Guillermo Lasso, Iván Duque and Felipe Calderón coincided at the XVII Atlantic Forum in Madrid and warned about the dangers that democracy faces in Latin America. The former leaders of Ecuador, Colombia and Mexico warned that the threat is part of the script developed by the Sao Paulo Forum or the Puebla Group.
The former presidents of Ecuador, Mexico and Colombia, Guillermo Lasso, Felipe Calderon e Ivan Duqueagreed this Wednesday in their analysis of the state of the democracy in Latin America and the rest of the world and assured that this is found «threatened«.
At a round table in Madrid during the XVII Atlantic Forum organized by the International Foundation for freedomchaired by the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas LlosaDuque and Calderón criticized the current governments of their countries while Lasso charged against those on the left that preceded him.
Duque assumed that democracy «is seriously threatened» and recalled that «70% of the people who inhabit the planet live under authoritarian regimes: «A few decades was 48 percentthere is a growing democratic deficit that is explained by three phenomena, the populismthe post-truth and the polarization«.
The Colombian assured that in Latin America “there is a scriptwhich some countries have been using under the Sao Paulo Forum or the Puebla Group” to “first win elections under the rules of democracy and once won begin to weaken it.”
“They create chaos, they make a historical rupture, they generate anger and they want to remain in power,” he said of governments like that of “Venezuelathe Ecuador of (Rafael) Correa, the Bolivia of (Evo) Morales, the Nicaragua of (Daniel) Ortega”, or “what is happening in Mexico» and where «Colombia is no exception».
Felipe Calderón referred to the electoral process of last June 2 in which the official candidate Claudia Sheinbaum She established herself as the first female president of Mexico and regretted that citizens were “outside” of the electoral lists in front of “friends and personal assistants” of the party leaders.
“Now, after the election, the threats continue, they have increased and strengthened, now endorsed with an absolute majority” by Sheinbaum, to whom he recognized the “merit” of having won the elections, but questioned the fact that it was “an election of State”: “Would I have won without being one? “We will never know.”
For his part, Guillermo Lasso He stressed what, in his opinion, is one of the main challenges for democracy, “organized crime, trafficking in drugs, weapons and people.”
«The problem is even greater when organized crime allies with political parties and leaders to have representatives in the National Assembly that obstructs the work of a democratic governmentwe are talking about something different, is what I mean, that happens in the Ecuador«he asserted.
Thus, he recalled that Latin America “has a homicide rate three times higher than the world average» and it is «the most violent region in the world in which only 8.3 percent of the world’s population lives, democratic sectors must unite as countries to face the racketeeringwe have to ally ourselves with USA who is our main partner,” he invited.
The former Minister of Economy of Brazil, in the administration of the far-right Jair Bolsonaro, Paulo Guedes, also participated in the talk.
Source: LA HORA newspaper