Anyone who views The House of the Spirits without specific knowledge of the political evolution of Latin America over the course of the 20th century would perhaps find it totally unbelievable. However, the observation that "Latin America's democratic opening has been uneven and fragile" (Lowenthal, 1991, p. vii) goes some way toward lending verisimilitude to the action. It helps to know that even the countries that have adopted democratic reforms have fragile democratic institutions and have proved to be vulnerable to postcolonial exploitation, Cold War politics, internal left- and right-wing political factionalism, and the shifting loyalties of the military and social elites. One consistent pattern of activity seems to have been the oppression of the uneducated masses by various elites and the weight of Latin American social structure in general. The whole matter has been further complicated by continual recourse to the politics of violence, with civil war, coups d'état, or revolution either a present or a possible condition at one time or another in virtually all of the countries of Latin America. Bethell sums the picture up:
The commitment of Latin American elites (and the middle classes) to democracy, insofar as it existed in other than a purely rhetorical form, by no means implied an acceptance of broadly based popular participation in the democratic process, competition for power by parties of the left as well as the right and center, and recognition of organized labor as a major political actor. For their part the parties in favor of political and social change generally lacked deep roots in society and were often internally divided and in conflict with each other (Bethell, 1991, p. 57).
To answer the question of why democracy in Latin America has been so fragile is to beg a multiplicity of questions whose answers provide only part of the picture. The film The House of the Spirits, based on Isabel Allende's novel of the s...