R2.10 Political developments in Latin America (1934–2020)

Latin America's twenty independent republics shared a set of political problems in the twentieth century: economies that depended on a few exports, deep inequality in land and income, powerful armed forces, and a large neighbour, the United States, that treated the region as its sphere of influence. Between 1934 and 2020 these problems produced populist governments, a communist revolution in Cuba, guerrilla wars, military dictatorships and, from the 1980s, a return to democracy that has lasted, with exceptions, ever since.

The overview timeline shows four broad phases, though countries moved through them at different times. Mexico had no military coup after 1920 and was governed by one party until 2000; Colombia and Venezuela kept elected governments from the late 1950s while their neighbours fell to the armed forces; Paraguay's dictatorship lasted from 1954 to 1989. Comparisons between countries are therefore as important as the regional pattern.

Latin America in the 1930s: export economies, oligarchies and the Depression

Until 1930 most Latin American states were governed by narrow elites of landowners, merchants and bankers, often called the oligarchy. Their wealth came from exporting raw materials to Europe and the United States: beef and wheat from Argentina, coffee from Brazil and Colombia, copper and nitrates from Chile, sugar from Cuba, oil from Mexico and Venezuela. Elections, where they were held, were usually limited by literacy tests, fraud or the influence of landowners over their workers.

The Great Depression broke this model. Between 1929 and 1932 the prices of Latin American exports collapsed, foreign loans dried up and governments could not pay their debts. In 1930–1931 alone, governments were overthrown in Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Guatemala and several other states, often by the army. The economic and social crisis of the 1930s in each country is a regional study of its own; its political consequences shaped the whole period.

Three changes followed. Governments turned to ISI, which created a larger industrial working class in the cities. The state took a far greater role in the economy, owning oil, steel and railways. And politicians began to compete for the votes and support of urban workers and the new middle classes, groups that the old oligarchies had excluded. The leaders who did this most successfully are known as populists.

The armed forces also became permanent political actors. In much of the region officers saw themselves as the guardians of the nation, above parties, with the right to remove governments that threatened order. A caudillo, a strongman leader with a personal following, was an old figure in Latin American politics; after 1930 the army as an institution increasingly took his place.

The growth of populism: Vargas in Brazil and Perón in Argentina

Populism was the first of the new challenges to the old order. It describes a style of politics that claims to speak for the people against a privileged elite. In mid-twentieth-century Latin America the term is used for a group of leaders who built mass movements among urban workers and the poor, led them personally, and used the state to deliver material benefits in return for loyalty.

Historians have argued over whether populism is an ideology, a coalition of classes or a political strategy. It is clearer to describe what populist governments did. Their unions were usually tied to the state through a system called corporatism, in which the state recognised one official union per industry, settled wages and disputes, and expected political support in return.

Getúlio Vargas and Brazil, 1930–1954

Getúlio Vargas, a landowner and politician from the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, came to power in the revolution of October 1930, when the armed forces backed him against the coffee oligarchy of São Paulo. He ruled Brazil for fifteen years: as provisional president (1930–1934), as constitutional president elected by the Constituent Assembly (1934–1937), and from November 1937 as dictator of the Estado Novo ("New State"), modelled in part on Salazar's Portugal. Parties were banned, Congress closed and the press censored.

Vargas's rule changed Brazil. The Estado Novo built a national steel works at Volta Redonda (with US loans agreed in 1940), created a minimum wage (1940) and brought together Brazil's labour laws in the Consolidação das Leis do Trabalho (1943), which gave urban workers holidays, limits on hours and labour courts, but also tied their unions to the Ministry of Labour. Rural workers, most of the population, were left out. Vargas presented himself as the "father of the poor", and the propaganda department (DIP) spread his image through radio and the press.

The armed forces removed Vargas in October 1945, as the end of the Second World War discredited dictatorships. He had already prepared his return by founding two parties: the Brazilian Labour Party (PTB) for workers and the Social Democratic Party (PSD) for regional bosses. In October 1950 he won the presidency in a free election with about 49 per cent of the vote.

The elected presidency and its crisis, 1951–1954

As an elected president Vargas pursued economic nationalism. After a national campaign under the slogan "O petróleo é nosso" ("The oil is ours"), Law 2,004 of 3 October 1953 created Petrobras, a state company with a monopoly over oil exploration. In 1954 his labour minister, João Goulart, proposed doubling the minimum wage, and Vargas granted a 100 per cent rise on 1 May 1954. Business groups, the conservative press and much of the officer corps saw this as a threat, and accused the government of corruption and of plotting a "syndicalist republic" on the Argentine model.

The crisis came when members of Vargas's personal guard tried to kill his fiercest critic, the journalist Carlos Lacerda, on 5 August 1954; Lacerda was wounded and an air force major killed. Senior officers demanded Vargas's resignation. On 24 August 1954 he shot himself in the presidential palace, leaving a letter addressed to the Brazilian people.

They do not want the worker to be free. They do not want the people to be independent. … The profits of foreign companies reached as much as 500 per cent a year. … I was the slave of the people, and today I free myself for eternal life. … Serenely I take the first step on the road to eternity and leave life to enter history.

Getúlio Vargas, carta-testamento (letter-testament), 24 August 1954, extracts (own translation from the Portuguese). The letter was read on the radio within hours of his death. It presents Vargas as a martyr destroyed by foreign interests and domestic enemies of the workers, and it turned public anger against his opponents: crowds attacked the offices of anti-Vargas newspapers and the US embassy. As a source, it shows the populist claim of a personal bond between leader and people, made at a moment designed to maximise its emotional force.

The letter had lasting effects. The coup that the officers had prepared was postponed for ten years. Vargas's heirs in the PTB, above all Goulart, dominated the labour vote, and the conflict between his supporters and his enemies in the armed forces and the middle classes shaped Brazilian politics until 1964.

Juan Perón and Argentina, 1943–1955

Juan Domingo Perón was an army colonel who took part in the military coup of June 1943. As Secretary of Labour he built a base among the unions, and when fellow officers arrested him in October 1945, a mass demonstration of workers in Buenos Aires on 17 October forced his release. He won the presidential election of February 1946 with about 53 per cent of the vote. As a case of Latin American populism, Peronism matters for its policies and for its long effects on Argentine democracy.

Perón's government nationalised the British-owned railways (1948), the telephone company and the central bank, and created the IAPI, a state agency that bought Argentina's grain and beef cheaply and sold them abroad at high post-war prices, using the profits to fund industry and welfare. The First Five-Year Plan (1947) set targets for industry. Real wages rose sharply until 1949, and union membership grew several times over, organised in a single confederation, the CGT, closely bound to the government. Eva Perón, his wife, ran a foundation that distributed welfare and gave the regime a personal, emotional face for the poor. She also campaigned for the law of September 1947 that gave women the vote, and founded the Peronist Women's Party in 1949; she died of cancer in July 1952.

Perón gave his movement a doctrine, which he called Justicialism, and a foreign policy, the Third Position, which claimed to stand between capitalism and communism and between the United States and the USSR. On 17 October 1950, the fifth anniversary of his release, he read twenty "truths" of Justicialism from the balcony of the presidential palace.

1. True democracy is that in which the government does what the people want and defends a single interest: that of the people. … 4. For Peronism there exists only one class of men: those who work. … 16. As an economic doctrine, Justicialism achieves the social economy, putting capital at the service of the economy and the economy at the service of social well-being. … 18. We want an Argentina that is socially just, economically free and politically sovereign.

Juan Perón, Las veinte verdades peronistas (The Twenty Peronist Truths, also called the Twenty Truths of Justicialism), read in the Plaza de Mayo, 17 October 1950, extracts (own translation from the Spanish). The truths were addressed to a mass rally of supporters and reduce Peronism to slogans that could be memorised. They define democracy as the will of the people expressed through the leader, not as elections and the rights of opponents, and they claim to abolish class conflict by declaring that only workers count. The three aims of point 18, social justice, economic independence and political sovereignty, repeated the preamble of the 1949 Constitution and remained the slogans of Peronism for the rest of the century.

The limits of Peronist democracy were clear. The 1949 Constitution allowed Perón's re-election; opposition newspapers such as La Prensa were closed or taken over; judges were removed and opponents jailed. When world prices fell after 1949 the economy stalled, inflation rose and the government had to ask workers for restraint. Perón's quarrel with the Catholic Church in 1954–1955 united his enemies, and the armed forces overthrew him in September 1955 in the so-called Revolución Libertadora.

Populism compared

The table of Vargas and Perón shows the shared features of classic populism and the differences between them. Vargas built his labour system from above, through a dictatorship that workers did not choose; Perón won the enthusiastic loyalty of a working class that was already organised. Both left their countries divided between a mass movement loyal to the leader and an anti-populist coalition of landowners, business, the Church hierarchy and much of the army.

