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Denis Merklen is the second Latin American after the Chilean Jacques Chonchol to hold the position of director of the Institute of Higher Studies in Latin America (IHEAL). Observer of the unstable situation in the region, he considers that there is a common denominator: the deep division. “There is a profound movement in societies that tells their rulers that there is something in the functioning of the State that cannot continue like this,” he analyzes.
The Institute of Higher Studies in Latin America is a recognized institution inside and outside France. Created 68 years ago, it is the main institute of its kind in all of Europe. “The Institute receives approximately 30% of its student body from Latin American countries and there is very rich and fluid cooperation with all the universities of the subcontinent, and even from the United States with all the colleagues who work on Latin America,” he notes. Uruguayan sociologist.
An institution that is in excellent health, even more so considering that there is a renewed academic interest in France in the region.
With regard to the currents of thought that for some time have wanted to limit academic freedom in educational institutions, Merklen points out that this is not the case with IHEAL: “Academic freedom is truly a very important value for us and above all that we have a link with the political life of Latin American societies and with French society as well”.
The so-called “Latin American progressivism” that recently led several representatives located to the left of the political field to the government is going through a crisis marked by instability, but also by a lack of prospects. “This has as a background a crisis of the democratic regimes that are seen, from the point of view of the populations, as increasingly impotent to solve the pressing problems that are presented to the different societies” thinks Denis Merklen.
“Democratic regimes need social cohesion, from which Latin American societies have distanced themselves. And no matter how much we have elections, no matter how much we have elections and freedom of the press, we will not be able to have healthy democratic regimes on the continent as long as societies are deeply divided”, underlines the director of IHEAL.
A region that tries to project itself while continuing to deal with the ghosts of its recent history. Last December, the IHEAL director signed a statement addressing the sentencing of Mario Sandoval, the Argentine torturer convicted by a court in Argentina for the kidnapping, torture and forced disappearance of a university student during the last military dictatorship in the South American country.
Sandoval taught for several years at IHEAL. After clarifying that Sandoval “was never head of the Sorbonne or the Institute of Higher Studies in Latin America, something that he was in charge of claiming and presenting in many places in Latin America,” Denis Merklen points out that for those of us who lived through the dictatorship, or some of the dictatorships in Latin America, as is my case, by Argentina and by Uruguay, it is a bit painful.
