Failed States: Perspective from Latin America

Fragile Premises and
Failed States:A Perspective
from Latin America
C h a pt e r 4 of the Canadian Development Report (North-South Institute, Ottawa, Canada) Alejandro Bendaña


Fragile Premises and Failed States:
A Perspective from Latin America
Alejandro Bendaña

“If you run away,” says the mother, “I will run after you.
For you are my little bunny”
— The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown

State fragility or state failure are, in essence, the latest in a long history of ideological constructs created by powerful nations to legitimize interventions in weaker ones. Although perhaps less dismissive than the “rogue state” category invented by the Clinton Administration, “fragile” or“failing” purport to underscore the right claimed by the global superpower to revamp other nations — toppling governments, invading states, destabilization, and so on.

State weaknesses, fragility, or “failure” are pretexts for empire-building. In many places,the US is increasingly perceived as a power in search of an empire but its determination to employ military means necessitates new justifications or rationalizations, particularly with a view to recruiting allies.

Given the term’s origins, it is no surprise the characterizations of failing states usually ignore causes of “failure” or “fragility,” often rooted in the global economy structure, neo-liberal economic policies pushed by international financial institutions (IFIs), or Northern governments, alongside the absence of effective democracy and domestic accountability within the country.

The Bush Administration, its European and NATO allies, and Bretton Woods institutions, have now proclaimed themselves the global arbiters of what constitutes good governance and acceptable states, and what and who does not. Not that a great deal of high-minded discussion goes on before invading: lower level policy-makers and policy-watchers are left, usually ex post facto, to problematize the role of donors and states in the post 9/11 security-first global order.

Revisiting the State
Before examining what is a failed or weak state, analysts would do well to address the question of what are the expectations, duties, responsibilities, and rights of states. Who are the legitimate parties to make such a determination? Domestic constituencies, of course, have varying public policy expectations and demands — as varied as the sectors that compose civil society along with the business sector. Differences notwithstanding there is a larger principle involved, which is the principle of democratic self-determination. In a world of sovereign states, governments may influence each other but, again in principle, it is individual nations alone that must decide with or on behalf of the citizenry.

Dominant hegemonic powers are not particularly keen on respect for sovereignty, save for their own. There are, of course, legal international responsibilities and agreements that require observation and monitoring. But over and above those norms, power and wealth considerations enter into the picture, and with it the imposition of particular “national” interests and corresponding “interpretations” over collective ones. At issue is the state, its purpose and the pressure for change, from within and outside national boundaries. From a normative perspective, a state fails when it cannot effectively ensure the delivery of physical security, economic opportunity and fundamental services to its citizenry, or at least a large majority thereof.

A case by case approach would be necessary to determine whether a state is functional or dysfunctional, but hopefully carried out in an objective fashion that ensures full respect for democracy, accountability, and legitimacy. Only then could one arrive at broader formulas for de termining state efficacy or its absence, and just what specifically state-building should entail. Subsequently one would ask, and not simply assume, that donors and international bodies assist with such a process. Which, in turn, leads to the central question of whether the state “reform” or “reconstruction” process driven from a market-oriented or a securityoriented perspective coincides with a domestic alignment of forces, or mostly to an external induction by powers suffering from delusional control issues.

Fragility and failure, in this context, may be more in the eyes of the beholder, conducive to the export of ideology and mechanisms (“reform,” “good governance,” “anti-terrorism”) defined by the hegemonic state and demanded by its requirement for a “global” environment conducive to its own economic and security concerns. Failed or fragile states cannot be full members of the new global order, nor can they enjoy the same rights as other countries — they are assigned a second class legal status, not fully worthy of independence and obliged to receive external tutelage and intervention. This new white man’s burden requires conceptual and eventual legal enshrinement contrary, in many basic senses, to the evolution of international law and the hard-won principles of non-intervention and national self-determination.

As with the use of the term genocide, a politics of naming comes into play. Some states will win the designation of “failed” and others, engaged in much the same practices, will not. There is no mathematical formula derived from the application of indicators. The logic is political not scientific having more to do with the real world of power projections and the definition of new codes of international behaviour from which the powerful are somehow exempt. Targeting is selectively guided by the existence of resources or strategic geographical locations (Afghanistan yes, Somalia no).1

Unfortunately, the more the categorization is propagated, the more interventions gain in legitimacy. A new generation of donor darlings and aid effectiveness criteria is born and the older generation of donor orphans is sent packing. Historical, systemic and global structural causes of state weaknesses are not acknowledged let alone tackled. The pre-determined prescription (intervention) requires a pre-determined diagnosis (state failure). Neither the prescription
nor the diagnosis take sovereignty into account, let alone the alternative economic and security perspectives being proposed by a nation’s citizens. Democracy is mentioned but not the facts that independence is its prerequisite, that democracy cannot be exported, or that external tutorials seldom make an enduring contribution.

If the rather meddlesome issue of democracy is sacrificed in the name of state or international security, then the picture, at least analytically, becomes clearer. It becomes a matter of “stabilization,” or “pacification” driven from the outside. A genuine peacebuilding and democracy building as bottom-up processes. Just if and how the lively-fiction called the “international community” can assist a true democratic endeavour is open to question, particularly if the subject being “helped” has its own ideas of what that help should be.

Stakeholders before rights-holders?

State failure per se is not a social problem. In fact, a state collapse may be welcome news when it puts an end to a repressive or undemocratic regime. But tears may be shed on the part of that regime’s external partners. Nor is fragility a problem if it entails the logical, slow, and complicated process of perfecting democracy and building citizenship-centred public institutions, a process that can involve decades and, in many senses, is never ending for rich and poor countries alike.