Other populists

Lázaro Cárdenas, president of Mexico from 1934 to 1940, distributed about 18 million hectares of land to peasant communities and nationalised the foreign oil companies in March 1938; he organised workers and peasants into separate sectors of the ruling party, a corporatist structure that kept that party in power until 2000. The Mexican Revolution and the Cárdenas reforms are a regional study of their own. In Peru, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre founded APRA in 1924 as a continental anti-imperialist party; it was banned for long periods and the army blocked Haya from power. In Ecuador, José María Velasco Ibarra held the presidency five times between 1934 and 1972 and was overthrown four times, a sign that populist appeal did not guarantee stable government.

Reasons for the Cuban Revolution, 1952–1959

On 1 January 1959 the dictator Fulgencio Batista fled Cuba, and within a week the guerrilla leader Fidel Castro was the most powerful man in the country. Within three years the revolution had become socialist and allied with the USSR. Explaining why requires looking at Cuba's long-term relationship with the United States and with sugar, at the political crisis that Batista created, at Cuban society in the 1950s, and at the leadership of Castro and Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

Background: a republic under US influence

Cuba won independence from Spain in 1898 only after the United States intervened in its war of independence. US troops occupied the island until 1902, and the Cuban constitution of 1901 had to include the Platt Amendment, which gave the United States the right to intervene in Cuba and to keep a naval base at Guantánamo Bay. US troops did intervene in 1906–1909, 1912 and 1917–1922. The amendment was abrogated in 1934, but the base remained.

Economic dependence outlasted the amendment. A Reciprocity Treaty of 1934 gave Cuban sugar a privileged share of the US market (the sugar quota) in return for low tariffs on US goods, which discouraged Cuban industry. By the 1950s US companies owned a large share of the sugar mills, most of the electricity and telephone services, the nickel mines and much of the banking system. Havana's hotels and casinos, some run by US organised-crime figures such as Meyer Lansky, served American tourists.

Cuban politics after 1902 was marked by corruption and instability. The dictatorship of Gerardo Machado fell in the revolution of 1933, and in September 1933 a group of sergeants led by Fulgencio Batista seized control of the army. Batista was the power behind a series of presidents until 1940, when he was elected president himself under a new, progressive constitution. The Constitution of 1940 promised land reform, workers' rights and free elections, and its restoration became the main demand of later opponents of Batista, Castro included. Batista's elected successors of the Auténtico party, Ramón Grau (1944–1948) and Carlos Prío (1948–1952), were notorious for corruption and political gangsterism. Their main critic, Eduardo Chibás of the Ortodoxo party, shot himself during a radio broadcast in August 1951; the young Fidel Castro was an Ortodoxo candidate for Congress in the elections due in 1952.

Political factors: Batista's dictatorship

On 10 March 1952, three months before elections that he was expected to lose, Batista seized power in a military coup. He suspended the Constitution of 1940, dissolved Congress and later held an election in 1954 in which he was the only candidate. The coup was the decisive political cause of the revolution: it closed the legal road to power and convinced many Cubans, especially students and young members of the Ortodoxo party, that only force could remove him.

Batista's government was corrupt and increasingly brutal. Opponents were tortured and killed by the police and army, and bodies were left in the streets as a warning. Repression widened the opposition rather than destroying it. It included Catholic and liberal professionals, the Directorio Revolucionario of university students (which attacked the Presidential Palace on 13 March 1957 in an attempt to kill Batista), and an urban underground led in Santiago by Frank País until he was killed on 30 July 1957.

The army itself was the regime's weak point. Its officers owed their positions to Batista, many were corrupt, and conscripts had little wish to fight in the mountains. In March 1958 the United States, embarrassed by the use of US weapons against civilians, suspended arms shipments to Batista. The embargo did not stop the war, but it showed Cubans that Batista had lost his most important foreign ally.

Economic factors, including the role of the USA

Cuba in the 1950s was not among the poorest countries in Latin America. By measures such as income per head, doctors per person, radios and televisions, it ranked near the top. The economy, however, rested on one product. Sugar provided about 80 per cent of exports, and its price and the size of the US quota decided whether Cubans prospered. The sugar harvest (the zafra) lasted about four months; for the rest of the year, the "dead time", hundreds of thousands of cane workers had no work.

Land was very unequally distributed: according to the agricultural census of 1946, about 1.5 per cent of landowners held some 46 per cent of farmland, much of it in large sugar estates and cattle ranches, some of them US-owned. Growth was slow in the 1950s, and young educated Cubans found few jobs to match their expectations. For nationalists, the economy's dependence on the United States explained both its weakness and the corruption of Cuban politics.

Social factors

The gap between Havana and the countryside was very large. According to the 1953 census about 24 per cent of Cubans over ten could not read or write, and the rate was far higher in rural areas; many rural homes had no electricity, running water or doctor. The eastern province of Oriente, where the guerrillas fought, had the poorest peasants, many of them squatters threatened with eviction. Afro-Cubans faced discrimination in employment and were excluded from many clubs and beaches. Middle-class Cubans, meanwhile, resented the corruption and gangsterism that blocked careers and offended their sense of national dignity.

Historians who stress these conditions speak of a "revolution of rising expectations": Cubans compared themselves with the United States, not with Haiti, and felt the gap. Others argue that social conditions explain why Castro's later reforms were popular more than why Batista fell, since the urban workers and their unions largely stayed out of the struggle until its last days.

The role of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara

Fidel Castro, a lawyer from a landowning family in Oriente, launched his armed challenge on 26 July 1953 with an attack by about 160 young men on the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba. It failed, and many of the captured rebels were tortured and killed. At his trial Castro defended himself in a speech later published as History Will Absolve Me, which set out a programme of land reform, restoration of the 1940 Constitution and action against corruption. The speech made him a national figure. Released in an amnesty in May 1955, he went to Mexico, founded the 26th of July Movement and trained an expedition.

In Mexico Castro met Ernesto "Che" Guevara, an Argentine doctor who had witnessed the US-backed overthrow of the reforming government of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala in 1954 and drew from it the lesson that reform without armed force would be crushed. Guevara joined the expedition as its doctor and became one of its most effective commanders.

On 2 December 1956, 82 men landed from the yacht Granma in Oriente. The army scattered them, and only about twenty survivors regrouped in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Three factors turned this small group into a national movement:

• Publicity. The interview Castro gave to Herbert Matthews of the New York Times, published in February 1957, showed that he was alive and exaggerated his strength. Radio Rebelde, broadcasting from the mountains from 1958, carried his message across Cuba.

• Peasant support. In the Sierra the rebels paid for food, punished abusive landowners and army informers, and promised land; peasants provided guides, supplies and recruits.

• Unity of the opposition. The Pact of Caracas (July 1958) united most of the anti-Batista groups behind the 26th of July Movement. A general strike called by the urban wing in April 1958 failed, which shifted leadership within the movement from the cities to Castro in the mountains.

Batista's summer offensive of 1958, with about 10,000 troops against a few hundred guerrillas, failed. In the autumn the rebels went on the offensive: columns under Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos moved west towards central Cuba, and Guevara's capture of Santa Clara on 28–31 December 1958 cut the island in two. Batista fled on the night of 31 December, and the army dissolved. Castro entered Havana on 8 January 1959.

Castro's personal contribution was his political skill. He kept his programme vague and moderate enough (restoring the 1940 Constitution, free elections, honest government) to win middle-class and even some US sympathy, while building an armed force loyal to himself. Guevara gave the revolution a military commander, a more radical ideology, and later a theory that the Cuban experience could be repeated across Latin America.

Weighing the causes

No single factor explains 1959. Long-term dependence and inequality created a wide sense that Cuba's independence was incomplete. Batista's coup and repression made peaceful change impossible and united almost all of society against him. Castro's leadership turned that discontent into an armed movement that survived and ended the war in control of the only armed force left in Cuba. That control is what allowed the revolution to become far more radical than most of those who fought Batista intended.

Castro in power: maintaining control and the impact of his rule, 1959–2020

Fidel Castro led Cuba from 1959 until illness forced him to hand power to his brother Raúl in 2006. Raúl Castro remained president until 2018 and head of the Communist Party until 2021. The regime that Fidel built therefore outlasted ten US presidents and the Soviet Union itself. Its survival rested on four connected sets of policies: political control, social reform and nationalism, economic transformation, and the treatment of opponents.

Political policies: from provisional government to one-party state

In January 1959 Castro held no formal office. A moderate lawyer, Manuel Urrutia, became president and a liberal cabinet was appointed, but real power lay with the rebel army and with Castro, who became prime minister on 16 February 1959. Over the next two years the moderates were pushed out: Urrutia resigned in July 1959 after criticising communist influence, and Huber Matos, a rebel commander who protested at the same trend, was sentenced to twenty years in prison in December 1959. The promised elections were postponed indefinitely; Castro argued that the revolution itself expressed the will of the people, shown at mass rallies in Havana.

