Latin America’s Lost Decade

National Catholic Register, 11 January 2020

DECADE IN REVIEW: Despite the election of the first pope from Latin America in 2013, the past decade has mostly been a march backward, both for secular society and for the Church.

In March 2013, I remarked often that Latin America had had its best month ever. The communist tyrant of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, had died March 5, and the first Latin American pope had been elected eight days later. It turned out that the rest of the decade was much worse for both state and Church. The 2010s were a decennium horribilis for Latin America, where more than half of the global Catholic population lives.

No country represents Latin America’s decade-long march backward more than Venezuela. The departure of Chavez, who died in the bosom of the Castro brothers in Cuba, brought not relief but more repression. Venezuela, under Nicolás Maduro, Chavez’s successor, has been reduced from petro-prosperity to literal starvation, with the population reduced to searching through garbage for food. Millions of refugees have fled Venezuela. The Maduro government has been declared illegitimate both home and abroad, has suspended the lawful operation of parliament, co-opted the judiciary and corrupted the armed forces. Maduro has resorted to violence against the people thronging the streets against him, violence that has also been directed at the Church.

A similar situation has been developing in Nicaragua, where another leftist regime, led by Daniel Ortega, back from his earlier tenure in the 1980s, has resorted to repression and violence to preserve its hold on power. Like Venezuela, the country’s bishops have been in the forefront of the democratic opposition to tyranny and have earned the wrath of the regime for doing so.

Violence in Honduras and Mexico, often related to drug cartels and criminal gangs, has reached such proportions that ordinary life has become untenable. In Honduras, the situation has become so dire that tens of thousands have fled north, adding to the refugees from Central America trekking through Mexico to the American border. Mexican violence has made that country the most dangerous place in the world to be a Catholic priest; priests there who raise their voice against the cartels have been lethally silenced.

Bolivia’s Evo Morales, another Latin American leftist riding high in 2013, changed the constitution — in spite of losing a plebiscite authorizing the amendment — to enable him to run again for president. A compliant, Morales-packed supreme court permitted the extra-constitutional measure. After an October 2019 election he won that was widely denounced as fraudulent, Morales fled into exile in Mexico.

And in Argentina, where a new government was elected in 2019, the economic outlook is bleak. It is expected that Argentina will default — yet again — on its debt. High inflation has already eroded savings, and austerity measures to stave off default have been painful. While the default will not bring the severe economic pain of the last default 20 years ago, Argentina has a bleak few years ahead of it.

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