The crux of the issue is the social and economic character of the state and its capacity to protect and promote democratic transformation, not to contain it. Granted the notions of state modernization or state-building have their problems, but this is not to trade-in processes for quick-fix solutions in which the technical experts take over from the internal beneficiaries. Nor is there much qualitative difference between “state-building,” public sector development and
democratization in fragile states as opposed to other poor developing countries, save for the unfortunate intrusion of the “anti-terrorist” criteria that is leading to the “securitization” of ODA and the emergence of “triple D” criteria (diplomacy, development, defence).

The problem has more to do with politics and power than with policy. In the name of rescuing or even preventing failed states, the United States and some of its allies have deliberately ignored international law and multilateral leaderships. In the absence of genuine multilateral decisionmaking, NATO determines what constitutes failure or fragility, and what states or even regions lack the capacity to ensure certain standards and what countries or multilateral institutions should step in for the reconversion and reconstruction. Governments would then organize “consultations” and commission research around good practices, the “how,” “when,” and “who,” sidelining the “whether.”

An insistence on “practical,” “policy-oriented,” “operative results” reinforces the dominant donor-defined framework. State fragility or failure become simplistic misnomers for what could be a more legitimate discussion around institution building and democratization — two interlocked propositions whose separation is responsible for more than one failure. We witness thereupon a regression to the era of trusteeships with entire nations held as wards of the so-called international community. That may be the easy way out given the complexities of state-building in the context of historical specificities and normative principles. The critical
principal here is national sovereignty as observers, particularly from the South, continue to reject concepts and practices that, in effect, signify a recolonization with the reversion of the hard-won principle of national self-determination.

What we require is a greater understanding of how the proposition of the state is intimately linked to national democratization, the failure of one is the failure of the other. But failure or fragility is also linked to the absence of global democratic governance, which makes any national democratic state-building process all the more difficult. The Latin American state, and states elsewhere, are caught in between the pressures from below (democratic) and the pressures from the outside (colonialist). Nonetheless, as Mariano Aguirre has argued, Latin America’s search for new models of governance can benefit from an understanding of how its fragile states encourage violence and block democracy. Indeed, extending these
concepts to Latin America may help better illuminate the problems posed by changing
political and social dynamics.2 From this standpoint, a deeper understanding and definition of fragility and failure is warranted.

Failed National States or Failed Global Systems?

The stepping stone for the World Bank’s entry into the fragile states foray was its “Low Income Countries Under Stress” initiative also known as LICUS. Not until January 2006 did the World Bank sign on to the new terminology.3 Multi-donor trust funds or reconstruction fund mechanisms managed by the World Bank gave this institution enormous power to complement its already sizeable influence over national economic policy-making. Unfortunately, donor fragility concerns are translating into yet another mission sweep by the World Bank as it is granted authority to enhance its already deep involvement in domestic policy-making.4
And there is no direct relation between IFI involvement on the one hand and macro-stabilization on the other. A recent study by William Easterly, a former World Bank official, found a disturbing correlation between IMF interventions and state fragility pointing to eight cases of state failure in the 1990s where each of these countries had an average of 55 IMF programs, as opposed to the average of 20 for all developing countries between 1970 and 1990.5 Statistically, claims the author, “spending a lot of time under an IMF program is associated with a higher risk
of state collapse… At best, the IMF doing a program in these countries was like recommending heart-healthy calisthenics every morning for patients with broken limbs. …the planner’s mentality in which the IMF applies the same type of program to all countries is ill matched to such ill societies… People in the country receiving the IMF loan,” he adds, “often blame the IMF when the government does those things, and they take to the streets to protest IMF-enforced austerity. One big trouble in IMF stabilization plans is their disturbance of domestic politics.”6

Genuine democratic development itself is a destabilizing proposition as it inevitably challenges the role and power of the IFIs. Economic fragility has political repercussions; a drop in revenue can strain or even provoke the collapse of basic services, including elementary physical protection. Fragility and non-performance, in a social context, are also linked to years of failed donorimposed structural adjustment conflicts resulting in violent conflicts, at worst or massive
violations of economic and social rights. Structural Adjustment Programs and the contemporary spinoffs are responsible for the dismantled state and public sector structures, for accentuating inter-elite conflicts over the spoils of office and policy, and for generating social unrest. Trade liberalization can aggravate internal contradictions and provoke the emergence of new elites and external corporate control that is resented by distinct sectors of national producers, increasing poverty and unemployment. Migration and remittances may attenuate conflict and offer an escape valve, but it raises reactions in the rich countries
bordering on hysteria.

In Latin America, we witness new evidence of an old phenomenon with a new name: state failure and fragility that take the form of government incapacity to help guarantee basic rights and services. Fragility and failure are also the result of the pressure placed on governments attempting to shift economic power away from the traditional elites and their corporate multinational partners. For their part, the IFIs and “donors” will insist on economic and governance “reform” packages in which the government is told to constrain public sector budgets, and promote privatization and liberalization. Washington seems obsessed with Venezuela, but this is a distraction from the real issues around state-restructuring in Latin America. Former Chief World Bank Economist Joseph Stiglitz believes that, “The mistake, from my point of view, is trying to figure out Chávez. What you’ve got to figure out is why the market economic model has not worked to include the majority from Mexico down to Tierra del Fuego.”7

The global power structure in both its military and economic manifestations can (and is sometimes intended to) induce destabilizations among Southern governments. Models
of state transformation that do not respond to the needs of the global political economy, or the global war on terror (GWOT), will hardly be the subject of “assistance” save for that provided to internal forces bent on regime change. Domestic processes develop with external constraints, and with sharply reduced spaces for policy discussion and democratic accountability.

