America is living in a failing democracy . The Afro-descendant communities lack of representation in the making of political decisions . The lack of participation spaces for this and other vulnerable popular sectors is a perverse game of interests played by those holding the power provided by the oligopolistic markets . A neoliberal view I shared by the powers that be against the promotion of democratic spaces . In a world of smallholders , property itself would have little to fear from democracy , but with the oligopolistic development within the capitalist system , democracy became the Achilles heel of many liberals ( Esping-Andersen , 1991 , 86 ). For the Afro-descendant communities , democracy requires an inclusive , universal and participatory logic of collective nature , in which group participation and representation can play a role within the interests ’ circles of diverse and heterogeneous people , as well as within the realities of various ways of social expression . In the world of ideologies , it is then necessary to ask whether democracy for the Afrodescendant communities would be a banner in the struggle for a socialist society . That ´ s why liberals are not willing to expand democracy , while " socialists , on the contrary , suspected that parliamentary democracy would be little more than an empty shell or , as Lenin suggested , a mere conversation between mannequins "( Esping-Andersen , 1991 , 88 ). Contemporary Marxism holds the belief that social reforms were no more than a dike in a filled-with-gaps capitalist order . The latter could not , by definition , respond to the working classes ’ desire for emancipation . Following this line of thinking , Liberals feared that full democracy would compromise markets and lead to socialism . Thus , freedom needs to defend the markets against political intervention . In such a logic , bourgeois democracy is seen as monstrous notion , since it conceals a decisive historical circumstance : to a greater or lesser extent in different latitudes , democracy was achieved and preserved against and despite the bourgeoisie . This notion pertains to another psychosocial level in the bourgeois domination over the Afro-descendant population , as part of the working class , but it faces a double difficulty . The bourgeois democracy cannot be gratuitously attributed to the bourgeoisie as historical conquest . It historically resulted from popular struggles against the domination of capital . And the adjective bourgeois is accidental as an accessory specification for a democracy fetishized as immutable value . This discussion leads to a series of challenges on how to strengthen democracy today in the given context related to the rights of the Afrodescendants . The starting point is the struggle for equality , social and political participation , and full representation of the excluded and invisible social forces in the current liberal and capitalist system . The democratization challenge in Latin America relies in the possibility of combining the institutional changes with the democratic practices and the strengthening of a new citizen culture ( Jelin and Hershberg , 2006 , 156 ). The democratic system in Latin America is not adequate to achieve such a combination , because there are perennial conflicts among interest groups and many spaces in dispute . The survival of democracy is as improbable as problematic within the economic diversity and the unfair social division in every sense . The key destabilizer is the extreme poverty correlated with extreme wealth . The diverse daily situations of poverty and inequality help us to understand the current panorama from a critical perspective regarding the Afro-
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