The images in this article were made by photographers chosen to exhibit in  “Documenting the Impact of Covid-19 through Photography: Collective Isolation in Latin America,” sponsored by ReVista and the Art, Culture, and Film program at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS.)

The exhibition, based on an Open Call for Photography launched in July 2020,  aims to create a critical visual record of our unprecedented times so they can be remembered by future generations. 2020 will be remembered as a watershed year in which a pandemic laid bare the inequalities and fissures within our society.

A specter has begun to float around the world: a new social pact. This notion-proposal is just about everywhere at global forums, common sense among politicians on both the right and left and constantly present in the international press. And this seems normal because the pandemic has revealed how fragile our societies are.

Peri Alto, a suburban pandemic #4, Brazil, A child, in the most vulnerable part of the favela, where the sewers are open-air. Most of the children of the community have been away from school for months. Photo by Luca Meola.

By stopping the world, the pandemic has allowed us to see, as never before, fissures, gaps and hardships. In just a few months, more than a million people have died; there have been more than 40 million confirmed cases of Covid-19 and the global economy has decreased 5%. However, the moral blow has come from the unequal way in which the sickness attacks societies. Thus, the World Economic Forum called for “a resetting of capitalism” and the UN Secretary General called for new social pacts in all countries, in addition to constructing a New World Agreement.

For Latin America, being the most unequal region in the world has translated into the fact that six of the ten of the countries most affected by coronavirus are located here (and if we talk about the Americas, we need to bring the number to seven).  At the end of this 2020, 231 million Latin Americans have plunged into poverty and the continental GDP has contracted 7%. More than the aggregate calamity, the pandemic has afflicted a continent where different types of inequalities—economic. social, territorial, gender—plot against the prosperity of countries and against the life project of each of its citizens. In the face of such a panorama, the clamor for a new social pact has resonance for everyone, from right to left.

What are these different voice talking about when they evoke a new social pact?  With different nuances, they are basically referring to the need for a new institutional arrangement that can ensure that, in each country, the citizenry can count on health, education, housing and good-quality basic services, ending a system in which only those who can pay can obtain these services.  In the generic and vague terms in which these things are discussed, then, it seems like a vastly agreed upon egalitarian convocation. Achieving such a goal would mark a before and afterwards in the relationship between the state, market and citizenry in Latin American countries.

Photo by Aaron Sosa. Autoconfinamiento/Self-Confinement 004, Montevideo, Uruguay

In this essay, I am not going to deal with the specific content of this demanded “new social pact.” Rather, I’m interested in observing such an intent from the stance of politics, asking three questions.

• Are great social transformations of an egalitarian nature made through social pacts?
• What are the political conditions that facilitate or make these social transformations difficult?
• Are Latin American countries in the necessary condition to pact these very ambitious social arrangements?

The answers to these questions could help evaluate the promise of the omnipresent new social pact. As I will conclude, only a few countries in the region have the necessary conditions to put forth and pact ample and ground-breaking agreements.  The calls to “reset” Latin American countries may be very just, but, at the same time, could result disastrous and improbable for many and thus inclined to spread frustration in a continent already submerged in despondency.

Competitive Consensus

 In the last poem of the last book published by Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges, there is a moving eulogy to the foundation of Switzerland.  Los Conjurados, translated as The Conjured Ones, pays tribute to its origin in 1291:

It involves men of diverse lineages, who profess diverse religions

And speak in diverse tongues.

They have made the strange resolution to be reasonable.

They have resolved to forget their differences and accentuate their affinities.

[Translation by Lynn Shirey]

What is reasonable unites us and culture distinguishes us.  And they opt for the former. It is the core of the philosophical tradition that we usually call “contractualism.” I’m not going to venture into philosophical terrain here, but I’d like to point out that contractualism carries with it a crucial illusion for the construction of modern political legitimacy in that it is based on the consent of society and the individuals that make up that society.   From Hobbes to Rawls—that is to say, from the pact that dictates who has the right to use violence to that which produces a scheme for social justice—contractualism tends to conceptualize what is agreed upon as the only reasonable pact for the contracting parties and therefore ties the idea of a social contract not only to the illusion of a vast consensus, but to that of unanimity.

Democratic life in pluralistic societies, however, has few opportunities to experience consensus, much less unanimity. Dissent is the rule of thumb. Democracy, after all, is an agreement to be in disagreement.  But it is an aspect that the technocrat called upon for “a new social contract” seems to disregard, because the mere fact of evoking this contract seems to suggest a type of comprehensive institutional arrangement that should have a vast social consensus from the beginning.  However, the changes that profoundly redrew the relations among state, market and citizenry in an egalitarian direction did not arise from the good and unanimous will of men and women who, as Borges would have it, make “the strange resolution to be reasonable.” Rather, they are born out of a political dynamic that I will call “competitive consesnsus.” I’ll give you some examples.

