The Coup D' Etat in Cold War Latin America (1964-1979)

CARASSAI, SEBASTIÁN; COLEMAN, KEVIN

(bajo contrato con una editorial norteamericana)

Año: 2022 p. 339

0-0000-0000-0

The second half of the twentieth century in Latin America was marked by the presence of military regimes, often carrying out acts of unprecedented violence and seeking to reorganize their societies within the context of the global Cold War. Although the political interventions of the armed forces were not new, this was the last wave of coups d?état and the end of an era of strong institutional instability. As the processes that these coups initiated were finalized, the balance of terror and suffering was so high that a vast majority of the populations of each of these societies reached a consensus: never again should they leave their civilian governments in the hands of the soldiers. This book analyzes the primary causal forces that culminated in a series of coups d?état that swept the hemisphere, focusing on Brazil (1964), Bolivia (1964), Peru (1968), Honduras (1972), Uruguay (1973), Chile (1973), Argentina (1976), and El Salvador (1976). As a whole, the book reconstructs the inter-American Cold War, a scene in which militaries worked adeptly within their own countries and outside of them, within their own institutions and in the broader civil society that they purported to protect. Each coup was also the result of specific circumstances that this book seeks to uncover, evaluating the degree to which national conditions were shaped by international factors, especially the policies of the United States. Placing so many distinctive national processes in the same frame is a task that only multiple specialists can collaboratively undertake. The book is organized around a series of questions, to which each author responds: When was a given transfer of power defined as a coup d?état? What were the objectives, both explicit and implicit, in overthrowing an existing regime? What role did the U.S. government play? What were the roles of local political actors? What were the various options considered by different political actors within each country? What kinds of resistance did the coup regimes face? What were their sources of support? Responding to these questions for each national case, this book evaluates the end of an era in the subcontinent, while also describing the foundations?indeed, ruins?upon which Latin American societies began constructing, from the 1980s forward, the democratic regimes that continue, in some form or another today.