Neopatrimonialism: The Politics of Military Rule in Chile, 1973-1987

Abstract

The dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet has persevered for nearly a decade and a half, outliving the military regimes of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay with which it was once contemporaneous. It may also have outlived the term by which it was characterized in the seminal writings of Guillermo O'Donnell.' While Chilean authoritarianism clearly has shared the exclusionary attributes of other recent southern cone military regimes, it has exhibited three distinctive characteristics. First, in the Chilean case power has been concentrated in the hands of a single individual at the expense of rule by the military as an institution. As president of the republic, commander-in-chief of the Chilean army,2 and generalissimo of the Chilean armed forces, Pinochet has achieved a position of preeminence unrivaled by any of his recent counterparts in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. As a result, his regime can not be regarded as simply another example of bureaucratic authoritarianism but rather must be seen as posing a theoretical challenge in its own right. The idea of impersonal control by the military institution as a whole is central to the bureaucratic-authoritarian model.3 Second, by the standards of other countries with well-developed popular sector organizations, Chilean authoritarianism has demonstrated surprising durability. Since 1973 it has stood up against an impressive array of obstacles and pressures: a national tradition of constitutional democracy, an established political landscape of parties and interest groups, widespread internal opposition, mass protests, economic crisis, and an environment of international isolation punctuated by U.S. pressures for political liberalization. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Pinochet also managed to survive a continentwide wave of democratization, thereby remaining the only authoritarian ruler in South America outside of Paraguay. With the exception of General Alfredo Stroessner, no South American military officer has ruled for a longer period of time in the postwar era, nor has any president in Chilean history. Under such circumstances, counterfactual outcomes, such as a democratic transition in the early 1980s, have come to seem easier to explain than the persistence of authoritarian rule.