By Gabriel Murillo

The title of this short essay is very pretentious. First, deliberation as a collective process to reach consensus and create agendas for social change is still largely unknown in Latin America. Second, the public in general is not familiar with the meaning of deliberative democracy and its relation to political representation and citizen participation. Third, most Latin Americans still find it difficult to distinguish between deliberation as a collective process with a distinctive methodology and deliberative democracy as a political compass in which representation and participation merge.

Nevertheless, deliberative forums appeared in Latin America in the early 1990s. The initial experiences took place in Colombia and were promoted by the Political Science Department of the University of Los Andes in Bogotá. They were a rather orthodox application of the methodological approach the Kettering Foundation had been using in the United States. Later, new civic institutions and NGOs in other countries began implementing deliberative forums after learning about them at the Kettering Foundation. Argentina, Brazil, and Guatemala followed Colombia. Two or three years later, participatory gatherings were being developed in Ecuador and Venezuela with Colombian assistance; in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras thanks to Guatemalan leadership; and in Paraguay with the help of Argentina.

These efforts faced more obstacles than opportunities. It was quickly understood that the entire deliberation project had to be adapted to local realities and distinctiveness. Initially, its flexibility with the application of the procedures associated with deliberative methodology was indispensable. It proved very difficult to develop all components with the same level of autonomy and familiarity, particularly the framing component and the convening strategy. Participants’ lack of previous exposure to explicit collective conversations that sought solutions to common problems constituted a serious handicap. Although other forms of tacit deliberation were already embedded in the Latin American political culture, there was no prior direct knowledge of this form of citizen practice. People were not familiar with a structured approach to identify, name, and frame a public problem amenable to collective solutions. Even less well known were structured public forums in which citizens deliberate in order to solve public matters. When “deliberation” had any meaning for participants, it related to formal practices of legislative debates intended to generate formal norms and procedures.

Recruitment of forum participants was difficult because of the lack of trust between people that stems from the high rates of crime and corruption in Latin America and the fact that average citizens are rarely a part of decision making. As a result of this mistrust, most people were surprised by the invitation to participate in the meetings. Not all accepted the invitation, and those that did appeared to do so with some degree of uncertainty.

These two obstacles—the lack of knowledge about deliberation and an initial reluctance to participate—as well as the high cost of formally implementing deliberative forums on a growing and sustainable basis combined to suggest that the project might be impossible. Fortunately opportunities materialized that helped overcome these handicaps. One was sharing the difficult and challenging experiences at the yearly international encounters hosted by the Kettering Foundation in Dayton, Ohio. The other was the launching of the Inter-American Democracy Network (IADN) in 1995. These two responses were oriented toward a commitment to strengthen deliberation in Latin America. The resources from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) allocated to IADN were crucial to achieving continuity and to expanding deliberation in the already mentioned countries as well as other sites—Jamaica, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean, and Bolivia and Peru in South America.

In the IADN’s first five years, programs on deliberation produced a sizeable number of issue books, manuals, and videos on many topics of public interest, such as education, electoral participation, citizen security, solid waste disposal, the struggle against corruption, environmental protection, child care, and youth. An evaluation of this work, required for renewal of another USAID grant to support democracy in the Americas, concluded that the promotion of deliberation was one of the most important achievements of this hemispheric network.

By 2000, an important collection of both human resources and materials was available for expanding the deliberative methodology in Latin America. The last five-year period has been rather busy, although uneven in the implementation of deliberation throughout the region.

Although not exhaustive, the following examples provide a panorama of this growth. First, a USAID-sponsored project to promote citizen participation in justice reform in Bolivia has used the deliberative methodology to generate public involve¬ment in justice administration. Second, a recognized advertising agency in the Dominican Republic has adopted this methodology to fight the lack of neigh¬borhood security in Santo Domingo. Third, in Jamaica, a well-known NGO devoted to conflict resolution in Kingston’s low-income areas applied this method to encourage citizen involvement in resisting urban violence. Fourth, in Colombia, with Kettering’s sponsorship, the University of Los Andes in Bogotá, along with a local college in Cartagena de Indias, has implemented a Public Policy Institute (PPI), for local leaders and educators that will use deliberation to create public agendas for problem solving. At present, these two universities are planning a second PPI to reinforce this approach. Fifth, the National Ministry of Education in Colombia will include the deliberative methodology as a recommended practice to promote civic education in public and private schools throughout the country. Sixth, at a regional level, the Inter-American Foundation (IAF) has provided a grant to the IADN Executive Secretariat (SERID) to develop four pilot training programs on the methodology in different countries that have been offered to their grantees. For this purpose, SERID is gathering materials produced in all the countries that have worked with deliberative forums throughout Latin America. In addition, it is inviting Latin Americans with previous practical experience in this method to create a clearinghouse to provide the required resources to the pilot projects. Finally, Partners of the Americas in Washington has launched the first online project to promote deliberation among OSC’s on the creation of employment to strengthen democracy and governance in Latin America. The output of this online dialogue will be used to improve the content of the next agenda for the Fifth Summit of the Americas, which will take place in Mar del Plata, Argentina, this fall.

These examples indicate a growing and promising future for the practice of public deliberation throughout Latin America. After 15 years of searching for better ways to generate awareness about the importance of this way to strengthen democracy has elapsed, the advocates of this approach must understand that the road ahead is still a very long one. Democracy in Latin America encounters countless challenges and enemies; among the most important are growing poverty and weak citizen involvement in the search for solutions to public problems. Public deliberation as a method of generating ample participation and responsible collective action for social change and deliberative democracy as an environment for promoting responsible political representation and active and pluralistic participation are required to strengthen democracy in the region.

Gabriel Murillo is a professor of Political Science at the University of the Andes in Colombia.