Until recently, Latin American governments did not feel sufficiently empowered to explore development and security options different from those defined in Washington. Intervention and external expectations can overload the state, and this may well be the greatest source of failure or weakness, far more than the corruption and lack of good governance as fashionable donor wisdom argues. The problem, the North insists, is not the “advice” but the unwillingness of the countries to adopt it.

The Pentagon and the GWOT in Latin America

The events of 9/11 convinced the US governing elite that the normal mechanisms for dealing with perceived security threats were insufficient. Individual freedoms and the democratic process may be taking second place to counter-terrorism, weakening democratic institutions in the process. If this is already reflected within the US and some of its allies, then it is that much more intense when operating abroad. In parts of Latin America it could entail the return of features of the Cold War anti-communist national security state.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, the Pentagon demands a “new architecture of hemispheric security” to integrate the region’s security forces more tightly into the US military’s command structure and global policy. An immediate need was to secure broader Latin American participation for the occupation of Haiti and Iraq. By 2006, however, only El Salvador continued to ship soldiers to Iraq. Washington continued to press Latin American armies to do more domestic policing and establish control over what it called “ungoverned spaces”, ranging from shantytowns to coastlines to rural areas where the civil state has a limited role. Root causes of statelessness are overlooked as the public security dimension is given priority, dangerously blurring the lines between military and police functions while weakening civil control.8

That is not the only line being blurred. Over the course of the past decade, economic suffering has led to peaceful organized social protests. Social movements are now warning that legitimate protest is being “criminalized” and dealt with as a security threat. “Terrorists, drug traffickers,hostage takers, and criminal gangs,” Donald Rumsfeld told the 2004 meeting of the Defence
Ministers of the Americas, “form an anti-social combination that increasingly seeks to destabilize civil societies.” James Hill, the head of the Pentagon’s Southern Command was more explicit: “Legal boundaries don’t make sense anymore given the current threat.”9 The Pentagon pushed Latin American and Caribbean armed forces to become more involved in the various fronts of the war on terror, the occupation of Haiti, containing the Colombian guerrillas, playing a greater role in disaster relief, integrating military commands in Central America, and making bases and forward operation facilities available to US forces.

In response to Rumsfeld, the Chilean defence minister reminded the defence ministers’ meeting in Quito in 2004 that the United Nations was the “only forum with international legitimacy to act globally on security issues”. The Argentine minister said that he and his colleagues could take care of their own borders and that “terrorism is a concern but not a top priority”. A former head
of Ecuador’s armed forces, General René Vargas, claimed Rumsfeld’s proposal was an attempt to “consolidate control” over his country’s oil and water: “In Latin America there are no terrorists,only hunger and unemployment and delinquents who turn to crime. What are we going to do, hit you with a banana?”10 At the October 2006 defence ministers’ meeting in Managua, the US again insisted on lining up the hemisphere’s armies in the GWOT, not only in the region but elsewhere.

According to an October 2 report by Reuters, “The United States is pressing some Latin American countries to send troops to Afghanistan and Iraq not so much for combat purposes but for the war-to-reconstruction transition envisioned by the Pentagon.”11 Canadian journalist Naomi Klein argues correctly “that the real war on terror is being waged by Latin America’s social movements — Brazil’s landless rural activists, Argentina’s unemployed,Ecuadorian indigenous confederations, Bolivian coca leaf growers, and many others — are actually waging the real war on terrorism — not with law and order but by providing alternatives to the fundamentalist tendencies that exist wherever there is true desperation.”12

Weak government has been endemic to much of Latin America, assuming indeed that lapses into authoritarianism are indicators of neither “fragility” nor strength. The reasons are many, including institutional crisis, narrow governing elite interests, and of course largely non-violent popular uprisings that have forced the removal of government leaders and, increasingly, of political systems.

Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela spring to mind, although each has its own characteristics. Strange as it sounds, Washington now has a problem with the absence of sovereignty in parts of the region. Pentagon doctrine calls for helping fragile states achieve “effective sovereignty” in territories that supposedly are, or could be, operating grounds for terrorist organizations. While the extension of effective political and civic sovereignty to remote regions would be welcome in
terms of enhancing access to public services, what the Pentagon has in mind is something different, demanding that the local militaries take up that occupation, guided by security considerations.

As a result, the military and security apparatus acquire an enhanced political influence and leeway in their operations. This does not happen by chance: US policy, according to Adam Isaacson, “seeks to direct military aid to the lawless areas, and to erase the dividing lines between the roles of military and police forces in these areas, giving the military a new role in the domestic politics of the region’s countries.”13

Is insecurity primarily the product of poverty, unemployment, and institutional weakness, meriting a political and state overhaul? Or is it the other way around, as is claimed by the United States, requiring big increases in the security forces? What each course entails is illustrated by the cases Colombia and Ecuador.

Addressing State Fragility in Latin America:
Counterinsurgency in Colombia
With one of the world’s highest rates of economic inequality, Colombia is also the largest recipient of US aid outside the Middle East and Afghanistan. It receives one-third of all US
assistance to Latin America, and 80 per cent of that “assistance” is military.14 Anti-terrorism
means counterinsurgency, and the main emphasis of US support is precisely on the military,
with economic and social assistance lagging considerably behind.

