THE RISE OF ORGANIZED CRIME
The last few decades have witnessed an unprecedented rise in organized crime in Latin America, creating havoc in the region, depressing its economic performance, and contributing to massive migrations to the United States. The problem has become so grave that many have come to believe that liberal democracy—with all its emphasis on the rights of the individual, which makes it difficult to capture, prosecute, and condemn criminals—cannot deal with it.
According to this logic, the only solution is to go back in time and give presidents absolute power to eliminate the gangs and restore social peace. Such a dictatorship would be limited in two ways: it would apply its naked power to the criminals only, retaining full liberal democracy for the rest, and would be temporary. That is, the proposed solution would be a partial and temporary dictatorship.
This is a very bad idea, however. It leads to the establishment of a full and permanent tyranny that, even if successful in getting rid of the gangs, would not liberate society from crime and would bring with it the terrible consequences of such a tyranny.
In this piece, I discuss how partial and temporary tyranny would necessarily become full and permanent and how concentrating absolute power in the executive branch would not eliminate crime but only shift the channels through which it oppresses the population.
THE ROAD TO TYRANNY
There Are No Partial Tyrannies
The proponents of this idea think that eliminating the individual rights of criminals only affects the criminals themselves and that these have relinquished their human nature when committing their crimes. Many enjoy the thought of having them tortured as retribution for the damage they have done to society. They think that giving them a chance to defend themselves is equivalent to opening the door for them to escape justice.
Yet, saying that individual rights will be abolished for criminals only implies that you know who the criminals are, ignoring that protecting the innocent when discriminating the criminals from the innocent is one of the most important dimensions of individual rights. Thus, you cannot derogate the right to defense of just the guilty side of society because you don’t know who they are. Therefore, you have to derogate such rights for the entire population and then have someone arbitrarily tell who is guilty and who is innocent—without giving the accused a chance to defend themselves.
Just doing that turns the entire regime arbitrary. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln’s famous speech: "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall down—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.” Equally, a government cannot be half-arbitrary and half-respectful of the rule of law. It's going to end up being either arbitrary or constitutional. If the power is already in the arbitrary, we already know where the whole house will turn.
Also, there are no temporary tyrannies.
There Are No Temporary Tyrannies
Even a sixth grader understands that thinking in a limited absolute power is contradictory. For this reason, the imposition of limits to absolute power is just a pretext for people to swallow an absolute tyranny, which was the objective from the beginning. But even if this was not so, absolute power develops networks of people who share and benefit from it who put pressure on the caudillo to continue in power.
One of the arguments they will use is that if the caudillo leaves, his or her successor would free the captives, who, after all, are in jail not because of any law or because they were condemned by an institutionalized procedure but only because the caudillo said so. People would be terrified if evil were set loose, even if it is clear that many of them are not evil. On the other hand, tyrants know that in their abuses of power, they have generated hatred that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
Because of this, tyrants never leave voluntarily. When they are forced to, they leave behind a government structure organized around an authoritative figure, not around the population's wishes. People forget democratic institutions, lose the will to assert their interests, and become fodder for new dictators, as has been the case, for example, in Latin America for 200 years.
This is so because, as Lord Acton said, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Most people understand this dictum as referring to the corruption of the holder of absolute power. Yet it relates to all population segments: the holders of absolute power, the intermediaries of this power—soldiers, police agents, people keeping the appearances of democracy amid the tyranny—and the population at large.
GENERALIZED CORRUPTION
The evil generated by eliminating individual rights is transmitted in concentric circles that encompass more and more innocent citizens. So, for example, by using unethical methods to keep itself in power, the government commits crimes that it wants people to ignore. This leads to the persecution of journalists who denounce them, who are not criminals but are treated as such because, in the minds of the government, they are helping the criminals by exposing the methods the government is using. This leads to increasing repression against anyone who criticizes the government. Then, the concentric circles reach the entire society, even those who lower their heads and say nothing.
Each of these circles has its dynamics.
The Corruption of the Rulers
Assuming the authority to discriminate between good and evil and send the latter to prison without any other procedure than your perception or that of one of your representatives is an abuse of power easily translated into hubris. The caudillos begin to behave extravagantly, going on trips sustained by the drug of power, showing off that if they want to do something, they can do it.
