more sectarianism. The challenge for these presidents is to establish what one
could call a separation of church and party. If they insist on excluding the evergrowing sections of the electorate that are more secular, they risk heightening
polarization.
There are two ways to interpret this moment in Latin America. One is to see it
as a moment of an ideological pendulum shift from left to right. The other is to see
it as a repeating cycle of hypercorrection, with crises of governance once again
producing mega-reformers. Hypercorrection comes from crises and is prone to
crises.
The prospects for breaking this unfortunate cycle seem uneven. On economics,
the chances look better than in the past. But on issues of corruption and
sectarianism, there is trouble ahead.
Javier Corrales is a professor of political science at Amherst and a Fulbright scholar at
the University of the Andes and the Pontificial Javeriana University.
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A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 24, 2016, on page A8 of the New York edition with the
headline: Latin Americas curse of hypercorrection.

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