As a politician, former president of Ecuador, and an active and lucid observer of the ways in which democracy is being undermined, Osvaldo Hurtado has acquired a unique and invaluable perspective on the onslaught against democracy. In these pages, President Hurtado offers a well-documented and alarming synthesis of the state of democracy in Latin America. A must-read.

Moisés Naím, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC

This study of Bolivia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela illuminates how democratic breakdowns and autocratic impositions occurred in these nations. Osvaldo Hurtado, a former president of Ecuador, was among the first to understand and oppose these populist regimes and to identify their shared tendencies and techniques. He shows how democratic governance decayed and why that matters for its future.

Abraham F. Lowenthal, emeritus, University of Southern California; founding director, the Inter-American Dialogue and the Latin American Program of the Wilson Center

Form and function, style and content merge in elegant harmony in this English rendering of Osvaldo Hurtado’s seminal work. The subject matter is profoundly serious, and the reader can expect to be dazzled by the sheer brilliance of the analysis, which is matched by a degree of academic objectivity that is remarkable in one who spent fifty years fighting the evils of dictatorship and promoting, defending, and implementing the principles of democracy in his own country and throughout Latin America. This book is a cry of warning and a call to arms. A warning against the disastrous mistakes of the past and a call to all to be vigilant against future threats to the freedoms that only democracy can bring.

Nick Mills, former director, University of New Mexico Andean Study and Research Center, Quito, Ecuador

It is a luxury to have a whole book on Ecuadorian and Latin American politics by one of the most respected authors in the field of language. Former President Hurtado possesses the intelligence, the language, and the academic instruments to achieve what he sets out to do.

Carlos Alberto Montaner, Cuban journalist, writer, and politician