Democracy in Latin America involves some fundamental issues. Firstly, it’ s accompanied by the world greatest wealth and income inequalities, as well as by a sovereignty that is conspicuous by its absence. It is also a divided democracy, which complies with the rules dictated by the dynamics of highly oligopolistic markets and with the governments often behind them. Democracy only gains relevance in the electoral period with its series of theatricalizations. " Therefore, we are in the worst of all possible worlds: democracies without popular sovereignty "( Borón, 1999, 37). Amidst regional development and growing oligopolistic markets, the social and economic gaps do not diminish. They even increase in some countries to hurt the historically vulnerable sectors and populations, such as the Afrodescendants. However, the democracy building process— including the citizen participation by Afro-descendant communities— is guided by a desire for justice as ultimate goal. Otherwise, " it would be incongruous as specific political form of organization( polis), since it could be built around the pursuit of ends incompatible with itself "( Borón, 1999, 24). Among the variants of democracy( Esping-Andersen, 1991, 93), one identifies nation-building with a citizenship that tends to include social rights; another has pluralistic and public-oriented nature and feeds the intense competition among political parties for the favor of the electorate, which in turn stimulates increasing public expenditures. Both variants offer some perspectives to understand the development of Afrodescendants’ citizenship in the logic of social rights and the need of some training for taking part in the social processes, especially in the political arena, to fight against the traditional culture of electoral competition among political parties.
The questions raised by the transition to democracy could be divided between two spheres in the citizenship building process: " Learning processes on rights and responsibilities, and development of a democratic institutional structure "( Jelin and Hershberg, 2006, 156). It should also be recalled that democracy— as an organizational form of social power in the public space— is inseparable from the economic and social structures on which the social power rests. It is in the public space where the diverse social, economic and political forces are confronting ideas to make decisions. Thus, the dispute for power has a leading role, but the differences based on class, race, ethnicity and gender are getting wider and deeper. They deprive the Afro-descendant communities of an equal footing for taking part in the free democratic dispute. And a key democratic requirement is a quite advanced degree of social equality:
" No theorist on democracy was so wrong in arguing that it could only work after all class differences were eliminated. All of them, without exception. Democracy cannot be sustained on societies marked by inequality and social exclusion. For the democratic regime to work, it is necessary to have quite egalitarian societies, and equality, as Adam Smith himself recalled, should be based on conditions and not just on opportunities "( Borón 1999, 33)
Within the democratic structures, some people vote every day, but other people, the overwhelming majority, do it once every two or three years. Democracy becomes extremely flawed under inequality for exercising political rights. It ends up being hardly a fantasy to disguise the legitimation of a regime that is very oligarchic both in structure and functioning. We think that the 21 st-century Latin
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