Latin American Presidential Republics from about 1830 to the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century

Abstract

In September 1973, the notion that Chile was different from the other Latin American states was brutally shattered by the violent and ruthless takeover of the presidency by General Pinochet, a takeover which led to the death of President Allende, perhaps a suicide, perhaps an assassination: these actions resulted in the establishment of a military form of government which was to last seventeen years in a country which had been said to be immune from such takeovers and which, since the middle of the 1830s, had indeed been regarded as having avoided military coups. There was even a view that, because of a constitution which a very influential minister, Portales, had brought about in 1833, Chile had been able to avoid any kind of illegal governmental ‘replacement’, by the military or any other body. Some aspects of an episode which occurred in the middle of the 1920s had perhaps already indicated that total immunity from such a type of intervention was somewhat unrealistic.