With which categories should the contemporary Latin American democratic crisis be read when the left–right distinction no longer captures the real mechanism of institutional degradation? What conditions allow unbounded power to become normalized through gradual and formally legal pathways, and why does the politicization of fear render both revolutionary rhetoric and order-based punitivism functional in the erosion of pluralism? This paper proposes an analytical framework centered on the dynamics of autocratization: the capture of state arbiters, the breakdown of informal norms of restraint, the production of enmity through scapegoating, and the securitization of the state of exception as technologies of legitimation. On this basis, it delineates a normative criterion: the decisive problem is not the declared ideological orientation, but the substitution of democratic competition with domination, the closure of accountability, and the transformation of the adversary into an enemy. The final hypothesis opens an agenda for research and reform: strengthening institutional resilience and the public sphere to reduce incentives for populism and to rechannel conflict toward non-destructive forms of disagreement.
Guasca et al. (Thu,) studied this question.