Military Rule and Popular Resistance

Abstract

Military intervention in the political life of Latin American nations has a long history, and almost certainly a long future. However, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw an apparently qualitative change in the type of regime that followed a successful coup. Moreover, the coups took place in the most developed Latin American countries, societies marked by complex social organizations and institutionalized political systems. On most indicators of modernity, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina would score high, though Argentina had a poor record of political stability, and Peru has many of the features of backwardness associated with developing countries. The military no longer intervened to correct the political system; it intervened to govern. Explanations for this new development stressed a number of factors, including internal changes in the military itself, the need to press on with a particularly difficult stage of economic development, the need to suppress the agitated politics of the praetorian state, and the need to adjust national development to changes in the international economic and political system.