Ballot bonanza: Latin America’s year of elections

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Shopping for a television these days means swimming in a sea of letters. LEDs, OLEDs, QLEDs. Each of these core technologies is improving. We go behind the acronyms to find out how a better generation of goggle boxes is being developed. And a look back on the life of Nikolai Antoshkin, a Soviet Air Force general who, when confronted with a huge but unknowable danger, saved an uncountable number of lives. But first, On Sunday, Ecuadorians will head to the polls to elect a new president and legislature. It's the start of what will be a busy political year across Latin America. Chile, Haiti, Honduras, Peru and Nicaragua are all due to hold national elections. Argentina, El Salvador and Mexico will have legislative and regional votes. This frenetic election year comes at a delicate moment. In 2019 and 2020, mass protests erupted in several of these countries over corruption, inequality and price rises. Since then, the pandemic might have quieted the streets, but it's also raised the stress. As economies contracted and poverty rose this year, all those strains may come to bear on the region's political systems.

Latin America's about to have sort of a bumper year of elections.

Brooke Unger is Our America's editor.

And these are taking place in a region that's been one of the hardest hit by the pandemic, if not the hardest hit in terms of cases and deaths per million people and in terms of the economic impact it's had. Latin America is going to shrink more than pretty much any other region in the world. And a bunch of these countries in the midst of this chaos and trauma are going to be choosing new leaders to help them find a way through. At a time when you're seeing across the world a lot of democratic backsliding including in Latin America. These elections are going to test the strength of democracies in those countries.

So it looks like the count is nine Latin American countries that will be holding elections this year. But I mean, it's a diverse region. They must have as many differences as commonalities.

Well, it is a very diverse group of countries that will be voting. I mean, you have on the one hand, for example, Chile, which is one of the richest economies in the region and one of the best established democracies. And you also have Haiti, which is pretty much the poorest country in the hemisphere and which has a very dysfunctional democracy. And there's everything in between, you know. But at the same time, these countries have quite a lot in common.

How so? What do they have in common?

Chile, Ecuador and Peru have all been hit by protests recently against inequality and poor public services and high prices and corruption. Pretty much every country in the region, the political parties have been largely discredited. Democracy is held in lower esteem than it was. So you're seeing democratic fragility and skepticism and anger. I'm a little bit less worried about the fate of democracies in the South American elections than I am about those in Central America where you've got some regimes that are authoritarian or trending that way.

Okay, then let's start with Ecuador, where the epic year of elections starts on Sunday. What are the main things to look out for?

Well, the big question in Ecuador is whether Rafael Correa, who's the former president there, leftist populist, will come back, not himself, because he's not allowed to run. He in fact was convicted of corruption, but he has a proxy in the form of Andres Araus, who's a not very well known left wing economist. Correa ran the country at a time when oil prices, which are Ecuador's biggest export, were very high. And he spent a great deal of money, not all of it very efficiently, on social programs, on infrastructure projects. And at the same time, he ran a very authoritarian state, cracking down on freedom of the press and things like that. Worry is, if Mr. Araus wins the election at a time when Ecuador is now in serious economic trouble, those unsustainable economic policies and authoritarian policies will come back in some form. The probably main rival of Mr. Araus is Guglielmo Lasso. This is his third time running for president. He's a conservative, a former banker, a businessman, and he has the support of the center right. I think the smart money right now is on Araus winning, but I certainly don't think Lasso is out of the race by any means.

And thinking about South America in a general sense, you said you expect better prospects for democracy and democratic norms.

Well, just in the sense that there are no real potential strongmen on the horizon in South American countries. I think the bigger concern is not so much the conduct of the election itself as the fitness for the next set of leaders to deal with the enormous problems that they will confront. In Peru, you have a very fragmented presidential field in which the frontrunner at the moment, George Forsyth, he's a former goalkeeper for one of the Lima football Clubs. He has 12% support, so, you know he's the front runner. You can imagine how much the vote is split among the other candidates. It's very, very hard to tell how that race is going to play out. I think there are fewer question marks about Chile. The culture is generally politically moderate. The election will be very influenced by the process of writing a new constitution to replace the one inherited from Augusto Pinochet, the dictator of the 70s and 80s. I think what you can expect is that it's going to move from being a country and economy where the markets play a very, very large role in the provision of public services to one that's more social democratic. And I suspect that process is going to bring a degree of moderation to the politics of the presidential race as well.

And for you, the concern is greater for democracy in Central America?

