In: LASA Forum, 56: 4

In recent years, scholars such as Joe Foweraker (2020) and Max Cameron (2021) have argued that Latin American politics is characterized by the coexistence and interplay of oligarchic and democratic modes of rule. This coexistence can work so smoothly that it becomes easy to overlook the oligarchic elements of rule informally shaping democratic processes. In other cases, the contradictions between the inegalitarian and exclusionary logic of oligarchy and the egalitarian and inclusionary promise of democracy manifest themselves in waves of popular contention that challenge the disproportionate wealth and power of oligarchic groups, giving rise to open struggles over the dismantling, adaptation, or restoration of oligarchical rule.

Three Central Andean countries—Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru—present an interesting panorama of such cases. In Ecuador, after serious challenges to oligarchic power, oligarchic actors have managed not only to restore preexisting modes of oligarchic rule but to take formal control of the state: first with one of the wealthiest and most influential members of Ecuador’s financial elite, Guillermo Lasso (Ruiz et al. 2024), then with the heir of one of the most powerful business groups built around the export of bananas, Daniel Noboa (Herrera and Macaroff 2023). Peru, in contrast, has long been described as a case of entrenched and relatively stable coexistence of democratic and oligarchic patterns of rule, amounting to a situation of state capture (Crabtree and Durand 2017). This configuration has recently come under increasing popular pressure (Cameron 2021, 783-5; Crabtree et al. 2023, 199-200), with the oligarchic and the democratic modes increasingly jarring. In Bolivia, oligarchic actors, who had to adapt to the challenges brought about by the governments of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), mainly succeeded in protecting both their wealth and their model of accumulation. Yet, with the disintegration of the MAS, the demise of its economic development model, and the election results in August 2025, this peculiar coexistence of oligarchic and democratic modes is facing a new phase of heightened uncertainty and, most probably, significant change.

In this contribution, we suggest that the three-dimensional theory of business power, which distinguishes between structural, instrumental, and discursive power, offers a useful approach to theorize and empirically analyze oligarchic modes of rule under democratic conditions. Drawing on a book in which we compare the political role of economic elites in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru (Crabtree et al. 2023, 2024), we show how analyzing the business power of oligarchic members of the economic elite helps explain the tumultuous interplay between oligarchic and democratic modes of rule. In what follows, we lay out our theoretical argument before briefly assessing the recent past and current situation in the three countries.

You can access the whole paper here.