Washington’s simplistic anti-terrorism policy reduces the possibility of finding a political solution to the three-decade-old violent conflict between the government and the armed extreme left. A conflict that is further complicated by the activities of paramilitary rightwing groups, drug traffickers and criminal groups.
Following his election in May 2002, President Álvaro Uribe unleashed a massive heavy-handed assault on the guerrillas and the drug trade. He pushed for constitutional changes to allow him to run for a second term, winning a strong mandate in May 2006. By the end of the year,however, there came embarrassing revelations of paramilitaries connected to his own party, government, and even cabinet members. The US-backed strategy generated a new state crisis as manifested in the degree to which drug cartels and paramilitaries had “infiltrated” the government, making Colombia, said critics, a narco-state or “para-state”. As of April 2007, eight pro-Uribe congressmen, a governor, and the president’s former top intelligence chief
had been arrested. Nearly 20 other current or former members of Congress, most of them allies of the president, were being investigated by the Supreme Court and the attorneygeneral’s office. That some branches of government took on the investigations only underscores the extent of governmental incoherence.

Uribe claims he is fighting all of Colombia’s illegal armed groups, denying links to paramilitaries,including those responsible for imposing a reign of terror in certain parts of the country. It is a fact, however, that tens of thousands of “paras” were the creation not only of drugtraffickers and landowners, but also of the army and some politicians, ostensibly to fight the guerrillas but also profiting from extortion and criminal activities. Uribe’s critics claim he seeks a return to the legalized, centralized, authoritarian governance practices of the past, also known as the national security state.

While trends toward the recentralization of power also appear in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela,these are driven by another logic altogether and are the product of an electoral mandate free from the influence of the elite and the armed forces. Unsurprisingly, the US government supports state centralization in Colombia, but attacks it in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia. This probably has much to do with the fact that the Colombian government is eager to sign a Free Trade Agreement with the US, something rejected by its three neighbours who are also in the process of challenging foreign-owned oil and gas companies while Colombia puts out the welcome mat. According to William Drennan of Exxon Mobil, Colombia now offers “among the best fiscal terms in the world”.15

State reconfiguration in Colombia seeks to place the government and its armed forces in a better position to battle the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia / Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia), even at the expense of an already deteriorated human rights
situation. Uribe and the military leaders are making the most of the GWOT to secure material
resources and political legitimacy for the counterinsurgency plan and to maintain the
traditional elite in power. Notwithstanding inherent limitations of a strategy based on external support, President Uribe has echoed US rhetoric, aligning his national and foreign policies with the US, to the detriment of relations with some of Columbia’s neighbours.

A new US-Colombian drive known as Plan Patriota is intended to redress state “fragility” by providing massive military assistance to the Colombian government to fight the guerrillas, and to a lesser degree the drug cartels and criminals. However, that framework is facilitated by the absence of civil and political control over the security bodies — something that should, in fact,
be an indicator of a failing state. There is moreover a danger that a new US-protected securityfirst regime in Colombia will become aggressive toward Ecuador and Venezuela.

Addressing State Fragility in Latin America:Reinventing the State in Ecuador

In Latin America there are two sources of state power: one stems from US economic and
military favours, while the second emerges from a mobilized electorate demanding greater self-respect and social sensitivity from elected officials. Serving either master is difficult enough and can generate fragility; trying to serve both is a recipe for failure.

In Ecuador, as in Bolivia, the elections were clean and the platforms clear as to the intention to push radical state and socio-economic transformation. There are numerous ambiguities and tensions in such a process, beginning with the fact that the traditional ruling elites, and the United States, do not take kindly to the process and throw obstacles in its path.

Governments also face the temptation to deal with opponents (and their press organs) in a high-handed manner. Nonetheless, defenders of the state-transformation process believe that a new concentration of power may be necessary in order to effect constitutional change that will institutionalize state and societal overhaul, legalizing new forms of popular participation in decision-making and government.
Mandates and majorities are built, to no small degree, on the basis of failed US and donor policies, from the social cost of Washington Consensus programs to the presence of the US military.

In Ecuador this included a general dislike for the presence of foreign oil companies and the US Forward Operation Location (FOL) base in Manta, as well as memories of the ten thousand peasants who, in September 2001, filed a lawsuit against DynCorp for indiscriminate fumigation with untested chemicals, which ruined their food harvest, poisoned adults,and killed children and livestock.16 The goal is to throw out the policies and mentalities that sustained injustice in Ecuador, kept it from diminishing its poverty rate, kept it from asserting greater governmental control over its resources and territory, and forced it to tolerate a foreign military presence. In and of themselves these are not necessarily anti-US steps; European, Canadian, and even Brazilian resource extraction corporations are also being questioned. But in the larger hemispheric context, there is no question that the US is the principal country being affected by the recuperation of state authority over national resources, along with the country’s self-respect.

In different ways and to different degrees, governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador are gearing the state to be more attuned to the aspirations of the majority of the people. Elected in November 2006, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa is no wild-eyed demagogue but a serious politician; a US-educated economist and former minister of finance who ran on a platform of ending traditional politics characterized by subservience to foreign corporations, the IFIs, and the Pentagon. As with Morales in Bolivia and to a lesser extent Chávez in Venezuela, Correa embodies a social demand for the overhaul and further democratization of the entire state apparatus.

Three policy shifts underscore the determination of the Ecuadorian government to strengthen the role of the state in a democratic, legal, and accountable manner. And having sufficient political support and clout, there is no need to appeal to populism or political overkill. The first is the announcement, upon taking office, that the government would not renew a 1999 bilateral agreement with the US that allowed for the presence of US military forces at the Manta air base on Ecuador’s Southern coast. In a remarkable example of previous state fragility, the agreement had circumvented congressional approval, yet few officials challenged
its legality. Humiliation grew after the US Navy took to detaining and even destroying local fishing vessels in the name of anti-drug trafficking and anti-terrorism.

