Political Development and Military Intervention in Latin America

1966 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 616-626 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin C. Needler
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Political Development ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Military Intervention ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Military Coup ◽  
The Political ◽  
Latin American Politics ◽  
The Military

It is noteworthy that the recent spate of writings in the field of “political development” has shown a pronounced tendency to omit consideration of Latin America. Thus the “communications” and “bureaucracy” volumes in the SSRC political development series are totally innocent of Latin American data, as is an excellent recent treatment of—of all things!—the political behavior of the military in developing areas.The Latin Americanists, for their part, have largely stressed those key features of the area's politics which have long remained constant—executive predominance, military intervention, and the influence of the peculiarities of Hispanic culture. At the same time, it is clear that the social changes usually collectively termed “modernization”—urbanization, technological borrowing, and the development of mass communications grids—together with their political correlate, the expansion of the political community to include hitherto excluded social elements, are proceeding in Latin America too. Accordingly, it becomes desirable to reexamine the “statics” of Latin American politics in the light of the “dynamics” of the processes of political development and social mobilization.The present article attempts this reexamination with respect to the most characteristic feature of Latin American politics, the coup d'état and the establishment of a de facto military government.A priori, mutually contradictory theses about the relations of the military coup to social development can be constructed—and indeed the literature on the subject abounds in such contradictory theses, evidence to support each of which is always available.

Elites, Elite Settlements, and Revolutionary Movements in Latin America, 1950–1980: Introduction

1994 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 543-574
Author(s):  
Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Social Revolution ◽  
Latin American Politics ◽  
Revolutionary Movements

Social revolutions as well as revolutionary movements have recently held great interest for both sociopolitical theorists and scholars of Latin American politics. Before we can proceed with any useful analysis, however, we must distinguish between these two related but not identical phenomena. Adapting Theda Skocpol’s approach, we can define social revolutions as “rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by” mass-based revolts from below, sometimes in cross-class coalitions (Skocpol 1979: 4; Wickham-Crowley 1991:152). In the absence of such basic sociopolitical transformations, I will not speak of (social) revolution or of a revolutionary outcome, only about revolutionary movements, exertions, projects, and so forth. Studies of the failures and successes of twentieth-century Latin American revolutions have now joined the ongoing theoretical debate as to whether such outcomes occur due to society- or movement-centered processes or instead due to state- or regime-centered events (Wickham-Crowley 1992).

True Crimes: Rodolfo Walsh and the Role of the Intellectual in Latin American Politics

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael McCaughan
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Open Letter ◽  
Latin American Politics ◽  
Dirty War ◽  
Death Squad ◽  
The Us ◽  
Own Name ◽  
The Military

Rodolfo Walsh was a writer of crime novels, a tireless investigative journalist who uncovered real political crimes, an instant historian of a turbulent and violent era in Argentinian and Latin American politics. He was in Cuba in 1960, participating in setting up the first revolutionary press service in Latin America, "Prensa Latina", when a coded telex arrived in their offices by mistake. After sleepless nights and with one cryptography manual, Walsh deciphered the plans for the US invasion of Cuba being planned in Guatemala by the CIA. Walsh was active in the Montonero guerrilla in Argentina, co-ordinating information and intelligence work. In that capacity he made public the existence of ESMA, the Naval Mechanics School which was the main military torture centre. In his own name he wrote an Open Letter to the Military Junta, a year from the coup and a day before his death, denouncing the dirty war. He was gunned down in the streets of Buenos Aires by a military death squad. This is an account of Rudolfo Walsh's life. It includes extended excerpts from his varied writings.

scholarly journals Frigørelsesfilosofi – Interview med Enrique Dussel

2018 ◽  
pp. 131-143
Author(s):  
Astrid Nonbo Andersen
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Latin American Politics ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
Enrique Dussel ◽  
Philosophy Of Liberation ◽  
Western Hegemony ◽  
Harsh Critique

Enrique Dussel is one of the most prominent Latin American thinkers and a founding father of the Philosophy of Liberation. Dussel is known for his long political engagement in Latin American Politics and for his harsh critique of Western hegemony on the global stage – both the political and the philosophical. In this interview with Dussel these themes are discussed as well as some of Dussel’s own notions, such as pluriversality and transmodernity.

The Chilean Socialist Party: Prolegomena to its Ideology and Organization

1978 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benny Pollack
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Latin American Country ◽  
Common Knowledge ◽  
Socialist Party ◽  
Military Coup ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
The Military ◽  
National Electorate

It is common knowledge that, prior to the military coup of 1973, Chile was the only Latin American country to have strong workers' political parties of the European type. Many reasons have been given for this phenomenon, but it is clear that Chile has been the only country in Latin-America to allow the development of Marxist parties with strong appeal and a strong following, within the framework of what could be called liberal, democratic processes. Up to 1970, the electoral force of the Socialist and Communist Parties in Chile oscillated between 20 and 30 per cent of the total national electorate. This rose to more than 40 per cent during 1975.

Political Development and Socioeconomic Development: The Case of Latin America

1968 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 889-897 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin C. Needler
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Socioeconomic Development ◽  
Military Intervention ◽  
Past History ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Latin American Countries

One way of acquiring insight into the processes of political development in Latin America is to compare the countries of the area systematically in terms of the “degree of development” which each can be said to have attained. Ideally, such an enterprise can lead to the understanding of the past history of the “more developed” countries by reference to the present problems of the “less developed” while an understanding of the problems confronting the more developed countries can make possible a glimpse into the future of those now less developed. Isolation of the factors responsible for a state's being more or less developed can moreover prove instructive for the understanding of the relations between political and socioeconomic phenomena.Perhaps most important, such comparisons provide the means for holding constant effects attributable to characteristics shared by all, or nearly all, of the Latin American countries. Thus it can be argued with much plausibility that military intervention in politics, say, derives from elements in the Hispanic tradition. Yet it is clear that the frequency of military intervention varies from country to country, even where they share equally in that tradidition. Thus one is forced to go beyond the “Hispanic tradition” thesis with which the investigation might otherwise have come to rest.In the present article I will be concerned with the problem of the relation of political development to socioeconomic development in the Latin American context. For reasons that will become apparent below, I will not at this point attempt a rigorous analysis of the concept of political development, which has already been the subject of a large and rapidly growing literature.

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