Photo by Marco Garro, Displaced migrants on the outskirts of Lima, Peru.

Let’s begin with the New Deal. When Roosevelt won the 1932 U.S. elections, he proposed some deep reforms that sought to protect the unemployed, regulate the markets that had generated the 1929 catastrophe and to relaunch the economy with aggressive state spending. The reforms set the country back on its path and were key in the construction of the triumphant U.S. 20th century. But these policies did not come from some foundational and comprehensive pact. Rather, they were the ideas of the Democratic political camp that were embodied in different and  successive public policies. Gradually, these policies became legitimate by gaining public support. And the Democratic party became hegemonic for a long period of time: it won seven of the ten elections between 1932 and 1968, which allowed them to deepen and increase the policies associated with the New Deal. Likewise, the union movement grew in strength and deepened its relationship with the Democratic party, which gave a social foothold to the coalition promoting these policies from the vantage of the state. Moreover, the reforms prospered thanks to an agreement with the Southern elites who favored the New Deal  as long as their right to segregate remained intact. As Columbia University political scientist Ira Katznelson sums up in reference to this tradeoff with the base of the New Deal,  “The triumph, in short, cannot be severed from the sorrow.” What interests me in underscoring this quick reference to the New Deal is that it rearticulates the relationship among state, society and market in a way that is similar to that which is being asked for today, because the political-social coalition around the Democratic party has been subject for a long time to the platforms led by the Republicans, without that correlation of forces transforming into the suppression or harrassment of the opposition party.

Or let us think about the reputable Swedish welfare state that has from the beginning of the 20th century promoted the construction of a very egalitarian citizenry in that country. As Swedish economic historian Erik Bengsston recently stressed, there was no egalitarian Swedish DNA; what set the country apart at the beginning of the 20th century was the size of its labor movement. And, in the political sphere, the Nordic welfare states were constructed due to a lasting alliance between the social-democrat and agrarian parties (the “red-green coalitions,” about which political scientist Gregory Luebbert and Danish sociologist Gosta Esping-Andersen have written extensively). The liberal parties and the interests of the middle- and upper-classes only get on board with the project when that alliance became hegemonic. In fact, the 1938  Saltsjöbaden in which liberals took part in a pact that limits the free market only came about because two years before, the coalition of social democrats and agrarians had once again won the general elections. The slow construction of the welfare state rises, therefore, with the defeat of a sector and takes root because the winning coalition that is pushing it lasts for a long time. Because of this, it manages to legitimize institutions and strengthen the actors that support the welfare state.  From 1932 to 1976, the Swedish social-democratic party remained in power. But it did not try to use this hegemony to limit political pluralism.

Last example. The British welfare state. The idea arose in the middle of World War II when the conservative-labor  coalition asked for the evaluation of the possibility of a British social security system. This led to the famous Beveridge Report that proposed an expansion of the British welfare state. The Labor Party adopted the proposal and implemented it, thanks to its sweeping victory in the 1945 election. Gradually, the institutions created obtained an important legitimacy. In particular, the National Health System became a central institution in British public life  and, in fact, in these months of pandemic, we can observe how important it has become both for the health of the British people, but also the important place it occupies in the British imaginary, their way of seeing themselves. As with the previous examples, at the same time the labor party gained support, the unions became much stronger. For the conservatives, the survival of this coalition for decades meant that it was not worthwhile to try to dismantle the welfare state policies that came into being in the shadow of the war. Only  Thatcherism would only try to do so at the end of the 1970s.

To sum up, all these great social transformations came about less because of pacts with wide-ranging, specific and nationally agreed-upon content, but rather because of a diffuse but powerful idea that was transformed gradually and indeterminately into public policy thanks to a hegemonic coalition that lasted over time but that did not suppress nor harass the opposition. It is a matter of a consensus that competes, makes legitimate and institutionalizes.

Missing What I Couldn’t Bear to See

“To include economic questions in our negotiations, we would have to keep on killing each other twenty years more.” This is, more or less, what a Salvadoran military man argued during the peace dialogues, which ended up restoring democracy in that Central American country. It wasn’t different in other countries. The urgency of creating a path to democracy postponed eventual socio-economic transformations.  Even the classic book by Guillermo O’Donnell and Phillipe C. Schmitter about democratic transitions cautioned prudence about including economic reforms in such transactions because they could derail the priority of establishing democracy. It was what was necessary. In that sense, it is very improbable that the Salvadorans have a social pact that ought to be replaced by a new one. Democracy was possible precisely because in essence it did not touch on the social-economic question.

