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The latest series of coups d'état in Latin America has left an enduring impact on the region's contemporary landscape. This book employs a comparative methodology that illuminates distinct national contexts, scrutinizing the fundamental causal factors that precipitated coups in Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Honduras, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The essays answer the following questions: when was a given transfer of power defined as a coup d'état? What were the objectives in overthrowing an existing regime? What role did the US government play, as well as local political actors? What were the various options considered by different sectors within each country? What kinds of resistance did the coups face? What were their sources of support? By comprehensively exploring these questions across each national case, this book dismantles the belief that the coups can be grouped into a single category, and marks the culmination of an era in the subcontinent.
List of contents
Introduction: Coups D'état in cold war Latin America, 1964-1982 Sebastián Carassai and Kevin Coleman; 1. 'Deus, Pátria, Família' across the Decades: Moralism, Authoritarianism, and the Brazilian Military Coup of 1964 Benjamin A. Cowan; 2. The limits of superpower: US developmentalists and the local origins of Bolivia's 1964 Coup Thomas C. Field; 3. The Velasco revolution in Peru, 1968-1975 Peter Klarén; 4. The Making of a reformist coup: general López Arellano and land reform in Honduras, 1972-1975 Kevin Coleman; 5. The Uruguayan coup d¿Etat in historical perspective: an ever longer path toward authoritarianism Vania Markarian; 6. Chile 1973, September 11: politics, protest, and the making and unmaking of the democratic road to socialism Camilo Trumper; 7. 'They're leaving and never coming back!': from the return of peronism to the return of the Military, Argentina 1973-1976 Sebastián Carassai; 8. El Salvador 1979: reform or repression Jeffrey L. Gould and Heather Vrana; 9. Coups and communism in Guatemala, general Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982-1983 Virginia Garrard; Afterword: the dictatorships and their afterlives Barbara Weinstein.
About the author
Sebastián Carassai is a researcher at CONICET and Professor of History at the University of Buenos Aires. He is the author of The Argentine Silent Majority and Lo que no sabemos de Malvinas. He has been a fellow at the Rockefeller Center at Harvard University and the National Humanities Center.Kevin Coleman is Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto. He is the author of A Camera in the Garden of Eden and co-editor of Capitalism and the Camera. His research has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Summary
A detailed analysis of the wide range of coups d'état in contemporary Latin America with contributions from leading experts in the field. It will interest scholars and students of history, political violence, and human rights in the Latin American context.
