title: “Power To The People” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-09” author: “Donna Voigt”
For the first time in recent memory, people power helped evict an African military dictator. It wasn’t exactly a happy ending: for four days, the country veered from resentment about electoral machinations to rage at Guei’s clumsy bid to cling to power to near anarchy as Muslim militants fought supporters of the winner, a Christian. At the weekend, the main Muslim leader, Alassane Ouattara, calmed tempers by publicly embracing the new president, Laurent Gbagbo. But that show of solidarity was clouded by the discovery of the bodies of at least 55 young Muslims apparently tortured and executed during the height of the crisis and dumped in a vacant lot outside the capital. In the end, Cote d’Ivoire appeared to have lurched violently back onto the path of national reconciliation. But as families prepared to bury as many as 200 dead, the only consensus was how miserably Guei had failed his country.
Guei came in claiming to be a reformer, but drove the country toward the abyss. He said junior officers staged the Christmas Eve coup and turned to him because he had served as chief of staff under founding president Felix Houphouet-Boigny. But Guei was backed secretly by neighboring rogue states Liberia and Burkina Faso, say well-placed diplomats. Guei promised to “sweep the house clean” then step aside. Instead, he built a fortune and repressed the Muslim north in favor of his home region, the mostly Christian west. Then he declared his candidacy for the presidency. His handpicked court turned this month’s elections into a sham by disqualifying 14 of 19 hopefuls, including former prime minister Ouattara.
But Guei couldn’t even steal a rigged election. He misjudged the only credible candidate left in the race. Socialist Party leader Gbagbo, a Christian from Guei’s region, had opposed the ruling party for 30 years, and served a six-month jail term for “subversive” teaching. During a previous run for president he polled just 11 percent of the vote. But in the campaign’s final days, Gbagbo called for a Yugoslav-style popular uprising if Guei won by fraud. When partial returns showed Gbagbo ahead in the polling, Guei sacked the electoral commission and declared victory. Gbagbo was ready. At his headquarters in Abidjan, youths filled plastic bottles with gasoline. Tens of thousands of protesters converged downtown.
At first, brutality blunted the uprising. Troops beat and whipped the crowd, firing into the air then into the mass. Overnight Gbagbo called for better-organized demonstrations. He also cracked Guei’s power base; the next day paramilitary gendarmes hit Guei’s headquarters with truck-mounted weapons. Guei’s top ministers deserted him. His family flew to Benin, and he went missing. After Gbagbo declared himself the victor, the Army formally backed him.
The tainted succession touched off a wave of ethnic fighting. Ouattara’s most militant supporters took to the streets wielding machetes and nail-studded clubs; he claims 155 of his backers died in running skirmishes with Gbagbo’s forces. Gendarmes raided Ouattara’s house and he briefly took refuge in the neighboring German Embassy. The United Nations and Washington called for a new presidential poll, but France said the best way forward is to hold free parliamentary elections later this year. To survive that long, Gbagbo must win over a divided military and expand his mandate. He promised “a broad-based government of national unity” and won the backing of the former ruling party. But fratricide remained an immediate threat. “We don’t know when this is going to end,” said Kunta Abdul, 25. “Now we’re afraid of our own.” That may be Guei’s worst legacy.
title: “Power To The People” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-10” author: “Pedro Polich”
Not so long ago, such organized defiance of the once popular Chavez might have seemed inconceivable. Today, however, the 48-year-old president has been put on the defensive largely by a unique coalition of trade unions, business federations, women’s-rights groups and other nongovernmental organizations. Mobilizing opposition to a failed head of state is supposed to be the preserve of political parties, at least in a modern, working democracy. But in recent years that vital function has been taken over by a variety of civic organizations in parts of Latin America that are unhappy with cronyism and politics as usual. Indeed, from Mexico to Argentina, the rise of civil society is writing an important new chapter in the political history of the region.
The backlash has been evident in several countries. In Buenos Aires a year ago, antigovernment demonstrators barred the Peronists and other opposition parties from unfurling their banners in the Argentine capital’s Plaza de Mayo. Hundreds of thousands of Colombians answered the call of a nonpartisan foundation three years ago to march in the streets of major cities and voice their outrage over the kidnapping epidemic plaguing their nation. “Over the past 15 years, civil-society organizations have been central to advancing political reform and protecting democratic processes,” says Kenneth Wollack, president of the Washington, D.C.-based National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI). “They are now an accepted part of the political landscape in Latin America.”
But it’s been a grudging acceptance in some quarters. Former Venezuelan Interior minister Luis Miquilena, a onetime Chavez ally, posed a mocking question in the course of a legislative debate two years ago: “Civil society? What do you eat that with?” The answer was not long in coming. In the fall of 2000, hundreds of angry parents formed a nonprofit civic organization to fight a Chavez decree that would have created a corps of “itinerant supervisors” to oversee the quality of instruction on offer at private and state-run schools. The fiat coincided with the announcement of a trade pact Chavez clinched with Fidel Castro that would have brought scores of Cuban “advisers” to Venezuela to help train public schoolteachers.
Many ordinary Venezuelans decided enough was enough. They rallied around the simplest of slogans, “Don’t mess with my kids,” and a grass-roots anti-Chavez movement was born. That movement has since blossomed–to the point where it encompasses a broad cross section of Venezuelan society, ranging from U.S.-educated oil-company engineers to neighborhood shopkeepers, all of whom are bent on ousting Chavez long before his current presidential term ends in January 2007. “These civil-society groups have a greater capacity to bring people into the streets today than do [opposition] political parties because they have greater legitimacy,” says Rosa Amelia Gonzalez, a political-science professor at the Caracas-based Institute for Graduate Administration Studies.
But some analysts believe the repudiation of political parties has gone too far. They point to the rise of Alberto Fujimori in Peru and Chavez in Venezuela as cautionary tales of what can happen when parties are demonized and collapse, thus paving the way for political outsiders to ride a tidal wave of discontent into the presidency. As Wollack of NDI points out, “Civic groups can only take this [reform] process so far. You need political organizations that can aggregate the interests of civil society and respond to their demands. The challenge in Latin America is to renew, reform and, in some cases, rebuild political parties.”
Chavez sees the new groups as a threat. He’s repeatedly derided many civic-group leaders as coup plotters in disguise. But he has acknowledged his political foes’ right to convene a nonbinding referendum on his turbulent four-year reign by next August. The opposition is aiming for a much earlier vote, but whichever comes, ordinary Venezuelans will have proven their newfound clout.
