—a type of political party with middle- or upper-class leadership, strong popular base, nationalistic rhetoric, charismatic leadership, and lacking a precise ideology (Angell 1968);
—a political discourse that divides society into antagonistic fields – the people (el pueblo) versus the oligarchy (la oligarquía) (Laclau 1977);
—attempts of Latin American nations to control foreign-led modernization processes through the state’s taking a central role as defender of national identity and promoter of national integration through economic development (Touraine 1989);
–a political style that implies a close bond between political leaders and led, usually associated with periods of rapid mobilization and crisis, but that emerges in periods of exceptionality as well as at other times (Knight 1998).
The previous enumeration of the uses of the concept of populism seem to confirm Peter Wiles’s observation that “to each his own definition of populism, according to the academic ax he grinds” (1969, 166). Given its many different uses and the variety of historical experiences to which it seemingly refers, authors such as Ian Roxborough (1984) and Rafael Quintero (1980) have proposed eliminating the concept from the vocabulary of the social sciences. They base their arguments on case studies that show that populism is not a stage in Latin American development linked to import substitution industrialization (Collier 1979; Roxborough 1984). They also argue that views privileging the importance of charismatic leaders and anomic and available masses have been replaced by interpretations emphasizing the rational utilitarian political behavior of popular sectors (Menéndez-Carrión 1986), or by class analysis of specific populist coalitions (Quintero 1980; Roxborough 1984). Finally, they question the theoretical validity of a concept that refers equally to civilian and military regimes in the region over a span of sixty years, which may, but do not necessarily, espouse anti-imperialist ideologies and in some cases apply distributive economic policies and in others policies that concentrate economic power. If we add to these objections the generally negative attributes of the term, such as manipulation, or a deviation from “normal politics,” one might conclude (as did Menéndez-Carrión) that the term populism has been “conceptually exhausted” (1992, 200).
Contrary to the premature efforts to ban populism from the vocabulary of the social sciences, this book argues that, despite the misuses and abuses of the term, it is worth preserving and redefining. The phenomena that have been designated as populist have in common certain characteristics that can be identified and compared by using this notion. Otherwise, “important empirical content can be lost when concepts are discarded prematurely as a result of ambiguity or an incomplete ‘fit’ across cases” (Roberts 1995, 88). As Laclau points out (1977), populism is not just a sociological concept, but rather an actual experience of people who have defined and do define their collective identities through populist participation as Peronists, Cefepistas, or Gaitanistas. Finally, authors who abandon the notion of populism in favor of objectivist categories for analyzing social reality cannot take into account realms of populist experience such as the formation of identity, ritual, myths, and the ambiguous meanings of populism for the actors involved.
I see populism as a style of political mobilization based on strong rhetorical appeals to the people and crowd action on behalf of a leader. Populist rhetoric radicalizes the emotional element common to all political discourses (Álvarez Junco 1987). It is a rhetoric that constructs politics as the moral and ethical struggle between el pueblo and the oligarchy. Populist discourse transmutes politics into a struggle for moral values without accepting compromise or dialogue with the opponent. Populist politics is based on crowd action. Crowds directly occupy public spaces to demand political participation and incorporation. At the same time, these crowds are used by their leaders to intimidate adversaries. Mass meetings become political dramas wherein people feel themselves to be true participants in the political scene. Populist politics includes all these characteristics. It is an interclass alliance based on charismatic political leadership; a Manichaean and moralistic discourse that divides society into el pueblo and oligarchy; clientelist networks that guarantee access to state resources; and forms of political participation in which public and massive demonstrations, the acclamation of leaders, and the occupation of public spaces in the name of a leader are perceived as more important than citizenship rights and the respect for liberal democratic procedures.
The Structural Preconditions of Populism
The first round of studies on Latin American populism, those of modernization and dependency theorists, tried to come to grips with the experiences of the major republics. In the 1930s and 1940s Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico endured processes of urbanization and import substitution industrialization associated with the emergence of the populist politics of Peronism, Varguism, and Cardenism. Hence Gino Germani (1971), for example, presented the hypothesis that populism is a phase in the transition to modernity. Developing an alternative explanation, authors working within the dependency perspective criticized the teleological assumptions of modernization theory and offered a structuralist argument that linked populism with import substitution industrialization (O’Donnell 1973; Malloy 1977).
Recent scholarship has demonstrated that the fit between populism and import substitution, even in the major republics, is not that neat (Perruci and Sanderson 1989, 34–35). For example, Ian Rox – borough (1984) shows that, whereas import substitution industrialization started in Brazil before the 1930s, populist politics was inaugurated in the late 1940s and during Vargas’s second term in office (1950–54). Moreover, in countries such as Peru and Ecuador, there is no fit between populism and import substitution. Populist movements emerged long before import substitution industrialization. Nevertheless and in general terms, populism is associated with dependent capitalist development and of the resulting emergence of popular sectors demanding an expansion of closed political systems (Collier 1979; Drake 1982). In this context, I will examine the social conditions that allowed the emergence of Sanchezcerrismo and Aprismo in Peru in the 1920s and 1930s, Gaitanismo in Colombia in the mid-1940s, and Velasquismo in Ecuador in the 1940s in this chapter.
The oligarchical social order typical of Latin America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been characterized by a combination of “liberal-inspired constitutions (division of the three powers, elections, and so on) with patrimonial practices and values polarized around a cacique, patrón, gamonal, coronel, or caudillo” (Ianni 1975, 79). These estate-based societies excluded the majority of the population from political decision making and had relations of domination and subordination characterized by unequal reciprocity. Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis (1961) of how socioeconomic differentiation between rich and poor in traditional societies appeared as naturalized relations of inequality between masters and servants is relevant here. Tocqueville points out that a fixed hierarchical social order is constituted in which generations pass without any change in position. “There are two societies superimposed, always distinct but governed by analogous principles.… Certain permanent notions of justice and injustice are generated between them.… Fixed rules are recognized and, in the absence of a law, there are common prejudices that direct them; between them reign certain determined habits, a morality” (Tocqueville 1961, 152).
In his study of the 1931 Peruvian elections in which APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana) was defeated by Luis Sánchez Cerro’s populist movement, Steve Stein (1980) analyzes the changes in socioeconomic and political structures during the 1920s and 1930s that brought to an end the so-called República Aristocrática. They included a greater integration into the world market through an increase in mineral and agricultural exports—primarily sugar—and an increasing presence of foreign capital from the United States, which modified the class structure. The state was modernized. The number of public employees increased from 975 in 1920 to 6, 285 in 1931, an increase of 545 percent (Stein 1980, 39). Rural-urban migration and processes of urbanization transformed Lima’s socioeconomic structure, with a great increase in middle and working classes. Stein also analyzes pressures for political incorporation from those social sectors that were seeking