The new government brought a new security perspective: “There can be no sustained security policy if there is not full sovereignty at all levels. The public position of the government is not to renew the Manta base agreement,” said the defence minister on March 5, 2007.17

Broad consensus in favour of closure had existed for years, to a large degree shared by the military and state authorities inasmuch as the Manta base hosted US operations against the Colombian guerrillas and, ostensibly, against the illegal drug traffic. US support for the military and police became conditional on the maintenance of base rights and this too caused resentment. US officials insist that Ecuador’s best interests are met through the continuation of the antidrug
effort. Correa’s government, in contrast, perceives that national security is at risk by the possibility of becoming involved in the Colombian war.

Second, the new government is making good on its pledge to define a people-oriented
development model in open contravention of the IMF neo-liberal parameters. Between
1960 and 2000, Ecuador received 16 standby loans from the IMF and had suffered considerably,including the decision to abandon its own currency in favour of the US dollar. Beginning in 2002, loan conditions included the forced reduction of teacher salaries and big increases in fuel and electricity prices. On January 22 of that year protestors from the indigenousco mmunities occupied the Congress as thousands stood vigil and demonstrated outside. When President Jami Mahaud ordered 35,000 troops and police to confront the demonstrators, the leaders of the armed forces and the congressional opposition forced the resignation of the president in favour of vice-president Gustavo Noboa.

Bowing to US and banker pressure, Noboa decided he would “stay the course” with IMF
reforms. In May teachers again went on strike to protest salary reductions and the government sent in the riot police. Defiant organizations then called a general strike and government employees, doctors, oil workers, and unions joined in. Two more confrontations followed. The army was summoned but the dispatched unit, under Colonel Lucío Gutiérrez, took sides with the indigenous protesters and attempted an unsuccessful coup. Gutiérrez became a hero and, in November 2002, was elected President. However, by February 2004 the indigenous confederation was back on the streets demonstrating against the “traitor” Gutiérrez who by then was embracing the IMF and the US. On April 20, 2005, it was Gutierrez’s turn to flee the
protests and go into exile. “Whatever respite it now enjoys, Ecuador’s democracy is deeply discredited,” said the Economist following the April 2005 “street coup”.18

Rafael Correa won the election in November 2006. His inaugural speech called for an opening to the “new twenty-first century socialism,” earlier proclaimed by Hugo Chávez. He declared the need to end “the perverse system that has destroyed our democracy, our economy, and our society”. Having refused to field parliamentary candidates, Correa pushed through with his promise to reinvent the state, then still dominated by what he and his followers regarded as a corrupt pro-US and pro-free trade political and economic oligarchy.

Correa’s election and his state “reinvention” program is rooted in a militant mass movement that has long demanded an end to the political oligarchy and economic inequality. Referred to as the “partidocracia,” the Ecuadorian political system has been run by splintering political parties dominated by a small corrupt elite that controls much of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as the presidency, until Correa’s election. Even Michel Camdessus, the former IMF chief, once
commented that Ecuador was characterized “by an incestuous relation between bankers, political, financial pressure groups, and corrupt government officials.”19 The goal is to end the dysfunctional state, reinvent not only the state but the country as a plurinational participatory democracy, reasserting Ecuadorian sovereignty and mandating the state to advance social and economic policies that benefit the majorities, regardless of what the old elite and the IMF would say.

In stark contrast to the conservative IMF-dictated fiscal policy of his predecessors, Correa ordered more government spending on social programs instead of repaying parts of the foreign debt he denounced as illegitimate. Until then some 90 per cent of all oil revenue (the chief source of revenue) was assigned to debt repayment. He also made good on the campaign promise to end negotiations with the United States for a Free Trade Agreement. Elected authorities and the social
movements believe that an FTA, however beneficial for big capital and exporters, would prove disastrous for the small producer. Ecuador and Bolivia instead have asked the US to maintain the preferential trade agreement tied to the anti-drug trafficking concerns.

As with Bolivia, Ecuador is fortunate to have the support of Venezuela, which in no small degree is deflecting US attention away from the rest of the “pink tide”. A new regional network may be able to provide markets and capital, through a Bank of the South, which, in some degree,would make the country less dependent on the usual providers.20 Joining the regional trend toward increased state control over natural resources, Correa ratified the previous government’s cancellation of a contract with the US oil giant Occidental and announced that the Manta base agreement would not be renewed. Trade unions and the indigenous movement claimed their year-long mobilization had yielded victory.

The third innovation is the decision to call a referendum on the election of a Constituent Assembly to write a new Constitution. Ecuador’s “institutions have collapsed,” he said, “after overcoming neo-liberal dogma” a new constitution was needed to “prepare the country for the 21st century…. To overcome the political and social impasse in which the country is bogged down.” When a group of legislators attempted to block the referendum, a broad civil society coalition joined together to back Correa and to prepare for the constitutional discussions around the creation of new political, legal, and economic structures in Ecuador.

Social movement leaders are insisting that the upholding of sovereignty, the nationalization of natural resources, the defence of biodiversity, and promoting agrarian revolution all become part of the new Constitution. Correa for his part said he would consider resigning if the initiative was rejected by the voters.
On April 15, 2007, the referendum approved the proposal by a landslide victory with
78.1 per cent of voters in favour. The Constituent Assembly will be installed in mid-
November following the election of its 130 members. That same week Correa announced the country had paid off its entire debt to the IMF and would henceforth sever ties with the financial institution: “We don’t want to hear anything more from that international bureaucracy.”21 The World Bank representative was told to pack his bags and leave.

