Huellas de las transiciones politícas: partidos y elecciones en América Latina

Abstract

This collection of essays examines the political transitions of the 1980s and 1990s in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, and Mexico, focusing on parties and elections. In the opening chapter, Fernando López-Alves presents a useful inventory of transition studies and locates the present volume within the vast literature on the topic. In contrast to the bulk of transition studies, the case studies in this book take a long view of recent changes by grounding themselves in the party and electoral patterns of the pre-dictatorial political systems or, in the case of Mexico, in the era of uncontested PRI supremacy.César Tcach finds that Argentina’s transition was completed by 1990, after (1) the country’s first presidential election (1989) in which the incumbent ceded power to a candidate of an opposition party and (2) the effective subordination of the military to civilian authority. An essential part of the transition was the resurrection and strengthening of the historic Peronist Party and the Unión Cívica Radical. Rachel Meneguello examines the 1985 and 1989 Brazilian presidential elections and the emerging party configuration against the backdrop of Brazil’s republican history in which parties came and went as instruments of populist leaders and/or the state. Drawing on the 1988 plebiscite and 1989 and 1993 presidential and congressional elections in Chile, Carlos Huneeus finds that, despite changes in leadership and names, the pre-1973 party constellations re-emerged. But he also notes the decline in party activism in Chile and other Latin American countries that followed the euphoria of the earliest post-dictatorial elections.Víctor Reynoso dissects the 1988 and 1994 presidential and the 1991 congressional elections in Mexico to gauge the direction and extent of the country’s unique transition toward a multiparty democracy. Silvia Dutrénit examines the Uruguayan elections of 1984 and 1989, including the plebiscite on prosecutions of human rights violators under the military regime. These reveal a marked evolution in Uruguay’s party system, with the decline of the Colorado/Nacional two-party system and the rise of Frente Amplio—a trend dramatically confirmed in the 1999 election. In the concluding chapter, Gonzalo Varela extracts the common threads from the five countries’ transitions. The enhancement of parties’ roles in Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil and the resuscitation of traditionally powerful parties in Chile and Uruguay form part of a broader trend toward strong party systems throughout Latin America after the passing of populism, statism, and dictatorship.Without breaking new theoretical ground, these case studies are well argued, thoroughly documented, and endowed with a wealth of detail, much of which is presented in numerous tables and graphs. Although published in 1998, the book does not cover some of the more recent elections, such as the 1997 Mexican and Chilean congressional elections, which were pivotal points in those countries’ recent political history. Nonetheless, this book will serve well as a source for historians of contemporary Latin American politics.