CNS STORY: Remaking Latin America, one constitution at a time?

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CNS Story:

LATAM LETTER Oct-30-2007 (970 words) Backgrounder. xxxi

Remaking Latin America, one constitution at a time?

By Barbara J. Fraser
Catholic News Service

LIMA, Peru (CNS) -- Ecuador has joined the list of South American countries that hope to ensure greater equality for their citizens by overhauling the constitution.

Peru launched the trend in 1993, when then-President Alberto Fujimori pushed his blueprint for a made-to-order constitution through Congress. Venezuela followed suit in 1999, and Bolivia has been embroiled in a similar effort since 2006.

Ecuador's Sept. 30 election of delegates to a constitutional assembly, in which President Rafael Correa's party won a resounding victory, put the country one step closer to its second constitution in less than a decade. The assembly is expected to start its work in November.

But while Correa announced that "the Ecuadorean people have won the mother of all battles" by giving his political group a majority of seats, a new constitution will not necessarily solve the problems of inequity, inefficiency and corruption that plague the Andean country.

The vote was mainly "a reflection of a profound discontent and a great clamor for change," said Michael Shifter, professor at Georgetown University and vice president for policy at the nonprofit Inter-American Dialogue in Washington. "The new constitution is a way to respond to that clamor."

Supporters of the constitutional assemblies in Ecuador and Bolivia see them as a way of rewriting the political and economic rules to include large numbers of citizens who have been sidelined from political life.

About half of Ecuador's population lives in poverty, a rate that is even higher in rural areas and among indigenous people. Catholic Church officials estimate that 2.5 million of the country's 12 million people have emigrated in search of work, sending home $2 billion a year -- the country's second-largest source of foreign income, after petroleum exports.

Nevertheless, rewriting the constitution "isn't the way to change in terms of addressing problems of poverty and inequality," Shifter told Catholic News Service. "Those problems are still there."

And while Correa has pledged to close Congress and establish a commission to handle legislative tasks while the constitutional assembly is meeting, "there are a lot of issues that need urgent attention, and it's unclear how they are going to be dealt with effectively," Shifter said.

Ecuador is not the only Andean country that is trying to reinvent itself with a new constitution.

In Bolivia, a constitutional assembly that began work in August 2006 has made little headway, bogging down most recently in a battle over whether the seat of government should be in La Paz, its current location, or in Sucre, the legal capital and seat of the judiciary.

The conflict reflects the struggle underlying the reforms that Bolivian President Evo Morales has been trying to implement since taking office in January 2006. The battle pits the agricultural and oil- and gas-producing eastern lowlands against the poor, mainly indigenous western highlands.

Bolivia's constitutional assembly suspended its work in August, and its future is uncertain.

Some political leaders have suggested that the only solution is an agreement among the country's political parties to close the assembly, possibly with an eye toward calling a new one, or shifting the task of constitutional reform to congress.

"People are losing confidence in the process, and that is sad, because there were high hopes in the beginning," Father Michael Gillgannon, a missionary from the Archdiocese of Kansas City, Kan., who has worked in Bolivia for 33 years, told Catholic News Service.

Even if the assembly fails in its task to write a new constitution and political reform ultimately comes by presidential decree or congressional mandate, the effort will not have been in vain, Father Gillgannon said.

"It's not all negative. They're widening the circle" of people involved in the democratic process, "and that is good, because it has to happen," he said.

Ecuador's assembly is unlikely to face the same risk of stalemate, because the president's party holds a majority of the seats, and approval of articles will require a simple majority rather than the two-thirds majority vote required in Bolivia.

Nevertheless, Bolivia's experience should be a cautionary tale for Ecuador, where political institutions are fragile and discredited, Shifter said.

"You're dealing with countries that have very fractured politics, and you open up these processes that are sometimes hard to manage," he said.

Only a handful of Latin American countries have constitutions dating back farther than 1980, when the region began to emerge from a period of rule by strongmen and military dictators.

Uruguay and Costa Rica, two of the countries with the longest history of democracy -- and the countries in which the largest number of people say they are satisfied with democracy -- have charters dating to 1967 and 1949, respectively. Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru and Venezuela drafted new constitutions in the 1990s.

In a statement issued Oct. 19 after their annual assembly, Ecuador's bishops called for the new constitution to take into account human dignity, education, protection of human life and the family, controls to root out corruption and development programs to eradicate poverty.

The reforms "should aim to bolster national unity and real and participatory democracy" the bishops wrote, with a goal of "the necessary balance and harmony between special interests and the common good."

For Shifter, good leadership is crucial, but many of the region's presidents have little political experience and lack a track record of consensus-building among groups with different agendas.

"There's always a possibility (of having) the effective leaders who can rise to the challenge of trying to pull these countries together -- the Nelson Mandelas that I think these countries need," he said. "There's a need for real reconciliation. There's a possibility for that, but it's very, very difficult."

END

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