The Transition to Authoritarian Electoral Regimes in Latin America

Abstract

President Carlos Menem of Argentina, during an independence-day speech on July 9, 1992, denounced student and teacher protesters of his attacks on public education for their exaggerated use of liberty. He warned parents that the demonstrations taken over by subversives and recommended that they be very careful about so quickly sending their to the streets, because they are more useful in the schools. He then threatened that these student demonstrations could result in another contingent of the Plaza de Mayo demanding their children (Brecha, July 24, 1992). This overt threat to turn loose the death squads against student protesters points to the authoritarian core of this electoral regime, not unlike others that have emerged in the 1980s and 1990s throughout Latin America. The transition from military to civilian regimes has brought the introduction of electoral processes, the establishment of elected parliaments or congresses, and, in some cases, greater individual freedom, but these regimes have continued to function within an authoritarian institutional framework and to pursue policies totally at variance with democratic procedures. These regimes practice many of the same institutional policies and political processes begun under the military, and for reasons of substance and structure it is appropriate to call them neoauthoritarian. We will discuss the structure and substance of neoauthoritarianism and contrast them with those of contemporary mass popular movements. We will begin by outlining an alternative conception of democracy, based on past and present political practices in Latin America, that can serve as a model for the formulation of criteria for evaluating democratic and authoritarian tendencies in contemporary Latin American regimes.