Castro merged the 26th of July Movement, the Directorio and the old Moscow-line communist party (the Popular Socialist Party) into a single organisation, which became the Communist Party of Cuba in October 1965. On 2 December 1961 he declared himself a Marxist-Leninist. Formal state institutions came only in the 1970s, after the economic failures of the 1960s persuaded the leadership to copy the Soviet model more closely. The Constitution of 1976, approved by referendum, made the Communist Party "the highest leading force of society and of the state" and created elected assemblies, the Organs of People's Power, in which only candidates approved through party-controlled processes could stand.

Below the party stood the mass organisations, which reached into every street and workplace: the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDRs, founded in September 1960) on every block, the Federation of Cuban Women, the official trade-union confederation, and youth and student organisations. They mobilised people for campaigns such as the literacy drive and vaccination, and also watched their neighbours for signs of disloyalty.

Above everything stood Castro himself. He governed through long televised speeches, personal visits and direct orders, often bypassing the institutions he had created. The armed forces, commanded by Raúl Castro from 1959 to 2008, were the regime's most reliable institution, and from the 1990s their companies ran much of the tourist and hard-currency economy.

Social policies and Cuban nationalism

The revolution's social reforms were its strongest claim to legitimacy. Rents were cut by up to half in 1959 and the Urban Reform Law of 1960 turned tenants into owners. The literacy campaign of 1961 sent about 250,000 volunteers, many of them teenagers, into the countryside, and the government claimed to have reduced illiteracy to under 4 per cent. Education and health care became free and universal; rural clinics were built and doctors trained in large numbers. By the 1980s Cuba's life expectancy and infant mortality rates were close to those of developed countries, although historians debate how far Cuban statistics can be trusted and note that Cuba already ranked high in the region before 1959.

The revolution also claimed to end racial discrimination. Segregated clubs and beaches were opened in 1959, and many Afro-Cubans gained from land reform, education and jobs. But the leadership remained mostly white, and the government declared the race question solved, which made it difficult for Afro-Cubans to organise against the inequality that remained. Women entered education and paid work in large numbers, and the Family Code of 1975 obliged husbands to share housework, but women remained rare at the top of the party.

Nationalism held these policies together. Castro presented the revolution as the completion of the struggle for independence led by José Martí, the poet and leader killed fighting Spain in 1895, and as the liberation of Cuba from the United States. US hostility, from the sugar quota cut of 1960 and the embargo to the Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961 and repeated assassination plots, made this claim credible to many Cubans. The Second Declaration of Havana, approved at a mass rally after the Organization of American States excluded Cuba's government in January 1962, extended this nationalism to the whole of Latin America.

The ruling classes are entrenched in all positions of state power. They monopolize the teaching field. … The duty of every revolutionary is to make revolution. … revolutionaries cannot sit in the doorways of their homes to watch the corpse of imperialism pass by.

Fidel Castro, Second Declaration of Havana, read at a mass rally in Havana, 4 February 1962 (English translation, Fordham Modern History Sourcebook, extract). The declaration was a reply to Cuba's exclusion from the Organization of American States, and its audience was the Latin American left as much as Cubans. Its rejection of reform through legal channels and its call to make revolution show how Cuban nationalism became a programme for the continent, the basis for Cuban support of guerrilla movements in the 1960s. It also shows the regime defining its legitimacy through confrontation with the United States.

Culture was mobilised in the same cause. New institutions such as the film institute ICAIC and the publishing house Casa de las Américas (both 1959) produced work of high quality, and sport, organised through the national institute INDER (1961), brought Olympic success out of proportion to Cuba's size. But in June 1961 Castro set the limits of expression in his speech to intellectuals, in which anything was allowed within the revolution and nothing against it. The arrest of the poet Heberto Padilla in 1971, and his forced public self-criticism, opened five years of tight cultural control.

Economic policies

The revolution transformed ownership of the Cuban economy within three years. The First Agrarian Reform Law of 17 May 1959 limited estates to about 400 hectares and placed expropriated land under a new agency, the INRA; much of it became state farms rather than peasant plots. When the United States cut the sugar quota in July 1960, the government nationalised US-owned companies, and by October 1960 most large Cuban businesses too. A Second Agrarian Reform (1963) lowered the limit to about 67 hectares. In March 1968 the Revolutionary Offensive nationalised almost all remaining small businesses, down to street stalls.

The table of economic phases shows a pattern of radical experiments followed by retreats. Political goals usually came first: equality, independence from the United States, and the leadership's control. Each crisis was survived because an outside patron (the USSR, later Venezuela) or a safety valve (emigration, remittances, tourism) was available, but Cuba never escaped dependence on one product or one partner.

Treatment of opposition

Opposition was treated harshly from the start. In 1959 several hundred officials and soldiers of the Batista regime were executed after revolutionary tribunals. Political prisoners numbered in the thousands in the 1960s, although estimates vary widely. An armed rebellion in the Escambray mountains (1960–1965), supported in part by the CIA, was crushed. Between 1965 and 1968 labour camps known as UMAP (Military Units to Aid Production) held men regarded as unreliable, among them gay men, Jehovah's Witnesses and Catholic seminarians. The Catholic Church lost its schools in 1961 and many foreign priests were expelled.

Emigration was the regime's most important way of dealing with opposition. About a quarter of a million Cubans left between 1959 and 1962, many of them professionals and middle-class families; the "Freedom Flights" of 1965–1973 took about as many again; about 125,000 left in the Mariel boatlift of 1980; and tens of thousands left on rafts in 1994. Allowing opponents to leave weakened internal opposition, but it also deprived Cuba of skills and created a powerful exile community in Miami that shaped US policy. Dissidents who stayed, such as those jailed in the "Black Spring" of March 2003 (75 people), faced long prison sentences.

Impact of Castro's rule

The impact of the revolution is judged very differently. Its supporters point to universal literacy, health care, social mobility for the rural poor and Afro-Cubans, and national independence from the United States. Its critics point to the absence of free elections, a free press or independent unions, to political imprisonment, to an economy that failed to provide basic consumer goods, and to the loss of perhaps a tenth of the population to emigration. Beyond Cuba, the revolution inspired guerrilla movements across Latin America and also frightened elites and armed forces into the counter-revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.

Emerging challenges: Argentina from Perón to the coup of 1976

Argentina shows all four of the challenges that faced Latin American democracies in this period, one after another: the growth of populism, the failure of elected leaders, the growth of guerrilla movements and the rise of military dictatorship. Between 1930 and 1983 Perón was the only president chosen in a free election who completed a full term.

A democracy without its largest party, 1955–1966

The officers who overthrew Perón in 1955 tried to remove Peronism from Argentine life. Decree 4161 of 1956 made it a crime even to mention Perón's name in public or display Peronist symbols, the CGT was taken over, and in June 1956 a Peronist rising was crushed and its leaders executed. Yet Peronism remained the loyalty of most Argentine workers, and the unions, organised in what became known as the Peronist resistance, kept it alive.

This created an impossible democracy. The Radical politician Arturo Frondizi won the presidency in 1958 with Peronist votes, after a secret deal with the exiled Perón. When Peronist candidates were allowed to stand in provincial elections in March 1962 and won, the armed forces removed Frondizi. His successor, Arturo Illia, elected in 1963 with only about a quarter of the vote while Peronism was again banned, governed honestly but weakly and was overthrown in June 1966. Each government was caught between the military, which would not accept Peronist rule, and the Peronist majority, which would not accept a government that excluded it.

The "Argentine Revolution" and the growth of guerrilla movements, 1966–1973

The coup of June 1966 brought General Juan Carlos Onganía to power, with a different aim. Rather than holding elections, the armed forces would rule indefinitely, modernise the economy and remove politics altogether. Parties were dissolved, and in July 1966 police beat students and professors at the University of Buenos Aires in an event remembered as the "Night of the Long Batons"; hundreds of academics left the country. The political scientist Guillermo O'Donnell later called regimes of this kind bureaucratic-authoritarianism: rule by military and technocratic institutions, not by one strongman, aimed at excluding the organised working class in order to restart economic growth.

Closing the political system pushed opposition into the streets and into armed struggle. In May 1969 workers and students in the industrial city of Córdoba rose against the government, and the army was needed to restore order. The Cordobazo ended Onganía's authority. Guerrilla groups appeared: the Montoneros, young left-wing Peronists, many from Catholic and middle-class backgrounds, and the Trotskyist ERP (People's Revolutionary Army). In May 1970 the Montoneros kidnapped former president Pedro Aramburu, who had led the 1955 coup and the 1956 executions, and killed him. Kidnappings of businessmen for ransom, bank robberies and assassinations of police and army officers followed.