Or let’s think about Peru (this article was finished and turned in before the November 10, 2020, removal of President Martin Vizcarra). Both in the number of deaths per million of inhabitants and in the effect on the economy, Peru has become the country that has done the worst job of coping with the pandemic. The Peruvian economics minister  has denounced how the country combines “the best macro-economic indicators with the worst social services.” Without a doubt, this is the true social agreement in Peru. But no one ever made a pact to arrive there. To ask for a new social pact for Peru is impossible.

Photo by Luis Weinstein. Avenida Pedro de Valdivieso, Santiago de Chile. Sanitation of Graffiti.

Chile, on the other hand, seems to be taking this road. From last year’s social explosion to the October 25, 2020,  vote massively demanding a new constitution, the nation has elected to leave behind a de facto social arrangement and to move forward with a pacted social contract. The 1980 constitution in effect was drawn up by an authoritarian government and the new constitution will be the first in its history to be prepared and approved democratically. This will be its great and undisputable triumph.  How much the new constitution can alter the form of articulating the relationship among state, market and society is a matter of speculation. Or, as the skeptic Juan Pablo Luna would say, it remains to be seen whether the vote to “de-constitute” will become a vote to constitute something new.

Thus, in many Latin American countries, an old social pact does not exist to be replaced with a new one. In another way, something similar occurs in several of the countries that took a leftward turn at the beginning of the century. In these countries, an explicit effort took place to open a period in national life that would correspond to the demands for a “new social pact.” They would do away with a “long neoliberal night” (Correa dixit). And although to pass a judgement whether these goals were reached or failed is beyond the scope of this essay, it’s worthwhile to note that former Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa himself in only three years of his presidency tripled Ecuadoran social spending. And something similar happened in the majority of these countries. Moving to the frenetic rhythm of oil, soy and gas prices, these countries developed an infinite number of social programs. As the years went by, however, it was difficult to sustain the construction of lasting social pacts. Rather, the reforms had two characteristics that dragged them down: access to easy resources without altering the country’s productive matrix and  political momentum speared by anti-pluralist strongmen.

In Argentina, it was difficult to provide continuity to social policy since both supporters of Mauricio Macri and Nestor/Cristina Kirchner saw each other as illegitimate actors (we think of Cristina Kirchner refusing to hand over the presidential sash to Macri in 2015). In Brazil, the corruption of the Workers Party (PT) and citizen weariness with the politicization of the state  led to the pro-fascist  Bolsonaro who seeks to do away with any policy that has even a whiff of being progressive.  In Ecuador, Lenín Moreno tore down a statue of Néstor Kirchner to demonstrate his rupture with Rafael Correa. And in Bolivia, the arrogant attempt to elect Evo Morales despite a referendum sayng he could not run led to a lamentable situation of arbitrariness and political limbo during an entire year.  The election of Luis Arce, from the same MAS political party, it is to be sure, opens up the possibility of a “process of change” that does not do away with political pluralism. In short, in all these countries, rather than a social pact, we find some variant of the expansion of social programs that went hand-in-hand with polarizing, anti-pluralistic policies that in the end sowed the seeds of their own erosion.

In most of the Latin America, there have not been coalitions of representative actors who sustain social reforms over time without intimidating the oppostion. Thus, to insist to insist on a new social pact would be equivalent to sing along with  Albert Pla the refrain “I miss what I couldn’t bear to see.”

Those Not in the Game, Keep Quiet

Uruguay is in fashion. And who has seen some presentation with President Luis Lacalle will note that the national spirit is as if Uruguay soccer player Sebastián  “Madman” Abreu  had just chipped the ball over the goalkeeper of Ghana in the decisive penalty shootout in the 2010 World Cup.   Within and outside the country, there is a recognition that Uruguay has not received in noral times. Both in terms of the numbers of deaths per inhabitant as in its economic performance, it has acted like a developed country in the face of Covid-19; only 59 lives have been lost in the entire country. If one day, like in a novel by Portuguese writer José Saramago, Uruguay should split off from the Latin American continent and find itself in Europe, it would be a country with a per capita income of $50,000. One almost feels one needs to apologize for being a neighboring country.

Photo by Aaron Sosa. Autoconfinamiento/Self-Confinement 006, Montevideo, Uruguay

Uruguay seems to confirm the necessity of a social pact in Latin America for one simple reason: it is the only country that has one. (I’ll leave Costa Rica out of the conversation because of lack of space). And the social pact was not adopted yesterday. Very early in the 20th century, Uruguay pioneered a welfare state under the leadership of Colorado Party President José  Batlle. As David and Ruth Collier argued in their classic book, the fact that a political party—and not the state— incorporated the workers’ movement had positive effects for democracy.  As a matter of fact, the salary board, a fundamental institution to dialogue with unions and business leaders in Uruguay in the last few years, was promoted by the so-called second wave of Batlle adherents in the 1940s.  More than the gradual superposition of  social reforms, political pluralism was maintained, which gave legitimacy to the reforms. After the dictatorship, in contemporary Uriguay, the right saw the Broad Front prosper without undermining its growth in an illegitimate fashion and, once in power, the Broad Front introduced a series of crucial social reforms without it backfiring on pluralism. And, very important, many of these reforms were not invented overnight, but expanded and strengthened what already existed. Thus, to sum up, Uruguayan social progress can be attributed, as in the initial examples, to initiatives sustained over time by coalitions of political and social (the role of the unions) actors that did not corral the opposition.

