The EconomistNovember 14th 2020 The Americas 372
Bello The problem of proxy presidents
O
n november 8thLuis Arce took
office as Bolivia’s president following
his clear victory in an election last
month. A day later the man who picked
him as a candidate, Evo Morales, was
greeted by adoring crowds as he crossed
into Bolivia from Argentina, a year after
fleeing his country after protests over
electoral fraud. Mr Arce, who was Mr
Morales’s finance minister, insists he is
his own man. His former boss, who ruled
as an increasingly authoritarian socialist
strongman for 13 years, “has no role in
the government”, he said. But some
Bolivians believe Mr Arce will have Mr
Morales breathing down his neck.
Mr Arce joins a small but growing
band of proxy presidents who owe their
jobs to the sponsorship of a more pow-
erful leader. In Colombia Iván Duque was
an inexperienced senator when he was
elected to the top job in 2018 thanks to
the backing of Álvaro Uribe, a conserva-
tive two-term former president who was
barred from re-election by term limits. In
Argentina Cristina Fernández de Kirch-
ner, president in 2007-15, struck a deal
with Alberto Fernández (no relation)
whereby he ran and won in 2019, with her
as his running-mate. Ecuador may be
next. Rafael Correa, the country’s strong-
man between 2007 and 2017, hopes to
return to power via a proxy candidate,
Andrés Arauz, a young economist. Mr
Correa lives in Belgium and has been
convicted of corruption in absentia.
The rise of the proxy president is
partly a result of term limits and partly a
consequence of the commodity boom of
the 2000s, which helped leaders fortu-
nate enough to be in office at the time to
become popular and politically strong.
The gambit sometimes backfires. Mr
Correa thought he would control things
by choosing Lenín Moreno, his vice-president, as his party’s candidate—only
for his successor to turn on him. Mr Uribe
reluctantly backed Juan Manuel Santos,
his former defence minister, to succeed
him in 2010. The two men soon became
bitter foes. In Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da
Silva (2003-10) chose Dilma Rousseff to
keep the presidential seat warm for him.
Ms Rousseff outmanoeuvred him to run
for a second term, only to be impeached
for breaking budget rules.
When the gambit works it causes even
bigger problems. A proxy risks being a
weak president, carrying the can for deci-
sions inspired by a sponsor who exercises
power without responsibility. Take Colom-
bia: Mr Duque is a moderate who in 26
months has yet to put his stamp fully on
his own government. Mr Uribe is seeking
to abolish a special court to investigate war
crimes set up under the peace agreement
with the farcguerrillas negotiated by Mr
Santos. Mr Duque, meanwhile, must de-
fend his implementation of that agree-
ment before the unand other bodies.
Security has deteriorated under Mr Duque.
His former and current defence ministersare people close to Mr Uribe with no
previous security experience. Prominent
members of Mr Uribe’s party campaigned
for Donald Trump in Florida. Mr Duque
must now deal with his victorious oppo-
nent, Joe Biden.
Mr Fernández, a more substantial
politician than Mr Duque, is struggling to
project authority, too. His controversial
vice-president, a leftist-populist, contin-
ues to control the street in Buenos Aires’s
rustbelt. Mr Fernández has imposed the
world’s longest lockdown, which delayed
rather than curbed the coronavirus. It
increasingly looks like a sign of political
weakness. The government pulled off a
restructuring of its debt with bondhold-
ers but failed to capitalise on that by
launching a credible economic plan,
perhaps because of the difficulty of
getting agreement between the two
leaders. Mr Fernández is paying a politi-
cal price for a plan for a judicial reform
that seems designed to save his running-
mate from corruption charges.
That is an example of the underlying
problem that proxies face. The interests
of their sponsors are not necessarily
those of the country. Mr Uribe appears to
be pursuing a personal vendetta against
his enemies and seems to want to install
another proxy in 2022 by continuing to
polarise Colombian politics. Mr Correa
wants revenge, too, and like Ms Fernán-
dez wants control of the courts.
As for Mr Arce, he has named a cabi-
net in which only the defence minister is
close to Mr Morales. Their party, the
Movement to Socialism, is broad-based,
and includes people critical of the former
president. Mr Arce has no illusions about
Mr Morales. “He’s not going to change,”
the new president said. If so, sooner or
later Mr Arce will face a choice: impose
his own authority or lose it.They are proliferating in Latin Americafrom covid-19 better than Brazil, Ecuador,
Mexico and Peru. Guatemala’s reported
death toll from covid-19 is a fifth of Peru’s as
a share of population. Nicaragua is an out-
lier. It barely attempted to curb the spread
of the disease. Its reported death toll is
among the lowest in Latin America, though
that may be because the government is
simply refusing to disclose accurate infor-
mation. In all the countries battered by Eta
doctors and aid workers fear that infec-
tions will rise. Thousands of people are
crammed into shelters, where the virus can
easily spread. In some places that are stillhabitable water supplies have been cut, so
people cannot wash their hands.
The storm has hit livelihoods, especial-
ly in farming. In Honduras, where agricul-
ture accounts for a tenth of gdpand nearly
a third of employment, coffee and banana
estates have been devastated. Food may be-
come scarce. Rebuilding will be even slow-
er than after past disasters. Government fi-
nances are stretched by recession and by
extra spending to control the pandemic.
Guatemala’s budget deficit is forecast to be
6% of gdp, nearly triple what it was last
year. The World Bank expects 1m more Gua-temalans will fall below its poverty line of
$1.90 of income a day.
The combination of Donald Trump and
covid-19 had largely stopped the flow of mi-
grants heading from Central America to the
United States. It could be restarted by Eta,
plus the belief that Joe Biden, the American
president-elect, will be friendlier to immi-
gration. Tropical Storm Theta, which has
formed in the middle of the Atlantic, seems
to be heading away from the Americas. But
the hurricane season runs to the end of No-
vember, and there are 16 letters to go in the
Greek alphabet. 7