The Latin American Military, Low Intensity Conflict, and Democracy

1990 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriel Marcella

There can be no expression of a desire to return to political power when experience tells us that the result is totally negative for our country and fundamentally so for the armed forces (LAWR, 1986b).— Chief of Staff, Army of ArgentinaThe most remarkable development in Latin America during the economically “lost decade” of the 1980s is the regionwide process of redemocratization. Close to 90% of the people of the region are ruled by civilian governments. The flowering of democratic, pluralistic, and participatory systems is still a noble aspiration, but it is radically different from the bleak political landscape of the 1960s and 1970s, when military governments prevailed. Nor is the appurtenance of civilian government equal to democracy. There is a large variety of civilian-military coalitions possible in a democratic setting.

1991 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 111-132
Author(s):  
Richard Weisskoff

The Issue of the Distribution of income is once again emerging as a critical component in the debates regarding Latin America's development path in the 1990s and as a factor underlying the proposed Enterprise of the Americas Initiative (EAI). I will argue that the degree of income inequality in the Latin American societies will prove to be an obvious, if unnoticed, obstacle to social progress which will affect the operation and outcome of the Initiative. In this essay, I review some of the hypotheses and recent findings from the research on income distribution. I shall contrast the conditions of the growth decades of the 1960s and 1970s with the “lost” decade of the 1980s. What have we learned, and what have we avoided learning during these years? How many of the initial conditions which the Alliance for Progress aimed at remedying 30 years ago are still with us?


ARTMargins ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (2–3) ◽  
pp. 3-13
Author(s):  
Klara Kemp-Welch ◽  
Cristina Freire

The guest editors' introduction to ARTMargins Issue 1:2–3 proposes that the dynamic marginal art scenes that developed under Latin American military dictatorships and in Late Socialist Eastern Europe in the 1960s and 1970s were characterized by their commitment to freedom and its furthering through cultural exchange and networking. To the extent that direct exchange was controlled from above, its significance, from below, increased in inverse proportion. From the peripheries of the Cold War, a marginal cultural intelligentsia sought creative ways to inhabit counter-cartographies and to foster an alternative sense of belonging. The introduction gives an overview of the transnational networks developed by artists operating outside a market framework, with a view to highlighting the need for scholars to rethink the complexity of past, present and future fields of international artistic exchange.


Author(s):  
Moe Taylor

Abstract During the 1960s, the Cuban government attempted to play a leadership role within the Latin American Left. In the process Cuban leaders departed from Marxist−Leninist orthodoxy, garnering harsh criticism from their Soviet and Chinese allies. Yet Cuba found a steadfast supporter of its controversial positions in North Korea. This support can in large part be explained by the parallels between Cuban and North Korean ideas about revolution in the developing nations of the Global South. Most significantly, both parties embraced a radical reconceptualisation of the role of the Marxist−Leninist vanguard party. This new doctrine appealed primarily to younger Latin American militants frustrated with the established leftist parties and party politics in general. The Cuban/North Korean theory of the party had a tangible influence in Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Mexico, Bolivia and Nicaragua, as revolutionary groups in these societies took up arms in the 1960s and 1970s.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 056-064
Author(s):  
María Belén Riveiro ◽  

This essay poses a question about the identity of Latin American literature in the 21st century. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Latin America Boom received recognition both locally and internationally, becoming the dominant means of defining Latin American literature up to the present. This essay explores new ways to understand this notion of Latin America in the literary scene. The case of the Argentine writer César Aira is relevant for analyzing alternative publishing circuits that connect various points of the region. These publishing houses foster a defiant way of establishing the value of literature.


2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-81
Author(s):  
Etienne Morales

This article focuses on the transformation of the carrier Cubana de aviación before and after the 1959 Cuban revolution. By observing Cubana's management, labour force, equipment, international passenger and freight traffic, this article aims to outline an international history of this Latin American flag carrier. The touristic air relationships between the American continent and Spain that could be observed in the 1950s were substituted – in the 1960s and 1970s – by a web of political “líneas de la amistad” [Friendship Flights] with Prague, Santiago de Chile, East Berlin, Lima, Luanda, Managua, Tripoli and Bagdad. This three-decade period allows us to interrogate breaks and continuities in the Cuban airline travel sector and to challenge the traditional interpretations of Cuban history. This work is based on diplomatic and corporative archives from Cuba, United States, Canada, Mexico, Spain and France and the aeronautical international press.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 432-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeppe Nevers ◽  
Jesper Lundsby Skov