Is This the Moment for Rawls? (Or… Can We All Be Uruguay?)

In the region, then, we have very few countries that count with anything close to a social pact. The question is, how may have political conditions that could generate one? Very few. The majority are divided between those who lack representative actors to pact something so comprehensive and sensitive as a new social order, and those who, having such actors, also possess a poisonous polarization (benign polarization is political pluralism) that makes the possibility of institutionalizing social reforms difficult.

In the first group, the Peruvian case is paradigmatic. In its political system, as anthropologist Eduardo Ballón has written, personalities, rather than actors, abound. The congress is made up of tiny groups (no “party” has more than 15% of representation) and congressional delegates are despicable amateurs without ideas, without organizations, without constituencies, without leaders. President Vizcarra did not have a group of congressional representatives nor a political party nor any type of program.   Five months from general elections, precariousness is on the verge of being reproduced: the former goalkeeper of the soccer team Alianza Lima and a former star of a mundane reality show, as well as a short-lived mayor of a small Lima district who quit to run for president, lead in the polls. In short, in Peru, nothing important can be pacted because it does not have political or social actions with any kind of mandate.

El Salvador embodies another type of configuration. Presidente Nayib Bukele and the two political parties that have until recently articulated the Salvadoran political system are strong and representative. However, gradually, pluralism has given way to the polarization promoted by President Bukele who, with the armed forces as allies, corral the congress, the court system and the press (Hang in there, El Faro!). In these conditions, the reforms that can be introduced—it goes without saying—are destined for instability because they are being carried out within the context of politics aimed at illegitimately weakening the sources of opposition to the executive.

Chile, finally, is the case in which the conditions for making a pact for a new social agreement seem to be aligning (Anyways, this is bad news for those who, on observing the pandemic, repeat the nonsense that “crisis is always an opportunity” —the Chilean process began before the pandemic.) At any rate, Chile could produce something like a social pact because it has political actors who do not hate each other and who, even if they do not have the representativity they held a couple of decades ago, have been able to undertake a series of effective steps to channel protest.  Right and left converged in the need for a plebescite and they accepted the call for a new constitution without the rudeness and bitterness of polarized countries. Finally, the street proved that  Chico Buarque was right when he sang, “um grito deshumano é uma maneira de ser escutado.” Much of what happens and will happen depends on the citizenry. Chile now faces a panorama in which state and society could enter into one of these cycles of mutual reinforcemtn that Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson in Why Nations Fail call “the red queen effect” and that, from South America, we could translate as virtuously cranking up to adapt and evolve.

Without Hurry, but without Pausing

Princeton economist Albert O. Hirschmann once criticized political scientists for constantly being interested in the unexpected consequences of institutional reforms and much less in the social frustrations left by disappointed reforms. This somewhat applies to the agenda of a “new socialpact.” Many of our countries fo not have the political conditions to achieve this ambitious goal (and we might add here that in this essay I have not referred to the enormous social difficulties such as informal work, inequality or the need for fiscal reform).  Perhaps more important than fantasizing about our own particular Moncloa pacts is to work on gradual and relative reforms…even if they are not resetting capitalism. These transformations will not sharply sunder a ruinous past from a luminous future, but at least they will show the possibility of real progress. The variable that ought to intervene to achieve this is the deepening of democracy and pluralism.  As Candelaria Garay points out in her book Social Policy Expansion in Latin America, millions of Latin Americans in recent years have been incorporated in social problems throughout the entire region. The key for their inclusion did not rest on an initial consensus for some comprehensive pact, but in the political competition for the vote of these citizens. As is evident because of the  algún pacto comprehensivo sino en la competencia política por el voto de esos ciudadanos. As is evident from what has happened with the pandemic, such a process has not been sufficient to avoid a debacle. A “competitive consensus” of some sort was not sustainable.  Because the importance of competitive consensus is not only to sustain reforms over time, but the crucial aspect is that they obtain legitimacy and create actors who can defend them when needed. And, if we want to continue in an optimistic vein, when this new legitimacy and new actors emerge, the possibility arises of pushing new, more ambitious reforms. And in this case, it seems that my grandmother was right when she said that one has to go through life without hurrying, but also without pausing.