
In late December, Latinobarómetro released its annual public opinion survey of 20,000 citizens across 17 Latin American nations. It asks them how they think their countries are doing and how they should be governed. The non-profit foundation based in Santiago, Chile, has carried out a similar exercise every year since 1995: a kind of health check-up for the state of democratic sentiment across the region.
Overall, the pollster found reasons for cautious optimism. Its results suggest that 52% of Latin Americans were in favour of democracy in 2024: an improvement of four percentage points on 2023. Latinobarómetro says the region’s democracies have proved “resilient,” weathering the storms of mass social protests in Chile, Colombia and Ecuador in 2019-20 and the doldrums of the post-pandemic era.
In Argentina, this score picked up by 13 points to 75%: the highest approval rating for democracy in the region. People voted for Javier Milei’s chainsaw, and they got it.
The results for Paraguay — where a representative sample of some 1,200 people were polled, with a margin of error of roughly 3% — were less encouraging.
Just 43% thought democracy was the best form of government. Meanwhile, 26% agreed that an “authoritarian government” could be preferable in some circumstances: the highest score in Latin America. Only Mexico (24%) and Ecuador (21%), each of them currently rocked by vicious drug cartel wars and sky-hide homicide rates, came close.
Even more strikingly, 70% of respondents in Paraguay said they “wouldn’t care” if a non-democratic government came to power if it resolved the country’s problems. Paraguay again took the top spot, followed by Guatemala (67%) and El Salvador (62%).
Half of Paraguayans would be fine with a president “bypassing the law, congress and/or institutions” to sort things out. And 45% agreed with “getting rid of elections and leaving experts to take decisions”, well above the regional average (32%).
For Latinobarómetro, these results illustrate the severity of the “unmet demands” facing the “weaker democracies” of Latin America — crime, corruption, economic stagnation — “given that citizens in many countries are prepared to forget about everything, even democracy, to resolve them.”
But Paraguay isn’t in the grip of a narco civil war or a mass influx of refugees. Its GDP has grown steadily for 25 years. Observers said the 2023 election was mostly free and fair. So why are so many Paraguayans willing to throw their freedoms out the window?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Paraguay Post to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.