Perón's return and the collapse of 1973–1976

Unable to restore order, the military government of General Alejandro Lanusse allowed elections in March 1973. Perón's stand-in, Héctor Cámpora, won, and Perón returned from exile on 20 June 1973. Right-wing Peronists opened fire on the left-wing columns in the crowd waiting at Ezeiza airport, killing at least thirteen people. Perón won a new presidential election in September 1973 with about 62 per cent of the vote, but his movement now included everyone from the Montoneros to the far right. He sided with the unions and the right, and in May 1974 publicly denounced the Montoneros, who went underground again.

Perón died on 1 July 1974 and was succeeded by his widow and vice-president, María Estela ("Isabel") Martínez de Perón, who had no political experience. Real power passed to her adviser José López Rega, whose death squad, the Triple A (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance), killed hundreds of left-wing activists, lawyers and artists. The guerrillas stepped up their own campaign; in February 1975 the government ordered the army to "annihilate" the ERP's rural guerrilla in the province of Tucumán. In June 1975 a drastic devaluation and price rise (the "Rodrigazo", after the economy minister Celestino Rodrigo) provoked the first general strike against a Peronist government, and inflation reached about 180 per cent for 1975 and several hundred per cent a year by the time of the coup.

By early 1976 Isabel Perón's government had lost its authority, and many Argentines, including much of the press and business, expected and welcomed a coup. On 24 March 1976 the armed forces removed her. The new junta of Jorge Videla (army), Emilio Massera (navy) and Orlando Agosti (air force) called its programme the Process of National Reorganisation, known as the Proceso.

The crisis of democracy elsewhere: Brazil 1964 and Chile 1973

Argentina was not alone. In the 1960s and 1970s elected governments fell in Peru (1962 and 1968), Guatemala and Ecuador (1963), Bolivia (1964), Brazil (1964), Uruguay and Chile (1973). Brazil and Chile were the most important cases, because their coups ended long traditions of elected government and created military regimes that lasted for decades.

Brazil: Goulart and the coup of 1964

João Goulart, Vargas's former labour minister, became president in September 1961 when the elected president Jânio Quadros resigned after seven months. The armed forces distrusted Goulart so much that they accepted him only after Congress created a parliamentary system to limit his powers; a referendum restored full presidential powers in January 1963. Goulart faced inflation of about 80–90 per cent a year, falling growth and a hostile Congress. He promised "Basic Reforms" (land reform, votes for illiterates, controls on foreign companies' profits), and at a mass rally in Rio de Janeiro on 13 March 1964 he decreed the expropriation of under-used land near federal highways and the nationalisation of private oil refineries.

The rally, followed by a mutiny of navy sailors that Goulart refused to punish, convinced senior officers that he was preparing to rule without Congress and to break military discipline. On 31 March 1964 troops in Minas Gerais moved against the government; Goulart did not resist and fled to Uruguay. The United States, which had prepared a naval task force to support the rebels if a civil war broke out, recognised the new regime within days. Many middle-class Brazilians and the Catholic hierarchy had marched against Goulart in the "March of the Family with God for Liberty" in São Paulo on 19 March, and they welcomed the coup as a defence against communism. Few expected the military to stay in power for twenty-one years.

Chile: Allende and the coup of 1973

Chile had the longest tradition of constitutional government in South America. Its party system ran from a strong Communist Party and a Socialist Party on the left, through the Christian Democrats in the centre, to the National Party on the right. In the presidential election of 4 September 1970 the Socialist Salvador Allende, candidate of the Popular Unity coalition, won 36.6 per cent of the vote, just ahead of the right's candidate. Congress confirmed him after he signed guarantees of constitutional rule.

Allende's aim was a "Chilean road to socialism" through legal means. Congress voted unanimously in July 1971 to nationalise the US-owned copper mines; banks and large firms were taken over; land reform, begun by the Christian Democrats, was greatly accelerated, often by peasant seizures of estates. Real wages rose and growth was strong in 1971. From 1972 the economy collapsed: the government printed money, price controls produced shortages and a black market, and inflation reached several hundred per cent in 1973. The United States cut credit and funded opposition parties and newspapers. Truck owners and shopkeepers struck in October 1972 and again in 1973.

Politics polarised. The Popular Unity coalition won about 43 per cent in the congressional elections of March 1973, enough to block impeachment but not to govern. On 29 June 1973 a tank regiment attacked the presidential palace in a failed coup (the tanquetazo). On 22 August the Chamber of Deputies, with the votes of the Christian Democrats and the right, passed a resolution accusing the government of a grave breakdown of the constitutional and legal order and calling on the armed forces ministers to restore it. The constitutionalist army commander, General Carlos Prats, resigned, and General Augusto Pinochet replaced him. On 11 September 1973 the armed forces struck.

Allende refused to resign. From the besieged palace he made a final broadcast to the nation on one of the last radio stations still loyal to the government.

Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Go forward knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again where free men will walk to build a better society. Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!

Salvador Allende, last radio address from La Moneda, 11 September 1973 (translation by Yoshie Furuhashi, Marxists Internet Archive). Allende spoke knowing that he would probably die, to an audience of his own supporters, and the speech is a political testament: it blames "foreign capital, imperialism, together with the reaction" for the coup and presents his government as loyal to the constitution to the end. It is valuable for Allende's own view of his presidency and as the founding text of the memory of the left, but it says nothing about the economic chaos and political divisions that had cost him the support of the centre. Allende died in the palace that afternoon; in 2011 a judicial investigation confirmed that he had taken his own life.

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Why did democracy fail?

The diagram of the breakdown of democracy groups the causes that the three cases share. Several of them interacted. The model of import substitution had produced fast growth in the 1940s and 1950s, but by the 1960s it ran into balance-of-payments crises and inflation, because industry still depended on imported machinery and the export sector that paid for it had been neglected. Inflation in turn made every group fight harder over its share of income, and governments without a majority could not impose a settlement.

The Cuban Revolution changed the meaning of these conflicts. For the left it showed that radical change was possible; for landowners, business and the armed forces it showed what they might lose. Latin American officers, many trained by the United States in counter-insurgency, adopted the National Security Doctrine, which taught that the main threat to the nation came from an "internal enemy", communist subversion, and that the armed forces had to take responsibility for development and security together. The political scientist Alfred Stepan called this the "new professionalism". It explains why the coups of the 1960s and 1970s produced long-lasting military regimes instead of the brief "moderating" interventions of the past, after which officers had returned power to civilians.

Historians weigh these causes differently. O'Donnell's theory of bureaucratic-authoritarianism links the coups to the economic exhaustion of import substitution in the most industrialised countries (Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay). His critics point out that Peru's military regime of 1968 was left-wing and reformist, and that Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico faced similar economic problems without coups. Political explanations stress the choices of leaders: Goulart's radicalisation, the failure of Allende and the Christian Democrats to agree, the Peronist movement's civil war. International explanations stress the Cold War and US policy, which is the subject of another regional study.

The growth of guerrilla movements

After 1959 dozens of armed groups across Latin America tried to repeat the Cuban Revolution. Very few succeeded, but their impact on politics was large: they provoked counter-insurgency campaigns, gave the armed forces a reason to seize power, and in some countries produced decades of war.

Theories of guerrilla war

The most influential theory came from Che Guevara. In Guerrilla Warfare (1960) he drew three general lessons from Cuba.

We consider that the Cuban Revolution contributed three fundamental lessons to the conduct of revolutionary movements in America. They are: (1) Popular forces can win a war against the army. (2) It is not necessary to wait until all conditions for making revolution exist; the insurrection can create them. (3) In underdeveloped America the countryside is the basic area for armed fighting.

Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare, chapter 1, 1960 (English translation, North Carolina State University course documents). Guevara wrote as a victorious commander and minister of the new regime, to persuade the Latin American left, including the cautious pro-Soviet communist parties, that armed struggle could succeed without waiting for a mass movement. The second lesson became known as the foco theory: a small armed group in the countryside could itself create the conditions for revolution. As a source it reflects the "guerrilla myth" of the Cuban victory, which played down the urban movement and Batista's own weakness.

The French writer Régis Debray popularised the foco theory in Revolution in the Revolution? (1967). Guevara tested it himself in Bolivia, where his small band found no peasant support (Bolivia had already had a land reform after its revolution of 1952) and was destroyed by the Bolivian army, trained and advised by the United States; he was captured and executed on 9 October 1967. Other groups turned to the cities. The Brazilian Carlos Marighella wrote the Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla (1969), and urban guerrillas such as the Tupamaros in Uruguay robbed banks, kidnapped diplomats and carried out spectacular raids. Peru's Shining Path followed a third model, Mao Zedong's "protracted people's war", in which peasants would surround and strangle the cities over many years.

