Latin America is a land of endless dreams and imaginations. It tends to believe if you have no imagination, you have no wings. Perhaps the region has a larger share of visionaries and builders, reformists and revolutionaries and samaritans and messiahs.

For long, Latin America remained a strategically secondary region because of its geographic isolation, historic subordination to the US and distance from the Eurasian landmass. It is Latin American writers and thought leaders who gave the region a global profile and visibility. As Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges says, “don’t speak unless you can improve on the silence.” To Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, “literature is fire” and writing great literature has been a political radical act.

But Latin America has also become a victim of romanticization and a degree of generalisation. After all, writers don’t merely reflect on reality, but add something to reality that is not there. Hamlet was not there if Shakespeare had not written him. Don Quixote won’t be there if Cervantes had not written him. Marquez has been projected primarily for his “magical realism” though he himself says that he writes “mostly about the reality I know, about the reality of Latin America. Any interpretation of this reality in literature must be political.” Some of Latin American writers are capturing their own present than the region’s likely future. Latin America, thus, requires reading against the grain. Another Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vasquez talks of “disproportionate reality.” He says that Latin America is more tragic than magical.

What is disproportionate in his novels is “the violence and cruelty of our history and our politics.” Over the past three decades or so, Latin America’s democratic advance, institutional innovations, political assertions of the indigenous people and social movements have been admirable.

Democratic consolidation and institutional innovations have been made bucking the global trends. Have these gains begun to evaporate? The Central American region has certainly moved in reverse gear. Nicaragua under the once revolutionary Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murrillo has become a “gulag” in Central America.

Last year, he assumed office for the fourth term after eliminating all opposition and arresting all the five presidential candidates. Ortega’s rivals are all languishing in prison cells waiting to die. He has not spared even those Sandinista commanders who took him out of dictator Anastasio Somoza’s jail and made him a heroic figure. Ortega has attempted to justify the treatment of their opponents as he sees them as “coup plotters,” which the Ortega regime has invoked since the 2018 protests that threatened his grip on power.

He also called the detainees “stateless.” Ortega is behaving like Somoza. El Salvador President Nayib Bukele came to power in 2019 on the promise to end the brutal gang warfare that has been raging for decades. He has built a dystopian prison which is now stuffed with tattooed and handcuffed prisoners like sacks under the worst human conditions.

The Guatemalan government has arrested a fervent critic of President Alejandro Eduardo Giammatei Falla and a leading opposition candidate has been barred from the current presidential race. UN SecretaryGeneral António Guterres has expresses his concern at the criminal prosecution against those who sought to shed light on cases of corruption and worked to strengthen the justice system. In Ecuador, the assassination of a presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio underlines the seriousness of the situation.

In the last couple of years, the situation has deteriorated very fast. From being one of the safest countries, Ecuador has now become one of the most violent. Parts of the country are now no-go zones in the grip of gangs, where truckers can no longer deliver basic products due to demands for protection money. Political violence in Latin America has a long history. It is the outcome of high inequality, poor economic performance and weak political institutions. Prison violence in Latin America is among the worst in the world. Political violence and prison violence are inextricably linked.

In September 2021, a riot in a massive prison in Ecuador left over 100 inmates dead. Such riots and gang wars inside prisons have become common in several countries. Parts of Latin America are in the grip of the politicisation of crime and criminalisation of politics. Prison gangs have acquired power and clout by providing crime intelligence in exchange for special privileges in the prison. In many countries given the drug situation, the police and security forces have been given extraordinary power.

Often the government has very little political power over the police. Several countries including Ecuador, El Salvador and Nicaragua have witnessed massive prison riots in which thousands of inmates and police forces have lost their lives. Drug mafia, institutional distrust and multi-faceted violence threaten to derail Latin America’s democratic gains. Decline of democracy is clearly visible.

The winner-takes-all approach and increasing social polarisation need to be addressed. However, all is not lost as there is an increased sense of self-esteem among the poor, the marginalised and the indigenous people. Latin America has moved in the direction of creating a new narrative of nationhood that challenges long held assumptions and previous representations of culture, history, race, gender, citizenship and identity. Social movements are still very vibrant. Many of the most hopeful democratic advances have been not the result of official policies, but of social movements.

Latin American countries have been called “protest states.” Protests have happened in spaces where people didn’t belong earlier. Protesters have demanded answers about public spaces ~ who owns them and who can use them. The intensity of protests has remained broadly the same during the left-oriented and right-wing governments. Streets continue to be new theatres of politics.

There is a growing rupture between the state and the citizenry. There is no growing without pain. Latin American poets and novelists have made their mark by capturing the people’s pain and trauma as also their dreams and imaginations. They are in pursuit of their own kind of truth. Isn’t pain, to borrow a phrase from Hannah Arendt, only another way of being alive?

(The writer is Diretor, Institute of social science, Delhi)