I think the picture is a bit more worrying. I mean, you have in Nicaragua Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista leader who really has become a full blown dictator. And it seems very unlikely that there will be a fair election in Nicaragua and very unlikely that Ortega will be leaving anytime soon. In El Salvador, you have what some people have called the region's first millennial dictator, Nayib Bukele. I'm not sure he's quite a dictator yet, but there's certainly a concern that he will use the upcoming legislative elections to consolidate his power in that country. And then finally in Honduras, the current president, Juan Orlando Hernandez, won't be running again. A lot of people think he shouldn't be president because he won reelection in a vote that many people consider to be fraudulent. And the prospects for a successor look pretty worrying. A couple of them have either been accused of crimes or have criminal records. And the danger is that Honduras really will become even less of a democracy than it is now.

So on balance, then, it's a fairly mixed picture, if not outright pessimistic for the region as a whole.

The good news is that where there are democracies Those democracies will probably endure. Elections provide something of a safety valve for public discontent. So rather than seeing violent protests on the street, you'll see that discontent channeled into the political process, which is a good thing. But whoever wins these elections is going to have absolutely enormous problems to deal with.

Brooke, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

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The television has come a long way since it was invented nearly a hundred years ago. The first sets were enormous room dominating things with tiny grainy black and white screens. Color sets first went on sale in the 1950s, but they were expensive, the equivalent of more than $12,000 today. It took a full decade for the price to come down. That innovation cycle then repeated at the turn of the millennium. Wide flat screens started to appear light enough to hang on the wall like a fine piece of art, and initially with a price to match. Now the cutting edge TV technologists are starting the cycle again.

Televisions of the future are going to have much brighter images and higher contrast pictures than ever before.

Paul Markilli is the Economist's Innovation Editor.

This is because of intense competition between the leading television makers who are going up against each other with rival technologies. In one corner you have Samsung and tcl, a big Chinese company who lead with LED technologies. On the other you have lg, a big South Korean company which leads with OLED technologies.

Okay, they don't sound so different.

So far they don't sound very different, but in fact they work in completely different ways. To put it simply, LEDs, which are light emitting diodes, those televisions are made up of a number of layers and have something called a backlight to help project the image on the screen. OLEDs, which are organic versions of the same thing, actually have the bits that produce the light, the pixels as they're called, embedded in the screen and then they light up directly and this allows the screens to much thinner and lighter. Generally the OLED television sets have a deeper, richer color, but they're a lot more expensive.

But both LED and OLED TVs have been around for a while. What are the innovations going on now?

Both are improving gradually with new techniques and new materials. And a new type of LED television is coming where they use tiny little LEDs which are embedded in the screen, so they project the picture pretty much like OLEDs do. LG doesn't think they're going to be quite as good, and they're coming up with new materials and even better pictures themselves. And because the benefit of an OLED television is without having the backlight and being thinner, you can make it bendable. So they've brought out a flexible television screen, which LG reckons is going to be great for gamers. I mean, often gamers use three television sets side by side to give themselves a more immersive experience. But a bendable set would allow them to bend the screen around them while they're gaming, but it would also allow you to straighten the screen out when the family come along and want to watch a movie. Transparent screens have also been looked at as well. Now, exactly what we'd use a transparent television set for remains to be seen, but there's a lot more technologies going on. There's something called quantum dots which may one day replace these mini LEDs. This technological race, this warfare, will go on and on. And so as consumers, we'll be seeing better and better televisions with all sorts of features.

The word quantum pricked up my ears a bit. What's this quantum dot stuff?

They're particles which could be made to glow. Now, at the moment, they're used with the backlight on conventional LED televisions to make the screen brighter. So they're quite useful in that respect. Now, one day these little quantum dots might form the actual picked cells in the screen itself, but that seems to be some way off.

I mean, it all sounds very high tech, but it also sounds like it's going to be very expensive.

Oh, it will be. You're going to have to dig deep into your pocket for some of these new technologies. Samsung's 110 inch mini TV, which is hoping to bring out later this year, is rumored to cost around $150,000 when it hits the market. Now that of course, will come down and indeed will need to, because not many people would be spending that amount of money on a television set unless they really out to impress the neighbors.

It sounds as if there's this huge intense race for a better and better picture. But what about the sound?

Well, the sounds actually got worse as television sets have got thinner and thinner and thinner. And that's simply because there just isn't so much room to put a decent pair of speakers into the thing. Well, one idea now Sony and LG are both using is to actually make the screen itself vibrate as if it was a speaker itself. Now, this is possible with the OLED technology because the screens are thinner and bendy, so you can put the little actuators into the screen to shake the screen so the sound actually comes projected to you from the screen. Now, this may sound a bit alarming, but the manufacturers promise us that it does not distort the image. And many reviewers say, no, it doesn't. But the sound is supposed to be really quite realistic because if somebody's talking to you, you know, if they're talking to you, straight into your face.