Reclaiming National Sovereignty and Public Sector Responsibility

If it drew on the positive changes in Latin America, the state failure/fragility debate could acquire greater legitimacy than it now enjoys. State strengthening could be addressed in terms of mass mobilization, new forms of democratic participation, and sovereign re-nationalization of basic resources and public services.

But globalization in its economic and military components — with its own version of state failure and state weakness — continues to manifest in practice (and often in theory) a deepseated aversion to both democracy and sovereignty. Debt conditions have allowed the US, the IFIs, corporations, and “donors” to liberalize economic activity to the point of losing control over foreign investors who are usually in complicity with local elites. To which we now add the security demands posed by the GWOT, but also the war on drugs and against the Colombian insurgents. Small wonder that states become fragile and even collapse in the face of such pressures, or simply step up repressive tendencies in order to survive.

Although unlikely, local militaries could take over in light of state breakdowns. Before that happens, however, some international preventive action would be contemplated. Wheremass human rights violations are the case, should some external liberal intervention be mounted? The trouble with this argument, aside from the implicit double standard (Venezuela yes, Israel no) is that it might still prove counterproductive. Susan Woodward points out: “If outsiders do take political positions, as occurs in the labelling of their favoured politicians
and parties as ‘moderates,’ ‘reformers,’ and pro-Westerners [or fragile states], this tends actually to worsen the asymmetry by substituting local legitimacy with international legitimacy and making them an easy target of nationalism or frustration with international demands at home.”22

In short, notions of state failure and state fragility are of little analytical and political utility, if not understood in terms of what a majority of a country’s citizens expects of its government. Labelling is risky, particularly where, as argued, radically different expectations of the state confront each other. New majorities in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela gave elected leaders a mandate for state restructuring — yet the democratic mandate and its implementation is cause
for alarm in imperialist quarters, still very much linked to the old regimes and the protection of their “minority” rights. But the GWOT cannot demand that democratic expectations be placed on hold, lest they provoke the US or be subsumed under the terrorist label. States can and must undergo profound change, sometimes, by definition, upsetting the old institutionalism and international relationships. Democracies must either deepen or decay.

Take for example the obligation of the state to ensure minimal public services to its citizens. In many places, people and governments come to the conclusion that the free market and the private sector have not guaranteed quality and accessible services — the state of public infrastructure in Latin America, as in Africa, so testifies. Public Services International defines public services as “those which are universally provided to the public and available equally to all; they affect life, safety and the public welfare and are vital to commercial and economic development;
they involve regulatory or policy-making functions; the service is incompatible with the profit motive or cannot be effectively or efficiently delivered through market mechanisms …and to promote quality public services as essential in building fair and inclusive societies, where all people have equal access and opportunity.”23 A violation of “economic freedom” and “common sense economics”?

Failure to secure the adequate provision of minimal resources should be considered a form of state failure, rather than an invitation for foreign corporations to step in, deregulate, and privatize left and right. The goal is to take back the public commons and, where warranted, revert privatizations that are inimical to the public interest.

The New Imperialism and Sub-sovereignty

One government in particular is disproportionately responsible for the sorry state of global affairs:the United States, invoking a war against terror, has embarked on a new cycle of global warfare and expansion. Such is the central reality of contemporary international politics. Michael Ignatieff, formerly of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, summed it up: “This new
imperialism… is humanitarian in theory but imperial in practice; it creates ‘sub-sovereignty,’ in which states possess independence in theory but not in fact. The reasons the Americans are in Afghanistan, or the Balkans, after all is to maintain imperial order in zones essential to the interest of the United States. They are there to maintain order against a barbarian threat.”24

But the barbarian threat hiding within fragile states is yet another ideological construct. Does refusal to follow the free market model and cater to US security demands constitute barbarism and merit sub-sovereignty? Is a nation refusing to follow that model a threat to Western civilization and doomed to “failure” — and therefore subject to regime change? Such is the logic of the War on Terror but also of the expansion of capitalist colonialism bent on securing more markets, more access to cheap labour, more raw materials, and more investment markets. Must states, economies, and even societies be structured so as to better take
their global place in the era of US supremacy?

In the final analysis, the question is whether states and electorates in the South and elsewhere will be denied the right to determine the future of their own countries and be trusted to exercise that right in a responsible and legitimate manner, nationally and internationally. As long as there is no respect for this right, then trauma and disorder will continue affecting not only a few states but the entire international system. And it is the system — imperialism— which must give way, not democracy.

State-building prescriptions are not a matter of taste, judgment, or of adopting the latest business model requiring World Bank-driven re-engineering. The issue is much deeper, societal, and global. Where is the “international community’s” concern for state failure and legal indecency in the United States? How can one change behaviour that is not the result of a temporary lapse of rational thinking, or a cognitive wrong turn in the road, or even an “understandable response” to the blow of 9/11? If we are going to engage in a discussion of failed states, we should not limit
it to the South.

Many US citizens are the first to demand that US “allies” not reinforce Washington’s
self-conception as a state economy that easily corrects itself and eventually will. The idea that the world can talk the US out of its behavioural disorder is not satisfactory. It disrespects human beings in nations suffering the daily cruelty of intervention. There are factors at work that go beyond elections. Corporations and bankers cannot abandon the bottom line and will not promote justice by force of will or reason any more than a leopard can change its spots. One can always hope that there is a small, still rational part of the brain of the social
polity that will recognize there is a state, or community of states, suffering from serious control issues, and that the current obsession with consumption and security are but its symptoms and not its cause. Force-feeding is not an option, but neither is the continued appeal to good intentions while maintaining a shocking disregard for the human beings concerned.

