Former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo Delivers Pearson Annual Lecture

Former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo set the record straight at the fifth annual Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Lecture on May 17: he said he was “brutally wrong” five years ago when speaking to a different University of Chicago audience. 

At the Harris School Latin American Policy Forum in 2017, Zedillo predicted that despite the election of Donald Trump the year before, populism would not resurge in Latin America. At the fifth annual Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Lecture, however, he said that Trump instead “emboldened other populist leaders.”

Zedillo did not name names, but examples are easy to find. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected in 2018, for example, is often called the “Trump of the Tropics” and says the former U.S. president is his “idol.”  

“More embarrassing for me,” Zedillo said, “is that at the time, I thought that the risk of a populist revival in Latin America would be mitigated by the fact that our electorates did not need to go far back in history to visualize and be mindful of the fallacies and failures of populism in our region.”

Zedillo, a professor at Yale and director of its Center for the Study of Globalization, spelled out those fallacies and failures — and the threats they pose to democracy — at a packed International House Assembly Hall. His lecture, which was also livestreamed, centered on Latin America but featured frequent references to the United States.

Zedillo, who has a PhD in economics from Yale, led Mexico from 1994 to 2000, steering the nation through an economic crisis. In his introduction of Zedillo before the talk, James A. Robinson, The Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies and Institute Director of The Pearson Institute, said Zedillo also led “the evolution of democracy and dramatic change in the inclusivity of political institutions in Mexico,” saying he has a “breathtaking spectrum of achievements.” Robinson joined him in an informal conversation after the speech as well as in a Q&A session.

Zedillo’s work on the global stage didn’t end when his presidency did. He and other leaders push for peace, justice, and human rights as one of The Elders, a group convened by Nelson Mandela. He serves on the Global Commission on Drug Policy. And he continues to champion democracy, warning his University of Chicago audience that it is “eroding and we can lose it.”

Latin America, he said, “is going through a unique process of democratic regression.” 

Democracy, he argued, is profoundly despised by populists, who oppose its pillars, such as rule of law, effective checks and balances, political pluralism, and tolerance and respect for human rights and individual freedoms.

“For a populist,” he added, “no opposition is legitimate.”

They pursue power by making sweeping promises, and “claim that they alone represent the people,” Zedillo said. “However, for the populists, ‘the people’ are regarded as only those who support them. The non-supporters are considered and openly labeled enemies of the people.”

Loyalty is used to promote conflict and polarization, he said.

“Latin American populists have felt entitled to abuse power as soon as they get it,” he went on. “The excuse is that whatever they do is justifiable because they falsely argue it is done on behalf of and for the benefit of ‘the people.’ They set about to aggressively incapacitate those institutions that exist to check and balance the executive branch of government.”

The cruelest irony, he added, is that in many cases populist leaders used democracy to pursue power. And they then use that power “to undermine or even destroy democracy.”

It was Latin America’s “dark” populist past, Zedillo said, that encouraged him “back in the spring of 2017 to express to an audience like this, my confidence that if not negligible, the risk of our relapse into that political disease in the region would be contained. This regretfully did not happen.”

“Our continent from north to south has been tainted by this behavior recently,” he added. 

To illustrate his point — and noting that populism is usually twinned with incompetence —  Zedillo turned to the ongoing pandemic, which he called “a major disaster” for the Americas. 

“It became apparent that the most populous countries in the Americas — actually all governed then by populist leaders — were not up to the task of responding adequately to COVID-19.”

Policy reactions in the region were uneven, he explained, with some governments reacting decisively and efficiently to make public health protection their primary objective. In other “very significant cases, preparations were parsimonious and frankly the policy reactions rather incompetent.”

Latin America, he said, has less than 8% of the world's population but has nearly 30% of the world’s COVID-19 deaths.

“Having been among the worst in responding to the pandemic, it's also no surprise that we had the worst economic performance in the world in 2020,” he said, adding that getting back to pre-pandemic levels could take some countries until 2025.

“We thought a few years back that democracy was in Latin America to stay, with just a few exceptions,” he said. “That is no longer the case.”

“At this moment of particular difficulty for Latin America, I would say, of course, we need to think hard about how to have more productive economies with higher growth, how to have more focused and effective social policies, how to build a better legal system that effectively guarantees rule of law,” he asserted, outlining a set of regional priorities. “But the most urgent task at hand is to defend democracy.”

If democracy is not defended, Zedillo said in conclusion, “I think very soon we may find yet again that democracy is not the rule but is at best the exception in Latin America. And that will be a tragedy.”

The Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Annual Lecture at the University of Chicago is an opportunity to hear directly from leaders in international policy who have worked in peace and conflict. This year’s lecture is the fifth annual; previous speakers include Miriam Corenel-Ferrer, Chief Negotiator for the Philippines Government; Husam Zomlot, Head of Palestinian Mission to the UK and Strategic Affairs Advisor to the Palestinian President; Sergio Jaramillo, former Colombian High Commissioner for Peace; and Jonathan Powell, Chief British Negotiator in the Northern Ireland Peace Process.