Drawing on examples from Danish and Norwegian history, this article traces the ideological origins of Nordic democracy. It takes as its starting point the observation that constitutional theories of democracy were rather weak in the Nordic countries until the mid-twentieth century; instead, a certain Nordic tradition of popular constitutionalism rooted in a romantic and organic idea of the people was central to the ideological foundations of Nordic democracy. This tradition developed alongside agrarian mobilization in the nineteenth century, and it remained a powerful ideological reference-point through most of the twentieth century, exercising, for instance, an influence on debates about European integration in the 1960s and 1970s. However, this tradition was gradually overlaid by more institutional understandings of democracy from the mid-twentieth century onwards, with the consequence that the direct importance of this folk’ish heritage declined towards the late twentieth century. Nevertheless, clear echoes of this heritage remain evident in some contemporary Nordic varieties of populism, as well as in references to the concept of folkestyre as the pan-Scandinavian synonym for democracy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 201-222
Author(s):  
Berk Esen

With four successful and three failed coups in less than 60 years, the Turkish military is one of the most interventionist armed forces in the global south. Despite this record, few scholars have analyzed systematically how the military’s political role changed over time. To address this gap, this article examines the evolution of civil–military relations (CMR) in Turkey throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Based on a historical analysis, this article offers a revisionist account for the extant Turkish scholarship and also contributes to the broader literature on CMR. It argues that the military’s guardian status was not clearly defined and that the officer corps differed strongly on major political issues throughout the Cold War. This article also demonstrates that the officer corps was divided into opposite ideological factions and political agendas and enjoyed varying levels of political influence due to frequent purges and conjectural changes.


2009 ◽  
Vol 66 (01) ◽  
pp. 81-106
Author(s):  
Howard J. Wiarda

The field of Latin American Studies owes much to Professor Howard J. Wiarda, whose pioneering work on “corporatism” and political culture during the 1960s and 1970s helped establish a new conceptual paradigm for interpreting the persistence of corporately defined, institutional identities throughout Latin America, despite the purported triumph of the “Liberal Tradition.” A child of Dutch parents, his early travels throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America sparked a keen interest in the question of “third world development.” Entering graduate school in the early 1960s, Professor Wiarda gravitated to the newly emergent field of modernization studies at the University of Florida, where he received his masters and doctorate degrees in Latin American politics. It was a time of tremendous social ferment in Latin America and his early fieldwork took him to the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Brazil, among other places. In each instance, he found recognizable patterns that transcended geographic locations, patterns that seemed to directly challenge the predominant arguments set forth in the modernization literature at the time.


1986 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicos Mouzelis

Despite marked geographical and sociocultural differences, Greece and the two major southern-cone Latin American countries share a significant number of characteristics which distinguish them from most other peripheral and semiperipheral societies. Although they began industralisation late and failed to industrialise fully in the last century, all three countries managed to develop an important infrastructure (roads, railways) during the second half of the nineteenth century, and they achieved a notable degree of industrialisation in the years following each of the two world wars. Moreover, until the beginning of the nineteenth century, all three countries were subjugated parts of huge patrimonial empires (the Ottoman and the Iberian) and thus had never experienced the absolutist past of western and southern European societies. Finally, all three acquired their political independence in the early nineteenth century and very soon adopted parliamentary forms of political rule; and despite the constant malfunctioning of their representative institutions, relatively early urbanisation and the creation of a large urban middle class provided a framework within which bourgeois parliamentarism took strong roots and showed remarkable resilience. It persisted, albeit intermittently, from the second half of the nineteenth century until the rise of military bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes in the 1960s and 1970s and, as the Greek and Argentinian cases suggest, such regimes do not necessarily entail the irreversible decline of parliamentary democracy.


1996 ◽  
Vol 146 ◽  
pp. 443-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nan Li

Defence doctrine is an important indicator of armed forces′ intentions and capabilities. Since the policy of defence modernization was introduced in China in 1973, the war-fighting doctrine and strategic principles of the People′s Liberation Army (PLA) have undergone two major changes. The first change came in the late 1970s. The Maoist doctrine of the “people′s war,” which had been prevalent in the late 1960s and 1970s, was replaced by a new doctrine of the “people′s war under modern conditions.”


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