It would be expectable that most citizens in countries that have recently been in a dictatorship would recognize the dangers of it and push democracy to a more centralized and equal stand but the truth is that often there is the so called “nostalgia of the good dictator” where many residents in these countries seem to have forgotten the atrocities that these leaders inforced on their people.
As a Portuguese citizen this is something that we are right now dealing with in my country. Coming from a family where my grandfather was arrested, tortured and forced to exile by the same man that has recently almost been praised by many Portuguese citizens, including, surprisingly, a lot of young people. And as a new extreme right party is emerging, reaching almost 10% on the latest polls just ahead of the next elections, I’d like to take this opportunity to showcase the effects of a dictatorship in our most important assets, the 30 articles that make up the Human Rights declaration.
All the data provided next comes from the website ourworldindata.org and can be found under the following chart (Human Rights Scores), a chart that scores the degree to which governments protect and respect human rights. The scores range from around -3.8 to around 5.4 (the higher the better).
When looking at this chart some details pop up to my eyes, the highest results (as expected) are in countries like Iceland, Luxembourg or Norway, 3 examples of free democracies, and the lower results are found in africa and the middle east where dictatorships and “fake democracies'' have been enforced throughout the last decade(s). But it's when we look at the historical variation of this chart that we really see the power of democracy.
Let’s take a quick look at the previously mentioned Portugal, during the dictatorship (until 1974) the score is between a -1,6 and a -1,5 and as soon as the dictatorship ends, this score jumps to a +0,8 inside 2 years, reaching a +1,77 (not far from today’s +1,94) in 10 years. The same can be said for countries in similar situations like Spain. More interestingly however is when we look at the south american charts, where multiple countries entered a dictatorship in the late 60s/70s, in argentina for example, the score drops from a -0,79 (which was already in a military dictatorship) in 1975 to a -2,98 in 1976. If we swiftly cross the eastern border to Chile we’ll find a similar scenario, in 1972 the score was that of a -0,99 and the year later when Pinochet’s coup took down the only communist party to be democratically elected months prior to the revolution, the score was a -3,01. Over 40 000 people died during the 17 years of this dictatorship.
Multiple other examples can be found within a few clicks, and that should be enough to drop the “back in the good ol’ days” argument. We are living in a decisive decade where we have the choice to be free and impose our precious Human Rights, as they are the universal law that we should all respect, or to once again succumb to the greediness of humankind and re-enter a wave of dictatorships and polarized governments across Europe and consequently the world.