Honduras President Porfirio Lobo attends a mass of reconciliation in Tegucigalpa in January.

The conference that drew Latin American leaders from all walks of life to a college campus in California was billed as a celebration of 200 years of independence for the region.

However, the focus at the Institute of the Americas was not on past triumphs, but on the difficulties that many countries face today in strengthening democracy and the rule of law.

As Dominican Republic President Leonel Fernandez said, “The transition to democracy has been a success story for all of Latin America.” But democracy, he added, is still “in its infancy in Latin America.” There are free elections and freedom of expression, but now “people want economic progress. What is missing in Latin America … is a combination of the principles of liberal democracy with the aspiration of social justice.”

The institute, a nonprofit organization housed at the University of California, San Diego, that promotes development, trade and good governance, gave Fernandez its Award for Democracy and Peace, making him the 12th Latin leader to receive the honor since it was bestowed on Argentine President Raúl Alfonsin in 1987.

The weeklong workshop, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and the Latin development bank CAF, drew 50 participants from 15 countries to examine issues crucial to the region’s future, including human rights, freedom of the press, organized crime and the role of indigenous communities, as well as post-Castro Cuba, the Chavez regime in Venezuela and the efforts to restore democracy after the 2009 coup in Honduras.

Among the participants were the mayor-elect of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and the mayor of Choluteca, Honduras; Paraguay’s vice minister of education; indigenous leaders representing the Mapuche of Chile, the Aymara of Bolivia, and the Mixteca of Mexico; civil society leaders such as two-time Olympic race walk medalist Jefferson Perez, whose foundation helps low-income youth in his native Ecuador; and journalists from some of the region’s leading newspapers, including La Nación of Buenos Aires and El Deber of Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

They came together during the bicentennial of the year that Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Mexico secured independence from Spain.

Eduardo Stein Barillas, former vice president of Guatemala, told of his efforts as head of a truth and reconciliation commission for Honduras to help that country find a path out of the crisis that ensued after the overthrow of President Manuel Zelaya in June 2009. He also spoke on a panel with former Bolivian President Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga and former Costa Rican Vice President Kevin Casas-Zamora on the topic “Who governs and who gives the orders?”

Stein sees an alarming weakening of democracy in several countries, including his own, “because many governments and presidents think that because they won the elections, they are entitled to change the rules.”

Soldiers patrol streets in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, as part of the government's crackdown on drug cartels.

“It’s like this saying in Buenos Aires: ‘Power is like the violin: You take it with the left, but you play it with the right,’” he said in an interview. “Indeed, they become rather authoritarian, neutralizing or trying to control the judiciary, Congress and other powers.”

“We inherited from the French Revolution a system of government in which the three powers of the state are supposed to balance each other. In several countries in Latin America this is not the case, and the executive branch is always trying to control Congress and … the judiciary,” Stein said. “That is very dangerous.”

The participants returned often to the question of how to stop the drug violence that has claimed 28,000 lives in Mexico since the end of 2006.

Efren Elias Galaviz, manager of external affairs and public policy for MSD Mexico, a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical firm Merck, said, “To me it’s very clear that we need better political and social institutions - including a solid justice system and trained police - if we want to recover our countries for ourselves and not for the drug traffickers.”

“We also need more jobs and more education,” said Elias, who said gangs can hire a gunman for just 800 pesos a week, or $50.

Craig Kelly, a former U.S. ambassador to Chile, said much has changed for the better in Latin America over the past 30 years.

Back then, said Kelly, now a vice president of the Cohen Group, a consulting firm, “you had widespread authoritarian governments, you had insurgencies in many countries, you had macroeconomic policies which were not delivering for the citizens.” Today, both democracies and economies in the region are much stronger. Forty million people have escaped poverty in the past decade, he said.

Kelly, who helped negotiate the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord that established a framework for Honduras’ return to democracy, said the positive trends do not get as much coverage as the drug war or controversies with Cuba and Venezuela, but “every day our hemisphere is more and more integrated, and every day the United States is more integrated with the rest of the hemisphere.”

Jeffrey Davidow, the institute’s president, said poverty and limited opportunity still pose “an inherent challenge to democracy” that needs to be addressed.

“Overall the trend towards democratic societies has been a good one,” said Davidow, a former U.S. ambassador to Mexico and Venezuela. But “no one can take for granted the continuation of democratic expansion on the continent.”

This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov