On April 18, the United Nations General Assembly held a special session on the drug trade. At this session, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos presented a plan for the complete and radical overhaul of global policy towards drug trafficking. Calling for an approach that is both more humane and comprehensive, he recommended an end to the victimization of drug users through abolishing the harsh penalties attached to drug related offenses. His views reflect growing support for a human rights approach to addressing the drug trade issue--one that recognizes that the punitive and repressive responses of states to drug production and trafficking have failed to reduce the trade while ratcheting up the level of drug related violence. The consequence has been that human rights violations related to drug offense are common throughout the region while Latin American prisons have become filled to overflowing with drug offenders, most of them consumers and low-level offenders. Altering the approach to the Latin American drug wars is essential to improving the human condition for millions who face both material deprivation and high levels of physical insecurity. In Mexico, for example, as many as 80,000 have perished in drug-related violence since 2006, while between 2012 and 2014, 2 million more fell into poverty. However, is taking a human rights approach to the drug issue, through decriminalizing lower level offenses, reducing sentences, and providing treatment for users, going to be enough to reduce the unfortunate social consequences that have arisen with drug production and trafficking?
Read MoreAdmittedly, my close familiarity with Latin America’s turbulent political history shapes my view of recent developments in U.S. politics, in particular, popular support for candidates at what seems to be opposite ends of the political spectrum (Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders). Latin America, with its long history of high levels of socio-economic inequality, is rife with populist, demagogue-like political figures, and radical left politicians calling for profound structural changes.
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The recent scandals in a number of Latin American countries raise the issue of institutional capacity and the vexing issue of what is at the root of state incapacity in Latin American countries, particularly in those cases that have made recent significant progress in reducing poverty. This blog entry argues that there are long-standing historical and structural conditions that make corrupt practices extremely resilient. The reform of formal institutions will not be effective unless it is accompanied by efforts to grapple with those underlying conditions.
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With the decline in commodity prices, Latin America faces the possibility of a downward political and economic cycle. During the last fifteen years, as the region has enjoyed economic prosperity with the rise of commodity prices on the international market, left/centre governments spent liberally on the expansion of social policy initiatives. These measures spread the wealth among all socio-economic groups in ways that have not occurred in the past. Poverty declined and there has even been a reduction in the region’s high level of inequality. However, these countries now faces a new critical juncture as left/centre governments face corruption scandals, loss of political power, widespread protests, and the rise of the political right. The commodity boom papered over both institutional inadequacies and hard redistributive decisions. Governments spread the wealth but did not substantially redistribute it, ensuring that middle and upper classes retained an inordinate share of state largesse. Faced with economic downturns and declining state revenues, governments will now have to make hard decisions about the allocation of diminishing state resources. This reality is already giving rise to an increased level of political polarization and contestation, a development that, in combination with the economic downturn itself, may worsen prospects for continued progress toward social inclusion.
Read MoreThis week and last, a number of my students asked me about me how and why I became interested in development issues, in general, and Latin America, in particular. These enquires forced me to think back to those heady days of the 1960s when we all thought that the world could be changed for the better. It also got me to thinking about the ways in which both popular conceptions and academic thinking about social injustice and the operation of the world economy has changed over the last forty years—despite the fact that the reality may not have changed all that much.
Read MoreIn this entry, Teichman discusses the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), drawing on some of ideas elaborated on in The Politics of Inclusive Development. Policy, State Capacity and Coalition Building, 2016. (Link to publisher).
Read MoreIn this entry, Teichman discusses the Brazilian crisis, drawing on some of the ideas developed in The Politics of Inclusive Development. Policy, State Capacity and Coalition Building, 2016. (Link to publisher).
Brazil appears generously endowed with attributes that should contribute to the achievement of equitable and inclusive development: its ample agricultural land and mineral wealth affords a wide array of commodity exports while the country’s a large domestic market can support the development of industry and manufacturing. Nevertheless, Brazil’s historical development trajectory has been far from inclusionary, involving high levels of inequality, persisting poverty (reduced substantially only fairly recently), and exclusion. In the early 2000s, the World Bank identified the social exclusion of blacks, children, youth and indigenous people as one of the country’s most pressing development challenges (1). Brazil has had historically high levels of socioeconomic inequality, a feature sometimes linked to a dependence on commodity exports—one of the implications of the so-called resource curse. However, inequality and exclusion also arise from a history of highly unequal political power relations and the operation of exclusionary institutions.
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