Gradually, caudillos, convinced that only they can solve the country's problems, abuse their power to achieve political ends, like reelecting themselves even if it is unconstitutional because the country cannot afford to lose their leadership. They then use their control of the judicial branch, obtained to persecute gangs, to eliminate opposition politicians and independent journalists, and attain their personal goals. If they abuse their power in their public functions, they abuse it in all the dimensions of their lives.
The Corruption of the Intermediaries of Terror
Philip Zimbardo, a professor of psychology at Stanford, did an experiment, which he reported in a book called "The Lucifer Effect," in which he divided his class into prisoners and guards and let the latter treat the former as they pleased. This transformed the guards, who became sadistic and aggressive, so Zimbardo had to suspend the experiment. Giving police and soldiers without judicial oversight power over lives and property always creates the Lucifer Effect.[1]
In countries where the government has absolute power over lives and properties, it has to delegate most of it to intermediaries. These intermediaries go to cities, villages, and the countryside to decide who will be sent to prison. They, like salespersons, are frequently provided with quotas (in this place, so many prisoners, and in these other, this other number). While the caudillos may want to include certain specific individuals in that quota (like personal or political enemies or rivals or indiscreet journalists), they care about the overall number, not the identity of the captured. The real power of granting freedom or prison gets thus concentrated on the petty officers or even the soldiers looking for captives. The value of their decision is almost infinite for the potential victims. The offer they may present to be granted freedom is limited only by their total monetary or human possessions. For the intermediaries, the identity of the captured is also immaterial. They fill their quota with one or the other because there is no accusation, no legal document identifying who is a member of the gang and who committed a crime. The probability that the one offering more will get freedom is overwhelmingly higher in most cases. Rapes and acts of revenge are included in these transactions. In this way, from being extorted by gangs, people become extorted by the authorities.
Ultimately, the original purpose is forgotten, and everything becomes an abuse of power. As the torturers say to Winston, the main character of the novel 1984: "Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution to establish the dictatorship. The goal of persecution is persecution itself. The goal of torture is torture. The goal of power is power."
The Corruption of the People
The concentration of power in the caudillos and their intermediaries produces a vacuum on the other side of society. The total lack of power embedded in the lack of individual rights also corrupts the people. As expressed by Nina Witoszek:
“If it is true that absolute power corrupts absolutely, it is also true that absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely. Without the ability to make decisions there can be no choice to act morally. Powerlessness corrupts by eroding the sense of personal, not public, responsibility. That is central to ethical conduct.”[2]
This is one reason why well-established tyrannies become so stable politically, even amid terrible repression. People adjust to the regime's lack of transparency and refuse to act ethically because not having any power becomes an excuse for any behavior. As a woman who had survived the age of Stalin told a younger nephew,
Why didn’t we put Stalin on trial? I’ll tell you why…In order to condemn Stalin, you’d have to condemn your friends and relatives along with him…our neighbor Yuri turned out to have been the one who informed on my father. For nothing, as my mother would say. I was seven. Yuri would take me and his kids fishing and horseback riding. He’d mend our fence. You end up with a completely different picture of what an executioner is like — just a regular person, even a decent one…a normal guy. They arrested my father, then a few months later they took his brother. When Yeltsin came to power, I got a copy of his file, which included several informants’ reports. It turned out that one of them had been written by Aunt Olga…It was hard for me, but I asked the question that had been tormenting me. ‘Aunt Olga, why did you do it?’ ‘Show me an honest person who survived Stalin’s time’ [she answered]…’When it comes down to it, there is no such thing as chemically pure evil. It’s not just Stalin and Beria. I’s also our neighbor Yuri and beautiful Aunt Olga.’[3]
This adjustment to the circumstances destroys social cohesion. People realize that others would denounce them at the first opportunity and then decide to do the same. This breaks down society and leaves every individual isolated in front of the all-powerful caudillo, not just psychologically but in fact. That isolation, that destruction of the social fabric, this elimination of trust, is the worst legacy of tyranny. Even if the tyrant goes, people will not trust anybody, and the person who seizes power will be safe against conspiracies and revolutions, even if the successor has no charisma. People learn to be slaves.
