Development and Reform under Military Rule

Abstract

The wave of military coups that swept through Latin America beginning in the mid-1960s ushered into power a new model of dictatorship. Gone were the days when ambitious military dictators unabashedly set about accumulating personal power. Likewise, the era when coups produced caretaker military regimes which performed a regulatory function had also come to an end. Defending the need for intervention to rescue their nations from turmoil, these new military rulers now proclaimed the establishment of institutional regimes committed to a fundamental restructuring of the political and economic order. In a message addressed to the Argentine people in the immediate aftermath of the 1976 coup, General Jorge Videla succinctly expressed the messianic mission of the new military dictatorships: ‘[the coup] represent[s] more than the mere overthrow of a government. [It] signif[ies] the final closing of a historic cycle and the opening of a new one whose fundamental characteristic will be manifested by the reorganisation of the nation, a task undertaken with a true spirit of service by the armed forces.’¹