New Identities and Faces

Abstract

The right lost its democratic credentials in 1972 after it began to advocate insurrection. However, the 1981–3 economic crisis undermined its confidence in authoritarianism as the optimum model for guaranteeing the political and economic privileges promised by the military after the 1973 coup. Moreover, the general political climate, both domestically and internationally, was now more congenial to democracy. The great ideological battlelines which had been drawn in the early 1970s were now a thing of the past. The right no longer perceived that there existed a violent threat to the capitalist model of transformation. Universal acceptance of neo-liberalism only helped to reinforce the self-confidence of the political and economic elites. By the mid-1980s, the international community, most notably the United States, had substantially altered its foreign policy towards the region. Whereas Latin American authoritarian governments were at least tolerated in the 1970s, because they represented a first line of defence against the perceived threat from communism, foreign policy now began to stress the importance of democracy. Most favoured dictators, in Central America, Argentina, Paraguay and elsewhere in the region, were abandoned and democratic opposition movements were courted by the international community. The Chilean right, more than any other movement representing the economic and political elites in Latin America, now realized the time was ripe for a change if its privileged position was not to be irrecoverably undermined. Therefore, the reconstituted right, or more specifically the blando tendency.