Christian ideas also fed armed struggle. After the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), Latin American bishops meeting at Medellín, Colombia, in 1968 called on the Church to stand with the poor. The movement known as liberation theology, set out by the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez in A Theology of Liberation (1971), read the gospel as a call to change unjust social structures, and organised the poor in small Bible-study groups, the base ecclesial communities. Most of its supporters rejected violence, but some, like the Colombian priest Camilo Torres, killed fighting with the ELN guerrillas in 1966, joined armed movements, and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua drew heavily on Christian activists.

Guerrilla movements compared

The table of guerrilla movements shows that success was rare. The sociologist Timothy Wickham-Crowley, comparing all the Latin American cases in Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America (1992), found that guerrillas took power chiefly where they won strong peasant support and faced a personalist, corrupt regime with little backing from the middle classes or from the army as an institution. Batista in Cuba and the Somoza family in Nicaragua were such regimes. Elsewhere armed forces with institutional loyalty, often with US support, defeated the guerrillas, and the war gave the officers reasons and opportunities to seize power themselves.

Case study: the impact of the Shining Path on Peru, 1980–2000

The Communist Party of Peru–Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) fought one of the most destructive guerrilla wars in modern South American history. Its impact on Peru was social, political and economic, and it affected women in particular ways.

Origins

The Shining Path was founded around 1970 by Abimael Guzmán, a philosophy professor at the University of Huamanga in Ayacucho, one of the poorest departments of the Peruvian Andes. Through the university, which trained the teachers of the region, Guzmán built a network of disciplined followers among young, educated men and women of rural and provincial origin, whose education had not brought them jobs or respect in a society where Quechua-speaking Andeans faced deep discrimination. He presented himself as the "fourth sword of Marxism", after Marx, Lenin and Mao, and his followers called him "Presidente Gonzalo".

Peru had been ruled from 1968 to 1980 by a left-wing military government. General Juan Velasco Alvarado nationalised the US-owned oil company IPC in October 1968 and carried out one of Latin America's most radical land reforms from 1969, ending the power of the great haciendas. The reforms did not, however, bring prosperity to the poorest Andean communities, and economic crisis in the late 1970s led the armed forces to hand power back to civilians. The Shining Path began its "people's war" on 17 May 1980, the eve of the first presidential election in seventeen years, by burning ballot boxes in the village of Chuschi.

The course of the war

The guerrillas killed local officials, landowners and anyone who resisted, and imposed their rule on Andean villages. The elected government of Fernando Belaúnde (1980–1985) at first treated them as a police problem, then in December 1982 handed Ayacucho to the armed forces under a state of emergency. The army treated Andean peasants as suspects and carried out massacres, such as the killing of more than a hundred villagers at Putis in 1984. Peasants were caught between two forces. The Shining Path killed 69 villagers at Lucanamarca in April 1983 as punishment for resistance.

Under Alan García (1985–1990) the war spread to new regions and to Lima, while the economy collapsed into hyperinflation: prices rose by about 7,500 per cent in 1990. In 1986 the security forces killed more than two hundred Shining Path prisoners after prison riots in Lima. From the late 1980s, however, peasant communities in many areas formed self-defence patrols, the rondas campesinas, and turned against the Shining Path, often with army weapons. This loss of rural support was one of the main reasons for its defeat.

Alberto Fujimori, an agricultural engineer of Japanese descent with no party behind him, won the 1990 election. On 5 April 1992 he carried out a self-coup: with army backing he closed Congress, suspended the constitution and took control of the courts, arguing that democracy had prevented the government from defeating terrorism and inflation. Polls showed that most Peruvians supported him. In July 1992 a Shining Path car bomb killed about twenty-five people in the Tarata Street district of Lima. Then on 12 September 1992 a small police intelligence unit, GEIN, which had spent years tracking Guzmán by surveillance, found and arrested him in a Lima house without a shot being fired. Guzmán was shown to the press in a cage in a striped prison suit, and the movement disintegrated.

Political impact

The war helped destroy Peruvian democracy. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission stressed that between 1980 and 1992 the conflict took place under elected governments with a free press, which the Shining Path set out to undermine. The war discredited the parties that governed during it and created public support for Fujimori's self-coup. Fujimori's government, with his intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos, used the war to justify military courts, censorship and a death squad (the Colina Group) that killed suspected subversives. The regime collapsed in 2000 when videos showed Montesinos bribing politicians; Fujimori fled to Japan and was later convicted, in 2009, of human rights crimes and corruption.

Social impact

The bar chart of the commission's findings shows who suffered. The commission estimated that the most likely number of dead and disappeared was 69,280, more than in all Peru's foreign and civil wars since independence. Three-quarters of the victims had Quechua or another Indigenous language as their mother tongue, against 16 per cent of the population. Ayacucho alone accounted for more than 40 per cent of the dead and disappeared. Hundreds of thousands fled the highlands for the shanty towns of Lima and other cities, a displacement often estimated at about 600,000 people, which broke up communities and their traditions of self-government.

For the CVR, the PCP-SL was the main perpetrator of crimes and violations of human rights, measured by the number of people killed and disappeared. It was responsible for 54 per cent of the fatal victims reported to the CVR. This very high share of responsibility of the PCP-SL is an exceptional case among the subversive groups of Latin America and one of the most notable singularities of the process that the CVR has had to analyse.

Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (CVR), Informe Final, Conclusiones generales, no. 13, 28 August 2003 (own translation from the Spanish). The commission was created by Peru's transitional government in 2001 after Fujimori's fall and heard nearly 17,000 testimonies. Its finding that the guerrillas, not the state, killed most victims distinguishes Peru from Argentina or Guatemala, where state forces were responsible for most deaths. The same report also found that the armed forces committed systematic or widespread violations in some places and periods, and it was attacked both by supporters of Fujimori and the military, who rejected its criticism of the state, and by those on the left who questioned its account of the guerrillas.

Economic impact

The war destroyed roads, bridges, power lines and crops; the Shining Path deliberately blew up electricity pylons supplying Lima and attacked development projects and agricultural co-operatives. Investment and tourism fell. Combined with the debt crisis and García's policies, the war contributed to the collapse of the late 1980s, when output fell sharply and real wages lost more than half their value. Fujimori's "Fujishock" of August 1990, a sudden end to price controls and subsidies, ended hyperinflation, and the end of the war helped growth to return in the mid-1990s. Large parts of the central Andes, however, remained poorer than before the war for decades.

Experiences of women

Women's experiences of the war were varied. The Shining Path recruited women in unusually large numbers and placed some at the top: Guzmán's wife Augusta La Torre ("Comrade Norah") and his later partner Elena Iparraguirre ("Comrade Miriam") were among its senior leaders. For some young women from poor provincial backgrounds the party offered status and a cause; critics stress that it also demanded total obedience to a male leader and used women militants in some of its cruellest killings.

Women were also the guerrillas' targets. The Shining Path murdered women community leaders who organised the soup kitchens (comedores populares) and "glass of milk" committees in poor districts, seeing them as rivals. The best known, María Elena Moyano, deputy mayor of Villa El Salvador in Lima, was shot and her body blown up with dynamite in February 1992. The truth commission condemned the "extended practice" of sexual violence against women by the armed forces and police, and recorded that many women lost husbands and sons and were left to support families as displaced persons. After the war, under a family-planning programme of 1996–2000, about 270,000 women, many of them poor Quechua speakers, were sterilised, many without informed consent, a case that was still before the Peruvian courts in 2020.

Military dictatorship: Pinochet's Chile, 1973–1990

Pinochet's regime is the best documented case of how a military dictatorship maintained power and of its impact on a country. It combined the most systematic repression in Chile's history with a radical free-market transformation of its economy, and it ended, unusually, by losing a vote held under its own rules.

Political factors: from junta to personal rule

The coup was carried out by a military junta of the commanders of the army (Pinochet), navy (José Toribio Merino), air force (Gustavo Leigh) and the national police, the Carabineros (César Mendoza). The junta closed Congress, banned the parties of the left and suspended all others, purged the universities, took control of the press and ruled by decree. It declared a state of siege and a curfew that lasted, in various forms, for years.

Pinochet was at first one among equals, but he made himself supreme. As army commander he controlled the largest force and the secret police; in June 1974 he became "Supreme Chief of the Nation" and in December 1974 President of the Republic. When the air force commander Leigh criticised the regime in 1978, Pinochet forced him out. The regime's civilian supporters, the free-market economists and the conservative Catholic lawyers of the gremialista movement led by Jaime Guzmán, gave it a programme and a constitution.

The Constitution of 1980, approved in a plebiscite on 11 September 1980 held without electoral registers or free campaigning (the official result was about 67 per cent in favour), was designed to make military rule permanent in a new form. It gave Pinochet eight more years as president and provided for a plebiscite in 1988 on a single candidate chosen by the commanders. It also created "authoritarian enclaves" to limit future democracy: appointed senators, a National Security Council with military members, a binomial electoral system that over-represented the second-largest bloc, and protection for the armed forces' budget and commanders.

