Demanding Accountable Government. Citizens and Politicians in Argentina

PERUZZOTTI ENRIQUE

American University, Washington

Conferencia; Council on Comparative Studies, 57th Forum; 2004

As the events of December 2001 pathetically illustrated, the bonds that bind Argentine politicians with their constituencies are seriously eroded. The civic mobilizations that took place in the major urban metropolitan areas of the country represented an extraordinary instance of massive withdrawal of social trust in political elites. Undoubtedly, the wave of angry civic protests against politicians constituted a dramatic political moment that placed a bracket mark into what represented the most challenging task of the democratization process: the consolidation of strong representative institutions. In the following pages, I will trace the genealogy of such crisis of representation in order to argue that the actual low points that are experiencing relations of representation is not an isolated or circumstantial episode or the exclusive product of failed socioeconomic policies. Rather, it is the latest act of a conflict between civil and political society over what constitutes representative government that can be traced back to the initial moments of the transition to democracy. The democratic period inaugurated in 1983 is characterized by a new form of relationship between citizens and politicians that sets it apart from previous democratic experiences. Perhaps the most notorious novelty of the past 20 years has been the emergence of a more sophisticated and demanding citizenry that is determined to redefine preexisting ideals of democratic representation to mold them to a novel civic concern for governmental accountability. The dramatic experience of state terrorism under the military dictatorship that governed the country between 1976-1983 gave rise to an actor, the human rights movement, which would play a crucial pedagogic role over Argentine society. The movement’s rights-oriented politics and discourse and its systematic denunciation of the horrors of state terrorism introduced into Argentina’s political culture a much-needed concern for rights and the rule of law. The emergence of a new civic sensibility in large sectors of Argentine civil society regarding breaches of law by public officials resulted in the rise of a politics aimed at improving the accountability of government. Throughout the 1990s, such politics of “social accountability” triggered unprecedented civic and media-based protests and exposes of unlawful governmental behavior. The systematic disregard displayed by Carlos Menem’s administration of the social claims for greater accountability fed civic anger and frustration against his government. The emergence of an electoral coalition in the 1999 presidential elections organized around a call for honest government unleashed great hopes in the middle class electorate. Unfortunately, those hopes proved short-lived: a major corruption scandal shocked the administration. The Senate scandal extinguished popular expectations for institutional and political reform and convinced many middle class Argentines that the problem of corruption could not be circumscribed to a particular administration but affected the political class as a whole. In the summer of 2001-2, civic anger and frustration triggered a shift from accountability politics towards forms of protest that in many instances rejected representative institutions altogether. The first part of the article analyses the processes of cultural and political innovation that took place between 1983 and 2000 and how they redefined the links between the citizenry and the political system. The second part focuses on the development of the crisis of representation that shook the stability of the Argentine democratic system in December of 2001.