States, Sovereignty, and Democracy

Although a necessary step, a diagnosis is not the same as treatment. But good science dependson focusing the research in the right direction and in collecting the pertinent data. If liberated from its captors in the Security Council, the UN can still play a healthy role in a nation’sreco nstruction and development, particularly if it can help deliver what is most needed —resources and not rationalizations.
A check needs to be placed on patronizing explanations of state disorder that feature societal dysfunction or plain native ignorance as causes. Also unwelcome are political therapists from the North promising to expunge the traumas, inner needs, and attachment disorders of the South.

States are told they are too lean in security terms and must be force-fed, or too fat in social spending and require being starved for a while. To see through this deception one must remember that it is not simply a matter of countries needing to be “fixed” or people being occasionally “consulted” or “included,” but that people are at the centre of the entire equation — it is their nation and their people. Countries in the South should not be testing grounds for other people’s ideologies or research hypotheses.

By the same token, societies in the South cannot simply heap all blame on external factors. Although an often convenient hook on which to hang the misery of day-to-day life, blaming the outsider is no substitute for confronting the internal factors that generate a dysfunctional state in human security terms. When rich nations are failing in so many respects as functional democratic states, there is a danger that illegitimate and illicit security-first clandestine coping methods will be exported to the rest of the world, North and South.

From a Latin American perspective, US behavioural flaws were not substantially greater in the days after 9/11 than they were the day or decades before. Countries in trouble have the right to get support, long before they need hospitalization, but the choices should not be between being treated like children or dealt with as rogue elements, infantilized and criminalized in equal and patronizing measure. “Surgeons” from abroad must also be held accountable,principally to the “patients” enduring their intervention. State-building support is for the purpose of protecting the state for and not from the people.

Are there “lessons” Latin America can offer policy makers? Two issues should be acknowledged from the outset. First, many of us in this region have trouble, and will continue to have trouble,distinguishing between the United States and the rest of the “donor” community (Europe,Canada, and Japan). The overwhelming historical, political, and commercial weight of that country in our region is the principal reason. One might detect different tactics, but there is a common bottom line around what constitutes “good governance” and a belief in the superiority of the capitalist, investor-privileging model of economic growth.

Second a Latin American visualization of what constitutes a failed state is considerably different from the pictures emerging from Central Asia, the Middle East, or Sub-Saharan Africa. There may be disagreements as to definitions, but these should not blind Latin Americans to the need to contribute more intelligent and pragmatic responses to failure where it affects human beings, whatever the causes. Nor can our region be insensitive to real or credibly impending human rights disasters, including the use of a state’s territory for proven (as opposed to suspected)terrorist operations.

A formidable Latin American contribution could be to demand clearer answers to questions about the criteria of intervention, who judges and how, and who responds and how. Based on our region’s considerable history of endured interventions, we would highlight the importance of legal (UN yes, NATO or OAS no) collective decision-making mechanisms and collective responses characterized by a strong preferential option for political means with regional involvement.

So, for example, the fact that none of Sudan’s neighbouring governments favours Northern military “humanitarian” responses makes it difficult for non-African states in the South to support intervention unauthorized not simply by the African Union but by the UNSC. The arrogant and illegal military overthrow and removal of the Aristide government has not been forgotten. Unlike their governments, key social movements and churches in Latin America support the demand of their Haitian counterparts in denouncing the UN occupation of that country. After all, non-intervention as an international legal norm was born in Latin America —
coming up with a list of exceptions will be hard, particularly when someone powerful
seems restive.

It should go without saying, that NATO war planes or soldiers killing innocent civilians, as in Afghanistan, thoroughly discredits concurrent state-building initiatives. It is shocking that some believe they can do development as usual in an occupied country. What much of the population in Afghanistan, along with many in the South, witnesses is merely the civilian wing of an ongoing military counterinsurgency effort. Under these circumstances, Washington’s partners should not ask for the benefit of the doubt, particularly if the UN Security Council
is bypassed.

Alternatives to intervention or alternatives to US modalities of intervention? Many in the North will lean toward the latter — and refraining from following the Pentagon is always commendable. But people’s movements and many Southern governments will focus on the first question, inviting their Northern associates, within and outside the US, to do so also. Policy and political discussions may need to be differentiated, and colleagues in the South should at least be sympathetic to the complexities faced by Northern counterparts forced to deal with both worlds and deal with their own government’s multi-faceted intervention.

All intervention areas need to be scrutinized, but the growing fragile state industry is by and large operating within “safe” parameters. Other colleagues believe that genuine peacebuilding requires a clear denunciation of military intervention and rejection of the current script whereby US military steps in, gets bogged-down, and then dumps the problem in the laps of its allies
or the UN, while, of course, retaining strategic and operational control.

Externally-driven state-building exercises capable of generating inclusive and participatory governance? External military interventions that incorporate genuine peacebuilding (as opposed to pacification and stabilization) and gender awareness? Democracy in an occupied country? Perhaps easier to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Finally, beyond the contextual issues, and in order to better analyze them, it is important to review the roles of ideology and paradigm. One can give credit to the challenge, within and outside the US, to Washington’s increasingly discredited position and pretension to act unilaterally whenever or wherever it decides. But there is a larger proposition. Does unfettered capitalism and corporate-friendly “good governance” produce freedom, democracy, and state stability? By definition perhaps, policy-making circles will not easily recognize the constraint,
let alone tackle it. Those outside the bureaucracies may simply take a pass on this question.

But that is an unaffordable luxury for many in the South because, as events in Ecuador,Bolivia, and Venezuela are showing, the failure of the capitalist neo-liberal state to deliver basic necessities can be taken as a failure not simply of the state, but of democracy itself.