Suppression of opposition

Repression was most intense in the first months. Thousands were held in the National Stadium in Santiago and other camps; in October 1973 a military delegation known as the Caravan of Death travelled through the provinces and executed nearly a hundred prisoners, many of whom had given themselves up voluntarily. From 1974 the secret police, the DINA under Colonel Manuel Contreras, hunted down the parties of the left in turn. Prisoners were tortured in centres such as Villa Grimaldi in Santiago, and many were "disappeared": killed in secret and their bodies hidden, so that the state denied all knowledge of them.

Repression reached abroad. DINA agents murdered General Prats and his wife in Buenos Aires in 1974 and Allende's former minister Orlando Letelier, with his American colleague Ronni Moffitt, by a car bomb in Washington on 21 September 1976. The Washington murder damaged relations with the United States and led to the replacement of the DINA by the CNI in 1977. DINA was also the driving force of Operation Condor, the secret co-operation of the security services of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, formally agreed in Santiago in November 1975 and joined by Brazil in 1976, to track and kill opponents across borders. In 1978 the junta passed an Amnesty Decree covering crimes committed since the coup.

According to the official commissions set up after 1990, about 3,200 people were killed or disappeared by the regime, and about 38,000 survivors of political imprisonment and torture were recognised; hundreds of thousands of Chileans went into exile, for political or economic reasons. The Rettig Commission of 1991 documented 2,279 deaths; the Valech Commission (2004, extended in 2011) documented imprisonment and torture.

Economic factors: the "Chicago Boys" and the free market

The junta inherited inflation of several hundred per cent and an economy in which the state controlled most large firms. After a period of uncertainty, Pinochet gave control of economic policy to a group of economists known as the Chicago Boys, many of whom had studied at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger. In April 1975, after Friedman visited Chile, they began a "shock treatment": deep cuts in public spending, the abolition of price controls, the sale of state enterprises (except the copper company, whose revenues partly funded the armed forces), the opening of Chile to imports by cutting tariffs to a uniform 10 per cent by 1979, and a welcome to foreign capital. In 1980 the state pension system was replaced by private, individual accounts managed by companies (AFPs), a model later copied in other countries.

The chart of Chile's growth shows why the economic record divides opinion. The shock of 1975 caused a deep recession and unemployment of more than 15 per cent. From 1977 to 1981 growth was fast, and supporters spoke of an economic "miracle". In 1982, however, the fixed exchange rate and heavy private borrowing produced a crash: output fell by more than 11 per cent, the banking system had to be rescued by the state, and unemployment, including people in emergency work programmes, reached about a third of the workforce. A more pragmatic team under Hernán Büchi from 1985 produced steady growth that continued after democracy returned.

Inflation, which the World Bank records at over 500 per cent in 1974, fell to about 10 per cent in 1982. The benefits of growth, however, were unequally shared. Real wages were below their 1970 level for most of the dictatorship, and by the mid-1980s a large share of Chileans, by some estimates around 40 per cent, lived in poverty. Economists still disagree whether the reforms laid the foundation for Chile's growth after 1990 or whether that growth owed more to the more balanced policies of the democratic governments.

Social factors

The regime's social policies followed from its economics and its anti-communism. The Labour Plan of 1979 restored limited union rights but weakened collective bargaining and the right to strike. Education and health were decentralised and opened to private providers; universities lost their autonomy. Land reform was partly reversed and agriculture turned to fruit and timber exports. The poor of the shanty towns (poblaciones) bore much of the cost of unemployment and police raids.

Women experienced the dictatorship in different ways. The regime's propaganda praised the patriotic mother, and its women's organisation, CEMA-Chile, led by Pinochet's wife Lucía Hiriart, organised volunteers in poor districts. Many opposition women, however, were tortured, including with sexual violence, and the relatives of the disappeared, mostly women, became one of the first groups to protest in public. The Catholic Church, through the Vicariate of Solidarity founded by Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez in 1976, gave legal help to victims and collected the evidence later used by the truth commissions.

How Pinochet maintained power

The diagram of Pinochet's power shows three sources. Terror destroyed the left's organisations and made opposition dangerous. The constitution and decree laws gave the regime legal form and a timetable that even many opponents eventually accepted. And many Chileans, especially in the middle and upper classes, supported the regime from fear of a return to the chaos of 1973 and from approval of its economic results. Support from business and, except under Carter (1977–1981), from the United States helped.

The crisis of 1982 showed the limits of that support. From May 1983 the opposition organised monthly "days of national protest", led at first by the copper workers' union; the shanty towns rose, and the regime answered with mass raids and dozens of deaths. Pinochet survived an assassination attempt by the communist guerrilla front FPMR in September 1986. The protests did not bring him down, but they convinced the centre and moderate left that only an electoral route could, through the plebiscite for which the 1980 Constitution provided.

On 5 October 1988 Chileans voted on whether Pinochet should rule for eight more years. The opposition parties, united in the Concertación, campaigned for "No" with television broadcasts that offered hope and happiness rather than anger, and organised their own vote count. "No" won about 56 per cent. On the night of the vote, the other members of the junta refused Pinochet's request for emergency powers and accepted the result. The Christian Democrat Patricio Aylwin won the presidential election of December 1989 and took office on 11 March 1990. Pinochet remained army commander until 1998.

Other military regimes: Brazil and Argentina

Brazil, 1964–1985: the "economic miracle" and AI-5

Brazil's military regime was more institutional and less personal than Chile's. Generals succeeded one another as president, chosen by the high command and confirmed by a Congress that the regime purged and controlled. The regime governed through Institutional Acts: AI-1 (1964) allowed it to remove the political rights of opponents; AI-2 (1965) dissolved the old parties and created two official ones, the government's ARENA and the tolerated opposition MDB. Student protests in 1968 led to the harshest, AI-5, on 13 December 1968.

Article 2. The President of the Republic may decree the recess of the National Congress, of the Legislative Assemblies and of the Municipal Councils … these only returning to function when called by the President of the Republic. … Article 10. The guarantee of habeas corpus is suspended in cases of political crimes, against national security, the economic and social order and the popular economy. Article 11. All acts carried out in accordance with this Institutional Act and its Complementary Acts are excluded from any judicial review.

Presidency of the Republic of Brazil, Ato Institucional nº 5 (Institutional Act No. 5), 13 December 1968, extracts (own translation from the Portuguese text published by the Presidency). The act is a legal document, and its value lies in its precision: it shows the regime using law to remove the limits of law, closing Congress at will, ending habeas corpus for political prisoners and placing its own acts beyond the courts. It made possible the period of torture and disappearances under President Emílio Médici (1969–1974).

The years after AI-5 were also those of the "economic miracle": from 1968 to 1973 Brazil grew by about 10 per cent a year, led by industry, state companies and foreign borrowing. Inequality grew, and Médici himself is reported to have remarked that the economy was doing well but the people were not. Urban guerrilla groups, including Marighella's, were destroyed by the army's DOI-CODI interrogation centres; the National Truth Commission of 2014 recognised 434 people killed or disappeared by the regime, a lower figure than in Chile or Argentina, while torture was used against thousands.

Argentina's Proceso, 1976–1983

The Argentine junta waged what it called a war against subversion, known since as the Dirty War. Its methods were secret: people were abducted from homes and streets by plain-clothes squads in unmarked cars, taken to some 340 clandestine detention centres (the largest at the Navy Mechanics School, ESMA, in Buenos Aires), tortured, and in most cases killed. Many were drugged and thrown alive from aircraft into the sea in "death flights". About 500 babies born to detained women were taken and given to military or police families. The official truth commission, CONADEP, documented 8,961 disappeared people; human rights organisations estimate 30,000.

The economy minister José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz opened Argentina to imports and foreign capital, cut real wages and weakened the unions. Industry shrank and foreign debt multiplied. The regime used the football World Cup of 1978, held and won in Argentina, to show a peaceful country to the world. It was the junta's invasion of the British-ruled Falkland Islands (the Malvinas) in April 1982, intended to win popular support at a time of economic crisis, that brought it down.

The comparison of the three regimes shows that "military dictatorship" covers different systems. The Chilean and Argentine regimes were far more violent than the Brazilian one after 1974; Brazil and Chile left lasting institutions and economic models, while the Argentine regime collapsed with almost nothing to show. These differences shaped how each country returned to democracy.

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Reasons for democratisation: Argentina, 1982–1983

Between 1979 and 1990 almost every military regime in South America handed power to elected civilians: Ecuador (1979), Peru (1980), Bolivia (1982), Argentina (1983), Uruguay and Brazil (1985), Paraguay (1989) and Chile (1990). Central America followed through peace agreements, and Mexico's one-party system ended with the opposition's election victory in 2000. Argentina's transition was the fastest and the most complete break with the old regime.

