The Path of Dictatorship

In turn-of-the-century Mexico, the editors of La Gaceta Comercial surveyed the accomplishments of the decades-long project of national regeneration called the Porfiriato. Dismissing criticisms that President Porfirio Díaz' long rule was undemocratic, they instead applauded the regime's obtainment of order, thus allowing material progress: "Men of experience care little or nothing if governments are republican or monarchical; what is important is that, under one name or the other, in this or that form, that they realize the ends of the State - security and justice, progress through order". In both Mexico and Colombia, the last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed projects to restrict vibrant, if often disorderly, democratic cultures, undertaken with the goals of promoting capitalist economic development. This essay, after briefly exploring why we should consider mid-nineteenth-century Colombia and Mexico as democratic, will focus on what those in control of the state thought they had to do to secure this capitalist development. In other words, in the context of already vibrant democratic experiments, what did the quest for capitalist development tell us about the historical relationship between capitalism and democracy around the world? In both Colombia and Mexico, the correlation was negative. Both Liberal and Conservative political elites determined that too much democracy was inimical to capitalist development. Thus, both acted (Mexico successfully, Colombia much less so) to restrict democracy and promote capitalism (part of a broader erosion of democratic culture across the hemisphere, I will suggest). Both Mexico and Colombia provide heretofore-unutilized case studies - since Latin America is a region of the world not much considered in these scholarly arguments - for a long-running debate, both scholarly and popular, over the historic relationship between democracy and capitalism.

The historic relationship between democracy and capitalism is the rare debate that ignites both scholarly (across numerous disciplines) and popular interest. The philosopher and public intellectual Slavoj Žižek, in reference to China's present-day authoritarian capitalism, queried, "What if democracy is no longer the necessary and natural accompaniment of economic development, but its impediment?" (2009, A21). Following Žižek, most non-scholarly North Americans and many Western Europeans, especially politicians and public intellectuals, assume the relationship as positive, perhaps the two terms are perfect synonyms: capitalism supports democracy and democracy supports capitalism. Martin Wolf (2016), the chief economics commentator for the Financial Times, states, "A natural connection exists between liberal democracy…and capitalism". Among historians and social scientists there is less consensus. Many assert, there exists a strong, positive connection between capitalism and democracy (if framed often as unintended consequences of capitalist development). Others see no correlation between the two processes or even argue that the two are historically antagonistic. This project will explore how, in Mexico and Colombia, the massive expansion of capitalism (or at least the desire to join an Atlantic capitalist system) led to the erosion, if not complete destruction, of democracy in those two societies (and, I will suggest, weakened democratic culture across the hemisphere).

A new wave of research has reassessed the history of democracy in Latin America. An older master narrative gave Latin America no role in the world history of democracy, at least in the nineteenth century. While most Spanish American states were republics, these were largely seen as anarchic failures, pantomimes of true democracies. However, new research has re-examined nineteenth-century Latin America's political and cultural history, recovering a rich, vibrant experimentation with democracy and republicanism, promoted especially by popular actors. Whether measured through voting, constitutional guarantees for individual rights, daily democratic practices (attending legislative sessions in the galleries, demonstrations, political clubs), or Latin Americans' own sense of their societies' success in creating democratic republics, Spanish America appears at the vanguard of the world history of democracy, especially compared to the United States (due to racial restrictions) or Europe (due to class restrictions).

The vindication of democracy's history, however, necessitates a reconsideration of the interaction of capitalism and democracy as well. If Mexico and Colombia were democratic in the 1860s and 1870s, these democratic republics collapsed over the next two decades. Why? This collapse happened at the same time as the expansion of capitalism through the region, after decades of economic stagnation. Was this rise of capitalism and the fall of democracy simply coincidence or were causal factors at work? Finally, how do Mexico's and Colombia's histories fit into the larger debate on the historical relationship between capitalism and democracy?