Reconceptualizing Latin American Authoritarianism in the 1970s: From Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism to Neoconservatism

Abstract

On March 24, 1976, a military coup took place in Argentina. At the outset, it did not seem very different from previous authoritarian experiments which had marked the country's unstable political history. As time went by, however, this new regime revealed its exceptionally coercive nature: political activity was banned, strike rights were withdrawn, and the military intervened in hundreds of labor unions, all this along with policies that made market economics the prime objective of the policymakers. This regime, however, was not unique. On September 11, 1973, a military coup had occurred in Chile. In contrast to Argentina, the event was quite unprecedented. Chile had been one of the most solid democracies in Latin America, highly institutionalized and politically stable. Its open system had even allowed something that would have been routine in western Europe but was unique to Latin America: a socialist coalition intent on implementing structural transformations by means of democratic procedures came to power in 1970. After the breakdown, General Pinochet also made coercion a central component of his regime: the national soccer stadium was transformed into a concentration camp. His political economy, like the Argentine one, was also built around neo-laissez-faire principles. Also in 1973, the Uruguayan military, for the first time in that country's modern history, took power. Against a democratic tradition as profound as Chile's, this event did not leave Uruguayan society untouched. A ban on political parties and labor unions, the dismantling of the structure of welfare services (the oldest and most powerful in Latin America), and a repressive campaign, lower in terms of disappearances than in Argentina and Chile but higher in per capita imprisonment, were the means of a thorough social transformation. Why was the repressive character of these regimes so harsh? Why did these governments not incorporate, as the previous military experiments of Argentina and Brazil in the 1960s had, any kind of collective representation in order to coopt potential opposition? Why did these regimes so severely punish important business sectors through inflexible monetarist economic policies?' Why were labor organizations dismantled and repressed when, particularly in Argentina, they were explicitly against socialism and even confronted urban guerrillas? Why did the new rulers see a need to privatize public goods and services, especially when in Chile this produced an acute regression in the distribution of income in one of the most socially balanced countries in the region? Why, after being staunch defenders and promoters of corporatist forms of social organization, did the armed forces in the course of the 1970s radically shift their orientation and design a social order in which collective life would be regulated solely by market relations?