Political factors

The Argentine junta had never been united. Each service ran its own detention centres and pursued its own ambitions; the navy chief Massera wanted to become a political leader. In 1981 Videla handed the presidency to General Roberto Viola, who was replaced within months by General Leopoldo Galtieri. Meanwhile the main parties, including the Peronists and the Radicals, formed a common front in July 1981, the Multipartidaria, to demand elections.

On 2 April 1982 Argentine forces occupied the Falkland Islands, which Argentina had claimed as the Malvinas since Britain took them in 1833. The invasion was popular, and crowds that had protested against the regime days earlier filled the Plaza de Mayo to cheer Galtieri. Britain sent a task force, and Argentina surrendered on 14 June 1982 after about 650 Argentine and 255 British servicemen had been killed. Defeat destroyed the armed forces' claim to be the guardians of the nation, since they had lost the one conventional war they had fought. Galtieri resigned, and his successor, General Reynaldo Bignone, had little choice but to promise elections.

Economic factors

The economic model of the Proceso had already failed before the war. In 1980–1981 a series of bank failures and a sudden devaluation ended the policies of Martínez de Hoz. Industry had shrunk, real wages had fallen and foreign debt had grown from about 8 billion dollars in 1976 to about 45 billion by 1983, much of it borrowed by state companies and the armed forces. When Mexico announced in August 1982 that it could not pay its debts, the debt crisis spread across Latin America and foreign lending stopped. Inflation in Argentina passed 300 per cent in 1983. The military could no longer claim that order brought prosperity.

Social factors

Popular pressure grew alongside the economic crisis. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo, mothers of the disappeared, began meeting in the square in front of the presidential palace on 30 April 1977 to demand news of their children. Several of the founders, among them Azucena Villaflor, were themselves abducted and killed in December 1977, but the marches continued every Thursday. The Abuelas (grandmothers) searched for the children taken from detained women. In 1980 the human rights activist Adolfo Pérez Esquivel received the Nobel Peace Prize, which brought world attention to the disappearances. The CGT unions called general strikes in 1981 and 1982, and on 30 March 1982, three days before the invasion, a large union demonstration in Buenos Aires was broken up by police.

International pressure also mattered. The Carter administration (1977–1981) cut military aid to Argentina, and a visit by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in September 1979 collected thousands of complaints. The Reagan administration was friendlier to the junta until the Falklands War, when it sided with Britain.

The diagram of Argentina's democratisation groups these factors. Most historians see the war as the decisive factor because of the way it ended military rule: a regime that collapsed after defeat could not negotiate guarantees for itself, as the Chilean and Brazilian militaries did. In the election of 30 October 1983 the Radical candidate Raúl Alfonsín, who had promised to put the juntas on trial, defeated the Peronists with about 52 per cent of the vote. It was the first time Peronism had lost a free presidential election.

The role of transitional justice

Argentina became a pioneer of transitional justice. Five days after taking office, Alfonsín created the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, CONADEP, chaired by the novelist Ernesto Sabato. Its report, Nunca Más (Never Again), published in September 1984, documented 8,961 disappearances and about 340 secret detention centres, and became a best-seller.

During the 1970s, Argentina was convulsed by a terror that came from both the extreme right and the extreme left. … The armed forces responded to the terrorists' crimes with a terrorism infinitely worse than the one they were combating, because from 24 March 1976 they had the power and impunity of the absolute state, abducting, torturing and murdering thousands of human beings.

Ernesto Sabato, prologue to CONADEP, Nunca Más, 1984, extract translated from the Spanish (the commission's English edition, Never Again, appeared in 1986). The commission was set up by a democratic government to establish the facts and hand evidence to the courts, and its findings were based on thousands of testimonies and on visits to the detention centres. The prologue's framing, which places the violence of the guerrillas and the state side by side before condemning the state's as far worse, became known in Argentina as the "theory of the two demons". Human rights organisations later criticised it for implying that the victims, most of whom had no link to armed groups, were caught between two equivalent sides.

In 1985 nine former junta members were tried before a civilian court in the Trial of the Juntas, the first trial of its kind in Latin America. In December 1985 Videla and Massera were sentenced to life imprisonment and three others to prison terms; four were acquitted. Further prosecutions provoked revolts by middle-ranking officers, the carapintadas, from Easter 1987. Alfonsín's government responded with the Full Stop Law (December 1986), which set a deadline for new prosecutions, and the Due Obedience Law (June 1987), which presumed that junior officers had followed orders. His successor Carlos Menem pardoned the convicted junta members in 1989–1990.

Justice did not end there. The Abuelas continued to find and identify children stolen under the dictatorship, about 130 by 2020. In 2003 Congress annulled the two laws, and in 2005 the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional. Trials reopened, and by the early 2020s more than a thousand people had been convicted of crimes against humanity. The political scientist Kathryn Sikkink argues in The Justice Cascade (2011) that the Argentine trials helped start a worldwide trend of holding leaders criminally accountable for human rights violations.

Democratisation compared: Chile and Brazil

Chile: a negotiated transition

Chile's transition shows different causes and a different kind of transitional justice. Political factors were central: the 1980 Constitution's own timetable, the decision of the opposition parties in 1987–1988 to unite in the Concertación and contest the plebiscite, and the refusal of the other junta members to override the result. Economic recovery after 1985 helped the regime claim success but also reduced the fear of change among business. Social pressure came from the protests of 1983–1986 and the Church. Externally, the Reagan administration turned against Pinochet from 1985–1986 and supported a free plebiscite.

Because the transition was negotiated, the democratic governments inherited the constitution, the appointed senators, the amnesty of 1978 and Pinochet as army commander. Aylwin's government created the National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation (the Rettig Commission), which reported in 1991, and offered reparations, but prosecutions were limited. Pinochet's arrest in London in October 1998, on a Spanish judge's warrant, changed this: Chilean courts began to try officers, and Pinochet himself faced charges, although he died in 2006 without being convicted. Constitutional reform in 2005 removed most of the authoritarian enclaves, and after mass protests in 2019 Chileans voted by 78 per cent in a referendum on 25 October 2020 to write a new constitution.

Brazil: a controlled opening

Brazil's generals planned their own exit. President Ernesto Geisel (1974–1979) began a "slow, gradual and safe" opening, the abertura, to restore the regime's legitimacy after the oil shock ended the miracle and the opposition MDB did well in the 1974 elections. His successor, João Figueiredo, signed the Amnesty Law of August 1979, which let exiles return but also protected the torturers, and allowed new parties. A mass campaign for direct presidential elections, Diretas Já ("Direct elections now"), filled the streets in 1984 but narrowly failed in Congress. In January 1985 an electoral college chose the opposition candidate Tancredo Neves; he died before taking office, and his vice-president José Sarney became the first civilian president since 1964. A new constitution followed in 1988, and the first direct presidential election in 1989.

The comparison of the three transitions shows that the more a military regime controlled the timing of its exit, the more it protected itself afterwards. Brazil's amnesty of 1979 still blocked prosecutions in 2020, while Argentina, where the regime collapsed, convicted hundreds of officers.

Democracy and its challenges, 1982–2020

The new democracies faced problems that continued the challenges of earlier decades in new forms. After 1990 open military takeovers became rare and short-lived, and civilian rule lasted longer than at any earlier time in the region's history. Elected governments nevertheless struggled with debt, inequality, corruption and crime, and several elected leaders weakened democracy from within.

Debt, the "lost decade" and neoliberal reform

The debt crisis that began with Mexico's default in August 1982 dominated the 1980s, which Latin Americans call the lost decade: income per head in the region was lower in 1990 than in 1980. Governments that had to negotiate with banks and the International Monetary Fund cut spending and subsidies. Attempts to stop inflation without such cuts, such as Argentina's Austral Plan (1985), Brazil's Cruzado Plan (1986) and García's policies in Peru, ended in hyperinflation by 1989–1990.

In the 1990s most governments adopted the package of free-market reforms that the economist John Williamson in 1989 called the Washington Consensus: balanced budgets, privatisation, free trade and open capital markets. In Argentina the Peronist Carlos Menem (1989–1999), elected on populist promises, privatised the state companies that Perón had created and tied the peso to the dollar under the Convertibility Plan (1991). Inflation fell, but unemployment rose, and when the economy fell into recession the system collapsed in December 2001: the government froze bank deposits, riots left more than thirty dead, Argentina had five presidents in two weeks and defaulted on its debt. Economists and historians call leaders such as Menem and Fujimori "neo-populists": personalist leaders who used populist methods to carry out free-market policies.

