	      8 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS IN LATIN AMERICA IN '94

	      - Most to be held in one year since the 1920's -

		by Arthur Golden: Staff writer.


	The Armed rebellion in the Mexican state of Chiapas sounds a warning
about the elusive goal of democracy in Mexico and the seven other Latin 
American nations where presidential elections will be held this year.

	In each nation, a democratically elected civilian leader is expected to
hand over power to a freely elected civilian successor, an accomplishment that
would have been unthinkable just 15 years ago, when the military ruled most of
Latin America.

	Yet, despite the progress at the polls, experts say, basic institutions
must be made more responsive to the will of the people before representative
government can flourish in Latin America.

	Furthermore, the elections come at a time of wrenching free-market 
reforms that have failed to bring economic benefits to many Latin Americans,
particularly the poorest sectors of society. And that raises the question as to
whether democracy can be strenghtened when people are suffering from the very
economic reforms that freely elected governments have spearheaded.

	The eight presidential elections are the most in Latin America in a
single year since at least the 1920's. The presidential terms range from four
to six years. Elections will be held this year in Mexico, El Salvador, Costa
Rica, Panama, The Dominican Republic, Brazil, Colombia, and Uruguay.

	The uprising in Chiapas, launched by indigenous people who claimed
generations of economic and political injustice, is a "warning" for Mexico
and the seven other Latin American nations where elections will be held this
year, said political scientist Peter H. Smith, director of the Center for
Iberian and Latin American Studies at UCSD (University of California, San
Diego).

PROCESS REMAINS SUSPECT

	Despite a strong (and sometimes repressive) government, and policies
that at least attempted to cushion the impact of free-market reforms, Smith
said, Mexico still failed to prevent the Chiapas rebellion by people who felt
they remained the victims of "exacerbated social inequality".

	Douglas Payne, director of hemispheric studies at Freedom House in New
York City, which monitor civil liberties worldwide, said Latin America's eight
presidential elections this year "are a necessary but insufficient part of
democratic governance. In essence, what is missing in most of Latin America is
a rule of law in which people can hold their governments accountable in
between elections."

	A State Department official added: "If a nation elects its leaders
through a fair process, that constitutes a narrow measure of democracy. But a
broader measure is whether the society itself is democratic. And that is where
a lot of work needs to be done in Latin America."

	Indeed, Nicolas Ardito-Barletta, a former democratically elected pre-
sident of Panama who was overthrown by his nation's military, said that 
although elections are important, most Latin American nations must modernize
their political and legal systems as essential conditions to achieve authentic
democracy.

	Some progress has been made, Ardito-Barletta said from Panama City, but
at least 10 to 15 years will probably have to elapse before political and legal
systems are made responsive to the needs of the people throughout Latin America.

A MIXED BAG OF CANDIDATES

	The long Latin American electoral cavalcade will begin Feb. 6 in Costa
Rica. But the immediate focus of international attention is the March 20
elections in El Salvador, which has emerged form 12 years of civil war. Polls
show that Ruben Zamora, a moderate leftist who has the support of El Salvador's
former guerrillas, is rapidly closing in on Armando Calderon Sol, presidential
candidate of the ruling rightist Arena party.

	On May 8, salsa singer Ruben Blades will make his first bid for elec-
tive office in the race for president of Panama. His opponents will include
Mireya Gruber, widow of legendary populist president Arnulfo Arias, and
Ernesto Valladares, a former close associate of ousted dictator-convicted drug
dealer Manuel Antonio Noriega.

	On Aug. 21 in a test of traditional one-party dominance, Luis Donaldo
Colosio, presidential candidate of Mexico's long-ruling Institutional Revolu-
cionary Party, will face a powerful challenge from Cuhauhtemoc Cardenas, of the
left-of-center Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), and Diego Fernandez de
Cevallos, of the conservative National Action Party (PAN). The PRI has been
shaken by the fierce and bloody rebellion of the Mayan Indians this month in
Chiapas, which ended when the government declared a unilateral cease-fire and
sought a negotiated settlement with the rebels.

3 OTHERS WILL VOTE IN '95

	Voters in Brazil, the region's biggest, most populous country, which is
plagued by widespread governmental corruption and four-digit annual inflation,
will elect a new president Oct. 5. Recent polls give a commanding lead to labor
leader Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, a socialist. Lula finished second in the 1980
presidential election, which was won by Fernando Collor de Mello. Collor was
impeached and removed from office in December 1992 on charges profiting from a
multi-million-dollar graft ring and he was replaced by Itamar Franco, his
elected vice-president.

	Presidential elections will also be held this year in Colombia, the
Dominican Republic, and Uruguay, continuing a process that began last fal with 
the election of new civilian presidents in Honduras, Venezuela, and Chile.

	The democratic trend will be further consolidated in 1995 with presi-
dential elections in Argentina and Guatemala, and even in Peru, where Authori-
tarian President Alberto Fujimori suspended some constitutional guarantees two
years ago because he said he needed widened powers to fight fanatical leftist
guerrillas.

	In fact, the regional movement towards free choice at the polls has
only two holdouts: the communist regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba, and the
repressive military rulers of Haiti, who, in 1992, tousted that nation's first
freely elected president, Jean-Bernard Aristide.

	"You can't have a democracy without elections," said retired U.S.
diplomat Kim Flower, executive vice-president of the Council of the Americas,
a private think tank in New York City. "It may be true that elections aren't
always fair as they may be or that in some countries there is considerable
corruption," Flower said in New York City. "Nevertheless, the evidence of 
elections is the first thing you look at when you are trying to decide to
what degree a people is a free people."

POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS WEAK

	Robert Pastor, professor of Latin American Studies at Emory University,
in Atlanta, said the eight elections are hardly a panacea for each of the
nation's problems. But without free elections, Pastor said from Atlanta, the
prospects of long-term solutions to those problems are much dimmer.

	Expressing a more bleak view, Freedom House analyst Payne said from New
York City: "What I see in most of Latin America is extremely weak democratic
and political institutions, and a still weak independent civic society. With a
few exceptions, the result is that politics is still monopolized by traditio-
nally corrupt political and socio-economical elites."

	Carlos Waisman, an Argentine-born political sociologist and Latin
American specialist at UCSD, called the Brazilian situation "very worrisome."
Should Lula win in October and adopt inflationary, anti-business policies that
cause the weakened Brazilian economy to collapse, Waisman said, "I can see the
military re-entering politics to re-establish order. This is not the option I
prefer." The military ruled Brazil from 1964-1985.

	With the impeachment of Collor and new scandals surfacing every day,
Waisman said, democracy has not been very effective in Brazil. "This doesn't
mean, of course, a non-democratic regime is the answer," he said. "We are just
judging performance rather than assessing whether alternatives would have
been more effective."

	Joseph Grunwald, adjunct professor of economics at UCSD and the 
founding president of its Institute of the Americas research center, said he
doubts whether any of the presidents to be elected this year would reverse the
broad Latin American thrust toward a free-market economy. 

	On the other hand, Grunwald said, some of the newly elected presidents
may slow the pace of privatization and take other steps "to protect those 
sector of the economy that have borne the brunt" of the free market reforms.
"There is now a realization that you have to do something about the enormous
social cost" of the reforms, he said.

	As for the economic advantages of democracy, Grunwald said foreign
businessmen would prefer to invest in a Latin American nation where the
president is freely elected rather than one ruled by a dictator - even if an
authoritarian leader would make attractive promises about future profits.