So which one of these cutting edge technologies have you got your eye on? Are you willing to reach deep into your pockets for?

I've already got a qled, which is the quantum dot one, but it's a few years old. We tend to run tellies for 10, 15 years until they become absolute dinosaurs and they're go out and get a new one when forced to.

Paul, thanks very much for joining us.

Best of pleasure, Jason.

Nikolay Antoshkin was the commander of the Air Force base in Kiev.

Ann Ro is our obituaries editor.

He was at home on Saturday, April 26, 1986, and getting odd little bits of news on the radio and television. And he began to put these bits and pieces together and then got a call to tell him that something had happened at a local power station. The managers and people at the plant were fairly cagey about it already. He had an inkling that this was something bigger than people were letting on and that it was going to need the air Force to sort it out. It took a few hours before he actually got the summons to go to the nearest town and meet the state officials and hammer out what had to be done about this.

It's now clear that the Soviet Union has suffered one of the worst disasters.

In the history of nuclear power.

One of the atomic reactors at the Chernobyl atomic power plant near the city of Kiev was damaged.

From their Washington embassy today, Russian officials told the Americans that the disaster was under control and casualties were light.

When he got outside the town, it was sunset, but he could immediately see that there were huge flames. And another thing that struck him forcibly as he approached the town was the long, long queues of white and blue buses. They were to take 60,000 or so people away. All the Inhabitants. Meanwhile, he and the state officials got into a huddle at the local hotel. And all they could say to him was, we've got to put the fire out. You work out how to do it. He went up in a helicopter himself, flew it up to see what had happened, and he was absolutely appalled at the damage. The concrete dome of reactor number four had blown off, and there was a huge fire burning. The graphite core had just ignited on exposure to the air. This was utterly terrifying. To look down into this fire, he felt it was like looking into the face of hell. All the smoke around him and everything he was looking at was actually damaging him at the same time. He could feel that it was. He could taste the rusty iron in his tongue. It was such an appalling taste, smell, and experience of as near as he had got to death. He thought the only possible way to tackle this fire was to try and tamp it with as much sand and clay, any sort of material that could be emptied into this raging inferno. He called in about 600 pilots and trainee pilots from all over the Soviet Union, 100 helicopters, and he ordered 10,000 break parachutes, which he was going to fill with this mixture of sand and minerals. It was a huge, huge operation. And it was not only huge, but it was immensely delicate because the helicopter pilots had to hover 200 meters above the burning core. And they flew flight after flight. In all, they flew 4,000 missions. They were completely overtaken by the horrors of the task and physically devastated by it. And, in fact, 28 of them died pretty soon afterwards. Another 14 died of lingering cancers well after the event because they had been given almost no protection to do this work, and they suffered for it, as he did. In the years that followed, he spent two years in the hospital. He was on an extremely rigorous routine of pill taking because he had suffered acute exposure to radiation. He never got over Chernobyl, although, in fact, as things turned out, he was to die of coronavirus and not of his experiences at Chernobyl. For his work at Chernobyl, he was given the medal of a hero of the Soviet Union, which is, in fact, the highest award that the Soviet Union could ever bestow, one of a gold star on a red ribbon. He'd fought in Afghanistan and had done many brave and commendable things, but it was Chernobyl that he was given the award for. And he always felt a slight disappointment that that was what he had the medal for, because he felt that heroes of the Soviet Union were generally people who'd fought in the Great Patriotic War, that is the Second World War, or the cosmonauts. And this always bothered him to some degree. But the medal did suddenly burnish his reputation. In 2014, he went into the Duma, the Russian parliament, and there helped to make laws. So he did become a significant, important figure. And I think by the end, he reconciled himself to being a hero in a different way. He returned to Chernobyl in 1996. There was then a 20 kilometer exclusion zone round the plant and a great concrete sarcophagus about reactor number four itself. And then when he went through the outlying villages from which everyone had been evacuated, he found that undergrowth and thickets were overtaking the houses. The houses were falling down. And there was talk then of making the whole place a nature reserve, because thanks to him, the radioactivity has got very much less. And he just reflected as he drove past that nature seemed to be healing itself very quickly, that the earth always did have that capacity to mend itself. And perhaps in some ways, it had managed to mend itself more successfully than he had.

Anne row on General Nikolai Antoshkin, who's died aged 86. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com intelligenceoffer the link is in the show Notes. See you back here on Monday.