Linking neo-liberal capitalism to democracy is a precondition for either the deepening or the discarding of democracy altogether. In the short run, however, the capitalism/democracy confusion, often openly propagated by Northern democracy assistance programs and our own Southern elites, creates a contradiction in people’s minds that can have disastrous consequences for democracy (and security). If the failed/fragile states discussion chooses not to deal with the dichotomy then it will follow the course of the international mainstream debate on governance and development, becoming reduced to simplistic, undemocratic, and insensitive
propositions of what kind of government and policies are needed to fit into the global market.

The same can be said about a “hard power” response to bringing about “democratic states” but which fuel a backlash against democracy (and democracy promotion work). Although the terminology is not helpful, failed/failing states demand a different international response: one that strengthens the principles and values of democracy and helps make the state newly relevant to people; democracy you can feel; a state that belongs to you. Responses to failed states that continue to exclude those previously excluded from decision-making will get us nowhere. The real question will then be how to promote sovereign, participatory, self-determined,democratic processes in the face of globalization’s military and economic onslaught.


Alejandro Bendaña is President of the Center for International Studies,
Managua, Nicaragua. During the 1980s, he served as Nicaragua’s Ambassador to
the UN. He has a Ph.D. in historyALEJANDRO BENDAÑA from Harvard University. He is the author of
various publications on international relations, peacebuilding, development and
history. He has worked as an consultant on demobilization and reintegration
issues in Central America, Mozambique, Sri Lanka, Somalia and Indonesia.

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Endnotes
1 A variation on the theme is Canada’s announced “re-engagement” with
Latin America in the form of diplomatic support for countries that are
outside the Venezuelan sphere of influence: “There are questions about
whether Harper is mainly trying to help Bush, whose last visit to Latin
America sparked widespread protests, and lend encouragement to freemarket
governments in the face of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s
push for a new leftist, anti-capitalist consensus in the region.”
Whittington, Less. “PM sees payoff in adding Americas to foreign
agenda,” Toronto Star, June 22, 2007, p. A14.
2 Mariano Aguirre, “Failed states or weak democracies? The State in
Latin America,” January 17, 2006, http://www.opendemocracy.net/
democracy-protest/state_violence_3187.jsp, accessed June 2007;
Kees Koonings & Dirk Kruijt’s (eds.,) Armed Actors: Organized Violence
and State Failure in Latin America (London: Zed Press, 2005).
3 World Bank Group, The Independent Evaluation Group, Engaging
with Fragile States (Washington, 2005). http://www.worldbank.org/
ieg/licus/download.html. Accessed June 2007.
4 The Reality of Aid, The Reality of Aid 2006: Focus on Conflict, Security
and Development Cooperation (Manila: Ibon Books, 2006) p. 9.
http://www.realityofaid.org/roa.php?id=34. Accessed June 2007.
5 Easterly, William. The White Man’s Burden, Why the West’s efforts to aid the
rest have done so much ill and so little good (Penguin Press: New York,
2006), p. 218, drawing on state failure data in Richard Rotberg,
When States Fail: Causes and Consequences of State Failure (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2002).
6 Easterly, The White Man’s Burden, pp. 216−217.
7 Quoted by Kyriakou, Niko. “Chavez’s Market Vision,”
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/12/14/
chavezs_market_vision.php. Accessed June 2007.
8 “Blurring the lines,” Washington Office on Latin America,
http://www.wola.org/
index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=64&Itemid=2.
9 Grandin, Greg. Empire’s Workshop, Latin America, the United States
and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Henry Holt, 2007),
pp. 214−215.
10 Ibid., p. 215.
11 Quoted in Centro de Estudios Internacionales, Expansionismo
Económico y Militar de Estados Unidos en América Latina y el Caribe
(Managua: Centro de Estudios Internacionales, 2007), p. 36.
12 Klein, Naomi. “The Daily War,” Guardian, March 17, 2003.
13 Isaacson, Adam. “United States Security Cooperation Policy in
Latin America,” The Reality of Aid, p. 165.
14 “How to boost the coca crop,” The Economist, May 22, 2007,
https://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=8888847.
Accessed June 2007.
15 “Oil in Colombia,” The Economist, February 1, 2007,
https://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=8633187.
Accessed June 2007.
16 Grandin, Empire’s Workshop, p. 221.
17 Cited in Edwards, Sandra. “The US FOL in Manta: The Ecuadorian
Perspective,” Washington Office on Latin America, March 30, 2007.
www.wola.org.
18 “A coup by Congress and the street,” The Economist, April 26, 2005,
https://www.economist.com/agenda/
displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_PRJPSPT. Accessed June 2007.
19 Burbach, Roger. “Ecuador’s Nascent Leftist Government Victorious
in Confrontation with the Right,” ZNET, March 25, 2007,
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12412.
20 Council on Hemispheric Affairs, “COHA to Ecuador’s Rafael Correa:
Tread carefully so your detractors don’t have an easy target,”
Press release, May 29, 2007, www.coha.org/2007/05/09.
21 Associated Press, April 16, 2007.
22 Woodward, Susan. “Institutionally Fragile States, Prevention and
Post Conflict: Recommendations,” FRIDE (Madrid), Failing States or
Failed States? The Role of Development Models, Working Paper 19
(February, 2006), p. 21.
23 Public Services International, Focus on the public services;
Vol. 8 No. 4, 2001.
24 Ignatieff, Michael. “The Challenges of American Imperial Power,”
Naval War College Review, cited in John Bellamy Foster, Naked
Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006), p. 12.