THE ROMAN PRECEDENT
Many would believe that this argumentation cannot be correct because the Roman Republic appointed temporary “dictators” to manage grave specific problems many times, and their democracy survived. Yet, the Roman institution of dictatorship differed from what the current aspirants to tyrants want to obtain. Democracy survived precisely because their laws protected against the problems we have discussed here: it assured that it would be limited in scope and time. They achieved this by denying the dictator absolute power and the means to obtain it.
Like modern liberal democracies, the Romans trusted the separation of powers to keep democracy in place. For most of the Republic, the ultimate authority was the Senate, formed by 300 and then 500 individuals appointed by the consuls, initially from the patricians (the aristocrats) and then from the plebes as well. The two consuls were elected for one year by a popular assembly of Romans represented by the tribes they belonged to. Nobody could be consul more than once. Each consul had a veto over the decisions of the other one. This could be a problem when rapid decisions were needed. In this case, one of the consuls could appoint a dictator to resolve a very specific situation (most frequently, a military one). The dictator had absolute power to fix this problem, but only this problem. The rest of the government was managed as usual, by different people.
Moreover, the dictator`s appointment was coincident with that of the consul who appointed him, so when that consul retired, the dictator had to leave as well. Even more, the dictator´s service could not exceed six months. The dictator could not change these laws, which remained under the authority of other people (the consuls and the senate), who were more powerful.
The Republic fell when consuls (not the dictators) began to violate the limitations that the constitution imposed on their power, overstaying their terms (as is happening in Latin America) until one of them, Julius Caesar, intimidated the Senate and acquired absolute power, as some are doing in Latin America as well. Julius Caesar was assassinated, and his death unleashed a terrible civil war that ended ten years later with the enthronement of Octavianus, Caesar Augustus, who ended the Republic while keeping in place all its appearances.
Thus, the Roman experience confirms the arguments of this article. The Roman dictators worked well when they did not have absolute power. When they did, they became tyrants, just like today.
THE FAILURES OF 200 YEARS
Deciding whether to give absolute power to one person is equivalent to determining whether the end justifies the means. To resolve one problem (the end), are you willing to sacrifice your freedom for the foreseeable future (the means)? For the reasons exposed here, the word is permanently, nor temporarily, as is frequently said.
The strongest argument against the idea that the end justifies the means is that Latin American countries have tended to justify the means with the end for 200 years, and, in every case, they have failed because the ends have been corrupted by the means. Ultimately, the only thing achieved is solidifying the tyrants' power. The oppression remains but is administered by a different actor.
This is the ultimate result. It shows that the initial diagnostic of the gangs’ problem was mistaken. Oppression and crime are there even if the gangs are not there. The gangs are only a symptom of a deeper problem, which is not the popular idea that it comes from the bad income distribution. The victims and the victimizers are in the same social and economic class. Moreover, criminality is a grave and worsening problem all over Latin America and is not correlated with the GDP of the different countries. Crime is less of a problem in several East Asian countries with lower incomes than in Latin America.
The problem is a lack of social cohesion. Latin American people cannot defend themselves against crime or tyrants and cannot organize to invest in their human capital to overcome the problems of underdevelopment in freedom. Because of this lack, they live in the world of Thomas Hobbes, where society needs tyrants to overcome chaos—the chaos of crime and other social malaises.
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Manuel Hinds is a fellow at the Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at Johns Hopkins University. He shared the Manhattan Institute's 2010 Hayek Prize and is the author of four books, the latest of which is "In Defense of Liberal Democracy: What We Need to Do to Heal a Divided America." His website is manuelhinds.com
[1] Zimbardo, Phillip, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, Random House, New York, 2007.
[2] Nina Witoszek in Moral Community and the Crisis of the Enlightenment Sweden and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, in Nina Witoszek and Lars Tragardh, Culture and Crisis: The Case of Germany and Sweden, Berghahn Books, New York, 2002, pp. 65.
[3] Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, Svetlana Alexievich Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, Svetlana Alexievich, Random House, New York, 2016, pp. 30-31.