ANDRES OPPENHEIMER Democracy still prevails in Latin America

Oops! A few weeks after the U.N. Development Program (UNDP) made big headlines with a poll showing that a majority of Latin Americans are shifting away from democratic principles, there is a growing debate over whether the U.N. group's figures were accurate.
You may remember that the UNDP report on democracy in Latin America, released April 21, stated that 58 percent of Latin Americans agree that heads of state can go beyond the law and that 55 percent of Latin Americans would support an authoritarian government if it solved their economic problems.
Democracy fails to win over Latin Americans, cried the headline in The Financial Times the next morning. Latin America losing hope in democracy, report says, lamented The New York Times' headline. Economic problems imperil democracy, warned The Miami Herald. Democracy on the ropes, said Business Week.
Well, not so fast. Marta Lagos, the director of the Latinobarometro polling firm that conducted the study of more than 19,500 people in 17 Latin American countries for UNDP and five other sponsors in 2002, says the UNDP report misinterpreted the figures.
"I'm amazed that UNDP would want to show that Latin Americans are more authoritarian than they really are," Lagos told me in a telephone interview. "I don't know whether they manipulated the figures for political purposes, but the UNDP report misrepresents our data."
Economic problems
According to Lagos, the real number of Latin Americans who agree that presidents may go beyond the laws is 38 percent, and the number of those polled who said they would support an authoritarian government if it solved their economic problems was 50 percent.
But another question showed that only 25 percent of Latin Americans think that there can be economic development without democracy, she said. "There are a lot of contradictions, but there is an overall support for democracy of about 60 percent," Lagos said.
How could the UNDP report reach a different conclusion based on Latinobarometro's figures? I asked. Lagos said it was a combination of UNDP sloppiness and an arbitrary way of interpreting the polls' results. By not taking into account the percentage of people who didn't respond, the figures of those who responded were automatically increased, she said.
Asked about the Latinobarometro claims, UNDP spokesman Victor Arango told me there was a "typographical error" in the report: The percentage of Latin Americans who say heads of state can go beyond the law should not have read 58 percent but 42 percent. Arango says the U.N. agency stands by its other figures.
Academic studies
UNDP statisticians say they indeed excluded the "no response" answers from the Latinobarometro poll, which elevated the percentages of those who answered, but add that this is often done in academic studies. "The UNDP uses Latinobarometro data, but processes them in different ways," the U.N. agency said in a new press release.
In addition to the disputed figures in its latest report, the UNDP shows a double standard in its regional research: It gives generally high marks to Cuba in its annual index of human development (although its figures have been challenged in a recent book by University of Pittsburgh economist Carmelo Mesa Lago), but it doesn't even mention Cuba in its indexes of democratic development.
Is it fair to single out Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico as countries with fewer press freedoms than its neighbors without mentioning Cuba, while putting Cuba ahead of some of these countries in a human development index? I don't think so. Either put Cuba in all categories or take it out altogether.
Granted, the UNDP's report on democracy is the first of its kind and should be seen as a work in progress. Despite its shortcomings, it should be given credit for raising a yellow light about the future of democracy in the region.
The recent ouster of elected presidents in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador and Haiti show that democracy is under growing strain.
But the report's newly corrected figure and Latinobarometro's raw data help place the issue in a better perspective. The majority support for democracy in the region is losing steam, but that does not mean that Latin Americans are yearning for authoritarian leaders who act beyond the law, as the original UNDP report indicated. Democrats prevail, for now.
X Andres Oppenheimer is a Latin America correspondent for the Miami Herald. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.