Former president of Ecuador, Jamil Mahuad, was deposed during a coup in 2000. The coup was a result of economic dissatisfaction in the country, yet he hasn’t let that keep him from his passion about Latin American politics and economics.

On March 30, Mahuad gave a speech at IU Southeast. The speech was open to the public and held at 7 p.m. in Hoosier Room West.

During his presidency, Mahuad received a Nobel Peace Prize nomination for his successful peace negotiations between Ecuador and Peru after decades of border disputes.

Mahuad now is the senior adviser for the International Negotiation Program at Harvard Law School, and he travels the country, lecturing at various universities and explaining how even the most diplomatic leaders can’t always withstand the pressure of economic downturn.

“I think one of the elements that define Jamil Mahuad is the veracity of learning,” Magdalena Herdoiza-Estevez, associate professor of education, said as she introduced the former Ecuadorian president. “He had learned, not because we intended to teach him anything but because he is a learner.”

Mahuad then took the stage.

“Without any doubt we can learn a lot from each other if we keep our ears open and our mouth closed,” Mahuad said.

Silhouetted by a large map of Latin America projected onto the wall, Mahuad delivered a lecture titled “The Rise of the Left in Latin America.”

He started in the 1960s and moved his way up to the present, showing how the economic and political scene changed in the South American countries.

Mahuad said the motto in the ‘60s was “Produce for your local world first and not for export.”

He said there was a lot of economic and political growth at that time, but added that government began to grow too large and began to senselessly manage parts of the economy that should be left alone.

By the time the ‘70s came, there was a stronger government and a failing economy.  All of the Latin American countries, except Colombia and Venezuela, were ruled by dictators and the end of the decade was marked by gross hyperinflation.

Mahuad told a joke that was popular in Latin America regarding the inflation.

“When you get in a taxi never pay [the driver] when you take the car, pay him when you leave the car,” Mahuad said, laughing.

“Latin America is the more unequal continent,” Mahuad said.

He said the gap between the rich and the poor is the largest in the world.

There were protests of this in the ‘70s, and the gap has still not decreased since.

The ‘70s may have looked grim, but Mahuad described the ‘80s as the worst decade in recent Latin American history.

“Unfortunately, that happened to us right when we came to democracy,” Mahuad said.

Presidents in South America tended to be very unpopular and people had an almost nostalgic outlook on the dictatorships of the past.

In the ‘80s, Ronald Reagan and Margret Thatcher began to command the global sphere and promote capitalism, free markets with a heavy emphasis on exports.

“The name of the game was privatization,” Mahuad said. “The answer was ‘Be Taiwan, become South
Korea.’”

Mahuad said the governments in Taiwan or South Korea were not democracies — each had leaders who stayed in power for 40 years.

“Nobody told me how to be a president in South America for 40 years,” he said.

Mahuad described the troubles South American governments had with trying to comply with International Monetary Fund regulations in order to receive loans.

By the time South America began to slowly work its way into the global economy, along came the East Asian economic crisis of 1999. People had invested so much in the East Asian economies and individuals and banks lost tons of
money.

“If that happened in Asia, imagine what happened in Latin America,” Mahuad said. “It’s not the velocity that kills — it’s the sudden stop.”

Then came the time period when Mahuad and many other Latin American presidents were overthrown by people unhappy with the state of the economy.

This series of events led to the main point of his speech.

“It’s the economy, stupid,” Mahuad said. “In my view, the main and singular factor [in politics] is the economy — always.”