The "pink tide" and new populism

Disappointment with neoliberal reform and with traditional parties brought a wave of left-wing governments to power after 1998, known as the pink tide. They ranged from social-democratic governments that kept market economies, such as those of Ricardo Lagos and Michelle Bachelet in Chile and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–2010) in Brazil, to more radical governments that expanded the state and attacked the institutions that checked their power, such as those of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia (2006–2019, the country's first Indigenous president) and Rafael Correa in Ecuador (2007–2017). The Mexican political scientist and former foreign minister Jorge Castañeda called these "two lefts".

Venezuela shows the link between the failures of the post-transition democracies and a new populism. Venezuela had been a stable two-party democracy since 1958, funded by oil. When oil prices fell and the government imposed IMF reforms in 1989, riots in Caracas (the Caracazo, February 1989) were put down with hundreds of deaths. In February 1992 Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chávez led a failed coup; allowed to speak on television to tell his men to surrender, he said that the objectives had not been achieved "por ahora" ("for now"), words that made him a national figure. Elected president in December 1998, Chávez rewrote the constitution in 1999, survived a coup attempt in April 2002, and used oil revenues for social programmes in his Bolivarian Revolution, while concentrating power and weakening the courts and the press. After his death in 2013 his successor Nicolás Maduro presided over economic collapse, hyperinflation and authoritarian rule; by 2020 more than five million Venezuelans had left the country, according to the UN refugee and migration agencies.

Other challenges to 2020

• Colombia. The FARC war continued alongside drug cartels and right-wing paramilitaries. After four years of talks in Havana, President Juan Manuel Santos signed a peace agreement with the FARC; voters rejected the first version in a referendum on 2 October 2016, and a revised agreement was signed on 24 November 2016 and approved by Congress. Santos received the Nobel Peace Prize.

• Mexico. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost its majority in Congress in 1997 and the presidency in 2000 to Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN), after reforms created an independent electoral authority. The Zapatista rising of 1 January 1994 in Chiapas, the day NAFTA took effect, put Indigenous rights at the centre of national politics.

• Corruption and the right. The Lava Jato ("Car Wash") investigations from 2014 exposed bribery by the Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht across the region. In Brazil they were followed by the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff (2016), the imprisonment of Lula (2018–2019) and the election of the far-right former army captain Jair Bolsonaro (2018), who praised the military regime.

• Bolivia and Chile. Evo Morales resigned in November 2019 after a disputed election and pressure from the army and police, which his supporters called a coup. In Chile mass protests from October 2019 against inequality led to the referendum of October 2020 on a new constitution.

• Cuba. After Raúl Castro's economic reforms and the restoration of diplomatic relations with the United States in July 2015, Miguel Díaz-Canel, born after 1959, became president in 2018, and a new constitution (2019) kept the one-party state.

By 2020 Latin American democracy had survived longer than at any time in the period, but surveys showed falling trust in parties and governments. The new challenges came less from armed forces and guerrillas than from elected leaders who weakened checks on their power, a pattern that in some ways echoed the populism with which the period began.

Perspectives and debates

Why did the Cuban Revolution happen, and why did it become communist?

Historians agree on the facts of 1952–1959 but weigh them differently. Hugh Thomas, in Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (1971), stresses that Cuba was relatively prosperous and that the revolution owed more to the political bankruptcy of the Batista years and the frustrations of the middle class than to poverty. Louis A. Pérez Jr., in Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution (1988) and later works, places 1959 in the long history of Cuban nationalism and of resentment at US domination since 1898. Marifeli Pérez-Stable, in The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy (1993), argues that Cuba's "mediated sovereignty", in which the United States limited what Cuban governments could do, left the old elites weak and divided and so unable to resist a radical movement.

A second debate asks why the revolution became communist. One view holds that US hostility in 1959–1961 pushed Castro into the arms of the USSR. Samuel Farber, in The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered (2006), argues instead that Castro and his inner circle chose the communist path for their own political reasons, because a Soviet-style system offered them unchallenged power, and that US policy accelerated rather than caused this. On how the regime lasted, Jorge Domínguez, in Cuba: Order and Revolution (1978), stresses its institutions and the mass organisations; Lillian Guerra, in Visions of Power in Cuba (2012), shows how real popular enthusiasm and growing coercion were combined in the 1960s, and how citizens were expected to perform their support in public.

Populism: manipulation or agency?

The sociologist Gino Germani argued in the 1950s and 1960s that Perón's support came from recent rural migrants with no political experience, who were easily manipulated by a charismatic leader. Torcuato di Tella saw populism as a coalition of classes, including industrialists and parts of the middle class, held together by a leader against the oligarchy. Daniel James, in Resistance and Integration (1988), rejects the idea of manipulation: Argentine workers supported Perón because Peronism gave them material gains and, just as important, dignity and a recognised place in the nation, and they kept that loyalty through eighteen years of proscription. Kurt Weyland (2001) defines populism as a political strategy by which a personalist leader seeks power through direct, unmediated support from large numbers of unorganised followers, a definition that also fits the neo-populists Menem and Fujimori.

Why did the armed forces take power?

Guillermo O'Donnell, in Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism (1973), argues that the most industrialised countries produced a new kind of military regime when the "easy" stage of import substitution ended and governments needed to hold down wages and attract foreign capital. Alfred Stepan, in The Military in Politics: Changing Patterns in Brazil (1971) and his essay on the "new professionalism" (1973), stresses the officers' training in internal security and development, which led them to rule instead of acting as temporary moderators. Contributors to David Collier's The New Authoritarianism in Latin America (1979) question the economic link, noting that coups did not follow the economic timetable the theory predicts. Others stress the political choices of civilian leaders and the influence of US policy.

Guerrilla movements and the Shining Path

Timothy Wickham-Crowley's comparative study (1992) explains guerrilla success by peasant support and the weakness of personalist regimes. For the Shining Path, Carlos Iván Degregori, a Peruvian anthropologist who taught for years at the University of Huamanga in Ayacucho and later served on the truth commission, explains its appeal to young provincial students for whom education had not brought social mobility, and describes the party as an authoritarian sect whose violence followed from its belief that it alone knew the truth. The contributors to Steve Stern's Shining and Other Paths (1998) emphasise how peasants made choices of their own, first tolerating and then resisting the guerrillas through the rondas, against the image of peasants as passive victims of both sides.

Why did democracy return?

The approaches in the table are not exclusive. The Argentine case fits the economic and international explanations well, but its timing was set by a decision of the junta, the invasion of the Falklands, that no structural theory predicts. The Chilean case fits the elite-choice approach, but the opposition chose the electoral route only after mass protest had failed to remove Pinochet. A strong argument uses the theories to explain why particular factors mattered in a particular country.

Pinochet's economic legacy

Debate about the Chilean economy is also a debate about the dictatorship's record. Economists sympathetic to the reforms, such as Sebastian Edwards, argue that the opening of the economy and the pension reform laid the foundations for Chile becoming the region's fastest-growing economy after 1985. Critics, such as the economist Ricardo Ffrench-Davis, point to the two deep recessions, the low average growth of the whole period 1973–1989 and the rise in inequality, and credit the more balanced policies of the democratic governments for growth after 1990. Steve Stern's trilogy on the memory of the dictatorship (2004–2010) shows that Chileans themselves remember the period in incompatible ways: as salvation from chaos, as rupture and persecution, or as a wound that must be closed without justice.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

These practice questions are written in the style of Paper 3 and cover the six areas of the study: the causes of the Cuban Revolution, Castro's rule, the challenges to democracy, a guerrilla movement, a military dictatorship and democratisation.

Paper 3: the reasons for the Cuban Revolution

Paper 3: Castro's maintenance of power

Paper 3: the rise of military dictatorship

Paper 3: the impact of a guerrilla movement

Paper 3: the reasons for democratisation

Self-check

• To do:

  I can explain how the Depression and import substitution industrialisation created the conditions for populism.

• To do:

  I can describe the policies of Vargas and Perón and explain what made them populists, and how they treated opposition.

• To do:

  I can explain the political, economic and social reasons for the Cuban Revolution, including the role of Batista and of the United States.

• To do:

  I can assess the roles of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in the victory of 1959.

• To do:

  I can explain how Castro maintained power through political institutions, social policies, nationalism, economic policy and the treatment of opposition, and how these changed between 1959 and 2020.

• To do:

  I can explain the challenges facing Argentine democracy from 1955 to 1976: the proscription of Peronism, failed elected governments, guerrilla movements and the coup.

• To do:

  I can explain why democracy broke down in Brazil in 1964 and Chile in 1973, and weigh economic, political and international causes.

• To do:

  I can compare guerrilla movements in several countries and explain why few succeeded.

• To do:

  I can describe the social, political and economic impact of the Shining Path on Peru and the experiences of women in the conflict.

• To do:

  I can explain how Pinochet maintained power and assess the social, political and economic impact of his regime.

• To do:

  I can compare the military regimes of Chile, Brazil and Argentina.