Latin American Populism: Some Notes on Periodization

Abstract

One of the more bemusing qualities of the guild of Latin Americanists is its remarkable susceptibility to fads. Since the early 1960s, when the Latin American boom first began, enthusiasms for the middle sectors, the democratic-Left, university student activists, nationalism, the reforming military, elites, corporatism, dependency, and populism, have swept through the academic establishment in rapid succession like waves of Asian flu through Camp Gitchigoomie. Latin American populism is as old as the century. Although seldom placed among the classic populist movements, the first notable expression of the populist style was in fact batllismo, which arose in Uruguay after 1900 under the banner of José Batlle y Ordonez and the Colorado Party. Outside Uruguay, populist movements came as the successors to the oligarchic republics that had, in the course of the nineteenth century, accomplished national organization, created a working polity, and presided over the development of export economies dependent upon the industrial powers of the Northern Hemisphere.